Carlos Monsivías — containing multitudes
There are Many Mexicos (as the title of one of the best books on this country had it) and an infinite number of ways to “be Mexican”. Trying to reduce the overwhelming varieties of human experience the country offers, we — and Mexicans themselves — are reduced to analogies to better known foreign models. Sometimes it works, but not always.
John Ross (Counterpunch) — writing on the deaths of both José Saramago and Carlos Monsivías — of course focuses on their political identification, although — with Monsivías — those labels were as twisted and sinuous as his writing:
Carlos Monsivais was a self-confessed addict of “lost causes” (a Mexico City university once honored him with a Doctorus of Lost Causes), a Quijote-like figment who embraced every social movement to flex its fist from the 1959 railroad workers strike to gay liberation. A disciplined, stylish writer whose baroque syntax sometimes confounded critics, Monsivais authored 50 books in 50 years, many defending popular culture against the MacDonaldization of post-NAFTA Mexico – read his final judgment in the just-published “Apocalipstick.” Untranslated and virtually untranslatable because his chronicles are so focused on the little things, Monsivais remains largely ignored north of the border.
Like Saramago, Monsi was fascinated by the Zapatista rebellion, penning the prologues to five volumes of EZLN documents but later quarreled with Marcos over the Sup’s gung-ho support for “ultras” who took over the 1999-2000 UNAM strike. Although once a member of the Young Communist League, Monsi was mostly a Groucho Marxist.
Appearing in today’s Los Angeles Times, Reed Johnson writes a”An Appreciation” of the writer who, asked to describe himself, said he was a cross between Albert Camus and Ringo Starr:
Carlos Monsiváis wasn’t a “pundit,” although he spoke and wrote with biting irony and insight about politics. He wasn’t a “talking head” either, although he regularly appeared on TV shows in his native Mexico to offer erudite yet unstuffy thoughts about pop music divas, movies, gay rights, globalization and, of course, to skewer the follies of the nation’s ruling elites.
Technically, the famously rumpled and feline-loving man of letters, who died June 19 at age 72, was an “intellectual,” a vocation that in Mexico isn’t merely descriptive. It’s an occupational category as formally circumscribed as doctor, lawyer, priest or bricklayer…
His closest U.S. equivalent might be the novelist, essayist and social critic Gore Vidal. But unlike Vidal, Monsiváis was practically as recognizable to Mexico City’s cab drivers and taco vendors as he was to presidents and belletrists.
A connoisseur of the capital’s vida cotidiana, or daily life, he was attuned to the strivings and sufferings of ordinary Mexicans, on whose behalf he wrote, talked and advocated tirelessly. He accepted pragmatically his role as a mass-media personality, albeit with a typical touch of sardonic humor. “They don’t tell me, ‘You are a writer, I have read you,’ they tell me, ‘You are a writer, I have seen you on television,'” he told one interviewer.
As the writer and critic Cuauhtémoc Medina put it in a 2001 interview, “In Monsiváis’ texts Roland Barthes and Bertolt Brecht meet Cantinflas, and the Beats, Warhol and McLuhan frame his readings of Bolero songs and the 1968 Mexican student movement.” …
But in ordinary speech, he was direct, funny, always epigrammatic, even when being telephoned at any hour of the day or night for a quote about the latest political fallout, a witty critique of a public utility meltdown or to deliver a remark about a colleague who’d passed away.
I remember calling him a couple of years ago while working on an obituary for Andrés Henestrosa Morales, a poet and essayist who’d traveled across Mexico in the pre- World War II era, collecting stories about the country’s indigenous people. “It was a great time for travel,” Monsiváis remarked, “before tourism.”
Carlos Monsivías was compared to Ringo Starr, Albert Camus, Groucho, Brecht, Gore Vidal… none quite correctly. Why not Oscar Wilde? Or why not that other great chronicler and celebrator of the urban, Walt “I contain multitudes” Whitman?
Why not indeed? Because Carlos Monsivías was, is, and always will be, simply our Monsí.
Night of the Living Iguana…
A real post from a real tourist website:
Of course, hilarity ensued.
(Photo: Iguana Stampede!, OK Go (aaronetto.blogspot.com)
Swear to God
Mark Lacey had an article — and a video that I can’t embed — in the New York Times looking at Father Frederick Loos and his unusual preaching style at Mexico City’s Iglesía San Hipolite. I wrote about San Hipolite — which has a long, long, long tradition of serving the city’s more recalcitrant souls (starting out as the world’s first alcohol rehab back in the early 16th century) back in 2004. Lacey focuses on U.S. born Father Loos’ potty-mouthed prayers (“God, I fucked up!”), but the Clarentians who have served San Hipolite since about the 1920s, have always seen their mission as serving the religious needs of the poor and outcast. And, being the world’s champion swearers, preaching unto the nations in Mexico sometimes requires a slightly less prissy use of the tongue of Cervantes.
One thing worth noting. Drug addicts in Mexico are not the same as drug addicts in the United States. Narcotics use is not much tolerated (even marijuana smoking is considered declasé) and the addicts in the video are mostly glue sniffers, not cocaine or heroin users.
The congregation is drawn from a very large metropolitan area. It’s not as if the area around Metro Hidalgo is a narcotics bazaar, although it is a good place to pick up a nice San Judas statue. You get a crowd on Saturday nights for early Mass, but the only reason to bypass the church is that San Hipolite isn’t JUST for junkies, but — as a shrine to San Judas Tadeo (the patron of both “hopeless causes” and as the friend of the friendless, something of a “mainstream” Catholic counterweight to Santa Muerte) — attracts other congregants like prostitutes, petty thieves and … policemen. I’ve always thought of it as the Church of Cops and Robbers, and admit, I’ve been reluctant to tour the shrine, although it has some of the more colorful fiestas in all of the “real Mexico”.
Nyah! nyah!…bang! bang!
If this had happened in Texas, you’d say either “he needed shootin'” or “he oughta hada been lynched” depending on your persuasion. Either this is an object lesson in understanding that teasing has consequences, or that one needs to learn to accept criticism gracefully. Or, that just more proof that alcohol and politics don’t mix… with guns.
Translated from yesterday’s El Debate.
The Presidente Municipal of San Pedro Totolapan, Oaxaca, Gerardo Jarquín Díaz — a PRI party activist — fired three shots into a PRD sympathizer, killing him and wounding another person, presumably because the PRD supporters were mocking the PRI for losing the state governor’s race.
The incident took place last night at a local establishment known as “El Llano” in this community located about 80 kilometers east of the state capital, when the Presidente Municipal stopped in to get out of the rain. Two apparently drunk PRD sympathizers accosted Jarquín Díaz and began mocking the PRI for its loss, at which time Jarquín Diaz pulled his gun and shot them.
The dead perredista, Fructuoso Méndez Lucero, and his wounded cohort, Cruz Rangel López, were transported by ambulance to the Mexican Social Security Institute clinic in Tlacolula de Matamoros, 30 Km. east of Oaxaca.
Outside the Palacio Municipal of San Pedro Totolapan, a crowd gathered threatening to lynch the elected leader, but soldiers arrived to take charge of the prisoner until he could be turned over to the State’s Preventative Police.
The Municipal Syndicato (Administrator) of Tlacolula de Matamoro was entrusted with handling the disposition of the cadaver, which was claimed by Méndez Lucero’s widow, Soledad Rodríguez Hernández, while Jarquín Díaz was interrogated by Adrián Jiménez, of the State Ministerio Público’s office (investigative magistrate), assisted by agents of the State Investigative Police.
Fructuoso Méndez Lucero, a tortilla-maker, lived on Cinco de Mayo street in colonia San Pedro. He was 49 years old.
Post-election punditry
Departure tax?
Rolly Brook, the go-to guy for anything and everything foreigners need to know about Mexican bureaucracy (he probably knows more about the rules and regulations than most Mexican bureaucrats, too!), took the time to read up on U.S. changes in regulations too.
There’s … a new fee if you’d like formally to renounce your U.S. citizenship — it costs nothing now, but the price tag will be $450 starting Tuesday.
Rolly, who manages to make sense of most things, won’t even attempt to try to explain this one.
Must read
There is only one of me to go around, so thanks to Structurally Maladjusted (are any of us Latinamericanist cyber-wonks NOT “maladjusted”?) for bringing attention to the long article by Peter Canby in The Nation, “Retreat to Subsistence” on the centrality of corn to Mexico and the destructive effects of NAFTA and GM seed on both Mexico’s heritage and its survival:
Maize—”corn” in the vernacular—is, in the amount produced, the largest grain crop in the world. In most places it is grown as animal feed; but in Mexico, for reasons unique to the country’s culinary history, it provides some 70 percent of the caloric intake of rural families. Part of the process of making tortillas and tamales in Mexico is the pre-Columbian practice of lime cooking known as “nixtamalization,” which increases the availability of calcium, amino acids and niacin in corn. Nixtamalization makes maize—especially when combined with beans—a complete protein. In the Popul Vuh, the ancient Maya book of origins, the first men are made of corn; part of the sway that corn holds over the region is that it evolved here. Archaeobotanists believe that some 9,000 years ago in the Rio Balsas valley in the Mexican state of Guerrero, early agriculturists began cultivating teosinte, a native grass, by carefully selecting for a series of mutations that included a sealed seed head and multiple rows of kernels attached to a central axis.
To this day, indigenous farmers continue to comb their fields for successful plants with useful characteristics, saving their seeds and exchanging them with neighbors. This process is central to indigenous culture in Mexico, and through continuous breeding indigenous agriculturists have internalized and accelerated the process of not just crop domestication but also plant evolution. In the Mexican countryside there are fifty-nine corn “landraces,” distinct cultivars that have been carefully developed over millenniums by indigenous farmers for different attributes: growth at high altitudes, early or late maturation, the ability to withstand drought or heavy rain and utility for particular dishes or shamanic rituals.
…
Landrace preservation, moreover, reflects a larger issue. Mexico has long been recognized as one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Along its mountainous spine, the climate ranges from neotropical to Nearctic. Over time, as the earth has warmed and cooled, various plant communities migrating between North and South America have become isolated among Mexico’s deep valleys and high peaks, where they have evolved in exotic isolation. Indigenous cornfields in Mexico are known as milpas. Typically, milpas contain not just landrace corn but also squash, beans and other crops that farmers have coaxed out of their biodiverse surroundings through astute and assiduous husbandry. Because so many staple crops evolved in the region, it is considered a “center of origin” of crops, one of the few in the world.
What’s particularly notable about Mexican cornfields are the “weeds” that coexist with more established crops and, in many cases, have herbal and culinary uses. A 2004 report by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), an environmental organization created by a side treaty of NAFTA, noted that “this group of species are not ‘weeds'” in the narrow American and European sense. “The relationships of Mexican poor peasants with their ‘weeds’ may be quite complex,” and weeds “represent a rich genetic resource on which selection towards domestication may take place.”
And this is only the beginning of the story. Read it.
Immigrants don’t kill jobs… stupid politicans do
The semi-official boycott of Arizona by the State of Sonora is having an impact. Retail sales in Yuma and Nogales are said to have dropped 40 percent since May, when a boycott in protest of the “Show Us Your Papers Law” received support from Sonoran business, academic and political leaders.
Sonorans are said to account for 97 percent of Mexican retail business — amount to 2.8 billion (thousand million) dollars — in Arizona. The Sonoran boycott alone has cost 30 Arizonians their jobs: probably all “native born” citizens. They can thank their idiot governor for that.
(El Universal, “Reducen 40% compras en Arizona por Ley SB1070”, 07-02-2010)
In the name of liberty…
The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.
(Simón Bolívar)
Peter Krupa (Lat/Am Daily) on the latest intervention cum “humanitarian gesture”:
Militaryless, democratic, non-conflict-having Costa Rica is the new front in the United States’ War on Inanimate Objects. The country’s national assembly has given the OK for a veritable US invasion force to enter Costa Rican territory: 7,000 marines on 46 warships, including the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship…
La Nación quotes a document from the US Embassy that states that, “The US personnel in Costa Rica will be able to enjoy freedom of movement and the right to carry out the activities that they consider necessary to complete their mission.”
Well isn’t that just permissively vague.
The legislation says the mission has to do with fighting drug traffickers, as well as a few humanitarian goals, though the humanitarian use of a Harrier jet is still somewhat unclear.
The population of Costa Rica is only about 4.6 million people… which works out to one warship for every 100,000 Ticos (actually about 90,000, since 10 percent of residents are foreign nationals). They aren’t known for violence, and it’s a relatively stable, middle-class country that hasn’t had any huge disasters requiring foreign “humanitarian assistance” any time in the recent past. Drug trafficking, mostly pass-though from U.S. client state (and #1 cocaine supplier) Colombia, is a growing problem, but one that doesn’t seem to call for sending in the Marines.
Of course, the Costa Rican government has the invite whomever they want into their country, but 46 warships and seven thousand Marines in a very small country in proximity to several other nations that have, over the years, had their disagreements with (and invasions by) the United States is of concern to those neighbors.
What I”d be more worried about that “right to carry out the activities they consider necessary” bit, myself. There’s suspicion here in Mexico that the various U.S. secret police units (the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, etc.) which have been “embedded” in the security apparatus may have more than a little do to with our military’s “policing” policy of tending to act as executioner with alleged drug traffickers (in a country without a death penalty). And, while it appears Mexico’s murder rate has not statistically dropped over the last decade, it also appears that the number of “drug related” deaths have … er… shot up, especially since the U.S. government began “assisting” Mexico.
And, in Mexico, the U.S. presence is more or less covert, unlike Colombia, which has stopped publishing the murder rate since the U.S. began “assisting” in their drug war, but is something on the order of three and a half to ten times that of Mexico*.
In Colombia, the U.S. forces enjoy a form of diplomatic immunity — allowing them to “carry out activities they consider necessary” without worrying about pesky little interferences like Colombian judges, international war crimes tribunals or the rights of civilians. Or even standing charges for ordinary criminal acts. As in occupied nations, the U.S. military polices and judges itself… a combination of extraterritorial judicial rights and fuero militar: two things Latin American democrats, liberals and progressives have been fighting against at least since the days of Simón Bolívar.
Perhaps I’m making too much of the incursion into Costa Rica. It’s the odd country out in Central America, having a murder rate of ONLY 7.6 per 100,000 which throws off the Central America rate of 29 per 100,000. With luck… and the “humanitarian assistance” of those Harrier jets, maybe they can be as murderous as their neighbors in Honduras, who kill each other at the rate of 67 per 100,000 every year.
All in the name of “liberty” for the United States to pretend the “war on drugs” is over. Not that the U.S. has stopped killing people over their insatiable appetite for narcotics… they’re just want it to be our war.
* The latest estimates for “intentional homicide” in Colombia are 35.2 per 100,000, but some unofficial (and unverifiable) estimates go as high as 120 per 100,000. Mexico’s rate is 12 per 100,000. That’s down from 14 per 100,000 in 2000, but higher than the 10 to 11 per 100,000 of the pre-“Meridia” years.
Slim and trim
HEY, TELMEX installed my phone early! I guess I owe Carlos Slim one.
Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world (or at least our corner of it), draws 300,000 pesos a month for personal expenses. Felipe Calderón, along with Supreme Court Justices and Federal Elections Commissioners can draw on 500,000 pesos for personal expenses. OK, so Slim can pick up his suits at stores he owns (and does — he’s a Sac’s Fifth Avenue guy) and he can get lunch at his own restaurants (I saw him once coming into one of his joints), but can’t the Elections commissioners brown bag it like everyone else and save the Mexican taxpayers a little money?
The median INCOME for a Mexican worker is 1,500 pesos. Carlos, in other words, has 200 times what José Lopez gets for food, clothing and shelter for himself, his spouse and two point one children what Carlos Slim has to spend on for lunch and work clothes. José may get a company uniform, and Carlos does in a way… to his credit he buys his own clothes off the rack, from his own department store. Perhaps, if José has a really good employer (like Slim’s restaurant chain, Sanborn’s), he gets lunch. Slim DOES have to buy his own lunch… but he owns not just Sanborns, but several even tonier joints like Café L’Opera (where I could barely afford a coffee on my one and only visit when Carlos came waltzing in surrounded by his well-armed, but low-key, posse) — and a couple of snack food companies if he feels peckish of an afternoon.
Carlos Slim could certainly draw more if he wanted … after all, it’s his money, but he has no reason to spend it. Among the powers that be (or want to be) in Mexico, probably the one who feels the most kinship to Slim is, of all people, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. In his latest blast at the rich and corrupt, La Mafia Que Se Adueño De Mexico…y El 2012 ,”The Mob That Took Over Mexico — and 2012″) he hints that he and Slim are both those rarest of all things — Mexican puritans:
Slim is quite simple, although the richest man the world. He doesn’t wear fancy suits or go in for extravagance. And he’s sensitive. On one occasion, in my old City Hall office, he began to reminisce affectionately about [recently deceased mutual acquaintance] and ended up weeping. ..”
Maybe the Prez and the Judges and the Commissioners should think about taking José Lopez and 332 of his compadres out for a decent meal.
Sound and fury: In-Decisíon 2010, Desmadre 2012
I think I was wise not to make any predictions about this latest election. None of them… and all of them… are proving true. Signifying???
Violence depressed voter turnout?
This was a popular theme , but then again, voter turnout has been dropping for years, and this was a by-election. As it is, no one seems to remember that a good third to half of the electorate in the last Presidential election initially believed that either the candidate who was “selected” did so by fraud, or that the election itself was rigged, or that their votes were not counted… and have been turned off by the whole process.
Add too, and this is one I haven’t seen any comment on, is the VOTO NULO campaign… something all the “reformist” types were praising a few months back. Nor, for that matter, has anyone mentioned the Zapatista “other campaign” which rejects the whole idea of electoral democracy. And, frankly, in a lot of places the candidates sucked. People didn’t vote for all kinds of reasons.
A set-back for democracy?
I’ll give George Grayson credit for recognizing that the democratic opening in Mexico was stealing the 1988 election from Cuautémoc Cardenás, not Vincente Fox’s 2000 presidential victory, but Grayson goes off on a tangent, carping about state election commissions — somehow coming to the conclusion that a centralized elections commission is “democratic” and running state elections within the state are somehow a “set-back”. Besides being faulty logic, it’s faulty history. Returning power to the states was considered “democratic” under the Fox Administration (especially those states where PAN expected to do well) and it was the Fox Administration that did its best to politicize the Federal Elections Commission. I remember Martha Sahuguen’s strong-arm tactics in the State of Mexico (driving the state elections commissioner to attempt suicide!) — there’s nothing sacred about the Federal Elections Commission, nor was the Fox Administration a golden age of democratic elections.
I can’t find the link now, but one Mexican commentator though the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate in one state signaled the end of electoral politics. C’mon… candidates die — and sometimes are murdered — all over the globe during elections. The process goes one.
I would have thought the arrest of a candidate was more of a setback, as happened in Quintana Roo (which also depressed voter turnout, though — I suppose — you can call that a drug war effect).
PAN or Felipe Calderon or PRI or Enrique Peña Neito or AMLO won or lost.
This is the fun of spinning… but forgets that ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL. Sure, one can read tea leaves out of PRI’s defeat in Oaxaca and Puebla, but that’s forgetting that the locals just were pissed off at the incumbents and threw the bums out. The bums in Oaxaca were seen as murdering thugs, and the ones in Puebla as child molesters (and thugs). Whether that’s good or bad for Enrique Peña Neito’s presumed PRI presidential campaign in 2012 is impossible to say. All the yakkers seem to have a different spin on it.
Here in Sinaloa, the PAN-PRD-etc. candidate WAS a PRI politico, and… anyway… in Sinaloa, there are heavy-hitting anti-Calderón PANistas like Manuel Clouthier to consider. And, anyway, Sinoala has a history of inter-party fights leading to strange election results. Mazatlán — the second city in the state — elected a PT (Maoist) Presidente Municipal a few years back, mostly because a PRI heavy-weight got into a snit about some hotel development funds and threw his support (and illegal campaign contributions) to the Commies.
As it is, the PAN-PRD candidate in Sinaloa was running as an opponent to the Calderón drug war, and the PRI-Green candidate in favor of the Calderónist option. But, probably a bigger factor in voters minds was that the PAN-PRD-etc. guy was promising to end the state valuation tax on new (and slightly used) automobiles. Or maybe it was something else. Who knows.
I think the most relevant question is whether the PRI has peaked. There’s no question that it today remains the strongest single force in the nation, and Peña Nieto, for all his shortcomings, remains a more attractive candidate than anyone the PRD or the PAN is likely to nominate. But the party seems a lot more vulnerable today than it did after the elections a year ago. Furthermore, the loss in Oaxaca and the likelihood of another alliance in Mexico State next year suggest that Peña Nieto could well fail to hand over his post to another priísta, which the conventional wisdom says would doom his presidential chances. If that happens, we could be looking at a presidential race every bit as wide open as that of 2006.
Which means he’s coming around to my way of thinking… don’t count on a horse race until you know whose in the running. It’s way too early to predict a winner in 2012 (while Fox pioneered the long campaign, it hasn’t worked out that way for others. Santiago Creel was the odds-on PAN candidate in 2004, but in only six short years has become the Harold Stassen of Mexico).
And, although David Agren manages to get in his snark about AMLO (its his job… and he does it well), I wouldn’t count him out either.
It must also be said that any coalition success saves the jobs of PAN president César Nava and PRD president Jesús Ortega – and makes Andrés Manuel López Obrador look like a hypocrite as he has blasted the PRI as a great looming danger, but did his best to scuttle any anti-PRI alliances. (It’s suspected, though, AMLO’s tours through the “Usos y Costumbres” communities of Oaxaca might have paid dividends for the coalitions and the same network that got out the vote for him in Oaxaca in 2006 might have been revived. Many of AMLO’s people were also less intransigent than him and participated in the coalitions.)
It’s not only in the “usos y costumbres” communities where AMLO has a following, but in the alternative media and among the social networking sites as well. The “under the radar” campaign is a “long campaign” and AMLO was running on a party that only polls 20 percent tops in a good year when he probably won the presidency in 2006. Although, as Gancho notes, the PAN-PRD-Convergencia-PT coalitions made sense not in any ideological way (PAN being “confessional” and conservative, the others Social Democratic and post-Communist Marxists), but in the sense of pure, practical politics. PRI is, as it has been since its inception in 1946, a coalition of interest groups (much as both U.S. political parties are). AMLO’s success was also in building coalitions — often ideologically incongruous ones) and — while he’s “intransigent” today, that’s not where he may be in 2012. Assuming he’s going to run… which he may… or may not… against… somebody.
My predictions? I wouldn’t be surprised if Jefe Diego suddenly popped up again… though I’m not betting on that happening. Somebody will run in 2012, probably a lot of people, and somebody will win the presidency. And somebody else will say the fix was in. And the talking heads will come up with simple narratives seeking to explain it all. All more or less right, and all more or less wrong.
Early returns
This is by no means a “finished” post (or even a slightly polished one), so consider this more notes than anything else. I won’t have phone service until next Friday, and in the meantime, am posting while back in the old house for a couple of hours.
I’m writing this Sunday afternoon, and have no idea how the elections are going, or will go. Unlike the United States and other countries, there are no “early exit polls”, nor any reporting until the PREP figures (based on sample counts) are made available by official sources… sometime around 11 PM Sunday evening.
In the meantime, it appears as if a late wave of voter and candidate intimidation as not — possibly to the disappointment of foreign commentators — “drug related”.
A PRD candidate for the broad anti-PRI coalition in Oaxaca was gunned down on Friday. With no ties to the “drug wars” and occuring far from the U.S. border, it received no foreign coverage. Also in Oaxaca, and at this time, with no further information available, 38 people were arrested in Oaxaca city hotels. The out of town visitors were carrying not just a variety of electronic communications equipment, but explosives. El Mundo (Spain) claims the 38 were from Mexico City and the “explosives” were molotov cocktails (which normally are manufactured on site, and usually aren’t classified as explosives). At any rate, a bunch of people with some nefarious purpose in mind were arrested — or maybe not, it being Oaxaca, where sometimes crimes are “discovered” after the guilty are identified.
El Mundo also reports on a caravan of armed (with machetes, bats and handguns) tooling around Veracruz, but gives very few details.
In Aguascalientes, a Federal Deputy (PAN) was arrested by State Police for driving with out-of-state plates on her car. That makes no sense, but the arrest warrant was issued by the State’s General Prosecutor (Attorney General) on some unspecified charge.
And, in Pachuca, Hidalgo, opposition coalition candidate Xochitl Galvez campaign headquarters were raided by police and computers taken after receiving an anonymous noise complaint. I’ve never heard of a noise complaint in Mexico anywhere, and certainly not one that required the police to seize computers. The computers were later released, by the way… but they’re staying quiet.
Finally, in Huehuetán, Chiapas (where there was a fight involving various PRI members), two unnamed men shot and killed each over while discussing the philosophical differences between coalition partners PRI and PVEM (Green Party).
Whatever weirdness is going on, it is not necessarily “drug related” as the foreign press keeps saying. Not that the narcos aren’t a factor, but old-fashioned power politics, the resurgence of the PRI as the only organized faction left after PAN did everything in its power to destroy PRD, and was itself riven by internal dissentions, and the generally inept performance of the sitting administration are all factors to be considered.
And we’ll live beneath the waves
It has long been the stuff of drug-trafficking legend, but federal authorities announced on Saturday that they have helped seize the first known and fully operational submarine built by drug traffickers to smuggle tons of cocaine from South America toward the United States.
The diesel-electric powered submarine was captured in an Ecuadorian jungle waterway leading to the Pacific Ocean, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The sub, which is about 100 feet long and equipped with a periscope, was seized before its maiden voyage by Ecuadorian authorities armed with DEA intelligence.
The various submersibles that keep showing up on the Pacific Coast here are technically not submarines. This thing is. But one question… why was it painted cammo and not yellow?
mexfiles.net 