Mexico Week In Review: 12.03-12.09

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 12.03-12.09
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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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JUAREZ EXHUMES THOUSANDS OF BODIES

Authorities in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez said that
they plan to exhume the remains of more than 4,000 unidentified
people buried in common graves and take DNA samples in an attempt to
identify them. Rene Medrano, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state
attorney general's office, said the bodies were being exhumed because
state attorney general Patricia Gonzalez "wants to bring order and
clarity to past police practices." Officials did not provide more
exact reasons for the exhumations, which they called part of a
statewide project that includes at least 180 exhumations in another
city.

Authorities said the project was not directly related to the cases of
360 women killed over the past 14 years in Ciudad Juarez, a city of
1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas. Victims' relatives have long
demanded that independent investigators take part in the probes,
saying efforts by state officials have been tainted by inept
officers. Chihuahua state investigators have been accused of losing
or contaminating evidence and of other missteps that botched cases.
Authorities' lack of progress in solving the cases of the Ciudad
Juarez women prompted international outrage, as news of the killings
made headlines around the world. Authorities have arrested and
prosecuted a number of suspects over the years, but family members of
some Juarez victims say authorities have yet to bring the true
culprits to justice. Federal authorities intervened in 2003,
promising to solve 14 rape-strangulation cases involving teenagers
and women in Ciudad Juarez. The federal attorney general's office
recently closed those investigations, however, without getting to the
bottom of what happened.

A team of 30 people, including forensic anthropologists and dental
specialists, are already exhuming remains from cemeteries in Ciudad
Juarez, Medrano said. The team will exhume unidentified bodies that
were buried in common graves between 1991 and 2005, Medrano said.
They will extract DNA samples and build a database. The remains then
will be tagged and reburied in individual graves, he said. Officials
estimate more than 4,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common
graves in Ciudad Juarez alone over the 14-year period. The program
first started three months ago in Chihuahua City where authorities
exhumed 180 sets of remains. One already has been identified, Medrano
said.

Source: Associated Press: 12/05
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INDIGENOUS GROUPS DEFEND MEXICAN CORN

Meeting in Chihuahua's Sierra Tarahumara, representatives of more
than 20 indigenous Raramuri and Tepehuan communities vowed to defend
the traditional corn that nourishes their cultures and livelihoods.
At the Third Annual Corn Fair held in Ejido Bacabureachi, indigenous
leaders agreed to implement measures aimed at protecting their corn
from genetically modified (GM) varieties. Among the proposals
considered was a demand to require that any corn entering the Sierra
Tarahumara for any purpose have a certificate of origin. Maria Teresa
Guerrero, director of the Chihuahua City-based Community Technical
Consultants, a non-governmental environmental and indigenous rights
advocacy organization, said indigenous leaders also agreed that more
effective lobbying was needed to goad Mexican federal authorities
into taking protective actions on behalf of indigenous communities.
"Until now, (authorities) have only shown commitments with
businessmen," Guerrero said.

In recent months, the introduction of GM corn has become a hot issue
in northern Mexican border states.  Opponents fear that GM products
will contaminate native corn species, as has already happened in
different parts of Mexico, and with unpredictable, long-term
environmental consequences. On the other hand, a large group of corn
producers in the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and
Chihuahua is seriously mulling the massive planting of GM crops. The
pro-GM farmers view the new crops as beacons of progress and promise
that will help them survive the January 1, 2008 elimination of corn
tariffs under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Reportedly, GM
corn produces a much greater per-acre yield than traditional species.
According to Perfecto Solis, president of the Tamaulipas Corn
Producers Council, farmers are growing frustrated by regulatory
delays at the federal level in Mexico. Since 1999, Mexico has
followed an official moratorium on the commercial planting of GM
corn. "We can't wait five years more, especially when we have been
placed at a competitive disadvantage with US corn producers," Solis
said. "With or without regulation, we will begin to plant transgenic
corn and, if necessary, we will recur to the use of force to defend
our crops."

But indigenous corn growers in Chihuahua, who cultivate small plots
less than seven acres in size, maintain that the agricultural future
still rests with the old corn varieties adapted to the high and dry
environmental conditions of the Sierra Tarahumara. Persistent drought
in the region remains a major challenge for small farmers who rely on
the rains. Speaking at the corn fair, Marcelino Moreno of Ejido Las
Lajas  affirmed that traditional farming wasn't a mystery. "With the
moon, as we always have done, as our elders did it, without chemicals
and with a lot of work," Moreno advised. Other fair participants
stressed organic fertilization and crop rotation as essential farming
methods to ensure healthy harvests. Bacabureachi resident Luz Maria
said preserving native corn was indispensable for the survival of
indigenous culture. "Don't let them do away with corn," Luz Maria
appealed, "because if corn is finished, so are the people."

On a related note, the environmental group Greenpeace Mexico
collected samples in Chihuahua in late November to test for the
presence of genetically-modified organisms. Greenpeace’s  sampling
took place in corn-growing districts of the municipalities of
Namiquipa, Nuevo Casas Grandes, Buenaventura and Cuahtemoc.

Sources: Frontera NorteSur (FNS): 12/04; La Jornada: 11/13; 12/02;
Americaspolicy.org: 12/03
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GOVERNMENT RAIDS LOGGING MILLS NEAR MONARCH RESERVE

Police conducted the biggest anti-logging raid in the nation's
history at clandestine sawmills that cut timber on a threatened
nature reserve where Monarch butterflies nest in the winter, the
government said. Illegal deforestation in and around the reserves
threatens the butterflies, which rely on the forest cover to protect
them from the cold, high-altitude winds. Huge numbers of Monarchs
died during a cold snap in 2002.

Agents seized the equivalent of about 600 heavy truckloads of wood,
the attorney general's office said, calling the raid "the largest
seizure of illegally logged wood in the country's history." "These
actions by the federal government are aimed at protecting the natural
balance of the Monarch reserve, where every year millions of
butterflies travel over 4,000 kilometers to winter," the attorney
general's office said in a news statement. The seizure was also an
indication of the failure of highly publicized pledges by previous
administrations to end illegal logging in the area. More than 6,000
tons of wood were cut from within the Monarch butterfly reserve, the
attorney general's office said. About 700 police and environmental
officials raided 19 clandestine sawmills in the western state of
Michoacan.

Police detained 56 people, prosecutors said, including sawmill
employees, lumberjacks and truck drivers, and seized scores of trucks
and other vehicles. Prosecutors have 48 hours to lodge formal charges
or release the suspects. If convicted of illegal logging, they could
face prison sentences of six months to nine years, and fines of up to
$13,650. "That's the important thing, that people are being charged,"
said Augusto Cabrera, a spokesman for the attorney general for
environmental protection. "Before, they would seize wood and
dismantle sawmills, but there weren't many charges." In all,
authorities seized about 210,000 cubic feet of logs and boards,
equivalent to about 6,600 tons of wood, or about 1,750 adult trees.
The government has closed 59 illegal sawmills and charged 193 people
with related crimes in the last year, not including this raid,
Cabrera said. A study conducted in 2000 showed that 44 percent of the
fir forests that shelter the migrating butterflies during their
annual stopover had been damaged or destroyed over the preceding 29
years.

Source: Associated Press: 12/07
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BORDER NEWS: DRUG GANGS MUSCLE TRIBE OUT OF HOMES

Just as he drove his pickup truck north over the U.S. border, Indian
community leader Julian Rivas heard the rasp of automatic weapons
fire, then three bullets ripped into the cab and tailgate. "I just
carried on driving ... and I didn't go back to my village in Mexico,"
he said. Rivas, a member of the Tohono O'odham tribe, whose ancestral
lands straddle the Arizona-Mexico border, is among tribe members from
villages in Mexico who say they are being driven out by an influx of
violent Mexican smugglers. The tribe, whose name means "Desert
People," numbers around 24,000 people. Their lands extend from Casa
Grande, south of Phoenix, to an area of remote desert north of
Hermosillo, the capital of Mexico's Sonora state, and members cross
back and forth through informal "gates" in the border.

In recent years, members in Arizona have increasingly been caught up
in the fallout from drug and human trafficking through the sovereign
Tohono O'odham nation, which lies on one of the most active smuggling
corridors on the U.S.-Mexico border. South of the line, in Mexico,
tribe members have long been squeezed by a lack of jobs and services,
and the number of villages has dropped to nine from 45 in the mid
19th century. Remaining residents complain they are now being
harassed by heavily armed Mexican smugglers who have muscled into the
area. The shooting incident, in October last year, together with
threats from the armed Mexican newcomers, they say, is forcing
already dirt poor residents of the isolated villages to abandon their
traditional lands and way of life and flee north of the border. "The
drug trafficking and the violence that comes with it is the last
straw for us," said Rivas, the community leader of Cu:wi I-gersk, a
village in Mexico, who now lives in Tucson, Ariz. "It is what might
finally kill off the communities on the south.

The Tohono O'odham have lived in the Sonora Desert for centuries
before the United States and Mexico existed, speaking their own
language, living off the land and following beliefs centered on the
natural world. U.S. border police say the rugged strip in northern
Sonora is used by Mexican drug cartels to stockpile hundreds of tons
of marijuana, which they run over the line in trucks, on horseback or
on foot. Last year alone, the Tucson sector Border Patrol seized 440
tons of the drug. While tribal lands are safeguarded by the sovereign
status of the nation in Arizona, villagers south of the line complain
they have suffered land invasions from Mexican ranchers for decades,
and now have the smugglers themselves moving into traditional tribal
villages of adobe and timber-framed homes to stage drug loads and
migrants.

Rivas, 57, said he had lodged complaints with authorities in the
Sonora town of Caborca, alleging land invasion from Mexican settlers.
He believes the attack on his truck was an attempt to intimidate him
by Mexicans who moved to the village, and use it to stage drugs and
migrants. Tribal members, who traditionally harvest saguaro fruit and
grow squash, Indian sweet corn and beans, say marauding security
squads for the drug gangs roam freely through the ochre patchwork of
lands, guarding drug loads and escorting them up to the border line.
While driving over a maze of dusty back trails between Sonoyta and El
Sasabe, Mexico, this correspondent was stopped, questioned and
searched by a group of six men dressed in camouflage fatigues, toting
assault rifles, and wearing drug trade amulets -- an experience which
tribal members say is increasingly common in the area. "Sometimes
they dress as soldiers, other times they just come with guns into the
traditional villages, which they want to take over for themselves,"
said tribal elder Ofelia Rivas, during a visit to Cu:wi I-gersk,
which lies a few miles southeast of Lukeville, Ariz.

Following years of grinding poverty and neglect, the impact of the
illegal cross-border trade on the once thriving village of Cu:wi
I-gersk is stark. Resident Gregorio Ortiz, 69, remembers a time when
more than a dozen families lived in the village -- whose name means
"Rabbit Falls" in O'odham -- planting crops in the sandy desert soil
and traveling to Arizona each year for seasonal work on farms. Now he
is the last O'odham there, a caretaker for 13 empty adobe and
timber-framed houses, several of which are now in ruins, the bare
ribs of saguaro cactus and mesquite poles poking through sagging
roofs and bowed mud walls. Ortiz lives opposite the dusty square from
the church and a newer home with pickup trucks and a tall satellite
dish outside, and Mexican neighbors that he is afraid of. "Everybody
knows what they do, but nobody wants to say," he said speaking in
O'odham through a translator, glancing nervously over his shoulder at
a group of men standing out in their yards.

Some tribal members say they would like the nation's authorities in
Arizona to do more to help members in Mexico. But while it is
concerned at the situation, the tribal government in Sells, Arizona,
said it is limited in what it can do to help those living south of
the border. "The tribal government can't go in and do anything in
that country," said chairman Ned Norris. "We have to establish a
relationship with the relevant authorities, but that's a long,
drawn-out process ... That doesn't happen overnight." Ortiz says his
last hope is that ramped up security on the U.S.-Mexico border --
where the Border Patrol is building a vehicle barrier -- will make
life so difficult for the smugglers that they will eventually leave.
"It used to be that people would come back and forth with nothing to
stop them, and nothing to be afraid of. That's what I would like to
see again."

Source: Reuters: 12/02
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INTERNATIONAL UNIONS GATHER IN MEXICO TO FIGHT STATE-OWNED OIL
COMPANY'S 'CORRUPT' UNION

Labor advocates and union organizers from the Americas vowed to
transform Mexican state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos'
allegedly corrupt and repressive union and replace it with an
organization that better represents workers. Organizers of a daylong
forum at the national Congress said they would draft legislative and
union-organization changes aimed at reinstituting a more democratic
union movement in Mexico. Mexico's largest employer with nearly
150,000 workers, for years has struggled with depleting reserves,
outdated technology, billions of dollars of debt and crumbling
infrastructure that leads to oil spills. The company's most recent
tragedy happened in October when a drilling-rig boom crashed into an
oil platform in bad weather, killing at least 21 workers, and dumping
more than 11,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Top Pemex officials, the Mexican government and oil experts agree
that the company is in desperate need of a massive modernization.
Research conducted by international labor organizations has shown
that "the most efficient" way to improve conditions for workers and
modernize the industry is to "take into account and respect the word
of workers, expressed in a free and democratic manner," said Rodrigo
Olvera, legal adviser to the Mexican non-governmental National
Committee on Energy Studies. The current union, which suffers from
allegedly rigged elections, a misuse of worker funds and other
corruption, "is designed to control the voice of the workers," Olvera
said. Alleged corruption in the Pemex union is no secret in Mexico.
One of the country's most widely publicized recent scandals, dubbed
"Pemexgate," involved allegations that a former union leader was
involved in diverting as much as US$170 million (euro116 million) in
state oil funds to the 2000 presidential campaign of the then-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. No one has been criminally
prosecuted in the matter.

The idea of forming more democratic unions is not a new one, but is
much like David taking on Goliath. The Union of Mexican Oil Workers
is led by immensely powerful leaders known to represent their own
best interests while staying on good terms with the company and
keeping workers in line. Federal Rep. Rosario Ortiz, of the
left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, said Friday's
meeting is one in a series of actions lawmakers and union organizers
have taken over the years to resolve the problems plaguing Mexico's
unions and its ailing oil company. "We are not here just to complain
to each other," Olvera added. "This meeting has the aim of
establishing short- and long-term strategies for a true modernization
of labor relations to benefit oil workers." Benjamin Davis, the
Mexican representative for the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, said
organizations from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Canada,
Colombia and Venezuela are supporting the effort. "In most industries
in Mexico, workers who want democratic unions have to fight against
their own union leaders, they have to fight against the government
and they have to fight against the employers," Davis said. "It's
three against one and it's really difficult to win as a result.
"That's where the international support and solidarity become key,"
he said.

Source: Associated Press: 12/07

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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: 12.03-12.09
--