This yet mythical realm encompassing Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru is populated by nearly 50,000,000 citizens of their respective republics, 40% of whom (low end estimate) are deemed to be indigenous peoples, perhaps 20-30 million in number — about half of the 60 million (high end estimate) “Indians” who survive in the Americas. When Francisco Pizarro […]
The story had everything: drugs, rape, torture, angry Indians, a corrupt justice system, gringo intervention… Philip True would have loved to cover it. But True, one-time correspondent for the San Antonio Texas Express-News in Mexico, wasn’t available for the assignment — in fact, the story was about his strange death. As the third anniversary of […]
The clocks are literally ticking as Mexico starts the final leg of the countdown to the 200th anniversary of its independence from Spain. Dozens of huge, solar-powered timepieces have been installed in this monster city’s great Zocalo plaza and 31 state capitols to mark the minutes until the bi-centennial celebration kicks in this September 15th-16th. […]
When I first returned to Mexico City in the wake of the great 1985 earthquake, the biggest drug pushers in that distant neighbor nation were Sherwin Williams Paint (“tinner” or “activo”) and Resistol-Dupont glue (“chemo.”) Street kids were huffing down gallons of these pernicious intoxicants in the allies and sewers of this monster megalopolis. A […]
The snow was already dusting the Organ Mountains of New Mexico fringing this high desert town, promising a hard winter further up the spine of Obama’s America. I ride the Mexican bus (officially doing business as the El Paso-East L.A, Limousine Express) when I ply the back roads of the southwest. Greyhound, with its stern […]
Mexico City — Last July, in a meticulously planned raid reminiscent of classic guerrilla jail breakouts that are legend in Latin America, a commando group of 20 heavily armed fighters freed 53 comrades from a prison in the northern state of Zacatecas. Were the perpetrators in fact guerrilleros from some as-yet unknown revolutionary foco or […]
First stop was the near north woods, Humboldt County USA, to wheedle the medicos into granting me a clean bill of health before I hit the road. A year ago this February, my doctor who has poked and probed my old broken cadaver for nearly 20 years pronounced me dead. “Liver Cancer” he parsed gravely […]
Fact: Every 100 years on the tenth year of the century, Mexico explodes in extravagant social upheaval. In 1810, this distant neighbor nation declared its independence from the Spanish Crown, signaling monumental bloodletting — hundreds of thousands died, mostly people the color of the earth, fully 10% of the census. In 1910, the Mexican revolution, […]
Mexico has a 10,000 ton monkey on its back and its name is Washington DC. While US drug enforcers gloat that 15-foot walls, high tech sensors, drones, blimps, spotter planes and rampant militarization have put a significant dent in the flow of cocaine across its porous southern border. Drug use escalates exponentially south of that […]
How to destroy Mexican corn, reap maximum profits, and buy a university in one easy lesson… Seated on the balcony of his appropriately professorial office upon a sun-stroked hillock in the midst of the Life Science complex on the hallowed Berkeley campus of the University of California, the controversial Mexican-born microbiologist Ignacio Chapela, an academic […]