Tuesday, August 08, 2006

La Jornada, Today

One of my favorite things about spending time in Mexico is perusing a nice, fat La Jornada every day. Why we strain at politically uninflected reporting in the United States is a mystery (well, its origin isn't mysterious, as those amateur historians of the Associated Press will quickly point out, but why do we keep insisting that unbiased reporting is important enough for people of every conceivable ideological allegiance to believe their time is best spent writing books proving political bias one way or another in "the media"); I always figure that readers can filter much better than writers can purify . . .

Anyway: much of the paper is devoted to the ongoing protests in Mexico City, in support of Lopez Obrador. He's saying things that are slightly more ominous, like, the "fight is no longer about counting votes, it's about transforming the country." But considerable space is devoted to the Oaxaca crisis, as well, the talk--especially from the government side--getting more threatening each day.

But readers will recall Flaco's post on the situation & his questions regarding tourism, and there are two interesting items in today's paper addressing this: one is a report, in the state section of the paper, that hotel occupation in Mexico City is down 5.5%. The other is even more interesting: a full-page ad identifying the Oaxaca protests--as well as events in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Michoacan--with a conspiracy rooted in Mexico City. The ad, which claims in huge letters that "Mexico esta secuestrado," deftly uses the T-word: "The only explanation is the conspiracy against Mexico by those who use terrorism to gain power."

The ad ends with a Benito Juarez quote (again, in a gigantic typeface): "La paz es el bien principal de los pueblos" (appeals to Juarez are a whole category of logical fallacy in Oaxaca, as far as I can tell).

Who paid for the ad? Economic development organizations and the "Asociacion Mexican de Hoteles y Moteles Delegacion Oaxaca" and the Oaxaca branch of the National Congress of the Restaurant Industry.

In short, yeah, it appears that tourist cash--or the lack thereof--is becoming a part of the story, here.

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