Caring and running for disabled children in Puerto Vallarta

 

I know a good deal about Mexico’s history. But my son Chris, who works for a charity, Pasitos de Luz, in the Bahía de Banderas tourist resort area on the Pacific coast, has learned about Mexico not from books and documents, but from his participation in the lives of Mexicans, from impoverished parents of disabled children to wealthy residents, the Canadian and American expatriate community, the state bureaucracies of Nayarit and Jalisco, local and national media, and his neighbours in San Vicente, Nayarit.

 

For example, during our recent stay in a hotel in Nuevo Vallarta, Chris chatted to the waiter who served us lunch and asked if he was de planta, meaning whether he was a year-round member of staff, or one of the many employed only for the six-month high season. This fortunate young man is de planta, but his colleagues who are not live especially economically precarious lives. Chris took us for a drive in the Ameca River valley, through the suburban towns beyond San Vicente. We noticed a number of smart buses emblazoned with the logo of the Vidanta Group, an enormously influential vacation resort company. Chris explained that these were taking resort staff home after the end of their shift. The homes were often public housing: small, identical homes built in rows, with no public space other than the street, and only a small concrete yard at the back, their whitewashed walls stained black in places. Chris told us that several of his Pasitos colleagues also live in these grim developments.

In the morning hotel workers sweep the public areas of the building, the gardens and the beach. The hotel business model is based on cheap labour.

If you are a poorly paid worker in the tourism sector, a disabled child is an unexpected economic burden, your home is almost certainly poorly ventilated (and certainly not air conditioned) in an exceptionally hot climate, and generally unsuitable for a child with special needs. In theory, the family might be entitled to help from the Sistema Nacional Para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (National System for the Integral Development of the Family), or DIF, the body charged with the constitutional duty of protecting the rights of children, “principally those who, on account of their physical, mental or social condition are vulnerable, to enable them to live a full and productive life.” I have seen DIF offices in towns with populations of only a few thousand people, so its network seems to be extensive. DIF issues identification cards that entitle disabled people to discounts in certain businesses. Chris tells me that DIF also offers therapy for disabled children, but charges a fee, which prevents the children of poor families from receiving vital support.

 

Pasitos de Luz celebrated its 20^th year during the pandemic. Its registered legal name is

Mamás Unidas por la Rehabilitación de sus Hijos A.C. (Mothers United for the Rehabilitation

of their Children Civil Association). Twenty years ago, Pasitos was a cooperative of mothers

operating from a building in the Bobadilla district of Puerto Vallarta. When I visited

Bobadilla in 2014 it was bursting at the seams with equipment, a kitchen, a nursery, staff

and children. The front door advertised what Pasitos offered to parents desperate to

improve the life chances of their child: “FREE professional care for disabled children [with]

cerebral palsy, Downs syndrome, myelomeningocele, autism, impairment from meningitis

early years stimulation, special education, other syndromes, special nursery.” Care was

provided Monday to Friday from 7am to 7pm.

 

Chris at the Bobadilla building of Pasitos in 2014

 
The front door at Pasitos

Pasitos now operates from a spacious, cool and well-ventilated building, with spacious gardens, 

and recently a hydrotherapy pool, set among fields of watermelons and cucumbers just outside 

San Vicente. Physiotherapists help the children to lift their heads, to sit, to walk. They learn 

basic skills: at Bobadilla I met a tall fifteen-year-old boy who had recently learned to hold a 

pencil so that he could be taught to write. They are also given a nutritious breakfast and lunch. 

Such life-enhancing work does not cost a fortune in our terms – the annual budget is a little 

more than US$250,000 – but charitable giving is not a well-developed social practice as it is 

in the UK, the USA and Canada and raising that money is hard work. Much of the funding is 

raised at events for expatriate residents during the high season. Covid-19 stopped that funding 

stream dead, although Chris is now organizing the annual River Café Fashion Show, the 

biggest fund raiser, since March 2020. Pasitos survived by drawing on its very modest reserves 

and putting the staff on half-time work and pay. When the children returned in September some 

had regressed, so the pains-taking therapy had to begin again.

 
The new Pasitos building, known as The Castle

Chris has been touring gyms promoting his 21K challenge, to run from “Old Pasitos” in Bobadilla to 

“New Pasitos” on 11 December. His goal it to recruit from the gyms’ customers more sponsored runners. 

He tells me that the gym members understand the concept of a personal running challenge, but the 

dea of seeking sponsorship for a good cause is quite foreign to them. Nevertheless, a friend, 

Rodolfo, who is running the Mexico City Marathon in November will join Chris to run the 21 kilometres 

from Bobadilla to San Vicente.

 
Physiotherapist Eliseo teaches Alexis to walk. Both are blind

If readers of my blog would like to sponsor Chris, those in Mexico can give at: 

https://carreravirtual.recaudia.com/ayudadesdecasa/21k_2021/pasitos_de_luz/chris_jacobs, 

Readers in the USA and Canada can donate here: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/pasitosdeluz

Readers in the UK should contact me at ianjacobsipswich@gmail.com. If you know of any 

organization, such as a local church, gym or disabled children’s group that might sponsor him 

please send them a link to this blog.
A session in the physiothrapist room

Thank you,

Ian Jacobs

Paid by the line with money printed by their bosses to work in hot airless tunnels

 

The landscape en route to San Sebastián del Oeste from Puerto Vallarta

 

Visitors to the Museo Conchita Encarnación in San Sebastián del Oeste, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, ring a bell and wait for Conchita’s daughter and granddaughter to appear. The granddaughter collects the entrance fee (20 pesos, equivalent to one US dollar). The daughter conducts the tour of the one room museum, a profusion of old photos, assorted memorabilia and curiosities. In fact, the display is a memorial to three closely intermarried families, the Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre, who, so the story goes, agreed to marry only members of their three families so that their Spanish blood should not be mixed with Mexican. The house is built of adobe (mud brick) and is about three hundred years old

 

One of the objects on display is a 19^th-century Libro de Raya (literally “Line Book”), used to record the days worked by labourers in the families’ silver mines. Against the name of each mineworker (such as José de Jesús Tovar and Juan Bernal, who have many lines against their names, or José Ancola and José María Velasquez, who seem to have worked in the mine shafts only occasionally) are the Rayas (“Lines”). Once the mine owner had totted up the days worked, he printed on a small hand-operated wooden printing press a simple paper token representing the number of reales (the currency of the day) earned. The miner could spend these tokens only in the shops (the Tiendas de Raya, literally “Line Shops”) in the town, one of which apparently belonged to a branch of the Sánchez family. The shop owners could then exchange the tokens for silver coins. Thus, the only people involved in these transactions who received real money were the mine owners and the merchants. The closest the mine workers came to handling silver was when they dug it out of the hills above San Sebastián.

 

The Libro de Raya

I know a good deal about Mexican silver mining from my sudy of mining in Taxco, a somewhat similar mining town in the state of Guerrero. My studies had told me that mine work was hard and dangerous, but I had not truly realized how miserable must have been the life of a Mexican mineworker until we followed the camino de las minas to the grandly named Mina de Santa Gertrudis (Santa Gertrudis was a 13^th-century German mystic; presumably the mine owner was a devout admirer of her). The path took us up into the hills to the north of the town. The vegetation was lush and watered by numerous rapidly flowing streams. We passed several houses, most built of adobe and corrugated iron, some of breeze blocks. 

The Camino a las Minas

 

 

Entrance to the Mina Santa Gertrudis

The mine is a damp, dank, narrow tunnel, which according to a local lady we met on our way down to the town runs for100 metres into the hillside and is accessible only in the dry season. The only ventilation seems to have been the narrow opening. To imagine working conditions, one must conjure up the image of men working bent low in a narrow, hot, sweaty, airless tunnel in the 16^th- and 17^th-century early days of mining by the light of candles made of beeswax or tallow, and by the 19^th-century by the flame of a carborundum lamp like one displayed in the museum. We passed several such shafts on our way up to the Santa Gertrudis mine. Rock from the face of the mine was carried out on the backs of labourers: there was no technology beyond the stone or iron hammer or pick used to dislodge the ore.

 

Mine entrance: note the brown water streaming from it

Mine work was not only hard and unpleasant, it was also dangerous. Silver ore generally contained toxic elements such as arsenic. The rock was carried away on mules to a hacienda de beneficio (“a refining mill:) where it was ground to a powder, mixed with salt, water and mercury (another toxic element) and then smelted to produce silver ingots. The 19^th-century mine owners of San Sebastián stored their ingots in a wooden chest in the house. Once the chest was full, the silver was carried by mule train to a railway station a five-day journey through the mountains. Bandits frequently raided the convoys of mules, but we were told, only twice succeeded in stealing the silver.

 

Museo Conchita Encarnación, general view: the press used to print tokens for the labourers is on the left, the Italian chests on the right

Life was evidently not so hard for the mine owners. The objects on display include a hat made in Paris in the 19^th century and a Chinese silk and lace baptism gown in which generations of the familywere baptised. We were shown a photograph of six galanes (“dandies”), elegantly dressed and sporting long Spanish-style moustaches. The galanes met for frequent banquets, at which each was given a napkin with which to wipe their mouth and another napkin specially designed to clean their magnificent moustaches. Wedding photos of couples who might be related as aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews or cousins, show elegantly dressed brides and expensively suited grooms. Items of heirloom furniture, such as two Italian chests and a baby’s cot, are on display. Between 1867 and 1910, when the Mexican Revolution brought an end to the family’s mining businesses, an Encarnación, Sánchez or Aguirre was Municipal President of San Sebastián on 21 occasions. The sign outside the house informs the visitor that Pablo Encarnación is considered the father of the town for his generosity and his service a Municipal President.

 

José Rogelio Álvarez and his encyclopedia

Other members of the family became prominent beyond their small home town. José Rogelio Álvarez was the editor of the Enciclopedia de México, published in 1977. Photos in the museum show him meeting the former President of Mexico from 1982-1988, Miguel de la Madrid. Another member of the family, Amado Aguirre Santiago (1863-1949), was a graduate in mining engineering and a general during the Revolution of 1910-1920. He fought with Generals Manuel Diéguez and Álvaro Obregón against Pancho Villa in northern Mexico. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1917, which wrote Mexico’s current constitution, and after the war he held various government offices, was governor of the Federal Territories of Quintana Roo and Baja California, and was interim governor of Jalisco. Another Aguirre, Agustín Aguirre Ramos (1867-1942) was a priest and bishop of Sinaloa for 20 years until his death. Yet another Aguirre, Ignacio (1900-1990) was a painter and engraver, who as a teenager also fought against Pancho Villa from 1915-1917. He was a student of Diego Rivera, and in the 1930s a member, and in the 1950s director, of the famous artists’ print collective, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (“Peoples’ Print Workshop”). However, the 1910 Revolution brought an end to the family’s mining enterprises. Doña Encarnación’s daughter and granddaughter seem to live in straitened circumstances today.

 

San Sebastián's town sign and ice cream shop

At its peak San Sebastián had a population of 20,000, now much reduced from its heyday to less than 7,000. In the 19^th century silver made the town sufficiently rich for the New York Life insurance company to open an office there: a policy on the life of one of the family was on display in the Encarnación Museum. For most of its existence San Sebastián was connected to the outside world by mule tracks. Only in 1957 was a road constructed to connect with the nearest highway to Guadalajara, the state capital. The town now lives principally off tourism from the resorts of Bahía de Banderas (“Bay of Flags), about two hours away, or from Guadalajara. There are one or two shops selling silver jewelry, but, I was told, the silver comes from elsewhere. There are several hotels (one a deluxe boutique establishment), restaurants and bars. The hills are good for growing coffee. Tropical fruits, from which a women’s cooperative makes jam, are plentiful. One jam which caused us some confusion when it was served as a complement to pan de elote (a dessert made of sweetcorn) was mermelada de faisán. In any other Spanish speaking country faisán means “pheasant”, but our helpful waiter explained that we were not eating pheasant jam, but rather one made of a local berry of the same name.

 

San Sebastián: the plaza, Portico Morelos and church

Church of Saint Sebastian Martyr

 

Many of the buildings in San Sebastián date from the colonial period, mostly from the 18^th century. The centre of the town is, as usual, the plaza with its gardens in the centre and its bandstand. The northern side is occupied by the Morelos Arcade, occupied by shops, bars and restaurants. Somewhat unusually, the church does not stand on the main square, but just off it behind the Morelos Arcade. It was built in the 18^th century, but its interior was later remodelled in neoclassical style. Our lodgings, the Hotel del Puente, is a typical 18^th century bourgeois home, constructed round an interior garden, round which a portico shelters residents from rain. Rooms, entered directly from the portico, have windows that are unglazed with their reja (bars or railings) and wooden shutters. The building lacks air conditioning and heating, but supplies its guests liberally with blankets.

 

 

The Hotel del Puente and its Garden

At the foot of the camino a las minas stands a building that would have been found in any 18^th- or 19^th-centruy town, the mesón or inn. The mainstay of the transport system was the arriero or mule driver, who travelled the mountain trails, carrying goods, including luxuries for the well to do, and transported the silver of San Sebastián to the railhead. Since journeys took days or weeks, a network of inns to rest and feed both the arrieros and their animals was essential.

 

The former mesón, now a family home

The informative signs that tell the visitor about the history of the buildings of San Sebastián, and praise the Encarnación family as one of the wealthiest in the municipality, do not name men such as José de Jesús Tovar and Juan Bernal, whose contribution to the wealth of San would be unrecorded were it not for their entries in the Libro de Raya. The visiting tourist admires the colonial architecture, visits the mines, dines and shops, but is not encouraged to ask about those on whose backs the town was built.

San Sebastián looking north

 

A Jacobs at COP26

 

I can’t avoid a brief post to reflect parental pride in my son David’s small contribution to COP26. For some years he has produced animations for the European Space Agency (ESA). One of the animations that ESA commissioned for the meeting in Glasgow is Change in the Arctic, available here:

 

Change in the Arctic 

 

 

To see the video click on Change in the Arctic and then on the url (https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2021/09/Change_in_the_Arctic). You will be asked whether you wish to be redirected to the link. Click on it again to see the animation. Sorry for the elaborate method of linking - the blog site requires it. You can also just cut and paste the link into a new window of your browser.

 

David designed the giant ice cube that looms larger and larger over London. It so pleased the ESA scientists that they decided to have a large inflatable version made for their display at COP26. Since the meeting is being held in Glasgow, it is particularly appropriate that David has contributed to the debate there, since he is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art.

Better to be on a bridge than behind a wall

 

It is a sad fact that we sometimes learn about the great achievements of a person’s life when we gather to mourn their death. This was certainly true of Anthony Wood, whom I had met only two or three years ago.

 

Over a lunch in our garden one day, Anthony told me two stories that exemplified his extraordinary life. He had been a jazz promoter and in 1998 had organized three concerts by Miles Davis, the great American trumpeter, bandleader and composer. Davis’ management was very demanding when it came to finance, and Anthony had little or no financial backing. Nothing daunted, Anthony somehow managed to meet Davis’ managers’ demands.This, I have learned was typical Anthony: he was not deterred by risks that might intimidate others, and enthusiasm trumped business sense. But his enthusiasm could produce extraordinary results. Not only did he pull off those three concerts, he arranged a rare interview on network television with Davis by Jools Holland.

 

Anthony’s other tale touched on another of his enthusiasms – riding his BMW motorbike. He had recently completed a feat known as the Iron Butt Challenge, which requires the biker to ride 1,000 miles in 24 hours without stopping (other than for essential bodily functions or fuel). Anthony had worked out that, if he drove to Berlin, and from there north to the top of Finland to see the Aurora Borealis, he could drive for 24 hours in daylight, which reduced the risks of the challenge. He had also begun plans to join a bikers’ ride in Jordan. He could not afford to ship his bike to the Middle East and he told me that one cannot hire motorbikes in Jordan. However, he had a plan: to hire a bike in Beirut, ride it to Petra, and there join the ride. Alas, Covid, the Beirut explosion and death frustrated Anthony’s plans.

 

Anthony the biker, August 2021

I learned from his obituaries and by “attending” his funeral online that Anthony was much more to the jazz and avant garde world than a man who had once organized three Miles Davis concerts against all financial odds. From early in his life Anthony developed an unbounded enthusiasm for music. He became a fan of Alexis Korner, “the founding father of British blues”, travelled widely to attend performances, and persuaded Korner to give a series of interviews at his home which Anthony recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

 

Anthony at an Actual Events concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1981

Anthony spent the little money he had on his collection of vinyl records and soon branched out into avant-garde jazz. One of the music musicians he met, in 1978, was the improvisation guitarist John Russell, who invited Anthony to stay in his home and encouraged him to become a music promoter. Anthony founded Actual Events to introduce the music of avant-garde British and international musicians to the British public. Audiences were sometimes very small, so this was a labour of love and certainly not a money-making exercise. Then in 1982 Anthony founded the seminal jazz magazine entitled The Wire: Jazz, Improvised Music and …”. In classic start-up style, Anthony financed the magazine, produced it from home, managed distribution and persuaded music friends to write for nothing. However, Anthony could not sustain the magazine without external finance and in 1984 he sold it to Naim Attallah’s Namara Group. Within the year Anthony had lost his magazine as a result of a boardroom coup. This setback and financial problems ended Anthony’s career in music promotion and publishing, but The Wire lived on to become an important part of the jazz scene.

 

An early issue of The Wire

Anthony now turned his enthusiasm to his other love – motorbikes. He joined long bike rides and wrote articles for biking magazines. He also had an interest, awakened during his family’s holidays, in Spain, and had made several friends there. Anthony was a regular at a biker’s café in London which had an affiliate in Barcelona. When terrorists attacked the city in 2017 Anthony got on his bike, contacted the biker’s café there, rode to Barcelona and organized a bikers’ ride into the city as an act of solidarity. Before they set out Anthony was invited to address the crowd and to ride at the head of the procession.

 

In his later years Anthony lived on the bank of the Thames in sheltered housing. He sat on committees to represent the interests of tenants and of social housing in general. He was never wealthy, but never daunted by adversity. He lived his life according to his great loves. He encountered many setbacks, which at times must have dispirited him, but they never quite extinguished his enthusiasm.

 

Anthony’s particular love of Spain made him a committed European. His friend and former colleague on The Wire Chrissie Murray quoted Anthony in the obituary she wrote: ‘There are too many walls being erected, physical ones by governments, physiological [sic: perhaps he meant ‘psychological’] ones by individuals, both trying to retain the illusion of perceived past greatness or racial purity. All intended to keep out either people or ideas. Bridges, on the other hand, close gaps, cross divides, bring people and ideas closer together. Despite the dangers of falling off, I would rather be on a bridge than behind a wall.’

 

I wish that I could have joined Anthony on his bridge earlier and that I had asked him more questions about his life and achievements.

 

For those curious to know more of Anthony his obituaries and memories of those who knew him can be found at:

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/larger-than-life-an-irrepressible-polymath-an-adventurer-memories-of-anthony-wood

 

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/anthony-wood-7-june-1948-15-september-2021

 

https://londonjazznews.com/2021/10/05/anthony-wood-a-tribute-by-chrissie-murray/comment-page-1/ 

https://jazzjournal.co.uk/2021/10/06/anthony-wood-free-jazz-flame/

Rescuing El Greco and Velázquez

 

It was 25 July 1936. In Madrid, Paco Ciutat, an officer of the General Staff of the army of the Spanish Republic was worried. The fascist forces of Francisco Franco had captured Oropesa, and were heading for Toledo, where El Greco had his studio and had produced many of his finest works. If the Republican government decided to defend Toledo, the damage to its cultural heritage, particularly its El Grecos, could be enormous.

 

Thus begins one of the many adventures of a young Spanish writer, María Teresa León, a writer and wife of the celebrated young poet Rafael Alberti. Her memoir, Memoria de la Melancolía (Memoir of Melancholy), was re-published in 2020 and was one of my lockdown reads.

 

María Teresa León in exile in Argentina after 1939

Paco spoke to María Teresa, who went straight to the monastery of the Descalzas Reales (Royal Discalced Order), the headquarters of the Junta de Incautación del Tesoro Artístico (Committee for the Appropriation of Artistic Treasures), formed only a week earlier to protect “all works … of artistic, architectural or bibliographic importance … that in its judgement are in danger of destruction, loss or damage.”

 

The committee instructed María Teresa to go to Toledo, so off she and Rafael went. They were directed to the office of the city’s mayor, who refused to give them keys to the building where an important El Greco was located on the grounds that the people of Toledo were excessively possessive of their treasures and did not want them to be removed. Nevertheless, the two writers went to the Hospital de Tavera, where they found El Greco’s portrait of Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera (oil on canvas, 103 cm x 82 cm, 1609), but they arrived too late to prevent the cardinal from being decapitated. An anticlerical militiaman had taken a pair of scissors and cut off the cleric’s head. Challenged, the soldier replied “María Teresa, don’t get so upset about a priest”.

 

El Greco, portrait of Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera

The next destination was the church of Santo Tomé to see The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (oil on canvas, 480 cm x 360 cm, 1586), an enormous work considered one of El Greco’s finest. But mayor de la Vega refused to allow the writers to remove the painting. Besides, he observed, how would they get such an enormous work through the door? A friend has pointed out to me that there was a simple answer to the mayor’s question. The painting was on canvas, so it could be removed from its frame and rolled up, but since María Teresa and Rafael were not conservators, they did not know this. The painting was later removed from the wall by a Hungarian conservator, laid on the floor and covered with sandbags.

 

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

 

At this point gunfire interrupted the cultural heritage rescue mission. The two writers sheltered in a nearby building until the fighting subsided. And then their mission changed. The fascists had captured Talavera de la Reina about 80kms from Toledo. The plan to stop their advance was to dynamite the bridge over the river Tagus. Instead of rescuing El Grecos from destruction the writers were now asked to lead a team of miners from Puertollano in Asturias to destroy the bridge, and thus prevent the hated Moors of Franco’s army from reaching Toledo. So, off they went in their little British Hillman car driven by Antonio, a former racing driver. When they reached the bridge, the miners explained that they did not have enough dynamite to destroy the bridge. As María Teresa writes, quoting Lope de Vega, this was a “night that manufactured tricks”. Then someone had an idea. “Let’s blow the railway line”.

 

María Teresa and Rafael left the miners to their work to return to their lodging at Puebla de Montalbán. The town’s civilians were fleeing the advance of the Moors, and the garrison had abandoned the rifles given to the Republicans by the Mexican government. The phone rang. The Ministry of War was calling. María Teresa was ordered to organize the defence of the town. She found a group of young men willing to fight and armed them with the Mexican guns, soon to be joined by the miners from Puertollano. At that moment, a bullet-proof train arrived and the officer in charge relieved the young writer of her command.

 

Later that year, María Teresa and Rafael were again rescuing paintings, this time with greater success. On 21 October, together with the essayist, playwright and poet José Bergamín, and his fellow poet Arturo Serrano Plaja, they removed works by El Greco, Velázquez, Van der Weyden, Tintoretto and Goya from the monastery of El Escorial to Madrid. Later María Teresa and her husband found themselves in charge of evacuating treasures from the Prado, including Velázquez’s large masterpiece, Las Meninas. The great painting was placed in a wooden crate and loaded on to a truck of the 5^th Motorized Division. When the soldiers reached the bridge of Arganda del Rey over the Jarama river, they discovered that the paintings were too tall to pass under the metal stanchions. The soldiers carried them across the bridge, loaded them back on to the trucks, and continued their journey to Valencia, where the paintings were stored for safekeeping in the Torres de Serranos, the remains of a Gothic fortress. As the fascists advanced, the paintings were moved again. Now they joined the human tide of Republicans, trudging, like the masterworks of Velázquez and Titian, into exile – in the case of the paintings in Geneva.

 

The Puente de Arganda

The Torres de Serranos, Valencia

The Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas (president 1934-1940), which had supplied the rifles used to defend Puebla de Montalbán,  provided practical and humanitarian support to the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. As María Teresa tells the tale, a group of trainee officers from the Military Academy in Mexico City deserted to join the Republican ranks in Spain.  After the Republican defeat Mexico generously offered asylum to many exiled Spaniards.

 

María Teresa and Rafael were inveterate travellers and had visited Mexico, where they travelled by train from the Gulf port of Veracruz to Mexico City. There they met Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, leading figures in the revolutionary artistic movement that covered the walls of public buildings with murals. Rivera was “fat, slow” and lived in a house “full of old stones [Mesoamerican sculptures]”. Kahlo always wore the typically Mexican skirt of the china poblana and lent the house “an air of acute intelligence.” Siqueiros carried himself with a proud grace, with the military bearing of a lieutenant, rather than of a colonel, holding his head high. Siqueiros, it seems, painted María Teresa’s portrait.

 

The artists had convened a public debate in the Palace of Fine Arts, a grand building covered in marble built in the late 19^th century during the dictatorship of Porfirio Dîaz. Violent disagreements were expected, so a neutral figure was required to chair the meeting. To her surprise, María Teresa was asked to do so. All went well until Siqueiros launched into a speech laden with Marxist dialectic. Some in the audience applauded, others shouted insults. María Teresa tried to “intervene with a little kindly oil” only to be greeted with yells of Mexican’s disparaging term for a Spaniard, gachupina. The chair of the meeting became truly concerned when a speaker walked to the podium, removed his gun from its holster and began to speak: “Comrades, painting today …”   

 

Federico García Lorca (left), María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti in Cuatro Caminos, Madrid, 1934

These two stories reveal María Teresa to have been a quite extraordinary woman. Her upbringing was traditional in the extreme. Her father was a military officer, trained like many other members of the family in Toledo. He sent his daughter to a school run by Catholic nuns, who required the girls to be escorted to school by a chaperone. She clearly loved her father dearly, but espoused views which must have alarmed a military man. Her memoir is a tale of absolute commitment to radical politics and action. Only when she flies to Algeria as the Republic was defeated did he surrender the pistol she carried during the Civil War. In her memoir we meet leading figures of Spanish letters of the first half of the 20^th century: “Federico [García Lorca], who died as the agony began; Antonio Machado, at its end [in exile in France]”; Pío Baroja, who like Alberti and María Teresa was exiled to Paris; Miguel de Unamuno, novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher, and grand old man of Spanish letters, who died in 1936, a few months after the start of the Civil War.

 

Antonio Machado

She also introduces us to the international literary scene. She visited Ernest Hemingway in his home in Cuba, accompanied by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. María Teresa and Alberti invited the Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet and her surrealist husband Louis Aragon to join the Alliance of Intellectuals of Madrid in 1936. They renewed their friendship in exile in Paris where they found work in the Spanish language service of Radio Paris. Pablo Neruda, Chilean Consul in Paris, invited them to his home and arranged visas for them to live in Chile. But when they disembarked in Buenos Aires en route to Chile, they were met by an exiled Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Losada. Losada had worked for Espasa Calpe in Spain and founded his own publishing house, Editorial Losada, in Bueno Aires. Losada tells them he will be their publisher and will arrange residence papers for Argentina. And so they lived their exile in Argentina, eventually to return to Spain in 1977.

 

Pablo Neruda

María Teresa’s memoir is in one sense a panorama of the international literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and a very personal account of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War. But above all, it is a moving lament for a lost cause, for friends who died in prison, who were executed, or who did not live to set foot in Spain again. María Teresa ends her account of her life and adventures thus:

 

“Pero, aún tengo la ilusión de que mi memoria del recuerdo no se extinga, y por eso escribo en letras grandes y esperanzadas: CONTINUARÁ.”

 

“But I still dream that my memoir of memories will not die, and for that reason I write in large letters full of hope: TO BE CONTINUED.”

Rafael Alberti (left) and María Teresa León on their return from exile 1977

 

Afghanistan Anecdotes

 

This picture will introduce my American friends to a character who may not be familiar to them. The earnest, determined-looking, businesslike man, gripping the arm of his chair, his face intent, as if giving somebody a good piece of his mind, is none other than our Secretary of State for Foreign Commonwealth and Development Affairs. He is patriotically posed in front of the Union flag, but also, rather curiously, what appears to be the flag of the People’s Republic of China. His name is Dominic Raab. He does not usually strike such a fierce pose. Rather, he tends to give one the impression of a well-programmed, rather humourless robot. Why then this carefully posed forceful photo?

 

As provincial capitals in Afghanistan began to fall Raab was on holiday in Crete, while his boss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was relaxing on holiday in the UK. As the débacle in Afghanistan moved closer to its disastrous outcome, Raab remained at his “luxury beach hotel”, although, as he later reassured voters, he remained in touch with his team. He finally returned to his desk after the fall of Kabul. It transpired that, while in Crete, his officials had advised him to call the Afghan Foreign Minister to request assistance in evacuating former Afghan interpreters who had worked for the British army. Raab refused to make the call – he explained later that he was busily making other phone calls – so the call to the Afghan minister was delegated to a junior minister, who, it turned out, did not manage to place the call.

 

Like Raab, never one to be hurried by a strategic disaster, our Prime Minister remained on holiday until after Kabul had fallen. Apparently, he has been to Afghanistan just once, when he was Foreign Secretary in the government of Theresa May. His motivation for making the trip was not to conduct any serious diplomatic business. Rather, he needed to avoid an awkward vote in the House of Commons. When Boris Johnson stood for election to the House of Commons, he promised his constituents, who live near Heathrow airport, that he would oppose a proposed new runway by lying down in front of the bulldozers. However, when he became Foreign Secretary the government’s policy was to approve the new runway, and a vote was scheduled in the House of Commons. As a member of the government, Johnson would be obliged to vote for approval. It seems that he was courageous enough to lay down in front of a bulldozer, but not in front of Theresa May

 

In the 2000s, I visited an anthropologist at a Boston university. He specialized in the study of Afghan tribal societies and told me he had been appointed as an adviser to the US army after the invasion of Afghanistan. One of his first pieces of advice was to explain that Afghans are not Arabs, so the Arab linguists the army had sent as interpreters would not be very useful. Apparently, the assumption was that, since the invasion was part of the War on Terror, and since are terrorists are Muslims, and since Muslims speak Arabic … He also gave a lecture to British officers at Sandhurst. According to the professor, the British officers had a greater awareness of Afghan society than their American counterparts, probably because they had been taught the history of the defeat of British occupying forces in our imperial heyday.

 

However, their political masters seem not to have taken the same history classes. But, as Mr Raab’s photo pointedly demonstrates, they do know how to make a phone call.

Is Prime Minister Johnson a Political Cousin of Viktor Orbán – or Worse Still Rodrigo Duterte?

I have never been a fan of Mr Johnson, but not long ago I would have considered this an absurd question. Now, I am not so sure.

 

While most media coverage and much political debate has focused on COVID-19 infection and death rates, vaccination, travel restrictions, proposals for vaccine passports and the like, the government has been introducing a number of measures with little scrutiny, and insufficient challenge, that threaten liberties.

 

Let’s start with the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Our current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, talks of the “threat” posed by refugees crossing the English Channel in unstable boats. She has at times referred to rapists and murderers when talking of refugees. One might think that an unprecedented flood of people seeking shelter in the UK threatens our borders and way of life. In fact, the numbers of people seeking asylum in our country peaked at over 80,000 in 2002. Since 2004, applications have been less than half that number. In the year ending March 2021, 26,903 people sought asylum. Nevertheless, Ms Patel describes our asylum system as “broken”. In fact, the only aspect of the system that is broken is the inefficient and inhumane way in which the Home Office processes applications. The bogus claims of Ms Patel and Mr Johnson are well summarized by a leaflet produced by the Refugee Council.

 

 

Still, one might argue that an inhumane and dishonest narrative about refugees does not in itself make Mr Johnson an authoritarian. However, let’s consider Ms Patel’s new Police and Crime bill. This gives the police the power to prohibit public protest if the police consider it too noisy, or judge that it is causing a nuisance. I imagine that many protests are noisy, and most will cause a nuisance to somebody. Moreover, Ms Patel and her colleagues have described Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protests as a “threat” (she loves threats) to our society. These, it seems, are the targets of her noise/nuisance reduction policy, but in future any government could designate a protest it does not like as noisy or causing a nuisance. She has also included in the bill measures designed to appeal to the prejudices of supporters of the government, such as giving the police powers to confiscate the mobile homes of travellers and gypsies who do not park their homes at an official site, of which there are too few, which forces travellers to use unofficial sites.

 

Ms Patel is very busy passing new laws. An update to the Official Secrets Act removes the public interest defence against prosecution under the Act. This is a serious threat to liberty and a handy tool for any authoritarian ruler who wants to ensure that we citizens know nothing of government incompetence or malfeasance. For example, under current law if a citizen should disclose that the government has given contracts for public services to supporters of and donors to the Conservative Party without any due diligence or scrutiny, the person who had revealed this malpractice could claim that she/he revealed the truth in the public interest. If Ms Patel succeeds in passing this bill unamended, that defence will no longer be available. In practice, the government can declare anything it likes a state secret and suppress any attempts to reveal dishonest conduct.

 

Ms Patel is not the only minister who would like to silent inconvenient opinions. The government has characterized Black Lives Matter as an anti-capitalist organization and a threat to public order. Since BLM is associated with campaigns to remove statues, it is also guilty of wishing to “rewrite history”. BLM is thus a threat (the government loves to identify imaginary threats). Our glorious imperial history must be defended. The Secretary of State for Culture, Oliver Dowden, has issued an unprecedented instruction to museums and art galleries telling them that, since they receive public money, their exhibitions must represent the views of the public. A fundamental principle of museum operations has been curatorial independence. Exhibitions can explore new ideas and interpretations or present new data that challenges assumptions and preconceptions. It seems that Mr Dowden has decided that, if museums take the public shilling, they surrender curatorial independence.

 

The BBC is another organization that the government considers guilty of not reflecting the views of the people (meaning, of course, the views of the people as interpreted by the Conservative Party). It is not unusual for the Conservatives to threaten the existence of the BBC, since the party is supported by the majority of the private sector media, whose owners have long resented the competition of the BBC. But a naked requirement that the BBC should toe the government line is new. BBC news coverage has already begun to cower. Interviews of ministers tend not to challenge contentious statements; statements made by opponents of the government tend to be qualified by interviewers with comments such as “The government, of course, states that this is not the case.” Another independent media outlet owned by the state, Channel 4 TV, is another target. A “consultation” (whose outcome is probably pre-determined) is being held to decide whether to sell the channel to a private operator.

 

One of the skills of Mr Johnson is that he has been able to avoid scrutiny and to evade responsibility for actions and behaviour for which other politicians would be censured or sanctioned. He has now extended the evasion of responsibility to his government. In 2019, in order to force through his version of Brexit, Johnson prorogued Parliament. This action was challenged using a process known as judicial review. Judicial review is a mechanism which enables a citizen to challenge the legality of a government decision or action. In the Brexit case, the High Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful. The reaction of the Johnson government was to declare its intention to restrict the use of judicial review – in short, to limit the ability of citizens to scrutinize the government’s behaviour. In short, if you are caught doing something unlawful, the solution is to change the law so that your unlawful conduct cannot be exposed.

 

But the Johnson government has greater ambitions to consolidate governmental power and to restrict the ability of citizens to challenge the government’s abuse of power. The Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto stated: “After Brexit we also need to look at the broader aspects of our constitution: the relationship between the Government, Parliament and the courts; the functioning of the Royal Prerogative; the role of the House of Lords; and access to justice for ordinary people”. This would be done by setting up a ‘Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission’ to “come up with proposals to restore trust in our institutions and in how our democracy operates”. A foretaste of the government’s intentions is new legislation to require, for the first time in British history, that a voter produce a photo ID in order to vote. The stated aim is to prevent fraudulent voting (my American friends will recognize the Republican playbook here). Opponents (I am one) have pointed out that voter fraud hardly exists in this country. The government does not dispute this. Indeed, it agrees that voter fraud is not a problem, but claims that it needs to demonstrate that it could not become a problem in future. Since the most common forms of voter ID are a passport and a driver’s license, this new requirement will probably prevent minorities and the economically deprived (who are not natural supporters of the Conservative party) from voting.

 

The Conservative Party likes to consider itself a bastion of individual liberty. The so-called libertarian wing has raged against pandemic lockdowns, regulations requiring the wearing of face masks and the like, as intolerable infringements of individual liberties. But they have had very little to say about the multiple attacks on liberties that their party has embarked on.

 

Mr Johnson may not be a dictator, but he has autocratic tendencies and may be able to create tools which in future could turn our country into an autocracy or a dictatorship.