Mexico Reporter

The attacks on police officers, detailed here, continued over the weekend.

The No. 2 police officer in this border city across from El Paso was shot to death Saturday, the latest high-ranking official killed in an onslaught of attacks blamed on gangs resisting a crackdown on drug trafficking. Associated Press.

HONORING THEIR OWN: Federal police officers salute three slain colleagues, including acting chief Edgar Millan Gomez, in Mexico City. Authorities suspect he was betrayed by someone who knew his movements, according to Mexican media reports. Gregory Bull for the Associated Press via The Los Angeles Times.

This week, Mexico City has been living up to its bad boy reputation. Heading down Paseo de Reforma after a trip to the LATimes office on Thursday, I crossed over the main traffic artery and waited for the bus. The sun was hot and high in the sky and I was wilting in my jeans.

I noticed sluggishly that the police had cut off the road just ahead of the bus stop, but that traffic was dripping through slowly in their direction. so I got on the next pesero.

But as the bus waited in line, a young police man came round the side of the police car blocking the traffic, his pistol drawn. I was astonished. He jogged up Reforma, past the side of my vehicle, his dark eyes scanning the traffic and the sidewalk. He was looking for someone. His colleagues back at the patrol car were shouting things and waving their hands, and the bus got beckoned forward.

But before we could drive around the patrol car onto the empty round behind, we were stopped again. This time two young policemen boarded the bus - one from the front door and one from the descent door on the side. Both of them had their guns drawn - not pistols this time, but the small machine guns that many of them carry down here. I was standing in the walkway of the bus, near the front, and as the officer stood next to me, asking one of the passengers to open his bag, his pistol sat on my hip. Read more »

Fascinating statistics released yesterday on the demographic makeup of the female Latina community in the United States show some striking, if unsurprising, differences between non-Latina and Latina women, as well as the native-born and immigrant female Latina communities. Read more »

Leonora Carrington is a British surrealist artist from Lancashire who left Europe during the Second World War, on the run from the Nazis.

She finally settled in Mexico, and has produced an impressive body of work, some of which is currently on display on one of Mexico’s main thoroughfares - Paseo de Reforma.

Click on the photo for more photos on Flickr

In the year ending September 2007, the U.S embassy in Mexico processed applications for 1,300,000 non-immigrant visas (visitor, student, temporary work, and other categories) according to this page on the site of the U.S Embassy in Mexico. This year the embassy is projecting more than 1,600,000 applications – and projections are generally overtaken by actual applications, as the graph at the bottom of this page shows.

I called the Embassy myself this week to find out how many of the 1,300,000 non-immigrant visas processed last year were actually granted, but was told that information is not available. Then I emailed a press and information officer at the Department of Home Security and was directed to this page.

According to THAT info, not including border passes, a total of 1,027,737 non-immigrant visas were issued from Mexico last year. That would suggest that only 272,263 non-immigrant visa applications DIDN’T get granted by the US Embassy in Mexico, if their figures are anything to go by. Can that be right? Was Juan just one of the unlucky few?

Or is my maths just wrong? Please click on the image below to see it in full - it won’t fit in this blogging template.

Figures provided by the U.S Department of State

A good friend of mine, Juan, was denied a tourist visa to the United States this week. It’s technically known as a B-2 visa. Juan’s girlfriend is from the U.S, and he wanted to travel with her to her home state later this year to attend her sister’s wedding and to meet her parents for the first time.

A home-owner (he bought the house thanks to a finance scheme through the Government) and Mexico City Government employee for the last five years, he did things the way that the United States want Mexicans who want to come to the U.S to do things. Read more »

Warrants for the arrest of five public employees involved in the illegal detention of journalist Lydia Cacho (pictured) have been issued in Mexico after the nation’s Supreme Court decided at the end of last year not to pursue legal proceedings against those involved in the case.

The Attorney General’s office, which represents a special office set up to investigate crimes against journalists in Mexico (Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos Contra Periodistas, FEADP), issued the arrest warrants. The names of those who are under arrest warrant have not been published, and it is not known whether Mario Marin, the governor of Puebla who was implicated in the illegal arrest of Cacho, is amongst them. Read more »

The fact that there exist official statistics on the amount and size of bribes paid in Mexico is perhaps indicative of the level to which corruption and the ‘informal economy’ is ingrained in Mexican Society.

The latest figures from Transperencia Mexico show that Mexicans spent 42% more on bribes last year than in 2005, splashing out a massive $2.6 billion. That’s an average of more than $24 for each of Mexico’s 105 million people.

A brief survey of friends shows that some have paid up to 500 pesos to policemen to get out of parking/ speeding and drinking infractions. But the best bribe story has to be a friend who got stopped for having a dodgy back-light, and gave the policeman such a hard time he eventually got off with just giving him a piece of gum as his payoff. Nice work.

For my part, I recall watching the TV news one afternoon. The newsreader was talking about how there is a problem in Mexico City with people dumping their trash on the pavement / sidewalk rather than leaving it in their house and bringing it out when the garbage guys pass by. It’s an offence, but it doesn’t carry a fine. He went on to say, on network TV, that the police were going to be of no help enforcing the law because there was no money in it for them - people weren’t going to pay a bribe if they weren’t eventually going to have to pay a fine. Such overt acknowledgement of the city’s system made me laugh.

There’s more on the nature of the types of bribes paid through this link - but it’s important to remember that the poll included tipping garbage collectors and other little ‘mordidas’ which in my mind, is more of a tip than a bribe. You decide.

The month of April started off badly, and it doesn’t look like letting up anytime soon. Two journalists received menacing phone calls this week as a result of reports they’ve written. Read more »