Heading south to Tijuana

Report to follow shortly….

The cacti in Los Angeles are exactly the same as those you see in Mexico. Even though you can step from the first into the third world and back across the United States - Mexican Border, what the land gives up and supports is the same.

I love these cacti - they look like Medusa’s hair, writhing out and into the air.

MexicoReporter.com is heading north of the border for two weeks on a research and training trip.

We’ll be in Los Angeles for some of the time, and then San Diego and La Frontera for the rest.

I’m hoping to file for you FROM the border, where we’ll be heading down to hook up with the Los Angeles Time’s border reporter, Richard Marosi and then Tijuana to El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

We’re also hoping to make the acquaintance of BorderReporter.com in the flesh.

Watch this space.

It’s a regular Tuesday night at the Lucha Libre in downtown Mexico City’s Arena Coliseo

For those of my readers in London, this is for you.

If you’ve enjoyed the coverage you’ve seen here on the Lucha Libre over the last year, now’s your chance to see the real thing in the flesh because the Lucha Libre is coming to London this weekend, and this weekend only!

Lucha Libre London presents sixteen of the best of the best of Mexico’s luchadores including El Hijo del Santo (the greatest living luchador and son of the all time great El Santo), Blue Demon Jnr (the man in the blue mask), Ramses (fighting star of Jack Black’s Nacho Libre) in a full-on struggle for the soul of Mexico.

It might be too late to buy tickets, but if you can get hold of them I can’t recommend the gig enough and would be curious to here from anyone who goes how the fights go down with the audience.

Check out the details here on the Roundhouse web site.

For all things Lucha Libre on MexicoReporter.com, click here and see my Lucha Libre photo gallery here on Flickr.

John McCain, the presumptive U.S Republican presidential candidate, couldn’t have timed his trip to Latin America better. Not only does he fly into Colombia a day before 6-year hostage of the FARC Ingrid Betancourt is liberated, he then rides into Mexico City this morning days after the Merida Initiative gets approved in El Norte.

Some of that great timing is pure coincidence - some not.

The liberation of 15 hostages in Colombia couldn’t have been predicted by McCain during the planning of the trip, but perhaps the timing as concerns the passing of the Merida bill, which will see President Calderon’s government receive a US$400 million cash boost from the United States Government to help in its heavily-militarized fight against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime networks, was intended.

On the one hand, Mexico has never needed more help with its notoriously crooked and corrupt legal branches.

At the start of this week, videos were leaked onto the internet that showed an elite brand of the Mexican police apparently in torture training class. Although dismissed by officials as training procedures aimed at helping police deal with extreme situations in which THEY might have been kidnapped by the country’s big, bad narcos, their emergence was unpleasant but not surprising to anyone with any knowledge of Mexico’s law enforcement agencies. I should add that the source and authenticity of the tapes hasn’t really been questioned.

Then, on the same day that McCain strides around Mexico City’s Basilica de Guadalupe, four decapitated bodies turn up in the northern city of Coulican. Their severed heads were left a few blocks away. The deaths were drug-related, according to the Associated Press this morning.

Three of the beheaded bodies were found inside black, plastic bags on Wednesday, while the fourth was wrapped in a blanket, according to the prosecutor’s office in Sinaloa state, where Culiacan is located. Authorities said they believe the killings were drug gang-related.

Police found the heads inside separate white bags on a nearby street in Culiacan, a center for the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

“You’re next Chapo. You ungrateful traitor,” read a note found on a piece of cardboard nearby.

Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman is head of the Sinaloa cartel. He escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 and is among the most wanted drug lords in the United States and Mexico.

So, there’s no doubt that Mexico has a problem with its drug cartels and that the drug cartels are horrifically violent people. But are they any more violent and corrupt than the Mexican army and police forces, who themselves are wanted for a catalog of human rights violations against the country’s civilian population. Just take a glance at the U.S State Department’s human rights report for Mexico 2007:

The following human rights problems were reported: unlawful killings by security forces; kidnappings, including by police; physical abuse; poor and overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency in the judicial system; confessions coerced through physical abuse permitted as evidence in trials; criminal intimidation of journalists leading to self-censorship; corruption at all levels of government; domestic violence against women, often perpetrated with impunity; violence, including killings, against women; trafficking in persons, sometimes allegedly with official involvement; social and economic discrimination against indigenous people; and child labor.

As a first step, in efforts to reform and professionalize the police, the government relieved 284 federal police commanders, including all 34 regional police commanders, and rigorously trained and evaluated their replacements. Source: U.S State Department.

The only things which really seem certain when looking at the Merida Initiative is that firstly, such a small amount of money will probably make very little difference to Mexico’s drug war. The original budget for Plan Colombia, conceived in the late 90’s to help Colombia deal with its drug cartel problem, was more than US$7 BILLION.

Secondly, how that money is spent - by whom and on what - will of course define its worth in helping Calderon fight the drug baddies. For a country in which the notion of transparency is little more than idealism, one can’t help but expect little. Not only does  the Mexican Government lack transparency, but only 15% of the aid given the green light by the United States will be conditioned on Mexico’s efforts to make police more transparent, accountable and responsive to complaints, and ensure investigation of reports of abuse by police or soldiers, according to this Dallas Morning News report.

That means Mexico’s heads aren’t really accountable to anyone.

It’s only realistic to have low expectations for Merida.

A story emerged here in Mexico today surrounding the emergence of a couple of videos which apparently depict the Mexican police, in the city of Leon, being instructed in the art of “torture” by an unidentified, English-speaking foreigner.

The videos are posted below - some viewers might find them offensive.

The videos - real or not - are not going to do much for the reputation of Mexico’s law enforcement agencies, which are perceived both at home and abroad as notoriously corrupt - a perception based very much on reality. Suggestions that the police are continuing to use torture - and in fact are being tutored in the art of it - will shock but not surprise.

Stories like this are tough. The initial question you have to ask, of course, is where did the videos come from? Secondly, how real are they? It wouldn’t be hard here to get hold of a police or army uniform for you and your mates, get them all dressed up and put them in front of the camera.

It’s worth noting that Mexico’s left-leaning PRD Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is currently in the midst of deep political unrest following the death a couple of weeks ago of 9 youths and three police offices in the News Divine nightclub tragedy.

A number of heads have rolled following the tragic event, in which youths as young a 13 were killed when a botched police raid turned into a stampede.

On June 24 , police officials fired 17 officers in connection with the raid, and on Thursday last week the police chief who led the raid, Cmdr. Guillermo Zayas, was charged with 12 counts of homicide. A youth advocate last week put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the police, saying that there was a complete lack of public policy in the city for dealing with young people. The owner of the nightclub, Alfredo Maya Ortiz, was charged with manslaughter this morning.

It would be great if the media took their eyes of Ebrard’s full-plate of problems right now, and so it’s also worth noting that Vincente Guerrero Reynosa, the mayor of León, is a Panista - i.e a member of the PRD’s rival PAN party.

One could argue that a scandal such as this - which was on the front page of today’s Reforma - seems to distract perfectly some of the attention currently being placed on Ebrard and his City Government. Could the tape have slipped out those affiliated with the PRD? Or did it just happen to turn up by coincidence, at what is such a sensitive time for the party.

Like most things in Mexico, fact merges with fiction all the time and there is so much smoke and mirrors that all one can really do much of the time is speculate. But a little speculation never hurt anyone, did it?

President Calderon on Friday welcomed the U.S. Congress’ approval of the Merida Initiative a day earlier, an aid injection from the United States which is aimed at helping Mexico in its fight against  powerful drug cartels.

The bill has dropped a controversial requirement that Mexico meet certain human rights standards in order to receive the aid. Mexicans had objected to the human rights provision, saying that it amounted to outside meddling by the United States in Mexican affairs. But dropping the human rights requirements seems certain to anger numerous opposition groups to the aid package - see this La Plaza post on the issue.

“Calderon said the bill ‘was an important step in the fight against international organized crime.’ He said its passage was due in part to Mexico’s insistence that the United States share the burden in the fight against drug trafficking,” writes the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s raging drug war claimed the lives of six more police officers, ambushed on patrol in the marijuana-rich state of Sinaloa, authorities said Friday.

The attack followed the slaying Thursday of a senior police commander, part of a long string of killings apparently aimed at eroding public confidence in the government’s ability to challenge drug gangs, reports the L.A. Times’ Tracy Wilkinson.

Last week, a report in the Christian Science Monitor questioned President Calderon’s use of the military in the fight against the country’s drug cartels - see that post here.

Read on…

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Read on…

Mexico’s Interior Secretary and Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa stressed that the anti-drug aid would include equipment, systems and training, not cash, and that no U.S. soldiers would be allowed to operate in Mexico as part of the plan.

“Mexico will not accept the presence of U.S. military personnel in Mexico,” Espinosa said.

There is good news and, well, good news here at MexicoReporter.com which I wanted to tell you, my readers, for the sake of transparency.

Next week, I will be start in a new job as staff blogger, investigator and video journalist for the Los Angeles Times and their Latin America blog La Plaza here in Mexico City. After freelancing for the Mexico office for the last six months, they have created a new role for me in the foreign staff. I am both flattered and excited at the new challenge.

As a result, it’s likely that the output of MexicoReporter.com will change slightly – how, I do not know. Yet.

MexicoReporter.com, up until now, has been an independent multi-media site. I expect that independence to continue but wanted to be clear about where my eyes are now based.

I do anticipate having a little less time to spend on bespoke content for the site than I have had during the last year. But MexicoReporter.com – both here and on the Frontline network – will continue at full pelt. It could be that the content becomes more ‘behind-the-scenes’ – a personal angle on the work and reporting I do for La Plaza – as well as broadening out a little more in terms of its coverage. The Mexico City Bureau down here covers Mexico and Central America as well as Cuba now, so hopefully I’ll be able to bring you coverage from those countries too.

As has always been the case with the site, it will develop as it develops – I am not going to set any rules of what future posts will be. Life here is too unpredictable.

The challenge at the Los Angeles Times and the Latin America blog la Plaza is an exciting one, and I hope that you, my readers, will continue to read my work – both here and at La Plaza – and as always, give it your critical eye and feedback.

Thanks for staying tuned for our first year – it’s been a roller-coaster ride that has whizzed by! Please stay with us as we move into phase two!

Deborah Bonello, MexicoReporter.com, can be reached at dbonello@gmail.com

The police commander who led a botched raid on a Mexico City nightclub will be charged with 12 counts of homicide, one for each person who died in the crush at the bar’s entrance, prosecutors said Wednesday.

The Associated Press reports this morning City Atty. Gen. Rodolfo Felix Cardenas said his office was bringing the charges against precinct commander Guillermo Zayas for failing to halt Friday’s mismanaged raid, in which one group of police tried to force youths out of the club while another blocked the exit to prevent them from leaving.

“Even though there is no evidence that Guillermo Zayas ever ordered police to close the doors of the discotheque, or block the entrance, it has been proven that he never gave the order to police blocking the entrance to let the youths out,” Felix Cardenas said at a news conference.”

But the removal and punishment of one official is unlikely to solve what is a deeply ingrained systemic problem within both the Mexican police force and society as a whole.

In this La Plaza post yesterday, Mexican youth advocate and sociologist Héctor Castillo Berthier attributed the tragedy to a police force not trained or equipped to deal with such situations, as well as a lack of public policy directed at the city’s youth.

–Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

This post was written for La Plaza.

This post was written for La Plaza, the Los Angeles Times Latin America blog.

A tragedy in Mexico City last weekend, in which 12 people were suffocated or trampled to death in a bungled police raid at the News Divine night club, was due to an inept police force and a lack of public policy directed at the city’s youth, says a sociologist and longtime activist for youth-related programs.

Héctor Castillo Berthier, who runs the youth culture center Circo Volador (Flying Circus) in Mexico City and has worked in youth programs for more than 30 years (pictured), said in an interview Tuesday with La Plaza that the capital’s police are not trained to deal with adolescents and young adults. That’s part of a wider failure to integrate young people into Mexico’s public and political life, he said.

“Mexico doesn’t have a defined public policy for its youth. They aren’t part of the public agenda or the political agenda,” said Castillo Berthier, speaking in his cluttered office in the run-down neighborhood of Lorenzo Boturini.

Last Friday evening, dozens of riot police descended on the News Divine club in the working-class Nueva Atzacoalco district of Mexico City to investigate reports of underage drinking and drug-use. A stampede
ensued as the crowd, some members as young as 13, tried to leave the club. In addition to the nine youths who were killed in the crush, three police officers died of asphyxiation.

Mexico’s legal drinking age is 18.

“Why did they want to detain three hundred youngsters?” Castillo Berthier asked rhetorically.

“What purpose does it serve? What are they expecting to find through detaining 300 youths?”

The incident has provoked widespread condemnation of police tactics, and sparked a political crisis for popular left-leaning Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, formerly the capital’s public security chief. As the L.A. Times’ Ken Ellingwood reports today from Mexico City, on Tuesday police officials fired 17 officers in connection with the botched raid.

“The firings came as newly released video footage showed police officers blocking exits as hundreds of young patrons tried to flee,” Ellingwood reports.

In the days following the tragedy, there’s been little analysis in the Mexican media of some of the long-standing, underlying tensions between Mexico’s youth and its notoriously ill-paid, corrupt and heavy handed police force, as well as other law-enforcement entities.

In 1968, when student demonstrations and riots were breaking out across
the globe, hundreds of peaceful protesters, many of them young
students, were massacred by army troops and undercover law enforcement agents in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco (see this Los Angeles Time report on that subject).

“What the youths chanted in 1968 and what they chant today is exactly the same,” said Castillo Berthier.

“In the poorer neighborhoods the youth call the police ‘the law’. So when you’re in a poor neighborhood and you learn the ‘the law’ is the police, and the police are corrupt, then the law loses all its significance.”

Castillo Berthier, who is a social investigator and also organizes get-togethers for rival gang members, said that afternoon parties such as the one raided last weekend are common.

Although he blamed police tactics for the deaths, he said that Mexico needs to ask itself a bigger question.

“What kind of citizens are we constructing?” he said. “We’re creating citizens who have to be alert and cautious of the police because they’re going to beat them and detain them, and they’re going to arrest
them illegally.”

Castillo Berthier said that while Western European youth know their rights in dealing with the police, Mexican youth do not.

“Here, you confront a power that has the right to overpower you, be what may,” he said.

“How do you learn that – what you have the right to and what not? How
is it that the police can come and arrest you in a place where you’re
drinking and dancing?”

“We have to stop thinking of the youths as the future – they’re the present of today,” said Castillo Bethier.

“And today, we have to try and take action on this.”

– Deborah Bonello, Mexico City

Photo: Héctor Castillo Berthier, who runs the youth culture center Circo Volador (Flying Circus) in Mexico City, said in an interview Tuesday with La Plaza that the capital’s police are not trained to deal with adolescents and young adults. Credit: Deborah Bonello
This post was written for and published on La Plaza

In anticipation of the scheduled debate around the controversial Merida Initiative aid package in the US Senate this week, the Financial Times newspaper from the UK urges President Felipe Calderon to accept the human rights conditions attached to the US$400 billion injection aimed at helping Mexico fights its drugs barons. But should he?

“Mr Calderón should also accept the conditions. Co-responsibility is
more than just sharing the financial and logistical burden of fighting
the war against drugs. In its broadest expression, it encompasses many
related spheres, including human rights. If he is to use the argument
of co-responsibility as a way to get the US to pay more, he must also
accept that it implies doing more to improve his country’s human-rights
performance”, writes the newspaper’s Mexico correspondent, Adam Thompson.

The Merida initiative was approved by house lawmakers earlier this month and the Senate is expected to follow suit. You can read all about the controversial package here, which is being opposed by groups on both sides of the border and all parts of the political spectrum. From Amnesty International and Friends of Brad Will (who campaign for justice after the journalist was shot dead in Oaxaca last year), to Republican groups.

The main worry is that the cash boost will place more arms and power in the hands of an already corrupt police and army in Mexico, and that the money should instead be spent on poverty-reduction programmes or, in the case of the Republicans, strengthening the border.

Meanwhile, as Ken Ellingwood reported earlier this month, opposition is also coming from within Mexico. Senior Mexican officials have called the provisions a form of U.S. interference and threatened to turn down the first-year installment if the conditions survive in a final version yet to be worked out by the
House and Senate. They want the human rights provisions on the Initiative deleted.

Luckily, the border’s Minuteman border group already have a plan in case the Merida Initative doesn’t pan out…

This post also appeared on La Plaza, the Los Angeles Times blog.

Reports are emerging this morning that 12 people, including three police officers, were killed yesterday during a police raid on the News Divine Nightclub in Mexico City.

The capital’s police chief said hundreds of youths marking the end of the school year had panicked when police raided the News Divine club.

He said there had been a stampede by customers trying to escape. Three police officers were among the dead.

Police said they had been investigating reports that drugs and alcohol were being sold to under-age clubbers. BBC

You can see a video here from El Universal on the tragic event and read the Miami Herald report here.

Photo: AP via the Miami HeraldA woman reacts next to the body of a young nightclubber who died in a stampede at the News Divine club in northeastern Mexico City, Friday, June 20, 2008. At least 10 people were trampled to death during a police raid on the nightclub, the capital’s police chief said. The Police went to the club in the early evening to check reports of drugs and alcohol being sold to minors.

Winner of the Frontline Club Journalism Award John D McHugh is interviewed at the Frontline Club, London, about his award-winning work from Afghanistan.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

Corruption within Mexico’s law enforcement agencies is reputedly rife, and recent figures show that people here spent more on bribes last year than they did during 2005. But it’s always interesting to see hearsay happen, and yesterday I had the pleasure of witnessing the power of the bribe first hand.

A friend of mine, Pedro, was driving me home after taking me for breakfast. We were on Avenida Insurgentes, one of Mexico’s City’s main traffic thoroughfares which, once you get onto, is hard to turn back on. U-turns are usually the form used by Distrito Federal’s confident drivers to get back to where they came from.

Pedro decided to pull a classic DF maneuver. In order to turn round, when the traffic light in front of us turned green, he pulled into the lane of waiting cross-traffic to our right, moving over in front of the waiting cars to wait for the light to change. But before it did, both of us spotted a traffic policeman on the other side of the road. He signaled to Pedro to move on, not to make the turn and to carry on driving down Insurgentes.
To my puzzlement, Pedro ignored him, later explaining that he was planning to ignore the warden and whiz by. But, as we pulled out into the road and swung round to the left back onto Insurgentes, we came face to face with the traffic warden’s colleague, standing in the middle of the road. He pulled us over.

I tensed up. I didn’t know what to expect. My companion started trying to explain that he’d made the move because we were in a hurry and turning round on Insurgentes was hard. Neither of those explanations were very true, and our man here knew it. He asked to see Pedro’s license.

There was a silence.

Pedro threw me a nervous glance.

He ran his hand through his hair and down his face, looking shocked.

“No traigo licencio, official,” he murmured.

“I don’t have a license.”

The policeman’s face lit up. His partner – who Pedro had blankly ignored – appeared in order to reap his revenge, jotting down the number of the license plate and the car details.

We didn’t need the policeman who had stopped us to pull out his little book of rules and read us the penalties for the traffic infraction Pedro had just committed, as well as the cost of driving without a license. But he did it anyway.

“Offer him some money,” I murmured, surprising myself.

But it looked bleak. The thousands of pesos my friend was going to have to pay in fines mounted. Later, friends told me that the jotting down of details and the threat of fines is all part of the elaborate theatre of the bribe culture.

Pedro got out of the car and stood speaking conspiratorially to the policeman who was jotting down the car details, paying him the attention he should have paid him three minutes ago when he told him not to make the turn. The policeman appeared to be focused on his work and was clearly enjoying himself.

Pedro reached into his back pocket and pulled out 500 pesos. The policeman took it discreetly, tucked it under his clipboard and walked away.

Game Over.

As frequently is the case, I was astounded and made no secret of that as we drove away. $US50 to get yourself out of driving without a license, a serious traffic infraction and disregarding an officer. What a bargain.

Latin American countries such as Brazil and Mexico have been strong on promoting human rights internationally and in supporting the UN human rights machinery during 2007.

But unless the gap between their policies internationally and their performance at home is closed their credibility as human rights champions will be challenged, according to this week’s report from Amnesty International on human rights around the world.

You can access the report here and click on the links at the top for specific country reports.

Techniques traditionally used by Latin American countries to oppress political dissidents have been turned on human rights defenders and, in countries such as Mexico, journalists.

The war in Colombia continues to hit civilians the hardest:

“Civilians continued to bear the brunt of Colombia’s long-running internal armed conflict. Although the number of those killed or kidnapped continued to fall, all parties to the conflict – the security forces, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups – continued to commit serious human rights abuses. Hundreds of thousands of people were again displaced by confrontations between the warring parties.”

The United States seems to be softening on th death penalty:

“For many years, US policy on the death penalty has run counter to the abolitionist trend in the rest of the region. While 2007 saw death sentences imposed in the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the USA, the USA was the only country to carry out executions. However, even in the USA, there are signs that support for the death penalty is softening.”

And there seems to have been some progress on women’s rights:

“Latin America continued to take important and innovative steps to stamp out violence against women and make gender equality a reality. Mexico and Venezuela, for example, passed new laws to combat violence against women. These laws broaden the definition of violence against women and provide a more comprehensive framework of protection mechanisms. Some initiatives to tackle violence against women – for example the pioneering women’s police stations in Brazil – continued to be hampered by a lack of adequate resources and continuing misconceptions about the nature and extent of the problem.”

Impunity however, is still rife in the region due to corruption, inefficiency and a lack of political will on the part of each country’s justice system.

Although there are some effective justice processes taking place in Argentina, Peru and Chile for past abuses during the dirty wars on those countries - see this week’s post La Plaza on that - perpetrators of human rights abuses, particularly agents of the state, went unpunished:

“Human rights violations committed by agents of the state continued to be poorly investigated in most countries. In Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Jamaica, for example, human rights violations committed by law enforcement officials were rarely, if ever, prosecuted.”

See last year’s post on Amnesty’s Mexico Report.