Mexico Week In Review: 08.13-08.19

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 08.13-08.19
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Published since 1994, 'Mexico Week In Review' is a service of the
Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS).  CIS is a Washington, D.C.
based activist group committed to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous
peoples in the Americas.  CIS is actively supporting the struggles
of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico while simultaneously combating
related structures of oppression within our own communities.

To view newsletter archives, visit:
http://lists.mutualaid.org/pipermail/mexico-week/

"Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros Nada"
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NOTE: Next issue will be sent the week ending September 09. - ed.

CHIAPAS: GUNMEN KILL FEDERAL AGENT

A female federal agent was gunned down in Ocosingo, a city in the
jungle region of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, officials
said. Erika Grisel Contreras Garcia worked for the AFI, Mexico's
equivalent of the FBI, in the city. Three unidentified individuals
opened fire on the 30-year-old agent from an automobile, killing her
instantly, the Chiapas Attorney General's Office said. Police have
launched a manhunt for the gunmen in the area, where authorities
began stepping up efforts against organized-crime groups at the start
of this year.

The law-enforcement operations have resulted in the seizure of arms
and drugs, as well as the arrests of suspects in Chiapas, which is on
the border with Guatemala. Last month, the press reported that the
number of federal crimes registered in Mexico in the first half of
this year rose 21.4 percent, compared to the same period in 2006.

The figure came from an internal report prepared for the Attorney
General's Office and published by the Milenio and Excelsior
newspapers. The rise in crimes was especially clear in the case of
drug trafficking, with 40,045 drug-related offenses registered in the
January-June period, compared to 20,033 in January-June 2006, or a
37.9 percent increase. The report, moreover, lists around 1,400
drug-related killings during the first six months of this year, or
slightly above the trend last year, when around 2,000 people died.
The killing has slowed in recent weeks when compared to the
unofficial tallies for the first few months of the year kept by the
press. This purported drop in murders-for-hire is due, according to
security experts, to the anti-drug operations launched by the
Calderon administration and agreements between drug traffickers.

Source: EFE News Service: 08/15
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ONE DEAD AFTER MINERS FIGHT AT MEXICO COPPER PIT

One man was killed in a battle between hundreds of miners at a
Mexican copper mine close to the U.S. border, the government said,
the latest violence in a long-running labor conflict. About 250
miners from two groups fought close to the La Caridad mine in the
northern state of Sonora on Saturday night, state Secretary for the
Interior Roberto Ruibal told Reuters. "There was a battle between two
groups, one group who work at the mine and another group of former
workers," Ruibal said. "One person died," he said. Ruibal said it was
not clear how the unidentified man died, but he denied union claims
the man was shot. He said police arrested six people.

Mexico's mineworkers are engaged in a power struggle within the
miners union and with La Caridad owner Grupo Mexico. The Mexican
mining industry has been hit by numerous strikes since last year by
workers loyal to union boss Napoleon Gomez, who is accused of
corruption by other workers and Grupo Mexico. Three steel workers
were shot dead in April 2006 when police used firearms to try and
break a strike at the Lazaro Cardenas steel mill in western Mexico.

La Caridad produced about 70,000 tons of copper last year until it
was closed for months by a strike that only ended when Grupo Mexico
fired all the workers. Most were rehired under a new contract, but
about 80 were not, Ruibal said. Grupo Mexico and the union gave
conflicting versions of what caused Saturday's violence, but it
appears some of the fired men wanted to enter the mine and were
turned back by a large group of workers. The union said the man
killed was one of the former workers and loyal to Gomez. Spokeswoman
Carmen Romero said the men had won a court ruling ordering the
company to reinstate them. A strike at La Caridad's larger sister
mine Cananea has crippled production there since July 30. A court
decision on legality of the strike is due next week.

Source: Reuters: 08/12
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16,000 VICTIMS OF CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION

The child pornography and commercial sexual exploitation industry
enjoys total impunity in the Mexican capital, according to a report
by the Mexico City Human Rights Commission. The "special report on
commercial sexual exploitation of children in the Federal District"
confirms that there are at least 20 spots in Mexico City where these
illegal activities flourish, under the protection of corrupt elements
in the police force. Although there are no figures on the extent of
the phenomenon in the capital, an estimated 16,000 girls and boys are
victims of sexual exploitation in this country of 108 million people.

Emilio Álvarez Icaza, head of the local Human Rights Commission,
complained about the lack of strategies to clamp down on the problem.
"The state is largely absent in the question of commercial sexual
exploitation of children," Álvarez Icaza recently told the press. "We
have compiled all of the reports that we requested, and in essence
what we found is that there are no specific programs or actions at
the local level."

International organizations fighting child sex tourism say Mexico is
one of the leading hotspots of child sexual exploitation, along with
Thailand, Cambodia, India, and Brazil. The global child sex trade,
including prostitution, pornography and trafficking for sexual
purposes, is a multi-billion dollar business. According to the
Federal Preventive Police, it takes a pedophile an average of 15 days
to have sexual relations with a minor after "meeting" the adolescent
or child over the Internet. Another chilling statistic is that 95
percent of Mexico City's 13,000 street children have already had at
least one sexual encounter with an adult.

Many girls and boys are lured to Mexico City from small towns or
rural areas by criminal networks, through false promises of domestic
work or other jobs. The number of child porn web sites climbed from
72,000 in January 2004 to an estimated 100,000 in 2006. The
Commission's report is "a powerful wake-up call to establish local
public policies on the matter," wrote Miguel Ángel Granados, a
columnist with the local newspaper Reforma. "A reading of the
passages that describe the main zones in the Federal District (of
Mexico City, where child prostitution, pornography, sex tourism and
trafficking are found) and their characteristics makes you shudder,
especially the accounts of the degradation to which thousands of
defenseless people are subjected, because they are children," he
wrote.

In its Global Monitoring Report on the Status of Action against the
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, the international network
ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of
Children for Sexual Purposes) warns that child sex tourists are
increasingly visiting Mexico. Drawn by web sites, many come from
countries like the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. But
the problem is not limited to Mexico City. Commercial child sexual
exploitation is also found in tourist resorts like Acapulco on the
Pacific and Cancún on the Caribbean, as well as in cities and towns
on the borders with the United States and Guatemala. In the
impoverished southern state of Chiapas, children are sold for as
little as 100 to 200 dollars, according to human rights groups. That
area is considered one of the worst places in the world in terms of
child prostitution.

Mexico committed itself to combating the phenomenon when it backed
the final declaration of the First World Congress against Commercial
Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996. In Latin
America, only Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina,
Brazil and Chile have national action plans to fight commercial
sexual exploitation of children.

The Mexico City legislature is preparing to approve reforms to the
local penal code in order to crack down on child pornography, sex
tourism, labor exploitation and trafficking. In February, the Senate
passed reforms to the law against organized crime and the penal code,
in order to make child sexual exploitation, sex tourism and
pornography specific crimes. Mexican society cannot claim to be
ignorant of how widespread is the sexual exploitation of children and
adolescents, and how fast the phenomenon is growing, argued Granados.

Journalist Lydia Cacho exposed a child sex ring in her 2005 book
"Demons of Eden", which contains testimony from minors in Cancún who
were sexually abused by adults who also photographed and videotaped
them engaging in sexual acts and sold the images over the Internet.
Cacho was arrested and charged with criminal libel. The charges were
brought by a textile magnate mentioned by minors and other sources
interviewed for Cacho's book.

Source: IPS: 08/13
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AMNESTY ABORTION STANCE BOLSTERS MEXICO ACTIVISTS

Pro-choice activists here say they feel bolstered by Amnesty
International's recent resolution recognizing abortion as part of a
woman's right to be free of fear, threat and coercion as they manage
the consequences of rape and other grave human rights violations.
"Because so many women are suffering, especially those who live in
countries where (abortion) is not decriminalized, they are forced to
have clandestine, unsafe abortions; the more voices that speak up
calling it an injustice, the better," said Mariana Winocur,
spokesperson for the Mexico City pro-choice organization Information
Group on Reproductive Choice, known as GIRE. "It's good for social
justice, for women's health and for women's rights."

London-based Amnesty International winds up its leadership's biennial
gathering here from Aug. 11-18, to discuss and make decisions on
human rights issues being worked on by the organization. Before the
weeklong meeting, Amnesty Secretary-General Irene Kahn toured Mexico,
where she met with various human-rights groups, including some
women's groups, as well as President Felipe Calderon, who promised to
improve Mexico's internal human rights situation and implement
judicial reforms. "For some time women have been working to get their
sexual and reproductive rights recognized as human rights," said
Maria Consuelo Mejia, executive director of the pro-choice group
Catholics for the Right to Decide, in Mexico City. "This helps close
the gap between human rights activists and women's rights activists.
The position that Amnesty International has taken is very important
in this sense."

Pro-choice activists in Mexico were buoyed in April when Mexico
City's municipal legislature legalized all abortions in the first 12
weeks of pregnancy. Pro-choice groups also supported Amnesty's
stance, including Ipas, a Chapel Hill, N.C., organization that works
with local health care practitioners around the world, and the Mexico
office of Marie Stopes International, the London-based reproductive
rights group. Amnesty International, with about 1.8 million members,
is the world's leading advocacy organization for human rights. Other
rights groups, notably New York-based Human Rights Watch, have led a
recent push to depict equitable access to safe abortion services as a
human right. But Amnesty, founded by a Catholic convert in 1961 to
advocate for political prisoners, has avoided taking a stance on
abortion before now.

The resolution adopted in April by Amnesty doesn't advocate abortion
rights on demand. Instead it seeks to ensure that women and men can
exercise their sexual and reproductive rights free from coercion,
discrimination and violence, Amnesty spokesperson Suzi Clark told
Women's eNews in an e-mail. "In doing so it responds to the human
suffering caused by abuses of these rights." As part of Amnesty's
global Stop Violence Against Women campaign, Clark said the policy
aims to recognize the right of women to be free of fear, threat and
coercion as they manage the consequences of rape and other grave
human rights violations. "The policy responds to the findings and
concerns of Amnesty International's global work to stop violence
against women," she said. For instance a pregnant rape survivor in
Darfur, where sexual violence is rife in the war-torn region, is
often ostracized by her community, Amnesty said, and in other
countries ranging from Poland to Nicaragua, women have been denied
abortions to save their health or lives. The World Health
Organization estimates that 19 million unsafe abortions take place
annually worldwide; about 68,000 women die from botched abortion
procedures, and 5.3 million suffer either permanent or temporary
disability.

Most Catholic and anti-abortion organizations labeled the stance
pro-choice and condemned it. Amnesty has also come under fire from
the Vatican, which called on Catholic individuals and organizations
to stop funding Amnesty; Amnesty has said it has never received
official Vatican funding. "The action of the executive council
undermines Amnesty's longstanding moral credibility, diverts its
mission, divides its own members (many of whom are Catholic or defend
the rights of unborn children) and jeopardizes Amnesty's support by
people in many nations, cultures and religions," Bishop William S.
Skylstad, president of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, said in a statement in July calling for Amnesty to revoke
its position ahead of its meeting in Mexico City. Such pronouncements
can carry particular weight in Latin American countries, where the
majority of the population is Catholic. For instance in Brazil, the
most populous Catholic country in the world, Pope Benedict XVI
insinuated that politicians voting for pro-choice measures should be
excommunicated during a trip in May. In a June statement following
the Vatican's outcry, Amnesty emphasized that "these additions do not
promote abortion as a universal right" that the group "remains silent
on the rights and wrongs of abortion." Amnesty's executive board
adopted the policy in April following two years of internal
discussions over how it should approach the issue of abortion.
"Amnesty International's position is not for abortion as a right but
for women's human rights to be free of fear, threat and coercion as
they manage all consequences of rape and other grave human rights
violations," said spokesperson Kate Gilmore in the release.

Similar criticisms from Catholic leaders were levied at the Mexico
City legislature, which set off a firestorm after legalizing the
procedure. Bishop Marcelino Hernandez, auxiliary bishop of the
archdiocese of Mexico, said that anyone voting for the measure would
be automatically excommunicated when the first abortion was
performed. The federal human rights commission, in conjunction with
the Mexico attorney general's office, challenged the
constitutionality of the law in the Supreme Court on the grounds that
the municipal legislature had overstepped its authority in passing
the law. Abortion is regulated by state governments in Mexico, which
generally allow exceptions only in cases of rape. The decision is
still pending, as is a case filed by the Catholic Church before the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Abortion is severely restricted and even penalized in most Latin
American countries. Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua ban it
completely; most others allow it under limited circumstances, such as
in cases of rape or danger to a woman's health. Cuba and Guyana have
legalized abortion. Bolivia is revising its constitution this year
and may guarantee the right to life from the moment of conception,
Time magazine reported Aug. 9. Amnesty's Clark said the group
probably won't take any more action on abortion, given that the issue
is just one facet of its position on people's right to "exercise
their sexual and reproductive rights free from coercion,
discrimination and violence."

Source: Women's eNews: 08/17
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DIRTY WAR UPDATE: TRUTH COMMISSION OR JUSTICE COMMISSION?

Human rights groups in Mexico are making another effort to get a
truth commission established to investigate the "dirty war," the name
given to the illegal strong arm measures used against guerrillas and
opponents of successive Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
governments in the 1960s and 1970s. Eight non-governmental
organizations have been debating how to set up the commission for the
past several weeks. Among the matters under discussion are candidates
for membership, and the scope of its remit.

The issue is whether the commission should restrict itself to
compiling testimony and information on rights violations that were
committed, as happened in South Africa with the commission presided
by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after apartheid was abolished in 1994, or
whether its aim should also be to bring human rights violators to
justice, as happened in Argentina after the most recent military
dictatorship (1976-1983). The head of the Mexican Commission for the
Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, Fabian Sánchez, told IPS that
setting up the commission is "a very complex issue" because of the
different aspects involved, from historical to social and legal. "We
want to define the aims, especially taking into account the timeframe
of the commission's working period," he said. Those promoting the
initiative want to avoid repeating what they call the "failure" of
the Special Prosecutor's Office for Political and Social Movements of
the Past.

The Special Prosecutor's Office was created in November 2001 by then
conservative president Vicente Fox (2000-2006), as part of the
Attorney General's Office, and was headed by Ignacio Carrillo. It was
disbanded in December 2006, just before Fox handed over the
presidency to his fellow party member Felipe Calderon. Human rights
organizations are searching for a way to overcome the flaws in the
work of this body. In its final report, "Historical Report to Mexican
Society 2006," the Special Prosecutor's Office concluded that
genocide had taken place in Mexico, orchestrated by the
administrations of Presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-1970), Luis
Echeverria (1970-1976) and José López Portillo (1976-1982), all of
whom belonged to the PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000.
Not satisfied with hunting down, arresting and jailing opponents and
activists, the state subjected them to cruel and unnecessary
punishment, says the over 600-page report, which was submitted to the
Attorney-General's Office.

In spite of these conclusions, the Special Prosecutor's Office only
managed to initiate prosecutions in barely 2.5 percent of the 532
cases investigated, which included killings and forced
disappearances. And only 17 cases were carried forward, resulting in
just seven arrest warrants. Alicia de los Rios, a member of the
Committee of Mothers of those Disappeared for Political Motives in
Chihuahua, in the north of the country, said victims should not sit
on the commission, as that would undermine its credibility. "It has
to be an independent body, not subject to political influence of any
kind," she told IPS. Her mother, a member of the September 23
Communist League guerrilla movement, was arrested by the security
forces in January 1978 and never heard from again.

The Mexican NGOs have tried to involve supranational human rights
bodies, such as the International Center for Transitional Justice and
Human Rights Watch, which already have information about the plan.
"We need them to participate. We should also ask the United Nations,
and get advice from other international bodies like the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights," Sánchez said. Before the
Special Prosecutor's Office was created, human rights organizations
were divided between those that supported it, and those that would
have preferred a Truth Commission. "The outcome confirms the distrust
that some of the organizations expressed," said de los Rios, who
presented a complaint to the Special Prosecutor's Office in 2002 to
find out where her mother was, and what responsibility the state had
for her disappearance, and received no reply. According to the
Special Prosecutor's Office, 12 massacres, 120 extrajudicial
killings, 800 forced disappearances and 2,000 acts of torture against
detainees were committed by state security agents, mainly in the late
1960s and the 1970s.

One of the unfulfilled challenges of the Special Prosecutor's Office
was to clarify the massacres committed on Oct. 2, 1968 and Jun. 10,
1971, when police and paramilitaries fired on unarmed civilians,
killing an undetermined number of people. The Special Prosecutor's
Office also failed in its attempt to prosecute Echeverria, who was
first interior minister and then president during that period, for
genocide. Luis de la Barreda and Miguel Nazar Haro, former heads of
the notorious Dirección Federal de Seguridad, the now-defunct secret
police agency, also escaped imprisonment.

Mexico's Supreme Court has ruled that no statute of limitations
applies to forced disappearance until the victim has been found, dead
or alive. However, it ruled that genocide is subject to the statute
of limitations. "Today, victims have neither truth nor justice, and
this is something that must be remedied," said Sánchez. In the
southern state of Guerrero, where the most intense repression of
opponents of the regime and guerrilla groups occurred in the 1970s,
the Calderon administration and the leftwing opposition Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD) are planning to set up a Truth Commission
to unearth the secrets of the "dirty war" in that area, as well as
crimes committed in the 1990s. In Aguas Blancas, 17 campesinos (small
farmers) were murdered in June 1995 by the police, and in El Charco
11 people were killed in June 1998 by the army. The human rights
groups' struggle may soon bear fruit.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the system of
the Organization of American States, is about to determine whether or
not the Mexican state violated the rights of Rosendo Radilla, thought
to have been arrested at a military roadblock in Guerrero on Aug. 25,
1974, and those of his relatives. "It's the first case of its kind in
relation to Mexico that has been accepted by the Commission. If it
decides that rights violations occurred, it could trigger a series of
chain reactions here," said Sánchez. When President Fox took office
in December 2000, he promised to investigate the "dirty war" and
bring its perpetrators to justice. This he manifestly failed to do.
Meanwhile, his successor, Calderon, has so far not said a word about
the subject.

Source: IPS: 08/15

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The above articles were originally published and copyrighted by the
listed sources. These articles are offered for educational purposes
which CIS maintains is  'fair use' of copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

end: Mexico Week In Review: 08.13-08.19
--