** Open thread, check back for updates.
Marcela Turati reports in Proceso that government and military personnel with experience in digging through rubble for survivors are complaining that civilians had "taken over" the rescue operations at collapsed buildings in Mexico City.
The trained personnel say picking away stones from the top of a collapsed structure — bit by bit, as civilians have lined up to do since the minutes after the quake hit — does not work.
"We made a tunnel, but we should have made five more," one unnamed engineer told Turati from an apartment tower that crumbled on Ave Amsterdam in trendy Condesa. "One tunnel, because they don't want to listen to the military or to Civil Protection. They're not listening to the firefighters, or those of us who lived through '85. [...] The ones giving orders don't know."
Reports say that site has already been cleared for victims. Watch these other heart-wrenching rescues.
Collapsed building on #Amsterdam Ave. all clear of victims. Rescuers, described largely as young people, break into national anthem. https://t.co/xSmBhMK0bs
— Daniel Hernandez (@longdrivesouth) September 22, 2017
Fissures
Four days since the Sept. 19 quake hit, this still feels like a death in the family.
My friends' Facebook posts in DF are heartbreaking, stirring. My people are still out there on the streets, finding ways to help. Others I know are joining caravans to reach the most affected and so far largely neglected areas of Puebla and Morelos.
These are streets, places, faces, voices that we know, intimately. I know so many people here in the United States and really around the world who have been touched by Mexico in some form feel the same way today.
More than 300 people are dead, according to official figures. The majority of the victims are in densely populated Mexico City and in Morelos, near the epicenter of the 7.1R sismo that hit at 1:14 pm Central Time on Tuesday. Dozens of buildings fell in Mexico City and in the states of Morelos, Puebla, and Oaxaca, which was still reeling from the 8.1R quake of September 7.
Unknown numbers of people are injured, unknown numbers of buildings are permanently unsafe, unknown numbers of roads and other infrastructure are damaged. I'm worried about the little towns and villages in remote corners of Chiapas and Puebla that have not received aid.
Millions, millions of people today are in shock, distress, and by now, almost certain fatigue.
* Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt, via AFP.
And now the fissures between government and society — always churning just below the surface — are emerging. Among citizens, there is a sense that this moment of "control" over the streets and the soaring solidarity cannot be let go from the people's grasp. We've suffered so much in the last ten years, endured so much chaos, violence, political stagnation.
Is this what it takes for Mexican society to actually wake up and do something? Can we sustain it?
This morning on Aristegui Noticias live, anchor Carmen Aristegui said: "In this moment of tragedy we are seeing that Mexico we wish to be, that muscle, that spirit, that vigor, that will to not be just a sitting flower but part of a society."
* Above, a woman volunteer rescuer outside the textile sweatshop in Colonia Obrera where 21 bodies have been recovered. Excuse her while she eats her torta. (Via Martha Ugarte)
Criticism has emerged over the Peña Nieto administration's optics handling. Video of one incident shows interior secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong being jeered away from a rescue site on the very first day of the disaster.
Reports have also emerged of convoys of being turned away in Morelos due to bureaucratic stops. This is something to watch out for in the days ahead.
The president and top cabinet officials visited the Rébsamen campus and had photo-ops, but did not illuminate or apparently guide the rescue operation. Differing rumors circulated about the possibility of a girl named "Frida Sofia" alive under the rubble, then circulated through the press, then were later proven false.
Frida Sofía never existed. And parents who are actually real and grieving say the education secretary has not contacted them at all.
Criticism has also rained down on default government-media conglomerate Televisa for apparently having exclusive access to some of the rescue sites, including the Rébsamen school. As far as the story of the child is concerned, some asked, could it be the fatigue, shock, and adrenaline coursing through the volunteer rescuers? Several at the school insisted to the Associated Press even after the story was proven false that a surviving child still existed down there.
Last night a contact in DF told me she was certain that rescuers heard voices, and maybe they did. Maybe they heard ghosts, the spirits of the 21 dead kids, she said.
El Universal is calling Frida Sofia a "ghost story." This is a signal of collective trauma, of course.
Either way, the case demonstrated a breakdown in communication at the government level, and apparently in standards and practices for journalists reporting from these sites. Colleagues say access is restricted. If a shaken and tired rescuer emerged and said something promising, of course, the impulse was to report it ...
* Photo via LAT.
'Diabolical'
The earthquake hit on the anniversary to the day of the 1985 quake that left at least 10,000 if not up to 30,000 people dead. My dad later called the coincidence "diabolical" and that is how I will describe this situation for the rest of my life. There's something cruel about this, a planet rendering punishment.
This time, only two weeks earlier, southern Mexico got severely ratted by an 8.1R monster in the Pacific that left more than 100 people dead, and the city of Juchitán (Oaxaca) largely devastated. Chiapas and Oaxaca were already begging not to be forgotten in the news cycle.
Keep in mind these big ones come about once or twice a year for central Mexico. They shake Mexico City good, because it's 20 million people on a dry lake in a high valley near some volcanoes, but "if it didn't fall in 1985, it won't fall ever."
The quake twelve days earlier put DF on the edge, but there also might have been a false sense of complacency; another heavy one went down, no major damages in the city as in 1985. Saved. Again ...
That morning, as they do solemnly every year, the president and his top brass held a flag ceremony on the Zócalo at dawn, when the big earthquake struck on September 19, 1985. This was Peña Nieto's fifth time doing this ceremony during his term.
The leaders were already dressed in black.
* Photo via Presidencia.
Mexico City, which suffered the worst in 1985 because that earthquake was centered relatively close — in Michoacán — has for years conducted a full earthquake drill across schools and office buildings to recall the devastation and the heroic civilian efforts of the '85 disaster.
Every Sept. 19, we recall how the DNA of the country was altered forever. The topos and grassroots brigades mobilized to save people from a sea of collapsed buildings, in a rising stench of human decay, and helped spark the fall of the PRI regime during its most decadent years, and moved us toward reforms.
On Tuesday, DF had its earthquake-drill, and then everyone went back to their offices and classrooms.
Another quake with that level of damage was not supposed to happen again. Not that same day. But it did. And now the regular, tough citizens of Mexico and Mexico City — mexicanos and foreigners, side by side — are rising and leading the way.
The sense of fear and panic that I hear is lingering in the air over DF now, four days into the disaster, is rooted partly in the sudden awareness not only that another 1985 has happened, but that a 2017 is now sure to happen at some point again in the future.
** More ...
* Top photo: Yuri Cortez via AFP.
** Originally published at VICE México, June 28, 2013:
Es un viernes lluvioso de tianguis, los morros están saliendo de sus clases, y la lona sigue colgada entre un comedor y una tienda, con un mensaje muy claro: “SI TE AGARRAMOS ROBANDO, TE LINCHAMOS”.
Se ven por varias calles de este pueblo en la Delegación Cuajimalpa del Distrito Federal, lonas que representan una hartazgo total de los pobladores de San Mateo Tlatenango contra una ola de robos y asaltos que se han incrementado, aseguran, desde que la policía de la Ciudad de México les retiró elementos de vigilancia por esa siempre misteriosa explicación llamada “falta de recursos.”
El pueblo de San Mateo está a menos que un kilómetro de las torres residenciales más lujosas de la zona corporativa de Santa Fe. Para llegar allí desde el suelo urbano del valle, subes a Santa Fe y pasas el CityMarket recién hecho, el Superama enorme, y la vueltita escondida que lleva al túnel de seguridad del Club de Golf Santa Fe. Ahí, subes por un camino de dos carriles que va escalando las montañas del poniente del DF hasta cruzar al Estado de México.
Las lonas se ven por todos lados en el pueblo, y hasta en la antigua parroquia se dice que el padre busca tener la suya también, para colgarla de unos muros que en la lógica religiosa le pertenecen a Dios. Quizá en estados como Michoacán o Guerrero serán conocidos o hasta esperados este tipos de mensajes, ¿pero dentro de la ciudad? ¿Qué pasa?
Continue reading "Si te agarran robando en este pueblo del DF, 'ya valiste madre'" »
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY — They were tweeting about it, turning it into memes and ogling it in real life along the route that President Obama took from Mexico City's airport to the colonial front gate of the National Palace.
Throughout Obama's visit, which ended Friday, the president's super-armored presidential limousine, nicknamed "The Beast" when it was unveiled four years ago, almost stole the show from the cool and cordial display of diplomacy between Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
When Obama stepped off Air Force One and hopped into the customized state Cadillac, one cable newscaster on Mexico's Foro TV called it a "spectacular vehicle." Broadcasters on a variety of channels seemed to mention The Beast — La Bestia in Spanish — as frequently as they could.
And they were also talking about it in Costa Rica, where Obama was headed after his morning forums with Mexican students and businesses.
Maybe it's that famed American engineering stirring up the fascination? Or could it have to do with Mexicans' similar obsession with the popemobile whenever the Holy Father comes to town?
"We came to try to see the car, La Bestia," said tourist Daniel Castillo, a 33-year-old port worker from Tamaulipas state who was standing outside the National Palace with his wife after Obama and Peña Nieto departed Thursday afternoon. "Don't really care for ... that señor," Castillo added, referring to the U.S. president.
News cameramen on motorcycles chased The Beast as it passed some of Mexico City's toughest neighborhoods along its speediest highways. Infographics on La Bestia adorned news sites, with journalists noting the elaborate features, such as a blood supply in case of an attack.
In a cruel twist, there was another vehicle nicknamed La Bestia making headlines in Mexico this week: The freight train that chugs along the rain forests and backcountry of eastern Mexico, carrying vulnerable migrants from Central America on an often deadly attempt to reach the United States.
On Wednesday, migrants were again attacked by suspected drug gangs, this time near the city of Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz state. At least nine were seriously injured by men armed with machetes and firearms who tried to extort $100 from each of the travelers, The Times reported.
According to accounts, some migrants were thrown from the train for refusing to pay. In recent years, tens of thousands have gone missing while traveling along La Bestia's tracks.
"Now isn't it curious that Obama's limo is called La Bestia, just like the train that takes thousands of migrants from Chiapas?" a politician wondered on Twitter, referring to Mexico's border state with Guatemala.
Castillo, the tourist, said cartel violence fueled by U.S. demand for drugs has made it too dangerous to travel from Puerto Altamira, where he lives, to the border to visit Texas. He and his wife now prefer vacationing in the "center of the country."
Obama "should stay over there and fix his own country's problems," Castillo huffed.
His wife, Irene Gomez, said the couple hasn't seen some family members in the United States in years. Most of her relatives left Mexico to flee the drug violence, she said.
"Everyone is going to the United States because the insecurity is so bad," said Gomez, 34. "And what are they doing over there? They're deporting people, separating families."
Once Obama's "beast" had departed the National Palace on Thursday, the low fencing placed around the Zocalo square was removed and pedestrians gradually reclaimed the plaza that has been at the heart of national identity here for centuries.
A few passersby hurled curses at the front door of the palace as soldiers emerged for the customary evening flag ceremony. For some, the awe of the La Bestia faded away and reality set in once more.
* Photo by AP via LAT.
** Originally published in print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
MEXICO CITY -- There were fewer riders than normal on driver Octavio Diaz's bus early Wednesday, the first day that a transit fare hike raised costs from about 4 pesos to 5 for a short trip, a difference equivalent to a mere 8 cents.
But many commuters, drivers, and officials in Mexico's capital seemed to more or less agree that increases on fares for taxis and buses were to be expected considering inflation and rising gas prices.
Ridership "does go down, as people get adjusted," the 39-year-old Diaz said, looking back to half-empty rows of seats on his hurtling microbus. "But then they return to their usual routines."
The fare increase was announced by Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera last week during a holiday, when many capital residents were away on vacation.
Mexico City in recent years has aggressively expanded its public transit system, investing millions of dollars in Metrobus, the city's dedicated-lane bus service, and Ecobici, its shared bicycle program. Both systems expanded rapidly under former Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, and Mancera has said he'll push for more growth.
City officials said bus and taxi fares hadn't been adjusted since 2008 and the city's subway fare, which increased in 2010, will remain 3 pesos a trip, or about 25 cents.
"I think people anywhere in the world prefer not having to pay more for services. However, this increase was necessary," Rufino H. Leon Tovar, the city's transit secretary, said in an interview. "People understand."
Although Mexico City's economy is considered healthy, many workers make meager wages, earning barely more than Mexico's minimum wage, about $5 a day. City officials said the transportation services are still a good deal, but a peso a day in two directions, on two or three separate buses, five or six days a week, can add up.
"You have less to spend in the house," said Araceli Graniel, 63, a retired nurse who was leaving a station at the Hidalgo transit hub. "That pesito that looks like just one, well, in a big family, that's a lot of pesos."
Taxi driver Arturo, who declined to give his full name, called the latest fare increase "one big joke," starting with the requirement that cabbies go to a City Hall office to get their meters adjusted.
"Listen, they said they lowered the city car tax, but I still pay other fees, permits, whatever you want to call them," the driver said. "Excuse me, but that's a big scam, my friend."
Diaz, the microbus driver, said he has worked on the same central-city route for 25 years. Fare hike or not, he doesn't expect a major increase in his earnings.
"Diesel just goes up and up and up and up," Diaz said. "When they raised [the fare] the last time, diesel cost about 50 pesos per loop on my route, and now it costs 115 pesos per loop.... There's never enough money."
* Photo: Commuters wait to board at a mass transit stop in Mexico City. Credit: Omar Torres / AFP
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's new government is considering relaunching an abandoned rescue effort to reach the bodies of 63 miners in a coal mine in northern Mexico since 2006, one of the worst mining disasters in the country's history.
The Pasta de Conchos tragedy left 65 dead and exposed poor and dangerous working conditions for miners in one of Mexico's largest but also most under-regulated industries. Relatives of the victims have insisted in protests that the recovery operation be resumed and in recent days sought support from members of the new federal Cabinet.
A methane explosion trapped the miners on Feb. 19, 2006. The recovery effort was abandoned in April 2007 after only two bodies had been brought out.
The Pasta de Conchos disaster deepened rifts between representatives of the victims -- their families and unions -- and Grupo Mexico, the mining conglomerate that owns the coal mine in the municipality of San Juan Sabinas, Coahuila state.
This week, after a fresh push by relatives of the victims before the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, the attorney general's office indicated it was open to examining the investigation and possibly reopening the recovery effort.
Speaking Wednesday at Mexico's Senate, the deputy attorney general for human rights, Ricardo Garcia Cervantes, said the Pasta de Conchos case is a reminder that poorly regulated mines known aspozitos should be closed.
"We should prohibit pozitos, because since Pasta de Conchos they've generated an unjustified number of dead," Garcia said. "They're an avoidable human pain."
By one count of victims' relatives, at least 67 more miners have died since Pasta de Conchos in accidents or explosions in Mexico through early 2012.No dates or guidelines have been been set yet for a reexamination of the case, said Armando Seguro, a spokesman in the attorney general's office.
Juan Rebolledo, vice president for international relations at Grupo Mexico, told The Times that the company has not received any formal petition to reenter the mine and would not comment further.
The explosion occurred during the mine's overnight shift. Some basic figures about the incident, such as at what depth it occurred, remain in dispute. In 2008, widows of the miners and volunteers from other mining regions of northern Mexico converged at Pasta de Conchos and attempted to storm the mine and launch their own effort to reach the bodies.
* Photo by Sharon Steinmann, via LAT.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- A Facebook page in Mexico has notched tens of thousands of followers for posting detailed but unconfirmed updates on security risks in the drug-war hot zone of Tamaulipas state. Now, purported assassins have declared a bounty on the head of the page's anonymous administrator.
In response, the Facebook author said the page would not stop gathering and publishing information on shootouts and highway blockades because the Tamaulipas authorities and local news outlets offer nearly zero updates on so-called "risk situations."
The person behind Valor por Tamaulipas posted a photograph last week of a reward notice that was said to have begun circulating in several Tamaulipas cities calling for information leading to the page's author or relatives.
The flier makes an offer of 600,000 pesos, or about $47,000, for information and includes a cellphone number with a Tamaulipas area code.
"I'm not trying to be a hero," the Facebook page says in response to the bounty claim. "I'm doing what I'm supposed to do as a citizen and a member of society before the threat that organized crime poses to the stability of our state and country."
The photographs and postings, like other content on the page, could not be independently verified, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Valor Por Tamaulipas and similar social-media platforms that offer intelligence related to incidents in Mexico's ongoing drug war.
Local, state, and federal government authorities release only scant details, if any, on the conflict in Tamaulipas between federal authorities, Mexico's military, and three major crime groups: the Zeta, Sinaloa, and Gulf cartels. As in many other violence-wracked regions of Mexico, local news outlets widely practice self-censorship.
The sharing of such information -- from sites of checkpoints to times and places of grenade or car-bomb attacks -- has generated risks in the past for social-media users.
In September 2011, a woman known as an info-sharing user of an online message board in the Tamaulipas border city of Nuevo Laredo was found decapitated. Though never fully confirmed by local authorities, the woman's death was blamed on cartel hit men who wanted to silence her constant postings on violent incidents there.
The page where the woman posted, Nuevo Laredo En Vivo, maintains a message board where locals apparently keep posting.
Valor Por Tamaulipas has chalked up nearly 158,000 likes on Facebook since its launch on Jan. 1, 2012. On Twitter, the Valor por Tamaulipas account currently has about 24,400 followers.
In contrast, the state government's official Facebook page has about 3,000 likes, and noticeably no steady updates on risky situations on the ground. And, in a sign of the horizontal nature of the drug-war's information battles on the Internet, a page intended to counter the assertions of Valor Por Tamaulipas has already emerged, calling itself Anti Valor por Tamaulipas.
The administrator of the first Tamaulipas Facebook page did not respond to emailed questions Monday.
Antonio Martinez, a spokesman for the Mexico City-based free-speech advocacy group Articulo 19, said his organization was monitoring the purported threat against Valor por Tamaulipas but suggested that the site might not be administered by an ordinary citizen.
"It's a little strange," said Martinez, who noted the Facebook page routinely praises military personnel and their operations, without mentioning any of the allegations of abuses or criminal activity within the army's ranks in the region.
"We are still investigating, but we think this could be some kind of military strategy, and not a case of a direct threat against one person," Martinez said.
In an interview with the daily El Universal, the Facebook page administrator would "neither confirm nor deny" the assertion that Valor por Tamaulipas is a product of Mexican military intelligence.
Tamaulipas' statehouse has remained silent on the Facebook page and its report of a death-threat. But days after the threat was publicized, the state attorney general's office released a statement reminding citizens that it offers rewards of up to 500,000 pesos, or about $39,000, for information leading to the solving of serious crimes.
On the question of political art in Mexico, one of the best places to turn in recent years has been the Internet. Simon Pecco, of Tijuana, tells Steven Rodriguez at LA TACO:
I did not burn down the Peña sign / I applaud the person who did. That’s more or less an invitation. Fuck the law! Those kinds of heroes are needed so that people can become aware that they need to get with it.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- As rescue efforts were winding down Friday at Mexico's state oil company, where a blast the day before killed at least 33 people, workers gathered nearby, saying they were unafraid of going back to work and eager to do so as soon as they were told it's OK.
There would be no business at the tower complex until further notice. Yet on Friday, employees of Petroleos de Mexico, or Pemex, kept showing up. Some were eager to get inside to help with the rescue effort, while others said they were awaiting news of co-workers and friends who remained unaccounted for.
Armed soldiers were guarding all the entrances and exits of the complex. Rescuers from the army, marines, Mexican Red Cross, and the searchers known as topos were still clearing away rubble.
An estimated 10,000 people work at the Pemex headquarters in Mexico City. The workers described it as a cosmopolitan setting, with employees, contractors and visitors from all over Mexico and the world circulating through the building each day.
Carlos Pineda, 45, an accountant who has worked in the main Pemex tower for 10 years, said he was on the 10th floor when the blast occurred Thursday afternoon. Pineda said workers in the buildings were prepared through previous drills to face an emergency such as an earthquake.
Pineda wouldn't speculate on what caused the blast in the basement of the building called B2, which he described as the human resources department, where there is "a lot of traffic."
"We're all asking ourselves the same thing, what happened?" Pineda said. "I really don't know what could have happened. These are administrative offices, not workshops. There are no solvents or anything like that."
Pineda and others said they wanted to know who was injured and who was killed. No official information has been released on the dead. He said he recognizes coworkers by faces but not necessarily by names.
Like others, Pineda said he's prepared to go back to work as soon as possible because Pemex is "so important to the country."
Marco Antonio Franco, a top search-and-rescue official at the Mexican Red Cross, said teams would keep looking as long as there was a possibility that people were trapped under rubble.
"A young man just came up and said he still can't find his father, he went to the morgue, and to all the hospitals, and well that gives us the possibility that someone could still be under the structure," Franco said.
"Ground zero here looks a lot like an earthquake," said Franco, who was among Mexican rescue workers who traveled to Haiti for search efforts after the 2010 quake there.
Carlos Alberto Hernandez, a 38-year-old cleaner in the tower, stood outside an entrance to the Pemex complex waiting for his chance to get inside to help. Others milled about with worried expressions.
"That's why we're here, to support our coworkers, to help look for anyone who might be trapped or injured," he said. "I don't have any anxiety about going back to work, no. Anxiety maybe so I can get inside."
By the afternoon, the Red Cross was pulling out, and the search was being suspended.
* Photo via LAT.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- Carlos Slim's telecommunications empire, Telmex, is poised to get a new shot at realizing its long-held goal of entering Mexico's television market after a regulatory board this week approved rules that may allow the world's richest man to launch a for-pay TV channel.
Mexico's television market is almost completely dominated by the duopoly of media giant Televisa and TV Azteca, which together control about 95% of what viewers see and hear on the country's airwaves.
On Wednesday, the congressional regulatory watchdog known by its Spanish acronym, Cofetel, sent rules to its executive-level counterpart that would settle Telmex's dispute with smaller telephone service providers over interconnection fees. Those charges are reflected in the extra pesos that customers pay when calling from one phone network to another.
This week's regulatory move happened largely under the radar in the public eye but was seen by financial news outlets in Mexico as a bargaining chip for Telmex and its ambitions for television (link in Spanish). America Movil, the Telmex telecom branch that hopes to start a for-pay TV cable channel via Internet, now must resubmit its bid after a separate judicial-level ruling came down last week.
Under the government of former President Felipe Calderon, Slim's desires to compete with Televisa and TV Azteca were tied up in dense regulatory appeals and negotiations. Opening up the market was further hindered by Mexico's fractious Congress.
The new government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose party is now the largest parliamentary group in Mexico's legislative branch, has yet to roll out its telecommunications reform package. But Peña Nieto has already indicated that he hopes his government can open concessions for at least two new channels on Mexico's airwaves.
Peña Nieto said the issue is about increasing "competition" at all levels in Mexico.
Televisa's dominance of Mexico's airwaves became a campaign issue in the 2012 presidential election after the grass-roots student movement known as #YoSoy132 held large-scale demonstrations opposing candidate Peña Nieto and Televisa at large. Protesters decried his Institutional Revolutionary Party's cozy relationship with the network, claiming Televisa favored him over his rivals on the left and right.
Peña Nieto is married to a former Televisa telenovela actress. His party has a history of being allied with Televisa and its top tiers of executives and producers.
* Photo via LAT.
ESTADO is a series of electronic music sets taking place each Saturday this month at the Estela de Luz monument in Mexico City, showcasing the most cutting-edge and challenging emerging talents from four eletronic music centers in Mexico: Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Monterrey, and D.F.
Here's the site, with samples and takes from each of the artists. The series is curated by Alberto Bustamante of N-A-A-F-I.
The Estela, a monumentally distastrous project since its inception, is being gradually claimed as everyday-usage public space along Paseo de la Reforma. This was where the #YoSoy132 movement held one of its earliest and most spontaneous demonstrations. Inside, or rather underneath the structure, a Centro de Cultural Digital was established, and from here, musical performances have taken place on the square at the base of the "Suavicrema."
The ESTADO site is well worth a browsing and listen. Here's a compilation of the artists at Soundcloud, with downloadable tracks.
* Also, upcoming in Tijuana, near where I am presently reporting, two good festivals I hope to check out: Norte Sonoro, curated by Jace Clayton, and All My Friends.
** PREVIOUSLY: See also, Estrella Cercana, "Teen DJ from Ciudad Juarez, Mock the Zuma, reflects a 'bizarro' reality," "More snapshots from Monterrey, NRML fest," "Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 4."
** Originally published at World Now:
For travelers who've never been to the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza, a virtual window into the site's pyramids and plazas is available online, among 30 archaeological zones in Mexico now mapped by history's greatest peeping Tom: Google Street View.
From the comfort of a computer, any Internet user anywhere can now zoom in and examine the perfect form of Chichen Itza's Kukulkan pyramid, known also El Castillo, or the Castle.
On Google Street View, a viewer can almost feel like they might tumble into the Sacred Cenote, or natural sinkhole, where Maya priests practiced ritual sacrifice. Or imagine cavorting on the Plaza of the Thousand Columns. Or maybe do some souvenir browsing, up close and in intensely high resolution.
Google and Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, announced the new maps last week. Using a 360-degree camera mounted on a bicycle, Google captured "street views" of other major archaeological sites in Mexico, such as Monte Alban in Oaxaca and Teotihuacan outside Mexico City.
Lesser-known Mesoamerican sites are also now mapped by Google Street View, including Tula in the state of Hidalgo and Xochicalco in Morelos.
The Internet search engine has focused its publicity campaign for the new maps on images captured at Chichen Itza, one of Mexico's most storied tourist destinations. But for travelers who have been there, could Google Street View now be better than the real thing?
Consider: A recent (physical) visit to Chichen Itza confirmed that tourists are no longer allowed to climb the Castillo pyramid, no more tackling its famous 91 steps that President Felipe Calderon recently climbed in a widely mocked tourism video.
Visitors can no longer actually, physically cavort among the plaza of the columns. In fact, most of the structures at Chichen Itza these days are off-limits to tourists, who must settle on snapping photos behind wire barriers. Worse, the archaeological zone is also overrun with vendors from the neighboring communities, making a non-virtual visit a somewhat disappointing experience overall.
Since Chichen Itza was declared a new Seven Wonders of the World site in 2007, access has been limited due to concerns over deterioration and also because the site's restoration process is ongoing, said an INAH spokesman.
The same is true at the Palenque zone in Chiapas, the spokesman said, where a visitor like you and me may no longer be able to climb that site's spectacular structures. But on Google, at least, there's a decent shot of a man in an orange polo with a sweat towel on his head.
* Photo: A view of the Kukulkan pyramid, or El Castillo, at the Chichen Itza archaeological site in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Credit: Google, via INAH
** Originally published at World Now and re-published in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
The pay phone is tucked into a colonial-era doorway facing a busy sidewalk downtown. It happens to draw attention only because the phone is bright red. “Free calls,” reads a plain sign taped inside, along with instructions on how to dial any number in Mexico or in the world.
An installation conceived by artist Minerva Cuevas, the phone also features a photograph of a chimpanzee picking up an old rotary phone, like an open invitation. One recent day, this reporter stumbled upon the phone and did what millions of others might do when faced with a free call. I called my mother.
“Hey, mom! I'm calling you for an art piece!”
“Oh, that's great, mi'jo,” she replied, before launching into the latest local gossip.
Few artists in the world challenge the penny-for-penny profits of global capitalism as bluntly as Mexico City native Cuevas. She puts revolutionary slogans inside mass-produced fortune cookies and hands out bottles of water taped with the word “Egalite” instead of “Evian,” because shouldn't water always be free?
Her free pay phone is a new work produced for an exhibit at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, or Museum of Mexico City. The show, on view until Aug. 5, covers a career defined by Cuevas' knack at turning art into giveaways for ordinary people hustling to make ends meet in a tough city. They are particularly subversive gestures for Mexico, the artist says, a society where the very wealthy and connected usually get all the shortcuts and giveaways they might wish.
Cuevas' Mejor Vida Corp. is perhaps her most well-known conceptual project. This Better Life “corporation” distributed subway tickets inside underground stations, handed out low-price barcodes to sneak onto items in stores, and produced fake student ID cards (for transit and entertainment discounts) by request from strangers.
As might be expected, the public responded approvingly. Mejor Vida Corp. went on to become an icon of contemporary Mexican art in the 1990s.
The exhibit on Cuevas also highlights works that are surprising for their almost formal expressions in painting and performance. In a 1995 video, the earliest piece in the exhibit, Cuevas films herself through the process of drinking an entire bottle of tequila.
She does so mostly in silence. In person, Cuevas is similarly soft-spoken yet precise, deliberately measured with her words. She would describe the tequila video only as “sculptural.”
The free pay phone is a powerful piece, the equivalent of an art-world bomb aimed at the web of private financial structures that profit from our 21st century need for telecommunicating with loved ones. It is especially potent in the financial nerve center of Mexico City, where telecom magnate Carlos Slim bases the Telmex and Telcel empires that make him the world's richest man.
“It was one of the most difficult pieces to get installed,” Cuevas acknowledged on a recent bright midday outside the museum. “Obviously, in Mexico, we have the reference of the monopolies, of Telmex, but it's also about creating this oasis in the city.”
Cuevas said she is paying for calls made at the installation herself. She is keeping a registry of the calls made, but in keeping with the strategy behind Mejor Vida Corp., the data will remain private. (The artist said she can confirm that calls from Mexico City to Cuba are the most expensive.)
On Wednesday, free-admission day at the museum, the phone doorway was closed because the museum's telephone and Internet connections were inexplicably down, a spokeswoman said. It was a cold reminder for any would-be caller of the frequently unreliable nature of telephone service here, even in today’s wired world.
* Photo: Artist Minera Cuevas says her free pay phone is about "creating this oasis in the city." Credit: Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times
** Originally published at World Now:
Mexico this week quietly signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, a controversial multinational treaty that sponsors say protects intellectual property but opponents call an assault on privacy and freedom of expression.
Ambassador Claude Heller of Mexico signed the agreement Wednesday on behalf of the Mexican government in Japan. The signing immediately set off condemnation among Internet activists in Mexico, who called the government's move a strategic ruse in an election year.
Mexico's Senate must ratify the treaty, but the chamber rejected ACTA in 2010.
By signing it while Congress is not in session -- and just days after the presidential election -- the administration of President Felipe Calderon is in effect forcing the issue to the front of the agenda once the new Congress convenes in September and before Calderon's term expires. The president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, assumes office for a six-year term in December. Peña Nieto has so far not indicated a position on the treaty.
ACTA has been negotiated and debated by world governments since it first emerged in 2008. The agreement would help improve international efforts to prosecute content and intellectual-property piracy, including digital and Internet platforms, but also covering trademarks, brands and pirated pharmaceuticals.
Opponents say governments could abuse ACTA and target private users with criminal charges for downloading copyrighted material, for example, or force Internet service providers to monitor the online activity of users and turn data over to authorities.
The United States is a key signatory as of October 2011 with Australia, Canada, Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. Last week, the European Parliament rejected ACTA in a crucial vote, a setback for the treaty. ACTA is "too vague, open to misinterpretation, and could therefore jeopardize citizens' liberties," the parliament said in a statement.
Mexico's signing, although contingent on ratification by the new Senate, revives momentum for ACTA supporters.
Rodrigo Roque Diaz, director of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, or IMPI, said in an interview that the government would ask Congress to develop legislation in the fall that would "jointly" protect Internet users concerned about privacy.
"The idea is not to criminalize the independent, private user of the Internet; the idea is to sanction those who are violating author rights on a commercial scale," Roque Diaz told The Times.
Piracy in Mexico, which is commonly associated with outdoor markets where illegally produced DVDs and CDs are sold, "generates great economic and tax losses" estimated at 2.7 million pesos (about $200,000) an hour, he said.
Activists in Mexico promised this week to vigorously oppose ratification of ACTA once the Senate convenes. They've started a Twitter campaign to request that each senator-elect stake out a position now.
So far, leftist legislators are assumed to oppose ACTA, while the ruling conservative party members are assumed to support it. Peña Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party will hold the most seats in the new Senate, but the party's position on ACTA is yet unclear.
Antonio Martinez, a free-speech advocate and one of the forefront voices against the treaty during the Senate's working-group debates on the issue in 2009 and 2010, said the government's signing of ACTA is "trickery."
"It's a very bad signal from the government to the outgoing Senate and to civil society; it's disdainful of all the work done in the legislature," Martinez said Friday. ACTA "is dangerous for what it doesn't say. The IMPI is wrong, and it's almost as though they haven't even read the treaty," he said.
* Photo: A vendor shows pirated DVDs on a sidewalk in central Mexico City in 2006. Credit: Sarah Meghan Lee / For The Times
** Originally published at World Now:
Mexico is recounting votes cast at more than half its polling places during Sunday's presidential election, the electoral body said Wednesday, as reports of vote-buying marred the apparent win of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Ballots from more than 54% of polling places will be recounted within 72 hours, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) said. The figure marks a huge increase over the 9% of ballots that were recounted in the long and contentious aftermath of the disputed 2006 election.
The recount began early Wednesday as part of the IFE's normal procedure of validating results gathered from the institute's 300 electoral districts. By law, ballots are recounted when a polling place shows irregularities, such as more votes cast than there are registered voters, a complete sweep by a single candidate or party, or a 1-percentage-point or smaller margin between first and second place.
Separately, the PRI is facing growing accusations that campaigns gave potential voters supermarket debit cards in exchange for their votes, among other allegations.
"They gave us the cards in the name of the PRI and Rep. Hector Pedroza [a PRI congressional candidate], and they said they were counting on our vote," a 20-year-old university student told the Associated Press at a Soriana supermarket in eastern Mexico City.
The PRI and Soriana chain said in statements that they had no such agreement.
Leftist coalition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has yet to concede defeat after the initial "fast count" that began Sunday night had him about 6 points behind presumed winner Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI.
The recount is not expected to significantly alter the preliminary results. Such a prospect places pressure on Mexico's progressive factions to decide whether they will follow Lopez Obrador on another possible wave of protests and mobilizations like those that shut down the center of Mexico City for weeks after the 2006 vote.
In that race, the final official tally had Lopez Obrador lose the election to current conservative President Felipe Calderon by less than half a percentage point. The leftist leader never accepted those results.
As in 2006, the Lopez Obrador campaign is claiming widespread fraud in the 2012 vote. He reiterated his call for a vote-by-vote recount at every polling place. His campaign also said it would send scores of complaints of vote-tampering and vote-buying to Mexico's electoral tribunal.
"What we are demanding is that the electoral authorities ... assume their responsibility," Lopez Obrador said.
Meanwhile, the emergent national student movement known as #YoSoy132 held an all-day assembly at the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to determine how it would proceed after the apparent Peña Nieto victory.
Due in large part to huge demonstrations led by #YoSoy132 movement, the results of the election have cast a harsh light on the relationship between the PRI; Peña Nieto; and the two leading media networks in Mexico, which control 95% of the airwaves.
Throughout the campaign, most polls showed Peña Nieto with a lead of 12 to 18 points over Lopez Obrador, but the initial results of the actual vote showed the spread to be half that.
The Times noted this week that the PRI's win is weaker than initially expected. And for Calderon's ruling National Action Party, or PAN, the 2012 results are an "unmitigated wreck," as a former party president put it.
* Photo: An official with the Federal Electoral Institute in Mexico City checks one of the ballots cast in Sunday's national election. Credit: Alex Cruz / European Pressphoto Agency
** Originally published at World Now:
It's looking more and more like a two-way race in Mexico's July 1 presidential election. That is, a contest between Mexico's former ruling party and everyone opposing its return.
Four candidates gather Sunday night in Guadalajara for the second and last officially scheduled debate of the campaign. The session offers another chance for one of the trailing contenders to alter the shape of the race.
Polls show the once-reigning Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, comfortably in the lead with its fresh-faced candidate, former Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto. Student demonstrations are planned nationwide to coincide with the debate, potentially raising the stakes. The grass-roots social media movement known as I Am 132 is gaining reach and influence as it has gone after the PRI and big Mexican media companies, especially Televisa, the nation's biggest TV network and the target of accusations that it has sought to manipulate public opinion in Peña Nieto's favor.
Here's an update on the campaign leading into Sunday's debate.
Enrique Peña Nieto
The PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Spanish, and pronounced "pree") ruled Mexico for much of the 20th century until it was ousted by voters in 2000 after decades of corruption, scandal and economic crises. This year, it is poised to return to power.
Peña Nieto, former governor of the central state of Mexico, faces two main rivals: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, representing a leftist coalition, and Josefina Vazquez Mota, a conservative. The parties are poles apart ideologically but united in their disdain for the PRI, with histories of struggle against its authoritarian leanings.
The Peña Nieto campaign has been forced to confront corruption allegations against former PRI state governors and accusations that the party shells out cash for favorable polls and media coverage. The party and Peña Nieto's campaign on Friday were denying a newly published report that his office appeared to have paid millions to Televisa after taking the governor's office in 2005, for favorable coverage on TV and in Televisa publications.
Nevertheless, the PRI's campaign has been run smoothly and holds a double-digit lead in most polls.
Its main opponents -- Lopez Obrador's leftist coalition led by the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and Vazquez Mota's National Action Party, or PAN -- have long ruled out forming a broader alliance to challenge the PRI in the presidential vote. But a grass-roots student-led movement opposed to the PRI has provided a jolt to the race and is a likely factor in Peña Nieto's slight dip in support in several polls.
Though his lead remains strong, analysts note that as many as a quarter of voters say they remain undecided.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
Lopez Obrador, who barely lost in the 2006 race and never accepted the results, is running again and has moved into second place in most polls.
On Wednesday night, during a tense conversation with panelists of Televisa's "Third Degree" program, Lopez Obrador said calmly that he was sure to "win again" and that his campaign's tracking polls showed he had moved two points ahead of Peña Nieto.
Even if that proves to be a bluff, recent developments are a reminder that Lopez Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, commands a formidable base and that he has been boosted by the I Am 132 movement.
Lopez Obrador's opponents are eager to remind voters of his less than flattering image as a polarizing figure. Attack ads against him were rolled out this week, including one by the PAN that doctors a fragment of a recent Lopez Obrador speech to make it seem as if he supports armed revolutions.
Lopez Obrador called the new ads the start of a "dirty war."
Josefina Vazquez Mota
The PAN also has some supporters in the I Am 132 movement. But Vazquez Mota, a former Cabinet member under the two PAN presidencies since 2000, has lost traction overall, slipping to third in the polls.
The first woman to bid for Mexico's presidency from a major party, Vazquez Mota has sought to convince voters she would be a "different" president, but she has so far been unable to connect broadly with female voters.
Perhaps worse, she's taken hits from senior figures in her own party, some of whom appear to be breaking for Peña Nieto.
On Sunday, former PAN President Vicente Fox suggested he would support Peña Nieto and that other party members should do the same. Vazquez Mota's campaign denounced Fox vehemently for the apparent betrayal. Fox, after all, is the man whose victory removed the PRI from power.
A former PAN president also said he would be supporting Peña Nieto.
The Student Factor
The presidential campaign took on a new player May 11, when Peña Nieto was surprised by a tempest of jeers from students during an appearance at the private Ibero-American University in Mexico City. He and PRI leaders then came under fire when they suggested initially that the protest was staged or orchestrated by a rival party.
In reply, 131 Ibero students who participated in the protest recorded themselves holding up their university ID cards or repeating their student ID numbers. The video went viral on social networks and spawned a movement taking its name from a Twitter hashtag, #YoSoy132, or "I am 132."
Counterparts at some 35 universities across Mexico have joined. The students have held demonstrations calling for more transparency in the news media and protesting the PRI's history of corruption and repression. They have also taken aim at the soaring drug-related violence during the PAN's tenure.
The I Am 132 phenomenon has already had an impact on the race. Under pressure, the two dominant networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, agreed to show Sunday's debate on their main channels, after relegating the first debate, on May 6, to secondary channels.
Last week, the students held a "general assembly" on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and, after hours of debate, agreed on a 15-point platform, declaring the movement officially nonpartisan.
Students have called for a third debate between the presidential candidates, to be organized and moderated by the I Am 132 movement. Lopez Obrador, Vazquez Mota and a fourth candidate, Gabriel Quadri, of the fringe New Alliance Party, have agreed to attend. Peña Nieto has not.
Photo: A Mexican university student member of the I Am 132 movement holds a banner in Mexico City on May 31. Credit: Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- The campaign for the front-runner in Mexico's presidential election is producing reality TV-style documentary videos that show him kissing and flirting with his wife, eating ice cream and returning home after a day on the campaign trail to hug his daughters.
The videos constitute a new level in the blurring of lines between politics and pop media in Mexico, and appear to be energizing support among voters.
Enrique Peña Nieto, galloping toward the July 1 vote with a double-digit lead over his two main rivals, would be the first president from the former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the 21st century. The PRI, often labeled through its history as quasi-authoritarian, was booted from power in 2000.
The videos primarily star Peña Nieto's wife, telenovela actress Angelica Rivera, and are narrated from her perspective under the title, "What My Eyes See, and What My Heart Feel" (links in Spanish). In them, she follows her husband to campaign events and chats with him between stops in clips that feel like journals or diary entries.
One ends with Peña, 45, and Rivera, 41, arriving home and letting the viewer in on plans for an evening of dinner, bathing and bedtime. In another, he samples local ice cream. Here's a new clip from a stop in Villahermosa, in the state of Tabasco:
The videos are meant to show an informal, intimate side of the couple, who married in 2010 after the sudden death in 2007 of Peña Nieto's first wife, Monica Pretelini, while he governed the central state of Mexico. The clips have garnered thousands of views on YouTube and "likes" on Facebook. There, Rivera's public page frequently posts casual snapshots of her and her family.
Political advertising in Mexico's two most recent presidential campaigns, won by Vicente Fox in 2000 and fellow conservative Felipe Calderon in 2006, has moved steadily toward a more U.S.-style media approach. The PRI's effort this year takes the current social-media orientation of Mexican politics to a new level.
Peña Nieto personifies the trend, making some political commentators bemoan the nature of the 2012 race. In a Jan. 27 column in the daily Reforma, author Juan Villoro called Peña Nieto a "political hologram" and a "tele-candidate."
"There is no election today that is not decided in the media," Villoro wrote. "Trusting in this precept, the PRI has chosen a telegenic candidate. The problem is that he appears to have little more than luminous wrapping."
U.S. officials in Mexico have been watching Peña Nieto's rise for years, noting his telegenic qualities since the start, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. One of those cables from 2009 relays a description of Peña Nieto as "a pretty face with nationwide appeal, but lacking in substance and political savvy."
His strongest detractors early on were apparently concentrated within his own party, the leaked cables show. In another from 2009, contacts inside the PRI told U.S. officials that they believed Peña was "paying media outlets under the table for favorable news coverage, as well as potentially financing pollsters to sway survey results."
His campaign has carefully guarded his public appearances, and the videos in "What My Eyes See, and What My Heart Feels," although edited with an unscripted, chop-and-cut flair, are no different.
During his first campaign stop in the city of Oaxaca, for example, Rivera's video diary showed an upbeat Peña Nieto greeting supporters at the city's central plaza but no images of the crowds of demonstrators who had gathered to protest the PRI machine.
The party isn't alone in pumping funds into sleek documentary-style video spots.
The campaign for Josefina Vazquez Mota, candidate for the conservative National Action Party, released a video Wednesday documenting her visit that day to the prestigious Tecnologico de Monterrey university.
In it, she speaks to students in an auditorium, then responds to a protestor who yells at her from the audience. The nature of the protestor's complaint, however, is not specified, and neither is the candidate's response, for that matter. Instead, the video ends with a crescendo of music and the candidate calling over applause, "Do not tire of truth! Do not tire of liberty!"
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Photo: Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, center, and his wife, actress Angelica Rivera, left, during a campaign stop in Papantla, Veracruz, on April 13. Credit: Peña Nieto campaign
** Originally published at World Now:
A Mexican Twitter user was detained and questioned by federal investigators about a message on the social media site that seemed to allude to the helicopter crash that killed Mexico's interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora.
The tweet by @mareoflores appeared Thursday, a day before the suspected accident that killed Blake and seven others, and referred to the 2008 Learjet crash that killed a previous interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño.
That accident also occurred in early November and its anniversary was a source of buzz among Mexican social media users in the days before Friday's crash.
"I haven't left work so early since the fall of Mouriño's plane," the tweet said. "Be careful, flying officials."
The federal attorney general's office said it detained the Twitter user Sunday under its duty to "exhaust all lines of investigation" in the Blake crash. A spokeswoman said Monday that the user was found by the agency's cyber-police unit.
Identified as a 26-year-old publicist named Mario Flores, the latest tuitero to enter the news in Mexico said in interviews Monday that agents dressed in civilian clothing approached him in his Mexico City driveway, tackled him and pushed him into a civilian vehicle. He said he was taken to meet investigators and was in custody for eight hours.
After his release Sunday night, Flores was greeted with news cameras and cheers outside an attorney general's office building in the capital (link in Spanish). Flores said he told authorities that the tweet was a coincidence and that it was rooted in his experience living through the 2008 Mouriño crash, which occurred just a few blocks from his place of work.
"It's in the collective consciousness," Flores said in a radio interview with journalist Carmen Aristegui (link and audio in Spanish). "It's the same way that Americans still talk about 9/11."
Flores joins a growing list of social media users in Mexico who have been targeted by criminals or government authorities for messages posted on Twitter.
In the border city of Nuevo Laredo, a string of grisly unsolved killings is spreading fear among Twitter users who keep one another informed on criminal activity. This year, two social media users in Veracruz became a political flash point after they were jailed over tweets that state authorities said spread rumor and panic.
And in the hours after the Friday helicopter crash, the Twitter user @morf0 became a brief media sensation when a message of his seemed to predict the Blake crash, saying: "Tomorrow on 11/11, a secretary will fall out of the sky."
For his part, Flores said Monday that Twitter users should be protected, not targeted, by authorities.
"I am a user, I am Mexican, I just want peace for me, my family and more than anything for my country," he told Aristegui. "I don't want ministers to fall from the sky and I don't want tuiteros to be taken from their homes for saying something."
* Photo: A memorial service for interior minister Francisco Blake in Tijuana on Sunday / Reuters
** Originally published at World Now:
Four people have been killed in gruesome fashion in Mexico since September for posting about drug cartels on social-media websites, the headlines and news reports say.
Trouble is, the reports could be wrong.
Information is the latest battleground in Mexico's drug war, as a string of brutal deaths in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo has produced alarming reports that social networks are under attack by the infamous Zetas cartel.
Most of the reports, however, are not built on verifiable facts. And facts have become a rare commodity in many regions of Mexico that are dominated by drug cartels.
In each case, such as a man found decapitated near a monument in Nuevo Laredo on Wednesday, the victims have been left with hand-lettered messages suggesting that they were using Twitter and the local chat board Nuevo Laredo En Vivo to report on cartels.
In each case, the messages have warned against cooperating with the Mexican military and have been signed with multiple Zs, presumably referring to the Zetas.
But how can anyone know for sure?
Continue reading "Facts also fall victim in Mexico 'social media' killings" »
* UPDATE: Fulfilling any decently skeptical person's expectations but failing those of info-war-mongers, including major U.S. media outlets and some heroin addict in Dallas, #OpCartel is basically a bust tonight. Here's my report from Friday.
** Originally published at World Now:
A story that at first seemed to point ominously to a dangerous new development in Mexico's drug war was spiraling into confusion Friday as social-media users claiming ties to the hackers group Anonymous announced -- and then retracted -- a threat against the Zetas cartel in Mexico.
Some Twitter users who claim membership in the secretive hackers collective said they would be carrying out the attack against the ultra-violent Zetas by revealing the identities of the cartel's associates and businesses starting Saturday.
Others, however, were reporting that the attack was canceled and warned that the operation, dubbed #OpCartel, would put innocent lives at risk.
Adding to the confusion, the reason for the supposed cancellation of the attack shifted throughout the day. Did the Zetas release the Anonymous member allegedly kidnapped in Mexico, an abduction that purportedly inspired the hackers' threat? Or did Anonymous receive threats itself and cancel the operation for the safety of its members and their families?
In the dual worlds of shadowy cartels and shadowy hackers, there is almost no way of knowing, and no way of verifying such claims.
Anyone can claim membership of the leaderless hackers group. And anyone, in theory, can start a hash-tag on Twitter and call it an "operation" -- even before a single action is taken.
** Originally published at World Now:
There are 13,000 surveillance cameras dispersed across this megalopolis, capturing everything in view, in real time and around the clock.
The cameras peek at streets and people from the tops of light poles, inside buses and over subway platforms, watching in the name of public safety.
The local government, headed by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, this week unveiled an intelligence center where all these video feeds are monitored. It is a state-of-the-art "integrated" hub with a name that sounds like a futuristic space vessel: the C4I4.
Speaking inside the building's circular nerve center -- where 600 video screens carried scenes of residential streets and choked intersections -- Ebrard told reporters that the C4I4 is one of the largest and most advanced public-safety command centers in the world.
It would serve as a hub in case of a major earthquake, an eruption of one of the nearby volcanos or an outbreak of the kind of intense drug-war street violence that has been seen in other parts of the country.
And every image captured by the center's cameras -- movement in the city's prison yards, commuters on the jam-packed Metrobus lines -- is stored for up to a week, making for a gigantic ongoing intelligence operation blanketing the urban obstacle course that is Mexico's capital. Hence the center's name, signifying four Cs (command, control, communications, computing) and four I's (intelligence, integration, information, investigation).
Ebrard said the center would help "guarantee safety in our city."
Continue reading "The C4I4: Mexico City's massive new surveillance bunker" »
** Originally published at World Now at the L.A. Times, the paper's new international news blog. My recent base at LAT.com, La Plaza, is hereby retired, but links remain live and available. Thanks for the follows and re-posts and continued tips and feedback.
REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- A woman found decapitated in the border city of Nuevo Laredo is being mourned as an apparent member of a social networking site used by local residents to share information on drug cartel activity.
The victim was found early Saturday with a note nearby saying she was killed for posting messages online about violent or criminal incidents in Nuevo Laredo.
The Tamaulipas state attorney general's office identified the woman as Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro, 39, and said she was an editor at the newspaper Primera Hora (links in Spanish). The Associated Press, however, quoting an employee of the newspaper, identified the victim as Marisol Macias Castaneda, and said she held an administrative and not an editorial post at Primera Hora.
A web search of the newspaper's website found no mention of the woman's death or the discovery of a decapitated female body on Saturday.
But on the website Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, a banner image appeared memorializing a member known as NenaDLaredo. "You'll always be present," the display says.
Continue reading "Nuevo Laredo: Killing social media users in Mexico" »
"Reporting from Mexico City—Thirty years behind bars for a few misinformed tweets? It's a possibility for the so-called Twitter Terrorists of Mexico."
Read the rest here.
The photo above is by Tatiana Lipkes, an editor and author at the indie publishing house Mangos de Hacha, during the presentation and party for "Down & Delirious" on Thursday night in Club Atlántico in Centro. I'm waiting while Gabriela Jauregui is presenting the book.
Went so well! I read from the book in Spanish for the first time, from a draft of a Spanish translation by Elizabeth Flores. Gaby and the Pulpo ladies had us sweat-dancing all night. Took some questions. Rad performance by punk riders Agudos, Crónicos, y Vegetales. Thanks to everyone who collaborated, participated, and attended! Special thanks to the friends at Bósforo for the mezcales.
Now some notes:
† "Down & Delirious in Mexico City" is now on sale in D.F.! You can get it at Pendulo Condesa; that's at Nuevo León 115, in Col. Condesa. Sorry for the delay on that, for readers who've been asking where they can get the book.
†† This summer, I'll be offering a workshop on periodismo digital at a new studio-cultural center-exhibition space in lovely Ciudad Satélite, called .357.
El taller abarcará temas como medios, plataformas, métodos, y éxitos del periodismo que se practica en línea. Las sesiones son martes y jueves entre las 4 y 6 de la tarde. Informes con .357! Apúntense!
††† Finally, here's a video by Carlos Alvarez Montero where I introduce myself and the workshop. Check it out, and see you soon.
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