Legal Commentary

Re-tracing Graham Greene's journey across Mexico

By Tom Kirkendall

In the first of a series of upcoming blog posts that will interest most Texans, The Atlantic's Graeme Wood is re-tracing the journey across Mexico of Graham Greene of The Lawless Roads fame seventy years ago:

Seventy years ago, Graham Greene crossed the US-Mexican border into a land blighted by violence, unrest, insurgency, and religious and counter-religious mayhem. If he came back today he would find a country riven by other forces, but in some ways just as chaotic, and just as worthy of the title he gave his account of the journey, The Lawless Roads.

The news out of Mexico is all bad. When I was a kid, my parents and I went across the border at Reynosa, Matamoros, and Tijuana to take awkwardly posed photos on the backs of burros, buy cheap Kahlúa, and eat frog-legs at Garcia's. Now the drug war has re-ignited, the rules of engagement between police and crime syndicates have changed, and the environment has become more savage. The government of Felipe Calderon has challenged the narco-traffickers and has militarized the border. Garcia's is still open, but tourists have vanished. College kids don't head down here from South Padre so much, which is a good indicator of the downturn, because they are college students, and that Kahlúa was awfully cheap. There are serious questions of whether Mexico is becoming that scariest of things, a military state in only partial control -- i.e., a Latin American Pakistan.

Only some of the drama is on the border. Greene's trip through Mexico crossed the country on its long axis and reported how Mexicans were dealing with the effects of the Cristero War, its violent suppression of the Catholic church, and the armed discontent that suppression sparked. Over the next cycle of posts, I will steer my rented Mexican Ford (an inglorious chariot that feels like it would crumple like a soda can, if I were to give it a bear-hug) along Greene's path, with deviations, to see whether that lawlessness is a permanent condition.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on August 26, 2009 (boomark / email).