Word: behinder
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This precarious moment - early on a Tuesday afternoon - I could not be more unconcerned that my room reservation has been screwed up. In this city hurt hardest by recession, partly because it built too many hotel rooms, I smile at the man behind the desk, sure that I am about to be upgraded to a presidential suite. Then I'm told there are no more rooms of any kind available at The Hotel. When I go to meet a friend by the pool at the Mandalay Bay, it's too crowded to find chairs. All the price-cutting has succeeded...
...want to be happy too," she says. The new house, like so many she deals with, was trashed by the previous owners, who were angry at being foreclosed on. The doorknobs, hinges and copper wiring were stolen, as were the appliances and carpet. The owners even left their dogs behind. (Abandoned pets have become a huge problem for local shelters.) "You couldn't walk into that house without holding your nose to keep you from vomiting," Boemio says. She and her husband had to spend $7,000 on appliances and carpet to qualify for a Fannie Mae loan...
...squatter left behind no bed, but she did leave stained bath mats, towels, flip-flops, Chinese-takeout remnants, Sun-kist soda cans, prescription medicine, old mail and some used airline tickets to Miami. Boemio casually walks around all of it, occasionally laughing. The buyer's agent - a woman in a Gucci scarf and sunglasses - is a little more freaked out, trying to figure out how much this mess will cost to clean up. Which is strange, since she's offering $250,000 on behalf of her overseas client - $70,000 more than the asking price. There are no other buyers...
...behind all that confidence, I figure, must be some hard lessons learned. This is the man who has been taught the main moral of this recession better than anyone else: you can't borrow more than you can afford to repay. His debt is going to be hard to dig out of even if things get better soon. So when I ask how long it will be before he'd even consider getting a loan for more expansion, I expect him to apologize for his recklessness and pledge to become a saver. Instead, he sits up, widens his eyes...
...raising more jail houses; the crisis, they say, also stems from profound problems in Mexico's justice apparatus. More than 41% of the nation's total prison population of 220,000 has not even been convicted and sentenced even though many of the prisoners have already spent several years behind bars. "There should be less focus on trying to put more people in prison and more on trying to get the right people in," Deputy Warden Herrera says. (Watch TIME's video "Inside Mexico's Overcrowded Prisons...