English journalist Richard Grant fulfills a lifelong ambition to explore the last refuge of native Americans like Sitting Bull, Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, train robbers, and more recent drug cartels.
While reading this book, I kept thinking of that scene in Blazing Saddles where scheming railroad speculator Harvey Korman (played by the fabulous Hedley Lamarr) advertises for the nastiest criminals on earth to come work on the railroad 'protection' team). The long line of applicants included gangsters, Hell's Angels, Klansmen, terrorists of assorted persuasion, and all-around evil bastards. Apparently, when Lamarr was finished with them, they all settled in the Sierra Madre.
It's not the long-gone history of the place that scares me off, but the fact that Mexico's largest revenue earner, illegal drugs, are grown, processed, stored, and shipped from this region just south of their biggest market, the USA.
The murder rate in most of the dusty villages is 2-5 times that of America's most dangerous neighbourhoods. Local males are driven by crude machismo, greed, and the burning need to "honour" a murdered relative by murdering the murderer and/or his relatives.
Aside from the constant murder, maiming and rape, Grant tells of hard-as-nails horsemen who use scorpions to sting their knees to dull the pain of repeated falls.
The irony that all of this plays out against a backdrop of bedrock Catholicism and so-called Christian family values is not lost on me, and is worthy of Bill Maher's testiest tirades. How strange that the otherwise divine Felicia should have recommended the book to me.
Takeaway: don't visit the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico. Ever!
No comments:
Post a Comment