The new film Our Brand is Crisis doesn’t tell us how a president who authorized the massacre of indigenous Bolivians has lived with impunity in the U.S. for 12 years.
By 2008, one in ten Mexicans, some 11.4 million people, resided in the United States. However, the global financial crisis, combined with the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the numerous costs and perils associated with emigrating to the United States from Mexico and Central America, have dissuaded increasing numbers from taking the risk.
Almost a year after resigning as Bolivia’s Defense Minister, Cecilia Chacón has broken her silence to question President Evo Morales’ appointment of ex-Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti as ambassador to the UN—an act which, she says, signifies impunity for those responsible for the police repression of lowland indigenous marchers last September 25 at Chaparina.
In Mexico, it is not only Mexican institutions that play the impunity game. While it has become commonplace to argue that the most important U.S. export is “the rule of law,” U.S. institutions have played an important role in reinforcing a transnational culture of impunity. And Mexicans have been paying attention.
Criminality and corrupt authoritarian politics have a tendency to blend, especially when large sums of money are available to grant impunity to certain citizens. Over the past three weeks, for example, Mexicans have witnessed a number of deliberate attacks—whose obvious foretelling was conspicuously ignored by state authorities—on political activists.
When the bodies of two female reporters were found dead in Mexico City last Thursday, public opinion questioned whether their murder should be investigated as a crime against free expression or a crime against women. Before any evidence was gathered, it was assumed that they were killed because they were reporters on the trail of information that somebody didn’t want uncovered. The second supposition was that they were killed simply because they were women.
