MEXICO: Good While It Lasted

Before going to his store in Mexico City one morning last week, a bookseller put in a precautionary phone call to his head clerk. Plainclothes cops, the loyal employee reported, had been riffling through the store's ample stock of pornographic novels and postcards, and were awaiting the owner's arrival. The owner, however, hastened to a district judge and got a magic writ called an amparo. When he walked into the store soon afterward and the detectives tried to arrest him, he produced the amparo. With a sigh of frustration, the cops shut the books and went away. The...

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