“Oil my hand”classic bite phrase.
An article published on the site México News Daily In January 2022, they refer to the “bite” in Mexico as a kind of bottomless barrel and according to the survey they cite, 18,500 of them are carried out in a single day. I do not know the methodology of the national survey but Urban Public Security estimates that 2.9 million people paid 3.4 million bribes in the second half of the year. To put it unscientifically 771 bites per hour or 13 per minute.
With or without a survey, the bite is as Mexican as the tacos. It is part of the foundations of the corruption that has plunged this hemisphere into misery. But the heirs of the corrupt tradition have moved on to bigger and more lucrative businesses. The bite is now big. It is associated with the cartels and due to the monumental profits from drug trafficking, human trafficking and everything else that organized crime practices, it stopped collecting a few pesos to avoid a fine or obtain a permit.
The bite became internationalized. We have seen presidential campaigns financed by drug cartels and not only in Mexico. In Colombia, the scandal involving former president Ernesto Samper and the recordings with members of the Cali Cartel negotiating funds for the presidential campaign and the decision not to prosecute him, ensuring that he would not be investigated, were described as the “farce of the century.” Samper was not the only one, but he was one of those who internationalized the bite and took it to high places.
Others practice ideological bite. Not that that implies there are no monetary gains. For years Cuba has been using blackmail and pressure against the United States. Coincidentally, it always – and they know it – works wonders for them with Democratic Party administrations. They launched a mass exodus of 125 thousand Cubans in 1980 via the port of Mariel, allowing the departure of those who wanted to leave the communist paradise, but they opened prisons and psychiatric hospitals to give a bad reputation to decent people who they described as scum and leaving a trail of crimes against American citizens. They returned to the fray in 1994 with 34,000 Cubans who were sent to the Guantanamo Naval Base to somehow stop what they described as aggression at that time. They have taken advantage of each and every one of the moves in some way, but always reminding the “empire” that they have the key to the private property of the Castro cartel.
The most recent exodus has been from Nicaragua – from which profits and business with the Mexican cartels have multiplied. You pay for the visa, for the transfer and 425 thousand Cubans have already entered in less than two years according to official figures. Greed, they say, breaks the bag and we have to get more out of it, even if the bag loses bottom.
Cuba is in ruins, economically collapsed, there are widespread shortages and a population extremely dissatisfied with having to live surrounded by rats, garbage and repression. We must achieve the lifting of the trade embargo and for Cuba to be removed from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism in order to carry out banking operations in American banks.
Here comes Andrés Manuel López Obrador, current president of Mexico, the biggest biter, the admirer of Fidel Castro and benefactor of the longest existing dictatorship. Who since last year has been asking President Joe Biden to lift sanctions on his friends in Havana, a fact that is not the responsibility of Biden, but of Congress. But there is something that the troubled American president can do: remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. For neither of the two requests, López Obrador has asked Cuba to release political prisoners, end repression or put aside its diabolical alliances with terrorist countries and groups. As Cantinflas would say, neither yes nor no, quite the opposite.
Of course there are other mutual benefits, for example, López Obrador, while refusing to give vaccines to private doctors in Mexico (those who denounced the hiring of Cuban doctors) promised to buy Cuban Abdala vaccines to apply to children under 12 years of age, despite not being approved by the World Health Organization. In the medical business, described as modern slavery, López Obrador, with the money of the Mexican people, paid 10,700 dollars for each of 585 doctors and only paid $600 to the Cuban doctors, an agreement that has raised such controversy in Mexico, which has led to an investigation motivated by the incompetence of the Secretary of Welfare.
Now the Biter-in-Chief has made a new proposal and with it he guarantees to stop the massive flow of migrants at the border. Of course the matter is not by magic.
The show begins with 20 billion in aid for Latin America and Caribbean countries, the legalization of 10 million undocumented Hispanics, the lifting of sanctions on Cuba and the beginning of talks to once and for all normalize relations with the Havana poster.
What a shame that progress in Latin America does not evolve as quickly and effectively as corruption, blackmail and bribery. How many advances would we see? At the moment everything indicates that demagoguery and deception continue to prevail. Meanwhile, we taxpayers pay the high cost of this macabre game. But everything can change this election year. Do you understand why Trump must be prevented from returning to the White House in every possible way?
