dollarvigilante.com / By Jeff Berwick / December 1, 2012
Hello from Acapulco,
I had a rough start to my week as I was forced to go to the slave processing center (passport office) to ask permission from a group of people operating on behalf of a criminal enterprise if they would allow me to travel with my six year old daughter who had yet to be the unproud owner of a slave card (passport).
We are planning a family and work vacation over Christmas and beyond through Central and Eastern Europe as well as parts of Africa and, of course, travel in the so-called free world is not allowed without permission.
As we approached the passport office my wife did the same thing she does everytime we go through customs in any country we visit. She asked me to promise her I wouldn’t fight with them. She said, “It’s for our daughter, don’t ruin this for her.”
I took a deep breath, as I always do after this request, then nodded my head and said, “I promise I won’t fight with them.”
After having to get up very early (something I despise doing) for an appointment whose time they choose we waited a few hours in your typical government office with all the plastic chairs and overflowing with people standing to the sides, all waiting to get called forward by the overseers. Eventually (finally) we were called. The amount of paperwork we had to provide had taken all week for my wife to gather and she had checked and double checked that she had everything they requested.
The middle-aged woman began sifting through all the paperwork. She was a very average looking woman just like many you’d see on the streets of town… you would never guess that she worked for the mafia. About a minute later she shoved the papers back to us with cold eyes, “You are missing two photocopies of this document,” she said.
In typical Mexican fashion my wife replied very politely that she wasn’t aware that two photocopies of that particular document were necessary. It finally got to the point where the woman firmly asserted that we need those two photocopies and we’ll just have to make another appointment (which takes a week to receive usually) and come back and do this all again then.
