POBRE MEXICO, TAN CIRCA DE ESTADOS UNIDOS Y TAN LEJOS DE DIOS

Any lover of Mexico and its grand culture would know the above quote attributed to Gen. Porfirio Diaz. 

First they took the land away, Texas and California among them. 

Like the Tohono O’odham elder said:

One day we were Mexican and the next we were Americans.

It was not their land to give away or take.

My close friend among the Mexican Kickapoo, Mena, said to me: When we were in Nacimiento, we were not Mexicans but we were Kickapoo, and now that we live in Eagle Pass, Texas, we are not Americans but still Kickapoo..

I have long admired Mexico and Mexicans; when I was a Medical Student I used to spend weekends in Merida, Yucatan where I learned the topography of the country, the sadness of the defeated Mayans, and the exuberance of the newcomers who sold Kibbeh in their eateries and the ever-present dance and song and music of Saturday evenings.

One thing I did notice on my repeated visits, the last one being on the 24th June 2006, when a sudden telephone call summoned me to Paris, which was to enslave me for the next six years, the bodies of the Mexicans were changing. Cafes and places where somnolent Yucatecans nursing their beers wept over their lugubrious music were ubiquitous, then the American Style establishments began, McDonalds replacing the corner taquerias.. Sad music giving away to the thud of the tex-mex music that promoted Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola.

(for the sake of the Tzotzil Indians of San Juan de Chamula, avoid any of the above chemical substances)

Soon the corpulent Mexicans were consuming more Coca Cola and Fizzy drinks than anyone else on earth, becoming bigger and soon , like the ghosts returning on the Dia de los muertos, Diabetes, Heart Disease began stalking the once jolly Mexican population.

I sat in the corner cafe, looking at the crooked tower of the cathedral, on to the Zocalo where multiple love seats entertained young Mayan women in huipiles, sadly reminding myself of the poem by Pablo Neruda...

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parcelled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the ’Banana Republics’
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Yes Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola divided the world, like they did at the Treaty of Tordesillas..

Treaty of Tordesillas. Treaty of Tordesillas, (June 7, 1494), agreement between Spain and Portugal aimed at settling conflicts over lands newly discovered or explored by Christopher Columbus and other late 15th-century voyagers.

There in the depths of the state of Chiapas, not far from the square of San Cristobal de las casas where once I stood mesmerized listening to the piped music in the square, it was Cesaria Evora and my younger brother was with me, there is the village of San Juan de Chamula

Now blessed with the Coca Cola church where drunken “chamans” offer you a cleansing ceremony for a few pesos, the obesity rate and the death rate from Diabetes ranks one of the highest in the world. The poor Tzotzil Indian enlarging like a balloon drinking this vile substance which is cheaper than water, not available every day because of the decreasing water supply, have made them fat and fatter and the God of Coca Cola and its parent company FEMSA which gave us Vicente Fox, its ex-CEO as President of the Republic of Mexico.

(photo of the "coca cola" church of San Juan de Chamula, pre coke days and post coca cola days)

Oh Poor Mexico, so close to the United States and so far away from God!

But you have become closer to one of the Gods of the USA, Coca Cola and you drink more of it than any one else on earth which poisons your Indian veins and leads you to limp on your amputated feet.

From New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/world/americas/mexico-coca-cola-diabetes.html

I see that FEMSA has expanded into Colombia and no wonder they hunt down the innocent Indians of the Amazon, to offer as sacrifice to their Celestial Obese Master of the Yuma!

Oh Pobre Mexico…