25 Jan 11 | Americas, Mexico
Online social networks will be serious players during the next year’s Mexican presidential elections. Electoral reform pushed through in 2008 means Mexican political parties cannot advertise on television. “That reform has totally changed elections in this country,” says Maria Elena Meneses, an elections and internet expert from university Tecnologico de Monterrey. According to Meneses, because political parties are cut off from such a massive media outlet they will turn to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in future elections.
Mexico’s electoral reform came after 2006’s presidential election debacle when the presidential candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, accused the winner, Felipe Calderon, of the Action Party, PAN, of fraud. Amidst claims of missing votes 1.1m people marched through Mexico city to protest against electoral fraud
Underlying these charges were accusations that the PAN had used television spots that to suggest Lopez Obrador was similar to Hitler.
But the internet also played a key role in 2006. High volumes of hate mail were circulated about all candidates, but most was negative targeted Lopez Obrador. According to a poll, voters received more electoral propaganda disparaging the PRD presidential candidate. On the other side, a computer savvy voter set up a YouTube video that showed dubbed clips of the movie Madagascar in which a computer animated raccoon figure asked for a recounting of the electoral votes. Close to a million viewers watched the clip.
The key claim from the Lopez Obrador campaign was that the 2006 presidential election was manipulated by the various ruling party state secretaries around the country.
In 2009, candidates in the provincial elections for state governorships and congress used Twitter to establish followings, but according to Meneses, they won’t be the only medium in the 2012 elections. “Twitter and Facebook will appeal to the working masses and to youth. The campaign will be dirty — dirtier than it was when it was conducted on television,” claims Meneses.
Part of the problem in Mexico is connected to the fact politicians are not used to having a conversation with voters. “In Mexico, we continue to have political relationships that not vibrant and do not embrace interaction with the electorate” she said.
21 Jan 11 | News and features
International recognition offers a degree of protection to investigative reporters. But, writes, Lydia Cacho being in the limelight presents a new set of dilemmas
Translated by Amanda Hopkinson
The first call is the one you never forget. The person uttering the death threat has spent days preparing for this moment — to let you know that your fate is sealed. Up until this phone call, threats were something ethereal and alien, something that happened to other people.
Over time, I learned a lesson that many journalists and writers have learned before me: that becoming the news is a double-edged sword. It can weaken and wound. It unsettles us and sets us apart from our colleagues and loved ones. The threats become as important as the original story.
This dilemma dominates the rest of our lives, because for us to come through safely we need to be out there, in public, and never be silenced. At the same time, we have to remain on guard, watching our backs, alert whenever we see a police or military patrol, reacting instantly to any sound resembling a shot, tensing every time a motorcycle accelerates or approaches, permanently on the look out for a weapon in case the rider is a hit man. And on and on, we have to proclaim to the four winds, until we’re fed up with doing so — and everyone else is fed up with us too — the name of the Mafioso, the politician, the policeman or the corrupt businessman who has put a price on our heads. Yet we yearn for the privacy and anonymity that would allow us to move around without being recognised, for those times when we used to have no need to conceal the names of our family members (for they are now vulnerable too).
We are the enemy, and truth is the enemy of a nation refusing to engage in self-criticism and assume responsibility for its own tragedy. Sixty-four journalists have died in my country. Not one of these murders has been explained.
In Mexico, death threats are hardly newsworthy. Nor is death, or the struggle to remain alive. Maybe this is why my father, in solidarity and with great emotion, asks me why I refuse to accept the idea of living in another country for a while, one where I would not be considered an enemy of the state because I defend human dignity.
Six years ago, when I was imprisoned and tortured by a mafia who trafficked in minors and in child pornography, parts of the Mexican media exclaimed: “A woman who opposes mafia power”, as if in surprise. Thanks to their reaction, society looked at and listened to me, but most importantly of all, it reacted and demanded justice for the hundreds of children who are the victims of sexual tourism and child pornography. Legislators created new laws to protect children, and when I was cleared of defamation charges, women on the streets, old and young, applauded and embraced me. They stopped me in public places to congratulate me on having reminded them that truth has power – and so do women who refuse to subject themselves to macho violence.
Only the other day, as I was pushing my trolley along the supermarket aisle, two older women approached me and asked, “Are you the writer?” Timidly, I said, “Yes”. One woman threw herself at me for a typically Mexican-style embrace, informing me that her granddaughter wrote an essay at primary school on her chosen heroine. It was me. “Why did she choose me?” I asked, and she answered: “Because we are all a little bit like you, and you remind us of it, when you refuse to give in, when you won’t hold your tongue, and when you smile and tell us that the world is also ours.”
Perhaps that’s what it comes down to in the end. Journalism brings it all together. We can’t ask others for something we are not inclined to give. There are moments to listen and others to be listened to. It is not enough to arouse empathy; it is not our job to make people cry. What we have to do is to reflect an outrageous reality with such power that it inspires the hope that all people want to participate in and be responsible for change. Objective journalism does not exist: we are not objects. We are subjects, so we write subjective journalism, and to do that well, everyone’s rights and everyone’s lives are of equal importance. Sometimes we tell the story. And at other times, we are the story.
Lydia Cacho’s most recent book is Slaves of Power: A Journey into Sex Trafficking around the World (Debate). She was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize for an international writer of courage in October 2010
This is an edited version of an article which appears in Index on Censorship’s latest issue, Beyond Bars: 50 Years of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
If you want to read more from Lydia Cacho, subscribe to Index on Censorship via Exact Editions. You will gain access to Index’s archive including Volume 38, Number 3 featuring Terror on the Highway in which Cacho tells the remarkable story of how she survived an abduction
12 Jan 11 | Americas, Mexico
The unrelenting violence in Mexico has provoked three well-known Mexican cartoonists — Eduardo del Rio “Rius”, Jose Hernandez and Patricio Ortiz — to launch their own civic Twitter offensive.
Since yesterday, the hashtag #NomasSangre hit the Twitter waves in Mexico. Other hashtags like #RedMexico and #losqueremosvivos, were launched to promote mass reaction to violence in Mexico. #RedMexico is new, while #losqueremosvivos was launched when four Mexican journalists were kidnapped by drug traffickers last June and were lated released because of the public outcry. But what makes the new hashtag interesting is that it is backed by three of the most important cartoonists in a country where the political cartoon is de riguer. Important reporters and analysts have changed the profiles on Facebook and twitter avatars to the one created by the three cartoonists.
“There is a lot of unhappiness in the country. A lot f people are fed up and desperate but feel impotent”, Rius, one of Mexico´s most important cartoonists, told the weekly Proceso. It could not be phrased better. A recent poll determined that 60 percent of all Mexicans feel that last year was one of the most violent years in the four year drug war declared by President Felipe Calderon.
Mexico’s Christmas and new year were marked with grisly crimes. One was the abduction on 31 December of a woman accused of being a kidnapper who was herself grabbed from police as she was taken from a women´s prison to a hospital for a checkup. Her body was later found, half-naked and hanging from an overpass in the city of Monterrey.
This week, police found 15 decapitated bodies in the resort town of Acapulco.
10 Jan 11 | Americas, Mexico
Mexico’s Roman Catholic church has taken a new target. Late last week church spokespeople called on Mexicans to stop following a cult that promotes the worship of death, which they call Saint Death. Mexico City Archdiocese spokesman Hugo Valdemar said the cult was “against Christianity and a chosen cult by organised crime.” His remarks came after a Santa Muerte bishop, David Romeo Guillen, was detained and charged with being the money man for a gang that specialised in kidnapping in Mexico City.
According to newspaper reports, Guillen admitted to being part of the kidnapping ring and offered police to collaborate with them and provide information on other kidnapping rings. Mexico has approximately 8,000 kidnappings a year, according to security consulting firm Multisistemas de Seguridad Industrial.
The Santa Muerte is a macabre sight that adorns altars across the country, complete with offerings. It is known to be followed by drug traffickers and criminals. The church has about 2m followers in Mexico, and an undetermined number of faithful in the United States, where immigrants have built about 15 churches dedicated to the cult.
The figure worshipped by its followers is a skeleton with a hooded robe. The colour of the robe may vary.
The first time Mexicans learnt about the figure was in 1998, when Daniel Arizmendi López, a well known kidnapper who was known as the “mochaorejas”, or the ear chopper, and police discovered an entire shrine to the Santa Muerte, where he prayed daily for protection.
There are people who think the cult goes back to the conquest, but some analysts say, the number of followers is mainly among people in prison, the young and drug traffickers.
Nevertheless, a group of followers has also conducted public demonstrations to protest the detention of Bishop Guillen. One follower, who said she had been a devout of the church for 25 years said the authorities should provide more evidence as to whether Guillen was really guilty.
