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| May 2007 »
Catholics in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, on Sunday welcomed a new archbishop, Odilo Pedro Scherer. Dom Odilo, as he is known, will soon be hosting Pope Benedict XVI on his first visit to the Western Hemisphere as pope.
The pontiff is scheduled to arrive to São Paulo May 9 for a four-day stop in the world’s most populous Catholic country. The pontiff is to meet with Brazilian youth, political and church leaders and canonize a Brazilian Franciscan, Blessed Antonio Galvão. The Brazilian media this week reported the advance arrival of a pair of ``pope-mobiles’’ to ferry the pontiff about.
Banners proclaiming that Brazil was to be ``blessed’’ by the papal visit were hoisted inside the neo-gothic cathedral where Archbishop Scherer, 57, assumed his new duties. Police were out in force in the adjacent plaza, a litter-strewn and dodgy island of green amid São Paulo’s gray downtown.
The new archbishop replaced Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who now heads the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, and was himself a papal candidate before Benedict XVI was named.
Like Hummes, Scherer is the descendant of German settlers in southern Brazil whose offspring hold considerable influence in the Brazilian church. Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Marcel Soares in Sao Paulo.
Credit the Mexicans with smuggling most of the marijuana into the United States and now, apparently, with making it stronger than ever. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported this week that the potency of marijuana sold in the United States has reached record levels. “This isn’t your father’s marijuana,” said John Walters, President Bush’s drug czar.
The University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project found that samples from around the country averaged 8.5% in THC, pot’s active ingredient, with some batches reaching a brain-numbing 32%. Your father’s dope averaged around 2% to 3% back in the day.
Mexican gangs in central California are using select seeds from back home to grow more powerful marijuana, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2007 National Drug Threat Assessment. Their counterparts in Mexico also are using strains that yield more THC-enriched buds. Canada’s new expertise in high-potency pot, with some 800 metric tons exported to the U.S. each year, also figures in the change.
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
Ever since Simon Bolívar (aka The Liberator) and his allies freed South America from Spanish rule in the 1820s, various politicians have dreamed of uniting the continent under a single economic or political system.
The idea of forming a kind of United States of South America, akin to the European Union, resulted in the founding of the Mercosur trade bloc in 1991.
Now the leaders of two countries of the so-called Southern Cone, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, are taking a step toward educational integration of the continent by kicking around the idea of a South American university.
"For a long time I have dreamt of constructing a Mercosur university, but I don't think that is enough," a story in the Santiago Times of Chile quotes Lula as saying. "We need to create various universities so that our young people can freely travel up and down the continent." But La Plaza wonders: Will classes be in Spanish, Portuguese or both?
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Art fairs are becoming as ubiquitous as film festivals. Sometimes it seems as if every city in the world has one. Mexico City's MACO, or México Arte Contemporáneo, is a relative latecomer to the scene.
But a visit to Wednesday night's opening festivities in the swishy Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood indicated that MACO, now in its fourth year, already has the basics down: a buzzing atmosphere, ambient music, lots of dressed-to-kill young people, and, yes, an interesting global cross-section of contemporary art.
Some 700 artists and 80 galleries representing 15 different countries, including regular attendees The Happy Lion gallery from L.A.'s Chinatown, have their wares on display through Sunday at the Residencial Palmas Park, a massive new upscale housing development that's still under construction.
On Wednesday night, browsers strolled the concrete labyrinth taking in witty "industrial sculptures" made of felt by Chilean artist Johanna Unzueta; Daniela Edburg's fantasy-realist photos, with neo-feminist subtexts that are simultaneously amusing and disturbing (my favorite, "Death By Cotton Candy," shows a pink funnel cloud chasing a young woman); Gabriel Orozco's iconic Mexican cardboard flags; and Simon Vega's "Caseta de vigilancia," a mock "guardhouse" cobbled together with scraps of wooden packing crates and other found materials.
Vega's fake security station, complete with "surveillance cameras" made of plastic water bottles, was the perfect symbol for an event where everyone seems to be watching everyone else.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
In a bid to reduce chronic prison overcrowding, Brazil is considering a novel alternative: satellite technology.
Legislators are contemplating approving the use of satellites to monitor the movements of persons convicted of minor, non-violent crimes, Brazilian media reports. That way, offenders deemed non-threatening wouldn’t have to be locked up. Instead, eligible violators would be outfitted with wrist or ankle bracelets equipped with communication devices linked to satellites. Authorities could then monitor their movements.
The idea is to reserve prison space for violent offenders.
“The costs are less than maintaining a prisoner in a jail unnecessarily,” said Sent. Demóstenes Torres. Brazilian jails are notoriously overcrowded and have become bases for gang leaders who send out orders to subordinates in the field. Violence by a prison-based gang virtually shut down the city of São Paulo for a day last year.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Mexico’s globe-trotting former president, Vicente Fox, visited San Diego yesterday for an awards ceremony where he talked tough against the proposed U.S.-Mexico border fence and took a veiled swipe at his old nemesis, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Fox has kept a busy public schedule since leaving office five months ago. He came to San Diego after giving a speech at the European Parliament. At the U.S. Grant Hotel ballroom downtown, Fox got several standing ovations and accepted an award from the Institute of the Americas for his commitment to democratic principles.
Fox plans on building the first Mexican presidential library and said he will “ride his horse of democracy” to South America to promote social policies. Though he praised some South American leftist presidents, he criticized “messianic, dictatorial” leaders.
“I don’t accept demagoguery as an easy answer to poverty,” said Fox, in an obvious reference to Chavez, with whom he had tense relations. The former president saved his most impassioned remarks for U.S. plans to build a fence along the border.
He noted that his own grandfather, a Cincinnati-born U.S. citizen who moved to Mexico, embodied the immigrant experience that enriches nations. “I can’t understand why a democratic nation, the champion of democracy and freedom, is building a wall,” said Fox.
Posted by Richard Marosi in San Diego
News that Warner Brothers has scooped up the feature rights to an acclaimed documentary about Bolivia’s contentious 2002 presidential elections has caused a stir. La Razon newspaper, La Paz.
The trade publication Variety reported this week that George Clooney’s production company, Smoke House, would remake “Our Brand Is Crisis,” the riveting 2005 documentary by Rachel Boynton.
The original film examines the hotly contested 2002 Bolivian elections and the candidacy of the much-criticized Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a longtime U.S. resident nicknamed “Goni.” On Sanchez de Lozada’s behalf, a team of Democratic political consultants — including James Carville, the ex-campaign aide to Bill Clinton — superimposed U.S.-style electoral tactics in the impoverished South America nation.
Bolivian critics called Sanchez de Lozada a U.S. henchman who spoke Spanish with a North American accent. He was elected president in a congressional runoff after receiving less than 25% of the popular vote. Sanchez de Lozada resigned in 2003 and fled the country amid a popular uprising.
The current Bolivian government, led by leftist President Evo Morales, who finished second in the 2002 balloting, is seeking Sanchez de Lozada’s extradition from the United States in connection with dozens of deaths during protests that chased the former leader from Bolivia.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires.
Mexico’s highest election court took a big step this week toward resolving the remaining controversy from last July’s presidential election. The final count gave conservative Felipe Calderon a margin of victory of less than 1 percentage point over leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The leftists demanded a recount of all 41 million votes, but Mexico’s election court refused to grant one. After the final court decision that named Calderon the winner, John Ackerman, an American-born law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and other academics and writers then filed suit in an attempt to gain access to the ballots. Their aim was to study the ballots, and perhaps conduct a partial recount, arguing that such an exercise would increase public confidence in the result.
On Wednesday, the court ruled in a 7-0 decision that the marked ballots are not public documents and need not be made available to the public. The court gave the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the government body charged with running the country’s elections, 48 hours to rewrite the initial ruling that denied Ackerman access to the ballots, saying the officials had failed to provide adequate legal arguments for denying the petition.
But the judges’ ruling made it clear that after IFE officials comply with that formality, they can destroy the ballots, as required by Mexican law.
Posted by Hector Tobar in Mexico City.
Noticias, the leading Argentine news-weekly, regularly assails Argentine President Nestor Kirchner as a bullying populist who tolerates little opposition to his way of doing things
But, for its cover story this week on Kirchner’s governing style, Noticias chose an unusual illustration: two giraffes in the act of mating.
The inspiration, Noticias explained in an editor’s note, was a celebrated 1994 edition of the British weekly The Economist. Beneath the headline, ``The trouble with mergers,’’ that Economist cover featured an illustration of two camels in a similar predicament.
``Discarding photos of lions, turtles and penguins, Noticias opted for the stylized image of the male giraffe on top of the female giraffe, which reflects with such brutality and beauty our chief of state’s way of relating,’’ the magazine explained. ``And that of those who opt to submit themselves, out of pleasure or necessity.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
How do you say "I love you" in Chile? Let us count the ways. Or wait, there are just too many, especially if you're a poet.
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chile's most famous maestro of meter and a national icon, penned some of the 20th-century's most stirring verses about love (among many other themes). Much of his work is so inherently musical that modern bands have set it to haunting rock and folk arrangements.
But there's lots more to Chilean poetry than Pablo, as one contributor to this exchange at Harvard's indispensable Global Voices Online project points out. You can start, as one blog poster does, with Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean Nobel Prize winner for literature. And let's not forget Nicanor Parra, or his younger sibling and musical wordsmith Violetta Parra, the Joan Baez of the Southern Cone.
Global Voices, which provides English-language translations of blogs across the world, allows you to read many comments in the original Spanish side by side with English, including some lines from Neruda's famous "Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada" ("Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair").
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Mexico’s losing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador got a new supporter early Tuesday: Jose Maria Lopez Muller.
Lopez Obrador’s newest son was born to Beatriz Gutierrez Muller, a 38-year-old journalist who married Lopez Obrador last fall. She’d said in an interview last year that she hoped the 53-year-old former Mexico City mayor would lose the election, rather than sacrifice their personal lives on behalf of the country.
She got her wish. And angry Lopez Obrador followers took over Mexico City’s main boulevard for weeks in protest after he narrowly lost last July’s election. Lopez Obrador, who was widowed with three sons, had promised more help to the poor.
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
 More than 700 people are believed to have been killed so far this year in the battle between Mexico’s east and west coast drug gangs and their affiliates.
Police and politicians are said to be coerced into cooperating through this menacing offer: Lead or gold? Everyone understands the choice is between a bullet or a bribe.
So the 50,000 constituents of Jesus Velazquez, the mayor of Guadalupe y Calvo, probably have mixed feelings about hizzoner taking a movie role as a farmer-turned drug mafioso, even if it is in a straight-to-DVD film. (movie still above)
Authorities said 61 people were killed this year in Velazquez’s state of Chihuahua, which includes the notorious smugglers’ city of Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
“In the beginning, I didn’t want to do it,” he told the Excelsior newspaper. “I didn’t like the movie’s theme. I thought, ‘How can I appear in such a movie while being mayor?’ But in the end I thought, a movie’s just a movie. I don’t think anyone is going to think what I’m acting is real.”
Posted by Carlos Martinez in Mexico City
Quick, what do these three Latin American cities have in common: 1) San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 2) Antigua, Guatemala 3) Cartagena de Indias, Colombia?
Answer: They're exquisite, colonial-era towns, islands of affluence in the middle of deprivation, that some worry are in danger of becoming private playgrounds for the wealthy and foreign tourists.
San Miguel and Antigua have been grappling with the trade-offs of their soaring popularity for years, and authors like Tony Cohan have written sensitively and perceptively about the delicate social ecosystems of these rare places.
The new kid on the block is Cartagena, a coastal Caribbean port, relatively safe by Colombian standards, with cobbled streets, resplendent architecture and a rich history that has made it a favorite of sight-seers and film makers. But as the Times reported in February, some fear that more cruise liners and soaring real estate prices linked to a construction boom are threatening the unique character of the so-called Heroic City, particularly its beautiful historic center.
Now the Colombian magazine Noventaynueve has weighed in with an editorial, arguing the need for better, more thoughtful planning by city officials in promoting Cartagena as a cultural destination -- and not just a destination for outside visitors. Among other points, the editorial says that the majority of Cartagena's local residents are "ignorant of the festivals that are going on in our house." Further, it says that many of these cultural events occur at times of day, and are priced at levels, that are "little accessible for the majority."
Any recent travelers out there care to comment?
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
 The U.S. State Department has renewed travel advisories to Mexico because of continuing violence and kidnappings, particularly in border cities under siege by warring drug gangs.
Visitors are warned to “stay in well-known tourist destinations and tourist areas of the cities with more adequate security.” High profile killings in Acapulco and the business capital of Monterrey have included those cities on the warning list. Don’t flash jewelry or wads of cash, the government warns; leave your itinerary with loved ones before you leave; stay on main highways; avoid demonstrations.
The advisory was issued by Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico who married the country’s richest woman, the billionaire heiress to a Mexican beer empire. Being a Mexican American of humble origins who blew into town and snagged the country’s most eligible bachelorette seems to have amplified resentment against Garza’s various travel warnings over the past two years.
The timing on this one, days after the Virginia Tech slayings, didn’t help.
The Reforma newspaper on Friday ran a cartoon with the caption, “Warning: Mexico is too dangerous!” over the image of a young man pointing two handguns.
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
Authorities in Jamaica have postponed today’s inquest into the death last month of Pakistan’s cricket coach, claiming to have discovered ``new and significant developments’’ in what has so far been presumed a murder case.
The body of Bob Woolmer, a South African national, was discovered in his Kingston hotel room a day after his team, which had been favored to advance to the final rounds of the 2007 Cricket World Cup now under way, was eliminated with a loss to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day.
Jamaica’s daily Gleaner newspaper had speculated the inquest was put off due to the security demands on police surrounding the semi-final cricket match to be played in Kingston’s Sabina Park stadium on Tuesday.
But a statement from the Jamaican Justice Ministry disclosed Saturday that the investigation under way with the aid of Scotland Yard, Pakistan security officials and Interpol has encountered fresh leads in the coach’s death.
Posted by Carol J. Williams in Miami
Love them or hate them, the Starbucks Coffee Co. is making a big splash in Mexico. They’ve opened 116 stores, mostly in Mexico City, where some neighborhoods already have two.
How can a Seattle-based firm conquer a coffee-growing country, especially when charging the equivalent of Mexico’s minimum daily wage for a latte and a cookie? For some of the same reasons they’ve been successful elsewhere: standardized service, choice of coffees, decent soundtracks and comfy couches to hang with your laptop while ostensibly writing a novel or wrapping up an important deal.
Of course, they weren’t facing much competition.
Many Mexican restaurants still serve instant coffee, even though growers in Veracruz and Chiapas raise some of the best beans available. Veracruz dark sells for about $12 a kilo on the street, about half the price of similar Starbucks offerings.
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
It is much transformed Alan Garcia who meets President Bush today at the White House. The Peruvian president saw the world differently during his first stint as president of Peru in the 1980s.
In those days, as a 30-something enfant terrible, Garcia, a spellbinding orator, balked at making debt payments to foreign lenders and assailed U.S. policy in Central America. He left his country a shambles, in the throes of a guerrilla war and economic turmoil.
A disgraced Garcia went into exile for years. Many Peruvians thought they had seen the last of el Caballo Loco [Crazy Horse], as Garcia was known. Not so.
Garcia sealed his extraordinary comeback bid last as a moderate alternative to Ollanta Humala, an ex-Army colonel and acolyte of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Given the alternative, the White House was thrilled to welcome Alan Garcia, the sequel.
In coming to Washington, Garcia says he plans an intense lobbying campaign for U.S. approval of a free-trade deal with Peru. Drug-trafficking will also be on the agenda. In recent weeks, Garcia has pledged to use war planes to bomb cocaine laboratories and clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian jungle. His hard-line stance has triggered criticism at home that he is playing to his new ``friends’’ in Washington.
How times, and el Caballo Loco, have changed.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires and Adriana León in Lima.
Global warming is threatening Mexico's beaches, one of the nation's most beautiful natural resources and a huge generator of tourism income and jobs.
According to a front-page Earth Day feature that ran Sunday in Mexico's national daily Reforma , hurricanes and rising sea levels are eating away hundreds of miles of beaches in five Mexican states, including Quintana Roo in the Yucatan Peninsula. That's the southern Mexican state that's home to the beach city of Cancun and other resorts along the so-called Riviera Maya, the wildly popular Caribbean playground that attracts about 40% of Mexico's international visitors.
Hurricane Wilma swept away much of the sugary sand of Cancun's famed hotel zone in September 2005. The government spent more than $21 million in an attempt to restore the beach, but continued erosion has undone much of that effort.
In the past, Mexican beaches destroyed by hurricanes have healed naturally. Cancun may recover its sand with time. Still, environmentalists say human activity is a major threat to Mexico's shores.
Melting glaciers are raising sea levels that could swamp thousands of miles of coast line. Global warming is likewise boosting ocean temperatures, which experts say portends more frequent and more powerful hurricanes. Water pollution and real estate developers are destroying mangroves that help shield beaches from erosion.
Other coastal states hit hard by erosion include Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico, and Sinaloa, home of the coastal resort Mazatlan, on the Pacific, according to Reforma.
Foreign visitors spent more than $12 billion in Mexico last year, much of that at beach resorts. Tourism is the nation's third-largest source of foreign exchange, behind petroleum and remittances. The industry employs 2 million people in Mexico.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
U.S. and European tourists are slowly trickling back to Oaxaca city, the beautiful southern Mexican state capital renowned for its colonial architecture, distinctive cuisine and handicrafts, and large, networked community of expatriate Americans.
But the aftermath of a bitter months-long showdown between Oaxaca state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and a coalition of striking teachers, trade unionists, leftist activists and indigenous people persists. That conflict came to a head last October when former Mexican president Vicente Fox sent in federal police to break an occupation of the city center by the teachers and their supporters. The police were dispatched just hours after U.S. activist and independent journalist Bradley Roland Will, 36, was gunned down in the street while shooting video of the conflict for Independent Media Center, an Internet-based alternative news agency.
Scores of strikers were arrested during the subsequent melee, and human rights groups have protested what they say have been numerous incidents of torture, unlawful detention and denial of legal counsel, charges that local authorities have denied.
While Oaxaca and the outside world wait for official and/or independent investigations of last fall's events, street theater is keeping the debate alive. On Saturday a "popular tribunal" made up of human rights lawyers and the author-intellectual Elena Poniatowska, among others, issued a not-unexpected verdict against Ruiz for what it called the "atrocities" that occurred during the conflict. You can read about it here in the left-leaning Mexico City daily La Jornada.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
That is the mantra of Peruvian officials and media outlets urging citizens to cast ballots for the Inca citadel in a global contest naming the ``new’’ Seven Wonders of the World. The competition has generated extraordinary interest and much civic boosterism in Peru, where the Inca site reigns as the biggest tourist draw.
Machu Picchu made the Top 7 among 21 ``finalist’’ sites in results announced last month by the New7Wonders Foundation, the Swiss-based contest sponsor. People can vote online, by phone or text message. Peruvian newspapers are providing voting links in online editions.
Other top-7 vote-getters: the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico; the Colosseum in Rome; the Great Wall of China; Petra in Jordan; the Pyramids of Giza; and the Taj Mahal. The statutes of Easter Island, a Chilean territory, fell from the front-runner group.
The seven ``winners’’ are to be announced in Lisbon, Portugal on July 7—or, as the organizers like to say, 07/07/07.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
For centuries, Mexico has downplayed its rich African heritage, and there've been some embarrassing recent examples of Afro-Mexican culture clash.
But a new wave of academics, film makers and others are exploring the impact of African slaves in shaping Mexican history, music, art, food and culture. The March issue of the Mexico City English-language monthly Inside Mexico devotes its cover story to a look at the African descendants of the Costa Chica region of Mexico's Guerrero and Michoacán states.
This week, Mexico City is hosting its first festival of African cinema. A total of 47 feature and animated films and documentaries from 20 African countries are being screened, and a giant map of Africa is being displayed in the capital's Zócalo (central plaza) to help Mexicans get better acquainted with the continent that has given them such famous citizens as the Mexican War of Independence priest-hero José María Morelos, whom many historians believe was of African heritage.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
They’re calling it the ``Garden of Death’’ in Rio de Janeiro.
Cariocas, as Rio residents are known, awoke today to find 1,300 red roses planted in the white sands of celebrated Copacabana Beach. Each flower represents a person killed violently this year.
The Rio of Peace group also planted 700 crosses last month at Copacabana in a symbolic protest against the carnage. But the number of victims has accelerated rapidly in the drug wars, gang battles and other criminality that afflict one of the world’s most picturesque cities.
If things don’t improve, organizers warn, there could be 6,000 crosses or flowers in the beach by year’s end.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
And speaking of fútbol (see two postings below), any country that can produce soccer talent of the caliber of Pele, Garrincha and Ronaldinho hardly needs a home-field advantage. But Brazil, the only five-time World Cup winner, is a current favorite to host soccer's premier showcase in 2014 for only the second time in its history.
The Portuguese-speaking futbol powerhouse was the only country from its 10-nation South American group to submit a formal bid for the tournament. Colombia had been pondering a bid, but backed out at the last minute. South America hasn't hosted the World Cup since Argentina won the tournament in Buenos Aires in 1978.
It remains to be seen whether Brazil can upgrade enough of its stadiums in time to convince FIFA, the soccer world's governing body, that it's capable of rolling out the welcome mat. Some Brazilians still are haunted by memories of their country's stunning loss to Uruguay in the 1950 final, at Rio de Janeiro's then brand-spanking-new Maracanã stadium.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
The growing intensity of Mexico's drug wars, and its spread to new corners of the country, has been covered extensively in all of the country's major dailies this week. Twenty-one people were killed on Monday alone: from the state of Quintana Roo in the south, to Baja California and Sonora in the north. It was the bloodiest day so far this year.
Perhaps most disturbing has been the news of a wave of violence sweeping through the northern city of Monterrey, part of Nuevo Leon state and considered by many Mexico's business capital. Mexicans are used to hearing about drug shootouts in border cities like Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo, and even in Acapulco, but not in corporate-dominated Monterrey.
El Universal reports on the battles taking place between the so-called Gulf and Sinaola cartels--and perhaps within the Gulf cartel itself--over the right to control the drug trade there. So far this year, 18 police officers have been killed by suspected drug bands in the Monterrey metropolitan area.
In March, El Universal columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote that officials in the federal Attorney General's office have linked "high officials" in the government of Nuevo Leon Gov. Natividad González Parás to traffickers. The officials are said to offer protection to one band of traffickers. Riva Palacio offers a highly detailed and chilling account of the battles going on in Monterrey, which has reportedly become a center of the retail drug trade and of arms trafficking.
Posted by Héctor Tobar in Mexico City
That was the headline today in the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, reflecting the wonder of the press here, and in Spain, with the transcendent goal that the young Argentine forward Lionel Messi scored while playing Wednesday for Barcelona.
Commentators instantly compared the goal to the classic netted by Diego Armando Maradona, the now-retired Argentine legend, against England in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Messi, 19, hadn’t been born yet.
While the circumstances of Messi’s goal were more mundane—it was scored in Barcelona during a King’s Cup victory against rival Getafe—the art and dazzle of the young Argentine’s feat were lauded on both sides of the Atlantic. Replays and analysis of his achievement dominated sports television in Argentina.
Messi began his epic run in his own half, clearing two defenders and charging toward the visitors’ goal with opponents converging. He swerved to avoid rivals, rounded past the goal-keeper and lifted the ball home from a narrow angle.
But there was a bittersweet coda at home, as Argentines lamented a lost opportunity during last year’s disappointing World Cup. The national-squad coach opted to use Messi sparingly last year. The phenom never got a touch in the decisive match, in which host Germany ousted Argentina. Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Last Saturday in his weekly Culture Mix column, Times staff writer Agustin Gurza informed readers that documentary film maker Ken Burns had agreed to revise his upcoming PBS series on World War II to include the contributions of Latinos who served in the U.S. armed forces.
Burns had come under fire from Latino advocates who were upset that the seven-part documentary "The War," scheduled to air in September, neglected the contributions of some 500,000 Latino men and women who served Uncle Sam in an hour of need.
Among others, Gurza spoke with Otto Santa Ana, an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA, "whose father and five uncles served in WWII," Gurza wrote. Now Jennifer Vo, identified as a library aide for the Los Angeles Unified School District, has joined the discussion in a commentary co-written with John P. Schmal that's posted on the local website latinola.com.
In her interesting, highly detailed piece (which apparently was written before Burns decided to shoot new material for his series), Vo discusses the many contributions of Latinos to the U.S. military, from the Expedition of 1781 that established the Pueblo of Los Angeles to the Korean War and beyond.
"From my earliest memories, my family has always expressed its pride in its military tradition of protecting American soil," writes Vo, two of whose family members were killed in action in World War II.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Mexicans who have been waiting decades for more competition in their nation's television sector are going to have to wait a little longer. Hector Osuna, president of the Federal Telecommunications Commission, said this week that his agency is going to have to do lengthy studies of the nation's broadcasting spectrum before awarding licenses for new radio and TV concessions.
Osuna said the research likely won't be completed until 2008, ensuring the continued dominance of Televisa and TV Azteca for the foreseeable future. The two networks control 94% of the nation's television stations and virtually all of its advertising revenue, making Mexico the most closed TV market in Latin America outside of Cuba.
Broadcasting is one of several key industries dominated by oligopolies, which are being blamed for retarding Mexico's economic growth and exacerbating income inequality. Seven of the 10 Mexicans listed on this year's Forbes ranking of the world's richest people made their money in industries where there is little or no competition in Mexico.
They include telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu, who recently surpassed American investor Warren Buffett to become the world's second-richest man with a net worth estimated at $53.1 billion, as well as TV Azteca Chairman Ricardo Salinas Pliego (No. 172, $4.6 billion) and Emilio Azcarraga Jean (No. 459, $2.1 billion), chairman and chief executive of Grupo Televisa.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
In the ongoing scandals involving U.S. government efforts to broadcast anti-Castro propaganda to Cubans, a senior executive of TV Marti drew a 27-month prison sentence in federal court in Miami Wednesday for bilking the taxpayer-funded operation of at least $112,000.
Jose M. Miranda also must pay $8,000 in fines for orchestrating kickbacks from a production contractor, Perfect Image Film and Video Productions, during his five-year stint as programming director.
TV and Radio Marti, both funded and operated by the U.S. government’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting, have been the subject of fierce criticism and debate in Latin America as well as in the United States. The broadcasts cost U.S. taxpayers tens of millions each year and seldom reach their target audience: Cuba’s 11 million people.
Cuban President Fidel Castro’s Communist regime jams the TV signal, and costly efforts to beam it from airborne U.S. military planes have also failed to get the programming into many Cuban households. Even those who can receive it tend to see the programs as amateurish and turn the channel in favor of livelier and less politically oriented programs from Mexican satellite providers.
Castro has railed against the intrusions into his country’s airwaves as imperialistic and aimed at inciting insurrection.
The Miami-based production and broadcast services are staffed by scores of anti-Castro Cuban exiles who keep pressure on the Bush administration to maintain harsh sanctions on Cuba.
Posted by Carol J. Williams in Miami
Tijuana’s downtown bullring played host to many a bloody battle between man and beast. And now, facing it’s own death, its not going down without a fight. Two months after work crews began demolishing the 50-year-old structure to make way for a residential tower, bullfight aficionados and history buffs have been granted a court injunction halting the work.
In it’s heyday in the 1960s and 70s, the bullring was packed to the rafters every Sunday, mostly with tourists from Southern California. Sometimes Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe would show up, say historians.
But after a new bullring was built near the beach, attendance waned. It may be too late to save the bullring; half the steel structure has already been torn down. But preservationists are working to at least salvage the façade or create a small museum.
The effort hasn’t attracted much support in this booming city where most residents are newcomers. A potential developer of the site considers the aging structure an eyesore that housed a brutal, antiquated sport.
“I don’t have any fond memories,” said Gabriel Robles, the managing partner of Baja Resort Advisors. “I always thought it was terrible. Why don’t we bring aback the lions and the Christians. How about gladiator fights?” State officials are expected to make their final decision in June. Stay tuned.
Posted by Richard Marosi in Tijuana
There's been a lot of speculation on both sides of the Straits of Florida about the reasons behind the closing of Vitral, a self-described "sociocultural Catholic magazine" based in the western Cuban diocese of Pinar del Río.
Founded in 1994, and noted for its relatively independent editorial stance and willingness to discuss and even occasionally criticize the communist Cuban government, the 10,000-circulation magazine announced in April that it was shutting down because of a lack of funds.
Named for a variety of multi-colored glass used in old church windows, the magazine stressed the need for openness and a diversity of opinions about Cuba. According to an unidentified "church activist" in this story in El Nuevo Herald of Miami, the magazine was closed down because it had become a threat to "conservatives in the church and hard-liners in government."
But two days ago, a Catholic News Agency story quoted the diocese's bishop emeritus Jose Siro Gonzalez as saying that he hoped the closing would be only temporary, while insisting that the lack of such basic resources as paper and ink was indeed a real problem for the publication.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
La República of Lima highlights the death at Virginia Tech of a Peruvian student, Daniel Pérez Cueva, who was among those gunned down on campus. Cueva was a swimming champ who spoke three languages and dreamed of becoming a diplomat, the newspaper says.Today’s issue of the tabloid features front-page photos of a smiling Cueva and a mug shot of the dead shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, alongside the headline: "The two faces of the Virginia Massacre."
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andres D'Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Mexicans have shared in mourning the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and expressed condolences to their cross-border neighbors. But there's also a widespread perception here that some of the United States' biggest problems -- from drug abuse to foreign policy mishaps to high rates of gun-related homicides -- are often self-inflicted.
So it is with the Virginia tragedy. On Tuesday, the left-leaning daily La Jornada ran several stories under the headline, "United States, in shock for the new slaughter; the cause is ignored." The cause, in the paper's view, is the large number of guns privately owned by Americans.
"Tragedy in United States blamed on a culture of weapons and the ease with which young people acquire them," ran another typical headline in La Prensa, another Mexico City tabloid.
An editorial cartoon in Reforma, a centrist-conservative Mexico City newspaper, depicted George Bush saying that the Virginia Tech students were "in the wrong place, at the wrong time." Behind the president, the U.S. bald eagle was shielding its eyes and saying, "Speaking of which...," an apparent reference to the rampant bloodshed in Iraq.
What galls many Mexicans is their perception that the United States sometimes preaches one thing to the rest of the world, but practices another itself. Mexico has bristled in recent years at U.S. criticism of its failure to curb an outbreak of drug-related killings.
Mexicans, however, aren't in a good position to cast stones over the Virginia massacre: In this morning's edition of the Mexico City daily Milenio, the Virginia Tech story took up just one column deep inside the paper. The cover photo of a dead, mutilated man linked to a story about a new rash of brutal narcotics-related torture and assassinations -- in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, writing today in the Spanish daily El Pais, noted the warm reception that greeted Bill Clinton last month at the international Congress of the Spanish Language in Cartagena, Colombia.
``It is said that comparisons are odious, but in that moment I thought: `How would George W. Bush have been received here.’’
Clinton, Fuentes noted, was accorded a hearty applause and was able to walk the streets of the colonial city and spend three hours with his old friend, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian nobel laureate who was the congress’ star attraction.
``What did you speak about, Gabo?’’ Fuentes asked, using Garcia Marquez’s universal nickname.
``About everything.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires
Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte has learned that comments regarded as sexist are no longer publicly acceptable in macho Latin America—even if made in an indigenous language.
Duarte ignited a firestorm last week by suggesting that a single female Cabinet member was in need of a partner.
He used a word in the Guarani language, which many Paraguayans speak. The verb he used referred to the custom of beating dirty laundry clean with a stick.
The minister, Judity Andraschko, was unfazed, calling the comment ''a quip of the moment.’’
But female opposition lawmakers demanded an apology from Duarte, a lame-duck president and former radio announcer.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andres D'Allesandro in Buenos Aires
The World Health Organization is expanding its efforts to eliminate chagas, a parasitic disease that affects an estimated nine million people in the Americas, most of them children.
The initiative, funded in part by Bayer HealthCare, comes as Brazilian health care officials have been wrestling with an unusually virulent and widespread outbreak of the disease. Three people have died and 25 cases have been confirmed in an outbreak that Brazilian officials have linked to contaminated sugar cane juice. Brazil has pulled the juice from shelves and notified neighboring countries that any tourists who visited beaches in the state of Santa Catarina should see their doctors if they drank sugar cane juice and felt unwell.
Chagas is spread when the feces of parasite-carrying triatomine bugs, or kissing bugs, is carried into the body. Symptoms can take years to appear and include cardiac problems and the swelling of internal organs, resulting in disability and even death.
Long limited to the Americas, chagas has recently been found in Europe and the United States because of migration and poor screening of blood bank donations.
Regional initiatives in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and large parts of Brazil and Central America have reduced the number of cases from about 18 million in 1990, but it is still thought to cause about 50,000 deaths a year. The WHO program, announced Friday in Geneva, would allow the treatment of about 30,000 people over the next five years.
Posted by Nicole Gaouette in Washington, D.C.
A World Bank report released Sunday shows that Mexico sends more migrants abroad than any other country on earth exceeding even the flows from nations that are much bigger, much poorer or convulsed by war and famine.
Two million Mexicans left their homeland between 2000 and 2005, according to the study, most of them to seek employment in the United States. China, whose population is more than 12 times larger than that of Mexico, saw 1.95 million of its citizens leave the country. More than 1.8 million Pakistanis left their homeland. Neighboring India produced 1.4 million migrants.
Economic migrants dwarfed the flows of refugees. For example, just over a half-million residents of Sudan fled that war-torn nation between 2000 and 2005, according to data from the World Bank's report, World Development Indicators 2007.
The northward flow of Mexicans to the United States is one of the largest exoduses in modern history. The equivalent of 10% of Mexico's population of 107 million people now resides north of the border, according to estimates.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
When Mexico's new national library, the $97 million Biblioteca Vasconcelos, opened 10 months ago, some critics already were writing its obituary. The massive edifice in the middle of Mexico City is the largest single cultural project undertaken during Vicente Fox's six-year presidency. But it's been derided as a wasteful vanity by legislators and others who think Mexico should be spending the money instead to beef up its regional library branches across the country, and investing in digital archives rather than dead-tree volumes.
Now it looks as if the nay-sayers may have had a point. The hulking five-story library, which was still under construction when it opened last June, has been closed to the public "indefinitely" while emergency repairs are made and unfinished jobs (such as the large botanical garden) are completed. Architects and engineers have declared the building to have numerous flaws, including cracked staircases and fancy bathroom fixtures that don't work. Another hue and cry erupted recently when it was revealed that the library had been used for a commercial fashion shoot. Images of young, pouting models slinking around the desolate book shelves didn't go over too well.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative this week released its yearly review of telecom agreements negotiated with trading partners. In what is becoming an annual ritual, American officials once again reserved special criticism for Mexico's telecom market.
USTR is upset about a new system for terminating international long distance calls to Mexico that shifts all the costs to U.S. callers. But what really has them steamed is that Mexico's carriers negotiated interconnection rates even higher than those recommended by the Mexico's Federal Telecommunications Commission, known as COFETEL. The upshot is that U.S. carriers will end up paying $124 million more between 2007 and 2010 than they would have if the COFETEL rates had been implemented, according to USTR.
The report noted that Telcel, which dominates Mexico's wireless service, charges U.S. carriers up to 71% more to terminate calls on its network than it charges its own retail customers.
Experts have cited Mexico's telecom market as one of the least competitive and most expensive in the world. Giant Telmex controls more than 90% of the nation's fixed lines while Telcel's share of the mobile market is nearly 80%.
Both companies are controlled by Carlos Slim Helu, the world's second richest man, with a fortune estimated at $53.1 billion by Forbes magazine.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
A judge ruled Wednesday that the longtime head of the Mexican miners union, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, was illegally dumped from his position a year ago.
Forged signatures were used to replace Urrutia with Elias Morales in a union coup just days before the Feb. 19 coal mine disaster that killed 65 workers, the judge ruled.
Urrutia, meanwhile, has been hiding out in Vancouver and no one expects the favorable ruling will bring him home anytime soon. He faces charges of stealing $55 million set aside for laid-off workers while union head, a job he inherited from his dad. He's said he's innocent of any wrongdoing.
Check out his abandoned Mexico City digs at Google Earth: 19 25' 25.72" N 99 12' 27.56" W
Posted by Carlos Martinez in Mexico City
Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost last year's presidential race to Felipe Calderon, has found a new way to raise dough to fund his shadow government: white bread.
According to the national daily Reforma, the self-proclaimed "legitimate president" of Mexico has launched a new line of bread called "Pan Mi General" or "My General's Bread." The logo is a mustachioed revolutionary in a giant sombrero holding a stalk of wheat. The slogan: "No mas pan con lo mismo...sabroso y resisente" which roughly translates into: "Not the same old bread...tasty and strong."
It's a fund-raising tool with some sharp edges to poke fun at Lopez Obrador's rivals. The word "pan" in Spanish means bread, but it's also the acronym for Calderon's conservative National Action Party or PAN.
It's also a slap at Mexican businessman Lorenzo Servitaje, the founder of baking giant Grupo Bimbo. He is one of several wealthy businessmen whom Lopez Obrador accused of helping rig the election for Calderon. (Lopez Obrador's allegations of vote fraud were rejected by an independent election tribunal.)
A loaf of Pan Mi General costs about $1.36, but Lopez Obrador has some disclosure issues of his own. The packaging doesn't contain nutritional information or an expiration date.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico
Might a thaw be developing in the more than century-long Cold War between Chile and Bolivia?
That was the talk following a historic ceremony in the northern Chilean town of Calama, part of the vast stretch of mineral-rich territory annexed from Bolivia following the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), a bloody conflict little remembered outside the region.
Bolivia's humiliating loss cost the country its access to the coast, leaving the nation landlocked and its leaders perennially pining for a corridor to the sea.
In an act of conciliation, military brass from both nations paid homage Tuesday to Eduardo Abaroa, a Bolivian defender who refused to give up as Chilean forces approached. According to legend, Abaroa declared: ``Me, surrender? Let your grandmother surrender!''
Abaroa was killed in the ensuing battle, and has remained a potent symbol of Bolivia's desire to recoup its lost coastal access. New bilateral talks on the issue are expected to begin next month.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires
There's been a news black-out in Guatemala over the kidnap and release of one of the country's leading political pollsters, Emilio Arroyave, earlier this month.
Arroyave, of the polling firm Vox Latina, is doing work for the newspaper Prensa Libre in advance of September's presidential election. He issued a national poll March 30 showing center-left candidate Alvaro Colom, of the UNE party, with a 10-point lead over retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina of the conservative Patriot Party.
Two days later, he was snatched and held for two days. He was released unharmed after his family paid about $5,000, according to the editor of Prensa Libre. The lack of news stories has fueled speculation over the motive of his captors: whether financial, or political dirty tricks. Prensa Libre editor Gonzalo Marroquin says the kidnappers didn't know Arroyave; only that he was driving a BMW.
Arroyave was too traumatized to talk, said a family spokeswoman. Marroquin promised more details Thursday during a visit to Mexico City.
Posted by Sam Enriquez and Carlos Martinez in Mexico City
Mexican President Felipe Calderon is talking energy with heads of state of eight Central American countries at this week's reunion of members of the Plan Puebla Panama in Mexico's Campeche state. Known by its initials PPP, the project seeks to stimulate trade and attract investment to impoverished southern Mexico and the nations of Central America.
The plan has gotten off to slow start since it was hatched in 2004, but leaders say they are committed to integrating economies of the region. One of their priorities is building a petroleum refinery somewhere in Central America to provide cheaper, more reliable supplies of fuel to Mexico's oil-starved neighbors.
Mexico's national daily El Universal
today reported that four companies - Reliance Industries Ltd., China National Petroleum Corp., Valero Energy Corp. and Itochu Corp. - have expressed interest in bidding on the project.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
The international press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, reports that the news program "Al tanto" of recently slain journalist Amado Ramírez on Radiorama Acapulco was taken off the air after the station received threats.
Ramirez was a well-known correspondent for Televisa, and was killed last Friday in what is suspected to be a reprisal by drug-traffickers. The day after his murder, the Radiorama Acapulco security guard got an anonymous phone call warning that "we haven't finished yet," the group reported.
The warning said that Misael Habana, the co-presenter of "Al tanto," would be the next target. Habana said Ramírez had received telephoned death threats a month ago. Here's the site
About 200 journalists marched through Acapulco on Tuesday to demand justice in the slaying. The Associated Press said federal prosecutors later announced they had detained two suspects in the case at a police checkpoint in Acapulco, and found a pistol of the same kind used to kill Ramirez in their car.
Posted by Geoffrey Mohan Times Foreign Desk
Lines of customers stretch more than a 100 deep at the main branch of Nacional Monte de Piedad, Mexico's national pawn shop this week. There's three busy seasons for quickie loans in this credit-starved country: the Christmas holidays, back-to-school week in the fall and spring break.
About 30,000 people came by Monday, said Gustavo Mendez Tapia of the flagship branch in Mexico City's main square. Nearly everyone brought jewelry; a handful had appliances. They're loaned about half what an appraiser figures it could be sold for.
Why now? It seems every year a lot of folks splurge on Easter week vacations that end up costing a lot more than planned.
Hustlers lurk outside the main entrance and offer their own bids. "I'll give you th | |
