Rafael Barajas is one of Mexico’s leading political cartoonists. He pens his cartoons
for the daily La Jornada under the name of El Fisgón (“the peeper”). He
has, the New York Times once wrote, “shaken the peaks of power” in Mexico.
He’s also just published his first book in English, How to Succeed at Globalization, A
Primer for Roadside Vendors. It’s a wonderfully witty comic-book history of
capitalism and globalization about which Rebecca Solnit has written: “For decades,
people have been telling us capitalism is a joke, but in this splendid pictorial tour El
Fisgón leads us all the way to the punchline so that we know why it’s funny.
And scary. And weird. And very destructive.” If you want just a taste of what the
book’s innards look like, click here and go to the American Empire
Project website. To check out an El Fisgón political cartoon (about our
President), click here.
El Fisgón’s piece below came about because I thought it might be interesting to
ask him to put down his pen, pick up his computer, and offer us in words a portrait
of our President as viewed from south of the Rio Grande. He responded in high style,
proving that drawing isn’t the only thing in this cartoonist’s arsenal.
As the electoral campaign here winds down (or up?), should you need a little moral
support from our own cartoon world, where reality often comes into sharper focus
than in our mainstream media, go pick up your daily dose of Doonesbury at
Slate, or check out Joshua Brown’s striking Life During Wartime series, or Tom
Tomorrow’s not-to-be-missed This Modern World or /www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17842″>the”>www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17842″>the latest Boondocks,
and then spend a little time with Mexican President George Bush. Tom
George Bush, The Worst Mexican President Ever
By El FisgónFree-trade globalization has produced some exceedingly strange phenomena: China,
the last socialist power, is glad to provide slave labor to multinationals; a firm in India
fills the tax forms of an American corporation that produces vodka in Peru and then
sells it to Polish immigrants who are constructing a British-financed building in
Madrid; an enterprise which specializes in biotechnology tries to copyright the DNA
of an isolated tribe from the Amazon, and George Bush has become the worst
Mexican president ever.Globalization tends to blur or erase all economic, geographic, and cultural
boundaries, leaving high technology to coexist with primitive forms of exploitation:
Taiwan sells watches to the Swiss; Brazil exports technology to Germany; and all
evidence suggests that George Bush has stolen his ruling style from old-fashioned
Mexican politicians.Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United
States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his
power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as
well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual
activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and
declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)
Free-trade globalization has produced some exceedingly strange phenomena: China,
the last socialist power, is glad to provide slave labor to multinationals; a firm in India
fills the tax forms of an American corporation that produces vodka in Peru and then
sells it to Polish immigrants who are constructing a British-financed building in
Madrid; an enterprise which specializes in biotechnology tries to copyright the DNA
of an isolated tribe from the Amazon, and George Bush has become the worst
Mexican president ever.
Globalization tends to blur or erase all economic, geographic, and cultural
boundaries, leaving high technology to coexist with primitive forms of exploitation:
Taiwan sells watches to the Swiss; Brazil exports technology to Germany; and all
evidence suggests that George Bush has stolen his ruling style from old-fashioned
Mexican politicians.
Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United
States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his
power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as
well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual
activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and
declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)
According to Mexican tradition, politicians always reach their positions thanks to a
fraudulent electoral process and then surround themselves with a clique which uses
its power to conduct “business” on a staggering scale while in office. The Florida
electoral thievery and Halliburton’s Iraq contract are classic examples of Mexican
corruption.
Based on a complex pyramid of political bosses, a totalitarian presidential regime
flourished in Mexico. It was organized around a political party whose name remains a
monument to paradox: the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). Names aside, the
PRI model was so efficient (for the PRI, of course) that the party was able to hold
power for more than seventy years. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called it
“the perfect dictatorship.”
This dictatorship was a mark of shame for all Mexicans. Only Mexico’s political
cartoonists were able to benefit from it. The profuse manifestations of cynicism and
obsequiousness it produced were a delight for us. In the Mexican court, dialogues
like the following were not uncommon and completely irresistible:
The President asks: “What time is it?”
His minister replies: “Whatever time you say, Mister President.
Our presidents were almighty creatures, the voices of God on Earth. Not to be with
them was to be against them. After them came the final flood or the atomic
apocalypse.
In order to maintain its political control, this regime needed to restrain civil rights
and limit freedom of the press. While others fell silent, Mexican political bosses,
lacking any kind of legal or moral counterweight, spoke with an enviable freedom and
without moral scruples, unbounded by reality. They used to say things like: “In the
state of Guerrero, the only ones who complain are the poor,” referring of course to
98% of the population; or “I can’t say yes or no, but quite the opposite.”
Undoubtedly, George Bush had these wise men in mind when he insisted that the
French weren’t able to understand the United States because they didn’t have a word
for “entrepreneur.” Having learned such turns of phrase and so much more from
Mexican politicians, he has now scaled the heights of Mexican political achievement,
becoming the most notorious cacique of modern times, and he’s done this,
without paying his predecessors a cent in royalties.
The creation of “free trade democracies” throughout Latin America has been one of
the major political triumphs of globalization. It has been said that the election to the
presidency of Vicente Fox, a free-trade globalizer if there ever was one, marked the
beginning of a new era for Mexico. This put the fear of God into Mexican caricaturists
who dreaded the possibility that the fall of the PRI might mean the end of our
professional paradise. We shouldn’t have worried. Fox has held onto all the old vices
of our former political bosses — except their authority. What he’s added to Mexico’s
presidency has been a touch of marketing and plenty of unintentional humor. He’s
been like a genetic experiment in which the DNA of an old-style Mexican president
has been cloned with Dan Quayle and Jerry Lewis. Free-trade democrats love to find
new ways of reducing the size and power of the state. Fox has proved an exemplar
when it comes to this. Never has a Mexican government been so weak; never have
Washington’s decisions carried such unprecedented weight in Mexican life.
Globalization favors chaos theory: a butterfly flaps its wings in the jungle and a
hurricane is formed in the Caribbean; in Saudi Arabia, a baby is born with a silver
spoon in its mouth, and two towers fall in Manhattan. An American politician acts like
a Mexican cacique and war explodes on the other side of the planet.
The only visible advantage Mexican politicians ever offered the rest of us was their
limited ability to damage the world. George Bush has overcome this obstacle. After
all, he has access to the sort of technology and to an arsenal that Mexico’s local
tyrants could only dream of. When he says he’s blessed, it’s because we’re damned.
Under the nuclear umbrella of his free-trade empire and incipient world government,
his clique of petty political bosses can dictate the economic agendas of dozens of
third-world countries. In recent years, the priorities of the Mexican economy have
been defined by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street, and
Washington; they establish our oil quota, the levels of our external debt payments,
and the minimum wages we can offer. Vincente Fox acts as what he’s always been: a
Coca Cola CEO, a multinational middleman, while the true president of Mexico is
George Bush, that cacique of caciques.
According to Mexican tradition, politicians are judged depending on how they take
care of their people and how they make them prosper and by such standards,
George Bush is the worst Mexican President ever.
We are told that American democracy still works, but if so, it’s the only aspect of the
U.S. that’s not globalized; which means millions of citizens around the world won’t
have the right to vote in this election, even though their futures too are at stake. For
Mexicans this a particularly bitter pill to swallow. After all, shouldn’t we have a right
to express our opinions on the last cacique?
Rafael Barajas (El Fisgón), political cartoonist for the Mexican daily La
Jornada, is also the cofounder of two satirical magazines, a children’s book
illustrator, a winner of Mexico’s National Journalism Prize, and the author of La
Historia de un País en Caricatura, a book on the history of nineteenth century
Mexican political cartoons. He has been dubbed the “dean of Mexico’s vigorous
corps of political cartoonists” by the New York Times. His comic-book
history of capitalism, How to Succeed at Globalization, A Primer for the
Roadside Vendor, has just been published in English.
Copyright C2004 El Fisgón