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Last night, President Barack Obama announced he will take executive action to shield five million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The prime-time speech was big news in the U.S., kicking up a political skirmish ahead of the 2016 elections. But it was far from the continent’s top story. Instead, that title goes to the disappearance and presumed assassination of 43 students in Mexico.
The American media has largely ignored the unrest down south. Bizarrely, the Book Fair has brought the news to Miami anyway. Earlier this week, prize-winning Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska compared the massacre to the horrors of the “concentration camps.” And in an interview to promote his own appearance this weekend, fellow writer Francisco Goldman tells New Times that this is a “terrifying and exhilarating” moment for Mexico.
“This is going on all over the country: this complete highjacking of all of Mexico’s institutions by organized crime,” he says. “Politicians are organized crime, basically.”
Goldman will be speaking this Sunday about his new memoir, The Interior Circuit. The book begins with Goldman still struggling to overcome the loss of his young wife, Aura, five years before.
More at the Miami New Times.
