Nothing was left to the imagination in what is one of the world’s biggest Passion plays. Holy Week, or Semana Santa, sees the staging of a number of scenes from the Bible on the streets of Iztapalapa, including Palm Sunday and the Resurrection. But none are as dramatic as the reenactment of Good Friday.

An estimated 2 million people descended on Iztapalapa on Friday to witness the 166th annual crucifixion, this year of Diego Villagran, the 18-year-old local playing the role of Jesus.

The sheer number of people taking part in or watching what was well-organized chaos was similar to portrayals of the crucifixion one might have seen in films such as “Ben-Hur” and Mel Gibson’s controversial “The Passion of the Christ.” Babies and young children sat atop their parents’ shoulders, crammed into crowded streets and pushed up against police barriers as some of the 4,000 actors in the street play bayed for the blood of “Christ”.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s ubiquitous street vendors showed no shyness in taking advantage of the religious event. They were everywhere, flogging sunhats, bottled water and stamps of the face of Jesus, while offering to imprint the faces of those willing to pay five pesos.

The heat of the April sun, combined with the severe water shortages that the borough also experienced over the week, made the setting feel uncomfortably real. When the blood-soaked “Jesus” staggered past, surrounded by a jeering crowd that kept pushing him to the ground and laughing, it was hard to resist the urge to wade in and save him from his violent destiny.

But Villagran was well prepared for his ordeal. He has been in training for the role since January, when he was selected during a casting process from 20 young men from the neighborhood (watch the video above, filmed over a period of three months, to see Villagran prepping for his big day).

Playing the lead made Villagran into a temporary celebrity here in Mexico, and he says he has had at least one media interview a day since he was given the role.

Over the last few months in the build-up to his big week, Villagran trained daily on the Cerro de la Estrella, a steep hill that doubled as Mount Calvary on Friday. His preparation included dragging a 190-pound cross around a 2.5-mile running track and doing push-ups with a brick on his back.

But he also said that he had to do some spiritual preparation for the role that included, naturally, regular visits to church, but also what he described as “finding himself, within himself,” and asking himself at every step of the process why he was doing it.

“It doesn’t scare me to play this role – it makes me feel proud and gives me confidence,” says Villagran, who is unusually tall for his 18 years and stands head and shoulders above most of the men in the neighborhood.

Although a big guy, Villagran is still boyishly handsome, and he was striking in the role of Jesus. But he says that acting isn’t something he’s planning to pursue, adding that he’s more interested in becoming an engineer at the state-owned oil company Pemex.

“Since I was little, I’ve watched the procession, and I always wanted to see myself there – I always wanted to play the main role,” says Villagran.

“And now that they’ve given me the chance, I’m going to make the most of it.”

Well, he certainly did.

Click here for the New York Times coverage of the event, and here for the Washington Post piece.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

Video: Diego Villagran trains for the role of Jesus on Iztapalapa’s Cerro de la Estrella. Photo image: A video still taken from the above film. Click here for more images on Flickr. Video and photographs by Deborah Bonello

“La Vida Loca” reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary, by photojournalist and filmmaker Christian Poveda (you can see his bio here), follows some of the members of ”la dieciocho,” the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

“Little One” is a 19-year-old mother with an enormous “18,” reflecting her membership in the 18th Street gang, tattooed on her face. The numbers stretch from above her eyebrows down onto her cheeks.

“Moreno” is a 25-year-old male member of the same gang who works in a local bakery set up by a nonprofit group called Homies Unidos. The bakery eventually folds when its owner is arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail on homicide charges.

And “Wizard,” another young mother and gang member, who lost her eye in a fight, is followed by Poveda during a long series of medical consultations and operations to fit her with a replacement glass eye. She’s shot and killed before the end of the film.

Stories like that, punctuated with funerals attended by silent, heavily tattooed male gang members and wailing young wives, mothers and girlfriends, make up the sum of “La Vida Loca.”

The nature of their existence meant that Poveda had to spread his camera lens wide in the 16 months he spent shooting the film.

“I knew right from the start that I couldn’t film just one character,” he explains during an interview on a trip to Mexico last month when “La Vida Loca” was part of the Guadalajara International Film Festival.

“Firstly, they get bored after a couple of months and don’t want to be filmed anymore. Or two, they get put in jail, or they get killed.”

That’s a reality that Poveda feels a lot of Americans don’t know about and should.

“Americans have to realize how much damage the U.S. has done to this region,” he says.

Poveda, who lives in San Salvador and has worked as a photojournalist covering the country before, during and after the 12-year-long civil war that began in 1980, is talking from experience.

The current situation in El Salvador is one of the less-inspiring examples of the long-standing social and economic ties between the United States and Latin American countries, he argues.

Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s. When the peace accords that ended the civil 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 U.S. authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.

As Rocky Delgadillo, a Los Angeles city attorney, notes in this column for the L.A. Times, “this only exacerbated the problem, spreading gangs like a virus until they grew into transnational `super-gangs’.”

Poverty and a lack of opportunities in post-war El Salvador made the country a ripe recruiting ground.

But gangs did exist in El Salvador before that. Tracy Wilkinson noted in her 1994 report on the issue for the L.A. Times:

However, it was after the United States began implementing their deportation policy in the 1990s that the groups grew into the super-gangs that they are today, with cliques all the way through Central America and Mexico as well as, of course, a huge presence in the U.S.

Speaking at the Mexico City premiere of “La Vida Loca” last month, Poveda said officials estimate there are 15,000 gang members in El Salvador; 14,000 in Guatemala; 35,000 in Honduras; and 5,000 in Mexico.

The biggest population of gang members still resides in the U.S., with an estimated 70,000 living there, he said.

As far as Poveda is concerned, the vast majority of the gang members in El Salvador are “victims of society, of our society. ” A desperate reaction to a desperate situation.

Many would disagree. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities. Here in Mexico, they’re one of the parties blamed for the high levels of violent attacks and robberies against migrants traveling from Central America and heading north to the United States.

But Poveda says that their big, bad image makes them an easy target and a convenient scapegoat for crimes difficult for governments to control. He also differentiates between gang members living in the United States and those living in El Salvador.

“They live in completely different economic situations,” he says.

“It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” he says, referring to the kind of profits gang members make in the two places.

When asked if he can see a day when the gangs cease to exist, Poveda says that the destruction of the networks is not the point.

“If you want to improve things, the first thing to know is that it’s not about making the gangs disappear. They need to be given another focus.”

At the time of interviewing Poveda, he had yet to secure a distribution deal for “La Vida Loca” in the U.S. The documentary opens on cinema screens here in Mexico on May 15.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

Click here to see Poveda’s images on Flickr.

The music of Mexico’s drug trade has taken a beating lately. As we reported from Tijuana last year, some radio stations south of the border have stopped playing the songs and promoters have banned the music from many public events. Nightclub owners ask bands to turn down narcocorrido requests.

Richard Marosi wrote: Narcocorridos still draw legions of fans, despite government
efforts to squelch the music. Calor Norteña played the song about
Villarreal only because of repeated requests from hard-drinking
bar-goers. But it was a momentary exception to a backlash that has
succeeded like none before in changing people’s attitudes toward the
music, say members of several bands, nightclub owners, concert
promoters and government officials.

They describe a growing dislike, even revulsion, for music that critics
say celebrates the people terrorizing a community that has suffered at
least 207 violent deaths this year. Attendance at narcocorrido concerts
has dipped; bands say audiences request the music less and less,
preferring dance and romantic tunes that take their minds off the
city’s troubles.

But Mexican artist Cristina Rubalcava wasn’t put off by the controversy. After writing a song for los Tigres Del Norte about the controversial 670-mile fence project along the U.S.-Mexico border, she got to listening to some of the band’s narcocorridos and created a mural that illustrates phrases from more than 40 of their canciones. Watch the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

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

That was until last week, when I managed to get myself on the list for a “Paseo Nocturna” of the Bosque (Woods), an activity that is back in season for a short time only. Despite having lived in Mexico City for two years, it took me until now to discover the night-time jaunt, which has been running since 2001 for two short seasons a year, in late winter and fall. The tours are publicized only by word of mouth and a little bit of news coverage. My curiosity was piqued to visit a space that I love but have only seen by day.

After being given the nod by the night guards on the park’s entrance on Paseo de la Reforma on a recent Wednesday night, we made our way to the Casa del Lago — or Lake House — at the center of the 1,600-acre park. About a dozen visitors were met by a very jolly young woman wearing a rainbow-covered neck-scarf, corduroy skirt and knee-high boots. She introduced herself as “Grisi” and ordered us to follow her.

We all walked through the grounds of the Casa del Lago to our waiting transport: an electric, rubber-tired train like the one that during the weekends does the run up and down the steep lane to the Castillo de Chapultepec, or Chapultepec Castle, once home to Mexican Emperor Maximilian I and his wife, Empress Carlota. We got on board, and the train took off up the Avenida de Colegio Militar, the mild night wind in our hair.

Grisi got right to it, reeling out dates and names as we moved through the night. I have to confess to not being able to pay much attention. I was much more interested in how the trees looked after-hours, especially lit up by the moon. There was no one but us in the park.

La Fuente de las Ranas, a small round fountain, popped up out of the darkness as we neared it. The fountain was circled by beautiful tiles from Sevilla, Spain, and by brass frogs, which spurted water from their mouths into the center of the round pool. Our driver kindly did three slow circles around it before we moved on, leaving the little oasis of light and water behind us.

Before we plunged again into total obscurity, a statue of the great poet-king Nezahualcoyotl came into view. This is where Grisi lost me as she started to lecture us in Spanish about pre-Columbian Mexico, which is hard enough to pay attention to in your mother tongue.

But Grisi was soon to be saved. As we moved further into the park down an avenue lined with enormous trees, a night watchman sped out of the night on his bike, waving frantically and ringing his bell to inform us that we couldn’t go any further.

“El vigilante (the night watchman)” — or Federico, as he was later persuaded to divulge — was part of the act. In his role, he not only took a fancy to Grisi but also took over as guide, lending the tour the enthusiastic air it had been lacking. Our new “”guide” couldn’t sit still for a moment. He rode alongside the train on a bicycle, playing old Mexican music over a mounted speaker. He leaped around our next destination, which was the Fuente de Quijote, dedicated to the main character in the novel by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Federico made magic happen. Dormant fountains came to life, suddenly lighting up and throwing water into the night air at his command. He recited poems in one of Mexico’s indigenous languages, Nahuatl, before translating them into Spanish for us.

He even showed us the alleged entrance to Mitlan, the underworld where the Aztecs believed their people went after death. It was at the back of a cave in the “audiorama,” a small, shady space tucked away in the park where, during the day, speakers tied to trees emit music to those lounging around on low, metal mesh benches.

Before I knew it, our hour and a half of magic was over, and I was waving goodbye to Grisi and Federico, the night watchman, as they rowed off together toward the center of one of Chapultepec’s lakes in a small, wooden rowboat.

Love, it appears, blossoms between them every Wednesday night -– at least when the romantic night tour is in season.

For details on how to get onto the tour, click here.

– Written for La Plaza

Photo (top): A statue in the Plaza de Quijote, in the heart of the Chapultepec Woods.

Photo (bottom): Nezahualcoytl, the poet-king.

Credit (photo and video): Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.

See more images here on Flickr.

Here in Mexico, we keep our eye on the frequent press-freedom reports that come out, given the high levels of violence against journalists in the country and the culture of impunity that abounds.

Tuesday’s release by the Committee to Protect Journalists, sadly, held no surprises.

The organization ranked Mexico among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists:

“Growing violence associated with criminal organizations has made Mexico one of the world’s deadliest countries for reporters. Since 2000, at least 24 journalists have been killed, eight in direct reprisal for their work. Seven other journalists have disappeared since 2005.”

About Latin American in general, the organization reports:

“Powerful drug traffickers in Mexico, gangsters in Brazilian slums, paramilitaries in Colombia,and violent street gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala are terrorizing the press. Self-censorship is widespread.”

The U.K.-based Frontline blog begins on a positive note about Colombia’s journalists, remarking that “according to the Foundation for Liberty and Freedom of the Press, no Colombian journalists were killed in 2008 for the first time in 23 years.”

But it goes on to say that a total of 130 journalists were killed in Colombia in the past 30 years. The CPJ reports:

“While violence in Colombia has eased in the last four years, it remains one of the world’s most murderous countries for the press. Forty reporters, photographers and editors in all have been killed since 1992, and the country has the highest per capita rate of unsolved journalist murders in Latin America.”

And 2009 has already got off to a bad start for Colombian journalists, continues Frontline.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, Maria Eugenia Guerrero, a Colombian journalist, was found dead on the outskirts of the Ecuadorian city of Tulcannear earlier this month,

“[Guerrero], who was working for the Integracion Estereo station in the southern Colombian city of Ipiales, was brutally assaulted and killed and her body was left in a remote area outside Tulcan. … The body, according to the forensics report, showed signs of sexual assault, and it is presumed the journalist was killed in a violent manner because a portion of her skull was not found and had presumably been detached as a result of a severe blow.” link

– Written for La Plaza

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.

David LaChapelle, the surrealist photographer, launched his first-ever show in Mexico City last night in a media scrum that resembled one of his chaotic images.

The American photographer, who has made his name photographing celebrities in bizarre settings, was accompanied by Amanda Lepore, the American transsexual icon, during the press conference in Mexico City’s Hotel Geneve.

Lepore wore a gold-trimmed white bathrobe that was open to the waist, which prompted great interest among the photographers in attendance.

LaChapelle’s Mexican debut, called “Delirium of Reason (Delirios de Razón),” will open at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso on Feb. 3 and feature a summary of work the photographer produced between 1995 and 2008.

“The times we live in right now are extremely confusing and anxiety-causing and people look to contemporary art for enlightenment,” said LaChapelle last night to the Mexican and international media. He spoke through an interpreter who couldn’t quite keep up, meaning that some of his musings were definitely lost in translation.

“Pieta With Courtney Love,” “Jesus Is My Homeboy” and the celebrity-studded “Star System” are some of the works scheduled to appear in the exhibition, which will run until mid-May.

LaChapelle said he was taking a hiatus on his farm in the United States after walking off the set of a Madonna video he was working on (“It’s a burden to have to work with these people,” he huffed). Then he got a call about doing the show in Mexico.

He said that after years working in magazines, he is enjoying the freedom of working in a gallery environment.

LaChapelle, whose uncle is a priest and whose last name means “chapel,” features a lot of religious imagery in his work, which could ruffle feathers within the hugely influential Roman Catholic Church in Mexico.

LaChapelle didn’t seem worried about that. When asked by a member of the press if there was anything in Mexico that he especially wanted to catch with his camera, he answered, “charros,” referring to the traditional cowboy of Mexico.

– Written for la Plaza by Deborah Bonello.

Photo: American photographer David LaChapelle and transsexual icon Amanda Lepore at the Hotel Geneve in Mexico City last night at the press launch of LaChapelle’s upcoming show, Delirium of Reason. Credit: Deborah Bonello.

For more photos of the press launch, go to Flickr.

There were no rabble-rousing speeches, but Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the film version, was greeted by an eager audience at the nearly full Julio Bracho cinema, which hosted the premier of the first part of Steven Soderbergh’s long-awaited portrait of the Argentine revolutionary last night.

“Che, the Argentine,” got its first Mexican screening on the sprawling campus of Mexico’s most influential university, the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico). The movie has, like all upcoming major releases here in Mexico, been selling for weeks now on stands that deal in pirated DVDs, but there remain those who want to see the film on the big screen. The audience was a mixture of all ages, from amorous teenage couples to unaccompanied gray-haired men, and they received the portrait of the much-adored revolutionary with gusto.

Guevara is popular among the sprawling student population here in Mexico City, where he and Fidel Castro, then an exiled Cuban lawyer, planned their Cuban Revolution over dinner and cigars on July 3rd, 1955. The myth and heroic image of the Argentine have replaced a real understanding of the complex man that he was. His face is often emblazoned across flags and T-shirts during student protests and commonly evoked as a universal symbol of social struggle.

No one left the theater during the two-hour film, which has been derided by some critics for its length. But Soderbergh paid detailed attention to Guevara’s weaknesses as well as his strengths, emphasizing how handicapped he was by his asthma. Both his treatment and Benicio Del Toro‘s impressive portrayal of the guerrilla fighter avoided over-romanticizing certain moments in the film which are such a vital part of history, such as his United Nations address in 1964, the real version of which you can see here on YouTube.

There was hearty applause at the end of the film, and we asked a few people on their way out what they thought.

Jessica Hernandez, 32, a teaching assistant at the UNAM, enjoyed the movie but said it was lacking a more in-depth portrayal of Che Guevara.

“I didn’t like how there wasn’t more about him, Che himself, and his nature,” she said.

Fernanda Portilla, a 45-year-old employee of the university’s culture department said: “It was too simple in the sense that they painted Che like the good guy and Fidel like the bad guy…. Che was never such a good guy and Fidel never so mean.”

And Ignacio Tlatela, a 39-year-old biologist, commented: “Maybe a lot of people who know about Che Guevara would have found the portrayal very interesting because they know what happened during the revolution, but not between each of the different soldiers…. It also shows a facet of him that we didn’t know — for example, his asthma and how ill he was.”

– This post was written for La Plaza and was also syndicated to The News

Watch the trailer for the movie below.

Photo: A still from “Che, the Argentine,” in which Benicio Del Toro portrays Ernesto “Che” Guevara addressing the UN General Assembly in 1964. Credit: www.cheelargentino.com/

Julio Cesar, a 19-year-old metalworker, crawled on his knees for five hours to reach the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Surrounded by four of his friends, who had to physically support him in the final meters as he scaled the steps of the huge church, Cesar was fulfilling a promise.

“I asked the Virgin to look after my children,” he said, his young face burned red by the sun on this December day. His prayers were answered, he said, and this was his act of thanks to her.

Cesar was one of an estimated 7 million Mexican Catholics who made the annual pilgrimage to the basilica in Mexico City this week. Today is expected to bring the largest numbers of people to the spot that tradition holds is where the Virgin de Guadalupe, Mexico’s most revered saint, first appeared.

Bertin Nava, a salesman, and his girlfriend Mayra Sanchez, a hairdresser, both from the working class Iztapalapa neighborhood of Mexico City, walked hand in hand towards the church. Each of them had a small statue of the Virgin tucked under an arm.

“This is a family tradition. My father started coming when I was small and started the custom of coming every year, walking from the house to here,” said Nava.

He and Mayra had been walking for six hours. Nearby, Ricardo Lozano walked for two and a half days from Atlixco, in the central state of Puebla. He arrived Thursday. He had a thick blanket rolled and tied to his back, and walked gingerly on feet rubbed raw by his boots.

But he was in high spirits.

“I have a strong faith and wanted to make the journey to the Virgin,” he said.

Two churches actually stand on Tepeyac hill in the north of Mexico City, known as La Villa de Guadalupe – the old and the new basilicas. Both were besieged by visitors Thursday, many of them with heavy, wooden-framed effigies of the Virgin tied to their backs.

The show of faith was a formidable sight.

This post was written and recorded for La Plaza.

Image: Julio Cesar, a 19-year-old metalworker, crawled on his knees for five hours yesterday to reach the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times. Go to Flickr to see more photos of the annual pilgrimage.