My Word is My Weapon

Proposal for a National Pact for Direct Democracy that Would Bring Together Zapatistas and Peace Movement

2012-01-14T03:44:00.001-06:00

The following is part of an exchange between Professor Luis Villoro and the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos. In that exchange, Villoro and Marcos contemplated the current security crisis that Mexico faces, as well as the nascent Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity's attempts to counter that crisis.

In this letter, Villoro and other Mexican intellectuals propose a "national pact" (something that the peace movement attempted in 2011) that would unite Mexican society around the goal of direct democracy.

Luis Villoro's Response to the Third Letter from Subcomandante Marcos

Greetings.

1. Let's continue this epistolary exchange by sharing visions when faced with the devastation that our country suffers, utilizing the reflection that you mention without trying to discover TRUTHS.

We agree that we can't hope for anything from the party-ocracy. As you Zapatistas say, "all politicians are the same." The institutional left as stopped being leftist.

2. I also agree that it is unjustifiable to blame the victims, a practice that is commonplace in the government, and I salute the respect that you have demonstrated in your last letter towards the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity that Javier Sicilia leads. I share that respect with an additional recommendation: to continue, yes, but without submitting oneself to the State's game.

3. A short while ago, Pablo González Casanova, Víctor Flores Olea, and I met because we were worried about the severity of the current situation. We finally managed to outline what we consider to be some of the necessary bases for a "national pact" for a Movement of movements, with the goal of making direct democracy a reality, that which is exercised in Zapatista peasant and indigenous communities, from below: that which can best be considered a real democracy. Let me share some points:

a. Direct Democracy beyond political parties.

b. Recognition of and support for the rights of indigenous peoples and their autonomies.

c. Defend national sovereignty, individual rights, and social and community rights.

d. Promote national education, public health, and social security.

e. Restructure the external debt and fiscal policy as well as recuperate the national patrimony to promote a new self-sustaining development project.

All of this, rescuing the idea of a Mexico that equals its life with its thinking.

With variations that will be determined, this project is an invitation to collectives, localities, entities, and sectors--that search for new alternatives for freedom, justice, and democracy--to form a minimum program that isn't just about talk, and that encourages other countries in our America.

4. This proposal comes about keeping in mind the agreement, already stated, that the alternative to the existing domination can not be a revolution in the traditional sense, but rather an organization such as that which the Other Campaign proposes.

5. We venture to say that the aforementioned "pact" could be strengthened with the coming together of two freedom movements: the Zapatista movement and Javier Sicilia's movement.

Wishing you the best,

Luis Villoro

---translated from the original Spanish by Kristin Bricker

Rural Student Protesters Under Siege in Guerrero, Two Killed by Police

2011-12-13T15:39:00.004-06:00

by Kristin Bricker

Plainclothes police opened fire on unarmed students.
Photo: El Universal

Mexico's normales rurales, or rural teaching schools, are publicly funded socialist schools that train poor peasants to be rural teachers. In a country where many rural students don't have the opportunity to study because there are no schools in their area, or the schools don't have teachers, the rural teaching schools are crucial to rural development.

The rural teaching schools believe that a populace must be educated in order to demand that their rights be respected and to organize to raise their standard of living. For this reason, the Mexican government is attempting to shut down all of the normales rurales by slashing their budgets, doing away with the boarding schools (making it nearly impossible for the schools to teach their desired student base, which is rural, marginalized, isolated, poor students), slashing the incoming class sizes, reducing the number of teaching positions guaranteed to graduates, and eventually shutting down the schools entirely.

The government's position has forced the normalistas to defend their schools. The student union frequently negotiates contracts with government officials, and like any union, they use protest to strengthen their hand during these negotiations. They frequently use highway blockades to force a meeting, as was the case in Guerrero yesterday.

Photo: EFE

The students were unarmed; the police immediately responded to the protest with high-powered assault rifles.

What follows are translated clips from media reports about the confrontation. The first two articles are regarding the confrontation itself; the third article provides more background on the situation at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching School and what led up to the protest; and the fourth is an update on the wounded, detained, and disappeared, as well as continuing police and military operations against the students.

Police Kill Two Students While Clearing a Highway Blockade
*They were students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching School
*The protesters demand a meeting with Gov. Angel Aguirre
*The students report wounded and disappeared persons

by Sergio Ocampo Arista, La Jornada
translated by Kristin Bricker

Chilpancingo, Gro., December 12. Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús, students at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teaching School in Ayotzinapa, died after they were hit by shots fired by federal and state police, as well as agents from the state attorney general's office, during a violent [police operation to] clear a group of students from that school who were blocking the Mexico-Acapulco Sun Freeway and a federal highway near the city of Chilpancingo.

At about 11:45am on Monday, about 500 formalists arrived in buses, supported by 26 indigenous people from the Peasant Organization of the Tecoanapa Municipality, and another 20 from the organization Xanii Tsavvi ("Mixtec Dream"), and closed the lanes of the aforementioned highways.

Their main demand is a meeting with Governor Angel Aguirre Rivero, whom they accuse of standing them up four times. They also ask that classes be reinitiated in the school. They have been suspended since November 2 because the teachers "are trying to impose" Eugenio Hernández García as school director. The students say he is a repressor.

Other demands are an increase in the class size from 140 to 170 students for the 2011-2012 freshman class and that the potential students who have a average of 7 points [on a scale of 1-10] be permitted to take the admission exam.

The blockade had barely begun when at least 300 officers with the federal and state police, with the latter led by Guerrero's undersecretary of Security, General Ramón Arreola Ibarría. Later, agents from the attorney general's office arrived.

Workers from the Servicio Centro Comercial gas station recounted that just minutes after noon, the federal agents attempted to clear the formalists, who repelled the police by throwing stones, bottle rockets, and molotov cocktails.

At that point, in the gas station, some of the students from Ayotzinapa set fire to a gas pump, and that was when the federal agents shot into the air. [Translator's note: the students deny that they set fire to the gas station, see below.]

Dozens of state police, led by Gen. Arreola, were positioned about 50 meters away, on the bridge over Huacapa River near the Liverpool department store.

Several of the police were dressed in plainclothes. "Let's go, cabrones!" yelled the undersecretary of Security to incite his officers to confront the formalists. Several agents fired their guns.

[...]

The students were attacked on two flanks, from the north and the south, from both sides of the Sun Freeway, and from the Huacapa River bridge.

One group of students attempted to take cover in one of the busses, and another attempted to repel the police with bottle rockets and stones, but they didn't succeed.

On the contrary, the gunfire intensified. The bus windows were shattered and the side panels were pocked with bullet holes.

Astonished and nervous, drivers of cars, busses, and trucks who witnessed the indecent from both lanes, fled to protect themselves from the gunfire.

The driver of a truck with license plate number 249-DC-5 was grazed in the face by a bullet, and an elderly man who took refuge in the truck was detained by police. His whereabouts remain unknown.

Police also detained Eric Escobar, a reporter with the Chilpancingo weekly Trinchera, whom they beat in the face and body and then later released.

At 12:10pm the gunfire intensified, and that is when student Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús was killed.

Jorge Alexis Herrera was shot down at about the same time. Their classmates, thinking that they were only injured, tried to get them onto a bus to protect them, but when they realized that they were dead they decided to leave them on the ground.

The gunfire continued for about 20 minutes from both lanes. The police, guns in hand, chased the students, who threw stones at the agents.

Several students took refuse in the hills located on both sides of the highway and from there they moved to their school. Others headed towards the town of Petaquillas, located about five kilometers from the highway blockade.

Some fled towards the municipality of Tierra Colorada, located about 45 kilometers away. According to the students, two of their classmates were injured.

On the ground there remained stones, pipes, molotov cocktails, and dozens of bullet shells from weapons of the calibers that police use.

The shooting ended at about 12:35pm. Minutes later, three military vehicles arrived. They stayed for about a half an hour and then headed for the town of Petaquillas.

[…]

At 2:35pm the highway was reopened in both directions. The persecution of the students didn't cease. The police searched the hills for formalists until after 4pm.

Herrera Pino was from Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, and Echeverría de Jesús was from Tixtla, Guerrero. Near their bodies were 7.62 caliber shells for a G-3 rifle.

[…]

We Were Completely Unarmed, Say the Normalistas
El Universal
translated by Kristin Bricker

El Universal's images from the confrontation: http://www.eluniversaltv.com.mx/detalle.php?d=27281

Rural teaching students who participated in the confrontation yesterday with police in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, say that they were unarmed and that they didn't even have bottle rockets. They blame the state agents for having initiated the aggression with gunfire, which led to the dead of two students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teaching School in Ayotzinapa.

The students, represented by student Jersey Peñaloza, said that they were never at the level of the police because of the weapons the police carried. They said their intention was only to protest and to demand a meeting with Gov. Angel Aguirre Rivero.

He added that according to a preliminary list from the State Attorney General's Office, nine people were detained following the confrontation, although Peñaloza says that at least another 15 students are disappeared, and it is not known if they were detained.

"We demand that this crime that has been committed against our classmates does not remain in impunity, and that those responsible be punished. They know who acted, there are videos that show that it was them (the police) who initiated the aggression, the unarmed students sought refuge," he pointed out.

Peñaloza stated that the agents kept shooting at them, and that the students only defended themselves with sticks and stones.

Regarding the fire in the gas station, the students said that it was the police who retreated to the gas station and set it on fire, and then later blamed the students.

[…]

"We Now Have the Green Light," Said Police Before Shooting
by Rogelio Velázquez, Contralinea
translated by Kristin Bricker

December 13, 2011

Students from the rural teaching school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, demanded negotiations with the governor and recognition of their demands. The blocked the Sun Freeway as a form of pressure. The police operation's toll: two students murdered, at least five injured with gunshots, and 18 detained. "It was the Federal Police who shot at us; many of us fled for the hills and even there they pursued us with helicopters," they said in an interview.

This past December 12 at about 11am, students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teaching School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, began to block traffic on the Sun Freeway, which connects Mexico City to Acapulco. Their demands were clear: a meeting with the state government and compliance with a verbal agreement made my Governor Angel Heladio Aguirre Rivero to increase the incoming class size from 140 to 170 students and to grant 30 teaching positions to the school's graduates.

The operation was led by Federal Police, who were accompanied by Ministerial Police [from the Attorney General's office], and state police.

"There were about 400 of us--students and people from social organizations. We blocked the freeway because the governor only says 'yes,' but he won't sign our demands. It has to be signed before the year ends," one of the students who participated in the protest told Contralinea. He is in hiding in Chilpancingo.

"Special Forces from the Federal Police arrived to clear our blockade. We were dialoguing with them. Then one of the police made a phone call--we don't know to whom--and when he hung up, they said that they had the green light to do whatever they wanted."

"That was when the Federal Police began to shoot tear gas at us. Some of us ran. Immediately afterwards they began to shoot us point-blank. They didn't care that there were children and women with us. The shooting continued, and all of us ran in different directions."

The bodies of two students, Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino, 22, and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús, 21, were hit by bullets and fell to the highway. The young men were students at the rural teaching school.

"Afterwards, they chased is in vehicles and on foot while they shot at us. Some of us who hid in the hills were chased by helicopters. We can't communicate with our classmates because the cell phones aren't working," he commented, alleging that the lines were cut. "They're still looking for us."

Bertoldo Martínez, president of the Coalition of Democratic Organizations of the State of Guerrero explains that the protest also included the demand that missing environmentalists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, both disappeared since December 6 as they were headed from Chilpancingo to Mexico City, be presented alive. [Translator's note: Alarcón and Bautista were members of poet Javier Sicilia's anti-drug war Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), and were kidnapped on their way to MPJD meetings.]

The human rights defender says that the Guerrero government is responsible for what is happening: "What is happening in the state is grave and shameful. These sorts of situations don't get solved. For example, the supposed suicide of Joel Santana Villa was a murder perpetrated by the State," he commented, referring to the death of an environmentalist who was imprisoned in the Iguala prison since last June. His death occurred this past December 2 inside the prison.

Students from the Federation of Peasant Socialist Students of Mexico (FECSM) commented in a press conference--which took place in the offices of Local 9 of the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE)--that they still don't know the whereabouts of the detained (about 24) and they blame Gov. Angel Aguirre, Federal Police, State Police, and the Mexican military for the murder of the formalists.

"The attack occurred during a state of calm. This was a normal protest, just like the ones we always do. Now, after this, there's going to be movement," which means that they will take more forceful actions and that there will be more mobilizations. "A few months ago the governor came to the school to talk with us, but he didn't want to sign anything. His predecessor, ex-governor Zeferino Torreblanca, starved us, and this governor kills us."

Moreover, they stated that the rural teaching school is besieged by the Mexican military: approximately 14 military vehicles surround the school. About twenty of their classmates are inside. They fear that the school will be taking over by the armed forces in the next few hours.

They also note that the Secretary of Education in Guerrero has not responded to their demands. They directly blame [President] Felipe Calderón for the strategy of war that is being carried out and for neoliberal policies that have deteriorated education in the country.

In a communiqué, the Interior Ministry said that it is working in coordination with Guerrero authorities to investigate the incident and to hold responsible those who were responsible for the homicides. Meanwhile, the Federal Attorney General's Office opened criminal investigation PGR/GRO/CHI/CASO/387/2011 for any federal crimes that resulted from the incident.

José Ramón Salinas, spokesman for the Federal Police, stated that the Federal Police had not participated in the operation; however, Ramón Arreola Ibarra, undersecretary of Police Control for the state of Guerrero, contradicted him and commented that the Federal Police broke up the protest.

The government of Guerrero made a statement on its web site. It explained that the governor had met with the students on various occasions and that the majority of their demands had been resolved. Those that had not been resolved, "is because [the government] didn't have the ability to resolve them immediately." Likewise, the statement reiterated the government's willingness to resolve the problems and demands from diverse sectors of society, respecting free expression of ideas and protest.

In response, the students stated: "We don't believe them. How is it possible that they want a dialogue while they are preparing to close down the school by force? They want to close it because inside we practice self-government."

The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), initiated a formal complaint with case number CGCP/309/11 regarding the aggression against the students. In a communiqué it mentioned that it would provide accompaniment, legal support, psychological support, and medical attention if it is required to the victims' families. Moreover, it declared the incident to be "lamentable and deplorable, and it should not, under any circumstance, remain in impunity."

Normalista Injured in Yesterday's Police Operation is in Grave Condition; 24 Detainees Are Freed
by Sergio Ocampo and Hértor Briseño, La Jornada
translated by Kristin Bricker


Several of the detainees say they were tortured in police custody

Chilpancingo, Gro. The Student Society of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching School stated that student José David Espíritu, who was injured yesterday as police cleared a highway blockade in the capital city carried out by students, has been operated on and his condition is listed as grave.

Iván Alberto Alvarez Adame and Rubén Eduviges Cuautololo were also injured during the operation. Today the State Attorney General's Office released 24 students who had been detained.

Of those, 11 are from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching School, five are from the Autonomous University of Guerrero's Economics Department, four are from Chilpancingo Tech, and four are peasants from the Coyuca de Benítez municipality in the Costa Grande region of Guerrero.

Manuel Olivares of the Guerrero Human Rights Network, denounced that student Gerardo Torres Pérez, whom the state attorney general's office is accusing of having shot an AK-47, told non-governmental organizations that visited him that he was brutally tortured into stating that he fired a weapon.

The normalista said that the police took him to an area near the municipality of Zumpango de Neri, located about 10 kilometers from the capital, where they took him out of the vehicle in a parcel of land and made him fire the weapon four times.

Olivares also said that the whereabouts of 13 people who came to support the students are unknown. The missing are from the municipalities of Ayutla de los Libres and Tecoanapa.

At 1pm there will be a protest march in the capital. The central demand is the ouster of the Chilpancingo government and the removal of governor Angel Aguirre's cabinet.

People Are Still Being Detained

Jersey Peñaloza, representing the normalistas, that hours after "the massacre" teachers and people uninvolved with the protest were still being detained. Some escaped and have taken cover in the hills.

[…]

Another student said that some of the detained have said that they were tortured.

[…]

Mexican Civil Society Wants President and Drug Traffickers To Face War Crimes Charges In The International Criminal Court

2011-10-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, SSR Centre

The accused (from left): Public Security Secretary

Genaro García Luna, Defense Secretary Guillermo

Galván Galván, President Felipe Calderón, and Navy

Secretary Mariano Francisco Saynez Mendoza.

A coalition of lawyers, academics, activists, and journalists has announced that it will seek the prosecution of President Felipe Calderón in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from his deployment of the military to battle drug trafficking organizations. “Our petition is supported by over 20,000 signatures, both handwritten and electronic,” they said in a written statement, “making it the largest citizens’ complaint that the ICC has ever received.”

Netzai Sandoval, the lawyer who is preparing the complaint, argues that the ICC has jurisdiction in this case because Mexico is a signatory to the Rome Statute, and because the country’s drug war constitutes an “armed conflict not of an international nature.” The Rome Statute, which created the court in 2002, defines an “armed conflict not of an international nature” as “armed conflicts that take place in the territory of a State when there is protracted armed conflict between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups.”

Details of the Complaint

In addition to President Calderón, Sandoval has requested that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor investigate Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, Defense Secretary Guillermo Galván Galván, Navy Secretary Francisco Saynez Mendoza, drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, and “other authorities, military officials, and drug traffickers who are responsible for war crimes in Mexico.”

The Office of the Prosecutor is responsible for determining admissibility, defendants, and charges. However, Sandoval has requested that the Prosecutor investigate both government officials and drug trafficking organizations for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He argues that both sides of the conflict have committed murders, rape and sexual slavery, forced disappearances, physical mutilations, inhuman treatment and torture, extensive destruction of property, and attacks against the civilian population, all of which are classified as war crimes or crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.

Sandoval notes that the Army has murdered and tortured innocent civilians at military checkpoints and during military operations. “It has attempted to cover up these incidents in order to guarantee impunity,” argues Sandoval. In 2010, for example, the military killed two students at the elite private university Tec de Monterrey. Soldiers planted weapons on the students’ corpses and removed their backpacks and student IDs to make them appear to be cartel gunmen.

The complaint that Sandoval will present to the ICC also details war crimes committed by criminal organizations. It specifically mentions the massacres perpetuated by unidentified gunmen at drug rehabilitation clinics that are occurring with alarming frequency in various northern states. Moreover, he accuses drug trafficking organizations of forcibly recruiting children under fifteen years of age, which has been demonstrated by arrests of children such as 13-year-old Edgar Jiménez Lugo, a cartel hitman who says that a drug trafficking organization kidnapped him when he was eleven and ordered him to kill or be killed.

Sandoval argues that both the government and drug trafficking organizations have committed physical mutilations. Early in the war, drug trafficking organizations began to terrorize the civilian population by dumping tortured and mutilated bodies in public places such as in dance clubs, alongside highways, hanging from overpasses, or in front of government buildings or schools. In late 2009, the government responded in kind: the Marines killed drug kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in his home, and then employees from the medical examiner’s office stripped him down to his underwear and covered his bullet-ridden corpse with bloody peso notes and U.S. dollar bills. They took pictures of his semi-nude body and leaked the pictures to the press, presumably to intimidate Beltran Leyva’s criminal organization.

The complaint also accuses officials from the Mexican government’s National Immigration Institute (INM) of collaborating with drug trafficking organizations to kidnap and traffic Central American migrants who pass through Mexico on their way to the United States. The government has admitted widespread corruption in the INM, where alarming numbers of immigration agents detain migrants and then hand them over to cartels in exchange for a fee. The cartels themselves frequently kidnap dozens of migrants in a single raid. The criminals detain the migrants in “safe houses” while theydemand ransoms from the migrants’ families in the United States, or they enslave the kidnapped migrants to work in fields or—in the case of women—the sex industry as prostitutes or in pornographic movies.

The Gravity Threshold

Due to its limited capacity, the ICC declines to investigate some cases in which it has compelling evidence that war crimes have occurred, but do not reach the ICC’s standard for gravity. “Even where there is a reasonable basis to believe that a crime has been committed, this is not sufficient for the initiation of an investigation by the International Criminal Court,” wrote ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo when he declined to file charges against coalition forces for war crimes committed in Iraq. “While, in a general sense, any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court is ‘grave,’ the [Rome] Statute requires an additional threshold of gravity even where the subject-matter jurisdiction is satisfied. This assessment is necessary as the Court is faced with multiple situations involving hundreds or thousands of crimes and must select situations” in which the commission of said war crimes are “committed as a part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.”

Migrants’ plight in Mexico might be one of the complaint’s more compelling aspects for the ICC because the crimes committed against them are so widespread. Germán Guillermo Ramírez Garduaza, who runs the “Santa Faustina Kowalska” Migrante Shelter in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, estimates that 80% of the Centeral American women who pass through his shelter have been raped during their journey. “They consider rape to be part of the price they pay to migrate,” explains Fermina Rodriguez of the Fray Matias de Cordova Human Rights Center in Chiapas.

The Mexican government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) documented 214 cases of mass kidnappings of migrants in 2010 alone, with a total of 11,333 victims. This number does not include unreported mass kidnappings, nor does it include kidnappings of small numbers of migrants, meaning that the total number of Central American migrants kidnapped in Mexico is likely much higher.

Sandoval hopes that the staggering statistics of over 50,000 dead, thousands of forced disappearances, at least 230,000 displaced persons, and the appearance of severely mutilated bodies left on public display in various parts of the country on a daily basis will convince the court that high-ranking government officials and drug trafficking organizations are committing war crimes in Mexico “on a massive scale.”

Goals of an ICC Investigation

Unlike the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), which allows victims to sue State parties over a range of human rights violations, the ICC prosecutes individuals—not States—who are allegedly responsible for a very limited range of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. Whereas the IACtHR has the power to order States to reform laws or policies that prevent victims from obtaining justice, the ICC only seeks punitive damages, such as imprisonment or indemnity for victims.

Nonetheless, Sandoval believes that an ICC investigation could have important political implications in Mexico. He hopes that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor will be able to obtain confidential information regarding the military’s role in the drug war because the Mexican military has denied many Transparency Act requests on the basis of national security. “On May 9, 2007, [Calderón] published an executive order to create an elite force called the Cuerpo de Fuerzas de Apoyo Federal [Federal Support Forces],” explained Sandoval. “This elite unit is directly controlled by Felipe Calderón and was involved in the drug war… There is no General or other official between Calderón and those soldiers.” Sandoval hopes that the Office of the Prosecutor will investigate the secretive Federal Support Forces for any possible human rights abuses, because domestic attempts to obtain information about their actions have been futile. If the ICC finds that the elite unit is responsible for human rights abuses, Sandoval argues that it can hold Calderón directly responsible for their actions.

Due to the corruption and complicity with organized crime that prevails in Mexico’s security institutions, many victims never report crimes for fear of retaliation. Mexico’s Census Bureau (INEGI) reports that in 2010, 24 percent of the Mexican population reported being the victim of a crime. However, only 12.3 percent of them reported the crimes to the police. Of those crimes that were reported to the police, the police only investigated eight percent.

“Mexico is a country of impunity,” argues John Ackerman, a legal scholar with the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Legal Investigations Institute. Ackerman says that bringing a case before the ICC is a way for citizens “to use legal, peaceful means to demand justice and accountability.”

Sandoval hopes that the ICC will open offices in Mexico to carry out a direct and impartial investigation into possible war crimes. “The ICC should open field offices in different parts of the country so that victims can go there and give direct testimony.”

Even though ICC investigations can drag on for years, Sandoval hopes that the complaint will pressure Mexican politicians to reform the country’s security strategy soon. “The candidates who will compete in the 2012 presidential election should know that if they continue with a militaristic policy that covers up soldiers’ crimes, they will share Calderón’s fate,” said Sandoval. “One would hope that they would begin to discuss a plan for the military to return to its barracks, and embark on a new strategy for confronting organized crime.”

Kristin Bricker is a Mexico-based freelance journalist who specializes in militarization, human rights, social movements and the drug war in Latin America.

Policing, Indigenous Style: Guerrero's Community Police

2011-10-12T12:14:00.001-05:00

Photo courtesy of the Community Police:
http://www.policiacomunitaria.org/

by Kristin Bricker, The Indypendent

While the Mexican state of Guerrero is plagued by both drug war violence and police corruption, it is also home to one of the most innovative criminal justice projects in the country: the community police. In 1995, when indigenous residents of Guerrero’s Sierra Costa region could no longer tolerate the general state of lawlessness in their communities, they turned to traditional indigenous policing methods. Seventy-eight towns replaced government police with unpaid, elected community police and prison terms with community service.

While the community police have been unable to keep cartels from trafficking drugs through their territory, they have been able to minimize the violent crime that is often associated with the industry. The community police claim that over the past 16 years they have reduced crime in their region by 98 percent.

“There’s hardly any robbery, rape, or violence. The criminals fled the area, because they know that the community will sentence them to five, seven, eleven years of community service,” explains Emilio, a community police officer. “With the government, if they arrest you, they’ll let you go the next day if you pay them. We don’t accept bribes. Here, you work hard every day, and every night you return to jail. And you always serve out your sentence. You think [criminals] want to wind up like that? No.”

The community police have an immediate response protocol for kidnappings that involves the entire community, not just the police. “One time the narcos kidnapped two community police officers,” recounts Emilio. The community police mobilized the entire town to save the kidnapped officers. “We organized checkpoints on all of the highways out of town, and we patrolled the city. The narcos got nervous, so the next day they freed them.”

The community police sent a commission to Acapulco with a message to the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity: “We hope that our experience … will be part of your struggle. There is no other way to confront violence than with collective organization.”

Inside Mexico’s Peace Movement

2011-10-10T14:43:00.000-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, The Indypendent

Photo by Santiago Navarro F.

On Sept. 10, thousands of people marched through the besieged resort town of Acapulco to greet the Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice led by Javier Sicilia, a poet who ignited a nationwide movement against drug war violence this spring after his son was murdered.

In recent years, Acapulco has endured a plague of violence — beheadings, massacres of tourists, kidnapping of schoolchildren and demands from criminal gangs that teachers pay 50 percent of their salaries as protection money. In the vast majority of the cases, no one has been charged with these crimes.

Armed with signs and T-shirts that said “No more violence,” “Stop kidnappings and crime,” and “No more militarization, we want education,” locals faced down their fear of being identified by halcones or cartel spies, and marched for peace.

“They asked me if I was afraid to participate,” said Yuridia Betancourt, whose son Christian Obeth was kidnapped on March 19. “I’m panicked. But I’m more afraid to stay at home with my arms crossed.”

However, moments after the peace march swept by Zaragoza Street, several blocks from the central plaza where the marchers rallied, unidentified gunmen shot and killed Antelmo Petatan Vasquez in his taxi in broad daylight, a fate shared by a growing number of cabbies who are often suspected of working as informants for the cartels or are forced to pay them “quotas” in exchange for the right to work. Petatan Vasquez was one of eight people murdered that day in Acapulco; three were killed during the march.

Petatan Vasquez’s killing marked another in the more than 40,000 deaths that have occurred in Mexico since conservative President Felipe Calderón escalated the government’s war on drug cartels in January 2007. It also underscored the challenges faced by Sicilia and the antiwar movement as it ventured into southern Mexico for the first time, hoping to build on earlier momentum.

Breaking the Fear

Rural and mountainous, southern Mexico is more impoverished and has a much greater percentage of indigenous peoples than the northern part of the country. And while southern Mexico generally has less violent crime than northern states, organized crime and government security forces are victimizing certain sectors of the population at alarming rates.

Located several hundred miles southwest of Mexico City, the state of Guerrero bore the brunt of a government counter-insurgency campaign against leftist guerrillas from the 1960s to 1980s. The Guerra Sucia (or, “Dirty War”) carried out by the army and its paramilitary allies officially ended almost three decades ago. Nowadays, Guerrero residents are suffering some of the worst abuses of the drug war, as, the military remained in Guerrero and a climate of government corruption has assured that crimes committed against locals are almost never punished.

“The Dirty War never ended in Guerrero,” argues Rosario Cabañas, the niece of Guerrero school teacher and guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas who was killed in 1974. “Unfortunately, thanks to [the Dirty War], peace and justice were lost. For 40 years, there has been impunity and injustice.”

Calderón’s militarized response disrupted drug trafficking routes and the cartels began to battle for control of Guerrero, which includes the coastal enclave of Acapulco. Residents found themselves caught in the middle. Unsurprisingly, the conflation of political and criminal violence gave birth in Guerrero to Mexico’s first narco-paramilitary organization, the “Liberator of the People Army” led by local political boss Rogaciano Alba.

Sharing Stories

Composed of 15 buses carrying more than 700 activists, journalists and family members of victims, the caravan rolled through 19 towns and cities in seven states over 10 days in mid-September. At every stop, caravaneros and locals marched for peace. The marches always ended in rallies where drug war victims from the north shared the stage with local victims to tell the world about how they have suffered in the so-called “war on organized crime.” At each stop, Sicilia’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity collected complaints about violence and human rights abuses, just as they had done in the north.

Mexico’s drug cartels were significantly strengthened in the early 1990s as junior partners to their counterparts in Colombia who were finding it increasingly difficult to ship cocaine to the United States through the Caribbean. In recent years, thanks in large part to the Colombian cartels’ decreased control over shipping routes, the Mexican cartels have become fully diversified organized crime syndicates and have expanded into new areas such as kidnapping, extortion, prostitution and human trafficking.

Approximately 40 Central American migrants traveled with the Peace Caravan, calling attention to how the cartels frequently prey on immigrants.

Mexico’s harsh U.S.-backed immigration laws force the hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants who enter Mexico each year to travel clandestinely, which puts them at great risk of being kidnapped by organized crime, caravan participants explained. When migrants are detained by authorities, they are sometimes handed over to criminal groups for a bribe.

During the caravan, the Central American migrants described how the gangs take people like themselves to safe houses where they are forced to call their families or friends in the United States and hold the telephone in their hands while the criminals torture them into begging their families for ransom money: “I saw them cut off a 14-year-old boy’s finger while his father was listening on the phone,” said one Salvadoran immigrant who says that he, too, was tortured.

Female immigrants are sometimes forced into prostitution or made to perform in pornographic movies. German Guillermo Ramirez Garduaza of the “Santa Faustina Kowalska” migrant shelter in Veracruz estimates that 80 percent of female Central American migrants are raped in Mexico.

Danira Meléndez, a Honduran migrant, recalled how her coyote (paid guide) demanded that she have sex with him. “He told me, ‘Here, I’m just one man. But I work with the Zetas, and if I turn you over to them, it’ll be 15 or 20 men raping you,’” Meléndez recounted. “We know that female migrants are easy sexual merchandise for organized crime.”

A Militant Tradition

Before the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity emerged, drug war victims were terrified, isolated and silent. On the two caravans, victims learned public speaking skills and how to organize protests and press conferences and hold more effective meetings with public officials. Now that the caravans are over, the victims will return to their communities, most of which now have local antiwar committees. Whereas before drug war victims were shunned, now they are in a position to become community leaders.

Citing lower turnouts at Peace Caravan events in the south, the Mexican media have portrayed the antiwar movement as losing support. However, this does not take into account the fact that the south has experienced less drug war violence than the north and in places that have been hard hit — like Guerrero and Veracruz — thousands of people turned out to protest the war. Moreover, the south has a long tradition of militant grassroots organizing (see sidebar) and resistance to military occupation that most of the north lacks. Whereas most northern drug war victims are just beginning to organize and define their politics, southern drug war victims are joining experienced organizations and hitting the ground running.

If southern organizations continue to collaborate with Sicilia’s national movement, they will likely provide a counterweight to Sicilia’s strong focus on engagement with authorities, which has included meeting with leaders of all three branches of a government that is widely seen as being complicit in the drug trade it claims to be fighting.

“We still don’t understand why they dedicate so much energy and effort to dialogue with a political class that long ago lost all will to govern and is nothing more than a gang of criminals,” the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos recently wrote, reflecting the sentiment of many groups in the south.

Mexico holds presidential and congressional elections next year. It remains to be seen how the budding anti-war movement will affect the electoral process. Ultimately, the country’s future depends on whether Mexico’s civil society can be mobilized to cleanse the state of a culture of corruption and impunity that exists at all levels of government.

Kristin Bricker is a Mexico-based freelance journalist covering militarization, social movements and the drug war in Latin America. She blogs at mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com.

Military Justice and Impunity in Mexico's Drug War

2011-09-28T11:28:00.001-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Security Sector Reform Resource Center
SSR Issue Paper No. 3
Monday, September 26, 2011

During Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s administration, over 5,000 human rights complaints have been filed against the military, but only one soldier has been punished by the military justice system. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has issued several rulings ordering Mexico to reform military jurisdiction so all crimes against civilians are handled by the civilian court system. Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on July 12, 2011 that the military should not have jurisdiction over cases of human rights abuse by soldiers. This issue paper argues that the Arce Initiative, put forward by Senator René Arce from Mexico’s opposition party, is the only proposed reform to military jurisdiction that complies with both the IACtHR rulings and international human rights law, unlike the proposal put forth by President Calderón. The paper concludes that the UN and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights should maintain their pressure on the Mexican government to reform the Code of Military Justice to ensure all human rights violations are tried in civilian courts.

Download the full report here (2.4 MB PDF file)

Mexico’s human rights violence on the rise, as neither military nor justice system provide security

NEWS RELEASE,
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2011
KEVIN DIAS

WATERLOO, CANADA — September 27 — Foreign governments supporting Mexico’s war on drugs should focus on strengthening civilian rule of law and encourage judicial reform to ensure that military personnel accused of human rights abuse are held accountable, according to a new report from The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Military Justice and Impunity in Mexico’s Drug War, released under CIGI’s Security Sector Reform Issue Papers series, comes at an important time as last week saw the deadliest attacks in Mexico’s drug war when 35 dead bodies were found in Veracruz and earlier this year the Global Commission on Drug Policy published a report stating that the “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”

In the report, it is argued that the military, despite the Mexican government’s obligation to reform the country’s judicial system as per recent rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and obligations set out by the American Convention, has been overstepping constitutional duties as per Article 129, and has been acting with relative impunity. “[During] Calderón’s administration, over 47,337 people – the overwhelming majority of them civilians – have been killed in the war on drugs,” says Kristen Bricker, a Mexico-based freelance journalist who authored the report. “The Mexican military’s jurisdiction over crimes committed by soldiers against civilians is completely out of line with international standards.”

While President Felipe Calderón has proposed reforms to the Code of Military Justice, monthly averages of 48,750 soldiers continue to fight the war on drugs with support from the US’s Medina Initiative. Particularly concerning is that Calderón’s proposal, which has since been annulled by a Supreme Court decision, would only prosecute three human rights crimes – torture, forced disappearance and rape committed by soldiers against civilians – in federal court. And as per Article 57.11 of the Code, the military would continue to assume jurisdiction over all other crimes committed by active-duty soldiers. The Arce Initiative, put forward by Senator René Arce from Mexico’s opposition party, is the only proposed reform to military jurisdiction that complies with both the Inter-American Court of Human Rights rulings and international human rights law.

Mexico, finding itself forced to reform an unbalanced judicial system, is in need of civilian rule of law in order to address human rights violations, according to the report. This is a priority that can be promoted by donor governments who are committed to increasing transparency, combating corruption and halting rampant human rights abuses.

For more information on this publication, visit http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2011/9/military-justice-and-impunity-mexicos-drug-war.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Kevin Dias, Communications Specialist, CIGI
Tel: 519.885.2444, ext. 238, Email: kdias@cigionline.org

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent, nonpartisan think tank on international governance. Led by experienced practitioners and distinguished academics, CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate and generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements. Conducting an active agenda of research, events and publications, CIGI’s interdisciplinary work includes collaboration with policy, business and academic communities around the world. CIGI was founded in 2001 by Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM (Research In Motion), and collaborates with and gratefully acknowledges support from a number of strategic partners, in particular the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario. For more information, please visit www.cigionline.org.

Drug War Meets Dirty War In Guerrero

2011-09-27T15:04:00.001-05:00

By Kristin Bricker, Americas Program

“The Dirty War never ended in Guerrero,” declares Rosario Cabañas, the niece of guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas. The Mexican military killed Lucio Cabañas in 1974, carrying out an order toexterminate the guerrilla leader and anyone who collaborated with him.

In July, unknown assassins murdered Rosario’s mother, Reyna Anaya Nava, and the guerrilla leader’s widow, Isabel Anaya Nava, as they left church in Xaltianguis, Guerrero.

As drug war violence spirals out of control in many parts of Mexico, people living in the countryside of the state of Guerrero are threatened not only by the traditional forces of the Dirty War—the military, paramilitary groups, and corrupt political bosses—, but now by narco-paramilitaries and drug trafficking organizations aw well.

Dirty War Crimes

Guerrero’s murder rate has more than tripled since Felipe Calderón ordered drug war operations in that state in January 2007.

To put the drug war violence into context, in a thirteen-year span of the government’s Dirty War against guerrilla forces and political opposition, between 1968 and 1981, 529 people were forcibly disappeared in the state. This was known as the most violent period in Mexico’s history since the revolutionary war. Today, the Committee of Families of the Kidnapped, Disappeared, and Murdered in Guerrero has counted 299 disappearances over the past six years alone, meaning that Guerrero is on track to surpass its Dirty War record.

The increase in violence was no surprise in Guerrero, where the drug war is the latest chapter in a decades-long history of military occupation, paramilitarism, and state violence. The military has occupied large swaths of Guerrero since the 1970s, when President Luis Echeverría sent 24,000 soldiers—one-third of the Mexican military at the time—to the state to suppress guerrilla organizations. The military terrorized civilian peasants. Forced disappearances and summary executions at military checkpoints became common. As a result of the intense militarization, Guerrero suffered more forced disappearances during the Dirty War than any other state—eight times more than second-place Mexico City—and a huge increase in summary executions.

In a chilling foretelling of what was to come in the war on drugs, a suppressed 2006 government report on the Dirty War criticized the military campaign against the guerrillas:

“Even now, when these crimes come to light, there are those who try to justify the State’s actions, arguing the necessity of bringing to justice—by any means—those who participated in illegal acts committed by guerrillas. This justification is so weak and contradictory that it necessarily concludes in the argument that crime is fought with crime, leaving aside the law…”

Most Dirty War crimes remain uninvestigated and unpunished. In 2002, then-President Vicente Fox created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Past Political and Social Movements (FEMOSSP) to investigate Dirty War crimes. However, the federal government refused to publish the FEMOSSP’s groundbreaking report on Dirty War crimes. Instead, it published a watered-down version and shut down the FEMOSSP. The crimes mentioned in the report, particularly the meticulously documented disappearances carried out by government forces, remain unpunished. And the Dirty War continues in Guerrero.

In the decades since the Dirty War ended in other parts of the country, the military has continued to “fight crime with crime” in Guerrero. It is unknown exactly how many soldiers currently occupy the state, because the Secretary of Defense has denied Freedom of Information requests regarding the number of soldiers deployed by state.

But the effects of the military occupation are painfully obvious. When the peace caravan led by poet and drug war victim Javier Sicilia visited Guerrero on September 9-10, many residents recounted how soldiers murdered their family members. Their stories were similar to those in northern states: loved ones were shot or disappeared at military checkpoints. The only difference is that in the north, military checkpoints and human rights abuses committed by soldiers are a relatively recent phenomenon. In Guerrero, soldiers have terrorized residents for forty years.

Alvaro Ramírez Concepción recounted how the military massacred eleven people on June 7, 1998, as they met in El Charco to discuss community-led economic development. Ramírez Concepción’s Organization for the Future of the Mixteco People has fought to bring those responsible for the massacre to justice. As a result, they have suffered attacks from unknown assailants.

“Five people were injured in my community. I was shot, too,” Ramirez says as he recalls an attack that occurred just a year ago. “I have these wounds because I go out and knock on doors. I’m working against the government.”

Tita Radilla recounted how the military was responsible for the disappearance of her father, Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, at a military checkpoint on August 25, 1974. His crime: he sang folk songs about human rights abuses in Guerrero. Despite winning her case against the Mexican government in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the government still hasn’t told her where her father’s body is, and it has not punished the soldiers responsible for his disappearance and murder.

In many disappearances, however, it is unclear who is responsible. Activists may receive threats for the work they do, but when they disappear, they disappear without a trace. That was the case with Jorge Gabriel Cerón Silva, who disappeared in 2007. Cerón Silva was an organizer with the Community Development Workshop (Tadeco, in its Spanish abbreviation), a Guerrero-based community organization. On March 14, 2007, witnesses saw that as he left his office, a recent-model truck with tinted windows and no license plate pulled up next to him. Men got out of the truck, threw Cerón Silva inside, got back in the truck, and drove off.

“From that moment, he was never heard from or seen again,” says Isabel Rosales of the Committee of Families of the Kidnapped, Disappeared, and Murdered in Guerrero, known simply as the Committee of the Disappeared.

Tadeco helped form the Committee of the Disappeared to search for Cerón Silva. “In the beginning the Committee was just family and friends of Jorge,” explains Rosales. “But when we went public, a lot of other families contacted us because they had the same problem: that someone in their family had been disappeared.”

Drug War Crimes

When Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared “war on organized crime” in late 2006, his decision to deploy the military to regions controlled by drug trafficking organizations set off a wave of human rights abuses, gruesome executions, kidnappings, and other violent crimes around the country. In Guerrero, where state-sponsored violence never ceased following the official end of the Dirty War, drug war violence has compounded residents’ security problems.

Guadalupe Orozco’s son Francis Alejandro Garcia Orozco was kidnapped from work on March1, 2010, along with five other young men. She has a security camera video that shows that soldiers kidnapped her son.

"Send the Army Back to its Barracks"

“The military refuses to accept this evidence,” she complains. “They say that they don’t know anything, that it wasn’t them.” Her family visited several area military bases, but they all deny having her son. She says neither her son nor his friends were activists, nor were they criminals. Her son and his friends simply disappeared into the back of a military truck and haven’t been seen since. She has no idea what motivated the detention and subsequent disappearance and she can’t get any answers from military authorities or ghe government.

Orozco is one of the many parents who have joined the Committee since the drug war broke out. Unlike the Committee’s founding members, they say no one in their family is a political activist,. They insist they aren’t criminals, and have nothing to do with organized crime. The families of the organization tend to come from very humble backgrounds. Some worked repairing computers; others worked in retail—in other words, not ideal extortion victims. Many families never received ransom demands.

Orozco is one of the lucky ones, because an anonymous tipster sent her the video of her son’s detention, providing evidence that the military was behind the disappearance Most families don’t know if the kidnappers were soldiers, police, organized crime, or petty criminals simply taking advantage of a violent and chaotic situation.

A lot of the Committee’s newest members can’t even begin to guess who could have taken their loved ones, nor do they have any idea as to why they were targeted. The problem is that the impunity and suspension of justice that has plagued Guerrero since the beginning of the Dirty War has allowed government corruption to fester for decades. Now it also provides a cover for violent crimes that are not politically motivated. In short, criminals in Guerrero know that there is almost no chance they will be caught, and if they are caught, there’s even less chance they will be punished.

Government Turns Its Back on the Problem

Even as forced disappearances increase to alarming proportions, the Committee of the Disappeared’s proposals to combat the problem fall on deaf ears. “We’ve proposed that the government of Guerrero implement a search plan, that it form a state-wide tactical group that would search and find them [the disappeared], that it re-open the cases and that it follow the leads that we have provided to learn their whereabouts,” said the Committee in a written statement. “We want to help with the investigations despite the risks entailed, but the government refuses to give in. It insists on keeping us isolated, separated, and to keep ignoring us and shutting us up. As for our proposal that the government create a contingency fund for victims of social violence, we haven’t received any response.”

The government’s refusal to search for the disappeared is due to a lack of will, not resources. Proceso’s Marcela Turati points out that a new system called Plataforma Mexico already has all the equipment necessary to track kidnapping victims and locate mass or clandestine graves. Plataforma Mexico, which receives funding from the United States government through the Merida Initative, is designed to connect federal, state, and local police to a national communications system, a security network and satellite cameras, databases of ballistics information from crimes, police reports, and the biometric data on both criminals and victims. Turati points out that, if used correctly, the government could use satellite photos to detect geographical anomalies that would indicate a recently dug clandestine grave.

Likewise, Plataforma Mexico’s network of government security cameras, highway cameras, and tollbooth cameras could be used to track perpetrators as they flee the scene of a crime, and the nationwide, multi-level communications network should allow police to coordinate actions between jurisdictions. Theoretically, this same system could be used to track kidnappers and their victims. Turati points out that instead of using Plataforma Mexico to combat violent crime and impunity, the government currently only uses the system to track and interdict drug shipments.

In Guerrero, many human rights organizations believe that the government’s refusal to investigate kidnappings and disappearances indicates it may be afraid that thorough investigations would uncover government corruption and complicity with organized crime.

Javier Sicilia, whose son was kidnapped and murdered, argued in Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, that corruption and impunity have “erased the line between the State and crime. It keeps us from seeing where one begins and the other ends.”

Narco-Paramilitaries

When ranchers Rodrigo Camacho Rodríguez, Pedro Salgado Mora, Cuauhtémoc Román Navarro, and Artemio Soroa Brito disappeared in separate incidents in Guerrero, the Committee of the Disappeared took up their cases. The prime suspect was Rogaciano Alba, a corrupt political boss, president of the Guerrero cattle ranchers union, and former mayor of Petatlán, Guerrero.

For years, locals had accused Alba of being in cahoots with the military to repress local peasant communities. Many civilians reported that his henchmen often acted as guides for the military during raids of their communities.

“There were various incursions into communities in the Sierra where residents said they saw that the people leading the incursions were Rogaciano Alba’s people, and that the military was protecting them,” says Rosales. “People also say that when he was being pursued by rivals, he hid out by living in the Petatlán and Altamirano military barracks. People who live near Rogaciano’s ranch say soldiers go up there to feed his animals. This tells us that he still has influence” over the military. This evidence of blatant collaboration between Alba’s gunmen and the military led locals to label his operation a paramilitary organization.

In recent years, however, rumors began to circulate in the Sierra that Alba worked for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera’s drug trafficking organization. Then in February 2010, the government confirmed locals’ worst fears: it arrested Alba, accusing him of controlling the Costa Grande region of Guerrero for the Sinaloa cartel. Alba is currently in prison awaiting trial on drugs, weapons, and organized crime charges, but according to Rosales, his closest collaborators continue to run his ranching and drug trafficking operations. A clear indication that Alba’s reach extends beyond the jailhouse walls is the recent assassination of Javier Torres, a witness who testified against Alba. Torres accused Alba of ordering the assassination of human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa and the murders of over twenty members of Torres’ family. Torres was assassinated in April; at that point Alba had been in jail for over a year.

The fact that Alba was arrested on organized crime charges, is a political boss and former government official, and has a team of armed men who collaborate with the military against indigenous and peasant communities has led to the conclusion that Alba runs what could be Mexico’s first official narco-paramilitary organization.

When the Committee took up the four cattle ranchers’ case in 2009, it publicly accused Alba’s narco-paramilitary organization of disappearing the men. As a result, the Committee began to receive threats. “They told us to give up the fight,” says Rosales, “because if we didn’t, it would be our names and photos that would show up on the Committee’s list of disappeared persons.”

The government offered no help to the Committee in its search for the cattle ranchers. “They told us that they were disappeared for a reason, that they must have done something, or that they were involved in something that they shouldn’t have been,” says Rosales. “Public officials even told family members, ‘Don’t denounce [the disappearances]. You have other children, you have a family, don’t do anything because they could come for you.’ When they tell you this, it makes you think that the authorities know what happened to your relative.”

Cuaúhtemoc Ramírez of the Guerrero-based Organization of the Me’phaa Indigenous People (OPIM) argues, “The state has been using [narco-paramilitaries] to eliminate any political or social opposition.” He, along with many other Guerrero residents who have encountered narco-paramilitaries, says Rogaciano Alba is behind the narco-paramilitary apparatus in Guerrero.

“Everyone in the small towns knows” who the narcos are, he says. “They are armed and they drive around town in luxury trucks.” Since the narcos don’t attempt to maintain a low profile, Ramírez explains, residents easily identify them when they accompany the military or mingle with government officials. “One time at a town New Years Eve party, everyone saw the local [drug] boss at the party with the interim mayor.”

Ramírez believes that in Ayutla, the military has an agreement with narco-paramilitaries: “they [the military] will let them [the narcos] work, selling narcotics for example, but in exchange the narcos have to eliminate us.”

Testimony from the Insurgent People’s Revolutionary Army (ERPI), a guerrilla organization that appeared in Guerrero in 1998, supports Ramírez’s assertion that the government is using narco-paramilitaries against the political opposition in that state. The ERPI’s leader, Comandante Ramiro, said that when the military detained him in 2001, known drug traffickers participated in his torture sessions inside the prison. Ramiro escaped prison in 2002. The ERPI has publicly stated that drug traffickers are on the organization’s list of enemies. The ERPI says that it has battled drug traffickers and narco-paramilitaries on multiple occasions, and that it seeks to keep them out of the indigenous and peasant communities that make up the guerrilla army’s popular support base.

On November 4, 2009, Comandante Ramiro was shot and killed with an AK-47. The ERPI claims that the government paid one of Rogaciano Alba’s hitmen, Cayetano Alvarado Palacios, to assassinate him.

Whether or not this is true, testimonies from a range of leftist organizations in Guerrero all point to the same conclusion: in Guerrero, the government is using narco-paramilitaries to repress and terrorize popular movements.

The Drug War and the Dirty War have become one.

Kristin Bricker is a reporter in Mexico. She is a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org.

Photos by: Santiago Navarro

BREAKING: Fray Tomas Gonzalez Detained By Military in Tenosique, Tabasco. Amnesty International Activist Beaten By Police

2011-09-17T20:36:00.002-05:00

by Kristin Bricker

UPDATE 9:11 PM CENTRAL TIME: Fray Tomas and Ruben Figueroa have been released. The authorities never informed them of why they were being detained.

Fray Tomas Gonzalez

Soldiers and Tabasco State Police have detained Fray Tomas Gonzalez outside of Tabasco's Mesoamerican University. He has been detained for three hours in his car by the following cars: Tabasco State Police patrol cars 332 and 287, and military vehicle 0818304. The official reason for his detention is unknown, but what is certain is that Fray Tomas is in grave danger.

Also detained is Ruben Figueroa from Amnesty International. A state police officer beat Figueroa when the men refused to get out of their truck. As they were beating him, they told him, "We will teach you some respect."

The men told the police and soldiers that they are participating in the "Peace Caravan" led by poet Javier Sicilia. The agents responded, "What caravan?"

Amnesty International reports that later, a man in a white pickup truck with license plate number RB94861 stopped nearby and yelled at the police and military, "Take him away!" The man yelled at Fray Tomas, "Conniving indian! You're worthless!" and "Here there aren't any witnesses, I'm going to kick the shit out of this jerk."

The state police eventually left when the government's National Human Rights Commission intervened, but the men are currently surrounded and detained by municipal police and the military.

Fray Tomas has repeatedly denounced authorities' complicity with the drug cartels that pray upon Central American migrants who pass through Mexico to reach the United States. Last night he stated that despite a recent purge in the government's National Migration Institute (INM), immigration agents are still in collusion with drug trafficking organizations. The purge occurred because immigration agents were detaining migrants and handing them over to drug cartels.

Fray Tomas was one of the organizers of the "Peace Caravan" event last night in Palenque, Chiapas. There, in an interview, he stated that he told authorities fifteen days ago that he knows where 40 migrants are being held hostage by criminals in Tabasco. He said he offered to accompany authorities to the house where they're being held, and authorities refused to act.

Fray Tomas has received threats for his work with migrants, the most recent being a death threat he received last week. The National Human Rights Commission ordered that the government provide him with "protective measures," that is, a police escort. The government has not complied with this order, forcing Fray Thomas to take his case to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

On the Mexico-Guatemala Border, Migrants Demand End to the Violence

2011-09-16T10:15:00.000-05:00

By Kristin Bricker, Americas Program

The caravan of drug war victims led by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia arrived at the Mexico-Guatemala border in Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, on Sept. 14, where they asked for forgiveness from the migrants who risk their lives to cross Mexico to reach the United States.

Simultaneous marches from the Mexican and Guatemalan sides of the border met on the international bridge that connects the two countries. The Guatemalan marchers greeted Sicilia and the marchers from Mexico with cries of “Long Live Mexico! Long Live Guatemala!”

Standing on the imaginary line that divides the two countries, Sicilia said, “We came to ask our Central American brothers and sisters to forgive us for having not spoken up before, for not having the consciousness and the strength necessary to prevent the kidnapping and murder that has affected thousands of migrants and Mexican citizens and has torn apart their families.”

When the Caravan for Peace set out from Mexico City on Sept. 9, some thirty Central American migrants accompanied it south towards the border. Just before dawn on Sept. 14, about ten more migrants from a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, joined the trek south. In Ciudad Hidalgo, the migrants told of how both organized crime and Mexican authorities abuse them as they cross the country precariously perched on the top of cargo trains.

One young Salvadoran migrant said organized crime members kidnapped him last December in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. The kidnappers called his family in El Salvador to demand ransom money. His family couldn’t come up with the money, so, on Christmas Eve, the kidnappers called his family so that they could hear him being tortured.

The kidnappers beat him has he held the phone in his hands; they told him that they would kill him if he didn’t cry and beg his family for the money. He refused to cry, so they beat him harder. The young man was also forced to witness the torture of other migrants who were being held in the same house. He saw them cut off a 14-year-old’s finger as the boy’s father listened on the telephone, and he was present when the kidnappers raped a woman in front of the rest of the kidnapped migrants.

“I saw with my own eyes that the police came to the place where we were [being held hostage],” he said. “The police are the most corrupt ones here.” Four migrants managed to escape and went for help, which is how the young Salvadoran lived to tell his story even though his family couldn’t pay his ransom.

“[Mexican] authorities have robbed me; they’ve beaten me in my travels,” recalled a middle-aged Salvadoran migrant. “Four months ago, I was violently robbed by [Chiapas] State Police as I crossed the border right here.” His misfortune didn’t end there. “My wife was kidnapped in Mexico State. She’s still kidnapped, and because we’re migrants in this country, the authorities don’t want to listen to us. It’s really difficult to get the authorities to listen to us when we want to report a crime.”

Honduran migrant Daniela Melendez, mother of five, recounted how her coyote, the man she paid to help her cross Mexico and enter the United States, tried to rape her as she traveled through Chiapas. In an attempt to pressure her to have sex with him, he told her, “Here, I’m just one man. But I work with the Zetas, and if I turn you over to them, it’ll be fifteen or twenty men raping you.” Melendez managed to reach the migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, run by Father Alejandro Solalinde. “Father Solalinde’s team in the shelter rescued me,” she recounts.

Melendez was spared, but too many undocumented migrant women aren’t. Drug trafficking organizations—particularly the Zetas—have branched out into the sex trafficking industry. The problem is becoming so severe that Fermina Rodriguez of the Fray Matias de Cordova Human Rights Center said, “When you talk to women, they consider rape to be part of the price they pay to migrate.” Germán Guillermo Ramírez Garduaza of the “Santa Faustina Kowalska” migrant shelter in Veracruz estimates that 80% of female Central American migrants are rapedas they transit Mexico.

As Mexicos’ drug war rages and more and more migrants fall victim to the cartels that have taken over the migrant routes, many Central Americans are still willing to risk traveling through Mexico to reach the United States because they feel as though they have no other choice.

Unemployment or underemployment are the reasons most Central American migrants give for why they decided to travel to the United States. Two young Guatemalans staying in Father Solalinde’s shelter in Ixtepec, for example, are from sharecropper families who don’t make enough money to survive. Even though they finished high school, the boys haven’t been able to find work. So the boys, who are neighbors, made their first attempt to reach the United States. They want to make enough money to help their families get ahead, and then they plan to return to Guatemala.

Twenty-one-year-old Francisco Rivera* first migrated to the United States from his native Honduras when he was twelve years old. A gang was threatening to harm his family if he didn’t join, and his older brother’s job sewing American Eagle clothing in Honduras’ “free trade zone” wasn’t enough to pay his family’s bills. After several attempts, he managed to reach the United States, but was deported back to Honduras.

In 2008, his father, the leader of an organization that helped landless peasants occupy government land to obtain deeds, was assassinated. Rivera’s family believes a mayor who lost land to his father’s organization ordered the execution. Days after the Honduran coup occurred in 2009, Rivera was nearly shot as a coup supporter opened fire on his neighborhood. As more and more bodies were dumped in his neighborhood in the weeks following the coup, Rivera’s mother told him, “I’d rather you be far away than dead,” so Rivera migrated again. This time, he sought political asylum in the United States. After spending a year in jail in general population as he fought for asylum, his petition was denied and he was deported. Rivera is now on his way back to the United States.

In crafting its immigration policy, the Mexican government is taking a cue from the United States. Whereas migrants cross Guatemala fairly easily and inexpensively by bus, Mexico’s strict immigration enforcement means migrants must take extra precautions. “You can cross Guatemala in a bus, and if the authorities catch you they might make you pay a bribe of 100 quetzales (about $12 dollars),” says Rivera. “In Mexico they have so many immigration checkpoints along the highways. And if they catch you at one checkpoint, they’ll make you pay a $500 peso ($38 dollar) bribe, but then they’ll radio ahead to the next checkpoint to advise them that you’re coming so that they make you pay the bribe at that checkpoint, too. When you get to the last checkpoint they’ll detain and deport you even though you already paid all those bribes.”

Mexico’s immigration checkpoints mean that many migrants prefer to brave the elements while perched on top of cargo trains. Some fall off and are maimed or killed by the train, and others are pushed off by organized crime members looking to extort money from the migrants. Still, every day thousands of migrants ride Mexico’s rails.

Rivera calls Mexico’s immigration policies hypocritical: “Mexico demands respect from the United States for Mexican citizens, but they treat us so terribly, and they accept money from the United States through the Merida Initiative.” The Merida Initiative, an aid package designed to support Mexico’s war on drugs, provides funds to expand immigration databases and monitoring, and equip and train border personnel. It includes support to implement biometric tracking of immigrants and build up security measures on both Mexican borders.

But some studies show that U.S. and Mexico’s tough immigration policies are actually driving migrants into the hands of organized crime. According to a 2003 brief by the American Immigration Law Foundation:

“A July 2002 study by the Public Policy Institute of California concluded that there is no ‘statistically significant relationship between the build-up and the probability of migration. Economic opportunities in the United States and Mexico have a stronger effect on migration than does the number of agents at the border.’ The study found that ‘the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has increased’ since the strategy was first implemented, due in part to the fact that ‘migrants who successfully cross the border stay longer in the United States than they did in the past.’ The study also notes that the more dangerous border crossings have led to the ‘increased use of hired guides, or coyotes,’ which ‘may have expanded the very profitable human smuggling industry.’”

Migrants Targetted

Increasingly dangerous conditions for migrants in Mexico have led them to support the nascent Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, which seeks to end violence and impunity in Mexico. While the migrants aren’t the only drug-war victims in the Movement, they are the only ones who have consistently been attacked while participating in Movement-related caravans.

When Sicilia called for a four-day march from Cuernavaca, Morelos, to Mexico City this past May, Central American migrants organized a trek from southern Mexico to meet the march in Mexico City. The plan was to walk along the railroad tracks that lead to Mexico City. The migrants never made it to the march in Mexico City because on May 6 in the state of Veracruz, gunmen attempted to kidnap women from the group. The presence of media that was covering the migrants’ march apparently scared away the gunmen, but they told the terrified migrants that they would return. The migrants called Mexican authorities for help, but for hours no law enforcement agency showed up to protect them. The migrants were left stranded by the tracks for the rest of the day, terrified that their attackers would return.

In June, migrants organized a second protest, this time a five-day caravan that would travel on top of the trains from Ixtepec, Oaxaca, to Veracruz. On June 24, gunmen armed with assault rifles stopped the train and kidnapped 40 to 60 of the 250 migrants who were onboard. Those migrants are still missing.

Migrants organized yet another caravan, the “Step by Step Toward Peace” Caravan from July 25-August 2, to protest violence against migrants. This time, they travelled with family members of Central American migrants who went missing in Mexico. After the second caravan, one of the participants, 19-year-old Guatemalan migrant Julio Fernando Cardona was detained by municipal police in Tultitlán, Mexico State, according to witnesses. Later that day, Cardona’s body was found dumped along the railroad tracks in Tultitlán. He had been stoned to death. Cardona’s participation in the second caravan led to an unusually high amount of media attention to his case. Under pressure, the government investigated the police that witnesses identified, and it found blood in the bed of the officers’ pickup truck, according to a source close to the case.

The brazen violence against migrants participating in the protest caravans has underlined the need for Mexico to make immediate changes to how it treats immigrants. Migrants and human rights defenders demand that Mexican authorities investigate crimes against migrants and punish the perpetrators. Migrants are also demanding that Mexico allow them to legally pass through the country on their way to the United States by cancelling the requirement that Central Americans hold visas in Mexico. North American and European travellers, for example, are automatically given tourist cards when they arrive at any Mexican port-of-entry, making the visa application process unnecessary for them. The migrants say that if they were permitted to legally travel through Mexico, they would stop using the dangerous trains and would start using buses to cross the country.

The migrants on the peace caravan say that despite their fear that their participation in the protests will make them targets, the caravans are working. They note that due to pressure from the caravans, the Mexican government has awarded 300 visas to migrants so that they can safely travel through Mexico. Moreover, two Central American mothers who participated in the “Step by Step Toward Peace” Caravan found their missing sons alive and well in Mexico, thanks to the caravan. Also, the police officers who allegedly killed Julio Fernando Cardona have been arrested, although it remains to be seen if they will do time for the brutal murder.

Many Central American migrants say they are glad to march side-by-side with Mexicans against the drug war, because migrants have to endure the same violence that terrorizes Mexicans on a daily basis.

“We’re here to support Mexico,” says Angie, a 21-year-old migrant who participated in the second caravan and is on the Caravan for Peace with Sicilia now. “There are a lot of people from other countries who migrate through Mexico every day, and we know about the kidnappings and the extortion all too well.”

* This name has been changed.

Kristin Bricker is a reporter in Mexico. She is a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org and is currently covering the 10-day Caravan of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity for the Americas Updater.

Guerrero Protesters Demand Education, Not War

2011-09-12T19:17:00.001-05:00

By Kristin Bricker, Americas Program

Acapulco: Fourty-nine students are on hunger strike
for the right to attend college.

Several thousand people marched on Acapulco, Guerrero, this past Saturday chanting, “We don’t want war, we want education!” The march occurred during poet Javier Sicilia’s visit to the seaside city as his caravan of drug war victims makes its way to the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Acapulco was once an international resort destination. Now, drug war violence has scared away many tourists who are afraid of becoming the cartels’ next victim. Last year, the kidnapping and murder of twenty Mexican tourists in Acapulco dealt a devastating blow to the city’s tourism industry. Drug traffickers apparently mistook the group of mechanics from Michoacan for a rival drug gang.

The increasing violence in Acapulco drove 800 teachers in 300 public schools to \strike last week to demand that the government take measures to increase security in their schools. The strike has kept at least 50,000 students from beginning the 2010-2011 school year. The teachers say they won’t return to classes until it is safe to do so. Teachers around the state are supporting the Acapulco strike by occupying all of the Ministry of Public Education buildings in the state. They are threatening to strike, too, if the government doesn’t reach an agreement with the union this week.

Shoot-outs outside schools are now a regular occurrence. Just this past week, shoot-outs occurred outside of three public schools in Acapulco. The teachers are afraid that criminals will seek refuge on school grounds during shoot-outs. One of their strike demands is to improve the schools’ facilities to prevent outsiders from entering the schools.

“There’s schools here that don’t even have a telephone,” complains Roman Maynardo López Pachuca, spokesman for the Guerrero State Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CETEG), the democratic organization within the National Education Workers Union. “They installed these so-called ‘emergency buttons’ in the schools, but they’ve never worked. If a teacher hits the button, sure, the police will arrive eventually. But it’s usually an hour later, or whenever they feel like showing up.”

“There’s been a wave of extortions, phone calls, anonymous threats, and, in some cases, some teachers have been kidnapped, and others have been carjacked at gunpoint,” explains López Pachuca. “Last month, we received an anonymous threat that named certain teachers by name,” recalls Lopez Pachuca. “It demanded that those teachers who earn more than eight thousand pesos per fifteen-day pay period turn over half their salaries” to a criminal group.

“They’re also demanding 50% of the Christmas bonuses,” says César Gonzalez, representative of the CETEG in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. “In exchange [for the payments], the schools would be protected by them [the criminal organization]. Moreover, if these teachers [who pay the quota] have problems with other teachers or with students’ parents, they [the criminal group] will make sure that the teacher or parent stops causing problems.”

Gonzalez says that organized crime first started demanding quotas from teachers in Acapulco, but now they’ve extended their threats to teachers in other parts of the state, such as Tierra Colorada.

The union has refused to pay. “If they tried to make good on their threats, there would be an uprising of all of the teachers in Guerrero, ” warned Lopez Pachuca.

The union spokesman isn’t making empty threats. His local, Section 14, has historically been one of the most militant locals in the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), and it is one of just a handful of democratic locals in the union. The local stood up to the military during the Dirty War in the 1960s and 70s in Guerrero, which was ground zero for the military’s brutal campaign against social movements across the country. Now, decades later, Section 14 refuses to be intimidated by organized crime.

“We teachers are not proposing a repressive police-military operation,” insists Lopez Pachuca. ”Instead of responding to crime, they focus more on repressing the social movements that protest the situation.”

Hunger strikers' sign reads, "Stop Militarization, We Want Education!"

The union spokesman blames the violence on the government’s decision to declare war on organized crime.

“This strategy of all-out-war, far from solving the violence problem, has only made it much worse,” he argues. “The problem is exacerbated when they ignore the simplest part, which is the extreme poverty that prevails throughout Mexico.”

According to the Mexican government’s own statistics, 46.2% of the population—that is, 52 million people—live in moderate or extreme poverty. Another 34.5% percent are classified as “vulnerable.” Lopez Pachuca explains, “This drives people to obtain money through illicit means out of necessity to pay their bills.”

“The strategy of all-out-war has failed, and it is time to change that strategy,” argues Lopez Pachuca. “A new strategy should combine intelligence work with social justice. There are students who were rejected from public universities, and they don’t have money to attend private colleges. There needs to more access to high school and college education, and special attention needs to be paid to the poorest sectors of society.”

Education Deficit

The striking teachers are demanding that the government dedicate more resources to education in Guerrero, particularly in the poverty-stricken outskirts of Acapulco. They want all students to have free access to all levels of education, including universities.

According to UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 19% of Guerrero residents aged 17-22 have fewer than four years of education—one of the worst rates in the country. The average Guerrero resident has only a middle school education, and indigenous peoples fare much worse. Forty-two percent of Mexico’s monolingual indigenous population (that is, those who only speak an indigenous language) is in the bottom twentieth percentile for the number of years they attended school.

Most of Mexico’s students are forced to end their education early due to a severe shortage of schools and teachers across the country. Last year, children in 46 rural towns in Guerrero did not attend school because the schools in their communities didn’t have any teachers at all.

The nation’s public universities also suffer severe shortages, leaving scores of young Mexicans with no hope of a professional education if they can’t afford private universities. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) rejected 90% of applicants in 2010; it turned away 105,386 applicants in just one of its admissions cycles that year. That same year, the Autonomous University of Guerrero rejected 35%, or 3,408 applicants.

Forty-nine rejected applicants are currently on their 32nd day of hunger strike in Acapulco’s town square to demand admission to the Autonomous University of Guerrero. “We have 9.9 [out of 10] grade-point averages,” says Berta Zuñiga, one of the hunger strikers. “We will not let an admissions exam undervalue us as human beings.”

Unfortunately, Mexicans’ demands for increased access to education have fallen on deaf ears. In July, Javier Sicilia and other drug-war victims met with Congress. During the dialogue, legislators agreed to significantly increase the education budget. “They promised that there would enough money for college and high school education so that any student who wanted to study could,” recalled Sicilia in Guerrero. “We don’t see that promise reflected in the 2012 budget.”

The proposed budget increases the Ministry of Public Education’s funding just 1.9% over last year, while the already bloated drug war budget would increase more than 10%.

“We demand that by next week, those who want to study are incorporated into the student body,” said Sicilia to cheering Acapulco residents. In the war on drugs, “it’s young people who are dying, and it’s young people who are killing. We can’t let this go on, because if we do, we’ll lose Mexico altogether.”

Subcomandante Marcos and Javier Sicilia's Letters About the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity

2011-08-29T18:27:00.006-05:00

translated by Kristin Bricker

Excerpt of the Third Letter from Subcomandante Marcos to Don Luis Villoro

Full text available in Spanish here and in English here.
July-August 2011

[…]

V. Judge or Try to Understand?

Also, from our geography we have tried to attentively follow the steps of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by Javier Sicilia.

I know very well that to judge and condemn or absolve is the preferred path of those commissioners of thought who appear on both sides of the intellectual spectrum, but here we think that it is necessary to make an effort to try to understand a couple of things:

The first is that this is a new mobilization that, in its project of forming an organized movement, constructs its own paths, with its own success and stumbles. As with everything new, we think that it deserves respect. They can say, rightfully so, that the forms and methods can be questioned, but not the causes.

And it also merits attention to try to understand, instead of making summary judgements, so costly for those who do not tolerate anything that is not under their control.

And to respect and understand, one must look above, but also below.

It is certain that above, the cuddling that those directly responsible for so much death and destruction receive draws attention and irritates.[1]

But below, we see that it awakens hope, sympathy, and company amongst victims' family and friends.

We thought that maybe it was possible that a movement would arise that would stop this absurd war. It doesn't seem as though that's the case (or at least, not for now).

But what can be appreciated is that, as of right now, it made the victims tangible.

It took them out of the nota roja [the newspapers' flashy crime section], out of the statistics, out of the mythical "triumphs" of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's administration, out of the blame, out of oblivion.

Thanks to that mobilization, the victims begin to have a name and history. And the tall tale of the "war on organized crime" crumbles.

It is true that we still don't understand why they dedicate so much energy and effort to dialogue with a political class that long ago lost all willingness to govern and is nothing more than a gang of criminals. Maybe they will discover that for themselves.

We don't judge and, therefore, we do not condemn nor absolve. We try to understand their steps and the yearning that motivates them.

In sum, the dignified pain that embodies them and moves them deserves and has our respect and admiration.

We think that it is logical that a dialogue occurs with those who are responsible for the problems. In this war, it is reasonable to address the person who started and escalated it. Those who criticize a dialogue with Felipe Calderón Hinojosa are forgetting this elemental point.

Regarding the forms that this dialogue has taken, it has rained all sorts of criticism.

I don't think that Javier Sicilia is kept awake at night by the mean-spirited criticisms of, for example, Paty Chapoy from La Jornada, Jaime Avilés (equally frivolous and hysterical), or the vileness of Doctor ORA (whom no one says is leftist, nor consistent), who have said everything except that Sicilia sent someone to kill his son in order to "propel" Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's image; or the accusations that reproach him for not being radical, made precisely by those who believe that "not having broken even one window" is an achievement.

In his correspondence (and it seems to me in some public events), Javier Sicilia likes to remember a poem by Kavafis, in particular a verse that says: "The Lestrygonians[2] and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them." And those hysterical critics don't even come close to that, so those little men's pathetic rancors don't get beyond their few readers.

The truth is that that movement is doing something for the victims. And that is something that none of its "judges" can allege for themselves.

Moreover, neither Javier Sicilia nor those closest to him spurn the critical observations that they receive from the left, which are not few, and which are serious and respectful.

But we can't forget that they are observations, not orders.

I transcribe the end of one of the private letters that we have sent him:

"On a personal note, if you would allow me, I would say that you continue with poetry, and art in general, by your side. In it there are firmer grips than those that appear to abound in the willy-nilly of the political "analysts'" hot air.

Therefore, I end these lines with the words of John Berger:

"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art frequently judges the judges, demands revenge for the innocent, and projects towards the future that which the past has suffered so that it will never be forgotten.

I also know that the powerful fear of art, in any of its forms, when it does this, and this art sometimes runs like a rumor and a legend amongst the people because it gives meaning to that which life's brutality cannot, a meaning that unites us, because in the end it is inseparable from justice. Art, when it works in that way, becomes a meeting place for that which is invisible, of that which is irreducible, everlasting: bravery and honor."

Perhaps all of this is besides the point (or thing, if you will)...

[…]

Letter From Javier Sicilia to Subcomandante Marcos

August 29, 2011

Let everything be light, peace, strength, and pleasure. I miss you so much.

Kisses,

Javier

Dear Subcomandante Marcos:

Many thanks for the lines you dedicate to the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in your third letter to Don Luis Villoro. We have read them with the care of those who are open to listening. From that care and listening we want to thank you for your deep humility and solidarity with the Movement and to tell you that your dead, like Dionisio-Chiapas and Mariano, peacemaker, we carry with us with all of the pain in our hearts. We also want to tell you that even though you don't understand us, even though that which is new--that ability to try to make peace even with our adversaries, because we believe that the mistakes of a human being are not the human being, but rather an alienation from his consciousness that must be transformed through the patience of love--puzzles you, we share the same yearning and hopes, those of "a world in which many wolds fit."

Peace, dear Subcomandante, is, as Gandhi said, "the way," a way that is only made with everyone. You, 17 years ago, alongside civil society, taught that to us not only when you visibilized and dignified our indigenous tradition's negative and humiliating past, but also when, through listening and dialogue, you opened the debate to that which, in the midsts of an institutional crisis, could be a new hope of national reconstruction: autonomy.

Unfortunately, power, which is blind; interests, which do not hear history's heartbeats, and selfishness, that ferocious form of "I" that breaks connections with others, did not listen to you--changing power's heart is always long and painful. The consequence is the frightening national emergency that the country is currently experiencing, whose epicenter, like a irony of deafness, is in Juárez, on the country's northern border.

Today the war has ripped apart the four parts of Mexico (north, south, east, and west), but also, in the visibilization of our pain--which are many and always increasing--of our faces, of our names and our histories, has united us--in the peace of love, which leads us to walk, embracing pain, and to dialogue, seeking to upset the consciousness of the powerful--to find that plural "I", that "we," that has captivated us. It alone has been able to be born from the heart, from solidarity and hope, that is, from the great moral reserve that still exists in the nation and from which you [the Zapatistas] form one of its most beautiful parts. Today, more than ever, we believe that only in the national unity of that reserve--which is not only below, but also above and to the sides, everywhere--we can stop the war and find in all of us the path to national refoundation.

Mexico, dear Subcomandante, is a body ripped to pieces, a broken ground, which must be put back together as a cured body and land in which--as with all bodies and all real land--each one of its parties, when they are harmonized and cultivated in good, are as necessary as they are important.

Walk, dialogue, embrace, and kiss--those four manners that we found in our history made from the indigenous world and the western world--are the forms that we assume not only to accompany one another, but also to find the lost path and make peace. Walk, is to go to meet others; dialogue is to undress, to tremble, to illuminate the truth--which stings at first, but then comforts--; to hug and kiss is not only to make peace, also to break with the differences that divide us and put us at odds.

A couple of years ago some friends and I founded a magazine--I hope that you have a couple of issues on hand--: "Conspiratio." The name comes from the first Christian liturgy, where there were two high moments: the "conspiratio" and the "comestio." The first is expressed through a kiss on the mouth. It was a co-breath, an exchange of breaths, a sharing of the spirit, which abolished differences and created a common atmosphere, a true democratic atmosphere--perhaps from there came the meaning that the word "conspiracy" has in our era; perhaps the Roman empire, an empire, as all empires are, frighteningly stratified, said, "Those who conspire and endanger power." When we kiss and embrace we create a common atmosphere, an unstable atmosphere--it's true about all atmospheres--that can quickly disappear, but that doesn't make it false. It is a sign of that which we yearn for and which, suddenly, in love, appears full of gratuity and life. In that way, to walk, to dialogue, to embrace, and to kiss is to do it, from our pain, for our dead--to whom we forget to give that love--for our young people, our children, our indigenous, our migrants, our journalists, our human rights defenders, our men and women--that is, for everyone. It is, in a way, avoiding that our soul's indolence, stupidity, and misery condemns us to death, corruption, and oblivion.

You put it well when you referred to the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity--a phrase that I have used for years in relation to the Zapatistas: "You can question the methods, but not the causes." It is for them, those causes, that stopping the war is everyone's task.

Let's take charge of what is today Mexico, let's take charge of the pain and the forgiveness, let's take the path of peace and leave judgement to history.

See you in the south, dear Subcomandante. While we arrive with the slowness of walking and the pain we carry on our backs, we send you and the compas a great kiss, that kiss which which our heart does not cease to embrace.

From the Arch somewhere near the Vercors Mountains,

August 27, 2011, five months after the murder of Juanelo, Luis, Julio and Gabo.[3]

For the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity

Peace, Strength, and Pleasure,

Javier Sicilia

Translator's Notes:

1. Here, Marcos refers to the infamous kiss that Javier Sicilia gave President Felipe Calderón following a dialogue between Calderón and drug war victims' families.

2. Mythical gigantic cannibals.

3. Juanelo is Sicilia's son, whose murder sparked the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. Luis, Julio, and Gabo are Juanelo's friends, who were murdered along with him.

Photo Chronicle of Mexico's Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity

2011-07-12T16:17:00.001-05:00

text by Kristin Bricker

photos by Santiago Navarro

published in Upside Down World

On June 4, poet Javier Sicilia and farmer Julian LeBaron led a 500-person caravan through what one major Mexican magazine referred to as the country's "route of blood." Over the following week, the caravan passed through some of the most dangerous places in Mexico: Michoacan, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Chihuahua. The caravan ended on June 10 in Ciudad Juarez, which Sicilia dubbed Mexico's "epicenter of pain" because just over one-fifth of the country's homicides occurred in that city in 2010.

One of the caravan's principle goals was for drug war victims to network and organize. The caravan collected victims' stories and contact information in every town it visited.

Dozens of drug war victims from across the country, such as Nepomuceno Moreno Nuñez from Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, travelled with the caravan to meet other victims and share their stories.

Moreno Nuñez (above, right, shown hugging Javier Sicilia) wants to find his son, 18-year-old Jorge Mario Moreno León, who was kidnapped and disappeared along with five friends on July 1, 2010.

Moreno Nuñez spoke with the kidnappers when they answered Jorge Mario's cell phone. They told him that the young men were kidnapped because they collaborated with the Beltran Leyva criminal organization. "They made a mistake," laments Moreno Nuñez. "They said that one of the boys [Mario Enrique Diaz Islas] was the son of an accomplice to the Beltran Leyvas. It's not true." In reality, Mario Enrique's father, Mario Diaz Garduño, was the director of the Hermosillo municipal Health Department.

The kidnappers killed Mario Enrique. Two families paid million-peso ransoms for their sons, who were released. Jorge Mario remains disappeared along with his friends José Francisco Mercado Ortega and Geovany Otero.

Moreno Nuñez knows that his son survived the initial kidnapping because the kidnappers put Jorge Mario on the phone. Despite evidence that Jorge Mario and his friends could have still been alive, local authorities refused to act. Moreno Nuñez carried out his own investigation into his son's disappearance. "I told [the government], 'Here's the investigation; here's the names of who did it and everything.' I have photos, addresses, everything. I know who it was," says Moreno Nuñez. "They did nothing."

Moreno Nuñez is too familiar with Mexico's version of "justice." For four years, he was imprisoned without charge for a murder the authorities eventually admitted he did not commit. A judge absolved and released Moreno Nuñez in October 2009, just ten months before his son disappeared.

On June 4 in Morelia, Michoacan, (above) drug war victims took the stage at the exact location where unidentified individuals attacked the 2008 Independence Day celebrations with fragmentation grenades, killing five. During each stop along the route, victims who travelled with the caravan and local victims packed the stage beyond capacity. They all shared their experiences living at the mercy of organized crime, soldiers, militarized federal police, and corrupt local police forces. The victims' experiences varied, but all of them were hasta la madre ("fed up") with violence and impunity.

Indigenous residents of Cherán, Michoacan, marched with the caravan in Morelia with their faces covered. Residents have maintainedbarricades in Cherán since April 15 to keep out kidnappers and illegal loggers who are in league with organized crime.

The Zapatista-allied National Indigenous Congress (CNI) has had significant presence in Cherán for years. The CNI's influence has likely played a role in Cherán's organizing style and politics. Plagued for years by corrupt or useless political parties, Cherán made the decision to to put up the barricades in a town assembly. Residents refuse to let political parties participate in their organizing process. They hope to drive out the parties and replace local electoral politics with "uses and customs," or traditional governance mechanisms.
"In this unjust war, we indigenous peoples are not only victims of organized crime," Cherán resident Salvador Campanur Sánchez told President Felipe Calderón during a recent dialogue. "We're also the victims of the Mexican state's institutional violence." As a "starting point," Cherán demands that the Mexican government implement the San Andres Accords, a 1996 indigenous rights agreement between the Zapatistas and the government that the government later betrayed.

Cherán residents accompanied the caravan to Juarez. A caravan had to escort them back home to Cherán because it was too dangerous for them to return alone.

Many of the people who rallied with the caravan in downtown Zacatecas on June 5 were family members of disappeared politicians.

Juan Carlos Guardado Méndez, former mayor of Fresnillo, Zacatecas, waskidnapped along with his driver this past February. At least 17 mayors have been murdered in Mexico since 2010. Guardado's case isn't included in that statistic because the government doesn't keep an official count of disappearances.
While violence against Mexico's mayors is commonly blamed on organized crime, Guardado's brother (shown above) believes that the "most probable" scenario is that his brother was kidnapped for political reasons. "We've talked to a lot of people, even some that we shouldn't have," he says. "They said they don't have him."

"We believe he's alive," says Guardado's brother. "We believe they have him holed up somewhere, and they're waiting for the time to pass, for information that he probably knows to become useless. We believe that someone very important is behind his kidnapping."

Unfortunately for the Guardado family, it is increasingly easy to sweep political crimes under the carpet amidst rampant corruption, impunity, and violence. The government finds it increasingly easy to blame all of its woes on organized crime, and the truth becomes lost in the chaos that has gripped the country.

As the caravan travelled to Durango, 6-year-old Francisco Fernando Rodriguez Flores flagged it down from the side of the freeway. Francisco showed Javier Sicilia a picture of his father, Fernando Rodriguez Maturiño, whose body was found a few months ago wrapped in a blanket. Authorities told Francisco's mother to abandon her husband's murder case, because the blanket was a message that the crime should not be investigated.

Vivien Echavari, whose three sons were gunned down in Durango, is outraged at Calderón's callous attitude towards victims and their families. She takes offense that the president shrugs off civilian deaths as "collateral damage." "The President said that sacrifice is necessary," Echavari told a rally in downtown Durango. "Sir, you made me sacrifice three sons. You destroyed my life and left me with nothing!"

Families United for Freedom and Justice (FULJ) helped organize the caravan's arrival in Monterrey. The organization includes missing police officers' families as well as families of civilians disappeared by police. They might seem like strange bedfellows, but they've all learned the same tragic lesson: that the government treats disappeared cops with the same distain as it treats disappeared civilians.

The government lied and abandoned San Nicolas municipal police officer Mario Jorge Tovar Martinez's family when he disappeared following months of threats and harassment. "They told my daughter-in-law that they would pay her his salary and benefits for five years," says Tovar's mother Laura. "That lasted ten months and then they forgot about us." The mayor told her that he would meet with her every fifteen days regarding her son's case. "I met with him once, and after that they refused to see me," says Laura. "What's worse, they told me 'Don't get the press involved, ma'am, or we'll forget all about you.'"

Melchor Flores' father (pictured above during theMarch for Peace with Justice and Dignity in May) traveled to Monterrey from Mexico State to demand that the government present his son alive. Melchor Flores was a well-known performance artist better known as the "Galactic Cowboy." Flores' character, a flirtatious, silver-plated robotic cowboy, has appeared on television programs and commercials. He was best known as a street performer who moved when passersby deposited coins in his tin can.

The Galactic Cowboy became a working class hero in January 2009 when police arrested him for working on the street without a permit. He'd been arrested for the same offense many times before, but that particular arrest turned into a comedy of the absurd when a TV news crew entered the Monterrey police station where he was held and filmed the Galactic Cowboy performing in police custody. "I told [the police] that if they wanted to arrest me for working, that's fine," Flores told Televisa during his detention. "I've applied for a permit, but no one wants to give me one." Police released Flores after he paid a $500 peso fine.

One month later, the Galactic Cowboy disappeared along with two friends. Witnesses saw Monterrey municipal police put the three men in patrol cars, and they wrote down the vehicles' license plate numbers. The men haven't been seen since. The Monterrey police department officially denies that it ever had them in custody despite the fact that two police officerstestified that their department participated in the kidnapping.

The Galactic Cowboy's numerous arrests and subsequent disappearance has drawn the ire of many Mexicans who question the government's priorities during one of the worst unemployment crises in Mexico's history. The government's own census bureau admitted this month that Mexico's informal sector employs more people than the formal sector. As more Mexicans fall into poverty, work in organized crime becomes a tempting or necessary alternative.
The Galactic Cowboy's father wants to know why police in one of the country's most dangerous cities arrested and disappeared his son, an entertainer. "The Nuevo Leon government stole my son from me because he was making an honest living!"

Masked residents of Torreon's marginalized neighborhoods risked their lives to tell the caravan about how militarization has turned their city into a living hell. In addition to the deployment of militarized Federal Police and soldiers to their city, the State Police are now commanded by a retired military general who trains his cops to shoot first and ask questions later. Interviewed by La Jornada about his policing style in Torreon, General Carlos Bibiano Villa Castillo said, "I like the adrenaline when I am on patrol. When I catch a Zeta or a Chapo I kill him. Why interrogate him? Let him tell Saint Peter what he did."
The problem with Torreon's public security strategy, say local residents, is that they're all treated as criminals in their own neighborhoods. Teenagers complain that soldiers use pat-downs as an excuse to rob and sexually abuse them. Families say that the soldiers use warrantless house searches to steal and break the few things they own. A mother complains that her son refuses to go to school because he's afraid of running into soldiers or police on his way there. A fourteen-year-old boy points to his colostomy bag. He says soldiers beat and stabbed him because he was standing on a street corner.

The residents are terrified that soldiers might see them in the news and retaliate, but they're tired of living with fear and violence. They said the recent mobilizations against the drug war have inspired them to organize. "I saw Javier Sicilia on television," says a mother who wishes to remain anonymous. "We had a meeting, and together we decided to come out today [to protest]. We're various neighborhoods. We're not just a couple of people. We're talking about what we're going to do about this, because they [the police and soldiers] don't help us, they just hurt us."
Chihuahua was one of the few states that didn't draw many new people out to the protests because many stayed home out of fear. Marta Garcia (shown above) carried a picture of her neighbor's husband to the march in Chihuahua City because her neighbor was too afraid to participate herself. The man in her photo, Oscar Zavala, was murdered on July 25, 2009, when unidentified gunmen opened fire on a group of men waiting outside of his sister-in-law's baby shower in Chihuahua City.

On June 9, Federal Police sent protesters a message when they rounded up fifty people for the crime of being "suspicious" in an operation in Ciudad Juarez just before the caravan arrived there. Amongst the detainees was Laurencio Barranza, a seasoned Juarez activist who helped organize the caravan's activities in Chihuahua state. Barranza (shown above), a community organizer in Juarez's poorest neighborhoods, wasdetained for two hours and released without charge.

Most of the local participants in the caravan's activities were seasoned activists who have protested publicly for years, and they've suffered threats, attacks, murders, and arrests.

The anti-femicide contingent was one of the largest that participated in the caravan's activities in Chihuahua. They've denounced impunity and corruption in Chihuahua since 1993, when they warned that leaving young women's kidnappers and murderers unpunished would encourage more violence against them. Eighteen years later, it is painfully obvious that they were right. Murders of both women and men have risen sharply in Ciudad Juarez since Calderón deployed the military in the war on drugs. As the military's deployment set off a wave of violence, the very civilian institutions that the anti-femicide groups had criticized for over a decade--namely, the prosecutor's office and the police--found themselves too constrained by incompetence and corruption to punish violent offenders. The result is a situation of lawlessness in which anyone--police, soldier, criminal, civilian--can kidnap and kill with impunity.

Following the caravan, Javier Sicilia and other drug war victims met with President Calderón. They presented him with 25 unsolved cases of murders, disappearances, kidnappings, and massacres and have demanded that the government find and punish those responsible. Likewise, they presented the Attorney General of Nuevo Leon with 41 unsolved cases. Sicilia and Calderón agreed to create a commission to follow-up on the 25 cases that the victims' families presented to the federal government.

Sicilia says that he wants to hold a national conference for drug war victims and their families. In the meantime, Julian LeBaron says that drug war victims will organize another caravan, this time to the Mexico-Guatemala border to see how the drug war has affected Mexico's southern residents.

Federal Police Detain Juarez Journalist at Checkpoint

2011-06-12T02:35:00.003-05:00

by Kristin Bricker

At approximately 1am local time on Sunday, June 12, Federal Police detained journalist Antonio Flores from the Juarez newspaper El Norte Digital. Police in patrol car number 10889 detained Flores at the Gomez Morin checkpoint near his office. They released him after about thirty minutes. However, they confiscated his press credentials and noted his address. Flores says he fears for his own safety and the safety of his family because now the Federal Police know where he lives.

As a result of the detention, Flores will have to flee his home temporarily because there are police trucks outside of his house.

At the time of his detention, Flores was returning home after covering the Caravan for Peace led by poet Javier Sicilia. Flores followed the Caravan from Cuernavaca to Ciudad Juarez. The article he filed for his newspaper just before he was detained is an exclusive interview with Javier Sicilia. Since he was returning to his home after traveling with the Caravan for Peace, the police found his Caravan press credentials when they searched his vehicle.

Peace Caravan Encounters Massacres, Military Abuses and Disappearances in Torreón

2011-06-09T16:36:00.001-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Americas Program

Gunmen armed with AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles massacred thirteen people in a Torreón drug rehabilitation center on Wednesday. The massacre occurred less than twenty-four hours before poet Javier Sicilia and his Citizens Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity were scheduled to arrive in Torreón for a rally against the drug war. The rehabilitation center is located just three blocks from the rally site.

Despite suspicions amongst some caravan participants that the massacre was an attempt to scare them away from Torreón, Sicilia refused to cancel the event in that city. “The march absolutely will not be postponed,” Sicilia told a press conference in Monterrey just before the caravan left for Torreón.

When the caravan arrived in Torreón, puddles of dried blood still filled the bullet-ridden rehabilitation center and ran out the door onto the sidewalk.

Sicilia had no choice but to hold the event as planned in Torreón. In a city ravaged by massacres, military abuses, journalist assassinations, and disappearances, residents risked their lives by simply organizing the anti-war rally.

According to participants, the massacre did have an impact on turnout though. “We live in constant fear,” said one protester. “There were people who wanted to be here today, but yesterday’s attack made them want to stay shut inside their homes.”

Olga Reyes Salazar, who has suffered the murder of six family members over the past two-and-a-half years in Ciudad Juarez, told Torreón residents that they can’t let fear overcome them. “We’re all afraid,” she told the crowd. “But if they keep intimidating us, we’re all just going to lock ourselves in our homes, and they’ll go there to kill us. So let’s leave our homes now and raise our voices against this government that is cruelly killing us.”

The Disappeared, Presente

One of the main organizers of the event was the United Effort for Our Disappeared in Coahuila (FUUNDEC), an organization of disappeared persons’ families that is based out of the Juan Gerardi Human Rights Center located in that state. In a scene reminiscent of Mexico’s Dirty War, mothers of the disappeared carried banners with their children’s photographs.

But the forced disappearance of their loved ones took place far more recently.

Of the more than 180 disappearances that FUUNDEC has documented in Coahuila, all but a handful occurred after President Felipe Calderón deployed the military to combat organized crime in December 2006.

The most terrifying aspect of the disappearances is that no one knows why they are occurring. Some of FUUNDEC’s cases are disappearances committed by the military or the police, but many persons have disappeared without a trace or were abducted by unidentified gunmen.

Some FUUNDEC families received phone calls demanding ransom after they went public about their relatives’ disappearance, but they don’t know if the call came from the real kidnappers or someone looking to profit from the families’ hardship. “We reported the extortion to the authorities, but they didn’t do anything,” complaints Ramona Ortiz Reyes, whose son and grandson disappeared in Torreón on May 12, 2008. “We gave them their names. These were the people who said they had them, and the authorities did nothing.”

Concepción Hernández says that when her son disappeared two years ago, the State Attorney General’s Office said that they would investigate the disappearance, but only if Hernández was willing to finance the investigation with her own money.

According to the Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center, which collaborates with FUUNDEC, Coahuila’s disappeared fit the profile of Mexico’s typical drug war victim: the majority are males between the ages of 17 and 40 years old. Nonetheless, the disappearances FUUNDEC has documented do not match the drug war victim stereotype that the government promotes. Whereas the Calderón administration has argued that most drug war victims were in some way associated with organized crime, the Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center notes, “The common profile that characterizes all of the disappeared persons is that they are everyday citizens and workers. There is no data that identifies them has having an activity or interest in common, and there is certainly no data that indicates that they were involved in illegal activities.”

FUUNDEC’s task is daunting. According to Ortiz Reyes, FUUNDEC has yet to find a disappeared person alive. “They’ve found a lot of dead people, but none of ours,” she says. “The problem is that they’re looking for dead people, not live ones.”

FUUNDEC doesn’t just looked for the disappeared; it works to transform the Mexican justice system so that disappearances stop occurring. “We don’t want the authorities to spend their time to looking for clandestine graves instead of looking for our family members,” says FUUNDEC member Rosalina Zapata Contreras. “[The disappearances] are not isolated incidents, so the strategy must be a coordinated response from all levels of government whose only objective must be to find our loved ones alive.”

Military Abuses

As the rally in Torreón began, a group of about twenty people—most of them masked teenagers—arrived at the event. They took their place among the crowd with a banner that listed the names of their friends and neighbors who were killed by soldiers and police. When press photographers and cameramen attempted to film them, they shooed them away because they were afraid of retaliation. They agreed to an interview with the Americas Program on the condition of anonymity, and only then because we assured them that we weren’t from a local media outlet.

The group is from poor neighborhoods located in the outlying areas of Torreón. The military and Federal Police are permanently deployed in the area at the governor’s request. They were supposed to bring security to Torreón, but instead, members of the group say they terrorize the city’s poorest residents.

One woman explained why the teenagers came to the rally despite the fact that they were afraid to show their faces. “There’s a lot of 13- and 14-year-old teens here because they don’t want to live a life full of violence like they are now with the soldiers and the Federal Police.”

“The soldiers steal from houses, they’ve killed people, they beat and abduct taxi drivers,” she explains. “They killed a 14-year-old boy from the southeast side. They grabbed him and they shot him in the right temple.” The military eventually admitted that they killed the boy, she says, “but they say it was because he ran.”

“They run because they’re scared!” interrupts a second woman.

“We see them [the soldiers and police] grab boys and girls, and where are they?” asks the first woman. “We saw them! But then they don’t show up, or they show up in a ditch somewhere, and then they blame other people who didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“They’re the problem there,” she continues. “They entered my brother-in-law’s home. They stole money from him and they made a mess of his home. They saw my niece naked in the bathroom because the soldier opened the door when she was showering. And they put a bag over my brother-in-law’s head. It was the soldiers!”

The second woman, a mother of two, recounts how soldiers raided her home: “They told me they wanted to come inside, and I asked them why. And they said they just wanted to search. And I said, ‘Search for what?’ and they said, ‘We want to check if you have drugs.’ And I said, ‘Why would I have drugs?’ They forced their way in. They stole $1,500 pesos ($125 dollars), a cell phone, a DVD player, and a television, and they broke all of my furniture.”

“And my daughter here, they stopped her on the street and they frisked her. But they didn’t frisk her, they felt her up! They raped a poor girl, too. She doesn’t even live here anymore, she left. But it was the soldiers who did it, because they detained her.”

The second woman calls over a teenage girl. “This is my daughter. She was followed by soldiers. She’s fourteen, and the soldiers tried to put her and my niece in their vehicle. They came home so scared. They also beat my son. He was a student, but now he doesn’t go to school because of the soldiers. He tells me, ‘I’m not going anymore, Mom, the soldiers are out there.’”

“They yell ‘Hey, faggots, what are you doing,’ and then they search you,” says a teenage boy who covered his face with a shirt. “They steal your cell phone, they steal your jewelry, they rip out your earrings, they cut your hair.”

“They even steal their sneakers!” a woman interjects.

“Soldiers beat my cousin, and look at what they did to him,” says another woman, pointing at a fourteen-year-old boy’s colostomy bag. “He was standing on a corner and they picked him up and put him in a truck and they tried to kill him.”

“I was just standing on the corner and they beat me and stabbed me,” explains the young man. “They perforated my large intestine.”

“All of the violence that we’re experiencing, they say it’s ‘insecurity,’” says a thirty-something woman. “But it’s them, the soldiers and the police, that are doing all these things. Instead of coming to help us, they just come to hurt us. Why would we want them here?”

Kristin Bricker is a freelance reporter and a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org . F. Santiago Navarro contributed to this report.

In Bloody Durango, Civilian and Police Families Unite to Protest Drug War

2011-06-08T20:34:00.001-05:00

By Kristin Bricker, Americas Program

The world was shocked when Mexican authorities uncovered seven clandestine mass graves containing at least 226 drug war victims in Durango this past April and May. However, the only truly surprising detail about the mass graves was that they weren’t discovered sooner.

The murder rate in Durango skyrocketed after President Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime in late 2006. The number of executions soared 1,401 percent from 67 in 2005 to 939 in 2010. With 910 murders so far in 2011, Durango is set to surpass 2010′s murders by the end of June.

As the executions continue unabated in Durango, it is obvious that Calderón’s unsubstantiated assertion that 90% of Mexico’s murder victims are members of organized crime is simply untrue. The government couldn’t even identify 54 of the 226 bodies in Durango’s clandestine mass graves—that is, 24% of the victims—so it reburied them in a municipal mass grave.

Even when victims are identified, the government rarely investigates their deaths. In 2010, the government didn’t even bother to open investigations into 95% of the 15,273 murders that occurred in the country that year. When missing miner Fernando Rodriguez Maturina turned up dead and wrapped in a blanket a few months ago in Durango, police told his widow that she shouldn’t push for an investigation. “The police officer who gave me his remains told me that because he was wrapped in a blanket, it was a message that we shouldn’t investigate the death,” María Flores de Santos recalls. “He told me that it was best if I didn’t stir up trouble.”

In Durango, the raging violence doesn’t discriminate between narcos and civilians, or between honest police and corrupt police. Durango is a war zone, and everyone is caught in the crossfire. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the peace movement refuses to discriminate between victims.

When the Citizens Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity arrived in Durango on Monday night to protest the drug war, thousands of locals from across the social spectrum turned out to greet it. The widows of murdered police officers marched in downtown Durango alongside the families of people disappeared by corrupt police. Families of civilians murdered by organized crime marched together with families who openly admitted that their murdered loved ones had gotten “into trouble.” Regardless of which side of the war their loved ones were on before tragedy struck, their grief and outrage brought them together to demand an end to a drug policy that has only brought death and destruction to Durango.

It seems as though everyone has lost at least one family member to drug war violence in this state, and after years of neglect and disdain, they are desperate for anyone to listen to their plight. Even the janitor who works at the school where the Caravan rested on Monday night took advantage of the abundance of sympathetic ears to tearfully announce that they just found her cousin in one of the mass graves. This afternoon her family has to try to claim the 22-year-old’s body. Her neighbors who have already been through the process prepared her for the long, frustrating, and sometimes futile struggle to get an unsolved murder victim released from government custody. It’s almost always a battle for victims’ families, even if the government has no intention of actually investigating the murder.

Many protesters in Durango carried signs that decried corruption in the State Police. Ivana Hernandez says that State Police were responsible for the forced disappearance of her cousin Adán Salazar two months ago during a routine traffic stop. Witnesses saw the police put him in their patrol car, but his detention was never registered. Hernandez’s family filed complaints with the government, but the State Police claim they never had him in custody. The investigation has gone nowhere.

Several march participants—including one woman whose cousin survived a police kidnapping—claim that Durango State Police detain victims and then deliver them to organized crime.

Police Families Join the Peace Movement

Despite the peace movement’s strong criticism of the police’s role in the drug war and the widespread belief that most police officers are corrupt, many police widows feel drawn to the movement for the same reason all other drug war victims are: they are unable to find sympathy and justice anywhere else. “It hurts me so much how they criminalize the victims, thinking that they deserve what happened to them,” says Gloria Aguilar, the wife and mother of three disappeared Monterrey Transit Police officers. “I’ve heard so many times, ‘But they must’ve done something to have been disappeared.”

Widows and mothers of seven murdered Federal Police officers protested the government’s abandonment of their loved ones both in life and death. The seven were kidnapped on their way to Ciudad Hidalgo, where there were supposed to shut down a corrupt municipal police department. “They didn’t even give them a vehicle or a per diem,” recounts officer Pedro Alberto Vázquez Hernández’s sister-in-law. “So they had to pass the hat for gas money, and they convinced a friend to drive them. That friend disappeared with them. They were kidnapped November 12, 2009, from a gas station in Morelia, Michoacan.”

Even though several suspects bragged to Mexican investigators that they participated in the kidnapping and murder of the eight men, the government refuses to declare the police officers dead so that their widows can collect death benefits and remarry. The government also hasn’t recovered the men’s bodies. Every time a new mass grave is discovered, the widows and mothers must travel to that state and review photographs of the cadavers in the local morgue.

Flor Susana Gómez, the widow of a Durango State Police officer, argues that the government’s treatment of police widows is callous and illogical. “We receive a monthly pension of six thousand pesos ($521 dollars) with which we have to feed, dress, house, and educate 3-5 children. Durango state law prohibits us from re-marrying and working,” says Gómez.

“This is yet another tragedy of this absurd war on organized crime, knowing that soldiers and municipal, state, and federal police are nothing more than cannon fodder for politicians.”

Former municipal police officer Oscar Hernandez resigned from his department in Mexico State and joined the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity. “I quit because my son asked me if I was corrupt, and it made me think,” he says.

“My last nine months on the force, they sent me to work in the federal Confidence Control program [the program that screens police departments and purges corrupt cops], and it’s even worse there. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the more corrupt it is!”

Hernandez has a message for police officers: “They’re turning the police into nothing more than killing machines. Quit and join the movement!”

Overcoming Fear

Durango’s residents know that they risk their lives by speaking out against the violence. But so many of them have lost so much already that they don’t see any other option. “If I turn up dead one of these days, thank you,” declared Vivien Echavari, whose three sons were gunned down in Durango. “Because then I will be with my sons.”

Mar Grecia Oliva Guerrero from the University of Durango urged her fellow Duranguenses to overcome their fear and speak out against the war. “How long will it take you to wake up and do something so that this stops? Tomorrow it could be your child or your parent! Will you do something today, while you still have your family, or will you wait until tomorrow, when you’re in a clandestine mass grave?”

Kristin Bricker is freelance reporter and contributor to the CIP Americas Program. F. Santiago Navarro contributed to this report.

For on-going coverage of the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity, check in frequently here and on our AmericasMexico Blog http://americasmexico.blogspot.com, and www.cipamericas.org/es for Spanish-language reports and audios.

Mexican Community Uses Barricades to Drive Out Organized Crime and Political Parties

2011-06-07T02:40:00.001-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World

Cherán participates in the Caravan for Peace to Juarez.
Photo: Santiago Navarro GF

Armed with machetes, sticks, and farm tools, residents of Cherán, Michoacan, covered their faces with bandanas and set up barricades around their community on April 15. It is a scene reminiscent of Oaxaca in 2006, except this time, the barricades aren't meant to keep out paramilitary death squads; they keep out organized crime.

The barricades have come at a cost for the town's 12,600 residents. Schools have been shut down since Easter, and the economy has come to a standstill. However, without the barricades, kidnappers and illegal loggers who are in league with organized crime would continue to prey upon the town with complete impunity. For Cherán's residents, unabated impunity is unacceptable, because in addition to the usual laundry list of drug war crimes--murder, kidnapping, extortion, and torture--the illegal loggers, protected by organized crime, have destroyed an estimated 80% of Cherán's woodlands.

When the municipal, state, and federal governments refused to protect Cherán from organized crime, the community took matters into its own hands. Now, not only are they driving organized crime out of they're community, they're also kicking out the political parties, whom they blame for allowing insecurity and crime in Cherán to spiral out of control.

Upside Down World spoke with "Emilio" and "Salvador," two Cheran residents who have united with their neighbors to maintain the barricades around the clock for the past month-and-a-half. For fear of reprisal against their families, they requested that their real names not be used in this interview.

Impunity and Insecurity

Emilio: Illegal logging began in Cherán about ten years ago due to our own community authorities' irresponsibility and poor organization. That led us to the situation we're in today, and now we're paying a terrible price for their irresponsibility.

In recent years, the crime has only gotten worse in Cherán. Before, the loggers would arrive, they would ask permission to cut down the trees, and if you were protecting a certain area of forest, they would respect that. Now it's not like that. They enter private property without the owners' permission, and if the owners discover them they tie up the owners and beat them. And you see these loggers with their really nice trucks with four or five people in them, and they're armed with big, high-powered guns to threaten and scare the community members. As a result, over the past four years, a significant portion of our forests have been depleted.

Most of us who live in Cherán work in the fields, and we're ranchers. Organized crime has hit us hard there, too. They steal our cattle. A lot of ranchers stopped keeping cattle because of the insecurity.

Everyone in Cherán knows who is committing these crimes. The only ones who don't seem to know are the authorities.

The three levels of government--municipal, state, and federal--have completely ignored the community's demands for the past three or four years. It's criminal. In that time, about eleven people have died and even more have been disappeared; there are extortions and kidnappings, and the State hasn't done anything to stop these people who have squashed the dignity of the Cherán community. Now organized crime and the illegal loggers are collaborating. Organized crime protects the illegal loggers, because the illegal loggers pay "quotas" [fees] to organized crime in exchange for protection.

The political parties are responsible for this situation because they marginalized us and ignored organized crime and the indiscriminate theft of our forest resources. Since the political parties have become involved [in the community], they have imposed the people who serve as the community authorities. And we don't even know what those authorities are doing or why they're there.

It is the authorities' fault that the situation got so bad. Because who do I, a community member, go to to complain? I used to go to an authority and I would complain, and the authority would ignore me and wouldn't back me up, and I'm left standing there with my arms crossed. So when these heavily armed people started showing up, what were we supposed to do? What could we do, apart from turning around and running away? So compañeros started asking each other, what do we do? On a couple of occasions the people got together and tried to go and stop them, but since we went unarmed, we always left beaten and bruised and terrified.

I personally have tried to file formal complaints with the government in which I name criminals who have committed certain crimes. The government never even investigated those complaints, so I'm scared to even talk about them. I've filed complaints with the anti-kidnapping unit, with the Attorney General's Office, with the governor [of Michoacan], and we even went to Mexico City to file complaints with the Assistant Attorney General's Office for the Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime (SIEDO). And I haven't received any response from any of them. They haven't done anything. When we went to Morelia to inquire about how the investigation was progressing, they hadn't investigated because of the security situation in Cherán. They say that the safety of the officials they would send to investigate can't be guaranteed, so they don't send anyone. The criminals are outside Cherán, not inside. It makes us feel bad that they respond in that way, because there isn't a single official who knows what the problem is in Cherán, so the investigations into the disappearances and extortions don't go anywhere.

I have a brother who disappeared on February 10, 2010, because he demanded that the state and federal governments take responsibility for the environment, that they stop the illegal loggers so that our forests aren't depleted so rapidly. Before my brother was disappeared, he told me that the illegal loggers were threatening him. And now they've been threatening us since my brother disappeared. There's been no progress in the investigation. He disappeared without a trace.

The day my brother disappeared, two other people were also disappeared. An armed commando came into the town and kidnapped the two of them right out in the open. To this day we know nothing about where they are. We know even less about my brother, because no one saw what happened to him.

I feel as though I can't speak freely because we've been threatened. I'm not afraid for my own safety, but I have a family and young children. I don't want the criminals to punish me for speaking out by going after my family or another one of my brothers.

Erecting the Barricades
Emilio: Erecting the barricades in Cherán took about six months of planning and discussion. Before that, a lot have people had been beaten. The criminals began to have free reign in the town, and they corrupted it. The trucks loaded with illegally harvested wood would pass straight through the town. One time, the people were watching this happen, and they began to yell "Enough!" and they began to search for a way to stop it.

The town decided to rise up and put up barricades so that outsiders couldn't enter in order to ensure the community's safety. The barricades are still up because we haven't seen a response from the government. We are demanding that the government solve all of the crimes. We want justice.

Soon it will have been two months since we erected the barricades. Two months of intense sacrifice and struggle. Our children are missing school--that's a high price that they have to pay. Classes have been suspended since Easter vacation. The only thing I can leave my children with is an education. That's why I work, so that my children can receive an education and become better community members and better Mexicans.

The violence hasn't stopped despite the barricades. There are barricades in and around the town, so they can't come into the community to commit crimes. But out of necessity residents sometimes go out into the woods or they go out to feed their animals or lead them to pasture, and that's when organized crime takes advantage of the opportunity to sow fear.

Since we put up the barricades, the government sent some police and soldiers, but it's not enough.

Salvador: We don't know how exactly many police and soldiers the government has sent to the area because it varies. For example, since there was a rumor that [Javier] Sicilia [and the Caravan for Peace] were going to pass through Cherán today, today there were a lot of soldiers and federal and state police. They even brushed their hair and made themselves up real nice. But it's really relative. Sometimes they're there, and sometimes they're not.

Emilio: The criminals keep coming after us, and they keep disappearing people. So yes, there's a lot of police in the area, but what good are they? It might have diminished a little bit, but they are still logging illegally despite the police presence. I don't know if it's due to fatigue or what, but the police don't detain the loggers. There's even videos where the vehicles are leaving the forest with wood, and the state and federal police are right there and they don't do anything.

Salvador: And the day the police went to investigate a disappearance, the illegal loggers magically were nowhere to be found. Who warned them away? Is the state government in league with them? We don't know, but when there's a military or a police operation, the loggers disappear.

Recently, the press published some articles that we think came from the municipal president's office. The articles mention that the municipality is asking the public to stop sending aid to Cherán, because everything is back to normal there, even though absolutely nothing has been resolved. They're saying this so that people stop sending us aid, and it's worked, because now we're not receiving as much aid as we were before. Nonetheless, we continue to request that people send us aid, because we're still resisting.

Obviously it is not true that everything is back to normal in Cherán. It's so untrue that a few days ago one of the community members went to his fields to check his crops and his animals. And they kidnapped him, and we haven't heard from him since. Is that what they call security? Is the government really complying with its obligations here? Fifteen days ago, another compañero was kidnapped. Fortunately, he has now shown up. But this is how they're scaring us. There's no security, so how could the government be saying these things?

The government doesn't see the real problem here, which is that they're still illegally logging our forests. Today, at this moment, they're still pillaging our natural resources. The government doesn't even look at that problem.

Solidarity and the Road Ahead
Salvador: We won't stop until we achieve our goals. Our first objective has been achieved, and that was town unity.

Emilio: We have to be very organized so that the political parties don't come in and divide us. This dignified struggle has required a lot of sacrifice from the community. We won't let the [electoral] candidates break us or co-opt us. We are trying to govern ourselves through uses and customs [traditional governance mechanisms that exclude political parties]. Instead of helping us, the political parties in Cherán have left us to rot. All of the political parties are corrupt. They've violated us and led us to the situation we're in right now. That's why now, the people of Cherán are saying "no more political parties," because the political parties sunk Cherán.

Salvador: We decided against the political parties, because the parties only represent the people in power, and they're not interested in the people and their problems. That's become very clear to us since we rose up.

Emilio: There's a lot of people from Cherán who are in the United States. I have three brothers who live there. Now that the insecurity has gotten so bad, people from Cherán who live in the United States have sent us money to support us. A lot of Mexicans who live in Los Angeles and St. Louis have sent us money, as have social organizations. With their help, we've been able to travel to Morelia and Mexico City to demand justice. Because bus fare isn't cheap. And since we can't work, we wouldn't be able to pay travel costs otherwise.

When my brother was disappeared, the kidnappers demanded a ransom for his release, but then they didn't hand him over when we paid it. And since he disappeared, my family and I haven't been able to work because we're afraid. The majority of the people in Cherán are in the same situation. As a result, the town's economy has been affected so badly, and that's why we've been asking for solidarity from outside the community, solidarity in the form of food and money. And we thank all of the Mexicans who work so hard to earn a dollar in the US and send it to us so that we can keep struggling.

I ask for support from all of my fellow countrymen who are in the United States. But not just economically. Support us with ideas, because we need ideas to move forward with work projects so that we can create jobs in our community. Because before, a lot of our people also made a living from illegal logging. Now what are they going to do? So we really do want people to support us with ideas so that we can solve Cherán's economic problems.

Salvador: Please keep supporting us, and hopefully we'll achieve our dignified objective, which is peace. Our people are hardworking and they never beg. Today, we've decided that we won't beg, but we will ask for support, because it's necessary. We've kidnapped ourselves and our town in order to protect ourselves. We can't leave Cherán, but you can come visit us. The press is very welcome in our community. We treat them very well, because they're our voice to the outside world. That's how our voice has crossed borders into other countries, and they hear us demanding justice and peace. We're demanding justice for the fallen, the kidnapped, the forests, our rivers, and for Mother Nature. That's all we're asking for.

Javier Sicilia Denounces Federal Police Raid of Juarez Human Rights Center During Peace Caravan

2011-06-06T11:06:00.002-05:00

Standing in front of the San Xavier mine in Cerro de San Pedro, San
Luis Potosí, Javier Sicilia denounces a Federal Police attack on the
Juarez-based Paso del Norte Human Rights Center.

Statement by Javier Sicilia in Cerro San Pedro in front of the San Xavier mine (San Luis Potosí)

This morning we found out that in Ciudad Juarez the Paso del Norte Human Rights Center, which is directed by Father Oscar Enriquez and is one of the organizations that is preparing for our arrival [in that city], was attacked by the Federal Police. They broke windows, they entered with violence, and they took documents.

Once again, we ask the government, "What message are you sending us? Are you going to fight against us? Are you going to end up killing us? Are you going to humiliate us? Or are you going to work for the citizenry?"

I demand that President Calderón investigate [this attack] and that he guarantee us security--not only for the citizens of Ciudad Juarez, but of the entire caravan. Because [with this attack the government is] responding to citizens' ethical demands with violence. It must be investigated, and we demand a response now from President Calderón about this attack.

We can't tolerate this! Especially not in a peace movement which is driven by a demand for justice.

We demand that President Calderón give the citizens of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez the security and peace that we're demanding. Because this was an attack by the authorities, and we can't allow that.

Transcribed and translated by Kristin Bricker

Juarez: Federal Police Raid Paso del Norte Human Rights Center Prior to Arrival of Peace Caravan

2011-06-06T08:12:00.001-05:00

by Blanca Carmona, El Diario

Federal Police carried out a warrantless raid of the offices of the Paso del Norte Human Rights Center, an organization that is actively participating in the march initiated by poet and writer Javier Sicilia, which is expected to arrive in this border city sometime next Thursday or Friday.

Priest and director of the Human Rights Center, Oscar Enríquez said that at about 8pm on Sunday, at least five patrol cars arrived at the organization's offices, which are located on Francisco Portillo Street #2307 in the División del Norte neighborhood. The police broke the locks on two doors in order to enter the building.

Once inside, the agents reviewed files and computers.

The patrol cars that participated in the raid were identified by patrol numbers 12427, 13972, 13943, 13748, and 10573.

Other units surrounded the block to secure the perimeter.

Translated by Kristin Bricker

Historic Anti-Drug War Caravan Heads to Juarez, Mexico

2011-06-04T13:55:00.004-05:00

by Kristin Bricker

The caravan reaches Mexico City. Photo: Santiago
Navarro

I waited until it was a sure thing to announce it: I'll be covering the Juarez-bound caravan against the drug war that Mexican poet and journalist Javier Sicilia convoked following the brutal murder of his son, Juan Francisco, this past March. Sicilia chose Juarez--the deadliest city in the world--as the site to sign a "Citizens Pact for Peace" on June 10.

The Citizens Pact for Peace is a commitment that civil society organizations will make to each other to pressure the government to fulfill specific demands within a firm timeframe, such as justly resolving eight high-profile crimes: the deadly campaign against the Reyes Salazar family; the murders of Rubí and Marcela Escobedo, Bety Cariño and Jirí Jaakola; the deadly fire at the ABC Daycare that claimed the lives of 49 toddlers; the murders and kidnappings of members of the LeBarón family in Galeana, Chihuahua; and the youth massacred in Juarez’s Villas de Salvárcar and the state of Morelos. They are also demanding constitutional human rights reforms and that Congress kill the proposed reform to the National Security Law, which would legalize the unconstitutional drug war. The Pact also demands that Congress pass laws that would allow impeachment.

The caravan left Cuernavaca this morning. Following a stop in Mexico City, it'll head to Morelia, Michocan, the site of the horrendous frag grenade attack against Independence Day celebrations in 2008. The Morelia attack marked the first time the world (including many Mexicans) realized that innocent civilians were targets in the drug war. Morelia is just one of twelve Mexican cities the caravan will visit. Sicilia's idea is to caravan into the heart of the drug war, to the cities that have been most affected by drug war violence

The caravan will also visit Toluca, Mexico State; San Luis Potosi, San Luis Potosi; Zacatecas, Zacatecas; Durango, Durango; Saltillo, Coahila; Monterrey, NL; Torreon, Coahuila; Chihuahua City, Chihuahua; and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where a cross-border event will happen with El Paso, Texas.

Check back to this blog, and also on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kristinbricker, because I'll be sending out constant updates about the people I meet as the caravan makes its way through some of Mexico's most war-torn cities.

Today, I would like to leave you with a letter that Julian LeBaron wrote to Javier Sicilia's murdered son, who was known as Juanelo. LeBaron, whom I wrote about in "Mexico's Drug War Victims Find Their Voice in Massive Silent March," lost his brother and brother-in-law to drug war violence because the LeBaron's community dared to stand up to organized crime. Here's what LeBaron had to say to Juanelo today:

"I didn't arrive in time to shake your hand. I couldn't look you in the eyes. I don't know how many years you lived, or what games you played. Nor do I know what your favorite food was. I don't know if you ever held a woman's hand, and I never heard the sound of your voice. But your absence hurts me greatly. Your father's gaze has infected me.
"I also don't know much about your friends' lives and what happened to them--those who were murdered with you. Nor do I know what to say about the 40,000 men, women, and children who are no longer here.

"You know what? I lost a brother, too. They killed him because he wanted to live in peace. But you didn't know him, either.

"There's too much bloodshed. The color red accumulates on the ground, and it begins to erase names, last names, professions, ages, sexes, social classes, and skin color.

"Today, collective tragedy must unite us as we have never been united before. This time, the cause isn't an earthquake or a flood. The cause is a seed of disdain for us, the Mexican people, which we have silently cultivated for years. And now we can see its tricks.

"I've come to march to scream that all of the dead are sons and daughters of someone. They aren't stones or numbers. Imagine the fathers and mothers of all of the people who are dying in Mexico. We are all sons and daughters of someone. And sadness and pain is accumulating in fathers' and mothers' eyes. But hearts accumulate decision.

"Javier Sicilia's son isn't here anymore. Many other sons and daughters are no longer here. I want to march in their name, because I don't want to be anyone's anonymous son. I don't want apathy to erase everyone's faces.

"This march is to once again meet with each other on a route of humanity and strength. This is the beginning of the solution. The philosopher Keith Raniere says that human suffering is the driving force behind our ability to be noble.

"Over the next few days, I invite you to march, so that we leave behind prejudices and the hate that keeps us from seeing each other. Let's propose, in this caravan of condolences, to feel deeply and respect our pain. Let's use this great instrument as our weapon to connect with the spirit and the truth."

Mexico’s Drug War Victims Find Their Voice in Massive Silent March

2011-05-10T17:00:00.003-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World

Drug war victims finally made themselves heard in Mexico in the most unlikely way: a nation-wide silent March for Peace with Justice and Dignity.

Over 100,000 Mexicans took to the streets over the weekend to protest the war on drugs, impunity, corruption, and violence. The largest march lasted four days and covered nearly 100 kilometers from Cuernavaca, Morelos, to Mexico City. On Thursday, May 5, about 500 protesters began marching in Cuernavaca. Along the way, more contingents joined the march, while other marches set out from different states to join the protest in Mexico City. By the time the marches met in Mexico City’s main square on May 8, an estimated 100,000 people were gathered to protest the war.

Those who couldn’t make the trip to Mexico City held protests in their own states. In Chiapas, 25,000 masked Zapatistas marched in complete silence to the main plaza in San Cristobal de las Casas, where Comandante David read a communiqué from Subcomandante Marcos. “Tens of thousands of people have died in this absurd war,” said Comandante David. “Their only sin was to have been born or lived in a country that is badly governed by legal and illegal groups who are thirsty for war, death, and destruction.”

About seventy Central American migrants passing through Mexico to reach the United States also joined the March for Peace with Justice and Dignity. They marched along railroad tracks through Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Puebla, the route that migrants generally travel as they cling precariously to boxcars. Near the border between Veracruz and Puebla, armed men attempted to kidnap at least one woman during the march. The protesters don’t know if the attack was politically motivated, or just another example of the extreme violence migrants suffer daily as they travel through Mexico. Drug trafficking organizations frequently kidnap migrants for ransom or human trafficking. According to Eduardo Almeida of the Puebla-based Nodo human rights organization, the presence of reporters covering the march likely dissuaded the kidnappers in this case.

In Ciudad Juarez, about one thousand protesters marched in silence until they ran into the city’s mayor at the Benito Juarez monument. He fled the area on foot to avoid the protesters as they began chanting at him.

Protests occurred in all 31 states in Mexico. Protests were also reported in the United States, Canada, Europe, and South America. Mexican immigrants organized many of the protests that occurred in foreign cities.

“We Are Not Collateral Damage”
This weekend’s march, convoked by renowned Mexican writer Javier Sicilia after his son Juan Francisco was murdered in Morelos, allowed the drug war’s innocent victims to bring their stories to the national and international media, in many cases for the very first time. Prior to Sicilia’s public outrage over his son’s murder, the government stigmatized drug war murder victims, arguing that 90% of them are “cartel hit men."Government agents have repeatedly doctored crime scenes and planted weapons on bodies to make innocent victims appear to be dangerous criminals. When the government does admit that innocent people have died in the drug war, it justifies the deaths as “collateral damage.”
However, from May 5-8, the drug war’s innocent victims stepped out of the shadows and into the international spotlight.
Many were meeting each other for the first time. When the marchers took breaks along Mexico’s 95D freeway, they sat down together to talk about their shared pain. Variations of the following exchange were frequently overheard during the march:
"Who is the young man in the photo you're carrying?"
"He was my son. He was murdered. And who is the young man on your t-shirt?"
"He is my son. He's disappeared."
Some marchers lost family members within the past few months and had not yet politicized their search for answers; they were still in the initial stages of shock and desperation.
Carlos Castro marched with a 15-foot by 7-foot banner that pleaded “RETURN MY FAMILY TO ME” printed above photos of his missing wife, two daughters, and the family’s housekeeper. “I’m marching today to see if I can find my daughters,” Castro said as he choked back tears. The four women disappeared on January 6, 2011, from their home in Xalapa, Veracruz. Castro says he has no clue who took his family and housekeeper. “They entered [the house] and took the whole family. I’m doing this so that they [the kidnappers] receive this message and return them to me. I don’t know why they took them, they had no reason to take my daughters.” Castro’s wife Josefina Campillo Cerreto had just ended a stint as the Actopan (Veracruz) City Council’s trustee when the family was kidnapped. On December 13, 2010—just three weeks before the kidnapping—she updated her Facebook profile to list her job at the City Council and posted what would be her last status update: “I’d rather die fighting than give up without a fight.”
Most marchers had at least a general idea of who disappeared or killed their family members. Surprisingly, protesters at the march against President Felipe Calderon’s drug war weren’t just limited to victims of military and police abuse. Victims of both organized and unorganized crime also marched against the war in large numbers.
Teresa, a middle-aged woman who lives in Morelos, marched with a photo of her son, Joaquin. “They killed him ten months ago in Mexico City,” she recounts. “I’m carrying his photo so that everyone knows who he was, sees that he had a face and a mother, just like the over 30,000 dead in this country. The dead aren’t just numbers. They were loved ones.” Joaquin was apparently murdered during a mugging. Teresa filed a report with the government, but the investigation, if there ever was one, went nowhere. As long as the investigation remains open, the government won’t let her cremate her son and spread his ashes in Cancun, where he was born. Joaquin is buried in a temporary grave in Morelos. The protests convoked by Javier Sicilia were the first time Teresa took to the streets to demand justice for her son. “I identify with Javier,” she says. “He was a young, productive, happy boy. Joaquin was beginning his third year of college, studying architecture. Joaquin was the type of young man this country needs, just like Juanelo [Javier’s son] was.”
Isaac Gomez Lopez, an art student who lives in Cuernavaca, argues, “A lot of people use the drug war as a pretext to attack other people. Now, it’s almost like anyone can kill someone and justify it by saying ‘it’s the drug war’ and it won’t be investigated. It just goes into a file.” Cuernavaca’s murder rate jumped after soldiers killed drug kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva there in late 2009. Beltran Leyva’s death destabilized the territory his organization controlled, providing an opening for other organizations to move in an attempt a takeover, which inevitably led to more violence. “You start to see curfews, the streets empty because they’re not as safe,” says Gomez Lopez. “It’s really affecting tourism.”
Victims of organized crime marched against the war as well. “I’m a victim of human trafficking and organized crime,” declares Ivan Monroy Medina of the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking of Women and Girls. “Seven months ago they took my daughter. She was eleven months old and they violently took her from my wife in Mexico State.” Ramos says that human trafficking is a growing problem in his state. “There were meetings in the neighborhood where we were living. They warned us to be careful because a lot of children had been stolen from the neighborhood. Fifteen or twenty days later, it happened to us.” Monroy Medina and his wife reported the kidnapping to the authorities, “but since we don’t live in Predregal [an upscale neighborhood] and since we don’t know how to play golf and don’t know governors, they don’t pay any attention to us.”
Seven members of the LeBaron family drove down from the Mormon community of Colonia LeBaron, Chihuahua, to participate in the march. The LeBarons made international headlines in 2009 when they publicly refused to pay a million-dollar ransom for 16-year-old Erick LeBaron after he was kidnapped. “The kidnappers told Erick, ‘But there’s so many of you, can’t you all chip in and pay the ransom?’” recounts Adrian LeBaron, Erick’s uncle. The LeBarons feared that if they paid one exorbitant ransom, kidnappers would descend upon their community like vultures. Instead, Colonia LeBaron organized protests in Chihuahua City to demand that the government take action to bring Erick home. Their gamble worked; the kidnappers released Erick after seven days.
The LeBaron’s victory was short-lived. Only a few months later, a criminal organization punished Erick’s older brother Benjamin for organizing about fourteen local communities into an anti-kidnapping organization called SOS Chihuahua. “Twenty armed men went to his house and broke all his windows, and so his brother-in-law [Luis Widmar] came over to help him,” recounts Benjamin’s brother Julian. “They kidnapped them both and executed them about a mile down the road.”
Despite the fact that the LeBaron’s battle is with organized crime, Julian argues that his community’s problems started when President Calderon declared war on drugs. “The war on drugs has been a disaster for this country,” he insists.
Chihuahua, particularly Ciudad Juarez, is Mexico’s drug war “laboratory.” There, argues Proceso reporter Marcela Turati, “Not only drug traffickers, drug dealers, and even drug addicts, but also common citizens, above all youngsters, are involuntarily subjected to an experiment: how it would be, in Mexico, to live under military control.” A large contingent from Chihuahua participated in the March for Peace and Justice with Dignity to tell the president that the experiment has failed.
Maria Alvarado traveled all the way from Ciudad Juarez to participate in the march because the military disappeared her sister Nitza Paola Alvarado and cousins Rocío Irene Alvarado and José Ángel Alvarado on December 29, 2009, from Ejido Benito Juarez, where they were spending the holidays with family. “We tried to follow the them,” she recalls. “But it was very dark and they were taking them on back roads. We returned to the house because we were scared.” The military later left Nitza’s truck at a Chihuahua State Investigations Agency office without giving the local authorities any explanation as to why they were leaving it there.
The Alvarado family filed all of the necessary complaints with relevant government agencies, but they hit a brick wall. “The military has always said that there’s no indication that it was them, that they’ve never carried out operations in the town, which is a big lie,” insists Alvaro. “They stayed three weeks on the ejido in a hotel called Los Arcos, and they made rounds in the entire ejido.”
Regardless of who perpetrated the attacks on their families, all of the drug war victims in the march had the same demand: “We’re demanding that the authorities do their jobs,” says Alvarado. “All they do is create fat case files, and they don’t investigate.”
“They told us we had to take the legal route. ‘You have to go give your testimony and file your complaint and we’ll see if we get motivated to go chase the kidnappers,’” complains Adrian LeBaron. “We told them, ‘We don’t want to be another little paper in your mountains of files. We want our son.’ So we protested.”
A common slogan on signs and banners in the March for Peace with Justice and Dignity was directed at the authorities: “If you can’t do your job, then quit!”
National Pact for Peace
The movement to compel Mexican authorities to “do their jobs” and reduce the country’s staggering impunity rate doesn’t show any signs of letting up.
Javier Sicilia says that Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos sent him a letter to tell him that the Zapatistas would join his march. The letter was hand-delivered and came with an oral message, too: “This march, this struggle, transcends the Left. This is a war against all of us, and all of us need to join together.”
“This is a struggle between those who want life and those who want death,” declared Comandante David during the Zapatistas’ march in Chiapas. “And we, the Zapatistas, we chose to struggle for life—that is, for justice, liberty, and peace.”
On May 8 in front of about 100,000 people, Olga Reyes, who has lost six family members in the drug war, and Patricia Duarte, whose son Andrés died in a fire at the ABC Daycare due to government negligence, read the proposal for a National Pact for Peace, a citizens initiative to reduce violence, corruption, and impunity in Mexico. The pact has six central demands:
truth and justice

an end to the war in favor of a focus on citizen security

combat corruption

combat crime’s economic roots and profits

emergency attention for youths and effective actions to rebuild the social fabric

participative democracy, better representative democracy, and democratization of the media

The proposal will be finalized and signed during a public event on June 10 in Ciudad Juarez, the deadliest city in the world.

Reflections on Mexico's National Anti-War March

2011-05-06T11:42:00.003-05:00

by Kristin Bricker

I'm in Morelos covering the "We've Had It Up to Here, Stop the War, For A Just And Peaceful Mexico" march.

I will publish an article about the march when it's over at Upside Down World. But I'm so awestruck by the people I've met in the march that I have to share my initial observations with you.

The march is growing by the hour. It left Cuernavaca with just over 500 people, and by the time it arrived in Coajomulco, Morelos, over a thousand people were marching. When I woke up this morning in Coajomulco, I saw that more marchers had arrived during the night, including a bus from Oaxaca that carried members of CACTUS, the community organization that Bety Cariño founded and led before she was assassinated near San Juan Copala just over a year ago.

Joaquin was murdered in an armed

robbery in Mexico City.

Bety's just one of Mexico's nearly 40,000 dead who are here in spirit and rage today.

I don't think I will interview Javier Sicilia, the poet and journalist whose son's murder sparked this national movement against murder and impunity. He's been interviewed enough, and I am enraged that the media following the march turns off their cameras when other drug war victims speak, and they only turn them on when Sicilia speaks. It's not his fault; it's the corporate media's fault. They've made it their job to ignore the drug war's innocent victims and the families it has torn apart. When one of their own lost his son (Sicilia writes for Proceso and La Jornada), they couldn't ignore it anymore. Actually, a lot of journalists in the corporate media know Sicilia and they knew his son. They feel genuinely terrible for the man, and they've been reporting constantly from the march, step by step. Most of them even camped with us in Coajomulco.

Even if I don't interview Sicilia, I do have to thank him. He's successfully removed--or at least reduced--the stigma that families feel when a loved one is murdered.* As I reported in an earlier article about the Reyes Salazar family, the drug war's victims are nameless. The government wants it that way, because it's easy to paint the drug war's dead as narcos if no one even knows their names, much less their stories. Now, however, that's changing. They're marching alongside and behind Sicilia, and the press is actually interviewing them, some of them for the first time. And they're interviewing them as human beings, not as narco-families.

The march that Sicilia made possible has also allowed survivors to connect with each other for the first time. I saw the following conversation occur multiple times yesterday:

"Who is the young man in the photo you're carrying?"
"He was my son. He was murdered. And who is the young man on your t-shirt?"
"He is my son. He's disappeared."

This march, more than anything, is a march against impunity. In some cases, police kidnapped and disappeared the victims. In another case, organized crime snatches little girls from a community and traffics them. In other cases, victims were killed in armed robberies. The perpetrators vary: organized crime, unorganized crime, or the government. But everyone has one complaint in common: the government has done nothing to stop the violence, and when citizens are victims of violence, the government does nothing to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a few days, you'll be able to read all about the amazing interviews I've done with some of the strongest people I've ever met. In the meantime, I want to share just one person's story with you: the Galactic Cowboy.

The Galactic Cowboy's dad marches.

The Galactic Cowboy's family is from Mexico State, but up until a year ago he lived and worked in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. He is a street performer, a human silver statue of a cowboy. He stands perfectly still until you insert a coin in his box, and then he makes robotic movements. "Ever since he was little, he wanted to be a cowboy," says his father.

The Galactic Cowboy works in the informal market. Police had detained him several times in Monterrey for working without a permit. One time he managed to get a permit to work on the street, but it was only for one month. "What good is a one-month permit?" asks his dad. Street theater is is a life-long career for the Galactic Cowboy.

One day, Monterrey municipal police detained the Galactic Cowboy and two companions in Monterrey. Witnesses saw police arrest them. They wrote down the patrol car numbers.

The police deny that they detained the Galactic Cowboy and his companions. The witnesses who saw them detain him refuse to testify for fear of reprisal. The government refuses to investigate the disappearance.

The Galactic Cowboy has been missing for a year.

------

* This sentence originally read: "He's single-handedly removed (or at least greatly diminished) the stigma that families feel when a loved one is murdered." Thanks to a reader comment, I changed the sentence, which I admittedly wrote in a hurry, in the heat of the moment, as I followed the march. I want to explain why I wrote this: he's been more successful than anyone else in removing the stigma victims' families feel. Other families have "thrown down" as the smart reader pointed out. And he's right. Actually, families like the LeBarons and the Reyes Salazar took MUCH greater risks than Sicilia, because they were up against much worse odds: their state and towns are more dangerous, they don't have media support, they don't have thousands of people marching with them. In short, what they are doing was a much bigger risk. Interviewing them...I'm amazed at their strength. I love Mexico.

Anti-Drug War Movement Emerges in Mexico

2011-05-04T19:52:00.005-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World

After four years of war that has left nearly 40,000 people dead, countless more disappeared, and soldiers on the streets of every state in the country, many Mexicans are finally "fed up" with President Felipe Calderón's drug policy. This weekend, Mexicans in at least 25 of the country’s 31 states will protest to “stop the war, for a just and peaceful Mexico." Protests are also planned in solidarity in at least twelve cities in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Brazil.

The largest protest will begin on May 5 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where protesters will march 100 km to Mexico City for a rally on Sunday, May 8. Marchers will follow the Mexico City-Cuernavaca freeway, which could bring traffic on one of the country’s largest freeways to a standstill over the Cinco de Mayo holiday weekend.

Mexico’s beloved journalist and poet Javier Sicilia convoked the protests after his son, Juan Francisco, was found murdered along with six other people in his home state of Morelos on March 28. Sicilia declared that he was “hasta la madre” (“fed up” or had “had it up to here”) with politicians and criminals. He vowed to abandon poetry (“The world is no longer worthy of words,” he wrote in his last poem) and to dedicate himself to stopping the drug war. “I’m going to march,” he said in a video message, “because I don't want any other family to suffer the loss of a son as we are suffering due to a poorly planned, poorly executed, and poorly led war."

Common Cause

After nearly 40,000 drug war murders, it was Juan Francisco’s execution that brought Mexico to the tipping point. This weekend’s mobilizations are expected to be Mexico’s largest anti-drug war protests to-date. Moreover, nearly every sector of Mexican society has confirmed its participation in the protests: labor, indigenous peoples, students, journalists, intellectuals, opposition politicians, feminists, artists, drug war victims and their family members, former political prisoners, Mormons, sex workers, autonomists, peasants, communists, marijuana legalization advocates, migrants in Mexico, Mexican immigrants living abroad, Catholic church leaders…even the commanders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) have ordered Zapatistas to take to the streets to “end Calderón’s war.”

Sicilia coined the protests, “We’ve had it up to here. Stop the war. For a just and peaceful Mexico.” However, he insists, “I’m just one more voice.” He believes that the movement’s proposals must come from the grassroots. The Network for Peace and Justice, which is helping Sicilia coordinate the protests, is encouraging citizens to hold assemblies and develop proposals for a “re-founding of Mexico.” Those proposals will be taken into account in a document that Sicilia will read at the end of the march on May 8.

Some organizations and individuals have already published their demands and proposals.

Students and young people gathered at the National Forum of Young People in National Emergency in Cuernavaca on April 28-29 to coordinate for the May 8 protests and develop a set of demands. Young people suffer the highest murder rates in the drug war, leading Forum participant Raúl Romero to lament, “Young people are no longer this country’s future; we’re this country’s dead.” The Forum published six demands: immediate demilitarization, an end to violence and impunity, decriminalization of drug consumption, a dignified life (which would include job opportunities), art and culture for everyone (including a proposal to nationalize the corporate media), and a guaranteed college education for everyone.

The Collective for an Integral Drug Policy (Cupihd), an organization of drug policy experts, will hold a march for marijuana legalization on May 7, and on May 8 it will join the national protests in downtown Mexico City.

Sociologist and nationally syndicated columnist John Ackerman borrowed a phrase from Argentina’s recuperated factory movement to sum up his proposal for the movement: “Que se vayan todos” (“they all must go”), referring to Mexican politicians. “We have to demand the immediate ouster of all high-ranking officials who are involved in this criminal war at the federal and state levels,” argues Ackerman. “Beginning with, of course, [Secretary of Public Security] Genaro García Luna, [Defense Secretary] Guillermo Galván, and Calderón. These politicians have spent enough time in office, and they’ve demonstrated that they are incapable of assuring social peace.”

Sicilia has called for the resignation of the governor of Morelos and several state legislators because they are “negligent and corrupt.”
“We’ve Had It Up To Here!”
Juan Francisco’s senseless and brutal murder was the catalyst that united drug war critics from diverse social sectors and across the political spectrum. However, discontent over increasing violence and human rights violations has been brewing in Mexico for quite some time. Pockets of resistance to the drug war have formed across the country, although it is only now that they are all coming together at the national level.

When Calderón declared war on organized crime, some towns racked by violent cartel rivalries initially welcomed the military's presence. However, it quickly became apparent that the military brought more chaos and abuses, not law and order. "The military doesn't solve anything because it commits a lot of abuses," a farmer from Galeana, Chihuahua, told Proceso reporter Marcela Turati. "They beat people, steal vehicles, rob from houses. Their trucks look like moving companies, they drive around loaded with so much furniture."

Initially reported in the press as isolated incidents (if they were reported at all), the military's abuses quickly turned into an epidemic. In mid-2009, human rights organizations noted that the drug war led to a significant increase in human rights abuses. The Mexican military now receives more human rights abuse complaints than any other government agency.

A handful of horrifying incidents shocked the nation and captured headlines for a few days, such as when soldiers killed two unarmed students in March 2010 on the campus of the elite private university Tecnológico de Monterrey (“Tec”). The soldiers planted weapons on the dead students to make them appear to be cartel gunmen. The cover-up managed to temper the public’s response to the shooting; the military’s wrongdoing only became clear months later.

Seven months later, on October 29, 2010, Federal Police shot and gravely wounded student Dario Alvarez Orrantia on the campus of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez as he participated in the 11th Walk Against Death during the International Forum Against Militarization and Violence. The shooting enraged students across the country and provoked protests. Students from the Mexico City metropolitan area who participated in the Forum and witnessed the shooting decided to form the Metropolitan Coordinating Committee Against Militarization and Violence (COMECOM). "We decided to begin to join together to denounce the crimes that are repeatedly committed against students," says COMECOM member Raúl Romero. "We want to network with organizations, regardless of political affiliation, in order to unify our voice and demand an end to Felipe Calderón's war." COMECOM is currently comprised of twenty-five metropolitan-area organizations.

Up until recently, the only killings, shootings, or kidnappings that provoked public outcry were those that were obviously perpetrated by government security forces. Cases in which the perpetrator was unknown or believed to be linked to organized crime were ignored. The Calderón administration labeled these murders “collateral damage” and Calderón himself argued (without substantiating his claim) that 90% of drug war murder victims were linked “in one way or another” to organized crime. The stigma meant that drug war murders weren’t mourned, let alone investigated.

The drug war’s true impact on Mexico’s civilians became apparent earlier this year when three members of the beleaguered Reyes Salazar family were found tortured and murdered in Chihuahua, bringing the family death toll to six. The Reyes Salazars are prominent activists and upstanding citizens who appear to have been targeted by a criminal organization. The government’s response was typical: it attempted to deflect public outrage over the murders by spreading rumors that the bodies were found with “narco-messages” that accused the victims of working for organized crime. The family fought back against attempts to smear their loved ones’ names and organized protests that brought organized crime’s innocent victims into the international spotlight for the first time.

The government also attempted to downplay Juan Francisco’s murder through “unconfirmed reports” leaked to the media that a message from the Gulf cartel was found with the bodies that said, “This is what happens for making anonymous calls to soldiers.”
A National Movement Is Born
Like the Reyes Salazars, Javier Sicilia refused to let the government write off his son’s murder as yet another tick on the country’s so-called execution-meter. “Many of the dead, maybe the majority of the dead, they have a story. They were innocent and they were killed stupidly for no reason,” Sicilia argues. “They're human beings, and behind them there are families who are suffering very much."

Sicilia’s outrage over his son’s murder—amplified by his excellent public speaking skills and his contacts in Mexican media—has caused disparate struggles to coalesce into a national movement against the drug war. The protests began with over 500 people in Cuernavaca on March 29, the day after Juan Francisco’s body was found. On March 30, protesters held a candlelight vigil in Cuernavaca.

By April 6, the protests had spread to at least 21 Mexican states and twelve cities in eight foreign countries.

On April 27, the protesters diversified their tactics. That day, young protesters dyed Cuernavaca’s “Peace Dove” fountain blood red. Then, twenty young members of the Network for Peace and Justice temporarily shut down the State Attorney General’s Office. Later, they burst onto the floor of the Morelos State Congress and read a declaration. The protesters called upon politicians to combat impunity and corruption, and to promote human rights and a "dignified life."

That same day, Sicilia hung a plaque bearing his son’s name on City Hall in downtown Cuernavaca and called on others to do the same. “It's important that when we arrive in any plaza in any city in the country, that we see the names of our dead,“ declared Sicilia. “The plaques are being put up to remember them and to tell the authorities who criminalized them that these people are not mysterious statistics; they're human beings.”

I'll be tweeting live from the anti-war march on May 5-8. Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/kristinbricker, or follow my tweets below.

Mexico's Proposed National Security Reform Would Allow President to Use Military Against "Movements or Conflicts of Political, Electoral, Labor, or Social Nature"

2011-04-27T21:04:00.001-05:00

President Felipe Calderón and Defense Secretary Guillermo
Galván Galván share a laugh.

Mexico's House of Deputies is debating a reform to the National Security Law that would attempt to legalize Mexico's unconstitutional participation in domestic policing duties, as well as expand its official mandate to include repressing social movements and organizations. Mexican human rights organizations are uniformly opposed to the reform.

The Americas Program's Murphy Woodhouse has the best analysis and summary in English:

The reform to the National Security Law now before the lower house would grant sweeping military powers to the executive and limit congressional oversight of domestic military activity. It would grant President Felipe Calderón the ability to effectively declare states of exception without congressional approval and unilaterally use the military against any group he deems to be a “threat to internal security.” Also expanded would be the surveillance powers of the army, marines and Cisen, the Center for National Security and Investigation, which would be allowed to “use any method of information collection, without in any case affecting human rights and guarantees for their protection.”

[…]

[T]he draft legislation, of which La Jornada obtained a copy, explicitly states that the executive can use military force against ‘movements or conflicts of political, electoral, labor, or social nature that are deemed to be a challenge or threat to interior security.’

[…]

The plot thickened several days ago when El Proceso released a report, which cited sources close to the negotiations, claiming that a threatened release of so called “black files”, containing incriminating information about numerous PRI governors around the country, was used by the executive and defense department to get favorable votes from previously recalcitrant PRI deputies.

Opposition senators from the PRD and the PAN have announced that they will block the House of Deputies version of the National Security Law reform, which greatly differs from the version already passed in the Senate.

Read the entire article on the proposed reform on the Americas Program site.

Javier Torres, Witness in Human Rights Lawyer Digna Ochoa's Murder Case, is Assassinated in Guerrero

2011-04-27T20:25:00.002-05:00

by Kristin Bricker, Huffington Post

Javier Torres Cruz

On April 18, unidentified gunmen opened fire on Javier Torres Cruz and his brother Felipe as they drove near their hometown of La Morena in Petatlán, Guerrero. Javier was killed and Felipe was injured in the attack.

Javier Torres was an environmental activist in his hometown. He entered the national spotlight in 2007 when he testified to the Mexico City Attorney General's Office that Guerrero narco-politician Rogaciano Alba Alvarez ordered the 2001 murder of human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa. Ochoa defended environmental activists from harassment by the military and Alba Alvarez in Petatlán at the time of her death. The government re-opened the investigation into Ochoa's death as a result of Torres' testimony.

Torres also accused Alba Alvarez of being the intellectual author of the murder of over twenty members of the Torres family.

Prior to Torres' death, gunmen who worked for Alba Alvarez, the former mayor of Petatlán, accompanied the military on raids on La Morena. Alba Alvarez's gunmen and the military used those raids to harass and threaten the Torres family.

Alba Alvarez is currently in prison for alleged ties to drug traffickers.

In December 2008, Torres was disappeared and tortured for ten days. During the disappearance, his family said that a witness saw Torres in the Army's 19th Infantry Battalion base in Guerrero near his hometown. After Torres escaped from his captors, he said that the soldiers kidnapped him and handed him over to civilians.