ALARMA!

Desensitizing you to violence since 1963So I jump off the bus and navigate the busy Eastside sidewalk, deftly dodging the various Vátos, Viéjas, and random Nácos. Suddenly, I struggle to hold back a violent impulse to gag. At a corner news stand I am suddenly eye-level with a magazine cover showing a decapitated human head with it’s skin brutally scraped off. I recognize the screaming yellow logo on the publication as the one that has haunted me ever since I was a little Pee-Pee Pants Cabrón. Immediately, I shift my gaze to the other magazines, spying various layouts of “Chicas con Grandes Nalgas” in an attempt to wash away that ghastly image of yet another victim of Mexican Narco-Satanicos!

 Alarma! Magazine is indeed, Mexico’s greatest “red press” crime tabloid. First Introduced to an “escandalo” hungry readership back in 1963, the sensationalist mix of uncensored full color blood & guts, scandal, crime, swimsuit models and crossword puzzles was an instant hit and remains so today.

ALARMA! has covered everything from “Las Poquiánchis” to the big Mexico City earthquake of ’85 to today’s violent Narco Wars while prominently displaying all of the headless corpses fit to print.

It’s the morbid fun that they seem to have with humorous word play, irony and puns in their articles that is priceless.

My personal favorite was about these two poor Cabrónes who broke into a shack to sleep off a massive hangover. Apparently, they then lit a fire to keep warm. The tragic results were announced with the headline “ENTRARON CRUDOS Y SALIERON FRITOS!”

So go pick up a copy if you dare having horrific images imprinted in your memory forever, or try watching any of the “Casos De Alarma” movies available on VHS, better yet, throw a TV party watching “ALARMA! TV”, Saturday nights on KRCA 62. ALARMA! Unicamente la verdad! 

 

This entry was posted in Eastside, Pendejadas, Uncategorized by AlDesmadre. Bookmark the permalink.

About AlDesmadre

Al Guerrero, Artist/Humorist. Los Angeles, CA. Born in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and raised in East Los Angeles from the age of two, Al Guerrero grew up just steps from the famous Chicano strip, Whittier Boulevard. His youth experiences include witnessing and participating in the 1970 Chicano Power demonstrations, cruising cars on Whittier Boulevard, and graduating from Garfield High School. After dropping out of UCLA (with honors), he drew upon his lifelong passion for art and cartooning and pursued a career in graphic arts. During this period, he traveled overseas and found artistic inspiration from the masterworks he discovered within the European Art Museums. His career blossomed when he was eventually hired by the Walt Disney Company in 1995, where he worked as a creative artist for a number of years. Although the artistic work was rewarding, he eventually grew weary & disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the entertainment business, and left to work briefly in the educational field. His credits include producing a feature film with actor, Conrad Brooks of Ed Wood fame, founding and performing with the Punk Rock group “The Psychocats” at numerous L.A. & Hollywood venues during the 1990’s, and in 1999 he founded and created a hell-bent puppet cabaret show aptly named: “The Puppets from Hell”. As a long time active member of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society, Al “Quaeda”, as he was known, was involved in countless Cacophony Society pranks and events throughout the city. He also produced the “Incredibly Strange Cinema” cult film series as well as themed events such as the now infamous “Pornothon Movie Nights” and the satirical “Mexican Night: Noche De Tequila & Putas” shows at local nightclub venues. Throughout his art career, he has exhibited his canvas paintings at various local galleries, and has also written & illustrated numerous comic strips and Graphic Novel stories. Today, he lives in Silver Lake, California and works as a freelance artist and writer with numerous multi-media projects under his belt and in the works. His personal hobbies include collecting vintage toys and comic books, cinema history and Los Angeles City history. Contact: alguerrero@earthlink.net Al Guerrero P.O. Box 29697 Los Angeles, CA 90029-0697 www.alguerrero.com Myspace.com/thepuppetsfromhell

17 thoughts on “ALARMA!

  1. Oh man, I remember going to Tecate since the age of 5 to visit my abuelita’s brother and they always had that mag. I could not put it down. It was like the print version of “Faces of Death”.
    Now its on TV?! crazy.

  2. Now if this isn’t an incentive to brush up on your Spanish, I don’t know what is! (These mags are sooooo bad, even in my sickest serial killer / medical journal obsessed youth, they were horrid to linger on.)

  3. Thanks Kim! Yeah- I made the editorial decision to make my blogs
    here without any English subtitles! Spanish learners will all thank me someday!

  4. I only got rid of my small stash of Alarmas last year, I thought I couldn’t live without the amazing photo of some dude on the side of a train track, while his head was 5 feet away! But it turns out there’s always more to come. Is the TV show that graphic as well? Somehow I doubt it.

  5. Chavo, it is as graphic. The day I stumbled upon the show it featured a segment on crowds looking at the desemboweled body of a woman who’d been hit by a bus–and doing nothing. She was mangled and they showed something like five minutes of her body lying in the street, folks looking at her in horror, and then those same folks going along their business. Their point, “la policia no llego por 12 minutos.” As if that point required me seeing her smashed body lying in the street with its appendages ripped off. Last time I watched.

  6. The TV show is as gorss, with cheesy crap added in too. I click over to Jose Luis or Secretos usually

  7. ALARMA! TV airs Friday nights at 10pm and then Saturdays at 7pm they show the ALARMA! Top 10 (!). One of the hosts is this RUCA who’s always falling out of her revealing outfits as she mournfully laments: “Ay, Que Tragedia!”
    I don’t know what’s more outrageous, this show, or “EL SHOW DE DON CHEPE” that comes on right before.

  8. ALARMA! is the greatest publication on Earth now that Weekly World News is no longer with us.

  9. Uhh, I just watched the program, it’s worse than the damn magazine. I got to see some dude having his arm sawed off, a line of people getting executed in Iraq, some mara gloating about all the people he killed, some decapitated bodies plus a pic of their heads located in a dumpster. And the host in the skimpy dress just kept saying “that’s terrible” or something to that effect. Yeah, decapitations are terrible.

  10. I’m making a trip to LA this summer from London and am gonna either volunteer in south america or try to find work with a newspaper. Do you think it would be easy to try and intern or just volunteer with the guys at alarma! I’m a photographer and I’ve become interested in the whole view point from mexico especially when were living in such a PC world, especially over the water. If anyone’s got some info my email is stevendunain@googlemail.com. cheers

  11. Hey, whats up, locos? The same pictures in the mag were everyday things in Tijuas. More so nowadays with these cartels. My dad used to read the mag after buying next to the Limon supermercado and than talk about the stories with his compas over a few beers. Once I started reading those pages it seemed like they were made up. But they are the truth, nothing but the dead truth. Viva la calle Morelos y viva Sidro, cabrones!

  12. Hi,I am Carlos Aguilar and i am reporter of Alarma! magazine. I like write about murders, revenges, and crimen, that is my pasion Also, I take photos of dead people….
    I like your blog, is very nice…Greetings

  13. I remember, when I was a boy we used to go visit our kinfolk in reynosa, tamps. My uncle would be reading the Alarma and I could see all kinds of horrible graphics, lhowever I didn’t know how to read spanish so I didn’t know how such tragics had occurred. It wasn’t until recently when I took a trip to mexico, that I witnessed a more gruesome scene. We were traveling along a countryside highway, apparently, a car had hit a boy and people were just standing around looking at him. I asked my cousin to stop- just as anybody would, here in the U.S.- to see if we could be of some assistance, but he didn’t dare as he was too scared he would be accused of having hit the boy. I was just glad I wasn’t living in Mexico back then; and even now.

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