Mexican Justice

¡Special Matt Agard guest author appearance!

Thinking we were over a bout of food poisoning, Mary and I embarked on an eight hour van journey through the part of Chiapas that borders Guatemala to get from Lagos de Montebello to Palenque.

The first five hours were relatively uneventful, multiple van changes, beautiful forests, mountains, and rivers intermixed with burned out fields, random men in camouflage with machine guns searching our bags and asking us where we were from, the usual. However, after about five hours, the Pepto I had taken started interacting with the still present food poisoning, and I started feeling nauseous and my temperature started rising. At this point, a different branch of the military (I knew this even in my feverish mind because they were wearing black instead of camouflage) pulled over the van.

After a brief conversation with the driver, the captain of the group asks the kids in front of us where they were from. When he hears Honduras he orders them out of the van. He allows our answer of being from the US to stand, but tosses out three more passengers when they can´t substantiate the fact that they are from DF (Mexico City). About a minute later he tells our driver to leave without the five passengers, but our driver says they haven't paid yet, and forces all of them to pay for the lift he gave them to their execution, exportation or whatever it is that the Mexican military does with people that it considers undesirable in Chiapas.

(Ed Note: This photo doesn´t have much to do with anything, I just thought it was cute.)