Puebla - City of Bugs

Patrolman Fermin Munoz, tall and crew-cut, sat in his police car on the edge of Puebla's lovely central square. He kicked the gas to rev the engine, which made a little whirring noise, like a can opener struggling with a tin of soup, and not even the pigeons noticed. It's hard to be bad in a Bug.

"We can't go very fast, but we can get through the tightest places," said Munoz, whose patrol car is a 1999 Volkswagen Bug, a lime green Herbie with a big rack of blue and red police lights strapped to the egg-shaped roof, hanging slightly awkwardly over the edges on both sides. "This is Mexico's sedan," Munoz said before putt-putting down the cobblestone boulevard. "It's like a symbol for us; it's the most practical for battle in the streets, and it lasts a long time."

Puebla - 70 miles south-east of the Mexican capital - is Bug City, the only place in the world where VW Beetles - the classic old ones as well as the trendy new ones - are produced. On the city outskirts, a monstrous white VW plant with its own highway exit cranks out 650 New Beetles and 124 old-style Bugs every day. The plant and its related suppliers and businesses account for upward of three-quarters of Puebla's economy.

The new Beetles produced in Puebla have become a phenomenal success in the United States, a $17,000 reprise of the symbol of freedom and youthful whimsy that captured America in the 1960s. The vast majority of the 160,000 Beetles produced in Puebla last year ended up on the streets of the United States, brightening the graduation days of dot-com kids in Silicon Valley and the commutes of government workers in Fairfax County.

Arlo Guthrie's America of 30 years ago may have put the Love Bug on the map, but Mexico is the country still keeping the faith. Old-style Bugs are everywhere. It is one of the first things a visitor notices. Old Bugs with their front passenger seats yanked out make up the bulk of the national taxi fleet. Police officers like Munoz patrol the nation's streets in them. Delivery boys and the water meter reader arrive in Bugs. The 36,000 old-style Bugs produced here in Puebla last year were almost exclusively for Mexico--at about $8,000 they are the cheapest car in the country. And in a nation that moves largely on gunk-belching, jury-rigged, wobbling jalopies, reliable, cheap cars are in great demand. Only 2,500 of the new models were sold in Mexico.

Mexicans joke about their beloved vocho, as the old-style Bug is known in Mexican Spanish, with the same self-deprecating humour they use to tease themselves. "Do you have a car or a vocho?" is a common quip. Mexico is in love with its old Bugs, and nowhere more so than this city of 5 million about 60 miles southeast of Mexico City, where the VW logo looms huge over the local stadium, local buses are VW vans and stores sell everything from VW sweat shirts to VW key rings, VW model cars and VW pens, candy and jackets.

Near the city centre, Gerardo Flores, 29, waited for a friend outside a store in his 1986 Bug, with chipped paint and rivet holes where his side-view mirror used to be attached. He was double-parked, but even on the narrow side streets of this old colonial city, there was plenty of room for traffic to pass by. Flores was asked why a German car had become such a national symbol for a nation so different, and so far away. "Well, yes, it's German," Flores said. "But maybe it just fits better in Mexico."

From an article in the online Washington Post

- sent in by Pete Frost