A flurry of little things come up as new problems arise on the homefront, and new solutions as well. The international situation....economic turbulence....unreasonable reasonability. This can be mixed with unreported or mis-reported news about Mexico and Texas. Set all of this against the backdrop of the fourteen month long American commercial holiday season and it becomes an interesting artist's studio full of paints, easels, and canvas.
(1) At this time of year, the Old Gringo pauses to remember that Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves, nor did he particularly give a whit what would becomes of Negroes once emancipated by force. His preference was to send as many of them as possible to Panama to dig the canal that would make the world perfect for all times.
(2) The Mexican military, somewhat discreetly, announced the arrest and confiscation of a large container off of a Red Chinese freighter at dock in Lazaro Cardenas, an unfortunately-named port city, situated on the Pacific coast in the western State of Michoacan. The contents of the container? A large shipment of knock-off brand AK-47 rifles with automatic conversion capacity, a large number of knock-off brand 9mm semi-automatic pistols, and a large number of kn0ck-off military police style 12 guage shotguns, along with considerable amounts of the appropriate ammunition. The port rumour is that a complete inspection of the ship will reveal the truth of the issue. The ship is probably carrying a huge shipment of illegally transported arms. That truth is also that Communist Chinese, northern South American producers and transporters of drugs, Castro's Cuba, Hezbollah/Iran, and international black market arms dealers especially from Russia and Eastern Europe are the purveyors of arms into Mexico. Not dumboe American gun stores and collectors....but people who want to destroy Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada. Communists, Islamic psychopaths, professional criminal interests, and other people with no souls who hate liberty.
This announcement by the military has to have been allowed by the President of Mexico. It is a dangerous step in a way for the President to allow this official news to be made public. The official Mexican position is that the "gun dealers" in Texas and Arizona have been the main sources of guns for the drug cartels. This faery-tale helps, to some extent, the leftists who wander in Mexico's pantheon of illustrious bologna-legends that all ills in Mexico come from the United States. It has taken the better part of 24 years of centrist and center-right conservative governance to barely pick away at the dead petals in the chrysanthemum blossom, so to speak. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa has taken a brave step in the direction of telling the world, the Americans, and the Mexicans the whole truth and nothing by the truth now.
We must remember that that largest cash interception of recent history was the 215, 000,000 dollars, in true American currency as well as much other treasure that was found on the finca of a Red Chinese "vacationer" outside of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, at another mansion near Culiacan, Sinaloa, and at an ultra-mansion in the posh Lomas de Chapultepec section of Mexico City about four years ago. That amount of money being found in the possession of an agent of the Red Chinese Army....a high ranking general officer....posing as a common wealthy tourist... can only be considered as an act of war against Mexico. There can be no justification for it when a person can live the life of royalty even in highly developed surroundings in Mexican resorts....easily on 1,000,000 dollars per year and have lots of change left over.....lots of change...forever....seriously.
For a fairly accurate summary of the events surrounding this matter, oddly enough, Wikipedia has a good collection of facts and suppositions. They do make reference to the Chinese individual's being elevated to "Che Guevara" status with bumper stickers and t-shirts and the like, and it is not true that most Mexicans believe the Chinese individual's claim that he was just keeping the money for Calderon. The Chinese individual is not one of those nice, kind, little men from Shanghai who just happens to have 1,000,000,000 dollars laying around in his dacha in the form of ready cash, Mexican gold coin, jewels, Euro cash and bonds, etc. He is also just a "regular Chou" who has active wants, warrants, and search orders out in several countries and Interpol....some of them for complicity in homicide. The Gringo Viejo recommends the perusal of this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhenli_Ye_Gon and gives Wiki an A- for its analysis. In the article, there are hints at obfuscation and a bit of a willingness to ask the reader to believe that cows and pigs can fly and jump over the moon, but it is easy to see that this is not the fellow you wanted your daughter to bring home to meet you. He is not "Charlie Chan" or the nephew of Confuscius. He is a Chinese "businessman" who set up a receiving operation for arms, money, espionage, sabotage, criminal alliances, and preparatory military penetration of the North American Continent. It is the Red Chinese method of making war.
It is worth pointing out that the American Coast Guard and the Mexican Navy probably co-ordinated with each other in this operation against the ship currently in port. O'bama will apologise to-morrow, we are sure.
(3) The Consul General for the State Department of the United States of America, situated in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico announced yesterday that travel advisories to that city and the State of Tamaulipas have been cancelled. They cited the success of federal troops in re-establishing the previously existing order and urged travellers to exercise only the normal precautions involved in travelling anywhere, anytime.
In this same vein, the Gringo Viejo was surprized to note that he enountered a caravan of travel trailers....about 29 or 30....heading south during his last drive north from our place by the mountains in the interior. It was such a normal sight that at first he did not register it in his brain. But then, as trailer number six or seven went by, it dawned on him that the phenomena had been absent from the Mexican roadway for almost three years now.
What the caravaneers encountered was a peaceful transit over highways that have been up-graded from B- and A- to B+ and A during their absence. They also, knowing it or not, will be re-enforcing a pride inside the heart and soul of the "common Mexican" that their country has fought for itself and is winning the respect of "common Americans" who have the willingness to reach beyond the controlled news media outlets and do their own research. The War is not over. The skirmishes will never end. But, the improvement in social order is very much like the difference between the dead of night and the brightness of the dawn.
God Bless the Mexican Army and the Naval Infantry.
(4) During the next months, Mexico will undergo Presidential Elections. The leftists and communist elements have already launched an Abu Ghraib event to throw into the mix in order to defame the Partido de Accion Nacional, the present President's party. They are backing an effort by "international human rights organisations" to prosecute the Mexican military for 450 "human rights" violations. Unreasonable searches and seizures, abuse of power, the killing of innocents, destruction of evidence in collateral damage cases, torture, illegal detention, illegal interrogations, etc. are being alleged.
To begin, when one considers 450....in fog of war....having been fought over a five year period so far....with literally millions of contacts with the populace.....that, in and of itself is remarkable. Would that the Union forces had treated the Confederacy so well. Next, what the Mexican military was facing was a group that would kill an entire family, men, women, and children because of the fact that one of their family, forced to work as a mule, had lost his load of marijuana or drugs to the American or Mexican authorities or to another criminal organisation. This has happened thousands of times in these recent contratemps. Thousands. The atrocities committed by the military's enemies have been monstrous and legion. They are the same things the communist guerrilla did in Guatemala and that Rigoberta and the world press blamed on the hapless Guatemalan Army.
The fact is that the Mexican military was the most respected institution in Mexico before this all began, and their ratings have only risen to this point. They have also been remarkably open and rapid in the court martialling of issues of violation of rules of engagement, fraud, and other violations of military protocols and laws. Not perfect....they say so themselves...but remarkable positive and pro-active.
(Long sentence warning)
(5) Finally, when one worries about all the money going to Mexico....as if it is somehow being removed from here and taken there....the Old Gringo was amazed to see the hundreds of overloaded pickups and SUVs with American plates heading south during this Thanksgiving holiday period, loaded up with junk....new junk....that had been bought before "black Friday", and then taken down to family, close and distant, to begin the celebrations. Mexican purchases, made by Mexican legal aliens, Americans of Mexican descent, and Mexican tourists coming up just to shop on the border and other places in the United States will spend up to 20,000,000,000 dollars this season. "Christmas" for Mexicans begins lightly with American Thanksgiving and then gradually builds into a period of lethargy, paralysis, fun, fiesta, food, conviviation, too much beer, tequila, rum, and too much gift buying, laughing, crying, singing....including the national MONSTER celebrations of the Apparition of the BVM at the Hill of Tepeyac in Mexico City on 12 December 1531....then the Posadas, door-to-door carolling based upon the trials of the Journey to Bethlehem, then the Feast of the Nativity....and then on to the 6th of January and the arrival of the Three Kings and their additional gifts to children. WHEW!! Out of breath.
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St, Juan Diego, and the tilma with the
image of Saint Mary, and the probative
roses she gave him
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This should be enough for a while. Please forgive the longwinded nature of the entry. More later.
El Gringo Viejo
