El Llano park in Oaxaca City is just one of the places in Mexico where you’re likely to hear this…

[DISTANT WHISTLE IN PARK]

That’s the sound of steam-cooked plantains and yams…well, the sound of the cart they travel in. The cart itself is an icon of street vendor ingenuity.  Its owner, Cesar Perez, explains.

CESAR PEREZ (voiceover): “This cart works with steam. I’m gonna make the sound for you. This sound is to let people know that the yam and plantain vendor is on the way. (STEAM WHISTLE sound)

The whistle works in the same way as an ice cream truck’s jingle. The sound projects for a couple of blocks, giving customers time to collect spare change and head outside by the time the vendor passes by.

[PARK TONE]

Local people call this invention a “camotero cart,” after the Spanish word “camote,” or “yam”. The cart resembles a rustic locomotive. It has a metal barrel that lies on its side, with a hole cut on the outer end. That’s where Perez feeds the wood that fuels the fire. The plantains and yams rest in a drawer situated over the flames. The smoke escapes through a sheet metal stovepipe on top.

The fire just keeps the food warm. Perez says the actual cooking process occurs before he hits the street.

CESAR PEREZ (voiceover): “You have to let the food cook to a certain point. Because if it only cooks a little bit, it tastes nasty. So it needs 2 hours of cooking before I leave home in order for it to be done.”

The end result is yams and bananas with a soft texture and smoky baked flavor that’s not easy to duplicate at home.

Meanwhile, every so often, water from an upside-down soda bottle releases steam into the cart’s cooking chamber. That keeps the food from drying out. The steam also creates the distinctive whistle sound when it escapes from the metal barrel through a special tube.

CESAR PEREZ (voiceover): “When the water falls on the hot part of the tube, it’s expelled at fairly high pressure which is what produces the little noise.”

The whistle on Perez’s home made cart has a pitch that’s a bit lower than others – something he did on purpose.

CESAR PEREZ (voiceover): “It’s different because each person has their own sound. That way they know it’s Mr. Cesar’s cart, of Mr. Julio’s or Gilberto’s – they know how to distinguish the sounds sometimes.”

The sound of the steam whistle is something that’s ingrained in the memory of Bernardo Sanchez, a young man who walks up to purchase one of Perez’s plantains.

BERNARDO SANCHEZ (voiceover): “Ever since I was little, I remember buying plantains from the cart that passed by my house. Now it’s a matter of tradition. Every time we hear this type of whistle, we know that they’re the baked plantains.”

The carts are also powered by traditional methods: some are pushed by hand and some use front-loader cargo tricycles. Either way takes effort, since a cart can weigh well over 100 pounds. Perez prefers the tricycle model, saying it allows him to cover more ground with less exertion.

[PARK SOUND, KIDS PLAYING]

After a couple of sales, Perez makes a wide loop around the park then heads off on the city streets, whistling along the way.

[DISTANT WHISTLE, PARK SOUNDS]

For the World Vision Report, I’m Shannon Young in Oaxaca, Mexico.

(NOTE: This segment originally aired on the January 9, 2010 program of the World Vision Report.)

Brightly colored murals decorate the walls of Mexico City's Las Duelistas pulquería

Pulque is a Mexican drink made from the fermented sap of the agave plant. It’s a mildly alcoholic beverage that’s been consumed in Mexico for thousands of years. The drink has fallen out of fashion in modern Mexico, but as reporter Shannon Young tell us, some scientific research is backing up the traditional believe that pulque is good for you. She reports from Mexico City.

At the dawn of the 20th century, pulque bars known as “pulquerías” were everywhere in Mexico City. Now, only a few dozen remain. Pulque has a fresh, slightly acidic flavor and a thick consistency. It’s either served plain or blended with fruits or vegetables – like a smoothie.

Pulque fell out of favor due to a combination of the rise in beer consumption, unfounded rumors about bad production hygiene, and its stigmatization as a drink for the poor.

Seventy-five year old Leopoldo López Garcia is the owner of “La Antigua Roma” – a pulquería which has been in business for over a century. López witnessed pulque’s heyday in his childhood and then its slow and steady decline.

LEOPOLDO LOPEZ GARCIA (voiceover): “It’s a real shame – and not because I have a stake in the matter – that an authentic

Pulque "curado" - or flavored - with fruit

national product like this is disappearing. And the saddest part is how they’ve disparaged it. It’s sad and it’s what hurts us most. Meanwhile – wine, beer and other types of drinks are flying sky high. There are very few pulquerías nowadays – even though I believe it’s a product that’s really less harmful than the others.”

The effect of pulque on human health is a topic of interest to Luis Raul Tovar, a nutrition researcher at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute.

LUIS RAUL TOVAR: “We are trying to revive – based on scientific facts – a drink that seems to be pretty good.”

Tovar and his fellow researchers found that pulque contains a digestive enzyme, called phytase, which helps to unlock nutrients found in several foods, among them – corn.

LUIS RAUL TOVAR: “And one of the main staples of this country is corn. What drinking pulque does is that – having this phytase activity – and having your tortillas and chili and beans and so forth, you make much more available iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium.”

Don Bonefacio Garcia harvesting maguey sap

Like wine – another alcoholic beverage with health benefits – pulque works best when consumed in moderation. I asked Tovar if people could survive on a diet of corn, beans, chili peppers… basically the Mexican subsistence diet…if it’s combined with pulque.

LUIS RAUL TOVAR: “I’m not sure about that to tell you the truth. It’d be nice if you can eat other things too, ya know…but, if there is a crisis, it’d be good to have pulque again in the country”.

[sound from La Antigua Roma pulquería]

Back in La Antigua Roma, pulque fan Felipe Ramirez, tells how the drink helped his family through a crisis in the late 1920s.

FELIPE RAMIREZ (voiceover): “My grandfather talks about how he clearly remembers a severe drought in his early childhood. During the shortage of food and water, their diet was based on pulque, maguey worms, and small wild fruits. My grandfather credits pulque with his survival.”

Behind the bar at Las Duelistas pulquería

While it is possible to get drunk with pulque, it requires relatively large amounts of the filling beverage. Ramirez runs a blog about the remaining pulquerías in greater Mexico City. It’s some of the only publicity pulque has received in a long time.

FELIPE RAMIREZ (voiceover): “I feel that this drink is worth saving so that it can nourish not only our generation and the ones that come after – but so that it’s valued as an ancestral drink and as a handcrafted drink – as something that’s worth knowing how it’s made and why it’s still made. It’s worth saving so that other people can enjoy what we are enjoying right now.”

The publicity seems to be having an impact says owner Leopoldo López Garcia, who has run La Antigua Roma for 45 years.

LEOPOLDO LOPEZ GARCIA (voiceover): “It’s changed in relation to the clientèle. Young people never used to come before, now they’re the main customers; twenty to twenty-five year olds.”

But something tells me these 20-somethings may not be drinking pulque precisely for its health benefits.

[This story originally aired on The World Vision Report. You can find my slide show on the making of pulque here.]

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://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.]

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.

Mientras tanto, a convocatoria de dos reconocidos sacerdotes, dos de los 3 grupos que se disputan el control político de la región triqui aceptan participar en mesa de diálogo: o MULT, acusado participar en el cerco paramilitar sobre Copala,  y  MULT-I, organización detras del municipio autónomo, finalmente no consiguen reunirse con los representantes de la iglesia porque MULT-I exige primero detener la violencia.

AUDIOS:

Reyna Martínez Flores – vocera del plantón de las Mujeres en Resistencia

[dewplayer:http://southnotes.org/radio/Copala/Sept20HuelgaDeHambre_ReynaMtzFlores.mp3]

Gabriel López Chiñas – Comité Ejecutivo Seccional de la Seccion 22 (el sindicato de maestros oaxaqueños)

[dewplayer:http://southnotes.org/radio/Copala/Sept20HuelgaDeHambre_CES_GabrielLopezChinas.mp3]

Pascual de Jesus González – representante de la comision de dialogo del MULT

[dewplayer:http://southnotes.org/radio/Copala/Pascual-Mult_20sept2010_Xochimilco.mp3]

Arturo Lona Reyes – Obispo Emérito de Tehuantepec

[dewplayer:http://southnotes.org/radio/Copala/ObispoArturoLona_20sept10_Xochimilco.mp3]

Wilfrido “Padre Uvi” Mayrén – Comisión Diocesana de Justicia y Paz de Oaxaca

[dewplayer:http://southnotes.org/radio/Copala/Uvi_20sept2010_Xochimilco.mp3]

Today was to mark the start of emergency church mediated talks between MULT-I, the organization behind the autonomous municipality, and MULT, one of the groups accused of participating in the paramilitary siege of Copala. The other group is the UBISORT, which has been linked to the PRI, the political party which has ruled Oaxaca for 8 consecutive decades.

In a press conference to announce the start of their hunger strike, displaced spokesperson Reyna Martínez Flores announced that MULT-I would cancel its participation in the dialogue due to a surge of violence over the weekend. She and the other protestors want security guarantees for the evacuation of autonomy sympathizers trapped in the town, among them, two people over the age of 90.

The displaced say Paulino Ramírez Reyes was killed in Copala over the weekend. Another man, David García Ramírez, is feared dead. Jordan Gonzales Ramírez and Susana López are missing. It’s unknown if they were successfully able to flee Copala. An unnamed woman and child were also reported as injured.

Women in the protest encampment say a “considerable group” of their people were able to escape the town Saturday night and make their way to other communities, but that around 30 people have been unable to leave Copala.

Oaxaca state police went into San Juan Copala over the weekend to transport 3 wounded women to a Oaxaca City hospital and to search for the body of David García Ramírez.

The police made no arrests while in the town.

A week ago, the state government had agreed to send 15 tons of food and 2 state police patrols to Copala in exchange for the women moving their protest encampment out of the central plaza – or Zócalo – ahead of Bicentennial celebrations. The women kept their word, but food aid and police patrols never arrived.

The displaced women say they don’t trust the state government to take any action against those accused of maintaining the siege of Copala. The federal government has remained silent on the issue.

Members of San Juan Copala’s indigenous autonomy movement say armed men from rival factions entered the town Monday, took over the local government building, and fired off automatic weapons. A local woman was reportedly injured by a high-caliber bullet, but has been unable to leave the town or seek medical attention.

A communiqué alleges that pro-autonomy residents have been given an ultimatum to either leave the town or face death.

Around 25 women and children displaced from San Juan Copala have been living in a protest encampment in downtown Oaxaca City since August 11th. They are all members of the movement that declared the town an autonomous municipality in January 2007.

The women moved their protest encampment a few blocks on Monday night from the central plaza (or zócalo) to the Santo Domingo church area. The state government had agreed to send tons of food and two police patrols to San Juan Copala in exchange for having the main square cleared of protests for the duration of Bicentennial celebrations.

Aside from the most recent reports of an armed incursion into San Juan Copala, two other violent events have marked the past 30 days in the region. Three people were killed and 2 injured in an ambush on August 22nd while organizing a caravan that aimed to allow women to safely leave the conflict zone. The caravan, which was due to leave the region the next day, was cancelled and has not been re-scheduled.

On Monday, Amnesty International called on the government to provide safety guarantees for 2 women who were attacked on September 7th as they went out to find food. One was allegedly gang raped and beaten upon capture while the other was shot while escaping on foot.

The territorial dispute over San Juan Copala has been deteriorating into a downward spiral of violence since late last year with the number of dead and injured growing each month. It’s precisely this level of violence makes reports from the area difficult – if not impossible – to independently confirm.

What is clear is that none of the alleged perpetrators have been taken into police custody and government authorities have demonstrated a lack of political will to ensure public security in the conflict zone.

The four companies that hold the patents on biotech seeds tout the technology as a solution to world hunger.

Pat Mooney, Executive Director of the non-profit ETC group, was on the conference’s international steering committee until he resigned in protest a few days ago over what he says is a bias in the conference documentation and a lack of space for opposing viewpoints.

Mooney said he’s particularly concerned about the position of the Mexican government in light of a recent announcement of 24 field trial of genetically-modified corn.  “The fear here” said Mooney “is that Mexico’s going to walk away from this conference saying ‘well, we brought the international community to Mexico, to the center of diversity for corn and everyone thought that biotech was lovely’. And so they can walk away saying that now they’ve got the approval of the United Nations for what they’re doing.”

Groups critical of the biotech industry’s role in agriculture have gathered in Guadalajara to hold parallel events. Participation in the FAO conference itself is by invitation only.