October 25 2011 – A dispatch for Time from a recent trip to Veracruz:

In touristy Veracruz, Mexico, drug-related violence has spiked. After a recent wave of 80 killings, the federal government sent troops to patrol the city. But many still don’t feel safe

See the video here on Time.com

This video was produced for AFP. You can also see it here on AFP’s YouTube channel.

March 7 2011 – No Mas Sangre (No More Blood), a social protest group that began life as a cartoon, took to the streets of Mexico City on a recent weekend. They were protesting what they see as a failed policy – President Felipe Calderon‘s campaign against the country’s drug cartels and organized crime. But how representative are they of the Mexican people?

John Ackerman’s blog -  and the Mexican Law Review

The two polls quoted in this video come from Buendia & Laredo, and Consulta Mitofsky.

With thanks to Jorge Buendia and John Ackerman.

This video was shot, produced and edited by Deborah Bonello.

Editorial assistant Ulises Escamilla Haro.

See last week;s edition of MRTV here.

This out this morning courtesy of Tijuanapress.com.

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 by Deborah Bonello to go with this Los Angeles Times report.