Anti-crystal meth campaign launches in northern Mexico

“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.

Latin America has reasons to worry about U.S. financial crisis

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

12 bodies found near Mexico school

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.

California immigration raids result in 1,157 arrests

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.

Soderbergh and Del Toro open film festival in Morelia, Mexico

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

Border fence project to limit family get-togethers at Tijuana-San Diego beach

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 boosts armed presence on border with Mexico

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

L.A. activist Dionicio Morales dies

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

Ecuador voters appear to approve constitution

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

Seafood trade in Gulf of Mexico swamped by Ike and Gustav

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