Lopez Obrador gains a vote

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

A mayor ready for his closeup

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

The gentrification of Latin resort towns

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

Violence triggers travel advisory for Mexico

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

New developments in cricket coach death

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

Starbucks finds its niche in Mexico

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

Garcia sets agenda for Bush meeting

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.

Mexico's beaches threatened by global warming

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

Trying to heal in Oaxaca

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

Vote for Machu Picchu!

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