A new L.A. taco restaurant has a narco theme to it.
Tacos Los Desvelados in Maywood, California named its food for notorious Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers. Chapo Guzman gets a taco, Pablo Escobar gets a burrito, and so on.
That’s pretty funny, and possible only because of Maywood’s safe remove (it’s a small town southeast of Los Angeles) from the real and sinister violence that these guys have created.
Here’s something else that’s not so cute:
Mexico’s Attorney General’s office reports finding 662 bodies in 201 clandestine graves in 16 Mexican states from 2005 to the present. Of those, 380 have been so decomposed that investigators can’t tell if the bodies are of men or women.
In Iguala, Guerrero alone, 63 graves with 133 bodies have been found.
I didn’t love everything that Charles Bowden wrote, but I did love the spirit with which he wrote – very much out on his own ledge of the world.
I didn’t agree with some of what he said about the border and Mexico, but most of it came from a life steeped in both. He was no dilettante, this guy.
His book on Juarez was damn good.
He spent a long time writing about the border, about drugs, about Juarez and I’m sorry to hear he passed Saturday in his sleep in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Find his book on Juarez – Murder City, it’s called – and read that. Pretty fine piece of journalism, and reflective of the guy and his take on his craft and the world. With the rough-edged, opinionated, cranky prose that made him worth reading, and listening to. I met him once, at a conference at Cal State Northridge.
There aren’t too many out there like him any more.
I’m here in Youngstown, Ohio. A tough-looking town that appears to have been through a lot.
Apparently the town once had miles and miles of steel mills. That’s gone.
Just interviewed a Mexican trafficker who told me that the guys from his town back home sent hundreds of guys to the US to retail heroin like pizza.
In time, they’d saturate a market and so the heroin pioneers in that market would move on to other places and thus, over the years, they expanded. They’re now in 20 states and cresting on the new markets for their dope created by the waves of addiction to Oxycontin, which contains a drug molecularly almost identical to heroin.
It’s all part of the next book I’m trying to get done.
Mennonite one-room school house near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua
Time Magazine has published a set of photos of an Old Colony Mennonite community in Durango, Mexico, titling it The Flower Girls. Check them out. Tell me what you think. I find the photos are sweet, delicate, beautiful, and only hint at the disaster that has befallen most of these Mennonite communities, which have tried mightily to separate themselves from the world.
The Mennonite communities in Chihuahua are replete with severe problems of inbreeding, domestic violence, benighted education, alcoholism, and, in the last 20 years, drug trafficking, particularly in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, four hours south of Ciudad Juarez.
Mennonites came to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s, invited by the government that wanted to colonize the north to avoid further US depredations. Those who came to escape the world were masterful farmers and cheesemakers. But in time they suffered from the same problems as other Mexican farmers: drought, lack of credit, etc. Many in the Chihuahua colonies turned to drug smuggling — some full time and some to pay an urgent debt. I ran into these folks in 2003 and included a chapter on the harrowing result — the scariest moment of my reporting life — in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.
I like the Time photos immensely, but from them you’d not guess much of the reality of Old Colony Mennonite life in Mexico.
For many of these world-rejecting Mennonites, it always seemed to me that their very attempt to isolate themselves made them vulnerable to the worst the modern world has to offer. Many I spoke with described their people as lambs, unprepared for what they would encounter outside their community. Some likened it to Indians’ lack of exposure to small pox before the Europeans came.
I’ve included a photo above of a one-room schoolhouse, taught by a man with barely a bad sixth-grade education, which is how Mennonite kids are still schooled in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. Would love your comments on the Time photos.
