Columns

December 10, 2008, an intriguing, romantic and tragic German-American film titled “The Reader” was released.  It was produced by two great film-makers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died before it was released.  Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet starred.  It remains a movingly fateful love story with a stinging twist shaping the end in which a woman kills herself to hide her illiteracy.  Winslet  won the Academy Award for Best Actress.  

President Enrique Peña Nieto visited China, Australia and the United States after the disappearance of the 43 students in the village of Iguala, Guerrero.  As public pressure forced him to meet with the students’ families, he insisted the encounter take place not in Guerrero, but in presidential territory.   Those grieving and incensed families were not at all pleased.  

Backed by numerous international economic forecasters, the administration of Mexican President Peña Nieto predicted a buoyant year of vigorous growth, robust foreign investment, muscular job creation and, magically, lower prices for consumers.

Present scrambled circumstances are bourgeoning. They are dipping foreign visitors (long- and short-term) to Jalisco’s “Lakeside” into a changed and squeezed together “North Shore.” It’s a place that increasingly sees itself painted a shade of metropolitanism... almost.  Often, this, in turn, seems to frustrate some outsiders who are trying to join together a scrambled “almost” with the vast and handsome lacustrine expanse once ambitiously known as the “Chapala Riviera.”

I live in a tile-and-carrizo-roofed house built in the early 1970s.  It’s set in the cerro some distance above Joctotopec.  

The United States Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which collects such data, reports that there were 40,000 known suicides in the U.S. in 2012.  That is the most recent year for which complete data are available.  And 40,600 suicide deaths make it the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. Someone in that country died by suicide every 12.9 minutes in 2012.  And a physician friend last November suggested that number had grown robustly since then, “continuing its account for more years of lives lost — after cancer and heart disease — than any other cause of death.”