The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
We lay well up on a rising slope, chins on our crossed arms. It was Father’s Day in the United Sates that morning. But at that time in Mexico nobody paid that any attention. Fathers didn’t seem to count. “You see anything?” my companion said. A hawk soared high on still wings noting us as he scanned the mountainside. I nodded at the bird. “There’s nothing to see.”
This week, the state of Veracruz reported more than 3,000 homicides in just four years, while Guerrero earlier counted hundreds of slayings in a matter of days. A cue for large numbers of Mexicans to shed their hopefully held complacency.
Unsurprisingly, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came out on top in Mexico’s midterm election June 7.
Don Elizar Dueñas got mad when a Hiuchol indian from the Rancheria Nayarit suddenly appeared. He stood several feet from the front door, silently waiting in the sun-rinsed morning mist for Alma Rosa Molinas.
The stuttery rains that have blown over the Cerrro de Santa Cruz some distance south of Guadalajara have been disappointing thus far (May 28). But campesinos there were so eager for the temporada de lluvias to begin, in any kind of way, that they celebrated extravagantly with a barrage of booking cohetes (skyrockets), a few pistol shots and not a little aguardiente — literally, firewater.
For much of his life, President Enrique Peña Nieto dismissed Mexico’s destructive blight, corruption, as “a cultural phenomenon.” An unfortunate one, but so commonplace that Mexican business people – those citizens that evidently count – are blasé about it. The less well-off tend to be angry about having to silently endure being robbed.
A young Huichol girl, gripping a costal with a machete sticking out, sat at the far end of the cattle truck. Forward, against the cab sat four mestizo workers. All the Mestizos – driver and workers – called her “La India” and tried to talk to her. Alma Rosa Molinas said nothing. She pulled her poncho tight against the cold. Only her eyes showed.
