Aljazeera
by Adam Goodman
For the last decade Victoria Alvarez Flores worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, 51 weeks a year at a Mexico City laundromat. Her round-trip commute from a town just outside the city added another four and a half hours to an already long day. The pay was modest, the benefits nonexistent, but at least she had a job. That is, until the owner sold the business.
On Oct. 27 the laundromat closed, marking Alvarez's first day of unemployment. It was her 54th birthday.
Alvarez’s situation is not uncommon. In the past year Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto — along with much of the international media — has emphasized the growth of the Mexican middle class and portrayed the country as an economic success story, an Aztec Tiger. The reality, however, is quite different.
“The Mexican economy is going through a recession right now,” said Gerardo Esquivel, a professor at the Center for Economic Studies at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. “The numbers that have been mentioned in terms of the growth of the middle class have been grossly exaggerated. There is not a clear definition of what middle class is.” Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the CIP Americas Program monitors and analyzes international press on Mexico with a focus on the US-backed War on Drugs in Mexico and the struggle in Mexico to strengthen the rule of law, justice and protection of human rights. Relevant political developments in both countries are also covered.
Nov 12, 2013
Mexico's tomato-farm workers toil in 'circle of poverty'
L.A. Times
By Tracy Wilkinson
November 11, 2013
Villa Juarez, Mexico - They sure do have tomatoes here in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Elongated red ones. Round green ones. Cherry tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, grape tomatoes.
Vast fields of tomatoes, lining the roads out of the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan, miles and miles of mesh tenting shielding the plants from the sun.
Last year, Sinaloa exported 950,000 tons of vegetables, mostly tomatoes and mostly to California and other parts of the United States, worth nearly $1 billion. Half the tomatoes eaten in the United States this time of year are from Sinaloa. The tomato is the symbol on the Sinaloa license plate.
But while a short list of landowners make millions, the planting, weeding, pruning and picking of the vegetables fall to armies of workers from Mexico's poorest states — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas — who have little opportunity for schooling or other forms of legal employment. Read more.
By Tracy Wilkinson
November 11, 2013
Villa Juarez, Mexico - They sure do have tomatoes here in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Elongated red ones. Round green ones. Cherry tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, grape tomatoes.
Vast fields of tomatoes, lining the roads out of the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan, miles and miles of mesh tenting shielding the plants from the sun.
Last year, Sinaloa exported 950,000 tons of vegetables, mostly tomatoes and mostly to California and other parts of the United States, worth nearly $1 billion. Half the tomatoes eaten in the United States this time of year are from Sinaloa. The tomato is the symbol on the Sinaloa license plate.
But while a short list of landowners make millions, the planting, weeding, pruning and picking of the vegetables fall to armies of workers from Mexico's poorest states — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas — who have little opportunity for schooling or other forms of legal employment. Read more.
Nov 8, 2013
Mexico: Key Supreme Court Ruling on Torture Case
Human Rights Watch
November 7, 2013
(Washington, D.C.) – A Mexican Supreme Court ruling on November 6, 2013, affirms the Mexican constitutional principle that evidence obtained through torture or other violations of fundamental human rights is inadmissible, Human Rights Watch said today.
The court ordered the immediate release of Israel Arzate Meléndez. He was arbitrarily detained by the military in 2010, tortured to confess to taking part in a multiple homicide, and held for more than three years in preventive detention while he awaited trial. The Supreme Court has yet to publish the grounds for reaching this decision, and so its scope remains uncertain.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling is a long-overdue acknowledgment by the government that Israel Arzate’s confession was obtained in violation of his rights and should never have been allowed as evidence,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Beyond freeing Israel, the court should use the ruling to affirm a clear and unequivocal prohibition on the use of torture-tainted evidence in Mexico’s justice system.” Read more.
November 7, 2013
(Washington, D.C.) – A Mexican Supreme Court ruling on November 6, 2013, affirms the Mexican constitutional principle that evidence obtained through torture or other violations of fundamental human rights is inadmissible, Human Rights Watch said today.
The court ordered the immediate release of Israel Arzate Meléndez. He was arbitrarily detained by the military in 2010, tortured to confess to taking part in a multiple homicide, and held for more than three years in preventive detention while he awaited trial. The Supreme Court has yet to publish the grounds for reaching this decision, and so its scope remains uncertain.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling is a long-overdue acknowledgment by the government that Israel Arzate’s confession was obtained in violation of his rights and should never have been allowed as evidence,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Beyond freeing Israel, the court should use the ruling to affirm a clear and unequivocal prohibition on the use of torture-tainted evidence in Mexico’s justice system.” Read more.
Journalist: Drugs destroying Mexico
CNN
November 8th, 2013
Becky Anderson talks with Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández about the country's war on drugs who also wrote an Op-ed for CNN.com. You can read it below:
Since December 2010, I have lived with death threats because I have documented and revealed corruption at the highest levels in the Mexican government. My family has been attacked, I have to live with bodyguards and some of my sources have been killed or are in jail.
But my case is just one of many. A large number of journalists and human rights activists - as well as those who denounce corruption in Mexico - receive similar threats or have been killed. And the biggest danger is not in fact the drug cartels, but rather the government and business officials that work for them and fear exposure.
My new book "Narcoland" is the result of five grueling years of research. Over this time I gradually became immersed in a shadowy world full of traps, lies, betrayals, and contradictions. Read more.
November 8th, 2013
Becky Anderson talks with Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández about the country's war on drugs who also wrote an Op-ed for CNN.com. You can read it below:
Since December 2010, I have lived with death threats because I have documented and revealed corruption at the highest levels in the Mexican government. My family has been attacked, I have to live with bodyguards and some of my sources have been killed or are in jail.
But my case is just one of many. A large number of journalists and human rights activists - as well as those who denounce corruption in Mexico - receive similar threats or have been killed. And the biggest danger is not in fact the drug cartels, but rather the government and business officials that work for them and fear exposure.
My new book "Narcoland" is the result of five grueling years of research. Over this time I gradually became immersed in a shadowy world full of traps, lies, betrayals, and contradictions. Read more.
Mexico's San Fernando Massacres: A Declassified History
National Security Archive
Electronic Briefing Book No. 445
Edited by Michael Evans and Jesse Franzblau
November 6, 2013
Four months before the feared Zetas drug cartel kidnapped and murdered 72 migrants in northeastern Mexico, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said that narcotrafficking organizations in that region operated with "near total impunity in the face of compromised local security forces." As the date of the massacre drew nearer, another U.S. agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), reported new evidence linking the Zetas to soldiers from the Kaibiles, an elite Guatemalan special forces known for spectacular acts of cruelty and brutality during that country's civil war.
These records are among a set of U.S. documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and published today by the National Security Archive, providing a glimpse of what U.S. diplomats and intelligence analysts were saying about the extreme violence that has engulfed Mexico's northern border state of Tamaulipas in recent years and the apparent complicity of Mexican officials. Just this week, a new round of violence in Tamaulipas took the lives of 13 more people, as drug-related violence flared yet again.
Some of these documents are featured in this week's edition of Proceso magazine, in an article by award-winning investigative journalist Marcela Turati. Her report highlights the unchecked power of the Zetas in the region and the inability or unwillingness of federal, state and local officials in Mexico to provide security for citizens and migrants traveling in the region. Read more.
Electronic Briefing Book No. 445
Edited by Michael Evans and Jesse Franzblau
November 6, 2013
Four months before the feared Zetas drug cartel kidnapped and murdered 72 migrants in northeastern Mexico, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said that narcotrafficking organizations in that region operated with "near total impunity in the face of compromised local security forces." As the date of the massacre drew nearer, another U.S. agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), reported new evidence linking the Zetas to soldiers from the Kaibiles, an elite Guatemalan special forces known for spectacular acts of cruelty and brutality during that country's civil war.
These records are among a set of U.S. documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and published today by the National Security Archive, providing a glimpse of what U.S. diplomats and intelligence analysts were saying about the extreme violence that has engulfed Mexico's northern border state of Tamaulipas in recent years and the apparent complicity of Mexican officials. Just this week, a new round of violence in Tamaulipas took the lives of 13 more people, as drug-related violence flared yet again.
Some of these documents are featured in this week's edition of Proceso magazine, in an article by award-winning investigative journalist Marcela Turati. Her report highlights the unchecked power of the Zetas in the region and the inability or unwillingness of federal, state and local officials in Mexico to provide security for citizens and migrants traveling in the region. Read more.
Nov 4, 2013
Juarez: The sequel
GlobalPost
Dudley Althaus
November 1, 2013
Young daughter in hand, Isabel Aguilera recounts the mayhem that stalked these streets.
Here they dragged a father from the breakfast table, shooting him dead outside in front of his family. There they came for a shopkeeper, gunning him down behind the counter. Yonder they snuffed two brothers after pulling them from their beds before sunrise.
“They were people from outside,” Aguilera, 38, said of the killings that recently swept like cholera through Riveras del Bravo, a teeming sprawl of Mexico’s working poor. “They wanted to inject power, fear.”
These thousands of matchbox houses once ranked among Earth's deadliest patches through years of criminal war in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial and narcotics corridor bordering America’s safest large city El Paso, Texas.
More than 10,000 people were murdered across the Mexican city of 1.3 million in less than five years. Many were young men gunned down on streets like these. Read more.
Dudley Althaus
November 1, 2013
Young daughter in hand, Isabel Aguilera recounts the mayhem that stalked these streets.
Here they dragged a father from the breakfast table, shooting him dead outside in front of his family. There they came for a shopkeeper, gunning him down behind the counter. Yonder they snuffed two brothers after pulling them from their beds before sunrise.
“They were people from outside,” Aguilera, 38, said of the killings that recently swept like cholera through Riveras del Bravo, a teeming sprawl of Mexico’s working poor. “They wanted to inject power, fear.”
These thousands of matchbox houses once ranked among Earth's deadliest patches through years of criminal war in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial and narcotics corridor bordering America’s safest large city El Paso, Texas.
More than 10,000 people were murdered across the Mexican city of 1.3 million in less than five years. Many were young men gunned down on streets like these. Read more.
Human Rights, the NSA, and U.S. Moral Decline (La Jornada, Mexico)
La Jornada
Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen
WorldMeets
October 31, 2013
In the context of the opening of its regular sessions, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) demanded yesterday, in the midst of scandal over the massive and systematic espionage practiced by Washington against citizens and governments, that the United States apply mechanisms to regulate the surveillance of communications so as not to infringe on human rights.
Felipe González, commissioner of the hemisphere-wide group, said that the Commission must advance toward a mechanism that, assuming the legitimacy of the security efforts of states, is not invasive of the rights of individuals. Meanwhile, his counterpart Rodrigo Escobar, stressed that the powers of the United States on security matters must not be absolute, and that the neighboring country must be subject to certain limits, rules and procedures. Read more.
Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen
WorldMeets
October 31, 2013
In the context of the opening of its regular sessions, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) demanded yesterday, in the midst of scandal over the massive and systematic espionage practiced by Washington against citizens and governments, that the United States apply mechanisms to regulate the surveillance of communications so as not to infringe on human rights.
Felipe González, commissioner of the hemisphere-wide group, said that the Commission must advance toward a mechanism that, assuming the legitimacy of the security efforts of states, is not invasive of the rights of individuals. Meanwhile, his counterpart Rodrigo Escobar, stressed that the powers of the United States on security matters must not be absolute, and that the neighboring country must be subject to certain limits, rules and procedures. Read more.
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