Word: mexico
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Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky's actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it's 2010, Mexico's bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico's 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico's bloody, decade-long War of Independence...
...been no shortage of talk lately about possible unrest, especially in the form of armed rebel groups, erupting south of the border in 2010. But is there really a basis for concern? None as apparent as the popular grievances that existed in 1809 or 1909. But this is still Mexico; and while Spanish colonizers no longer oppress the country, and dictators like Porfirio Diaz aren't brutalizing campesinos, the country nonetheless is reeling from the worst criminal violence in its history and one of its hardest economic slumps. "We are very near a social crisis," José Narro, the director...
Mexican insurrections often do coincide with important dates. Most recently, Zapatista guerrillas in the poor southern state of Chiapas started a revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the day the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A big fear now is that Mexico's drug cartels, responsible for almost 15,000 killings in the past decade, are lending their resources and firepower to emerging guerrilla groups. If so, their plan may be to sow bicentennial terror and turn Mexicans against President Felipe Calderón's drug-war offensive. This past fall authorities say they seized an arsenal of large...
...same time, political observers like Denise Maerker, a prominent columnist for the Mexico City daily El Universal, fear that provincial governments in places like Chiapas, where the weapons were found, are using 2010 fears as a pretext for cracking down on social activists. "They're drawing questionable links between advocates for the poor and armed groups," says Maerker, who adds there's little evidence that Hernandez is an EPR boss. (See pictures from Ciudad Juarez, the most dangerous city in the Americas...
Some 14,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón declared war on Mexico's drug cartels three years ago, sparking a brutal conflict that showed no sign of easing in 2009. Battered border cities like Juárez witnessed up to a dozen or more murders a day amid fighting between drug gangs and government forces--and, just as often, among rival cartels. Meanwhile, corruption in the ranks of police, army and government officials is so endemic that some analysts have declared the nation of 110 million a failed state. The U.S. has pledged $1.4 billion over three...