|
|
« April 2007 |
Main
| June 2007 »
 For Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian nobel laureate, this is a memorable year—his 80th birthday, the 40th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and, this week, a return after 25 years (officially, anyway) to his birthplace, Aracataca, immortalized as Macondo.
He and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, traveled back to Aracataca in the inaugural trip of a train dubbed the Macondo Express, adorned with images of the yellow butterflies, like those that always accompanied Macondo’s irrepressible Mauricio Babilonia.
Forty years earlier, recalls Tomás Eloy Martínez in the Argentine daily La Nación, Garcia Marquez had traveled to Buenos Aires, where Cien Años de Soledad was initially published.
Fame and fortune was still in the future, the hardships of paying his family’s bills in Mexico City and securing with the postage to ship off the manuscript the present. The initial printing was only 8,000 copies.
But word was already coursing through Latin American literary circles about the seminal achievement that would eventually sell more than 30 million copies, translated into 35 languages. One morning 40 years ago in Buenos Aires, Eloy Martínez recounts, García Márquez suddenly got up from the breakfast table, took his wife by hand, stopped traffic at a busy downtown intersection, and kissed her right there on the street.
``He did it because I was thinner then,’’ his wife said recently, recalling the romantic episode. ``Don’t say that,’’ cautioned García Márquez, ``because I’m capable of doing it again right now.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Census takers in El Salvador are going door to door this month to take the measure of this nation's households. Citizens' responses have provoked an important question: Where the heck is everyone?
A preliminary head count reveals that El Salvador's current population is probably about 6.7 million people, according to a story in the national daily La Prensa Grafica. That's well below the 7.1 million residents that demographers had projected based on data from the last census in 1992.
Heavy migration has played a role. More than 15% of people born in El Salvador are living in the United States, according to figures from the Pew Hispanic Center. The country is also experiencing lower birth rates as impoverished families flee the countryside to find work in the cities and more women enter the workforce.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in San Salvador
Ten months was apparently enough time for Roberto Madrazo to shrug off his humiliating third-place defeat in Mexico’s presidential election and return to the public spotlight. Or try to, anyway.
He’s written a 301-page book is titled, "Treason," or "Treachery," depending on how you translate La Traicion. He met with reporters at the Nikko Hotel Tuesday to tout the book, and he was charming and talkative as he tried out a new role as an elder statesman in Mexico’s former ruling party, known as the PRI.
"Renewal of the party is urgent," said Madrazo, a former governor and party president who was himself known as a PRI dinosaur.
Madrazo, a career politician, gave two reasons why he lost the 2006 election, which takes up a third of the book:
He said he was betrayed by the wily head of the national teacher’s union, Elba Esther Gordillo, after the two former allies had a falling out; and by the PRI governors who yanked their support because they allegedly thought they’d get along better with Felipe Calderon, the conservative PAN party candidate who won.
Of course, a lot of voters didn’t trust Madrazo, either, according to polls last year. He amassed a fortune while ostensibly spending a lifetime on the public payroll.
The Q&A-style book, required reading for Mexico political junkies, can be purchased online at Planeta's website.
Bloggers such as enigmatario and voz independiente are pouncing on the book excerpts.
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
Miss Peru went on national TV to beg an anonymous Mexican taxi driver to return a suitcase full of clothes, shoes and jewelry that her dad forgot in the trunk when they returned to their hotel after Monday night’s Miss Universe contest.
Jimena Elias Roca not only lost the contest, she’s out a $4,600 gown she never got to wear. She had it in case she was a finalist.
"If you bring it, I can give you an autographed photo," she said during the Televisa interview. "Please, Mr. Taxi Driver, bring back my suitcase. I’m really worried about it. Tomorrow I’m leaving, so please bring it to the Camino Real hotel."
Miss Peru didn’t have much fun at the contest. "It went badly," she said. She wasn’t the only one who ran into trouble at the 56th Miss Universe contest.
The largely Mexican audience booed Miss USA, Rachel Smith, when she appeared onstage at the National Auditorium. Nothing personal, commentators said later, just an outburst of animosity for a country they see as paying billions to Mexican drug kings while trying to boot out Mexican working stiffs.
Posted by Cecilia Sanchez and Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
A bit touchy?
Officials in Argentina weren’t pleased at all this week with a U.S. consular report that provided some candid advise to Argentina-bound visitors.
While generally calling the country safe, the report on a State Dept. travel information web page did warn Argentina-bound travelers about a litany of potential hazards: reckless drivers, domestic flight delays, pickpockets, purse snatchers, scam artists, street protests and even ``express kidnappings,’’ in which unfortunate victims are made to withdraw as much money as possible from ATM machines. All are well-known to Argentines.
One section even advised of alleged terrorist links in the so-called ``triple frontier’’ region bordering Paraguay and Brazil, though the report noted that there was no indication U.S. citizens were targeted.
Unmentioned was the much-reported fact that President George W. Bush’s daughter, Barbara, had her purse snatched in the trendy San Telmo neighborhood six months ago.
Such consular travel reports are rather routine, rarely making news, and, if this wasn’t an election year in Argentina—mayoral voting in Buenos Aires next month, presidential balloting in October—it seems likely no one would have taken umbrage. But defending the national image against perceived calumnies from the northern colossus is seldom an unpopular response in Latin America.
Argentine authorities expressed dismay at the ``unjustified alarms’’ and testily summoned the U.S. ambassador, Earle Wayne, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The minor diplomatic dustup then faded from the local press, and the many U.S. and European tourists went about their business.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Last year, the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca was convulsed with violence stemming from a bitter confrontation between state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and tens of thousands of striking teachers and their supporters.
On Thursday, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission issued its final report on the crisis, in which at least a dozen people lost their lives.
According to an Associated Press story, the commission's report "slammed" the federal government of former president Vicente Fox for not intervening more quickly to end the months-long standoff. In the report, commission president Jose Luis Soberanes blamed both police and protesters for "committing excesses."
Among the abuses was evidence that police physically tortured a number of detainees. The commission also faulted the investigation of the death of Bradley Roland Will, a 36-year-old New York journalist-activist who was gunned down while reporting on Oaxaca's streets.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
As La Plaza has reported, although national elections still are nearly two years away, some El Salvador politicians already are going on the warpath, at least rhetorically.
As several bloggers have discussed at length, Salvadoran president Tony Saca recently called for the ruling right-wing ARENA party to create an army of "nationalist soldiers" to combat the "populist wave," presumably a reference to the left-leaning political opposition.
Both ARENA and the leftist FMLN, the political party that emerged from the coalition of guerrilla forces that fought a 12-year civil war with the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government, are digging in for a bitter campaign that will be closely watched for signs of whether Central America's most pro-American government outside of Costa Rica will continue its tilt toward Washington.
Some fear that civil war could break out again in this deeply polarized country, where many social wounds from the previous war still haven't healed, and politicians often invoke military-like words and imagery. As timing would have it, Saca this week donned an army uniform to inspect Salvadoran forces stationed in Iraq.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
In yet another sign of the increasing militarization of Mexico’s drug trade, comes this report from the Mexican media: Three Colombians were detained on Wednesday in the region of Apatzingan, a city in the southern state of Michoacan, suspected of being brought to the area to train hit men for a drug trafficking group. The three men arrived in Mexico City a few days ago, on a flight from the Colombian city of Medellin via Panama, says Reforma (subscription required).
The newspaper Excelsior says that the three Colombians, along with two Mexicans, were detained in the town of Tepalcatepec, during the search of a suspected drug-cartel safe house. Excelsior says locals in Tepalcatepec alerted the army to the presence of foreigners in the house.
Some 150 soldiers of the Mexican army entered Tepalcatepec this week, in tanks and Hummers, according to Excelsior. The Times wrote on the entry of the Mexican army into Apatzingan last week and on the “paramilitarization” of Mexico’s drug wars on Sunday.
Posted by in Hector Tobar Mexico City
 Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed 12,696 of the nation’s 90,000 or so combat-ready soldiers in his five-month-long campaign to stop rival drug gangs from killing each other...and anyone standing in their way.
The exact number of soldiers was disclosed today in response to inquiries by a citizen under disclosure laws similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. While getting such information from Mexican bureaucrats is slower and even more painful than dealing with their pencil-pushing counterparts north of the border, it’s still easier than it used to be under Mexico’s former one-party government.
Calderon’s deployment dramatically favors his home state of Michoacan, where his mom still lives and where rival gangs are fighting over pot and opium poppy farms, as well as access to the Pacific Coast ports where Colombian cocaine shipments arrive.
Michoacan had 4,660 soldiers, one per 851 residents. The neighboring state of Guerrero, where competing traffickers are transforming Acapulco from an old-school resort into a post-modern shooting gallery, has one soldier for every 1,558 residents. At the California border, where dope passes by the ton, Tijuana now has 362 soldiers, about one for every 3,896 of the city’s residents.
Posted by Carlos Martinez and Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
Residents of Chile’s tremor-plagued southern Patagonian region are still waiting for President Michelle Bachelet’s promised return visit.
The remote and picturesque zone has been on edge after months of tremors, culminating in a magnitude 6.2 earthquake on April 21 that swept up people along the craggy coast, leaving at least 3 dead and 7 missing.
The quake triggered landslides that plunged earth, rocks and trees into the narrow Aysén Fjord, generating 25-foot waves. Speculation about its cause has centered on an underwater volcano.
Bachelet, who has been under fire in the capital for a botched public transportation plan and other woes, traveled to the site last month and promised federal aid, proclaiming she was not an ``ostrich’’ avoiding crises. She also vowed to return within a month.
Residents of the area have criticized the government response as inadequate and are looking for more relief for their economically and psychologically battered community.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Global warming is exacerbating drought conditions in parts of California and the American West. In Mexico City, officials are worried about the opposite problem: too much rain.
The rainy season has begun with a vengeance here in the nation's capital. Newspapers have been filled with photos of cars trapped in water-filled tunnels and of hapless homeowners tossing their soggy belongings. The usual afternoon storms are spilling into the night and early morning. La Plaza goes nowhere without its trusty paraguas, as an umbrella is known in Spanish.
Annual rainfall now registers about 35 inches a year, up from 24 inches a year in the early 20th century, according to Martha Delgado, Mexico City's environment chief, who cited the figures at a recent news conference. She blamed climate change for the increase as well as for the growing intensity of the capital's storms.
The cruel irony of all this wet stuff is that Mexico City is so in need of potable water. The megalopolis has overexploited the aquifers that lie beneath its surface. It's now swiping water from lakes and watersheds hundreds of miles away. Little effort is made to capture and store the city's abundant rainfall. Leaks and waste are chronic.
Meanwhile, thousands of poor residents in Mexico have no running water. They are the same ones who will be grabbing buckets and bailing for their lives when torrential rains pound their homes this season.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
Experts have compiled endless reports and statistics showing that Mexico's monopolies are hobbling its ability to compete in a global economy. To date, the nation's political parties have shown little appetite to confront the business elites that fund their campaigns. But the evidence keeps coming.
Consider high-speed Internet access.
The most recent statistics by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that Mexico ranks dead last among the 30 member countries for broadband penetration.
The country has 3.5 subscribers for every 100 inhabitants, according to an OECD report. That trails nations such as the Slovak Republic (5.7) and Turkey (3.8), whose economies are much smaller. Denmark leads the pack with 31.9 subscribers per 100 residents. The United States has 19.6 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, while the OECD average is 16.9 subscribers
High-speed internet access in Mexico is pricey and dominated by Prodigy. That's the provider owned by telecom mogul Carlos Slim, whose firms also control the vast majority of the nation's land lines and cell phones. Slim is the world's second-richest man with a net worth estimated at $53.1 billion.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
In Bolivia, where Ernesto ``Che’’ Guevara was executed in 1967, they’ve got big plans to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his death.
El Che has become a worldwide political and cultural icon since he was killed on Oct 9, 1967 in the semi- tropical Bolivian lowlands, where he had led an ill-fated guerrilla uprising.
Memorial events are expected in the country of his birth (Argentina), his death (Bolivia), and, of course, Cuba, site of his lifetime’s greatest success. More books, films, ballads and remembrances (``My Che,’’ etc.) seem inevitable.
Bolivia has been making a strong bid for the Che franchise under President Evo Morales, a fervent Che devotee. A new memorial is planned for Vallegrande, where the rebel’s remains were found a decade ago, and a mass Che ``encounter’’ is scheduled for October in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
``It’s time to rescue the thought of El Che to confront a world so characterized by individualism and a lack of solidarity and inclusion,’’ declared Erick Koffman, head of the Ernesto Che Guevara Foundation, in the Bolivian daily El Deber. Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Will Mexico City be destroyed by an earthquake on Thursday? A rumor that has rumbled for months around chat rooms and street corners hit the pages of the national daily newspaper El Universal over the weekend.
Essayist Hector de Mauleon poked fun at the latest doomsday scenario which is warning chilangos, as capital residents are known, to flee the city by Wednesday night. An alleged shaman named Minik Zek Balam has predicted that Mexico City will be hit by a temblor "of such intensity that...no stone will remain standing." As yet, no one has been able to produce this Mayan mystic, who supposedly predicted the devastating quake of 1985.
So far there has been no rush for the exits. But it's not surprising that this bit of Internet gossip has shaken up some people here. The '85 quake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and killed 10,000 people in Mexico City, according to official estimates. Some Mexicans believe as many as 10 times that number perished. Many residents remain emotionally scarred. A small temblor in April sent thousands of capital dwellers into the streets clutching valuables. Some had to be treated for panic attacks.
The only upside of a cyberspace prankster scaring the pants off people in a seismic zone is that it motivates them to get prepared. An insurance agent told La Plaza that her phone has been buzzing over the past few weeks with calls from property owners wanting to buy earthquake policies.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
 Venezuela’s Congress has approved $20 million in financing for two films by actor Danny Glover, a supporter of President Hugo Chavez, the Associated Press reports.
One movie Glover plans is “The General in His Labyrinth,” based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It will be directed by Venezuela-born director Alberto Arvelo.
The other is “Toussaint,” which the statement said Glover plans to direct. The film will document the life of Haitian revolution leader Toussaint Louverture.
Glover met Chavez during visits to Venezuela, appearing on Chavez’ weekly talk show, and in the United States. The statement did not make clear whether the films would be produced at a new “cinema city“ that Chavez wants to build to counter what he has described the pernicious influence of Hollywood on Venezuelan culture. A similar impulse drove his foundation of an independent television network. Posted by Chris Kraul, Bogota Bureau Chief
Baja California Atty. Gen. Antonio Martinez Luna has had better months.
An alleged drug cartel hit man, in a videotaped interrogation posted on a Tijuana newspaper website in early May, accused Martinez Luna of plotting with the Sinaloa drug cartel to crush the Arellano-Felix organized crime family.
The accusations were made by Jose Ramon Velasquez Molina, 50, who was found beaten to death in Mexicali a few days before the video surfaced. Martinez Luna has dismissed the accusations, saying Velasquez was tortured by his captors into making the statements.
But federal authorities are investigating, and the influential Tijuana newspaper, Zeta, which broke the story and featured the videotape on its website, has called for the attorney general to step down.
Martinez Luna’s resignation, however, may not be enough for the Arellano-Felix drug cartel.
In a video that appeared on YouTube.com earlier this month, a Mexican Norteno band sings a death threat against the attorney general, saying the Tijuana criminal organization wants him dead, according to Zeta.
If Martinez Luna’s nickname is any indication, that won’t be too easy. He is supposedly referred to in the criminal underworld as “El Blindado” -- the armored one, in reference to the armored cars in which he travels.
Posted by Richard Marosi in San Diego
 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has every right to feel flush these days, swimming as he is in oil revenue. But is prone to go a bit overboard with promises of spreading the cash around in his nonstop bid to win friends and influence people.
Often that tendency rears its head with a near compulsion to promise multi billion dollar refineries to those he is trying to impress.
This week it was the Pacific island nation of Fiji that Chavez’ government designated as its next beneficiary, saying it wanted to help build a refinery to ease that country’s high cost of fuel imports, according to the Xinhua news agency.
But Fiji should, as the Mexicans say, wait sitting down.
There are six, eight , maybe a dozen countries ahead of it in line for a promised Venezuelan-financed refinery. Brazil, Jamaica, Panama, India are just a few. None of these foreign plants are under construction although the Brazilian project set for the northeastern state of Pernambuco, a joint venture with Brazil’s Petrobras, is said to be in the feasibility study stage.
Posted by Chris Kraul, Bogota Bureau Chief
Peruvian justice plans to get to the bottom of the curious case of the Mother’s Day strippers.
A pre-Mother’s Day spectacle at the official auditorium of the Superior Court in Lima erupted into scandal on May 8 when male dancers from the ``Piso 14’’ nightclub began to cavort in an ``obscene’’ manner to Mexican music, the Peruvian press reports. Whistles and catcalls erupted, mostly from the women in attendance, but whether the clamour from the audience was condemnatory or favorable remains opaque.
The show, organized by the union representing court workers, had been officially sanctioned—but not necessarily the racy dance. A union spokesman told the press that the ``homage to mamá’’ performance was conducted with ``delicacy and affection,’’ and that no one in the audience complained.
Outraged authorities declared that the episode was designed ``to taint the image of the Supreme Court of Justice of Lima.’’ The court wants to know who was behind the ``shameful incident.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
 It was as if Miss USA had turned up at a beauty contest "wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the deep South, with their hoods, their burning crosses and beer cans," a columnist wrote in the Mexico City daily newpspaper La Jornada.
The cause of this outrage was a dress worn by Miss Mexico, Rosa Maria Ojeda, the dark-haired beauty who is currently representing her country in the Miss Universe pageant, which Mexico is hosting this month. From a distance, the garment in question looks like a fetchingly old-fashioned, hoop-skirted ensemble. But the dress, accented by a bandolier belt and a wide sombrero, was adorned with depictions of a firing squad and Catholic rebels hanging from posts.
The theme of this, um, highly original design refers to Mexico's so-called Cristero War of 1926-1929, when Roman Catholic followers rose up against Mexico's leftist, anti-clerical government. After the Mexican revolution of 1910-20, the victorious rebels effectively outlawed the Catholic church, which they regarded as a repressive vestige of the old regime.
Catholics fought back against the government and allied vigilante groups in a brutal conflict that claimed 90,000 lives. The designers of the dress said it expressed a rich chapter of Mexican history.
But, Miss Mexico's dress has been redesigned with a less controversial image: the Virgin of Guadalupe. NBC and Telemundo will broadcast the pageant's finale live from Mexico City on May 28. No official word yet on whether there'll be any historically themed bathing suits.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Cuba’s population declined by more than 4,300 last year, the first drop in more than 25 years and an indication that the island’s economic difficulties might be discouraging Cuban couples from having more than one child. The number of live births fell by 8%, with 111,084 Cubans born last year in comparison with 120,716 in 2005, according to the Center for Population Studies and Development. Center director Juan Carlos Alfonso didn’t provide the current population figure in his account to the Communist Party daily Granma and the Prensa Latina news agency. But the CIA World Fact Book this year estimates the island population at 11.4 million. The Granma article noted the average size of Cuban families is now three people, compared to four a few years ago. With food prices soaring and huge deficiencies in housing and transportation, Cubans often complain that they can’t afford to have more children. The population shrinkage appears to be attributable solely to the reduced birth rate because infant mortality and life expectancy remain on a par with the world’s most developed nations and emigration has fallen off in the 10 months since President Fidel Castro stepped down while recuperating from a grave but undisclosed illness. Figures published by the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol respectively show declines in the number of Cuban migrants intercepted at sea and those who make landfall and are allowed to stay under the U.S. government’s ``wet foot, dry foot’’ policy.
Posted by Carol J. Williams in Miami
Pope Benedict XVI is back in Vatican City, but his words during his just-completed trip to Brazil continue to stir controversy—and not just his strictures against pre-marital sex, abortion and Liberation Theology.
Indigenous leaders have expressed outrage about the pope’s benign take on the ``encounter’’ between ``faith and the indigenous peoples.’’ From Brazil to Guatemala, spokesmen have challenged what they view as a neo-revisionist interpretation of the Conquest narrative, which was for centuries largely a story of Europeans bringing ``civilization’’ to the New World.
In modern times, historians have also stressed some of the Conquest’s catastrophic fallout—destructive of native cultures and mass death due to disease, forced labor and murder.
The pope’s words: ``What did the acceptance of the Christian faith mean for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean? For them, it meant knowing and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious traditions... In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of His Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
In the wake of Pope Benedict XVI´s stern moral lectures in Brazil, political blogger Guilherme Fiuza has some advise for Brazilian teenagers. ”Enjoy yourselves while there´s time.´´
The columnist for the web magazine no minimo poses some provocative, and ironic, questions: ”Is sex before marriage the beginning of the end of the family? What about the media, with its insistence on disrespecting chastity? Has modern society come to the bottom of the well?
"The controversy raised by Pope Benedict XVI seems on the verge of denying the passage of time itself. Alas, why not discuss the two-piece swimsuit and birth control pills. Now is the time."
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Belem and Marcelo Soares in Sao Paulo
Migration is so woven into Mexico's fabric that the government has institutionalized it. Officials carefully track migration patterns and growth in remittances . Public agencies provide services for those looking to cross the border, and to expatriates living in the U.S.
From the Mexican perspective, it's recognition of reality: an estimated 11 million people born in Mexico already reside north of the border, and at least 400,000 more join them every year. From the viewpoint of many Americans, the government's actions are tantamount to aiding and abetting illegal immigration.
One of the most controversial episodes in recent years was "The Guide for the Mexican Migrant", a handbook created by the Mexican government in 2004 to warn would-be border crossers of hazards like heat and bandits.
Mexicans saw it as a way to dissuade some people from making the dangerous trip and keep others from dying. Some Americans viewed it as a how-to guide for crossing the border illegally, particularly the tips about water and protective clothing.
La Plaza imagines there will be similar disagreement over a more recent Mexican government effort to aid its citizens living in the exterior: Remesamex . That's a Web site to help consumers shop for the lowest price on wiring money to Mexico.
Mexican-born workers living outside the country sent $23 billion to their homeland last year. The money is a lifeline for millions of families in a nation with virtually no social safety net. Thus the Mexican government has a vested interest in seeing fees reduced so more of that money makes it here.
Still, development experts view this dependence on remittances as a weakness, not a strength, of Mexico's economy. This source of cash will diminish over time as migrants put down roots in the United States. In the meantime, it has allowed Mexican politicians to put off tough reforms to stimulate jobs and growth at home.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
How to greet the pope? That was the dilemma facing young people invited to meet Pope Benedict XVI during his just-completed visit to Brazil . The half dozen youths selected were instructed to kiss the pontiff’s ring, as is customary. But Aline Lacerda, 24, said she felt “appalled” that the pope would leave her homeland without having received “a good, typical, spontaneous Brazilian hug.” Others agreed. A plot was launched — and it seemed the pope himself was a willing accomplice. During the encounter at São Paulo’s Pacaembu Stadium, Benedict held the arms of Rodrigo Rosa, 21, so firmly that “it was impossible to kiss his ring.” So Rosa resorted to instinct: He hugged the pope. A group hug of the pontiff followed before the youths went back to their places. The pope beamed, seeming thrilled with the break in protocol and his abraço brasileiro. Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Cristiana Coimbra in São Paulo
The fallout continues from last weekend’s much-publicized group nude photo shoot by Brooklyn artist Spencer Tunick, which attracted a record 18,000 people to strip in the middle of Mexico City’s Zocalo, or central plaza. Many of those who took part in the event said it was a liberating, exhilarating experience, as these videos demonstrate. At a news conference, Tunick declared that “all eyes are looking south from the United States to Mexico City to see how a country can be free and treat the naked body as art. Not as pornography or as a crime, but with happiness and caring.” But in recent days, a number of women who got naked have gone public with their complaints about Tunick’s decision to make a separate shot of just the women, after allowing the men to get dressed. Large numbers of men took advantage of the situation to stand around and ogle the females, taking pictures and shouting insults, according to numerous accounts. After starting the day feeling “on the same level as men,” and sharing in a “secure and happy” common experience, one female participant wrote in a May 12 letter to editor of the Mexico City newspaper Reforma, the women ended up feeling “like sheep” on their way to a “visual and verbal slaughterhouse.” “What a shame, Mr. Tunick!” the writer concluded. “And what a shame to all those that contributed to our shame.” Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
It’s been another bloody, tragic week in Mexico’s drug wars. The head of the local police in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Artemio Mejia Chavez, was killed on Wednesday by 12 men dressed in black uniforms with the logo of Mexico’s FBI. On Thursday, a naval commander in the Pacific port of Zihuatanejo was ambushed--he survived unharmed, but his bodyguard was killed. Proceso, the respected and left-leaning investigative magazine of Mexico City, dedicates its cover story this week to an analysis of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision to send the army into several states to fight the drug lords. The cover has the provocative headline: “Narco: Calderon’s Iraq.” The piece has a detailed description of the May 2 incident in the southernstate of Michoacan in which five Army soldiers were ambused and killed by gunman working for a local drug lord, Flavio Rodriguez Espino in the town of Caracuaro. Afterwards, the police chief of Caracuaro was arrested because his officers simply stood by and watched while the soldiers were ambushed. The newspaper Cambio of Michoacan reports that Rodriguez Espino was arrested by police in December but apparently let go. Various analysts in the Proceso piece assert that the drug traffickers have lost their fear of the army, and that the army doesn’t have the resources to fight all the fronts in the drug war: Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border, Acapulco and other towns on the Pacific Coast, and now Veracruz and other cities onthe Gulf of Mexico. Mexico’s army is already severely stressed. The Secretary of Defense recently reported that 35 soldiers desert Mexico’s armed forces every day. Posted by Hector Tobar in Mexico City.
Mexico City was rolling on Sunday as an estimated 10,000 cyclists responded to the call of the capital’s mayor to take back the storied Paseo de la Reforma - if only for a few precious hours.
From 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. the stately boulevard was blocked to automobile traffic in a 10-kilometer loop running from Chapultepec Park to the Zocalo. It's part of the plan by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard to promote bike usage to ease gridlock and improve air quality.
Mexico’s Federal District has a long way to go before it’s Amsterdam, where cyclists and pedestrians reign supreme. Yet on Sunday one could catch a fleeting glimpse of how a slightly saner transportation policy could significantly boost quality of life in this smoggy, congested capital.
Toddlers on tricycles shared the road with spandex-clad speed racers, joggers and in-line skaters. Yuppies showed off nifty folding bikes and fancy touring models. Teenagers cruised on choppers with long handle bars and banana seats. A unicyclist turned his mount on a dime. The rust on some bikes was exceeded only by that of their wobbly riders. But no matter the experience of the cyclists or the condition of their wheels, wide smiles were standard equipment.
The city is also looking to extend its network of bike paths to encourage more cycling. It’s installing racks in the subway and on public buses and contemplating ways to get bicycles into the hands of low-income people.
But the biggest barrier is sheer terror. Mexico City drivers mow down hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists every year. Re-educating them to share the road will be tougher than teaching those preschoolers on Reforma to graduate from their training wheels.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori may be gone from the country, but he’s certainly not forgotten.
Fujimori is under house arrest in neighboring Chile, awaiting the outcome of an extradition petition from Peru on human rights and corruption charges stemming from his tumultuous presidency (1990-2000). Chilean authorities are expected to rule soon.
This week, media in Peru and Chile reported that a new documentary film has surfaced lauding Fujimori’s role in one of his tenure’s more sensational episodes—the 1997 commando operation that freed 72 hostages from the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima.
A band of leftist guerrillas had held the hostages for 126 days. In the rescue operation—known as Chavín de Huántar, after a pre-Inca ruin known for its subterranean passages—all 14 rebels, 2 commandos and 1 hostage died.
A photo released afterward showed a triumphant Fujimori striding amid guerrilla corpses. Questions still linger as to whether some of the leftists were executed.
The documentary, reportedly funded by the ex-president’s supporters, gives absolute credit for the successful operation to El Chino, as the ex-president is known, despite his Japanese, not Chinese, ancestry. Fujimori has long touted his role in the operation, which sent his popularity soaring. Critics call the documentary a propaganda vehicle to spur support in both Peru and Chile to clear Fujimori.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in São Paulo and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
The drill is becoming all too familiar to Paulistanos, as native residents of São Paulo, South America’s most populous city, are known. A VIP comes to town and authorities clear major thoroughfares, post legions of police and troops along motorcade routes, and restrict vehicular access, paralyzing the city’s already chaotic traffic.
It happened in March with George Bush, and this week with Pope Benedict XVI. Homeless were swept away, graffiti erased and potentially offensive advertisements were banished from the streets.
As the pope’s column rumbled down Avenida Consolação en route to a visit with President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva, the pope may have glanced at a sign declaring, Bem-vindo [Welcome] Papa Bento XVI
That was undoubtedly a more appropriate sight to Benedict than the billboard’s previous incarnation: A sultry lingerie add featuring scantily clad Brazilian super-model Daniela Cicarelli, who seems to attract scandal. The leggy Cicarelli had been in the news last year for her attempts to quash web distribution of video footage showing her cavorting amorously with her boyfriend in the Spanish surf.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Marcelo Soares in São Paulo
Today is Mother’s Day in Mexico, as it is every May 10, but instead of a sappy greeting card, mothers here get the day off from government jobs and many businesses. Even factories cut moms loose at lunchtime. Families visit cemeteries. Children give home-made cards. And the traffic is mostly families taking the afternoon off. It’s not all roses. Despite the deep reverence for mothers by their Mexican families, women’s rights here are still lagging badly. And it’s not like mom can spend her day off enjoying the peace and quiet: schools close early after Mother’s Day pageants and festivals. But Mexico City restaurants have been packed, with mothers spilling onto the sidewalks in clumps of spring pastels. Mothers were also being celebrated Thursday in El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile. Making mom’s day doesn’t come cheap. Flower vendors were asking two to three times their usual rates, and mariachi bands were charging as much as $20 a song. Posted by Sam Enriquez and Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico City
Brazil is getting its first native-born saint. Pope Benedict XVI, who is visiting Brazil, will formally recognize Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, a Franciscan friar who lived and worked in Brazil in the 18th and early 19th centuries, on Friday.
Friar Galvao is beloved by many Brazilians, especially in Sao Paulo, for what they believe to be his healing powers and his ability to ease childbirth. While alive, Galvao invented a “pill,” actually a small piece of paper inscribed with a prayer to the Virgin Mary that people swallow in the hopes of being cured of some ailment or affliction.
Not everyone in the church is delighted with the Friar Galvao pills, as they are known, since they border on the purely superstitious. But nuns make tens of thousands of them, and distribute them to the faithful for free.
Latin America’s other saint-in-waiting, Mons. Oscar Romero, has received something of a boost from the pope. Asked aboard his flight to Brazil about the case, Benedict praised the slain archbishop of San Salvador as a “great witness to the faith” who stood up to the military dictatorship of his day and who “merits beatification.” Beatification is the step before sainthood.
Posted by Tracy Wilkinson in Sao Paulo.
The international press freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, voiced concern today about threatening messages to journalists in Mexico, including an apparent attempt to kill a reporter in Veracruz by sabotaging her car.
The group stated that reporters had been getting threatening warnings, apparently from drug traffickers, the latest being a note left with a human head on a Veracruz street that read: " Here is a gift for journalists and other heads will fall, as Milo Vela well knows." Vela is a columinst for the Veracruz daily newspaper Notiver.
Also, one of the wheels on a car being driven by freelance journalist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro was loosened, causing her to nearly crash. She has been the focus of death threats.
"These so-called narco messages to the press are extrememlly disturbing," the group said in a press release.
Two journalists have been killed and one missing in Mexico this year, making it the hemisphere's deadliest country for the press, according to the group.
Posted by Michael Young in Los Angeles
Colombia's Vice President, Francisco Santos, issued a major skid-back on his comments earlier this week that "30 or 40" members of Congress would wind up in jail when investigators reach the bottom of a scandal involving the solons' alleged links to paramilitaries.
Colombia's El Pais website carried the full letter to the Senate, in which Santos said he was sorry if the comments, made to the RCN TV network, "interfered" with the work of Congress, which he said would "emerge stronger" after the investigation concludes.
So far, 17 members of Congress are under investigation for alleged ties to the right-wing paramilitaries, which have been blamed for numerous human-rights abuses in Colombia.
Santos also had told RCN that Congress should not approve a free-trade agreement with the United States. The President, Alvaro Uribe, went to Washington recently to promote passage of the agreement in the U.S. Congress, and was not pleased about either of the veep's comments. Some of those under investigation in the "parapolitics" scandal are close Uribe allies.
Posted by Geoffrey Mohan in Los Angeles
The only thing acid trips and school productions usually have in common is they go on way too long. But students of Colegio Williams, a private Mexico City prep school that taught Octavio Paz a thing or two, deftly fused both in a show Tuesday night that transcended the tedium of amateur performance while avoiding any nasty emergency-room freak-outs.
“With a Little Help From My Friends,” was ostensibly a tribute to the Beatles, their music, lyrics and 1960s love-love-love philosophy. Students also honed their English—for example, taming Spanish accents for live solos of “Nowhere Man” and “Imagine.”
The treat for anyone who still remembers the ‘60s was seeing kids having fun with Beatles songs while dressed as clowns, jugglers, bobbies, gangsters, punks, fairies, magicians, hippies, demons and cellophane flowers. Each tune featured an elaborate performance that some of the parents might have once described as pretty trippy.
Pix to be posted Friday at www.colegiowilliams.edu.mx
Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City
The government of Grenada has lifted the protected status of its national parks in preparation for selling much of Hog Island, a refuge for the endangered Grenada Dove, to a resort developer.
The Mount Hartman-Hog Island preserve on the little-developed island off Grenada’s rugged southern coast is home to at least a third of the estimated 120 native doves surviving in the world now, and environmentalists fear the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts construction will destroy the birds’ habitat.
Grenadian officials have argued the five-star resort at Mount Hartman harbor, wildly popular with the yachting set, will boost Grenada’s attractiveness to well-heeled tourists and create new jobs in an economy still reeling from the widespread destruction of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004.
Opponents of the project, including Pastor Stanford Simon of St. George’s Baptist Church, have been fighting the development on the grounds that the national parks and preserves are entrusted to future generations and should not be sold for commercial benefit.
Despite assurances two months ago from the Ministry of Health, Social Security and the Environment that the government had no plans to abandon the dove sanctuary, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell’s government this week signed off on Parliament’s amendment of the Grenada National Parks and Protected Areas Act to allow the sale of parkland.
Mitchell’s government has ordered an environmental impact assessment on the project and Four Seasons said it planned to leave migratory corridors undeveloped to a 150-acre dove sanctuary inland. But opponents report that land clearing has already begun in preparation for building.
Posted by Carol J. Williams in Miami
Residents of Colombia’s capital city, Bogotá, are justly proud of the long literary heritage of their city and nation, which is often familiar to outsiders only for headlines of violence. Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez is only the best known in a venerable tradition of Colombian writers.
The capital’s promotion of reading contributed to Bogotá being named a World Book Capital for 2007, a recognition bestowed on a different city each year by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Previous Unesco World Book capitals included Turin, Montreal, Antwerp, New Delhi, Alexandria and Madrid.
Bogotá officials decided to ask some 2,000 literary observers—editors, agents, authors and readers—for their thoughts on the ``most representative’’ of young Latin American writers.
The result is the ``Bogotá 39,’’ a total of 39 writers, all under 39, whose homelands range from Mexico to Argentina, from Cuba to Chile.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
The pope is coming to Latin America. And the controversial animated series Popetown will remain on the TV airwaves in Chile.
Chile’s National Council of Television has refused to block programming of the parody program, known as Papavilla in Latin America and shown widely in the region on MTV, reports the Santiago daily El Mercurio.
Many Catholics have denounced the series as offensive, limiting its worldwide distribution, though Popetown is widely seen and commented upon in cyberspace.
The satirical sitcom features a juvenile pope who likes to bounce around on his pogo stick and watch horror films in a fictional Vatican City called Popetown. The principal character is the exasperated Father Nicholas, charged with the luckless task of papal damage control.
Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to arrive in Brazil Wednesday for a five-day visit, his first trip as pope to the Americas. Catholics in Chile, where the church is known for its old-world conservatism, have sought to get Popetown off the airwaves.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
The Spanish daily El País reports a potential cultural ``opening’’ in Cuba, following protests earlier this year from Cuban writers and artists.
``The intellectuals’ mobilization allowed the start of a debate in cultural institutions and universities about taboo themes,’’ writes Mauricio Vincent, El Pais’ Havana correspondent.
Such taboos included examinations of the ``cultural Stalinism’’ of the 1970s and the ongoing censorship of Cuban films by the Cuban Television and Radio Institute. Programs judged not within ``revolutionary parameters’’ have been excluded from state-run television.
Only this month did the Cuban educational station run the 1993 comedy-drama "Strawberry and Chocolate" co-directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío. The movie explores revolutionary Cuba’s intolerance of homosexuals, still a sensitive theme. Its appearance on the small screen follows the TV airing last month of several other films with a critical vision of the contemporary Cuban reality.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires
Will Latin America grow old before it grows rich?
It's a race against time for countries such as Mexico, which are woefully unprepared for aging societies that will strain their resources in the coming decades. President Felipe Calderon is moving ahead with a campaign promise to provide a pension of about $46 a month for seniors living in the nation's smallest rural communities.
That's bingo money for many American retirees. But it's a godsend in Mexico where the vast majority of elderly have no form of old-age pension and nearly half have no health coverage.
There is no "retirement" for the vast majority of people here. Those who are able work until they drop dead, typically in subsistence farming or street vending. The rest depend on family or charity. Seniors can be seen on the streets of the capital daily begging for loose change.
The twin forces of increased longevity and lower fertility are producing a global elderly boom. Latin America is still one of the world's youngest regions, but it is aging at warp speed. Within a couple of decades, more than half of the Western Hemisphere's seniors will live south of the U.S. border.
For some, the future is already here. The hemisphere's oldest country isn't the United States or Canada. It's Uruguay, where more than 17% of the population is over 60, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau in partnership with a couple of health organizations.
In Mexico, nearly 20% of the population will be elderly by 2050, up from less than 5% in 2000. Most European nations had at least a century, even two, to adjust to their graying societies. Latin America may soon be grappling with First World levels of elderly with only developing world resources to care for them.
The biggest shock may be cultural. Organizations such as the AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, have no equivalent in Mexico. Employers here routinely advertise for workers in their twenties. Buildings, sidewalks and public transport aren't equipped to handle users with disabilities.
Posted by Marla Dickerson in Mexico City
Mexican immmigration to the United States, whether by legal or illegal means, is an extremely passionate issue these days on both sides of the border.
Mexican newspapers have been reporting on the MacArthur Park melee that broke out when L.A. police officers clashed with pro-immigration marchers on May Day.
But if Los Angeles hadn't been grabbing most of the immigration-related headlines this week, an even more potentially inflammatory story out of Alabama might have gotten more attention in Mexico. As this story describes, a judge this week denied bond to five men belonging to a militia who allegedly were plotting a machine-gun attack on Mexicans. A federal agent testified that the five members of the so-called Alabama Free Militia were planning to attack Mexicans in Remlap, a town north of Birmingham.
According to the story, the men had been stockpiling weapons including 130 homemade hand grenades, a machine gun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition. A lawyer for one of the men said the incident was being overblown, and that his client had been stockpiling weapons "partly because of the scare of the Y2K computer glitch in 2000."
Whatever the outcome of this affair, La Plaza predicts it will confirm many Mexican politicians, pundits and ordinary citizens in their belief, justified or not, that blame for the current immigration standoff lies primarily in the attitudes of people living north of the Rio Grande.
Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Brazilian biographers may be thinking | |
For Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian nobel laureate, this is a memorable year—his 80th birthday, the 40th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and, this week, a return after 25 years (officially, anyway) to his birthplace, Aracataca, immortalized as Macondo. 
