We have spoken of El Zorro's background....

         This is something of profound interest to people who know and understand history instead of  just knowing  that its something in the past.  This is a monsterous, huge barn that was built to become a home.   Our best estimate would be that it was built in the 1868 - 1875 period.   It was built, obviously, en situs, in extreme North Central Texas....not many miles from the Indian Territory.   When it was built, there were still errant bands and groups of Comanche and Kickapoo, along with smaller and less frequent bands of Kiowa and western Apaches (Mescalero and Chericahua) who would still try to cause a bit of mayhem and destruction.

 

      The Cherokee and Choctaw who were already translocated (Andrew Jackson really was a slug) into the Indian Territory had pretty much turned the White Man into some form of ally, business partner, client, provisioneer, in-law, or some neutral to positive connection to him, his family and his sub-tribe, and nation.   There was still a bit of hostility here and there and now and again, but one can consider the person of Will Rogers to understand the simplicity, complexity, racism and anti-racism among the largely Confederate Cherokee and White groups who lived in that mystical, spooky, noble, harsh, and beautiful land 50 miles either side of the Red River. 

An old homestead home, not far from El Zorro's ultra-modern, ultra-deluxe
Metal Roofed "cabin" a long stone's throw away from this noble old timer.

         This noble structure, as is noted by sight, is made of hewn logs.   The logs are either cypress (sabinal) or pecan/walnut (nogal/ nueces).   The logs were cut and finished by a skillful ax man (or men).  The logs were planked, still something around 3 X 10 X 120 inches and variations.   The heavy planked part starts on a mounted rock pier foundation, and rises up to a height of 10 feet, where it forms the base for a vaulted roof...much less common at the time than one might think when watching re-runs of Bananas, or The Big Valleyhoo".   Each of the long members in the body of the walls probably cost up to 50 dollars gold, silver or Yankee greenbacks if that was all that was available.   Further, it was double-walled, and the space between filled with mud and rock.
      If they were done by El Zorro's collateral family, the ones who owned the home...with two grown men, skilled, working on the logs it  would have taken two to three weeks of steady felling and swinging.    Then, not to mention the draughting or dreyage back to the farmstead.   But delivered from some "big city" within a hundred miles...well, you can imagine just how expensive oats can be.

     Please note, consider that the woman standing by the chimney chamber....probably a tall girl if her descendants are a guide...and it would indicate a stack height of nearly 25 feet.   The bricks seem to be nearly adobe, and might represent the rough and ready work that might be done by a Mexican.   Were it so, he would have plastered it with gypsum, sand, and oyster shell and/or cow bones and/or perhaps finely ground limestone both in the house and all the way up to the mouth of the chimney.   Judging by the probable width, it seems enough to have been a stove, oven, and a hearth because the people at that time, if they could afford it, would make that space so as to enjoy the obvious benefits.   That would include multiple. simultaneous uses, and during the really bitter winter episodes that come down from the north...pleasant warmth for the nearly airtight home.

     Now, we are given to understand that this woman was born to this home, and the auto in the background is a 1955 Ford  in the right, rear background....was built probably 80 Years after the initial construction of the house.

     People in those days would become older, and then move to town, as it was said.  Houses such as these were not treasured so much although they saw a lot of joy and a lot of tragedy.  They were left to fend for themselves pretty much....facing thunderstorms  with large hail, lightening, floods, intense cold, oppressive heat and all such inclemency.   El Zorro says that not much is left, even of the old shell pictured above, beyond some of the walling and the like.  Of course the roof would have been carried off by any 100 mile per hours gust, but all of that would have been when El Zorro was kicking around on the Mexican with El Gringo Viejo in the Magic Lower Rio Grande Valley, in the City of Palms, McAllen, Texas....where you find Elegance on the Border.   It was a terribly good time.

     El Zorro is probably toying with the idea of putting some of the pieces back together...who knows, he's not poor...and he might do a bit of restoration and make a man cave out of the peices...and he says he is going to finally put together the ascendency and descendency of his family....a very interesting family it is.   Figure...esteemed OROGs...that when you hear the name Quanah Parker...what come to mind....google it up...and think that, on many different levels that name, those people, white people made red by captivity and by choice, and red people becoming as much an American as any Virginia or Boston aristocrat, and everything in between....and that house there probably watched and heard much of those goings on.   It was just about six inches away from the dead centre of it all.

 

     Pardon El Gringo Viejo's ramble, but when El Zorro sent this magnificent picture, it was as if I were 5 years old on early Christmas Morning.  My brother, Ph.d. in Cultural Geography, were he alive to-day, would have driven over just to touch the bone of that noble old structure.   Our grandfather built and lived in a sod house for seven years up in Sargent (that's the way it is spelled) County, North Dakota....when he was establishing a fairly large tree stead and grain farm.  But that was also back in the late 1880s and nothing would be left of it now.  It is all just very interesting and pleasant to contemplate.

 

Thanks as usual for your time and interest.   Pray for America.  And for the Texan OROGs, "If at first you don't secede, try try again."

El Gringo Viejo

 

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Un mensaje para la atencion de el Senor Ciudadano, Presidente- Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, "Ya, le quede solamente treinta dias hasta que le pasa el desastre de San Jacinto.  Preparese" 

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Our little carport at the Quinta (two weeks ago)

These pictures were just sent up, and they are also dated, about two weeks old now.  We have been advised that the work is completely done now, and they are waiting for my arrival with glossy white paint, because the columns have been thickly and correctly plastered with a finishing grade cement and "porcelana" finish.   Please notice the ceiling of the lower shot, with the cane work.   This allows the carport to "rhyme" with the interior of the home.

Thanks for everyones attention!
El Gringo Viejo

Ahem! AAHHEEmmmm!!! May I have your attention?

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 Before the second war with Saddam Hussein broke out, some seven weeks in advance of the first bombings, the entire world was in agreement with the fact that Saddam Hussein al Tikriti had substantial reserves of various cannon launched and missile launched weapons and devices of mass destruction.

     It was known, and evidentially proven that he had deployed such weaponry during the Iran - Iraq War that left a staggering one million humans of sorts dead, including battalions of Iraqi children of no more than 12 years of age, who were designated and trained to charge machine gun positions.   This tactic was justified because (1) they were smaller targets (2) since they were children, Allah would take them up without sin and give them a greater life at another time and place, (3) it would reduce casualties among the Iraqi regulars because the Persians would exhaust their ammunition shooting at the waves and hordes of children.

 

     Before people laugh at this silly notion, it was, has been true that  such measures were commonly used among the uncivilised totalitarian regimes throughout ancient and recent history.   The Red Chinese used the tactic...nay, the strategy against both Chung Kai Shek's forces, and later against the Gringos and United Nations troops in Korea.  The North Vietnamese commands used variations of the tactic, and both the Communist Chinese and the North Vietnamese Communist forces gathered up groups and crowds of women and children, purposely, to be placed in front of small but significant infantry manoeuvres.  Most frequently these bullet catchers were drawn from populations known to be friendly to the Gringos and/or anti-communist (Meos, Fundamental Buddhists, Roman Catholics and other Christians, and intellectual anti-communist traditionalists).

     Saddam Hussein used various gasses against his own populations.   Shi'ite and Kurdish opponents of his dictatorship were slaughtered en masse and with intermittent and unpredictable schedule.  Another form of culture torture was, of course, the draining of the marshes and river back-ups and seasonal flood zones of the Swamp Arabs, who had produced excellent vegetable crops for centuries on the floating pads of rich soil.   Saddam caused the swamps, marshes, and river estuaries to be drain, thereby all but destroying the arch-traditional, self-sufficient and noble people that served as an example of the success derived from hard work.

      We return to that period just before the Second Iraq  War began.   Several weeks before the  War,  Saddam Hussein was known to have led the atomic projects inspectors sponsored by the United Nations on wild goose chases, minded by "minders", while certain strange convoys were seen transporting covered loads of something to Syria to the west.    Many of the tractor-trailer rigs had trailers with triple rear axles, used almost exclusively for ultra-heavy loads.    The rigs were waved through at the usually horridly corrupt, extortionist, manipulative border personnel....and DID NOT STOP.   There were an estimated  (low end) 17 or 18, and (high end) up to 35 or 40 of these rigs sent by Saddam Hussein.

        The trucks were conducted to some area within the confines of the Bakaa Valley.    This issue has been looked at, overlooked, studied, denied, supported, discussed, and analysed.  It is certainly the opinion of the important people who count that such an event never occurred.  The Israelis and the Saudis seem to think that there is "something there".  One thing is certain.

      There is a group of people who HATE HEBES.  It is an inborn hatred that comes especially from National Socialists and Communists and elitists.   Much of the inborn hatred comes from atheist, Jew-hating Jews.  Many such Jew hating Jews are found in the broadcast and print media...and of course they are the ones who come up with terms like "neo-conservatives"  as a "dog-whistle" to identify those terrible Jews who think that socialism is bad and that there is a god named Yahweh (Jehovah- same word).

      The Jew-hating Jews...really, really hate Jews who know what the inside of a synagogue looks like....who do stupid things like jump up and down on perfectly good cocktail stems at weddings, who wear funny clothes and say dumb things like "lookit, dollink" and "Hello muddah, hello faddah" and so forth.   They even hate Sandy Koufax.....and they have never seen a screening of "Fiddler on the Roof"  (Hebrew for 'Porgy and Bess').  Their theme song is "Lips that taste Kosher, will never kiss mine". 

      Then there are the Gentiles....like (Sir Edmund) Hillary who discovered that the Jews displaced the poor innocent "Palestinians" and learnt at Wellesly to HATE ISRAEL!!!  And hate Jews in general.  BAD, BAD HEBES,  BAD, BAD ISRAEL...oppressing the poor Palestinians who they displaced.

     If a dumboe traditionalist Episcopalian comes along and says, "Can we not all just get along?  Are we not all sons of Abraham...?"  we are ridiculed with the "dog-whistle" of  snake-handler, rube, hillbilly, intellectually challenged, Southerner, fascist, gun-owner, backwards, anti-Arab, and of course, RACIST!!!!

     NOW, we are met with the greatest Jew-hater of all, Barack Hussein Obama, walking among the 12 tribes.   Nothing good can come of it.   Every step Obama takes obscures  the line between treason and the oath of fielty to the constitutional republic that we were.

     NOW,  we are watching the greatest Arab-haters....Assad, the Muslim Brotherhood,  the regime in Teheran, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Al Fatah, Jamaz, and the 319,436 other radical Muslim/Arab groups with really strange, stupid names.....continuing to do what they do best.....kill Arabs and Muslims (women and children, first, of course) when there aren't any Jews or Gentiles handy.

      This is not a time to be reasonable with Islamist radicals.  This is a time to be reasonable with ourselves and our stewardship of our own resources.   We could start by withdrawing the forwarding of 250,000,000 dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.   And the tanks and F-16 airplanes.....now.

 

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This brief summary of how a "Goldwater Girl" is re-booted into a marxist robototron at schools that used to be bulwarks of tradition and normalcy.   Reprinted from Wikipedia, because they know that no one will believe you when you say that Hillary Diane Rodham was lobotomised by an atheist Jew-hating-Jew marxist.   The radioactive linkages lead nowhere except to definitions, but Dr. Alan Schechter was an interesting personality.   More on him at some other time, however. 

 

Alan Schechter (born 1936 in a Jewish family) is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He was educated at Amherst College, where he received his AB, and at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD. He is a distinguished and award-winning political scientist. He was also Hillary Rodham's advisor during her years at Wellesley College and supervised her senior thesis; Susan Estrich's book The Case for Hillary Clinton mentions her experience also writing an honors thesis for Professor Schechter (at a different time). He remains involved with the college, running the Wellesley in Washington internship program, in which Rodham participated as a student and which continues to send approximately twenty women to Washington for internships each summer. Professor Schechter is the former Chairman, Vice-Chairman, and member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (Fulbright Program), a Presidential appointment.

Where the left sides of brains
are de-activated.  Wellesly
College Library

 

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That should do it.   Pardon the inflammatory nature of our beginning of the day.  The Republic is burning and the low-information, low-intelligence, obsolete-media, male-lesbian, left-handed, Eskimos are riding around our circled wagons shooting their child-safe, lo-cal, non-fat arrows.   They really look silly wearing those safety helmets.

El Gringo Viejo

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More Realistic and Full Truth Reportage

EXERPTED FROM Americas  Quarterly

Dispatches from the Field: Ciudad Juárez

Civic and economic life is coming back to a city once synonymous with gangland murders and violence against women.

In this issue:

• Dispatches from the Field: Ciudad Juárez

A tranquil park in front of the Catedral de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
in downtown Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua

 

Dispatches from the Field: Ciudad Juárez

BY

Joseph J. Kolb

Documenting the return of civic and economic normalcy to a city under siege.

Civic and economic life is coming back to a city once synonymous with gangland murders and violence against women.

     The lunch shift is in full swing at Viva Juárez restaurant. After a morning of shopping, pedestrians trickle into the popular eatery on Avenida Benito Juárez, where cooks chop onions and peppers at a formica counter and the aroma of carnitas wafts onto the sidewalk.    The mood inside Viva Juárez and on the nearby streets is relaxed. But the bullet holes in the peeled and faded burnt-orange façade of the nearby Del Pueblo restaurant, closed down after a shooting, are stark reminders of the city’s recent history as the “Murder Capital of the World.”

     Since 2006, Chihuahua state statistics show that more than 10,000 people were murdered in Ciudad Juárez during former President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs. According to the Ciudad Juárez Chamber of Commerce, an estimated 10,000 businesses closed their doors because of extortion by street gangs, and city officials say that 100,000 residents fled the city to El Paso, Texas, or to other parts of Mexico. Even before Mexican security forces began a crackdown on drug cartels, Ciudad Juárez received international attention for the murder and disappearance of women.

      Yet, since 2011, a guarded sense of normalcy has returned, and many citizens feel Ciudad Juárez is getting a second chance. In 2011, the murder rate plummeted 45 percent—from a high of 3,622 homicides in 2010 down to 1,976 the next year. That number was on track for another 40 percent drop by the end of 2012.
An explanation for the decrease in murders is elusive.

       Ciudad Juárez Mayor Héctor Murguía credits Julián Leyzaola, whom he hired as municipal chief of police in 2011. According to Murguía, the hard-charging but controversial Leyzaola—who has also received significant negative attention for alleged police abuses against suspects—cleaned up Tijuana before moving on to Ciudad Juárez, where he has attempted to instill a new degree of professionalism in the municipal police department, weed out corrupt officers, and establish a community-oriented style of policing. Key to Leyzaola’s crime-fighting strategy was establishing patrol sectors and shifting resources to high-crime areas.

     But there is another explanation, says Jorge Villa, the state medical examiner. “There just isn’t anyone else to kill.”

    The four-year battle between the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels for control of the so-called “Juárez Drug Plaza”—and control of drug routes into the U.S.—has wound down now that the Sinaloa cartel is widely considered to have defeated the Juárez cartel in a brutal turf war.

Life After Wartime

     For the residents of Ciudad Juárez, the reasons and explanations for the drop in violence are irrelevant as long as they can live peacefully again.    Marguirite, a college student who declined to give her last name to avoid being targeted by extortionists, says her family has owned the popular Viva Juárez restaurant, just down the block from the Paseo del Norte Bridge that connects Juárez and El Paso, for 20 years. They survived the dark days of 2008 through 2010, when murder and extortion were at their peak.

     “People are coming back to Juárez from El Paso, and people from Juárez are coming out of their houses again, no longer afraid,” she says. “Things are getting so much better that my family has opened a second restaurant here.”


     Meanwhile, Alberto Calvo, a middle-aged man folding T-shirts in the downtown souvenir shop Mexico Lindo, notes business has improved since Juárez’ crime rate started going down, but times are still tough.
After all, it is the American tourism dollar that helps sustain his business, and Calvo’s shop is on a block that thousands of Americans would have passed on their way to local dentists and pharmacies, many of which are now either closed or scaled back because of the drop in business.

      “I am just surviving,” he admits.

     Still, U.S. tourists are slowly returning to the city, thanks to the lower murder rate and a greater confidence in security. It’s a development that city and state officials hope to capitalize on with a massive physical and image overhaul.   Combined municipal, state and federal investments in Ciudad Juárez have been the cornerstone of the revival, according to Murguía, who is enjoying a second non-consecutive term as mayor after a first term from 2004–2007. The reason for the reinvestment is simple economic survival, Murguía says. He and Chihuahua Governor César Duarte hope to return Ciudad Juárez to the commercial and manufacturing hub it promised to be in the early days of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

     Construction crews are beginning a $300 million project to improve the city’s bone-jarring roads and reduce choking traffic jams. New red and white seats have been installed in the $15 million baseball stadium for the city’s professional team, the Indios, which opened in November 2012. Even nightclubs that were once closed are reopening.

     Murguía said he is especially excited about the urban renewal project planned for the decaying downtown shopping district, which involves demolishing vacant and hazardous structures and transforming the area into a large pedestrian plaza like those found in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara, to bring back U.S. tourists and shoppers.

     These projects are projected to create 24,000 new jobs over the next year, chipping away at the city’s unemployment rate of 6.4 percent—nearly 1.5 percentage points above the Mexican national average.
The number of export sector jobs jumped from 166,000 in June 2009 to 215,000 in June 2012, an increase of nearly 30 percent. Trade between Ciudad Juárez and neighboring El Paso jumped to $80 billion in 2011, an increase of $10 billion from the previous year.
     “The government is interested in restoring not just buildings, but social and family life for the citizens of Juárez,” said a spokesman for Governor Duarte.   That may be the more daunting task for city and state officials.



Developing the Economy
Even with the work currently in progress, the majority of jobs in Ciudad Juárez are extremely low-paying, keeping the poverty rate high. Murguía says that as many as 65 percent of Ciudad Juárez’ 1.2 million residents lives in poverty. The majority of export, construction and manufacturing jobs pay the equivalent of $55 per week.

     “We don’t want the cheap labor jobs, we want high-skilled, high-paying jobs coming here,” Murguía says. “It can be done. We have so many of our youth attending U.S. universities such as UTEP [the University of Texas–El Paso]. This will allow them to stay here and contribute.”
    

      Moira Murphy-Aguilar, a professor at the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at UTEP, lived in Ciudad Juárez for about a decade and is optimistic about the city’s future.
     “Juárez has been, since I first lived there in the early 1990s, a vibrant city,” Murphy-Aguilar says. “What people forget, for example, is that Juárez is home to a campus of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, one of the best universities in the world, which also has a stellar middle and high school.”
     Murphy-Aguilar believes that Ciudad Juárez’ infrastructure was unable to cope with the accelerated population growth of the early 1990s, contributing to the poverty it must now overcome to become a modern, developed city. During the 1990s, the promise of maquiladora jobs attracted some 100,000 people from southern and central Mexico, but the city was unprepared for this influx of people, says Murguía. Most of the new residents were forced to live in colonias that did not have infrastructure or adequate housing—and were then stranded without jobs when many of the maquilas closed or downsized. Many still live in bare cinderblock or wood pallet homes with tin or tarp roofs.


     Regardless of the social and economic improvements on Juárez’ horizon, it’s the image of violence that the city has to overcome if it wants to regain the American tourism dollar.     Across the border, it’s clear Juarez’ renaissance remains unpersuasive.
     Bobby Vee, 30, an assistant manager at a cigar lounge in downtown El Paso, says that Ciudad Juárez was always an option for Americans who wanted to cross the border for dinner or to visit nightclubs, but that changed when the violence increased. He says that now very few people from El Paso, including himself, venture across the border, and he doesn’t plan to for the foreseeable future.   He believes that many U.S. citizens remain influenced by media portrayals of the city as a cauldron of crime.

     Murguía concedes the point. “We do have an image problem—people fear that as soon as they walk off the bridge into the city, they will be shot—it is a big challenge,” he says. “But we need our citizens to be our spokespeople and invite others to come to Juárez.”
     Marguirite, an accounting major at UTEP, could be one such spokesperson, but not yet.   Her family’s businesses are flourishing on both sides of the border, including a growing potato chip business in El Paso, and she may go there instead—an option the majority of impoverished Ciudad Juárez residents don’t have.
Still, at a Catholic church in the western colonia of Anapra, a zone of cinderblock houses with tin and tarp roofs, a 16-year-old girl at a youth group concert displays the spirit of defiant optimism that Ciudad Juárez will need to stage a true comeback.
“If I ever had the chance to go to the U.S., I would still stay here,” she says. “How can I make my city better off if I leave?”

View a slideshow of Ciudad Juárez. Photos courtesy of Joseph Kolb and REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

http://www.flickr.com//photos/americasquarterly/sets/72157632465562038/show/
 

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Perfectly Useless Corrupt Liar

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BREAKING NEWS: Fire Crews Called To Senate Floor

                         Well Harry, There Goes Another Pair Of Pants

 

 

 

 

 HARRY REID: As I indicated, it was quite a big explosion. We'll follow this news very closely. I will do whatever I can going forward to support the United States military and the families of the fallen Marines.

Mr. President, it's very important we continue training our military, so important. But one of the things in sequester is we cut back in training and maintenance. That's the way sequester was written. Now, the bill that's on the floor, we hope to pass today helps that a little bit. At least in the next six months, it allows the military some degree of ability to move things around a little bit. Flexibility, we call it, and that's good. But we have to be very vigilant. This sequester should go away. We have cut already huge amounts of money in deficit reduction. It's just not appropriate, Mr. President, that our military can't train and do the maintenance necessary.

These men and women, our Marines were training there in Hawthorne. And with this sequester, it's going to cut back this stuff. I just hope everyone understands the sacrifices made by our military. They are significant, being away from home, away from families, away from their country.

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El Gringo Viejo
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Patriots' Games and Traitors' Mischief in Reynosa

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The last few days have seen a return to a certain type of violence of which many people thought they might have seen the last.   The relatively peaceful turn of events in Mexico's cartel adventures has left the passive observers (the overwhelming majority) with the impression that things are getting better.

 

     Then, suddenly, there is a fortnight of events that sets the "general impression" dial back several notches.     But, please, once again, when you all are reading what I am writing please understand the meanings of the words that we are using.

 

      We are still about a year and a half from returning to a 1958 level of violence, criminality, and anti-social behaviour in Mexico.   We have reduced the insanity of the cartel on cartel violence and the "secuestros" of people being held for ransom by about 80% from the peak in late 2011.

 

      Our particular area around our little mud hut in rural Tamaulipas was pretty much surrounded at a close distance with  really bad fighting between two cartels and even intra-cartel bloodshed.   We were never bothered or menaced in any way.   We are not involved in their business.  We have shown support for the forces of order, especially the Army and the Naval Infantry, and of late for the "Fuerza Civil", a uniformed National Police force that is nominally civilian.

 

       During the time when folks might have thought that the violence had ended, "Just like El Gringo Viejo said that it would"....that is neither what happened nor what we  said.   We have repeated been optimistic that the war would, in large part, be won.  We have also said, repeatedly that the military and certain police authority and the will of the people to be brave enough to "drop a dime" on the cockroaches had turned  the corner, and that we were winning the war against the cockroaches.

 

     We have also pointed out on three or four occasions that there was a conundrum associated with the militarily efficient and effective shredding of large group cartel cells.    With the heavy casualties and many fallen lieutenants, captains, and jefes, the lesser, younger, stupider, more testosterone driven dummies would present a greater difficulty to weed out one by one.   In the Monterrey Metroplex, some four million people, there are about 40 major neighbourhood pandillas (gangs).   Many used to have a bit or a lot of affiliation with one cartel or the other....say three and four years ago.

      They have been killing each other and shooting each other....not as bad as Detroit or Chicago....but they are still doing it.  Nowhere near as bad as two years ago...but its still there.  If the demographic of crime divided by total population decline continues, we might be on schedule to return before 21015 to Monterrey's fame as being the safest city of over one million population in Latin America, or perhaps the world.

 

      Great swathes of the Mexican Republic are now either devoid or almost totally devoid of cartel activity that manifests in violence.   The Yucatan Peninsula,  the Colonial Highlands, most of the entirety of the Pacific Coast, with three or four exceptions and of very few square miles of concern....almost all of Baja California, and by almost all, let us say 99.8%.

      The area around Puebla....almost all of Mexico City....almost all of Guadalajara...almost all of the Republic.    But it is just not over yet.  When the per capita criminality and violence returns to the 1958 level, and remains within those actuarial parameters, then we will have what is the best that can be expected...anywhere.  That is almost Japanese level crime rates.

 

      My area...in spite of a bit of sporadic spurts and fits of  cartel-like fluffery....is almost..right at....just about at the 1958 level.   But we really do not like to talk about it, because of our superstitious olde English/Anglican spooky nature.    But the picking crews have returned to the massive, beautiful Valencia orange, Persian lime, and Texas Red grapefruit orchards....big, new and almost new 7 tonne trucks, with 40 men in the esquadrilla, are arriving at the orchards in the dawning hours and harvesting millions and billions of pesos  worth of nature's bounty.   And they are not being tailed by cockroaches back to the pay out station to shake them down for half of their base and weight pay.

      My drives are on full highways, with hundreds of long-distance big-rigs....not 18 wheelers, but 22 wheelers (many triple-rear-axle), and 24 wheelers (double-b0x).   Busses meeting a driver 40 or 50 times in a drive of 200 miles....full or nearly full of passengers.

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     We are still in the recovery of the country of Mexico.   In the United States we are still in the process of absolutely losing it.   But I diverge.

 

    We are moving finally into the point behind this particular posting.  Beginning on 8 March 2013  abrasion and friction was noted by various observers and  gossipers about cartel activity.   This time it was an issue within the family of the Cartel del Golf0, now largely back in charge of drug and human trafficking in the northeastern quadrant of Mexico.

    The Zeta group is cornered in the Monterrey area, and losing ground and personnel rapidly.   But there are several clusters of "personality conflicts"  within the Cartel del Golfo.   Suddenly, on the weekend before last, all Hell broke loose.  One faction raided six auto distributorships in Reynosa and stole about 20 new cars, another faction of the same cartel was forming in another neighbourhood.    Please remember that the County of Reynosa has a population that is right at 1,000,000 people.   The City of Reynosa is almost 900,000 people.

     The two factions, number about 70 members total, with approximately 35 autos, SUVs, minivan,  all stolen....and they are seeking each other out, milling around in the relatively heavy traffick one would normally find in a busy, advanced industrial and agricultural and medical centre.    They begin to circle around in and around and between the various up-scale shopping centres.   And voila!  They encounter themselves.  And all Hell breaks loose.   Speeding and shooting, Shooting and speeding through town.   For three hours, there is sporadic pursuit and shooting.   Casualties mount up.  Busted-up vehicles, overturned, smoking, some afire,  dead and wounded littering the highways, by-ways, and streets...

     Absolutely no strategy....absolutely no tactics....just the willingness to kill somebody for no real reason and also to not care where errant bullets might land.   "That's all we need to have one great blast of glory....just like a real movie or television  show.   Maybe they'll make a song about me!" thinks the juniore cockroach.

     After three hours of driving back and forth, spraying automatic weapons fire throughout the City, the Army came up in force on the various exits of the city.  By this point it is estimated that there are 22 cartel people dead.   Perhaps 9 or 10 have been wounded to the point of incapacitation.   The Army locates the provocateurs, one by two, one by one, and shred their vehicles and their occupants when it become apparent that they are not willing to submit to arrest.   There  were perhaps as many as 18 or 20 who are killed in these encounters, all cockroaches.   The Army has learnt to let them kill each other for a while and then take on the leftovers.   It cuts down on the court dockets.

 

     The unfortunate part?    One teenage boy going home with his Uncle, leaving on of the fancy shopping centres, is stuck in the head and killed by an errant, un-aimed, un-cared about bullet.  That same bullet strikes the Uncle, leaving a wound, but nothing at all serious.   And a taxi driver....a taxi driver by profession, a family man, and a popular noted person in his section of the city.....is killed, while waiting for a fare who is inside the upscale store in the upscale shopping centre.  Two soldiers...heroes....are wounded but not seriously. 

 

    Two things about the American press.   (1) They declared that the State and local authorities are lying because they said only two people were killed.    They did say that, but they quite frankly do not worry about including cockroaches as "people".   They have no souls, and therefore they cannot be considered human.    (2)   Cartel people are really noble because they take their dead with them, like the Indians did.  Very noble.  Also totally false.

 

     The vehicles were all collected, including some that had been armoured  (13), some that were stolen from the dealerships the day before (20).   The Army piled bodies of cockroaches into four pickups and took them to the  Judicial and Police processing, where some observers estimated that there were 48 - 50 dead.   At that place they would be fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA and their bodies were dispatched to various funeral homes.   After seven days, the bodies that are unclaimed will be cremated.

 

      There are  presently 30 cockroaches still in area hospitals.  Which means that almost all who participated managed to kill each other or catch Army bullets.   Almost all.   Not a very successful day of it for the home team and the visiting team.   It was a good day for the Army team.

 

   This past weekend, 384 pounds of pure methamphetamine, and almost 20,000 pounds of marijuana were "decommissioned" in Reynosa as a result of information derived from "an anonymous citizen's telephone call".  It is probable that there was some interrogation of those in the hospital as well.    Numerous weapons and other devices were found as well, stashed in an underground, reinforced structure.   Also, police and Army units were still looking for a "pod" of delinquents, and did manage to isolate and eliminate 7 more, in three different venues, with the delinquents choosing to fight it out instead of surrendering.

     Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is the fact that so many of these people who were playing "big important drug trafficker boss man"  were aged 14 to 21....well over half.   Born without souls.

 

 

     So, the impetuousness and lack of military discipline or any discipline, and the willingness to let testosterone rule the day and the issue, for no other reason than just "to win"....underscores what El Gringo Viejo has been saying.  The degradations have resulted in more and more irrational, unpredictable events, and fewer sophisticated, long-term processes which guard against drawing attention to ones activities, and the losing of team members and assets (drugs and illegal aliens to shake down).

     That is why I am encouraged.  Everything is proceeding according to my analysis of 10 and 12 months ago.  And with that, I retire to watch a bit of  Fox Business Channel.

 

We sincerely appreciate your attention and time.  Questions and comments are always a pleasant surprise, and those that are emailed are usually attended first.

El Gringo Viejo

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