National oil company Pemex struggles as oil production drops. Carola Hoyos reports from Mexico for the Financial Times. Filmed, produced and edited by Deborah Bonello.

Most Mexicans think their lives would be better in the United States, and one in three said they’d move to the U.S. if they could, according to the latest findings on Mexican attitudes from the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

Half of those who said they’d migrate north of the border said they would do so without permission, although recent data on immigration suggests that the flow of Mexicans north is slowing.

President Felipe Calderon’s military-led campaign against the country’s drug lords and organized-crime networks is “overwhelmingly endorsed” by the majority of Mexicans, although large majorities describe crime (81%) and illegal drugs (73%) as very big problems, according to the study.

Calderon’s offensive against organized crime is now in its third year amid rising drug-related violence, but the Pew project reports that most Mexicans believe those anti-crime efforts are effective.

A hefty majority, 66%, say the army is making progress against the traffickers, while only 15% think it is losing ground. Calderon also is well regarded.

The popularity of the tough stance against drug gangs seems to be bolstering support for Calderon. Roughly two-thirds (68%) have a favorable opinion of the president, while only 29% express an unfavorable view.

You can read the report in its entirety on the project’s website or download it.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 1,000 adults in Mexico between May 26 and June 2, 2009, for the Pew report.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Mexico City’s central plaza, or Zocalo. Credit: Deborah Bonello / For The Times

At the end of last month, my partner Ulises and I were lucky enough to hit the road for a week’s break here in Mexico, and headed down to Tulum on the Caribbean.

I was a loooooooong drive that, in retrospect, we won’t do again unless we have more time.

President Felipe Calderon’s military campaign against Mexico’s narcos is much more obvious once you leave the confines of Mexico City.

We drove through a number of states including Tabasco, Veracruz and Campeche and encountered at least 10 military checkpoints along the way, all of which were furnished by signs in both English and Spanish as to their purpose.

“The Mexican Army is carrying out President Felipe Calderon’s campaign against Mexico’s drug traffickers…..,” and they even invited complaints and recommendations from people passing through.

Oh, if only.

Complaints of human rights abuses by the Mexican military have surged since Calderon started this campaign in 2006. So much so that money for the Merida Initiative, the cash injection from the U.S intended to help fund the fight against Mexico’s organized crime industry, could be held off until Mexico cleans up its human rights record.

When a kid with a machine gun in the middle of nowhere (Mexico’s long, straight highways, or carreteras, are pretty isolated) asks for permission to search your car, it never seems like a good idea to say no.

Which brings me to my main point. The soldiers who are on at least part of the frontline of this military campaign are extremely young. The vast majority of the military personnel that we encountered at the checkpoints, standing in the tropical heat, sweating into their combats with machine guns strapped onto their shoulders, were only just out of their teens.

On the way to the Yucatan, heading out of Mexico City to the coast, we weren’t stopped once. Ulises thinks that because I’m a ‘güera’ (a term that refers to light-skinned or light-haired people, although I don’t regard myself as either of those) that they waved us through.

Not so on the way back, disproving that theory. We were stopped four times by different checkpoints. There didn’t seem much point in trying to explain to the 18-year-old searching our trunk the second, third and fourth time that we’d just been searched in the neighboring state.

The logic goes that if we’re on our way back from the coast, or the coastal states, we could well be bringing something back that we picked up via sea.

It was disconcerting to see the age of the soldiers executing Calderon’s stop and search policy. How much experience could they have gained in the field before now? Older soldiers may be as likely to mess up as their younger counterparts, but it’s easy to see how situations might get out of control when those directing them are fresh out of the barracks.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for MexicoReporter.com

Image: On the road in Veracruz. Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com

“Money sent home by Mexicans working abroad fell by 19.9 percent in May, the biggest monthly decline on record as the U.S. recession slashed jobs.

“Remittances dropped to $1.9 billion from $2.4 billion in May 2008, the central bank said on Wednesday. The amount of money sent home in the first five months of 2009 fell 11.3 percent to $9.2 billion compared with the same period last year.

“Remittances are the second-biggest source of foreign currency after oil exports in Mexico, and their decline has contributed to the country’s own economic downturn.”

The recession in the United States and related job cuts, combined with the crack down on illegal immigration
might tempt some migrants living in El Norte to head home. But things are just as bad if not worse in Mexico. Even on a normal day, if there were so many great jobs in Mexico then there wouldn’t be12 million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, where they go looking for better job – el Sueno Americano.

But the recession up north is causing the demand for exports to drop. The U.S buys around 80 per cent of Mexico’s exports, so it’s a serious blow for the country. The knock on effect here? More job cuts. So if there already weren’t enough jobs, now it’s only getting worse for Mexico. Swine flu earlier this year didn’t help, and neither do the steady reports of drug related violence from around the country.

The City Government’s modest program of subsidised soup kitchens and unemployment cheques shouldn’t just be confined to the city. As the informal system of social security that migrants have provided to their families living in Mexico starts to fall away, the pressure on the Government to help out it’s poor and unemployed will only grow.

So far, it’s efforts have largely been limited to the left-leaning city government. So what comes next?

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.

Broadcast live on Ustream, June 24th 2009

Moderator: Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News
Panel:Ed Vulliamy, Guardian and Observer journalist and writer
Alex Tweddle<, director of Juarez City of Dreams
Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch

In fact, if I’m honest, it hasn’t been easy to find those who know people who have died from the new strain of flu or who have relatives suffering from them, which isn’t helped by the fact the the Mexican authorities are refusing to publish a list of the dead.

I did find people affected by the illness of course (hey – come on – I’m a snoop) but, well, given that the swine flu has been labeled a pandemic, there’s no panic in the streets, no riots in the hospitals, and no over-supply of sufferers of their families to speak to.

This afternoon outside the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias (INER), which translates is the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, there were at least as many journalists as there were patients or family of patients.

INER, I’m told,  is Mexico’s major hospital for respiratory diseases. Cameras had been set up on tripods, and TV hosts were waiting around in their suits to do their pieces to camera. I abandoned my hope of making a video piece.

Slightly up the road from camera-land was the emergency room for respiratory diseases, and outside I found Anna Contreras, a 45-year-old housewife, waiting. Her husband Jose Luis Martinez, a 49-year-old driver, has been at the hospital for over and week and had, according to Contreras, been diagnosed with swine flu, or influenza porcina as it is being called here (the name in itself is political).

She said her husband fell ill about a month ago with body aches and a cold.

“We thought it was nothing serious so we took him to private doctors who diagnosed him with having tonsillitis or a sore throat, and a third opinion said that he had the beginnings of bronchitis. But instead of improving with the medication they gave him every time he was worse and worse until around 2 weeks ago I was at the end of my tether.”

Jose Luis, she says, lost 12 kilos inside of three weeks.

“I brought him here [nearly a week ago]and they diagnosed that he had pneumonia due to influenza.”

Does she think he has the never-seen-before swine flu? “Well, he does have it. But I’m calm, in a way, because most of the others who have come here with the same illness and have been here less time have been put on a breathing machine or have died – that hasn’t happened to my husband. He’s stable, he can speak, he hasn’t been put on a breathing machine.”

When I asked her if she knew whether many people were dying in the INER she told me, “Many, many, every day. People are dying here every day.”

– Deborah Bonello, MexicoReporter.com

Waking up this morning, I noticed that the death toll attributed to the outbreak had risen since Friday and that the virus – which has also been detected in the United States - is being called a possible pandemic by the WHO. The streets were very quiet for a Saturday morning and the odd person we passed on the way through town in a taxi was wearing the government-issued blue surgical masks to cover their faces to avoid contagion. But there was no panic, no wrestling in the streets for the last face mask, just a sort of eerie quiet – eerie for Mexico City, which is always a seething mass of traffic and people on a Saturday.

So I was surprised to find that a gallery opening in the posh neighbourhood of San Miguel de Chapultepec, part of the city-wide Zona Maco contemporary art festival, was swarming with people. I at least expected to see fashionable versions of the blue face masks being combined with the latest clothes labels, but it wasn’t so. Of the 500 or so attendees at the event (download the details here), perhaps 10 of them were covering their mouths, and some of those had their masks pulled down around their necks. 

Risking their lives for art? Well, the new Gabriel Orozco work unveiled at the recently-opened contemporary gallery Kurimanzutto was rather smashing. No one I spoke to felt that the risk of contracting a possibly deadly form of flu was as high as the repercussions of missing out on one of the most trendy dates in the Mexico City art diary.

Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor.

“There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert,” she said.

“But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people.”

Then it was on to Del Valle, the middle class neighbourhood where I live, after passing through the trendier Condesa on the way. The streets in Condesa were unusually quiet and the restaurants had a lot of empty tables. We went to two major emergency rooms in Del Valle – the IMSS on Gabriel Mancera, and the ISSTE hospital called “20 de Noviembre.” Both of them had people their awaiting attention, but nothing like the lines AP was reporting yesterday.

We got a number of taxis during the day, none of the drivers of which reported seeing anything out of the ordinary other than the eerie quiet I mentioned earlier. The theory of one of our drivers was that Mexico’s working classes pay such little attention to health scares and government-issued orders that it is only the dramatic kind of measures being taken by the Government now that spur them into action and taking precautions. 

Not only have schools been closed and soccer matches been cancelled, but President Felipe Calderon signed this directive which gives the Government the freedom to implement any measure it sees necessary to prevent, control and combat the virus, and that includes entering private houses and businesses.  

The government reaction has definitely caught people’s attention. Let’s just hope that such severe measures prove themselves necessary over the coming days.

Check my mate Daniel Hernandez at his blog Intersections for more on Mexico City today…..

Image: Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor. ”There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert,” she said. ”But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people.” Deborah Bonello for the Los Angeles Times and MexicoReporter.com.

Dark-blue clad soldiers started cordoning off parts of the posh Polanco neighbourhood as early as Wednesday morning because Obama and his entourage were due to stay in a hotel up the road. On the way to my gym late yesterday afternoon, plain-clothes soldiers were loitering on street corners (their crew cuts and navy-blue caps a dead giveaway) and police trucks were driving slowly through the avenues, confidently holding their guns and scanning around from behind dark sunglasses.

But this morning proved to be much less of a challenge than I’d expected and I made it in ahead of time, albeit using the underground rather than my usual shank’s pony.

I saw on my arrival that Obama had written a column that was published in a number of Latin American newspapers as well as the Miami Herald in expectation of his arrival in Mexico and his approaching attendance at the 5th Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago Friday. See it here in English on the Miami Herald website.

“We can overcome our shared challenges with a sense of common purpose, or we can stay mired in the old debates of the past. For the sake of all our people, we must choose the future. Too often, the United States has not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors. We have been too easily distracted by other priorities and have failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas. My administration is committed to renewing and sustaining a broader partnership between the United States and the hemisphere on behalf of our common prosperity and our common security,” he wrote. Strong stuff.

Every media in Mexico and the United States was on high alert and the Facebook updates started pouring in thick and fast, both from the journalistic community as well as from interested readers out there. The Twitter-sphere was also very active – and I’m not just talking about my twitter feed. Everyone from CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux to Inside Mexico and Mexico Times were busy all day keeping avid onliners up-to-date.

What can anyone could really accomplish in a 24-hour stop in Mexico – even if they are Barack Obama? Arguably, Mexico is the U.S’s most important “foreign” issue right now – although it’s hard to think of Mexico as a country that’s foreign to the U.S when they share a border, citizens and a multitude of economic interests.

The recent problem of drug-related violence in Mexico has added itself to the age old ones of trade and immigration between the two countries, and continue to confound policy-makers and frustrate citizens on both sides of the border. Neither of those two massive issues are going to be sorted out during this trip, especially against the background of the current economic crisis.

Padre Luis Angel Nieto, a catholic priest and immigrant activist, acknowledged that this afternoon when I spoke to him during a demonstration he organized outside of the United States Embassy on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma. I went down there to get some quotes for the report we were putting together on local reaction to Obama’s visit (read the report here, link added April 17th 9:29am local time).

Nieto and Elvira Arellano – a Mexican woman who was deported from the United States in 2007 after taking refuge in a Chicago church for a year – brought a group of ten children, all of them United States citizens, to the U.S Embassy to submit a letter addressed to President Obama asking that he push for comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.

“I know that these things can’t happen quickly,” said Nieto, adding that with all the good intentions in the world from President Obama, the issue of immigration reform was one for Congress, not the President alone.

The group of protesters was small, and there were nearly as many journalists there as there were manifestantes. But the tone of the dialogue was SO different from the anti-American sentiment so common here in some parts of Mexico that was given the conditions to flourish during the Bush administration.

Arellano said: “Personally I know he [President Barack Obama] is a person with a big heart because I met him personally when he was a state senator and we were fighting for the rights to driver’s licenses, and we approached him to thank him because he voted for driving licenses to for undocumented migrants in the state of Illinois.

“He promised that there was going to be migratory reform in his first 100 days as President. Time is coming to an end but we have faith that he is very willing to work with congressmen and senators in favor of a migratory reform.”

Arellano’s 10-year-old young son Saul Hernandez was one of the children present at the protest, and he wore a T-Shirt, the back of which said: “Born in the U.S.A. Don’t take my Mommy or my Daddy away.”

It’s not for me to speculate on what kind of policies are being developed behind closed doors, but its pretty safe to assume nothing’s going to happen overnight before Obama sets off to the Americas Summit. But maybe that’s not the point.

From the small insights that I can offer from Mexico’s capital, his visit does have a strong symbolic value for a lot of people here, who felt part-ignored and part victimized by the U.S administration of George Bush.

Mexico President Felipe Calderon said during the televised welcoming ceremony for Mr Obama:

“We are, we can and we should be friends, partners and allies.

“Mr. President, let’s start a new era of relations between the United States and Mexico, . . . new era in which we work together to make our border an example of productivity and security . . . a new era in which the fight against organized crime is waged completely as a shared responsibility, a battle waged by both Mexicans and Americans and won as allies.”

We can only hope that both he and the U.S President are starting as they mean to continue.

I did plan to sign off there, but wouldn’t you know it? Just as I was about to the cry went up around the office that Obama was about to drive past! So I rushed out with my trusty snapper as soldiers dragged steel railings into position and policeman on both sides of the road started signaling to each other. There were lots of men in suits standing around waiting just like us, joking “Here comes la Bestia!” (That’s the name of Obama’s car, apparently)

And they bloody DID drive by! So I snapped the car I THOUGHT Obama would be in – but he wasn’t. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be anyone in it, but that and around 28 other cars and SUVs with blacked-out windows swept by, escorted by policemen on motorbikes.

Cool.

Please note, this reports only represents the view of the writer, Deborah Bonello, and not that of the Los Angeles Times.

See here for the LATimes daytime dispatch on President Obama’s visit and here for Tracy Wilkinson’s report in anticipation of his arrival.

Image: A sign hung on the fence outside of the U.S Embassy in Mexico City Thursday during a pro-immigration reform demonstration. Credit: Deborah Bonello. Click here for more images on Flickr.

*Edited 9:29am local time April 17th – link added.

The day started with a panel discussion about media coverage of the “drug war” in Mexico. I can’t help but put those two word in commas because, well, it just makes it sound so dramatic. Although it IS dramatic — the violence I mean — it’s not like the whole country is at war. Far from it.

The panel was filled by three representatives from local media, as well as three journalists from Mexico – none of whom spoke great English so a lot of the discussion was lost in translation.

The panel session was rather like a lot of television news – about a mile wide and an inch deep. It was frustrating because it focused so much on the current border violence plaguing the line between Mexico and the United States, without delving any deeper.

As I said pointed out during the discussion, the drug-related border violence between Mexico and the United States is really just the head of the beer – the violence is present in many of the country’s states and failing to report that misrepresents the problem.

Failing to report the U.S’s seemingly insatiable appetite for narcotics — which is the main driver between the illegal trade — is also problematic. One of the speakers described the responsibility of the U.S for the drug violence problems in Mexico as a “school of thought.” I’d say it’s a hard fact, not a theory. People buy fair trade coffee but then roll up a joint or have a few lines of coke at the weekend — chances are they haven’t stopped to think much about where their drugs come from and at what price in the same way that they worry about the origins of their coffee.

There was also a lot of concern over whether the border violence is “spilling over” into the United States. There was a lot of difference of opinion over that issue, and not one that I could apply any of my own experience to being based mainly in Mexico City. What I DO know that the Los Angeles Times (full disclosure:  I spend the majority of my time working for them) has reported drug-related incidents spilling over into the United States here and here.

It’s also been reported by the LATimes that the drug cartels are moving in on the people smuggling business.

The other thing the television reporters during the event in Texas were especially were keen to talk about was what they see as the similarity between Mexico with the Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was a hard one for me to sit still through. Although the drug-related violence around Mexico is widespread and brutal, there are also huge swathes of the country — Mexico City being one of them — where you wouldn’t even know that there was a “war” on between the drug traffickers, as well as between them and law enforcement .

It’s my understanding that the vast majority of the 7,300 or so people that have been killed in drug-related violence since the start of 2007, when Calderon’s offensive began in earnest, are either law enforcement agents, drug traffickers or people involved in some way with the drug trade. Innocent civilians have been caught in the cross-fire, but they’re in the minority.

The media coverage of the drug war shows us how now more than ever, in these times of media accountability and economic hardships, we have to balance information and news provision with a need to entertain and engage audiences.

Everyone wants to report accurately, but they also want good ratings / reading figures / hits. Good reporting takes time and money — the internet means that news rolls now, there ARE no deadlines. Blood and guts gets more viewers / readers. In a time and cash-poor world, its understandable that alot of coverage focuses on the blood and guts of the illegal drug story. Understandable, but is it forgivable?