Friends have urged me to post this report from April 2002, which I emailed to several of them after Lenor and I got our first Nayarit driver's licences. On subsequent renewals at the Transito office in Tepic and at a mobile office in a bus in Guayabitos we've found the process to be much more organized, streamlined and professional than it was the first time.
14 April 2002
Yesterday was a big day for Leonor y mí: we bought shiny new Mexican drivers' licences! The Secretaria General de Gobierno of the Gobierno del Estado de Nayarit sent its Dirección General de Transito y Transporte on its semiannual pilgrimage here to little backwoods La Peñita to sell drivers' licences to anybody with the cash and the desire to drive legally. That's probably about 10% of the drivers here, or maybe 20% of those of legal driving age. Between yesterday and today they'll have taken more than CDN$30,000 out of this community to buy more sirens and beer and fireworks for the traffic police and to pad more officials' bank accounts.
In more cosmopolitan places people apparently have to write driving tests - ¡en español! - but that would never work here.
We started out a little before 0900 at the Transito (city traffic cops) office to get a number for the big show. We were told that we couldn't get our numbers until we showed up with copies of the necessary documents: our FM-3s (visas) and our phone bill (you have to show a phone/electric/water bill with an address on it for just about any bureaucratic process here, but the bill doesn't have to be yours.) Some people got numbers without showing anything, but it was our lucky day. So we trooped off to the copy shop two blocks away on la Avenida along with our friends Bill, Shar and Maria.
Back to the Transito to be awarded our waiting-in-line numbers, then off to the big Ejido hall where SURPRISE! there were chairs for us (about 200 people at the time) to sit in while waiting. The chairs all bore big Corona beer advertisements, stressing the fundamental connection between cerveza and driving in México.
When our numbers were called we went up and stood in another line to have our documents scrutinised and criticised and passed along to the computer operators. We were each asked our blood type, whether or not we wanted to be organ donors, if this was our first licence in México, and the type of licence we wanted (regular driver's or commercial.) Some of our answers were correctly recorded; many were put through the Mexican Data Randomiser first. Four computers were lined up where each operator entered a little bit of the information. If they'd networked these computers, each applicant could have been processed by one person. That would have made too much sense, though; this system gave them four times the odds that one of the computers would get screwed up and the whole process would grind to a halt and some of the bureaucrats could sit around poking at things and looking puzzled while they sent others out for beer and tacos and fireworks.
After our papers were processed, a guy would eventually staple a bunch of stuff together and rapidly whisper our names; we took our papers and walked a couple of blocks to the Hacienda (federal tax department) where we paid our fees: 403 pesos each for Lenor and me, 345 pesos for the people who'd been properly entered as plain old car drivers. The guy who took our paperwork decided, for some reason, that Lenor and I should have commercial drivers' licences.
Next back to the Ejido hall where we fingerprinted ourselves at the edge of the stage. Instead of using one of the children who were playing with the inkpads, I stupidly used my own fingers on my form. We only needed to do our right hands so, being a zurdo (lefty) I added an extra finger for good measure and gave them six well-smeared prints (they didn't care how the prints looked as long as there were some marks there, and Lenor thought after that we should have used nose prints instead. But, as there was nothing for people to wipe the ink off with, we would have had to walk around with ink on our noses until we escaped the bureaucrats.)
After that we lined up on the stage to have our pictures taken, then sign our names on a digital thingie for imprinting on our licences. I don't know what they did about the many people who couldn't sign their names, but that wouldn't have stopped them from getting a licence. Nothing stopped cash-carrying people from getting licences.
Finally we stood around until our new licences popped out of the machine and Presto! In and out (and in and out and in and . . .) in just four hours!
Lenor and I are now fully licenced to drive busloads of clenched-butt passengers up and down mountain roads at breathtaking speed, passing trucks on blind corners with sheer dropoffs of hundreds of meters just centimeters from the wheels. Or we could drive big double tankers full of gasoline along these same roads. Or maybe a bulldozer. Whatever. Without any testing at all, we're legally authorised to do these things.
On both of our licences the signature of the Director General de Transito cuts across the end of our blood type entries changing both of us from "RH +" to "RH -". Shouldn't be a problem, right? Lenor's middle name, Josephine, is entered as "UJOSEPHINE". Both licences have our street address correct, but Lenor is properly shown as living in La Peñita whereas I apparently now live in Rincón de Guayabitos. Our friend Maria, who's from Seattle and of Sicilian ancestry, is shown as a Mexican on her licence. The Mexican guy who was in front of us in the line at the tax office was surprised to find that he's now a US citizen.
We could have tried to have the misinformation corrected, but doing so would have brought the entire system down and required us to spend several more hours on the project and we might still not have our licences.
One of the people we saw there was so cross-eyed that he wouldn't have known which highway to drive on. Undoubtedly, though, his licence reads "NINGUNA" (none) under "Restricciones" just like mine does; it's the first time in twenty years I haven't been required to wear eyeglasses while driving. So now, while I'm barrelling down mountainsides with my two tankers full of gasoline behind me, I don't have to be able to see any farther than my windshield.
Many other people certainly came through the process similarly. You could have been legally blind and picked up a licence yesterday. I'm sure some dead people became licensed yesterday. I think they may even have documented a dog or two who were carrying well-chewed utilities bills in their mouths. Their blood types are probably listed as "BARG! BAHK!" or "WOOQF" or "ARG". There are certainly no restrictions, and they can now donate organs to humans.
We love it here, but sometimes things stun us and sometimes we just have to laugh.
