Tag: Mexico

Texas wastes million$ on hiding from Mexico

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As Governor Greg Abbott’s scheme to wall off Texas from Mexico quickly and quietly accelerates, the state has now doled out $830 million in contracts to raise over 30 miles of border barrier.

Last week, the Texas Facilities Commission approved its fifth construction contract for the project, worth $137 million, to erect nearly 7 miles of steel-bollard fencing along the border in Webb and Zapata counties. That’s on top of the over 9 miles that the state contracted to build in Webb earlier this month.

As fast as $$$ pour in the door, Abbot and Trump shovel ’em back out. Wonder how many land in whose pockets?

Mexico City to replace Columbus statue with indigenous woman statue

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Gone but not forgotten…

A statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus situated in a prominent position in Mexico City is to be replaced with one of an indigenous woman…

The statue’s former position will be dedicated to a monument that delivers “social justice” regarding the historic role of women in Mexico, particularly those of indigenous origin, Ms Sheinbaum said.

“Of course we recognize Columbus. But there are two visions,” Ms Sheinbaum said, adding that one of these was the European vision of the “discovery of America,” even though civilisations had existed for centuries in Mexico…

At the time, authorities said the statue was removed for restoration work and to allow reflection about Columbus’s legacy.

Obviously, reflection led to decision. One worth endorsing.

Looks like first humans arrived in North America 20,000 years earlier than imagined

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Andrew Somerville, Iowa State University

An unexpected discovery by an Iowa State University researcher suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago – nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought.

Andrew Somerville, an assistant professor of anthropology in world languages and cultures, says he and his colleagues made the discovery while studying the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. As part of that work, they wanted to establish a date for the earliest human occupation of the Coxcatlan Cave in the valley, so they obtained radiocarbon dates for several rabbit and deer bones that were collected from the cave in the 1960s as part of the Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. The dates for the bones suddenly took Somerville and his colleagues in a different direction with their work.

The date ranges for the bone samples from the base of the cave ranged from 33,448 to 28,279 years old. The results are published in the academic journal Latin American Antiquity. Somerville says even though previous studies had not dated items from the bottom of the cave, he was not expecting such old ages. The findings add to the debate over a long-standing theory that the first humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas 13,000 years ago.

Wow! Fascinating stuff.

Mexico’s Deadly Elections

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Mexico coppers patrolling neighborhoods at election time
Luis Antonio Rojas/Washington Post

Mexico is in the final days of one of its most violent electoral campaigns in modern times. Eighty-nine politicians have been killed since September, according to the security consulting firm Etellekt. Scores more have been wounded or threatened. The campaign has become a stark illustration of crime organizations’ quest to expand their control of Mexico’s territory, a rising threat to this young democracy…

Crime groups that once concentrated on exporting drugs to the United States have diversified into extortion, kidnapping and narcotics sales. A U.S.-backed effort to decapitate big cartels caused them to splinter into competing bands. Heroin producers sought additional routes, to respond to a growing American appetite for the drug and to evade federal authorities…

RTFA. The details make the days of Al Capone in Chicago seem like a summer festival.

The eruption of Paricutin volcano

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There are very rare occasions when people can see a new volcano emerging from virtually nowhere. Considered by some as one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, Parícutin volcano is undoubtedly one of the wonderful geomorphological landscapes of the Globe…

Parícutin volcano was born on a Mexican cornfield owned by Dionisio Pulido, a farmer who saw vapor emanating from a hollow and shortly afterwards, witnessed the beginning of a unique event of a volcano being created…

[February 20, ~4 in the afternoon]…Pulido reported…I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened . . . and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter. I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself 2 or 2.5 meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen . . . Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.

I saw a roughcut documentary of the birth and growth of this volcano around 1948-1950. Sound overdubbed on film probably 16mm Ektachrome or something similar. May have been made from the work of Howard Thompson, though folks who manage his estate say his film records weren’t available that early.

Wherever it came from, it impressed the heck out of me. I was still in elementary school at the time.

Ex-Mexican government minister busted for drug trafficking

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Mexico’s former defence secretary has been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, becoming the latest in a string of senior officials accused of collaborating with the very criminal groups they were supposed to be confronting…

(General Salvador) Cienfuegos was Mexico’s top military official during the 2012-2018 presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, and played a key role in the militarized “war on drugs”…

Generations of the Mexican military have been implicated in drug violence: the country’s first anti-drug czar Gen Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was arrested in the late 1990s and convicted of taking bribes from drug cartels…

But the armed forces remain one of the country’s most trusted institutions, “despite their known issues with corruption and human rights abuses”, said Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez, a sociologist in Mexico City.

It can’t happen here! Right?

Not when you can make as much or more as a “consultant” to drug companies, military weapons manufacturers, Republican Party, Democratic Party, blah, blah, etc..