Burro Hall Car Seat Giveaway Madness!! isn't just something we do because we have to if we want to maintain our non-profit tax status (though we'd be lying if we said our accountant has never mentioned this). It's more like a Mission from God. While we don't particularly like - indeed, we actively detest - small children, we hate to see then needlessly hurled through the windshield of a moving vehicle, when something as simple as an $80 car seat could have saved them from a permanent vegetative state. Like, for instance, this youngster here, standing up untethered in the back of a moving pickup truck as it rumbles up a hill in the Centro.
But maybe we're just wasting out time. Maybe senseless child endangerment is so deeply ingrained in Mexican society that even a gringo blog as powerful as this one can't excise it. In America - the non-hillbilly parts, at least - riding through city traffic with a four-year-old standing free in the bed of your pickup would not only be unacceptable, it would be illegal. Not "pay a $30 fine" illegal, but, like, "we're taking your kids to foster care" illegal. Anyway, let's widen out a bit...
Yep. That's a police car two cars back, following along as this guy rolls up a cobblestone street with a very small child wobbling around in the back of his truck. We waited to see if the cop would pull him over. Within a block, the truck did in fact pull over, but of its own volition. The cop pulled wide to his left to get around him, and continued on his way.
The truck has stopped not too far from the Burro Hall offices, in fact, allowing us to see the "Vivir Mejor" decal on the side, indicating that it was an official government vehicle (it says "Gobierno Federal" across the hood). It's hard to say if he was on official business at the time, but still... when a small, untethered child is standing up in the back of a moving government vehicle being driven by a government employee and trailed by a police car in broad daylight in the middle of the state capital, is it really possible to shame them with a blog post?
A few days ago, President Obama was speaking at a fundraiser in California, when a heckler shouted, "You're the Antichrist!" and was hustled out of the room by Secret Service. End of story.
Or, if you're our local paper, you take up nearly the entirety of the international news section with a two-line header reading "They [plural] Scream "Antichrist" at Barack Obama," and illustrate it with an enormous, unrelated photograph of a bunch of Pakistanis burning the president in effigy.
The analogy between this and US media coverage of the drug war in Mexico should be obvious.
Finally, a heartwarming love story from the Narco Wars - or not so heartwarming, depending on your perspective. But a few weeks ago, Sinaloa Cartel boss Chapo "Chapo" Guzmán became a daddy - twice! - after his barely legal bride, former beauty queen Emma Coronél, niece of the late capo Nacho Coronél, gave birth to twins. Mazel Tov!
The less-than-heartwarming part is that, because Mrs. Guzmán has US citizenship, she was able to give birth in Los Angeles, despite her baby daddy being #1 on the FBI's most wanted list.
The spaces for “Name of Father” are blank. But the L.A. County birth certificates list the mother, who happens to be the young wife of one of history’s biggest and most sought-after drug lords, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Emma Coronel traveled to Southern California in mid-July, and on Aug. 15 gave birth to twin girls at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, according to birth records and a senior U.S. law enforcement official.
We've got a pretty awesome alternative theory here that involves the "Father" space being blank because it isn't Chapo, but the consequences of that are too horrible to contemplate. So we'll stick to the superficial - starting with the fact that there are a lot of mediaoutlets out there that have illustrated this story with a photo of Laura Elena Zuñiga - the other young Sinaloan beauty queen sleeping with a major narco. The confusion is understandable. This is the real Emma Coronél. Not as hot as Laura Elena Zuñiga, we'll grant you, but she's probably got a nice personality.
Anyway, the boys here at Burro Hall Laboratories were wondering what the future heirs to the Sinaloa Cartel might look like, so we fired up the interwebs and ran the data through the supercomputers over at MakeMeBabies.com, and came up with the image of the next li'l narquito:
Then, because scientific results, like narcos, should be reproducible, we zipped over to MorphThing.com's "What Will My Baby Look Like?" feature, and ran the numbers on both sexes, boy [left] and girl [right]:
As you can see, Chapo covers his tracks well. Damned if we know what the kids look like.
If you're entering Culiacán from the mountainous outskirts, there's a toll plaza with a sign that says "We Only Accept Mexican Currency." This seems odd at first, since the US border is about 500 miles away, and there's hardly a lot of cruise ship tourists wandering in. But out in the mountains there's a considerable amount of, um, "alternative agriculture" taking place, and that's a cash business. And because the Mexican drug cartels are financed almost entirely by American citizens, that cash tends to be crisp, unmarked, non-sequential $100 bills - which is, ironically, worthless around these parts. So there's a steady stream of "farmers" riding into town with a fat wad of Benjamins in their pockets, looking to turn them into pesos. And apparently, they often forget to bring change for the tollbooth.
The Calderón administration has implemented a bunch of new rules aimed at curbing money laundering, so the farmers can't exactly come rolling into their local bank and deposit the money. So a thriving underground money-changing network has sprung up. And by "underground," we mean "right out in the open" - located along the length of Benito Juárez Ave.
Every few feet there's a woman on a stool, under a beach-sized umbrella, with a male goon standing next to her for protection. The cars drive up, the dollars come out, pesos go in, and the car drives off, without any of the yucky paperwork a legitimate enterprise might require. Every now and then the cops pretend to do their job and raid the place, but that basically amounts to what the Mafia calls "taxation."
We of course wanted to film all this, but it didn't seem especially wise, given the number of people involved. We manged to talk our way onto a neighbor's roof (as we said, these press passes: solid goddamn gold) to get some wide shots, which of course resulted in us being spotted. Within a few minutes a very friendly, extremely well-endowed young lady came over, goon in tow, and very politely asked us what we were doing. We gave the usual spiel about "regional aspects," which she swallowed. She really couldn't have been nicer. We asked gently if she thought anyone would mind if we came to Juárez Ave with the camera, and she said they probably wouldn't want to have their pictures taken because "mostly what we're doing is laundering narcotrafficking money." We told her that was a pretty good reason.
Later on, just for laughs, we rolled down the street shooting out the window of the moving van. Turns out our amiga was right: no one was excited to have their pictures taken.
This weekend our street was home to the Most Pointless Fería in Mexico, hosted by the church on our block (Nuestra Señora de los Nacos). Basically, it's a cavalcade of loudspeakers, drummers, mariachis, concheros, barkers, amusements and fireworks, all taking turns making noise - some constantly, some sporadically, usually overlapping, and with no underlying pattern or structure, starting at a randomly chosen hour early in the morning and dragging along until everyone grows bored with it. There's probably a religious tie-in of some sort, but whatever it was got lost in the gunpowder and boiling grease.
But at 7AM, before the sun comes up and the people wander in (but after the fucking fireworks have started, of course), it's kind of nice, in an eerie, post-apocalyptic sort of way. If only the entire fería was like this.
(Those rides sure look safe, don't they? Sharp, rusty metal and small children - what could possibly go wrong?)
The Zetas - or, as we like to refer to them around the office, the TOTALLY AWESOME Zetas! - have apparently taken exception to the postings a woman had been leaving on the Nuevo Laredo en Vivo website and, rather than simply express their displeasure through a sternly-worded comment, instead decapitated her and left her body on a monument on one of the city's main thoroughfares. Perfectly understandable!
So anyway, here's a picture of the perro yawning! Awwwww...he's so cute! Mister Sleepy-pie! Him no get nap, him become Mister Gwumpy-pants! Woof! Woof woof!
* We've been glad to see El Universal taking a week of from reporting the bad news of the drug war, to focus instead on the bad news about the human trafficking situation in Mexico. Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for starters.
* Remember when all the wingnuts got mad at Obama for playing golf, even though he came home that afternoon and killed Osama bin Laden? Imagine if he more or less hosted a travel show. (Blog post from the producer here.)
* This story about Metallica in Mexico is terrific. "Hetfield beams as he observes the long line of stalls selling bootleg Metallica gear. 'Isn’t this great?' he says without a hint of sarcasm." Needless to say, we plan to download a pirated copy of the concert video right now. (Also, Some Kind of Monster is one of the best documentaries ever.)
* We've been gloating all week about how safe we were in Culiacán last week, but that was before we saw this: 137 people sickened from eating raw shrimp that had been contaminated but fishermen using pig-fattening feed as bait. We ate a lot of shrimp ceviche last week, people. And lived to tell the tale.
* We know our love of bullfighting makes us unpopular with certain readers (Hi, Mom!), but we'd like to go on the record as saying this shit isn't bullfighting, no matter what the media calls it.
* We know the QRO State Police think they need something like this, but we can't imagine why.
* We haven't yet seen the movie based on Patrick Corcoran's life, but highly recommend his reflections on the gradual unraveling of Torreón in the years that he lived there.
* People naming their kids after politicians, celebrities and athletes is nothing new, but we were still surprised to learn of a man in Watertown, NY, who'd changed his name to Burro Hall. Burro Hall, Sr., to be precise. We have decided to adopt him as our official mascot. According to his Facebook page, he hates the Red Sox, loves Fox News, and really doesn't care for the little socialist fella living in the White House right now. So, really, he's perfect for us.
* We're not sure why this 124-year-old Mexicana is referred to as the Oldest Person in Mexico, but not in the world. We can only assume politics has something to do with it.
* Our Commenter of the Week this week is last's weeks Commenter of the Week, writing in to apologize for calling the perro ugly. Apology accepted, Bee. We'll call off the vigilantes - but we might not reach them in time.
One of the first places we went in Culiacán was the Jardines del Humaya Cemetery, where the casualties of the drug war go to live large after they're dead. You can tell you're getting close when you pass the flower shop named after Jesús Malverde, the so-called patron saint of narcotraffickers. Open 24 hours, because you never know when you might have to hastily bury a body.
One of the first things you notice at Humaya are the weatherproof plastic banners flying over some of the more modest graves. It seems to be that if someone can't really afford to really bling out their tombstone, their family will erect a brightly-colored photographic tribute. Since these wind up on the cheaper graves and the cheaper graves are all lumped together, the effect is sort of like the world's most depressing MySpace page.
Wandering around the graves for a while, we started to wonder if Humaya was restricted to men between the ages of 18 and 39, but in fact they just make up an insanely disproportionate share of the city's dead.
"When I die, bury me under an image of my Jeep Grand Cherokee with the 23-inch rims!"
The kid on the right may be dead, but he's throwin' gang signs in Heaven.
One thing they should probably teach wanna-be hard guys on their first day of Narco Orientation is: If you think there is even a remote chance you're going to die in a hail of bullets someday, make sure your family has at least one really good picture of you.
Wrong:
Right:
The super-awesome part of this one is that, if you look at the dates on the cross (1907-1989), it's pretty clear this isn't even this guy's grave. He just moved in. Because that's the way this shit goes down. You got a problem with that, old man? I didn't think so.
We realize it's not just a kid's cartoon, but the SpongeBob mausoleum is still probably going to seem regrettable after a few years.
But the reason to visit Humaya (if you're a pack of gringo journalists, anyway), is to gawk at the so-called narco-mausoleums, clustered together in the closest thing the dead have to a gated community. Most of these places are bigger than our first apartment.
Some are bigger than our current abode.
The person who lives here is dead.
These places tend to have some combination of the following: airconditioning, bulletproof glass, purified water, satellite tv, parking, kitchenettes and other things you wouldn't imagine a dead guy needing. (We assume most of these amenities are for visitors rather than the dead, but if we were ever to be buried in Culiacán, we'd at the very least insist on airconditioning, and possibly a dehumidifier. Eternity is a long time.)
AC units.
Most lack a name on the outside, but contain little (or not so little) shrines to the occupants.
This one was decorated for Independence Day.
But while most of the Mexican economy has slowed over the past couple years, burying Sinaloan men in their 20s and 30s is a booming business. Luckily there's a lot of empty land on the back end for it to grow into.
Oh, Lord, do we loves us some ceviche! Velvety-soft chunks of shrimp or salmon or mackerel slow-marinated in citrus juice. A dash of sugar to cut the tartness. Garnished with little flakes of cilantro or red onion or jalapeno or tomato. Serve it all up in a martini glass or a on a tostada or saltine cracker. The possibilities are endless....ly delicious!
Probably the worst boxing nickname in the history of the sport, however.
On the afternoon of the Grito, we visited the home of a guy in Culiacán who writes narcocorridos - basically, gangsta rap for accordion, extolling the virtues of whichever hardass commissioned the tune. He charges $1,000 per corrido, and judging by the very modest house he still lives in with his family, he's probably written less than a dozen over the years. The family has a small grocery store in the front of their house, and as we pulled up a municipal cop was leaning against the counter, chatting amiably with the guy's dad. We went in and set up in the service patio, surrounded by drying laundry, and listened to his Corrido del Chapo Guzmán and a few others.
We're groping for a delicate way to put this, but... the brother was really not very good. His voice was okay, and the lyrics were of the usual "His pistol is loaded/ And so are his balls / And he'll drink from the skulls of his enemies..." variety. [Note to Simon Cowell: we just made up that lyric on the spot.] But his accordion skills were on par with this kid's. To be clear, though, this just makes us dig the guy even more. In an art form where a bad review can mean blood on your dashboard, it takes some serious cojones to not bother to practice your instrument.
After a few songs he cut the performance short because he had to get ready to play at an Independence Day party that night. As we didn't have any evening plans, we asked if we could come with him. He just laughed. The host of the party (he said) was Ismael Zambada-Garcia, aka El Mayo, one of the biggest drug lords in Mexico. Assuming that was true, we suppose it's kind of interesting that one of the most wanted men in Mexico (with a $5 million price on his head from the FBI) is still living in Culiacán (or at any rate, a short ride from this guy's house) and is comfortable enough to throw an Independence Day party, with security lax enough that the entertainment is comfortable telling an American tv crew what his plans are.
We said our goodbyes out in the street as he climbed into the car that would take him to El Mayo's place. The police officer out front had wandered off by then.
This is on a car parked outside our offices right now. "For those who drive drunk, Tecate for you!"
This is either: (a) That Mexican sense of fatalism we hear so much about ("You're going to drive drunk, so why not drink our beer?); (b) A tremendous display of self-awareness on behalf of Tecate ("We're basically just Coronoa Light mixed with brewery workers' urine - seven or eight of these babies and you'll still be sober enough to drive!"); or (c) something altogether different. The Google has been no help with (c). Anyone?
On the evening of May 9, 2008, three trucks loaded with fifteen gunmen drove into the parking lot City Club supermarket in Culiacán and went all Sonny-at-the-tollbooth on Édgar Guzmán López, ("apparently to the surprise of his security detail," as La Jornada magnificently put it), killing him and two companions, injuring a fourth person and shooting up about 20 vehicles. Édgar was the son of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, so killing him was a bad idea for all the obvious reasons (his two companions were both second-generation narcos as well). "They made a mother cry," Chapo is said to have told Édgar's mother. "I will make many mothers cry." Chapo went on to make good on that promise.
But Chapo is not without his sentimental streak, and he directed his underlings to erect a small, understated monument to Édgar marking the spot where he died - well, small and understated unless you consider it's in the middle of a supermarket parking lot, in which case it might be considered sort of gaudy and obtrusive. We drove past it at least three times in the middle of the week, and never saw a car parked within 100 feet of it. Would you want to be the poor fucker who accidentally backs into it? We also never saw the Bridgestone AutoCenter open. We assume it's been closed since May 10, 2008. If you've got a problem with your brakes, this seems like the worst conceivable place to try to steer your piece of shit Nissan Tsuru.
But so being a tv crew, we got out and started to shoot pictures in the middle of the empty parking lot. Suddenly, a young man appeared (literally out of nowhere - it was like he'd dropped from the sky) and said we could shoot it, but not touch it.
Um... okay. And not that it's any of our business of course, but who might you be?
"I guard the monument."
He doesn't work for the developer or the supermarket or the Bridgestone AutoCenter. He's one of three guys, each working an eight-hour shift, whose entire job is to stare at a granite cross in the middle of a supermarket parking lot 24 hours a day, seven days a week, weekends, holidays and drive-by shootings included, and make sure nobody - nobody - fucking touches it. (He's also the softy of the group, telling us that the other guys wouldn't have let us film, but he's cool with it as long as we don't touch; we predict he'll be boiled in acid by the end of the year.) We immediately thought of about 50 questions we wanted to ask - Do you get bathroom breaks..? - but decided it best to shut up, finish our work and leave. Which we did by hugging the van to the perimeter of the parking lot and giving the monument as wide a berth as possible.
As Mexico's drug war grinds on, violent homicide has overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of death of young people in the country, reports the Mexico City daily El Universal
Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubled in the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes.
The comparison is less than perfect, but it turns out it's not wildly off-base when it comes to real numbers. Mexico suffered 15,000 drug war deaths last year and 17,000 traffic deaths, while in the US the numbers were 38,000 drug deaths vs. 36,000 traffic deaths. Most striking to us, however was that in the US, whose population is 2.7 times that of Mexico, drug deaths numbered a bit over 2.5 times the number of drug war deaths in its southern neighbor.
Or, to put it another way, while the two countries are on opposite ends of the problem - an insatiable demand in the north, a bloody war to stanch the supply in the south - the drug-related death rate in the two countries is practically the same. When it comes to drugs, the US is as much a killing field as Mexico. Sure, the deaths on the Mexican side tend to be a little more...theatrical, but that's probably just a Latino thing.
President Calderón is probably getting tired of suggesting that the US do something to cut demand. Maybe let's just try it his way. See if it works.
If you're a municipal police comandante in Culiacán, just getting a shoeshine involves a serious expenditure of man-hours and other resources.
The reverse angle:
Our local reporter explained that the comandante probably earns about 7,000 pesos ($600) a month. That struck us a kind of low for a job that requires an entourage of six heavily-armed deputies to get a shoeshine at 8AM on a Thursday.
"Well yeah, that's why they all do some other work on the side, if you know what I mean."
Sure. But wasn't one of the perks of working for the gangs[*] a certain level of protection against getting iced while having your boots shined?
"Yes, but only from that gang. Not from the gangs that you're not working for."
* We're speaking generally. We assume the comandante pictured here is an absolute paragon of virtue.
One thing everyone should know about the staff of Burro Hall is that we're tremendous cowards in just about every way imaginable, but especially physically. So it was somewhat unnerving before heading to Culiacán to have so many Mexicans (admittedly, Mexicans who live in cozy, safe, Querétaro) try to talk us out of it. A couple of days before we left, we received from the tv channel we were going with a copy of their Medivac airlift information, kidnap procedures, and something called a Global Rescue card, which we were supposed to cut out and keep in our wallets, where they would magically make all trouble disappear.
We called the producer of the shoot and, trying not to seem at all concerned, casually asked what sort of security arrangements had been made. (Aside from being a pack of pasty-faced gringos, we would be carrying tens of thousands of dollars in equipment.)
"It's all cool - we're hooking up with a couple of local print reporters there."
Really? What, were there no snitches available to show us around? Just a couple of days earlier, Mexico had surpassed Iraq as the most dangerous place for journalists on Earth (though none from Culiacán had been slaughtered in at least, um, two weeks). The company's idea of security was to take a couple of these walking targets and put them in our car.
We flew into Sinaloa with the Mexican sound engineer, who explained to us that if we were to get shot, it would most likely be by accident, from a stray bullet. This was something less that comforting since, from what we had heard, there were quite a few of those. Ultimately, he said, the narcos don't target Americans "because you are the paying customers." We hadn't actually bought any drugs here in Mexico, and all our US suppliers are 100% American, but that apparently didn't matter. We were covered, the beneficiaries of our countrymen's insatiable hunger for intoxicants! It was like the best mileage-rewards program in the history of the world.
But wait...what about Americans with tv cameras asking questions about the narcos?
"Oh, yes, well, I suppose there's that."
We'll probably just ruin the end of the story right now and say that everything turned out to be fine, the people couldn't have been nicer and, as far as we were aware, no one shot at us. That's not to say there weren't a few menacing moments. If you work in tv long enough, you get used to people coming up to you on the street and asking what you're doing, and Culiacán was no different. But where most people mean it like, "So, you're making some kind of tv show?" people in Culiacán tended to ask it without smiling: "What are you doing?" The upcoming Independence day festivities gave us a handy excuse, but no one was buying it. "Yes, Independence Day... but what are you doing in Culiacán?" Points for self-awareness, at least. It fell again to the Mexican sound guy to construct the bulletproof response: "We are doing aspects of what is happening regionally in Mexico." We asked him is this was any less nonsensical in Spanish, and he assured us it was not. Most people found the answer satisfying.
The temperature in Culiacán was consistently in the high 90s, and when you factored in the extreme humidity, you get a heat index (sort of the opposite of wind chill factor) reading of about 115°F, which is clearly in the meteorological danger zone. And so under those conditions, your first thought if you're a Sinaloense is, "Man, I'd love me some sushi!" And once you've committed yourself to that, why not eat it outdoors, on the side of a four-lane highway?
This picture was taken early in the morning, so you'll just have to take our word for it that we saw it open on other occasions. Because, honestly, we just couldn't make up something that depraved.
