The exception to the story is, as with the entire world, really large cities. They are all unsafe in areas, containing more human suffering than the countryside ever does. That said, another masterpiece of public relations was convincing the US people that they are rich and Mexico poor. No matter how “poor” most families have land, humble abode and agriculture FREE AND CLEAR with a 365 growing season.

How many times have we all read some photo caption like “a poor farmer and his cows.” What? Is there an adult cow in Mexico that is not worth some $800US on the hoof? Is anything on the planet more fungible than a goat in Mexico? So this guy with 40 cattle is poor? You do the arithmetic: how many people in the US are that far in the black anymore???!!!

Just had to pipe up after living now in Mexico nearly three years and hearing slander from US friends about Mexico ad nauseum, never mind inflammatory headlines like Rolling Stone’s “Mexico Descends into Chaos and Brutality” or something like that…

Like you intone, Mexico is a civilization with a 10,000 year back story, compared to the US where I, born in 1956 in Montana, a mere 67 years after the Battle of Wounded Knee in which some 300-500 native Americans (depending which side does the counting) were slaughtered with automatic gunfire by the US calvary and heaped into a mass grave. With such a scant history behind my state, unlike most US citizens I see the US as more of a refugee camp for Europeans than a genuine civilization such as Mexico, what with more pyramids than any nation on earth.

Furthermore there persists this notion among pilgrims up yonder that Mexico is Spain. Even the Mexican gummnt admits only some 10% of its people are anything close to fully Spanish. This is native America. If they look Indian they are Indian. Look at photos of DeSoto, Cortez, et al. They look like the English, with fish eyes, scant cheekbones, balding pates, etc. They do not look like “Indians” because the Spanish are a white race. Mexico is greater native America.

Also those who flee northward to work illegally, more often than not, are not the wealthy scions of Spain who settled in Mexico, but instead are fairly illiterate people from more Indian-blooded places. This means that the “Indian Wars” of the US never ended, that in fact the nation most proudly boasting of democracy has “outsourced” its agriculture along racial and even border lines, and that if what our Mexican friends say is true, one day they will get fed up with rude treatment up there, and all leave en masse. Since more than 90% of all things agriculture – including and in particular restaurant work and food processing – are accomplished by Mexican hands, that famous “democracy” up there where 98.5% of the citizens are NOT employed in agriculture will have a hard time feeding themselves.

This provides great motivation for “official” sources to play both sides of the question. They don’t dare offend their outsourced agricultural class en masse and they know it. Therefore there would be good reason to drum up a disinformation war, convincing their agricultural class that things back home are insufferable when in fact it is heaven on earth for 99% of the country. Wish we could say that about the US, huh?

This and other aspects of what I can only think of as the native American/agricultural wars (including growing drug crops illicitly down south and hiring international support to “traffic” it northward) would provide significant explanation for the purely hallucinatory reports of Mexico being at war.

Our Mexican friends (I speak Spanish well enough to converse with those who don’t speak English) are even more peeved and fatigued than we are with the propaganda war, everyone glancing hither thither and yon trying to find evidence that some “mass movement” is afoot among the people along the lines of civil war, but aside from the drug thing, no one has a clue what the US media is talking about.

Finally one and all Mexicans seem to agree that up there it is very different in terms of sheer concentration of government forces. Up north if you consider all military and peripheral personnel, postal workers, all state, federal, county and municipal civil servants and the overweening bureaucratic classes such as forest service and bureau of land management personnel, perhaps you have a 1:2 if not 1:1 ratio among adults employed in some species of bureaucracy or government. Such a society is going to feel economic collapse like a heart attack.

Down here, conversely, what holds society together is extended family. US people, a vast pastiche of strangers to one another for the most part, could never get it. Most US people don’t know four families on their block, do they? Down here, imagine you were related by blood to 50% of the people on your block and another 49% by marriage, and it went on like that for 100’s of miles. They do things as a vast extended family. They don’t have vast social services, let alone rely on them. Perhaps in Mexico the citizen to bureaucrat ratio is something like 1:1,000 if not 1:10,000. Most Mexicans we’ve asked agree with the notion that if the entire government and bureaucracy were entirely abducted into outer space, much of Mexico would not know or sense the difference for weeks, if ever.

Don’t forget that it’s a myth that Spain conquered Mexico. True they dug into the valleys and fertile areas, as well as establishing mines, but they never went hells belles conquering all the Indians. There are still perhaps 15% of Mexico’s people up in the mountains hardly living any differently than they did 2,000 years ago. Funny, they don’t come down en masse begging for it to be different, either.

Mexico is the native American success story, the last hold-out. If you get along with extended families, you should do much better than up north with the pilgrims.