Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 9, 2012, 8:00 am
Based on a study of 17,364 Mexicans the “average” adult Mexican male weights 74.8 Kg and stands 1.58 m tall; the “average” woman quite a bit lighter and shorter:  68.7 kilos and 1.58 m. For any adult age cohort you plug these figures into in a Body-Mass Index calculator (like this one here...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 7, 2012, 2:43 am
Josefina Vazquez Mota said her victory in the PAN primary was “historic” making her the “first woman” to run for the Presidency… well, at least from the right wing. Rosario Ibarra de la Piedra, Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (1982) Marcela Lombardo Otero, Partido Popular Soci...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 7, 2012, 1:40 am
One of the better things about Mexico is that political campaigning is tightly controlled, and the candidates can’t start bombarding the helpless citizenry with ads until 90 days before the election.  Which doesn’t mean they don’t try to put their best foot forward before they go toe to toe w...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 6, 2012, 6:07 pm
Los Angeles Times:   Two more tubas have been stolen from an area high school, extending a rash of thefts of the expensive instruments at Southern California campuses in recent months that instructors say is likely related to the popularity of Mexican banda music … With the surge in banda’s...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 6, 2012, 3:51 pm
It’s Constitution Day. Well, it’s celebrated today anyway… or celebrated to the extent that we’d have to pay holiday pay to the store clerk, so I’ll be flogging the slightly used and one-owner paperbacks today. All to honor Venustiano Carranza’s reluctant approval (5 February 1917) of t...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 6, 2012, 1:05 am
John  Donaghy takes a short break from his somewhat daunting duties as associate director of Caritas (Catholic Social Services) for the Diocese of Copan, Honduras to visit friends in San Crisobal de las Casas, and makes time to visit the very humble tomb of the late, great (and very humble) Samuel ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 5, 2012, 4:47 am
5-Feb-2012, 12:00 Oops… a bit of post-posting editing… a paragraph got moved and a few words were lost, making a mishmash of things. Not to mention my usual 2 AM misspellings. El Blog de Izquierda (and a tip of the sombrero to Erich Moncada for pointing me to an excellent political resource) ha...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 5, 2012, 1:34 am
The ordinary traveller, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package. Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wildernes...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 5, 2012, 1:13 am
The Mexican way to serve up kibbles … Filed under: Gatos
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 3, 2012, 11:12 pm
While the Mexican rural teachers’ colleges have specific issues that may not translate elsewhere, Mexico is hardly the only country where cuts in funding for higher education is leading to protests, some more violent than others. A thought or two An Alabama state legislator, in justifying salary...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Feb 1, 2012, 1:20 pm
Via MSNBC: Canadian Mounties canceled plans to send hundreds of officers to Arizona for training after finding out the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is accused of racial profiling, unlawful stops and other offenses against Latinos. Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were to receive train...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jan 26, 2012, 12:59 am
I was prevailed upon (flattery will get you anywhere, but I’d prefer to receive bribes) to begin posting with some sort of regularity here.  Right now, with at least a dozen projects for Editorial Mazatlán and our new imprint, Libros Valor, in process I’m finding it very difficult to do any su...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jan 23, 2012, 12:30 pm
Via Inca Kola News: San José del Progreso, Oaxaca. In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca one person was killed and another injured during a confrontation between mining opponents and police on January 18th. The middle aged farmer and a woman in her twenties, both indigenous Zapotecs, were among ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jan 18, 2012, 1:03 pm
Blogging by Boz said everything I would have said, though I would have made one editorial change: It’s unfortunate ironic that a number of industries are lobbying for legislation and regulations in the name of intellectual property… I’m not only an author, but the part owner of a book and e-...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 15, 2011, 7:00 am
After extensive travel and reading, I moved here on the first of September 2001.  Back in those dark ages on on-line communications I shared my excitement at being a resident, and not just a visitor, though emails.  One correspondent seemed to think things like my adventures with laundry, or my br...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 13, 2011, 2:00 pm
Cross posted from Voice of Mexico When in 2004, it began to become clear that Andres Manuel López Obrador was a serious candidate for President, and it very much looked like he would be President, opponents were continually flummoxed in their attempts to discredit the populist Federal District gov...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 13, 2011, 4:51 am
Arizona Daily Star (10-August-2011) A 40-foot stretch of mesh border fence east of Lukeville in Southwestern Arizona was knocked over Sunday by rainwater rushing through a wash. This is the first time any part of this 5.2-mile stretch of fence has been knocked down by floodwaters since it was buil...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 12, 2011, 5:30 pm
Wow… I thought I was cutting it close reducing Mexican history to a mere 472 pages.  The 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors have me beat in the brevity department, managing to reduce the entire history of China, from Peking Man to becoming the creditor to the United States to a mere three and a half min...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 12, 2011, 7:30 am
  The American press called Cantinflas the “Charlie Chaplin of Mexico.”  Charlie Chaplin, a man not known for modesty, however, called him the world’s best comedian.  Today is the one hundredth birthday of the Mexican whose comedy still transcends borders… even the Arizona one: Filed un...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 12, 2011, 6:54 am
Respected poet Efraín Bartolomé’s home in Lomas de Padierna, Tlapan was invaded yesterday at three in the morning by masked men carrying high-powered arms. As the poet and his wife, photographer Guadalupe Belmontes Stringel, cowered in their bathroom for the next five hours, the attackers smash...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 11, 2011, 5:22 am
Mexico’s economy is better than ours Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg Financial Reports, really rich guy, etc.) The only stock market NOT to take a nose-dive Wednesday were in Latin America.  The Bolsa de Valores Mexicana lost 0.5%. You figure it ou...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 11, 2011, 4:53 am
When you’re writing for something called the  “TransBorder Project of the Center for International Policy” I suppose it’s natural to fall into bureaucratic prose (full of references to “DTOs” — “Drug Trafficking Organizations”, or what the real world calls narcos — and such).  ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 11, 2011, 4:00 am
While some pundits will certainly overreact to the presence of any US security personnel in Mexico, what I find surprising is just how small this operation is. This article describes fewer than two dozen people assisting a fusion cell and perhaps another dozen serving as advisors for a police unit, ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 10, 2011, 3:09 pm
The government, in its continuing quest to sell the its mano duro (hard hand) focus on anti-crime activity, may be slightly stretching the importance of some captures. While kidnappers are no joke (and there are proposals to make kidnappers eligible for life imprisonment), and the fears generated b...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 9, 2011, 3:10 pm
Patrick Corcoran’s “crowbar” award (for the best gratuitous mention of narcotics in any news story mentioning Mexico) has, like the U.S. war on its favored chemical and agricultural lifestyle enhancers, found its way into the Central American republics. From the Latin American Herald-Tribune ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 8, 2011, 11:04 pm
Filed under: Gringo(landia) Tagged: Arizona, bone-headed stupidity, Generic idiots, WTF??
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 8, 2011, 5:17 am
 Carlos Slim lost EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS in four days.  That’s about 83 million dollars an hour. Much of the loss is attributed to a decline in the value of the Peso against the dollar, but a drop in world-wide stock prices (especially on the Mexican Bolsa) contributed to the eleven percent drop...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 8, 2011, 2:31 am
Via Patrick Corcoran (Ganchoblog) comes an intriguing question that I thought might just be an outlier in political discussions, until I also heard it discussed on  Televisa’s political press chat-show, “Tercer Grado” (“The Third Degree) — which means the talking heads are talking: In re...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 7, 2011, 7:18 am
Agence France-Press (my snark in boldface) The United States is sending new CIA operatives and retired military personnel to Mexico and may deploy private security contractors to fight drug cartels, The New York Times said. “Private security operatives” = mercenaries.  I said this was gonna ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 6, 2011, 3:15 am
Napoléon III has always gone gone in history as a devious sleazoid, but you have to give him credit for being an honestly devious sleazoid.  While his commander in Mexico, General  Elie Frédéric Forey, was making the usual rationales always given when launching wars of aggression, proclaiming h...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 5, 2011, 4:27 am
Sorry posting is a little on the light side right now.  I am working on a couple of other things (and I’ll be getting back to my “soap opera” version of the Spanish-English royal family conflicts that I think are the source for the U.S.-Mexican mutual mistrust and misunderstanding), but when ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 5, 2011, 2:04 am
Strange fits of passion I have known… while passionately tracking down a minor factoid about something entirely unrelated (well, at least tangentially related to Latin America), I learned something entirely unexpected. Lucille Ball and Fidel Castro: Both were Communist Party members . Both marri...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Aug 4, 2011, 3:12 am
Rick Perry, who thinks he wants to be President of the Republic of Texas, when he’s not making noises about trying to become President of the United States (probably, but not definitely, including Texas) has called for a “Day of Prayer and Fasting” at Reliant Stadium in Houston (seating capaci...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 15, 2011, 12:40 pm
There’s been a fad lately in Mexico for creating “world records”, usually in things like the largest tortilla or most naked people in one place or … so it appears… biggest marijuana field. At least according to official reports: The 300-acre Baja marijuana plantation is four times larger...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 14, 2011, 7:14 pm
Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! Contre nous de la tyrannie, Métal lourd est levé! Filed under: France, Music in English
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 14, 2011, 1:04 pm
U-17 Mexican forward Marco Antonio Bueno Ontivero is apparently being offered a contract by the Liverpool Football Club.  He wouldn’t be the first Mexican to go abroad to work at a very young age, but aren’t the British big sticklers for pushing for laws against trafficking in minors?  The Cul...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 13, 2011, 3:24 pm
It took a court order from the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación, for the Secretaría de Gobernacíon to FINALLY admit that after having broken the very simple law in this country that says ministers of religion cannot proselytize for or against any particular political party, ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 13, 2011, 2:14 pm
So, how many U.S. Representatives and Senators does it take to change a lightbulb?  I can’t believe (actually, I can) that light bulbs are a political issue in the United States.  Rather than deal with something like their aggressive wars against other countries (and the trillions of dollars its...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 13, 2011, 1:42 am
With a slew of constitutional changes that strengthen human rights guarantees, the Supreme Court was FINALLY a able to rule that human rights violations by the military must be heard in regular civilian courts.  The court decision was 9 to 3, the three dissenting ministers being Salvador Aguirre, J...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 11, 2011, 3:23 pm
Yup, somebody went there. Mazatlan, Sinaloa- The president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mazatlan, Maribel Chollet Moran said that her party stands in opposition to everything done by the new (PAN) municipal administration. Mazatlan said did not want a Hitler, to repress all...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 10, 2011, 11:27 pm
Facundo Cabral, the Argentine poet and musician who survived childhood abandonment, his wife and daughter’s death in an airplane accident, cancer,  blindness, and political exile, all the while  singing of hope for a better world, was murdered yesterday morning in Guatemala City. Though Cabral ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 10, 2011, 4:25 pm
The matriarch of the clan, having managed to marry into an ambitious family, and strategic violence successfully built up the family business into a huge and profitable enterprise.  Of the two daughters, the elder, who is heir to the family marries the hot stud … who turns out to be something of ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 10, 2011, 3:51 am
Unlike Aguachile, I don’t see anything outrageous about a daily hiring a failed politico as a columnist.  Rosario Robles, the former PRD party chair and interim governor of the Federal District between Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is remembered mostly for being spectacular...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 9, 2011, 2:30 pm
Via Mexico Trucker On-line: EL PASO — A border security program to X-ray every train rolling into the US has prompted as much as $400 million in fines against US railroads, which are held responsible for bales of marijuana, bundles of cocaine, and anything else criminals cram into the boxcars as ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 7, 2011, 8:51 pm
The Major League All Stars game… scheduled for Phoenix’s Chase Field next Tuesday is supposed to highlight professional baseball’s finest… although, being in Arizona, since the passage of the “Show us your papers” law, aka SB 1070, that could be a problem: … 27 percent of MLB players ...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 7, 2011, 8:08 pm
Cuatzacoalcos, Veracruz cattle-man José Facundo Montalvo Burgos is encouraging his fellow breeders to think about changing their ways slightly, and letting the water buffalo roam southern Veracruz. An advantage of buffalo is that the same animal can provide both milk and meat, although, as with ca...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 7, 2011, 3:11 am
… maybe not of execution … not in Mexico anyway,  which is relatively civilized (and doesn’t have a death penalty), but any of us who are U.S. citizens, and travel abroad, or live abroad, are in imminent danger of having our rights violated, in the event we are arrested or detained for any re...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 7, 2011, 2:36 am
… and he should get credit for:  making a convincing case for the need to take climate change seriously — a much better job than the leaders of some other North American Free Trade Association countries (two I could name). From Mexico Today, “a joint public and private sector initiative desi...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 6, 2011, 11:56 pm
General Pinochet must figure being dead is no reason not to have an after-life of crime.  He hasn’t just been pushing up daisies. From Sabina Becker: A marijuana plantation has been found in a sector of a hacienda where lie the ashes of the ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, a property currently und...
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Richard G. posted an article on The Mex Files - Jul 6, 2011, 1:46 am
Well, this is something TEA partiers and Mexican lefties (and center-ies) and righties) all agree on:  Fast and Furious was FUBAR. Of course, for right-wingers in the U.S. the bizarre operation under with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms knowingly allowed guns to illegally cross into Me...
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