Photographs by José Luis Aranda

The Wirikuta mountain range in the Chihuahua desert in central Mexico. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

Under a heavy afternoon sun, the desert landscape in central Mexico lays long into the horizon, interrupted only by railroad tracks, roadrunners racing beside cars, and every once in a while, a cluster of houses and shops. But towards what some consider the sacred heart of the desert, new features begin to emerge: new age hippies and fellow travellers compete for rides on the side of the road, and in the distance, a dramatic mountain range rises from the plane.

Stretching from Arizona to San Luis Potosí, the Chihuahuan desert wraps around two of Mexico’s largest mountain ranges, laying claim to over 450,000 square kilometers of territory. While at first glance the topography might appear dry and barren, it is in fact home to a fifth of the world’s species of cacti, as well as a host of birds and other creatures.

But there’s one plant in particular that’s an essential part of the region’s draw: peyote. A small, circular cactus, divided into sections that look like a light green cross section of a mandarin orange, it pushes its way out from under the hard dry earth, sometimes into the direct sun, other times under the sparing shade of gobernadora plants.

In the southern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert is an area known as Wirikuta, a sacred site for the Huichol people. Every year, hundreds of Huichol people, whose name for themselves in their own language is Wixáritari, leave their communities in Jalisco, Nayarit and other parts of Mexico and begin a pilgrimage to Wirikuta.

“For us it’s like a temple,” says Marciano de la Cruz Lopez of Wirikuta. He’s one of the few Huichols making a home in the small, mining-cum-tourist town of Real de Catorce.

Wirikuta’s 140,000 hectare site was recognized by the state government as a Natural Protected Area and Sacred Site in 2000. It also includes a 146-kilometre path through the landscape named the Historic Route of the Wixárika People. In 1998, UNESCO declared Wirikuta as one of the world’s 14 natural sacred sites in need of protection.

“It’s a sacred site where we can leave our offerings when we do ceremonies there in the mountains, or when the pilgrims come,” says de la Cruz. “It means everything to us, as Huichol people.”

Alberto Hernandez Gonzales, a Huichol guardian of Wirikuta. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

The Huichols are among the few indigenous groups in Mexico who were never successfully converted to Catholicism by Spanish colonizers, and their fidelity to their traditions is celebrated throughout the country. “I congratulate all of you, the traditional governors, the Wixárica union from the ceremonial centres of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit, to all of you, for defending these holy places, these marvellous places,” President Felipe Calderón said in a 2008 speech, while dressed in a traditional Huichol pullover and feathered hat.

Huichols believe that Cerro del Quemado, the stunning mountain range that rises from Wirikuta, is the birthplace of the sun and of all life. At the mountain’s summit is a structure where the Huichols leave offerings of thanks as part of their ceremonies: feathers, arrows, water from sacred springs, and other precious objects.

But this historic spiritual site is now at risk, its ancient landscape threatened by modern industry. And for the Huichol people, the stakes couldn’t be higher: the prospect of mining for silver under their holy mountain not only endangers the safety of their water supply; it represents a spiritual affront. Imagine drilling for oil under the Vatican, or bulldozing Eden to make room for a golf course.

Miners working at the former La Luz mine owned by First Majestic Silver. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

First Majestic Silver, a Vancouver-based mining company, holds a series of concessions that overlap with Wirikuta, and the company’s plans to develop the mine have already been controversial locally and around the world.

First Majestic already owns three producing silver mines, in Durango, Coahuila, and Jalisco, and is preparing to bring a fourth mine online. The project at Real de Catorce is the earliest-stage project the company owns, and they have yet to begin the permit process. If First Majestic receives all the permits needed—which have not yet been acquired—they expect to start producing silver at the property in 2014. Technical studies carried out by the previous owners of the concessions at Real de Catorce indicate that mining the silver laden tailings left over from historic mines combined with opening up new mine shafts in Real de Catorce could net 33 million ounces of silver, as well as substantial quantities of lead and zinc. The company says they’ll employ at least 600 locals by the time production begins, and the mine could operate for as many as 15 years.

The common thread that unites the company and many of those opposed to the project is something that’s sorely lacking in the region: water.

“There’s a limited amount of water here,” says Humberto Fernandez, owner of the Hotel Real, perhaps the most prestigious accommodation in Real de Catorce. “The aquifer here is disappearing,” he says. We met Fernandez and his wife Cornelia over lunch in the restaurant of the hotel that he’s owned and operated for almost 35 years. From the right angle, with his grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a green corduroy shirt and a peyote charm on his necklace, Fernandez bears a slight resemblance to Fidel Castro, and he talks a mean streak, too.

“Water is the main cause for concern that we’ve noticed among the local population,” he says, sitting straight up in his chair and talking over a steaming plate of pasta. “There’s been weeks without any water in the village.”

The local aquifer providing what scarce water there is in the region, is classified as “over-exploited” by the National Water Commission. The water problem isn’t new: when the local mines were operating at full tilt in the 19th century, there wasn’t enough water to run a mill in Real de Catorce.

“The water supply is still in the planning phase,” says Todd Anthony, head of First Majestic’s investor relations department, from his office in Vancouver. “but its not going to disrupt any supply to the local community there. We’ve got other plans in mind,” he says. He refused to elaborate on what those possible alternatives might be, however.

Interior of the former Santa Ana mine. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

The anti-mining fight in Wirikuta and Real de Catorce is far from the first flashpoint of resistance against Canadian mining companies in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. In fact, it is in many ways mirrors a struggle that has been going on in the equally picturesque village of San Pedro. Also a colonial mining town, the Cerro de San Pedro was of such importance in the region that it is featured to this day in the centre of the state’s official emblem.

Except the Cerro de San Pedro hardly exists anymore. Over the past four years, the hill has been blown to pieces and trucked to a cyanide treatment plant. Instead of rising like a tiny, stand alone colonial mecca half an hour by car from the city of San Luis Potosí, San Pedro today is surrounded by growling dump trucks and mountains of cyanide treated waste rock, by-products of a large scale, open pit silver and gold mine operated by Vancouver-based New Gold.

The abundance of new mining projects popping up across Mexico have generated enough problems throughout the country to prompt the creation of a Special Commission for Mining Conflicts in the national congress. Anti-mining activists and industry groups alike trace surge in investment in the mining sector back to the North America Free Trade Agreement.

“To facilitate what’s happening now, the pillaging of our country and the arrival to our country of a large quantity of companies— especially mining companies—it was necessary to have a working free trade agreement,” says Mario Martínez, a spry septuagenarian anti-mining activist from San Luis Potosí. Among the key changes in legislation NAFTA wrought were adjustments to Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution, which defines the legal framework for the ownership of land and the use of natural resources.

But Enrique Flores, an engineer working with First Majestic Silver, says things have changed for the better in the world of mining. I caught up with him on the company-owned hacienda in the village of La Luz, which lies just a few kilometres outside of Real de Catorce. He was animated and talkative, having just returned from a workshop at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City on Corporate Social Responsibility.

“Mining investment is made for profit, but at the same time it provides work for people, and raises the standard of living here,” says Flores, who took the time to show me images of the proposed mining project, pointing out on a map where the company is going to work, and how. “For example, in the case of Canadian mining companies, the government of Canada follows very closely what their companies are doing in other countries,” he says.

But though corporate social responsibility and Canadian government oversight might sound like progress, there are no binding international standards through which Canadian mining companies can be held accountable for their actions around the world, says Jennifer Moore from Canadian mining watchdog group MiningWatch Canada.

This fact didn’t seem to ruffle Flores, who took me on a tour through the historic Santa Ana mine. A few dozen locals are already working for First Majestic to transform the abandoned mine into a museum—part of the company’s promise of long-term jobs to the community. Deep inside the hills, the cool, dark mineshaft widened in places and exposed large galleries that once featured the most upto-date technology in the country. In other places, traces of more primitive mining were visible, sometimes overlaid with red spray paint indicating that there’s still silver in the walls after all these years.

Humberto Fernandez, owner of the Hotel Real and opponent of First Majestic Silver's mining plans. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

Just how sacred is Wirikuta? “Wixárika culture is about living for ceremony, because that is the form of life, there is no other form of living,” says Javier Ignacio Martínez Sánchez, an anthropologist originally from Chiapas who has lived in the heart of Wirikuta, for more than a decade. “It breaks your heart to see how they dance, to see the corn that they come and leave here, or the blood of the deer, how much it took to go hunt it, how much it all takes,” he says.

Martínez cuts an eccentric figure: he pays the rent on the tiny adobe igloo in which he lives by giving massages, and his only possessions are a bed surrounded by musical instruments, a few neat stacks of books, an empty plastic cooler, and a smattering of feathers and other ceremonial items.

With a masters’ thesis on the use of peyote under his belt, Martínez has worked hard to integrate himself into desert society, and to help build links between the Huichol pilgrims and the communal owners of the land they must travel. He’s the first to point out that Huichols’ annual trek through the desert also carries great significance for others living in the area.“The [landowners] here already made the link between the presence of the Huichols and the arrival of the rains,” says Martínez from his perch on the edge of his bed. “They say that when the pilgrims arrive on foot, it meant that there would be a good harvest.”

The use of peyote at the end of the pilgrimage is of supreme importance to the Huichols, who are considered the guardians of the spiritual tradition of peyote use. Only after weeks of fasting and celibacy and a long walk through the desert armed with the blood of a freshly sacrificed deer, can the mythic cactus—more often referred to as “medicine,” or hikuri in the Wixárika language—be consumed.

The fact that there’s mineral wealth under such a special site didn’t come as a surprise to Marciano de la Cruz’s wife, Yolanda. “The shamans always said that where there are sacred things, there are mines,” she interjected, looking up for just a moment from the intricate combination of thread and beads between her fingers.

“Our medicine is like a teacher, because it teaches us many things,” says de la Cruz. While we talked, Yolanda continued with her beading, while his children shifted their attention between a plastic bowling set on the floor and a cartoon on the family’s small television set.

De la Cruz is also among those concerned about impacts on the water from the proposed mining operation, but for a more particular reason. “Here there’s not much water, they say it takes lots of water to wash the rocks in mining, for silver, after they do that the water can run underground and it can contaminate our medicine,” he says. “And then we’re going to eat the medicine, and it could affect us.”

The Huichol people are, of course, not the only ones to take advantage of the powers of peyote. The cactus, which contains the psychedelic alkaloid mescaline, is used by Indigenous peoples throughout the northern part of the hemisphere. The Native American Church is a registered organization in the US whose members have the right to use and transport peyote.

But its use by non-Indigenous people throughout the 1960s and 70s might just be that which has brought the most attention to the sacred plant. Peyote was a cornerstone of the beat generation’s hallucinogenic trips, inspiring part of Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl, and figuring into the writings of other such as William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey. Rock stars got in on the game too: Jim Morrison, legendary front man for the popular American rock band The Doors, was known to experiment with peyote.

The cultural legacy of psychedelic art influenced by mescaline still resonates today. Tourists from around the world, inspired by the far-out message of the beat writers, flock to the desert, and to Wirikuta, to sample the effects of the button-like cactus on their own consciousness.

Sol Rak is one such visitor to the region, who has made the trek from his home in Chiapas more than 10 times in order to participate in ceremonies in the mountains that separate Real de Catorce from the desert below. “I love going to Quemado,” says Rak, who travels with fire sticks and a Temascal drum.

But mass cutting and overuse of peyote by outsiders has led to its near extinction in some regions, and it’s forced the Huichol people to set up a system to oversee who enters and leaves Wirikuta.

One of these Huichol look outs is a simple cement house on the edge of Las Margaritas, where Alberto Hernandez Gonzales lives with his wife and two teenage sons. “My job is to be here watching to make sure there is no pillaging [of peyote],” says Hernandez, whose Huichol name is Mukieri Kuayumania, which means “from the feather of an unknown bird.”

The first time we tried to meet with Hernandez he was dead tired, having done a 24 kilometer patrol of the area on foot. He was appointed to the post for a three-year term by a community assembly in his home village. And though he says he’s managed to stop some peyote thieves from entering Wirikuta, he quickly adds that he and guardians like him are severely lacking in resources. There’s only three of them working when there should be six, he says, and he doesn’t even have a mule upon whose back he could more easily safeguard the area.

Under a strong wind that moved through the plastic notches hanging from Hernandez’s traditional hat, he recounted the five points of the Huichol universe from a notebook containing carefully written notes.

“We really need to take care of these sites, they are the historical patrimony of our ancestors,” says Hernandez, referring to the threat posed by First Majestic Silver. “The Wixárika communities don’t want these places to be destroyed.”

Flores, speaking on behalf of the mining company, says First Majestic will do its best to leave the Huichol’s sacred sites alone. “The company is, what do you call it, promising to respect the ceremonial centres of the Huichols,” he says. “In fact in a meeting with the Huichol gentlemen we’re going to propose that they take over this part, and we won’t touch it,” says Flores, pointing his finger onto a section of the map that includes part of Wirikuta.

But company’s claims that they won’t touch Cerro Quemado and will work underground instead of open pit mining don’t comfort Hernandez, who likens Wirikuta to his own body.

“The mountain, in any case, is ourselves,” he says. “Right now we’re alive because we are complete. If someone comes along and splits my stomach open and rips out my insides, I’m no longer alive.”

In many ways, this tiny classroom was just like any other: rows of young students looking up at their teacher, the day’s lesson displayed on the dusty chalkboard overhead. But this day was not about grammar or arithmetic. It was about the long fight for freedom. In South Sudan, it is rarely about anything else.

I watched as a small boy walked to the front of the room. “This is the Leer Primary School Drama Club,” he announced, unexpectedly firm for a child. “I hope you will enjoy.”

Then the teacher took centre stage, behind him, a chalkboard cluttered with notes on the local harvest, Jesus, and salvation. In his hand he grasped the long wooden stick that would act as his conductor’s wand. He thrust it upward and the children rose at its command. The call and answer was about to begin.

An invisible border split the class, forming a group of students on either side. The teacher pointed his wand to one section. “Yes!” the children cried out. Swung now to the other, his wand signalled the reply. “Yes for what?” the students boomed. This time in unison, each child rang the final call. “Yes for separation! Yes for the independence of Southern Sudan!”

The mood was hopeful, but solemn. The children seemed so young and I wondered how much they could possibly understand about the words they dutifully recited. To see a primary classroom charged with nationalist emotion was jarring at first, but in context, not surprising. In late 2010, the same sentiment permeated the entire region, spreading far into remote villages like this one, touching young and old alike. It was a sentiment that had been building for decades.

Starting in 1983, civil war between the central government and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) persisted for more than 20 years, resulting in nearly 2 million deaths and one of the largest and most gruelling displacements of refugees imaginable. A peace agreement ended the war in 2005, but six years later, as its terms came to a close, the South remained one of the most undeveloped regions in the world, and relations with the North had not improved.

Though the roots of Sudan’s problems are complex, for Southerners the solution became clear—secession from the North, independence, and freedom. In hopes of growing up in peace, these children sang for a nation of their own.

On July 9, 2011, that nation arrived. Following a referendum on January 9, 2011, in which a reported 99 percent of South Sudanese citizens voted for their independence, the Republic of South Sudan was born. Celebrations in the new nation’s capital of Juba lasted for days.

Still, the trials are not over for North or South Sudan. Leading up to the split, discourse in the South left room for little more than a simple separatist cry—a resounding Yes for independence. Now, unresolved issues of oil-sharing, citizenship, and border demarcation loom while the Northern government has started a new campaign of violence in its state of Southern Kordofan. The Republic of South Sudan may have gained the independence for which its children sang, but for North and South Sudanese, separation does not yet mean peace.

“You cannot have outer revolution without inner revolution,” explains Kyoto-based Buddhist teacher Doug Duncan. As someone who has taught internationally for the last 30 years, he finds that this dynamic between inner and outer transformation is something people often fail to examine closely.

“We are skilled at manipulating our material world, devising technologies and policies,” he says while conducting a month-long meditation retreat at Clear Sky Meditation & Study Center in the mountains near Cranbrook, B.C. “All good things. But look at the government systems we collectively choose for ourselves: they reflect the mind state.

“And so we have capitalism as the preferred formation as it reflects our inner state: greed, hatred, delusion. We can’t handle enlightened theocracies like old Tibet, nor can we manage anarchy, arguably the highest form [of government] because everyone has to be utterly and totally responsible. We need the average person to realize awareness.”

A Canadian born in Regina, Duncan began his journey to acariya (Pali for “accomplished teacher”) at the age of 24 as a student of Namgyal Rinpoche, Canada’s first incarnate lama as recognized by the 16th Karmapa of Tibet’s Kagyu lineage. Duncan’s teaching bridges worlds, integrating the three major branches of Buddhism— Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajryana—as well as the teachings of western contemplative traditions, psychology, art, and modern science.

Known to many of his students simply as “Sensei Doug,” he describes his approach to teaching as asking questions, not prescribing outcomes. While his ethic is transformation, not politics or public relations, he observes a major imbalance between our inner and outer worlds. “The biggest problem with us these days is that we are materialists; our science is concerned largely with objects, not consciousness,” he says. “Yet objects exist only in relationship, subject to change.

“Ultimately, the rebellion is not against external authority, which may need to happen occasionally. It is rebellion against being subject to our inner states.” In other words, if you want to change things, look closer. Cultivate awareness and interest, observe new patterns, practice generosity. Look closer again. “The spiritual path is in essence not an escape from life but an immersion into life,” Duncan explains. “The fruition of life is to explore, discover, and share. The spiritual search, built on a foundation of bliss, is to investigate.”

Photo by Lisa Xing

The mermaids of Korea’s Jeju Island are a sight to behold, but not in the way you might think. They don’t have long, flowing locks, nor figures reminiscent of magazine models. They don’t sing Disney ballads. The sound they do make is through whistling—their own method of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide after they surface from the water. Most haenyeo, literally “sea women” in Korean, are grandmothers. They have weathered faces, deep wrinkles, and walk with slow, measured steps. Each morning at dawn, they plunge into the sea to catch clams and other marine life. They dive without much equipment, using only flippers, weighted vests and rubber diving masks. Their method is simple—mark their location in the water with a float, use a weeding hoe for digging up the sea life, and gather their harvest in a net. Some dive as deep as 20 metres, staying under for as long as three minutes without surfacing.

When my friend and I rented mopeds to explore this small island off of Korea’s southern coast, seeing the haenyeo dive was a top priority. After all, the practice helped place local traditions on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2009. We had read about them in our Lonely Planet guides and heard about them through friends. Devastatingly, we both caught a bad case of food poisoning our second evening there, so waking up at the break of dawn was far from feasible. The majority of the trip was spent nursing ourselves back to health and easing stomach cramps, and we gave up hope of actually seeing the haenyeo ourselves.

On our last day on Jeju, we were determined to see more of the island, ill or not. Not up for anything strenuous, we went to spend the afternoon with a picnic near Sunrise Peak, a popular destination on the island’s east coast. Before we even had a chance to spread the picnic blanket, we spied a small figure in the distance walking toward us with what seemed like a net in one hand. Closer and closer she came—until we realized it was one of the haenyeo, standing before us with that day’s catch, still wearing her rubber diving mask. Without a word, she plopped herself down on the beach and motioned for my friend and me to do the same. Because she spoke no English, and our Korean was broken at best, our communication consisted mostly of hand gestures and chuckles. We sat with her for about 10 minutes as she showed us her catch of the day—squid and other sea life she’d scooped up by hand. She spent every morning in the sea—using practices of eras past, armed with just her two calloused hands and an unflinching strength that seems nearly mystical to modern-day generations.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization, there were about 30,000 haenyeo on Jeju Island in the 1950s. By 2002, the number had dropped to 5,600 divers, more than half of whom were at least 60 years old. When this group of women retire, it seems like the legacy of the haenyeo will also vanish into history books, nearly as mythical as mermaids themselves.

Smoke clouds over Alexandria. Creative commons photo by Al Jazeera English.

As the world spent the last two weeks watching the pro-democracy movement swell in Egypt, occasional outbursts of violence prompted many governments to advise their citizens to avoid travelling there. Some are also arranging to get people out. Multiple governments of varying prosperity have organized charter flights to evacuate citizens. Even the Iraqi government has procured flights, despite the irony that many Coptic Christians fled to Egypt to avoid persecution in their homeland.

So far, three flights chartered by the Canadian government have left Egypt. The first flight out left hours late, after airport staff demanded a collective $2,000 bribe from all passengers before granting access to the plane. A fourth flight was delayed due to a lack of interest. About half of passengers on Canadian flights have been Canadians, with remaining seats being filled by mostly other Western nationals.

The Canadian government has decided to charge Canadian evacuees for their flight. According to the consular website, “passengers must sign an undertaking to repay the Government of Canada for $400 per seat, which will be claimed after their return to Canada. Canadian citizens accompanied by non-Canadians must sign an undertaking to repay on behalf of their co-travellers.” The website doesn’t specify how the amount will be collected. Other governments do the same: UK citizens are expected to pay “approximately £300” ($480 CAD) before boarding a government-chartered flight home, while the Americans are expected to pay for the trip to Europe, and the Australian government is paying the expense.

Why make Canadian citizens pay for their own evacuation? There are a few possible reasons, and they all have to do with the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. During that crisis, the Canadian government evacuated 15,000 citizens at a cost of $6,300 each, totalling $94 million. That cost prompted outcry from fiscal conservatives. Which means a classic conservative move this time around—user fees!

The 2006 outcry was also not-so-subtly tinged with anti-immigrant sentiment: the operation prompted Conservative MP Garth Turner to coin the term “Canadians of Convenience,” referring to people who obtain Canadian citizenship but return to their home country, therefore contributing little by way of taxes, but enjoying consular protection and other benefits of a Canadian passport. By charging for evacuation this time around, the Conservative government deflects some of the “freeloading foreigners!” accusations.

In September 2006, Stephen Harper mused about changing the rules around dual citizenship, in order to prevent another episode in which the government would have to pay to evacuate citizens “of convenience.” Judging from the Egypt experience, it looks like some of those changes have already been made.

A Campa Vista home with a view to the ocean. Photo by Dawn Paley.

I’m sitting with the cab driver who has brought me to the end of a long gravel road, near the edge of Trujillo, a small town on the north coast of Honduras. He’s flipping through a newspaper, telling me in halting English that he’s saving up to buy an excavator. Anyone with an excavator has work, he says. I hear the sound of four-wheeled all-terrain-vehicles in the distance, humming as they near. In a cloud of dust, Cathy Bernier appears at the top of the hill, followed on another ATV by her two daughters. All of them are here for a vacation from a freezing Alberta December. Bernier, who works as a client-relations manager with the development, has agreed to take me on a tour of Campa Vista, a housing project for retired Canadians perched above the Caribbean Sea.

With a wave from a security guard tuning his radio in a tiny booth, we pass under the front gate, a cement arch built over a dusty gravel road. From the back of Bernier’s speeding ATV, her blonde hair blowing in my face, I can see that the route we’re on is cut through what was quite recently a thick jungle. Along one side, a high wall of earth shades the road, and on the other, a steep ditch drops away toward the ocean. Peeling around a corner, the road forks. We hang right, and Bernier slows to a stop in front of an imposing house with a pool set in the front patio. Within a few months, this house will be occupied by a 70-year-old rugby player from Edmonton—one of this gated village’s first residents. Below us, dense jungle sprawls down the mountain toward the water, interrupted only by the newly built roads, faint outlines of staked-out lots, and high power lines.

Once completed, as promised in the promotional materials, Campa Vista (“Country View” in English) will afford a sunny, secure perch for Canadian snowbirds. The development’s website boasts of a “Euro-Mediterranean-style private gated community, with each property possessing its own unique and outstanding view.”

North American baby boomers have proven to have a boundless appetite for vacation or retirement homes in sunny, cheap places that aren’t too wracked by crime or war. It’s been a global windfall for many other countries, and now the people who run Honduras want a cut. Canadian entrepreneur Randy Jorgensen, developer of the Campa Vista complex, is happy to oblige. Jorgensen sells this tropical dream over the internet and in hotel conference-room seminars held in grey-skied Canadian locales: Regina; Etobicoke, Ontario; Duncan, B.C. His basic pitch: Honduras is the latest, best bargain available to Canadians wanting to own their own piece of a developing country.

But—as you might have guessed—this sunny picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Just off the beach in Trujillo, six men sit around a peeling wooden picnic table. They’ve agreed to meet me here to discuss their concerns about the Canadians they say are squatting on their ancestral lands.

“Canadians have a strong sense of private property,” said Evaristo Perez Ambular, a native of Trujillo and member of Honduras’s major organization representing the Garífuna indigenous population. “We don’t have any access to that land anymore, including to some of our traditional pathways.”

Ambular speaks fluent Spanish, but switches back to the Garífuna language at times to discuss with the other men. The Garífuna language and its people are unique in a way that is recognized worldwide: the language, dance, and music of the Garífuna peoples were added to the United Nations’ list of rare cultural traditions in need of safeguarding.

Popular lore has it that Garífuna peoples descend from a slave ship that washed up on St. Vincent Island, whose passengers escaped slavery and instead intermarried with local indigenous people. The Garífuna were once called “Black Caribs” by the British, who forced them off St. Vincent and onto Roatán Island and the Central American mainland in 1797.

A fishing people, the Garífuna developed a rich collective lifestyle dependent on the ocean, the forests and the beaches. Expert seafarers, many Garífuna became deckhands for cargo ships travelling up and down the coast of Latin America. Today, there is a significant Garífuna diaspora in the United States.

The latest threat to Garífuna people, says Ambular, is the wave of Canadian settlers who are cutting them off from their land base.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the Garífuna who live in Trujillo were given collective titles for a fraction of their territories. But community members allege that in 2007 a former leader misrepresented himself as the owner of the land and wrongfully sold off parcels of real estate—land that eventually ended up in Randy Jorgensen’s hands.

“There are many Canadians in our communities on the coast, and we haven’t seen a positive presence from them,” says Ambular. “They use our bridges and our roads, and they don’t leave us a thing.”

Evaristo Perez Ambular (far right) together with members of the Garifuna community in Trujillo. Photo by Dawn Paley.

José Velasquez, the current president of the two Garífuna communities in Trujillo, hands me a photocopy titled “Pronunciamiento No. 3.” It outlines the Garífuna peoples’ desire to reclaim their ancestral territories, and demands that the Honduran government nullify all land sales to Jorgensen.

Randy Jorgensen has lived in Honduras for 20 years, on and off. It’s been a getaway of sorts from his bustling life in Canada, where he conceived and oversaw the creation of Adults Only Video, the country’s first national chain of pornography stores.

Originally a muffler salesman in small-town Saskatchewan, Jorgensen was nicknamed Canada’s “porn king” in a 1993 Maclean’s profile. His specialty, as the article put it, was to “bring dirty movies into the clean streets of middle-class Canada,” and by the early ’90s, Adults Only Video was bringing in $25 million a year. Faced with lawsuits and police raids because of the content of his videos, Jorgensen maintained that everything he did was within the boundaries of the law.

Later, when I called Jorgensen to get his response to the claims of the Garífuna on the land where he’s building Campa Vista, he laughed, chalking the claims up to a form of “extortion.”

“For Canadians, the easiest way to compare it is to compare it to our own native Indians in Canada,” he says. “Depending on what’s going on, they may or may not decide that they have a land claim going on.” He says all of the paperwork for the land that he’s purchased is legitimate, and there’s no conflict. “As soon as there is any development going on generally, the Garífuna start checking around and seeing if there isn’t some way that they can extort some funds or something out of whoever is doing that development,” said Jorgensen.

Today, Jorgensen lives full-time in his home near the Campa Vista development in Honduras. He runs AOV Online, the internet broadcasting version of what his porno chain once was. But his first career is downplayed in his most recent venture into real estate, where he instead positions himself as a lifestyle expert. However, it’s clear that he’s learned something from his years in the porn business: sex sells.

The marketing videos for a partner project sold in Costa Rica include close-ups of various young, attractive women in tight, white T-shirts. After I watched these videos with a crowd of prospective buyers, the first comment from a man sitting nearby was “I wonder if she’s single.” Should he choose to move down to Honduras, he wouldn’t be the first to discover that sex tourism abounds.

In the tropical coastal town of La Ceiba, a few hundred kilometres from Trujillo, I meet Rick Mowers. I find him, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer from Hamilton, sitting at the computer beside the bar at Expatriates, a restaurant that he now co-owns.

“I just quit, moved here, went to instant retirement, did nothing for one year,” he says. The boredom eventually got to him, though. “It costs money to do nothing all day long. We find that too many of us drink too much alcohol or beer if you have nothing to do all day long.” Buying the restaurant has given the young-looking 53-year-old something to do with his time. He tells me he moved to Honduras with his wife, but they split after he had an affair. A warm breeze moved through the restaurant, stirring up the air under the high, thatched roof.

“It’s too cold, it’s too expensive, and I’m not going to live there for the free health care,” says Mowers of Canada. He rattles off how much cheaper things are in Honduras, from rent and food to crack cocaine and sex.

“Here sex is, in the whole country, sex is $10. So if you go downtown, and you stop and the girl gets in your car, it’s $10, 200 lempiras, for you to go have intercourse,” he says. Mowers didn’t mention the AIDS epidemic in the north-coast region, where over 60,000 people have HIV/AIDS, the highest infection rate in Central America.

Later, I Google Mowers. It turns out he was a bad cop. He had at least six disciplinary sanctions on his record when he left the Ontario Provincial Police, including neglect of duty when responding to a domestic violence complaint. On his partial police pension, he now lives like minor royalty in Honduras, a country where more than half the population lives below the official poverty line, and at least two million people live on less than $2 a day.

Sitting in the central park of San Pedro Sula one hot afternoon, I get a text message from a friend who says that the Honduras National Tourism Federation is having its annual meeting in the city tonight. After stopping at my hotel to change from shorts and a T-shirt into my most stiflingly hot, but fanciest, dress, I catch a cab over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The downstairs lobby, in from the heat, noise, and chaos of the outside, might as well be in Winnipeg, Los Angeles, or Shanghai. Air conditioning blasts the air, and well-dressed Hondurans sip fancy drinks and drag on cigarettes. San Pedro Sula has long been home to the country’s richest families, and today is the hub of Honduras’s sweatshop industry. I finagle my way into the upstairs ballroom and mingle with the upper crust of the tourism business in Honduras. They’re happy to talk about Canadian tourists. “Canadians are super-important to us,” says John Dupuis, the top representative for tourism in La Ceiba. In some hotels in the region, 70 to 80 percent of the guests are Canadian.

“Tourism from Canada, especially in winter, represents the largest source of income in the tourism sector in the Bay Islands and the north coast of the country,” said Piero Dibattista, who owns and manages several hotels in Roatán.

Canada has always been an excellent ally of the tourism industry, says Juan Antonio Bendeck, the chair of the Honduran Chamber of Tourism. Honduras’ tourism industry is small by comparison with its neighbours: the country welcomed 247,082 visitors in 2001, compared to nearby Costa Rica’s 823,575.

But following the June 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the already struggling tourism sector took a substantial hit. “I’d like to tell everyone to come to Honduras and that it’s a tranquil place and everything is beautiful, but you think I’d be successful with that message?” asked deposed tourism minister Ricardo Martínez, after showing footage of riots and repression in Tegucigalpa during a presentation to the Central American Travel Market.

“Well, Central America is Central America,” says Jorgensen, when asked about the safety of travelling and living in Honduras. He says Trujillo is a small town, and the “really bad guys” tend to stay away from the area.

Jorgensen’s Campa Vista development in Trujillo is being marketed by Tropical Freedom Properties Ltd., who promise just that for only $85 per square foot. Tropical Freedom is a subsidiary of Fast Track to Cash Flow, a St. Albert, Alberta-based company. The local Better Business Bureau gives the company a D on a scale of A+ to F, expressing “concerns with the industry in which this business operates.”

On this sunny morning in June, I’m attending a meet-up hosted by Tropical Freedom Ltd. in the basement of a Travelodge hotel on the freeway beside the sleepy retirement town of Duncan, B.C. Cindy Storme, a petite blond woman in a gold-accented brown pantsuit, wowed the three dozen or so mostly retirement-age people attending the event with stories about waking up to the sound of howler monkeys, banana boating, barbecues, and life beside the water. As her audience chewed on white-bread sandwiches cut into little triangles, Storme talked about Costa Rica, a much more stable country, which she says is “exactly like the movie Avatar.” At the tail end of Storme’s talk, she spends about 10 minutes talking about Honduras, a country that she says “every Canadian” can afford to buy property in. Not only will investing in Honduras give Canadians a place to get away, says Storme, but there’s no credit check involved. Jorgensen is even offering a travel allowance for anyone to go visit the properties, and there are income-tax breaks to boot. At least a few people in the room signed up for a $500 gold membership with Tropical Freedom, which gives them the right to buy property with Jorgensen’s Honduran project. Jorgensen is making sales. But the global market in pleasant tropical experiences is a highly competitive business, and members of the North American middle class have certain expectations when they purchase their own little slice of a Third World paradise.

Québécois tourists in La Ceiba, with a Garifuna boy. Photo by Dawn Paley.

My mind went to a conversation I’d had with two tourists from Gatineau, Quebec on a beach near La Ceiba. They told me that they found their hotel boring. They were too scared to go into town. The two of them were the closest thing I can imagine to professional beach-goers: deeply tanned, lathered up in oil, laid out on folding lounge chairs with most of their middle-aged skin exposed to the scorching sun. For the money, they said, Cuba is a better deal.

Honduras isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach, as anyone who strays from their supervised beach resort or walled-in retirement complex to a larger city will soon learn. There were 4,473 murders in Honduras in 2008, giving the country the chilling designation of having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world.Canadians who ignore the country’s security situation do so at their peril.

But Canadians who choose to ignore the long-standing conflicts over rural land do so at the expense of all who have lived there before, and put themselves at risk as well. Consider the advice of the U.S. State Department: “U.S. citizens should exercise extreme caution before entering into any form of commitment to invest in real estate, particularly in coastal areas and the Bay Islands.” Instead of buying into a smooth sales pitch, Canadians would do well to ask themselves why they expect to land in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, which is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and be treated like gods.

Bassam and Zahra's studio in Damascus.

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water.

Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished paintings decorate their apartment walls, some are for sale at a Greekowned gallery in Souq Al-Hamadiyye, and some are for sale at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The couple are refugees who fled to Syria to escape the war in Iraq. They scrape together a living by selling their paintings to tourists. It’s much cheaper to live in Damascus than it is in Baghdad, but even so, they can’t get by without occasional gifts from relatives to make ends meet.

When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003 and work was hard to come by, Bassam began painting portraits for American soldiers. After his neighbourhood was occupied by the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, he quickly became a suspect. A friend of Bassam’s who ran a bootleg liquor store was killed. After his death, Bassam says life in Baghdad became “like being in a movie, no life and no feeling.” Terrified of the violence, Zahra did not set foot outside of their home for three months.

Paint brushes in Bassam and Zahra's Damascus studio.

As the situation in Baghdad deteriorated, educated, middle-class individuals and students—Zahra’s father, now 75, graduated from Oxford University and was a successful engineer; Bassam’s mother was an accountant—were in danger, either of kidnapping for ransom or of being perceived as collaborating with the American military. So, in 2006, like many other Iraqis, Bassam and Zahra made the difficult decision to leave their families and escape across the border to Syria. Bassam describes a huge sense of relief when they passed into Syrian territory, like he could finally breathe again.

Neither of them have been back to Baghdad since 2006— nor do they want to return. The couple says life before the war was like being “choked.” Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime was oppressive, but stable. Today, sectarian violence is rampant, and neither Zahra nor Bassam believes the situation in Baghdad will improve any time soon.

Some of Bassam's comics.

As refugees in Damascus, they live in perpetual fear of being kicked out of the country and having to return to Iraq. Both of them continue to harbour the dreams they shared when they met at art college: Bassam hopes to have an exhibition of his paintings and perfect his work as a comic artist; Zahra, who laughs easily and is seldom seen out of her Converse sneakers, smiles at the thought of having children. But both are too worried about deportation to consider a family right now.

A phone call from the UNHCR with the promise of resettlement to a Western country is their best chance at finding a normal, stable life. However, they have no illusions that it will happen soon—Syria is home to an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees just like them.

Collectively, the camps in Dadaab are the largest refugee settlement in the world. Built to house 90,000 displaced people, they now hold upwards of 250,000, mainly from neighbouring Somalia. Camps which were supposed to provide temporary shelter for refugees before they could be resettled have instead become distressingly permanent, with many people living in limbo for years.

Goodwin builds a relationship with each student, meeting the families and friends they will have to leave behind as they move, alone, to various universities across Canada. There are wonderfully light moments, and the strength and dignity with which the students face their various challenges is incredibly inspiring. But this is not a happy story. The feelings of dislocation that come when trying to adapt to an alien culture are accompanied by the constant pressure to do well enough, quickly enough, to pull their families out of the camps.

Expectations are high partly because of the perception in the camps that everyone in Canada is “rolling in money” and that once they break through and make it here, they — and their families — are set. Only after arriving in Canada do they learn that this is not the case. It is here that the book offers a look at Canada through the eyes of some very intelligent newcomers. Some wonder why their new Canadian friends don’t seem to care very much about Canadian politics. Others wonder why, in a country so much richer than the ones they were born in, homelessness and poverty are allowed to persist.

The students also struggle with questions of identity, with each having to decide how strongly to hold to lifelong religious and cultural beliefs. Often there is an eagerness to try new things, accompanied by a deep reluctance to leave behind customs which remind them of home. Their views on the interaction between women and men in Canadian society are varied, as are their recollections of gender relations in the camps. More than one of the male students has had the word “feminist” used against him as a severe accusation, and more than one of the female students believes the hijab is a central part of her wardrobe.

As a journalist, Goodwin gains the trust of the students and reports their experiences and observations in their own words. As a mother with a daughter the same age as the students she is writing about, she becomes part of the story herself. For most of them, she is the only outsider who has seen them both as they used to be, young leaders in Dadaab, and as they are now, young leaders in Canada.

Bodies lie in a ditch in rural Mexico, as police look on. Photo by Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The first of Juan Escobedo’s many trials began in 2007 when his common-law wife, Lisbeth, then just 31, was diagnosed with cancer. The couple had four children and little money. At the time, Escobedo (not his real name) drove a bus he rented by the day around the city of Oaxaca and Lisbeth worked as a cleaner at the Mexican Social Security Institute. As a state employee, she qualified for free radiation and chemotherapy treatment at a public hospital, but doctors there held out little hope. It quickly became clear Lisbeth did not have long to live.

Escobedo’s second trial began in July 2008, when a gang of masked, gun-toting men burst into his house in the middle of the night. They blindfolded and tied him up along with Lisbeth and bundled them both into a van. They drove them to the Huayapam reservoir, where Escobedo was held underwater until he almost drowned, then beaten while Lisbeth was forced to look on. Their assailants identified themselves as members of “Los Zetas,” and said they wanted the couple to work for them. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?’” Escobedo recalls. “My wife was sick, and even so they made her sell drugs from our house.”

In a region known for corruption, electoral fraud and strong-arm politics, the Escobedos were just the kind of people the Zetas knew they could control and extort—average citizens without resources or connections. “They forced me to sell drugs, but others, they were forced to keep an eye on us,” he explains. “So anyone who said anything or made an accusation, for sure they would kill them.” The Zetas made copies of the couple’s identification cards, but that wasn’t the only factor that trapped them. What really stopped the couple from trying to escape, says Escobedo, was the fact that outside Oaxaca, Lisbeth’s cancer treatments would no longer be paid for by the state, and there was no way Juan could afford to pay for them himself.

He describes this period as “very painful. Like something you might see in a movie, but I was living it. I couldn’t do anything, and this put me into a kind of shock. I wanted to die.” By then, his wife was in constant pain and unable to sleep, “crying and moaning all the time,” he recalls. Every day for four months, dealers and addicts would climb onto his bus and purchase small bags of cocaine and crack, which he kept in his change box beside the steering wheel. Passengers and police alike took no notice. At one point, the couple was once again blindfolded and taken to a house where they joined a circle of people similarly bound. Two men brought in a third and beheaded him with a machete in front of the group’s horrified eyes—his punishment, they were told, for trying to escape. This was where Escobedo saw the one person he could identify, a uniformed police commander named Castillo.

In September 2008, Lisbeth died and Escobedo sent his children to stay with relatives. Mourning and hopeless, he also stopped working. Two weeks later, Castillo came to see him. “He said, ‘You’ll keep on working for us because you work for us.’ I really didn’t want to, so he said, ‘Here it’s not whether you want to or not,’ and he pulled out a knife. I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

In desperation, Escobedo’s father called Juan’s older sister, who lives in Canada, to see if she could help. She paid for his passport and a plane ticket, and in April 2009, with $5 to his name, Escobedo landed in Canada and immediately applied for refugee status. With his application to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Escobedo became one of the unprecedented 9,309 Mexican migrants seeking Canadian refugee status last year.

Though Escobedo’s status as a refugee applicant allowed him to go on welfare, he found work in Toronto instead. “I am not here to take anything from this country,” he says. “I am here for the second chance I wouldn’t have otherwise. And because I am more use to my family alive than dead.”

As drug-related violence sweeps across Mexico and the death toll rises, Canada has responded by shutting out more and more Mexican refugees fleeing the mayhem. In 2006, when 4,955 Mexicans applied, the Immigration and Refugee Board accepted 28 percent of those applications. That acceptance rate steadily dwindled to just eight percent, and in July 2009, the immigration ministry placed a visa requirement on all Mexicans travelling to Canada, essentially halting the flow entirely.

Lawyers and others who work with Mexican refugee claimants readily agree that there are opportunists using the violence as a pretext to enter Canada for short-term, higher-paid work than they can get at home. The dilemma they face is not gang-style execution, but a profound lack of economic opportunities.

“You have people in Mexico selling stories,” says Francisco Rico-Martinez, who heads the Faithful Companions of Jesus Refugee Centre and has been helping refugees for more than 20 years. “You come and the only detail is to say that you will be killed in Mexico if you go back. So we have those cases as well—people who are desperate for the lack of future and the poverty in Mexico, and they use any way to get out.”

Rico-Martinez estimates that roughly 60 percent of Mexicans claiming asylum here fit that profile, while 40 percent are at genuine risk of violence or murder. Yet Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney routinely refers to all Mexican asylum claims as “bogus,” fostering a climate of skepticism even toward legitimate claimants who can document the persecution and death threats they have experienced. In these cases, says lawyer Mordechai Wasserman, the IRB “skips any consideration of credibility whatsoever. They jump to state protection. They say that Mexico is a democracy, that there’s a presumption of state protection.”

For the IRB, Mexico is a sunny travel destination, a functioning democracy where citizens have ample recourse within its domestic laws to deal with serious crime. When Wasserman points to the murders of police, soldiers, and members of the judiciary as evidence of the lack of state protection, the IRB says that evidence simply indicates that the police were killed in the line of duty and the government is making an effort to root out corruption. The absurdity of that rosy view drives Wasserman crazy. “I just want to tear my hair out,” he says.

Wasserman isn’t alone in his frustration. Aviva Basman, a lawyer at Toronto’s Refugee Law Office, describes her Mexican clients as “some of my most traumatized and most compelling cases.” Many are battered women, whose husbands have backchannel connections to Mexico’s public security apparatus that allow them to repeatedly track down and attack them. “I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall,” she says, “because you go in and make what you think are very strong legal arguments based on facts as they now are in Mexico, that is so dire, and then you get a kind of boilerplate answer back.”

Among the most prominent cases of those refused is that of Wasserman’s client Gustavo Gutierrez. A detective commander with the Ciudad Juárez police force investigating the murders of more than 200 young women, Gutierrez fled to Canada after 36 of his colleagues were killed and he himself began receiving death threats from traffickers.

Another is Toluca lawyer Alfonso Vega, who was represented by Andrew Brouwer of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario. Thanks to two legal cases Vega was pursuing against their members, he ran afoul of the shadowy yet powerful Atlacomulco Group. Wasserman had a client who was actually told by an employee of the Public Prosecutor’s Office that he would be killed if he did not leave the country. His claim was also denied by the IRB.

However, one of the most gruesome consequences of an IRB decision affected a Mexican woman identified only as Nuemi.

She came to Canada with two daughters in 2004, after she and her family received death threats from the Familia Michoacana cartel. The family’s claim was rejected, but the women stayed in Canada fighting deportation orders until, in August 2008, the elder daughter returned home to visit her dying grandmother.

Detected by La Familia and raped, Nuemi’s daughter flew back to Canada—which promptly deported her back to Mexico in December. Nuemi and her younger daughter were deported the following February, and all three women went into hiding at the home of an elderly friend. Only weeks later, then seven months’ pregnant as a result of the rape, Nuemi’s elder daughter was kidnapped. Police found her body in June; not only had she been beaten and shot in the back of the head, but the baby she had been carrying had been removed by Caesarean section. The elderly man sheltering them was also killed. His family, not surprisingly, told them to leave.

After receiving various desperate email messages from Nuemi, Rico-Martinez and Basman succeeded in bringing her and her surviving daughter back to Canada on temporary residence permits. Adding insult to injury, the condition of Nuemi’s return was that she reimburse Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their original deportation costs— including those of her murdered daughter.

While Nuemi’s assertion that she and her family lived in fear of their lives—and that Mexican authorities were incapable of protecting them—was tragically and graphically proven by her daughter’s grisly death, the IRB continues to rely on the “Internal Flight Alternative.” It suggests that applicants move elsewhere within their own country, such as Mexico City, where, in the words of one ruling, “I am convinced that state protection would be reasonably forthcoming.”

For lawyers defending what they feel are clearly meritorious refugee claims, their clients risk becoming victims of the Mexican government’s stated intention—but demonstrated inability—to protect its own citizens.

“There’s this belief,” says Basman, “that it’s okay as long as the government is trying to protect—even if it can’t.”

It is early summer and Mexico City bathes in the sweltering heat of a dry season stubbornly refusing to give way to the rains. Even as the number of deaths from the government’s struggle against organized crime reaches past 23,000, even as one of the nation’s most powerful men (former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos) is himself kidnapped, life goes on in the vast metropolis and in towns and cities across the country. In Oaxaca, an international aid and human rights caravan is attacked and two activists killed, but no police investigation will take place and everyone accepts this. It is as if an alternate reality, a webbing of uncontrollable criminality, lurks below the surface of daily life. It’s a reality to which Mexicans, appalled as they may be, are becoming accustomed.

“It’s not like you’re fearful just walking down the street,” says John Mill Ackerman, professor at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “but if you’re targeted by a drug cartel, there’s really nothing you can do. And this,” he adds, “is an inheritance of the authoritarian system of government. This has been the big problem of the democratic transition of the last 10 years. We are still working with the same state apparatus, the same institutions. The changing colours of the party has led to different groups or mafias coming in or out of government— but not to a real conquest of formal institutions over informal institutions.”

Mexicans who, like Juan Escobedo, have for one reason or another fallen afoul of what Ackerman calls “powerful informal actors” should be seeking protection from the federal attorney general, or PGR. Its Ministerio Publico, or Public Prosecutors Office, has the job of not only investigating crimes, but deciding which cases will be prosecuted. “The Ministerio Publico is in total control of every part of criminal proceedings,” says Ackerman.

While the 2000 ousting of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party from government may have cracked open the political system, the judiciary remains mired in a culture of favouritism, secrecy, and corruption.

Judges rarely question or even see defendants during trial. There are no juries, no oral arguments, and no public access to evidence until the trial is over. Evidence gathered under torture is admissible, and most suspects are found guilty without scientific proof like fingerprints or DNA. In this system, prosecutors have unusually broad powers, deciding if a suspect is guilty before their day in court and using their own police force to gather evidence to support those decisions.

For José Rosario of the non-governmental Miguel Agustin Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre, the probability of such a system offering protection is “almost zero. There are many inequalities in Mexican society,” he says, “and those same inequalities reproduce themselves in the justice system.” What’s more, Mexican law severely limits the effectiveness, and so the likelihood, of people from one state accusing anyone of so-called “common” crimes like extortion, threats, kidnapping, or even murder in another. To seek justice, victims must stay within the jurisdiction where the crime has occurred, putting themselves in even greater danger. And, says Ackerman, “that’s not going to happen because the person knows the Ministerio Publico itself is, if not totally corrupt, that at least a criminal gang will have eyes and ears there. They’re going to see who is actually charging them. So there’s a very strong disincentive to even accuse these people.” The entire apparatus allows organized crime to flourish. “Most Mexicans,” says Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and an expert on organized crime, “consider the judicial system corrupt at all levels. By being conceived as corrupt by society, people do not report crimes, do not collaborate with the authorities and therefore any effort of the state is hampered.”

Originally trained by the Mexican army in the 1990s as an elite crime-fighting squad, a Mexican version of the Green Berets, the Zetas were soon co-opted by Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel. When Cárdenas was captured, “they slowly became more and more independent in many of their operations,” says Buscaglia, “at first with kidnappings, later extortions. And at some point they acquired so much economic power that they were able to divorce themselves from the Gulf Cartel.”

By now, he says, they are much more than a drug-trafficking gang. “They are a transnational organized crime group involved in 17 types of crimes, and present in 23 countries around the world.” Branching out into weapons and human trafficking, along with contract killings, protection rackets, and the kind of small yet profitable business of forcing non-members to retail drugs, “they have made fortunes out of this huge diversification,” he says.

Their financial clout and violent methods have allowed the Zetas to infiltrate police and judicial systems in several states, including Chiapas and Oaxaca. Infiltrating the federal government has been more of a challenge for them, says Buscaglia, but that’s only because their main rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, “has had a long-term monopoly on the capture of federal authorities at the highest level.”

There are 982 “pockets” in Mexico, where “the authorities and organized crime are one force,” Buscaglia adds, “and that’s the essence of a failed state. Mexico is facing limited symptoms of a failed state—and it’s expanding.”

Although President Felipe Calderón has continually proclaimed his desire to vanquish organized crime, dispatching the army throughout the country to do so, he seems unwilling to overhaul its dysfunctional justice system. “That system,” says Buscaglia, “is quite cosy for the political and business elite.”

Mexico’s congress did pass new acts designed to reform the justice system in 2008. With reform, says Buscaglia, “the capacity of organized crime to capture the judiciary would be limited.” But the president has done nothing to actually implement those changes. For Buscaglia, judicial reform is “a joke—two years have gone by and nothing substantive has been done.”

“The big opportunity of democratic transition,” says Ackerman, “the possibility of reforming our institutions, of bringing democracy into the state itself? Calderón just hasn’t done it.”

The third trial of Juan Escobedo is still under way. The ruling that will, in one way or another, change his life is yet to come. An April 2010 hearing was interrupted, as the IRB grappled with the fact that he took part in criminal activity, even if it was against his will. Another hearing in June was postponed. He remains convinced that if he does return to Mexico, the Zetas will somehow find him and subject him to the same gruesome death they have historically inflicted on so many others. “You don’t ask how they can find you,” he explains. “They have all your documents and that’s why they go and look for you.”

For her part, Basman is convinced that the IRB will carry on making negative rulings against Mexican claimants. “Because of the sheer number of claimants, there’s a fear,” she said, “that if you give positive decisions, you’re just encouraging more to come. If you recognize Mexico as a refugee-producing country, then more are going to come and they’re just going to be overwhelmed at the board.”

Yet in Mexico, said Buscaglia, “this nightmare will never cease until the violence and the suffering of average Mexicans reaches the political and business elite—when their families, their persons, and their net worth is actually hampered by organized crime, and the monster they created starts to eat them.”

Photo Credits: Hamed Saber and Peter Ashton

Consider this exchange:

Speaker 1: “Would you like to go the aquarium with me [tomorrow] to see the dolphin show?”
Speaker 2: “The dolphin show?”
Speaker 1: “The dolphins are very intelligent animals.”
Speaker 3: “But the aquarium is not open tomorrow.”
Speaker 1: “It will be open tomorrow”

Out of context it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.  We know someone is inviting someone else to watch the dolphins.  The someone else sounds a bit confused.  And somehow the first speaker knows that, despite normally posted hours, the aquarium will be open tomorrow.  Under normal circumstances you would, as I would, think this was some sort of surrealist play when Che’s daughter and a nuclear scientist entered the dialogue.  And, normally, we would be right.

Today, however, the truth is far stranger.  Speaker 1 is Fidel Castro, speaker 2 is American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and speaker 3 is a bodyguard.  You just can’t make this up.  I’ll spare you all of the details (although I do encourage you to read the original pieces from the Atlantic here and here) but Fidel apparently was so impressed with an article that Goldberg wrote about Iran and Israel that he decided to grant him an extended three day interview — part of which took place at the aquarium.

Since coming out on the right side of a serious gastro-intestinal illness Fidel has been speaking with increasing frequency about international matters.  This, says Goldberg’s travelling companion Julia Sweig, is Castro trying to reinvent himself as a senior global statesman: “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation, climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”

But, the dolphin show.  To me, at least, this seems an odd stage from which to launch your global nuclear disarmament campaign or, stranger still, to argue for a more ecologically sound global order.  To be fair this is no ordinary dolphin show nor, for that matter, is it an ordinary aquarium.  The dolphin trainers do not run the show so much as they are also part of it.  Watched from beneath the surface the show is a carefully scripted dance between human and dolphin.

The aquarium itself is run by a nuclear scientist and one of the veterinarians is the aforementioned daughter of Che.  Perhaps there is some sort of message here about beating tanks into tractors.  It can be no coincidence that an interview about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and Iran’s nuclear ambitions ends up at an aquarium managed by someone with the theoretical know-how to build the bomb.  Cubans, maybe we are supposed to infer, have no time for such pursuits?  Having been brought to the brink of nuclear apocalypse once they would rather spend their time with the planet’s second smartest animal, who don’t happen to be threatening existence as we know it.

Any which way, however, this has to be one of the strangest meetings since, well, ever.  I have no doubt that Castro was following some sort of script but, even if it will be some form of plagiarism, when it comes time to write my screenplay I’m using this scene.