There is always a chance that Barack Obama’s luck will hold and therefore that the face saving way he concocted for getting U.S. combat troops, and not much else, out of Iraq won’t unravel while he is still in office.

But events on the ground portend otherwise.  Now is therefore a good time to reflect on the importance of saving face, and on what losing face can mean.

Military might is indispensible for superintending a global empire.  But being able to fight several wars at once and to annihilate the planet thousands of times over is not enough.  America needs “credibility.”

It has commitments to honor – to the global capitalist order and to national elites.   And, from time to time, it has rebellions to quell.  It doesn’t always have to prevail in fact.  But it cannot seem to have been bested in a way that makes it look weak.  Above all, it must never lose face.

It can be instructive to think of a superpower as a criminal organization writ large.  For both, strength matters.  But the appearance of strength matters more.

It was this way too when the Soviet Union existed, and it will be this way again if and when China assumes superpower status.  It has been this way for all empires at all times.

Saving face has always been deemed crucial.  There is no American exceptionalism here.

The consequences can be, and often are, horrendous.

For example, if the story Robert Dallek tells in Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (2013) is even remotely on track, events in Berlin and Cuba got blown up into such proportions that the world almost came to an end because whatever else moved Kennedy and his advisors, losing face was out of the question.

Similar considerations explain why they got the Vietnam War going.

Dallek accepts, as best he can, the standard view of Kennedy’s presidency.  His Kennedy therefore comes off as a rather statesmanlike figure (with a little brother for an attack dog); and while many of Kennedy’s top military and intelligence advisors are depicted like the Neanderthals they were, the civilians in Camelot’s “ministry of talent” seem almost benign.

But the evidence he presents tells a different story – “the brightest and the best” were clueless and, for the most part, irrationally anti-Communist.  They were also divided among themselves.

By the time the Kennedys ratcheted up America’s involvement in Vietnam, both the President and the Attorney General had come to doubt the advice they were getting from the military and the CIA.  And they seem to have had more than an inkling of what would happen if he let them have their war.

Why then did Kennedy move forward anyway?  Domestic political considerations played a role.  But the main reason was that, in his mind and in his brother’s, credibility was all; he could not appear to back down or otherwise lose face.

That was more than a half century ago, but it is how our leaders still think.  Caroline Kennedy was on to something in the 2008 electoral campaign when she very publically likened Barack Obama to her father.

Lyndon Johnson seems to have been more of a true believer than his predecessor, though it must have been clear to him, by 1966 if not before, that he was ratcheting up a lost war.  It was certainly clear to Richard Nixon.

But they felt stuck – “ankle deep…, waist deep…, shoulder deep in the big muddy,” as Pete Seeger put it.  And like “the big fool” in Seeger’s song, they saw no way out but to push on.

They did have a choice, of course; they could have withdrawn.  But then the empire’s credibility would be shot.  This they could not permit – no matter how much death and destruction they had to cause.

The American people would have been better off had the empire taken the hit and been humiliated sooner, but the Vietnam War was never about the American people – just as it was never about “saving” the Vietnamese.  It was about the welfare and security of the economic and political elites for whose benefit the empire exists.

As it turned out, Johnson and Nixon could only postpone the inevitable; they were powerless to prevent it.  After perpetrating a decade long series of gratuitous horrors, the United States ultimately did lose face.

The picture of helicopters evacuating the American embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, as the city was liberated – or “fell,” as our media still say – lingers to this day.

This is why Ronald Reagan fought his wars in Central America through proxies, and why, to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome,” he and then Bush the Father found it expedient to pick fights with such mighty foes as Grenada and Panama.

But who really won the Vietnam War?  Decades ago, the answer seemed obvious.  It is not obvious anymore.

According to Dallek, among the Kennedy advisors who stayed on with Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow stands out for never later expressing regrets.   Rostow, it seems, thought the war was a success because the dominoes never fell – and that, he insisted, had been the goal all along.

Rostow’s moral and intellectual judgment may be even more abysmal than, say, Robert McNamara’s.  But, for several decades now, it has looked like he was right.  Notwithstanding its humiliating defeat, the U.S. did wreak so much devastation upon the victor that Vietnam would never serve as an example that other countries could emulate.

And what other purpose did all the death and devastation serve?

America “lost” Vietnam but got what it was after anyway.  It is telling that victorious Vietnam has long been more or less in the American ambit.  Would it have been any different if America had “won?”

This example, along with countless others that could be adduced, shows that, because time and perspective are crucial determinants, maintaining credibility and saving face have more to do with how outcomes and events seem to people at the time than with inalterable matters of fact.

Johnson and Nixon — and also Gerald Ford, whose misfortune was to inherit the presidency and therefore the Vietnam War after Nixon resigned — fell afoul of this basic truth.

They did do their part to assure that the United States would get what it was fighting for.  But, at the time and for many years thereafter, it looked like they caused the United States to suffer an ignominious defeat.

In Kennedy’s defense, he and his advisors did not have a clear view of what the future would be like if America’s involvement in Vietnam intensified, though some of them had a pretty good idea.  But, by the middle of the decade, the “quagmire” was already obvious.

From then on, if not before, winning was not an option, but saving face was an imperative.

Four decades later, Barack Obama entered the White House at a time when both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars had already been in face saving phases for several years.

In the early days of the Bush-Cheney presidency, overthrowing Afghanistan’s Taliban government was easy, and so was killing lots of Afghanis – in revenge for what fifteen Saudis and four other Al Qaeda hijackers, none of them Afghani, did on 9/11.

But anyone who knew anything about Afghanistan could have told Bush even before he launched that still unfolding war that he would soon find that he had put the United States shoulder deep or worse in a muddy even more inescapable than Vietnam.

This was not quite as obvious in the case of Iraq, at least in the first months.  But by the time Bush declared the “mission accomplished,” there was little doubt.  Several “surges” later, there was no doubt at all.

The voters who elected Obama were confident that he would end both wars in short order.

He would certainly have liked to end the Iraq War, the one he called “dumb.”  It is not clear what he and Democrats more “liberal” than he  – Howard Dean, for example – thought about Afghanistan.

But the evidence is not encouraging. Maybe they never understood the Greek tragedies they read in college that dealt with connections between revenge and moral progress.   Or maybe, as Democrats fearful of being thought “weak,” they were only hanging tough.

It hardly matters.  An emperor cannot just cut and run; not if it means losing face.

Obama’s problem therefore was to assure voters that he was doing his best to end the wars he inherited while, at the same time, making sure that the taint of defeat would not fall upon the American superpower.

Temperamentally, Obama seems more like Dallek’s Kennedy than like Johnson or Nixon.  He does not shed his ambivalences easily, and he is not one to rush headlong into the abyss.

But he came on the scene too late to abort Bush’s wars without the empire he stewards losing face.  In this respect, the situation he inherited was more like Johnson’s and Nixon’s than Kennedy’s.

However, like Kennedy and unlike the other two, Obama seems to know enough to be wary of his advisors.  But again like Kennedy, he can’t – or won’t – do anything about it.

In this respect, they are two of a kind.  When it comes to “profiles in courage” or displays of “audacity” that might do some good, all they do is publish books about it.

Obama, like Kennedy, is also in the thrall of disabling ideological assumptions.

In Kennedy’s case, it was Cold War anti-Communism, a “bipartisan” disorder, emblematic of liberalism and conservatism alike.

Now, terrorism is the new Communism.  And, although he should know better, Obama buys into it.  After more than a decade of TSA checks at airports and similar efforts to scare the hell out of everybody, so does nearly everyone else.

However, the further idea that, to keep (islamist) terrorists at bay, it made sense to make war on Afghanistan and Iraq – for starters — is peculiar to the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party.

Remarkably, they are still at it.  Having done so well with their starter-wars, they now have Iran in their sights.  This is not just admirable stubbornness; it is dumb incorrigibility.

Fortunately, now that Dick Cheney can no longer help them, their influence is waning – even in Republican ranks.

Democrats have long been keen to seem at least as bellicose as the chicken hawks on the other side.   Nevertheless, they never quite bought into the idiocy – not even in the aftermath of 9/11, when they shamelessly embraced its consequences.

Bush’s military and intelligence advisors – not just David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, but the vast majority of them — were as inept as any in recent history and, for sheer cluelessness, his neocon civilian advisors more than rivaled anything Camelot had to offer.

The neocons considered themselves experts on the Middle East, though their ignorance was risible.  And since they took the Israeli right’s world-view for granted, their determination to advance Israel’s interests clouded their judgment further.

At least the advisors Kennedy relied upon served only one master.

It didn’t help either that Middle Eastern politics is complicated and disorderly, or that the  participants are moved as much by (extra-rational) “passions,” as the late Albert Hirschman called them, as by rational self-interest.

Contrary to what is widely assumed by those who shape public opinion in the West, those passions are not religious only – or even mainly.  They also involve yearnings for recognition and self-assertion by peoples whom the West disparages and relegates to a subaltern status.

In contrast, the Cold war imposed an intelligible structure upon political affairs that even the a Henry Kissinger could discern.  There was nothing remotely comparable in the world into which George Bush inserted his wars.

When Kennedy was out of his depth, as he often was, he knew it.  Being an outright ignoramus, Bush was always out of his depth, and didn’t know it at all.  This is why his shenanigans gave rise to so many more untoward unintended consequences than Kennedy’s – or any other president’s in modern history.

Bush set chains of events in motion that gave rise to unforeseen and fatally ironic outcomes.  That this would happen in Afghanistan was, again, a foregone conclusion.  That Iraq would be torn asunder was not quite so clear.

However, by the time it became impossible to deny that “the mission,” whatever it was, had by no means been “accomplished,” a staggering array of political maelstroms had already erupted — accompanied by successive waves of sectarian violence.

Thanks to a massive American military presence – and strategic restraint on the part of some of the principals — a semblance of national unity and order was nevertheless achieved.

But, as the several sides fought each other to exhaustion, what emerged was a national government dominated by Shiites with strong ties to Iran – America’s enemy, and Israel’s “existential threat,” du jour.

This is now unraveling.  Sunnis, some with Al Qaeda connections, are back with a vengeance.  They have even retaken control of Fallujah, the Guernica of the Iraq War, and they are reportedly active throughout Al Anbar province – reigniting fears of a resumption of the civil wars that raged before Obama took office.

Even if there were a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon at the ready, primed to escalate America’s involvement, and even if that could still effectively postpone the inevitable, everyone nowadays understands that the American public will have none of it.

Despite the best efforts of Ronald Reagan and every president after him, there is still too much Vietnam Syndrome left in the body politic.

And so, Obama’s repackaging of the last phases of George Bush’s Iraq War could soon fall apart.

If it does, will Obama find that he has brought down upon himself the worst of both worlds: that, like the presidents who followed JFK, he will have failed to save face; but that, unlike them, he will not even have bought the empire enough time to conceal its losses?

This is a public relations issue, not a question about reality.  The reality is that the empire long ago lost both Bush wars and much else besides.  This was obvious even before Obama moved onto the national stage.

Whoever controls mainstream discourse controls history — for a while.  There must be some fit with the facts on the ground, but the connections can be and often are tenuous.

But, in the end, politically driven confabulations have their limits: the real story usually does come out.

Saving – and losing – face follows a different time line.  In its effects on real world politics, this typically matters more than the eventual judgment of history.

That was how it was with Vietnam.  How it will be with Iraq remains to be seen.

It now seems likely, though, that Obama’s temporarily successful repackaging of the Iraq War will soon unravel.  Were that to happen, the consequences could be horrific.

Even so, there could be good that comes of it — if Obama’s fix unravels in ways that underscore how wrong-headed Bush’s wars were.  The Vietnam Syndrome – or rather a contemporary equivalent – might then revive.

The facts are what they are, but whether or not Obama can save face, if and when his efforts unravel, depends on how the story is presented and received.  So does what will follow from the unraveling.

It is taking a long time for the consequences of Kennedy’s face saving efforts to become apparent.  To this day, his role in bringing on the Vietnam War is widely misunderstood, and his culpability goes largely unrecognized.

In the case of Obama’s machinations in Iraq, events are unfolding rapidly, and he is not likely to be so lucky.  The Afghanistan War, which he did so much to revive and refashion, may not be the only Bush war he tried to make the best of for the empire’s sake that comes back to bite him.

It is bound to happen in the fullness of time.  Too bad for him, if not for the rest of us, that it is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

Translated by Patrick Timmons

Translator’s Note: According to freedom of expression organizations, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas to practice journalism. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented 29 “work related” murders of journalists in Mexico since 1992, with the murders of 40 other journalists as yet unconfirmed. Investigations are stalled in most cases. A recent murder still considered unrelated to journalism is that of Oaxacan crime reporter, Alberto López Bello. But investigative journalist Luis Cardona reports that López Bello’s murder could be related to his profession. – PT

***

At ten past seven in the morning on Wednesday 17 July 2013, officers from the Oaxaca State Attorney General’s office discovered two bodies on Sabino Street in La Humedad around a place called Trinidad de Viguera. One of the corpses was that of the journalist Alberto López Bello, crime reporter for the newspaper El Imparcial. According to the Attorney General’s office, Bello was discovered with the body of Arturo Alejandro Franco Rojas, “a municipal police informant.”

At the time of his murder, López Bello worked for El Imparcial of Oaxaca. Colleagues called him, “El Chamaco” (the Kid). His colleagues wrote on the newspaper website that, “We lament and condemn the loss of our colleague, a contributor to the crime section.” El Imparcial demanded the authorities offer a clarification “that shows how communicators are exposed to vulnerabilities as they carry out their daily work of faithfully and appropriately informing the citizenry.”

Oaxaca’s state governor, Gabino Cué Monteagudo, said in a press release that he instructed the State Attorney General, Manuel de Jesús López López, ”to pursue the murder as a high impact crime, directed by” a special investigatory committee.

The State Attorney General, Manuel de Jesús López López, reassured that the inquiry would not ignore any investigative lines. He publicly stated his commitment to use the powers of his office to clarify the murder and bring those responsible to justice. The state’s top prosecutor had analyzed the aggressions previously suffered by the journalist, giving some credence to media workers’ suspicions that police officers participated in López Bello’s murder.

Previous Threats Against López Bello

At a press conference last May, Alberto López Bello and Jacobo Robles, both crime reporters at El Imparcial held the State Secretary of Public Safety, Marco Tulio López Escamilla, and police officers responsible for an arbitrary detention occurring almost exactly a month before his murder. On Saturday 18 May, State Police detained the reporters as they covered the appearance of a narco-banner on a pedestrian overpass at the CONALEP Bridge in the township of San Antonio de la Cal.

Unidentified people had placed a printed message on a banner, the same one photographed by the journalists. Minutes later, the State Police arrived in a patrol car bearing the number 1514. The officers questioned the reporters, identifying them as responsible for placing the banner. At the press conference to denounce their detention held in front of the Palacio de Gobierno, the reporters confirmed that they did identify themselves. But the order the officers received on the “matra” — the radio system used by the State Police — instructed them to take them to police headquarters.

At headquarters, they were fingerprinted and, after five hours, ordered to appear at the Federal Attorney General’s Office. Both journalists maintained that because no officials were available at the Attorney General’s office, they were not processed. The reporters filed a complaint that directly accused the State Secretary of Public Safety of having given the order. When challenged, the state official took to Twitter to deny the facts. The journalists had also indicated that the State Police officers showed special concern about securing the immediate removal of the banner. During a telephone conversation, the officers reported the narco-banner’s message to their superiors.

The reporters remembered that the “narco-banner” made references to various State Police chiefs, asking them to fulfill previously negotiated agreements.

“They were trying to make us say who had told us about the banner, saying that we should not publish the photographs,” López Bello said at his press conference with his colleague.

“The State Police officers never recorded our detention.” López Bello added that when they arrived at the Federal Attorney General’s Office, one of the State Police chiefs asked over the “matra” communications system if “there was any possibility that they could be returned to the Police Headquarters.” But since they had already been taken to the Federal Attorney General’s office in Oaxaca, the state police officers were powerless to act.

Sub-delegate Elba Alicia Sánchez Domínguez of the Federal Attorney General’s Office in Oaxaca confirmed that no information existed about those events. A complaint detailing which crimes needed to be investigated did not exist, so the official said that she did not know the reason why the state police had detained the journalists, or why they had been transferred to the federal prosecutor’s local office.

As a result of these events, both reporters received assurances that their professional security would be respected and that they could work without interference. However, work colleagues (who requested guarantees of anonymity in fear of their safety) said that since their arrest the reporters asked to be accompanied, and communicated their whereabouts to their superiors and friends. However, on 17 July 2013, César Alfaro, Oaxaca’s State Police Commissioner announced that López Bello had been found dead in a place called Las Humedades.

On discovery of the bodies, it could be seen that both had been attacked in the head with large pieces of paving stone, like those used for posts in rural areas.

The victims had been gagged, and bound hands and feet. Blows to the head had destroyed their faces, complicating the process of identification.

Discovery of the Victims’ Motorcycles

The State Prosecutor recognized that around two o’clock in the afternoon the same Wednesday the victims’ motorcycles, their usual form of transport, had been found in front of a bar between Porfirio Díaz and Morelos streets. He assumed that the night before both had been drinking inside the establishment.

The body found beside that of the journalists was Arturo Alejandro Franco Rojas. The State Attorney General said he worked as a municipal police informant. One of the journalist’s friends confirmed that he was one of López Bello’s sources.

The Attorney General said that the State Police investigated these events and assumed that when the men left the bar they were captured. However, there are no known witnesses to corroborate the state prosecutor’s version of events.

The battered old model motorbikes that belonged to the two men were parked on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

Oaxaca’s prosecutor added that owing “to the fight against organized crime, there is an ever-present risk that these types of organizations want to influence the editorial line of certain newspapers.”

“I cannot confirm if the killings’ motive is connected to freedom of expression. There exists, however, a 2009 precedent when a truck belonging to El Imparcial del Istmo was attacked, and three workers were killed,” he said.

The Federal Attorney General asked the State Governor to be aware of these facts and that Oaxaca’s state prosecutors should work with counterparts in the Federal Special Prosecutor of Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE, according to its Spanish acronym).

Oaxaca Fails to Investigate While Federal Investigation Underway

The Oaxaca State Prosecutor’s office admitted the existence of an inquiry (401/PGR/2013) conducted by the Fourth Investigative Division into the detention of López Bello and his colleague. But it could not confirm the motive for their May 2013 arrest.

At López Bello’s press conference the journalist said that state authorities had not conducted a preliminary investigation into their detention. Furthermore, the Federal Attorney General’s representative recognized the journalists had been transferred without a criminal complaint, just an order for detention, which is why they had been released.

Article 19, a press freedom organization dedicated to the protection of at risk journalists, said: “The reporters’ detention by state police sends a message criminalizing the practice of journalism. In the context of violence against the press their detention not only violates the state’s international responsibility to prevent and protect journalists from any type of aggression but also increases the vulnerability of those exercising their right to freedom of expression. Their detention undermines the promotion of a freedom essential to democracy.”

The arbitrary detention of López Bello and Jacobo Robles occurred just two weeks after death threats against two other journalists in the state, Pedro Matías and Giovanni Vásquez. In Oaxaca in 2013, 11 threats were made against journalists and reporters. When added to the 22 threats documented in 2012, of Mexico’s 32 states and the Federal District, Oaxaca registers one of the highest numbers of attacks against freedom of expression.

López Bello gave an interview to Article 19 in which he discussed his arbitrary arrest: ”After we photographed the banner, two state police officers arrived on the scene and they asked us to identify ourselves. We identified ourselves and showed them our press passes. But the still detained us. They took our equipment from us, including our phones and money. Then they transferred us to the Federal Attorney General’s office, where we were then released.”

During their detention, state police deprived journalists of contact with the outside world and fingerprinted them. Finally they took them to the prosecutor at the Federal Attorney General’s Office. But the now murdered López Bello confirmed that once the federal prosecutor had taken their statements, “he said that there was no crime to investigate and that the police had acted incorrectly.”

Laura Borbolla, Federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression Concluded that the Journalist’s Death “Was Not Work Related”

The Federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression, Laura Borbolla, reported publicly on 6 November 2013 that Alberto López Bello’s murder was not work related. Instead, she said that it was connected to his relationship with his murderers, who belong to a gang. Borbolla criminalized his relationship to his murderers and ended her office’s investigation.

But nobody has reviewed the statements López Bello made when he protested his arbitrary detention in May 2013.

Oaxaca’s Attorney General has indicated that gang members Julián Ramírez Benítez, Gerardo García Flores, Rafael Martínez González and Aldo José Luis Tenorio Benítez, all from Verarcuz, were arrested for the murders of López Bello and his companion, a city police officer, Alejandro Franco Rojas.

The State’s top prosecutor said the four culprits in custody for López Bello’s murder could be identified because last June they had participated in murders at two bars, La Farola the Casa de Mezcal.

An analysis of the murder conducted by the late Mike O’Connor, Mexico Representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that during 2013 no murders of journalists occurred for work-related reasons. O’Connor added that this was the first time in a decade CPJ had been unable to confirm a work-related journalist’s death in Mexico, saying also that the country has always been a difficult place to pinpoint the motive behind the murderof journalists.

Other Murdered Journalists in Mexico in 2013 

– 24 April 2013: the mutilated body of Daniel Alejandro Martínez Bazaldúa was found in Saltillo, Coahuila. He was a photojournalist for the society section of Vanguardia. He had worked for the newspaper about a month.

– Jaime Guadalupe González Domínguez, reporter and editor of Ojinaga Noticias, was killed on 3 March 2013 in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, on the border with Presidio, Texas. Rival organized crime groups are fighting to control the trafficking routes to the United States. He was shot while eating at a taco stand.

– On 15 April 2013 Alonso de la Colina Sordo, 50 years old, was fatally shot the moment he exited a bank in Puebla. He had been the long-term presenter of a news show in Guerrero, a state brought low by organized crime. The Zetas, the Beltrán Leyva Oragnization (BLO), the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) are all fighting for control of drug trafficking routes in Guerrero. De la Colina Sordo retired from his job in February 2013.

Mexican Journalists Killed In 2012

At least 16 journalists were assassinated or disappeared in Mexico in 2012 under circumstances which authorities believe was connected to their work:

– In November 2012, freelance journalist Adrián Silva and his assistant, Misrael López González were killed minutes before covering an army operation near the city of Puebla. In that operation, soldiers secured a warehouse filled with quantities of gasoline stolen from Mexico’s state-owned oil company, PEMEX. Both men were shot.

– In August 2012, photojournalists Arturo Barajas and José Antonio Aguilar Mota were killed in Michoacán. Their bodies were found in the boot of a car. Both had been shot in the head.

– Also in August 2012, Mario Segura, editor of the Tamaulipas newspaper Sol del Sur was kidnapped and then released. Today he lives outside the state.

– In June 2012, Victor Manuel Baez Chino, crime reporter for national newspaper Milenio was murdered in Xalapa, Veracruz. According to the police, two Zetas hit men are suspected of murdering Báez, who was writing articles about organized crime that angered the leaders of the Zetas.

– Also in Veracruz, in May 2012, Guillermo Luna, a photojournalist with veracruznews.com was found dead beside the body of Gabriel Huge, a photojournalist with Notiver, and Esteban Rodríguez, a photojournalist who left the profession in 2011. Their bodies showed signs of torture.

– In May 2012, Marco Antonio Ávila García was shot and killed while working in Sonora.

– Also in May 2012, the body of René Orta Salgado, reporter for El Sol de Cuernavaca was found in the trunk of a car in the state of Morelos.

– Again in May, the body of journalist Marco Antonio Ávila García was found on an unpaved road in Sonora. He was working as a reporter for El Regional de Sonora. Some armed men kidnapped Ávila García in Ciudad Obregón, about 65 miles from where his body was discovered.

– In April, Proceso magazine investigative journalist Regina Martínez was beaten and strangled in her home in Xalapa, Veracruz.

– In January, Raúl Regolo Garza, a reporter for Última was killed by gunshots in Sonora.

Analysts’ Conclusions

“Attacks on journalists continue because criminal groups insist on coverage of their acts in order to keep their turf warm,” commented Gerardo Rodríguez, security analyst for Seguridad Mexico.

For Vicente Sánchez, analyst at the Colegio de la Frontera, violence against journalists serves as a warning so that they do not publish specific information on certain subjects about organized crime, making the gang members liable to attack or prosecution by the Federal Government.

Journalists are under constant threat in Mexico because nobody really wants to protect them. According to José Pérez-Espino, author of several books about journalists, journalism, and press state relations, journalists always work at their own risk, and neither media outlets, nor the authorities provide security against the threat from organized crime.

http://diario19.com/?p=299

Patrick Timmons is a writer, human rights journalist, and language teacher with a PhD (2004) in Latin American History from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2011 to 2012 he was the Human Rights, Migration, and Security Policy Officer at the British Embassy in Mexico City where he reported for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office on a wave of killings of journalists in the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz. He is finishing his first book Plucking the Plumed Serpent: A Memoir of Madness and Sensibility in North America. He divides his time between Mexico City and Colchester, England.

Where and to whom one is born is, it seems, arbitrary, chance, fate or karma being the divine decision maker. Wake from innocence to middle class parents in one of the developed wealthy nations of the world, and be blessed with comfort, opportunity, good health care and education and a life of profitable possibilities. Find yourself in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya or the daughter of tea pickers in Assam, India, and see before you: poverty, uncertainty, suffering and the threat of extreme exploitation.

 

Inequality: The Plague of the Times

We live in a world rife with inequality (wealth and income, power and influence); it is the underlying cause of deep-seated social tensions, community divisions and a range of poisons causing terrible suffering to millions of people.

The disparity between the wealthy minority and the billions living in suffocating poverty is greater than it has ever been. Worldwide it is estimated that the wealthiest 10% owns 85% of global household wealth. The UC Atlas of Global Inequality states that the “three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 47 countries with the least GDP,” and reports that “The richest 2% of the world population own more than 51% of the global assets”. At the other more densely populated, less perfumed end of the scale, Global Issues report that: almost half the world’s people (over 3.5 billion) live on less than $2.50 a day; and 80% live on less than $10 a day. The largest proportion of those living in poverty are in India, rural China and Sub-Saharan Africa, where despite the fact that some countries within the last decade or two have seen economic growth, poverty rates have remained unchanged and “some countries – Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon – have actually seen an increase in the percentage of their population living in extreme poverty” [World Bank study Africa Pulse]. Prompting the omnipresent question: who is this economic growth for; who, under the current development model, is benefiting?

Discussing the possibilities of change to a more equitable world, UNICEF paints a rather bleak picture; assuming the perpetuation of the current economic model, they estimate “that it would take more than 800 years for the bottom billion to achieve ten percent of global income under the current rate of change.”

The world of income and wealth inequality is awash with shocking statistics. Figures disclosed by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic and reported by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz reveal that, “eight percent of humanity takes home 50% of global income, the top 1 percent alone takes home 15 percent.” America, he states, “provides a particularly grim example for the world.” It is where income and wealth inequality reach their zenith, and where one in four children live in poverty. The country’s wealthiest 1% (incomes above $394,000) take “home 22 percent of the nation’s income”; the top 0.1 percent, make do with a colossal 11 percent. Stieglitz goes on to make the point that an average American worker earns less today than he did 45 years ago (inflation adjusted), and that men without a University degree, earn “almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.”

Why are millions of Americans not marching in the streets demanding justice and equitable living one wonders? Physically exhausted, emotionally strained and mentally put to sleep, most do not have the time or the energy to revolt.

The figures depicting poverty and hardship are many and varied and shocking to all: over 20% of the world’s population (that’s 1.4 billion people) live on less than $1.25 a day, 75 cents below the official World Bank poverty threshold; UNICEF states that 22,000 children (under the age of five; if it was 6, or 7, the numbers would be even higher) die every day due to poverty related issues. They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”

Of the two billion children in the world, half are currently living their lives in extreme poverty, with limited or no access to clean water or sanitation, health care and education worth the name. The greatest concentrations of people living below the $2 a day poverty line are to be found in rural areas where three in every four are to be found. Life is little better in the cities where over half the world’s 7.2 billion population now live, one in three of whom live in a slum.

The Unequal are Always With Us

It may well be true that income and wealth inequality has always existed; the industrial revolution in Britain and America certainly created sharp inequities. However, the worldwide gap between the “rich and the rest” as Stieglitz puts it, “widened even more, right up [and] through World War II.” But it took the combined doctrinal political idealism of Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of Britain 1979–1990) and President Ronald Reagan (President of USA 1981–1989) to hyper-accelerate levels of inequality, and set the divisive competitive tone for the years that followed. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states that income inequality “first started to rise in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel).” The ratio between the average incomes of the top 5% to the bottom 5% in the world increased from 78 to 1 in 1988, to 114 to 1 in 1993. That’s some achievement. During the Thatcher/Reagan reign, Income tax was lowered for higher earners, trade unions were broken and the financial sector was deregulated with, we now know, devastating consequences. The inequality “trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s,” and continues to poison the social fabric of countries throughout the world, including more egalitarian nations, like Sweden, Finland, Germany and Denmark.

Stieglitz relays that, “from 1988 to 2008, Mr. Milanovic found, people in the world’s top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by 60 percent, while those in the bottom 5 percent had no change in their income. In America, home to the 2008 recession, from 2009 to 2012, incomes of the top 1% in America, many of which no doubt had a greedy hand in the causes of the melt down, “increased more than 31%, while the incomes of the 99% grew 0.4% – less than half a percentage point” [Los Angeles Times].

Flowing from wealth and income inequality (combining to create the powerful elite), is the inequitable use and distribution of natural resources; water and food, minerals, and we could add knowledge, information, technology and skills. The United States, for example, with a mere 5% of the world’s population, uses 30% of natural resources; the 25% of people living in developed countries use 80% of the world’s non-fuel minerals.  Many of these are found in poor developing countries, which have little or no control over their resources and on the whole benefit little from their extraction and sale. Not only do the wealthy countries usurp and waste 80% of the world’s resources, but according to a United Nations (UN) report, their “voracious consumption of resources cannot be sustained.”

Inequality, Vulnerability Exploitation

The extreme dualities of poverty and wealth inevitably create the vulnerable and the powerful, the abuser and the abused. There are wide ranging consequences of such social division: the erosion, or denial of democracy, for with money comes power and with power political influence, making it inevitable that “inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance,” [Joseph Stieglitz]. Man-made climate change though affecting everyone, it is the poorest people living in the poorest who are suffering most acutely, as a recent report by The World Bank Group makes clear; stating “that global warming will lead to a major food-crisis in the future. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are expected to be the worst-hit.” That is, the regions with the largest concentrations of people living in utter poverty.

One of the gravest consequences of this social-economic imbalance is the worldwide movement of people, from impoverished communities with few employment opportunities and poor education, to a rich or richer region or nation. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates there to be, over “105 million persons [excluding children] working in a country other than their country of birth.” Women make up the lions share of this army of workers, many of whom are vulnerable to trafficking. The US State Department states that up to 800,000 persons are trafficked every year (although the figure is probably considerably higher): 80% of victims are women, of which 80% are sold into the commercial sex industry. Trafficking (which is the second most widespread and profitable worldwide criminal activity) often arises from debt bondage, resulting in forced labour. Trafficking is nothing less than modern day slavery, there are thought to be more people living as slaves (that’s people held against their will, forced to work and paid nothing) now than at ant time in history, and for those with the means they are cheap; on average, $90 will buy you a human being [Free the slaves].

Working within an economic system, that disempowers the disadvantaged, migrant workers form an economic lifeline for millions of families. In 2012 they sent, “$406 billion in savings to their families in developing countries” [The World Bank]. Money earned through domestic servitude, with its inherent dangers of mistreatment, or construction work in appalling, often dangerous conditions: remittances, which may enable their children to eat three meals a day, to go to school and learn to read, or perhaps allow for an elderly parent to receive health care. Essentials: indeed fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that should be met by the nation state and if not, more broadly by the international community.

It is poverty in its many manifestations – poor education and health care, poor sanitation and water supplies, poor living conditions; poor or low self-esteem and an absence of hope – which drives migration, and creates the environment in which trafficking and extreme exploitation can flourish. The vulnerable are vulnerable in a variety of ways: to exploitation, to slavery, to sexual abuse, to the effects of natural disasters and to political and economic manipulation.

In a world of plenty why are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people vulnerable at all? The vulnerable and exploited exist because of an inherently unjust social-economic system, which has caused extreme global inequality and built a divided fractured world society.

Inequality, Sharing Justice

The complacent party line of the wealthy and elite is that “there is no alternative (TINA)” to the present unhealthy, divisive economic model. The advocates of market fundamentalism have sought to close down totally the intellectual space for enquiry and discourse. If indeed ‘there is no alternative’, inequality and poverty will continue to increase, building intensely “divided societies, [where] the rich will hunker in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them, and vice versa. I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns” [Joseph Stieglitz]. The resulting social injustice of such a horrific future would strengthen existing divisions, creating resentment, anger and potentially violent conflict.

The cherished economic model of choice – market fundamentalism, used as a paradigm for worldwide development has, as UNICEF makes clear, failed and continues to fail, both the people and the planet. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy, and leads us to question as UNICEF does “the current development model (development for whom?), which has accrued [growth] mostly to the wealthiest billion” people. “Not only does inequality slow economic growth, but it results in health and social problems and generates political instability. Inequality is dysfunctional, and there is a grave need to place equity at the center of the development agenda,” they correctly assert. A more just and humane model of development, based on equitable distribution of the world’s resources, is a viable alternative whose time has come.

The idea of equitable distribution, of sharing the food and water, the resources knowledge, skills, ideas and technology of the world, as the guiding principle for development and economic life, is supported by Frances Stewart, Professor Emeritus at Oxford Department of International Development. She believes that “poverty can be eliminated. Essentially, what is needed is a significant reduction in the quite obscene levels of inequality that prevail today” [The Guardian]. The distribution of resources “from the privileged to the deprived, would be enough to eliminate poverty in high and middle income countries,” she asserts. Not simply the redistribution of wealth but resources more broadly, to, as she puts it, “improve the health, the education, the assets and the productivity of the poor so that the improving of their lives can become self sustaining.” Expanded and imaginatively applied to address the needs of the poorest people in the poorest nations, such a simple common sense model, based on social justice and equality, would meet basic rights and needs, reduce vulnerability and exploitation, ease social tensions and slowly establish trust and unity.

Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: graham@thecreatetrust.org