Laura Carlsen on Democracy Now! on Plan Mexico/Merida Initiative

Check out Laura's interviews on Plan Mexico, they are short and informative about the situation.

Democracy Now! (Today, July 31)

In this interview, Democracy NOW! interviews CIP Americas Program director Laura
Carlsen, TV host and documentary-maker Avi Lewis, and Global Exchange's
John Gibler on NAFTA and the implications of Plan Mexico.

Watch or listen here: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/31/plan_mexico

InsideUSA with Avi Lewis on Al-Jazeera English (July 26)

Watch this interview with footage from the drug war and a rooftop Mexico City
interview with Laura Carlsen and Jorge Chabat on Plan Mexico, the war
on drugs and the human rights casualites of militarization:

Part One (15 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyDHNeJxazU

Part Two (8 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz8k39p8z4U

The Riz Khan Show on Al-Jazeera English (July 8)

In an interview focused on the recent torture tapes from Mexican police
training programs, Human Rights Watch and Americas Program debate
whether the Merida Initiative will have a positive or negative effect
on human rights in Mexico.

Watch at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busyzt3GzaA

Resources on Plan Mexico page

Plan Mexico and the Billion-Dollar Drug Deal

"Deep Integration"≈the Anti-Democratic Expansion of NAFTA

If you'd like to interview Laura you can contact us at lcarlsen(at)ciponline.org and americas(at)ciponline.org.

Border activist on trial for leaving water for migrants

This is taken from the press release today

"Trial for Border Volunteer, Cited for Littering while Picking Up Trash"

A humanitarian aid volunteer goes to federal court Friday over a littering
citation received while picking up trash along the Arizona – Mexico
border. No More Deaths volunteer Dan Millis, 29, has entered a plea of
not guilty to the Class B Misdemeanor offense of littering on a National
Wildlife Refuge. He faces a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or
$5,000 in fines.

The trial is this Friday, July 25, at 9:30 a.m., at the DeConcini federal
courthouse, 405 W. Congress, in Tucson. A press conference will be held
in front of the courthouse at noon or immediately following the trial.

Millis and three other humanitarian aid volunteers were picking up trash
and leaving jugs of drinking water along border trails in Brown Canyon
north of Sasabe on February 22, 2008, when they were confronted by U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement. Officers informed volunteers that they
could neither leave water nor recover trash without proper permits, and
Millis was presented with a $175 ticket for littering.

“I felt especially compelled to leave drinking water out that day, because
only two days earlier I found the body of a young girl in the desert. She
was only fourteen,” states Millis. “It was heartbreaking.”

238 migrants were found dead in the Arizona borderlands during the 2007
fiscal year. During the summer of 2007, No More Deaths encountered 388
migrants along the Arizona – Mexico border, including twenty seven women,
fourteen children, and one pregnant seventeen-year-old. Many required
serious medical attention. No More Deaths has been working to provide
humanitarian aid to people along the border since 2004, including the
Brown Canyon area where Millis was cited.

For more information, please visit www.nomoredeaths.org, write us at
action@nomoredeaths.org, or (928) 821-0331.

Mexican Oil Referendum Next Sunday

Mexicans will cast a historic vote this coming Sunday July 27th on the fate of the much-debated Petróleos Mexicanos. The privatization debate and reform proposals have been making continuous headlines, and now the general population will vote in this unique referendum. The two questions will have two answer choices each and deal with the modernization of Pemex, the participation of private investors in the transportation, ducts and storage of hydrocarbons and on budget autonomy and administrative controls for the national oil company.

The Mexican people are in general very proud of their natural resources, and it's important to note that Pemex contributes nearly 40% to the federal budget. Mexico City residents and nine other states will vote at 5,600 community sites from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Politicians of all stripes are campaigning for the "correct" answers. Lopez Obrador says to vote "no" and Calderon's administration is in the midst of a media blitz using the slogan "The oil is ours, lets go get it" (El petroleo es nuestro, vamos por el).

The exact questions are:

"La explotación, transporte, distribución, almacenamiento y refinación de los hidrocarburos son actividades exclusivas del gobierno, ¿Está usted de acuerdo o no está de acuerdo que en esas actividades puedan ahora participar empresas privadas?"

"En general, ¿está de acuerdo o no está de acuerdo con que se aprueben las iniciativas relativas a la reforma energética que se debaten actualmente en el Congreso de la Unión?"

Previous surveys have shown high majorities voting to keep Pemex as nationalized as possible. On Sunday I'll interview voters on their reactions to the referendum and hopefully post some short video and quotes here.

Back to Oaxaca

I was in Oaxaca City last week for a workshop on the Security and Prosperity Partnership, Plan Mexico, privatization reforms to Social Security, and job insecurity. That sounds like a wide range of issues, and it is—especially considering the complexity of each one.

But that was the point—to give workers from the state a broad picture in which to understand what´s happening to them. It turned out to be one of those very fruitful gatherings where those of us who analyze “broad pictures” got a chance to work together with those who experience the worst consequences on a daily basis. The workshop was sponsored by the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and Mujeres Sindicalistas (Women Union Members), bringing together Oaxaca maquiladora workers, state employees from the Health and Transportation departments, and teachers.

Being back in Oaxaca was a strange experience in itself. I had been back since the uprising but still the images burned into my mind were from late 2006 when federal troops were sent in to put down the teachers’ strike that spread into a popular uprising.

Then it was a city occupied by machine guns and fear. Where you’d turn a corner on a quaint colonial street and run into a row of shield-yielding, riot-geared cops. Where groups playing music or selling crafts shared the sidewalk with heavily armed federal police looking like they didn’t quite know what they were supposed to be doing.

If those images are burned into my memory, they’re branded into the flesh of the participants of the movement. But despite lingering trauma from the torture, repression, assassination and imprisonment they faced, Oaxacans continue to fight back. Now the tourists have returned en force and the hated Governor Ulises Ruiz repeats ad nauseum that everything is back to normal. The crimes committed during and after the uprising have gone unpunished and in most cases the government has failed to carry out even a pretense of an investigation. Given the lack of response from the state government, the Mexican Supreme Court agreed to form a commission to investigate what happened. Oaxaca will be yet another test case of the highest court’s commitment to justice when entrenched political interests are involved.

Apparently “normal” in Oaxaca means a fresh onslaught of offensives. The women workers discussed the way privatization of social security is cutting back their hard-earned pensions and benefits, intensification of work in the maquiladoras means obligatory overtime under the threat of closure, President Calderon’s labor reform—on his checklist of neoliberal “reforms” after social security and privatization of PEMEX—would create “flexible” working conditions and further erode job security and working conditions. The Plan Mexico discussion was lively as participants asked about the plan and discussed the already dire situation of human rights violations in the state.

We just put up a new Human Rights section of the website that contains a series on Oaxaca. These are papers presented at the “After the Barricades” conference sponsored by Simon Fraser University a few months back. They cover many aspects of the conflict and its aftermath: the viewpoint of surrounding rural communities, the linkage between freedom of expression and rights the breakdown of the social compact in Mexico and the dynamics of the conflict.

We’ll be posting more there over the next few days, so check back in as documents from the Oaxaca Women’s Coalition, Section 22 of the Education Workers Union and the Human Rights Commission report go up.

Oaxaca: After the Barricades

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5364

Mexican Torture Training Raises Questions About U.S. Military/Police Aid

Two videos of a torture-training session with the police force of León, Guanajuato shocked the Mexican public last week and raised serious questions about human rights under the Calderon offensive against organized crime. For readers with strong stomachs, the videos can be found here.

The videos leaked by the local paper El Heraldo de León hit the media just one day after President Bush signed into law a $400 aid package to support President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs and organized crime. The tapes show graphic images of torture techniques used on victims who city officials claim were volunteers from the police force. In one, a debilitated victim is insulted and dragged through his own vomit. In another, a victim receives shots of mineral water up the nose and has his head forced into a pit of “rats and excrement.”

It´s old news that torture exists in Mexico. The videos were especially shocking in a society relatively inured to human rights violations for two reasons: they prove without a doubt that torture is not an anomaly in the country, but an institutionalized practice; and they reveal the role of foreign private security companies.

1) The graphic images led to public outcry throughout the country and made it into the international press. Compounding the outrage at the torture scenes, Leon officials responded by defending the training program and refusing to suspend it. As people across the country watched in horror, the mayor and police chief claimed the practices do not violate human rights and are necessary to fight organized crime.

When reminded that torture is prohibited under Mexican law, the officials backtracked and claimed they were teaching specialized police officers to withstand torture techniques rather than dish them out. But it’s obvious watching the video that this is a Torture 101 course. Trainers bark orders at police officers on how to humiliate and “break” the victims.

What has many people worried is that the war on drugs launched by Felipe Calderon--and explicitly endorsed and supported by the U.S. government through aid to the Mexican police and military--is sending a message to Mexican security forces that “anything goes.” These tactics are reprehensible, yet they are being presented as acceptable in the context of a war mentality.

2) The second point of concern is that the video clips show foreign private security companies teaching torture interrogation techniques to Mexican security forces. Kristin Bricker, an investigative report from the online newspaper NarcoNews, uncovered evidence that indicates the trainers are from a Miami-based private security company called “Risks, Incorporated.”

The company, incorporated in London, boasts “Psychological torture is the main tactic used in professional interrogations, it works and leaves no physical marks. We do this interrogation technique and others in some courses to show how easy it is to break a hostage and we're being nice!”

The images raise serious questions about the direction of U.S. aid under Plan Mexico (Merida Initiative). The Plan includes an unspecified amount for contracts to U.S. private security companies. As the webpage of Risks Incorporated shows, these kind of courses are the dead opposite of human rights training.

We don’t know if other companies carry out similar courses. But private security companies under contract from the State Department and the Dept. of defense have come under heavy fire since the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in which Blackwater employees were involved and the lawsuits against security firms for torture in Abu Ghraib. Even Department of Defense officials have complained that they have “quick trigger fingers,” “act like cowboys” and “lack accountability.” A military intelligence officer referred to them as “essentially mercenary forces”--the term commonly used throughout Latin America to describe U.S. private security forces.

To make matters worse, these firms seem to operating in an international legal void. A CRS report to Congress states “It is possible that some contractors may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq.” This lack of legal accountability extends to their actions elsewhere as well. The UN Mercenaries Working Group has noted the lack of regulation worldwide of these growing forces.

In Mexico, despite legal reforms that no longer allow testimony obtained through torture as evidence, the practice is widespread. When we took testimonies in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Atenco in February as part of the International Civil Commission on Human Rights, I heard many cases of beatings, scaldings and sexual abuse in police custody. These cases, and these victims, remain beneath the radar of the press and public opinion, and were ignored by U.S. legislators quick to please Latino voters.

The Mexican government recognized only 72 cases for the entire period 2001-2006. When torture cases are prosecuted at all, they often wind up being prosecuted as lesser charges. According to its website, the Human Rights Commission has issued only three recommendations regarding torture since 1995. Many victims who have suffered torture at the hands of the authorities are understandably reluctant to report the violations to the same governments whose security forces or agencies were responsible for the incidents.

Mexican human rights groups report that violations have been on the rise in Mexico since the drug war sent over 25,000 soldiers out into the streets and emboldened police forces. In its annual report, the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center notes “a regression in respect and protection of fundamental rights.” Since most of the aid from Congress goes to the police and military, with another large chunk for domestic spying operations, it’s fairly easy to predict that instead of cleaning up Mexican security forces in their fight against organized crime, we will see the empowerment of impunity.

Women, indigenous peoples and opposition leaders are the most common targets. Since Plan Mexico also funds equipment for tracking Central American migrants in Mexico and further militarizing the Mexican border, it can be assumed that migrants will also be the victims of increased human rights violations.

Some Washington human rights groups have claimed that Plan Mexico will help Mexico reform and eliminate illegal practices such as torture. But the aid package funds the same forces that commit those atrocities with virtual impunity.

The problem for Mexico in reaching a higher level of respect for human rights is a political--not a legal or economic--problem. All indications show that the Calderon model of militarized control, supported by the Bush model of counter-terrorism security embodied in Plan Mexico, will only make it worse.

A Primer on Plan Mexico
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5204

Drug Trafficking, Violence and Repression in Chihuahua
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5218

Plan Mexico: Uphill battle will continue against failed model

On June 26, after months of intense manoeuvering in Washington, the U.S. Senate passed the final version of the “Merida Initiative” and the President subsequently signed it into law.

The date will be remembered as a turning point in the U.S.-Mexico relationship, not just because it increases U.S. aid to Mexico ten-fold but because it militarizes the bilateral relationship just when sensitive issues had a chance to be worked out through political and diplomatic channels. Given the security paradigm of Plan Mexico—to the exclusion of other aspects of the bilateral relationship--, the State Department will take a backseat following presentation of a report that attests to Mexico’s efforts to obey its own laws, and the Pentagon will take the reins.

The human rights conditions that were first added by Congress and then mostly withdrawn when the Mexican government rejected them, sent up a smokescreen that prevented real analysis and debate on what is popularly known as Plan Mexico. That ultimately futile discussion also sidelined the voices of organizations that urged Congress to oppose the measure: the ten-million strong AFL-CIO and its 1.7 million-person Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, non-governmental organizations including CIP Americas Policy Program and Global Exchange, religious organizations including Witness for Peace, Tikkun and the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and grassroots activist organizations including the Latin American Solidarity Coalition, Alliance for Democracy, CISPES and Friends of Brad Will.

Much has been made of the $73.5 million appropriated for institutional reform of the justice and penal systems. This compares to $112 million allocated for 2008 under the original Bush proposal. But as I stated in the Primer on Plan Mexico, even this section raises serious questions of efficacy and appropriateness. Mexico doesn’t need U.S. training to increase “rule of law” so much as it needs political will and pressure from Mexican civil society. If Mexican grassroots leaders who have traditionally exercised this pressure feel threatened by repercussions from empowered security forces, instead of progress we will see regression.

Mexican legislators and jurists have a point in noting that the U.S. government has few credentials to establish it as the sole arbitrator of reform in Mexico. Laws are different and the United States faces serious problems with its own justice and penal systems, especially in the area of drug enforcement where racial discrimination and police extortion and brutality continue to be common. If the Plan had included an extension of sharing “best practices” between police forces based on actual experiences, this section might make sense. As it is, it imposes U.S. equipment and notions with no proven track record.

Part of the strategy for approving Plan Mexico was to portray it as merely a bilateral counter-narcotics plan. This was never the case. The Plan betrays its much more ambitious aims. Note the words of John Negroponte to the OAS General Assembly: “With full funding, the Merida Initiative will provide substantial support over several years to train and equip Mexican and Central American law enforcement. We are committed to this initiative because no country in the hemisphere can be safe from organized crime, gangs, and narco-terrorism unless we are all safe.”

The use of the phrase “narco-terrorism” is not surprising but it constitutes a bad omen for Mexico. When drug trafficking is considered synonymous with terrorism, it opens the door to suspension of civil liberties, pulls the country into the Bush counterterrorism strategy, and obscures the real nature and roots of the problem. Negroponte’s remarks also reflect the removal of the security locus from the national to the regional realm, where the United States calls the shots. In this context, fears of violation of national sovereignty are not exaggerated.

While accusing the opposition of being insensitive to drug-related violence, proponents of Plan Mexico paved the way for an aid package that will likely increase violence and bring it closer to home as the drug war extends to opposition targets like it did under Plan Colombia. It will also fail, just as other applications of the drug war model have failed.

I would like to be wrong on this, but the signs are already there—human rights violations have increased precipitously since President Calderon launched the militarization of Mexican society in response to the violence of the drug cartels. The Merida Initiative applauds this strategy and explicitly aims to reinforce and broaden security measures. It adds U.S. espionage equipment and firepower while providing no significant funding or role for civil society measures or protection of civil liberties. Violence fought with violence has led to nearly double the drug-related deaths this year alone and multiple attacks on grassroots leaders, unarmed civilians, Zapatista communities and women by security forces.

The media focused all of its attention on the counter-narcotics “shared responsibility” aspect of the plan. Most reporters apparently never bothered to read the entire plan and eagerly accepted the spoon-fed connection between the violence on the border they had been covering and the ostensibly benevolent response of the U.S. government embodied in Plan Mexico.

Since its passage, they have reacted with mixed messages and contradictions. The New York Times titled its May 28 article “U.S. Includes Rights Language in Mexico Anti-Drug Aid” as if the final military/police aid package were a major advance for human rights. The Washington Post noted just the opposite, sub-titling its article “U.S. Lawmakers responded to Counterparts’ Objections” and stating that “The U.S. Senate approved the aid--known as the Merida Initiative--late Thursday after stripping conditions that Mexican officials said would have infringed on their sovereignty, particularly on the issue of human rights.” The Mexican press nearly unanimously agreed that Mexico had “won” the conditions battle, with headlines like “Mexico Beats Back U.S. Congress” (El Universal, the largest daily). The El Universal article went on to quote Mexico’s ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan stating, “There is no type of explicit restriction or limitation on the transference of resources and military equipment.” (We’ll talk more about the controversial conditions in this blog tomorrow).

The task we have before is to monitor impact and stop the plan in the next appropriations round. Not condition it, not tweak it, but end it. There are many constructive ways in which an aid package to Mexico could be designed that would increase security and long-term development and human security. Many people were working on drafting legislation that responds to these needs from a civilian point of view until the process was so tragically detoured by Plan Mexico.

It will be an uphill battle to defeat later stages of Plan Mexico. The plan has no clear benchmarks for evaluation. In the case of Plan Colombia, even though studies demonstrate its failure in decreasing the production and flow of illegal drugs it continues to be funded. In both Mexico and Colombia, support has to do with creating a strong U.S. military presence in these countries—a misguided strategy for increasing U.S. influence in the context of Latin America’s widespread rejection of the Bush national security strategy and free trade agreements. Also, defense companies and information technology companies that benefit handsomely from the allocations will lobby heavily.

Moreover, at the recent meeting of Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP)—supposedly a “development and integration project”--President Calderon praised the Merida Initiative and announced he will work to “build mechanisms that broaden the aid to Central American and Caribbean nations…” Backed up by Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe, Calderon’s inclusion of Plan Mexico and the security agenda as the first point in his statement on the renewed PPP made it clear that the rightwing governments in the hemisphere have every intention of “securitizing” the hemispheric agenda, applying military models to public security problems with the generous help of U.S. taxpayer dollars. This path follows the evolution of NAFTA into a “White House-led” regional security plan under the Security and Prosperity Partnership. In its wake, the root problems facing Mexico—increased drug use, poverty, the fall of real wages, loss of rural livelihoods and emigration, corruption and erosion of the rule of law—have been pushed aside.

For more information:
Resource Page on Plan Mexico: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5118

Security vs. Prosperity?

It’s difficult to hold a discussion on NAFTA’s Security and Prosperity and Partnership (SPP) because everyone has a different point of entry to the subject. Add to the perspective problem, the fact that there is no document to analyze, no comprehensive set of rules and guidelines to critique. The result is a lack of coherent public policy focus that in itself reveals a lot about what’s wrong with the SPP.

Last week the University of the Americas in Puebla held a two-day conference called “Critical Perspectives on SPP: Comparisons Between Canada and Mexico.” The organizers have to be commended for taking on an issue that’s not in the news but has huge ramifications for both countries. And they did it by welcoming rather than avoiding the diversity of viewpoints.

That makes it a little hard to sum up the event or come up with conclusions. Here are a few reflections.

1. There is a conflict between the security and prosperity agendas within the SPP. This observation was echoed by most of the Mexican presenters. Alejandro Estevil of the Foreign Ministry emphasized the need for Mexico to move the focus of SPP from the security agenda to a prosperity agenda aimed at Mexico’s development needs and addressing social issues including immigration. Jose Luis Valdes noted an even stronger contradiction between the security and prosperity agenda, saying the former has been aimed at “unification of the security scheme based on the U.S. model” which has strained the Canada-Mexico relationship. Mexico’s lack of a national security plan has made it easy to impose the U.S. regional plan. Both Canada and Mexico have felt the contradiction in border measures that inhibit trade, and immigration dealt with as a security rather than integration issue. Valdes also pointed out that the central economic issues for Mexico—poverty and inequality—aren’t even on the “prosperity” agenda.

Strategies for dealing with this problem vary. The Foreign Ministry believes that accepting the U.S. security agenda will aid chances to push a stronger prosperity agenda in the future. Others believe that the way to gain attention to social issues is to include them in a broader definition of “human security.” Although there was considerable criticism of the limited nature of both security and prosperity paradigms, there was little sense of the way out.

2. Washington’s influence has hampered Canada and Mexico’s abilities to defend national interests in the SPP and to create a stronger alliance. Canada’s Ambassador Guillermo Rishchynski described North America as a sandwich, with Canada and Mexico as the bread and “the problem is the filling.” U.S. power and particularly its power to set the agenda in the SPP has clearly diminished the possibilities of an effective Canada-Mexico alliance or defense of issues central to those two countries.

3. The Bush government has set the security agenda while mostly U.S.-based transnational corporations lead the prosperity agenda. Whether related to the U.S. counter-terrorism agenda or the recent Merida Initiative, the Bush administration has defined the security focus in the SPP. On the economic side, the North American Competitiveness Council of the SPP has controlled the process from a business rather than public policy perspective.

Civil society’s role in all this has been first as a watchdog, trying to determine what is happening in the process and how it will affect the populations of the three countries. Groups have also tried to affect the trinational agenda, forming their own networks and setting their own agendas, with a special emphasis on the need to integrate immigration reform into the process.

For more information see our articles:

Dissecting the North American Summit Joint Statement: Bush's Last Stand
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5178

Time to Renegotiate NAFTA, Not Expand It
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5175