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Mexico City, DF - I am sitting at a lovely Starbucks in Mexico City, specifically in the Lomas District which is near many of the foreign embassies here. Mexico City is a surprising and spectacular city, truly one of the great capitals of the world. We are lucky enough to be the houseguests of a diplomat from Brazil who is a friend of a friend, so have had the opportunity not only to tour Mexico City as guests of a 'local' resident, but also to understand Mexico City from the eyes of someone as foreign to this place as we are.

I am on deadline today for EDA Weekly. By midnight tonight, Mexico City time, I must submit an article that will be published next Sunday night at midnight, California time, on EDAToolsCafe. My article, which I will complete in tandem with my extra-hot, non-fat, vente white mocha here in this sunny patio in Mexico City, will be sent tonight to an IBSystems employee in India. It will be Thursday daytime for him. He is an assistant web master for the company, who reports to the EDAToolsCafe web master who lives and works in Silicon Valley.

I am typing this article on my brand-new HP Pavilion laptop. It was manufactured in China, but designed in a host of other locales. I'm guessing partly in the U.S., partly in India, and perhaps a bit in Eastern Europe - I'm not really sure. Of course, the operating system is Vista - somewhat unstable in these early stages of its product life, but functional nonetheless. Hence, the operating system on my laptop was conceived in Redmond, although the coding undoubtedly occurred across a range of other geographies. The “gadgets” I have set up on my desktop include weather updates for Boston, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and Guatemala City. Ni importa why I have chosen these places. The point is, I am enjoying instant updates on local weather conditions in a host of places that house the people of importance in my life.

Yesterday, I drove through the newest commercial/corporate district here in Mexico City. It's in the northwest of the city and is called Santa Fe. There I saw dozens - and I mean dozens! - of 30-story, gleaming, steel and glass skyscrapers which have all come online in the last decade or so, and appear to house regional headquarters for Nokia, HSBC, FedEx, and so on. They say the occupancy in this mystical city of Santa Fe is not what it should be, nor the transportation system. Perhaps the place is channeling Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, enroute to Santa Fe, we passed one particularly luminescent complex emblazoned with the Hewlett Packard logo. Clearly, HP has a major presence here in Mexico City along with most other major internationals.

Which brings me to one point of this eclectic essay.

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Twice in the last two years I have cringed deeply at some of the questions lobbed at panelists at the BigWig/Troublemaker panel at DVCon. One was a withering and belittling question addressed to Jasper Design CEO Kathryn Kranen in 2006 (and I paraphrase) - “Jasper R&D in Brazil? Yeah, right. Like there are any EDA developers in Brazil!”

The other question was equally withering and belittling, and was addressed to Sequence CEO Vic Kulkarni at the DVCon panel in 2007: “Vic, why do you hate America? Why do you want to outsource everything?”

Ay, qué cosa, hombre! Could we look more stupid, more provincial, more America-centric with such idiotic questions? The world is evolving, it's on the move, and it will leave those populations in North America in the dust who do not recognize the changes. Work and play is going on all over the world!

All over the world!

In metropolitan centers like Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, and Shanghai, the populations are not waiting for the green light from North America to contribute to, and enjoy, the fruits of globalization. They are not waiting for the mocking, disrespectful attitudes of certain populations in North America to subside.

The peoples in these dynamic, hyperactive economies are producing and consuming products designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold within a truly worldwide electronics industry - and in volumes that defy the imagination. They are living their lives on cell phones, on the Internet, speaking multiple tongues, wearing fashions from around the globe, and exploring ways of life and (my phrase) philosophies of fusion that we are barely able to grasp. It's all so new, so quick, so changing, and so altering to our worldview. Neither my parents' parents, nor my parents, could ever have conceived of such a thing. And even my own generation, in our youth, could never have predicted the pace of this race to the future.

Having said all of this - I am sure to receive feedback from the somber realists among you who say these changes I dramatize here are superficial, or only apply to those at the top of the socio-economic ladder across various geographies, or are bad for local economies, disastrous for regional cultures, deadly for distinctive languages, habits of dress, and traditional mores, or are highly destructive to the environment. And yes, you realists are possibly right - in part. Change for the sake of change or universal knowledge for the sake of universal knowledge is not enough.

But I will also argue that change cannot be stopped, that history does not always take the correct or optimum path. Bad, destructive, disastrous, or deadly are not adjectives that have necessarily been enough to prevent change. And sometimes those adjectives are in the eyes of the beholder only, beholders who are shielded from the larger realities, including the profound advantages and/or harsh realities of change.

Consider this - I'm now halfway through my white mocha, which tastes exactly like the one I can buy in Silicon Valley. People around me are chattering away on their cell phones in Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Japanese, and Korean. They are pounding away on their laptops, sending and receiving messages, making arrangements to meet for coffee, closing business deals, and working to establish or expand on treaties and agreements between governments.

In so doing, they are not only using the tools delivered to them by the brains and brawn of the electronics industry to facilitate it all, they are also inadvertently using these tools to create a totally new uber-culture, a new language, a new moré, and a new method of interacting that is quite possibly larger than the sum of its parts. The world is being drawn together at warp speed and simultaneously being jettisoned into a fantastical cyberspace that dazzles and seduces the young, and exhausts and dismays the not-so-young.

Do I think it's happening too fast? What I think doesn't matter. Do I think it's destroying my own personal way of life? It doesn't matter. Do I think it's upending various careers and national opportunities for the land of my birth, the land of my ancestors? It doesn't matter what I think. History does not care what I think. Change will happen because that is the human condition. Nether mocking questions nor insulting jibes will prevent it, because the only thing that is a given in this world of change is change.

Which brings us to the global village.

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Before Mexico, we were in Guatemala. We arrived in the capital, Guatemala City, on the morning of Saturday, March 10th. Prior to our trip, we did not know that President Bush was scheduled to arrive in Guatemala on Sunday evening, March 11th. Perhaps he heard that we would be there, and decided Guatemala is a happening place. More likely, his people felt it was important to include Guatemala in the president's list of destinations as he made his 10-day lap around Latin America.

In any case, we were lucky to arrive when we did on Saturday morning, because had we planned to arrive later that day, even though it was the day before Bush's arrival, we would not have been able to land. The entire airport was shut for more than 2 days in and around his visit.

In addition, for several days prior to our arrival and continuing throughout Saturday the 10th and Sunday the 11th, American F15s were buzzing the city. The noise was tremendous! We were told the American fighter jets were “clearing” the airspace over the capital in anticipation of the arrival of Air Force One on Sunday evening, March 11th. Qué increible! Can you imagine the heads of state of France, or India, or Argentina being allowed to send in their military aircraft to “clear” the airspace over Washington D.C. in advance of an official visit?

But that's not all. Whole sectors of Guatemala City were completely shut to traffic on March 11th and March 12th for the duration of the official visit. During that time, many Guatemalans who needed to get from their homes to their offices, from their offices to the store, or from the store back to their homes, could not. The roads were shut. Period. In fact, a significant number of people who live and work in Guatemala City decided to simply stay home from work on Monday, March 12th, rather than fight the traffic and congestion around the city. That was undoubtedly great for the productivity of the country.

By some fateful irony, our hotel happened to be situated one block from the Intercontinental Hotel where the American president and delegation ended up staying. Needless to say, the blocks around us were not only shut down, they were teeming with armed men in uniform arrayed along the sidewalks all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. They represented various Guatemalan armed services and a contingent of American military personnel as well. We ourselves were free to come and go, but tip-toeing past hundreds of men with sub-machine guns on the sidewalks was not exactly a tourist's dream come true.

However, our adventure was not complete until Sunday evening. We happened to wander into an Italian restaurant right next door to the Intercontinental Hotel at 7 PM on Sunday evening to have some dinner. As the penthouse suites of the three top hotels in the city had all been rented out for the visit, no one actually knew in advance which hotel the president would occupy. It was not until halfway through our dinner that it became clear that the Intercontinental had indeed won the presidential lottery.

We were enjoying some pasta and wine, when again the F15s split the sky. It sounded like they were zooming past at about 150 feet overhead. All of the restaurant clientele rushed out onto the sidewalk and looked up. And there, quite clearly visible in the gathering dusk, was Air Force One gliding into its final landing pattern towards the airport less than a mile away. We all went back inside to complete our meals for a few minutes, and then saw a sudden intensifying of activity out on the street, a sudden gathering of even more military personnel armed to the teeth.

Again, the restaurant clientele rushed out onto the sidewalk. Somebody asked a large, muscle-bound American in shades standing nearby if the president was, in fact, headed towards the Intercontinental Hotel. The dark-suited man confirmed it, and we all stood waiting for the cavalcade to come by.

But no - that was not to be. Instead a total sweep of the street commenced. Tourists, locals, and waiters alike were all shooed back into the restaurant by men one wouldn't want to argue with. We were told to stay put and the doors were shut fast. And so there we were, locked in the Italian restaurant with nothing but our pasta and our wine to console us in our incarceration.

But Guatemalans (and tourists) are nothing, if not resourceful. Somebody slowly opened the door out onto the street while the army of men were all concentrating on the distant corner. We perched on the doorstep, one by one, leaning as far out as possible without actually stepping onto the sidewalk, preparing to watch the proceedings unfold.

Suddenly a car turned the corner and approached us on our dark and empty street. Then another. Then another. Through the silent, armed street the cavalcade began to appear. Excitement grew among the men on the street. And among the pasta-and-wine crowd. And the show began.

We could see crowds of dark-suited men running in advance of the slow-moving line of limos and dark-windowed SUVs. One particularly ominous SUV pulled out ahead of the line and stopped right in front of us with its engine idling. We could not see inside, but by the looks of the equipment arrayed across the top, they were probably receiving and sending madly.

Slowly the cavalcade came towards us and then turned left right in front of us, heading down into the bowels of the parking structure below the Intercontinental. We all knew that somewhere there, amidst the slowly moving wagon train of power and privilege, was the American president. But no one could tell in which vehicle. A few of us snapped a photo or two, hanging our arms and cameras out the door and pointing in the general directions of the cavalcade. It was a moment of high drama like few I have ever witnessed before.

Clearly, I don't get out enough.

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The next day, Monday the 12th, President Bush and his entourage were flown out to the countryside of Guatemala to visit a Mayan ruin not too far from the city. There he was entertained for all of about 20 minutes with some dancing or singing or something.

We had actually driven with some friends the previous day, Sunday, out to those same ruins thinking to spend the afternoon there. To our amazement, the ruins and museum were shut. The American president is coming, we are told, and the place is being scoured to secure the site. Our friend and driver, a charming Guatemalan, attempted to convince the guards at the gate to let us in: “These are American tourists. They should be allowed to come in today, even if their president is coming in tomorrow.”

The guards were very gracious, and very amused. But they were also adamant. We were not coming in. Period. Happily, I was able to see Iximché via the footage on CNN the next day that showed President Bush in shirt sleeves being entertained at the site. I didn't get to see Iximché in person, but he saw it for me.

Meanwhile, as we were driving away from Iximché on Sunday afternoon the day before, we saw a gathering of men dressed in indigenous garb at the side of the road attending to some task there. They were preparing to perform an ancient ritual, we were told - a ceremony of cleansing for excising evil spirits. We were told these Mayan shamans would be cleansing Iximché after the foreign president left the place the next day. The idea felt both amusing and startling at the same time, and we thought maybe somebody in our car was pulling our leg. But apparently, neither our friends nor the shamans were kidding.

Several days later in the Guatemalan newspapers, there was the photo. There was the photo of the shamans cleansing Iximché to rid the place of the spurious spirits they said had visited earlier in the week. It was amazing. And, oddly enough, it made me think of the F15s and DVCon.

I wanted to confront those shamans and ask them, “Why do you hate America? Don't you know we have your best interests at heart? Don't you know that our F15s really needed to cleanse your airspace. But you didn't really need to cleanse our evil spirits!”

I'm not sure the shamans would have understood me. Perhaps I could reach them on their cell phones and we could continue the discussion.

































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Peggy Aycinena is Editor of EDA Confidential and Contributing Editor to EDA Weekly.

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-- Peggy Aycinena, EDACafe.com Contributing Editor.