Some images from today’s ‘March for Peace’ in Mexico City protesting President Felipe Calderon’s ‘war’ again Mexico’s drug cartels and organized crime networks
No Mas Sangre (No More Blood), a social protest group that began life as a cartoon, took to the streets of Mexico City on a recent weekend. They were in protesting what they see as a failed policy – President Felipe Calderon’s campaign against the country’s drug cartels and organized crime. But how representative are they of the Mexican people?
Marc had Gael Garcia Bernal on board as his presenter, and has produced some excellent advocacy work. “Los Invisibles” (the invisibles) series is beautifully produced and shot, giving voice to a community rarely asked it’s opinion.
The killing of documentary maker Christian Poveda represents a sad loss for a region much in need of greater understanding.
At first glance, “Los Bastardos” seems a surprising film for a Mexican director to make.
This is a longer version of an edited interview with the director Christiane Burkhard about her documentary film project, “Tracing Aleida”.
The Committee for the Protection of Journalists reports on journalists working in the northern border town of Ciudad Juarez.
What happened here last week was a sheer massacre.
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 [...]
The blood-soaked drama is about to hit U.S. TV screens, and the first episode of the first series goes out April 23 on Univision.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what the real crucifixion of Christ might have been like if you were anywhere near the populous, working-class neighborhood of Iztapalapa in Mexico City last Friday.
“La Vida Loca” reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary follows some of the members of ”la dieciocho,” the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.
Last week, I was invited to speak at the University of Texas Pan America about MexicoReporter.com, violence against journalists, the drug war coverage and how new technologies are contributing to the journalism beast. So I went.
Peter Gabriel implored President Calderon to show “real political will, muscle and budget” in investigating the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez.
After writing a song for los Tigres Del Norte about the controversial 670-mile fence project along the U.S.-Mexico border, Cristina Rubalcava got to listening to some of the band’s narcocorridos and created a mural that illustrates phrases from them.
Mexico City’s Museo de la Ciudad is playing host to a photojournalism exhibition — Expofotoperiodismo — that features nearly 50 photos from 2008.
Young animal rights activists took to the streets in central Mexico City on Sunday in protest against the hundreds of bullfights that take place here in Mexico.
Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights appealed to authorities over the weekend to investigate thoroughly the recent killings of a number of journalists here, and to put an end to the impunity for those who murder members of the profession.
Reporters Without Borders issued an appeal to the international community today to provide asylum for journalists fleeing Mexican cities such a Ciudad Juarez.
Jorge Luis Aguirre, director of the news website “La Polaka,” has fled Mexico with his family to the United States after receiving death threats in his home city of Ciudad Juárez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Veteran Mexican crime reporter Armando Rodríguez was shot to death yesterday morning while in his car in the border city of Ciudad Juárez.
November 6 2008 – Mexicans don’t have much faith in the word of their government. The natural reaction of many here in Mexico following a plane crash last week that killed Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño has been suspicion.
November 6 2008 – The Mexico Government maintains that there is no sign of foul play surrounding the plane crash on Tuesday night here in Mexico City that killed interior minister Juan Camilo Mouriño.
Two members of the protest movement that activist and videographer Brad Will was covering when he was shot dead more than two years ago have been arrested in connection with his murder.
Lilia Alejandra is one of the 370 women who have disappeared in Mexico’s Chihuahua state since 1993. Her story is the main focus of Bajo Juárez, a documentary film that was five years in the making and opened here in Mexico this weekend.
Today, people of all ages will march in memory of a massacre that took place forty years ago in Mexico City – an event that remains one of the darkest in the country’s recent and bloody history.
Rafael Bucio, a 30 year old car-parking attendant, was out with his wife and two small children in Morelia, Mexico on Monday night enjoying the Independence celebrations when two grenades went off.
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.
A story emerged here in Mexico today surrounding the emergence of a couple of videos which apparently depict the Mexican police, in the city of Leon, being instructed in the art of “torture” by an unidentified, English-speaking foreigner.
The videos are posted below – some viewers might find them offensive.
April is shaping up to be a bad month for journalists in Mexico.
Threats to reporters from government and criminals are making investigative journalism impossible, writes Deborah Bonello
In February this year, the car of Mexican journalist Estrada Zamora was found empty on the side of the road in the southern state of Michoacán with its engine running. Zamora was not inside and has not been seen since.
Click on the link above to read the full article, published today by Index on Censorship.
While traveling home through Pánuco, Veracruz with his 16 year old son in late January this year, Octavio Soto Torres, journalist and director of the Mexican daily Voces de Veracruz, was shot at by four masked gunmen. This was just the latest in the ongoing litany of attacks against journalists in Mexico. Torres, who escaped alive, is known for his harsh criticism of local authorities.
There is a great Leader in this Sunday’s Observer which makes a point I’ve often debated – how cocaine takers in Britain and the US, which provide the demand for the illegal drug industries in Latin America, tend not to think too hard about the impact their weekend drug habits might be having on other people.
If they did, given the trend for ethical shopping that is sweeping the Western World, demand would surely drop.
Mexico remains the deadliest country in the Americas for journalists with two murders in less than a month, and three disappearances, according to today’s annual report from Reporters Without Borders. Three journalists were murdered last year, and three media workers were shot dead.
Those levels are an improvement on 2006, when nine journalists were killed, but 2008 is looking grim if the stats are to be believed. As many journalists were killed last week than in the whole of last year.
The developments in the Lydia Cacho case and her revelations yesterday come in a week when violence against journalists surged again. Last year four reporters were murdered and three disappeared, and 2008 is promising to be as equally violent for members of the profession.
There is something odd about entering a modern, brilliantly choreographed and beautifully presented exhibition created in memory of one of the darkest episodes in a country’s modern history. Odd because the tragedy of Tlatelolco, depicted in such rich and excellently executed multi-media form here at at Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Universitario, has yet to be seriously investigated by the Mexican administration even after nearly forty years, and remains a painful scar for those that survived that terrible night and the families of those that didn’t.
Militants of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) beat and threatened to kill reporter Edi Darinel López Zacarías on 22 January 2008, according to Mexico’s Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET) in San Miguel de Allende.
Following the assault, López Zacarías, who works for “El Orbe”, “Diario de Chiapas” and “Chiapas Hoy” newspapers, as well as for ASICH news agency, had to be taken to hospital where he was treated for a fractured cheekbone and damage to an eye that caused ocular edema.
My folks just flew back last night after a month-long stay in Mexico. Amongst the places they visited, either with me or alone, were Oaxaca, Puebla and Acapulco.
‘I don’t understand it,’ my father kept telling me.
‘I mean you read all this stuff about violence in Mexico, and yet they seem like such a gentle, nice, kind people,’ was his assessment after a couple of weeks living in Distrito Federal, just off Reforma.
Just the ramblings of an average, non-Spanish speaking tourist, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of this words as we walked along the street past a newspaper stand, where on at least three of the front pages I could see gory photographs of deaths by shootings that had happened over the last 24 hours.
Browsing through my feeds this morning, I came across this story on the Los Angeles Times which documents well the experiences many journalists working in Mexico covering the drug trade experience.
Although studies have found that violence against journalists stems as much from Government officials as it does from narco-traffic, Hector’s piece really gives some insight into the reality for many in the profession.
Read the story here:
Although one hates to be a pessimist, the coming year is still looking grim for journalists in Mexico.
Despite the fact that the numbers of murdered journalists declined last year, levels of violence against them are on the rise and the Government is showing no increase in willingness to investigate cases of murder, violence and intimidation against members of the profession.
Univision: Young angels in Juarez battle the city’s demons
AFP: Mexico City struggles with waste disposal
AFP: Activists under fire in Mexico
AFP: Ambulance attacked in Ciudad Juarez
Time: Evidence of Killings and Disappearances by Mexico’s Security Forces
AFP: Mexicans honor drug war victims on Day of the Dead