Recently in Mexico Category
PALENQUE -- Last month, Mexico decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of pot, heroin, methamphetamine, and acid. You still can't buy or sell drugs, and if you have more than a very small amount you can still get in serious trouble. At Room for Debate, the New York Times has asked five luminaries to give opinions on this move. Some are insightful. I could weigh in with an opinion, too, but since this blog is a reported one, I instead procured a bag of psilocybin mushrooms and ate them in my hotel room, to experience a newly semi-legal Mexican high myself.
Read MoreMEXICO CITY to VILLAHERMOSA -- With few exceptions, a warlord is someone who controls a stretch of road and can, with the threat of force, extract tolls from anyone who uses it. That definition serves well in Afghanistan, where the Taliban rose to popularity in part because they subdued the warlords and made the Kandahar-to-Kabul highway something other than a suicide rally where every few miles lurked another unpredictable suzerain of the road.
Read MoreIn my previous post I wondered why almost no one copies Mexico City's signature crime, the "express kidnapping," in the U.S. and in big and chaotic cities like Cairo. Via Reihan and a worried Matt Yglesias, Noel Maurer explains:
Read MoreMEXICO CITY -- Since Cairo is the foreign city I know best, I often see its image in other world capitals. Usually those kinships present themselves in little flashes here and there, reminders that when you gather a few million people in one place they are certain to organize themselves in predictable and familiar ways. But in Mexico City, the resemblances are not fleeting; they are ubiquitous, even uncanny.
Read MoreSAN LUIS POTOSI to MEXICO CITY -- Along the highway to Mexico City, placards every few miles advertise the availability of "tuna" -- which puzzled me, till I put my brain into Spanish mode and figured out the vendors were selling not tuna but prickly pear or cactus fig. They also sell peaches, as well as fresh strawberries and cream. I tried the last of these, with no ill effects (yet).
Read MoreSAN LUIS POTOSI to MEXICO CITY -- Not far south of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican authorities reveal their presence for the first time, with the most haphazard checkpoint I have ever seen. Cars pass through at sixty miles per hour, which is too fast even to read the sign that says the federales are stopping vehicles to search for "contraband, weapons, and explosives."
Read MoreSAN LUIS POTOSI -- When Graham Greene, whose path I am now following, crossed the border from Texas, he vaulted almost immediately to San Luis Potosi, a place that then meant to Mexicans what Anbar now means to some Iraqis, or for that matter some Americans. In the rough deserts an insurgency thrived, seemingly ineradicable and openly defiant toward the Mexican state. By some reports the same is true today.
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SAN LUIS POTOSI -- Seventy years ago, Graham Greene crossed the US-Mexican border into a land blighted by violence, unrest, insurgency, and religious and counter-religious mayhem. If he came back today he would find a country riven by other forces, but in some ways just as chaotic, and just as worthy of the title he gave his account of the journey, The Lawless Roads.
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