Tuesday night the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts will hold a public forum with Mexican poet and novelist Homero Aridjis and a group of Latino intellectuals self-named as ‘Los MacArturos’ for having been recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
During a press conference Tuesday morning, the forum’s featured speaker, Homero Aridjis, spoke of the current situation of violence and human rights crisis in Mexico.
“Mexico is facing its worst crisis since the Mexican Revolution,” he began. After the political party in power for 71 years, the PRI, was overthrown, the power shifting has led to an accumulation of corruption and social and economic inequality. Aridjis spoke of an oligarchy of politicians and businessmen whose power is disproportionately growing. “To finish with extreme poverty, you have to finish first with obscene richness,” he said.
Aridjis said that it is common to hear people refer to Mexico as a ‘failed state’, but explained that Mexico is composed of many states in which crises have had a direct impact on the people as well as on journalists who cover the news in each state.
Aridjis went on to speak of self-defense groups in his hometown of Michoacán and the Mexican media. He criticized the media’s campaign strategy to compare the self-defense groups to create criminal simply because they are armed. But many in Mexico, Aridjis included, believe these groups are an obvious outcome of growing violence and corruption. The leader of the self-defense groups in Michoacán, José Manuel Mireles, a farmer and a doctor has been imprisoned in a maximum security prison on charges of evading taxes—which many believed to completely fabricated by the federal government.
The most recent incident that has caught international media attention is the disappearance of the 43 students at the hand of federal and local police in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero. Aridjis praised the effectiveness of protests and organizing abroad that puts a spotlight in politicians and exercises public pressure.
Aridjis said he believed that those outside of Mexico see the country as one big failed state, however it’s consists of many smaller state, each with their own character and set of issues.
In Tuesday night’s forum, speakers will discuss the current situation in Mexico, and Aridjis will also discuss his most recent book Ciudad de Zombies, which “pictures Mexico’s current reality of violence, corruption, impunity and indifference.”
The public forum will be bilingual and will be live streaming at radiobilingue.org. It will also be available through KBBF FM 89.1 in the North Bay KPOO FM 89.5, local public radio station will rebroadcast the from from 6-8p.m., on Thursday, January 29th. On Saturday January 31st, Spanish language station KIQI 1010 AM will rebroadcast the forum from 3-5p.m.
Doors open tonight at 6:30 and admission is free. 2868 Mission Street, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts.