As many as seven million Mexicans will make the pilgrimage to Mexico City’s Basilica de Guadalupe this year to pay their respects to the Virgin de Guadalupe, one of Mexico’s most revered holy figures. Pilgrims come from all over Mexico to arrive here around the dates of December 11th and 12th to give their thanks. Filmed for AFP by Deborah Bonello.

November 2 2011 – Day of the Dead in Mexico is usually a time for celebrating and remembering lost loved ones. But in the context of a brutal drug war that has cost 40,000 lives, the commemoration of the dead has taken on a more sombre tone this year.

Below, other video edits from the Day of the Dead celebrations around Mexico City this year.

Danzon, a slow-moving, elegant swing, is popular with Mexico’s older generation. But now, younger people have begun stepping out on onto the the plazas that serve as dance floors, moving alongside their elders to its free-flowing style.

By Deborah Bonello (AFP) – 1 day ago

JALAPA, Guatemala — They call it the “green hunger.” Here in the mountains of central Guatemala, one of the world’s top exporters of sugar and bananas, vegetation is everywhere and yet the people are starving.

Guatemala, which has a population of 14 million, has the highest rate of child malnutrition in Latin America. Half of all children under five are malnourished.

In rural areas such as Jalapa, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) or a three-hour drive from Guatemala City, where many families scrape by on less than a dollar a day, that figure can rise shockingly to as high as 90 percent.

Luis Alexander is nine months old and suffers from acute malnutrition. He appears weak and tiny in his mother’s arms in front of their mudbrick house.

Ronald Estuardo Navas, a hunger monitor at the international non-profit Action Against Hunger, measures Luis’s arm with a tape that evaluates the nutritional health of a child via the size of the upper arm.

“He has a perimeter of 9.9 centimeters — there’s a high risk he could die,” he said.

His mother, Herlinda Rodriguez, who has two other children to care for, is also undernourished.

“He’s underweight because I don’t have enough breast milk to give him. That’s why he’s so thin,” she said.

Looking around the green and mountainous land surrounding the Rodriguez family’s humble home, it’s hard to understand why they are slowly starving.

Guatemala is the world’s fifth largest exporter of sugar, coffee and bananas, and when subsistence crops fail thousands of families simply cannot afford to buy enough food.

Many families have had to resort to buying their basic staples of corn and beans and rice from local markets because their modest subsistence crops have been seriously reduced by droughts and floods over the last few years — the creeping effect of climate change across this region.

But the purchasing power of the little money these communities have has been battered by both international food price fluctuations and local prices, which have been pumped up by domestic scarcity. Three quarters of the food produced here is exported to the international market.

Willem van Milink Paz, World Food Program Representative Guatemala, says: “What we are seeing in Guatemala is that the price, the local price of food, is even higher proportionally than what we’ve seen at international levels.”

That has hit families hard.

Benjamin Lopez Ramirez, a subsistence farmer in Jalapa, says: “The truth is that there is no work here, or the chance to have a salary, the fact that (maize) is so expensive makes it very difficult for us.”

More than 6,500 people died from hunger related issues last year, 2,175 of whom were under five years, according to Luis Enrique Monterroso, who oversees the right to food at the Guatemala Human Rights Office.

Although there are schemes and money to help, he says, there’s a lack of political will.

“The state doesn’t exist for the most vulnerable families in this country.”

Malnutrition doesn’t stunt just physical, but also mental, development in children, which does not bode well for Guatemala’s future economic development.

Guatemala’s income from taxes is one of the lowest in the region at just 10 percent, and although the private sector could play a bigger role in reducing the levels of malnutrition and poverty in the country, the key factor is state involvement.

Van Milink Paz said: “To be clear and honest about this, there is not going to be a real solution to the problem if the government of Guatemala doesn’t take a major part in the solution.

“The problem is too big for anybody — you know private companies or even a UN agency like the World Food Program or other NGOs working in this area to solve. We are only really nibbling at this problem and not really solving it.”

There have long been programs purportedly aimed at targeting child hunger.

The latest, overseen by outgoing President Alvaro Colom, is called “My Family Progresses,” and is a conditional cash transfer scheme that gives poor mothers a stipend provided their children go to school and get regular health checkups.

But the program has been mired in criticism, and accused of a lack of transparency. Monterroso says this scheme and others like it are more directed at winning political popularity than producing real social change.

Billy Estrada, sub secretary of food security for the Guatemala government, said the problem is not a lack of schemes, but a lack of consistency.

“What I think is lacking, and will be lacking, in this government and those that will be, are continuous policies that can extend their mandate.

“It wouldn’t matter if the political parties alternated if there was a continuation of activities started by one government and worth the effort continuing.”

Unless the state can find the political will to implement schemes effectively to tackle the structural causes of malnutrition, children like Luis Alexander will continue to suffer.

If you can’t see the above video due to geographical restrictions, please watch it here on the AFP YouTube channel.

* This post was editing at 9:46am Mexico City time on August 10 2011. The text version of the story was added.

Bono, lead singer of U2, took a moment during a concert the band played in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca on Sunday to send a message north across the border. The singer – famous for his political and social activism – asked the band’s Mexico fans to “send a message of love across the border to the good and great people of the United States of America.”

“I want you to send a message to people of conscience. And ask them to answer the question: why is it that all we hear on the news is how drugs are smuggled through Mexico to the United States and we don’t hear about all the automatic weapons that are being smuggled into Mexico from the United States. 9,00 registered arms dealers on the United States, on the other side of the border – 9,000. Most of the murder committed here are from weapons sold in the United States of America. Sing this – we sing this for the innocents who have lost their lives in the violence here.”

There has been some serious media attention given to the arms issue, as the recent Fast and Furious scandal showed. All the same, one hopes someone in the United States is listening.

 
Gun flow south is a crisis for two nations

May 16th 2011 – Lady Gaga’s “Monster Ball” tour finale in Mexico City inspired devoted fans to dress up and share their enthusiasm. I worked with photographer Yvonne Venegas, who created this series of photographic portraits, of the two dates Lady Gaga played in May.

You can see the video here on Time’s website.

Videographer: Deborah Bonello
Assistant: Ulises Escamilla Haro

Every now and again, a story finds you. For me, one of the most moving stories that found me during my time in Mexico was that about people from Central American who cross Mexico on their way to the United States as undocumented migrants. It was something I reported on frequently, and when Marc Silver, a British filmmaker, came to Mexico City looking to make a series of films about the issue for Amnesty International, I was thrilled he planned to focus on the issue.

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 tone of these videos is not journalistic – Silver and Bernal have a very strong point to make on behalf of Amnesty International. They tell the stories of this group of people excellently. As media budgets diminish, we’re likely to see a lot more of this sort of work fill the information space left.

On how he and Bernal were received when they were making the film, Silver said:

“We were received very warmly. It is not often anybody asks their opinion or story, so people were very keen to share their experiences with us. It seemed to be a very empowering experience for people to talk about the horrors of the journey because it’s almost like these are taboo topics that no-one wants to discuss at home because they don’t want to scare their families, particularly their mothers.”

The films were shot mainly on DSLR using the Canon EOS 7d with a Canon EF 50 mm F1.2L USM lens, and a Canon EF 14 mm F2.8L II USM lens.

Click on the video to see the first of the four films, and that link will also take you to the rest of the series.

Also, do check out another film in the making from Marc called “Who Is Dayani Cristal?”, which is about the quest to identify an anonymous body found in the Arizona desert whose only identifying feature is a tattoo reading ‘Dayani Cristal’. Part drama, part documentary, the film again features Gael García Bernal. See the trailer here.

“Arturo has captured with his camera shocking images which document the massacres, attacks, disappearances and car bombs which have left thousands of victims in a city which has become the battle ground for criminal gangs”, says Manuel Carrillo, Senior Producer at Reuters Television in Mexico, who nominated Arturo for the Prize.

“Despite threats and intimidation from these gangs and even from the security forces, Arturo has remained strong and unfailing in his coverage – mindful of the fact that in Mexico, other journalists have been killed just for fulfilling their duty to keep society informed”.

The recognition of Arturo is a nod to all of the journalists who work up on the Mexican border, covering the violent flashpoints of the ongoing conflicts between Mexico’s drug cartels and government. Violence against journalists in Mexico was a theme that I found difficult to escape on MexicoReporter.com, from when I arrived in 2007. Things have only grown worse since then.

It remains incredible to me that many of the local journalists and fixers who foreign correspondents often work with up on the border manage to get up and go to work every morning in a climate as violent, insecure and explosive as the one they live in. Respect to them.

You can see Arturo talking about life on the job in Ciudad Juarez below.