Narco Blogs: Following Mexico’s Drug War

In an earlier post, I talked about Mexico’s drug war. Because the cartels have murdered journalists, and infiltrated news organizations, it can be difficult to follow the conflict using the main-stream Mexican press. For this reason, Mexicans themselves have increasingly turned to blogs that cover the conflict -so called Narco blogs- to gain information that may be difficult for conventional reporters to print. At the same time, some of these blogs clearly play to people’s interest in sensationalism, and most sometimes contain videos or photos that are disturbing and violent, or even have been filmed by the cartels themselves. The bloggers are also facing pressure, although sometimes it is unclear from whom the threats are coming.  In particular, Mexico’s Blog del Narco has had trouble remaining accessible, which has attracted media coverage in the United States. Still, for students interested in Latin America, and what is happening in Mexico, these blogs are a useful resource, particularly if they speak Spanish, so I wanted to list a few here. …

Totally Drug Resistant Tuberculosis

In our book and this blog we give considerable attention to the threat posed by avian influenza, which also attracts a great deal of media coverage. But there is another, and older, threat that also deserves attention. Tuberculosis has been a growing problem. As Paul Farmer’s work has described, it flourished in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and drug resistant tuberculosis has been a growing threat from Peru to Haiti. The challenge is that if patients are not properly diagnosed, or if they fail to take a long course (a minimum of six months) of medication, the disease becomes resistant.

"Bacteria" by ddpavumba at freedigitalphotos.net

This problem has combined with the spread of HIV/AIDS, which decreases people’s resistance to TB. This led to a terrifying outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, where an epidemic of extensively drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) began spreading in 2006. From South Africa, the disease was moved into neighboring countries, such as Lesotho.

A recent news article in South Africa gives some insight into why TB was so difficult to treat. After a woman was diagnosed with XDR TB, she required intensive, inpatient care. Her family had to conduct a (successful) fund-raising campaign before she could be admitted to a hospital, where she is finally receiving the care she needs. In this case, the woman’s family rose to the challenge, and obtained care for her. But what if she had not been so fortunate? …

Canada’s Northern Gateway Pipeline

An article by Edward Welsch in the Wall Street Journal today today talks about upcoming

Photo “Two Oils of Alberta” by Rosemary Ratcliff, courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

hearings regarding Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta to Kitimat on the British Columbia coast. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, Canada views this pipeline as an alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move oil to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Legally, the Obama administration must make a decision on this Keystone XL pipeline by the end of February. Because production from the Oil Sands is increasing so rapidly, Canada badly needs to find an additional means to bring petroleum to market. From the perspective of the Canadian government, therefore, the Northern Gateway pipeline allows it to hedge its bets, by allowing to sell oil to the Asian market, in particular China. Even if President Obama’s administration approves the Keystone XL, the Canadian government badly wants this other pipeline to the Pacific to increase its market options. …

Language and Maps in Global Studies

I’ve mentioned my favorite website, Strange Maps, in an earlier post. Part of the reason I enjoy it is that it’s filled with visual information, which makes it fun to examine after a long day of reading or writing. But I just came upon one post with images so striking that they made my jaw drop. Frank Jacobs recently came across a map created by a team (Mike McCandless and Eric Fischer) who found a way to use Google Chrome’s tracking feature to analyze language use in Twitter, and to display it on a map. The resulting images are as informative as they are beautiful. They not only show where people are using twitter around the globe, but also the language that they are using it in.

As Jacobs notes, what’s fascinating about these images is that they allow us to contrast official language regions with how language is actually being used. For example, as he points out, Catalan emerges as a major voice on Twitter. Some aspects of the map are to be expected. For example, North Korea disappears into blackness. But other aspects are surprising. Who knew that the Dutch were addicted to Twitter? One of the most interesting aspects of this map has been the comments that it has attracted, both on Jacobs’ site, as well as on the original posting by Eric Fischer. A lot of the discussion seems to focus on language anomolies. Why do so few people twitter in Ukrainian or Belorussian? Why aren’t Celtic languages such as Welsh apparent on the map? Are most tweets in India really in English? And is that really Dutch being spoken is southern France, or Occitan?

A key topic in Global and International Studies is language. We even wrote an additional chapter on language, which we couldn’t include in the textbook for reasons of length, but which is available on this webpage here. This chapter might form the basis for a class lecture. And this particular map would be a great tool afterwards to begin a class discussion about minority languages, technology and cultural globalization.

Shawn Smallman, Portland State University

Mexico’s Military and the Drug War

I already discussed the drug war in Mexico in an earlier blog posting on the UNC website. But it’s worth returning to this topic, because of many new developments since last February. At this point, over 45,000 people have been killed in the drug war since President Calderon began it in December 2006. The toll of this carnage has been described in detail by the Los Angeles Times, which has had the best coverage of this conflict from its inception. Sadly, its very difficult for Mexican reporters to cover this conflict, because the drug cartels have infiltrated the major media organizations, and are killing reporters who cover the war. For this reason, Mexicans have turned to twitter and blogsfor information. While these sources provide a great deal of information,  one topic, in particular, seems to me to be under-covered: the struggle’s impact upon Mexico’s armed forces.

Photo of army truck by Stuart Miles

Hillary Clinton was widely denounced within Mexico in September 2010 for declaring that the conflict had taken on the appearance of an insurgency. But the reality is that Mexico is no longer primarily engaged in law enforcement, but rather a war between the government and the cartels. Mexico has become a frequent topic in the Small Wars Journal, which is devoted to low-intensity warfare (the British term) and counter-insurgency operations (COIN, the American term). Consider a recent communique from the Zeta’s drug cartel, as described on a blog covering the war:”A communique from the special forces of the Zetas. Message to the nation, the government, and all of Mexico and to public opinion. The special forces of Los Zetas challenges the government and its federal forces. Not the Army, not the marines nor the security and anti-drug agencies of the U.S. government can resist us. Mexico lives and will continue to live under the regime of Los Zetas. Let it be clear that we are in control here and although the federal government controls other cartels, they cannot take our plazas. You want proof? Look at what happened in Sinaloa and Guadalajara. If we can get all the way into their kitchen we are not going to lose control of our territory. Sincerely, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, Z-40.” Such statements leave little question how the cartels themselves view the contest. …

Canada’s Oil Sands, Pipelines and Atomic Bombs

I am a Canadian, born and raised in Southern Ontario. I founded a Canadian Studies program at my university. I was happy to see our first student recently graduate with a Canadian Studies certificate, and I am currently writing a book on a Canadian topic. So, it has been very painful for me to watch Canada’s recent foreign policy decisions related to global warming and the Oil Sands, particularly this last week in South Africa. My frustration has been magnified by the fact that I myself wrote an article about the Oil Sands years ago that -in retrospect- failed to examine the environmental costs of this resource.

Photo by puttsk at freedigitalphotos.net

Recent technical breakthroughs  have led to a current giddy sense of optimism about energy production, and the promise that the Western hemisphere rather than the Middle East may be the future of oil and gas production. As Daniel Yergin noted in a recent newspaper column: “U.S. petroleum imports, on a net basis, reached their peak -60%- of domestic consumption in 2005. Since then, they have been going in the other direction. They are now down to 46%.” Yergin pointed to the technological changes that made this possible: “The reason is the sudden appearance of `tight oil,’ which is extracted from dense rocks.” The spread of shale oil production has reversed the decline of domestic oil production. But there are costs to this development, and choices to be made. For a long time, the Canadian government has said that it would meet the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol, but that it would do so without restricting Oil Sands development. But in Durban, South Africa last week Canada set this position aside for an all-out attack on Kyoto. …

Egypt’s military and the Latin American experience

On Friday, November 18, 2011, thousands of Egyptians rallied in Tahrir square to protest the military’s efforts to retain power. The military had recently suggested language for the constitutional convention, which would have made the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy.” The military has also suggested that it should choose 80% of the members of the Constitutional committee. The protest seems to have captured the growing civilian concern about emergency laws, and the Egyptian military’s influence over society. When Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, people gave credit to the military, which ultimately decided not to repress the uprising. In their current state of disillusionment with the military, Egypt’s people are not in a position dissimilar to that of many Latin Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. For this reason, it’s worth placing what is happening in Egypt now in a broader context. …

More websites for teaching International and Global Studies

Since I last posted some suggested websites to the blog, I’ve learned about several others that are useful for an introductory class in International and Global Studies. I’ve tried to focus on sites that emphasize analysis or resources rather than news, with the exception of one suggestion from The New York Times:

Financial Crisis:

Some students are visual learners. For those trying to understand current economic news in Europe, the New York Times has a set of interactive graphics that convey relative GDP, and debt flows, to make sense of the crisis. …

Indigenous Peoples in International and Global Studies

A "weetigo" dance, photographed at the Sweet Grass Reserve in 1939: Saskatchewan Archive Board, R-A7671.

I am fortunate to be on sabbatical this year, thanks to the generous support of the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund at the Reed Foundation. I am studying how colonialism impacted Algonquian peoples in Canada, particularly women, by examining a particular form of spirit transformation called the windigo. In some respects, I believe that windigo cases acted like the Salem witch trials, in that they created a record of a society under stress, in this case of its encounter with colonialism. Over the course of four centuries, different outside actors created narratives around the windigo in order to assert their power over Algonquian peoples. In my book, I’ll be using Algonquian oral narratives, fur-trade records, missionary accounts, court cases and psychological case files to consider how the French, English and Canadian states interacted with different Algonquian nations through time. …

Websites for teaching International and Global Studies

Because international affairs can change so quickly, websites are a key tool in an introductory class, both to keep up to date, and to find resources for students. In our Teacher’s Manual, we list some helpful sites but here is a longer list that you might want to explore:

Data:

My thanks go to my colleague, Dr. Stephen Frenkel, for sharing what I think is one of the most fascinating websites for International and Global Studies. Gapminder advertises itself as creating a “fact-based” view of the world. Don’t let the reference to statistics make you think that it might be inaccessible for beginning students though. Its resources range from detailed information on equality to videos on everything from population growth to democracy. Check out the resources under the “For Teachers” link. Explore it yourself: http://www.gapminder.org/

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