Pena Nieto and Trump - Allow me to make the complex even more complex

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    Americans and Mexicans were treated to one of the best Mr. Dogge and Mr. Phoney shows in the history of North American political activity recently.  It began when, for some unknown reason, President of Mexico Citizen Ernesto Pena Nieto invited the two major party candidates to come to Mexico City and have conversation and contact with the President and his inner circle of Secretaries of This and That.

     It is almost impossible for Trump to avoid any spotlight, and (Sir Edmund) Hillary, being the closest somewhat-humanoid relative to a vampire cockroach, must avoid any light, artificial or natural, it was clear that one would go to the meeting in Mexico City, and another would not. 

     One thing restrains (Sir Edmund) Hillary from going to Mexico that is not absolutely official in nature is that she could not permit herself to be surrounded by funny-looking, little brown people who cannot speak anything but jibber-jabber....and who look kinda dirty.

     Trump, on the other hand, knows how to hone his uncomplimentary Jew-jokes to a fine edge before his lecture at the biggest synagogue in Paducah.  But, by the Great Jehovah, he reassures all, "I will build a wall and the I'll make the Mexicans pay for it."   Good lead-in.

Angelica Rivera
First Lady of
Mexico

    What happened in Mexico City ended with a quiet that actually was the result of a stunned Mexican populace.   Each man came out of the meetings and declared his position, recognised the position of the other side as worthy of consideration, declared his own boundaries, and agreed to continue the discussion.  It was a classic win, win.  El Gringo Viejo was somewhat stunned that Trump could actually act like an adult and not a repetitious, posturing, thuggish  bully.  Pena Nieto, for his part, spoke firmly and even without the idiotic Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) arcane and bifurcated-meaning laden rhetoric as he laid out the perimeters of the discussion and the understandings that had begun during those discussions.

      Sr. Pres. Pena Nieto was doing fine until  he let it slip later that he had laid down the law that Mexico was not going to be paying for any wall.  Earliest statements had suggested that there were no significant talks concerning The Wall.  Trump learned, third hand, what Pena Nieto had said, and suddenly turned into his customary childish-bully, strutting and repeating and uselessly flourishing all nature of peculiar threats.  He again became the genuine combination of low-class and childishness.....and moldy, stale ego.

     It was all that was needed to re-charge the anti-Mexican Bubbas and Daisy Maes who peopled the Phoenix Trump "Rally".  And, of course, that "Rally" and the extreme-left, upper and intellectual class of Mexico was all that was  needed to re-charge the Che Guevara Campus Proletariat Unity Campaign (ChGCPUC) people who hate Pena Nieto and his Telenovela-Trollop wife and his PRI, and who hate America, first, last, and always.

     The wild-eyed, irrationalalist, pro-communist community (aka: WEIPCC) in Mexico has presided over the complete melt-down of one-half of the professorial and teacher class of public Mexican education.  The central government, and the teachers' union that is most prevalent in the south and southwest of Mexico, has been at loggerheads....almost at war....during the past two or three years.   The up-grading of expectations of teachers' and professors' attendance habits and forcing certain intellectual attainment standards for primary and secondary "students" are too "repressive" and "fascist inspired" for the Union.  At times the Secretariat even suggested that the teachers should avoid arriving at work inebriated or with marijuana on breathe, clothes, or person.
     There is also the issue of the "Iquala 43", an issue that El Gringo Viejo has reported upon in this blog.  We pointed out then that the pro-communist and drug-trafficking mayor of Iguala and his sister, who was postulating for Governor of the entire State of Guerrero (includes Acapulco) were the ones who had "eliminated" fellow, but troublesome, students of the local "Federal Normal College".
    (An OROG might say, "Gringo Viejo, don't go around slinging the Commie-word all the time.  It turns people off.  Say 'centre-left'.....it is much more becoming.  Try to grow-up.  It is not the Hour of McCarthy.  People who exaggerate lose credibility and become known as unthinking extremists worse than the people they are condemning.   After all, the socialists only want a better life for the poor.)
     Folks, the "Normal" wherein attend over 400 "students" has end-walls with frescoes on walls that are 50 feet wide and 15 feet high of Karl Marx, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Fidel Castro, Sub-comandante Marcos, Hugo Chavez, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh,  and Mao Tse Tung, etc.  No other "world leaders" or political thinkers are pictured, and the hammer and sickle emblem is seen in every classroom.  There are no Mexican flags or deferences to Mexicanism of kind.  The "Normal" and others like it, are internationalist, marxist re-education centres.
     The woman who was to run for governor and whose brother was the president of the second biggest city in the State of Guerrero?   Well, she had two brothers who ran part of the ''Knights Templar" drug and prostitution and human slavery trafficking operation in neighbouring Michoacan State.   They were killed in confrontations with the Army - two years before this woman declared for the governorship of Guerrero.   Please...let us be serious.

     And the press?   Foreign and most of the Mexican domestic press?  They keep beating the drum about "What happened to the 43?" and pointing at Pena Nieto.

     And the American Press?   They muddle the issue because they can count on the fact that (1) the Americans know little or nothing about Mexico and could care less.  Most Americans know little or nothing about Canada.  And could care less.  Pokemon, Kardashians, Dancing with the Naked Women, Just Trying to Get By, and the Lottery....that is the issue for almost a majority of the American populace at this time.   And (2)....the Mexicans are very, very, very similar.
     So, with Forty-three dead and their bodies burned and raked into a river or whatever, it doesn't matter much, so blame it on Pena Nieto and go down and check the lottery....the Telenovela comes on at 20:30 and it begins the last chapter of "My Sister Was a Slut for The Cartels and Made One Million Pesos a Day and Drives a Maserati".
     The that, the equally unimaginative Mexican "mainstream" reporters dutifully report like the American, French, British, and even Japanese and you-name-it....the same story.   The story always ends with something like, ".....and Pena Nieto has done nothing about it."  Or in the case of the United States, ".....George Bush flew over it,  he knew it was going to happen, and since it was Democrat votes, he let it happen....and then he flew over it without ever touching down.'

     There have been literally over 1,000,000,000 pesos spent on this Iquala case.  That is over 50 million dollars.  There is only one explanation, foreign and domestic analysts have studied and agreed.   The leftist factions are guilty of fratricidal "cleansing".  But, the highway blockages continue, as do the demonstrations in Mexico City, tying up traffic for hours at times, and the international press purposefully misreporting the events to the "World" so that people can feel assuaged of their "guilt".....guilt they do not have, but that they are demanded to accept.

Pena Nieto (president) and his wife,
Hoochi-Coochi (actress)
actual name - Angelica Rivera

   So, that is the deal.  If Trump would just have smiled and shut up,  he would have had a total success. But he knows nothing of Iquala.....he knows nothing about which buttons to push in a Mexican situation so as to cultivate approbation without sacrificing Americanism.   (Truth helps)

     Trump thinks in Dancing with Naked Women and the Stars with One Leg terms.   Oddly, Pena-Nieto might even think the same with his soap-opera (telenovela) wife and her legal and corruption problems.    She was accused of taking an ultra-la-ti-da mansion in an exclusive Mexico City subdivision because  of some kind of a sweetheart deal from people who later gained a Central Government contract to build a rapid-rail connection with very limited stops between Mexico City and Guadalajara....and then later between Mexico City and Monterrey.....

Future first "lady" Melania?

     The deal continues.  So we shall see if someday soon we can go to those places on conveyances that are dependable and relatively comfortable.  If they were to have showers and sleeping facilities I might be willing to use the service.  We carried hundreds of clients on-tour during our days of operation of Excursions to Mexico.  The equipment was old, but pretty well maintained.
   My mission has always been to establish an Orient Express-type service for the Republic of Texas....a standard-speed train....with a world class restaurant car, and a world class saloon car....and a world class observation car....with five first-class special coaches and three Pullman cars and a baggage / express car carrying a complement of 400 passengers.  Breakfast and supper included for Pullman...special arrangements for business travelers....next connection....Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.
      But Pena-Nieto, the politicians, the press, the electorate....they play to the next crisis.  Trump is a daily crisis, like Pena-Nieto....

     For instance, he could have pictures of his wife that are almost as bad as the ones Pena-Nieto has to endure in the telenovelas.   How bad....not as bad as Laura Bush or Nancy Reagan or Pat Nixon....just 'girls just want to have fun pictures".....you know..... We have to be reasonable about these things.

   Bush, Reagan, Nixon, even Queen Elizabeth were seen cutting ribbons to hospitals and schools and such.   Can you imagine?  Horrid full-propaganda,  playing to charity pictures?  Or Ladies doing what ladies do?  Actually pushing millions of dollars and thousands of hours to useful eleemosynary activities that actually benefit others in lieu of the person doing the pushing? 
    
     Perhaps there is one thing for which we can be grateful.  There are no other such pictures of (Sir Edmund) Hillary that are available to the mainstream press.  We do recall the staged "dancing on the beach" scenes that were "surreptitiously stolen" by paparazzi about 300 years ago...with Billy Jeff and (Sir Edmund) Hillary dancing in swimming suits.   Things were halted suddenly when a whale rescue unit came up to see if they could help...but there was an embarrassed  withdrawal when they found out that everything was "normal".

     Perhaps all four of them...Pena-Nieto, his wife and Billy Jeff and (Sir Edmund) Hillary can just say...."It's all Trump's fault and the Rightwing Conspiracy.....and the Bimbo Eruption Complex of Special Area 51 Interests from Mars."

     We hope that some of this made a bit of sense for the OROG community.   We guess that this stuff plays well to the mass of television soap-opera addicted dumboes.  It is what is happening.   Please check out the issues of Oaxaca's, and Guerrero's, and Michoacan's educational problems.  The problems of the several candidates and their spouses is the problem of someone other than El Gringo Viejo.

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Dilma Rousseff is gone: We hardly knew ye' at all.....

Dilma Rousseff, unemployed ex-commandante affiliated with the Mao-Communist Sendero Luminous  and of late an erstwhile President of Brazil.   The leftist world press is, predictably, bemoaning her recent impeachment and conviction by the Brazilian Senate  (62 - 19).

As in the case with her now-deceased homologue, Hugo Chavez, and her still-alive homologue Cristina Fernandez Vd. de Kirchner, Poor Dilma is another of the "nuts-and-bolts, non-ideological  leftist democrats" who float up to the surface of seemingly every nation in the New World from time to time....or perhaps, all the time.

   The picture of poor Dilma, looking forlorn, makes one think that she is pondering how it was that George Bush managed to destroy her approach to establishing the  Brave New World.   She seems to be saying to herself, "Self, you had every detail planned, every single citizen's life mapped out, every method of soaking the wealthy and the established middle class sector of Brazilian life (2nd largest middle class by numbers in Latin America), all my friends paid off with Petrobras graft and shenanigans....it was all so perfect."   She seems to be waiting for the strains of the theme song from "Evita" to strike up.

     To put it mildly, the previous administration of Mr. Lula, her mentor, practiced tax-and-spend to perfection, setting poor Dilma up for a possible fall when the inevitable "Latin-American Inflation" would set in.  The solution, for leftists in Latin America (and elsewhere) to the problem of the poor people not having a lot of money is  to put more zeros on the bank notes that constitute a given leftist-rule country.   Of course, a month goes by and a person cannot purchase a box of matches for 50,000 pesos.  But, he has a ''lot'' of "money" (monopoly, anyone?). The system, similar to what we describe in our preceding  submission concerning the true cost of helping people become dependent on income-transfer payments, public assistance, subsidised or free housing and the like, never works.

Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva
President of Brazil, 2002 - 2010

  The Little Red Hens become exhausted and fewer in numbers and the rest of the barnyard animals become more sullen, less industrious, and more disposed to have babies that have no fathers.   

Michel Temer
President of Brazil

     People might point out that during Lula's two terms, things seemed to be gaining traction, finally, in Brazil.  Heck, more and more students were receiving essentially free money to attend the universities, where they could major in Vegetarian Perspectives through a Socially Democratic Lens.   Or, courses in "How to Combat Climate-Change Deniers".  Lula could afford to provide such lofty academic fare because the price of oil back then was running between 100 and 140 Yankee Dollars per barrel.  Or at least he thought he could provide such niceties and other vote buying schemes as well.

 Finally,  we leave the OROG community with this photograph of the ex-Vice President of  Brazil, who is decidedly more conservative, and who was just approved by the Brazilian Senate to serve the unexpired term of Madame Rousseff, by a vote of 61 to 20.   He faces high seas and strong counter winds, but he is an old and wily fox, relatively popular throughout the  Brazilian populace.   At the very least, a non-marxist at the helm might help stabilise the jittery nerves in the Brazilian economy.  The people look nervously at the Venezuelan situation and they must be praying to any god that might listen that such anarchy does not spill into Brazil.

El Gringo Viejo

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(Sir Edmund) Hillary plays to another (not so) sell-out crowd

REALLY PACKING THEM IN, HILL?

   STANDING ROOM ONLY?....EXCEPT THAT THE ONES STANDING WERE ALL OUTSIDE OR AT THE BAR WAITING FOR YOUR BLOVIATION TO CEASE.

   (SIR EDMUND) HILLARY, DO THE HONOURABLE THING....RESIGN FROM THE RACE AND REPORT TO SOME MINIMUM SECURITY COUNTRY CLUB PRISON FOR THE REMAINDER OF YOUR MISERABLE DAYS.

  WRITE YOUR MEMOIRS ABOUT ALL THE WORK YOU DID AND THINGS YOU ACCOMPLISHED FOR THE CHILDREN....AND THE WOMEN'S ISSUES.

   PEOPLE HAVE GONE TO PRISON FOR MUCH LESS THAN WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.

     PERHAPS YOU CAN SET UP AN ANTHONY WEINER DEFENSE FUND.

PLEASE JUST LEAVE.....NOW.

Heads, we all lose; Tails, we all lose

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     There is a lot of counter-current and cross-current in the political/cultural theatre at this time.   Deviousness abounds.  It would be nice to try to overlook and not remember blowhards such as FOXNews's O'Reilly talking about how the Big Oil Companies needed to be punished for profiteering during the last episode when one gallon of gasoline finally rose to the same cost as one gallon of milk.

     O'Reilly howled about how there should be investigations and a punitive tax of some sort, because it just wasn't fair that a company should make a profit on the backs of people who needed their cars to go to work.

      Possibly he was referring to the 51st Amendment to the Constitution which reads, "Therefore, by the hand of those who care for the welfare of others, we order and require that all gasoline and any other product deemed to be necessary for the conduct of what anyone decides is necessary for the conduct of a comfortable and rewarding life, that product or service can be received at no cost.

    This includes, but is not limited to, a basic supply of 5,000 packets of prophylactics, and in order to assure inclusiveness, these condoms will only be provided to girls or those self-identifying as girls between the ages of 12 and 39  (39...get it?  39....funny, right?) who will attend, do attend, or have attended prohibitively expensive private Marx0centric Universities.  The Un-Founding Parents proudly name and dedicate this Amendment for Mzrsrq. Santa Fluke.

    To be fair, O'Reilly is what is known as a "rationalist".  It is good to be rational, right?   Somebody is informed by another, "All horses have four legs." it might be discerned down the road that the observer would see a cow, and then turn to tell his son, "That's a really handsome cow."

     The meaning, of course, is that Rationalism is fraught with many exits that lead to blind alleys, or at times to intellectual cliffs.

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     Speaking of intellectual cliffs, we now have various and sundry important people speaking about "doing something" concerning the "Negro Problem", or the "Inner City Problem", or the "Black Lives Matter" problem, or "The Racial Divide", etc.    We are brought immediately to some of the most profound words ever spoken on the topic.  To wit:

     “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tecumseh Washington

     As many OROGs (Order of the Readers of the Old Gringo) know, El Gringo Viejo frequently states that he is a Confederate and not a Klanner.  This above observation is not only salient, but also indicative of the mind of a man who has gone far beyond the limitations brought on by "Rationalism".    I, your humble servant, would not have given a second thought to voting for him as President of the Confederated States of America.

     Booker T. Washington was rational, but more importantly he was deductive, inductive, reasonable, and inspired by Greater Power.   He was, in short, at least one of the top ten most important social - cultural thinkers of all times in the  case of the American experiment.   I shan't even think about mentioning the names of Sacred Cows and Bulls of the "Civil Rights Movement".  It would probably result in some kind of vendetta by Lois Lerner or Loretta Lynch.

     Dr. Washington, however, bears an audience.  For all times.

  This humble servant (El Gringo Viejo) does clearly remember the times when his Godmother, as a member of the McAllen Independent School District (McISDP) Board of Trustees, repeatedly declared that participation in the Department of Agriculture's programme to feed children at and in school would be the ruin of local control of socially democratic schools that served as an extension of the culture, the religions, and the family needs of a locale.   

     My mother, Auntie Marty, and several other well-placed ladies of the area in their circle agreed wholeheartedly.   They all likened the programme as "...the camel's nose under the tent flap".    "Should we yield on this, then the Government will choose the rabbi, preacher, or priest who says grace over the school's Easter Vacation assembly."   Liberals, (almost all anti-Mexican in their make-up, roared with laughter about this.)   said very frequently, things along the order of ,"If we don't feed them, then who will?"  and other idiotic things such as, "After all, it's good for employment...free money from the government....for the ladies in the cafeteria.  And the farmers will benefit, too!"

     The joke is, and almost nobody will believe it now, that the Mexican-descended people who lived among us, and us among them, fed themselves and frequently delivered specialty holiday Mexican specialties late at night....such as on Christmas Eve, or during Christmas-tide....things like incredible tamales and/or chiles rellenos (stuffed peppers).  It was a different time, and Hollywood and the Hamptons could never understand.

     It was one of the greatest complements that "Anglo" families had....and they would strut around at Church the next Sunday, dropping, "...the Lopez's brought us 4 dozen tamales of chicken last night".....and then "Well, the Garcias came by at sundown and they had 'our choice'....picadillo, or picadillo with venison or chicken with chili or without.....you know...we are very important to them...as they are to us...." .   It was very much like an Angloid variation of hens clucking around in the scratch-yard....each clucking her importance.   The Left will never, and cannot ever, understand.   And further they wish not to understand.  They want the "minorities" as political cannon-fodder.

To wit:

     For the past 50 years, the Washington Establishment has been telling us that they had to help the Negro component of the population.  According to them, and certain bigots, almost all of whom were socially lower-case Democrats, the Negro needed to be cared for and the proof of it was that Negro leaders said that that was the case.

     Oddly, the Progressives, the Klan, and certain of the Negro "leadership" in the South as well as places especially in the urban north developed that mentality in union, in unison, simultaneously, and with positive conviviality.   Remember, as we have previously  posted, Margaret Sanger addressed the Women's Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, twice during the National Convention. They were listening to harangues about  euthanasia, selective breeding, and the need to eliminate the races of Jews, Negroes, and Mexicans.  Shades of (Sir Edmund) Hillary and her outreach to children,.

     The words Margaret spoke were almost identical to what was being said at the same time in a place called Germany by another fellow, who was decidedly un-Arian in appearance and ancestry.   However, the Progressives wanted to be "ahead of the curve" in the matter of "improving the race".

     The scenes of thousand of Jews being bulldozed into common graves by the Nazis, forced them to change their tactics.   They considered spaying and neutering the 'undesirable elements" of society.  Others had a better idea.  Why don't we just give them "public assistance".  Everywhere it had been tried, the recipients had devolved into an almost sub-human, lethargic, violent group that would consume itself with murder and disease.  It worked for a long while in England....and in France they decided to kill each other after they ran out of aristocrats.

   Ergo....massive public assistance begins to set in, especially accelerating during and after the time of the establishment the Great Society.  Paternity is replaced almost entirely by AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children).   Thereby...State welfare systems, heavily subsidised by Uncle Sam forced fed literally trillions of dollars into the digestive and reproductive tracts of people who gradually, and then steadily, learned that blobbing was easier than self-support. 

     We return to one of our favourite statistics....that being that the level of American babies born without known paternity among the Negro cohort in 1950 was 7 per cent.  To-day it is well over 70 per cent.   In the 1950s, people of Black African ancestry had well-established themselves in the skilled labour, the arts, sciences, and the field of professional athletics.  They were very much a part of the patchwork quilt that made America whole.
     After just thirty years, they were in serious jeopardy of social disintegration.  After fifty years, as it is now obvious, the situation has gone well beyond social psychosis.  The idea that a major party candidate can make truck with any group that can declare that Black Lives Matter and underscore that other lives are not significant, speaks to the hideous union made by the givers and takers of the largesse of the Exchequer of the Republic and its federated units.

    Therefore, we are with regret driven back to the point:   If we pay for more of the same just to keep the growing mass at bay a little longer, we lose, but if we cease to pay for even some form of marginal peace, we lose.   This is the brilliance of the social engineering brought to us by the Fabian Socialists, the Klan, the effete Northeastern liberal thinkers, the rapacious Democrat vote engineers, and those who were identified by Booker Tecumseh Washington....that there is a class, made of numerous charlatans who meet this description below-reposted.

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

    Lord, please take the Sharptons and the Klanners and the vote-buyers and enslavers to the public dole and deliver them up to some greater purpose.  I advise Dr. Washington that there are numerous of the Caucasians who also benefit from the plight. real and imagined of the Negro race, and they too wish for that plight to continue so as to justify their inflated sense of self and their inflated sense of purse.

El Gringo Viejo

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Paul Harvey - 1965 Warning to America Speech

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     Pardon the paranoia, but we have typed this up three times before this time, and  each time, upon return, the writings have been sent to the Planet Zenox.  Only (Sir Edmund) Hillary's server could have been wiped clean enough to have done that. Therefore our commentary will be short. 

     We begin this brief set of commentaries over several points, simply looking for a reset button to put order to the scrambling eggs that now serve as a replacement for what was left of my brain.   The admonitions of Paul Harvey concerning what would happen if we were ever so stupid so as to follow the path that we have followed.....have all come to roost  (I'm sorry.  We meant to say 'to chick'.  Or is that anti-PC as well?)

     We have come to the conclusion that there is a worst-case scenario.  It is not quite a tie for last place.   The worst case is to have a certifiably psychotic, anti-American, narcissistic, pathologically mendacious,  national socialist, presumptuous dilapidated old hag at the helm of the Ship of State.   The Ghost of Paul Harvey Aurandt compels us to this conclusion.  We are out of last chances.

El Gringo Viejo

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A bit about the Battle of Mier - Christmastide of 1842

David Christian Newton submitted the material below onto a Facebook screed that pertains to people who are interested in their Spanish Colonial Period ancestral roots and who seriously study and develop their genealogies. The events centre around a city named Mier, a present-day county-seat in the long, northern panhandle of Tamaulipas State of Mexico.  It has seen and felt the effects of much wild weather, military engagements, and recently the effects of the drug-trafficking and human smuggling activity plaguing the Mexico - Texas frontier.  

 It is well that this event be covered and studied deeply.

      It is of interest to some Texians that General Adrian Woll entered into the centre of the Republic of Texas in 1842 in command of a punitive expedition and also to remind the Texians that Mexico could bring serious force against the outnumbered and less productive and less powerful Texas. Both Mexico and Texas at that time were boiling over with their own internal political warring and arguing.

    Woll's army arrived in good order outside of San Antonio and promptly took control of the city in the late Summer of 1843.  His approach consisted of essentially of five major columns coming up from Laredo, Matamoros, Rio Grande (aka - San Pedro / (to-day) Miguel Aleman), and Reynosa.    The combined rosters suggest that the total force was 2,600 effectives.

   The whole event was terribly humiliating to the Texians who had been impotent in the face of overpowering and more professional military force....and then forced to pay for their own failure to prepare, to be aware, or even lift a finger in terms of maintaining a ready defense posture.  As the Mexican forces deployed near the edge of the city and then gave demonstrations  that they were going to enter, a delegation came forward to request that the application of force be avoided because many people who were innocent of any wrongdoing would be subject to injury or death.
         There was an engagement where about 150 citizens of San Antonio had taken a defensive position, in a building owned by a leading rancher and businessman, Samuel A. Maverick.   Civil Authority was brought forward, along with good numbers of the business class, and were informed that the General was imposing a Punitive Charge against the Texians and he exacted, if I recall, about 3,000 dollars and supplies, a couple of cannons, various weapons, powder, medicines, and forage enough for his retirement back to Laredo.

     A useless cavalry charge of about 67 or so Texian regulars and momentary volunteers made a rearguard harassment of Woll's main body, in spite of Woll's written notice to them to not engage, due to the fact that their lack of familiarity with warfare would lead to devastating losses, referred to at times by the Texians as the Salado Creek massacre.   There were several engagements in and around San Antonio, to the east Sequin,  Hondo to the west, each of which the Mexicans said they won, and the Texian declared themselves the victors.  Woll was a respected enemy, as had been Urrea, Castrillon, and even Perfecto de Cos, and General Filisola after a fashion during the 1836 War.   

    Woll returned in good order to Laredo with his punitive rewards and called it a day.  His Expedition was widely applauded and lauded, perhaps with considerable justification.   They had gone up in pretty fair order, and come back the same way with all their standards and minimal casualties.  Further service awaited in a matter of weeks.

  The Texian Congress demanded that an Army be equipped and sent to Laredo to punish the Mexican's embarrassment of the San Antonio population. Sam Houston was not in favour of such an action but the Congress and other powerful political figures were in favour of it. General Somerville, the actual winning general in charge at San Jacinto, was chosen to the lead the reverse punitive expedition.

     It left in earliest December with about 760 effectives along with about 300 from local militia units and some artillery. At about the time of arrival near staging places north of Laredo, messengers arrived from Washington on the Brazos with orders stating that the Act of War against Mexico and commissioning of hostilities had been withdrawn by the Congress of the Republic of Texas. This was something for which Sam Houston took credit and considerable heat both then and during later years.
    Somervell had been left on the line to dry, so to speak. He informed his Army, and then requested a parley with the Mexican military and civil authority in Laredo. There was meeting and all agreed to call it a day, let the Texians regress to their homes....according to some accounts there was quite a pachanga (barbecue and celebration) to celebrate the new Pax Texana - Mexicana.   It is noted here that Laredo in those days was entirely on the left side (north) of the Rio Grande.  All the remaining organised cities downstream in this region were established on the right side (south) of that watercourse.

     The problem was that "Colonels" Fisher and Green and their contingent of "soldiers" essentially declared that they were not gong to abide by the agreements. There were 303 who broke with the main body, and began, somewhat stupidly, to head downriver going through Palafox, San Ygnacio, Ramiren~o, Ureben~o, Revilla, Chapen~o, and Salinen~o, exacting payments, forage, and other things. The film suggests that at around Christmas-time the Texians were in Chapen~o, but my understanding is that they were in Salinen~o and they were preparing to attack Mier.  These above named hamlets were small affairs, almost all entirely located on the north side of the Rio Grande, a small but difficult distance from their controlling urban centres, like Camargo, Mier, and Reynosa.

     By that point general Ampudia and various elements of the Mexican regular army and the various Guadias Nacionales between Matamoros, San Felipe de China, Reynosa, Camrgo, and Mier itself had been made aware of the approach of this Army-without-commission.

     

      One thing that most Texians....and Mexicans...as well as descendants of the Spanish settlers in the area of Mier.....are not aware of is that the man put in command of significant elements of Mexican cavalry at the Battle of Mier was Juan Sequin, one of the great Texian heroes of the Battle of San Jacinto. The outcome of that Battle is pretty well known.   Sequin's story after that 1836 engagement is complex, and he did return to his homeland in later live to resume ownership of lands his family had, and he died in Texas.

     It was a pointless military function and the slaughter was immense. It is probable that about 120 men died on both sides.   Each side badly overestimated the size of its opposition.  General  Ampudia was certain that there were almost 1,000 Texian effectives.  Texians at first thought Mier would be a cake walk like the tiny hamlets through which they had passed during preceding days.  Only after engagement did it become clear that they were dealing with real military resistance.  Their estimates of 1,600 Mexican  Army soldiers was also inflated, there having been about 760 or so.   Another quirky thing was the proclivity for the Mexican formal military reports to refer to Green, and Fisher, and a couple of other ranking Texians as "Generales" which was probably less a courtesy than an attempt to imply that the Texian force was larger than than it truly was.

 It should also be pointed out that the people of Mier treated the Texian prisoners with considerable kindness.  Ampudia arranged with the remaining officers to allow for their repatriation with the agreement to not bear arms against Mexico again, but that agreement was rescinded personally by a messenger bearing orders from Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, declaring the prisoners to be war criminals.

     They were to be interned in deep into the interior of Mexico. Another small correction to the presentation might be that the escape of prisoners did not include all of them. But a significant number ran off into horribly unsupportable territory. There was even some dispute that the "Black Bean" matter was overplayed because few if any of the Texans who returned (at the demand of Lopez de Santa Anna's wife's deathbed request) mentioned the event in their writings.

    Bigfoot Wallace was one of the few who talked about it. It was one heck of a Christmas. There are many, many others stories related to the Battle of Mier, but there is neither time nor space here to delve into it. One last thing, the Texians did comment on the incredible and elegant and massive buildings of Mier in writings.

Thanks for the time.  There should be more commentary about this and other related matters of Texian History and how that relates to Mexico of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow.
EL GRINGO VIEJO

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