Latin America-2

Mexico drug war killings traumatize children

TIJUANA, Mexico - Mexico’s drug war is bursting into the lives of young children, especially in violent northern border cities where they are becoming traumatized by the sight of bloodied bodies and daylight shootouts. Schools in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and even the upscale business city of Monterrey have seen drug cartel battles break out in nearby streets, and young children are alarming their parents with their use of graphic drug gang slang. In one of the worst cases of violence near schools, gunmen and more than 100 police and soldiers fought a three-hour gun battle outside a Tijuana kindergarten in January 2008.

Teachers and parents want the government to send mental health counselors to visit classrooms and start programs to help children deal with the emotional trauma. “Children are scared and we have pupils with very serious emotional crises,” said Laura Elena Carrion, a teacher at the primary school in Tijuana, where children playing outside witnessed the killing of a drug hitman in early March and went running to their classrooms crying.

After another Tijuana drug killing in March, children stared as forensics picked up the bodies of three beheaded and dismembered men near a shopping mall. “It feels awful to see it,” said Gabriela, 8, who saw a different dead body on a Tijuana sidewalk in February. “Didn’t anyone tell them that killing is wrong?”

Some children have nightmares, wet their beds, turn aggressive or become quiet and shy. Not all are outwardly traumatized, however, and some boast about having seen decapitated bodies or are no longer shocked by violence.

The drug war killed some 6,300 people across Mexico last year, and the cartels are increasingly using teenage hitmen and breaking honor codes by killing youngsters. At least 20 children were killed last year in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, the drug war’s bloodiest flash points. In Ciudad Juarez, children going to school have had to walk past bodies dumped on roadsides. In one case a body was strung up from a bridge near a school. And in two incidents last year, gunmen seized children as human shields, leading to the death of a 12-year-old girl.

An escalating turf war between Mexican drug cartels is scaring the public, investors and tourists. Mexico’s border cities, where U.S. tourists used to flock, have become the most violent fronts in the drug war as top drug lord Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman and his rivals battle over smuggling routes into the United States.

U.S. President Barack Obama is tightening security along the border to prevent the violence from spreading further into the United States. Because of the drug war, Phoenix, Arizona, is already the kidnapping capital of the U.S. with an average of one a day last year.

– edited from Reuters, March 31, 2009
PeaceMeal, May/June 2009

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Murdered Guatemalan lawyer fingers president in video

GUATEMALA CITY — An average of 16 murder victims turn up in Guatemala every day, some shot, some stabbed, some bludgeoned, and only about three percent of the cases are ever solved. Even in the rare instances when a killer is arrested, the suspect frequently turns out to be a hit man hired by some shadowy figure who is never identified and gets away to plot again. But of the more than 2,500 killings on the books this year, one unsolved case has jolted this country like no other. The Mother’s Day shooting death of Rodrigo Rosenberg, a prominent lawyer, has thrown Guatemala into a full-fledged political crisis and focused all eyes on a United Nations commission created to prop up Guatemala’s ailing judiciary.

Mr. Rosenberg foresaw his killing and identified the people he believed were out to get him in a chilling video he prepared three days before he died: “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, and unfortunately, if you are watching the message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom,” he said, going on to also blame the president’s wife, Sandra Torres; the president’s personal secretary, Gustavo Alejos; and various bankers and businessmen.

In the video and a written statement, Mr. Rosenberg said the president and those around him were involved in a corruption scandal tied to Guatemala’s Rural Development Bank and had already killed one of his clients, the businessman Khalil Musa, as well as Mr. Musa’s daughter, Marjorie Musa, with whom Mr. Rosenberg was having a relationship. He called the bank “a den of robbers, drug traffickers and murderers.”

Mr. Rosenberg offered no proof to back up his allegations, but the fact that he foretold his murder — he was shot by one assailant as he rode his bicycle near his home and then finished off with a bullet to the head by a second gunman — has led to calls for the resignation of Mr. Colom, a leftist leader elected in 2007 on a platform of, among other things, reducing crime.

Mr. Colom has denied having had anything to do with the killings, as have his wife and others mentioned in the video, and has turned the case over to the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a United Nations body set up in 2007 to help a judiciary riddled with corruption. The commission is made up of international jurists who do not present cases themselves but support Guatemalan prosecutors, lending an international imprimatur to an institution that few here trust.

Two schools of thought have emerged from the intrigue: that Mr. Rosenberg, in an elaborate setup, was killed by opponents of Mr. Colom who wanted to damage the president; or that he was killed, as the video suggests, by the president’s own inner circle because he had learned too much about misdeeds among those in power.

There have been some promising leads, people with knowledge of the case say, including a surveillance video that recorded the actual killing of Mr. Rosenberg, evidence suggesting that Mr. Rosenberg was being followed for days before he was killed, and some possible witness testimony. Investigators have begun speaking to an array of witnesses, including Mario David García, a radio commentator and critic of the president who recorded the video of Mr. Rosenberg on May 7. “I don’t have any more information,” said Mr. García, suggesting that he feared that his life might be threatened as well. “It could be deadly to have anything, and I don’t.”

Beyond the investigation, there is a political battle raging. Mr. Colom’s many critics, especially in the business community, have begun calling for his ouster. The first lady’s involvement in the scandal is relished by Mr. Colom’s detractors because she has led social programs for poor people in rural areas and is widely viewed to be laying the groundwork for her own presidential run in 2012.

Given Guatemala’s history of high-profile murders that are never fully solved, many fear that this case will follow the familiar pattern. Mr. Colom’s own uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, a onetime presidential candidate, was killed by members of the army in 1979. That family history may explain why Mr. Colom has pushed for the public release of police archives from Guatemala’s bloody, 36-year civil war, which could help identify some of those responsible for many wartime killings and disappearances.

– edited from The New York Times, May 22, 2009PeaceMeal,May/June 2009

U.S. policy in Mexico: The perfect storm

Fidel Santiago Martinez stands on the southern side of the U.S./Mexican border, a man-made line that snakes 2,000 miles from California to Texas. All U.S. debate on immigration reform, a critical issue during these 2008 election campaigns, begins and ends at this border, centering upon what Martinez plans to do next: take a step without proper documentation into U.S. territory.

Martinez is caught in the perfect storm of U.S. policy, which has the potential of being changed, modified, or kept in place after this year’s election. His family is left behind in the wreckage of rural Oaxaca where the International Monetary Fund’s economic programs have severely reduced subsidies and credit to small farmers. NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement), by loosening and phasing out trade barriers, has allowed subsidized multinational corporations to import millions of tons of agricultural products that under-price his harvest. He simply can’t compete.

In front of Martinez wait the Border Patrol, the National Guard, rumors of migrant-hunting armed civilian groups like the Minutemen, and a brutal desert that has claimed the lives of over 4,000 migrants since 1994. Beyond all that is a potential job as a janitor, doing landscape work, picking fruits or vegetables, jobs that could earn him more in an hour than in an entire day in Mexico where minimum wage is an unlivable five dollars a day. Martinez will take any job that will allow him to send money back to his family. He understands that an immigration raid could deport him penniless back to Mexico.

According to WFP partner organizations in Mexican civil society, the elements of this perfect storm need to be urgently addressed if there is to be an honest and comprehensive immigration reform package, starting with the economic conditions in communities from where people are migrating in unprecedented numbers.

“One of the principal consequences of NAFTA has been — because of the disaster to small farmers in rural Mexico and the loss of jobs due to the devastation of Mexican industry — millions of Mexicans have had to migrate to the U.S.,” says Marco Antonio Velazquez Navarrete of RMALC (Mexican Action Network on Free Trade). “In the last six years 575,000 Mexicans each year have migrated to the U.S. This statistic alone clearly demonstrates the failure of NAFTA.”

Carmen Alonso Santiago, director of the Oaxaca based Indigenous Rights center, Flor y Canto (Flower and Song), has lived this devastation first-hand in her community which she describes as a “community of ghosts.” “Right now the only ones left are the old. We no longer have a kindergarten. Why? Because there aren’t any children. The teachers have left. Everybody has migrated. Small farmers cannot possibly compete with huge companies. If you go to the supermarket, imported tomatoes may cost 8 pesos a kilogram. It costs 15-20 pesos a kilogram to produce tomatoes in the countryside. What do the small farmers do? They lose. They migrate. Everybody is gone. This is serious. There has to be a renegotiation of NAFTA.”

Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa from the Oaxacan non-governmental organization Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA) suggests that leveling the playing field may be the first step to a renegotiation. But first, policy makers have to seriously study and establish the correlation between poverty, migration, and social conflict. He explains, “Under the NAFTA model in Mexico there is no investment in small producers. If employment is not being created, if there is an abandonment and neglect of small farmers in rural Mexico, and if small farmers and the poor don’t have any other alternative but to migrate to the U.S., one can establish a relationship and correlation between high levels of poverty created by this model, the amount of people who migrate, and the potential for social conflict as seen in Oaxaca in 2006. From this analysis two clear concrete steps could be taken immediately to start a renegotiation: either a reduction of subsidies to huge U.S. based agribusiness, or increased investment in small Mexican farmers, or both, to begin to create a level playing field of competition.”

Velazquez Navarrete from RMALC follows Vasquez’s logic and puts it squarely into the immigration reform that needs to happen. “We have to consider an immigration policy that includes not only the social, civil, and political rights of migrants in the U.S., but that also considers development in the countries from where people are migrating. If they want to avoid an increase in undocumented migration, the negative results of NAFTA have to be reversed. Mexico then has to create an honestly developing economy.

“Instead of destroying Mexican industry, instead of crushing and bankrupting the rural farmer, it is necessary to invest in development projects that give people the opportunity to choose not to migrate, so that they have the option not to leave their land, so they have the right to dignified work in the state where they were born — with a living wage, with benefits that cover the needs of their families. If this doesn’t happen, they will not succeed in stopping migration, not with physical or virtual walls, not with the military on the border. Migrants will continue crossing from Mexico to the U.S.”

Fidel Santiago Martinez took that step across the border into U.S. territory. Like many, if not most, he never wanted to leave his home, his family, his culture, the place where he was born. If in the future there are significant changes to U.S. immigration and trade policies, Martinez will never see them. His body was found this year in the Sonoran desert in Arizona. The cause of his death was exposure to the elements. Martinez’s death gives testimony that millions of Mexicans who have migrated, are migrating, or will migrate undocumented to the U.S. have a lot at stake in the outcome of the upcoming U.S. elections. It is time to change the perfect storm of policy that already has decimated too many lives.

– Witness for Peace, Fall 2008
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2008