Archive for February, 2008
Talk of 'illegals' in Beverly Hills
The bar was beautiful, and so was she. Utterly Los Angeles, she wore a knee length dress with a low-cut top, allowing her audience to enjoy her full breasts framed by a fake fur coat that hung off her shoulders.
The Beverly Hills hotel bar was comfortably full of what its image suggests is the normal fare: gorgeous women being pampered by old, wrinkled men in expensive suits; one or two famous actors; wide-eyed tourists; and young men and women sharking the crowd.
‘I prefer my boring life,’ she said after discovering I live in Mexico City. Boring is preferable to being kidnapped was what she meant, after finding out where I make my home. Mexico City gets a lot of bad press.
Video: Exhibition Remembers the Dead
Even today there is no definitive count of how many pro-democracy demonstrators were slaughtered by Mexican army troops in the Tlatelolco zone of this capital on Oct. 2, 1968. Was the death toll a few dozen, as the government claimed? Or closer to 300, as some intrepid journalists reported? Did President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz approve the attack? No one knows for sure.
Knifepoint on Valentine's Day
La Marquesa is a sprawling national park and forest out in the mountains between Mexico City and Toluca, and seemed like the perfect place for me and my man to get some time alone today, the day for lovers. As it turns out, it wasn’t such nice place to be alone.
Mexican Human Rights Commission is ineffective, says report
Human Rights Watch released a damning report today, calling Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission ‘ineffective’ and ‘disappointing’.
‘When it comes to actually securing remedies and promoting reforms to improve Mexico’s dismal human rights record, the CNDH’s performance has been disappointing,’ reads the report, which also points out that the Commission’s failures hasn’t been due to a lack of funding.
Despite the violence, Mexican authorities stay silent
Despite the murder of three journalists last week, the developing trend of self-censorship amongst the media and the fleeing of one journalist from the country to save his life, both the Mexican Administration and the country’s national Human Rights Commission have remained silent on the issue of press freedom and violence against journalists.
Mexico still deadliest country in the Americas for journalists, says RWB
Mexico remains the deadliest country in the Americas for journalists with two murders in less than a month, and three disappearances, according to today’s annual report from Reporters Without Borders. Three journalists were murdered last year, and three media workers were shot dead.
Those levels are an improvement on 2006, when nine journalists were killed, but 2008 is looking grim if the stats are to be believed. As many journalists were killed last week than in the whole of last year.
Violence against journalists surged this week
The developments in the Lydia Cacho case and her revelations yesterday come in a week when violence against journalists surged again. Last year four reporters were murdered and three disappeared, and 2008 is promising to be as equally violent for members of the profession.
Supreme Court Judges Were Bribed, says Cacho
The Supreme Court judges who voted that the rights of Lydia Cacho were not violated enough when she was arrested, detained and tortured by Puebla’s police under the orders of Governor Mario Marin were paid off by Marin’s lawyers, according to the journalist.
Cacho made the accusation, which if true promises to scandalize Mexico’s Supreme Court, in a conference last night during which she launched her new book ‘Memorias de una infamia’.
In her latest publication, Cacho documents her maltreatment at the hands of Marin, local businessmen Kamel Nacif, Jean Succar Kuri and other Mexicans that she implicated in a pedophile ring in Cancun in her book, ‘Demonios del Eden’.
Video: tequila, gun-fire and dancing in the streets
The pueblo of Santa Maria Aztahuacan in the sprawling working class municipality of Iztapalapa, Mexico City, got Semana Santa off to a rousing start this Saturday afternoon with dancing in the streets, tacos, tequila – and random gunfire.
The festival, which began this weekend, will run for the next month. MexicoReporter.com went along to get a taste of the action.
Video: NAFTA Protestors Bring the Country to the City
Yesterday hundreds of tractors and thousands of people from rural Mexico came to Mexico City to protest against the lifting of trade restrictions on agricultural commodities like corn, rice and oats. The farmers say lifting these restrictions will put them out of work, because they won’t be able to compete with powerful U.S. agri-businesses, and they’re pressuring Mexico’s government to renegotiate portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.
Video: Filmstar Bárbara Mori gets Ugly
Uruguayan actress Bárbara Mori wants to be more than a pretty face, and she has the fake buck teeth and fat suit to prove it.
The Los Angeles Times covered her new movie launch, and we provided the video interview to match.
Mexican Farmers Protest NAFTA
Pictures from this week’s protest in Mexico City against NAFTA – more details to come.
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