By Carlos Harrison

That’s the hope, anyway, for a growing group of Latino activists trying to separate the distinctly Hispanic holiday from the grip of its ubiquitous image as a drunken fiesta.

Go ahead, Google “Cinco de Mayo” and see how many pages of bar and drinking party ads you have to wade through before you happen across an alcohol-free event. “Drinko de Mayo” turns up a quick 10 pages worth of listings. The national restaurant chain Howl at the Moon is hosting “Drinko” events from Hollywood, Calif., to Baltimore, Md., and 10 other locations in between.

And, apparently not willing to cede its claim on drinking festivals to Spanish-speaking interlopers, an Irish Pub in Sacramento issued an invite to fete its “O’Drinko de Mayo 2013,” complete with $3 margaritas, $2 tequila shots and the decidedly non-Irish staple of $2 tacos.

There’s even a Living Social half-priced offer for entry plus two drink tickets for “delicious beverages like Corona and margaritas” in the nation’s capital. “Enough!” say proponents of a Cinco that celebrates its cultural roots, without the booze. The Cinco de Mayo Con Orgullo Coalition was one of the first to launch a Cinco sans alcohol campaign, beginning in San Diego in 2001.

The object is to bring the community together

“The mission of hosting these Cinco de Mayo festivals is to bring the community together,” said Orgullo Prevention Specialist Claudia Baltazar, “and also to send out the message we don’t need to have alcohol or sponsorship from the alcohol industry to celebrate a cultural celebration like this is.”

It’s easy to see how what is really an American tradition with a Mexican flair got its boozy reputation.

It started with Mexican-Americans on the U.S. side of the border cheering for the surprising Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla. That was in 1862, when outnumbered Mexican troops defeated invaders from what was, at the time, the greatest army in the world—the French.

Profit-minded alcohol companies

The Bacchanalian drunk-fest concept came about over 100 years later, thanks to profit-minded alcohol companies. Chicano groups revived the Cinco events as a cultural celebration in the turbulent 1960’s. Twenty years later, when local groups went looking for cash to fund the commemorations, the liquor and beer folks jumped at the chance to connect with the booming Hispanic market.

They wound up co-opting the commemoration and turning the celebration of the Mexican victory into a win for the alcohol industry, fueled with mass quantities of tequila and beer.

But the effort is facing a backlash in Latino communities across the country. There are now liquor-less Cinco events, large and small, from San Diego to Boston.

One of the largest is held in Sonoma County, Calif., at the Roseland Cinco de Mayo Festival, where local leaders sought a family-friendly and safe way to celebrate a day of Mexican pride. Last year, an estimated 12,000 attended. This year, its eighth, they’re hoping for even more.

“We definitely made it very clear from the onset that we did not want to allow any alcohol because we just felt that was the last thing this type of event, in this area, needed,” said one of the festival’s founders and continuing advisor, Rene Meza. “We obviously missed out on lots of financial support, but that’s OK.”

And while the increase in venues and size of the events is still slow-going, Baltazar sees encouragement in the very fact that they are spreading despite the millions and billions the alcohol industry can invest in advertising.

“It’s great to hear that other cities and states are doing it for Cinco de Mayo,” she said. “People are starting to realize bringing alcohol to a community event is not a good idea.”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Born in Panama, Carlos has covered local, national and international events on TV, in print and online from Miami for more than 20 years, and in New York as the deputy managing editor of People en Español. He has written 14 books in English and Spanish.

[Image courtesy Howl At The Moon]

By Latino Rebels

Yesterday CBS’ “Sunday Morning” did a seven-minute segment about a war that is rarely talked about: the Mexican-American War. It is a war that literally changed the landscape of the North American continent. It is a war whose consequences still resonate today. A war based on a lie.

As the show’s official site says: “For the U.S., the Mexican-American War expanded its territory as a victory of manifest destiny; for Mexicans, the “American Invasion” still stirs emotions 165 years later. Mo Rocca traveled to Mexico City and the site of the Battle of Chapultepec to learn about a ‘forgotten war’ that helped determine the fate of North America.” Here is the whole segment, in case you missed it.

This article was first published in Latino Rebels.

The Latino Rebels are a collective of social media influentials, bloggers, marketers, journalists, poets, writers, producers, photographers, and marketers. We use humor, commentary, opinions, independent stories, cross-links to others blogs, and our social media platforms to share our universe. 

[Image by Latino Rebels]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

It’s early April and Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde, 68, arrives in McAllen where he will be the keynote speaker at a migrant smuggling and human trafficking conference. He shoulders a worn Amnesty International bag stuffed with paperwork, his Bible, and his passport. Solalinde is accompanied by a quiet, watchful man with dark eyes. He is just one of the priest’s four bodyguards. The rest wait in Mexico where Solalinde has received a series of death threats.

Father Solalinde is not well known in the United States. But when he visited neighboring Matamoros— a Mexican border city wracked by gun battles and kidnappings—a day earlier, people rushed to hug and touch the humble priest as if he were a talisman. They jockey for position in the crowd to snap photos with him. In Mexico, he is recognized for his bravery. He dares to speak out about corrupt government officials, organized crime and even the Catholic Church, which Solalinde argues hasn’t done enough to fight poverty and violence, which are at the root of the massive migration north—a great outpouring of the poor and brutalized, which he calls a “humanitarian disaster.”

Solalinde founded his migrant shelter Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers on the Road) near a busy railway junction used by migrants in 2007 in Ixtepec, Oaxaca.  It was a precipitous moment. President Felipe Calderon had launched the drug war in 2006, sending military troops into cities and towns to battle the drug cartels. Trafficking organizations were branching out becoming multi-billion-dollar global corporations. The brutal Los Zetas and other gangsters began to refer to the mostly Central and South American migrants who sought refuge in Solalinde’s shelter as their merchandise.

The world turned upside down. Priests began to fear for their lives and the criminals flaunted their power. The first death threat came shortly after he opened the shelter, says Solalinde.  “It was a Zeta kidnapping migrants. We started protecting the migrants at the shelter. One of my assistants took a picture of the kidnapper. He said ‘you take a picture again and I am going to shoot you here,’” Solalinde points at his forehead.

The well-worn pathways north to the American Dream are fiercely divided and protected. Organized crime and corrupt officials demand their cut from anyone passing through their territories. Every step of the migrants’ route has a price.  It is a feudal arrangement. A migrant must pay corrupt transit cops and organized crime $100 for the right to cling to the top of a dilapidated freight car as it rolls through their territory. When the migrants arrive at the next station they pay another cop $100. “God help you if you can’t pay, because then the criminals take you,” says Solalinde. “They violate the women. The migrants are kidnapped, held for ransom.”

At his shelter, Solalinde provides food, shelter and medical care. “It’s as if they were programmed and nothing can convince them that they should change their path,” he says of the people who come to his shelter. “ I tell them ‘don’t go. They’re going to kidnap you.’ And they tell me, ‘we’ll make it with the help of God.’ And I say, ‘Yes, but God can’t stop kidnappings, so what are you going to do?’”

What propels the Central Americans forward is their collective, brutal past. “Countries like Guatemala have suffered genocides over many years,” says Solalinde. “The extermination of entire towns. When you treat a town or a person that way, there have to be lingering social effects. But there’s also countries like El Salvador, that experienced a civil war for many years. Those wounds still haven’t healed. Society remains paralyzed in a way, it still hasn’t been able to take off economically and in this case, again, the Catholic church has not been able to help the people to heal those wounds.”

In the new world order, he says, money is overvalued and human beings are merely vessels to be exploited. “Crossing Mexico has become a very dangerous venture. Most of the young men and women are just looking for work, for an opportunity. But sometimes they are used to transport drugs or forced to work for organized crime.”

Solalinde has not been shy speaking publicly about the collusion between government officials and organized crime in the growing brutality against the migrants who come to his shelter. After denouncing corrupt officials in 2012, the priest received death threats which compelled him to leave the country for several weeks. “It’s unthinkable that in Mexico there would be this growth in organized crime in all sectors without thinking about the complicity of public officials,” Solalinde told a crowded auditorium during his keynote address in McAllen, which was organized by UT Brownsville and South Texas College. “The cartels aren’t alone. They’ve always infiltrated the inner circles of all institutions, or almost all institutions, and have been able to operate that way. Mexico has become uncertain; Mexico has become unsafe, no matter how much the previous government tried to deny the facts.”

After fleeing Mexico in May 2012, Solalinde was suddenly a man without a country. The priest traveled to North America and Europe to meet with human rights and religious organizations. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent agency of the Organization of American States, had already pressured the Mexican government in 2010 to provide him with bodyguards after he’d been detained and held at gunpoint by the Federal Police. At the time, he had been pressuring the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Oaxaca state to investigate the murders of three migrants.

In June 2012, he flew to Geneva to meet with Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Pillay sent a team of security experts to Ixtepec to design a protective wall around the migrant shelter and reinforce Solalinde’s sleeping quarters so that he could return to Mexico.

“We now have four state police who guard the shelter, and I have four federal agents as bodyguards,” says the priest, who is still uneasy with the idea of traveling with bodyguards. “I am a servant of Christ and that’s all,” he says. “I don’t want anyone holding the door for me or stopping traffic so that I can pass.”

Javier Hernández Valencia, the Representative in Mexico of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says his agency and other human rights advocates had to convince Solalinde to keep the bodyguards. “He was very uncomfortable with the idea of the bodyguards,” says Hernandez. “But the very sad perspective of having him wounded or killed was enough for us to insist he accept these measures at least for the time.”

The supreme irony has not been lost on Solalinde that his body guards and the guards at the shelter come from the same law enforcement agencies that are often corrupted by organized crime. The priest says he has worked hard to gain their trust and win them over to the cause of defending human rights. “They were baptized, and all four of them are Catholic,” he says of his bodyguards. “ I told them if you were baptized, you can’t just be a cop, you have to turn your police service into a mission. You are not protecting me or defending me, you’re protecting the cause that I work for. I try to raise their awareness and remind them of their love for Mexico. But the real key to a police officer’s heart is to care about him as a person. I care about them, and about their families.”

But the priest says that his guards are largely symbolic. “It doesn’t matter if you have eight bodyguards,” he says. “Don’t you remember what they did to that retired general in Nuevo Laredo? If they really want to kill you, they will.”

Sadly, Father Solalinde’s predicament is not unique, says Daniel Zapico, a spokesperson in Mexico for the human rights group Amnesty International. Other priests who run migrant shelters such as Fray Tomas Gonzalez in the state of Tabasco and Father Pedro Pantoja in the state of Coahuila have also received death threats because of their work, he says. “Organized crime is trying to attack the migrants and these priests are trying to prevent it,” Zapico says.  “But the biggest problem is not just the threats but the impunity from the local to the federal level,” he says. “The government refuses to acknowledge that civil servants linked to organized crime are often behind the threats. They want to characterize it as just a few bad actors instead of a systemic problem.”

And the threats aren’t just limited to priests.  “The threats against human rights defenders, journalists and those who are working with the most vulnerable populations such as women and migrants are increasing and getting worse,” Zapico says. “Human rights defenders deserve recognition and they deserve protection.”

But both the United States and Mexico have failed to fully acknowledge the growing human rights crisis in Mexico, which has grown exponentially since the drug war began in 2006. A year after Calderon’s war was launched, the United States pledged $1.9 billion to help combat organized crime in Mexico through a multi-year agreement called the Merida Initiative. According to the initiative, 15 percent of that aid can be disbursed only if Mexico is meeting four human rights requirements: ensuring that federal police and military officials who commit human rights abuses are investigated and prosecuted by civilian prosecutors in civilian courts, that Mexican civil society organizations are consulted  regularly on the implementation of Merida Initiative measures, the prohibition of testimony obtained through torture and improving the transparency and  accountability of law enforcement.

The Mexican government hasn’t fully complied with any of these measures, according to human rights organizations. There were 7,441 human rights complaints filed against Mexico’s military from 2006 through 2012, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). None of these complaints have led to a conviction in Mexico’s civilian court system. In military court during the same period of time, only 38 military personnel have been charged with human rights violations out of the 5,000 cases opened by the military, according to the nonprofit Human Rights Watch.

The United States continues to provide Merida funding despite Mexico’s failure to meet the human rights requirements stipulated in the agreement. “The Mexican government is not working fast enough to implement measures that would prevent attacks against journalists and human rights defenders,” says Zapico. Already, 62 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, according to the nonprofit press freedom organization Committee to Protect Journalists.

On May 2, President Obama will arrive in Mexico for talks with President Enrique Peña Nieto who took office in December. A U.S. State Department report released last week on the human rights situation in Mexico paints a troubling picture of “significant human rights-related problems included police and military involvement in serious abuses including unlawful killings, physical abuse, torture and disappearances.”

During the meeting with Obama, Peña Nieto will undoubtedly be anxious to discuss economic development. Since taking office in December he has tried to turn the international and national conversation away from his country’s human rights and security crisis. But ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, says Solalinde.

“Enrique Peña Nieto’s new government is trying to show a different image…As if with the change of party, we were already a better Mexico: a peaceful Mexico, a Mexico that respects human rights, a safer Mexico, not only for migrants but for capital – for investments. This is not true,” the priest told the audience in McAllen.  “Mexico’s situation isn’t going to get better because the press puts out less information about the violence. It’s also not going to be resolved by trying to make the people believe through speeches and rhetoric that the migrants’ situation has changed. The truth is it hasn’t. A real, practical and effective change hasn’t been attainable in human rights.”

And until the change comes, the 68-year old priest with the Bible and the bodyguards will keep advocating for the men, women and children seeking shelter along the way.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo by Melissa del Bosque]

By Daniel Hernandez, Latino USA

Commentator Daniel Hernandez is a pocho, a Mexican-American, living in Mexico City. But lately he’s noticed he’s not the only one, and the line between pochos and chilangos, what Mexico City natives call themselves, is blurring.

This article was first published in Latino USA.

Daniel Hernandez is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City and a news assistant in the Los Angeles Times bureau in Mexico. He’s been a staff writer at the L.A. Times and LA Weekly. A native of San Diego, Calif., Daniel is author of the 2011 book “Down & Delirious in Mexico City.”

[Photo by Distra]

By Stratfor

When U.S. President Barack Obama travels to Mexico on May 2, he will arrive amid a period of sweeping transformation in the country. Embroiled in myriad political battles and seeking to implement an extensive slate of national reforms, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration has been focused almost solely on internal affairs. Meanwhile, after years of delay, the U.S. Congress has been debating gun control and immigration reform — two issues of serious interest to the Mexican government.

U.S.-Mexican relations are strategically important to both countries, and Mexico’s period of transition has created opportunities for each to reshape the partnership. And although U.S. media attention has focused primarily on bilateral security issues ahead of Obama’s visit — namely cooperation in Mexico’s drug war – the Pena Nieto administration is working with Washington to re-orient the cross-border conversation to one centered primarily on mutual economic possibility.

Analysis

As the first member of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party to win the presidency this century, Pena Nieto has set about reconsolidating the party’s control over the government while attempting to turn attention away from the country’s entrenched security issues and toward its economic opportunities. The pace of reform and political cooperation since the new government was elected July 1 has been unusually high for Mexico.

Labor and education overhauls passed through the legislature relatively easily, and banking reforms intended to broadly increase access to credit are set to be proposed once the legislature reconvenes in September. The administration still has an aggressive to-do list remaining, with planned overhauls ranging from the telecommunications and energy sectors to issues such as taxation. The majority of the reforms has been structural in nature and driven by economic imperatives, representing a notable shift in tempo and character from the previous government, which saw its legislative efforts largely stall for years prior to the 2012 election.

Domestic political factors will determine the success of the pending overhauls. But the labor reform could improve bilateral commerce and investment with the United States, as would a successful liberalization of the country’s energy sector in the coming years. Mexico is already the United States’ third-largest trading partner, and economic coordination between the two countries has become a routine matter at the ministerial level, but there is still a need to ease bureaucratic trade and investment barriers.

Security Cooperation and Centralization

Pena Nieto’s predecessor, the National Action Party’s Felipe Calderon, focused heavily on Mexico’s security challenges and oversaw the sustained military offensive against criminal organizations throughout the country. Pena Nieto has yet to elaborate much on his plans to address the security issues, but he has emphasized the need to combat street violence and kidnappings, while playing down the importance of combating drug trafficking — a U.S. priority.

But ahead of Obama’s visit, certain details have emerged indicating that the Pena Nieto administration intends to change the nature of intelligence cooperation between the United States and Mexico. Until now, the two countries’ various law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to interact directly, but Mexico’s interior ministry will begin overseeing all intelligence collaboration.

This centralization effort has not been isolated to cooperation with the United States. The Mexican Interior Ministry has also taken charge of the federal police, and Pena Nieto intends to eventually create a national gendarmarie under the interior secretariat in order to fill the role in the drug wars currently played by the Mexican military with a security body better equipped with law enforcement training.

Thus, the extent and manner to which this centralization will affect security cooperation with the United States is unclear. But the changes are primarily designed to give Mexico greater control over the intelligence process involved in combating the country’s violent gangs. The intention is not to block U.S. collaboration and assistance, but rather to reform existing structures.

Domestic Issues, Bilateral Implications

While Mexico reorients its internal focus to structural changes that its leaders hope will lay foundations for economic development, the country could also be affected by domestic issues under debate in the United States. For years, Mexico has been pressing the United States to enact stricter gun laws. Though a prominent gun control bill failed in the U.S. Senate on April 17, the issue will likely re-emerge later in 2013, and at least some gun control measures currently enjoy broad popular support. Meanwhile, demographic changes in the United States are driving a debate about immigration reform that, if implemented, would require collaboration with Mexico, many of whose citizens would seek to legalize their residential status in the United States.

Though the passage of these reforms will similarly be determined solely by U.S. domestic political factors, their success would be a significant boon for bilateral relations with Mexico. Indeed, for Obama and Pena Nieto, the effects each feel of the other’s policy decisions will be magnified by the unique demographic, geographic and economic ties binding their countries. Yet, the domestic environment and political calculations in each country will ultimately shape the effects of this period of political change.

The U.S. political decision-making process is largely isolated from international influence, and the Pena Nieto administration likewise appears to be consolidating key policy areas under Mexican control at the expense of U.S. influence. Still, Mexico’s steady emergence as an economic power in North America sets the stage for a bilateral relationship much more heavily focused on opportunities for economic cooperation.

Evolving U.S.-Mexico Relations and Obama Visit is republished with permission of Stratfor.

[photo by nirvfan81]

By Fox News Latino

Just days before President Barack Obama’s visit south of the border, the Mexican government announced it will end the widespread access it has given U.S. security agencies to combat the drug war.

It could signal a potential dramatic shift in relations between the neighboring countries.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking to change his administration’s focus from violence to the country’s emerging economy, which is due to take over Brazil as the strongest in Latin America.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy Fox News Latino]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

One of the reasons I love doing what I do is that it gives me the chance to make things better.

Case in point: a post about the celebration of the birthday of an Aztec chief. I though it was the kind of story that Taquistas would want to read, and it was. Lots of people read it.

I was also drawn to the story because of a book I’ve been reading (in fits and starts) titled “Mexicas, El Pueblo Elegido” by Jamie Montell. It’s an historical fiction about the founding of the city of Tenochtitlán. I bring that up because I should have known better… The book mentions Nezahualcoyotl, the subject of the news story. But the news story headline tagged the chief as an Aztec, which he wasn’t.

Six hundred years later we have the expedient habit of labeling all south-of-the-border pre-columbian things as “Aztec,” and that’s what happened with the story I posted here. I should have known better. Luckily one NewsTaco reader did know better.

Taquista Juan Carlos Cutiño wrote this email:

Nezathualcoytotl was not an Aztec, he was am Acolhuan or in today’s nomenclature a Texcocan, although allied to the Mexica, forming with Itzcoatl, the Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan the Triple Alliance. And they are not Aztecs, they are Mexica or more proper Mexica/Azteca, established  on an island on the West side of the Lake Meztliapan in 1325. (Today’s Lake Texcoco, practically has disappeared), and Nezathualcoyotl was on Acolhuacan on the East side of the Lake.  And by the way Nezathualcoyotl was probably the greatest of the native intellectuals of pre-hispanic Mexico, Hidraulic Engineer, Jurist, Poet, Civil Engineer/Road Builder, Legislator and Tlatoanir. Regards, Juan-Carlos.

By Antonio Garza, Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

This week’s meeting between Presidents Obama and Peña Nieto brings U.S.-Mexico relations to center stage. This second face-to-face between the two leaders occurs at a critical time in each presidency. Domestic reform efforts that have far-reaching implications for the bilateral agenda are underway in both countries. These include immigration reform in the U.S. and reforms to boost economic competitiveness in Mexico.

Recent efforts to broaden the discourse on U.S.-Mexico relations have been largely successful-and overdue. Nevertheless, security remains the focal point for many citizens of both countries.

Peña Nieto campaigned on promises of a recalibrated strategy on security and the Mexican public has been patient in granting his administration time to develop its approach. But there are risks in the pace his team seems to have adopted, including mounting skepticism-at home and to some extent in the U.S.-that the issue has not been given the priority it deserves.

Now near the 150^-day mark of his six-year term, Peña Nieto has pushed through a number of long-awaited reforms-to labor, education and telecommunications-and is readying other, thornier ones for action. His efforts have been widely praised and his popularity is high, but passing the reforms is just the opening act. Implementation is crucial.

The foundation for the administration’s ambitious reform drive has been the Pact for Mexico, an historic agreement Peña Nieto and the leaders of the two main opposition parties signed the day after the new PRI president took office. A few days ago the administration was forced to temporarily suspend all activities related to the Pact, including a planned announcement of financial reforms.

The crisis was provoked by the opposition’s discovery that the PRI was using public funds to finance party-run programs-and thereby gain political advantage-ahead of local elections in July. The dispute has exposed the inherent political tensions and consequent limitations of the Pact.

Though the parties may be able to resolve the immediate controversy, many see signs that the alliance is fraying and expect negotiations for remaining initiatives on the 95-item reform agenda to be more problematic.

President Obama will be able to sympathize with his Mexican counterpart on this score. Over four years and 100-days into his second term he has become well acquainted with difficult negotiations. Like other two-term presidents, he may soon look to foreign affairs to burnish his legacy and his visit to Mexico offers a rare opportunity to promote goals in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas.

President Obama will emphasize the need to continue to effect close security cooperation and coordination. He will also seek to positively frame the immigration reform debate, which is just getting underway in the U.S. Senate and is expected to continue for the remainder of the year.

The visit to Mexico affords the chance to highlight the successful and interconnected economic partnership the countries share and to make the case for immigration reform as essential to North America’s economic security. And in many respects President Peña Nieto will have the opportunity to do the same.

The U.S.-Mexico economic partnership is thriving. Mexico is the U.S.’s second largest export market and third leading source of imports. Bilateral trade reached nearly one-half trillion dollars in 2012, roughly $1.4 billion each day. An estimated six million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Mexico and 40 percent of every product the U.S. imports from Mexico is really “Made in America.”

As strong as the bilateral relationship is now, however, it must deepen and evolve in order to ensure expanded opportunity and security for both countries going forward. Presidents Peña Nieto and Obama have both entered a post-honeymoon environment that demands hard work and successively heavier lifts on every policy goal.

With the stakes potentially so high on so many issues fundamental to the relationship, only the highest-level commitment will advance the agenda. There may never be a more opportune time.

Antonio Garza served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 2002-2009. Mr. Garza is now counsel in the Mexico City office of White & Case and Chairman of Vianovo Ventures. He currently serves on the Council of the Americas’ Advisory Group on Immigration and can be found online at www.tonygarza.com

[Photo by victoriabernal]

Tweets about “#LadyProfeco”

By Damien Cave, New York Times

MEXICO CITY — Andrea Benítez simply did what many rich, connected Mexicans have always done: she used her influence to step on the lower born. Witnesses said that when she was not given the table she wanted on Friday at Maximo Bistrot, a popular Mexico City restaurant, she called in inspectors who worked for her father at the country’s main consumer protection agency to shut it down.

“Dreadful service,” she wrote on Twitter, before announcing she had arrived at the agency to complain. “They have no manners.”

What followed, however, caught much of Mexico by surprise.

Read the full story HERE.

[Photo courtesy Maximo Bistort]