‘Tis the season: The post-World Cup Christmas blues

 Al Jazeera English

When the World Cup kicked off in November, I was rooting for Mexico. Having resided off and on in the coastal town of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state since the start of the pandemic, I had already amassed a good quantity of Mexican football shirts, and I watched the games at a café on the beach, where a television had been set up on a table in the sand.

A traditional Mexican blanket was hung to deflect the glare of the sun, and an altar was erected below the TV comprising burning incense, a green candle bearing the image of Jesus Christ, an enlarged photograph of Mexican goalie Guillermo Ochoa, and assorted good luck charms. A small audience would gather with the beer the Mexican TV commentators in Qatar had encouraged us to imbibe on their behalf, and the 90 minutes would pass in animated camaraderie, with plenty of hollering and colourful Mexican swear words.

Little did we know that, upon the elimination of the Mexican team, Morocco would replace Mexico in our hearts – in my case rather literally. With the help of a laundry pin, a piece of paper, and red nail polish, I amended the MEXICO emblazoned across the chest of one of my jerseys. The letters OROC took the place of EXI, and I was ready to go. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Mexico and the unbearable whiteness of advertising

 Al Jazeera English

Scrolling through Facebook recently on my phone in Mexico, I came upon an advertisement informing me in Spanish: “The moment has arrived to renew yourself.” A company based in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León offered to loan me up to 250,000 pesos — more than $12,000 — to pursue the plastic surgery of my choice. An image of a bikini-clad white woman with blond hair provided additional encouragement.

A perusal of the company’s Facebook page revealed that she was not the only white person selected to promote these surgically focused financial services. In fact, not a single non-white person had been chosen to embody “renewal”. This in a country where the vast majority of people are not white, and where a soaring national poverty rate — nearly 44 percent at the end of 2020 — means most folks could never afford a $12,000 loan.

And yet the Nuevo León firm is scarcely alone in its extra-white marketing approach. Generally speaking, the chromatic composition of Mexican advertising exists in glaring defiance of the physical diversity of Mexico’s primarily mestizo (mixed heritage) and Indigenous population. As is the case elsewhere in Latin America and in other countries subjected to European colonial depredations, the Spanish colonial legacy in Mexico has meant that lighter skin is associated with societal superiority and economic advantage. And what is the point of advertising if not to make people want to be something “better” than they are? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

El Salvador’s war on itself: The siege of Soyapango

 All Jazeera English

On December 3, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who is also a Bitcoin influencer and the self-dubbed “coolest dictator in the world”, took to his favourite platform for governance, Twitter, to announce that 10,000 soldiers had surrounded the Salvadoran municipality of Soyapango.

According to the tweet, which came accompanied by a video set to dramatic music, “extraction teams” from the police and army had been tasked with removing gang members from the area “one by one”.

The following day, Bukele tweeted another annoying video to accompany the news that “more than 140 gang members” had already been arrested in Soyapango, El Salvador’s most populous municipality and a satellite city of San Salvador, the country’s capital.

And the day after that, he reported that the Soyapango operation had entailed the largest concentration of troops in Salvadoran history — no small feat in a nation whose 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992, killed upwards of 75,000 people. . . .

Of course, in his euphoria over the unprecedented mobilisation of an entire army division, Bukele failed to explain why a president should derive such delight in effectively waging war against his own country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Hardcore’: The Mars of Elon Musk

 Al Jazeera English

Not long after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk – who is also the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter employees giving them two options. The first was to commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity”. The second was to quit.

Musk had already fired approximately half of Twitter’s workforce – since anyone with a mere $44bn to spare on buying a social media platform is clearly in the business of pinching pennies. . . .

On the surface, writing about Musk should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The 51-year-old US-based South African live-tweets his bowel movements, makes penis jokes, gets off on anti-Black racism, and builds not-so-self-driving electric cars that crash into parked emergency vehicles. Unfortunately, this particular fish happens to be the richest person on the planet, who wields disproportionate control over terrestrial matters like the stock market and Donald Trump’s Twitter presence and who is now determined to make humanity a “spacefaring civilisation” as well – whether we like it or not.

As Musk told Time magazine, which shamelessly crowned him “Person of the Year” in 2021, the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”. According to Time’s obsequious writeup, Musk predicted colonising Mars within five years. Eventually, rocket ships would shuttle 100 people at a time to the Red Planet and then travel back to Earth, powered by Made-in-Mars fuel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.