It’s getting hot here in Monterrey, and if you’ve been reading my column lately, you know I’m not talking about the weather. Remember about the surge of military presence in the state I wrote about? Well I got to witness…
March 6th, 2009 | Comments (49)
I saw that the US government posted an “extreme warning” travel advisory about Mexico last week and wanted to weigh in on the bullshit. If you’re traveling to Culiacan or Acapulco, or any major Mexican city for that matter, you…
February 26th, 2009 | Comments (35)
This is a video of shootout that happened a few days ago (the same day the international bridge into America was blocked in Reynosa), that Yasha Levine sent along, asking me to decipher what the hell is going on. Well,…
February 23rd, 2009 | Comments (19)
MONTERREY, MEXICO — Kidnapping and Mexico, they go together like beans and rice. There has always been a kidnapping industry in Mexico. It’s not for nothing that we have become the kidnapping capital of the world. Yep, that’s a true,…
February 3rd, 2009 | Comments (30)
Pancho Montana is an eXiled Special Mexican War on Drugs Correspondent. As a native of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, located in northern Mexico, Mr. Montana lives in Gulf Cartel territory. That means the streets belong to the Zetas, a paramilitary organization…
January 26th, 2009 | Comments (19)
Today’s Topic: In semi-praise of Down by the River. Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: As we have ruled earlier, there are few good books. Down by the River by Charles Bowden, a meandering and disorganized collection of facts, soundbites and…
January 21st, 2009 | Comments (16)
Miss Drug Universe 2008: Laura Elena Zúñiga On Monday night, Mexican police nabbed Laura Elena Zúñiga Huizar, a 23-year-old babe named “Miss Sinaloa 2008.” Ms. Zúñiga, who also holds the title of “Queen of Latin America 2008,” was traveling in…
December 23rd, 2008 | Comments (4)
War on Drugs Blowback: A bullet-riddled body found stuffed upside down in pot used to cook pork… A body tied to a fence in front of a police station… Reporters wearing bullet-proof vests… 4,500 dead in one year…Dozens executed in…
November 27th, 2008 | Leave Comment
Today’s Defendant: Mike Williams, resident of Douglas, Arizona Statement from the Grand Inquisitor: Hard-working people all across Mexico are busting their asses for American consumers. No, we are not talking about the migrant workers cleaning your dishes, picking your grapes…
November 4th, 2008 | Comments (2)
Seems like I ought to do something religious today, so I picked a battle from the the ultimate military expression of religious devotion: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe’s way of debating the Catholic vs. Protestant thing by counting corpses.
Somebody with a face finally died in Libya. His name was Tim Hetherington, an Oxford literature graduate who made that documentary Restrepo about an Afghan base.
Stories about the riots in Northern Nigeria are starting to come in, full of amazing details and ridiculous lies. The lies are the first thing you notice.
One of the strange things about this war in Libya is how slowly it’s moving.
Today we’ve got election riots in Northern Nigeria, a military mutiny in Burkina Faso, and massacres in Ivory Coast. They look like separate stories, but they’re not. It’s all one story, a long, slow war between the coastal christianized people…
Today I wanted to talk about the great nominations y’all provided last week when I asked for people’s favorite war books.
Battle of Rich Mountain: McClellan Wimpout Preview Lately I’ve been reading soldiers’ memoirs, mostly from the Western Theater of the Civil War. A lot of them are by Ohio men, and you realize quickly that Grant wasn’t so unique. He…
