Forwarded message:
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 01:18:41 -0400
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: MAI Mexico
Message forwarded by Bob Olsen..........
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hendrik)
Subject: Poor Journalism From Mexico
From: Norman Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Via: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Michael Givel)
Via: Emilie Nichols <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Via: Caspar Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ Hendrik's comment: although not explicitly linked to the MAI
(Multilateral Ageement on Investment-OECD) issue, this report is
valuable background information when discussing the implications
of MAI and "globalisation" in the style of transnational
corporations - agribusiness is, after all, part of the problem.]
POOR JOURNALISM SOUTH OF THE BORDER
By Norman Solomon
Filled with speeches and photo ops, President Clinton's
visit to Mexico produced a lot of good press back home. Most
journalists sang the official tunes about immigration, drugs and
corruption. The few off-key notes didn't last long, as when ABC's
Peter Jennings reported: "This is where the U.S. gets cheap labor
and makes enormous manufacturing profits."
Perhaps you saw TV footage of Mexican people living in dire
poverty. But it's unlikely that you heard much about
*why* so many are so poor. If the network's roving
correspondents knew why, they avoided spilling the beans.
But not all the U.S. reporters arrived and left with
Clinton. One of the few who actually lives in Mexico is John
Ross, a freelance journalist who has been covering Latin America
for 16 years. He's committed to probing beyond the conventional
media wisdom.
When I reached him in Mexico City during Clinton's trip,
Ross began by pointing out that "Mexico is a country where
158,000 babies annually do not survive their fifth year due to
nutritionally related disease. Two million more infants are
seriously harmed by underfeeding."
The crisis, he stressed, is growing more severe. "As many as
40 percent of all Mexicans suffer from some degree of
under-nutrition. And a report by Banamex, the nation's top
private bank, indicates that half of Mexico's 92 million citizens
are eating less than the minimum daily requirement of 1,300
calories as a result of the deepest recession since 1932."
Imagine the human realities behind the dry statistics:
"Mexico's basic grain consumption dropped by 29 percent in 1995,"
Ross says, "and meat and milk consumption has slipped by an
alarming 60 percent and 40 percent respectively during the last
three years. The price of tortillas, the staple of poor people's
diets, has doubled in the past 18 months."
President Clinton's upbeat visit to Mexico is now history.
And so is the superficial sheen put on that event by U.S. mass
media.
Ross -- who wrote the award-winning 1995 book "Rebellion
From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas" -- refuses to polish
the sheen. Instead, he tells about places like the town of San
Agustin Loxicha in southern Mexico, "where poverty is so extreme
that babies die in the priest's arms during baptism."
The town is in a region that supplies coffee beans to cafes
in my neighborhood and yours.
Those who challenge the conditions in Loxicha face an iron
fist, Ross explains: "Fifty of Loxicha's most upstanding
citizens, including most of the town government and seven of its
teachers, are penned up just outside the Oaxaca state capital, at
the riot-scarred Santa Maria Ixcotel penitentiary, behind thick
black steel doors in two cramped cells." The pending charge is
armed rebellion.
Ross adds that "the prisoners tell of classic torture by
authorities -- their heads were wrapped in rags and dirty water
poured into their mouths; electric wires were attached to their
genitals; they were threatened with being hurled from helicopters
into the ocean."
Far from media spotlights, the Mexican military -- wielding
U.S. equipment -- is on the march to bolster the status quo, Ross
reports. In Oaxaca, the routine includes "forced interrogations,
widespread use of torture, secret prisons and kidnappings of
prominent citizens, according to a report filed in February by
the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights, the state's
most active independent human rights group."
Today, at least 60,000 troops are deployed across broad
terrain to crush resistance. In Ross's words: "From the Huasteca
mountains, an impoverished, coffee-growing range that stretches
through five states in eastern Mexico, all the way to the
Lacandon jungle on the Guatemalan border, the Mexican army moves
through indigenous zones, setting up road blocks, conducting
house-to-house searches, arbitrarily beating and incarcerating
Indians."
Meanwhile, Ross says, 27 million Mexican people still labor
-- against worsening odds -- to scratch the soil for a living.
They do so "despite a decade of decapitalizing the agrarian
sector to conform with International Monetary Fund strictures,
huge imports of cheap NAFTA grain that is driving small farmers
off the land in droves, and forced 'association' with
transnational agribusiness that gobbles whole farming
communities."
Do you think such information belongs on the evening news?
_________________________________________________
The above article is this week's "Media Beat" syndicated column
by Norman Solomon. If you like what you read, please contact the
editorial page editors at newspapers in your area and urge them
to carry the column! (It's distributed to daily papers by
Creators Syndicate.) Suggestions from readers have been very
effective in getting newspapers to publish "Media Beat" on a
regular basis. For more information, send a blank e-mail message
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
............................
Bob Olsen Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED]
