A topic not much addressed in MEXICAN SLANG 101 is political slang. There's a lot of it, of course, but this list is of some terms that shed some insight into the way Mexican politics tends to work.

Burro, of course, if the Mexican term for "stupid", "dunce", etc. Therefore the perfect graft-on to form the self-explanatory terms, Burrocracia or Burrocrata.

WIth in that framework, a cute term is aviador. The "aviators" are people working on government sinecures, getting paid for positions on arts counsels, studies, and institutes that don't require them do much work because they are political appointees and protected. So they just drop in twice a month like airplanes...to pick up their pay checks.

A more serious term is also illustrative. Mapache is a racoon and it's probably the animals mask and nocturnal prowling that makes the word apply to election stealers, ballot box stealers and stuffers, double-registered voters, and other activities designed to corrupt the election process and ensure that the "ins" stay in and the "outs" stay out.

A recent reaction to this (since the Pan presidential victory in 2000 put the first crack in the power of the PRI party) is the emergence of cazamapaches, or "mapache hunters". These are frequently groups of idealistic young volunteers who man the polling stations, watching out for fraud and looking for faces they know to be goons of the incumbents.

It's a civic activity that can be harmful, even fatal at times. Which brings up another loaded word: madrina. It means "godmother", a feminine twist on padrino, which means "godfather" literally and in the movie mafia sense.

But it doesn't apply to women, as such. It refers to people who draw a government salary but "moonlight" as criminals. This is very pervasive. Most "hit men" in Mexico are state or Federal police. The narcotics business is run out of the government, which is the protector, investor, and main dividend-casher. So the cop-as-thug is a fixture on the politics/crime landscape: enforcement by madrinas.