History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.
The Americas Program has signed the pronouncement against death threats to social and human rights organizations in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. We fully support the pronouncement and encourage others to do the same.
Over the 27 years since IRCA, a general division has marked the U.S. immigrant rights movement. On one side are well-financed advocacy organizations in Washington DC, with links to the Democratic Party and large corporations. They formulate and negotiate over immigration reform proposals that combine labor supply programs and increased enforcement against the undocumented. On the other side are organizations based in immigrant communities, and among labor and political activists, who defend undocumented migrants, and who resist proposals for greater enforcement and labor programs with diminished rights.
Over the last 25 years, guest worker programs have increasingly become a vehicle for channeling the migration that has stemmed from free market reforms. Increasing numbers of guest workers are recruited each year for labor in the U.S. from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean under the H1-B, H2-A and H2-B programs. Recruiters promise high wages and charge thousands of dollars for visas, fees and transportation. By the time they leave home, the debts of guest workers are crushing.
A political alliance is developing between countries with a labor export policy and the corporations who use that labor in the global north.
Desinformemonos.org, an “autonomous, global communications project”, covers grassroots movements throughout the world and the ideas and aspirations behind them. Its team reported on the international seminar held in Chiapas to commemorate and reflect on the 18th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. In collaboration with Desinformemonos, the Americas program presents this summary in English of their coverage of the event.
The assassinations of Nepomuceno Moreno, member of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity whose son was disappeared, and Trinidad de la Cruz of the Nahua community of Ostula, and the shooting of Norma Adrade, the founder of Bring our Daughters Home in Ciudad Juarez, mark a new stage of attacks on human rights defenders in Mexico.
