The 3rd of February 2010 marked the beginning of a nightmare for Israel Arzate Meléndez. His crime? In a stroke of bad luck he ran into a Mexican army unit just days after the Villas de Salvárcar massacre – an international scandal where 16 young people were killed in Ciudad Juarez. To take pressure off themselves, the Mexican government needed to uncover (or perhaps invent) the culprits of the killings.
“His only crime is struggling for his people, telling the truth, and fighting for true democracy, liberty and justice,” says the Good Government Junta (JBG)[i] of Oventic of their compañero Francisco Sántiz Lόpez, who has been unjustly imprisoned in the state penitentiary in San Cristόbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, since December 4, 2011. On September 29, 2012, a week before his 57th birthday, Francisco completed 300 days behind bars for a crime it has been proven he did not commit.
Mexican activists winding down a month-long U.S. tour warned Tuesday that guns licensed in the United States were playing a massive part in gang- and drug cartel-related violence in Mexico. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has confirmed that approximately 70 percent of the guns being used and recovered in the Mexican drug war are of U.S origin.
The false notion that the state and drug traffickers are oppositional forces is firmly dispelled in Drug War Mexico, which draws on numerous examples to prove cooperation and at the very least complicity between the political and business class and the so-called underworld. They go on to document how narcotics trafficking must be understood as an “integral component” in Mexico’s economic transformation towards neoliberalism.
This personal narrative offers testimony from one of the four Mexican cities in which 55% of migrant kidnappings take place. That’s more than half of the United Nation’s estimated 18,000 migrants who are annually kidnapped in Mexico. Scarcity or security on train lines, a plethora of Western Unions used to process ransoms, and the overwhelming involvement of drug cartels make these cities a center for the human trafficking and the direct reaping of corporate profit from the migrant markets in Mexico and the United States.
Civil disobedience has halted production at Mexico’s “top grade producer of silver.” Farmers of the La Sierrita village, a close knit community of about 50 families, located 40 minutes north of the city of Gomez Palacio, Durango, have shut down the La Platosa mine owned by Canadian firm Excellon Resources for over a month.
Andres Torres Checa, a spokesperson for ITAM University in Mexico City, tells how the movement snowballed. “It started out as an act of solidarity with the Ibero students, but it soon became about much more. . . The movement just grew, we were 20 universities then 90, Torres says. “Now we are over 120 universities from all over Mexico.” The movement’s influence has not only gotten people out into the street calling for greater political transparency, it has played an active role in way the elections were held.
On August 12, the Movement for Peace will begin a four-week tour of the United States, beginning in San Diego, California, and taking in 27 cities on its way to Washington, D.C. According to Javier Sicilia, the goal of “The Peace Caravan” is to “promote dialogue with American civil society and its government regarding the following themes: the need to stop gun-trafficking; the need to debate alternatives to drug prohibition; the need for better tools to combat money-laundering; and the need to promote bilateral cooperation in human rights and human security…”
This past week a caravan of more than 200 Ch’ol Mayan indigenous from the Mexican State of Chiapas arrived in Mexico City to demand that the nation’s Supreme Court recognize their right to their communal lands (ejido), which are being denied by Chiapan state authorities. The “Caravan for Land and Territory” arrived to the nations capital on August 1 with a dignified, combative yet peaceful march from the city’s Monument of the Revolution to the main plaza where the Supreme Court is located.
Tens of thousands marched throughout major Mexican cities on July 21 to decry the outcome of the July 1 presidential elections, which gave Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto the win. The call to march came out of last weekend’s National Convention Against the Imposition. Spearheaded by the unions and the YoSoy132 student movement, the march was a rejection of what many call as an “imposition” of Nieto’s presidential win through voter buying and electoral fraud conducted by his once-ruling party the PRI.
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