Worldfocus

Women embroider traditional indigenous garb in San Nicolas, Mexico. Photo: Martin Savidge.

Anchor Martin Savidge reports on a quiet immigration town and the clamoring abortion debate in Mexico.

In my previous life before Worldfocus, I was a reporter. I still like to think I’m a reporter who just works from behind the desk. But when time allows, I still want to get out there to find some good stories to tell you.

So this past weekend, instead of going home to Atlanta, I kept on flying south down to Mexico to investigate two reports we will bring you in the near future.

For the first story, we rose early on Saturday and loaded into a minivan for a three-hour drive north of Mexico City. It takes at least an hour to free yourself from the sprawl of 20 million people. Eventually, the scenery gives way to farmland and distant peaks shrouded in clouds.

We arrived in the Mezquital Valley and the town of Puerto Dexhti, population 800. In a way, you could call it the town America helped to build. Many of the houses — even the town hall, which once a week is also the doctor’s office when he comes to town — were built thanks to dollars earned in the United States and sent south by immigrants.

But these are hard times in America, which means these are even harder times in tiny towns like Puerto Dexhti. It’s an immigration story told in a different way.

The other story is simple, but the implications are literally life and death. Abortion is now legal in Mexico City. That shocks many people since Mexico is overwhelmingly Catholic. We talk to all sides of this emotionally and religiously charged issue. How did it happen? Who performs the procedure when 85 percent of Mexico City’s doctors refuse? It’s a long-fought debate, but one made new when seen though the lens of another nation.

I’ll talk to you soon.

- Martin Savidge