Hey all, I’ve just posted another story on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale.
Johnathan Quevedo tells the story of how Los Angeles was the lifesaver he turned to as he fled his mother’s manic depression.
Until, that is, his encounter with Latino gang members one day in Compton.
Check out “One Day in Compton” — a terrific story, very well written.
Filed under Culture, Gangs, Storytelling, Streets, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, has begun a new strategy intended to coordinate federal, state and local police forces in the fight against the rampant criminality of kidnapping, robbery, exortion, murder that is the detritus of cartel wars.
Michoacan has been horribly affected by all this — with some areas controlled by squads of roving criminal bands against which the local police are powerless. In one town I visited often, residents tell me a cell from one of the groups disputing control in the state with what amounts to a roadblock at the entrance to town inquiring who is coming through and what their business is.
The state is among the first to receive funds, and federal attention, in EPN’s new plan, which will also include funding for help to the 68 municipios with the highest homicide rates — Tijuana, Culiacan, Juarez, Acapulco, and others.
Michoacan is a great state. I spent dozens of trips wandering through the state, looking for stories about, in those years, mostly immigrants, as so many Michoacanos have migrated to the US.
Those kinds of trips are now impossible due to the spread of the violence.
The idea of combining and coordinating police forces has some appeal — instead of the use of the military, as ex-president Felipe Calderon resorted to. Soldiers aren’t trained or prepared for police work, after all.
Problem is, that many police forces aren’t either. I’m wondering whether local police forces can be effectively used at all. Or state forces, for that matter. They are not just corrupt in many cases. They are poorly funded, equipped, trained, educated.
This is why, after all, Calderon resorted to the military — something for which he was widely criticized. He had no other weapon at his disposal but soldiers.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had recently with a man in Los Angeles who is from a rancho near Apatzingan. He told me that he returned home and on two corners he saw headless bodies. Whenever a police issue arose, officers sent citizens to the cartel gunmen to get them resolved, as they were the real power.
It’s possible when this new strategy plays itself out, we all may understand better why Calderon acted in the way that he did.
My homeboys in Mexico, Dudley Althaus and photographer Keith Dannemiller, have a new story up on Global Post asking this question, and visiting places where citizens have taken up where the police have not in the face of rampant criminality.
This town, Ayutla de los Libres, in the Mixtec region of Guerrero, has had a masked militia for a month or so. (More here on the disaster that is Guerrero lately.)
It’s interesting that the militia also is part of the usos y costumbres system under which many Mexican Indian villages are governed — unpaid municipal labor by each member of the community, including policing.
Vigilante justice is nothing new in Mexico. Lynchings have been going on for decades if not centuries. I wrote about one lynching in True Tales from Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.
But I take it as sad commentary on the country that the question the story poses even has to be asked.
Photo: Civilian militia, Ayutla de los Libres; Credit: Keith Dannemiller
These are the remarkable questions asked in its El Palenque column by Animal Politico — a Mexican online newspaper.
The questions are brought on by the rape of six Spanish tourists last week, and by a constant narcoviolence going back to 
the real beginnings of Mexico’s cartel war — that being roughly 2004-05, when heads were placed on stakes and that kind of thing.
The state of Guerrero has been infamous within Mexico for its wanton violence, brought on by its intense heat, poverty and caciquismo – a term referring to the political and economic control by certain families and individuals.
Here’s what Jose Carreno Figueras, from the Tec de Monterrey, had to say:
“You have to remember that Guerrero was always a problem state, and that except for a few enclaves — like Acapulco, Taxco and Zihuatanejo –where there were appearances of authority, it was never far from being ungovernable. Political bosses, criminality, banditry, injustice have always been part of the perennial panorama of Guerrero.”
You just never could see much of it from an Acapulco hotel room — until recently, that is.
For those who read Spanish, Jose Antonio Alvarez Lima had the following remembrance of Acapulco in the 1960s’s glory days, and its fall in the 1970s — calling the city “a mirror of our own failure”:
“Durante los sesentas, disfrute Acapulco y mi primera juventud. Era el paraiso. Quizá uno de los sitios más bellos del mundo, junto con Río. En los setentas, el populismo echeverrista llenó los cerros de invasores sin servicios y se inició el deterioro desastroso que hoy conocemos. Acapulco es el espejo de nuestro fracaso. De la corrupción generalizada, la demagogia, la codicia y la indiferencia.
“El mismo futuro que espera para Cancún y las Rivieras Maya y Nayarita. Nunca tan pocos y tan rápido han hecho tanto daño a la naturaleza.”
Filed under Mexico
The story today is about the violence in South Los Angeles over July 4th.
Just a sad thing.
The family members of Unique Russell told me about this family tradition that dates to the 1960s of getting together at these two duplexes on 97th Street for a day-long July 4th, including barbecue and firecrackers in the street.
This pair of beige duplexes acted as a center for a family that included many dozens of people and a long list of last names. In the house lives `Granny Cherry,’ now blind and well on in years, great-grandmother to the girl who was killed.
Pictured are two of the girl’s aunts, Emily Sharp-Williams and Mary Dill.
Filed under Gangs, Los Angeles, Streets
