Your one-stop shop for all things Latin/Hispanic/Mexican
The swine flu case found this weekend in Cuba was brought to the island by a Mexican student in Havana, and NOT the CIA as everybody Fidel Castro had feared. According to Granma’s Reflexiones del Compañero Fidel:
But wait! what if this particular Mexican works for the CIA? eh? anyone?
[Hat tip to Mariana Carreño King, an avid reader of Granma online]
You can badmouth the gringos as much as you want, but they are soooooo nice to us, Mexicans.
Take Barack Obama, who this afternoon arrived in Mexico City to personally give the Calderón government US$66 million!
Alas, the greenbacks might not end up in my family’s hands any time soon. They are, reportedly, to be used to purchase a few BlackHawk helicopters.
Oh, well, beggars can’t be choosers, right?
1 Beast (the bullet proof limo, NOT who you’re thinking of…)
5.4 meters. Length of The Beast
12:00 P.M. (CST) Time when Mexico’s air travel space will shut down for one and a half hours
13:00 P.M. (CST) Estimated Time of Arrival at Mexico City’s International Airport
3,5000 Police agents charged with the U.S. President’s security during his visit
24 Estimated number of hours in Mexico
5 Number of activities planned
6 Number of floors to be occupied by Obama and his staff at Polanco’s Hotel El Presidente
15:35. Estimated time for a joint press conference with the other beast Felipe Calderón
3 meals (presumably not Whoppers)
It didn’t take long for Mexican cartoonists to take on the whole Burger King brouhaha.
In the image, Obama is seeing as the tall, lanky gringo who poses next to a chubby -and tiny- Felipe Calderón. These two, however, are not “Brought together by destiny,” as the Texican Whopper, but “Brought together by nonsense.”
ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Image: Calderón. (Reforma)
Hat tip: Carlos Gutiérrez
Undeterred by American TV anchors reporting on Armageddon south of the border -and despite what Anderson Cooper wants you to believe— U.S. manufacturers are flocking to Mexico in search of some extra dinerito. (Even when things are so messed up that BusinessWeek is using rifles to spell out the name of the country!)
According to the April 20th issue of BusinessWeek big business is standing its ground for one simple reason:
“Manufacturers have good reason to hang tough. The 41% drop in the peso against the dollar since August has made Mexico an even cheaper place to manufacture: Factory workers in Juárez can be hired for $1.50 an hour.”
$1.50 an hour!?? Good lord! That’s not even enough to get you a spicy Whopper across the border. Crap!
Move over, Carlos Slim. Another “notable” Mexican, our very own drug lord El Chapo Guzmán, 54, has made Forbes’ list of billionaires with a fortune described as “self-made.” (Please, don’t be fooled by the cheap-looking Gortex jacket.)
According to Forbes, the fortune of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is estimated at around $1 billion — No. 701 on the list– right between a Swiss oil-trading tycoon and a U.S. chemical heir and just on pair with Televisa’s Emilio Azcárraga-Jean.
Oh, and he is only 54, which makes us believe a bright future still awaits the Sinaloa native.
¿Quién dijo que no se puede?
Crisis? What economic crisis? Mexico’s disgustingly fat healthy-looking Finance Minister Agustín Carstens seemed to have his head elsewhere during this week’s Mexico visit by the Sarkozys. The hell with everything else!
“¡Mamita sabrosa!”
That’s it my friends. Remember the New York sixtuplets, the first ever born to a Hispanic couple? Soon, they will be joining the billions millions of little ones taking over populating America’s kindergartens. According to the latest Census data:
“Nearly a quarter of all the nation’s kindergarten students are Hispanic, more than triple the rate during the 1970s.”
That is roughly ….a lot of chilpayates.
And wait ’till you hear some staggering statistics about tortillas consumption. Stay tuned. More Census data to come.
Photo: Viktor Glez
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero surely knows what needs to be done to support tourism to Russia.
Ah…. .. the wonders of Freudian slips.
Barack Obama this week put in a call to Univision Radio’s Eddie “Piolín” Sotelo to let him know he’s hard at work fixing the immigration mess -and that they are now BFF. I’m not going to bother you with details (you can read the full transcript here) but the highlights of the show were definitely the first and last 5 seconds:
1:48 P.M. MST
THE PRESIDENT: Hello.
PIOLIN: Hello.
THE PRESIDENT: Who am I speaking with?
PIOLIN: Piolín.
THE PRESIDENT: Piolín, my friend, this is President Barack Obama.
And, just a few minutes later, at 1:57 P.M. MST:
THE PRESIDENT: All right. Well, thank you so much, Piolín. It’s great to talk to you.
PIOLIN: Mr. President, you know we are close friends and you know that I have your BlackBerry phone number and you have mine.(Laughter.) So keep in touch.
After all, there are far more important things than creating a union or launching a scholarship program for Palestinian students.
Photo bluntly stolen from: Gawker
…Either things are really, really ugly or the Web designer at El Universal got a little too creative by super-imposing the voter’s head over the section’s headline, which I believe is actually called La Disputa 2009 (The Dispute 2009). But then again, when it comes to Mexican politics, you can never be sure.
Ever wondered why Hispanics are underrepresented in the U.S. military? Well, according to Rand Corporation, a California think tank, it’s simply because we are fat -and not very bright at school.
But Latinos should not despair: Rand is making some suggestions to change all this, including easing weight requirements and instead measuring recruits’ strength, among other options. “You can have a large bone structure but still be very strong and effective,” the report’s author tells the Houston Chronicle. (No word on the poor scores, though.)
In the meantime, if you are still looking for the right career path, you might want to check out working for La Migra, apparently the only hiring institution in these tough times.
It’s always nice when your country gets the attention it deserves. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Huffington Post has added a Mexico channel, because, as its editors say: “Some News are so Big it Needs its own Page.”
The news is indeed so big, that you’ll find an assorted variety of articles about drug wars, drug lords, drug gangs, drug kidnappings, drug killings, drug zars and drug beauty queens.
(Oh, did I mention there are also some stories about plain drugs?)
Because, you know, nothing else seems to be happenging down there.
[Click on the photo on the left to read more Mexican stories.]
So much for the Inauguration euphoria. I woke up Wed. January 21st, ready to take in the long-promised Change. So I took a stroll around the White House’s Web site, where I hoped to find a comprehensive, all-inclusive Spanish-language page by clicking on the En Español link.
Alas, all I could find was four short biographies of Barack, Michelle, Joe and Jill, telling me for instance that Obama es el cuadragésimo cuarto presidente de EE.UU.
Could it be that they haven’t found a documented Spanish speaker in the Washington D.C. area? Perhaps Mrs. Obama’s Cuban designer can lend a helping hand.
Hat tip to Gabriel Sama
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