By Claire Marshall, News correspondent, Mexico, 7 December 2004

It’s just that all the pictures seem to have disappeared. It’s the fourth day editing a special report for BBC Four. The Avid manual has been tossed aside. Desperate, my colleague Lara and I are now on the phone to sympathetic editors in London.

Our entire piece, lovingly crafted, has turned to black. There’s nothing there. Nada.

Getting new kit to play with out here in the Mexico bureau has had its good and bad sides. The idea is for us to be a fully independent unit.

We shoot on a mini-dv camera, put the pictures in a laptop computer, edit and then send it all over a broadband connection to London. The point? It’s a cheap way to produce quality television, meaning that we can get more stories from this region on air.

The only difficulty has been learning all this technical stuff on the job. People spend years training to be editors. We’ve had just a few hours’ instruction.

Tacos-munchers are disgorged from a taxi

But this time we are saved by an angel called Tony. An Avid specialist, he explains to us how to get to a place called ‘the attic’ to where our corrupted file had been spirited. We are back in business. And it’s the most satisfying thing in the world.

I’ve been based here in Mexico for just over a year. I had trouble persuading my friends to take me seriously when I explained that, yes, my job would involve covering the Caribbean.

However their envy soon evaporated. Rather than sunset cocktails in Nassau, I was greeted with heavily-armed mobs in Haiti. Trying to explain to your parents why you are not on the last flight out of a conflict zone is difficult.

My base is the monster that is Mexico City. Twenty million people live here. Sizeable numbers of them seem to be able to fit in to the smallest places.

It’s quite a sight to witness an entire extended Mexican family munching on tacos being disgorged from a two-seater green Beetle taxi. It is a mad, colourful and addictive type of chaos.

Policemen should be deeply feared

The bureau is spread across two locations. First, and convenient, the spare room in my flat. I can edit and file in my pyjamas if need be. My office is a short walk down a leafy avenue, past a dazzling flower stall and a wizened old man who sells irresistible fresh fruit juices.

I have the luxury of an assistant who wrestles with my terrible accounting, somehow keeps the phone lines connected, and deals with the impenetrable Mexican bureaucracy.

Tequila flowed when we got an ISDN line set up after harassing the dominant telecommunications company for a mere eight months. A year on, and we’re planning that trip to the Bahamas when the government’s media department finally gives me my journalist visa.

Mexicans are warm and convivial, but there is a dark side to their country. Corruption is rampant. Policemen are to be deeply feared rather than trusted.

Hollywood actually underestimated the figures in Denzel Washington’s latest film Man on Fire, as 12 people are abducted here each day. I don’t carry credit cards around and won’t catch taxis on the street.

Something else that perhaps my Mum shouldn’t find out.

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