A Mexican university has banned miniskirts and other “provocative clothing” in an effort to stop “provoking” violent attacks against women.

Héctor Melesio Cuen Ojeda, rector of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, said that minskirts worn by many of the pupils are an invitation for attacks both inside and outside the university, according to El Universal.

He advised the women among the university’s 46,000 pupils to lower their skirts to knee-level.

The Mexican Catholic church has asked women not to wear “provocative clothing” or to get into “spicy” conversations or jokes with men, in order to avoid sexual assault.

“Si quieres evitar una agresión sexual… No uses ropa provocativa… Cuida tus miradas y tus gestos… No te quedes sola con un hombre, aunque sea conocido… No admitas pláticas o chistes picantes… Busca ayuda cuando sospeches una mala intención…”, señala la ficha.

Translation: “If you want to avoid sexual aggression….do not use provocative clothing…watch your glances…don’t be alone with a man, even if you know him…Don’t permit spicy chats or jokes… look for help when you suspect bad intentions….” (see the story in Spanish here)

The suggestion that women are responsible for the pervasive sexual aggression and violence in Mexico’s macho society is sure to provoke reaction from human rights activists, feminists and the general public.

Amnesty International in Mexico says that 1 in 4 Mexican women has suffered physical or sexual violence at the hand of their husbands, and that 82% of women who are victims of violence do not report it to the authorities. Although a law promising women a life free from violence was adopted by many states last year, no measures have been taken to enforce it, says the human rights group.

The story on the issue in the Mexican national newspaper El Universal has received more than 6,500 comments in response. Click here to read them, in Spanish.

This post was written for La Plaza

The video and photography exhibition Laberinto de Miradas - Laberinth of Glances - that opened in Mexico City last month in the Cultural Center of Spain - features the kind of images that we are used to seeing in relation to immigration.

But the show also looks at migration and immigration as a concept, broadening out the typical notion we might have of the phenomenon of human migration and immigration.

Migration is “a middle-class Argentine woman, driven into exile by her country’s 2001 peso collapse. A Cuban man who bears the scars of jail time served for trying to flee to Miami. Hundreds of Brazilians of mixed ethnicities, body types and attitudes, mostly economic refugees from other parts of the country, all crammed into a ramshackle São Paulo apartment building, striving to co-exist (see photo, by Cia de Foto), writes Reed Johnson in this Los Angeles Times dispatch.

Watch the narrated slideshow below, made for the Los Angeles Times,  for some pictures from the show.

Photo: An empty bench outside the American Embassy on Tuesday. There was no candlelit vigil for Medellin in a city still on shock from other violent crime. Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com

On Tuesday, I waited for a man to die. Even though several people die every minute of every day, I’ve never known the name of the person that I knew was going to die; neither have I ever known so closely when they were going to die and how. But yesterday I knew.

The man’s name was Jose Ernesto Medellin, and now he is dead. On Tuesday, he was due to die at 6pm at the hands of the Texan government for the brutal rape and murder of two teenage girls in 1993.

Jose Ernesto Medellin from Mexico Mexican, and the United States Embassy had predicted protests in a case that had attracted international attention and condemnation. The Mexican Government, the International Criminal Court at the Hague as well as other major players such as Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations had all tried to step in to stop the execution, claiming the United States had violated the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to inform the arrested Mexican nationals of their right to seek help from the Mexican Consulate. Their pleas didn’t work.

So I left the confines of the office to head down to the embassy try to catch some of the expected protests on film around the hour of Medellin’s execution.

At 4:43 pm, there was nobody there. And I mean nobody, save a few tourists taking pictures of Reforma – the traffic artery on which the U.S Embassy sits. Other than them, the only thing outside the Embassy was the ten-foot high blue metal barriers that have been there as long as I can remember, to dissuade the odd Molotov cocktail and other expressions of anti-U.S sentiment that international events can sometimes drum up.

That, and the usual bored-looking policemen, standing around chatting or playing on their mobile phones.

Where is everyone? I thought. He’s only got an hour to live.

I did another swing around the block and watched as a security guard checked the underneath of a truck waiting to enter the Embassy compound. He was using a tool that looked like a giant dentist’s mirror – the kind they use to look into people’s mouths – to look at the undercarriage of the car.

Back around the front. Still no one. I approached a rosy-cheeked policeman at the side of the front entrance to the Embassy.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be a protest today? About Jose Medellin?”

“Today? No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Perhaps tomorrow.”

“But he’s going to die today, at six,” I said.

“Maybe people will come tomorrow,” he answered.

I decided to ring my colleague back in the office.

“This is Reed,” he said when he picked up the phone.

“Unless there’s some other U.S Embassy in Mexico City, there’s no one protesting,” I said.

“Really? No one?”

“No one.”

“They couldn’t be bothered?” he said in a fake British accent he sometimes put on to amuse us.

5:33pm. Just more tourists, passing by, looking at the fence.

6pm came and went. I sat on a bench outside the Embassy, watching the minutes tick by on my phone, wondering what the scene in Texas was like right then. Well, I could kind of imagine it actually. I was sitting pensively when I noticed that the back of my bench had two backrests shaped like giant crucifixes. Weird. And a little creepy.

As it turned out, Medellin didn’t die at 6pm after all – as I discovered when I walked back into the office half an hour later. His case had been put off whilst the U.S Supreme Court considered his appeal. They rejected it, and Medellin was executed a few hours later, declared dead at 9:57pm.

“I’m sorry my actions caused you pain. I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate,” Medellin, 33, told those gathered to watch him die.

There were no protests in Mexico City yesterday or today about Medellin’s execution. Perhaps Chilangos were too shocked over the discovery of the bullet-ridden body of a 14-year-old boy earlier in the week, who had been kidnapped and held hostage for $6 million from his rich, sports-chain owning father. His father paid the ransom, but they killed him anyway.

Perhaps people so saddened by that they couldn’t care too much about a convicted murderer and rapist confronting his fate north of the border. Who knows. What I DO know is that there was no candlelit vigil here in Mexico City for the man on Tuesday night.

*day edited. ‘Yesterday’ changed to ‘tuesday’. 0926, August 7th

Following last week’s filming session in the Zócalo, where I was denied the chance to film closeup to the military whilst they were raising the ntaional flag, I managed to edit the move into a decent summary of the ritual.

This film was made for La Plaza, and you can see it here on this post.

Oscar, above, is 10 years old and his favorite subject at school is math. He wants to be a lawyer when he grows up. Oscar also is HIV-positive, and he lost his parents to complications with the virus two years ago.

He lives in a community of children here at La Casa de la Sal (the House of Salt) in Mexico City. All of the 25 children in the home have been orphaned by HIV and have the virus themselves.

An estimated 2,934 children ages 14 and younger have HIV/AIDS in Mexico, according to Mexico’s national center for the Control and Prevention of Aids (CENSIDA) (link to PDF). Those are just the cases that have been detected, and there is a lack of reliable statistics on the issue.

Oscar and his friends are the lucky ones. La Casa, which has been open for 22 years, gives them access to antiretroviral drugs that may allow the children to live long enough to fulfill their ambitions.

Read more Mexico’s HIV-positive orphans look to the future »

This post was written for La Plaza.

Every morning in Mexico City’s Zocalo, the country’s military raise the national flag in a ceremony enjoyed by tourists and Mexicans alike. Many of the Mexican bystanders on their way to work stop and salute as the flag goes up.  Sometimes it goes up at 6, sometimes at eight, and it usually comes down around 6 at night - timing tends to depend on the season and the weather.

I wanted to make a film of the ceremony as part of the more experiential-type posts I am hoping to put up on La Plaza. That meant a 5 a.m start, as apparently they raise the flag at 6. I arrived in the Zocalo with my faithful assistant Ulises at 5:45 a.m, courtesy of a cab who drove like the Zocalo was burning down. At 5 a.m - when the streets of Mexico City are practically empty - it’s too tempting for him not to. Usually, the crawling traffic means getting from A to B takes a long time.

First off, a policeman we approached to ask when the flag went up told me that because of a protest camped in the Zocalo, they weren’t doing the ceremony at the moment.

“What a lot of crap,” I thought.

Firstly, there is always some kind of group protesting or camped in the City’s Zocalo - meaning the flag would never go up if were being postponed for that reason. And secondly, the tradition is SO famous and well-known that I couldn’t believe that it would be passed over in any situation other than a national emergency. And even THEN, I expect it would still happen - for the sake of el pueblo and la patria (the Mexican people and land).

So we hung around as the morning light seeped onto the enormous concrete square. People walked by us on their way to work as pigeons pecked at the ground, looking for crumbs from the array of street fold sold on Mexico’s City’s streets.

As it neared 6:45a.m the doors of el Palacio Nacional opened. One simple question to a helpful soldier elicited a simple answer. The flag would go up at eight.

So, in the meantime it was off to one of our favourite Mexico City cafes La Blanca for breakfast, which for me was a traditional Mexican tamale. That’s a savoury corncake, served hot, with mole and chicken hidden inside like a little gift, topped with a warm, red spicy sauce. Yummy.

We headed back to the square before eight and the solider began filing out as I was busy shooting a pigeon. Amazingly, I initially got to shoot very close to a couple of soldiers who were arranging the winch on the pole that would pull up the flag. But after getting a few takes, a young soldier stepped out of his position in the ring of men surrounding the pole to inform me I would have to get outside the circle to film - and ask for official permission to film up-close.

I knew it had all been to easy. But that getting official permission would be hard. I’d already tried negotiating a permission to get inside a women’s Army training school. No joy. Might it be easier now that I was working for a an established media provider? We’ll see, I guess.

I moved back from the flag pole, dragging my feet, and had to be content with filming from a few crazy floor angles and the saluting public.

A call to SEDENA, the Defence Secretary office, later that morning, elicited a promise that the permission would be granted in 5 - 8 days so I will hopefully be going back to have a better go.

The film so far is coming soon - it’s still in editing.

A bitter debate on how to rescue Mexico’s troubled state-owned oil company went directly to the people on Sunday as capital residents voted on President Felipe Calderon’s plan to open some portions of Mexico’s nationalized petroleum industry to outsiders.

This video went with this Los Angeles Times report.

Heading south to Tijuana

Report to follow shortly….

The cacti in Los Angeles are exactly the same as those you see in Mexico. Even though you can step from the first into the third world and back across the United States - Mexican Border, what the land gives up and supports is the same.

I love these cacti - they look like Medusa’s hair, writhing out and into the air.

MexicoReporter.com is heading north of the border for two weeks on a research and training trip.

We’ll be in Los Angeles for some of the time, and then San Diego and La Frontera for the rest.

I’m hoping to file for you FROM the border, where we’ll be heading down to hook up with the Los Angeles Time’s border reporter, Richard Marosi and then Tijuana to El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

We’re also hoping to make the acquaintance of BorderReporter.com in the flesh.

Watch this space.

It’s a regular Tuesday night at the Lucha Libre in downtown Mexico City’s Arena Coliseo

For those of my readers in London, this is for you.

If you’ve enjoyed the coverage you’ve seen here on the Lucha Libre over the last year, now’s your chance to see the real thing in the flesh because the Lucha Libre is coming to London this weekend, and this weekend only!

Lucha Libre London presents sixteen of the best of the best of Mexico’s luchadores including El Hijo del Santo (the greatest living luchador and son of the all time great El Santo), Blue Demon Jnr (the man in the blue mask), Ramses (fighting star of Jack Black’s Nacho Libre) in a full-on struggle for the soul of Mexico.

It might be too late to buy tickets, but if you can get hold of them I can’t recommend the gig enough and would be curious to here from anyone who goes how the fights go down with the audience.

Check out the details here on the Roundhouse web site.

For all things Lucha Libre on MexicoReporter.com, click here and see my Lucha Libre photo gallery here on Flickr.

John McCain, the presumptive U.S Republican presidential candidate, couldn’t have timed his trip to Latin America better. Not only does he fly into Colombia a day before 6-year hostage of the FARC Ingrid Betancourt is liberated, he then rides into Mexico City this morning days after the Merida Initiative gets approved in El Norte.

Some of that great timing is pure coincidence - some not.

The liberation of 15 hostages in Colombia couldn’t have been predicted by McCain during the planning of the trip, but perhaps the timing as concerns the passing of the Merida bill, which will see President Calderon’s government receive a US$400 million cash boost from the United States Government to help in its heavily-militarized fight against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime networks, was intended.

On the one hand, Mexico has never needed more help with its notoriously crooked and corrupt legal branches.

At the start of this week, videos were leaked onto the internet that showed an elite brand of the Mexican police apparently in torture training class. Although dismissed by officials as training procedures aimed at helping police deal with extreme situations in which THEY might have been kidnapped by the country’s big, bad narcos, their emergence was unpleasant but not surprising to anyone with any knowledge of Mexico’s law enforcement agencies. I should add that the source and authenticity of the tapes hasn’t really been questioned.

Then, on the same day that McCain strides around Mexico City’s Basilica de Guadalupe, four decapitated bodies turn up in the northern city of Coulican. Their severed heads were left a few blocks away. The deaths were drug-related, according to the Associated Press this morning.

Three of the beheaded bodies were found inside black, plastic bags on Wednesday, while the fourth was wrapped in a blanket, according to the prosecutor’s office in Sinaloa state, where Culiacan is located. Authorities said they believe the killings were drug gang-related.

Police found the heads inside separate white bags on a nearby street in Culiacan, a center for the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

“You’re next Chapo. You ungrateful traitor,” read a note found on a piece of cardboard nearby.

Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman is head of the Sinaloa cartel. He escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 and is among the most wanted drug lords in the United States and Mexico.

So, there’s no doubt that Mexico has a problem with its drug cartels and that the drug cartels are horrifically violent people. But are they any more violent and corrupt than the Mexican army and police forces, who themselves are wanted for a catalog of human rights violations against the country’s civilian population. Just take a glance at the U.S State Department’s human rights report for Mexico 2007:

The following human rights problems were reported: unlawful killings by security forces; kidnappings, including by police; physical abuse; poor and overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency in the judicial system; confessions coerced through physical abuse permitted as evidence in trials; criminal intimidation of journalists leading to self-censorship; corruption at all levels of government; domestic violence against women, often perpetrated with impunity; violence, including killings, against women; trafficking in persons, sometimes allegedly with official involvement; social and economic discrimination against indigenous people; and child labor.

As a first step, in efforts to reform and professionalize the police, the government relieved 284 federal police commanders, including all 34 regional police commanders, and rigorously trained and evaluated their replacements. Source: U.S State Department.

The only things which really seem certain when looking at the Merida Initiative is that firstly, such a small amount of money will probably make very little difference to Mexico’s drug war. The original budget for Plan Colombia, conceived in the late 90’s to help Colombia deal with its drug cartel problem, was more than US$7 BILLION.

Secondly, how that money is spent - by whom and on what - will of course define its worth in helping Calderon fight the drug baddies. For a country in which the notion of transparency is little more than idealism, one can’t help but expect little. Not only does  the Mexican Government lack transparency, but only 15% of the aid given the green light by the United States will be conditioned on Mexico’s efforts to make police more transparent, accountable and responsive to complaints, and ensure investigation of reports of abuse by police or soldiers, according to this Dallas Morning News report.

That means Mexico’s heads aren’t really accountable to anyone.

It’s only realistic to have low expectations for Merida.

A story emerged here in Mexico today surrounding the emergence of a couple of videos which apparently depict the Mexican police, in the city of Leon, being instructed in the art of “torture” by an unidentified, English-speaking foreigner.

The videos are posted below - some viewers might find them offensive.

The videos - real or not - are not going to do much for the reputation of Mexico’s law enforcement agencies, which are perceived both at home and abroad as notoriously corrupt - a perception based very much on reality. Suggestions that the police are continuing to use torture - and in fact are being tutored in the art of it - will shock but not surprise.

Stories like this are tough. The initial question you have to ask, of course, is where did the videos come from? Secondly, how real are they? It wouldn’t be hard here to get hold of a police or army uniform for you and your mates, get them all dressed up and put them in front of the camera.

It’s worth noting that Mexico’s left-leaning PRD Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is currently in the midst of deep political unrest following the death a couple of weeks ago of 9 youths and three police offices in the News Divine nightclub tragedy.

A number of heads have rolled following the tragic event, in which youths as young a 13 were killed when a botched police raid turned into a stampede.

On June 24 , police officials fired 17 officers in connection with the raid, and on Thursday last week the police chief who led the raid, Cmdr. Guillermo Zayas, was charged with 12 counts of homicide. A youth advocate last week put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the police, saying that there was a complete lack of public policy in the city for dealing with young people. The owner of the nightclub, Alfredo Maya Ortiz, was charged with manslaughter this morning.

It would be great if the media took their eyes of Ebrard’s full-plate of problems right now, and so it’s also worth noting that Vincente Guerrero Reynosa, the mayor of León, is a Panista - i.e a member of the PRD’s rival PAN party.

One could argue that a scandal such as this - which was on the front page of today’s Reforma - seems to distract perfectly some of the attention currently being placed on Ebrard and his City Government. Could the tape have slipped out those affiliated with the PRD? Or did it just happen to turn up by coincidence, at what is such a sensitive time for the party.

Like most things in Mexico, fact merges with fiction all the time and there is so much smoke and mirrors that all one can really do much of the time is speculate. But a little speculation never hurt anyone, did it?