On Monday November 3rd, 2008 Chapala Municipality officials were proud to announce that they were one of the few municipalities in Jalisco ready to take steps towards a recycling program. Despite the 5 years notice provided by Jalisco state officials, many of the other municipalities were not ready for such an endeavor. As a result of the poor response to the rallying “Semades” (garbage separation department) the state of Jalisco is off to a less than stellar start.

Many of the state officials claim that the lack of funding is the real issue. They believe that in order to take on such an ambitious project they would need massive financial support which is not forthcoming.
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by Roger Toll, former Editor of Mexico City News (Delta Sky Magazine, February 2006)

Near Guadalajara, the lakeside town of Ajijic has proven irresistible to many Americans. Here’s why.

If the cherished ideals of human unity and harmony between cultures remain hard to achieve, maybe we’d best look to a basic biological concept for a solution. Symbiosis, the dictionary says, is the life association of two dissimilar organisms for mutual benefit. I thought of this on a recent visit to Ajijic (pronounced “ah-HEE-heek”), the prettiest of several towns laced together by a two-lane highway running along the northwest shore of Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, 45 minutes south of Guadalajara. It is midsummer, the rainy season, where the air is soft and the surrounding mountains turn an exuberant tropical green. The setting is bucolic, Old World, with a rustic church and peaceful plaza, and a gazebo waiting for a band to arrive. Village streetCobblestone streets slow traffic to a genteel crawl, and people come and go, murmuring a polite “buenos dias” as they amble by. (more…)