Frontera NorteSur 2006

FEATURE ARTICLES

  The Ciudad Juarez Border Social Forum: Cross-Border Movements Growing

In response to a call that "another world is possible without borders" about 1000 people gathered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez , Chihuahua , from October 12-15, 2006 . Hailing from Mexico, the United States and other nations, representatives from immigrant rights, environmental justice, campesino, ex-bracero, Chicano, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific Islander, left, and human rights organizations attended the first-ever Border Social Forum (BSF). A delegation from Cuba 's National Assembly also observed the events. BSF organizer Ruben Solis, coordinator of the San Antonio-based Center for Justice, said the event built on years of cross-border movements to "bring together all that's happened before in a new phase of development."

Kat Rodriguez, coordinator of the Tucson-based Human Rights Coalition, captured the concerns of many of the delegates at the meeting when she detailed migrant deaths in the dangerous border crossing zone between Arizona and Sonora . Rodriguez said her group has documented the deaths of 698 people in the Arizona-Sonora border region during the last three years alone. According to Rodriguez, 317 victims remain unidentified, with 17 remains so deteriorated that it is impossible "to know if they were male or female."

The human rights activist said stepped-up controls are confining previously frequent border crossers to "the golden cage" of the United States and encouraging more men to send for their families. "Another dynamic we've seen in the last three years is an increase in the deaths of women and children," Rodriguez said, adding that the death toll of border crossers has risen so greatly that last year Pima County was forced to rent a refrigerator truck to deposit bodies because the local medical examiner ran out of storage room.

Upwards of 4,000 migrants have died along the length of the entire US-Mexico border while trying to enter the United States without papers during the last 13 years, according to estimates from human rights organizations.

Contending that the failure of market-driven economic policies in Latin America to raise living standards and provide decent-paying jobs is spurring an increasingly fatal exodus from the South to the North, Rodriguez proposed the reexamination of the economic status quo. "I think the first thing we need is to demand a renegotiation of the free trade agreements, NAFTA and CAFTA" Rodriguez said. "Nobody asks why people are coming here."

During the Border Social Forum, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Ciudad Juarez to protest the planned construction of new walls on the US side of the border, a project which activists contend will force more desperate migrants into hostile weather zones like the so-called "corridor of death" east of the Yuma Valley . Before one day, a rainbow suddenly bloomed from the stormy border skies over the marchers.

Blasting the project as the "Wall of Death," the protestors wound their way through the border city's downtown femicide zone where dozens of young women have vanished. Filing by the pink cross monument set up to honor femicide victims and distributing leaflets in memory of 22-year-old schoolteacher Edith Aranda Longoria, who disappeared in May 2005, the marchers partially closed the Santa Fe Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, before halting at the US borderline to hear short speeches delivered in support of immigrant workers and against prevailing economic policies.

Justice for veterans of the 1942-64 Bracero Program of Mexican guestworkers who worked in US fields and on railways was one prominent theme addressed at the BSF. Former bracero Filemon Ruiz Martinez, who labored in the sugar beet fields of Michigan in the late 1950s, recalled that he was paid "very little money" for lots of hard work. Early this year the Mexican Congress approved pay-outs to former braceros who had money withheld from their paychecks by the Mexican government decades ago for a supposed savings account. While some ex-braceros received payments of about $3,700 dollars this year, many others like Ruiz complain that they are still waiting for their money. "We understand that they gave 125 ex-braceros in Chihuahua their money, but they have given us absolutely nothing," Ruiz said.

A Border Reality Tour

Helping kick-off the BSF was a "reality tour" of Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industrial sites. Former maquiladora plant worker and tour guide Veronica Leyva of the Mexico Solidarity Network led two bus loads of visitors through the dusty and flood-prone streets of the Felipe Angeles, Anapra and Lomas de Poleo colonias. Situated in the high desert where company buses transport workers back and forth to the factories far below in the city, Lomas de Poleo is the focus of a land ownership dispute between long-time residents and members of the prominent Zaragoza family. The once-marginal shantytown is now a potentially lucrative parcel of real estate abutting the zone where the state governments of Chihuahua and New Mexico plan the new binational-border city of San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa .

Monitored by two guard towers that rise above the desert shrub, as well as the vigilance of two municipal policemen parked in patrol cars nearby, dozens of visitors listened to two residents accuse authorities of permitting a campaign of violence and intimidation against them to proceed unimpeded. Residents charge that the land conflict is behind house burnings and three deaths in Lomas de Poleo during the last two years, including the deaths of two young children in a mysterious fire. Displaying gunshot wounds, one young man said his friend Luis Alberto Guerrero was killed and another companion wounded in a confrontation last year with alleged Zaragoza gunmen. "The people who were responsible for this act are roaming free," he charged. "The law doesn't do anything."

In the 1990s, Lomas de Poleo gained international notoriety as one of the clandestine cemeteries where the multiple bodies of young female murder victims were discovered. Of the eight crosses erected in honor of the murder victims, only two were visible by the time of the 2006 BSF. One of the remaining crosses was defaced by gang-related graffiti.

Rambling out of the rough hills and back into the glitzy flatlands, the tour buses followed the long commute that maquiladora workers from Lomas de Poleo endure each day as they clock in another shift on the global assembly line. In contrast to the rustic living conditions they witnessed in Ciudad Juarez 's colonias, the BSF delegates also saw the newly redone Paseo del Triunfo de la Republica boulevard that whisks traffic pass the US fast food franchises, strip malls and trendy bars and cafes which define the other Ciudad Juarez . Halting in front of the Antonio J. Bermudez Industrial Park , tour guide Leyva compared the bustling side of her city with the forgotten one, and explained the wages and working conditions she said many maquiladora employees are forced to accept.

"It's important for you to see the channeling of economic resources by the government to the big industries, big capital. This channeling of resources has not permitted the development of the popular colonias," Leyva affirmed. "I don't know if you've noticed that we've passed through big avenues that are well maintained and preserved," Leyva continued. "It's not a coincidence that these avenues have been solely constructed for the purpose of linking together the 18 industrial parks of the city so commerce flows freely to the international bridges."

Yvonne Stratford and Gerda Graham closely paid attention to the tour scenes. The two women belong to Low Income Families Fighting Together, a non-governmental organization struggling to preserve low-income housing in Miami 's African American community of Liberty City . Appalled at the conditions in Ciudad Juarez 's colonias, Stratford and Graham stressed the need for people to organize. "Don't think (anybody) is going to give it to you," Stratford remarked. "You got to go out there and fight for it."

Convened just weeks after summer flooding provoked widespread destruction in Ciudad Juarez , the BSF featured one session in which residents of the Luis Olague colonia and other poor neighborhoods reiterated their complaints about uncertain relocation plans; the theft of flood relief aid; inadequate official support for reconstruction, and the spending of public money on monuments instead of flood control. Some explained how they now suffer anxiety attacks every time the skies thunder and the rain starts dropping.

Although the 2006 floods in Ciudad Juarez were especially bad, this year wasn't the first time colonia residents have experienced disaster from the rains. Elizabeth Flores, the director of Pastoral Obrera, a Catholic Church affiliated worker advocacy organization that assists flood victims, framed the disaster issue as ultimately one of human rights. "(Flooding damage) wasn't unpredictable, " Flores contended. "It was a lack of respect for the human rights of all residents of the city not to invest..."

Flood victims reported an additional problem that emerged after the deluge: the spread of health-threatening molds inside homes and stagnant water pools on the streets outside that provide prime mosquito-breeding grounds. "We cleaned and disinfected," shrugged Luis Olague resident Maria de Jesus Avila . "But what are we going to do?"

Action Plans

After hearing from grassroots groups, the BSF participants issued a statement that called for sweeping changes in economic, immigration, justice, environmental, gender, and security policies on both sides of the border. Comparing the fate of Louisiana flood victims in 2005 to those in Ciudad Juarez a year later, the statement denounced what it called "the classism and racism" of the authorities' "late, timid and limited" response to the flooding disasters in the United States and Mexico.

Denouncing border walls from the US-Mexico frontier to Palestine-Israel, Border Social Forum attendees expressed solidarity with the Oaxaca strikers, Pasta de Conchos mine disaster victims' families ex-braceros, and 5 Cuban prisoners currently held in the United States . They also called for an international group of observers to be present at Ciudad Juarez's embattled Lomas de Poleo colonia in order to "guarantee protection and security" for residents.

A central demand of organizers was to remove agriculture from world free trade agreements and that basic grains in Mexico be exempted from the tariff tear-down scheduled in the North American Free Trade Agreement for 2008. Picking up on last spring's immigrant worker strike and boycott in the United States , support for a similar action planned for May 1, 2007 was declared.

Organizers of the BSF came from many different groups in Mexico and the United States , including the Southwest Workers Union, Border Agricultural Workers Union, Pastoral Obrera, Cetlac, Southwest Organizing Project, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, Democratic Farmers Front of Chihuahua, Grassroots Global Justice, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and CISO, among many others.

Modeled after the World Social Forum initiated in Porte Alegre Brazil in 2001, the BSF is a prelude to the first US Social Forum scheduled for 2007 in Atlanta , Georgia . Tens of thousands of people have attended the world and regional social forums. Veterans of the Ciudad Juarez gathering plan to take their movement to upcoming regional and international social forums, as well as to other events like the 2007 Border Governor's Conference in Nogales, Sonora, where an "alternative border people's summit" will be held.

Organizer Ruben Solis said that participating social organizations will likewise attend big NGO meetings slated for Puerto Rico , Venezuela and Bolivia in the coming months. One important achievement of the Ciudad Juarez meeting, Solis said, was a call to organize a Mexican farmer's social forum in Chihuahua , Mexico . At the same time, plans are in the works to create an alternative border media network. In terms of developing solutions, Solis credited the Ciudad Juarez event for putting a wide array of social movements on the path of "convergence." instead of "competition." "(The BSF) carried out what we intended in terms of creating convergence between the movements," he said. "It has a multiplying effect, it's very positive."

GATHERING CHALLENGES THE BORDER FEMICIDE COVER-UP

In the balmy winds of late March, a bare lawn at the New Mexico State University campus in Las Cruces was transformed into a field of hundreds of pink crosses. Adorned with handmade clothing and pictures to symbolize the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico, the crosses were put up by community members and organizers of the Las Cruces-based Friends of Juarez Women as a kick-off to the three-day J. Paul Taylor Symposium on Social Justice convened to promote justice for the more than 500 women and girls murdered or disappeared in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City since 1993.

The event came at a strategic crossroads in the justice movement: While the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office (PJGE), long charged with investigating the killings, is paying more attention to murders related to domestic violence and assisting in efforts to locate some missing women and identify the remains of unidentified corpses, impunity reigns in the cases of scores of raped and slain women.

“It's true there are 177 guilty sentences for the nearly 400 murders,” said Guadalupe Morfin, the head of the federal Commission for the Prevention and Elimination of Violence Against Women in Ciudad Juarez, “but there is still a layer of impunity in emblematic cases like the cotton field case.”

Choking back tears, Ciudad Juarez resident Malu Garcia told a crowd of hundreds gathered in a university auditorium how her then-four-year-old daughter was watching cartoons on television one day in 2001 only to see the corpse of the child's beloved 17-year-old aunt, Lilia Alejandra Garcia, suddenly flashed on the screen. The teenager had been brutally tortured, raped and strangled. According to Malu Garcia, the little girl suffered an emotional shock. Garcia contended that valuable evidence was lost in her sister's case, despite FBI-generated leads. Subsequently, she said a suspect personally warned her to shut up or suffer a similar fate as her sister.

"I am always going to stand up, not just because of Alejandra or because I have a daughter," Garcia vowed, "but because I am a woman and as a woman it pains me all that those women who have suffered, and I don't want this to continue happening in my country..."

NEW LEGAL ROUTES TO JUSTICE

Sadness, frustration and determination fill the voices of family members of murdered and missing women who have spent years struggling to find justice for their loved ones. Sacrificing normal lives, many report threats from anonymous intimidators. Denied justice, some family members and their supporters now seek legal redress in international forums. In frequently emotional testimonies, family members and women's advocates spoke in Las Cruces about lines of investigation that implicate members of law enforcement, organized crime and the business community.

Waving a paper, Eva Arce said she is confident that the recent decision of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States to accept the case of her long disappeared daughter, Silvia Arce, is a step forward in her struggle. A jewelry and food saleswoman, Arce's daughter vanished in March 1998 along with a friend, Griselda Mares.

Undertaking an exhaustive investigation, Eva Arce pinpointed three officers of the former Federal Judicial Police as the likely culprits in the disappearances. Arce said she later tracked one of the men to a jail in Veracruz state, but the suspect has not been charged in the disappearance of Silvia. The IACHR is likely to issue non-binding recommendations to Mexican authorities in the Arce case, which could then move to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights if officials do not follow the recommendations. Rulings from the Inter-American Court are obligatory for member states like Mexico .

Arizona State University Professor William Simmons urged relatives to consider using an old US law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, as a tool of justice. The law allows foreign nationals to sue officials from their own countries in US federal courts for violations of the law of nations or US treaties. The act has been successfully used in the United States against officials from Paraguay and other countries.

Focusing on the torture suffered by women like Lilia Alejandra Garcia, Professor Simmons said the Mexican government is complicit in sanctioning an internationally-prohibited practice by failing to conduct proper investigations. "So I believe there could be a case in federal courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act," he added.

In the Mexican court system, the parents of Minerva Torres, an 18-year-old resident of Chihuahua City who disappeared in 2001 and was found dead in 2003, is pursuing criminal charges against former Governor Patricio Martinez, ex-State Attorney General Jesus "Chito" Solis and other officials for concealing their daughter's body. For two years, Torres' corpse was stored in state police headquarters without notifying the victim's family.

Torres' body was discovered in July 2003 on the Cuernos de la Luna mountain near state police headquarters, only feet away from the spot where another rape murder victim, Neyra Azucena Cervantes, was recovered two days earlier. Along with Cervantes and Torres, the bodies of 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar and another unidentified victim were found at separate times in the same burial ground. At least three of the victims had attended private computer schools in Chihuahua City . “Like in Ciudad Juarez , we're talking about a clandestine cemetery,” said attorney Lucha Castro of the Human Rights Center.

Filed months ago, the case against Martinez and company is currently in the Chihuahua justice system, but the two former, high-level officials have yet to render their testimonies, according to Minerva's father, Francisco Torres. “It seems to me, there is no political will to try the ex-governor,” contended Cas