After Hurricane Irma, we have seen a lot of spot light on many Caribbean islands. While media unfolds on Puerto Rico and its government officials we forget to see how the communist society of Cuba are doing and how has Irma affected them. On one hand we can blame Irma for a lot of destruction on Cuba’s cost line but was Irma the only key player?

Spotlight of the article starts with a mangled bus and two dead victims. Not the cause of another revolution attack but cement pieces falling from a nearby building due the brunt of Irma. There has been reported 10 deaths due to Irma, 5 resulting in building collapses. Cuban officials say that Irma has weakened thousands of structures, and expect many more collapses within these buildings. In Havana alone 175 homes were destroyed and over 4,000 were weakened. These aren’t just regular homes and apartments we see in the U.S. Architect Yoandy Fiallo states “The combination of water and sun creates structure problems”. In Cuba, old structures and building collapses are a normal thing. Many victims who live or used to live in these types of buildings ask the government for relocation and are scared to sleep in their own homes that might collapse on top of them.

Why is it so hard for the government to keep up with renovations of these buildings? You must look back at Cuba’s history. Cuba has been in an economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union and economic sanctions from the U.S. CNN states “The Cuban government maintains the exclusive right to import items to the island and at state-run hardware stores many building materials are overpriced, shoddy or simply nonexistent.” Citizens blame government for the collapse of their housing rather than Irma “It’s painful because it could have been avoided if the authorities had taken measures,”.

Many towns are still awaiting help from the Cuban government. While the government responds back to telling people to go to shelters it leaves citizens in limbo to when they will receive housing and relocation. The Cuban government is focusing its relief efforts to more major tourist attraction towns to prepare for vacation time which bring in income for the Cuban people and government.

This article has key themes that we talk about in class like how is a government structures its society. It helps us think in a different mindset then the one we are used to due to political influences on the island. In the article, one can see that the citizens are the ones who impose there bias on its own government.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/americas/cuba-hurricane-irma-collapsed-buildings/index.html

Since 2013, Brazil has been pushing for the Programa Mais Médicos (More Doctors Program) to contract doctors from Cuba to work in Brazil. This program has resulted in Brazil sending millions of dollars over to Cuba, and in return Cuba sends thousands of doctors to live and work in Brazil for a few years. Sounds like an “everybody wins” sort of scenario, right? Not exactly.

Unfortunately, the Cuban doctors seem to have “drawn the short straw.” What I mean by saying this is the fact that these doctors are being compared to slave labor. They make very little compared to the amount that Brazil is paying Cuba for their services. According to one Dr. Álvarez and her husband, they were made to leave behind their children in the care of relatives, while earning an income of 2900 Brazilian reais a month (roughly $908 by current U.S. standards), which seems quite comparable to the $30 a month that Cuban doctors receive back home. By their standards, this may seem like a very profitable outcome.

However, according to the agreement between Brazil and Cuba, Brazil pays Cuba $3620 a month per doctor, nearly four times the amount the doctors themselves are getting paid. Despite the U.N.’s endorsement of this project for improving healthcare in Brazil, many doctors see it as an injustice. In fact, a federal judge in Brazil has claimed these contracts to be a form of slave labor. Unfortunately, there are many repercussions that these doctors are being faced with, as Cuban supervisors are sending any doctors who file for a law suit and ultimatum that is they must either return to Cuba within 24 hours, or face exile for up to eight years.

Cuba doctor Álvarez working in Brazil to provide healthcare to impoverished regions of the country

The article portrays the Latin American nations involves as two entities that are working together to improve the livelihood of Brazilian citizens, with little regard to how the Cuban doctors feel they are being treated. There is a small overtone of resentment towards Cuba in this article based on the violation of human rights, and Brazil is seen secondarily to blame for contracting these atrocities. However, it is also portrayed as a delicate issue that cannot be simply answered with whether or not these doctors’ human rights are being attended to, since these doctors are being contracted to provide healthcare to parts of the country that do not have access to it.

In relation to the themes we’ve discussed in class, this event portrays three main points. First, it shows ongoing interactions between different parts of Latin America, and I would challenge the idea of grouping them together as one entity. Second, it touches on the problem of healthcare in Latin America, an issue that has been ongoing ever since first contact. I anticipate this issue being further discussed as we move further into colonization, as providing healthcare to a mass of people in a new environment can be a challenge to the colonists. And third, this article brings into question government corruption and human rights, which has been a part of class discussion almost every day in this class. In this case however, it is about human rights being realized for those who are impoverished, while using virtually slave labor to provide for those rights.

Link for main article (NYTimes)

Link for secondary article (Rio Times)

The Brazilian government has recently overturned a decision from President Michel Temer to open up a section of the Amazon to private mining and infrastructural companies. The Renca (an acronym for National Reserve of Copper and Associates) is a reservation about the size of Switzerland and was put into place during the Brazilian military dictatorship in order to stave off foreign interest in the many minerals that the 17,800 square miles hold. The dictatorship ended in the mid 1980s and the Amazon has since been subject to ever-expanding private interests. In an unpopular decision, President Temer announced this past August a plan to lift the reservation status in the coming months, much to the disdain of environmental advocates like Greenpeace, the Catholic church, and anthropologists, as there are uncontacted tribes who live within the designated area. Temer’s proposal was struck down by the Brazilian congress; however, the tight connections between the president and his cabinet and multiple oil and mining companies are still cause for future concern. At the present moment there are a number of illegal mining operations already underway within the Renca, so the battle is far from over.

I thought this article could highlight not only a bit of the treatment of indigenous tribes on the part of the Brazilian government, but also Western European attitudes toward the natural world and what it has to offer. I believe this could open up discussion to how the conquistadores viewed what the Amazon could offer them, and how they were willing to forgo the well-being of the natives to obtain it.

Other areas of discussion could include national sentiment toward the dictatorship of the past, disparities between the president and the rest of Brazil’s government, and division among the Brazilian population in opinion of President Temer.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/26/brazil-backtracks-on-plan-to-open-up-amazon-forest-to-mining#img-1

Tarahumara people of Copper Canyon region, which is often called “Sierra Tarahumara” because of its reputation as the home of significant Tarahumara population, have been living in the treacherous terrains of northwestern mountains of Mexico for nearly five hundred years. Ever since the Spaniard came to their original homeland, the region which is now referred as “Free and Sovereign State of Chihuaha”, Tarahumara people moved deep into the Sierra Madre Occidental, thus avoiding direct clash with Spanish conquistadors. Since they have migrated to one of the deepest regions of the Sierra Madre, Tarahumaras became one of the not so many indigenous groups in Mexico who managed to fully preserve their pure ancestral cultures and customs barely touched by Spanish influences. The Jesuits could not manage to fully convert them to Christianity, with quite a lot of Tarahumaras still practicing their indigenous religions barely changed. Even their very existence was largely unknown until 1993, when a group of American photographers convinced a few local people to participate in 100-mile ultramarathon held in America. One of their most renowned and well-known feat that is closely related to their tradition, is long-distance running, with every single member of the tribe being able to run hundreds of miles and hundreds of kilometers for days without stopping. Even their name come from the Spanish corruption of their name in their native tongue The Raramuri, which means “light runners”, or “the ones with light feet”.

The male runners of Tarahumara tribe, photo courtesy to http://imgarcade.com/tarahumara-runners.html

But as of the dawning of the twenty-first century, when the entire country of Mexico has been plunged into nationwide drug warfare between US-Mexican law enforcement forces and drug cartels, Tarahumara tribe started to face one of the biggest challenges to their identity and safety – the drug cartels and illegal narcotics industries. Most of the accounts and testimonies from Tarahumara victims of the illegal drug industry point out that the drug cartels have been extorting and threatening the locals to work for them since the mid 2000s’, which coincides with the beginning of the Mexican Drug war which started in December 2006. Since then, quite a lot of Tarahumara people have been the victims of labour exploitation and violent attacks from the drug cartels. One of the biggest reasons they became easy target for drug cartels is that they live in close proximity with the Sierra Madre regions, one of the largest drug producing regions in the entire Mexico. They also found great usefulness in Tarahumara tribesmen’s long-distance running abilities, high stamina and great endurance forged from centuries of living experience in harsh mountain regions. And compared to other means of transportation and delivery, Tarahumara people are much cheaper and less likely to be detected by the law enforcement officials. They are cheap because they usually do not demand wage increases and higher standards of employment, due to fears of receiving personal vendettas from murderous drug cartel leaders and their assassins. Tarahumara people were considered to be highly resilient cheap laborers who can smuggle the products into faraway regions not only in Mexico but also in Southern parts of United States such as New Mexico Desert.

Female members of Tarahumara tribe, courtesy to http://www.landscapes.org/glf-2014/?contestants=sierra-tarahumara-mexico

It is impossible to figure out the exact number of the Tarahumara people who are being forced to work for drug cartels and narcotics producers, since there have been no official consensus report of neither the total population nor the victimized population of Tarahumara tribe. Their traditionally reclusive nature, extremely rough and dangerous terrains of the local environment and complex power dynamics between local authorities and drug cartels are hindering many efforts to create reliable statistics of the exact number of Tarahumara populace and the extent of the victimization of Tarahumara tribe by the drug cartels. Most of the articles and documents which write about the exploitation of Tarahumara people by illegal drug industries are relying on eyewitness accounts by the locals and actual interviews of the former Tarahumara narcotics workers who were either convicted in United States and Mexico for drug smuggling, or luckily escaped into outside world to tell the stories. Private investigators, journalists and indigenous peoples rights activists are also finding it extremely hard to figure out the way to help certain Tarahumara people who have been essentially enslaved by the cartels, for their homeland is located in Sierra Madre, one of the most prominent drug producing region in the Mexico. Although the drug industries are not the only problem which threatens the existence of Tarahumara people, their plight remains to be one of the tragically unexplored territory of the tragedy of Mexican Drug War.

http://www.excelsior.com.mx/nacional/2015/04/09/1017872

*The video link above, which is allegedly filmed by one of the cartel convoys, in November 2014 in Copper Canyon (Sierra Tarahumara) when there were several confrontations between groups of organized crime, features cartel militants operating in the region Tarahumara people live.

Goldberg, Ryan. “The Drug Runners.” Texas Monthly, July 2017. Accessed September 24, 2017. https://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/the-drug-runners/?src=longreads

Roston, Aram. “MEXICAN DRUG WAR’S NEXT VICTIMS: TARAHUMARA INDIAN RUNNERS.” Newsweek, June 25, 2012. Accessed September 24, 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/mexican-drug-wars-next-victims-tarahumara-indian-runners-65101.

The article I chose, “Mexico City, Before and After the Earthquake” was published by the New York Times on 23 September, 2017. It discusses the natural disaster that killed at least 155 people in Mexico City last Tuesday. While this earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.1, may not be shaking the ground anymore, the damage is not yet complete.[1] Many buildings around the city are still standing but are liable to collapse at any time. This situation also poses a threat to surveyors, construction workers, and residents[2].

In addition to presenting descriptions of the damage caused by the earthquake, the article also includes numerous pictures. The author also described the story behind many of the pictures and stated the locations where they were taken. This is very helpful because the pictures display different kinds of damage buildings sustained.

I also appreciated the use of photographs because they give the audience an idea of what life is like currently in Mexico City. Additionally, I found it interesting that no residents of the city were quoted in the article. I believe this was a good choice because the article did not portray the people of Mexico as victims. Instead, it focused on the technical aspects of the earthquake, while still providing information to show how the earthquake is impacting the lives of people in the area. I was also happy to see that there is a Spanish version of the same article.[3]

In class, we spent a significant amount of time discussing the geography of Latin America. This article relates to class themes because Mexico City exists in a location that experiences frequent earthquakes. Because earthquakes are relatively common in the area, they play a significant role in Mexican history and culture. For a personal perspective, follow this link to an article that describes life in Mexico City during various earthquakes over the years, including the one on Tuesday.[4]

[1]. Larry Buchanan et al., “Mexico City, Before and After the Earthquake,” The New York Times, September 23, 2017, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/23/world/americas/mexico-city-earthquake-surveying-destruction-damage.html.

[2]. Ibid.

[3]. Ibid.

[4]. Francisco Goldman, “A History of My Mexico City Home, in Earthquakes,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-history-of-my-mexico-city-home-in-earthquakes.

Bibliography

Buchanan, Larry, Jasmine C. Lee, Sergio Peçanha, and K. K. Rebecca Lai. “Mexico City, Before and After the Earthquake.” The New York Times, September 23, 2017, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/23/world/americas/mexico-city-earthquake-surveying-destruction-damage.html.

Goldman, Francisco. “A History of My Mexico City Home, in Earthquakes.” The New Yorker, September 23, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-history-of-my-mexico-city-home-in-earthquakes.