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“I don’t know how many men raped me, but they raped me. When I got up I didn’t have my clothes on. I started bleeding from my nose. I lived two months on the street; I slept in cars. Cold, hunger -– I suffered everything.
“There were days when I didn’t have the drugs, and these days I was desperate -– to do drugs for sex, to do ... anything.''
Patricia -– her full name is unknown -– is a former crystal meth addict. Testimony like her's is featured in "La Obscuridad de Cristal, Sonora" ("Crystal Darkness in Sonora"), a documentary scheduled to air Wednesday across the Mexican state of Sonora. The initiative is backed by the local government and the U.S nonprofit group ChildHelp, which has already run similar campaigns in the United States and one in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez.
The documentary is being promoted by a billboard campaign in Sonora, and trailers running on YouTube feature extracts of interviews with former crystal meth users, aiming to generate interest in the program that will air on 72 television stations, 130 cable TV outlets and 90 radio stations throughout the state.
Crystal meth -- methamphetamine -- is a growing problem in northern Mexico, which is also one of the states heavily affected by the country's increasingly violent and deadly drug war.
While the national government tackles the country's powerful drug lords using the army and federal police, this campaign from local Sonora authorities suggests they are attempting to tackle the problem at the demand, as well as the supply, end.
Sonora's health secretary -- Raymund López Vucovich -- claims that drug consumption in the state is the No. 1 public health concern, especially the growing consumption of crystal meth. Use of the drug grew by more than 300% between 2002 and 2007, according to the state's health department. Of the 2,272 patients treated in Sonora for addiction in 2007, 38.4% were crystal meth consumers.
Go here to watch the Spanish-language trailers for the campaign on YouTube.
The "Crystal Darkness" program has previously aired in San Diego, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Reno, El Paso, Oregon; New Mexico; Arizona and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Campaigns are underway in Oklahoma, Colorado, Arkansas, Washington and Central California -- you can see the English-language website here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: These images are taken from the "Crystal Darkness" campaign, and picture an unnamed woman before and 3 1/2 years after she started using crystal meth.
After being lectured for 20 years about the superiority of the free market, officials in Latin America see no small irony in the effort to bail out the U.S. banking system, writes Chris Kraul from Ecuador.
Latin America has several reasons to worry about the U.S. economic meltdown. Ecuador, for instance, fears the possible loss of duty-free export markets for its coffee, fish and flowers.
People here are also worried the crisis will cut into the $2 billion in annual remittances sent home by Ecuadoreans living in the U.S., and wonder whether the nation's use of the dollar as the national currency, a move made in 2000 to curb inflation, still makes sense.
But there is an undercurrent of schadenfreude when it comes to America's pain. Commentator Boaventura de Sousa Santos scolded the United States for its "ironhanded evangelizing" that free markets, privatization and deregulation were innately more virtuous than "corrupt and efficient" state-run economies.
"Millions were thrown into unemployment, lost their land and labor rights and had to emigrate," the Portuguese-born Santos wrote in an article widely distributed over the Internet.
Read more about how the United States woes are also Latin America's problems.
Click here for more on business.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Stock traders negotiate at the Mercantile & Futures Exchange in Sao Paulo, Brazil, last week. Credit: Mauricio Lima / AFP / Getty Images
Leonor Merino said she was shocked Monday to find that what she thought was a pile of rags was a dozen bodies. Then she realized children soon would be passing by the carnage on the way to school, reports Richard Marosi.
So as class time approached at Valentin Gomez Farias Elementary School, Merino and her neighbors blocked the streets.
"We closed the streets so the kids wouldn't see all the dead bodies," Merino said hours after the bodies were removed. "Our hearts are trembling right now. We're wondering what's going to happen next."
The grisly discovery capped four days of violence that has shaken the sprawling Tijuana metropolitan area and forced Baja California state officials to plead for more federal police to help control the city. Police on Monday also discovered four bodies in a vacant lot in eastern Tijuana. They had been carefully arranged in a circle and, like other such scenes, carried a narco-message.
Click here to read about the bodies found in Tijuana, and here to see our special report on Mexico's drug wars, Mexico Under Siege.
Authorities said today that federal immigration agents arrested more than 1,150 people in the largest collective sweep by specialized enforcement teams in California, reports Francisco Vara-Orta
The sweep targeted those who ignored deportation orders or returned to the United States illegally after being deported, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
The raids, which ended Saturday, produced 436 arrests in the San Francisco area, 420 in the Los Angeles area and 301 in the San Diego area.
Of the 1,157 illegal immigrants arrested statewide, 595 had outstanding deportation orders and 346 had prior criminal convictions, Kice said. Those arrested come from 34 countries.
The squads responsible for the arrests, known as fugitive operations teams, were developed in 2003 to focus on apprehending foreign nationals who have ignored final orders of deportation or have returned to the U.S. illegally, Kice said.
The most prominent cases involve those wanted or convicted in violent or drug crimes, agency officials said.
"Individuals who defy immigration court orders to leave the country need to understand there are consequences for willfully disregarding the law," said Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Julie L. Myers, who oversees the federal immigration agency.
One L.A.-area case involved Jose Avila, 41, a Mexican national whose criminal history includes convictions for lewd acts involving a child and for battery. He was arrested Sept. 15 in Santa Fe Springs. After he is released by local authorities, Avila will be returned to federal custody for prosecution on felony charges of reentering the country after his deportation last year.
Click here for more on immigration.
Director Steven Soderbergh and actor Benicio Del Toro are to open Morelia's sixth annual international film festival in Mexico this weekend with "Che," the much-anticipated film about the Argentine revolutionary starring the Puerto Rican actor.
Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacan, is still reeling from two grenade explosions that went off in the city's center during the Independence Day celebrations on the night of Sept. 15. But the show is going on.
"Che," which was four hours long when it was last aired for the critics, was both panned and praised at the Cannes film festival in May this year.
"If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure," said Variety's Todd McCarthy.
A.O. Scott of the New York Times praised Soderbergh for his cohesiveness and attention to detail in the film, but goes on to say: There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in "Che," Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro's soulful and charismatic performance, allows Mr. Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naive and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Actor Benicio Del Toro and director Steven Soderbergh at the Cannes photo call for "Che" earlier this year. Credit: WireImage
Meetings between family members and friends on the beach and the park that lie along the international border between San Diego and Tijuana are to be limited by the Department of Homeland Security's border fence project.
Despite the project's budgetary difficulties, construction will begin next month on the extension of the fence through the park and down onto the beach and into the ocean.
As a result, a 90-foot-wide no man's land will be created on the U.S.-Mexico border, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The new fence will bring an end to the cross-border picnics, yoga sessions and meet-ups that friends and families held at the border with people in Mexico who don't have legal permission to cross north into the United States.
The current fence on the beach is made of thick black poles that protrude out of the sand. Gaps between the poles allow people who are on different sides of the fence to touch each other and talk. From the U-T story: It was like any seaside picnic, with family members sitting on folding chairs, colorful umbrellas and a cooler full of sodas. The only unusual thing was the steel mesh fence running through the middle of it.
On a recent Sunday, the Sotomayor family of Riverside rose early, packed a lunch and drove south to Border Field State Park, where the fence that separates the United States from Mexico meets the ocean.
As many Mexican-American families have done for years, they were there to spend the day with relatives unable to legally cross north to hug them and must be content to visit at the see-through fence.
This binational social scene, as it exists now, is unique along the southern border of the United States. Soon, it will be a memory.
However, federal officials said a gate in the new fence would allow visitors to reach the 1851 border monument that marks the point where the United States and Mexico agreed on a common border after the Mexican-American War. Arrangements over a roughly 40-foot-wide space surrounding the monument are being worked out but may give members of families access to one another.
Meanwhile, when the gate is closed, visitors will still be able to see into Mexico, but any socializing will be limited to waving from a distance.
Read the rest of the report on the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: The fence that cuts down the beach where Tijuana and San Diego end. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
Guatemala is to send an additional 1,300 soldiers to its border with Mexico in an effort to slow the illicit flow of people, drugs and contraband across the frontier that it shares with its northern neighbor, according to the Associated Press this morning.
The Guatemalan authorities also plan to send more police and immigration personnel to administer the 935-kilometer-long (580-mile) border.
President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala made the announcement Saturday night during a session called "Government With the People," says the report.
Guatemala's border with Mexico is the principal point of passage through which migrants from that country make their way north to the United States.
Times staff writer Héctor Tobar visited the frontier this year and wrote: Staff and equipment shortages are endemic to every law enforcement and military agency operating in the region, officials say. An overstretched army brigade of about 700 soldiers covers an area the size of Belgium. Guatemala's air force owns just two helicopters and no tactical radar capable of seeing low-flying aircraft.
To read the rest of the AP report on renewed efforts by the Guatemalan authorities to police its border with Mexico, click here.
Click here for more on Mexico, here for more on Guatemala and here for more about immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: A Guatemalan soldier patrols a nature preserve in the Peten, Guatemala, a region said to be crisscrossed with drug traffickers' illegal landing strips. Of one criminal band in the area, an official says, "There's no way to oppose them. The only way you can come in here is with heavy weapons." Credit: Héctor Tobar / Los Angeles Times
Dionicio Morales, an early giant of Eastside activism who came out of the agricultural fields of Moorpark to create the nation's largest Latino human services provider, has died. He was 89, writes Hector Becerra.
Morales died of natural causes Sept. 24 at Beverly Hospital in Montebello, said his daughter, Magdalena Morales.
In 1963, Dionicio Morales created the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation to provide social services, such as job training and child care. Along the way, he also became a mentor to many future community leaders and an eloquent crusader for social justice.
In the 1970s, at a time when Mexican American men overwhelmingly held the reins of neighborhood activism, Morales also opened doors for female leaders.
Read the rest of the article on Dionicio Morales here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Voters in Ecuador overwhelmingly approved a new constitution Sunday that would concentrate power in the hands of socialist President Rafael Correa, advance his reformist agenda and enable him to remain in office until 2017, exit polls indicated.
The constitution was drafted last summer by a special congress convened by Correa, who was elected in a 2006 landslide by voters exasperated by this country's chronic corruption, political instability and ineffectual lawmakers.
According to the exit count conducted by government-commissioned pollster Santiago Perez, 66% approved the constitution and 25% voted against it. The independent Cedatos-Gallup poll said the yes vote was 70%. Voters were required by law to vote on the constitution as a package, not by individual provisions.
Very early returns showed 65% support with 5% of the vote counted.
Read the rest of the dispatch on Ecuador's new constitution here, and for more on Ecuador in general, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The Associated Press surveys the damage done by this year's Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Gustav, which is being felt among gulf seafood harvesters, distributors and restaurants: On the eve of October's peak seafood harvesting season, migrant fishermen are sweeping debris from gutted bay-side homes instead of scooping shrimp and oysters from the Gulf of Mexico's lucrative floor. The $100-million fishing industry in Galveston Bay is nearly paralyzed.
Hurricane Ike's effect is being felt among gulf seafood harvesters, distributors and restaurants. Government and industry officials fear it will take as long as two years for the processing plants, boats and docks along the bay to recover and rebuild.
"It's like a bomb went off," said Lisa Halili, owner of Prestige Oysters Inc., which is among the largest seafood harvesters in Texas and Louisiana.
Read the full dispatch on the damage left by Hurricanes Ike and Gustav here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Slumped at an interrogation table, a gang member accused of participating in an attack that killed eight people at a Mexican Independence Day celebration described calmly how he was eager to get rid of the grenade he tossed into a crowded plaza, reports Tracy Wilkinson.
"I was hiding it in my hands and it made me shudder," Juan Carlos Castro Galeana told his interrogator. "I was desperate to get rid of it."
Castro added that he thought the attack, which he said he was ordered to carry out, was meant to "provoke" the government. He appears in a video posted Saturday on the website of El Universal newspaper. The video was obtained from the attorney general's office, the newspaper said.
Castro is one of three men arrested by Mexican authorities as suspects in the Sept. 15 assault during a revered national celebration in Morelia, the hometown of President Felipe Calderon. It was the first major deliberate attack on civilians since Calderon launched a crackdown on drug gangs nearly two years ago.
Federal prosecutors said Castro and two other men, Julio Cesar Mondragon Mendoza and Alfredo Rosas Elicea, confessed to the grenade attack.
Click here for more of this dispatch and here for our special coverage of the drug wars in Mexico, Mexico Under Siege.
To watch one of the grenade victims tell his story, go here.
— Deborah Bonello
Image: Officials inspect the bomb scene in Morelia's central plaza earlier this month. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
 "Blindness," Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's 1997 allegorical novel about an epidemic of sightlessness that threatens to destroy society, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that reads like a fever dream. Not exactly "Harry Potter," straight-to-the-big-screen material, reports Lewis Beale.
Yet Don McKellar saw in it a screenplay and Fernando Meirelles ("City of God") saw in that screenplay a film he could direct. And the fact that "Blindness" is now multiplex fodder, with the film opening Friday, is a testament to the willingness of moviemakers to tackle — sometimes against great odds — some of the toughest literary works.
"The more successful the work of art is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more it's going to resist a translation into another medium," says writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose adaptation of the Philip Roth novel "The Dying Animal" was recently filmed as the Ben Kingsley movie "Elegy."
Click here to read more of this report about converting books into screenplays.
Read our report on 'Blindness' and its making here.
Click here for more on film.
— Deborah Bonello
 Daniel not come home.
Linda LaPorte stood in the kitchen of her home in Pascoag, R.I., holding her cellphone. Her son's Thai girlfriend was calling from San Diego, speaking a mile a minute in fractured English, reports Evelyn Larrubia.
He said call mom if he not come home.
Linda and her husband, Joseph, had called their son just days earlier to wish him a happy 27th birthday. He'd said nothing about traveling anywhere.
Yet here was his girlfriend saying he'd gone to Mexico on business with a guy named Big Daddy. And he hadn't come back.
"What she was trying to convey to me didn't make sense," Linda recalled.
Dozens of American citizens have been kidnapped and killed in Mexico in the last year. They are a small fraction of the more than 3,000 people, the vast majority of them Mexicans, who have been slain gangland-style. Countless others have been kidnapped for ransom.
Read the rest of the dispatch about the disappearance of Daniel LaPorte here.
Click here for more on Mexico and here for our special report on the drug wars in Mexico, Mexico Under Siege.
— Deborah Bonello
The Colombian office of the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights has asked the government and its military to ''clarify and put an end to the practice of alleged extra-judicial executions'' that may have left as many as 80 dead, reports El Nuevo Herald.
In the past week alone, the bodies of 45 young men have been found in unmarked graves, 23 of them in northern Santander province, sparking a furor in this violence-riddled South American nation.
Although the identities of the killers has not been determined, Colombian authorities have said they are investigating the possible existence of death squads within the military that portray the dead as enemy combatants killed in firefights.
Other theories are that the young victims were recruited by drug traffickers or paramilitary groups, now reorganizing after the dissolution in 2006 of the umbrella United Self-Defenses of Colombia under a surrender agreement with President Alvaro Uribe.
The attorney general's office said Friday that some of the victims were young men who disappeared from low-income neighborhoods in Bogotá after reportedly receiving offers of employment.
Bogotá Government Secretary Clara López said last week that the victims were ''forcefully disappeared and murdered'' after having been recruited by illegal organizations.
Read the rest of the dispatch here.
Click here to read a recent Los Angeles Times editorial on Colombia's armed forces here. Chris Kraul, our correspondent in Colombia, filed this dispatch on the rising number of killings by armed forces in Colombia in late August.
Click here for more on Colombia.
— Deborah Bonello
A Republican official in the U.S. has resigned over comments he made to the BBC that "Hispanics consider themselves above blacks."
Fernando de Baca, chairman of the Republican Party in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, also said Latinos "won't vote for a black president."
De Baca spoke last week but resisted calls from his own party to resign, saying he was quoted out of context.
He said he decided to step down because of the "media circus" that developed.
De Baca had been approached by the BBC's Jon Kelly for comments on the presidential election campaign at the New Mexico State Fair in Albuquerque, part of Bernalillo County.
Read the full BBC dispatch here.
— Deborah Bonello
Continue reading Republican quits in row over comments »
The Mexican attorney general's office announced Friday afternoon that it has arrested three men in connection with the two grenade explosions in Morelia, Michoacan, last week that killed 8 people and left more than a hundred injured.
According to a statement from Asst. Atty. Gen. Maricela Morales Ibañez this afternoon, the suspects were arrested in the town of Apatzingan, Michoacan, after an anonymous tip.
Authorities said Julio César Mondragón Morales, Juan Carlos Castro Galeana and Alfredo Rosas Elisea had confessed to having detonated the grenades during Independence Day festivities on Sept. 15. Officials identified the men as members of a brutal drug gang known as the Zetas.
El Universal, reporting from the press conference where the statement was made, said one of the detainees, Rosas Elisea, appeared to have been beaten.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The Mexican government launched a competition Thursday to find the worst examples of inefficiency within the bureaucratic machine. The initiative is asking people to submit the most outrageous examples of inefficiency and corruption they have experienced when dealing with officials and government agencies in Mexico.
The effort is being overseen by la Secretaría de la Función Pública, and the "winners" will be announced in December. According to the daily newspaper La Jornada, foreigners as well as Mexicans can submit their tales of exasperation and dissatisfaction with red tape in the country.
Promotional material for the competition (above) features two men in a cluttered office. One man -- a bureaucrat -- is behind a desk and holding up his hands as if to say, "What do you want me to do about it?" The other man, laden with a stack of bound paperwork, looks on in frustration.
The message accompanying the image: "Denounce the worst procedure -- the most useless bureaucratic procedure."
Mexico is listed as the 72nd-most-corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International's 2008 index.
The amount that Mexicans paid in bribes last year rose in comparison to previous years, the nonprofit reports. Mexicans paid the equivalent of about $2.6 billion in bribes in 2007 -- that's 42% more than they paid than two years earlier and an average of more than $24 for each of Mexico’s 105 million people.
Much of the money went to fix parking tickets, get garbage collected or secure parking spots from the legions of informal attendants who block off spaces and charge for them.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Part of the publicity for the competition launched by la Secretaría de la Función Pública to find the most outrageous examples of bureaucracy in Mexico. Grabbed from http://www.funcionpublica.gob.mx/.
Mexico's former head of security and anti-crime activists renewed their calls for the public to act against organized crime and rising street crime levels in Mexico.
María Elena Morera, president of the México Unido contra la Delincuencia (Mexico United Against Crime) Foundation, said Thursday during an interview with the La Cronica newspaper at a forum: "We have to be much more active -- it's time to raise our guard. We're many more [in number than the criminals]. We citizens who want to live in peace don't have to be scared by these situations."
Since a double-grenade attack in the city of Morelia, Michoacan, last week killed eight people and injured dozens more, much of the Mexican media's attention has focused on whether authorities knew an attack was likely and then botched the investigation. Authorities here have pointed blame at the country's powerful organized crime networks. But at least one gang has denied it was responsible.
Speakers at the safety forum emphasized the importance of the role of the Mexican public in reporting crime networks and people they know are engaged in kidnappings and other crimes, which are on the rise.
Alejandro Gertz Manero, rector of the Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City and a former federal public safety chief, said that because of the failings of Mexico's law enforcement and justice system, civil society has to generate its own institutions for dealing with organized crime and delinquency.
He dismissed the citizen council scheme proposed by the organizers of August's march against crime and approved by President Felipe Calderon, saying, "I'm talking about serious things!"
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Russian and Venezuelan energy firms reached an energy cooperation pact during a meeting of their presidents, the BBC reports this morning: Venezuela's [President] Hugo Chavez was in the southern Russian city of Orenburg with Russia's Dmitry Medvedev.
The two countries have been rapidly building closer military and economic ties, and have spoken of their opposition to US global dominance.
The latest deal calls for broader co-operation on oil and gas production.
We reported earlier this month that Russia and Venezuela announced joint military exercises and that Russia flew two long-range bomber planes to the oil-rich Latin American country just a few weeks ago.
Chavez's trip to Russia is part of a five-nation tour that began Sunday in Cuba. China, France and Portugal were also on the list of stops during his weeklong tour.
Read Megan Stack's story, "Venezuela, Russia extend ties in energy, weapons as Chavez visits
Moscow."
Click here for more on Venezuela.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
More than two dozen rivers have overflowed in the coastal states of Veracruz and Tabasco, the Associated Press reports this morning.
Thousands of homes have been inundated, and the floodwaters have damaged bridges and homes and cut off some villages.
Flooding in Tabasco last year killed at least 33 people and inundated more than 1 million homes.
This year, a woman and four children were killed as a result of conditions caused by the storm, AP reports: Maria de Jesus Riandez was driving home with her three children and their 13-year-old friend when her car skidded and fell into the irrigation ditch in the Veracruz town of Nanchital, said district attorney Juan Castro. The three siblings were 1- to 9-years-old.
More than 1,100 people were in shelters in Veracruz, where the floods also forced state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos to close five wells.
Click here for more on Mexico.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Our correspondent Ken Ellingwood hit the streets of Mexico City on a recent Sunday -- but not in pursuit of the latest morbid development in the country's violent drug war.
He went for a bike ride with his family, making the most of a year-old city initiative that converts one of the city's main drags -- Paseo de la Reforma -- and other big roads into a 20-mile loop for bikes, banishing traffic for several hours every Sunday. Ellingwood writes: On wheels, we charge -- a vast and exultant army of cycling, skating, spinning, scooting, sweating warriors in the thrill of conquest.
We rule this city -- at least for a few hours....
We strap on helmets and spend two to three hours on a citywide loop: zooming past glassy high-rises and triumphal statues, through graffiti-spattered precincts where sidewalk stands send up a tang of raw seafood, along normally jammed commercial boulevards lined with chain stores and sex-driven billboard ads.
We are Mexico City residents of all shapes and styles, from Lycra-clad speed demons to wobbly tykes on training wheels.
Read the rest of his dispatch here.
Photo: A police officer stands watch at an intersection on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma as cyclists ride past. Every Sunday morning, some of the biggest streets of the car-flooded capital are handed over to bicyclists, who roll in by the tens of thousands. Credit: Sarah Meghan Lee / For The Times
Remember how we reported earlier this year from Mexico on ALAS, a new charity initiative by Colombian superstar Shakira to aid Latin America's millions of poor, malnourished and undereducated children?
Well, she's at it again, this time in New York and accompanied by Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz.
But her companions weren't just other Spanish-speaking pop stars but rather the presidents of Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador, Panama and Paraguay. The singers asked the presidents to adopt an agreement on combating child poverty during the upcoming Iberoamerican Summit in late October. ''If we win your personal commitment today, we will have opened the future of Latin America,'' said Sanz, a Spaniard.
''I promised Shakira that in the next summit, which is in El Salvador, we will work on the topic,'' Salvadoran President Tony Saca told a crowd of 1,000 at Columbia University in New York, where the presidents are attending the United Nations General Assembly.
The five leaders spoke of child poverty in their countries and expressed interest in the project -- as well as admiration for the artists' work through ALAS.
Click here to read the full report from the Associated Press on yesterday's meeting in New York.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: A screen shot taken from a video earlier this year in Mexico, where Shakira hosted a throng of Spanish-speaking pop stars and millionaires from both sides of the border to promote the new initiative ALAS.
It appears that Mexico's kidnapping craze is crossing the northern border. Kidnappers in Mexico are extorting money from immigrant families living in the United States as their family members try to cross the border illegally, according to this Associated Press report. The culprits behind so-called 'virtual kidnappings' typically strike when illegal immigrants make the three- to four-day journey through the remote desert, where they are cut off from communicating with family members. Relatives are told to cough up thousands of dollars or their loved ones will be maimed or killed.
'It's just an extension of what happens in Mexico,' said Armando Garcia, assistant special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, where the trend first appeared five years ago and has escalated to an average of one case being reported each week.
According to the report, the kidnappers speak good English and use cell phones with a Phoenix area code so it looks like they are in the Arizona capital, even though they are probably making the calls from Mexico, where the extortion money is often sent.
Mexico is currently suffering a crime wave, with an increase in kidnappings across the country that don't discriminate by class.
Thousands of Mexicans marched in August across the country to express their anger at the increase in crime and demand action on the part of their government.
Read the complete report from AP on how kidnappings from Mexico are seeping into the United States here.
Click here for more on Mexico, and here for more about immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: A truck crosses the United States border with Mexico. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
The Institute for Mexicans Abroad, a program run by the Mexican government, has been providing money, resources and sometimes even teachers to schools and nonprofits in the United States to help Mexicans living there, legally and illegally, to improve their English and complete their education, according to this report from the Associated Press.
The Mexican community living in the United States is an economic lifeline for Mexico. After profits from oil, remittances sent home from the community in the U.S make up Mexico's second biggest source of foreign income.
But illegal immigration is a huge issue in the United States. The U.S. government is tightening border security and in the process of building a 670-mile long fence along its Southern border with Mexico.
Acknowledgment that the Mexican government is helping educate Mexicans in the United States - many of them there illegally - may be interpreted by some as tacit support for unlawful immigration. "The programs aren't substitutes for U.S. curricula, but educators familiar with them say they provide a lifeline for adult students with little formal education by helping them become literate in Spanish — and by extension, English," reports AP.
"Yet many educators are wary of even talking about the programs, fearing they might stoke an anti-immigrant backlash.
"The Mexican government, which spends more than $1 million annually on the programs, has many reasons to provide the aid to the immigrants and their children. The programs allow it to give back to the growing number of Mexicans living legally and illegally in the U.S. Behind oil, remittances from these individuals are the second-largest source of foreign income for the Mexican economy — almost $24 billion last year.
Read the rest of the report from AP on how Mexico is helping with the education of its countrymen in the United States here.
Click here for more on Mexico, here for more about education, and here for posts on immigration issues.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The Miami Herald is reporting this morning that a Cuban man trying to reach Florida on a speedboat with 32 others died Wednesday from head injuries he might have suffered when suspected smugglers tried to run from federal authorities in rough seas. The man, whose name has not been released, was declared dead early Wednesday at Opa-locka Airport's Coast Guard station. He was airlifted to the station after cutters stopped the grossly overloaded 25-foot speedboat south of Key Largo late Tuesday. Miami-Dade Police said he was 35.
The Coast Guard also intercepted two smaller speedboats in the vicinity believed to have been involved in the smuggling operation. Federal authorities were holding seven suspected smugglers and 32 passengers in custody Wednesday while they investigate, the Coast Guard said.
The government would not say where they are being held. Cubans intercepted at sea are usually returned to Cuba, but in cases where fatalities have occurred some or all in a group can be brought to the United States to serve as witnesses in the criminal investigation.
Read more about the failed immigration trip from Cuba to Florida here.
In July, we reported how many Cubans were trying to get to the United States via Mexico in the face of a U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration in the waters between Cuba and Florida.
For more on Cuba click here, and go here for more about immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has asked the United Nations for help in combating the lack of security in his country.
The plea comes after two grenade explosions in Morelia, Michoacan, last week killed eight people and injured hundreds. The government is blaming organized crime networks for the attacks.
Meanwhile, a wave of kidnappings around the country prompted tens of thousands of Mexicans to take to the streets last month to demand action from the government.
"Mexico reiterates its call to all nations to find new ways to confront this threat; the eradication of this scourge is at the center of Mexico's national security policy and our international agenda," said Calderon this morning in New York, addressing the United Nations General Assembly.
You can read Calderon's full speech, in both Spanish and English here.
Click here for more on Mexico and go here to see our special report on the country's drug problems, Mexico Under Siege.
--Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Tens of thousands of Mexicans marched in Mexico City and across the country last month, expressing their anger at rising crime levels and demanding action from the government of President Felipe Calderon.
Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
Making headlines in Mexico today is the close resemblance between the man pictured in a composite sketch of a suspect sought in last week's grenade attacks in the state of Michoacan and ... the city's police chief.
Eight people were killed and more than a hundred injured when two grenades went off -- one in the central plaza full of people, the other on a street corner full of people watching the celebratory fireworks during Independence Day festivities in the city center.
The city's public-security chief, Mario Bautista Ramírez, has said he was one of the first people to arrive after the blasts on the night of Sept. 15. That could explain why witnesses may have described him. He has said he is willing to be investigated as part of the government's probe into the attacks.
The sketch, of a man with a full face and a mustache, was based on the testimony of witnesses. The suspect was reportedly around 28 years of age -- much younger than Bautista Ramírez -- and wearing black, the color of police uniforms in Michoacan.
You can judge for yourself on the similarity -- click here to see an image of Bautista Ramírez and a drawing of the suspect based on witness testimony.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Officials inspect Morelia's central plaza on Sept. 17, two days after two grenade explosions ripped through crowds of people celebrating Mexico's independence day. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
Gael Garcia Bernal, the Mexican actor and heartthrob, has responded to the bombings in the Mexican state of Michoacan last week with a column for the newspaper El Universal.
The article, written from Europe in complicated Spanish, is a poetic tribute to the eight people who died in last week's bombings in Morelia, and a lamentation of the state of affairs in Mexico. Garcia Bernal's father was born in Michoacan.
"It hurts me not to be close. To be so far -– now more than ever. Instead of feeling relieved for being so far, I feel sad and vulnerable," writes Bernal.
"Why, when I see so much violence, do I feel like the aggression was against my memories, and my identity? Each death robs me of my freedom to remember, an attempt against the future."
Garcia Bernal, the star of films including "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "Amores Perros," revisits his childhood memories and remembers breakfast in the local markets and the smell of tamales.
But this morning, another national newspaper, Milenio, published a criticism of Bernal's piece, lambasting him for having written something in such complicated language using words that "three dictionaries and two encyclopedias" were needed to decipher.
Jairo Calixto's column treats the actor's reaction to events in the country in sarcastic tones, and mocks his level of understanding of Mexico's problems:
"Relax, Gael. Instead of asking, from a very nice place, 'Why, when I see so much violence, do I feel like the aggression was against my memories, and my identity?,' we should celebrate the fact that Mexico, for the third year running, has maintained its position as the 72nd most corrupt country in the world.
"You say, Gael, that it hurts you to be far away. Don't you worry -- they also say that to be far away is to forget."
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo credit: Tom Wagner / For The Times
New data from the U.S Census yesterday reported that the proportion of native Spanish speakers fluent in English increased to 51.4% in 2007 from 44.6% in 2000. This Los Angeles Times editorial argues that those new statistics reveal an enthusiasm for the United States that the nation should welcome. "Those gains suggest the enthusiasm of these new arrivals for their adopted country and argue for their absorption, not their demonization. Granted, these percentages lump legal and illegal immigrants together, and evidence suggests that those here illegally are less likely to master the language. Border control and a sputtering U.S. economy have done much to deter illegal immigration over the last several years, and may be contributing marginally to the increased fluency of the immigrant population that remains.
"But that's an argument for legalizing families, not for imagining them as a threat to our cohesion. American culture grows and adapts as new immigrants redefine it over the generations, and the same can be said of the English language. We should embrace that evolution, not hold it at bay with false and alarmist arguments about the threat to American values."
Read more of the Los Angeles Times editorial on the fact that more immigrants speak English here.
Go here for more on immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Sven-Goran Eriksson, the recently appointed coach of Mexico's national soccer team, spent some time with the media in downtown Los Angeles yesterday. "Near the end of a news conference ... Eriksson was asked by a female television reporter what he thought of chili.
"Since Mexico is playing Chile on Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Coliseum, Eriksson started talking about Santiago.
"The television reporter laughed and said no, she meant the food, not the country.
"It might have been a set-up, but Eriksson took the joke well and afterward made a point of meeting and shaking hands with the reporter, the only one of four dozen writers and photographers in the room so honored," reports Grahame L. Jones.
Click here to read more about Sven-Goran Eriksson in Los Angeles.
Click here for more on sports and here for more on Mexico.
Photo: Sven-Goran Eriksson, the Swedish coach of the Mexican national soccer team, walks between television cameras Tuesday after a news conference in Los Angeles. Eriksson says coaching Mexican players, many of whom also play in Europe, hasn't been markedly different from his previous job coaching the English national team. Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Associated Press
Exploratory oil wells drilled off Brazil's coastline indicate the presence of a vast pool of crude that could propel this nation into the top tier of world energy producers, reports Chris Kraul.
The oil field highlighted last week by state-controlled oil company Petrobras lies in "ultra-deep" waters beneath an unstable layer of hot salt, presenting technological challenges that are sure to bring ultra-high costs.
The find has sparked a fierce debate about whether Brazil should stake hundreds of billions of dollars on a risky field amid market uncertainty and pressing social needs.
Read the rest of the report on Brazil's new energy find here.
Click here for more on Brazil.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, right, and Petroleo Brasileiro SA president, Sergio Gabrielli, show their hands covered with oil during a visit to the P-34 offshore platform, 75 miles east of Vitoria in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / Associated Press.
Northrop Grumman contractor Tom Janis was slain in 2003 after making a difficult crash landing in the jungle. His three American colleagues were held hostage by the FARC until this summer, when they were liberated in a military resuce operation.
Now, reports Chris Kraul from Bogota, officials want to rename a wing of the U.S Embassy in the capital after Janis. "The 2009 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill coming to a vote soon in Congress contains an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) proposing that a section of the bunker-like embassy be renamed in honor of Thomas Janis. Passage is likely.
'Tom Janis saved our lives,' said rescued defense contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell in a statement e-mailed to The Times in support of the proposed honor. 'He was exceptionally brave. ... Tom Janis is a hero.' "
Read the rest of Kraul's dispatch from Bogota on the future name of a wing of the U.S Embassy there here.
For more on Colombia, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes inside an airplane after being rescued in July this year. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency
 Colombia's President Uribe was one of the heads of state who met with the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin yesterday.
Palin, a small-town mayor turned Alaska governor turned national candidate, has traveled very little outside of the United States and boasts few foreign-policy credentials. "Tuesday's tutorials were with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Palin, wearing Alaska-shaped gold earrings, also consulted for almost 90 minutes with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in his Park Avenue office.
The candidate's staff carefully choreographed her debut onto the international stage, starting each meeting with a brief photo opportunity and allowing no questions. Unscripted moments were kept to a minimum," reports Geraldine Baum.
Click here for the full report of Palin's debut into the world of international affairs.
Federal agents yesterday seized a 26-foot boat carrying 22 illegal Mexican immigrants off the San Diego coast, reports Molly Hennessy-Fisk.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped the blue-and-white fishing boat at 3:30 a.m. about a mile west of city-owned Torrey Pines Golf Course, officials said in a news release.
Agents fired two warning shots before the boat's operator surrendered. No one was injured, officials said. Agents found 16 men and six women from Mexico on board, all wearing life vests and in good condition. Investigators later determined they were in U.S. waters illegally.
Agents seized the boat, which did not have any registration markings, and held two of the men for possible criminal prosecution. Three of the other men will remain in the U.S. as witnesses, and the others were turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol for possible return to Mexico, officials said.
Click here for more on immigration and here for more on Mexico.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: This 26-foot boat with 22 suspected illegal immigrants aboard was seized by federal agents in the ocean about a mile west of San Diego's Torrey Pines Golf Course. Credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
An five-ton elephant that escaped from a circus was involved in an accident with a bus early this morning on the outskirts of Mexico City. The animal and the 49-year-old driver, Tomás López Durán, were killed, and six people were injured.
The animal was trying to cross a busy highway shortly after midnight when it was hit by a bus owned by the Transportes Teotihuacán company.
The elephant, aged 40, had escaped from the Circo Unión and crossed two neighborhoods before the collision.
Click here for the report on El Universal. You can see pictures of the accident here and here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Luis Martínez went from being a successful Dallas businessman to a struggling alfalfa farmer in rural central Mexico because of a North Texas crackdown on illegal immigrants, reports the Dallas Morning News this morning.
Now, that crackdown is squeezing towns across Mexico as immigrant unemployment grows in the U.S. and money sent home declines at a record rate. "A growing number of deportations, along with rising unemployment, are forcing Mexicans to further tighten their belts as remittances sent home dropped by nearly 7 percent in July compared with a year earlier. That's the biggest one-month fall on record as measured by Mexico's central bank."
Read here on a report about Mexico's financial woes at the end of July.
To read more about Luis Martínez and the problems facing Mexicans at home and north of the border in the Dallas Morning News, click here.
Click here for more on immigration and here for more on Mexico.
-- Deborah Bonello
 A former model and ballerina is making headlines across Brazil after claiming she was John McCain's lover 51 years ago, reports the Associated Press.
Maria Gracinda Teixeira, 77, says she is the woman the Republican presidential candidate fondly described -- though never named -- in his 1999 book "Faith of My Fathers.''
In the book, McCain said he met a ''Brazilian fashion model'' as a young Navy sailor in Rio de Janeiro when the destroyer USS Hunt docked in the city for a week in 1957. McCain was stationed on the ship.
Local reporters tracked her down late last week, turning Teixeira into an overnight media sensation.
Read more about Maria Gracinda Teixeira and her claimed links to McCain here.
-- Deborah Bonello
Although the overall U.S. abortion rate is at its lowest level since 1974, the drop has been far more dramatic for whites than for African Americans, who in 2004 had abortions at five times the rate of white women, according to a report released Monday.
The abortion rate for Latinas was about three times that of whites, reports Mary Engel.
The Guttmacher Institute, a New York research group that supports abortion rights but whose statistics are generally respected by anti-abortion groups, analyzed 30 years of data since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
The analysis found that the differences partly reflected varying pregnancy and childbearing patterns.
-- Deborah Bonello
California's immigrants are growing more assimilated, with greater proportions reporting last year that they became U.S. citizens and the majority of Spanish speakers now saying they speak English very well, a sharp rise from 2000, according to U.S. Census data released today.
Data from the bureau's 2007 American Community Survey showed that California continued to diversify, with whites declining to 42.5% of the state's total population and Latinos, Asians and blacks increasing to 54.4%. The foreign-born population inched upward and now makes up more than one-fourth of residents in the state and one-third in Los Angeles County, report Teresa Watanabe and Francisco Vara-Orta.
But bucking perceptions that high levels of immigration are jeopardizing national cohesion, the data showed that today's immigrants, like those before them, are embracing an American identity. In Los Angeles County, for instance, the proportion of native Spanish speakers fluent in English increased to 51.4% in 2007 from 44.6% in 2000. The share of naturalized citizens among the foreign-born grew to 43.3% from 38% over that time.
"Every major study shows that immigrants from whatever country are integrating into our society at the same level and degree as prior immigrants," said Antonia Hernandez, president of the Los Angeles-based California Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that recently launched an initiative to help immigrants adapt here.
Click here to read more about the latest U.S census data and it's findings on immigrants in the United States.
Click here for more on immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello</ | |
