A Mexican beauty queen arrested in the company of heavily armed drug suspects will be released after prosecutors decided not to charge her with any offense, the attorney general's office said on Friday. Laura Zuñiga, 23 and the reigning Miss Sinaloa, was detained along with seven men in December at a military checkpoint. Police found assault rifles and more than $55,000 in cash in the luxury vehicles they had been driving.
The raven-haired beauty from the drug-infested northwestern state of Sinaloa has been a fixture in the Mexican media since she was arrested and placed in a federal detention center.
The attorney general's office said on Friday it had not found evidence that she was involved in criminal activity.
Apparently, driving around in an armored SUV with two AR-15 assault rifles, three pistols, nine ammunition clips, 600 rounds of ammos, 16 cell phones, 18 grand in cash and a number of known drug cartel leaders is, in Jalisco at least, technically not illegal. But since her boyfriend, Juarez cartel kingpin Angel Garcia Urquiza, remains in jail (for now), we'd like to invite Srta. Zuñiga to come watch the Super Bowl at our house. No wagering, of course.
While we were up in New York slaving for The Man, we got invited to a dinner party where we were seated next to a correspondent for the UK Telegraph. Charming fellow, and he recently published a piece advancing the thesis that being president of the United States may actually prove more difficult than a week of inauguration parties would lead a foreign journalist to believe. He didn't interview us, but he did talk to our dinner host - he's the one attacking the 'biased liberal media' and impugning the patriotism of the Left (his wife, we should say unreservedly, is a fantastic cook.)
Politics aside, though, what made us chuckle was this:
Talking solemnly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Justin Timberlake intoned how, the day after the inauguration, "I woke up with a little swagger in my step…[Americans] all of a sudden have swagger. We are cool now. Think about it."
It was a predictably cringe-making choice of words from a pop star who, in any other country probably wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the spotlight on such an occasion.
Setting aside the fact that, as far as we can tell, Timberlake never got anywhere near the inauguration or any of the parties, or that, where we come from at least, if you sleep with Britney Spears, Cameron Diaz and Jessica Biel we already think you're swaggering and cool (of course, Swampscott did go heavily for Obama), what we most love is the implication that no country other than silly ol' America would ever allow a pop star to play even a tangential role in a solemn state affair.
As part of Operation 'Oh Shit, UNESCO's Coming!,' the city has been repainting just about every old building in the Historic Center. This sometimes involved workplace safety violations so egregious that even the Mexican press is as forced to take notice, as seen in this photo that ran in the paper Noticias a couple of days ago, which we're reprinting for the amusement our friends in the ladder and scaffolding community.
These painters have reached the third floor of this building not by raising a tall ladder from the ground, but by hanging short ladders with handmade wooden stabilizers off the edge off the roof and then climbing down them, unencumbered by nanny-state burdens such as ropes or safety harnesses while hanging 30 feet off the ground.
Amzingly, the paint they're chipping off does not contain lead.
You may remember Chip Saltsman, the candidate for Chairman of the Republican National Committee who's positioned himself as the "Weird Al" Yankovic of eugenics by distributing a CD of racist parodies including the infamous "Barack the Magic Negro." Since we don't listen to much hip-hop down here, we somehow missed this other track on the CD, "The Star Spanglish Banner." A lot of Mexican officials are worried (rightly so, in our opinion) that Mexico simply isn't on Obama's radar at the moment. But rest assured amigos, the the Republican party has you in their thoughts and considers you as worthy of racist mockery as the colored folk!
For what it's worth, we think "Star Spangled Beaner" would have been a lot funnier.
"No jodas con el Burro" Update:Announced within two hours of posting:
I wanted you to be first to know that I have decided to withdraw my candidacy to become your next chairman.
Thank you for your passion for our party and for the principles that make it great. I hope that you won’t hesitate to call on me as we rebuild our majority.
The U.S. and Mexico soccer teams will be meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in a couple of weekend for a World Cup qualifying match. Rather counterintuitively, it turns out the Mexico hasn't beaten the US on American soil in a decade, or on anyone else's soil since 2000. But this time it'll be different, because Mexico has a "secret weapon": Voodoo.
An advertisement in the sports newspaper Record on Tuesday invited fans to clip coupons and redeem them at their local Radio Shack store for a voodoo-doll likeness of a U.S. player...
An illustration showed a pair of scissors slicing off the leg of a doll in a U.S. jersey that was bruised, crying out in pain, leaking stuffing and stuck with pushpins.
Ha ha! Good fun. So, you may have noticed that the dolls are being doled out by Radio Shack, the Texas-based maker of fine Tandy consumer electronic products. Apparently, no one in the Mexico office bothered to ask Headquarters if there'd be any objection to distributing an American-clad doll for Mexicans to torture. Not surprisingly, there was.
"In their desire to support their national team in the World Cup, our recently acquired operation in Mexico was interested in participating in a promotion created by the Record," RadioShack said in a statement. "Upon notification of our potential involvement, RadioShack Corporation has decided not to participate."
...the promotion will continue, and the paper was in talks with businesses interested in taking over as distribution centers.
Put us down as very interested. But lest you think the promotion is indicative of some kind of anti-American grudge, rest assured, Record genuinely believes the voodoo dolls will work.
Record planned to expand the promotion to include effigies representing the other CONCACAF finalists: Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador and Trinidad and Tobago.
We've been making fun of the raging paranoia in this town for a while - typified by the fact that the vast majority of the residents believe Querétaro is safe, and an equal number agree that "it's necessary to implement more security controls," - presumably meaning above and beyond the 100 remote-controlled police surveillance cameras already set up around town. Anyway, we were wandering the dust-choked streets yesterday and noticed for the first time (since we don't usually walk around staring up at the rooflines) the specific camera assigned to monitor Burro Hall, cleverly attached to a rooftop religious icon on the corner of Pasteur and Independencia.
We're pretty sure that from that height the lens can see right onto our roof, which means there's going to be a lot more nude hairy-gringo sunbathing going on as the weather gets warmer. Webcam shows start at 10:00AM, noon, and 2:00PM.
We're just finishing up Richard Grabman's Gods, Gachupines and Gringos - which we realize we urged you to read back in October, but, hey, we've been a little busy. (Yes, busy. Look, one does not simply get a tan, okay? One works on a tan.) And we came across this amusing footnote:
Ir a Dallas Texas (to go to Dallas, Texas) is Mexican slang for having totally screwed up, equivalent to the British expression "to be sent to Coventry."
Our in-house cultural attache insists that the latter actually means to be exiled or ostracized, but the point remains the same. That point being, we finally understand the amused expressions on several Mexican commentators when discussing a certain ostracized, exiled, total screw-up who recently fue a Dallas, Texas.
The local government [in Huixquilucan] has decided to suspend the killing of dogs by electrocution, "in accordance with the wishes of the people," who called for an end to the practice and for the promotion of sterilization campaigns, adoption and in extreme cases the use of other methods such as lethal injection.
That thing about "the wishes of the people" is just politics. Understandably, they can't admit to caving in to a gringo website. We get it.
As part of the endless national effort to break the world record for the most world records set in a single country, 55 cooks in Mexico City spent 60 hours preparing what they claim is the World's Largest Cheesecake. This of course shatters the previous record of....well, there is no previous record. It's safe to say that they're just making shit up now.
Our question, which we plan to put to the public affairs office at Kraft General Foods, is why this event - sponsored by Philadelphia Cream Cheese - was held in Mexico (a country hardly synonymous with cheesecake to begin with) rather than, say, Philadelphia, or even Kraft's hometown of Chicago. We're in a serious recession, guys. This is no time to start shipping cheesecake-record-breaking jobs south of the border.
"We know that the human body begins to deteriorate immediately at death..." With those words begins what historians are already calling "the greatest documentary about the corpse of Abraham Lincoln ever made."
Our Tio Loco send us this troubling evidence that the job market down here is just as bad as in El Norte:
Santiago Meza López, known as “el Pozolero” in the Mexican news media, has confessed to dissolving the remains of 300 people in acid while working for a top drug trafficker, the Mexican Army said Friday. Dissolving bodies is gaining increasing popularity in the internecine killings between rival traffickers that is playing out here, and the practice has become known as making pozole.
Mr. Meza, 45, confessed to receiving $600 a week to dispose of bodies for Teodoro García Simental, a drug kingpin who broke with the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix cartel
Six hundred lousy bucks a week for dissolving human corpses in acid? Shit, the New York State Dept of Labor was paying us $405 to do nothing back in 2005. How much you want to bet the Arellano Félix boys didn't even provide safety goggles and face masks? If this country had an OSHA...
We've made fun of the god-awful subtitling on Mexicn bootleg DVDs before, but apparently no one took our suggestions to heart. We're trying to catch up with all the major Oscar contenders again, and just wanted to take a second to inform our local Frost/Nixon pirates that "Howard Hunt" is a person, and should not be translated as "como cazar" - "how to go hunting." Seriously, call us if in the future you have any questions.
Ah, but we do love Mexico - where it's never enough just to be an 11-year-old torero, you've got to be an 11-year-old world-record setting torero.
An 11-year-old Mexican boy has killed six young bulls in a single fight, apparently becoming the world's youngest matador to achieve the feat.
A video of the contest is to be verified by Guinness World Records.
Seriously, we had no idea this was even a category. As you can imagine, everyone and their nanny tried to stop this, but little Michelito had what we thought was a pretty eloquent response: Like, how 'bout you all shut the fuck up?
"The bullfighting opponents shouldn't stick their nose in things they don't like," he said ahead of his record attempt.
"No-one is forcing them to watch bullfights or to keep informed about them. It's as if I told a boy who does motocross not to do it, it's very bothersome."
Awww. You can see the little scamp in action here.
Last weekend we went down to Mexico City to watch a local kid, Octavio "El Payo" Garcia, take his alternativa, which is where he "graduates" from being a novice to a full-fledged bullfighter (thus ensuring that the only way he will ever appear in Querétaro's Plaza Santa Maria again is if he joins Grand Funk Railroad as a backup singer). Our boy was mediocre at best, but that's possibly because his choice of padrino was destined to overshadow him: José Tomás, whose testicular fortitude we've chronicled here many times. Having never (to the best of our recollection) seen him in person, we decided it was worth the road trip. This turned out to be a rather unoriginal idea, and we were amazed to find Plaza Mexico - the largest bullring in the world, considerably bigger than Fenway Park - sold out. Luckily, we quickly met up with the world's worst scalper, who sold us a decent ticket at face value. Tomás more than lived up to the hype, as you can see in this (bloodless, vegetarian-friendly) compilation:
It's easy to see how he keeps getting gored in the cojones; we've had lap dances that were conducted at a greater remove. Unfortunately for the bulls, they wind up breaking a horn on his enormous, clanking brass balls. Tomás does all this without a hint of showmanship or flash.
The same couldn't be said for the other big name on the bill, Mexico's Arturo Macías, but we'll forgive him because he pulled one of the best fake-dramatic moves we've seen anywhere: apparently having been gored at the moment he was killing the bull, Macías falls to the ground and is quickly scooped up by his team, who frantically run with him towards the exit. But then Macías, noticing that the bull is still standing, grabs the wall of the bullring with both hands and tries to pull himself back in. A struggle ensues, he breaks free, staggers over to the bull, and the two injured warriors stand there, swaying back and forth until finally the bull collapses and Macías - forgetting he's supposed to be badly injured - dances around like he'd just won Latin American Idol. All we could think of was James Brown being dragged off stage by his handlers ("Please, James, please - this is insanity! Don't do no mo'!"), only to shake them off and break into "It's a Man's Man's Man's World."
It's unseasonably warm, the street is full of rubble and the air is filled with dust, but for our neighbors, that's no reason not to continue leaving entire gutted sheep carcasses sitting in the back of the pickup truck all night.
We're sure you've all been following the big Oscar story - that Mexico's Mike Elizade has been nominated in the Best Makeup category for his work on Hellboy II! Okay, sure, he's lived in the US since he was five, but that still makes him more Mexican than Anthony Quinn. Muchos saludos, Miguel!
Boy, did the Holocaust suck, or what? Sorry, we've been struggling for a segue from Obama to Hitler, and we lack Congressman Broun's facility with language.
When it comes to the Holocaust, it's hard to find fault with any attempt at remembrance or education. Still, we're going to try, because earlier this week we spent an hour or so in Mexico's Holocaust Museum (specifically, the Museo Histórico Judío y del Holocausto 'Tuviel Maizel'), and, man, was it weird.
The museum proudly claims to have had 150,000 visitors to date, though another way of putting this - since it's been open six days a week since 1970, - would be "12 a day." It seems kind of obvious to us that efforts to educate and memorialize are considerably less effective if no one knows these efforts exist. We would never have even heard of this museum if it wasn't listed on one of those cheesy ad-laden maps that hotels hand out. The marker on the map was in the wrong place, but because we'd happened to double-check the address in the phone book, we were able to find it. Or at least we thought we had. What we found was an enormous black monolith of a building, its yard ringed with (irony alert!) electrified wire, and with no sign or other identifying markers except for two policemen outside and a number of concrete barriers protecting the entrance from truck bombers. In today's world, we know better than to quibble with anyone's possibly excessive security measures, but it's unclear to us just how a truck bomber would find the place. We've been to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, Yad Vashem, and the Dachau concentration camp - all of them had signs on the outside.
The policemen (actual cops, not security guards) assured us this was the place, and ushered us into a hallway, where we rang a bell and a heavy metal door was buzzed open. We presented identification at the window, and were then asked to step back outside, presumably while they Googled us. We sat there for ten minutes before being buzzed back in, relieved of our bags, and led up a couple of flights to the museum. Before we could tour the museum, we had to sit through a short film about Nazism and the Holocaust, in English (they could cater to us individually, since we were the only people in the place.)
Perhaps because we've actually met Jews before ("some of our blog's best commenters are Jewish!") we found the first third of the museum - which could have been titled "Jews Exist" - somewhat tedious. (Mexico being 99.6% not-Jewish, we do realize this section serves an actual purpose.) The next section got down to business: The Nazis came, and they persecuted the Jews, then moved them into ghettos, then death camps, then they were liberated, Israel was founded, and they all lived happily ever after. We're condensing here, but not by much. Seriously, it was about as challenging as a coloring book.
As we moved on to a display on the four stages of Jewish life (circumcision, bar mitzvah, marriage, Kaddish), an attendant came over to inform us that photography was not allowed. This seemed odd in a museum, but odder still was his demand that we erase the photos we had already taken. Because, really, the last thing you'd want in an educational museum is for any of the information contained therein to leak out. Burro Hall readers should feel especially robbed, since we were taking a photo of a photo of a well-respected Mexico City mohel named (this is true) Dr Klip. That's him below in a picture we lifted from the website. You deserve better.
The final third of the museum is dedicated to Squadron 201 the famous (in Mexico, anyway; they've even got a metro station named after them) squad of Mexican pilots attached to the US Air Force in 1945, which flew a bunch of missions in the Philippines, about 6,000 miles from the nearest concentration camp. The reason it's included in the Museum of Jewish History and the Holocaust is...well, we don't know. It's not like there's any guide there you can ask.
As we wandered back downstairs towards the exit we found, tucked away in an empty corridor, an exhibit called "Visas for Life," about consular officers who worked to get Jews out of dangerous areas, including the genuine Mexican hero Gilberto Bosques, who probably saved more European Jews personally than all the Allied Nations combined. There was another visitor walking through it as well, but she was accosted by the attendant who said she couldn't look at the exhibit unless she went upstairs and sat through the introductory video first. We slinked quietly towards the exit at that point.
Prosecutors say three heads were found in an ice box south of Ciudad Juarez, which lies across from El Paso, Texas.
The local prosecutor's office says the heads belonged to three unidentified men and were found in a rural town about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Ciudad Juarez.
A headless body was discovered in a canal a few miles (kilometers) away.
The mainstream media won't talk about The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, but Burro Hall will.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists again, exactly 14,706 days after their famous protest gesture at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
But this time they were clasped in victory and not burdened with pain.
"They said it would be a cold day in hell before a black man became president," said Carlos, the bronze medalist in the 200 meters at Mexico City. "Look out the window - it sure looks like a cold day in hell out there to me."
Watching Barack Obama become the first African-American president from their hotel room in Boston with their wives, both men wept. Carlos called the event "the greatest day of my life."
"My fellow—," began Obama, who then stopped when he and the 2.5 million citizens present, some of whom had traveled thousands of miles to experience the once-in-a-lifetime event, were startled by loud, metal-on-concrete banging. "My fell…my fell…my—."
"Is that a jackhammer?" Obama added.
...Obama appeared most frustrated about halfway through the address when reverberations from the pneumatic drill set off several dozen nearby car alarms, drowning out the new president's attempt to describe his vision for America's future in a changing world.
...During a particularly loud spell of thuds, Obama muttered, "Oh, come on."
At one point during the address, Obama stopped talking entirely and walked off the stage for nearly five minutes. When he returned, he asked the restless crowd for calm and understanding.
"Okay, so, it looks like they're not going to stop jackhammering. We're just going to have to keep going, I guess," Obama told the massive group, many of whom had already begun walking to their cars. "I'll try to speed through it."
The life of "Martha Luker King," as explained by our nephew Lucas, age six:
He liked to talk a lot and walk around a lot. And let's say you had some bagpipes, and someone else wanted the bagpipes, he would tell you to talk about it instead of fight.
We've editorializedrepeatedly about the rather inhumane ways in which stray dogs are executed in this country, but the one thing we haven't argued with is the need (unfortunately) to do it. Many of these dogs carry rabies and other diseases, and virtually all are unsterilized. Here's a factoid: in the State [not the country] of Mexico there are four dogs for every person - 58 million in all. That's an enormous health hazard, and putting down a mere 4,000 a month doesn't even begin to address it.
So we were a little surprised to learn that most of the dead dogs are simply thrown into open air dumps, where their rotting carcasses pose a major threat to public health. Seriously, is anyone actually in charge of animal control here?
And with that, we're off to Plaza Mexico for the day. Saludos!
The ultra-creepy The Sixth Annual Worldwide Families Meeting, which is sort of like Renaissance Weekend, but run by the Catholic Church, wraps up today in Mexico City. (President Calderón was greeted with cries of "Long live our Catholic president!" Which is the kind of thing that makes up happy to hold foreign passports.) For days of predictable doctrinaire Muzak about how life should be lived - "immorality is bad," etc. - but occasionally something managed to cut through the static. For instance, this official pronouncement - and this is apparently something that people in authority here just can't say often enough - that women wouldn't get raped so often if they'd just stop dressing like whores.
Don't wear plunging necklines or miniskirts because "the woman is provoking an attack, to be dressing herself this way is provoking the man," said the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez.
Or, as the auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, Darwin Rudy Andino, put it, women "expose themselves to rape," because they "devalue their dignity," by wearing something other than a burlap sack and snowpants.
We're willing to cut Bishop Andino some slack because we assume a guy named "Darwin" doesn't become the Catholic Bishop of Tegucigalpa without saying a lot of crazy shit he doesn't really believe. But several lay members interviewed "agreed that the woman is responsible for attacks both physical and verbal, since she should be modest in her style of dress and not arouse curiosity on other people." Or, to put it another way:
Renato Ascencio, bishop of Ciudad Juarez, said that shame is a virtue...
Quote of the Day, from White House flack Dana Perino, one of the dimmer bulbs in the Bush firmament:
When asked if she perceived a bias in the media against the president, she said, "I don't think I would always be asked about my feelings about liberal bias in the media, if there wasn't any liberal bias in the media."
Sigh. And since she was also constantly asked about incompetence, malfeasance and criminality within the George Bush White House, then there was obviously incompetence, malfeasance and criminality within the George Bush White House! Typically, Perino buries this stunning admission on a Friday before a long weekend.
Why can't it be Tuesday yet? There's precedent for this: in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII eliminated October 5th through the 14th. We see no reason the current pope can't just declare today January 20.
Soldiers in Tijuana have detained three suspected drug assassins with uniforms featuring a skull above crossed crutches, apparently patterned after the logo of the "Jackass" television show and movies.
The men are suspected of working for a Mexican cartel operator nicknamed "Muletas," or "Crutches."
The 15 black uniforms found in the men's SUV in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, had arm patches with the logo and the slogan, "Muletas Special Forces."
No word yet on whether these guys were videotaping their own hits, but MTV América Latina has reportedly asked for a pitch meeting.
Anyway, the Spanish word for jackass is burro, so obviously they were trying to suck up to us for some reason.
Irresistible offer, innit? This is Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the National Teachers Union, which sounds like a genteel enough organization, but in Mexico they're sort of like the Teamsters back in Jimmy Hoffa's day. This lady literally makes or breaks presidential candidates here. Even we don't want any trouble with her, which is why we used the most flattering picture we could find.
Anyway, back in October, Gordillo - a politician with an obviously keen sense of optics - thought this was a good idea:
The boss of Mexico's public sector teachers' union has caused outrage in a country where 40% live below the poverty line by splashing out on 59 Humvees for her top officials.
Elba Esther Gordillo - known simply as "la maestra", or "the teacher" - handed out the first dozen of the controversial vehicles at a meeting of her 1.6 million-strong union at the weekend.
...But the Mexican public has reacted badly to images of union bosses getting into the orange and silver Hummers, worth some 500,000 pesos [$40,000], bombarding radio programmes and newspaper websites with angry comments. Many have expressed their outrage at such largesse at a time when the global financial crisis is causing widespread concern.
At which point, Gordillo said something to the effect of, "Oh, what, those Hummers? No, those are going to be raffled off to raise money for poor schools!" Of course they were! And so now the Querétaro Hummer is finally up for grabs - 100 pesos ($8) a ticket, with a 1-in-10,000 chance of winning (assuming a clean contest, por supuesto!) We're buying a ticket, of course, and will be happy to pick one up for any non-queretanos who want to send us eight bucks. If we win, we're going to paint it with the Burro Hall - er, Monumento de Poo - logo and raffle it again. All the money will, we swear to god, go to the kids.
As we mentioned yesterday, we seem to have two options for 2009: Get swept up by American troops invading Mexico; or get swept up by Mexican troops looking for American collaborators in advance of the invasion of Mexico. Well, sorry, amigos, but we're not taking this lying down. Pulling out a fat wad of greenbacks, we've contracted the services of Coelse S.A de C.V. to dig an enormous trench around our entire block, from Rio de la Loza to the intersection of Venustiano Carranza.
This trench will be filled with piranhas and ringed with an incendiary napalm-like substance, the name of which we are, on the advice of counsel, not releasing lest certain local gadflies start whining about "environmental impact statements" and the like.
A new U.S. Marine Corps policy is in effect restricting travel south of the border without prior approval. Officials with the U.S. Marine Corps said with the escalating violence in Mexico it's just too dangerous for Marines.
Awww, whassamatter? Mommy didn't warn you about the napalm-piranhas back at Camp Pendelton?
Proving that we will learn to decipher Maya hieroglyphs before we fathom the logic of Google, we thought you'd like to know that this site is the very top hit in all the internets when you Google "stop staring at my special needs kids."
On the other hand, we're no longer the top hit for "what governor called Thanksgiving a damn Yankee institution?" In fact, we're not even in the top 600, as we predicted.
Shorter Bush valedictory speech: "I made monumentally bad decisions, but ya gotta admit, I made them."
We're not sure when we first noticed this weird tick, but it was probably when he pompously anointed himself The Decider. He seems to genuinely believe that the thing that sets his job apart from everyone else's is that he's got to make some decisions. People make decisions all the time, George - police officers, heart surgeons, soccer goalies...hell, we make dozens of decisions every day here, it's just that the American people have not been so foolish as to entrust us with anything that matters. Watching his endless series of exit interviews in which he pats himself on the back for making "tough calls," while refusing to acknowledge how badly he made them is just maddening. (Also, since he famously goes to bed at 9:00 every night, these calls can't really be all that tough, can they?)
Is it just us, or does time actually seem to be slowing down as Jan. 20 approaches?
Mexico is one of two countries that "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse," according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats.
The command's "Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)" report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. "In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.
"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."
Emphasis Mexico's. We're sure Joint Forces Commander Marine Gen. J.N. Mattis means well, but no matter how many caveats and weasel words you throw in, what Mexico sees is "US Thinking About Invading Mexico Again." Pretty soon they're rounding up potential Fifth Columnists here in Querétaro. Stop fucking around, Mattis.
Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino, 1920-2008.
In 1971, troubled by the way he was asked to portray Mexicans, he helped to found Nosotros, an advocacy group for Latinos working in the movie and television industry. As president of the organization, he later said: “I put my career aside and dedicated my heart and soul for over a year and a half to this new organization, going to radio and television to talk about it, talking to directors, producers, writers. I received tremendous support, but there were also some negative repercussions. I was accused of being a militant and as a result I lost jobs.”
Wandering through the National Anthropology Museum the other day, we came across a pair of absolutely fantastic band names: Obsidian Monkey Vase and Monumento de Poo. Rather than let these go to waste, we decided on the spot to start our own band, and will be holding rhythm section and back-up dancer auditions this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Of the two, we're leaning towards Obsidian Monkey Vase because "OMV" (as the cognoscenti will refer to us) looks better on a poster.
We'll be changing the name of this blog to "Monumento de Poo" as soon as Legal draws up the paperwork.
In case you were wondering how things turned out for these little fellas, well, they did, in the end, get juiced. The US press picked up the story - which means they might start writing about the 8,000 Mexican kids who die of malnutrition every year, right? Still, we found this factoid interesting:
The city of Querétero [sic] and some boroughs in Mexico City are the only places in the country where electrocution is forbidden as a means of killing unwanted or dangerous animals.
Presumably, the uneven power supply played a role in this decision. Anyway, if you want to throw some cash at the Mexican Animal Rights Assn., they're fighting the good fight on this one.
We realize that in the grand scale of criminal activity in Mexico, the attempted robbery of $1.70 is pretty far down on the list of outrages, but we're going to indulge ourselves here, because this one really pissed us off.
The guy in the jacket and cap at left is part of the security detail at the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. The Palacio is home to a series of Diego Rivera murals, and a number of important government offices, including, until recently, the president's. So far from being just a rent-a-cop, this guy stands guard over a national cultural and political treasure. And as we alluded to above, he tried to steal a buck-seventy from us.
Passing through the metal detectors at the Palacio's entrance, we emptied our pockets of camera, cellphone, a couple of pens, and about a dozen coins, and placed them in a plastic basket, which Juan Candy here then picked up and carried for us as we walked through the detector. But when he picked up the basket, he scooped up two 10-peso coins and hid them under his fingers against the inside of the basket. It was a move performed with all the subtlety of a Mexican sitcom, prompting us to wonder, "What do we look like, fucking rubes?"
This guy, who is, by the way, an officer in the Mexican Army, then makes a great show of holding the basket out in front of us so we can retrieve the camera, cellphone, a couple of pens, and ten of the original dozen coins. Which we do. Then we stand there. He stands there. No one moves.
"Y las otras?" we ask. Pause. Plink! Plink! Our amigo releases the coins and lets them fall into the basket. He does this without flinching, without looking away, without showing the slightest hint of embarrassment or remorse, despite being caught in the act of pickpocketing a tourist inside the Placio Nacional.
"Thanks a bunch," we say to him, as we take our money and walk away. Later, we took several photographs of the Rivera murals despite the prohibition on flash photography. The atmosphere of impunity really does breed lawlessness.
While we were down in the capital for the First Annual Gringos-in-Mexico Panamerican Summit Meeting, we stayed at the ultra-swanky Camino Real, the home, we discovered, of the Mexican outpost of Le Cirque. (And no, we didn't eat there. Every dollar you donate to Burro Hall goes to help a child in need. Overhead and executive travel are paid out of a separate account funded by our MacArthur grant.) The entrance is adorned with a large mural of all the A-listers (or, as they'd be referred to here in Mexico, "¿quién?") chowing down back at the NYC flagship - including, rather unsettlingly, our old office mate Morley Safer:
Earlier this afternoon, while Obama and Calderón were holding an unofficial, substance-free photo-op, a delegation from Burro Hall traveled to Mexico City for high-level talks with the cast and crew of Gringo en Mexico, in what was billed as the First Annual Gringos-in-Mexico Panamerican Summit Meeting.
Talks broke down shortly after the Burro Hall delegate's taxi arrived, and most of agenda items were tabled until 2010.
The only reason we didn't enter the national contest to identify Mexico's most onerous bits of red tape is because we're foreigners and, as such, would have had to present a mountain of notarized documents to prove ourselves eligible.
The contest, which was organized by the government office that works to stop corruption and inefficiency, attracted 20,000 applications. Federico Reyes Heroles, the president of the contest jury and of Transparency Mexico, an anti-corruption group, said the submissions shared a common complaint: that bureaucrats treated their fellow citizens with disdain.
Here's the winner:
To get life-saving medicine for her young son, Cecilia Velázquez embarks each month on a bureaucratic odyssey. First, two government doctors have to sign off on the prescription. Next, four bureaucrats must stamp it. Last, she has to present it (in quadruplicate) to a hospital dispensary.
The process takes at least four days and sometimes as many as 15. Since her son suffers from a hereditary immune system deficiency that could make an infection fatal, she said she asked God to keep him well on the months when he had to go without his medicine for several days.
She once complained to the government agency that runs the hospital where her 7-year-old son, Diego Emilio, is treated for his illness, agammaglobulinemia. But the comptroller’s office there told her that the procedure “just is that way.”
This finalist here is particularly good, a woman trying to correct her husband's name, which had been entered incorrectly on their child's birth certificate:
[Ana Maria] Calvo's saga still drags on. She first showed up at Mexico City's civil registry office with her husband's original birth certificate, their marriage certificate and more papers — surely enough, she thought, to fix her husband's first name from Antonio to Juan Antonio on her child's birth certificate. Mexican officials refused to issue her child a passport because of the name discrepancy.
The first official said she would have to go through the courts to correct the mistake. When she expressed astonishment, the official told her he didn't like her attitude and sent her to another line. By the time she reached the front of that line, she was crying.
"The second official told me, 'You know what, I don't help crying women. Go see if my colleague will help you,'" Calvo said.
One of our friends had a similar data-entry mistake happen to her own father, who eventually gave up trying to correct it, and has gone through his entire life - in a small town in the conservative state of Guanajuato - being legally named "Joto," a slang term meaning, for lack of a better translation, "Fag."
Closing fetid garbage dumps is a good thing. But that leaves a lot of hungry, probably rabid dogs prowling the streets, which is a bad thing. So the dogs have to be rounded up, which is a good thing. But then, as is scheduled to happen in Huixquilucan tomorrow, they are executed by the hundreds, which is a very bad thing.
The dogs receive an electric shock of 120 watts, with two cables that are placed at the base of his neck and tail, which causes respiratory arrest.
Lethal injection is more expensive and therefore only applied to the puppies, "straight to the heart," said the specialist.
A man who jumped into a tiger pen at a Mexico City zoo on Wednesday escaped with two bites on his arm after zoo personnel pulled him to safety, officials said.
According to officials at the Chapultepec Park zoo, the man jumped over a retaining wall at the tiger exhibit and stood face-to-face with a male Bengal tiger. The tiger then tried to "play" with the man, biting him twice on the arm, the officials said.
Zoo officials said the incident appeared to be a suicide attempt.
With our favorite tio loco arriving for a weeklong visit tomorrow, it seemed like a good idea to start lawyering up - y'know, just in case. That's when we found this law first a few blocks away from us. How could you not feel good facing criminal charges in a foreign country, knowing that the lawyer at your side has Don Quixote on his business card?
We immediately put this guy on a 5,000 peso retainer.
A Portuguese woman who lived to see five of her great-great grandchildren born and was believed to have been the world's oldest person died on Friday at the age of 115, officials said.
Maria de Jesus died in an ambulance near the central Portuguese town of Tomar, town council officials said.
Sounds as if the killer made it look like an accident. We would strongly encourage 114-year-old Gertrude Baines of Los Angeles, California, to demand 24-hour police protection.
It's 75 degrees in Querétaro today. It's been like that since we returned over a week ago. Here's the ten-day forecast:
Bear in mind, this is the coldest time of the year. No one we've talked to can remember exactly when the last time was that it rained here. On the shortest day of the year, the sun set at 6:08PM. And it's not just Querétaro: 74 degrees in Mexico City; 78 in Guadalajara; 81 in Cancun; 79 in Oaxaca; and so on. Mexican weathermen buy those little smiley-faced suns by the metric ton.
We mention all this not for the sake of rubbing it in to our Northern readers (well, at least not only for that reason), but because we were fairly stunned to learn that the Mexican social services agency has treated over 220,000 people suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Given the local attitudes towards mental illness, we can say with some confidence that those seeking treatment are a very, very small percentage of those who are actually suffering. And not suffering from plain old depression, mind you (we know a thing or two about that - we didn't decide to move to Mexico because we'd lost our taste for potable water, you know), but specifically depression brought on by lack of sunshine and nice weather.
Burro Hall suggests every man, woman and child in the country drop what they're doing and go immediately outside and turn their faces towards the sun for a few minutes. There, better? Now get back to work.
We're not much for televised college football here, so instead we spent the afternoon at the Plaza de Toros Santa Maria, which we're pretty sure is the most ineptly-run bullring in the world. Still, at just 70 pesos for general admission, it's about 85 cents per bull, which is pretty hard to beat, entertainment-dollarwise. Back in New York it costs $11.50 to see "Marley & Me."
Yesterday's corrida marked the "triumphant return" of the Forcados Queretanos, touted as "the most important and successful forcados in Mexico," who had regrettably not performed in Querétaro in over a year. We weren't entirely sure what a forcado was, though we knew it had something to do with Portugese bullfighting. When they entered the ring, the thing that immediately struck us was that there were thirteen of them. Bullfighters being, with the possible exception of voodoo priests, the most superstitious people in the world, we can't imagine how a group of 13 people is allowed anywhere near a bullring, let alone given headliner status. If Jesus and the 12 Apostles showed up at a bullfighter's dressing room, his manager would make one of them stand outside.
Anyway, here, in its entirety (from last year, not yesterday) is what the Forcados Queretanos do:
Quite possibly the most pointless thing since the $700 billion bailout. The ovation, of course, was rapturous. A few minutes later, another torero came along and finished off the bull.
(Mark Sanchez went 28 for 35, for 413 yards and four touchdowns.)
It's New Year's Day and, strangely, there's a lot more interest in the Rose Bowl than we would normally expect there to be for an American college football game.
But then we remembered that USC's starting quarterback is Mark Sanchez, the pride of Mexican-America. Of course, in America, Mexican pride is something best kept secret.
Last fall at Notre Dame, in only his second college start, Sanchez took the field biting down on a protective mouthpiece with a dime-size Mexican flag painted on the front -- a gift from team dentist Ramon Roges, a Cuban.
Sanchez passed for 235 yards and four touchdowns in a 38-0 victory, and what was perceived as a gesture on his behalf was well received by many Mexican Americans. But there was also backlash over the tiny flag that smacked him like a blitzing linebacker.
Sanchez's patriotism -- even his sanity -- was questioned, with some letter-writers urging him to go back to Mexico (never mind that he never actually lived there).
"It was eye-opening. It was educational," Sanchez says. "I never in a million years would have thought that kind of reaction would happen. It just blew my mind that people were upset about it."
...In the NFL, he would join a fraternity of Mexican American quarterbacks, including Dallas' Tony Romo, Buffalo's J.P. Losman and Tampa Bay's Jeff Garcia. They, in turn, are part of a storied tradition dating back to Super Bowl quarterbacks Joe Kapp of the Minnesota Vikings and Jim Plunkett of the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders, each of whom are of Mexican heritage.
