By RICARDO CASTILLO Migrants Try to Barge into Mexico Throngs of Central American migrants Sunday, Jan. 19, continued to gather along the Guatemalan border on Sunday, Jan. 19, with the intent of moving through Mexico to the United States. On Saturday. Jan. 18, approximately 1,500 of the mostly Honduran migrants attempted to stage their first show of force
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Dos Bocas Bubble Bursts The news was sensational. Chinese Ambassador to Mexico Zhi Qingqiao told reporters during the celebration of a China Day event organized by Mexico’s Economy Secretariat on Monday, Jan.13, that Chinese banks were investing $600 million in the Dos Bocas Refinery, currently under construction in the southeastern state of Tabasco. Immediately after
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By RICARDO CASTILLO There’s an old practice in Mexican political journalism known as “tying knives” (“amarrando navajas,” if you want the Spanish term.) The term is not political in origin. In fact, it actually refers to the moment before a cockfight when the people in charge of making the birds fight tie a steel blade to the roosters’ spurs. Consequently,
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Snafu over Gay Zapata Painting Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata was murdered 100 years ago, on April 10, 1919. Over the last century, he became a Mexican Revolution icon, a magic figure with a holy aura. But all hell broke loose this week at Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Palace) when, in an exhibit to
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By RICH GRANT It was a wild, cold, blowing October afternoon in Charlevoix, Michigan, and as I crossed the street I heard a woman say to her friend, “Is that snow? Oh, thank heavens! Now we can finally get our town back.” I knew what she meant. I was a stranger here, but even on a first visit,
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By SILVIO CANTO, JR. As an outsider who follows Mexico and Mexican news closely, I’ve noticed a couple of recent articles that should be worrying the Mexican middle class. First, according to his column in Pulse News Mexico, Ricardo Castillo has noted that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is making investors nervous. Castillo wrote: “Fear does not ride on
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By RICH GRANT More than 100 years before the U.S. Civil War, the first underground railroad to freedom for escaped slaves didn’t go from the South to the North – it went the other way, from Georgia and the Carolinas to Florida. And ironically, the escape route often ended in the one place blacks could be free from recapture
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By RICARDO CASTILLO After the threat by U.S. President Donald Trump to impose export tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t stop the flow of migrants coming out of Central America, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has complied both with stopping Trump from slapping Mexican exports with his blatantly illegal tariffs, but also, cartoonists claim, can trump up his roster
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By RICARDO CASTILLO On March 6, Pulse News Mexico published an article offering a retrospective on the arrival of Hernán Cortés to Cozumel island. (It was the first incursion of a European army into the American continent with an intent to conquest.) It happened in 1519. Actually, the intent of that article was to set up an observation point from
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By RICH GRANT The U.S. Virgin Island of St. John is only three by five miles – the size of Manhattan – but for such a small place, it is ringed with some of the most famous beaches on the planet. A full 60 percent of this green, mountainous paradise is protected from development as part of the Virgin Islands
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