Bullying - a phenomenon which, based on childhood experience, we rank just below genocide on the list of mankind's evils, has been making a lot of news in Mexico this year, ever since the OECD ranked the country #1 on its bullying index. This was followed by a report by Querétaro's state Commission on Human Rights declaring incidents of bullying to be up by 60% compared to last year. (As an aside, if you clicked the links, you'll notice the Spanish word for bullying appears to be bullying, because the concept of conquering people weaker than you simply doesn't exist in Spanish.) The report pointed out that bullying is mostly directed at fat kids, short kids, and kids missing one or both parents; basically every kid in Querétaro.
So even though the obvious solution is to simply round up the dozen or so tall, thin kids from well-adjusted homes and ship them off to a labor camp, the state legislature nevertheless held a special session yesterday to address the whole bullying issue. Magnificently, as if we were making the rest of this up but we swear we really aren't, an argument erupted and the legislators came to blows, with diputado José Luis Aguilera popping his shorter, fatter counterpart Juan José Jiménez Yáñez right smack in the honker.
Like all Mexican arguments, this one was about something that happened 150 years ago - specifically, Aguilera's referencing of Benito Juárez's famous quote about respecting the rights of others, and Jiménez's pedantic insistence that Juárez wasn't literally talking about playground bullying. (Seriously, people get into fistfights about this kind of shit here.) Presumably, what happened next was that someone mentioned that the chubby Mr. Juárez was an indigenous orphan who stood barely 4'6", and as such may well have had a passing acquaintance with the whole bullying thing, at which point hands were thrown. (Again, we know from experience that pointing out a dumber kid's errors is an excellent way to to test the impact-resistance of one's facial cartilage.)
The two of them have been sent to the principal's office, as it were, with Gov. Calzada issuing a statement demanding everybody play together nice. For the children's sake.
Many thanks to the commenters and emailers determined to keep this site running during our current labor unpleasantness (the unpleasantness being that we're busy doing other labor). Mexico recently landed itself a piece of another world record, and readers were understandably concerned that Teeming Millions might not hear of this remarkable feat. But we're a community here; we watch out for one another.
But so, apparently, last weekend, 301 Mexicanos armed with blue paint, big white shoes, and a crazy, crazy dream, took part in the World's Largest Simultaneous Dressing-Like-A-Smurf. Forgive the somewhat tortured phrasing, but it wasn't really a "gathering." Rather, Smurfophiles held simultaneous rallies in 12 cities around the world; the 301 Mexicans were part of a total blue mob of 4,617.
The Mexican word for Smurf is "Pitufo," which bears a striking resemblance to the American word "pitiful," which pretty much sums up what we think of this. ¡Ánimo, amigos! Since when does Mexico need the help of eleven other nations to break an asinine world record? We invaded Iraq with a smaller coalition than that. And you didn't even pull your weight! Three hundred and one out of 4,617 is a contribution of barely six percent. One of the other cities was The Hague, for Christ's sake.
Probably the saddest detail is that those 301 would-be Smurfs held their gathering in Estadio Azteca - which has a capacity of 105,000.
We were going to throw in a joke about having set a world record for Most Desperate and Embarrassing Attempt At Getting Into the Guinness Book of World Records, except that someone is the Mexico City government is probably on the phone right now trying to get this certified.
In yet another example of why we need an impermeable border fence as soon as possible, it turns out American mass-murderer (and fellow Bostonian) James "Whitey" Bulger spent a lot of time in Mexico, opportunistically availing himself of the nation's superior health care system.
Though Bulger was a fugitive wanted for 19 murders, he was by no means reclusive. Bulger said he and his girlfriend, 60-year-old Catherine Greig, frequently drove to the border, parked on the US side and walked into Tijuana, using a false identification to get through security, the official said. In Tijuana, he was able to purchase Atenolol, a drug taken for chest pain and high blood pressure, without a prescription.
A former close associate, Kevin Weeks, a gangster-turned-author, said yesterday that before Bulger fled Boston to avoid a federal racketeering indictment in January 1995 he talked about the easy availability of prescription drugs south of the border.
“Before he took off, he used to talk about Mexico," Weeks said. “He said you could get as much prescription medicine as you wanted"...
The FBI has known about Bulger’s interest in buying prescription drugs from Mexico since at least 2000, when agents distributed wanted posters in English and Spanish along the US-Mexican border.
But since Tijuana authorities are too overstretched to pursue a mere 19-time killer, and the US Border Patrol isn't trained to apprehend people called "whitey," Bulger was able to travel back and forth without incident.
President Obama, for the love of God, finish the danged fence!
* Once again we apologize for the sporadic posting. After working so hard to get visas for the interns to come work out of the New York office, we woke up yesterday to find they'd all run off and got gay-married. Jesus, guys, you could have done this a year and a half ago in Mexico City! Don't you read the papers? Anyway, now that it's official policy in NYC, we'll be pressing hard for gay marriage in Querétaro, though we think it's more likely to pass in Utah first.
* Anyone stuck in NYC and feeling homesick for Mexico should spend the day in Chinatown. The noise; the crowds; the way people saunter down the street, oblivious to the fact that people who walk normally may be trying to get past them; the cheap counterfeit goods for sale; the stunning variety of unusual, allegedly edible animal parts on display under conditions of dubious sanitation; the pervasiveness of religious figurines; the pushy old ladies who don't care that you were in line ahead of them, etc, etc. Muy mexicano.
* Instead, check out El Sur Experiment's Seven Deadly Sins as embodied by window-display mannequins. (Find all seven here.)
* Querétaro may soon have direct flights to Cancún, an airport which also has nonstop flights to Paris. So the local paper of course goes with the angle that QRO and Paris will soon be linked. Finally, an indirect way to get from one City of Lights to the other.
* We get all kinds of mail here at BH HQ, including a recent query from a woman considering moving here, who wanted to know if the city's water was hard or soft. We have to confess we don't actually know what those terms mean, but does anyone with superior understanding of el agua queretano want to answer this one for us?
In which we make a fairly lame joke about a horsemeat industry lobbyist, and discover that our audience is made up almost entirely of humorless equiphiles.
More of America's finest jobs are being sucked south to Mexico, this time thanks to well-funded America-hating animal rights establishment. We used to earn a good living bludgeoning horses to death at close range in this country. Not anymore:
With the only three horse slaughter plants in the U.S. closed, the industry has turned to Mexico and Canada to kill horses for their meat largely for export abroad for diners.
As of this week, the U.S. exported 20,196 horses from Texas for slaughter in Mexico. That's up from 1,109 over the same period last year, U.S. Agriculture Department statistics show.
In an almost literal example of good intentions paving the road to hell, animal rights activists got horse slaughter banned in the US, which means that now, before being slaughtered, the horses have to endure a long, uncomfortable drive to Mexico first. We've made that drive; trust us, it blows.
All this was predictable, according to the man who has quite possibly fallen as low as an elected official can fall:
"The U.S. plants had, certifiably so, the most humane way to end the life of unwanted horses available to those horse owners who did not object to horse slaughter and we turned our back on it," said Charlie Stenholm, a former Texas congressman who now lobbies for the horse slaughter industry.
"Who now lobbies for the horse slaughter industry"? Christ, that's just sad. PhRMA didn't have anything available? The Petroleum Institute wasn't taking applications? It's gotta be hard to keep your head high at cocktail parties when you're introduced as Big Horse Meat's man on the Hill. (Actually, now that we say it out loud, it sounds pretty cool.) Still, if you want to console him, his direct number is (202) 518-6334.
Earth-shaking news from the front lines of the Drug War: "La Linea" leader Marco Antonio Guzmán Zúñiga has taken the Burro Hall Award For Best Organized Crime Nickname, for the nombre de guerra "El Brad Pitt." Guzmán won on the strength of his ambiguous "El," which could be read as either "the Brad Pitt," or as a way of distinguishing himself from, well, the Brad Pitt. Bonus points were awarded for the fact that El Brad Pitt bears not the slightest physical resemblance to Brad Pitt.
* Our friends at the MexFiles could probably offer a more complete history of American meddling in Mexican elections, but a quick and informal poll of several friends and family members leads us to say with confidence that the Burro Hall community easily contributed more than 720 votes - the margin by which "Querétaro" was declared the Palabra Mas Fantastica del Universo. (Our Executive Editor's Dad is responsible for at least one-third of them.) (Click here to see various local officials call for a day of public celebration.) We'll let you know our picks for president in 2012 as soon as we meet with Mr. Soros.
* We were out of town when this happened, but the perro assured us he had nothing to with it.
* The year's only half over, but I think we can present the 2011 award for Most Offensive Medical Metaphor to PRI's Cristina Díaz Salazar, who joked that PAN in Querétaro is suffering from "political Parkinson's and Alzheimer's." We wish her a prolonged case of political uterine cancer - metaphorically speaking, of course.
* Is Jorge Castañeda a regular reader of Burro Hall? This column makes us think so. Or at least his assistant is.
* We usually find the reader comments on any online article about Mexico to be a foul cesspit of scum and stupidity, but the the way Gawker's readers produced this Bette Midler-themed riff from an article about horrific cartel murders has reaffirmed our faith in the internets.
* Via Gancho, it's hard to figure out whether the Mexican Agriculture Dept or the national soccer team are lying about the quality of Mexican meat.
* We finally understand why the Failed State of Arizona insists the Feds crack down on cross-border drug trafficking: they don't want the competition. Frankly, we're sick of these Commie-Socialists using Big Government to stifle the free market.
* When FSoAZ Senator John McCain begins a sentence with. "There is substantial evidence..." that's a pretty good indication that there is no evidence whatsoever.
* Mexico asks Texas to tone down the hysterical travel warnings. Texas says no, and continues to sell military-grade ammunition to drug cartels. Which we guess means the travel warnings kinda make sense. Can't be too careful.
* The Week in Cheesecake: We got nuthin', but here's what the front page of our local paper looked like on day last week. We think that's Kim Kardashian.
Not feeling, nor thanks, nor flamenco nor happiness - the most beautiful word in the Spanish language isn't even in the Royal Academy's dictionary. Querétaro, four syllables that together form a little-known word is nothing more than the name of a Mexican city. It means "island of the blue salamanders," was proposed by the actor Gael García Bernal, and received the most votes among more than 30 words nominated by Spanish-speaking personalities at the behest of the Instituto Cervantes.
We're not sure about that "blue salamanders" stuff, but we'll clear it up after the ticker-tape parade. Felicidades, you city of winners, you!
So it turns out the naysayers were correct: 90 percent of the guns confiscated in Mexico do not come from the the US - merely 70 percent do. Burro Hall regrets the error. This stunning 25% drop in American exports can of course be traced to the fact that we have a Kenyan socialist in the White House.
But 70 percent is still an impressive share of a market as awash in weaponry as Mexico. And, as noted before, we still have 100% of the growing Mexican-guns-used-to-kill-American-officials market. And once it was revealed that many of these gun shipments were monitored as part of Project Gunrunner, an Obama Administration ATF sting-gone-bad, we opined that:
It should be interesting watching the Republicans in Congress demand the ATF do more to regulate guns, while simultaneously making sure the ATF has no ability to do more to regulate guns.
Darrell Issa (R-CA) wouldn't let ATF agents testifying before his House Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday on the controversial Project Gunrunner say how weak U.S. gun laws were making it difficult for them to catch criminals smuggling assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels....
Issa butted in to say that their ATF agent's opinions on U.S. gun laws would not be "considered valid testimony."
"I want to caution the witnesses that the scope of this, your testimony here is limited, and that it's not about proposed legislation and the like and under House rules would not fall within the scope of this," Issa said. "So, anecdotally you can have opinions but ultimately it would not be considered valid testimony."
So there you have it. The NRA's pals in Congress score a few points off Obama, the regulators' hands get tied even tighter, the gun sales continue unabated, a lot of Mexicans die, and the American media gets to report on it. It's win-win-win-win-win!
We joked a few days ago about the city of Querétaro being so hungry for approval that it would actually make a big fuss about the meaningless "Award For Outstanding Achievement in Phonological Excellence" being offered by the Instituto Cervantes. We were kidding, of course, but that was before one of our local correspondents informed us that a radio station had given him a free t-shirt after after he said he'd voted. This would probably explain why "Querétaro" has surged ahead of "Sueño" by over 2000 votes.
And yet, somewhat inexplicably, "Gracias" - nominated by someone named Raphael, who appears to be like the Englebert Humperdink of Spain: someone we've never heard of but who seems to have sold more records than Elvis or the Beatles - as been steadily gaining ground.
What the fuck, people? National pride is at stake here! Not for "Querétaro" per se - it's not even really a word, for fuck's sake - but because stealing an election is something Mexicans do better than almost any other Spanish speaking nation. This is our thing! It's tailor-made for us! Vote early. Vote often. Call your friends and family, living or dead. Three days to go... ¡Sí, se puede!
Because our Research Dept. tells us that our readership is comprised mainly of people who bought their first computer in order to view cute pictures of kittens, we repost this fly-on-the-wall video of the Burro Hall staff's afternoon editorial meeting from September, 2008.
We thought trading the Spare Cat to another blog would improve productivity but, if anything, the staff has become even more lethargic in his absence.
Ha ha! No, we're not really dead, we're just having a hard time breathing because The Man's buttcheeks are fully covering our nose and mouth these days. We realize we've been remiss in our duties to you, the Teeming Millions, but it might be that way for the next week or so. We'll try to throw up the occasional inanity from the archives just as soon as our staff historian gets back from the Hamptons. Until then, we thank you for your patience and understanding.
And of course, dissatisfied readers may apply for a refund in person at our Guadalajara offices every weekday between noon and 2:30.
It's probably just a coincidence, but before we posted a week ago about the Instituto Cervante's World's Best Spanish Word Ever Award, Gael Garcia Bernal's oddball nomination of "Querétaro" was mired in sixth place, hundreds of votes behind "Sueño," proposed by self-help book author Luis Rojas Marcos, and "Libertad," by Mario Vargas Llosa, who we gather is also a writer of some sort. Since then, "Querétaro" has surged into first, with a seemingly insurmountable 500-vote lead.
We say insurmountable (which, incidentally, would be on our short list for Best English Word) because we very much doubt there is a constituency of people passionate about seeing "Sueño" win a fake award, whereas the 1.8 million residents of Querétaro would crawl through broken glass for a mention on Lady Gaga's Twitter feed. Seriously, we haven't seen this much ballot-stuffing since Pepe Calzada's surprise victory in the governor's race, and are proud to have done our part to enhance the civic pride. (To do yours, just click here.) Our prediction: "Querétaro" wins with 2.5 million votes, followed by "Libertad" with about 3,200.
Kudos to Garcia for being one of the few to understand the spirit of the contest. While most of the other nominators tried to show how clever they were by proposing words based on some poetic or symbolic reading of their meaning - "Yes," "You," "Spirit" and "Jesus" are all on the list - Garcia picks "Querétaro" simply because he likes the word, the way it sounds and feels and looks. (For our money, we'd have gone with "Murciélago," which means "bat.") But at the same time, shame on the Instituto for overlooking the fact, which we think is relevant in a poll about great Spanish words, that "Querétaro" isn't a Spanish word, any more than "Swampscott" is an English word. The Best Spanish Word in the World can't even be used in Scrabble.
Amusingly, the word "Querer," meaning "to want" or "to love," is currently in last place, despite being literally the closest thing the actual Spanish language has to "Querétaro."
Here’s a photo we snapped a few months ago of the bulletin board outside some local school, which was decorated with images representing various countries, including this one of the United States, which is apparently chock full of cowboys and Indians.
The plan was, of course, to heap scorn upon our Mexican neighbors. When did they buy these – 1885? Does the lesson plan include watching repeats of F-Troop? Are they getting us back for our sombrero-and-serape caricatures? Where on Earth do they get these ridiculous ideas?
Apparently, they get them from the United States pavilion at the Querétaro Foreign Community Festival where, as you can see in this photo sent in by a friend, Uncle Sam was represented all weekend by buckskin-clad braves serving up all-American tamales and pasteles de elote in a room decorated with teepees and cave paintings, while maize hung drying from the ceiling.
The message is clear: Not so long ago, America was populated by people not unlike you. And then we exterminated them. Any questions?
That said, if we’d known they’d have Sam Adams, we’d have sent an intern over to stock up.
Authorities in the central Mexican state of Queretaro evacuated the residents of a village threatened by a giant boulder dangling from a crag, officials said Thursday.
All 363 inhabitants of Adjunta de Higueras were taken to a makeshift shelter at an elementary school in neighboring Peña Blanca, the state government said in a statement.
The authorities who supervised the evacuation also took steps to protect the residents' possessions in the event the boulder breaks loose and devastates the village, while Queretaro police are standing guard over the now-deserted community to prevent looting.
With so many tragic, violent, and heartbreaking deaths occurring in Mexico these days, it seems like the only respite we get is the occasional tragic, violent, cartoonishly funny death, like the one that befell an unfortunate young man in Celaya, Guanajuato, this weekend, reported in the local paper under the headline "Man Crushed to Death By Falling Piano."
While the accompanying photo makes it look like Daniel Hernández Núñez was hit by a piano that plunged whistling from the heavens, he was actually helping a friend move it in the back of a pickup truck when, as we presume happens with astonishing frequency in Mexico, the back opened up and the piano, on wheels, rolled into Hernández, throwing him to the street and landing on top of him. Proving once again that absolutely everything in Mexico can, and eventually will, kill you.
[Thanks to alert and slightly-twisted reader Erin for the link.]
* It really shouldn't be all that hard to figure out how many people in a small state kill themselves in any given month or year, but Querétaro officials seem to be having a hard time with it. Back in April, the head of the municipal anti-drug council announced that there had been 77 in January 2011 alone - four more than occurred in all of 2010. This was quickly debunked by the state Justice Dept, which put the number at 28 for the first four months of the year, or around seven per month. Now, a local legislator is insisting that there were 77 in the month of January 2010, just in the city (not the state) of Querétaro. And of course he's citing the same source, INEGI, that the first guy cited for the 77-in-Jan-2011 stat. We believe it's possible that Mexican statisticians are killing themselves in great numbers because of the way statistics are reported in the press here.
* They say there are no cartels operating in Querétaro, but we can't think of a better word to describe the chokehold that Grupo Modelo and Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma have on the city's beer supply. We wish every bar and restaurant owner would read the Beer and Records in Mexico City blog on a regular basis. C'mon...live a little.
* The Audacity of Hope: QRO has apparently, sent a letter to the federal government saying, hey, if you haven't nailed down a place to hold the G20 meeting you're hosting next year, maybe give us a call. Prompting the local rag to go with the banner headline "OBAMA COULD BE COMING HERE."
* News of a Kidnapping: Seems like every couple months we get an email asking us to be on the lookout for a missing little girl named Catherine Juliette García Martínez, even though she was found like eight years ago.
* We suppose we can imagine a Mexican politician coming to Querétaro and botching the Corriegidora's story as badly as failed former half-term governor and current resident of the Failed State of Arizona Sarah Palin botched the story of Paul Revere in Boston yesterday. Why we can't imagine is that politician being his party's presidential front-runner.
* Apocalypse 2012 Countdown: Popocatépetl spewing smoke and ash? Check.
* Unidentified objects hovering in the sky? Check.
We've always loved the word "foreigner," with its connotation of exotic otherness leavened with a hint of cluelessness, but even after half a decade, it still surprises us a little whenever the world is applied to us. Yet every year there's a "Festival of the Foreign Community" in Querétaro, which kicks off with a parade of doughy-looking white people through the center of town (notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of the city's foreigners are Central and South Americans, which we suppose is why we're always astonished to hear that the foreign "community" numbers more than 9,000, since, honestly, it's hard for a gringo to tell Colombians, Panamanians, and Mexicans apart).
This years Festival has apparently been underway for most of the week, though no one thought to invite the city's only foreign-run news organization. Highlights from this year's parade include the Croatian contingent proudly waving the Ustaše colors in honor of Latin America's long tradition of harboring Nazi collaborators [Ed. Note: LOL!]...
InQro.com photo
...and Spain's homage to National Lampoon's Animal House's Deathmobile.
InQro.com photo
The United States has a history of phoning it in, despite being the city's largest source of non-Latino foreigners. And this year, judging from the program of events, has continued that tradition. Our contribution appears to have been screening Robert Altman's 40-year-old movie, M*A*S*H, and Gus Van Sant's Elephant (two movies about Americans with guns); a concert by the Dr. Blues Band (who look kinda Mexican to us); and a dance performance by a group from a country called Hawaii. USA! USA!
However, this display of All-American Half-assedness could redeem itself tonight and tomorrow, as a troop of troupers from sister-city Holland, MI, present a musical called Showtime!, which could be this century's Red, White and Blaine. We will report on this as aggressively as we can from 2800 miles away. If any of our local stringers happen to be at Parque Bicentenario tonight at 8pm or tomorrow afternoon at 1:30, we'll be happy to hear from you.
Update: Man, even Showtime! turns out to be something warmed-over from five years ago.
Tornadoes seem to be striking in a lot of unusually tornado-free places lately - proof, as we see it, that climate change is all an elaborate hoax. In the past couple of days, twisters have hit our home state of Massachusetts, and Jocotitlán, Estado de México. Still, not even Mother Nature can compete with Mexican drivers when it comes to producing carnage. One of these photos shows the aftermath in Jocotitlán; the others are randomly-selected news photos of the highway outside of Querétaro. Can you tell which is which?
The Instituto Cervantes, which promotes the Spanish language worldwide, has asked a bunch of notable Spanish speakers to propose a favorite word, which you, the public can then vote on. The winner will be crowned, um, Best Spanish Word or something on June 18. Anyway, Gael Garcia Bernal, one of Mexico’s two actors, proposed “Querétaro.” “I feel there’s no more beautiful word in Spanish, and when it’s written out, it’s beautiful.” This is all the stranger when you realize that (while the origin is unclear), the word is possibly decended from the P’urhépecha word crettaro meaning “place with crags.”
Presumably "Burro Hall" is ineligible because it's technically two words, and one's in English.
It's not unusual for there to be annoyingly loud music here on a Sunday morning at 4:30AM, generally a hymn of praise for Jesus Christ, his mom, or some Barbie-doll representation of one of the many lesser Virgins about town. This morning, though, the music had more of a rave/electronica feel than usual. Finally, around 5:30, when it became apparent that this racket was not going to die down any time soon, we got up, took a walk, and located the source of the noise: a dozen or so drunk, obnoxious, ostentatiously wealthy young guys from Mexico City (juniors they're called, unaffectionately) who had set up a pair of DJ-sized speakers in the doorway of a nearby house, turned the volume up to about 11, and were drinking, dancing and - God only knows why - hollering at the tops of their lungs in the street.
Because we're not complete fucking idiots, we opted not to start a fight with them, and instead came home and, for the first time not only in Mexico but in our entire adult lives, called the cops. Or tried to.
The first call to 066 (that's Mexican for "911") went smoothly, with the operator taking down the details in the extremely polite manner of Mexican officialdom (¿Con quien tengo gusto? - "And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?" - she asked as she was taking our names.) In the end, she promised to "make a report," which we took to be her formal way of saying she'll get someone right on it.
No, apparently it just meant that she would make a report. After almost half an hour with no response - and, understand, there is absolutely nothing else that the Querétaro Police could be doing at 6:00AM on a Sunday - and during which time the party had progressed to the "drunken fighting in the street" phase, we called back and made another complaint. Again, we were promised that a report would be made.
"Yes, but will the police come?"
"Well, the only thing the officers can do is ask them to turn down the music," she explained. It was not really clear to us why the cops should be constrained in this way - what if these guys turned out to have a house full of child prostitutes? - but since all we'd wanted was for the music to be turned down, we told her that this would be considered a result most satisfactory. (That florid formality thing is kind of contagious.)
Of course, she was speaking hypothetically, since no police ever arrived to ask anyone to do anything. We called back yet again, and she referred us to another number - we got a bit lost in the conversation, but this new number appeared to be the number you call if you actually want something done, whereas 066 was simply for the making of reports. So we called and found myself on the phone with the Juzgada Civica in Desarrollo San Pablo, a neighborhood about five miles away. The very nice woman on the phone assured mus that action would be taken, as long as we called back Mon-Fri between 8AM and 4PM.
"We imagine the party will have quieted down by then," we said, though we weren't entirely convinced this was true. She explained that we were not talking to the police, per se, but the office with which one files administrative complaints. If we were to call back during proper business hours, a report would be made immediately.
By now - 7:30AM, the problem had more or less resolved itself, since the juniors have a prodigious appetite for alcohol but very, very little tolerance for it, and had presumably passed out after the CD ended. We'll take a nap this afternoon and all will be well again, but we still can't help wondering who you're supposed to call around here if a knife-wielding rapist is coming through the window.
