Smokin!
Here’s Popocatépetl at 8 AM Monday morning:
… and here is is yesterday, at just after 6 AM:
There are still those who believe that Popocatépetl is a living being, and when he starts belching, he is telling us something, and that human intervention is required.
As I wrote in Gods, Gachupines and Gringos:
Popocatépetl, the volcano, was a Náhutl god, but today Saint Gregory guards the volcano. Or maybe he lives there. Local people still bring the saint food and gifts to remind him to ask God to send the rain and good weather the farmers need for a good crop. When the volcano erupted in December 2000, one local man suggested that Saint Gregory was hungry… and maybe a few tortillas would solve the problem.
Somewhat in the spirit of that campesino, Estamos Joditos Mexicanos (and I’m not gonna translate that!) suggests another tidbit that might settle Don Goyo’s bout of indigestion.. or make him sick:
Poll dancing
Whoops!
Milenio’s daily poll is not usually THIS far off (they counted 123 percent of likely voters?), but I don’t take it as gospel. While all polls tend to show Peña Nieto as having a commanding lead, nearly none of them report undecided voters, nor are the demographic breakdowns (by income, or other indicator) generally reported.
I’m not sure that polling — even face to face — is accurate here. A large number of potential voters don’t have land lines and won’t answer telephone calls from unknown persons. And, so far, none of the polls I’ve seen indicate how many people refused to answer, or are still deciding whether or not to even vote.
Milenio’s poll at least shows undecided voters and whether or not I trust the numbers, shows some trending information. Peña Nieto and Vásquez Mota have both been losing support, even though we haven’t had the debates, nor has the election season run even a third of its course. Neither Peña Nieto nor Vásquez Mota are looking forward to the debates (and did their best to limit the number to two). The debates usually (well, based on the few elections in which there have been debates) shake up the polls (last time out, AMLO unwisely skipped the first debate, and never recovered his momentum).
Barring a volcanic eruption (a plausible occurrence), the widely rumored “soon to be announced” and probably unlikely reappearance of El Señor (“Chapo” Guzmán to those of you outside Sinaloa) or any one of a thousand unexpected events, the the directions in which candidate support is moving in the Milenio Poll will probably continue — if present trends continue — which they won’t.
A weapon of mass instruction
There’s more to this photo (by Judie Montoya) of just a clever art-car and literacy project by Argentine artist Raul Lemesoff .
The Ford Falcon was to Argentina what the Tsuru is to Mexico… the most common family sedan and the generic fleet car … Black and Yellow Falcon taxis, black and white Falcon cop cars and dark green secret police Falcons, that cruised the streets and roads of Argentina, piloted by the henchmen of the dictatorship. Somewhere around 30,000 people simple “disappeared” in Argentina, and — if their disappearance was seen at all, it was of them being bundled into the back of a dark green late 1970s Falcon.
The Weapon of Mass Instruction is, under all those books, a military surplus dark green 1979 Ford Falcon… a history lesson on wheels, a moving(and mobile) monument to Latin American democracy and a return to humane values.
Screwing Latin America — an object lesson
American investigators seeking to get to the bottom of the reported late-night activities of a group of Secret Service agents and military personnel assigned to President Obama’s recent visit to Colombia have begun searching for as many as 21 women who are believed to include prostitutes and to have spent the night with the security officers, American security officials say.
William Neuman and Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times (17 April 2012)
What the Hell?
If you want to know why so many ordinary Latin American despise the U.S. government, this is it…
In the morning, one of the men refused to pay the $250 he was asked for in exchange for the previous night’s sex with one of the women and instead handed over the equivalent of about $30 in local currency and shut her out of the room, the driver recounted. The woman and her friend banged on the door, they told the driver, until other Americans came out of their rooms and gave the women $100, and the women left.
By what stretch of the imagination does the U.S. Secret Service, military forces and Congressional Committee on Homeland Stupidity assume they have anything to “investigate”? Senator Susan Collins of Maine (isn’t that where the Puritans lived?) frets that the working girls:
… could they have planted bugs, disabled weapons,” or in other ways “jeopardized security of the president or our country?
Give me a friggin’ break! Unless Senator Collins is referring to crabs or viruses, what “bugs” could she mean? I get the point when she’s talking about these dudes having their weapons disabled, but assuming these bad boys were the usually fit, healthy type of guys usually sent on this type of mission, they should recover use of their … ahem… weapons within a normal period of time (depending on how long it takes the alcohol in their bloodstream to be processed, of course). If the Senator from Maine is talking about something else, whose “fault” would that be?
The Colombian women did nothing illegal or even wrong. But, this is a perfect metaphor for the U.S. government’s activities in Latin America: send in military and paramilitary types who make promises, don’t deliver, and screw the locals. If the locals, being screwed, have the temerity to demand justice (or even fair trade) then first try palming off some pittance and hope the problem goes away. If that doesn’t work, then the U.S. government sends in more military and paramilitary types under the pretense that demands for simple justice are a threat to the national security of the United States.
Yanquí stay home, or keep it in your pants.
Ser culto para ser libre (José Martí)
“Education = Freedom” to put it into anti-Orwellian terms.
Fantastic plastic
The perfect presidential candidate…
Yes, indeed, that is an Enrique Peña Nieto doll. I wonder if the Elections Commission (IFE) has ever ruled on opposition candidates resorting to voodoo.
Popocatépetl
Photo by J Alberto Aguilar Iñárritu
Don Goyo has been rumbling on and off the past couple of years, but he looks rather angry right now. Maybe he’s got something to way about the elections, though what the fall-out will be is anyone’s guess. Last time he really had something to say was 1910, the year of the Revolution.
I smell desperation
PAN is running ads highlighting Peña Nieto’s “messy” personal life — specifically that he has at least two illegitimate children — and trying to make something of the fact that Lopez Obradór has been married twice.
Both are widowers, although questions about how exactly Mónica Pretelini Sáenz died have been the subject of rumors for years (and are much nastier — and potentially fatal to a political career — than mere infidelity).
I’m not sure what the point was in trying to rope in Lopez Obrador. His first wife, Rocío Beltrán Medina, although considered an excellent political strategist and adviser to the then Jefe Gobierno, was almost never mentioned or even photographed in the press — not only because Mexican media tends to avoid discussing public figures private lives, but also because it was well known that she was dying of lupus. Incidentally, the day she died, 13 January 2003 was the only day her husband skipped his normal 6 A.M. press conference.
Lopez Obrador, while he and Peña Nieto both made a list of Mexico’s most eligible bachelors, didn’t court in the limelight and didn’t marry or shack up with a soap opera star and didn’t even move in with Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller until they were married. How scandalous is that?
I can see why PAN would resort to mud-slinging against Peña Nieto. Cutting into his lead makes sense, even if this is a very unMexican way of going about it.
The party has used, and used effectively, U.S. media advisers and propaganda techniques. In the U.S., the rationale is that the personal choices one makes in life somehow reflect one’s governing ability and style (though I don’t see it… Franklin Roosevelt had an extremely complicated personal life, Mary Todd Lincoln was nuts, and Lady Bird Johnson was known to opine that “presidents should be born orphans and die bachelors”).
But, what’s surprising is the attempt to rope in Lopez Obrador, unless he is seen as a much larger political threat than acknowledged.
Polite as a Mexican
Manuel Uruchurtu Ramírez, was a prominent attorney and close confidante of Ramon Corral, the former Vice-President. Representing “los catrines” — the reactionaries and supporters of the old regime — Uruchurtu was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the special election of 1911. In the spring of 1912, he traveled to France to consult with the exiled Corral, and may have met with Don Porfirio. Corral’s son-in-law, Guillermo Obregón, then chair of the Chamber of Deputies “Gran Comisión” (the Chamber’s ruling body), had traveled separately to France to consult with the former Vice-President. They were probably up to no good (most of Corral’s cronies were), but Uruchurtu would be completely forgotten today if it wasn’t for a display of those old-fashioned manners Mexicans are known for.
Uruchurtu and Obregón both needed to return to Mexico. For whatever reason, Uruchurtu needed to get home sooner than Obregón, so the two switched tickets for the return voyage from Cherbourg to New York. You can figure out the rest…
Elizabeth Ramsdel Nye, a thirty-year old second-class passenger on the same ship as Uruchurtu lived to the age of 81, because the only Mexican aboard the Titanic
had the opportunity to take a seat in lifeboat 11 but that, as the boat was about to be lowered, he noticed an English lady of the Second Class standing by the bulwark. She pleaded to be let into the boat, because her husband and little child were awaiting her. He stood up and offered his place to her, only asking her to visit his wife at Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.
Mrs. Nye, who settled in the United States, did visit Xalapa and Uruchurtu’s widow in 1924.
A recent study from Uppsala University, breaking down survival rates during shipwrecks by gender, suggests that it’s every man for himself (and women and children last) when a great ship goes down.
British ships have the worst record according to the study, but maybe that’s because few Mexicans travel on British ships.
(La Opinion, Encyclopedia Titanic)
Consumation comes: 15 April 1912
Nothing to do with Mexico, but I don’t often have occasion to sneak in a poem by that master-craftsman of stories and poems reflecting nature’s indifference to human wants and needs, Thomas Hardy.
The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” …
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Purrrrrrr-a mexicana
Born at the Oaxaca Zoo, these tiger cubs have a Bengal tiger mama and Siberian papi… mestizos in a word.
Some, one, or none of the above
El Economista has a nice simple over-view of the Mexican ballot. There are eight boxes on the ballot, each one but the last showing a party logo and the name of the presidential candidate. The last one is blank. Voters write an “X” in the box of their choice.
Fusion tickets are common here, and so, Enrique Peña Nieto shows up on the ballot as the candidate for two different parties (PRI and the Green Party boxes) and Andres Manuel López Obrador shows up three times (as the PRD, Movimiento Ciudadano and the Workers’ Party candidate). PAN (Josefina Vásquez Mota) and PANAL (Gabriel Quadri), as single party candidates, only show up once. The blank box is for “none of the above”.
While the blank box is new, and could possibly get a sizable number of votes (there are several organizations recommending null votes as a protest against the entire political establishment… how many of those who reject conventional politics but go to the polls anyway is probably worth counting) what is very important is a minor, overlooked change. Had it been the rule in 2006, it might have meant a completely different presidency.
Which party receives votes doesn’t really matter when it comes to electing the President, but whether the party or the coalition receives the vote matters when it comes to appointing Senators to proportional representation seats and to determining funding levels for the parties in the next election cycle. What’s different this time is that if the voter marks two or more of the same candidate’s boxes, the parties don’t get the vote, but the candidate does.
In 2006, the ballots also had boxes for the candidates, AND for their coalition. Then, as now, the PRI and Greens ran a fusion candidate and López Obrador was also running as the presidential candidate for three parties also. But, if a voter marked the coalition and/or one or more of the other boxes for their candidate, the vote was considered a “double vote”, and didn’t count as a vote for anyone .
Based on late returns, López Obrador lost in 2006 by only 243,934 votes, or 0.58 percent to Felipe Calderón. Although the ballots were later destroyed, we know that two and a half percent of all ballots were disallowed either because they were left blank (a vote for “none of the above”) or more than one box for a candidate was marked. Whether that two and a half percent included enough votes to change the outcome (Calderón was a single party candidate and his voters only had to select a single box) is impossible to say, though it is within the realm of possibility.
At least as of today, the polls suggest that the final results will not be anywhere near as close as they were in 2006, but not having had a “normal” election since multi-party elections became a reality after 1994, I don’t think there is any real way to predict the outcome only a week and a half into the three month campaign.
mexfiles.net 