Heriberto Yepez: Letter to You, The U.S.

[I ripped this from Heriberto Yepez's blog, The Tijuana Bible of Poetics.]

I've having problems writing in English these days.

I think a great number of Mexicans are becoming basically anti-American State and if this new series of wars is conducted further, the United States needs to know this is going to damage greatly the relationship between our two cultures.

This war has no reason. This war is part of the system to make America richer, and dominant over the rest of the world. Bush is no more good than Saddam. He's just your Bin Laden.

The American government looks like a serial killer to us.

I come from a great series of cultures, an even though we have been sleeping for some time now, we are now awake. And even this stupid blog is part of a campaign from our culture to try to communicate before language has no meaning left.

Is this war going to really happen? And then what other war is the United States government going to create next?

You're cloning yourselves all over the world. It appears like the United States wants to erase the Other, and wants to take resources from other cultures to continue your way of life. Your government and our corrupt politicians are uniting to turning Mexico, for example, into a slum. How could you helped our interior enemies to destroy Mexico? This cannot continue.

The alliance between these two corrupt governments is turning the Mexican people into enemies of both, and now sees them as one force whose purpose is to destroy our freedom.

The American government and American companies are making money out of our future. The signs of a social disaster are everywhere. And a big part of the problem is the role of the U.S. in our economical, social and political life.

The U.S. is part of the present threat against our language and existence. We are starting a revolt against our government because we want to put an end to our racism and social injustice (40% of Mexicans live in extreme poverty because 90% of the wealth is property of less than 10% of the population, the TV system is erasing the real issues, and is part of the government, drug dealing is widespread and is, of course, part of the government). We need to transform ourselves to fix the political life of our culture—and that involves the United States, because this government is corrupting even more our political life and is making us poorer and poorer.

And now we see how the American government is going into one more of its international lies, at the same time that is ruining our economy. The Irak war (the sequal!) is part of the same pattern that promotes the transformation of Mexico and Latin America into the employees of American interests.

The United States has been the leader of implementing a nuclear orden, a continuous war. The United States, because of that, is solely responsabile of stopping this blindness. First this new war, and then the total order your politicians and companies run.

You are headed to a disaster. This kind of world cannot go on more than two or three decades more. Change before your population is subject of all kinds of attacks, from terrorism to world wide hate.

This is one of the most dark times of American History. Get out of it.

Do you know, for example, that burning American flags is becoming an increasing activity in Mexican life? Each day that goes by Antiamericanism grows in Mexico. I'm sure this is not something which your media let's you know, but this is happening here.

The feeling in Mexico is 9/11 happened because the U.S. States asked it for. Spreading violence and inequality all over the world brings you this kind of karma. Every time I meet with my students, friends or talk with any people, the U.S. is strongly criticized.

We don't like violence. So, why do you believe so much in violence? What's the fun of it?

This has been happening all over the 20th Century, but now it has reached a point, in which the Mexican national project is collapsing. This is a moment in which Mexican history is about to change drastically. Different groups are preparing to go to war against poverty, and popular culture is imagining a third quest for justice, after the first two in 1810 and 1910. Too many things have happened in the last decades and now the country is a daily state of discontent.

The U.S. is criticized strongly here, radically. First the government, for behaving like a butcher, and then regular Americans, who appear to be powerless or lacking any desire to see what your country represents in the world.

You appear to have no respect for espirituality and others. You appear to be the leaders of destroying the Earth.

I would not say this to you, if I didn't know for sure this is not just me talking, but a whole culture. This is what is being discussed here. You.

You need to realize you must stop your government. It is destroying not only our cultures but also your own culture. You are a country with a great number of cultures, and you have created great things (like your different literatures and musics) but now you're turning into this monster which even your neighbors fear and are now preparing to resist.

You may say, "What is this young Mexic@n intellectual talking about? This e-dude must be crazy, exaggerating, have nothing to do". But believe me, your government and your silence is damaging the way we see, feel and think about the United States. Mexico is becoming basically anti-American.

You must take responsability for stopping Bush, the CIA and the companies that are runing the war. You're risking to live Vietnam again.

But this time all the world is going to be Vietnam.

The last time three American intellectuals (friends of mine) came to Tijuana, I was afraid we could encounter anti-American reactions. And it kind of happen. We were sitting in a dowtown bar, drinking a beer, and then a man came, directed his talk to my friends, and used the bottles to explain us in the table how he felt the U.S. is opressing Mexico and other countries, and then he asked if we had any work for him because he had no job thanks to both governments.

It was a completely miserable situation. Here I was sitting with American writers I admire, and here I was also hearing a Mexican poor man, with no future. Two worlds in a strange encounter. None of us knowing what to say or do.

Just last night somebody remembered to me, that the Indian uprising in Chiapas started the same day that Nafta oficially began working. It was the first war against the Mexican-U.S. goverments alliance. It was a war against what president Carlos Salinas represented: the poverty and opression of the Indian population in Mexico, the continuation of the PRI (which was the party who ruled Mexico, thanks to violence and fraud, for the last seventy years) and the strenghtening of the American influence in our daily life.

The Mexican 1910 Revolution started in a similar way. For similar causes.

And now after the PRI was beaten in an election we all prevented from becoming another electoral fraud, this new party arrived, PAN. We got out of the PRI perfect dictatorship (as it was called some years ago by Vargas Llosa, one of the most important writers in Latin America) but entered into this new way of functioning, less visibly corrupt but far more effective in widening the difference among the classes.

PAN is a party from the right wing. And guess what? The head of our first "democratic goverment" is a former president of Coca Cola.

(Literally. This is not a joke).

Mexico headed by a Coca Cola ex-president? This is simple humillating to what our culture means. Mexicans are people who dedicate a great part of their energy to understand our relationship with language, knowledge, the place we live in, and now, suddenly a bunch of crooks are humillating us with this Coca Cola clown?

This will not stand. Americans need to understand you cannot do this to Mexico. We are going to reconstruct the relationship with ourselves, because it has been damaged greatly due to our corruption and Mexicans selling our country to the highest client. We are going to take care of ourselves, but you need to stop your companies and politicians. They are going to fail.

So do what you have to do before they throw you into this non-sensical situation they are creating. Your culture is strong, it doesn't need this kind of generals, senators, ceo's and fools damaging it.

The Mexican population is thinking how to act on the threat of us becoming Americanized.

Even though our media and our government don't appear to be anti-American State, regular people are becoming that in great great numbers. We used to be the country represented by maize, but know we buy corn from the U.S.

Mexico is realizing following the American way is destroying our culture.

I am telling you this because you need to know this is happening in the South. A couple of days ago, the most important newspaper (leftstist and anti-PAN-PRI) from Mexico City reported the poets stance against the war (click here). Guess why this makes front news in Mexico?

It looks to us as if the people of the United States, its politicians, intellectuals, don't care enough about the killings and injustice your government is spreading. An any news about resistence inside the U.S. is welcome.

To the Mexican mind, an American (a "gringo") is somebody who is a macho, doesn't understand his relationship with this planet, and wants to make more money, and would do anything to accomplish this, even organizing wars or trying to control other countries. This is the image your sending.

I'm convinced this is a moment you're going to regret if you don't act. This is a moment similar to that before and during the nazi regime. People knew what was being done to the jews, but many of them didn't do anything to stop the nazi government. You're government is behaving like a serial killer, like a sniper (the sniper from Washington), you're government is the leading terrorist State, don't you see how this is turning the world against you?

Do you want to become a culture who is going to be blame for the murder of many thousands, even millions of people, in two or three decades or even in a few years?

And all of this is why, when I have try to write in English these days, something happens in my hands. A discomfort.

Posted by Brian Stefans at February 16, 2003 11:20 PM