Same-sex couples inch toward sharing benefits in Mexico City

UPI, 5/21/2013

Lawyer Jaime López was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2008. But he did not have health insurance to cover his treatment. As a sole practitioner, López did not have access to any public social security services available in Mexico through its two social security agencies. The Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social offers these benefits to employees of private companies, and Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado offers them to government employees.

David González, López’s partner of 10 years, had health insurance through IMSS and tried to enroll López as his beneficiary. But IMSS denied their request because they were not married. The laws governing the social security agencies extend benefits to only spouses and concubines. By that point, López had already had his left kidney surgically removed to prevent the cancer from spreading. Since 2008, he has been receiving medical care at the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología, a public hospital in Mexico City for people without social security. He must pay for services out of pocket.

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In Mexico, fears for democracy as threatened journalists curtail coverage

McClatchy,  5/16/2013

Mexico is easily the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere for reporters to ply their trade. Dozens of journalists have been killed or disappeared. Nearly every month, a newspaper or a radio or TV station is firebombed, attacked with explosives or raked with gunfire, targeted by the country’s rising criminal gangs who use violence to discourage reporting the gangsters don’t like. And the violence has worked. In much of Mexico, local news outlets no longer report on organized crime or corruption. Analysts call these areas “zones of silence,” where the lights have gone out on the dark activities within.

The success of the intimidation alarms advocates of both free speech and democracy. With no news reports on Mexico’s drug and crime problems, citizens find it difficult to stay informed about what could be life-threatening situations developing nearby. They also cannot effectively participate in the normal give and take of public discussion that fuels a democracy. The muffling has been so effective that many Mexicans don’t even realize that a near blackout of news on crime exists in swaths of the country. “If journalists don’t act as a viewfinder to say who is winning the contracts, who will become police chief, if there’s no accountability, they can do whatever they want,” said Andres Solis Alvarez, a former crime reporter and author of a self-protection manual for Mexican journalists.

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To read the Mexico Institute’s newest publication on violence against journalists, click here.

Telefonica Mexico chief sees quick move to loosen Slim’s grip

Reuters, 5/16/2013

Spain’s Telefonica expects Mexico’s new government to quickly implement new regulations designed to challenge billionaire Carlos Slim’s dominance in the local telecommunications market, a top company official said. In the last decade since entering Mexico, Telefonica has battled Slim’s firms – the country’s dominant fixed-line, Internet and mobile providers – while struggling to convince regulators to level the playing field.

However, President Enrique Pena Nieto successfully pushed a sweeping telecommunication legislation through Congress this spring that should help growth at Telefonica, No. 2 in Mexico in terms of subscribers with about 20 percent of the mobile phone market. This week a majority of Mexican states approved the constitutional reform designed to circumvent the legal hurdles that have prevented regulators from boosting competition in the sector for so long.

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New Digital Map Tracks Attacks on Journalists and Bloggers in Mexico

International Center For Journalists, 4/24/2013

In Mexico, where more than 80 journalists have been killed since 2005, many assaults, beatings, threats, disappearances and abductions go unreported because victims and their families fear retribution. We need a safe way to report these attacks and to show the effect of violence on freedom of expression in Mexico. That’s why Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists are launching a new map to track attacks against journalists, Twitter and Facebook users, bloggers and citizens who use social media to report crime and corruption.

I am coordinating the map, called “Periodistas en Riesgo” (“Journalists at Risk”) as part of my ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellowship. In my previous fellowship with ICFJ, I developed Mi Panamá Transparente, a map tracking crime and corruption in Panama based on reports from citizens and journalists. The map will be presented to the public April 25 in during an Internet Freedom panel in Mexico City organized by Hacks/Hackers Mexico, Freedom House, the International Center for Journalists and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (Center for Research and Teaching in Economics).

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Mexico Now A Latin American Leader In Tech Services

Fronteras, 5/15/2013

In the last decade Mexico’s tech industry has flourished, growing three times faster than the global average. Most of that growth is fueled by demand from the United States. But without certain reforms Mexico’s progress can only go so far. On the cover of April’s edition of Forbes Magazine in Mexico is Blanca Treviño. She is the 53-year-old CEO of Softtek, the country’s biggest technology service.

Softtek spans four continents and provides software support to clients that include Fortune 500 companies. The business sector represented by Softtek is one that’s growing rapidly in Mexico thanks in large part to its proximity to the United States, the world’s largest consumer of tech services. “I think it’s safe to say that without the U.S. the Mexico market would not be doing very well,” said Morgan Yeates, an analyst with the IT consulting firm Gartner.

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Majority of Mexico States Approve Telecom Bill, Official Says

Bloomberg, 5/14/2013

A Mexican law to boost competition in telecommunications and media gained approval from a majority of state legislatures, surmounting its final hurdle for passage. “It’s a historic day for Mexico,” Jose Ignacio Peralta, deputy communications minister, said in a message posted on Twitter announcing the milestone. President Enrique Pena Nieto has already pledged support for the bill, which passed both houses of Congress last month.

The proposal seeks to increase investment and reduce prices in the phone and pay-television industries and to create more choice in broadcast TV. It would create tougher conditions for America Movil SAB, which has 70 percent of Mexico’s mobile-phone subscribers, and Grupo Televisa SAB, which gets 70 percent of the nation’s broadcast-television audience.

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As Stigma Eases, Single Motherhood In Mexico Is On The Rise (Audio)

NPR, 5/13/2013

There’s been a dramatic drop in Mexico’s birthrate in the past 40 years from an average of nearly seven children per woman to now around two. This has allowed many more women to work outside the home, and Mexican woman now make up nearly half of workforce. With greater economic freedom has come popular acceptance for single women who head households. President Enrique Pena Nieto recently announced a new federal life insurance program for single mothers. Under the program, the children will be taken care of in case of the death of the mother. As the president put it, single mothers are the “most appreciated, most loved member holding the family together.”

Anthropologist and editor of a feminist journal, Marta Llamas says Mexico is modernizing, opening up economically and in turn becoming more accepting. Though the country’s roots are strongly Catholic, Llamas says, 80 percent of Mexican women say they use contraceptives. But motherhood in Mexico, she says, has been the “normal destiny” of a woman.

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In Mexico, comedy and scandal expose class schism

AFP, 5/10/2013

How the mighty have fallen in Mexico — at least on movie screens and in social media. A comedy lampooning the rich has become the highest-grossing film in Mexican cinema history, with five million moviegoers laughing at the story of a construction tycoon fooling his spoilt children into a life of poverty. “Nosotros Los Nobles” (“We Are The Nobles”) has hit a nerve — or the funny bone — in a country with one of the widest income gaps in the world, where 10 percent of the people control 40 percent of the wealth while almost half live in poverty.

Then last month, in a real-life scene that could have come right from the script, inspectors from the Profeco consumer protection agency tried to close a restaurant after their boss’s daughter complained she was denied her table of choice. But the tables turned on her when Mexicans denounced her behavior on Twitter, dubbing her #LadyProfeco. Some mocked her as a daddy’s girl, asking her to shut down a volcano spewing ash, but many saw it as the latest example of the elite’s sense of entitlement.

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Mexico’s abusive well-heeled and well-connected suffer rare comeuppance after traffic accident

The Washington Post, 5/9/2013

The arrogant among Mexico’s well-heeled got a sharp rebuke Thursday, when two women who crashed in a Porsche and injured a pedestrian were hauled off to jail while threatening police and proclaiming their political connections after what authorities said appeared to be an all-night drinking spree. Federal authorities, meanwhile, suspended four officials in the country’s consumer protection agency for allegedly punishing a restaurant that had angered the daughter of the agency’s chief prosecutor last month.

Mexicans have long complained about such behavior, but social media have made it easier to document and ridicule people involved, as happened with both incidents, and tolerance for such behavior has dropped. Police officers, who get little pay and less respect, often bear the brunt of the arrogant, and traffic stops involving politicians’ relatives can end with the threatening phrase, “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”

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Obama in Mexico: Little talk of human rights

The Christian Science Monitor, 5/3/2013

It didn’t appear to get much play in the meeting between presidents, but civil society organizations in Mexico and the United States say they hope human rights will be higher on the bilateral agenda than they have in recent years.

Making respect for human rights central to the US-Mexico security strategy is a critical issue for those who have suffered at the hands of soldiers, police, investigators, and other authorities here.

Abuses mounted over the past six years, as the Mexican government deployed the military to police communities wracked by drug-related violence. The US has recognized Mexico’s shortcomings on human rights, but some say it and the Mexican government haven’t done enough to encourage change.

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