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Friday, January 25, 2008

The ultimate half-time show

By Jeremy Schwartz | Friday, January 25, 2008, 01:59 PM

Hands down, the coolest half-time show I’ve seen in any sport took place last weekend at a soccer game between Mexico City’s Cruz Azul and Santos of Coahuila (which should be the home town team for Austinites given their proximity).

If I had known what was going to unfold I would have videotaped it, so hear goes the written explanation: Two men ran parallel races through an obstacle course. So far so good. In the first leg, the men ran with parachutes strapped to their back, which slowed them up a little. Then they jumped on tricycles and tried to pedal their way across a steeply pitched see-saw (they went almost vertical before the see-saw crashed to the ground). They were then met by hulking luchadores, the famous Mexican masked wrestlers, who tried to keep them from advancing. The men were slapped, kicked, tackled and pile driven. If they managed to make it past the wrestlers, they found a teammate strapped inside a gigantic ball who they then had to roll into the goal while the same wrestlers tried to take out their knees. That, my friends, is entertainment.

Forget grown men in animal costumes doing dunks off trampolines. The Mexican soccer league knows how to do half-time.

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Mexico drug war really is like a movie

By Jeremy Schwartz | Friday, January 25, 2008, 01:31 PM

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Remember that movie The Departed, where Matt Damon’s character joins the Boston Police Department so he can serve as the inside man for Jack Nicholson’s criminal enterprise? Well, it seems that that little ploy is in full effect here in Mexico, according to an article in this morning’s El Universal. No longer content to corrupt existing police officers, Mexico’s drug organizations are apparently sending their own stealth officers through the training academy and into unsuspecting law enforcement agencies.

“They infiltrate the authorities to create a group with impunity,” said top federal prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos.

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Vasconcelos should know — not only is he one of Mexico’s most respected law and order men, but he was also a target of two assassination attempts over last month that authorities believe were carried out by the Sinaloa Cartel. Police foiled both attempts when they arrested the alleged gunmen just before the hit was supposed to take place. Among those arrested were three high ranking police officers, who just may have entered the force under the scheme described above.

The arrested men were found with vests emblazoned with FEDA, an acronym for Arturo’s Armed Forces, a nod to drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, whose brother was arrested this week.

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