It`s always something…

Being only coherent for a few hours at a time over the last few days, I´d bookmarked several recent items on Mexican politics, the economy, history, to explore.   But… wouldn´t you know it, my computer’s power supply seems to have given up the ghost during a lightning storm last night, and I’ve turned the thing over to the Aztechnicians who´ll rip out its heart… and maybe get it back to me, maybe not.

In the meantime, a few other reads worth looking at:

Anthony Wright (MexConnect.com) on sports and art in Mexico City:

Art and sport seem rarely intertwined. There is the American cliché of the muscle-bound football jock bursting with idiotic energy, indulging his time off the field to torment the nerdy, isolated artist (who invariably exacts his revenge by growing up to become a Hollywood screenwriter and perpetuating the cliché in teen flicks — wherein the nerd heroically wins at the end of the day, even though we all know he never does).

Soccer, the European version of football, may generate its own cliché of a more athletically-styled player, and a more intelligent, subtle form of play. Yet the sports brain (like the song) remains the same, and it is not a brain normally associated with an appreciation of culture. There are also those who feel that graffiti art does not count as “culture” anyway, so it is perhaps apt that Mexico City’s largest sports stadium has allowed the “low art” of graffiti murals to adorn its many outer walls, entrance gates and car park enclosures.

Increasingly here in Mexico’s capital, the graffiti mural is coming to represent what some local experts feel is a new movement in mural art in the great tradition of early 20th century Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros…

Sabina Becker on a new breed of military hero:

… Antonio Benavides Torres, … a colonel in the Venezuelan national guard…  kept the public peace. He played the music of Venezuela’s most popular folk singer, the late Alí Primera, to counteract the ugly crap being blasted at the recent oppo demo. And when the oppos tried to provoke the national guard and the metropolitan Caracas police into starting a riot, the colonel wasn’t having any of it. He grabbed a mike and told his troops not to fall into the trap…

I´d written a while back on the hilariously overblown threat of Bolivia´s Muslim community (all thousand or so of them).  Benjamin Dangle went to the trouble of following up and talking with Mahmud Amer Abusharar, who manages the Santa Cruz Islamic Center, which includes several people who — like most Bolivians –aren´t particularly thrilled with recent U.S. policy in that country, or elsewhere for that matter.

“It is not the Muslims who are the problem of the United States in Bolivia. It seems that our government is the problem and they are looking for motives to threaten our government or looking for reasons why they have bad relations with Bolivia.”

The government of Evo Morales which has initiated pro-indigenous and socialist reforms has butted heads with the United States in recent years. Contentious issues include expelled US diplomat Philip Goldberg and other US agencies links to violent rightwing opposition, the nationalization of natural gas exploitation, and supposed setbacks in Bolivian anti-narcotics measures following the expulsion of the DEA for alleged political activity. Evo Morales described the recent suspension of Bolivia from the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act as based on “false accusations of the Obama administration against the Bolivian government to suspend the tariff preferences and in a political program of open interference by the United States government against the Bolivian people.”