Locally spent money works better than global corporations would have you believe.

I’m becoming a raging activist, but check out this post at Small Mart (which I found via Corrente). My last argument was for increased tax revenue, here, but come on, this is so simple even an economics ignoramus like myself can see it. This is really something I think about every single time I have to buy something at Oxxo instead of from the lady with a table – and that’s why I try to always buy from the lady with a table.

Growing evidence suggests that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times more economic benefit—measured in income, wealth, jobs, and tax revenue—than a dollar spent at a globally owned business. That is because locally owned businesses spend much more of their money locally and thereby pump up the so-called economic multiplier. Other studies suggest that local businesses are critical to tourism, walkable communities, entrepreneurship, social equality, civil society, charitable giving, revitalized downtowns, and even political participation.

Oddly, all of this stuff is what a conservative, pro-business party should be arguing for. This is what a chamber of commerce should be yammering incessantly about. Oddly, those clowns – in both countries – seem really most content with business models based more in the Halliburton/Northrup Grumman model. Eventually they will all, only sell everything to the US Military. What a great economy that will be – oh wait. That’s what we have now.

Setting up the Tianguis at Jardin del Arte

One of the first things I remember being spoken to me when I was newly in the Mediterranean, and with some good amount of pride, was that “You Americans have great living rooms and showers. We Italians spend most of our lives outside because we have better weather – so we don’t have or care about living rooms – and our showers suck because we have less water.” And really – the trade off was understood – by rich, of whom there are plenty, middle (who seemed plenty rich to me) and probably by poor.

But we’re not in Italy now of course. The great sop of American culture is that it overwhelms neighboring cultures and wants to view them through it’s own prism – so much so that sometimes even the people in the neighboring culture are viewing themselves through northern Anglo eyes. The whole concept of “Latino people” just seems so absurd when you are not in the United States.

It’s a pity – though of course this great American project not been totally successful either. I remember with some glee the first time I witnessed Mexican office workers all laughing and eating underneath what we could call a “Highway Overpass” somewhere in Coyoacan. Official business takes place in glass-covered office buildings and whatever is going on outside is just off the radar.

I’ll get myself into trouble of course, for generalizing, but if Mexico’s business community would simply recognize that there is a need to legitimize and recognize that some half of commerce is conducted out of doors, with no physical addresses, then Mexico’s struggling tax-rolls could be greatly and rather rapidly improved. I can just hear the Tianguis controllers – perhaps the most Mediterranean “Family-style” business people on this side of the Atlantic – all squirming and raging.

Perhaps I will write more about it later, but that’s my two cents for the moment.

The confusion between DF and SMA may be the only thing wrong in an otherwise outstanding report.

Here’s a news item that you might have missed – even if you have been paying attention to the “immigration wars” on cable news in the US. See the video below.

It turns out now that the Mexican Government is offering amnesty to all immigrants in Mexico whether they are legal or illegal.

The story cites the US Embassy still repeating the 1 million number – it’s a number that never seemed right to me. Though here Marvin West at Mexconnect has a theory on where it came from, and John Mason Hart traces the phenomena of Americans in Mexico all the way back to the Civil War.

But beyond that – I’d rather hear news like this from Al Jazeera than from plenty of other sources I can think of.  Let me know what you think.

Senadora María de los Ángeles Moreno Uriegas (photo: wikipedia)

Although the Mexican Senate continues to look at the 2010 budget, the fact that the diputados took the easy way out is very distressing.

You might want to read this article by Deborah Riner, American Chamber/Mexico’s chief economist, that highlights the salient points of  the budget and what to look out for.

More taxes for those of us who already pay and who feel like we get very little in return. No real cuts in the benefits or numbers of diputados although all the economists and business men alike have said “don’t do it,” it’s being proposed anyway.

Another article that highlights the need for a different perspective is this one from Bloomberg. It’s states – helpfully enough:

The government’s proposal “looks regressive, insufficient and without stimulus for growth and jobs,” PRI lawmaker Jesus Alberto Cano Velez said today at Congress, [...] “This package has generated a definite consensus: Everyone rejects it.”

Perhaps we need to have a tea party and march on Reforma clamoring “no taxation without representation.” Or we can go to Lago de Chalpultepec and make a more impressive stand.

I know that in most of the world cigarettes and alcohol are heavily taxed, but beer?  Of every peso we pay, 43 centavos are already going to the Mexican hacienda. To me, it seems a bit much to hit them up for even more.

But the most depressing is a 4% increase on telecommunications. Mexico doesn’t have much Internet use as it is, Telmex land lines cost a fortune so people buy cellular phones and mostly pre-pay them. So to add more taxes is simply ludricous.

But Senator Maria Angeles Morena (PRI-DF) to the rescue. Maybe at least one voice of reason in what has become a chorus of opposition. She was on the radio on Friday explaining that her “illustrious colleagues” had done a fine job, but a bit more tweaking still needed to be done.  Up the price per barrel of oil – and forget about the telecommunications tax. Senator Morena’s official page is here, but the bio on her Wikipedia page is perhaps more interesting.

Let’s hope her voice becomes stronger and the senate will come up with a proposal that makes more sense.
[ad#june-post-ad]

How much further can decriminalization really go ?

Without mentioning any of the enormous profits that the US Arms industries have made through their “Plan Colombia” – John McCain suggested Columbia was the Most Important “Trade” partner in the Region during the 2008 presidential campaign - and the copy-cat  “Plan Mérida” – the New York Times assembled a straight-faced, straight-laced panel of columnists, to address the issue of Mexico’s decriminalizing drug possession.

Essentially the amount of drugs that a Mexican street cop could stuff into the brim of your baseball cap when he is quite legally inspecting it – is now, well, not a problem.

What the panel comes up with – most interestingly – is from Tony Payan, associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso who is also on the faculty of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez.

But decriminalizing drug possession is in and of itself a change of, paradoxically, gigantic and modest proportions. Gigantic because it is a solid first step to pave the way for 1) distinguishing between drug use and drug abuse 2) paving the way for fully medicalizing abuse, that is, reinforcing the idea that we should treat drug addicts much as alcoholics and offer them help instead of prison time, and 3) focusing state resources on the production, trafficking and distribution networks. But modest because it still commits governments to continue their war on drugs, just not on the user.

He messes this up by suggesting that Latin America’s Catholicism  implies equally Latin America’s conservativism. It doesn’t.

The rest of the panel addresses the fact that there won’t likely be any drug tourism and – interestingly, some numbers on the tiny percentage of actual drug users in Mexico (0.4%?), a few lines on Portugal, but essentially nothing on the other Cartel – the one that seems to be enjoying this war more than the rest of us.

Don’t plan on any Amsterdam-style hash bars – no real relief in sight from the Drug War – and no accountability either. John McCain seems to think Plan Colombia was a huge success. Let’s hope Plan Mérida is less so.
[ad#june-post-ad]

From the Posted Petition asking for the revocation of the Permission Granted to the developer Posted on Basta ya a la destrucción de San Miguel de Allende

We’ve written at length that El Charco del Ingenio is among the real treasures that make life in San Miguel de Allende so special.

La Jornada is reporting this morning on the development of 93 Condos in several hectars adjoining the ecological reserve of El Charco del Ingenio and apparently in violation of the municipal charter of the area.

That Charter designates that the area is suitable only for low density development. 3 hectars of the development are within the zone surrounding the preserve and the other 2 are currently zoned “low density.”

The issue has created an uproar in the area including in the Guanajuato Correo Newspaper. You can read the letter sent to the Municipal President in protest of the building permit already issued here.
[ad#june-post-ad]

Mexico's informal economy keeps growing and growing, but what's in it for me? (Mexico City's Tepito District)

This is another of those posts that’s generated from the translator’s desk. I can’t give you too much information but this is along the lines of what I’ve been working on:

The informal economy in Mexico has now reached 19 MILLION people. That means – if you believe it – that there are 45.7  million economically active humans in Mexico.  Some LARGE percentage – close to half – of them work in the informal economy. I ask the question if you believe the numbers because I think that more than that number would like to be working. And many of them will enter into the informal economy simply as a practical economic fact – that’s where the jobs are.

In any case -  try to imagine 19 million people working on the streets across Mexico: selling comida, music and movies, used or stolen clothes, personal care goods and cosmetics, and the list goes on and on. There are very few things you cannot get in Mexico’s informal economy.

For many of us – it’s a great deal. We get goods that are cheaper because they are not taxed. There’s literally no markup. But I actually just translated a proposal on fiscal reform and the bottom line: these 19 million people need to pay TAXES. Those of us who do pay taxes because we are in the system are being overburdened (screwed) and the Congress is getting ready to stick it to us even more.

Look, I like the guy who sells me  fresh squeezed orange juice in the morning. He isn’t paying for the light or the space he occupies on the street and he sure as hell isn’t paying taxes. Mexico has one of the lowest tax recovery incomes in Latin America. But let’s not abolish all these unique entrepeneurs. 100 pesos a month into the tax coffers from each of them would go a long, long way! I do hope the proposed legislation can bring more of them into the tax-paying fold.

It’s not the only problem that the forthcoming fiscal reform proposal addresses. Many companies make FALSE claims to exemptions, which means that they too are paying NO taxes. We probably have a good idea of who those companies are – so the reform lets Mexico’s SAT go ahead and do their job. This is going to be a real firestorm in some political quarters.

This little translating job woke me up to some scary facts about the Mexican economy. I’ll post some more based on my next job.
[ad#june-post-ad]

Crime Prevention Tip of the day: Your Ipod, in addition to making you appear anti-social, is the most likely thing to make you the target of street assault in Mexico City.

I seem to be covering an increasing number of crime and judicial system stories, not because I have a vested interest in overturning the system in Mexico, but because the issue just seems to jump up more and more frequently. And understanding the bigger picture – the constitution, the church, and the people wrapped up in both – is part of the pleasure of going forward.

Diane’s post on Mexico City street crime a few days ago – while heart-wrenching – is not all that atypical of the kind of stories one hears. And while the CIDE video we published a few weeks ago is informative, I still like to dive a bit further into the history of the thing – because history is such an important part of the Mexico experience. And as Diane said in her post, telling foreigners that Mexico is “safe” – which we both do all the time – is just not all the story.

My own introduction to the story, came not from paying off the occasional traffic cop (which I’ve done), but from crash-coursing (mostly in English) a lawyer with 10 years experience working at the Procuraduría General del DF., the main prosecuter’s office in Mexico City, comparable to a district attorney’s office in the US.  We were preparing him for the Comexus/Fulbright Scholarship interviews at the American Embassy. The ultimate goal was to get him into a graduate program in Public Administration at one or another American university.

In the course of a couple of weeks we pretty well covered what is wrong with the judicial system in Mexico, what needs to be done, and what is realistically going to happen. I would suggest – after all that – that one does need a Masters in Public Administration to even begin to address, to understand or to opine over the problem of Mexico’s Judicial System.

This article from Nancy J. Blake and Kathleen Blake Bohne at openDemocracy is another good place to start looking at the history of Mexico’s judicial system -  if you don’t want to kill yourself poring over the minuteae of judicial reform and the arcane in Mexico’s constitutional system.

Here’s what I thought was a particularly eye-opening excerpt:

Since the Catholic Church was willing to do anything to retain its wealth and power, it would take leaders with even fewer scruples to finally break its stranglehold on Mexico. Enter Carranza (Don Venus), Obregón (El Manco de Celaya) and Calles (El Turco) – an unholy trinity of powerful dictators with an avid hatred of the Church. Their anti-clericalism infuses every article of the Constitution of 1917, a passionately nationalistic document, progressive, liberal, activist, similar to the United States’ Constitution in its declaration of human rights, national sovereignty and a division of powers. But whereas the U.S. Constitution was designed to limit government, the Mexican constitution was spewed onto paper in defense of a beleaguered, struggling people and insists on social activism, envisioning a government obligated to promote human rights and responsible for the social, economic and cultural well-being of the nation. In other words, it promised the impossible [...]

There’s your historical context, anyway.  Catholic Mexico remains as Anti-Catholic as any more sectarian country I’ve visited. (Italy on the other hand, with all her churches, could not ignore the church in a louder and more determined silence.)

Only yesterday I waited 20 minutes in a taxi waiting to drive around a San Judas fracas that spills onto the street every month. Filled mostly with the young still under the influence of the old, every feast of San Judas inspires not only a traffic nightmare, but the widely perceived acceptance that a chasm still exists between Mexico’s visible, entrenched and moribund classes – the poor and the Catholic vs. the well off and the secular. But that’s not to say that the Catholics will necessarily unduly influence any reform of the Judicial System being proposed now – only that what it is they are attempting to reform – as Blake and Bohne point out – is a hefty and Baroque piece of constitutional reasoning and precedent.

The Mexican Constitution of 1917 is still here in English for those wanting to look into it.

Note: when openDemocracy manually sends me a password allowing me to read parts 2 & 3 of the article excerpted above, I’ll try to return with another post.
[ad#june-post-ad]

This message that Mexico is safe has been harder and harder for me to support lately, but the last month and this past weekend have really shaken me up.

A month ago a colleague at work was assaulted at knife point, no violence but her wallet, money and cellphone were quickly removed. This was at 2pm outside of a supermarket.

The following week – a dear friend was kidnapped and hit repeatedly inside a taxi. Dropped off far away, she lost all of her ID and had money withdrawn from the ATM. Time : 8:30am.  And then the idiots called her home phone for the the rest of the day spewing groserias.

Week 3: Another colleague had money and  jewelry and her entire purse taken while on a combi van at 6 in the morning.

It all gets topped off this past Saturday when my nephew went to an ATM. He was driving home when a car with three men and a woman quickly cut him off in the street.  They hit him repeatedly and dragged him out of the car and continued punching him. Mostly this was done by a huge 140 kilo woman. Luckily a police car drove by and stopped and all of them were taken in to the municipal hall.

Here’s the scary part though. After six hours in the Naucalpan municipal offices, my nephew was arrested because the other guys said he ASSAULTED THEM! The enormous woman had dropped a ring and a bracelet in his car while she was assaulting him. So the judge ended up saying that both the woman and my nephew would be held for 72 hours until the truth be known.

In the end, by greasing a few hands everyone got to go. My nephew went to the hospital with a broken nose and some nasty bruises and the others, I assume, went off looking for another victim.

I listen to the news morning and evening – listening but not really paying attention – to all the reports of heads found in iceboxes, people being tortured and killed with narco mensajes scrawled onto their bodies and the regular stolen car reports that keep the city on its toes. But I don’t know any of those people. In the last few weeks it has all really hit home.

It’s still hard to say if it is due to the economic crisis or to narco violence or to a society where corruption and unclear laws allow for essentially 95% impunity.  I don’t have answers, but I don’t like it either.
[ad#june-post-ad]

Well, no, I didn’t marry a Mexican. But I know a lot of people who did! This post is cross posted from the original at eldefe.com.

A couple of friends of mine got married several years ago in the United States.  He is Mexican, she is American. They’ve spent all of their married life in Mexico where she is a legal resident.

About 10 years ago – immediately after they got married – they had to get all paperwork regarding her stay along with lots of advice about the marriage from the Mexico Foreign Relations Department.

Mexico welcomes the spouse of any Mexican citizen – but things are a bit different here than in the U.S.  When getting married in Mexico, you need to have a ceremony performed by an official from the Civil Registration Office and only then – if you wish to marry within a religious institution – you can do so, but that ceremony has no standing in the eyes of the government.   On the other hand, if you get married elsewhere and only have a religious ceremony, it will be valid in Mexico, if it is official in the country where you got married. There is a relatively short period of time after getting married when you must announce the wedding with the corresponding government institutions, if you’re planning on living in Mexico.

My friends thought it was about  time for them to register their marriage certificate in the corresponding civil registration offices in Mexico City. It’s a different process than that with the Foreign Relations Department which basically allows you to stay in the country and maybe to work. There’s a number of reasons to do this, including benefits in terms of banking and credit, housing and employment benefits. But if you’re reading this maybe you’ve already found your own reasons.

Well – it turns out that there is not much on the Internet that really provides you with the right information. There’s an awful lot that you “may need to do,” and very little hard information.

After spending more than my usual time searching the net – I came across an official website where they mention free assistance for immigrants and their families. The Programa de Atención a Migrantes y sus Familias (Program of Attention to Migrants and their Families).   Unfortunately the site is only in Spanish and you need to call them as they don’t actually provide much specific information. (They actually do an awful lot there!)

So, last week I actually accompanied my friend to ask in person everything that they need to do.   The offices are super convenient – right off the Insurgentes subway and Metrobus stations and on the 3rd floor of Jalapa #15, in Colonia Roma.

The working staff there was friendly and very attentive to the many people going in and out of the office.

These are the documents and steps you’ll need to follow to register your foreign marriage with the Mexico City government.

• You must present a certified copy of the marriage record.
• Once you have that certificate, you’ll need to send it to the State Authentication Authoritiy (PDF) of the state where you got married for them to officially stamp the document.   You can send the document from Mexico and find the letter of request in the section of “Documentos de Estados Unidos” from this Foreign Relations section.
• Once you receive the officially stamped certificate you need to take it to an official translator.  The Program of Attention to Migrants and their Families office will provide you with the name and address of the person who can do this job. They will charge around US$50.
• With the translated document, you ‘ll take all of the above back to the Program of Attention to Migrants and their Families office with:

1. a certified copy of the birth certificate of the Mexican spouse
2. a copy of an official document (voters registration card or passport)
   
3. a copy of the Migration Form of the American spouse
4. a copy of proof of address (copy of electric, water, gas or phone bill)

• The Office of Attention to Migrants and their Families will take care of the paper work – for free! It takes between 2 and 3 months – after which both spouses will need to go to sign before the authority of the Civil Registration office.

I hope this information is helpful for anyone who finds themselves in this situation. I’d recommend that you get an appointment with anyone at the office – the service is personalized, informative and really essential.

And after all this is done, it is also recommended that you celebrate – or go on another honeymoon. It’s always nice to have a pretext to have some fun and enjoy the many places Mexico has to offer for vacationing and living!
[ad#june-post-ad]