Drug War Is Peace

Her Majesty the Queen (God save 'er!) gets a wee bit cheeky, she does:

Mexico's president given George Orwell's 1984 by the Queen

At Buckingham Palace, Felipe Calderon was presented with a first edition of George Orwell's nightmarish book, which tells of a totalitarian regime and coined the concept Big Brother.

The Royal Household seeks guidance from the staff of incoming VIPs when deciding what to offer during the official exchange of gifts.

A Palace spokeswoman said: "Apparently the president really admires George Orwell."

Doubleplusawesome!

Querétaro: Try Our Individually Handcrafted Artisanal Highways

As part of the city's ongoing construction of a flaming piranha-filled security moat, workers have been ripping up the streets and sidewalks all over town (usually with sledgehammers, which, as tools for digging trenches go, are inefficient even by local standards) and then patching them up again. It's been fascinating to watch. Because Querétaro is under a governmment mandate to be charming, the streets, rather than being paved with asphalt, are made of rectangular, gold-brick-shaped paving stones quarried from the nearby town of La Cañada, each one cemented in by hand and leveled off against a string tied between two pencils.

The sidewalks, meanwhile, are made up of flat, square paving stones arranged in a diagonal checkerboard fashion, which means that, along the edges of the sidewalk, every other stone has to be cut in half with a grinder. As the sidewalks' widths are wildly inconsistent, each cut has to be measured individually. It's not unusual to see three guys on their knees with mallets and chisels working a single stone into place. Then the spaces between the stones are filled with a cement - plain gray cement for the street, tinted a pinkish-red for the sidewalk - mixed by hand in a bucket and then poured into the cracks from a plastic Pepsi bottle cut in half (always Pepsi, because they're cylindrical; Coke bottles are shaped like Pamela Anderson and lead to spillage). The wet cement is smoothed down with a wet finger and sanded with a stiff brush after it dries. Then, it's on to the next stone.

We're not sure how many miles of sidewalks and roads there are in Querétaro, but it's a pretty large city.

I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide

As luck would have it, traffic to this silly site has, like, quadrupled today, thanks to us being mentioned by the Los Angeles Times and El Mensajero, driving hundreds of people to see....a bunch of pictures celebrating our dog's birthday. We could be embarrassed by this, but we've decided to embrace it. So, below is a photo of the perro, fresh from the breeder, on his first day as a family member back in October 2000 (he was a year and a half when we got him). Presumably our new California friends will be coming back for more...

Are Towns With Mexican-Sounding Names Safe?

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Six people, including three children, were shot and killed and a seventh victim is fighting for her life in what Santa Clara police are investigating as a murder-suicide, one of the deadliest such incidents in the Bay Area in recent memory.

X

The perro turns 10 years old today.



Brief biography here. Previously posted photos (for the collectors out there) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Mexican Students Warned Against Traveling to Outer Banks

We love stuff like this.

North Carolina Sheriff Spouts Off About “Mexicans” to the Media

September 18th, 2008 - In a recent article in Raleigh's The News & Observer, Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell was quoted calling Mexicans "trashy," accusing Latinos of "breeding like rabbits," and stating, "When people think about illegal Mexicans, you know the first thing they think of? Driving drunk and shooting."

Actually, Hoss, that's what Mexicans think of when we think about North Carolina.

Update: Gunman identified as "Robert Stewart." No word yet whether this is an anglicization of Roberto Sanchez, but we're sure officials are on the case.

Much Later Update: Seriously?

A Squirrel in Every Pot

The midterm elections are coming up here, and last week marked the official kickoff to the tightly-regulated election season (Mexicans, for some crazy reason, don't think campaigns should last for two years). In Querétaro, though the ruling PAN party manages to campaign year-round by running ads in all the papers, tv and radio touting the government's (i.e., PAN's) accomplishments, under the heading "Querétaro Does Great Things!" Anyway, you start to get a sense of how different this place is when you see this ad, featuring a stooped old man feeding chickens from a bucket while his wife sets about slaughtering a rodent Pets or Meat-style and you realize, rather than being a stinging indictment of the incumbent government, it's actually a positive ad promising three more years of the same.

"Great Works for Better Living!" it says. Alrighty, then...

Some Americans Should Definitely Avoid Vacationing in Mexico

Just a quick note to Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Doug Feith, Bill Haynes, Jay Bybee, and David Addington: Mexico has an extradition treaty with Spain and the Mexican Supreme Court upheld its use vis-à-vis the extradition of foreign nationals to Judge Garzón's courtroom just a few years ago.

Just sayin'.

Welcome to the Jungle

It gets worse there every day...

COTTONWOOD, Arizona. — A bobcat has attacked three people in the central Arizona community of Cottonwood, including two men who were bitten by the animal after it wandered inside a bar.

...About 11 p.m. came the call from the bar that a bobcat was inside as patrons climbed atop bar stools to get away.

Meanwhile, a Phoenix jury handed Dale "Serial Shooter" Hausner six death sentences, plus 500 years in prison for having such a lame nickname.

It has been two years and eight months since Hausner, 36, and Dieteman, 33, were arrested in the Serial Shooter crimes, which terrorized the Valley for 14 months in 2005 and 2006.

Eight people died in the attacks. Hausner was found not guilty of two of the murders. An additional 19 people were shot or stabbed but survived, and 10 animals were wounded or killed.

In all, Hausner was found guilty of 80 crimes, including multiple counts of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, drive-by shooting, arson and animal cruelty.

So close to our border...

All About the Netzahuacoyotls

Sometimes we wonder whether we've become even more reflexively defensive to anti-Mexican slights than the Mexicans themselves (we believe this is known as Stockholm Syndrome), but more likely we've just figured out what sort of things pissed them off. Like this ad for Mitsubishi, which caught our eye because of the excellent mash-up of the 100 peso and 100 dollar bills. Throw a couple of Canadian geese on the back and you've got yourself an Amero, we thought. But the tag line - At Mitsubishi, we make your money worth more - indicates that someone didn't read the "How to Sell Stuff to Mexicans" textbook very carefully. With the peso bouncing up and down (mostly down) against the dollar, we're not sure the best way to appeal to the patriotic middle class here is to say, "Hey, at Mitsubishi, we help you pretend your shitty, worthless little currency actually has value - almost as if you were Americans!"

The Pickup Artist

This is something you see all the time here. Dangerously overloaded pickup trucks crammed with Mexicans - could be laborers, could be a family of eight, or some combination of hitchhikers and livestock - rambling down the road on bald tires, the back gate held shut with rope, and nothing to protect the passengers from the wind and the sun and the elements. For a bunch of dirt-poor gringos hitching their way down the Sierra, though, it's the best way to travel.

God Is Watching Us!

A couple months ago we discovered the one police surveillance camera (out of hundreds city-wide) specifically angled to help The Man keep an eye on Burro Hall. And while we joked about it being concealed by a religious icon, it should be pointed out that it's in fact attached to a private home which, like many, many houses here, has a cross sitting atop it.

Apparently, though, The Man's got us both coming and going, because yesterday we noticed yet another camera pointed our way, this one sticking out from the roof of one of the city's biggest Catholic churches, Templo de la Cruz.




Call us paranoid, but this is one of the most disturbing photos we've seen in a while, notwithstanding the fact that we took it ourselves. Personally, we liked it better when the Church was a victim of a police-state mentality, rather than an active participant in it.

The Less You Know

We're reprinting in full this latest (and last) post from Cox newspapers' Man in Mexico, Jeremy Schwartz, coming as it does at a time when demand for intelligent coverage of Mexico is rising and supply, sadly, continues to dwindle:

Goodnight and good luck from Uncovering Mexico

By Jeremy Schwartz | Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 11:14 AM

It’s with sadness that I have to report the end of the Uncovering Mexico blog. As some of you may have read, Cox Newspapers is shuttering its Washington D.C. bureau as well as its foreign operations. That means bureaus in Beijing, London, Jerusalem, the Caribbean and Mexico City are closing. The Mexico City bureau actually closed on March 15.

It’s been an amazing three years in Mexico, and I’m grateful for all our readers, a small, but loyal tribe. Since beginning at the end of 2006 we’ve tallied 299 entries and more than 650 comments. Be on the lookout for the grand finale, the blowout 300th blog post in coming days.

It’s no revelation that struggling news organizations have been cutting back coverage, nowhere more so than in their foreign operations. Since I arrived in Mexico in 2005, I’ve seen the foreign press corps dwindle. One longtime correspondent remarked that any gathering of reporters quickly assumes the air of a wake. I’ve seen the bureau closures of the San Antonio Express-News, Newsday and the San Diego Union-Tribune, seen the McClatchy chain’s position remain unfilled, and a significant reduction in the size of the Dallas Morning News bureau. Great journalists remain in Mexico, doing amazing work. But too many are nervous about their jobs.

So what will the future look like? If the trend continues, regional papers will find themselves without a presence in places like Mexico. Newswires like AP and Bloomberg, along with national papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, will likely become the main sources for foreign news. Such operations do great job of covering breaking events and finding interesting features. But what will go missing are those local connections to Mexico, stories that illuminate immigrant communities and explore the connections between American cities and their vast neighbor to the south.

For those of you interested in Mexico, there are reasons for hope. More than ever, papers are striving to give readers what they want, and that represents a potential opportunity. As newspapers across the country reinvent themselves, let them know what kind of coverage you want to see. Engage with newspapers. Be proactive, and interactive. Continue to seek out news about this fascinating country, which is far too vast and complex to be pigeonholed.

As for me, I’ll be moving to Austin where I’ll be writing for the Statesman on local issues. Keep in touch and drop a line. And thanks again for keeping this blog going as long as it has. Hasta la proxima.

Pay No Attention to the Blog Behind the Curtain

Burro Hall, 3/23:

At some point the US is going to have to step up and take ownership of this problem, which stems from the country's insatiable demand for narcotics

Secretary of State Clinton 3/25:

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Mrs. Clinton said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

Looks like we're still in the running...

And Then There Were 36

Kinda makes you wonder why no one thought of this "hey, let's offer up a shitload of reward money" thing sooner.

Authorities announced the arrest of Hector Huerta Rios on Wednesday, just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives for a two-day visit to discuss security issues and U.S. support for Mexico's battle against the drug cartels. Clinton is scheduled to travel to Monterrey on Thursday.

Huerta Rios was detained Tuesday in a suburb of Monterrey, said Army Gen. Luis Arturo Oliver. He was one of 37 top drug suspects on a most-wanted list published Monday.

One neat thing about the system they've set up here is that it's completely anonymous - tipsters never have to give their name, and are identified only by assigned number - and, best of all, anyone is eligible: cartel underlings, hired assassins, even (presumably) people who are themselves on the most-wanted list can earn a quick $2 million just by picking up the phone. Unlike, say, the Italian mafia, these guys don't have that old-time "honor among thieves" code of conduct.

Anyway, since this is a blog and, therefore, massively egocentric, what really caught our eye was how closely we'd been courting a potentially tragic case of mistaken identity.

Huerta was nicknamed "La Burra," or female donkey. "Burro," or male donkey, is a common slang word for someone who transports drugs, but it was unclear if that was the reason for the nickname.

Burro Hall would like to make perfectly clear that we are not engaged in the transport of drugs. Indeed, they rarely make it out of the house. But this leads us to a question we're hoping a native Spanish-speaker can answer for us: Is burro a common slang word for someone who transports drugs? We've only heard mula, which is what we call them in English. And if it is, why would Mexicans say "drug donkey" and we say "drug mule"? And where does the fact that another word for burro is "ass," which is where most mules hide their drugs, fit into all this? Or are we reaching?

Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse

It gets worse.

Hundreds of Killer Whales Seen in Gulf of Mexico

Failure, from A to Z

Author and intellectual Enrique Krauze takes to the op-ed pages today to explain, as simply as possible, what a failed state looks like.

The opinion that Mexico is breaking down seems to be shared by much of the American news media, not to mention the Americans I meet by chance and who, at the first opportunity, ask me whether Mexico will “fall apart.”

It most assuredly will not. First, let’s take a quick inventory of the problems that we don’t have. Mexico is a tolerant and secular state, without the religious tensions of Pakistan or Iraq. It is an inclusive society, without the racial hatreds of the Balkans. It has no serious prospects of regional secession or disputed territories, unlike the Middle East. Guerrilla movements have never been a real threat to the state, in stark contrast to Colombia.

Try to imagine a state like that, right on our border.

El Preppie

Having grown up in Swampscott, MA, we were very excited to see this:

Mexican authorities published a list of their most wanted drug traffickers on Monday. The attorney general’s office is offering up to $2 million for information leading to the arrest of any of 24 top traffickers on the list and up to $1 million for any of 13 lieutenants — more than double previous rewards. The list was the government’s first public breakdown of major traffickers, who are listed by cartel and include aliases like the Taliban, the Monkey and Marblehead.

Hands down, the pussiest gangster nickname ever! Plus, it just seems destined that a guy from Swampscott would bring him in and collect the $2mil. How hard could it be to find a Mexican guy dressed in boat shoes, green slacks, an Izod shirt and a whale belt? Unfortunately, the having read the list linked to above, and another one here, we can't find anyone nicknamed Marblehead (cabeza de mármol), nor, for that matter, "The Monkey." (El Taliban is there; we're not touching him.)

Until someone can point us in the right direction (and we'd be grateful if you could), the title of "Pussiest Gangster Nickname" will be awarded provisionally to Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal.

15 Candles

Today's the 15th anniversary of the assassination of presidential candidate Donaldo Colosio, which is sort of Mexico's version of the RFK murder - at least in terms of the effect on the national psyche, rather than because of any similarities between the candidates.

The Five Scariest Words in Journalism

"First article in a series."

Since officials here formed a special squad last year to deal with home invasions, they have counted more than 200 of them, with more than three-quarters linked to the drug trade. In one case, the intruders burst into the wrong house, shooting and injuring a woman watching television on her couch. In another, in a nearby suburb, a man the police described as a drug dealer was taken from his home at gunpoint and is still missing.

...Although overall violent crime has dropped in several cities on or near the border — Tucson is an exception, reporting a rise in homicides and other serious crime last year — Arizona appears to be bearing the brunt of smuggling-related violence. Some 60 percent of illicit drugs found in the United States — principally cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine — entered through the border in this state.

That's the New York Times reporting from the failed state of Arizona, where residents of the state buy a lot of guns, buy a lot of drugs, sell a lot of drugs, take a lot of drugs, and commit crimes violent crimes against each other. So the article is, of course, titled Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S. Poor America. So far from God, so close to Mexico!

At some point the US is going to have to step up and take ownership of this problem, which stems from the country's insatiable demand for narcotics, but until then we can look forward to more articles like this one, which kind of remind us of those "vintage" illustrations from The Onion in which some foreign invader is always raping Lady Liberty. At least from the headline, the article seems to imply that violent Mexicans are threatening innocent Americans, though the piece itself doesn't implicate any actual Mexicans. And with the exception of the female victim of mistaken identity mentioned above, every other victim in the story is believed to have had some connection to the drug trade - kinda the way it is in Mexico, except no one's trying to destroy Arizona's tourism industry because a bunch of drug dealers are shooting each other.

(Ironically, given our recent focus here on Spring Break, the only time we went away for Spring Break in college was to visit friends at Arizona State. But that was back in '88, before Arizona collapsed into lawlessness. Back then, you could walk down the streets of Phoenix without fear of being beheaded. Don't look at us like that, young'uns...it's true!)

American street dealers shooting each other with American guns over American dollars earned from selling drugs to American addicts. Fuckin' Mexicans...

Unexpected Plot Twist

Public works projects in Mexico are always unearthing weird archeological stuff, so it was no surprise when the guys digging the flaming piranha-filled moat dug up this thing a couple of weeks ago. Against our advice, though, they struggled day and night to get the hatch open, and now all the neighbors have to take turns climbing down and entering a series of numbers every 108 minutes. It was fun at first, but there seems to be a conspiracy to stick the gringo with the 3 a.m. shift, and if it happens again, we're going to see what happens when damn clock runs out.

John Carroll

A friend of ours passed away earlier this month, though putting it like that risks overstating our closeness to the deceased. The Brooklyn Inn is the kind of place where you can talk to a guy every weekend, year after year, and still not be sure of his last name. He was that kind of friend, but riotously funny and always exceedingly kind to the perro, and we liked him immensely. John was a prosecutor in the Special Victims Bureau, so it's no exaggeration to say the world is a less compassionate place without him.

He's also, to this day - the things you find out about a guy - the Delaware state high school record holder in the high jump. The fact we never knew this speaks volumes about the man's humility, since we'd have brought this up every time we got two beers in us, and would probably still be wearing the medal.

We won't be able to make it to the memorial party tonight, but if you're in the area you should stop by. Donations in John's name can be made to Safe Horizon, or the American Melanoma Foundation.

Update: This is turning out to be a very weird day for Brooklyn Inn regulars.

Blue Are the Life-Giving Waters Taken For Granted

Though voiced over by the worst English-language narrator we've ever heard, who mispronounces the name of the city throughout, this probably the best short video about Querétaro's aqueduct you're likely to see today.

At 0:06, Ye Olde Burro Hall is here.

Happy BJ Day

Today is Benito Juarez's 203rd birthday, so it's a holiday here, like President's Day in the US, and for some odd reason it was celebrated last Monday, rather than this coming Monday (though if we were betting, we'd count on it being celebrated this coming Monday as well.)

Querétaro has a lot of crazy legends, and one of the is the story of "La Carambada," a local woman whose husband was an Imperial soldier Juarez refused to pardon from execution. Long legend short, the widow swore vengence, mastered the dark art of poison-making, and managed to slip a couple drops of a sure-to-kill-you-in-three-weeks concoction into BJ's drink....21 days before he, in fact, died! If true, this helps explain why the town has a statue of Juarez so large as to require airplane lights.

Speaking of dead presidents, we'll use the fact that Lincoln and Juarez were contemporaries who admired each other (see also this statue of Lincoln in Juarez, and this one of Juarez in the Land of Lincoln) to segue into what we swear will be our final Lincoln post. For everyone in Mexico who wasn't able to see it, and for everyone in the US who thinks "interactive television" means calling the producer and saying, "Hey, I missed your show, can you send me a DVD?" we're posting the Lincoln opus here, in two enormous quicktime files (approx 600MB each), which you can download or spend two hours watching on this page in a two-inch window. We'll take them down as soon as our own attorneys send us a cease-and-desist letter.

You can also buy it for eighteen bucks here, but you have to leave a comment saying how ugly the boxcover art is.

Part One:

Part Two:

[Note: Files are quite large. For best results, hit "pause" and let it download a bit before playing. There are eight 25-second black holes for commercials.]

U.S. Steel

This should send the Mexican government a clear and unambiguous message: that when it comes to the War on Drugs, the United States is ready to stand by and tell you go fuck yourselves.

With its lenient gun laws and large number of dealers, Arizona is one of the biggest sources of weapons for the drug cartels, which killed 6,000 people in Mexico last year. More than 500 guns recovered by the police in Mexico in 2008 were traced to sellers in the state.

The dealer against whom the charges were dismissed, George Iknadosian, 47, of Glendale, Ariz., had been accused of knowingly selling about 700 weapons through intermediaries to two smugglers, who then shipped them to a drug cartel in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

Several of the weapons have been recovered in Mexico after shootouts with the police, notably one gunfight last year in which eight officers died in Culiacán, the Sinaloa capital. Federal agents say the smugglers, who have pleaded guilty to lesser charges, recruited at least seven people with clean records as straw purchasers to buy the guns on their behalf, paying them $100 a gun.

But after a week of trial, Judge Robert L. Gottsfield of Maricopa County Superior Court on Wednesday threw out the charges against Mr. Iknadosian, saying no fraud had been committed.

Judge Gottsfield determined that even though the straw buyers had made false statements on federal forms claiming they were buying for themselves, they were legally eligible to buy the weapons, so the deception did not amount to a “material falsification” under state law.

He also asserted that federal gun laws require prosecutors to prove not just that someone lied to a gun dealer to obtain a weapon for someone else, but also that the person who ended up with the gun could not legally buy one.

“There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearms,” the judge said in his decision, recorded in the court’s minutes.

Arizona - a freewheeling arms bazaar, where criminality rules and law enforcement officers consider themselves above the law. It's the primary gateway for cocaine entering the United States, a sanctuary for religious nuts, and a breeding ground for terrorists.

At what point can we finally declare Arizona a failed state?

How To Celebrate the Equinox

Wrong:



Right:

The Art of the Comeback

Sometimes, I wish Spy was still around:

Don't Smear Tijuana With Donald Trump's Fraud

TIJUANA, BC - Representatives of the government and business groups said the name of Tijuana should not be dragged into the alleged fraud committed by a US company owned by Donald Trump.

Tijuana doesn't want it's good name sullied by being linked to Donald Trump.

[Background here.]

Janet Napolitano Is Not, At This Point, A Known Child Molester

But we should probably keep an eye on her, just to be prudent.

Napolitano: Mexico Not A Narco-State "At This Point"

Oil!

It's been fun listening to the mouth-breathers scream "socialism" every time Obama does something they don't like, mostly because the subtext is usually, "I have no idea what 'socialism' means, but it sure sounds scary, dunnit?" Until the president starts calling for state ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, the whole 'socialist!' thing is kind of meaningless.

We mention this only because today is Oil Expropriation Day, a national holiday celebrating the day in 1938 that President Lázaro Cárdenas decided that, while the country could continue to let foreign oil companies drain its precious bodily fluid for centavos on the peso, another option would be to decree state ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution.

Seventy-one years later, there's an ongoing debate over how well this turned out (in terms of today, we mean - every seems to agree it was the thing to do back in '38), but that, amigos, is real live socialismo. Send the children to bed.

Welcome to Mexico: Please Buckle Up

We've been saying for a while that if anyone wants a real Mexican Travel Advisory, our suggestion would be: do what you can to avoid the highways. Good advice, as you can see. It shouldn't be long, however until websites devoted to the loony proposition that Mexico will kill you will hold this up as another reason to steer clear of the country. (For the record, 16,000 people died in drunk driving accidents in the US in 2006. And while we can't find national statistics for Mexico, the 2006 tally for Mexico City, where 25% of the population lives, was 277.)

Anyway, we wanted to bring to your attention a new site that hopes to cut through some of the horseshit out there, The Truth About Mexico - we realize the name sounds like it ought to be full of horror stories, and some of the writers are of questionable talent, but we assure you they're on the side of truth, justice and the Mexican way.

There Will Be Thuds

Back when we were in college in Boston, it seemed every St. Patrick's Day ended the same way: with a bunch of angry, shirtless guys pummeling each other in the most theatrical way possible. Tonight, the tradition continues. After a couple false starts, there's finally some A-List lucha talent coming to Arena Querétaro in the form of Mistico, who'll be joining forces with Volador Jr to take on Black Warrior and Sangre Azteca. Mistico owes us one, having pulled out of a match we'd bought overpriced tickets for last year, so if he's not at the top of his game tonight, there could be at least one drunken boyo hopping into the ring to deliver a beatdown. (Keep in mind, when viewing his beefy torso, that yr. humble corresp. has a full five inches on him.)

Green Day

Running through the center of town is a body of water which in any other city would be called "the municipal drainage ditch," but is in this case known as the Rio Querétaro. And looking at this we-swear-to-God unretouched photo below, you're probably thinking, "How cool, they dye it green for St. Patrick's Day - just like Chicago!"



Alas, it always looks like this. And we don't think it's because they love the Irish 365 times as much as Chicago does.

That Didn't Take Long

The new English Only cafe caves in to reality:


We hear the pescado frito is riquisimo!

Casualties of War

Oh, god, it just keeps getting uglier. Drug traffickers in Quintana Roo have apparently taken a bunch of American tourists hostage and, taking a page from the al Qaeda in Iraq playbook, they've paraded their trophies in front of the camera, forced them to spout propaganda and to assure their families they're being treated humanely. Watch if you must, but this one is not for the squeamish.

You just know there's a pile of empty Oxxo ice chests sitting right off camera.

Rhymes with 'Insanity'

A couple nights ago the ever-intelligent Sean Hannity brought his analytical skills to bear on the issue of spring break in Mexico, during a three-way with Fox News bimbettes Kimmy Guilfoyle [top] and Courtney Friel [bottom]. Let's listen in, shall we?

HANNITY (voice-over): But beyond the fruity drinks, packed clubs and the sandy beaches, lies the gritty backdrop of drug violence that has exploded over the last two years and is now threatening the lives of tourists.

There were more than 6000 drug-related murders in Mexico last year, and cartels are dumping decapitated bodies in the streets every single day. Just last month, a retired general hired to dismantle the cartels running rampant in Cancun, was kidnapped and brutally tortured. His body was left on the side of the road.

With the violence out of control, some in the Mexican government feared the brazen drug runners might start singling out tourists, much like terrorists have done in Bali and Mumbai.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HANNITY: And joining us now is FOX News anchor and analysts, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and FOX News correspondent, Courtney Friel.

Guys, good to see you. All right. Any parent, my take on this. We have literally 100,000-man armies in these drug cartels, and any parent that sends their kid to go to Mexico on spring break I think is nuts. Agree?

COURTNEY FRIEL, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, actually, the good news is I randomly Googled a couple travel agents and called them up. And they said that there is no interest any more in Mexico, and those that have had trips planned cancelled [sic] them. And they're not trying to encourage them to go.

HANNITY: But there are still some parents that are not getting this.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: They're not getting it. They're not getting it. Don't let your children go. You will be sorry if you do. I'm telling you. Why would you want to take that kind of risk and put your child in that kind of danger? Even in Cancun. Sure, there's fabulous resorts there like the Ritz Carlton, et cetera. That's not where they're going like spring break. And those drug cartels operating there, people have been murdered. It's all over Mexico.

HANNITY: There's a movie out, and I forget the name of it. Liam Nielsen [sic] is in it, right now, where his daughter is abducted when she travels abroad. And I would be like him, except I'm not as, you know, talented at beating people up. But any time your child leaves the country, there's a risk.

GUILFOYLE: Look at Aruba.

HANNITY: Looking to Aruba.

GUILFOYLE: Natalee Holloway. There is a risk. And you know what? During this economic — we're having this hardship in this country. How about buy American, travel American? This is an amazing country. Why not you and your family, with your children, take a trip, see a part of the country...

HANNITY: Go to Vegas. Vegas is something.

GUILFOYLE: Spend your dollars here. Is that such a bad idea, Sean.

HANNITY: Last word?

GUILFOYLE: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of other alternatives that are safe, that are prudent, that also support the American economy now, and you should choose that, choose wisely for your children.

Kinda like the Special Olympics, but less heartwarming, isn't it? Anyway, Burro Hall heartily endorses Sean Hannity's suggestion that anyone who takes Sean Hannity seriously should stay the fuck out of Mexico. Seriously, it's not safe for you here. Go to Vegas. No crime or corruption there - just good, clean family entertainment. American family entertainment!

Straight to Hell

In Mexico, being a drunk driver is a very bad idea. Dodging a breathalyzer checkpoint is even worse, especially if, in doing so, you manage to drag a cop to his death.

But if you're looking to make a horrible situation as bad as it can possibly be, you can't do better than to end the chase by crashing into a statute of Pope John Paul II.

Seriously, the guy probably could have bribed his way out of trouble up to that point. Heaven help him now.

Armchair Race Warriors

Remember back in the day, when if you wanted to be a phony border-guarding vigilante Minuteman, you actually had to drag your fat ass down to the border and sit on an uncomfortable lawn chair drinking warm beer? How many of us would have gone down to play Border Patrol Agent, if not for the whole "actually patrolling the border" thing? Well, thanks to a new $2 million website funded by the state of Texas, we know the answer: 43,000. That's how many people have so far taken advantage of the opportunity to sit on their fat asses and patrol the border from the comfort of their own homes:

When her baby girl takes an afternoon nap, or on those nights when she just can't sleep, Sarah Andrews, 32, tosses off her identity as a suburban stay-at-home mom and becomes something more exotic: a "virtual deputy" patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border.

From her house in a suburb of Rochester, New York, Andrews spends at least four hours a day watching a site called BlueServo.net.

..."Today, there's a couple vehicles that are parked side by side next to each other," she said by phone, her 7-month-old cooing in the background, "but I can't tell what's going on, you know?"

... She said she hopes her work as "virtual deputy" will prevent so many drugs from working their way north from Mexico into New York. She also said the site draws her interest because she's nosy about what's going on along Texas' 1,250-mile international border.

"It's interesting. You see different things on there, but I just -- I don't know that it's doing any good," said Andrews, the stay-at-home mom. "I wonder if it's a waste of time."

A: Yes.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Stupid Questions.

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

Nice to see a couple of mexicanos bookending the Forbes Billionaires List this year. At #3, Telmex telecommunications monopolist Carlos Slim Helu ($35 billion), and, in a massive 100-way tie for #701, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, CEO of the Sinaloa drug cartel ($1 billion).



One of these guys delivers his customers a quality product at a competitive price.

Dept. of Bad Ideas

Let's hope this one dies in committee.

An Open Letter to the Students and Parents of the Ignacio Altamirano Elementary School in Querétaro

What started out as anal beads can wind up as anal beads again, you catch my meaning?

Sincerely,
Burro Hall Executive Editor
Thursday Morning, 7:28 AM

Slam Dunk

Querétaro is about 450 miles from the nearest beach, and farther still from the nearest wet t-shirt contest, so we've generally decided not to wade into the whole "Don't go to Mexico for Spring Break" controversy. Our opinion has been that, unless you're spending Spring Break in Juarez (in which case there's something very, very wrong with you), it's completely safe, though at the same time we'd rather these throngs of drunken underage buffoons went elsewhere. We don't really know how important Spring Break is to the Mexican economy, but we're pretty sure that a nation dependent on horny teenagers sleeping six to a room and subsisting on tequila shooters is not a nation destined for greatness.

Still, when the disgraced former head of the Central Intelligence Agency gets pulled into the discussion, we're interested. This is a long excerpt from an email that's been making the rounds lately:

Some important and very relevant inside information regarding the security situation in Mexico has come to my attention:

I just received a call from an acquaintance who is friends with the son or George J. Tenet, a former director of the CIA from 1997-2004. This acquaintance, is also scheduled to Spring Break in Acapulco next week (and was clever enough to buy insurance on the trip so that plans could be canceled for full refund and who just might cancel his plans after what I will tell you). Mr. Tenet’s son also had plans to go on Spring Break to Acapulco, but Mr. Tenet called the head of Mexican intelligence to see what the deal really is. After his conversation, he has decided to cancel his son’s trip because of the security risks, which according to my friend (who received information firsthand from Tenet’s son are as follows:

Mexican authorities and the drug cartels are in the process of negotiations (obviously). The US State Department has already issued warnings to college students not to Spring Break in Mexico due to the current violence. They have done so because they know a lot more than we do, but they, however, do not tell the whole story like it really is for a variety of reasons. What the American public allegedly does not know at this point (according to my friend) is that the drug cartels have offered an ultimatum to Mexican intelligence. Although I do not know the specific terms of this ultimatum, I have heard that if the terms are not met by the end of this week (perfect timing as our spring break coincides with the one week expected to bring more American college students to Mexico than any other week), the drug cartels have threatened to begin targeting young spring-breaking Americans next week with kidnappings and shootings in the 3 biggest hot-spots of Cancun, Cabo San Lucas, and Acapulco (the one destination of the three that is already very unsafe, more so than the others). Some Americans have already been caught in crossfires in Acapulco when they weren’t even being targeted. If drug cartels were to start targeting American spring breakers next week, the situation would become such a clusterfuck that nobody, not even bodyguards or policemen would be able to handle. Furthermore, think about how easy it would be to blow up one or both of the clubs where Americans go to party in Acapulco.

I imagine this information does not come out publicly because those destinations would immediately start to go crazy and become a total mess (definitely completely unmanageable by Mexican authorities) when residents and current spring-breakers hear the news...

Alberto Sevilla
The Wharton School
Candidate for Bachelor of Science in Economics, May 2009
Double Concentration in Finance and Real Estate
3913 Pine Street, Apt. #2F
Philadelphia, PA 19104

It's worth stepping back for a second and asking ourselves, in light of the events of the past several months, which institution has done more to fuck up the world, Langley, or the Wharton School? Alberto Sevilla is about to graduate with a double major in finance and real estate, and will likely play an active role in extricating us from the current financial crisis. He is also, based on this email, either a total rube with the IQ of a bag of hammers, or a liar, since his friend's "firsthand" account is largely bullshit.

The e-mail message exaggerated some of the facts, saying that Mr. Tenet, who resigned from the C.I.A. in 2004, had consulted with the head of Mexico’s spy agency and had been told that the cartels had threatened to harm tourists.

It turns out that no conversation between the spy chiefs took place, and thus no such threat was disclosed, Mr. Harlow [Tenant's former spokesman at the CIA] said. “It’s true that his son was considering going to Mexico for spring break, but Mr. Tenet looked at the public State Department warnings and news accounts and determined it probably wasn’t a good idea to go down there,” Mr. Harlow said. “As for the rest of it, there’s no there there.”

But enough about Alberto Sevilla, who is certainly not the dumbest college kid pondering a Spring Break vacation in Mexico. Instead, let's just savor the image of George Tenet reading cautionary information from the State Dept., deciding it's valid, and, as a result, recommending that young American men and women (or at least his own son) not be sent into a dangerous foreign country. My God, how he's grown.

Update: A friend has suggested, in fairness to young Mr. Sevilla, that Tenent hijo may have indeed said what Sevilla reported, and in doing so was simply carrying on the family tradition of inflating evidence and exaggerating threats. We guess we can't knock a kid for trying to impress his old man.

Later Update: Well, sometimes we can.

Great Moments in Corporate Branding

And the Bruno Magli Award for Most Unfortunate Product Placement goes to:

Mexico police find severed heads

Five severed heads have been found inside ice coolers by the side of a road in Mexico, police say.

A police patrol made the grim find in the central state of Jalisco, on a road leading to the city of Guadalajara.

The heads were found with messages addressed to rivals of the killers, who were assumed to be involved in Mexico's bitter and violent drug war.

[Oxxo is like the Mexican version of Kwik-E-Mart.]

"I'd Hit That Like a Piñata..."

Finance Secretary Agustín "The Stimulus Package" Carstens stands erect as the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, saunters by during this week's state visit.

The Big Unit

We wanted to run these photos of Finance Secretary Agustín Carstens tossing out the first pitch (and being furiously booed) before Mexico's 17-7 pasting by Australia at the World baseball Classic, and
once again challenge our readers to find us a fatter cabinet-level official anywhere in the world. In the unlikely event that this can be done, the winner will receive a Meme Uribe-sized Burro Hall t-shirt.

Rat Race

Here's an image that ran in last week's Dia Siete Magazine, of a swarm of rats streaming out the front door of the New York Stock Exchange - almost as if these rats were, say, fleeing a sinking ship. Or better yet, serving as a metaphor for the global financial crisis. Kinda witty, we suppose, and we definitely admire the Photoshop skillz.

But Dia Siete, apparently unfamiliar with the expression, published this image on the first page of an an article about, well, rats - the disease-carrying, rapidly-multiplying, four-legged inner-city vermin - with the caption "An infestation of rats photographed outside a building on Wall Street, in New York."

Once again, we invite all Mexican journalists to check with us first, free of charge, before publishing any New York-related information.

2009: A Space Odyssey

Technology-wise, this has never been a nation of early adopters.

Hearing of this intended attack, [Cortés] brought ten of his horses ashore.... Suddenly there was a sound of galloping as the horsemen charged. The apparition of ten unknown animals caused a panic. The Tabascoans not only had never seen horses; they had never seen or heard of beasts of burden of any kind. They thought the horses were supernatural creatures and, at first, that horse and rider were one animal, a monstrous god bent on their destruction. They had stood up to cannon...But the horses were too much. They fled to the woods. It was the end of the battle.

-- Maurice Collis, Cortés & Montezuma

We thought of this today when we were buying juice and bread at the store up the street where we've been shopping every morning for two and a half years. Things generally move pretty slow in there, thanks to the archaic system - common throughout Mexico - whereby baked goods are handled in a separate section of the store, so that, even though we're just buying one single bread roll, we have to stand in line at the bakery counter to have it priced and bagged before preceding to the checkout line.

But this morning, the checkout counter suddenly had a brand new, computerized cash register armed with one of those bar-code reader wands. It took us ten minutes to get to the front of the four-person line, and another three full minutes to complete a three-item transaction. And the look on the poor checkout lady's face was exactly how we imagine the Tabascoans looked when they saw those horses.

Criminal Masterminds

From the No Shit, Sherlock! file. Posted outside a market on Corrgidora:


"Stealing is a Crime."

We suppose this would pretty much demolish the old "I didn't know stealing was a crime" defense.

Update: Speaking of stealing, note that the name of the store is "Waldo'sMart."

This Just In: 99.4 Percent of Houston Homicides Unrelated to Mexican Gangs

As part of our ongoing coverage of how insanely fucking dangerous Houston is, and how it should be avoided at all costs, we bring you the Houston Chronicle's latest front-pager about the city's killer drug gangs. Fan's of the Chronicle's reporting will not be surprised to learn that the focus of the piece is on Mexican gangs, of course.

[I]in a case of mistaken identity, Jose Perez ended up dead. The intended target — the Houston-based head of a Mexican drug cartel cell pumping millions of dollars of cocaine into the city — walked away.

Perez, 27, was just a working guy, out getting dinner late on a Friday with his wife and young children at Chilos, a seafood restaurant on the Gulf Freeway.

His murder and the assassination gone awry point to the perilous presence of Mexican organized crime and how cartel violence has seeped into the city.

...Authorities, saying it’s tough to spot cartel connections because the gangsters work in several jurisdictions, point to at least seven homicides in the Houston area since 2006, as well as nine home invasions and five kidnappings tied to cartels. They believe there are many more.

So out of roughly 1,100 homicides in the last three years, at least seven were Mexican gang-related - about 0.6%. You can see why they held the front page for this one.

There Goes the Neighborhood

A cafe with an "English Only" policy is the kind of thing you might expect to find opening up in some former bastion of the Confederacy, or maybe Maricopa County, AZ. So we were a little surprised to get this flier for a new ALL IN ENGLISH!!! joint a block and a half from Burro Hall. We're extremely ambivalent about this - on the one hand, it's definitely a Warning Sign of the Apocalypse; on the other, it's actually not a bad-looking cafe, and the young Canadian woman who runs it seems very nice, and insists that it's aimed not at gringos, but at Mexicans who want to practice English. Given the many other obstacles to success - Independencia is the street where bars and cafes come to die, and to get into this one, you need to walk part way into a different floundering cafe - we're not sure that the English Only policy is the thing that's going to do it in, but it still seems weirdly unenforceable to us.

Smooth

Jalisco's Carlos Santana has apparently been turning down movie soundtrack work left and right, and for a pretty admirable reason

As most of the pitches that have come to Santana for possible soundtrack work have been films that denigrate Mexicans, he's declined to participate. "...I'd rather wash dishes than work on projects that always portray us as criminals, drug addicts or gangsters..."

We're assuming Carlos is exaggerating a little bit here. Us, we'd rather live off 1% of his royalties from Supernatural than wash dishes or write movie soundtracks. But we're more intrigued by this: how big do your balls have to be to bring a picture full of negative Mexican stereotypes to Carlos Santana and ask him to score it? Weeping Jesus. If there are any Hollywood producers reading this, we're fnishing up a screenplay about a Scientologist serial killer, and are looking for a way to get it into Tom Cruise's hands.

Just the Facts, Please

While we're always happy to see the Mexican government placing the blame for the drug wars squarely on the shoulders of the US, where it belongs, we think the presidente is overreaching a bit here:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon hit back at accusations his government is failing in the fight against violent drug cartels, saying that corruption in the United States is also to blame.

With murders among feuding Mexican drug cartels on the rise and continued ravenous demand for cocaine and other illegal drugs north of the border, Calderon said the United States should take a hard look at itself before pointing the finger at anyone else.

"The main cause of the problems associated with organized crime is having the world's biggest consumer next to us," Calderon said in an interview with AFP.

"Drug trafficking in the United States is fueled by the phenomenon of corruption on the part of the American authorities," he said, calling on US President Barack Obama to step up the fight against drugs in his own country.

Calderon admitted some Mexican officials had helped cartels, but urged the United States to consider how many of its officials have been implicated.

"I want to know how many American officials have been prosecuted for this," he said, listing a string of prosecutions made against Mexican police officers and government officials during his administration.

Well, no. Sure, American's are the ones buying the drugs, funding the cartels and selling them all the guns, grenades and rocket launchers, but cops and politicians on the drug lords' dole (while certainly not unheard of) is really more of a Mexican thing. Stick to the facts, Felipe - they're incriminating enough, and generally on your side.

Seamstresses Wanted

Yet another way the US and Mexico are more alike than different: the fastest way to pick up chicks is still to cruise around town in a 1989 Chevy Astrovan.

MONTERREY, Mexico -- The world's heaviest man still can't walk, but he will soon be able to roll. Manuel Uribe said Thursday he is having a 1989 Chevrolet Astrovan outfitted to support his record-breaking weight, giving him mobility after more than six years of being confined to his bed.

Uribe, known as Meme to his friends, even has a name for his new ride.

"My friends call it the Meme-Mobile, just like the Batmobile," he said.

The minivan is being converted into an open-air, flatbed pickup of sorts. Manuel says he will put a bed on the back of the van to drive around town, with his new wife at the wheel. When at home, he will hang out in a remodeled garage that will include a forklift to help raise his regular bed up to the level of his car bed, allowing him to switch locations from time to time.

Yes, just like the Batmobile.

We're not sure how Meme makes his money, but we notice that he has plenty of resources to sink into steel-reinforced motor vehicles, yet is unable to afford many shirts. We've been thinking of branching off into merchandising for a while now, and have decided to commission a handmade "Burro Hall" t-shirt in size...well, whatever size an 800-pound guy would wear. If any of our (no doubt many) skilled seamstress readers wish to get involved, you know how to reach us.

If the Peso Keeps Dropping, Maybe We'll Just Feed Them Ground-Up 50s

In the category of Great Lines From Terrible Movies, one of our favorites is from Turner & Hooch, in which Turner (Tom Hanks) is buying food for Hooch, his recently-adopted crime-fighting bull mastif, and experiences as massive case of sticker shock: "$97.51! What is that, pesos? This is for a dog!" We still use the "what is that, pesos?" line a lot, though the jury is still out on whether the current answer ("Uh, yes, that is pesos, Señor,") makes it more funny, or less.

Anyway, here's the remorseless eating machine known as the spare cat, sitting next to the second $375 bag of cat food we've bought in the last two weeks. And yes, that is pesos. Until recently that was about 35 bucks. Something to keep in mind if you're ever offered a "free kitten."

Homoerotic Sporting Events and the Women Who Love Them

We've always found contact sports to be kinda....what's the word...gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you - Burro Hall doesn't ask, doesn't tell. Maybe it's just that we spent so much of our youth getting beat up by football players that we we felt compelled to lash back at them somehow - which we did by pointing out that they spent their afternoons dressing up in tight pants and tackling each other, after which they'd all shower together. (This generally led to more beatings or, in extreme cases, being held down a bunch of them while they pulled our Fruit-of-the-Looms up our asscrack. Which is, like, so gay.)

So the other night we went out to the lucha libre - which, traditional Mexican notions of machismo notwithstanding, is a wildly popular entertainment in which guys in tights grapple with each other. We think the men in the audience are probably vaguely aware of this, because every time a woman gets up out of her seat, a furious stream of whistles and catcalls rains down on her, which feels to us like "protesting too much." The folks in charge seem to realize this too, and so after every fall a scantily-clad ring girl is sent out into the coliseum to give the guys a chance to demonstrate their heterosexuality.

Anyway, one thing that struck us about the lucha this week was that there were a lot more women in the crowd than usual - there are usually quite a few, but this time they made up about half the audience. And they were ferociously passionate. These three young ladies in the back row hurled some of the most obscene, pornographic invective we'd ever heard in our lives.


(Incidentally, she's nursing an infant under that yellow blanket. Because it's family entertainment.)

But by the time the main event started, we figured out what was going on: we had stumbled into the Querétaro equivalent of Chippendale's. The star of the show was Marco Corleone, who fights without a mask or tights, the better to show off his magnificent, steroid-enhanced form. Marco's signature move is to wow his opponents into submission by gyrating his perfect, chiseled buttocks in their direction, at which point the ladies would all screech, squeal and swoon.


(Not that his appeal is exclusively feminine, of course. While Googling around for some better pictures than the one above, we were led to a few websites that would have embarrassed Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead, here's Marco's MySpace page. Marco's actually a gringo who used to wrestle in the WWE under the names Mark Jindrak, and before that [and somewhat hilariously in the context of this post], Sodom.)

The other three dudes in the ring went along with the act, of course, bowing before Marco's superior abs and "accidentally" pulling down his briefs a half dozen times. We suppose face-sitting is fairly common in a wrestling match, but we seemed to notice it a lot more this time. We're not sure how the men in the audience were reacting to all this, because we were overwhelmed by the feminine frenzy, which actually got a little scary at times. Even though we stuck around for the whole thing, we couldn't for the life of us remember who won, until we picked up the paper today. (Marco, por supuesto.)

Update: It's probably worth mentioning that the evening's entertainment was sponsored by PAN, the conservative Catholic political party. They don't do a lot for women or gays, public policy-wise, but they'll happily haul out the beefcake with elections approaching.

Racial Sensitivity Watch IV (Sports & Leisure Division)

"What Does the Black Guy Want...?"




[From Noticias de Querétaro. Irrelevant pop culture reference here. (Answer: "He wants your sugar but you won't give it to him." Hmmm. Maybe it's not so irrelevant, after all. We are talking about Don King here.)]

The Sweet Science

Seriously, is there anyone who's not sucking up to Charlie Slim these days? From a World Boxing Council press release, translated from Punch Drunk into English [lack of punctuation theirs]:

The WBC will present tomorrow [actually, yesterday] The Man of The Year 2008 Award, to Don carlos Slim Helu

During the 46th annual WBC convention in Cheng Du China, last November 7th, 2008 the general assembly and the Board of Governors voted unanimously to present Don Carlos Slim Helu. The Man of the Year 2008 WBC Award, this will come tomorrow in a special ceremony that will count with most of the former & current Mexican WBC World Champions, and well known Promoter Don King, who will join along with Mexico's today's Promoters.

Only in America! (Or Mexico. It's not clear, really.)