Guest commentary: The 1% Cacique Democracy

Armando Vazquez

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

Sixty five years ago, I was born in the small little village of Ahualulco, Jalisco, Mexico. After the rains, when they came, a barren, foreboding and desolate valley was temporarily transformed into a magnificent tapestry of Gods green promise to all of us. A promise of a better life for the impoverished campesinos. That prayer of deliverance recited so piously honest and desperate in incessant resigned whispered by all of campesinos of the village into the cruelest black hole of infinity was never heard.  My father with his 4 brothers and 3 brother in- laws, each morning before sun rise had their miserable helping of atole, with a bowl of beans and a couple of dried up corn tortillas and in courageous resignation march off to the campo, to work on the caciques land, planting the caciques maize seeds, using the caciques tools, and working the caciques mule. Nothing, absolutely nothing belong to my fathers and my uncles, except the belly ache in their guts from hunger or the alcoholism that was already killing 3 of them. The soul decimated, the faith waning, the hunger and alcoholism becoming more acute by the day, the Vazquez family made the decision that has be made for millenniums, by hungry desperate people all over the world, we would migrate to a better life. We migrated from Mexico, I am acutely aware today, because we had no other choices or options, the very few rich caciques of the area control  everything, the land, the food, the water, the church, the police, the businesses, the bars, the laws and the guns. In their evil greed they regulated our hungry and desperation by taxing everything that they loaned us; money, rent, our religion, the campo, the seeds, the Molino, the alcohol, everything! The Vazquez family some 57 year ago migrated because we were slowly being starved to death. I learned early in my life that power corrupts, absolute power corrupt absolutely!

The 1 percent Cacique Democracy. Courtesy image

We Mexican have a say when we lament our often luckless fate, “So far from God, yet so close to the United States.”  Only a Mexican really understands that incredible paradox, we trade in one oppressor for another, willingly and without reservations; hemos llegado al Norte, para echarle ganas y consigir esa buena  vida que merecermos!” But the  cacique we left behind is no match for what we find in El Norte; here the 1% cacique is more far more insidious, stealth, impenetrable, and armed to the teeth with laws, guns and power! But at the very least we are not starving to death, we lament as we continue our often mindless and powerless march toward modern day indentured servitude.

In my life here in the United States I have experienced many times, firsthand the inevitably first responder goon intimidation ploys that the 1% cacique has at his beck and call that he marches out  when he or his empire is remotely threaten. I will see the lapdog police, their intimidation, their threats, their guns, their jails long before I will see the 1%cacique’s face that hold the entire mortgage of who I am, and  the fragile disappearing franchise as an American I now possess. We have all come from all over the world to the United States to seek out and work hard for a better life, we all want justice and to live free of tyranny.

And so the drama unfolds again, here in the US like in Mexico, and all over the world, we see the way power corrupts, how it decides that a young man of color life is worth less that the 1% caciques son.  The system is rigged we know it but we can do precious little to change it. They say that we live in a democracy and that the vote matters, look around America; we would be fools to think that we as a people are voting for a county like this that has been so polarized and hijacked by so few, the 1%caciques. They have all the money, all of the property, all of the laws, all of the cops and soldiers, the media word, first and last. We the 99% have precious little. In many ways I am back to where my journey began some 65 years ago. My life, like the life of some many of Americans, is now controlled by the insatiable greed of the very few, much like the caciques that rule the lives of my forebears in Mexico. But I now live in the US, I am a American citizen and I will not leave or migrate to another county like my father! This is my county and I will  organize, mobilize, work, fight until my dying breath to make America live up to the promise that is this democracy has pledged, that our red, yellow, black and brown son and daughters lives’ are worth just as much as the sons and daughters of the 1%caciques. And that this land we call America is worthy of its lofty aspiration of liberty, equality and justice for all!