As is our habit when we visit our con Chris in Puerto Vallarta, we first check into the hotel Villa La Estancia for a few days of luxury relaxation. There was an innovation this year in the breakfast restaurant: quesadillas with hand-made tortillas, with cheese and a choice (or combination) of mushrooms, spinach, tinga de pollo (chicken in a sauce of tomatoes and smoked chiles), or birria. The latter is a western Mexico speciality of beef, goat or lamb, cooked for two to three hours in a marinade of chile ancho and guajillo, garlic, cumin, oregano, thyme, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, bay leaf and vinegar. It is hearty and absolutely delicious.
Chatting to Yolanda, who made our breakfast to order, I discovered that she was born in Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero (and the place where Mexico’s first constitution was drafted) seven years after I had stayed there for a couple of months to consult the state archives. We reminisced about Chilpancingo’s culinary speciality, pozole. Everyday white posole is made from long-cooked hominy, pork, garlic, onion, bay leaf, oregano, pepper and salt, and served with lettuce, radish, avocado, oregano and lime. But the truly special pozole is the green pozole made only on jueves pozoleros (pozole Thursdays), flavoured with fewer herbs and spices, but with that all-Mexican herb epazote, and with tomate, which in English we call either green tomato or tomatillos, and jalapeños.
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| Yolanda making quesadillas. |
Our conversation reminded me of a long afternoon sharing local mezcal and quantities of pozole verde with a colleague from the Autonomous University of Guerrero. The pozole was delicious, the mezcal too copious, and our fellow diners included anybody who was anybody in Chilpancingo.
Apart from the rather mundane mornings spent in the archives, I was trying to make contact with the Figueroa family, whose ancestors had been important figures in the state during the Revolution of 1910-1920. Indeed, they had continued to be important players in state politics, and Rubén Figueroa Figueroa had recently been elected governor. The governor was, to say the least, a colourful figure. He was one of the breed of rough and tough gun-toting politicians who had ruled Guerrero not at all well for half a century. The most spectacular episode of his career had been his capture by the guerrilla band of Lucio Cabañas. Figueroa had hoped to persuade Cabañas to give up his armed struggle in return for ‘election’ to remunerative political office. However, instead of pulling off a political coup de théâtre, Figueroa found himself held captive until all political prisoners in Mexico were released. Cabaña’s bands methods were rather haphazard, and on one occasion the corpulent governor-elect had managed to walk away from his captors, only to be recaptured. Finally, the band was betrayed and caught in an army ambush. In the midst of the firefight, Figueroa walked over to the army side and demanded to be given a gun with words to the effect of ‘so I can shoot the bastards.’
I had tried to meet the governor in Acapulco, but was told that he was fishing with the Shah of Iran. In Chilpancingo, however, I managed to make the acquaintance of the governor’s cousin, Arturo Figueroa Uriza, the family historian and guardian of their archive. Arturo refused my request to have access to the archive, arguing that all that was in the archive was in his book Ciudadanos en Armas (Citizens in Arms). I tried to gain access to the archive through another cousin, Jesús Figueroa, who lived in the family’s home town, Huitzuco (now known in full as Huitzuco de los Figueroa) and made wine there. But he asked me what I was interested in. When I replied ‘The social background of the followers’ of his relatives, hoping to allay fears that I might be digging for dirt, he responded that the archives contained no such material. The Figueroas guarded their past carefully, so I never was allowed to see a single document, except for a few which were in the national archives, beyond family control.
However, don Arturo offered to introduce me to the governor. We found him meeting the people who brought their petitions hoping that the governor would take up their case. Anybody of importance who happened not to be the governor’s enemy need not queue up, but ordinary citizens (almost all small-scale farmers) had to wait their turn. I was taken straight to the front of the queue, where I found the governor, a corpulent man dressed in a white guayabera shirt. He was flanked by two other rotund gents wearing guayaberas; the greatest living poets in the state I was told.
We talked about the governor’s rescue by the army and he invited me to a seminar of the mayors of the state’s largest cities to discuss municipal finance. Guerrero’s main problem is poverty and an economy and political system structured so as to keep the majority impoverished. In the context of the seminar, a secondary problem was the number of tiny municipalities. The population of each is too small and too poor to pay much in taxes, so the governor commented that, except in the larger municipalities, such as Chilpancingo or Acapulco, they lacked sufficient budget even to buy pencils. Nevertheless, locals often jealously and forcefully guarded the autonomy of their municipalities, despite the fact that they did very little to benefit their tax payers.
In these circumstances, I was often impressed by how resourcefully the people of Guerrero could manage to improve their lives with very little (or no) support from those who were “elected” to govern them. I recall being asked by the head teacher of a politically radical secondary school in Acapulco to give a presentation to a class about the history of their state. The head’s office was equipped with a desk, a couple of chairs and a filing cabinet, as minimal as the office of the mayor of Buenavista de Cuéllar, far to the north of the state, who I once visited. But the head’s room was palatial compared to the classrooms.
Looking at the class, I was struck by the footprint of the history of enslaved Africans on the coast: many of these young men and women had much darker skins than fellow Mexicans descended from the ancient peoples of Mexico. When I had finished my talk, the students were not interested in the history of their state; they wanted to ask me questions about my own country. In response to a student who asked what the police in the UK were like I answered that “en mi país los policías no tienen pistola”, meaning that they were unarmed. This remark caused such hilarity that the head decided to end the class there; in local slang a pistola was a penis, and I had told these young people that British police officers don’t have any.
As I reminisced with Yolanda, she commented that many say that the people of Guerrero are bad and violent. We both agreed that this is an unjust stereotype. This reminded me of a conversation with Margarita Zavala, wife of the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. The occasion was the private view of an exhibition in 2010 about Moctezuma Xocoyotzin at the British Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of the beginning of Mexico’s war of independence. Noticing that Margarita was alone after giving her speech in English, my friends Dudley and Silvia Ankerson and I introduced ourselves to her. She was very keen to be reassured that her English was up to scratch. We assured her that it was excellent, and Silvia complimented her on her elegant rebozo (a Mexican stole). When my friends commented that I had studied the history of Guerrero, the First Lady commented “Un pobre estado con muchos problemas” (a poor state with many problems). Quite what her husband was doing to solve the problems of Guerrero she did not say.
Guerrero’s current predicament as one of Mexico’s most violent states is in some ways a historical conundrum. In pre-Columbian times the region had abundant resources of cotton, coffee and metals, all much in demand. The indigenous communities fared reasonably well. Spanish law gave the indigenous some useful privileges and protections. They paid no sales tax, could not be tried by the Inquisition for heresy, and were left to govern most of their own affairs. The best-placed municipalities were able to accumulate substantial community funds and to defend many of their cultural practices, their land and treasured documents.
Then came the Bourbons followed by Independence. The Bourbons, hard up for cash, “asked” for loans from village funds. Independence piled on the problems. The Liberals who led the movement to free Mexico from Spanish rule decried the supposedly infantilizing protections and privileges given the Indians under Spanish rule: they must have the full rights and responsibilities of all Mexicans and pay taxes like everybody else. And the Liberals deplored the communal property of indigenous towns as “la mano muerta” (the dead hand) that stifled economic development. Instead, village lands were to become private property on the open market, and thus, coincidentally, available for non-indigenous Liberal thinkers to snap them up and accumulate capital. This process was sometimes resisted determinedly and violently by communities in the mountains of Guerrero; ironically, the only ruler to try to help them retain their land was the Austrian-born emperor Maximilian I, only for disamortization as it was called to be pursued with greater vigour by the government of the national Liberal hero Benito Juárez (himself an indigenous person) and his successors.
The revolutionary regimes after 1920 distributed land to many communities, an initiative to which the Figueroas were opposed. However, this was not ownership by the community, but rather a highly conditional tenure controlled by federal law and politicians. True, clinics and schools appeared in small towns and villages, but politicians focused on grand initiatives that did little to ease rural poverty. Meanwhile fortunes were made in tourism, the only modern sector of Guerrero’s economy, in Acapulco and Itztapa Zihuatanejo. Oh, and the Figueroas came to control some key sectors of the state’s economy, notably passenger and goods transport.
And most recently, crime syndicates have seized control of much of the state and have suborned local politicians. Those who do not submit to the demands of organized crime pay with their lives. So the hardworking and long-suffering people of Guerrero live in poverty and insecurity.
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