Balloon launch over the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan

Morning balloon launch over Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan. We got to the site at just the right moment.

Cindy and I have been to Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) a couple of times before, but the scale of the place never ceases to impress us. So when the staff at the university invited us to join a Sunday tour with other international students and professors, we said sure.

We had a pleasant surprise when we got to the site, which is about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. A balloon launch was under way. It looked at first like an invasion of the aliens.

Guangxi: Terraced rice paddies, sugarloaf mountains

Rice paddy near Ping'an

Yao women are famous for their long hair.

A tourism boom is fueling construction of new homes and hotels

 in rural areas.

In Old Drum village

This rice farmer, 70, said he had worked 50 years in the fields.

Ethnic Zhuang and Yao people showed their wares.

Village tucked in between the terraced rice paddies.

We happened upon a rice-planting ceremony. Note the water buffalo to the left.

Guilin is famous for its limestone hills -- karst formations. My
colleague, Yoichi Nishimura, news exec with Asahi Shimbun
in Japan.

Inside a Zhuang family's home.

Related:

Impressions of China
China's grandparents
A little tour of Tsinghua University campus
Chinese adults stay limber with hacky sack


Why the Chinese will never drop their written language
Deciphering China, ideograms to menus
Three days on the Yangtze River
Video: Chinese calligraphy in Xi'an
The madding crowd in the Forbidden City

Hike in hills has auspicious beginning
Beijing revisited, 23 years later
From the Economist: Daily chart: Choked

Thanksgiving in Beijing

Cindy on the campus of neighboring Beijing University. 

Today I am thankful for having a spouse...

....who is comfortable living in a country where she can't speak the language as long as she can figure out how to take the subway wherever she wants.

...who gave up a nice house and all its contents so we could have a couple of years of adventure on the road.

Beijing revisited, 23 years later

I spent a week running around Beijing to meet journalists and people connected to the business journalism program at Tsinghua University where I will start teaching in the fall.

Little is recognizable from a visit I made in 1988. The city and society have packed a century of progress into two decades. Beijing is now like Manhattan with wider streets. Freeways of 10 and 12 lanes ring the city center.  Then it seemed there were 1,000 bicycles for every car; now it is the reverse. I have a few photos from then and now.

China, 1988

Bikes owned the road.

A hutong, courtyard home

The hutong homes once seen everywhere in Beijing are rapidly disappearing. In hutongs, several one-story brick homes surround a coutryard and families share toilet facilities. High-rises, highways and other new constructions are replacing them.

At the People’s Daily, printers were still hand-setting type 23 years ago. Today the media have world-class technology.  

Beijing today

High-rises surround the Tsinghua University campus

The National Center for the Performing Arts, also known as the Egg, is one of many avant-garde buildings in Beijing. The Egg houses several large concert halls. The massive scale of the place is not, unfortunately, captured in this photo.  

China’s economic success has made many people nostalgic for the simpler life of the old days. This night club is a kind of Cultural Revolution dinner theater, where songs from the era are performed. The Long March ballet was amazing. The restaurant’s tasty peasant style food was served by waiters in Red Army garb.

Christmas in Oaxaca and Monte Albán

As we were walking through the streets of Oaxaca, we happened on a religious procession honoring the Virgin Mary. The Virgin is perhaps more important than Jesus to Mexicans, especially those who mix Catholicism with native beliefs.

In the state of Oaxaca (the capital has the same name), there are 15 different native languages spoken. The dominant local one is Zapotec, with some 500,000 speakers. Mexico´s first and only indigenous president, Benito Juarez, was a Zapotec from Oaxaca.

In a cafe on the town square we met up with Olga Rosario Avendaño and Victor Ruiz, a couple who have a news website, Olor a Mi Tierra (The Scent of My Homeland), that specializes in covering human rights, the environment and local culture of the state of Oaxaca.

Victor and Olga have both taken courses with me through the Digital Journalism Center. Their biggest audience is in Mexico City and the U.S., where residents of Oaxaca go to find work.


These angels were part of the procession mentioned above.



In the south of Mexico, native languages and culture are more important. The people here have less-European features.
























Monte Albán is one of the most important pre-Columbian archeological sites in Mexico. The city was founded in 500 B.C. as a ceremonial center and was important for the next 1,300 years.

The scale of it is impressive, but it´s not as big as Teotihuacan, which is near Mexico City.

The people who built this site had a form of writing, a mix of hieroglyphics and ideographs. The stories they tell are of conquest of other local peoples. History as usual is all about war, one people taking away other people´s stuff.







This is a ball court. Players would use the angled walls, originally smooth, to steer the ball toward the goal. The ball game evidently had an astronomical significance.

At some sites, evidence suggests that the losers of a ball game were ritually sacrificed. There is no evidence of such a practice at Monte Albán.

Bolivia's media titans and a photojournalism show

This is Jose Pomacusi, who is Bolivian President Evo Morales's scourge in the news media. Pomacusi, 41, is the news director for Unitel, the country's most-watched television network. It has grabbed ratings with its soap operas and its sensationalistic and right-leaning news coverage. When Evo Morales talks about the press being his No. 1 enemy, Unitel is at the top of the list.
The station is owned by the Santa Cruz-based Monasterio family, whose interests include soybean farming, banking and other businesses. Monasterio reflects sentiments of most businesspeople in Santa Cruz, who oppose the government's plan for redistributing land to indigenous people, the nationalization of various industries and the centralization of political power in La Paz.
Pomacusi told me in an interview that he is not trying to advance any particular political philosophy, only to serve the public. However, neutral observers can easily identify the station's anti-government and pro-business tendencies.



























Pedro Rivero is director (editor-in-chief) of El Deber and son of the newspaper's founder. The Rivero family is one of the few media owners in the country whose primary business is media. That is to say that most news media owners use their outlets to advance political or business agendas, like the Monasterios. El Deber has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the country, about 30,000 daily and 50,000 Sunday (figures are not audited and some say these numbers are on the high side), and is the voice of the Media Luna, the four eastern provinces which favor autonomy.

The Riveros take journalism very seriously, and their news columns are generally very balanced and fair in their treatment of issues. Their editorial page reflects Santa Cruz sentiments, but El Deber also carries opinion pieces by those who favor President Morales and his party.

Big complaints about the news media

When conversations turn toward the news media, few have anything good to say. The general public complains about sensationalism in television news coverage, particularly aggressive coverage of grieving families. The commonly expressed view is that the press is unethical, politically slanted, nosy, tasteless and too concerned with trivia, celebrities and sensuality.

The socialist government complains about right-leaning news coverage from media that are owned by, in their words, big land-owners and big businesses with an opposition agenda.



Erick Torrico is being interviewed here as he presented a study by the Media Observatory, a nonpartisan organization which describes and analyzes the performance of news media in the country. A lot of its funding comes from European and U.S foundations. No surprise that the observatory found big weaknesses in the press in terms of training, execution and fairness. Although there was a fair amount of publicity about his presentation, only a handful of people showed up.
El Deber summarized the study in today's paper.

The organization asked 33 "social leaders" in the community of Santa Cruz, "Do journalists work in a professional manner?" Only one-fourth of those polled responded "always" or "nearly always" and 39 percent responded "almost never." Of those polled, 4 in 10 felt that the press's professionalism had deteriorated in the past five years. And finally, when asked which news medium had the best information, printed media came in strongest with 48% of those polled, radio 39% and TV 3%. Nine percent didn't like any news medium.

At a time of big changes in the country, every story is a political story. For consumers of news, that often leads to baffling news articles in which there is extensive coverage of opposing views of an issue (nationalization of the gas industry) with too little probing into the facts at the root of the debate. A reader often is left with many, many questions. Still, daily newspapers tend to be voices of reason in the media landscape, with the space and time to give some depth and balance to issues.

A push for controls on the news media

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Assembly is in the process of drafting a new constitution for the country, and indications are that there is strong sentiment for putting controls on the news media. El Nuevo Dia had a story about this in yesterday's paper......


One part of the draft says that the ownership and control of news media "shall not reflect a monopolistic or oligarchic character in opposition to society in general and indigenous people, workers and those of African descent." This sounds as if it would outlaw most of the mass media as they now exist.

Given the complaints about the media, controls could win popular support. There is fear that Bolivia will start to follow in the footsteps of Venezuela, whose president and Morales supporter, Hugo Chavez, has fined and closed down opposition media.




Work by Santa Cruz photojournalists

All of these photos were in a photojournalism show here in Santa Cruz
This little boy showed up for the first day of school without his uniform. The Superman symbol seems to be no consolation.


A supporter of the president´s MAS party shows her displeasure with one of a group supporting autonomy from the central government Dec. 15 in San Julian.



























This year´s El Niño effect produced widespread flooding in farming areas.



Bodies of victims of a bus crash are lined up along the road. Fatal crashes are common. Drivers are overworked and often drunk. Guardrails are rare.




Most public schools here are in sorry shape.

Carnaval parade in Cochabamba

The Corso Infantil, or kids' parade, in Cochabamba, was interesting to see after a day in Oruro seeing an adult version. (That was spectacular; see next post) The kids' parade involved a lot of interaction between the participants and the crowd. Kids in the crowd used big soaker water-guns or cans of foam to shoot at each other and at the kids in the parade.
Certain people seemed to be identified as non-combatants and therefore escaped attack. Grandfatherly and grandmotherly types, very small children, people without protective plastic smocks and the Aymara and Quechua vendors of spuma (foam), water balloons and snacks.


There was a lot of warfare going on. Among the images you see are an Inca queen with a golden backdrop behind her throne, a devil dancer, a little chola girl in a white hat, a chola woman selling a can of foam, $1.25 each.

Frontier justice

In the past few weeks there have been two big stories in the papers about vigilante groups killing supposed malefactors. A few days ago, villagers in an indigenous community, Puesto Nuevo, got together at a meeting and passed a death sentence on a 38-year-old father of six who they believed was a witch. There had been a series of three unexplained deaths in the town and they decided it was this guy´s fault. It was never clear in the articles why they suspected him. The townspeople grabbed the guy, locked him in a trunk and threw it into a bonfire. Two schoolteachers were among those leading the mob. They freely admitted what they had done and said it was just community justice. The authorities are investigating.
A few weeks before that, the mototaxi drivers of a the community of San Julián responded when one of their colleagues was beaten within an inch of his life by robbers. The injured driver named one of his attackers, and the mototaxistas went looking for him. First they found the suspect's brother, 16. They threatened to burn him to death unless he told them where to find the suspect. Then they found the older brother, 17, who was evidently the leader of a group that had been attacking and robbing mototaxi drivers in the area. At least one other mototaxi driver had beeen killed. The mob found a stolen mototaxi at the suspect's house.

The mob led the brothers into the public square where, by now, some 12 hours into the drama, the news media and police had also gathered. But no one dared stop the mob, who put the younger brother on a pedestal for public judgment and beat the other one to death with sticks, stones and fists. All of this was recorded on film.

The photos show the body of the older brother, and the younger brother during his public display, after the beating and in a jail cell, where the public is making fun of him. Photos are from El Deber and El Nuevo Dia.
We of course have our own history of frontier justice for rustlers, robbers and suspected killers Out West, and of racially motivated lynchings well into the 20th century.