Broadcast live on Ustream, June 24th 2009

Moderator: Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News
Panel:Ed Vulliamy, Guardian and Observer journalist and writer
Alex Tweddle<, director of Juarez City of Dreams
Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch

You may recall that last year, I published this video about a group of Honduran mothers who came to Mexico looking for their missing family members and friends.

Since then, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has a carried out it’s own investigation into the problems Central and Latin American migrants encounter when they try to cross or enter Mexico, usually on route to the United States.

The report found 198 cases of migrant kidnappings during that time, with an average of 33 kidnappings a month – that’s more than one a day. During that period, 9,758 migrants were deprived of their liberty. More than 60 percent of kidnappings involved groups of migrants travelling together. The majority of those kidnapped were from Honduras (67 %). 18% of the victims were from El Salvador and 13% from Guatemala.

Who’s doing the kidnapping?

More than 9,000 of the victims were kidnapped by gangs that operate along Mexico’s migrant routes, 35 of them were kidnapped by police, migrant officials or other Mexican authorities, and 56 were taken by a combination of the two working together. In 6 of the cases, migrants were kidnapped by a single kidnapper.

According to the Commission’s research, the various kidnappers asked for a ransom of between US$1,500 to US$5,000 for their hostages, who were often blindfolded, driven to various locations, and in some cases only fed one meal a day, sometimes consisting of little more than bread or stale tortillas. The average price they demanded was around US$2,500, meaning that over the six-month period, kidnapping gangs or authorities made around US$25 million from ransom money out of the 9,758 victims detected by the study.

The president of the Comision Nacional de Los Derecho Humanos (CNDH) Dr. José Luis Soberanes Fernández, made a speech at the unveiling of the report here in Mexico City on Monday. Needless to say I wasn’t there in person due to my foot injury, but was sent the speech.

“These figure clearly show that the frequency and magnitude of migrant kidnappings represent an enormous level of this criminal activity, which means high earnings from delinquency.

He also said that the reaction of the Mexican authorities hasn’t been proportional to the severity and volume of the crimes against migrants in Mexico, leading to an increase in the impunity enjoyed by those who commit these crimes.

Gigi Bonnici, an independent human rights consultant, specializing in immigration and asylum issues who has six years of experience working with migrants and refugees in Mexico for a number of organizations including Sin Fronteras, said of the findings:

“The statistics are frightening, given that we are probably talking about thousands more, since this is obviously a very difficult issue to assess, primarily because the overwhelming majority of cases are not reported to anyone. The migrants often consider these crimes as part of the cost of migrating, part of the tax one has to pay for being poor and for crossing through Mexico and into the US without legal documents.”

She said that the fact that many migrants don’t know their rights combined with the indifference of the majority of the Mexican population compounds the problem.

“The international migrant population traveling through Mexico by train, by bus or on foot is by and large an invisible one to the majority of the Mexican population – invisible in the sense that they are essentially undocumented and live in fear of being discovered by any type of authority; invisible in the sense that they themselves are often unaware that as human beings they have the same rights as all of us to physical integrity and to be protected from criminal acts, whether they have legal status to be in the country or not; invisible in the sense that in the eyes of the authorities charged with protection they have no rights and so are not subject to protection by the state (which also means that criminal perpetrators who harm migrants are not subject to state investigation); invisible in the sense that (unlike other so-called vulnerable groups) migrants do not exist to the Mexican population at large – because they are considered criminals who are simply using passage through the desert to get to the north (in fact sometimes even considered as “competition” for those Mexicans who are trying to do the same thing), the public also does not believe that they should be owed protection by the state.”

Finally, Bonnici picks up on a point that explains why I choose to highlight this issue so frequently. Mexico and the Mexican Government have worked hard to gain recognition of the migrant rights of Mexicans in the United States. The issue of Mexico’s northern border with the United States and the thousands of migrants (of many nationalities) who die trying to cross it each year is a humanitarian tragedy. That said, it’s only fair that Mexico’s government and people turn their attentions to those migrants suffering within Mexico’s own borders and pay them the same respect they demand for their paisanos / countrymen abroad.

“Undocumented migrants have no access to justice in Mexico; at most, access to justice for migrants is conditioned on a regular legal status,” says Bonnici.

“If an undocumented migrant wishes to approach the police or prosecutor in order to lay a charge for a crime committed against him or her, or to provide witness testimony, he or she would risk being detained and deported. According to Article 67 of the General Populations Law and section 201 of its Regulations, the authorities are obliged to first confirm legal status of the claimant, and if the person cannot prove legal status in Mexico, he must be transferred to the migration authorities (which means, being detained in immigration detention prison and most likely deported). Why on earth would any migrant who already has suffered at the hands of criminals, expose himself to these risks, especially when there is strong evidence to suggest that the authorities are in collusion with the kidnappers, and when it is abundantly clear that the migrant will get no redress or restitution.

“This is obviously a significant violation to the right to equality before the law, and is also something Mexico has fought hard to get for its own migrants in the US.”

The CNDH’s investigation took place between September 2008 and February 2009 this year, and was carried out by Comission employees who toured migrant shelters throughout Mexico, from Chiapas all the way to Baja California and Nuevo Leon.

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

The following is a short chapter about a taxi ride.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

Money

Onions

Calle Balderas was deserted at one in the morning, except for the odd taco eaters at the white-painted puestos, lit by bare bulbs. The taxi driver picked me up and began to hurtle down the street at great speed. I tried to fasten the seatbelt, but it wouldn’t budge from the wall. He began to complain about his fellow drivers:

“You don’t have to worry about the drunks until about three in the morning. These people in front of me may have had a drink or two, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re tired. A lot of people know how to drive, but they don’t really know how to handle a car. They don’t know the difference between driving at night, and driving during the day, driving when it’s dry or driving after it’s rained.”

As he expounded, he tore down Avenida Cuauhtémoc, switching lanes with abandon, missing the cars at his sides by inches. “They don’t know how to stay awake,” he went on. “Me, I’ve been driving for, what?” He looked at his watch. “Forty-nine hours. I’ve only stopped to eat and to bathe, and to drop off my money at home. I don’t like to have a lot of money in the cab.”

I turned to get a good look at him. He appeared to be about 40 years old, with his hair brushed back, a trim moustache and huge bags under his eyes.

“I’m not on drugs, either,” he said with a smile. “The longest I’ve ever driven is eight straight days, from Sunday to Sunday.” I tried once more to maneuver the seatbelt, to no avail. “I have to bathe every twelve hours or so. I have very sensitive skin. If I don’t bathe, the collar of my shirt gives me a rash on my neck. But the real secret to staying awake is eating. I eat a lot.” He was of a normal body type, not at all running to fat. “In the last 24 hours, I’ve stopped to eat six times. You need to eat for energy. Our bodies our like these taxis. If you don’t fill them up, they won’t run.

“You know what the real secret is?” he asked, now with a manic look in his eyes. “Onions. If I eat a lot of onions, I can go on and on. At this hour, I usually get some beef tacos at a stand on Bolívar. They know me, and they always pile on the onions. No cilantro, just some extra cheese and a heap of onions. ” He must have noticed an incredulous expression on my face. “Look, I can’t give you a scientific explanation. I’ve never looked it up, and frankly, I don’t care. Try it and you’ll see for yourself.”

THE BORDER REPORT

Is Caborca, Sonora, changing hands? If so, the latest would-be owners want everybody out, the narcos, the cops and the mayors of the Pinacate. And the new guys are backed by Macho Prieto, Mayo Zambada’s security chief.

What happened here last week was a sheer massacre, the carnage going far beyond what now passes for normal along the Mexican border.

The incident started with a mass kidnapping of four people in Plutarco Elias Calles, late Wednesday night. What happened next was pure Macho M.O., down to the matching cars, reminiscent of the Bazucaso de Obregón in early ‘05. On Thursday afternoon, a convoy of five Yukons stopped outside the state police substation, gunmen attacking the building with machine guns fired from the sunroofs. Nothing more than intimidation; only two hundred rounds and no serious injuries. The coup de grace came Friday when a Yukon blew past a federal checkpoint, headed north. The Policia Federal Preventiva chased the Yukon and found it abandoned on the side of road heading north to Sonoyta and the U.S. border. Inside the SUV, police found the bodies of eleven men, nine had been burned and chopped to pieces, the heads, arms and legs removed.

Read on….

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” It is an in-depth examination of the perceptions and realities of the crime problem in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

For about ten years there was a man who was known as the “go-to guy” in the Jewish community in case of a kidnapping. Before he retired from this activity, he negotiated 88 kidnaps, and in each the victim was returned alive. In 76 of the cases, at least some of the gang members were arrested and convicted. Due to his request for anonymity, I’ll call this man Jacobo.

He is about 70, slim, bald-headed and morbidly witty. I met him in his “office” – an elegant café off a hotel lobby. Jacobo blames the wave of kidnapping in Mexico to television coverage. He refers specifically to the news about the leader of a kidnapping ring named Daniel Arizmendi López, who before his capture was known as el mochaorejas (the earchopper) because of his proclivity for sending the ears of his victims to accelerate ransom payments.

“Before him,” said Jacobo, “a criminal would stick up a grocery store or rob people on the street, get 500 or 1000 pesos and then, after a hard day’s work, go home and watch TV. Thousands of these guys saw the reports about how much Arizmendi made and said to themselves, ‘I’m in the wrong business.’”

Jacobo refused to offer any details about how a kidnap is negotiated, explaining that if a kidnapper read this book, he would be tipped off to strategy. “How much is a life worth?” he asked. “Buying and selling shirts is an easy business. You know if you buy a shirt for ten pesos and sell it for twenty, you’ve made a ten-peso profit. If you sell it for nine, you’ve lost a peso. But how much a life is worth is the business of kidnap negotiation. They’ve got a person and they want to sell him. The family wants to buy him. It’s all about money. It’s not personal. They’re just trying to move merchandise.”

The father of another kidnap victim – whose son was returned to him for about $20,000 after the intervention of the AFI, Mexico’s equivalent to the FBI – was willing to go into more detail. He drew a triangle on a piece of paper. The line at the bottom represented the passage of time. The line on the left pointing upward symbolized the mounting pressure, both for the kidnappers and the victims’ families. The line pointing downward on the right stood for the diminishing financial expectations of the kidnappers. At a certain point, a convergence is reached for a sum of money.

If the family of the victim agrees to pay the first amount requested by the kidnappers, then the criminals will decide that they’ve asked for too little and demand more. As painful as it may be when the life of a loved one is at stake, professionals urge the victims’ families to start with an extremely low number, so the final price won’t be usurious.

“Violence is always a part of it, verbal or physical,” said Jacobo. “You can’t be a polite kidnapper or no one will take you seriously.” The longest period of captivity for one of the kidnaps he negotiated was 100 days, and the shortest 24 hours. The smallest amount of money ever handed over was about $5,000, and the greatest close to $100,000.

“And three fingers,” he added.

Malcolm Beith was appointed editor of the newspaper at the beginning of June following its sale by former owner Victor Hugo O’Farill to Grupo Mac. But Beith says that he was handed a check and shown the door yesterday.

“I was handed a check this morning for my week’s work — bear in mind that we were signed on to 30-day contracts, but I had yet to sign on because I am dealing with some other contract issues of my own — and sent on my way.”

It’s remains unclear whether Grupo Mac plans to continue producing original content for the News following their acquisition of the title, or whether they plan to publish translated reports from the group’s other media properties. There are currently only two reporters employed by the News, and in today’s issue of the newspaper there is one original report, the rest is wire copy.

Either way, it’s not a decision Beith will have to deal with. Although he stressed in his email that he was let go very professionally, it’s unlikely that his editorial when the New changed hands went unnoticed, in which he lambasted both the former newspaper’s owner as well as Mexico in general, saying:

“There are ways of treating employees that Mexico must learn if it truly wants to be a member of the OECD and not be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a third-world backwater.”

But Beith said in relation to his dismissal: “No bitterness, for the record, they handled the exit very professionally (after all, legally they didn’t have to pay me a dime, but they paid me for the week anyway). I wish all my colleagues the best of luck,” said Beith via email to MexicoReporter.com last night.

Before the News changed hands, Beith was the national editor and had been with the newspaper since it launched in late 2007. Brian Rausch will replace Beith as the new editor of the News.

– Deborah Bonello for MexicoReporter.com

*edited at 12pm Mexico City time. Blake Lalonde is not the acting editor of the News – he got in touch to tell us he turned the position down. Stay tuned.
*edited at 12:20pm Mexico City time. Brian Rausch is the new editor of the News.

Deborah Bonello reporting for MexicoReporter.com

My breath is tearing out of my lungs and my leg muscles are screaming for a reprieve. I just scaled a 60-degree hill coated in thorny brambles and poisonous plants whilst being pounded by rain. In the dark. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. Later that night, my fellow journalists and I were kidnapped by masked guerillas who jumped onto our bus.

Our only comfort? That none of this was real. But it could have been, which is the point of the survival course 18 journalists who live and work in Mexico attended last week in Toluca, just outside of Mexico City.

During the five day survival program, the journalists dodged tear gas and Army tanks and learned how to survive in the wilderness. The psychological stresses were addressed, too; they learned strategies for dealing with emotions.

In Mexico these days, that may be the most important lesson of all.

“Once in Apatzingan a cameraman and I were taken,” says Miguel Garcia Tinoco, a 40-year-old journalist and owner of the Notivideo video news website based in Michoacan.

“They took us to talk with a drug-trafficking boss on a street in Apatzingan, and they wanted to make us write what they wanted, what they wanted to communicate.”

This group of traffickers gained infamy three years ago when they tossed the severed heads of six enemies onto the dance floor of a nightclub.

“They wanted us to publish an explanation of why they’d murdered those six people. What we told them was that we couldn’t make a decision in terms of what we published or didn’t publish in the newspaper – that it was up to the editor. And in the end my editor decided not to publish anything at all.”

Antonio Ramos Tafolla, a 58-year-old reporter in the same state as Garcia, was kidnapped and beaten up by a group he says he was never able to identify.

“It limited me and the boldness that I had before to write. It limited me but it didn’t shut me up or stop me thinking, but I have more reservations now.”

Some don’t get granted any conditions. Ramos said that a colleague of his went missing two years ago and has never reappeared. Garcia says the same of two other fellow journalists in Michoacan. They are three of the eight journalists currently listed as missing in Mexico.

It’s not only reporters covering Mexico’s drug traffickers and organized crime networks that run the risk of reprisals. These journalists recounted tales from covering everything from car accidents, massacres and assassinations, to shoot-outs, kidnappings and election campaigns.

Run-ins with the federal police, the army and local governors are common for any reporter who questions local power networks.

“Sadly, the army has seen us, to a certain point, as enemies,” Garcia said.

“They close their operations and don’t let us film, they don’t let us into some crime scenes to get information … And they also take away our gear and they assault us.”

Back in the classroom Dr. Ana Zellhuber gives the journalists some practical guidance in dealing both with people who have just come out of emergency situations, as well their own emotional reactions to tough circumstances.

“You’re not heroes,” she says. “You’re reporters. Everyone has a duty to perform – do yours. Don’t turn yourselves into one of the victims.”

Stories unfolded in the classroom. One of the four women on the course, a reporter from Tijuana, talked about  the time she was approached by a man who said the Mexican Army had massacred people in his town.

She didn’t know what to do because as the man told her his story she knew she was going to cry but she worried that crying would draw attention to herself.

“There are no wrong emotions,” said Zellhuber. “And there are always emotions.”

Monica Franco is a 31-year-old journalist working in Puebla.

“Intimidation is a daily reality for us,” she told me.

“We’re not just intimidated by the police – we’re intimidated by government spheres, by press officers, intimidated by politicians and by civilians who now don’t see us as allies.

“A lot of co-workers end up losing the point of why we’re here, which is to inform and give a voice to those people who don’t have one. And that’s what leads a lot of people to see us as enemies of society.”

Franco hits on an interesting point. Some of the journalists that have been killed here in Mexico over the last few years (see here for more numbers) were targeted as a direct result of reports they’d filed.

But in Mexico, where training is in short supply, wages are pitifully low and reporters aren’t protected or helped by their employers, it’s easy to see how they themselves can fall prey to corruption.

Franco says that someone broke into her home in Puebla. The burglars only stole journalism gear, nothing else.

“Instead of helping us we were intimidated by the police and told that due to our jobs, they could break into our homes, she said.”

They never learned who did the break in, Franco says.

“We just put up a stronger gate on the front door.”

Article 19 and the Rory Peck Trust organized the survival course, which took place between May  17th – 22nd in Toluca, Mexico.

Waking up this morning, I noticed that the death toll attributed to the outbreak had risen since Friday and that the virus – which has also been detected in the United States - is being called a possible pandemic by the WHO. The streets were very quiet for a Saturday morning and the odd person we passed on the way through town in a taxi was wearing the government-issued blue surgical masks to cover their faces to avoid contagion. But there was no panic, no wrestling in the streets for the last face mask, just a sort of eerie quiet – eerie for Mexico City, which is always a seething mass of traffic and people on a Saturday.

So I was surprised to find that a gallery opening in the posh neighbourhood of San Miguel de Chapultepec, part of the city-wide Zona Maco contemporary art festival, was swarming with people. I at least expected to see fashionable versions of the blue face masks being combined with the latest clothes labels, but it wasn’t so. Of the 500 or so attendees at the event (download the details here), perhaps 10 of them were covering their mouths, and some of those had their masks pulled down around their necks. 

Risking their lives for art? Well, the new Gabriel Orozco work unveiled at the recently-opened contemporary gallery Kurimanzutto was rather smashing. No one I spoke to felt that the risk of contracting a possibly deadly form of flu was as high as the repercussions of missing out on one of the most trendy dates in the Mexico City art diary.

Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor.

“There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert,” she said.

“But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people.”

Then it was on to Del Valle, the middle class neighbourhood where I live, after passing through the trendier Condesa on the way. The streets in Condesa were unusually quiet and the restaurants had a lot of empty tables. We went to two major emergency rooms in Del Valle – the IMSS on Gabriel Mancera, and the ISSTE hospital called “20 de Noviembre.” Both of them had people their awaiting attention, but nothing like the lines AP was reporting yesterday.

We got a number of taxis during the day, none of the drivers of which reported seeing anything out of the ordinary other than the eerie quiet I mentioned earlier. The theory of one of our drivers was that Mexico’s working classes pay such little attention to health scares and government-issued orders that it is only the dramatic kind of measures being taken by the Government now that spur them into action and taking precautions. 

Not only have schools been closed and soccer matches been cancelled, but President Felipe Calderon signed this directive which gives the Government the freedom to implement any measure it sees necessary to prevent, control and combat the virus, and that includes entering private houses and businesses.  

The government reaction has definitely caught people’s attention. Let’s just hope that such severe measures prove themselves necessary over the coming days.

Check my mate Daniel Hernandez at his blog Intersections for more on Mexico City today…..

Image: Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor. ”There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert,” she said. ”But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people.” Deborah Bonello for the Los Angeles Times and MexicoReporter.com.

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.