Ford To Announce $2.5B Investment In Mexico On 90th Anniversary

Not a problem as long as you pay protection.

They are not exaggerated, but violence in Mexico is down. Homicides peaked in 2011. Intrestingly enough, Mexico is way safer than most other Latin American countries.

@28-Cars-Later The only people who get paid protection at Ford are anyone above the Director level (VP's, etc). All I got was a Hybrid fusion and a few STD's.

@bball40dtw Eh, I've heard its become more violent since I was down there two years ago. The previous president kept assassinating cartel bosses to the point where street thugs got 'promoted within' to be the new terrorist organization leaders.

@tresmonos You had eyeballs on the ground there, so I don't doubt your words, but I was under the impression that much of the serious violence and serious corruption (versus graft) was narco-cartel related and concentrated disproportionately in particular regions such as Juarez (as one example), and that Mexico's government & judiciary had cracked down on areas having manufacturing zones/parks (such as Coahuila, as one example).

@tresmonos "All I got was a Hybrid fusion and a few STD’s." That's a t-shirt.

@DeadWeight We got to see what only could be a Narco hit in Cuatitlan. That was tons of fun. 5 dead in a Dodge Ram in the middle of the street. Gunned down 1.5 miles from the plant. Also - Last week I was there, all those kids got abducted from a night club 1.5 blocks from the US Embassy just off Reforma. Those kids are dead as f*ck because one of their friends ticked off some narco boss. Yeah. Only the northern parts are bad. I highly suggest the B&B go visit Cancun and socialize with the Zeta's for their next family vacation. Better yet, Acapulco was super safe when I visited. Make sure to bring your teenage blonde haired daughters with you. All that drug stuff is only on the border where the talking heads have done their professional risk assessments. I must have forgotten about the time that Mexican Marines kidnapped my coworkers and took all their money. Those classy, trustworthy mutherf*ckers must have just been playing a prank on us! Haha! Get back to fighting crime you silly soldiers.

@DeadWeight Also: borderlandbeat.com Whenever I ventured out to visit stuff with coworkers, I would read this until I got super depressed and familiar with whatever current narco activity guerrilla reporters could miserably track.

@tresmonos The violent groups are more fractured now. It's like all the Al-Queda offshoots once OBL was killed and thrown in the ocean. I haven't been to Mexico since the height of the drug wars in 2011, but friends tell me that many places are better. Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California are better, but some other places are worse. Violence has actually shifted out of cities and to the countryside and thr rural US. Murders are down quite a bit, but Mexico is still far from safe.

@DeadWeight I recently spent a week down in the state of Jalisco for work, which admittedly is very different from the border areas that generally are the source of drug related issues. Didn't see or hear of any violent crime, seems that it's mostly the standard issue of property crime that people are worried about (broken glass cemented to tops of walls, etc). I did have sketchy guys on bikes with backpacks offer to sell me all sorts of drugs, at least once every evening I was there (resort area where the hotel was).

@bball40dtw Stay long enough anywhere with my degenerate behavior and you'll see the violence. Most people stay in and don't socialize or drive around like they own the place. I see some of my old Mexican coworkers are more self aware of the cartel and corruption issues of their country via social media. That makes me happy as I feel like there's hope for a shift in the mindset of that culture. There are many educated engineers who I worked with that are just as good as our best up here. The faster they fix their issues, the sooner I can retire there and enjoy their superior climate and topography.

@DeadWeight In Tucson, the news would have a "BorderWatch" segment every night. My favorite was the drug smugglers catapulting drugs over the fence with an actual catapult that was towed by a Lobo.

@bball40dtw "superior climate and topography" Does topography = T&A?

@bball40dtw "the sooner I can retire there and enjoy their superior climate and topography." After spending a week in balmy weather, surrounded by delicious cheap food (50 peso meal at 'comida corridas' in small villages blew anything I ate in the resort part of town out of the water), my colleague and I were both half-seriously scheming and inquiring about property values and ex-pats' experiences there. My dream would be to farm a small piece of land out there, cook on an outdoor stove, take siestas in the shade, and drive my produce to market in a beat up little Nissan NP300 :)

@bball40dtw An emphatic YES on that point. Must be something in the water...

@bball40dtw A Hermosillo 5 is a middle America 10.

@gtemnykh Might be the lack of HFCS in the general diet. "Must be something in the water…" ...or maybe something that's not in the water?

@bball40dtw Hermosillo is chocked full of gorgeous women. The DF not so much. That being said, I had a Mexican GF was was absolutely gorgeous when I lived there. Probably the most or second most attractive woman I've dated. And I picked her up being a miserable over worked DB.

@bball40dtw Actually no, much safer countries in the rest of the Americas where the drug trade is not big

As of 2005, based on the UAW's own statistics, the median wage of a UAW worker in a manufacturing facility owned & run by GM, Ford or Chrysler (Daimler then) was $74 hourly, which included $28 per hour in terms of cost for health insurance, pension plan funding, etc. I was an intern at a financial institution in 2002 and personally saw W2's of UAW line workers who then made over 100k in salary with overtime included.

"Once upon a time the average Mexican autoworker made around $4 (USD equivalent) an hour. And there was much grousing about them being overpaid…" Not so sure about this part since they pretty well match the lowest cost regions in the world. Still, everyone wants a better deal.

@danio3834 "... since they pretty well match the lowest cost regions in the world." I think NAFTA did a lot in support of that for Mexico. But all-in-all, NAFTA has done more good than it has harmed. Obviously, not from the UAW perspective but the take-no-prisoners philosophy of the UAW re their employers has been a huge impetus to get American-based automakers of all nationalities to seek the more profitable green grass on the south s!de of the fence. I think it is great. If Mexico employs that many more of their own people, maybe we'll see that many less on this s!de of the border.

@highdesertcat Every single thing that Ross Perot said back in the 1980s about what passing NAFTA & MFN Trade Status for China would do to the American middle class has come true, yet the establishment politicians such as the Bush's & Clinton's made fun of Ross and demonized him as some sort of conspiracy theorist at the time he made those predictions.

@DeadWeight I voted for Ross Perot. To no avail. And I realize that for SOME American workers NAFTA has been catastrophic. They lost their jobs because they were not competitive. But I still believe that looking at the whole picture, NAFTA was good for America and the vast majority of our 330+ Million residents. During the most recent Dockworkers and Longshoremen strike, their union had to deal with the Chinese and the Chinese who run America's ports, harbors and docks don't mess around, and nearly broke the union. Just like Sergio doesn't mess around with the UAW. My brother in the LA area told me that the Longshoremen there didn't gain squat and in fact lost a bunch of pay in the process of not working on weekends and overtime. So selling our harbors and ports to the Chinese paid us some dividends I never expected when Bill Clinton sold them to the Chinese. I was against that but I was wrong.

@highdesertcat If you don't want your neighbor coming over the border, you may want to tell your right wing nut job representative to focus on domestic issues that will make Mexico safer. Until then, chicken before the egg.

@DeadWeight NAFTA was great in theory, if we had only focused on educating our workforce for higher tech trades. We never evolved from WWII industrialization. We never reinvested in our children's public education. All that money went into everyone's investment portfolio's and bumping up the bar of welfare so all those textile workers' standard of living didn't change whether they were combining cotton or smoking pall malls on their front porch watching their mill get torn down.

@tresmonos It could be worse; he could have Debbie Stabenow as a Senator...

@DeadWeight "Every single thing that Ross Perot said back in the 1980s about what passing NAFTA & MFN Trade Status for China would do to the American middle class has come true" That's narrowly true. But NAFTA and trade policies didn't end up actually being the cause of all those bad effects. Horrendous fiscal policies are the cause.

@HDC I voted for Ross also. I literally cried that election night. Ol' Ross wasn't 100% correct with 23 years of rear view vision, but he had some very valid points.

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