Published with permission: Chilton Williamson Jr.**
and Crisis Magazine
My late father-in-law, Neil McCaffrey (founder of Arlington House publishers, The Conservative Book Club, etc.), remarked back in the 1960s that bishops would do well to learn something about economics, given their predilection for instructing the faithful and indeed the world in that discipline in its moral dimension. It has seemed to me for the past 30 years that churchmen would do equally well to read up on matters in all sorts of fields relating to immigration and migration—from South to North and from the Third World to the First especially. It seems the prudent thing for them to do, and Christ and the Church have always counseled prudence.
I was reminded of this apparent gap in their education while reading a recent account in The Daily Mail of a riot on New Year’s Eve at the Cieneguillas penitentiary for men in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. According to the Mail, the ructions erupted from what was planned as a “friendly” soccer match between incarcerated members of the Gulf and Zetas drug cartels. Following an argument over an asserted dirty tackle in the penalties box, players drew guns and fired them. Three hours later, the federales, the National Guard, and prison officials managed to subdue the mayhem in which 16 inmates were killed and five wounded. In the aftermath, the prison conducted a search that yielded—in addition to more guns—“knives, 77 bags of marijuana, a saw, three pairs of scissors, nine phones, phone chargers, two hammers and a bottle of liquor.” The suspicion is that all this contraband had been smuggled into Cieneguillas by relatives of the inmates during visiting hours on New Year’s.
It goes without saying that Mexico has no monopoly on crime, including prison crime. Americans of a certain age will remember the 1971 “rebellion” at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York. It was the worst prison outbreak in American history: 1,281 of the prison’s approximately 2,200 inmates rioted, gained control of the prison, and took 42 of the prison staff hostage. Subsequently, other prison riots have occurred in the nearly five decades since Attica, but none of them was near as deadly as the one in Zacatecas.
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época.
Ask any Taiwanese who owns Taiwan, and the answer invariably will be "the Taiwanese people" or sometimes simply "the people". That the country should belong to its people should be obvious, but this is not always the case in a place where equality is lacking and entitlement is rife. Thailand is a telling example.
ateniense. Promulga una ley de emancipación de los siervos que produjo una élite de ciudadanos. Introduce el Consejo de los Cuatrocientos y un Tribunal de Justicia Popular. Sus reformas se constituyen en semillas que establecen condiciones para el surgimiento de la democracia. Su lema se fundamenta en la siguiente expresión: Nada en demasía.