It's Awful Down There

I do not take any solace in what’s happening to my country at present.

The nation I Love, have always Admired and have always been Proud Of is being Fundamentally Changed. The people who ought to be saving it do not seem to be worried about all the Awful that is reported every day on our never-ending news shows.

Actually, our public officials often appear to be orchestrating and cheering on the Awful.

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I’ve just stopped writing this blog because I am now into Fella’s Copy and Paste Mode. There are still lots of reasons why we should be glad that we live in the Good Ole USofA instead of Mexico but there appears to be less of those reasons with each passing day.

If we lived in Mexico below is a sample of what the nightly news would be reporting to us each night...

June 1, 2024

Crispín Mendoza bounded up the stairs to the roof of his house earlier this spring and shot back at the gunmen who were peppering his home with automatic-rifle fire. It was election season in the rugged mountains of lawless Guerrero state, Mexico’s deadliest place to run for municipal office.

Since January, when he began campaigning for mayor of the town of Alcozauca, Mendoza said he has endured dozens of telephone death threats. A local criminal kingpin, known as “El Señor,” left a message written on a sheet warning Mendoza to stay out of politics.

A short, stocky man with a neatly trimmed beard, Mendoza said he was asleep in the middle of the night in March when two gunmen started shooting up his home. As his wife and three children screamed and hid under a bed, Mendoza grabbed his Taurus 380 revolver.

“I started firing back,” he said. “I scared them away.”

Since the shooting, his neighbors have rallied to his defense, bringing their rifles and sleeping in his home, three at a time. Mendoza now has a detail of seven National Guardsmen, who protect him around the clock.

A wave of political violence has become a threat across Mexico ahead of the country’s national elections Sunday. More than 200 government officials, candidates and political party activists have been gunned down since Mexico’s electoral process got under way in September, according to Integralia Consultores, a Mexico City consulting firm.

While the presidency and both houses of Congress are up for grabs, organized-crime groups are particularly focused on thousands of local elections. Mexico’s electoral agency, INE, has requested federal protection for more than 550 candidates for public office because of threats or attacks.

“This election is going to be the most violent in history,” said Luis Carlos Ugalde, Integralia’s general director and former chief of Mexico’s electoral agency. “If you want to be a candidate in a region controlled by gangs, you need to ask for permission so they don’t kill you.”

Mendoza didn’t. He said he was drawn into politics to make a better life for his neighbors, many of whom live hardscrabble lives in homes that have dirt floors and no running water. The town is plagued by corruption, with criminal organizations stealing a good chunk of the money that should go to public works.

The tempo of violence has quickened ahead of Sunday’s election. Between May 15 and 17, three candidates running for municipal office in three states were killed. The bodies of a candidate for City Council in another Guerrero town and his wife were found in the back of a pickup truck. During the same period, the body of a candidate for a town in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa was found in a field, and a candidate for mayor in a town in the southern Chiapas state was gunned down.

On Wednesday evening in the town of Coyuca in Guerrero state, near the once-glitzy beach resort of Acapulco, the opposition candidate for mayor, José Alfredo Cabrera, was gunned down as hundreds of his supporters watched in horror. He was shot twice in the head as he arrived to give his final speech at the closing rally of his campaign. The gunman, who had approached the candidate in a wheelchair, was immediately killed by Cabrera’s security guards, authorities said.

The wave of political violence has exposed the cracks in Mexico’s democracy. Polls show that security is a top concern for Mexican voters. Security experts have said that the six cities with the highest homicide rates in the world are in Mexico.

“Now a lot of people get by with a tortilla with sauce and salt,” an official said.

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I underlined what I thought stood out as Awful. I could have underlined the entire article.

Would I kid u?

The bad guys in Mexico are not kidding either!

Smartfella