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Life & Times Transcript

11/28/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

They came to Tijuana hoping to find a better life. Instead, they found themselves infected with AIDS.

Alicia Vera>> You are in a completely new context, completely unfamiliar, and you become vulnerable. Unfortunately, in the aspect of health is that you can be doing things that will put you at risk.

Val Zavala>> And then, they're back after waiting out a four-year home remodeling project. We visit the Los Angeles Zoo's new Campo Gorilla Reserve.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> World AIDS Day is this Saturday and we continue our look at AIDS in Tijuana. You may not realize that, of all the major cities in Mexico, Tijuana has a disturbingly high rate of HIV. Part of the reason is that it's on the border. So why should the border be a risk factor? Well, for some answers, professor and reporter James Hill from Cal State Northridge went to this city of more than a million people.

James Hill>> The port of entry between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro, California is the busiest land border crossing on earth. Fourteen million vehicles a year carry more than forty-five million people northward toward the U.S. Customs checkpoint. Huge foreign manufacturing plants called Maquiladoras dominate nearby hillsides and employ thousands of workers. Maria Nelly Castro says that she came to Tijuana from her native Honduras looking for work.

Maria Nelly Castro>> I have five sons and I couldn't support them there. The job I had wasn't enough to buy them what they needed.

James Hill>> But instead of prosperity, the immigrant only found more poverty and HIV. She told journalism student Natalia Zeyala that she was infected by a man she began living with.

Natalia Zelaya>> What did you know about AIDS before you got infected?

Maria Nelly Castro>> Nothing, because in my country you don't hear much about this illness, to tell you the truth. When I came from over there to Mexico, I was naīve about illnesses.

James Hill>> Tijuana continues to attract immigrants like Castro and place them at risk.

Dr. Manuel Gallardo Cruz>> What we have are many patients that come from the United States and the center of Mexico. They come from different parts of the country. Not everybody is from here. Many are from outside and come already infected.

James Hill>> Many immigrants are desperate to try to enter the United States illegally, but a new double fence snakes its way eastward and bars their path. Slopes on the United States side have been scraped clean of heavy brush and dotted with powerful lights. Fence jumpers like these are simple to spot day or night. Within moments, U.S. Border Patrol agents descend across the network of graded roads and chase the border crossers back into Mexico.

Courtney Crane>> Once they get here, it's difficult to cross. So it's like a stagnant life of, you know, just staying here and waiting, I guess. They often end up finding themselves in the loop of like prostitution and drug use and that's where they become infected.

Alicia Vera>> You are in a completely new context, completely unfamiliar, and you become vulnerable. Unfortunately, in the aspect of health is that you can be doing things that will put you at risk.

James Hill>> Castro's tragic mistake cost more than her health. She bore an HIV-infected daughter who lived only months before dying here at the AIDS hospice, Casa Hogar Las Memorias. Researchers say that Castro is not alone. A study of pregnant women at Tijuana General Hospital found an HIV infection rate of one percent.

Kimberly Brouwer>> And to have one in every hundred pregnant women possibly being infected with HIV is a concern that HIV may be spreading to the general population at this stage.

James Hill>> Researchers say that drug use in the border region has also produced a spike in HIV infection. This man is among up to ten thousand injection drug users in Tijuana, inhabiting zones called Shooting Galleries. They are a growing byproduct of the huge drug smuggling route where South American cocaine, Mexican heroine and marijuana flow north.

Kimberly Brouwer>> You get a lot of spillover use where the drug traffickers end up selling drugs locally for very little money. This has led to one of the highest prevalence of injection drug users in Mexico.

James Hill>> Such patients are common in the AIDS hospice.

Dr. Manuel Gallardo Cruz>> There are many patients who have been deported from the United States who have been under treatment at the jails of health departments. Because they are deported, they abandon their treatment.

James Hill>> Jose Hernandez Rubio is an ex-convict and heroine addict who says that he's used drugs in the United States and here in Tijuana. He says that he was infected with HIV from sharing needles in the early 1990s.

Jose Hernandez Rubio>> In the border, people make a line of thirty to share the same needle. So maybe from thirty people, eight or seven become positive.

James Hill>> Erick de la Cruz shares a hospice dormitory with Rubio. He says that he spent much of his life in Los Angeles in a street gang. He told Zelaya that he was jailed repeatedly, served a prison term, and was deported to Tijuana infected with HIV.

Natalia Zelaya>> Do you know how you got infected?

Erick de la Cruz>> Using needles, I believe. That's the only reason that I could find, unless it was tattoos in jail or something, tattoos with dirty needles.

Natalia Zelaya>> Do you use drugs?

Erick de la Cruz>> Yeah.

Natalia Zelaya>> So there's a possibility that it could be needles from the drugs or it could be from the tattoos from jail?

Erick de la Cruz>> From jail, from tattoos.

James Hill>> HIV among drug users is a problem that flows back and forth across the border.

Dr. Remedios Lozada>> The virus doesn't have boundaries and I would never blame that it comes from either Mexico or the United States. My position is to never look for a guilty one. The virus exists on both sides.

[Film Clip]

James Hill>> Casa Hogar Las Memorias continues to help the infected remain as healthy as possible, but shame keeps Castro from contacting her relatives in Honduras about her illness and her status as an immigrant bars her from Mexico's health program. Rubio works in the hospice woodshop, but admits that he leaves sometimes to use heroine.

Jose Hernandez Rubio>> I can't resist wanting to get drugged. I have to stop getting drugged because I'm getting old.

James Hill>> De la Cruz often sits for hours pondering his deportation from the United States, his inability to return and his life infected with the disease that has no cure. In Tijuana, Mexico, I'm James Hill for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> Our thanks again to James Hill and the Department of Journalism at Cal State Northridge for that story.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Fifty-three homes in Malibu destroyed by fire. It's another reminder that we're not out of fire season yet. But is there anything the average citizen can do to improve firefighting? Well, Hena Cuevas met one resident of Topanga Canyon who's determined to bring more air power and technology to the front lines.

Hena Cuevas>> Tony Morris is the founder of the Wildfire Research Network. He's lived in Topanga Canyon for more than fifteen years and he remembers just how devastating the fire of 1993 was.

Tony Morris>> It moved fast. It was incredible. I think in twelve hours -- it could be longer than that -- but it went all the way from where it started all the way to the ocean in Malibu.

Hena Cuevas>> The response to that fire frustrated him, so Morris brought neighbors together and formed a nonprofit group to explore ways to improve the fighting of wildfires. It's called the Wildfire Research Network.

Narrator>> "Managing wildfires requires innovative technology and new strategies. There is a need to develop more effective firefighting tools to deal with this growing threat."

Hena Cuevas>> The group is exploring the use of new technology such as night vision goggles. These would help firefighters battling fires at night when temperatures are cooler. Another technology is airborne mapping devices. These allow firefighters to map the wildfires and better predict which direction they will go.

But because of the California terrain, Morris is pushing for more support from above. Having studied wildfires, which is what your organization does, what are some of the biggest challenges that are presented particularly in this area?

Tony Morris>> This is a very difficult place and Los Angeles County Fire would admit it. How to defend it? We have a very narrow road. It's only one way in, one way out. If the fire trucks are coming up and we're wanting to go out, what do you do? We also have a canopy of trees throughout this area and we have hundreds of neighbors living here. In essence, it's very hard to fight it on the ground without aerial support.

Hena Cuevas>> He says that California could use more water bombers such as this one from the Canadian company, Martin Mars. The plane used in California in 2000 can scoop seven thousand gallons of either fresh or saltwater in twenty-five seconds.

Tony Morris>> It drops almost two-thirds of a mile in one drop. We have nothing like that in the country. The Cal Fire air tankers are much smaller capacity, about twelve hundred gallons. Every time they drop, another plane has to come behind and pick up where the other one dropped off, whereas this plane is so big and has such a large capacity that it drops an enormous amount of fire retardant.

Hena Cuevas>> The aircraft has been contracted by the state and will begin flying over San Diego, but what about getting more planes like this one?

Tony Morris>> We spent about twelve months talking to homeowners groups, asking people around Los Angeles County to email, call or write the governor about setting aside some money for a Tanker 910 which is a converted DC-10 that drops twelve thousand gallons.

It is currently on contract with the state of California for three years, but what precipitated the decision was the Griffith Park fire and then the Catalina fire. The governor was very correct in what he did. He said, "Let's get that plane on contract."

Hena Cuevas>> Why do you think the state of California hasn't gone that direction?

Tony Morris>> Well, first there was no such plane, okay? We have a fleet of aircraft that the state has which are very well managed and we have the largest firefighting fleet of any state in the union. But there never was a DC-10 to use. It's been developed over the last five years by private enterprise.

Hena Cuevas>> He points out that it's been the private sector that's made the biggest advances. For example, Evergreen Aviation of Oregon owns a Boeing 747 called the Super Tanker. Last year, they brought it to San Bernardino for a demonstration to show fire officials what it could do.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> It's still pending additional testing, but if everything goes as planned, it would go into service in 2008. Not soon enough for Morris. What has been the biggest obstacle in trying to get these as quickly as possible?

Tony Morris>> First of all, reluctance upon the part of the government to realize that we can find the money. I must say, that's something that, you know, the aviation division of Cal Fire has always struggled with. Do they have enough money? We don't think they have enough money.

They do amazingly with what they have, but this airplane costs a lot of money. I do believe it was not part of their normal annual contract. It's taken from another source. But still in all, it pays for itself.

Hena Cuevas>> Getting one of these airplanes is very expensive. How willing do you think taxpayers are going to be to fork over that money?

Tony Morris>> I think, if they put it in perspective, saving one five million dollar house or two five million dollars houses, I mean, it more than pays for itself over the term of its contract.

Hena Cuevas>> Morris says that his goal is to start a dialog. He knows that now is the time to get the ball rolling when it's fresh on the minds of the people and he has the attention of government officials. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> It's the definition of culture clash, three thousand restless, fidgety teenagers coming to the opera, but that's exactly what happens twice a year here at the Music Center and you'd be amazed at the results.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In less than an hour, the curtain will rise and one of Puccini's most popular operas, the tragic story of "Tosca".

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> And outside, an eager audience. But these are not your typical patrons. They are three thousand excited, noisy teenagers, middle and high school students who usually get their music fix from Napster and MTV, but today will be different. Today they will see their first opera.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Twice a year for the past fifteen years, the Los Angeles Opera has invited students to the Music Center for a free performance.

Stacy Brightman>> Not just a dress rehearsal, but the full-on production, full orchestra, sets, costumes, cast, everything.

Val Zavala>> Stacy Brightman is in charge of the Los Angeles Opera's youth programs. Their message is simple.

Stacy Brightman>> We are so excited that you are coming to the opera. We can't wait to see you at our opera house.

Val Zavala>> Their dress may be more casual and they may make more noise, but don't be fooled. These kids have been preparing for weeks. The Los Angeles Opera spends several hundred thousand dollars on the program. Teachers must apply and agree to design lesson plans.

Stacy Brightman>> After all of this, after the teachers do their lessons, we've given them all these materials, a gift from us for them to keep, our volunteers go, these kids are ready. They come as one of the most prepared audiences you're ever going to see at an opera house (laughter).

Val Zavala>> The house has gone from empty to full and finally the time has come for the curtain to rise. "Tosca" is a classic crowd-pleaser. The setting is Rome, 1900. It's the story of a singer, Floria Tosca. Her lover hides a political fugitive in a church and, over the course of three acts, Tosca is forced to give in to a nefarious police chief who plots to find the fugitive and forces Tosca to give in to his lustful desires.

Stacy Brightman>> The idea is, you know, we want to share a love and knowledge of this art form that brings in all the art forms together, incorporates all the art forms, and there is no better way to bring people into it but literally to bring them into it, to have them experience it in its most grand, beautiful, sweeping fashion.

Val Zavala>> The stage is getting set for the next act and here's something even season ticket holders won't see. The curtains are being left open so you can see the set changes between acts. That's so the students get a chance to see what's going on behind the curtains.

Stacy Brightman>> Any time there's an opera performance, it's an event. It takes so many people, you know, whether it's sixty-five or eighty-five people in the orchestra, another one hundred people on stage, another hundred fifty people backstage, all doing their jobs at exactly the right moment.

Val Zavala>> And what do these first-time opera goers think so far?

Stephanie Mercado>> It's great.

Val Zavala>> Why do you like it?

Stephanie Mercado>> Because you can actually see all the action happening and you can actually feel or sense things that are happening.

Ralph Corrales>> I think the opera was good because, when Tosca killed Scarpia, I think Scarpia actually deserved to die.

Val Zavala>> Was that the most exciting part?

Kenya Darden>> For me, I think that was. yes.

Val Zavala>> What character did you like best and what is she
feeling?

Kenya Darden>> Tosca.

Val Zavala>> Why?

Kenya Darden>> Anger, misery --

Val Zavala>> -- jealousy?

Kenya Darden>> Disappointment.

Val Zavala>> Have you ever been jealous of somebody?

Kenya Darden>> No.

Val Zavala>> No? Never?

Kenya Darden>> Well, one person.

Val Zavala>> It's time for the dramatic final act. Tosca and her lover, Cavaradossi, are reunited. She has bargained for his life and gotten the police chief to promise that the execution will be a mock execution. She tells her lover to fake his death, but what Tosca doesn't realize is that the evil police chief, Scarpia, has gone back on his word.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Tosca realizes in horror that her lover is dead. She makes the ultimate decision and climbs to the top of the parapet.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> It doesn't bother you that everybody ends up dying at the end?

Ralph Corrales>> I know that it's fake, but I just go along with it.

Ruben Ruiz>> Floria Tosca fights for her love and, at the end because she couldn't have him, she lived for her music and love. And because she didn't have love, she died.

Val Zavala>> But for some students, the performance isn't over. There's a special treat in store for the kids who had to watch from the balcony. This is not a place for anyone who's afraid of heights.

Stacy Brightman>> We're able to bring our three leading artists and only the kids up in the balcony get to have this kind of, you know, special question and answer time. They really get to feel like they know who the artists are and actually even our Tosca started to sing for them up there (laughter).

>> "All right, one note."

[Film Clip]

>> "You notice, or maybe not, when we're singing on stage, we never sing directly in someone's ear ever."

>> "Or you're not supposed to (laughter)."

Val Zavala>> The three leads are a hit on and off the stage, but will this day at the opera make an impact long-term?

Stacy Brightman>> I'm getting college students that are volunteering for us today because it's the same thing. They came as a student five years ago and maybe they got hooked.

Val Zavala>> What will you tell them when you go home tonight?

Stephanie Mercado>> It's going to look like a huge palace with lots of people in it and all the sounds will come to them and they will feel like they're really in it.

Val Zavala>> Do you think you could sing like they could? Really? Well, you could grow up to be an opera singer then.

Kenya Darden>> I know (laughter).

Stacy Brightman>> We're starting to actually have that generation of people who can grow up with opera and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make it possible for people to grow up with opera in Los Angeles.

Val Zavala>> Imagine getting a nineteen million dollar home renovation with a beautifully landscaped yard, a shady retreat, and even a waterfall on three-quarters of an acre. Well, that's what a family of six is enjoying at the Los Angeles Zoo.

The family is a troop of gorillas, three males and three females, and the new habitat is called the Campo Gorilla Reserve. It's been years in the making. Los Angeles Zoo spokesman Jason Jacobs told us more.

Hena Cuevas>> It has everything you'd expect to find in a nineteen million dollar Los Angeles home, plus all the comforts a gorilla could need. Last November, the Los Angeles Zoo opened its Campo Gorilla Reserve. The new exhibit is home to six gorillas living in two separate areas.

Jason Jacobs>> It makes the Los Angeles Zoo one of only a handful of zoos in the nation to display three species of Great Apes.

Hena Cuevas>> Jason Jacobs is with the zoo. He says that the exhibit took four and a half years to build and, like most homeowners, the gorillas had to move out. So while construction was going on, the apes were kept at other zoos.

Jason Jacobs>> And I can tell you that whenever these gorillas traveled to or from institutions, staff from the Los Angeles Zoo escorted them or staff from the institutions they were at escorted them to ease the transition, to make it as easy as possible for these animals.

[Film Clip]

Jason Jacobs>> A lot of our visitors were very happy to have them back and it's really been worth the wait. It's a great experience for our visitors and it's great for the gorillas.

Hena Cuevas>> The new display occupies three-quarters of an acre. It includes five observation areas to give visitors an up-close look.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> Jacobs says that this expansion is part of the zoo's efforts to upgrade the areas where animals are kept. Built in 1966, many of the spaces just aren't adequate anymore. Thanks to a series of city and county bonds approved in the late 1990s, the zoo is going through some major renovations.

For example, the elephant enclosure is expanding from a quarter of an acre to six. That opens in 2009. And last year, the sea lions moved into a bigger home. This time, it was the gorillas' turn to leave their cramped quarters.

Jason Jacobs>> We tore those three exhibits down and built two lush, larger habitats and, in addition to that, expanded behind the scenes areas to manage theses apes.

[Film Clip]

Jason Jacobs>> Two of those observation areas are through glassed areas where you can potentially get very close to these animals. The other three are across planted moats such as this. As you can see, you can get very close to these animals. It's a great experience for our visitors. Many of these visitors would never get to see gorillas in the wild.

Here, they're able to make a connection with them, learn about them and, by the time they leave our zoo, I'm sure they're going to care about gorillas which is really what conservation is all about, getting people to change their habits or their ways to benefit the other animals and the life which we share this planet with.

Hena Cuevas>> And even though twenty million dollars might sound like a lot, Jacob says that it really isn't, considering how expensive Los Angeles real estate is.

Val Zavala>> For information on zoo hours and more, you can go to their website at lazoo.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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