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

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

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.

Indigenous Zapatista Supporters “Held Hostage” in Chiapas for Opposing Ecotourism Project

by Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World

This article was published in Upside Down World just before Movement for Justice in El Barrio's "5 Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5" on April 1-5.  The five indigenous Zapatista supporters (adherents to the Other Campaign) are still in prison, so Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) has called for "5 MORE Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5" on April 24-28.  

This past February 3, approximately 300 state police raided a meeting of indigenous Zapatista supporters in San Sebastian Bachajón, Chiapas, and arrested 117 people. The arrests sparked protests across Mexico and in front of Mexican consulates around the world, leading the Chiapas government to release the majority of the prisoners. However, five Tzeltal indigenous men, who are now known as the “Bachajón 5,” remain behind bars. One is accused of murder, another is accused of attempted murder, and all five are accused of crimes against the peace.

The Bachajón Zapatista supporters are adherents to the Other Campaign, which was initiated by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in order to form national and global alliances amongst leftist organizations and movements.

The arrests stem from a confrontation between rival indigenous groups that occurred the previous day in San Sebastian Bachajón, which is an ejido, or communally held lands. Marcos García Moreno, an ejido member who belonged to the faction that allied itself with the government, was shot and killed during the confrontation with ejido members who are Other Campaign adherents. The government accuses the Other Campaign adherents of murdering García Moreno and attempting to murder a second man who was shot during the confrontation. The Other Campaign adherents deny the charges. They say they were unarmed, and that the government-allied ejido members were shooting guns into the air during the confrontation.

The government has attempted to paint the conflict as a dispute between rival indigenous factions over control of a tollbooth that charges a fee to enter the Agua Azul waterfalls, one of Chiapas’ most popular tourist attractions. However, the Bachajón adherents and their lawyers at the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center (“Frayba”) say that they have proof that the tollbooth confrontation was designed to provoke government intervention and police occupation of the region. The Bachajón adherents argue that the government orchestrated the confrontation at the tollbooth “as a pretext to take over the Agua Azul Waterfalls Ecotourism Center for its transnational interests and projects.”

According to leaked government documents provided by Frayba, the government plans to have multinational corporations build a multi-million dollar ecotourism hotel on indigenous land. The leaked“Palenque-Agua Azul Waterfalls Development Strategy” Powerpoint, which was prepared by a United States consulting firm, argues:

"The state and local government need to ensure that tourists that visit Chiapas and Palenque feel safe and protected. The Zapatista movement is still strongly associated with Chiapas… Many of those unfamiliar with the region still consider Chiapas to be unsafe… The state needs to protect the developers and hotel operators against the perception of political instability… Before attracting investments, the state must resolve land acquisition and access problems. The acquisition of lands adjacent to the waterfalls is vital…”

 Bolom Ajaw, a small community founded by Zapatistas after the 1994 uprising, is located directly across the river from the proposed hotel. The San Sebastian Bachajón ejido, home to a few hundred Other Campaign adherents and Zapatista supporters, is located just outside of Agua Azul. The highway that leads to the Agua Azul waterfalls cuts through the Bachajón ejido. A proposed freeway included in the Palenque-Agua Azul Waterfalls Development Strategy would cut through Bachajón and Bolom Ajaw.

History of the Agua Azul Conflict

Prior to 1994, the lands around the Agua Azul waterfalls were ranches owned by rich men and worked by underpaid and poorly treated indigenous peasants. When the Zapatistas rose up in arms in 1994, 96 of those indigenous peasants ran off the rich ranchers and took over the land they had worked for generations. As a result, Zapatistas and their supporters control much of the land in and around what is now the Agua Azul nature reserve.

In 2001, the Mexican government demonstrated that it would not honor its commitments under the San Andres Accords, which, if implemented, would have granted autonomy to Mexico’s indigenous peoples. In response, the EZLN began to unilaterally implement the San Andres Accords. It began to redistribute unoccupied recuperated lands to landless Zapatistas from other areas, such as the families who founded Bolom Ajaw—located next to the Agua Azul waterfalls.

In 2000, the Chiapas governor offered individual land titles to any peasant who occupied recuperated lands. The Zapatistas interpreted the offer as an attempt to divide the collectivized lands and bring recuperated territory back into the government’s sphere of control, and they rejected the land titles. However, many indigenous peasants who benefited from the uprising but were not Zapatistas did title their lands, causing divisions within the communities.

Around this time, non-Zapatista indigenous peasants, such as those who now belong to the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Peasant Rights (OPDDIC), took advantage of the diminished government repression of land takeovers, and they began to occupy lands close to the Agua Azul waterfalls. OPDDIC is a Chiapan paramilitary organization that the government officially granted non-profit status. “Little by little [OPDDIC] amplified [its territory] in a disproportionate manner until they began to border the Zapatistas’ parcels, and [then] they began to invade,” Frayba explains. “First [OPDDIC invaded] seven hectares of cultivated land, and later the Bolom Ajaw waterfalls reserve, with the intention of being beneficiaries of the tourism projects that are planned for that territory.”

Divisions in the indigenous communities worsened as the government began to offer “development” projects to peasants who allied themselves with the government, as is the case with the Agua Azul Tzeltal Indigenous Ecotourism Cooperative (Ecoturismo Indígena Tzeltal de Cascadas de Agua Azul S.C. de R.L.), which is affiliated with OPDDIC and operates the Agua Azul waterfalls tourist area with the help of generousgovernment subsidies. OPDDIC, members of the Agua Azul Ecotourism Cooperative, and local indigenous peasants affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, one of the most powerful political parties in Mexico) have carried out armed attacks on the Bolom Ajaw Zapatistas in attempts to drive them off their land. The most recent attack occurred in February 2010, when OPDDIC ambushed Zapatistas who were attempting to retake Bolom Ajaw farmland that OPDDIC occupied the month before. The confrontation resulted in one dead OPDDIC member, whom Zapatistas say was hit by friendly fire as the OPDDIC surrounded Bolom Ajaw and opened fire from various points in the community.

Divisions amongst residents of the Agua Azul area have led to disagreements over how tourism proceeds are spent. As a result, Other Campaign adherents and pro-government ejido members are engaged in a constant battle over the right to charge admission into the Agua Azul tourist area. The tollbooth has changed hands several times, and often, tourists must pay separate entrance fees to different peasant organizations in order to enter Agua Azul. In 2009, Chiapas state police raided the Other Campaign-controlled tollbooth and gave pro-government peasants the right to charge admission. Later that year, the Other Campaign re-took the tollbooth. This past February, in the events leading up to the February 3 mass arrest of Other Campaign adherents, local PRI members attempted to once again take control of the tollbooth.

Showdown in Agua Azul

On February 1, 2011, Bolom Ajaw residents noticed two helicopters flying low over their community. The helicopters were white with red and green stripes, although witnesses could not discern who the helicopters belonged to. The witnesses’ description matches the Air Force helicopter that President Felipe Calderón used that same day to visit Chiapan tourist destinations that are under development by the federal Secretary of Tourism (FONATUR). Calderón visited Palenque, where FONATUR wants to build an integrated tourist center (which includes the proposed hotel in Agua Azul) and a freewaythat would cut straight through San Sebastián Bachajón and Bolom Ajaw.

On February 2—one day after the helicopter flyby in Bolom Ajaw—sixty local PRI members take over the Bachajón tollbooth in a surprise early morning raid. The PRI group was led by Carmen Aguilar Gómez, former leader of the Regional Organization Ocosingo Café Growers (ORCAO), one of the peasant organizations that broke its agreement with the EZLN and legalized recuperated lands.

Following the attack, the Bachajón adherents regroup, and at 2:30pm, 150 of them attempt to retake the tollbooth. “We were armed with sticks and machetes,” one of them told Frayba. “No one carried firearms.” According to Bachajón adherents who participated in the action, the PRI members began to fire their guns into the air. The adherents pushed forward, and when they arrived at the tollbooth, the PRI members fled. An hour and a half later, state police arrived on the scene, accompanied by Carmen Aguilar and several other leaders of the PRI group. The police told the adherents that a PRI member had been murdered and they took over the tollbooth. The zone is now heavily occupied by state police.

On February 3, state police interrupted a meeting of Bachajón adherents to the Other Campaign. A commander asked if they agreed to a three-way dialogue with the government and the PRI ejido members. When the adherents responded that they would not participate in the dialogue, the police arrested 117 people who were in attendance at the meeting.

On February 5, the government released 107 prisoners and filed charges against the remaining ten.

Manufactured Conflict

The Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center, whose lawyers are defending the Bachajón 5, insists that the confrontation at the Agua Azul tollbooth is part of the government’s strategy to strip indigenous Chiapans of their territorial rights. “Territory as an essential element of a dignified life and the clear exercise of indigenous peoples’ collective rights run contrary to the business interests that the federal and state government have promised to private investors. Projects that benefit Mexican and foreign investors and cause poverty and death for residents,” argues Frayba. In Agua Azul, “the State did not intervene to prevent confrontations. Instead, it planned a strategy for territorial control in the zone.”

In addition to the previously mentioned leaked Powerpoint presentation in which a private consulting firm identifies the Zapatistas as problematic for Chiapas’ tourism industry and argues that the “acquisition” of their land next to the Agua Azul waterfalls is “vital,” Frayba says that an informant has told them about secret meetings between the government and PRI ejido members. According to Frayba, “Since March 2010, officials from the Chiapas General Government Secretariat—including Secretary Noé Castañón León—public officials, political operators, police officials, and pro-government ejido members have held a series of meetings in which they designed a plan for territorial control of Agua Azul.” Carmen Aguilar Gómez, who led the February 2 attack on the tollbooth, was present at the meetings.

According to Frayba’s informant, who was present during the meetings, participants agreed on a plan that would result in the government purchasing $20 million pesos ($1.7 million dollars) of land from the pro-government ejido members in order to build the Agua Azul hotel. The informant says that the government told the ejido members present “to look for people in the region who have land titles.”

The Bachajón Other Campaign adherents were specifically mentioned in the meetings. The government “mentioned that from this moment on they [the pro-government ejido members] would be safe,” reports the informant. “Because the Other Campaign adherents were being pursued for being criminals that the Fray Bartolomé [Human Rights Center] was protecting.” In a later meeting, the informant says, they agreed that “together they would find a way to take down the Other Campaign.”

The conspirators decided to use the contested tollbooth to set their plan in motion. “The plan was that the organizations would clash so that the government would intervene and take over the tollbooth.” The ejidomembers investigated how many people they had to carry out a raid on the tollbooth, and how many people the Other Campaign could possibly mobilize to defend it. Then the government and the ejido members agreed on a date when the pro-government ejido members would take over the tollbooth. According to the informant, “Noé Castañón asked [the ejido members] if the majority of their group was in agreement to take over the tollbooth, and they said yes, even if they had to give their lives.”

The government’s behavior following the February 2 incident at the tollbooth appears to corroborate the informant’s testimony. On February 6, the state government held an “Agua Azul Ecotourism Center Dialogue and Coordination,” which was billed as a negotiation to resolve the conflict. Representatives from the Agua Azul and San Sebastian Bachajón attended the Dialogue, creating the appearance of an actual dialogue between conflicting parties. However, the representatives were all pro-government ejido members because the Other Campaign adherents refused to participate. Amongst the “agreements” that came out of the Dialogue are the following: 

• “At the communities’ request, the police will have a permanent presence.”
• “Frayba will not be permitted to participate [in negotiations], because it only exhorts violence and divides the communities.”

 The second point of “agreement” is particularly troubling because the Dialogue purports to address territorial control over indigenous lands, but it explicitly excludes the Bachajón adherents’ lawyers.

According to the Bachajón 5, they are being held “hostage by the state government, as a way of forcing us to accept their ecotourism project and end the Other Campaign organization on the ejido.” They say they have received several visits from government officials who have pressured them to sign on to the Agua Azul Ecotourism Center Dialogue and Coordination “agreement.” Domingo Pérez Álvaro, accused of attempted murder, says that during the confrontation at the tollbooth, he was in a meeting with José Manuel Morales, a government official from Ocosingo, Chiapas, with whom he was attempting to negotiate an agreement over the tollbooth. Morales visited Pérez Álvaro in prison and reportedly told him, “If you sign the agreement, I will say that you were with me, and the charges will go away.”


Global Solidarity

 Mobilizations have occurred around the globe in support of the Bachajón prisoners. Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB, a New York tenants rights organization and fellow Other Campaign adherent) declared this past March 7 to be a Worldwide Day of Action for the Liberation of the Political Prisoners of San Sebastian Bachajón. That day, protests occurred around Mexico and in ten other countries in support of Bachajón.

In an attempt to prevent the protests, the government freed five of the prisoners just before the Worldwide Day of Action. The government-funded Chiapas State Human Rights Commission (CEDH) says that it personally informed the Bachajón adherents that the men had been released in the hopes that it would prevent a highway blockade outside of Agua Azul. Because five of their comrades were still in jail, the Bachajón adherents went forward with the March 7 blockade. In response, the CEDH issued a statement criticizing the Bachajón adherents: “The incident that occurred today, in which the highway in front of the Agua Azul Waterfalls tourist center was blocked, worries this Council because these acts could provoke conflict amongst the region’s inhabitants and cause damage to third parties who are uninvolved in the conflict.”

The CEDH says that the five men now known as the “Bachajón 5” remain in prison because they tested positive on a gunpowder residue test. Its press release does not mention the fact that the men were detained the day after the confrontation at the tollbooth, and that the gunpowder residue test was performed two days later, on February 4. Furthermore, the men’s lawyers argue that they were not provided with adequate interpreters during their detention and interrogation. Instead of providing a qualified Tzeltal-Spanish interpreter, Palenque police officers interpreted during the interrogation.

MJB is keeping up the pressure to release the remaining five prisoners. The group has called for “5 Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5” on April 1-5 to demand the release of the remaining prisoners. MJB proposes that during the 5 Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5, “we unite our forces and organize actions–from our particular locations and respective forms of struggle–such as demonstrations, marches, informative street actions, flyering, public forums, theatre, teach-ins, and any other activity.”

Postscript:

MJB reports that since this article was written, the Bachajón Other Campaign adherents have suffered another heinous act of repression:

During the morning of Friday, April 8, 2011, our compas from the ejido of San Sebastián Bachajón once again recovered control of the tollbooth – which they themselves had installed – that marks the entrance to the Agua Azul waterfalls in the territory of the Bachajón ejido. This dignified and rebellious action, which constituted another step forward in the process of building justice and autonomy for indigenous peoples, truly inspired us.

On the following day, April 9, over 800 police and military agents, sent by the repressive PAN president Felipe Calderón and the repressive PRD governor Juan Sabines Guerrero, arrived at the location of the tollbooth and violently displaced the ejidatari@s. Shortly after this act of repression by the bad government, three compas disappeared.

MJB's entire statement, along with the call to action for "5 MORE Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5," is available here.

Revolutionary Pedagogy in Action: Mexico's Rural Teaching Schools. East Coast Mini-Tour, April 1-11, 2011

I'm excited to announce my upcoming mini-tour.  From April 1-11, I'll be speaking in Sarasota, Baltimore, and Philadelphia about Mexico's rural teacher training schools (escuelas normales rurales in Spanish).  Mexican teachers' public enemy number one, Elba Ester Gordillo, refers to the schools as "guerrilla breeding grounds."  She's wrong, but she and the rest of Mexico's power elite are afraid of the schools because they train teachers to be community organizers, to help rural towns demand their rights and combat poverty.

Event Dates:

Saturday, April 2, 2:30pm: I'll be speaking on the rural teacher training schools at the All Power to the Imagination! Conference at the New College in Sarasota, FL.  I'm speaking as part of the Institute for Anarchist Studies' Anarchist Theory Track.
RSVP for the conference on Facebook, and share it with your friends!

Thursday, April 7, 7pm at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore, MD.
Red Emma's is located at 800 St. Paul Street.
RSVP for the talk on Facebook, and share it with your friends!


Monday, April 11, 7pm at Wooden Shoe Books and Records in Philadelphia, PA. 
The Wooden Shoe is located at 704 South Street.
RSVP for the talk on Facebook, and share it with your friends!

Revolutionary Pedagogy in Action: Mexico's Rural Teaching Schools

In the 1920s, Mexico’s revolutionary government created normales rurales (rural teaching schools) to train teachers to “bring education to the most marginalized and distant places in every state in the country and to offer a dignified form of life to peasants.” Rather than simply teaching students reading, writing, and math, rural teachers must also “assist in the organization of the populace to improve its quality of life and work on projects for social development” as well as “contribute to the struggle against imperialism and the nation’s bourgeoisie.”

The Mexican Federation of Socialist Peasant Students, the semiclandestine organization that coordinates the nation’s network of seventeen normales rurales, believes that providing carefully screened applicants with explicitly socialist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist education is what has maintained the normales rurales’ revolutionary project, and has protected it from the infiltration and co-optation that has derailed all other government-funded revolutionary education projects in Mexico. This presentation will cover the history and philosophy of the normales rurales as well as some of their most infamous graduates. It will also provide illustrative details about particular normales rurales’ struggles along with tactics to defend themselves against the neoliberal government that threatens to destroy them.

Kristin is a freelance journalist covering militarization, social movements, human rights, and the drug war in Latin America. She is the Security Sector Reform Resource Centre’s Latin America blogger, a regular contributor to Upside Down World, and a former NACLA research associate. Her articles have appeared in the Huffington Post, IPS, Counterpunch, Telesur, Upside Down World, Rebelión, Left Turn, the Indypendent, Por Esto!, and the News (Mexico). She has appeared on Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now!, Radio Mundo (Venezuela), Morning Report (New Zealand), and various Pacifica radio programs.

"As long as poverty exists, the rural teaching schools will have a reason to exist." 

The Reyes Salazar Family and the Hidden Toll Behind Mexico's Execution-meter

by Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World

Sara Salazar buries two more children, Magdalena and
Elias.  Photo: Agencia Reforma.

In the prologue to his new anthology, Pais de Muertos(Country of the Dead), renowned journalist and Monterrey native Diego Enrique Osorno writes, "It's not the same to count the dead as it is to recount our dead's stories." Osorno has joined the growing number of Mexican journalists who criticize the ejecutometroor “execution-meter,” which refers to the running tallies of drug war dead kept by the government and newspapers. Thanks to the public's obsession with the execution-meter, Mexico's murdered citizens are metaphorically heaped together into the drug war's mass grave. With an average of one person killed every hour in the drug war (and eight per day in Ciudad Juarez alone), newspapers don't even bother to report the dead's names, let alone the circumstances of their lives and deaths. They simply report the gruesome manner in which the bodies were found: if the body was found whole or in pieces, clothed or naked, which body parts were missing, how they were tortured before they were killed, which of all of the injuries was the fatal blow…

Mexico's skyrocketing homicide rate means that the bodies are dumped in the metaphorical mass grave with increasing frequency. Journalists find it more and more difficult to keep up with the death toll, let alone carry out a serious investigation into individual murders. Moreover, argues Proceso reporter Marcela Turati in her new book Fuego Cruzado ("Crossfire"), "When violence competes with itself and habitually breaks its own record, it stops being news."

The growing heap of bodies also means that the government, notorious for its dismal conviction rate, feels even less pressure to investigate individual murders. Instead, it issues press releases and statements arguing that the dead were members of organized crime, as if that meant that their murders were justified and don't merit an investigation. "If the dead was a young man, surely he was a gang member; if it was a cop or a soldier, surely he was an infiltrator; if it was a citizen on the street, what was she or he doing walking at the scene of the crime?" explains Roberto Zamarripa, a journalist for the national daily Reforma. "Model students displayed as hit men; tortilla vendors turned into shooters; construction workers treated like dangerous crooks."

The government's lack of investigation into the cases, combined with proven cases where the governmentdeliberately painted innocent civilian victims as drug traffickers, leads journalists like Turati to question the President's unsubstantiated statistic that 90% of all drug war dead were drug traffickersand cartel accomplices who deserved to die. Casting further doubt on the government's claim is the fact that in 2010, the government only opened investigations in 5% of the country's murders. The other 95% were never investigated at all.

The Reyes Salazar Family Tragedy

The execution-meter currently stands at over 35,000 drug war deaths since President Felipe Calderón took office just over four years ago. That statistic’s failure to accurately portray the real-life consequences of the drug war for Mexico's citizens was highlighted the same weekend Turati and Osorno launched their books. On Friday, February 25, the bodies of Magdalena Reyes Salazar, her brother Elias Reyes Salazar, and his wife Luisa Ornelas Soto were found dumped along the side of a road in Guadalupe, Chihuahua, just outside of Ciudad Juarez. Authorities say that "narco-messages" were attached to the bodies that said that the three were killed for their involvement in organized crime.

The three dumped bodies would have ticked Mexico's execution-meter up three more notches without any fanfare (and certainly without any investigation) were it not for the work Magdalena and Elias' sister Josefina started three years ago, when she began campaigning against the militarization of Ciudad Juarez. The triple murder wouldn't have made it onto the execution-meter at all if Josefina's sisters Marisela and Claudia hadn't continued Josefina's fight for justice after Josefina herself was murdered in January 2010. The three cadavers were found covered with dirt and lime, leading authorities to believe that they were buried before they were dumped alongside the road. It is believed that the murderers dug up and dumped the bodies because of the pressure created by Marisela and Claudia's protests. Had the murderers not done this, Magdalena, Elias, and Luisa would have been considered “disappeared,” not murdered, and disappeared persons aren’t counted on the execution-meter. Unlike murders, the government doesn’t even attempt to keep track of drug war disappearances. Bodies that are dissolved in acid, dumped into the sea, buried in cement, or dumped in clandestine mass graves disappear without even registering on the execution-meter, let alone in the press or the attorney general’s office.

In total, the Reyes Salazar family matriarch, Sara, has lost six family members to the execution-meter: four children, one grandson, and a daughter-in-law.

The family’s plight began in 2008, when the military arrived to occupy their state as part of “Operation Chihuahua.” Josefina, a well-known activist who protested against femicides and the Sierra Blanca radioactive waste site, opposed the militarization of her region. When the military arrested thirteen of her neighbors in mid-2008 and placed them under Mexico’s internationally criticized pre-charge detention(“arraigo”), Josefina joined a commission that met with human-rights-activist-turned-senator Rosario Ibarra to plead for their release. On August 14, 2008, Josefina spoke at a conference entitled “Forum Against Militarization and Repression.” She participated as “a political activist under attack by the military,” and during the forum she led a march against the soldiers’ presence. Just days later, on August 21, the military disappeared her son Miguel Angel.

Josefina declared a hunger strike to demand that her son be charged or released. The government released Miguel Angel shortly after Josefina began her protest.

Josefina’s victory was short-lived. In November, just three months after Miguel Angel’s ordeal, Josefina’s other son, Julio Cesar, was murdered at a wedding. Adrián Fuentes Luján, spokesperson for the Reyes Salazar family, told Upside Down World that a paramilitary squad entered the wedding, ordered everyone to lay down on the ground, and searched the crowd. “One of the men kicked Julio so he could see his face. He asked another man if he was the one they were looking for and he answered yes. Then he pointed his gun directly to the heart and fired a single shot,” says Luján. “The family believes that Julio Cesar's death was in retaliation for Josefina's and his own activism against the abuses of the militarization in the Valle de Juarez area.”

On September 4, 2009, the army arrested Miguel Angel once again. Two months after his arrest, the Federal Attorney General’s Office issued an arrest warrant, accusing Miguel Angel of working for the Juarez cartel. The arrest warrant “regularized” Miguel Angel’s arrest and allowed the government to imprison him until his trial. A year and a half later, Miguel Angel is still in prison, awaiting trial.

Throughout her struggle against the military—which was becoming more and more personal with each subsequent attack on her family—Josefina received death threats. In 2009, she was arrested for leading protests against the military. That year, she left her hometown of Guadalupe for a short period because she feared for her safety. However, she returned to run her business, a barbeque stand.

It was in front of that barbeque stand that unknown assailants executed her on January 3, 2010. Witnesses report that as she struggled with her murderers, one of them told her, “You think you’re so f--king cool because you’re with the organizations?” referring to her work with human rights organizations. Josefina’s family says that the people who murdered Josefina were “paramilitary commandos.”

The brutal attacks against the Reyes Salazar family didn’t end with the execution of its most vocal member. On August 18, 2010, unknown assailants executed Josefina’s brother Ruben Salazar Reyes as he headed to the store to buy milk for workers in his family’s bakery. In addition to being a prominent member of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, Ruben had taken up Josefina’s cause, demanding justice for the murders of his sister and his nephew. His execution followed months of death threats.

Even after losing three family members to hitmen and a fourth to indefinite imprisonment, the Reyes Salazars refused to be silent. Two days after Ruben’s murder, his mother Sara and his sister Marisela led a Walk Against Militarization to demand justice for Ruben and three other Juarez activists who were murdered the day before Ruben was.

Sara and her remaining children refused to give up the struggle that Josefina started and Ruben continued. Their struggle was met with death threats from their enemies and deafening silence from the press, which was too busy covering headless cadavers hanging from bridges and abandoned mines stuffed with bodies—stories that attracted more readers than a humble family’s fight against militarization, impunity, and annihilation.

The Reyes Salazars’ plight made news once again on February 7, 2011, when gunmen kidnapped Magdalena and Elias Reyes Salazar and Luisa Ornelas Soto. Sara, 76, who witnessed the kidnapping along with her 12-year-old granddaughter, set up a protest encampment outside of a branch of the State Attorney General’s Office in Ciudad Juarez. Sara and her daughters Marisela and Claudia hoped that a hunger strike would pressure the government to either present the three disappeared persons or investigate the kidnapping.

The Chihuahua government, however, greeted their hunger strike with cruel distain. Even after unidentified assailants burnt down Sara’s home and the home of fellow anti-femicide activist Malú Garcia as they were on hunger strike outside of his office, Assistant Attorney General Jorge González Nicolás refused to meet with the women. Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission member Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson hascalled for an investigation into the arsons, because the assailants managed to burn down Sara’s humble cinderblock-and-sheet-metal home only one hundred meters (328 feet) away from the Guadalupe military barracks.

After nearly two weeks of hunger strike in front of González Nicolás’ office, the Assistant Attorney General still refused to meet with the Reyes Salazars, as did Governor Cesar Duarte. Marisela, Claudia, and Sara decided to increase the pressure, so they moved their protest encampment to Mexico City outside the Senate building. Coincidentally, they were camped in front of the Senate when Gov. Duarte arrived to deliver a report to Senators on his successes as governor. He still refused to meet with the Reyes Salazars, until opposition senators “hunted him down” and forced a meeting, which Duarte limited to ten minutes.

While the Reyes Salazars’ hunger strike failed to bring their loved ones home alive, it did, at the very least, allow them to give Magdalena, Elias, and Luisa a decent burial. Magdalena and Elias’ wake was held in the protest encampment in front of the Assistant Attorney General’s Office in Juarez. Magdalena and Elias’ brother Saúl explained that the wake’s location wasn’t so much a form of protest as it was a necessity: “We held their wake in front of the Prosecutor’s office because we don’t even have a house, they were vandalized, and my mom’s home was burnt down.” On February 26, amidst cries of “Long live the Reyes Salazar family! Death to the criminal state!” Chihuahua bid farewell to three more human rights activists, “collateral damage” in Mexico’s war on drugs.

The Reyes Salazar family, “or what’s left of us,” as Saúl said during his siblings’ funeral, are considering offers of asylum from various countries, including Venezuela, Spain, France, Canada, and the United States. Regarding the United States’ offer, Marisela says, “I wouldn’t accept the offer to go live there, because the United States plays a big role in everything that is happening to us.” Whether or not the family decides to flee the country, Marisela explains why they won’t cease their fight for justice: “I'm scared for my family, but I'm even more scared of continuing to watch so much blood run in the streets of my city. Because if we don't cry out, they'll still kill us, and if they kill us, let it be for something, so that the world hears what is really happening in Mexico.”

Blaming the Victims

In Juarez, where more people died in the drug war in 2010 than did in the war in all of Afghanistan over the same period, the government hasn’t found it very difficult to avoid investigating murders of innocent civilians. Cases in which security forces are clearly to blame, such as the shooting of civilians at military checkpoints, cause national scandals. However, cases where the assailants are not readily identifiable, such as the Reyes Salazar murders, fail to attract media attention because they are automatically written off as cartel-on-cartel violence.

Nonetheless, the Reyes Salazar family refuses to let their dead turn into nameless ticks on the execution-meter. They’ve made it difficult, if not impossible, for the government to avoid carrying out at least a superficial investigation into the murders. So the government is falling back on an old stand-by: blame the victims. To some extent, the strategy worked in Josefina’s murder. Because the government accused (but never convicted) Josefina’s son, Miguel Angel, of having worked for the Juarez cartel, even the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission’s de la Rosa Hickerson believed at one point that the most likely culprit in Josefina’s murder was the Sinaloa cartel.

“Before, they only applied sanctions to those persons who were involved in the drug trafficking business,” he explained following Josefina’s murder. “But starting in July [2009] we’ve been warning that they’ve extended their war to the destruction of the families of those who had illicit or licit business with the opposing cartel. In Josefina’s case, a son (Miguel Angel) worked as a mechanic for La Linea [of the Juarez cartel].”

The appearance of “narco-messages” on the bodies of Elias, Magdalena, and Luisa has given the Chihuahua state government the opportunity to wipe its hands completely of the investigation into the murders. Assistant Attorney General González Nicolás says that his investigation points to the Sinaloa cartel as the most likely culprits of the triple homicide. Therefore, he argues, the case falls into federal jurisdiction, not his state’s. “It’s clear to us that organized crime participated [in the murders],” he argued. “There’s no doubt, because of the data and proof that we have.” In the meantime, he told the press his office is investigating the Reyes Salazar family to see if they have any criminal records.

The Reyes Salazar family scoffed at the suggestion that the three victims worked in organized crime. Elias and Luisa “were handicapped, they needed help walking. How could they possibly believe that [they worked for organized crime], if their whole lives they humbly worked in their bakery?” The family has insinuated that the narco-message, which claimed that Magdalena, Elias, and Luisa were murdered because they collaborated with a drug cartel, was planted after the bodies were dumped. They say that the witnesses who discovered the bodies alongside the road told them that they never saw the narco-message. “We will not permit—as often happens—that the name of this family of activists be tarnished by framing this unfortunate event as [the result of] a supposed relation with organized crime,” the family said in a statement.

While it’s still not clear who killed the six Reyes Salazars, the family and international human rights organizations agree that the government is responsible. The Reyes Salazars are demanding the resignation of González Nicolás, “who is directly responsible for these crimes against humanity, due to his inability to carry out his responsibilities and for not guaranteeing the life and security of the family and the people of Juarez.”

The government’s obvious indifference to the plight of the Reyes Salazar family was highlighted by the speed in which the government says it solved ICE agent Jaime Zapata’s murder. The government’s priorities weren’t lost on Marisela, who said, “In a couple of days they caught Agent Zapata's murderer because he's from the United States. My siblings’ murders need to be solved. Those responsible must be caught and tried.”

Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, lashed out at the government for failing to protect Chihuahua human rights defenders. It noted that Sara Salazar and Malú Garcia, whose homes were burnt down while they were on hunger strike, were granted protection measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2008. Human Rights Watch argues that federal and state authorities did not comply with their obligations to protect Garcia and Salazar and their families. Had the government complied, perhaps Salazar’s children, grandson, and daughter-in-law—all of whom were murdered while she was under IACHR protective measures—would still be alive.

“Even though it’s not possible to confirm that the authorities are actively complicit with organized crime,”argued Garcia, “it can be said that they are [complicit] by omission, because they have not advanced in investigations into various attacks against human rights defenders, whom they’ve even blamed for attacks.”

Reyes Salazar family spokesman Adrián Fuentes Luján agrees with Garcia. “The Prosecutor’s Office is limited and incapable of combating the powerful criminal group that harasses the Reyes Salazar family,” he argues. “The State is the only one responsible for the massacre that’s being committed against them.”

Mexico "Unwilling to Comply" With International Court Sentences in Military Rape Cases

Plaintiffs Inés Fernández
Ortega (left) and Valentina
Rosendo Cantú.

by Kristin Bricker, Security Sector Reform Resource Centre

Human rights lawyers accuse the Mexican government of noncompliance with recent Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) rulings in the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, indigenous women who were raped by soldiers in separate incidents in Guerrero in 2002.  In a press conference last week, the lawyers who represent the women stated: “The Mexican State has not demonstrated with concrete actions that it plans to fully comply with the sentences.” Mexico is a signatory to the American Convention on Human Rights and has accepted the IACtHR’s optional jurisdiction, meaning that it is legally obligated to comply with the IACtHR’s rulings.

Both cases, the Court determined that soldiers raped the women, constituting an act of torture. Furthermore, the Court ruled that the Mexican government violated the victims’ right to a fair and impartial trial when it investigated and tried the cases in the military justice system instead of the civilian justice system.  The Court argued that the use of the military justice system led to “a state of absolute impunity.”  Furthermore, in both cases the military revictimized the women by forcing them to recount the details of the attacks over and over again as part of its “investigations.”

The IACtHR’s rulings aim to assure the justice is served in the cases, that the victims receive reparations and rehabilitation, and that the government take steps to ensure that similar abuses are not repeated. Therefore, the IACtHR ordered Mexico to:

• try the women’s cases in civilian courts and punish the perpetrators;
• levy administrative sanctions against public servants responsible for irregularities in the investigations;
• modify Article 57 of the Code of Military Justice to exclude human rights violations from military jurisdiction;
• create a legal mechanism that allows affected persons to challenge the military’s jurisdiction in their cases;
• admit its responsibility for abuses committed against the two women in a public event in which the President of Mexico offers an apology in the presence of high-ranking local, state, federal officials; that the event be translated into the women’s native language; and that the women and their families play a central role in planning the event;
• publish specific paragraphs of the IACtHR sentences in Spanish and Me’paa (the victims’ native language) in the government’s Official Diary of the Federation, and in other media outlets if the victim so desires;
• offer adequate medical and psychological rehabilitation to the victims and their families;
• implement a human rights course for all military personnel of all ranks that addresses gender, indigenous rights, and limits the military should respect when interacting with civilians;
• offer educational scholarships to the victims and their children until they earn undergraduate or technical degrees if they so chose;
• establish a community center that promotes women’s rights in Fernández Ortega’s town;
• and pay court costs and damages to the victims and their families for lost wages and emotional suffering.

Now, four months after the IACtHR published and officially notified the Mexican government of the rulings, lawyers argue that the government’s noncompliance is obvious.  Santiago Aguirre, a lawyer for the Guerrero-based human rights organization Tlachinollan, one of the groups that argued the cases in the IACtHR, points out that the government has still not moved Fernández Ortega and Rosendo Cantú’s cases into the civilian judicial system.  Furthermore, President Felipe Calderón’s recent legislative proposal to remove cases of rape, torture, and forced disappearances from the military’s jurisdiction was criticized by human rights organizations as a “cosmetic gesture” that would bring Mexico “no closer to complying with… the binding orders of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.”

Tlachinollan’s director, Abel Barrera, reports that just one day before the government was set to inaugurate working groups that would organize Mexico’s compliance with theFernández Ortega and Rosendo Cantú rulings, the Ministry of the Interior unilaterally cancelled and indefinitely postponed the event.  “There we can see the authorities’ distain, neglect, and lack of commitment to compliance,” argues Barrera.

Of all of the actions Mexico must take in order to comply with the rulings, the only one the government has acted upon is financial compensation for the victims, which Congress has included in its 2011 budget.  “While this is included in the sentences,” says Aguirre, “this [money] is really a secondary issue for the victims.”

Mexico has also filed a request for interpretation of the judgments, a legal remedy that exists to clarify any ambiguous portions of IACtHR sentences. According to Aguirre, “There is a very common practice in which states present requests for interpretation, when in reality they are attempts to modify the ruling. They have never worked. The Court’s rulings are definitive and cannot be appealed.”  Aguirre says that Mexico’s request for interpretation questions the Court’s assertion that it was soldiers who raped the two women.  “This is a very clear sign that the state is not willing to comply with the sentence, that the state questions facts that have already been proven during the legal proceedings, and that the state, even though the facts have already been established, continues to question Inés and Valentina’s testimonies.”

Fernández Ortega et al. and Rosendo Cantú et al. v. Mexico are two of four IACtHR rulings against Mexico in just over a year.  In November 2009, the IACtHR ruled that the Mexican military disappeared Rosendo Radilla Pacheco in 1974. In December 2010, the Court ruled that the military arbitrarily detained and tortured two prominent environmental activists in 1999. In all four cases, the IACtHR ordered the Mexican government to reform the Code of Military Justice to assure that all human rights crimes are tried in civilian courts.  The four rulings have led to unprecedented international and domestic pressure on the Mexican government to reform the long-criticized Code of Military Justice and strip the military of the impunity it has enjoyed for over seventy years.