Los Angeles News Blog

It may be a typical Monday for many in Southern California but for millions there and across the U.S. families are preparing to celebrate fiestas patrias, the season of Independence Day celebrations for Latin American countries that begins tonight with the "Grito," or The Yell, of Mexican Independence. The ritual marks the beginning of the long war that Mexicans waged against Spanish rule beginning on 16 September, 1810.

Here in Mexico, it's Monday and the streets of the Centro Historico are already packed with people and vendors selling every imaginable kind of item with the tricolor of the Mexican national flag. On Sunday night at the sparkling Zocalo it was almost as if the hour of the "Grito" had already arrived. The plaza and the surrounding cantinas were alight with all the glorious desmadre of Mexican partying, in the form of drumming and party foam and street food-eating and firework-popping and cartoony Zapata mustaches.

The country like the world at large may in a state of social decay, but bad times have never been a hindrance to the high ritual of the fiesta in Mexico. And on the actual holiday, Tuesday, the citizenry comes together to face a national hangover, felt, painfully yet bravely, across the Republic and beyond.

The palm trees are laid out everywhere, in rows and clumps, in corners, and all over the structure that from a distance -- with its metal surfaces and elevated floor -- evokes the broken tropical landscapes of war and dislocation. Buenos Aires-born New York-based Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija landed in Mexico City last week to present this his "Palm Pavilion" installation at the Kurimanzutto temporary gallery space in the Condesa on Thursday night. The piece, less interactive than Tiravanija's works tend to be, is a weirdly seductive temple to what (when you think about it) really is one of the most enduring symbols in the history of man, from Biblical times to the Orientalized travel catalogs of today.

"It's the pavilion for the palm plant, and in a way, a look at the palm plant as a kind of witness to the going-ons in civilization," Tiravanija said on Thursday. "It's interesting that of course the palm is everywhere else but in the West. It's in the 'Other' zones."

The palms, fresh from a Mexico City hardware store, brushed against the bodies of spectators at the opening, who glanced at one another flirtatiously between the fronds while sipping the waters of fresh young coconuts. The plants beckoned from nooks inside the elevated pavilion. There, screens play a video focused on the tree and display cases feature found items such as postcards and soft drink bottles, reminding the viewer of the infinitely layered ways in which this symbol of peace, godliness, and tranquility has been commodified by every new wave of colonialism and globalization.

* Photo above, a demonstration during the XVII International AIDS Conference, via AIDS2008.com.

There were too many reasons to come away depressed by the knowledge gathered and shared at the International AIDS Conference this week, so few reasons to be hopeful that a cure could be reached or that millions of lives could be saved. Currently, there is no cure in sight for AIDS, no vaccine for HIV. Major research efforts to come up with a fully preventive solution have stalled. The more you learn, the more you realize the whole situation is really is a failure of humanity, a failure for humanity.

One of the most startling statistics I picked up this week is that only a tiny percentage of people living with HIV or AIDS receive any kind of treatment, at all, meaning that millions -- millions -- of people are simply wasting away and dying. Those people are mostly poor and "marginalized." That means women and children living in poverty, MSM, or "men who have sex with men" and who live in societies where they are stigmatized or criminalized (gay sex is still a crime in more than 70 countries), drug users who get HIV by sharing needles, and sex workers.

That last group were truly in the spotlight this week.

* Image above, hijras in Chennai, India, by Maciej Dakowicz.

I took my first full tour of the Global Village at the AIDS Conference here in Mexico City on Tuesday and truly found myself in a "global" community: Activists and organizers and artists from all corners of the world were manning booths, sitting in on talks and discussions, socializing, selling hand-made artisan jewelry, and drinking free little shots of tequila. On the stoop of a booth a few lovely Indian women in bright saris and make-up sat resting. I sat down and struck up a conversation. They were transgendered women, representing the culture of the hijra, or India's "third sex."

"The main profession of the transgendered community in India is sex work, predominantly sex work," said Agniva Lahiri, executive director of People Like Us, a shelter in Calcutta. "Imgaine a guy who is feminine in gender, from a very low income background, in India, highly populated, with very small job options, without any skills, education, so the available options for them, either go for sex work, or go for other cultural spaces."

People Like Us provides HIV prevention and anti-discrimination support, said Lahiri, who studied English in Australia. Transgendered herself, she's been involved in HIV/AIDS-related work for a decade. "Most of these young boys, they're castrated. It's self-castration," Lahiri told me. "It's a very cruel process." They're a mystique around hijra, she added. They bless children, "give money," and the mystique in many ways gives the women a unique social role in Indian society.

The women around her chatted among themselves in Bengali, talking eagerly about their first plane trip and their first trip to Latin America. They said their only other previous connection to Mexico was tequila. "It's really expensive" in India, Lahiri said.

* Returning to the Village on Thursday. Read more about it at this post at NPR.org, which asks: "An LGBT-rights organization in Kyrgyzstan?" Yes, indeed.

The AIDS Conference opened with a bang on Monday: An activist take-over of a symposium hosted by a pharmaceutical company (which decided to stop distributing HIV drugs to kids) and a speech by Bill Clinton where I suppose he said some quotable things. On Sunday night the gala opening happened at the majestic Auditorio Nacional, with speeches by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. And a 13-year-old girl from Honduras, Keren Dunaway-Gonzalez, who is living with HIV. "We want to be artists, teachers, doctors -- even get married and have kids," Keren said. "But achieving these goals will only be possible when we receive the attention we need, when we are guaranteed the medicines that we need, when we are accepted in schools."

AIDS has been ravaging the world for a quarter-century now, and with precious drugs not available to all and no concrete cure in sight, a brighter future for young people like Keren is as dubious as ever. Keep in mind almost half of new infections annually occur among people ages 15-24. In Latin America, this being the AIDS Conference's first stop in the region, 63,000 people died of AIDS last year. In Mexico City alone, 21,000 people live with the HIV virus.

I know important people are giving speeches and new research will be presented, but really, what are we supposed to be doing at this conference exactly? You know, after eight years of disastrous Bush administration AIDS policies inflicted upon the globe?

More than 800,000 Mexicans in the metropolitan region went to special polling places on Sunday to register their opinion on the energy reform package being pushed by President Felipe Calderon's conservative PAN party. Depending on your source, it was either a rousing civic success or a shameless fiasco. I'm leaning toward the latter.

The "citizen's consultation" asked two questions on the matter on small rectangular pieces of paper. First, "Currently, the drilling, transport, distribution, storage, and refining of hydrocarbons are activities exclusive to the government. Are you or are you not in agreement that private companies may participate in these activities?" And, "In general, are you or are you not in agreement that the proposals related to energy reform currently being debated in the Congress of the Union should be approved?"

A bit more than 87 percent of respondents said "No" to both questions. Not at all surprising. Dave Biller, an energy correspondent based in Mexico City told me: "The leftist PRD party is playing the poll off as a national referendum, but in reality it's far from representative. It was organized by the left for the left. [...] Leftist voters arrived knowing how they were supposed to vote: no to question 1, and no to question 2."

How "cool" is Mexico City? Well, the new issue of Vice magazine is all about Mexico, and especially the capital. You can lament this, ignore this, or just get over it and go see the bands. A week ago the editors and media agents behind the urban bad-kid cocky hipster brand converged upon town for a party of epic depravity, even by Mexico City standards.

For starters there was nearly a News Divine-style crush to get in ("News Divine" is fast becoming a darkly cynical local colloquialism). When The Black Lips stepped up to the sorta-not-really-there stage at the Tropicana in Plaza Garibaldi (a sufficiently vice-y venue), the sweaty, frenzied crowd went bonkers.

Off in Chiapas, I missed the massive annual Pride Parade in downtown Mexico City, but Cesar Arellano has photos. Check them out here and here and here.

It was the 30th anniversary of the first gay march in Mexico City, which happened in 1978, at a time when gay activists were spied upon and even killed for their work, as La Jornada reminds us.

The city has come a long, long way since. The leftist municipal government is very gay-friendly, almost aggressively so. Public service ads in the metro -- on certain lines, at least -- show photo illustrations of people with Adolf Hitler-style mustaches, the message reading: "When you discriminate against a [gay/bisexual] person this is what you look like."

It won't stop raining.

It's rained pretty much all day today. In the morning, during the lunch hour, during rush hour, all night. It's just past midnight and it's raining right now. In fact it's been raining all week. As of Tuesday night various boroughs of the city are on flood alerts. El Universal is reporting that a regulating reservoir on the edge of Iztapalapa is about to overflow.

You can't escape the rain even in the metro. Water drips in through the layer of streets, buildings, and pipework overhead. Illegal vendors are making bank selling cheap umbrellas. Because many of the metro lines go above-ground when they radiate away from the center, trains return to the core dusted in raindrops. The seats nearest open windows are drenched.

Weirdest part is, it's cold out. Today I wore a sweater, a navy coat, and a scarf. And I still feel a chill from running around all day. Apparently there's a sizable storm passing through the center of the country, but I'm not fully convinced there are not other forces at play.

It is well known that covering the narco war in Mexico as a journalist is a difficult and in some cases deadly profession. (Look no further than the threats that trailed Jesus Blancornelas throughout his life.) This sobering reality hung over a panel here on Saturday organized by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, featuring some definite heavyweights in Mexican journalism: Andres Oppenheimer, Carmen Aristegui, Lydia Cacho, and others. Covering organized crime in Mexico was the announced topic but the discussion was dominated by somber and very angry testimonies about intimidation and violence against journalists on the part of hitmen and cartels, and about apathy against protecting journalists' rights on the part of the government. It was Aristegui who, in spirited remarks, made mention of a news story that really startled me last week: the 38 oil workers from rural Nuevo Leon who have been missing for more than a year, with zero action on the case from local authorities.

Besides this article in La Jornada, there has been little media chatter about these men. In mentioning them on Saturday, Aristegui was trying to make a point about how apathetic both the country and the news media have become in the face of an almost daily parade of stories about cartel violence or obvious government failure and corruption. But the 38 missing oil men present an especially disgraceful stain on Mexico's poor record of fairly and duly administering justice to its citizens. Relatives of the missing men were finally paid some attention last month -- a year after the workers were snatched up by armed men and never heard from again -- because they arrived at the government palace in Monterrey accompanied by Rosario Ibarra, a prominent political activist.

Read the details in English at this link. The implication of the story -- and it's a strong one -- is that the state government's inaction on the matter points to some level of collusion between authorities and whatever powers were behind the disappearances.

By the way, the CPJ chairman and executive director met with President Felipe Calderon at Los Pinos during their visit to Mexico City. The committee reports that Calderon "expressed concern at ongoing violence against journalists" and that his government was drafting legislation to better protect freedom of expression in Mexico. Read CPJ's special report on three specific cases of unsolved journalists' deaths in Mexico here, in an article prepared by D.F.-based freelance reporter Monica Campbell.