Mexico: As corpses stack up in narco-violence, president launches surreal TV tourism campaign

William Booth in the Washington Post covers a disastrous media juxtaposition that many of my internet-friends in Mexico have been talking about online today:

The timing couldn’t have been worse. As Mexican President Felipe Calderon was unveiling a new campaign and TV program Tuesday to draw wary tourists back to his country, a gang dumped 35 bodies at a busy intersection in the tourist zone in the coastal city of Veracruz.

One of those videos is here: "Mexico, the Royal Tour." To be fair, many in Mexico have been criticizing this surreal Presidential publicity campaign long before yesterday's Veracruz horror, which seems to be only the latest in an ongoing stream of horrors.

• [Jose Alberto Abreu]

  *Sigh* As they say around here… It is one thing for us to know that our president is an incompetent idiot… but for it to appear in BoingBoing and discussed worldwide!? It’s downright embarrasing!

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    The people of Mexico are awesome, however, and you’ll read me writing about that a lot here.

• [yahoo-OSDK2E7QPTRPANLPSNNUWJBUC4]

  Not so embarrassing as fortunate. Dirty laundry smells worse when it’s hid away out of some misguided idea of national pride or the defense of social status. I can imagine so many people thinking: if only all our problems could be solved by sitting on them until we forgot them.
  It is so like conservatives in Mexico to spout superficial commentary and leave off, as if that solved anything. You might as well have voted for him. I don’t mean to flame the previous poster, on the contrary, but that kind offhand dismissal of the roots of a problem is a major factor in the lack of development of social thought in Mexico.

  –Carlos Azabache

  • [Jose Alberto Abreu]

    tru dat.

• [Huwman]

  Silly, OTT, definitely grandiose, but it would need melting watches or flaming giraffes or something like that before I’d go with “surreal”. This seems to be the overused word of the moment though, kind of like the phrase “on acid” used to be.

• [Sofia Ortiz]

  I don’t know that it is that stupid of him. Calderón has made a lot of mistakes, but he’s not fundamentally a bad guy (at least not as much as 95% of his predecessors). I think the timing of this is more “weird” than “stupid”. Tourism is one of Mexico’s main sources of income, and the narcos are hitting hard at EVERYTHING they can get their hands on. The tourism industry has been hit particularly hard, and hundreds of thousands of people (at different levels of legality) work in that industry. This weird TV thing may seem an indirect way to fight chaos, but it’s better than pretend it’s all going to get better if we don’t move.
  The thing in Veracruz was particularly horrible, but I’d rather the President be doing his job as representative and administrative leader of Mexico than flying around to wherever horrible things happen and giving speeches after the fact, like a lot of politicians (including him) tend to do; as if saying some words and looking diplomatic helps anybody. He’s not a firefighter and he’s not a legislator, he’s the leader of the executive branch; he signs papers, pressures legislators, gives speeches and meets foreign dignitaries.
  Even if he’s the worst president we’ve ever had (which he is not), we Mexicans should rally behind the federal government at times like this. We’re terrible at doing that. It’s so much easier just to throw mud at each other…

  • [Cowa Ecdqemsd]

    felipe calderon is garbage and he knows it… the “thing in veracruz” is 35 people out of the 50,000 killings that he is responsible for. the narcos are hitting hard, because he allows them to do so.

• [yahoo-OSDK2E7QPTRPANLPSNNUWJBUC4]

  @de la Peña: I don’t think there is any sleight of hand in posting this, and that your anger is misdirected, not to mention disproportionate. Are you one of those trolls that gets his jollies posting nonsense in the Mexican newspapers all day long? @S. Ortiz: implying he is not a bad guy, when it seems easier to shoot people who enter the employ of the drug cartels due to social abandonment, lack of support and development of agriculture, lack of sufficient health care, and perhaps worst of all a hopelessly corrupt educational system which robs our youth of education and a healthy job market. Sometimes the incapacity to see that the best investment is in the general population and not in macroeconomics goes beyond being weird or stupid, it is socially irresponsible, and amoral. Even if it makes sense from a certain point of view (a horrid one in my personal opinion) to keep promoting tourism while carrying out a drug war, it certainly does not make sense in the face of the failure of the conservative agenda to recognize and face the country’s most grievous problems.

  –C. Azabache

  • [Antonio de la Peña]

    I see my comment was deleted.

    No I am not a troll.

    It saddens me that USA has a rate of violent murders per citizen comparable to Mexico’s “drug war” and let’s not start adding up the corpses in the Middle East, yet no one seems to think about that when making judgements.

    What I mean is, if it is dishonest of Calderón to promote Mexico as a tourist spot because there is a “drug war” -btw he’s never called it that- shouldn’t the USA close Disneyland until they are out of Afghanistan and Iraq and there are no mass murders in its land?

• [yri]

  They should really play up the “Mad Max” angle. We have a lot of pissed-off, out-of-work Americans with guns and V8s; the anarchy down there is the perfect chance for to go all thunderdome, blaze o’ glory, etc.

  (That being said, please don’t take my flippancy for a disregard of the horror of violence there or anywhere. It’s just that, well… oy.)

• [chaopoiesis]

  There’s one thing I’m certain of
  Return…
  I will…
  to old…
  BRAZIL

• [Susana Zavala]

  Wooooo there’s no way we Mexicans are proud of such stupidity…

  The point here is that even when we’re not happy with the way things are going on here, nobody does anything! This show is a sample of the in-consciousness we’re living on.

• [nsputnik]

  I was at the premier for this program (airing tonight on PBS) in Los Angeles last night.  Peter Greenberg and President Calderon were present.  They address narco violence within the first 3 minutes of the program.  I saw him in person and Calderon is such a likable guy.  Watch the program tonight and don’t be ignorant about Mexico.