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 on December 12, 2006.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Virgin of Guadalupe miracles
I was startled awake at 6 this morning and for a second I thought I had been somehow transported to Baghdad. What sounded like mortar rounds exploded with powerful booms from the church down the street. And then I remembered today is the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the artillery was in fact fireworks.
An estimated 6 million Mexicans are making the annual pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe in northern Mexico City to give thanks and commemorate the 475th anniversary of the Virgin’s appearance to Indian peasant Juan Diego. Some have walked for days from outlying villages to arrive in the city, while others finish the trek on their knees, crawling over asphalt and concrete to arrive at the Basilica.
The day’s first miracle occurred about noon, when a 28-year-old woman from Tlaxcala gave birth to a baby in the Basilica’s atrium. No word on the baby’s name, but I’m putting my money on, umm, Guadalupe.
Michoacán: The new battleground
It seems Nuevo Laredo has passed the torch to the central state of Michoacán when it comes to levels of unimaginable drug violence. The state has registered more than 500 drug-related executions and, more spectacularly, 17 beheadings this year.
In a show of strength by his week-old administration, President Felipe Calderon, who was born in Michoacán, is sending in the troops. Almost 7,000 to be exact. Michoacán will take on the appearance of a militarized zone, with 24 checkpoints on the state’s roads, flyovers searching for clandestine marijuana fields and a virtual sealing of ports on the Pacific Coast.
Vicente Fox tried to flood Nuevo Laredo with federal troops in 2005, an effort that did nothing to slow the grinding war between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. Those two cartel giants appear to have found another battleground in Michoacán, where proxy groups have been doing most of the fighting.
The most violent of those groups may be a local outfit called La Famila. While the Mexican government has said La Famila is linked to the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, the group has presented itself as home-grown vigilantes trying to do good.
Even as it claims responsibility for several grisly decapitations, it has taken out ads in local papers defending its actions, arguing that it is seeking to rid the state of purveyors of ice, a particularly addictive and damaging form of methamphetamine.
The group also has granted interviews to Mexican newspapers, telling El Universal that it is helping poor farmers and funding schools in the poorest regions of Michoacán, which is annually among the states sending the most migrants to the United States.