Aren't you afraid?

A friend e mailed me the other day to ask if I was ok.  She was concerned about my safety here in Cuernavaca because she had read in The Seattle Times that drug violence was out of control here.  I try to read the newspaper everyday when I'm here, and I also watch the evening news. I talk to a lot of people in the course of the day, and I always ask about what's going on.   With my ear to the ground, so to speak, I wasn't hearing anything about violence, and I wrote to my friend to assure her that all was well.  I frankly didn't know what she was talking about.

Yes, it's true that Mexico has a serious problem with violence related to the drug trade.  No one is going to deny that.  It's scary to read about mutilated bodies found alongside the road, or shootouts between drug lords and police.  But, let's be honest.  These kind of events aren't isolated to Mexico.  I live in Tacoma, Washington now, and not a day goes by that I don't read in the newspaper about someone killing someone, criminals shooting police, crazy people shooting members of their own families, children kidnapped and murdered, the list goes on and on.  I grew up in Detroit, and lived there when it was "the murder capital of America."  I remember sitting in my living room hearing gun shots outside the window.  Everyone in my neighborhood knew to turn off the lights and duck, get out of the way of flying bullets, and keep your head down until the shooting stopped.  Every big city in the United States and lots of small ones experience violence.  (Let's not forget Columbine, Colorado, that nice upper class town where students open fired on their classmates and teachers....)  What I don't understand is why the press in the United States is so determined to paint this extremely negative vision of Mexico, when we're really talking about a global problem.

Is it a coincidence that we're talking about extreme violence and danger in Mexico at the exact same time Mexican immigrants are coming under fire in the United States for "taking jobs away from Americans," or introducing violence into the US, or draining the resources of the country with their demands for free schooling for their kids, or health care in our hospitals?

I'm not trying to simply a complex situation, but it make sense to me that, given the negative attitude in the US today toward Mexican immigrants, the media would want to demonize them, to help people "understand" why we don't want them in our country.  If in the popular imagination Mexicans are violent criminals, it's easier to take active steps to keep them out of our country.

But, back to the question of violence....
I'm staying with a Mexican friend and her family here in Cuernavaca, so I think I have a pretty realistic idea of what life is like for "normal" people on a day to day basis.  I know lots of people here and talk to people from all walks of life, I'm observant, well-informed, I know Mexico well, I'm fluent in Spanish, and I can speak with some authority about what I've experienced here because I've been visiting Mexico on a regular basis since the early 1970s.  What I'm seeing now is this:

My friend and her husband get up in the morning and go to work, their kids go to school, they all go about their normal business in a perfectly normal way.  As far as I can tell, they aren't changing their daily habits much, if at all.  They take precautions, like sensible people do in any part of the world. They make sure they know where there kids are; they don't let strangers into the house;  they lock the door when they go to sleep at night;  they don't go out, get drunk and start fights in bars; they don't wander around alone in bad neighborhoods at 3 a.m.  I don't see them acting out of fear.  The kids continue to go to their swimming lessons and play with friends, they go to birthday parties, they go out with their grandparents for ice cream.  Their parents drive around doing errands, looking for school supplies, doing their grocery shopping, filling up the car with gas.  I see people in the streets, in the stores, in the restaurants, people going to the movies and waiting for buses,  in other words, life goes on as normal.  If they're worried about violence, they don't talk about it much.  If I ask them questions, they give me straight answers, but the fear of violence is not keeping them at home behind locked doors.

So, what's going on here?  In Cuernavaca, like in other parts of Mexico, there are some conflicts between rival drug gangs, and the police are actively involved in fighting these drug cartels.  The violence that results from these encounters seems to be limited, for the most part, to people on both sides of the law who are involved in the drug war.  There have been some gruesome sights, which the US newspapers have reported with so much detail I don't have to repeat them here, but I personally haven't seen anything, nor have any of the people I talk to.  The closest I've come is a conversation with a taxi driver who reported some gunshots in a certain part of town, but he had only heard about it from someone else, he didn't know any details and he wasn't involved in it at all.  I'm pretty sure that people in the city where I live have heard gunshots from time to time, as well, because less than a month ago, a woman in Tacoma was accidentally shot while standing on her front porch talking to a neighbor.  Some people drove by in a car, they mistakenly fired on her, confusing her with the neighbor, and they shot her dead in front of her husband and son.  The neighbor explained she had had a fight with some people over some angry text messages that they exchanged, and the result was gunfire and death.  I don't think this is an isolated case. I would guess that in cities all over the US this kind of thing happens.

Since the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, people in the US have lived with a lot of fear, especially fear of things foreign.  With a war going on in Iraq that claims the live of many US soldiers on a daily basis, with the economy in crisis, and with so much uncertainty about our own future, it's easy to turn a blind eye to what's happening in our own country and focus on our  neighbor to the south, falling back into that old stereotype of Mexico as a wild, barbaric land, full of bandidos and revolutionaries, men with guns shooting at random, corrupt leaders and ruthless armies of men running down innocent people in the street.  That's the vision of Mexico we get from watching old westerns on tv.  But, if that Mexico ever existed, it's buried in the past, along with Pancho Villa.    Mexico has moved on, and we should too.

That's a topic for another day.