Mexico: Can lightning strike twice in the same place?
Saturday, November 19th, 2011
((José Francisco Blake))
Second interior minister dies in suspicious plane crash
[Translation of an article from El Faro of San Salvador, El Salvador, for November 14. See original here.]
By Blanche Petrich
Important pieces of the puzzle that is Mexico these days have again fallen into place. Faced with a new calamity – a helicopter crashed on a hillside, the bodies of eight officials and military officers amid the twisted metal – the figure of President Felipe Calderón is weakened even more. In a period of three years, mourning has befallen his cabinet on two occasions. First a secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño, dies in a plane crash (September 21, 2008) [sic. -- it was in fact on November 4, 2008] and now José Francisco Blake, his successor, dies in another airplane accident, last November 11.
But can lightning strike twice in the same place? Science and common sense would say that the probability is minimal. But nevertheless…
In fact we can speak of three bolts of lightning, three air “accidents” that kill three cabinet members in a period of only six years and leave strategic national security ministries leaderless during the past two Partido Acción Nacional administrations, if we include the helicopter crash in which José Ramón Huerta, the public security minister in the previous administration of Vicente Fox (September 21, 2005), died. (more…)