Posts tagged Mexico

Univisión takes home an IRE award

Univisión, the US Spanish-speaking broadcasting company, recently won an IRE award in the Broadcast Video category for their in-depth investigation on the Fast and Furious scandal, carried out by journalists Gerardo Reyes, Tomás Ocaña, Mariana Atencio, María Antonieta Collins, Tifani Roberts, Vytenis Didziulis, Margarita Rabin. 

After giving the award, the IRE judges had this to say:

In a yearlong investigation, hundreds of classified Mexican documents were obtained with great difficulty under the Mexican public access law. A database of 60,000 entries was combined with US government documents to find 57 previously unreported lost weapons under the “Fast and Furious” program and to show the depth in human cost.

Univision detailed previously unknown crimes committed with those weapons - including the shooting of 14 teens at a birthday party – and uncovered similar U.S. programs in Colombia, Honduras and Puerto Rico that also went awry.

As a result of Univision’s diligence, the Mexican Congress asked for economic compensation for the victims of massacres in which guns from the “Fast and Furious” operation were used.

A public debate erupted in Mexico on how much the Mexican government knew. Congress pressed the U.S. Justice Department for more information, and one U..S Congressman called “Rápido y Furioso” the “Holy Grail” that broke the case.

And this is a fragment of Univisión’s original submission:

Although the hundreds of classified us and Mexican government documents weren’t obtained through a FOI request, we believe our process of gathering and comparing comprehensive information from two different governments, resulted in a story that did “open records and open government” in a unique and revealing way that could not be achieved by simply filing a FOI request.

Bonus: The eight-country collaborative investigative effort Plunder in the Pacific was a runner-up in the Multiplatform category, after revealing how Asian, European and Latin American fleets have devastated what was once one of the world’s great fish stocks (jack mackerel). The project was led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in synergy with Latin American journalists from IDL-Reporteros (Perú) and CIPER (Chile).

Video: Courtesy of Univisión’s news show Aquí y Ahora. 

Swallow Mag on Mexico City: flabbergasting!

Swallow has devoted its third issue to our beloved Mexico City, as reported by The New York Times’s Maria Newman in a short introductory blog post. 

What is remarkable about this issue, though, apart from the stunning and jaw-dropping photography, is a strange new feature that, in our view, exponentiates the scope of basic written storytelling:

“A scratch-and-sniff feature that brings you the smells of the sprawling metropolis”.

Delicious, or maybe not, depending on your sensibility towards all things chilango. Yet, we kind of wonder if this trend-setting feature will eventually embody the future of travel writing/reporting for print publications; a disruptive device hard impossible to find in digital publications.

Here is the rationale behind that editorial decision:

This time, said James Casey, the magazine’s editor, they decided to include the ambitious olfactory project, put together by Sissel Tolaas, a fragrance expert and artist. Mr. Casey had reached out to Ms. Tolaas after he heard of a project she had done that reproduced the smells from 200 Mexico City neighborhoods.

This issue of Swallow includes 20 scratch-and-sniff stickers throughout that are imbued with the aromas of one of the city’s many colonias, or neighborhoods. (Reproducing the smells in the magazine was a complex undertaking for their printers in Singapore, and is partly the reason it took more than a year to publish.) Not all of the odors are pleasant.

FJP: We can only hope that our fellow Chilanga-in-Portland is not the only one left awestruck:

Images: Assorted local snacks, candies, and pastries. Partial screenshots of Swallow Magazine’s piece on Mexico City’s supermarkets.

Founder of Blog del Narco (MX) breaks silence The Texas Observer (in collaboration with The Guardian) has a story on the admin of one of the most famous anonymous blogs nowadays: Blog del Narco, a must-read for authorities, drug gangs and ordinary people in Mexico mainly because it lays bare, day after day, horrific violence censored by mainstream media.    Their most breathtaking find? Yes, the blog is operated by a young, brave woman (kind of a big deal for Mexico’s traditional machismo establishment). The rest of the story is fascinating and provides a much larger context on how the blog works, it is definitely worth your time. Yet, these are our main takeaways: I don’t think people ever imagined it was a woman doing this. Who am I? I’m in my mid 20s, I live in northern Mexico, I’m a journalist. I’m a woman, I’m single, I have no children. And I love Mexico. I’m in love with my culture, with my country, despite all that’s going on. Because we’re not all bad. We’re not all narcos. We’re not all corrupt. We’re not all murderers. We are well educated, even if many [foreign] people think otherwise. We have thought about quitting the blog thousands of times. But we haven’t because we have to get the message out. They have stolen our tranquility, our dreams, our peace. Only my close family knows, no one else. We change where we live every month. We’ve been in basements. It’s very difficult. We hide our equipment in different places. If the authorities get close we run. FJP: Follow our Mexico tag for more coverage of the Drug War. Image: Partial screenshot of Blog del Narco’s first published book Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War, via Feral House. 

Founder of Blog del Narco (MX) breaks silence

The Texas Observer (in collaboration with The Guardian) has a story on the admin of one of the most famous anonymous blogs nowadays: Blog del Narco, a must-read for authorities, drug gangs and ordinary people in Mexico mainly because it lays bare, day after day, horrific violence censored by mainstream media.   

Their most breathtaking find? Yes, the blog is operated by a young, brave woman (kind of a big deal for Mexico’s traditional machismo establishment).

The rest of the story is fascinating and provides a much larger context on how the blog works, it is definitely worth your time. Yet, these are our main takeaways:

I don’t think people ever imagined it was a woman doing this. Who am I? I’m in my mid 20s, I live in northern Mexico, I’m a journalist. I’m a woman, I’m single, I have no children. And I love Mexico.

I’m in love with my culture, with my country, despite all that’s going on. Because we’re not all bad. We’re not all narcos. We’re not all corrupt. We’re not all murderers. We are well educated, even if many [foreign] people think otherwise.

We have thought about quitting the blog thousands of times. But we haven’t because we have to get the message out. They have stolen our tranquility, our dreams, our peace.

Only my close family knows, no one else. We change where we live every month. We’ve been in basements. It’s very difficult. We hide our equipment in different places. If the authorities get close we run.

FJP: Follow our Mexico tag for more coverage of the Drug War.

Image: Partial screenshot of Blog del Narco’s first published book Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War, via Feral House. 

Readers Capture the Complexity of the U.S.-Mexican Border

What does life look like along the 2,000 miles of the US-Mexico border? The New York Times crowdsourced reader photos, from the intimate to the aerial, to tell the visual story. 

FJP: One of the best crowdsourced interactive features we’ve seen in a long time. Yet, you will need more than a thousand pictures to really grasp what exactly is going on along the US-Mexico border, one of the busiest in the world. And, as you most certainly know, it is not only about Tijuana anymore, but about a long series of bordertowns than span all the way East until the Rio Grande Valley.

H/T: Propublica.

PEN Ups Pressure in Mexico as Another Journalist Is Murdered

penamerican:

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The murder this week of Jaime Guadalupe González Dominguez, who edited and reported for the community news web site Ojinaga Noticiasin Ojinaga, Chihuahua, is the first killing of a colleague in Mexico since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December, but at least the 47th murder of a Mexican journalist since 2006. It comes as the United Nations is beginning its triennial review of the human rights situation in Mexico and as representatives of the global PEN community are preparing to return to Mexico City to assess progress in protecting journalists over the past year.

As our Rapid Action alert details, González was shot 18 times by a group of armed men with large-caliber firearms in the center of Ojinaga. He was reportedly working on the second in a series of stories about issues affecting people who work on the streets, and the web site he edited had just posted a story about recent arrests and murders in Ojinaga. González reportedly established the web site after being forced to resign as a journalist for the newspaper Contacto because of threats.

In recent years, local media in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán state (Mexico) have been portraying the members of the Knights Templar cartel as genuine defenders of their community against external attacks, without even mentioning that their financial resources come from extortion and marijuana/meth trafficking. According to these journalists (sic), the Templars cannot be considered neither as a cartel nor an organized crime group, but as a hero-like insurgent group fueled by social injustice, the overall lack of opportunities, and other misdeeds of the central government.

Fragment from a blog entry [in Spanish] with no visible byline on how local rural media “collaborate” with drug cartels, posted by the staff of the Mexican literary magazine Letras Libres. 

The post goes on saying that:

The Templars pay these journalists to become their informal spokesmen; they have financed their books and, more importantly, they have granted them an important role in a territory where control is tight and no one enters without proper authorization. Journalists are their de facto social communications staff, mediating between the cartel and other journalists or foreigners who intend to go into the area.

FJP: To illustrate, the Los Angeles Times picked up a related story a couple of years ago.

Bonus: As far as local use of social networking goes, criminals in Tamaulipas state recently offered a juicy reward for information identifying a social media user who reports on violence in Mexico. The Knight Center has the full story.

UPDATED: They are [still] blitzing us with Tijuana stuff… … and we like it. Today has been one of those days of constant social media iterations in which, oddly enough, you end up connecting a handful of stories on the same subject from different sources. It feels like a Tijuana-themed week already! One. This marvelous piece of storytelling (audio, 06:21 run time), produced by Venezuelan journalist Ruxandra Guidi for Radio Ambulante, on what exactly happens when someone (..err.. a non-US National, that is) tries to go through the world’s busiest border crossing. Tens of thousands of people do it everyday, but this is only one of those stories. Although the story may sound familiar to those of us who have actually suffered the burden of crossing the US border from Mexico at least once (regardless of point of entry), please go ahead and play the embedded audio track: Two. Jorge Aranguere Jr. at SB Nation just dubbed the Tijuana Xolos soccer franchise as “The Americas’ Team”:  The task for Xolos has been to convince Mexican-American players that Tijuana can be an inviting environment for them, and to convince fans along the border not to see the team as either Mexican or American, but to embrace the hyphen and see the border as a bridge, and not a barrier. In this way, they have created a unique team, one that reflects life in a place that always seems defined by a line between cultures, using that line not to define differences, but to underscore similarities. Three: Travel section writer David Landsel at the New York Post praises Tijuana’s cool metamorphosis of late (with its accompanying photo gallery, of course) : Today Tijuana feels different. Something happened, though, while we were out. These days the second largest city on the West Coast and one of Mexico’s wealthiest per capita, it may still look like the sprawling, sun-splashed border town it has always been, but 125 years or so after its beginnings as a city, Tijuana seems to be moving on up. There will probably always be cheap beer and pills and hookers and cosmetic surgery, but as the city comes out of hiding after this latest forced cooling-off period, Tijuana seems ready to experiment at being known for something new. It’s working. The outside world is taking notice. Four: An op-ed in The New York Times on why moving manufacturing operations from China into Tijuana is not a surprising decision anymore:  Like many Americans, until recently, when I heard “Tijuana” I thought only of drug cartels and cheap tequila. “TJ,” though, is a city of more than two million people (larger than neighboring San Diego), and it has become North America’s electronics assembly hot spot.You can drive from a San Diego engineering center to our Tijuana factory in 20 minutes, no passport required. (A passport is needed to come back, but there are fast-track lanes for business people.) Some of our employees commute across the border each day; good doctors are cheaper and easier to find in TJ, as are private schools, although it’s generally nicer to live in San Diego. In some ways, the border feels more like the notional borders of the European Union than a divide between the developed and developing worlds. Five: This quote from the Mayor of the city of San Diego showed up in my Twitter timeline, via The San Diego Union Tribune: One way to truly become a binational region, would be for Tijuana and San Diego to share the same area code — a move that would not only save the cost of calling long distance but also offer a powerful symbol. The quote was extracted from a speech in which the Mayor outlined his dos ciudades, una región (two cities, one region) agenda; an idea that we suspect may result quite appealing to Ruxandra Guidi and our fellow tijuanenses. All in all, what may be left for Tijuana and San Diego to share in the foreseeable future is not clear yet. However, at least we can perceive that journalists (like Ruxandra) on both sides of the border are already working as one single community in order to develop a new zeitgeist, and that’s a good thing. Image: Local composition.

UPDATED: They are [still] blitzing us with Tijuana stuff…

… and we like it. Today has been one of those days of constant social media iterations in which, oddly enough, you end up connecting a handful of stories on the same subject from different sources. It feels like a Tijuana-themed week already!

One. This marvelous piece of storytelling (audio, 06:21 run time), produced by Venezuelan journalist Ruxandra Guidi for Radio Ambulante, on what exactly happens when someone (..err.. a non-US National, that is) tries to go through the world’s busiest border crossing. Tens of thousands of people do it everyday, but this is only one of those stories.

Although the story may sound familiar to those of us who have actually suffered the burden of crossing the US border from Mexico at least once (regardless of point of entry), please go ahead and play the embedded audio track:

Two. Jorge Aranguere Jr. at SB Nation just dubbed the Tijuana Xolos soccer franchise as “The Americas’ Team”: 

The task for Xolos has been to convince Mexican-American players that Tijuana can be an inviting environment for them, and to convince fans along the border not to see the team as either Mexican or American, but to embrace the hyphen and see the border as a bridge, and not a barrier. In this way, they have created a unique team, one that reflects life in a place that always seems defined by a line between cultures, using that line not to define differences, but to underscore similarities.

Three: Travel section writer David Landsel at the New York Post praises Tijuana’s cool metamorphosis of late (with its accompanying photo gallery, of course) :

Today Tijuana feels different. Something happened, though, while we were out. These days the second largest city on the West Coast and one of Mexico’s wealthiest per capita, it may still look like the sprawling, sun-splashed border town it has always been, but 125 years or so after its beginnings as a city, Tijuana seems to be moving on up. There will probably always be cheap beer and pills and hookers and cosmetic surgery, but as the city comes out of hiding after this latest forced cooling-off period, Tijuana seems ready to experiment at being known for something new. It’s working. The outside world is taking notice.

Four: An op-ed in The New York Times on why moving manufacturing operations from China into Tijuana is not a surprising decision anymore: 

Like many Americans, until recently, when I heard “Tijuana” I thought only of drug cartels and cheap tequila. “TJ,” though, is a city of more than two million people (larger than neighboring San Diego), and it has become North America’s electronics assembly hot spot.

You can drive from a San Diego engineering center to our Tijuana factory in 20 minutes, no passport required. (A passport is needed to come back, but there are fast-track lanes for business people.) Some of our employees commute across the border each day; good doctors are cheaper and easier to find in TJ, as are private schools, although it’s generally nicer to live in San Diego. In some ways, the border feels more like the notional borders of the European Union than a divide between the developed and developing worlds.

Five: This quote from the Mayor of the city of San Diego showed up in my Twitter timeline, via The San Diego Union Tribune:

One way to truly become a binational region, would be for Tijuana and San Diego to share the same area code — a move that would not only save the cost of calling long distance but also offer a powerful symbol.

The quote was extracted from a speech in which the Mayor outlined his dos ciudades, una región (two cities, one region) agenda; an idea that we suspect may result quite appealing to Ruxandra Guidi and our fellow tijuanenses.

All in all, what may be left for Tijuana and San Diego to share in the foreseeable future is not clear yet. However, at least we can perceive that journalists (like Ruxandra) on both sides of the border are already working as one single community in order to develop a new zeitgeist, and that’s a good thing.

Image: Local composition.

During the last administration (six years), much of the Mexican media specialized in tallying the daily acts of violence, crimes and human casualties committed throughout the country. Figures were refreshed every morning and published both in print and online. As a result, news organizations refined their methods of monitoring and tracking the amount of casualties and/or abductions in the so-called “Calderón’s war on drugs”, to the extent that those numbers were in fact more accurate than the official record.

Mexican columnist Ricardo Alemán in today’s edition of El Universal [in Spanish].

For instance, take a look at this interactive infographic created by the newspaper El Norte, aptly dubbed execution-o-meter.

Update: I’ve decided to attach a screen caption of said infographic, since most contents of El Norte are currently located behind a paywall. —Roberto

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Image: Screen caption of El Norte.

Mexican Teachers Adapt to Their American-Raised Students

Public Radio International is reporting (scroll down for original audio clip) on a state-sponsored contest [in Spanish] carried out in emigration-prone Zacatecas, Mexico, that invites students to draw or paint what immigration means to them upon their personal experiences.

In recent years, Antonio Acosta, an education official here, has witnessed the influx of school-aged kids returning to Mexico. They arrive with their parents, who have left the United States because they are undocumented or couldn’t find work. Acosta says the kids can feel disoriented in a Mexican classroom—like foreigners, but in what is supposedly their own nation.

Now, Acosta is pioneering a project to get Mexican teachers more accustomed to English. While some believe that the money might be better spent other ways, Acosta says that English classes are critical to help teachers and their students adjust. “Where am I from?” they ask.

FJP: After a long stare at these images, one is left wondering how much of a deal binational coverage on immigration issues has influenced them. -Roberto

Images: Photoset by Myles Estey, via PRI The World.

Now Showing: Reportero

Last summer we interviewed Bernardo Ruiz, the director of Reportero, a documentary that follows the crime and drug war reporting of a Tijuana-based newsweekly called Zeta.

The hour-long film gets its PBS premiere on POV this Monday January 7.

Via POV:

In Mexico, more than 50 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime. As the drug war intensifies and the risks to journalists become greater, will the free press be silenced?

For our interviews with Bernardo, see here.

More important, tune in to POV Monday. A full description of the film is here and includes a background on Mexican press freedom over the last 25 years.

Trivia: The film follows closely the -oftentimes lethal- misadventures of the Mexican newsweekly Zeta, the only publication of its kind printed abroad (in Vista, California). A nonetheless complicated issue that is further explained in the documentary. Do not forget to tune in.