Socialist is a dirty word?

The Economics Secretariat (S.E.) has a little list.  Susana González G. in this morning’s  La Jornada:

“Socialist” was listed by the Ministry of Economy (SE) as one of the 352 “disturbing, humiliating, offensive, discriminatory or violent” words that may not be used to register companies or associations.

Added to the list were other terms including “social democracy”, “government” or “Legion” and the names of Beltran Leyva, Chapo, Bin Laden, Hitler and Osama, as well as (Spanish-language) words referring to murder, narcotics traffickers, assassins, terrorists, “making do”, shit-stains and the KKK.

Regulations on corporate names recently changed, and the Economics Secretariat, in compiling their black-list breaks down its list by category:  171 “disturbing”, 159 “humiliating and offensive”,  “violent” words.  The categories don’t make much sense.  While “faggot”, “asshole” and “mother-fucker” are merely considered “disturbing,” the thirteen variations of the verb “chingar” (to fuck) are “offensive and discriminatory — as are “beaner”, testicles, vagina.  The violent words mostly deal with physical assault and include both “violar” (to rape) “biolar”, the sound of “B” and “V” being the same in spoken Mexican Spanish.

“Socialist and   “social-democratic” made the “offensive and discriminatory” category for some reason, which includes terms like  “syphilitic” and and least thirteen variations on the verb “chingar” (to fuck).

While in one sense, this sounds like bureaucrats with too much time on their hands (or to look at the bright side, an attempt to take the “creative interpretation” of regulations so common in Mexican bureaucracy out of the hands of low-level civil servants).  On the other — like the undue haste with with the outgoing administration pushed through radical changes in labor law — part of a larger effort to erase even the symbols of the Mexican Revolution as possible before PAN leaves office on the first of December.   One can, presumably, register a company named “Ayn Rand, S.A.” or “Cerdos capitalistas imperialistas, S.C. de C.V.”