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 February.
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2007 > February
February 2007
Where Monopolies Rule, Cell Phones Costs Soar
When it comes to telecommunications, Mexico is a land of monopolies.
Billionaire Carlos Slim’s Telmex controls 94 percent of the landlines in the country, charging some of the highest rates on earth.
The situation isn’t much better when it comes to cell phones. Slim’s Telcel has about 80 percent of the market share and upstart Movistar takes much of the rest.
The lack of competition results in rates and pricing plans that seem outrageous compared to the U.S.
With Telcel, you need a plan that costs about $100 a month to qualify for free nationwide roaming, in a country with a minimum wage of $6 a day.
Since Movistar offered free roaming with more reasonably priced plans, and because it seemed like a scrappy underdog fighting the Telcel goliath, I recently switched to Movistar when my Telcel contract expired.
All seemed to be going well when, without warning, my cell phone stopped working. After calling Movistar I learned it had cut my service because I had surpassed my “credit limit” of about $60 (I was never told of this credit limit when I signed up, but it’s in the tiny fine print on the back of my contract).
I had traveled to Honduras for work and made international calls that had made my bill higher than usual. I certainly planned to pay the bill when it arrived, but Movistar apparently didn’t trust me and cut me off. I ended up having to make an emergency payment of the full amount to get my phone working again. I was told the only way to avoid such situations in the future was to leave a large cash deposit, which every Mexican I know tells me I’ll never recoup.
Coming Home: LA Gangster Style Finds a Place in Mexico
Federico Gama is a groundbreaking photographer from Mexico City. His acclaimed recent exhibition, Top Models: Mazahuacholoskatopunk, documented the emergence of punk, gangsta and gothic dress among recent indigenous migrants to Mexico City.
Gama has long been interested in questions of cultural identity within Mexico City youth groups. A few years ago he did another project about “cholos” living in the notorious slum of Nezahualcoyotl.
Cholos grew out of Chicano, or Mexican-American culture, and found their greatest expression in East Lost Angeles. The gangster-influenced cholo attire includes bandannas slung low over the eyes, flannel shirts with only the very top button buttoned and distinctive black and white tattoos.
Cholo style was most definitely a result of the Mexican immigrant experience in the southern U.S. as opposed to a style found in Mexico itself.
Yet, Gama explains, a group of youths who grew up minutes from the heart of Mexico City have found their Mexican identity within a culture born thousands of miles away and in a different country.
Gama says many of the Neza cholos learned of the culture from friends or relatives who had immigrated, and adopted it as their own. These new generation cholos even pepper their speech and graffiti with English words in an attempt to mimic the Spanglish of their cross-border peers. Their music, art and lowriders seem to have been magically transported.
The crackdown
The Tepito neighborhood has long had a bad reputation, mostly because it houses the country’s biggest market of bootlegged and stolen goods. Along with pirated DVDs though, the Tepito market is also known as a place to find drugs and guns.
For years, Mexico City has tolerated the situation, mostly, many say, because the street vendors are extremely well-organized and a potent political force come election season.
On Tuesday, the city government stepped into Tepito, kind of. Officials did not target the market, but rather a nearby apartment complex they say is a den of drug and pirated DVD activity. The government is taking the drastic step of expropriating the building and evicting residents. The government plans to turn the complex into a drug rehab or cultural center.
Residents will be indemnified, but only if they can prove they own an apartment. Understandably, the action has created an uproar in Tepito, where residents have taken to the streets in what promises to be a nasty fight.
The Tepito situation only highlights a looming problem: Lacking decent jobs, Mexico has turned a blind eye to perhaps millions of street vendors, many of whom sell pirated goods such as movies and compact discs. The day that the government attempts to confront the situation will surely be a bloody one, if it ever comes.
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Gay unions catching on in northern Mexico?
The new gay civil union law is under attack in Coahuila, even as legislators in neighboring Chihuahua are considering a similar law.
The conservative National Action Party is taking its objection to the Mexican supreme court, arguing that the law approved in Coahuila last month is unconstitutional. At the same time, northern Mexico continues to be the unlikely vanguard of gay rights in the Americas, as legislators from the Revolutionary Democratic Party in Chihuahua introduced a gay union bill this week.
Meanwhile, Karla Lopez and Karina Almaguer say they have been overwhelmed by the reaction since they became the first gay couple to sign a civil union in Coahuila on Jan. 31. The Matamoros couple apparently had no idea they were the first civil union in the country and are beyond bothered by all the press attention.
“They won’t leave us in peace; they won’t let us eat or sleep,” an annoyed Lopez told the Mexico City daily El Universal.
Permalink | | Categories: Central America
Oliver North, Central America and drug runners
Flying to the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras is sort of like going back in time. It’s the last remaining U.S. base in Central America, a throwback to the days when revolution seemed to rage throughout the area. It was here that Oliver North hatched his ill-fated plan to sell arms to Iran to finance the Contra war in neighboring Nicaragua.
Today the base concentrates mostly on counter-narcotics work in the region. Col. Christopher Hughes says the latest tactic of drug runners is to crash-land airplanes in the jungles of Guatemala and load the drugs into trucks before the authorities arrive. The U.S. military also has trained hundreds of Salvadoran troops at Soto Cano before their deployments to Iraq.
I visited the base last week for a story on its role in the rescue of a group of missionaries from the Atlanta area, whose open-bed truck toppled in Honduras’ remote central mountains. Here is a picture of the base I took from a Blackhawk helicopter, an unforgettable experience, along with a shot of hilly Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital.
Where lion meat sells for $36 a pound
Got a hankering for some lion meat? How about a crocodile steak? Skunk soup? Then Mexico City’s San Juan Market is the place for you, reports the Spanish news agency EFE this week.
It seems the otherwise humble market has become the source for hard-to-find exotic meats, which are getting snapped up by a growing number of high-end chefs and demanding foodies.
The market also sells xoloescuintle, a hairless dog that sometimes found itself the main course on pre-Hispanic dinner plates. Lion meat was selling for $36 a pound earlier this month. And the skunk soup? Apparently it helps cure skin infections.
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Techworld
After fruitlessly searching the megalopolis for some stereo headphones to fit my new Motorola SLVR cell phone, I realized I needed to pay a visit to the Plaza de la Tecnologia.
Sprawling for a full city block, the Technology Plaza is the place to find obscure computer parts, quarter-size MP3 players and laptops for $400 (a huge bargain in this city of ultra-expensive electronics). I first ventured into the plaza because it was the only place in town where you can find 100 feet of Ethernet cable, which I needed to connect wireless routers between our living room and the Cox office.
Squeezing past the army of software pirates outside (Microsoft’s new Vista operating system was selling for $15), I made it into the warren of stalls, each with its own aggressive hawker. At first I thought the great plaza would let me down — no one had the headphones I needed, which connect to the phone via a mini-USB connection.
But then next door, I found the equally chaotic Plaza de los Celulares (heaven for cell phone gadget freaks). An innocuous-looking stand had a whole selection of mini-USB headphones. Ahh, the joys of living in a city where you can find anything if you look long enough.
For first time, gay couple “marries” in Coahuila
A lesbian couple from Matamoros became the first Mexicans to legalize their union under Coahuila’s new civil union law Wednesday.
Karla Lopez and Karina Almaguer held the ceremony in a Saltillo hotel. PRI legislator Julieta Lopez, who introduced the bill amid much controversy, was one of the witnesses.
Coahuila’s law allows gay couples to formalize their union before a registro civil, a Mexican justice of the peace, and is aimed at protecting assets accumulated by the couple. It also confers retirement and social security benefits.
The couple traveled to Saltillo, Coahuila’s capital, from neighboring Tamaulipas state after learning about the law on the Internet. Officials in Coahuila said the border state could see an influx of same-sex couples from across the country looking to legalize their relationships.
(Karla Lopez, center, and Karina Almaguer, right. photo from El Diario de Coahuila)
Graffiti dreams in Mexico City
Like most world capitals, Mexico City has its share of graffiti-covered buildings and walls. Unfortunately, most are just plain ugly: boring black tags that serve to add to the city’s already chaotic vibe and turn some neighborhoods into visions of urban purgatory. But there are some gems to be found here, and none more so than in the dingy, otherwise depressing neighborhood around the city’s Terminal del Norte bus station. A wall there is covered with some of the best examples of graffiti in the city (and rivals some of the best I’ve seen in the U.S.). For those who’ve wondered how graffiti can be art, take a look at these examples. I’m posting just a small sample; if readers are interested, I’ll post more in the future.
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