It's the time of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian nobel laureate, this is a memorable year—his 80^th birthday, the 40^th 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

Where have all the Salvadorans gone?

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

Madrazo returns to Mexican politics

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 hails a taxi driver

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

Travel warning rankles Argentina

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

Report blasts Fox administration on Oaxaca violence

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

A bitter battle in El Salvador's politics

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

Foreigners invade Mexican drug trade

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

Mexico's military 'surge' in the war on drugs

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

Waiting for word in Chile's earthquake zone

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