Mexico Week In Review: 09.10-09.16

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 09.10-09.16
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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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PIPELINES ATTACKED, EPR THREATEN MORE

The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) claimed responsibility for bomb
attacks on Mexican oil and gas pipelines earlier this week, and
threatened more assaults against the state-owned oil company. Blasts
at six pipelines on Monday (09/10) disrupted oil and gas supplies,
forced thousands from their homes and caused hundreds of millions of
dollars in damage to oil monopoly Pemex and other businesses. No one
was injured. It was the second such attack in two months and the EPR
said it planned more. The group accuses the government of secretly
abducting two of its guerrilla organizers.

"Hand over our companions alive, and the acts of self-defense will
stop," the tiny Revolutionary People's Army, or EPR, told the
government, in an apparent reference to two EPR members the group
claims were detained and tortured by security forces in May. The
government has denied holding the men. On Thursday, Attorney General
Eduardo Medina suggested that the pair - who have not been seen since
their disappearance - may have fallen victim to internal divisions
within the guerrilla movement. "It is possible that these people are
being held by members within the same organization, or by similar
groups," Medina told reporters. In the statement, the rebels
dismissed such speculation as a smoke screen aimed at "covering up
the government's responsibility" in the disappearances. The message
was similar to previous communiqués from the group in language and
style, and came from the same e-mail address, but it could not
independently be authenticated.

Huge billowing flames leaped into the sky after Monday's blasts and
more than 20,000 people were rushed from their homes to emergency
shelters as gas and oil spewed from the ruptured pipes. Some 750
Mexican engineers started repairs on four natural gas pipelines blown
up in the attacks and were close to extinguishing a fire at one of
the fuel ducts on Tuesday evening, Pemex said. Pemex said in a
statement it hoped domestic natural gas supplies would be back to
normal by early on Monday, Sept 17. The bombings halted 60 percent of
Mexico's steel industry and affected more than 2,5000 companies,
causing daily losses of $100 million while gas supplies are cut,
business groups said.

The EPR's new strategy of bomb attacks on energy pipelines began in
July with a wave of bombings that cut natural gas supplies to
thousands of businesses. Monday's bombings were on an even larger
scale. The EPR burst into public view in 1996 when about 70 masked
and armed men strode onto a stage at a rally in the poor southern
state of Guerrero. The rebels fired 17 shots in the air, one for each
peasant killed in an infamous police massacre there a year earlier.
At the time, the group claimed 500 members across Mexico. Within
months it launched a string of lethal ambushes on rural police and
army bases, culminating in two days of coordinated attacks in several
states. Dozens of police and soldiers were killed. The group set off
a bomb at a Sears department store in Oaxaca in August and attacked a
jail under construction in the southern state of Chiapas in July.

Mexico has deployed soldiers and federal police to protect pipelines
but President Felipe Calderon has acknowledged it is almost
impossible to completely secure the vast network. Mexico is a major
exporter of crude to the United States but its six refineries were
operating as normal and exports of oil, gas and fuel products were
not affected, Pemex said. German automaker Volkswagen suspended
production at its plant in Puebla state in central Mexico, due to a
lack of natural gas following the bombings. The plant is Volkswagen's
sole factory in North America and produces the New Beetle.

Sources: Reuters: 09/11; Associated Press: 09/13
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BORDER NEWS: MIGRANT DEATHS AHEAD OF RECORD PACE

Deaths along much of the Arizona-Mexico border are ahead of the
record pace set two years ago despite tightened border security
expected to discourage migrants from crossing, a border county
medical examiner said. The office of Pima County medical examiner Dr.
Bruce Parks, which performs autopsies on many of the illegal
immigrants who die in Arizona, has tallied 181 bodies or sets of
remains recovered between Jan. 1 and Sept 8. Last year, 148 bodies
were recovered during that period. In 2005, officials found 166
during that period.

Many of those victims will have died because of the heat, which
regularly exceeds 100 degrees during the hottest part of the Arizona
summer. Much of the Arizona border is the busiest illegal entry point
on the U.S.-Mexico frontier. "We still anticipate finding remains
between now and the first of the month," said the Rev. Robin Hoover,
founder of the Tucson-based Humane Borders group, which has had
search parties out looking for bodies the last two weekends. "There's
bodies out there that we know of that we just haven't found yet,"
Hoover said.

Border Patrol statistics show a higher death toll, but the agency's
count for 2007 began with the start of the federal fiscal year on
Oct. 1. According to federal figures, 197 bodies or remains have been
recovered in Arizona's deserts through Aug. 31. In the year-earlier
period, 200 were found. "The patrol doesn't want to see any deaths,"
said Dove Haber, a spokeswoman in the patrol's Tucson sector, which
covers most of the Arizona border except for an area around Yuma.
"Our ideal would be that there would be none. The positive is that
our rescue numbers are high."

Lloyd Easterling, a Border Patrol spokesman in Washington, said he
believes more skeletal remains are being found because the agency's
ramp-up of personnel and resources has more agents out patrolling
remote, treacherous terrain. Hoover said the Border Patrol's efforts
to shut off migration have just forced illegal immigrants to cross
even more dangerous ground. Easterling said the number of deaths
across the entire Southwestern border stood at 371 as of the end of
August, compared to 442 two years ago. The total for all of the 2005
fiscal year was a record 494.

Source: Associated Press: 09/14
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KEY VIDEO EVIDENCE BLOCKED IN CHILD SEX RING TRIAL

Prosecutors in a case involving the sexual abuse of children in
Mexico have failed to hand over to the courts 10 video recordings and
70 photos that show the accused, who claims to have friends in high
places, in compromising circumstances with minors. "The accused and
those who were involved with him are being protected by influential
people," freelance Mexican journalist and activist Lydia Cacho said.
She added that the case has "international ramifications" and is
linked to other criminal activities like the trafficking and forced
disappearance of persons. Cacho has received death threats and was
even briefly thrown into prison in late 2005 for exposing a powerful
child prostitution and pornography ring operating in the popular
beach resort of Cancún, in her 2004 book "Los demonios del Edén" (The
Demons of Eden).

The Supreme Court set up a commission in April 2006, at Congress'
behest, to investigate whether government officials violated Cacho's
civil rights when she was arrested and driven 20 hours across state
lines to the central state of Puebla to face libel charges. (She was
released on bail after Amnesty International, the World Organization
Against Torture, the Inter-American Press Association and other
international groups raised an outcry). The governor of the state of
Puebla, Mario Marín, and textile mogul Kamel Nacif are implicated in
the harassment of Cacho.

The videos and photos in question reportedly show the accused, Jean
Succar, a Lebanese-born hotel owner who is in prison facing charges
of arranging child sex parties in Cancún, and others, engaged in acts
of pedophilia. Sources at the Attorney General's Office told IPS that
the tapes and photos were handed over months ago to the prosecutor's
office in the state of Quintana Roo, where the case is being heard.
But court officials in Quintana Roo, where Cancún is located, say
they do not have the video and photographic evidence, although they
had asked for it. Cacho said that in a week, the deadline set by the
judges for accepting new evidence will expire, and they will hand
down a sentence. The activist believes there are influential people
who do not want the judges to see the videos and photos.

The case of Succar, who was arrested in the United States in February
2004 and extradited to Mexico in July 2006, is the highest-profile
pedophilia case in Mexico. But studies indicate it is only the tip of
the iceberg. A 2004 study by researcher Elena Azaola estimated that
some 17,000 children under the age of 18 are victims of the sex trade
in Mexico. Like Cacho's book, her study was based on interviews with
minors who managed to escape. In addition, the researcher collected
information in visits to establishments where underage girls and boys
were forced to work as prostitutes.

Succar returned to the headlines after the leftwing Mexican newspaper
La Jornada published an interview with one of his lawyers, who said
he would no longer represent his client because he was now certain
that he is a "pervert." Attorney Wenceslao Cisneros said he saw a
video where a naked Succar can clearly be seen instructing two nude
little girls around the ages of seven or eight to assume sexual
positions with each other. In an interview with IPS, Cisneros said
that due to "professional ethics," he could not provide further
details of what he saw and learned as Succar's attorney. But he
claimed that until he saw the video, he had no direct proof that his
client was guilty. He said he decided to leave the case because he
does not want to be involved with a "pervert," and because he has
daughters and granddaughters for whom he must set an example and who
he must protect. Cisneros said that some of the girls who spoke out
against the abuse to which they were subjected as part of Succar's
child sex ring retracted their stories after the family of the
accused contacted them, although the lawyer said he did not know
exactly what the family told them.

Interviewed by the Radial W radio station in the capital, Cacho said
she welcomed Cisneros to the world of threats and risks that she has
been living in. The journalist, who has had police protection since
2005, recommended that the lawyer take precautions. Cacho was
arrested in late 2005 in Quintana Roo and driven to the state of
Puebla, where she was charged with committing libel against Nacif,
who owns a number of companies in that state and is a close friend of
Governor Marín of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
According to Cacho, Nacif, who appears in her book, provided
protection to Succar, another of his close friends. In February 2006,
the local media aired recordings of tapped telephone conversations
between Nacif and Marín and between Nacif and Succar. It emerged
later that the recordings had been obtained and leaked to the press
by Nacif's (now ex-) wife. In the first conversation, the governor of
Puebla says he had Cacho, who he refers to as "that old b***h,"
arrested and taught a lesson. The two men can also be heard
discussing how they had the activist thrown into a cell with
"nutcases and dykes (lesbians)," so that she would be raped --
something that did not occur, because in the prison, "the prisoners
themselves and the guards protected me," the writer said in an
earlier conversation with IPS. And in the second obscenity-laced
conversation, Nacif and Succar discuss two underage girls with whom
they plan to have sex. Cacho stated that she knows there are videos
showing public figures having sex with minors, apparently taped by
Succar in his hotel in Cancún. She said, however, that she does not
know who appears in the videos. In her book, she says wealthy and
politically influential men took part in Succar's child sexual
exploitation ring.

The investigations into the case have uncovered evidence that Succar
and his family are also involved in a network that smuggles
undocumented migrants from Cuba to the United States, via Mexico's
Caribbean coastal region. They are also implicated in the
disappearance of at least two underage girls, one of whom was from El
Salvador, who were allegedly victims of the sex ring.

Source: IPS: 09/06
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CONGRESS GIVES FINAL APPROVAL TO TAX REFORM

Mexico's Congress approved a landmark tax overhaul on Friday, handing
President Felipe Calderon a major legislative victory and Mexico its
biggest economic reform in a decade. Senators backed the package in a
vote that capped months of talks over how to boost government revenue
so the country can spend more on sagging schools and roads without
relying so heavily on oil revenues. Mexico, a major crude producer
with close trade links to the United States, is arguably Latin
America's most developed economy but it has one of the lowest tax
takes in the region. The tax law might open the way for changes to
allow more exploitation of Mexico's potentially vast oil reserves.

Calderon has pushed two economic reforms through Congress, more than
predecessor Vicente Fox managed in six years. Analysts say the
importance of the latest reform is as much political as financial.
"This puts an end to the Mexico that looked paralyzed and incompetent
under Fox, and of course Calderon comes out looking good," said
political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo.

Predictions that Calderon, an uncharismatic former energy minister,
would have a lame duck presidency hounded by leftists have proven
wrong. He won a pension reform in March and received plaudits in
Mexico for taking a tough stance against U.S. President George W.
Bush over Washington's crackdown on illegal immigration.

In months of tough negotiations, the president convinced the
second-biggest opposition party, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, to back the tax overhaul. Calderon's National Action Party
lacks a majority in Congress. The tax changes, set to generate
additional income of more than $10 billion in the first year, are the
most important economic reform in Mexico since the government
privatized its pension system for nonpublic sector workers in 1997.
Mexico will now increase tax revenues by up to 2.5 percentage points
of gross domestic product a year, lawmakers say. The cornerstone of
the plan is a minimum income tax rate for companies at 16.5 percent
in 2008, rising to 17.5 percent by 2010.

Source: Reuters: 09/14

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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: 09.10-09.16
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