Mexico City has officially closed its biggest rubbish dump, threatening to put thousands out of work. Yet the city government has yet to find an alternative for the thousands of tonnes of rubbish produced by its 9 million plus inhabitants. A voiced AFPTV report.Duration: 01:58

September 9 2011 – My final piece for AFP from my trip to Guatemala. Will be watching elections this weekend….

Fifteen years after the end of a vicious civil war, Guatemala is still beset by violence, only now it is organized crime and street gangs that are driving up death tolls to wartime levels. Emergency workers called to clean up the bloody aftermath are struggling to cope.

See the video here – it’s not on the AFP YouTube channel yet.

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.

Crops are wilting in the countryside, and the capital’s water shortage has turned dire as Mexico grapples with its worst drought in more than half a century.

See the Los Angeles Times report here.

“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?

Visits to some of Mexico City’s museums have fallen by as much as 90% since the outbreak of the H1N1 virus last month that prompted a near shutdown of numerous facilities, according to reports in the local media.

Owners of some of the privately owned museums in the capital are seeking financial help from the government  and say that if attendance doesn’t pick up, they may be forced to take “drastic measures,” such as cutting staff by half and opening for only three days a week.

Carlos Phillips, owner of the Dolores Olmedo Museum, which houses a collection of paintings by Frida Kahlo and the largest private collection of works by Diego Rivera, told the Notimex news agency that before the H1N1 virus hit Mexico City, visitors to his and other museums had risen over the last 12 months.

But he said that government measures in reaction to the virus, which included shutting schools, museums and cinemas and restricting restaurants to take-out service only, “put various sectors in a precarious situation, among them the cultural sector.”

He referred to museums – such as his own – that don’t receive governmental support and depend on entrance fees for their survival.

Phillips, who is also the owner of the Frida Kahlo Museum and the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum, told Notimex: “We’ve decided to wait for May and June to go by before taking drastic measures like reducing the number of staff we have or only opening our doors for three days a week.”

Last week, La Jornada reported that five of the city’s non-government-owned museums, including the three mentioned above as well as the Soumaya and Franz Mayer museums, were petitioning the government for help and accusing it of ignoring the cultural sector’s needs after the influenza shutdown.

“They treat us like a pending problem,” Alfonso Morales, head of the Soumaya museum, told the newspaper.

“They don’t think of museums as part of the economy, or they regard them as subsidized entities that have other means of existing.”

Both Phillips and Morales want to create an association of non-governmental museums with the aim of improving their access to the media as well as reduce the taxes they’re required to pay.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

Image: Kahlo painted “Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States” (1932) while she was in the U.S. with Diego Rivera as he worked on murals. Credit: Jennifer Szymaszek / Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes

Not one to sit around watching paint dry, Able made use of her time “inside” and fueled her cabin fever into some pretty entertaining creative writing, which she’s been kind enough to share with us. 

An inexpert mull over a bunch of random alphabeticised phenomena that have occurred since the outbreak of Swine Flu in Mexico City.

Apocalyptic doom scenarios and conspiracy theories (available for discussion with any of the city’s taxi drivers, who invented most of them)

-The world’s gonna end! We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die! The world’s gonna end! 

-The government here in Mexico is covering up a whole bunch of stuff, including hiding the true figures of the amount of dead and infected, which most likely stretches into the thousands.

-The flu was actually an attempt to assassinate President Barak Obama during his recent visit to Mexico City, during which he shook hands with the director of the Anthropology Museum who died from Swine Flu days later. 

-This wave of the flu is just one of several that will evolve to be increasingly aggressive and lethal, eventually killing us all in one even bigger epidemic in November.

-It’s all a ruse by the government to display their dexterity in handling crises.*

*My favourite so far.

Bootleg Tamiflu

Unlike just about every other drug available to buy with a nod and a wink over the counter from your friendly pharmacist, Tamiflu cannot be purchased in Mexico without a prescription. Probably because there’s only a million or so doses to go around a population of 110 million (compare that with the UK which has stockpiled enough treatments for half its population), and because the sick here frequently prefer self-diagnosis and self-treatment to visiting a hospital. But like all drugs in Latin America, if there’s a demand, they will make it onto the streets by hook or by crook. The latest offer I had was from a friend of a friend of a friend coming back from a holiday in Guatemala with a small consignment of about 4 packs of the anti-viral. Hardly Pablo Escobar, is he?

Compulsive news checking

As if the internet’s siren draw wasn’t enough of a distraction during peacetime, the hyperbolic high-drama ‘journalism’ of news companies vying for readership in times of so-called crisis has the rather effective consequence of keeping our attention glued to the screen. Website stories branch off from one another with such graceful ease that it’s hard not to jump from one story to the next video, to a photo gallery and to a blog. It’s the well-crafted melee of scientific fact, expert opinion and political analysis that excel in distracting us from pressing tasks and lunging us into the dark forest of fear and paranoia.

Domestic Bliss? 

Since Friday 24^th April, we’ve all been warned by the government to stay at home as much as possible and to only leave the house under pain of necessity. Initially, the prospect of a few relaxing days off work was rather appealing given the warm summer weather and the Mexican penchant for taking it easy. But once restaurants, cafes, bars and shops began to close down, our homes took on a darker, more penal hue. We were no longer indoors by choice but by obligation. Families were suddenly flung together in the confines of their houses and apartments and forced to face up to the often grim reality of kinship, while most couples I know, rather than lolling in a pool of romantic rapture, have reported an upsurge in stress-induced squabbles and arguments over heavyweight subject matter like which movie to watch next.

Economy

Screwed. The businesses that will hopefully be re-opening at the end of this week will have been closed for a fortnight, which for some will deal a fatal financial blow. The mayor of Mexico City has estimated that the city has been losing $88 million per day since the start of the crisis, and businesses have reported a slump of 80%. One of the worse hit industries will be tourism, which brings an annual $14 billion into Mexico’s national coffers. In a climate of global recession and with the peso already weak against the dollar, things ain’t looking up.

Friends

Potentially hazardous carriers of Swine Flu, friends were to be avoided at all costs during the first few days of news of the outbreak. As time wore on and we all realized we were fine and not in fact dying of the deadly scourge set to wipe out humanity in one fail sneeze, things began to get more intimate. My first venture into the outside world was a trip to a girlfriend’s house for lunch four days into the lockdown and we ate pasta and complained how bored we were. Another friend came round to my place the next day, and another, and another, and before I realized it we were a drunken party, united under siege and happily sharing our trusted saliva on the tip of a Turkish water pipe. On reflection perhaps not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but during a tipsy, six-person game of scrabble with Monty Python animating the background, it seemed like a great idea and a thumbed nose to the authorities that had tried so hard to isolate us from one another.

God

Apparently not protecting worshippers from Swine Flu. All masses in Mexico City have been cancelled or re-located to open-air spots like outside the massive Basilica de Guadalupe in the north of the city. Oh ye of little faith…

Hypochondria

Inevitable: sniff, sniff; is that a runny nose? I wake up and feel a tickle somewhere in the back of my sinus. Is that a pain when I swallow? Is that an ache in my joints? I sneeze. Oh my god I just sneezed. Call the hospital, call the undertakers, call the priest; it’s the beginning of the end. Or is it? A bleary cup of coffee and a vitamin drink later and sanity is returning. Morning respiratory hiccoughs are par for the course for residents of Mexico City. It is, after all, one of the most polluted places in the world. A breath of fresh air here is inextricably laced with frightening levels of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. The fact is that I feel like this every morning; I’m just never that aware of it unless there’s a killer epidemic on my doorstep.

Information (and lack thereof)

Never a global trailblazer in bureaucratic efficiency, the Mexican authorities excelled even their own standards in their erratic response to the swine flu crisis. Official death counts have peaked and troughed with all the stomach-turning turbulence of a roller-coaster ride, from 7 to 158 and back down again, depending on which organization you choose to believe, while details of victims and how they might have contracted the disease have remained flimsy, as has information about the behaviour of the virus itself, and indeed any sense of how this is all going to pan out in the future.

Jitters

Easy to succumb to, important to keep away from. It is my profound belief that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and since the start of the outbreak, humanity appears to have divided into two sections: freaked-out harbingers of extinction with far too high a backlog of Hollywood doomsday imagery to kick start their already fear-ridden minds, and the other lot, the ultra-pragmatic, ultra-denialists who think that anything more than a raised eyebrow in the direction of a possible global pandemic is an act of extreme over-reaction and alarmist nonsense. Already, people have begun leaving Mexico City in their droves, heading for outlying towns and villages, the United States, Europe, usually under the influence of mothers and fathers scared to their wits’ end by the black armband-rhetoric of international news stations, while others refuse to so much as cover their mouths in an orgy. Could it be that a sense of balance is the first thing to go in national crisis.

Kissing

In breaking with national tradition, all Mexicans have been warned off kissing and shaking hands when meeting people. By all accounts, it’s been by far the hardest habit to break. Chance encounters with acquaintances on the street have become a minefield of etiquette. They start at a rather awkward distance from which I’ve embarrassed myself several times by crying “air kiss dahhh-ling!” in too-loud Ab-Fab alto if I sensed the other party was cruising for a peck on the cheek. Greeting comportment also depends heavily on alcohol intake: stiff handshakes at the beginning of the night soon meld into hearty embraces and juicy kisses after a few jars of plonk. 

Lassitude

Bored, bored, bored. What’s on TV? Don’t care. How about a game of chess? Nah. Fancy making a dent in that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read? Can’t be bummed. And how about that rapidly growing pile of work? Tomorrow. It appears that tedium breeds ennui breeds lethargy, and indeed what initially seemed to be an opportunity-laden home sabbatical soon became dreary house arrest. Bored with everything being closed. Bored with bad news. Bored with the general negative mental state. Bored by the prospect of another hour spent in my own company. Bored of complaining about being bored.

Metro

The one place even the cynics and pragmatists are steering well clear of. Taxis in Mexico City are relatively affordable, and the gloved, masked taxi drivers offer a service free of the sardine-tin scenario of most metro trains. Plus there’s the additional perk of thrashing through some key conspiracy theories with your driver (see A).

Narco-wars

What the hell happened to them? One minute there’s a raging border conflict with news of cartel killings pasted over the front cover of every broadsheet and tabloid, and the next they’ve been elbowed out of the spotlight in favour of some sickly piggie winkles. How fickle the press… Though if there are any cartel bosses reading this, my top tip of the day is that the world’s drug of choice appears to have changed from Polvo Blanco to Tamiflu, so you could consider adjusting your supply lines accordingly (see B)

Out of Office

With most offices in the city shut down last week, the majority of my friends, acquaintances and colleagues have been ‘working from home’. This has meant a huge increase in Facebook activity as well as larger telephone bills. (See L and C) 

Parklife

With restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs, concert venues, small businesses, cinemas, stadiums, gyms, offices and schools all closed, the one remaining recourse for public interaction appears to be the trusty old park. Mexico City’s green areas have taken on a whole new dimension with the new fear of public gatherings in enclosed spaces, as well as providing exercise junkies with a back-to-basics alternative for the treadmill. Parque Mexico, my local, has transformed into some kind of utopian architecture model: scores of ardent joggers run laps of the park, while dogs bark, run, pee and sniff each others’ butts in age-old fashion; children ride bikes, teens play football, lovers kiss in the shade of the giant trees and bohemian students on benches bury their noses deep in library copies of Hegel. 

Quake

As if the panic, hype and sequestration of the Swine Flu weren’t enough, at around 11am on Monday morning, the city was treated to a series of 5.7 tremors that ripped through its infrastructure, forcing masses of residents out onto the streets. It appears that Mexico City has incurred a wrath in our Maker so mighty as to compare with the Ten Plagues of Egypt back in the 1600BC. We are now scanning the skies for clouds of locust.

Resignation

An inescapable part of the lifecycle of any sentient being: the eventual resignation to one’s fate and mortality. Ahhh, quit worrying! If we die, we die, and that’s it. Now, what’s for lunch…?

Superama

The supermarket two blocks from my gaf that seems to be doing pretty damn well from the closure of restaurants and the air of siege mentality in general, as shoppers are turning up in droves to fill their trolleys with everything from long life milk to bottles of tequila. In fact, if appearances are anything to go by, alcohol sales are going through the roof. It seems Chilangos are unanimous in the conviction that only the steady administration of ethanol into the system will get us through this. So we don the masks at Superama, let the security guy at the door spooge our hands with antiseptic gel, and we go forward into the only enjoyable commercial activity that remains open to us: food shopping. On one occasion I back into a masked man by the meat counter, who, after careful inspection of his eyes and hair reveals himself to be my editor. We both laugh though the gauze of our masks at the ridiculousness of it all, before casting a guileful eye into each other’s baskets to check there isn’t something we might have forgotten.

Tapabocas

Literally ‘cover-mouths’ or masks, they’re the new craze sweeping Mexico City. Available in a variety of shapes and designs, from the blue surgical kind that scrunch up small around the mouth, or expand to cover half your face, to the white work-shop models with the thin aluminum strip across the nose that’s meant to be molded to your face for a better fit. My own personal mask comes from the home of public hygiene: Japan. I got a bad hit of flu there during a trip last winter and actually purchased a batch in line with local protocol regarding spreading one’s germs in public. My tapaboca differs from its Mexican cousins in its streamlined Akira-type design as well as its integral behind-the-ears attachment and not via a piece of elastic that goes all the way around the back of the head and thus ruining any chance of a good hairstyle.

USA 

The H1N1 virus looks like it’s spreading from second world bogs like Mexico (where it’s OK if a few people die) to first world civilizations like the USA and Europe (where it’s certainly not OK if people die, or are even inconvenienced for a few days – unless, of course, they’re originally from second-world bogs like Mexico.) The US has always had an uncomfortable relationship with Mexico in many ways, what with border issues, illegal immigrants, spring break Cancun invasions and that whole drug war thing. Add lethal swine flu to the list of delicate diplomatic subjects and Mexicans holidaying in the US might as well start wearing bells.

Vaccines

Nope. Not for at least another 6 months. By which time, as the taxi drivers warn us, the virus will have mutated beyond recognition. So lay down that tiny flame of naïve hope, will you, and accept the plain and simple fact that we’re all gonna die! (See A)

Where’d everybody go?

May 1^st 2009. Mayday, you know the drill: it’s when mobs of disgruntled lefties traditionally take to the streets in earnest to protest exploitation of the working class and to make a fresh call for the socialist revolution. Then police in riot gear make their habitual entrance and start blasting the demonstrators with hoses and batons, and the whole spectacle is pasted together on celluloid for the evening news viewing pleasure of the bourgeoisie. But this year was different: the streets of Mexico City have never been so empty. May 1st was like a ghost town and being out and about felt like trudging through the set of some strange post-apocalyptic stage set. People kept mentioning ’28 Days Later’ and ‘I am Legend’, and it didn’t feel too far from that. You could hear the birds sing; it was actually quite beautiful. So where the hell has everyone gone? Well, as it turns out a lot of people have skipped town for the outlying hotspots just a few hours drive from the city centre. Valle del Bravo, Cuernavaca, even Acapulco. All playgrounds of the affluent, and word is that these places are rammed with visitors congregating in enclosed spaces, kissing, holding hands and breathing over one another, sans facemasks. Is that really a good plan, guys?

Xenophobia 

It’s official: the world now hates Mexico, and they’ve no reason to hide the fact any more. France has all but put forward a motion to nuke the country off the face of the planet, while most of South America refuses to even fly here any more. China is quarantining Mexicans and anyone who’s had anything to do with Mexico ever. And as if Mexicans in the US didn’t cop enough crap already, they’re now going to be dealing with people treating them like lepers for at least the next year.

Yuk it up

As Lao Tzu probably once said, the most effective strategy in the face of fear is to belittle one’s opponent by way of a good old larf at its expense, and indeed Chilangos have been pumping out the jokes with the proficiency of court jesters. Tapabocas have been painted with all manner of amusing mouth shapes while rib-ticklingly mirthful online references to hamaggedon, parmageddon and the aporkalypse have been dealt in every direction. For my part, I spent a good hour trying to come up with a pun to do with flying pigs in the past tense in which I could fashion into a sentence involving ‘pig flu’, with little success. 

Zeitgeist (‘The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time’)

What, at the end of the day, will we be able to glean from all of this? Is our over-comfortable world really lapsing into absurd paranoia at the prospect of a jolt to the social order from a phenomenon that is beyond our control? Or are the powers that be in fact dealing with this incredibly well by identifying a possibly lethal pandemic at an early stage and nipping it in the bud before it reaches the dizzying homicidal heights of the 1918 Spanish Flu? Indeed, two weeks of shutdown in Mexico City appear to have contained the virus, for the time being at least. With technology, hindsight, and a good sprinkling of irony, it seems that we might be able to transform this and other potential global catastrophes into a risible, and maybe even educational, storm in a teacup.

** This post was edited at 10:54am Mexico City time to include the text of the article.

As Ken Ellingwood wrote last year, “many Mexicans feel their leaders have lied so many times about so many things over the years that it’s hard to believe them, even when they might be telling the truth.”

The H1N1 / swine flu outbreak that descended on Mexico more than a week ago has provided an abundance of flammable fuel for those partial to conspiracy theories here in Mexico City.

You don’t have time to read, and I don’t have time to write, all of the theories that I’ve heard over the last ten days. But I would like to share my favorite with you, which came out during a conversation I had with Raul Camacho, a 62-year-old taxi driver, on Tuesday last week.

I asked him why he wasn’t wearing a face mask. At the beginning of last week, face masks and plastic gloves were yet to be mandatory for taxi drivers (that happened on Thursday), but everyone had been asked by the government to cover their noses and mouths as a precaution.

Camacho said he wasn’t worried about protecting himself because he didn’t believe the risk was as high as both the federal and city governments would have us believe.

“People in power do or say whatever they like to get what they want,” he said.

Camacho then went on to explain to me that Mexico President Felipe Calderon was in fact making the whole thing up in order to give Mexicans the impression that he was taking care of them and saving them from certain and gruesome death.

Camacho referred back to Mexico’s controversial 2006 elections during which Calderon beat the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a voting process that many still claim was fraudulent, and referred to Calderon as “el espurio” (the illegitimate one). Calderon is trying to gain legitimacy with this swine flu “story”, claimed Camacho.

OK, I asked, if that’s the case, why is Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, also a member of the opposition PRD party,going along with Calderon’s flu-stopping strategy of closing schools and nonessential services?

Camacho had an answer for that.

“It’s not convenient for Ebrard to fall out with Calderon right now. There are elections coming up in July, and he doesn’t want any trouble before then.”

My ride came to an end before I could ask Camacho why the World Health Organization was also in on the plot, but no doubt he’d have had an explanation for that too.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza.