The perils of investing in paradise

A road sign points the way to Tenacatita Bay in Jalisco state, where a titling dispute jeopardizes the investments of at least 40 foreign property owners. The owners bought deeds over the past five years that had been issued by the federal government and validated by the president of Mexico. But a Guadalajara-area businessman recently won a court injunction saying his company holds a valid deed to the same area - which was purchased in 1991 from the widow of a former Jalisco state governor and upheld in 1977 by the Mexican Supreme Court. 

State police now block access to the land the foreigners purchased along with the beach at Tenacatita, which had been popular with working-class Mexican sunseekers. The businessman, Andrés Villalobos, told reporters last week he would not offer the foreigners any compensation since, he said, they were most likely deceived in making their purchases. He promised, however, to help prosecute anyone tricking them into purchasing land that he said was always private property and not for the federal government to title and sell.


The foreign buyers insist they did their due diligence and hold titles validated by one of either President Felipe Calderón or former president Vicente Fox. At least one buyer put her title into a bank trust, suggesting her purchase was considered proper by some institutions.

I recently travelled to the Jalisco coast to write on the issue for Postmedia News. Click here to read it.

A bit of New Year's self-promotion

I spent three days in early December working as a fixer in the Lake Chapala area and Guadalajara for a New York Times reporter, who was investigating what happens to the undocumented migrants that lose access to health care services in the U.S. and subsequently return to Mexico. The story focuses a 34-year-old woman, Mónica Chavarría, from an ejido on the Jalisco-Michoacán state line. She has end-stage renal failure and used to receive treatment at a public hospital in Atlanta. But the hospital closed the kidney dialysis clinic earlier this year due to budgetary issues.

The undocumented migrants receiving dialysis were offered three months of treatment elsewhere and a trip home. (U.S. Citizens with kidney failure are eligible for Medicare.) Mónica returned to Mexico with her youngest son, while her husband and older son stayed in the Atlanta area. Her husband has been working as a paver and raising money to pay for a transplant - which would cost far less in Mexico.

Read the full story here, at the Times' website.

Happy new year to everyone!

PAN vs. PAN

The PAN losses suffered on July 5 extend beyond the disastrous performance in the midterm elections - and hit the conservative party hard in many of its heartland states. The party lost gubernatorial offices in San Luis Potosí and Querétaro. It lost the suburban corridor to the west of Mexico City in the State of Mexico that includes Naucalpan and Tlalnepantla. The PAN even lost municipal races in Guanajuato, the most conservative state in the Republic, as it dropped the state capital Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende.

Party president Germán Martínez resigned Monday, when he accpeted blame for the losses - and took gratuitous barbs from disaffected party rivals such as former PAN president Manuel Espino. But dissatisfaction with the party leadership goes beyond Martínez and the PAN National Executive Committee and has been expressed on the state level.

Take Jalisco, for example, where the Panistas in Guadalajara turned out in force to protest ... the PAN! (Pardon the Grupo Reforma-style headline.)

The PAN lost its majority in the state congress and all six mayoral races in the Guadalajara metropolitan area on Sunday - a reversal of the PAN sweep just three years ago. On Tuesday, the Mural newspaper reported that some 400 Panistas protested outside the party offices in Guadalajara's Col. Americana to demand the ouster of PAN Jalisco president Eduardo Rosales. A few colonias away, another group of Panistas armed with eggs protested outside the governor's official residence against the leadership of PAN Gov. Emilio González, who they blamed for the July 5 defeat.

Ironically, the local PRI had been rocked by internal conflicts that involved irate members taking over the party headquarters in central Guadalajara last April after the state PRI president - who eventually resigned - welshed on a deal for registering municipal councilors.

This week, it was the PAN's turn for conflict - not entirely unusual for Jalisco, where the party is split between a faction known as the "paquistas" that is loyal to former governor and former interior minister Francisco Ramírez Acuña - who won a seat in Chamber of Deputies and is being mentioned as the potential PAN leader in the Chamber - and González, whose PAN faction tilts decidedly in the conservative-Catholic direction.

The scorn for González is obvious. He courted controversy over the first two years of his term by mouthing off on contentious social issues - questioning if an AIDS prevention program that distributed condoms should also give away hotel vouchers and "un six de cerveza," for example - and pledging 90 million pesos of government money for the construction of a Catholic sanctuary in Tlaquepaque that would pay homage to the martyrs of the Cristero Rebellion. (The money was returned by the church; González made things worse by saying at an audience of business and religious types, "Me vale madre," which politely translates: "I don't give a flying ..."

But blaming González is not entirely fair. The paquista faction won the primary elections earlier this year. The losing PAN mayoral candidate in Guadalajara, Jorge Salinas, also happens to be the brother-in-law of Jalisco PAN president Eduardo Rosales. The runner up in the primary contest for the mayoral nomination - a former mayor of Guadalajara - alleged nepotism and quit the party. 

The PAN ran into other problems in Jalisco, most notably the mayor of Tonala being removed due to his alleged involvement in a homicide and the operation of an illegal slot machine operation.

Still, it must be said that this is far from being the end of the PAN in Jalisco, where it has governed since 1995. Six years ago, the PRI made gains in the 2003 Jalisco midterm and municipal elections, but the party was soundly thumped in 2006. The state also has a solid two-party political system in which the third-place PRD is divided and non-existent in places, the Green Party is on the rise and the PRI is said by some observers to be more conservative - and friendly with influential church leader, Cardinal Juan Sandoval - than the PAN.

Rising from ruin

BY DAVID AGREN
The News

CHAPALA, Jal. - The Titanic sets sail from the main pier in this municipality on the north shore of the country's largest lake, taking passengers on excursions to nearby Scorpion Island.

But earlier this decade, boarding the 12-person "lancha" - as such boats are locally known - wasn't easy. A precipitous decline in Lake Chapala's water level left the shoreline far away from the pier. Passengers had to board buses just to reach the departure point. Few bothered to show up, recalls Titanic captain Ramón Montes.

Today, however, he says he's making more trips than ever - at 200 pesos a boatload - thanks to a recovery in Lake Chapala's water level.

"There are at least 10 times as many passengers as there were six years ago," he said while docking at the Chapala pier. Within five minutes, his lancha filled up, and he was off to Scorpion Island again.

Six years ago, Lake Chapala was drying up - the lake's volume had receded to less than 20 percent of its capacity. The situation was so serious that some locals feared the level would never completely return to normal. Some in the ex-pat population fretted about low water levels hurting local property values; others who work in tourism and fishing figured their livelihoods would never bounce back.

"All you'd ever hear was that [Lake] Chapala is dying," said innkeeper Michael Eager, whose family runs La Nueva Posada in Ajijic, a village in the Lake Chapala area.

But some refused to give up on their lake. A local advocacy group organized events such as "hands around the lake," participated in forums and raised awareness. Politicians, too, promised action - in 2006, presidential candidates Felipe Calderón and Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that they would save the lake - but little concrete action was taken. That fueled conspiracy theories of unscrupulous politicians deliberately starving the lake to make other public works projects more saleable.

Other residents ignored politician's promises, and looked instead to divine intervention. Local Catholics pleaded with a revered local religious icon to save the lake; the indigenous Huichol, who consider Scorpion Island the southernmost point of their territory, said one of their gods was angry.

Then, almost serendipitously, the lake started filling up. In 2003, the water level climbed more than three meters during the annual rainy season. It continued climbing in subsequent rainy seasons, as upstream dams were unable to hoard any more water and spilled excess toward Lake Chapala. In 2008 alone, the water level rose more than two meters and swelled to more than 80 percent of full capacity.

UPS AND DOWNS

Locals haven't forgotten just how grim the Lake Chapala situation was just a decade ago.

With the shoreline receding, farmers invaded the dried-up lake bed, using the land to plant crops ranging from agave to zucchinis. They built fences around their fields and dug wells. Some even raised cattle on what once was lake. Locals still tell stories of baseball diamonds, racetracks and playgrounds being built.

The number of tourist visits also dropped along with the water level, especially in the town of Chapala, located 40 kilometers south of Guadalajara.

"The lake was completely forgotten," said Eager, whose business is now usually full of customers from the Guadalajara area.

Extreme fluctuations in water levels are nothing new for Lake Chapala, which is mainly fed by the Lerma River. The most recent crisis was not even the worst fluctuation, according to the National Water Commission, or Conagua. The water level dropped to barely 17 percent of its normal capacity in 1955. But just three years later, it recovered to the point that water splashed over the Chapala pier and flooded the local parish, famed for its twin spires.

"There have always been ups and downs," said Eugenio García, Conagua spokesman in Guadalajara. "When the Chapala [water levels] fall, it's due to hydrological cycles."

Environmental groups and scientists partially agree, but they blame many of the lake's woes on issues beyond capricious weather patterns.

Unseemly political maneuvering by Jalisco and federal lawmakers is one bone of contention, as is water management along the Lerma River, which flows from the State of Mexico through five states before emptying into Lake Chapala.

Problems upstream in the water basin are said to be rife. Agricultural and industrial users have been accused of having priority over those who live downstream in the villages by Lake Chapala. Upstream farmers are said to withdraw vast quantities of water for irrigating crops that include corn, sorghum and strawberries, while agricultural runoff pollutes the river. Discharge from industrial operations in the State of Mexico and Guanajuato - home to a refinery - add to the contamination, say environmental groups and scientists.

(Pemex says its Guanajuato refinery is no longer polluting the Lerma River.)

Further complicating matters, they say that more than 3,000 dams in the basin were hoarding water, mainly for agricultural users. State and local governments have also bickered over sharing water.

But García said the upstream situation changed earlier this decade with the signing of a water-sharing agreement by the federal government and the governors of the State of Mexico, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán and Jalisco.

In years prior, García said that the dams would routinely hold back any additional water beyond the amount that had been authorized by Conagua, but the new agreement mandates that any excess be sent onward toward Chapala.

Still, many academics and environmental groups dismiss the government's role in rescuing Lake Chapala. Some say that the main Lerma River dams were filled, and thus couldn't hoard any more of the runoff from heavy precipitation in the basin.

"It was nothing more than heavy rains," said Alicia Córdova, an adviser to Amigos del Lago, a lake advocacy group. "There were [water-sharing] agreements, but they weren't respected."

The University of Guadalajara's Manuel Guzmán, one of the foremost experts on Lake Chapala, blames the recent water-level problems on politicians attempting to create an "artificial crisis." Guzmán alleges that the Jalisco and federal governments attempted to starve Lake Chapala of water so that a new dam on the Santiago River - which drains the lake - could be built to supply the Guadalajara area with a more dependable source of drinking water. (The Guadalajara metropolitan area depends on Lake Chapala for most of its drinking water.)

"In 2000 and 2002 there were ... torrential rains for filling the lake, but the water wasn't allowed to reach Lake Chapala," he said, adding that recovery only really began after uncertainty over the construction of the dam diminished.

DIVINE INTERVENTION?

Whatever the exact reasons for the rebound, the rise in water levels caught many by surprise. The water level rose so quickly in 2008 that farmers reportedly tried using canoes to salvage their floating crops. One ejido to the east of Chapala had 400 hectares of farmland swallowed by the rising waters. In the community of San Juan Cosala, parts of a new waterfront development built by the municipal government - but built too low - were flooded out.

The rising water also flooded out a soccer pitch and playground near the Ajijic shoreline, where fisherman Toño López docks his boat. Today, goalposts, a swing set and several trees poke out from the water. Farmers who grew crops on the lake bed were also flooded out.

López has no idea where the farmers who swooped in when water levels declined originally came from, or where they went. But he vividly recalls them trying to board canoes last summer in an attempt to salvage their suddenly waterlogged crops. "The rising water completely caught them by surprise," he said.

López said underwater obstacles - fence posts and barbwire left by the farmers, for instance - still present boating hazards. But he's not complaining; he's more than doubled his daily catch of "tilapia" and "charales."

Like many in the area, he once thought the source of his livelihood was going to disappear.

"No one knew if the water would return - only God," he said.

The religious groups who once pleaded for divine intervention certainly credit what they asked for.

Catholics in the area are currently contemplating honoring the Virgin of Zapopan with the title "Queen of Lake Chapala" for answering their prayers. The Huichols, meanwhile, regularly return for ceremonies at their sacred body of water.

But some residents remain cautious about Lake Chapala's comeback. Córdova, the Amigos del Lago adviser, said that pollution in the lake remains a serious concern, for instance.

"There are still many challenges," she said.

Guadalajara rector spat highlights power struggle

Photo by Steven H. Miller

Guadalajara rector spat highlights power struggle

BY DAVID AGREN
The News

The University of Guadalajara ousted its rector Aug. 29 over vague allegations of mismanagement, sparking calls for campus demonstrations, a string of appeals and accusations of power-brokering at the nation's second-largest public university.

On Aug. 29, Rector Carlos Briseño was ousted by the university's governing council, a body packed with loyalists of Raúl Padilla, a controversial former student leader and rector who is considered by many to be the most influential figure in the university over the past 25 years.

Within hours, Marco Antonio Cortés, a Padilla ally, began occupying Briseño's office in the school's white marble rectory building.

Briseño, too, had once been a friend of Padilla, but after he began cozying up to the local governing National Action Party, or PAN, and the leading opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, both of whom had long been at odds with Padilla, he quickly fell out of favor.

"Carlos Briseño arrived [in the rector's] office by the decree of Raúl Padilla, but the strongman made a mistake," said El Universal columnist Jorge Zepeda, a former editor of the Guadalajara newspaper Siglo 21.

But Briseño wouldn't roll over and play dead, despite decisions by Jalisco Gov. Emilio González and the Public Education Secretariat not to intervene in the case. Instead, he immediately denounced his firing as illegal and began pleading his case to the citizens of the western state.

He convinced a local court to grant an injunction against the firing, but it was overturned Sept. 4 by a federal judge.

Meanwhile, back on campus, 1,500 sympathetic students and teachers in his support on Sept. 5, some of them chanting: "Out with the Padilla crowd!"



OLD-STYLE LEADERSHIP

Briseño assumed the post of rector in early 2007, and it did not take long before he was losing favor with his former mentor.

In late August, Briseño began suggesting reforms at the Centro Cultural Universitario, which oversees a group of successful businesses and projects including hotels, language schools, a burgeoning film festival and the prestigious International Book Fair - the second-largest event of its kind in the world.

Many of the projects had been founded by Padilla, and he had remained as the head of the center after stepping down from the rectory in 1995 at the end of a six-year term.

When asked in an Aug. 28 radio interview why the center and Padilla's leadership of it were being scrutinized, Briseño responded: "Absolute power corrupts.

"I don't have any proof, but we're investigating . we're going to audit each one of the university's businesses," he said.

The General University Council sacked Briseño a day later, citing budgetary mismanagement and insubordination.

For some observers, the firing showed how the university, despite its reputation as an institution on the vanguard of higher education, at the same time remains wedded to an old-style authoritarian leadership.

"At this university, both the past and present are very much alive," said Sergio Aguayo, a professor at the Colegio de México and a Jalisco native.

"There are parts that are excellent, but very large parts are extraordinarily backward in their political culture."



`A BENIGN STRONGMAN'

Zepeda, a University of Guadalajara graduate, called Padilla, "a benign strongman," whose use of power has been both "favorable and unfavorable."

Under Padilla's guidance, both as rector and behind-the-scenes playmaker, the school undertook modernization initiatives that included decentralizing power to regional centers beyond Guadalajara, and organizing successful cultural events.

"In many ways, it's been more at the [cultural forefront] of any other university of the country, including UNAM," Zapeda said.

But the U. de G. - as the school is known locally - has also been viewed suspiciously due to a lack of transparency in its finances. And the school's not-so-secret affiliation with the local Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, which is headed by Padilla, also raised local hackles.

Briseño brought differing political allegiances to the Padilla inner circle. He was openly friendly to the PRI and numerous PRI functionaries, including Gov. Mario Marín of Puebla, Nayarit Gov. Ney González and party president Beatriz Paredes, attended his annual state of the university address in April 2008.

Local newspapers called the annual state of the university address "A coming-out party" for Jalisco's most prominent PRIísta.

Then, when he began forging better relations with the local PAN administration, which had previously denounced the U. de G. for a lack of transparency, he really fell out of favor.

"He had a series of political commitments, with political forces, that were inconvenient for the university . [including] the old national PRI," Zepeda said. "Briseño suddenly represented the possibility of breaking [the U. de G.] open, but for the worst reasons.

"Everyone views it as a jackpot."

Prelate's murder still haunts Jalisco

The Templo Expiatorio in Guadalajara

DAVID AGREN
The News

Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo went to the Guadalajara airport 15 years ago to welcome papal nuncio Archbishop Giralamo Prigione, who was coming to the country's second largest city to bless a furniture factory. But the two men never met.

Cardinal Posadas Ocampo, who was dressed in his usual clerical robes, was shot dead shortly after 5 p.m. as he stepped out of his car in front of the terminal.

A federal investigation said the prelate was inadvertently caught up in the crossfire of a shootout between the rival Tijuana and Sinaloa drug cartels, which were active in the Jalisco capital during the 1990s. Catholic officials reject the official explanation, however. They note that Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was shot at close range in an attack that also claimed the life of his chauffer and five others. No one has ever been convicted in the matter, although the investigation officially remains open.

The cardinal's death and the unresolved investigation have been long-standing sources of consternation in Jalisco, where the events of May 24, 1993 – and a massive explosion blamed on gasoline leaking into the sewer system barely 13 months prior – ushered in sweeping political and social change in one of the country's most fervently Catholic states.

"With the death of the cardinal, the government left a lot to be desired in its official explanation," said Mario Ramos González, a political science professor at the University of Guadalajara. "In the Catholic Church, there's still a lot of outrage."

Analysts credit the ascent of the National Action Party, or PAN, in the region to the general disgust with the inept government response to the 1992 explosions that flattened a five-kilometer stretch of a working class part of Guadalajara and killed at least 200 residents, and a Catholic backlash against the perceptions of a cover up in the investigation into the violent death of a popular prelate.

Agriculture Secretary Alberto Cárdenas, then the little-known mayor of Ciudad Guzmán, deposed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in 1994. The PAN, which tilts decidedly conservative in the region, later won consecutive gubernatorial elections in 2000 and 2006.

Columnist Jorge Zepeda, editor of the now-defunct Guadalajara daily Siglo 21 in the 1990s, compared the political impact of the explosions and assassination to the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which gave rise to social movements and the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. But the shift in Jalisco went in the other direction, he added.

"The 1985 earthquake generated the formation of a civil society with distinct ideologies while in Guadalajara it was essentially a turn to the right," Zepeda said. "The cardinal's assassination generated a conservative militancy in defense of the church."

STATE CRIME

Speculation about what really transpired at the Guadalajara airport and who might be responsible for the cardinal's death is still rife in Mexico – even 15 years later. Theories on who might have carried out the cardinal's death range from narcotics traffickers to gunmen acting on the orders of senior politicians to the Masons.

Alfredo Araujo Ávila, a key hit man for the Arellano Felix cartel, was arrested in January and implicated in the Guadalajara shootout.

Cardinal Posadas Ocampo led an Archdiocese that was the base for narcotics trafficking gangs during the 1980s and 90s, leading to speculation that his criticisms - or relations with - might have sparked their wrath.

The Archdiocese of Guadalajara said the Araujo Ávila meant little as many Catholic officials consider the cardinal's death to be premeditated murder. Last week, the Mexican bishops' conference described the cardinal's death as "a state crime" and called on former President Carlos Salinas, who governed from 1998 to 1994, to produce more information on the matter.

Salinas has long been a polemic figure in the Cardinal Posadas Ocampo affair.

A new book by Guadalajara-area lawyers José Antonio Ortega and Fernando Guzmán – presently the No. 2 official in the Jalisco state government – alleges the former president made efforts to close the preliminary investigation.

They also allege that officials in the federal government are still hindering the investigation.

Salinas has denied any culpability in Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's death.

But the former president, according to a pair of reports by Ortega and Guzmán for then Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, was seeking the intervention of Pope Benedict XVI to have the death "not declared a state crime."

The report, which was obtained by the Excelsior newspaper last May, added that Salinas was also advancing the idea that "Freemasons and public servants of that persuasion" - Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, who passed away in 2000, was mentioned by the lawyers - possibly ordered the cardinal's murder. The lawyers also noted that Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had been under surveillance in the days leading up to May 24, 1993.

One prominent Catholic leader during the 1990s disagreed, however. Luis Reynoso, a lawyer and the former bishop of Cuernavaca, quashed the conspiracy theories in a series of investigations in the late 1990s. Reynoso died in 2000, but his nephew recently released a book based on the bishop's investigations that insists the cardinal was in the wrong place at the wrong time and no proof of premeditated murder exists.

UNSATISFACTORY INVESTIGATION

Salinas left office in late 1994, but during the administration of his successors – Former Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox – the investigation "did not advance," according to the reports by Ortega and Guzman.

"There hasn't been any will on the part of the government," said Adelberto González, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Guadalajara. "Until now there hasn't been a single conviction for having the cardinal murdered."

Church officials insist they're not looking for revenge. Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval, said in a statement issued last week, "The church wants to know the truth – even so that we know whom to forgive.

CNDH backs Huichol exiles

David Agren
The News

The National Human Rights Commission, or CNDH, demanded the Jalisco government better protect indigenous Huicholes, who have been expelled from their communities for not following traditional religious practices.

The CNDH also admonished the state attorney general’s office for failing to take action on legal complaints of religious intolerance filed by Dagoberto Cirilo Sánchez, a Guadalajara missionary, on behalf of the expelled residents. The first complaints were lodged in 2003.

“This national organization has no proof that shows the government of Jalisco has taken actions that would restore the victims’ properties or help them purchase other lands,” the CNDH said in a press release issued on April 7.

The CNDH press release added that Huicholes residing in the municipality of Mezquitic in northern Jalisco state were banished by an elders’ council after joining the Seventh Day Adventist church.

Nearly 300 Huicholes departed Mezquitic in August 2005, when they reported having their houses burned down and lives threatened. Many of the converts stopped participating in rituals that involved drinking tejuino – a fermented corn beverage – and consuming peyote, a hallucinogenic plant harvested in San Luis Potosí state by Huicholes fulfilling community obligations.

The expelled Huicholes are now living in Nayarit state near the Agua Milpa dam. The CNDH described their living conditions as “deplorable” due to a lack of basic services and an inability to participate in a local fishery, which an ejido, or communal farm, has the right to exploit.

The Huichol, who are famed for their artwork and colorful clothing, are known to be reclusive and live in the dry sierra of Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas states. Many of their communities are not accessible by roads.

Remittance rate slows down

According to the Bank of Mexico, the rate of remittances sent home by Mexican migrants slowed down during the first six months of 2006 even though the number of migrants living in the United States increased. The Washington Post described the suspected reasons for the decline in a story last week: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/08/AR2007080802241.html


I recently went to Mezcala, Jalisco, a sad sacked town on the north shore of Lake Chapala that bleeds migrants, for the annual patron saint holiday. The saint is a pretext for hundreds of migrants to return home for two weeks every August. Most of those arriving brought money for their families and gifts for community institutions. As one person there told me, "It's tough to imagine life in Mezcala without remittances."

Remittances in Mezcala seemed to be flowing home like always.

Los extranjeros invaden Jalisco/Foreigners invade Jalisco

The National Immigration Institute (INM) released figures earlier this week showing that Jalisco has more foreign-born residents than any other Mexican state except for Baja California. (Chihuahua, which like Baja California is also on the border, placed third in the survey. It wasn't mentioned if data from the Federal District were included.)

With booming expat enclaves in the Chapala Riviera and Puerto Vallarta - the latter area spills into neighboring Nayarit state - this news about foreigners in Jalisco shouldn't come as a surprise. The INM said 56,065 foreign-born residents live in the state, a figure that's probably low as many people arriving in Jalisco simply obtain a tourist card - if anything - and stay for less than six months.

Somewhat curiously, a story announcing the INM findings in the Mural newspaper (subscription required) stated:

"La Perla Tapatia [as Guadalajara is referred to] is now considered one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world."

Not so fast. Yes, Guadalajara is much less provincial than before, but locals still call it El Rancho Grande, in English: The Big Ranch. Many of the foreigners here, according to the INM, are studying in one of the seven local universities. But the city doesn't attract many expats that work and/or run businesses - spare some tech industry workers. (The average age of the foreign-born population is supposedly younger than the average Mexican, but this must simply reflect children born to Mexicans in the U.S. that now live down here.)

Foreign retirees now opt in much larger numbers to settle in the Lake Chapala area. (Take a look at the dwindling membership at the American Society of Jalisco if you don't believe me.) Adding to Chapala's appeal, it has an even better climate and less pollution than Guadalajara. Still, Guadalajara is one of the most livable big cities anywhere and tastes are becoming less conservative - even if the politics and social mores still tilt in that direction.

Los "Cristos" de San Martin de Hidalgo, Jalisco

An apt piece on Good Friday festivities in a small Jalisco municipaliy published in today's Miami Herald Mexico Edition.

Tradition thrives in Jalisco village

BY DAVID AGREN/THE HERALD MEXICO
El Universal
Domingo 08 de abril de 2007

Nobody is sure of the origins of the custom which is unique to the town.

SAN MARTÍN DE HIDALGO, Jal. - In the weeks preceding Good Friday, a member of the García clan lowers the family´s treasured wooden Christ statue from a cross in their home and takes the fragile figure to the local church for a special Mass, where the icon is washed and blessed.

Then, in a re-enactment of Christ lying in rest after his crucifixion, they place the 16th-century statue on a bed of laurel leaves, under the gaze of a Virgin of Dolores photo, in the front of their barrio La Flecha home.

Finally, after the local Passion Play finishes on Good Friday, the Garcías welcome hundreds of guests, who come to pay their respects.

While many Mexicans decamp the country´s cities and towns and head for the beach during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the residents of San Martín, an agrarian municipality southwest of Guadalajara, instead turn their homes into capillas (small chapels), where their Christ statues lie at rest, awaiting resurrection.

According to local priest Luis Zuñiga, "What´s represented is the moment that Jesus is being lowered from the cross" and prepared for burial.

Nobody really knows the exact origins of the tradition, which only happens in San Martín, although Malaquías García González, 77, said it dates back centuries.

His statue, named Cristo San Salvador, has been in his family for five generations and might be the oldest in the municipality.

Legend has it the Spanish, who arrived in 1540, brought indigenous craftsmen from Michoacán, who made the statues and founded barrio La Flecha. (Flecha, or arrow, referred to the founders´ indigenous and less affluent roots.)

Some 32 statues are registered as being at least 150 years old, but with time, the custom expanded beyond barrio La Flecha and now includes many younger Christ figures.

Jorge Mendoza, a trumpet player with the mariachi group "Los Flecheros" - a name taken from the barrio - first built an altar for his relatively new Christ statue in 1998 after surviving an accident that claimed the life of a band member.

Somewhat aptly, he named his statue, Cristo del Mariachi.

Some motives for participating in the tradition, though, might be less pure, said Susana Evangelista, whose family runs a small restaurant and owns the 200-year-old Cristo de la Agonía.

"Here, we´re all sort of copy cats," she said cynically.

Still, she acknowledged faith just might be driving the tradition. "People (in San Martín) have stayed pretty loyal to the Catholic Church," she observed.

Por Fin! Jalisco's new governor takes power

Nine months after besting the PRI in a bitter gubernatorial contest, Emilio Gonzalez Marquez finally assumed power in Jalisco, succeeding Francisco "Paco" Ramirez Acuña, who departed in December for a spot in President Felipe Calderon's cabinet. Gonzalez, the former mayor of Guadalajara, heads the conservative state's third-consecutive PAN government. Originally from Lagos de Moreno in the Los Altos region east of Guadalajara (and just across the state line from Vicente Fox's San Francisco del Rincon, Guanajuato,) he's long been linked the Yunque, a secretive conservative organization sympathetic to the PAN. (Gonzalez denies the connection.)

Gonzalez takes over a state that could best be described as middle of the road. While not especially corrupt, Jalisco is hardly an innovator on the national level. Guadalajara's sleepy elite-family-dominated business scene is prospering like always and the high-tech sector is making a nice recovery after a long slump.

Paco accomplished little over his term other than bring the 2011 Pan American Games to Guadalajara - a competition won by default - crack down on the globalifobicos at a 2004 summit in the state capital and take numerous foreign junkets of dubious value. Gonzalez's track record in Guadalajara was hardly stellar as he flip-flopped constantly and revved up a dormant publicity machine. During the election, he went negative early on and blasted the University of Guadalajara, an institution with prominent PRD members in top leadership positions. Perhaps most conveniently, the PGR, acting on old allegations of fraud in the Zapopan IMSS, showed up at PRI candidate and former Zapopan mayor Arturo Zamora's upscale Valle Real home mere days before the July 2 vote.

Perhaps Gonzalez will turn out okay. He's already won his battle for an audit at the U de G. But he'll probably turn in another lackluster term - the norm for Jalisco.

Mexican firefighers to help resolve labor crunch in Alberta

The Alberta and Jalisco governments signed a twinning agreement in the late 1990s that originally concentrated on agriculture, but later grew to include education and business links. The two jurisdictions are now cooperating on fighting forest fires as the Alberta government will help establish a training center in the Primavera Forest just west of Guadalajara. The Mexicans trained at the center will eventually make their way north to battle blazes in Alberta during manpower shortages, which are forecast due to the province's red-hot economy. With fire season in Jalisco about to start and Alberta's beginning in the late spring - just as the rainy season arrives in Mexico - the arrangement should work well.

I recently wrote on this for the Miami Herald Mexico Edition: http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/23530.html

As an aside, no Alberta publication to my knowledge has bothered to report on this arrangement ... good news stories out of Mexico unfortunately don't fit anyone's news agenda these days.

Poutine arrives in Mexico

Chef Bernard shows off poutine
Originally uploaded by David Agren.

Chef Bernard Corriveau proudly shows off a plate of poutine. The Quebec native, who now resides in Zapopan, prepared the dish for a group of cooks from the Sanborns restaurant chain. Sanborns locations in Guadalajara will put poutine on the menu this month as part of Canada Week in Jalisco. No word on if Carlos Slim, Latin America's wealthiest man and the owner of Sanborns, signed off on the menu selection.

Poutine, a plate of french fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds, is wildly popular in Quebec - not to mention an instant heart attack.

Puerto Vallarta parking problems continue

The Puerto Vallarta municipal government started turning four of its public parks into parking garages in 2005. The work is pretty much done and new, concrete-intensive parks now sit atop underground parking garages at three locations. The projects have been controversial for some people, who argue that a rash of development in the central part of the city is jeopardizing the charm and ambiance that made Puerto Vallarta so popular. Here's what I wrote on the subject for the Miami Herald, Mexico edition.

BY DAVID AGREN/The Herald Mexico
El Universal
Sábado 27 de enero de 2007

PUERTO VALLARTA - Over his three years as a vendor near this town´s Playa los Muertos, Pedro de Jesús Álvarez has noticed more and more traffic pass through the area and parking spaces become increasingly scarce.
To remedy the situation and accommodate a growing number of tourists arriving in private vehicles, the Puerto Vallarta municipal government unveiled a polemic solution several years ago: Convert four of its public parks - three of which were either in or adjacent to the Historic Center - into parking garages. New concrete-intensive parks would be built on top of three of the underground garages.

Álvarez´s old business location, Parque Lázaro Cárdenas, was dedicated as an underground parking garage by outgoing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Mayor Gustavo González Villaseñor in late December, capping a pro-development term in office, during which time the seaside destination has grown immensely in popularity with both domestic and international tourists and building has been rampant.

According to the local tourism board, the once sleepy fishing village on a spectacular bay now trails only Cancún in tourist preference and 3.5 million people visit Puerto Vallarta each year.

The ongoing modernization of the Historic Center - site of the famed Malecón - and nearby Zona Romántica, though, unsettles some longtime residents and environmental groups, who accuse the municipal government of charging ahead without drawing up a proper development plan and recklessly approving projects that could, if not carried out with caution, turn Puerto Vallarta into another Acapulco.

Read the whole article at: http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/23166.html

Dolf Horn, R.I.P.

Mr. Adolf B. Horn Jr., the former U.S. consul in Guadalajara, passed away earlier this week. He was 95. The Cuban-born Horn, a pioneer in Jalisco's expatriate community, founded Helados Bing in 1965 at a location near Guadalajara's Los Arcos and served for more than three decades as the local president of the American Chamber. Horn sold Helados Bing in the early 1980s and later became involved with Dolphy, another chain of ice cream stores.

Over the years Horn became somewhat of a living legend in Guadalajara's business community. A road in suburban Tlajomulco de Zuñiga was named after him, although it was in somewhat of a sorry state in recent years.

Horn also counted friends on all sides of the political spectrum. He was friends with various presidents and governors and was always a proponent of Mexico opening up to the outside world.

I interviewed Horn previously. Here's something I wrote on him for the Miami Herald, Mexico edition back in Oct. 2005. http://agren.blogspot.com/2005/10/ice-cream-pioneer-still-going-strong.html

Tequila flows like never before while subsidies trickle in for struggling agave farmers

Tequila once again surged in popularity as distillers increased their output by 15.7 percent in 2006, making it a record production year. Exports grew by an even bigger number, 17.8 percent and another legendary tequila brand, Herradura, slipped into foreign hands. The region around Tequila, Jalisco was also named a UNESCO World Heritage Site last year.

But all isn't well in Mexico's tequila country. Farmers still receive only a fraction of the sky-high prices agave fetched during the salad days of the late 1990s. The price of agave has bottomed out at around one peso per kilo after reaching as high as 16 pesos per kilo. Prices have hovered at that low level for several years now.

To ease the hardship, the Mexican government unveiled a plan to give agave growers 200 million pesos in subsidies. Agriculture secretary - and former Jalisco governor - Alberto Cardenas Jimenez announced the relief, but commented that the previous high price drove many growers to plant agave and attracted many speculators into the industry. Agave arriving from outside of the designated growing area - Jalisco and certain municipalities of Nayarit, Michoacan, Guanajuato and Tamaulipas - is also aggravating the situation.

Somewhat ironically, the Jalisco government's rural development secretariat forecasts the supply of agave will plunge by the end of the decade after the glut works itself out, which would, of course, put the same boom-bust cycle in motion again.

Los Reyes Magos go for a boat ride

A mesquite statue of Melchor, one of the Santos Reyes (three kings), is carried off of a humble fishing boat yesterday at the wharf in Cajititlan, Jalisco. The town just south of Guadalajara celebrates Dia de los Reyes every January with the usual activities - fireworks, indigenous dancing, church services, etc. - but the local fishermen also take the kings on a tour of the Laguna de Cajititlan. The tradition dates back to at least 1587 in the municipality of Tlajomulco.

I wrote about the event; here's my account for the Catholic News Service.

Paco heads for Gobernacion (Interior Ministry)

Former Jalisco governor Francisco "Paco" Ramirez Acuna collected on an imense political debt with his ascension to the interior ministry, perhaps the most prestigious spot in President Felipe Calderon's cabinet. Paco, who governed Jalisco from 2001 until a few weeks ago, gained a reputation as a no-nonsense character willing to have the police bust heads when necessary - principally at the May 2004 summit of European and Latin American leaders held in Guadalajara. Local and state police forcefully cracked down on globalifobicos (anti-globalization protesters) trying to enter a restricted downtown area. Human rights abuses were documented and some of the protesters were detained for months without being charged. When asked to explain things, Paco testily responded afterwards, "Nothing happened."

Few tapatios (Guadalajara residents) lost much sleep over those events as the city and region generally sees few protests and the local population is seldom enamored with causes viewed as radical.

That doesn't mean Paco was well regarded. He certainly never achieved the same levels of popularity as Alberto Cardenas, Paco's predecessor. Paco seldom spoke to the media, took numerous foreign junkets of dubious value - promoting tequila in Poland comes to mind - and accomplished little other than bring the 2011 Pan Am Games to Guadalajara. (No other cities made bids.) A fuss broke out in Chapala after the new malecon was named for the outgoing governor last month. (PAN was just voted out of city hall in Chapala after disastrous back-to-back terms and Lake Chapala has improved slightly in spite of government inaction.) New PAN governor Emilio Gonzalez Marquez won fewer votes in Jalisco than Felipe Calderon and only a deeply-negative campaign kept the state from going PRI.

Although perceived as a law-and-order guy, Paco willing broke the rules when it served his purposes. After a new transparency law was passed, he refused to show his paycheque - as required - to a constituent.

But Paco backed Felipe Calderon back in 2004, going against the PAN establishment - and Cardenas. And now Paco's collecting.