New England Public Radio

After a week of fighting between civilian militias, drug traffickers and federal forces, there is a tense calm in the western Mexico state of Michoacan.

It’s been the site of clashes between civilian militias defending themselves from ruthless drug traffickers, and federal forces trying to regain control.

For now, businesses are slowly reopening, school will restart on Monday, and the militias who took up arms have put down their weapons. It’s unclear how long this fragile peace will last.

About 20 men stand guard at the main intersection on the road into the Michoacan town of Nueva Italia. Some are young, some old. A few wear T-shirts identifying them as the civilian militia — or self-defense patrols, as they call themselves.

There are no arms in sight, except for a pistol one young man has strapped to his belt.

All say they’ve had run-ins with the Knights Templar. That’s the drug cartel that rules this region, which is known for its limes, avocados and tempestuous residents. The area also has a reputation for rebellion.

Joel Gutierrez says residents here are sick of the cartel kidnapping, murdering and stealing.

“That’s why we took up arms,” says Gutierrez, 19. “The local and state police did nothing to protect us.”

Federal Police Once Encouraged Militias

He should know. Gutierrez says last summer he was at a neighbor’s house when he heard Knights Templar cartel members screech up their dirt road in several cars.

He took off running. He says the gang took his parents, his grandparents and three cousins. They haven’t been heard from since.

Another man at the checkpoint says he was held with his two brothers until his family paid a ransom. And nearly everyone talks about having to pay quotas, or being forced to sell their crops to the drug cartel at below-market prices.

The militia men have been patrolling their towns and inspecting cars at checkpoints like this one for nearly a year. All that time, federal police did little to stop them, and at times seemed to encourage the movement.

But that tacit approval appeared to end last weekend, when the number of the militias mushroomed and surrounded Apatzingan, a town of 100,000 people and the Knights Templar’s stronghold. A major battle between the militias and the cartel seemed imminent.

The federal government sent in thousands of police and troops to disarm the civilian patrols. A deadly confrontation ensued. Federal soldiers fired into a crowd of civilian militia supporters, killing two.

‘Terrorizing Us For More Than A Decade’

Militia leader Estanislao Beltran says the government should have gone after the real criminals, the Knights Templar, and not those defending themselves. He vehemently denies rumors that he takes funds from a rival group.

“The cartels have been terrorizing us for more than a decade,” Beltran says. “Why would we side with any of them?”

In fact, the Knights Templar is just the latest group to control the meth and marijuana trade here. A break-off of the former Familia Michoacan cartel, the Knights Templar members are known for their quasi-religious preachings and ruthless violence, which quickly expanded beyond drug trafficking and into extortion and kidnapping.

Beltran says for now, the militia is willing to store their weapons.

“We would like to give the federal police the chance to show us they can control this problem,” he says. But he adds, short of arresting the cartel leaders and their lieutenants, the group will not retreat.

Since the killing of the two civilians, the federal forces have backed away from their plan to disarm the militias.

The escalating violence in Michoacan has become the biggest security problem for President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has tried to downplay the drug war since coming into office 13 months ago.

This week, the government appointed a trusted Pena Nieto ally to coordinate security and development in Michoacan.

But for now, dozens of checkpoints in the region remain manned by the civilian militias. Heavily armed federal police watch nearby in pickup trucks. The militia no longer carry their rifles or assault weapons in plain sight, but they say their arms are close by if the Knights Templar come back.

Gutierrez, whose whole family is missing, says he’s in the fight for the long run.

“We have to stop the Knights Templar for the kids that still live here,” he says. “Hopefully we can bring back the peace and stop the injustice … if not, this insanity will never end.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Four years ago Sunday, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, destroying its capital of Port-au-Prince and killing more than 200,000 people.

Today, much of Port-au-Prince looks like it did before the quake. Most of the tent camps in the city itself are gone, and streets are loaded with overcrowded buses and women selling vegetables.

Most of those whose lives were upended by the quake are back in some kind of home. Most of the rubble has been cleared from the streets. The severely damaged presidential palace has finally been razed. And the government is rebuilding its ministries downtown.

But for nearly 150,000 people, life hasn’t moved on. They still live in the temporary plastic and plywood structures erected after the disaster.

What Keeps Them There

“It’s the worst place to be in Haiti,” says Gregoire Goodstein, mission chief for the International Organization for Migration. “We’re talking about the higher hanging fruit; people who are unable to get out of the tent camp system because they really don’t have any other solutions for themselves.”

Goodstein says it’s possible the final resettlements could wrap up next year, but that depends on major factors, like hurricane season. Haiti is also planning parliamentary elections, and there’s fear electoral violence could overtake the city, slowing down all government functions.

The government says there’s one major obstacle to resettling the final 150,000 people: money.

“It will take $800 per person to get them out of the camps,” says Harry Adam, who heads the Haitian government agency that’s spearheading the reconstruction. “It’s quite a big amount of money.”

Some of that $800 goes to residents as rent subsidies — cash to help them get into a safe home.

No Water, No Electricity

Meanwhile, 271 official tent camps dot the region. The Haitian government recognizes these sites, and each tenant has been registered by NGOs. They’re perched on dangerously steep mountainsides and pack busy street corners. There’s a cluster of tents in view of a Porsche dealership.

Rosemary Durvessaint lives with her two children in a three-room hodgepodge of corrugated tin, cardboard and tarps that reads “USAID. From the American People.”

Since May she’s lived in Titanyen, a cluster of tents and ramshackle houses growing up north of Port-au-Prince. Titanyen is one of the unsanctioned camps on land the government declared free to the public, and thousands have taken advantage — creating new homes along the dusty, dry mountainsides.

As the wind rips through and the structure struggles to hang on, it’s hard to see this as safer than before the quake, but Durvessaint says the government has done nothing for the people out here.

“We don’t have water, we don’t have light,” she says. “We don’t have electricity.”

A New City With Old Problems

Peter de Clercq is the new humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations. He says international donors have moved on to other crises, and Haiti needs to transition away from relying on outsiders.

It needs to demonstrate “clearly and visibly to the international community that it’s capable of taking care of these basic services,” he says.

Basic services like water and sanitation aren’t even guaranteed in Port-au-Prince, let alone Titanyen, yet residents say they’re likely to stay permanently.

That’s okay for Adam, the reconstruction chief. He says Titanyen and the new villages will one day be the northern reaches of Port-au-Prince. He’s pledging $6 million in aid for water and sanitation projects in the area.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The use of social media is exploding in Brazil. It’s the third largest market for Facebook; fifth largest for Twitter.

The controversial women-only app Lulu recently launched here and quickly became the top downloaded app in the country, making Brazil Lulu’s biggest market.

“I think it is cool because it’s a social network for what all women throughout history have always done,” says 20-year-old Marcela, as she taps away at the Lulu app on her iPhone. “Talk about the guys we like; the guys we think are handsome.”

In case you have been living in isolation in a cave in Tibet — or are over 25 — Lulu is the girls-only application linked to your Facebook account that allows you to anonymously rate your exes, your current boyfriend or your male friends with hashtags like #Mommasboy, #IncurableRomantic or #BurpsAndFarts, among many others.

Created by entrepreneur Alexandra Chong, Lulu started in the U.S. and took off. Its first foray into the international market was in Brazil.

An App Made For Brazil

“In the first week [in Brazil], there were 5 million visits by girls [and] 300 million profiles used,” Chong said in an interview.

Social media in Brazil is booming, analysts say, because it taps into some fundamental Brazilian traits: sociability, a love of communicating and a consumer culture that prizes anything new. All this made Brazil the obvious market for Lulu, says Deborah Singer, the company’s marketing director.

Singer says Lulu makes some men uncomfortable at first. “But once they see how the app works, that it’s multiple choice [and] they can’t write whatever they want, overall the reviews tend to be very positive,” she says. “That’s when we convert them and they really start to see the value of Lulu.”

But if you try to get onto Lulu today in Brazil, you’ll see a banner reading: “Lulu is on vacation, happy Christmas. We are renovating during the holidays and we will be back soon.”

Lulu has been faced with lawsuits by men who say their privacy has been violated, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office has even launched an inquiry.

A Privacy Backlash

Law student Felippo de Almeida Scolari is among those unhappy with Lulu. He says a friend showed him a screen shot of his Lulu profile with all of the hashtags about him. “I got revolted because I saw things about my intimate life exposed on the Internet for anyone to see,” he says.

Almeida Scolari says Facebook got his information and used it for something he didn’t expressly authorize. He says the fight is to regulate privacy on the Internet, and wants Lulu to comply with Brazilian law.

The problem is Brazilian law is still in flux, and legislation is only just being created to deal with the rise of social media.

“In the Brazilian Constitution, freedom of expression is guaranteed,” says Fernando Baptista, an independent researcher on Internet use. “But the Constitution also says there can’t be anonymity in this expression. So if I rate someone, that’s not the problem, but the anonymity could be. That’s the debate right now.”

And it’s not only a discussion about Lulu. Last month, two girls killed themselves after sexually explicit photos of them were distributed through social media. One congressman has proposed legislation that would make so called “revenge porn” illegal. In the past few months there has been a raft of other laws passed dealing with Internet hacking, identity theft and racism on the Internet.

More broadly, Brazil’s Congress is expected to pass sweeping Internet legislation in 2014 that will deal with issues of privacy, among other things.

As for Lulu, it promises to be back this year and says it will now only use the profiles of men who have agreed to opt in. In the meantime, it has launched a marketing campaign to get guys to agree to be rated.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In Mexico, Dec. 12 is the day to celebrate the country’s most revered religious icon: the Virgin of Guadalupe.

As many as 6 million pilgrims have made their way to the Mexican capital to pay homage to the country’s patron saint on Thursday, and one woman has taken her devotion of the Virgin and turned it into a multimillion-dollar company.

Amparo Serrano, the owner of a company called Distroller, says it’s customary on holiday to ask the Virgin of Guadalupe for something. The requests usually fall in the health or wealth categories, but she likes to lighten the religious mood and ask the Virgin for other things.

“Why not ask the Virgin to help you get rid of your cellulite or find a new boyfriend?” Serrano says. “Or, ‘Please tell my mother-in-law to go away for a little bit.’ “

Those are the kinds of messages she prints on dozens of products with her sparkling cartoon depictions of the Virgin, all with a “please” at the end. She spells it plis, as you would phonetically read it in Spanish. You can find her chubby-cheeked Virgencita Plis now on pens, notebooks, pajamas, plates and picture frames. All of her items are packaged at Serrano’s warehouse, tucked away in the hills of southern Mexico City.

On the warehouse floor, there are a pile of Converse shoe boxes. Last year, Distroller signed a deal with the shoe giant. Serrano says she is very careful about what she puts the Virgencita on, and shoes didn’t seem appropriate. Socks, maybe, but not shoes. Instead, she decorated them with her line of doll characters, the same ones she puts on sanitary napkins.

This year, Distroller sales will top $5 million. Wal-Mart picked up her doll line, and she penned a deal with Cartoon Network. Her lawyer says licensing fees will bring in another $45 million.

That’s quite a feat considering Serrano started out 10 years ago with nothing, she says, and with little confidence. She says she never planned on this being a business.

“I’m very passionate about what I do, so I never thought that anyone was going to pay for a thing that I did, really,” she says.

Serrano comes from a very prominent and religious Mexican family, and says her animated products make religion fun and accessible to young people. She’s perplexed that people would say she is making fun of the revered Virgin.

Mexico’s Catholic Church agrees. “It is something positive, and to us it is not in bad taste at all,” says Father Pablo Pedrazi.

But outside the Grand Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, reaction among devotees is mixed. One mother says she loves that her kids want purses and notebooks with the Virgencita. But Angelica Espinoza, a mother of three small children, is not happy. She says she thinks it’s just a passing fad, and she wants her children to worship the real image.

Serrano shrugs off the criticism. Business is booming, and she is deeply flattered by the idea that the Virgencita is like the Hello Kitty of Mexico. She hopes her colorful images will travel well beyond her country. She has stores in Spain, Colombia and Ecuador, and hopefully soon in the United States.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.