Bursting in Air March 12
Tultepec, the self-declared fireworks capital of Mexico, outdid itself at the National Pyrotechnic Festival this week, injuring 549 celebrants. Last year the famous market in DF exploded and sent 32 people to hospital. This year the wizards of gunpowder have clearly upped their game. Apparently one artisan started a chain reaction when the device he was assembling ignited in his hands, setting off a string of “toritos“, or blasting little bulls, that burned through the happy crowd. And yet, San Juan de Dios, the patron saint of firework makers, is still not satisfied, so the festival continues uninterrupted today for another grand display of light and sound and human carnage.
Tultepec’s closest competitor for bombs and bodies is the furiously growing Caribbean city of Playa Del Carmen, in recent years the fastest growing municipality in the western hemisphere of the New World. Today Playa is under close watch for incendiary intrigue. The US consulate is closed, at least until next week, due to unspecified threats, and official Yanqui personnel are barred from entering the downtown area.
Estado Quintana Roo officials decry what they see as a disproportionate response to the ongoing Barcos Caribe ferry problem, but these are the same officials who took more than a week before confirming FBI reports that it was a homemade bomb, and not technical malfunction, that blew through the side of a Cozumel-bound ship. The government takes pains to avoid disturbing the tourists in the hotel zone—they certainly won’t be disturbed by American consulate personnel.
According to El Universal, the bomb was detonated remotely, while the ferry was in port and the passengers had already debarked, including the owner of Barcos Caribe, Roberto Borge Martin. The bomber used potassium perchlorate, aluminum, and boric acid stuffed in cardboard and PVC tubes. The same man also prepared the two bombs found on other ferries.
As to the allegation that the company is sabotaging its own ships—in order to receive a big insurance payoff, to destabilize the current adversarial government of Juan Joaquin Gonzalez, to resist the incarceration of a favorite son, Quien Sabe—security footage obtained by the newspaper shows that Borge Martin boarded the ship in Cozumel with a man carrying a backpack, and the two left separately and hastily after landing in Playa—without the backpack.
State and federal officials promise new investment in port security, while the fleet sits idle, as does Borge’s jailbird son Roberto Jr. in Ciudad Mexico. The ship with a massive starboard hole sits especially idle at this very moment, one block from my house, at the marine-fortified industrial pier. Special forces drive through town, with black-masked men in helmets, waving assault rifles, on the roofs of blue armored pickups. Their shade of blue does not match the hollowed Barco Caribe ferry across the way—it is much darker.
Yesterday, in a park in La Colonia, shots were fired during an American football game played among 5-year-olds, and all the adults and kids immediately ducked to the ground. Lo Normal. Minutes later, after frantic phone calls from the small besieged crowd, municipal police arrived to reassure that all was well and under control. This was merely a backfiring truck or car—a “mechanical failure,“ as authorities prefer to call it.