Stopped by Mexican Police!

look at my beautiful view today Oh lots of view of Limbs bouquet of cotton balls it's real cotton this is my voltmeter up here there you can see that twelve point six twelve point seven thirteen point one the batteries are fully charged when it pulls 40 amps that still shows twelve point six and what's going on I just did dishes I should have put those away what's going on is this is my insta pot it started out cooking lima beans and ham for 45 minutes it's down to 11 minutes and my batteries are still fully charged from my solar well I took the popcorn kettle the one with the crank there and popcorn and the oil up to the fire last night it started popping popcorn and the first kettle full tasted fishy we figured out that the first kettle full was melting off the rancid oil from me not washing it a year ago the second batch was really good and I washed it today so tonight everybody's looking forward to pop car we're in Arizona that's California on the other side and in Kowloon Kay hello and it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood oh no that I sound like mr. Rogers and over there is Kathy and a bit of a breeze but all as well but I'm gonna go in here and sit down and tell you something that I promise to do back in July I'm gonna sit right there in my chair and talk to you hi friends I got a comment a couple of days ago about do I worry about the police stopping me in Mexico and I got another comment that reminded me that back in July I had promised to tell some stories about being stopped by the police in Mexico so I thought that's what I would do today when I first came to Mexico of course it kind of worried me too that you never know what's gonna happen during a an official stop whether it's by the police in Mexico or if it's one of those military stops where they have the sandbags with the machine gun and supposedly if you don't stop the machine gun is going to catch up with you the first one I went through of those and I may have talked about this in one of my videos before so if I'm repeating myself I apologize the first one of those I stopped at I got stopped that was between chapala and Guadalajara and the officer came up to the window and said something to me in Spanish and I was nervous I was in my little Suzuki and I didn't understand what he said in Spanish and I replied I'm sorry I don't speak English and he started laughing at my nervousness and my statement and said in perfect English I presume you mean you don't speak Spanish and he got us out of the car and looked under the seat and we got back in the car and left and that was the end of it but it was just an E my nervousness that I didn't even say what I meant to say I think we've been in Mexico about a year and we were up in Guadalajara on the pericle and the para fara Co is a ring road that goes all the way around the city of Guadalajara it's three or four lanes going each way and sometimes five or six lanes if the Mexicans all get in hurry and use the ditches on both sides as lanes well I had pulled off we were going to check on a vehicle that was being repaired and so I had another person with me and Lynn was with me and her boyfriend who spoke a little bit of Spanish but not much and we pulled off but it wasn't the right exit so we're getting back on the pericle now those ramps that go on two freeways in California we call them speed ramps because you speed up and you match your speed with the flow of traffic in Texas Dallas the Ring Road has a stop sign at the end of it I don't know if they still do but a long time ago when I used to live in Texas that had stop signs at the end of what we at the time Californians called speed ramps so you're looking backwards like this and Californians would have rear-end collisions because they're looking back to time themselves with the trial flow of traffic and there's a stop sign at the end of the speed ramp anyway on the Perico and there was a long ramp going on to the Perico and towards the end of the ramp there was a police car and had another car stopped and two officers and as I went past the officer did this and it didn't make any sense to me because I'm kind of looking back but I see him I'm speeding up to match the flow of traffic and I think he means slow down and that just it's a it's a it's the opposite of what my brain is thinking I'm thinking speed up and he's telling me slow down well it turns out that he didn't mean slow down he meant stop and I didn't so one officer jumps in the police car and chases this down with the lights and the siren I say lights but when you drive in Mexico you will find that police cars have their lights on all the time and if you are a US driver and a police car comes up behind you with their lights on you think he's either after you or he wants to pass you but in Mexico they just drive around with their lights on all the time and I don't have an explanation for that I'm just giving you an observation they do have not sirens but really ugly loud sounding beep beep horns that tell you to pull over anyway he pulls us over and the guy that was with me who sort of but didn't really speak a little bit of Spanish was trying to talk to him and nothing was happening the guy was irate because he thought I'd disrespected him by not stopping when he did this and so he was not he was not an uh he was not a happy officer anyway he has by this time he's got my driver's license in his shirt pocket and he tells us to follow him and so we follow him and we go down to the next exit on the freeway peripherical and pull off into a residential neighborhood and we're going down through several blocks of what didn't appear to be very nice part of town and we're getting very concerned we're thinking okay this is it she's gonna dump us out and take our car or whatever finally he weasels his way around through this residential neighborhood and gets underneath the freeway underpass and back up on the freeway and goes back to where about where we were before and his partner who didn't jump in the car with him when he came to chase me has now crossed the freeway all eight lanes at that point and he's standing over there and the bushes on the other side so we pull off there and the other officer comes out and then it becomes apparent to me because this officer speaks English that I'm going to need to pay my way out of this situation the term in Spanish is mordida and the literal translation is the little bite so they want a little bite out of your billfold and the other guy that's with me now he's he's sort of trying to negotiate this so he offers him like fifty pesos and the officer in English replies that's not even gonna pay for my gas for chasing you down anyway it soon became apparent to me that there was a process that goes on here and he couldn't threaten me at the first stop with the ticket because they have a ticket booked and his partner who didn't come along didn't have the ticket booked so now they've got the ticket booked and they're threatening booked and anyway 200 pesos and we're on our way another traffic stop I wasn't driving I was in a big four-wheel-drive diesel pickup and as a passenger and the owner of the pickup was driving and again this was in the city of Guadalajara and we were on what's called the lateral you may have a Main Street with a couple of lanes going each way and then off to the side of that is another separate street one that goes one way on one side and the other way on the other side and they're called laterals well we're on the lateral and a motorcycle cop runs us down and he claims that we had run a red light which absolutely was not true I mean there were four of us in the vehicle and I'm always watching even though I'm not driving I absolutely know we did not run alerted light so he's just saying that in order to get some money from us well the guy who was driving was very inexperienced in Mexico and so he pulls out his wallet and he's got a stack of bills in there like this and it costs us six hundred pesos I think it would have cost us a hundred pesos if somebody who had more experience had done the negotiating but that was that was a month's pay for this guy without not a month's but it was a lot of money for for paying mordida at a traffic stop in Guadalajara so the motorcycle now we have asked him for directions and realized that we're on a lateral but we have gone too far and we need to make a u-turn so now that we're buddy buddy buddy and have financed him and his family for some considerable amount of time he goes with his motorcycle turns on the lights and he's got traffic in four lanes to go in each way stopped so that we can make a u-turn and we do and then he catches up and passes us and he's going to lead us we were trying to get the Costco on out on why are talking about anyway he takes us back and he's leading the way to show us where to go and it turns out that the guy is one of the motorcycle app acrobats he and you have to have a special motorcycle to do this because if you let go of the throttle it'll go down so he set the throttle he stands up on his seat and he's moving the motorcycle driving it like this by leaning put on a great show for us let us into the parking lot you know stopped had a lot of laughs and it's another stop by the police in Mexico that turns out to be a story instead of a scary thing I've got a I've got quite a few of these in the 18 years that we've lived there I've been stopped by the police quite a few times not as much as we used to be for two reasons first of all in the town of ahi canned chopped all on the north shore of Lake Chapala the police pretty much recognized me and my cars as as locals so they're not wasting their time with me because they know I'm not going to pay em a mordida anyway so what you do is you just say oh I'll give me the ticket I know how to pay it over there in chapala and the half of the time they're not gonna waste their time writing you a ticket they'll say something like oh I'm gonna give you two tickets next time and that's absolutely happened I was on the way to the airport one day right in ahi well actually la floresta and in la floresta there's a place where you're supposed to in order to make a left turn you go off the highway to the right and around a circle it's not really a glorietta or a roundabout or a circle drive it's kind of like that but not exactly anyway I'm going straight and there's an officer standing in the middle of the road who is directing the car ahead of me to turn left off the road and he doesn't really move he's just looking at me and I follow that car cuz I think he's telling me to make a left turn which is illegal it's there's a big sign you know no left turn you're supposed to go to off to the right and around the circle instead of just to make a left turn so he comes to me first because he's walking off the road to come to where we've stopped and he asked me for my driver's license and I hand it to him and he puts it in his shirt pocket and walks up to the other car well I'm on my way to the airport which is not a left turn that's straight ahead and I'm a little annoyed that he has stopped me for no apparent reason and I get out of my car and I go over there he's talking to the other car to their driver's window I said why did you stop me he said you made a illegal left-hand turn and I kind of lost it the healthy reason I made a left-hand turn is because you're standing in the middle of the road pointing for me to do so I'm on my way to the airport that's not the way to the airport the airport is straight that's where I was going why did you make me go over here and he kind of he took his the license out of his shirt pocket and he handed it to me with a little bow and said I'm sorry sir have a nice day again I've got a number of these stories and the point that I want to make with them is that being stopped by the police in Mexico as long as you are respectful and and don't get all angry about it they are equally respectful and generally might not have stopped you for a good reason and they might want a little more Dida and the country of Mexico is working on that by the way we don't do that anymore and as expats who live there we don't encourage other people to do that anymore eighteen years ago was a little different it's much better now and there is much less of this you know the little bite at a traffic stop my point is that you shouldn't be afraid to be stopped by the Mexican police it might cost you a little money but it's not gonna piss much money as a real ticket in the United States and unless you are often the dark in a rural area nothing really serious is going to happen now why did I say off in the dark in a rural area well because it can be a lot more expensive off in the dark in a rural area and a lot scarier there's you know other cars and traffic in your you know traffic stop and akihiko chapel or even Guadalajara is not a is a public thing there's lots of people around so nothing really untoward is going to happen if you like these stories I've probably got several more and even more of them from friends who have told me stories about their stops so let me know if you want to hear some more of these or if you just find them annoying or boring thanks for watching hey if you liked me give me one of those thumbs up and please subscribe and hit that little Bell so you know when I post next please share me with your friends on social media thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed what was on my mind today

Channel: JC Travel Stories

Views: 15,631

Rating: 4.9350648 out of 5

Keywords: Mexican police, Traffic stops, Arrested in Mexico, mordida, police corruption in Mexico, Mexican cops, Retired Life in Mexico, Retire in Ajijic, Retire in Chapala, Lake Chapala, RV in Mexico, How to retire in Mexico, medical cost in Mexico, drug cost in Mexico, rentals in Ajijic, retire in an RV, rv living, retired life, cheap living, full time RV life, rv hacks, boondocking, dry camping, free camping, stopped by Mexican police, Mexican federales

Id: c-IWZikN_DQ

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018