You might remember this post we did in June on a documentary about Nicaraguan banana-plantation workers and the Dole Food Co.
Well, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Dole accused Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten of slander and libel in making the documentary, which was shown at last month's Los Angeles Film Festival.
The film "Bananas!" chronicles a 2007 case against Dole and prominently features L.A. attorney Juan J. Dominguez, who now faces contempt charges. The Times' Victoria Kim reports:
In light of the judge's finding of fraud by the plaintiffs' attorneys, Dole attorneys contend in the complaint that "Bananas!" unfairly demonizes Dole and is riddled with factual inaccuracies.
Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney, in a 60-page ruling dismissing two pending lawsuits, said attorneys for the Nicaraguans engaged in a brazen scheme to recruit men who had never worked on banana plantations, train them to lie on the stand and fabricate medical evidence to back up the claims."
Read the rest of Kim's story about the Dole lawsuit here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Remittances from Mexicans living and working in the United States are continuing to fall.
"Money sent home by Mexicans working abroad fell by 19.9 percent in May, the biggest monthly decline on record as the U.S. recession slashed jobs," reports the Associated Press in Business Week.
"Remittances dropped to $1.9 billion from $2.4 billion in May 2008, the central bank said on Wednesday. The amount of money sent home in the first five months of 2009 fell 11.3 percent to $9.2 billion compared with the same period last year.
"Remittances are the second-biggest source of foreign currency after oil exports in Mexico, and their decline has contributed to the country's own economic downturn."
Read the full Business Week report
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed a marginal event -- Henry Ford's failed attempt to establish a gigantic agricultural-industrial complex in the heart of Brazil's Amazon Basin -- and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry's contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism.
For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of a blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.
"Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" is precisely that -- a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist's sense of pace and an eye for character. It's a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.
Read the rest of Tim Rutten's review of Greg Grandin's book Fordlandia.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Only five of the original 14 people rehired by the new owner of the News, Mexico City’s struggling English-language newspaper, remain on the job. In the last few days, nine more employees have left the paper.
Brian Rausch was the most recent editor of the daily after the dismissal of Malcolm Beith earlier this month. Rausch departed Wednesday along with four other people, and three others left on Monday. Of the five remaining and original employees, only two are native English speakers.
Beith was the first to sit in the editor’s chair after the News was sold by its former owner Victor Hugo O’Farill to Grupo Mac at the beginning of June.
The latest developments at the News do not bode well for the paper, which for the last two weeks has relied even more heavily on wire reports and translated copy from other Grupo Mac titles to fill its pages.
Today's front page story in the Mexico City daily is a New York Times wire story about how the U.S needs a new financial system.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
In the eyes of Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten, his documentary "Bananas!" is a balanced, nuanced depiction of a trial pitting Nicaraguan banana plantation workers and a prominent L.A. attorney against a powerful multinational agribusiness, reports Reed Johnson.
"It is a classical David-Goliath story," the director said in a phone interview last week.
In the eyes of Dole Food Co., Gertten's film is an egregiously flawed document based on what Dole lawyer Scott Edelman calls "a phony story" that has been discredited by the allegedly fraudulent conduct of Juan J. Dominguez, the L.A. attorney at the film's center. Dole, the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables, is vowing to sue the filmmaker and the Los Angeles Film Festival for defamation if it screens the movie this week.
Read more of Johnson's report here and watch the trailer above.
Mexico’s only national English-language daily newspaper, the News, based in Mexico City, was bought by a Mexican media company, and dozens of staffers were laid off over the weekend, a development that left employees standing outside the newspaper’s offices “looking bewildered,” according to an editorial in the paper Monday morning.
The newspaper will continue publishing with a third of its original staff but will offer a smaller daily edition and will no longer publish on the weekends.
Read on »
Controversial ad campaigns about Mexico seem to keep popping up.
This time, it was a campaign running in the UK from Coca-Cola Schweppes. The ad, which ran for just one day on May 15 in The Times (of London) newspapers, was quickly withdrawn after complaints from Mexico's embassy in London.
The soft drinks' advertising agency Mother London created a number of illustrations as part of a series of ads called "Experience Matters."
The image in question featured an illustration of a man wearing a huge Mexican sombrero on London's Underground subway system, with a box of tissues by his side.
The ad was intended to be a humorous take on the H1N1 influenza strain that was first detected in Mexico and has now spread to a number of countries, including the United Kingdom. According to the World Health Organization, the UK has reported 112 cases but no deaths from the virus.
Read on »
You may remember the article we published last November about the issue of medical tourism in Mexico and around the world -- you can read it here.
At the time, we also followed the case of Paul Hambleton, a Texan, who went to Monterrey, Mexico, for mild knee surgery. He said that the same operation in the United States would have cost him twice as much.
A survey from Gallup this week found that the availability of medical services in foreign countries isn't something that American consumers have failed to notice.
Read on »
Fonda Garufa, a restaurant in the trendy Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, is feeling the effects of the swine flu outbreak.
Government restrictions have limited the restaurant and thousands of others in Mexico City to only providing takeout meals, and sales at Garufa have plummeted.
See the video for more.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Claudia Eller and Reed Johnson report how Hollywood movie studios, about to enter the most crucial time of the year for ticket sales, are being forced to delay the Mexico releases of their big early-summer movies, including "Star Trek," "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Angels & Demons," as theaters here close because of the swine flu epidemic sweeping the country.
"Such a delay could cost the studios tens of millions in revenue at a time when they are increasingly relying on international box office to offset production and marketing expenses. Mexico ranks in the top 10 movie markets, accounting for about 6% of foreign ticket sales. It could also undercut the performance of movies when they eventually open in theaters by giving pirated DVD copies a chance to flood the market."
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Chris Kraul
Mexico City:
Deborah Bonello
Ken Ellingwood
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette