Mexico is a Vietnam War next door

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Today`s Column

Mexico is a Vietnam War next door

Posted : 2012-08-24 17:02

Updated : 2012-08-24 17:02

By Jose de la Isla

MEXICO CITY ― I have been looking for a book I used as a first-year graduate student at the University of Oregon. It was a philosophical treatise, not light reading, titled "Explanation," used by Professor Joseph G. Jorgensen in his anthropological methods course.

The book is one of the few works I know that specifies what kinds of evidence lead to understanding.

There are intention, rational, psychological, historical and ― the purpose of the course ― empirical explanations, using the scientific method. The most developed empirical methods in the social sciences were those applied in economics. Anthropology, the most humanistic of the social sciences, also weighed in, even with small-sample statistics.

I look for the book today to review the difference between explanation and understanding.

I studied at a beautiful, bucolic campus in the late 1960s. Some street corners elsewhere in the nation were burning, and fiery rhetoric ignited disenchanted groups.

When the Vietnam War escalated, bystanders became increasingly caught up at the instability of the world stage. People were told the war would end soon but they weren't told about the secret war in Cambodia and Laos and anti-insurgency in Thailand.

A number of graduate students in my class were drafted. Some volunteered, some fled, some refused.

Back then, Joe Jorgensen and other faculty members mounted a speaker's platform and talked about the war's immorality.

The American Anthropological Association in 1967 issued a statement opposing those who "have falsely claimed to be anthropologists, or who have pretended to be engaged in anthropological research while in fact pursuing other ends." Jorgensen, as a member of the association's ethics committee, helped try to guard the integrity of how anthropologists do their field research because of how it was used to conduct the war.

Anthropological knowledge and experience in the Third World often had been compromised ― intentionally or not ― by government counter-insurgency policy and clandestine research.

With eminent scholar Eric R. Wolf, Jorgensen wrote a classic essay in 1970 that appeared in The New York Review of Books and remains the ethics standard for anthropologists. It explains how anthropological research had been used in Latin America, India and Asia to formulate counter-insurgency policy against peaceable people.

It is plain, they wrote, that "scientific objectivity implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from the people among whom he or she works."

"The future of anthropology, its credibility, depends upon sustaining the dialectic between knowledge and experience," Jorgensen and Wolf wrote.

Jorgensen was an expert on North American Indians. He wrote a classic on the Sun Dance religion and about oil-age Eskimos in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill. He retired following a distinguished research and teaching career at the University of California, Irvine.

I tried locating him to get the exact book title and its author and learned he had died in 2008.

I knew Jorgensen when the nation's consciousness was changing. As casualties rose among Americans and others, people asked what we, as a nation, were trying to accomplish ― at what personal cost? When they realized they'd allowed the nation's leaders to conduct public war policies that produced death and misery, grief and dismay informed their understanding.

Before it was over, nearly 60,000 U.S. service members were killed.

In the last five years, nearly 60,000 Mexicans have been killed or gone missing as a consequence of the drug war next door. It stems in part from gun trafficking, human rights violations, human trafficking, migration, money laundering, illicit profiteering, buccaneering, corruption, business interruption, and lawlessness related to narco trafficking to feed mostly U.S. drug habits and gunrunning,

Just as in Vietnam, another policy has been needed for decades.

That's why you, too, should look for that book defining what is an explanation. We all need to know why. And we need to demand that our public policy leaders stop making us complicit with the violence.

Jose de la Isla is a columnist for Hispanic Link and Scripps Howard News Service.