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Book Notes: Fabrication by Ricardo Raphael

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In July 2005, a successful Mexican businesswoman Isabel Miranda de Wallace found out that her ne’er-do-well son Hugo was kidnapped and murdered. Isabel owned a billboard company and she used her billboards to put up the information about the tragedy that had devastated her family. As a result, Hugo’s murderers were found and incarcerated. And his mother became one of Mexico’s most important fighters for human rights, lionized on the pages of New York Times and Time Magazine.

    Except…

    It looks like Hugo was neither kidnapped nor murdered. And his supposed kidnappers were a bunch of utterly innocent poor bastards who were tortured and raped in jail on orders from the human rights champion Isabel Miranda de Wallace. Who wasn’t a grieving mother as much as she was a bloodthirsty corrupt maniac.

    Except…

    Maybe Isabel, although corrupt, was not a bloodthirsty maniac. Maybe she had a really big reason to act like she did.

    Ricardo Raphael is a talented journalist and builds the 530-page investigative report of the famous Wallace case with the precision of a watchmaker. I have no idea to what extent his interpretation of the events is correct. But I did notice one thing that was disturbing to me. The Mexico that Raphael portrays is in the grip of extraordinary corruption and shocking  chaos. There is no justice system as such. There’s nothing resembling morality, either institutionally or individually.

    And with all this, every social and moral reject described by Raphael sees the United States as a convenient place to dump the overflow of Mexican dysfunction. The book’s real-life characters always end up in the US, mostly illegally or fraudulently, possessed of the most adamant conviction that the US exists to help them hide from the consequences of their criminality or moral turpitude.

    Maybe this is one of the reasons why Mexico is such a mess. If people know they won’t have to face the consequences because they can always cross over in the US and be rewarded with a complete blank slate, they will be more prone to act badly.

    An excellent book. I still have no idea what happened and who’s to blame but Fabricación was very enjoyable to read.

    9 responses to “Book Notes: Fabrication by Ricardo Raphael”

    1. Demotrash Avatar
      Demotrash

      Are you aware of the Mathew Shepard case? A young gay man tragically murdered by homophobes because of his sexuality…or was he? In The Book of Matt, the author, a liberal gay rights activist, gradually discovers while investigating the case that this story that everyone believes is complete bullshit.

      I’m always interested in these deconstructions of common stories that nobody even questions the truth of. The left gains its power through stories, it’s important to deconstruct the false ones and put stories of our own in the public consciousness. Though I draw the line at dishonest deconstructions (watch “Capturing the Friedmans” if you want to see a particularly distasteful and manipulative example; I don’t recommend it.)

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        Omar Mateen’s story too. No he didn’t target a gay club. He went to the closest one he could find. The big daddy of them all is of course that the Stonewall riots were started by a troon. Nope!

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “The big daddy of them all is of course”

          Tonypundy.. as described by Josephine Tey in ‘the Daughter of Time’

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonypandy_riots#Historical_myth

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughter_of_Time

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        2. Demotrash Avatar
          Demotrash

          I wouldn’t really put these two in the same category. Nobody lied about the Omar Mateen story, we were just operating off limited information, and everyone who kept up with the story later on knows the truth because the media was very transparent about it. There isn’t any kind of cover up going on, people just understandably but prematurely assumed a mass shooting at a gay bar was motivated by homophobia, and it ended up not being the case. And the “black drag queens threw the first brick at Stonewall” just-so story is openly contested by many on the left. Stonewall comes closer to what happened with Mathew Shepard because there’s an attempt to push a bs story, but it didn’t have nearly the same level of success and it’s widely known to be untrue even on the left, whereas 99% of the general public thinks Mathew Shepard was killed for his sexuality (99% who’ve heard of him, I should say.)

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            I was one of the dupes who wholeheartedly believed the Matthew Shepard hoax. And every other hoax until “Trump mocked a disabled journalist” finally made me wonder.

            Never again will I believe the MSM without triple checking everything. Which is a shame because who has the time?

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            1. Avatar
              Anonymous

              I agree with you about so many stories we later find out are complete fiction, but how is the story about Trump mocking that journalist a hoax? I watched the video. It’s not fake, is it?

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                “When Trump told a rally that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had cheered the 9/11 attack, his statement was subjected to a forensic analysis that would never be applied to anything Hillary said. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” gave Trump “Four Pinocchios,” so Trump produced a slew of contemporaneous news reports confirming that Muslims had cheered the 9/11 attack—the most hilarious of which was a story in the Post itself, by Serge Kovaleski. His article said, “In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” In response, Serge disavowed his own reporting. When Trump hit back, doing an imitation of Serge as a flailing imbecile for recanting his story, the media replied: BUT HE’S DISABLED! Trump denied knowing that Serge was disabled, and demanded an apology, saying that anyone could see his imitation was of a flustered, frightened reporter, not a disabled person. It’s true that Trump was not mimicking any mannerisms that Serge has. He doesn’t jerk around or flail his arms. He’s not retarded. He sits calmly, but if you look at his wrists, you’ll see they are curved in. That’s not the imitation Trump was doing—he was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid: “‘Ahhh, I don’t know what I said—ahhh, I don’t know.”

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            2. Demotrash Avatar
              Demotrash

              The Book of Matt wasn’t published until 15 years after the murder, and before that point there was genuinely no way for an ordinary person to know the truth (the trial itself even gave a misleading impression), so I wouldn’t feel too bad about being duped (and of course, gay rights activists systematically obscured the truth after its publication.) But in light of that, I’m willing to be skeptical of fishy seeming stories even when a solid debunking hasn’t come out yet. In the case of hate crimes specifically, assuming the story is false is actually the safest assumption; they usually are.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        For a real classic in this vein, check out the Kitty Genovese story if you’re not already familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese.

        The initial NYT story was universally accepted for decades and all sorts of social/philosophical conclusions were drawn from what had supposedly happened. It wasn’t until that late 00s that the story started to be questioned and then fell apart.

        (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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    A conservative literary critic and college professor

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