Frontera NorteSur Oct - Dec 2009

A caravan aimed at upholding women’s rights and stopping violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and Mexico is headed to the US border. Organized by Women in Black along with other women’s and human rights organizations, the caravan set off from Mexico City on November 10.

Prominent Chihuahua City women’s activist Irma Campos Madrigal spoke to about 100 people gathered in the Mexican capital as the Exodus for the Life of Women prepared to embark on its journey.

“The great distance between Mexico City and the old Paso del Norte is shorter than the breadth of impunity,” Campos said, “but never greater than the demand for justice for women murdered in the city in which (Benito Juarez), present here today, and the lay Republic, found refuge in during the 19th century.”

The Exodus for the Life of Women promotes a 10-point program which calls for finding missing women and clearing up murders, defending sexual and reproductive rights, advancing gender equality in the political system, demilitarizing the country, and ending military impunity in human rights violations against civilians. Women in Black and its allies are urging local legislatures in the states they pass through to codify femicide as a crime.

On the long road north, the caravan has stopped in several cities to hold public protests and document violence against women.

In the central Mexican city of Queretaro, caravan participants were present in a demonstration demanding justice for Maria Fernanda Loranca Aguilar, a 17-year-old local university student who was found murdered with signs of sexual violence in late October. At the Autonomous University of Queretaro, the caravaneers painted a mural that included the names of Ciudad Juarez femicide victims.

Reached briefly while marching near the border of San Luis Potosi and Aguascalientes, Chihuahua human rights lawyer Luz Castro told Frontera NorteSur the caravan should reach Ciudad Juarez on November 23, two days prior to the celebration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. In Ciudad Juarez, caravan organizers plan to deliver a big bell constructed from keys collected over the years in memory of femicide victims, Castro said.

In Aguascalientes, the marchers faced down local police reluctant to allow the bell onto a section of the city’s main square, Plaza Patria. Gathered in the city which was the scene of Mexico’s historic 1917 Constitutional Convention, mothers of murdered and disappeared women recounted their suffering and struggles.

“There is a lot of pain on this road,” said Norma Ledezma, mother of 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar murdered in Chihuahua City back in March 2003. “It is very tiresome, and our strength is extinguished,” Ledezma said. “Nonetheless, the position of a mother is that I am going to struggle until the end of my life to find the murderers of my daughter.”

Eva Arce, mother of Silvia Arce who disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 1998, also delivered a message of persistence and resistance. Arce pledged that the mothers on the caravan will aid all mothers of victims in the states visited by the caravan.

Surrounded by wooden pink crosses assembled on Plaza Patria, other speakers addressed violence against women in Aguascalientes. As if delivering a huge wake-up call to Mexico and the world, the bell lugged by the caravan rang out after each presentation. The event concluded with the singing of “Ni Una Mas,” the anthem of the Mexican anti-femicide movement.

As it nears the borderlands, the caravan will retrace the route of a similar event in 2002, when Women in Black and others traveled from Chihuahua City to Ciudad Juarez in protest of the femicides. Now, more than seven years and hundreds of murders later, most crimes remain unpunished and the killing of women in Ciudad Juarez is at an all-time high.

The Exodus for the Life of Women coincides with a flurry of activity around the Mexico femicides on the international front. At a meeting in Washington, D.C. earlier this month, representatives of Mexican human rights groups requested that the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) once again send an investigator to Ciudad Juarez.

In 2002, the IACHR visited Ciudad Juarez and issued a series of recommendations to the Mexican government.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Parliament is expected to review this week any progress that has been made since the elected body passed a resolution two years ago calling on governments in Mexico and Central America to protect women from violence and sanction the perpetrators of femicide.

Also in November, all eyes are on Costa Rica, where the Inter-American Court for Human Rights could render a historic decision holding the Mexican state accountable for the slayings of Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez and Claudia Ivette Gonzalez. The three young women were found murdered in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001.

A recent report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission claimed that the three levels of the Mexican government spent tens of millions of dollars from 1993 to April 2009 in response to the women’s homicides. According to the federal agency, the money went for special prosecutors, new institutions and related expenses.

Despite the alphabet soup of agencies brought into the field, women’s homicides have broken all records in Ciudad Juarez this year. Through mid-November, more than 120 women were reported slain in the violence-battered city. Unlike previous years, when gender and domestic violence were clear motives in numerous killings, most of the crimes this year appear to be connected to the ongoing narco-war between rival cartels.

However, gender violence and gangland rivalries could be merging in an increasingly sadistic synergy. Late last week, for example, two young women said to be in their late teens or early twenties were reportedly tortured and possibly sexually assaulted before being dragged outside of a house in the Senderos de San Isidro neighborhood where a party had been underway and then set on fire. The house in which the party was held was then torched in the fashionable style of warring gangs.

Because of indications of sex-related violence, the case was turned over to the women’s homicide prosecutor. Earlier, in October, the body of a beheaded woman was found on a Ciudad Juarez street. Four execution-style slayings of young women also bloodied Chihuahua City in recent days.

Differing statistics from Mexico’s National Defense Ministry and the Office of the Federal Attorney General report that somewhere between 3,726 and more than 4,000 women were slain in all of Mexico from December 2006 to October 2009. Domestic violence was blamed for the vast majority of the killings, but there was a clear trend of organized criminal activity as the culprit of crimes.

Some officials even attributed murders to human traffickers who killed victims resisting sexual exploitation. Mexican states registering the highest number of women’s murders were Mexico, Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas, Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, and Sinaloa, in that order.

Notably, because of smaller overall populations, violence against women was higher-than-average in the northern border states of Baja California, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.

In a new book, Ciudad Juarez sociologist Julia Monarrez Fragoso explores the various causes and patterns of gender violence in her city. Among the roots of violence, Monarrez contends, are an industrialization based on existing gender and class discrimination, localized cultures of violence, drug trafficking and organized crime and, above all, the lack of rule of law.

According to Monarrez, “The demands for justice by relatives, by organized groups of women and feminists have not been heard by the State.”

Commenting on the Exodus for the Life of Women, Chihuahua state legislator Victor Quintana wrote that Women in Black is attacking “apathetic attitudes, numbed consciences and normalized perceptions that the murders of women are something ordinary.” The November 2009 caravan, Quintana added, proposes to shake up the nation and refocus its future on “a new reality built by all, women and men, of bountiful rights and of bountiful life.”

Additional sources: La Jornada (Aguascalientes edition), November 15, 2009. Article by Susana Rodriguez. Lapolaka.com, November 11 and 13, 2009. El Diario de Juarez, November 11 and 13, 2009. Norte, November 7 and 11, 2009. Articles by Felix A. Gonzalez and Herika Martinez Prado. El Universal, October 30, 2009; November 13 and 14, 2009. Articles by Juan Jose Arreola and Luis Carlos Cano.

La Jornada, November 13, 14 and 16, 2009. Articles by Israel Davila, Mariana Chavez, Miroslava Breach, Ruben Villalpando, Gustavo Castillo Garcia, and correspondents. Cimacnoticias.com, September 11, 2009; October 2 and 20, 2009. November 6 and 13, 2009. Articles by Paulina Rivas Ayala, Anayeli Garcia Martinez and editorial staff. El Paso Times, October 12, 2009. Article by Diana Washington Valdez.

A Catholic Church-run migrant shelter in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila is the target of escalating attacks. Every day, Casa del Migrante Posada Belen in the state capital of Saltillo serves between 80-100 mainly Central American migrants headed to the United States. But since last month, staff and property have been busy responding to aggression, harassment and death threats.

Father Pedro Pantoja Arreola, shelter coordinator, reported that threats against his person reached a fever pitch one evening last week when he received 50 anonymous telephone calls in the space of several hours. According to Pantoja, he could hear no words spoken on the other end of the line-only breathing.

Earlier, on October 11, a shelter worker observed a group of about 12 people destroying an electricity meter and cutting off power. Later, on October 25, a group of unidentified persons broke windows and destroyed an electrical transformer, again shutting off power to the building. The vandals reportedly shouted insults at the occupants inside and warned them to leave the premises. On October 28, yet another group attempted to forcibly enter the shelter, according to a letter from a network of 40 Mexican human rights organizations directed at high Mexican officials.

In the wake of the attacks, Saltillo Bishop Raul Vera accused the local National Action Party (PAN) of creating a climate of hostility around the presence of migrants. In particular, Bishop Vera singled out PAN state legislator Carlos Orta for allegedly orchestrating a “campaign of xenophobia” against Central American migrants.

Supported by other state lawmakers, Orta is pushing a legislative initiative that urges the Mexican Congress to modify immigration legislation and give Mexico’s Interior Ministry, an agency responsible for internal security, authority to regulate church-run shelters. Orta spearheaded the initiative after a Honduran immigrant was accused of killing a local businessperson on September 30.

In his preamble to the proposed legislation, Orta made reference to the “brutal murder of a citizen at the hands of a foreigner.” The PAN representative said the “eternal conflict” between victims and criminals was evidenced by the September 30 slaying of the Saltillo merchant. According to Orta, migrant shelters should toe the line with National Migration Institute (INM) rules and regulations governing the presence of foreigners in Mexico.

“It’s regrettable and condemnable that someone who should be taking advantage of his position to do good is instead committing injustices,” Bishop Vera said of Orta. “We citizens don’t pay (politicians) high salaries for this.”

Stretching from Chiapas to Chihuahua, church-sponsored migrant centers provide food, medical attention and shelter to thousands of Central Americans traveling to the United States. On the border, the facilities also give assistance to undocumented migrants deported from the US.

Despite the recession and tougher US border controls, the shelters continue welcoming large numbers of people from both directions.

Jesus Gerardo Lopez Macias, Saltillo INM delegate, said many Latin Americans, especially adolescents, keep making their way north. In Ciudad Juarez, the Casa del Migrante reported receiving 6,000 deportees through October 31 of this year-a sharp increase over 2008 when the shelter assisted 3,500 migrants for the entire year.

In the Saltillo region, tensions and troubles have accompanied the migrant surge in recent years. In 2002, two Honduran migrants, Delmer Alexander Pacheco and a man known only as Jose David, were murdered near train tracks. According to the INM’S Lopez, young migrants face ongoing dangers from sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

As in other regions of Mexico, organized bands of traffickers have increasingly attempted to channel the migrant stream in Coahuila under their control.

In response to the incidents at Casa del Migrante Posada Belen, the Migration Forum network as well as Amnesty International issued statements condemning the attacks and demanding urgent actions by Mexican authorities to safeguard the shelter and its staff.

Until now, protective measures recommended by the National Human Rights Commission, which were accepted by the federal Public Security Ministry, have not been effective in eliminating threats to the shelter, the Migration Forum charged.

Sources: La Jornada, November 3, 4 and 6, 2009. Articles by Leopoldo Ramos and Emir Olivares Alonso. Zocalo.com.mx, October 27 and November 6, 2009. Articles by Paola A. Praga and El Universal news service. Norte, November 3, 2009. Article by Claudia Ivonne Sanchez.

The Storm over Mexico’s New Attorney General

If Arturo Chavez Chavez is confirmed as Mexico’s new Attorney General, the lawyer from the state of Chihuahua will be in a pivotal role to influence, steer and direct the binational, anti-drug Merida Initiative between the United States and Mexico, as well as an expanded version of the drug war waged with Canada and other nations.

As Mexico’s chief drug law enforcer, Chavez will be in charge of federal prosecutions for human trafficking, women’s murders, product piracy and environmental crimes, among others.

But President Calderon’s nomination of Chavez to replace Eduardo Medina-Mora, has stirred up a storm of controversy.

Women’s, human rights organizations and members of opposition political parties reject Chavez. They accuse the controversial lawyer of covering up the mass murders of women and the disappearances of many men in Ciudad Juarez as well as helping to fabricate a scapegoat, the late Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, in the border femicides.

“This is a bad piece of news,” said Paula Flores, mother of 1998 Ciudad Juarez femicide victim Sagrario Gonzalez. “It could be more of a political favor, because Chavez is a member of the PAN (National Action Party) and President Calderon is a member of the PAN.”

Mexican press accounts allege Chavez concealed from the public a series of 1996-97 armed robberies in Chihuahua that could be linked to the PAN and a clandestine, ultra-conservative organization, El Yunque, that promotes a Catholic theocracy as the solution to Mexico’s crisis.

Some opponents accuse Chavez of later having a hand in the 2006 repression against anti-government protestors in the state of Oaxaca, when he held a key post in Mexico’s Interior Ministry under the late Carlos Abascal during the administration of Vicente Fox. Multiple Mexican media reports indentified Abascal as a member of El Yunque.

A graduate of the Tec de Monterrey’s Chihuahua branch, Chavez is associated with a Mexico City law firm that includes onetime PAN presidential candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos and current Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Montt.

Informed about Chavez’s nomination by a reporter, longtime women’s rights activist Vicky Caraveo of Women for Juarez simply said, “Jesus, I can’t believe it.”

>From 1992 to 1998, Chavez variously served as the deputy state attorney general and then state attorney general for Chihuahua in addition to a stint as the delegate for the federal attorney general’s office in the same state.

In his different capacities, Chavez was among the first state law enforcement officials to oversee the investigations of numerous sex-related slayings in Ciudad Juarez as well as the kidnappings of men (and some women) said to have fallen out with the dominant drug cartel. Both the women’s and men’s murder investigations were characterized by indifference, irregularities, lost files and evidence, threats against victims’ family members, and no credible prosecutions, in spite of credible leads.

In 1998, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) issued its Recommendation #44/98 that held Chavez and other Chihuahua state officials responsible for bungling the femicide investigations. Later probes by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others reached similar conclusions.

In another matter, Chavez’s office was also found responsible by the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of indigenous members of the Monterde ejido who were brutally attacked by the Chihuahua state police while conducting an anti-logging protest in 1997.

Although the CNDH recommended investigating and sanctioning Chavez and other responsible state officials for dereliction of duty in the Ciudad Juarez cases, then-PAN Chihuahua Governor Francisco Barrio criticized the report as politically-inspired and took no action.

Today, Barrio is Mexico’s ambassador to Canada and will work with Chavez again if the latter is confirmed as the new attorney general.

Chavez’s nomination almost single-handedly revived the largely dormant anti-femicide movement in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua. In Ciudad Juarez, mothers of femicide victims organized a public protest last week, while in Chihuahua City, Women in Black and other groups staged a similar demonstration. Scores of Mexican human rights and women’s organizations have voiced opposition to the nomination. Relatives of femicide victims and their supporters announced plans to travel to Mexico City, where Chavez could render testimony as part of his confirmation process in the Senate on Tuesday, September 15.

In a letter to the president of the Mexican Senate’s justice commission, Marisela Ortiz, the head of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, a femicide victims’ relatives group based in Ciudad Juarez, took sharp exception to the Chavez nomination. The appointment, Ortiz contended, would enshrine continued impunity in human rights violations and represent an insult to national and international human rights mechanisms.

News of the nomination quickly crossed the Atlantic, where the Green fraction of the European Parliament issued a statement requesting that the Mexican Senate deny Chavez the attorney general’s post. Spanish Green Raul Romeva, who authored the European Parliament’s 1997 resolution against femicide in Mexico and Central America, said awarding the attorney general’s post to Chavez would constitute a negative signal about the “seriousness the government of Mexico in combating impunity.” Approving Chavez, Romeva added, would put “the fox in charge of the hen house.”

Until now, there has been no peep about the Chavez nomination from the US Congress, which passed its own anti-femicide resolution in 2006 and just released in $214 million in Merida Initiative funds.

Chavez’s nomination comes at politically-sensitive moments for Mexico. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is expected to render a judgment soon in a 2001 Ciudad Juarez femicide case that could result in a mandatory order for greater federal involvement in clearing up the women’s murders. The Mexican attorney general’s office is also pursuing a controversial murder case against a suspect in the slaying of US journalist Brad Will during the 2006 repression in Oaxaca. A US-based group of Will supporters, Friends of Brad Will, regards the prosecution as another instance of cover-up and fabrication.

Reaction to the Chavez nomination from the Mexican political class has been mixed. While making no public comments about his controversial nomination so far, Chavez was staunchly defended by members of his own party. Chihuahua Senator Maria Teresa Ortuno said Chavez possessed all the right stuff for combating corruption and organized crime. Jose Gonzalez Morfin, general-secretary of the PAN, defended Chavez’s ‘90s stint as Chihuahua’s state top cop.

“I believe he was a good state attorney general, even in an issue as complex and with such international impact as the murdered women of Juarez,” Gonzalez said.

In the old days of absolute presidential power, the Chavez nomination would have sailed through without further adieu. But the Senate, which must ratify the nomination under Mexican law, is now dominated by opposition parties, especially the former ruling and resurgent PRI. Mexican senators from the PRI,.PRD, PT, and Convergencia parties expressed a mixture of surprise, disgust and wait-and-see.

Chavez, however, has supporters within the ranks of the PRI, such as Fernando Rodriguez Moreno, coordinator of the PRI group in the Chihuahua state legislature, who called Chavez “good people.” Despite the femicides and the Monterde incident, there was no reason Chavez should not be approved, Rodriguez said.

A group of mothers from Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua will have a very different message to tell senators when they assemble in Mexico City on September 15, one day before Mexico’s national independence holiday.

Sources: La Jornada/Notimex, September 8, 11 and 12, 2009. Norte, September 8, 9, 11, 12, 2009. Articles by Carlos Huerta, Jesus Batista, Manuel E. Aguirre, Ricardo Espinoza, and editorial staff. Cimacnoticas.com, August 18 and September 9, 2009. Articles by Lourdes Godinez Leal.

El Diario de Juarez, September 8, 2009. Lapolaka.com, September 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 2009. El Sur/Agencia Reforma, September 9, 2009. Article by Efrain Klerigan and Erika Hernandez. Proceso/Apro, September 8, 2009. Article by Jesusa Cervantes. El Universal, September 8, 2009. Articles by Liliana Alcantra, Maria de la Luz Gonzalez and Ricardo Gomez. Terra.com/EFE, April 11, 2004.

Memories of Angie

Mysterious disappearances of young women. Distraught mothers protesting official investigations at an international border crossing. Bodies unearthed from the desert. Ciudad Juarez, 1993 to the present? Try neighboring El Paso back in 1987.

Six years before the mass murders of young women began to be publicized in Ciudad Juarez, femicide struck the US side of the border. In 1987, nine girls and young women vanished in El Paso; six were discovered in desert graves on the northeast edge of the city. Three are still missing to this day.

The murder victims included Angelica Frausto, 17; Rosa Maria Casio, 24; Ivy Susanna Williams, 23; Karen Baker, 20;; Desiree Wheatley, 15; and Dawn Marie Smith, 14. The missing girls include Marjorie Knox, 14; Cheryl Vasquez-Dismukes, 19; and Melissa Alaniz, 14.

El Paso resident David Leonard Wood was later convicted of the six killings and sentenced to death. The 52-year-old Wood is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday, August 20, in the Texas state prison at Huntsville. Previously claiming innocence, Wood has not made any recent public statements. If Wood is truly guilty as judged by the State, he could possibly take the secrets of what happened to three missing young women to the grave.

A recent series of articles in the El Paso Times reexamined the 1987 murders, delving into Wood’s earlier convictions on sex-related offenses, drug and prostitution sub-cultures, connections between the victims, lingering doubts about the State’s case, and an intriguing link to Chaparral, New Mexico. Although multiple witnesses placed Wood with several of the victims, and two cellmates testified that the suspect admitted to them he was responsible for the killings, no physical evidence
was presented and considered to convict Wood. The defendant did not testify at his 1992 Dallas trial.

A Sisterhood Shattered

Twenty-two years later, sobs break out and emotion cracks the voice of Denise Frausto, the older sister of murder victim Angelica Frausto, or “Angie” as she was known. In a phone interview with Frontera NorteSur, the 41-year-old Frausto recalled how a hard family life and tough economic circumstances led Angie to rebel against the hand-me-down world of many a poor girl.

The spunky teenager then did what so many others in similar situations in the borderlands do: she started trafficking illegal drugs.

But Frausto, who was immersed in the same intense party scene as her sister, flatly rejected that Angie was a drug abuser or prostitute. In fact, Angie, who did not even drink or do drugs, “was always the sober one,” Frausto said.

Now a 41-year-old sales professional, Frausto maintained that Wood was involved with her sister’s murder, but not alone as the State of Texas determined.

Frausto said she never personally met Wood but had seen him hanging around the same bars frequented by the two sisters. Though small, Angie was a scrappy fighter who could take on and even whip her biker boyfriend, Frausto insisted, discounting the possibility that the “puny” Wood was capable of physically subduing her sister.

“From the beginning, I’ve told detectives there was no way that man could’ve done it alone.”

Stabbed and suffocated, Angelica Frausto was not sexually assaulted, according to her older sister. Strangely, Angie was found wearing her jailed boyfriends’ jacket, an odd choice of attire for a teenager who disappeared in the hot El Paso days of August. “She was the one who fought off the attacker,” Frausto asserted.

A critic of the police murder investigation,” Frausto pointed to illicit activities as the likely explanation for the murders of her sister and the five other victims linked to Wood. According to the former El Paso resident, Angie and two young women later identified as Wood victims were selling drugs for a cop from El Paso’s Royal Hawaiian Motel. About a month before she vanished, Angie took Denise to an East El Paso stash house where 15 large plastic sacks of marijuana were piled up in the garage. The visit alarmed big sister.

Almost immediately after Angie disappeared, and long before her body was found, another strange incident startled Frausto. Walking down an El Paso street, Frausto was pulled over by an Anglo police officer who told her not to worry: Angelica was in jail and would be coming home soon. Frausto and her mother checked the local jail only to be informed that their relative was not on the premises.

Fast forward nearly 20 years later, in 2005, and family members of another missing young woman, Ciudad Juarez school teacher Edith Aranda Longoria, were told a similar tale about the whereabouts of their relative. Only this time it was Mexican authorities reporting they had heard the 22-year-old Aranda was locked up in El Paso. Aranda’s body was later discovered in the Juarez Valley in January 2008.

Other jarring incidents followed in the wake of Angie’s disappearance: veiled threats were floated in the bars Frausto frequented, and one evening shots were fired into the Frausto’s grandmothers’ home while Denise watched the two children of another sister.

Frausto contended that Angie and the other 1987 victims ran afoul of a powerful underworld.

“It has something to do with drugs, with the bars,” she insisted. “I think these girls knew too much.”

Early on, the scuttlebutt in the street was that the El Paso killings might be connected to events in Ciudad Juarez just across the border. Although omitted from the official mythology of the Ciudad Juarez femicides that dates the killings as beginning in 1993, Frausto said the cross-border grapevine was already reporting murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez in the late 1980s.

“I wonder if it has anything to do with the bodies found in Juarez?” Frausto recalled her grandmother asking after the El Paso murders were exposed.

In a 2005 book, El Paso investigative journalist and author Diana Washington Valdez mentioned the case of Pedro Padilla Flores, a Ciudad Juarez resident who was jailed for killing several girls and women in the Mexican border city. Characterized as a serial killer, Padilla was presumably locked up at the time of the El Paso killings but escaped custody in 1991.

Deadly Secrets of the Chihuahuan Desert

The slayings blamed on Wood were among numerous cases of disappearances and murders of girls and young women in El Paso and the southern New Mexico border region from 1984 to 1991.

Two murder cases from 1988 that happened after Wood was in jail are still under active investigation status with the El Paso Police Department. One homicide involved 16-year-old Angela Irsay, who was reportedly last seen walking on North Mesa Street in September 1988. Irsay’s body was recovered on the edge of the growing Sun City the following January.

A Myspace page is dedicated to Irsay. Containing heart-felt messages from her sister and friends, the page displays a photo of the ill-fated Guns and Roses fan, pleading, “Help me find my killer…I was murdered September 22, 1988, a day before my 17th birthday.” The page urges anyone with information about Irsay’s killing to contact El Paso Police Detective Michael Aman.

Another cold case assigned to Detective Aman involves 33-year-old Frances Yvonne Williams who vanished one month before Irsay and was also found slain in the desert. According to the El Paso Police Department, Aman was traveling and unavailable to comment about any progress in the two murder cases before Frontera NorteSur went to press.

Reports from by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) reveal the discovery from 1984 to 1993 of at least seven initially unidentified women’s bodies in the vast desert country of Dona Ana County bordering Mexico and El Paso. Like the El Paso cases- as well as those in Ciudad Juarez- victims and evidence were almost always found by passerby.

For example, a rabbit hunter stumbled across the remains of a woman estimated to be 28 years old in an area located 1.5 miles from the La Mesa landfill south of Las Cruces on November 10, 1988. The body was unclothed from the waist up and the pants were pulled down.

A little more than one year later, on December 27, 1989, a person shooting cans in the desert discovered a skull and what appeared to be a human bone. After arriving to the scene situated one mile east of Vado Exit 155 between Las Cruces and El Paso, investigators from the Dona Ana County Sheriff’s Department found the bones of two probable Hispanic females, who were estimated to be 16 and 20 years of age, respectively. The OMI classifies the cause of death of the young women as homicide.

In neighboring Luna County, which also borders Mexico, an 18-year-old missionary from Montana was bicycling alone through New Mexico during October 1991. Jennifer Lynn Pentilla made a phone call to her family from Deming, New Mexico, before disappearing. On September 4, 1992, two hunters discovered property belonging to Pentilla under a tarp in an area off State Road 26 between Deming and Hatch, New Mexico, according to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.

State Road 26 is a short-cut to Arizona and California from Interstate 25 to the north that shoots down from Truth or Consequences and Albuquerque; the two-lane highway has long been prowled by drug traffickers, immigrant smugglers, truckers, and US Border Patrol agents.

The Looming Demise of David Leonard Wood

In Texas, David Leonard Wood’s pending execution has reignited debate over the death penalty. The El Paso Times received dozens of e-mails in response to its recent series, with many writers voicing enthusiastic support for the maximum penalty. Others recalled the mood in El Paso during the scary summer and fall of 1987.

“Us girls had to walk to school in groups, and were always on the lookout for each other,” read a message on the Times website. “The rumor was that a man was killing girls with brown hair and brown eyes (almost all the girls in El Paso, including me!) and we were terrified.”

Wood’s date with death, meanwhile, is being publicized on the Internet by Texas and national groups opposed to the death penalty. The Texas State Department of Corrections maintains a fund so victims’ relatives can travel to the Huntsville death chamber and watch the convicted killer’s execution.

Denise Frausto said she will not be among the witnesses. This year has been a hard one for the survivor of violent crime. The discovery of 11 female murder victims in a mass grave on Albuquerque’s West Mesa last February jolted memories of Angie, and Wood’s fast approaching execution set for August 20, almost 22 years to the day her sister was suddenly stolen from her, has Frausto on edge wondering if she can even make it to work that day. Though shedding no crocodile tears for Wood, Frausto said there is still injustice in the case. “I don’t think it’s fair for him to die by himself.”

Instead of remembering a dying Wood, Frausto said she preferred the memories of a lively sister who was “too young to die.”

For the bereaved sister, the full story of the murder of Angelica Frausto and the other El Paso victims still has not come out and needs to be thoroughly investigated. “You think it can never happen to you,” Frausto concluded. “You see it on TV, but you think it can never happen to you.”

Additional sources: El Paso Times, September 22 and 23, 2006; August 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 2009. Articles by Daniel Borunda, Ramon Renteria, Diana Washington Valdez, and editorial staff. Myspace.com/angelasis. Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico, Diana Washington Valdez. Oceano, 2005.

Remains of Long Missing Ciudad Juarez Women Identified

Years after they were reported missing in Ciudad Juarez, two young women were declared dead. And as is the case with other instances of missing young women, more questions than answers remain on the table.

Ciudad Juarez’s El Diario newspaper reported late last week that the remains of Edith Aranda Longoria were identified earlier this year by the Argentine Anthropological Forensic Team, a group of experts that was brought in by the Mexican government under pressure from relatives of femicide victims and women’s activists to identify unknown murder victims in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. The team has been successful in identifying many female murder victims from both cities.

According to El Diario, Aranda’s remains were discovered in Loma Blanca, a rural town in the Juarez Valley south of the border city, on January 6, 2008.

A 22-year-old teacher and mother of a young child, Aranda went missing on the afternoon of May 3, 2005. El Diario reported that a death certificate listed Aranda as dying in April 2007 of undetermined causes.

If the identification of Aranda is correct, it means that almost two years passed between the time of the teacher’s disappearance and her death.

Aranda’s possible whereabouts during this period of time are not publicly known at the moment. Aranda’s remains were buried in her family’s hometown of Chihuahua City last April, according to El Diario.

In a 2005 interview with Frontera NorteSur,  Aranda’s brother, Pedro Aranda, said his sister was last situated seeking employment at a Discorama music store in downtown Ciudad Juarez, a zone where dozens of young women have vanished since the 1990s. Aranda said contradictory reports surrounded the subsequent whereabouts of Edith, and confirmed his sister possessed a US travel visa which he could not locate.

Edith Aranda’s disappearance stoked public anger, leading to a one-day work stoppage by fellow teachers who marched in the streets by the thousands.

Both the place where Aranda’s reported remains were discovered and the timing of the recovery could be of some importance. A haunt of drug traffickers and immigrant smugglers, the Juarez Valley has served as the dumping ground for other femicide victims. Celebrated as Three Kings Day, January 6 fell in a month last year when a bloody war between rival drug cartels erupted in Ciudad Juarez.

In a second victim identification accomplished by means of DNA testing, authorities established that the body of a murdered young woman who was set on fire and discovered in an arroyo on March 21, 1999, belonged to 17-year-old Rosario Palacios Moran.

The teenager was earlier reported missing after leaving her Ciudad Juarez on December 7, 1998, or more than three months before she was killed. Delivered to her family, Palacio’s remains were finally buried in her native state of Guerrero late last month.

According to a report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission(CNDH), Palacios was headed to a shopping center at approximately 4 pm on December 7 when she vanished. In its report, the CNDH concluded that Chihuahua state law enforcement officials violated Palacio’s human rights by not adequately investigating her disappearance.

The Palacios murder was one of several slayings attributed to a group of bus drivers known as “Los Choferes” by the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office (PGJE) and Suly Ponce, the controversial former special prosecutor for women’s homicides.

Attempts by El Diario reporters to get comment on the Aranda and Palacios cases from the current special prosecutor for women’s homicides, Flor Munguia, were unsuccessful as of last weekend.

Vladimir Tuexi, spokesman for the Ciudad Juarez office of the PGJE, said the identifications of Aranda and Palacios were not made public in order to protect “the investigations.” Curiously, in Palacio’s case, investigations were supposedly concluded more than ten years ago.

Family members of another Ciudad Juarez femicide victim, Sagrario Gonzalez, were very critical of the PGJE’s withholding of important news on the fates of missing young women whose disappearances moved many in the Paso del Norte borderlands and across the globe.

“(Authorities) try to hide the truth,” charged Guillermina Gonzalez, older sister of Sagrario Gonzalez. “There is no transparency in the investigations, and it has always been this way….they want to make believe that everything is under their control when in reality it is the opposite.”

Additional sources: El Diario de Juarez, July 3 and 4, 2009. Articles by Gabriela Minjares and Luz del Carmen Sosa. Cndh.org.mx

Historic Femicide Trial Gets Underway

Thousands of miles and a continent away, it’s a long haul from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to Santiago, Chile. But that’s where the road to justice led Benita Monarrez, Irma Monreal and Josefina Gonzalez.  Mothers of murder victims, the three women from the Mexican border city pressed their case last week against the Mexican government as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights opened a milestone trial in Santiago, Chile.

Marking the first time the Organization of American States’ court has heard a Mexican femicide case, the historic legal proceeding centers on the slayings of three young women who were found with five other female victims in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001. The three victims, Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, 14, Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez, 17, and Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 20, all went missing between September 25 and October 29, 2001.

Counting only two months in Ciudad Juarez at the time of her disappearance, Herrera was a domestic worker employed by Mitla Caballero. A high school student, Ramos also worked for the Fogueiras restaurant. An assembly-line worker for the US-owned Lear Corporation, Gonzalez was turned away at the plant gate because she was a few minutes late and then vanished. Relatives contend the disappearances and subsequent murders of their loved ones were never truly investigated or punished by the Mexican government.

For example, Benita Monarrez has stated that two investigators from the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office (PGJE), Ramirez and Miramontes, personally knew two young men, “El Gato” and “El Perico” who appeared in a previous photo taken with Laura Berenice Ramos. When pressed to explain their relationship to the mysterious pair, the law enforcement officials clammed up, Monarrez has asserted.

“This is the case to show the many failings there have been by the Mexican government,” said Maureen Meyer, program associate for the non-profit Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a group which supports victims’ relatives. Meyer told Frontera NorteSur that the Inter-American Court case could set a precedent for other femicide cases, including sex-related homicide cases from 1993 or 1994 that are now falling into legal oblivion because of Mexican statutes of limitations.

Mexican, US and European human rights activists are throwing their support behind the mothers involved in the Santiago trial. Together with other organizations, Ciudad Juarez’s Citizens Network for Non-Violence and Human Dignity called the Inter-American Court case a “historic opportunity” for femicide victims not only in Ciudad Juarez but in the rest of Mexico and the Americas as well.

The Long Road to Chile

Many irregularities marked the Mexican government’s response to the disappearance of the three young women, who vanished along with numerous others in both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City during 2001. The disappearances followed a pattern of young, low-income women suddenly disappearing in the northern Mexican state since at least the early 1990s. Several suspects were investigated or arrested in the cotton field slayings, but human rights activists and other observers widely criticized government legal cases as lacking any shred of credibility.

The grisly discoveries of the eight cotton field victims on November 6 and 7, 2001, set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Inter-American Court trial. In 2002, the mothers of Herrera, Ramos and Gonzalez filed a complaint with the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that charged the Mexican government with committing human rights violations and denying justice in the cases of their daughters.

After finally determining that the Mexican government never provided an adequate response to the petitioners, the IACHR pursued the next step in the OAS human rights system and referred the case to the Inter-American Court in late 2007. The international legal institution is considering the cotton field case based on the Mexican government’s alleged violations of the American Convention on Human Rights and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention of Belem Do Para), international agreements that uphold popular access to the justice system and the right of women to live without violence. Under the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, Mexico is obliged to follow any rulings the legal body will issue.

Last year, Mexico filed a preliminary defense but did not submit all the documents requested by the Inter-American Court, according to a statement from the legal body. The mothers seek reparations of damages from the Mexican government, the launching of a serious murder investigation and the dismissal and sanctioning of officials involved in allegedly botching their daughters’ cases, among other remedies.

Showdown in Santiago

On April 28 and 29, 2009, the mothers and Mexican government mustered their respective forces in Santiago, Chile, for a legal battle that will be heard around the world. Supported by Mexican and international lawyers and human rights activists, the mothers from Ciudad Juarez spent several hours retelling their stories to the judges.

In her testimony, Benita Monarrez accused Mexican government officials of covering-up the murders for other officials involved in the crimes.

“This trial proves we are right. The state has never approached us, always acting with a lot of hypocrisy and nothing has changed,” Josefina Gonzalez testified. “I don’t believe anything is going to change if the court doesn’t help us in the name of all the women of Mexico.”

For its defense, the Mexican government flew in a team from the Foreign Relations Ministry and the PGJE, including Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez. Chihuahua’s top law enforcement official said she was satisfied to represent the Mexican state and its “tireless work of changing the logic of gender themes and the murder of women in my country.”

Gonzalez admitted that numerous irregularities characterized the cotton field investigations during 2001-2004, but insisted authorities cleaned up their act afterward, reordered the investigation and moved forward with a statewide legal reform- a project supported by the United States Agency for International Development. The PGJE stands ready and willing to provide additional reparations and assistance to the mothers, Gonzalez said.

“There were omissions and irregularities before my service,” Gonzalez, said, “not only in these cases but other ones too that have since been resolved and the mothers left totally satisfied.”

Gonzalez’s comments were reminiscent of statements made by previous PGJE personnel, including former Ciudad Juarez special prosecutor Suly Ponce (1998-2001), who frequently accused predecessors for widespread disarray in the femicide investigations only to be later blamed themselves by successors.

Rodrigo Caballero, a special homicide investigator for the PGJE told the Santiago courtroom that Chihuahua legal authorities know of two men involved in the women’s murders.

Currently, the state’s prime suspect is Edgar Alvarez Cruz, who was fingered by an old friend, Jose Francisco Granados de la Paz. The two young men came to public light in 2006 when Tony Garza, then the US ambassador in Mexico, made a sensational announcement that US authorities were cooperating with Mexican officials in what could be a major break in the cotton field case.

A former Ciudad Juarez resident who had been living in Denver, Colorado, Cruz was deported to Mexico to face charges based on a “confession” made
by Granados to the Texas Rangers.

Alvarez has since been convicted of the murder of another cotton field victim, Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis, whose slaying is not part of the Inter-American Court case. Alvarez lost an appeal in a Mexican court last month, and is serving a 26-year sentence.

Alvarez and his family vehemently deny the murder charges, pointing to contradictions and irregularities in the state’s most recent cotton field case.

In past statements to Ciudad Juarez media, members of Granados' own family questioned the credibility of their relative. Reportedly prone to abusing drugs and alcohol, Granados was emotionally disturbed and overcome with hallucinatory flights of fancy, according to relatives.

Abraham Hinojos, defense attorney for Alvarez, said his client’s rejected appeal was also a loss to society since “we continue in the same (legal) practices.”

David Pena, attorney for Irma Monreal, ridiculed the Mexican state’s defense in Chile as simulation designed to “make it appear they are doing something.”

With oral testimony completed in Chile last week, the Inter-American Court will review legal documents and deliberate the merits of the case. A decision is expected later this year or early next year. Typically, the OAS court conducts proceedings in countries not involved in a legal complaint. Hence the trail setting of Santiago, Chile, another continent and an entire season removed from Ciudad Juarez.

Local Fall-Out from the OAS Case

In Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua, the Inter-American Court case reopened a huge can of worms. Purported PGJE documents leaked to El Diario newspaper, contended the Mexican government had provided generous compensation to the families of the three cotton field murder victims involved in the OAS case.

In a detailed piece published on the second day of the Santiago trial, El Diario said the mothers and other named relatives of Hererra, Ramos and Gonzalez, received money for funeral expenses, educational grants, homes, and  businesses including a tortilla shop and small grocery store. The state support surpassed more than one million dollars, according to El Diario. State government assistance also consisted of providing medical and psychological services for surviving family members, El Diario reported.

Besides the very personal details reported in the El Diario story, the newspaper account was unusual in that it included information that reportedly will be used in the Inter-American Court proceedings. Mexican officials routinely deny reporters access to sensitive legal documents which are part of ongoing cases.

Whether the story is accurate or not, it could refuel disagreements between different groups of victims’ mothers.

Before it was quickly yanked from El Diario’s website, the story drew sharp comments from several readers. An individual identified as Tararecua questioned when Guatemala (scene of thousands of femicides)  and the US would be tried internationally for murders of women, including the 11 bodies discovered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, last February. Another writer identified as Esperanza applauded the Inter-American Court’s action, but urged the OAS legal authorities to hold exican officials accountable for allowing a violent criminal gang to run amok in the Juarez Valley.

Two other documents related to the cotton field case also grabbed media and public attention in recent days. Portions of a PGJE report submitted to the Inter-American court were challenged by a separate report from the Argentine Anthropological Forensic Team, a group of investigators contracted several years ago by the PGJE under pressure from activists and relatives of disappeared women to identify the remains of unknown female murder victims in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City.

The PGJE report contended the majority of 447 women’s murders in Ciudad Juarez between 1993 and December 2008 have been duly prosecuted, with more
than 60 percent of the cases solved and scores of murderers brought to justice. The Argentine forensic experts, however, questioned several aspects of the report. Media reports indicate the true number of female murder victims during the time covered by the PGJE report is more than 600.

Chilean Judge Cecilia Medina Quiroga, president of the Inter-American Court, requested the Mexican government turn over an accounting of all the women’s murder cases supposedly resolved in the 1993-2008 period.

Ticked off by the contradictory reports, Chihuahua state lawmaker Antonio Sandoval proposed last week that the Chihuahua State Congress pass a resolution demanding the PGJE provide a report on its femicide report and explain how much money the state agency has spent publicizing the information.

While new battles brew over old but unresolved issues, three mothers of Ciudad Juarez  murder  victims await a verdict from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

“There was no justice done in Mexico, and this the last opportunity the mothers have,” said WOLA’s Maureen Meyer.

Additional sources:  Norte, May 3, 2009. Article by Nohemi Barraza and Guadalupe Salcido.  Lapolaka.com, April 29 and May 1, 2009. El Paso Times, May 1, 2009. Article by Diana Washington Valdez. El Universal, April 25 and 30, 2009. Articles by Silvia Otero and Notimex. El Diario de Juarez, April 25 and 29, 2009. Articles by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, Gabriela Minjares and Alejandro Salmon. Cimacnoticias.com, April 28 and 29, 2009. Articles by Sandra Torres Pastrana, Nancy Betan, and editorial staff. Wola.org

The Lost Daughters of the Rio Grande

Up and down the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, from Laredo to Albuquerque, families and friends protest, plead and pray for the return of their missing daughters, mothers and loved ones.

In Laredo, Texas, a case of two missing young women ended on a positive note Friday, April 3, when 19-year-old Yazmin Silva and 18-year-old Nydia Benavides were returned home. The two friends were reported missing in Laredo’s sister city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, last Sunday, March 29. A car driven by the young women was subsequently recovered in a supermarket parking lot not far from Nuevo Laredo’s red-light district.

US and Mexican law enforcement officials teamed up find out what happened to Silva and Benavides, but it is still not clear who was behind the disappearance of the two friends and for what ends. Elizabeth Hernandez Arredondo, investigator for the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s office, confirmed the two young women were held against their will, but insisted their nearly week-long absence was “not a case involving organized crime.”

After reappearing in public, Benavides and Silva hid their faces and avoided talking to the media. Benavides’ mother, Angeles Benavides, later described her daughter as depressed and in need of treatment.

While last week brought good news to two families, others in the two Laredos continued to wonder about their loved ones. A web site maintained by the relatives’ group Laredo’s Missing lists 17 women reported vanished between 2003-2006.

In Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, many families also anguish over the fate of missing relatives. Scores of young women have been reported missing since the early 1990s, with the latest instance involving an 18-year old student from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez (UACJ), Monica Janeth Alanis Esparza, who vanished last March 26 after advising her family she was leaving the school to go with friends.

“My family is destroyed,” said Monica’s father Ricardo Alanis. “We are desperate from not knowing anything.”

The missing person’s department of the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office lists 33 “high-risk” cases of young women who disappeared in Ciudad Juarez between 1995 and March 2009, but many women’s advocates say the true number is much higher.

According to research by El Paso reporter and author Diana Washington Valdez and subsequent press reports, more than 620 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez because of various reasons since 1993; reportedly, 22 women have been slain in the border city since the beginning of 2009.

The prevalence of forced disappearance and violence against women motivated a group of human rights activists and mothers of missing and murdered women to stage a protest outside the Ciudad Juarez offices of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) on Friday, April 3. The group demanded that the Mexican government comply with international human rights agreements protecting women from violence, that Mexico finally get to the bottom of the femicides and disappearances and that former Chihuahua Governor Francisco Barrio be retired as Mexico’s ambassador to Canada.

Mothers of femicide victims and their supporters contend that as governor of the state of Chihuahua from 1992-98, Barrio blamed the alleged lifestyles of victimized women for the violent crimes perpetrated against them, while he permitted the mass murders of women to go unchecked by helping to fabricate a scapegoat for the crimes, the late Egyptian national Abdul Latif Sharif Sharif.

“Let’s Not Export Impunity,” read a sign at Friday’s demonstration in Ciudad Juarez. “Barrio is not a dignified representative of Mexicans,” charged Marisela Ortiz, spokeswoman for the Ciudad Juarez non-governmental organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa.

A letter containing protestors’ demands was also written to the Mexican Senate. In addition to Nuestras Hijas, signatories included Pastoral Obrera, Tonantzin Women’s Center, Mesa de Mujeres, academic researchers from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte and UACJ, and many other individuals and groups.

Simultaneous to the Ciudad Juarez demonstration, the Quebec Federation of Women, Committee for Human Rights in Latin America and Committee in Solidarity with the Women of Ciudad Juarez held protests outside Mexican consulates in Montreal and Ottawa in support of the demand that Barrio be declared “persona non-grata” in Mexico’s most northern NAFTA partner.

There was no immediate public comment by either the SRE or Ambassador Barrio on the bi-national demonstrations.

Four hours upriver from Ciudad Juarez, the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is another community now forced to come to terms with issues of violence against women.

In a scene strikingly reminiscent of previous events in Ciudad Juarez, a group of relatives and their supporters gathered on the bitterly cold evening April 4 to honor the memories of at least 20 young women who have gone missing or fallen victim to the streets since 1989. As an Artic-like chill whipped the Duke City, scores of activists and relatives installed a shrine, displayed photos of missing women, set up pink crosses, and conducted an indigenous ceremony in Robinson Park on Central Avenue.

Speakers challenged a narrative of stigmatization flowing from media stories and police reports that emphasize the connection between missing women and drugs/and or prostitution. Six of the women honored April 4 were among the 11 sets of female remains that have been unearthed at a clandestine graveyard on the outskirts of Albuquerque since last February. One of the presumed victims of violence was pregnant.

“She was a beautiful person, always smiling,” said Elsie Montano, god-mother of Veronica Romero, whose remains were identified last week. Montano said years passed between filing the police report about Romero’s disappearance on Valentine’s Day 2004 and any official word of her fate. “I don’t think (police) responded very well to anything,” Montano added. “I mean, this was terrorism, actually. These girls have been killed and thrown like garbage.”

Although differences exist in the backgrounds of some victims in Albuquerque and Ciudad Juarez, similarities are also evident. In both cities, working-class Latinas went missing and later turned up in mass graves uncovered not by hard-nosed detective work but by a random member of public.

Little is publicly known about the ongoing Albuquerque investigation, which is headed by the Albuquerque Police Department. For example, it is still not publicly known how the 11 women died in what the mass media refers to as the “West Mesa Mystery.”

Several elected officials attended the Albuquerque victims’ memorial, including city councilors Rey Garduno and Ike Benton and Bernalillo County Commissioner Art de la Cruz, who represents the district where the mass graveyard is located.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, de la Cruz said he was concerned about initial law enforcement responses to the women’s disappearances in Albuquerque and elsewhere, but was confident police were now working “very, very hard” to get to solve the “mystery.” De la Cruz called the West Mesa saga a “huge issue” that can’t be permitted to happen again.

Several relatives of missing women said they were against reported proposals to discontinue excavations at the crime scene soon. They also vowed to form a relative’s group to press for justice and the apprehension of criminals.

“We’re a little snowball at the top of the hill where we started,” said Dan Valdez, father of Gina Michelle Valdez. “When we get to the base we’re going to be an enormous snowball. We’re not going to stop.”

After delivering a short but powerful speech about her disappeared cousin, an eight-year-old girl perhaps best summed up the sentiments of the people gathered. “And (my cousin) got a son,” the elementary school student said. “And her son’s here too, but he loves her and he misses her. I hope everyone prays for her too.”

Additional sources: Norte, April 4 and 5, 2009. Articles by Herika Martinez Prado and Nohemi Barraza. Lapolaka.com, April 3, 2009. Cimacnoticias.com, April 4, 2009. El Diario de Juarez, April 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 2009. Articles by Luz del Carmen Sosa and editorial staff. Laredo Morning Times, April 3 and 5, 2009. Articles by Miguel Timoshenkov, Zach Lindsey, Melva Lavin-Castillo and Vicente Rangel Hernandez. Enlineadirecta.info, April 3, 2009. Article by Gaston Monge. Koat.com (Albuquerque), April 2 and 3, 2009. Laredosmissing.com

Stars Cast New Light on Mexico Femicides

Internationally-known music and film celebrities are casting new public attention on the unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua. In a March 27 meeting in Mexico City, a trio of English and Mexican celebrities conveyed their concerns for justice during a personal conversation with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Attending the meeting were legendary English rocker Peter Gabriel, Saul Hernandez, front man for the popular Mexican rock group Jaguares; and acclaimed Mexican actor Diego Luna, who had a role in the recent Hollywood biography of the assassinated US politician and pioneer gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

Also in attendance at the unusual encounter were Tamaryn Nelson, director of the Latin American and Caribbean desk for Gabriel’s pro-human rights organization Witness, and Patricia Cervantes, mother of 2003 Chihuahua City femicide victim Neyra Azucena Cervantes.

In a press conference prior to the meeting with President Calderon, Gabriel appealed to the Mexican government to support the justice campaign for murdered women.

“We know that Felipe Calderon confronts many challenges in many areas of his government,” Gabriel said. “We hope to inspire him to invest money, muscle and interest in this campaign.”

Released after the meeting, an official statement from the Mexican White House affirmed that President Calderon pledged that he will combat abuses of authority, promote reparations of damages to the relatives of femicide victims and struggle against impunity. Mexico’s president agreed to give special attention to cases like the Cervantes murder via a joint Internet page with Witness. Working together with local officials, federal forces are attempting to clear up the femicides, President Calderon reportedly told his guests.

Recognizing the work of human rights defenders, President Calderon said that the conviction and participation of activists motivated the three levels of the Mexican government to do a better job, according to the statement from the presidential office.

The meeting between President Calderon and the international celebrities came just weeks after a new fictional movie about the Ciudad Juarez femicides, “Backyard,” premiered in major theaters in Mexico. The meeting also took place one month before Mexico is scheduled to go on trial in the Inter-American Court for Human Rights for alleged human rights violations committed during the “investigations” of the slayings of three women found murdered along with five others in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001.

As a member state of the Inter-American Court, Mexico will be bound to follow the verdicts issued by judges.Despite numerous high-level pronouncements by various officials from different branches of government over the years, the murder of women continues to be a grave problem in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of
Mexico.

Perhaps it will never be known with one-hundred degree certainty how many women were murdered in Ciudad Juarez in recent years. Based on press reports and information from prominent Ciudad Juarez women’s activist Esther Chavez Cano, the US-based Mexico Solidarity Network reported 508 women were slain in Ciudad Juarez from 1993 to mid-December 2008.

A comprehensive list compiled by El Paso-based journalist and author Diana Washington Valdez reported 440 women were murdered for varied reasons in Ciudad Juarez from 1993 to 2004. If subsequent press stories are added to Washington Valdez’s total, then at least 622 women were slain in Ciudad Juarez between 1993 and most of March 2009.

The bloodiest year was 2008, when at least 86 women were murdered, according to a recent blog posting by Washington Valdez. In addition to domestic and sex-related violence as being leading causes of women’s murders, narco-violence is now a major reason for the high rate of women’s homicides. Ciudad Juarez press accounts signaled that the majority of last year’s female murder victims, 55, were killed because of the gangland war that raged in Ciudad Juarez.

Some officials downplay the violence, contending Ciudad Juarez is getting a bad rap in the media. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, for example, was recently quoted in a maquiladora industry trade publication as saying his city now had a distorted image it could not shake because of negative publicity over the femicides.

“Something that was not precisely real and significant was left to grow like a snowball,” Mayor Reyes Ferriz said.

A recent report from the latest incarnation of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies’ femicide commission revealed that at least 2,232 women were killed in all of Mexico during 2006-07, mostly due to domestic violence. While the country’s main population center of Mexico City and the adjoining state of Mexico accounted for the majority of women’s homicides (543), the much more sparsely-populated state of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juarez, registered 84 slayings in the time period covered by the study. The official report concluded that gender violence is keeping women in a subordinate position in Mexican society.

“Violence against women, for the sole fact of being women, puts them in a relationship of inequality, oppression, exclusion, subordination, discrimination, and marginality,” the report stated.

Other Mexican states where women’s murders reached alarming levels during 2006-07 included Michoacan (202), Guerrero (129) and Baja California (105), suggesting that where narco-violence was at an extreme so were crimes against women.

The Chamber of Deputies’ report also noted a national pattern of governmental indifference and denial of justice for the family members of slain women.

In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, disappearances of young women who fit the profile of earlier femicide victims also continue unimpeded. In one of the most recent cases, a young mother, 22-year-old Marisela Avila Hernandez, vanished March 18 after going to a Bancomer bank branch where she had an account to process an unemployment claim. The bank is located near the San Lorenzo Curve, a section of the city where crimes against both women and men have been frequent. On March 27, friends and relatives of a young woman reported missing six months ago, 17-year-old Rubi Marisol Frayre Escobedo, joined Chihuahua state law enforcement authorities in a search for traces of their loved one.

Speaking to the Mexican press late last year, feminist activist and Casa Amiga co-founder Esther Chavez assessed the situation for women in Ciudad Juarez 15 years after Chavez helped alert the public to the rising tide of femicides. For Chavez, generalized impunity and rampant police corruption resulted in the creation of a monster that eventually reared its head against the entire society. “Now we can’t control it,” Chavez said.

Nonetheless, activists like Esther Chavez, Patricia Cervantes, Peter Gabriel and others keep up the fight to corral and vanquish the loose dragon.

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, March 28, 2009. Article by Luz del Carmen Sosa. Presidencia.gob.mx, March 27, 2009. Press release. Lapolaka.com, March 27, 2009. Norte, March 21 and 24, 2009. Articles by Arturo Chacon and Pablo Hernandez Batista. La Jornada/Notimex, March 14 and 27, 2009. imacnoticias.com, March 4, 2009. Article by Sandra Torres Pastrana. Juarez-El Paso Now, March 2009. Dianawashingtonvaldez.blogspot.com, January 26, 2009. El universal/EFE, December 6, 2008. Cosecha de Mujeres, Diana Washington Valdez (Oceana 2005).

Mexico in the Hot Seat

Mexico’s government is under the glare of stage lights in different national and international venues for allegedly allowing the systematic violation of human rights. The administration of President Felipe Calderon faces a test Tuesday, February 10, when the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council will submit Mexico to a three-hour exam and possibly assign voluntary make-up work.

Although the UN committee’s grading of Mexico’s compliance with international human rights standards is pending, a network of prominent Mexican human rights organizations has already given the Calderon administration an “F” in the subject matter.

“Torture continues, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances occur, freedom of expression is limited, and practically none of the cultural and economic rights is guaranteed or protected,” charged a report from civil society organizations delivered to the UN Human Rights Council prior to this week’s meeting.

In their report, the groups also criticized the Mexican government for failing to align federal and state laws with international human rights agreements signed by Mexico City, and for failing to ratify the International Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, an agreement which could open to the door to prosecutions of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions carried out by soldiers and police officers since the 1970s.

A big problem, according to the report, is that the Calderon administration follows long-standing political traditions of permitting Mexican soldiers, who constitute the front-line troops in the drug war, to escape civilian prosecution for criminal offenses..

Groups signing the document included the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, the Mexican Human Rights Academy, the International Federation of the Rights of Man, and dozens of other Mexican human rights advocacy organizations.

Although the report’s authors noted progress in implementing an oral-based trial system with the presumption of innocence as a guiding principle, the activists criticized a 2008 legal reform that allows suspects to be held without charges for 80 days, a length of time the report compared to the “normal period” of preventive detention lasting two to seven days in other democracies.

Overall, the report concludes, human rights violations and impunity are constants in Mexico.

In another Swiss show-down of sorts, the Mexican government faces a complaint filed February 5 in the International Labor Organization (ILO) by an international federation of mining and metal workers. The complaint accuses Mexico of committing systematic violations of “union freedom” as defined by the ILO. According to the complaint, Mexico only permits the existence of company or government-sanctioned unions.

The international unions’ action grows out of a long-running battle between two Mexican presidential administrations and miners’ union President Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, whom the Calderon administration is attempting to extradite from Canada to undergo prosecution at home.

Gomez fled to Canada in 2006 after the administration of former Mexican President Vicente Fox pressed legal charges related to the alleged mishandling of union funds. Gomez and his supporters, consider the case a maneuver by the Mexican government to divert attention away from the February 2006 explosion at the Grupo Mexico-owned Pasta de Conchos coal mine in northern Coahuila state that killed 65 miners. Only two bodies of killed workers were ever recovered.

Jose Luis Soberanes, president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said recently the federal attorney general’s office (PGR) was not addressing justice recommendations made by his office about Pasta de Conchos, but PGR official Juan de Dios Castro Lozano disputed the assertion and said an investigation into the mine disaster was open.

Unsatisfied with the state’s response to the tragedy, victims’ relatives are considering taking their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.As the Calderon administration prepared to take the hot seat in Geneva this week, multiple human rights controversies stirred throughout the
country and abroad. Concluding a visit to the southern state of Guerrero last week, a delegation from Amnesty International demanded the government release five indigenous men accused of the murder of an army informant last year.

Kerrie Howard, deputy program director of the Americas Program for Amnesty International, said charges against the men, all of whom belong to the activist OPIM organization, are “not credible.” The OPIM has experienced a long series of conflicts and run-ins with the Mexican army and other authorities.

In response to the Amnesty International visit, Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca said he “greatly respected” the work of the international advocacy organization but it was the job of the courts to decide the fate of the five men.

Physicians for Human Rights, meanwhile, released a statement last week that said the PGR was ignoring forensic evidence challenging the official version of the murder of US journalist Brad Will in Oaxaca in 2006. An anti-government activist, Manuel Martinez Moreno, is being charged with the crime despite professions of innocence.

In still another development, renewed press attention is being devoted to the massive May 2006 police raid against protestors in San Salvador Atenco outside Mexico City that resulted in the deaths of Alejandro Benumea and Javier Cortes Santiago, the injuries of at least 50 people and more than 200 arrests.

Mexico’s Supreme Court is considering a report this week by an investigative team headed by Justice Jesus Gudino Pelayo which concluded nearly 3,000 public servants committed violations of eight constitutional rights in Atenco.

Sexual aggressions against 31 of 50 female detainees could have equaled “torture prohibited by international and national law,” according to the report.

Female prisoners have testified they were forced to endure bodily molestation and engage in oral sex with arresting officers. At least one woman was reportedly subjected to forced vaginal penetration with a metal object.

While condemning the “violent and criminal actions” of protestors, Justice Gudino Pelayo characterized the raid staged by state and federal police as“excessive, disproportionate, inefficient, and indolent..”

Many of the Atenco violations described in the Supreme Court report were earlier documented by the CNDH.

The Supreme Court’s report named Mexico state Governor Enrique Pena Nieto, federal Attorney General Eduardo Medina and Miguel Angel Yunes, director of a national social security institute, as among the high officials ultimately responsible for the police rampage. The report also questioned the PGR’s special unit for crimes of violence against women for its slowness in acting on the Atenco matter.

The unit, currently headed by former Ciudad Juarez special women’s commissioner Guadalupe Morfin, reports directly to Attorney General Medina. At the time of the Atenco confrontation, Medina oversaw federal police sent to help crush the rebellion. As Mexico’s attorney general, Medina is in a key position in any US-Mexico security alliance, which could expand under the Obama White House.

Governor Pena, who is frequently mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for the opposition PRI party in 2012, said the Supreme Court report was the opinion of one judge but he stressed his administration is cooperating with a probe that represents an opportunity to clarify facts.

No reparations of damages or prosecutions against Pena and other officials will result from the Supreme Court’s Atenco deliberations this week. Arguing constitutional limitations prevent the Supreme Court from meting out punishments, Justice Gudino Pelayo said the high court’s final report could instead be used to help regulate police conduct vis-a-vis future citizen demonstrations.

Atenco activists continue demanding punishment for state officials and freedom for remaining detainees, some of whom are serving very lengthy prison terms human rights advocates have characterized as draconian.“We demand a solution to this case, the release of all our companions and justice,” said Trinidad Ramirez, wife of imprisoned Atenco leader Ignacio del Valle, who was sentenced to 112 years in prison for kidnapping and other alleged crimes.

Sources: El Sur/Proceso, February 8, 2009. Article by Homero Campa. El Sur, January 30, 2009; February 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 2009. Articles by Aurora Harrison, Tomas Tenorio Galindo, Zacarias Cervantes, Daniel Velásquez Olea, and Agencia Reforma. La Jornada, January 29, 2009; February 6 and 9, 2009. Articles by A. Mendez, Patricia Munoz, Carolina Gomez, Alma Munoz, Jesús Aranda, Victor Ballinas, Enrique Mendez, Roberto Garduno, and the DPA news agency. Tribuna de la Bahia/Agencia Reforma, January 28, 2009. Cimacnoticias.com, January 8, 2009. Article by Guadalupe Cruz Jaimes.

Mothers of the Disappeared March Again…and Again

On the same day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African-American president in US history, an old story was repeating itself in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the river from El Paso, Texas. Staging a caravan through the violence-ridden city, a new group of mothers of disappeared young women brought public attention to the cases of daughters who went missing after January 2008. Holding a rally at the downtown Cathedral, the mothers demanded their daughters be returned home alive.

“If there were leads as to the whereabouts of my daughter, I would not be here,” said Ernestina Enriquez, mother of Adriana Sarmiento, “but I do not have any favorable results from the little or the lot the authorities are doing. They don’t tell me anything…”

Demonstrators also demanded action in the cases of Hilda Gabriela Rivas, Brenda Ponce, Lidia Ramos, and Brenda Berenice Castillo. Representatives of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, the Mexico Solidarity Network, Centro de Mujeres Tonantzin, and other non-governmental organizations joined in the protest.

The personal stories aired in public January 20 bore striking similarities. All the disappeared young women are teenagers who went to school or worked for a living, and most were headed to downtown Ciudad Juarez, the scene of numerous disappearances since the 1990s. Two of the women’s disappearances could be connected to travel on the same bus line, while a third instance might have some relationship to the Ignacio Allende preparatory school, an educational institution attended by several earlier victims of sexual assault and murder.

At least one member of the latest group of vanished teenagers was reportedly last headed downtown to purchase shoes, an activity connected to additional disappearances as far back as 1995. The most recent disappearances also bear a similarity to many earlier ones in that the missing persons were not seen being forcibly abducted, suggesting that the young women may have been lured into dangerous situations.

Brenda Berenice Castillo, 17, disappeared on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, a day celebrated as Three King’s Day in Mexico, after she reportedly headed downtown on the Zaragoza bus line to apply for a job at a jewelry business. The mother of a month-old baby, Castillo was quickly forced back into the job market because her husband’s work hours were cut back at his job with an export assembly plant.

“Although (Brenda’s baby) is little, he misses his mother,” lamented Bertha Alicia Garcia, the mother of Castillo.

At least 29 new cases of women who have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez since January 2008 are pending. As in previous times when disappearances of women rose, many tragically ending with the discovery of the tortured and sexually abused corpse of the missing victim, the latest rash of women’s disappearances coincides with violent upheavals in the criminal underworld, increased seizures of drug loads, changes in political administrations, and deployments by the Mexican army or federal police.

Since 1995, several groups of relatives have thrust the issue of their missing daughters and sisters into the international spotlight. Mass protests, which reached their zenith in 2003-04, prompted the administration of former Mexican President Vicente Fox to create new government bureaucracies, including a special commission on violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and a special prosecutor’s office.

Both agencies were widely criticized for failing to clear up numerous disappearances and femicides. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon assumed power in December 2006, the two agencies have become virtually invisible.

Meanwhile, murders of women officially reached all-time heights in Ciudad Juarez last year, when at least 86 women were slain; many homicides were connected to the narco war that claimed more than 1,600 lives overall. Women´s murders have continued into 2009. In early January, the body of a tortured young female was discovered near the village of El Millon in the rural Juarez Valley, the same zone were men’s heads and headless bodies were discovered in recent days.

In response to earlier publicity about the Ciudad Juarez femicides, some Chihuahua state and federal officials frequently pointed to the central state of Mexico as the most violent place for women in the country.

According to official sources cited in the Mexican press, 173 women were murdered and another 1,000 were raped in Mexico state in 2008. Less than half the murder cases were reported solved. Surrounding Mexico City and containing the capital city’s suburbs, the state of Mexico has a population about 10 times larger than Ciudad Juarez’s estimated population of 1.3 million people.

In its recent world report, Human Rights Watch charged that violence against women in Mexico was endemic and draped in a mantle of impunity. Indeed, the saga of the Ciudad Juarez disappearances and femicides now covers the terms of four Mexican presidents and an equal number of US leaders.

In Ciudad Juarez, many women denounce living hemmed in by gun battles, forced disappearances, sexual assaults, and street crimes of all sorts. The state of terror was further heightened late last year when the body of a young woman was found on a public street with an attached message that warned “sexy” women not to go out alone because “the devil was loose” in the city.

“Women do not enjoy the freedom of secure transit in the city,” said local women’s activist Irma Marrufo, “and this is a right and a responsibility of political authorities and the legal system.”

Additional sources: Lapolaka.com, January 21, 2009. La Jornada, January 20 and 21, 2009. Articles by Israel Davila and Ruben Villalpando. Norte, January 15, 20, 21, 22, 2009. Articles by Nohemi Barraza and Herika Martinez Prado. El Diario de Juarez, January 21, 2009. Proceso, January 18, 2009. Article by M. Turati. Cimacnoticias.com, January 5 and 22, 2009. Articles by Gladis Torres Ruiz and editorial staff.

Indigenous Communities Battle Mega-Tourism

A small indigenous community in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state finds little glitter in the “magic town” planned for their ancestral lands. Instead of good fortune, leaders of the Raramuri community of Bacajipare allege they’ve been the target of death threats and bullets because of an escalating land conflict related to the planned Divisadero-Barrancas Adventure Park.

To counter the purported attacks, Raramuri leaders Antonio Gutierrez, Pedro Moreno, Lorenzo Moreno and Enrique Moreno have filed a legal complaint with the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office.

“The threats are in response to community demands over the fences that are put up to profit from the sale of lands to tourist project investors,” the Raramuris charged in a public document.

A 400-member community which forms part of the San Antonio communal lands in the Sierra Tarahumara, Bacajipare is located in a zone slated for development as part of a renewed push to draw more tourists and their dollars to the famed Copper Canyon region. The land dispute pits Raramuri against mestizo members of the communal landholding unit known as an ejido.

Tagged as part of a cross-country network of “magic towns” envisioned by Mexican tourism promoters, the Divisadero-Barrancas mega-project is planned to include a tramway over the Copper Canyon, a heliport and major hotels. Reportedly backed by Spanish capital, the Chihuahua state government is supporting the tourism industry expansion.

Previous efforts to expand tourism in the Copper Canyon region have sometimes clashed with the desire of indigenous communities to control their lands, their cultural resources and their local economies.

“When projects of this kind are announced, it is always claimed there will be development and economic benefits for the residents,” Mexican environmentalist and columnist Ivan Restrepo recently wrote. “Experience shows they end up dispossessed of their best lands and working as gardeners and minor employees in hotels and other businesses.”

As the Bacajipare conflict heats up in Mexico’s north, an indigenous movement to take control of tourism is gathering steam in the country’s south, in the state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala.

On December 28, indigenous supporters of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) stepped up demands that Mayan archaeological ruins and popular tourist parks be managed by local communities. Arriving in four trucks, a group of protestors entered the legendary Palenque archaeological site and painted slogans on museum and administrative walls. A few of the slogans read: “The Country is Not for Sale,” “Death to the Capitalist System” and “Long Live the EZLN.”

The EZLN is celebrating the 15th anniversary of its armed uprising against the Mexican government with an international festival in Chiapas this week.

Currently, Palenque and other ruins are administered by the federal government’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. Indigenous activists contend that Article 169 of the International Labor Organization recognizes indigenous communities’ ownership rights to archaeological sites.

Last September, a police operation to dislodge indigenous protestors from an archaeological zone near Chinculitk and the Montebello Lakes National Park in Chiapas left six people dead and more than 20 others injured.

Amid the end-of-the-year holiday celebrations when most government officials are away on vacation, the Chiapas Human Rights Commission issued a December 26 report that concluded state agents committed human rights violations during last September’s confrontation. The official human rights agency sent its non-binding recommendations to the Chiapas state public safety and justice ministries for review and possible action.

Sources: La Jornada, December 19 and 29, 2008; January 2, 2009. Articles by Miroslava Breach Velducea, Ivan Restrepo, Angeles Mariscal and Hermann Bellinghausen.

Pain and Protest on the Day of the Butterflies:

A 1995 novel by writer Julia Alvarez retold the story of the three Mirabal sisters brutally assassinated by the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Decades later, the date of the murders, November 25, was declared the International Day for the  Elimination of Violence against Women by the United Nations.  

In Mexico, more than 200 women’s and human rights activists kicked off a cross-country caravan in Ciudad Juarez to protest against femicide and ongoing violence in all its forms against women.

Initiating their action at the monument to murdered women situated at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge on the Mexico-US border, the women’s activists embarked on a week-long journey to the state of Chiapas on Mexico’s southern border.  Along the route, caravan participants plan to meet with the widows of the Pasta de Concho miners killed in 2006, as well as  survivors of violent government crackdowns in San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca the same year. A meeting was also scheduled with Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza.

For many, beginning the caravan in Ciudad Juarez, the site of more than 600 women’s murders since 1993, held both symbolic and urgent meaning. Dr. Julia Monarrez Fragoso,   a researcher with Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juarez, said the rape-murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez has become one element of a violent social storm that is now claiming the lives of large numbers of men. Spawned by organized crime and weak government, massive violence has rendered civil society “scared, terrorized” and in need of truth and justice, said the women’s rights advocate.

“The number (of victims) is alarming and we shouldn’t say it’s just a war between narcos,” Dr. Monarrez said, “because in the final analysis, they are human beings and there should be a State that rules a city and takes care of the safety of its inhabitants. That’s why there are laws.”

On November 25, nearly twenty people, mostly men, were reported murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The incidents included the apparent firing-squad style execution of 7 men whose bodies were found outside a high school, and the slaying of a man and his son in front of hundreds of middle school students. Local press accounts report the murders of more than 1,400 people in Ciudad Juarez so far this year.

Even as activists prepared to launch the Chihuahua-Chiapas caravan, the number of female homicide victims kept mounting in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua.  For instance, in a period of less than 24 hours November 20-21, five women were killed in Ciudad Juarez in gangland-style slayings.

Two other victims of violent death were recently discovered outside Chihuahua City and near the north-central city of Cuauhtemoc, respectively. In the first incident, an unidentified woman was found dead on a highway where the bodies of previous femicide victims have been recovered, and in the second case, 14-year-old Gabriela Ivonne Valdiviezo Majalca was found naked with her throat slashed on November 23. Valdiviezo  had last been seen alive at a dance party attended by her parents and others.

In Ciudad Juarez, approximately 700 women have been murdered since 1993, the first year large-scale killings of women came to public light. Dozens of other women and young girls remain disappeared. Two adolescents, 14-year-old Iveth Rocio Hernandez Cuellar and 17-year-old Hortensia Areli Rojas Romo, are the latest publically-known cases. Both teenagers were reported missing from the same Ciudad Juarez neighborhood on November 18. 

Meanwhile, a new report by a Mexican network of non-governmental activists dedicated to monitoring official responses to violence against women, documented the killings of 1014 women in 13 Mexican states from January 2007 to July 2008. With 206 slain women, Chihuahua was ranked second in the overall number of women slain, behind the much more populous state of Mexico. According to the study by the OCNF network,  8,100 women were murdered in Mexico from the end of 2000 to the mid-summer of 2008. 

On the broader issue of gender and domestic violence, the official Chihuahua Women’s Institute reported attending 3,353 people who sought professional help to escape violent situations between the months of January and August of this year. Among the solicitants were 103 men.    

In a statement prepared for the November 25 commemoration, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan credited the UN Security Council as well as national governments for according increased recognition to the problem of violence against women since the international human rights group launched a global campaign around the issue in 2003-2004. The Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City femicides were an early part of Amnesty’s campaign.

Still,  gender violence in Mexico and many other parts of the globe is “endemic,” Khan contended,  with issues of war, economics and social development all mixed into the package.    

Wrote Khan:

“Recent research in Afghanistan, Armenia, Canada, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jamaica, Haiti, Liberia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Venezuela, and the USA has shown that this violence is not only a human rights violation but also a key factor in obstructing the realization of women’s and girl’s rights to security, adequate housing, health, food, education and participation. Millions of women find themselves locked in cycles of poverty and violence, cycles which fuel and perpetuate one another.”

In a November 25 communique, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay condemned the systematic violence against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but noted “violence continues being a huge problem suffered by thousands of women in the whole world.” The UN official urged governments to put into practice international resolutions on gender equality that were adopted at the 1995 Beijing Conference and by the 1979 Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Sources: Lapolaka.com, November 25, 2008. El Heraldo de Chihuahua, November 25, 2008.  Commondreams.org, November 25, 2008. Article by Irene Khan. Norte, November 20, 22 and 25, 2008. Articles by Nohemi Barraz and editorial staff. La Jornada, November 25, 2008. Articles by Victor Ballinas, Miroslava Breach, Ruben Villalpando, Octavio Velez, and news services. Cimacnoticias.com, November 24, 2008. Article by Lourdes Godinez Leal.

Femicide Torture Case Heads to OAS

A long-running case of state torture and legal chicanery related to the Chihuahua City women’s killings could end up in the Organization of American States (OAS) soon. This week, the Mexico City-based Commission for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (CMDPDH) announced it will take the case of David Meza Argueta to the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C. during the December-January time period.  The human rights commission regularly makes recommendations to the Mexican government and other member states of the OAS system.

In 2003, Chihuahua City state police agents arrested Meza and accused him of the murder of his 19-year-old cousin, Neyra Azucena Cervantes. The suspected body of the young computer school student and retail shop employee was discovered on the Cuernos de Luna hill outside Chihuahua City in July 2003. Together with Neyra, the remains of another missing young woman, Minerva Torres, were recovered at the crime scene but concealed from family members for two years by Chihuahua state authorities.

Subsequent probes by the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission and other investigators applying the international Istanbul Protocol supported Meza’s contention that he had been tortured and forced into making a false confession by Chihuahua State Judicial Police officers then under the command of the late Vicente Gonzalez and former State Attorney General Jose “Chito” Solis.

Chihuahua Judge Aram Delgado declared Meza innocent in 2006, but only after the young man had spent nearly three years in prison for a crime he said he did not commit. Meza’s case attracted international attention, prompting protests outside Mexican consulates by Mexico solidarity groups abroad.

Although Meza is free, the CMDPDH, supported by the Chihuahua-based Justice for Our Daughters organization, contends that justice is far from being served in the case. The human rights advocacy organization said it will seek recommendations from the Inter-American Commission to compensate Mesa for his torture and prison time, to publicly recognize the injustice, to investigate and prosecute the torturers, to enact legal mechanisms to prevent similar episodes from occurring in the future, and to carry out an investigation of Neyra’s murder.

“It is also grave and worrisome that the investigation to get the real perpetrators of Neyra Azucena Cervantes’ murder remains without any advance, permitting impunity,” the CMDPDH said in a statement. 

“It is inadmissible that after the liberation of Mr. Meza Argueta, the state attorney general’s office is still analyzing the case file without clearly defining the lines
of investigation they will follow…”

The CMDPDH contended the Cuerno de la Luna case was linked to a third killing, the Rosalba Pizarro Ortega murder, as well as to the disappearances two young women still missing, Yesenia Concepcion Vega and Julieta Marlen Gonzalez.

Similar to some femicide victims in Ciudad Juarez, many of the Chihuahua City victims had connections to computer schools or were last seen in the downtown section of their city. According to the CMDPDH, Chihuahua state attorney general’s office investigator Sandra Delgado initially uncovered leads pointing to the involvement of organized crime in the Chihuahua City disappearances and murders but the evidence was quietly tucked away and not pursued.

It’s important to note that Neyra Azucena Cervante’s murder occurred more than two years after the first wave of disappearances and investigations by the state attorney general’s office. 

In its statement, the CMDPDH urged Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza and State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez to compensate Meza and his family for their suffering and to finally clear up the Neyra  Azucena Cervantes murder and other femicides. There was no immediate public reaction from Chihuahua state officials to the CMDPDH’s statement.

Sources: Mexican Commission for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, October 13, 2008. Press statement. Cimacnoticias.com, October 14, 2008. Article by Lourdes Gonzalez Leal. 

Judge Rules for Border Patrol in El Paso Shooting  

Shot dead by El Paso Border Patrol agent Vernon Billings in 2003, 19-year-old Mexican immigrant Juan Patricio Peraza did not fulfill his dream of reaching the Promised Land of California to find work and help his family. Peraza’s killing sparked protests by human rights organizations, drew the attention of the Mexican Consulate and received international press coverage. A federal grand jury later declined to issue criminal indictments, prompting Peraza’s parents to file a wrongful death civil suit in federal court against the US government in 2005.

On July 25, US Magistrate Richard P. Mesa finally issued a ruling in the long-running case. Siding with Border Patrol agents’ testimonies, Mesa found that Billings’ use of deadly force was justified. 

The case centered on Peraza’s actions after he was stopped for questioning by the Border Patrol outside Annunciation House, a faith-based shelter for homeless migrants in central El Paso, on the morning of February 22, 2003.

Border Patrol agents contended Peraza fled from the scene, ran through the streets and threatened officers with his fists and a metal pipe after being cornered.  Officially
the last agent to the scene of the confrontation,  Billings, who had a little more than one year with the Border Patrol at the time of the incident, fired the shots that killed Peraza.

Contradicting the Border Patrol’s story, two witnesses maintained that agents were not in a life-threatening position when Peraza was gunned down. Judge Mesa, however, found the witnesses’ accounts were not credible. In his ruling, he contended a “reasonable and prudent” Border Patrol agent in Billings’ shoes “would have believed that Peraza presented an imminent threat of death or serious injury.”

Conceding that Peraza’s death was “tragic and regrettable,” Judge Mesa nevertheless wrote that “it was not the result of negligence.”

Interviewed by the Spanish news agency EFE, Border Patrol spokesman Ramiro Cordero said justice was served in the Peraza case. “We have confidence in the legal system of our country,” Cordero said.

In a statement to Frontera NorteSur and other news media, Annunication House sharply questioned the verdict. The El Paso immigrant advocacy group noted irregularities in the murder investigation conducted by the El Paso Police Department.

For example, Border Patrol agents were allowed to immediately leave the scene of the shooting and regroup at agency headquarters before being questioned by local police.

In Judge Mesa’s written ruling, former El Paso Police Department homicide investigator Antonio Leyba, now retired, is cited as stating that local detectives arrived at El Paso Border Patrol headquarters to “take statements but the (Border Patrol) was running the show.”

Calling Judge Mesa’s ruling “deeply troubling and bearing significant consequences for the El Paso and greater border community,” Annunciation House said the case raised critical issues not only about the implementation of Border Patrol training procedures, but  about the overall treatment of migrants in the border region. The activist organization asserted that Juan Patricio Peraza’s death should be viewed in the context of a social and ideological climate that dehumanizes undocumented persons.

According to Annunciation House:    “…murder and other forms of violence against migrants, particularly those who are or appearing to be Mexican and undocumented, have been and continue to be defining features of the U.S.-Mexico border since its establishment. But they don’t have to be,”

In a brief statement after Judge Mesa’s verdict was announced, the office of El Paso attorney Lynn Coyle, who helped represent the Peraza family, called the shooting of Juan an unnecessary and avoidable act. “Juan Patricio’s parents continue to feel their loss,” the statement said. Lawyers for the family are still reviewing Judge Mesa’s opinion to determine whether an appeal to a higher court will be pursued.

Additional source: El Semanario (Albuquerque)/EFE, July 31, 2008.

News Service Burgled

Based in Mexico City, the non-profit Women’s Communication and Information news service (Cimac) provides unique perspectives on issues, events and trends in Mexico, Latin America and other parts of the world. Offering original stories about women’s rights, immigration, human rights and other topics, the award-winning Cimac is a vital source of information for news outlets that range from Frontera NorteSur to Mexico City’s Proceso newsweekly.

Lately, Cimac may have even caught an unwelcome eye. On the morning of July 28, a Cimac employee discovered that the organization’s Mexico City headquarters had been broken into by an unknown individual or individuals. At least 10 computers were reported stolen, and sensitive files and archives rifled by the burglar(s).

Due to its relentless coverage of controversial stories, Cimac and its supporters strongly suspected that more than common thievery was behind the break-in.

“The disorder that (thieves) left was unusual for it to be considered a common robbery,” said Cimac attorney Manuel Fuentes. According to the lawyer, the crime scene alluded to interested persons searching for documents and information.

“The aggression against Cimac requires an urgent and rapid investigation that will clear up what happened and result in the punishment of this attack, which has all the hallmarks of an attempt to intimidate a civil society organization,” added Emilio Alvarez, president of the official Federal District Human Rights Commission.

Alvarez’s office is assisting Cimac in pressing criminal charges with the Mexico City attorney general’s office.

If  Cimac’s journalistic work was the motive of the burglary, then investigators will have a long list of politically “delicate” stories from which to connect leads. In the last few years, Cimac has excelled in its reporting on the Pasta de Conchos mine disaster, the persecution of pedophile-exposing author Lydia Cacho, the mass rape of sex workers by Mexican soldiers in the northern border state of Coahuila in 2006, and the June 20 News Divine disco tragedy/scandal in Mexico City in which 12 people were killed in a stampede. Female minors detained in the raid accused policemen of stripping them naked and snapping photos, and family members of the arrested juveniles later complained of receiving threats.     

Many of Cimac’s most politically-charged stories have discussed the  involvement of the Mexican army in alleged rapes and other human rights violations in  different places and at different times, spanning the era of the 1970s Dirty War to the present.

Internationally, Cimac is well-known for its long-running coverage of the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City and Guatemala, among other places. The news agency’s website (cimacnoticias.com) maintains an archive of the Ciudad Juarez-Chihuahua killings dating back to 1999. A file containing information about death threats against Chihuahua City women’s activist and human rights attorney Lucha Castro, who has been an outspoken advocate for the relatives of femicide victims, was reported among the items stolen earlier this week.

Human rights organizations and journalist associations in Mexico and abroad quickly condemned the burglary. Although valuable equipment and files were lost, Cimac barely lost a minute covering the news of the day. In the days following the break-in, the decades-old women’s news service published new stories about an armed attack against the homes of two workers for an indigenous community radio station in Oaxaca, the case of a famous Argentine psychologist suspected of pedophilia, women migrants and AIDS, and worsening water shortages in Mexico.

Sources: Cimanoticias, July 28 and July 31, 2008. Articles by Guadalupe Cruz Jaimes, Lourdes Godinez Leal, Guadalupe Gomez Q, Alejandra Waigandt, and editorial staff. Proceso/Apro/Cimac,  July 30, 2008. La Jornada, July 29, 2008. Article by Elizabeth Velasco C.

Death Threats against Women’s Activists

Prominent women’s rights activists in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua have reported receiving a new round of threats. Members of Ciudad Juarez’s Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May our Daughters Return Home), a group of relatives of murdered women, canceled their participation in a screening of the Hollywood movie Bordertown scheduled for their hometown because of death threats received by e-mail and on cell phones. “Now the threat is more real,” said Marisela Ortiz, Nuestras Hijas spokeswoman.

Titled Verdades que Matan in Spanish, the film stars Jennifer Lopez as a US  reporter who probes the Ciudad Juarez femicides.  The movie also features Antonio Banderas, Martin Sheen, Kate de Castillo, and Maya Zapata. Directed by Gregory Nava, the film has not been released on the big screen in the US and is only available on DVD. After years of production and delays in its release, Bordertown finally achieved a limited showing in some Mexican theaters last week. In Ciudad Juarez, unidentified journalists have also reportedly received threats warning them against promoting the film.  

In a Mexico City press conference on May 12, Nava said the movie was possibly not  released in the US because of its critical portrayals of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the maquiladora industry. Nava also revealed that when Bordertown’s producers were in Ciudad Juarez a crew member was kidnapped and tortured into telling his tormentors the hotel where film material was stored. Local policemen then lifted the material, according to Nava. Many scenes in the movie were filmed in Nogales, Sonora, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, among other locations.  

Nava was recently interviewed by a reporter for Ciudad Juarez’s El Diario newspaper. The journalist pressed Nava about exaggerating the murders, propagating presumed “myths,” surrounding the killings and profiting from the suffering of victims and their families. Defending the film, Nava blamed Mexican authorities, free trade and US companies for creating an environment in Ciudad Juarez in which women’s lives have no worth.

“Women in Juarez live in terror, their life has no value, and this is what we have to change,” Nava said. In an earlier interview with the Mexican press, Nava charged that governments on both sides of the border were doing nothing to address the femicides. “It is horrible, but it is easier for the authorities from Juarez, from Chihuahua and from the United States to cover up the situation. It is a grand injustice…”

The Diario interview mentioned incidents of harassment against Bordertown staff, but it did not report the alleged kidnapping of the crew member.  

Prior to Ortiz’s denunciation of death threats against members of Nuestras Hijas ,
Chihuahua City lawyer Lucha Castro, director of the Women’s Human Rights Center,  reported receiving a similar threat. Castro has long represented the mothers and family members of young women from Chihuahua City slain in a manner very similar to the more-publicized Ciudad Juarez rape-murders. According to Castro, an unidentified male caller threatened her on May 14. Castro then filed a criminal complaint with the Chihuahua State Office of the Attorney General, and two officers were assigned to  protect  the human rights attorney. Activists also demand that the Chihuahua state government protect Marisela Oritz and the other members of Nuestras Hijas.

The death threats against women’s rights activists come amid an unprecedented wave of narco-violence in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state. More than 400 slayings attributed to organized crime have been reported this year alone, and fear of further carnage is gripping society. In recent days, e-mails and messages to cell phones in Ciudad Juarez have warned people to stay home during the coming weekend or at least exercise extreme caution because of an alleged plan to carry out spectacular executions on public thoroughfares.

The threats against women’s movement leaders likewise occur in a broader context of violent attacks and legal pressure against social activists of all stripes. Since March, Chihuahua farm movement leader Armando Villareal has been murdered, and labor and women’s rights activist Cipriana Jurado, has been arrested on federal charges stemming from a demonstration nearly three years ago. Arrest warrants are reportedly pending against dozens of other farmers involved in a payment strike against the Federal Electricity Commission.

Mexican and foreign activists contend that a deteriorating human rights environment characterizes the country. Juan Ignacio Garcia, Spanish member of the International Civil Commission for the Observation of Human Rights, cited Ciudad Juarez as among human rights cases crying for redress from the authorities. The international community is seriously concerned about the femicides, murders of journalists and other human rights violations, Garcia said.

“We know that public opinion is aware of all this, and it would be good for the Mexican government to show a measure of stronger will and attend to these cases,” Garcia added. 

Sources: Frontenet, May 22, 2008. El Paso Times, May 22, 2008. Article by Marisela Ortega Lozano. Cimacnoticias, May 19 and 22, 2008.  Articles by Lourdes Godinez Leal. Apro/Cimacnoticias, May 21, 2008. El Diario de Juarez, May 16, 2008.  Article by Gabriela Minjares. Pagina 24/Agencia Reforma, April 21, 2008. Article by Dalila Carreno.   

Mexican Journalists Still Under Siege in 2008

Despite the creation of a special federal prosecutor and protests from virtually all international press organizations, new attacks against journalists in Mexico continue to mount while old ones go unpunished. Two young radio announcers from the southern state of Oaxaca are the latest journalists to suffer violent deaths.  Felicitas Martinez, 22,  and Teresa Bautista , 24,  were shot to death in an ambush April 7 while on their way to cover a state meeting of indigenous peoples. Four other persons were wounded in the attack, including two young children aged 2 and 3.  As of April 19, no suspects had been arrested for the crimes.

Indigenous Triquis, Martinez and Bautista were announcers for the “The Voice that Breaks the Silence” community radio station in San Juan Copala,  a town which has enjoyed autonomous status since early 2007. Outspoken commentators in a region riddled with social conflicts, Martinez and Bautista allegedly suffered threats before their murders. “ Some people think we are very young to know, but they should know we are very young to die,” Martinez and Bautista reportedly said on the air shortly before their  deaths.

Alfonso Ortiz, radio station coordinator, blamed a group connected with the PRI state government of Ulises Ruiz for the killings of his colleagues. Ortiz also accused the state government of attempting to bribe family members of Martinez and Bautista into silence. Oaxaca State Secretary Manuel  Garcia Corpus, who earlier met with the victims’ survivors, said a truce was necessary between warring political factions in the region.

Oaxaca State Attorney General Evencio Martinez ( no known relation to the victim) said the radio announcers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. “What’s clear from the preliminary investigation is that the attack wasn’t against them, but against the person who was driving the vehicle,” Martinez said. The presumed target of the attack, in the state attorney general’s view, was Faustino Vasquez, a local government employee who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his left arm.

Earlier, the San Juan Copala radio station demanded that Mexico’s Office of the Federal Attorney General take over the murder investigation.  

The Martinez-Bautista murders were condemned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),  the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mexican Episcopal Conference and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters  (AMARC), among other organizations.

AMARC representative Aleida Calleja  said Mexico was already  dangerous territory for communicators but that the murders of the two young indigenous women “added to it.” In a statement, the UN’s  human rights ombudsman  contended that “only through the effective clarification” of the Martinez-Bautista slayings will similar attacks  against journalists and social communicators be prevented.

Mexico´s official human rights commission is investigating the Oaxaca murders, while the AMARC has announced it will dispatch an international investigative delegation to the country between April 21-25.

In northern Mexico, another media outlet has also suffered aggressions. Readers of the daily El Cinco newspaper in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, have had a difficult time  getting the news lately because of an escalating wave of intimidation that culminated April 16 in the kidnapping of the paper’s pressman by alleged members of the Tamaulipas state police force.   Quoted in the Apro news service,  El Cinco’s  management added that other workers were threatened with guns. Copies of the paper which managed to make it onto the streets were then reportedly bought out by unnamed individuals offering higher-than- normal prices to vendors. There was no immediate word of the fate of the kidnapped pressman. Prior to the armed invasion of the printing facility,  editions of the newspaper had  allegedly been confiscated by state policemen at different intersections in Ciudad Victoria.

In the northern Mexican border community of Agua Prieta, Sonora, meanwhile, about 60 friends and relatives of murdered journalist Saul Noe Martinez staged a protest last week on the first anniversary of his killing, which like the vast majority of murders of journalists in Mexico remains unsolved. The editor of Interdiario, Martinez was kidnapped from an Agua Prieta police station by armed gunmen; his body was later found in the neighboring state of Chihuahua.  Demonstrators demanded the speeding up of the murder investigation, and that Martinez’s name be cleared of allegations that cocaine was found along with his body. According to Martinez’s supporters, the substance in question was rat poison.

Speaking out  on the Oaxaca murders, UNESCO General Director Koichiro Matsuura called the killings of journalists “an odious crime that causes great damage to society, since it suffocates the democratic right of the citizens to debate issues of common interest…”

Mexican Navy Operation Against Migrants Investigated  

A high-ranking Mexican military official has acknowledged that Mexican marines could have violated institutional procedures and used violence against a group of Central American migrants in the southern state of Oaxaca on March 31. Admiral Ramon Morales Gutierrez, naval inspector general, said he will compile a report of the alleged attack and other irregularities for his superiors. The Mexican navy does not condone or permit human rights violations, Morales said. The admiral added that he could not confirm a report that  a marine raped a woman detainee. 

The March 31 incident came to public light after Mexican media ran photos that appeared to show Corporal Raul Trinidad Hernandez  striking a detainee. Denying he used violence,  the marine said he was only trying to protect himself from insults and threats. Dozens of marines helped Nacional Migration Institute  agents raid a train passing through the community of Las Palmas from Chiapas late last month.  The train is frequently used by undocumented Central American  on their journeys north to the United States. Chasing migrants into homes in Las Palmas,  Mexican marines reportedly arrested 91 persons.  Detained individuals were allegedly beat up in front of
children.

A resident of Las Palmas, Teresa Ramirez, said a group of youths that escaped detention asked her for water and a place to rest after their encounter with marines. Ramirez and other Las Palmas said  contact with migrants was a commonplace occurrence with few problems, but scenes of military and immigration agency personnel chasing migrants through the streets were very unusual, they added.

At  a seminar held in Chiapas last weekend, Hayman Vazquez Medina, director of a non-governmental migrant center in Arriaga, Chiapas, informed Nacional Human Rights Commission President Jose Luis Soberanes of the Las Palmas incident. Mexico’s  official human rights commission has also dispatched two investigators to look into the matter.

The Las Palmas operation is another instance of how Mexican military personnel are increasingly  delegated  the task of  enforcing  civilian laws. Besides enforcing anti-organized crime and immigration laws, soldiers and marines are involved in campaigns against illegal tree harvesting and in patrols to protect commerical cruise ship passengers.

Sources: La Jornada, April 9, 2008. Article by Jesús Aranda and Hiram Moreno. El Universal, April 7, 2008. Article by Maria de la Luz Gonzalez.

National Protest Grows over Assassination of Chihuahua Farm Leader

The assassination of Chihuahua rural protest leader Armando Villareal Martha last March 14 outside his home in Nuevo Casas Grandes is now a national issue. On Tuesday, March 25, the Mexican Senate passed a resolution that demands the government of President Felipe Calderon quickly get to the bottom of Villareal´s murder. The resolution was brought before the high chamber of Mexico’s Congress by
 Senator Heladio Ramirez, a former governor of Oaxaca who represents the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The next day, March 26, hundreds of members of the National Committee for the Improvement of Agriculture, an organization with which Villareal was once affiliated,
blocked highways and held protests in two different regions of Mexico to repudiate
the Nuevo Casas Grandes murder.  Employing tractors, farmers staged actions in Irapuato, Guanajuato, as well along the Leon-Silao and Mexico-Nuevo Laredo highways. Led by Gustavo Guerrero Velazquez, a former elected official from the National Action Party (PAN), farmers who took over the Leon-Silao highway in the state of Guanajuato passed out pamphlets to motorists.

In Villareal’s home state of Chihuahua, several agricultural organizations are planning a mass protest for Monday, March 31, in Chihuahua City. Supported by El Barzon, the National Campesino Confederation, National Agrodynamic and the Democratic Campesino Front, organizers of the action said they will form a human chain between the state and federal justice departments located in the Chihuahua state capital.

The broad range of organizations speaking out on the Villareal murder reflects the slain activist’s long history in a variety of causes and political movements. Thousands of enraged farmers and others attended his funeral. At one time or another, Villareal had been involved with the PRI, PRD and Convergencia parties. Best known for leading militant protests against National Electricity Commission (CFE) rates charged to well-using farmers, Villareal was also involved in protests against the extraction of groundwater near the New Mexico border and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

At the time of his death, the Chihuahua activist and former self-proclaimed political prisoner, was targeting the national Pemex oil company to protest the dismantlement of petrochemical operations and the high cost of fertilizers. According to PRD Senator Yeidckol Polevnsky,  not long before his death Villareal denounced that Pemex  had purchased worthless equipment valued at more than $55 million. Mexico´s national oil giant is currently at the center of a growing national political storm concerning its future as a state-owned entity.

Meanwhile, conflicts between the CFE and an estimated 2,200 Chihuahua farmers participating in a payment strike are still unresolved. On March 26, Mexican federal law enforcement officials detained four farmers from the Aldama ejido near Chihuahua City on charges of  illegally using electricity and preventing CFE workers from cutting off the power supply to wells.

In response, about 200 farmers blockaded CFE offices in Chihuahua City March 27 to demand the release of the four men. Prior to the action, Aldama ejido leader Luis Carlos Nieto said he and other farmers also had outstanding federal arrest warrants. “We can’t live with this terror,” Nieto said. “We don’t know if they are going to arrest us or kill us.” After a three-hour blockade, Nieto said his group and CFE officials reached a preliminary agreement to release the four farmers, suspend power cut-offs  and form a new negotiating committee involving Chihuahua state legislators. Farmers, however, would remain active until their grievances are satisfied and Villareal’s murder is clarified, Nieto added.   

Sources: El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 26, 27 and 28, 2008. Articles by Dora Villalobos Mendoza, Ever Haro Guillen and news services. La Jornada, March 15, 26, 27, 28, 2008. Articles by Miroslava Breach Velducea, Andrea Becerril and Ruben Villalpando. 

Femicide Resurfaces in Chihuahua City

Once again, the spectre of femicide is haunting Chihuahua City. The  murder of high school student Paulina Elizabeth Lujan Morales sparked outbreaks of “collective psychosis” and triggered youth protests this month. On Monday, March 17, hundreds of high school students marched through downtown Chihuahua City carrying placards and chanting the familiar slogan “Not One More.” Halting at city government offices, the young people were nevertheless greeted with silence since officials were away on vacation.

A 16-year-old student at Chihuahua City’s Cobach 2 school, Paulina Lujan was last seen leaving classes early on the evening of Monday, March 10. Her sexually assaulted and severely beaten body was discovered on Thursday, March 13 off the highway that leads from the Chihuahua state capital to the nearby town of Aldama. The young woman’s shoes were located in a nearby arroyo.

Lujan’s body was discovered in the same area where the corpses of other femicide victims were found in the past, including 16-year-old ECCO computer school student Paloma Angelica Escobar, who disappeared in 2002 under similar circumstances as Lujan did and  almost six years to the day of the latest victim’s murder.  The Chihuahua-Aldama highway zone is near the headquarters of the Chihuahua state police.

The Lujan slaying  bore resemblances to other women’s killings that struck Chihuahua City between 1999-2003. Besides having the same physical, age and occupational profile of other victims, Paulina Lujan was described as a tranquil, reserved young person by her mother, “(Paulina) was a model student who didn’t have behavior problems,” Patricia Morales Rodríguez. said. 

“Let there be no doubt, we will get the murderers of Paulina,” vowed Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza, adding that authorities would not fabricate scapegoats in the murder case.

According to PGJE spokesman Rene Medrano, 18 persons have rendered declarations in connection with the Lujan crime. A young man who’s been mentioned as a posible suspect, Alexis Garcia, complained that presumed friends and family members of Lujan  have unfairly harassed him.  Garcia said he had “nothing to do with the crime.” Early press accounts of the Lujan murder mention the possibility that the victim could have met her killer via an Internet blog and e-mail.

Paulina Lujan was the fourth women murdered in Chihuahua City since last November. The other victims have been identified as Angelica Lopez Cruz, Claudia Janeth Llana Moreno and Irene Pena Monje. Lujan’s disappearance occurred two days after Internacional Women’s Day, an anniversary which was marked in the borderlands this year by a protest rally in Ciudad Juarez staged by relatives of femicide victims from the border city  and Chihuahua City.  Only days earlier, victims’ relatives were met with a police response in the Chihuahua State Legislature  during an unsuccessful attempt to convince state lawmakers to renew a special commission dedicated to investigating the women’s murders.

Additionally, the Lujan crime occurred within a broader context of escalating violence in the region involving organized crime gangs and Mexican security forces. Two days prior to Lujan’s disappearance,  Mexican soldiers and suspected members of the Sinaloa drug cartel engaged in a bloody Chihuahua City shootout  that left one army officer and six gunmen dead.

Youths, meanwhile, demanded greater security for Chihuahua City’s  schools.  Students said they were concerned about loud strangers hanging around Paulina Lujan’s  school at dismissal time.

Sources: El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 2008. Articles by Jorge Armendáriz, Ever Haro Guillen, Octavio Marquez, E. Fernandez, Ernesto Topete,  Jose Hernandez Berrios, David Pinon Balderrama, and Manuel Ruiz. La Jornada, March 15, 2008. Article by Miroslava Breach B. Lapolaka.com, March 13, 2008. Cimacnoticias.com, March 6, 2008. Article by Dora Villalobos Mendoza.

The “Silent” Side of Mexico’s Narco War  

The unearthing of at least 48 murder victims from three properties in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City during recent weeks, grimly refocused attention on the persistence of torture and forced disappearance in Mexico. Since many-if not most-of the victims were presumably associated with illegal drug trafficking and other criminal activities, the popular wisdom is that common citizens who keep their noses out of trouble shouldn’t be overly concerned by the discovery of mass horrors like the latest narco graves.

But victims’ relatives have another message for society: human rights are universal. Contending that authorities are ignoring their pleas for justice, relatives and friends of victims of forced disappearance are increasingly taking their plight to the media and to the public. In the Baja California state capital of Mexicali, members of the Esperanza Association Against the Forced Disappearance of Persons set up a protest encampment earlier this month outside state government offices. Members of the organization charged that 300 cases of disappeared people in five municipalities of Baja California remain unsolved.

In the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo, meanwhile, the Committee of Friends and Relatives of Murdered, Disappeared and Kidnapped Persons, contended that Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca and State Attorney General Eduardo Murueta have closed their doors to family members of missing persons presumably kidnapped by organized criminal elements.

“Not a single state official has faced down the violence that this place is going through,” charged Filiberto Ceron  Radilla , father of disappeared architect Jorge Gabriel Ceron Silva. “It is as if they want to oblige the citizenry to accept a reality that we are not ready to tolerate.” There was no immediate comment from either Governor Torreblanca or State Attorney General Murueta.

The Guerrero relatives’ committee has documented the cases of 107 people who disappeared in the state from December 2006 to January 2008. Additionally, the group reported at least 20 similar disappearances in the first two months of this year. Although violence has diminished somewhat from last year and 2006, high-profile disappearances and murders suspected of being carried out by organized criminal gangs continue on a fairly regular basis. In one of the latest cases to hit the press, Edgar Calvillo Roux, the director of the Acapulco police department’s intelligence center, was reportedly kidnapped by armed men on March 5. Until now, no information about Calvillo’s fate has come to light. 

Condemned by all human rights organizations, forced disappearance constitutes the silent side of Mexico’s narco war. Much more visible, of course, are the inner city shoot-outs, streetside body dumpings and public executions that have jarred entire regions of the country.  In Ciudad Juarez, for example, 9 people were reported slain gangland style on Monday, March 17, including one man who was shot to death inside the popular Willy’s dance club in the city’s Pronaf district. Since the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office on December 1, 2006 more than 3,000 people have been murdered in gangland fashion. As of March 14 of this year, the victims included 2,811 men and 197 women. Added together with similar statistics from 2006, more than 5,000 people have been killed in narco-tainted violence in the last two years. The body count is significantly higher than the total number of US soldiers killed during the first five years of the Iraq war.

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, March 18, 2008. Article by Martin Orquiz. Norte, March 18, 2008. Article by Arturo Chacon. Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2008.
Article by Marla Dickerson and Richard Marosi. La Jornada de Guerrero, March 15, 2008. Article by Marlen Castro.  La Jornada, March 10, 2008. Article by
Antonio Heras. El Sur, March 1, 8, 15, 16, 2008. Articles by Ezequiel Flores Contreras, Aurora Harrison, editorial staff and the Agencia Reforma news service. 

Activists Take Aim at Merida Initiative, Trade Pacts

Promising $1.4 billion in new funding to fight the drug war over the next three years, the Bush White House's Merida Initiative is a strategic cornerstone of the outgoing administration's envisioned future relationship with Mexico and Central America. Thomas Shannon, US assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, has called the assistance package a "new paradigm" of regional security cooperation.

Still awaiting approval by the US Congress, the Merida Initiative, which some  compare with Plan Colombia, would significantly increase assistance to the Mexican military, aid Mexico with high-tech communications and surveillance equipment and increase the training of Mexican security forces. According to US State Department anti-narcotics official David Johnson, Washington trained 4,627 Mexican police in 2007 and plans to train an additional 5,800 in 2008.
 
The Merida Initiative is expected to be a major topic of discussion when US Department of Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo Maurino meet in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, later this week.

Politically, the Merida Initiative is under consideration at a time when the Mexican army, the principal force in President Felipe Calderon's offensive against organized crime, is coming under renewed fire for alleged human rights abuses. Two incidents reported in northern Tamaulipas state this month exemplify the mounting controversy. 

In the first case, hundreds of residents of the border city of Reynosa held a protest earlier this month against the shooting death of Sergio Meza by Mexican soldiers in Matamoros.  Meza and his brother-in-law, US citizen and Reynosa resident Jose Antonio Barbosa, reportedly attempted to evade a Mexican army patrol because they had been drinking and using illegal drugs. The National Human Rights Commission opened an investigation of the shooting.

In the second incident, Guadalupe Barbosa Cruz, a Roman Catholic priest from San Fernando, Tamaulipas, was allegedly beaten along with three associates by soldiers at an army checkpoint. Matamoros Bishop Faustino Armendariz Jimenez charged that the priest and his companions were also robbed of their personal possessions.

According to the Matamoros Diocese, the beatings went on "for a long time" until soldiers realized that one of the men in their custody was a priest. The incident drew a condemnation from the Mexican Episcopal Conference: "The fight against organized crime does not justify crimes against innocent citizens by those who should be looking out for their safety."

In the United States, meanwhile, labor and human rights activists demand that the Bush Administration's proposed security aid program for Mexico and Central America be rejected outright or at least have stringent rights guarantees placed on it.

Helping galvanize the opposition is the still-unpunished murder of US journalist Brad Will in Oaxaca during the 2006 uprising against the state government of Ulises Ruiz. Although Mexican police were clearly identified in photos and by witnesses as the shooters who killed Will, none of the perpetrators has been arrested for the crime. Twice since last fall, the activist group Friends of Brad Will has disrupted US congressional hearings on the Merida Initiative.

Although some of Will's supporters were removed from the sessions by police, the group took credit for broadening the security debate to encompass human rights issues. On Friday, February 23, Friends of Brad Will helped organize a forum and cultural event on the Merida Initiative at the City University of New York. Last week, the group also relayed its concerns to New York Senator Charles Schumer.  
 
Another big issue spurring opposition to the Merida Initiative is the Mexican government's breaking of a strike over safety conditions at the Cananea copper mine near the Arizona border last month. Armed with an order from the country's Labor Ministry that declared the strike illegal, Mexican federal police-reportedly aided by soldiers-forcibly removed strikers from the Grupo Mexico-owned mine. However, the Mexican Union of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers, which is led by the exiled Napoleon Gomez, quickly won a legal victory when a court ruled the strike was indeed legal. 

An important ally of the Mexican miners, the United Steelworkers (USW) of the United States and Canada, demanded this month that the Merida Initiative be suspended until US congressional hearings are held on the Cananea strike. In mid-February, a group of USW and Mexican union leaders met with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Hispanic Caucus on Capitol Hill.

"Mexico cannot be permitted to violate the rights of workers with impunity under the pretext of securing the borders and combating drug trafficking," said USW President Leo Gerard.

On their Washington visit, Mexican labor activists also protested the cancelled recovery of the bodies of 63 miners killed in the 2006 Pasta de Conchos explosion, and the shooting deaths of two workers by police at  Lazaro Cardenas steel works in Michoacan also in 2006. 

"We want to make sure that in the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the United States, where issues such as the Merida Initiative are on the table,   money won't be used against the people of Mexico and the workers, like what happened at Lazaro Cardenas," said Jose Luis Hernandez, a leader Gomez's union from Coahuila state.

The USW's demands surrounding the Merida Initiative should be viewed as part of a bigger challenge that the union is launching against other existing or proposed international agreements. For instance, the USW is lobbying the US Congress to reject the proposed US-Colombia free trade agreement due to massive labor and human rights violations allegedly committed by the Colombian government. According to the USW, 2,283 labor leaders have been killed in Colombia since 1991; more than four hundred of the murders have occurred during the six-year-old administration of current President Alvaro Uribe.

In a recent statement, the USW criticized the Uribe government`s Peace and Justice Law for opening the legal door to light prison sentences for paramilitary gunmen convicted of killing trade unionists. "In the meantime, death threats against trade unionists in Colombia persist, with more than 200 occurring last year," the union said.

The USW formed part of a delegation of international trade unionists from North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland that traveled to Colombia to meet with Colombian union and political leaders this month. Claiming 850,000 members in the US and Canada, the USW is certain to have an influential voice during a US election year, especially one in which Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are stating that trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), deserve a second look.

Not all the activists' fire is directed at governments in the south. Some US-based immigrant rights activists, for example, are urging the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon to forego signing any new security, anti-drug or economic development agreements with Washington until the United States implements an immigration reform that benefits undocumented workers and their families.

On his US tour this month, President Calderon was read a letter from activist Flor Crisostomo that proposed conditioning Mexico-US cooperation on a satisfactory resolution of the immigration question. Taking the torch from Elvira Arellano, Crisostomo, an undocumented immigrant, is defying deportation from the sanctuary of a Methodist church in Chicago, Illinois. In her letter, Crisostomo also urged Calderon to revisit NAFTA. 

"We call on the Mexican government to renegotiate NAFTA, because for 14 years it has been the principal propeller of migration and the separation of families in Mexico," Crisostomo wrote the Mexican president. "And we are seen and treated like criminals in this country," she added. 

Taken together, the emerging waves of activism that link trade and security agreements to outstanding immigration, labor and human rights issues are not all that surprising in view of the parameters which were laid down for NAFTA and other bilateral agreements between Mexico and the US. In the run-up to NAFTA more than 15 years ago, labor and human rights advocates unsuccessfully appealed for the inclusion of strong human rights and immigration provisions in the trade pact. But unlike the European Union's trade regime, which includes democratic, human rights and immigration guarantees, broader social concerns were largely excluded from the deal hatched by NAFTA's negotiators.

Sources: Enlineadirecta.info, February 19, 2008. Article by Hugo Reyna. Proceso/Apro, February 16, 2008. Article by Jose Gil Olmos. Cimacnoticias.com, February 13, 2008. La Jornada, November 15, 2007; February 14, 19 and 21, 2008. Articles by David Brooks, Jose Antonio Roman and editorial staff. United Steelworkers, February 11, 2008. Press statement. Friendsofbradwill.org

Cotton Field Murder Prosecution Falters as Violence Escalates  

In a sharp blow to the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE), state Judge Catalina Ochoa Contreras declared innocent on February 6 a suspect charged with killing one of the eight women found murdered in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001. The defense of Edgar Alvarez Cruz had long contended that the charges against the young man were based on lies, pressured statements and questionable or non-existent evidence.

Alvarez’s defense also presented proof that their client was in the United States at the time of many of the disappearances and slayings of the victims found in the cotton field. Another inconsistency was the single murder charge against Alvarez, who was formally accused of killing 17-year-old Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis, but not tried for the murders of the other victims who were discovered on the same site and at the same time as Reyes.

The PGJE appealed Judge Ochoa’s verdict, but made no immediate public comment on the ruling.  

"The exoneration of the innocent man adds to the list of scapegoats detained by the state prosecutor as serial killers and then freed for lack of proof to incriminate them," editorialized Ciudad Juarez's Lapolaka news site. Upon hearing news of the sentence, Alvarez thanked the court for absolving him of the Reyes slaying but added, “it should’ve been done within the first 72 hours.” 

Alvarez still faces charges in the 1998 killing of teenager Silvia Garbiela Laguna Cruz, a murder he also vehemently denies committing.

If Alvarez’s legal victory is upheld, it would mark the third time Chihuahua state and federal cases against suspected cotton field killers have wound up in tatters. Previous investigations unraveled amid revelations of tortured suspects, extracted confessions, wild stories, mismatched bodies and other irregularities.

Although questions swirled around Alvarez’s August 2006 detention from the very beginning, Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez and representatives her office repeatedly told the press that additional evidence against Alvarez and two other accused men would be forthcoming. In the end, however, none materialized.

What distinguished the Alvarez affair against the prior cotton field cases was the key role played by the United States. Alvarez was living as an undocumented worker in Denver, Colorado, when he was arrested based on a confession made by Jose Francisco Granados de la Paz to the Texas Rangers. Held on an unrelated charge, Granados tied Alvarez to the cotton field killings. Later revelations seriously questioned Granados' credibility as a witness, painting instead a picture of a disturbed, drug-abusing individual who was prone to delusions.

Despite the flimsiness of the Alvarez case, as well as the previous use of torture in the cotton field investigations, the US government quickly deported Alvarez to Mexico to face trial. He has sat in jail ever since.  At the time of Alvarez's arrest, US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza hailed a major breakthrough in solving the Ciudad Juarez femicides.

While the US-Mexico investigation of the cotton field killings verges on collapse, three of the victims' mothers are taking their quest for justice to an international legal body. Last December, the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights notified lawyers for the women that it has accepted their case for review.

The cases were originally pursued in the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)  by the mothers of victims Esmeralda Herrera Monreal,  Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez and Claudia Ivete Gonzalez.  Transfer of the case to the Inter-American Court means that the Mexican government did not follow the IACHR’s  recommendations it earlier issued to ensure justice for victims' relatives. In a separate report late last month, Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission criticized all three levels of the Mexican government for not following its own justice recommendations related to the Ciudad Juarez women’s murders.

Karla Michel Salas Ramirez, an attorney for the three mothers and a member of Mexico's National Association of Democratic Lawyers, said the Costa Rica case could set a legal precedent for other femicide cases. The Mothers' lawyers will argue that Mexico is in violation of the Belen Do Para Convention, an international agreement which obliges states to protect women from gender violence. The plaintiffs also seek sanctions against Chihuahua state government officials who were responsible for handling the cotton field investigation.  Unlike the advisory nature of the IACHR’S recommendations, rulings from the Costa Rica court are obligatory for member states.

On another international note, the Ciudad Juarez femicides drew a sharp comment from United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, who was on an official visit to Mexico this week.

"In Mexico, the issue of impunity is the greatest challenge that has to be confronted and overcome," Arbour said. "The case of the femicides, in which the justice system doesn't protect women, is worrisome."

In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, media outlets, business groups, human rights organizations and just plain ordinary citizens are all alarmed at the escalating homicide rates for both men and women since the beginning of the year. Nine women and girls have been killed for different reasons since January 1. Also last month, a woman's skeleton was recovered from an area frequently used as a dumping ground for both male and female murder victims.

Additionally, a 15-year-old high school student, Adriana Enriquez Sarmiento, was reported missing from downtown Ciudad Juarez on January 18. The young girl had attended the private Ignacio Allende Preparatory, the same institution three previous femicide victims, including Laura Berenice Ramos, had also attended,

In a blog entry this week, El Paso author and longtime femicide researcher
Diana Washington Valdez reported that a female Allende Prep student was accosted outside the school January 31 by a man who exposed himself to the girl. According to the journalist, an intervention by prominent Ciudad Juarez labor rights activist Cipriana Jurado, who just happened to be in the vicinity of the school at the time of the incident,  prompted the man to run away before police could detain him.

Sources: Lapolaka.com, February 6 and 7, 2008. El Diario de Juarez,
February 7, 2008. Article by Gabriela Minjares. Norte, January 30 and February 7, 2008. Articles by Nohemi Barraza and Antonio Rebolledo. La Jornada, January 30, 2008 and February 6, 2008. Articles by Victor Ballinas and Ruben Villalpando. Cimacnoticias.com, December 26, 2007 and January 24, 2008. Articles by Sara Lovera Lopez and Lourdes Godinez Leal.  Proceso/Apro, January 29, 2008. Article by Jose Gil Olmos. Dianawashingtonvaldez.blogspot.com/

Suspect in Cross-Border Femicide Indicted

A 37-year-old El Paso man has been indicted in a December 2007 murder case that spans the US-Mexico border. According to a January 28 criminal complaint filed by the Otero County District Attorney's Office in New Mexico District Court,  Guillermo Ruiz killed 20-year-old Anabel Calzada Alvarado on Mescalero Apache tribal land in New Mexico last December 17 or 18,  drove the victims' body across southern New Mexico to El Paso and then headed to Ciudad Juarez. Calzada’s two-year-old son allegedly was in the back seat of Ruiz’s vehicle during the murder flight.

Once in Mexico, Ruiz went to a familiar area near the state prison on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, where he dumped Calzada's body on a vacant lot and then set it afire, according to case documents. Tipped by residents, Mexican authorities discovered the smoldering body early on the morning of December 19 at the intersections of Francisco Villa and Sergio Dominguez streets in the January 6 neighborhood of Ciudad Juarez.
At some point, Ruiz abandoned Calzada’s son to the cold of the night.

"Crimes have in fact been committed in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico and the Mescalero Indian reservation," said Otero County District Attorney Scot Key in an interview with Frontera NorteSur. "Any crimes that occurred in Mexico pale in comparison to the murder and the kidnapping of the child."

Because of the international nature of the Calzada crime, the New Mexico State Police, FBI, Ruidoso Police Department, Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office and El Paso Police Department were involved in different aspects of the investigation.

The Calzada slaying reportedly happened in the vicinity of the Mescalero Apaches' popular gaming resort that draws many customers from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in addition to southern New Mexico.

Key said Ruiz has been indicted in New Mexico on an open charge of murder as well as on additional counts of false imprisonment, child abuse and evidence tampering. The murder suspect could face a capital murder trial, Key added. A one-million dollar bond, without the right to a 10 percent payment, has been established for Ruiz.

The suspect is currently jailed in El Paso on an evidence tampering charge. Ruiz was arrested by El Paso police just days after Calzada’s murder for making a phony car-jacking report and burning his vehicle in an alleged attempt to get rid of incriminating evidence.

Key said his office is now negotiating with El Paso officials to move Ruiz to New Mexico for prosecution. No court date for Ruiz has been set, the Otero County prosecutor said.

Coming only one week before Christmas, the timing and brutality of the Calzada killing drew both widespread public attention and condemnation. Calzada’s son, two-year-old Bryan Alexis, was found by a woman who saw him wandering alone in downtown Ciudad Juarez early on the freezing morning of December 19. She turned the child over to members of the city's fire department. Key confirmed the two-year-old is now safely in the care of other family members.  

Ruiz confessed to the Calzada homicide to the El Paso Police Department detectives and Mexican officials after he was detained last month for making the false car-jacking report and trying to destroy his vehicle. Informed that he would be deported to Mexico for murder, Ruiz quickly told investigators that he had killed Calzada in New Mexico

In a case affidavit, Carl Christiansen, an investigator for the New Mexico State Police and FBI, recounted Ruiz's story how the suspect killed Calzada in the US and got rid of her body in Mexico. According to the affidavit, Ruiz, first became acquainted with Calzada, a resident of Ruidoso, shortly before the murder. He later met up with the woman and her son at the Casino Apache Travel Center outside Ruidoso. Ruiz ended up stabbing the woman the woman to death after he became angered over a rejection of his sexual advances. Supposedly, Calzada's son stayed asleep in the back seat of Ruiz’s jeep as a struggle ensued between the suspect and the young New Mexican.

According to Christiansen, Ruiz drove the victim's body to his mother's home in El Paso, parked the jeep in the drive-way, with the boy and his dead mother inside the vehicle, and then attempted to clean up any blood that might be on his body. In Christiansen’s account, the accused killer said he drove across the border to discard Calzada's body so blame "don't come back to me."

On multiple occasions during the last 15 years, the burned bodies of other murdered women have been discovered in Ciudad Juarez. Calzada's physical profile was similar to many previous victims, and the initial Mexican press reports of her murder identified the victim as a teenager.

In his affidavit, Christiansen stated that he later encountered physical evidence at the crime scene described by Ruiz. New Mexico law enforcement authorities now have a video-tape that shows Ruiz's vehicle in and around the Casino Apache Travel Center "on the dates and times concerned with the crime.” Calzada's Mexican voter identification card was recovered by police investigators from the spot where the knifing allegedly occurred.  The weapon used to kill Calzada  was later allegedly tossed along railroad tracks in Ciudad Juarez.   

"We've settled the murder scene. There was evidence at the murder scene consistent with what the defendant told us" Key said. "Had we not found the murder scene, (the investigation) would've been complicated."

A former resident of Ciudad Juarez,  Calzada moved to Ruidoso two years ago. At Calzada's funeral in Ciudad Juarez last month, relatives described the high school graduate as a peaceful, serious young woman who only wanted the best for her son and to get ahead in life.

Additional sources:  El Paso Times, December 24 and 26, 2007. Articles by Louie Gilot. El Diario de Juarez, December 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 2007. Articles by Armando Rodriguez and Gabriela Minjares, Nancy Gonzalez, J. Saucedo, and editorial staff.  Lapolaka.com, December 19 and 24, 2007. Cimacnoticias.com, December 21, 2007. Article by Jonathan Padilla.

Still No Justice for a Tijuana School Girl

Two years have passed since 15-year-old Sara Benazir Chavolla Ruiz met a horrible fate. Tossed bound from a moving vehicle in front of a property associated with former Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, Benazir was then run over by a taxi driver who claimed he could not stop in time to prevent an accident. The high school student lingered in a coma for six days until she succumbed from her injuries on December 13, 2005. On the second anniversary of the young girl's death, family members planned a quiet mass in her honor.

In the two years since Benazir's passing, her case has become another symbol of the gender violence, legal injustices and impunity that characterize the times. The prime suspect in the crime, 22-year-old Fernando Emmanuel Valencia Perez, was briefly detained by police, but was just as quickly released.  DNA tests of hair fibers found in Valencia's vehicle identified the samples as belonging to Benazir.
 
However, another key piece of evidence, Benazir's body, literally went up in smoke. Initially assured by then-Assistant State Attorney General Maria Teresa Valadez that the case was "resolved," Benazir's parents quickly cremated their daughter's body.

"It was on that day that the irregularities began," recalled Benazir's mother,
Sara Elena Ruiz Meza. "The authorities argued there was not enough sufficient evidence, and from then on began the intimidations, jokes and the lack of justice."  According to Benazir’s parents, an arrest warrant for Valencia is gathering dust. A second suspect who allegedly was with Valencia when Benazir was thrown from the vehicle, Carlos Jesus Soto Ocio, has not faced the legal music either. Valencia is a nephew of Adrian Humberto Murillo Gonzalez, a member of Baja California's judiciary, and his wife, Claudia Valencia, an advisor to the director of a state land title commission.

Benazir's parents haven't let the violent death of their beloved daughter become another cold, forgotten statistic. The victim's mother waged a hunger strike for justice, and the family filed a complaint with the Baja California State Attorney General for Human Rights. The official state agency issued recommendation 8/2006 to the administration of former Governor Elorduy Walther which, among other measures, urged the conduct of prosecutors in the case be investigated; the recommendation was rejected. In Mexico City, Benazir's parents found the doors of the National Human Rights Commission closed. With the assistance of Baja California and national human rights organizations, the couple began preparing a complaint to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Benazir's parents and their supporters suspect state authorities of falling prey to "influence peddling," and they accuse law enforcement officials of smearing the teenager's reputation as a promiscuous substance abuser.

"We believe there was an agreement made at the highest level," said Benazir's father, Jose Manuel Chavolla Flores. "The authorities never had the will to clarify the case, and the only thing we seek is justice. We want the guilt or innocence of (Valencia) demonstrated. That's all we ask."

In Tijuana, a cross marks the spot where Benzair landed on the pavement. Her family has acquired a crypt in the new Tijuana cathedral where the deceased adolescent's ashes that were carried during numerous public protests by her mother will be deposited. And Benazir's mother won't let up in her quest for justice.

"The last time I saw the (former) state attorney general, Antonio Martinez Luna- thank God he's gone- was October 17 at a lawyers' dinner," Ruiz  said. "I went to hold him accountable, and when he saw me it seemed like he saw the devil." Ruiz is cautiously optimistic the new Baja California state administration will take some action. A new assistant state attorney general for Tijuana, Salvador Juan Ortiz Morales, was appointed this week. "I now believe they will remove some of the people who were blocking the investigations-at least some of them," she said. 

Sources: Frontera, December 5 and 12, 2007. Articles by Manuel Villegas and Fausto Ovalle. La Jornada, November 17, 2007. Article by Agustin Salgado. Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. August 29, 2007. Press bulletin. Zeta, July 19, 2007. Article by Tania Navarro Camacho.

Mexico-Japan Sex Trade Exposed

Mexican federal officials are beginning to look at the export of "sex slaves" to Japan. Reports from the International Organization for Migration, the Organization of American States (OAS) and other agencies indicate that at least three thousand Mexican women could be in Japan working involuntarily in the sex industry. In a recent interview with the Mexican press, Susana Chiarotti, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights, said the victims are deceived by employment ads in Mexico, kidnapped by human traffickers and then sold to the Yauzka, the Japanese mafia.

"They are lured with glamorous-sounding employment offers connected to the entertainment industry, to work in a bar or in an artistic production," Chiarotti said. "(Women) are promised very high salaries and never told what is really going on: their passports are taken from them and they pass hours and hours enclosed in a room where they have sex with dozens of persons." 

Ads promising grants for study abroad or work in the entertainment industry in Japan or Australia are commonly posted on the streets of Mexico City, especially in the youth-popular Condesa and Zona Rosa districts. Chiarotti charged that the human trafficking network could not flourish without the connivance of some officials in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

"We didn't realize it, but (Japan) is especially demanding Latin women, particularly Mexicans," said Sadot Sanchez Carreno, coordinator for the National Human Rights Commission's human trafficking program. According to Sanchez, his agency has signed an agreement with the United Nations to document the intercontinental sex trade, while the Federal Public Security Ministry has opened a legal investigation.

The Japanese government, meanwhile, is turning a blind eye to the international sex trade that's centered on its shores, contended two Japanese researchers. "Japanese authorities refuse to recognize the greater part of trafficking cases, because the victims don't report this crime to the police or because if they do they risk being processed as illegal foreigners and deported," said Kanane Tsutsumu of the Women's University of Kysuhu and Sumiko Honda of Fukuoka's Asian Feminine Center. 

In a report on human trafficking in Latin America, the OAS noted that the Japanese government grants 120,000 entertainment visas every year, especially to women. An estimated 1,700 women from Mexico and other Latin American countries are kidnapped annually for the Japanese sex industry, according to figures compiled by the OAS and other international organizations. 

Source: Milenio.com (Monterrery), November 18, 2007. Article by Alberto Najar.

OAS to Probe US Immigrant Detentions

Investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States will examine conditions in detention facilities for immigrants held in the United States. The news was announced by IACHR President Florentin Melendez following testimony by both immigrant rights advocates and representatives of the US government in Washington last week. At a hearing held by the IACHR, immigrant advocates and their legal representatives accused the US government of   violating the human rights of immigrant detainees.
 
Representatives of the Women's Commission for Refugees and Children and the Rights Working Group charged that substandard medical care, physical and psychological mistreatment and even sexual abuses were part of an overall set of bad conditions faced by immigrant detainees. According to the immigrant advocates, lack of access to lawyers is another common problem. Forced to don prison garb, immigrant detainees are being treated like common criminals, the advocates charged.  Representing the Women's Commission, attorney Christopher Nugent accused the US government of traumatizing detained immigrant children. Nugent said that 80,000 Mexican children are arrested and deported to Mexico every year.

Countering that immigrant detainees "receive the best human treatment possible," Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Gary Mead insisted that Washington seeks to resolve individual cases of detainees as rapidly as possibly. Mead acknowledged that 66 people have died while in the hands of ICE during the last four years, but added that the number of deaths is still low since "more than one million people have passed through our custody on this period." Mead said that Washington spends $100 million annually on medical and dental treatment for detained immigrants. 

Unconvinced by the testimony presented by either side, IACHR President Melendez and his fellow commission members decided that more information, including a first-hand look at US detention facilities, was necessary in order to assess the human rights complaints filed by immigrant advocates. Melendez said that the U.S. Department of State has agreed to allow the IACHR personnel access to immigrant detention centers in this country.  The official human rights arm of the Organization of American States, the IACHR issues reports, orders protective measures and makes recommendations to member governments.

Source: Cimacnoticias.com, October 16, 2007. Article by Leticia Puente Bersford.

Femicide Cases Unravel

Legal charges in the murder cases of several women and young girls in Ciudad Juarez began falling apart in recent days. Even as Mexican authorities stepped up a campaign to convince international public opinion that the justice tide was turning in favor of female victims of gender violence, multiple defendants walked free or were not charged with crimes.

In a major setback to the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE), a state judge dismissed a murder charge against Alejandro Delgado Valles, or "El Cala," who was accused in the 1998 killing of teenager Silvia Gabriela Laguna Cruz. In response, Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez said that her office would retain the option of reviving the case against Delgado. The young man's lawyer, Abraham Hinojos Rubio, declared he would demand state restitution for alleged "moral damages" that the PGJE caused his client.

Officially implicated in another case in which the bodies of 8 murdered women were discovered in the same Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001, Delgado was presented by the PGJE as a "protected witness" against two men accused of the killings.

Publicly recanting earlier this year, Delgado charged that he had been pressured into making false statements by state policemen. Ciudad Juarez media, human rights activists and even former government officials have all criticized the latest cotton field case as lacking the same type of credibility that characterized two previous ones against suspects who were eventually cleared. Relatives of Edgar Alvarez Cruz, a suspect jailed in the cotton field case who insists on his innocence, are calling on Chihuahua's high court to review the charges.

In a separate development on October 3, new Chihuahua State Supreme Court President Rodolfo Acosta Munoz ordered two men freed from prison who were earlier convicted in the brutal 2005 sexual assault and murder of 7-year-old Airis Estrella Enriquez Pando, whose remains were found stuffed in a barrel at a pig farm on the edge of Ciudad Juarez.  Ruling on an appeal, Judge Acosta found there was insufficient evidence to connect Eustacio Aleman Zendejas and Juan Manuel Alvarado Saenz to Airis' murder. Two other men, including prime suspect Luis Garcia Villalbazo, are serving long prison sentences for the crime. 

Airis' parents, Rubi Pando and Jose Cesar Enriquez, were outraged by the court's action. "We were hoping that (the suspects) would serve their sentences, because we were almost sure that they were the guilty ones,"
Pando said. Maintaining his innocence, Zendejas blamed his misfortune on the alleged lies of convicted co-defendant Garcia, who has also been connected to the sexual assaults of three other young girls. Surviving 3 prison riots which left 17 dead inmates, Zendejas added that he could seek restitution from the state for moral and psychological damages.
 
Two other recent cases also cast doubt on women's prospects for justice in Ciudad Juarez. In late September, state Judge Neza Zuniga decided that there wasn't enough evidence to charge Rafael Pineda Delgado with murder.  Pineda claimed that last month’s shooting death of his 20-year-old wife, Karla Ivonne Quiroz Bernal, was accidental.

"It happened when I was playing a joke on her," Pineda said. "I pointed at her the pistol which I had removed the bullets from for cleaning, but a projectile got stuck in the magazine and caused her death."  Quiroz left behind two young children.

Eyebrows were also raised in the city-even within the ranks of the PGJE- when a commander for the State Investigations Agency (AEI), the police department long responsible for investigating women's homicides, was ordered to undergo therapy instead of criminal prosecution for allegedly trying to strangle his girlfriend before attempting suicide. Jesus Eduardo Aleman Medina previously served in different posts in Palomas, Villa Ahumada and the Juarez Valley, but now reportedly is assigned to the AEI's special anti-kidnapping squad.

The legal developments in Ciudad Juarez came amid an October 4 visit by German parliamentarians to the border city. Sponsored by the Chihuahua state government, the objective of the tour was to show the German lawmakers the supposed progress authorities are making in prosecuting crimes against women.

Prior to leaving Mexico, German Deputy Jurgen Klimke, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, was quoted as saying he felt deceived by victims' mothers who charge authorities with fostering impunity. Klimke said that it was important to get to the truth about the Ciudad Juarez femicides because a measure had been introduced in the Bundestag to advise German companies not to invest in Mexico.

While Klimke was departing Mexico, the PGJE announced that it had tentatively identified the remains of a suspected female murder victim discovered last month in the desert outside Ciudad Juarez. Press accounts reported that the remains likely belong to Irma Isabel Vargas, a 16-year-old employee of a Tres Hermanos shoe store who vanished in downtown Ciudad Juarez in 2005. Like Vargas, several other femicide victims worked or shopped in downtown shoe stores. No suspects have been publicly named in the Vargas case.

“This was a terrible blow to the family, because we all hoped that she was going to be found alive,” said Vargas’ aunt, Leticia Moreno Gallegos.

Meanwhile, other relatives of Ciudad Juarez femicide victims and their supporters, spent Sunday, October 7, painting the familiar pink crosses on posts along the Camino Real highway that was recently opened on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. 

“This activity keeps alive the memories of our daughters and is a message to our authorities that we continue seeking justice,” said Paula Flores, mother of 1998 murder victim Sagrario Gonzalez. 

Sources: Norte, October 6 and 8, 2007. Articles by Carlos Huerta, Jorge Chairez Daniel and Felix Gonzalez. Frontenet.com, October 4 and 6, 2007. El Universal, October 5, 2007. Article by Luis Carlos Cano. El Diario de Juarez, September 25 and 30, 2007; October 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 2007. Articles by Pedro Sanchez Briones, Armando Rodriguez and editorial staff. La Jornada, September 30, 2007. Article by Ruben Villalpando.     

Justice for Journalists?

In the eyes of Mexico's official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), it's now up to Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza to ensure that justice is delivered to a group of Ciudad Juarez journalists. Issuing Recommendation 33/2007, the CNDH urged that the executive branch of Chihuahua's state government probe the conduct of the Chihuahua Office of the Attorney General (PGJE) in relation to the beatings and robberies suffered by three Ciudad Juarez journalists last year. Allegedly, the aggressors included officers from the State Investigations Agency (AEI), which previously was known the Chihuahua State Judicial Police, as well as members of the Aztecas street gang.

In last year's incident, two reporters from the afternoon PM daily, Eugenia
Cicero Rivera and Aurelio Sanchez Nunez, and a photographer from the El Diario de Juarez newspaper, Jaime Murrieta Briones, were attacked while attempting to cover a loud drinking party on a public street that involved members of the AEI and the Aztecas.  Enraged at the reporters' presence, attackers shot up the journalists' two vehicles, beat up the victims and took away cameras. Manuel del Castillo Escalante, president of the Ciudad Juarez Journalists Association, later filed a complaint with the CNDH on behalf of the journalists.

Legal charges stemming from the assault have been brewing against AEI agents Jose Abelardo Torres Bernal and Jorge Manuel Villegas Esparza.  Civilians Ruben Antonio Martinez Olivares, Ricardo Barrios Simental and Carlos Alberto Hernandez Luna are accused of physical assault, robbery and possession of weapons reserved for exclusive use of the army.

The CNDH recommended to Governor Reyes Baeza that his government investigate the involvement of the AEI in the assaults, clarify the conduct of the district attorney's office for its alleged omissions and irregularities in the preliminary investigation and determine why the PGJE did not respond to information requests about the case made by the national human rights agency. Additionally, the CNDH recommended that the PGJE move forward with the legal case against the suspects.

There was no immediate comment from Governor Reyes Baeza about the CNDH’s
recommendation. Accompanied by a group of indigenous Tarahumara dancers, Governor Reyes Baeza was in New York City for a parade and meetings with potential investors this week. While in the Big Apple, Governor Reyes Baeza touted Chihuahua’s advantages in the mineral, maquiladora and emerging aerospace economic sectors.

Though the CNDH's recommendations are purely advisory, the commission’s investigations are widely viewed as enjoying a certain moral authority. Citing the gravity of the 2006 Ciudad Juarez incident, the CNDH declared that the freedom of expression,  personal security and legal rights of the three journalists were violated by members of the AEI.

In other news concerning Mexican journalists, a judge absolved four Coahuila journalists of weapons and drug charges after the federal attorney general’s office failed to prove the government’s case this week.  Arrested in Coahuila by Mexican soldiers and federal police last month, the reporters were initially held incommunicado and allegedly tortured.    
 

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, September 17 and 18, 2007. Lapolaka.com, September 18, 2007. Frontenet.com, September 18, 2007. La Jornada, September 19, 2007. Article by Leopoldo Ramos.

Youth Curfews, Opposition Spread 

In northern Mexico, local governments are turning to youth curfews as one answer to the public security crisis. First unveiled in Ciudad Juarez more than two months ago, youth curfews have since been enacted in cities in Sonora, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas states. While curfews are spreading, so is the opposition to the new laws.

"The government wants to use the curfew in Ciudad Juarez as a pilot plan to extend it elsewhere and, above all, to condition society to these sorts of authoritarian measures," contended Juan Carlos Martinez Prado, a spokesman for the pro-Zapatista Other Campaign in Ciudad Juarez.

Charging that the curfew discriminates against poor youth and violates the right of free transit as guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution, Martinez and other critics worry that curfews, together with random police searches of public schools for illegal drugs and student drug-testing programs, represent a step backwards from Mexico's quest for a more democratic, participatory society.

Hundreds of young people and adults attended an all-night gathering at the Benito Juarez Monument in Ciudad Juarez's downtown to protest the curfew earlier this month. Featuring rock bands and speakers, the event was sponsored by the Popular Independent Organization, Paso del Norte Human Rights Organization, Companeros Program, College of Sociologists and other groups.

Separately, outgoing Ciudad Juarez Mayor Hector "Teto" Murguia announced that he was partially scaling back the curfew hour from 10 pm to 11 pm. Claiming that "90 percent" of Ciudad Juarez's population supports the curfew, Mayor Murguia announced the new policy after meeting with young skaters at an extreme sports park. “It’s good to have contact with the young people of Juarez,” he said.

The newest curfew regulations prohibit children 10 or younger from being outdoors without the accompaniment of an adult after 10 pm,  while unaccompanied young people aged 11-17 must be at home after 11 pm.  In neighboring El Paso, Texas, youths below 17 must remain off the streets between 11 pm and 6 am if they are not accompanied by adults. El Paso violators are ticketed by police.

Mayor Murguia's new policy was rolled out after the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, a purely advisory body, assumed what some view as a contradictory posture on the curfew question. Ruling on citizen complaints, the CEDH declared that the law was unconstitutional but that it could be improved.

Curfew opponents contend that the CEDH missed two key points. "The CEDH has a legalistic view of reality, but it doesn't analyze (the curfew) as an authoritarian policy that goes beyond the constitutional issue," said Martinez in an interview with Frontera NorteSur. "Certainly, it violates the fundamental rights of human beings to travel freely at any hour in this country. The Constitution guarantees this."

In response to the CEDH, the Ciudad Juarez municipal police department drew up with a 29-point protocol to guide officers who detain and release curfew violators. The enforcement policies require officers to not keep detained youths in police campers for more than 45 minutes, emphasize releasing youths to parents as soon as possible and prohibit mixing detainees with the opposite sex or with adult and juvenile prisoners held on criminal charges.

As controversy brewed in Ciudad Juarez, a youth curfew was ordered in the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas in mid-August.  The measure is aimed at youths below 18 in 20 low-income neighborhoods considered particularly troublesome. Under the new ordinance, parents of curfew violators will be fined about $50.

"We are going to send to court as a suspect anyone we encounter on the streets or on the corners after ten in the evening and who can't justify his presence," vowed Juan Martin Reyna Garcia, operational director of the Matamoros public safety department. Reyna said that 10 pm was chosen as zero hour because "only those that have no job or purpose are out wandering around on the streets."

Both the official Tamaulipas State Human Rights Commission and the Tamaulipas Youth Institute immediately protested the curfew on constitutional and human rights grounds.

"We have to ask the authorities to do their work with a high degree of responsibility, because they should understand that it doesn't mean that a young person who is in the street after ten in the evening is a delinquent," said Omar Masso Quintana, youth institute coordinator. "People are leaving work and getting off public transport at this hour," Masso added. "They are good, productive people who have no reason to be detained by our police. Just the fact that someone is a young person doesn't mean that he is a delinquent."

In Ciudad Juarez, some residents complain that police patrolling low-income, working-class neighborhoods harass law-abiding youths but allow real troublemakers to operate unchecked. In neighborhoods like Colinas del Norte, the streets are alive with young people during the hot summer months. Children playing street soccer, talking with friends and running errands are everywhere as the sun sets down. Lacking air-conditioning, residents must crank up fans-and their utility bills-just to keep tolerably cool in the stifling heat.

Veronica Arzola, coordinator of the Aldea community organization in Colinas del Norte, told Frontera NorteSur that city patrols have recently targeted youths sitting in front of their homes or going to the store. A 12-year-old boy was picked up and kicked a couple times by unidentified officers before his mother intervened, Arzola charged. A 65-year-old neighbor, Josefina Moreno, contended that she is constantly harassed by name-calling, rock-throwing teenage gang members, so-called "cholos," who terrorize her neighborhood with impunity. Moreno is worried that flying missiles will soon cause real damage. "I'm afraid they'll hit the gas tank and blow me away," she lamented. Complaints to the authorities have gone unheeded, Moreno added. “Nobody pays attention to me,” she said.

Community activist Arzola cited another curfew-related concern that is widely shared by Ciudad Juarez's human rights and women's organizations: reports that members of the city's police force have been involved in the disappearances and killings of young girls and women. "We're afraid the (police) will pick girls up and they won't get to the police stations," Arzola said.

With new city governments scheduled to take office in both Ciudad Juarez and Matamoros in the coming months, it's unclear if the curfew laws in the two cities will survive the political transitions. The Ciudad Juarez curfew overcame a key legal hurdle this month when a federal judge refused to grant a protective order to the sons of a lawyer who had been detained while playing a baseball park after 10 pm. The teens' father, attorney Jose de Jesus Duron Gomez, said he will appeal the decision.

Meantime, the Other Campaign's Juan Carlos Martinez said his group will set up informational tables in Ciudad Juarez's low-income neighborhoods for the purpose of gathering documentation on alleged curfew enforcement abuses and educating the public about the constitutional, human rights and political issues connected to the controversy.

Additional Sources: El Paso Times, August 20, 2007. Article by Tammy Fonce-Olivas. El Universal, August 19, 2007. Article by Rocio Tapia. Lapolaka.com, August 15 and 16, 2007. El Diario de El Paso, August 17, 2007. Article by Araly Castanon. El Diario de Juarez, August 9, 13, 15, 19, 2007. La Jornada, August 15, 17, 18, 2007. Articles by Julia Antonieta Le Duc, Ruben Villalpando and Martin Sanchez Trevino. 

Journalists Face New Wave of Attacks

Despite the Mexican government's repeated commitment to respect freedom of expression, violence and other aggressions against journalists continue to mount. In fact, government officials are implicated in many recent attacks. For instance, four young reporters who were attempting to cover raids against street-level drug dealers in the city of Monclova, Coahuila, were detained, blindfolded, held incommunicado overnight and allegedly tortured by the Mexican army last week. 
 
The four arrested journalists were Manolo Acosta and Sinhue Samaniego of the Grupo Zocalo print and radio news company, Jesus Meza Gonzalez of La Voz de Monclova and Adalberto Rodriguez of the local Channel 4 television station.

"They were held out of view and beaten while the (soldiers) asked them if they were halcones (lookouts for the Gulf drug cartel)," charged Luis Humberto Rodriguez Saenz,  a lawyer for Acosta and Samaniego.
 
Genaro Maciel, a Coahuila agent for the Federal Office of the Attorney General (PGR), confirmed that the reporters had been arrested on charges of possessing weapons and drugs.  Family members and colleagues immediately challenged the accusations.  

"If they had really been carrying bags of guns and drugs in their vehicles, which were surely planted, they would not have been tailing the operation," said Channel 4 journalist Karina Borrego, wife of Manolo Acosta. "My husband is not a drug addict and he would never carry a weapon."

Borrego pointed to "revenge" as the motive behind the detentions of her husband and his fellow journalists. Borrego and Acosta covered the beatings of workers and the rapes of 14 sex workers by soldiers at clubs in the nearby red-light zone of Castanos last year.

Verdicts are expected next week in the cases of eight soldiers who are currently on trial for the attacks. Additionally, Jose Luis Soberanes, the president of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has announced that he will send a non-binding recommendation about the Castanos incident to the army next month.

Two days prior to the Castanos attacks, Coahuila journalist Rafael Ortiz disappeared. More than one year later, he remains missing.

Informed about the August 7 detentions of their colleagues in Monclova, dozens of journalists rapidly organized a protest the next day outside the local PGR office. Bishop Raul Vera of Saltillo joined other prominent voices in condemning the detentions. Finally, the four arrested journalists were released August 10 after each one posted about $1,000 in bail. Prior to their release, the men met with a representative of the CNDH, which could pursue a new case against the Mexican army. 

Contending that the state's case was riveted with holes, defense attorney Rodriguez said he expected the charges against his clients would be dismissed. The lawyer added that he might press torture charges against the soldiers involved in the detentions. 
 
The Monclova Four were not the only Coahuila journalists who experienced trouble with the government last week.  On August 6, five journalists were allegedly detained in the state capital of Saltillo by the same group of soldiers which arrested the Monclova reporters the next day.  On August 8, the day after the Monclova journalists were detained, reporter Brenda Rodriguez of La Prensa de Monclova was reportedly harassed by local police. 

As Frontera NorteSur was headed to print, neither the Mexican Defense Ministry (Sedena) nor the PGR, which regularly issues press bulletins about drug-related arrests, had officially commented about the Coahuila events. 

On August 1, the Sedena released a summary report of human rights training given to members of the military since 2000. Carried out in collaboration with the CNDH, the training has become an integral part of military programs, according to the statement. 
A special session covering the human rights of women was attended by 1,033 military personnel. All members of the army and air force have copies of documents pertaining to human rights, the press bulletin stated.

"By means of these types of actions, the Ministry of Defense strengthens and consolidates a culture of respect for human rights on the part of its members, in all and each one of the activities they realize inside and outside the military environment..," the statement noted.

In other developments, journalists in Oaxaca and Chihuahua were the targets of new violence and threats. Alfredo Fernandez Portilla, director of the Semanario newspaper was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant early on the morning of August 5 in the port city of Salina Cruz- just hours before the Oaxaca state election. Fernandez, who was accosted outside his home, was transported to a local hospital. The shooting coincided with the well-publicized visit of Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan to Mexico. Fernandez’s colleague, Edwin Meneses Santiago of the Noticias newspaper, has reportedly received threats.  An estimated forty journalists protested the attacks in a  demonstration held in Salina Cruz this past weekend.   

In Chihuahua, meanwhile, a state journalists' association has demanded that authorities protect reporter Cecilia Granados Montes of the El Sol newspaper. Granados filed criminal charges against businessman Jose Talamas and two Jimenez municipal police officers for illegal privation of freedom and threats after Talamas and the policemen allegedly confronted the journalist July 21 over articles about a kidnapping Talamas supposedly suffered. Granados, who denies being the author of the stories, accused Talamas of nearly pulling a pistol on her before he was calmed down by Jimenez's police chief.

"We have been warning for some time that we are putting ourselves at risk because of the activity of organized crime," said Alejandro Salmon Aguilera, president of College of Chihuahua Journalists. "That's why we have asked for guarantees from the authorities, not life insurance policies, for those who cover the riskiest beats."

Jimenez Mayor Amador Moreno Lujan and District Attorney Sandra Salas promised to thoroughly investigate Grandados' complaint.

When pressed about murders and other attacks against journalists in recent years, many Mexican officials blame organized crime. What's striking about many of the latest incidents is the alleged involvement of government officials.

Completed before the latest cases in Coahuila, Oaxaca and Chihuahua, a review of 170 attacks against Mexican journalists by a special commission of the federal Chamber of Deputies revealed a significant number of incidents linked to government officials. According to federal Deputy  Rocio de Carmen Morgan Franco, only 23 percent of the cases were traced to organized crime, while 20 percent of the aggressions came from municipal, state and federal authorities. Deputy Morgan blamed the remaining attacks on individuals. 

Sources: El Universal, August 11, 2007. Article by Hilda Fernandez. Frontera/EFE, August 9, 2007. Proceso/Apro, August 8, 10 and 11, 2007. Articles by Arturo Rodriguez Garcia. El Zocalo (Monclova), August 11, 2007. Article by Alberto Rojas. La Jornada, July 24, 2007;  August 8, 11 and 12, 2007. Articles by Javier Valdez Cardenas, Leopoldo Ramos, Roberto Garduno, Hiram Moreno, and editorial staff. El Diario de Juarez,  August 6, 2007. Cimacnoticias, July 25 and August 9, 2007. Articles by Patricia Mayorga and Soledad Jarquin Edgar. Sedena.gob.mx. PGR.gob.mx.

Women's/Human Rights News

The Showdown over the European Parliament's Femicide Resolution

An alliance of Spanish, Polish and German legislators is watering down a resolution in the European Parliament that proposes tougher actions against femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and Central America. Moving behind the scenes, the lawmakers have introduced more than killing 100 amendments to the strongly-worded document.

Sponsored by Green/European Free Alliance Deputy Raul Romeva Rueda, the original resolution would create a femicide coordinator; elevate women's murders to a priority status between governments; monitor the treatment of women employees of transnational companies in Latin America; require an annual report to the gender commission of the European Parliament; and carry out a review femicide cases prior to the 2008 Euro-Latin American summit scheduled for Lima, Peru.

"This has more weight than any other international recommendation," said Humberto Guerrero of the Mexico City-based Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, a non-governmental organization which has been active in raising the profile of the women's murders on the world stage.

In addition to the credibility of international treaties, the growing commercial relationships between Mexico and the European Union (EU) are at stake in the femicide resolution debate. Unlike the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1997 EU-Mexico Agreement contains  democracy and human rights provisions. Conceivably, Mexico could lose out on new European investments and trade if the women’s murders and other human rights violations remain unpunished.

According to the Mexican Senate, economic transactions between Mexico and the EU jumped 103 percent from 1999 to 2005, reaching at least $37 billion. In the six-year period studied,  Mexican exports to the EU soared by 123 percent. Currently, about 25 percent of foreign investment monies in Mexico come from Europe.

While Romeva's resolution awaits action, new economic initiatives like the Latin American Institute of Biotechnology planned for the state of Nuevo Leon are in the works between Mexico and the EU. The project also involves the Nuevo Leon state government, the privately-owned Technological University of Monterrey, the Monsanto company and other organizations.  

The Murder of a Dutch Woman

Although some EU legislators condemn all the femicides, the 1998 killing of Dutch citizen Hester van Nierop in Ciudad Juarez helped place the issue on the inter-continental political agenda. The 28-year-old victim was found semi-nude,  strangled and stuffed underneath a bed in a seedy downtown Juarez hotel. Van Nierop was traveling alone to the United States after a long vacation with her family in Mexico when she was slain.

A squad of state police officers from the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE) headed by Antonio Navarrete was assigned to investigate van Nierop's murder. Navarette was earlier involved in the controversial arrest of the late Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif,  who was accused of multiple women's murders but widely regarded as the first scapegoat in a long line of slayings.  

Navarette and other agents involved in the van Nierop case were among officers named  for possible criminal negligence and omission in a 2004 report by former federal Special Prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina. Several possible suspects in the van Nierop slaying emerged, including an escaped serial killer, Pedro Padilla Flores, but no arrests were ever made.

While on trip to Ciudad Juarez and El Paso in 2004, van Nierop's outraged parents discovered that the investigation of their daughter's murder was paralyzed.  Meeting in late 2005, European non-governmental organizations vowed to escalate their campaign against the Ciudad Juarez femicides by pressuring the transnational Philips company, which operated maquiladora plants in Ciudad Juarez where several victims had once worked, and by lobbying for the triggering of the democratic and human rights clause of the EU-Mexico Agreement. In this context, Romeva's resolution set off alarm bells in Mexico.

Meet Mexico’s New Crisis Manager

Last April, Romeva traveled to Mexico City for meetings with  Special Prosecutor for Women’s Homicides Alicia Perez Duarte, Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez and other officials. According to Romeva, Mexican officials expressed concern that his resolution "would damage the image of Mexico."

The day before Romeva's trip, the Mexican Senate gave approval to the Calderon administration’s appointment of Sandra Fuentes-Berain as Mexico’s new ambassador to the European Union. In her new position, Fuentes-Berain would be the chief troubleshooter in charge of smoothing over thorny matters like the femicide resolution.

A 57-year-old native of Mexico City, Fuentes-Berain, began her career with the Ministry of Foreign Relations (SRE) as a young woman in 1971, the same year government-supported paramilitaries mowed down students in Mexico City in the infamous Jueves de Corpus massacre.

Fuentes-Berain has served as Mexican ambassador in several countries, including a stint in Holland during the Hester van Nierop controversy. The career diplomat is credited with negotiating the North American Free Agreement with Canada, and with greasing the wheels of Mexico's entry into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation pact. Ratifying the seasoned deal-maker as EU ambassador, the Mexican Senate noted Fuentes-Berain’s  talent at encouraging "strategic alliances between foreign and Mexican companies, especially in the automotive, energy, banking and agro-industrial sectors."

Holding an honorary doctorate from Harvard University, Fuentes-Berain has generally enjoyed a non-controversial record of service. An exception came during the 2000 presidential election when she was criticized for allegedly using her government position to promote the candidate of the  Institutional Revolutionary Party, Francisco Labastida, whose campaign later came under fire for receiving millions of dollars in public money from the Pemex state oil company.

Fire and Brimstone in the European Parliament  

On June 25, European legislators gathered for a lively debate of Romeva's femicide resolution. Ambassador Fuentes-Berain and Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez were on hand for the session. Chihuahua’s top cop assured the lawmakers that the administration of Governor Jose Reyes Baeza was making steady progress in chipping away at impunity.

According to Gonzalez’s data, of 413 female homicide cases opened from January 21, 1993 to May 18, 2007, fully 264 were in some process of resolution; 8 of the cases were determined to have been suicides. According to the PGJE’s statistics, only 139 cases were still under investigation.

Spanish parliamentarian Ignacio Salafranca of the conservative Popular European Party was among the deputies who spoke out against Romeva’s resolution. In 2006, Deputy Salafranca headed a controversial EU observer delegation that gave a quick stamp of approval to the Mexican presidential election even as doubts about the official results mushroomed amid accusations of fraud, widespread irregularities and massive street protests.  Mexican SRE official Lorena Larios, who collaborated with Salafranca while she was assigned to the European Parliament, coordinated Deputy Romeva's April 2007 official meetings in Mexico.

In the debate, Salafranca emphasized that violence against women was a "planetary" and “universal,” phenomenon, and that it was unfair to single out Mexico. Turning to Romeva, he said, "Before you set out to save the world, you should first look at your own house." Salafranca compared the Ciudad Juarez femicides to gender violence in Spain, where "150,000 complaints of physical mistreatment of women" were registered this year alone. Declaring that the European Parliament is not a tribunal to judge others, Salafranca urged a spirit of cooperation with Mexico.   

Left Deputy Eva-Britt Svenson responded: "The fact that this is a world problem doesn't mean that one is not going to investigate in a certain region or country. We are not a tribunal, of course, but our responsibility is to investigate what goes on (in Mexico), a country with which we have a signed a democratic clause, but it doesn't seem to be enough in this case." 

Introduced by Salafranca, German socialist Deputy Erika Mann,  Polish Deputy Ana Zaborska and other deputies, amendments to Romeva's resolution propose nixing a femicide coordinator; foregoing any monitoring of transnational companies; eschewing the reform of Mexico's legal system; and not requiring a review of the van Nierop murder and other femicides before the 2008 Peruvian summit. Another amendment praises Mexico’s federal government for its “efforts realized in terms of (achieving) no discrimination between men and women.”   

The amendments, which can be voted up or down, are expected to be considered by the European Parliament's gender commission next month;  the femicide resolution will likely be heard by the political institution's plenary in October. Mexican human rights activist Humberto Guerrero is dismayed by the latest developments. "One cannot be very optimistic" he said.

Despite the existence of the democratic clause in the EU-Mexico accord, some critics have long accused the EU of practicing having a double standard when it comes to human rights. In a 2005 article, Tobias Pfluger, a deputy for the United Left/Norwegian Greens, criticized the president of the European Parliament's Mexico delegation, Erika Mann, for allegedly being more interested in free trade than in human rights.

While Mexican human rights violations languished in impunity, Pfluger contended that the EU was abandoning principled action for economic gain.  The EU was most interested in pressuring Mexico to open up 14 additional investment opportunities in the electricity, education, water and other sectors, Pfluger charged.   

Sources: Cimacnoticias.com, August 3, 2007. Article by Lourdes Godinez Leal. Proceso/Apro, December 25, 2005 and August 2, 2007. Articles by Marco Appel and Tobias Pfluger. La Jornada, November 25, 2006. Article by Claudia Herrera Beltran. Senado.gob.mx. Conocimientoenlinea.com. Bones in the Desert, Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez. Editoral Anagrama, 2002. Harvest of Women, Diana Washington Valdez. Oceana, 2005.

Ciudad Juarez Police Criticized for Migrant Detentions
 
As in the United States, the involvement of local police and military forces in enforcing immigration law is a question of hot debate and growing conflict in Mexico. A report from Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has criticized the Ciudad Juarez municipal police force for detaining migrants, mainly Central Americans, and turning them over to the National Immigration Institute (INM) for possible deportation.

Mauricio Farah Gebrara, an immigrant rights investigator for the Mexico City-based CNDH, said that Ciudad Juarez police do not have the legal authority deliver migrants to the INM unless specifically requested to do so by the federal agency. The CNDH official contended that the current practice of routinely turning over migrants to the INM violates the Mexican constitution.

According to Farah, the local police are responsible for approximately 26 percent of the detentions of undocumented migrants in the border city. In many cases, migrants have accused police officers of physical abuse and theft, Farah said. Farah added that legal authority for detaining migrants bases solely on their immigration status rests with the INM or the Federal Preventive Police, which is currently being merged with the Federal Agency of Investigations to form one, unified federal police force. Nonetheless, the Mexican army also detains migrants based on immigration reasons.

In the southern border of state of Chiapas, several Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan migrants have filed three formal complaints with the CNDH this year against Mexican soldiers for robbery, physical aggression and improper searches of women. A Chiapas-based human rights organization, the Fray Matias de Cordova Center, charged that the complaints have not progressed because the CNDH demands "evidence" that the undocumented immigrants entered Mexico. 

Despite the CNDH's Ciudad Juarez report, local police officers, especially agents assigned to the downtown sector, have been recently spotted demanding documents from individuals with migrant-like physical characteristics.  Human rights investigator Farah said that he expects to visit Ciudad Juarez within the next several weeks to investigate the issue.

Sources: La Jornada, July 23, 2007. Article by Angeles Mariscal. Lapolaka.com, July 23, 2007. El Diario de Juarez, July 20, 2007.

Youth Curfews Spread

In northern Mexico, youth curfews are spreading. Following the lead of Ciudad Juarez,
the municipality of San Nicolas in the border state of Nuevo Leon implemented a youth curfew in the late June. The measure, which applies to minors under 18 years of age and other vaguely-defined young people, was ordered by the city government to address public alarm over growing insecurity. Even though Mayor Zeferino Salgado Almaguer refused to call the measure  a curfew, the new law enforcement provision allows police to detain minors and other young people after 11 pm if the youths cannot show good cause for being away from home.

In the first days of the curfew, at least 27 youths were briefly detained. Camilo Ramirez Puente, San Nicolas’ chief of public safety,  rated the curfew a success. Ramirez said that  crime initially fell by 80 percent, with only 6 businesses and 3 private homes robbed in the initial phase of the new law. In addition to suffering on-going bouts of street crime, San Nicolas has been a battleground between the warring Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels. In the last two weeks, 24 “halcones,” or look-outs for the Gulf Cartel,  have been detained  by federal police in San Nicolas. Reportedly, several of the “halcones” were former local and state police officers.

Alleging that the curfew is  a violation of  constitutional rights of freedom of movement as well as an abuse of authority by the executive branch of the municipal government,  San Nicolas’s new law has drawn opposition from human rights activists. On July 6,  Gregorio Vanegas Garza, the president of the non-governmental organization Agapito Trevino, filed a petition with the Nuevo Leon State Legislature that calls for the impeachment of Mayor Salgado.

“If the political will existed, the mayor would be impeached,” Vanegas said. “Any one should know that he is flagrantly violating the constitution. He’s inventing laws with the curfew. What are the state legislators waiting for to remove him from power?”

In response to critics,  Mayor Salgado convened a popular referendum July 8 to test citizen reaction to the curfew. Eligible voters, who included minors and residents of other municipalities, were asked whether they approved of the new law and how it should be applied. In an exercise  monitored  by the Nuevo Leon State Human Rights Commission and two other non-governmental groups, not including Agapito Trevino, less than 10,000 of San Nicolas’s estimated 470,000 residents turned out to vote. Of the San Nicolas voters, only 308 voted against the curfew. Initial reports indicated that nearly 2,000 residents of other municipalities also cast votes in the referendum.

Commenting on the vote, Mayor Salgado said that the curfew would continue in operation.However, statements made by the mayor prior to the referendum anticipated a positive   vote.  

“We will continue being criticized for a project that is approved by the people of San Nicolas,”  Mayor Salgado said, “and it will be (the people) who decide if we continue with it or not.”
     
Youth curfews in northern Mexico are gaining appeal across the political spectrum. In Ciudad Juarez, a city-wide curfew was put into effect June 15  by the city’s Institutional Revolutionary Party-led government, while in San Nicolas, the curfew was initiated by a National Action Party-led administration.

Sources: El Heraldo (Aguascalientes)/Agencia Reforma, July 11, 2007. El Universal, July 9, 2007. Article by Juan Cedillo. Proceso/Apro, July 6, 2007.

Sonora Press under Siege

Journalists in the northern Mexican state of Sonora are reeling after two attacks this week. On Tuesday evening, April 17, an unknown assailant or assailants tossed a
grenade onto the grounds of the Cambio Sonora newspaper offices in the state capital of Hermosillo. The newspaper is part of the Mexican Editorial Organization national chain. No injuries resulted from an explosion but minor property damage was reported. As in numerous grenade attacks in Mexico during the last two years, the make and origin of the grenade was not publicly revealed by authorities.

Roberto Gutierrez Torres, director of Cambio Sonora, slammed the attack as a threat to journalism.

"I believe that this a message directed against the entire media, because we are not currently doing any investigative journalism that would make criminal bands uncomfortable," Gutierrez said.

Susana Saldana, president of the Sonora state legislature, labeled the grenade attack an act of "terrorism." Sonora's chief of public security, Francisco Figueroa Souquet, pledged greater police protection for the news media. Together with murders of Sonora police officers, Figueroa characterized the grenade attack as part of
a "destabilization" campaign waged by organized crime. Like other states, Sonora has been recently shaken by escalating violence tied to drug traffickers and organized
crime.

The grenade explosion almost immediately followed a silent march staged by 30 journalists in Hermosillo to protest attacks on communicators, including the apparent kidnapping of journalist Saul Noe Martinez Ortega in the border town of Agua Prieta on April 16. A reporter and editor for Agua Prieta's Diario de Agua Prieta, Martinez was snatched by four or five men in front of the town's police station.

Martinez was the sixth Mexican journalists to have been reported disappeared since 2000, according to figures maintained by the Latin American Journalists Federation
(Felap). In a recent Mexico City press conference, the group affirmed that 67 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since 1987, with almost half the number, 33, killed during the administrations of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon since 2000.

"In the Fox era, Mexico became first in the world in the number attacks against journalists in a place without a belligerent conflict, only after Iraq, a country that
suffers from a war of intervention," said Teodoro Rentaria Arroyave, vice-president of the Felap.

Amado Ramirez, a nationally-known correspondent for the Televisa network, became the most recent murder victim when he was slain outside an Acapulco radio station this month while the resort city was packed with tourists for the Holy Week and Easter holidays.

Before it left office last year, the Fox Administration established a special prosecutor's office for journalists' homicides. On a visit to Mexico earlier this month,
Santiago Canton, executive secretary of the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, praised the Mexican Congress' recent passage of a national law that decriminalizes libel and defamation charges, but lamented the lack of progress in stemming violent attacks against journalists. Insisting that the state might not bear direct responsibility for murders of journalists, Canton contended that the government does hold blame for allowing impunity.

Meanwhile, new legal wrangling has emerged in the case of Sonora journalist Benjamin Flores Gonzalez, the director of San Luis Colorado's La Prensa newspaper, who was shot to death in 1997. The suspected mastermind in Flores' killing, Gabriel Gonzalez Gutierrez, was extradited from the United States to Sonora, where he awaits trial. Former La Prensa reporters who witnessed the murder complain that they are being pressured by lawyers to give new testimony. According to Jesus Barraza Zavala, director of the Internet daily Regidores.com, the witnesses maintain that their original declarations are sufficient and that there is no reason to render new ones.

Sources: Cambio Sonora, April 19, 2007. Articles by Oralia Acosta G. and editorial staff. El Universal/Notimex, April 18, 2007. La Jornada/Notimex, April 17 and 18, 2007. Proceso/Apro, April 14, 2007. Frontera/PH/EFE, April 13 and 18, 2007.

Migrant Labor Activist Murdered

Family members of Rafael Santiago Cruz are expected to bury their loved one inMexico City sometime over the coming weekend.  A staff member of the US-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), the 28-year-old activist was found dead in a union office located in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on April 9.  Amado Medina, public safety chief for Monterrey, was initially quoted in the Mexican press as saying that no signs of violence or forced entry were detected at the scene of Cruz’s apparent murder. But FLOC members tell a different story. “He was tied up and beaten to death,” said Leticia Zavala, the FLOC’s international vice-president. “If that’s not violence, I don’t know what violence is.”

In a telephone interview with Frontera NorteSur, Zavala said that Cruz arrived in Monterrey about one month ago to help administer the FLOC’s campaign with Mexican H-2A guest workers who are recruited for contract labor in US agriculture. According to Zavala, the FLOC has a contract that covers upwards of 7,400 H-2A workers who are employed in 27 crops in North Carolina, principally in tobacco, sweet potatoes, cucumber and Christmas trees. Most of the guest workers hail from the Mexican states of Hidalgo, San Luis Potosi, Nayarit and Durango, Zavala said, adding that the temporary field hands travel to Monterrey, where a US consulate is located, in order to obtain legal work documents.

A native of southern Oaxaca state, Cruz first became active with the FLOC while he was working in the United States ten years ago, Zavala said. “He was a lively person. He loved music,” Zavala recalled. “He was a good Christian. He was working to support his mom and his younger brothers.” Although the union has not seen a police report about Cruz’s death, Zavala affirmed that the FLOC’s cross-border organizing work had ruffled the feathers of migrant traffickers and others. She said that the FLOC has experienced previous episodes of harassment and office break-ins in Mexico, but that the overall situation had been quiet during the past two months.
 
Union members are concerned that the larger climate of violence and impunity in the Monterrey region could impede an investigation of Cruz’s murder, the FLOC leader said.  Gangland-style executions have left at least 48 people dead in Monterrey since the beginning of the year. On April 12, the Mexican army engaged in a shoot-out with possible drug traffickers that left one person dead and two arrested in Marin, a municipality located about 30 miles northeast of Monterrey.

FLOC members are urging that the Nuevo Leon Office of the State Attorney General conduct a thorough investigation of Cruz’s murder.  According to Zavala, the union is receiving backing from the US AFL-CIO and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur to prompt the US Department of State to get involved in the Cruz case.  Mexican non-governmental organizations are also speaking out on the FLOC’s behalf.

“There are very few organizations like FLOC that defend the dignity and rights of workers who have seen the necessity of emigrating to the United States, and that’s why we regard an injury to them as an injury to the entire society,” said Consuelo Morales of Citizens in Support of Human Rights.  “We show our support for the rest of the members of the FLOC who work in any part of the republic and in the United States, and we make a firm call to the authorities of all levels to take the measures within their power to guarantee the integrity of these worker defenders and their families.”   

Additional sources: Proceso/Cimac, April 12, 2007. La Jornada, April 10 and 12, 2007.Articles by David Carrizales and the Notimex news agency. El Universal, April 9, 11 and 12, 2007. Articles by Juan Cedillo and the Notimex news agency

FNS Special Report: From Chihuahua to Chiapas : Chronicles of Mexico 's Dirty War

Editor's Note: Late on November 17, at the start of a 3-day holiday weekend, a long-awaited report from Mexico 's Office of the Federal Attorney General was released. Compiled by the staff of Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, special prosecutor for crimes against social and political movements of the past, the report officially reveals the Mexican government's practice of torturing, disappearing and executing guerrilla and other opponents from the 1960s to the early 1980s. According to the report, the Mexican government was responsible for 645 forced disappearances, 99 extrajudicial murders and more than 2,000 incidents of torture. Carrillo lays the blame for Mexico 's Dirty War on three presidents: Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo.

Interestingly, Carrillo has a personal connection to this history. He is a relative of Denise Prieto Stock, a 19-year-old woman of Mexican-North American parentage who was killed by the Mexican army in 1974. Prieto was a member of the National Liberation Forces (FLN), the predecessor group of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. During a speech in Nuevo Leon on November 17, the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos rendered tribute to Prieto and other fallen FLN militants.

Early in his term, outgoing President Vicente Fox pledged to bring to justice those responsible for going above the law and carrying out political repression. Special Prosecutor Carrillo filed legal charges against Echeverria, the sole surviving president named in his final report, and other high officials, but Mexican courts blocked the prosecutions. One of the allegedly responsible officials, General Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo, was reported to have died suddenly on November 19, only two days after the Dirty War report was released.

No official will have been punished for the Dirty War when Vicente Fox leaves office on December 1. Kate Doyle, a researcher with the Washington-based National Security Archive which has posted the Spanish-language report on its website ( www.nsarchive.org), said it will be up to new President Felipe Calderon to act on the information in the report.

Still, the more than 800 page report authored by Carrillo's office is quite unprecedented for Mexican government disclosures. In certain ways, it is Mexico 's equivalent of the truncated Church Committee CIA investigations of the 1970s and the Iran-Contra probes of the 1980s.

As a November 24 report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture on recent police abuses in Mexico also underscores, Carrillo's report has special relevance today, when the major elements of Mexico 's previous Dirty War -popular revolt, state repression and guerrilla insurgency- are resurfacing in Oaxaca and elsewhere in the country. The following article is based largely on excerpts from the Dirty War report, and is the first in an occasional series.

Kent Paterson, FNS editor

Revolt, Repression and Resistance in Chihuahua : Part One

On May 23, 1962, Mexican soldiers under the command of Captain Jose Martinez kidnapped Ruben Jaramillo and his family from their Morelos home. Carting off the campesino leader and his family, the soldiers filled their prisoners with bullets near the pre-colonial ruins of Xochicalco. As a teenager, Jaramillo had served as an officer in Emiliano Zapata's insurgent army. From the 1920s to the time of his assassination, Jaramillo kept Zapatismo alive in Morelos and much of central and southern Mexico .

Alternating between armed revolt and participation in electoral politics, Jaramillo spearheaded large peasant mobilizations that evoked Zapata's dreams of land, liberty and justice. Eventually, President Adolfo Lopez Mateos ordered the army to get rid of this pesky reminder of the still-born 1910 Revolution. Murdered along with Jaramillo were his pregnant wife and three adopted sons.

The cold-blooded killing of Jaramillo did not end the campesino revolt. Hundreds of miles to the north in the border state of Chihuahua , the old battleground of Pancho Villa, resistance was simmering. In the early 1960s, Chihuahua was fertile ground for renewed campesino risings. Nearly one-third of the state's land base of more than 50 million acres was in the hands of 300 landowners like Luis Terrazas, who alone held more than 2 million acres. Logging and cattle companies also controlled a large chunk of Chihuahua 's real estate. In 1963, 50,000 landless men wandered Chihuahua 's landscape. Discontent with the status quo was boiling over on the small ranches and in the growing cities.

In the countryside, the Ibarra family of Madera other rural strongmen known as caciques were accused of burning out small ranchers and unleashing their pistoleros on protesting campesinos, who were routinely slain with impunity. Local agrarian authorities routinely blocked presidential resolutions favoring land rights petitions, while in the state capital of Chihuahua City , officials turned a deaf ear to the protests. Collaborating with the caciques, the Chihuahua State Judicial Police (PJE) often served as the enforcement agency for the bosses. The northwestern Chihuahuan sierra bordering Sonora state was considered a "lawless land" of misery, desolation, land theft, and abandonment.

Land invasions, student protests and strikes swept Chihuahua during the early 1960s. Involving thousands of people, the protests united campesinos, students, pulp mill workers, and urban dwellers. Armed self-defense groups began forming in response to the violence of rural white guards deployed by caciques like Jose Ibarra. Politically, many of the Chihuahua activist leaders had been influenced by the national General Union of Workers and Campesinos of Mexico (UGOCM), the Mexican Communist Party, the Popular Socialist Party (usually the loyal opposition of the ruling PRI party), and the National Liberation Movement of former President Lazaro Cardenas del Rio.

School teacher Arturo Gamiz and Dr. Pablo Gomez were two of the most important movement leaders to emerge in Chihuahua . Also an educator, Dr. Gomez was the father of former Chihuahua state legislator and prominent women's activist Alma Gomez. In September 1963, the Chihuahua protests reached Mexico City , when the UGOCM conducted a public protest in the capital city. A month later, Gamiz and Dr. Gomez held a meeting with President Diaz Ordaz about their grievances but walked away empty-handed.

In 1964, Gamiz, Dr. Gomez and others took up arms. Launching the Popular Guerrilla Group (GPG), they directed their first actions against the caciques. The new guerrilla group burned down the Ibarra home in Madera , destroyed other properties that belonged to the family, including a radio station in Mineral de Dolores, and executed Florentino Ibarra, who was blamed for killing an indigenous Pima man, Carlos Rios Torres.

In response to the guerrilla offensive, the Mexican army sent soldiers into the northwestern Sierra and began torturing campesinos. Residents-even children- were hanged from trees for hours and dangled from helicopters in a unsuccessful bid to extract information about the insurgent cell.

Counterattacking, the GPG overran a PJE post that was commanded by Rito Caldera, an ex-Ibarra gunman. Once again on the trail of the insurgent group, soldiers and police left behind them a path of destroyed homes, stolen animals, uprooted crops, and more tortured victims. By 1965, the GPG, now counting two rural columns in Chihuahua , was engaging soldiers and white guards in armed clashes; the group's biggest strike was brewing.

Although the GPG grew out of a specific, rural struggle in northern Mexico , the organization did not represent an isolated, armed peasant uprising with localized demands. Influenced by the Cuban Revolution, the group called for a socialist Mexico . While pushing the armed struggle, the GPG still supported electoral politics and mass struggles as vital components of the revolution. A third GPG cell was active in Mexico City , and contacts were made with revolutionary-minded organizations and individuals throughout the country.

In the Mexico City area, the GPG got its military training from a supposed former Mexican officer, Lorenzo Cardenas Barajas. Connected to the PRI and trained at the US Army's School of the Americas , Cardenas Barajas was in fact a spy for the Mexican army. However, Cardenas ' acquaintanceship with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara gave the infiltrator a certain credibility in leftist circles.

By the fall of 1965, the GPG was preparing to launch its biggest action to date: the assault on the Mexican army barracks in Madera , Chihuahua . A force of more than 40 guerrillas was supposed to participate in the raid, but logistical complications and organizational foul-ups left a reduced contingent of 15 men outside the barracks on the morning of September 23, 1965. Underestimating the number of soldiers inside the military installation, the 15 guerrillas unleashed their attack against a reinforced garrison which had been tipped off by spy Cardenas Barajas' intelligence that something big was in the works somewhere.

When the shooting was over, 17 people were dead: 8 guerrillas, 7 soldiers and 2 civilians caught in cross-fire. 8 civilians and 7 soldiers were also wounded. Arturo Gamiz and Dr. Pablo Gomez, two of the three principal Chihuahua leaders of the GPG, died in the combat. In a ghoulish warning to the population, the bodies of Gamiz, Dr. Gomez and the other guerrillas were publicly exhibited in a truck parked in the center of Madera . Seven of the eight fallen insurgents were then hastily buried in a common grave.

In a famous statement, Chihuahua Gov. General Giner Duran said, "They wanted land, so let them eat dirt." Though an official information blockade was erected around Madera , word of the attack still leaked out to the national press.

Madera and the nearby mountains were militarized, and all the homes in the town of about 12,000 people were thoroughly searched; dozens of people were arbitrarily detained and interrogated. Troops were parachuted into the mountains, and at least one civilian, Rodolfo Dominguez Galaviz, was killed by soldiers as he attempted to speak with General Gonzalo Bazan Guzman. More than 100 people were rounded up and transported to the Madera military base, where they were held on the floor of a building hog-tied and naked. The region was under military siege.

On the Day of the Dead 1965, 500 people defied the blanket of repression in Madera and gathered at the grave of the guerrillas to lay wreaths and pay homage. Decades later, hundreds would still periodically gather for a memorial in Madera on the anniversary of the attack. Scattering in the wind, the GPG survivors of the Madera assault regrouped in Mexico City . Plans were already being hatched to move forward with the revolution that for some began in the Chihuahua mountains on September 23, 1965.

Sources: pgr.gob.mx. nsarchive.org. Proceso/Apro, November 21, 2006. El Diario de Juarez, November 24, 2006. La Jornada, November 19, 2006. The Arms of Dawn, Carlos Montemayor. (Joaquin Moritz/Planeta, 2003)

Mayors Mobilize Against Border Walls

Mayors in Texas and the northern Mexican border state of Coahuila are mobilizing their opposition to the new series of border walls planned by the Bush Administration. Supported by Mexican mayors and representatives of non-governmental organizations, a 3-day march against the walls commenced November 7 in the Coahuila border city of Ciudad Acuna . Evaristo Lenin Perez Rivera, the mayor of Ciudad Acuna, said the action was directed against both Washington and Mexico City because of the two national governments' "incapacity to resolve common problems while trying to divide a community of neighbors with a mud wall."

Drawing the support of Coahuila state labor, educational and commercial groups like the Canacintra and Canaco business associations, the march is expected to culminate at a November 10 rally in Piedras Negras, which is also on the Mexico-US border. The Coahuila anti-border wall march moved forward as incoming Mexican President Felipe Calderon flew to Washington this week for meetings with US Latino leaders and President Bush. A critic of the border wall plan, Calderon has called for "bridges for progress and not walls that isolate and divide."

Back on the protest march, meanwhile, Mayor Perez, who was joined by Mayor Francisco Trujillo of Jimenez, Coahuila, said he was uplifted by the results of the November 7 election in the United States that saw President Bush's Republican Party lose control of Congress. Mayor Perez said he was confident the new US Congress would cut the budget for the planned series of walls that will extend 700 miles along Mexico 's northern border.

On the US side of the border, Richard F. Cortez, the mayor of McAllen, Texas, said in a recent interview with the Mexican press that he and other Texas mayors from "El Paso to Brownsville" hope to meet soon in Laredo, Texas, with United States Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in order to convey their rejection of the fencing plans.

" Washington politicians should understand that for us, the citizens of Texas , crossing the Rio Grande is like crossing the Potomac . We have friends and cousins on the other side.." Cortez said. "The people of the United States are uninformed. They think that immigrants come to carry out crimes."

While criticizing Washington , Mayor Cortez also scored Mexico City for not doing enough to curb emigration. Calling on both countries to seek the "path" of dialogue, Mayor Cortez said that the Texas border economy depends on the dollars spent by Mexican consumers who shop in McAllen and other cities. "Between 35-45 percent of the sales of businesses in McAllen depend on Mexican customers," Mayor Cortez added. "This is a very serious situation," Mayor Cortez said. "As neighboring countries we should not be just cousins," he added. We should get along as brothers."

Sources: Zocalo.com.mx, November 9, 2006. Article by Enrique Gonzalez Correa. El Universal, November 6, 2006. Articles by Juan Cedillo and Hilda Fernandez Valverde. Albuquerque Journal/Associated Press, November 9, 2006. Article by George Gedda.

Fresh Violence Hits the Press

Physical attacks against Mexican journalists and press institutions continue to take their toll. Veteran Chihuahua journalist Enrique Perea became the latest victim when he disappeared on August 7. Perea's tortured and bullet-riddled body was found two days later outside Chihuahua City . A well-known crime reporter who had worked for El Heraldo newspaper of Chihuahua City and other press outlets, Perea had founded a new magazine dedicated to covering organized crime themes. In its last issues, Perea's magazine criticized the Chihuahua state government for the high rates of violent crime in the border state.

Perea was the 25th Mexican journalist murdered since 1995. Three other journalists are missing. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Mexico is now second only to Colombia in the number of journalists murdered in the Western Hemisphere during the last 11 years.

In southern Mexico , two attackers, one of whom was armed with an Israeli-style Uzi submachine gun, assaulted the offices of the Noticias daily in Oaxaca City also on August 9. Six persons were wounded in the shooting, including newspaper vendors Isabel Cruz and Adrian Cervantes. Noticias is Oaxaca state's largest circulation daily and a vocal opponent of the state government run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The newspaper has had a long-running battle with business and political sectors connected to the PRI. After violent attacks were directed against Noticias in 2004, the IACHR ordered the implementation of protective measures.

Far from isolated incidents, the most recent attacks against the press should be viewed as part and parcel of a landscape of criminal and political violence. Gangland-style executions like the Perea killing are almost a daily occurrence in Chihuahua state. In the same week the well-known journalist was killed, other slayings bearing the hallmarks of organized crime splashed across the headlines. Marcos Arturo Nazar Contreras, the chief of the Chihuahua State Agency for Investigations in Ciudad Juarez , was gunned down by assassins on August 7, while Julio Cesar Vazquez Manjarraz, the owner of the New Paradise bar in Ciudad Juarez , was shot to death in an August 9 incident outside his business establishment.

In Oaxaca , violence arising from political motives is on the upswing. A mass uprising against PRI Governor Ulises Ruiz continues to gain force as opponents organized into the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People (APPO) seize city halls, set up roadblocks and stage economic boycotts to force Ruiz from office. The protestors are demanding that the federal congress dissolve state powers in Oaxaca . On Wednesday, August 9, the same day as the Oaxaca City attack against the Noticias daily, three members of the Unifying Movement of the Independent Triqui Struggle and the APPO were killed in an ambush in the Mixteca region of the state.

Meanwhile, Mexican journalist Rafael Ortiz Martinez remains missing after he vanished more than one month ago in northern border state of Coahuila. The 32-year-old reporter for the Zocalo newspaper of Moncolva was last reported seen the afternoon of Saturday, July 8. Shortly before his disappearance, Ortiz had published stories about clandestine prostitution in Moncolva.

Unconfirmed versions report that Ortiz also had knowledge about a rape reportedly committed by Mexican soldiers in the municipality of Frontera this summer. In an interview with the Mexico City-based Cimac news service, Frontera Mayor Rogelio Ramos Sanchez denied that Mexican soldiers were involved in a rape in his municipality's red-light zone. Ramos contended that he knew Ortiz "got lost," and strongly suggested that the media "be very careful about what it says."

Ortiz's disappearance attracted the attention of the international journalist community. The Mexico City-based Center for Journalism and Public Ethics sent letters of concern to President Vicente Fox, Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira and David Vega, a special federal prosecutor for crimes against journalists. Responding on behalf of Gov. Moreira, Coahuila State Attorney General Jesus Torres Charles wrote, "We share the concern that exists for Rafael Ortiz's physical safety, and for the attack against freedom of expression and the press that this incident could imply." Attorney General Torres pledged to devote the state's full resources in an effort to locate Ortiz. Weeks later, however, there is no sign of the disappeared journalist.

Sources: La Jornada, August 10, 2006 . Articles by Hermann Bellinghausen and Octavio Velez. El Diario de Juarez, August 10, 2006 . Article by Mauricio Rodriguez. LaPolaka.com, August 9, 2006 . El Universal, August 8 and August 9, 2006 . Articles by Luis Carlos Cano, Carlos Coria Rivas and Genaro Altamirano. Proceso/Apro, August 8, 2006 . Article by Alejandro Gutierrez. Cimacnoticias.com, July 31, 2006 and August 8,2006. Articles by Soledad Jarquin Edgar and editorial staff. Cepet.org

Drug Cartel Violence Shakes Peru

Violence blamed on Mexican drug traffickers is shaking Peru . In a July 19 attack month widely attributed to organized crime, an unidentified gunman shot to death Peruvian Judge Hernan Saturno Vergara in a Lima restaurant. At the time of his murder, Judge Saturno was presiding over criminal cases involving alleged members of the Tijuana Cartel. The 60-year-old judge reportedly had received threats prior to his slaying.

General Carlos Olivo Valenzuela, the chief of Peru 's anti-narcotics national police, later commented that Mexican drug cartels have established an important foothold in his country. General Olivo said Peruvian law enforcement officials have detected the presence of drug traffickers linked to organizations from the Mexican states of Baja California , Chihuahua , Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Guanajuato.

"We've destroyed part of these organizations and confiscated a great quantity of drugs," said General Olivo. "This speaks of police work, but it certainly indicates an increase in the activity of Mexican cartels."

General Olivo estimated that Peru supplies 30 to 32 percent of the cocaine exported to Mexico , with Colombia and Bolivia providing the remainder of product that's sent to Mexican shores. Largely cultivated in the Huallaga and Apurimac-Ene valleys, Peruvian coca leaves are then converted into paste and transported to laboratories in the coastal region for final processing. In addition to the Mexicans, Peruvian drug producers count Dutch, South African, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Afghan buyers as their principal clients. Argentina and Chile serve as transshipment points for the export of cocaine headed to nations other than Mexico .

Arguing for greater Peruvian military involvement in combating drug trafficking, Chief Olivo estimated that about 20 percent of the cocaine currently produced in Peru is confiscated by law enforcement authorities. Additionally, about 26,000 acres of coca plantings were eliminated in 2005.

Six Mexican nationals, including Miguel Morales Morales, are defendants in a high-profile case stemming from the 2002 seizure of a ton of cocaine in a northern Peruvian port. Morales is reportedly married to the daughter of alleged Peruvian drug trafficker Tito Lopez Paredes, supposedly one of his country's major capos. Judge Saturno's murder has sent shockwaves through the Peruvian justice system. According to reports, other judges investigating major drug cases are now afraid to appear on camera.

Sources: Univision, July 20 and July 25, 2006 . Radio Cooperativa ( Chile )/EFE, July 19, 2006 . El Universal/Notimex, July 23, 2006 . Living in Peru.com/La Republica/Oscar Chumpitz C.

Where Have All the Mexican Soldiers Gone?

Coahuila state Governor Humberto Moreira Valdes expressed concern this week about the sudden, public disappearance of Mexican army units from his state. The border state governor contended that the withdrawal of Mexican army units from checkpoints and posts could encourage a "cockroach effect" by leaving the pantry wide open to organized crime. Moreira had no explanation for the Mexican army's vanishing act, but he speculated that it could be related to the intensifying post-electoral conflict in Mexico City .

"I don't know if this had to do with the election conflict, which perhaps we haven't appreciated in its full dimension here in the northern part of the country," Gov. Moreira said. "Maybe this redeployment of military forces is directly associated with what is happening in the center of the country."

Press dispatches reported that Mexican army outposts in Muzquiz, Saltillo , Cuatrocienegas, Ciudad Acuna, and Piedras Negras appeared practically deserted this week, while soldiers who normally staffed highway checkpoints were nowhere in sight. Military guards were reported to have been withdrawn from an airport in Sabinas and security duties turned over to the Federal Preventive Police and Coahuila state police, whose personnel conducted sporadic visits.

The Mexican Defense Ministry made no immediate public statements in response to Gov. Moreira's comments, but press bulletins posted on the armed forces' web site emphasized continued anti-drug campaigns underway in different regions of Mexico . An investigation by one reporter in the city of Moncolva , Coahuila, discovered a group of 6 soldiers quartered in a private home.

The mystery surrounding the Mexican army's public disappearance from Coahuila closely follows a growing scandal over an alleged mass rape commited by soldiers assigned to the 6th Military Zone in Muzquiz in north-central Coahuila early last July 11. Thirteen dancers and sex workers working in a rural red-light zone outside Muzquiz allege they were raped in two clubs by numerous soldiers after an altercation broke out between a soldier and security guards. One of the women lost a fetus as a result of the violence; another was hospitalized twice since the incident because of injuries sustained. Six municipal police officers were allegedly severely beaten and stripped naked by the soldiers.

Supposedly, the soldiers were guarding ballots from the July 2 election at Federal Electoral Commission installations in Moncolva, but showed up dressed in full uniform in the red-light zone late on the evening of July 10. The mass rape is alleged to have occurred over a four-hour period.

In the aftermath of the incident, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the head of the Office of the Federal Attorney General's anti-organized crime unit, said a line of investigation pointed to Los Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel that was founded by army deserters, and whose members are sometimes reputed to don military uniforms. But subsequent probes led to active-duty soldiers as the alleged perpetrators of the July 11 attacks against the 13 women.

Although as many as 30 or more soldiers might have been involved in criminal acts, military authorities have arrested only 6 soldiers on charges of abandoning their duties; at least two other alleged culprits have deserted. Reportedly, the 6 detained soldiers were transferred to the military brig in Mazatlan , Sinaloa, to face the music for violating the military's code of justice. The Mexican Defense Ministry has not released a public statement about the scandal or detentions, and the names of the arrested soldiers have not been publicized.

Much to the criticism of human rights advocates, the soldiers have yet to face civilian charges. Coahuila State Attorney General Jesus Torres Charles vowed to issue state arrest warrants for rape, robbery and battery. "I'm ordering the soldiers arrested and put in jail," Torres said. "I won't accept any kind of arbitrary behavior by these animals." Relatives of the 6 policemen allegedly attacked by the soldiers report receiving anonymous threats on the telephone and in the streets in recent days.

Torres and Rogelio Ramos Sanchez, the mayor of the municipality of Frontera , denied they had knowledge of another rape that was reportedly committed by soldiers in Frontera's red-light zone in June. The Coahuila rape scandal follows other episodes that involved sexual assaults allegedly carried out by Mexican police or soldiers this year.

For instance, 16 policemen from Mexico state face charges of raping or sexually abusing dozens of women detainees arrested after a confrontation between authorities and protestors in the municipality of San Salvador Atenco last May. In Chihuahua, 6 soldiers from the 76th Infantry Battalion were accused in of raping a 16-year-old girl in Parral in April, while in Ciudad Juarez, a municipal policeman was arrested but later ordered released without charges after a 15-year-old accused the officer of raping her late last month.

On August 2, Roman Catholic Bishop Raul Vera Lopez led march of 500 people in the city of Moncolva in support of justice for the 13 Coahuila women. Bishop Vera said that he hopes the Mexican army's sudden absence from Coahuila was not in response to the rape scandal. "(Soldiers) are the ones that should receive punishment and not the citizenry. They must not send a message that they are untouchables,” Bishop Vera said.

After experiencing a spike in narco-linked violence, the Mexican army stepped up its presence in Coahuila, especially in Ciudad Acuna on the Mexico-US border, where a shoot-out reportedly involving Los Zetas claimed the life of a police officer two months ago. By August 4, officers from the Office of the Federal Attorney General and the National Migration Institute were reported in charge of at least one of the highway checkpoints previously staffed by Mexican troops.

Sources: Proceso/Apro/Cimac, June 9, 2006 ; August 1, 2, 3, 4, 2006. Articles by Arturo Rodriguez Garcia, Soledad Jarquin Edgar, Jackie Campbell, and editorial staff. Zocalo.com.mx/Infonor, August 3 and August 4, 2006 . Articles by Camelia Munoz, Juan Ramon Garza, Jose Luis Jimenez, and Alejandro Lopez Garza. Cimacnoticias.com, July 21 and July 31, 2006 ; August 2, 2006 . Articles by Soledad Jarquin Edgar and editorial staff. El Diario de Juarez, July 31, 2006 . Article by Javier Saucedo. Cronica/Vanguardia, July 13, 2006 . La Jornada, April 26, 2006 and June 8, 2006 . Articles by Ruben Villapando, Miroslava Breach and Victor Ballinas. Sedena.gob.mx

The Death of a Scapegoat

In the end, he was buried in an anonymous grave- just like some of the women he was once accused of killing. Dying in a Chihuahua City hospital on June 1, Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif was an emblematic and controversial figure in the Ciudad Juarez femicides. At the time of his death, Sharif was serving a 30-year sentence in Chihuahua's Aquiles Serdan prison for the alleged murder of Elizabeth Castro, a 17-year-old Ciudad Juarez computer school student and maquiladora worker who was reportedely found raped and slain in 1995. After a still-murky encounter the same year with a young woman who accused Sharif of rape, the Egyptian, as he was popularly tagged, was arrested by Chihuahua state policemen led by the late Francisco Minjarez ( gunned down in a 2003 Chihuahua City gangland-style slaying) and Antonio Navarette.

Shortly afterward, the Office of the Chihuahua State Attorney General ( PJECH) was publicly accusing Sharif of the mass-murder of young women whose raped and murdered remains were found on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Protesting his innocence, Sharif always maintained he was a scapegoat and the real killer or killers were still on the loose. Chihuahua state policemen stole his belongings and confiscated his passport, Sharif charged. After serving almost 11 years in prison, Sharif could have been on the verge of finally winning his freedom. Questions were immediately raised about the timing of the 59-year-old inmate's death because of a legal appeal pursued by Sharif and his lawyers, and because of the history of other femicide suspects and/or their lawyers suffering mysterious deaths and murders.

Irene Blanco, a federal congresswoman who represents the National Action Party (PAN), reportedly spoke to Sharif less than one month before his death. Quoted in the Ciudad Juarez newspaper Norte, Blanco said Sharif complained about suffering from knee problems but did not mention an ulcer or heart condition as subsquent published reports said after the prisoner's death. "Sharif always suffered insomnia, a knee problem and hypertension that they were able to control," Blanco said. "This is not a health problem that leads to death." Blanco once served as Sharif's legal defender, but left Ciudad Juarez after her son suffered a shooting attack in 1999. Later, while visiting Sharif with personnel from the National Human Rights Commission, she heard the inmate complain that prison personnel were force-feeding him unknown medicine.

Just hours after Sharif's death, a US forensic pathologist, Dr. Ross Reichard, was flying to Chihuahua City at the request of the New Mexico Office of the State Attorney General to perform an autopsy. Dr. Reichard who works as a assistant medical investigator for the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, attributed Sharif's demise to natural causes stemming from cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis C, which can cause cirrhosis. An upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage led to Sharif's death, according to Dr. Reicard, who added that Sharif also had heart disease. Examining Sharif's body, Dr. Reichard said he found no signs of abuse or acute, traumatic injuries. Sharif's cause of death was also verified by the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission. "There was no evidence to me of foul play at the time of his death" said Dr. Reichard in an interview with Frontera Norte Sur.

In the immediate aftermath of Sharif's death, Maria Sanchez- Gagne, the director of the border violence division of the New Mexico Office of the State Attorney General, said she was contacted by Chihuahua State Attorney General Gonzalez's office and asked for assistance in determining the inmate´s death. Chihuahua state paid for Dr. Reichard's expenses, Sanchez-Gangne added. Sanchez-Gangne said Dr. Reichard's Chihuahua trip grew out of a May 26 Memorandum of Understanding signed between her agency and the PJECH, currently headed by Patricia Gonzalez. According to Sanchez-Gagne, the agreement lays out different facets of cooperation between New Mexico and Chihuahua law enforcement, including the training of PJECJH personnel by New Mexicans, and is part of a broader effort to reform Chihuahua state legal system, Chihuahua state is the recipient of a $5 million-dollar grant from the United States Agency for International Development to help pay for the legal reforms.

Once in Chihuahua City, Dr. Reichard conducted the autopsy at the PJECH's C-4 complex and met with officials including Attorney General Gonzalez. "Their objective was to make this as transparent as possible and demonstrate this, and really find out what happened to this guy" Dr. Reichard said.The New Mexico pathologist was provided an oral history of Sharif's medical history by Chihuahua doctors. No toxicology test was done, but Dr. Reichard didn't consider one "terribly relevant" since he said cirrhosis was the underlying cause of Sharif's death.

THE FLIMSY CASE AGAINST SHARIF

Women's activists, mothers of femicide victims all expressed varying degrees of shock, sadness, ambivalence, anger, and resignation at news of Sharif's passing. Elizabeth Castro's mother, Irma Garcia, was quoted as stating that she still had faith the authorities had detained right man who killer her daughter. But Ramona Morales, the mother of 16-year-old Silvia Elena Rivera, who was also found raped and murdered in the same general area where Castro's body was reported found, said she had come to believe that Sharif was not responsible for her daughter's murder. Sharif was once charged in Rivera's killing, but in a 2004 interview, Morales said she had visited with the judge in the case only to discover there was no evidence in the case file against the Egyptian.

Sharif was no saint, and he admitted to a drinking problem. He served time in a US prison for assaulting a woman companion before a judge ordered the engineer deported from the US. Instead of returning to Egypt, however, Sharif moved to Ciudad Juarez in 1994 (one year after the femicides began to get publicly noticed) and continued his career as a chemist for an international company. At the time of his arrest, Sharif was well-known in certain downtown Ciudad Juarez bars for his boozing and dancing sprees.

When women's bodies kept appearing even while Sharif was behind bars, PJECH officials in the administrations of Gov. Francisco Barrio and later Gov. Patricio Martinez tacked on accusations that Sharif was paying two gangs of killers, Los Rebeldes and Los Toltecas, to kill women in order to make the murder suspect appear innocent. However, authorities never presented proof of the money trail Sharif supposedly utilitized to keep the bloody crime wave alive from his prison cell: nor was solid evidence ever presented that linked Sharif to numerous serial murders. Members of both Los Rebeldes and Los Toltecas publicly accused Chihuahua state policemen of torturing them to extract false confessions.

After a long odyssey in the Chihuahua courts, Sharif was convicted of the Castro murder and eventually given a 30-year sentence. Still, doubts persisted about the identify of the body authorities claimed was Castro's, a skepticism fueled by the lack of a DNA test on the remains. At one point, armed with information provided by two former police officers, Sharif accused Alejandro Maynez, aka Armando Martinez, as the killer of women in Ciudad Juarez. Maynez, who was allegedly linked to organized crime and bars in downtown Juarez, mysteriously vanished from sight. The gaping holes and grave irregularities in the case against Sharif are well-documented in numerous newspaper and magazine accounts, as well as in the books Bones in the Desert by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez and Harvest of Women by Diana Washington Valdez.

CLOSING THE BOOKS ON THE FEMICIDES?

Unlike several other femicide suspects whose cases became international human rights causes, Sharif received virtually scant support from non-governmental organizations and spent years in prison without ever receving a visit from family members. Recently, that began to change a bit. Minnesota human rights activist Carol Kiecker, a founder of the Kiecker Justice Fund, told Frontera NorteSur that her group decided to financially support Sharif's legal appeal. Kiecker said she knew Sharif had abused women in the past but had paid his debt to society. "I felt really bad. I think clearly he was a scapegoat," Kiecker said. "All that crazy stuff about him manipulating from the jail cell didn't make sense to me."

A late-blooming activist, Kiecker is a good scapegoat detector. Her daughter, Cynthia Kiecker-Perzabal and her son-in-law, Ulises Perzabal, were picked up by the same Chihuahua state police force that arrested Sharif and, according to the couple, savagely tortured into falsely confessing to the murder of a 16-year-old Chihuahua City girl, Viviana Rayas, in 2003. The artist-musician couple was found innocent by a Chihuahua judge after spending 18 months in prison. According to Cynthia Kiecker-Perzabal., she and her husband recently won an appeal of their acquittal by the PJECH, but only learned about the development because of a Google alert they have set for news stories about their case.

Ulises Perzabal, who spent 18 months in the same Chihuahua state lock-up as Sharif , said the Egyptian was long held in a high security cell away from the other prisoners. Perzabal said he spoke to Sharif a few times in the prison infirmary and noticed how prison staff were forcibly administering medication to his fellow inmate. Perzabal described Sharif as rebellious, isolated and incredulous. "He couldn't believe what was happening to him," Perzabal said. "I think that was killing him little by little." In Perzabal's view, Sharif was "the perfect scapegoat" because of his foreign status and lack of Spanish-language fluency at the time of his arrest. Perzabal termed Sharif's death "the triumph of "impunity."

In the wake of Sharif´s death, cross-border women's advocates and mothers of femicide victims are concerned that the killings Sharif was accused but never convicted of will be swept under the rug. The concern is especially pressing because statutues of limitations in many of the older murders are kicking in. And in Elizabeth Castro's murder, the case can be legally closed, since Sharif was legally convicted of the teenager's murder at the time of his death.

Sally Meisnehelder of the Las Cruces-based Friends of Juarez Women said news of Sharif's death saddened her, and added to the climate of impunity surrounding many of the women's murders. "The Fox Administration, in terms of the femicides, has been very disappointing," Meisenhelder said. "Six years ago, there was a lot of hope that the Fox Administration, as an outsider, would do something but it hasn't." The women's advocate said community expectations that the Federal Office of the Attorney General would carry out genuine murder investigations were dashed when former federal Special Prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina ended up confiing her probe into a review of case files and naming Chihuahua state justice officials allegedly negligent in their duties. "Our position all along is that there never has been an investigation, and there needs to be an investigation," Meisenhelder insisted.

Sharif, meanwhile, was laid to rest in Chihuahua City's Muncipal Cemetary Number One, reportedly in an unmarked grave.

Additional sources: El Diario de Juarez, June 2 and 7, 2006. Articles by Alejandro Quintero and Ramon Chaparro. El Mexicano, June 3, 2006. Norte June 2 and 3, 2006. Articles by Sonia Aguilar and Angel Zubia Garcia. La Jornada, June 2, 2006. Article by Ruben Villalpando and Miroslava Breach. Proceso.Apro, June 2, 2006. Article by Alejandro Gutierrez. Bones in the Desert, by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez (Anagrama, 2002) Harvest of Women, by Diana Washington Valdez (Oceana, 2005)

Mexican Police Under New Fire for Human Rights Violations

One year after a sudden twist of fate took the lives of three young men, family members in the Tamaulipas border city of Reynosa are still waiting for answers. In a set of circumstances that is still not completely clear, members of the Federal Preventive Police ( PFP ) shot to death Jose Reyes Avendano, Jorge Castillo Fuantos and Alberto Jorge Arevalo Gonzalez in Reynosa last May. A PFP agent, Pedro Moreno Feria, also died of gunshot wounds in the incident. Ricardo Lopez Alvarez, the lawyer for relatives of the slain young men, said recently that investigations of the shootings were proceeding "very slowly," without any one held responsible.

Initially, the PFP claimed that the three youths, all in their 20s, were killed after they attacked a PFP convoy. Testimony from a friend of Reyes and Castillo, Herman Aleman Serratos, who was also shot during the encounter with the PFP but survived, contradicted the official story and focused scrutiny on the PFP as the possible instigators of the violence. Gunpowder tests revealed that the three slain men had not fired any weapons, and suspicion grew that PFP agent Moreno was likely killed by gunfire from his own comrades. Allegedly, PFP agents planted guns on the victims and altered the crime scene.

Reportedly, a video was recorded that showed Arevalo under interrogation by the PFP before later turning up dead. Contending that Avendano, Castillo and Arevalo were passing by the wrong place at the wrong time, Avendano and Castillo in one car and Arevalo in another, relatives and friends of the youths mounted street demonstrations in Reynosa last year.

On the one-year anniversary of the shootings, Reynosa's Border Studies and Human Rights Promotion Center, (Cefprodhac), one of Mexico's leading non-governmental human rights organizations, has issued a statement in which the group characterized the incident as "an extrajudicial execution." In addition to calling for justice in Reynosa , the Cefrprodhac demanded that the PFP accept recommendation 48/2005 from the official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), issued on December 20, 2005 , that documented organizational deficiencies in the federal police agency and urged that officers be trained in civil affairs.

Formed in 1998 largely by active-duty military personnel loaned for civilian policing, the PFP remains dominated by members of the armed forces who receive military but not civilian police training, according to the Cefprodhac. The border human rights advocates also criticized the conduct of PFP units in civil disturbances this year in Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan, and San Salvador Atenco , Mexico state, incidents which left three persons dead, all allegedly killed by police.

The Cefprodhac charged that the PFP displayed "abuse of authority, arrogance, lack of control over its elements, and grave violations of human rights" in the two confrontations. In both Lazaro Cardenas and Atenco, the PFP coordinated operations with state and local police agencies. The Atenco raid, which was carried out against supporters of The People's Land Defense Front (the group that led the successful 2002 battle against a new Mexico City airport on rural land) after a dispute with street-side flower sellers escalated and led to the detention of policemen by residents, was followed by accusations that police gang-raped female detainees.

According to relatives and supporters, at least 47 female detainees charge they were gang-raped or sexually abused by police who rounded them up in Atenco on May 3 and 4. "While (police) continued threatening us, we were bit on the breasts, nipples, ears, lips and tongue," charged a group of detainees. "(We were) penetrated with fingers and objects, some of us obliged to perform oral sex while taunted about being women."

In a pre-emptive response to a CNDH investigation, the Federal Security Ministry released a PFP report that justified the action in Atenco as a necessary measure against an allegedly violent group that had kidnapped policemen but denied participating in the actual home raids or pre-ordered detentions. Dozens of PFP agents were also injured or aggrieved in Atenco, the PFP report noted.

On May 23, the CNDH delivered a preliminary report on the Atenco raid that documented more than 200 serious rights abuses against Atenco residents and supporters, including 7 rapes and 16 sexual aggressions. Four of the victims were foreign nationals who were first allegedly sexually abused by officers and then quickly deported from Mexico . Several of the Mexican women arrested in Atenco have filed a legal complaint with the Office of the Federal Attorney General.

It's worth noting that Mexico state and neighboring Morelos have been the scene of mounting femicides in recent months. At least 18 young women have been murdered under circumstances similar to the better-known Ciudad Juarez homicides since last August. In Morelos, 8 victims have been found slain during the last two months alone.

The Atenco episode recast the attention of international human rights organizations on Mexico . In recent days, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have delivered sharp criticisms against the Fox Administration for not doing enough to curb torture, gender violence, extrajudicial killings and official impunity.

In Reynosa , meanwhile, Victoriano Castillo Martinez, the father of Jorge Castillo Fuantos, complained in a press conference that he had not even received an apology from the authorities for his son's death one year ago.

Sources: La Jornada/La Jornada Morelos, May 14, 17 , 22, 23, 24, 2006. Articles by Emir Olivares, Gustavo Castillo, Rene Ramon, Victor Ballinas and editorial staff. El Universal/AP, May 22, 2006 . Article by Maria de la Luz Gonzalez. Proceso/Apro, May 19, 2006 . Article by Gabriela Hernandez. Cimacnoticias, May 19 and 23, 2006. Articles by Lourdes Godinez Leal. Univision, May 17, 2006 .

US Congress Condemns the Killing of Mexican Women

Finally acting on long-pending resolutions, the US House of Representatives and US Senate unanimously passed resolutions this week condemning the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua , Mexico . Sponsored by Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Ca.) in the House and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) in the Senate, the statements contain the same language.

Both the House and Senate resolutions condemn the femicides, express sympathy to victims' families, deplore the use of torture in the murder investigations, offer US assistance in DNA testing, and urge the US President Secretary of State to place the femicide issue on the official binational agenda of the US and Mexican federal governments. The resolutions also request a review of cases where scapegoats are widely believed to have been fabricated, and urge the Mexican government to punish of errant law enforcement officials.

“Binational cooperation between the US and Mexico will help bring an end to the murder of women in Ciudad Juarez and closure to the families,” said Rep. Solis after the House vote.

Mexican state and federal authorities did not offer immediate, public comment on the resolutions. Most Ciudad Juarez news media did not immediately mention the US Congressional action on their Internet sites. One exception was the Norte newspaper, which quoted several Ciudad Juarez activists who praised the resolutions, including former Chihuahua Women's Institute head Victoria Caraveo and Sonia Torres of the Center for the Integral Development of Women.

Alfredo Limas, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Juarez and a member of the Citizen Network for Non-Violence and Human Dignity, said the resolutions could help prod Mexican authorities into paying more attention to the femicides. Limas contended the Mexican government starts to really worry when it “gets scolded in English.”

Long organizing for the passage of the resolutions, some US human rights advocacy groups also considered the US Congress' action a step forward. "We hope the passage of this resolution will encourage the Mexican authorities to redouble their efforts to investigate the cases that have yet to be solved," said Laurie Freeman, the Mexico program associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

The vote came amid a spiraling wave of violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state. Figures compiled by the WOLA report 20 murders of women and girls in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua from January 1 to April 25, 2006 . Additionally, a woman only identified as "Maria de los Angeles " was run over by a car and killed in Ciudad Juarez in an April 29 incident that could have been a homicide.

Also, 13-year-old Reyna Ortiz Rivera was reportedly killed by her boyfriend in another April 29 incident in Palomas, a small border town located across from Columbus , New Mexico . Ortiz's alleged victimizer, 14-year-old Eduardo Mayor, then supposedly shot himself in the head and was then transported to a hospital in Las Cruces , New Mexico .

If present trends continue, the cases reported by both the WOLA and the Mexican press reflect a murder trend higher than the rates for either 2004 or 2005. Domestic violence, sexual attacks, suspected narco-related mayhem, and robberies stand out as multiple motives in the 2006 murders. The ages, identities and backgrounds of victims suggest that a broad curve of violence against women is expanding.

Apart from the murders, dozens of young women like 22-year-old Edith Aranda remain missing. Wednesday, May 3, marked the first anniversary of the school-teacher's disappearance after she reportedly was last seen applying for a job at a Discorama music store in downtown Ciudad Juarez , the site of numerous disappearances. Aranda's disappearance was remembered by her former pupils and fellow teachers who briefly interrupted the school day on May 3 to call for renewed attention on the missing young woman.

"Time has passed since the disappearance of this teacher, and the results promised in the investigations by (teachers') union leaders have been forgotten," noted Ciudad Juarez women's activist Paula Flores, the mother of femicide victim Sagrario Gonzalez.

Human rights activists said they hope the US Congress' message will help convince Mexican officials to begin curbing the impunity prevailing in many murders and disappearances.

"Congress was responding to the fears of many families that they will not see justice for their daughters," said Kristel Mucino, WOLA's Mexico program assistant. "The Mexican authorities should punish not only the killers, but the public officials whose negligence and malfeasance have allowed them to go free."

Previous to this week's US Congressional action, various resolutions concerning the femicides were approved by the city councils of El Paso and New York City , the mayor of Las Vegas , New Mexico , and the New Mexico State Senate.

Sources: Norte, May 3 and 5, 2006. Articles by Javier Kuramura and Sonia Aguilar. lapolaka.com., May 3, 2006 . WOLA, May 2, 2006 . Press release. Rep. Hilda Solis, May 3, 2006 . Press statement. El Diario de Juarez, May 1 and 3, 2006. Articles by Guadalupe Felix, Javier Saucedo and Mauricio Rodriguez.

One Year Later: Still No Justice for Mexican Journalists

One year has passed since Nuevo Laredo journalist Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla was gunned down in front of the radio station where she worked. After struggling with multiple wounds, Garcia died 11 days later on April 16, 2005 . A popular crime beat reporter and radio host who probed delicate topics, Garcia left behind an 18-year-old son and a city increasingly mortified by the mounting violence that's transformed Nuevo Laredo into a battleground between rival organized crime cartels. Despite official promises to get to the bottom of the Garcia crime, no suspects have been arrested.

The impunity found in the Garcia murder is far from confined to her case. Early in April, more than 100 people staged a march in the Sonora state capital of Hermosillo to demand answers about the disappearance of journalist Alfredo Jimenez Mota, a reporter for Hermosillo 's El Imparcial newspaper who vanished on April 2, 2005 . Demonstrators chided Mexican President Vicente Fox, who met with Jimenez's parents last year and promised the couple “the full capacity” of the state in locating their son. Placards compared President Fox's pledge to a statement he once made promising to resolve the Chiapas conflict in “15 minutes.”

An investigative reporter specializing in border drug trafficking and organized crime beats, Jimenez could have run afoul of Sonora-based drug traffickers possibly connected to the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels. An investigation by Project Phoenix, a media collaborative organized by Mexican reporters to investigate crimes against journalists, recently reported that the SIEDO, the elite organized crime unit of the Federal Attorney General's Office ( PGR ), had identified suspects in the Jimenez disappearance, including one Raul Enriquez Parra.

If Enriquez had anything to do with Jimenez's disappearance, he won't be of any help to the authorities. According to Project Phoenix, Enriquez's mangled body was discovered in Sonora last November. Enriquez and three other men supposedly had been tortured and tossed from an airplane in the style of executions carried out by Mexican and Latin American security forces during the dirty wars of the 1970s.

April also marked the first anniversary of the murder of Raul Gibb Guerrero, the owner of the La Opinion newspaper in the southern Mexican city of Poza Rica , Veracruz . Gibb's successors used the occasion to organize a silent march and denounce the lack of progress in clearing up the murder. In an editorial, the Veracruz paper warned against threats to freedom of expression, and compared Gibb's murder to other attacks against journalists, including the December 2005 arrest of author Lydia Cacho on defamation charges stemming from her exposure of a Cancun-based pedophile ring with high-ranking political and business connections.

The attacks against Garcia, Mota, Gibb, and many others led to a wave of protests by Mexican and international journalists last year. In response, the PGR created a special prosecutor's office to investigate crimes against communicators. Special Prosecutor David Vega Vera's office has attracted 22 cases so far, but none have been cleared up to date.

Taking his post just last month, Vega began work in a borrowed office with one telephone and carton boxes containing files. In a recent interview with the El Universal newspaper, Vega acknowledged that with less than 8 months remaining for the Fox Administration the clock was ticking in the investigations. Nonetheless, the federal official said he was confident the probes would go forward and continue after the Fox Administration since attacks against journalists are considered matters of national security.

Meanwhile, no one has been brought to justice for last February's grenade and automatic rifle attack on Nuevo Laredo 's El Manana newspaper, an assault that left reporter Jaime Orozco Tey gravely injured. Like other attacks against the press, the El Manana case is under investigation by the SIEDO. Still hospitalized two months after the attack, Orozco could end up as a paraplegic for the rest of his life if medical treatments do not improve his condition.

Sources: El Universal, April 3, 8 and 9, 2006. Articles by Project Phoenix, Edgar Avila Perez, Silvia Otero, and the Notimex news agency. La Jornada, April 4, 2006 . Article by Cristobal Garcia Bernal. Proceso/Apro, April 7, 2006 . Article by Gabriela Hernandez.

The Dirty Dozen Torturers

The northern Mexican border states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon were recently included in a dirty dozen list of states with a high number of torture complaints investigated by human rights officials. The findings were reported by Ricardo Fernandez Forcada, a researcher with the National Center of Human Rights Studies of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). Fernandez studied torture complaints received by the CNDH and Mexico's 32 official state human rights commission during the period from 1992 to 2004, finding that federal and state judicial police agencies earned the bulk of complaints.

"Torture is a reality in the country. We found complaints about this crime in all the state commissions," Fernandez said.

In the case of Tamaulipas, which was ranked number 2 only behind Jalisco state in terms of allegations, Fernandez reported that 488 complaints were received and 32 recommendations issued by human rights commissions. Nuevo Leon, which shares a small border with Texas, accounted for 220 complaints and 36 recommendations. Currently governed by President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, Jalisco rated Numero Uno on the dirty dozen register for torture accusations, tallying 727 complaints and 16 recommendations.

An international scandal made headlines last year after police broke up demonstrations in Guadalajara against a world summit of leaders. Protestors alleged that passerby were randomly assaulted and arrested; detainees were forced to run a gauntlet, and naked women prisoners fondled and threatened with rape by male guards. One pregnant woman reportedly lost her child during detention.

Fernandez's findings came in spite of a 1988 federal Mexican law that made torture illegal. While a detailed, state-by-state breakdown was not available, Fernandez revealed that federal and state judicial police nationwide were the most frequent target of complaints, registering 69 percent of the processed cases. The Mexican armed forces and other police corporations each accounted about 7 percent of the complaints.

Given new monikers and retrained, often by US police agencies, many of the formerly titled judicial police agencies recently have been renamed "investigative" or "ministerial" police, though numerous old personnel remain on payrolls.

According to Fernandez, the vast majority of torture was allegedly committed by arresting officers when a suspect was first in custody, largely for the purpose of extracting a confession. Fernandez said common torture methods included beatings which leave no marks; stripping detainees naked; pointing guns to a suspect's head; and covering an individual's head with a plastic bag to threaten suffocation.

Fernandez's report followed the recent issuance of a CNDH recommendation that highlighted the persistence of torture. In response, President Vicente Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said the chief executive is fully committed to curbing torture. Aguilar said Mexico's adherence to the Istanbul Protocol and the installation of a UN office on human rights in the country are evidence of the Fox Administration's sincerity in fighting torture. Aguilar called on local authorities and police to undertake "greater efforts" toward protecting citizen rights guaranteed in the Mexican constitution.

Established during the Carlos Salinas de Gortari Administration, the CNDH makes periodic recommendations to government agencies on a range of human rights issues. Authorities are not required by law to follow the CNDH's recommendations.

Additional sources: La Jornada, November 24, 2005. Articles by Victor Ballinas and Rosa Elvira Vargas

State Lawmaker Calls Femicides an Emergency

 A Sonora state legislator has called on her state government to declare a state of emergency due to the rise of women’s murders. Patricio Patino Fierro, a deputy for the Party of the Democratic Revolution in the Sonora State Congress and a member of the body’s women’s commission, urged this week all three branches of government to agree on a joint plan to address the phenomenon of femicide as soon as possible. Patino requested that state officials be trained to handle the violence, and the general public be educated about it. “Public servants need to be trained to attend to these type of situations,” Patino said.

 To much fanfare, the state attorney general’s office teamed up with other government agencies and representatives of the Sonora-based non-governmental group Citizens for Non-Violence to form an anti-femicide commission last fall. But statistics quoted by the Citizens for Non-Violence report at least 22 women murdered so far in Sonora this year.  According to the group, 123 women were murdered in Sonora during the last five years, Patricia Alonso Ramirez, the group’s director, recently criticized state law enforcement authorities for not taking the crimes seriously. Alonso contended that high officials were “hiding” the violence in order to not scare away investors.

 “The severe problem of mistreatment of women continues to be a non-priority for the current government,” maintained Alonso. She scored the state attorney general’s office for having a specialized investigative unit dedicated to stolen automobiles but not one for women’s murders.  The activist questioned figures from the state attorney general’s office that 77.68 percent of women’s murder cases had been resolved.

 “The majority of the guilty parties are on the streets, without the legal authorities doing anything to stop the wave of violence against women,” Alonso said. On the legal front, Deputy Patino proposed the formation of a special legislative commission to take up the femicide issue and put new laws on the books that have a gender perspective. Domestic violence is considered the leading cause of women’s homicides in Sonora, but suspected narco-executions and Juarez style rape-murders are registered on the crime rolls too. Murders have been reported in San Luis Rio Colorado, Nogales, Agua Prieta, Hermosillo, and other localities in the border state.  

Sources: cimacnoticias.com, July 26, 2005. La Cronica, July 25, 2005. Article by Luis Gonzalez. La Jornada, July 17, 2005. Article by Cristobal Garcia Bernal. Notimex, November 15, 2004.

Family Plans to Pursue Criminal Charges Against Former Governor and State Attorney General for Hiding Daughter's Body

Nearly two years after her body was found, Minerva Teresa Torres Albeldaño was finally buried last Friday in Chihuahua City. The 18-year-old Chihuahua City resident disappeared in March 2001 after leaving home for a job interview at a private employment agency in downtown Chihuahua City. Minerva's body was recovered by the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office on July 16, 2003, but the discovery was kept secret from the victim's family until last week, when state authorities contacted the Torres family and  disclosed that DNA test results showed the probability that the body in their possession was probably Minerva Torres.' The Torres family and attorney Lucha Castro almost immediately announced they will seek criminal prosecutions of former Governor Patricio Martinez and former State Attorney General Jesus Jose Solis Silva on charges of moral damage. Both men left office in 2004, with Solis resigning amid scandals involving members of his law enforcement agency in child prostitution and narco-related murders of men in Ciudad Juarez.   

 "I don't seek revenge, but demand justice," said Minerva's father Francisco Torres at a religious service for his daughter. Like numerous other kidnap and rape-murder victims in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Minerva had at one time attended the private ECCO computer school. And as was the case in other disappearances of young women in the two northern Mexican cities, Minerva's family was fed false information about the possible whereabouts of their daughter. Minerva's mother, Martina Albeldaño, was even taken on a tour of red-light districts throughout northern Mexico by members of the Chihuahua State Judicial Police, who claimed to have leads indicating that Minerva might be working in nightclubs. Minerva's disappearance hit the international spotlight after members of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department in California saw a picture of the missing young woman being held up by her mother in a photo taken of a 2004 demonstration.  Members of the department concurred that Minerva's face and age resembled that of an unidentified murder victim found in their jurisdiction. Detectives from California later flew to El Paso and took DNA samples from the Torres family to confirm their suspicions, but the tests came up negative. Despite the press and international attention swirling around Minerva Torres,  no one from the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office or any other representative  of the Patricio Martinez administration contacted the Torres family to say that Minerva's suspected body already had been recovered.

 The admission by Chihuahua state authorities that Minerva's body was in storage during the last two years casts more doubt on the state's case against alleged killer David Meza. Meza is charged with killing his cousin, Neyra Azucena Cervantes in a 2003 crime of passion. At the time of her murder, the 19-year-old retail shop employee was also associated with the ERA computer school in downtown Chihuahua City, the successor institution to ECCO. Neyra and Minerva's bodies were found  within a short distance from one another on the same day and in the same place, Cuernos de la Luna, an elevated point of difficult access on the outskirts of Chihuahua City which was reportedly used by the Chihuahua State Judicial Police for training purposes. Women's activists and family members have long charged that Neyra's body was planted at the site. At no time during Meza's judicial proceedings has the state said that a second body, Minerva's, was found close to Neyra's.  Meza maintains that he was tortured into signing a false confession admitting to Neyra's murder. His stance is supported by Neyra's family and Guadalupe Morfin, President Fox's special commissioner for violence against women in Ciudad Juarez. An independent medical examination supported Meza's torture claims. 

 Members of the Chihuahua City-based non-governmental organization Justice for Our Daughters demanded at Minerva's funeral that a thorough search of the area encompassing Cuernos de Luna and the nearby C-4 state police complex be conducted. The body of another ECCO student, 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar, was discovered in the same perimeter more than one year before Minerva Torres and Neyra Azucena Cervantes were found murdered. At least 7 other young women from Chihuahua City are still missing.   Although he assumed office in October 2004, current Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza denied knowing that during almost the last 9 months of his administration the State Attorney General's Office was withholding Minerva Torres' body from her family. There was no immediate comment about the affair from either former Governor Martinez or former State Attorney General Solis.

Additional Sources: Norte, July 2, 2005. Articles by Miroslava Breach Velducca. Norte, July 1, 2005. Articles by Hugo Hernandez Juaregui and Teofilo Alvarado. Frontenet, July 1, 2005. Justice for Our Daughters statement, June 30, 2005.

Police Blamed for Mass Kidnappings

 Kidnap victims rescued in a spectacular raid conducted by federal Mexican police and soldiers blamed Nuevo Laredo municipal police for their abductions. In versions confirmed by Mexican federal law enforcement officials, rescued victims accused Nuevo Laredo city policemen driving official patrol cars of detaining and turning them over to other men wielding guns. At least 43 victims were recovered alive last Sunday after hundreds of Mexican police and soldiers stormed two houses in the Colonia Benito Juarez section of Nuevo Laredo, touching off brief gun battles. Three suspected kidnappers were arrested while other suspects fled. The three detained men included Marco Antonio Tapia, 35; Miguel Angel Abrego Chavez, 33; and Fidel Torres Castillo, 34. All the suspects as well as the rescued hostages were later flown to Mexico City for questioning by the elite SIEDO anti-organized crime unit of the federal Attorney General's Office. The victims were found bound, gagged and semi-naked, with some showing evidence of torture. Of the 43 found alive,  37 were men and 6 were women. Several teenagers were discovered in the group, including Ericka Cisneros Silva, 15; Aidee Guadalupe Mendez Gonzalez, 16; and Leonicio Silva Arriaga, 14. Additionally, some of the rescued kidnap victims were reported to be relatives of federal police officers.

Conflicting versions stand as to the motives of kidnappers. Some state and federal law enforcement statements attribute the abductions to Los Zetas, a band of gunmen founded by U.S.-trained Mexican army deserters working for the Gulf Cartel, and the bloody, ongoing fight over control of the Nuevo Laredo drug export corridor between the Gulf Cartel and fugitive, Sinaloa-based drug lord "El Chapo" Guzman. According to these versions, the victims were snatched by Los Zetas in a bid to obtain information about enemies.  But versions of former hostages and family members of missing persons point to a possible monetary motive behind the crimes. For instance, Miguel Angel Holguin denied his 26-year-old son Miguel Jr. of Laredo, Texas, was involved in the drug business. He said kidnappers had previously demanded $50,000 dollars for his son's safe return. Holguin added that his son's only crime was to cross the border to "go to Senor Frog's (a popular disco) to dance." Another man, who was only identified as Angel because of security fears, said his brother was among the rescued hostages. According to Angel, he and his two brothers were driving in Nuevo Laredo last March when they were stopped by police and detained. While Angel was released on the street naked after paying money and suffering a beating, his two brothers continued to be held until one of the two was rescued on Sunday. The third was reportedly earlier executed. 

As many as 400 Mexicans and 40 U.S. citizens have gone missing in Nuevo Laredo. The magnitude of the kidnapping operation raided last weekend startled even seasoned observers. Raul Salinas, a former FBI agent who trained Mexican police, called the kidnapping ring "mind-boggling," adding that a large number of well-organized people had to be available around-the-clock to maintain such a large number of hostages. Neighbors of the two homes raided stated that groups of armed men were seen in recent months coming and going at will throughout the day and evening, but fears prevented  residents from reporting the suspicious activities. Items confiscated from the raided homes included police uniforms, weapons and cell-phones. Last Sunday's raids were the most dramatic show of force since Mexican soldiers and the Federal Preventive Police occupied Nuevo Laredo and de-activated the city's police force earlier this month as part of the "Safe Mexico" operation launched by the Fox administration. Despite the military presence, at least 10 murders have been committed since soldiers were deployed in Nuevo Laredo. The latest homicide was reported early Monday when a former policeman, Pedro Guadalupe Galvan Solis, fell victim to a drive-by shooting.

 Sources: Laredo Morning Times, June 28, 2005. Article by Miguel Timoshenkov. El Manana, June 28, 2005. Diario de Nuevo Laredo, June 28, 2005. El Universal, June 28, 2005. Article by Silvia Otero. Dallas Morning News, June 28, 2005. Article by Tracey Eaton and Alfredo Cochado. Proceso/Apro, June 28, 2005. El Sur (Agencia Reforma), June 27, 2005

Where is Edith?

 A recent arrival to Ciudad Juarez, 22-year-old Edith Aranda Longorio quickly earned a reputation at the Pablo Neruda Elementary School as an energetic young teacher who instructed first graders how to read and write. Like other Mexican teachers, she faced a money crunch, and had a 14-month old baby girl to support. So one day in early May the single mother set off to downtown Juarez to apply for a part-time job at a music store. None of her family members, co-workers or friends have reported seeing her since then. The disappearance of the Chihuahua City native, together with the brutal, rape murders last month of 7-year-old Airis Estrella Enriquez Pando and 10-year-old Anahi Orozco (who dreamed of being a teacher) sparked perhaps the greatest outbreak of mass indignation and rage against gender violence that Ciudad Juarez has seen.

 After her disappearance, Edith’s fellow teachers staged a one-day work stoppage, marching 4,000 strong and closing hundreds of schools. Student demonstrations were held in front of the offices the state attorney general and on the city’s principal streets. Matachine dancers jangled through intersections in opposition to the attacks against women.  The predictions of one long-time activist that fed-up people were on the verge of lynching some one, reportedly became almost true last week when enraged residents of one neighborhood nearly lynched a man they accused of spying on young girls.

 Still, weeks after her disappearance there is no word from or about Edith. Perhaps it’s no accident that Edith disappeared in the same zone where dozens of other girls and young women have vanished since at least 1989. And she disappeared in the same manner as did many others: searching for a job, going shopping or leaving school, and at the same time of day and on the same day of the week. Edith’s brother, Pedro Aranda, says he was last able to determine his sister’s whereabouts at about 5 pm on Tuesday, May 3, when she supposedly left the Discorama music store on Avenida Juarez after going there to apply for a job. FBI intelligence leaked to the media in 2003 connected another music store situated just blocks from Discorama to the kidnapping and murder of young women.

 Mysterious rumors about Edith’s disappearance have floated in the border press. One seemingly bizarre story in the Tijuana newspaper Frontera suggested that the missing teacher had wound up in Tijuana after being spirited away from a tarot card reading session by gypsies. “There are many versions, and that’s one of the credible ones,” says Pedro Aranda, adding that his sister had previously told him about seeing a female tarot card reader who had a store near Zaragosa Avenue. Pedro Aranda says it’s odd that the tarot card reader vanished and her store closed up after Edith disappeared.

Another Tijuana-generated rumor suggested that the recovered body of a young woman was Edith’s, but that story turned out to be false too, and authorities haven’t publicly stated whether in fact a young woman was murdered in Tijuana and who it was. For days Juarez newspapers were full of accounts that Edith might be in an El Paso jail-perhaps under a different identity. Pedro Aranda says the Mexican Consulate in El Paso forwarded pictures of Edith and other information to the jail but turned up nothing. County jail spokesman Rick Glancey and another booking official both confirm there is no Edith Aranda at the women’s facility.  

 Al Patino of the U.S. Marshall’s Service, which handles Mexican national and foreign prisoners in El Paso, says he has not been contacted by the consulate regarding Edith Aranda. “I haven’t received any phone calls from the Mexican Consulate for a person by that name,” he says. Patino adds that the El Paso County Detention Center is just one lock-up among a dozen that prisoners are farmed out to after coming into the custody of U.S. marshals.

 Rumors of Edith’s whereabouts mimic a long pattern that’s confronted relatives of missing young women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. In 2001, for instance, a group of mothers from Chihuahua City were whisked around red-light districts from town to town in Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon states by officers from the Chihuahua State Judicial Police. None of their missing daughters were ever encountered in the table-dance joints or bars in which they were supposedly working. The disappearance of persons of interest like the purported tarot card reader, as well as the abandonment of a storefront possibly connected to the case, also follows an earlier pattern in which potential suspects vanished and businesses closed or changed names.

 Since Edith had a visa which allowed her to cross into the United States, Pedro Aranda considers it possible his sister might be on this side of the border. He searched  her belongings and found the visa missing, leading him to speculate that Edith had the document on her person when she vanished. The father of Edith’s baby girl lives in Roswell, New Mexico, but the man denies knowing the location of the mother of his daughter, according to Pedro Aranda.

 Despite having family in the United States and living in a border city, Edith Aranda has received scant-if any- mention in the U.S. press. Unlike the media barrage surrounding the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, the cameras and microphones have glossed over the story of the missing young Mexican teacher.  Contemplating the possibility that Edith simply decided to run away from a stressful life, Pedro Aranda is inclined to think otherwise, but he prefers that scenario to one which has his sister in the hands of unscrupulous individuals. “I don’t think she’s gone off to have an adventure, to have fun,” says Pedro Aranda. “I hope so, but she wasn’t that kind of person.”

 Meantime, Pedro Aranda says the family is experiencing “tremendous anxiety” not knowing Edith’s whereabouts. Under the care of the grandmother, her baby daughter has now spent more than one month without her mother. Edith’s students, who grew used to a young teacher at the beginning of her career, are now approaching the end of the school year without the encouragement of their main mentor. Most of all, Pedro Aranda appeals to anyone with real information about his sister to contact him or the authorities.  

Kent Paterson

Outrage Deepens over Police Shootings

 A controversy over the shootings of four young men by the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) boiled over this week when the results of gunpowder residue tests leaked to the  Tamaulipas daily El Manana reportedly showed that at least three of the victims did not fire weapons as earlier claimed by federal officials. Initial statements from the Federal Ministry of Public Security and the Federal Office of the Attorney General (PGR) blamed the four young men for firing on a PFP patrol last Saturday, in a series of incidents that left PFP officer Pedro Moreno Feria dead.  Three of the young men, who included two recent university graduates, were killed by gunfire while the fourth, Hernan Aleman Serrato, was hospitalized.  (Frontera NorteSur,  May 23, 2005). Tests performed by PGR personnel undercut the official version of events when they came up negative for the slain students Jorge Castillo Fuantos and Jose Reyes Avendano and their wounded friend Hernan Aleman.  The results raised another sticky question:  if the young men did not shoot at the PFP as claimed, then who shot officer Moreno?  A video which allegedly showed Jorge Alberto Gonzalez Arevalo, being interrogated by the PFP before he was shot, was reportedly broadcast on two local television stations. Gonzalez also died from gunshot wounds.

 As news of the findings spread, friends and relatives of the young men gathered for a protest in Reynosa’s downtown plaza to demand justice. They then held a meeting with the city’s mayor. Jesus Avendano Garcia, the brother of Jose Reyes, contended that only through the efforts of  relatives and friends is the truth about the shootings coming to public light. “If we had not stuck out our necks for our family members, I assure you that right now the majority of people would believe that they were delinquents who were killed that night,” said Avendano.  Besides family and friends, other sectors of Reynosa society criticized the PFP, which is deployed in the border city to supposedly combat organized crime. Camilo Martinez Cortez, the president of the Reynosa Chamber of Commerce, accused the PFP of not fulfilling its stated mission. “We also feel that since they arrived in Reynosa, the only thing they’ve done is cause hassles and fear among residents and visitors,” said Martinez.   

Reynosa’s  Border Studies and Human Rights Promotion Center (CEFPRODHAC), a well-known non-governmental organization, issued another demand that the names of the four young men be cleared , and the individuals responsible for their deaths and injuries be brought to justice. Federal officials had no immediate comment on the latest reports, but PGR investigators stayed on the scene.   

 Sources: La Prensa (Reynosa), May 26, 2005. Articles by Luis Alberto Triana and Jesus Rivera. El Manana (Matamoros), May 25, 2005. Proceso/Apro, May 25, 2005. Article by Gabriela Hernandez. El Manana (Nuevo Laredo), May 25, 2005. El Manana (Reynosa),

Police Shootings Spark Protests

One thing is certain. Four young men, three civilians and a police officer, are dead in the wake of another bout of violence in  Reynosa. Versions as to who is responsible for the deaths, however, are in dispute. According to the Federal Ministry of Public Safety (SSPF), gunmen on two occasions attacked a contingent of officers from the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) last Saturday. Repelling the attacks, PFP personnel shot and killed three men identified as Alberto Jorge Gonzalez Arevalo, Jorge Castillo and Jose Reyes Avendano. Pedro Moreno Feria was named by federal authorities as the PFP officer killed in the violence. A fourth civilian and a friend of the dead men, Hernan Aleman Serrato, was wounded in the gunfire. Family members and friends of the three slain civilians tell a different story. Rejecting government claims that the young men, all friends, were gangland gunslingers, they accused the PFP of firing in an unprovoked manner at the vehicle in which the victims were driving as it passed a PFP convoy on the road. “We know that the (students) who we knew at school never carried arms,” said a friend, Alberto Santos. “It’s not true that they carried arms. They weren’t bad people. They were good people…. hopefully the authorities will do justice.” Two of the slain men recently finished their studies at the Autonomous University of Tamaulipas, and the third attended the University of Valle de Bravo. 

 After the weekend funerals of the shooting victims, friends and relatives held a protest outside the local offices of the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR). Reynosa’s  Border Studies and Human Rights Promotion Center (CEFPRODHAC) later announced  it was sending a letter of protest signed by more than 100 individuals to President Vicente Fox and other state and federal officials. The letter accuses the PGR of covering-up the PFP’s  responsibility for the killings. The SSPF, which has formal command of the PFP, is reportedly cooperating with the PGR in investigating the incident. Like other Tamaulipas border cities, Reynosa has suffered a wave of violence linked to organized crime in recent months. Last month, another PFP patrol engaged in a gun battle with suspected gang members in the city. One PFP officer was wounded in the earlier shootout. The body of PFP officer Moreno, killed in the latest outbreak of violence, was transported to state of Tabasco for burial.

Sources: La Prensa (Reynosa) May 23, 2005. Article by Luis Alberto Triana. El Universal, May 23, 2005. Article by Roberto Aguilar and Alejandro Medellin. El Manana (Nuevo Laredo), May 23, 2005. El Universal, April 29, 2005. Article by Roberto Aguilar Grimaldo.

Another Sad Mother’s Day for Some Families

Like in other parts of Mexico and Latin America,  May 10, Mother’s Day, was celebrated in Ciudad Juarez with gifts, musical homages and festivities. But for some families it was a day filled with grief and anguish. Only days before the holiday, 20-year-old Maria Estrella Cuevas Cuevas was planning a small party with friends and family. The celebration never happened. On Thursday morning, May 5, Cuevas’s shoeless body was found on a street in one of Juarez’s working-class colonias. The mother of two infants,  ages one and two, Cuevas had been raped, beaten and stabbed. Cuevas reportedly was last seen at party with friends during the evening prior to the discovery of her body. According to her brother, Gabriel Angel Gonzalez Cuevas, his sister worked as a temporary domestic worker to make ends meet. Cuevas’s sister, Socorro, added that the murdered young woman had dreams of visiting Tijuana and seeing the ocean one day.

 Just hours before Cuevas’ murder, 48-year-old housewife Tomasa Echeverria was apparently bludgeoned to death with a hammer inside her Juarez home. Echeverria’s body was discovered by her son Martin Soto, who informed members of the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency (the former Chihuahua State Judicial Police) that  Echeverria’s husband had recently threatened to kill his wife.

 No arrests have been made in either the Cuevas or Echeverria homicides. Special Prosecutor for Women’s Homicides Cony Velarde announced after the Cuevas killing that three men were detained on drug charges in connection with the case, but the trio was later freed by the federal attorney general’s office.  The Cuevas and  Echeverria murders brought to at least 13 the total number of femicides in Juarez since the beginning of 2005. Additionally, authorities recovered two skeletons of women believed to have been previously murdered. In another development that’s jarred the border city, the family of 7-year-old  Airis Estrella  Enriquez continued to anguish over the fate of their child. The second-grader was reported last seen playing with friends in a working-class neighborhood on the afternoon of May 2, when she might have been forced into a dark-colored car with tinted windows driven by an older man.  The Roman Catholic Bishop of Juarez, Renato Ascencio Leon, then made a public appeal for the return of Airis, as did Chihuahua  Governor Jose Reyes Baeza. Airis was described by her teacher, Miriam Solis Facio, as a shy but excellent student. Soto said the young girl hailed from a family with few resources and wasn’t able to afford the class photo in which she appears, or contribute a $3 dollar donation for Children’s Day, the very day she disappeared.

Posters of the missing girl have been widely distributed in both Juarez and El Paso. Brigades of neighbors, classmates, police, and the citizenry in general have been fanning out across the city in a fruitless search to date for Airis.  Media reports named a school teacher, Luis Tomas Contreras Millan, as a suspect in Airis’ kidnapping, but the educator quickly proclaimed his innocence and accused authorities of trying to create another scapegoat.  

 Sources: Norte de Ciudad Juarez, May 11, 2005. Article by Carlos Huerta.  Diario de Juarez, May 11, 2005. Article by Javier Saucedo Alcala. Diario de Juarez, May 10, 2005. Article by Guadalupe Felix. El Mexicano (Ciudad Juarez), May 10, 2005. Article by Ruben Rios Macias.  Diario de Juarez, May 8, 2005. Article by Ramon Chaparro. Norte, May 8, 2005. Articles  by Carlos Huerta and Teofila Alvarado. Norte, May 6, 2005. Articles by Salvador Castro.  Diario de Juarez, May 6, 2005. Article by Javier Saucedo Alcala  El Universal, May 6, 2005. Article by Luis Carlos Cano.

PGR Probes Journalist’s Murder

 Officials from the federal Office of the Attorney General (PGR) inspected the murder scene this week where Nuevo Laredo journalist Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla was shot by an assailant on April 5. Meeting with the owner of radio station XHNOE which employed Garcia, the head of the PGR in Tamaulipas, Marco Antonio Ramirez Cabrera, vowed  to “totally clarify” Garcia’s murder.  Despite the hopes of her family for a recovery from the gunshot wounds suffered in the attack earlier this month, Garcia died in a local hospital on April 16 after complications caused the well-known Nuevo Laredo radio journalist to take a turn for the worse. “Now I am without a mother, “ said Luis Garcia, the 18-year-old son of the slain reporter. Besides her son, Garcia is survived by her mother, Beatriz Escamilla, and her brother, Hector Contreras Garcia. Amid a silent protest by her colleagues, the Garcia was subsequently buried in the Tamaulipas state capital of Ciudad Victoria.  The 39-year-old crime beat reporter was shot 9 times by a gunman on the morning of April 5 as she arrived at XHNOE, a centrally located radio station in a well-transited section of Nuevo Laredo.  No suspects have been arrested in the murder, but Garcia was known to have been threatened on several occasions during the last two years

Described by her colleagues as a daring journalist unafraid to take on delicate issues, Garcia reported with passion on the mounting narco-violence, government corruption and femicides which have turned Nuevo Laredo upside down in recent years. A former teacher, Garcia once worked as a print journalist for Nuevo Laredo’s El Manana daily. She also served at one time in the press office of former Mayor Monica Garcia Velasquez, and later became head of human resources for Nuevo Laredo’s municipal police department before returning to reporting and hosting a popular morning radio show on XHNOE, Punto Rojo.  Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores said that leads in Garcia’s killing point to organized crime. Following a public outcry, Garcia’s murder investigation was assumed by the PGR. Garcia was the second journalist in Nuevo Laredo to be slain during the last 13 months. Roberto Javier Mora, the managing editor of El Manana, was stabbed death outside his home in March 2004. According to statistics from the Inter American Press Association, Garcia’s death brought to 14 the number of Mexican journalists who have been murdered in the northern border region during the last 10 years. Organized crime is widely suspected of having a hand in many of the killings.

 Sources: El Manana, April 26, 2005. Article by Joaquin Soto. Apro, April 20, 2005. Article by Gabriela Hernandez. Apro, April 19, 2005. Article by Regina Martinez and Gabriela Hernandez. Laredo Morning Times, April 17, 2005. Article by Miguel Timoshenkov. El Manana, April 17, 2005. Article by Joaquin Soto.

Kiecker and Perzábal Found Innocent in Chihuahua City Femicide

On Friday, December 17, 2004 US-citizen Cynthia Kiecker and her Mexican husband Ulises Perzábal were found innocent of the murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas.  Rayas was murdered in Chihuahua City in May 2003, according to Chihuahua law enforcement. 

Throughout their ordeal Kiecker and Perzábal stated that they were tortured for days until they falsely confessed to murdering Rayas.  During the trial alleged witnesses reversed statements against the two saying that they were also tortured or coerced into make false, incriminating statements.

Kiecker and Perzábal’s case received international attention and became an embarrassment for the Fox administration.  In June 2004, while in Minnesota on a trade mission, President Fox told US Senator Norm Coleman that the murder charges would most likely be dropped against Kiecker and Perzábal.  Then, approximately a week later, the Mexican embassy reversed the president’s statement saying that the charges would continue and that it was charges against the police officers accused of torturing Kiecker and Perzábal that were being dropped.

According to Carol Kiecker, Cynthia’s mother, her daughter and son-in-law left Mexico as soon as possible after their not guilty verdict.  To insure their safety they were whisked to El Paso by US consular officials in a bullet-proof vehicle that was accompanied by Mexican federal police vehicles and another vehicle with three US FBI agents.

Kiecker and Perzábal have said that they will live in Minnesota—Kiecker’s home state—and will not be returning to Mexico for years.  According to both Cynthia and Carol Kiecker, the family plans to join the struggle for justice being waged by others that have been unjustly incarcerated and by the families of the serial-killing victims in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City.

Cirilo Rayas, the father of Viviana, says that he will not be quiet until there is justice for his daughter, according to an article in the Chihuahua newspaper El Pueblo.  He plans to meet with the state attorney general to discuss his daughters case, he said.

According to a December 18, 2004 article in the Chicago Tribune the Mexican Secretary of the Interior criticized prosecutors noting that “"to blame the innocent only foments impunity, and that only benefits the guilty."

Chihuahua prosecutors have said that they plan to appeal the acquittal.

Sources:  
El Pueblo (Chihuahua), December 17, 2004.  Article by Carlos Hernández. 
Chicago Tribune, December 18, 2004.  Article by Hugh Dellios.

Mexican Minors Prostituted To Farmworkers Near San Diego

At 4:30 in the afternoon a group of ten young woman arrive at a farm in Del Mar, California, about 25 miles from downtown San Diego.  They are being forced to work as prostitutes and accompanying them is an equal number of men with radios and cell phones.  The men keep them from escaping and make sure that no one interferes with their profitable business.   

Every Wednesday the prostituted women are brought to the farm where more than 300 workers are picking tomatoes.  On other days of the week they are taken to five other nearby farms in Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista, Rancho Bernardo and Rancho Penasquito, California. 

Told that they were going to work in US factories or restaurants, these women and others like them from poor Mexican communities were smuggled into the US only to be forced into prostitution, says Venustiano, a farmworker that has befriended some of the women.  He says that the women do not protest how they are treated because they fear deportation or retaliation against their families. 

Most of the ten women at the farm in Del Mar are minors although the women vary in age from 14 to 22.   Upon arrival the women walk down to a stream surrounded by trees to change their clothes and put on makeup.  

Men go and look at the women and choose one.  The cost is US$30.  

Venustiano says that up to ten men will go with one woman.  The women have condoms to protect themselves, he states.  

At 7:00 p.m. Venustiano heads to the place where he sleeps at night.  The women have been at the farm for two and a half hours but when he leaves they are still down by the river.

Source: Frontera (Tijuana), December 13, 2004.  

Ciudad Juárez Femicides:  More Deaths and Law Enforcement Officials Investigated

Cinthia Irasema Ramos' dream was to become a nurse, her father said at her funeral.  Found dead on a sidewalk in central Ciudad Juárez on December 3, 2004, the 21 year old woman's life was cut short near the bar where she worked.  Police have yet to make an arrest in the case although family member's believe Ramos' boyfriend may have been involved. 

On November 2, 2004, Martha Lizbeth Hernández, age 16, was murdered and raped .  José Luis Montes, a carpenter, confessed to the crimes saying that he was drunk and had been using cocaine prior to killing Hernández.  

Montes was spotted by city police while allegedly raping Hernández who he had apparently already choked to death.  He tried to flee the scene but was apprehended by police.  

In between these killings another body was found on November 25 in the outskirts of Cd. Juárez, according to an article in the Dallas Morning News.  

Law Enforcement Investigated

The federal investigation of the Cd. Juárez femicides led by María López Urbina has been criticized as "garbage" by organizations that represent victims' families, particularly because the investigation has not led to any new arrests.  However, another part of the investigation is aimed at identifying state law enforcement officials that were negligent in properly investigating the crimes.  One of those Chihuahua officials named by López's investigation is Zulema Bolívar García who was the special  investigator into the femicides between July 2001 and March 2002. 

In mid-November 2004 Bolívar testified to López's investigation that in November 2001 it was the Chihuahua Attorney General and the Assistant Attorney General at that time, Arturo González Rascón and José Manuel Ortega Aceves, that steered her investigation of the eight bodies that were found in a Cd. Juárez cotton field in that month. Bolívar also stated that it was Ortega Aceves who framed two bus drivers for the crime, Javier García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza. 

Although former Attorney General González Rascón is no longer active in state law enforcement, Ortega Aceves is the current director of the legal department of the Chihuahua Attorney General's Office.  

Patricia González Rodríguez, the current state attorney general who was appointed by the state's new governor, José Reyes Baeza, to clean up Chihuahua law enforcement, has said that she can not investigate Ortega Aceves or take other action against him unless Bolívar testifies against him at the state level.  So far, Bolívar has only made statements to the federal investigation.  

For one of the bus drivers, Bolívar's statements offer no hope: Gustavo González Meza died in jail under suspicious circumstances.  García Uribe, the other driver, was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison for his role in the death of the eight women found in November 2001. 

Sources: 
Norte (Cd. Juárez), December 7, 2004.  Articles by Salvador Castro and Margarita Hernández. Diario (Cd. Juárez), November 6, 2004.  Article by Pedro Sánchez and Javier Saucedo. Norte (Cd. Juárez), November 17, 2004.  Article by Carlos Huerta. 
Diario (Cd. Juárez), November 18, 2004.  Article by C. Cruz and A. Rodríguez.