George W. Bush In Mérida, Yucatán March, 2007
George W. Bush's visit to Mérida to meet with Mexico's illustrious new president Calderón (and, in passing, a whole bunch of really rich Mexicans) has thankfully come to an end. George has returned to the land of the 'free' while the Mexican president has returned to the D.F. where he will hopefully continue to apply pressure on organized crime in this country.
It would be remiss of my part to not at least offer some useless comment regarding the visit from the Neurotic Foreigner Viewpoint.
Everyone else has written ad nauseum about how the president (pick one) said this and did that and and and. In my humble opinion, Dubya's whole Latin America circus was perfectly summed up in the online article at The First Post. You can read the article here.
NotTheNews and it's nitpicking editor would like to offer, as the only commentary to be added that hasn't already been dissected to the point of confetti, the photograph above, of the table at Xcanatun (the hacienda was reported as being 'closed for maintenance' during the presidential dinner visit. Couldn't they just say we're closed for the duration of the President's visit? Apparently not)
If you look closely at the photograph, scanned shameless from the pages of the hallowed Diario de Yucatan newspaper, you will see that the table had a name assigned to it, and that this particular table is named "Loltum". I would venture to guess that they wanted it to be Lol Tun (flower/rock) as in the caves of LolTun. So was it a Yucatecan spelling mistake (the classic m vs. n thing)? Or perhaps it was a Yucatecan who mispronounced it and the waches who made the sign didn't check? Was it the hacienda Xcanatun?
I told you that this wasn't going to be very deep.
back to the March Issue page
