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Hound Dog

Apr 29, 2010, 9:06 AM

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The Dawg and the Tlaquepaque PÓlice Department

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Dawg has been pretty hard on the police in Chiapas recently having been been seriously and openly ripped off by local, state and federal officers in that state which I love but which has its own rules of behavior which have both good and bad aspects. Perhaps cops in Guadalajara and around Lake Chapala are not quite as openly and fiercely corrupt but those Chiapas based cops are a piece of work. That doesn´t mean you should fear traveling there but it does mean that you should have certain expectations.

I would define the situation in Mexico´s poorest state bordering Guatemala as:

The corruption is fine as long as it works to your benefit which it usually does unless you are of indigenous heritage (and in an indigenous community - these matters are somewhat complex) but if it starts to work against your personally valued interests, it can work against you in a manner that may result in your entering the "gulag" perhaps to become a guest of the "underworld" for an indeterminate period of time.

This is difficult to talk about because Dawg grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in a part of the deep south in the U.S. corrupted by poverty and racial politics but I will try. If you live in a political entity corrupted for political, social or economic reasons and you are the beneficiary of that corruption then you actually like it. It is only when the system turns againt you or annoys you that you do not like it.

We were becoming a bit cynical about Mexican law enforcement after having had some unfortunate experiences with those folks in Chiapas although the results of that corruption were ambiguous to say the least but let´s not go there because the results of the corruption were both good and bad from our perspective so let´s leave it at that.

We were pissing and moaning about corruption and thievery in Mexico when, early this morning, we got up in the dark so I could drive my wife and her friend to the Guadalajara Central Bus Station in Tlaquepaque and they could take an express bus to Oaxaca. Since we just returned from Chiapas, which is far east from Jalisco, we expected the sun to come up under EDT at 6:00AM but in Jalisco the sun comes up around 7:00AM so we found ourselves lost in the pitch-black dark in Tlaquepaque from having taken the wrong freeway exit and with 20 minutes to get to the central bus station in time for the Oaxaca express bus. Those of you who have only been to Tlaquepaque to shop on its main drag may not know this but that town can be pretty hairy and impossibly complex to navigate in the dark so we were hopelessly lost.

At that time we came upon a Tlaquepaque municipal police patrol car with its roof lights flashing and two rough looking cops seemingly in a confrontation with somebody but we needed help badly and stopped, against our better judgment, to ask them for help in finding the central bus terminal. After our Chiapas experience, we would not have been surprised if they had robbed us at gunpoint. Those two guys could not have been nicer to three foreigners lost in what was obviously a tough Tlaquepaque slum and asked us to follow them on an impossibly circuitous route to the Tlaquepaque Guadalajara Central Bus Terminal with roof lights flashing and other drivers avoiding us like the plague.

Sometimes it is inappropriate to paint all with one brush.

(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Apr 29, 2010, 8:58 PM)