The Power and the Money

Bad news in tragedy avoided: building codes and the Mexican earthquake

Four days ago, I worried that the smaller force of the recent quake meant that we could not be sure that better building standards were the reason fewer buildings collapsed. There was some pushback in comments, noting that the epicenter was much closer to Mexico City in 2017 than in 1985. There was also some pushback on Twitter making a similar point. The Twitter exchange ended with Leticia Arroyo-Abad presciently saying that we could tell nothing from the size the quake because “it would depend on how different frequencies affect different structures.”

And she is absolutely right. The New York Times now reports that the closer distance of the 2017 quake meant that the shaking was far less damaging to buildings above six stories in height. Moreover, a 2016 study showed that many new buildings did not meet the minimum requirements of the building code. 

This photograph was taken in the same neighborhood as the new high rise mentioned in the NYT article, the one which collapsed. (More details here.) We know people who live in new buildings in that neighborhood. They dodged a bullet. There should have been no bullet to dodge, even in a 7.1 quake. That makes me angry. 

 

The jury is still out, but evidence is piling up that repeat of the 1985 quake would have killed far more people than the one Mexico City just experienced. The heads of bureaucrats and politicians in CDMX need to roll. The Line 12 saga shows that Mexico can have such a reckoning ... and once we are over counting our blessings and celebrating the heroism of the citizenry, this reckoning should be big. 

Good news in tragedy

Mexico City seems to have come through this earthquake much better than it did in 1985. Earlier, I worried that the reason might be that the quake was far smaller on the Richter scale; Dwight Dyer, in comments, pointed out that the epicenter was also much closer to Mexico City and the shaking was likely comparable. 

Is there any way to know if the tightening of building codes helped make Mexico more resilient? After all, it is not like the country stopped suffering from corruption in ‘85. 

One good sign is that it seems that no public schools collapsed during the quake; only 16 experienced major damage. The horror in the southern suburb of Villa Coapa happened when a private school fell in; subject to the new codes but not under the direct control of the federal government. The reason that the performance of the public school matters is that they were all supposed to be retrofitted after the 1985 quake. Their relatively good performance does not mean that the new codes were properly implemented ... but any public school failures would have been a damning condemnation.

Mexico has a lot to be proud of in how it has responded to the disaster. It also may have much to be proud of in how it prepared.

You take hope where you find it. 

El terremoto

I do not have much to say about the quake, save that it is horrifying, and that fortunately it seems (we hope) that no one we know has been hurt, although several have been terrified. There are some places where you can help. One place is below, managed by the sister of a good friend:

Ayuda para el terremoto en México https://t.co/yTwMHsew6t via @youcaring

— Marusia Musacchio (@tintachina88) September 20, 2017

I suppose I have a few more things to say. The first, for those of you who don’t know Mexico City’s geography, the worst damage has been in the center of the city. The reason is that the city was built on a lakebed: when the earth shakes, the ground liquifies. The most horrifying damage in ‘85 came about when high rises around the Alameda or in Tlatelolco came crashing down. The Metro stopped working. 412 buildings collapsed. 

The geographic scope of the damage seems similar, but so far only 47 buildings appear to collapsed, far less than in 1985. That said, this quake was an order of magnitude less on the Richter scale. So while I would like to believe that the better results are due to better building codes, I am sure that this is true. 

There has not been much looting or rioting, but two forms of criminal activity have been reported. The first seems to have been a spate of carjackings aimed at cars stuck in traffic, particularly out around Santa Fe. There have also been scattered reports of people entering homes disguised as rescue workers and robbing the inhabitants. I will predict that these reports turn out to scattered exceptions, both because the authorities seem to be responding to them with alacrity and because social disorder generally tends to decrease in disasters, as long as the authorities avoid general food and water shortages. 

Godspeed, Mexico City. You are loved. Please give above if you can.

Kiddie fútbol and the Trump administration

My son had a bit of culture shock in Mexico City, where he learned that 4-to-6 year-olds there take fútbol seriously. None of this everybody-wins bullshit we have back here in D.C. Nope, kids in Mexico play fút the way kids here play basketball. My son overreacted to that realization: he started to play dirty, like Luis Suárez dirty. The professors (that is what the coaches are called!) could deal with it, but the other kids would complain to my wife and me after practice.

Fortunately, nobody ever attributed the boy’s dirty pool to his nationality. He scored a lot and made saves, albeit diosmio the red cards. Whatever image the other kids had of American children was not affected by this crazy American fond of fouling, handballs and other Suárez-like program activities. He was the youngest kiddo out there and represented nobody but himself. (And maybe his parents, but the other kids’ parents came across as amused and sympathetic, not judgmental. Much like the reaction of soccer fans when they talk to Uruguayans about Suárez. Which is fortunate for Uruguay’s international reputation.)

And that brings us to the impact of another individual at about the same maturity level as my 4-year-old son: President Donald J. Trump. Earlier this summer, I noted that there seemed to be very little anti-Americanism among middle-class chilangos, certainly when compared to the wave of hate-America that passed over the same group in 2001-02. Mexicans realize that the current American president is unpopular and does not represent the American people as a whole any more than my son represents all American children.

A former Mexican ambassador to China initially shared my views but now fears that the Trump administration is doing permanent damage to Mexicans’ view of the American people:

I believed Mex people can tell diff btwn Trump & Amer people & would revert to normal once he's gone. Now afraid damage will be long lasting

— Jorge Guajardo (@jorge_guajardo) August 27, 2017

How can we know who is right? Polls are not helpful. The standard question asks about Mexican views of the United States, and those views, obviously, depend greatly on the current government. Consider the below results from the Economista poll. They are obviously influenced by the policies of the American government-of-the-day. The U.S. was highly unpopular in early 2004, only a year after Gulf War 2 and while the Iraq insurgency dominated the headlines. By late 2005, that had passed from Mexican headlines (albeit not American ones) and people’s view of the United States recovered.

I would like pollsters to ask Mexican respondents a different question: “What is your view of the American people?” or “What is your view of American society?” Asking them about the “United States” invites conflation with the current administration. What we want to know is the damage that Trump has done to the relationship between the two peoples, not to the image of his administration.

Does anyone have any data on this? I would also like to know qualitative impressions. Please, comment below.

The mystery of tranquility in Mexico City

We are back in D.C. Time to think about the time in Mexico City, which we intend to repeat every summer that we can.

Crime has gotten worse in the statistics, but not in the feel. The center of the city is as safe (or not) as ever.

But there are some signs of worse to come. Right after our arrival, there was a large-scale shootout between the Marines and a local gang called the Tláhuac Cartel, Tláhuac being a poor borough out on the edges of the city. (The new Line 12 runs there.) 

The short version of the shootout isn’t ominous at all. The gang’s leader, Felipe “The Eyes” de Jesús, was dealing drugs on the UNAM campus. University officials complained to the feds, so the Marines started an investigation. (Yes, it is a problem that the Marines needed to handle the investigation instead of the federal police.) They found him, moved in, and everything went wrong. Tragic and possibly incompetent, but these things sadly can happen anywhere.

No, what’s worrisome are what else the gang was doing and what happened after the shootout. The gang wasn’t just selling drugs on a big college campus. Rather, it was engaged in extensive extortion of Tláhuac’s retail markets and taxi services. That is worrisome. Now, if taking down The Eyes ends that, then we do not have a problem. But right after the shootout that killed him, mototaxis controlled by the Tláhuac cartel blocked off roads and gang members set a large truck and three buses on fire. That does not sound like the organization’s grip on the borough has been broken.

What makes it worse is the mayor’s insistence that everything is fine, cartels don’t operate in Mexico City. Homicides leaped 25% this year. Just a blip? Possible, but unlikely in a city of this size. Now, I understand why Mancera insists on this, for reasons beyond the political. (He wants to run for president in 2018.) First, homicide was not that high (through September 2016) in the affected areas. Consider this map, from the indispensable Diego Valle. In 2015-16 there were only 19 reported killings in the sector where the shootout happened (outlined). That is a rate of 10.3 per 100,000, which is neither low nor high by American standards. The area is far from a no-go zone. And while it is clear from the overall time series (see below) that something happened in CDMX around August 2016, things do not look to be out-of-control. 

So even though a federal report states that cartels do indeed operate in greater Mexico City (you can see a map of their territories here) the situation is not yet scary, at least not to a jaded child of the 1970s and 80s like myself.

I am, however, I think, French at heart. Mexico City may be under control in practice, but I do not fully understand how it stays under control in theory.

It suffers from the same corrupt and ineffectual police as the rest of the country. And it has had the same trouble making the new legal system work as a the rest of the country. So why does violence remain relatively low? After all, CDMX is safer than Washington, D.C., but D.C. has a decent police force and a functioning justice system. (For example, D.C. clears up about 70% of homicides. Mexico City, around half.) What then keeps a lid on the violence?

Until I can explain that, even if only in theory, I will remain nervous about the future.

Departures

With four of us, we will be calling a carshare to take us to the airport. I know, right now “Uber” has become a generic word, the way “Fridgidaire,” “Hoover,” and “Xerox” used to be. Since I dislike the company with a passion, however, I will do my part to insure that it remains a proper noun. “Carshare!”

It is slightly easier than calling a radiocab, I suppose, and it does insure working seat belts in the back. I am of mixed minds, to be frank. In Mexico City there is an upwards redistribution of income, since carsharing drivers tend to be richer.

And I miss taking the subway to and from the airport. It’s an experience that most middle and upper-middle class chilangos avoid, for reason that I do not understand. You do have to traverse the entire terminal from the international area to get to the station, but it isn’t that big a terminal: call it twelve Manhattan blocks, a little over a half-mile. You will also have to change trains at least once, since Line 5 runs a peripheral route down the middle of the Interior Circuit expressway. But unless you’re encumbered with bags or headed beyond the reach of the metro, it’s cheaper and faster than taking a taxi.

So why don’t more people do it? Well, practically, the station interchanges are a major PITA. They are long labyrinths. Not unpleasant, but not efficient. The reason the connections between lines are so ridiculous is that Mexico City, wisely, decided to build its metro on the cheap. Sure, you could have had lines dive under each other with platforms carefully laid out to make transfers quick and easy — the Washington Metro is pretty good in this respect — but building cathedrals to urban transit is not how Mexico City rolls. So other than the first three lines (1, 2, and 3, easily enough) everything is jury-rigged.

The most relevant connection for this post is La Raza, which connects Line 5 (the airport line) to Line 3 (a north-south line that runs through a lot of nice middle class neighborhoods). The damn thing is over a half-mile long (like the airport) but rather less pleasant. The first time you do it you will notice the science museum laid out along the walls, covering the history of the universe. The 78th time you do it, you will start to feel like the transfer has taken you the entire age of the universe. I can see this being a deterrent, but come on. By the time you have memorized the panels on the evolution of the cockroach, you can start people watching instead.

The wildest is Chabacano, which connects lines 2, 8, and 9 in wild mess of tunnels, bridges, and escalators. Up-down up-down up-down, great for kids, less so for commuters. But the brutalist architecture is so cheap that it’s charming. In fact, you might recognize some it: they filmed the subway shootouts in Total Recall there. Click the link. The station really is laid out just like the chase! No directorial tricks; they just had Arnie make the transfer. With people shooting at him.

The weirdest is Ermita connecting Line 2 and the newest Line 12. The corridors zig and zag like a protractor. I have no idea why, but if I had to guess, it was much cheaper than just barreling a straight connection through. Kinda triples the distance.

The best is Zapata. Just take it. Much more interesting stuff on the walls than the science museum at La Raza.

And the longest? Oh sweet Mary mother of God, Atlatilco. It connects Line 8 and Line 12. It goes on forever. I did it precisely once, just to see it. I will not voluntarily do it again.

I could go on.

Anyway, the long La Raza connection is not why few people take the airport line. Nor is it crowding. (Want to go to Condesa? Line 5 to Line 9. Annoying transfer; you gotta climb a lot of escalators. But it is still crazy fast and there is very little crowding, even by D.C. standards.)

No, it is just that too many upper middle class chilangos still feel weird on the metro. You know, people selling you candy and phone chargers and music CDs. (I do not understand that market.) Which is too bad.

But which will soon change. Mexico City is building a new airport right outside the city. The talk is of extending Line B to it ... but the real project will be an express train running from Observatorio, where the new commuter rail from Toluca will come in, out to the new airport. It will not be part of the Metro system (although it will connect to it) and it will cost a lot more than the current 29¢. So the middle class will take it, but the poor will not, and so transit will remain class segregated.

It also looks like the airport might be open before the airport connections, which is going to be a Godawful mess, but that is another story.

The beginning of the end of parking?

Mexico City is creaking under the number of cars on its streets. For details, see this post. So what to do about it?

The metro is already a modern miracle and is being expanded. Notably more middle-class people appear to be riding it. It should be expanded faster, but there are practical limits to how fast that can be done. 

Road-pricing is a distinct possibility, but would be politically, administratively, and technically extremely difficult in this town. Mexico City is much nicer than it was, but it still ain’t London. Although they have managed to close off major streets in the city center on Sunday.

Which leaves you with ... limit parking! In a brilliant move, the Ciudad de México just moved to limit parking spaces in new residential construction. Current regulations mandate minimums, on the assumption that people will drive no matter what. (For offices, it was one spot for more-or-less every 300 square feet.) The newest office tower downtown, for example, has more than 3,000 parking spaces.

Now there are no minimums. The maximum is three per apartment (which is rather high) or one per 300 square feet of office space. (See pages 7-8 of the new regulation here.) You can build more, but you need to pay a tax. 

The literature says that this should discourage driving. European cities have de facto parking limits, and they do indeed have fewer auto trips than American ones. The question for Mexico is whether this is enough to keep all of the future middle class from commuting by automobile. The question for the rest of North America is whether this policy can or should be emulated.

Thoughts?

More subway geekery, Mexico City edition

I know, up north the Senate is debating ... uh ... something that might impoverish and sicken millions of people, while the President burns through every norm we have left. But I am south of the border, so let’s talk about subways.

Back in 2014, we blogged about the Line 12 mess. (The above station is on Line 12 where my boy goes for soccer practice.) The problem was that the city decided to use steel rails and overhead catenary power lines instead of rubber tires and third rails. The trains proved too heavy for the tracks, 15 kilometers of which had to be replaced. In addition, curves on the elevated structure had to be widened and the camber reduced from 160 millimeters to 100. It was a design mess, but as I argued in the post, the Mexican government actually comported itself fairly well in the aftermath.

The question is, why did they decide to switch designs? This wasn’t the first steel-wheeled line constructed in Mexico City, but Line A runs out the eastern suburbs mostly on a straight ground-level right-of-way in the middle of a freeway. Moreover, Line A was originally designed to be a light rail that would link into the end of the Metro but not really be part of it. Its cars are a full 30 centimeters narrower than regular metro cars and weigh 88 tons less. (The history of Line A can be found here.) In other words, the decision to build Line 12 with overhead wires and steel rails had nothing do to with the earlier experience with Line A.

The decision seems to have been based on a 2000 study for the World Bank, which compared Madrid’s successful subway roll-out to experiences in Mexico, Caracas, and Santiago. Madrid used steel and overhead and got it done cheaper. The reason was simply that most of its lines had historically used overhead wires and its maintenance operations were designed around them. (You don’t have to turn off the power to protect maintenance crews when you have overhead lines.) So it could use the same sort of railcar that it always used. In that sense, Madrid went with overhead for pretty much the same reason that Mexico City should have stuck with third rail. 

As for steel versus rubber, the study provided evidence that steel wheels should be cheaper. Steel wheels last longer, so there will be some savings over the long-run. And you need three sets of rails for rubber-wheeled trains, because you need guide tracks to keep them on course. So steel should be cheaper. But is it? As the study itself noted (page 77), Mexico’s rubber-wheeled trains can operate on 7% slopes and make turns with 105 meter radii, compared to 4% and 250 meters in Madrid. If Line 12 had used that technology, it would not have needed to be rebuilt.

In short, it looks like the Line 12 decision was the triumph of hope over experience. There were plenty of reasons to believe that steel wheels and overhead wires would be a better design if you were starting a subway from scratch. But Mexico City was not starting a subway from scratch. It was extending a well-established system. And its only experience with steel-wheeled cars was on what was a suburban light rail with much smaller cars and trains than the rest of the system. 

Still, the ending so far has not been unhappy. As we noted in 2014, the cost of the new line is still reasonable. Moreover, in May 2017 the government obtained a further discount of 2.1 billion pesos from the consortium built the line.  And ...

... the new trains, they are very nice!

Air pollution in Mexico

 OK, so when I flew into Mexico earlier this month I was astounded to see the brownish murk as my plane descended into the Valley of Mexico. The horizon disappeared, the mountains were invisible. After landing, the sky had a strange greyish tinge that persisted even when you looked straight up. My eyes watered. It was awful.

Back to the 1990s, I thought! The government declared a smog emergency, ultimately taking most cars off the road. By the time I flew out on the morning of Saturday, May 7th, the sky had gone back to a normal blue and you could see the mountains. Ozone levels had dropped from almost twice the safe limit (0.11 ppm) to “only” 2% above. 

But it took heroic measures. The cutback on the number of cars in circulation was herculean. 

Naturally, I wanted to see if things were really back to the 1990s. How bad was this smog emergency in historical perspective? Sadly, the data wasn’t easily available in one place. So I decided to get it. And after much looking, I managed to put together a complete series on the average maximum daily ozone reading for the Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México (ZMVM). That is to say, it takes the highest reading from all five metropolitan sectors for every day, then averages that across all the days of the month.  The data from 1992 to 2010 (save 2003) are from INEGI, with the caveat that they changed the calculations in 2006 in a way that I do not fully understand. The data from all the other years are taken from hourly readings downloaded from the Atmospheric Monitoring Board of the D.F. government. I had to write some annoying Excel code to extract the data that I wanted, so I wouldn’t bet the bank on it having no errors.

Caveats aside, the numbers give a good idea of the trend:

Air quality has deteriorated markedly in the last three years, with spikes in May 2013, March 2014, April 2015 and ongoing for this year. But ... things are still better than they were when I left to work with Uncle Sam in 2002. And that despite an almost threefold increase in the number of motor vehicles in the metro area since then. 

I was told several competing (but not necessarily exclusive) hypotheses. The obvious one is that the number of vehicles on the roads has finally outrun the decrease in smog per car. A complimentary one notes that congestion has markedly gotten worse with the increase in the number of vehicles ... and idling cars pump out more smog. Finally, the D.F. mayor decided to allow any car that could pass the smog check to get the coveted permission to hit the road every day of the week. It used to be that only newish cars could qualify; once the car got past a certain number of years, you could only drive it four weekdays out of five. That reform meant both that older cars could legally put out 25% more smog ... and, of course, some cars that should not have passed the smog check did with a little baksheesh. 

And then there is the climate change hypothesis, but that is really a worry for the future.

But the future is coming fast. Even if things aren’t really back to the 1990s, it is clear that the government is going to have to do something fairly soon. The roads may be becoming saturated, but there is still lots of room for the number of vehicles on the road to increase. Traffic isn’t going to get better. And 2016 isn’t a fluke: as the data show, things have been getting worse for three years now.

Sunny days in Mexico

 I lost a Cinco de Mayo post, straight from Mexico City. So while I try to recover it, let me talk about solar power. The title of this post is ironic, since last week in the D.F. was far from sunny, in the worst possible way.

The picture is from last November, not last week.

Background: Mexico recently passed a new environmental law. Details here. Last month, the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) bid on clean energy certificates. Basically, the bids were to buy 20 years of clean electricity. In concrete terms, that was for about 6.2 million megawatt-hours (MWh) per year for two decades. 

By itself, that is less-than-impressive. Mexico’s gross electricity production in 2015 came to about 299 million MWh. Total domestic sales came to about 212 million MWh. So six million more? Whatever.

But the amount ain’t the kicker. That was baked into the law. No, the kicker is everything else.

First, the CFE got offers for 102 million MWh. All that with a $71 per MWh price ceiling. (The price ceiling is a little complicated. Basically, CFE offered to pay a certain amount for the electricity plus a certain amount for a certificate insuring that the energy was green. The electricity had a price ceiling of $47 and the certificate a ceiling of $24. $47 + $24 = $71.)

Second, solar projects won 74% of the 5.4 million MWh ultimately bought. Projects here. That was unexpected!

Third, the average price for the solar bids was $50.7 per MWh ... without any subsidies! The lowest clocked in at $35; the highest at $68. We don’t have data on the cost of generation in Mexico, but we do know average retail prices (or at least we can calculate them from Sener data): $87 per MWh.

Now, don’t get too excited just yet. You can look up the wholesale price of electricity in the PJM region of the U.S. here. At this writing, it came to about $22 per MWh for PEPCO. But $51 is well-within the yearly range paid by American utilities. And it is within striking distance of the average $39 per MWh cost of your typical fossil steam plant in 2014, although natural gas prices were quite a bit higher then than now. (Coal, not so much.) 

Moreover, there are going to be problems in execution. These projects need to get up and running by 2018. Some may be late and some may wind up losing money.

But it is, overall, great news ... and a great source of data, since these projects are not subsidized. ¡Viva México!

Murder in Mexico City

 Organized crime is the major plague on Mexican society right now. One of the great fears of the middle class is that gang warfare might spread to the capital city. There are reasons to fear that, of course. The D.F. suffers from the same weak institutions as elsewhere ... and it provides a rich market for drugs and a lucrative source of protection money. 

Moreover, homicide was up some 14% in the D.F. last year. Should we be worried?

Consejo Ciudadano went over the statistics (such as they can be trusted) and found that most of the increase appears to have been driven by interpersonal disputes. That is, there were 109 more homicides in 2015 than in 2014. The number of murders between parties that knew each other went up by 81. So interpersonal disputes made up 76% of the increase. 

So that’s all right then? Not quite. One red flag is that homicides associated with robbery went down by 20 (a 14% fall) whereas those associated with brawls or firefights went up by 51 (21%). Now, 99% of all gun-related homicides used pistols, so these are not the sorts of firefights that have plagued other regions of the country. But it is worrisome.

Second, do you trust the Mexican police reports? Mexico City may be avoiding open gang warfare, but it quite likely that many of those interpersonal disputes and public brawls were related to turf wars among organized crime rings. 

Be afraid! Be very afraid

 A long time ago, I worked on financial systems. And so, back in 1998, I was called to give some comments to a gathering in Mexico City’s historic district. (I still have the suit I wore, a very sturdy Christian Dior; it isn’t the one in the below photo from December 2014.) I kept my discussion short, since I was well-aware of my ignorance, having just lost a potential job at Columbia University due to overly sweeping claims of knowledge.* 

So, still chastised from the New York fiasco, I made only one claim to the gathered dignitaries from the Financial Ministry, the U.S. State Department, the IMF, and the big Mexican banks: shareholders must lose in a bailout. Give away money, write checks, defend depositors, make good guarantees on subordinated debt, throw bags of money at the banks’ creditors. But shareholders must be wiped out. 

And so, I am terrified to read today that a federal judge held that the U.S. government was too harsh when it bailed out AIG. The bailout, you see, wiped out the shareholders and ultimately made money for the Treasury while preventing a much worse financial collapse. But wiping out the shareholders, according to the judge, was too harsh. Better to have let the shareholders be ... uh ... wiped out with no public benefit.

Wait, what?

It gets even weirder than that. The AIG investors received nothing in damages ... the judge recognized that without the bailout they would have lost everything. But he still held that the government overstepped its bounds. I cannot parse the logic.

Which means one of two things the next time a financial crisis rolls around. One, no direct bailouts. Fun! Why have a second Great Recession when you can go full on to a second Great Depression? Two, bailouts (or bailouts in disguise) that enrich the already prosperous, who will face no consequences for their bad investments. Heck, let’s see just how unequal a modern automated economy can get! 

I don’t even have to mention the words “moral hazard” to make this look scary. But since I am on the topic: Moral hazard! Boo!

And so, I give you Judge Thomas Wheeler, a George W. Bush appointee still making the world a worse place. I guess it deserves some sort of prize.

I really need to respond to the comments in the Crazy Base World post, no?

The Line 12 construction disaster actually makes Mexico look pretty good

 So Mexico City recently opened Line 12 of the metro. Built in five years at $145 million per mile, it is a miracle compared to the long-tragedy that is the Second Avenue subway. (New York, in its awesomely pathetic current incarnation, is going to take 10 goddamned years at $2.7 billion per mile.) The underground portions of the line were built by cut-and-cover, so the stations are easy to access, and according to Professor Andrés Calderón of the Universidad Iberoamericana, the tunnels did not cost much more than the elevated portions.

A triumph! 

Until the damn thing broke down. 

They had to close half the line and run trains crazy-slow over the rest.

So what happened? Well, the D.F. decided to build the line using conventional steel rails and steel wheels instead of the French-style rubber-wheeled trains used on most of the system. Still, it isn’t the first time that Mexico City built a steel-wheeled line: Line A (lettered lines run across the border from the Distrito Federal into Mexico State) uses steel wheels.

But Line 12 used new, bigger and heavier cars than Line A. And those cars had trouble making curves tighter than a 350-meter radius. Of which there were a bunch on the elevated section. So that wrecked the rails and the railbed. In September, a consultant determined that most of the rails would need to be replaced ... and at least one section of the elevated portion of the line would have to be rebuilt. Worse yet, Prof. Calderón told me that rebuilding that section would mean that multiple private homes would need to be expropriated and demolished. The blame right now seems to be falling on the Spanish company that built the trains. The line won’t fully reopen until November 2015.

So, a disaster for Mexico.

Or is it?

1. The line will open almost two years late and at a cost of $216 million per mile ... but still cheaper and faster than shorter lines in the U.S.
2. After the fracaso become public, the D.F. hit 33 Metro officials hard with fines and other sanctions. Does that ever happen in the United States?
3. The construction companies are now in court over how much they will have to pay. Victory is not assured; the dispute has hurt their stock badly.
4. The disaster is not going to lead to the cancellation of the unbuilt portion of the line. The D.F. is going to pay for the new section to the Observatorio station. In fact, current Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera (of whom I am not generally a fan) wants to expand the Metro even further during his term. Would that happen in the United States? 
5. Finally, the politicians responsible are hurting as well. Former mayor Marcelo Ebrard is taking a hit in his popularity in the D.F. He will need to overcome the headwinds if he wants to win the presidency in 2018. Greater screw-ups often seem to have little political impact in America.

In short: an engineering disaster wrecked the rollout of a new transit line. But the disaster also wrecked the careers of the responsible bureaucrats and may wreck the finances of the responsible companies.  Moreover, despite the overruns and delays, the D.F. will still get a line built cheaper and faster than anything in the United States. 

So take away the opposite of the moral that you thought you were going to take away, pinche gringos! Mexico comes out looking pretty good in this story of woe. 

Divorce in Mexico

 My time living in Mexico wasn’t the only time that I found myself arguing with incredulous observers that Mexican society was changing at blinding speed. When we were writing Mexico Since 1980, I got into some epic battles with one of my co-authors over the chapter on social policy in Mexico. He turned in a draft that made it seem as if the only change in Mexican families since 1950 was the decline in fertility. The quote: “Yet despite the magnitude of these changes, Mexico remains a surprisingly stable society in terms of such fundamental institutions as the family and religion.”

I argued that we couldn’t publish that. Marriages were less stable, and with almost half of all births occuring in “free unions,” abandonment was rife. It was so clearly and blatantly untrue that Mexico was a “surprisingly stable society” that we would look out-of-touch, almost crazy. The image of Mexico as stable and conservative would have been true in 1990, maybe even 1995 — it was not true in 2008.

The final version read as follows:

There has also been a substantial rise over time in family instability. One measure of this phenomenon is the growth in female-headed households, which as a proportion of all households increased from 12 percent in 1960 to 13.5 percent in 1976, 15.3 percent in 1990, 20.6 percent in 2000, and 23.1 percent in 2005. The increase in the number of female-headed families mainly reflects higher rates of divorce and abandonment. Indeed, although still low by European and U.S. standards, the proportion of marriages ending in divorce in Mexico rose from 4.4 percent in 1980 to 7.4 percent in 2000, and to 11.3 percent by 2004. In addition, since the 1990s growing numbers of men have abandoned their families (possibly temporarily) to seek work in the United States.

A skeptical reader might argue that the rising rate of family dissolution in Mexico is a side effect of the aging of the population. The logic behind this position is that the longer people live, the more likely their marriages are to end in divorce rather than death, and so the divorce rate is increasing in line with Mexican life spans. The data, however, do not support this hypothesis. Indeed, dissolution rates have risen fastest among new families. In married and cohabitating couples that formed before 1967, there was only a 7.4 percent chance of dissolution before 10 years had passed, whereas a couple that formed in 1987 (the last year for which data are available) had a 14 percent chance of breaking up before ten years had passed.

An even more skeptical reader might argue that an increase in the proportion of “extended families” (households in which uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters, and elderly grandparents live with a nuclear family composed of parents and their children) among Mexican households indicates that the Mexican family is as strong as ever. Between 1990 and 2000 the proportion of all family households defined as “extended” rose from 20.7 percent to 26.3 percent. It is equally likely, however, that this increase was an artifact of the interaction between economic distress and rising rates of single-parenthood and couple dissolution. Indeed, in the year 2000 some 60 percent of single mothers and 28 percent of female divorcees with children lived in “extended families” (that is, with their parents).

Now comes the irreplaceable Diego Valle with data on the current state of divorce in Mexico. (Hat tip: Gancho.) The short version? Divorce is rapidly increasing, but Mexico’s divorce rate is still at around the same level as the United States in the 1950s. The catch is that with half of all birth occuring out of wedlock, the true rate of family dissolution is higher. The long version? Very worth reading.

But there’s more! Here Diego digs into the divorce figures for the Federal District (aka, Mexico City) which adopted no-fault divorce in October 2008. In a brilliant analysis, he shows that the entire increase in divorce rates is driven by couples who married outside the D.F. In fact, divorces fell for people who married in Mexico City ... the implication being that the inexorable rise in Mexican divorce rates might not be so inexorable. (Read it!)

Of course, that begs the question of why D.F. divorces fell with no-fault. Diego hypothesizes (probably correctly) that the reason was the legalization of early abortion in April 2007. “Perhaps pregnancies that previously resulted in shotgun marriages now end in abortions. And it was precisely these marriages that were more likely to end in divorce. When looking at the age specific marriage totals, the younger the bride the bigger the percentage decrease in marriages compared to previous years. But this theory doesn't explain the fall in divorces among those marriages more than a few years old.”

For those of you who don’t know, Mexico City also legalized same-sex marriage in December 2009. (Coahuila has civil unions ... but more importantly, same-sex marriages performed in the D.F. are recognized by both the federal government and other states.) Abortion, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage ... you have no idea how happy I am that we didn’t publish that early version of the chapter.

Organized crime and a research fail in Mexico City

 So I’m in Mexico City at the moment. Why am I here? I’m looking for county-level homicide data back to 1950. Thus far, I haven’t found it. INEGI, the national statistics agency, didn’t have it. The Instituto Nacional de Estudios Penales didn’t have it. The health ministry didn’t have it: that last was a surprise. Thus far, a bust, which has me annoyed because the other bit of data collection — finding the times and places of PGR and Operation Condor actions — has proved less hard.

Bah. It is enough to drive one to purchase and smoke a good Cuban cigar. For $3.87. Which would be, in 1913 prices, 17¢. A bit more than a good five cent cigar, but not too far off. It is annoying. Unless I have some data collection luck, my next big project now looks to be French nuclear power instead of a history of violence in Mexico. Not that there’s anything wrong with either one! One is a form of energy that (absent breakthroughs) needs to be developed around the world in order to avoid catastrophe; the other threatens one of the great countries of the world.

The Revista magazine recently ran an issue about organized crime in Latin America. (Warning: the link will only work until the next issue comes out.) There is a piece by yours truly on the business strategies of Mexican cartels. (I may post a condensed version on this blog.) Morris Panner, a very smart guy, wrote another good piece that illustrates how far organized crime has sunk its tentacles into Mexican life. (The title is a bit misleading, however; the article is not about crime business models.) A third piece gives a nice short view of life in Ciudad Juárez.

For some hope that might be realized in the short-term, read this piece by Gabe Aguilera and Viri Rios about the keys to reducing violence in Mexico: the tactical recommendations are well-worth following. There is also a very nice piece warning Mexico that it might want to think twice about adopting models that worked in Colombia. The reason being that they are, you know, very different countries. (My wife had some very cogent observations about law-and-order in Colombia that I will try to remember to blog about in the near future.) And everyone needs to read more about the Zetas and Guatemala, a country that will (with Honduras) start filling headlines in a newspaper near you, or whatever insane electronic thingcrappy the young people are using.

The rest of the issue is also very good! If you have any interest in the violence spreading south of the border, go read it.

While I am here, I’d like to make a plug for Grits and Tamales, a blog about life in the deep south, published by a compa from Los Angeles. (Deep South meaning the one inside the United States, not Tierra del Fuego.) I know this blog has Canadian readers. I love you all and your country, but trust me, Prince Edward Island to Brooklyn has nothing on East L.A. to Montgomery, Alabama. Recommended. Especially as someone who has spent the past week gorging on tacos al pastor, enchiladas con mole, cochinita pibil, chilaquiles (verdes and rojos!), caldo tlalpeño, cebollitas, and all the other good stuff that is pretty much impossible to get outside of southern California, a few parts of Texas (Tex-Mex is awesome, and eaten by most Mexican-Americans in the state, but it is not Mexican food), and that truly awful taquería on East 117th Street and First Avenue in the old neighborhood down the block from Patsy’s.

(Side note: the miracle of Google tells me that Eric Asimov reviewed la crapola taquería for the Times. Which has gotta say something about the pathetically small number of taquerías in NYC.)

Anyway, regardless of the review, it is a bad taquería. But is bad in the way that lousy taquerías in Mexico City are bad, and thus I highly recommend it should you find yourself in Manhattan jonesing legitimate Mexican street food. Californian and Mexican readers take note. If, however, you should find yourself with the same jones, but be looking for something more upscale, I give this place a conditional recommendation. Why conditional? Well, my dearly-departed ma knew the owners, and we used to eat there all the time, and it was excellent. But ... I have not been there since 1988. So you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Oh, and since I have friends from the Deep South who still harbor suspicions about us effete academic liberal not-quite-white folk from the coasts, lemme give you this post from Grits and Tamales. God bless you Al Pacino, another boy from the old neighborhood.

Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground!

 It has been a little harder to keep up the blog than I had thought. Work is quite pressing. But every so often, something comes up that the rest of the internets seem to be ignoring. So, in the interest of showing how Boston is changing, I would like to mention that Sunday was the fourth annual “No Pants Subway Ride,” in which people ride the T without any pants.

Of course, as you might expect, the “No Pants Subway Ride” didn’t start in Boston in 2007. It started in New York in 2002, and has since gone international. An example of the influence of the internet! I can hear some of you shouting. Well ... probably not. I mean, I’m sure that this idea in particular spread via the internets, but anyone familiar with the 1960s will find lots of similar events, and let’s not mention the decade after that one. Moreover, the participants physically rally before removing their pants. So please no conclusionamating about the awesome marveliciousness of our new interlinkeded planet. 

It isn’t really a surprise to find that it’s spread to Boston ... Boston has a giant 250,000 person college town laid atop the real city of 1.7 million. While Boston itself is not the sort of place that would smile upon pantless T-riding, the college town appended onto it certainly would. So no surprise there. And it has also spread to such unsurprising places as Philly. After all, the city that celebrates Mummer’s Day is not going to have a problem with pants-removing on the Orange Line. 

I have to admit that it was a bit more unexpected to find that it had spread to the Mexico City. But when you think about it, that reaction makes no sense. The D.F. long ago left behind its cultural conservatism. 

My excuse is that the rapidity of the cultural changes in Mexico between 1990 and today have left me reeling. Still, the United States changed even more between 1960 and 1980. So it is far from unprecendented. And why wouldn’t the chilangos take advantage of the opportunity to ride the subway without any pants?

My worry that it presages the end of Mexico’s unofficial ban on shorts.

Here is a much better photo of the Mexico City event, courtesy of El Pinche Holandés:

 

Watching Team USA in Mexico

 This is a little late, but I was in Mexico City for the U.S.-England game, and it was awesome. With the quarterfinals coming up, it’s time to relive the glory. 

 
The bar was the Black Horse, a self-styled English pub in the Condesa, a part of Mexico City that was a run-down formerly-Jewish area when I first moved here and is now more hip than Bo Jackson. I got there an hour early, figuring that there’s a big group of English expats in the D.F. The outside seats were already taken, but the inside was pretty empty. It didn’t stay that way. My friends showed about 15 minutes after I got there. (I managed to claim a slew of bar seats.) With a half-hour  to go, it was SRO ... with U.S. fans. None of whom knew each other.

Which made it awesome. The U.S., see is not a big soccer nation. So we had to make stuff up as we went along. First thing we did was try to launch into “America the Beautiful” over “God Save the Queen.” That didn’t work, because nobody knew the lyrics — this after nine seasons of singing the damn thing at the seventh inning of every Yankee game — so we switched to “This Land is My Land” That got everyone going. 

The drama of the game has been recounted elsewhere. But it was great. We yelled, we screamed, we chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and in the most perfect touch, yelled “The roof! The roof! The roof is on FIRE!” after the U.S. tied. 

We drank out the bar’s entire stock of Sam Adams, some midwestern beer I’d never heard of, and Budweiser. The party then moved outside.

 

I love the world cup!Tomorrow, I hope for the triumphs of Brazil and Uruguay. Go Mercosur!

How to speak Mexican in 197 easy lessons

 I swear a lot in Spanish. My wife doesn't like cursing — public swearing is illegal in Trinidad, and her extensive time in Queens did nothing to change her (most excellent!) preferences — but I can't abandon the practice.  But what I can do is change languages.

Now, the groserías that I picked up as a kid came mostly from Spain (at home) or Puerto Rico (hundreds of different people and places). But my Spanish swearing really didn't come into its own until I lived in Mexico City. That town has developed it to a high art.

Now, courtesy of my old friend Tania Martínez, comes an excellent guide to swearing in Mexican, or, more properly, Chilangese.

I have had to insist that my wife not call me “güey” when she's talking to me, even though that's how she refers to her Mexican friends. When you understand why that sounds wrong, then you will be ready to advance to the next level. When you can explain the proper use of “cagado,” then you will be an expert. Until then, enjoy, learn, and feel free to exercise the Nicoll Doctrine of English language expansion.  You will be doing your country a mitzvah.

And it will come very much in handy while watching sporting events in certain parts of North America and most of Europe north of the Pyrenees. If not a Yankees bar in Boston. Trust me, and I speak from highly embarrassed experience, somebody will understand you.

Secuestro express

  Via Matt Yglesias via the National Review, Graeme Wood wonders why secuestros express aren't more common in the United States.

An “express kidnapping” occurs when a criminal gang mugs you and takes you from ATM to ATM until your cards don't work anymore.  In all the first-hand accounts that I've heard the victim was let go within hours.  (I have reliable second hand accounts of ones that ended rather worse:  one lasted a few days; in the other the victim resisted, got shot with a small caliber handgun, and drove himself to a hospital.)  After nothing that this sort of thing doesn't happen in Cairo, Wood wonders why such a “high-reward and not more than medium-risk [crime] does not happen more in America.”  

Sometimes it seems that half my Canadian in-laws are in the Mounties, and my uncle Brent is a cop in Baltimore.  So I asked him why it doesn't happen.  His answer was fairly obvious:  express kidnappings are not medium-risk in the United States.  They are superlatively high-risk, in terms of being caught.  An express kidnapper needs accomplices, needs to travel with a victim in tow, needs to visit public spaces that are often under electronic surveillance, and leaves a very exact trail showing where they went and when.  If they don't want to commit murder, they also usually leave behind an eyewitness who has spent enough time with them for a positive ID.  You'd have to be nuts to try it anywhere in the United States outside New Orleans.  People do, of course, but they get caught, so it doesn't catch on.  The same applies to other countries with efficient police forces, like Chile or Spain.  There was a brief surge of express kidnappings in Spain in 2006, but the criminals were often caught.

Mexico City does not have an efficient police force.  Not only does it lack anything resembling an investigatory capacity, but response times are extremely slow, and the police are often involved in criminality themselves.  The mystery isn't why express kidnappings are rare in the U.S. and Canada.  It's why they don't happen in Cairo.   

Meanwhile, enjoy Method Man:

UPDATES:  Unexpected shout-out from Graeme Wood!  Also, in comments, a link to this book, which illustrates why secuestros express rarely happen in the United States.  It also looks like a good read. 

A George Will moment

  Some time ago, George Will published an odd screed against blue jeans.  Gancho mentioned the column on this blog here, where he pointed out that I was, in fact, wearing blue jeans while travelling in Greece. 

But I have to say that I have my own George Will moment when it comes to male sartorial style in early 21st century America.  Below is a picture of the street outside the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, where I met with some officials from the country’s Treasury department to ask some questions about the recent petroleum reforms.  What don’t you see in the photo?

That’s right!  Shorts.  Only one guy is wearing shorts, thankfully long ones, and yes, he turned out to be a European.  What about looking in the other direction?

What about out front?

None!  No shorts.  This is true throughout Latin America.  If you’re over the age of 18, standing on a hard surface, and cannot see the ocean, then you don’t wear shorts.  Not in Panama, not in Venezuela, not in Mexico. 

And I agree with that convention.  The only exception is if you are actively engaged in exercise.  Period.  Adult men in shorts look ridiculous.  I have felt this way since I turned 18; my high school graduation was the penultimate time that I broke this rule.  I ultimate time was while I was travelling in Trinidad, and I looked ridiculous.  It won’t happen again.

As for sandals?  Gimme a break.  At least shorts are comfortable.  Sandals and flip-flops don’t even manage that.  I found flip-flops useful in the Army for the prevention of athlete’s foot, and that’s about it.  They are not comfortable.  They flip, see.  And flop.  Sandals, meanwhile, manage to be shoes without the advantage of keeping your toes safe if you drop something on them.  So, WTF?

Ban ‘em.  End.  None of this.  C’mon Americans.  Get some dignity.  No more shorts.  And no more capri pants on men either, which have started to infiltrate the USA from Europe.  So all you shorts-wearing flip-flopping young people?  Get off my damn lawn. 

El ambiente Azteco

  Gancho asks about the ambience at the U.S.-Mexico qualifier.  Why was I at the U.S.-Mexico qualifer?  Wasn’t I just in the Philippines? 

Well, yes.  But I’ve been a bit busy, and when I haven’t been busy I’ve been jet-lagged, so I haven’t written much.  The proximate reason why I needed to go to Mexico was to research a case on Pemex that I’ll be teaching for the first time on September 15th.  (Agh!  Right before Independence Day, no less.) 

That said, the reason that I picked this week instead of some other week is that this was the week of the big game.  I went to the stadium with mis amigos Gabo y Carlos y prima Silvia. For those of you who’ve never been, Estadio Azteca is impressive.  It feels much larger than similarly-sized stadiums in the United States. We got there on public transit, from which you walk down these concrete elevated walkways filled with hawkers selling Tri-related merchandise, including green-white-and-red Pancho Villa mustaches. 

Everyone wore some version of green-and-white; I’m not sure that I’ve ever been to a game anywhere where so many spectators seemed ready to run onto to the field and substitute just in case Javier Aguirre needed them.  

Of course, I was a ringer, a U.S.-fan wearing El Águila under the leather jacket.  What, you think I was going to drape myself in Old Glory?  Not at this game, sir.  I would have been the only person in America’s colors.  In fact, we couldn’t find the opposition stand.  Carlos was certain there was one, but nothing we could see.

The TV-news later showed scenes of people waving Old Glory in what looked to be a stadium of some sort, but we saw nothing.  I later discovered that there was in fact a U.S. section, but if you go below the fold you’ll be able to see why I don’t have any sympathy for them.

The atmosphere was … raucous.  Not unlike a regular-season professional game in Mexico.  Every time Tim Howard tossed or kicked the ball back towards the Mexican side the stands would come alive in a long shout of “puto!”  It felt like a Molotov concert.  The singing of the traditional “En donde estan en donde estan los pinche gringos que nos iban a ganar” only added to the concert-like atmosphere.  As did the fact that Mexican fans threw paper cups at Davies right after he scored the only U.S. goal. 

In fact, hurtling beer cups was a motif of the game.  Whenever the U.S. tried to set up a corner shot, the fans would pelt the player with cups and bottles.  I have been to many sporting events in the U.S. and Canada and Europe, and I’m not sure I’ve ever fans throw stuff at the players outside of Yankee Stadium, and then only in from the bleachers at the far outfield.   

Now, I have to say, hurtling beer cups is a motif of Mexican soccer matches in general.  But I hadn’t been to one in a while, and so the flying cardboard came as a bit of surprise, as did the fact that most of said flying cardboard still seemed to contain beer.  Every time Mexico scored, we got pelted.  It made for an interesting time in the lower stands.  Below the fold you can see one teenager trying to protect his mother with what appears to be an empty box of Glenfiddich. 

Sotomayor, soccer, and all that

  I’m all for ethnic solidarity and all that, but Senator Jeff Sessions is taking it to a whole ‘nother level at the Sotomayor hearings.

Anyway, interesting as the linked story is, I just wanted to post a picture of me in this shirt, which I wore to the World Baseball Classic games in Mexico City.  (The picture above is at my favorite bistro in the D.F.)  I will not be wearing it to the U.S.-Mexico World Cup qualifier in Azteca Stadium on August 12th.  In fact, while I will be rooting for the U.S. team, I also want to live, and so will dress in green and red. 

Patrick, Mike, Carlos, what think you?  Am I wimping out?

Newsflash: Mexico flu

  I'm in Los Angeles, eating breakfast.  As in, that's what I'm doing right now.  And all the people at the table next to me are saying, in Spanish, that the Mexican government just shut down the school systems in the D.F. and Mexico State after 16 people died.  Apparently two people in the their 20s passed away, leading the government to decide that the outbreak was serious enough to close the schools and organize mass vaccinations.  People are urged to go to a hospital immediately if they detect symptoms.

I would like to take the opportunity to repeat that failing states do not react to flu epidemics in this manner. 

El Clásico del Beis

  I'm in Mexico, for work, but one of the nice things about my line of business is that I have some flexibility to choose when I travel.  So I chose this trip to coincide with the first round of the World Baseball Classic, being held at the Foro Sol in Mexico City.  You can kind of see the Foro off to the left of the spiky dome thing in the picture below. 

The spiky dome is the Palacio de los Deportes.  In a sign of the amazing rapidity of Mexico's cultural revolution, it just finished hosting the Expo Sexo 2009, which is exactly what you think it is. 

Anyway, we were in the area for el beis.  For the Cuba-Mexico final game, I was with three fellow fans:  an American, a Venezuelan, and a Canadian.  We took Line 9 of the metro, which was much more crowded than I remember it being.  On the way, we met an older fellow in a baseball jacket.  He was a very talkative guy, who knew a lot about the game.  He also happened to be the most foul-mouthed man I've met in a long time, and that's saying a lot.  Every other word was a curse.  I wish I'd had a tape-recorder; the man was artistic in his use of profanity.

So were the fans.  They shouted pretty foul things at the Cuban team.  Nothing that you wouldn't hear among the Bleacher Creatures of the Bronx, of course, but good to hear.  My favorite was “culero” chanted at anyone who seemed to be, well, a culero.  It was raining — hard — and only the hard core were left by the sixth inning.  (It wasn't, I have to say, a very good game, as a game, and neither was the previous day's match against Australia.)

At one point a dude dressed as a stuffed Barney came out and started a dance with some other stuffed animal, to loud boos.  Until Barney ripped off his head to reveal a wrestling mask, and started tossing the other animal around the sidelines.  That was fun. 

The Cuban fans were also a lot of fun.  They sat in their own blue-white-and-red draped sections, with giant flags and ridiculous wigs, and played music.  We didn't a get a chance to talk to any of them, but I have a strong suspiscion that they're mostly Cuban expats, and not people whom the government flew out for the games.  They didn't seem organized enough.

Anyway, despite getting soaked to the bone, and having beer poured on me, and having people confuse my Puerto Rico flag shirt with a Cuban banner, it was a great night.  ¡Viva el beis!

Pobre México gordo

  An unwanted sign of North American convergence has been the convergence of the Mexican waistline with the American one. 

Today's Financial Times ran a story about obesity in Mexico.  The figures are sobering, and obvious to anyone who rides a pesero in Mexico City, although you could miss it in Polanco or Condesa.  4.1 million 5-to-11 year olds — 26% of the total — are overweight or obese.  Two-thirds of male adults are overweight, as are 71.9% of females. 

We wrote a bit about this in Mexico since 1980, especially in chapter 6.  Diabetes was the number-one killer when we wrote.  What we didn't know was that treating diabetes consumes one-third of the health budget, according to the FT.  Now, I still don't know that we know that, and I don't trust the FT's numbers.  But I believe the trend.

The future in most countries, I think, is going to be Big Government.  Soon what you eat and how you eat it will be taxed and regulated.  I don't particularly like the idea.  I used to be a heavy drinker, by American standards if not by European or Mexican ones, and the only reason I don't smoke a cigar or two every day is that my wife won't let me.  (That's also why I'm no longer a heavy drinker, in fact.)  But the fact is that nobody pays for their own health treatment in later life:  either an insurance company does, or, if you're under insured, the United States will pick up the tab.  So unless some sort of miracle Singularity-related program activity comes along to either make us all capable of pigging out and staying thin, or making it healthy to carry about lots of excess adipose tissue, Big Government is going to get what you eat. 

Or so I think at this particular moment.  As those of you who've known me know, I change my mind a lot.  It may be the only way in which I resemble Andrew Sullivan.  So, in that vein, counterarguments?

Acribillado en mi colonia

"Acribillado" is a good word.  It carries the connotation of the English "ventilated," or "plugged," only it's not a colloquial term in Spanish.  The formal way to translate it would be "riddled with bullets." 

An unidentified gunman fired six bullets from a 9m m handgun into a prominent Mexican defense attorney, Marcos Castillejos, when he was sitting in his car on the corner of Montes de Oca and Mazatlán in the Condesa neighborhood this morning.  It's the most recent of several assassinations in Mexico City.  Most of the recent killings, like the head of Federal Investigation Agency, Igor Labastida, have been linked to the federal government's recent assault on the northern drug cartels. 

This killing might also be linked to the cartel war somehow:  Luis Cárdenas Palomino, the head of the federal Department of Public Security, is Castillejos's son-in-law.  Then again, it might not be.  Sadly, contract killings haven't been that rare in Mexico for a long time, and there are plenty of other possible motives.  Castillejo defended the accused in the murder of a comedian, Paco Stanley, a few years ago. (Stanley was killed in a taco joint off the Periférico freeway that I used to haunt).  The Stanley killing is shrouded in mystery (he was politically connected) and God only knows what could be crawling out from under that rock. Castillejos was also hired by the head of the association of street peddlers, Alejandra Barrios.  She was charged with murdering the husband of one of her competitors. In addition, the street peddlers are currently in the middle of an epic battle with the city government, which has been successfully squeezing them out of the historic old city.  If I were an investigator in this murder, that's where I'd start.

In other words, I wouldn't make too much of this recent killing, although I suspect that John Robb might anyway.  It's sad, but it doesn't represent a worsening.  Just more of the same. 

I recommend Ganchoblog for more.