The Mex Files

Five white Bengal tiger cubs (and one “normal” cub) were born in April at the Guadelajara Zoo and made their public debut this week.  The tigers are not albinos, but carry a natural  recessive trait for the white coloration.

Mexican zoos are world leaders in breeding rare and endangered species in captivity.

Friday night cat blogging. Our kitties are cuter than americablog’s and dailykos’ kitties any day. These jaguar cubs were born at the Leon, Gto. zoo. (Photo, Notimex).

IN what passes for tradition in the Blogosphero, you’re supposed to put up a cat picture on Friday nights.
So… being Friday, here’s “Illegal Alien Cats”:

Now, going to the Dog.

Duane Lee Chapman (the kind of name that if it’s not on a country music singer, is on either a serial killer or the guy whose family is covered in your local paper’s county police report). Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Duane Lee is in a heap o’ trouble. He’s a bailbondsman, and famous for bringing bail jumpers to justice. In a “man bites dog” story, the Dog was arrested in Hawaii by U.S. Marshalls on Thursday morning … on a Mexican warrent charging him with very, very serious crimes. Seems our boy… the famous bail jumper stopper … jumped bail.

Although something of a pariah among “respectable” bailbondsmen “Dog” has his admirers. They seem to overlook the obvious, things you can find, say, in Wikipedia:

Chapman … joined a motorcycle gang, the Devil’s Disciples, that reportedly had a distaste for blacks… According to Chapman, another gang member, Donny Kirkandall, murdered pimp and drug dealer named Jerry Lee Oliver a crime for which Chapman was found in complicity by a Texas judge. Chapman has reportedly been arrested at least 32 timesIn 1977, Chapman was sentenced to five years of hard labor on murder charges, he served just 18 months before being paroled in 1979. Before his sentencing, Chapman had married, and fathered at least one child. His wife Lafonda filed for divorce while he was in prison on the murder charges. Because Chapman owed money for child support, the judge in charge of handling the child support case asked Chapman to catch a fugitive for $200. This is considered the beginning of his bounty-huting career.

That last sentence doesn’t sound like anything that would stand up even under the laxest possible intrepretation of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct.

“Dog”, out of prison, moved to Hawaii and set up shop as a bailbondsman… how, with his prison record, is never quite clear. Somehow. He’s a master showman.

When Andrew Luster, heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune and serial rapist, ended up in Puerto Vallerta, the Mexican police knew he was there. PV has its share of shady gringos. Intespersed amongst the retirees, the old queens, tthe eurotrash and the gay vacationers are the retired marijuana dealers, ponzi schemers keeping a low profile, the occasional mobster on the wrong side of a family disagreement. Not nice people, but not any particular concern to the Mexicans. Andrew Luster though. A serial rapist, already convicted in California, and facing a 124 year prison term?

Mexican prosecutors had already prepared extradition papers and were waiting for the FBI to come in and quietly pick the guy up in June 2003 when … and if this seems a tad “convenient”, you’re not alone in thinking so, but newspapers reported that a couple spotted Luster, called the FBI… and the DOG.

The Dog showed up — with a TV crew in tow — in time to get into a barroom brawl with the fugitive heir. Mexican cops threw the whole lot of them into jail. Where someone paid “bajo fianza” to spring the Dog from the pound. Luster somehow also was out of jail — presumably as a courtesy to the FBI, allowing the G-men to put Luster on a plane and fly him back to the U.S. without going through an extradition hearing.

That would not make for great drama. Or tacky television. DOG kidnapped Luster, put him on a private plane and … the rest, they say, is history.

Lest we forget, DOG is a bailbondsman. Somehow he managed to get bajo finanza for this very serious charge… and promptly fled the country. Sort of like… oh… Andrew Luster?

Dog milked that “capture” for everything it was worth. He’s a master showman who manages to appeal both to his white trash roots and to the sophisticated. In Mexican terms, he’s a naco — rich white trash, with excreable taste in jewelry and a ridiculous haircut that was a joke even when it was semi-fashionable 15 years ago. But, then, American culture since WWII has been defined by a lot of poor boys who never passed through the middle class. Though those boys had talent — Warhol, Liberace, Elvis.

Dog had…? Good publicitiy, basically. Somehow the biker and his big-boobed foul-mouthed wife became de rigor television viewing in the U.S. While no one with any taste or culture would want to BE THOSE people — there’s a weird fascination with the Chapman family (maybe due to the fact than we’re lucky none of us know anyone remotely like them). For people who DO know people like them, there’s the satisfaction of seeing themselves as the “good” people against the bad guys.

The bad guys, more often than not, are darker skinned than Duane’s fan club. I don’t think that’s quite coincidental, as the amazing posts from The JAWA Report article on his arrest indicate. I’ll leave their names off to protect the moronic:

Fuck Mexico!! How dare those assholes take our number one well known american hero and imprision him aftrer all the crimes they committ here..Screw Mexico..Let’s go to war and blow em like we did in Iraq!!

I guess two wrongs make a right, or something like that. As to getting blown in Iraq, ok… but what does that have to do with Mexico.

he is not a criminal and he did not break any laws, because mexico has no laws, just revenge for taking out a rich man, who was pooling tons of money into mexico. i agree with military action, take the illegal mexicans out of our country or the people will one way or another.

Uh… kidnapping gets you 30 to 50 years in Mexico. Murderers only get 20. Duane was a very, very bad boy.

And, the one I love…

What is wrong with this sick world is it not bad enough we have so many mexicans taking our jobs and and their spanish on every recording and instruction mannuel we have ever gotten! Dog and Beth are good family people Bush step your sorry but in on this one.They have gotten so many bad people off the streets and helped many that would be nowhere without Dog And Beth’s and the whole Chapman family, I will be praying for them all, we can’t let them get away with this!!!!!!!!

“Instruction mannuel”… wasn’t he the translator I used to work with when I was a technical writer?

Links to racist hate sites like this: blahblahblah (verdana italic typeface)


In Mexico, my favorite TV show is Los Simpsons (who doesn’t love Los Simpsons?), which is produced by the U.S.’s Fox Network. One good thing about being in the U.S. is I can catch some other Fox comedies — Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone“, John Gibson (of “make more white babies or we’ll be overrun with brown ones” fame and “Your World With Neil Cavuto“.

Watching these programs requires a “willing suspension of disbelief” — you have to buy into the American Right, and their alternate universe where two opposite ideas coexist without, as on Star-Trek, destroying life as we know it.

On the one hand, the alternative reality folks tell us, “white Mexican elites” export their “problems” to the United States. On the other, those “elites” are planning to take back their problem (and add a bunch more). You see, it’s all a secret plan for the “Reconquista”

For those of you in the Real Mexico (and in the Real World) this is the ardent belief of tho residents of that alternative universe reality that Mexican plans to take over the territories ceded to the U.S. by the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. (Why not Spanish Louisiana , which once stretched as far as Manitoba?) .

While there is a group that Mexican authorities consider a possible right-wing foreign terrorists, and that talk about Reconquista, these U.S. based neo-fascists, like Aztlan (”brownshirts with brown skins,” as one friend called them) are tiny organizations that exist mostly on the internet, or in the nightmares of “white-wing” worriers (and the folks who they worry). I half suspect that at least half their alleged members and supports just enjoy scaring the bejeebus out of these folks. No one in the sanity-based world takes their aims very seriously.

By the way, these groups should NOT BE CONFUSED WITH THIS MERRY BAND OF RECONQUISTADORS — they have a sense of humor, which is to facists what water is to the Wicked Witch of the West.

In one variant of the theory, the Mexicans will join with the Yellow Hoardes of Asia to invade California, as in a 1915 Hearst produced serial starring Paulette Godard and reprised (as a theory — Paulette and William Randolf are both long gone) by a wacko U.S.Army Major last year.

Which brings me to another film director, Ron Maxwell. I never heard of him either — his film about the Battle of Gettysburg is praised by the Heritage Foundation, and other organizations unlikely to be heard of outside of wonky Republican circles or internet political blogs. Somehow, that makes him an expert on the Reconquista — he even wrote for the (offensive, but not officially racist) World Net Daily about it.

Which, in turn, brings me back to Fox News. While Vincente Fox blathered on (presumably in his slow norteño way — the sound was off) on one side of the screen, Neil Cavuto and Ron Maxwell chatted about the Reconquista on the other. According to Ron, it’s a common belief among “Mexican elites and intelletuals” that the Reconquista is real.

Prone to giving even complete morons the benefit of the doubt, I did a little googling on this. Carlos Fuentes, once talked about the Spanish language and Latin American culture shaping the United States. Carlos Monsivais during a 1999 talk mentioned that California was as much Mexican as anything else (which it is). But, really, have you ever met Carlos? He’s a pudgy, balding, near-sighted writer who ventures out to the Sandborn’s katty-corner from Chapultepec Park for his morning coffee before returning to the comforts of home, his beloved cats and his writing. Somehow I can’t see him leading the troops across the Rio Bravo del Norte.

Carlos Fuentes? He’s pushing 80, and frankly, he’s more at home in Washington or London than in Mexico.

Elena Poniatowska, maybe… having been born Princesa Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor, I guess she qualifies as one of those infamous “white elites”. She’s a bona fide intellectual and a tough broad. Even with those Polish and French warrior ancestors, I can’t image such a nice, quiet lady storming the gates of San Diego either.

SO… kids… who exactly are these Re-conquistadors? Anyway care to enlighten Neil Cavuto ?

Mexican health officials say they have failed in their effort to deal with a rat plague in a remote mountain village by sending in hundreds of cats.

Authorities in the state of Chihuahua came up with the plan after the people of Atascaderos appealed for help in dealing with an estimated 250,000 rats. But rodent control expert Alberto Lafon said not enough cats had been obtained and some had died soon after arrival. He said the villagers would just have to learn to live with the rats.

“At this point, they are going to have to take charge and learn to control them,” he told the Associated Press news agency. Residents in Atascaderos asked the authorities for help two months ago, saying at least 800 homes had become rat-infested and traditional extermination methods had failed. Experts launched an appeal asking people to donate unwanted cats, in the hope of recruiting an attack force of up to 700 animals. In the end, however, they only managed to rustle up a mere 50 cats.
And in a further setback, fears that the cats would not be able to survive in the harsh weather conditions of the mountains proved justified when many of them died after just a short time in the village.

But there is one last hope left for the villagers, say health officials. Javier Lozano, director of health services in Chihuahua state, told AP that traditional poisons had not worked on the rats, because they had learned to avoid them after seeing their fellow rodents die. But he added that the authorities had now ordered a special poison that took up to four days to kill its victim. “Poison that slowly takes effect will be more effective,” he said.