Burro Hall

What could possibly go wrong?

A large percentage of men who regularly have sex with prostitutes in Tijuana do not use condoms and have a history of drug and alcohol abuse, according to a binational study published Friday in the online journal AIDS.

The researchers said that Tijuana has a "thriving" prostitution trade and though local authorities regularly test registered "sex workers" for AIDS, only about half of prostitutes have registered or been tested.

More than half of the men had had unprotected sex within the last four months, the researchers found. The average customer is 36 years old, unmarried and visits prostitutes more than 25 times a year.

Many reported being under the influence of drugs, particularly methamphetamine, while having sex with a prostitute.

Our mission (or, if you'll excuse us while we show off a little in Spanish, our raison d'être) -- strengthening ties between Brooklyn and Mexico -- scored a major, unexpected success this week right here in our own backyard, with an exhibition in the Plaza de Armas of photographs by Ricardo Azarcoya, titled "The New York Soul." Though we don't believe the soul of New York to be quite as Hasidic and homosexual as Azarcoya does, we decided to read his choice of subject matter as a coded message of solidarity directed at Burro Hall. Hasidim, after all, tend to be located in Brooklyn, and the Gay Pride parade usually happens on the weekend of our birthday.

And of the 468 subways stations in New York City, we noticed only one made it into the exhibition:


Can there be any doubt that someone's trying to curry favor? Could a Sister Cities request be far behind?

Tonight, at an undisclosed - or at least really poorly-advertised - location somewhere in town, Miss Querétaro 2009 will be chosen from the bevy of interchangeable broadcasting and communications majors (Tania, Daniela, Alejandra, Venus, María Guadalupe, Maricarmen, Jessica, Yenisei and Paulina) pictured at right. Burro Hall will bring you all her vital stats, likes and dislikes, and of course bikini pictures, as soon as we have them.

In other pageant news, visitors to Cancún next week will be able to check out the Miss Spain Pageant. If they're very lucky, they may even learn why the Miss Spain Pageant is being held somewhere that isn't, um, Spain.

Update: Our sources are telling us that Miss Querétaro 2009 is Alejandra Cabral Cabrera, whom we believe is the third future-weathergirl from the left. More news as it breaks.

Sunday Morning Update: Christ, this is like trying to get information about CIA interrogation methods. Diario de Querétaro, having had two days to put its story together, informs us that Srta. Cabral is 19 years old, and stands 5'6" tall. Nice work, Woodstein!

Just a quick note of local interest: if you're in the Centro, go check out Querétaro's newest art gallery/boutique hotel/soon-to-be café, La Casa del Atrio, which had its grand opening last night, and promises to make this town wicked classy, as we say in Boston.

Mother Jones has a series of Drug War-related articles in its latest issue, including one very brief and modest contribution from yr. humble corresp., which somehow wound up with the most inflammatory title in the package.



Update: Related, from today's Post:

The Mexican army has carried out forced disappearances, acts of torture and illegal raids in pursuit of drug traffickers, according to documents and interviews with victims, their families, political leaders and human rights monitors.

Since the whole reason this blog exists is to build bridges between Mexico and Brooklyn (okay, so the rationale changes a lot - it's like the Iraq War of blogs, in that sense), we were delighted to see this piece in the old hometown paper about a Mexican-born photographer exhibiting his pictures of the Mighty Gowanus Canal. This is a definite short-lister for Quote of the Year:

These sights might drive others away. For Mr. Gaytan, they set off reveries of his childhood in 1950s Mexico.

“When I was growing up in Juárez, my grandfather was a handyman who took me on jobs with him,” Mr. Gaytan said. “The first thing he would do was go to the junkyards in Juárez to buy toilets and things he would clean and fix to sell to the people across the border in El Paso. I used to play in those junkyards. That aroma is embedded in my brain: a mix of sewage, kerosene and oil. That’s what the Gowanus brought back to me. My childhood.”

We'll leave it to partisans on each side to decide which city this quote flatters.

We'll just note we've been calling for this for over three years now.

Mexico Builds Border Wall To Keep Out US Assholes

We realize that election results are supposed to be breaking news but (a) we know you don't really give a shit about Querétaro's local elections, and (b) we felt the need to fire most of the Burro Hall polling staff this morning, and things got a little heated. (Yeah, chain yourselves to the door handles - brilliant move, Einstein! You should have seen their faces when we took the doors off the hinges and threw them out the window. Hey, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way down!)

Anyway, despite this page's repeated prediction that PAN was going to cruise to victory, they got about as much of a spanking as men are allowed to give each other in public here. The new governor of Querétaro will be former bullfighter, fanatical runner and big pimpin' guayabera-wearer Pepe Calzada. We know little about his policies and proposals, except that his father was governor way back whenever. And speaking of family, meet the new, almost-legal First Daughter of the State of Querétaro:


That's right, that always classy Rotativo named her "Chica of the Weeka" a few weeks back. That seemed as good a reason as any to vote for the guy. Even though we've been here for some time, it's hard, as outsiders, to really assess whether the state is well-run. It seems to be, insofar as it's clean, it's safe, and there's hardly talk of revolution in the air. But are the schools well run? Public health services adequate? Taxes reasonable? Honestly, we don't really know. But there seems to be genuine excitement about at the prospect of change - though it also says a lot that the party that ran the country as a virtual dictatorship for 71 years is suddenly viewed as a breath of fresh air around here.

To us, the most interesting story will be how it was that Calzada won by four points after most polls showed him down by over 20. (Not that anyone in the polling dept. is getting their job back, of course. We're just curious.)

PRI also picked up the majority of the state's seats in congress, echoing similar gains around the country. PAN held on to the mayor's office here - the next mayor of Querétaro will be some punk named Pancho, who's welcome to apply for a job with us as soon as he gets a couple years seasoning.

Ánimo has not been officially named to a cabinet position, but we're hoping secretary of public health.

From the site Bad Paintings of Barack Obama comes this image, which we think is supposed to be the 4th of July picnic at the White House, set in the very near future, after the Mexican Reconquista of the United States.


We believe the 13 pairs of Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs represent each of the 13 original colonies.

Happy Mary Gorman Day!

It was a year ago today that the filthy little bag of parasites we christened Juan Pablo II washed up on the doorstep of Burro Hall. Since his initial seven dollar vet consultation and $50 neutering, he's cost us roughly $900 in premium catfood and lost collars and nametags. We read somewhere these things can live for 20 years.

For all the weirdness around here, there are a lot of thing Mexicans do in a far more civilized way than we do up in El Norte. With three days to go before election day, the cacophony in the US is usually unbearable. Here - where on a daily basis the cacophony is unbearable - it's just the opposite. Jornadas de refléxion - days of reflection - begin today. Nobody campaigns. everybody....we dunno, reflects, we suppose. It's kind of nice, except when we get to the Jornadas sin alcohol, when the bars close early the night before, and remain closed throughout election day. If a valid US passport is good for anything around here - and it's not - it should be good to prove that we're not voting and would like a very cold, very dry martini, up, with olives.

A few weeks ago we mentioned the beloved local oddball Ánimo, who'd been recruited into the PRI campaign around here. Setting up one of those motion-triggered cameras like they use to photograph leopards in the veld, we got this rare shot of the man doing his thing.


We very much doubt the Days of Reflection mean Ánimo will be keeping silent this weekend. It would, we believe, be a first.

One thing we've been hearing over and over since the border patrolling loon Shawna Forde and a couple of her compatriots gunned down a sleeping man and his 9-year-old daughter (allegedly to rob them of drug money which would be used to finance their vigilante activities) is that, even by the bargain-basement standards of sanity among the anti-immigrant crowd, she was considered someone to shunned, like some Amish girl who won't part with her iPod. As it turns out, they really only started to shun her after she blew a little girl's head off.

Shawna Forde was a rogue, many border-security activists say, or an impostor or a criminal.

But interviews with so-called Minutemen and their critics, as well as reviews of recently scrubbed Web sites, suggest Forde was well-placed in the border-security movement and represented a persistent radical wing. ...

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project and an early leader of the movement, said last week that he donated $200 to a member of Forde's group, that he called Forde a few days after the murders as investigators closed in, and that his group removed postings by and about Forde from its Web site after the arrests. But he called Forde and her associates "rogues," and denied that he or his group had a formal relationship with her.

"They happened to use the Minuteman movement as a guise, as a mask," he said.

Glenn Spencer, founder of the American Border Patrol and another prominent figure in the anti-illegal-immigration movement, posted an Internet account of Forde's arrest titled "Full Disclosure About Shawna Forde." She was arrested minutes after leaving Spencer's house near Sierra Vista.

He said Forde had dropped in uninvited on June 12 and asked to use a room in the house, which doubles as American Border Patrol's offices, to write an e-mail, then left.

"Being a polite person, I spoke with her, even though last summer I told American Border Patrol employees that, due to her strange behavior, she was no longer welcome at the ranch," Spencer wrote. "This is an object lesson about understanding with whom you are dealing in the border volunteer effort."

But former American Border Patrol employee Michael Christie, who left the group in February, said radicals such as Forde were a persistent part of the movement.

"This movement attracts people who are desperate to be a part of something big," Christie said. "These are people who are discontented with their lives for one reason or another, who have probably tried to make a difference in other aspects of their lives and failed." ...

As Forde made forays into other groups, she formed an association with Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project. She posted reports from the border on his Web site, and they defended each other publicly from critics.

In July 2008, Forde wrote about Gilchrist, identifying herself as "Operations Director For The Project," and saying, "The Project has worked closely with MAD (Minutemen American Defense) for several years now."

On Feb. 23, the day after Forde's hometown newspaper, the Everett (Wash.) Herald, published an exposé of Forde's background, Gilchrist defended her in an Internet posting.

"In my experience with Ms. Forde I conclude that she is no whiner. She is a stoic struggler who has chosen to put country, community, and a yearning for a civilized society ahead of avarice and self-glorifying ego."

"The Minuteman Project is proud to be a supporter of Shawna Forde's Minutemen (women) American Defense (M.A.D.)"

On June 2, three days after the murders, Gilchrist received an e-mail from a Southern Arizona associate who had been visited by investigators looking for Forde. Gilchrist forwarded the e-mail to Forde, he said.

He said he called her and asked if there was a warrant for her arrest. She said no.

But after roaming Southern Arizona for another nine or so days, she was picked up outside Spencer's home.

Of course, we hate to refer to groups like Gilchrist as "mainstream," but they're at least allegedly on the non-homicidal side of crazy. We think. Maybe. Anyway, the beauty of these revelations is that the predictable fissures are starting to open among the nutters. This, from Americans for Legal Immigration, in our inbox this afternoon:

NOTE: We warned the nation and all group leaders, including Spencer and Gilchrist, about Shawna Forde many months before these murders. It is truly unfortunate that Gilchrist and others continued to offer Shawna support and aid long after all other groups and leaders in the movement did our best to isolate her. These latest articles show us that Gilchrist and Spencer assisted Shawna Forde after the date of the murders. If Jim Gilchrist and Glen Spencer had listened to the rest of the movement after Shawna Forde and Jim Gilchrist tried to circulate fake rape and beating pictures of Shawna, it would have been clear to Forde that she had no reason to be on Spencer's property or in regular phone and email contact with Jim Gilchrist (Co-Founder of Minuteman Project).

Fourth of July isn't much of a holiday here, but we're gonna pull up a blanket and enjoy the fireworks anyway.

As if Mexico hasn't had enough bad news this year, they country suffered a stunning setback today in its quest to unseat the United States as the Fattest Nation on the Face of God's Green Earth. Turns out obesity in the Unites States isn't just increasing, it's "surging!"

Obesity rates in the US have surged over the last year, a report shows.

The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found adult obesity rates rose in 23 of the 50 states, but fell in none.

In addition, the percentage of obese and overweight children is at or above 30% in 30 states.

Thirty percent in 30 states! And this report was released before the summer ice-cream-and-video-games season even began. President Obama may want to challenge the nation: 50% in 50 States by 2050. What's that? Too great a challenge, you say? America's not up to task? I'm sorry, but could you speak up a little? Neil Armstrong can't hear you...because he's standing on the fucking moon right now.

"Our health care costs have grown along with our waist lines," says Dr. Jeff Levi, the author of the report and a man whose patriotism, we believe, is deeply suspect. "How are we going to compete with the rest of the world if our economy and workforce are weighed down by bad health?"

How are we going to compete? Hey, "doctor," why don't you ask Mexico how we're competing?

Election season is winding down here, and, sadly, it's produced precious little in the way of collectibles (noise not being easily bottled and preserved). However - while again stressing we have no interest in who wins (no tenemos gallo en esta pelea!) - we'd love to get our hands on a Pepe Calzada souvenir guayabera. As campaign props go, this is the flyest thing we've seen in some time.


Calzada is the PRI candidate for governor here, and what makes it so great is that people don't even wear guyaberas in Querétaro - certainly not guys in their early 40s - but it's become Calzada's standard uniform. It's as if Mitt Romney started campaigning in a dashiki, just because, hey, it's comfortable and it looks cool. It comes in a long-sleeve model, too, as you can see in the picture below. (These pix come from inqro.com's Flickr page.) Actually, the picture below - in which the candidate, flanked by his wife and a clown, is being purified by a pair of Chichimeca conchero dancers - gives you a pretty good idea what it's like to run for governor of Querétaro.

The last time we brought up the issue of child car seats, we have to say we were somewhat taken aback by the strength of the anti-car seat sentiment out there. Arguments ran the gamut from child car seats are expensive, to raising children to adulthood is a lot more expensive than hosing them out of the wreckage at an early age, which, we must confess, we're still unable to counter. It would be wrong to say that these arguments put a price tag on a child's life, but they do at least give us a range - the bottom end of which would seem to be about 200 US dollars.

Still, because the internets were sort of tailor-made for lonely cranks, we're going to continue our no-time-limit offer to buy child car seats for anyone whose photograph gets printed here, and who contacts us with a letter of apology for endangering the life of their child.


If this week's winner, for lack of a better word, seems a little big for a car seat, that's an optical illusion, because Dad is driving a Mini Cooper (owned by BMW, starting price US$23,900). Our little man is not completely unprotected, as you can see from the state-of-the-art glass and plastic angel hanging from the rearview, but we still believe that a seat belt would not be too much to ask. We're sympathetic to the argument that the Mini Cooper is such an insanely bad choice for driving in Mexico - why not just put your family on roller skates? - that a child seat is sort of superfluous, but if you're shelling out for top-of the line Bavarian engineering (hey, is that a fully-retractable sunroof?) we strongly believe you can afford a car seat from Wal-Mart. Burro Hall operators are standing by.

Remember that old Simpsons episode about a big, fat, psychiatric patient who thought he was Michael Jackson (voiced, of course, by Michael Jackson)? We were reminded of it when perusing the YouTube Channel of "Estefan Jackson," who we've seen named in a number of news stories as "Mexico's top Michael Jackson impersonator." We're quite certain Estefan started his career as "Mexico's top late-period Elvis impersonator," before deciding to branch out.

Querétaro is generally pretty insulated from the drug war crap, but every now and then it feels like the craziness is closing in. To whit, today's news out of Apaseo El Alto, which is about an hour from here.

State and federal security forces killed 12 presumed gangsters Friday morning in a small Central Mexico village as the government’s crackdown on organized crime intensifies.

The battle in Apaseo El Alto, about 150 miles north of Mexico City and an hour’s drive from the popular resort town of San Miguel Allende, began when gunmen tried to repel officers who came to arrest them. Soldiers as well as federal and Guanajuato state police returned fire, authorities said.

Three police officers were injured, one of them seriously, officials said.

Police had stepped up operations in the area after the recent arrests of Apaseo El Alto’s two top police officials on suspicion of working for La Familia, a violent drug syndicate based in neighboring Michoacan state, Guanajuato Gov. Juan Manuel Oliva said Friday.

When the top police officials have been removed under suspicion of drug ties, and then the cops and the cartels start gunning each other down, it;s hard to know who to cheer for. As for Apaseo, we spent a delightful afternoon there about a year and a half ago, though as we wrote at the time, "a lot of people looked as if they might have personal knowledge of a hidden airstrip somewhere in the valley."

Hard to decide which is tackier: our old hometown Boston Herald making the Worst Pun Ever, or Ultimas Noticias (Santiago, Chile) flipping the very much alive Michael Jackson on his side to look dead (an illusion somewhat undercut by the upright figures reflected in his glasses).


As often happens to middle-aged gringos, things started to unravel for Jackson in Mexico, where he wrapped up the 1993 Dangerous Tour and amid accusations of, well, you know. A contemporaneous account of MJ's Mex City sojourn from People:

What is known of Michael Jackson's final days on tour in Mexico City does not support the view that he was incapacitated by drugs, though as usual the star was moody and unpredictable. From Oct. 24 to Nov. 11, he and his 170-person entourage stayed at the Hotel President México, where Jackson occupied the palatial eight-room presidential suite on the 42nd floor. "He wasn't very animated," says a hotel employee. "He was sad—always wearing sunglasses." Though he had scheduled an appearance on Oct. 28 at El Nuevo Reino Aventura amusement park—home to Keiko, the Free Willy whale—he never showed. Instead, he bought tickets for 5,000 underprivileged children to visit the park.

One evening, Jackson, clad in black pants and jacket and a black fedora, arrived unannounced, with three young boys who looked to be between 8 and 13 years old, at the Mixup record store in the upscale Pabellón Polanco shopping mall. During the hour-long visit, Jackson signed autographs and bought about S4,000 worth of laser discs and CDs (Jackson's own Thriller and Bad CDs were in a bin of marked-down goods) and danced and moonwalked in the back of the store with his young companions, two of whom wore outfits nearly identical to his own. "They behaved real well," says store clerk Jose Angel Hernandez. "There was a lot of communication between them and Michael."

Jackson did reschedule three of his five concerts because of dental problems. A source in the Jackson camp confirms that the star had an abscessed molar pulled—under general anesthesia—at the ABC Hospital in Mexico City. This source says he saw no signs that the star was suffering from drug addiction. "He's a nice, mellow guy," said the source. "He was calm and relaxed." A local observer, however, thought it odd that Jackson did not fly home for the surgery, especially in light of the fact that many wealthy Mexicans themselves go to Houston or Miami for medical treatment.

Most significant, perhaps, is that by the end of his stay, Jackson's mechanical shows and general eccentricity had made him something of a laughingstock. Local newspapers ran cartoons mocking him (one showing his face melting under the spotlights, another picturing him purchasing 45 bottles of Clearasil), and reviewers called his concerts monotonous and complained about the long wait between songs. Madonna's concerts on Nov. 10, 11 and 13 generated more excitement, and radio ads urged fans to "Come see Madonna. Her teeth don't hurt." Michael was treated as a has-been. ...

Jackson himself has provided few clear answers. Instead, he simply disappeared, making an escape as smoothly choreographed as one of his shows. Liz Taylor and her husband joined the singer in Mexico City on Nov. 9, and after his Nov. 11 concert, the three never returned to the El Presidente hotel. Late that night, they boarded an MGM Grand 727, which touched down to refuel near Toronto, stopped briefly in Iceland, then landed on Saturday morning at London's Luton Airport, where a figure thought to be Jackson was seen emerging wrapped in a blanket.

You can watch what was salvaged of the 1993 Mexico City tour here.

Our own personal recollection of Jackson would be the time we visited with him in Paris back in 2002, to discuss combining the Beatles and Burro Hall back catalogs under a single offshore holding company. He ignored us most of the afternoon, instead spent the day down on all fours playing with le chien. Things started to get out of hand, and when he playfully dangled the little dumpling over the edge of the balcony, we decided to take our leave.

More Mexican violence spilling over into the peaceful, God-fearing city of Houston:

The stakes are clear in Houston, as the city is considered by the ATF to be the number one point of origin for military-style weapons traced from Mexican organized crime scenes to U.S. sales counters.

“Those people who buy the guns in Houston have just as much blood on their hands as the people who pulled the trigger down in Mexico,” J. Dewey Webb, chief of the ATF’s Houston field division, said Wednesday.

Dozens of guns purchased in Houston have been traced to kidnappings and murders in Mexico.

In one recent federal investigation of 70 weapons bought here by arms traffickers, 36 were used in homicides. The dead include 19 cartel members and 17 civilians or law officers.

Houston is appealing to gunrunners because there are so many stores that those seeking to exploit the system believe they can go unnoticed and find what they want, authorities said.

The "Firearms for Everyone!" crowd, through its mouthpiece organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the 'sport' part comes from the fact that the victims are often running away when they're being shot at) is taking a bold step to crack down on the gun show free for all: throwing up some billboards and public service announcements, in the event that transnational gun-runners don't realize that what they're doing is illegal.

Anyone know how that border wall coming along?

There's a road race here on Sunday - specifically, at 8AM on Sunday so, no, we won't be participating it in, thank you - but the posters are stuck onto every phone pole in town. Here's a fun exercise: can you spot the two guys not from Querétaro in this picture?



Related: Can you guess the first and second place finishers from last year's event?

"Women With Manuel Gonzalez Valle!"

With just eleven days to go before the election, the PAN gubernatorial candidate (and current mayor) Manny G appears to be in the middle of an unfolding sex scandal involving two or more women. (We haven't read the article, but mujeres is plural. Could be talking Berlusconi numbers, for all we know.) We can't help but admire the way he had the presence of mind to flash the "victory" sign as the DQ's photographer surprised him in his love nest. A guy with those political reflexes just might survive this thing.

Exclusive Video: South Carolina governor Mark Sanford hiking Argentina's Appalachian Trail.

Some welcome news from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority:

Selling the name of a subway station has been a goal of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for nearly five years. But interest has been low, even for a piece of real estate so recognizable to the public....

If a $4 million deal is approved on Wednesday, the nexus of subway stops at Atlantic Avenue, Pacific Street and Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn will add an additional name to its already lengthy title: Barclays.

A question, dear readers: Do we ever ask you for anything? No? All right, then, just this one time, we're asking you for $4 million (we're pretty sure we can pull it off for three, but in case the city wants to play hardball, we should have a cushion) so we can have the Borough Hall subway station renamed.


As you can see, it's really just a matter of tweaking the existing signage, which is why we think we can bring it in under 3 mil. The goal would be to cut the ribbon on the Mexican Bicentennial, Sept. 16, 2010.

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