Posted 5 years, 2 months ago mid-afternoon by oso
On the front page of today’s El Norte is a photograph of Mexico State governor, Arturo Montiel and his nearly naked wife at a lavish seaside mansion in Acapulco. What sets this photograph apart from the typical daily digest of National Enquirer-like snapshots of politicians and their entourages here in Mexico is its source, which (to El Norte’s credit) is written in large italicized print: http://el-lagarto.blogspot.com/2005_06_05_el-lagarto_archive.html
The largest headline on the front page might as well start paying rent. It’s been there off and on since the 1980’s at least and resurfaces more often then that damned blackhead on the side of my nose. Yet another group of academics or politicians or business executives or god knows who this time is proposing that Pemex – Mexico’s nationalized oil company – becomes privatized. Though in this article, I learned something I did not know before: in the entire world, there are only two countries whose oil supply is absolutely closed to foreign investment – Mexico and North Korea. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and Cuba have public-private partnerships and the rest of the world (even Venezuela) allow some form of foreign investment and/or involvement. Privatizing oil in Mexico is not an economic question (Pemex is a commercial and environmental disaster), but rather a cultural one. After the fall of Porfirio Diaz and that nasty decade of revolution and chaos, nationalized oil became the defining symbol of national sovereignty. Just like many people hold on to failing investments because of symbolic attachement, the Mexican public is doing the same.
Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos has proposed that a team of ski-mask clad Zapatista soccer players compete in Mexico City against the Italian powerhouse, Inter Milan.
Inter Milan President Massimo Moratti and the Zapatistas agreed in principle to play a charity match, though Inter officials have said they have yet to formally start preparations.
According to the article, the Zapatistas will play while wearing their signature black ski masks.
Families of slain daughters who have been killed over the past decade in the turbulent border city of Juarez walked out on a meeting put together by special prosecutor Mireille Roccatti saying she’s full of shit and more interested in closing cases than investigating them. More than 350 women have been killed in Juarez since 1993. At least of 100 of those homicides followed the same pattern of sexual abuse followed by strangling followed by dumping the bodies in the desert outside the city.
As Google is busily scanning in the entire contents of three major university libraries, the state of Nuevo Leon (where I live) contemplates paying Kodak Mexico 9 million dollars to digitalize all of its accounting and administrative archived documents. I wonder how many decades of the 21st century are going to be spent just scanning things in. Most of my time creating online is really just playing catch up – typing in old journals, scanning in old photos, entering in contact information from old friends written on tiny scraps of paper. It’ll be a long time until I’ve digitalized all I can/want to from my past. The article says two separate research studies both found that Kodak’s technology is the best and most cost effecient for scanning in documents. That’s interesting. I wonder if Google won’t one day license their own technology. It seems like a lot of money could be made. I know Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archives and some others are also working on open source technologies to allow librarians and archivists to scan in massive amounts of searchable text documents. Too bad we’re still not smart enough to just go ahead and agree on an open source standard for scanning in text documents.
On the last two pages of the local section: “devil blamed for burning family’s houes,” “young rich kids in BMW found with two joints in San Pedro,” “15-year-old mother tried killing her baby,” “Two more suicides,” “sexual abuse in a high school,” “marijuana found by police mixed in with grass.”
Mexico competes with Russia and China when it comes to the largest “informal economy.” It’s more than just burned CD’s and DVD’s though – even Taxis here are counterfeit. Which is why the government just announced that all registered taxis will soon be outfitted with an electronic chip that can be detected by police. It would be smart to allow everyday commuters to also detect the chip. There have been several instances of commuters in Mexico City climbing into unregistered taxis – which look identical to their legal counterparts – and then being mugged and/or raped by the “drivers”. Officials estimate that at least 1000 illegal taxis will be confiscated.
Speaking of piracy, popular singer and actor, Ernesto D’Alessio “announced earlier this month that he wouldn’t record his next album because of piracy. He said he made teh decision because he’s sure “the bandits will pirate your material and sell it at a miserable price and since we singers live off our sales, for the moment it’s not worth it.” That’s pretty funny. Poor guy, he’ll probably spend the next decade moping on a private island in the Caribbean.
Maroon5 is really really big in Mexico. I don’t get it. I sure as hell hope no one pays $15 for a CD of theirs.
My apologies to Moreno for once again discussing my movements, but I’m just reading the newspaper. I had the shits last week. In fact, we both had the shits. Our house was full of the shits. It was so weird. I’d wake up in the morning, it was like around 95 degrees at 6:30 a.m., and head straight to the toilet for that terribly unsatisfying gastrointestinal blast of brown slushy. (or here in Mexico, trollebus) The girlfriend claimed it was because of the heat and I said, woman you are crazy, the heat dost not inspire the shits. But check this out, right here in the paper, it says now that the temperature is rising above 40 degrees celsius through much of the north, the hospitals are filling with clinch-cheeked patients. In Puebla alone, 93,656 have been to the hospital reporting diarrhea and 262 of them have died. Let me tell you, never will my obituary read, cause of death: the shits. It’s all too symbolic. Have any of you ever had a really bad case of diarrhea/dehydration in a developing country and had to drink salt water? Man, that stuff is the worst.
A volcano in Colima is erupting and the nearby towns are being evacuated. The article says that flaming hot rocks were seen being shot out of the crater. That’s pretty sweet.
Wow, ok, now we’re on the international page. I know, not part of the agreement, but this is too sweet: Salen ‘camionautas’ otra vez de Cuba. Camionautas is a play on words – something like Nautical Trucks. Damn, I gotta get one of those. It’s one of those old school cars – Kerouac used to call them Jalopys – with spare boat parts attached onto the front, back, and sides. I’m not entirely sure why they’d take apart a boat and attach it to their car instead of just taking the boat, but it looks pretty damn cool. Says here it’s a 1949 Mercury. Article says this is the third ‘camionauta’ intercepted in the past year (I wonder how many have made it through) and that since last October to now, 1,406 Cubans have been caught trying to enter Florida illegally.
Jimmy Carter wants Guantanamo closed, Lula wants all corruption stomped out in Brazil, Bolivian leftists want a new government, the Organization of American States want Bolivian leftists to shut the fuck up. Panamians were successful in avoiding cuts to their social security benefits, a cura (which I’d translate into witch doctor, but am afraid someone will get upset) was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined 70 dollars for sacrificing a dog.
There you have it. Our world according to an overpriced but usually not so bad newspaper in the wealthiest city of a developing country at the beginning of the 21st century.
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The camionauta was pretty cool looking. Oh yeah, and I’d like to see Zapatistas playing soccer. This reminds me of the 2001 “ZapaTour” that a lot of people considered a publicitity stunt to draw attention back to the EZLN.
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Oso,
Revaz directed me to your blog a few weeks ago. I liked your recent article but I disagreed with your comment that “Mexico competes with Russia and China when it comes to the largest ‘informal economy.’”
Most economists estimate that the Indian economy is 90% “black.” In fact, there have been studies stating that India’s GDP would increase by at least US $500 billion if the black economy was taken into consideration.
Considering that Mexico’s GDP and population is very small compared to India and China’s, I don’t think that you can even compare.
See these links:
http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/archives/000739.html
(second paragraph)
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2009/stories/20030509000107100.htm
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Vikrum,
I agree with you, something seems fishy. I was merely quoting from the article, but from my own experiences in both India and Mexico I’d have to give the fake gold trophy to India.
Even books are pirated in India. (which I took fool advantage of – there’s nothing like buying your choice of the NY Times bestseller list for 150 rupees)
I’m not sure how the article measured “informal economy” – it might just be an estimate of businesses without licenses rather than percentage fo GDP from the “black market.”
Anyway, welcome aboard. Your post on sexuality in India – From the Kama Sutra to banning Valentine’s Day – looks way interesting.
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I think El Norte is actually a pretty decent newspaper, but like every publication, it has its own particular ideological slant, which lately tends to be very pro-business and quite socially conservative. You may want to sample some of the other journalistic fare while in Monterrey: compare Milenio, which is also fairly socially conservative, but brings more of a leftist perspective to its coverage of industry and economic issues. La Jornada is Mexico’s flagship leftist newspaper, although it has toned down it’s stridency a great deal since the worldwide debacle of socialism.
With regard to the size of the informal economy in different countries: there are at least two alternative measures of the value of an economy’s total output (GDP). One is nominal GDP, and the other is Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) GDP. You may want to refer to a macroeconomics text for all the details and intricacies, but, in general, econometrists use PPP to calculate per-capita GDP, thus enabling a comparison of living standards across economies.
On the other hand, nominal GDP, which is calculated using market exchange rates, is the usual measure applied for comparisons of total output across countries. With that in mind, here are the most recent (2003) validated GDP estimates published by the World Bank (2004 will be available this summer):
Nominal GDP
PPP GDP
With regard to the issue of “underground” or informal economy, then, it may well be the case (simply due to the different methods of calculation) that, based on Nominal GDP, Mexico has a larger informal economy, while measured in PPP terms, India would have the larger informal economy.
¡Saludos!
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You left out the item of most interest in that story!
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It’s almost intimidating how intelligent the readers of this blog are.
Crazyhands,
You taught me a lot. I hope you keep checking back in and keep us on our toes. I completely agree with your description of El Norte – pro-business, socially conservative, and I’d even say biasedly pro-catholic. I’m completely used to the first two since my hometown paper is equally so. I’m a big fan of La Jornada and read its online version at least once a week. (unlike El Norte, it’s available free online) Milenio, on the other hand I tend to stay away from since they seem more interested in AMLO’s girlfriend than his policies.
Prentiss,
That was in fact, what I meant to link to. And that was the picture blown up on the front page of El Norte. Which means they printed the wrong link – I can’t imagine they did it on purpose, but it seems like a silly mistake that shouldn’t have got past the copy editors. Either way, the guvna’s wife has some impressive curves.
This sort of corruption amongst Mexican politicians seems run of the mill to me, but I’m glad bloggers are starting to make more noise about it. Last week Ana Maria Salazar dedicated an entire show to combatting corruption and I was disappointed that she spent about 30 minutes talking about the new “don’t buy pirated DVDs” announcements they’re playing before movies and not one second on the Arturo Montiel story.
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You think the Zapatista soccer players will sell space for a swoosh on their ski masks? (Just a joke — the ski mask itself is one of the most ingenious brands of the last half century and there’s no way they’d dilute it.)
A while back I heard this report or something similar about El Paso journalist Diana Washington Valdez’s book claiming that the Juárez killings were being carried out essentially for fun by a group of men from prominent families. But her book seems to be available only in a Spanish edition from a minor publisher. Did she swallow an urban legend or is there some other reason why her theory isn’t in wider circulation? Here’s a review with a slightly different angle from the NPR one two years ago.
I think what Google is doing with books and what Kodak would do with administrative records are related but not identical processes. Scanning books is usually harder than scanning files of individual documents, because books are clumsy and fragile and need to be handled with white gloves; under the right circumstances you can even feed piles of loose documents through a sheet feeder. On the other hand, as far as I know all Google plans to do is offer images and OCR full-text search of the books, whereas with office documents you are likely to want an extraction of more structured data (at a minimum you’d want account or file numbers). Google’s library project is by far the largest digitization project done with books, whereas Nuevo León’s is probably modest in the office-doc world. One of the big engines driving mass digitization of corporate documents is legal discovery: when multibillion-dollar companies get into lawsuits, one of their weapons of choice is to blast each other with cannonades of millions of documents. That used to happen in the form of fleets of trucks carrying dead trees, but now it largely happens digitally.
(I’m studying in a program which teaches both archiving and digital preservation so I ought to really know what I’m talking about here; in fact I haven’t taken those classes so I’m making this up.
But I think it’s more or less right anyway.)
Yes, I’ve had GI problems before which sure seemed to coincide with heat. I once cut a trip to India short by four days and missed the Taj Mahal for that very reason. Although if it’s happening to the locals, too, I would wonder whether it’s the heat per se or a heat-induced bloom of some local bug — infectious diseases have their seasonal ebbs and flows, after all. And yeah, those rehydration formulas are nasty. I swear the one I had to drink in India did me more harm than good because it stimulated my nausea so. Surely you can get Gatorade in Monterrey?
Why haven’t the Cubans sold all their collectible cars on the international market yet? Yes, the most obvious customers are here in the US behind the embargo, but still I’ll bet a boatload of cool 50’s cars would fetch a pretty penny in Canada or Europe. Or maybe Japan. God I so want to visit Cuba once before there’s a Hard Rock Cafe Havana.