My father-in-law has always said that Mexico is a fantastic country. By fantastic, he meant that daily life, the obvious, the logical, all become fantastical. Anything can happen here. Here is just one more example of that.

When I stepped out of my house, I used to see this:

Green trees filled with hundreds of species of birds and other animals. You could hear the birds in the evening and in the early morning. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about where we live. When the downtown traffic and smog got to be too much, I would just look across the street at what everyone said was a federal reserve and feel instantly refreshed.

This is what is happening to it:

When people started holding protests and handing out petitions to stop the construction of a Wal-Mart in La Joyita, I immediately joined the fight. We were later told that thanks to our efforts, no Wal-Mart would be built. We all let out a sigh of a relief.

However, a few weeks later, we noticed that trees were being knocked down. We could hear them falling from early morning until late evening. The sound of bulldozers replaced the sound of birds but we couldn’t yet see anything happening.

Then we saw it: an ugly red dirt road like a bloody gash right through the middle of the forest. The gash kept growing and growing and right along with it, the sound of bulldozers.

Now there are streetlights, a few buildings and preparations to build a private neighborhood complete with a shopping center. A Wal-Mart perhaps?

My neighbor stopped by the local government office with a few friends in action. A government official calmly told them that there is no construction taking place in La Joyita. They’ve flown over the area and seen with their own special helicopters that the reserve is untouched.

So there you have it folks. Either their special helicopters really are quite special, or these pictures are a figment of your imagination.