The dark crown jewel in Mexico State, with the fifth highest murder rate in the country, and the nation’s highest femicide rate, is Ecatepec de Morelos. And this week, wouldn’t you know, politicians decided finally to do something to help the poor people there.Following the governor’s gift to Rubí, and in anticipation of a crowd of more than 1.3 million who claimed on Facebook to be “attending” the party, Octavio Martinez Vargas, a politician with the country’s leftist party, set up a tour bus leaving from deadly Ecatepec to San Luis Potosí, so that dozens more could attend Rubí’s vastly overbooked quinceañera.In nearby Metepec—a city in Mexico State near the site of Senator Ana Gabriela Guevara’s beating—city councilman Jair Garduño Montalvo took to Facebook, to offer Rubí a brand new laptop if his post reached 2,000 likes.It did not. But Garduño came under heavy criticism as Mexicans dredged through their collective memory of memes and remembered just where they’d heard of this guy before.Garduño’s brother was a social media celebrity of sorts earlier this year.In May, a viral video showed several bodyguards beating up a police officer on a Mexico State highway, apparently acting on the orders of a man nearby in a Rolls Royce. That man, #LordRollsRoyce as he’s now known, is this Metepec politician’s millionaire brother. Thanks to the social media pressure and meme fever, Emir Garduño Montalvo is now behind bars, charged with money laundering.It is unclear if Rubí ever got that promised Garduño laptop. But another social media celeb dubbed “Lady Wuuu” assumed the role of Rubí’s godfather when he appeared with Raquel Bigorra, a television personality on TV Azteca whose station raged an all-out ratings war with Televisa over coverage of Rubí’s birthday party.These two most important stations in Mexico, TV Azteca and Televisa, “control over 90 percent of the free-to-air television market,” Freedom House noted in 2012 in its Countries at the Crossroads report. This “Mexican media oligopoly has historically shared a close relationship with the government,” the report noted, and this concentration of power “is one of the primary impingements on freedom of expression” in Mexico.So it came as no surprise that Televisa and TV Azteca offered deafening coverage of the event this week, along with reporters from just about every other national media outlet.
Mayor Raúl Castillo Mendoza of Villa de Guadalupe, the municipality that encompasses La Joya, said two weeks before Rubí’s birthday party that the region doesn’t have cell phone coverage, much less Internet. Nor does La Joya have basic infrastructure, like a hospital or sewage system or, in most homes, running water, electricity or paved roads.“There is one spot where we have WiFi,” he noted of the greater Villa de Guadalupe area. “But it’s a landline with an antenna.”Mexico’s electrical company offered a temporary solution for Rubí’s party, and Telcel—the telecom company that produced Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim—finally came out to survey the area for future coverage.Four nearby towns worked together to provide lodging and services for the party’s guests, and the growing fiesta eventually was held on a dry lake bed in the neighboring town of Charcas. (When it was over, guests left behind three-and-a-half tons of beer cans and other debris in a scene reminiscent of Coachella.)
While the birthday spectacle was under way last Monday in San Luis Potosí, sweeping gas shortages hit states across Mexico—including San Luis Potosí, where at least 86 percent of stations were without fuel. (News outlets like Univisión erroneously linked that to Rubí’s birthday party.) In fact, the cost of gasoline is expected to increase 20 percent beginning in January, as market-based prices are introduced following historic but controversial energy reforms in which Mexico’s crippled oil sector is opened for private investment.Despite being an oil-rich country, Mexico imports well over half of its fuel due to the severe deterioration of its refineries. At least a dozen Mexican states reported fuel shortages last week in a crisis that the national oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, alternately blamed on breaks in the supply chain, measures taken in anticipation of the changes to come in 2017, an increase in need during the holiday season, and organized crime. Pemex, to its credit, did not blame Rubí’s birthday.
Probably never unless you have some outside intervention or another revolution
Quote from: LC on January 01, 2017, 04:42:39 PMProbably never unless you have some outside intervention or another revolutionevery revolution mexico has had ends up with oppression of poor people and then the cycle continues
Quote from: LC on January 01, 2017, 04:50:38 PMQuote from: Naru on January 01, 2017, 04:46:40 PMQuote from: LC on January 01, 2017, 04:42:39 PMProbably never unless you have some outside intervention or another revolutionevery revolution mexico has had ends up with oppression of poor people and then the cycle continuesMaybe your revolutionaries should stop supporting people who just want to get their turn at the top of the money making ladder.A lot easier said than done though. Someone has to finance that revolufion.Very rarely does armed revolution lead to a better future.
Quote from: Naru on January 01, 2017, 04:46:40 PMQuote from: LC on January 01, 2017, 04:42:39 PMProbably never unless you have some outside intervention or another revolutionevery revolution mexico has had ends up with oppression of poor people and then the cycle continuesMaybe your revolutionaries should stop supporting people who just want to get their turn at the top of the money making ladder.A lot easier said than done though. Someone has to finance that revolufion.