The Dental Blacklist

Our initial intention was to publish profiles of the best dentists in Tijuana. That idea proved to be impracticable. There’s a lot more to being outstanding than being recommended by a tourist or a taxi driver, and those of us on The Real Tijuana simply don’t have the time or energy to vet each dentist. We will leave that project to the medical tourism groups to sort out – our Reader Service can put you in touch with the appropriate group, if that’s what you’re looking for.

There is still a valuable service we might perform. Our blog has become a lightening rod for complaints, so we though we should identify those dentists whose quality we have reason to believe is unacceptable. As Catherine Aird said, “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” The complaints we have received have dealt with three general areas: technical quality, personal treatment, and price. Our list falls into two broad categories as a result. “AVOID” is for dentists who have had believable complaints concerning technical quality. “NOT RECOMMENDED” is for dentists for whom complaints in the other two areas predominate.

Guitars as Works of Art

text by Fernando Daniel Martínez
photos by Infobaja staff

In a workshop in the Colonia 20 de Noviembre neighborhood of Tijuana filled with Canadian and German spruces, Indian rosewood, Honduran cedar, African ebony, and other rare woods, masterpieces renowned as some of the finest classical guitars in Mexico are being made. They carry the name of Fructuoso Zalapa.

Zalapa comes from four generations of luthiers in Paracho, Michoacán. He has spent his life building guitars that are now commissioned by professional guitarists who demand the unique acoustical properties and fine craftsmanship that his work is known for.

After his life took him down several paths – among which he studied to be a classical guitarist and a teacher – he settled four years ago in Tijuana because this city allows him to build outstanding guitars thanks to the select woods available across the border. “For this work,” Zalapa comments, “excellent materials are essential even though they cost ten times more than ordinary materials.”

During an interview with Infobaja magazine, this maker of fine instruments and characteristic acoustics talked about his craft, with which he has achieved international fame.

Tijuana 1950 as described by Fernando Jordán

Fernando Jordán Juárez (1920–1956) was trained as an anthropologist and worked as a journalist. In 1949, the magazine Impacto asked him to write a series of articles on the entire Baja California peninsula. That work was later collected into two books, still in print today and well worth reading.

Jordán was captivated by the anthropology, sociology, and history that he found throughout the peninsula but, when he got to Tijuana, the culture of tourism then present caught him off-guard. His horrified reaction, copied and caricatured by generations of chilangos since, is reflected in El otro México: Biografía de Baja California, in which the chapter on our fair city is entitled “This is going to annoy some Tijuanans”.

 “While noisy, Avenida Revolución has always seemed to me to be childish. It is unpleasant but not sordid” he wrote. “The Americans are simple-minded and very clean even when drunken. At daybreak they end their binges by cheering and by taking photos of themselves on little mobile stages of ‘Mexican’ scenes drawn by white burros painted with black stripes – ‘Mexican burros’ (!) – found at every street corner. The sailors climb onto these stages and arrange themselves among the cardboard cactuses, exchanging their sailor caps for charro sombreros, and smile for the photographer. The burros are impassive, enduring all manner of abuse: they are the philosophers of the carnival.”

In that same annoying chapter, Jordán has left us an early poetical approximation of our special form of bilingualism, which he addressed to his Spanish-speaking readership. To show that modern-day Tijuana holds him no rencor, we would honor his memory with a side-by-side semitranslation to accommodate our English-speaking readership.

Tijuana cardiologist honored for innovative stem-cell therapy

Dr Juan José Parcero Valdés 

by Moisés Márquez

An eighty-year-old woman from the United States was able to keep her leg thanks to a team of doctors from the Tijuana Institute for Regenerative Medicine who successfully introduced stem cells into an incurable lesion left by radiation therapy.

The patient was treated last year at Hospital Ángeles Tijuana as part of a stem-cell study begun in 2010. Dr Juan José Parcero Valdés, a local cardiologist and the primary investigator of that study, was honored by the National Cardiology Association of Mexico for his work on that case. The CADECI Nacional award, presented to Parcero on 24 February 2012 at the association’s annual convention in Guadalajara, recognizes the country’s best research.

Stem cells are unspecialized cells of the body that change into the specialized cells of various tissues. They can be implanted into different parts of the body and onto damaged or sick tissues, transforming themselves into that type of tissue and functioning as such.

History of the Cervecería de Mexicali

This company was founded in 1924 and has installed its factory and cellars in a large, attractive building made of wood faced with American cement, which gives it an appearance exactly like granite.

The latest advances in industrial chemistry and sterilzation have been incorporated into the manufacturing process of this beer, the raw materials of which are barley malt from the United States, hops from Bohemia, and rice from Mexico.

On the fourth floor of the brewery is a Columbia mill that crushes the rice and sends it to a blender. On the same floor is a machine that separates the chaff from the malted barley. The rice and barley grists are turned into a cauldron in which they are cooked briefly before being sent to another cauldron where they get a more thorough cooking; this mixture receives the hops, which are first cleaned by a Muller Improved machine. From the second cauldron the cooking is continued in a third, after which the liquid passes through a copper sieve in order to remove the suspended solids. Then the wort is pumped into a cooler also on the fourth [scil., third] floor. There the wort's temperature is lowered so that it can be sent to the fermentation tanks. The beer doesn't leave these tanks until it's been matured for four months.

Baja's Visitor Assistance Hotline

The state of Baja California comes up with some unusual ways to help its tourists. Toward the end of the twentieth century, it posted bilingual attorneys in the tourist areas to resolve visitors' problems free of charge. In this century it has made use of advances in telephony to give its visitors access to government officials around the clock.

SecTurE, the State Secretariat of Tourism, maintains a line within the three-digit Special Services network of the Mexican telephone system. By dialing 078 from anywhere in the state of Baja California, help in English is available day or night. Any phone will do - a public phone, a private phone, even a cell phone from another country (so long as the subscriber has automatic roaming).

Additionally, whenever the operators of the emergency system receive a call in English, they'll transfer it to 078. This works equally for those who call the U.S. emergency number (911) while in Baja California or the European emergency number (112) or the Mexican emergency number (066). All phones in Mexico allow free access to 066.

The hotline offers reasonable assistance to visitors who need help with such things as directions, language, or cultural differences.

How to choose a dentist in Baja California

You might be disappointed. Our advice is going to be pretty much the same as that for choosing a dentist in Outer Mongolia. On the bright side, our dentists are more plentiful and better trained than what you might encounter in Outer Mongolia.

The first step in both places is to overcome the cultural discomfort of traveling for professional services beyond one’s neighborhood. “What if I pick a bad dentist?” is the greatest fear when you’re in a different town. Well, relax. Bad is very rare these days because of all the quality controls in place. The worst we’ve heard of so far has been an average dentist who charged like he was the best.

After that, we recommend you research your options thoughtfully, whittle your candidates down to a short list of four to six dentists, interview them, and make your decision based on who made the most sense to you.

“My dentist in Los Angeles thought he was a Mercedes mechanic” writes one of our correspondents. “I left him fifteen years ago and have been going to a dentist in Tijuana ever since. Now I’m not afraid to sit in the chair and, even better, my teeth stay fixed.”

Our correspondent is not alone. Because the dentistry in Mexico is of world-class quality while also being relatively inexpensive, you’ll find concentrations of dentists along the border from Tijuana all the way to Matamoros. The Asociación Dental Mexicana counts more than five thousand members in the central part of Tijuana alone.

The ADM didn’t count the many dentists who are not members. Nor does that number include the thousands of ADM members in Tijuana who practice outside of downtown and the Zona Río. It does not include any of the hundreds of ADM dentists in Ensenada, Rosarito or Los Algodones, nor the large numbers in Mexicali and Tecate. Dentistry along this border is very serious business and has been so for some while now.

Mike, the unwily coyote

Mike is one of Tijuana’s newer immigrants from the United States. He moved here during the twenty-first century. He recently found himself involved in what the law broadly refers to “human trafficking”. In our local slang, he was a coyote. Or, as he says, “I helped people get into the U.S. without all the red tape.”

Mike had been a salesman in southern California who was “transitioned” into a commission-only job. He came to Tijuana because he couldn’t afford the place where he used to live. He wound up near the Otay crossing because, as he says, “the rents are low and we’re real close to the border”. Unfortunately for Mike, sales jobs were still far away.

“I tried a lot of jobs. Another gringo in the Zona Norte hooked me up with a telemarketing gig, a boilerroom in Mira Mesa, but I couldn’t meet their sales quotas. I walked the streets of Bonita for a remodeling contractor, telling people they had mold in their homes in order to get them to sign up. I started a website but it isn’t making any money. I went to Telvista because they said I only need to speak English, but that wasn’t true – I also need to permission to work in Mexico!” Mike hasn’t bothered to do any immigration paperwork.

“One day I was walking down Calle Coahuila and a chicano from Sylmar came up to me asking if I wanted a job. All I had to do was drive somebody else’s car across the border and they’d pay me a thousand dollars. ‘What’s the catch?’ I asked. The guy said it wasn’t anything illegal or dangerous but Juan would be the one to explain.”

Baja’s Medical Ombudsmen

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Every culture has its own expectations concerning their medical profession. The ancient Chinese paid their physician every day they were healthy in order to be treated for free whenever they were ill. In Mexico, doctors tend to be extremely Hippocratic in their approach – the idea here is that people whose social position has allowed them to learn a great deal now want to help you feel better. But what happens when a patient doesn’t see the improvement he expected?

In the United States, an unhappy patient pays a lot of money to a malpractice attorney and hopes for the best. In Mexico, that sort of patient has more options: he or she can go to the Ministerio Público (the district attorney) to file a criminal complaint for malpractice, go to PROFECO (the federal attorney for the protection of consumers) to file a civil complaint, or ask a medical commission to resolve the problem with expert arbitration. There is no cost involved in any of these options. Additionally, one can hire a private attorney to file the case in civil court, similar to what is done in the U.S. More and more, the medical commissions are becoming the preferred route.

CAME-BC, the Comisión de Arbitraje Médico del Estado de Baja California, is part of the state government and has been around in one form or another for about a decade. Originally it maintained a single office in Mexicali, the state capital. “To do our job, we have to be where the patients are,” says Dr Agustín Escobar, the head of the commission, “so we came to Tijuana in 2008. That’s where most of the medicine is being practiced in this state. Very soon we will be opening offices in Rosarito, Ensenada, and Tecate. We’re also working on a web presence like the one our big brother in Mexico City has.”

Yet another appreciation of tequila

Although tequila does not come from Baja California, it is an integral part of our local culture. Tourists have been coming here for generations in search of it, so much so that a spring-breaker bar in Rosarito Beach once called itself (fancifully) The Tequila Museum. With the turn of this century, Tijuana has been setting aside a week in October to host an annual Expo Tequila. Similar festivals crop up frequently throughout the peninsula. And so a few words about this quintessentially Mexican spirit are in order.

Surely no other liquor is more misunderstood. Nor is there another that offers as varied or as rewarding a spectrum of flavors, everything from raw vegetal spirit to refinement rivalling cognac. Those who know tequila only from frat parties or chain restaurants will be surprised to discover that Don Julio blanco tastes exactly like raspberry eau-de-vie, that Gran Centenario añejo is reminiscent of a twenty-year-old Demerara rum, or that the flavors of Don Abraham and Herradura Antiguo surpass the descriptive power of words. To appreciate this spectrum, one first must get beyond the misunderstandings.

Day-trips for alternative tourism

photos by Derrik Chinn

by Cristina González Madín

What do you call a calafia bus full of gringos who visit the most surreal parts of Tijuana and who take part in our most ordinary activities? Turista libre.

If the mental picture of this seems a little odd, we still have to mention that the fellow who organizes these day-trips is from the United States and lives in Tijuana by choice. Derrik Chinn is twenty-eight years old. Three years ago, he left his apartment in San Diego in order to move to Tijuana. And this journalist has enjoyed living here so much that, like so many who are fed up with the city’s bad press, he decided to do something about it.

“I couldn’t stand to hear all the nasty things that were being said about Tijuana. The place is actually very cool, life here is like nowhere else in the world. A lot of people in the U.S. tell me they’d like to visit but they’re afraid to or they don’t want to put up with the wait at the border or they don’t speak Spanish or, well, you get the idea. Sadly, they don’t care that pretty much everyone here speaks at least some English. There’s no reason to use the culture or the language as an excuse.” he says.

A few quesadillas

 

The oldest published recipe for quesadillas, from 1831, is found in El cocinero mexicano. These are remarkably similar to the ones we still make today.

Quick quesadillas  Either make or buy small, soft tortillas. In the middle of each tortilla place some cheese, which can be fresh or aged cow’s milk cheese or even goat’s milk cheese if you add a bit of salt, then fold the tortilla in half and sew it together with cornbrush or maguey fiber, or pin the halves together with three blades of sacaton [Sporobolus wrightii]. Cook the quesadillas without delay, on a grill over live coals or on a griddle, until the cheese just starts to melt. Remove the threading and serve at once because they’re no good cold. Some people fry their quesadillas in deep fat or sprinkle them with salt and sauté them in black butter.

This recipe is unusual for a couple of reasons. It’s the only antojito to appear in Mexico’s first printed cookbook, which distinguishes it from things like tacos, memelas, and sopes. The gente de razón (as the upper class referred to itself), for whom cookbooks were published in those days, felt that indigenous cuisine was beneath their dignity. Even now restaurants that would never consider offering tacos, memelas, or sopes proudly offer some sort of quesadilla as an antojito, entremés, tentempié, or appetizer.

Further on we present several examples from our own Baja California restaurateurs.

When Hernán Cortés dined with Moctezuma, they ate what later became known as tacos. By using a corn tortilla the way that Ethiopians use njira bread, one can pick up bits of almost anything and eat it wrapper and all. But Cortés and Moctezuma did not eat quesadillas – there simply was no cheese among the hundreds of dishes at Moctezuma’s table. The quesadilla had to wait until Mexico developed a dairy industry. And that brings us to another unusual thing about quesadillas: Mexico is the only lactose-intolerant part of the world where cheese plays an important part in the local cuisine.

Do I need a passport to visit Baja California?

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The simple answer for all visitors from the U.S. and for most visitors from Canada is No, you don’t need no pinche passport. Here at the border, we see people crossing all the time without one. Across the border, at Across the Border, Anna Cearley has been collecting up reports from readers whose experiences confirm what we say.

And yet people continue to ask and the Internet’s self-appointed experts continue to give the same mistaken answer. The confusion has been caused from what both governments have been telling us. The U.S. government puts up frightening-sounding websites like “GetYouHome.gov” to talk about their “requirement” for “WHTI-compliant documents” and the Mexican government talks about enhancing security in order to continue the disastrous war on drugs. Nonetheless, people keep crossing into California and Baja California just as they have always been doing.

Those of us in The Real Tijuana cross the border, collectively, pretty much every day. We are Mexican citizens, U.S. citizens, and dual citizens. Our documentation varies but only the Mexican nationals among us use WHTI-compliant identification (laser visas and green cards) – the rest of us cross with expired U.S. passports, one of which is more than thirty years old. We have never been sent to Secondary for not being WHTI-compliant. We often see other people crossing with just a birth certificate.

Since the same questions have been cropping up over and over again, we thought it might be helpful to present a FAQ on the subject as it applies to our beat, the border between California and Baja California.

We do not intend to discourage the use of passports – we agree with the Mexican government that the passport is the “ideal international identity document” – but we disagree with irrational impediments to tourism and we are categorically opposed to any restriction on fronterizo culture. Since it is to the government’s benefit that its citizens carry passports, it behooves our governments to facilitate our access to this document. And yet both the Mexican and the U.S. governments place escalating burdens on the individual citizen instead.

Eco-Sol works to improve the environment and to develop ecological awareness in Baja.

by Laura Durán

Seventy percent of the land in Baja California is under environmental protection. Among the largest areas are Parque Constitución (Laguna Hanson), Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, the Biosphere Preserve of the Vizcaíno Desert, Valle de los Cirios, the islands in the Sea of Cortez, and the Colorado River Delta.

Many xerophytic plants serve to retain soil and prevent erosion. Knowing about these plants and being able to use them are very important for those whose houses are built on slopes and hillsides. In this way, erosion and mudslides can be prevented ecologically.

Tijuana’s elementary-school teachers get to receive training in such environmentalist subjects by members of Eco-Sol, a local nonprofit organization. According to José Luis Morales, the NPO’s president, the teachers’ involvement is essential in order to develop their students’ awareness at an early age and to ensure that future generations act more kindly toward the environment. “Our educational system has taken a bold step by arranging to have environmentalist groups prepare its teachers in this curriculum.”

The tuna universitaria has come to Baja California

If you’re in the right restaurant at the right time, something unusual will happen. A bunch of guys show up dressed in Renaissance clothes, carrying Renaissance instruments. They begin playing in bright tones and quick rhythms – possibly Italian, to gringo ears, but the lyrics are unmistakably Spanish – while the little guy with the tambourine capers theatrically.

What happened to the mariachis and “La Bamba”? Has Tijuana suddenly become addicted to Lope de Vega? Or maybe the restaurant thought we’d like to watch “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in translation?

It’s a bit disorienting, here in the city that began as a Hollywood-style fantasy, to encounter something so deeply traditional and so authentically hispanic as Baja’s first tuna universitaria. Even the name is confusing … the locals know tuna to be cactus fruit and the gringos think it’s a fish … but the term refers to a group of tunos, university students who sing for their supper.

The tradition can be traced back continuously to the beginning of the thirteenth century with the founding of the Studium Generale (now University) of Palencia during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Nowadays tunas are established throughout the Spanish-speaking world. They’re even found in such unlikely places as Oxford, Belgium, and Japan. In central Mexico, tunas date back to the Porfiriato. For UABC (the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California), however, the tuna arrived in 2008.

Tijuana’s health industry prepares for international competition

by Laura Durán

Tijuana Health without Borders, the medical tourism business cluster that was created two years ago, now counts one hundred eighty organizations as members and has created the first academic program for medical tourism in all of Latin America.

Today more than ever Tijuana is looking to develop its tourism. Not necessarily the leisure tourism of earlier years, because that has been depressed by fear, Customs lines, and the recession. Instead, Tijuana’s new tourism is being fueled by medical necessity. Patients come here for the high quality of our medicine, because our doctors spend time with their patients, and because health care in Tijuana is much more affordable than it is in the United States.

“The response to our educational program exceeded anything we imagined” said Jorge Gutiérrez, the treasurer and logistics coordinator of the Cluster. “It demonstrates the degree of interest that exists in this area. We thought maybe twenty people would show up and instead we have one hundred thirty who are committing one hundred sixty hours of their time, an entire semester, to earn this university certificate.”

A new way to get border-wait information

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Crossing the border on 4 July 1920

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of crossing the U.S.–Mexican border is the unpredictabiity of the Customs lines. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes five hours, sometimes caused foreseeably, sometimes capriciously. To anticipate this difficulty, every “frequent crosser” has their favorite source of border-wait information.

Decades ago, the local radio stations began sending spotters to the San Ysidro border to phone in their Reporte de la Garita every half-hour. Channel 12 and Síntesis television now issue reports on the hour and half-hour during their news programs. When the webcam craze hit, Telnor (the local telephone company) began offering real-time images of the four major sources of vehicular traffic at the point where they converge, later adding a fifth webcam for Otay’s non-commercial lanes. Recorded information is available by telephone (San Ysidro Port of Entry, +1-619-690-8999; Otay Mesa, +1-619-671-8999; Telnor’s service, +52-664-700-7000; from Mexican cell phones, *LINEA). Most popular recently are various Internet portals, primarily tourist sites and Tijuana newspapers, that embed the U.S. government’s reports and the Telnor webcam feeds.



A programmer here in Tijuana known by the nom de guerre “IsReal” has come up with yet another way to get border-wait information: it can now be integrated into your web-browser.

GaritasBC is an extension for Firefox that sits unobtrusively in the right-hand corner of your status bar. When you roll your cursor over it, a tooltip window pops up containing the most current reports for Tijuana and Tecate; right-click to select from a menu of Telnor webcams. The current version of the extension also allows you to access the same information for the Mexicali crossing.

click to enlarge

GaritasBC currently reports all northbound wait times, in Spanish. The source of this information is U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which currently updates its data at the top of every hour. The GaritasBC extension checks for new data every ten minutes, however, so its reports are as timely as the CBP affords.

The extension can be installed automatically by downloading it while running Firefox.

Once installed, the name “GaritasBC” will appear in the status bar at the bottom-right corner of your monitor. Place your cursor over the name and the current report will appear at the tip of your cursor. Right-click (or control-click) on the name and a pop-up menu will offer the available webcams; selecting one will replace whatever is in the active window of your browser with the current static image from that webcam.

To switch between Tijuana/Tecate and Mexicali reports, chose the appropriate radio button in the extension’s preference: from the Firefox menubar -> Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> GaritasBC -> Preferences.

click to enlarge

IsReal describes the development of GaritasBC as a labor of love – in other words, it is not being promoted commercially. Consequently, Firefox continues to classify it as beta software (primarily because of its austere interface and because it’s still waiting to be reviewed by the Firefox editorial team) even though it is now in its fifth version and has received no reports of bugs or instability. If the extension generates enough interest, IsReal has plans to get it out of beta by giving it more a of a graphical interface and by including reports for all the U.S. terrestrial ports of entry along the Mexican border.

Updated August 2018

The world now uses mobile apps, so this Firefox add-on has not been updated and is not compatible with current versions of the browser.

There are now about two dozen of such smartphone apps to choose from … and all of them show a lot of user dissatisfaction due to inaccurate wait times.

We need to be clear at this point: GaritasBC – as well as the smartphone apps that have replaced it – all suffer from a significant defect in that they’re little more than different “skins” for displaying Customs and Border Protection’s RSS feed.

Official CBP procedure has each Port of Entry along both land borders sending to Washington DC before the top of each hour what it estimates its wait-times are. Washington then makes the basic information available to the general public on its Border Wait Times webpage. These wait times are concerned with travelers coming into the US only. We know of no reports available for the traffic entering Tijuana.

When you check users’ reviews of the currently available apps, you’ll see a lot of anger over the inaccurate times but not over the apps themselves. As far as Tijuana goes, at least, the CBP has been wildly dishonest in its reporting of these numbers. Some of the inaccuracy is inherent in the CBP’s methodology: the data are sent to Washington only once every hour and, if that transmission arrives late, those data won’t be reported by CBP until the top of the following hour. Whenver the hamsters turning the treadmill that powers the CBP system get tired, the website continues to report the last transmission it received until the hamsters start working again.

Another reason for the inaccuracy – at least according to local lore going back several generations – is due to tortuguismo, that is, a tacit governmental policy of impeding travelers so as to make the idea of avoiding Tijuana and staying in the US more attractive. Motorists often comment that it takes them just as long to clear Customs regardless of whether there are three cars or thirty cars in front of them. Pedestrians have even stranger stories to tell.

To counter the unreliability of the official information, there have already been several attempts to harvest real-time data. One pioneering effort in this direction, bordertraffic.com, has been trying to monetize the existing CCTV traffic feeds: this might make sense for those who cross the border frequently and who are willing to learn how to interpret the video information. UCSD’s experimental app, “Border Wait Times”, attempted to crowdsource the wait times by means of its users’ GPS pings – excellent methodology – but its web server, traffic.calit2.net, was taken offline by the university without explanation. Other attempts at crowdsourced data, such as Garita Center, still need to attract a crowd. 

La Cantina de los Remedios

photo courtesy of Cindy Mosqueda, loteriachicana.net

If you can make it to only one restaurant on your first trip to Tijuana, that one may as well be La Cantina de los Remedios. It offers a quintessential Mexican experience that can serve as the keystone to understanding all the culinary arts of Baja. The menu is Mexican comfort food, the inspiration for all our alta-cocina/Baja-Med pretensions; the setting, reminiscent of the good old days, includes sly references to the Tijuana of half a century ago.

Because the nostalgic details are historically accurate, and because the menu is strictly legit (no combination plates even though they do serve tacos, enchiladas, and tostadas), the place attracts a lot of locals out for a good time. It's also gringo-friendly – you can get both waiters and menus in English and they accept all major credit cards.

Their menu is varied enough to allow customers to share a snack over drinks, to eat a full meal, or to throw a small party. They offer more than a dozen botanas, four salads, a pasta, five soups, and three tortas. The main dishes include about a dozen forms of chicken, half a dozen shrimp and two fish fillets. Choices of grass-fed beef are extensive, including four parrilladas (mixed grills), arrachera, tampiqueña, a few filets, and a couple U.S.-style steaks. The desserts include favorites from both sides of the border such as crepas de cajeta, flan, carrot cake, and guava cheesecake. And they make one of the best margaritas in the business.

Aguilar and Castañeda come to Tijuana to say the war on drugs is a myth

Rubén Aguilar (left) and Jorge Castañeda (right). Photo by Manuel Montoya.

by Fausto Ovalle

Rubén Aguilar and Jorge Castañeda unveiled their new book, El narco: La guerra fallida [The Failed War on Drug Trafficking], on 20 January 2010 at the Tijuana campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIAT).

The president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, used false assumptions to justify his failed drug war, say Vicente Fox’s former presidential press secretary and the former secretary of state. They point out that this war against drug trafficking was something Calderón created in order to legitimate his presidency and that it was not in his platform when he was running for office.

Cross-border pet adoption

When Jessica and Evan moved to Tijuana, they didn’t plan on starting a charitable service. They came for the same reason that many have done lately – rents are high and incomes are low north of the border. They initially thought they’d live here while working in San Diego, but Tijuana had other plans for them.

They started in an apartment and commuted across the border. That got old fast, especially after they added a relinquished puppy to their household of cats … and then another puppy. It became obvious that there was a great need to save pets from abandonment … and that they could do this themselves … and that they’d surely be needing larger quarters.

They found a house with front and back yards close by the border and settled in to create a place “where dogs and cats of two countries unite”. To fit into their neighborhood, both Jessica and Evan started to learn Spanish. A scant year later, they’re proud to trill their RRs.