Mexico Review

Mexico 2012:A Year of Change, A Year of Renewal

PEOPLE!:!POLITICS!:!CULTURE!:!TRAVEL. FROM MEXICO. IN ENGLISH.

Presidential Politics An Early Look at a Historical Election

Remembering Leonora A Farewell to the Last of Mexico’s Surrealists

Magical Trips Nine Special Pueblos You’ll Want to Visit

Totally Tri The National Soccer Team Has a World To Conquer

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SPECIAL EDITIONJanuary, 2012Mexico CityVol. 01 No. 0132 pages

www.mexico-review.com

From the PublisherWelcome to Mexico Review. BY ANA MARÍA SALAZAR : 2

They Said It Quotable quotes by, for and about Mexico.: 3

The Race for Los PinosMexicans will be going to the polls on July 1 to elect a new president and Congress. It’s already shaping up as an intense three-way contest, and there’s even more to it than meets the eye. BY TOM BUCKLEY : POLITICS : ELECTIONS : 4

2012 Centennials Notable 100-, 150-, and 200-year anniversaries in Mexico didn’t stop after 2010. BY THE NUMBERS : 9

Crude RealityMexico’s national oil company is being pulled in two directions. Privatization is politically unpopular, but a more alliance-friendly structure, a la Brazil’s Petrobas, has strong support. The next step: a vigorous election-year debate.BY RON BUCHANAN : ECONOMY & FINANCE : PEMEX : 10

The Art of Managing UncertaintiesBelow-par growth is the most likely scenario for 2012. But then again, who knows?BY ROBERTO SALINAS-LEÓN : ECONOMY & FINANCE : PEMEX : 13

More of the Same?Nobody’s expecting a quick and dramatic turnaround in the security situation. But the drug war will be a campaign issue, and with a new president may come a new policy. BY MALCOLM BEITH : SECURITY : WAR ON DRUGS : 14

Sing Me Back HomeSusana Harp mines Mexico’s musical riches ... and makes some pretty darn good songs come alive again. BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT: LIFE & LEISURE : MUSIC : 16

The Indomitable MareA farewell to painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington, who left Mexico an unsurpassed surrealist legacy. BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT : LIFE & LEISURE : ART : 18

Who We LostA beatnik journalist, a respected columnist, a world-class opera composer, Pedro Infante’s best songwriter, a prizewinning novelist, a blogging poet, the premier Chiapas historian, an activist priest, a rocker and a jazz man were among those who passed on in 2011.LIFE & LEISURE : IN MEMORIAM ... : 22

Magic TourismExplorers of Mexico’s wonders can consider some new small town options in 2012, after the Tourism Secretariat named nine new Pueblos Mágicos in the last year. : LIFE & LEISURE : DESTINATIONS : 24

On the Horizon: The Road To RioTeam Mexico is taking some momentum into 2012, with its sights set on the London Olympic Games and World Cup qualifying. BY TOM BUCKLEY : LIFE & LEISURE : SPORTS : 28

EventsMajor to-do’s in Mexico in 2012. : LIFE & LEISURE : EVENTS : 32

CONTENTSMEXICO REVIEWJanuary 2012

theysaid it...

LET THEM EAT CAKE “Consumers will feel restricted, or they’ll say ‘I don’t care what they tell me, I’m going to keep eating it because I like it.’”— LORENA CERDIÁN, director of a food industry advocacy alliance that

includes Coca Cola, Nestlé and the Mexican baked goods giant Bimbo,

expressing opposition to a Health Secretariat proposal to require warning

labels on unhealthy foods.

BUT CAN WE KEEP THE COONSKIN CAP?“In the American popular imagination, John Wayne’s (David) Crockett blowing up the gunpowder supply has eclipsed Fess Parker’s Crockett dealing out blows with his rifle.”— Prolific author Paco Ignacio Taibo II in his new book on the Battle of the Alamo, subtitled “A History Unfit for Hollywood”

IT’S ALL HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

HE PRI INSISTS MEXICO

H A S A LWAYS BE E N A

DEMOCR ATIC COU N TRY, TH E PA N

CONSIDER S IT DEMOCR ATIC ON LY

SINCE THE YEAR 2000, AND THE PRD IS

CONVINCED THAT IT STILL ISN’T.”

— Luis Rubio, political analyst and columnist, and

president of CIDAC, an independent think tank in

Mexico City.

Oh. Never Mind, Then ...

GOING OUT GREEN “When we talk about climate change, we often think about the costs of acting against it. But we think too little about the cost of not doing anything, which is many times higher, and even more rarely about the economic benefits that public sustainability policies o!er.”

— President Felipe Calderón

GEOGRAPHY UPDATE

‘Latin America’ no longer exists. Or it on-ly exists insofar as literary, social, politi-

cal or artistic – never scientific – confer-ences are organized about it ... (And) the

majority of conferences about ‘Latin Amer-ica’ take place outside Latin America.’

— Jorge Volpi, author and former director of Canal 22, a Mexican public television channel, in an essay contending that the idea of Latin America, as defined by

“dictators, guerrillas, soccer players and the rhetoric of magic realism,” is long dead.”[T]

hen Maya scripture began to be deciphered, with its references to the

end of cycles, a facile interpretation was made from the perspective of

occidental thought, connecting it with a vision of the end of the world.”

— Archaeologists Mario Aliphat and Rafael Cobos, along with researcher and Maya specialist Carlos Pallán, in a statement

released by Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH) debunking the so-called Mayan 2012 Prophecy.

W“

“

What might we expect in 2012? Some pundits say next year could be boring, since likely PRI candidate Enrique Peña Ni-eto has held a steady lead in the polls. Something extraordinary would have to happen to stop him from becoming Mexico’s next president, they say.

What about the economy? Many analysts are betting on a stable re-covery that will translate into growth and employment, along with a noticeable uptick in the tourism industry. Hopes are high that the final months of the Calderón administration will see a respite on the securi-ty front and the government strategy to reduce crime and violence in Mexico will finally produce positive results.

After what we witnessed in 2011, it would be great if Mexico had a “boring” year with few surprises on the political and financial fronts and an improved security environment.

Here at Mexico Review we are betting that 2012 will be full of sur-prises. And we want to be the place you go to when you need to un-derstand what is happening in Mexico.

Mexico can be difficult to understand, even if you are fluent in Span-ish. For foreigners with political, business or family interests in Mexico, it can be virtually impossible to figure out what is going on here if you don’t speak Spanish.

For this and many other reasons, Mexico Review was conceived.

However Mexico Review is not just a magazine. The magazine is an integral part of a multimedia project featuring radio, Internet and television. We will strive to provide accurate news and analysis of the broad spectrum of politics, economy, lifestyle and culture in Mexico. Initially you will receive Mexico Review – free of charge – with your lo-cal newspaper. Soon enough, we hope you’ll want to subscribe to our home delivery service at [email protected]

With such promise of a captivating 2012 in Mexico, can you afford not to read Mexico Review? Visit us at www.mexico-review.com.

Ana María SalazarExecutive Director

[email protected]

Welcome to Mexico Review!

Mexico Review@MexicoReview

2!MEXICOREVIEW!:!January, 2012 January, 2012":!MEXICOREVIEW"3

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LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

E D I T O R I A LOscar McKelligan

PRESIDENT

Ana María Salazar VICE PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Fernando Ortiz LEGAL ADVISER

Tom Buckley EDITOR IN CHIEF

Kelly Arthur Garrett MANAGING EDITOR

Andrea Sánchez EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Daniela Graniel ART DIRECTOR

S A L E SVerónica Guerra de Alberti

CANCÚN REPRESENTATIVE

Abril de Aguinaco CABO REPRESENTATIVE

Iker Amaya Álvaro Sánchez

U.S. REPRESENTATIVES

C O N T R I B U T O R SMalcolm Beith, Ron Buchanan,

Roberto Salinas-León, Keith Dannemiller

B O A R D O F D I R E C T O R SOscar McKelligan Ana María Salazar Yurek McKelligan Fernando Ortiz

C O V E RShutterstock

Election fever is spreading rapid-ly yet the official campaign season doesn’t begin un-til March 30. Of course, such a clam-

or is to be expected when one presidential candidate has been on the stump for five years and another has been enjoying fa-vorable (and controversial) TV exposure for nearly as long.

In fact, it’d be a good sign if the voting public should be so engaged since the elec-tions are pivotal for the advancement of Mexico’s gestating democracy.

The long-ruling Institutional Revolu-tionary Party, or PRI, was finally ousted from o"ce in 2000 after 71 years in pow-er. Since then, the conservative Nation-al Action Party, or PAN, has controlled the executive branch and its performance has failed to meet expectations. The econ-omy has been sluggish, party politics has stagnated and considerable power has de-volved to state governors.

Now the PRI seems poised to retake Los Pinos and aims to win a majority in Con-gress. Perpetual infighting within the Par-ty of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, and other leftist parties has produced high negative numbers in public opinion polls and the PAN has seen support dwin-dle thanks to two straight underachieving administrations.

DEMOCRATIC RECESSION Mexicans go to the polls on July 1 to elect a new president, an entire new Congress and a new Mexico City mayor. In addition, there will be local elections in 10 states as well as the Federal District. Also, five state governors will be elected in 2012.

The presidential race will garner the lion’s share of attention, naturally, but the election process itself and the battles for Congress and Mexico City deserve equal scrutiny.

Voter apathy and organized crime are two primary issues that concern election o"cials and political analysts.

Two recent studies have provided ev-idence of a disturbing trend among the electorate in Mexico. An annual survey by Latinobarómetro measures democracy in Latin America. The public opinion poll has been carried out since 1995 and the 2011 version suggests that democracy is losing favor among Mexicans.

THE RACE FOR LOS PINOS

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN is the headline competition in 2012, but the electoral process and party posturing will provide subject matter worthy of attention BY TOM BUCKLEY • PHOTO: KEITH DANNEMILLER

: July 1Federal elections:President500 deputies (300 by direct election) 128 senators (96 by direct election) Federal District (mayor, 16 precinct chiefs, 66 assembly-men – 40 by direct election)

State elections:Campeche: 11 may-ors, 35 congressmen – 21 by direct election Colima: 10 mayors, 25 congressmen – 16 by direct election Guanajuato: 46 mayors, 36 con-gressmen – 22 by di-rect election Jalisco: 126 mayors, 40 congressmen – 20 by direct election State of Mexico: 125 mayors, 75 con-gressmen – 45 by di-rect election Morelos: 33 mayors, 30 congressmen – 18 by direct election Nuevo León: 51 mayors, 42 con-gressmen – 26 by di-rect election Querétaro: 18 may-ors, 25 congressmen – 15 by direct election San Luis Potosí: 58 mayors, 27 con-gressmen – 15 by di-rect election Sonora: 72 mayors, 33 congressmen – 21 by direct election

Gubernatorial races:Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Chiapas, Tabasco

THE 2012 LINE-UP

Two key questions illustrate this con-clusion. Mexico was last among 19 coun-tries in terms of the response to the ques-tion: “In general, would you say you are sat-isfied or dissatisfied with how democracy is functioning in your country?” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed (73 percent) re-sponded that they were “dissatisfied.” Only 23 percent said they were satisfied.

When asked to decide from among three statements, 36 percent of Mexicans said it didn’t matter to them if Mexico was a democratic nation or not.

Only 40 percent of Mexicans surveyed agreed with the statement “Democracy is the best form of government.” While

Guatemalans agreed to the tune of only 36 percent, Mexico’s status pales in com-parison to other Latin American nations such as Peru (59 percent), Costa Rica (65 percent), Argentina (70 percent) and Uru-guay (75 percent).

In December, national employers’ con-federation Coparmex published a survey that suggests nearly 60 percent of Mex-icans are disenchanted with democracy. The conclusions indicate that rising crime rates were the No. 1 reason for the decline in public support for democracy.

Sen. Diódoro Carrasco of the PAN re-sponded to the Latinobarómetro poll by blaming politicians (but not the Senate). “It

seems to me that the main reason for this [crisis] is the autism dem-onstrated by the political class,” he said. “Corruption, the feudalis-tic attitude of governors … and the anti-reform stance of the Chamber of Deputies have helped make our democracy unproductive.”

In addition, Congress failed to fill three vacant seats on the Feder-al Electoral Institute, or IFE, for 13 months. The IFE struggled to func-tion short-handed, posing a seri-ous handicap for IFE councilors as Election Day approached. The three seats were finally filled on Dec. 15.

DIRTY MONEY

IFE has been scrambling to win greater authority to audit cam-paign funding. IFE has also host-ed two forums inviting internation-al election experts to brainstorm about regulating money in politics.

“Our mission and our commit-ment is to make sure that money that comes from illicit activities does not taint the election pro-cess,” said IFE president Leonar-do Valdés in opening remarks at the second Foro de la Democracia Latinamericana.

The November state elections

in Michoacán – a drug cartel hot-bed – seem to illustrate how orga-nized crime can influence the vote in Mexico. While campaigning for the PAN gubernatorial candidate, the mayor of La Piedad was gunned down by mobsters. The day before the election, a drug cartel ordered a La Piedad newspaper to print a let-ter warning supporters of the PAN to stay away from voting booths. In the aftermath, stories have cir-culated that hundreds of politi-cians either turned down candi-dacies or stopped campaigning due to threats from crime gangs.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spent almost five years touring every municipality across the Republic.

4!MEXICOREVIEW!:!January, 2012

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An audiotape surfaced in which a capo bragged about funding the PRI.

Two weeks after the election, President Calderón made a speech in which he said or-ganized crime is putting democracy at risk.

“We desperately need real democrats who recognize and act when they see crim-inals interfering [in elections],” he said.

Interior Secretary Alejandro Poiré has proposed greater protection for election au-thorities and called for more vigilance in en-suring clean electoral processes. As far back as 2008, Guillermo Valdés, a top intelligence o"cial, warned that it was not so far-fetched that drug money would find its way into the electoral process. Valdés was heavily criti-cized but the 2009 federal elections were marred by accusations of winning politi-cians being bankrolled by drug cartels.

The PRI has interpreted the empha-sis on this concern as a thinly veiled at-tack on the former ruling party, especial-ly since there is broad support for the nar-rative that PRI governments at the state and federal levels have negotiated pacts with drug cartels.

“These assertions and suppositions have never been substantiated,” said con-gressman Francisco Rojas. “Anybody who accuses or hints at the interjection of criminal elements into electoral processes should denounce it and provide evidence.”

ABORTED PRIMARIESThe presidential field has been narrowed to five competitors and two major parties have already settled on a candidate, ef-fectively silencing themselves during the strictly regulated primary election season.

Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones grudging-ly retired from the PRI race when it became apparent that his opponent, Enrique Peña Ni-eto, had firm control of the party apparatus. Though the PRI is desperate to project an im-age of unity, Beltrones has not gone quietly.

“Democracy could be strengthened by passing a law that bolsters party institu-tions so that party bosses can’t dominate and manipulate internal activities,” he said at the second IFE forum.

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard gracefully bowed out of the PRD race af-ter barely losing an internal poll to Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Ebrard has won global recognition for his performance at the helm of the world’s second-largest city. The idea behind the poll was to avoid a bitter primary contest that might have

fractured the three-party leftist coalition.“A divided Left would fall o! the cli!,”

Ebrard said upon accepting the results of the polling. “I will never be the person who impedes a real chance to change the direc-tion of our country.”

While the PRI and the PRD must stay on the sidelines during the Dec. 18- Feb. 15 primary season, the PAN will be on center stage as three contenders wrestle for the party nomination.

EARLY FRONTRUNNEREnrique Peña Nieto, 45, ended his six-year term as the governor of the State of Mexi-co in September 2011. A fast-rising star in the PRI, Peña Nieto is a member of the in-famous “Atlacomulco Group” that has ex-erted significant power in the state and in national politics since the 1940s, but has never occupied Los Pinos. Peña Nieto was born in Atlacomulco and he was preced-ed as governor by four men who were also linked to the group.

A lawyer, Peña Nieto began his politi-cal career with important party posts in the early 1990s before leaping into state poli-tics in 1993, serving in three administra-tions. He lasted one year (2003-04) of his three-year term as federal congressman before resigning his seat to run for gover-nor. He won election on July 3, 2005, with 49 percent of the vote. Peña Nieto’s term was marred by a violent clash between protesters and authorities in San Salva-dor Atenco in May 2006 and by a contro-versial project to install a light-and-sound system at the Teotihuacan pyramids.

The photogenic governor and his PR sta! developed a cozy relationship with the Televisa network, staging frequent photo-ops and “media availabilities.” His appearances were polished and well-scripted. A widower at 39, his dashing good looks also led to regular inclusion in the society pages. This presence was mul-tiplied when he began courting Televisa soap opera star Angélica Rivera. Their celebrity wedding in November 2010 re-ceived maximum exposure.

Since then, Peña Nieto’s surge toward victory in 2012 had seemed unstoppable.

LEFTIST ICONAndrés Manuel López Obrador, 58, is a na-tive of Tabasco who left the PRI in 1988 af-ter having held several modest state and national positions.

Ad Overkill43,611,072That is the number of political ads that the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, will bombard Mexican airwaves with from Dec. 18 through June 30.

That’s not a misprint. More than 40 million election-related ads will be aired on television and radio across the country. That’s more than 222,505 campaign commercials per day!

Current election law prohibits parties and candidates from buying political ads on TV or radio. All campaign-related commercials are arranged through IFE. The idea behind this section of the law was to limit the influence of money in campaigning. The total number of ads are assigned according to the number of votes each party earned in the 2009 federal elections.

Of the 40 million-plus advertisements set to air in the current campaign cycle, 21,999,240 will be commercials for parties and their candidates, the remaining 21,611,832 will be IFE promotional spots.

In the 58 days from Dec. 18 through Feb. 15, the electorate will be exposed to 13,282,560 spots, with the bulk of the adverts being promotional material (8,301,168 ads to be specific).

Candidate selection is scheduled for Feb. 16-22 and registration with IFE will take place from March 15-22. IFE formalizes the candidacies on March 29 and the official campaigns begin on March 30. No party or candidate ads will air between Feb. 16-March 29 (41 days), but 9,519,160 IFE promotional ads will feature.

The 90 days of official campaigning (March 30-June 27) will feature 19,923,840 election ads and the overwhelming majority will be party and candidate ads (17,018,120 spots). In the final week prior to the election (June 28-July1), 885,504 IFE promotional spots will run.

Also known as AMLO, the charismatic politician joined the National Political Front headed by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and was the 1988 gubernatorial candidate for Tabas-co. The Front evolved into the PRD in 1989. As the PRD candidate, López Obrador also lost the subsequent gubernatorial election in 1994 in a race broadly seen as fraudulent.

López Obrador was elected president of the party in 1996 and his three-year term was a rousing success. He parlayed that in-to election as Mexico City mayor in 2000. Despite frequent spats with President Vi-cente Fox and an unsuccessful e!ort by the federal government to remove him as mayor on criminal charges and thus make him in-eligible to run for the presidency, AMLO re-mained a popular political figure. Although he enjoyed a solid lead in the polls in the run-up to the 2006 presidential election, López Obrador lost by roughly 0.5 percent.

AMLO and his sta! refused to accept the results and massive protests were staged, including the occupation of Paseo de la Re-forma boulevard in the capital. He had him-self declared “legitimate president” in No-vember 2006. Since then, López Obrador has toured the nation extensively and or-ganized the National Regeneration Move-ment, or Morena. This new organization is comprised of 4.12 million members who are represented by 2,217 municipal committees and 37,453 regional committees.

Morena will man polls across the na-tion and its members will represent AMLO and PRD candidates as o"cial Elec-tion Day observers.

THREE-HEADED DEBATE The PAN is the only party that will conduct a primary to select its presidential candidate. Three candidates are vying for the chance to represent the conservative party on July 1.

Deputy Josefina Vázquez Mota, 51, has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls and could become the first female presidential candidate of a major party in Mexico’s his-tory. Vázquez Mota served as the social de-velopment secretary during the Fox regime and was Felipe Calderón’s first education secretary before she resigned her post to run for Congress.

Sen. Santiago Creel, 57, has struggled to build support for his campaign six years af-ter he was stunned by the underdog Calde-rón in the party primary ahead of the 2006 election. Creel was a member of the IFE (1994-96) before winning a seat in the

Chamber of Deputies (1997-99). He nar-rowly lost the 2000 Mexico City mayor-al election to López Obrador but served as Fox’s interior secretary from 2000 to 2005. He resigned the top Cabinet post to seek the PAN presidential nomination and built a comfortable lead in the polls, but overlooked Calderón in the primary and he was handily beaten. Creel won a seat as senator in the 2006 election.

Ernesto Cordero, 42, is seen as Presi-dent Calderón’s choice as the party stan-dard-bearer. Cordero is an economist who has filled two Cabinet posts during the cur-rent administration, first as head of the So-cial Development Secretariat for two years then as head of the Economy Secretariat for two years. Before that, Cordero twice served in departments that were headed by Calde-rón, including the Energy Secretariat.

SOME ‘OOPS’ MOMENTSThough official campaigning is months away, pundits are examining candidates’ public appearances with ruthless overef-ficiency. When Peña Nieto misspoke at the Guadalajara Book Fair (he misidentified a book by Carlos Fuentes), he was raked over the coals for weeks.

Reforma headlined a story “Stumble causes crisis in Peña’s team” three days after the incident. “At first, we underesti-mated the impact and so we were late in re-sponding,” said an unidentified campaign

consultant cited by Reforma. “We didn’t go into damage control mode soon enough.”

Peña Nieto was characterized as dim-witted and unable to express ideas out-side of scripted a!airs. The author Fuent-es also piled on: “Our nation’s problems re-quire a president who can talk as an equal to Obama, Angela Merkel and Sarkozy and this man is not capable of that.”

The PRI hopeful now faces extra scru-tiny wherever he goes. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, Peña Ni-eto was asked if he knew the price of tor-tillas. He said: “I’m not the woman of the house.” Within hours he and his team were deflecting charges of machismo. “I have the utmost respect for women and my remarks were taken out of context,” he posted on his twitter account. Peña Nieto blamed the op-position for orchestrating a smear cam-paign and trying to magnify the missteps. “It is human to be imprecise and there are bound to be more flubs.”

In addition to the cracks in the veneer of invincibility that had surrounded Peña Nieto, the image of party unity appeared to be showing some cracks.

Behind the scenes, members of the PRI rank-and-file have been grumbling about the concessions granted to its coalition partners, the Green Party and the teach-ers union-backed National Alliance Par-ty. In an agreement pushed by Peña Nie-to and former party president Humberto Moreira, the junior partners were granted

Enrique Peña Nieto, left, shakes hands with Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones at a PRI National Council Meeting.


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several significant Senate and gubernato-rial candidacies. After Moreira was forced out due to the massive public debt he left behind in Coahuila while governor, prom-inent PRI-istas whispered about chang-ing the terms of the coalition. On Dec. 13, new party president Pedro Joaquín Cold-well announced that the PRI would re-ex-amine its coalition deals in an e!ort to pac-ify the nascent insurrection. Any action re-ducing seats for either of the allied parties could severely damage the coalition.

BACK-ROOM MACHINATIONSOn the left side of the political spectrum, factions within the PRD are pushing back against apparent e!orts by López Obrador to impose candidates and veto others.

AMLO and the PRD have been at odds frequently since the New Left faction won control of the party. The creation of More-na along with López Obrador’s favoritism for Labor Party and Convergencia candi-dates in recent elections is seen as a strat-egy to minimize the influence of the New Left. López Obrador largely kept the New Left out of his campaign sta! and circum-vented some of its key decision makers.

The PRD has seen its presence in cer-tain regions shrink to disturbing levels as continual infighting perpetuated the image of the party as a collection of rabble-rous-ers who can’t agree on policy or process.

One growing concern is that the PRD could lose its stranglehold on Mexico City due to its self-destructive bent. Political columnist Carlos Ramírez hints that López Obrador has broken an unspoken deal with Ebrard that the mayor would be able to pick his successor in return for his gallantry in bowing out of ther presidential race.

“López Obrador is playing puppet master by using the Labor Party to veto two of Eb-rard’s favorites for mayor – Education Sec-retary Marcelo Delgado and Attorney Gen-eral Miguel Ángel Mancera – by saying they are not genuinely leftist,” Ramírez wrote in his Dec. 8 “Indicador Político” column.

Instead, AMLO seems determined to anoint a mayor himself, Ramírez opines. The story goes, therefore, that the Left will create an internal schism and leave open a path for congresswoman Beatriz Paredes to ride Peña Nieto’s coattails and retake City Hall for the PRI for the first time since 1997.

AMLO is shielding his behind-the-scenes maneuvering by preaching a new message for the general public. López Obrador knows he

must change his image as an angry antagonist and win over key independent voters if he has hopes of moving into Los Pinos.

As such, he is combating the antipathy by embracing the paradigm of a Loving Re-public (República Amorosa).

“[López Obrador] is promoting a more inclusive and moderate dialogue,” writes analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson. “But is it a mistake to rely on quasi-religious language in order to demonstrate that he has moved to the political center?”

Placards with the slogan “Yo AMLO Mex-ico” are reinforcing the new image. In some quarters, the new message is taking root.

“Something is obviously happening as [López Obrador] has managed to win con-verts among business groups and former PAN-istas in Monterrey and Guadalaja-ra,” reported Zepeda Patterson on Dec. 11.

BLUE PARTYThe PAN will be center stage through February since its primary will a!ord it exclusive space on radio and TV. Candi-dates from parties that don’t hold prima-ries can’t run mass media campaign ad-verts nor can the parties promote their own platforms thusly.

The three PAN aspirants have been pin-balling within conservative circles, polish-ing their speeches and spouting their talk-ing points. Each is eager to explain why they are the best-positioned to defeat Peña

Nieto and AMLO. They must first convince the blueblood PANistas of their conser-vative bonafides, while also deferential-ly voicing support for President Calderón.

The consensus is that Cordero was anointed by Los Pinos, but his candidacy never gained a foothold. In mid-December, a key Cordero adviser – Mexico City’s Cu-ajimalpa borough chief Carlos Orvañanos – jumped ship and joined Vázquez Mota’s team. Vázquez Mota surged ahead in polls in September and has maintained a healthy lead for months now. Cordero and Vázquez Mota engaged in heated verbal jousting during web-based debates sponsored by the party, particularly about poverty and economic theory.

Beginning in late December, the three can broadcast campaign spots and their de-bates can be televised. Expect exchanges to get testy, especially since internal uni-ty is weakening.

Several well-known PANistas with fa-mous names – particularly in Nuevo León – have resigned their party membership and thrown support to López Obrador. Some of this has grown out of a regional rebellion against centralized selection of local can-didates. The Federal Electoral Tribunal re-ceived 150 complaints about the PAN selec-tion procedures in that northern state.

All in all, the presidential election process is shaping up to be a fascinating study in political posturing and media evaluation.

The PAN conducted debates online in December and kept followers informed via their Facebook account.


POLITICS


1812

1862

Feb. 9-May 2 Rebel leader José María Morelos survives the Siege of Cuautla led by Gen. Calleja to become the No. 1 enemy of Royalist forces battling the still-nascent Independence movement. The insurgents held out for 72 days. On May 2, Morelos and his lieutenants Hermenegildo Galeana and Mariano Matamoros led rebels through the Royalist lines. Gen. Calleja was removed as commander of Royalist forces and named military chief of Mexico City days later.

Nov. 25 Morelos defeats Royalist forces defending Oaxaca City and establishes a base of operations there through the winter. As part of his victory celebrations, Morelos plants an ash tree (fresno) in front of the Iglesia de Guadalupe. The tree still survives at the northwest corner of Parque Benito Juarez El Llano. The victory significantly enhances Morelos’ military prestige and the rebels dominate southern Mexico through early 1813.

Jan. 6-8 The British, Spanish and French fleets land at Veracruz to exert pressure on the government of Benito Juárez to settle its debts. At the same time, Gen. Juan Nepomuceno Almonte (José María Morelos’ illegitimate son) and Monsignor Pelagio Antonio

de Labastida visit Archduke Maximilian of Austria at his Miramar Palace in Trieste, Italy, as conservatives sought to recruit a European sovereign to replace the liberal Juárez as leader.

Maximilian agrees in principle to become emperor of Mexico.

April 28 The French defeat Mexican troops at the battle of Las Cumbras in the mountains above Orizaba, Veracruz. The easy victory gives Gen. Lorencez confidence that his veterans of the Crimean War with an international

reputation as the best army in the world will have little trouble conquering Mexico.

May 5 The French army suffers a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Puebla against Mexican forces commanded by Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza.

1912

Aug. 6 The federal government institutes martial law in the state of Morelos as campesino leader Emiliano Zapata continues leading an agrarian revolution based on his Plan de Ayala of November 1911. This is the second declaration of martial law in Morelos in 1912, the first lasting from January through May. Gen. Felipe Ángeles is charged by Madero with subduing the Zapatista rebellion. Since April, Zapata’s forces had maintained a solid foothold in Tepoztlán, Jonacatepec, Tlaltizapán and Jojutla.

Oct. 16 Gen. Félix Díaz (the nephew of former President Porfirio Díaz) rises up in rebellion against President Francisco I. Madero with a base of operations in Veracruz. The rebellion collapses unexpectedly a week later and Díaz is captured and court-martialed, then sent to Lecumberri Prison in Mexico City where he makes contact with Pascual Orozco and Gen. Bernardo Reyes. All three – along with Gen. Victoriano Huerta – would become leaders of the coup d’etat that unseated Madero in February 1913.

In 2010, Mexico celebrated two major centennials – the Bicentennial of Independence and the Revolution Centennial. These observations really only marked the initiation of two critical historical movements that each continued for roughly a decade. Here, we take a look at events from both of these periods as well as the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the French Intervention.

2012 CentennialsELECTIONS

by thenumbers

There are days when Juan José Suárez Cop-pel takes a rather gloomy view of Pemex and its problems. The state oil monopoly “is an ine"-cient company,” Suárez

Coppel recently told an audience of stu-dents from the ITAM, the private univer-sity that serves as a production line for the government’s technocratic elite.

Suárez Coppel should know about Pe-mex’s e"ciency or lack thereof, because he is its chief executive. But a few days earli-er he had put a much more positive spin on the outlook for the company when he met with senior business executives.

Bipolarism? Of course not! But like almost every other Mexican, Suárez Coppel does have mixed views about Pemex and its future.

Certainly, his personal future as chief of Pemex is very much in doubt. There have been very few exceptions, but each new administration traditionally appoints a new Pemex chief. And, in most cases they change horses in mid-stream. On average, the last four six-year governments have had more than two Pemex chiefs.

That comes to less than three years each in the post, a mere blink of the eye by the standards of most of the chiefs of the rest of the world’s oil industry.

With such limited time, there is very lit-tle space for developing long-term goals, and international companies know that.

The problem, and Suárez Coppel has said as much, is that Pemex is being pulled in two contradictory directions. Almost no-body in Mexico wants Pemex to be priva-tized, but many would like it to be a state-owned company like Brazil’s Petrobras, Norway’s Statoil or Colombia’s Ecopetrol.

These are companies that form allianc-es with others in projects all over the world. With a wealth of experience to back them, they make substantial profits and their shares are traded in New York.

Pemex has stayed largely the same for at least half a century. It is managed and financed like a government department whose head answers not to shareholders but to politicians. Just as in the construc-tion of schools and hospitals, spending is strictly controlled.

Combined with the Constitution’s stric-tures on the state’s monopoly of the owner-ship of oil and gas, Pemex lacks the funds and experience to tackle the nation’s oil challeng-es, much less those of the rest of the world.


ECONOMY&FINANCE PEMEX


Crude RealityTHE NATIONAL OIL COMPANY is being pulled in opposite directions as politicians resist privatization yet want Pemex to be more like state-owned entities such as Petrobras. BY RONALD BUCHANAN • PHOTOS: KEITH DANNEMILLER

The first indications from the 2012 presidential campaign are that the two views of Pemex – or possibly another, yet unforeseen – will be amply debated by the candidates.

Yet there is an elephant in the room. Oil accounts for one-third of all the gov-ernment’s income. That proportion would have to be radically reduced if Pemex were to be a new Petrobras or Statoil.

And it hardly seems likely that the political class – the politicians themselves, their par-ties, the election apparatus and their chorus line in the media – is prepared to suffer hard-ship in order to achieve a new-look Pemex.

Meanwhile, Pemex production – like the economy as a whole – is not so much stable as stuck. But that is good news af-ter the drop of some 800,000 barrels per day of crude production between the 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004 to 2.6 mil-lion in 2009. Since then, crude production has stabilized at a little less than 2.6 mil-lion barrels per day.

The reason for the sharp drop some years ago was the natural decline of the massive Cantarell field in the Campeche Sound, which peaked in 2004.

Cantarell, once the world’s largest o!-shore oil field, used to provide almost 2.2 million of the nation’s 3.4 million daily pro-duction. Now it has dropped to just over 400,000 barrels per day. The ability of Pe-mex to develop other fields to compensate at least in part for such a huge decline merits the state company several brownie points.

Yet more brownie points should be add-ed for the relative stabilization of proven oil and natural gas reserves. These, and not the possible or potential reserves are what the world’s oil industry regards as the yardstick of a company’s assets.

Last year, the proven reserves came to 13.8 billion barrels of crude and its equiva-lent in gas. That meant the relation between the proven reserves and production was very similar to that of many international companies. But there was a big di!erence.

Other companies replenish all their proven reserves each year by adding new ones. Pemex’s proven reserves have been dwindling, and rapidly, since the beginning of the century.

Pemex, of course, is at a disadvantage to the others. If Chevron or Shell needs to replenish their reserves they can do so by acquiring reserves in Angola, for example, from junior companies that have explored and developed them.

It is as simple as that. But not for Pe-mex, which can develop reserves only by itself and only within Mexico. The low point was reached approximately 11 years ago when no new reserves at all were an-nounced. Since then, matters have im-proved. By last year, Pemex had replen-ished its reserves to 86 percent of the pre-vious year’s level.

That was much better, but still not enough. This year, however, Pemex has pledged to replace 100 percent of its proven reserves. If so, more brownie points.

Yet Pemex is much more than a produc-er and exporter of crude. Shale gas has rev-olutionized the U.S. natural gas industry, and Pemex has massive deposits, or so it seems. It has yet to prove any reserves, nor does it have any plans to develop them.

And what the oil industry calls down-stream production, such as refining and petrochemicals, is desperately short of in-vestment here.

Currently, Mexico exports $4.8 billion a month of oil, the overwhelming majority of it crude. But it also imports $3.8 billion in gasoline and other products. So in net terms, oil earns Mexico $1 billion a month. That is certainly a lot of money, but it is very much less than what most people would imagine and certainly much less than what a real oil power – as Mexico claims to be – would expect.

Big investments have been promised in refineries, pipelines and petrochemicals plants. But will they survive the change of administration? Watch this space ... if you dare!

The uncertainty facing Mexico’s short-term economic performance seems to have become a permanent phe-nomenon. But this is not merely an issue surrounding expectations of typical variables like inflation, the rate

of exchange or the balance of trade. It is not, additionally, an issue arising out of the political struggles that characterize an elector-al year. The principal uncertainty is a product of what happens outside – in the United States, in Europe, and in emerging mar-ket powerhouses like China and India.

Such is the pattern since the perfect storm of 2008. The long term seems to have become … well, next week. It is extremely dif-ficult to foster long-term investment commitments amid such a climate of global uncertainty. The verdict on the U.S. economy, which is such a determining factor in our external sector and in-vestment climate, is still out there. And while signs of structur-al recovery have arisen (in particular, the rise in capital expendi-tures), financial volatility, high unemployment and the pains of the deleveraging process remain immediate and tangible threats. And, alas, 2012 is also a year of elections north of the border.

The overwhelming sovereign debt overhang in the developed world countries and the prospect of a euro currency collapse has paralyzed global economic recovery – and produced financial con-tagion in world markets. This combination of external shocks (“ex-ogenous” in the vernacular of economists) constitutes the fun-damental threat to short-term economic performance in Mex-ico – and will continue to influence economic expectations well into 2012.

Fortunately, our economy has bounced back nicely from the brutal collapse of growth in 2008. In particular, this is due to a solid fiscal position in public finances and a long-term expecta-tion of low inflation in the future. So, independent of variations in the peso-dollar parity (which again saw swings ranging from as low as 11.50 to as high as 14.30 per dollar), macroeconomic sta-bility seems to be here to stay. This presumption is also justified in 2012, despite fleeting ghosts of how the past presidential con-tests were accompanied by an exchange rate collapse. Indeed, the volatility of the currency parity has been a product not of mone-tary reasons, but of global market panics and manias a!ecting our system. Again, an uncertainty imported from abroad.

The only certainty of exchange rate performance is, as a for-mer central banker used to caution, that it will either go up or go down. Accurate forecasts are impossible in the face of such uncer-tainties. But whatever the case may be, the consensus seems to be that the parity should probably appreciate, especially if recovery remains robust. The expected rate of 3.7-percent growth – while well under par for what Mexico could accomplish – is not unrea-sonable given the challenges facing the global economy.

Still, it is unfortunate that such forecasts are met with a certain complacency by politicians – the main culprits, arguably, behind Mexico’s mediocre growth performance in the past two decades. The average growth rate in this timeframe has been 2.6 percent per annum; and in the Calderón administration, it has been lower still, registering an average growth of 1.47 percent per annum. We may appeal to factors such as the global financial crisis, the out-come of the influenza panic in 2007 and certainly the bloodshed that has defined the war against organized crime.

Similarly, however, there is no doubt that party politics has se-questered the agenda of reforms required to generate high sus-tained growth in a state of structural paralysis. The tax system continues to impose high transaction costs. The proposed labor reforms, so needed to increase flexibility in such markets, were drowned in the exasperating to-and-fro of party politics. And sig-nificant pro-investment energy reform will likely have to wait un-til Mexico begins to import crude.

Lack of imagination on the part of the executive branch in de-signing and selling reforms was yet another factor in this process of reform stagnation. In sum, political incentives for reform are in direct opposition to the growth imperatives that Mexico needs to follow. It is small wonder, therefore, that the ranks obtained in such rubrics as competitiveness or economic freedom are character-istically lame, with good marks on the macroeconomic front, but typically low marks in areas such as doing business or access to competitive markets or regulatory burdens. The new productiv-ity index published by CIDAC, a well-known think tank, suggests that Mexico’s labor productivity today is similar to that of the U.K or France ... in the mid 1960s! In fact, accumulated productivity growth has registered 2.1 percent in the past two decades. Such a paltry figure contracts with our northern neighbor (35 percent), or with more comparable markets, such as South Korea (83 per-cent). As the saying goes, “por eso estamos como estamos.”

Will this change in a year of presidential election? Almost cer-tainly not. Yet, this is precisely the formula the Mexican econo-my needs to strengthen its internal market – create the right in-centives for a much greater flow of productive investment. Such a trend, were it to happen, would also go a long way toward miti-gating the myriad of uncertainties that have become a fact of life in discussions about the future of Mexico’s economy.

In sum, 2012 will likely witness another episode of below-par growth, together with the volatility that is part and parcel of inter-nal politics and deep global uncertainty. Or, as another folk saying goes, “lo más seguro es que quién sabe.”

Roberto Salinas León is the president of the Mexico Business Forum in Mexico City.

The Art of Managing Uncertainties


ECONOMY&FINANCE PEMEX


BY ROBERTO SALINAS-LEÓN

Speculation about a “June sur-prise” is not unheard of. The suspicion that the Calderón ad-ministration and the U.S. gov-

ernment might team up for a splashy ar-rest ahead of the July 1 elections is a fa-miliar plot line in the blogosphere.

The government begins its sixth year in an Army-led war on organized crime and regularly deals with “body counts” and ac-cusations of rights violations as a result.

Officials contrast the shocking numbers with conspicuous apprehensions and often try to spin favorable interpretations. The ef-fort to downplay or rationalize the reality on the ground is aimed at protecting key sec-tors of the economy, most notably foreign investment and tourism.

RECENT HEADLINES:Stratfor’s latest intelligence update indi-cates the three primary conflicts in the war on drugs are cartel vs. cartel, car-tel vs. government and cartel vs. civil-ians. In early December, the U.S. State Department confirmed that Mexico is spending $13 for every $1 the U.S. govern-ment is providing via the Mérida Initia-tive. The U.S. government also explained that Mérida’s funding focus was now “di-rected at strengthening democratic insti-tutions… moving away from just supply-ing military equipment and technology.” Rising crime rates through November

There may be a new party in Los Pinos in 2012, but don’t expect too much to change on the security front. The current admin-istration – and feder-

al police chief Genaro García Luna – have publicly said that the drug-related violence is unlikely to abate for another seven years. They’re telling the truth.

The violence plaguing swaths of Mexico –particularly in Tamaulipas, Ciudad Juárez and Sinaloa– cannot simply be stopped over-night. All of the current candidates for pres-ident –Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (PRD), Josefina Vázquez Mota (PAN), Santiago Creel (PAN)

and Ernesto Cordero (PAN)– have present-ed security platforms involving the Army’s withdrawal from the streets. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to be able to accomplish such a move as quickly as they would like: if there’s one thing the last five years of turmoil during the Calderón administration have proved, it’s that the Army is absolutely necessary.

Every time the Army has moved into a city or region to secure it and quell the violence, violence has been quantifiably reduced. But there are very few stories of long-term suc-cess, where the troops have moved on and peace remained. The local police are not yet strong enough to secure urban areas on their own. The crucial reforms to improve muni-cipal forces and merge them with state police are still being debated in Congress.

U.S. ON STANDBY

At best, Mexico can hope for a decline in random shootouts (in which innocent by-standers have been caught in the crossfire) and fewer massacres of the sort occurring in Tamaulipas and Durango, as federal and local police gradually impose more control and reassert themselves in these regions.

Cartel against cartel violence will al-most definitely continue. It’s not even clear at this point whether a government-spon-sored “pact” with the most powerful orga-nization –the Sinaloa cartel– would even serve to diminish the gang rivalries, due to the independent, fluid manner in which the cartel bosses run their operations.

What Mexico can expect is more U.S. involvement, not less. Already, drones are

being used to gather intelligence on drug traffickers. Operation Fast and Furious, no matter how flawed its execution, is evi-dence that U.S. authorities are making the Mexican situation a top priority.

STEADY DRUMBEATThe real question, of course, is what Wash-ington will prescribe to fix the problem, in addition to the $1.5 billion in Mérida Ini-tiative assistance. The war talk in Wash-ington is certainly ratcheting up, and a new U.S. president might choose to take a harder line than Barack Obama has done.

U.S. presidential hopeful and current Tex-as Gov. Rick Perry has openly said that Mex-ico’s war on organized crime “may require

our military.” After a visit by members of his team to Mexico City in September, U.S. Ar-my Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby urged for more cooperation between the two nations, espe-cially regarding intelligence sharing. At a re-cent U.S. congressional hearing on the Mex-ican drug war, members of the U.S. House of Representatives were warned about “spiritu-al insurgencies… now taking place in Mexico.”

“I never thought we would contemplate the day when ‘true believers’ from a Mexi-can cartel would start looking a lot like ji-hadists fighting for Al Qaeda – instead rep-resenting a perverted form of Christianity – but such a day appears very close at hand,” the members of the hearing were told.

There is no doubt that a U.S. “invasion” is out of the question. U.S. Deputy Secretary

of State William J. Burns recently declared that any U.S. involvement in Mexico would be restrained. “There are clear limits to our role,” he told The New York Times. “Our role is not to conduct operations. It is not to engage in law enforcement activities. That is the role of the Mexican authorities. And that’s the way it should be.”

But the banging of the war drums in Washington is a clear indication that the U.S. Congress is taking Mexico’s security situation seriously, and U.S. officials will work to main-tain the current strategy with whomever moves into Los Pinos in December 2012.

Malcolm Beith is a freelance journalist and the author of “The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord.”

More of the Same?THE WAR ON ORGANIZED CRIME begun by President Calderón in December 2006 will continue to produce shocking headlines in the coming year and the U.S. is taking notice. BY MALCOLM BEITH • PHOTOS: KEITH DANNEMILLER

Spinning the Drug Warprompted foreign governments to issue travel warnings about the violence in Mexico City and 20 of the 31 states. The Tourism Secretariat criticized the diplo-matic advisories, saying they were based on analysis that “lacked objectivity and relied on questionable methodology.” A Central Bank study released in late No-vember indicates tourism to Mexico was down 13 percent since 2006.

In November, the government as-sured Human Rights Watch that Mexico “is not at war.” Top o"cials insisted “the fight against crime is being carried out with strict observance of the law” and is aimed at “re-establishing the rule of law and guaranteeing liberty to all residents.” HRW had criticized the “war on drugs,” saying it had generated “a dramatic

increase in the number of murders, ac-cusations of torture and abuse of author-ity by public security agencies that only serve to aggravate the climate of … fear that permeates the country.”

The government announced in late No-vember that authorities had arrested eight top Zetas leaders since July. On Dec. 1, Mi-lenio reported that drug-related murders in November (756 slain) had declined by half since April (1,402 dead). The newspa-per also reported that 11,379 deaths during the first 11 months of 2011 were attribut-ed to the crime-related violence, a total of 46,064 since the beginning of the Calderón administration. The Army reported that its actions had become more “surgical,” as 68 percent of the cartel suspects it had killed since 2006 occurred in 2011.


SECURITY


WAR ON DRUGS

Sing Me Back Home

SUSANA HARP IS TAKING traditional and ethnic Mexican songs out of the archives and onto iPods. BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

few days before the 101st anni-versary of the Mexican Revo-lution last November, a Zapata impersonator and two women

dressed as soldaderas — fake bullet shoul-der straps, toy rifles, serious expressions — guarded the entrance of the Corazón de Ma-guey mezcal bar on one of the twin main pla-zas in Mexico City’s arty Coyoacán area.

Inside, Susana Harp, the 43-year-old, mixed-descent Oaxaca-born interpret-er and popularizer of traditional Mexi-can song, was in a good mood. She chatted about her new and ninth CD, “Mexicanísi-ma,” an unusual collection of 19 mostly lit-tle-known pieces that span Mexican his-tory from the pre-Columbian to the mid-20th century. “There’s nothing commercial about it,” she confessed, proudly. “It’s more cultural. I’m very happy with it.”

Harp would be giving two concerts that week to introduce the album. Neither would take place in any site like the Auditorio Na-cional, the 10,000-seat prestige venue that would be filled a week later by Lila Downs (the other, more famous, 43-year-old mixed-descent Oaxaca-born interpreter and popu-larizer of traditional Mexican song).

Instead, Harp would be singing in the pla-za, pretty much right outside the mezcal bar’s doors, as part of the Coyoacán borough’s Rev-olution Day celebrations. This is Harp in her element; there’s a clear community bent to just about everything she does, including her choice of music. You’re as likely to see her per-form at a plaza party as in a formal concert.

Or in a document warehouse. As she spoke, final preparations were under way for a concert she was to give the next day in the National Archives building on the east

side of Mexico City. Rare is the profession-al singer who would walk into such a place, let alone consider it as a performance ven-ue. Harp, who researches her music before she records it, is right at home there.

“I’m thankful that they let me in,” she said. “It’s amazing to be in the bowels of that building, looking for lost verses, old photo-graphs, decrees from the Inquisition. You can really feel the energy of the place.”

The building’s appeal is mitigated, or perhaps enhanced, by its use as a notori-ous prison from 1900-1976, the infamous Black Palace of Lecumberri.

“It has a gloomy history,” Harp said of Le-cumberri. “But we’re going to cheer it up.”

Harp cites the National Archives, using footnote format, in the 24-page booklet of explanatory text and printed lyrics that accompanies “Mexicanísima.” It was the

2008

2011

2010

2002

1997

Archives, and ultimately the Inquisition itself, that provided the lyrics to two songs on the album — “El Puente de San Francisco” and “El Chuchumbé.”

It was mandatory in colonial times to denounce to Church authorities any “provocative” or “dishonest” songs, a musical category that seems to have includ-ed an extensive selection of compositions about ran-dy priests. The ecclesiastical prurience was disguised by double-entendre lyrics, but not very much. It turns out, though, that in the process of prosecuting the lyr-ics, the Inquisition succeeded in preserving them in the public record, just waiting for the Susana Harps of the world to find and revive them centuries later. Instead of printing the lyrics to “El Chuchumbé” in the Mexicanísima” booklet, Harp reproduces the In-quisition document that contains them.

“I was tempted to do an entire album of songs banned by the Inquisition,” Harp said. “I found a lot of delightful ones. Maybe that’s a project for the future.”

SANDUNGA FOREVERMOREHarp was born in the city of Oaxaca. Her father was Lebanese but came to Oaxaca at age 5. She was tak-en by Oaxacan folk traditions once she discovered them, and she loved to sing as a girl, but she pursued a degree in psychology and moved to Mexico City for further studies.

All the while, though, she continued to explore songs and singing. In 1996, she recorded “Xquen-da,” an album that included selections in Mixteca and Zapoteca, the indigenous languages of Oaxaca. It was groundbreaking both for Harp and the budding movement to get traditional and indigenous Mexi-can songs out of the halls of academe and the muse-um gifts shops (and the National Archives) and into the modern public imagination.

“Xquenda” was as much a project as a CD. It led directly to another Xquenda, a cultural association Harp founded to research and rescue Mexico’s abun-dant ethnic music, and find ways for people to play and sing it so others can hear it. The Asociación Cul-tural Xquenda supported, for example, the record-ing in 1999 of “Sandunga,” Lila Downs’ first album.

All of Susana Harp’s CDs are thematic. With the exception of “Ahora” (2005), in which she interprets 14 tunes from more or less mainstream contempo-rary composers such as David Haro and Rafael Men-doza, they all involve traditional, historical or Mex-ican ethnic music. So they’re all “projects,” and they all require research.

“I consult with specialists — ethnomusicolo-gists, historians, knowledgeable musicians,” she said. “Virtue isn’t knowing everything; it’s knowing who knows. And who’ll share.”

She is convinced — and the results bear her out — that the project aspect of her albums contributes to the di!erence between a Susana Harp album and just another collection of Mexican folk songs. The context

and understanding that the background work gives her turns a pleasant collection of tunes into some-thing more enriching, and more enjoyable. This is es-pecially true of “Mexicanísima,” the most “historical” of her releases. ”The idea,” she said, “is to go beyond 19 pretty little songs.”

Right about now is probably a good time to stop and assure readers that listening to a Susana Harp CD is not a mentally taxing exercise in plodding an-thropology. You’re not in a classroom. The research is a means; the end is a rewarding musical experience. The songs are good, not just historically interesting. They can touch you the way any good song can. Be-sides, no law says an album can’t be edifying and sat-isfying at the same time.

Harp’s voice is sweet and high; you can hear her smiling as she sings. She has nowhere near the range and power of Downs, and she avoids the emotional displays that are common in the genre and always seem too obviously manufactured (unless Chavela Vargas is doing it). Harp focuses on clarity, letting the song itself provide the impact.

Much of what makes Harp Harp (and Downs Downs) is embodied in the public domain song “La Sandunga.” Downs’ 1999 version is haunting, musi-cally inventive, almost perfect. It helped make her a star. Harp recorded the same song three years later in a collection of traditional pieces called “Mi Tierra,” performing it with the State of Oaxaca Symphonic Band, a horn-dominated ensemble that plays plaza-style arrangements. So you have Downs accompanied by a jazzy piano, and Harp with wind instruments racing around the lyrics like mice in waltz time. One version is mournful, the other uplifting.

Interestingly, not a single line in the “Mi Tierra” version matches the lyrics in Downs’. Harp explains in the liner notes that when the song, a Spanish im-port, found its way to Oaxaca, it became subject to a process of revisions and additions that continues to this day. And in classic Harpian fashion, she also tells us the exact date and location of the song’s first performance in Mexico (Dec. 3, 1850, in a theater on Bolivar Street in Mexico City).

Harp re-recorded “La Sandunga” for “Mexicanísi-ma,” using the more popular lyrics that Downs used, which are credited to Máximo Ramón Ortiz, a 19th century composer and politician. It’s not hard to see why the song can evoke di!erent moods. On the one hand it’s an anthem of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, honoring its women, and uniting the population. On the other, the most commonly used lyrics refer to the death of the singer’s mother.

Harp said she’s about halfway finished with her next project. After seven albums celebrating Mexi-co multicultural population, this one will be about its biodiversity. People give way to plants and animals.

“Our megadiversity is a source of pride, but also a great responsibility,” she said. “We still have a lot of history to sing.”

Nine “Projects”Susana Harp’s releases

include “Xquenda,”

her first album; “Mi

Tierra” and “Mi Tierra

2,” with the State of

Oaxaca Symphonic

Band; “Fandangos

de Ébano,” featuring

Afromexican music;

and “Mexicanísima,”

her latest release. Not

pictured are “Béele

Crúu” (2000), “Arriba

del Cielo” (2003), “De

Jolgorios y Velorios”

(2009) and “Ahora”

(2005).

life&leisure


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t the time of her death last May 25 in Mex-ico City at age 94, Leonora Carrington, the last great Mexican surrealist artist, was a subject in a remarkable exposition at the Museo de Arte Moderno featuring “Reme-dios Varo and Her Contemporaries.”

The show brought together the pan-theon of immigrant surrealists who lived and worked in Mexico —Carrington (from England), Varo (Spain), Alice Ra-hon (France) and Kati Horna (Hungary). With Carrington’s passing, the last star in that constellation flickers out, but the light those women shone over Mexico will live on in their now universally admired paint-ings and sculptures.

Leonora Carrington did not go gentle. Weeks before her passing, she was there at the opening of an exhibition of her recent sculptures at the Indianilla Station Cultur-al Center in the decidedly non-posh Doc-tores area of the capital. Two years earli-er, she cut the ribbon to open the annual art fair at Mexico City’s then-121-year-old American School, which featured her art — giant bronze scuptures placed around the campus and new works in the gallery — and that of her sons Gabriel and Pablo Weisz-Carrington.

Her work is familiar to Mexico City res-idents. Carrington sculptures animate Pas-eo de la Reforma, one of the few pedestri-an-friendly boulevards in the city. Some are permanent fixtures, such as the huge croco-dile-themed work she donated to the city af-ter being named a “Distinguished Resident.”

Conaculta, Mexico’s national arts coun-cil, paid homage to her after her death with a special display of 18 of her works at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the nation’s pre-mier cultural venue. That’s a high honor for any artist, especially a foreign-born one.

The Indomitable MareLEONORA CARRINGTON was English-born and Irish-influenced, schooled in surrealism by a German and married to a Hungarian. In the end, though, she was Mexican. BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

The late-life activity and posthumous honors tell us a few things about Car-rington not much emphasized in coverage outside Mexico. One, obviously, is the im-pressive energy of an artist in her 90s who not only shows up at openings, but shows up at openings of her recent work.

The other is Carrington’s role as an art-ist of Mexico, as a national treasure in a na-tion teeming with them, as a huge contribu-tor to the country’s cultural stockpile. Such a local legacy is a given, one would think,

after nearly six decades as a resident. Yet the eulogies written outside the country seemed to emphasize (rightly) her art and (narrowly) her dramatic early adulthood, before trailing o! into some variation of “... and she spent the rest of her life in Mexico.”

FROM JANE TO ELENA But it’s hard to blame a chronicler for priv-ileging Carrington’s European youth over

her productive Mexican years. Her art, af-ter all, is vision-inspired and dream-like, with none of the sense of place as in her old-er, semi-surrealist contemporaries María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo. As far as her art is concerned, it doesn’t matter where she lived.

And, it must be said, her pre-Mexico life really is irresistable as melodrama.

Her childhood was straight out of Jane Austen, her coming of age straight out of “Casablanca” and her introduction to the

New World straight out of ... well, straight out of Elena Poniatowska, the venerated French-born Mexican journalist and au-thor whose fictionalized biography “Leono-ra” appeared just before its subject’s death.

Poniatowska tells of the daughter of an industrial titan growing up in a Lancashire mansion almost too perfectly named Crookhey Hall, where she spent more time with her beloved Irish nanny than her par-ents. It was this nanny, Mary Poppins-like, who introduced Leonora to the sidhes and

other magical beings of Gaelic mythology, which turned out to be as much religion as she would need in life (“I’m an artist,” she later said, “My only faith is in creation.”).

She was rebellious, iconoclastic and stubborn. Her parents sent her to convents and finishing schools and she’d promptly get herself kicked out. She was presented before King George V and was singularly unimpressed by the experience. It is said she took an Aldous Huxley book with her to pass the time at the royal proceedings.

“Indomitable” is a word often used by admirers in her adult life. It applied to her childhood personality as well.

Her identification with animals, espe-cially horses, was no mere childlike whim. She didn’t think of herself as being sym-pathetically equine-like. She was a horse. “I am a horse disguised as a girl,” she told her parents, and, much to their horror, she meant it.

When the English art patron Edward James first saw Carrington’s 1947 work “The Giantess” (above) he was convinced it was a masterpiece. More than 60 years later, it sold for $1.5 million, a rare figure for a living female artist. At left, Gabriel Weisz-Carrington and his mother examine their works at the 2009 ASF Art Fair at the American School in Mexico City.


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Later, when Leonora was pregnant with her first child and wondering aloud about what she was getting into, her friend Reme-dios Varo tried to reassure her by pointing out that she, Leonora, was once a girl her-self. “No,” she corrected, “I was a pony, then a filly and now I’m a mare.”

In a more recent newspaper interview, she said, “What I always loved about hors-es is the way they can move a little piece of their skin to scare off flies, just a tiny piece. I often tried to do this myself, but I never could.”

That kind of close observation and her fantastical renderings of horses in oil and bronze may seem opposite — the scientif-ic versus the magical. But they are really two sides of the same coin; you have to re-ally know horses to do either.

One sculpture displayed at the American School had a horse set on a pole, with exagger-atedly sharp and elongated toes on the front hooves, and back hooves like shark fins. The short tail curled back on itself like a scorpi-on and it was large enough to make us think of a strange second head that was observing the more traditional one in the front. Some-body turned the sculpture around during the course of the fair that day, as though to em-phasize the dual sense of direction.

STRANGE NEW WORLD Carrington’s father discouraged her artis-tic ambitions, but she managed to study

Picasso’s whose harrowing wartime refugee route to Mexico, through Lisbon via Casa-blanca, reminded her that her own woes were of the rich girl’s variety. The two children fol-lowed, and Carrington painted, as Poniatows-ka puts it, “between sleepless nights, diapers and pediatrician appointments.”

THE SURREALIST FAIR The most important man in Carrington’s life was probably Edward James, the Brit-ish railroad heir, surrealist art patron, sometimes poet, and mildly eccentric lov-er of Mexico. Poniatowska tells the story of how James first wandered on foot into the tiny town of Xilitla in the state of San Luis Potosi, his body wrapped in toilet paper to fend o! the cold.

His arrival as a walking mummy was not the oddest sight he’d give the townspeo-ple. Over the years, he constructed there a surrealist Xanadu of bizarre sculptures, unusual plants and o#eat structures, to-day open to the public in blissfully shoddy and unsanitized condition. It is also the site

for the last two years of something called the Surrealist Fair.

James adored Carrington’s work, and took over as her benefactor, adding her to a list that included Dalí and Magritte. He bought her pieces and arranged show-ings, including a breakout exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1947. Barely 30, she was now a major inter-national artist. In return, she and her family had to put up with James’ exotic birds and snakes when he stayed at their apartment in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood.

It’s not hard to see the appeal in her art. A biographer, the art historian Whitney Chad-wick, describes it as the mystical occupying space in the everyday world. Put another way, Carrington gives us images that are at once phantasmagoric and somehow familiar. They descend, one suspects, from the other-wordly beings of her Irish nanny’s Irish tales.

“I don’t consider myself a surrealist,” Poniatowska has Carrington saying. “I have fantastic visions and I paint them and write about them. I paint and write what I see, that’s all.”

art in London. She had already developed an appreciation for the still young surreal-ist movement, and especially admired the German surrealist Max Ernst. A school roommate named Ursula Goldfinger ar-ranged for the two to meet. Some young artists get to shake hands with their hero; Leonora ended up living with hers.

Through Ernst (born 1891), Car-rington (1917) plunged into the Europe-an art world, circulating among the surre-alists in London and Paris. Among other things, they supplied her with epigrammat-ic descriptions of her chosen school of art. “The strongest surrealist image is one that reaches the highest level of arbitrariness,” counseled Ernst. “It’s the one that’s hardest to translate into practical language.”

And this from Lee Miller, the American model and photographer, disciple of Man Ray: “Madness opens the doors to your in-terior. To commit acts that others condemn lifts you to another dimension, lets you leap over your own mediocrity.”

Carrington credited Ernst for her artis-tic education, but had a few lessons of her own for him and his friends, few of whom are particularly remembered for enlight-ened attitudes about women. “All that dei-fying of women is pure fiction,” Poniatows-ka has her saying to him. “I’ve seen how you surrealists use them like any other wife. You call them your muses but they end up clean-ing your toilets and making your beds.”

Things fell apart. Ernst was arrested twice — first by the French for being Ger-man, then, during the occupation, by the Germans themselves. Leonora suffered mental collapses, and her father arranged to have her committed to a Spanish asy-lum. (Later, in Mexico, she would write “Down Under,” a memoir of that grue-some episode; she also wrote novels and short stories.)

She escaped, and with the help of Re-nato Leduc, a Mexican poet and journal-ist who worked as a diplomat in Spain, she reached New York.

Leduc, with whom she had entered in-to a short-lived marriage of convenience, talked her into coming with him to Mexi-co. “There’s no snobbism there,” he told her in Poniatowska’s rendering. “We’re hungry in every sense of the word.”

Mexico in 1942 was both a producer of and magnet for the world’s great sur-realists —Bretón, Buñuel, Mondrian and Artaud among them. Carrington moved among them, but was slow to warm to Mexico. She wasn’t taken in by its icons of culture. She was digusted by the bullfights, hated the rodeos and charro events (“the way they throw down the horses”), consid-ered Mexico City’s famous Sonora Market, known for its exotic flora and fauna o!er-ings, “diabolical.”

Orozco was a “horror.” She avoided Ri-vera and Kahlo and their Casa Azul crowd — repelled by their noise, their tequila and their guns. “I think smoking is the only thing we have in common,” Poniatowska has her saying.

It didn’t help that she knew little Span-ish at first, her French and English hav-ing previously been enough to get by with most of the crowd she ran with. She was also broke, cut o! by her father.

She did enjoy riding horses along Pas-eo de la Reforma and on into wooded Chapultepec Park, something you could still do in those days. Another thing you could do in those less-crowded times was run into an old friend unexpectedly on a residential street. That happened with Carrington and Remedios Varo, and led to a long friendship that included mutual ex-ploration of the occult.

She traveled through Chiapas to research the Mayas for a commissioned mural. As it has done for so many others, Poniatowska hints, Chiapas won Leonora over to Mexico. She met and married the Hungarian pho-tographer Imre Emerico Weisz, a friend of

“The strongest surrealist image is one that reaches the highest level of arbi-trariness.”

—Max Ernst

“Tuesday” (1987) dates from the same year that Carrington published “The Seventh Horse and Other Tales,” a collection of her short fiction.

Carrington left this crocodile sculpture to the people of Mexico City. It’s a permanent fixture on Paseo de la Reforma.


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They Came, They StayedTOMÁS SEGOVIA (1927-2011)He belonged to Spain’s greatest generation, emigrating to Mexico in the 1930s along with so many other writers and scholars who fled Franco and ended up invigorating the culture of the nation that took them in. Segovia — au-thor, essayist and most of all a poet — became a fixture in the Café Chufas, a Spanish exile favorite near the Alam-eda in downtown Mexico City, where he scribbled his diary. The restaurant didn’t survive the 1985 quake, and the bulk of his diaries didn’t survive a Washington D.C. thief. (“Perhaps they’ll turn up at an auction some day,” mus-es José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican literature’s eminence grise and a fervent admirer of Segovia.) But the final vol-ume (1985-2011) is viewable on the Internet, a medium through which Segovia continued to blog until his death.

MICHEL DESCOMBEY (1930-2011)Michel Descombey performed dance in his native France and then revolutionized it in Mexico. After partic-ipating in cultural events related to the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, he became a full-time Mexican resident in the 1970s and for the next three decades created and choreographed many of the most important dance works in Mexico. But his main e!ort and contribution was the founding of the Ballet Teatro del Espa-cio, the dance company that served as the focal point of Mexico’s homegrown ballet productions until federal cultural authorities pulled its funding in 2009.

JAN DE VOS (1936-2011)He literally wrote the book on Chiapas; his three-volume history of the peoples of the Lacandón forest chronicles their relentless exploitation in scholarly detail. More accessible to the lay reader is his booklet on the life of a curi-ous 16th century Jesuit missionary named Fray Pedro Lorenzo, who came to Chiapas with the naive idea that the Spanish were there to save Maya souls and then clear out. The good friar, like the people he came to Christianize, soon found himself on the run from Church authorities. Four centuries later, De Vos, a Jesuit priest turned histo-rian, arrived in Chiapas in his mid-30s from his native Belgium and had his own falling out with the order’s au-thorities. He spent the rest of his life as part of the history he wrote, serving as an adviser in talks between the Za-patista rebels and the government, and pulling off the difficult feat of advocating for the indigenous without jeopardizing his academic credibility.

JOHN ROSS (1938-2011)Rabblerousing reporter, political activist, jazz-lover, beat generation hold-out and “investigative poet,” the New York-born Ross took up permanent residence at Mexico City’s marvelously seedy Hotel Isabela after the 1985 earthquake, and spent the next quarter century sending northward torrents of sharp-edged journalism. His re-porting was no less objective than other English-language journalists in Mexico, just less subtle about it, and also far more in touch with Mexico’s displaced and dissatisfied. Ross seldom met social upheaval he didn’t love or an anti-U.S. sentiment he didn’t endorse. And it’s doubtful his hectoring style and lack of nuance in separat-

ing good guys from bad guys changed many minds. But his hard-earned insights published in The Nation and other U.S. outlets, along with books such as “The Annexation of Mexico” and “Zapatistas!,” served as a salutary antidote to the assumption-burdened superficialities that too-often pass for reporting out of Mexico.

Men of Their WordsSAMUEL RUIZ (1924-2011)They called him Tatik, the word for “father” in Tzeltal, one of the Maya languages that Ruiz learned to speak as he served in Chiapas as bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal since 1960. Ruiz, who founded the Fray Bar-tolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights, was a passionate campaigner for the indigenous poor in Chi-apas. His pursuit of Liberation Theology endeared him neither to Vatican authorities nor the Salinas and Ze-dillo administrations, who saw him as in league with the Zapatista uprising. Time heals, however, and in most circles Ruiz is remembered as somewhere between a positive force and a hero in the still-unachieved, but at least no longer ignored, quest to bring human rights to the native peoples of Chiapas.

MIGUEL ÁNGEL GRANADOS CHAPA (1941-2011)

He was by all accounts the dean of Mexican journalism right up to the publication of his final “Plaza Pública” column in the daily newspaper Reforma days before his death. He criticized and he proposed and he sometimes got involved in politics, but he mostly explained. He was there at the beginning, starting out at the weekly Crucero, run by the leg-endary Manuel Buendía, who was later the victim of a political assassination and the subject of one of Granados Cha-pa’s numerous books. He was among the all-star roster of journalists who bolted Excelsior in the 1970s when the then-critical daily was gutted by President Luis Echeverría. (The move eventually backfired in that it led to the founding of several more-critical publications that Granados Chapa was involved with.) In perhaps the highest honor a journal-ist could receive, his columns were devoured by other journalists, and for good reason: He understood what was going on better than they did. He was a master researcher, but not above camping out in the reporters’ bullpen with the rest of the media during sessions of Congress. The writings and pa-pers he leaves behind will be a treasure for generations to come, but his most valuable research sources, his mind and memory, he has taken with him.

DANIEL SADA (1953-2011)The Tijuana-born and Coahuila-raised Sada, author of novels (such as “Casi nunca,” “Lampa vida,” “Albedrío” and “Una de dos”) and short stories, was a writer’s writer par excellence, which means he was admired more by his colleagues for the musicality and preciseness of his prose than he was read by the population at large. Anointed early on by Carlos Fuentes as “a revelation for world literature” and praised by Roberto Bolaño, Sada was named co-recipient of Mexico’s highly prestigious 2011 National Arts and Science Award in the Linguis-tics and Literature category just hours before his death. Heavily sedated at the time, he never received o"cial

news of the award, but he apparently had been tipped o! weeks in advance by friends to whom the results had leaked.

The Music FadesMANUEL ESPERÓN (1911-2011) A film scorer and master of melody, Manuel Esperón was one of those songwriters who insinuated himself into the national psyche. The background music he wrote is the background music for all Mexicans, and perhaps a good per-centage of non-Mexicans as well. He’ll forever be associated with the films of Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema, and with the songs he wrote for the voices of the stars of the 40s and 50s. That would include especially Pedro Infante, the gen-tleman macho whose version of Esperón’s “Amorcito Corazón” in the socially aware 1948 movie “Nostros los Pobres,” may be the best-loved — certainly the most familiar — tune of from 20th century Mexican film. He wasn’t often a lyr-icist; Pedro de Urdimalas, for example, wrote the words to “Amorcito Corazón.” But he worked closely with the great-est directors in Mexico, including, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, Ismael Rodríguez and Luis Buñuel. American audi-ences got a taste of his magic on occasion, notably in Walt Disney’s “Los Tres Caballeros.”

DANIEL CATÁN (1949-2011)The Mexico City-born composer never saw performances of his signature work, an adaptation of the movie “Il Posti-no,” in his native country. They took place at the International Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato last fall, after his sud-den and unexpected death in April. (The opera had first been staged in Los Angeles, with Plácido Domingo in the role of Pablo Neruda.) Of Russian and Jewish descent, and educated in the United States and England, Catán was some-thing of a musical go-between in the United States and Mexico. He was a Mexican opera composer working in Eng-lish in the United States, as well as the recipient of the first U.S. commission of a Spanish-language work, which be-

came ‘’Florencia en el Amazonas’’ (1996). His first opera, “Encuentro en el ocaso,” used a libretto by Carlos Montemayor, the late Mexican author and essayist who moonlighted as an opera singer. At the time of his passing, Catán was at work on another opera adapted from a film, ‘’Meet John Doe.’’

EUGENIO TOUSSAINT (1954-2011)He was a pianist, a jazz and chamber music composer, and a ubiquitous performer who was as much at home on the stages of the country’s most prestigious classical music venues as on television talk shows. His jazz group Sacbé was one of the most influential in Mexican jazz history. He also did plenty of work in the United States, collaborating with the likes of Herb Alpert and Paul Anka, among others. He is survived by his sister, the singer Cecilia Toussaint.

RITA GUERRERO (1964-2011)Back in December of 2010, an unprecedented collection of talent took the stage in the old Teatro de la Ciudad in Mexico City’s Historic Center, with a line-up that included Maldita Vecindad, members of Café Tacuba and Zoe, Jaime López, Natalia Lafourcade and Alonso Arreola. They were there to raise funds for Rita Guerrero, diagnosed with breast cancer. One of the major Mexican rock bands of the 1990s was Santa Sabina, named for the Oaxacan shaman María Sabina and built around Guerrero. She didn’t make it, but the concert was one last example of what Guerrero did best — make music happen.

Who We LostMEXICAN ARTS AND LETTERS enter 2012 without some major figures in art, music, literature, journalism and religion who passed on in 2011. Some, like Leonora Carrington, were born abroad. Some spent their final days outside Mexico. But all made major impacts in their chosen fields, and all leave the national spirit richer for having lived here.


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San Sebastián, a mountain town, close to Puerto Vallarta, yet a universe away.

Construction on Zacatlán’s Franciscan convent, a colonial architural jewel, began in 1562.

From top to bottom: The Poza Tulimán, a pool of water, outside Zacatlán. Colonial architecture is plentiful in Cadereyta, and you can see it all in a tram ride. The 6768-acre Parque Nacional El Chico is Mexico’s oldest and most

admired National Park. El Cedral dam, outside Mineral de Chico, offers trout fishing and leisurely boating.

Tula, surrounded by cactus, mesquite and mammoth fossils.

The Palizada river is the heart and soul of the town of Palizada.

Magic TourismFOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: Nine newly recognized small towns in Mexico that are guaranteed to be worth a visit in 2012.

Zacatlán de las Manzanas, Puebla Visitors here often end up spending as much time in the sur-rounding Sierra Norte mountains as in the town itself, sleeping in cabins or wandering on horseback around the waterfalls and eerie rock formations, with flocks of goldfinches flying out of the highlands mist.

The town itself exudes that attractive blend of tranquility and industry, with a huge beflowered clock in the main plaza

belying stereotyped notions of Mexico and time as it chimes the hour with a selection of melodies. It was locally made in a facility specializing in the manufacture of monumen-tal clocks, and there’s a museum in town dedicated to clock- and watchmaking.

You can look around the factory where they make low-proof ciders from the apple or-chards that give the town the second part of its name (the first part, Zacatlán, is a Náhuatl word meaning grassy area). The guide will let you taste the chocolate, co!ee, coconut and amaretto liqueurs used to make mildly alcoholic creams. And there is wine fer-mented from the apples, as well as peach, quine (membrillo) and a local fruit called huiquiño. Zacatlán de la Manzanas is about a three and a half hour bus ride from Mexico City.

Cadereyta de Montes, Querétaro A pleasant artisan town about a hundred miles from Mexico City in the state of Querétaro’s Sierra Gorda mountains, Ca-dereyta de Montes is just up the road from another Pueblo Mágico, Ezequiel Montes. Both are close to the Peña de Ber-nal, a climbable monolith that rises imposingly out of the earth like a huge thimble. Cadereyta is an artisan town, and visitors usually take at least one pass through the crafts mar-

ket selling locally made items of its signature marble, as well as clay, leather, wicker, cane and wool. Of equal local interest is the large botanical garden that serves as a fascinating introduction to the state’s diverse and mostly semi-arid flora.

There are waterfalls and grottos in the surrounding landscape, as well as the ruins of Toluquilla, an ancient site of rulers that more than a millennium ago controlled much of the southern Sierra Gorda. Though named a Pueblo Mágico just months ago, the town leaders got a jump on things and built a tram route that takes passengers on a 60-minute tour of the town’s plentiful historical architecture, and other points of interest.

Mineral del Chico, HidalgoHere’s another former colonial mining town that stayed vi-brant after the ore ran out. It’s picturesque, of course (aren’t they all?), with that relaxed pueblo feel, a 19th century church and plazas marked by monuments to national he-roes (the reform President Benito Juárez and Indepen-dence heroes Josefa Ortíz de Domínguez and Miguel Hi-

dalgo, for whom the history-conscious state was named).Mineral del Chico has managed to strike that balance between traditional ap-

peal and contemporary comfort; you can stay at a no-frills inn or a five-star hotel, and there are enough restaurants and bars to keep everybody happy. The town teems with visitors during the December and Holy Week holiday seasons, be-cause the celebrations are lavish and colorful, and the ceremonies elaborate.

But the main draw is the natural environment. They say no fewer than 32 unusual rock formations are in view from the town itself, and each has a name (like The Grind, The Chalice, The Fox and The Grapefruit). Mineral del Chico hugs the mag-nificent Parque Nacional El Chico, designated in 1898 as Mexico’s first protected natural area. It’s a wooded wonderland of pine and oak, as well as ocote, a Mexican pitch pine, and oyameles, the native fir so attractive to butterflies. Lush and river-rich from the abundant rainfall, the nation-al park o!ers all the amenities — from primitive campsites to trailer parks and cabins, and there’s a lake created by the El Cedral dam, with boating and trout fishing. Mineral del Chico is about 12 miles from the state capital of Pachuca, which in turn is only about 65 miles from Mexico City.


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DESTINATIONS

Travelers in Mexico who want to get away from the cities and the resorts to explore small town life suffer an embarrassment of riches. How do you choose among so many? The Tourism Secretariat has made things easier. In the last several years, it has designated four dozen towns as Pueblos Mágicos — Magic Towns — and therefore worthwhile destinations for travelers. Now, “magic” may be a subjective, if not meaningless adjective for a pueblo, and it smacks more of marketing than anything else. Still, we know what they mean, don’t we? To get a Pueblo Mágico designation, the town must: Have historical, religious or cultural value. Possess traditions, mythology or an especially compelling daily life. Be accessible, via passable roads, and not too far from a big city or established tourist area. Offer at least basic amenities to visitors. Nine such towns have been designated Pueblos Mágicos in the last year. That means they are just beginning a new era in tourism development. So there’s no better time to visit them than 2012.

From top to bottom: The San Juan Bautista Convent in Tlayacapan, a World Heritage Site. The memorable roofs of Palizada. An architectural heritage reflected in churches and hacienda buildings in Tula.

From top to bottom: San Sebastián del Oeste, a view from above. A unique train car dining experience in El Oro. The Cerro de Teul, an ancient archeological site, dominates the town.

Tlayacapan, MorelosThis is an artisan town and a stop on the “Convent Route” of 14 early colonial era monasteries so striking in their beauty and historical sig-nificance that they’ve been recognized in their aggregate by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Mexico City residents like to escape the ur-ban atmosphere and tour these convent towns in the mountains east of Cuernavaca (including nearby Tepoztlán, another Pueblo Mágico).

They usually do it by car, sometimes on tour buses, even occasionally on bicycle, venturing out from popular accommodations in Cocoyoc, Oaxtepec or Cuernavaca itself. But there’s enough in Tlayacapan to merit making it your base.

It’s own World Heritage convent, EL Convento de San Juan Bautista de Tlayacapan, dates back to the 16th century and was mostly used by the Augustinians. It was also used by Emiliano Zapata as a barracks during the Revolution. There’s a museum on site, in what was the De Profundis hall, with re-ligious paintings, prehispanic artifacts, revolutionary documents and (always a favorite) mummies.

Walking through town, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer dominance of the arts and crafts shops and stalls, even if artisan work isn’t your thing. If it is your thing, you’re in the right place, because the prices are generally lower what you’d pay in the cities — for the sim-ple reason that the work is done right there. It smells as good as it looks with its abundance of scented candles; the Cerrería, a 16th century building still standing next to the main plaza, once manufactured a quarter of the wax that Mexico sent to Spain, It’s now a cultural center.

You can also hear the tradition. Tlayacapan is known for its music, and is considered the birthplace of the Chinelo, a symbol-laden, costumed carnaval dance that is the best-known

and most-performed dance throughout the state of Morelos and beyond.

Palizada, CampecheA river runs through it. It’s called the Río Palizada, and both town and river got their name from the abundance of dyewood in the area. It’s a pretty river, and used recreationally, one of the reasons that tourists (about 30 per cent of which are foreigners) enjoy coming to this mystic town near the Campeche-Veracruz border. It was originally settled by the Spanish to discourage Caribbean pirates from working their way inland.

Palizada is the state of Campeche’s first Pueblo Mágico. It actually received the honor at the very end of 2010, but we figure that’s recent enough to include it here. The town is unusu-al, with roofs of French tile, and an unexpected replica of the Statue of Liberty in one of its sev-eral lush parks. The climate is warm and wet, and the natural surroundings are a main attrac-tion. The wildlife is abundant, and in many cases tasty; townsfolks boast of their turtle dishes, and the famous local fish, the pejelagarto, is brought in from the coast.

For many, the town’s appeal, besides its natural beauty, is its remoteness; it’s promoted as a “hidden treasure.” The closest airport city, Ciudad del Carmen on the Gulf coast, is about 35

miles away. And it’s a very small town, well under 10,000 in population.

Tula, Tamaulipas It’s the oldest inhabited area in the border state of Tamaulipas, now occupy-ing the skirts of the Cerro de la Cruz. In the 19th century, it was a major pro-ducer of ixtle, a distinctly Mexican textile fabric made from the same plant as tequila, the maguey. The railroads passed it by, however, ending its eco-nomic glory days. But the artisan know-how remained, and Tula’s weav-ing and leather goods are famous. The town’s biggest attraction may be its

leather jackets, which pull in visitors form both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.The boom also left an architectural heritage of wonderful colonial era constructions, most-

ly churches and hacienda buildings. But things get even older when you venture outside of town. There are pre-Hispanic vestiges to visit in the nearby Nahola Caves. And a large num-ber of mammoth fossils have been found in the area.

Tula (not to be confused with the old Toltec capital in the state of Hidalgo) is warm and mostly dry, part of a landscape where cactus and mesquite reign. And that can be heaven.

San Sebastián del Oeste, JaliscoMost visitors understandably find it hard to leave Puerto Vallar-ta once they get there. But if they can manage to make it some 40 miles out of town, up almost 5,000 feet into the mountains and across the state border into Jalisco, they can find themselves in a quintessential colonial paradise. Now sparsely populated but immaculately preserved, San Sebastián was a major min-

ing center (silver and gold, of course) for centuries until running out of energy about a hundred years ago.

Visitors don’t need to do much else but enjoy the crisp mountain air and explore the village — a 19th century stone lovers bridge, 18th century inns and mansions, and a 17th century church, as well as any number of only slightly more recent ones. Or rent a horse and get out of town to take in the natural scenery, the old haciendas, and the thriving organic co!ee farms.

There are small museums in town to fill you in on local history, and visitors often find locals, from families with centuries-old roots in the area, who will engage in a little oral history.

El Oro, State of MexicoOne of the more pleasant weekend excursions available to residents and visitors of the greater Mexico City area is to head northwest out of Toluca, the state capital of the State of Mexico, and tour the ethnically traditional and astisti-cally active highland towns along the breathtakingly scenic backroads. There’s Temoaya, with its world-famous woven

rugs. There are visitable ceremonial centers of two major indigenous cultures in the ar-ea — the Otomí and the Mazahua. And there’s Temascalcingo, the birthplace of Mexi-co’s premier landscape painter, José María Velasco (1840-1912).

At the far reaches of this tour, some 60 miles out of Toluca and hugging the Micho-acán border, is El Oro, a newly named Pueblo Mágico. Its story is a familiar one — an im-portant mining town that fell on hard times in the 20th century, leaving a mostly poor population that depends on tourism brought in by the architectural wonders left behind, the surrounding natural beauty and the town’s overall pleasantness.

A railroad spur veered o! from the main route toward Michoacán, leaving behind a late 19th century station straight out of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” (You can now dine in a converted railroad car from that era, a tourist indulgence reportedly unavailable anywhere else in Mexico). The old Teatro Juárez hosted major theater attractions of its day and it looks like it still could. An old dam, built to supply water to the town and its neighbors back in their heydays, created a lake in an area perfect for hiking, picnics or overnight stays in available cabins.

Teul González Ortega, ZacatecasHere’s an out-of-the-way and little known town that’s in the ex-treme southern reaches of the state of Zacatecas, actually clos-er to Guadalajara, Jalisco than the capital of its own state. It’s right in the heart of one of the richest archeological zones in all of Mexico, which is saying quite a lot. The cultures whose arti-facts and other remains are being found in the area date back

to the B.C. era. Many of the finds come from the Cerro Teul, the hill that has symbolized the area for millennia and dominates the town today. The site is still being actively ex-plored, so visitors have to make do with a small museum and whatever they can run in-to during their wanderings.

The town itself is attractive and comfortable, with beautiful colonial-era church-es and public buildings. Plazas and gardens abound. And Teul is surrounded by fields of the blue agave plant, from which tequila is made.


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On the Horizon:The Road to Rio

TEAM MEXICO is looking hopefully toward the 2014 World Cup in Brazil after a very successful year on international stages. BY TOM BUCKLEY

Team Mexico scaled heights it had never be-fore reached in interna-tional soccer, hoisting three trophies in 2011 and even climbing into the FIFA Top Ten briefly.

Green, white and red flags were a promi-nent fixture at international soccer tour-naments throughout the year.

Sadly, “Chicharito” and friends won’t have the opportunity to duplicate the thrills and glory in 2012, but only because there are fewer premier tournaments in the coming year. Instead, El Tri must set-tle for a gradual build-up toward the Con-federations Cup of 2013 and the World Cup in Brazil in 2014.

Federation o"cials and coaches will emphasize developing youngsters who flourished in the spotlight in 2011 and en-courage veteran players to focus on secur-ing regular minutes with their club teams, especially players on rosters in Europe.

At the same time, coach José Man-uel “Chepo” de la Torre will be making plans for the senior team to start World Cup qualifying with maximum e"cien-cy so as not to complicate the process – a recurring problem that has troubled El Tri in the past three World Cup cycles.

NO-NONSENSE COACH“Chepo” de la Torre took the reins of Team Mexico in December 2010 but did not prowl the sidelines in front of El Tri’s bench until Feb. 9, 2011. After a disap-pointing World Cup in South Africa 2010, Mexico spent four months adrift as the Federation conducted a coaching search. During that span, El Tri played several friendlies with a series of interim coaches.

Worse than the uninspired perfor-mances was the controversy that erupt-ed after a match against Colombia in Mon-terrey in September 2010. An “unauthor-ized” post-game party at the team hotel got out of hand and 11 players were fined while two were slapped with six-month suspensions.

El Tri was on the brink of slipping in-to disarray.

Into that maelstrom stepped “Chepo,” a 44-year-old former star player who had coached three league champions in his nascent managerial career (Guadalaja-ra in 2006 and Toluca in 2008 and 2010). Despite the success, “Chepo” was con-sidered inexperienced and was seen as a second choice behind Monterrey coach Víctor Manuel Vucetich. Pundits opined that Mexico might regress without a prov-en manager at the helm.

Upon taking over, “Chepo” made it clear that discipline would be a priori-ty. Players would have to earn their spots and demonstrate growth at the club level. Past performance and reputation would not guarantee a place on the national team. The new coaching staff featured respected teachers and talent evaluators, indicating the youth teams would be cul-tivated and developed.

Twelve months later, the turnaround has been dramatic. Players understand that actions have consequences and lack of professionalism on or o! the field will keep you o! the team. First-choice goalie Jesús Corona missed the Gold Cup after a head-butting incident in a league playo! game. Long-time captain Rafael Márquez was overlooked for a November friendly after he was suspended by his club team.

The team has responded positively to the stricter standards of conduct as well


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Destination BrazilMexico’s World Cup qualifying schedule gets under way in June.El Tri and five other nations (Costa Rica, Cuba, Honduras, Jamaica and the United States) will be joined by six other clubs who advanced out of the second round of qualifying – El Salvador, Guyana, Panama, Cana-da, Guatemala and Antigua and Bar-buda. The 12 teams have been sorted into three groups of four and each team plays each nation in its group at home and on the road.

The top two teams from each group advance to the final round-robin stage in 2013, from which three teams will qualify for Brazil 2014.

Mexico opens its qualifying cam-paign on June 8 at home against Guyana.

El Tri’s Group B schedule:June 8: Mexico vs. Guyana

June 12: Mexico at El Salvador

Sept. 7: Mexico vs. Costa Rica

Sept. 11: Mexico at Costa Rica

Oct. 12: Mexico at Guyana

Oct. 16: Mexico vs. El Salvador

Group AUnited StatesJamaicaGuatemalaAntigua and Barbuda

Group CHondurasCubaCanadaPanama

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as the tactical approach that emphasiz-es possession, flowing movement and a pressing defense. El Tri went 10-4-0 – in-cluding a 7-game winning streak – before losing to Brazil. Team Mexico finished the year 11-4-1 with 38 goals scored and 11 goals conceded.

YOUNGSTERS GROWING UPAt the junior levels, the rewards were more tangible as several pieces of hardware were collected.

Mexico hosted the Under-17 World Cup in June-July and coach Raúl González masterfully led his team into the semifi-nals where powerful Germany awaited. The score was knotted at 2 in minute 90 when Julio Gómez converted a spectacu-lar bicycle kick to push El Tri into the fi-nals at Estadio Azteca. Mexico defeated Uruguay 2-0 to claim the nation’s second U-17 World Cup trophy, joining a short list of multiple U-17 champions (Brazil and Ni-geria -3; Ghana and Mexico – 2). Gómez was awarded the Golden Ball as the tour-nament’s top player while teammate Car-los Fierro garnered the Bronze Ball.

The backbone of the current senior na-tional team is comprised of members of the 2005 squad that claimed Mexico’s first U-17 crown – Giovani dos Santos, Pablo Barrera, Efraín Juárez and Héctor More-no. Ironically, Javier “Chicharito” Hernán-dez was left o! that roster due to injury, but he was with the team two years later when Mexico was ousted in the World Cup quar-terfinals by Lio Messi and eventual U-20 champions Argentina.

So while U-17 stars Gómez, Fierro, Giovanni Casillas and Marco Bueno bear watching as they develop with their club teams (Bueno had a 10-day training try-out with Liverpool in August and the Reds have indicated they are interested in sign-ing him when he turns 18), it could be four to six years before they make an impact at the senior level.

On the other hand, Mexico’s Under-20 team demonstrated that there is talent available to fill spots that might open be-fore the 2014 World Cup.

Coach Juan Carlos Chávez took his team to Colombia in late July where they opened eyes with o!ensive flair and disci-plined defense. El Tri fell to eventual cham-pion Brazil in the semifinals before defeat-ing France to bring home the bronze med-al. Defensive midfielder Jorge Enríquez

Fabián (Chivas) and Jonathan dos Santos (Barcelona).

No doubt the Olympic tournament will provide “Chepo” with the perfect oppor-tunity to scrutinize potential senior team candidates up close. Tops on his list will be defensive midfield where senior start-ers Israel Castro (31) and Gerardo Torrado (32) are getting long in the tooth.

Enríquez, Zavala and Jonathan dos Santos are all promising candidates for midfield roles heading into Brazil 2014.

KINGS OF CONCACAF Perhaps the most satisfying result in 2011 was the June 25 victory over Team USA in the Gold Cup final. El Tri stormed back from an early 2-0 deficit and blew away Uncle Sam’s Army 4-2 behind two goals from Barrera and a gem for the ages from Giovani dos Santos.

The tournament win sends Mexico into the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil that will feature the host team, Spain, Uruguay, Japan and the 2012 European Champion-ships winner.

Before that, regional World Cup qualify-ing begins in June and Mexico will square o! with Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guy-ana. El Tri and Costa Rica are the favorites to advance out of the third round into the

final six-team qualifying tournament that will take place in 2013.

While “Chepo” might do some experi-menting, he’ll be more focused on settling on a first-choice goalkeeper and identifying strikers who pair up well with “Chicharito.”

Goalie Guillermo Ochoa is currently play-ing in France for cellar-dwelling Ajaccio but his solid performances could see him trans-fer to a bigger club over the summer. The 26-year-old Ochoa is only the second Mex-ican goalie to play in Europe, but he has yet to sparkle when standing between the posts for El Tri. His continued development could be critical to Team Mexico’s hopes in 2014.

Another rising concern for “Chepo” is the ongoing run of injuries that has haunted “Chicharito” this season. If nagging leg and ankle knocks become a constant instead of just bad luck, a brittle “Chicharito” will not be a reliable choice up front. That’s when strik-ers such as Fabián, Oribe Peralta and Aldo de Nigris might be called upon to deliver goals.

After reveling in a thrilling 2011 that saw Team Mexico climb as high as No. 8 in the FIFA world rankings, El Tri will want to stake its claim as an unquestioned mem-ber of the world’s Top 20 national teams Naturally, the next two years will be used to take this step with an eye on finally reach-ing the quarterfinals at a World Cup played outside of Mexico.

earned the Bronze Ball while forwards Ulises Dávila, Taufic Guarch and Edson Rivera performed so well that they now play in Europe.

Most of the players on the U-20 team are contributors on Mexican club teams and we shouldn’t be surprised if many of them make headlines in 2012, especially with Olympic qualifying around the corner.

EYEING A GOLD MEDALAfter missing out on the 2008 Olympics in China, Mexico will have a London-or-bust attitude at the Concacaf qualifying tournament this spring. The goal will be to repeat the performance of the 1996 team that breezed into Atlanta with a 7-0-0 re-cord and a 21-1 goal di!erential.

The Olympics require teams in the qualifying process to be comprised of players 23 years or younger. So, in addi-tion to members of the U-20 squad, “Che-po” could select Team Mexico stalwarts such as Giovani dos Santos, Efraín Juárez and “Chicharito” as well as up-and-com-ers like Jesús Zavala (Monterrey), Marco

London CallingThe Olympic qualifying tourna-ment for the Concacaf region will take place in the United States be-ginning in late March. Two groups of four teams will play a round-robin tournament with the top two teams from each group advancing to the semifinals.

In addition to El Tri, Canada, Team USA, El Salvador, Guatemala, Pan-ama, Cuba and Trinidad & Tobago are vying for an invitation to Lon-don. The two finalists will qualify for the 2012 games. Participating teams must play the qualifying tournament with an Under-23 team.

Four years ago, Mexico finished third in the group stage to miss out on the Beijing Olympics and the disastrous performance eventually cost coach Hugo Sánchez his job.

Mexico was given the second seed in Group B which is comprised of 2008 tournament champion Honduras, Panama and Trinidad & Tobago. This group will be based in Nashville, Ten-nessee, and will play its matches at LP Field on March 22, 24 and 26.

Group A features Team USA, Cana-da, Cuba and El Salvador and will be based in Carson, California. Its games will take place at The Home Depot Center on March 23, 25 and 27.

The semifinals and the finals will be played at Kansas City’s Livestrong Sporting Park on March 31 and April 2, respectively.

El Tri has taken part in nine Olympic tournaments (1928, 1948, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1992, 1996, 2004) but has never earned an Olympic medal.

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Eye on Champions LeagueFour Mexican clubs reached the quarterfinals of the Concacaf Cham-pions League tournament, includ-ing defending champion Monter-rey. Since the new format was intro-duced in 2008, Mexican clubs have won each time, earning a spot in the year-end FIFA Club World Cup. Mon-terrey finished in fifth place at the 2011 Club World Cup in Japan in De-cember that also featured Barcelona and Brazil’s Santos.

The Concacaf tournament resumes in March with the two-legged finals set for late April.

The first leg of the quarterfinals features these match-ups:• Santos Laguna at

Seattle Sounders (MLS)

• Los Angeles Galaxy (MLS)

at Toronto (MLS)

• Isidro Metapan (El Salvador)

at UNAM Pumas

• Rayados de Monterrey

at Monarcas Morelia

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CARNAVAL DE VERACRUZ Feb. 14–22 in Veracruz, VeracruzVeracruz offers the truest — some say only — carnival experience in Mexico, or anywhere else north of Rio de Janeiro. After the ceremonial burning in effigy of Bad Humor, the streets of this historic port city are taken over by floats and costume parades, as well as the music, dance and food that Veracruz is known for even in more mundane times of the year.

FESTIVAL DE MÉXICO EN EL CENTRO HISTORICO Mid-March in Mexico CityMexico City’s 668-block downtown Historic Center is a year-round cauldron of cultural celebration, but never more so than the three weeks in March when the annual Festival of Mexico fills more than 60 indoor and outdoor venues with music, art, theater, dance, film, food, traditional entertainment, academic activities and (if past is precedent) a number of cultural pursuits that defy definition. The urban festival, entering its 28th year, emphasizes the homegrown but is also generous in its international offerings. The main attraction, however, might be the old city itself; it seems to shine a bit brighter when it’s on display.

PAPAL VISIT March 23-25 in León, GuanajuatoThose are the probable dates that the city of León in the state of Guanajuato is expecting to host Pope Benedict XVI, as part of his Western Hemisphere visit that will include a historic stop in Cuba.

FESTIVAL VIVE LATINO 2012 March 23-25 in Mexico City The biggest and best gathering of rock en español greats and newcomers fills Mexico City’s Foro Sol (an outdoor stadium) for three days every spring. The 2011 edition reunited Caifanes, Mexico’s seminal rock band.

FERIA DE SAN MARCOS April 14-May 6 in Aguascalientes, AguascalientesIf Mexico had a true national fair, this one in the San Marcos barrio of the city of Aguascalientes, in the state of the same name, would be it. Celebrants flock in from across the country, and from abroad. There’s a ton of cultural events and amusement rides, but the emphasis is also on the traditional — including bullfights, cockfights, charro-style equestrian shows and, of course, food.

G-20 SUMMIT June 18-19 in Los Cabos, Baja California SurHeads of state and other top government figures from the 20 biggest economies — including Mexico, the United States and the European Union — will take over the Baja Peninsula resort area of Los Cabos for the annual G20 Summit meeting, with President Calderón wielding the gavel. A 653,400-square-foot, solar panel-equipped convention center is under construction to house the sessions, and 11,000 of the 13,000 available room accommodations have been set aside for summit attendees.

ELECTION DAY July 1, nationwideMexicans go to the polls to elect a new president, an entire new Congress, a new Mexico City mayor and new governors in Guanajuato, Jalisco and Morelos.

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL CERVANTINO Oct. 3-21 in Guanajuato, GuanajuatoThe most prestigious cultural event in Latin America will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2012 with its familiar blend of the traditional and cutting edge in art, music, theater, food and more, all unfolding in the aesthetically mesmerizing ambience of one of Mexico’s most beloved colonial city. Special invited guests: Switzerland, Poland, Austria and the state of Sinaloa.

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DEL LIBRO Nov. 24-Dec. 2 in Guadalajara, Jalisco What started out as a modest University of Guadalajara book fair a quarter century ago is now the most important literary gathering — and publishing industry reunion — in the Spanish-speaking world, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and participants, among them Nobel prize winners such as Herta Muller and Mario Vargas Llosa (pictured above at the 2011 book fair). The 2012 special guest country: Chile.

PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION Dec. 1The newly elected president takes office at a special session of Congress. The ceremony did not go smoothly during the last transition in 2006, when incoming President Felipe Calderón’s forces had to physically maneuver their way around an opposition blockade to get the oath of office administered.

END OF THE WORLD Dec. 21 (or is it Dec. 23?)As prophesied by the ancient Maya — at least as interpreted in some sectors of the public imagination. Expect awesome parties.

Carnaval de Veracruz

Feria de San Marcos

Mario Vargas LLosa


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Some Major Events in Mexico for

2012

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