Down and out in Mexico
This time of the year — at least according to what statistics I have for the last year and a half — the Mex Files numbers start to look like recent stock market charts. There was a huge number of hits (relative to a “botique” site like this one) in September, thanks to Sven-Goran Eriksson — or rather, mention of Mex Files in an article about Sven-Goran in The Guardian (U.K.) Sports Blog. And, Animal Planet had a show about the Axolotl that month, which brought in a thousand hits a day for a couple of days in a row.
I expect the number of hits to peak about November and early December. My guess is that people are either thinking about winter vacations or writing term papers and — I hope — doing research, and not just cutting and pasting. After Christmas, the numbers plunge.
I thought at first, maybe changing over to “mexfiles.net” caused the huge drop — and, it probably has temporarily. For some odd reason, my post on Ramon Novarro used to get at least 60 hits a day, and now gets 
one or two a week. Of course, I don’t think those hits came from silent film buffs, or film historians, or Chicano studies students… the title, “Nude Gay Mexican“, had a lot to do with it. Weirdly right now — a later “companion piece” — or, maybe, an attempt to provide something for everyone — on a not-nekked, but scantily clad “Miss Mexico 2008” is now the tops the hits chart.
Anyway, I expected it to be “slow” this time of year, which made it less traumatic to switch servers, and expect it’d be a while before people’s links caught up.
And… this being a slow time of the year for the Mex Files, I can afford to take a few days off. Not that I’m slacking off. Quite the opposite. Gods, Gachupines and Gringos is available now in the United States, but there have been yet more challenges getting books into Mexico. The off-again, on-again rules about cross border trucking make it prohibitively expensive to commercially import something under half a ton, and the “alternative transport” methods we looked at ran into a glitch… i.e., the guy who was driving them here in a motorhome (with all the import papers and customs declarations done) can’t make the trip. SO….
I’m also working for the publisher, so I guess this is part of my job. I’m off to Nogales this coming week to pick up the books and bring them down. I’ll also be carting books around the country and doing a writers’ road trip in a couple of weeks (independent book distribution in Mexico requires a more “hands on” approach than in the U.S.), so posting may be a bit lighter than usual.
For the next week, I won’t have my laptop with me, so other than a few posts I write over the weekend, nothing until at least next Friday.
The maddening Edith O’Shaughnessy
I find that the Mexicans are constantly studying us, which is more than we do in regard to them. They look upon us as something immensely powerful, that is able and, perhaps, if displeased, willing, to crush them. They are infinitely more subtle than we, and their efforts tend more to keeping out of our clutches than to imitating us. Our institutions, all our ways of procedure, are endlessly wearisome to them, and correspond to nothing they consider profitable and agreeable.
A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico (1916)
Edith O’Shaughnessy (1870 – 1939) is one of those maddening writers who it is profitable to read, even though you may find yourself not much liking the author.
Though a Roman Catholic by birth, Edith Louise Coues could have been invented by Henry James or Edith Wharton. A true “southern belle”, eminently secure in her belief in her racial and class superiority to the “lesser races” after a careful convent education, she was sent to Europe both for the experience, and in the hope of finding a suitable husband. Rather late for a Wharton heroine, she married Oxford-educated diplomat and lawyer Nelson O’Shaughnessy in 1901. From 1901 to 1915, Edith O’Shaughnessy was a diplomatic wife, serving her country (and tea) as a proper diplomatic hostess in Copenhagen, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Bucharest, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro. Her fame as a writer rests on her experiences in Mexico City during the Madero and Huerta Presidencies.
Nelson O’Shaugnessy was U.S. Charge d’Affairs in Veracruz during the “Ten Tragic Days” when (as I wrote in Gods, Gachupines and Gringos: A People’s History of Mexico, © 2008 Richard Grabman):
[Ambassador Henry Lane] Wilson … concluded Madero had to go…. As he saw it, his job ws to protect United States interests (meaning the large landowners and U.S. owned companies) in México. Madero’s election had unleased thirty years of built-up anger and resentment against the foreign control of Mexican resources. Wilson took even mild reforms (higher taxes on oil exports) as attacks on U.S. rights in México. Madero would have to go.
For Edith, neither overthrowing the democratic reformist Madero, nor the ten days of intense street fighting and bombardment in Mexico City was the tragedy. It was the lack of decent hotel service in Veracruz, and the tedium of provincial society. When — in the outrage over the U.S. involvement in Madero’s replacement by the military dictator Victoriano Huerta, Wilson was recalled by President Woodrow Wilson (no relation), Nelson O’Shaugnessy moved into the Ambassador’s residence as charge.
Source: University of Minnesota Women's Travel Writing, 1830-1930
Although not the Ambassador, Nelson was the United States representative, and Edith felt it her duty as a diplomatic wife to keep up appearances. She gave tea parties and went to receptions, where she endlessly fretted over the fate of displaced landowners and bemoaned the abuses heaped on the “better classes” by the “bandits” and “revolutionists” who didn’t know their place.
Not surprisingly, she was a favorite of Huerta. And that is what makes Edith O’Shaugnessy such a maddening figure. She was by no means stupid. And she wrote very well. In a series of letters to her mother published by Harper in 1916 as A Diplomat’s Wife In Mexico — and available as a free download), O’Shaugnessy has no illusions about Huerta’s alcoholism and bloody-mindedness. Despite her sometimes condescending attitude towards President (mostly a matter of his indigenous heritage), she defends him in the letters as a necessarily iron-fisted leader, doing his best to control an unruly populace.
She is loyal to Huerta and seems almost smitten with him. Huerta returned her affection, treating her as a friend, and even inviting her to family events (and, as every foreigner knows, to be invited to a Mexican family event is a sign of true acceptance). Certainly, she was defending the indefensible, and “on the wrong side of history”, but amidst the reports on her grandson’s health and the ungoing interior decorating at the Ambassador’s residence, Mrs. Coues was probably the best informed person in the United States about the Mexican government during the early Revolution.
The published letters are still worth reading today — while not as consciously literary as Englishwoman Rosa Eleanor King’s book on Huerta and the Revolution in Morelos, Tempest Over Mexico (also available as a free download), it is better reporting. And much more readable (and less self-serving) than Henry Lane Wilson’s Diplomatic Days (Garden City: Doubleday Page and Company, 1927).
O’Shaughnessy wrote three books altogether on her Mexican experience: in addition to the letters, she published Diplomatic Days (1917) and Intimate Pages of Mexican History (1920). She also later wrote two books about Alsace and a series of sketches of (and probably the only book in English about) Rankwiel, Lichtenstein. True to her aristocratic sensibilities, she also wrote the biography of Marie Adelaide, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, and a novel, Viennese Medley, based on her screenplay The Greater Glory which tells the story of former aristocrats at loose ends in Vienna after the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Sarah Wadsworth wrote a short biographical entry for the of the University of Minnesota’s “”Womens Travel Writing Project ” but there is almost nothing (not even a Wikipedia entry) on the maddening Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. And that’s a damn shame.
Party animals
Among the many “political animals” in Mexico (the mapuche — “raccoon” — who is the dirty trickster who buys votes and stuffs ballot boxes being the most pernicious), the grillo (grasshopper) is the most common.
Grillos are the professional pols who switch parties like most of us change underware. While there are those like the late Gilberto Rincón Gallardo — who campaigned as a Communist, a Socialist and PANista at various times in his career — who would work with any party that would further their own agenda (disability rights, in Rincón’s case) there are also those with their own political machine that the parties want to co-opt.
Normally, these grillos don’t hop that far from their base. On the left, where there are more parties to chose from, it’s not unusual for a disappointed PRD primary candidate to run for office from Convergencia, or vice-versa. And, as the smaller parties have shaken out over the years, and the larger parties have split or had purges, some — like former PRI Central Committee and teachers’ union boss Elba Esther Gordillo — more or less become “rent a factions”. Gordillo’s PANAL is supposedly a labor party (which would logically make it a member of a leftist coalition), but is willing to lend its support and candidates to PAN. Likewise, the Green Party (which hasn’t been that “Green” of late) was originally part of Vicente Fox’s “Alliance for Change”, but — disappointed with their failure to gain secretariats under Fox, became permanantly attached to PRI.
And, finally there are those grillos who have their own organization AND their own agenda. Rubén Mendoza Ayala was a PRI politico, who — like many others during the “democratization” process left the dominant party for one of the more ideologically based ones: in his case, the more conservtive alternative, PAN. Mendoza has had a relatively successful career as a PANista, cumulating in his candidacy for State of Mexico Governor in 2005. Though he lost to PRI’s up-and-coming star (and early favorite for 2012 presidential candiate Enrique Peña Nieto and the campaign was marked by irregularities (Vicente Fox’s wife, Marta Sahaguen was accused of involvement in dirty tricks which included death threats against an Elections Board official), the state as a whole leans towards PRD.
However, with the leftist party’s problems, PAN has had hopes of gaining the most populous state in the Republic, and kept Mendoza on ice. He was presidente municipal of the suburban community of Tlanepantla (“suburb” being something of a misnomer for a city of 700,000) where he built his own state-wide organization, the Civil Council.
PAN, in line with classic “neo-liberal” thinking tried to privatize trash collection and sell off some city park property to developers in Tlanepantla. Mendoza, needing something for the Civic Council to do, opposed these moves, which is the rationale for his expulsion. He is going over to PRD, with the express purpose of being the next PRD candidate for state governor. This doesn’t sit well with everyone on the left. They’d love to control the state government (and undermine PRI’s Peña Nieto), but don’t completely trust Mendoza and his Civic Council groups.
Convergencia, which partnered with PAN in the 2005 state election, and is now partnered with the Workers’ Party (PT) and PRD in fractious on-and-off leftist coalition. They may put up their own Gubenatorial candidate in 2010 from the Lopez Obrador faction of the coalition. Which would leave PRI likely to retain state control, even with a minority victory.
Yeidckol Polevnsky Gurwitz, presently a Senator and the PRD gubenatorial candidate in 2005 may again run for the office. She fared worse than expected, in large part due to a questions about her birth (Polevnsky owes her Polish name to a fraudulent birth certificate that was meant to cover up a family scandal) — which Mendoza and his organization were happy to exploit. A rematch could be ugly. Expect an outbreak of raccoons and grasshoppers in the State of Mexico.
Frontera justice
California writer Richard Rodriguez, in noting that the Spanish word for border — frontera — fits the borderlands, writes (Days of Obligation, Penguin: 1992. © Richard Rodriguez):
From prehistory, the North has been the problem. Mexico City (la capital) has been the platform from which all provincialism is gauged. From the North came marauding tribes, iconoclasts, destroyers of high Indian civilization. During the Spanish colonial era, the North was settled, even garrisoned, but scarcely civilized. In the nineteenth century, Mexico’s northernmost territories were too far from the center to be defended against America’s westward expansion. In the after-decades, the North spawned revolutionaries and bandits, or these fled into the North and the North hid them well
And, as I’ve argued in the past, for complicated reasons, Juarez may be a 21st century city, but in many ways can only be understood in terms of a “Wild West” frontier settlement.
Reuters reporter Julian Cardona writes (19 January 2009) that in Ciudad Juarez
Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.
One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”
The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government…
I don’t see “vigilantes” as a “new twist” at all, nor, do I think that the United Stated was “forced” to “give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.”
As the jumping off place from Mexican civilization into the barbaric unknown (or, all too well known) Juarez includes more than its fair share of what were once called “bandits” and who “fled into the North”. And in our day, the “marauding tribes” of gun-runners, narcotics buyers and money launders are overwhelming the decent settlers and peaceful pioneers. It’s no surprise that — right across the river from a place where “he needed shootin'” is said jokingly of malcontents that come to a bad end — but expresses a very real possibility (and does happen from time to time), that “vigilantes” might appear.
And, as to being “forced” to spend money… I don’t recall any reluctance on the part of either the Executive nor the Legislative Branch of the United States government to spend the money. They quibbled over how much, and what oversight they would have over Mexican law enforcement, but no reluctance to spend that cash… on U.S. suppliers and services, not in any way a gift to Mexico. The only ones being “forced” are the Mexican government … forced to fight gangsters (or “bandits”, if you prefer) WILLINGLY financed and armed by the United States.
All in the name of preserving the fiction that the United States’ narcotics control system is not massively violent.
In Ciudad Juarez, some residents say they would welcome vigilantes. “That way they would stop the gangs, the mafia. People are leaving here because of so many murders,” said David Hinojosa, 30, who shines shoes in the city.
…
But local lawmakers say encouraging vigilantes is a mistake. Some residents question whether soldiers are moonlighting as hitmen for drug gangs, a charge the army denies.
I question whether the “vigilantes” aren’t being paid by the same people who supply the narcos… i.e., those north of the border (or in business with them) and whether or not “vigilante” is even the right word. With the apparent attempt to “legitimize” the gangsters as a quasi-political threat — even branding them as “terrorists” — and the sorry history of military policing in Latin America, where dissidents are conveniently accused of connections with whatever “terrorist de jour” is in fashion… let’s at least be honest enough to call these “vigilantes” by their real name:
“Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez…
Death squads — possibly composed of off-duty soldiers, and possibly financed and armed from the United States. This sound depressingly familiar to anyone who knows their recent Latin American history, and all too believable. In no way is it a “new twist” on anything.
PAN: ick! attack
Not the International Herald Tribune, but an unrelated English-language Caracas paper, the Latin American Herald Tribune reports:
MEXICO CITY — Kissing in public [or, rather “inappropriate kissing” — whatever that might be] will be punished with fines and even jail time in the central Mexican city of Guanajuato under a new municipal ordinance that also bans begging, using rude words and street peddling.
The measure emerged Tuesday from a municipal government controlled by the rightist National Action Party, or PAN, which has been in power at the national level since 2000.
The ordinance also punishes tourism promoters who approach motorists, people who cross streets without using pedestrian bridges, those offering windshield-cleaning services and those who engage in street demonstrations.
For example, the law bans “obscene words and attitudes in public places that offend third parties, as well as touching obscenely in public spaces.”
Those who fail to abide by the ordinance can be punished with 36 hours in jail and fines up to 1,500 pesos ($108).
…
PAN’s “piety wing”, like the “Christian Conservative” wing of the U.S. Republican Party, has a thing for protecting “traditional values.” They seem to forget that traditional values in Mexico include making out in the street (with homes crowded with aunts, grand-fathers, third cousins and whomever happens to be in town, where else are horny teenagers to go.
And, traditional values includes swearing at crappy drivers as you blithely jaywalk.
AND… demonstrations (like the mega-demonstrations organized by then defeated gubenatorial candidate Vicente Fox in 1991, which led to the appointment of an interim PAN governor, and the beginning of the party’s emergence as a serious opposition to then-ruling PRI) are more than just a traditional value… they’re a national art form.
Obviously, I don’t think this municipal ordinance is aimed at “traditional values”, but — again, like Christian Conservatives in the U.S. — is an attempt to pass off intolerance under the guise of civic order.
The most serious problem with the new ordinance is the attempt to suppress “unofficial” demonstrations. It’s likely to misfire very badly, increasing the likelihood of violence during what is otherwise a somewhat annoying, but necessary part of the democratic process.
The rest is just the perverse attempts by the stick-in-the-mud piety types to suppress whatever it is they find “icky”.
This isn’t all that different from the Christian Conservatives who took office as Republican officials throughout the United States in 1980 on Ronald Reagan’s coattails. In Mexico, it was Vicente Fox’s 2000 election coattails that brought “piety wing” PANistas into office in municipalities throughout the country. In Aguascalientes, the new administration had signs posted in the city parks reading “No dogs or homosexuals” — the dogs unlikely to organize a protest, but the homosexuals certain to, though they were beaten up by gangs organized by the Legionaries of Christ (as were Mormons, Protestants and indigenous people).
Even within PAN, this was thought to be a little extreme, and eventually, the signs came down, and — though there are still reports of official abuse against minorities, Aguascalientes is not much on Mexican political or cultural radar. It’s not really a tourist stop, and its local political actions aren’t much reported nationally — think of it as the Nebraska or Iowa of Mexico.
Guanajuanto IS a major tourist center, both for foreigners and Mexicans. It is an internationally known artistic and cultural center. The annual Festival Internacional Cervantino every October in recent years has become an unofficial Mardi Gras for the hoardes of young, well-educated, “artsy” visitors who come not just for the “official” artistic performances, but for the street and coffee-house entertainment — music, theater, visual arts, poetry slams, dance. And where there are the arts there are… uh… as the euphimism had it, “artistic types.”
City police are likely to look the other way at “artistic” visitors (especially those speaking a foreign language and spending money freely), but there could be an incident which would seriously impact Mexico’s growing reputation for tolerance.
Thankfully, every party in the country — including the pragmatic PANistas — recognizes this is nutty, and unlikely to pass Constitutional muster.
A sign of change?
Boy, and I thought just writing Mexican history made me an obsessive who interprets everything anywhere in terms of Mexico. Dr. David Stuart , the David and Linda Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, publishes Mayan Decipherment, a blog for the very specialized audience of those seriously involved in the “epigraphy and related archaeological and linguistic topics” related to the study of Mayan hieroglyphics.
Mayan hieroglyphs are still being deciphered by scholars such as Dr. Stuart, a task that began with Diego de Landa Calderón(1524 – 1579) the first Bishop of Yucatan, who did everything he could to learn the Mayan language and culture, the better to wipe it out. Dr. Stuart’s interests are much more benign, and… he even dares to create new glyphs for the words the ancient script (now replaced in the thirty plus Mayan tongues by Roman alphabet) for the words that even those future-obsessed people overlooked:
Coffee mugs and tee shirts with the Obama glyph are available from Mayanists for Obama through Cafepress.com.
(Sombrero tip to Lord Pakal Ahau’s Maya Diaries)
Slim chance the Times are a’changin’
Marketwatch is reporting (from Tel Aviv, for some reason) that Carlos Slim, who has already bought 6.4 percent of the New York Times stock, is preparing to invest “several” hundreds of millions of dollars in the company.
American newspapers are a dying industry, mostly due to technical changes (paper and ink are increasingly expensive resources), management misteps that often were counterproductive (downgrading the “core mission” of providing news in favor of more immediate revenue generators like advertising), and being slow off the mark in adjusting to new communications technologies.
Slim’s investment is logical. His family fortune started when his father arrived in Mexico City at the start of the Revolution, looked around for an opportunity and began buying up the furniture and nick-nacks from departing exploiting class… becoming — some say — the exploiting class themselves.
Carlos — like Warren Buffet in the United States — inherited a large fortune and turned it into a HUGE one. His “core enterprise” is broadly defined as consumer goods and communications — which makes the New York Times fit in quite nicely.
I know there are those on the left (where I’m usually assumed to be) who just hate the guy, but I’ve never had a problem with him being super-rich. Yeah, we may be getting screwed on our telephone bills, but TeleMex is a much better company (and we have much better telephone service) than we had even a few years ago. We were going to have mega-stores and chains stores, no matter what happened, and Slim expanded his empire by buying up troubled U.S. chains in Mexico (like J.C. Penny and Sears) and investing in similar businesses outside Mexico. And, if Slim has any ideology, it’s pragmatism. He understands that his success depends on people having the money to spend on consumer goods and services. He supported the Lopez Obrador administration in Mexico City, and has been willing to work with leftist administrations throughout Latin America.
Given the sometimes troubling role the New York Times has played in Mexican history, especially in the Wilson Administration (the last time Mexico was painted as a “threat” to U.S. security requiring intervention), there’s something fitting about a Mexican investment in the Times. Wilson’s personal investigation into the Huerta regime was handled by Times correspondent William Bayard Hale. As I said in Gods, Gachupines and Gringos (© 2008, Richard Grabman):
[Hale] … spoke no Spanish and had never been in México before, but Wilson trusted Hale, and Hall understood Wilson’s idealistic belief in constitutional democracy. Working undercover, Hale unsurprisingly reported that Huerta was a tyrant with no popular support. It was only control of the oil fields and the revenues from the oil fields that let him buy the foreign munitions that kept him in power.
Two things haven’t changed: New York Times reporters — with a few exceptions — tend to accept the prevailing theories in Washington about the way the world SHOULD work, and report though that filter. AND… while the Times’ reporters are better prepared linguistically than was Hale, they often know very little about Mexico or Latin America, and rely on “official sources,” as did George Carrothers, the “embedded reporter” with Pancho Villa’s army.
Carrothers — who was also Woodrow Wilson’s first cousin — was a good reporter, but because of his limited access, misled the Wilson administration into poisoning its future relations with the ultimate winners in the Revolution… Carranza and Obregon… as well as the unfortunate blow-back that occurred when the Wilson Administration changed policy and Villa launched his successful “terrorist strike” on the United States.
Today’s Times reporters STILL seem to rely too much on “official sources”, not just in Mexico. And, too often, sprung from the loins of the elites themselves.
Should the deal go through, Carlos Slim will not have a voting voice on the Times Board of Directors, nor will he be setting editorial policy. Still, PERHAPS it’s TIMES for a change.
Sunday Reading: Crime and Punishment
Justice… or “just us”?
…the New York Times [12-January 2009] ran a story on the rising number of federal prosecutions for immigration offenses [as opposed to actual violent crimes], which the Department of Justice ostensibly has pursued with increased vigor as part of the government’s broader counterterrorism strategy. But, the story notes, while immigration prosecutions have skyrocketed over the past five years, “white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent.” One might question the wisdom of devoting more and more resources to the prosecution of undocumented immigrants for “illegal entry” at the expense of, say, arms traffickers who actually do have an adverse impact on public safety.
(Walter Ewing, Immigration Policy Center, via Alternet)
One might also question the adverse effect of white collar criminals (say, Bernie Madoff) and corruption by government contractors like Halliburton on the United States versus whatever Jose Lopez didn’t report on his taxes from those jobs he got standing out in front of Home Depot.
“Let the punishment fit the crime…”
SEVERAL policemen have been suspended after four teenagers in north Mexico alleged officers spray-painted their hair, shoes and buttocks to teach them not to paint graffiti on public property.Emilio Alfaro of Nuevo Leon state’s Human Rights Commission said on Thursday that the youths were fined more than $200 before being released.(The Scotsman, not the Associated Press: 17 January 2009)
Peru”s top court has ruled that workers cannot be fired for being drunk on the job, a decision that was criticized by the government on Wednesday for setting a dangerous precedent.
The Constitutional Tribunal ordered that Pablo Cayo be given his job back as a janitor for the municipality of Chorrillos, which fired him for being intoxicated at work.
The firing was excessive because even though Cayo was drunk, he did not offend or hurt anybody, Fernando Calle, one of the justices, said on Wednesday.
Calle said the court would not revise its decision, despite complaints from the government…
The wheels of justice turn slowly:
Madrid January 13, 2009 – Today, the Judge of the 6th Chamber of the Spanish National Court agreed to initiate a criminal prosecution in the “Jesuits Massacre,” a crime which has gone unpunished for nineteen years, in which members of the Salvadoran military murdered six priests, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. Fourteen former officers, including General Ponce, Head of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Rafael Humberto Larios, former Minister of Defense, are now formally charged with crimes against humanity and state terrorism for their role in the massacre. Additionally the Judge reserved the right, during the course of the investigation, to indict former Salvadoran President and Commander of the Armed Forces Alfredo Cristiani for his role in covering up the crime.
Prosecuting a president for war crimes and covering up human rights abuses? What a concept!
Another country could choose to investigate the war crimes committed on behalf of and authorized by the Bush administration and prosecute top officials of the U.S. government. Should this scenario unfold in the coming year, what effect will it have on the credibility of our country’s Justice Department? How will the United States ever regain its moral standing in the world when other nations must prosecute our citizens for committing war crimes?
(Karen Harper, Birmingham Progressive Politics Examiner)
Trouble in paradise
Nacha Cattan, The (Mexico City) News:
A nonprofit group that is helping carry out a national reforestation effort acknowledged Friday that the federal program lacks planning and that 40 percent of hundreds of millions of trees planted last year have already died.
Pronatura Mexico said that the multi-million-dollar ProArbol initiative at times provides saplings too late in the season, or delivers them to communities before they are mature enough to be planted.
Launched by the Calderón administration, the program came under attack this week after El Universal revealed that top ProArbol officials are being investigated for corruption.
Greenpeace also dismissed ProArbol as a superficial measure to combat Mexico’s devastating deforestation rate…
True enough, but then again, aren’t conservative administrations SUPPOSED to contract government services to inefficient corrupt cronies ? Anyway, ProArbol is not the only tree-planter, and 60% of their trees are still alive.
Road trip!
Mexico highway 40 from Durango to Mazatlan runs through the Sierra Madres, across the Continental Divide (the Durango/Sinaloa State line) and is better known as “La Espina del Diablo” — the Devil’s Backbone. The trip takes about four to six hours on a good day, ten or so if the weather is bad.
Rolly Brook suggests bringing food and water, but there are several small communities along the route, with truck-stops and restaurants perched on the hillsides… just be very careful when entering and leaving the parking lot: it’s a long, long, long drop sometimes.
This video, by “extremejay1” of his father’s 2006 drive down (and up.. and down… and around) Highway 40 was shot on a clear day with little traffic. Buses, heavy trucks, and farm vehicles also have to use the highway… which for now is the only way through the mountains. The challenge in Mexico has always been transportation, and the present two-lane road (being slowly replaced by a four-lane divided highway) is an engineering marvel.
Sorry, Devils’ Island is booked for the season
I just can’t envision myself, you know, the big straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt sitting on some beach.
(George W. Bush 12 January 2009)
I can’t envision George W. Bush in a Hawaiian shirt either. But I can recommend a perfect beach for George.
mexfiles.net 