Any generalization is a bold but, as not talking to Pedro Paramo but Gabriel is one of the privileges we have foreigners when we go to visit the lands distant. "We see a country we want see, "he said while talking about his experience with the kindness and patience of the bank tellers and drivers Lima, gentleness and patience that I -" Peru Peruvian, "as the donkey Vallejo-not remember. How to escape from the arbitrariness of a comment that is constrained to the few paragraphs that follow, how to give an opinion without appearing complacent or "much more complicated, but becomes a vivisection, clumsy and without anesthesia, just to not accuse the writer of contemplative with the country hosting it temporarily? I have no idea.
Mexico is a vast country, friendly and hostile, peaceful and aggressive, tender and fierce, selfish and solidarity, a country of extremes, horrible and wonderful, that can not close in the few lines of an article and not on preconceived ideas which foreigners arrived at the airport.
This Mexico is more than Pancho Villa and his gold, rather than movies or Indian Fernández Cantinflas, rather than the eight Chavo Chespirito, but Infante and Negrete, rather than Cuauhtémoc and Cortes, more than Nezahualcóyotl Rulfo rather than Dona Marina and María Félix, rather than Mayans and Aztecs, but the Chivas and America, more than tacos and enchiladas, but the metro and peseros, rather than trajineras of Xochimilco and the murals of Diego Rivera, but the Zocalo and much, much more that the Tlatelolco massacre.
Mexico, and again I agree with Paramo, who said that Mexico is not Mexico City, although it contains in itself, tortured and transformed the essence that defines it-can be a beautiful and peaceful place where people, friendly and helpful, is able to stop traffic on a wide avenue just to give you directions on how to get this or that street, where, contrary to what would happen in Peru, the other Mexicans, whose cars are blocked because the kindness of taxi driver will wait patiently without the horn, can hit the body or to remember the holy Mother of good man. However, this friendly and tame the violence lies behind that, as a sudden surge can come and turn everything into a bloody carnage if, for example, two drug gangs shot and decide to hold who knows how to settle accounts or stop corrupt federal at a checkpoint on the wrong truck and, as in the song "Los Tigres del Norte", criminals (disturbed by the ambition of the police calling for "too much"), decide to take the "goat horn" and unleash hell.
Mexico is a violent country, so its people have chosen to live in a gray middle ground, a middle ground, broken only innocently and occasionally exaggerated, in the celebrations in the Quinceanera where families spend the they do not have to dance with girls escorts, or funerals, holidays, music, sumptuous and surreal, when Mexicans shake the dust of fear, sing, dance and make fun of death to that of both fear, have lost respect. Since
to choose between being a coward and murderer, the average Mexican, a devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe, choose not to take away anyone's life, until it does. Then things do get ugly. Mexicans do not take the gun to impress, to pose as brave or off in front of the bride, they drew to kill. Fired at close range and not come with stories, cacerina is to be unloaded, not to play the shooting. Gang fights ending in massacres, crimes are vicious and it is rare to find mutilated bodies of people whose deaths did not happen before a long torture including burns, removal of fingers and genitals, and beheadings.
When the Mexican Mafia decides to kill someone, does not stop at trifles or expenditure measures, exaggerated at parties and in the horrors, send forty heavily armed thugs and as leaving "a job" is synonymous with prestige unfinished, it is not uncommon for the lucky survivor of a massacre to be executed in the hospital where he is recovering from the previous shooting. Paradoxically, the crimes are not indiscriminate and reckless, "it's getting to a restaurant and kill twenty people to shoot himself after the Yankees is, they're crazy." The hitman has its tradition and its school, not a makeshift, plans, provides and implements, it is not suicide, it is reckless. He has no problem sticking it a shot, "total, all going to die", but neither is daunted in a hail of bullets.
The violence is so prevalent that when a student told me that her father was murdered when she was a child, nobody in the room, blinked too. I then asked indiscreetly how it happened, "was an abduction or an assault?" I said, "was Mexico," she replied with the same tranquility. On another occasion, while talking to a dozen people came to me asking how many had been an assault on the family, all raised their hands. When I asked how they felt if they passed the night with a police patrol, answered "fear." But violence
is not the only tangible property, without the concept of "Malinche" the Mexicans could not ever explain all evils, because all the blame for the misfortunes of these people find their origin in "La Malinche", the "traitor." That, Dona Marina, unknowingly and unwittingly gave corruption, laziness and ignorance, birth and mother known (the father, not yet agree, it was Cortez or Uncle Sam, depends on moods and circumstances.)
Now that the "Spaniards" go too far, Mexicans are exercised hating Americans hating and admiring; because they envy and despise at the same level, in equal proportions, the flatter and spit, insult them and obey them, gouge their tourists and are exploited by their employers, all in the same circumstances, all at the same pace. Porfirio Diaz say the famous dictator, so loved and so hated, "said:" Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to America, "and something that should explain that worship so devoutly and so pagan virgin Guadalupe, colonial and indigenous virgin, untouched virgin and never questioned, patient mediator between the creator of the conquerors and the people overwhelmingly Catholic who has found, however, its very Mexican way being and not being at the same time, leaving stranded on the sands of oblivion, hamletian dichotomy, because in Mexico, as well José Antonio taught me when I first landed in this land, everything is yes and no, while at same time.
Thus we have, for example, that the players are branded as incapable but not a single restaurant in Mexico without a TV for viewing at any time and every day, some of the hundreds of parties that are transmitted to the delight and national pride. We have a president calling itself "legitimate," the candidate who lost the election - that he called "spurious" (sic) democratically elected government like it or not, and which, therein lies the paradox, given their lucrative salaries all democratic congressmen, who, in order not to confuse us, participate legitimately illegitimate government. We have "My house is your house" and invitations wholesale rampant but it is rare that materialize into actual visits. We have the largest national company Pemex throws astronomical losses just in the time that oil has reached its higher prices due to an organic corruption which everyone wants to preserve the name of "national dignity" (delicious euphemism for clientage party and trade union jobs that are inherited "revolutionary", the style monarchy). We have the most popular songs are the narco-corridos (who sing and know everyone from the poorest to the privileged students of the universities "strawberries"), modern hymns that tell the "exploits" of drug traffickers and corruption insults police (compositions distributed on compact discs, obviously, require respect for copyright that protects corrupt police). We have dozens of journalists killed each year at the impassive gaze of law enforcement and the silence of the two large chains that monopolize television companies, however, put the outcry if the government intends to lower campaign spending, the dead pass, but does cut the budget for commercials? That one is an attack on freedom of expression! We have two community radio announcers are killed and the School of Communication's most prestigious (or at least most expensive) of the City, nobody says anything (worse!, Nobody knows anything). We have not, it happens and no one knows, is known and not, so and so, yes and no, definitely, possibly, eventually.
All these are or appear to be (yes, no) masks that are used not to hide a face, beautiful or hideous, false or true-but to hide the fact that sometimes fierce, many times, the continent has no content, fills the void around and beneath-the ridiculous or ferocious-masks is not any face.
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