* Above, Waiting to be slaughtered in Veracruz, AP photo via Daylife.
We posted previously about the gross conditions at the Smithfield subsidiary hog farm in the Perote Valley in the state of Veracruz. (Watch this Channel 4 video for the rotting pig carcasses.) On Sunday the Washington Post's Steve Fainaru went long on the ongoing war Grangas Carroll has waged with the old men and women of La Gloria, the village that decided to stand up to the pork plantation.
The paper says La Gloria villagers blocked a highway to protest the awful and potentially dangerous stench that emanates from the farm's football field-sized, open-air fecal pools. And what did the U.S.-based conglomerate's local arm do to its neighbors? It took the old folks to court:
Closing roads and highways is one of the most common forms of protest in Mexico. "Normally, the police arrive and they enter into a negotiation to open up the highway. It usually takes an hour or two," said Franco, the Perote mayor. "But Granjas Carroll, as a company, went to the authorities."
[...]
A month after the demonstrations, around 10 a.m., Guadelupe Serrano heard a knock at his door. He was greeted by a man in civilian clothes and three federal policemen, he said, and was told that he had been charged with launching an "attack" on a federal highway. He was taken first to Jalapa, the Veracruz state capital, then to Puebla, where he was jailed overnight before his family bailed him out, he said.
Serrano, 66, has short gray hair and weathered skin from a lifetime in the fields. "I didn't kill anyone. I didn't rob anyone. I'm not a drug trafficker," he said during an interview in his living room. "We simply raised the voice of alarm that these pig facilities are contaminating our environment and threatening the health of the people."
Read the whole thing there. At La Jornada, here is a crónica narrating the scene in La Gloria under the eye of the international news media.
Meanwhile, Larry Rohter of the NYT argues convincingly in the first-person for more credit for the Mexican government's response to the swine flu outbreak, particularly in comparison to China's response to SARS in 2003. But in a quote, Denise Dresser warns us against getting too cozy with the idea that Mexico is suddenly a mature democracy out of the shadows of the PRI autocracy:
What you've created is a perverse system of oligopolistic elites with vested interests and a willingness to use their veto power to prevent the changes that are needed but which they don't want.
Dresser is referring to Mexico's politicians and moguls, of course. Yet I couldn't help thinking that in the country's new-world bilateral relationship with the U.S., she might just as well be referring to companies like Smithfield, Inc.