Mexican adventure

I decided to explore a little bit of Baja California today. Drove from Tijuana to Mexicali. It was kind of surprising how good the road was... as with most major roads in Mexico, there are two that generally go the same direction. One is a "federal" highway, usually not so well maintained, two lanes, rather narrow. Then there's the toll road.

Those are nice. Damn right well better be for USD$8 from TJ to Mexicali. But it was a controlled access highway in every respect and oh baby you could go like a bat out of hell. The trucks are largely on the free road so there isn't much traffic.

My GPS was freaking out, this duality of highways was very confusing for it. I'd loaded map data for Baja and I'm not sure if I did it quite right. There was a manual or something but I ignored it. The battery on my PC was almost dead so it was better to do it fast than do it right. But it was close enough... there are not a hell of a lot of directional cues on Mexican roads. It definitely DID NOT provide turn by turn directions but it was a great reality check.

I knew I needed to re-enter the USA in Mexicali. To go any further would be too far out of the way. Next point of entry was Nogales. In TJ the border crossing points are well labeled on the road signs. Not so much in Mexicali!! I stopped and asked for directions like four times and eventually got where I needed to go. The express border crossing paperwork I did a few weeks ago paid off. ZIP into the commuter lane (after FINDING it). One car in front of me.

From the time I pulled into the commuter lane on the south side of the border to being back in the USA - less than three minutes. I estimate the wait in the regular lanes was 40 minutes to an hour. So, realistically given the 12 hours I spent doing the pre-clearance paperwork to get the ID card etc.... I just need to cross 14 or 15 more times to re-coup the time spent ;)

The border patrol has gotten creative with the location of their checkpoints. Obviously, no checkpoints on Mexican Highway 2d (or "second" as my GPS pronounced it... gotta love technology) naturally. But there's a pretty well established one east of Yuma, AZ. Nope, they moved it 50 miles further along. They look to see if you look remotely American and do the usual pass of the working dog around the car. Off you go...

So now I need to actually read the manuals that came with that GPS so that I can load the maps onto an SD card instead of into the device's memory... and definitely figure out how I can get files that show all the exact locations of the speed cameras on the roads. Once you have the coordinates for all the speed cameras the unit will alert you if you're traveling too fast ;)

I think I'll xerox the dog.

No, silly, it's not a plot element of a Sarah Silverman show. This was just one of the pages laying around near the copier in a place where I sometimes work. Guess it was a slow day.

E-Verify signs are popping up like mushrooms in every business

Anyone who remotely pays attention to the news media (and I can't say I blame ya if you don't...) knows that immigration is a great big controversy right now. From my cynical viewpoint, I think its going to be an issue that is discussed a lot during the election and then it will pass into the sunset during the first months of the new administraton.

Individual state laws are already taking effect. Arizona has one making it illegal to knowingly hire an illegal alien.

Employers have had an out on that "knowingly" part. Since 1986 the I-9 form came into effect. You had to prove your US citizenship based on your drivers license and your social security card. Anyone could get a drivers license at the time, there was little verification or communication between the states. They certainly didn't care about your immigration status.

Attorneys advised employers that they simply had to collect the information and keep it on file. There was no mechanism to verify anything and an employer could actually put themselves in legal jeopardy by doubting the veracity of a provided ID.

And so it went from 1986 roughly until the present. It was essentially a joke.

There is finally a mechanism that can be used to tie a social security number back to a name, a program called e-verify. Banks have been able to do this for years, but it was done through a private fee-for-use system. Employers now have a free way to verify that the numbers on the card are correct. The state laws are forcing that mechanism to be used.

So every business I've been in today has had very visible posters stating that they use E-verify to make sure that you're really eligible to work. This is something that the US should be protecting - but mechanisms for limited-term working visas that are just as efficient (I know, I'm dreaming) have yet to be created.

Lawyers invent claim of "temperament and suitability" to assist with executions - Missouri

Those readers who know me personally or online know that I'm generally pretty left-leaning. However with regard to the death penalty - I believe that in the case of premeditated murder or the rape of a child: you should be subject to death.

I'm not so sure about the loooooooong list of other crimes that have been added to that category in the last ten years though.

But this legal argument threw me for a loop.

"Lawyers for five death row inmates are pressing Missouri to identify members of its execution team after a newspaper revealed that a nurse on the team was once accused of stalking. The lawyers filed papers last week in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, arguing that the executioner's criminal record raises questions about his "temperament and suitability" to help with executions.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch named the nurse in a story last week, revealing that he was on probation in 2001 when he worked on executions and was allowed to join a federal team that executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in Indiana."

Ok... if the job description is, the convicted murderer goes in alive and comes out dead... SO WHAT if one of the team has a little bit of a checkered past? Is raising the issue of a background check done out of concern for their safety? The whole process is inherently unsafe, right? Go in alive, come out dead... yup, not real safe.

In general I think the US has gotten overly tough on crime. But when someone plans to kill another person and carries it out... an eye for an eye.

Since this blog ostensibly focuses on Uruguay, this is what I observed there:
Get caught robbing a bank (dumb idea there) - 20 years.
Kill someone? - 7-10 years.

Granted, each of those years is 1000% harder than they would be in the USA because prison conditions are, well, a little different.

One phone, two numbers, two service providers. New toy inbound from Hong Kong

I was on ebay browsing Chinese-made off-brand GSM phone devices this weekend. I skipped over a couple of spitting-image iPhone clones - they aren't compatible with iTunes of course but they come unlocked and are damn right well going to stay that way throughout their life. Some of them even have an apple logo on them!

They had an interesting feature! The phones support the simultaneous installation of two SIM cards. For you Verizon and Sprint subscribers this is a foreign concept, GSM phones have a removable plastic smartcard chip under the battery that contain the phone's number and in some cases your contacts. You can therefore change your phone depending on your mood or your environment.

Going to work? Take the full-featured heavier-weight PDA phone. Pop the chip out after work and put into your imported Samsung/Prada phone for a nice dinner out. Going out to a club after that? Pop the chip into that cheap Nokia that you won't shed a tear about if you lose it.

So the iPhone knockoff had the option to switch between the two chips but not have both operating simultaneously. There are hack-ish adaptors that will already do this for existing phones but you have to cut the SIM card to fit inside. You have the same limit with the iPhone knockoff - you're only on one network with one phone number active at a time. And oh by the way when you switch SIMs from one provider to another all your settings for GPRS, SMS and MMS all change too. Plan to carry a 3x5 card with that info and reprogram every time you switch. Um not so much.

But they had others that were far more interesting. Both SIMs active at once! Now this is a neat feature that should be on the market here. Many employers will issue their tech support folk phones but prohibit use of personal phones in the workplace. If your employer happens to be using T-Mobile or the Deathstar AND for personal use you have one of those carriers - you can tell your boss that oh yeah, its your phone service, "I just put it in this other phone." You don't mention there's another radio in the phone thats simultaneously online for your personal cell service. ;)

My application? Local SIM card for the country I'm visiting plus the T-mobile SIM so that if I choose to pay extortionate rates for roaming, I can. Oh and its just neat. I expect that the phone will have some surprise limitation or downside but it was just so neat that I had to have one.

Americans in Brazil

Time Magazine had an article entitled "Soylandia," covering Brazil's huge growth in soy production. The Mayor of a frontier farm town in Brazil had this to say:

"They come down here and start missing their cable TV and their Internet, and they don't come back."

That seems to be true. Americans all over Central America and the Caribbean go to huge lengths to maintain a link with US television, sometimes using satellite dishes that are 3-5 meters in diameter to pull in the weak edges of the signal beamed at the 48 states. There are entire online forums devoted to that very subject. On the South American continent the northern coastal areas of Colombia and Venezuela can just barely receive the faint signals with very big dishes. In Brazil - not so much.

It's an incredible culture shock going from having 300 channels and 4 megs of internet bandwidth to having 3 snowy channels and dialup that doesn't really perform much better than 19.2 kbps if at all due to the quality of the lines.

I've lived it. November 2002 I'm living the connected life in Bloomington, MN. December 2002 we've crossed the equator into disconnected nothingness. For a few weeks its ok but then you start jonesing - bad.

Planning on escaping to South America and making a local salary? Plan on spending 1/6 of your income on TV and and whatever internet bandwidth you can get.

Oh, and from Uruguay the way that USED to work (and may still) to get a glimpse of ABC, CBS and NBC was to get a DirecTV Latin America box activated in Puerto Rico. The same receiving dish provided by DirecTV Uruguay aims at the same satellite and the Puerto Rican box would still receive those US channels live. As of 2005 this worked, but the DirecTV Latin America folks are a secretive lot and it may not any longer.

Besides the way to get your US TV fix from anywhere with a good internet connection is Slingbox. I have an Uruguayan friend who has a dedicated US DirecTV receiver in my home connected to a Slingbox that only he uses - and that thing is keeping my internet connection busy more often than not.

Take this pill and lose weight - Alli hits the US market

Americans, who want everything NOW, have a pill to help them lose weight faster. In any drugstore you can see the big display for Alli. In some stores the display is the same size as a small car. (If you're the same size as the display, you're the target market for this drug...)

Here's the rub. You have to be very certain that you're going to eat low-fat diets. Why? If this miracle drug is in your system and you eat a high-fat meal you're going to shit yourself.

The warning label says as much. It advises that you should carry a change of dark-colored clothes with you when you first start taking it!

The well water on the farm in Uruguay had the same effect and it was much cheaper.

Super Bowl brings super ho's

The Super Bowl is in Phoenix this year and starts in 16 days and 10 hours from now. The cheapest remaining tickets available "officially" are $7,500.00 each.

"People come to the Super Bowl looking for a good time. High-class prostitutes are known to travel the glittering circuit of sporting events, hoping to be the ones to provide it.

But Valley police plan to spoil those kinds of party plans."

In other words, if you've not already made arrangements for your high class ($1000 and up) prostitute to entertain at your Super Bowl pre- or post- party, the risk has gone up. I'm sure the really expensive sex workers have already received confirmation messages on their blackberries from the executive assistants of the customers.

The ones that don't have that hole rented out yet better be careful about how they advertise, could be a cop answering the ad. Visitors to the valley looking to play that 1 (or 2) hole game (hitting the 2nd hole is usually more expensive) that ain't golf better be careful... Could be a cop advertising in print or on the net.

It's my party - or, is it even possible to get HIV treatment in Uruguay?

It's My Party was on TV this evening. Despite the title, it's not an upbeat movie. The whole plot leads up to one thing and its quite sequel-proof.

It has moments where you laugh, you smile - but it's absolutely not a happy ending. I cried throughout the ending and for about ten minutes afterwards.

It reminded me of caring for someone who has HIV. Oh yes, the medication and the support is there. The blood tests are available.

Best advice I could give is this - if you're already part of a mutualista hopefully it's CASMU. Yeah, CASMU doesn't have a great repuatation... but in 2005 the word on the street was that Asociacion Espanola or Medicina Uruguaya would do everything they could to deny the coverage and the expensive drugs. Since CASMU is the Physicians' Union, its the best one to be part of.

If you're not part of a mutualista when you receive the news... make it happen somehow. Form a Unipersonal so that you can pay DISSE to BPS. Then enroll in CASMU. Get yourself an appointment in the "Medicina Preventativa" clinic. That's where the HIV specialists work. You may have a bit of a battle with the administration about a month after you get your first batch of whatever regimen of pills you're put on - because they may try to drop you. My now-ex told them, if you do this I will have the media here covering the issue. "No soy una marica de la calle." (I'm not a faggot from the streets, literally.)

It is possible to date and have a relationship with someone who is HIV positive without contracting the virus. I'm living proof. The relationship did not end due to his HIV status, life can throw other problems your way after THAT disaster.

I've decided that it's best I don't have contact with him anymore because I'm not sure he's continuing to take the medication. I prefer to remember him as he was in 2004, very much alive and healthy and thats the image I will always have.

Wow. I HAD to write this to recover some sense of normalcy after seeing that film. Thanks for reading.

International roaming on that trip to the border

WOW. Unless there's yet another month to wait for the data roaming charges I got off cheap. $2.98 on the bill carried over from roaming on Telcel Mexico. Worth every penny for that call I got too. But that's ten times less than I expected it to be.

Yes, I introduced a new tag - GSM. I gotta go back and re-tag all the old posts that are pertinent. Manana....

Skype isn't doing the trick... what about Antel D20 number in Uruguay

I have occasion to contact people in Uruguay pretty frequently and I'm tiring of lost or elusive connections through Skype. Antel has a service that allows you to get an Uruguayan virtual phone number in whatever area and then have calls to it get forwarded to a landline in, well, a short list other countries including the USA and Spain.

This is an interesting approach to competing with voice-over-IP, which has certainly impacted what was a windfall years ago: international per-minute settlement fees paid on inbound calls.

What's this, you've never heard of that? It's a big hard-currency cash cow that every developing country takes advantage of in the business model of their telecoms administration. Basically the phone company in whatever country can set whatever price they want to connect that call the last few hundred km. Doesn't matter if you've handed it to them on an overseas cable and its right there - you have to pay that extra cost per minute to have the call go through to the local phone. The disparity in rates between countries? This is the source of it. Voice over IP causes that single biggest area of their revenue to plummet, it disrupts things.

Anyway as voice over IP almost assuredly eroded their revenues, it caused prices to go down. The settlement rates for terminating traffic dropped as well and its possible to call into Uruguay for less than 15c a minute now. (Yes, I'm well aware the price can be far lower... but the quality of that call if it even gets connected is far lower.)

So to compete with this they have this D20 service. Your local contacts call you on your local number and it rings on your designated phone in the USA (or Spain, or a few other select countries). I have to think the quality might be better.

Gets back to that innate love/hate relationship a lot of Uruguayans have with Antel. When the execute a service they do it VERY well. But the idea of giving more money to the government OR having a little extra bureaucracy - that doesn't sit so well.

I'm on the fence right now about whether to pull the trigger. It has the potential to make conference calls oh-so-much easier... :)

It's not just major league baseball that has a doping scandal...

According to a front page article on observa.com.uy, the statistics are in. This year's top substance that Uruguayan "futbol" players popped positive for in anti-doping tests was....

Bolivian marching powder.



Yup, that IS what you think it is. It's hysterically illegal - get caught with it and you WILL go to prison - but its also fairly pervasive.

Ezeiza airport pisses off other passengers too...

The circus that is Argentina plays on... This doesn't seem to have popped up in English anywhere, I saw it on Observa.com.uy. This is my translation of the article:

"Delays and incidents at Ezeiza
5000 Aerolineas Argentinas passengers suffered delays and cancellation of their flights. The employees walked off the job after passengers rioted.

Furious at the long delays and flight cancellations this Saturday, hundreds of Aerolineas Argentinas passengers attacked the company's agents at Buenos Aires' international airport.

Local TV channels showed images of passengers attacking the gate areas in a giant brawl including throwing computers in the air while an airline representative attempted to explain the cause of the problems.

5000 passengers remained stranded at Ezeiza International Airport just outside the capital. Only two flights that had been rescheduled took off and the rest were suspended at noon when the airline employees union (APA) walked off the job due to fear of the passengers.

Neither the airline or the union explained what started the fight. Aerolineas Argentinas said the delays were caused by work slowdowns from the pilots and ramp workers unions. However, representatives from both unions denied any such action and blamed the problems on oversold flights.

"We are worried because (the airline) sold more tickets than their capacity," said the spokesperson for the Airline Pilots Association, Gerardo Cuadro.

Maria de los Angeles Aguer, spokesperson for the APA, stated that their members left their posts after a passenger attacked a gate agent. APA is demanding that Aerolineas Argentinas guarantee that their flights are staffed with their full crew and have requested that airport police step in to assure the workers' physical safety.

-----------------
My comment? I wasn't kidding when I wrote that passing through Ezeiza airport flying out was irritating.

Holy shit, it's not "holy sand?"

A man dressed as a priest caught at Amsterdam's airport with three kilos of cocaine under his vestments claimed to police that his packages contained "holy sand", Dutch police said.

Police stopped the man at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport as he was transiting on a flight from South America, Robert Van Aapel, a spokesman for the Dutch Royal Military Police told CNN by phone Saturday.

"He refused to be searched saying that he was a religious person and it was not allowed," Van Aapel said.

"However, this is normal procedure so our officers insisted. They asked him again and after the second time they carried out the search and discovered the man had packs strapped to his legs below his priest's clothes. He told us they contained holy sand," he said.

He said the man, who is aged around 40 and a Bolivian national, was arrested Thursday after arriving in to the airport on a flight from Lima, Peru. He was attempting to transit on a flight to Milan when he was apprehended with the cocaine, worth around €105,000 ($155,000).

The Bolivian appeared in court Friday on charges of drug smuggling, Van Aapel said.

Dutch police are trying to establish if the man is a real priest after he claimed to be a senior member of the clergy in the Bolivian capital La Paz, he added.
----------------------------

I can't figure out why they'd waste time trying to figure out if he's a real priest... Maybe there's a special provision in Dutch law.

Maybe their customs exemptions are something like:
Regular people: 2 bottles of booze and two cartons of cigarettes
Catholic Priests: 2 bottles of booze, two cartons of cigarettes, 10 kilos of coke and a laptop full of child porn

It's also going to be a mild setback for Milan. ;)

Deliverance, delivered

You see some strange stuff in traffic around here. From a distance I thought it was just another plumber or electrician but this guy's offerings are more ethereal. The picture was taken in North Scottsdale so it's not like there are a lot of street people to reach out to - can only surmise he's on the way home or just passing thru.

Where there's smoke...

Signs of the times... A Fortune Magazine article entitled, "Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?" 2008 may be the hottest year on record.

"Russellville (Indiana) resident Christina Snyder is accused of asking her neighbor to tie her up with duct tape, beat her up, write the word "whore" on her chest and set her house on fire..."

"State Police and the prosecutor's investigator went to the Snyder home on Tuesday of this week -- the date Snyder had allegedly plotted to carry out her scheme -- where they found her with the word "whore" already written on her chest with a marker and the duct tape in her possession.

On Wednesday, investigators spoke with Snyder's insurance agent in Greencastle and according to her testimony, Snyder was in her office approximately two months ago and stated that she was fearful her ex-husband was going to burn down her house. "

Fed wiretaps cut due to unpaid bills

Ok, I seem to be on a phone-related theme here. It's getting about as pervasive as Mean Orange People were a few months ago. But... who's watching the watchers? One fed stole $25k?

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

This is relevant to Uruguay because that giant US Embassy building is rumored to be CIA headquarters, I bet lots of monitoring goes on there... They sure don't have that big of a building just for processing visas.

Uruguay got rid of the concept of "national" long distance

It may have been well-publicized there, but I noticed a mention of it online last night. I was incredulous and of course had to verify... I hadn't noticed it while I was there because I was using mostly cellphones, never had occasion to buy one of the chip cards the payphones accept.

The telephone bills I used to get for calls between home and a couple of numbers in Salinas seriously added up and were not. When we lived in the countryside outside Pando we had a Montevideo (02) number. To call Salinas (037) about 10km away - long distance.

It added up to real money.

Now, it's not a huge thing to celebrate... local calls are still timed there. You pay per minute whether you're calling next door or what used to be long distance. There's some allowance each month that's part of the basic phone charge but when you go beyond that it starts to add up.

January 6th. 1 year anniversary

That which does not kill you makes you stronger. One year ago today something truly horrific happened to me. It has made me a much stronger person. Time helps the day-to-day impact of a crime fade, but you tend to relive it on the anniversaries.

It's not over yet. I thought it would be over far sooner but it wasn't meant to be. I will never forget and never stop standing up for myself.

It IS the world's oldest profession...

Ask yourself... how long do YOU have to groom your mate?

MACAQUE MONKEYS 'PAY' FOR SEX
Male macaque monkeys "pay" for sex with females by grooming them, according to scientists. The monkeys' version of the "world's oldest profession" is also a rare example of market forces acting in nature, with the availability of females affecting the "price" of mating. In areas where there are fewer females, males are forced to groom their partners for up to twice
as long before they are able to have sex, the research found.

Sexual activity among a 50-strong group of long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, increased after bouts of male-to-female grooming, according to findings published in Animal Behaviour journal and reported in New Scientist.

On average, females had sex 1.5 times an hour, but it jumped to 3.5 times an hour immediately after the female monkey was groomed by their male partner. The females were also less likely to look elsewhere for sex after being groomed. Michael Gumert, of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said unlike examples of "reciprocal altruism" – in which one organism provides a service to another in return for getting something back at a later date – the value of sex fluctuated like any other economic commodity. The macaques' behaviour is thought to be an example of a "biological market".

But what's six hours SOUTH of Phoenix?

Seriously.

San Diego is about 6 hrs. to the west. Las Vegas about 6 hrs. to the north. Albuquerque, New Mexico is 6 hrs. to the east.

For those of you who had social studies after your high school's open lunch hour and you were stoned during that class, one does not need a passport to visit New Mexico.

South is another story. You'll wind up somewhere in Mexico... but that's possibly dangerous, they don't all speak English and it's hard to find a Starbucks. Oh, and you shouldn't drive at night.

It's all true. Starbucks is very overpriced for that market, very few speak English and you shouldn't drive at night because there are dogs, stray farm animals and local vehicles on the road with no lights.

Yeah, and you might get robbed. But that can happen on the street near the Phoenix Airport or lots of places!

It's sort of the same as the attitude people in Wisconsin and Minnesota have about visiting Chicago. It's dangerous.

Great, buy into that idea and you get to stay home and watch whatever's on cable. Catch up on the weather channel and watch the steady diet of fear on the news channel of your choice. What's the threat level today? How many more died in Iraq? (Sure, these things are all important but for most of us only the first one might have a significant impact on your next 48 hours...) Oh, and be sure to believe it all.

I don't buy it - not completely. I have a healthy respect for risk but I'm not going to let fear run my life.

A real issue about exploring six hours south of Phoenix is that it may well take you six hours to get back into the USA. You might sit on the road overnight stopped in traffic on the Mexican side of the border.

There's not much of a middle class in Mexico. (There's less of one here in the USA every day - every time a kid drops out of school, every teenage pregnancy, every new gang member and every new Wal-Mart that opens squeezes our middle class more and more - but I digress.) So the border is real easy to cross heading south but not so much in the other direction. But paradoxically you see a fair number of Mexican-registered cars on the road in Arizona - I notice one or two each day.

You notice something about all those cars too - they are fairly new or at least very well-kept. I.E. the vehicles that get across are owned by corporations or by relatively wealthy people. A VW Jetta is a hell of a lot more expensive in Mexico due to taxes, keep that in mind the next time you see one on the road with Mexican plates.

The seed had been planted for this whole process while I was standing in line at the San Ysidro crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. The cars/travelers in the SENTRI commuter lanes do cross faster.

As the Customs and Border Patrol website says... it's a privilege and not a right to cross. It was interesting to see the demographic when I went to register myself and my car to use the express lanes going northbound. It's a seductive offer. Sell your soul to the man - give up a bunch of information - and get a faster trip north at the end of your travels. Even more seductive for their target demographic - wealthy Mexican citizens.

For me it's already a foregone conclusion. To live in Uruguay I had to give a set of fingerprints to the FBI so they could in turn tell the Uruguayan police I didn't have a record. Visa is everywhere you want to be - and Uncle Sam's nose is following the money every time that machine outside the US says "aprobado" and you sign the slip. Wire transfer? They collect that information too. So it's not like they're asking for anything new.

It DOES tie it all to a couple of RFID's. One goes on your car and the other goes in your wallet.

Signing up with The Man entails a trip to a border post. Nogales is closest but it had no times that were convenient to my schedule. I chose to go to Calexico instead.

They give you an approval letter that you print off the internet. You print it yourself and bring it with you. It has a succinctly worded list of documents you have to bring - if you're employed by someone. If you're self-employed as I am, it's more of a grey area.

The place is damn hard to find.

I've never been to a government office and encountered a representative that didn't speak English fluently. I am not one of these people who pisses and moans about bilingual education and adamantly says English First or English Only. Hardly. But it was a hell of a surprise when the gatekeeper/cashier for the whole process could not put together a coherent sentence in English.

It was a bit like a visit to a government office south of the border. Much more well appointed - US tax dollars at work to have the place air conditioned and as well finished as a retail store. Not a typewriter in sight, lots of high tech equipment. What it DID have is a lot of employees standing around with lots of idle time and an unclear process.

I had called to try to find out exactly what documents were necessary if you've been an employee half the year and self-employed the other half of the year. To borrow a phrase from the media "A telephone call requesting comment was not immediately returned."

So it began with the gatekeeper. Show her the letter and start asking about documents. It becomes clear that this conversation is not going to go far in English. We're clearly going to have a heated conversation about documents and I'm more accustomed to doing that in Spanish anyway.

I'll translate bits and pieces. It's not an unfriendly conversation, more a battle of wits. It's adversarial but sugar coated and respectful.

"What is all this? Where is your business license?"

"This is it. It's proof that I've registered with the state of Arizona and my tax ID numbers for federal and state."

"But you need a business license!"

"Not according to my CPA. This is as close to a business license as I have or need."

"You need a utility bill to prove your address."

"It doesn't specify that in the letter. It said rent or mortgage receipts - those are two recent ones. I have my voter registration card which was issued December 7th, 2007 in the state of Arizona. It was mailed to me."

"But you need a utility bill, everyone needs a utility bill"

"It doesn't say that in the letter. If anyone ever answered the phone here I might have known that. Instead I have this brand new voter registration card mailed to me by the state of Arizona."

"Ok. But your bank statement has to be the original it can't be printed off the internet."

"Your agency's own acceptance letter is printed off the internet. My bank doesn't send statements, it makes them available for download. This is very common."

She thought she had me. "You don't have your last year's tax return for your business. You have your own but there is nothing here for your business showing it paid taxes."

"My incorporation document shows that my business did not exist before August of 2007. Therefore there is no tax return for it for 2006 because it did not exist then."

Pause.... "So where are your tax reciepts then?"

"Here is the report from my payroll service showing the thousands of dollars in federal and state taxes."

"I've never seen anything like this."

"The dollar amounts on the report match up with the deductions from the bank account, I'm not hiding anything." She looks at me as if I have more to say but I remain silent.

It is at this point that I have to give thanks to the employees of the Uruguayan "Departamento" (state) of Canelones - particularly in the Atlantida and Pando offices - for training me to argue so well. Without help from them and other experiences I would have been intimidated and given up early on - or at least been beaten back to return a second time just because of the cross-examination.

Finally she assembled everything together into a file folder and handed me a "welcome packet" explaining the program. I'd gotten past the first step. "Ok take a seat, we'll call you."

It wasn't quite over but it was looking good. I was still VERY surprised that I'd just had to justify my existence and income IN SPANISH to an official of the US government.

Ok, time to regroup. Wonder what's going on in the outside world... The TV is of no help. Crystal clear picture, I thought it was a DVD. However the rabbit ears are concealed behind a fake plant on top of the cabinet where the TV is. The TV is showing channel 5 from Mexicali - Mexican television. I see a toy commercial showing a URL at the end - something at mattel.com.mx. Ok, it's childrens programming... Any messages on my cellphone?

My phone is roaming on Telcel, one of the Mexican services. Five bars of signal too! Must not be any T-mobile signal. This'll cost at least twenty bucks on next month's bill.

Then I get called for phase two of the inquisition. This officer has already been briefed about the weak spots in my documentation. I politely but firmly hold my ground. THIS conversation is in English.

"Well, ok, you do esentially have everything but you just have your business bank statement here. We need your personal one too."

This eventually got resolved. All I will say is they were willing to work with me.

So after that negotiation was finished, "one more thing..." It's a double sided questionnaire about previous travels. It's some of the same information that I was required to provide online at the start of the process - i.e. they're verifying if I was really the same person who filled out the online questionnaire. The questions would cause privacy advocates to foam at the mouth.

If you live in the USA you simply don't have any privacy. No sense raising the alarm about all the horses being missing when the stable door has been open for years.

They even ask about tattoos and piercings. I'm not kidding.

As I fill out the questionnaire I glance at the TV. I get distracted for a minute while I see one MX government ad about "transparencia" and then another touting (and reminding viewers of) human rights.

I turn the questionnaire in. They look it over. "Why were you in Uruguay so long?" I answer the question. "Write it down on the form just like you said."

Finally we're finished. The officer takes a picture of me with a little webcam they have attached to the workstation. They have the same little machine that foriegners entering the US encounter - the fingerprint reader. Again, I don't care about giving up the prints. Did it already to BE in Uruguay that long.

"Go pay the cashier." She points at the same lady where you start the process. I go pay the $97.50 fee. I get a receipt and get told to go back to the officer's station. This back and forth is eerily reminiscent of Latin American bureaucracy at its finest.

She hands me a card with a very bad picture of me. It outdoes my Arizona driver's license for having a bad picture. It simply says "SENTRI" - the name of the trusted traveler program and has some other information on it. The card is an RFID. There's a pamphlet that explains what the reader looks like in the "Sentri" lane at the border crossing and how to hold the card so the reader is most likely to correctly interrogate it.

"This card is not proof of citizenship. You still have to have your passport. You're going to get a card in the mail at some point in the future that IS proof of citizenship."

Then come the teeth in the process.

The officer hands me the "Know before you go" pamphlet. It's on the web. "Sign this." It's an acknowledgment that I've received a copy and will read/abide by it.

"You will get a faster crossing experience. However, be sure to declare everything. Now that you're in the program it's zero tolerance. If we catch you with an extra bottle of undeclared liquor it's going to be the full penalty the first time. You will have to pay 30 times the US value of that bottle AND have to pour it out. Ordinarily the first time we catch something like this you just forfeit it. Understand?"

"Yes, I understand." What am I gonna do at this point? Protest?

"Ok, last step, go out and pull your car up to the yellow area by the building entrance. I need to verify that the vehicle matches the registration and insurance documents and put a sticker in the windshield."

I go out to the parking lot. My car is the only one in the SENTRI parking area with US registration. It's also the oldest car in the parking lot, by a good five years.

I pull up. The cuteness of the dog is noted (yeah Shaggy went with). The numbers are verified. A sticker is put inside my windshield. When there is bright light shining through the sticker you can see the embedded radio antenna inside it. Otherwise its completely nondescript. No markings. Much thinner than one of those toll transponders.

I'm not sure in retrospect how I feel about the whole thing. But its done and whats more - I have nothing to hide. I might feel a lot different if I'd never gotten Uruguayan residency - but if I'd never been there I wouldn't speak Spanish. I'll write about what Shaggy and I find six hours south of Phoenix in the future when we make the trip. Gotta get her papers in order next.