In the central park of the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, a camp was improvised, where thousands of migrants stopped to rest and wash before proceeding to the border with the United States, 2,000 kilometres away. People of all ages, entire families and many children are part of the caravan that began its desperate trek on Oct. 13 in Honduras. Credit: Javier García/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
TAPACHULA, Mexico, Oct 22 2018 (IPS)

A long chain of people is winding its way along the highways of Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state. It is moving fast, despite the fact that one-third of its ranks are made up of children, and it has managed to avoid the multiple obstacles that the governments of Honduras, Guatemala and now Mexico, under pressure from the United States, have thrown up in a vain effort to stop it.

Every attempt to make it shrink seems to have the opposite effect. And on Monday Oct. 22, some 7,000 Central Americans, most of them Hondurans, kept walking northward, in defiance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s warning to do everything possible to “stop the onslaught of illegal aliens from crossing” the U.S.-Mexico border."This is giving rise to something like a trail of ants, and we don't know where it's going to end…We're going to be seeing mass exoduses much more similar to those we see from Africa to Europe." -- Quique Vidal Olascoaga

The caravan that set out from San Pedro Sula, in northern Honduras, in the early hours of Oct. 13, has put the migration policy of the entire region in check. Trump took it up as the campaign theme for the Nov. 6 mid-term elections, and via Twitter, threatened Honduras with immediate withdrawal of any financial aid.

“People have to apply for asylum in Mexico first and if they fail to do that, the U.S. will turn them away,” Trump tweeted.

The caravan isn’t stopping. In nine days it has travelled a little more than 700 kilometres to reach Tapachula, a city of 300,000 inhabitants, close to the border, which has welcomed the migrants’ arrival with food, beverages and encouraging messages.

Groups of activists and human rights defenders are preparing to meet them in different parts of the country. “This is not a caravan, it’s an exodus,” say migrant advocates.

There is still a long road ahead, however. The migrants still have 2,000 kilometres to go before reaching the nearest Mexican-U.S. border crossing, in an area governed by criminal groups, which have made migrant smuggling one of the country’s most lucrative businesses.

In addition, the Mexican government has threatened to detain them if they leave Chiapas, where local legislation allows them to be in transit with few requirements because it is a border zone.

But none of this has prevented new groups of migrants from arriving every day to join the caravan.

The number of children in the arms of their parents is striking, as they walk kilometre after kilometer, cross rivers and border barriers, or wait for hours in crowded, unsanitary conditions, in suffocating temperatures.

The stories they tell are heartbreaking.

A line of more than five kilometres of migrants walked on Sunday, Oct 21, from Ciudad Hidalgo to Tapachula, 40 kilometers inside the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. There are 2,000 kilometres left to the U.S.-Mexico border, along a route that is partly controlled by organised crime groups. Credit: Javier García/IPS

“We don’t have a job, we don’t have medicine, we have nothing in our country, we can’t even afford to eat properly. I want to get to the United States to raise my children,” Ramón Rodríguez, a man from San Pedro Sula who arrived with his whole family to the Guatemalan-Mexican border on Oct. 17, told IPS in tears.

In the last decade, human rights organisations and journalists have documented the massive displacement of Central Americans toward the southern border of Mexico, and have repeatedly warned of a humanitarian crisis that is being ignored.

In 2016, the Global Report on Internal Displacement, published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, devoted a special section to an emerging phenomenon of displacement in Mexico and the countries of the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador).

In May 2017, Médecins Sans Frontières presented the report “Forced to Flee Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Neglected Humanitarian Crisis”, in which it warned of an exodus, caused above all by criminal violence in the region.

The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which has organised 14 caravans of mothers of migrants who have disappeared in Mexican territory, has also described the situation in the Northern Triangle as a “humanitarian tragedy”.

The violence, along with precarious labour and economic conditions, skyrocketed a few days ago when the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez announced hikes in the electricity rates.

According to versions given by Hondurans who arrived in Mexico, it was Bartolo Fuentes, a pastor and former legislator who has participated in several caravans in Mexico, who launched the call for a collective march to the United States.

They were to gather in the Great Metropolitan Central bus station in San Pedro Sula. Around one thousand people showed up.

Hundreds of Mexicans mobilised to help Central American migrants, many giving rides in their cars and trucks to members of the caravan, to ease their journey to Tapachula, where other supportive residents provided them with food and beverages. Credit: Javier García/IPS

“Many of us thought that in a group it was easier and safer, because we know that going through Mexico is dangerous,” a member of the caravan who asked for anonymity told IPS. “Later, messages began to arrive through Whatsapp (the instant messaging network), and people began to organise to flee the country,” he said.

By Oct. 15, another group had organised in Choluteca, in southern Honduras, and yet another in Tegucigalpa.

The Honduran government tried to close the border crossings, but was unable to stop some 3,000 people from leaving the country and crossing Guatemala. The detention and deportation of Pastor Fuentes did not stop them either. On Oct. 17, the caravan arrived in the city of Tecún Umán, on the border with Mexico.

The Mexican government had stepped up security at the border and the caravan was stranded on the bridge that joins the two countries. Desperation set in: on Oct. 19, the migrants crossed the police cordon and were dispersed with tear gas.

Faced with media pressure, the Mexican authorities offered “orderly passage” for groups of 30 to 40 people who were to take the steps to apply for refuge.

But it was actually a ruse, because the migrants were taken to an immigration station where they must stay 45 days, and have no guarantees of the regularisation of their immigration status.

The border bridge became a refugee camp, without humanitarian assistance from either government. The only thing the Guatemalan government provided were buses for those who wanted to “voluntarily” return to their country.

Exhausted, many decided to turn around, the disappointment plain to see on their faces.

However, the bulk of the caravan made the decision to swim or raft across the Suchiate River.

For more than 24 hours, images of thousands of people crossing the river circled the world, while other groups of migrants continued to arrive at the border to join the caravan that today numbers more than 7,000 people, according to human rights groups.

Some activists believe that, because of its size and the form it has taken, this caravan could fundamentally change migratory movements in Central America, with people increasingly turning to a new strategy of migrating in huge groups.

“This is giving rise to something like a trail of ants, and we don’t know where it’s going to end,” Quique Vidal Olascoaga, an activist with the organisation Voces Mesoamericanas, told IPS. “We’re going to be seeing mass exoduses much more similar to those we see from Africa to Europe.”

With reporting by Rodrigo Soberanes and Angeles Mariscal, from various places in the state of Chiapas.

Migrants with tired faces laden with the hardships of the hazardous journey from Central America to the United States rest in a shelter in Mexico, which many reach after being cheated by “coyotes” out of everything they had. Credit: Ximena Natera/ Pie de Página

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 3 2017 (IPS)

Each year, some three million undocumented immigrants enter the United States, half of them with the help of traffickers, as part of a nearly seven-billion- dollar business, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Although Mexico is still the main source of migrants to the United States, a rise in the flow of migrants from Central America and South America has been seen in the last few decades, and more recently from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa.

Three-quarters of these new migrants cross Mexico and many of them are victims of criminal networks.“When they refer to transnational policies in the U.S., they mean not letting migrants into the country and pursuing the coyotes. But they are not referring to policies to address the problems surrounding the whole phenomenon, and even less to the victims.” -- Ana Lorena Delgadillo

Human trafficking is one of the hidden violations of the human rights of hundreds of thousands of people. But, although the smuggling of migrants is a transnational crime, in the countries involved in this phenomenon there are no transnational policies to address the problem.

“The agreements that exist between countries are aimed at cracking down on people to keep them from crossing borders. But there is not one bilateral or trilateral agreement that really seeks to solve the problem in an integral manner,” Martha Sánchez Soler, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement (MMM), said in an interview with IPS.

Every year, the MMM organises a convoy of Central American mothers searching for their missing children in Mexico, which has prompted an effort to build bridges between countries in the region to trace the missing migrants.

“We have reported ‘coyotes’ (people smugglers) a thousand times and they don’t do anything to them because there is no serious intention to stop the problem. Coyotes are good business for governments,” the activist explained.

Human trafficking and people smuggling are crimes that have come into the spotlight in Latin America, and in multilateral bodies, in recent years.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) says the phenomenon is fuelled by difficult living conditions in less developed countries, the stiffening of migration policies in industrialised countries, and the fact that it was not previously seen as a structural problem, but as a series of isolated events.

The U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, signed in Palermo, Italy in 2000, was the international community’s response to the rise in human trafficking, considered a modern form of slavery.

The Convention was reinforced by the Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children.

Although many people confuse human trafficking and people smuggling and use them as synonymous terms, they are related but involve different activities: the objective of trafficking is the exploitation of a human being,it is considered a form of modern slavery, and victims do not necessarily cross borders.

Migrants travelling across Mexico on their way to the United States replicate the Way of the Cross to symbolise the ordeal experienced by the victims of human trafficking in the region, which generates some seven billion dollars a year in profits. Credit: Ximena Natera/ Pie de Página

Smuggling, on the other hand, is a transnational crime, since it involves the facilitating of the illegal entry of a person to a country for economic benefit; it is often done in dangerous or degrading conditions; the victims give their consent; and it generally ends with the arrival of migrants to their destinations.

However, in Mexico, people smuggling has combined with other forms of crime and many migrants fall victim to trafficking networks for sexual exploitation or forced labour for drug cartels.

According to the UNODC, the smuggling of migrants from Mexico to the U.S. generates nearly seven billion dollars a year in profits, which makes it one of the most lucrative transnational organised crimes, since it is less risky than drug trafficking.

Felipe de la Torre, from the UNODC office in Mexico, said this is a “conservative” figure, in a crime “necessarily linked to corruption, which has proliferated“ up to the highest levels of government and public bodies, not to mention private sectors such as railway companies.

“The routes of migrants began to coincide with those of drug trafficking, making the crossing even more violent…It became a business generating outrageous profits for organised crime, in which many lives are lost and the physical and psychological health of many others is put at risk,” said De la Torre.

Mexican lawyer Ana Lorena Delgadillo, head of the Foundation for Justice and Democratic Rule of Law, told IPS that “the Palermo Convention is the key to these issues; there are more general bilateral agreements, but they focus more on research and on coordination between justice systems.”

She added that: “although regulations are in place, there are no real regional policies establishing measures to ensure a comprehensive approach to this phenomenon.”

“When they refer to transnational policies in the U.S., they mean not letting migrants into the country and pursuing the coyotes. But they are not referring to policies to address the problems surrounding the whole phenomenon, and even less to the victims,” she said.

The particular case of Cuba

An example of this lack of policies has been seen in the case of Cuban migration since 2015. In November that year, the government of Costa Rica dismantled a people smuggling network, which triggered a crisis, with several thousands of migrants stranded in different countries in the region, that closed their borders to the transit of undocumented migrants.

Two Cuban migrants rest in a shelter in Costa Rica, when hundreds of them were stranded on their way from Ecuador to the United States, where many fell victim to human smugglers. Credit: Mónica González/Pie de Página

In Cuba, most of the people cheated by human smugglers suffer the consequences in silence. The most dramatic cases, with tragic human losses, are often depicted in national TV series on crime, based on real life stories. This phenomenon has hit Cuba since migration got trapped in the conflict with the United States, in the 1960s.

Migrant smuggling is punished with harsh sentences that include life imprisonment in aggravated cases. But no clear data exists on the human costs.

“The risks are enormous, because you are at the mercy of the mafias. With them, there is no room for any law or human rights,” a Cuban living in the United States, told IPS. He said smugglers mainly used to come from the U.S. to pick Cubans up on speedboats, as they defected illegally.

In recent years, migrants have left Cuba legally, heading first to South America or Central America on their dangerous journey to the U.S., paying smugglers 7,000 to 13,000 dollars per person and often falling prey to violence, extortion and other crimes at the hands of trafficking networks. The journey of at least 7,700 km takes them across as many as eight national borders.

“One of my best friends paid 4,000 dollars to a man who was supposed to arrange her departure from the country. Her family spent the same amount in the U.S. After a year, she had no choice but to admit that she had been swindled. Since it was an illegal operation, she did not file a complaint,” 40-year-old professional Idalmis Guerrero told IPS.

The woman’s story dates back to before the immigration reform implemented in January 2013, which expanded travel rights for Cuban citizens, revoked the requirements of an exit permit and letters of invitation from hosts abroad – cumbersome procedures that drove up the costs and red tape involved in any trip for personal reasons.

However, obtaining a visa for the United States or other countries is still difficult.

On January 12, 2017, a week before handing over the presidency to Donald Trump, then president Barack Obama terminated the U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which basically guaranteed Cuban immigrants residency one year and one day after they set foot on U.S. soil.

He also eliminated the Cuban Medical Parole programme, which enabled Cuban medical professionals stationed in other countries on international missions to defect and obtain visas to the United States.

Although Mexico and Cuba have several agreements for working together against people smuggling, Cubans arrested on their way to the U.S. began to be deported on Jan. 21 after they were denied safe conducts that give foreign nationals 20 days to leave Mexico.

With additional reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana.

Mexican photographer Rubén Espinosa places a plaque in honour of Regina Martínez, on Apr. 28, 2015, in the central square of Xalapa, the capital of the southern state of Veracruz, to commemorate the third anniversary of the journalist’s murder. On July 2015, Espinosa was also killed. Credit: Roger López/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Apr 29 2017 (IPS)

Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Brito covered drug trafficking issues in a region of the southern state of Guerrero where criminal groups are extremely powerful.

In September 2015 he survived an attempt on his life, and because he was deemed at “very high risk” he became a beneficiary of the federal mechanism for protection for human right defenders and journalists created in December 2012.

The protection measures he was assigned consisted basically of police patrols. They offered him a place in a shelter in Mexico City, but he refused.

In October 2016, the protection measures were cancelled; five months later, Pineda Brito became the first journalist murdered in 2017 in the most dangerous country for reporters in Latin America.“In addition to Mexico, Honduras, Brazil and Colombia, the situation in Paraguay and Venezuela, in particular, reflects the deterioration of freedom of expression in the region.” -- Ricardo González

Pineda Brito’s Mar. 2 murder was followed by six weeks of terror in which three more journalists were killed and two others survived after being shot, in different parts of this country of 127 million people.

The highest-profile murder was that of Miroslava Breach, on Mar. 26, a veteran journalist who covered political news for the La Jornada newspaper in the northern state of Chihuahua along the U.S. border.

But Pineda Brito’s killing reflected the inefficacy of institutional mechanisms for protecting journalists in the region.

“Last year it became clear that the state’s protection model exported from Colombia to Mexico and recently to Honduras had failed,” said Ricardo González, Security and Protection Officer of the London-based international organisation Article 19, which defends freedom of expression.

“The cases of journalists murdered in Mexico, who were under the protection of different state mechanisms, as well as the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s refusal to take part in the assessment of cases under the Colombian mechanism are things that should be of concern,” he told IPS.

For González, the lack of a functioning justice system and redress makes the model “ineffective, apart from financially unsustainable.”

The numbers in Mexico prove him right: according to Article 19’s latest report, of the 427 assaults on the media and journalists registered in 2016, 99.7 per cent went unpunished.

Meanwhile, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression has only managed to secure a conviction in three cases.

Most of the attacks were against journalists who work for small media outlets outside the country’s capital, and at least half of them were committed by state agents.

The federal protection mechanism currently protects 509 people – 244 journalists and 265 human right defenders).

But even though the dangers are growing rather than decreasing, the government and the legislature cancelled the funds available for protection, and since January the mechanism has been operating with the remnants of a trust fund whose 9.5 million dollars in reserves will run out in September.

According to Article 19, violence against the press is still one of the main challenges faced in Latin America, and something to be reflected on when World Press Freedom Day is celebrated on May 3.

“In addition to Mexico, Honduras, Brazil and Colombia, the situation in Paraguay and Venezuela, in particular, reflects the deterioration of freedom of expression in the region,” said González.

Map of the World Press Freedom Index, released Apr. 26 by Reporters Without Borders, where Cuba (173rd of 180 countries) and Mexico (147th) are the worst positioned in Latin America, while Uruguay (25th) and Chile (33rd) top the regional ranking. Credit: RWB

In the same vein, the 2017 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders on Wednesday Apr. 26 warns about the political and economic instability seen in several countries of Latin America, where journalists who investigate questions that affect the interests of political leaders or organised crime are attacked, persecuted and murdered.

“RWB regrets the pernicious and continuous deterioration of the situation of freedom of expression in Latin America,” said Emmanuel Colombié, the head of the RWB Latin America desk, presenting the Index.

“In the face of a multifaceted threat, journalists often have to practice self-censorship, and even go into exile, to survive. This is absolutely unacceptable in democratic countries,” he added.

The RWB report underscores the case of Nicaragua, the country that experienced the largest drop in the index because since the controversial re-election of President Daniel Ortega, the independent and opposition press has suffered numerous cases of censorship, intimidation, harassment and arbitrary arrests. The country fell 17 spots, to 92nd among the 180 countries studied.

The report also describes Mexico as another worrisome case: in 15 years it dropped from 75th to 147th on the Index, putting it next to Syria and Afghanistan. Mexico is still torn apart by corruption and the violence of organised crime, says RWB.

In fact, it is the second worst ranked Latin American country, after Cuba, which is 173rd, after dropping two spots.

At a regional level, the countries best-positioned in the ranking are Uruguay (25th, after falling five), Chile (33rd, after dropping two) and Argentina (50th, after going up four).

Increasingly sophisticated means of control

Despite the threats and risks, independent journalism is making progress in the region. In 2016, the organisation Sembramedia created the first directory of native digital media in Latin America which has listed more than 500 independent platforms.

But at the same time, the means of control of the independent press are getting more sophisticated, said González.

Legal, labour and online harassment, as well as indirect censorship through the control of state advertising are tools that governments and political and economic groups use ever more frequently around the region.

In Mexico, the most emblematic case is that of journalist Carmen Aristegui, who was fired together with her investigative journalism team from the MVS radio station after publishing an investigation about corruption implicating President Enrique Peña Nieto.

But there are even more unbelievable cases, such as a judge’s order for psychological tests for political scientist Sergio Aguayo, after he published well-substantiated information about massacres in the Mexican state of Coahuila, connected to former governor Humberto Moreira.

The organisation FUNDAR Centre for Analysis and Research has documented that this country’s central government and 32 state governments spend an average of 800 million dollars a year on official advertising and announcements in the media.

Another Mexican organisation committed to the defence of digital rights, R3D, reported that various regional governments have bought programmes from Hacking Team, an Italian cybersecurity firm that sells intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments and companies on websites, social networks and email services.

According to R3D, online intimidation and monitoring have increased in Mexico during the Peña Nieto administration.

This pattern repeats itself in other Latin American countries, where attacks are increasing and presenting new challenges.

“In the last year, we have seen how the risks of violence which in the past were limited to questions such as drug trafficking are now faced by those who cover issues related to migration and human trafficking, the environment or community defense of lands against the extractive industries,” said González.

Another flashpoint is the coverage of border issues. “Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States has had quite a negative effect in terms of freedom of the press, both domestically and internationally, in the entire region,” he said.

Excerpt:

Eight-year-old Juan de Dios Torres, whose five-year-old sister Zoe Zuleica Torres went missing in December 2016 on the outskirts of the northeastern city of San Luis Potosí, participates along with his mother in the brigade searching for the remains of missing people in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Credit: Marcos Vizcarra/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
NAVOLATO, Mexico, Feb 1 2017 (IPS)

Juan de Dios is eight years old and is looking for his younger sister, Zoe Zuleica Torres Gómez, who went missing in December 2015, when she was only five years old, in the northeastern state of San Luis Potosí. He is the youngest searcher for clandestine graves in Mexico.

With pick and shovel, in the last week of January he joined the Third National Brigade for the Search for Disappeared Persons, which on Monday Jan. 30 found the remains of a body in a grave hidden in a corn and sorghum field on the communal land in Potrero de Sataya, in the municipality of Navolato, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

It is the second body found by this brigade, made up of a handful of women and men who search in the ground for signs of their children, siblings and parents gone missing during the years of the so-called war against drug trafficking, together with human right defenders and Catholic priests.

“A problem that has not been recognised cannot be solved, nor can it heal,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera, who is behind the creation of the brigades, told IPS during the brigade’s work in Sinaloa.

“All the public prosecutor offices in the country are saturated with this issue, there is no structure in place that would allow us to think that the institutions are going to work. That is why we have had to go out to look ourselves for our family members,” insisted Trujillo, who is searching for four disappeared siblings.

On taking office in December 2006, right-wing president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) militarised the security of the country to combat the drug mafias and threw Mexico into a spiral of violence from which it has not escaped.
One aspect reflects the seriousness of the problem: before that year, the Mexican government identified seven major drug cartels. Ten years later, there are nearly 200 organised crime groups operating in the country, according to information published this month by the Drug Policy Programme of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching (Cide).

The data from Cide, one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions, also registers at least 68 massacres in that period of time.

In 10 years, the so-called war on drugs launched by Calderón has left more than 177,000 murder victims, 73,500 of them during the administration of his successor, the also conservative Enrique Peña Nieto.

It has also left at least 30,000 missing people, although registers on disappearances vary greatly among the different authorities and civil society organisations.

In 2011, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity headed by the poet Javier Sicilia brought to the forefront the issue of forced disappearance, reporting hundreds of cases in this country of 122 million people.

But it was in October 2014, with the forced disappearance of 43 rural student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in the southwestern state of Guerrero, and in January 2016, when five young people were detained and “disappeared” by state police in Tierra Blanca, in the state of Veracruz, that the country discovered that many of the disappearances attributed to organised crime were actually carried out by the authorities.

“That is why they did not look for them,” said Miguel Trujillo, Juan Carlos´ younger brother.

Since then, groups of family members who, desperate because of the absence of the state, started their own searches, have mushroomed around the country.

To do this, they train: they take courses in forensic anthropology, archeology, law; and they gear up: they buy caving equipment, they get trays to find small bones; they form crews and have become experts in identifying graves and bones.

The first brigades were organised in March 2016 in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico where several clandestine graveyards have been discovered, where the remains of160 people have been found so far.

There are now at least 13 brigades in the country. And since Jan. 24, different groups have gone out into the field in Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Sinaloa, where people belonging to brigades from five states arrived for a 12-day collective search.

“There are two different kinds of searches, for people who are alive or for people who are dead. I think this is where we’re failing, because we also have to look for people who are alive, but the thing is that nobody was doing this,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo.

The groups are supported by civil society organisations, such as the Marabunta Peace brigade, a group of young people from Mexico City who provide security for the families.

“It is very hard for young people to deal with these realities, for them to not get disillusioned with humanity, but escorting the groups gives them hope. Because when they realize that they are able to help, they find hope and they reaffirm themselves as builders of peace,” Miguel Barrera, the head of Marabunta, told IPS.

Sinaloa is the land of the cartel created by the powerful drug lord Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States on Jan. 19.

The brigade has made two findings: the one in Potrero Sataya and another in the municipality El Quelite, 10 km from port Mazatlán. The little boy from San Luis Potosí came with his mother, to help search for human remains.

“This is something we have to do because the government is not doing it and it was never going to,” said Mario Vergara, who founded the group The Other Disappeared from Iguala, the municipality where the students from Ayotzinapa disappeared, and now helps brigades all over the country.

“We are making progress in terms of organisation and we are going to continue. The people that remain in each state are going to learn how to coordinate to carry out better searches; we need to replicate the model in each state and engage the governments to help the search groups,” said Miguel Trujillo.

One of numerous protests by relatives of victims of forced disappearance, who come to Mexico City to demand that the government search for their relatives and solve the cases. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Aug 26 2016 (IPS)

“Go and tell my dad that they’re holding me here,” Maximiliano Gordillo Martínez told his travelling companion on May 7 at the migration station in Chablé, in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. It was the last time he was ever seen, and his parents have had no news of him since.

Gordillo, 19, and his friend had left their village in the southern state of Chiapas to look for work in the tourist city of Playa del Carmen, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo. It was a 1,000-km journey by road from their indigenous community in the second-poorest state in the country.

But halfway there, they were stopped by National Migration Institute agents, who detained Maximiliano because they thought he was Guatemalan, even though the young man, who belongs to the Tzeltal indigenous people, handed them his identification which showed he is a Mexican citizen.“One single forced or politically motivated disappearance in any country should throw into doubt whether a state of law effectively exists. It’s impossible to talk about democracy if there are victims of forced disappearance.” -- Héctor Cerezo

When his friend tried to intervene, he was threatened by the agents, who said they would accuse him of being a trafficker of migrants. The young man, whose name was not made public, was terrified and fled. When he reached his village he told Arturo Gordillo, Maximiliano’s father, what had happened.

It’s been over three months and the parents of Max, as his family calls him, have not stopped looking for him. On Monday, Aug. 22 they came to Mexico City, with the support of human rights organisations, to report the forced disappearance of the eldest of their five children.

He had never before been so far from Tzinil, a Tzeltal community in the municipality of Socoltenango where four out of 10 local inhabitants live in extreme poverty while the other six are merely poor, according to official figures.

“The disappearance of my son has been very hard for us,” Arturo Gordillo, the father, told IPS in halting English. “I have to report it because it’s too painful and I don’t want it to happen to another parent, to be humiliated and hurt this way by the government.”

“The Institute ignores people, their heart is hard,” he said, referring to Mexico’s migration authorities. At his side, his wife Antonia Martínez wept.

The case of Maximiliano Gordillo is just one of 150 people from Chiapas who have gone missing along routes used by migrants in Mexico, the spokesman for the organisation Mesoamerican Voices, Enrique Vidal, told IPS.

They are added to thousands of Central American migrants who have vanished in Mexico in the past decade. According to organisations working on behalf of migrants, many of the victims were handed over by the police and other government agents to criminal groups to be extorted or used as slave labour.

Antonia Martínez, devastated by the forced disappearance of her son, Maximiliano Gordillo, 19, while his uncle Natalio Gordillo went over details of the case with IPS. His parents and other relatives came to Mexico City from the faraway village of Tzinil, of the Tzeltal indigenous community, to ask the government to give back the young man, who they have heard nothing about since May 7. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

The only official data available giving a glimpse of the extent of the problem is a report by the National Human Rights Commission, which documented 21,000 kidnappings of migrants in 2011 alone.

But the problem does not only affect migrants. In Mexico, forced disappearances are “widespread and systematic,” according to the report Undeniable Atrocities: Confronting Crimes against Humanity in Mexico, released by the international Open Society Justice Initiative and five independent Mexican human rights organisations.

The study documents serious human rights violations committed in Mexico from 2006 to 2015 and says they must be considered crimes against humanity, due to their systematic and widespread nature against the civilian population.

The disappearances are perpetrated by military, federal and state authorities – a practice that is hard to understand in a democracy, local and international human rights activists say.

“One single forced or politically motivated disappearance in any country should throw into doubt whether a state of law effectively exists. It’s impossible to talk about democracy if there are victims of forced disappearance,” said Héctor Cerezo of the Cerezo Committee.

The Cerezo Committee is the leading Mexican organisation in the documentation of politically motivated or other forced disappearances.

On Wednesday, Aug. 24 it presented its report “Defending human rights in Mexico: the normalisation of political repression”, which documents 11 cases of forced disappearance of human rights defenders between June 2015 and May 2016.

“Expanding the use of forced disappearance also serves as a mechanism of social control and modification of migration routes, a mechanism of forced recruitment of young people and women, and a mechanism of forced displacement used in specific regions against the entire population,” the report says.

Cerezo told IPS that in Mexico, forced disappearance “evolved from a mechanism of political repression to a state policy aimed at generating terror.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) urged Mexico in March to acknowledge the gravity of the human rights crisis it is facing.

Signs with the images of victims of forced disappearance are becoming a common sight in Mexico, like this one in a church in Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

The report presented by the IACHR after its visit to Mexico in 2015 denounced “alarming” numbers of involuntary and enforced disappearances, with involvement by state agents, as well as high rates of extrajudicial executions, torture, citizen insecurity, lack of access to justice, and impunity.

The Mexican government has repeatedly rejected criticism by international organisations. But its denial of the magnitude of the problem has had few repercussions.

The activists who spoke to IPS stressed that on Aug. 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the international community has an opportunity to draw attention to the crisis in Mexico and to hold the government accountable for systematically disappearing members of certain groups of civilians, as documented by human rights groups.

But not everything is bad news with respect to the phenomenon of forced disappearance, which runs counter to democracy in this Latin American country of 122 million people which is free of internal armed conflict.

This year, relatives of the disappeared won two important legal battles. One of them is a mandate for the army to open up its installations for the search for two members of the Revolutionary Popular Army who went missing in the southern state of Oaxaca, although the sentence has not been enforced.

Meanwhile, no progress has been made towards passing a draft law on forced disappearance under debate in Congress.

“The last draft does not live up to international standards on forced disappearance nor to the needs of the victims’ families, who do not have the resources to effectively take legal action with regard to the disappearance of their loved ones. There is no real access to justice or reparations, and there are no guarantees of it not being repeated,” said Cerezo.

In the most recent case made public, that of Maximiliano Gordillo, the federal government special prosecutor’s office for the search for disappeared persons has refused to ask its office in Tabasco to investigate.

For its part, the National Human Rights Commission issued precautionary measures, but has avoided releasing a more compelling recommendation. The National Migration Institute, for its part, denies that it detained the young man, but refuses to hand over the list of agents, video footage and registries of entries and exists from the migration station where he was last seen.

Aug. 22 was Gordillo’s 19th birthday. “We feel so sad he’s not with us. We had a very sad birthday, a birthday filled with pain,” said his father, before announcing that starting on Thursday, Aug. 25 signs would be put up in more than 60 municipalities of Chiapas, to help in the search for him.

As the days go by without any progress in the investigations, Gordillo goes from organisation to organisation, with one request: “If you, sisters and brothers, can talk to the government, ask them to give back our son, because they have him, they took him.”

Excerpt:

In Mexico there is a trail of ghost towns, where local residents have fled en masse due to the violence of the drug cartels. On empty streets in Santa Ana del Águila, in the municipality of Ajuchitlán del Progreso, Guerrero state, bullet marks can be seen on the walls. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, May 18 2016 (IPS)

“This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, referring to the generalised violence in Mexico and in Honduras and other countries of Central America, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and is a product of transnational crime, but is invisible to the international community.

Zúñiga Cáceres, the daughter of indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered on Mar. 2, is in Mexico after visiting several European cities to ask for help clarifying her mother’s murder and to call for a cancellation of the financing for the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, to which the Lenca indigenous people are opposed.

In an interview with IPS she admitted that despite the death threats and the murders of other activists, she didn’t believe they would dare kill her mother, who was so well-known at an international level.“You don’t hear bombs here (like in the Middle East, for example), but blood is shed, there are killings, many killings. It’s a situation that has to be urgently addressed by the United Nations agencies, especially the UNHCR (the refugee agency).” -- Rubén Figueroa

She herself and her siblings had fled to Mexico due to the threats against members of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH), which was founded by Cáceres 23 years ago. She had been studying in Mexico for a month when her mother was killed.

Now she wants to tell the world about communities that are displaced and forced off their land because of a “neoliberal, racist and patriarchal” system.

The victims, she said, are not only the Lenca Indians. Also affected are the Garifunas, mixed-race descendants of native people and African slaves, who have been displaced by the construction of tourist resorts in their coastal territory.

To that is added abuse by the police and other agents of the state, since the 2009 coup d’etat that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya, mixed with criminal violence that has forced thousands of people to seek refuge outside of Honduras.

Rubén Figueroa, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which has organised 11 caravans of Central American mothers searching for their children who have gone missing in Mexico, concurs with Zúñiga Cáceres.

“The situation in the entire Northern Triangle region of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) is a humanitarian crisis,” the migrants’ rights activist told IPS.

“You don’t hear bombs here (like in the Middle East, for example), but blood is shed, there are killings, many killings. It’s a situation that has to be urgently addressed by the United Nations agencies, especially the UNHCR (the refugee agency),” he said.

Figures from an invisible crisis

According to the 2016 Global Report on Internal Displacement, published this month by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the number of internally displaced people forced from their homes by armed conflict and violence rose to a record 40.8 million in 2015.

Of that total, at least 7.3 million were in Latin America, most of them in Colombia, because of its decades-long armed conflict.

But the report dedicates a special analysis to the growing new phenomenon of displacement caused by criminal violence, in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico now stand out on the global map of internal displacement because of the victims of criminal violence, a phenomenon that is invisible and ignored by international humanitarian assistance agencies. Credit: IDMC 2016 report

These four countries accounted for a total of one million internally displaced persons – nearly double the number reported in the 2014 edition of the report. They are mainly victims of criminal violence, principally associated with drug trafficking and gangs.

The IDMC stresses that these are incomplete figures, to which must be added the number of people who are forced to leave the country by criminal violence.

It describes those displaced by criminal violence as “unseen and in displacement limbo”.

Human rights activists in Mexico blame this generalised violence on the war between organised crime groups, as well as on violence by the states against opponents to mining and energy projects.

“What we are experiencing is not a war on drug trafficking, but a war by the state against the general population,” María Herrera, an activist with the group of relatives searching for family members forcibly disappeared in Mexico, who number in the thousands, told IPS.

Also part of this new kind of humanitarian emergency, arising from transnational crime, are civilian victims of the growing militarisation in countries of Central America and Mexico, according to those interviewed by IPS, who complain that the issue is not on the agenda for the World Humanitarian Summit to be held May 23-24 in Istanbul.

Figueroa said a series of regional policies, such as Mexico’s Southern Border Plan and the Alliance for Progress in Central America, were partly to blame for the crisis.

“Approximately five years ago we began to notice that displacement is caused by more direct violence. We have seen young people who come to the shelters with bullets in their bodies. People who have returned to their countries and have been killed,” the activist said.

The Beast, the train that undocumented migrants from Central America ride on its way across Mexico, heading for the United States, stopped in Hidalgo in the centre of the country, in a photo from the IDMC 2016 report. Migrants hitching a ride on the train face the risk of being robbed, assaulted, raped and even killed by gangs and organised crime. Credit: Keith Dannemiller/OM

“Migration has always existed, but now people are being displaced by drug trafficking and gang warfare, and there is also the question of persecution and harassment of activists and human rights defenders in Honduras. It’s become structural violence,” he said.

Mexico between a rock and a hard place

The Central American diaspora triggered by violence, along with the deportation of thousands of migrants by the United States, has turned Mexico into a sort of sandwich. And this is causing a growing phenomenon, which has not been addressed either: Central Americans who are choosing to stay in Mexico rather than head north to the United States.

More than two million people were deported during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term – 2009-2012 – alone.

The governmental Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (COMAR) reports that 2,000 Central Americans requested refugee status in 2014, and only one-fifth were granted it.

Mexico, meanwhile, has its own humanitarian emergency. The Mexican Commission of Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) documented 281,400 cases of forced displacement caused by generalised violence between 2011 and February 2015.

One-third of these displaced persons fled their communities in 141 mass displacements in 14 states.

Mass displacement is defined as an event simultaneously affecting more than 50 people or 10 families. Between January 2014 and February 2015, the CMDPDH registered 23 mass displacements.

One-fifth of these happened in Guerrero, a state that doubled its record and became the leader in forced displacement due to violence in Mexico in the last year.

“People who have been internally displaced do not have mechanisms or institutions for their protection or assistance,” says the report Forced Displacement in Mexico, released by the CMDPDH, a government agency, in 2015.

But there are other cases, like that of Myrna Lazcano, a Mexican woman who, after marrying and having two daughters in the United States, decided to return to Mexico in 2008.

However, the violence against women in her home state of Puebla and in Veracruz, where she found work, forced her to send her daughters back, first, and then return herself to the United States, where she has requested asylum.

Like her, another 9,200 Mexicans applied for asylum in the United States in 2012 – three times the number of requests filed there by Mexicans in 2008.

“This is an emergency that no one wants to address,” said Figueroa. “It is influenced by the position, especially on the part of the United States, with regard to the situation in Central America, because they would be forced to offer refuge if they recognised it.”

But in his view, “another element is the stance taken by Mexico and the countries of origin (of the migrants), because they would be forced to admit that they are failing, as is the international community.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

Demonstrators in a protest held to commemorate murdered reporter Regina Martínez at the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City. Mexico accounted for 14 of the 43 journalists killed in Latin America in 2015. Credit: Lucía Vergara/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Apr 27 2016 (IPS)

Mexico is the most dangerous country in Latin America for journalists. In 2015 it accounted for one-third of all murders of reporters in the region, and four more journalists have been added to the list so far this year.

The latest, Francisco Pacheco Beltrán, was shot dead outside his home in the southern state of Guerrero on Monday Apr. 25. Pacheco Beltrán regularly covered crime and violence, which have been on the rise in connection with organised crime and drug trafficking. He worked for several local media outlets in Mexico’s poorest state, which is also one of the most violent.

His murder adds one more chapter to the history of terror for the press in Mexico in this new century, which has not only included the killings of 92 journalists, but also a phenomenon that is almost unheard-of in democratic countries around the world: 23 journalists have been forcibly disappeared in the last 12 years, an average of two a year.

And every 22 hours, a journalist is attacked in Mexico, according to the latest report by the Britain-based anti-censorship group Article 19.

“Violence against the press in Mexico is systematic and widespread,” said the former director of the organisation’s Mexico branch, Darío Ramírez, on the last International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, celebrated each Nov. 2.

But violence and impunity are not the only problems faced by journalists in Mexico and the rest of the region.

Ricardo González, Article 19’s global protection programme officer, told IPS that freedom of the press in Latin America faces three principal challenges: prevention, protection and the fight against impunity; the de-concentration of media ownership; and improving the working conditions of journalists.

“For us, the red zones are Mexico, Honduras and Brazil,” González said.

According to the Federation of Latin American Journalists (FEPALC), 43 journalists were killed in the region in 2015, including 14 in Mexico (besides two that were forcibly disappeared). Mexico is followed by Honduras (10), Brazil (eight), Colombia (five) and Guatemala (three).

Brazil’s National Federation of Journalists reported a 60 percent rise in journalists killed between 2014 and 2015. The highest-profile case was the murder of investigative reporter Evany José Metzker, whose decapitated body was found in May 2015.

Honduras and Mexico have a similar problem: the violence against journalists is compounded by a culture of impunity.

Honduran journalists protest an official secrets law that undermines their work. By means of laws and other mechanisms, some governments in Latin America have restricted access to information, the theme of World Press Freedom Day this year. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“In the first half of 2015, the Commission registered a worrying number of unclarified murders of communicators and media workers,” says the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ (IACHR) annual report on Honduras.

Not just murders

But violence is not the only threat faced by the media in Honduras. One of the Central American country’s leading newspapers, Diario Tiempo, which stood out for its defence of democracy during the 2009 coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya, was recently shut down.

The closure of the newspaper is linked to the downfall of one of the most powerful families in the country: the family of banking magnate Jaime Rosenthal, who is accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of laundering money for drug traffickers.

The freezing of the accounts of businesses in the family’s Grupo Continental conglomerate, as a result of that accusation, led to the closure of the newspaper, announced in October. As a result, the government was accused of taking disproportionate measures against the outspoken publication.

In a public letter, Rosenthal said “the circumstances that led to this suspension are very serious with regard to freedom of speech, social communication and democracy in our country, to the extreme that this is an atypical case in the Western world.”

A newspaper with a similar name, in Argentina, is an example of the other side of the coin in the region. On Monday Apr. 25, journalists from Tiempo Argentina, a Buenos Aires daily that closed down in late 2015, relaunched the publication, this time as a weekly.

Under the slogan “the owners of our own words”, the Tiempo Argentino reporters got their jobs back by forming a cooperative, similar to the format used by factory workers to get bankrupt companies operating again after Argentina’s severe 2001-2002 economic crisis.

“It’s really good to see that the more people organise, the more the competition between companies is overcome,” Cecilia González, a correspondent for the Notimex agency in the countries of Latin America’s Southern Cone region, told IPS from Buenos Aires.

But González said that in Argentina there are plenty of problems as well, and few positive answers like Tiempo Argentino. One of the big problems was President Mauricio Macri’s modification by decree of a law pushed through by his leftist predecessor in 2015 that outlawed monopolies by media companies.

On Apr. 18, Macri, who took office in December, told the IACHR that he would draft a new law with input from civil society. But reporters in Argentina are sceptical.

“Besides the more than 300 media outlets owned by the Grupo Clarín and which it will avoid losing, another monopoly is being built in the shadows, associated with La Nación, and they plan to get hold of the entire chain of magazines,” the Orsai magazine wrote.

But for the IACHR and its special rapporteur for freedom of expression, conservative governments are not the only ones causing problems.

In Ecuador, to cite one example involving a left-leaning administration, President Rafael Correa, in office since 2007, used the strength of the state to sue executives of the El Universo newspaper – Carlos, César and Nicolás Pérez – and its then editorial page editor, Emilio Palacio.

The president sought 80 million dollars in damages and three years in prison for libel after an editorial by Palacio alleged that he ordered police to open fire on a hospital full of civilians during a September 2010 police rebellion.

In December 2015, the IACHR accepted a petition accusing the government of the alleged violation of legal safeguards and freedom of thought and expression, and requesting legal protection.

Correa also took aim against one of Latin America’s best-known cartoonists. In 2014 a cartoon by Xavier Bonilla – who goes by the pen name Bonil – that depicted a raid by police and public prosecutors on the home of a political opposition leader enraged Correa, who launched a campaign against the cartoonist.

“Ecuadoreans should reject lies and liars, especially if the liars are cowards and haters of the government disguised as clever, funny caricaturists,” was one of the president’s outbursts against Bonilla.

As journalists in the region get ready for World Press Freedom Day, celebrated May 3, there are signs of resistance in some countries, although the climate is not the best for media workers.

One example is Veracruz, the Mexican state that has been in the international headlines for the alarming number of reporters who have been assaulted or killed.

On Apr. 28, the fourth anniversary of the murder of Regina Martínez, a correspondent for the local weekly Proceso, journalists belonging to the Colectivo Voz Alterna, who have battled hard in defence of the right to inform, in the midst of a climate of terror, will place a plaque in her honour in the central square of the state capital.

“We cannot forget, and we cannot just do nothing,” Vera Cruz reporter Norma Trujillo told IPS. Similar sentiments are voiced by reporters working in dangerous conditions around the region.
Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

The photos of victims of forced disappearance in the southwestern state of Guerrero hang on the walls of the San Gerardo parish soup kitchen, in the city of Iguala. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
IGUALA, Mexico, Sep 24 2015 (IPS)

The soup kitchen of the San Gerardo parish in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero has become a memorial to horror. Long rows of photos have been hung on the walls of the large hall – the faces of dozens of people who were “disappeared”, abducted, extracted from their lives without a trace.

Most of them are from the northern part of Guerrero, the poorest state in Mexico and one of the hardest-hit by violence. The database of the organisation searching for missing loved ones includes 350 ‘desaparecidos’, and every week new names are added.

Over the past year, this parish church in Iguala has offered a safe meeting place every Tuesday for families who have overcome their fear of speaking out and searching for their ‘desaparecidos’ in the clandestine cemetery which was discovered in the hills surrounding this city after the Sep. 26, 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the rural teachers college of Ayotzinapa.

That night, the students were attacked by the Iguala municipal police and – as is now known thanks to a meticulous investigation by a group of experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – there was a concerted action by different security forces, including the military and federal police, which lasted a number of hours and took place in at least nine different locations.

Municipal police executed five civilians, including two students, while another student was tortured and killed, his body appearing hours later next to a garbage dump.

Another 43 students, most of whom were in their first year of teachers college, were seized and taken away.

Saturday Sep. 26 marks the first anniversary of their disappearance. But the remains of only one student have been found – a burnt corpse in a plastic bag – while the possible discovery of the remains of a second student is now being investigated.

There is no trace of the rest of the missing students.

The attack brought to light alliances between local political leaders and organised crime groups.

It also revived the pain surrounding the 30,000 ‘desaparecidos’ left, according to human rights groups, by the militarised security strategy launched by former president Felipe Calderón in January 2007.

Enrique Peña Nieto, president since December 2012, kept his predecessor’s hard-line security policy in place. But its effects have become largely invisible due to a media strategy focused on promoting constitutional reforms that have opened up the energy and telecommunications industries to private investors.

In its first year alone, the Peña Nieto administration invested nearly 500 million dollars in official advertising, according to a joint study by the FUNDAR Centre for Research and Analysis and the Mexican office of Article 19, a London-based human rights organisation that focuses on defending and promoting freedom of expression and freedom of information.

But the levels of violence have not come down. According to a report by the newspaper El Universal, published ahead of the anniversary of the disappearance of the teachers college students, more than 5,000 ‘desaparecidos’ were reported by public attorneys’ offices around the country in 2014 – 14 a day.

Another area heavily affected by the problem is the northern state of Nuevo León, where 31,000 bone fragments have been found on a ranch since 2011, leading to the identification of 31 missing persons.

“The difference is that now, human rights defenders and members of organised social movements are being targeted for human rights violations,” Héctor Cerezo, who has documented forced disappearances of fellow human rights and social activists over the last four years, told IPS.

Since Peña Nieto took office, “we have documented 81 human rights defenders who became victims of forced disappearance; under Calderón we documented 55. In total that’s 136 missing defenders since 2006 – cases in which it has been documented that they were taken away by agents of the state.

“That might seem like a small number in the universe of thousands of ‘desaparecidos’, but it indicates a stepping up of the Mexican state’s social control strategies,” the activist said.

The report “Defending human rights in Mexico: political repression, a widespread practice”, presented Aug. 27 by the Cerezo Committee Mexico and the National Campaign Against Forced Disappearance, listed 860 human rights abuses against social and human rights activists between June 2014 and May 2015.

The incidents include collective abuses, against 47 civil society organisations and 35 communities, and a rise in arbitrary detentions, which nearly doubled.

These included arrests during a protest by seasonal farm workers in the northern state of Baja California, who work in slavery conditions, and teachers’ protests ahead of the June legislative elections, in Guerrero and the southern state of Oaxaca, where two demonstrators were killed.

Héctor Cerezo of the Cerezo Committee said the disappearance of the teachers college students from Ayotzinapa occurred in the context of this strategy of social control.

“The brutality, the scale of the aggression, and the fact that the government would assume such a huge political cost cannot be explained if it was merely part of a drug affair. Their disappearance was meant to serve as a lesson for the human rights and social movements,” he said.

In any case, the brutal attack on the students drove home the gravity of Mexico’s human rights crisis.

Journalistic investigations have documented at least 80 extrajudicial executions committed this year by the army and the federal police in three supposed “shootouts” with organised crime groups in the central states of México and Michoacán.

In Iguala, civilian brigades searching for the remains of missing family members in the hills around the city have found 104 bodies in clandestine graves, although only nine of them have been identified so far.

“It’s not just Ayotzinapa; the whole country is like this,” one of the members of the brigades, Graciela Pérez, told IPS. She has been searching for her missing daughter for three years now, in the south of Tamaulipas, 750 km north of Iguala, where she mapped – on her own – the location of 50 secret graves in January and February.

In response to the crisis, the IACHR has scheduled a Sep. 28-Oct. 2 on-site visit, as requested by human rights groups.

And in the legislature, four separate bills to create a law that would classify the crime of forced disappearance have been tabled and are awaiting debate.

“This is the first forced disappearance of a large group of people, members of a social movement, in contemporary Mexico,” says the Cerezo Committee report, referring to the disappearance of the students.

On Wednesday Sept. 23, the parents of the missing students began a 43-hour hunger strike, one day before meeting with the president.

And a Saturday Sep. 26 march is being organised in the Mexican capital, to demand the students’ reappearance and a solution of the case.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Parents and other relatives of the 43 missing students at a Sep. 6 meeting with the press in Mexico City shortly after the five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts announced their initial conclusions on the serious shortcomings in the investigation of the case. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
Sep 8 2015 (IPS)

Nearly a year after the forced disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, the government’s investigation is back to the drawing board, after a group of independent experts refuted all of the official arguments.

“The investigation must be completely refocused and rethought,” said Spanish psychologist Carlos Beristáin, one of the five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (IGIE) designated by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), which presented its report on Sunday Sep. 6.

The IGIE was set up by the IACHR under an agreement with the Mexican government and the representatives of the victims’ families, to provide international technical assistance in the investigation of the Sep. 26, 2014 municipal police ambush of the buses the 43 students had boarded.

The male victims were students at one of Mexico’s 17 rural teachers colleges, in Ayotzinapa in the southwestern state of Guerrero.“They weren’t burnt in the Cocula dump. That event, as it was described, did not happen.” -- Francisco Cox

The IGIE’s initial mandate was from Mar. 2 to Sep. 2. The experts reviewed the 115 volumes of the case file, visited the area, and interviewed the families of all of the victims.

The 550-page report is a catalog of the errors committed by the investigation headed by Mexico’s attorney general’s office: leads that were not investigated, evidence that was destroyed, omissions, major inconsistencies in witness statements, reports of torture, false conclusions, and a disconnect between the investigations of the ambush itself and the final fate of the students.

Above all, it dismantles the central thesis, presented in January as the “truth” by former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, that the students were killed and their bodies burnt in a municipal dump in Cocula, next to Iguala, the town where they were ambushed.

The government’s theory was based on testimony from three alleged participants in the massacre, who said that for 12 hours they fed the fire, using tires, wood, diesel and other fuels, before crushing the bones into ash and gathering the rest in garbage bags that they threw into a nearby river.

“They weren’t burnt in the Cocula dump,” said Chilean lawyer Francisco Cox. “That event, as it was described, did not happen.”

The IGIE’s conclusion was based on research by José Torero, a professor in fire safety engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia. He said it would have taken 30 tons of wood, 13 tons of tires and at least 60 hours to incinerate the 43 bodies.

Furthermore, the flames would have been seven metres high and the smoke plume 300 metres high, a forest fire would have been inevitable, and the heat would have burnt alive anyone who came near.

The report cleared up other doubts such as the presence of the army in at least two of the possible crime sites, and the possibility that the students were attacked by mistake.

The five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts meeting with students and relatives of the victims during their visit to the Escuela Normal Rural Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa, the rural teachers college attended by the 43 students who were disappeared on Sep. 26. Credit: Courtesy of CENTROPRODH

“The students were being watched by state and federal authorities and the army,” Guatemalan lawyer Claudia Paz said. “It wasn’t a question of them not knowing who (the students) were or what they were doing.

“The students weren’t carrying arms, no police were injured, they reached the city long after the event and they did not plan to enter the city,” she added. She was referring to an alleged motivation: that they wanted to boycott a political rally for María de los Ángeles Pineda, the mayor’s wife, who is accused of ties with a local drug gang in Iguala.

On the other hand, there was a lead that was not investigated, where a key role could be played by a bus from the Estrella Roja company, which pops up in the case file before disappearing again. That “fifth bus” was the last to leave the bus station with students aboard, setting off in a different direction.

The IGIE reported that Iguala is a hub for the trafficking of heroin to the United States, which is sometimes shipped in passenger buses. It concluded that the students could have unwittingly boarded a bus carrying drugs, which would explain “such an extreme and violent reaction and the massive character of the attack.”

The group of experts explained that the simultaneous attack lasted at least three hours in nine different places, and was intended to keep the buses from leaving the city.

The extent of the involvement by the police at different crime scenes indicates the level of coordination and command needed to carry out such an action, the report states.

The IGIE notes that the investigation was fragmented from the start, and that at one point there were 52 prosecutors working on it separately, without sharing information among themselves.

The experts set forth 20 recommendations, including: to unify the investigation, to investigate public employees who hindered or blocked the inquiries, and to focus principally on the hypothesis that the main reason for the ambush was drug trafficking.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced on Twitter that he instructed investigators to take into account the report’s theories and findings.

In a press briefing where questions were not allowed, Arely Gómez, named attorney general in March, offered a new investigation at the garbage dump and a six-month extension of the IGIE’s work.

The parents of the students refuse to accept that their sons are simply missing.

They feel they have been cheated by the authorities, and demanded that the president meet with them before Sept. 10. They also called for the IGIE to continue operating until the students are found.

The question now is: “What next?”

“The experts’ central recommendation is for the attorney general’s office to incorporate the report in the investigation and in the case files,” lawyer Abel Barrera, the director of the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Centre, which is providing the victims’ families with legal support, told IPS.

Mario Patrón, of the Miguel Agustín Pro Human Rights Centre, commented that the lines of investigation into the political-criminal connection must be exhausted. “A good sign is that the group of experts was endorsed; as long as they are operating we can have guarantees,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is so optimistic. In the attack, not only were 43 students forcibly disappeared, but six were killed, including two students shot at point-blank range and another who was tortured and then murdered, and 40 were injured (two are still in coma).

The IGIE report also cites 148 documented cases of forced disappearance in eight years – 82 in Iguala and 55 during former mayor José Luis Abarca’s term in office.

Since October 2014 more than 100 people have been arrested, including Abarca and his wife. But no one has been sentenced, and not all of the arrests were linked to the students.

The former mayor is facing charges for another of the 55 disappearances reported during his term. The 60 people prosecuted in connection with the case of the students have been charged with kidnapping, not forced disappearance.

“Imagine if they do this in the case of the 43 students, which has made headlines around the world, what’ll they do with us,” said Mario Vergara, a representative of the Association of the Other Disappeared of Iguala, which groups relatives of victims of forced disappearance searching for the remains of their loved ones in the common graves that have been discovered in the area during the investigation of the missing students.

“I’m really grateful for the experts’ work, but until we find our missing family members, and those responsible are punished, this won’t go anywhere,” he told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

One of the empty streets in the town of Santa Ana del Águila, in the Mexican municipality of Ajuchitlán del Progreso, where there is almost no one left and homes and businesses are shuttered and many have bullet marks. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
AJUCHITLÁN, Mexico, Feb 7 2015 (IPS)

Cerro del Águila, which two centuries ago was a refuge for independence fighters in Mexico, is now a stronghold of organised crime groups engaged in turf wars for control of the prosperous poppy trade and trafficking routes, which have left a string of ghost towns in their wake.

From Águila mountain – “cerro” means hill in Spanish – it’s possible to see who is coming and going from a number of villages down below in this region known as Tierra Caliente, which is in the Balsas river basin in the impoverished southern state of Guerrero, and in neighbouring municipalities in the states of Michoacán and México.

These states are hotbeds of organised crime and drug trafficking, and made the headlines in 2014: Michoacán, as the state that armed paramilitary forces known as “self-defence” groups; México, where the army killed at least 15 civilians; and Guerrero, where municipal police ambushed and forcibly disappeared 43 students from a rural teachers college.

In Santa Ana del Águila, a town of 748 people at the foot of the hill which belongs to the municipality of Ajuchitlán del Progreso, over half of the population has fled in the last few weeks. There is no longer a sheriff, a priest, or anyone to run the shop where people buy food at subsidised prices as part of the government’s National Crusade Against Hunger anti-poverty programme.

The windows of the houses are closed and barred and local businesses are shuttered. The doors to the health clinic and schools have chains and padlocks. Only the middle school dared open after the year-end vacations, but at a high cost: on Jan. 12, the second day of classes, the teacher was kidnapped, and his family has not been able to scrape up the ransom money yet.

“I’m not afraid to die, but the way these people are going to die makes me sad,” one local resident who is still here told IPS.

Ajuchitlán del Progreso and the adjacent San Miguel Totolapan are the municipalities that have been hit by the highest levels of violence in Guerrero. Several organised crime groups, including the notoriously violent La Familia Michoacana and Guerreros Unidos drug cartels, are fighting for control of this region, which is key for the trafficking of poppies, used to produce heroin.

In an interview with IPS, the mayor of Ajuchitlán, José Carmen Higuera, said that since 2007, the most frequent crimes in the municipality are kidnapping and extortion. “What happened here is the usual: the town fills up with police and the army, but nothing happens, no major arrests are made. I have said it before: we don’t want them here, in the municipal seat; they should go out and protect the villages and communities, where they are really needed.” -- Mayor José Carmen Higuera

“I try to do the best I can, but we need a more efficient and operative strategy, with real intelligence work,” said the mayor, who does not have bodyguards even though two of his predecessors, Raymundo Flores and Esteban Vergara, have been missing since 2013.

As in many similar cases of missing local officials and priests, no investigation has been carried out.

The federal authorities “do a lot of pretending,” Higuera said. “What happened here is the usual: the town fills up with police and the army, but nothing happens, no major arrests are made. I have said it before: we don’t want them here, in the municipal seat; they should go out and protect the villages and communities, where they are really needed.”

The municipality includes the main town of the same name and 127 villages spread over nearly 2,000 sq km, with a total population that before the forced displacement stood at nearly 140,000.

Heroin for the United States

Mexico produces nearly half of the heroin consumed in the United States, and in recent years has become the main supplier of illegal opium derivatives in that country, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2014 National Drug Threat Assessment.

In the annual report on the major drug transit or producing countries that President Barack Obama sent to Congress in September, the DEA reported a 324 percent increase in heroin seizures at the Mexican border between 2009 and 2013.

“The United States is particularly concerned about poppy cultivation in Mexico, the primary supplier of illegal opium derivatives to the United States,” Obama said in the presidential memorandum.

The poppy-producing areas in Mexico are in the Pacific coastal states, from Oaxaca in the south to Sinaloa in the north, and in mountainous areas in the neighbouring Chihuahua.

Guerrero, one of the country’s three poorest states, has been the leading producer over the last three decades. Some experts estimate that the state accounts for 40 percent of the opiates produced in Mexico.

Control of Tierra Caliente, which has two ports, is key. And because of that, Santa Ana del Águila and other communities in Ajuchitlán and Totolapan have become ghost towns, as more and more people flee the violence.

The last wave of armed clashes began shortly after Christmas, local residents of Santa Ana and the nearby village of Garzas told IPS.

But the problem is not new. Massive forced displacements in this area began in July 2013, when battles between organised crime groups forced 631 people to flee Villa Hidalgo, a village in Totolapan.

At that time at least 1,300 people fled seven villages, Totolapan Mayor Saúl Beltrán Orozco told IPS.

The National Human Rights Commission, an independent government agency, launched an investigation, and in its special report on self-defence groups and rising crime and violence in Guerrero, presented in December, it documented 2,393 cases of forced displacement from mid-2013 to mid-2014.

The second wave occurred from March to July 2014. In March, 136 people from the town of Linda Vista, which is also in Totolapan, hiked through the mountains for nearly 24 hours without food, to reach another town before heading to Chipalcingo, the capital of Guerrero, where they sought shelter and were housed in centres used to evacuate people during heavy rains and flooding.

Three months later, armed civilians attacked villages, setting houses on fire and kidnapping or killing local residents. In one community, Atlayolapa, only an older couple was left.

Local press reports estimate the number of people displaced by the violence in the area at 4,000 from mid-2013 to mid-2014. But a national lawmaker puts the total at over 7,000. None of these figures have been verified.

In January, after the kidnapping of seven people, the commander of the military zone 35, Juan Manuel Rico, officially confirmed that a camp would be set up in the county seat in Ajuchitlán, to protect the local communities, which over 1,000 people have fled in the last few weeks.

But the federal forces – military and police – rarely leave the main town and can be seen walking around the central square, while every day people comment about new murders, homes burnt down, and armed clashes in communities just 20 minutes away.

“They do a lot of pretending. They don’t even inform us about what they’re doing,” said Mayor Higuera, complaining that the military and police forces don’t patrol the communities and villages, where the violent clashes take place. To sum up the lack of support he feels in his fight against organised crime, he said “better alone than in bad company.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Students from this school, the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were attacked by the police in the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero. Six were killed, 25 were injured and 43 are still missing. Credit: Pepe Jiménez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Oct 17 2014 (IPS)

The images filled the front pages of Mexico’s newspapers: 61 half-dressed state policemen kneeling, with their hands tied, in the main square of the town of Tepatepec in the central state of Hidalgo, while local residents threatened to burn them alive.

It was Feb. 19, 2000. The reason the townspeople were furious was the police occupation of the Normal Rural Luis Villarreal rural teachers college in the town of El Mexe, and the arrest of 176 of the students, who had been on strike because of the government’s announcement that enrollment would be reduced.

Between that episode and an incident on Monday Oct. 13 in the southwest state of Guerrero, when teachers, students and local residents of the town of Ayotzinapa set fire to the state government building, there has been a history of repression and criminalisation of the country’s poorest students: the sons and daughters of small farmers who study to become teachers in rural schools.

“It’s built-up anger,” Etelvina Sandoval, a researcher at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Mexico’s national university for teacher training, told IPS. “For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.”

Guerrero is the third-least developed state in the country, and one of the most politicised. It has been the birthplace of social movements, and four decades ago it was one of the targets of the “dirty war” – a time of military repression of opponents of the government, which left a still unknown number of dead and disappeared.“For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.” -- Etelvina Sandoval

It is also one of the most violent states. And since Sept. 26 it has been in the global spotlight, after police in the city of Iguala attacked three buses full of students fom the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college of Ayotzinapa.

The reason for the attack is not yet clear. But it was reported that the police handed over a group of students to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel.

In the clash with police, six people were killed, 25 were injured, and 43 mainly first-year students went missing.

Implicated in the massacre were Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda, both of whom are fugitives from justice and who, according to investigations, were on the cartel’s payroll.

In the search for the students, 23 mass graves have been found so far, containing dozens of corpses.

“The indiscriminate violence against the civilian population that we saw during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) has been directed towards organised social movements since the change of government. What happened in Iguala was just a question of time,” said Héctor Cerezo, a member of the Cerezo Committee, an organisation that documents forced disappearances and the dirty war.

The young people who study at the rural teachers colleges – known as “normales” or normal schools – are the poorest students in the country, who receive training to educate poor “campesinos” or peasant farmers in the most marginalised and remote communities, where teachers who have trained in urban areas do not want to go.

The students are themselves campesinos whose only chance at an education is the normales, which were founded in 1921 and are the last bastion of the socialist education imparted in Mexico from 1934 to 1945.

In the normales, which function as boarding schools, and where students are given meals as well as a scholarship of three to seven dollars a day, the students are in charge.

They participate directly in administrative decision-making, and have established support networks among schools through the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico, the country’s oldest student organisation, which has frequently been accused of churning out guerrillas.

Through its ranks passed legendary guerrillas like Lucio Cabañas, who in 1967 founded the Party of the Poor, and Genaro Vázquez (both of whom were graduates of the Ayotzinapa teachers college). Another was Misael Núñez Acosta, who studied at the “normal” in Tenería, in the state of Mexico, and in 1979 founded the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación teachers union and was killed two years later.

“They were created for that reason – to do political work and consciousness-raising. The students are very independent young people [in comparison with students at the urban ‘normales’] with very strict discipline,” said Sandoval, who added that the rural teachers colleges have been “a thorn in the side of the governments.”

Of the 46 original rural teachers colleges, only 15 are left. Half of them were closed after the 1968 student movement by then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970).

The ones that are still open have been waging a steady battle since 1999 to avoid being turned into vocational-technical schools. But the state governments have financially suffocated them, with the argument that the country doesn’t need more primary school teachers, because the declining birth rate has reduced student enrollment.

As a result, fires and other incidents have become common in the rural teachers colleges as the installations have become more and more rundown. In 2008, for example, two students died in a fire caused by a short circuit in the first rural school of its kind in Latin America, the Normal Rural Vasco de Quiroga in the northwest state of Michoacán.

“What I can say is that there are not enough teachers in the most remote areas,” Sandoval said. “There are communities who go for months without a teacher. In some places a ‘non-teacher’ covers the gap temporarily, working without any contract or fixed timeframe.”

The attack on the buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa school has put President Enrique Peña Nieto’s human rights policy to the test.

The incident occurred in the context of growing tension caused by attempts by the latest governments to close down the school.

In January 2007, then state Governor Zeferino Torreblanca tried to reduce the number of students enrolled and declared that his government’s aim was to reduce the “studentocracy”. In November of that year, the anti-riot police cracked down on students when they demonstrated outside the state legislature.

On Dec. 12, 2011 the police killed two normal school students: phys-ed student Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús and primary education student Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino.

They were taking part in a roadblock to protest cuts in the school budget. In addition, Édgar David Espíritu Olmedo was seriously wounded, and 24 other students were beaten and injured.

“Ayotzinapa is standing up to fight for justice. The academic excellence that we are seeking cannot be conditioned on our political submission,” the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico stated in a communiqué at the time.

No one was held responsible or punished for the deaths.

Nearly three years later, as they were getting ready to visit Mexico City to take part in the commemoration of the anniversary of the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, the students from the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa were ambushed by municipal police, and the detained students, according to the investigations and testimony, were handed over to a criminal group that the mayor worked for.

Since then, there has been no sign of the 43 missing students.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Zanjón, the nucleus of the Alto Golfo de California y Delta del Río Colorado Biosphere Reserve in northwest Mexico, where the Cocopah have fished for a living for centuries. The restrictions on fishing condemn them to extinction. Credit: Courtesy of Prometeo Lucero

By Daniela Pastrana
EL MAYOR, Mexico , Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

In their language, Cocopah means “river people”. For over 500 years the members of this Amerindian group have lived along the lower Colorado River and delta in the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora and the U.S. state of Arizona.

They fish and make crafts for a living, have strong family ties, and are united by their Kurikuri or rituals and funeral ceremonies – and, now, by the struggle to keep from disappearing, in a battle led by their women. Today, the Cocopah number just over 1,300 people, most of whom live in Arizona.

“I’m Hilda Hurtado Valenzuela. I’m a fisherwoman. And I am Cocopah,” says the president of the Cocopah Indigenous People Cooperative Society.

She and other women of this community introduce themselves this way at an assembly attended by IPS, held to discuss the federal government’s promise to finally consult them about a fishing ban which took away their livelihood and practically condemns them to extinction.“The case of the Cocopah is an example of how ultra-conservationist policies can endanger the existence of a native community.” -- Lawyer Yacotzin Bravo

“No government has the right to take our habitat from us,” Hurtado told IPS during a visit to the El Mayor Cocopah Indigenous Community, where the Red de Periodistas de a Pie (Journalists on Foot Network) and the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights are carrying out a project for the protection of human rights defenders, financed by the European Union.

In May, the 61-year-old Hurtado, a mother of four and grandmother of 10, sat down on the road connecting the port of San Felipe on the Gulf of California with Mexicali, the capital of the state of Baja California, which abuts the U.S., and refused to budge until the federal government formalised its promise to hold a consultation with the local communities.

“The government agreed to do something that it should have done 25 years ago,” said the lawyer Ricardo Rivera de la Torre of the Citizens Commission of Human Rights of the Northwest, an organisation that has been documenting violations of civil rights in Baja California since 2004.

Rivera de la Torre and Raúl Ramírez Baena took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2008.

“The government violated the Cocopah’s people’s right to consultation as outlined in the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169,” which Mexico ratified in 1990, said Ramírez Baena.

ILO Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples requires prior consultation of local indigenous communities before any project is authorised on their land.

But in 1993, without any prior consultation, the government decreed the creation of the Alto Golfo de California y Delta del Río Colorado Biosphere Reserve. The nucleus of the reserve is the Zanjón, where the Cocopah have fished for the Gulf weakfish (Cynoscion othonopterus) for centuries.

The Gulf weakfish lay their eggs between February and May in shallow waters in the Gulf of California where the states of Sonora and Baja California meet, and the fish are widely sold during Lent, when Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays.

After the biosphere reserve was created, a Reserve Management Plan was adopted in 1995, along with a string of laws and regulations – such as the Law on Ecological Balance and a fishing quota and ban – which restricted the fishing activities of the Cocopah to levels that have made it impossible for them to make a living.

“The case of the Cocopah is an example of how ultra-conservationist policies can endanger the existence of a native community,” said Yacotzin Bravo, another lawyer with the Citizens Commission of Human Rights of the Northwest.

A group of Cocopah women in the Indiviso ejido, in the El Mayor Cocopah Indigenous Community in the Mexican state of Baja California, during an assembly where they discussed how to carry out a consultation on reforming the regulations and laws that limit their fishing in the biosphere reserve. Credit: Courtesy of Prometeo Lucero

The Mexican constitution defines indigenous people as the descendants of the populations that inhabited the area before the state was formed and who preserve their ancestral cultural or economic institutions.

Article 2 of the constitution establishes that native people have “preferential access” to the nation’s natural assets.

“Indigenous rights are the rights of peoples,” expert in indigenous law Francisco López Bárcenas told IPS. “Not of persons, not of municipalities, not of rural communities. With respect to indigenous rights, we are talking about the appropriation of territory, which is necessary for a people to be able to exist as such.

“They depend for a living on fishing, on a close relationship with their natural surroundings. It’s not only about money. First, as a result of the laws on agriculture, their territories were shrunk to small spaces, and now their main livelihood activity is reduced. And if they can’t fish, they have to go to other parts to find work,” he said.

Every year, just after the waning moon, the weakfish begin their migration to the shallow waters of the Colorado River delta, and fishing season starts.

The Cocopah go to sea in their “pangas” or fishing boats and sit quietly until they hear the weakfish and throw their “chinchorros” or nets. The Cocopah capture between 200 and 500 tons of fish per season.

“What the government has done with us is segregation,” Juana Aguilar González, the president of the El Mayor Cocopah Rural Production Society, told Tierramérica. “They know that we Indians don’t threaten the environment.”

The Cocopah are not the only ones who catch weakfish. There are also two non-indigenous cooperatives in the area – San Felipe in Baja California and Santa Clara in Sonora – with a fishing capacity 10 times greater, according to statistics from the governmental National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO).

The weakfish “captured by the Cocopah are approximately 10 percent of the recommended quota, which shows that the fishing done by that indigenous community, even if they fish in the nucleus of the reserve, does not hurt the ecological balance or threaten the species with extinction,” says recommendation 8/2002 of the National Human Rights Commission addressed to the ministries of the environment and agriculture.

“The decree creating the reserve changed our lives,” Mónica González, the daughter of the late Cocopah governor Onésimo González, said sadly. “Now, instead of being busy organising our dances, we have to be worried about the legal action, the trials, confiscations and arrests.”

The Cocopah, descendants of the Yumano people, are one of the five surviving indigenous groups in Baja California.

In the 17th century, some 22,000 Cocopah were living in the Colorado River delta. Today there are only 1,000 in the Cocopah Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of Arizona, and just over 300 in Mexico, in Baja California and Sonora, according to the governmental National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) , Cocopah is an endangered language. There are only 10 Cocopah speakers still alive. Years ago one of them, 44-year- old Mónica González, began to make an effort to revive the language.

“Sometimes I think our leaders talk about the Cocopah as if we had already died, but we are alive and still putting up a struggle,” she told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

A migrant deported from the United States sleeps under a bridge on the stretch of the Tijuana River known as El Bordo, at the northwestern tip of Mexico, next to the border. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
TIJUANA, Mexico, Aug 23 2014 (IPS)

The areas under the low bridges over a section of the canalised channel of the Tijuana River that runs along the border between Mexico and the United States have become enormous open-air toilets.

Along the entire two-km stretch from the eastern part of Tijuana to the wall on the U.S. border, hundreds of people sleep in makeshift tents of cardboard and cloth, tunnel-like holes, and sewage ditches and on the bridges and the sides of the levees. The banks are strewn with trash washed down by the Tijuana River, which stinks from the sewage.

The stench is dizzying. At 7:00 AM, the junkies, who can get heroin here for two dollars a dose, are happy to be given a few chocolates, which help curb their sugar craving. “This is the city of El Bordo,” one of them tells IPS with a crooked smile, his hand stretched out.

This is the “city” of people who have no one. The underside of the border bridges and the banks of the concrete-lined channel are home to hundreds of deported homeless migrants who have decided to wait for a better moment to cross this tightly sealed border, and who survive cleaning windshields, offering to carry people’s bags outside of supermarkets, doing odd construction jobs, collecting refuse to sell for recycling, or panhandling on the streets of the border city of Tijuana.

“The population that inhabits El Bordo is an illustration of the extreme conditions that the most vulnerable deportees can face in Mexico,” says the study “Estimates and Characteristics of the Population Residing in El Bordo on the Tijuana River Channel”.

The report, produced by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF), counted between 700 and 1,000 people living in El Bordo in August-September 2013.In the last five years more and more families have been broken up as a result of deportations. One statistic reflects the magnitude of the phenomenon: while in 2007 only 20 percent of those deported were sent back without their families, that proportion climbed to 77 percent in 2012.

It adds that the residents of El Bordo are mainly male addicts (some began to use drugs here) in their forties, who were deported in the last four years and have no identity documents. Most of them have left children behind in Mexico or the United States.

According to the report, half of them speak English, and overall they have similar levels of schooling as the rest of the population of Tijuana. It adds that only six percent say they want to return to their place of origin in Mexico.

“These results reflect that deportations from the United States to Mexico are causing families to separate, and are specifically separating parents from their homes, which causes a rupture in the lives of individuals and families, and puts an end to the possibility of integration in the country of residency by the rest of the members of the family,” says the study, coordinated by Laura Velasco, a researcher in COLEF’s Department of Cultural Studies.

Tijuana is at the northwestern tip of Mexico, 2,780 km from Mexico City. It is in the state of Baja California across the border from San Diego, California. In 2012, the city received 59,845 of the 409,849 people deported by the government of Barack Obama.

Since Obama’s second administration began in 2009, more than two million people have been deported – seven people per hour in 2012 – which means the administration has deported more people than any other government.

Tijuana, population 1.7 million, has more drug addicts than any other city in Mexico, in proportional terms. It is the headquarters of weakened drug cartels, and is considered one of the most violent and dangerous cities in the world.

For decades it was the main gateway for migrants to the United States.

But the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington prompted a shift in U.S. migration policy and the Mexican border began to be sealed off, forcing undocumented immigrants to seek out increasingly remote and hazardous routes, while the number of Border Patrol agents climbed from 3,500 in 2005 to 21,000 in 2013.

Mexico and the U.S. are separated by a 3,500-km border. Baja California, which borders the city of San Diego and the state of Arizona, receives one-third of the deportees and is the state with the largest number of foreign residents.

In the state capital, Mexicali, 177 km east of Tijuana, the heat of August – up to 50 degrees Celsius – can kill, and people who don’t have air conditioners sleep on rooftops.

Mexicali has its “mini Bordo”: the Montealbán condominium complex, severely damaged by an earthquake in 2010, on the eastern shore of the now non-existent Nuevo River, a few metres from the historic old city.

Some 80 local homeless people and deported immigrants, basically all of them addicts, live in the condemned buildings.

Bodies have been found in the ruins. The latest was discovered on Apr. 15. And there are constant fires and police raids.

“I live here because there is nowhere else to go,” Josué, a 33-year-old from Guatemala, told IPS.

“I felt overwhelmed in the shelter, there are so many people,” said Josué, who was deported Aug. 1, 2013 and has only one thing on his mind: returning to the United States.

He has already tried to cross the border in Nogales, in the state of Sonora, but he didn’t make it. He was told it was easier here, and he’s just waiting “for the heat to end” to try again. “I was 10 years old when I got to California; I have nothing in Guatemala,” he said.

Another COLEF study on the characteristics of deported immigrants, in this case Mexican women, sounds the alert about the health problems they face.

“There is an alarmingly high rate of symptoms of emotional problems among the deportees – nearly 20 times higher than among those who return voluntarily,” says the study, based on research on the health of deportees being carried out by Letza Bojórquez, a researcher with COLEF’s Department of Population Studies.

Drawing on statistics from the Border Survey of Mexican Migration, the study found that 40 percent of the migrant population living on the streets reported emotional problems and 12 percent answered “yes” to the question of whether they had ever thought about taking their life.

In the last five years more and more families have been broken up as a result of deportations. One statistic reflects the magnitude of the phenomenon: while in 2007 only 20 percent of those deported were sent back without their families, that proportion climbed to 77 percent in 2012.

“The problem here is that there is no policy providing for attention to the deportees,” activist Sergio Tamai, director of the Albergue Hotel Migrante, a shelter in Mexicali, and one of the heads of the organisation Ángeles sin Fronteras, told IPS. “Hundreds of deportees started to arrive and there was no institution prepared to receive them.”

Between August and November 2013, Tamai led a protest in Tijuana, with 800 people camping out in the Plaza Constitución to demand programmes providing assistance to migrants, deportees and the homeless.

Lobbying of the authorities by civil society organisations and religious groups has brought some results.

On Aug. 7, the state legislature of Baja California passed a law for support for the rights of and protection of migrants in the state, which requires that the state system for the integral development of the family provide social assistance to unaccompanied minor children and adolescents, and that a state registry of migrants be created.

It was the first state to do so, after the Mexican Congress approved the creation of a new migration law in 2011, which replaced the 1947 law and provides legal recourse for Central American migrants making their way through Mexico.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Students from the high school attended by José Luis Alberto Tehuatlie, during the boy’s Jul. 22 funeral in the town of San Bernardino Chalchihuapan, in the Mexican state of Puebla. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
SAN BERNARDINO CHALCHIHUAPAN, Mexico , Jul 31 2014 (IPS)

People in this town in the central Mexican state of Puebla found out the hard way that protesting can be deadly.

A new law passed in Puebla makes it possible for police to use firearms or deadly force to break up demonstrations.

Local inhabitants felt the impact of the measure during a harsh crackdown on a protest against another law that they say undermines their autonomy.

A dead 13-year-old boy, another who lost three fingers, a third with a broken jaw and teeth knocked out, a driver who lost an eye, and 37 others injured by beatings and tear gas were the price this Nahua indigenous town of 3,900 people paid for blocking a road to demand the repeal of a state law that transferred responsibility over civil registries from local community authorities to the municipalities.

“It’s not fair that they attack the people like this just because we are asking that our community life, our authorities, be respected,” Vianey Varela, a first year high school student, told IPS.

On Jul. 9, when local residents blocked the Puebla-Atlixco highway some 150 km from Mexico City, the state police first used the powers given to them by the Law to Protect Human Rights and Regulate the Legitimate Use of Force by the police, which the state legislature passed in May.

The “Ley Bala” or Bullet Law, as it was dubbed by journalists, allows Puebla state police to use firearms as well as “non-lethal weapons” to break up “violent” protests and during emergencies and natural disasters.

The roadblock was mounted to protest another state law approved in May, which took away from the local authorities the function of civil registry judges or clerks and put it in the hands of the municipal governments.Since May, in at least 190 villages and towns in the state, no one has been born, no one has died, and no one has been married – at least officially, because there are no records.

As a result, since May, in at least 190 villages and towns in the state, no one has been born, no one has died, and no one has been married – at least officially, because there are no records.

Javier Montes told IPS that he became “presidente auxiliar”- a post just under mayor – of San Bernardino Chalchihuapan in May, but added that “I still haven’t signed a thing. The archives are in our care, but we don’t have stamps or the necessary papers. And in the municipal presidency [mayor’s office] they don’t know what to do, so in the meantime nothing is being registered.”

“We sent letters to all the authorities,” said Montes, who has received anonymous threats for speaking out. “They never responded. When the ink and paper ran out, and our fingers were worn out from so much typing, we went out to protest and this is what happened.”

The town is in the municipality of Ocoyucan and the local inhabitants belong to the Nahua indigenous community. According to the latest estimates by the government’s National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, the native population of Puebla is one million people – one quarter of the state’s total population.

In Mexico’s municipalities there is a “presidente” or mayor, and “presidentes auxiliares”, who are the highest level authorities in the communities, many of which are remote and located far from the seat of the municipal government.

The presidentes auxiliares name the police chief and run the town. And up to May they were also the civil registry judges or clerks..

They are directly elected by local voters without participation by the political parties, and they tend to be highly respected local leaders who are close to the people.

In the Jul. 9 police crackdown, 13-year-old José Luis Alberto Tehuatlie was hit by a rubber bullet in the head and died after 10 days in coma.

The Puebla state government initially denied that rubber bullets had been used. But the public outrage over the boy’s death forced Governor Rafael Moreno to announce that he would repeal the law.

Puebla is not the only place in Mexico where there have been attempts to regulate public protests. In the last year, the legislatures of five states have discussed similar bills.

The first was, paradoxically, the Federal District, in Mexico City, which has been governed by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) since 1997.

In the capital street protests are a daily occurrence, but since the very day that Enrique Peña Nieto was sworn in as president, on Dec. 1, 2012, demonstrations and marches have frequently turned violent.

A Federal District bill on public demonstrations, introduced in December 2013 by lawmakers from the rightwing opposition National Action Party, failed to prosper.

In April, the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, ruled by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), became the first part of Mexico to regulate protests.

A state law, the “Ley de Ordenamiento Cívico”, known as the “anti-protest law,” is a toned-down version of another initiative that would have required demonstrators to apply for a permit to protest at least 48 hours ahead of time.

But the law maintains the ban on roadblocks and allows the police “to take pertinent measures” against demonstrators.

Other initiatives to regulate and allow the “legitimate use of force” have been adopted in the states of San Luis Potosí and Chiapas.

Global rights groups like Article 19 and Amnesty International have spoken out strongly against these laws aimed at regulating demonstrations, pointing to a worrisome tendency towards the criminalisation of social protests in Mexico since 2012.

But the governmental National Human Rights Commission has failed to make use of its legal powers to promote legal action challenging the anti-protest initiatives as unconstitutional.

On the contrary, in October 2013 it recommended that the Senate amend article 9 of the constitution referring to the freedom to hold public demonstrations and to the use of public force.

The Jul. 9 protest was not the first time rubber bullets have been used in Puebla.

Just hours before Tehuatlie’s death was confirmed, the Puebla state secretary of public security, Facundo Rosas, showed a document from the secretariat of national defence which indicated that the government had not purchased rubber bullets under the current administration.

However, in December 2011 the state human rights commission rebuked the Puebla police chief for the use of rubber bullets to evict local residents of the community of Ciénega Larga, when 70-year-old Artemia León was injured, as reported by the Eje Central online news site.

It became clear in conversations that IPS held with people in San Bernardino Chalchihuapan that they are very angry. Hundreds of people attended the boy’s funeral, on Jul. 22, where many of them called for the governor’s resignation.

“Why doesn’t he try the rubber bullets on his own kids,” said one man after the funeral, which was attended by some 40 “presidentes auxiliares” from other communities.

So far no one has been held accountable for the boy’s death.

Garifuna children from Honduras relax at one of the shelters on Mexican migration routes. Credit: Courtesy of Migrant rights defenders

By Daniela Pastrana
IRAPUATO, Mexico, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

In early May, the Irapuato Migrants’ House, in the centre-west Mexican state of Guanajuato, took in a group of 152 Garifuna Afro-Caribbean people from Honduras. Sixty of them were children.

“It was a Sunday,” said Bertha, the cook. “They had children of all ages, from babies on up. They were only here a few hours, they showered, ate and left. They did not talk much. I asked one of the women if these children go to school, and she just said: ‘No, we can’t right now,’ and nothing else,” she told IPS.“It is an appalling bloodletting. Children aged 13-16 are sent straight into sexual exploitation or slave labour, or they are massacred or disappeared, or become hired killers." -- Diego Lorente

Between May and June, this shelter took in over 400 children, mostly from Honduras. They travelled in large groups. Only once did they stay for more than four hours.

“They said very little, they did not tell us how they travelled, although we know they did not come on the train. They wouldn’t say what route they were taking, either,” Guadalupe González, the head of the shelter, told IPS.

Some 1,000 kilometres to the southeast, “La 72” migrants’ shelter in Tenosique, a municipality in the state of Tabasco on the border with Guatemala, is also experiencing a similar trend.

They began to see a marked increase in unaccompanied young migrants aged 14-18, women with small children, and groups of Garifunas, who were previously only occasionally to be found on the migrant route to the United States.

Mexico’s northern border with the U.S. is 3,152 km long, while in the south its border with Guatemala is 956 km long, and with Belize it is 193 km. The distance from south to north of the country is 3,200 km as the crow flies, but the six main migration routes are over 5,000 km long.

The same pattern that has been seen in other hostels has been found at the Belén Migrant Shelter in Saltillo, the capital of the northeastern state of Coahuila, on the U.S. border, where since May the passage of children has risen from an average of four a month, to four a day.

“Its an extremely alarming situation,” Father Pedro Pantoja, who runs the hostel and is an expert on migration affairs, told IPS.

It is still not clear what has provoked this exodus of Central American children, many of them on their own, which has overwhelmed the capacity of the U.S. Border Patrol and created a humanitarian crisis in the United States, according to President Barack Obama.

Advocates for migrants in Mexico attribute the surge to the spread of rumours about future regularisation for migrants who enter the U.S. as children.

This, at least, is what has prompted Delsy, a 20-year-old Honduran woman who looks several years younger, to head north, leaving behind her mother, four siblings and her 15-month-old son.

“Someone told me that if I declare I’m under 18, I can get into the United States from (the northwestern border city of) Tijuana. She said it’s a sure thing, because that’s how she got in,” Delsy told IPS at the Irapuato shelter, shortly before taking the train to the border.

Since October 2013, more than 52,000 children have been detained in the United States. In Texas and Arizona, two states on the border with Mexico, facilities at detention centres and military bases are filled to overflowing  and minors are overcrowded while they await deportation.

Organisations working for migrants’ rights, like the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Centre (CDHFrayMatías) in the southern city of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, documented the systematic increase in the influx and detention of children since 2011.

However, none of the governments involved took measures to combat it. What did change was the place of origin, because Mexico was formerly the main country of origin of migrant children.

In contrast, from Oct. 1, 2013 to Jun. 15, 2014 the U.S. authorities detained 15,027 children from Honduras, 12,670 from Guatemala, 12,146 from Mexico and 11,436 from El Salvador, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The Washington-based Pew Research Centre linked the new places of origin of child migrants with indicators of violence.

“There is a humanitarian crisis, not only in the United States, but also in the northern triangle of Central America, and chiefly in Honduras, which is forcing children and victims of social and political violence to leave the region,” activist Diego Lorente of CDHFrayMatías told IPS.

The problem could be even worse than it seems, because thousands of child migrants who leave their homes never make it to the United States. Human rights organisations estimate that four out of 10 children who migrate do not even reach Mexico’s northern border.

Some are detained in Mexico. The government’s National Migration Institute reported that between Jan. 1 and Jun. 26, 2014, it had “rescued” 10,505 migrant children, who are in the process of being deported back to their countries.

But many more simply disappear in Mexican territory.

“It is an appalling bloodletting. Children aged 13-16 are sent straight into sexual exploitation or slave labour, or they are massacred or disappeared, or become hired killers,” said Pantoja of the Saltillo shelter.

In the United States, the law stipulates that children must be processed within 72 hours of their detention. The solution for most of them is for a relative to legally claim them, or to stay in shelters for a long time. When they reach their 18th birthday they must be deported.

On Jun. 30, Obama announced that his migration reform had met with stalemate in the House of Representatives, dominated by the rightwing opposition Republican Party, and that he would rely on executive action from now on to try to solve the crisis.

But there is no simple solution to the problem. According to the Honduran authorities, 3,000 children have dropped out of school so far this year in order to pursue the “American dream.”

“In Garifuna communities on the north coast of the country, many children are dropping out of classes because they are leaving the country with their parents or private persons, en route to the United States,” Honduran newspaper La Tribuna said on Jun. 28.

“The rumour spread like wildfire, and now there seems to be no stopping it,” said Guadalupe González at the Irapuato shelter, while two young Honduran women walk away, convinced that if they get to the border, all they have to do is say they are underage in order to get across it.

Yakiri Rubí Rubio, a young Mexican woman, was jailed for three months and is at risk of being sent back to prison for killing her rapist in self-defence. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 27 2014 (IPS)

“I just want all this to be over,” Yakiri Rubí Rubio, a young Mexican woman facing trial for killing the man who raped her in December 2013, laments to IPS.

The 21-year-old Rubio lives in the bustling neighbourhood of Tepito, one of the most dangerous areas of Mexico City.

On the evening of Dec. 9 she set out to meet her girlfriend when she was approached by two men in the street. They abducted her at knifepoint and took her on their motorcycle to a hotel, according to Rubio’s statements throughout the investigation.

She testified that both men beat her, then one of them, a 90-kilogram 37-year-old called Miguel Ángel Anaya, raped her while his brother, Luis Omar Anaya, went out for a smoke. Rubio fought her attacker and wounded him in the abdomen and neck with his own knife. Miguel Ángel fled the hotel on his motorbike, bleeding.

“Thousands of women have been raped and then killed, and their killers walk free. But a rape victim who defends her own life ends up in prison, while one of her attackers is at liberty." -- journalist and activist Lydia Cacho
Rubio also ran out of the hotel and asked some police officers for help. Bleeding and half naked, she got to a branch of the Public Prosecutor’s Office three blocks away.

While her various wounds were being treated, including a 14-centimetre gash on her arm, Luis Omar Anaya arrived and accused her of murdering his brother in a lovers’ quarrel, a specious argument according to her defence lawyers, since Rubio is a lesbian.

Rubio was charged with homicide, an offence punishable by 20 to 60 years in prison, and sent to a facility for women who have already been convicted and sentenced.

Three months later a judge reclassified her offence as “legitimate self-defence with excessive violence”, and set bail at 10,000 dollars. Her family paid this sum, with great difficulty; she was freed pending trial and had to appear weekly in court.

Now she lives shut up in her home, because of the constant threats she and her family receive. She only goes out in the company of her parents.

“She went from one kind of prison to another,” said Marina Beltrán, who raised Rubio since she was six months old, and was present at the interview with IPS.

Luis Omar Anaya denied taking part in the abduction and said he was at his home, a short distance from the hotel, when his brother arrived, at death’s door.

On Monday Jun. 23 Anaya petitioned a federal judge to revoke Rubio’s conditional release. The appeal must be decided within 90 days. IPS tried to interview Anaya’s lawyer, without success.

The entire legal process has thrown a protective cloak around the Anaya brothers, including subsequent fabrication of evidence against Rubio.

In the view of organisations working for the defence of women’s rights in Mexico, Rubio has become a symbol in the fight against machismo in the justice system, where the norm is to disparage the complaints of women who have been raped.

“Thousands of women have been raped and then killed, and their killers walk free. But a rape victim who defends her own life ends up in prison, while one of her attackers is at liberty,” wrote journalist and activist Lydia Cacho.

This case, at least, has shown all the defects of the justice system where rape is concerned.

The real situation is much worse because only 12 to 15 percent of women and girls who are raped report it, according to information presented by Amnesty International in July 2012 to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Amnesty International is not aware of the existence of any proof that the number of rapes is falling or that trials and convictions with sentencing are rising, the organisation said.

In Rubio’s case, officials at the Public Prosecutor’s Office took nine days to open an investigation into the rape and refer the case to the special prosecution service for crimes of violence against women.

She was not examined by a gynaecologist, nor was she given psychological care or contraceptive pills, as the law in the federal district of Mexico City requires.

Mexican Official Standard 046, in force since 2005, states that in the case of rape, institutions providing medical care “must offer emergency contraception immediately and up to 120 hours after the event” and are obliged to “provide medical abortion services.”

Failure to do so is another form of machismo, defence lawyer Ana Katiria Suárez, who is acting pro bono for Rubio, told IPS. She said the category of “excessive force” in legitimate self-defence is mostly used against women rape victims.

The main precedent for this case occurred in February 1996 in the state of Mexico, largely occupied by Greater Mexico City. On leaving a party, a young woman shot and killed her friend’s boyfriend who attempted to rape her.

A judge ruled then that, since his blood alcohol level was extremely high and hers was not, the aggressor was not responsible for his actions while she was in control of hers.

“Excess violence in legitimate self-defence is absurd!” Rubio’s mother complained. “How can you defend yourself a little bit?”

The nuance is decisive. Had the judge not ruled excessive violence when the offence was reclassified, Rubio would have been exonerated; but if she is found guilty of excessive violence, she will have to pay her rapist’s family more than 28,000 dollars for “damages.”

In contrast, Rubio’s rape complaint is at a standstill because the federal district prosecution service considers that the aggressor has paid in full. The prosecutors have not considered reparations for the harm done, or regarded the participation of the second attacker.

Six months after the rape, Rubio and her family are battling on two fronts: in the legal sphere, for her to be acquitted of murder and for reparations to be made, and on the personal level, to live without fear and get their lives back.

During this time her parents have given up their jobs and her brothers and sisters have left school. The family is receiving psychological support, and Rubio has had to learn how to deal with the press.

“At first it was dreadful, I would start crying because every time I had to talk about what happened I would relive it over again. Now I don’t cry any more. I just want it all to be over,” she said.

She also wants to go back to studying. “I used to prefer working. But now I would like to study law to help other women who are going through the same thing I did, but don’t have a lawyer like mine,” she said, finally summoning up a faint smile.

(END)

Autodefensa (self-defence) group in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, who have been illegally fighting a drug cartel since 2013 and whom the government is now trying to legalise. Credit: Félix Márquez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Feb 11 2014 (IPS)

“In the long term, what benefit will regulation of the autodefensas [self-defence groups] bring us? Do you think I have an aptitude or professional vocation for police work?” asked Juan Carlos Trujillo, a peace activist in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

Trujillo, from Pajacuarán in Michoacán, was displaced from his home by violence and has four siblings who have been forcibly disappeared. He is not hopeful about the latest strategy of the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto in the war being fought in this southwestern state."Many within the autodefensa groups are not interested in continuing to bear arms, and when the state does its job they will be able to lay down their weapons." -- Karla Michelle Salas

The battle is being waged between the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar), the region’s main drug trafficking cartel, and the Michoacán “autodefensas” or vigilantes, a loose confederation of vigilante groups formed in April 2013 who have taken the law into their own hands in response to the state’s failure to provide security.

After months of armed conflict that reached a peak in January, the self-defence forces joined police and soldiers on Feb. 9 in taking the city of Apatzingán, regarded as a Templar stronghold, without a shot and without capturing a single cartel leader.

Some 100 unarmed members of the autodefensas carried out a march for peace and declared that they will not leave Apatzingán “until it is cleaned up.”

The operation followed the signing on Jan. 27 of an unprecedented pact between the Mexican government, Fausto Vallejo, the governor of Michoacán, and autodefensa leaders, agreeing to Peña Nieta’s decision to incorporate 10,000 illegally armed civilians in Michoacán into the Rural Defence Corps of the municipal police.

The first item of the eight-point agreement stipulates that “the autodefensas will be institutionalised by incorporation into the Rural Defence Corps.” The vigilante groups are to present lists of their members’ names and come under the control of the Mexican army.

The autodefensas must also register the weapons in their possession, while the federal forces are to provide them with “the tools needed for communication, transportation and operation.”

In the complicated jigsaw puzzle that is Michoacán, the agreement convinced nobody.

Security experts have warned of the dangers of legitimising a paramilitary model.

Erubiel Tirado, a researcher at the Ibero-American University, told Proceso magazine that the government is “fighting lawlessness with lawlessness” and has made the autodefensas “a modern version of Chucho el Roto,” the nickname of Jesús Arriaga (1858-1894), a legendary Mexican bandit who, like Robin Hood, robbed the rich and gave to the poor.

Another concern, particularly of human rights organisations, is that the same rules are being applied to different self-defence groups that have recently arisen in the country.

“You cannot enforce a general measure on all the autodefensas. They must be understood on a case by case basis,” attorney Karla Michelle Salas of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers told IPS.

In her view, “cases like Cherán or the community police in Guerrero must be seen differently, as the autodefensas here have taken historic forms of people’s organisation according to local customs and practices.

“We don’t all have to become police because the state fails to guarantee security as it should. Many within the autodefensa groups are not interested in continuing to bear arms, and when the state does its job they will be able to lay down their weapons,” Salas said.

The High Council of the indigenous community of Cherán, of 13,000 people, is also suspicious of the agreement.

“We took care not to register our names” in the autodefensas regularisation agreement, one of the Council members, Trinidad Ramírez, told IPS.

“They want to coopt them for the police, but the police have often been involved in crime, so no good can be expected to come of it,” he said.

Cherán is a community of native Purépecha people that became famous in April 2011 when it barricaded itself against criminal groups that were seizing farms and destroying forests, removed its municipal authorities and set up its own traditional government. Since then, the town has been surrounded by ditches and barricades and is protected by local people themselves.

Disarming does not even occur to the Purépechas as a possibility.

“We are not going to lay down our arms,” Ramírez said.

“We have learned lessons because people have memory. And no one is putting a stop to crime in Michoacán,” where the mafias “are just regrouping,” he said.

Ramírez said “dismantling one of these groups needs more than capturing the leaders, because they have an organisational structure that ensures that if one goes down, there is someone else to take his place.”

The situation could hardly be more complex. Meanwhile, many analysts view the agreement as little more than a ploy for positive publicity by Peña Nieto.

No one is predicting a rapid solution to the conflict, in which the Mexican government’s attitude has been ambivalent.

The autodefensas provide the regular forces with information, and have accompanied them on several operations and offensives to recover towns under Templar control. But at other times they have been isolated. On Jan. 13, the government launched an operation to disarm the self-defence groups, leading to the deaths of three civilians.

However, the autodefensas did not disarm and on Jan. 21 there was a three-hour gun battle between Templars and autodefensas in two communities in the municipalities of Parácuaro and Apatzingán, while an army helicopter circled overhead with orders not to intervene, according to local reporters.

It’s a yo-yo strategy — hitting then hand-holding, said Arturo Cano, an experienced reporter for the national daily La Jornada.

And for the local people of Michoacán, hopes of living a normal life remain distant.

“I would like to go back to my village and create an organisation to monitor the authorities,” said activist Trujillo.

“I think members of the autodefensas could do the same, not as groups integrated into the state, but as part of a citizen observatory. That is my modest opinion, but right now we do not have the right conditions,” he said.

Trujillo is one more victim of the Mexican war on drugs, launched by former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), that has left more than 80,000 people dead and 20,000 disappeared.

Members of self-defence groups are still patrolling the town of Nueva Italia in the region of Tierra Caliente in Michoacán, ignoring the Mexican government’s call for them to lay down their weapons. Credit: Félix Márquez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jan 16 2014 (IPS)

“The army decided to open fire on the people,” Estanislao Beltrán, a spokesman for the self-defence forces of Michoacán, said in a radio interview after the government’s attempt to disarm the vigilante groups in the state of Mexico, in which at least two people were killed.

The confirmed casualties were Rodrigo Benítez Pérez, 25, and Mario Pérez, 56, both day labourers from the town of Antúnez. They were not armed.

Some sources say four people were killed when the military attempted to disarm the self-defence group on Monday Jan. 13. But only these two deaths have been confirmed.

Michoacán is caught up in something like a civil war for which no solution is in sight. In February 2013, people from several towns in a region known as Tierra Caliente took up arms to defend themselves from the Knights Templar drug cartel.

Tierra Caliente is a farming region that has become the world’s largest avocado-producing area in the world. It also has mines, as well as the Pacific Ocean port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico’s third-most important.

The Knights Templar are a breakaway faction of another cartel, La Familia, that emerged during the government of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), initially claiming to “protect” the people of Michoacán from the notoriously brutal Zetas drug cartel.

But the new cartel soon forgot that aim, and began to kidnap and extort businesspersons, ranchers and farmers. They were so powerful that not even the executives and managers of transnational companies like Mexico’s potato chip maker Sabritas, a subsidiary of U.S. food giant PepsiCo, were safe from their attacks and extortion.

The situation hit a low point when they began to commit sexual abuse.

“They would show up at your house and say: ‘I really like your woman, I’ll bring her back soon’,” said Dr. José Manuel Mireles, the founder and leader of the self-defence group, in an interview with the independent agency SubVersiones.

Mireles is convalescing in Mexico City, after the small plane in which he was flying home to his town, after a meeting with federal authorities, crashed on Jan. 4. The cause of the crash has not been clarified.

In the last few months, with the green light from the federal authorities according to the self-defence force’s leaders, the group gradually gained control of the towns in Tierra Caliente. And little by little, they hemmed in Apatzingán, a city of 100,000 people that is the main stronghold of the Knights Templar.

The cartel, cornered, began to set fire to town halls and buses around the region. But instead of moving to dismantle the cartel, the government of Enrique Peña Nieto sent in the army to disarm the self-defence groups, which it had allowed to grow for months.

The government’s argument is that they are illegal groups, because in Mexico civilians are not allowed to carry guns of a larger calibre than nine mm.

The government has leaked information about a possible link between the self-defence groups and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which splintered from the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

According to the federal government, the Jalisco New Generation cartel has been trying to take control of the production and trafficking routes for synthetic drugs in Michoacán.

The leaders of the self-defence forces deny any ties to criminal groups, and feel betrayed by the federal government, which used to back them.

“The government has changed its tune,” Alejandra Guillén, a reporter who has closely followed the phenomenon of the self-defence groups in indigenous areas of Michoacán, told IPS. “It used to clearly support them, and would accompany them. But something happened; now it is sending in the military to disarm them and kill civilians.”

Experts in security like Martín Barrón, a researcher at the National Institute of Penal Sciences, say that what is happening in the state is the result of a misguided strategy applied by the Calderón administration: “governing through fear.”

Interior minister Miguel Osorio acknowledged that the current situation in Michoacán is a consequence of a decade in which violence incubated.

Michoacán, in the southwest, is one of Mexico’s most lawless states, and decades ago the population learned to live with – and in many cases, live off – the drug trade.

“None of the categories of analysis help us understand Michoacán,” said Guillén. “There are no good or bad guys, just a society very closely linked to the phenomenon of the drug trade, which it didn’t see as a bad thing until the turf wars began. We can’t forget that the region has been a drug production area for many years.

“And another important thing is that it’s not just a question of taking up arms. They have a social base,” she added.

One of the founders of the Knights Templar, Servando Gómez, was a teacher in a primary school in the Michoacán town of Arteaga, where until 2009 he received his paycheck as a schoolteacher.

And until early 2013, when he swapped his stethoscope for an assault rifle, Mireles attended patients in the small public hospital in Tepalcatepec.

In mid-2009, the druglord Gómez, known as La Tuta, phoned a radio programme to call for a pact with then President Felipe Calderón, saying his organisation would be prepared to disappear if the authorities guaranteed security in his territory and defended them from rival cartels.

“We are a necessary evil,” he said. “Please understand that the day I die they will put someone else in my place, and someone else will replace him, and so on; this will never end.”

Calderón rejected the proposal, and in response sent the security forces into the state, with poor results, and with dozens of police and soldiers ambushed and killed.

The tension in Michoacán has spread to neighbouring states like Colima, Querétaro and Guerrero, which have their own self-defence forces. There are a total of 36 of these vigilante groups, in eight of Mexico’s 31 states.

In the past few days, people in the Tierra Caliente region have seen public services restricted, supplies reduced, roads cut off, city government buildings set on fire, and civilians killed by the army.

The federal government launched a special operation in Michoacán and said it would not allow the self-defence forces to continue to act.

The self-defence groups, meanwhile, say they won’t hand over their weapons unless the leaders of the Knights Templar are arrested or eliminated. They say that if they lay down their arms, the drug traffickers will kill them.

“We are not going to put down our weapons or sit down to negotiate, until the criminal leaders are detained,” Beltrán told listeners of the Radio Nacional station.

Local maize production has gone down in several parts of Mexico. Cobs in a crib in Yaluma, Chiapas. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

A month after Hurricanes Ingrid and Manuel caused the worst destruction from a natural catastrophe in Mexico in 30 years, another disaster has come to light: hunger in communities that are supposedly served by a rural food supply programme.

The stories repeat themselves in 14 municipalities in the mountains of the impoverished southwestern state of Guerrero, as indicated by the people who have come to the municipal seats to ask for assistance, like three men from the village of Los Laureles who walked three days and crossed rivers using ropes to reach the town of Coyuca.

“We need food, everything has run out, we don’t have anything to eat,” one of them, Gregorio Angulo, told IPS. He came to ask for a helicopter to fly out the elderly and pregnant women.

Guerrero was the state that was hit hardest by the combined impact of the two nearly simultaneous hurricanes: Ingrid, which swept through the Gulf of Mexico Sept. 12-17, and Manuel, which formed in the Pacific Sept. 13-20.

But “hunger was already here,” the president of the National Confederation of Community Councils of Abasto, Porfirio González Cortés, told a newspaper in the southern state of Oaxaca, the second-most damaged state.

With dozens of federal highways cut off by the hurricanes, availability of low-cost locally-grown foods is key in rural areas of this country of 118 million people. The state food distributor Diconsa – the acronym for Distribuidora Conasupo Sociedad Anónima – was created to that end in the 1970s.

Through a network of slightly over 25,000 stores that serve poor communities of fewer than 2,500 people, Diconsa has a mandate to offer 22 staple foods, including maize, beans, rice, sugar, oil and pasta, at subsidised prices.

For years, the system regulated the market in the poorest regions of the country. During the 1999 floods, for example, it guranteed supplies for isolated communities.

But in the last 15 years, it has lost operational capacity and budget.

An assessment of Diconsa’s performance, carried out this year by Conejal, an autonomous public agency, found “problems in ensuring constant, regular supplies in the stores.”

In addition, in 10 percent of the rural communities served by the programme, the Diconsa stores were the only place to buy food, but only one-third of all of the stores had all of the 22 products they were supposed to sell.

From 1998 to 1999, the federal budget for all food aid programmes was cut in half – including Diconsa, Liconsa (a milk distribution system) and Fidelist (a now-defunct programme that provided corn tortillas at subsidised prices).

In 2000, the authorities wanted to completely eliminate the subsidies for Diconsa, but a major mobilisation by the community councils kept them from doing so.

It was reported at the time that the budget assigned, 41 million dollars, barely covered the operating costs. This year, only 14 million dollars were earmarked for the programme, according to the government’s Federal Expenditures Budget 2013.

The basic basket of 22 subsidised staple products costs some 220 pesos (just under 20 dollars), while in a regular grocery store or supermarket the price goes up to between 230 and 330 pesos.

But there have been numerous complaints that the Diconsa stores sell other products, including junk food, at the same, or even higher, prices as other stores.

And the system draws very little on small-scale local agricultural production but depends instead on a costly centralised distribution system in this vast country chequered with remote, hard-to-reach places. In fact, many of the food products are imported.

Mexico is one of the world’s biggest importer of food, according to the National Association of Rural Producers’ Enterprises (ANEC).

In this country, which belongs to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), known as the “rich countries club”, there were 27.4 million people who did not have enough food in 2012, according to official figures.

Nearly 14 of every 100 preschool children are stunted – low height-for-age – a sign of chronic malnutrition. And among the country’s sizeable indigenous minority, stunting affects 33 out of every 100 children in that age group.

In Guerrero, María Natividad saved up every last cent in July and August. She had saved up enough to buy, as she does every year, enough meat, beer and Coca-Cola to fill up two refrigerators. But none of it was for herself.

With luck, sales on the long Independence Day weekend (Sept. 16) would bring her enough income to last through Christmas. Her shop, which is in her small two-story home, is on the banks of the Azul river that borders Santa Fe, a leading tourist town in the state of Guerrero.

But in the wee hours of the morning of Sept. 15, the Azul river overflowed in a question of minutes, flooding 100 metres beyond its banks. Natividad’s house was nearly completely submerged, and when the water receded, a mixture of mud and garbage completely filled the lower floor.

A month later, her only source of income is gone. And although tourism is the main source of livelihood for the entire town, the authorities have dragged their feet on the local residents’ requests, because as a town that normally draws tourists it is towards the end of the list in terms of urgency.

Natividad is one of the thousands of people in Guerrero who have not received any help, neither cash nor food. “No one has come to Santa Fe,” she told IPS.

The floods, which killed 157 people, damaged half a million hectares of crops. The devastation drove up prices of lemons, onions, beans, maize and tomatoes.

In addition, several dozen people are still missing, half a million people lost their homes and businesses, and 1.2 million homes were damaged.

With additional reporting by Ximena Natera (Coyuca y Santa Fe, Guerrero).

Students and teachers from a physical education school in Michoacán take part in protests in Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

On his first day of fourth grade, Efraín found there were no desks or benches in the classroom in his Mexico City school. His parents had to help the teacher haul in furniture from other rooms so the children wouldn’t have to start the new school year sitting on the floor.

That day, Aug. 19, Efraín’s mother found out about the suspension of the swimming programme that served 15,000 public school students in the capital and had functioned successfully for 10 years.

She also learned of the start of teacher protests, which culminated in a national teachers’ strike on Wednesday Sept. 11.

“Being in the swim programme was a privilege for your children,” a public ministry official told the parents who demanded an explanation.

The parents didn’t know it, but the disappearance – by presidential decree – of the general directorate of physical education was merely the start of a series of changes in public education, planned by the conservative government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

The reforms have triggered an insurrection by teachers in roughly two-thirds of Mexico’s 31 states.

The problem is not a shortage of funds for education. The educational system, which serves some 26 million primary school students and 4.3 million secondary students, receives 17.5 percent of the federal budget.

But 93 percent of that goes to salaries of teachers and other staff according to “Education at a Glance 2013” by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called “rich countries’ club”.

The report says that is the highest proportion among OECD countries, which include Mexico.

Efraín’s school is in the Benito Juárez borough in the capital – the municipality with the highest level of human development in the country, according to the United Nations Human Development (UNDP) index.

That means he is better off in terms of school conditions than children in the rest of the country.

To get to the bilingual school he heads, Raymundo Carrera has a four-hour walk every Sunday and crosses the Presa Miguel Alemán lake by motorised canoe in the region of Tuxtepec in the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca, which has a high concentration of indigenous people.

The 50-year-old, who has been a teacher for 26 years, lives in a hut with a tin roof and a dirt floor.

“That’s what the community gives you, and you get used to it. We also join in the local harvests and fiestas,” Carrera told IPS as he took part in the protest camp that teachers have set in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square.

Oaxaca is Mexico’s second-poorest state, according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2010.

Teachers from Oaxaca make up the biggest delegation among the 15,000 teachers protesting in Mexico City since Aug. 19 against a series of laws restricting their labour rights. Their roadblocks have exacerbated the chaos of downtown traffic for nearly a month. The teachers have also occupied public buildings, blocked the Mexico City international airport for several hours, and seized toll booths on highways.

On Wednesday, protesters clashed with anti-riot police as they tried to approach the presidential residence.

The laws were approved by Congress last week and signed into law by the president on Tuesday.

But news on the issue was overshadowed by the scandal of the arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo, the lifelong leader of the teachers’ union and one of the country’s most powerful political leaders.

Gordillo is in prison, charged with embezzlement and organised crime.

The protesting teachers form part of a dissident faction of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación – the national teachers union – which has 1.2 million members among primary and middle school teachers.

But after the laws were passed, the protesters were joined by other unions, and the movement grew in strength until declaring Wednesday’s national strike.

The laws, which are focused on primary and secondary education, introduce mandatory periodic teacher evaluations. In addition, teachers will be recruited through open tests, starting in 2014. There are also changes to the systems of promotions, wages, benefits, and working conditions in different states.

But critics say the evaluation system is vague. They also complain that their concerns were not taken into account by the legislators, and that the reforms do not take into consideration the specific challenges of teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as indigenous children, many of whom do not speak Spanish.

Mexico’s native population is variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language).

Furthermore, the protesters argue that the reform paves the way for the privatisation of the education system in Mexico.

The trade unionists are calling for an autonomous national institute to carry out evaluations. An institute was created in 2002, but it is not independent.

“This is a labour reform, not an educational one, and it did not arise from a negotiated consensus,” Raymundo Vera, a teacher from the Oaxaca committee, told IPS.

Promoters of the reform, spearheaded by business leaders, have complained about the high proportion of education expenditure that goes towards salaries.

However, the OECD study also reveals that Mexico has the highest student/teacher ratios – more than 25 pupils per teacher in early childhood education, compared to the OECD average of 14.3. And the ratio is even higher at the primary school level (28 students per teacher) and highest (nearly 30 students per teacher) at the secondary level.

“I do want to be evaluated, but who will guarantee that they’re going to do it properly, and not like they have up to now, with standardised tests that do not take into consideration the conditions at each school?” asked Carrera.

Teacher evaluations, which were introduced in 1989, were held up by the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) as an indication that quality was improving.

But few advances have actually been made on that front.

The “2012 Panorama educativo de México” (Mexican Educational Outlook), by the National Institute for Evaluation of Education (INEE), found that half of the students in the first three years of secondary school were unable to solve mathematical problems involving two or more operations.

The same study, which measures advances made between 2006 and 2010, shows that primary students in urban public schools improved in Spanish, while the proportion of indigenous students who under-performed in Spanish had risen to nearly 50 percent.

A primary school teacher earns between 2,000 and 8,000 pesos (160 to 620 dollars) a month. “Much less than these personages,” Vera said, referring to lawmakers who earn at least 20 times more.

“The people complaining about our protest marches do not and will never understand our living conditions,” he said.

In Mexico, only 56 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are enrolled in school – the lowest rate in the OECD.

INEE statistics from the “Panorama educativo de México”, presented in April, show that 4.8 million children and adolescents in Mexico do not go to school.

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

“We have to understand that information, above all else, is a social service. If we lose sight of that dimension we begin to regulate it as merchandise, but the state has many other obligations, such as to guarantee freedom,” said Frank La Rue.

“In Latin America we made a historical mistake when we allowed the commercial vision of information to prevail,” said La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

In this interview with IPS, La Rue, a legal scholar from Guatemala, said: “Freedom of expression must be understood as the collective right of society to be informed, to associate freely and to express itself, but also as the right of peoples to their culture, language and values, and to transmit them to the world through their own communications media.”

The special rapporteur referred to other challenges to freedom of expression in the region. They include “censorship laws” that punish, for instance, defamation of civil servants and inhibit criticism of those in power, or penalise the unauthorised use of radio frequencies.

Another “very important” challenge is the case of the telecommunications laws being debated in countries like Honduras and Mexico.

Q: What basic conditions should be met by the new telecommunications laws?

A: Part of freedom of expression is defending cultural diversity. I have maintained that there should be four categories of media using the broadcast frequencies.

One is commercial radio stations, that should be regulated by a law on concessions; another is community radio stations, which should have the same rights as the former in spite of having low power and short range; a third category is for clearly identifiable ethnic groups; and finally, public telecommunications, which belong to the state rather than to the government of the day.

In the last case, we are not talking about media controlled by those who wield political power, but about the use of public resources for public media.

And the public aspect of social life needs to be recovered. The concept has been lost in Latin America, in contrast to Europe, where several countries have maintained their vision of the public sphere.

But the frequency spectrum is a public good; the airwaves exist all around us, and the state regulates their administration for the benefit of all, like other natural resources.

Q: Is it necessary to divide the spectrum into equal parts?

A: The state does not need one-third of the frequencies, as in Argentina, because it is unlikely to have the administrative capacity or the resources to use them. What is needed is a segment reserved for community stations.

There is a human rights principle which calls for diversity of the media and pluralism of positions. Above the individual rights of journalists is the human right of society to be informed.

The idea is that people should be able to develop their own thinking. In that sense, the concentration of media in very few hands is an attack on democracy, not just on human rights.

Where’s the catch? It’s in the concession mechanisms. Auctions of licences for frequencies are not an appropriate method because they favour economic wealth. There should be transparent, public competitions, with clear rules.

Q: What kind of rules?

A: As frequencies are state property, they are neither a gift nor a lifetime concession. Concessions should be issued for a limited, defined time period.

There is a basic principle: if a frequency is not used as soon as a concession is granted, the rights should be lost, because sometimes people accumulate frequencies without using them, just to avoid competition.

So rules are needed for withdrawing a concession, and there should be a limit on how many frequencies one person can own or operate, because too much accumulation leads to manipulation of public opinion, which is a bad thing.

Q: This leads us to another issue being discussed in Mexico, for instance, about financing methods, because it is understood that only commercial media can sell advertising.

A: An organisation that is not-for-profit can generate income, but no one can make a personal profit from sales.

The state should have regulations for distributing official advertising, with clear criteria. And it should put its house in order, without criminalising community radio stations. Having an unlicensed radio station cannot be seen as a crime, because if we look at the origins of the big media consortia, their concessions were not granted legitimately. They were all granted by dictatorships or corrupt governments.

Q: In Honduras, the inclusion of content regulations in the telecommunications bill has been very controversial.

A: The state should not interfere with content in any way whatsoever. There are legitimate limits to free expression, based on human rights rules and principles, but in my view only one aspect of content should be regulated, and that is regulation of watersheds for adult broadcasting, for the protection of children.

Children and adolescents should be protected from live, graphic scenes of direct violence and sexual acts, not of sexuality but of sexual acts, pornography and the malevolent misuse of sexuality.

But nothing else. Freedom of expression means the prevalence of openness and broad-mindedness. Limitations are the exception, and should not be over-generalised as this gives rise to censorship. There is always the temptation, when legislating, for everyone to impose his or her opinion.

Q: What about the internet?

A: Even less regulation is appropriate. The internet is an open space where there is room for everyone. By its nature, it is impossible to regulate. It can be monitored, but that is an attack on privacy.

The issue here is self-regulation. There is a new challenge of professionalism and ethics which is up to the press itself to define. It is not for the state to determine this, but journalists and the media themselves.

Excerpt:

“Help us find them” reads a sign with photos of victims of forced disappearance, put up by their families. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

Mexican police officer Luis Ángel León Rodríguez disappeared along with six other officers and a civilian on Nov. 16, 2009, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Six days later, his mother, Araceli Rodríguez, began her ceaseless search.

In the past three and a half years, she has knocked on every door, heard from her son’s killers how his body was dismembered and buried, supposedly under an avocado tree, and helped excavate twice in a fruitless search for his and the others’ remains.

But in April an official citation was delivered to her house from the internal affairs department of the federal police, summoning León Rodríguez to appear on May 15 “without his uniform and service firearm” and “with a lawyer” to respond to charges of dereliction of duty and abandoning his post.

His mother showed up with the same photo that she has taken to protest marches and caravans by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, to meetings with then conservative president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), and to a number of interviews.

“Here is my son, in uniform, because I couldn’t take it off; without a gun; and with his lawyer, me. Can I bring charges against you, who lost my son?” she told the police representatives.

The head of the internal affairs department, Paul Aguilera, said the police do not have a complete up-to-date database making it possible to follow the precise circumstances of each officer, and that his office has 16,000 cases pending.

“What they did to me was cruel, and the worst thing is that if this can happen in my case, which is so visible, what about the thousands of others who have not drawn so much attention?” Rodríguez remarked to IPS.

Local and international human rights groups have been sounding the alert about the humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and forcibly disappeared since Calderón involved the military in the war on drugs. The violence has not let up since conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December.

There are 26,000 missing people in Mexico, according to a list released in February by the interior ministry. But the list does not include, for example, 86 of the 140 cases of forced disappearance documented by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in the report “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored”.

Nor does it include the victims of cases made public by the Movement for Peace in 2011, like those of environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, chess player Roberto Galván, or Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, whose mother has held two hunger strikes to demand answers.

In a Jun. 4 report, “Confronting a nightmare: Disappearances in Mexico”, London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International talks about a “pattern of systematic disappearances and enforced disappearances largely ignored by the previous administration.”

It says “Some are the victims of enforced disappearances in which public officials are implicated. Others have been abducted by private individuals or criminal gangs.”

The rights group says that during several visits to Mexico since 2010, it documented 152 cases of disappearance, and adds that evidence of involvement of public officials was found in 85 of the cases.

It mentions cases of people apparently abducted by criminal groups for their professional skills, such as nine telephone engineers who went missing in June 2009 in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

But the available information is just the tip of the iceberg that the government of Peña Nieto risks crashing into.

Investigative reports by the daily newspaper Milenio published in October 2012, based on municipal reports, found that during the Calderón administration, at least 24,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common graves.

In Mexico there is no protocol for collecting information on missing persons, or for medical examiners to register information. Each state has its own system for identifying bodies, and the files on most unidentified corpses buried in common graves are, in the best of cases, incomplete, lacking fingerprints, photographs, dental X-rays or DNA samples. In other cases, the information in the files actually turns out to be wrong. And in some cases, unidentified bodies are even cremated.

There are only 25 forensic anthropologists in this country of 117 million people, and many mortuaries have no DNA lab. There are no standard procedures in place for exhuming and identifying bodies.

The government refuses to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian tragedy. But on Feb. 21 it signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross for advice on the creation of a protocol for the search for missing persons.

There are cases like that of Bárbara Reyes, who disappeared at the age of 17 in August 2011, and whose remains were found 18 months later in a common grave. To find her body, trenches were dug along 64 metres over the space of three days. “I only recovered my daughter’s bones,” her mother, Lourdes Muñiz, told IPS.

Alejandra Viridiana was kidnapped in November 2011 from a bar on the outskirts of Mexico City. After searching through morgues far and wide, her mother, Beatriz Mejía, finally found her last month – in the morgue where she had initially reported her daughter’s disappearance.

The young woman’s body had been there two months, from December 2011 to January 2012, on the list of unidentified bodies.

“They had her there for two months and put her in a common grave. Two months when I went there practically every day to ask if they had any news! How can that be?” Mejía complained.

There are innumerable stories of families who incessantly make the rounds of cemeteries and mass graves seeking bodies buried as “NN” or Jane or John Doe or who fight to revive investigations that have been shelved.

“They told me they had no more leads to follow and that they had shelved the case,”
Brenda Rangel told IPS. Her younger brother, Héctor, disappeared in November 2009 with two other people in the northern state of Coahuila.

In response to the pressure from the families, the government announced May 17 the creation of a specialised unit to investigate and search for missing people, under the attorney general’s office.

But the unit, which has begun to operate, was only assigned 12 investigators.

To complete the bleak outlook, the crisis of forced disappearances has reached the capital, which up to now had seemed off-limits to the worst displays of violence.

On May 26, 11 young people from the poor suburb of Tepito were kidnapped from a bar in the centric tourist area of Zona Rosa. The police still have no leads.

Mexican police officer Luis Ángel León Rodríguez disappeared along with six other officers and a civilian on Nov. 16, 2009, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Six days later, his mother, Araceli Rodríguez, began her ceaseless search.

“Help us find them” reads a sign with photos of victims of forced disappearance, put up by their families. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

In the past three and a half years, she has knocked on every door, heard from her son’s killers how his body was dismembered and buried, supposedly under an avocado tree, and helped excavate twice in a fruitless search for his and the others’ remains.

But in April an official citation was delivered to her house from the internal affairs department of the federal police, summoning León Rodríguez to appear on May 15 “without his uniform and service firearm” and “with a lawyer” to respond to charges of dereliction of duty and abandoning his post.

His mother showed up with the same photo that she has taken to protest marches and caravans by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, to meetings with then conservative president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), and to a number of interviews.

“Here is my son, in uniform, because I couldn’t take it off; without a gun; and with his lawyer, me. Can I bring charges against you, who lost my son?” she told the police representatives. The head of the internal affairs department, Paul Aguilera, said the police do not have a complete up-to-date database making it possible to follow the precise circumstances of each officer, and that his office has 16,000 cases pending.

“What they did to me was cruel, and the worst thing is that if this can happen in my case, which is so visible, what about the thousands of others who have not drawn so much attention?” Rodríguez remarked to IPS.

Local and international human rights groups have been sounding the alert about the humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and forcibly disappeared since Calderón involved the military in the war on drugs. The violence has not let up since conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December.

There are 26,000 missing people in Mexico, according to a list released in February by the interior ministry. But the list does not include, for example, 86 of the 140 cases of forced disappearance documented by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in the report “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored”.

Nor does it include the victims of cases made public by the Movement for Peace in 2011, like those of environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, chess player Roberto Galván, or Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, whose mother has held two hunger strikes to demand answers.

In a Jun. 4 report, “Confronting a nightmare: Disappearances in Mexico”, London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International talks about a “pattern of systematic disappearances and enforced disappearances largely ignored by the previous administration.”

It says “Some are the victims of enforced disappearances in which public officials are implicated. Others have been abducted by private individuals or criminal gangs.”

The rights group says that during several visits to Mexico since 2010, it documented 152 cases of disappearance, and adds that evidence of involvement of public officials was found in 85 of the cases.

It mentions cases of people apparently abducted by criminal groups for their professional skills, such as nine telephone engineers who went missing in June 2009 in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

But the available information is just the tip of the iceberg that the government of Peña Nieto risks crashing into.

Investigative reports by the daily newspaper Milenio published in October 2012, based on municipal reports, found that during the Calderón administration, at least 24,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common graves.

In Mexico there is no protocol for collecting information on missing persons, or for medical examiners to register information. Each state has its own system for identifying bodies, and the files on most unidentified corpses buried in common graves are, in the best of cases, incomplete, lacking fingerprints, photographs, dental X-rays or DNA samples. In other cases, the information in the files actually turns out to be wrong. And in some cases, unidentified bodies are even cremated.

There are only 25 forensic anthropologists in this country of 117 million people, and many mortuaries have no DNA lab. There are no standard procedures in place for exhuming and identifying bodies.

The government refuses to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian tragedy. But on Feb. 21 it signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross for advice on the creation of a protocol for the search for missing persons.

There are cases like that of Bárbara Reyes, who disappeared at the age of 17 in August 2011, and whose remains were found 18 months later in a common grave. To find her body, trenches were dug along 64 metres over the space of three days. “I only recovered my daughter’s bones,” her mother, Lourdes Muñiz, told IPS.

Radio Totopo was founded in February 2006 in the Pescadores neighbourhood, the oldest and poorest part of the city of Juchitán in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. But the authorities closed it down in late March, even though Congress is debating a constitutional reform that would recognise community radio stations.

Residents of Pescadores say the radio station belongs to all the people. Totopo, like most community radio stations in Mexico, has no official licence, and 90 percent of its programming is transmitted in Diidxazá, the language of the Zapotec indigenous people.

In recent years, Radio Totopo has supported campesinos (peasants) and fisherfolk of the local Zapotec people, who call themselves Binnizá, in resisting a wind park that the Spanish company Gas Natural Fenosa is planning to install on communal lands on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Community radio stations in Mexico continue to fight for legal recognition. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

The indigenous Assembly of Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory denounced that deception was used in the presentation of the project to the campesinos, some of whom, unable to speak Spanish and not provided with a translation, signed contracts to rent out their plots at a complete disadvantage, violating the right of native peoples to information and prior consultation.

For six months, Radio Totopo translated contracts into the Zapotec language, broadcast them and ran campaigns on the project – until Mar. 26, when state police dismantled the radio station, removed power and audio cables and took away the transmitter and a computer as part of an eviction action in the disputed area.

One of the radio station coordinators, Carlos Sánchez, sustained a broken arm during the operation and he is now in hiding to avoid detention. Mariano López Gómez, the leader of the movement opposing the wind parks, was held for several days, accused of extorting government officials.

This happened while Congress debates a complex constitutional reform on telecommunications, promised by President Enrique Peña Nieto as part of the multi-party Pact for Mexico, a response to longstanding demands from civil society groups fighting for the right to information.

“This initiative reflects many demands that society as a whole has made for three decades, especially to change the current model of concentration of broadcasting and telecommunications ownership, and its contents are largely a product of expert studies and social mobilisation,” said the Mexican Association for the Right to Information (AMEDI) after its presentation to parliament on Mar. 11.

Among other issues, AMEDI highlighted the need for constitutional recognition of community radio stations, which under the reform would be entitled to concessions for social purposes, and the state’s obligation to guarantee the right to freedom of expression for all existing broadcasters.

“Constitutional recognition is very important, it is not a minor point,” lawyer Gisela Martínez, of the Mexican chapter of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), told IPS. “If (community radio broadcasters) are not named (in the constitution) it is as if they did not exist; that is why we are fighting for recognition under the law, because they say we are illegal.”

Martínez said the telecommunications bill was only the first step in the ongoing construction of people’s effective right to have their own broadcasting media.

On Apr. 30 the senate passed the telecommunications reform bill, designed to boost competition. It has now gone to the 32 state parliaments. Since it is a constitutional amendment, it will have to be approved by a majority of 17 of the states in order to become law.

If this majority approval is not achieved, an extraordinary congressional period will be required, or the bill will be on hold until September, when regular parliamentary sessions are due to resume.

In any case, “the mother of all battles will be over the secondary regulations,” said Martínez, as there has already been a negative precedent with indigenous community radio stations.

“In 2006, a constitutional amendment allowed indigenous communities to have their own radio stations, but seven years later there are still no secondary regulations permitting native people to exercise that right,” she said.

In AMARC’s view, if the law is finally approved, the next battle will be to ensure that the radio stations are not subject to power restrictions; can sell advertising; and are not confined to a specific geographical area; and that 33 percent of the radio spectrum is reserved for community and indigenous broadcasters.

Other major issues will include transparency in the permitting process, as well as the definition of effective mechanisms to guarantee the economic survival of the radio stations, without jeopardising their autonomy and independence.

Not everyone is optimistic. In Oaxaca and many other places in the country, community radio stations have played an essential role in the struggle for territories and culture and against large development projects.

“That law is useless to us,” Óscar Ledima Santiago, another of the coordinators of Radio Totopo, told IPS by telephone.

“That whole debate is a lie, because the radio stations are being subjected to repression for defending people’s rights, and by the time the secondary regulations are passed, there won’t be any land left to fight for,” he said.

Radio Totopo has already been off the air since Mar. 26, nearly six weeks, and the confiscated equipment is valued at over 5,000 dollars. Local people have mounted roadblocks and barricades around the area where the wind park is planned to be built.

And this is not an isolated case. Two journalists from Radio Voces de los Pueblos (Voices of the Peoples) were detained for several hours together with two reporters from the national newspaper La Jornada on Mar. 21.

A few days later Filiberto Vicente of Radio Xadani reported he had received death threats, and finally Radio Huave, a pioneer among community radio stations on the Isthmus, had its transmission equipment stolen.

Each of these cases involved radio stations that supported indigenous people’s resistance to the construction of energy or mining megaprojects.

“We demand a thorough investigation of these attacks, and punishment of the officials and company owners linked to the violation of our right to information,” the Assembly of Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory said in a communiqué.

Mexico has been a prominent defender of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the battle being waged by some members of the Organisation of American States to curb its authority.

What is paradoxical, according to human rights defenders, is that Mexico’s strong support for the IACHR actually endangers to some extent access by victims of human rights abuses in Mexico to this last resort for justice.

“Mexico has backed the work of the (inter-American human rights) system and in its discourse it presents itself as a defender of human rights. It even managed to place representatives in the system,” human rights lawyer Simón Hernández told IPS.

“The risk is that this can translate into a degree of political control over decisions against the Mexican state,” said Hernández, an activist with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre.

The human rights group has presented petitions to the IACHR in cases like the Pasta de Conchos coal mine disaster, where 65 miners were buried after a methane explosion in 2006 in the northern state of Coahuila, or the women raped that same year in San Salvador Atenco during a police crackdown on protests.

The problem, Hernández said, is that “in international forums, Mexico’s position has always been marked by an enormous contradiction between its rhetoric and reality.”

David Peña with the National Association of Democratic Lawyers said “Mexico’s foreign policy has been characterised by accepting everything, supporting everything – but domestically, the situation is different.”

Peña is one of the lawyers who brought the case of eight women killed in 2001 in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, known as the “cotton field” case for the name of the waste ground where their bodies were found, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In November 2009, the Court found the Mexican state guilty of denial of justice in relation to three of the murders.

Three years later, Mexico asked the Court to declare that it had complied with the sentence, even though the femicides (gender-related murders) and disappearances of women not only continued but had spread to the rest of the country, as part of the wave of violence that has swept Mexico since 2006.

And the map of femicide hotspots includes the central state of Mexico where San Salvador Atenco is located – and which was governed by current President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2005 to 2011.

“Mexico has supported the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” said human rights lawyer Peña. “It was one of the countries that proposed closing down the discussion (of the reforms) and I hope that position will win out. But we don’t know what repercussions that support will have (on denunciations against the Mexican state).”

The regional human rights system – made up of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission and the San Jose, Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights – oversees compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights.

The IACHR has eight thematic rapporteurships, the most dynamic of which is the special rapporteurship on freedom of expression, which receives nearly one million dollars a year in external financing.

The regional human rights system is appreciated by human rights defenders but not governments. Since June 2011, states affected by its resolutions, including Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been pressing for reforms to curtail its reach.

And in May 2012, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza of Chile, himself questioned the system, stating in an interview that “if you look at the statistics by country, most of the countries that have the most cases (before the IACHR and the Court) are not the ones where the largest number of abuses are committed, but are where the non-governmental organisations know how to use the system.”

The debate is focused on the IACHR’s power to issue binding precautionary measures; the singling out of countries considered “problematic” – like Cuba, Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela – in its annual report on human rights; and the operation and financing sources of the special rapporteurships.

The criticism is that one-third of the IACHR’s budget comes from the European Union, the United States and Canada, even though the last two have refused to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights, which forms the basis of the system.

In the special OAS meeting held Friday Mar. 22 to discuss the reforms, Mexico defended the need for states to be reliable in meeting their payments to the system, and announced an extraordinary 300,000 dollar contribution.

“It is time for the states to give all of their support to the Commission,” said Mexican foreign minister José Antonio Meade.

The legal experts who spoke to IPS said it was necessary to strengthen the inter-American system.

But one of them added that, compared to “the level of violations” committed in Mexico, very few cases are accepted by the IACHR. There are even cases, like that of San Salvador Atenco, in which there had been “certain delays” by the Commission when it came to carrying out an in-depth investigation, the source said.

Nor is Mexico included in the annual report singling out countries with human rights problems, even though as many as 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished in this country, according to NGOs.

On Mar. 14, the IACHR held a marathon session of hearings related to abuses by the Mexican state.

Two of them involved the leftwing government of Mexico City, one for the public exhibition of detainees and another for the refusal to accept evidence running counter to the sentence that found that activist Digna Ochoa’s 2001 death was the result of suicide rather than homicide.

In another case, the women raped in San Salvador Atenco rejected the apology they were given by representatives of President Peña Nieto.

Two other hearings involved public policies, such as the concentration of authority over the police forces in the interior ministry, and the inoperativeness of the government’s Mechanism of Protection for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists.

Since 2006, 61 activists and more than 50 reporters have been killed and at least 15 have gone missing in Mexico.

In the latest hearing, representatives of the Rarámuri and Tepehuán indigenous communities complained that the authorities did not consult them on the construction of a tourism project in the northern state of Chihuahua.

“We will not stop fighting until there is justice for our children,” says Araceli Rodríguez, the mother of a young federal police agent in Mexico who disappeared along with seven other people in the western state of Michoacán on Nov. 16, 2009.

Rally in Ciudad Juárez in June 2011, when the civil society movement decided to promote the Victims’ Law. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

This woman is one of tens of thousands of relatives of the dead, disappeared and displaced by violence in Mexico, and she hopes to find support for finding her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, in the General Law on Victims, which enters into force on Saturday, Feb. 9.

“If it’s true that he’s dead, I want to find his ashes. If it’s true that they incinerated him, I want to find his teeth. And I won’t rest until all those responsible for his death are in prison and his name is cleared of any suspicion,” she told IPS.

For the last two years, Rodríguez has been participating in the citizens’ Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), created by poet Javier Sicilia.

Twenty months have passed since the MPJD demanded a law to help relatives left behind by violence in Mexico, at a mass rally in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez. The law, backed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was promulgated Jan. 9.

The big challenge is for it to be enforced and produce results, everyone agrees.

“Such a law should not have to exist,” Sicilia said the day it was promulgated. “It’s the consequence of not applying the laws that are made to protect and provide justice to citizens, and of a war that should never have happened.”

Since his son, Juan Francisco, was murdered in March 2011, Sicilia has toured the country and knocked on the doors of government offices, accompanied by hundreds of victims and fellow citizens in solidarity with them, who seek to end the security policy inherited from the government of former president Felipe Calderón.

In December 2006, when Calderón began his presidential term that ended Dec. 1, 2012, he declared war on drug trafficking cartels, militarised public security and conferred extraordinary powers on the federal police, whose personnel increased six-fold while their budget expanded from 800 million to three billion dollars.

As a result of the strategy, 60,000 people have been killed and 25,000 disappeared, according to official figures, although civil society organisations cite much higher statistics. A total of 250,000 people have been displaced and there are countless relatives of victims, many of whom have lost everything in the pursuit of justice or have even been murdered themselves.

In June 2011, in Ciudad Juárez on the border with the United States, after a caravan had driven 3,400 kilometres through the most violent states in the country, the MPJD first proposed a victims’ law.

The victims’ bill had a rough passage, and once the law had been approved in Congress, it was vetoed by Calderón. But his successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, promulgated it in a solemn ceremony at which he said it was urgent to have a legal framework in place to protect victims.

“It is a victory for the Movement, and will benefit many people, but enforcing it is still a distant prospect,” another mother, Margarita López, whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared, and was presumably killed, in the southern state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

On Jan. 19, López was attacked in Mexico City when she was going to meet a team of Argentine forensic scientists to take DNA samples from the skeleton that the authorities say is her daughter.

“I am tired of fighting everyone, because the authorities are part of the problem. Sometimes I think about leaving the country, but if I go, who will look for my daughter?” she said.

The Victims’ Law covers legal and psychological protection, compensation, health services, housing and education, as well as a key element: “declarations of absence”.

These allow, for example, grandparents to have legal custody of their grandchildren, while the state is compelled to continue to look for their disappeared parents, because the declaration is not a death certificate.

The law involves re-engineering the enforcement of justice by means of a National Victims’ Assistance System. It has been harshly criticised by organisations close to former president Calderón, and also by the autonomous National Commission for Human Rights, which would lose some of its powers.

The law’s promotors themselves acknowledge that it contains errors, due to the speed with which it was enacted. The senate will have the opportunity of making corrections this month when it incorporates regulations that will translate it into policies.

“The law needs to be perfected; it was approved very quickly because the priority was getting the state to recognise the tragedy, but we are already amending it,” the recently appointed coordinator of human rights advisers to the attorney-general’s office, Eliana García, a supporter of the law, told IPS.

“It establishes a system of restorative justice in four dimensions: the right of victims to the truth, the right to justice, comprehensive compensation and the guarantee that this will not be repeated. It is an unprecedented law,” said García, a renowned leftwing social and political activist.

Detractors of the law point to the burden on the budget, as the law obliges the state to pay the costs of physical, mental, moral and material harm, as well as healthcare costs for victims of crime and human rights violations, no matter the perpetrator or when the crime occurred.

This means coverage would be extended to victims of the so-called “dirty war” in the 1970s.

Article 71 states that if the perpetrator of the crime cannot pay compensation, because he or she is a fugitive, dead or disappeared, the state will take responsibility for reparations up to the equivalent of 78,600 dollars.

“It was a mistake to make such a broad promise of subsidiary compensation; in the corrections we are working on, we have restricted reparations to serious crimes against life, freedom and physical integrity,” García said.

There will also be modifications to the National Victims’ Assistance System, which under the law includes nearly 4,000 officials in national and states’ ministries, as well as to the chapter on competencies, which only involves the national government.

What is still not clear is how regional and municipal authorities will be made to comply with the law, especially as they are most frequently accused of crimes by victims and their relatives.

The new bodies that will look after victims who are currently helped by the Procuradoría Social (socio-legal office), created in September 2011 and now to be replaced under the new system, have yet to be identified.

The MPJD is already preparing workshops and reading circles to study and promote the law in the country’s 31 states, in accordance with one of the agreements at a meeting held in the Mexican capital Jan. 25-27, at which organisations in the United States and Canada were also represented.

“We know that after this law’s publication, there is still a great deal to be done. We have come away with a long agenda,” activist Ted Lewis, head of the human rights programme for Global Exchange, one of the organisations that financed the caravan that travelled the United States and arrived in Washington in September 2012, told IPS.

Edgar Torres Castillo, 21, has spent two years in the prison of Gómez Palacio, in the Lagunera district between the northern Mexican states of Durango and Coahuila – an arid zone known as one of the most dangerous parts of the country.

Amparo Castillo, the mother of Edgar, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing a cell-phone, last saw him during a Dec. 18 visit to the prison. “I thought he was acting strange, he seemed really sad and as if he had been hurt,” she told IPS by phone. “We spent just an hour together before they started to shoo us out – things were really tense,” she said with anguish in her voice.

In the wee hours of the morning on Dec. 17, the police transferred 137 prisoners from the Gómez Palacio prison to federal penitentiaries.

The next day, at the end of the visiting hours, people living in nearby homes heard loud bursts of gunfire and cries inside the prison. The authorities reported that 25 prisoners and six unarmed guards had been killed during an escape attempt.

In a communique, the Durango police said the prisoners had opened fire on the guards when they were thwarted in their attempt to escape.

Later, the federal government emptied out the prison, where 78 people have been killed in the past three years and several major prison escapes have been staged. At the time it was emptied, there were 500 inmates left in the prison.

Like other family members, Castillo went to the prison after the reports of gunfire, to find out what happened. When little information was offered, the prisoners’ relatives held protests and set up roadblocks. “We didn’t even know if they were alive or not,” she said.

The bloody clash between prisoners and guards was one more illustration of the crisis plaguing Mexico’s prison system, which experts say is on the verge of total collapse.

There are 429 prisons in Mexico, according to the latest report by the ministry of federal public security. Of that total, 15 are run by the national government, 10 by the authorities in Mexico City’s Federal District, 91 by municipal governments, and the rest by the states.

Studies indicate that the prison population is 22 percent (around 40,000 prisoners) over capacity. In addition, four out of 10 inmates are still pending sentencing. But prisoners awaiting trial are held in the same cells as convicted inmates.

Those charged with or convicted of federal crimes, generally for involvement in organised crime like drug trafficking, make up just one-fifth of the prison population.

After a visit to 24 prisons around the country in 2009, a report by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture warned about structural flaws in Mexico’s penal system, which encourage abuses of all kinds committed with the aim of obtaining confessions or self-incriminating statements.

The already heavy use of preventive detention became even more excessive during the crusade against the drug cartels waged by President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) in his six years in office.

The “Diagnóstico Nacional de Supervisión Penitenciaria”, an assessment of the prison system presented by the governmental National Human Rights Commission in September, found that six out of 10 prisons in the country were co-governed to some extent by criminal groups.

The report warns of prison hotspots in 10 of Mexico’s 31 states. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, a total of 521 prisoners escaped in 14 prison escapes, and 350 people were killed in two riots and 75 fights.

The prison of Gómez Palacio, which went through six different directors in less than three years, has been the site of high-profile escapes and acts of corruption.

In March 2009, a group of armed men wearing federal police uniforms walked into the prison in broad daylight and took five prisoners away with them. In July 2010, the then director of the prison, Margarita Rojas, was arrested and accused by the attorney general’s office of allowing inmates who later took part in a mass killing of 17 people on a nearby farm to leave the prison.
According to the federal government, the guards allowed a group of inmates to leave the prison at night, using the guards’ weapons and official vehicles, to carry out reprisals against rival criminal groups.

But that was not the only case. Jorge Carvallo, president of the bar association of the state of Mexico, next to the capital, reported in November 2010 that prisoners, with the complicity of the state police, were allowed to leave the Barrientos prison at night to commit armed robberies.

The government of Durango announced on Dec. 21 the definitive closure of the Gómez Palacio prison, which will be converted into a police station.

Meanwhile, the families are still desperately seeking information about what happened to the inmates.

“We are trying to help a group of women who came to us in a terrible state, in despair and full of fear for their loved ondes,” activist Verónica Villarreal of the Popular Workers Coordinating Council told IPS. Her group provided shelter to a group of women who came to the capital of the state, four hours from Gómez Palacio, in search of information.

Since Dec. 19, Amparo Castillo has been on a vigil outside the Durango prison, hoping to see her son. “They haven’t told us anything, we don’t know how they are. We only know that they took some to prisons in other states and that others are here, but they told us we’ll only be able to see them in four weeks.

“There’s no law here, people have been tried and convicted without evidence. And now it’s easy for them just to shut down the place; they don’t think of the expenses that represents for us. My son didn’t steal the cell-phone, but in any case, I have already paid it off. What do they want? It wasn’t something that deserved eight years in prison, or to have to go through all of this,” she said.

Artists and activists embroidering for peace in Coyoacán square. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Each scarf represents a life cut short. Each stitch, a tear. Each thread, a cry of frustration about death and impunity.

The Mexican hands embroidering for peace belong to mothers searching for missing sons and daughters, people demanding justice for their brothers and sisters, and students, teachers, activists and artists showing their solidarity.

Conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who hands over power on Saturday Dec. 1 to Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is facing criticism from activists regarding his human rights record.

But one protest stands out for its moral force: a string of thousands of white scarves embroidered with the names and stories of people who have been killed or have gone missing in Mexico since Calderón began to wage his war on drugs after taking office in December 2006.

“We want to send off Calderón with the pain that he has caused thousands of families,” one of the organisers of the embroidery project, Leticia Hidalgo from the northern city of Monterrey, told IPS. “Because (the measures taken by his government) totally destroyed my family, and changed our lives, and only the love for my son has kept us going.”

Her son Roy Rivera, a philosophy student at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, was kidnapped on Jan. 11, 2011. His family paid the ransom, but he never returned. He was just about to turn 19.

Hidalgo embroidered on her scarf: “My boy, I put you in the hands of God. We’re waiting for you to come back soon, very soon. Stay strong. Your mama and Richi.”

The white scarves memorial will be set up in the Alameda Central, a park in Mexico City, with the scarves embroidered by hundreds of hands over the past 15 months in dozens of towns and cities around the country and abroad.

Some carry painful messages from parents and other family members. Others tell stories salvaged from oblivion by anonymous hands.

“15th of January. NL. Two women lose their lives in a shootout in Balcones Altavista. Embroidered by: Another woman”, reads one scarf hanging in Coyoacán square in the capital.

The idea of embroidering scarves as an act of protest came from Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains), a group of artists who have dyed the water in fountains red to protest the blood shed by the government’s militarised security strategy.

The activists first began to embroider scarves in their meetings. In August 2011, during a day of artistic and cultural activities organised by the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, they held their first collective embroidering session in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square.

After that, they held such gatherings every Sunday in Coyoacán square, in the south of the capital, and next to the Torre Latinoamericana in central Mexico City.

“We wanted to raise public awareness about this enormous tragedy, using the symbolic gesture of stitching up these broken stories that have been caused by the violence,” Elia Andrade, an artist, told IPS.

“We embroider for everyone, and what we put on the scarves is basically the information that we manage to find: the name, how and when they died, and who made the scarf. But it’s completely different when it’s stitched by a family member,” she said.

“That’s why every group started to do things a little differently, when the idea caught on and began to spread.”

For example, the women in Nuevo León, one of the Mexican states with the largest number of victims of forced disappearance, switched from red thread representing people who were killed, to green thread, to represent their missing sons and daughters.

“Green is the colour of hope, that we are going to find them,” said Hidalgo, who has been meeting with a group of women since March to embroider outside the Monterrey city hall. They now have 200 scarves embroidered, because every week, new people show up, who are searching for a missing loved one.

One of the biggest and most active groups is in Guadalajara, the capital of the western state of Jalisco.

“Embroidering a scarf is an act of love, of acknowledgement,” Teresa Sordo, one of the organisers of the group that meets every Sunday in Guadalajara’s Rojo park, wrote in the blog “Bordamos por la paz” (Embroidering for peace).

Many of the names and stories embroidered on their scarves are taken from a list titled
“Menos días aquí” (Fewer Days Here), an initiative of the group Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender) which, based on newspaper reports, has started counting the number of people killed in the country every day.

“We embroider, perhaps, because a few hands can transform things and we need to transform them into beautiful things because so many hands are already doing appalling, unmentionable, incomprehensible things,” Sordo wrote.

Indigenous people forced to flee the community of San Juan Copala, in the southern state of Oaxaca, embroidered scarves for 28 of their people who were killed. Several native communities in Michoacán also sewed scarves for their dead.

In Guatemala and Nicaragua, scarves were stitched for the 72 migrants slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August 2010.

And in Mexico City, scarves were embroidered for the 49 children who died in a June 2009 fire in a day care centre in Sonora.

Other hands have started to embroider in Coahuila, another one of the states with the highest numbers of missing persons, and in Morelos, Puebla, Chihuahua, the state of Mexico, as well as countries like France, Germany and Japan.

The white scarves will form a memorial – a request that the victims expressed to Calderón during public talks s he held with representatives of the peace movement in June 2011.

But the only result of the talks was the construction of a mausoleum for soldiers killed, and a controversial construction that the government calls the “Memorial for Victims”, built in the Campo Militar, a military installation in Mexico City.

With skilled hands, María Herrera from Michoacán sews in red thread the name of one of the thousands of people killed during the six-year term of Calderón, who belongs to the National Action Party, which 12 years ago put an end to seven decades of government by the PRI, the party that is now returning to power.

A militarised police patrol, which have become routine in Xalapa, drives past the poster of a missing young woman. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
XALAPA, Mexico , Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Something smells rotten in the state of Veracruz. In Xalapa, the capital of this eastern Mexican state, known as the “Athens of Veracruz” because of its strong cultural tradition, fear is in the air.

The police only patrol the streets in convoys, wearing face masks and armed with assault rifles. Flyers with the faces of missing young people are everywhere, plastered along the streets and in bus stops. In university seminars and talks, outsiders are warned that there will be government informants in the audience.

“Xalapa was always a haven for social activists from communities in the north or in the mountains plagued by political violence,” environmental activist Javier Hernández told IPS. “It seemed like a place that would not be touched, but things changed with the military operations and the new governor who took office in 2010.”

Hernández left the state after the murders of journalist Regina Martínez and Professor José Luis Blanco Rosas, in April and May 2012, respectively.

Veracruz, which has 720 km of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico and borders seven other states, has become a kind of long skinny black hole in eastern Mexico in the last few years.

The third-most populous state in the country, with 7.6 million people, and one of the nine states ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for 83 years, Veracruz is today the most dangerous part of the country for the tens of thousands of Central American migrants who cross Mexico every year in their attempt to reach the United States.

One out of three migrants who have gone missing in Mexico were last seen in Veracruz.

“We know they are kidnapped, and the ones who can’t pay the ransom are forced into crime. The least fortunate become victims of labour or sexual exploitation,” said Rubén Figueroa, of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which in October organised a protest convoy of women whose sons or daughters have disappeared.

But this is not only a dangerous place for Central American migrants. In the last two years, nine reporters have been killed in Veracruz, two have gone missing, at least a dozen have been forced to flee into exile, and the offices of a newspaper were set on fire.

Women’s rights groups are also on the alert. They started to document the disappearance of women and girls in 2009, when 14 women were killed in a brothel in Ciudad Isla, a town in southern Veracruz.

The mutilated bodies of the women were only found several months after they went missing.

“Women are disappearing, but so are boys and girls, teenagers and young men, and, especially in Xalapa, many students,” an activist who asked to remain anonymous told IPS.

Reliable statistics on the phenomenon are not available. The local authorities even removed information on people reported as missing from the local government’s website.

According to the outgoing national government of Felipe Calderón, more than 600 people have disappeared in the state in the last six years.

But that would appear to be the tip of the iceberg. An article published in October by the newspaper Milenio, based on information from forensic services across the country, reported that at least 5,245 of the 24,000 bodies buried in unmarked graves during the six-year Calderón administration were buried in Veracruz.

In Puerto de Veracruz alone, a city of half a million people, there were 1,000 unidentified bodies in 2011.

And these figures, provided by some 30 municipal governments, are incomplete.

The state government of Javier Duarte refused to provide information, meanwhile, under the argument that it would be an “invasion of the privacy” of the unidentified bodies, and that the information would endanger institutions and “the territorial integrity of the state.”

“There are territories that have been completely lost, where no one is documenting what is happening,” said a rural activist who preferred not to be named. “In the north of the state, in the area of the Pánuco river, and in the south, around Poza Rica and Coatzacoalcos, things are happening that no one dares report,” he told IPS.

And no solution is in sight. On the contrary, security analysts predict a rise in violence in regions dominated by the Los Zetas drug cartel, since its leader, Heriberto Lazcano, was shot down by the Mexican marines on Oct. 7.

Los Zetas, the most violent of the eight organised crime groups operating in Mexico, was created by former members of the military who had originally joined the Gulf Cartel. In the last few years, its power and influence has grown, and it now controls the entire eastern edge of the country.

The latest battle by the people of Xalapa to regain control over their city was waged in the Jul. 2 presidential and legislative elections.

The PRI lost the state’s seat in the national legislature, which was won by left-wing candidate David Flores, thanks to Xalapa voters.

But the party that governed Mexico for seven decades until 2000, and is now preparing to return to power when its presidential candidate Enrique Peña takes office on Dec. 1, won the rest of the state posts with the votes from rural areas and the oil-producing region, where the oil workers union is controlled by PRI Senator Carlos Romero Deschamps.

“There was a sense of hope during the elections, after a few mothers dared to speak out about the disappearance of their sons and daughters,” said Hernández.

“But then the government of Veracruz began to get worried and started to pressure the victims to keep their mouths shut. And Xalapa became an impossible place to live,” the environmentalist said.

The small Mexican town of Temacapulín would be left underwater by the El Zapotillo dam. Credit: Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Daniela Pastrana
TEMACAPULÍN, Mexico , Nov 9 2012 (IPS)

“What do we stand to lose because of the dam? We will lose everything!” said Maria Abigail Agredani, a member of the committee for this indigenous community in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, reporting the damage that will be caused by the hydroelectric complex being built nearby.

“We will lose the right to life, our culture, traditions, peace, happiness and freedom, our burial sites and our dead, the square, the Christ of Temaca that we love so much, the Agave temacapulinensis plant, the Verde river and 14 centuries of our people’s history,” said Agredani.

She is a member of the movement to “Save Temacapulín, Acasico and Palmarejo,” small towns that will be completely submerged if the El Zapotillo dam is completed.

Temacapulín, a town of 1,500 people in a kind of bowl surrounded by four hills, hosted a pre-hearing this week about dams by the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), which has held sessions in this country since October 2011.

After listening to the testimonies of people from nine communities that have fought the construction of hydropower complexes in five of the country’s provinces, the members of the PPT issued their verdict Wednesday Nov. 8, condemning the Mexican government and demanding the definitive cancellation of all the hydroelectric megaprojects.

“In no case has the right to consulting with and providing information to the affected communities been respected,” said one of the tribunal judges, Monti Aguirre, as she read out the verdict, which maintains that the procedures have been characterised by “systematic and continued violation of individual and collective economic, social and cultural rights of individuals and communities under threat.”

The PPT was founded in 1979 in the Italian city of Bologna, inspired by Lellio Basso, a lawyer and political leader. It is an international ethical tribunal that seeks to try cases in which crimes against humanity are denounced. Although its rulings are non-binding, they carry moral weight.

The Mexican PPT will conclude its work in 2014, at a final hearing which will review the verdicts of all the pre-hearings held during three years of trials of the Mexican state, on issues such as the dirty war and human rights, migration and forced displacement, femicide (gender-related murder) and gender violence, and workers’ rights.

Its work also includes matters related to attacks on maize and food sovereignty, environmental destruction, disinformation, censorship and violence against journalists.

At this pre-hearing about dams, which is included in the panel on environmental destruction, Miloon Kothari of India, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, and Professor Carlos Bernardo Vainer of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, were invited to act as international judges.

Maude Barlow, a Canadian activist for the right to water, and Monti Aguirre, the Latin America programme coordinator for International Rivers, were also invited.

Local experts Francisco López Bárcenas, an indigenous rights lawyer, Luis Daniel Vázquez, coordinator of the doctoral programme in social sciences at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, and Patricia Ávila of the Ecosystems Research Centre at the National Autonomous University of Mexico also served on the PPT.

In an interview with IPS, Vainer emphasised that a constant feature of complaints from these communities is the lack of information and consultation, and indeed even disinformation that appears to be premeditated on the part of the federal government.

“People are not given adequate, timely information. This seems to be a general complaint,” he said.

The problem, he said, is how each of these cases is connected with the global market. He noted that the links between the dam-building industry and large energy-consuming industries with the financial sector result in emerging economies importing technologically obsolete projects in their efforts to develop.

“To supply people’s energy needs, large dams are not needed, because megaprojects do not serve local development but industrial centres. But how much is energy worth, and what is the value of a nation, a culture or a people? There is no possible comparison,” he said.

In the view of López Bárcenas, the pre-hearing clearly established that the outgoing Mexican government of conservative President Felipe Calderón is “plundering communities” and granting concessions for exploiting natural resources to powerful groups.

“Public policies are promoting the stripping of resources, not the development of communities, and those resources are passed on to other sectors, like mining, hydropower, wind farms and tourism,” he said.

One of the most worrying cases presented at the pre-hearing was that of the Arcediano dam, also in Jalisco. The project is meant to supply water to Guadalajara, the state capital.

If the plan had gone ahead, the village of Arcediano would have ended up entirely underwater. However, in 2009 it was cancelled before completion. But the former residents had to move to small houses in resettlement communities on the outskirts of the state capital.

Guadalupe Lara, who was the last person to leave her home, is now about to publish a book about her struggle titled “Yo vi a mi pueblo morir” (I saw my village die). She told IPS it is “very sad and frustrating to see how those who ought to look after us are robbing us instead.”

Another case was that of La Yesca hydroelectric plant in the western state of Nayarit, inaugurated by Calderón on Tuesday Nov. 7.

“La Yesca will be the emblem of a modern and competitive 21st century Mexico,” Calderón said.

“The government operates illegally to build its projects, which means that in our experience, there is no room for negotiation,” said Rodolfo Chávez of the Council of Ejidos (common lands) and Communities Opposed to La Parota Dam, in Guerrero, where protests succeeded in getting the megaproject cancelled.

“One cannot let them (companies) in even to perform research studies, because they end up trampling all over everything,” he told IPS.

In the case presented by the host community, the people of Temacapulín are affected by the construction of El Zapotillo, a megadam that would lead to the flooding of Acasico, Palmarejo and Temacapulín, their cemetery and chapel, and a 250-year-old church.

Local residents have documented psychological damage, technical errors in the project and violations of two court verdicts – at the state and federal level – compelling the authorities to stop work on the power plant and on family resettlement.

“They want us out of the way. But it’s not even clear what water is going to fill the reservoir, because we have had drought for the past four years,” municipal delegate Alfonso Íñiguez told IPS.

Mónica Olvera, a researcher with the Mexican Movement of Those Affected by Dams and in Defence of Rivers (MAPDER), estimated that over 185,000 people have been forcibly displaced by the construction of hydropower plants in Mexico in the last 40 years.

Members of the PPT delivered their verdict to the Supreme Court on Friday Nov. 9, while the work of the panel on environmental destruction continues on the weekend in the Purépecha community of Cherán in the state of Michoacán.

In that western state, 10 cases of environmental attacks will be presented, including road projects, agribusiness plantations, tourist facilities and mining projects.

Miguel* is one of millions of Mexicans scraping by on a meagre income – he earns 60 dollars a week working 11 hours a day in an electronic products store in the northern city of Mexicali.

He walks home – it takes him 20 minutes – to save on bus fare, which would cost him a dollar.

“There are only two things to do here: work and drink beer,” he tells IPS in a room where he has just a bed and a small TV set. “We all have to work overtime, to boost our wages,” adds the 41-year-old, who lives alone.

Some 2,500 km from Mexicali, the correspondent for a national daily in the eastern state of Veracruz is paid just 15 dollars per article. On top of the low wages, he works in the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists, where a record nine reporters have been killed in the last two years.

Like many of his colleagues around the country, he does not have social security, labour benefits or healthcare coverage. He spends half of what he earns travelling to Mexico City every two weeks to take a course on journalism and human rights.

Things are not much better in the capital. Juan, a designer who has taken masters’ level courses, earns 90 pesos (seven dollars) an hour teaching at a private university. He doesn’t have social security coverage either. He works freelance to increase his income. But as a professional, he pays one-third of what he earns in taxes.

“In this country, the biggest problem is not unemployment, but precarious job conditions,” Alberto Arroyo Picard, a researcher at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and a member of the executive board of the Mexican Network for Action Against Free Trade (RMALC), told IPS.

In this country of 112 million people, 2.5 million are unemployed, according to the latest figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

The outgoing government of conservative President Felipe Calderón boasts that Mexico has a lower unemployment rate than other countries in Latin America, like Brazil. But it fails to note that working conditions here are often dismal.

For example, while 51 million people are counted as “employed”, 12 million of that total are in the categories of “under-employed” (those who work less than 15 hours a week) or “critical conditions” (less than 35 hours a week or earning less than the minimum wage). And 14.2 million are active in the informal economy.

These figures on the precarious conditions of labour contrast with Mexico’s fairly robust economic performance. According to the World Bank, the economy grew 3.9 percent in 2011, and the projections for this year and next are 3.5 and 4.0 percent, respectively, despite the global crisis.

Only 16 million people have social security and labour benefits – less than one-fourth of the economically active population, according to the most recent data from the Mexican Social Security Institute. And of those, two million are on short-term contracts or are temporary workers.

But conditions are set to get even worse. A bill before Congress would make it easier to hire and fire workers, and would create trial employments periods, allow companies to hire employees on an hourly basis, and legalise subcontracting and outsourcing.

The ambitious overhaul of the country’s labour laws is opposed by left-wing parties.

“What they are doing is legalising infamy,” Salvador Arellano, the secretary-general of the Commercial, Office, Retail, Similar and Allied Workers’ Union (STRACC), told IPS.

Patricia Juan, of the Authentic Labour Front (FAT) independent confederation of unions, said the proposed reforms would not only further reduce the cost of labour and undermine job stability, but would inhibit collective bargaining and make it more difficult for workers to organise to defend their rights.

“That is the last social right we have left in Mexico, besides free education, which is going to end soon,” she said. “Since you’ll be on trial all the time, you’ll accept anything in order to keep your job.

Although outsourcing and subcontracting have existed in Mexico informally for the past two decades, the effects of the global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 have led to their expansion to virtually every industry.

To illustrate, nearly half of all bank employees in Mexico work under outsourcing arrangements.

Of the 42 banks currently operating in the country, in 11, nearly all of the employees work under an outsourcing regime, including BBVA Bancomer, Banco Wal-Mart and Inbursa, which belongs to billionaire Carlos Slim.

And according to the Mexican Association of Human Capital Business (AMECH), which represents employment services companies, outsourcing of services is growing by about 10 percent a year.

But the finance ministry has identified outsourcing companies that evade taxes. The federal audit office of the tax administration service (SAT) reported that outsourcing is responsible for more than 300 million dollars a year in tax evasion.

The proposed labour reform was approved by the Senate in late October but sent back to the lower house of Congress, which has to decide on articles aimed at opening up labour unions to greater scrutiny – a demand set forth by business and independent workers and opposed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which will govern the country after president-elect Enrique Peña takes office in December.

But the rest of the articles have already been approved and will not be modified.

“The Chamber of Deputies could delay passage of the law if it does not consider the union question a priority issue. But the aspects involving civil rights are irreversible,” labour lawyer Manuel Fuentes told IPS.

The next step, he said, is to exhaust all of the legal options to fight the bill. For example, different labour groups will ask the National Human Rights Commission to challenge the law as unconstitutional.

But he is not optimistic.

The problem is that just nine percent of wage-earning workers are unionised in Mexico, and only those who belong to independent unions are willing to wage a battle against the labour reforms.

And in a country where wages have lost 76 percent of their buying power in the last 30 years, and three-quarters of workers have already lost their rights, people are more concerned about holding on to their jobs than fighting for better conditions.

*The names of the interviewed workers have been changed to respect their privacy.