Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (39 page)

"Why is Mexico so poor?"

"Corruption!" said Torres. "We are in a sea of corruption!
There has been nearly sixty years of the same party! Because of
that political party, we have not become an economic power."

"What should the U.S. do about illegal Mexican immigration?" I asked.

But Torres had had enough for one day. "The U. S. can do what
it likes," he said and handed me off to PAN committee member
Pepe Marquez.

Marquez spoke very quickly, as though the Mexican social
disaster might overtake us at any minute and we'd have to hightail
it across the Rio with the rest of the wetbacks. He, too, blamed
everything on the PRI, throwing in many statistics about how the
Mexican government controls 75 percent of business and industry
and 80 percent of agricultural land and so on-the kind of facts
and figures responsible reporters dutifully copy down and all
readers blithely skip. In the news trade, this stuff is known as
"MEGO," short for "My Eyes Glaze Over."

Marquez noticed that I was beginning to snooze. He paused,
trying to figure a way to put his case succinctly. "If the government
was given the desert to manage," he said, "there would be a
shortage of sand."

"Is there something the United States should be, you know,
doing?" I asked.

"The Mexican government," said Marquez, "is kept alive by
the United States agreeing to bank loans."

Interesting that our administration, so sis-boom-bah about
anti-communism, is footing the bill for their administration which
sounds pretty communistic.

"Well," I said, "how'd your windows get broken?"

"A group of leftists did it, the CDP, the Committee for Popular
Defense."

"Did they attack the PRI offices too?"

"They never attack the PRI."

"Why'd they hit you and not the ruling party?"

Marquez gave me one of those world-explaining, whole-body
Latin shrugs, an educated version of the shrugs I got from the
illegals on the border. "The CDP, they are supposedly against the
government."

I drove south out of Juarez, across the beautiful edges of the
Sierra de la Magdalena mountains, through the prairie scrub of
northern Chihuahua State and into vast rolling hills, green and
well-watered and empty. A Cleveland a year, full of would-be
immigrants, could be built out here for decades.

In Chihuahua City the Institutional Revolutionary Party was
setting up a press conference, too. President de la Madrid would
address the media the next day in an enormous hotel ballroom, full
of comfortable chairs, buffet tables, red velvet draperies and putting-green-size Mexican flags. I asked the party officials for a PRI
spokesman, and they got me an appointment with Arturo Ugalde,
the Chihuahua state director of economic development.

I had an hour to kill so I went sightseeing. There was a
beautiful eighteenth-century colonial baroque palace on the main
plaza. Father Hidalgo, the leader of Mexico's revolt against Spanish
rule, had been imprisoned here until his execution in 1811. The
walls of the palace courtyard were covered with murals painted by
Pina Mora in the early sixties. They depicted, in heroic style and
with villainous content, the entire history of Mexico. The literally
heart-wrenching Aztecs were shown sacrificing people and skinning them alive. Then came the dirtsack Conquistadors, with dim
Montezuma mistaking Cortes, of all people, for a god. Then Catholic missionaries converting the Indians to death.

Father Hidalgo figured large, murdering Spanish civilians and
getting the stuffing kicked out of his revolution in its only pitched
battle. Mexico didn't become independent for another decade, not
until the local Spanish aristocrats declared it independent because the government back in Spain was getting too liberal. This was
faithfully depicted as was the period of bloody chaos from 1821 to
1848, the period of bloody chaos from 1858 to 1867 and the period
of bloody chaos from 1911 to 1920. (Artist Mora was forced to use
every conceivable variation of the determined peasant with upraised face holding a gun in the air with one hand.) Also portrayed
was Benito Juarez, the "Abraham Lincoln of Mexico," who freed
the Indian peons but accidentally destroyed their livelihood by
letting communal land fall into the hands of speculators; the comic
opera emperor Maximilian, installed by Napoleon III because
Mexico defaulted on French bank loans (Citibank take note); and
dictator Porfirio Diaz, who sold the country's natural resources to
foreign companies for peanuts and gave press swine William Randolph Hearst a 2.5 million-acre ranch in Chihuahua as a thank you
for good newspaper PR. In the middle of all this was a cluster of
pale, slightly vampiric-looking characters in blue uniforms carrying a frightening and complicated flag full of stripes and things.
They were taking California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico,
and Texas away, Rt. 66 included.

I drove to Ugalde's office in an industrial park on the edge of
town.

"Why is Mexico so poor?"

Ugalde hemmed and hawed a while about the Mexican economic system and then blamed it on the Indians. "We never," said
Ugalde, "had the saying `the best Indian is a dead Indian.' I will
put it this way: We have three types of people. People in the south
of Mexico, they want. People in the middle, they think. People in
the north, they work."

What he meant was the south has the most Indians. And in the
middle, Mexico City, the intelligentsia make their Indian heritage a
point of pride. But in the north of Mexico, people are mostly
European. We weren't going to get anywhere with this line of
reasoning.

I asked about Mexico's one-party system of government. What
I have in my notes is: "Yr. gov.-fucked or what?" Though I'm sure
I phrased that differently.

"If we had a perfect democracy-everyone votes, without any
education-you could hardly expect anyone to win," Ugalde said, going all glasnost and Gorbachevy on me. "There will be five, six
parties. Seventy million Mexicans want to be president, but only
one can be. The PRI system has been the right people at the right
time, avoiding dictatorship and political strife."

Then Ugalde pulled out a heap of charts and graphs that he
said showed Mexico's rapid pace of development. "And the Japanese are coming soon," he said.

I told him I'd just spent a week with the United States Border
Patrol, and I hadn't seen many signs of what you'd call rapid pace
of development.

"People can go live in the U.S.," he said, as though it were a
matter of whether to winter in Aspen or Palm Springs, "but it's
hard. We are not so disciplined. We have to learn the laws and
rules of living in a new place. There is a rigidity to the North. In
Mexico we have an expression"-he gave me that wised-up
shrug-"Everything is negotiable."

Ugalde sighed as though I'd made much more alarming allegations about the Mexican state of things than I had. "Mexico," he
said, "is rich in raw materials but poor in resources of technology
and of ways to use technology." In other words somebody stole the
half with all the paved roads.

I left Ugalde's office and drove around the industrial park. It
had been laid out in sectors like a spoked wheel. There were
absolutely no buildings in the entire park, except Ugalde's little
office suite. Grass was growing in the pavement cracks. And in the
middle of the park, at the hub, there was an enormous welded-steel
sculpture of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.

So what's going to happen at our southern border? Is an
enormous, terrifying, beaner tidal wave going to roll across our fair
nation? Well, we don't have to worry about that. It already has.
We've suffered a huge invasion of cheerful, hard-working, poor
people, who grabbed all the shit jobs nobody else wanted and
caused a fearsome outbreak of Tex-Mex yuppie restaurants.

We don't have a problem. It's the Mexicans who have the
problem. And there are four billion other people in the world, most
of them with even worse problems than the Mexicans have. Where
are they going to go?

JANUARY 1988

You haven't really seen the Old City of Jerusalem until you've seen
it at dawn on a Moslem sabbath while you're disguised as an Arab
and accompanied by a guy who's probably with the PLO, plus two
hulking press photographers in unlikely-looking Bedouin headdresses, and all four of you are following the footsteps of Christ
down the Via Dolorosa at a jog trot, running in and out of doorways
dodging Israeli army patrols.

Old Jerusalem is a medieval city, not an adorably restored
medieval city like Heidelberg, but a real one where you can smell
the medieval sanitation and smack your head on the dirty, low
medieval ceilings. The fortress-fronted, time-soiled limestone
houses are built all over each other. The boulevards are steep,
twisting, littered and as wide as a donkey. Some streets are roofed
in stone; most have steps cut in the pavement, and they seem more
like staircases in a crypt than city avenues. Lamps are few.
Signposts date from the Ottoman Empire. Each shadow holds some
sinister passage or dwarfish portcullis. The place is the original for every game of Dungeons and Dragons. At dawn in Jerusalem, you
could be in any century of human civilization.

The guy who was probably with the PLO, whom I'll call
Ahmed, was smuggling me and my photographer friends Tony Suau
and John Reardon into the forbidden precincts of the Haram esh"Sherif, the Noble Sanctuary" enclosing the Dome of the Rock and
the al-Aksa Mosque. Except for Mecca and Medina, these are
Mohammedanism's most sacred shrines. Infidels are banned from
the Haram's thirty-five acres on Friday, the Moslem sabbath, and
this Friday the sanctuary was also being sealed by Israeli soldiers
and Jerusalem police. There had been an ugly incident the week
before. After midday prayers, some kids displayed the illegal
Palestinian flag, burned the flag of Israel (and, of course, the U. S.
flag, too) and threw stones. The Israelis responded with clubs and
tear gas, and, at one point, actually tossed a gas grenade inside the
al-Aksa Mosque. The result was some coughing and sneezing and
lots of international indignation. Today the Israelis would be checking identity cards at the sanctuary's eight gates and letting in only
respectable believers.

Tony, John and I had tried to slip into the Haram before the
soldiers arrived. There was only one sleepy Moslem guard on duty
at 6:00 A.M. at the Gate of the Tribes. We'd wrapped black and
white checked kaffiyehs-traditional Arab kerchiefs-over our
heads. But since I was wearing a Burberry trench coat and they
were carrying thirty pounds of camera equipment, this wasn't
much of a ruse. The elderly guard was having none of us. While we
were arguing with him, Ahmed stepped out of a crowd of morning
prayer-goers and took our part. (This happens all the time in the
Middle East. No matter who you're arguing with or what you're
arguing about, some stranger will always come to your defense.
They're generous with their contention; you never have to argue
alone in the Arab world.)

When he couldn't prevail on the guard, Ahmed took us home
to a warren of ancient stone rooms (though the furniture was Danish
Modern) and served us sticky tea and rolls and bread and coffee
thick as syrup.

Several of Ahmed's knuckles were enormously knobbed and
one of his fingers was bent at a sickening angle. There were scars around his wrists. He had been imprisoned by the Israelis for four
years during the Seventies, he said, for "Palestinian activities' and
again during the early Eighties for helping a friend repair a gun.
He said he had been tied in a chair once for five days with a black
hood over his head. "It was beautiful when they would take me
away to beat me"-he gave us that big grin everyone wears in these
parts when they talk about something grisly-"because then I
could breathe and see."

Ahmed claimed there would be a demonstration at al-Aksa
and that the journalists, the sahaffi, must be inside the mosque to
see how Jews treat Moslems in this holy place. He led us through
the Arab Quarter to the Via Dolorosa which runs parallel to the
Haram's north wall. Then he opened an iron door near the Ecce
homo Arch-the place where Pontius Pilate, saying "Behold the
man," presented a flogged Jesus to the Jerusalem mob. We went
through somebody's house, across roofs and down concealed spiral
stairs with stone treads worn hollow by a thousand years of excapes
and forays. It was a scene from an Indiana Jones movie except the
stairs opened into someone's modern bathroom. We went out
through the kitchen, down one more flight of steps cut into the
Haram's wall and there, framed in a Byzantine Empire back door,
was the Dome of the Rock-a big gold cupola rising from an
octagon of royal blue tiles and set upon a vast stone platform like a
bonbon on a deck of playing cards.

Burnooses were produced to conceal Tony and John's photo
gear. I ditched my trench coat. And Ahmed showed us how to
fasten the kaffiyehs properly with the ukals, the tasseled headbands. Then we went, stiff with adrenaline, down the length of the
Haram esh-Sherif compound, past guards and policemen and "fellow" Moslems. "Walk comfortable!" whispered Ahmed with some
irritation. Tony's cameras were clanging under his lumpy robe.
Israeli soldiers lined the sanctuary walls and helicopters swayed
back and forth overhead.