The "Brothers on the Road" shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca

[Transcript and audio of a report produced for The World]

ANCHOR: Many undocumented migrants from Central America travel through Mexico on their way to the United States. It’s a perilous journey. The migrants face lots of dangers, from exposure to the elements to murder. And now Mexico’s drug cartels have gotten involved. They control the smuggling routes for profit and they often kidnap the migrants and force them into work. About the only protection migrants can count on is that offered by shelters. The shelters offer services such as free meals and a safe place to sleep, but these shelters themselves have become targets. Shannon Young reports.

REPORTER: A recent incident in the southern Mexican city of Tenosique illustrates just how brazen criminals have become in targeting migrant shelters. A staffer at the “La 72″ shelter received an anonymous tip that the shelter would be the target of a mass kidnapping. And indeed, in the early hours of July 6th, men pulled up to the shelter in three vehicles and tried to force their way in. Migrants fled over the back wall.

The incident occured shortly after the shelter’s coordinator, Friar Tomas González and other religious figures, had met with the top United Nations human rights official – precisely to speak about the dangers facing migrants and those who defend them.

(Friar González speaks, reporter interprets)

Friar González says in addition to providing food and water, the shelters also document human rights violations suffered by migrants. That

invites intimidation or retribution from those who abuse the migrants, which González says includes both immigration authorities and organized criminals.

“La 72″ in Tenosique isn’t the only shelter that’s been targeted. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission recently documented threats or security breeches at five other facilities. Among them is the “Casa Belén” shelter in the northern city of Saltillo, which was granted a protection order last year from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Casa Belén coordinator, Father Pedro Pantoja says the government has stood idly by as the attacks have intensified.

PEDRO PANTOJA (voiceover): “Organized criminals have come inside our migrant shelter. Despite the protection order, there were no police patrol cars outside. We see that not only as incompetence, but disdain. The authorities couldn’t care less about the disaster, the cruelty to which these people are subjected. They are completely invisible as victims. Even more invisible are those who victimize. And in all of this, there’s not only silence, but also zero action and a total lack of respect for the lives of these people.”

Two European volunteers had to abandon the Saltillo shelter last month after an act of intimidation by men who identified themselves as members of the Zetas cartel. A shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo closed its doors in late June citing threats and a lack of security guarantees.

The rails where migrants wait to catch a freight train

(Roll Solalinde tape – reporter interprets)

Father Alejandro Solalinde – who runs a shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca – says profit is the motive behind many of the attacks against the shelters. He says the drug cartels would love to see the shelters disappear because they hinder the criminals’ ability to make money by controlling the migrant routes. The most notorious hallmark of this cartel expansion is the mass kidnapping of migrants.

Mexico’s Human Rights Commission says more than 20 thousand migrants are kidnapped each year in Mexico, generating upwards of 50 million dollars in ransom revenues. Father Solalinde has himself received multiple threats, but seems unfazed in his work.

(roll Solalinde tape, reporter interprets)

He says despite the dangers, his life is in God’s hands. He adds that’s he’s well aware that he can be killed at any moment, but that the work will go on with or without him because it’s part of God’s plan – a plan he’s willing to carry out whatever the consequence.

In a country where dozens of human rights activists have been killed over the last five years, it takes a special kind of conviction to continue the dangerous work of protecting migrants, one of the most vulnerable – and transitory – groups in Mexico.

Armed men broke into the home of columnist and editor Miguel Angel Lopez Velasco early Monday morning and killed him along with his wife and 21 year old son, Misael, who had recently started performing photography work. Another son, named Miguel like his father, is a staff photographer at the same newspaper but lives in a separate residence.

While more reporters die violent deaths in Mexico than in any other country in the Americas, it’s not common that they are killed inside their homes with other family members. According to Notiver, the newspaper he co-edited, Miguel Angel Lopez Velsco lived two blocks from a police station.

Two other Mexican reporters have been murdered in recent weeks. Pablo Ruelas Barraza was shot dead June 13th while resisting an apparent kidnapping attempt in the state of Sonora. Some regional coverage of the crime indicated that Ruelas Barraza had spent some time in prison and stated he was  unemployed at the time of his murder.

Noel López Olguín was found in a shallow grave in the state of Veracruz. He had been kidnapped in March.

Another newspaper reporter, Marco Antonio López Ortíz, has been missing since unidentified men kidnapped him earlier this month in the state of Guerrero.

Different press freedom organizations register different death tolls. Switzerland’s Press Emblem Campaign documents 14, France’s Reporters Without Borders registers 7, 8, and 11 depending on the post, and the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists lists only 3.

Comparing notes with the laudable documentation conducted by Mexico’s Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), it seems the figure published by the Press Emblem Campaign is the most accurate. However, I switched out one of the deaths listed by PEC for another.

Journalists killed in Mexico in 2010:

1. Valentín Valdés Espinosa was abducted with a colleague on January 7th in Saltillo, Coahuila by armed men in SUVs. His co-worker was released but the body of the Zócalo de Saltillo newspaper reporter’s body was dumped in front of a motel bearing signs of torture and multiple gunshot wounds. There was also reportedly a handwritten message that read “This is going to happen to those who don’t understand. The message is for everyone”.

2. José Luis Romero was found dead on January 16th along a rural road near Los Mochis, Sinaloa. He was last seen on Dec 30, 2009 as he was abducted on his way into a restaurant. His body bore gunshot wounds and signs of torture. The police investigator assigned to the case was also murdered.

3. Jorge Ochoa Martínez, editor of El Sol de la Costa and founder of the weekly El Oportuno, was shot multiple times on January 29th after leaving a party in Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero.

4. Jorge Rábago Valdez dies on March 2nd in a coma in Reynosa, Tamaulipas after his abduction on February 19th amid speculation over the cause of death. Former employers from Radio Rey and “Reporteros en Red” remained tight-lipped about the case. Reynosa is a city in which organized crime maintains a short leash on press coverage.

5. Evaristo Pacheco Solís, reporter for the weekly Visión Informativa, shot to death on March 12th in Chilpancingo, Guerrero.

6. Enrique Villicaña Palomares, political analyst and columnist for the La Voz de Michoacán newspaper found dead on April 10th with wounds from an “arma blanca”, which can be anything from a knife to a blunt instrument. He was abducted on April 5th.

*. Maria Isabella Cordero, former local Televisa presenter, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Chihuahua City on April 17th. * Cordero was no longer working in the media industry at the time of her death and her work at Televisa was not related to news reporting. She is counted in Press Emblem Campaign’s death toll, but not here.

7 & 8. Juan Francisco Rodríguez Ríos, correspondent with the El Sol de Acapulco newspaper, and his wife Elvira Hernández Galeana, editor of the weekly Nueva Línea were gunned down on June 28th in Guerrero in the internet cafe the couple operated. Rodríguez Ríos had just come back from covering an event marking the 15 year anniversary of the Aguas Blancas Massacre of campesinos by Guerrero state police.

9. Hugo Alfredo Olivero, editor of the El Día de Michoacán newspaper and correspondent for ADN news agency shot 3 times in the head in his truck in Apatzingán, Michoacán on July 6th.

10. Marco Aurelio Martínez Tijerina of XEDD Radio La Tremenda in Montemorelos, Nuevo León was found with a gunshot wound to the head on July 10th after he was abducted the day before.

11. Guillermo Alacaraz Trejo, audiovisual producer and cameraman for the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, was gunned down on July 10th while leaving the offices of his former workplace, Omnia newspaper.

**12.  Eduardo Antonio Nieves Rubio, cameraman for the city government of Tepic, Nayarit, killed in a drive-by shooting on July 14th. **Nieves Rubio is not included in Press Emblem Campaign’s 2010 count, but is included here due to the frequency with which Mexican media outlets use stock content produced by the media relations departments of governmental entities.

13. Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco, photojournalist in training at the El Diario de Ciudad Juárez newspaper, shot dead on September 16th while sitting in a car in a parking lot in Ciudad Juárez. Another reporter from the same outlet was wounded in the attack. Soon after, El Diario newspaper editors published a headlines-grabbing editorial asking power brokers and organized criminals what they had to do to ensure the lives of their reporters.

14. Carlos Alberto Guajardo, reporter for the El Expreso newspaper in Tamaulipas, gunned down in Matamoros while covering the November 5th shootout that killed Gulf Cartel leader Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, aka “Tony Tormenta”.

While this list strives to be as comprehensive as possible regarding media worker deaths in Mexico in 2010, it does not touch on the dozens of incidents of threats and intimidation, nor does it include a list of Mexican journalists who have fled the country due to security concerns.

The image to the right is of the Oaxacan-born revolutionary journalist and anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. He is often referred to as one of the intellectual founders of the Mexican Revolution. He was chief editor of the newspaper Regeneración and his strident stance in opposition to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (another native of Oaxaca) led to multiple arrests in Mexico and exile in the United States.

Exile did not treat Flores Magón well. The US administration at the time was close to the Mexican dictator and found ways to make sure the revolutionary journalist spent years in prison there as well. His overt anarchism in later life also attracted negative attention from the authorities – as it did for his close friend Emma Goldman. In 1918, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years for violating sections of the World War I-era Espionage Act.

Ricardo Flores Magón died a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary on November 21, 1922. His remains were later repatriated to Mexico, where they were buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons…an honor the anti-authoritarian may have actually opposed were he given a choice.

The person depicted in the image to the right is campesino hero Emiliano Zapata. He is best known for leading a revolutionary army in Southern Mexico under the cause of land redistribution. A motto for many of his followers was (and still is) “the land belongs to those who work it”.

This particular mural is located next to the IV Centenario market in Oaxaca City and faces the house where the Porfirio Díaz, the dictator the revolution ousted, was born.

General Emiliano Zapata was lured into an ambush and killed April 10, 1919. Social movements across Mexico often mark the date with commemorative marches.

One of Zapata’s most significant and lasting contributions was Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which enshrined the agrarian reform for which he and his army fought. Article 27 was itself “counter-reformed” in 1992 as part of a pre-condition of Mexico signing on to the North American Trade Agreement – or NAFTA. On January 1st 1994 – the day NAFTA went into effect – an indigenous rebel army in the southernmost state of Chiapas launched an armed uprising. They are known as the modern-day Zapatistas.

The words spray painted below the Zapata busts call for the now ex-governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO for short) to be put in prison. Ruiz Ortiz is widely despised among Oaxaca’s social movements for repression of activists and – most notably – for refusing to step down during a popular uprising that largely paralysed government activities in the state capital for the second half of 2006.

The metallic structure on the left is a clock type thing that was installed back in 2009 on the side walk next to the cathedral to countdown the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the Bicentennial on September 16th. Here it is on September 23, 2010 just after a protest.

The spray painted message demands freedom for political prisoners. The clock – which still stands in zeros – has become a favorite target for spray paint, stickers, and posters.

The image to the right evokes the “Soldaderas” or “Adelitas”; women who took up arms in the Mexican Revolution.

The photo is from July 2, 2010 – two days ahead of historic elections in Oaxaca in which the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) lost the gubernatorial race for the first time in more than 8 consecutive decades. The image was painted on the façade of the Government Palace, in the spot now occupied by a camp of displaced persons from San Juan Copala.

If you liked this post, feel free to leave a comment. It may provide me with the motivation I need to edit the photos of street art accumulated over the years of living here.

The Magdalena River in southern Mexico City

Home to over 21 million people, Mexico City is the largest urban area in the Western Hemisphere. While its smog is world famous, its haphazard expansion has led to another environmental issue; it’s water system can’t cope. We sent Earth Beat correspondent Shannon Young to the city to look into the issues behind its those water problems.

[dewplayer:http://www.southnotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/EarthBeat_MexicoCityWater.mp3]

Live stand up next to river: “I’m standing along a stretch of the Magdalena River that comes through Mexico City proper. And at this point, it is a grey/green/brown mass of relatively viscous liquid. And there’s a small cascade here. It consists of a concrete block with broken tree branches and lots of garbage. I see a bottle of bleach, a rusty can of spray paint, lots of shredded tatters of plastic bags, some broken styrofoam plates, pieces of clothes…and it’s all really stinky.” (fade under river tone)

The Rio Magdalena is the only river considered to have any life within the limits of Mexico City. It originates in a forested area in the mountains west of the city, but is a putrid mess by the time it reaches the city’s southern edge.

Nearly all of the other rivers that used to exist in the city have since become vehicles for transporting sewage out of the metropolitan area.

AMBI: pumped water gushing into the giant septic tank (bed under)

Some of that water comes through here – the Aculco pumping station. Here, veteran engineer Jorge Chang Castro points out the sewage that’s being pumped into a giant concrete pool under our feet. The plant mixes sewage and storm water together and pumps them towards the main tunnels out of the city.

All of the water expelled from the main drainage systems is untreated and is used by farmers downstream for irrigation.

[fade out pumping station ambi]

But Mexico City’s pumping stations operate with outdated equipment. The Aculco station is at least 40 years old. When the pumps seize up, Julio Cesar Cu Camara has to go below the surface to manually unblock the pumps.

CLIP Julio Cesar Cu Camara 1 (translated): “The most common problem is garbage. All of the city’s litter ends up here, in the drainage system and it obstructs the pumps, the metal grates, the hatches. It’s always been the city’s biggest problem – the amount of trash thrown into the drains.”

Cu Camara is one of only a handful of sewage divers in the world …and one of only 2 working in Mexico City. The divers work blind because there’s no visibility in the raw sewage.

CLIP Julio Cesar Cu Camara 2 (translated): “I think the worst thing to find is a human being, because we’ve found bodies of people and we don’t know who they are. But there are also other outrageous things. I’ve found everything from cigarette butts to bits of cars and trucks, big tires, furniture, fridges, microwaves. We find all of it in the sewers. You’ve got to ask yourself how it got there? But there it is – it’s crazy. We’ll be down there working and be like ‘let’s see what this is here’ and we’ll feel around think ‘hmm this feels like a tire, ok let’s get it out of there.’ Then there will be something else – a tree trunk. So we get it out. And then suddenly we’ll be like ‘here’s something strange - a fridge! Hey – there’s a fridge here!’ Well, we have to get it out. But how does it all get there? Nobody knows.”

Fade under sound… [END OF PACK]

Marnie Chesterton: That was a pack by Shannon Young in Mexico City. Shannon joins us now. Shannon – it sounds disgusting! I hope you had a bath after that.

Shannon Young: Yes…and I thought twice about where I was going to eat lunch.

MC: Oh, I’m so sorry we sent you there. Why are things so bad? Is this a city full of people putting fridges down the sewers or is this simply a question of not keeping up with infrastructure?

SY: Well, one if the main problems is that the water system there is not designed to separate the storm water from the sewage. So, that’s problem #1. They’re pumped together untreated out of the valley Mexico City is located in via an artificial opening into a river.

While the city pumps polluted water out of the valley, it also has to pump up from more than 1000 meters below the surface its potable water.

MC: That’s really deep!

SY: Yeah, more than a kilometer.

I spoke with Arsenio Gónzalez of the national university’s Program for City Studies, and he says the problem with water in Mexico City is historical. Originally the valley where Mexico City is located was home to a system of 5 lakes, but in 1607 Spanish colonizers created an artificial canyon to drain these lakes and send raw sewage out of the city. And this pumping of the groundwater from below the surface has caused the city to sink in some areas by 10 or more meters.

MC: But surely Shannon the water infrastructure’s has been adapted or improved since then…

SY: There were three major public works projects in the 20th century that created other – or expanded upon – existing artificial outlets for the city’s sewage. But plans to recharge the area’s aquifers were neglected. Gónzalez says they’re essentially bringing in clean water at ever higher costs, dirtying it, then pumping it out of the valley.

CLIP Arsenio Gonzalez (translated): “What we’re seeing is that modern-day Mexico City, which is a city of 20 million inhabitants, gets around 70 percent of its water from underground sources… All the storm water and sewage is expelled to another watershed. So the problem is that the city isn’t self-sufficient with the water it has in its own watershed.”

SY: Like I said earlier, storm water and sewage is combined in Mexico, which is unusual for a large city. Deputy director of Mexico City’s pumping stations, Jorge Chang Castro says it’s time for officials to invest in separating the two types of waste water.

CLIP Jorge Chang Castro (translated): “It’s been 70 years already and we’re still working with this same idea. It’s time to change it. The government needs to invest money to separate the water. A few neighborhoods here and there have started to separate their water, but it needs to be done on a larger scale. Why? Because we need to use the rain water to recharge the aquifers. Or hell, build a dam!”

SY: Chang Castro says another potential source of potable water is the Magdalena River and that it’s important to make sure that it

Trash in the Magdalena River

doesn’t get contaminated as it enters the city. But as you heard earlier, the restoration of this polluted section of the Magdalena River seems like a distant reality.

CLIP Arturo Rivas Montaño 1: “en mi infancia el agua era un poqito mas clara. Inclusive se veían las piedras qe estaban en el río, osea piedras peqeñitas y pasaba el agua. Si si habia piedras.” (SY translates.)

SY: That’s forty-nine year old Arturo Rivas Montaño. He grew up in the district of Coyoacán and says that when he was a kid, the water was clear enough to see the stones on the bottom.

CLIP Arturo Rivas Montaño 2: “Lo qe me comentan mis abuelos, que también ellos son de aquí nativos, qe antes, en sus tiempos de ellos iban a lavar la ropa, el agua era un poqito mas limpia. En aqel entonces ellos le nombraban el acueducto qe era la parte qe ellos iban alla a lavar su ropa. Entonces mis abuelos decían qe el agua era muy clara muy limpia y no había ninguna enfermedad. Ahora ya no.” (SY translates).

Rivas says his grandparents can recall times when people were able to wash their clothes in the river. The water was very clean and didn’t carry sicknesses. That’s not the case anymore.

MC: Right…yeah. Like you said at the beginning; rusty spray cans, plastic bags, concrete blocks, fridges. But even if this river is rescued, it sounds like Mexico City’s water issues are way bigger than a single river is going to solve…

SY: Yeah, you’re right. Another huge problem in Mexico City is the fact that the city is sinking. When they originally built these pumping plants more than 40 years ago, they were built on the outskirts of the city. Now those areas have become heavily populated. As the city sinks, there’s no longer this force of gravity to send the waste water to the pumping stations.

A couple of areas of the city have even experienced sewage floods – where it goes into the homes. And if the main tunnel that expels sewage from the city we to experience some major problems, a huge swath of Mexico City – from the airport into the downtown area – would flood with sewage

MC: Ummm – not good. I guess the question is will they opt for new and preventative ways – or continue with the 400 year old model of bringing it in, polluting it, and the spending energy on pumping it away again?

SY: Well, most people who work with water issues in Mexico City say that it’s also clear the city’s water problems require not only new ideas from engineers and city planners, but there also needs to be a political will to finance it and to really move these projects forward. There also need to be participation from the citizenry and the various sectors of this massive city’s population to make it work.

It requires a major change in the mindset of the general population and that’s not something that’s easy to achieve.

Protest Graffitti - Oaxaca City - Sept. 2010

Across Mexico today, celebrations to mark the 100 year anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution. Amongst other things, the revolution was considered a victory for the country’s rural poor, who won land rights away from the wealthy elite.

While Mexico today is preoccupied with with the bloody Drug War in the country’s north, small farmers are facing a new fight over land rights in the south.

[dewplayer:http://www.southnotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/twtw_MexRevCen.mp3]

[Chants from Oaxaca City march for Copala]

Women march through the streets of Oaxaca City to call attention to the situation in the farming village of San Juan Copala.

Most of these women fled the town this summer during a violent paramilitary offensive that killed about 20 residents.

[Efendia López speaking in Triqui]

Efendia López is one of those who left.

MULT-I protest camp in the Zocalo

She says men, women and children were shot to death. Others were wounded, gang-raped, or received death threats. Like Lopez, many of the displaced have settled in Oaxaca’s state capitol.

They set up a protest camp in the main square of Oaxaca City, desperate for help.

Reina Martínez speaks for the group.

[Reina Martínez speaking in Spanish]

Martínez accuses the state government of being behind the armed groups that have been working in San Juan Copala.

She says the government is exploiting local political differences as part of a deadly divide-and-conquer strategy.

San Juan Copala is home to fertile farm land…but it also has valuable forests…and studies suggest, under all of it, valuable minerals.

San Juan Copala isn’t the only town in Oaxaca where farmers are facing a bleak future.

Opposition to the Paso de la Reina dam

[Juan Gómez speaking in Spanish]

Juan Gómez is with a group fighting a planned hydroelectric dam on the Rio Verde. The project would flood thousands of acres of agricultural land.

Gómez says they’ve tried to convince the federal government to cancel the project, but their campaign hasn’t worked.

Local control of communal farmland was one of the big changes after the Mexican Revolution. It was protected in the country’s Constitution…until 1992, and NAFTA.

Allowing private sale and ownership of farmland was one of the requirements of Mexico signing onto the North American Free Trade Agreement. That, and an end to some subsidies for farmers who made a living off the land.

Almost two decades later, those reforms are one of the reasons behind a big change in Mexican rural society. Millions of farmers have moved to cities – and to the United States – in search of a living.

[José Rodríguez speaking in Spanish]

Environmental consultant Jose Rodríguez says Mexican farmers used to have a guaranteed price for crops like beans

Zapata on a bike on a wall on Avenida Juárez, Oaxaca - 2010

and corn. He says cheap corn from the United States meant price cuts in Mexico…devastating the rural economy.

[sfx of Oaxaca City protest]

That, and the violent fights over valuable resources under all that land has left Efendia Lopez and others at the Oaxaca City protest camp with an uncertain future.

[López speaking in Triqui]

López says she left everything behind…her home…her animals. She says they didn’t do anything to deserve this.

Rural discontent helped fuel the Mexican Revolution that began 100 years ago today. There may be discontent again…but with Mexico now an increasingly urban country, rural life, and those who cling to it, are being left behind.

[NOTE: This report was produced for November 20, 2010 edition of the CBC's "The World This Weekend". All rights reserved by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.]

Gun store in Eagle Pass, Texas just blocks from border

It’s no secret many of the firearms used by Mexican drug trafficking organizations are purchased in the US. The Department of Justice launched “Project Gunrunner” in 2005 to crack down on weapons smuggling to Mexico. At the forefront of the effort is the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – or ATF.

The 138-page report released Tuesday by the Department of Justice Inspector General has found that “significant weaknesses in ATF’s implementation of Project Gunrunner undermine its effectiveness.”  These weaknesses include a low level of intelligence sharing between the ATF and other US and Mexican law enforcement agencies, an emphasis on investigating small-time “straw purchasers” over large trafficking networks, and the bureau’s failure to expand its gun tracing program in Mexico.

The report also found that the lack of reporting requirements for rifle sales has hindered investigations.

The Justice Department made 15 specific recommendations to the ATF for improving Project Gunrunner. Among them, strengthening the crime gun tracing initiative that is supposedly the cornerstone of the operation.

The mass murders started last Friday when gunmen killed 15 young people at a house party in Ciudad Juarez. On Sunday, 13 people were shot to death in a Tijuana drug rehabilitation center. Another 13 died in an armed attack on a car wash in Tepic, Nayarit on Wednesday.

Thursday morning brought two mass killings. Six youths were gunned down on a street corner in Mexico City. An attack near Ciudad Juarez targeted 3 buses of maquiladora workers, leaving 5 women dead and another 14 wounded.

Thursday afternoon, an ambush of a police convoy killed nine policemen in the state of Jalisco.

Other incidents this week include the discovery of a 4 person “narco-grave” near Oaxaca City and the explosion of two fragmentation grenades in Jalisco which injured 5 people – including 2 small children.

Nearly 30,000 Mexicans have died since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country’s powerful cartels four years ago.

In a video posted to YouTube on Monday, a man identified as the brother of former Chihuahua state attorney general Patricia Gonzalez sits in a chair surrounded by masked men in camouflage. The former official’s brother was reportedly kidnapped last week. With rifles pointed at him, the brother says Gonzalez took bribes from the Juarez cartel, covered up crimes and ordered others, including the deaths of two local journalists.

Just last week, the Chihuahua state legislature passed a bill that includes a mandatory sentence of life in prison for those convicted of murdering journalists. The former state attorney general says she recognizes the backdrop in the video as a cubicle in a government office and suspects police are tied to her brother’s kidnapping and video interrogation.

The scandal comes in the wake of a particularly gruesome weekend along the border. Thirteen youths were massacred at a birthday party in Ciudad Juarez (in Chihuahua state) and another 13 recovering drug addicts were gunned down in a Tijuana rehab.

Nearly 30 thousand Mexicans have died in drug war related violence since President Felipe Calderon began his frontal military strategy against the country’s powerful cartels 4 years ago.

A gabion along a creek traps soil rushing downhill

Residents of the Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca are still digging out from a rash of late summer landslides. The disasters killed dozens of people, destroyed homes and blocked rural highways. The landslides were blamed on unusually heavy rains and bad mountain roads… but deforestation and poor agricultural practices have made erosion a chronic problem in the region. Now some local residents are trying to address the problem by experimenting with low-tech traditional practices. Shannon Young reports.

[dewplayer:http://media.theworld.org/audio/102020107.mp3]

REPORTER: Back-to-back storms have drenched Oaxaca and three neighboring states in this busy hurricane season. Much of this rain has hit remote mountainous regions that are already prone to landslides . Storm-related damage to roads has left some towns unreachable by car for weeks.

Forest management consultant Jose Rodriguez says the Mexican government hasn’t provided much help in cleaning up, so the task has largely fallen to unpaid locals with their own shovels.

Impassable roads are a fact of life during the rainy season in southern Mexico’s most remote areas.  Deforestation and overgrazing on steep mountainsides have helped create serious erosion problems here…but much of the erosion is preventable.  Without much help from the government, some local residents have begun fighting erosion and other land use problem with low cost do-it-yourself techniques.

The town of San Andres Huayapam overlooks Oaxaca City from the foothills of the Sierra Norte mountains. The town’s original name

Downtown San Andres Huayapam

means “on the big water”…but the springs that inspired the name have been drying up. The area now swings between drought and the kind of floods experienced in recent weeks.  But one project here has developed a system to restore the ecological balance.

JUAN JOSE CONSEJO: “What we try to do is combine scientific and traditional in a way that everyone gets a better condition.”

Juan Jose Consejo is the director of Oaxaca’s Institute of Nature and Society. He’s working on what’s called the Pedregal permaculture farm and demonstration center.  The project is experimenting with various combinations of modern and traditional technologies for retaining soil and recharging watersheds.

Consejo shows off one erosion control system on the Pedregal site.

Trenches running down this hillside channel heavy rainwater that would otherwise carve out gulches and gashes. The trenches contain chain link cages filled with rocks, which trap eroding soil. The topsoil is then collected and piled onto nearby hillside cornfields that have been stabilized with new terraces and hedgerows.

(water flowing through a small dam)

The demonstration center also has 2 small dams… one built with reinforced concrete and one made using an old technique combining earth and large rocks.  The dams catch overflowing creek water during the rainy season for irrigation during the dry season.
JUAN JOSE CONSEJO: “The idea is to give a little help to nature to do what nature does in healthy conditions. That means – lets the water run down, forming ponds and steppes. Then we have a system of terraces in order to protect the soil from erosion.”

After the recent downpours, the dams and traps are filled to capacity.  But the experimental plots seem to have weathered the season better than much of the surrounding landscape.

(hiking sounds)

Farmer Pedro Santiago in San Andres Huayapam

REPORTER AT SCENE: “Standing on a hillside, I can see the hills that have been reforested. Now, as I turn around and look at the opposite face of the canyon, gashes have been cut into the hillside by running water and these gashes converge into an entire area balded right down to the rock.”

(walking up a cornfield)

Local farmer and traditional leader Pedro Santiago set up the Pedregal center five years ago. Santiago says managing the many experimental projects here requires patience and ceaseless hard labor….but that signs of success are emerging.

Forest ecologist Jose Rodriguez says more than 2 dozen towns have implemented stewardship programs similar to the work done at the Pedregal center and elsewhere in the region… but tailored to their own diverse local conditions.

The combination of old and new approaches being demonstrated here won’t completely solve the erosion crisis in this part of Mexico.  But these small-scale efforts here in Oaxaca are showing that it IS possible to restore degraded land and to protect Mexico’s hillsides against the devastating effects of rain that just doesn’t seem to stop.

For The World, I’m Shannon Young in Oaxaca, Mexico.