Mexico's central bank released a string of bad news Wednesday confirming that the nation is feeling the effects of a U.S. slowdown and exploding global prices for food and fuel.
The Bank of Mexico revised its inflation expectations sharply upward to a high of 6% for the fourth quarter. That's well above the 5.26% annualized rate recorded in June and double the central bank's long-term target.
Mexicans have long fled to the United States when things got tough at
home. But tight employment conditions north of the border may dissuade
some from making the trip.
Money wired home by Mexicans living outside the country, most of them
working in the U.S., totaled $11.6 billion through the first six months
of the year, according to figures released Wednesday. That's down 2.2%
from the same period last year -- the longest sustained drop since the
Bank of Mexico began tracking the flows in the mid-1990s. Read on about Mexico's financial woes here.
The Justice Department said Wednesday it had opened an investigation into the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant in a small northeastern Pennsylvania town, reports the Associated Press.
The federal involvement comes less than a week after local officials in Schuylkill County charged three white teens in this month's attack in Shenandoah on Luis Ramirez, a 25-year-old father of two.
Ramirez was attacked July 12 when he crossed paths with a group of
teens who had been out drinking in Shenandoah, about 80 miles northwest
of Philadelphia. He died two days later.
The killing of Ramirez exposed long-simmering tensions in Shenandoah, a
blue-collar town of 5,000 with a growing number of Latino residents
drawn by factory and farm jobs.
On Cinco de Mayo in 1945, thousands of people gathered to dedicate the Casa del Mexicano, a community center that served as a sentinel of Mexican culture in Los Angeles, writes Esmeralda Bermudez.
In the 1950s, after the center moved west to Boyle Heights, stars from as far away as Spain flew to Los Angeles to perform. Wealthy Mexican bureaucrats, adorned with pearls and bow ties, mingled with celebrities who included Ricardo Montalban and Maria Felix. The events filled the center's coffers with donations.
In the 1960s, a former President of Mexico, Miguel Aleman, put Casa del Mexicano at the top of his list of places to visit in Los Angeles. The building seemed a majestic anachronism tucked away in an unexpected cul-de-sac of a Mexican American barrio, its massive proportions and stately dome prompting double takes.
Then, about seven or eight years ago, Casa del Mexicano fell into disrepair. The roof leaked, windows were jammed shut and the structure reeked of vermin. Advisory committee members waged a nasty court fight to determine who would seize control of the Boyle Heights building and the organization that runs it.
Today, the historic center is slowly coming back to life.
Read on about Casa del Mexicano here. Photo: Contestants in the Miss Jalisco Pageant rehearse at the historic, 77-year-old Casa del Mexicano, a longtime civic and cultural center for the Los Angeles Latino community. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
The issue of illegal immigration is continuing to rock the nation. Yesterday, a study reported that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is falling, protests took place in San Francisco over the city's alleged sanctuary policy, and the Government announced a new scheme which invites illegal immigrants to turn themselves in for deportation.
A strain of the salmonella bacteria that sickened more than 1,300 people has been found in a serrano pepper and a sample of irrigation water at a farm in Mexico, U.S. health officials said Wednesday, writes Tiffany Hsu.
They called the discovery a "breakthrough" but cautioned that tomatoes may still be a culprit in the nearly four-month outbreak that has alarmed consumers and cost the domestic produce industry hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mexicans are dubious of the latest pronouncement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In an article in today's national daily El Universal, Enrique Sanchez Cruz, director of the Mexican agricultural sanitation agency known as Senasica, said that testing procedures used by FDA officials in Mexico have been "inconsistent" and "have no scientific support."
The FDA's previous warnings about Mexican tomatoes -- which so far have proven unfounded -- have resulted in huge financial losses for Mexican producers.
Mexico is as famous for its drug violence as it is for its tequila these days. As the country continues its bloody battle against the powerful drug cartels in the region, the popularity of some of the cultural facets that surround the drug trade are dropping.
The whiskey is flowing at La Cantina when Calor Norteña kicks out the accordion jams for a homage to gangster Arturo Villarreal, who rose from drug cartel protege to crime boss in a six-year reign of mayhem and murder, writes Richard Marosi from Tijuana.
"The law calls me a dangerous [criminal] so don't dare take me on because I have bullets to spare," the band members sing, as beer-swilling youths shout and long-nailed women twirl on the dance floor.
Since drug traffickers set foot in this border city, Mexican musicians have strummed along, chronicling their exploits in the traditional polka-based rhythms of the corrido. The sub-genre has been a soundtrack for the city, with bands like Calor Norteña sprinkling their repertoires with tunes about the city's most feared gunmen. But with drug war violence and kidnappings escalating, the narcocorridos are losing their swagger.
Radio stations have stopped playing the songs and promoters have banned the music from many public events. Nightclub owners ask bands to turn down narcocorrido requests. At the cavernous Las Pulgas nightclub downtown, managers banned the music two months ago -- a decision tantamount to West Hollywood's Whisky A Go-Go banning heavy metal hair bands in the 1980s.
Photo: Alfredo Madrigal, a member of Herederos de la Frontera, plays accordion for admiring fans at the Baby Rock club in Tijuana. His group specializes in traditional Norteño-style ballads. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times
Turnout was light, but voters in a nonbinding referendum gave an overwhelming "no" to President Felipe Calderon's proposal to give private firms a bigger role in Mexico's government-controlled petroleum industry, reports the L.A. Times' Marla Dickerson.
More than 80% of those who cast ballots Sunday in Mexico City opposed the plan, according to the official tally of the federal district released Monday. The results were even more lopsided outside the capital, where nine of Mexico's 31 states also participated. With about two-thirds of the ballots counted, more than 90% of those voters gave the president's proposal a thumbs down.
Slightly more than 1.5 million people cast ballots Sunday. Organizers had been hoping for a turnout twice that size in the greater Mexico City area alone.
But according to El Universal here in Mexico this morning, Calderon said in a meeting last night that the Consulta Ciudadana failed to achieve its objective of discrediting his reforms, and that it had been designed to obstruct the discussion.
Photo: A woman wears a T-Shirt which says "I decide" during a voting session Sunday in Mexico City's Zocalo. Those who took part voted "no" on the question of opening up parts of Mexico's nationalized oil company Pemex to outsiders. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
Venezuelan motorists are crossing the frontier with Colombia to sell gas to their neighbors, making the most of the varying price of oil across Latin America.
These gas-sellers -- or "pimpineros" as they're known -- are taking advantage of the fact that in the border city of San Antonio de Táchira, Venezuela, gas is a whole lot cheaper than on the Colombian side of the border in Cúcuta, where it sells for around US $3.44 a gallon. A story in Reforma states that gas prices in Venezuela are around 7.6 cents a gallon, but other sources say it's more around 12 cents a gallon.
Cheap gas prices in Venezuela mean that those enterprising individuals who cross over to sell the contents of their car tanks can make a good profit. Some are even living off the earnings, according to this report in today's Reforma (in Spanish).
The same kind of thing is happening in Mexico, where gas is much cheaper than in the U.S. This has led to United States citizens crossing over the border into Mexico to fill their tanks. The Dallas Morning News reported in June that Texans were heading across the border to escape gas prices at home, which at the time were around US $4 a gallon.
Today, the cost of oil per gallon in Mexico is about US $2.72 a gallon. In the United States, it's US $3.95 a gallon.
The cost of oil in Latin America varies. But surging fuel prices across the region have ignited inflation throughout Latin America, driving up the cost of food, the price of which was already on the upswing thanks in part to ravenous global demand for its farm products, as we reported in June. Read more on the Venezuelan cross-border gas sale here.
The Dominican Republic's drug czar has criticized the United States for failing to support Caribbean nations in their fight against drug wars, while at the same time handing millions of dollars to Mexico and Central America to help them fight their powerful drug cartels and organized crime.
Quoted in Dominican Today this morning, Marino Vinicio Castillo, who is the drug advisor to the country's executive branch, said that the United States government's neglect of the Dominican Republic is obvious.
"As an example he said Plan Merida, in which the U.S. gives US $500 million to Mexico and Central America to fight drug cartels, organized crime and human trafficking, but donates only US $2.5 million to Dominican Republic and Haiti for the same effort."
There are about 5,000 community kitchens in Lima, the capital of Peru, that are run by women who cook cheap meals for the poor as rising food prices make eating well much harder.
"But their work goes well beyond survival; the kitchens have become a vehicle for collective action, giving women the self-esteem to denounce government shortcomings and demand change. They have risen as one of the most significant women's organizations in Latin America, and today are on the forefront of protests demanding solutions to a cost of living that many say is reversing recent progress in reducing poverty," writes the Christian Science Monitor.
The poverty rate in Peru has dropped five percentage points in the past year -– to about 40% of the population. But higher food prices are reversing some of those gains -– and with little government response, poor women are essentially supporting the poorest. Click here to read on about community kitchens in Peru.
"On a recent post, she talks about the wave of Cubans rushing to prove their Spanish heritage in order to gain citizenship in Spain amid 'a lack of expectations and material hardship' in Cuba. With irony and wit, she mocks the tangle of Cuban bureaucracy, the senseless privation of its citizens, and the way the state media views all of it through rose-colored glasses. Her entries are translated into English, French, Italian, German, and Polish."
"In other words, she is not exactly the ambassador that Cuba –- with a tight grip on dissenters –- wants to present to the world. And yet, she reasoned, permission denied might garner so much media attention as to backfire in a Cuba trying to present its more tolerant face. After all, the Raúl Castro administration had just dropped bans on owning cellphones and computers. How could they deny a week-long trip to a well-known blogger who recently was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine?"
"It looms solemnly over the shady corner of a city park, an incongruous emblem of pain amid a happy clamor of picnicking families and children chasing scuffed soccer balls," writes the Times' Ken Ellingwood from El Salvador.
"A granite echo of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, the 300-foot-long lead-colored monument serves as a kind of giant gravestone for the civil war that ripped El Salvador apart in the 1980s."
"Engraved with nearly 30,000 names, the Monument to Memory and Truth is a roll of dead and disappeared from the conflict, which ended in 1992. It is incomplete. Officially, the fighting between leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military government killed 75,000 and left thousands more missing. Not all the names of the war's victims were available when the monument project began, so the list is growing."
Despite the many hardships suffered by its people, Mexico is a rich country, in terms of its natural resources. And none of those resources is more highly prized than the nation's oil reserves. The country's wealth of black gold is a great source of nationalistic pride, as well as political opportunism. Raising the question of how much to open Mexican oil fields to foreign investment or development is a sure way to spark a heated discussion.
That's the historical background to what Times business writer Marla Dickerson describes as the current "bitter debate" over "how to rescue Mexico's troubled state-owned oil company," known as Pemex. That debate, she writes, "went directly to the people Sunday as residents of the capital and nine states voted in a nonbinding referendum on President Felipe Calderon's plan to open some portions of the petroleum industry to outsiders."
"The vote, organized by the opposition Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has no official bearing on energy legislation making its way through Congress. But opponents of Calderon's reforms hope a decisive 'no' vote will force legislators to back off."
"The balloting was the first of three so-called Citizen Consultation referendums over the next month that will eventually cover Mexico's 31 states and federal district.... Mexico City's historic center was bustling with poll workers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with 'I decide,' the referendum's slogan. A six-piece band performed 'The oil isn't for sale,' a popular refrain among Mexicans wary of privatizing Pemex, the state oil company."
Here's a video by Times staffer Deborah Bonello looking at Sunday's scene.
Carrying guitars, mandolins, tambourines and an ungainly string bass, they led 35 of us away from the center of town, beyond the church of San Diego and the Jardín Unión, over stone bridges, up narrow, dark streets, centuries old, until somewhere near the Alley of the Kiss, in a plaza not much bigger than a family room, they stopped to play.
The pied pipers call themselves estudiantinas. They wander the city, playing traditional music, singing old favorites, making wisecracks, telling the city's stories and retelling its legends. They pass the hat and, sometimes, little ceramic carafes of wine.
"The satisfaction is to meet people, make them laugh," says Gerardo Leyva, 28, a violin student at the University of Guanajuato and head of the university's estudiantina group. "This is our job, to make people happy."
We have received some responses to our post this morning about illegal immigration numbers that quote different figures -- figures that allegedly come from the Los Angeles Times.
Some examples of those figures:
1. 40% of all workers in L.A. County ( L.A. County has 10.2 million people) are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card. 2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. 3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens. 4. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers. 5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
Those figures are a hoax, which you can read about here on Snopes.com.
No article has appeared in The Times with this list. And some of these "facts" appear to have been misleadingly edited from articles that appeared in the L.A. Times as many as 20 years ago and are now being cited inappropriately. When this Internet rumor started last year, The Times' opinion website looked into this hoax; here is the link to what they found:
One example of the innacuracies is the claim that a Times story reported that "Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages." This appears to misquote information from a May 24, 1987, article about the number of people living in garages in Los Angeles County. It reported that, at that time, about 42,000 garages were sheltering about 200,000 immigrants in L.A. County. That article provided detailed information explaining how the figures were arrived at, but it did not allude to anyone's residency status.
We are lucky enough to receive many comments here on La Plaza each day, a lot of which are in response to items we post about the issue of illegal immigration.
Occasionally, commenters will post conflicting statements about the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States. In this post, we wanted to take a look at what the actual numbers are.
Colombian officials have suggested that the Swiss mediator, Jean-Pierre Gontard, exceeded his authority and became a money courier for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Photo: Swiss peace envoy Jean-Pierre Gontard, second from left, embraces Ricardo Palmera, a former commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in San Vicente del Caguan, Colombia. Credit: Associated Press.
Hate crimes in Los Angeles County rose to their highest level in five years last year, led by attacks between Latinos and blacks, officials said Thursday.
The annual report by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission showed hate crimes rose by 28%, to 763, with vandalism and assault leading the way, reports The Times' Teresa Watanabe.
In what commission Executive Director Robin Toma called an alarming trend, hate crimes based on race, religion and sexual orientation all rose, increasing against nearly all groups -- including blacks, gays, Jews, Mexicans, whites and Asians -- even as crime in general declined.
The largest number of racial hate crimes involved Latino suspects against black victims, followed by black suspects against Latino victims. Latinos also made up the largest number of suspects in hate crimes based on sexual orientation. Whites were the leading suspects in religion-based incidents. Overall, blacks made up nearly half the hate crime victims, totaling 310.
Photo: Robin S. Toma, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, presents the commission's 2007 Hate Crimes report during a news conference in Los Angeles. Hate crimes in the county soared last year to their highest mark in five years even as overall crime dropped across the region.Credit: Los Angeles Times
A special constituent assembly in Ecuador has overwhelmingly approved a draft of a new constitution sought by the country's president, Rafael Correa, reports the BBC.
Ninety-four of the 130 assembly members backed the text, which will be put to a national referendum on Sept. 28.
The left-wing leader says the reforms, which would allow him to stand for election again, will tackle political instability and make Ecuador a more just society.
But critics say they will focus more power in the president's hands.
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There isn't much Tijuana is known for that has ever made its residents proud. But in recent years, one of Mexico's most daring art scenes has emerged in the city. Opera is part of that.
Tijuana now has dozens of kids studying voice. It has several choirs, an orchestra, a music conservatory, and an opera company.
Plus, every July for the last five years, opera fans hold a festival on a street in a most unexpected place.
The move signals Obama's increasing efforts to win more votes from the growing Latino community in the U.S., and comes as a new poll shows that he has a strong lead over his Republican rival John McCain -- 66% of registered Hispanic voters support Obama (see this morning's Associated Press report here).
The popular Mexican rock group Maná has released a video featuring footage of human rights violations, including content that shows migrants piling out of a open-backed truck and being beaten by law enforcement agents.
Vocalist Fernando Olvera was quoted in an interview with the newspaper Reforma saying that it would be good for Mexico if Barack Obama won the U.S presidential elections in November.
"I'd like to speak with him [Obama] about how humiliating the wall [on the United States border with Mexico] is, because the human rights of Latinos are not respected," Olvera states in the interview. He also added that he thinks conservatives in America do "not view Mexicans in a good light."
You can see the new video, "Arde de Cielo" (The Sky Burns), below.
Maná is from Guadalajara and has sold more than 20 million records. Its latest video was directed by Dago González, who has also worked with artists such as Madonna and Christina Aguilera.
Hurricane Dolly hammered the southern tip of Texas on Wednesday, lashing buildings with violent winds, triggering tornado warnings and fueling fears of massive flooding and failed levees along the Rio Grande.
The first Atlantic hurricane to strike the United States this year, Dolly made landfall at South Padre Island, near the Texas-Mexico border, about 1 p.m. as a Category 2, with winds topping 100 mph, the National Weather Service said.
As rising interest rates draw capital south of the border, Mexico's currency is trading near a six-year high against the U.S. dollar and is poised to crack the psychological 10-peso-to-the-buck barrier. The peso closed at 10.007 per dollar Wednesday, compared with 10.07 on Tuesday. The peso has gained about 9% against the greenback this year, writes the L.A. Times' Marla Dickerson.
The last time a dollar bought fewer than 10 pesos was October 2002.
The pumped-up peso is making U.S. goods cheaper for Mexican consumers. But it's bad news for American tourists, for whom a visit south of the border is becoming costlier. The rising peso is also cutting into Mexican exporters' profits and making it costlier for U.S. businesses to set up shop in Mexico.
DNA tests for the first time have confirmed that a baby was stolen from her mother and adopted for profit in Guatemala.
The baby, Esther Zulamita, was taken by armed men in 2007 at her family's shoe shop. Her mother, Ana Escobar, has spent the last year searching for the child.
The apparent confirmation of an actual case of "baby theft" raises doubts about a law passed in December by Guatemalan legislators to overhaul the nation's poorly regulated adoption system, "in which poor mothers were paid to turn over their children to American couples," as the New York Times reported last year.
"The new law, pushed by the United States government, allows thousands of pending adoptions, most to Americans, to proceed. Guatemala sends more adopted children to the United States than any other country except China; this year [2007] it has sent 4,700. The new law also creates a government authority to handle future adoptions, bringing Guatemala in line with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and wresting the system away from lawyers who charge as much as $30,000 per child."
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Antonietta, held by a lawyer, awaits adoption by a Pennsylvania couple at a Guatemala government office. Credit: Daniel Hernandez-Salazar for The New York Times
Times Art Critic Christopher Knight reviews the Wilfredo Lam show at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
The Cuban painter "was Creole -- Afro-Spanish on his mother's side, Cantonese on his father's -- and that hybrid identity is reflected in his art," writes Knight.
"Lam is one of those second-tier Modern artists -- there are a lot of them -- whose work rarely fails to impress when it is encountered but isn't encountered nearly often enough. Out of sight, out of mind, his paintings have become perpetual surprises."
Image: "Woman With Long Hair, I" from 1938, is among the works in "Wifredo Lam in North America" at the Museum of Latin American Art. Credit: Museum of Latin American Art
Spanish-language pop-music station KLVE-FM (107.5) jumped back to the No. 1 spot in the Southland radio ratings, ending the brief reign of English-language Top 40 outlet KIIS-FM (102.7), according to the spring Arbitron figures released Tuesday.
Among local listeners ages 12 and up, KLVE scored an impressive .9% increase in its audience share, to 5.6% total, between the first three months of 2008 and the spring survey period, which ran from April 3 to June 25. KIIS dipped slightly, from 5% to 4.9%, dropping it back to second in the Los Angeles-Orange County market -- a position it's held for six of the last seven quarters.
Regional Mexican music station KSCA-FM (101.9) also posted big gains, jumping from sixth to third place as it added .8% to its audience share.
The eye of Hurricane Dolly headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border and the heavily populated Rio Grande Valley, where officials feared heavy rains could cause massive flooding and levee breaks.
Dolly's sustained winds of about 100 mph classified it as a Category 2 hurricane.
A hurricane warning is in effect for the coast of Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and in Mexico from Rio San Fernando northward.
Read more on Hurricane Dolly here and below, watch Brownsville residents prepare for extreme weather conditions in the Associated Press dispatch below.
The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is one of the largest Hispanic advocacy organizations in the United States, and frequently referred to in the U.S media as "la Raza."
That has to stop, argues Daniel Hernandez, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and now a journalist and LA Weekly blogger based in Mexico City.
Hernandez argues on his blog Intersections, which is featured here on La Plaza's recommended links, that the term "la Raza" is a historical one and that the NCLR includes it in its name purely as a consequence of the era in which it was founded, which was during the 1960s. He faults a number of U.S. publications, including the L.A. Times, for continuing to use the term outside of this very specific historical context.
"The mainstream press has adopted the semantics tricks of the right-wing propaganda machine to conflate together two very different things: NCLR -- the largest and most middle-of-the-road, big-money-backed, non-partisan Hispanic (their word) advocacy organization in the United States, and the codeword for reconquista hallucinations advocated only by an extremely small, extremely fringe, and extremely irrelevant batch of Chicano nationalists," argues Hernandez.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blew through Russia on Tuesday, being his usual, controversial self, according to our correspondent Megan K. Stack.
Chavez cut some business deals and pumped up the friendship between the two oil-rich nations, while criticizing the United States.
He pressed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to pay him a visit in Venezuela. He subtly ribbed President Dmitry Medvedev, who has been widely portrayed as Putin's handpicked puppet. And he announced that his country would buy Russian weapons "to guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela, which is being threatened by the United States."
Photo: Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez smiles during his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Credit: Dmitry Kostyukov / AFP/Getty Images
Anna Gorman of the Times reports on Heather Suarez and her family. Heather has to commute from Tijuana, where she lives with her husband and children, to San Diego every day. Her daily journey starts at just after 4 in the morning.
After Heather, a native of Kentucky, fell in love and married Evaristo Suarez, an illegal immigrant, her life changed completely, writes Gorman.
The couple assumed that Evaristo, 30, would be eligible for a green card once they got married and that they would raise their family near her hometown. But because he had crossed into the United States illegally more than once, he was denied a visa and must wait 10 years before reapplying to return legally.
Photo: Heather Suarez applies makeup while waiting in a line of cars on the Mexico side of the Otay Mesa border crossing during her two-hour morning commute to work in San Diego, which starts each weekday at about 4:15. Credit: Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times
A hurricane watch was issued yesterday for the southern Texas coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said, as Tropical Storm Dolly worked her way toward that area from Mexico.
Dolly was 475 miles southeast of the border, where it was due to hit Wednesday near Brownsville, well away from sensitive offshore drilling rigs and production platforms.
The United States has largely escaped the last two Atlantic hurricane seasons, with just one hurricane -- Humberto in November 2007 -- making landfall.
Federal immigration officials say they have arrested a driver who flipped his sport utility vehicle into a canal near the border, about 125 miles east of San Diego, killing six, while transporting at least 20 illegal Mexican immigrants.
One of the survivors, a 12-year-old girl, saw her parents and 8-year-old brother die in the crash, said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reports Molly Hennessy-Fiske.
These sorts of accidents are common, and show the vulnerability of people from Latin America trying to cross into the United States illegally. The name of the driver has not been released because he may be a juvenile, according to the report.
Fresh jalapeno peppers joined tomatoes as possible culprits in the nationwide Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak that has sickened thousands of people and killed two since April, the federal government confirmed Monday.
The same salmonella strain once thought to have originated in raw tomatoes was found in a Mexican-grown jalapeno in a Texas distributing plant, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday, prompting a nationwide warning for consumers to avoid fresh jalapenos and food products made with fresh jalapeno peppers, report Conor L. Sanchez and Jerry Hirsch.
In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration angered Mexican farmers when it focused on their tomatoes as the source of salmonella outbreaks in the United States.
Mexico's main leftist party on Monday faced the possibility of months' more disarray after it threw out a disputed leadership vote held four months ago, writes the L.A. Times' Ken Ellingwood.
The move leaves the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, beset by division at a key moment. The party plans to lead the fight against President Felipe Calderon's proposed overhaul of the state-run oil industry and must also gear up for congressional elections next year.
"TJ? Really?" was the response from most people last week when they learned I was heading down south of San Diego for a research trip.
They were right to be cautious. I live in Mexico City -- one of the biggest, baddest towns around -- but still gave Tijuana a second thought. The world's most famous border city has been getting some bad press of late due to the drug-related violence playing out on its streets.
But what struck me more during my brief trip was the border itself and how it is littered with evidence of its own casualties and conflicts, past and present. The wall is at the center of the current national debate on immigration, and I wanted to see it for myself.
More than 3,000 people were evacuated from the state of Quintana Roo, where the tourist resorts Cancun and Tulum are situated. Winds of more than 50 mph battered the beaches, according to reports.
A tropical storm warning stayed in effect in Mexico, from Campeche on the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula all the way through to the country's border with Belize.
Although her half-brother has yet to set foot south of the U.S-Mexico border, Sen. Barack Obama's half-sister will be in Mexico City this week wooing the expat American community here.
Jeremy Schwartz, the Mexico City correspondent for Cox Newspapers, reports on his blog that Maya Soetoro-Ng (pictured) will be hosting a dinner tomorrow night in the city. Her visit, he says, is a sign of how the Democrats are prioritizing the targeting of Americans living abroad this year in the run-up to November's elections.
"We’ll see if the effort improves the numbers. The AP reports that of the 990,000 who requested absentee ballots in 2004, less than 400,000 were actually counted (problems with foreign mail services got most of the blame)."
The Christian Science Monitor reports this morning that hundreds of thousands of Colombians poured into the streets across the country Sunday in massive rallies demanding freedom for hundreds of hostages.
"They were joined by demonstrators in 80 cities around the world in a show of solidarity. It was the loudest message to leftist rebels yet to stop kidnapping and lay down their arms," wri
