Word: mexican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky's actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it's 2010, Mexico's bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico's 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico's bloody, decade-long War of Independence...
...Mexican insurrections often do coincide with important dates. Most recently, Zapatista guerrillas in the poor southern state of Chiapas started a revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the day the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A big fear now is that Mexico's drug cartels, responsible for almost 15,000 killings in the past decade, are lending their resources and firepower to emerging guerrilla groups. If so, their plan may be to sow bicentennial terror and turn Mexicans against President Felipe Calderón's drug-war offensive. This past fall authorities say they seized an arsenal of large...
Aside from inflated drug and guerrilla violence, another specter is unrest resulting from Mexico's deflated economy. Given its enormous reliance on the U.S. market - and on remittances from Mexican workers there, which have declined sharply this year - the global recession has hit Mexico especially hard. Its GDP, in fact, will contract more than 5% in 2009, exacerbating unemployment as well as Mexico's chronic poverty. A report this year by the Colegio de Mexico, one of the country's top universities, warned, "A national social explosion is knocking at the door." Said top Roman Catholic Bishop Gustavo Rodriguez...
...year and make 2010 "a moment of peaceful transformation." Last month, he predicted next year will see "Mexico on a different trajectory toward development and progress." Calderón tried to get the ball rolling this month with a major political reform proposal that would allow re-election for Mexican office holders like mayors and legislators, a change he insists will give voters more power. It would still limit Presidents to one six-year term; but the move is significant, especially on the eve of 2010, because the ban on re-election was a pillar of the 1910 revolution...
...said bluntly that the idea of gay marriage was "stupidity." And Armando Martinez, head of Mexico's Catholic Lawyers College said the law would provoke a backlash against gays that the assembly would be responsible for. "The promoters of this law are promoters of homophobia," he said. "Why? Because Mexican culture is not ready for these things and they can release a level of homophobia that no one will be able to stop." (See what gay marriage activists are planning to do after their defeat in Maine...