No. of Recommendations: 1
What a shame.
My real Mom's side of my family are Southern Californians (my Dada's side are the 1930's Euro immigrants). The loved Mexico. My Grandmother moved from L.A. to quiet little Puerto Vallarta about the time they shot The Night of The Iguana there. My Mom was a bullfight afficionado. We roamed the streets of Tijuana, Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara without a care in the world. As a teenager I did a lot of surfing/fishing/camping trips as far south as Puerto Escondido and camped anywhere.
Working with a magazine team in Mexico for a month around 1980, the writer, Selwa Roosevelt, told us over dinner that the average age in Mexico was TEN YEARS OLD... and that Mexico could not possibly create enough employment opportunity for the baby boom those 10 year olds would create. The message was clear. Things were gonna get ugly.
We started to experience increasing episodes of crime by drug rings, police, and people associated with them...and not just the usual little nips of mordida.
It ceased being fun when we got stopped just before dark at a road block in the middle of the desert south of Ciudad Obregon by machine gun toting guys in plain clothes; feds/cartel? Quien sabe. When they tap the barrel on the window and say 'abre la puerta, you damn well do it.
I loved Mexico. I'm very sad they were unable to control the crime, corruption. We are the market that facilitated the evolution of the cartels. We trained the Zetas. The Zetas were the future of the cartels. And here we are.
