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AFP: Mexican army moves into Veracruz

MexicoReporter — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:54:02 +0000

October 14 2011- The Mexican government has launched a military crackdown in the state of Veracruz following more than 80 killings in the tourist port in the last few weeks. Despite the military’s poor human rights record, local residents say they will seek safety where they can find it.

You can also see the dispatch here on AFP’s YouTube channel in English and in Spanish.

AFP: Cross-border protest asks US to stop funding Mexico’s drug war

MexicoReporter — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:46:42 +0000

Mexico’s march for peace, led by Catholic poet Javier Sicilia, crossed over from Ciudad Juarez – the violent epicenter of the country’s drug war – into El Paso, Texas Saturday.

They were joined by hundreds of Americans in their demands for a change in strategy from both the Mexican and US governments.

This video was created for AFP.

Mexican day laborers are ‘Los Bastardos’ in fictional work

MexicoReporter — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:15:32 +0000

At first glance, “Los Bastardos” seems a surprising film for a Mexican director to make.

The second movie from Amat Escalante, 30, is a disturbing fictional tale about 24 hours in the lives of two undocumented Mexican day laborers in Los Angeles.

The documentary style of Escalante’s storytelling, which uses two non-actors in the main roles, lulls the viewer into a false sense of complacency that comes to a traumatic and sudden end. The long, lingering shots, taken by a stationary camera, are reminiscent of films such as “Luz Silenciosa / Silent Light” by hot Mexican film talent Carlos Reygadas, who was an associate producer on “Los Bastardos” and also provided Escalante with what he calls “moral support.”

Given the debate raging in the United States over the rights of undocumented migrants, “Los Bastardos” could be accused of playing into the hands of the anti-immigration lobby.

After a day’s hard (illegal) labor, the lead characters Jesús and Fausto break into the house of a white, middle-class woman. OK, she’s too high on crack to really care that much. But why would Escalante _ the son of an American woman and a Mexican man who illegally crossed the border into the U.S. before Escalante was born _ want to portray his undocumented paisanos as violent delinquents?

Escalante said his intention was to provoke thought, not to strengthen stereotypes. The film will be seen on both sides of the U.S. border with Mexico, and promises to challenge the two audiences.

Although anti-immigration activists may feel vindicated by the criminal nature of Jesús and Fausto, many people in the U.S. could be concerned by the way Americans in the film treat day laborers in California. Likewise, Mexican viewers might empathize with the persecution of their countrymen abroad, but bristle at the portrayal of the undocumented Mexicans as ultimately violent thugs.

“What I wanted … is that both sides could be offended, not just one,” said Escalante, who knew since he started making movies in his early 20s that he was going to one day focus on immigration.

“I didn’t want to make a movie [in which] the Mexicans had to be completely good,” he said in near perfect English during an interview in Mexico City. Escalante lived in the U.S from the age of 11 to 18. He now resides in Guanajuato, Mexico.

That none of the characters is completely good or bad is what makes the film much more cynical and complex than it first seems. The bleak social background against which the events of the film roll out paints a depressing picture of the daily lives of at least two Americans, too. The day laborers’ victim Karen (played by Nina Zavarin, a professional actress) can barely have a conversation with her teenage son, and hits the crack pipe in the evening to block out her everyday existence.

Throughout the film the viewer has a mounting sense of dread as they observe the abuse Jesús and Fausto endure from U.S. citizens. But whether their crime is a vengeful act, or one for which they’re being paid by a third party (as Karen suspects, at least from her drug-addled perspective) isn’t really the point. Perhaps the point is that everyone in the movie is a victim in some way.

“The movie is about something that stops working, and collapses, for me. I have the theory that when things are not just, or not equal, or not the way they should be naturally, they will explode and some bad things are going to happen. In the movie this is what I wanted to show,” said Escalante.

He does so very graphically, with a feature film that deserves the recognition it has received from a number of festivals including the Morelia International Film Festival (best feature film) and Cannes (Un certain regard).

Whether you love it or hate it, “Los Bastardos” promises to leave an impression that’s hard to shake.

“Los Bastardos” opened in Mexico cinemas last Friday, and is available on DVD in the United States.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times

Video by Deborah Bonello. All non-interview material courtesy of Mantarraya Productions. With thanks for the Red Tree House for hosting the filming of the interview.

“Tracing Aleida” director on making the film and Mexico’s “dirty war”

MexicoReporter — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:13:52 +0000

We mentioned the documentary “Tracing Aleida” back in May, which follows a woman’s search for her brother, from whom she was separated during Mexico’s “dirty war”.

Since then, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Christiane Burkhard, who filmed and directed the documentary, in her Mexico City home. The interview was for the Los Angeles Times, the edited version of which you can see here.

Below is a longer version of the interview with more insights from Burkhard.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Journalists reporting, and surviving, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

MexicoReporter — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:09:10 +0000

Mike O’Connor, head of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists here in Mexico, filed the following report about journalists working in the northern border town of Ciudad Juarez (see a dispatch from Mexico correspondent Ken Ellingwood from December last year on the violence gripping the city).

“For the press, Ciudad Juárez is among the most dangerous cities in one of the deadliest countries in the world. CPJ research shows that 27 journalists have been killed in Mexico

since 2000, at least 10 in direct reprisal for their work, and that seven more have disappeared. In November, veteran police reporter Armando Rodríguez was shot dead in front of his home in Ciudad Juárez. State investigators told CPJ they have identified drug cartel members as suspects in the killing, but federal authorities in charge of the case have not acted on the information. The federal attorney general’s office declined comment on the status of its probe,” writes O’Connor in the report, published here on the CPJ website.

Listen to the audio report below, or click on the link above to read the full document.

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

BorderReporter: God’s Gonna Cut You Down

MexicoReporter — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:04:23 +0000

MexicoReporter.com is going to be occasionally crossposting stories from BorderReporter.com, which is run by Michel Marizco. We’ll sometimes be collaborating with him to bring you stories from the border. Check out his site, which focuses on organized crime and immigration stories on the border.

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….

First Stop in the New World: the Reality of Crime

MexicoReporter — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:40:41 +0000

This week MexicoReporter.com is publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World,” which has just come out in paperback. The book is divided between long chapters that deal with topics of great importance in Mexico City (crime, inequality, food, sex and even shopping), and shorter chapters that provide vignettes on certain sectors of the city.

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

Jacobo

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.

Military’s drug museum shows narco tactics

MexicoReporter — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:55:58 +0000

Mexico’s “Museum of Drugs,” buried up on the seventh floor of the Defence Ministry, isn’t open to the public. The installation was designed as an educational tool for military personnel who have been tasked with fighting Mexico’s narco-trafficantes and organized crime networks. It explains the methods that drug traffickers use to get their product around and out of the country, as well as the strategies that the army employs to try and stop them.

This video was made by Deborah Bonello to go with this Los Angeles Times report.

Media non-profit appeals for asylum for journalists escaping Mexico

MexicoReporter — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:58:49 +0000

Reporters Without Borders issued an appeal to the international community today to provide asylum for journalists fleeing Mexican cities such a Ciudad Juarez. The non-profit appealed especially to the United States and Canada to provide humanitarian assistance.

Journalists in Mexico who cover organized crime are often risking their lives. The move from the global press-protection network comes in the wake the murder of Armando Rodriguez, crime reporter on El Diario, who was shot dead in Ciudad Juarez last week, and the problems some journalists are experiencing in attempting to escape Mexico.

Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a fellow reporter of Rodriguez at El Diario, fled to the United States in June because he was getting death threats, reports Reporters Without Borders. But the non-profit claims that Gutiérrez Soto has been detained in the Texan border town of El Paso since June after entering the United States “in an unauthorized manner – while his asylum request is considered”.

“Gutiérrez has remained in detention despite a recent reminder by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees about the obligation to provide asylum. He could remain there
for several more months as a hearing scheduled for today has been postponed until March.“

Gutiérrez Soto is not the only journalist to have fled Mexico. As we reported yesterday, Jorge Luis Aguirre, director of the news website La Polaka, fled Mexico yesterday with his family to the United States after receiving death threats in his home city of Ciudad Juárez.

Luís Horacio Najera, a correspondent for the national daily Reforma, is currently in Canada, and the managing editor of Reforma, Alejandro Junco de la Vega, went to the United States several months ago for what he said were safety reasons.

Reporters Without Borders said:

“Claudio Tiznado, a reporter with Géneros, a newspaper based in Hermosillo, in the northwestern state of Sonora, requested asylum in Tucson, Arizona, in May 2007 but was unsuccessful and returned to Mexico a few months later.

“Misael Habana had a similar experience. Habana used to co-produce a news programme on the privately-owned national TV station Televisa with Amado Ramírez, who was murdered in Acapulco, in the southwestern state of Guerrero, on 6 April 2007. He requested asylum in Canada but gave up after seeing it was going to take a very long time.”

Mexico’s Military Marches as Citizens React to Bombings

MexicoReporter — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:13 +0000

Two explosions during Mexican Independence Day celebrations in the western state of Michoacan killed eight people Monday night and injured dozens more, we reported yesterday.

I spent the day down on Reforma where, as Mexico’s military marched, people reacted to the bombings.