June 6th – Mexicans protesting a military crackdown on drug cartels launched a convoy protest Saturday that will travel through some of Mexico’s bloodiest towns on its way to the US border.

This dispatch was done for AFP. You can see it here on their YouTube channel.

Courtesy of Twitter community.

Dark-blue clad soldiers started cordoning off parts of the posh Polanco neighbourhood as early as Wednesday morning because Obama and his entourage were due to stay in a hotel up the road. On the way to my gym late yesterday afternoon, plain-clothes soldiers were loitering on street corners (their crew cuts and navy-blue caps a dead giveaway) and police trucks were driving slowly through the avenues, confidently holding their guns and scanning around from behind dark sunglasses.

But this morning proved to be much less of a challenge than I’d expected and I made it in ahead of time, albeit using the underground rather than my usual shank’s pony.

I saw on my arrival that Obama had written a column that was published in a number of Latin American newspapers as well as the Miami Herald in expectation of his arrival in Mexico and his approaching attendance at the 5th Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago Friday. See it here in English on the Miami Herald website.

“We can overcome our shared challenges with a sense of common purpose, or we can stay mired in the old debates of the past. For the sake of all our people, we must choose the future. Too often, the United States has not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors. We have been too easily distracted by other priorities and have failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas. My administration is committed to renewing and sustaining a broader partnership between the United States and the hemisphere on behalf of our common prosperity and our common security,” he wrote. Strong stuff.

Every media in Mexico and the United States was on high alert and the Facebook updates started pouring in thick and fast, both from the journalistic community as well as from interested readers out there. The Twitter-sphere was also very active – and I’m not just talking about my twitter feed. Everyone from CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux to Inside Mexico and Mexico Times were busy all day keeping avid onliners up-to-date.

What can anyone could really accomplish in a 24-hour stop in Mexico – even if they are Barack Obama? Arguably, Mexico is the U.S’s most important “foreign” issue right now – although it’s hard to think of Mexico as a country that’s foreign to the U.S when they share a border, citizens and a multitude of economic interests.

The recent problem of drug-related violence in Mexico has added itself to the age old ones of trade and immigration between the two countries, and continue to confound policy-makers and frustrate citizens on both sides of the border. Neither of those two massive issues are going to be sorted out during this trip, especially against the background of the current economic crisis.

Padre Luis Angel Nieto, a catholic priest and immigrant activist, acknowledged that this afternoon when I spoke to him during a demonstration he organized outside of the United States Embassy on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma. I went down there to get some quotes for the report we were putting together on local reaction to Obama’s visit (read the report here, link added April 17th 9:29am local time).

Nieto and Elvira Arellano – a Mexican woman who was deported from the United States in 2007 after taking refuge in a Chicago church for a year – brought a group of ten children, all of them United States citizens, to the U.S Embassy to submit a letter addressed to President Obama asking that he push for comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.

“I know that these things can’t happen quickly,” said Nieto, adding that with all the good intentions in the world from President Obama, the issue of immigration reform was one for Congress, not the President alone.

The group of protesters was small, and there were nearly as many journalists there as there were manifestantes. But the tone of the dialogue was SO different from the anti-American sentiment so common here in some parts of Mexico that was given the conditions to flourish during the Bush administration.

Arellano said: “Personally I know he [President Barack Obama] is a person with a big heart because I met him personally when he was a state senator and we were fighting for the rights to driver’s licenses, and we approached him to thank him because he voted for driving licenses to for undocumented migrants in the state of Illinois.

“He promised that there was going to be migratory reform in his first 100 days as President. Time is coming to an end but we have faith that he is very willing to work with congressmen and senators in favor of a migratory reform.”

Arellano’s 10-year-old young son Saul Hernandez was one of the children present at the protest, and he wore a T-Shirt, the back of which said: “Born in the U.S.A. Don’t take my Mommy or my Daddy away.”

It’s not for me to speculate on what kind of policies are being developed behind closed doors, but its pretty safe to assume nothing’s going to happen overnight before Obama sets off to the Americas Summit. But maybe that’s not the point.

From the small insights that I can offer from Mexico’s capital, his visit does have a strong symbolic value for a lot of people here, who felt part-ignored and part victimized by the U.S administration of George Bush.

Mexico President Felipe Calderon said during the televised welcoming ceremony for Mr Obama:

“We are, we can and we should be friends, partners and allies.

“Mr. President, let’s start a new era of relations between the United States and Mexico, . . . new era in which we work together to make our border an example of productivity and security . . . a new era in which the fight against organized crime is waged completely as a shared responsibility, a battle waged by both Mexicans and Americans and won as allies.”

We can only hope that both he and the U.S President are starting as they mean to continue.

I did plan to sign off there, but wouldn’t you know it? Just as I was about to the cry went up around the office that Obama was about to drive past! So I rushed out with my trusty snapper as soldiers dragged steel railings into position and policeman on both sides of the road started signaling to each other. There were lots of men in suits standing around waiting just like us, joking “Here comes la Bestia!” (That’s the name of Obama’s car, apparently)

And they bloody DID drive by! So I snapped the car I THOUGHT Obama would be in – but he wasn’t. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be anyone in it, but that and around 28 other cars and SUVs with blacked-out windows swept by, escorted by policemen on motorbikes.

Cool.

Please note, this reports only represents the view of the writer, Deborah Bonello, and not that of the Los Angeles Times.

See here for the LATimes daytime dispatch on President Obama’s visit and here for Tracy Wilkinson’s report in anticipation of his arrival.

Image: A sign hung on the fence outside of the U.S Embassy in Mexico City Thursday during a pro-immigration reform demonstration. Credit: Deborah Bonello. Click here for more images on Flickr.

*Edited 9:29am local time April 17th – link added.

Mexico City’s Museo de la Ciudad is playing host to a photojournalism exhibition — Expofotoperiodismo — that features nearly 50 photos from 2008. You can see some of the images featured in the show in the above slide show.

All images appear courtesy of the Museum de la Ciudad, and the show runs until April 19th.

– Written for La Plaza

But “Voces Silenciadas” (Silenced Voices), a documentary film that was part of the Ambulante film festival here, broadens the debate around the persecution of journalists to encompass the bigger issues of media ownership and the relationship between the media and Mexico’s political powers.

Director Maria del Carmen De Lara doesn’t simply examine the dozens of unsolved cases of murdered and disappeared journalists in Mexico over the last couple of years –- she delves deeper, looking at media monopolies in Mexico and how those affect press freedom more broadly.

The film uses the departure of Carmen Aristegui , one of Mexico’s most prominent and respected journalists, from W Radio in January of last year as her starting point.

Aristegui’s “Hoy Por Hoy” morning news program had been on for five years and was one of the most listened to in Mexico when it was cut from the airwaves. Aristegui has since returned to radio news on a different network, but De Lara says her case shows how concentrated media ownership in Mexico has reduced the range of opinions in Mexico’s media and silence unwanted ones.

You can see Aristegui explain the circumstances behind her case in the video below, first shown in this La Plaza post.

In the documentary, De Lara makes her point mostly through a series of interviews with prominent Mexican journalists, analysts and writers, as well as media executives. Those interviews are interspersed with an audio recording of her repeatedly calling Televisa, part owner of W Radio, for an interview about Aristegui’s case — an interview that is eventually granted but sheds no new light on the case. Mexico’s giant Grupo Televisa multimedia company and Grupo Prisa, Spain’s largest media conglomerate, are joint owners of W Radio.

The format of the documentary is where it sags because the film is mainly a series of talking heads, sometimes accompanied by images of satirical cartoons snipped from Mexican newspapers. None of the visual material does justice to the urgency of the problems facing the press here in Mexico, which is a shame, because the issues of freedom of expression and violence against journalists here are serious.

The latter continues to hobble many media workers in Mexico, especially those who cover organized crime and the government, and has created a culture of self-censorship.

But De Lara’s interviewees do make a great case.

On leaving the cinema, I was disappointed as a viewer with the format of the documentary and didn’t feel I’d learned anything I didn’t already know.  But on reflection, it occurred to me that foreign journalists were not the target audience of this film. The cinema is a good place to reach at least some average Mexican citizens, most of whom get their news from television. A massive 92% of Mexico’s television stations are owned by just two companies -– Televisa and TV Azteca -– which is De Lara’s point.

“I want the people to see the whole story that has been the struggle for a different kind of journalism in Mexico, a journalism that’s more diverse and inclusive,” she said in a telephone interview from Puebla, Mexico.

“That they understand what are the pressures for journalists, that the people understand another view of things, that they have other information, which this documentary has also done, for history.”

She also said she wants to show that, since the 1984 assassination of one of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, Manuel Buendia, Mexico “continues to have situations of impunity and situations that violate fundamental human rights.”

At the time of writing, there was no distribution deal signed to take the documentary to the United States, but De Lara was in conversations about possibly showing the film in London.

– Written for la Plaza.

Image: A publicity poster for the documentary “Voces Silenciadas” (Silenced Voices). Credit: Ambulante.com.mx. Video: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

February 6 2009 – Carmen Aristegui, one of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, disappeared from the Mexican radio airwaves last year in a cloud of controversy.

As Reed Johnson reported in January 2008, “Aristegui’s departure from W Radio set off a flurry of op-ed commentary in Mexico City newspapers. Several commentators have denounced the incident as an act of censorship and harassment by media and governmental interests.”

Now Aristegui’s back with a new radio news show –- this time on a different network. The journalist, who continued to host her nightly television news show on CNN Español during her radio hiatus, returns to the Mexican airwaves from 6 – 10 every weekday morning on MVS Radio.

She took some time out to speak to the Los Angeles Times about why her show got silenced last year, and the reality for journalists working in Mexico.

You can watch a video of protests over her departure last year here, and the Spanish-language version of the interview is below.

To see the whole, 40-minute unedited video in Spanish, click here.

Young animal rights activists took to the streets in central Mexico City on Sunday, chanting “Corridas de toros — vergüenza nacional (bullfights — a national shame).” They were protesting the hundreds of bullfights that take place here in Mexico.

The march was attended by about 800 people, most of them in their late teens or early 20s. It began at the Hundido Park on Avenida Insurgentes at midday, a few blocks from the Plaza de Toros Mexico, the biggest bullfighting venue in the country and one of the largest in the world with capacity to seat 48,000 people.

The protesters walked just a few blocks north, taking up a lane of traffic. Many of the motorists driving by honked in support.

Mariana Hernandez, a 20-year-old biology student clutching a sign that said “Ya Basta! (Enough, already)” said, “The bulls that they kill are living things. They shouldn’t kill them for fun.”

“The more of us that are here, the better,” said Manual Hernandez, 19, another protester. “This is the second year that I’ve come here and there are more of us every time.”

Many of the activists that we spoke to mentioned 11-year-old apprentice matador Michel “Michelito” Lagravere, who in January killed six calves in the bullring in Merida, southern Mexico.

“It’s such a cruel act and that a child of this age is promoting this type of activity and being treated like a hero is really bad. He killed six calves — in reality, that’s six children,” said 28-year-old Israel Arriola, another activist taking part in the march.

The protest was organized to coincide with the 63rd anniversary of the Plaza this week. Bullfighting was brought to Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s and nowhere is it more popular outside of Spain than in Mexico.

Claudia Ortega, 25, a coordinator at Animanaturalis.org, one of the organizations behind the march, said a survey conducted by the nonprofit group found that 75% of Mexicans are against bullfighting, but that very few act on their views.

“Each year, 250,000 bulls or horses die in bullfighting or related activities” worldwide, she said. Ortega expressed hope that protests such as Sunday’s might encourage more Mexicans to speak out.

Click here for more bullfighting coverage from 2008.

– This post was created for La Plaza.

See photos here on Flickr.

Will was filming violent street battles in the southern Mexican state two years ago when he was shot dead, and controversy has surrounded the search for those responsible.

In Oaxaca City yesterday, more that two thousand people marched across the state capital to the big central plaza, or Zocalo, in memory of the dead journalist. Their protest was mirrored across the border in the United States, where protesters staged a hunger strike outside Senator Hilary Clinton’s office in New York City, demanding a full investigation into the murder of Will.

The journalist’s family, friends and supporters believe that Will was gunned down from a distance by government-backed thugs and have rejected past official investigations into his death by the Mexican authorities.

But earlier this month two members of the protest movement the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, known in Spanish as APPO, were arrested in connection with Will’s murder. The official investigation into his death alleges that Will was shot at close range, not from far away, as his supporters claim.

The arrests were condemned by human rights groups including Amnesty International and Mexico’s own human rights commission, which claims that both the state and federal investigations into the death of the journalist included “irregularities”.

Click here for more on Mexico.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Traffic, protesters and street vendors are some of the biggest daily headaches for Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

This video was made to go with a profile of Mayor Ebrard written by Ken Ellingwood for the Los Angeles Times.

Marcelo Ebrard has turned this balmy city into an ice skaters’ wonderland. He’s conjured sandy beaches far from the sea. He’s made hordes of annoying hawkers vanish from the historic main plaza.

In nearly two years as mayor of Mexico’s capital, Ebrard has shown a bent for splashy initiatives to ease the strains of daily life in a huge and unruly city. But the question is whether the leftist mayor can succeed against the city’s deep problems: legendary traffic, kidnappings, poverty, eye-stinging smog, water shortages, an aging subway system and crooked police. It is a tall order.

If he does, the 49-year-old Ebrard could be a contender for the country’s top office. A wonkish technocrat with years of working the halls of Mexico City’s government, he has signaled his presidential aspirations, though the election is four years away.

The arrests have infuriated supporters of the dead journalist, who have campaigned for justice since his death and complained about official investigations into his murder.

They claim that Will, who was reporting for IndyMedia,  was shot dead by government agents in October 2006, while he was covering an anti-government protest in Oaxaca involving the People’s Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO).

Mexican government investigations, however, say that Will was shot at very close range, suggesting his assassins had to be fellow protesters or at least those in the crowd near him at the time of his death.

A deputy prosecutor said they identified the alleged shooter based on witness statements.

“All agree in identifying the suspect as the person who was about two meters in distance from the victim,” said the deputy prosecutor, Victor Emilio Corzo Cabañas.

Officials identified the suspected gunman as Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno. The other arrested man, Octavio Perez Perez, and at least eight other people are accused of helping hide Martinez.

Both were supporters of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, known in Spanish as APPO. The group’s leaders denied the allegations. LATimes

But as our friend Daniel Hernandez points out on his blog Intersections, stills from the final footage on Brad Will’s camara suggest otherwise.

The arrests of Martinez and Perez has prompted the National Commission for Human Rights in Mexico to label the investigation riddled with “omissions, deficiencies, irregularities, and delays.”

Amnesty International this afternoon called for the protection of Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno, currently in custody in Santa María Ixcotel, where the human rights organization claims the activist is at risk of being tortured in order to procure a confession to the crime of which he is accused. Amnesty also raised doubts about the thoroughness of the investigation into the journalist’s death.

Estas fallas incluyen la incapacidad para evaluar las pruebas forenses y la investigación de todos los posibles sospechosos, entre ellos funcionarios del Estado.

These failures include the inability to evaluate forensic evidence and the investigation of all of the possible suspects, amongst them, government employees. (Amnesty International statement).

For past posts on Brad Will, click here.