On a recent visit here Bing Crosby announced his association with the Bosques de San Isidro golf and homesite development on the Barranca north of the city. He plans to build a hotel and cluster of cottages as well as a home of his own, he told reporters.
Crosby also plans a series of big purse tournaments for San Isidro, the first to be a Ladies Pro-Am, which will bring 25 of the top U.S. Ladies Professional Golf Association stars here to play with 75 Mexican amateurs, tentatively scheduled for December of 1973. The following year he plans a 100,000-dollar Bing Crosby Open in October. The Crosby International Pro-Am that is played in Acapulco in November will be moved to Guadalajara. Both of these events will be televised.
Crosby’s first sojourn south of the border was in 1937 and he became an instant booster for the country. Hunting, fishing and golf have led him to all parts of Mexico. His Spanish is adequate enough to talk you into giving him two strokes aside in a golf match.
He has been in Guadalajara dozens of times to play golf and visit his many Mexican friends here.
(Editor’s note: To our knowledge, none of the planned tournaments ever took place.)
1983
AMSOC buys burro
The American Society of Jalisco has added a burro to the ranks of the Rural Nurses Program and initiated a new door to door service to be provided by the nurses. The program sponsored by AMSOC is designed to benefit tiny outlying pueblos including Huichol and Cora Indian rancherias. The burro is to help the nurses deliver health care to remote communities of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain area.
Domitila Alvarez, one of the many rural nurses trained by the AMSOC program in basic medical procedures, hygiene and child care, will be using the burro to help cover the rough terrain she must cross in order to reach those who need her medical attention.
The burro was purchased by the Society with money earned from a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey contest featured at the organization’s most recent welcome to new members party.
Along with providing mountainous areas with medical attention, the Rural Nurse graduates are directing a door to door project in the community of Concepcion de Buenos Aires, near Lake Chapala.
Nurses will visit every home in the pueblo providing residents with hygiene instruction, first aid, family planning, control of parasites, nutrition and other health related subjects, all of which they have studied under the AMSOC program.
1993
PV hotels try toPrivatize beaches
Piles of stone limiting public access to stretches of Puerto Vallarta’s beachfront must be removed, according to the director of municipal public works, Arturo Cervantes Garcia.
Puerto Vallarta hotels Krystal, Pelicanos, Plaza las Glorias, Racquet Club and Sheraton were instructed in early August to ensure that public access to beach areas is not obstructed.
According to Mexican federal law, no beach in the republic can be privately owned and anyone is entitled to walk in any beach areas in front of hotels. However, this has not kept many vacation-resort hotels from constructing “walls” and blocking public access in an attempt to create “exclusive” beach areas for hotel guests. Members of the public trying to reach beaches through hotel lobbies are frequently stopped by hotel staff. In other instances hotels make public access to beaches by vehicle difficult by means of long and circuitous routes.
2003
Faux car legalization group reappears
One clear indication that the cyclical invasion of cheap, second-hand automobiles from the U.S. into Mexico has gathered momentum again is the appearance of outfits that promise to legalize vehicles with U.S. license plates.
Onappafa, a “non-profit” association that ripped off almost 2,000 drivers of foreign-plated cars who missed out on the nationwide auto legalization program of 2001 is back in business. For 500 pesos the “family patrimony protection organization” gives motorists a windshield sticker that they say will protect foreign-plated cars illegally in the country from being seized by authorities. They claim they have an agreement with Hacienda and the Jalisco Secretary of Finance (Sefin) to process the legalization of 25,000 cars.
A spokesperson for Sefin told the Reporter that it has no agreement with Onappafa and that Hacienda has not formally announced another legalization program.
Nationwide Onappafa defrauded many motorists of some 15 million pesos with promises to obtain Mexican license plates in 2002. Most of these people never received a refund.
2013
Raul Salinas de Gortari declared innocent
A federal judge has exonerated Raul Salinas de Gortari of all charges against him and ruled that a substantial fortune in seized assets be returned to him.
Salinas, the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who ruled Mexico from 1988 to 1994, spent a decade in prison until 2005. He was first indicted for laundering around 160 million dollars, said to be the product of drug trafficking and embezzlement, in 1995.
The following year Salinas was accused of being behind the 1994 disappearance of Manuel Muñoz Rocha, the federal deputy for Tamaulipas, but the charges were eventually dropped as Muñoz’s remains were never found. Then, in 1999, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison for masterminding the assassination of his brother-in-law Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, then secretary general of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1994.
Salinas was released from prison and had his Swiss bank accounts thawed in June 2005, when he was acquitted of Ruiz’s murder and cleared of money laundering.
In early August this year, a federal judge in Mexico City overturned the remaining charges against him, formally exonerating Salinas of embezzling 224 million pesos.
The judge ruled that at least 24 properties in Baja California, Guerrero, Jalisco, Mexico City, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Queretaro and the State of Mexico be returned to Salinas. The judge also ordered that the National Banking and Securities Commission unfreeze six bank accounts and six checking accounts that belonged to him.
Raul Salinas maintains that the charges against him were politically motivated, the result of a feud between his brother Carlos and his successor, President Ernesto Zedillo, who reportedly ordered Raul’s arrest in 1995.
Critics of Carlos Salinas have long suggested that he retains a strong influence over President Enrique Peña Nieto and the decision to exonerate his brother just eight months after the PRI reentered Los Pinos will only reinforce this impression.