Controversial ad campaigns about Mexico seem to keep popping up.

This time, it was a campaign running in the UK from Coca-Cola Schweppes. The ad, which ran for just one day on May 15 in The Times (of London) newspapers, was quickly withdrawn after complaints from Mexico’s embassy in London.

The soft drinks’ advertising agency Mother London created a number of illustrations as part of a series of ads called “Experience Matters.”

A statement from Coca-Cola Great Britain, sent to us via email, said: “The essence of the Schweppes ‘Experience Matters’ campaign is celebrating the very British tradition of satire. The cartoons are designed to bring a smile to an otherwise gloomy news agenda and reflect topical issues in the news.

“It is not our intention to offend however, and following discussions with the Mexican Embassy in London, we took the decision to remove the advert immediately.”

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza.

Take a trip to the cinema in Mexico anytime soon and you’ll probably see an ad campaign that scolds the Mexican public for buying pirated movies.

Purchasing any of the millions of pirated DVDs and CDs available at an estimated 50,000 “puestos” or open-air street stalls doesn’t, apparently, make one a great ethical shopper. In fact, it reflects badly on your character. That’s according to the campaign by Canacine (Camara Nacional de la Industria Cinematografica), an association that protects Mexico’s film production and distribution industry.

The ad currently running across cinema screens features three young middle-class girls hanging out in one of the girl’s bedrooms. Two of the girls are playing on the Internet, and the third discovers a pirated movie while browsing her friend’s bookshelves.

“Does your dad buy you these movies?” she asks her friend, a disgusted look on her face.

“Yeah, so?” says the friend.

“Que chafa!” the other girl exclaims, which roughly means, “What a cheapskate!”

The two friends then go on to taunt the other girl and accuse her of having a Papa Pirata (Pirate Papa) before the screen cuts to a line of text that says: “Buying pirated movies says a lot about who you are.”

The advertising campaign launched in December, and is an attempt to tackle the enormous problem Mexico has with pirated products. The International Intellectual Property Alliance says that around 90% of motion pictures sold in Mexico are pirated. At most street stalls, 20 pesos (around $1.38) buys you a pirated movie, and 50 pesos ($3.45) buys you three. In shops, the price of authentic movies on DVDs starts at around 100 pesos (nearly $7).

Piracy in Mexico is “entrenched” and “the sheer dimension of the piracy problem in the Mexican market remains severe and unchanged,”  the IIPA says in its annual country report for Mexico (pdf file).

Growing Internet penetration is also increasing illegal music and movie downloads in the country.

Copies of “Che, the Argentine” were selling at black-market street stalls before the film’s official release in Mexico. You can already buy “The Wrestler” starring Mickey Rourke, at a puesto near you, even though the film is yet to come out south of the border.

The seven or eight times I have seen the anti-piracy ad aired in the last month in Mexican theaters, it always elicited snorts of laughter from cinema-goers.

Maybe they’re amused by the running of such a campaign in cinemas when clearly, the people who go out to the movies are not the worst piracy offenders.

Or perhaps it’s just that piracy is such a normal part of Mexican life that the idea of getting rid of it seems ridiculous. Audaciously, many pirate-movie vendors flog their wares outside cinemas. There is always a woman selling pirated films outside the Cinepolis Diana on Avenida Reforma, and when leaving the parking lot of the Cineteca Nacional in the Coyoacan neighborhood (the city’s most important venue for art and foreign cinema) you can rely on finding a young man and his pirated movie stall specializing in — you guessed it — art and foreign film.

As if that weren’t enough, the indifference of Mexico City’s street cops speaks volumes about the attitude of the government towards piracy. You can frequently spot the city’s police perusing the pirated movie stalls, looking for something to take home and enjoy after a hard day on the job.

– Written for La Plaza.

Image: Pirated goods are widely available on the streets of Mexico City. Taken from a video still by Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.

You see some strong stuff on the streets of Mexico City. Women begging with babies in their arms, young kids, high on glue, washing car windshields and children no older than 5 trying to sell chewing gum and lollipops to people eating at sidewalk restaurant tables.

This month, there was a surprising new addition: an advertising campaign from Mexico’s Green Party, Partido Verde in Spanish, demanding the return of the death penalty to the country.

“Because we care about your life — the death penalty for murderers and kidnappers,” read the billboards.

It feels rather strange to be accosted by such a proposal while walking down the street, waiting for the bus or driving on the freeway. But perhaps stranger is that the demand comes from a political party that aligns itself with environmentalism and, generally, with left-of-center values.

As Tracy Wilkinson reported last week, there is a discussion underway in Mexico about bringing back the death penalty.

It is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that the death penalty could be re-introduced because of legal obstacles, according to experts. But the current wave of crime and drug-related violence rocking the country has upped the public’s demand for stronger measures against criminals. A survey published by El Universal on Monday reported that 70% of respondents supported bringing back the death penalty.

Despite that, lawmakers in the Chamber of Deputies rejected proposals by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Green Party on Tuesday to create a forum that would have analyzed the reinstatement of the death penalty.

This post was written for La Plaza.

Photos: Mexico’s Green Party is running an advertising campaign supporting the death penalty for murderers and kidnappers in the nation. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

They feature men well known in Mexico — journalists, sports personalities, actors and singers — asking that their fellow males stop beating up and abusing women.

The captions on this poster say: “From man to man, more respect, let’s learn to listen to and work with women. Let’s be more fair, more like men,” and “Punches? Against a woman? Never!”

The campaign is being run by the National Women’s Institute in conjunction with last week’s International Day of the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Now, it is great to see men on the side of treating women fairly in Mexico. Amnesty International reports that nearly one in every four women in Mexico has suffered either physical or sexual aggression at the hands of an intimate partner. Some of the posters for this campaign claim that one in every two women is a victim of physical, emotional or sexual violence.

But it’s interesting that the minds behind this campaign chose to put men at the front of it. Do Mexican men need to be told by other Mexican men to stop beating up and abusing women? Is it not enough that women denounce the high levels of abuse and violence against females all the time? Apparently not.

The idea behind the campaign, says the accompanying press release, is to fortify values and attitudes that favor eliminating violent behavior toward women and discrimination against them. But the message that some might take away from this is that only men have the necessary weight and authority to do so.

The campaign is running on television, radio, print media, public transportation and the Internet and in other major cities across the country until Dec. 31.

This post was written for La Plaza.

Photo: A poster from an advertising campaign called “Men Against the Violence” from the National Women’s Institute in Mexico. Credit: National Women’s Institute website, http://www.inmujeres.gob.mx

A television, radio and print advertising campaign called “What you don’t know can hurt you (“Te hace daño no saber” in Spanish)” is to launch here in Mexico in an attempt by press freedom groups to raise public awareness about violence against journalists and to demand more action from the government of President Felipe Calderon.

At a candlelit presentation Tuesday night in the Interactive Economy Museum in downtown Mexico City, domestic and international organizations announced the campaign to an audience of several hundred people. They hope to bring an end to what they claim is impunity for those who commit crimes against journalists in Mexico.

Since 2000, 28 journalists have been killed in Mexico and eight have disappeared, according to Article 19, one of the organizations sponsoring the advertising campaign. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says the figure is actually higher and that 45 journalists have been killed in the same period. Mexico is the deadliest country in the Americas for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders, and reporters who cover organized crime are especially at risk.

In recent weeks, Miguel Angel Villagomez Valle, editor of the newspaper La Noticia, was killed in Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan state. Also killed were David Garcia Monroy, columnist for El Diario, in Chihuahua, and reporter Jose Armando Rodriguez Carreon, also of El Diario, in Ciudad Juarez.

“The response of the Mexican state in all of these cases has been the same — immunity for those behind the crimes,” said Brisa Solis, executive director of the National Center of Social Communication (CENCOS), another of the groups supporting the campaign.

Expressing solidarity were several Mexican journalists, including Lydia Cacho, who has become a symbol of the persecution of journalists here in Mexico.

Cacho says that she was arrested illegally, taken to the end of a pier and told to jump by state police from Puebla after she published a book alleging the existence of a pedophile ring in Cancun in 2005. Her case against her alleged aggressors went all the way to Mexico’s Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled, controversially, that although there was evidence of crimes against Cacho, her rights weren’t violated enough to warrant further action.

“The defense of our reporters is a vital factor in the guarantee of our access to information, and to make decisions in a free, autonomous way,” Cacho said during last night’s event.

The first phase of the campaign — which opens in the media today — will be aimed at raising awareness, and the second phase will take more of an advocacy approach. The campaign is being supported by a number of press freedom nonprofits: The Global Latin America Community Radio Assn. (AMARC), the Mexican Assn. for the Right to Information (AMEDI), Women’s Communication and Information (CIMAC), Fundacion Manuel Buendia, the Institute for Security and Democracy (INSYDE), Reporters Without Borders, The National Journalism Prize, the Mexican Press and Democracy Foundation (PRENDE), Universidad Iberoamericana, the Rory Peck Trust and the National Press Editors Assn. It is being funded by CENCOS and Article 19.

TV spots for the campaign show the names of journalists who have been killed or disappeared in Mexico. The names appear over a white background, until they eventually obliterate all of the white.

This post was written for La Plaza, LATimes.com.

Photo: One of the campaign ads, which asks: “If they’re not there, who is going to inform us?” Credit: Article 19.

*Edited Dec 5th, 2008, 9:35a.m Mexico City time. The campaign is being supported, but not funded, by a range of non-profits. It is being funded by Article 19 and Cencos.

This advertising campaign is currently running on buses, bus stops and billboards across Mexico City. The ads are promoting a funeral home, and was run in conjunction with Day of the Dead.

Here’s an update on La Plaza with some more detail about the fallout, and Absolut have tried to address the mountain of complaints rolling in about the ad:

‘We have received many comments on an ad showing what an ABSOLUT world would look like from a Mexican point of view. We are sorry if we offended anyone. This was not our intention. We will try to explain. Though you may not agree, I hope you understand’

Vote on the ad here.

Please go to the blog post here to read the complete version, which was the most-read blog post on LATimes.com for the whole of 2008.

Absolut’s global advertising agency TBWA, and in this case their Mexican branch TERAN\TBWA, came up with an excellent, geographically specific angle.

The agency makes a play on Mexico’s ambiguous, love/hate relationship with its northern neighbour the United States. A map of the top half of the Americas is displayed, only in this version California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and other northern states remain part of Mexican territory, as it was before Mexico lost out to the US in the Mexican-American war.

Given Mexico’s national sense of pride and the often cited fact that California, as we know it now, once belonged to the Mexicans, the campaign will be warmly and no doubt humorously received south of La Frontera.

MexicoReporter assumes that Absolut is unlikely to run this campaign north of the border, but what if it does?……