Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted in December.
Categories
Commenting is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. M-F
More recent entries
Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2007 > December
December 2007
Graffiti dreams part IV
We’re off to Austin for the holidays (hopefully we’ll still recognize the place) so I’m leaving another installment of the critically acclaimed graffiti dreams series. Here’s another group of shots from super scary Ciudad Neza. See you in Dos Mil Ocho!
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Drug seizures lead to ruthless retribution
If anything vividly demonstrates the uphill battle Mexico faces in battling the drug cartels, it’s the gruesome payback the frontline drug war fighters are receiving.
On Friday, customs agents at Mexico City’s international airport seized half a ton of pure cocaine on a plane coming from Colombia. Two days later, authorities found the decapitated heads of two customs workers. Officials haven’t declared the cases connected, but most observers believe there may be a link.
Such direct retribution is becoming a disturbing trend. Last week, two soldiers who manned a highway checkpoint near Monterrey were found executed, days after the seizure of seven tons of marijuana from the back of a tractor-trailer. 
What can be done about these apparent retribution killings, which are sure to have a chilling effect on customs agents, soldiers and cops? Will they all have to wear ski masks to hide their identity? In discussing the case with one longtime foreign correspondent here, it seemed clear that even such extreme measures probably wouldn’t work. In the Monterrey case, the killers likely knew the names and addresses of the murdered soldiers, and that would require the work of an inside snitch.
Mexico boycott over Republican immigration policies?
Mexico’s foremost expert on immigration is calling on Mexicans to do whatever they can to stop Republicans from winning the White House next year, including a boycott of companies that donate to Republican candidates.
Jorge Bustamante, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, this week called Republican Party policies on immigration “immoral.” Writing in the Mexico City daily Reforma, Bustamante said the Republican candidates share a in immigration stance that “lacks even the most minimum recognition of the demand for the Mexican migrant labor.”
He called on Mexicans to harness “the real power we have as consumers” to boycott big companies that do business in Mexico and fund Republican candidacies. Bustamante didn’t name any particular companies, but said “that is public information available to anyone with basic understanding of how to navigate the Internet.”
Cannibal Poet found dead in prison cell
Jose Luis Calva, Mexico City’s “Cannibal Poet,” was found dead inside his prison cell this morning. Mexico City authorities are calling the death a suicide, but Calva’s sister claims other inmates were extorting him and threatened to kill him if he didn’t pay them a reported 500 pesos (about $50). He was found strangled with his own belt.
Calvo shocked Mexico earlier this year when police found the remains of his ex-girlfriend frying on his stove and her body parts in the refrigerator. Calvo was a failed screenwriter who sold his horror-infused poetry at informal, bohemian markets around Mexico City.
Frida: Now found on your shoes and in your tequila
The commercialization of Frida Kahlo is now complete: You can wear the works of the iconic Mexican painter on your shoes, as Converse has released a Frida Kahlo line of its Chuck Taylors. There are three styles to choose from, “The Two Fridas,” “Feet for Those I Love,” and simply, “Frida Kahlo!” The shoes, featuring the painter’s image, signature and snippets of her more famous paintings, are available throughout Mexico and are going for about $80 a pop on Mexico City’s trendiest avenue.
The cult of Frida has reached so far that the Mexican media has coined a term for it: Fridamania. And lest you think sneakers are the only mass consumer item you can buy with Frida’s visage, you can also buy Frida Kahlo tequila, courtesy of Venezuelan businessman Carlos Dorado, who has bought a 51 percent share in the Frida Kahlo Corporation. The Corporation, set up along with Frida’s niece, controls the rights to Frida’s image and Dorado is also reportedly planning a Frida clothing line and, if you can believe it, a musical group called “The Daughters of Frida.”
The mass marketing of Frida has generated a number of critics in her homeland, who point out that the leftist painter (her casket was covered with a Communist Party flag) would have likely been revolted by the idea of her face and paintings being used to rake in corporate profits. “In this instant she must be turning in her grave (and not because of the pain in her spinal column)” wrote columnist Fernando Rivera Calderon in the Mexico City daily La Cronica.
High cuisine in Mexico City
Over the weekend I passed over from the Larry Bird year to the Big Papi year (translation: I turned 34, and yes, I’m from Boston) and to celebrate we ate at one of Mexico City’s most amazing restaurants. Mexico City is enjoying a culinary renaissance with a good half dozen restaurants that are re-inventing modern Mexican food. The unspoken gospel here is that street food is often better than anything you’ll find in a restaurant, but these eateries and their cutting-edge twists on Mexican classics are turning that rule on its head.
The best of the lot, or so we were told, is Pujol, a restaurant founded by culinary savant Enrique Olvera in 2000 when he was just 23-years-old. The restaurant is sparse and simple and doesn’t have the look of the place that is becoming a legend. But the food truly was an out-of-this world experience. We ordered the avocado raviolis, which were made with chunks of smokey shrimp, and a some buttery short ribs that were topped with a reduction of mole sauce that tasted like no mole I’ve ever had. It was the type of meal where you linger over every bite, chewing longer than usual just to keep the flavors coming. I’m still partial to street tacos, but a splurge like Pujol every once in a while is no sin.
The best part about the place might be that chef Olvera actually offers cooking lessons through his satellite restaurant TEO. The classes are limited to 12 lucky people and reportedly fill up months in advance.
Do you have any Mexico City eating recommendations? Let us know, we’d love to hear about them.
A day without Wal-Mart in Mexico
The anti-Wal-Mart movement is fixture in the U.S., but relatively new to Mexico, where the giant retailer has 997 stores. There have been a few sporadic protests at specific stores, including a Wal-Mart near the pyramids of Teotihuacan and in the picturesque lakeside village of Patzcuaro.
But this weekend, a group of Mexican and U.S. organizations, including the AFL-CIO, kicked off what they hope will be a sustained protest of Wal-Mart labor practices in Mexico, as a group of workers fights to form a union. It began at a store in southern Mexico City on Sunday with a so-called “Day Without Wal-Mart,” which featured protesters handing out leaflets urging shoppers not patronize Wal-Mart and a short rally.
The organizers decried Wal-Mart’s refusal to enter into collective bargaining with its workers or pay overtime wages. Wal-Mart in Mexico responded, according to Bloomberg, with a fact sheet boasting that it’s lowest salary is 18 percent higher than minimum wage.
Permalink | |
Ice skating in the Zocalo?
The world’s largest ice skating rink is now located … in Mexico City? The wondrous thing is smack dab in the middle of the Zocalo, Mexico City’s premiere plaza, where it bakes under a merciless autumn sun and captivates this city as it plunges into the Christmas season.
Tens of thousands of Mexicans have made the pilgrimage to the massive rink since it opened over the weekend, many waiting hours in line to strap on a pair of skates for the first time in their lives.
More than 1,500 pairs of skates have been trucked in (you could probably count the number of Mexico City residents who own their own skates on your fingers and toes) and 600 instructors are on hand to help the beginners with their first tentative steps.
Sunday, the first day of public skating, featured spills aplenty. Here’s how the El Universal newspaper described the scene: “The fear almost immobilized some, who were barely able to make it around the rink, going step by step like babies learning how to walk.”
The rink was inaugurated Saturday night and I have never seen the Zocalo more packed, even during the mega-rallies of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of 2006. But despite the fascination with the rink, many Mexicans question the wisdom of building it, given the high cost (about $1.5 million). The city is not exactly swimming in cash (it’s scrambling to find enough money to build a new municipal dump), and according to one newspaper poll, 48 percent of city residents oppose it.
But Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has never been one to shy away from splashy displays of governmental largesse. To great fanfare, last summer he built a series of urban beaches (mostly tons of sand around portable pools) that were ridiculed by the city’s wealthy set, but embraced by the masses of people who can’t afford weekend jaunts to Acapulco.
The new ice rink, the mayor said earlier in the week, will make Mexico City residents “feel like we are in Paris or New York, but prettier.”