Must Reads: A 'Red Era' museum, Obama and mothers of the missing

From attacks in Afghanistan to the missing in Mexico, here are five stories you shouldn't miss from the past week in global news:

China museum builder lets history speak

Obama faces new Mideast challenges in his second term

As 'insider attacks' grow, so does U.S.-Afghanistan divide

Mothers from Central America search for missing kin in Mexico

Britain's crackdown on Web comments sparks free-speech debate

-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles

Photo: Marta Elena Perez of from Nicaragua attends Mass at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City on Oct. 28, 2012, with a photograph of her daughter, Karla Patricia Perez, who went missing in 2005. Credit: Marco Ugarte / Associated Press

Quake rattles Guatemala, Mexico; 3 reported dead

MEXICO CITY -- At least three people were reportedly killed in Guatemala after a powerful earthquake shook the Central American country Wednesday morning.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the quake, which registered magnitude 7.4, occurred at 10:35 a.m. CST along the northern part of Guatemala's Pacific coast, about 100 miles west-southwest of Guatemala City.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina declared a "national red alert," suspending public activities and recommending that buildings be evacuated. The Mexican newspaper Milenio reported that three people had been found dead under the rubble in the Guatemalan city of San Pedro Sacatepequez -- along the country's border with Mexico -- where at least 40 houses had been destroyed by the temblor.

Guatemalan media reported downed phone lines, lost power and damaged buildings in various parts of the country.

The quake was also felt in numerous areas of Mexico, including parts of Mexico City, where some buildings were evacuated. However, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard tweeted in the early afternoon that the city was "without harm."

ALSO:

An industry fortified by Mexico's drug war

Mexico drug war displaces families in Sinaloa highlands

Mexican officials capture key lieutenant of Sinaloa drug cartel

-- Richard Fausset

Photo: Crowds of people gather at a meeting point in Mexico City on Wednesday after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Guatemala near the Mexican border. Credit: Mario Guzman / EPA

14 kidnapped Central American migrants found in Mexico

 

MEXICO CITY -- As a group of mothers from Honduras, Guatemala and other countries travels across Mexico in search of missing relatives, the Mexican navy on Monday announced that it had freed 14 Central Americans kidnapped by suspected drug traffickers.

Thousands of migrants from Central America go missing every year as they attempt to reach the United States through Mexico. They are often kidnapped by Mexican gangsters, held for ransom, forced to work for cartels or on marijuana farms, or killed. Many turn up in hidden mass graves.

Naval marines acting on what they described as an anonymous tip over the weekend discovered 14 migrants being held against their will in a shack in the town of Altamira, in the violent border state of Tamaulipas (link in Spanish). The state has been the scene of several massacres of Central American and Mexican migrants.

The rescued men and women looked for the most part young and skinny, judging by a video released by the navy. They told authorities they had been kidnapped in different places in Tamaulipas and were from Central America, the navy said. The navy did not offer a breakdown of nationalities and said their "migratory status" would be corroborated. They stand a good chance of being deported.

Two men who apparently were holding the migrants were arrested, the navy said.

Monday's announcement from the navy gives hope to groups searching for the missing that more  victims may still be alive.

A caravan of mothers  this month embarked on a 19-day, 14-state journey through Mexico. All 40 or so mothers are looking for children, spouses or other relatives who vanished on their way north. Through the efforts of the organizers -- they've staged a caravan every of the last several years -- and other migrant-rights activists, a few missing relatives have been found and reunited with mothers.

Human rights groups say government neglect and refusal to recognize the problem of the missing result in  families left with the task of searching on their own, sometimes going state to state to offer DNA evidence when bodies turn up.

RELATED:

Sifting for answers in a mass grave in Tapachula, Mexico

Two-thirds of most-wanted Mexican drug lords are in custody, dead

Mexico's drug war disappearances leave families in anguish

-- Tracy Wilkinson

Photo: Central American migrants ride on top of a train in Veracruz state, one of the precarious ways in which they try to reach the U.S., in June 2011. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

 

 

 

 

 

 

9 from Guatemala military arrested in killings of protesters

GUATEMALA CITY -- Nine members of the Guatemalan military were ordered arrested Thursday in connection with the killing last week of six indigenous peasants during a protest -- a remarkable development in a country where the army was long considered untouchable despite egregious abuses.

National prosecutor Claudia Paz y Paz said a colonel and eight soldiers would be tried on charges of "extrajudicial execution" in the shootings of the peasants, who blocked a highway in western Guatemala's Totonicapan province Oct. 4 to denounce electricity prices, a series of proposed constitutional reforms and other grievances (link in Spanish).

At least six peasants were killed, more than 30 were wounded, and one remains missing.

The government of former Gen. Otto Perez Molina initially blamed the shootings on "provocations" by protesters engaged in what he called illegal demonstrations. But as pressure mounted, the president ordered the army to cooperate with the investigation.

Arrest warrants were issued and agents dispatched to pick up the accused military personnel, the government's website said  (link in Spanish).

The shootings drew widespread condemnation from church officials, human rights organizations and international agencies, and sparked larger demonstrations by indigenous communities demanding justice.

"We hold Col. [Juan] Chiroy Sal principally responsible for the acts because he had a position of command over the actions of his troops, but he abandoned them," Paz y Paz said at a news conference.

She said he ignored orders from the National Police, which was in charge of attempting to disperse the demonstrators, to steer clear of the people in the roads.

The Guatemalan military was the most brutal in Central America's dark history of civil conflict in the last half of the 20th century. About 200,000 people were killed or disappeared --  the majority of them indigenous campesinos --  during the nation's 35-year civil war, which ended in 1996.

In only a handful of cases have military officers been held accountable.

Human rights organizations welcomed Thursday's arrests in the Totonicapan killings.

"Considering the history of impunity for members of the military in Guatemala," said Kathryn Johnson, development and advocacy coordinator for the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, "the charging of the soldiers in this case is an important step toward ensuring justice and the peaceful resolution of social conflicts in the future."

She also expressed concern about the "alarming rise" in the deployment of the army in what should be police actions under the Perez Molina administration.

ALSO:

Mexico drug war displaces families in Sinaloa highlands

Jaded Mexicans air doubts about killing of top Zetas leader

Salvadoran group dogged in search for children gone missing in civil war

-- Anna Bevan in Guatemala City and Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City

Photo: Activists attend a ceremony Tuesday for one of the indigenous campesinos killed during a protest in western Guatemala on Oct. 4. At least six people were killed when the army opened fire on the demonstrators, authorities say. Credit: Moises Castillo / Associated Press

 

Accused Mexican drug ring posing as media on trial in Nicaragua

 

MEXICO CITY — The 18 Mexicans said they were journalists from their country’s main television broadcaster, Televisa. They wore the company T-shirt, and the six vans they drove into Nicaragua bore the orange Televisa logo.

The vans contained equipment including computers and cameras. Oh, and also $9.2 million in cash hidden in secret compartments and traces of cocaine.

The mysterious caravan apparently plied the length of Central America, from Mexico to Costa Rica, in the last couple of years, never raising more than passing suspicion until Nicaraguan authorities stopped it in August at Las Manos, a Nicaraguan post on the border with Honduras.

Authorities suspect the group was part of a drug-trafficking network that moved cocaine and money throughout the region. Nicaraguan Judge Julio Cesar Arias this week ordered the group of 18 — 17 men and one woman — to stand trial in December on charges of money-laundering, drug-smuggling and organized crime.

The exposure of the 18 has proved one of the most vivid illustrations to date of the well-known but often unseen spread of Mexican drug operations deep into Central America, long a conduit and increasingly a base of storage, production and marketing for Mexican cartels.

It has also proved dicey for Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish-language TV network, which quickly disavowed any knowledge of the group. In a statement, the broadcaster said the people were not its employees and the vans did not belong to the company. Televisa says it will ask for an investigation and hoped to take legal action against the 18 for falsifying its logo.

Televisa got backing from Mexico’s top legal official, Atty. Gen. Marisela Morales, who said in a television interview (with Televisa, of course), that the suspects falsely used Televisa’s name as a cover for their criminal doings, part of a “machination.”

But journalists in Mexico (real ones) turned up paperwork that they say shows that the vans, or at least their license plates, were in fact registered to Televisa.

Already in progress in Managua was a separate trial of Nicaraguan businessman Henry Fariña or Fariñas, who is accused of aiding Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel move cash and coke to and from Colombia through neighboring Costa Rica. His alleged operations came to light when he survived an assassination attempt in Guatemala last year that instead killed a chance companion, renowned Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral.

It is not known if there is a connection between that case and the 18 Mexicans, who have since their arrest been reported to have made numerous trips through Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday, the Mexican suspects sat rather forlornly and heard Judge Arias read the charges and set a date for the trial, Dec. 3.

The lone woman in the group, who has been identified as Raquel Alatorre, 30, of Merida, has been called the leader. She often tries to shield herself from cameras, lowering her head or hanging back in the crowd of suspects.

Nicaraguan prosecutor Rodrigo Zambrana said the suspects gave conflicting and rather improbable accounts of what they were up to when they drove into Nicaragua. At one point they said they were doing a special report on Nicaragua; another time it was a story on a Mexican accused of money-laundering in Managua, according to Zambrana. Neither scenario explains the need for an 18-member TV team, nor why they needed more than $9 million.

They were nabbed when an anonymous caller notified police that he heard the group in Honduras talking suspiciously about their mission in Nicaragua, officials have said.

And speaking of the money, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is apparently already spending it. He says it will go toward buying new patrol cars for police and building and remodeling prisons.

Ortega pretty much publicly condemned the suspects, praising in a speech earlier this month the national police for capturing a crew that, as he put it, took large amounts of drugs north and money south.

Using the Televisa vans, Ortega added, gave the 18 “impunity.” “Because,” he said, “it is not easy to detain supposed journalists to investigate them."

ALSO:

Panetta lifts ban on New Zealand naval ships

In Spain, an amusingly botched fresco is now a moneymaker

French missions abroad on alert after cartoons mock Muslims

— Tracy Wilkinson, with a contribution from a special correspondent in Managua, Nicaragua

Photo: Some of the Mexican suspects are escorted to a court hearing in Managua on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. Credit: Esteban Felix / Associated Press

Like 'wolves,' merciless gangs prey on migrants in Mexico

MEXICO CITY -- Along Mexico's southern border region with Guatemala, ruthless criminals hunt for migrants from Central America like a "pack of wolves." Migrants victimized by gangs often end up in mass graves, while their survivors to the north or south anxiously await their arrival, or at least an identification of their dead.

On the other side of the country, on Mexico's northern border with Texas, deportees ejected across the border from the United States become automatic targets for gangs who often kidnap, torture and kill them.

"They are like the wolves and we're the sheep," said one man deported from Huntington Beach.

Two articles this week in The Times highlight the horrific realities in Mexico for the migrants who pass through the country on their way to the United States, as well as for those who are deported from there.

In the southern city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala in the state of Chiapas, Times Mexico City bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson meets Argentine forensic experts as they work to identify remains found in a mass grave. The dead are presumably migrants from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, but who will ever fully know?

"Not knowing is the worst," one investigator said. "I've seen it across countries and cultures."

Mexico's government has estimated that 10,000 migrants remain unaccounted for on their journey across the country. The story notes that more young women are attempting the crossing into Mexico over the last year, and then become targets for sexual assault.

Read the entire story here.

In the northern border city of Matamoros, in Tamaulipas state, Times U.S.-Mexico border correspondent Richard Marosi meets a group of illegal immigrants recently deported to Mexico in the city across from Brownsville, Texas.

The migrants are repatriated in a controversial U.S. program that seeks to reduce the chances that they will try to cross again by sending them back into an unfamiliar region. As World Now reported a year ago, the practice puts them squarely in harm's way, with often fatal results.

Upon crossing back into Mexico, authorities warn them: "They will try to get phone numbers of your relatives in the U.S. for ransoms."

The warning offers little protection; migrants are promptly targeted by gangs. They are snatched up and robbed, extorted or killed. Some are forcibly recruited into the gangs.

"Deporting people here is like sending them into a trap … to be hunted down," a priest in Matamoros said.

Marosi relates how he is approached by a suspected gang member while reporting his story. The man tells the journalist that migrants have "nothing to fear" and that he is there to "protect" them.

Read the entire story here.

RELATED:

U.S. steps up deportation efforts for criminal immigrants

Does U.S. deportation program put migrants in harm's way?

Mexico says leader in kidnapping, killing of 72 migrants arrested

-- Daniel Hernandez

Photo: Deportees carry personal items in boxes provided by U.S. authorities and file across the Gateway International Bridge over the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico. They will soon be warned by Grupo Beta, the Mexican migrant safety force, about dangers they are about to face. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Mexico's Monterrey still ranks as top city, despite violence

 

MEXICO CITY -- How can Mexico’s “most modern” and “most prosperous” city also be one of its most dangerous?

That is the contradiction that often plays out in this country of great wealth and crippling poverty, of record tourism and skyrocketing homicide rates.

In a new study by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, or IMCO, the city of Monterrey, at the once-tranquil heart of Mexico’s industrial hub, was ranked No. 1 in most of the things that make an urban center attractive to business and residents. And yet, the report also noted that Monterrey’s murder rate grew by 300% between 2010 and 2011. (Links in Spanish.)

Part of the explanation, the report noted, is that homicides really soared after the cutoff date for the data used to rate competitiveness in the study, late 2010. But security in Monterrey had already begun to deteriorate in early 2009, and other factors apparently sustained the city’s ability to develop and attract investment.

“Before, [Monterrey] was like the United States or Uruguay” in terms of homicide rates, the report noted. “Now, it’s more like Guatemala.”

Yet it continues to have major strengths, the IMCO report said: the nation's highest per capita GDP, 247,000 pesos (nearly $20,000), and second-highest rate of foreign investment; relatively good education; excellent infrastructure and services, like sewage treatment.

Those and other factors were used to measure competitiveness.  Also counted were innovation, labor relations, and government efficiency.  Monterrey was, in fact, the only Mexican city to score the rating of “highly competitive,” the top category.

Monterrey has long been the economic engine of Mexico. It is the center of textile, food-processing, beer and construction industries -- a modern, sophisticated metropolis where per-capita GDP is twice the national average.

It has always been considered Mexico’s wealthiest, and third-largest, city, and for decades its safest. But as long ago as 2006, foot soldiers from the Gulf cartel and its then-ally, the Zetas paramilitary force, were invading poor neighborhoods of the city to recruit followers. Violence exploded in early 2010 when the Zetas split from the Gulf cartel, and by May of that year, authorities were losing control; the air of safety vanished, roadblocks and brazen killings  by narco-traffickers were a common occurrence, some of the elite fled or moved their families. And yet business went on.

"In my opinion, it's not a contradiction because we are saying Monterrey is competitive DESPITE the crisis of violence that it is living," the report's author, IMCO urban development studies director Gabriela Alarcon, said in an email message.

"So far, violence has had an impact on one aspect of competitiveness [security] that, despite being very important … is for now outweighed by Monterrey’s strengths in economic … [and] social aspects … as well as some areas of government that function well.”

Alarcon warned that the key to Monterrey’s future will be to what extent the bad security situation destroys the other areas of the city’s relative success.

For the report, IMCO studied 77 of Mexico’s largest cities, which together account for 80% of domestic economic production and 63% of the national population (link in Spanish).

Ranked at the bottom of the list were Acapulco, where worsening drug-war violence has succeeded in eroding tourism to the once-great coastal mecca, and, in the same state of Guerrero, the state capital, Chilpancingo.

RELATED:

In Monterrey, Mexico, a culture of fear is evident

Memorial to victims of drug war inspires debate

Surge in violence in Mexico's drug war? Figures are inconclusive

-- Tracy Wilkinson

Photo: Police and forensic investigators stand outside a bar in Monterrey, Mexico's wealthiest but increasingly dangerous city, where gunmen attacked. Nine people were killed. Credit: Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP/Getty Images

 

African adoptions raise alarm about safeguards

As Guatemala, China and other adoption hubs have pulled back on foreign adoptions or stopped them altogether, Africa has become the new frontier for adoptions, bolstered by the sight of stars such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie bringing African children into their families.

But the rapidly advancing trend has raised concern that many African countries lack protections to prevent local families from being misled or pressured into giving up children -- the same kind of problem that led other countries, such as Guatemala and Romania, to clamp down on adoptions by foreigners.

Foreign adoptions of African children increased more than fivefold in seven years, even as international adoptions declined worldwide, a new report from the African Child Policy Forum says. Ethiopia is now second only to China in foreign adoptions, according to the most recent available data.

Child-protection groups are alarmed that most of the increase was in African countries that have not signed the Hague Convention, a 1993 agreement meant to prevent children from being abducted or trafficked by setting rules and procedures for cross-border adoptions.

Most African countries lack even basic rules to protect families, a vacuum in which “adoption can become a vast, profit-driven industry with children as the commodity” instead of turning to out-of-country adoption as a last resort for children in need, the report warns.

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.

ALSO:

Drug violence spilling into Guatemala

Making the border less enticing to cross

In Mexico, rising tension at shelter for migrants

-- Anna Bevan

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

 

 

 

U.S. Vice President Biden in Mexico says 'no' to drug legalization

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, on a swing through Mexico and Central America, on Monday adamantly rejected any move toward legalizing drugs.

Biden's comments to reporters came as a number of Latin American leaders have begun to suggest decriminalization as a way to reduce deadly violence engulfing parts of the region.

"It is totally legitimate for this to be raised," Biden said. "It warrants discussion. It is worth debating to lay to rest some of the myths."

He said that ultimately, legalization creates more problems than it solves, including the bureaucratic costs of regulating and distributing drugs plus the damage to public health from consumption and addiction.

Biden also met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and with the three candidates who are competing to replace him in July 1 elections. Biden said he was confident each of the three would continue a close working relationship with Washington.

The vice president travels on to Honduras where on Tuesday he will sit down with Central American leaders to discuss drug trafficking and other security issues.

ALSO:

Red Cross still blocked from entering traumatized Syrian area

Drug allegations may hamper former Mexico ruling party's return

Activists: Most trash picked from Mexican beach is from elsewhere 

-- Tracy Wilkinson

Photo: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, left, greets Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City. Credit: Mexican government via European Pressphoto Agency