Hay Xalapa: Mexico's garden city It is the tourist low season in a Mexican town that attracts little tourism. The town of Xalapa, in the Mexican province of Veracruz, has not the showpiece beauty of other Hispanic places that have hosted the Hay Festival. But it is famous for the excellence of its university, its lively intellectual life, and the exuberance of the lush tropical vegetation that seems to spill over from the jungle-like, mountain-backed surroundings. The French Nobel prize-winning novelist Le Clezio, the festival's first speaker, endeared himself here by dubbing Xalapa "the Garden City." Sadly, in recent years, the town's Eden-like aspect has been tainted by the province's notoriety for drug-trafficking and the high murder rate of journalists. Tight security surrounded the official inauguration held on Thursday morning inside the pompously classical Palacio de Gobierno, where, under the presiding portrait of the Mexican Liberator Benito Juarez, the Governor of Veracruz gave a speech stressing how the Hay Festival was helping turn the "Garden City" into the Athens of the province. After the characteristically Hispanic bombast of the proceedings it was pleasant to move on afterwards to the opening of an exhibition of the playful and life-affirming photographs of the Argentinean Daniel Mordzinsky, Hay's official photographer, and one of the world's great specialists in portraits of writers. The exhibition was devoted to the rising young stars of Latin American literature, many of whom have been brought over to the festival, together with such established Hispanic names as the novelists Enrique Vila-Matas and Evelio Rosero, and a selection of Hay regulars ranging from the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, to Britain's Jeanette Winterston. In admirable democratic fashion, all the Festival's guests have been brought together in the friendly Hotel Xalapa, where, later the first day, Mordzinski could be seen photographing the psychedelic-T-shirt-wearing journalist Ed Vulliamy pushing a maid's trolley piled high with rumpled sheets and rubbish. This was one of Ed's rare still moments. A man fired by anger at the injustices of the world, and by multiple enthusiasms, Ed was busily occupying himself trying to find out as much as he could about a subject that most other people in the hotel were trying at first to keep quiet about: the local political situation. This subject was touched upon in the evening debate I hosted with Ed and the Zimbabwe-raised journalist and author Peter Godwin. We were going to talk largely about the blurring of travel-writing, memoir and reportage, but, suitably for an event sponsored by PEN, we ended up dwelling at length on the subject of objectivity versus neutrality. Though Ed and Peter disagreed about the extent to which journalists can be objective, both were adamant about the impossibility of remaining detached when faced with the conflict zones they have covered. A group of the exceptionally intelligent and intellectually passionate students who make up most of the audiences at this festival came up to us afterwards to see if we could help give a higher profile to the alternative newspaper they have founded, Los 4 Barrios. They intend this journal to be a counterpoint to the official Mexican press, which, as we already have been frequently told, is dominated by journalists who have been forced to keep in check their principles and cow-tail to the government. A moving reminder of the dangers journalists face in Mexico, and in Veracruz in particular, came at the end of a packed concert given at night by the compellingly energetic and charismatic American group Hypnotic Brass. This band of endearing eight brothers from Chicago won massive applause by shouting (in bad Spanish) "We Love Xalapa," and then by being persuaded to hold up a banner (which they couldn't understand) reading "Truth kills. No more murder of journalists. For a moment the role of the Hay Festival as a "festival of ideas" became movingly pertinent.