It’s bad. With schools closed, as well as cinemas, theaters and museums, sales for some vendors have dropped by as much as 70%. And it doesn’t look like things are going to get better anytime soon. The usual Monday morning traffic crawl was nowhere to be seen this morning, and I arrived at my office door to door in less than 20 minutes.

About half the people walking around on the streets are using masks, around half are risking it.

For a roundup of the Government reaction to the crisis, you can listen to this BBC Wales morning radio show, who got in touch to ask me about what the situation. You can listen to the program here, my interview is about 10 minutes in.

Dispatch to come.

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.

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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.

Jonathan Mirando García, age 7. Disappeared in the Tlapan neighborhood of Mexico City on Nov. 22, 2006. Distinguishing features: a mole on his nose.

Saul Hernandez Ramírez, 10 months old and 55 centimeters in size. Disappeared in Naucalpan, Mexico City, on an unknown date.

América Martínez Enriquez, 1 month old. Disappeared from Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas, on June 23, 2003.

The list of missing children in Mexico, crushingly, goes on for a lot longer. About 45,000 children are reported missing in Mexico every year, according to Aprenem (Asociación Pro Recuperación de Niños Extraviados y Orientación de la Juventud de México), an organization dedicated to trying to find them.

It was that staggering fact as well as the huge number of posters and ads for missing children around Mexico City that prompted Mexican artist Ilán Lieberman, 39, to create “Niño Perdido” (Lost Child). The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a book of the same name later this year, opened Tuesday in the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico in downtown Mexico City and is scheduled to travel to El Paso, Texas, in June.

Lieberman spent more than three years working on 100 drawings that are intricate copies of often bad-quality newspaper photographs of missing children, taken from the Mexican newspaper Metro. Using a pencil and a microscope, he labored over each postage stamp-sized portrait for two weeks –- almost as though he was paying personal homage to each boy and girl.

The result is a show of tiny drawings framed and hung in the upstairs gallery of the museum, and on Tuesday the exhibition’s first visitors inspected the detailed images with magnifying glasses provided as part of the work.

“What these images represent is a social reality in Mexican society,” Lieberman said.

The exhibition also features the newspapers from which Lieberman cut out many of the images that he so painstakingly copied. Often, ads for the missing children with basic information such as their age and where they disappeared were published alongside lists of recovered stolen
cars, or on the other side of a news page carrying bloody, attention-grabbing stories.

“That says everything there is to say about the issue,” Lieberman said. “A lack of information and a lack of care.

“The sensation that I got from those images was sad … that they seemed so forgotten.”

The show brings out the profundity of those tiny images — how the loss of something so precious is represented in such a poor way. It also reflects a very sad reality and one that, according to Aprenem, the Mexican government does little to change.

But Lieberman insists that the show is not a direct attempt to change government action on the issue, but to prompt society as a whole to reflect more on Mexico’s disappeared children.

“It’s not criticism specifically against the Mexican government, because it’s a problem within Mexican society -– it shows a lack of care on the part of our society as a whole and our social fabric.”

Lieberman also stressed that the project has an artistic angle, examining the concept of reproduction versus originals.

Past works by the artist have seen him labeled the “human photocopier” by reviewers. The 2005 New York show “Desperdicios,” or “Waste,” featured hand-drawn replicas of objects such as a yellow Post-it notes with a telephone
number scribbled across it, a restaurant customer’s bill, and a folded phone message slip.

“Niño Perdido” will be showing in the Museo de la Ciudad de México until May 10. After that, the exhibition will travel north to El Paso, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and neighboring Ciudad Juarez -– one of Mexico’s most violent urban centers. Not only is the city currently in the grip of extreme drug violence, but it has a long history of women being slain or disappearing.

Given the theme of the exhibition, Lieberman said, a showing next to Juarez made a lot of sense.

– Written for La Plaza

Top photo: The drawings in Ilán Lieberman’s “Niño Perdido” (Lost Child) exhibition in Mexico City are
best appreciated with a magnifying glass. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

Middle photo: Lieberman’s drawing of Rosario Pérez Monzalvo, age 1. Height 70 centimeters. Slim build. Brown
hair. Big, dark brown eyes. Distinguishing features include a rash on her legs. Disappeared from Ixtapaluca in the state of Mexico. Credit: Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico

Bottom photo: Museum visitors view the “Niño Perdido” (Lost Child) exhibition in Mexico City. Credit: Deborah
Bonello / Los Angeles Times

See more pictures from the exhibition here on Flickr.

The giant ice rink in Mexico City’s Zocalo is back this year –- all 9,843 square feet of it. Inaugurated at the end of November, the rink is part of Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard’s “Invierno en la Capital” (Winter in the Capital) initiative.

Clearly, Ebrard was not put off by criticism he received last year about the project, which he says provides winter entertainment for low-income families. Detractors said that the ice rink -– which is free of charge — was a waste of public funds in a country where so many people live below the poverty line.

The Christmas-themed Zocalo project is more ambitious this year than it was in December 2007, with the addition of artificial snow for tobogganing and building snowmen. A 164-foot-high Christmas tree dominates part of the square, and a spokesman for the city government said officials expect 6 million people to make use of the facilities this year, compared to 4 million last year.

Three-year-old Ismael Arenas Sosa and his father, Edmundo, a 31-year-old chef, enjoyed the artificially produced snow in the Zocalo last week. And it appears Ebrard and his team have devised a rather ingenious way of limiting the wait time for children eager to build their first snowman. Watch the video for more.

Readers can watch our video on the ice rink from December 2007 here.

This post was created for La Plaza.

Photo: Snowmen made the Mexican way in the city’s Zocalo. Artificial snow is being produced as part of Mexico City’s Christmas celebrations in the giant plaza. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times. See more photos here on Flickr.