LETTER FROM MEXICO #1
Tribunal Takes Up Mexico's Migrant "Hell"
By David Bacon
The Progressive, web edition
MEXICO CITY (10/5/14) -- Just before judges heard testimony
on migration at the Permanent People's Tribunal in Mexico City last week, the
Mexican government announced a new measure that might have been deliberately
intended to show why activists brought the Tribunal to Mexico to begin with,
three years ago. Interior (Gobernacion)
Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told the press that the speed of trains
known by migrants as "La Bestia" (The Beast) would be doubled.
Photos of "La Bestia" have become famous around
the world, showing young migrants crowded on top of boxcars, riding the rails
from the Guatemala border to near the U.S. It's a slow train, but many boys and
girls have lost arms and legs trying to get on or off, and wind up living in
limbo in the Casas de Migrantes -- the hostels run by the Catholic Church and
other migrant rights activists throughout Mexico. Osorio Chong said Mexico would require the
companies operating the trains - a partnership between mining giant Grupo
Mexico and the U.S. corporation Kansas Southern - to hike their speed to make
it harder for the migrants.
In the Tribunal, young people, giving only their first
names out of fear, said they'd see many more severed limbs and deaths as a
result, but that it wouldn't stop people from coming. Armed gangs regularly rob the migrants, they
charged, and young people get beaten and raped.
If they're willing to face this, they'll try to get on the trains no
matter how fast they go. "Mexico is
a hell for migrants already," fumed Father Pedro Pantoja, who organized
the Casa de Migrantes in Saltillo.
Outrage wasn't limited to the Tribunal hearings. Former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador, now the head of one of Mexico's left parties, the Movement for
National Renovation, asked, "How can the government keep them from freely
moving through Mexico, when they're trying to stay alive, and find work so
their families survive?" If Osorio
Chong really wanted to reduce migration, he told La Jornada, Mexico's leftwing
daily, "he'd support the farmers, so that people have work and don't have
to leave to seek life on the other side of the border."
While the Tribunal hearings offered an insight into the
way the Mexican left sees migration to the U.S. and Canada, the Tribunal itself
is an international institution based in Rome.
It was first organized by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to
investigate U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. Since then it has held hearings about the
violations of human rights during the "dirty wars" under the military
dictatorships in Latin America, as well as in the Philippines, El Salvador,
Afghanistan, East Timor, Zaire and Guatemala.
In 2011 the Tribunal announced it would hold hearings in
Mexico on a wide spectrum of issues, including attacks on unions, farmers, the
environment and women. Of them, the
hearings on migration have been the most extensive, including three
pre-hearings in Mexico, three in the U.S., and a weeklong debate at the
national autonomous university (UNAM).
Bishop Raul Vera declared at their start, "We are experiencing the
breakdown of the social order and the militarization of the fight against drugs
[and] actions imposed by a state whose leaders are full of ambition, where it
is not political proposals that count, but business and theft."
For many Mexican migrant rights activists, the most
serious violations are committed against migrants passing through Mexico. In August of 2010 seventy-two people were
found massacred outside San Fernando, a small town in northern Mexico. All were migrants passing through Mexico, and
had been kidnapped and murdered. The
following April 193 bodies of migrants were discovered in 47 graves. Many were Central Americans, but others were
Mexicans. In May of 2012 another 49
graves were found.
While the perpetrators of these crimes were, according to
Tribunal testimony, members of drug cartels and their paramilitaries, the
accusation submitted to the judges charged the Mexican government was
ultimately responsible. Not only did the
government fail to protect migrants, knowing that they were being kidnapped
regularly for extortion, but it did not recognize their right to migrate at
all, treating them instead as criminals.
"All these acts are the predictable and preventable result of its
policies and actions," emphasized Mexican academic Camilo Perez at the
hearing's start.
He urged the judges to use the massacre in San Fernando
as a lens through which to examine the causes of migration and the reasons for
the vulnerability of migrants.
"Government policies actually depend on migration at the same time
it criminalizes migrants," he cautioned.
"The responsibility is structural, not just the actions of
individuals."
Raul Ramirez Baena testified before the Mexico City
hearing by Skype from Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, just across the
border from California's Imperial Valley.
Ramirez Baena, Baja's former human rights prosecutor, argued that U.S.
border enforcement policies were also linked to violence against migrants south
of the border.
"U.S. border enforcement really got going when NAFTA
took effect in 1994," he explained, "and national security became a
major justification, even extending U.S. authorities' reach to Guatemala. At the same time, it established a policy of
deportation, which made the problems of poverty and gangs here worse. Then Mexican government militarized the
Mexican side, using the war on drugs as a pretext. The killings and kidnappings in northern
Mexico are a consequence of this joint policy."
There was something very Mexican about focusing on the
situation of Central American migrants passing through Mexico. In one way it highlights a generosity of
spirit - "their situation is worse than ours" - and responds to the
extreme brutality of kidnapping and murder.
But it also reflects the way Mexicans, especially on the left, have
looked at the migration of their own countrymen. Historically, many leftwing activists saw
those who left for the U.S. as people who had abandoned the struggle for social
change at home. In addition, they
sometimes argued, migration relieved the social pressure of poverty on the
Mexican government.
Yet at the same time, Mexican political activists have
not only come to the U.S. (sometimes fleeing repression themselves), but
they've become increasingly outraged by the treatment Mexicans get there. And the increase in migration has been
phenomenal. Today there is no town in
Mexico so isolated that people haven't left for the U.S., and to which dollars
now flow from those working in the north.
The most important achievement of the Tribunal, therefore, was not just
assigning responsibility for the violence, but digging into the reasons and
responsibility for the migration itself.
According to the conceptual framework established at the
beginning of the hearing by Ana Alicia Peûa Lopez, an economist at UNAM,
"Mexicans and Central Americans are forced to leave home because of their
precarious economic and social conditions.
These are the product of neoliberal reforms, especially the free trade
treaties implemented in Mexico and the rest of this region."
Peûa Lopez listed several changes in migration in the
free trade era -- most important, its massive size. In 1990 4.4 million Mexican migrants were
living in the U.S. At the beginning of
the economic crisis in 2007 it was 11.9 million and in 2013 it was still 11.8
million. In other words, jobs in the
U.S. might have been harder to find, but people didn't go home because the
conditions causing them to leave hadn't changed. Money sent home by Mexicans reached
$27 billion by 2007, even during the crisis.
But, she also noted, migrants now include women, young
people, indigenous people and even children.
"Employers take advantage of this to lower their labor costs,"
she charged. "Criminalizing migrants
hasn't simply led to the violation of their rights, but has made their labor
even cheaper. And Mexico pushed this
process, through reforms that lower wages and make jobs less secure, that drive
rural communities off the land to enable mining and energy projects, and that
put basic services like health and education out of the reach of more and more
people."
The Tribunal's report on migration will be presented to
another set of judges in November, where it will be included with those on
other human rights issues. The tribunal
has no power to bring legal charges against the Mexican, U.S. or Canadian
governments over human rights crimes.
But it can focus international attention on violations, and create a
climate in which progressive jurists can try to use their own legal
systems.
Throughout Latin America, in the wake of military
dictatorships and civil wars, truth commissions were established to counter the
culture of impunity - that governments can jail and murder people with no
consequences for those who give the orders.
Mexico has never had such a commission, nor has the U.S. or Canada. The Tribunal hearings certainly found
evidence and witnesses that testify to widespread abuses, and provide an
argument for further proceedings with more formal consequences.
But to Andres Barreda, another UNAM economist involved in
setting up the hearings, the ultimate goal is also to ask Mexicans themselves
what direction they choose for their country.
"Trade agreements and economic reforms have undermined Mexico's
national sovereignty, and led to its economic and political subjugation to the
United States," he says.
"Mexico has a right to a national economic system that protects
sovereignty and autonomy, and therefore places the needs of its people before
the profits of corporations and an economic elite. Unless we face this, we can't resolve the
situation of migrants, whether our own or those passing through Mexico."
David Bacon was one of the judges in the PPT hearing in
Mexico City.
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