The Right to Death

The practice of arresting or kidnapping then murdering civilians and burying their bodies in unmarked graves, leaving families and society grimly unclear as to their exact fate, was not invented in Latin America. Arguably, this innovation in terrorism coincided with the development of the totalitarian, surveillance state in 20th Century Europe. Yet, it was in Latin America during the Cold War era that ‘forced disappearance’ found its widest expression. Through the 1970s and 1980s, US-trained security forces working for US-backed military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador and Guatemala abducted and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Perhaps unsurprising then that it is to Latin America that an aspiring forensic anthropologist goes to apprentice in that most fascinating profession. In her lyrically rich and poignant memoir Still Life With Bones Alexa Hagerty recounts how she learnt on the job alongside the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). We follow them, abseiling into abandoned wells and ossuaries in hazmat suits, or splashing into the jungle of the Petén to inspect possible gravesites, turning over the soil for any sign of colour change that might indicate disturbance, then painstakingly peeling back layers of earth. The skeletons and scraps of clothing they tease from the ground tell of terrifyingly extreme violence.

In Guatemala, between 1981 and 1983, over 160,000 citizens were killed by police and special forces both in detention centres and in their villages. The vast majority of the victims were ethnic Maya people and the methods of execution barbarous. In Argentina, between 1974 and 1983, up to 30,000 citizens were ‘disappeared’ by the state in a campaign to eradicate left-wing politics from the nation. The bones of the victims testify to the torture most endured before execution. The brutality of the deaths is matched only by the sadness of families unable to grieve for fear of reprisals and for lack of a body. In the words of a Guatemalan son who never knew his father, “They took away our right to life, but they also took away our right to death.”

With the help of oral testimony, DNA testing and other supporting evidence, the anthropologists seek to identify and return the bodies to their families. They race to find the bones before  they are forgotten, to offer closure to families and communities suffering from the trauma of kidnappings and massacres by the state. For those lucky enough to be found, exhumations are followed by inhumations. Families have the chance to bury their loved ones how they see fit, and these second burials make space for new rituals to develop. In Guatemala’s Ixil Maya community the reinterring of partial or complete skeletons is often accompanied by the sharing of a testimonio: a public narration of a personal history that bears witness to oppression. Forensic anthropologists are not just highly trained experts in hazmat suits, Hagerty stresses; they work best when they work with and for communities. With communities they create “singular forms of mourning and resistance.” A testimonio “take[s] the lid off sadness” and at the same time allows the historically voiceless to set the historical record straight.

Of course, the unearthing of bones is a very political act. By digging up the past they also open wounds anew, rewriting the historical narrative and stoking political tensions. Thus, there are those who would rather keep the bones in the ground. It is not uncommon for the teams to receive threats while funding is hard to come by and insufficient to the enormity of the task. Whereas Spain, for example, has doggedly maintained its amnesty on crimes committed during the dictatorship, the authors of genocide in Latin American countries are vulnerable.

General Videla, the dictator who instigated the Argentine policy of state terror in the 70s and 80s, was jailed for crimes against humanity in 2010 before dying in 2013. Argentina’s latest populist president, Javier Milei, has sought to play down the crimes of the dictatorship. The work of the anthropologists makes Milei’s task harder. As one Argentine mother of a disappeared son said, “Many want the wound to dry so that we will forget. We want it to continue bleeding.”

Hagerty’s memoir is a compelling argument for the importance of forensic anthropology that works with the communities of the affected, so that their voices and stories can be heard, so that no excuses or apologies can be made for crimes against humanity. It is also a raw meditation on the most human and humanising experience of grief, on the meaning-making that any death entails for those left alive.

Forensic anthropologists are trained to answer closed questions: whose bones are these? Can we establish how and when they died? How did they come to be buried here? But for Hagerty the questions that motivate her – and that this book with forensic precision and care tries to answer – are, “What is to be learned from the catastrophe of history? Can inheritances of violence be transformed? … How can we go on in the face of incalculable loss?”

The race is on to research Colombia’s upland amphibians

A recent systematic study published in Tropical Conservation Science suggests that increased scientific investigation of frogs and salamanders in the páramo ecosystems of Colombia is vital for safeguarding the abundance of endemic amphibians in the country.

The survey revealed gaps in scientific knowledge about scores of endemic amphibians in the threatened ecosystem which the authors warn are a barrier to the development of conservation legislation, to securing funding for conservation efforts and to efficient and effective implementation of conservation programs.

Understanding the population changes, vulnerability to disease, climactic adaptations and community ecology of amphibian species is crucial to securing legislation and funding for conservation, as well as knowing how to use these resources once you have them. New species of amphibians are being discovered all the time, so the race is on to identify, understand and protect species before they are lost forever.

Mass amphibian extinction?

You may have heard that the mountain chicken frog (leptodactyllus fallax) of Dominica and Montserrat has been almost entirely wiped out. On a recent count, only 21 of these 21cm-long frogs were found in the wild on Dominica and few more on Montserrat. The blame for this disaster is shared between the chytrid fungal infection, habitat loss to human development and storm damage from Hurricane Maria. Leptodactyllus fallax seems to be on track for what has been called the fastest extinction of modern times.

There is hope that some members of this prodigious species that have developed resistance to the chytrid fungus will survive on Dominica.

This is concerning news for the inhabitants of the aforementioned Caribbean islands, who used to enjoy roasting this once-abundant anuran, and the exact same perils confront many of the world’s 7,556 known extant frog species (and the unknown species too). A major outbreak of chytridiomycosis, beginning in Central America in the 1980s is linked to the decline of over 200 species of frogs worldwide, including the likely extinction in Colombia of the páramo-dwelling leopard rocket frog (aromobates leopardalis). The greatest loss of species has occurred in Australasia and the Indian sub-continent, but the deadly infection continues to spread on all continents. There is particular concern in the herpetological community for the vulnerable salamanders of North America.

While some frog species have been seen to develop resistance to the disease, global populations face habitat loss and the developing threat of global warming and associated climactic changes. Scientific journal Nature estimates that 40% of the world’s frog species are at risk of extinction as a result of climate change impacts. Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to climate change because their water permeable skin makes them very sensitive to air moisture content. Many species are highly adapted to specific environments and their reliance on transient water sources to reproduce is also a risk factor.

Despite all the bad news, there is cause for hope. Hundreds of other species’ populations have improved as a result of habitat protection schemes, and it is the need to promote, legislate, fund and effectively implement such schemes in Colombia’s páramo ecosystem that impels this new research.

The leopard rocket frog (aromobates leopardalis) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta páramo has not been seen in over a decade.

What is the páramo landscape?

If you haven’t heard of them before, páramos are misty moorlands between three and five thousand metres up in the Central and South American High Andes  – above the timber line, below the snow line.

I had the chance to visit the páramo in Tolima earlier this year. It is a quiet, wet, huge and frankly quite scary place. A gloomy expanse of rolling rocks and strange grasses wreathed in cloud. Out of the mist, looms a forest of giant shrubs, a turkey vulture wheels overhead.

For a moment, the mist clears and reveals an impossibly far below, then an impossibly far above.

Between your feet, flowering mosses from another planet. Thin air. The sound of the hummingbird’s wings reaches you after it has disappeared. From somewhere, a trickling. The damp cold creeps in at your neck. At night it will be much, much colder. You don’t see the Andean condor, the spectacled bear or the Andean wolf, but you know that they too are somewhere in this fastness in the clouds.

The biome that has developed in this wild and unsettling place is unique on our planet for its richness and number of endemic species. Just as in the Galapagos Islands, extreme conditions and geographical isolation in the páramo triggers unusually high diversification of species. The result is an abundance of flowering plants, insects and vertebrates that are highly adapted to this valley or that mound and which reside nowhere else on the planet.

As well as giving cover to curious bears, Espeletia capture vapour from passing clouds in their spongy trunks releasing it through the roots into the soil.

 Why are Colombia’s páramos so important to frogs and what threats do they face?

Frogs and salamanders have adapted and diversified to withstand the high exposure to wind and UV and sudden changes in temperature which characterise the páramo climate. They have become the most diverse vertebrate lineage in the páramo. The páramo biome is found in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, but Colombia has the greatest share of páramos and the greatest number of amphibian species in this ecosystem. Science knows of 134 frog species native to the Colombian páramos (as well as a smattering of salamanders). By this count, Colombia’s páramos sustain over 2% of the world’s known frog species. 95 of these species are endemic to Colombia.

The Andes is experiencing accelerated ecosystem loss as a result of mining, agriculture and climate change. Less than 60% of Colombia’s páramos are within the national system of protected areas. The agricultural frontier is expanding into Colombia’s páramos with the land use in some of these areas changing by over 18% in recent years. Changes to the “natural cover” can lead to the frogs’ habitats changing and to population decline and increased likelihood of extinction. The authors calculate that about two thirds of páramo amphibians are either vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. These species will decline and may be lost if their habitats are not protected from agricultural expansion and mining activities.

Worryingly, the authors describe “a clear lack of efforts to mitigate threats to the habitat of these species or to implement concrete actions for their conservation. (i.e., amphibian translocation, citizen science, engagement of landowners and other volunteers in managing land for amphibians, or management plans with the support of environmental institutions.” They believe a lack of research could be at the root of this problem.

The most researched frog in the Colombian páramo is the green spotted treefrog (dendropsophus molitor)

What did they find?

There has been a huge increase in research on amphibians in the páramos of Colombia since the turn of the millennium, but more needs to be done.

Accurate data from the field, including the size, location and change over time of populations is the bread and butter of conservation work. Yet, they found a startling lack of reliable data about population dynamics which makes it hard for scientists to assess the risks of species loss or to implement effective conservation measures. Amazingly, for more than 80% of páramo amphibians in Colombia little or nothing is known about their “ecological requirements,” i.e. the exact conditions that they need to survive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a country still struggling to bring to a close decades of armed conflict, some areas of the country have been understudied, particularly in the Eastern cordillera and in the north of the country. Of the thirty-six páramo complexes, there is no published scientific research on amphibians for six páramo complexes. Thus, there are likely many undescribed or unidentified species at large in the páramos. This research tells us that the race is on, not just to find and identify these populations, but also to understand the changes and risks that they face.

A yellow bulldozer flattens a new stretch of road that is being laid through this once-pristine landscape.

Referenced works:

Luedtke, J. A. et al. (2023). Ongoing declines for the world’s amphibians in the face of emerging threats. Nature.

Saboyá Acosta, L. P. & Urbina-Cardona, J. N. (2023). Current State of Knowledge of Páramo Amphibians in Colombia: Spatio Temporal Trends and Information Gaps to Be Strengthened for Effective Conservation. Tropical Conservation Science.

Colombia vs. Multinational mining

Those who seek to defend the environment in Colombia are used to having their lives threatened. They are less accustomed to sparking hundred million dollar lawsuits against their nation from companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. Increasingly, however, multinational corporations are using provisions within trade agreements (ostensibly designed to promote foreign direct investment) to threaten Colombia with crippling reparations if its courts and its democratically elected politicians make decisions that negatively affect their profits. This tactic limits the sovereignty of a democratic state and can effectively deny government and the courts the opportunity to make vital decisions about environment and security policy in the national interest.

Human rights and the environment

In February this year, I visited Tolima, a region in the centre of the Andean country, spanning the central and eastern cordilleras. A friend of mine, Hans, took me to see part of the Santa Ana mine near the town of Falan. The machines were quiet when we visited and orchids were flowering by the roadside. The courts had suspended the development of the mining operation in thirteen locations across the municipality because of a lack of “due process and citizen participation.” Many locals, he told me, were concerned about the risk of cyanide, regularly used in the extraction of gold ore from the substrate, getting into the water supply. What is more, Hans complains, the mining contractors began tearing up the earth before they had acquired the relevant permits, so that when locals began to complain a court order was needed to halt the operation.

Halted gold mining operation near Falan, Tolima (February, 2023)

The ambivalence of President Iván Duque’s administration (2018-2022) towards the historic 2016 peace agreement has contributed to a deteriorating security situation in the resource-rich nation. Rural communities whose land sits atop precious metals or fossil fuels find themselves between a rock and a hard place. The development of mines in their neighbourhood can lead to species extinction and habitat loss for endemic species, desecration of sacred sites, poisoning of water supplies, loss of farmland and forced relocation of their communities, often to insufficient alternative accommodation. Exercising their legal rights to challenge the development of mines and defend the environment can lead to threats, destruction of property, intimidation and assassination at the hands of armed groups whose connection to the foreign multinational companies seeking to mine is difficult to establish. Last month Global Witness released a report which showed the country to be the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmental defender, with 60 activists murdered in 2022.

On September 2nd 2023, a public audience was held at the High School in Falan for local people to receive information about the proposed mine and express any ongoing concerns. Hans sent me video footage from the event, which shows a man in a white polo shirt taking the microphone and expressing his pride that in Falan the local people grow all the food they need to live healthily – yuca, maize, fish – because they look after the water and keep it clean. He asks the audience to help him in protecting the water supply against anything that might contaminate it. “What are you drinking?” he asks them, “What are you drinking? Are you drinking gold?” He goes on to say that he has received threats because of his opposition to the mine, but that if he has to die he will die defending his land.

The following day, a young man was found murdered in the neighbouring village of Lajas. Local newspaper El Cronista reported that the victim was Johan Ferney Aguilar, son of the environmental activist Wilder Aguilar who had spoken out the day before.

Johan Aguilar was 27 years old

It may never be possible to establish the connection between the murder and Minerales Santa Ana Colombia, a contractor of the Canadian mining company (Outcrop Gold and Silver) which owns the concession, but either way, the bargaining position of the mining company is strengthened by the perpetration of violence against families and communities who speak out.

When I saw that a pressure group based in the UK called ABColombia were advertising a panel at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster about corporate responsibility for environmental damage and human rights abuses in Colombia, I knew I had to go and find out more. The event included testimony from an environmental activist, Robinson Mejia, who opposes the development of an enormous gold mine (roughly the size of Manchester metropolitan area) at Cajamarca, on the other side of Tolima. In a familiar tale, a local farmer who opposed the mine was assassinated, and many others have received death threats. In a local referendum, 97% of voters chose to reject the development of the mine.

We also heard from a Colombian lawyer working to protect the rights of rural communities and from a representative of Corporate Justice Coalition. Whilst it was terrible to hear about the violence and intimidation suffered by people who speak up about the threats to their communities and the natural world, it was the story told by Corporate Justice Coalition that surprised and intrigued me. They warned that if the government side with the people of Cajamarca and decline to give AngloGold Ashanti the green light to start digging, they may quickly find themselves in court - in the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in New York, to be precise.

There are roughly 800,000 Wayúu people living between Colombia and Venezuela

If the security situation in Colombia is making it harder to ensure basic human rights and to protect the incredible diversity of natural life which Colombia currently supports, the current political and legal situation at the national level offers hope. In 2022, Colombia elected its first progressive president, Gustavo Petro, a social democrat who campaigned on promises to transform the country. He campaigned on an ambition to spearhead a new anti-extractivist movement in Latin America. One of Petro’s most eye-catching promises was to stop giving new licences for petroleum exploration in the country.

Meanwhile, environmental activists are having some success in using the courts to seek protection from abuse by corporations. Colombia’s courts have delivered some significant victories for progressive causes in recent times, such as ruling in favour of free access to abortion. In 2017, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of the Wayúu, an indigenous group in the north east of the country, against mining giant Glencore. Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trader, is headquartered in Switzerland and listed on the London Stock Exchange. The court ruled that Glencore’s use of a branch of the Rancheria River to service a new pit at the Cerrejón coal mine breaches the local Wayúu people’s rights to health, water and food sovereignty.  

Cerrejón was opened in 1985 in the harsh climate of La Guajira, a desert region whose indigenous tribes rely on seasonal rains to survive. The Wayúu have suffered displacement and famine over several decades as a result of drought, and 18 of their 25 communities have been displaced. Since 2011, the region has been in the grip of a particularly fierce drought. It is estimated that 5,000 Wayuu children died from lack of access to safe drinking water in the decade preceding the judgement.

In recent years the Wayúu have learnt water conservation techniques that present an opportunity for them to continue to live in their ancestral home. The court’s judgement appeared to be another lifeline for one of Colombia’s most vulnerable and abused minority groups. Unfortunately, victories like these are under considerable threat of being swept away as a result of legal challenges held at investment protection tribunals far from Colombia, the majority of which are held within ICSID.

Corporations suing states

The developing national consensus in Colombia regarding the need to protect the human rights of rural communities and safeguard the country’s unique ecosystems is under threat from supranational investment protection arrangements. Decisions made by the supreme court or policies mandated by the people and enacted by the government to protect the environment and defend basic rights of Colombian citizens has resulted in the country being sued. In the increasing number of these cases the country may be liable not only for investment consequently lost by foreign companies but also for the loss of their projected future profits. These legal threats are having a chilling effect on government policy and are being used as bargaining chips to secure mining rights where the law and the decisions of elected governments have sought to deny them.

The idea of a regime for investor-state dispute settlements (known by the acronym ISDS) was outlined by the banker and economist Hermann Abs in the 1950s in the context of post-colonial national liberation movements which threatened the capital of colonial and former-colonial powers in those states.[i] Under these arrangements, countries can be sued by foreign investors for state actions which affect their investments. Abs’ promotion of a global supranational legal framework sought to reduce the motivation for developed nations to intervene violently in the affairs of newly independent nations to protect their companies’ capital – think the Suez Crisis or the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala at the behest of the United Fruit Company (today rebranded as Chiquita).

Despite murmurings from some politicians and lawyers about the potential threat to national sovereignty that such agreements could come to represent, developing nations signed up in droves from the 1960s onwards, keen to secure foreign direct investment, and perhaps bargaining that it was safer to agree to negotiate directly with the world bank and investing companies than to risk invasion and clandestine interference.

The majority of ISDS cases are presided over by a 3-person tribunal at the World Bank in New York

Colombia and ISDS

Since the 1990s, the use of ISDS agreements by companies to sue countries has risen continually and substantially. The one country attracting the most cases of this type in recent years is Colombia. London Mining Network reported in March this year that there were 14 open cases brought against the conflict-ravaged state and 8 more in the pre-arbitration stage. The Colombian National Agency for Legal Defense of the State (ANDJE) reported in 2022 that claims from 8 of these cases totalled almost 2.5 billion USD, which almost 3% of Colombia’s total budget for 2023.

A US company called Sea Search Armada is trying to use the Colombia-US Trade Promotion Agreement to sue Colombia for 10 billion USD for not allowing them to look for a Spanish galleon loaded with gold that sank off the coast near Cartagena de Indias in 1708. If we include this claim in the total that is being demanded from Colombian state, the amount is roughly equal to the annual budget for education in the country. The sum claimed in several other pending cases is not in the public domain.

One such case is that brought by Glencore, which took full ownership of Cerrejón coal mine in 2021 in a 588 million USD deal. Glencore brought their lawsuit in 2021 and continue to operate the mine in denial of the Colombian court’s authority and in denial of the grave humanitarian crisis in La Guajira to which the mine is contributing. It is not known how much are the damages that Glencore is seeking, but there are concerns in Colombia that the independence of the courts is being tested by this legal action.

Cerrejón is the largest open-pit coal mine in Latin America

International campaign and sunset clauses

Cases are currently being brought against Colombia by invoking treaties with the US, the UK, Spain, Switzerland and Canada, with the most common source being Canada. 9 of the 14 open cases are related to mining, mineral exploration or secondary industries related to the extraction and refinement of fossil fuels.

Civil society actors have been urging the Colombian government to withdraw from these agreements. In May of this year, a group of 13 delegates from environmental organisations and charities from across the Europe and the Americas visited Colombia to learn about communities and ecosystems threatened by corporate lawsuits. They sought to convince policy makers and politicians of the need to remove ISDS from investment and trade treaties (rather than simply adjust the terms as Canada did for its 2007 FTA with Colombia). Their report suggests that government ministries were planning to review treaties that included ISDS, starting with the Colombia-Switzerland BIT.

One complication that Colombia finds itself in is that many BITs have ‘sunset clauses’ that determine the terms under which the treaty can be terminated. In the case of the Colombia-UK BIT either party to the treaty may unilaterally withdraw, but this would entail that the terms of the treaty remain in place for 15 further years. It is necessary for both parties to agree to terminate or renegotiate. The Colombia-UK BIT was signed in 2014 and covers a period of ten years, so that it is up for renewal in the coming year. With this in mind, charities in the UK are gearing up to campaign for the UK to remove ISDS provisions from the BIT with Colombia due for renewal next year. It remains to be seen what the response will be from corporate lobbyists.

Herman Josef Abs was the most powerful commercial banker of the Third Reich and later worked closely with Chancellor Adenauer to rebuild the German economy after WWII

Ramifications for the peace process

One of the primary arguments for the ISDS regime is it helps to promote investment flows. There are 3,300 agreements for ISDS currently in force worldwide. However, a 2017 study by the International Institute for International Development found no substantive evidence that ISDS provisions have increased FDI globally. Meanwhile, both Brazil and New Zealand have determined to remain outside of the regime, but have not struggled to attract investment. Furthermore, there is increasing awareness about the use of the system by corporations seeking to trample over democratically elected governments and the rulings of the courts, often to the detriment of human dignity and the health of the natural world. The case of the Wayuu is just one of many that highlights how extractive industries are placing an unsupportable burden on ecosystems in the context of climate change. The UN have declared that ISDS presents a significant threat to the global mission to protect the environment.

Claims made to ISDS tribunals are not only threatening the environment, but also the peace process in Colombia. According to Andrei Suarez-Gomez, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, the main drivers of the ongoing conflicts in Colombia include displacement of rural communities as a result of environmental collapse and violence. Peace in the country depends upon the successful protection of rural communities from intimidation and violence, whether it be carried out for the ends of leftist guerrillas or those of multinational corporations. The ISDS regime is not only supporting multinational mining companies to hold Colombia to ransom, but doing so at the expense of developing the conditions for peace.

Spare a thought for the citizens of Falan and of Cajamarca. Even if they stand firm in their opposition, in the face of terrible danger, it is not clear the government of Colombia will be so resolute when the lawyers for Outcrop Silver and Gold and for AngloGold Ashanti come calling.

[i] Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, 2023

Can Chileans find a way forward that is acceptable to the majority?

A year ago it seemed Chile’s young, leftist president Gabriel Boric was about to sail into a new era of Chilean politics, before a referendum result took the wind out of his sails.

On the point of leaping bravely into the future, Chileans had doubts. I went to speak to them and found a society divided on many issues, but acknowledging that something has to change.

Gabriel Boric Font assumed the office of president aged 36, making him Chile’s youngest ever head of state

On the 7th of October 2019, in response to a 30 peso (3p) hike in the price of a ticket on the city's metro system, secondary school students in Santiago, Chile collectively refused to pay their fares and openly confronted police who challenged them. When the following day a government minister suggested that those unable to pay the higher fare could get up earlier in order to take advantage of off-peak rates, anger about the cost of living spread with many protesters decrying the out of touch elite. The protests that followed came to be known as the social explosion.

Over the next ten days, confrontations between protesters and police escalated with metro stations and other public buildings burned to the ground and pitched battles between protesters and security forces in all major cities of the country. On the 18th of October, then-President Sebastian Piñera declared a state of emergency, warning that the country was "at war with a powerful and relentless enemy [...] willing to use violence and crime without limits." In contradiction of their president and in defiance of his curfew, on the 25th of October 2019, 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago in a peaceful protest against income inequality and the privatization of public services. (1.2 million amounts to over 6% of the entire population of Chile, making this possibly the largest protest march in modern history as a percentage of national population.)

A primary target for protesters' ire was the constitution of 1980, authored by the regime of General Pinochet, which enshrines the rights of private enterprise and property over and above access to public goods and political freedoms, thus protecting the free market from the intervention of democracy. In their attempts to quell the protests, the government offered a referendum on the constitution. Exactly a year on from the greatest protest in Chile's history, 51% of Chileans turned out to vote with 78% asking for a new constitution to be drafted by a democratically elected constituent assembly. The constituent assembly was chosen by the electorate in a second vote the following April, with an overwhelming majority of seats won by actors from the left of the political spectrum. They began to draft an unprecedentedly progressive text: it would have enshrined gender parity and reproductive rights, promised action on climate change, and recognised Chile’s indigenous peoples.

In November of 2021 Chileans went to the polls again, to choose their president. Right-wing populist José Antonio Kast was comprehensively beaten by the 35-year old left-wing populist candidate Gabriel Boric in the run-off vote. It seemed that the progressive movement in Chilean society, riding the tsunami of political energy released by the social explosion, was going to sweep away the fortifications of the neoliberal state so carefully constructed during Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Kast, whose German father was a member of the Nazi Party in the 1940s, aspired to become “Chile’s Bolsonaro.”

Within 6 months of Boric taking the reins, however, the proposed new constitution was roundly rejected in a second referendum; with compulsory voting, 62% of Chileans rejected the draft document. Boric had supported the new constitution from the outset and several of his campaign promises were dependent on its ratification.

A year into Boric's mandate, I arrived in Chile and asked people what they thought of the desirability and possibility of changing the country's constitution.

Rosa

Rosa is one of the bar staff at The Last Frontier, a craft beer place in the university town of Valdivia. She studied sociology at university. She’s forty-ish, diminutive and has a curt, no-nonsense manner.

For Rosa, the 1980 constitution is a symbol of General Pinochet’s neoliberal-authoritarian regime. She sees the need for a new constitution as matter of legitimacy; Pinochet’s constitution “was never agreed by the people. It was written in the times of dictatorship.”

Indeed, Pinochet did hold a referendum on his 1980 constitution, but given the campaign of terror he had been waging against Chilean society, and given that they treated any blank or spoiled ballots papers as votes for the constitution, it can hardly be seen today to have much democratic legitimacy.

Furthermore, the 1980 constitution “doesn't address the needs of people today… Many primary resources in Chile are privatized and that is quite unusual. Even the water we drink is privately owned and many people in Chile today still don't have access to safe drinking water.”

90% of Chile’s water is owned by private interests, such as the Suez group, a sanitation giant based in France, who may sell it to the highest bidder. Decades of unsustainable water use by agribusiness (Chile produced 220,000 metric tons of avocados in 2022) and the country’s enormous mining sector, amongst other industries, have irrevocably depleted aquifers and reduced rivers to trickling streams. Large parts of Chile are in the grip of a decade-long drought, with 67% of the population living under a water emergency, and Chileans pay far higher prices for water than any other citizens in the region. Almost every disgruntled Chilean that I spoke to used water ownership as an example of how public goods are insufficiently protected by Chilean law.

“The right to water” – graffiti in Valdivia created to share the draft constitution’s highlights with passers-by

Like many on the left, Rosa is embittered by the rejection of the draft constitution, by the sense of an opportunity missed. “They are going to write a new constitution, but it won't have the same legitimacy as the defeated draft. The most democratically created constitution was rejected and defeated.”

It is true that the rejected constitution was created in a radically democratic manner. The method by which it was drawn up has been described as an experiment with democracy in real-time. While this may be a strength from the perspective of legitimacy, it resulted in an unwieldy document that was easy for the right to attack and undermine so that it was democratically rejected. Yet, as the example of the 1980 constitution shows, a constitution does not need to have been created democratically in order to have a lasting effect on the shape of a society.

Gregorio & Paulina

I have been standing at the side of the highway in between Castro and Ancud, on the island of Chiloé, for only two minutes when a black 4x4 pulls over. I hop up to be greeted by two rosy-cheeked septuagenarians. Paulina is heavily made-up with a string of pearls sitting over her black sweater. Her husband Gregorio at the wheel wears a black beret over a brilliant white moustache. While she speaks in a loud sing-song voice, he speaks in soft, forgetful tones.

The road to Ancud shortly before sunrise

Paulina taught in a primary school for over 40 years before retiring at the start of the pandemic. She thinks that the constitution needs to be made “up to date” because it was written a long time ago and some of it “doesn't cover the world as it is today.” She thinks it particularly important that any new constitution protect the environment because “the wildlife of Chile is a gift for the whole world.” Gregorio, in the driver’s seat, keeps very quiet.

The rejected constitution was deeply concerned with the environment, with 13% of its articles addressing the environment. It would confer on nature “the right […] to the regeneration, maintenance and restoration of its functions and dynamic balances, which include natural cycles, ecosystems and biodiversity.” The impacts of climate change are particularly obvious in Chile. Today, desertification threatens not only the country’s wine industry but also its biodiversity.

Gregorio, an engineer, isn't so sure Chile needs a new constitution, but concedes, a little petulantly, that, “the politicians seem to want one.” It seems they both voted against the proposed draft of the new constitution and when I ask why Gregorio focuses on the members of the constituent assembly, describing them as “ill-mannered.” When I ask what he meant by that, he changes tac and explains that they did not have sufficient experience: “they were unqualified for the job, just ordinary people.” It is easy to see how a constituent assembly made up largely of environmentalists, feminists and communists chaired by an indigenous woman might not be palatable to these well-to-do Chileans, who kept their heads down during the ‘disappearances’ of the 1970s, prospered during the economic boom of the 80s and 90s, and may or may not be apologists for Pinochet’s reign of terror.

Paula complains of the constituent assembly, "they wanted scrap everything and start again. It was too violent, too aggressive." Neither of my hosts is keen to elaborate or give details as to which aspects of the proposed constitution they considered ‘violence,’ but its clauses included obligatory gender parity on the boards of public companies; that reproductive rights should be extended (abortion only currently being allowed in cases of threat to life and rape); and, that the state should respect the self-determination of indigenous groups and guarantee them their ancestral lands in perpetuity.

The constitutional crisis has become a proxy for Chile’s culture wars. The same energy that filled the constituent assembly with anti-establishment figures of the left, could end up propelling a toxic far-right populist such as Kast into the presidency.

Protesters gather peacefully on the Alameda in central Santiago on International Women's Day, many demanding access to elective abortion

Constanza

Constanza, dressed all in black with facial tattoos and a septum piercing – the uniform of young Santiaguiños, is tapping away on her laptop in the Museum of the Social Explosion, a collection of artwork and artefacts connected with the movement that ignited Chile in 2019.

It is no surprise that Constanza believes Pinochet’s constitution is “standing in the way of democracy.” But why does she think that the people rejected it?

“The right wing were always telling stories and spreading lies. Probably half of Chileans never read it [the draft constitution], but they believed what they heard.”

In the months leading up to last September’s vote on the draft constitution, misinformation about its contents abounded on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Many of these took the form of deliberate misinterpretations or exaggerations of clauses included in the document, which were therefore harder to refute. One popular claim seized on the draft’s assertion that Chile was a ‘plurinational’ state to suggest that the country was being broken apart. Posters were printed suggesting that abortions would be permitted up to 9 months and that the protection of private property was coming to an end. It is difficult to know how much of an impact these lies had on the electorate. Unusually for Chile, the final referendum to approve or reject the draft constitution was compulsory, thus including many more indifferent or apolitical voters who predictably preferred no change to an apparently highly controversial unknown.

Constanza points out that “the older people, those over the age of 40, grew up in an age of repression.” She thinks that as a result they “find it very difficult to hear young people talking about issues that for them are taboo, such as homosexuality or reproductive rights. So this too has put them off the new constitution. I don’t know what it is like in your country, but older people in Chile don't respect the ideas of younger people.”

She is describing very accurately the suspicion and lack of respect that I observed in Paulina and Gregory only days before. It is a neat picture: the reactionary older generations – haughty, repressed and fearful – unite to crush the progress of the youth and maintain the grey status quo. It is, however, worth noting that the authors of the draft constitution were not all particularly young; 60% of the constituent members were over the age of 40. More importantly, it was not only the Paulinas and the Gregorios who voted to reject; many young people voted to reject the draft constitution, as did many indigenous communities.

She also complains about the misconceptions regarding the make-up of the constituent assembly. “They heard that the constituent assembly were not experienced and so they didn't trust them, but it was not true, there were many lawyers involved in writing the constitution.”

It is true that the constituent assembly was not only very democratic, but also contained many objectively well-qualified and talented people. However, its workings were not characterised by harmony and collaboration. The right-wing rump were not needed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority required for any additions to the draft document and were thus alternately trampled and ignored, which did not stop them from passing unflattering anecdotes and scare stories to a hostile press. Long before the draft document was available to read, many Chileans must already have decided that it was not the constitution for them.

Carolina & Joaquín

Carolina runs a guest house in the town of Machalí, an hour south of Santiago by car, on the edge of the Andean cordillera and just a few miles from the world’s largest underground copper mine, El Teniente. Joaquín is her neighbour and boyfriend.

“We used to go swimming in the river after school.” - Carolina remembers growing up in the mining town of Coya in the 70s and 80s before climate change and unsustainable water usage made the area dangerously dry

They are both concerned about the effects of climate change in their region, which has witnessed devastating forest fires in recent years. They both voted for Boric at the presidential run-off, but while he voted for the proposed constitution, she voted to reject.

Joaquín explains, “we need a new constitution but there are many competing interests that divide the people and so impede the process. For example, the mining industry: our economy needs copper, but we also need a healthy environment.”

Chile’s copper mining industry makes up 15% of its GDP and the role of mining is set to increase with the race on to increase lithium production and match global demand. Meanwhile, the water usage of the mining sector is placing an unbearable strain on ecosystems.

He felt that the proposed constitution would have empowered the state to reign in private companies; she thought Chile could do better. She reasons, “If the constitution is going to last, it has to represent the people of Chile, a majority of people, and this text was a bit ahead of its time.”

Who knows when it will be the time to listen to those suffering under environmental, racial, gender-based and economic injustices in the country.

Despite the disappointment of the progressive element in Chilean society, there seems a strong likelihood that the 1980 constitution is on the way out. Congress – finely balanced between left-wing and right-wing coalitions – has turned away from direct democracy to a more hybrid approach, appointing a group of experts who will draft a new text according to twelve institutional bases agreed upon by lawmakers. This draft will be handed to a directly-elected ‘constitutional council’ of fifty to edit, before a final referendum in December of this year.

Is Gustavo Petro offering ‘renewed hope’ to Colombians?

Colombia’s left-wing president has had a busy first seven months in office and, after his government began negotiations with armed groups, secretary-general of the UN António Guterres has claimed there is “renewed hope” for peace and prosperity in the troubled country as it struggles to emerge from over half a century of war. However, as I found out, both Petro’s supporters and his detractors see a long and treacherous road ahead.

In June of 2022 Gustavo Petro Urrego was elected the 34th president of Colombia. It was his third run for what is surely one of the hardest jobs on the planet. Born in the Caribbean department of Bolívar in 1960, Petro moved with his family to the capital soon after, and it was near Bogotá, in the salt-mining town of Zipaquirá, that Petro began his decade-long career as a member of the M-19, an armed group calling for more democratic elections and redistribution of wealth. Far from hiding out in the jungle or terrorizing farmers with landmines, Colombia’s future president was working for the rights of displaced Colombians living in insecure and unregistered accommodation, though he was imprisoned for a year and a half. When the M-19 demilitarized in 1990, he studied economics in Colombia and Belgium before being elected senator and rising to fame by exposing the ‘false positives’ scandal (in which the government of Alvaro Uribe paid army officers to kidnap and murder around 6,400 civilians, dressing them up as guerrilla fighters in order to be seen to be winning the war). He endured a catastrophic term as mayor of Bogotá during which a dispute with binmen led to rubbish piling up in the streets and he was later impeached, before being reinstated by the supreme court. After 2015, he devoted himself to trying to become Colombia’s president, founding a coalition of left and centre-left parties, Historic Pact for Colombia, in 2021 to propel himself to power.

In 2022, Petro campaigned on an ambitious platform of free higher education for all, expanding public healthcare, promoting gender and ethnic equality, land reform, improved environmental protection (including ending new contracts for fossil fuel exploration), investment in green energy, and bringing total peace to a country still beset by drug cartels, right-wing paramilitary groups and left-wing guerrillas. All this was to be paid for by progressive taxation on higher earners, big business and the church.

Competing in the run-off against Rodolfo Hernandez, a businessman whose campaign was largely based on him doing dances on TikTok and talking vaguely about tackling corruption, he only won by a whisker (earning 50.44%). It is safe to say, then, that many Colombians were sceptical, even if a majority of the 20-odd million voters did support him at the ballot box.

Rodolfo Hernandez, who describes himself as the “King of TikiTok,” famously declared that he admired Adolf Hitler - only later to clarify that he had meant to say Albert Einstein

In the first months of his administration, he has managed to pass ambitious tax reforms with amendments that weaken but by no means neuter the legislation; while he lost about 20% of the projected revenue increase, higher taxes for the highest earners and companies extracting fossil fuels have put an extra $4 billion in the government’s kitty which they propose to use to expand the welfare state. It remains to be seen how successful the state will be in collecting this revenue. He has also passed legislation that allows the government to begin peace negotiations (but not a truce) with the dogmatic ELN (National Liberation Army), as well as right-wing paramilitary groups and drug cartels. He was always going to be busy, especially given that presidential terms are four years with no right of re-election (although that didn’t stop Alvaro Uribe).

Now the government’s proposed health system reform is on the agenda and it seems the wheels might be coming off Petro’s fragile coalition. Meanwhile, inflation rose for the ninth consecutive month, hitting 13.28%. Having won his mandate with a fraction over half of the popular vote, Petro’s approval dipped to 40% last month according to a poll by Invamer.

Six months after he took office, I set out to ask an entirely unrepresentative, but hopefully broad selection of Colombians what they think of their president, how his administration is faring so far and his ability to overcome the challenges faced by the country. The people who shared their opinions with me did not all agree about what those problems were, but several clear themes emerged as well as some interesting outliers. I believe all the people I spoke to had Spanish as their first language, though there are at least sixty languages spoken in the ethnically diverse republic. The majority of the people I spoke to were university-educated, more than half were men, and most are based in cities far from the violence that blights rural Colombia. Below is a selection of just some of these conversations.

Antonio, 39, grew up near Medellin, but until a year ago he lived in the enormous and sparsely populated grassland state of Meta, where he drove a milk truck, before he came to Bogotá in order to care for his mother. He now works as security for a bar in the historic La Candelaria neighbourhood.

This government has “new faces, but it’s the same people. Politics is like an escalator that keeps going around. The politicians come to power, they sell us lies and they take our money.” Antonio has a point here; the lack of any clear majority in congress necessitates a very broad coalition between Petro’s Historic Pact and the traditional parties many of whose leaders are seen, rightly, as corrupt. Petro risks compromising his own credibility by working with these actors to pass legislation.

Antonio’s experience of living in Meta, parts of which are still dominated by FARC dissidents who refused to lay down their arms after 2016, has led him to be sceptical about the peace process. “The government says the guerrillas have gone, but if you go to San José del Guaviare [in Meta], there they are. I have seen them with my own eyes. I have worked for them. But the government says they don’t exist.”

“They [the guerrillas] come and collect taxes. It might be two million pesos [about £350], it might be more. […] If you pay the money then there are no problems and you go on living your life, but if you don’t want to pay or you can’t pay, you better get out of there or they will fuck you.”

Whilst it is generally acknowledged that groups such as the FARC dissidents and the ELN are still active in many parts of the country, Antonio’s doubts about the possibility of demobilization where there is so much easy money to be made from organised crime is something that came up in many conversations.

Ricardo, 62, is a systems engineer from Aracataca, the birthplace of Nobel prize winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is much more interested in getting me to wear a Marimonda mask that is typical of Barranquilla carnival, but he does agree to share his opinions on politics in the end.

He argues that Petro must be given at least a year to get his reforms under way before he is judged. Nevertheless, he believes that some of Petro’s initial moves, such as resumption of diplomatic relations with Venezuela and tax reform, bode well.

He is enthusiastic about “putting the divisions of the past and this failed drug war behind us,” but concedes that Petro has “inherited a polarised country.” He thinks this administration has the chance to “build an inclusive society,” by investing in “education, infrastructure and the green economy.” For Ricardo, the great challenge and risk is the fragile coalition that the government has built with other parties in congress.

Costeños (people from the coast) mock cachacos (people from the interior/the elite) by wearing a mask of a man with a penis on his face; Petro is the first costeño president for half a century

Andrés, 25, is a masters student in Public Policy and an activist for the right wing Democratic Centre party of former president and strongman Alvaro Uribe. I have a hard time interpreting his gomelo drawl, but this is my best shot.

He applauds the beginnings of negotiations for a peace with the National Liberation Army (ELN) and is supportive of how the administration is giving greater representation to members of indigenous communities.

Andrés thinks the first year is crucial as a test of Petro’s legitimacy, but he simultaneously holds that Petro is “doomed to failure […] because of the internal conflicts in his party and the parties he has allied with [through his Historic Pact coalition].” Meanwhile, he thinks Petro’s cabinet, to which he has appointed ministers from across the political spectrum, could also be an Achilles heel for the administration.

Whilst he credits Petro with being the first president of Colombia who represents and works for marginalised communities, he does not think Petro has shown the leadership qualities necessary to bring the nation together. He points to the “turbulence and litigation” of Petro’s time as mayor of the capital as evidence that “this guy does not know how to govern.”

He was one of the few people I spoke to who was upset by Petro’s use of tweets to direct the national conversation, or “governing by twitter.” In particular, Andrés thinks Petro is at risk of becoming a laughing stock due to his rash behaviour online: making incorrect claims and criticising the governments of neighbouring countries (the parliament of Peru recently voted to make Petro a persona non grata in the neighbouring country for his vociferous support for deposed and imprisoned ex-president Pedro Castillo). This behaviour seems particularly rash to Andrés because Colombia is very much in need of foreign direct investment if he is to bring about the green revolution that he has promised to instigate.

Mafe, is an anthropologist and primary school teacher from Bogotá. She coordinates international volunteers working with the YMCA, the same project I worked on four years ago, although we only had the pleasure of meeting recently.

She is very hopeful about the new administration, but has doubts about Petro’s leadership capabilities. She sees Petro as “supremely stubborn […] which is part of what has brought him to where he is,” but could also be a weakness.

For her, this administration represents a chance to “give a voice to those who historically haven’t had one in our country,” after fifty years of worsening inequality. She sees the creation of a ministry for equality as a success, but waits to see if this will deliver real change.

The overarching challenge that Mafe sees is the division within the country and the long-held habit of defending ones traditions and way of life with violence. She points out that the election was exceptionally close and suggests that many people voted more out of opposition to the other candidate than out of support for the candidate they chose: the anti-Petristas, who wanted anyone but Petro, and the anti-Uribistas, who wanted anyone but another belligerent, right-wing leader in the mould of Alvaro Uribe.

Having composed a cabinet not only ethnically and socially diverse, but diverse in its politics, he is now struggling to control ministers. The minister for the environment and the chancellor have repeatedly contradicted one another in recent months on the question of whether the current administration will be handing out any more contracts for fossil fuel exploration. Mafe is worried that the recent sacking of the centre-left health minister, Alejandro Gaviria, indicates Petro is losing experienced and qualified members of government in preference for ideological fealty. Furthermore, she sees a great risk that if Petro’s presidency is seen as a failure and his successor undoes or discredits the reforms, this could see the end of Colombia’s experiment with progressive or left-leaning leadership for a generation.

Mafe with the lovely YMCA volunteers and teachers at Colegio Fe y Alegría Torquigua, Bogotá

José Luis, a taxi driver in Barranquilla, lived in Miami for 16 years and his two children still live in the US. He returned to Colombia after his wife died six years ago. He wanted to be around people he could banter with: people who understood him. He also had problems with his immigration status in the US after he was three times stopped whilst drink driving. Our conversation may indicate more than anything else what a breeding ground for violent, reactionary politics the Floridian metropolis has become. But it also points to the depth of division in Colombian society and the ignorance that underwrites it.

"Someone needs to put a bullet in the president. Someone needs to get rid of him.”

I’m not sure how literal he is being, but I ask him if he doesn’t think that killing elected officials might make the country’s problems worse. In reply, he asserts that Petro was not democratically elected, but paid to become president, though he is not sure who Petro paid.

He sees Petro’s progressive politics as a moral threat. In particular, he is concerned about the rise of recreational drug use in Colombia. Possession of small quantities of drugs such as cocaine and marijuana has been decriminalized in Colombia, but Petro has indicated he would like to go further, recently giving a speech at the UN in which he asked, “Which is more toxic to humans: cocaine, coal, or oil?”

“It is very hard to start taking drugs with cocaine, although some do, but it's more common to start with marijuana. It is the gateway to misery.” He concedes,  “I know people who are forty or so and they smoke marijuana without taking it further, but young people can't help themselves."

I ask what problems the country faces, aside from drug use. “We have so much corruption in this country […] and politicians who are lying to the people, like your Boris did with the separation [Brexit].” Whilst Petro has not yet been accused to printing lies on the side of a bus, it is not hard to see how the sheer number of commitments he made on the campaign trail will lead to disillusionment when inevitably many of these are side-lined. Meanwhile, Petro is struggling to keep his own name out of the mud, recently calling for the attorney general’s office to investigate his son, Nicolas Petro, after allegations of corruption relating to the peace process.

José Luis is also upset by the legalization of abortion. "This will incite young people to have sex. Girls who are 13 and 14 will have sex and then get an abortion and that's it. The president is corrupting society." Although this change came about before Petro was elected, as a result of a supreme court decision, there must be many others in Colombia who, not unjustifiably, suspect that their conservative values are under threat.

Which came first, Miami or the reactionary right?

Daniela, 25, is a project manager working in environmental education.

She thinks Petro is very well qualified for his role because “he walked a long road to get there.” She also respects that he has “struggled for his dreams and he has achieved the impossible,” but she is left feeling disillusioned by perceived cronyism and the government’s failure to fulfil the campaign promise to dismantle ESMAD, the Colombian riot police who Human Rights Watch accuse of “killings […] beatings, sexual abuse, and arbitrary detention of demonstrators and bystanders.” Daniela describes them as a “band of assassins,” and believes the government reforms to the institution are merely superficial.

She is doubtful Petro can achieve the structural changes he has promised in a four-year term, and she doesn’t necessarily want him to either: “Every stone or brick is important when you are building a house, so you must go carefully and slowly.”

“Colombia has always been lacking in its attention to environmental issues and has underinvested in environmental protection, in education about the environment, and also in terms of science. This will take many years to achieve. Another big, big, big challenge is the transition to renewable energy.”

With an eye on the potential for Petro’s progressive ideas to deepen division in society, Daniela is concerned to see how the government will seek take care of those “communities who rely for their livelihoods on fossil fuel extraction industries.”

It is clear from all of these conversations that few in Colombia is getting carried away; they feel the weight of their history and expect no quick fixes. For Petro’s supporters, the elation of victory last summer has long passed. His enemies watch the chaos and indiscipline of his cabinet with satisfaction, and are deploying disinformation about Petro’s drug policy and democratic legitimacy with some success. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that, whether desirable or not, the structural changes he has argued for will not come to pass inside his presidential term. Nevertheless, the president still seems to have the initiative. Petro does not seem to have developed the kind of cult of personality that for example followers of Mexico’s president AMLO or Bolivia’s possibly soon to be president again ex-president Evo Morales. Most Colombians seem simply too worldly to fall for that kind of thing. Hope there certainly is, but a wary hope, a cautious hope.

Walking Mexico’s volcanoes

There are a lot of volcanoes in Mexico. The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, running east-west across southern-central Mexico, has formed over millions of years at the edge of the North American plate, where it meets and drags beneath it the Rivera and Cocos plates. As these plates undergo subduction (where the more dense of two converging plates dives beneath the other) rock melts and becomes magma. The proximity of this magma to the Earth’s surface, creates the perfect conditions for volcanic activity. Depending on how you define them and who you ask, Mexico has between thirteen and thirty-five Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) volcanoes (tending to be lower owing to their enormous age). There are a further thirty-three volcanoes that emerged during the Holocene epoch, or since the end of the last ice age. Twenty-six of Mexico’s Holocene volcanoes have a prominence of over 1,500 metres.

The Smithsonian Institute identifies five-hundred and sixty active volcanoes in the world today, forty-eight of which are found in Mexico

I had always wanted to see an active, smoking volcano up close, and the three-month trip to Mexico I was planning seemed the perfect opportunity. A few searches online revealed that this was something eminently doable, that one didn’t need to be an expert mountaineer to get up a Mexican volcano. The volcanoes were easily accessible from major cities. All the travel bloggers were doing it. They made it sound rather easy actually. At an overpriced brewery on Blackhorse Road in Walthamstow, on a torrential, October night, I recruited Farhan. Farhan seemed a good hiking partner: someone who prefers to be led by the evidence, at least as fit as me, and perhaps most importantly, a cool head if we got into a difficult situation.

Given the sheer number of earth-rumbling, fire-breathing volcanoes in the region it is unsurprising that pre-Hispanic cultures in Mesoamerica equated the mountains with gods, and were quite sensible to identify them with the natural forces that determined to a great extent their survival.

For the many Mesoamerican peoples that lived in and under the Aztec empire until 1521 AD, volcanoes held great spiritual and cosmological significance. In a dry climate, volcanoes were seen to control the vital element of water. As such, prayers and offerings were made at volcanoes associated with either Matlalcueye, the goddess of water, rivers and the sea, or Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility. If today you go to the slopes of Tetlalmanche, a Pleistocene volcano on the outskirts of Mexico City, you can still see sacred rites being performed in request of rain. You may also see teams of men cutting back vegetation to prevent the fires that are becoming increasingly common and threaten the hastily constructed neighbourhoods that lap the foot of the mountain.

View from the cable car that takes you to the foot of Tetlalmanche Volcano, Iztapalapa (Mexico City)

Catching a lift 2 hours out of Mexico City, I met Farhan in the zócalo (central plaza) of Puebla de Zaragoza. We would use the colonial city as the base from which to attempt two volcanoes: first an acclimatization hike up La Malinche (4,461 metres) before attempting the more challenging Iztaccíhuatl (5,230 metres). Farhan had consulted two local doctors about the advisability of high altitude trekking whilst carrying an ear infection and had been given two contradictory opinions, so La Malinche would also have to decide for us which doctor was correct.  

La Malinche emerges from the plain like a great, angry pimple 35 km to the north-east of Puebla

When Hernán Cortés defeated the Mayan Chontals and their obsidian arrows and axes at the Battle of Centla on Mexico’s Gulf Coast in 1519 AD, he received a tribute of nineteen enslaved women. The volcano known as La Malinche takes its name from one of these women. Cortés, a down at heel nobleman from the driest, most forgotten corner of Castile, had defied the orders of the Spanish crown, to desist his incursions into the mainland, and was harnessing incredible ambition, cunning and greed, on his way to a rapid and improbable victory over the brutal and feared empire of the Mejica, more commonly known as the Aztecs. Malinche, also known as Malintzin, or sometimes Doña Marina, had a gift for languages and intrigue.  She quickly rose to become Cortés’ mistress, translator, a mediator with the Aztecs, a strategist and a spy whose contributions would determine the course of his campaign against the imperial city of Tenochtitlan.  

View from La Malinche. Cortés passed La Malinche volcano on its north side while travelling through the land of the fierce Tlaxcalans, one of the few tribes not to have been subjugated by Moctezuma’s Aztecs

In the suburbs of modern-day Puebla, the ancient city of Cholula claims to be home to the largest pyramid in the world as measured by mass, though the pyramid is covered in earth and only 20th century archaeological intervention revealed that it was more than just a hill. At Cholula, Cortés inflicted the first of several massacres that would deliver the collapse of the hierarchical societies that predominated in pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. After a tip off from Malinche, who claimed to have been warned to leave town to avoid an ambush by Aztec forces, Cortés planned an ambush of his own. Inviting the local chieftains into the central square, at a given signal Cortés had them all killed. He then withdrew from the city and allowed the Tonantzin warriors who had been accompanying his force since Veracruz to destroy the city and carry off its inhabitants into slavery. It is quite credible that the Aztecs might have been planning an ambush with the help of the Cholulans, but it seems equally likely that Cortés fabricated the information to have a pretext to do away with his untrustrworthy hosts and send a strong message to Moctezuma before his march on the imperial capital. It is also worth considering that Malinche may have had her own motives to want the Cholulan booty transferred into the hands of her kinsmen whilst also burnishing her own reputation with the Spanish. Mexican art has often interpreted Malinche as the ultimate temptress and the embodiment of treachery, but more recent analysis has helped us to see Malinche as a woman twice colonised and enslaved, faced with a set of impossible choices, who nevertheless, with tenacity and phenomenal talent, managed to leave a huge mark on the history of her continent

These days many Mexicans enjoy taking a day’s walk up her volcano. Several major cities in Mexico lying at over 2,000 metres above sea level, this is something many Mexicans are acclimated to. In this they are accompanied by mountain dogs who stretch themselves out after frosty nights on the hillside and then chaperone their humans up and down ensuring that no-one comes to any harm.

A Mexican mountain mutt

We set of before dawn. On the bus to Apinzaco, a dry, little staging-post on the road to Veracruz, Farhan gave up his seat to a cauldron-shaped old lady with a full set of silver teeth who gave a knowing laugh when I told her we were planning to climb the volcano. We teamed up with a French couple to hire a private van to reach the start of the trail as the sun was getting up into the sky. Marching through pine forest over frosty ground, but were soon pulling off layers. We stopped to watch a white-eared hummingbird flit and then sit in a bush by the path. Having kitted ourselves out with proper boots, waterproofs, quick-drying underlayers and a camelbak ‘3-litre reservoir’ for the hike, we were affronted to see Mexican teens jogging up the hill in jeans and hoodies and not apparently carrying any water. As we neared the treeline, we looked behind us and saw the great green carpet of pine below us and beyond it the yellow plain. Cortés and his band of 300 soldiers of fortune, plus an escort of Tlaxcalan and Tonantzin warriors eager to contribute to the downfall of their hated adversaries the Mejica, came this way on their march to Tizatlán and then to Cholula. Perhaps the Spaniards walked in thick pine forest, constantly fearing ambush from hostile tribes or betrayal by their chaperones, occasionally glimpsing the snowy peak through the canopy as it rose imperiously two kilometres above them.

Cortes exploited the hatred of subjugated tribes to destabilise the Aztec Empire

Farhan, having arrived in Mexico more recently, was less acclimatised than I was and perhaps a bit alarmed by how hard it was for him to breathe once we got over 4,000 metres, or even before that. We achieved the false peak after 3 hours, but the final three hundred metres to the true peak, over a field of boulders festooned with snow and ice took us another hour and a half. Diego, a hiker from Pachuca, Hidalgo, declared on summitting, to his smartphone, “This is my spiritual home, where I feel most alive.” The peak, when we finally reached it gave a toe-tingling view down the baroque southern face as well as a smoky outline of Popocatepetl and Iztaccíhuatl in the west. After slip-sliding down the loose volcanic sands we had managed to avoid on the way up, we raced to the carpark for the last bus back to Apinzaco. The next day, my thighs were as heavy and stiff as tree trunks, but Farhan’s ear had unblocked itself.

Mexico’s most emblematic volcanoes, Popocatépetl (Popo-ca-TE-pet-ul) and Iztaccíhuatl (Ist-a-SEE-wat-ul) stand, or lie, or kneel, side by side, 45 miles to the south-east of Mexico City, the site of Tenochtitlan, and almost as far to the north-west of Puebla. After a day of rest and carb-loading, it was to the Izta-Popo National Park that we headed for our next challenge.

Popocatepetl and Iztaccíhuatl are the 2nd and 3rd highest volcanoes in Mexico

We had hired two guides for the two-day trip: the softly-spoken Santiago, the leader, a small and wiry guy of 30-odd with a decidedly lopsided face that sprouted thick, short hairs at random; and Misael, apparently an experienced mountain guide, described by Santiago as his “mountain father.” To be honest, Misael did not look like he was necessarily going to be able to get up to 5,230 metres. He looked about 60 and like he was used to spending a lot of time on the sofa. He smiled constantly and barely spoke, though when he did he mumbled through his teeth in Spanish I could barely understand, and squinted as though he were suffering from snow-blindness.

Before driving to the National Park, we made a stop at the site of Cortés famous massacre of the probably-scheming Cholulans. Fifty-five years after the slaughter, the Spanish colonisers, as was their wont, began to build a church atop the temple mound of the vanquished city. The Church of Our Lady of Remedies, which is decorated with 24-carat gold leaf inside and painted sunflower yellow outside, affords some decent views, but our volcanoes were lost in smog. Farhan and I bought postcards, Santiago bought some chapulines (grasshoppers deep-fried with garlic and spices) for a mountain snack. We got in the stifling hot car and set off.

Cortés climbed to over 3000 metres to pass between the two volcanoes

After leaving the paved road it is a 2-hour drive on a dirt track to reach Paso Cortés, these days a car park. We hop out of the car and stand in the thin air peering into the mist at the faint outline of Popocatepetl. We can feel its massive presence, but can barely see it. Little grey birds with bright-yellow eyes nip and bob on the wind around our feet as we stand around discussing the likelihood we’ll see a coyote, an eagle or a volcano rabbit. In this cold and desolate car park a mile above the valley floor, a women and a man are having a party in the cab of a truck. There is a blanket thrown over the back of the cab, perhaps to prevent anyone from seeing what they are up to in there (we are the only other people around). Suddenly, the car stereo is blasting Killer by Michael Jackson and the man jumps out of the passenger door trailed by howls of laughter. In the chill west wind the man begins to dance, using a pine sapling as a pole. Hitching his left leg it seems for a moment that he intends to climb the pole (it clearly will not bear his weight). His leg comes down and he compromises by stripping his tight, nylon t-shirt to reveal a broad, round belly. He laughs, but his expression is plaintive as he slaps his chest in a Tarzan routine. His dare, or penance, apparently completed, he disappears back into the cab, slams the door, and MJ’s voice is lost in the rippling wind. I wonder, did Malinche ever exercise this kind power over Cortés?

For fear of an ambush, Cortés and his bloodthirsty gang chose to ignore the directions they had been given to reach Tenochtitlan

Owing to the continual eruptions and emissions of dangerous gases, increasing after 1994, there is a strict prohibition on attempting to climb Popocatepetl. During his march to conquer the Valley of Mexico in 1519, Cortés, sent ten brave men to do just that, “charging them to use every endeavour to ascend the mountain and find out the cause of that smoke, whence and how it was produced.” His men turned back owing to “the whirlwinds of ashes that swept over it, and also because they found the cold above insupportable.” Cortés and his miniature army passed right between the two stratovolcanoes on his way to meet the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and has given his name to the saddle that joins the volcanoes at 3,400 metres elevation.

Iztaccíhuatl, rising at the northern end of the Paso Cortés, is composed of six cones produced by eruptions throughout its active period. These cones produce the silhouette that is said to resemble a reclining woman: the feet, the knees, the breast, the neck, the ear, and the head. We planned to go around the feet and ascend the knees, then cross the glacier (the belly) to the highest summit, the breast.

Iztaccíhuatl is also known as La Mujer Dormida (the sleeping woman)

It's a further half hour drive along a sandy track to La Joyita, the campsite with views of both summits, though Iztaccíhuatl is lost in the clouds when we arrive. As we build our tents, then take lessons on crampons, ice-axes and how to dig a poo-hole, Popocatepetl grumbles several times and then coughs. A plume of grey-white, like goose down, spills into the pale blue dusk and drifts, expanding as it reaches out, and stretching into a noodle in the sky. We have already put on all of our layers just to stand outside and watch the sunset, so the news from Misael that he expects -16 degrees centigrade on the summit fills me with some trepidation. Farhan, meanwhile, has been doing some googling and begins to explain, “There is an altitude at which the oxygen pressure is insufficient to sustain human life for an extended time span.” I am beginning to have doubts. He goes on, “At high altitude, in order to increase the concentration of red blood cells in the blood, your body will reduce the volume of blood in circulation, sometimes by up to 20%, and your resting heart rate will increase by up to 30%.” We eat several pot noodles to try and get warm before we climb into our sleeping bags and lay down to sleep at the unusual hour of 7.30pm.

Farhan looks for Iztaccíhuatl in the mist

I don't sleep more than half an hour in the hot squish of the tent, where I listen to mice skittering around outside. I lie on my arms and imagine the volume of my blood draining away by 20% and thickening, coagulating. On the wind I think I hear a howl, and then another, until there must be five or six. I imagine coyotes catching our scent on the stiff breeze. I listen to my heart-beat. I listen to someone retching outside.

I am awake and ready to go before my alarm rings at midnight and coffee is boiled by half-past midnight. We set off at 1am, in the light of a half-moon, tramping down paths of frosted dune grass and frozen thistles. For three hours we walk in a secret world of harsh beauty: the blue-black sky and against it silhouetted sharp crags and fells, and the moonlit streaks of purplish-white snow; the purple mountain Popocatepetl wreathed in cloud and attended by expectant stars; and, far below, Puebla and Amecameca on the valley floor. We have the eagle's view and I an eagle-like sense of power.

Popocatepetl before dawn

As we pass el pie (the foot), the wind becomes incisive but we keep warm by moving forward and the walking is a joy. Until it isn't. The downhill stretch between the 4th and 5th rest-stop exposes us to a new wind that rifles through our layers with alarming ease. Banging our hands and feet together is simply not working any longer. Thus, we are relieved to reach the mountain refuge at about 4.30am, containing several cold-bitten walkers, and some rather bold, big-eared mice. We find that the water in our bottles has turned to slushy ice while the tube to my camelbak is frozen stiff. The next stretch of the walk will be the most brutal and also the most sublime, a turning point where the reality of the physical challenge asserts itself and we push ourselves to new limits.

The Aztecs told a charming story about how these volcanoes came to be. Iztaccíhuatl was an Aztec princess who fell in love with a warrior in her father’s army named Popoca. Her father opposed the match and then sent Popoca away to war in Oaxaca, suggesting that they could marry when Popoca returned. Enemies of Popoca then sent a message to the king that Popoca had died in battle. When she heard the news, Iztaccíhuatl lay down and died of grief. Popoca returned alive, however, and finding his beloved dead he carried her body outside the city and laid it down on a burial mound he had had built. He knelt beside her with a torch keeping watch. The gods were moved by Popoca’s devotion and they turned the lovers into mountains, covering each with snow. The flames and ash that come from Popocatepetl show that the warrior is still watching over the body of his lover. In another version of the story, Popoca got into an argument over Iztaccíhuatl with the warrior Xinantecatl (represented by the volcano more commonly known as Nevado de Toluca). Popoca became so angry that he beheaded Xinantecatl with a piece of ice, explaining the flat crater rim of that volcano.

I advise taking a guide to avoid getting lost in the mist, as I did, at the flat-ish crater rim of Nevado de Toluca

There is not much resembling a trail for the ascent to la rodilla (the knee), more a sand-rubble slope, what our guides describe as arenal (sandpit) and Farhan calls choss. I am full of energy, but we find ourselves stopping more regularly to catch our breath at this altitude while the temperature continues to drop. Knowing that this is the most challenging section of the ascent, I am driving forwards, almost manic in my determination to reach the next checkpoint, get to a level patch or some shelter from the wind. Yet Santiago, our guide, keeps reminding us that we'll need half of our energy for the way down. The other guide, Misael, has been lagging behind for some time, and since he is not using his head torch several times we almost or totally lose sight of his black silhouette in the cascades of black boulders.

"Misa! Misa!" calls Santiago into the whistling dark, and always Misa picks his way forward and reaches us again before we keep moving. It becomes necessary to drink the slushy electrolytes that we are carrying and also to get some sugar in our blood, but this comes at the high price of exposing cheeks and lips to the freezing cold air, followed by brain freeze. It is small consolation that our guides don’t seem to be finding the going much easier than we are. The whistling and the dark become cruel and my thoughts land unkindly; I struggle to focus on my surroundings and began reliving past humiliations and failures. Dawn is near, but not nearly near enough. I long for the sun, but it seems too far away from this moment.

The only thing to do is to keep moving forward. And moving forward brings rewards with some fun scrambling as we pass a cross that marks 5,000 metres above sea level. When we look behind and see both the climb we have just achieved and Popocatepetl squatting in the pre-dawn, I feel a surge of amazement and pride, and yet I realise that I am struggling to stay calm. In hindsight, I think I was on the edge of shock or panic from the cold. Though my extremities were no longer numb, my core temperature seemed to be dropping. In that moment, I stop to scan the world below me, above me. In the west, the sky refracts and splits the light into ribbons of blue, purple, pink, the faintest mossy green. To our left, an inch of radioactive yellow, tragically bright it seems to me, a colour I have never seen before, separates the dull earth from the icy blue above. The sense of expectation is almost unbearable. Slowly, into this inch of yellow, a drop of the purest orange pushes its way and soon became a whole disk sailing upwards through a veil of yellow. When it reaches the outer edge of the blue sky, it breaks and leaks through like sand falling upwards through an hourglass.

"Sick!" cries out Farhan.

"Fuck that's cool!" I crow.

And then, both together, "Woooow!"

At the same moment that the world is being raked by this long-awaited light, the volcano spumes a billowing, grey-brown cloud, which seems to grow and evolve as it rises hundreds of metres in the air.

Farhan, who has the knack of taking photos without removing his gloves, gets out his phone. Every contour of this terrible fist of particulate matter is lit from below and revealed to us in high definition. And even as I howl in delight and coo in appreciation of this wonder, I feel my body is reaching its limits. The wind is savagely whipping around us, and I am hopping around increasingly manic and desperate for the sun to find me and warm me, but it is still too weak. My head feels light. My bowels assert that an evacuation is necessary. This does not suit me and I breathe deeply to try to regain control of my body which seems to be going haywire.

For several long moments we stare. The cloud rising from the volcano drifts north-east and transforms from a fist to a great, blind snake opening its mouth to swallow the sun. After a few precious moments, the sun is consumed in the now-black cloud. Darkness returns. The only thing to do is to keep moving forward along the ridge towards the glacier.

Popocatepetl after dawn

For the next two hours I feel I am battling to regain control of my body. Aided by the sun’s warmth, I slowly re-enter myself and recover some of my calm. Yet, several times I seem to have regained my composure only to find once again that my body was collapsing on me, or was it my mind? I knew I could keep going, but because of adrenaline rather than determination. I know that I needed to go slow in order to acclimatise, but I want to move fast in the hope of warming up. Around 8am, we reach the glacier. I somehow muster the concentration and strength to secure my crampons and this feels like the hardest thing I have done so far, an incredible achievement. Mind over matter. I looked at Farhan.

He looks broken, but his spirit is undimmed, “This next bit will be easy!”

Taking it all in

I have regained enough composure after the initial shock of altitude and cold to notice that Santiago seems to be struggling even more than we are. He confesses that he was sick in the night (now I remember hearing retching between all the other sounds that ruined my sleep), but says he is okay to go on for now.

We crunch our way down the glittering glacier with our crampons and piolets, each grimly focused on his own breathing. At the bottom, Santiago begins to retch again. In between gasps, he seems to be muttering something, “g-g-grass-hoppers!”

Misael, the barrel-chested sexagenarian who had been holding us up all morning, takes the lead and now reveals his stamina. We would let Santiago rest and pick him up again on the way back past. We cross the bottom of the glacier and ascend another sand-rubble track to attain the ridge below the peak. For the first time since 3am it is getting warm inside my jacket, but at this moment, a half-hour from the summit, I realise with awful certainty that there is a limit to mind over matter. I grab some tissues from Farhan and ran off down a loose stony slope, La Malinche standing up out of the haze 60 miles in front of me, and not having time to reach cover, let alone dig a poo hole, have to relieve myself rather publicly. (Apologies to the one or two walkers who were behind me and probably didn’t expect to walk for 8 hours into the wilderness to see a man defecating on a pile of stones.)

Is this what the death zone feels like?

After this incident, relieved but reduced, I continue towards the summit. I can see Farhan and Misael up on la pechuga (the breast): little miniatures striding around in attitudes of triumph. Another 30 minutes trudging forward on a crumbling and rather ambiguous track, with hundreds of feet to fall, I join them at 5,230 metres. We take our photos and share our high-fives, amazed at how much we have suffered in a few short hours to reach this square of ground. It having taken 9 hours to reach the peak and there being only 8 hours left of daylight, we don’t hang about too long up there.

Victory! But at what cost?

Indeed, even our sense of victory didn’t last long. Scuttling back down the ridge where an hour earlier we had left Santiago, Farhan went over on his ankle. Now we had two walking wounded. Farhan was ginger on his left foot and it was clear the slippery downhill sections would be treacherous for him. Meanwhile, Santiago leant so close to the ground as he walked that it was as if here were looking for lost jewellery. We emptied Santi’s bags and divided the contents. The handful of other walkers on the mountain soon left us behind. Most of the next six hours of walking were purgatorial. The sun went away again; wet, cold cloud assailed us; Farhan bravely shuffled forward on his ruined ankle. Luckily, as we lost some altitude, Santiago recovered a little. We needed almost all of the daylight available to get back to our dusty, disconsolate campground and packed up the tents in silence. Despite the relief of making it back and the pride at having achieved our mission and overcome challenges in the process, in that moment, I just wanted to get as far away from the mountain as possible. Unfortunately, we had another 2-hour drive down the atrocious dirt road.

Saboteurs at large in Mexico City’s metro network?

Mayor Claudia Scheinbaum’s approval rating has dropped by 4 points in the last month

Since the turn of the year, one person has died and scores more have been injured in “atypical events” on Mexico City’s metro network, opening debates about austerity and militarization in the country and damaging the reputation of presidential hopeful Claudia Scheinbaum Pardo.

On January 7th a train on Line 3 collided with another stationery train on the same line leading to the death of Yaretzi Adriana, an 18 year-old student, and injuries to at least 35 other passengers. The tragedy was not an isolated incident, however. In the subsequent days, a wagon of a moving train became detached, while there have been two separate fires in different parts of the network leading to evacuations and severe delays. Mexico City mayor Claudia Scheinbaum, with the backing of the president, has responded by deploying 6,000 officers of the Guardia Nacional (GN) into the metro, leading to protests both above and below ground against the ongoing militarization of the country.

Whilst AMLO, Mexico’s leftist, populist president, has often been able to lay the blame for today’s problems on the corruption and incompetence of previous administrations, it is harder for him to do so in this case; either he or one of his close allies has been the mayor of Mexico City for 16 of the last 22 years. In particular, these incidents looks to have damaged the reputation of mayor Scheinbaum, a vocal supporter of the president and one of the six “strengths of the party” that he himself has suggested should compete to succeed him as the candidate for his MORENA party in the presidential elections of 2024.

Mexico city’s underground train network, opened in 1969, carried 4.6 million passengers daily prior to the pandemic. After the New York City Subway, it serves more passengers than any other metro system in the western hemisphere. With 12 lines and 195 stations, the metro is essential to the economic life of one of the world's largest metropolises. And at 5 Mexican Pesos a ticket regardless of the length of the journey (£0.21 at the current exchange rate) it is not the cheapest public transport in the world (that prize goes to Cairo), but is far cheaper than the regional average.  

An abundance of memes make light of overcrowding on the metro: “If I don’t make it back… tell my family I love them.”

These are not the first dangerous accidents to take place on the metro in recent times. Just days ago, mayor Claudia Scheinbaum rode on the newly reopened Line 12. Line 12 had closed 18 months earlier after two carriages fell from an overpass leaving 26 passengers dead and hundreds more injured. Having been constructed whilst Marcelo Ebrard, now AMLO’s chancellor, was the mayor of Mexico City, Line 12 initially cost 2.6 billion USD, but has been beset by problems from the beginning of its operational life due to poor construction and earthquake damage.

The metro network is ordinarily policed by the Policía de Tránsito Público. You won’t go to any station or platform without seeing these officers, often supported by Policía Auxiliar, blowing very loud whistles with a certain flair. Meanwhile, station officers are also on hand at busy times to remind people to stay behind the yellow line etc. In spite of the existing presence of security personnel in the metro system, Scheinbaum insists the deployment is necessary to “ensure the safety of passengers.” She has promised that there will be eight at least GN officers in every station as well as plainclothes, undercover officers travelling around the network. This has sparked renewed complaints from across civil society about the continued militarization of the country during AMLO’s sexenio.

An underground station on the newly reopened Line 12

Why would stationing more police on the underground lead to protests?

The Guardia Nacional (GN) is an officially civilian police force, formed in 2019, but staffed primarily by ex-military personnel, headed up by a former general of the Mexican Army and, as of last year, officially administrated by the Mexican Ministry of Defence (SEDENA). Whilst it is common to see groups of heavily armed GN officers in desert camouflage in many public places in Mexico, the GN deployed in the metro are not apparently armed and most are not wearing their desert fatigues. AMLO believes that the presence of the GN will help to make users feel safe to ride the metro, rather than developing “psychosis… [due to] worry about an accident on the subway.”

Nevertheless, as many have pointed out, a military force that has received twenty complaints of abuses of civilians per month during its brief existence will not help to make everyone feel safe on the metro. Events so far suggest that fears of abuse of power by the GN are not unfounded. Since the deployment, one student has been arrested for peacefully protesting about transport safety on Line 3. Meanwhile three men have been detained, in separate incidents, for the crime of “attacking communication routes” after accidentally dropping things onto the tracks. All have since been released without charge.

In response to the deployment, Amnesty International called for a march against militarization last Friday. AMLO’s rejoinder was to close roads that marches (such as that called by himself in November in support of his own administration) normally move along, and to put up hoardings around public buildings. This latter move appeared well-advised when protesters began to throw homemade explosives at the Palacio Nacional, AMLO’s presidential residence. He then used his 3-hour morning press conference to work himself up to the point where he claimed that those who oppose the deployment of the military/police on the metro “would like there to be accidents and wish harm on their neighbours because of their alienation, their conservatism, and their fanaticism.”

A national guard has a look around

Why put more police on the underground?

If the cause of these accidents was technical malfunction or human error, it is hard to see how putting more police on the platforms will help protect passengers from similar incidents. The mayor has insisted that the recent accidents represent “atypical situations” and are in no way a result of a lack of maintenance or staffing, but were “intentional.” She has declined to provide evidence of this claim, but has asked the attorney general’s office to investigate claims of sabotage.

The head of the Ministry of Defence, Luis Crescencio Sandoval, has declared that the recent accidents were not accidents at all, but “the work of human hands.” As evidence for this claim, he has mentioned a video of another train on the network that seems to have had some bolts removed. These bolts, he insisted, could only have been removed with specialist tools.

For an administration that has put infrastructure projects at the centre of its brand, endlessly promoting its work on new train lines and airports, might it be that the stain of mismanagement and chronic underfunding of the public transport network would simply be too politically damaging? Is austerity in Mexico beginning to bite?

An officer of the transport police checks his phone

There has been a percentage and real-terms reduction in the amount of maintenance work completed across the network. The public accounts of STC (Mexico City’s public transport body) show that in 2021 56.85% of maintenance work commissioned for the metro was carried out, down from 85.7% in 2019.

Meanwhile, the head of the National Union of Collective Transport Workers, Fernando Espino Arévalo, has insisted that the recent incidents are the result of technical faults. He has claimed that railworkers charged with maintaining the cars often lack the correct equipment to do so, and are thus forced to purchase with their own money the specialist tools needed to do their work.

Whilst no accusations have been levelled at the railworkers of having sabotaged the network, Espino Arévalo has felt compelled to head off any potential accusation by arguing that it would make little sense for railworkers to put themselves and their livelihoods at risk. If it were to transpire that some workers had taken the extraordinary step of sabotaging trains, perhaps in order to strengthen their hand in negotiations over pay or working conditions, this would (while abhorrent) surely be evidence of how desperately extra investment is needed.

The crisis represents in microcosm many of the dynamics or set-pieces in AMLO’s interactions with critics of the government. Promises and expectations are high, but money is tight. When things don’t go to plan, the military are called in to sort things out. Those who oppose the incremental spreading of the military into more and more areas of public life at the expense of well-run public services and civic institutions (victims of state violence, feminists, students, environmentalists, human rights groups, Amnesty International) are then accused by the president of politicking simply in order to thwart the agenda of his left-wing movement.

A member of the auxillary police reminds passengers not to push while getting on the train

While AMLO is trying to convince us that the only people who think that deploying the GN is a bad idea are right-wing fanatics, the government’s right-wing critics are certainly enjoying the moment. Locals may get used to overwhelming security presence on the metro network, as they have done in other aspects of life, but more disruption or injury will hurt the administration’s reputation in the capital. In the meantime, AMLO’s rhetoric continues to divide the progressive elements in society.

If it transpires that these events were the result of sabotage, the government will be vindicated. If no credible evidence of sabotage emerges, if and when the next accident occurs on the metro the stakes will be even higher for AMLO and Scheinbaum, and for Mexico.

Why the Mexican Armed Forces aren’t going back to their barracks any time soon

Content warning: this article contains descriptions of violence, torture and attempted suicide

A mannequin left outside the Secretariat de Gubernación in Mexico City

In 2009, Oscar Kabata, 17, and his friend Victor Baca, 19, were sitting at a hotdog stand in Ciudad Juarez when soldiers arrived and detained them without charge. Under arrest they were pressured but refused to confess to involvement in the kidnapping of a politician. The soldiers, under the command of General Felipe de Jesús Espitia Hernández, tortured and sexually abused the young men. Victor, apparently critically injured after days of physical abuse and likely to die, was shot in the head with a pistol. Oscar, despite being a witness to his friend’s murder, was released without charge after five days.

I heard this tale from Oscar’s mother, Laura Kabata de Anda, who has been campaigning for justice for her son and his friend by protesting outside government buildings in Mexico City for the past four years. She has left her younger son and her mother in Ciudad Juarez in order to live in a tent in Mexico City and demand justice.

Oscar, who his mother says was mature for his age and very independent before his abduction, has since withdrawn from the world. He suffers from bouts of debilitating depression and has attempted suicide multiple times. He cannot work. He cannot stand crowds or confined spaces. The Kabata family have had to divert significant resources to providing specialist psychological care to Oscar who, according to his mother, might have two good days followed by a week of not being able to move from his bed. What hurts Oscar most, she says, is the feeling that the government do not care about what has happened to him and his friend. Meanwhile, “he boils at the thought that his tormentors are enjoying life on the beach while he has to live with the scars that they have left him.”

Victor was officially a missing person for 8 years before his body was identified in a military morgue and returned to his family. Victor’s father Ivan passed away last year without ever having seen justice for his son.

Meanwhile, Oscar has been offered US$30,000 in compensation for what was done to him, but he has refused to accept the pay-out. Laura says this amount goes nowhere near covering the damage to her son’s and her family’s lives. She wants those responsible for abusing Oscar and Victor to be punished and she wants reparations that reflect the loss of her son’s past and future earnings, the costs of private therapy, and the trauma endured by their family. Last year, she received text messages threatening her life if she did not accept the money and stop protesting.

These days, she lives in a tent outside the Secretariat de Gubernación (Interior Ministry). During her years-long protest she reports that she and a few other families sharing her protest, have been harried by security forces, who have resorted to beatings, tear-gas, and cutting the guy-lines of their tents. She has been robbed, threatened with a pistol and even stabbed. She shows me the scar where, a few months ago, she cut her left wrist on the pavement outside the Interior Ministry in protest at the lack of concern for victims’ families. No one offered her assistance for five hours, by which time she was sat in a pool of blood. 

Laura Kabata with Eric Guichard, whose father was killed by soldiers in Chiapas, in their makeshift encampment on the pavement.

Given the treatment that she and other protesters have received, it is perhaps unsurprising that few other families of victims are prepared to make the sacrifices that Laura has made. Laura says that the families of victims are “too afraid to speak up or they are too tired.” Nevertheless, it is an indication of the difficulty of accessing justice in the country that Mexico City is dotted with semi-permanent protests of this kind, from teachers demanding unpaid wages to indigenous groups seeking protection of ancestral lands.

Thirty-five complaints have been documented of civilians being held without charge for over 25 hours and abused during General de Jesus Espitia’s two-year deployment in Chihuahua. Neither Felipe de Jesus Espitia nor any of the men in his charge has ever been formally charged. The General continued to work for the SEDENA (Ministry of Defence) until 2020 and it has been reported that he has since retired with a pension equal to US$3,700 per month.

***

In 2006, Felipe Calderón secured a very narrow and contested electoral victory and assumed the presidency of Mexico. Calderón declared he would be taking a firm hand to drug trafficking and deployed 6,500 troops to the state of Michoacan in what is accepted as the opening move of the ‘Mexican drug war.’ The Policía Federal, Calderón argued, had been corrupted by drug money and did not have the trust of the people, and thus it was necessary to deploy the Mexican Armed Forces to restore order to the country. 45,000 troops had been deployed by the end of 2008 in the escalating conflict with drug traffickers.

In the short term, this was good politics: presenting himself as defender of the people, Calderón shored-up his legitimacy at home, while helping to secure about $400,000,000 per year in military training and equipment from US from 2008 onwards. Incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also a fan of the policy. While there were no shortage of sceptics and critics at the time, few imagined how bloody and protracted would be the struggle that Calderón had begun.

It is well-documented how Calderón’s deployment of the military across the country precipitated an enormous surge in violence as drug cartels splintered and competed for territory. The Mexican National Institute for Statistics and Geography reported an average of just over 20,000 drug-related deaths per year in Mexico during Calderón’s sexenio (six-year term), more than double the death toll in 2005. The rate of deaths per year has continued to rise in the subsequent presidencies of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-present). Meanwhile, renegade special forces troops working for the Gulf Cartel saw the opportunity to start their own cartel, Los Zetas. They not only had access to greater military technology and tactics, but also pioneered the use of domestic terrorism to ensure civilian compliance.

Not only did Calderón’s policy cause a huge surge in drug-related violence across Mexico but, as Ioan Grillo shows in his book El Narco, it failed to slow the movement of drugs through Mexican ports and across the northern border. Furthermore, the Mexican drug war exposed Mexican citizens to a new threat: abuse by the army and navy that had been deployed in the name of public security. Mexico's National Human Rights Commission received over 5,700 complaints of human rights violations by the military relating to 2007 to 2011 alone. From 2013 to 2020, there have been a further 3,799 complaints of abuses by the military. Human rights abuses perpetrated by the military have included torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. According to Human Rights Watch, “one of the main reasons military abuses persist is because soldiers who commit human rights violations against civilians are almost never brought to justice.” As of 2014, cases brought against military personnel for abuses of civilians have to be tried in civilian courts. However, complaints are regularly investigated by military police and rarely lead to charges.

On the campaign trail in 2012 and again in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) sought to address public concern about the abuses of the military by promising a new direction. He proposed sending the armed forces back to their barracks and replacing the corrupted Policía Federal with a new national police force, the Guardia Nacional. In 2012, he promised that the military would be off the streets of Mexico within 6 months if he came to power. He lost that election, but six years later he campaigned successfully for the presidency declaring that “we must remove the army from the streets. The army is not prepared for this function, it is outside their remit [which is] to defend national sovereignty.” Furthermore, AMLO presented himself as the figure who would assist families in their quest for truth and justice regarding their abused, disappeared and murdered relatives. As president-elect, he promised a permanent dialogue with the families of victims and that the Interior Ministry would work hand-in-hand with families to achieve justice.

Perhaps the biggest test of the current administration’s commitment to victims and their families has been the Iguala mass-kidnapping. In September 2014, 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero while returning from a protest, in a mysterious case that continues to cause outrage in Mexico. While body parts of two of the students have been recovered it is unknown where the remaining students have gone, though it is widely believed that they are not alive.

“They took him alive! We want him back alive!”

In 2018, AMLO ordered a new investigation into the disappearance and the previous cover-ups. The report found that the military acted in concert with local police and the Guerreros Unidos cartel in the disappearance of the students. Following its publication this year, 80 arrest warrants were issued. One colonel, accused of ordering the execution of 6 of the students days after their disappearance, has been arrested. However, 16 other arrest warrants for soldiers have since been withdrawn leading to the resignation of the special prosecutor who led the investigation in October of this year. The Financial Times reported that “the outside experts’ report said the army violated orders from López Obrador by blocking access to its intelligence files. They also accused the federal prosecutor’s office of hindering the investigation.” Whether or not AMLO is able to control the Armed Forces, it seems his appetite for holding them to account has subsided since taking office.

Further evidence of the dangers of AMLO’s close relationship with the SEDENA is offered by the case of General Cienfuegos. The retired General was arrested in Los Angeles in 2020 on drug trafficking charges, after a lengthy and top-secret investigation by the DEA. AMLO managed to have Cienfuegos released by calling in a favour with the Trump Administration, presumably to appease Mexican Armed Forces top brass who were threatening to cease collaboration with the DEA if Cienfuegos was tried in the US. The General is now a free man in Mexico and nobody expects he will see the inside of a courtroom any time soon.

AMLO is also working to rehabilitate the image of the Mexican armed forces by diverting their efforts away from military acts. Yet, far from sending the army and navy back to their barracks AMLO’s administration extended the range of tasks in which the military are involved, so that they now act as security against oil theft for Pemex (the national oil company), supervise the construction of Tren Maya (the proposed train network being built in the south-east of the country), and are tasked with building an ecological park in Mexico city.

Indeed AMLO has made no secret of his close working relationship with the military. It seems he has been working to rehabilitate the image of the Mexican armed forces by diverting their efforts away from military acts. AMLO is clearly pleased to have found a large, efficient workforce, which he can rapidly mobilise, and without the need of lengthy planning processes. In 2020, AMLO deployed an additional 16.5% of Mexico’s military across the country. While a controversial austerity has been imposed on many areas of the state, 2022 saw a 22% increase in the budget for the army compared with 2021.

Soldiers escorting an oil truck leaving Dos Bocas refinery, Paraíso, Tabasco

Aside from these duties having little to do with defending national sovereignty, using the military in this way impedes the development of civil institutions with transparent and accountable processes that are necessary for good governance. The same day that I spoke to Laura at her encampment, AMLO held a rally to celebrate his first four years in office. In a nearly 8,000-word speech claiming the achievements of his administration, he made no mention of justice for the families of victims of abuses of state power. He mentioned the military once, in passing, to note how soldiers assisted in the construction, expansion and modernization of airports in various states. The previous month, congress – dominated by AMLO’s MORENA party, voted in favour of a bill to allow the army and navy to be deployed across 16 of Mexico’s 32 states until 2028.

AMLO’s move to restructure the police also looks like a step towards further militarization. As AMLO promised in his 2018 campaign for the presidency, the Policía Federal was disbanded and replaced as the principal national police force by the Guardia Nacional in 2019. In its first year, the Guardia Nacional recruited roughly 24,000 ex-Federales, almost 60,000 former soldiers, and 16,000 from the navy. Despite the constitution mandating that the Guardia Nacional be a civilian police force, the Guardia Nacional has developed as a military organisation not only in that it is composed primarily of trained soldiers, but also in its leadership. Their desert-camouflage uniforms add to the perception that this is a combat force. As of last year, the government has begun the process of officially reassigning control of the new police force from the  Ministry of Security and Civilian Protection to the Ministry of Defence.

National Guards with a bag of KFC in Villahermosa, Tabasco

AMLO insists that the Guardia Nacional must be administrated by the army because the discipline and values of the army will ensure against the temptations of power and money to corrupt his new police force. In the first two years since its inception in 2019, the Guardia Nacional has received an average twenty complaints per month of human rights abuses committed by its officers.

***

Laura Kabata voted for AMLO in 2018, but now she feels badly let down. She wonders how many more families will go through what she and her son have gone through at the hands of the armed forces before public security in Mexico means public safety.

“We believed in him, but he betrayed us … The Mexican military has its foot on the neck of the Mexican people so that we continue to comply … and the violence continues. I am afraid, not for myself, but for my people. The military have become more powerful during this sexenio than ever before. They are untouchable.”

‘Chilangos’ on AMLO

A peculiar feature of Mexican politics is the sexenio – the single 6-year term allowed to each president, after which there is no option for re-election even after a term out of office. This creates a particular urgency for leaders to complete projects within the lifespan of their presidential career: no matter their popularity, they cannot afford put off until an unspecified later date. The health of their legacy will largely depend on the successes of those six years. That having been said, the popularity of the president as the sexenio draws to a close may affect his or her (Mexico has not yet had a woman president) ability to have a handpicked successor elected to the presidency.

Andres Manuel López Obrador (known everywhere as AMLO) is a remarkably popular politician. According to Morning Consult’s 7-day rolling approval rating tracker, Mexico’s populist president is the world leader with the second-highest approval rating (behind only Narendra Modi) with 69% of Mexican residents approving of his presidency. Indeed, his approval rating has been consistently high throughout the first four years of his term. At the lowest ebb, when Mexico was in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic that his government was seen to have dealt with poorly and with over 700 Mexicans dying per day, AMLO still enjoyed approval ratings of 55%.

López Obrador is no stranger to such adulation. When he left his role as Mayor of Mexico City in 2005 in order to run for the presidency the first time, he enjoyed approval ratings of over 80% among chilangos (residents of the capital city), after tightening up the city’s finances and finding the money to offer a pension to the over-65s, support for single mothers and increasing scholarships for the national university. As president, he has developed a loyal base by expanding his pension scheme to cover the whole country and promoting multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects in the poorer southern states, promising to always put “the poor first.”

AMLO may be popular with his supporters, but he is nothing if not divisive. An old-school leftist, he has made enemies of many progressives by doubling-down on fossil-fuel extraction and trying (unsuccessfully) to pull Mexico back from the Paris climate agreement, while he has claimed to have no need for the concept of patriarchy because he is “respectful of women, of all human beings.” Indeed, he frequently dismisses environmental and feminists issues as “politicking” designed to stop him from transforming Mexico.

A defining feature of his relationship with the Mexican people has been the mañanera: a daily press conference, beginning at 6am and often continuing for over 2 hours, in which AMLO trumpets government policy, discusses events of the day, rails against his opponents – including those in the judiciary and the media, commiserates with the victims of violence, and, amazingly, calls for the people to march on the capital in support of him and his policies.

Unscripted speeches, in which he pauses for several seconds in the middle of a sentence or reveals an astounding lack of scientific understanding, have been derided by Mexicans and foreign journalists alike, and have inspired the launching of a thousand memes. Nevertheless his supporters, often described by those on the right as amlovers or chairos (with origins in a colloquial term for masturbation, this is a very Mexican alternative to ‘woke lefties’), appreciate having an insight into the business of government and trust a man who gets up early and communicates directly.

AMLO has called on Mexicans to march on the capital next weekend (27.11.22) in support of his government.

AMLO came to power with ambitious plans for “national regeneration,” including but not limited to huge infrastructure projects, expanding access to public health services and anti-corruption measures. UK media coverage of his presidency has tended to focus on the shallower aspects of AMLO’s policy agenda (his plan to decommission the presidential jet or turning the presidential residence in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park into a public museum, for example). Four years into his government would Mexicans still be impressed by such populist gestures or would they judge the man on the success of his more substantive projects? Would they still be angry about Mexico’s disastrous response to Covid-19, or would they offer the global pandemic as mitigation for the slow pace of change?

Rather than speculate any more about the reasons for AMLO’s incredible popularity or the disgust he may inspire in many others, I decided to go out on the streets of Mexico City to ask the locals what they think about their president. This was never going to give me a representative sample of citizens and it is worth noting the people I spoke to were primarily the working people you might expect to be in favour of many of the populist, redistributive policies AMLO has pursued. Rather than try to steer the conversation, I simply asked people what they thought of their president and then encouraged them to expand on their answers.

***

My taxi driver, Miguel, is a neat man with slicked back hair and dimpled cheeks. When I mention that I want to know more about Mexican politics, he mumbles about politicians being a bad lot. However, when I mention AMLO he immediately becomes excited, and begins to praise AMLO at length. He is particularly happy with the way AMLO has closed tax loopholes and ended tax breaks for some corporations while using his presidential prerogative to push through the national pension scheme.

 “This president understands what it is like to be a human being. He is of the left, but he is just to all people whether rich or poor. He treats everyone the same.”

"He has given a pension to every person of the tercer edad (over-65s), whether rich or poor, so that old people don't end up wandering the streets begging for money after having worked their whole lives. No president has ever done this before. The other presidents only robbed the poor. He has given us a pension to look forward to when we can no longer work. And he has brought this about by presidential decree meaning nobody can take it away. It is decreed so it is forever.”

“The government were taking money from the people, but never from the companies. How is that fair? This government is finally making the big companies like Coca-cola pay their taxes.”

He tells me that before AMLO came to power Oxxo (an ubiquitous chain convenience store owned by Mexican multinational FEMSA), never paid for their electricity. “I paid my bills throughout Covid even though I had no work. If I am 50 pesos short they will cut off my lights, but Oxxo wasn't even paying for their light. Now they all are starting to pay their taxes.”

Me, Fabi and an excellent Dutchman on the crater rim of Volcán Tetlalmanche

Whilst on a hike up one of the city’s extinct volcanoes, another walker, Fabi, offers me half of her orange. When I gratefully accept, she pulls more and more snacks from her many pockets (sugared nuts, tamarind sweets and pickled cassava) and insists I try all of them and give my opinion on each one. Fabi works for local government in the borough of Iztapalapa, in the east of Mexico City. She prefers not to talk about the president as a person. I wonder if this is because she disapproves of personalist politics or cannot countenance speaking badly of AMLO for some reason.

“I am interested in what needs to change.”

“The current government is giving too much support to ninis”(which, she explains, means people who are not in employment or education – “Ni trabajan, ni estudian”). “These people don’t try hard and they don’t have enough ambition.”

Instead, the government should be incentivising young people to get into education by offering more generous support to students. Her children are both at university and they are struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, she believes that people who are “lazy” are being given money by the government.

Cristina has seen the Rolling Stones live (twice) in Mexico City

Cristina, who sells newspapers in Mexico City’s main plaza, identifies strongly as left wing but is also dissatisfied with the government. She approves of increased support for ninis, the elderly, the marginalised and students, but thinks it hasn’t gone far enough. She is worried that inflation is cancelling out any good work the government might be doing to redistribute wealth in society.

“AMLO is a good person, but he has made the wrong choices with his cabinet. He could have made more radical changes if he had been more independent of his advisors.”

When I ask what this would have looked like, she says that it is “the difference between survival and dignity. Mexicans are used to living from day-to-day, or less, so they don’t know what dignity looks like. The working people are not used to generosity, so they are quiet, but life is getting harder not easier. I believe there is enough money in the world and in Mexico to feed everyone, so why are people going hungry?”

She estimates that AMLO has raised the minimum wage by about 70%, “but the price of corn flour has gone from 9 pesos per kilogram to 20 or 21 pesos, so how does that help?”

Francisco thanks god he is healthy and working

During a hair-raising uber ride, Francisco tells me that chilangos still love AMLO because of his successes as mayor of the capital. He believes AMLO has been unlucky that the pandemic delayed many of the policies he had planned, but that nevertheless the economy is rebounding quickly. As with most people I spoke to, he favourably compares AMLO with his predecessors. While he bemoans the cost of petrol, he thinks that the government cannot be blamed for the high rate of Covid deaths and inflation in Mexico since these are global problems that they could not have predicted.

“The previous presidents robbed the people. AMLO wants to help people. The people love him. If there was another election right now, I would vote for AMLO again.”

Since AMLO cannot run again, would he vote for whoever AMLO backs? “Probably, yes.”

“What I like about him is that he doesn’t waste money on hairdressers, cars and planes like the other presidents. He has always been more modest.”

Me with entrpreneurs Alejandro and Quetzl

Alejandro and Quetzl, selling their home-made soap at the La Búfalo tianguis (street market), have a dimmer view of their president. In contrast to most people I spoke to, they view him as just another power-hungry politician. They are exactly the kind of jaded people, fed-up of politics, that a populist leader would hope to motivate, yet, they represent those in society who cannot tolerate the eccentricity of their leader, who feel their intelligence is being offended by his populist showboating.

Alejandro guffaws, “He is a crazy person. He actually told the Mexican people that wearing an image of the virgin would protect them against Covid-19. So people wore stickers of the virgin instead of masks.”

“How many times did he try to become president?” he asks Quetzl. They can’t remember, but it is clear that his repeated attempts to assume the office are evidence that he is not to be trusted. “People like him because he says different things, but he is still a politician.” They would never attend a march for or against the government because “all you do is waste your time.”

Alejandro doesn’t approve of AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, Tren Maya, because “in the end it’s the people who end up paying for it through higher taxes.” He also blames AMLO for the current inflation of the Mexican peso.

Quetzl is only slightly less damning: “He is better than the previous president [Enrique Peña Nieto], but the bar was set very low. It’s like measuring yourself against a child.”

Between a Fiesta and a Wake: a reading of ‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry

When I realised that I would be in Mexico during the syncretic festival of Miquixtli, which in Spanish is called Día de los muertos (the Day of the Dead), I knew I had to spend it in the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca. Not because of anything particular or special about the way that the festival is celebrated in Cuernavaca, but because I had recently finished a novel set in precisely that place on precisely that day. I planned to retrace the novel’s steps and see if being in the same place on the same day, albeit 84 years later than the fictional events, might reveal to me more about the novel and what if anything it has to say about Mexico.

The alcoholic British novelist Malcolm Lowry came to live in Mexico with his first wife, Jan Gabriel, in 1936 and on the Day of the Dead they arrived in the town of Cuernavaca (called Quauhnahuac in Nahuatl), which sits beneath the two volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. The marriage fell apart and not long after, Lowry was, after a dispute with a local fascist militia in Oaxaca, arrested, imprisoned and deported to Canada. Yet, in his drunkenness and despair Lowry had conceived the idea for a novel that would be the great achievement of his short, unhappy life and recognised over 70 years later as a masterpiece of British modernist literature. He spent much of the next seven years writing and rewriting Under the Volcano while imploring Jonathan Cape to publish the work, which they finally did in 1947.

The novel tells the story of one day (the last) in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a decorated war hero, frustrated literary talent, ex-British consul to Mexico and complete drunken wreck, wandering around Cuernavaca resisting, or remaining impassive in the face of the attempts of, those that would save him (namely his ex-wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh). The main events are set on the Day of the Dead in 1938, though an opening chapter set on that day in 1939 serves as a kind of epilogue and coda to understand the hints and allusions of the rest of the novel. Over the course of 12 hours, the Consul, as Firmin is ironically referred to in the novel, drinks a fantastic amount of alcohol, sticking almost exclusively to whisky, tequila and most of all mescal, as he battles with the terrifying effects of delirium tremens and the irresistible attraction of the abyss.

Malcolm Lowry did not publish another book in his lifetime.

As a study of how two people can be sat side by side and yet fail to connect, fail to act to save themselves and others, Under the Volcano is a tragedy, the slow-motion car crash precipitated by rampant, untreated alcoholism. Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Republicans’ defeat at the Battle of the Ebro and the Munich agreement, the inertia of Firmin and his friends reflects the moral inertia of the time. At the same time the novel is an incredibly dense collection of images layered and interposed; passing thoughts, snippets of conversation from next door rooms, hallucinations, film posters, radio announcements, strange noises all intrude on the consciousness to create a sort of tapestry of hell.

As the narrator jumps between the different characters’ perspectives, all of whom are drunk, in a state of turmoil, or both, the fairly straightforward narrative becomes secondary to a terrifying phantasmagoria of intoxication. I found it hard to go on but, after navigating the difficult opening chapter at the second attempt, impossible to stop ploughing forward through his gruesome underworld to the inevitable end.

And yet, Lowry sets this bleak tale in an earthly paradise. Lowry’s Quauhnahuac, “there was no denying its beauty,” is a small town on a hill surrounded by gardens and terraces “that command a spacious view in every direction,” is surrounded by forest on all sides, overlooked by a volcano and “filled with the water that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains.” When we arrive at the Consul’s house, we find that the garden has gone to seed but it hardly seems the less gorgeous: “between floribunda and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight.” However, for the Consul everything is poisoned by his misery and he observes “the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death.” He has been cast out of Eden and the richness and mystery of this forest town only entails a fecundity of nightmarish visions.

***

The earthly paradise, “whether fatal or cleansing,” Lowry describes in Under the Volcano is not the place I find when I get down from bus on the highway into Cuernavaca on a hot, breezy Sunday morning. From what I can gather, the town expanded significantly in the 1970s subsuming the nearby villages of Acapatzingo, Ocotepec and Ahuatepec. The small town that Lowry lived in is now a city of 350,000 people. The colonial centre remains unspoilt, and since Lowry’s time they have uncovered some charming 17th Century murals under the plaster of the cathedral. Cortes' Palace remains squatted on the foundations of the Tlahuican temple, with Diego Rivera's mural inside, but I couldn't get within 10 metres due to maintenance work. One of the novel’s key locations still remains, and has been turned into a hotel named Bajo el Volcán, but the manager has never read the book and says the watch tower is not safe to climb.

The Hotel Bajo El Volcán on Calle Humboldt.

The street on which our heroes live has been renamed and rerouted; the decaying splendour of the Hotel Casino de la Selva now lies beneath a bus terminal; and the hillside on which the Consul's bungalow ought to have stood, then on the outskirts of town and almost ready to be swallowed by the forest, is crisscrossed with fume-choked roads and a large, paved market that is speckled with spoilt market dogs flopped on the floor like great furry enchiladas. The grackles that Lowry describes – “black, ugly birds, yet too long, something like monstrous insects” – are still hopping about, though it is hard to see how they will roost in the fresno trees of the zócalo (the central square) with a ska band entertaining Day of the Dead revellers.

Lowry’s vision of Quauhnahuac is of course imbued with his own alcoholic torment. Thus, it seems fortuitous that I have arrived with a mescal-induced hangover in order to be in the right frame of mind. I do now know from experience “the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside my window, … the dark spinnets.” I wander up and down the steep streets, cross the bridge over the barranca (ravine) and peer into its depths looking for a familiar, but nothing peers back at me. Certainly Lowry made the volcanoes more towering (I can barely see them through the haze of smog), and the barranca deeper and more alarming than they are. He may have made the forest closer and denser, the vultures more menacing. In other words, Lowry made the most out of his setting to create the novel’s atmosphere of a fallen Eden, or an Eden in free fall.

Quauhnahuac means ‘place near the woods’ and Lowry makes much use of the imagery of the forest, but the forest has receded. I suspect this may be why the city has never become a major site of literary pilgrimage - the lush, diabolical atmosphere of the novel has been lost with the forest. To get some sense of what Cuernavaca might have felt like for Lowry/Firmin in the 1930s, I took a trip to the nearby town of Tepoztlán. Here the forest still encroaches at the edges, trogons and butterflies still swoop down cobbled side streets, and the mountains sneak up and peer over your shoulder when you least expect it. Here you might not be surprised to find a caged vulture in the forest, see an old woman playing dominoes with her chicken on a leash, or have a small girl try to sell you an armadillo.

Great-tailed grackle.

There may be something inherently problematic about a British author during the time of empire representing Mexico as a sort of Eden after the fall. Lowry’s imperial worldview (his racism) has certainly contributed to the strange and sinister atmosphere of Under the Volcano. The indigenous Mexicans in the novel are hardly fully rounded characters: whether noble, menacing, or just ridiculous, they are always obscure and unknowable. We could adapt Chinua Achebe’s famous complaint of Heart of Darkness – and insist Mexico and Mexicans are more than just a prop “for the break-up of one petty European mind.” It is true that Lowry does not explicitly seek to interpret for us the meaning of the Mexicans’ pagan-catholic festival that is the setting for his novel, but there is reason to believe that Lowry had gained some (horrified) insight into Mexico that makes the novel’s setting particularly apposite.

Only three years after Lowry’s book was published, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz produced a series of essays (Labyrinth of Solitude) about Mexico and the Mexican national character, one of which treats the custom of the fiesta and specifically the Day of the Dead and suggests that Lowry might have been getting quite close to the beating heart of the matter.

According to Paz, Mexicans are inherently gloomy and closed off from one another. He claims that because something “impedes us from being” and since we “cannot or dare not confront our own selves, we resort to the fiesta. It fires us into the void.” The fiesta allows them to “leap over the wall of solitude” and embrace their brother, but sometimes “to prove that they are brothers they kill one another.”

In this sense, the Consul is a kind of Mexican. Like them, he drinks to confess and is “seduced by death” finding both life and death “strange and remote.”

During a fiesta, Paz explains, Mexicans “form a living community in which the individual is at once dissolved and redeemed.” The Consul, however, does not quite want to be redeemed. Or, the more he drinks, the more he likes the sound of hell. Whereas Paz’s Mexicans “oscillate […] between a shout and a silence, between a fiesta and a wake,” the Consul seeks continual “delirium, song, outcry, monologue.” 

***

Back in Cuernavaca on the eve of Día de muertos, I go out to try and witness some of the “chaos,” “self-immolation,” and “impeded being” rending itself open that Paz describes. The streets of the old town are decked out in bright, paper decorations, garlands of orange marigolds hang from every conceivable place, and the locals and tourists are having a grand time. My taxi driver proudly tells me that he has been drunk for six days straight. At dusk, hundreds of costumed motorcyclists, two or sometimes three to a bike, begin dragging around the zócalo, one trailing a very realistic corpse wrapped in black bin liner. I decide that I had better find a cantina, the hole-in-the-wall bars with roll down metal shutters that are the Consul’s home from home and beacon of light in the dark.

Bikers passing el Palacio Cortés.

The first cantina I sit down in, a group of locals - Natalia, Alberto and Oscar - ask me to join their table. Before long, they are confessing, calling me brother, insisting that I should come to their weddings. However, so they say, Mexicans are good liars and life is cheap in Mexico so I should not trust anyone and should never leave my drink unattended to. Though apparently not particularly drunk, they are giddy, almost childlike in their frenzy. Despite myself, I can't help but wonder if at some point, to prove that we are brothers they will kill me, whether, as Paz suggests, their outburst of joy might end in violence.

Of course I am trying to avoid making generalisations about Mexicans or Mexican character, a right which Paz has earned by being Mexico's most venerated national poet. Even then, I'm taking him with a big pinch of salt. I push the thought aside.

Nevertheless, we all laugh and dance (we even jump around with flowerpots on our heads), and then at a certain point I feel a silence creeping in, a raising of masks recklessly thrown aside only a couple of hours before. I take my leave and go to bed.

When we meet again the following evening my new friends are polite and generous, but somewhat glum and withdrawn. Their infectious warmth has gone. We are going visit the ofrendas (literally ‘offerings,’ altars for the dead decked out in bright colours) for which the families of the deceased open their doors to their neighbours. As we queue up in dark streets with candles to pay our respects to the dead, they are happy to joke, but not to talk about themselves or the fiancées they were so keen to tell me about before, and always falling away into gloomy silence after a few moments.

Miquitxli celebrations in Ocotepec, Cuernavaca