Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
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June 2008
Where is all the Mexican basketball talent?
With tonight’s NBA draft, some here in Mexico are lamenting the lack of names from south of the border. While the NBA has gone international in a huge way, with stars from Croatia to China, Mexico has been pretty much been left to watch from the sidelines.
Basketball is maybe the fourth sport in Mexico (if that), behind king soccer, baseball and American football. While Mexican networks show NFL and Major League Baseball games, the NBA can’t crack the schedule. This year’s ultra-hyped Finals matchup between the Boston Celtics and L.A. Lakers was shown on an obscure cable channel.
So are there any Mexican superstars waiting in the wings? Judging by some of the names associated with the Mexican National Team, maybe not. The biggest name may be former UCLA center Lorenzo Mata, a Mexican-American who averaged 3.1 points last year in a supporting role. Another talent is the Chihuahua-born Hector Hernandez, who averaged nearly 10 points and 7 rebounds a game for Fresno State last year. The national team also has some intriguing American talent: Seattle Supersonics guard Earl Watson, whose grandparents were born in Mexico, recently joined the team and former Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson (and El Paso native) briefly coached the team before giving way to an Argentinian coach.
Mexico does have a professional basketball league with more than 20 teams, a league with little exposure or coverage and dominated by CBA-type American players and the occasional aging NBA player. Last year a Mexico league alum, Jamario Moon, made a big splash with the Toronto Raptors, winning rookie of the month honors for February.
If you know of any up-and-coming Mexican bball stars, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
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Video: Police blocked door, caused deadly stampede
But video recorded by authorities, as well as numerous witness statements, paint a much different picture: it now appears that police, who had been called to the News Divine club because of reports of underage drinking, blocked the only open exit to the club, creating the deadly bottleneck. The club, which had been closed for violations in the past, was particularly full because of a Friday afternoon party to celebrate the end of the school year. According to the AP, an emergency exit was blocked by cases of beer.
An uncensored video of the incident taken by authorities reportedly shows police blocking the exit. According to Mexican media accounts, the police were ordered not to let anyone out of the club until more buses arrived to cart away the underage patrons. During the ensuing stampede, nine clubgoers and three police officers died and authorities are investigating who gave the order.
This morning, 17 cops were removed from their post and could face charges. Yesterday, the officer in charge of the operation was charged with murder and there are whispers that Mexico City Police Chief Joel Ortega could be fired. One official with the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office told the El Universal newspaper: “It was a total error by police.”
Here is video taken of the chaos outside the club as the first bodies are taken out (be warned, these images may be hard to take):
Here is a heavily edited version of the video taken by police:
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Mexican cinema: a window into a world
We’ve been on a bit of a roll watching Mexican movies lately - about five or six in the last couple months. After stuffing ourselves with so much Hecho en Mexico cinema, it’s hard not to notice some common threads running through the latest crop of movies, some excellent, some hard to sit through for an entire viewing.
Mexican movies are a world away from Hollywood - instead of glitzy soundstages, the gritty, traffic-choked Mexican capital serves as the ultra-realistic setting for most. But Mexican movies also seem to share another trait. Most are unsettling - you don’t leave the theater feeling all is well with the world. There are are no tidy endings. Most are as messy and ambiguous as the city itself.
Drama/Mex, another good movie (it’s become a festival darling) features a spectrum of flawed characters: a suicidal bureaucrat, an underage prostitute, and a young couple who can’t help hurting each other between jumps into bed.
But the best of the lot is probably Parpados Azules, an unusual love story that comes closest to veering into happy ending territory. It features two of the most emotionally stunted characters to ever grace the big screen (the female lead is Cecilia Suarez, perhaps the finest Mexican actress of the moment). Suarez’s character moves through life fleeing from any type of real connection with another human being while her eventual love interest is a bureaucrat stuffed in the basement of one Mexico City’s many faceless government buildings. The last time he felt a spark was in high school, and the 30-something has a hard time talking about anything else. The two inevitably join together, and the result is at times touching, but often painfully empty.
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Low gas prices = SUV boom in Mexico
Do high gas prices change consumer behavior? A comparison of American and Mexican car buying trends seem to give a resounding yes to that theory.
In the U.S., where gas has topped $4 a gallon, SUV sales have dropped dramatically (pickup sales fell 36 percent and large SUVs fell 42 percent in May, according to Bloomberg). Meanwhile in Mexico, where subsidized gasoline costs about $2.70 a gallon for regular unleaded, sales are spiking. SUV sales have jumped about 5 percent in the first months of the year, while sales of practical, high gas mileage compact cars fell 2.5 percent.
“The gasoline subsidy is benefitting high (gas) consumption autos and that’s why we aren’t seeing demand behaving the same way as in the United States,” Jose Gomez Baez, president of the Mexican Association of Automobile Distributors told El Universal.
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A cure for Montezuma’s Revenge?
One of the best parts about coming to Mexico is savoring its delicious street food. But for many visitors, the looming threat of traveler’s diarrhea (otherwise known has Montezuma’s Revenge) is enough to scare them away from eating anything that’s not on a restaurant menu.
Thanks to some researchers with the Iomai Corp, such worries may soon be a thing of the past. Reuters is reporting that the company has come up with an experimental vaccine (it has yet to be approved by the FDA) patch that that travelers could wear when they take a trip. According to a study of the patch, 11 percent of travelers who took a placebo while traveling in Mexico and Guatemala got severe diarrhea; only 2 percent who took the patch got majorly sick.
The patch is apparently the first vaccine against a strain of E. coli that is the top cause of traveler’s sickness. A UT-Houston professor told Reuters the vaccine is “one of the most exciting new developments in travel medicine.”
Hallelujah. That should mean the wonderful world of tacos campechanos, tortas cubanas and gorditas and sopes should soon be available to everyone.
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Salma and Penelope: we didn’t hang with narcos
The witness said the movie stars were guests of Sergio Villarreal, “El Grande,” who is linked to the powerful Beltran Leyva organization.
Hayek told reporters that the production office for Bandidas set up the lodging in the mountainous state of Durango, and that she never met the owners. Cruz said she never stayed at the hacienda and her rep angrily chastised the Mexico City daily El Universal, which reported the allegations earlier this week. “We are very surprised because we would have liked to have been asked about this before it was published,” said Antonio Rubial. “We all know how these things work in Mexico and to what point the source is reliable.”
El Universal claimed it had reached out Cruz before reporting the story, but that it got no answer. (After reading the Mexican newspapers for two years, I can say that it’s common practice for papers to print allegations without comments from the accused and then to print a follow-up story the next day with the response.)
Several Mexican stars have been linked to narcos in the Mexican press recently, mostly performers who reportedly gave private concerts. Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the son of a Colombian drug lord, wrote in a recent book that Juan Gabriel performed for a narco party.
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The bicentennial edition: best and worst of the last 200 posts
Following the tradition of post number 100, we sift through some of the best and worst moments of the last 10 months with the 200th post of Uncovering Mexico. From bribes to crushed pineapple mixed drinks, it was an interesting year.
Strangest Night
We arrived in San Marcos, just south of Acapulco, on the fifth day of the town’s annual feria, and it seemed the entire town was deep into a bender. The first day it was a challenge to find sober people to interview and things just got weirder when we went to the cockfights in an abandoned lot (we were there for a story on imported American birds). The fights were supposed to begin at 7, but didn’t start until closer to midnight. Meanwhile the grizzled old men (and a few women) got steadily drunker. When the fights started, so did the betting. San Marcos is a poor town, so poor that most men migrate to the U.S., but on this night guys were pulling out fat wads of pesos, betting hundreds and even thousands of dollars on a single fight. The floodlights added to the sensation we were on a Hollywood set. A few guys tried to get me to bet on the birds, but I begged off, explaining that I had no idea how the betting worked. We got out of there after the first couple fights, but the night was just beginning. The cockfights lasted until breakfast time.
Best Cocktail
We arrived in Guatemala City for last summer’s election in the middle of a drenching thunderstorm and scurried inside our hotel as the power flickered on and off. It was harrowing enough to require a direct trip to the hotel bar, which was decorated like a private British polo club and couldn’t have felt more out of place in Central America. But when the waiter brought a mix of fresh pineapple juice (forget that canned stuff) and local rum all the worries of the night melted away like butter in a frying pan. Salud!
Second Best Cocktail
I’m not sure pulque qualifies as a “cocktail,” but I drank some truly delicious versions of the ancient Aztec beverage while working on a story about its resurgence. The best was pinon, or pine nut, at a pulqueria in southern Mexico City called the Blue Bird. The drink itself was blue when the bartender scooped it out of a huge wooden barrel and tasted like no other drink I’ve ever ingested. It was milky, yes, but had subtle nutty flavors that weren’t overpowering or too sweet. I finished half the glass and took the rest home in an old Coke bottle the bar uses for to-go orders. When I tried to open the bottle a few days later at home, it nearly exploded, as I learned a vital pulque lesson: the stuff just keeps fermenting.
Most Stereotypical Encounter with Police
Back in San Marcos, we had our license plates confiscated by the local police looking for a little mordida, or bribe. The cops waited for us to park and go inside an Internet cafe before unscrewing our plates. Luckily a local woman alerted us and we were able to run outside and confront the officers. They claimed I had driven the wrong way down a one-way street and that I would have to come to the police station Monday morning to get the plates back (this was Friday afternoon). To make a long story short, after much wrangling, I paid 60 pesos, about $6, to get the plates back. I gave the cop the money in coins in full view of half the town on the main plaza. We later learned that the cops often target cars with out-of-state plates, figuring on an easy pay day.
Best View
In the south of Mexico City, there is a sandwich stand called Muertorta, which offers up the Cubana, a 4.4 pound monster of marinated pork, onions, dripping cheese and hot dogs. The place gives them out free to anyone who can eat two. In more than 20 years, only one person has pulled off the feat. Many others buy one and use if for a few days’ worth of meals.
Most Underrated City
Just a couple hours from Mexico City, Queretaro has all the charm of a colonial city without all the tourists. Overshadowed by more well-know colonial gems like Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Oaxaca City and San Luis Potosi, Queretaro is decidedly off the radar. But there’s more history there than in most places (it is the site of the signing of Mexico’s Constitution) and it has plethora of good restaurants and boutique hotels. And the city makes a great base for exploring the psychedelic cactii of the nearby deserts as well as the missions in the fascinating Sierra Gorda.
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Mexican journalists still under attack
Two years ago, I attended a conference on protecting journalists in Nuevo Laredo at the height of that city’s drug violence. More than one hundred journalists convened on the beleaguered city, offering solidarity to their Nuevo Laredo counterparts and trying to figure out how to cover drug trafficking in a country where the authorities are unwilling or unable to protect journalists from cartel hitmen.
Ten days after the conference ended, the journalists of Nuevo Laredo heard back from the cartels: the offices of El Manana, the city’s biggest daily, were attacked with machine guns and grenades, leaving one reporter paralyzed. The drug traffickers goal was to silence the newspaper and soon afterwards editors decided it wasn’t worth risking lives to investigate drug trafficking and the newspaper stopped reporting on the story that was ripping apart their city.
Newspapers throughout Mexico have had to resort to this type of self-censorship, especially those along the border or outside the major cities. The reason is not just the ferocious response of the cartels, but the deafening lack of a response from the Mexican government. Of the 21 reporters killed in Mexico since 2000, human rights organizations say few cases have been adequately investigated by authorities. As Mexican lawmaker Gerardo Priego Tapia told the journalists assembled for Saturday’s panel, “Here in Mexico a reporter is killed and no one does anything.” Whereas killing journalists in the U.S. and many other countries is considered unacceptable by the larger society, in Mexico it provokes little outcry.
As if to underscore the grim situation for Mexican journalists, on the morning of the panel discussion, news broke of a decapitated head delivered to a newspaper in the southern state of Tabasco. The body, found on the outskirts of the city, came with a message: “keep it up snitch; the army won’t protect you.”
So what is the solution? Some suggest that covering drug trafficking will have to become the purview of the Mexico City press corps and foreign correspondents, those who don’t live in the communities where the narcos ply their trade. But even those journalists aren’t immune from the cartels’ reach as last year’s threats on Texas reporters showed.
One solution often put forward is the idea of making threatening or attacking journalists a federal crime. Such a move would “create political accountability, with the federal government broadly responsible for protecting freedom of expression,” says the Committee to Protect Journalists. But “federalization” is just one piece of the puzzle. Most agree complete overhaul is needed. As long as the Mexican justice system remains weak (“collapsed” as one participant put it) and rife with corruption, journalists in far-flung pueblos will continue to be at the mercy of powerful drug gangs.
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Merida Initiative doomed?
But then both the U.S. Senate and the House trimmed the original aid amount and placed several conditions regarding human rights on the money (Mexico’s military, which would get a good chunk of the aid, has been accused of several atrocities during its time fighting the cartels). The aid package also calls for Mexico to implement civilian investigations of military abuses.
Mexico, always touchy when it comes to perceived meddling from its powerful neighbor to the north, has flatly rejected the conditions. Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino has called the conditions “unacceptable” and “counterproductive.” And Mexican officials aren’t holding out hope that U.S. lawmakers, in an election year, will change their minds and remove the conditions.
Of course, Mexico doesn’t need the money as much now as it did a year ago, as it is swimming in a bonanza of oil money thanks to skyrocketing oil prices.
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IHOP goes upscale in Mexico City
But in Mexico City, IHOP has become the Next Big Thing (The first IHOP opened in Monterrey a couple years ago). The Reforma newspaper reports that on a recent afternoon the wait time for a table was nearly two hours. Weekends it seems it’s impossible to get a table without a reservation. And IHOP in Mexico is decidedly upscale: there’s valet parking and the first restaurant is located in the exclusive neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec. Upcoming branches will reportedly be located in ultra-sophisticated areas like Santa Fe and Polanco.
A reviewer for Reforma was at a loss to explain the restaurant’s popularity in the DF: “The place doesn’t have much charm,” wrote Myrna Martinez. “The decoration is so simple that it borders on austere.”
IHOP isn’t the first American chain to migrate across the border to be reborn as a trendy, upscale status symbol. Starbucks have become meeting places for city’s wealthy youth, Chilis is a hotspot for movers and shakers and Blockbuster serves an upper-class clientele. Even H-E-B has some stores in Monterrey that feel more like a luxury department store than a supermarket.