The Liveries of Others

It seems that the Querétaro government has once again decided that the police-state apparatus here is insufficiently disproportionate to the city's negligible crime rate, so yesterday Governor Calzada rolled out the latest program from his Urban Paranoia Department: a plan to recruit 1,000 taxi drivers to fink on the citizenry via a network of government-financed cellphones.

A thousand taxi drivers will be "the eyes and the voice of the citizens," via the cellphones that the government distributed this weekend.

With this delivery of 1,000 cellphones and an investment of 6 million pesos, the taxi drivers and citizenry will be able to report any kind of irregularity...

It's not clear if it will be obvious which taxi drivers are the snitches-on-wheels and which ones aren't, so if you happen to be doing something suspicious-looking as a taxi drives by, you should probably kill the driver just to be safe. We all know what happens to the wrongly-accused in this country.