Our fearless correspondent dishes more TJ dirt...

Greetings from the apex of obscurity, high in the Tijuana hills! I am a block away from a heavily guarded military installation, grim men clad in khaki, handle-bar mustaches on tan glowering faces, men toting evil-looking M16's and AK-47s, pacing to and fro under the largest national flag I have ever seen. A flag large enough to blanket a football field. Are they principally protecting that giant flag? Or a nest of Lockheed hand-me-downs, ICBMs aimed at Venezuela? More likely a mountain of cocaine... Why else would the governor of Morelos suspend the entire police force last week — all 552 officers — and then come under scrutiny himself as a shill for the Juarez cartel? But tracking cocaine hauls in Latin America is definitely not in my job description, thanks...

A few hundred feet from that sinister bunker, tucked into a sere hill overlooking the infamous Avenida Revolucion, resides a quiet internet cafe, lodged in the front room of an upscale white stucco house, a real bourgeois pad, where I type the present dispatch; costing me twelve pesos an hour. There's no one else here but me and a couple of kids blasting the simulated daylights out of suspiciously Arab-looking rebels...

I pause to gaze panoramically at the dithering valley below; splayed out somewhere under the diesel exhaust fumes, lies the sleazy Avenida Revolucion, a street many a junky has nodded off on for the last time, many a USD sorority girl filled her last Valium prescription, many a Puebla country girl forced to work in the Zona Rosa — servicing belching, obese gringo truckers, and slobbering Federales with terminal dandruff and halitosis, their enormous pot-bellies gurgling disgustingly, still digesting the carne asada they just ate as they furiously fuck the dead-eyed fifteen-year-old peasant girl fresh off the flatbed truck from Guaymas... Semi-literate girls hiking skirts and lap-dancing for Neanderthal frat boys from USD: gangs of young white american thugs, moving in menacing groups up and down the drag, skylarking and crushing malnourished beggars under their Air Jordan treads, laughing obstreperously, carrying newly-bought bottles of Tequila in brown paper bags, shouting at each other about hotel rooms, money made, money lent, money spent, the latest epithets from the hip-hop tapes they like... Real Americans...

Yes, the Avenida Revolucion! What else but pure anguish could be distilled from a street which has five giant pharmacies, five giant discos and five painted, fluttering prostitutes badly in need of dental work, per block? Some might think such a ratio heaven itself... But I am not of their number. At least not after the first few nights...

I asked a young Mexican college student what keeps all those pharmacies in business? At first, she said she didn't know. Her face a model of polite perplexity, of perfect ignorance. But I wore an earnest grin and pressed her. "Valium," she blurted in defeat. "Valium Y Prozac Y Deprivara Y..." she stuttered as if I had forced out something fetid from her, hidden, vile and repulsive... Deprivara? I couldn't remember. Was that an SSRI? Female hormone? Viagra? My pharmacological knowledge gets shaky at such moments of truth... Pharmacy culture in TJ is worth a study in itself. Would it lead back to that heavily guarded bunker I'm next to? Maybe. Probably...

Editor's Note - Our best guess is that Deprivara must be Depo Prevera, an injectable birth control hormone that lasts up to three months...

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