MexicoReporter.com

AFP: Mexicans say goodbye to Carlos Fuentes

MexicoReporter — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:18:04 +0000

Hundreds of people filed past the coffin of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes Wednesday in Mexico City’s Bellas Arts Museum. The writer died in hospital on Tuesday afternoon.

Cientos de personas desfilaron este miércoles con emoción ante los restos mortales del escritor Carlos Fuentes. Sobre su ataúd depositaron libros, flores y mensajes de despedida.

AFP: Pope Coverage

MexicoReporter — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:41:50 +0000

A roundup of the footage I filed for AFP for the Pope, combined with the POOL footage from the official feed. See a package here on the issue of abortion in conjunction with the Pope’s visit, for AFP and GlobalPost.

GlobalPost: Pope visits Mexico town where ending pregnancy means prison

MexicoReporter — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:08:58 +0000

For GlobalPost, March 24 2012, in LEON, GUANAJUATO, Mexico — The arrival of Pope Benedict XVI here is being celebrated by many, but not by all. S

Guanajuato is one of Mexico’s most religious, conservative states, and the birthplace of President Felipe Calderon’s center-right National Action Party. The pope’s decision to visit this town — and bypass Mexico City — sends a message to the country’s more liberal capital.

Few issues bring the contrast into focus as sharply as abortion. Mexico City legalized abortion; Guanajuato cracks down hard on any signs of it.

Maria Lopez (not her real name) got pregnant in Leon in 2008 when she was 19, and she couldn’t afford to bring up a child at that time. She took the drug misoprostol, used for chemically induced abortions in many western countries, to provoke a miscarriage. She ended up in an emergency room with severe abdominal pains.

“A doctor arrived to examine me, and she opened my legs almost in anger, saying ‘let’s see what you’ve done,’” says Lopez, now 22.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital reported her to the authorities. She was arrested and imprisoned. She was later released on bail and served a nine-month sentence under house arrest.

More from GlobalPost: Cuba is waiting for Pope Benedict [2]

Between 2000 and 2010, 168 women have been jailed for having abortions or miscarriages in the state of Guanajuato. Some of them were incarcerated on homicide charges. Currently some 30 women are under investigation here for aborting their pregnancies or miscarrying, sometimes through natural causes, according to non-profits.

Nearly one in five pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriages [3].

“We believe that it’s the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that represents the biggest obstacle to access to safe abortion for Mexican women,” says Maria Consuela. She is the director of a non-profit organization called “Catholics for the Right to Decide,” which campaigns for women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

In 2007, Mexico City legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, angering the Catholic Church. In response, and with encouragement from the church, 16 Mexican states adjusted their constitutions to protect the fetuses, beginning at the moment of conception and turning abortion — technically — into murder.

Abortion is permitted across Mexico in extreme circumstances such as when a woman has been raped, the fetus shows signs of serious deformities, or the pregnancy puts a women’s life at risk. But those monitoring such cases say authorities often fail to fulfill their obligation.

More from GlobalPost: Latin America’s hidden growth story [4]

Women in conservative states like Guanajuato who visit hospitals or clinics with pregnancy complications often face suspicion — whether they’ve had an abortion or not.

“In Leon, they start to question you, accusing you of provoking the situation, and they try to investigate you to see if you did,” says Eugenia Lopez, director of the feminist sexual rights non-profit Balance.

Mexico is estimated to have the world’s second largest [5] Catholic population after Brazil, but Catholic Mass attendance is shrinking.

The issue of abortion has divided Mexico. Most approve only of abortion in certain circumstances such as after rape, according to a survey by Catholics for the Right to Decide.

“We don’t want to end innocent lives,” says Irene Lopez, a Mexican housewife.

Yet those women who can afford it travel to the capital from other parts of the country to end their unwanted pregnancies legally and safely.

Veronica Cruz, founder of the Guanajuato-based women’s rights group Las Libres (the Free), says that women with money can get abortions secretly in private hospitals in most Mexican states. It is poor, young women who are being criminalized, she says.

“Poor women have to go to cheaper, backstreet clandestine services that aren’t hygienic where they risk their health and their lives,” says Cruz. “And these women are at risk of losing both their lives and their liberty because they are then denounced by medical staff when they seek medical help following complications.”

Mexican law separates the church and state, and priests are supposed to be barred from preaching politics from the pulpit.

But with a general election looming in July, Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church issued guidelines on how Mexicans should vote, emphasizing they place prime importance on “the right to life, starting at conception.”

As long as abortion remains illegal and taboo in some Mexican towns, women like Maria Lopez will continue to be criminalized.

“The priests say that you should have all of the children that God sends you,” she says, “and I say OK well if God sends me 20 children should I have them even though I can’t feed them?”

See the story here on GlobalPost.

AFP: Abortion divides Mexicans on Pope’s visit

MexicoReporter — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 14:55:48 +0000

March 24 2011 – The Pope’s visit to Guanajuato this week will be celebrated by many, but definitely not by abortion campaigners. This Mexican state is the one of the strictest, banning abortion except in extreme cases of rape, and the courts don’t hesitate to jail women who dare to take matters into their own hands. By Deborah Bonello for AFP.

PRI ‘s The World: A Mexican Village’s Evangelical Shift

MexicoReporter — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 02:36:21 +0000

March 23 2012 – Once overlooked in heavily Catholic Mexico, Evangelicals are on the rise. Here is a multi-media profile of the tiny town of Zongazotla in the Pueblan mountains that I worked on with Monica Campbell and Myles Estey for PRI’s The World. Mine’s the video…..

All photos by Myles Estey.

AFP: Cassez case throws spotlight on Mexico’s media trials

MexicoReporter — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:52:44 +0000

March 20 2012 – The staged arrest of French woman Florence Cassez in Mexico back in 2005 puts an uncomfortable spotlight on the practice of putting suspects in front of the media even before they go in front of a judge. For AFP by Deborah Bonello

AFP: El Paso gives refuge to Mexico’s human rights defenders

MexicoReporter — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:57:12 +0000

Spanish Video below.

Deborah Bonello for AFP

EL PASO, Texas — El Paso, one of the safest US cities, now hosts a growing number of human rights activists seeking to escape persecution in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s most deadly city just across the border.

Some are on the run from Mexican drug gangs. Others seek refuge in their tranquil American neighbor because they fear the very soldiers who were deployed to protect them.

Saul Reyes Salazar and his activist family have paid a heavy price for lobbying against what they call the “militarization” of Ciudad Juarez.

Six members of the family have been murdered since 2008.

Reyes, his wife and kids now live in a cramped red-brick tenement house in El Paso, after receiving asylum in January.

“The first few days that we were in El Paso marked the first time in a long time that I could go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning without waking up in the middle of the night, or having nightmares,” he told AFP.

Around four years ago the family started denouncing alleged forced disappearances, murders and torture by soldiers deployed to the violent border city by President Felipe Calderon, under a nationwide crackdown on criminal gangs.

The crackdown has been accompanied by a rise in brutal killings — some 50,000 nationwide since it started in December 2006.

Just in Guadalupe, a small town of 3,000 on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, Reyes counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and the dumping of eight unidentified bodies.

The family, which set up a bakery business in the town, began receiving threats as they started to speak out against the violence.

And then they became victims themselves.

“Maybe we’re safer here,” Reyes Salazar said in his small, dark kitchen in El Paso.

“But I don’t feel good knowing that there is still so much evil there.”

Carlos Spector, the family’s lawyer, has won a handful of similar cases.

He says 21 human rights defenders have been killed in the state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez lies, since the army was sent there in 2008.

“Most of the asylum cases we’re handling and we’ve seen are crimes of state, as opposed to drug-related. None of the cases we’ve won are drug related,” Spector said.

“All of the cases have targeted the Mexican government as the perpetrators of the crime and the US Government has agreed with us by granting those cases.”

Wherever the threat may come from, there are some for whom it is too late.

A mother who fought a two-year battle to bring her daughter’s killer to justice was shot dead in December 2010 outside government offices where she was holding a vigil in Chihuahua City, the state capital.

A security video shows masked men pulling up in a car outside the offices and Marisela Escobedo trying to flee by running across the street, before a gunman shoots her in the head.

Her killer remains free.

Norma Andrade, who became an activist after her 17-year-old daughter was abducted and killed by suspected drug traffickers, fled south to Mexico City late last year after she was shot six times outside her Ciudad Juarez home.

She said last month she would seek to leave the country after being attacked again outside her Mexico City residence.

Meanwhile her daughter, Malu Andrade who is also an activist, has received threats and an arson attack on her Ciudad Juarez home.

“It makes you so paranoid,” she told AFP.

For those activists who choose and manage to flee, life on the other side, just a stone’s throw away, is a big change.

Reyes and his family are grateful for their new-found freedom but they left everything behind — their business, their belongings, their lives.

“Now we find ourselves in a much more vulnerable position financially, with fewer options for social activism,” Reyes Salazar said.

“I miss Mexico… I think the dream of everyone in exile is to be able to return to their country one day.”

Editing by Sophie Nicholson

Univision: Young angels in Juarez battle the city’s demons

MexicoReporter — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:48:19 +0000

February 6th 2012 – In Ciudad Juarez, the violence is a constant, human suffering a given, and trying to understand why the city has so many problems depends on who you ask. The people who live there are justifiably weary of the violence and the near-blanket impunity enjoyed by those who perpetrate it.

But then, sometimes you meet people that offer a glimmer of hope — like a group of young “angels” who since 2010, get together on weekends and sometimes during the week to stand at crime scenes and street corners, asking murderers to repent. Is it having an impact?

Violence over the past year has declined. Local Juarez newspaper El Diario reports that murders in January in 2012 were half what they were in 2011. Perhaps it’s just a momentarily lull, but the angels and their persistent determination suggest that Ciudad Juarez could emerge as something more than just a city of victims.

This video was shot, produced and edited by Deborah Bonello and published by Univision. You can see it here on their website if you live within the US.

AFP: Mexico City struggles with waste disposal

MexicoReporter — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:05:04 +0000

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

AFP: Hunger threatens indigenous Mexicans

MexicoReporter — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:02:16 +0000

Jan 24 2012 – The Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, are going hungry. In the state of Chihuahua in Northern Mexico, where the indigenous tribe lives, drought and cold weather have made food scarce. The government and non-profits are handing out food, but handouts are only a short-term solution to the survival of the Tarahumara. Shot, produced and edited by Deborah Bonello for AFP.