Días DeliZIHosas

The elections next door: Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals

Note: Link to article is good for 30 days after this post.

Thanks for posting the article. Risking one's life to run for office is shocking, but all too common these days. How long before the USA goes the same way?

We spent a few hours in that beautiful white church on the zocalo in San Juan Chamula 18 years ago. We'd taken a combi from San Cristobal de las Casas to Chamula, unaware that it was a major feast/fiesta day......(Feast of St. Stephen, maybe?)....and the zocalo was packed with villagers from miles around, the Tzotzil (Sp?) elders wearing those same sheepskin vests. Inside the church, which was jammed like sardines, a priest at the front was blessing animals....or maybe it was babies...the crowd was so thick and the air so smokey, we couldn't really tell. The church floor was covered with pine needles....and set amongst the bone-dry pine needles, on the floor, were lit candles. Talk about a fire trap! I think we were perhaps the only extranjeros in town. The fireworks out front of the church were very loud and very scary....not an OSHA rep in sight.
At one point we were walking along the sidewalk surrounding the zocalo...and blindly walked right through a circle of seated Tzotzil women performing some sort of ritual. We apologized profusely. The group simply nodded, obviously thinking "Oh, these ignorant gringos."
It was a truly fascinating experience, one we will never forget.