MEXICO'S ARMY GOES AWOL... or just gone off to serve the MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS POURING OVER OUR BORDERS?

The Mexican army's AWOL problem Posted: 19 Apr 2012 02:45 PM PDT The Mexican military is afflicted by desertions. According to documents from the Defense Ministry, 56,886 soldiers and officers have fled the army and air force over the past six years. The figures were published (in Spanish) on the animalpolitico.com website here. That's a lot of soldiers, and to make matters worse the Mexican army has lost track of the majority of those gone AWOL. No one knows if they've joined the gangsters or are simply on the lam. By my calculations, this is somewhere around a fourth or a fifth the number of the standing army, although trying to figure out how many soldiers Mexico has is not easy. I've just spent 10 minutes researching and come up with figures between 242,000 and over 300,000. This may be a reflection of featherbedding ranks so that higher ranking officers can pocket the salaries. Animal Politico said that Sedena has tracked down and sanctioned only two of every 10 soldiers gone missing. The rest have escaped any punishment. The site says punishments can range from a month to six years in prison, depending on the rank of the desertor. If this figure seems high, it was even higher for the period 2000-2006. The website says the ministry told it 106,813 soldiers went missing during that period. To understand why the desertion problem is so severe, one can catch a glimmer of the reasons from the comments posted to the article. One person writes: "With those starvation salaries and the risks, let's see who turns out the lights." Another writes: "Is it because Mexican military tradition is a tradition of an army staying in the barracks or marching in an annual military parade? An army at the personal service of politicians, their relatives and friends? An army at the service of those temporarily in power? That is to say, a shoddy army?..."

The world's highest political ad Posted: 19 Apr 2012 02:15 PM PDT A Mexican mountaineer, Leonardo Fernandez, recently reached the summit of Mt. Everest, the world's highest mountain at 29,035 feet in elevation. Fernandez does more than just gaze out at the stunning panorama from the rooftop of the world. He records a video endorsing the presidential campaign of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. What interested me more about the video (in Spanish), though, was how deeply out of breath Fernandez appears to be. It's for logical reasons. At the top of Everest, there is only a third of the level of oxygen in the air as at sea level. Even at base camp on the Tibetan side, at a little more than 15,000 feet in elevation, oxygen levels are only half what they are at sea level. I can attest to this personally. Click here for a video I did in 2007 of the scene at base camp as climbers prepare for the ascent. That's me about half way through the video, gasping for air and complaining how I woke up every half hour during the night. So Sr. Fernandez, my advice is to forget about Lopez Obrador for the moment. Take some long oxygen-deprived breaths and get off the mountain. Otherwise, you'll be one more victim of the Everest "death zone" (that I wrote about here) littered with corpses.