Today beautiful downtown Catemaco received new phone books. Actually it is the phone book for 83 cities in Veracruz, including Veracruz City. It is a shame that no entrepreneur in Los Tuxtlas has the desire to produce a Los Tuxtlas directory with both white and yellow pages. Considering the junky advertising sheets and magazines that are constantly published here, this could be a profitable business for someone.
The phone book delivery man said they would distribute about 1600 books in Catemaco. My page count of numbers shows about 1700 (I counted one row and mulitplied it by 16).
I did the same count last year, and it looks like there is a little growth in Catemaco. (La Victoria and Sontecomapan were split off the Catemaco phone book this year, about 100 combined)
Of those 1800 I would guess no more than 15% (270) have internet access at home, plus a 100 or more machines in internet cafes primarily devoted to hotmail and pornography.
Catemaco Noticias (not Catemaco News) averages a measly 600 returning readers per month, plus another 20,000 fly bys and I would guess most everyone in Catemaco reads the Noticias at least twice before upchucking.
The local monopoly of TELMEX which delivered the book against a 10 peso propina, considers its white pages a military secret. Idiotically, only Telmex subscribers have access to the pages.
The yellow pages, also of course, have no listing for Catemaco, until you figure out that the section listings are ordered by by cities.
And also "off" course the current and previous mayor have no listing, and the roll of last names sounds like any small town in southern Spain, with a focus on Dominguez, Hernandez and Perez, the equivalents of Smith and Brown.
TELMEX (owned by the second richest man in the world, depending on the dollar exchange) has some of the highest rates in the world, but I have no complaints about either its quality or service.
Catemaco info made a very small effort to list some of the basic phone numbers in the soon to be finished (2015):
Los Tuxtlas Directory
