Canadian officials and diplomats will now have to obtain visas before coming to Mexico, but the new restrictions will not affect Canadian tourists. Mexico’s tourist industry was severely hit by the H1N1 flu outbreak earlier this year. The adding of restrictions for travelers would only cause a further drop in visitors to the country.

The new measures were made public by Mexico’s foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa, during a meeting with her Canadian counterpart, Lawrence Cannon, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Guadalajara yesterday.

"We have made it absolutely clear that we are not in agreement" with the Canadian decision, Espinosa said.

The Canadian government announced the visa restrictions for Mexican nationals on Monday, only two days before they were due to come into effect. Since then, Mexico City’s Canadian embassy has been descended upon by thousands of Mexicans desperate to process the necessary visa paperwork before the departure of flights they’ve already booked.

The Canadian embassy issued a statement yesterday that said that on Tuesday and Wednesday more than 3,500 people applied for the visas, and that by the end of play Wednesday 1,300 had been processed.

See the video for more.

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Video: At the Canadian embassy in Mexico City. Credit: Deborah Bonello

"Money sent home by Mexicans working abroad fell by 19.9 percent in May, the biggest monthly decline on record as the U.S. recession slashed jobs.

"Remittances dropped to $1.9 billion from $2.4 billion in May 2008, the central bank said on Wednesday. The amount of money sent home in the first five months of 2009 fell 11.3 percent to $9.2 billion compared with the same period last year.

"Remittances are the second-biggest source of foreign currency after oil exports in Mexico, and their decline has contributed to the country’s own economic downturn."

The recession in the United States and related job cuts, combined with the crack down on illegal immigration might tempt some migrants living in El Norte to head home. But things are just as bad if not worse in Mexico.

Even on a normal day, if there were so many great jobs in Mexico then there wouldn’t be12 million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, where they go looking for better job – el Sueno Americano.

But the recession up north is causing the demand for exports to drop. The U.S buys around 80 per cent of Mexico’s exports, so it’s a serious blow for the country. The knock on effect here? More job cuts. So if there already weren’t enough jobs, now it’s only getting worse for Mexico. Swine flu earlier this year didn’t help, and neither do the steady reports of drug related violence from around the country. T

he City Government’s modest program of subsidised soup kitchens and unemployment cheques shouldn’t just be confined to the city. As the informal system of social security that migrants have provided to their families living in Mexico starts to fall away, the pressure on the Government to help out it’s poor and unemployed will only grow.

So far, it’s efforts have largely been limited to the left-leaning city government. So what comes next?

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Orozco toured the Mexico states of Oaxaca, Puebla, Queretaro and San Luis Potosi in his jeep, accompanied by some biologist friends, collecting old, dead nopal (a type of cactus) branches and palm stumps usually used as fuel for burning off fields.

As Ken Ellingwood wrote last year, "many Mexicans feel their leaders have lied so many times about so many things over the years that it’s hard to believe them, even when they might be telling the truth."

The H1N1 / swine flu outbreak that descended on Mexico more than a week ago has provided an abundance of flammable fuel for those partial to conspiracy theories here in Mexico City.

You don’t have time to read, and I don’t have time to write, all of the theories that I’ve heard over the last ten days. But I would like to share my favorite with you, which came out during a conversation I had with Raul Camacho, a 62-year-old taxi driver, on Tuesday last week.

I asked him why he wasn’t wearing a face mask. At the beginning of last week, face masks and plastic gloves were yet to be mandatory for taxi drivers (that happened on Thursday), but everyone had been asked by the government to cover their noses and mouths as a precaution.

Camacho said he wasn’t worried about protecting himself because he didn’t believe the risk was as high as both the federal and city governments would have us believe.

"People in power do or say whatever they like to get what they want," he said.

Camacho then went on to explain to me that Mexico President Felipe Calderon was in fact making the whole thing up in order to give Mexicans the impression that he was taking care of them and saving them from certain and gruesome death.

Camacho referred back to Mexico’s controversial 2006 elections during which Calderon beat the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a voting process that many still claim was fraudulent, and referred to Calderon as "el espurio" (the illegitimate one). Calderon is trying to gain legitimacy with this swine flu "story", claimed Camacho.

OK, I asked, if that’s the case, why is Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, also a member of the opposition PRD party,going along with Calderon’s flu-stopping strategy of closing schools and nonessential services?

Camacho had an answer for that.

"It’s not convenient for Ebrard to fall out with Calderon right now. There are elections coming up in July, and he doesn’t want any trouble before then."

My ride came to an end before I could ask Camacho why the World Health Organization was also in on the plot, but no doubt he’d have had an explanation for that too.

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

  — Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza.

You can’t have failed to notice that Mexico is in the grip of a swine flu outbreak. Schools, museums and theaters are shut, people have been warned by the government not to kiss or shake hands when they say hello, and around half the people on the street are walking around wearing surgical face masks.

But the swine flu outbreak isn’t just taking its toll on people’s health. Local businesses are also starting to suffer as customers stay away. Watch the video for more.

In fact, if I’m honest, it hasn’t been easy to find those who know people who have died from the new strain of flu or who have relatives suffering from them, which isn’t helped by the fact the the Mexican authorities are refusing to publish a list of the dead.

I did find people affected by the illness of course (hey – come on – I’m a snoop) but, well, given that the swine flu has been labeled a pandemic, there’s no panic in the streets, no riots in the hospitals, and no over-supply of sufferers of their families to speak to.

This afternoon outside the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias (INER), which translates as the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, there were at least as many journalists as there were patients or family of patients.

INER, I’m told, is Mexico’s major hospital for respiratory diseases. Cameras had been set up on tripods, and TV hosts were waiting around in their suits to do their pieces to camera. I abandoned my hope of making a video piece.

Slightly up the road from camera-land was the emergency room for respiratory diseases, and outside I found Anna Contreras, a 45-year-old housewife, waiting. Her husband Jose Luis Martinez, a 49-year-old driver, has been at the hospital for over and week and had, according to Contreras, been diagnosed with swine flu, or influenza porcina as it is being called here (the name in itself is political).

She said her husband fell ill about a month ago with body aches and a cold.

We thought it was nothing serious so we took him to private doctors who diagnosed him with having tonsillitis or a sore throat, and a third opinion said that he had the beginnings of bronchitis. But instead of improving with the medication they gave him every time he was worse and worse until around 2 weeks ago I was at the end of my tether.

Jose Luis, she says, lost 12 kilos inside of three weeks.

I brought him here [nearly a week ago] and they diagnosed that he had pneumonia due to influenza.

Does she think he has the never-seen-before swine flu?

“Well, he does have it. But I’m calm, in a way, because most of the others who have come here with the same illness and have been here less time have been put on a breathing machine or have died – that hasn’t happened to my husband. He’s stable, he can speak, he hasn’t been put on a breathing machine.

When I asked her if she knew whether many people were dying in the INER she told me,

Many, many, every day. People are dying here every day.

— Deborah Bonello, MexicoReporter.com

Looking at British newspaper headlines courtesy of the Sky News website, you’d think that the world is in the throes of a Swine Flu epidemic as opposed to a pandemic. CNN International has become an All Swine Flu, All the Time channel judging by my periodic viewing here in Nairobi. Al Jazeera English (where in full disclosure I should say that I’ve consulted for recently) is also giving swine flu considerable coverage but at least is placing the story in a global perspective. It devoted its Inside Story, which you can see above, to the issue of whether the media are hyping the coverage. 150 deaths in Mexico is an alarming story. No doubt about that. But seen from here in Nairobi, there is so far a detachment that is understandable given the yearly malaria death toll. There were nearly 900,000 deaths a year worldwide caused by malaria according to the most recent figues from Global Health Reporting. And 8 of 10 of those were African children. So where’s the Breaking News Coverage? Where’s the constant reminder of what needs to be done? In the Nairobi press a small news item today about the Kenyan government preparing to distribute 11 million mosquito treated bed nets. The report notes that 25 million Kenyans are at risk of being attacked by malaria.

You can’t have failed to notice that Mexico is in the grip of a swine flu outbreak. Schools, museums and theaters are shut, people have been warned by the government not to kiss or shake hands when they say hello, and around half the people on the street are walking around wearing surgical face masks.

But the swine flu outbreak isn’t just taking its toll on people’s health. Local businesses are also starting to suffer as customers stay away. Watch the video for more.

It’s bad. With schools closed, as well as cinemas, theaters and museums, sales for some vendors have dropped by as much as 70%. And it doesn’t look like things are going to get better anytime soon. The usual Monday morning traffic crawl was nowhere to be seen this morning, and I arrived at my office door to door in less than 20 minutes.

About half the people walking around on the streets are using masks, around half are risking it.

For a roundup of the Government reaction to the crisis, you can listen to this BBC Wales morning radio show, who got in touch to ask me about what the situation. You can listen to the program here, my interview is about 10 minutes in.

Dispatch to come.