The first was this column in the Guardian by George Monbiot, who came back to an issue we touched on here on MexicoReporter.com some time ago about the ‘ethics’ of using illegal drugs. Having lived in London for years, of course I knew free trade shoppers who worried about where their coffee came from but enjoyed a few lines of coke or spliffs at the weekend without thinking about where THAT was grown and harvested and what the aftereffects might have been.

Hell, for a few brief months in my mid-twenties, I was one of them.

I believe that informed adults should be allowed to inflict whatever suffering they wish – on themselves. But we are not entitled to harm other people. I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites, he writes.

Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes. Children are blown up by landmines; indigenous people are enslaved; villagers are tortured and killed; rainforests are razed. You’d cause less human suffering if instead of discreetly retiring to the toilet at a media drinks party, you went into the street and mugged someone. But the counter-cultural association appears to insulate people from ethical questions. If commissioning murder, torture, slavery, civil war, corruption and deforestation is not a crime, what is?

In a world in which the production of everything from clothes to coffee has become globalized and is outsourced to every corner of the globe, why should cocaine be any different? Although the problem of the illegal drug trade is a huge one, it is based on the principals of demand and supply.

Which is why President Felipe Calderon’s war against the illegal drug traffickers here in Mexico – which has killed nearly 10,000 people since January 2007 – is so baffling, something that Monbiot doesn’t mention in his column, which only makes a reference to Colombia.

Whilst Calderon has deployed the nation’s army across the country to fight the organized crime networks and drug traffickers, he is doing very little to create job opportunities and tackle the rising levels of drug addiction in his country (see the video below), never mind the demand for narcotics coming from Mexico’s northern neighbour, which he is incapable of affecting. It would seem to be obvious to everyone but Calderon and his administration that this is not a battle that can be won through brute force alone.

Another article that really caught my eye was this one by – full disclosure – the newspaper that I spend the lion’s share of my time working for here in Mexico City, the Los Angeles Times; “Drug war on another border: Canada”, about drug-related violence in Canada.

Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for cocaine north of the U.S. border.

The report demonstrates how the drug war in one country squeezes the prices in another, as do policies affecting production of practically any product around the world.

Just because a product is taboo in society as well as illegal, why should it be excluded from the same considerations we apply when we’re buying anything else? It’s illegality is what makes the product so valuable, but its manufacturing process and consumption so difficult to monitor and, crucially, regulate. And as along as people living in the United States and other developed countries continue to demand and buy cocaine, drug related violence in the world’s poorer countries promises to continue.

I guess someone just needs to figure out a way to stop people wanting to get high.

Mexico City’s Museo de la Ciudad is playing host to a photojournalism exhibition — Expofotoperiodismo — that features nearly 50 photos from 2008. You can see some of the images featured in the show in the above slide show.

All images appear courtesy of the Museum de la Ciudad, and the show runs until April 19th.

– Written for La Plaza

Since 2000, 45 journalists have been killed in Mexico, according to the latest missive on the issue from the human rights body. Those who cover organized crime are especially at risk.

The appeal from the CNDH follows the recent murders of Miguel Ángel Villagómez Valle, editor of the newspaper La Noticia, in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán state; David García Monroy, columnist from El Diario, Chihuahua; and José Armando Rodríguez Carreón, from El Diario in Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua.

The largest number of killings of journalists has been in Tamaulipas, where nine cases were recorded since 2000. Six journalists were slain in Chihuahua, and four in each of the following states: Veracruz, Oaxaca and Michoacán.

The CNDH also refers to the recent attack on the offices of the Culiacán newspaper El Debate earlier this month, which it said was an attack on the fundamental rights of the newspaper’s workers. Two grenades were thrown at the offices in the early hours of the morning of Nov. 17. No one was hurt.

Towards the end of last week, the global non-profit Reporters Without Borders issued a statement appealing to the international community, and especially the United States and Canada, to grant asylum to journalists fleeing Mexico.

Violence against journalists in Mexico has become increasingly intense over the last few years. In 2007, Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report that the country in 2006 was second only to Iraq in dangers for journalists.

Today, the CNDH said that it “deplores…the lack of results from investigations to identify and apprehend those responsible.”

This post was written for La Plaza.

His departure follows the killing of crime reporter Armando Rodríguez last week, who was shot to death on Thursday November 13th when he was in his car.

Aguirre told the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), a non-profit based in Mexico City, that when he was on the way to reporter Armando Rodríguez Carreón’s funeral last week he received a call on his cell phone.

“They told me, ‘You’re next,’ and because of the way things are, I decided to take my family and leave,” said Aguirre.

“I left everything: my house, my office. I left my car in a public parking lot. I was very scared. I didn’t ask the authorities for help, I don’t trust them.”

BorderReporter.com did some digging around about what was going on just before Armando Rodríguez was killing last week.

I’ve ascertained a few details from Juárez, some chismes that a few birds sang last night.

On October 29, Rodriguez, a cops reporter for El Diario, had co-written a story about the murder of a nephew of Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez. The story in its entirety is at the end of this posting in case it’s removed from the Diario site. He pretty much knocked that one out of the ballpark.

The nephew, Andrés Sanchez Pineda was murdered along with two other men. Forty-three AK-47 rounds were found at the scene.

In the story, Rodriguez and the other reporter noted that the nephew, Andrés Sanchez Pineda had been arrested in El Paso, Texas, three years before for trafficking more than 350 pounds of weed. He pleaded guilty, admitting that he was supposed to haul the weed in a tractor-trailer to Tennessee. Carry on reading here…

When he was murdered in late October, he’d been driving a Dodge Ram truck that belonged to the State of Chihuahua. Sanchez was not a government employee.

“La Polaka” is an online political newspaper that frequently, according to CEPET, publishes critical reports. It covers information from the state capital of Chihuahua City, Ciudad Juárez, and El Paso, Texas.

The persecution of journalists here in Mexico is common. Just this weekend, two grenades were thrown at the offices of the Culiacán newspaper El Debate. The explosions, which shattered windows but caused no injuries. Click here for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

The area has been cordoned off by the Army.

El Debate is the largest newspaper in Sinaloa and “fairly aggressive in its organized crime coverage”, according to BorderReporter.com. As Tracy Wilkinson reported earlier this year, the city of Culiacán is the birthplace of Mexico’s multi-million dollar drug trade and home to some of the major players in Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

El Debate is not the first newspaper to be targeted with grenades in Mexico, where attacks against journalists and the media – especially those who cover organized crime – are depressingly frequent. More than 30 reporters have died or disappeared in Mexico since 2000, the group Reporters Without Borders says.

In May last year, Cambio in the Northern State of Sonora closed its doors after two grenade attacks and what its editor said was a failure on the part of the Government to protect its 250 employees. In October 2007, journalists of the Oaxacan newspaper “El Imparcial del Istmo” resigned out of fear for their lives following the killing of three of the newspaper’s employees and repeated threats after the newspaper reported the finding of a grave containing seven corpses.

In February 2006, the offices of El Mañana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo were attacked by men wielding grenades and assault rifles. A reporter was left paralyzed and the paper later announced that it
would cease producing investigative reports on drug trafficking.

Reporters Without Borders says that Mexico is the most deadly country in the Americas for journalists.

This post was written also appeared on La Plaza.

The Los Angeles Times reports the above, adding:

The crash…was a serious blow to President Felipe Calderon at a time when his government is locked in a violent struggle against drug traffickers and faces growing signs of economic trouble related to the global downturn.

But both gossip and common sense do raise the question of the possible involvement of Mexico’s powerful drug trafficking networks in Tuesday’s “accident”. As we saw earlier this year during Morelia’s September 15th Independence Day celebrations, certain factions of Mexico’s drug networks are willing to take out their frustrations not just on Mexico’s politicians but on the public themselves if the ensuing arrests are to be taken at face value.

[Note: The entire matter of the Morelia bombings has gone quiet since those arrests were made and those confessions from Julio César Mondragón Morales, Juan Carlos Castro Galeana and Alfredo Rosas Elisea presented to the public. As MexicoReporter.com noted at the time, the arrests pose as many questions as they provide answers. How do three men throw two grenades? If these guys are soldiers - or the highly trained hit men that Los Zetas are rumoured to be - then why do they look like the average man off the street rather than trained killing machines? Or were they just hired by the Zetas to do their gruesome bidding? And physical bruising visible on some of the suspects suggest that confessions might have been extracted under questionable circumstances.]

The Christian Science Monitor could be right in reporting this morning that the death of Mouriño and José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos is a “colossal setback” to Mexico’s battle against drug traffickers. That’s convenient both to the drug traffickers themselves, and of course elements within the Mexican government who want Calderon to look as though his plan against the drug cartels is failing.

Santiago Vasconcelos was the former deputy chief Federal Prosecutor and a leading advisor to President Felipe Calderon in the drug war. At the time of this death he had resigned after complaints about his ineffectiveness and corruption within the elite, organized crime-fighting agency that he led. During his career, he suffered a number of attempted assassinations.

“The other high-ranking official, Vasconcelos, had dedicated most of his life to fighting organized crime. He survived at least one potential assassination attempt this winter, when five hit men allegedly out to kill him were arrested. He headed the organized-crime division for the Mexican attorney general until August.

“US Ambassador Antonio Garza said the two men were models in the fight against organized crime” (Christian Science Monitor).

The Presidential office released a statement saying that the plane’s black box has been sent to the Unites States for analysis and that results can be expected within a week. The press noted the involved of both British and United States authorities in the investigation, no doubt intended to give it more credibility and transparency than an official Mexican investigation alone would carry.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post notes the loss of Miguel Monterrubio, Mouriño’s press spokesman.

“Monterrubio … introduced journalists to marvels of Mexican culture, such as the Day of the Dead, a holiday that features hot chocolate, sweet buns and offerings of brandy and cigars to the departed. He also hosted tours of the Mexican Cultural Center on 16th Street to showcase murals of fabled painter Diego Rivera, husband of artist Frida Kahlo” (Washington Post).

According to a statement from Asst. Atty. Gen. Maricela Morales Ibañez, the suspects were arrested in the town of Apatzingan, Michoacan, after an anonymous tip.

Authorities said Julio César Mondragón Morales, Juan Carlos Castro Galeana and Alfredo Rosas Elisea had confessed to having detonated the grenades during Independence Day festivities on Sept. 15. Officials identified the men as members of a brutal drug gang known as the Zetas.

El Universal, reporting from the press conference where the statement was made, said one of the detainees, Rosas Elisea, appeared to have been beaten.

Tracy Wikinson filed this report for the LATimes this morning:

Slumped at an interrogation table, a gang member accused of participating in an attack that killed eight people at an Independence Day celebration described calmly how he was eager to get rid of the grenade he tossed into a crowded plaza.

“I was hiding it in my hands and it made me shudder,” Juan Carlos Castro Galeana told his interrogator. “I was desperate to get rid of it.”

Castro added that he thought the attack, which he said he was ordered to carry out, was meant to “provoke” the government. He appears in a video posted Saturday on the website of El Universal newspaper. The video was obtained from the attorney general’s office, the newspaper said.

The arrests pose as many questions as they provide answers. How do three men throw two grenades? If these guys are soldiers – or the highly trained hit men that Los Zetas are rumoured to be – then why do they look like the average man off the street rather than trained killing machines? Or were they just hired by the Zetas to do their gruesome bidding? And physical bruising visible on some of the suspects suggest that confessions might have been extracted under questionable circumstances.

Gael Garcia Bernal, the Mexican actor and heart throb, has responded to the bombings in the Mexican state of Michoacan last week with a column for the newspaper El Universal.

The article, written from Europe in complicated Spanish, is a poetic tribute to the eight people who died in last week’s bombings in Morelia, and a lamentation of the state of affairs in Mexico. Garcia Bernal’s father was born in Michoacan.

“It hurts me not to be close. To be so far – now more than ever. Instead of feeling relieved for being so far, I feel sad and vulnerable,” writes Bernal.

“Why, when I see so much violence, do I feel like the aggression was against my memories, and my identity? Each death robs me of my freedom to remember, an attempt against the future… ”

Garcia Bernal, the star of films including “The Motorcycle Diaries” and “Amores Perros”, revisits his childhood memories and remembers breakfast into the local markets and the smell of tamales – a traditional corncake.

But this morning, another national newspaper, Milenio, published a criticism of Bernal’s piece, lambasting him for having written something in such complicated language using words that “three dictionaries and two encyclopedias” were needed to decipher.

Jairo Calixto’s column treats the actor’s reaction to events in the country in sarcastic tones, and mocks his level of understanding of Mexico’s problems:

“Relax, Gael. Insead of asking, from a very nice place, ‘Why, when I see so much violence, do I feel like the aggression was against my memories, and my identity?,’ we should celebrate the fact that Mexico, for the third year running, has maintained its position as the 72nd most corrupt country in the world.

“You say, Gael, that it hurts you to be far away. Don’t you worry – they also say that to be far away is to forget.”

This post was written for La Plaza.

Image: Tom Wagner / For The Times

It’s been a few days since I returned from the bomb site in Morelia, Michoacán. I visited there on Wednesday; two days after a double-grenade attack in the city’s centre during its Independence Day celebrations killed eight people. The death toll rose from 7 to 8 at the weekend when a 13-year-old boy died from him injuries.

During that trip, my colleague and I visited both sites where the grenades detonated. One went off in the city’s central plaza – the other a few blocks away on a street corner.

Since then, I’ve had some time to reflect on the question everyone is asking: who is responsible for those bombs? And perhaps more importantly, I’ve had time to speak to ordinary Mexicans about their thoughts on what it going on.

I’ve always felt, during my time here in Mexico that because I was a foreigner there was always a fog hanging over the world of politics and public life. That maybe there are subtleties that I just don’t get because Spanish isn’t my first language.

But what I’ve found this week is that the fog is there for everyone – Mexican or not. Not many people have much of a clue of what’s going on in this country, and are reduced to speculating or drawing up their own hypothesis based on their own, limited, personal experiences to provide answers.

The possible culprits over dinner or drinks over the last week have ranged from the obvious to the ridiculous, and included President Calderon and his party the PAN, various factions of drug cartels, and the PRI – looking to destabilize an already fragile democracy.

Meanwhile, while speculation runs wild, the theatre that is Mexican public life goes on.

The head of public security in Michoacan – Mario Bautista Ramírez – said that Morelia’s police arrested and then let go three suspects on the night of bombing. And ten police officers who were meant to be patrolling the investigations in plain clothes apparently never turned up for work.

Before the weekend, authorities cleared a different three men who had been arrested in connection with the bombing in the northern state of Zacatecas. La Familia in Morelia – a drug gang based in the state of Michoacan – were the most obvious suspects following last week’s attacks but managed to get past security and put up signs across the city denying responsibility for the explosions. Instead, they passed the blame onto the Zetas – a paramilitary gang that’s the hired muscle of the Mexican Gulf Cartel.

The most important thing that occurred to me as I’ve perused other media’s coverage, my own, and the scene itself, is how frighteningly informal the attitude of the authorities is to the crime scene itself.

When we arrived on Wednesday, the main plaza – as you can see from my stills – was uncovered. Officials in white boiler suits were walking all over it, taking pictures. There have also been reports that officials were seen pouring water over their hands to wash themselves in the plaza – and letting the water spill over the floor of what is a crime scene.

Remember I mentioned the corner of the streets Madero and Guzman, where the second grenade went off? That I recalled seeing a pool of dried blood with a lock of hair in it – how will they know where that lock of hair come from now that the crime scene has been open to the elements all week? Did it fall into the blood during the explosion? Did is blow in after the event? Does it a belong to a victim, the perpetrator, or an innocent bystander? Does it mean ANYTHING?

I know nothing about forensics or the science of a crime scene, but I’ve seen enough American police dramas to know that the first thing one does in a crime scene is cover it up to protect it from the elements and to stop any alterations of where things dropped and where and how. On the corner of Madero and Guzman the only measures that seem to have been taken to protect the crime scene was plastic police tape, which marked delineated a limit around where the grenade had gone off. That and an armed soldier, standing guard.

It was all just so informal – how can the authorities be serious about tackling crime when they don’t even seem to know how to treat a crime scene? And a serious one at that. It doesn’t look like they are going to be the ones to discover the answer to the question on everyone’s lips: who threw those grenades? And is it going to happen again?

Image: Officials inspect the central plaza in Morelia, Mexico on Wednesday of last week. The Monday before, seven people were killed and more than a hundred injured by two bombs that went off during the city’s independence day celebrations. An eighth person – a 13-year-old boy – died of injuries sustained by the bombings over the weekend. Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com

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.

Bucio’s wife Gloria Alvarez, 32, was holding their three-month old son Uriel in her arms when the explosion happened. She died from her injuries in a public hospital. The baby somehow escaped unharmed.

Watch Bucio tell his story of that night in the video below.

Meanwhile, Ken Ellingwood reports that three arrests have been made in connection with the two bombs which went of in Morelia on Monday night, killing seven people and injuring more than a hundred.

This video and post were made for La Plaza.