Brooke and WNYC reporter Marianne McCune report from Mexico City about how the Mexican media is grappling with the country's upcoming presidential elections, and the youth movement that is tired of business-as-usual.

Los Lobos - El Gusto

Over the past couple years, violence in Ciudad Juarez has fallen from its peak levels, but the city (along with its neighbor accross the border, El Paso) is still trying to revitalize its image. Marianne McCune talks to the mayors of El Paso and Juarez about what they're doing to accomplish this, the 2010 decision to leave Juarez off of an El Paso tourism map, and the recent decision to add it back to the map.

Just across the border from El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez is notorious for the violence that has accompanied a long war between cartels. Marianne McCune goes to Juarez to see how the once-epicenter of Mexico’s drug violence has changed the city and the reporters who risk their lives to cover it.

I’ve been interviewing people who write about depressing things. Journalists, currently in Mexico City, who’ve spent a good part of the past decade (or more) covering horrifying murders, over and over again. The death toll since President Felipe Calderon launched his war on the drug cartels in 2006 is in the tens of thousands. Thirty five thousand? Eighty thousand? Many here dispute the number of murders and disappearances and that’s because only a tiny percentage of them are ever investigated, much less solved.

One of my favorite features of Mexico City is the blank billboards. The ones for which no one has bought an ad. All that remains are quadrants of empty space, beautiful geometric shapes in shades of grey and beige that gain color from this city’s extraordinary evening skies.