Guerrero: a history of social struggle, chiefdoms and poverty (translation)

This article was originally published at: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2014/10/28/actualidad/1414457377_371609.html

Massacre in Iguala

The violence in the state corresponds to a long history of guerrillas, confrontations, chiefdom and poverty

• The 43 disappeared students in Iguala were assassinated
  

Verónica Calderón México 8 NOV 2014 - 01:05 CET

A student from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college. To the right, an image of Lucio Cabañas. / José Méndez (EFE)

The 43 Mexican student teachers assassinated the last 26^th of September belong to the Rural Teacher-Training School of Ayotzinapa, a tiny mountain community of scarcely a hundred inhabitants in Guerrero, in the south of Mexico and one of its poorest states. But it isn't the first time that the word has resounded in the ears of the country. The Mexican guerrilla, Lucio Cabañas, also graduated from that Rural Teacher-Training School, from Ayotzinapa. Cabañas founded the Party of the Poor, an armed group that in 1974 kidnapped the senator – who became a governor a year after - Rubén Figueroa Figueroa. The event, from 40 years ago, recalls that Guerrero bears a long history of poverty, forget, chiefdom and violence: a cocktail that the massacre in Iguala, ordered by the municipal mayor himself according to the investigations, has left bare.

At least 14 of the 80 municipalities of Guerrero have already been taken over by federal forces in the month that has passed since the tragedy, but the violence has gone up for a long time. Its winding geography of mountains doesn't make access to the towns easy. Meanwhile a quarter of its 3.4 million inhabitants live in Acapulco, that have the third highest rate of homicides in the world, only surpassed by San Pedro Sula (Honduras) and Caracas (Venezuela), according to the figures of the Citizen's Council for Security and Peace. Not even talking about the other towns. The crossing of the Sierra Madre and those of the south turn into paths that appear impregnable at a distance and fertile terrain for a network of chiefdoms that are decades old.

You only have to follow the trail of some of its leaders to understand the reach of that network of chiefdoms and their reason for existence. The poverty that extends to the other 80 municipalities of Guerrero oblige the majority of its inhabitants (men, women, children) to wander all over the country to work as harvesters in the crops of tomato in Sinaloa, apples in Chihuahua or chilli peppers in Guanajuato and, together with their neglible wages, surviving thanks to federal subsidies managed, on many occasions, but their regional leaders.

The case of Cabañas and Figuero is emblematic. Their confrontations is one of the episodes of the Dirty War in Mexico: the period of political and military repression carried out in the sixties and seventies whose objective was dissolving armed and political opposition movements against the dominant party of the country, the PRI¹.

Cabañas' movement initiated demonstrations, at the start peaceful, to denounce the poverty of the populations and the confrontation, each time greater, between the peasants and the regional chiefs. “The chiefs have been the people that do everything, make themselves authorities, buy cheap harvests, manage the economy as they please. The governments relied on the chiefs for nothing other than the promotion of voting, they were the leaders that used to do everything: but that brought as a consequence difficulties, because the rest of the people want to develop themselves, they want to study, they want to get better health-wise, they want that their family might get ahead”, affirms Evaristo Castañón, peasant from El Quemado, a community from Atoyac, 100 kilometres from Acapulco, in an investigation by the George Washington University.

Cabañas, that carried out guerrilla activities for at least 10 years, ordered the kidnapping of Figueroa (then a senator and in a political campaign for the governorship of Guerrero) the 30^th of May 1974. The event shook the country. He was liberated in a military operation on the 8^th of September of that same year, but the U.S. embassy doubted that it might not have paid a ransom, such as has been demanded by Cabañas, according to a cable from the State Department revelled by Wikileaks in 2011. Figueroa became the governor of his state in April 1975. By then, Cabañas had already died in a conflict with the Mexican army in December of the previous year.

Upon the arrival of Vicente Fox, from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the Special Prosecution's Office for Past Political and Social Movements was created in 2002, to clear up the disappearances, assassinations and repression that occurred during that period. Rubén Figueroa Figueroa was filled with pride that they might have given him the nickname The Tiger of Huitzuco, and his son, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, followed in his footsteps in politics and also became governor of the state until another scandal obliged him to leave the position. The massacre of Aguas Blancas, occurred in 1995. A group of peasants, that were walking to a demonstration to demand freedom for a rural leader, were ambushed by the police. Seventeen died and 21 were injured. Figueroa's initial version was that the officers “had been attacked first”. A video also showed that what happened had been an ambush against unarmed civilians. The successor of Figueroa? Ángel Aguirre Rivero, that later would decide to insist in returning to hold the position, now through the ballot box and in the ranks of another party, now the PRD², in 2010. He held the post until Thursday the 23^rd of October, obliged by the pressure of another massacre: this time the one of Ayotzinapa.

The loose ends finish with the recently named interim governor of Guerrero: Salvador Rogelio Ortega. In his inauguration speech, Ortega mentioned his mother, Rosaura Martínez, also a teacher. The journalist Roberto Ramírez Bravo remembers that, in the times of the dirty war, Ortega was detained by the police and illegally held prisoner. His mother was to receive an award for 20 years of work as a teacher at the hands of the governor, Rubén Figueroa Figueroa, The Tiger of Huitzuco himself. She refused to receive the diploma and faced him head-on. Ortega was let go a little afterwards.

1PRI - Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican political party. Its modern policies of neo-liberalism and privatization have been characterized as centrist or even as Centre-right

2 The Party of the Democratic Revolution (Spanish: Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) is a social democratic political party in Mexico that advocates for democracy.

Paramilitarism and Counterinsurgency in Mexico, a necessary history (translation)

25 August 2015

By Gilberto López y Rivas
Mexican politician and anthropologist. He denounced the Party of Democratic Revolution in 2003 due lack of ethics. He participated in the student movement of 1968. Worked as a deputy in the 54th and 57th Legislatures of Congress of the Union of Mexico.

This article was originally published at teleSUR:

http://www.telesurtv.net/bloggers/Paramilitarismo-y-contrainsurgencia-en-Mexico-una-historia-necesaria---20150825-0002.html.

Paramilitary groups have already existed for more than forty years in our country. During those four decades, paramilitaries have been dedicated to the annihilation of guerrilla organisations, and the violent harassment of student and popular movements.

Paramilitarism is recognised in the military lexicon of all the armies of the world, including the Mexican one. Retired brigadier general, Leopoldo Martínez Caraza, in his book Léxico histórico militar[1], published by the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA), notes: “Paramilitary: that has an organisation with similar procedures to soldiers, without having this character”. The definition helps, but it is vague and completely insufficient. It doesn't clarify how it comes to have this similarity with the armed forces in organisation, or military procedures.

John Quick is more precise. He defines paramilitaries as: “those groups that are different from the regular armed forces of whatever country or state1, but that observe the same organisation, equipment, training or mission as the former.”[2] This is a better approximation: militaries as much as paramilitaries have the same organisation, training and mission. However, the origin of the paramilitary organisation is still vague. How does it achieve that organisation? Why does the professional military and the paramilitary have the same mission? Who gives to the latter the same mission?

 In that case, the paramilitary groups act by a delegation of power from the state and they collaborate with its ends, but without forming part of the “public administration” strictly speaking. In this way, the paramilitary doesn't define itself only by similarity in its missions or organisation, but because it originates in a delegation of punitive force from the state.

In Mexico, this delegation of functions has come directly from the army, from the intelligence-security bodies, or from the combination of both, but usually under the orders of the Executive Power, in its quality of supreme chief of the armed forces, and always as a direct delegation of the state.

 “The Falcons”, one of the first paramilitary groups, was created by the initiative of officials from the army, although under the administration of the then Department of the Federal District. Its members were youths from gangs with military training and leadership, dedicated to the control, infiltration and destruction of the student movement, as well as any guerrilla foco2 that could have come out of the ranks of it. It is fully documented that this group was created by a colonel of the Mexican army whose services were rewarded afterwards with impunity and military promotion.

Gustavo Castillo García gave detailed information in the newspaper, La Jornada, in 2008, about the most well-know paramilitary group during the so-called “dirty war”, from his documentary research in the General Archive of the Nation:

The Special Brigade, as it officially called the White Brigade, integrated in June 1976 a group with 240 elements, among them the police of the capital and the state of Mexico; military and personel from the Federal Directorate of Security (DFS), as well as the Federal Judicial Police, to “investigate and locate by all means the members of the so-called September 23rd Communist League. The order was to limit the activities of the league and detain “the guerrillas that were taking action in the valley of Mexico, according to the documents obtained from the Attorney-General of the Republic's Office (PGR) that are the support of the investigations that are still being carried out around the events that happened during the so-called dirty war. According to the official reports, although the White Brigade formed in 1972 and operated in Guerrero, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Puebla and Morelos, it wasn't until June 1976 when the government of Luis Echeverría decided to form a special group that would take action in the City of Mexico, and in which the commands were in the hands of Colonel Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo, Captain Luis de la Barreda Moreno and Miguel Nazar Haro. The consulted documents have their original under protection in the General Archive of the Nation. In them it details “ Plan of Operations Number One: Tracking. The group had 55 vehicles, 253 arms: of them 153 were Browning nine millimetres.[3]

In this way, the state link gives a fundamental element to an understanding attached to the Mexican experience. Based on this experience, I propose the following definition: paramilitary groups are those that have military organisation, equipment and training, to which the state delegates the execution of missions that the regular armed forces can't carry out openly, without that involving the recognition of their existence as part of the monopoly of state violence. Paramilitary groups are illegal and act with impunity because this fits the interests of the state. Paramilitaries consist, then, in the illegal and unpunished exercise of state violence and in the concealment of the origin of that violence.

Historically, paramilitarism has been a phase of counterinsurgency, that one applies when the power of the armed forces isn't sufficient to annihilate insurgent groups, or when the loss of military prestige obliges the creation of a paramilitary arm, linked clandestinely to the military institution.

Mexican military doctrine doesn't call them paramilitaries, but “civilian personnel” and establishes their urgent necessity to control the population during counter-guerrilla operations. The Manual of Irregular Warfare of SEDENA holds that:

531. counter-guerrilla operations form part of the security measures that a commander of a theatre of operations adopts in their rearguard zone, to avoid that regular operations suffer interferences caused by the action of bands of traitors or enemies, to it which the commander of a theatre of operations should employ all organised elements and even the civil population in order to locate, harass and destroy opposing forces[4].

The aim of the utilisation of the civilian population is evident in this paragraph. But here, the necessity of civilian population is random and it is only used in the case of interference by the enemy. However, further on, the Mexican military manual establishes a more permanent and organic manner of utilisation of civilians in rural counter-guerrilla operations:

547. When Mao affirms that “the people are to the guerrillas like water to fish”, undoubtedly that is a saying of lasting validity, as we have already seen that the guerrillas grow and strengthen themselves with the support of the civilian population, but, returning to the example of Mao, for the fish one can make life in the water impossible , agitating it, or introducing elements that are prejudicial to its survival or more ferocious fish that attack it, pursue it and oblige it to disappear or to run the risk of being eaten but these voracious and aggressive fish are nothing more than the counter-guerrillas.[5]

The experience of the Mexican army in the annihilation of the guerrillas that the schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas directed between 1968 and 1974 demonstrated that the use of peasants and gunmen as informants was fundamental to locating, encircling and annihilating the Settlement Brigades of the Party of the Poor.

But the use of civilians goes further: according to the Manual of Irregular Warfare, counter-guerrilla operations are led with civilian or militarised personnel (civilians or police directed by military chiefs). We might look at the following paragraph of the Manual:

551. From it presented earlier, one can establish that counter-guerrilla operations are those that one leads with units of military, civilian or militarised personnel in their own terrain in order to locate, harass and destroy forces made up by enemies and traitors to the homeland that carry out military operations with guerrilla tactics.[6]

The type of counter-guerrilla operations one carries out with civilian personnel and is allocated to the control of the population is pointed out in the Manual:

552. Counter-guerrilla operations comprise of two different forms of interrelated operations that are:

A: Operations to control the civilian population.

B: Tactical counter-guerrilla operations.

553. As one can appreciate, the first form isn't a classical military operation, as it can be led by civilian or militarised personnel, although it is directed, advised and co-ordinated by the military commander of the area, while the tactical counter-guerrilla operations are led by military and militarised units.[7]

According to the Manual of Irregular Warfare, the responsibility of the use of the civilian population falls on the federal government and on the agreements with the governments of the states and diverse authorities in the area of conflict. Paragraph C of point 562 describes in detail:

562. The commanders that plan counter-guerrilla operations and the civilian population are governed by restrictions and agreements that the federal government has with the states and diverse authorities of the places in conflict. In case the problem is provoked in areas occupied by the enemy, the counter-guerrillas will establish co-ordination with the resistance to locate and destroy the groups of traitors.[8]

This paragraph indicates that the responsibility for the use of civilians in counter-guerrilla operations falls directly on the federal government, just as much as on the local and state authorities of the area in conflict. The Manual itself establishes that international law is applicable in the case that the armed forces commit inhumane treatment or criminal acts against the civilian population.

F. Psychological Factors. A population that actively supports the guerrillas increases the possibility of detecting the guerrillas. Generally in our territory we will encounter the support of the population and specifically in liberated areas in which that they opposed the objectives of the enemy force. The population that supports the objectives of the enemy favours their guerrillas. The military objective of destroying the guerrillas acquires greater importance over other considerations, even so the operations must be planned to making sure to minimise the damage to civilian property. The counter-guerrillas should in all cases treat the civilian population in a just and reasonable manner, not rely on our force. Inhumane treatment to criminal acts are serious violations and punishable under international law and our laws[9].

Mexican military doctrine holds that operations of control of the civilian population one exercises through a committee that brings together the military authorities with representatives of the civilian authority and organisations related to the army:

592. To control the civilian population, it is necessary that total co-ordination exists between the military forces and organisations that take part, for which should be established a committee with representatives from all the forces in order that they can plan and co-ordinate their actions under a single command.

593. The forces that normally take part in the operations to control the people and their resources are:

A. Government organisations.

B. Police forces.

C. Military forces.

D. Social, political and economic organisations, like political parties, unions, sports organisations, chambers of commerce, etc.[10]

From 1994, and the same as the paramilitary groups that existed during the internal wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, the paramilitary groups in Chiapas have dedicated themselves to sowing terror in the indigenous communities that sympathise with the EZLN3, through assassinations, ambushes, burning towns, death threats, expulsions, cattle theft, detention and torture of the support bases or Zapatista militants.

The denunciations of the indigenous people presented since 1995 to the human rights groups that have worked in Chiapas insist that the paramilitary groups operate in co-ordination with the public security corporations, they receive support and training from the Mexican army and that, on occasions, soldiers and police officers that control the towns of the North and the Heights of Chiapas are among the contingents.

In my capacity as a Federal Deputy and president on duty of the Commission of Harmony and Pacification (COCOPA), I presented a complaint in the Attorney-General of the Republic's Office about the existence of paramilitary groups in the state in 1998; in a conversation with the members of this commission of the Congress of the Union with then Attorney-General, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, this functionary informed us of the existence of at least 12 groups of “presumably armed civilians”, a euphemism to refer to the paramilitaries. A special attorney's office was created for the case, which disappear without shame or glory, years after.

It is evident, however, that the Mexican federal government can't manage, like in the Colombian case, that the paramilitaries remain at the vanguard of the state war against the insurgent groups. In Colombia, as I observed in the department of Putumayo, the paramilitaries were maintaining effective control of extensive zones of the territory of that nation and constituted the semi-clandestine vanguard of the counterinsurgency. Apparently it was already out of the control of the Colombian state, the paramilitaries received funding from landowners and drug traffickers and they had been a force that even had demanded recognition as a belligerent party4. By recommendation of the CIA advisers, the Colombian army integrated the paramilitary groups into the structure of the national military intelligence.

For all the observers and citizens that have observed the conflict in Chiapas since 1994, the federal and state governments and the Mexican military trusted that the paramilitary forces from the north of Chiapas, “Peace and Justice” and “the Chinchulines”, at the start, might achieve territorial control and make it unnecessary for the army to intervene and sustain direct combat with the Zapatista support bases. However, the mobilisations of the Mexican army that maintained themselves during all these years, indicate that the federal government considered it necessary to maintain its military intensity in the zones of high Zapatista political presence. It is evident, then, that the paramilitaries aren't sufficient for this purpose; even so, the co-existence of military squads and paramilitaries in the same theatres of operation implies the possibility that in Mexico it might occur something which is already routine in other countries: joint operations of paramilitaries and the army.

The government has maintained the use of paramilitaries despite some symptoms of fatigue. The non-government organisations from Chiapas reported ten years ago that the paramilitaries bases existed, in some cases, the same famines that the Zapatistas and those that were discontented because of their leaders, like Samuel Sánchez, head of Peace and Justice, was developing his own hotel and tourism empire in the municipality of Tila, while the indigenous Choles continued in the same poverty. In Tila, even, an Association of ex-Militants of Peace and Justice was created and some paramilitaries without land have carried out occupations of land in the North of Chiapas.

In these years the acronyms and names of groups supposedly disposed to fight against the EZLN and their communities of support have proliferated: “Los Tomates” in Bochil, “Los Chentes” in Tuxtia Gutiérrez, “Los Quintos” in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza, “Los Aguilares" in Bachajón, "los Puñales " in Atenango del Valle, Tepisca and Comitán.

The activities of the Army, far from making clear before the population a real policy of peace of the PRI-PAN5 federal executives, demonstrates the opposite. The concern provoked in the population by the presence of paramilitaries, the harassment of Zapatista support bases that operate in the Autonomous Municipalities and the Assemblies of Good Government, the major presence of the Army in Chiapas, and in other indigenous regions of the national geography, highlight tactics tending to provoke aggressions and massive displacements in regards to the creation of optimal conditions for the development of big capital in the process of comprehensive occupation on behalf of all types of corporations.

The Federal Army keeps up an intense labour in the Zapatista regions and extensive zones of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz,among other states with a indigenous population. From the orchestration of intelligence work that has to do with a more precise outline of maps that reflect the dynamic of the population, to understand and control the daily activities of indigenous communities by the full knowledge of their rural roads, their work and the precise location of their habitats, but above all, the scope of natural and strategic resources coveted by transnational companies.

It worth highlighting that phenomena like militarism and its concomitant paramilitarism are given in terms of a new international division of labour that tries to allocate to Mexico and Central American region a role of provider of biodiversity, of a cheap workforce and a exit route for U.S. goods to the markets of the Pacific, besides what the country represents for that other transnational corporation, which is organised crime. With that strategy in mind, Mexican government programs have been put into practice like Attention to the 250 micro-regions, Sustainable Development of the Rainforest and Integral for the Sustainable Development of the Rainforest, etc.

The attempts to dislodge 110 communities in the Lacandona Rainforest and the Integral Reserve of the Montes Azules Biosphere, for example, go precisely in the direction of creating conditions of inhabitability for these communities. Those who have been doing the dirty work, they receive the pressures from transnational companies like the mining companies or like the supposedly ecological corporations, Conservation International. Pulsar Group, Mc Donalds, Disney, Exxon, Ford and Intel, this last one with an investment of 250 million dollars.

To achieve their aims they have had the inestimable support of departments from the federal sphere like Federal Attorney-General's Office of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat). Accompanying these authorities have been the Mexican Army, with their programs of active or latent counterinsurgency and the use of ferocious fish or paramilitaries.

Far from demonstrating a vocation of dialogue and peace, the Army carries out constant patrols in remote indigenous communities. Showing a supreme ignorance of the Constitution, or consciously ignoring the Supreme Law, the Army has awarded itself the functions of a police force, and for this, it assists judicial police, paramilitaries, vendors or religious preachers, in the oldest style of the Linguistic Institute of Summer.

As well as this, the State continues damaging the social fabric through the financing of productive projects that break the traditional vocation of the land and the common forms of collective property and production of the land. Such is the case of it carried out by the past PAN governments that introduced highly predatory and profitable activities, like raising cattle or royal palm. In this sense, some years ago, they carried out activities on behalf of the coffee growers from Ocosingo (ORCAO), who, with the help of official programs, developed economic activities without the consent of the community, increasing the violent actions against it and the autonomous authorities.

Summarising, paramilitarism serves the ends of counterinsurgency, destroying or damaging severely the social fabric that supports the guerrillas. It acts under the most diverse expressions. Attacking providers of social services in the camps of displaced peoples, causing conditions of inhabitability in indigenous and peasant communities that provoke displacements, making common cause with civil authorities, exercising harassment through the action of bribable judges, infiltrating religious associations, carrying out intelligence work, suggesting developmentalist dilemmas that cause environmental damage, assigning as enemies of development the communities that refuse to follow the logic of capitalist profit, with its consequent instability, and above all causing or increasing the spiral of violence in the communities making from this a way of life through drug trafficking, militarisation and criminalisation of opposition.

The features of many communities has changed due to militarism, organised crime and paramilitarism. The arrival of phenomena like prostitution, drug addiction and drug trafficking aren't natural circumstances, but the result of a strategy of penetration of capital, with its multiple armed wings at the service of the State.

The autonomous praxis expressed precisely in the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities and Assemblies of Good Government, in the communities that adhere to the CRAC6, of Guerrero, in Cherán, Michoacán, or in municipalities of Oaxaca, by mentioning, the most visible cases, has called attention and has meant the increase of the military activities, and the whole gamut of armed groups related to organised crime and the paramilitaries. These experiences, by acquiring importance through their de facto autonomies have put themselves once more in the sights of the State. By displaying strategies of resistance, protected in international jurisprudence, like those expressed in Convention 169 of the OIT7 and Universal Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued by the United Nations, the autonomous communities give an example of anti-capitalist struggle.

Therefore, any future project to rescue the nation requires debating in depth the constitutional tasks of the armed forces with the aim of totally shifting it from its present condition: which in fact is a truly a force of occupation of the peoples. A project to democratise the country requires strengthening civil and legislative control of the armed forces and definitive disappearance of of the fourth illegal, secret, armed force that is grouped under the paramilitaries and on which the government bases its undercover operations against the EZLN, other armed groups and the whole gamut of civilian organisations that take part in peaceful resistance in the national territory.

[1]Leopoldo Martínez Caraza, Léxico histórico militar. Biblioteca del oficial mexicano. Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, México, 1993.
[2] John Quick. Dictionary of weapons and military terms. McGraw Hill. Estados Unidos, 1973. [3]“El gobierno creó en 1976 brigada especial para “aplastar” a guerrilleros en el valle de México” La Jornada, 7 de julio de 2008.
[4] Manual de guerra irregular. Operaciones de contraguerrilla o restauración del orden. T. II, SEDENA, enero de 1995.
[5] Ibíd.
[6] Ibíd.
[7] Ibíd.
[8] Ibíd.
[9] Ibíd.
[10] Ibíd.

Translator's notes:

1 the state being the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property relations from basic change and keep all other classes in subjection

2 Foco – centre of a guerrilla organisation that could provide a focus for general discontent against a sitting regime

3 EZLN - Zapatista Army of National Liberation or simply the Zapatistas, is a revolutionary leftist political and militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Since 1994, the group has been in a declared war "against the Mexican state", although this war has been primarily defensive, against military, paramilitary and corporate incursions into Chiapas.

4 Belligerency is a term used in international law to indicate the status of two or more entities, generally sovereign states, being engaged in a war. Once the status of belligerency is established between two or more states, their relations are determined and governed by the laws of war.

5 PRI - Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican political party. Its modern policies of neo-liberalism and privatization have been characterized as centrist or even as Centre-right

PAN - National Action Party has been linked to a conservative stance in Mexican politics since its inception.

6 Regional Network of Community Authorities

7 ILO – International Labour Organisation

A Month's Worth of Impressions of Mexico (City)

It's already been over a month since I arrived in Mexico, so I thought now might be a good time to finally give some incite into the country from personal experiences, as well as some facts I stole from wikipedia. In truth, I shouldn't say I can talk about the country as a whole, as I haven't really travelled extensively. Most of my opinions are more based on hanging out in Mexico City, with a couple of shorter trips to places nearby.

Geographically, Mexico City is situated in the valley of Mexico in the high plateaus region of south-central Mexico. The city has a minimum height of 2,220 metres above sea level which is equivalent to Australia's highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, at 2,228 metres. It's funny because you kind of don't realise the city is so high. But when I first arrived, as well as being super tired from jet lag, I had a headache from the change in altitude. There was some debate with my girlfriend, Abril's family about whether it was altitude or air pollution that was causing this. Air pollution is an issue for the city as it's surrounding by higher mountains and volcanoes that stop wind from clearing the pollution above the city.

Demographically speaking, it's estimated that 8.8 million people live in Mexico City proper, but that Greater Mexico City region has around 21 million. This is about the population of the whole country of Australia and makes Mexico City the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere. It is also largest Spanish-speaking city in the world.

In terms of history, Mexico City is the oldest capital city in the Americas. The city was originally built on an island in the Lake Texcoco by the Aztecs in 1325 as the city-state of Tenochtitlan. It was almost completely destroyed in 1521 during the siege of Tenochtitlan by Spanish invaders led by Hérnan Cortés. Due to this, the city was redesigned and rebuilt in accordance with the Spanish urban standards afterwards.

RELIGION

One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was that Mexicans appear to be quite religious. According to the 2010 census, 83% of people here identify as Catholic, with another 10% being other Christian and only 5% identifying as having no religion (while in Australia, 25% people claim no religion). There are many churches in the country, particularly Catholic ones. Some date back to the 1500s, as the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish was carried out with the support of the Catholic church under the pretext of converting heathens and spreading the true religion. They also made a lot of money in the process.

I might have encountered this religious aspect early on because I am staying in the a “colonia” called Aragón La Villa, which is home to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is said to be the most important basilica or church outside of the Vatican. The place is visited by several million people every year. There have already been some smaller “pilgrimages” since I have been here. The original basilica was built after a peasant, now saint, Juan Diego, saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. But, coincidentally, the spot was quite close to an indigenous temple to Tonantzin, an Aztec mother Earth goddess. In fact, one of the chapels in the Basilica was built over this sacred site. 

Basilica of Guadalupe

It was quite common for churches to be constructed on top of previous sacred sites in order to force Indigenous people to convert to be able to continue visit them. Another good example of this, right in the centre of Mexico City, is the fact that the Metropolitan Cathedral, the largest in the Americas, is built right next to the Templo Mayor (Mayor Temple) of the Aztecs. This practice also lead to a lot of syncretism (mixing of elements from difference cultures/practices) in Mexican Catholicism. Indigenous people tried to continue their traditional beliefs under the guise of the new religion. Sometimes worshipping their traditional gods through Catholic saints that covered a similar area or important date of the year for a particular god.

The Metropolitan Cathedral over (looking) the Templo Mayor

There are a wide variety of archaeological sites around Mexico. From the different civilisations that inhabited it before the Spanish conquest. These include: Aztecs; Olmecs; Toltecs; and Mayans. Just around the capital, you can visit the Templo Mayor in the centre of the city, the National Museum of Anthropology, Tlatelolco, and Teotihuacán.

A lot of the architecture, as well as the pyramids, was made of stone so it has survived. Another interesting method that the indigenous people used to protect these areas during the conquest was to put more plain rocks over the top and bury their important sites, so the colonisers couldn't recognise, locate and destroy them. It appears that it wasn't until around the 1960s that well-organised efforts were made to excavate, document and preserve these sites.

FOOD

Most people will have heard of Mexican food. There has been a bunch of burrito and taco places spring up in Australia (and I assume the United States). But most of these are styled on Tex-Mex versions of these dishes, along with nachos and quesadillas. It's worth noting some of the foods that are now common internationally, originally came from Mexico, these include: maize/corn, beans, peanuts, tomatoes, chilli peppers, squash/pumpkins, avocados and vanilla.

In Mexico City, my rough estimate is that 80% of all food stalls are tacos (the rest are gringo tacos or hamburgers). They are ubiquitous. The standard Mexico taco differs a lot from your more gringo-style tacos in the fast food outlets and also those Old El Paso tacos your mum used to make for dinner. Firstly, the tortilla is soft (it doesn't shatter into a thousand pieces when you take the first bite) and only about 10 to 15 centimetres in diameter. They also the fillings are usually a lot more simple, usually just some type of meat, onion, coriander/cilantro, chilli sauce and some lime juice. The “different-flavoured” tacos come from the different types of meat they put in them and how that meat has been cooked.

A basic Mexican diets consists of tortillas (or some form of corn), meats, salsa (usually hot), sugary drinks and maybe beans. A lot of the dishes revolve around these key elements with different ways of preparing them or with different condiments. The flavours that seem to be popular are cream, chilli, lime (they call them lemons, but they are green and usually small), coriander/cilantro, salt and sweet.

By far, the most popular flavouring is chilli. When I went the supermarket the first time, I saw at least 6 different types of chillies in the grocery area and also 4 different chilli-flavoured chips in just once brand: one was even called fire flavour. Apparently chilli peppers have been considered a staple, along with corn and beans, since before the colonisation of Mexico by Spain. Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and a friar with the Catholic church wrote that without chillies, the indigenous people did not think they were eating. Personally, I'm not a big fan of chilli (I think it's some sort of masochistic torture for your mouth), but the salsa definitely adds flavour. It's a pity that one of the salsas I like flavour-wise is one of the hotter ones. I'm trying to build up my tolerance for it.

If you ever come to Mexico and have a low tolerance for hot chillies, here is a guide for the heat of foods.

Some other interesting foods I have eaten are nopales and tuna (no not the fish). These are the same plant which is type of cactus that we call prickly pear. Nopales are the green pads and tuna are the fruit which we call a prickly pear. The tunas are nice, but they have a lot of seeds in them. They also have pasties (spelled paste) here of various flavours, including sweet ones (I know it sounds weird). The pasties were introduced by miners from Cornwall in England who worked in the silver mines in Mexico. (They also introduced soccer to Mexico). There is also atole which is a hot corn-based drink which has a few flavours and is very filling because of the corn. They apparently use it feed babies, if they can't be breastfed or they want them to put on weight. Another thing is quesadillas. They are sort of similar to tacos or like Venezuelan-style fried empanadas. They have similar fillings to tacos, but the dough is raw and is cooked in oil. There is another style that isn't fried and has cheese in them as the name would suggest (queso is cheese in Spanish).

Pozole, a traditional corn soup with meat and other ingredients and spices

ORGANISATION

Another thing that has struck me in Mexico City is the chaos of daily life. This comes in many forms. There are the random directions that people walk in the street, sometimes making it difficult to pass because people take up the whole footpath. There are the many street stalls selling various products and street food that occupy parts of the street. There is the peak hour crush in the metro in which the people getting on don't wait for you to get out and you practically have to fight them to get off. Even in the supermarkets, it doesn't seem like they leave enough room for queues in front of the checkouts. People sometimes run into you with their trolleys and in the queues for the 10 items or less lanes people sometimes push past you even though you are waiting for the checkout to be free.

Some of this is probably common to many cities around the world that aren't planned. This is especially the case in less developed countries where the city populations have ballooned with people coming in from rural areas to try and make their livelihoods as they can no longer do so in the country. Having such large population probably leads to the need to have a very competitive survival mentality of only worrying about what you need to do yourself and not worrying too much about what's other people's needs are.

The most dangerous aspect of the disorganisation of the city I would say is driving/traffic. For me personally, it's already confusing that people drive on the right-hand side of the road. But on top of that, there don't seem to be road rules per se, as much as there being loose guidelines of trying to avoid crashing with other vehicles. I don't think I have seen one speed limit or stop sign since I have been here. They do have speed bumps before a lot of the local intersections though.

I have only driven a little around the local area, but even this has been difficult at times. The lane markings aren't really respected that much, that includes direction markings. The use of indicators is pretty haphazard and sometimes is only used to indicate that you are going slow and trying to look for the right address. The description of the Mexican driving test that I have read basically consists of 2 questions: can you really drive; and do you have 300 pesos. This probably explains the driving culture, as well as the police being pretty lazy/corrupt.

TRANSPORT

Don't play punch buggy in Mexico City! Well, not with full-on punches, you will get a really sore arm because there are so many Volkswagen beetles around. On one occasion I walked 4 blocks and saw 10. The construction of Vochos, as Beetles are know in Mexico, started in the early 1950s with imported kits and then local production of parts started in 1961. There are a few reasons to explain their abundance in Mexico City: one is that in 1971, the Department of the Federal District selected it to become a Minitaxi in Mexico City, another is that aside from being a very inexpensive car, that the Mexican government arranged an agreement with the company to peg the price of the basic model to official minimum wage; and finally there is a local production factory, that by 1990 had produced one million Mexican Beetles and only ended production of the model in 2003.

Another central feature of transport in Mexico City is the Metro. It's reasonably cheap: it's only 5 pesos for each ride (about 50 cents Australian) and it covers most of the metropolitan area. It can be very intense during peak hour in terms of the crush and also heat as there is no air conditioning. But it usually pretty easy to navigate and you don't have to wait too long in between trains.

Inside the metro

The Mexico City Metro system originally started in 1969 and comprised of 16 stations and covered 13 kilometres. It has grown to consist of 12 lines, serving 195 stations and covering 223 kilometres, making it the second largest metro system in North America after the New York City Subway. Each station has a logo related to the name of the station or the area around it. This is due to the fact that at the time of the first line's opening, Mexico's illiteracy rate was extremely high, with almost 40% of Mexicans over the age of five being illiterate. Given this, it was thought that passengers would find it easier to navigate a system based on colours and visual signs.

Catching the metro you will encounter many wandering sales people in and around the station and in the carriages themselves. They sell anything from snacks to lollies to earphones. There are even people that sell music CDs and give you are sample of the music by playing it through a CD player attached to a backpack speaker. As I mentioned earlier, the metro at times can be very busy. In 2012, the system served 1,609 billion passengers, placing it as the eight highest ridership in the world.

Besides, private cars and the Metro there is a lot of other transport in the city. You have the larger metrobuses, minibus peseros, electric trolleybuses and even taxis are relatively cheap. If you are specifically in sightseeing in Mexico, it's worth getting a ticket for the turibus. It is a double-decker bus. The fare is around $30 or $40 Australian and it covers 4 different routes that you can switch between at certain stops. You can hop on and hop off at each stop to look at different sites for the entire day and it has an audio guide it around 5 languages. Be careful on the southern green route though! There are a lot low hanging branches to watch out for if you are sitting on the top of the bus.

Watch out for those trees!! (on the southern turibus route)