You may remember this story I did a few months ago on survival techniques for journalists. I also produced a video on that course for the non-profit that runs it, Article 19, which you can see here as well as on their website.

Courtesy of Twitter community.

Last weekend I spent a couple of days on a course with Mexican journalists in Toluca, just outside Mexico City. The training was put together by Article 19, a non-profit working here in Mexico trying to lobby and protect the rather besieged journalistic community which is under fire from all sides.

You can read my full report here, but here’s an extract:

Raymundo Arellano wears a pair of dog tags around his neck. His name, blood type and next of kin have been indented on the silver plates.

“My greatest fear is that I’ll be killed and they’ll bury me somewhere and no one will recognize my remains,” he says.

Arellano is a Mexican television reporter trying to do his job in a country wracked by drug-related violence. More than 30 journalists have been killed or disappeared since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; ten of them in the last year alone.

When Calderon came to power five years ago, he unleashed the Mexican army and police against the country’s drug cartels and organized crime networks – a strategy that has resulted in more than 35,000 deaths so far. Both drug gangs and Mexican officials target journalists reporting on events surrounding organized crime, according to non-profits.

One thing I didn’t write about was a feeling of guilt – guilt that as yet no foreign journalist has been targeted by either organized crime or government officials whilst trying to cover the country’s raging drug-related violence. Meanwhile, Mexican journalists are kidnapped and killed with impunity.

Why?

I asked most of the journalists I interviewed on the course that question, and most of them gave the same answer – that the foreign press don’t cover the “inside-baseball” side of the story, and it’s those details that get local reporters in trouble. In general, the reporting of foreign journalists here (some of which is incredibly insightful, not to mention brave)  puts the drug-related violence in a country-wide context.

That said,  Tracy Wilkinson, head of the Los Angeles Times bureau here in Mexico City, pointed out to an audience during a panel of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and the American Society of News Editors (ASNE);

“What we’re dealing with – the foreign or international press – is nothing compared to what our Mexican colleagues have to deal with, who are really under pressure, and take risks that – thank god – don’t affect us at the same level.

But, she said, “foreign correspondents have had to radically change how we work in Mexico. Before, we could travel all over without thinking twice about it – now we still travel all over but with military-style planning.”

Violence against media workers in an old problem here in Mexico – you can see some reports I did on the same issue, same course, a couple of years ago here and here. But despite that, the impunity enjoyed by those who commit those aggressions remain. Self-censorship is now commonplace amongst reporters trying to stay alive, whilst drug-related violence that has claimed more than 35,000 lives since 2006 continues to consume the country. With the nation’s army roaming the streets, under the orders of President Felipe Calderon to catch those big bad drug lords, the army too stand accused of human rights violations against innocent civilians. And non-profits say that government officials are equally as responsible for abusing journalists as organized crime networks.

Mexico’s people desperately need quality journalism if they’re to understand what’s going on in this huge terrain. It’s my guess that as general elections approach in 2012, the suppression of reporters is only going to get worse.

You can see a video I produced for Article 19 on this course here.

Image: Mexican journalists enjoy first aid training during a training course on the outskirts of Mexico City in early April 2011. Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com

This post also appeared on the Frontline Club network.

Published February 25th 2011

• Mexico’s migrant monarch butterflies in the state of Michoacan see less visitors as tourists are put off by press reports of narco violence.
• After being fired for asking Mexico President Felipe Calderon to respond to rumors that he has an alcohol problem, outspoken broadcaster and journalist Carmen Aristegui returned to the airwaves.
• Drug-related violence for the first time claimed the life of a US security agent – we ask what it means for US/Mexico relations.

Related links

Killing of US Customs and Immigration officer

• Drug Raids Across U.S. Net Hundreds of Suspects (NYT)
• Nine Arrested in ICE Agent’s Killing, but Questions of Torture Persist (BorderReporter.com)
• DEA sweep targets cartels in response to agent’s slaying in Mexico (Washington Post)
• Mexico’s Calderon not so happy with U.S. drug war cooperation (Los Angeles Times)
• Mexico Says U.S. Agent’s Killing Was Case of Mistaken Identity (WSJ)
• Oakland homes raided after federal agent’s death in Mexico (The Detroit News)

Carmen Aristegui:

• Carmen Aristegui on her dismissal (Spanish link to PueblaYa) and rehiring (LAT)
• MexicoReporter.com interviews Aristegui about the dangers for journalists in Mexico, June 2009
• Targeting the media in Mexico (AlJazeera)

Monarch Butterflies:

• Cartels have butterfly effect on Mexico’s monarchs (Houston Chronicle)
• Kings of the sky: The cautious comeback of an intrepid insect (Economist)

This is the first edition of MexicoReporterTV. Please leave your thoughts, suggestions and comments below – this is a work in progress. If you’re a journalist based in Mexico and want to be involved, ping me an email.

Acknowledgments and credits

With thanks to Laura Carlsen at the Americans Program and Dario Ramirez at Article 19 here in Mexico City, and editorial assistant Ulises Escamilla Haro.

Video shot, written and edited by Deborah Bonello. Shot on a Sony Z1 and the Canon Rebel T2i and the JuicedLink DT454 preamplifier/XLR adapter, using Manfrotto tripod and monopod, and edited on Final Cut Pro.

MexicoReporter.com graphics by Pablo Puga.

The first, last and only time that I met the French-born filmmaker and photographer Christian Poveda was on 1 April of this year, when I interviewed him in an apartment he was renting in Mexico City while doing promotion for his film, La Vida Loca.

I’d seen the documentary the night before at a screening attended by Poveda, who fielded questions on why he chose to spend 16 months following members of El Salvador’s notoriously violent 18th Street gang with a video camera. It is a film that could well have brought him to his violent end.

Poveda was shot dead on Wednesday 4 September just outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where he lived. Sources say that the night before he was killed, Poveda confessed to being afraid and worried that the gangs were taking a turn for the worse, with a new crop of ever-more vicious leaders coming to the fore.

La Vida Loca is a groundbreaking documentary that shines a light onto the bleak lives of El Salvador’s Mara gangs. Poveda achieved unprecedented, long-term access to certain branches of the gangs and their daily lives in the capital.

I’m not one to speculate on who might be responsible for his death — the disorder, impunity and lawlessness in El Salvador means we might never know. But his murder is a terrible loss, not only to his friends, family and colleagues, but to the journalistic community in Latin America, which already suffers some of the highest rates of aggression and intimidation against members of the trade.

To Poveda, the young people who join las Maras were “victims of society”. He approached the gangs as a documentary filmmaker with an open mind and a lack of moral judgment.

As he said to me during our interview, he was of the opinion that “the majority are young boys that were abandoned at a very young age, and the fact that someone would come from another continent to spend time with them on a daily basis, filming and listening to them, for them that was something very important, that someone was paying attention.”

Many would disagree with Poveda’s assessment of the gangs that stretch across Central America to the United States. Poveda worked as a photojournalist in El Salvador during and after the 12-year-long civil war, which began in 1980. But the gangs really took on their current strength and size in the United States.

Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, many of who went to the US to escape the civil war ravaging El Salvador. When the peace accords that ended the war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by US authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.

Although gangs did exist on a small scale in El Salvador before the mass return of migrants from the US, they only grew into the super-gangs they are today after the end of the civil war. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities across the Americas.

But however you view the gangs, Poveda did what good journalists do — he broadened the discussion, taking a new visual and journalistic angle on an issue that has become so black and white. As the United States continues to sweep the issue of immigration reform under the carpet and turn a blind eye to the repercussions of some of its policies on its smaller, poorer, weaker neighbours, Poveda put some of those realities up on cinema screens on both sides of the Atlantic for all to see.

Tragically, he paid the highest price for doing so.

La Vida Loca, which has been showing on the international film festival circuit, is coming up for commercial release in Mexico and France over the next two months. But the day after Poveda’s death, his producer Gustavo Angel was still trying to negotiate a US release for the film.

I can’t help feeling that if La Vida Loca isn’t seen by audiences within the United States, many of whom have never traveled south of the border, let alone as far south as Central America, we will miss an opportunity to advance the discussion surrounding America’s gang and immigration problems — issues that are inextricably linked.

Deborah Bonello is a blogger and video journalist MexicoReporter.com

www.MexicoReporter.com

This article was written for Index on Censorship.

Mexico’s second annual human rights film festival, supported by a number of organizations here including the Mexico branch of Amnesty International, the Ambulante documentary film project and Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, opens at the end of the week.

The series of documentary and fiction features, as well as short films, come from 23 countries and will run on screens Aug. 14-20 in two of the city’s Cinepolis cinemas. The cinema chain’s Fundacion Cinepolis is the event organizer.

Unlike last year, this year’s festival will have two competitive sections: best Mexican documentary and best Mexican short.

Mexico has no shortage of human rights issues for documentarians to tackle, and among the fare at this year’s festival are themes such as migration, global warming, freedom of expression, child prostitution and the slayings of women in Ciudad Juarez.

Productions included in the program range from films such as “Los Que Se Quedan” (“Those Who Remain”), “Voces Silenciadas” (“Silenced Voices”) and “Sin Nombre” (“Nameless”), which have already made the film festival rounds, to less prominent documentaries.

Last year’s event attracted fewer than 4,000 visitors, and about 1,000 of those attended an open-air film broadcast in Mexico City’s Zocalo. In a city of more than 20 million people, that’s not a great turnout.

This year, organizers are going to charge 20 pesos per ticket, unlike last year, when screenings were free.

It’s hoped that charging for tickets might encourage more people to come and see the films. Lorena Guille, executive director of Fundacion Cinepolis, said, “There is a cultural perception here that what’s free isn’t of good quality.”

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

For more recent posts on the working conditions for journalists in Mexico go here.