[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by wetibbe

I read a book - History of Mexico bought at Barnes and Noble.

It started way back thousands of years ago, with the ancestral tribes, and bit by bit, chapter by chapter, progresses through the Aztecs, Meso America, Spanish invasion, independence, French occupation, more recent wars and revolution.

The whole place, it's whole history and all of its people are one huge, colossal disaster. It was always full of bandido's and revolutionaries and it still is.

Basically true.

The worst of peninsular Ibero - Arab governmental culture and totalitarian Indian empire were cobbled together to maintain an empire managed on the cheap.

500 years of bullshit, where the past is the present, where the past interferes with the present and sabotages the future.

However, Europe crawled out of its dark ages. Why not Mexico?

"For the very, very first time, people, civil society as a whole, have come together and decided, this is enough," said Marcos Fastlicht, a prominent Mexico City businessman who heads an organization dedicated to the uphill task of promoting citizen participation in crime-fighting. "And they've said that to Calderon . . . to his ministers . . . that they are not going to take any more" neglect and broken promises.

(Calderon) quietly took a tongue-lashing from a middle-aged maquiladora worker, mother of two of the teenagers killed in the massacre, who confronted him at a town meeting.

"President, I cannot welcome you here," Luz Maria Davila started, voice raised; Calderon waved off an aide who moved to whisk Davila away. "We are living the consequences of a war we did not ask for."

It was a highly unusual rebuke from a humble woman in a country that retains paternalistic tendencies and demands a certain reverence for presidential figures.

Pre-1810 discontent bubbled out into short lived local uprisings, which were bloodily repressed.

However, regardless of the kill tally from the cartels, no one in Mexico wants another state sponsored Tlatalolco massacre or Corpus Cristi massacre. Perhaps this may be the first seeds of a national consciousness which demands rights and conditions which don't disappear amid all of Mexico City's hollow promises.

And certainly, absolutely no one wants the senseless mass killing of another Mexican Revolution.

Maybe it is the first step with a nation haunted by all the ghosts of the past to genuine reform.