Word: michoacan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Yakima Valley of southern Washington is 1,000 miles from the Mexican border. But so many former migrants have settled there after coming north to $ pick the valley's apples, pears and cherries that no one thought it odd when the governor of the Mexican state of Michoacan made a speech to them last spring over the local Spanish-language radio station. The governor, or so went the local joke, was only trying to stay in touch with his constituents...
According to the Mexican account, the federal judicial police received an anonymous letter saying the two missing men might be found at the ranch of Manuel Bravo Cervantes, a former legislator, in Michoacan state. When some 30 federal judicial policemen approached the Bravo house, the police say, shots from inside killed an officer, setting off a half-hour gunfight. Bravo, his < wife and their two sons died in the battle. The police claimed they later seized two pounds of cocaine and a slew of guns and ammunition...
...agents say he was suspected of illegal arms dealing, but they do not believe he was in the narcotics trade. Moreover, the federales, who had recently been making a deliberate effort to cooperate with U.S. investigators, did not tell the DEA of the Bravo raid beforehand. Nor were Michoacan state police notified of the raid in their jurisdiction until after the shooting started; when the local officers arrived at the scene, the federal police even prevented them from entering the ranch grounds...
Explains Refugio López Ortega, 45, who earns $3.40 a day as a laborer: "It is tough living in the city but tougher living in the country. I left a little farm in the state of Michoacan in 1942, and I would not return there for anything. I never went to school. Here my children go to school." Ortega and his family of eight live in a single-room jacale at "La Cuchilla" (The Knife), a squatters' community on a ledge high above El Trotche. His food bill is $4 a day, and he must somehow find money...
...about the way things really are. As set down with disarming simplicity by Romero, Pito's story is "the dialogue between a poet and a madman." His travels with what he calls his "prodigious flute," a pipe whittled from bamboo, lead him all through the state of Michoacan and always take him back to the village of Santa Clara del Cobre, his bitterly loved and hated birthplace...