crime
AFP: Crime no bar to big business in Mexico border town
My final piece from a recent reporting trip to Juarez for AFP:
Multinational-run factories employing tens of thousands are doing brisk business in Ciudad Juarez, even as local businesses in the Mexican border town wither, devastated by the high murder rate and extortion by drug gangs.
Training journalists in defence techniques: Article 19
You may remember this story I did a few months ago on survival techniques for journalists. I also produced a video on that course for the non-profit that runs it, Article 19, which you can see here as well as on their website.
Poet peace activist confronts Mexico’s Calderon
Mexican poet turned peace activist Javier Sicilia meets President Felipe Calderon, who he has much criticized for the strong-arm military tactics against drug cartels that many blame for unleashing widespread violence.
This video was produced for AFP. You can also see it here on AFP’s YouTube channel.
The dangers of reporting Ciudad Juarez
Daniel Dominguez, one of the hard-worked crime reporters on El Diario, the biggest newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, was kind enough to let me spend the day with him last week. Here’s the report I produced for AFP, which you can also see here on YouTube. The same video is also embedded below, in case of geographical restrictions on the above.
Cross-border protest asks US to stop funding Mexico’s drug war
Mexico’s march for peace, led by Catholic poet Javier Sicilia, crossed over from Ciudad Juarez – the violent epicenter of the country’s drug war – into El Paso, Texas Saturday.
They were joined by hundreds of Americans in their demands for a change in strategy from both the Mexican and US governments.
This video was created for AFP.
Javier Sicilia and peace march welcomed warmly in Ciudad Juarez
Just to give you a taste of last night:
Friday 10th 2011 – Mexican poet Javier Sicilia and his caravan of peace protestors received a warm welcome from thousands of people in Ciudad Juarez when they arrived Thursday evening. It was the final stop on a tour of some of the country’s states worst affected by drug-related violence. On arrival, Sicilia and his supporters held a rally remembering the dead.
Some 37,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared ‘war’ against the country’s organized crime and drug networks.
Mexico peace protesters head to US border
June 6th – Mexicans protesting a military crackdown on drug cartels launched a convoy protest Saturday that will travel through some of Mexico’s bloodiest towns on its way to the US border.
This dispatch was done for AFP. You can see it here on their YouTube channel.
‘I’ve never been afraid’: Director, recently slain, talks about filming El Salvador’s gangs
Photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda was shot dead in El Salvador Sept. 2, 2009. He spent more than 16 months, every day, with the mara gangs of San Salvador to make the 2009 documentary “La Vida Loca.” This is footage from an interview conducted by the Los Angeles Times’ Deborah Bonello with Poveda a few months before his death. It took place in Mexico City on April 1.
Training Day
Deborah Bonello reporting for MexicoReporter.com
My breath is tearing out of my lungs and my leg muscles are screaming for a reprieve. I just scaled a 60-degree hill coated in thorny brambles and poisonous plants whilst being pounded by rain. In the dark. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. Later that night, my fellow journalists and I were kidnapped by masked guerillas who jumped onto our bus.
Our only comfort? That none of this was real. But it could have been, which is the point of the survival course 18 journalists who live and work in Mexico attended last week in Toluca, just outside of Mexico City.
During the five day survival program, the journalists dodged tear gas and Army tanks and learned how to survive in the wilderness. The psychological stresses were addressed, too; they learned strategies for dealing with emotions.
In Mexico these days, that may be the most important lesson of all.
“Once in Apatzingan a cameraman and I were taken,” says Miguel Garcia Tinoco, a 40-year-old journalist and owner of the Notivideo video news website based in Michoacan.
“They took us to talk with a drug-trafficking boss on a street in Apatzingan, and they wanted to make us write what they wanted, what they wanted to communicate.”
This group of traffickers gained infamy three years ago when they tossed the severed heads of six enemies onto the dance floor of a nightclub.
“They wanted us to publish an explanation of why they’d murdered those six people. What we told them was that we couldn’t make a decision in terms of what we published or didn’t publish in the newspaper – that it was up to the editor. And in the end my editor decided not to publish anything at all.”
Antonio Ramos Tafolla, a 58-year-old reporter in the same state as Garcia, was kidnapped and beaten up by a group he says he was never able to identify.
“It limited me and the boldness that I had before to write. It limited me but it didn’t shut me up or stop me thinking, but I have more reservations now.”
Some don’t get granted any conditions. Ramos said that a colleague of his went missing two years ago and has never reappeared. Garcia says the same of two other fellow journalists in Michoacan. They are three of the eight journalists currently listed as missing in Mexico.
It’s not only reporters covering Mexico’s drug traffickers and organized crime networks that run the risk of reprisals. These journalists recounted tales from covering everything from car accidents, massacres and assassinations, to shoot-outs, kidnappings and election campaigns.
Run-ins with the federal police, the army and local governors are common for any reporter who questions local power networks.
“Sadly, the army has seen us, to a certain point, as enemies,” Garcia said.
“They close their operations and don’t let us film, they don’t let us into some crime scenes to get information … And they also take away our gear and they assault us.”
Back in the classroom Dr. Ana Zellhuber gives the journalists some practical guidance in dealing both with people who have just come out of emergency situations, as well their own emotional reactions to tough circumstances.
“You’re not heroes,” she says. “You’re reporters. Everyone has a duty to perform – do yours. Don’t turn yourselves into one of the victims.”
Stories unfolded in the classroom. One of the four women on the course, a reporter from Tijuana, talked about the time she was approached by a man who said the Mexican Army had massacred people in his town.
She didn’t know what to do because as the man told her his story she knew she was going to cry but she worried that crying would draw attention to herself.
“There are no wrong emotions,” said Zellhuber. “And there are always emotions.”
Monica Franco is a 31-year-old journalist working in Puebla.
“Intimidation is a daily reality for us,” she told me.
“We’re not just intimidated by the police – we’re intimidated by government spheres, by press officers, intimidated by politicians and by civilians who now don’t see us as allies.
“A lot of co-workers end up losing the point of why we’re here, which is to inform and give a voice to those people who don’t have one. And that’s what leads a lot of people to see us as enemies of society.”
Franco hits on an interesting point. Some of the journalists that have been killed here in Mexico over the last few years (see here for more numbers) were targeted as a direct result of reports they’d filed.
But in Mexico, where training is in short supply, wages are pitifully low and reporters aren’t protected or helped by their employers, it’s easy to see how they themselves can fall prey to corruption.
Franco says that someone broke into her home in Puebla. The burglars only stole journalism gear, nothing else.
“Instead of helping us we were intimidated by the police and told that due to our jobs, they could break into our homes, she said.”
They never learned who did the break in, Franco says.
“We just put up a stronger gate on the front door.”
Article 19 and the Rory Peck Trust organized the survival course, which took place between May 17th – 22nd in Toluca, Mexico.
Mexican journalists put through their survival paces
Journalists in Mexico can have a pretty hard time doing their jobs, especially those who cover Mexico’s narco-trafficking and organized crime problems.
A couple of non-profits who work on press freedom and protection issues here in Mexico, the Rory Peck Trust and Article 19, got together and ran a course just outside Mexico City this month for 18 journalists living and working here.
During the five-day course, the participants, who came from states all over Mexico, from Michoacan all the way to Tijuana in Baja California, were “kidnapped”, dodged tear gas, learned first aid, and received psychological training on how to deal with emergencies.
See the video for more.
– Deborah Bonello in Toluca, Mexico for La Plaza
Video: Mexican journalists put through their survival paces, by Deborah Bonello.
Military’s drug museum shows narco tactics
Mexico’s “Museum of Drugs,” buried up on the seventh floor of the Defence Ministry, isn’t open to the public. The installation was designed as an educational tool for military personnel who have been tasked with fighting Mexico’s narco-trafficantes and organized crime networks. It explains the methods that drug traffickers use to get their product around and out of the country, as well as the strategies that the army employs to try and stop them.
This video was made to go with this Los Angeles Times report.
Jesus Christ Superstar in Mexico’s Passion Play
It wasn’t hard to imagine what the real crucifixion of Christ might have been like if you were anywhere near the populous, working-class neighborhood of Iztapalapa in Mexico City last Friday.
Nothing was left to the imagination in what is one of the world’s biggest Passion plays. Holy Week, or Semana Santa, sees the staging of a number of scenes from the Bible on the streets of Iztapalapa, including Palm Sunday and the Resurrection. But none are as dramatic as the reenactment of Good Friday.
An estimated 2 million people descended on Iztapalapa on Friday to witness the 166th annual crucifixion, this year of Diego Villagran, the 18-year-old local playing the role of Jesus.
The sheer number of people taking part in or watching what was well-organized chaos was similar to portrayals of the crucifixion one might have seen in films such as “Ben-Hur” and Mel Gibson’s controversial “The Passion of the Christ.” Babies and young children sat atop their parents’ shoulders, crammed into crowded streets and pushed up against police barriers as some of the 4,000 actors in the street play bayed for the blood of “Christ”.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s ubiquitous street vendors showed no shyness in taking advantage of the religious event. They were everywhere, flogging sunhats, bottled water and stamps of the face of Jesus, while offering to imprint the faces of those willing to pay five pesos.
The heat of the April sun, combined with the severe water shortages that the borough also experienced over the week, made the setting feel uncomfortably real. When the blood-soaked “Jesus” staggered past, surrounded by a jeering crowd that kept pushing him to the ground and laughing, it was hard to resist the urge to wade in and save him from his violent destiny.
But Villagran was well prepared for his ordeal. He has been in training for the role since January, when he was selected during a casting process from 20 young men from the neighborhood (watch the video above, filmed over a period of three months, to see Villagran prepping for his big day).
Playing the lead made Villagran into a temporary celebrity here in Mexico, and he says he has had at least one media interview a day since he was given the role.
Over the last few months in the build-up to his big week, Villagran trained daily on the Cerro de la Estrella, a steep hill that doubled as Mount Calvary on Friday. His preparation included dragging a 190-pound cross around a 2.5-mile running track and doing push-ups with a brick on his back.
But he also said that he had to do some spiritual preparation for the role that included, naturally, regular visits to church, but also what he described as “finding himself, within himself,” and asking himself at every step of the process why he was doing it.
“It doesn’t scare me to play this role – it makes me feel proud and gives me confidence,” says Villagran, who is unusually tall for his 18 years and stands head and shoulders above most of the men in the neighborhood.
Although a big guy, Villagran is still boyishly handsome, and he was striking in the role of Jesus. But he says that acting isn’t something he’s planning to pursue, adding that he’s more interested in becoming an engineer at the state-owned oil company Pemex.
“Since I was little, I’ve watched the procession, and I always wanted to see myself there – I always wanted to play the main role,” says Villagran.
“And now that they’ve given me the chance, I’m going to make the most of it.”
Well, he certainly did.
Click here for the New York Times coverage of the event, and here for the Washington Post piece.
– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza
Video: Diego Villagran trains for the role of Jesus on Iztapalapa’s Cerro de la Estrella. Photo image: A video still taken from the above film. Click here for more images on Flickr. Video and photographs by Deborah Bonello
Jesus as a migrant in pro-immigration street theater
Traffic on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma was blocked briefly last Friday afternoon by an actor in the role of Jesus.
Wearing a long white robe over jeans and sneakers and carrying a cross fashioned roughly out of wood, ”Jesus” took a tumble on a pedestrian crossing on the traffic artery in front of the U.S. Embassy while on his way to Calvary Hill.
But Friday’s performance wasn’t part of Mexico’s traditional Semana Santa (Easter week) activities, which are now in full swing. The depiction of the crucifixion of Christ in the tradition known as the Stations of the Cross, or Via Crucis, had a cross-border purpose.
Organized by pro-immigration activists, the street performance depicted Jesus as a Mexican migrant, and as the actor walked around dragging his cross, others wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ICE (U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and INM (Instituto Nacional de Migracion, Mexico’s national migration agency) flogged him from behind shouting, “Walk, wretch, walk!”
One of the organizers was Elvira Arellano, who shot into the spotlight in both the United States and Mexico in 2006 after she took refuge in a Chicago church to avoid being deported back to Mexico. Click here to read more about Arellano’s case.
Arellano was eventually deported, leaving behind her 10-year-old son Saul, who was born in the United States after she had crossed the border illegally from Mexico.
“It’s very sad that the migration policies treat us as though we were basically terrorists or criminals,” Arellano said in an interview after the protest.
“We’re just families looking for a better life. We want to live better and we all believe we have the right to look for work opportunities. Unfortunately, we don’t find those opportunities here in Mexico, which is why we go looking for those opportunities in the United States.”
Arellano, who was accompanied by protesters carrying signs that said “Stop the Deportations” in English and Spanish, implored Mexican as well as U.S authorities to show more respect for migrants’ human rights. As we reported last year, tens of thousands of Central Americans traverse Mexico illegally each year on their way to the U.S. border. Migrants have been maimed or killed hopping aboard freight trains. Others are robbed or raped.
Often, they are arrested and held in squalid cells or denied medical care. In hundreds of cases, Central American families never hear from their relatives again.
“Mexico’s National Migration Institute is complicit with the U.S immigration authorities because here in Mexico they ignore the rights of migrants who come from Central America,” Arellano said.
Thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans cross the U.S. border with Mexico illegally every year.
See the video for more.
– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza
Image: A Mexican man playing the role of Jesus takes a tumble in front of the U.S embassy Friday during a street theater performance depicting Jesus as a Mexican migrant. Click here for more images on Flickr.
Talking violence in Texas
Last week, I was invited to speak at the University of Texas Pan America about this website, MexicoReporter.com, violence against journalists in Mexico, the drug war coverage and how new technologies are contributing to the journalism beast. So I went.
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?
Video: Peter Gabriel asks for political will to end impunity over Ciudad Juarez's dead women
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.
Video: 'Those Who Remain' focuses on families left behind in Mexico by migrants
“I’m always telling Marcos, when he left my hair was black and now it’s as gray as the Orizaba volcano.”
Juanita often sits outside the small and humble home that she shares with her husband Pascual in the Mexican state of Puebla. She thinks of her children as she sews. Three out of eight of her brood are living in the United States, where they have been for the last eight years. Life goes on without them, but for Juanita and Pascual — who eke out a modest living on their small farm -– it has never been quite the same since the children left.
“We’re getting on. There’s no turning back the clock. We spend our time thinking about our children … about how far away they are,” says Juanita, speaking to the cameras directed by the Mexican duo Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman in “Los Que Se Quedan,” or “Those Who Remain.”
The focus on the issue of migration that we see in the movies tends to focus on the treacherous journey that so many Mexicans and Central Americans make across the border to the United States, or what life is like once they get there. The homes and families that those migrants come from are usually just a jumping-off point for filmmakers, but Rulfo and Hagerman chose to stay at the point of departure to see how those who remain deal with their reduced numbers.
“It’s kind of the Ullyses, and we wanted to make the Penelope story, about the people who stay behind and wait,” Hagerman said in an interview during this year’s Guadalajara International Film Festival, where “Those Who Remain” was competing in the Mexican documentary section.
But the film is barely a documentary. “It’s a movie,” emphasizes Rulfo, and it features such strong characters that the directors could not have asked for more had they been casting a feature film.
Viewers are spared the well-intentioned preaching common in so many Mexican documentaries.
“We didn’t want this film to say ‘don’t go’ or ‘go’, because who are we to judge what the people do?” Hagerman said.
The directors spent 11 months with more than a dozen Mexican families, living in their homes, observing their lives and getting a sense of their realities.
“Maybe the people who leave the country are always thinking about the relatives they left behind … but the feeling is very strange — it’s like the absence of your deepest, deepest whole,” Rulfo said.
“Those Who Remain” is about absence, broken families and unworked fields, about survival, identity, love and relationships. The film won’t just speak to Mexican migrants living in the United States, but to any family, from anywhere in the world, split by migration.
“There are a lot of very small things that you have in your mind that you remember all the time when you’re out of your own country. And nobody knows that. So that’s the basis of the kind of feelings that we’re trying to express to the audience,” Rulfo said.
Hagerman adds: “It’s those little things — it can be a taste, or a smell, or the way your grandmother made lemonade. These are the little things that you miss when you’re away from your own country.
“By staying with the families through their everyday lives it’s like we’re witnessing the little things for the ghosts that are over there [on the other side of the border]. It’s the things that they are missing and would like to be a part of.”
The intimacy that the directors capture in the film, in terms of people’s feelings as well as the relationships they have with their loved ones, is what gives “Those Who Remain” its poetic tone — a tone enhanced by a music score by Cafe Tacuba, among others.
But that intimacy also presented the directors with their biggest challenge.
“When you’re doing a documentary with real characters, it affects you, what happens to them. It’s a big responsibility, and that’s a big challenge, because it moves you,” says Hagerman.
At the time of this writing, Hagerman and Rulfo were looking for a distribution deal in the United States.
If shown in the U.S., “Those Who Remain” will be a sweet, if painful, reminder to the millions of migrants living in El Norte of what they left behind. But it also has the potential to inform audiences about what drives the millions of migrants north in the first place.
– Deborah Bonello in Guadalajara, Mexico for La Plaza.
Video: Narcocorridos inspire Mexico City mural
The music of Mexico’s drug trade has taken a beating lately. As we reported from Tijuana last year, some radio stations south of the border have stopped playing the songs and promoters have banned the music from many public events. Nightclub owners ask bands to turn down narcocorrido requests.
Richard Marosi wrote: Narcocorridos still draw legions of fans, despite government
efforts to squelch the music. Calor Norteña played the song about
Villarreal only because of repeated requests from hard-drinking
bar-goers. But it was a momentary exception to a backlash that has
succeeded like none before in changing people’s attitudes toward the
music, say members of several bands, nightclub owners, concert
promoters and government officials.They describe a growing dislike, even revulsion, for music that critics
say celebrates the people terrorizing a community that has suffered at
least 207 violent deaths this year. Attendance at narcocorrido concerts
has dipped; bands say audiences request the music less and less,
preferring dance and romantic tunes that take their minds off the
city’s troubles.
But Mexican artist Cristina Rubalcava wasn’t put off by the controversy. After writing a song for los Tigres Del Norte about the controversial 670-mile fence project along the U.S.-Mexico border, she got to listening to some of the band’s narcocorridos and created a mural that illustrates phrases from more than 40 of their canciones. Watch the video for more.
Video: Be an illegal immigrant for a day
In El Alberto, a small village over 1000km from the border between Mexico and the US, tourists can pay to experience what it’s like being an illegal migrant. MexicoReporter.com accompanied the Guardian’s Jo Tuckman to film the video for her piece on the fake border crossing, where participants try to enter “America”.
You can see the film on the Guardian website here.
You may remember that I first did this story for the Los Angeles Times last year — you can see the first video I made of it here.
Photojournalism show explains 2008 in Mexico
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.
Video: Legal graffiti hits the walls of Mexico City
In a country with such a rich artistic heritage of mural-ism, graffiti is a popular past-time for many of Mexico´s youth.
Last week, Henry Chalfant – a photographer and filmmaker who has focused his career on documenting the form of street art — paid a visit to el Faro, a community arts center in the working class neighborhood of Iztapalapa, Mexico City. The event was organized by Graffitarte, a Mexico City-based arts group.
Some of the young people who came to the event were there specifically to see Chalfant — others just wanted the chance to graffiti in peace in a city where space for their form of expression is limited. Watch the video for more.
Mexico's media under scrutiny in documentary
Violence against journalists in Mexico is, sadly, nothing new and has been followed closely by the press and nonprofits alike for the last few years.
But “Voces Silenciadas” (Silenced Voices), a documentary film that was part of the Ambulante film festival here, broadens the debate around the persecution of journalists to encompass the bigger issues of media ownership and the relationship between the media and Mexico’s political powers.
Director Maria del Carmen De Lara doesn’t simply examine the dozens of unsolved cases of murdered and disappeared journalists in Mexico over the last couple of years –- she delves deeper, looking at media monopolies in Mexico and how those affect press freedom more broadly.
The film uses the departure of Carmen Aristegui , one of Mexico’s most prominent and respected journalists, from W Radio in January of last year as her starting point.
Aristegui’s “Hoy Por Hoy” morning news program had been on for five years and was one of the most listened to in Mexico when it was cut from the airwaves. Aristegui has since returned to radio news on a different network, but De Lara says her case shows how concentrated media ownership in Mexico has reduced the range of opinions in Mexico’s media and silence unwanted ones.
You can see Aristegui explain the circumstances behind her case in the video below, first shown in this La Plaza post.
In the documentary, De Lara makes her point mostly through a series of interviews with prominent Mexican journalists, analysts and writers, as well as media executives. Those interviews are interspersed with an audio recording of her repeatedly calling Televisa, part owner of W Radio, for an interview about Aristegui’s case — an interview that is eventually granted but sheds no new light on the case. Mexico’s giant Grupo Televisa multimedia company and Grupo Prisa, Spain’s largest media conglomerate, are joint owners of W Radio.
The format of the documentary is where it sags because the film is mainly a series of talking heads, sometimes accompanied by images of satirical cartoons snipped from Mexican newspapers. None of the visual material does justice to the urgency of the problems facing the press here in Mexico, which is a shame, because the issues of freedom of expression and violence against journalists here are serious.
The latter continues to hobble many media workers in Mexico, especially those who cover organized crime and the government, and has created a culture of self-censorship.
But De Lara’s interviewees do make a great case.
On leaving the cinema, I was disappointed as a viewer with the format of the documentary and didn’t feel I’d learned anything I didn’t already know. But on reflection, it occurred to me that foreign journalists were not the target audience of this film. The cinema is a good place to reach at least some average Mexican citizens, most of whom get their news from television. A massive 92% of Mexico’s television stations are owned by just two companies -– Televisa and TV Azteca -– which is De Lara’s point.
“I want the people to see the whole story that has been the struggle for a different kind of journalism in Mexico, a journalism that’s more diverse and inclusive,” she said in a telephone interview from Puebla, Mexico.
“That they understand what are the pressures for journalists, that the people understand another view of things, that they have other information, which this documentary has also done, for history.”
She also said she wants to show that, since the 1984 assassination of one of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, Manuel Buendia, Mexico “continues to have situations of impunity and situations that violate fundamental human rights.”
At the time of writing, there was no distribution deal signed to take the documentary to the United States, but De Lara was in conversations about possibly showing the film in London.
Image: A publicity poster for the documentary “Voces Silenciadas” (Silenced Voices). Credit: Ambulante.com.mx. Video: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
Mexico's special prosecutor for crimes against journalists ineffective, reports nonprofit
Freedom of expression advocates in Mexico have issued yet another missive in support of the country’s long-suffering journalistic community.
The special prosecutor’s office for crimes against journalists, created in 2006 by the Mexican government of then-President Vicente Fox, is ineffective, lacks independence and is poorly funded, according to a report by the international freedom of expression nonprofit group Article 19.
Speaking at a news conference in the Casa Lamm cultural center in Mexico City on Friday, Dario Ramirez, head of Article 19 here, said the role of the FEADP, or Fiscalia Especial Para la Atencion de Delitos Cometidos Contra Periodistas, had not been adequately defined.
“That means that the scope of prosecution and protection is limited and ambiguous,” Ramirez said.
Article 19 says that 29 journalists have been killed and eight have disappeared in Mexico since 2000. Most cases remain unsolved, in part because of the inefficacy of the FEADP, according to the nonprofit. It and other organizations claim that a “culture of impunity” exists in Mexico, created by the failure to bring to justice those who kill or harass journalists.
“The inability to resolve these cases not only contributes to the climate of impunity, but it encourages future aggressions,” Ramirez said.
Sanjuana Martinez, a Mexican journalist who received death threats after reporting the alleged sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priests in the United States and Mexico, also attended the launch of the report.
”We have a saying here in Mexico: If you want to hide something, create an attorney general’s office,” she said.
Only a few months ago, the head of the FEADP, Octavio Orellana Wiarco, said that reports of violence against journalists in Mexico were being exaggerated and that “there is a mistaken perception that Mexico is the country where the largest number of homicides of journalists takes place. This is not true.”
His comments sparked incredulity among Mexican journalists and their defenders.
Ramirez was keen to stress that the purpose of the Article 19 report is not to demand the termination of the FEADP but rather to adjust it to make it a stronger, more effective institution.
The statement from the nonprofit recommended — among other things — changing the focus of the legal body from protecting journalists to protecting freedom of expression and to improving the FEADP’s transparency and accountability.
Violence against journalists continues in Latin America
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Attacks on the Press 2008: Carl Bernstein on Self-Censorship of the Press from Meredith Megaw on Vimeo.
Here in Mexico, we keep our eye on the frequent press-freedom reports that come out, given the high levels of violence against journalists in the country and the culture of impunity that abounds.
Tuesday’s release by the Committee to Protect Journalists, sadly, held no surprises.
The organization ranked Mexico among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists:
“Growing violence associated with criminal organizations has made Mexico one of the world’s deadliest countries for reporters. Since 2000, at least 24 journalists have been killed, eight in direct reprisal for their work. Seven other journalists have disappeared since 2005.”
About Latin American in general, the organization reports:
“Powerful drug traffickers in Mexico, gangsters in Brazilian slums, paramilitaries in Colombia,and violent street gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala are terrorizing the press. Self-censorship is widespread.”
The U.K.-based Frontline blog begins on a positive note about Colombia’s journalists, remarking that “according to the Foundation for Liberty and Freedom of the Press, no Colombian journalists were killed in 2008 for the first time in 23 years.”
But it goes on to say that a total of 130 journalists were killed in Colombia in the past 30 years. The CPJ reports:
“While violence in Colombia has eased in the last four years, it remains one of the world’s most murderous countries for the press. Forty reporters, photographers and editors in all have been killed since 1992, and the country has the highest per capita rate of unsolved journalist murders in Latin America.”
And 2009 has already got off to a bad start for Colombian journalists, continues Frontline.
According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, Maria Eugenia Guerrero, a Colombian journalist, was found dead on the outskirts of the Ecuadorian city of Tulcannear earlier this month,
“[Guerrero], who was working for the Integracion Estereo station in the southern Colombian city of Ipiales, was brutally assaulted and killed and her body was left in a remote area outside Tulcan. … The body, according to the forensics report, showed signs of sexual assault, and it is presumed the journalist was killed in a violent manner because a portion of her skull was not found and had presumably been detached as a result of a severe blow.” link
Video: Carmen Aristegui talks about the reality for journalists in Mexico
Carmen Aristegui, one of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, disappeared from the Mexican radio airwaves last year in a cloud of controversy.
As Reed Johnson reported in January 2008, “Aristegui’s departure from W Radio set off a flurry of op-ed commentary in Mexico City newspapers. Several commentators have denounced the incident as an act of censorship and harassment by media and governmental interests.”
Now Aristegui’s back with a new radio news show –- this time on a different network. The journalist, who continued to host her nightly television news show on CNN Español during her radio hiatus, returns to the Mexican airwaves from 6 – 10 every weekday morning on MVS Radio.
She took some time out to speak to the Los Angeles Times about why her show got silenced last year, and the reality for journalists working in Mexico.
You can watch a video of protests over her departure last year here, and the Spanish-language version of the interview is below.
To see the whole, 40-minute unedited video in Spanish, click here.