Turning poor Guatemalan kids into photographers -- 21 years later

 
GUATEMALA CITY -- It began at a toxic garbage dump, Central America's largest and most dangerous.

Nancy McGirr, a Guatemala-based American photojournalist and veteran of Reuters news agency, one day surveyed the burning plastic, cardboard houses, gardens of sewage and thousands of people scavenging for food at the 40-acre dump in Guatemala City. Many of them were children who pursued her, eager to look through her camera lens.

"The thought occurred to me: If they had the camera, what would they see through that lens?" McGirr recalled.

That was more than 20 years ago.

With a handful of cheap, plastic cameras, McGirr armed a program known now as Fotokids (and originally as "Out of the Dump") and taught children from the dump to photograph their surroundings, taking in everything, censoring nothing.

The Times first wrote about the project in 1993, shortly after it was launched. "The dump is a place where the stench is nauseating and inescapable, where vultures darken the sky and where disease breeds uncontrollably," The Times wrote.

The children's photos, it continued, "the result of something between creativity and serendipity, show the dramatic horrors of life at the dump -- the drunken scavengers, the wretched landscape of trash, the roosting vultures. But they also capture private moments of poignancy and joy, of young Indian girls dancing, of a wedding of an elderly couple, lifelong residents of the dump."

Today, the remarkable thing in a region of dashed promises and debilitating violence is that the program continues strong after achieving worldwide acclaim.

"I originally thought the project would last six months to a year, but it just took off," McGirr said.

McGirr, a San Francisco native who has also taken pictures for The Times, said her goal was to use photography to break the cycle of poverty. She soon realized the kids' snapshots could also be used as a teaching tool: showing them that they didn't have to be a part of a gang to be in a group and that cameras are a more effective weapon against poverty than guns.

From an initial six students who entered the after-school program in 1991, hundreds have passed through, receiving a camera, food, photography classes and education scholarships. One of the early sponsors was the Japanese photo giant Konica, which donated supplies, and the kids have had exhibits the world over.

"Of course they don't all go on to become photographers," McGirr said. "Photography just gives them a face and a platform" -- a tool that they might use to escape lives of perpetual poverty, drugs and gang violence.

More of the kids' snapshots can be seen at the Fotokids website.

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Upper photo: One of Nancy McGirr's young students, Marta, takes pictures in Antigua, Guatemala, alongside a professional news photographer from the Prensa Libre daily. Credit: Fotokids

Lower photo: A student poses with her camera. Credit: Fotokids

 

 

 

Liberia's Charles Taylor guilty of aiding, abetting war crimes

LONDON -- In a landmark case, former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity through his arming of ruthless rebel groups in neighboring Sierra Leone in exchange for so-called blood diamonds.

An international war crimes tribunal announced Thursday that it had found Taylor guilty of "sustained and significant" support for the rebels who engaged in a long campaign of terror, murder, rape, sexual slavery and enlistment of child soldiers. However, he was found not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of ordering those abuses himself.

Still, it was a milestone verdict in a case that has been seen as an important test of the international justice system. Taylor, 64, is the first former head of state to have a judgment brought against him by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

The verdict followed a year of deliberations by the judges of the Special Court of Sierra Leone just outside The Hague. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for May 16; Taylor could be imprisoned for life.

His trial lasted five years, during which the court heard a catalog of horrific acts committed by rebels whom Taylor helped arm in Sierra Leone’s civil war. The war ended in 2002 after more than a decade of fighting and more than 50,000 deaths. The rebels backed by Taylor became particularly known for hacking off the limbs of their perceived enemies and carving words onto their bodies.

They also recruited children to fight and terrorized the civilian population through rape, looting and burning down homes. Crucial to their campaign were the weapons they bought from Taylor and paid for with what came to be known as “conflict" or "blood" diamonds, because of their role in fueling conflict in Africa.

At one point during the trial, supermodel Naomi Campbell testified to receiving diamonds from Taylor at a banquet hosted by South African President Nelson Mandela. Actress Mia Farrow also testified regarding that incident.

Taylor, a warlord-turned-elected president, was indicted in 2003, arrested in 2006 and eventually flown to The Hague for trial. Conducting the proceedings in Sierra Leone itself was deemed potentially too destabilizing for West Africa.

Taylor pleaded innocent to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He testified for seven months in his own defense, portraying himself as a statesman, peacemaker and victim of a witch hunt by “vindictive” former colonial powers intent on keeping him out of power. His lawyers acknowledged that terrible abuses took place during Sierra Leone’s civil war but argued that he was not responsible for them.

The prosecution disagreed, describing him as the “godfather” of the rebels. Prosecutors called 94 witnesses and backed up its case with nearly 800 exhibits admitted into evidence. Taylor’s defense team called 21 witnesses.

Another former African leader, Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, is now awaiting trial at The Hague.

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Photo: A journalist records the speech by former Liberian President Charles Taylor (on screen) during his trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, based in Leidschendam outside The Hague. Credit: Peter Dejong / AFP Photo, Pool

Satiric video makes Mexico politicians uncomfortable

 

MEXICO CITY -- It may be one of the most clever video spots to come along in Mexico's political campaign season. And one of the most controversial.

The four-minute clip presents vignettes from Mexico's mayhem -- shootouts and shakedowns,  corrupt politicians and violent drug traffickers. But all the roles, from the police to the crooks, are played by children.

It is jarring, and perversely amusing, to see pint-sized perps and kiddie kidnappers going about the ugly business that is otherwise so familiar in Mexico. One politician is a boy in a suit and tie who gladly fills his briefcase with stacks of dollar bills delivered to his office in a paper bag (while other legislators snooze on the floor of Congress). In another vignette, children dressed as military special forces -- black masks, heavily armed -- capture and then parade before reporters a boy meant to represent a notorious drug gangster known as La Barbie who calmly smirks in ways we have seen all too often.

Wildly popular, the video at this writing had nearly 3 million views on YouTube. You can see it here, in Spanish.

"If this is the future that awaits me, then I don't want it," a girl steps forward to say at the end of the clip. She then calls on each of Mexico's four presidential candidates, by name, to work for the country, not their political factions. "Time has run out," she says. "Mexico has hit bottom."

The video is well done, if slightly subversive, and immediately won praise from the candidates and numerous commentators. But a group of lawmakers took offense and demanded the government remove the video from the Internet (as if that were even possible).

Strangely, these lawmakers, for whom legislation protecting children seems never to have been much of a priority, claimed their objection was that the video was abusive of children. It violated their human rights, they said.

This left more than a few people scratching their heads. Could the objection really be that politicians are so sublimely skewered in the piece?

"Not me!" protested Rep. Miguel Angel Garcia of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (a faction with a particularly corrupt past). He was answering a television interviewer's suggestion. He said it was wrong to "use" children and that the video was shrill and sensationalistic.

During a debate on the floor of Congress at which there were proposals to ban the video, Rep. Mario Di Costanzo said it was "unacceptable and excessive" to dress children up as kidnappers, drug traffickers and cops on the take. "I think it is scandalous to use children who are armed, smoking, have guns and are shoving their victims into car trunks," he said.

The video was produced by a social action group called Nuestro Mexico del Futuro, Our Mexico of the Future, which said it was paid for in part by donors in the business community. The head of the group, Rosenda Martinez, seemed somewhat bemused by the controversy. The children, all aged between 8 and 10, were actors, she noted, and the guns were fake.

The video comes out as the presidential race is heating up, and the top candidates are exchanging increasingly pointed jabs at one another. Under new election rules, however, Our Mexico of the Future's effort cannot be aired on regular television (except as parts of news broadcasts) and instead will circulate primarily on social media.

The election is July 1.

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Photo: A screen grab of the satiric political video on YouTube. Credit: Associated Press

 

Titanic: In most shipwrecks, it's more like 'every man for himself'

As the world gets set this weekend to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, attention is once again being focused on the old adage: when a ship is going down, it's women and children first.

After the storied liner struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, men were ordered to stand back while lifeboats were loaded. That chivalrous act led to 70% of women and children surviving -- while only 20% of the men escaped alive.

But the Titanic isn’t the norm. A new study from Sweden finds in most shipwrecks, a more apt slogan is "Every man for himself." Men stand a better chance of surviving than women. Captains and crew escape more often than their passengers. And children seem to have the worst survival rates of all.

All in all, the study suggests the recent scandalous wreck of the Costa Concordia in Italy, in which the captain pleaded not to go back to his sinking ship, is more typical than the case of the Titanic.

Economists Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson of Uppsala University pored over records of 18 different maritime disasters spanning from 1852 to 2011 to assess whether "women and children first" has really been the "unwritten law of the sea," as it has long been dubbed.

Women were roughly half as likely to survive (17.8%) as men (34.5%); they found in three of the shipwrecks, all the women died. And despite the storied saying, less than half of captains went down with their ships.

Though the statistics seem grim for women, shipwreck survival rates for women appear to have improved since World War I. The finding echoes other studies showing that when women hold higher status in society, they tend to fare better in disasters.

What made the Titanic stand out, the researchers believe, was that the captain ordered women and children to be saved first -- and threatened to shoot men who disobeyed the order, as some sought to do. The captain plays a crucial role in whether women are more or less likely to survive, the new study found.

Unfortunately for women, the researchers also found, captains rarely give such an order.

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Photo: This 1912 photo shows Titanic lifeboat No. 6, carrying 11 women and six men away from the sinking ship. Credit: U.S. National Archives

Story behind missing Russian child takes a chilling turn

REPORTING FROM MOSCOW -- The uncontrolled weeping of a teenage mother whose baby was missing tore at the heart of an entire nation.

Through inconsolable grief, Svetlana Shkaptsova, 19,  told her TV interviewer that one week earlier she had left her 9-month-old daughter in a stroller outside a pet store while she ducked in to pick up some cat food. When she returned just five minutes later, baby and stroller were gone.

More than 1,000 police officers from the region surrounding in the industrial city of Bryansk, 240 miles southwest of Moscow, along with hundreds of volunteers, launched a massive search March 11. Every attic and basement in town was examined. Mothers with babies were checked. A nearby Gypsy camp was thoroughly tossed.

Only an empty pram was found outside a house near the pet food store.

In the Russian24 TV report,  Shkaptsova stood in a small room near a sofa brimming with toys. “We go out every day to buy toys, waiting for her to come back home,” she said through endless tears.

“I am begging ... return my child,” the nursing school dropout pleaded. “We are waiting for her and we love her.”

Then police administered a polygraph test. And the story took a dramatic turn.

A week before the baby was reported missing, police now say,  Shkaptsova and the baby’s father, Alexander Kulagin, 31, got into a drunken brawl. He beat up Shkaptsova, then hit the child and kicked her out of her perambulator, said Vladimir Markin, the Russian Investigative Committee spokesman.

The child was severely injured, but Kulagin would not permit Shkaptsova to leave the house or call an ambulance, Markin said. The baby died the next day, Markin said investigators were told. Kulagin -- who has two children he is not allowed to see from a first marriage, and two children from two other girlfriends -- told interrogators that he could not bury the baby’s body because the ground was frozen, so he incinerated the corpse in a campfire. He later buried the remains at his grandmother’s grave.

For the next week, Shkaptsova roamed the streets pushing an empty stroller, pretending her child was still alive for the benefit of witnesses, police said. When she entered the pet food store March 11, Kulagin, dressed as a woman and wearing a wig, rolled the pram away, leaving Shkaptsova to call the police and begin the gruesome charade.

Pavel Astakhov, a Russian children’s ombudsman and renowned lawyer, said Friday that he would seek the maximum life sentence in this case, and push for the death penalty for such crimes in the future.

 “If the president finds it necessary,” Astakhov said, “we may cancel the moratorium” on the death penalty.

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Madonna turns down gay activist calls to boycott Russian city

Madonna turned down calls to boycott St. Petersburg after the Russian city passed a law punishing people for promoting homosexuality to youth, saying she would instead use her August concert there to speak out.

“I will come to St. Petersburg to speak up for the gay community, to support the gay community and to give strength and inspiration to anyone who is or feels oppressed,” the pop star said on her Facebook page Wednesday. "I don't run away from adversity."

Russian journalist Masha Gessen had urged Madonna to steer clear of the Russian city in a blog post for the International Herald Tribune. Gay activists in Russia were unswayed by the pop star,  telling Agence France-Presse that they would protest "the hypocrisy of pop stars" at her show.

Russian media reported that the new law imposes fines of up to roughly $170 for individuals, $1,700 for officials and $17,000 for legal entities for advocating homosexuality to minors. It makes it illegal to foster "the false perception that traditional and nontraditional relationships are socially equal" among youth.

"The legislation makes it illegal to argue against it: A lawmaker who dared say that same-sex relationships are not inferior to heterosexual ones could be fined," Gessen wrote Monday.

Human Rights Watch criticized the law as so vague that it "could lead to a ban on displaying a rainbow flag or wearing a T-shirt with a gay-friendly logo or even on holding LGBT-themed rallies in the city."

Vitaly Milonov, who wrote the bill, said it would not be used against the media or to stop gay pride parades, and was meant to "outline certain additional rules of behavior toward minors" It would only affect "children's environments," Milonov told the St. Petersburg Times. 

Russia decriminalized homosexuality nearly two decades ago, but bias against gays has continued,  including routinely banning or breaking up gay protests, Human Rights Watch said.

Madonna has run into problems in Russia before -- though not from the gay community, which she has championed worldwide. Russian Orthodox activists protested her first show there six years ago, upset with her singing “Live to Tell” while wearing a crown of thorns and dangling from a cross, Bloomberg reports.

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Photo: Madonna. Credit: Chris Jackson / Getty Images

Vatican issues report on Irish church child abuse investigation

REPORTING FROM ROME -– In a report summarizing the results of an internal investigation of Irish dioceses and seminaries, the Vatican on Tuesday acknowledged “with a great sense of pain and shame” that minors and young people had been abused by the very figures they trusted most.

The investigation, or Apostolic Visitation, was ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in response to the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests in Ireland and subsequent coverup that had been detailed in at least two damning reports commissioned by the Irish government.

The Vatican said that in issuing the eight-page summary, “The Holy See re-echoes the sense of dismay and betrayal which the Holy Father expressed in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland regarding the sinful and criminal acts that were at the root of this particular crisis.”

In that March 2010 public letter, Benedict promised to root out the problem, which had been ignored by church authorities for decades. The investigation involved four dioceses, four seminaries, including the Irish College in Rome, and religious orders in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Gunman kills 3 children, teacher outside Jewish school in France

REPORTING FROM PARIS -- Three schoolchildren and a teacher were reported killed Monday after a gunman opened fire outside a Jewish high school in the southern French city of Toulouse.

The shooting took place outside the Ozar-Hatorah secondary school in a residential area. Police said the gunman opened fire on a group of parents and children outside the school before entering the playground, where he continued to shoot people at close range. At least one other person was seriously injured, police said.

Early, unconfirmed reports said the dead included a rabbi who taught at the school and his two sons, ages 3 and 6. The fourth victim, between 8 and 10 years old, was believed to be the daughter of the head of the school. The shooting happened around 8:10 a.m. local time.

PHOTOS: Shooting at French school

Investigators said one of the weapons used by the gunman, who escaped on a motor-scooter, was an 11.43-millimeter pistol, the same type of weapon used in two attacks on soldiers in the same region in the last 10 days. A paratrooper was killed in Toulouse just over a week ago and two more were killed in Montauban, 28 miles north of Toulouse, on Thursday.  A third soldier, also shot at close range in Montauban, is hospitalized in critical condition. The soldiers were all of North African or Caribbean descent.

Investigators said it was too early to establish a link with the school shooting.

Speaking after Monday's shooting, local prosecutor Michel Valet said the gunman first opened fire with a 9-millimeter weapon outside the school, "firing at everything in front on him." When he ran out of ammunition, he continued shooting with another pistol inside the school before fleeing on the scooter, Valet said.

A witness inside the school, identified only as Alain, told French television: "I saw at once a man in a helmet -- not a military helmet, a motorcycle helmet -- who had come into the playground of the school a few feet from the entrance. He was shooting not haphazardly but directly as close as possible to the head of those, adults and pupils, around the entrance of the school."

President Nicolas Sarkozy, in the middle of an election campaign, traveled immediately to the school. He described the shootings as an "appalling tragedy." 

"The whole French republic is touched by this abominable drama," he said.

The French interior ministry ordered all police headquarters across the country to step up security around Jewish schools and colleges, especially those in the south. "We have to be very vigilant. There is one or more killer out there right now," a ministry spokesman said.

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Photo: A student is flanked by an unidentified woman and police officers as they leave the scene of Monday's shooting. Credit: Manu Blondeau / Associated Press

Bodies of young bus crash victims return home to Belgium

This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

REPORTING FROM LONDON -- Belgian and Dutch victims of a fatal bus crash in Switzerland that killed 22 schoolchildren and six adults returned home Friday in coffins borne by military aircraft.

Belgium largely came to a halt for a minute's silence at 11 a.m. in remembrance of the victims, young students and teachers from schools in Haverlee, near Brussels, and Lommel, close to the Dutch border. Flowers, messages and soft toys covered the walls and gates of St. Lambertus School in Haverlee and Stekske School in Lommel, where people continued to arrive and leave tokens of sympathy.

In official mourning, flags flew at half-staff in Belgium and the Netherlands, home to six of the children who died Tuesday night in the Valais region of Switzerland. Planes carrying the bodies of victims landed Friday morning at an airport in Melsbroek, Belgium.

On Thursday night, a convoy of buses brought eight of 24 injured children home to Belgium. Others remain in a hospital in Switzerland.

Since the crash, condolences for the victims have arrived from people all over the world, including messages from President Obama and Pope Benedict XVI.

Swiss police are still seeking to determine the cause of the crash. According to official reconstructions of the accident, the bus had entered a tunnel on Swiss Highway A9 near the Italian border when it clipped a curbstone. The vehicle catapulted across the two-lane highway and slammed into a concrete wall of an emergency parking bay. The front of the vehicle was completely demolished; the driver died in the crash.

No other vehicles were involved in the accident, which reportedly traumatized several of the first responders who arrived to find children still trapped inside the wreckage.

[Updated, 9:17 a.m. March 16 : During a news conference Friday by the investigative and medical teams in the case, Swiss prosecutor Olivier Elsig confirmed that the bus was not speeding at the moment of the accident and that interviews with surviving children and adults did not support a theory mentioned in news reports that the driver might have been distracted by operating a DVD player.

While awaiting final autopsy results on the driver, initial examinations showed no signs of alcohol use or a heart attack, officials said, but analyses were still ongoing. The remaining hypotheses include the possibilities of a technical fault, human error or some kind of illness. officials said.]

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Photo: A girl, flanked by two adults, looks at flowers, drawings and candles on Friday at a primary school in Lommel, Belgium, displayed for the victims of Tuesday's bus crash in Switzerland. Credit: Yorick Jansens / AFP/Getty Images

Court convicts former Congolese warlord of using child soldiers

REPORTING FROM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- The International Criminal Court in the Hague on Wednesday found former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty of using children as soldiers, the first verdict in the panel's 10-year history. He could face life imprisonment.

After a three-year trial, the court convicted Lubanga of recruiting boys and girls as soldiers during a civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002 and 2003.

The verdict was seen as a major breakthrough in forcing warlords and politicians to be accountable for atrocities and crimes against humanity, sending a message that international justice eventually would catch up with them.

Three victims gave evidence during the trial, while others participated indirectly, such as by making submissions to the court. The evidence said girls forcibly recruited by Lubanga were used as sex slaves, while videos aired in court showed Lubanga surrounded by child combatants.