Photo: Sedena

Taking a page from the A-Team, drug cartels of Mexico are creating their own DIY, Mad Max (Mad Mex?)-styled armored vehicles. This one above was captured in a metalworking shop:

The completed versions were bigger than what has been found before. Built on three-axle truck beds, they had room for 20 armed men, one official said. They were covered with inch-thick steel, which could withstand 50-caliber fire, and each had been equipped with insulation.

The Mexican Army wasn't impressed, though that may not be the point of these monsters-on-wheels:

The Mexican Army officials do not seem particularly intimidated. They have criticized the machines for being difficult to maneuver, noting that they are designed to frighten rivals.

But for most Mexicans, the mere sight of the seized narco-rhino monsters in military photographs offers a stark reminder that in the battle against crime here there is no place more dangerous than Mexico’s roads.

Link | More Narco Tanks at Telstar Logistics

In 1940, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark performed the groundbreaking "doll experiments" study on children's attitudes on race using white and black dolls (the study was repeated in 2005 and documented by Kiri Davis in the film A Girl Like Me). The study showed how minorities view themselves in respect to racial stereotypes.

Recently, the Mexican government released a YouTube video on racism in Mexico - which brought a lot of comments on this thorny question: is Mexico an inherently racist society?

The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the "good doll" or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them.

One child in the video with mixed-race features says the white doll resembled him "in the ears."

"Which doll is the good doll?" a woman's voice asks the child.

"I am not afraid of whites," he responds, pointing to the white doll. "I have more trust."

Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, in mid-December began circulating the video, modeled on the 1940s Clark experiments in the United States. The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.

Daniel Hernandez of The Los Angeles Times reports: Link

2012 may be the end of the world, but that won't stop Mexico from cashing in on the whole Mayan apocalypse prophecy thing!

The country's tourism agency, which stressed it does not itself believe the world will end, hopes to attract 52 million visitors to southeastern areas that were the heart of Mayan territory over the course of next year. The whole of the country usually attracts 22 million visitors annually.

More than 500 Mayan-themed events have been planned including ceremonies with Mayan priests performing rituals, burning incense and chanting.

In the jungle near Cancun messages and photographs will be placed in a "time capsule" and buried.

The town of Chiapas, on the Guatemalan border, is installing an 8ft digital clock in its main park which will count down to the much anticipated date.

Link

Santo or “the Saint” is “one of the most famous and iconic of all Mexican luchadores” Over his life he produced numerous B-Horror/Action films for Mexican cinemas. In 1972 he may have made his greatest film ever. Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, the plot is fairly straight forward. The wrestlers stop in Guanajuato and all the mummies come alive to attack them. Obviously. (There is a motive. Something about one of the mummies avenging his defeat by Santo’s grandfather… or something…)

The film proved to Santo’s most successful, and the mummies even got their own series, starring in such films as Robbery Of The Mummies and Castle Of The Mummies.

Atlas Obscura has clips from the movie, in which the real mummies appear, but they do not perform in action sequences -they have real live stunt doubles for that. Link

If you're wondering why the roads in Nogales, Arizona, near the border with Mexico are riddled with square, symmetrical patches, the answer is that those are the visible remnants of drug smugglers' newest creativity: temporary drug smuggling tunnels!

In the latest innovation uncovered by law enforcement, smugglers in the border town of Nogales, Arizona were bringing drugs into the U.S. for the cost of a quarter.

The parking meters on International Street, which hugs the border fence in Nogales, cost 25 cents. Smugglers in Mexico tunneled under the fence and under the metered parking spaces, and then carefully cut neat rectangles out of the pavement. Their confederates on the U.S. side would park false-bottomed vehicles in the spaces above the holes, feed the meters, and then wait while the underground smugglers stuffed their cars full of drugs from below.

When the exchange was finished, the smugglers would use jacks to put the pavement "plugs" back into place. The car would drive away, and only those observers who were looking closely would notice the seams in the street.

Link

Think that the guy driving next to you on the I-95 is bad? Well, he's Mr. Good Driver compared to the lawless drivers of Mexico.

Here's a scary statistics from The Economist:

SIX out of ten road deaths worldwide take place in just 12 countries, one of which is Mexico. Dented doors and battered bumpers are backed up by official figures: every year some 24,000 people lose their lives on Mexico’s potholed roads, almost double the number that die at the hands of its drug mafias. A further 600,000 are injured. The World Health Organisation reckons that, along with mountainous Peru and misgoverned Venezuela, Mexico has the most dangerous roads in Latin America.

In Mexico’s case the main problem is the drivers. Fourteen of Mexico’s 32 states, home to just over half the population, grant licences without setting a practical driving test. Three of those 14 run compulsory courses which students pass merely by attending. Five others have multiple-choice written exams, but they are not very hard. For example: “If on entering the vehicle we find the windscreen dirty”, one (incorrect) option is “to drive fast to clean it”. In six areas, including Mexico City, there is no compulsory training or test of any sort. Applicants in the capital need only pay 604 pesos ($45). [...]

Mexico was not always so freewheeling. Until the 1990s driving tests were near-universal, but it took unusual robustness of character to pass without paying a bribe. Rather than tackle corruption, some states simply abolished the test. Others followed suit in order to attract applicants (and income) from out-of-state residents.

Link (Illustration: Claudio Munozs)

If you’re looking to plan a creepy vacation for Halloween time, the BBC has you covered with this wonderful article documenting some of the scariest spots on earth. Pictured is the Island of the Dolls.

Lying off the canals of La Xochimilco, in Mexico, is a chinampa (floating garden) covered with the hundreds of dolls. Gathered by Don Julian Santana Barrera who scrounged rubbish piles, the dolls were hung from trees to keep away evil spirits and remember the drowning death of a young girl. According to Barrera, the dolls he planted and hung around the chinampa were still alive, but forgotten by their owners. While alive, Barrera would move the dolls around the island from different trees, creating a chilling sight. The chinampa is accessible by boat and the dolls are still around, despite Barrera’s death in 1992.

Personally, I’d love to visit any of these spots, but I’m a bit morbid.

Link Image Via SkilliShots [Flickr]

Shown above is the voice of an everyday hero from Juárez, a city suffering from violence propelled by the Mexican Drug War. From MIT’s Center for Civic Media, Crónicas de Héroes attempts to bring optimism to cities by sharing the stories of everyday people who do good. It’s a bit reminiscent of foursquare in it’s social capabilities, and is inspiring in its brilliance.

Link -via Boing Boing

Photo: INAH

When archaologists lowered a small camera into an unexplored Maya pyramid, they saw this fascinating image: a 1,500-year-old blood-red funeral chamber.

The tomb was discovered in 1999, though researchers have been unable to get inside due to the precarious structural state of the pyramid above. Any effort to penetrate the tomb could damage the contents within, according to the team, which is affiliated with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Instead, the archaeologists lowered the 1.6-by-2.4-inch (4-by-6-centimeter) camera through a 6-inch-wide (15-centimeter-wide) hole in an upper floor of the pyramid.

National Geographic has more photos: Link

Mexican archaeologists have discovered a Prehispanic grave site they believe to be Mayan in the state of Tabasco. Estimated to be around 1200 years old and containing 116 bodies, this is the largest group of skeletons found in the region. The area was thought to have been used as a cemetery, with the elite buried in a separate area from their companions, and skeletons found with dental inlays, cranial deformation and other body modifications. Read more about it at ArtDaily.

Link

“I’ll say right off the bat that I’m a conservative – I believe in hard work and I believe our border needs to be secure,” says Debbie Loop, whose 15-acre citrus farm is on both sides of the fence. “But when they signed this fence into law, nobody stopped to think Texas isn’t Arizona or California. Our border does not run dirt to dirt. Any idiot could have told them that. My grandchildren now live on the wrong side. Who is going to protect them? Who protects me when I’m in my orchards after dusk? I just want to work hard and earn a living. But they’ve changed this place forever.”

Link -via Metafilter

And by “extremely”, I mean points about 2-7 feet long extending beyond the toes.

This video, which is voiced in Spanish but subtitled in English, is from the web series Behind the Seams. It describes the emerging Mexican fashion trend of wearing boots with very long points, which is closely affiliated with the Tribal music and dance scene.

via Nerdcore | Show Website (warning: auto-sound)

In the years leading up to the Civil War, many Northerners and Southerners alike wanted the federal government to take a more aggressive approach to acquiring new territory. In fact, some private citizens, known as filibusters, took matters into their own hands. They raised small armies illegally; ventured into Mexico, Cuba, and South America; and attempted to seize control of the lands. One particularly successful filibuster, William Walker, actually made himself president of Nicaragua and ruled from 1856 to 1857.

For the most part, these filibusters were just men in search of adventure. Others, however, were Southern imperialists who wanted to conquer new territories in the tropics. Abolitionist forces in the North greatly opposed their efforts, and the debate over Southern expansion only increased tensions in a divided nation. As the country drifted into war, U.S. Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky warned that “the Southern states cannot afford to be shut off from all possibility of expansion towards the tropics by the hostile action of the federal government.”

But Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 put an end to the argument. The anti-slavery president refused to compromise, and war broke out in April 1861.

CONFEDERATE COLONIES, SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Winning the war was clearly a higher priority for the Confederacy than conquering Latin America, but growth was certainly on the post-war agenda. Confederate president Jefferson Davis made sure the Confederate constitution included the the right to expand, and he filled his cabinet with men who thought similarly. He even hinted that the slave trade could be revived in “new acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”

During the Civil War, Confederate agents attempted to destabilize Mexico so that its territories would be easy to snatch up after the war. One rebel emissary to Mexico City, John T. Pickett, secretly fomented rebellion in several Mexican provinces with an eye to “the permanent possession of that beautiful country.” Pickett’s mission ended in failure in 1861, but fate dealt the South a better hand in 1863. French Emperor Napoleon III seized Mexico, and the move provided the South with the perfect excuse to “liberate” the country after the Civil War.

Of course, Mexico was just part of the pie the South hoped to inherit. Confederate leaders also had their eyes squarely on Brazil -a country of nearly 4 million square miles and more than 8 million people. Prior to the outbreak of the war, U.S. Naval Academy founder Matthew Maury dispatched two Navy officers to the Amazon basin, ostensibly to map the river for shipping. Instead, they were secretly plotting domination and collecting data about separatist movements in the region. When the South lost the war, Maury refused to abandon his plans. He helped 20,000 ex-rebels flee to Brazil, where they established the Confederate colonies of New Texas and Americana. To this day, hundreds of descendants of the Confederados still gather outside Americana to celebrate their shared heritage of rocking chairs and sweet potato pie. In a strange way, a part of the Old South still survives -thousands of miles below the U.S. border.

(Image source: Os Confederados)

__________________________

The above article is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Hierve el Agua in Oaxaca, Mexico looks like a beautiful waterfall, but it’s not moving. Ice? No, this illusion is actually a rock formation, made of minerals left behind by dripping water. The white that makes it look like water is calcium carbonate, just one of many minerals that make up Hierve el Agua, which means “the water boils”. Read about how this happened and see many more pictures at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Wikipdia user Lavintzin)

Critics contend that the law will lead to racial profiling. Even Mexican President Felipe Calderón has blasted the law as violating basic human rights.

Whether you agree with the law or not, here’s the point of this post: it turns out that despite its bluster, Mexico actually has very similar laws on its book against the country’s own Honduran illegal immigrants!

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said the law "violates inalienable human rights" and Democrats in Congress applauded Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s criticisms of the law in a speech he gave on Capitol Hill last week.

Yet Mexico’s Arizona-style law requires local police to check IDs. And Mexican police freely engage in racial profiling and routinely harass Central American migrants, say immigration activists. [...]

"There (in the United States), they’ll deport you," Hector Vázquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, said as he rested in a makeshift camp with other migrants under a highway bridge in Tultitlán. "In Mexico they’ll probably let you go, but they’ll beat you up and steal everything you’ve got first."

Chris Hawley of USA Today has the full story: Link (Photo: Sergio Solache/USA Today)

Photo: Shaul Schwarz

If you’re a drug-runner in Mexico with powerful enemies, or an innocent citizen horrified by the increasingly gruesome turf battles between the cartels, you might well turn to religion for supernatural protection. A new breed of spiritual guardians have cropped up to fill this need, but you won’t find these characters in any Lives of the Saints.

The most popular is a female deity called La Santa Muerte, represented by a skeleton in long robes who carries a reaper’s sycthe. Anoher is Jesus Malverde, a 19th c. outlaw who may not actually have existed but has shrines in his honor and is often depicted with an AK47.

Alma Guillermoprieto reported on the rise of these cults in the May issue of National Geographic, with photos by Shaul Schwarz.

El Niño and Antonio say that La Santa Muerte will grant your prayers—but only in exchange for payment, and that payment must be proportional to the size of the miracle requested, and the punishment for not meeting one’s debt to her is terrible.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

5. Cinco de Mayo must be HUGE in Mexico! Not really. While the Batalla de Puebla helped to unify Mexico around one event, the major celebrations of Cinco de Mayo has largely been contained to the village of Puebla, about 100 miles east of Mexico City, where the original battle took place. In reality, Cinco de Mayo is much more popular in America, where citizens of Mexican descent (and those who just like a good margarita) hold festivals from sea to shining sea.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Link -via the Presurfer

Ever wonder if it’s even possible for the average Joe to race Rally Car these days?  With a little perseverance and a little luck the answer is yes!

Professional motorsport is a cold, hard place. If you want to run with the big dogs, you can’t just build a car in your mom’s garage and show up, right? Wrong. One guy did just that. Here’s his amazing story.

This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a crapcan off Craigslist to run against $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It’s the story of a gearhead who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned event.

Link – via jalopnik

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by jaredh.

Photo: Carsten Peter, Speleoresearch & Films

A geological wonder of immense proportions and intense beauty can be found in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico… 1000+ feet below the surface.  Mentioned on Neatorama before for the photographic wowness, the Cueva de los Cristales - the Giant Crystal Cave – is also one of the most deadly environments on the planet.

For his BBC series How Earth Made Us, filmmaker Paul Williams discovered firsthand the scorching heat and toxic setting that has kept humans away from the crystal phenomenon.  ”The coolest part of the caves is your lungs and so moist air starts to accumulate in them… leading to respiratory difficulties.”

Cueva de los Cristales is the incarnation of our most awesome science fiction imaginations – Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. At about the same time as humans first ventured out of Africa, these crystals began to slowly grow. For half a million years they remained protected and nurtured by a womb of hot hydrothermal fluids rich with minerals.

It wasn’t until 2001 that miners, searching for lead, eventually penetrated the cave wall and brought it to light. [...]  My hope is that Gonzalo will prevail in his mission to secure funding and to preserve this site as a world heritage monument. To me they are a testament to the hidden forces of the planet, forces which operate on scales far beyond our own.

Link to Story.  Experience the caves in this Video.  (via Dark Roasted Blend)

(YouTube Link)

“With this speed bump, people will feel rewarded for obeying the law,” says Carlos Cano, the company’s president.

The technology is relatively basic: The speed bump is formed by two steel plates that form a triangle sticking out of the pavement. When a car tire touches the plate, a patented device under the triangle measures the force of the impact.

If the tire’s impact is gentle enough — that is, if the vehicle is traveling slowly — both plates immediately collapse into the ground under the weight of the car.

Link via DVICE | Image: Sergio Solache, USA Today

Image: The Cellar

The Axolotl is a rare type of salamander, closely related to the Tiger Salamander species.  They are about 9 inches long on average, and carnivorous.  The cute critters are only native to central Mexico’s Lake Xochomilco, and yes – they are edible, and used to be a staple in the Aztec diet; but they are highly endangered due to the expansion of Mexico City.

They are, on the other hand, highly bred in captivity due to their value in research.

Axolotls are especially easy to breed compared to other salamanders in their family, which are almost never captive bred due to the demands of terrestrial life. One attractive feature for research is the large and easily manipulated embryo, which allows viewing of the full development of a vertebrate. Axolotls are used in heart defect studies due to the presence of a mutant gene that causes heart failure in embryos.

Cellar Image of the Day
Link to Axotls site
Wiki
More photos

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2009/10/16/axolotl-salamanders/feed/ 7 http://www.neatorama.com/2009/08/31/mexico-goes-for-thriller-record/ http://www.neatorama.com/2009/08/31/mexico-goes-for-thriller-record/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:18:55 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=25903
(YouTube link)

Thousands of people turned out for an attempt to break the world record for the number of people doing a simultaneous Thriller dance in Mexico City. Organizer Javier Hildago says 12,937 participated on Saturday, which would have been Michel Jackson’s 51st birthday. Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records will take some time to determine whether all those people completed the entire dance routine. The current official record is 242 dancers from the College of William & Mary. Link

Link Via Weird Stuff News

The project results in one crime bust in the six week it has been on, but it was a biggie: "virtual deputies" spotted three suspects trying to smuggle 540 pound of marijuana across the border. According to Wired:

The exact location of the cameras is not disclosed, but according to a press release about the project, "a significant number of Texas landowners" requested that the cameras be placed on their property.

More than 21,000 people from several states, including as far away as Ohio, have signed up to be virtual deputies so far. BlueServo claims its web site has received more than 5 million hits, resulting in about 1,000 e-mail reports of suspicious activity. The average camera watcher spends about eight minutes on the site examining video.

What do virtual deputies get in return for their efforts?

Aside from the satisfaction of knowing they’ve done their part to combat crime, they get the opportunity to become targeted consumers.

Link | Here’s the webcam: BlueServo – via Attuworld

Past articles have included the gruesome tale of drug boss dissolving the bodies of his enemies in vats of lye and the tale of a legendary kingpin who picks up the tab of everyone dining at the restaurant he happens to eat in.

In the latest article of the series, Tracy Wilkinson writes about Yudit del Rincon, an anti-drug crusader and state legislator from Sinaloa, who had a brilliant idea:

Yudit del Rincon, a 44-year-old lawmaker, went before the state legislature this year with a proposition: Let’s require lawmakers to take drug tests to prove they are clean.

Her colleagues greeted the idea with applause. Then she sprang a surprise on them: Two lab technicians waited in the audience to administer drug tests to every state lawmaker. We should set the example, she said.

They nearly trampled one another in the stampede to the door, Del Rincon recalled.

Link

(Photo: Don Bartletti/LA Times)

Once he had stopped, the woman walked up and told him an accomplice was pointing a gun at him, said David Perales, a spokesman for state investigators.

She then tied him up with packing tape, super-glued his hands to the steering wheel of his truck and demanded money. Carrizales didn’t have any cash, but the woman took his credit cards and fled.

"He probably thought it was his lucky day when he saw the woman in the miniskirt, but was surprised when she tied him up," Perales said.

With his motor still running and his hands still glued to the wheel, Carrizales managed to drive a few miles (kilometers) down the road until he found a police officer to help him.

Link

Japanese citizen, Hiroshi Nohara, has decided to live in the Mexico City airport for 3 months and with apparently no reason. Since September 2, his home has been in the terminal and he has survived off food and clothing donations from travelers and airport shops lookin for advertising. In his own words, he claims to have no reason for staying so long:

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. “I don’t have a reason.”

He is now a minor celebrity in the city, as his refusal to go home has ignited the city’s imagination. Neither Mexican or Japanese authorities have been able to help persuade him to leave and he may stay put until his visa runs out in Early March.

Link Via Tokyo Mango