poor people in Mexico

I watched Entourage on HBO last night, wow, the people in that show have it real easy when compared to the human vermin descirbed in this article. Here's another article illustrating the incredible hopelessness filling the life of each mexican citizen.

Monday, August 8, 2005

Mexico’s ignored underworld crises

By Carlos Luken

You find them lingering in every large Mexican city. Disorderly, hungry and worst of all jobless. Like many of their hundreds of thousand of compatriots nationwide, they stand out like characters from a Steinbeck novel as they journey from hope to hopelessness, harboring dreams while ignoring their reality.

In Mexico they are called “malandrines,” an archaic word meaning “scoundrel” that Mexicans today use as a one word definition of those caught in the country’s modern malaise, fusing words such as “vagrant,” “jobless,” “homeless” and “criminal.”

Most are male, many are young, but all are disappointed and desperate. They have met frustration and it has conquered them. They are typically uneducated and ill prepared except for very low-level jobs in construction or the farming trade. Countless numbers are beyond any political ideology or ethical principle. They are simply a retrogression of persons that have devolved in the face of despair.

You will find them in railway or bus stations, traveling anywhere rumors claim there might be work. Any delusion is better than their reality at home, however once they arrive at unknown destinations they are still lost and hungry. They have no place to sleep and parade to where others gather, in hope of finding employment in any field that allows them a day’s meal with maybe a little left over for a beer or cheap drugs.

Like Steinbeck’s legions in the 1930s, these migrants originally left home in search of work. But unlike many jobs in the post-depression era, in the new globalized world malandrines find that it is work that moves from one location to another. Gone are many old-time stationary agricultural areas or industrial cities, thus migration — legal or illegal — is encouraged. And too many, tiring of the frustration of aimless wandering without finding employment, turn to crime just to survive and stay in one place.

To make situations worse, malandrines are constantly harassed by local police who use them to comply with daily arrest quotas — holding them for up to 36 hours and much of the time without food. Others find themselves being used to commit burglaries or robberies, bullied by local police and under their protection.

These people are part of a growing problem, that some in Mexico are calling “the ignored underworld.”

Thousands of desperate individuals, who lull about street corners or abandoned buildings, have given up on trying to find work so they can send money to their families that may not receive even sustenance income. Far from home and unable to find opportunities, out of desperation these men disassociate themselves from family obligations and, like predators, form packs in order to prey on anything or anybody they can rob to simply survive.

Although the malandrines are responsible for almost all of Mexico’s petty thefts, muggings, robberies and home burglaries, their social plight is relatively unknown — except for them being seen as a public pain.

These human packs and their transgressions are somewhat obscure, because individually or in groups the malandrines are not sophisticated like well-publicized drug cartel criminals or Mara Salvatrucha gang members. Nor does the world media report on them incessantly as with illegal immigrants in more fashionable categories. Like all petty criminals, they are only reported by local TV or in the crime pages of provincial newspapers.

Although many of them have first tried to migrate illegally into the U.S., most have been turned back and as such are also ignored by activist organizations. They are only to be used as political capital in order to basically engross statistics.

Mexican employment suffered a serious blow when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) hope ended due to an unexpected economic downturn in the U.S. Some economists blame the downturn on rising U.S. unemployment that they allege was caused by NAFTA outsourcing.

If this is true it’s expected that the new Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will only worsen the U.S. effect, and as an associate result bring about yet greater unemployment and crime in Mexico.

With national and international crime-related attention being chiefly focused on narcotics trafficking, drug cartel wars, border violence and illegal immigration, the malandrines may be a less stylish and significant problem. But as in other developing countries, Mexican society must face the fact that this is a burning fuse problem caused not by a lack of resources, but by too few opportunities rooted in inadequate fiscal distribution and competent education programs.
__________

Carlos Luken, a MexiData.info columnist, is a Mexico-based businessman and consultant. He can be reached via e-mail at ilcmex@yahoo.com.