Making Limonada

With the city of Querétaro practically being washed away by relentless rains, it was nice to get off the subway this morning and see the tourist board moving quickly to make a virtue out this.

It's that sort of nimble thinking that makes the town the #1 non-beach tourist destination year after year.

For Whom the Bells Toll and Toll and Toll and Toll...

Because we've made fun of him a few times in the past, we wanted to take a minute here to wish a buen viaje to the Archdiocese of Querétaro's former spokespadre, José Morales Flores, who passed away this week, at age 81.  This front-page illustration from Diario de Querétaro cheerfully announces that "There's a great party in Heaven" - because what party isn't enlivened by a talkative octogenarian priest? (It also seems to indicate that he would bring his Bible with him, which feels unnecessary to us; and that he'd still have terrible eyesight in Heaven.)

The headline describes him as a torero, but the article only says he was an aficionado.  Either way, we're taking it as Divine endorsement of bullfighting. 

We couldn't begin to do it justice in translation, but the Mexican tradition heaping verbal floral arrangements upon the dead gets pushed to the point of parody here, in what is ostensibly a news article.  

Aviso

Just a reminder that, despite Judge Bolton's ruling, our Travel Advisory for the Failed State of Arizona remains in effect until Gov. Brewer can certify that illegal immigrant drug mules have stopped beheading people all over her state.

Vampires

Though we kind of pride ourselves on our affection for Mexico, Mexicans and all things Mex-ish - and also dig Korean food and have some Korean friends - it turns out we're the very top hit on the internets when you search for "Koreans are like Mexicans: worthless trash" on Google Romania.

Never mind how this came to our attention...

The Unbearable Lightness of Being In Charge of Branding in Querétaro

Querétaro's aqueduct was host to a Cirque du Soleil-style extravaganza this weekend - which is appropriate. The city, which seems to re-brand itself every few months, is looking ahead to life after the bicentennial, and has now decided to call itself the "City of Light" - as if there weren't already enough reasons to confuse Querétaro with Paris. The aqueduct is the first part of town to get its Moulin Rouge makeover, which was unveiled in a display of civic pride not seen since the Dancing Fountains a couple of years ago. The aqueduct actually runs down the middle of a six-lane highway, bisected by two of the most accident-prone intersections in the city, which makes it an extraordinarily dangerous place to hang out. So of course the plan is to lure tourists and pedestrians to the area with a garish nighttime light show. Hilarity will surely ensue.

The company that designed the lights put together this promotional video, which manages to airbrush out the six lanes of Mad-Max traffic, and also gives a preview of coming illuminations around the rest of the Centro, which we have to admit don't look at all bad and could actually be a big improvement. And probably also not fatal.

Stupid Like a Fox

Vicente Fox says a lot of smart things about immigration, Arizona, the Drug War and the climate of fear in this brief interview with the hometown paper. But he also says stuff like this:

What do you think Mexicans have contributed to American culture?
Oh, starting with Mexican food! The jalapeños and the tacos and the rest. I think they have contributed family values. And then we have our culture. When you were killing Indian Apaches there, we had built Mayan cities, the pyramids, Mexico City.

We'll assume Fox is using "we" as a sign of national solidarity, since - as his mother was born in Spain and his grandfather in Ohio - we're not sure he gets to take credit for the pyramids. We'll also ignore the fact that, by the time to US started killing Apaches in earnest in the mid-19th Century, it had actually racked up a few accomplishments of its own - the Constitution, the steam engine boat, and the seizure of half of Mexico's territory come to mind. Instead, we'll just note that of the three accomplishments Fox mentions, the first two had been extinct for centuries and the third, the building of Mexico City, was done by European settlers on the ruins of the great Indian civilization they had systematically exterminated.

But mostly it's annoying because, when it comes to dealing specifically with the Apaches, Mexico hasn't exactly covered herself in glory:

The traditional and sometimes treacherous relationships continued between the [Spanish settlers and Apache bands] with the independence of Mexico in 1821. By 1835 Mexico had placed a bounty on Apache scalps but some bands were still trading with certain villages. When Juan José Compas, the leader of the Mimbreño Apaches, was killed for bounty money in 1837, Mangas Coloradas or Dasoda-hae (Red Sleeves) became principal chief and war leader and began a series of retaliatory raids against the Mexicans.

When the United States went to war against Mexico, many Apache bands promised U.S. soldiers safe passage through their lands. When the U.S. claimed former territories of Mexico in 1846, Mangas Coloradas signed a peace treaty, respecting them as conquerors of the Mexican's land

Finally, Fox doubles down on the idea of destroying a great culture, when he talks about his presidential library in Guanajuato:

Let me give you news. We’re going to have Elton John in October.

Sábado Gigante

* Peter O'Toole has done some crazy shit over the years, but we never thought we'd see the day he set foot in Puebla. "When they asked me to come to Mexico to film this picture, I thought, 'What an excellent opportunity to eat tacos, tacos, tacos!'" Famous last words.

* The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin', or so we have read.

* We hate when we read something that makes us re-evaluate the Nixons, but here's one:

On that August day in 1971, hundreds of people assembled on both sides of the border to witness Pat Nixon's visit. After dedicating the new [Border Field State Park], the First Lady requested a member of her security detail to cut a section of the barbed-wire barrier so that she could greet the hundreds of Mexican nationals who came to meet her.

She took an unscheduled plunge into a reaching, waving throng of Mexicans who lined the Tijuana side of the border to witness the ceremonies. Engulfed by Mexican well wishers for almost 15 minutes, the Secret Service looked nervous as the Spanish-speaking crowd surrounded Mrs. Nixon. The mariachi band followed closely behind as she shook hands and hugged children. She turned and said to her escort, "When is this coming down?"

* Jim Cramer is bullish on San Miguel real estate. We expect the town to be awash in decapitated bodies and foreclosed casonas by Monday morning.

* More Mexican violence spilling over into White America. While Obama vacations in the Gulf.

* Our other hometown is also absorbing the worst of Mexican culture. (Of course, it's better than what Germany learned from them...)

* Our new multiple-personality-disorder-afflicted barnacle sent us an ominous note warning us that "the same folks cleaning your house and washing your car will be cutting your throat as soon as the cartels make it easy to get away with it." This totally puts in perspective the maid's habit of hiding the kitchen knives on us. (The local car wash, on the other hand, is far more lucrative than drug-running. No way are those guys selling out to the cartels.)

* New rule: the violence in Mexico may only be exploited by right-wing politicians, not the cosmetics industry.

* Ay! The paintings talk and move! Witchcraft!!

* Mexican babes in Querétaro; Guanajuato; Cabo (by way of Hollywood) and totally old-school, Nuestra Belleza Quintana Roo Ice Age.

Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

One of our favorite made-up Mexican words is teibolera, which is Spanglish for "table dancer," which is the what overly-polite Mexicans call strippers. Querétaro has about as many strip clubs as the Vatican, but that hasn't stopped the cartel behind organizers of the Miss Table Dance 2010 contest from moving it to Querétaro this summer. (Well, partly, anyway - like the Olympics, it's being held in multiple venues, including Hidalgo, Edomex and Tlaxclala.) The strip-a-thon culminates here on Sept 17, the day after the bicentennial, just like Creed v. Balboa in Philly back in '76.

That we're planning to cover this is a no-brainer. But what we want to do is take a moment here to announce our availability to judge this thing. Seriously, chicos, we'd add a veneer of international, cosmopolitan respectability to the whole sordid enterprise. Call us.

There No "Yo" In Team

Ironically, before we devoted 500 words to picking on a hapless commenter yesterday, we were planning a little post to say how pleased we are that so many people appear to be commenting lately. We're not sure what caused this - certainly not any increase in the quantity or quality of the posting here - but it's nice to see all you ungrateful bastards getting off your lazy asses and contributing for a change. (Or, to put it another way...gracias.) A silly item this week about a parasailing Russian burro led to a discussion of Ruso-Mexican babes, particularly Olga Breeskyn, which led to someone digging up a video of Olga Breeskyn parasailing. The circle was closed, the Wheel of Life spun on.

That's fuckin' teamwork, people!

In the unlikely event that anyone is curious about our comment policy, we really don't have one. We usually delete the Chinese porn links, and generally take a harsh view of anyone picking on other commenters (specifically, on commenters we like; you can slap the douchebags around all you like). The Board of Directors doesn't intend to disable anonymous commenting, but would encourage the bashful to at least make up some bullshit name so as to avoid having too many Anonymouses talking over each other. (Unless your name really is Anonymous, of course.)

Our Secret Admirer(s)

A few weeks back hastily banged out a post in which we made the seemingly uncontroversial assertion that the spiraling violence in Ciudad Juarez is no reason to cancel a study program 1,200 miles away in Puebla. Within hours we had set a record for the greatest number of reader comments (not counting the one in 2007 where we heaped sarcastic praise on former congressman Charlie Stenholm for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Mexican horsemeat industry, which unleashed a torrent of bile that overheated our servers and threatened a massive power outage throughout the Bajia before the governor begged us to delete it; horse folks apparently lost their senses of humor after Mr. Ed went off the air). Most of the comments came from someone who was furious - furious! - that we aren't as frightened of Mexico as he is. We're not sure how he got here - we do rank pretty high when you Google "Mexico burro fucking" - but we kind of admired the self-righteous bravado he brought to his most demonstrably false assertions. He was a man determined not just to step on his own dick, but to stomp up and down on it. We have a sweet spot for clowns like that.

But then he turned ugly. He suggested that one female commenter perform oral sex on him, and warned another to "watch his back" when he comes to Mexico. The rantings of a probably harmless fool, yes, but like jokes in the airport security line or presidential death threats on Facebook, we have a policy of referring such comments to the proper authorities. Of course, this being Mexico, the authorities simply noted our complaint, held a press conference to declare our comments section safe, and went back to watching the World Cup. So we called up our usual private investigator, Hank Quinlan. His methods are unorthodox, but he's very affordable.

Turns out our boy spends most of his waking hours stumbling from blog to blog, leaving his stream-of-consciousness ravings under a variety of aliases. Indeed, he logs onto this site more often than our own IT Dept. Sometimes, his alter-identities get in discussions (or arguments) with each other, making it hard to tell where the ventriloquist ends and the dummy begins.

He even has a blog of his own! The dude may loathe Mexicans, but he really loathes Muslims. And our Latina Supreme Court justice, our black president, the NAACP and, most of all, anyone who would suggest that all his targets have certain pigmentation issues in common.

Jesus, what a crank, we thought. But our hearts melted when we noticed that his multiple online aliases are also his own blog's most frequent commenters. Suddenly, he seemed less of a Glenn Beck tea partier and more like our little niece throwing a tea party for her teddy bears, voicing the the entire conversation herself. Adorable!

Eventually we forgot about the guy, but yesterday a friend suggested we read "Clueless in Cholula," his latest man-crush love letter to someone who sounds vaguely like, well, us:

There is this jerk-off who blogs on Mexico, who moved from New Yawk City to the Mexican state of Puebla a few years ago, and who seems to hold the world's record for mendacity.

Sure, we can be kind of a jerk-off at times, but does anyone who reads at a third-grade level or higher want to see if they can spot the factual error there? Bear in mind, this guy reads Burro Hall four or five times a day.

Our friend is fearless in assaulting straw men (presumably because of the honey-brown color of their skin), and so he takes us to task for referring accurately to Puebla's drug-related murder rate when linking to an article on drug-related murders, and brands us a pack of mendacious liars for not mentioning non-drug-related murders when discussing drug-related murders.  Or people struck by lightning.

We immediately called the Legal Dept. up to our office and demanded they sue his (or their) ass(es) for libel. And they refused! "This is a silly blog on the intertubes, Sir - of course we lie. Probably 30% of what we publish is invented. The rest is embellishment." We fired their oily hides on the spot. Hank Quinlan says he knows a guy who knows some guys, so we're leaving the case in his shaky but capable hands.

He mumbles on a bit more about our inability to sell our house (though we don't own one) and gives a weird shout-out to albinos, those whitest of white men. We kind of stopped reading it so we could look up hotels in Cholula, where we'd love to visit someday. His other personalities have already left eight comments there, so he's clearly struck a nerve with his public. We're sure they'll all be commenting here in a few minutes. The Fire Commissioner has asked us to remind you that no more than 25 people are allowed inside the comment section at a time.

A Plan Without a Plan

The US Government Accountability Office has squeezed out a new report [pdf] on Plan Mexico today. We're as stunned as you are to learn that "millions of dollars have been spent without enough regard for whether the money is doing any good."

Really, no one could have predicted this.

Burro Haul

From the people who brought you Stalin, pogroms and the assassination of Pope John Paul I:

Police in southern Russia are investigating allegations of animal cruelty after a donkey was made to parasail as part of an advertising stunt, Russian media report.

Witnesses near the beach on the Sea of Azov in the Krasnodar region said the animal had been screaming in fear.

It landed in the water and was pulled onto the shore, said police.

"The donkey screamed and children cried," regional police spokeswoman Larisa Tuchkova told AFP news agency.

The donkey screamed and children cried. We hope you're happy, Russia.

The Burro Hall Travel Advisory for the Failed State of Arizona is expanded to include the Krasnodar region of southern Russia.

Pepe Va en Grande!

We're not sure if this means that his predecessor was hated by everyone, or that the citizenry of Querétaro don't really pay attention to stuff, but our current governor, José "Pepe" Calzada, appears to have an astounding 82.5% approval rating, putting him ahead of the Virgin of Guadalupe and just 17 points behind Kim Jong Il.

The 17.5% who hate freedom are probably disappointed by his failure to wear a red guayabera even once since he was elected.

Interestingly, five percent of the population is willing to admit that they've never heard of the governor.

The Spy Who Dug Me

There have been some changes in the upper echelons of state government, as the woman whose name we never did quite manage to confirm handed over the Miss Querétaro crown during a ceremony at the Hotel Juriquilla this weekend. The transfer of power was by all accounts an orderly one.

Thanks to the crack reporting of Diario de Querétaro, we can tell you that our new sovereign is 21 years old, a bit over five-foot-nine, and...well, nothing else except her name. Just a couple of weeks after an enormous Russian spy ring was found to have links to president Calderón, the Nuestra Belleza Querétaro 2010 sash was draped across the firm, modest bosom of the queretanisima Señorita Natasha Kaufmann.

We will, as always, bring you photos of Her Majesty in a bikini, taken a few summers ago at her dacha on the Volga, as soon as we are able to transfer them from the microfilm.

Update:

More here.

Sábado Gigante

* Before moving our corporate headquarters to Mexico in 2006, we searched the internet for "Mexico and pugs," and quickly determined that the only person in the whole country who owned one was the writer CM Mayo, who generously advised us that Jesús could be a problematic name for a dog here. She appears to also share our obsession with Emperor Maximilian - though, unlike us, she has written a book and maintains a couple of blogs about him.

* Vaseline introduces a photographic skin-whitening app for Facebook India, but we see no reason it wouldn't work on Mexicans in Arizona. (It will not, however, make you look like Olivia Newton-John.)

* It was just a matter of time before Ry Cooder weighed in on the SB 1070.

* We buy our tortillas by the kilo in a plastic bag, but some people still prefer to make them the old-fashioned way.

* Racial Sensitivity Watch wonkery.

* Mexico Tourism is running a photo contest. Take a trip to Mexico, submit the best picture you took on your trip to Mexico and you can win...a trip to Mexico!

* Querétaro has 14,000 unsold houses, so come on down and make an offer. Apparently, all the intended buyers have moved to the Bronx.

* The Wall Street Journal has an interactive drug-slaughter map. We notice that the situation in Puebla has spiraled up to a record two murders per month, out of a population of barely 5.5 million.

* Juárez, on the other hand, is still worth avoiding.

* Scientology in Mexico. We still prefer them to the Jehovahs.

* The Guanajuato Women's Institute is a government agency that works to assure dignity and equality for all women, as long as they don't have tattoos.

* Kittens make everything sweet.

Why Risk It?

A bunch of Failed State of Arizona bureaucrats - specifically, coroners from counties bordering Mexico - are pushing back against FSoAZ governess Jan Brewer's claim that her state is ankle-deep in severed heads chopped of by Mexican immigrants:

The Arizona Guardian contacted coroners’ offices in Yuma, Pima, Pinal, Maricopa, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. All of the said they’d never investigated an immigration-related crime in which someone’s head had been cut off within their respective jurisdictions.

Their statements are significant because their offices would have investigated and known about any violent deaths.

Well, color us unconvinced. If the Sarah Palin of the West tells us her state is in the grips of a blood-soaked Mexican crime wave, with drug mules running wild, sawing off heads and deliberately causing car crashes, that's good enough for us. Out of sympathy for their plight, we are officially ending our call for a boycott of Arizona. However, a Burro Hall Travel Advisory for the FSoAZ is now in effect, and we strongly urge our readers and their loved ones to steer well clear of the state until Gov. Brewer sounds the all-clear.

Take My Same-Sex Spouse. Please.

Argentina finally gets around to legalizing gay marriage, earning themselves "First In the Region" status from the hometown paper, even though Mexico City beat them by four months. (Mexico seems more excited by the symbolism rather than the actual "getting married" part, since only 270 same-sex couples have taken advantage of their new civil right, in a city of 20 million.) Anyway, the only reason we're posting this is to note that a perfectly good homo-baiting zinger in English really doesn't carry over into Spanish as well as the anti-gay-marriage forces might have hoped:

In Guatemala, President Álvaro Colom said of gay marriage during his 2007 campaign that “God said ‘Adan and Eva,’ not ‘Adan and Esteban!'"

(The sound of crickets chirping turns out to be the same in Spanish and English.)

Soccer: It's Not Just For Hooligans

Laura Martinez at Mi Blog Es Tu Blog finds this magnificent ad for some Spanish company (one of those big European conglomerates where we can never figure out what they do), rubbing the World Cup in Holland's face. But whereas she looks at the tagline - The World is Ours Once Again and sees Spain's ugly Conquistador history, we think it's brilliant.

Velázquez's "Surrender of Breda." Somewhere, we've got a picture of our much younger selves standing in front of this thing in the Prado. It commemorates a 1625 Spanish victory over the Dutch in the Eighty Years War.

The siege of Breda was not only a clash between the Netherlands and Spain, but a, “decisive contest between two famous generals, [Spinola and Dutch general Nassau], both well versed in the arts of fortification, who had their renown at stake”.

That a faceless conglomerate would use this painting, and everyone in Spain and Holland would recognize it and get the reference to a 400-year-old battle is one reason we love European sports, even if we don't really understand the game itself. It almost makes us wish Spain had played Germany in the final. (Of course, Germany-Holland could have been good, too.)

Meet the New Mexico, Same As the Old Mexico

Six Dead in Albuquerque Office Shooting.

Police said a man entered an Albuquerque, New Mexico, fiber optics company with a gun and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded four according to CBS News affiliate KRQE. Police said the shooter then apparently shot and killed himself in what was apparently a domestic violence dispute.

Albuquerque is only 267 miles from Juárez, thus four times as dangerous as Puebla. What all those people were doing in a place with "Mexico" in its name is beyond us.

We Are the World Cup

We can't say we've been paying too much attention to the Great Big Soccer Thingy going on this month, but we feel duty-bound to hunker down and watch today's all-Burro-Hall final, pitting the country that founded Brooklyn against the one that founded Querétaro.

Anyway, if you'll excuse us, we've got to go install Skpye so we can be interviewed live during halftime.

Sábado Gigante

* Mexicans are so lazy, they can't even bother to let their kids out of school until July 9! Two things we learn from this article. (1) If the school across the street from our offices is typical, Mexican kids learn nothing but the National Anthem all day long, but at the end of the year they get a free backpack, so it's totally worth it. (2) There's a school in Querétaro called The Bicentennial of Mexican Independence Elementary School, which we think is going to be a deeply uncool place to be as of September 17.

* Hurricane Alex unearths the remains of a woolly mammoth in Nueva Leon, which is of course immediately picked clean by thieves.

* We might not be so quick to slam the door on the next proselytizing Jesus freak who shows up unannounced.

He was paid to murder businessmen, local government officials and senior policemen, never small-time smugglers. The hitman apparently worked for Guzman, but refused to say the kingpin's name. "You know who I mean," the hitman said.

After 20 years in the business, he couldn't take it anymore and he got out. "I've changed my life." He holds a Bible, he is repentant, he is a born-again Christian.

* Meanwhile, another group of Jesus freaks were walking along a major highway on a pilgrimage from Querétaro to San Luis, when a tractor trailer swerved to avoid hitting them, flipped over, and left the driver critically injured. Diario de Querétaro unironically proclaims it a 'miracle.'

* So this is why we can't get good lambchops here.

* Nightlife reporting in this town leaves a lot to be desired. Not that the daytime entertainment is anything to get excited about, of course.

* Vintage Mexican ads.

* Mugshot of the week. Really, the only thing more disturbed than raping a schizophrenic teenager is doing it dressed as a clown. But that goes without saying.

* Question for the AP Stylebook: Is "douchebags" one word or two?

Racial Sensitivity Watch: Holier-Than-Thou Edition

When he's not knocking the shit out of his girlfriend, the Baby Jesus's favorite anti-Semite racist apparently like to vent about the brown-skinned people from the country where his last two movies were set.

The Oscar-winning director/actor is heard referring to one of his staffers as a "wetback” during a recorded argument with Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his love child.

RadarOnline.com has heard the tape in which Mel tells Oksana: "I will report her to the f**king people that take f**king money from the wetbacks."

He is referring to turning a worker into immigration authorities, RadarOnline.com has been told.

Radar helpfully explains that epithet wetback "stems from the fact that illegal Mexicans would sometimes swim to cross into other countries," leading us to wonder what countries besides the US* a Mexican could swim to.

We'd like to believe that the fact that Mexicans use the term wetback (mojado) in polite company mitigates this one slightly, but common sense tells us otherwise.

*(Yes, commenters...we know about Guatemala and Belize.)

Old School

Mexican schools are appropriating a classic American approach to student safety:

Schools across Mexico are teaching students to dive to the floor and cover their heads as the violence-torn country sees more urban gunfights between drug gangs.

At least nine shootouts have erupted in school zones since mid-October, three of them in the past month. On June 15, soldiers and gunmen battled for an hour 60 feet from a preschool in the central town of Taxco.

Several Mexican states require "shootout drills" and incorporate them into summer teacher-training courses, which will begin next week. School ends Friday in most of Mexico.

Given how successful "duck and cover" was in the US - absolutely no American schoolkids died in atomic holocausts in the 1950s and 60s - a few cartel hitmen with guns should be no problem at all. The program had to be updated a bit for the 21st Cenutry, of course.

Above all, children should not take pictures or video of the shootout.

"The first thing the kids want to do is take pictures to post on their social networks," says Erika Arciniega, director of crime prevention for the Guerrero state police. "We don't want them to become targets."

Kids!

Racial Sensitivity Watch Watch

We used to be fairly regular readers of the Los Angeles Times Mexico coverage, until they vastly improved it by starting the La Plaza blog, which writes up coverage of their coverage which is often more interesting than the original article. So while longtime Burro Hall readers won't have much need for the Times's take on Mexican's tv's golliwog-centric reporting from the World Cup, La Plaza's follow-up post is pretty informative.

In online reader comments to an article in the El Universal newspaper on the Times report, many readers reacted with indignation to the suggestion that the Televisa skits are racist (link in Spanish). "Disgusting double standard for an imperialist and invading country," wrote one El Universal reader. "They should be ashamed criticizing a cartoon."

Touchy, touchy! If we may broadly caricature an ethnic group for a minute, Mexicans sure are sensitive about any perceived insult, even when it involves calling them to account for broadly caricaturing another ethnic group. Anyway, we pretty much endorse Gancho's take on the issue:

I have wondered for years now about how appropriate US standards for racism are for Mexico. My initial reaction was that if Mexicans are at peace with their racial circumstances, the US, with its set of higher standards stemming from a racial history far more awful than that of Mexico, shouldn't really have much to say. Though the sentiment is well intentioned, it feels almost arrogant to conclude that, because black cartoons with exaggerated features were part of a Jim Crow mindset in the States, then Mexicans are racist for enjoying Memín Pinguín, and have no business doing so. The American experience isn't universal. Racially speaking, Mexican history is much less hateful than in the US (though not without its tragic episodes, such as the Caste War and the treatment of the Indians generally) and while national standards for offensiveness in the US need to in a sense atone for our history, other nations should not necessarily have to do so.

That's why we title our posts on the subject "Racial Sensitivity Watch" rather than "Racism Watch" - we really don't think racism is behind it. But, man, is it cringe-worthy sometimes.

Subway Series

At the risk of sending nativists to the fainting couch with an attack of the vapors, here's a scene from the Fourth of July in New York City, on the downtown 1 train - the one that goes to the Statue of Liberty Ferry.



Our favorite moment is at :54, where the guy with the Guadalupe tattoo gives them a buck.

The Bargain

The Memphis Commercial Appeal weighs in today with probably the longest non-travel article about Querétaro we've ever seen, which is surprising until you realize that it's Craig Pettie's hometown paper. [Plus video.] It's also the first American article to get the city's place in the Grand Scheme of Things right. After noting that the state of Querétaro has a murder rate one-fifth as high as Memphis, reporter Daniel Connolly explains:

High-ranking officials in Queretaro didn't agree to interviews when reporters visited. But they have said publicly that while there are illegal drug sales in Queretaro, there is no drug trafficking.

But other residents say Queretaro is a safe place not because drug traffickers aren't there. It's a safe place precisely because the drug traffickers are there, they say.

"There is a protection here for the drug lords. They have a truce between them and the government," said Jose Guillermo del Hoyo.

Large payments to officials and agreements between cartels help make Queretaro a safe haven for major traffickers and their families, he said. Part of the deal is that violence happens elsewhere.

"It has been this safe for a long, long time," he said. "All the drug lords have their families in here. For the kids."

Del Hoyo, known as "Pepe," knows a few things about drugs. He's the 41-year-old director of Clinica Vida, a swanky drug-treatment center outside the city where addicts do morning yoga and stroll among pools and manicured lawns.

Del Hoyo says he was a drug user and unsuccessful drug dealer himself, that he once associated with major traffickers, and that he still knows people who sell drugs.

The cartels themselves sometimes send him clients.

"A lot of drug lords have people on their organizations that need to be clean because they have a position in the organization," del Hoyo said. "So sometimes they send me people in here to get clean."

It's impossible to know for sure if the payments to Queretaro officials take place. It's still harder to know if the treaty among cartels exists, but local journalists and others believe it. "The great narcos have families here," said Aitor Juaristi, a Queretaro drug-prevention official.

In the interest of not having a horse's head tossed over our wall, we should make clear that we have no evidence of any bribes paid to public officials - though it certainly would explain a hell of a lot, since they probably didn't move here for the nightlife.

As far as we're concerned, we heartily endorse whatever backroom deals are being cut to keep Queretaro family-friendly. So on the little matter of the dismembered corpse found stuffed in a plastic bag about 45 minutes from our offices yesterday, we fully expect someone to be disciplined for breech of contract and to issue a public apology by the end of the week.

Happy (American) Independence Day From the Burro Hall Board of Directors

Sábado Gigante

* Tragedy strikes, in the form of Mother Nature's wrath, as Hurricane Alex prevents the completion of the world's largest flag painting on a Houston rooftop in time for July 4th. (Also, it appears to have destroyed Monterrey, Mexico.)

* Presidente Calderon linked to Russian spy ring! They must have decided he was too incompetent to take part in it.

* A brief history of Netzalucoly...Nezawacolly...Nestorcoyote....shit, we've never been able to pronounce it.

* After years of insisting they're not anti-immigrant, but anti-illegal-immigrant, ALIPAC makes it official: they're anti-immigrant.

* Great moments in theatrical prognostication:

"Let's face it, Hank. There's no life for us in this city, I'm taking my family and I'm moving to Arizona."

* PhotoIcon's contemporary Mexican photography issue is on the stands. And here's a treasure trove of Mexican-ish comic-bookish images soon to be overused on this site.

*Also, there's the Vivir Mexico group on Flickr.

* The 2010 Miss Querétaro competition is heating up. You may glimpse your future here, señoritas.

* Mexican drug lords pull in billions of dollars, and spend it all on teddy bears.

* For two years, that bitch Perez Hilton has been trying to hire away our weekend/overnight sports editor. Good luck affording him now!

* Back in our old job, we used to debate whether a certain colleague would be any good at a certain sex act. We should probably just ask General McChrysal.

* Live from Queretaro, a little alphorn for ya, bitches!

Return of the Princess

Strolled in last night as if nothing ever happened. We're going to kill her.

Silver Lining

This should spell the end of college exchange students coming to Querétaro and hogging all the good beer-drinking seats on the Plaza for a while.

Six arrested for shooting in Queretaro

Two hours of confrontation between police and suspected criminals elements left in the balance a state trooper was killed and five wounded, and six attackers arrested.

We should have expected this, being just 240 miles from Puebla.

Update: Our well-placed sources (by which we mean third-hand gossip from someone who's related to a guy who knows some cops) say that, for reasons not entirely clear, the Zetas and La Familia are taking off the gloves and fighting over who will control Queretaro. (What there is to control here is the part that's unclear.) We can't say we have a strong preference on which murderous drug gang our fair city ultimately falls prey to, but we know a marketing opportunity when we see one. So, coming soon to the Burro Hall Boutique - Show your cartel pride, queretanos! Let 'em know who you're rooting for!