Monk

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MORELIA, Mexico — Mexico’s country music stars are being killed at an alarming rate — 13 in the past year and a half, three already in December — in a trend that has gone hand in hand with the surge in violence between drug gangs here.

-- James C. McKinley for The New York Times

This is the sort of violence we associate with the rap music world. You know something is wrong when even country music life is this wild. It also brings home how far Mexico remains from being a true First World country, and that it probably never will become one.

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“I thought the crossing was the worst thing in my life,” she said, sitting on the front step of her home in a village outside of Puebla. “We saw human bones and clothes in the desert. There were robbers there, who would rape the girls and take all the money they could. I thought that had to be worst. Now, I have this.”

-- Marc Lacey, "Mexican Migrants Carry H.I.V. Home", in The New York Times

It was thought that any transmission of disease through Mexican migrants would be from Mexico to here, but it looks like the U.S. is more of the contaminant when it comes to AIDS:

Migrant workers like him go to the United States with dreams of new prosperity, hoping to bring back dollars. But some are bringing back something else as well, H.I.V. and AIDS, which they are spreading in the rural parts of Mexico least prepared to handle the epidemic.

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