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?

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

You may recall that last year, I published this video about a group of Honduran mothers who came to Mexico looking for their missing family members and friends.

Since then, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has a carried out it’s own investigation into the problems Central and Latin American migrants encounter when they try to cross or enter Mexico, usually on route to the United States.

The report found 198 cases of migrant kidnappings during that time, with an average of 33 kidnappings a month – that’s more than one a day. During that period, 9,758 migrants were deprived of their liberty. More than 60 percent of kidnappings involved groups of migrants travelling together. The majority of those kidnapped were from Honduras (67 %). 18% of the victims were from El Salvador and 13% from Guatemala.

Who’s doing the kidnapping?

More than 9,000 of the victims were kidnapped by gangs that operate along Mexico’s migrant routes, 35 of them were kidnapped by police, migrant officials or other Mexican authorities, and 56 were taken by a combination of the two working together. In 6 of the cases, migrants were kidnapped by a single kidnapper.

According to the Commission’s research, the various kidnappers asked for a ransom of between US$1,500 to US$5,000 for their hostages, who were often blindfolded, driven to various locations, and in some cases only fed one meal a day, sometimes consisting of little more than bread or stale tortillas. The average price they demanded was around US$2,500, meaning that over the six-month period, kidnapping gangs or authorities made around US$25 million from ransom money out of the 9,758 victims detected by the study.

The president of the Comision Nacional de Los Derecho Humanos (CNDH) Dr. José Luis Soberanes Fernández, made a speech at the unveiling of the report here in Mexico City on Monday. Needless to say I wasn’t there in person due to my foot injury, but was sent the speech.

“These figure clearly show that the frequency and magnitude of migrant kidnappings represent an enormous level of this criminal activity, which means high earnings from delinquency.

He also said that the reaction of the Mexican authorities hasn’t been proportional to the severity and volume of the crimes against migrants in Mexico, leading to an increase in the impunity enjoyed by those who commit these crimes.

Gigi Bonnici, an independent human rights consultant, specializing in immigration and asylum issues who has six years of experience working with migrants and refugees in Mexico for a number of organizations including Sin Fronteras, said of the findings:

“The statistics are frightening, given that we are probably talking about thousands more, since this is obviously a very difficult issue to assess, primarily because the overwhelming majority of cases are not reported to anyone. The migrants often consider these crimes as part of the cost of migrating, part of the tax one has to pay for being poor and for crossing through Mexico and into the US without legal documents.”

She said that the fact that many migrants don’t know their rights combined with the indifference of the majority of the Mexican population compounds the problem.

“The international migrant population traveling through Mexico by train, by bus or on foot is by and large an invisible one to the majority of the Mexican population – invisible in the sense that they are essentially undocumented and live in fear of being discovered by any type of authority; invisible in the sense that they themselves are often unaware that as human beings they have the same rights as all of us to physical integrity and to be protected from criminal acts, whether they have legal status to be in the country or not; invisible in the sense that in the eyes of the authorities charged with protection they have no rights and so are not subject to protection by the state (which also means that criminal perpetrators who harm migrants are not subject to state investigation); invisible in the sense that (unlike other so-called vulnerable groups) migrants do not exist to the Mexican population at large – because they are considered criminals who are simply using passage through the desert to get to the north (in fact sometimes even considered as “competition” for those Mexicans who are trying to do the same thing), the public also does not believe that they should be owed protection by the state.”

Finally, Bonnici picks up on a point that explains why I choose to highlight this issue so frequently. Mexico and the Mexican Government have worked hard to gain recognition of the migrant rights of Mexicans in the United States. The issue of Mexico’s northern border with the United States and the thousands of migrants (of many nationalities) who die trying to cross it each year is a humanitarian tragedy. That said, it’s only fair that Mexico’s government and people turn their attentions to those migrants suffering within Mexico’s own borders and pay them the same respect they demand for their paisanos / countrymen abroad.

“Undocumented migrants have no access to justice in Mexico; at most, access to justice for migrants is conditioned on a regular legal status,” says Bonnici.

“If an undocumented migrant wishes to approach the police or prosecutor in order to lay a charge for a crime committed against him or her, or to provide witness testimony, he or she would risk being detained and deported. According to Article 67 of the General Populations Law and section 201 of its Regulations, the authorities are obliged to first confirm legal status of the claimant, and if the person cannot prove legal status in Mexico, he must be transferred to the migration authorities (which means, being detained in immigration detention prison and most likely deported). Why on earth would any migrant who already has suffered at the hands of criminals, expose himself to these risks, especially when there is strong evidence to suggest that the authorities are in collusion with the kidnappers, and when it is abundantly clear that the migrant will get no redress or restitution.

“This is obviously a significant violation to the right to equality before the law, and is also something Mexico has fought hard to get for its own migrants in the US.”

The CNDH’s investigation took place between September 2008 and February 2009 this year, and was carried out by Comission employees who toured migrant shelters throughout Mexico, from Chiapas all the way to Baja California and Nuevo Leon.

This video was made to go with this Los Angeles Times report.

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?

Peter Gabriel, the musician and activist, implored Mexico President Felipe Calderon to show “real political will, muscle and budget” in investigating the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women in the border town of Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua Friday.

Speaking to a packed press conference through a translator, and flanked by Mexican film star Diego Luna and musician Saul Hernandez from the band Jaguares, Gabriel said that he asks no more young women have to suffer the same fate as more than the 300 girls and young women who have been murdered in the border town since 1993.

He also asked that “all those families who are still suffering an enormous pain have the chance to find out the truth of what happened to their kids, to their family members, and to get some kind of justice and reparation.”

Towards the end of the press conference, Gabriel was asked what he thought about the current levels of drug-related violence in Mexico and whether Calderon’s military strategy would be a success. The drug war in Mexico has killed more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2008 — read more about it here.

Gabriel answered that a new, global approach was needed to fight the illegal drug trade, and that, in his opinion, legalization of drugs is the obvious solution.

“I would rather the doctors were administering the drugs than the drug traffickers,” said the musician.

Peter Gabriel is a prominent human-rights activist, and in 1992 founded the nonprofit group Witness, which uses video and online technologies to bring human-rights violations to light.

A press release from the federal government about the meeting between Calderon and Gabriel reported that “President Calderón pledged to combat any abuse of authority and to promote the repairs of damage to victims. At the same time, he confirmed his government’s will to combat impunity. He said that federal forces are collaborating with the local authorities to solve the cases of feminicides.”

See the video for footage from the press conference.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

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