NOAM CHOMSKY IN MEXICO

>
>FROM: JOHN ROSS
> 011-5525-5518-1213 X102
> johnross@igc.org
> Blindman's Buff #259
>
>LEFTY RAG INVITES NOTORIOS GRINGO RABBLEROUSER
>TO CELEBRATE ITS 25TH ANNIVERSARY - NOAM CHOMSKY
>IN MEXICO
>
>MEXICO CITY (Sept. 29th) - Seven mornings a
>week, Vicente Ramirez's battered aluminum kiosk
>on Cinco de Mayo Street in this city's old
>quarter is plastered with the front pages of 22
>daily newspapers. All day handfuls of
>pedestrians pause to gawk at the incendiary
>headlines slapped to the siding, often engaging
>in animated debate about the nature of the news.
>"This country is going down the toilet," sneers
>one elderly gentleman studying a story about a
>particularly cruel kidnapping. "Ay Mamacita!"
>another old gaffer exclaims, oogling a
>bare-breasted senorita.
>
>Fully a quarter of the score of dailies on view
>at Vicente's kiosk are dedicated to the "nota
>roja" or "red note." Tabloids like La Prensa
>(reputedly Mexico's biggest seller but
>circulation figures are elusive) and Impacto are
>all blood and tits, spotlighting brutal
>beheadings, sensational crimes of passion, and
>bevies of topless lasses. Three sports dailies
>including the venerable Esto, which still
>publishes in sepia, rivet the ad hoc attentions
>of passerbys. Two financial papers (El
>Financiero and El Economista), The News (a
>re-incarnation of the long-lived
>English-language paper) and El Pais, or at least
>the Mexican edition of the prestigious Madrid
>daily, dangle from Vicente's stand. Noontime
>and evening editions of Mexico City papers will
>join the display during the day.
>
>Editorial slants run from hard right to soft
>left - Cronica, reputedly financed by the
>reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas, savagely
>slams the left-center Party of the Democratic
>Revolution (PRD) that has managed the affairs of
>the capital for the past 12 years. Many of the
>dailies hung from Vicente's kiosk exist only to
>cadge juicy government advertising and are
>hesitant to bite the hand that feeds them.
>Excelsior and El Universal, broadsheets founded
>in the midst of the Mexican Revolution not quite
>a hundred years ago, make much of their
>"impartiality" but are intractably linked to the
>once and future ruling PRI party. Reforma and
>its tabloid sidekick Metro are sounding boards
>for the right-wing PAN of which President Felipe
>Calderon is king - both are unavailable at
>Vicente's kiosk, having broken with the powerful
>Newspaper Venders Union, and they now field an
>army of comically uniformed street hawkers.
>
>The only openly left wing daily in this vast
>array, La Jornada ("The Work Day"), is Vicente's
>best seller at 20 a day, followed by La Prensa
>(15) and Universal (10.) When leftists gather in
>the nearby Zocalo plaza, usually for events
>captained by ex-Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel
>Lopez Obrador (AMLO), Vicente will sell up to a
>hundred Jornadas.
>
>One caveat: despite this monumental exhibition
>of newsprint and dead trees, the first news
>source for 95% of all Mexicans is still the
>nation's two-headed TV monopoly, Televisa and TV
>Azteca.
>
>September has been a big month for La Jornada.
>To celebrate its 25th birthday, the National
>Lottery offered a commemorative ticket as did
>the Mexico City Metro subway system, rare
>mainstream honors for a lefty rag, and notorious
>U.S. rabble rouser Noam Chomsky came to town to
>help cut the cake - along with Gabriel Garcia
>Marquez (a founding investor) and the
>much-lauded Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano,
>Chomsky is one of several literary superstars
>whose words fill the pages of La Jornada.
>
>The Jornada was founded in 1984 by itinerant
>journalists who had bounced from one short-lived
>left periodical to the next - for many of the
>original Jornaleros, like LJ's first editor
>Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, the last ports of
>call had been Uno Mas Uno ("One Plus One") and
>El Dia but when their publishers were bought off
>by then-president Miguel De la Madrid, the lefty
>newshounds trundled their old Underwoods
>(computers were nowhere on the horizon back
>then) up the winding stairs of La Jornada's old
>ramshackle headquarters on Balderas Street's
>newspaper row and went to work.
>
>Nostalgia was on the menu for La Jornada's 25th.
>During one celebration under chandeliers at the
>elegant Casa Lamm where the paper presents
>weekly forums on burning social issues, founding
>director Carlos Payan recalled how in February
>1984 he summoned movers and shakers from a broad
>spectrum of the Mexican Left to the
>phantasmagoric Hotel Mexico, the unfinished
>dream of Spanish visionary Manuel Suarez with a
>revolving rooftop restaurant (it has since been
>converted into Mexico's World Trade Center.)
>800 potential investors showed up at the
>assembly, buying in at a thousand pesos a share
>- one of those on hand was Carlos Slim, now the
>third richest tycoon on the planet but then
>still a two-bit corporate cannibal who shared
>Payan's Lebanese ancestry. Two of Mexico's most
>illustrious painters, Rufino Tamayo and
>Francisco Toledo, donated priceless works that
>became La Jornada's principal capital.
>
>Payan's words to those gathered in the
>Insurgentes Avenue ballroom that night ring just
>as true today as they did back then: "In this
>hour of crisis, we convoke a new labor of
>critical journalism in solidarity with those who
>struggle for the causes of this country."
>
>The first issue of La Jornada rolled off
>borrowed presses September 19th of that year to
>the universal disdain of Mexico's ruling class
>which then maintained a hammerlock on the press,
>doling out government advertising and even
>newsprint to newspapers based on their
>allegiances to the PRI and the government it
>commanded. The barons of the press gave the
>left daily a few short months of life at best.
>
>La Jornada was indeed born into turbulent times
>- always a propitious moment for independent
>journalism. Mexico had just gone belly up,
>forced into default of $100,000,00,000 USD in
>short-term foreign bank loans by plunging oil
>prices, and the crisis kicked the legs out from
>under outgoing president Jose Lopez Portillo and
>his hand-picked successor De la Madrid. Wars
>fomented by U.S. proxies were raging in
>neighboring Central America - two of the paper's
>veteran reporters Carmen Lira (now Payan's
>replacement as director) and Blanche Petrich
>(winner of the National Journalism Award) made
>their bones in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
>
>On the first anniversary of La Jornada's birth,
>Mexico City was savaged by an 8.1 grade
>earthquake that took up to 30,000 lives and when
>the "damnificados" (survivors) built a social
>movement that triggered the resurgence of
>Mexican civil society, La Jornada became its
>voice.
>
>The left daily's history is built on such
>dramatic moments. During and after the stealing
>of the 1988 presidential election from leftist
>Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by the evil Salinas and the
>PRI, La Jornada stood on the front lines,
>exposing the fraud that included everything from
>tens of thousands of burnt ballots to crashing
>computers, and the paper accompanied Cardenas
>when he consolidated the PRD in 1989 - the
>Jornada is often accused of being the
>left-center party's mouthpiece.
>
>In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall
>and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, also in
>1989, La Jornada played a critical role in the
>debate about the future of the Mexican Left and
>the left press.
>
>The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas that exploded
>on January 1st 1994 further burnished La
>Jornada's bonafides and sold tons of papers for
>Vicente Ramirez. Petrich rode into the jungle
>on horseback and got the first interview with
>Subcomandante Marcos and Hermann Bellinghausen,
>another National Journalism Award winner (he
>turned it down) has reported daily from that
>conflictive zone ever since.
>
>As the '90s ebbed into the new millennium, La
>Jornada closely covered the collapse of the PRI
>and the installation of the rightist PAN in Los
>Pinos, the Mexican White House. The paper's
>platoon of mordant, militant political
>cartoonists continue to relentlessly lampoon and
>skewer the political class.
>
>For the 12 years that the PRD has administered
>the affairs of this monstrous megalopolis, La
>Jornada has provided critical support and has,
>in fact, played a key role in the
>democratization of the most contaminated,
>crime-ridden, corrupt and chaotic city in the
>western hemisphere.
>
>The left daily's reportage of the heist of the
>2006 "presidenciales" by Felipe Calderon from
>Lopez Obrador - who still enjoys the blessings
>of the Jornaleros - became Vicente Ramirez's
>bread and butter. "I sold a "chingo" ('a
>fucking lot'.) They flew out of here like
>"balas" ('bullets'.")
>
>Giving this bold trajectory and because LJ has
>never been "a yes man for the corrupt
>governments of the PAN and the PRI" (Lira), the
>paper is despised by right-wingers and
>establishment intellectuals. Historian Enrique
>Krauze's vitriol at La Jornada is splattered all
>over the glossy pages of his Letras Libres.
>Writing in Krauze's rightist monthly,
>poet-philosopher Gabriel Zaid bemoans the
>influence that LJ has accumulated over the
>years: "how can La Jornada have so much weight
>when important decisions are taken in this
>country?" he complains, blaming the paper's
>"opportunistic" use of culture. "La Jornada
>brings together left intellectuals who define
>what they think is political correct."
>
>Every morning, LJ's letters to the editor column
>is packed with bristling epistles from
>government flunkies assailing La Jornada
>reporters for exposing the shenanigans of the
>bureaucracy. When the left paper reports on the
>dirty dealings of provincial governors and their
>abuses of authority, the governors are apt to
>send agents into the street to confiscate every
>Jornada in the state. State and federal
>governments threaten the withdrawal of paid
>publicity but LJ's clout has often nullified the
>denial of this lifeblood of the Mexican
>newspaper industry. For its 25th anniversary
>edition, mortal foes of La Jornada like Oaxaca's
>tyrannical governor Ulises Ruiz, the Falangist
>state government of Guanajuato, and the
>Zapatista-hating mayor of San Cristobal de las
>Casas were all obligated to take out paid
>birthday greetings.
>
>While the corporate newspaper industry appears
>to be gasping its last in the United States
>where no comparable left daily has ever survived
>for longer than two years (PM in New York City
>in the late '40s), Jornada runs in the black.
>
>Although La Jornada is published in Mexico City,
>the hub of a highly centralized nation from
>which all power emanates, the Jornaleros have
>mothered affiliated dailies in eight Mexican
>states and the national edition is distributed
>from Tijuana to Tapachula on the southern border
>where eager readers snatch up the paper the
>moment it hits the stands. In addition to the
>print edition, La Jornada On Line receives
>thousands of hits each day and has attracted a
>lively community of bloggers.
>
>Despite its long reach into the provinces, La
>Jornada is anything but provincial. Its
>correspondents prowl New York and Moscow and
>Havana, Bolivia and Chile and Argentina. The
>newspaper's perspective is firmly grounded in
>the global south but Robert Fisk and Patrick
>Cockburn share their London Independent
>dispatches from Middle East hotspots. This
>correspondent reported on the first days of
>Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq from Baghdad.
>Similarly, David Brooks covered the 9/11 terror
>attacks on New York and Washington from Ground
>Zero. Luis Hernandez Navarro never misses an
>international anti-globalization mobilization or
>World Social Forum. Cronista (chronicler) Arturo
>Cano hangs out with Mel Zelaya in Tegucigalpa.
>
>La Jornada does not only print the news, it
>makes it, actively espousing social causes and
>decrying injustice daily on its pages. In fact,
>the resistance of marginated communities from
>Chiapas to Pais Vasco would be little noted if
>the news had not first run in La Jornada.
>Crucial to this insemination of resistance in
>Mexico are daily notices of meetings and forums
>and rallies and marches that act as a mighty
>force multiplier for left movements, turning
>handfuls into multitudes. La Jornada, whose
>strong suit is reporting on social movements,
>has itself become a social movement.
>
>Although politics are its main course, La
>Jornada publishes monthly supplements on
>agriculture, the environment, labor, indigenous
>cultures, women's struggles, and gay and lesbian
>rights. The weekly cultural insert and daily
>reports on painting, dance, literature, music,
>and popular entertainment have deep scratch
>among cultural workers. The Jornada even once
>published a weekly magazine in English, a losing
>commercial venture that was eventually killed by
>Lira. "We are not going to spend the benefits of
>our workers" by continuing to publish a magazine
>"in the language of the oppressors," Carmen
>explained to this writer at the time. Jornada
>workers have built a strong in-house union.
>
>La Jornada also operates a book publishing arm
>with dozens of titles authored by its own
>reporters like Bellinghausen's account of the
>massacre at Acteal, "A Crime of State."
>Translations of Noam Chomsky's multiple works
>are hot sellers.
>
>Despite hard-wired anti-gringo sentiments, La
>Jornada invited the renowned gavacho gadfly to
>crown its 25th birthday celebration with a
>magnum lecture at the National University. Noam
>Chomsky is hardly the only U.S. lefty to adorn
>LJ's op ed columns - Howard Zinn, Immanuel
>Wallerstein, James Petras, and Amy Goodman are
>regular collaborators. In introducing his
>September 21st lecture at the UNAM, the oldest
>and most prestigious in the Americas, Carmen
>Lira posited that Chomsky's analysis of mass
>media in writings like "Manufacturing Consent"
>and the ethical guidance of the late Polish
>journalist Ryzsward Kupascinski ("bad people
>cannot become good reporters") were the
>cornerstones of La Jornada's credo.
>
>Chomsky's near two-hour talk to a jam-packed
>auditorium named for the poet-king Nezahualcoytl
>(every seat in the house was claimed within 30
>minutes of the announcement of the lecture)
>lazored in on Washington's fading domination of
>a uni-polar world. Noam ranged far afield: how
>Barack Obama, the darling of Wall Street, was
>sold to the North American electorate "like
>toothpaste or a wonder drug"; the British Empire
>as the "first international narco-trafficker"
>(the Opium War); the strategic perils of U.S.
>bases in Colombia for the Global South. The
>elderly (82) MIT linguistics pioneer's
>discourses are often better read on the printed
>page than pronounced out loud and Chomsky's
>low-key, nebbishy persona left some attendees
>dozing despite the dazzling blizzard of data he
>offered.
>
>Focusing on Washington's crimes around the
>globe, the talk often approached the world on an
>west-east power bias rather than south to north,
>mentioning NATO more than NAFTA with no
>reference to new Latin Left leaders like Hugo
>Chavez with whom Chomsky had just huddled. The
>perennial icon of the U.S. Left also avoided
>much mention of contemporary Mexican politics,
>perhaps with an eye out for Constitutional
>Article 33 that gives the Mexican president
>carte blanche to kick out any "inconvenient"
>foreigner. Still, the old gringo's condemnation
>of free trade, the war on drugs, and neo-liberal
>economics must have made Felipe Calderon (whose
>name was never dropped) uncomfortable.
>
>Despite the length of the talk, Chomsky was only
>twice interrupted with applause - once when he
>advanced that like the U.S., Mexico was not a
>"failed state" (a favorite theme) at least for
>the oligarchy but for millions of the poor who
>have lost all social protections, the state has,
>in fact, failed. When Noam Chomsky counseled
>that the best cure for neo-liberal excess was to
>confront the rulers with mass mobilizations, the
>audience again broke into cheers.
>
>As the very professorial Noam Chomsky stepped
>from the podium he was greeted by Trinidad
>Ramirez, wife of the imprisoned (113 years)
>Ignacio del Valle, leader of the Popular Front
>for the Defense of the Land, who tied a red
>kerchief around his neck and presented him with
>the emblematic machete of the farmers of San
>Salvador Atenco who count 13 political prisoners
>among their ranks.
>
>After 25 years and upwards of 9000 editions, La
>Jornada has forcefully disproved one of Noam
>Chomsky's pet thesis: that an independent media
>cannot survive in a corporate-dominated press.
>"You've proven me wrong," the old professor
>sheepishly confessed during a visit to the
>paper's Spartan headquarters in the south of the
>city.
>
>"9000 editions! You've got be kidding!" Vicente
>Ramirez marveled in his cramped little newspaper
>kiosk, whipping out his pocket computer. "Lets
>see - 9000 editions at 10 pesos a piece times
>20. That's 1,800,000 pesos! Happy Birthday! La
>Jornada has been very good to me."
>
>FIN
>
>John Ross's monstrous "El Monstruo - Dread &
>Redemption In Mexico City" will hit the streets
>in November (to read raving reviews from the
>likes of Mike Davis and Jeremy Scahill go to
>www.nationbooks.org.) Ross will be traveling
>Gringolandia much of 2009-2010 with "El
>Monstruo" and his new Haymarket title
>"Iraqigirl", the diary of a teenager growing up
>under U.S. occupation. If you have a venue for
>presentations he would like to talk to you at
>johnross@igc.org
>