President Felipe Calderon on Mexico’s dangerously cinematic year

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon, summing up a bloody 2009 for his country, evoked a movie title far from anything the tourism department might pick.

“The Year of Living Dangerously,” he said.

Indeed, some of the spectacular violence this past year was, as many Latinos say, de pelicula, meaning ‘like from the movies.’ The carnage included beheadings, chopped-up bodies in ice chests and wild shootouts in the middle of towns. Thousands of people have been killed in the government’s battle with drug cartels.

And the dangerous living has not stopped there: Mexico is mired in a terrible economic crisis that has slashed growth and cost jobs.

“This year,’ Calderon said, ‘was, and still is, very complicated, very difficult, very challenging.”

-- Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City