Pagan par excellence, “the festival of carnality”, prior to Lent, gives rise to pleasures but also to an infinite series of temptations, sins… and dangers.
Rare, very rare, has been the case of a carnival with white balance. Between the riots and the consumption of alcohol, the demons are unleashed until they cross all limits. Ash Wednesday (March 3) will come to repent and begin the 40 days in which the Catholic creed prohibits the sins of the flesh and, thus, honor the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; Holy Week, from April 5 to 11.
The day after tomorrow the carnival festivities begin to culminate next Tuesday, March 1. These are dates marked at a global level although, as Mayor Luis Guillermo Benítez declared to the media yesterday, most of the world’s carnivals have been canceled (including the most famous in the world, Rio de Janeiro, and all those in Brazil) , so, according to his calculation, the tourism that likes these celebrations will be allowed to come, from the most diverse countries, to Mazatlan in the coming days.
Yesterday the Secretary General of the Government, Enrique Inzunza Cázarez, at the weekly conference (Governor Rubén Rocha Moya traveled to CDMX to reschedule the presidential tour to the Santa María dam), announced not one, but two strong security operations for the carnival: the police and the health.
It is true that joy defines, above all, this festival in Mazatlan, given the noisy character of the marismeños. Decades ago they changed the Ugly King for the King of Joy, under an undeniable precept: “In Mazatlan there are no ugly people.”
Nobody can deny, I hope, that the intense carnival movement provides a place for the commission of illegal acts, including the most serious, such as homicides.
In a carnival in Mazatlan, the peasant leader known as the Gitano assassinated then-governor Rodolfo T. Loaiza in 1944. It was in the middle of the gala ball of these festivities that, by the way, owe a lot to Loaiza, who laid the foundations for his international takeoff. Don Rodolfo loved carnivals, he was a “farandulero”, as the crowd now says to refer to partygoers.
One Sunday of carnival, that of 2002, in the middle of the Golden Zone of Mazatlan, elements of the Ministerial Police opened fire against the most powerful capo of those times, Ramón Arellano Félix, until they ended his life on the edge of a sidewalk. The fact meant the beginning of the end of the criminal domain of the Arellano brothers. The oldest of them, Francisco, previously made his legendary contribution by “stealing” the Carnival queen in 1990, Rocío del Carmen, who was the girlfriend of a young man with the surname Coppel and had just been crowned.
Violence has accompanied the Mazatlan Carnival in many ways throughout history.
To its 2022 edition, the health risk is added, in case it was necessary, in the midst of the fourth wave of covid-19.
The Secretary of Health, Héctor Melesio Cuen Ojeda, called on whoever decides to attend the carnival, to do so responsibly and strictly comply with sanitary measures.
More radical was the director of the General Hospital of Mazatlán, Dr. Carlos Leonel Verdugo, who on January 18 declared that his recommendation to the population is only one: not to attend.
Yesterday, the president of the Congressional Health Commission, deputy Viridiana Camacho, urged both the government and society to give their best effort so that there are no regrettable consequences.
Personally, we are left with what was declared to EL DEBATE on Sunday by the bishop of the diocese of Mazatlán, Monsignor Mario Espinosa Contreras:
“We can only ask God that everything goes well.” So be it.
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