The Art of the Deal...fundamental reality

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     Several hundred years ago, when we were in business, we had to practice the 'art of the deal' as a matter of course.  Daily, weekly, hourly, minutely, monthly, and at every turnly.  Our business was in the arbitrage of tourism - touring, excursions, many destinations, thousands of clients, ever changing conditions, currency fluctuations, competition, duplicities, constants, variables, and, of course, the lady who wanted me to pay for her dentures that she left in her hotel room.

     One example of practicing the nuances of "The Deal" was the fact that we had to defend ourselves, actively and passively, from a rapacious competition.  In the main, their "Deal" was to post the lowest price possible.   "Why waste your money?  We have the same tour that El Gringo Viejo has, but he charges 300 dollars while we only charge 150 dollars for the same tour to Mexico City!!!  Don't get ripped off!!"

     Of course, the poor Yankee Snow Bird could reasonably assume that he and Mrytle could both go to Mexico City for the price I was charging just one person.   The problem was that the cheaper trip had the not so small print that would point  out that on  the 5 day trip, only two nights were in Mexico City.   Actually, only two nights were spent in a hotel of any kind.  The other two nights were spent aboard a bus, making the fourteen hour run from Mexico City to McAllen on two rest stops and one 30 minute meal stop (not included).  

     Our excursion would be 8 days and 7 nights (with hotels),  all breakfasts included, and major local touring included, excellent tickets to the National Folklore Ballet, all entrance fees to archeological and historical sites, luggage handling, meals (lunches) on the road, and so forth.  Our hotels were always the low range of deluxe (four stars in Mexico) or higher...and always in the middle  of the "action" and zones of interest, museums,  shopping, entertainment venues, etc.

     Plus they had me or a reasonable facsimile...and we were (and still are) a formidable fountain of information, opinion, facts, history, archeology, ethnography, and experience in Mexico.  People of the level of my brother the egg-head...Chairman of the College of Geology, Geography, and Earth Sciences of Louisiana State University for instance.  He was fascinated by my business and decided to leave his lofty position in academia to do something that would be really fun.  He was a great favourite among the clients.

     In developing itineraries and negotiating prices for the various hotels, carriers, etc. I would always weigh first the quality of the place or service being considered.  When arguing a price, my greater concern was not to reduce the price down to bare bones, primarily because I did not want my people to wind up with a "run of the hotel" assignment like the other tour operators.  My objective was to always make a sincere attempt to segregate our clients into the best section, the best selection of rooms, etc. and for that I would leave a little meat on the bone.    It would also give me more latitude to whine, moan, and demand if there were avoidable shortcomings in the accommodations or services.
    If everything was working between good and excellent, as was the normal case, then the hotels and services people could be happy that I was paying a little more for their attention and good service.  A woman in Tuxpan told me one time that I treated her hotel like I treated my clients and everyone at that facility seemed to appreciate seeing us arrive.   She gave us a 20% group rate discount...while the others who wanted to use her place demanded 50%, "...or we'll take our business elsewhere".  Not a good demand to make to a hotelier with a 91% occupancy rate.

     This is all stated while remembering that the business of a business is not to make the providers or the operators or anyone beyond the clients, "happy".  The business of a business is to produce profit

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     We move on now to the point of this brief editorial.  All OROGs know that this particular writer is not the biggest fan of Donald John Trump.  The vote he gained from me was in full recognition of his strengths, the horror of the alternative, and the resignation to the fact that disgusting slugs and blowhards must be tolerated at certain points in the life of a Republic.  It was the most difficult vote we have ever made.  We have voted in every partisan election since 1968.

    While my sensibilities may have been injured, it is amazing to note the manoeuvrings, positioning, and posturing of the Obsolete Press during these times.   Case in point:  the North Korean issue.

     The President and his people decide that enough is enough and the time has long passed for Little Rocket Man to come to his few senses and set his people free while desisting with all manner of dangerous toys such as nuclear weapons and long range, highly inaccurate missiles.

      Administration after administration has dealt with the Kim Dynasty, and always to no avail. Agreement after accord has been round-filed within 24 hours after the Gringos delivered on their part.  When the Kim Dynasty had the oil, food, money, porno library, and whatever else was demanded by the Kim machine, they could get back to murdering, oppressing, and generally dehumanising an entire population, while menacing all neighbours.

    And now we witness a different approach...very much a businessman's approach to what appears to be an intractable problem.   The businessman asks, "When do you want to meet, and where?" and the Obsolete Press with all its talking heads howls about "the inadvisability" of engaging so directly with a dangerous tyrant who has nukes.
     A week or so later, just when the Obsolete Press is almost calmed down to their normal level of hysteria and rabid slobbering, the President informs the world that he is withdrawing from an agreement to meet in Singapore with Kim because it appears as though they are not arriving with preparation protocol people that would be necessary for the conduct of such an historic meeting.
    Once again, flying in the face of everything the Obsolete Press declared just a few days earlier, they declare that the President is being irrational, even bi-polar.  This was no way to treat another head of state who deserves respect.  And while they pile on because of this latest horrible error and faux pas by the American President, he is already renegotiating the final touches to the re-establishment of the previous agreement.  This was done at the request of the North Korean foreign ministry.
     At each turn the Obsolete Press was left in the dust, stuttering and stammering, wrong on every major and minor point...yet terribly proud of themselves because they can still bring themselves to hate a person because he is boorish and terribly un-cool.   Only they...the Obsolete Press...are able to be cool, suave, so very informed, so...how should we say...correct in all things.

   Or not.

We leave all to rest.   As always, the attention and time of old and new readers is profoundly appreciated.
EL GRINGO VIEJO

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CHEYENNE BODIE
Que en Paz Descances

     Cheyenne, Johnny Yuma, Sugarfoot, Paladin, Marshall Dillon, and all such models of heroes of the morality play...the good against the bad...rush into the mind of one who lived through that time.

    Imagine! We survived the continuous hail of bullets, the hours and hours of verbiage without having to hear one "bleep" to cover the obtuse profanity, and almost no coarse body function innuendoes.

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A Little Catch-up About and Around the Quinta and Other Issues

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     This is just a brief piece to remind the OROG Community that we are still here and about.  We arrived back into the Magic Lower Rio Grande Valley on Monday afternoon just past.   The earliest hours of Monday were a bit of a challenge.
     What is called "la madrugada", an ominous-sounding word that actually only means, generally, the period between 00:00 hours (midnight) and what we would call "morning's first light", we were involved with a long-lasting, extensive cluster of thunderstorms.  They were originating both in the mountains...then moving East...and in the North, coming down from Texas, and moving South where the clusters unified with each other and proceeded to bring down the Tears of Angels upon us.

     We received in that area, which is roughly 20,000 square miles, anywhere between two and ten inches of rain during a six to ten hour period.   When I left at 07:00, gutter-rushes and puddles were everywhere.  Chaff and small to medium sized limbs, along with a few large limbs and trees were downed, and they paralleled the little paved route to the main highway.   In keeping with the general situation in Mexico, the small, rural road has now improved to the point that, what would have been a washout 20 years ago, has become just a drive that required only mature caution and deference.

    Our arrival at the destination in Texas was accomplished before noon.   My job, besides unpacking, was to process some of the few pictures that had been taken in the days just before the storms.  To the left are two flowerings of the peculiar trunks that shoot up out of the hennequin maguey after between seven and up to fifteen years of that plant's existence.
     In the light of the late morning, one can appreciate the truly strange, weird, peculiar,  even almost extraterrestrial nature of the sprouting.  At the tips of the branches are flowerettes that, in different times and in similar places, were taken and planted to develop another great extension of hennequin maguey plants.
     At one time, in Tamaulipas and generally around its capital city of Ciudad Victoria, there were over 2,000,000 acres of these plants...all rowed up in great lines, awaiting for that very moment when the plants began to confess to their pregnancy (as in the above photo), which would result in the sacrifice of the already dying central plant (el quiote), and the subsequent planting of her 100 - 200 babies.    The main "asparagus", which is strictly my term, as in "Texas Asparagus" to entertain my tourists on the excursions into that area, would dry into a very nice, straight pole.  That resource would be used as the apex-point for a roof of a jacal (ha - KAHL), the name of a rustic mud, stick, and rock home, and/or any of its humble but comfortable rooms.
     The leaves of the maguey would be battered and beaten by English thresher machines in order to reveal and allow extraction of the magic fibre within.  Those machines were made specifically, in England and to a lesser extent in Mexico, to make the access to fibre easier.    Great maritime rope and all nature of work clothes reinforcement was drawn from plants identical to those pictured.  They were the many time great-grandmothers the plants the OROG sees. 

     My oldest child...named after two of her mother's fore-bearers...planted Blue Mist weed in a huge pot, and the planting exploded with growth and production of flowers.   This greenery shown above is Blue Mist  weed as well, but perhaps more primordial because it is from the area of its "known" origination.  It is famous for being the "rest-stop" of preference for the Monarch Butterfly that moves between a couple of places in North Central Canada and a few places in South Central Mexico.   That stopping place is a quadra-generational migration between those areas which ebbs and flows during the decades.   Each year there are long moanings about how there are not as many now because George Bush killed them all except for the survivors.
    This year, however, Obama came and restored them to life. But he did it at night so that no one would know.
           All kidding aside, however,  destruction of the forests near Agangueo, in the highlands of the State of Michoacan, between Mexico City and Guadalajara, due to the value of one 100 foot trunk is around 100,000 dollars, has done a bit of damage to that race of butterflies.  But they always come back...and this year in force.

     The next picture shows a small but important planting we have near our grilling and outside cooking area when we have guests who want to burn meat.  The pictures the OROG sees is actually the flowing of oregano.   We are hoping to disperse the seeds over about 200 square feet near the "parrilla"  (grilling place), and thereby have an almost marketable harvest of "wild oregano", which is the best thing for poultry cooking and a thousand other things.

     We use a lot of these natural, local, common, and  enjoyable spice plants in our effort to have a wide selection of both Mexican and other national palates pleased with our very humble kitchen.   We have, besides the  oregano, rosemary (romero), basil (albaquar),   and such things as cebollin (say - boh - YEEN) which are true chives, that are found now in abundance in the Quinta's gardens.  We even have mint and another plant the Mexicans call "Vicks" because it has that very pronounced mentholated fragrance.  And it is used by the locals to alleviate the problems associated with sinus, nasal, and upper (as well as lower) lung involvements. 

     Everyone can appreciate the flowering and spectacular show that the Lord's Nature puts before us.  This usually means that even the  small things, such as the picture to the left...showing the "explosion flower"...are lurking around to surprise the visitor.

     Another is the "Butterfly Weed" which we have allowed to sprout here and there on the grounds of the Quinta.  That poor plant has the misfortune of having hosts or owners who are horrified at the appearance of "worms" on the plant and who then fumigate or physically destroys the poor butterfly larvae, who are only doing what nature intended.
   Those larvae, of course, become various types of very impressive butterflies, so each fumigation is an emotional and physical setback for both man and plant and beast.

     
     Here, one can see the flowering of the famous "Crown of Thorns" plant, and in the background are some of the butterfly weeds along with a good stand of "romero" or what we call rosemary.   This particular romero is, in fact from around the area...I do not know if it is native...but it has been known to be in this part of Mexico for at least the entire colonial period.

     We could go on and on about all of this.  Some of my impatience comes from having to deal with quirks in this  computer and my lack of ability and/or intelligence to understand how to fix or adjust what is going on in this computer's brain.   Frankly, it is more than just a bit of a daunting task.  

 
     We now show the "gift" we were given by a family which has an abundance of cats...which is a rarity in our community and surrounding area.  This is a pure-bred, full-scale, alley cat who is full of joy and playfulness.

    That demeanour does not sit well with our older two females, although the tri-colour does try to practice tolerance and provide instruction to the white male.   One problem we have, however, is the fact that the kitten is absolutely and certainly deaf.
     We began to notice that he did not respond to loud noises in the least.  I can clap my hands, very loudly, within 9 or 10 inches from the back of his head, and he will not even move or flinch or...hear.
Beyond that, he eats well...perhaps 10 to 15 times a day, and he likes to sleep in inconvenient places.    With that considered, it should be understood that he is a purebred cat.  He quickly understood that he was the owner of the house and would abide by his own disposition.

We shall do some more in a bit.  Thanks for the attention and interest.
El Gringo Viejo

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We re-publish work that is not ours...But this writer and the writer below...we each walk in each other's shadows...

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    For 15 years, the girls lived parallel lives. Left behind in El Salvador by mothers bound for America, they grew up a few miles apart in San Vicente, entering adolescence just as the city sank into gang violence.  They fled within weeks of one another, traveling north in 2014 along the same smuggling route, before ending up in the Washington suburbs.

     It was there that Venus Iraheta and Damaris Reyes Rivas finally met, after becoming entangled in the same violent street gang, MS-13. And it was there, in a wooded park in Springfield, Virginia, that Venus stabbed Damaris 13 times.

Even amid a nationwide surge in MS-13 slayings, the 2017 killing stood out. Female victims are nothing new for MS-13, which is infamous in Central America for making young women choose between rape and execution. But in a gang as chauvinistic as it is fearsome, female killers are almost unheard of.   Teen girl confesses to stabbing victim 13 times in MS-13 related murder during interrogation,  (FOX 5's Cori Coffin reports.)

Media: Fox10Phoenix

RELATED: 'I'm not going anywhere,' rapped a defiant MS-13 gang member. Days later, he was dead

     As Iraheta, now 18, awaits sentencing for murder later this month, authorities say the killing may be a sign of growing female involvement in MS-13 in the United States.  Unlike their counterparts in Central America, some MS-13 cliques in the United States now allow female members, said Michael Prado, assistant special agent in charge of the Washington office of Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

     "In that regard they are somewhat progressive," he said. "The [cliques] here are a little bit more, for lack of a better term, Americanized."  In response, ICE has begun instructing its agents to scrutinize girls and young women as closely as males for MS-13 involvement, Prado said, "There are female MS-13 members engaged in some extremely heinous and violent activity," he added.

     Some turn to MS-13 to escape poverty, homelessness or sexual abuse, only to be prostituted by the gang, immigration advocates say. Others are attracted to its reputation - often invoked by President Donald Trump - as the most dangerous gang in the world.   "MS-13 is the new bad boy in girls' lives," said Carlos Salvado, a defense attorney who has represented young women accused of gang connections. "By the time [parents] understand what their teenage daughter is doing, it's when they are called by the police."

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RELATED: 'People here live in fear': MS-13 menaces a community seven miles from the White House

     

     In a series of jailhouse interviews, Iraheta told The Washington Post she had been introduced to MS-13 as a child. She denied being a member, but defended the gang.  "They aren't the monsters people think they are," she said. "You don't know their stories. You don't know what's happened to them to make them this way."   (stunningly absurd statement that reflects the moral, social, personal depravity and hatred of the value of human life...welcome to between 8% and 16% of the "migrants just searching for a better life")

     

    In the summer of 2003, an angler working the dark waters of the Shenandoah River in Virginia made a startling discovery. Lying on the bank under a bridge was the tattoo-covered body of a 17-year-old girl.  Brenda Paz had been a "homegirl," or full female member, of MS-13. But "Smiley," as she was known, had wanted out and had begun helping federal authorities.

     She was four months pregnant when MS-13 members slit her throat.  Her defection, and others like it, convinced gang leaders in El Salvador that women couldn't be trusted and led to a ban on new female members.  Becoming a homegirl once provided some protection, said Tom Ward, an anthropologist who spent much of the 1990s hanging out with MS-13 in Los Angeles, where the gang was founded, for his book, "Gangsters Without Borders."

     "There was an unwritten rule that you can't rape a homegirl," he said. "Homegirls weren't running things, but some had a lot of respect."  The ban fell hardest on females in El Salvador, where women are still forced to serve the gang by cooking or cleaning, smuggling contraband into prison or collecting extortion payments, according to Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez.

     "We're seeing more and more girls pulled into the gangs for the purpose of sexual slavery," said Silvia Juárez, a researcher at the Salvadoran Women's Organization for Peace in San Salvador. "Now we're seeing girls as young as 9 years old being harassed."  Those who resist gang rape or prostitution are often killed. Thousands have fled. Girls make up nearly one-third of the 200,000 Central American unaccompanied minors detained at the U.S.-Mexico border since late 2012.

     A small percentage of these girls have joined MS-13 after being placed with relatives in the United States. Their recruitment has boosted the gang here, but has also begun to change it, authorities say.   Washington area prosecutors say they've seen an increase in female involvement in MS-13 in recent years - a sign that new cliques in the United States may not be adhering to the ban on homegirls. "They are including women in their activities more than they have in the past," said Paul Ebert, commonwealth's attorney for Prince William County. In most cases, he said, they remain "around the edges of the crime" as getaway drivers or bait to lure men into ambushes.

     "We see all that continuing," said Patrick Lechleitner, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations' Washington office, "but we also see a rise in their violent activity."

     When a homeless man was stabbed to death behind a liquor store in Suitland, Maryland, in 2014, one of the six arrested was a 17-year-old homegirl.  Katherine Lopez had joined MS-XIII in Las Vegas after she was sexually abused by a family friend, her mother told The Washington Post. A few months before the murder, she ran away from home. MS-13 pimped her out, her mother said.

    When the homeless man said something to Lopez outside the store, she grabbed his arm as the others stabbed him. She pleaded guilty in 2015 and was sentenced to 10 years.   Girls in the United States are not forced into MS-13 like they are in Central America, but they are often driven toward it by trauma, poverty or loneliness, advocates say. Unaccompanied minors are especially vulnerable, yet girls raised in the United States aren't immune. Lopez, a legal resident, moved to the U.S. from El Salvador when she was 3 years old.

     Vanesa Alvarado was born in Maryland. In the summer of 2016, the then-19-year-old used a promise of sex to lure a man into the woods in Gaithersburg, where male MS-13 members stabbed him 153 times as she shouted encouragement and laughed, according to prosecutors. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 years.

     Alvarado had dropped out of school in ninth grade after getting pregnant, later using cocaine and marijuana "to a significant extent," according to court filings. Her attorney, Tim Clarke, said she dated several MS-13 members.   "She was offered the opportunity to be part of a group, and that's what sounded good to her," he said.

      The gang's bad-boy allure can cross cultural lines.

    Long before she was known as "Flaca," or Skinny, Shannon Sanchez was born Shannon Marie Spicer. She befriended MS-13 members at her Northern Virginia high school, learning Spanish, according to her attorney, Tom Walsh. Later, after her husband was sent to prison in 2015 for molesting a child, she reconnected with the gang, which began hanging out at her house in Leesburg.

     Sanchez, 36, wasn't a gang member but occasionally helped them, like the time she drove one to the hospital after his fingers had been chopped off by a machete, Walsh said. But she also convinced two young men to leave MS-13, angering leaders in El Salvador, he said.

(RELATED: Details emerge in alleged MS-XIII 'satanic' killing of teen girl in Texas)

     In 2016, gang members borrowed her car to drive a suspected rival to a remote quarry, where they killed the teen. Afterward, Sanchez helped burn their bloody clothes in her fireplace and clean the vehicle, according to federal prosecutors. She pleaded guilty to being an accomplice after the fact and was sentenced April 27 to almost six years in prison.

"The feds are going to say, 'You should have come to the police,' " Walsh said. "Yeah, right. And on her way, she'd get killed. (El Gringo Viejo asks, "What is the loss?)

In the evenings, as kids played soccer or finished their homework, the sun would sink behind the San Vicente volcano, casting the city of 50,000 in shadow.

That's when the shootings would start.

     For Damaris, the deepening gang problem was evident at school, where MS-13 members coveted her delicate features and eager smile.

"They walked behind her in the streets, saying things to her, following her everywhere she went," recalled her mother, Maria Reyes.

Iraheta, who spoke to The Post from jail on the condition that she not discuss the charges against her, credited MS-XIII with keeping her San Vicente neighborhood peaceful.
     Her father, a taxi driver, was sometimes paid to chauffeur the gang. One night when she was 12, he didn't come home. He'd been jailed alongside members of MS-13 and its rival, the 18th Street gang.

"He said he didn't want us to come to see him because he was scared that something might happen to us," Iraheta recalled.

(We are forced here, in the voice of El Gringo Viejo, to be sure the OROG, and the visiting reader, understand how the rot affecting the taxi-daddy somehow learns to follow the lead of ''invasive" MS-XIII cancer.   They have ruined entire neighbourhoods in central Houston.  Mexican ancestried people do not want them around.  Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia people of the organised classes do not want to be around anything that starts with an MS.   The cancer will kill and/or destroy everything...Latin, Angloid, African, Extraterrestrial, etc.  The sins of the fathers will, most certainly, be visited upon the third, yea! even unto the fourth generation.)

    Iraheta dated an MS-13 member who sold drugs for the gang inside their school, she said. One day, worried he'd be caught, he put marijuana in her backpack. She was caught and suspended.  When her older brother joined 18th Street, Iraheta decided to flee north before she was caught in the crossfire.

   "I came because I had to," she said. "They knew my brother was in the opposing gang, and he knew what type of guy my boyfriend was."  Her family paid a coyote $7,500 to take the 14-year-old to the United States, she said. She crossed the Rio Grande on a dinghy near McAllen, Tex., and was arrested in the desert days later by Border Patrol.   (Where did people who make 4,000 dollars per annum per family come up with 7,500 American dollars?)

     Without a parent, she was turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a federal program that places unaccompanied minors with relatives while they are in immigration proceedings. She lived with an aunt in Riverside, California, before joining her mother in Alexandria, Virginia.

     Iraheta hardly recognized the woman who'd left her behind when she was 7.   "She was almost like a stranger to me," Iraheta said. "One day she asked me what my favorite color was, because she didn't know."  Iraheta re-connected with MS-13 in Virginia. She declined to tell The Post how, but at least one of her co-defendants also attended Annandale High School.

    At one point, when her grades began to suffer, she said she tried to distance herself from the gang. But then she met Christian Sosa Rivas.   Iraheta would later tell police she didn't know Sosa Rivas was in MS-13 until she overheard him using gang slang on the phone. But the 21-year-old boasted in rap videos about being the "leader of the Harrison clique," and Facebook photos showed him throwing MS-13 hand signs.

     After dating him for a month, Iraheta found Sosa Rivas hanging out in his room with another girl. Suspicious, Iraheta asked her where she was from. San Vicente, the 15-year-old said.  Damaris had come to the United States weeks after Iraheta. But instead of being caught at the border, she'd been smuggled all the way to Maryland. She, too, felt isolated in America. And she, too, met MS-13 members - at her Montgomery County, Maryland, high school. She'd once fled gang members. Now she ran away from home with them.

     Damaris bounced from one gang apartment to another with nothing but a backpack. But the clique soon tired of her, and when Sosa Rivas told her to stop coming around, Damaris was upset, Iraheta later told police.  But Damaris was not done with Sosa Rivas.

     Members of another MS-13 clique in Maryland suspected him of being a poser. On New Year's Eve, they apparently used two other young women to lure Sosa Rivas to the woods in Dumfries, Virginia, where they attacked him with machetes and dumped his body in the Potomac River. Hours later, Damaris allegedly sent his friend a text saying: "I told you Christian was going to pay."

     On Jan. 8, 2017, Iraheta and nine others surrounded Damaris in the woods of Lake Accotink park.   Iraheta led the attack, grabbing Damaris by the hair and hitting her in the face so hard she fell to the ground. Iraheta then interrogated Damaris at knifepoint as Jose Torres Cerrato, one of Sosa Rivas's closest friends, recorded a video on Iraheta's phone.

     "I'm telling you, these videos are going down there," Torres said in one of the videos, which he hoped to send to gang leaders in El Salvador and earn a promotion, authorities say. In the videos, Torres and others can be heard egging Iraheta on.

     "What the ----!" someone shouts at one point. "Just stick the steel in her."

She did, stabbing Damaris after the 15-year-old admitted to sleeping with Sosa Rivas and helping set him up, Iraheta later told police. The others then joined in the attack. Damaris's body was found a month later under an overpass.

     When police arrested Iraheta and the others, they traced the videos to her iCloud account. Emerson Fugon Lopez told Fairfax County detectives that Iraheta had taken charge of the clique after Sosa Rivas' death - an extraordinary claim, if true. She had warned him not to talk about their crime or she would "rip my head off," he said. She had contacts everywhere.

     But when Fugon falsely claimed that Iraheta had been the only one to attack Damaris, the detective scoffed. "You're a man," the detective said. "There's no way that a gang is going to allow Iraheta to be the only one that hits the girl."

     The thing is that we're just starting out," he replied. "We don't know real well how the Mara thing works."

     But Iraheta did. During her interrogation, she showed detectives Mara Salvatrucha hand signs, boasting that she'd grown up around MS-13, "I know how things work," she said.

     From jail, Iraheta claimed that others involved in killing Damaris may have done it to move up in MS-13 but that she was motivated by love - and hate.   "They keep saying I'm a gang member when I'm not," she said. "If you really, really investigate, women are not allowed in the gang. They are not trusted."

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   Here begins the commentary of El Gringo Viejo.

    All of their DOAs and Emergency Room transport and treatment is paid for by the taxpayer.   All of their illegitimate babies...many of whom are sacrificed to "Santo Muerte", are supported by public funding through AFDC, Food Stamps, Section 8, Medicaid...etc.
   Catholic Charities, the Mexican American Legal Defence and Education Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, all associated Soros "ACORN" descendants such as Occupy Wall Street and movements such as Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, and the entire "Progressive" movement are all involved in the task to destroy America as the last free-standing common-law democratic, republican nation.
    The Mara Salvatrucha were sent by Satan to speed up the process.

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This is the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe, so named by orders of the Virgin herself
to the Indian man...some say Aztec, but he was in all probability of the Otomi' nation .   This image appeared on his 'tamil' (blouse made of cotton and maguey strand reinforment)
 when he unfolded the gift of roses to the Bishop of Mexico from his tamil.  He did not know
until openning the gift that the Image would be there.

This depiction of 'Santo Muerte is
actually a desecration  of the classic
image of Saint Mary of Tepayac, also
known as The Virgin of Guadalupe,
Patron Saint of Mexico and all the
Americas...there is no greater
desecration of a religious emblem
in the opinion of this writer.
Skepticism is understandable. One
should have at least a healthy dose
of skepticism when dealing with
"religious relicry".   The true image
of the Virgin is confounding, the one
above is simply a vain and profane
piece of work inspired by Satan.

The Basilica where millions pay
homage to the apparition of the
Holy Virgin and the tilma
(blouse) of the Indian, Juan
Diego.  The "new" Basilica is the
 ugliest religious structure in the 
world, but it houses the 
most beautiful "painted
blouse" in all religious art. 

     With all due deference, El Gringo Viejo wants to point out  this Mara  thing and all such groups, really does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, and such things.   They care only about making an illegal living; worshipping  "El  Santo Muerte, extorting...stealing...shaking down and "taxing" the "huddled masses, AND the wealthy by kidnapping, killing by means of extreme torture, raping, destroying, and all the while directly or indirectly being supported by some or several forms of governmental subsidy in the United States.  The reason they come here is because there are so many people who are not accustomed to this type of incomprehensible violence.  They can strut upon a stage of incredulity.

     While not a fan of Hemingway in any way, I am moved to remember the words that inspired the term..."For Whom the Bell Tolls" in the popular culture.  It reads:

   John Donne (1572-1631), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation    Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris:

   "Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.''

     Hemingway was not capable of such eloquence.  Perhaps I am not so blessed , either.  But I do know the difference between pewter and silver.

       It is not too terribly over-expressive to suggest that the violence we read and hear about in Mexico is not a distant thing.  Each minute, hour, day, and week that goes by, the rot...the cancer...in a sociological and anthropological sense, is not "over there".
       It is now within, and has been for several years.  And when the ignorant and arrogant chant, "There are no 'illegal' people!!!  There are no borders!!!"  Please remember, the Mara Salvatrucha did laugh to hear such sport, and await the chance to tear apart one of their own...or one of your own.

The tamil of Juan Diego spoke for itself, and still speaks.  Thankfully, the Bishop of Mexico at the time decided to take the words of a well-spoken Indian, subject of the new religious and royal order,  seriously.

Pray for the ordering of the Affairs of Earth.
El Gringo Viejo.

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Heading down next Thursday to the Fabled Quinta -

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     We are going to be heading down to the Quinta this next Thursday, the 10th of May, after doing a bit of shopping for the larder down there and making other necessary purchases that the gang requests from "up here".  We shall be out for about 2 weeks during this episode.

     During the past weeks and months there has been a very serious up-tick in the number of animals great and small who visit us, as well as a proliferation of new birds and butterflies.

     This seems to have coincided with a significantly higher number of nearby and Monterrey and Tampico people asking for accommodation and / or for afternoon "parrilladas" - the famous outdoor grilling and chewing the fat social and political talk, speculation, and tiddlywinks that most Texians and Mexicans seem to enjoy so very much.

    We shall have a chance to get to know the most recent addition to our family, a new water heater, which is always a pleasant thing to have.   I suspect that it has not been used yet, because Alvaro, our charge' d'affaires, will frequently eschew using the hot water because he thinks the room temperature water is fine.

     El Gringo Viejo, on the other hand, thinks that if the "hot" water cannot blister your skin and steam up the house with just the "hot" water faucet of the sink in the little kitchen, then the setting is not high enough.

      We are anxious, as well, to see how our new, semi-albino male kitten is adapting.  It was noticed that he was almost totally deaf when we took possession of him, but that over the days he seemed, finally, to be beginning to  respond to sharp noises.   Alvaro informed me during one of our telephonic connections that the cat "Whitey" had been "hearing pretty well".

our newest family member
"Whitey"  more or less  at
 home in the Quinta.

     In any regard, on Thursday, we shall turn into a pumpkin, mainly due to a quirky problem we have in terms of telephone and computer connections.   We are quick to add that such connections throughout Mexico are quite good, in reality.   It has to do with a notorious "black-hole" of about 1 mile in diameter, and the end of a cable service that is always going to be extended "next month".    We do have very good SKY satellite television reception in our parlour and a 17 channel 1950s style, very clear old-fashioned antenna feed for the guest room.

     Please do not worry.  When you visit, the guest has priority over both televisions.   For instance, there are times during a Dallas Cowboy game or an important soccer match or political event when we might have 10 or more people gathered around our flat-screen (a medium-large new one) in the parlour, with all our different chairs, cheering and/or moaning about the proceedings.

    So, people asking me to pay up my bar-bill, and wash the car, and keep my cats out of their flower beds need to be aware that such orders and advisories need to be made no later than Wednesday night, because before daybreak on Thursday, I shall be nearly 100 miles deep into Mexico.   Any messages or requests need to be made before departure.

El Gringo Viejo

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We seemed to have made a fairly good analysis...Check out the data on the Presidential polls for Mexico

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Posted by Reuters

(Repeats with no change in text)

By Christine Murray

MEXICO CITY, May 3 (Reuters) - Mexican leftist presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's lead narrowed for the first time in months as his nearest rival rebounded from corruption allegations ahead of the July 1 election, according to a poll released on Thursday.

Less than two months before Mexicans vote, Lopez Obrador's support grew to 39 percent from 38 percent in the previous poll at the end of March, according to polling firm Parametria, but his lead narrowed to 14 points from 18.

The possibility of a victory by Lopez Obrador, who has threatened changes to the country's landmark reform to lure private investment to its energy markets, has spooked some investors, helping send the peso currency down more than 3 percent in April.

Support for Ricardo Anaya, the candidate of the "For Mexico in Front" coalition of three parties from the right and left, grew to 25 percent from 20 percent the month before. In a recent TV debate, he portrayed himself as the only alternative to the front-runner.

Third-place ruling party candidate Jose Antonio Meade's support fell to 14 percent in the latest poll from 16 percent previously.

"There is now no debate about who is in second place," said Parametria founder Francisco Abundis, saying Anaya was helped by a shift in focus away from corruption scandals.

"If this trend continues, we would expect a closer election," he said, although adding that Anaya may not have enough time to catch up.

Independent Margarita Zavala fell to 6 percent and Jaime Rodriguez declined to 2 percent.

STEADY LEAD

Until now, Lopez Obrador had maintained or increased his lead in opinion polls every month since December when he was ahead by 11 points.

The face-to-face Parametria poll of 1,000 people was taken between April 25 and 30 and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.

Some 14 percent of those asked either did not answer, said they did not know or could not choose a candidate listed.

The results were similar to a poll published by national newspaper Reforma on Wednesday, which showed Lopez Obrador's lead slightly narrower than its previous poll.

Despite his smaller lead, Lopez Obrador's advantage has led to a focus on how his Morena party will fare in national congressional and gubernatorial elections also held on July 1.

His ability to control Congress will be key for his proposals, including a review of major energy-sector reforms enacted in recent years.

In the lower chamber race for 500 seats, Lopez Obrador's Morena is ahead with 25 percent support versus 19 percent for Anaya's National Action Party (PAN). In the 128-seat Senate, Morena holds 25 percent of preferences, with the PAN at 21 percent.

Abundis said the difference between the presidential numbers and those for the Senate and lower chamber showed Anaya's coalition had potential to grow.

He said the first candidates debate on April 22, seen by 13 million people, was an element but not the most important factor in changing voter preferences. Anaya is generally viewed as having won the debate.

Now on his third presidential bid, Lopez Obrador has been almost universally known in Mexico since he first ran in 2006, although opinion of him has varied. Less than two years ago, Anaya was known by less than half the population and Meade by less than one-fifth, according to Parametria.

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATION BY EL GRINGO VIEJO:

     It will be noticed  that this poll took place between the dates of 25 April through 30 April 2018.  The data was "centrifuged" and published yesterday by the Parametria company, which has a slight leftward bent, although their work is creditworthy, in our opinion.  

         The OROG community can take comfort in the fact El Gringo Viejo's forecast, published four days ago, has begun to prove to be accurate...if anything, a little ahead of schedule.   Anaya's share shot up due to his performance at the first debate.  There are rumours that AMLO might choose to forego any further debating, because he seemed to be "scowly" and "grumpy", as well as rambling in his answers.   Age has its advantage but youth also has its advantage, and we shall see how that plays out.

     We look for a continued gradual increase in the "market share" for Anaya, and a slight erosion in the following for AMLO.  We were a bit surprised by the reading for Meade to measure two points less...we were, frankly expecting a one or two point increase.

     Anaya was the only one whose "market share" went up substantially, and should one regard the margin of error, at best case, Anaya could be very much in striking distance.  The fall-off for Mrs. Margarita Zavala de Calderon might suggest that her PAN followers might be drifting over to the candidate that is at least within some kind of striking distance.   It is also evident that the leftist Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) is holding in strongly with the right / left amalgamation that I personally find strange to the extreme.

We shall see...

EL GRINGO VIEJO

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