Dissident teachers hold mass protest in Guerrero State against President Nieto’s education reform.

Obama last visited Mexico during the G-20 summit in Los Cabos last June. He and his entourage will touch down again today for talks with Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Since his election, Peña Nieto’s team has worked to shift media focus away from violence related to the drug war and towards the economy, something that will likely be reinforced during this visit.

According to the New York Times, “In Mexico, Mr. Obama plans to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto for talks that the Mexican foreign ministry said earlier ‘will cover competiveness [sic], education and innovation, along with border infrastructure, commerce, migration and citizen security among other subjects of shared interest.’”

Competitiveness

Competitiveness is a preferred term that governments use today to talk about privatization and regulatory reforms designed to benefit the corporate sector. Previously, competitiveness was known as austerity, structural adjustment, or privatization, terms that have fallen out of favor due to the harsh consequences of these programs on the population at large.

So with respect to competitiveness, what might Obama and Peña Nieto discuss? Well, for one, Mexico recently changed their labor laws in order to “increase competitiveness,” pushing down minimum wage to about 60¢ an hour and making it more difficult for workers to receive social security and regular workweeks.

Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil firm, will definitely be a topic of conversation. According to the Financial Times, “an opening of Mexico’s highly protected oil sector, which is dominated by state behemoth Pemex, could provide untold opportunities for US oil companies as well as the sort of technology-transfer Mexico desperately needs.”

With all the talk of the gains to be achieved through privatizing Mexico’s oil sector, the fact that 99 percent of the state owned oil company’s profits go towards the federal budget, representing about 40 percent of the total national budget, will probably be sidestepped. Full privatization of Pemex would mean harsh austerity throughout the country.

In addition, the US funds something called the Mexico Competitiveness Program through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). According to the agency, “USAID is working with Mexican partners to improve economic governance and increase private sector competitiveness by improving the business enabling environment and by building sustainable support for continued policy reforms and systemic changes.” This means funding Mexican think tanks and non-governmental organizations to promote business friendly policies, privatization, and US backed reforms to the justice sector.

Education & Innovation

On December 11th, ten days after taking power, the Government of Mexico changed two articles of the Constitution, resulting in what they are calling an education reform. The focus on mandatory testing for all teachers has generated controversy, as, among other things, it makes teachers into increasingly precarious workers who can be fired for failing a test. “What was approved isn’t an education reform, rather a labor and administrative reform in disguise,” wrote columnist Luis Hernández Navarro in La Jornada. In the same column, Hernández maintained that the legislation opens the pathway to the privatization of the education system.

There has long been pressure from organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change the education system in Mexico. In a December 2012 press release announcing the renewal of a $73 billion credit line for Mexico, the IMF called for reforms to the education system, among other things. Peña Nieto has already earned the admiration of the International Monetary Fund, whose leaders say they are “very impressed with President Peña Nieto’s structural reform agenda.”

Mass protests against the education reform have taken place across the country. On April 18th, a record 250,000 teachers, students, and their supporters are estimated to have marched in Guerrero against the reform and for free and public education.

The US corporate sector has a lot riding on innovation and education in Mexico. “With Mexico able to provide US companies with young, skilled and cheap labor, and with the US able to play a potentially crucial role in the transfer of technology and know-how to its southern neighbor, there is clearly plenty of room for the two administrations to push ahead with further economic integration,” according to a recent article in Financial Times. General Electric has an important center for research and design in Querétaro, which is fast becoming home to the country’s most important aerospace cluster. Engineers, 115,000 of which graduate in Mexico each year, are particularly sought after, as they can be hired here for less than $1,000 a month. This is a crucial element in Mexico’s ability to attract foreign direct investment in advanced manufacturing. According to data from Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy, the number of aerospace companies in Mexico rose from 61 to 249 between 2005 and 2011. Eighty-five percent of aerospace exports are to the United States.

Border infrastructure, Migration & Citizen Security

Obama will likely promote the immigration reform bill that is before the US Senate. The bill comes in at over 800 pages, and places immigration squarely within the context of national security. There are positives and negatives to the proposal, which aims to ensure an adequate and flexible labor force in the US. While some workers may eventually achieve the “pathway to citizenship” offered through the reform, other prospective migrants will be directly impacted by its political tradeoff, an expanded border wall and even more militarization along the US’s southern border.

There’s a demand from the corporate sector to build new border crossings and expand existing ones between Mexico and the US. “Financially, investment in border crossings and infrastructure has not matched the exponential increase in trade crossing the border each year,” reads a December memo from the Council on Foreign Relations. This border infrastructure is necessary for the maquila (assembly) industry in Mexico to expand, and the US requires Mexico’s cooperation on these crossings, the construction of which amount to huge subsidies for the US and other corporations with operations along the US/Mexico border.

In terms of “citizen security” it is plain as day that violence in Mexico has risen in tandem with the implementation of the Merida Initiative, a US backed strategy militarizing the transshipment and production of narcotics. Over 120,000 people have been murdered and at least 27,000 disappeared since the beginning of the “drug war” in December, 2006.

Many of the dead and missing are migrants and “non-citizens,” Mexico has increasingly become one huge border for Central Americans, where the enforcers are not only immigration police but also the army and organized crime groups. It’s likely the presidential talks will skirt the ongoing violence in Mexico and focus more on police training and community programs, which are the supposed positive aspects of the Merida Initiative. Talking about the “drug war” probably the last thing Peña Nieto wants to do while sharing the spotlight with Obama.

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and independent researcher. See more of her work online at dawnpaley.ca.

Two new governments have taken office–Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico and Barack Obama in the United States. Although Obama begins a second term, he has appointed new Secretaries of State and Defense, launched new initiatives and expanded some old ones. Both governments have new Congressional representatives.

Just as there have been significant changes in the governments, there have been some major changes within our movements as well. This makes it necessary to rethink our path: where we are, where wecan move forward and what obstacles lie in the future.

We are bound together by our commitment to the two objectives laid out for this meeting: truth and justice for the victims and a change in the security model to a vision of human security. They are two separate goals yet one single path: we know that there is no peace without justice, since security must be based on justice and on our community ties, not on fighting violence with violence.

Changes in US-Mexico Security Policy?

Enrique Peña Nieto came to office with a pressing need to distance himself from Calderon’s war. The disastrous drug war played a major role in the downfall of the PAN in the 2012 elections. Since the campaign, we’ve heard talk of modifications to the war strategy and focusing more on public security and reducing violence.

Members of the Peña cabinet talk about “building peace”. The Inter-secretarial commission installed on Feb. 12 has a previously absent emphasis on social programs. The president and members of his cabinet use phrases that repeat verbatim some of what the peace movement has been saying all along. It sounds good, or at least, better.

And there are some specificactionsthat point to another approach. The approval of the Victims Law, for example, could have a real impact on the situation of thousands of victims’ families.

So the question is: Are we really seeing a change in the security model?

Unfortunately there are many elements that point to the answer being no.

Like a magician who practices sleight of hand, Peña Nieto is betting that we will watch his lips as his hands perform tricks under the table. To get a real idea of how much is likely to change, it’s more realistic to look beyond the rhetoric to the facts.

Reasons to believe the war on drugs will not change substantially

1. The new government–who they are and where they come from

During the elections, the youth movement YoSoy132 reminded us that the historical memory has not been erased. The PRI is not an unknown factor. MeriMany names in the new cabinet of the “new PRI”–starting with the president himself–are closely associated with old-school politics, machismo and repression.

The PRI is a political party that spent decades of its unchallenged rule developing forms of social control through diverse means: manipulation of the justice system, cooptation, fomenting internal divisions and, when all else fails or it’s deemed convenient, violence.

Drug war militarization is a disguised system of social control. It works for them.

This time around the PRI government has big plans for a series of structural reforms that are extremely unpopular. These policies seek to consolidate a misnamed “development” model based on privatization of resources, increased transnational investment and displacement of whole populations. Militarization of broad swathes of the country is the stick that follows the carrot. To impose these kinds of reforms, the presence of the armed forces in the name of the war on drugs helps to remove people from zones of interest, to repress communities and groups that defend their territories and to intimidate or even wipe out sectors in resistance.

To quietly continue with the war while promising changes, the new Peña Nieto administration has placed some key figures in high places. To give an example: Eduardo Medina Mora. Recall that Medina Mora was Attorney General in the Calderon cabinet until 2009. As such, he was the spokesperson for the Calderon war and main apologist for the national injustice system. Today he is ambassador to the United States for the Peña government.

In 2008, Medina Mora gained headlines briefly for uttering the Orwellian phrase–apparently with no irony intended—“We are at war to recuperate the peace.” The Pentagon has a close ally in Medina Mora. In a cable made public by Wikileaks, the US Embassy referred to Medina Mora as “a key player” in instituting the Merida Initiative—the foreign aid plan that arms and perpetuates Mexico’s war on drugs. Now the US government’s point person for the war works out of Washington overseeing a binational relationship whose main and practically only focus is the Merida initiative.

2. The military budget

The 2013 Mexican budget maintains and increases the militarized model of the drug war. As it was approved, the budget to the Sec of National Defense (SEDENA) is 60.8 billion pesos—double its funding in 2007 when the drug war was just beginning and 5 billion more that the last year of the Calderon administration.

The administration says the resources will go to spy equipment, to set up military checkpoints throughout the country, weapons, etc. It justifies the war-time increase by citing an “integral” war with the stated objectives of “corralling armed groups throughout the country, and improving the schemes of operation in integral combat against drug trafficking, to make more efficient the activities that they carry out in the areas of eradication, interception and the fight against organized crime.”

3. The gendarmerie

Peña Nieto’s proposal to create a national gendarmerie is not in practice a form of demilitarization. It entails the creation of an initial force of 10,000 troops, most of whom according to the government, will be military men, with some police agents.

In effect, and in the absence of a real change in the drug war model, it is the same scheme as Calderon initiated, with massive military deployment, only with a different name.

4. U.S. Pressures

Another reason the Peña Nieto administration will probably not make any major changes in the war on drugs is the dependence that Mexico has on the United Stats and the huge interest the U.S.government has in continuing—and expanding–the war.

Washington’s Drug War in Mexico

In Washington, there is also a recognition that the drug war’s reputation is tarnished with blood and that it’s necessary to clean up the image of the Merida Initiative. The State Department, backed by interested beltway NGOs, has tried to float a renaming as “Merida 2” or “Beyond Merida” and stresses that the plan now includes aid to social programs and not just espionage and military/police counternarcotics operations. The rhetoric stresses that the U.S. supports Peña Nieto in a less military-heavy model and has modified the Merida to have a more integral focus.

This would be a good thing if it were true.

Although the direct military financing (DMF) has gone way down from 2008 to 2013, the war model has not changed nor has the strategy. In fact, it has been deepened and intensified. The following are the most important and recent indicators of Washington’s war commitment:

1. 1.    John Kerry’s declarations at the Senate confirmation hearing. The new Secretary of State said that Mexico is “under siege”, and offered to intensify support. He affirmed “president Peña Nieto is trying to move this in another direction (less militarized) and that it is more important than ever to support him.” Kerry even went further, insisting that in any discussion of budget cuts, the Merida Initiative should be exempted.

“I think that we are going to need to convince our colleagues of the importance of this initiative,” he said, without offering a single criticism of a model that has left more than 100,000 people dead or disappeared in just six years.

Foreign aid to Mexico: if we follow the money rather than the rhetoric, we see that the war model has not changed in the Merida Initiative. Merida Initiativeaid in the 2013 State Department’s foreign operations budget still under discussion provides $7 million to the armed forces, $199 to counternarcotics efforts, $8 million to programs against terrorism (in Mexico?) and only $35 million in economic support for a neighboring country in which half the population lives below the poverty line. Aid in areas like global health and education have been reduced or eliminated in this budget, and a list of human rights recommendations had been stripped from the Initiative at this writing.

The Department of Defense is funding more of Mexico’s drug war and those funds are even harder to track.

1. 2.    The expansion of military training for Mexican military in the northern command. The Pentagon is actively expanding training programs with the Mexican armed forces. It created a new base of special operations in Colorado Springs, home of the Northern Command (Northcom), to train Mexican military in the name of the drug war in techniques employed in Iraq. According to the magazine Proceso, this training in the US has included “espionage, torture, surprise attacks and kidnapping.” It focuses on counter-insurgency/counternarcotic/counterterrorism operations as if the three security threats were synonymous.

This merging in the discourse and practice of the expanded drug wars increases risks to the population and to civil liberties. It increases the criminalization of protest and harassment and attacks on human rights defenders. The express purpose of the new Northcom center, according to a Jan. 17 AP story, is the war on drugs “so the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto establishes a military force focused on criminal networks…” (presumably the gendarmerie).

The US military officials had already taken Mexicans to visit centers of special operations in Balad Irak and Fort Bragg, NC. The news report states that the Mexicans are being trained in tactics of capture as applied in the capture, or rather killing, of Osama bin Laden. This is cause for concern on many levels, one of which is that all studies show that the strategy of capturing drug lords known as the “kingpin strategy” leads to explosions of violence where carried out and does not work to reduce drug trafficking or much less improve public safety.

Just so there is no doubt about the relationship between the new Northcom efforts and the Merida initiative designed by Bush and extended indefinitely by the Obama administration, AP states it clearly: “Northcom’s current special operations training missions are an outgrowth of the Merida Initiative that was formalized in 2008, to provide extensive military assistance to Mexico.”

The imposition of the counterterrorism paradigm on Mexico has terrible consequences for the US-Mexico relationship. When the Calderon administration began to redefine drug traffickers as a threat to national security, and not just as criminals, the cartels began to act much more like a threat to national security– unleashing battles for control of territory, increasing their interference with daily life in civil society, and challenging and coopting the State in many regions of the country.

There is no doubt that when the drug war becomes a war on terrorism with the help of exaggerated risk assessments from U.S. warmongers, the drug traffickers will escalate their own actions and reactions, despite the fact that their fundamental logic is far different from that of international terrorists.

Furthermore the war on terrorism is characterized by the use of torture, the murder of civilians by both sides, especially women and children, drone strikes and indiscriminate attacks on society, the division of society, hatred and racism. It is also characterized by U.S. intervention, in ways that stand in clear violation of national sovereignty, and very probably in violation of national laws.

Is this what we want in our relationship with Mexico? Do we really want to replace the war in Iraq with a trumped up drug war, just to feed the national security industry, the military-industrial complex, or what ever we´re currently calling this monster that just keeps growing and growing?

The change in rhetoric accompanied by no intention of changing the security model puts us in a situation of simulation that in many ways is more dangerous that the war talk of before. There is an effort to cover up the war, at the same time that it is being intensified. There is an enormous distance between the discourse and the reality.

If our peace movements do not continue to expose the real nature of the war—as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity has done since it began—we  will leave the victims and future victims defenseless against a war that has officially ended and unofficially ends or destroys more lives every day. The new context can mean more isolation, more vulnerability, and more doublespeak–journalists say they are being told not to cover drug war violence any more (although it continues unabated) because that would contradict the official line of the new government that says it is over and seeks to wipe the slate clean of all the blood that continues to spill on it.

Its important to note that although the new governments plan to continue the war, there still may be opportunities for the movement to press for a real change in the security model. Sergio Alcocer, Sub-Secretary for North America of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations announced an upcoming evaluation of the Merida Initiative “and based on that, we will decide how or if we continue within the Initiative or other processes are established.”

This is the moment to demand transparency and citizen participation in a review from both sides. In the U.S., urgent budget cuts open up the possibility of challenging Merida Initiative funding and demanding the plan be terminated. The arguments against the application of a counterterrorism paradigm to the trafficking of prohibited substances and the likelihood that this course of action will create another costly and threatening war–this time on our border—should be sufficient to cause legislators to at least listen. We have never argued for inaction against crime—we have alternative approaches that have successful track records.

On both sides of the border, citizen groups are coming up with constructive proposals to replace the destruction. Mexico’s peace movement has drafted documents on human security, mending the social fabric and fighting corruption. In the US, organizations have proposals for regulation of drugs, demilitarization of the border, and building a more integral binational relationship that deserve to be heard in Washington and throughout the nation.

Forging a commitment to end the war, the violence and the injustice

There’s an impressive line-up o forces on the side of violence:authoritarian politicians, corrupt public servants and institutions, organized crime, the Pentagon, the US government, the defense lobby and businesses looking to assure investments. So what’s on the other side?

We are.

Indigenous communities in Chiapas and Michoacan who struggle to live in peace and care for Mother Earth as they have for centuries. The mothers and fathers who, with broken hearts, struggle for justice and to never forget the memory of their lost children. The human rights defenders, men and women, in communities and cities throughout the country who due to their brave work are targets for violence and repression. The campesinos in Chihuahua who oppose the Narco-NAFTA model of terror and land grabs. The youth of Ciudad Juarez who live and create in the shadow of militarization and fear.

And in the United States, the migrant activists who say that nobody is illegal and that walls can kill. The organizations of African-Americans who protest against imprisonment of their children in the war on drugs. The border communities that protest the militarization of their homes. The groups that demand an end to the bloody foreign policy of hegemony that is Plan Merida.

We are the other side; we who are slowly finding each other, like now, and will continue to connect to build a vision that stands up to the war mentality that currently dominates U.S.-Mexico relations. We don’t have to share the same program—we’re a diverse set of organizations and issues and movements in two countries, with our own agendas and very different national contexts. It’s important that we maintain our focus.

But we are bound by a common purpose: to end a patriarchal war model that dominates our national politics, and for some, life in our communities. Alliances and shared goals and mechanisms of coordination are essential. The challenge isn’t necessarily to construct joint plans or build binational platforms along the five issues we defined for the caravan—arms smuggling, drug policy reform, money-laundering, migrant rights and an end to U.S. military aid to Mexico. It is to understand how these issues, and our efforts to make change, come together in this war model that oppresses and wounds us, and how all of our efforts can be mutually reinforcing to end this war.

Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Program, www.cipamericas.org

More than 50,000 men, women and children have been killed in violence related to the drug war since December of 2006. That was when President Felipe Calderón made the now deeply regrettable decision to launch thousands of army troops into the streets to confront drug cartels.

Almost no one believes the drug war has been a success. In one recent poll, 53% of Mexicans surveyed said that organized crime was winning the war. Their perception is born out by statistics. The same poll, by Consulta Mitofsky and Mexicans United Against Crime, reported that in the five years since the drug war began (2006-2011) crimes have increased 15%, with homicides up 88%, kidnappings 81%, and extortion 46%. According to the US drug report, between 2004-2008, heroin production increased 340% in Mexico.

Gender-based violence has also risen dramatically. In the northern border state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juárez—already infamous for its femicide rate—is located, assassinations of women rose 1,000% between 2007 and 2010. Chihuahua was one of the first places that the federal government organized a major military operation in the drug war and it continues to have heavy military presence. Yet, far from being safe, its citizens live in fear. In addition to assassinations, hundreds of people have been ‘disappeared’ and tens of thousands have fled their homes.

The law-and-order strategy of focusing on supply enforcement and interdiction in the drug war, rather than a demand-side social or health approach has also had a terrible impact on eroding legal institutions in Mexico. According to government statistics, only 20% of crimes are investigated, only 9% go to trial and only 1% result in punishment. One percent. Incidents of corruption among police, judges, prosecutors and other public officials are commonplace. There has been an 83% rise in human rights complaints 2006-2011; complaints against the Army make up 45% of the total, with the increase in complaints about the army rising ninefold since the drug war. Torture, rape, murder, illegal detention and disappearances are the most serious of the many complaints filed.

Although the Obama administration worried again about “spillover” violence coming across its border at the April 2 North American Summit, it is clear that U.S. policies are largely to blame for the current mess. Plans for regional cooperation under a model of expanding U.S. security priorities, including drug prohibition, to Mexico began under the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2005 and developed into the Mérida Initiative under George W. Bush in 2007. The security aid package for “Counter-Terrorism, Counter-Narcotics and Border Security” included millions of dollars in military equipment and training to fight the drug war. Calderón had already sent more than 45,000 soldiers into the streets of Mexico for crime fighting and the Mérida Initiative consolidated politically and economically the strategy of military/police confrontation.

It is U.S. demand for drugs, estimated at tens of billions of dollars a year, that creates and sustains the business, and its failed prohibition policies that deliver that business into the hands of organized crime. It is the U.S. arms industry that arms the hit men, through legal and illegal sales and aid. It is U.S. corruption and crime that allows for the money and drugs to flow within the U.S. and over the border. And it is the lobbying power of U.S. defense contractors and private security firms that keeps the Mérida Initiative funded year after year by Congress. In times of budget constraints, the Mérida Initiative has now inexplicably been funded well beyond the original three-year extension proposed by the Bush administration.

Experts and analysts are still trying to explain the obvious but paradoxical correlation between a strategy ostensibly aimed at cracking down on the cartels and the chaos that has resulted. Even President Obama, a staunch ally of Calderón’s in the drug war, has noted publicly that the cartels are stronger than ever. The violence has resulted from turf wars between rival drug cartels—often caused by a government strike against one, battles between the armed forces and cartels, and the splintering of cartels when their leaders are killed by the government or arrested. Many of those splinter groups are the most violent and ruthless cartels of all.

Even the head of the U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Charles Jacoby told a Senate committee in March that the strategy of killing drug lords was not working. This is something that Mexican researchers have been documenting for some time, with charts that show a clear relationship between the murder or arrest of a local drug lord and an explosion of violence in that city.

Besides the booming economy of war, the drug war strategy serves interests of social control. When the nation is militarized in the name of the drug war, the government can and does intimidate and often do worse to dissidents. Human rights defenders, indigenous people seeking to protect their land and natural resources from incursions of companies, and youth in general are particular targets of military occupation, killings and repression.

It’s clear why the drug war has become a political liability. It has tainted the prospects for Calderón’s would-be successor, candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota of the National Action Party; she has endorsed the militarized strategy but sought to change the tone as she trails in the polls. Enrique Peña Nieto, from the PRI, the party which ruled Mexico with an iron fist for seven decades until being unseated from the presidency in 2000, has also endorsed the strategy yet there is some sense that his advantage going into the campaigns is in part owing to a desire among many Mexicans to return to a time when it seemed that the ruling party had secret agreements with cartels to avoid rivalries and violence by giving everyone, not least of all government officials, a piece of the pie.

The only candidate to promise a change of strategy is the center-left coalition candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has said he would change the strategy and put the emphasis on tackling the social roots of crime and violence.

This is one of the tragedies of the drug war. With violence capturing headlines, the more than half the population that says that economic issues are of most concern to them has been left out in the cold. Mexico felt the U.S. recession hard and has been slow to recover, and now could be facing the consequences of another global recession. The number of poor people has increased by five million during this administration. The North American Summit announcements said that the three partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement would continue to reduce trade barriers and failed to note the negative effects of the agreement on their countries’ most vulnerable populations.

More and more Mexican migrants are returning home—because of record numbers of deportations in the US and because the high rate of unemployment means they’re out of work. They come back to communities with no jobs, and in many cases suffering culture shock after decades in the United States.

Stories like theirs don’t make the news like a gory beheading does. But as elections loom, the rise in poverty and the abandonment of the poor–with the nation pouring billions into security to fight criminals who find it easy to recruit fresh ranks among hapless youth—could and should be issues of primary concern.

Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas Program.

Diego Felipe Becerra

On August 19th, 2011 a uniformed Colombian police officer shot and killed sixteen year-old Diego Felipe Becerra who, along with a group of friends, was spray painting street art in north Bogota. The facts, murky then, are now the subject of an investigation into the shooting. According to those who were with him on the night of the shooting, Diego began to run as soon as he saw the police. That’s when the officer opened fire, mortally wounding Diego in the back. The version that the police would have you believe is that Diego was part of an armed gang of criminals who were trying to rob a city bus— thus justifying the police officer’s actions as defensive and appropriate

In the days following the shooting, the National Police offered up evidence to back up their version of the story. They claimed to have located a firearm and the supposed bus driver gave his testimony of the events on a popular Colombian radio station. However, subsequent investigations have shown that Diego wasn’t a criminal, nor was he carrying a firearm when he was taken to the hospital that night. These inconvenient facts lead one to question if the police’s official story isn’t just a huge cover-up —one that could involve high-ranking officials in the National Police in “justifying” the error that took the life of the young artist.

But the debate in Colombia about this case isn’t only centered on the cover-up, which in the best of cases, attempts to blur and obfuscate the actions of the officer, and in the worst of cases could constitute a criminal act involving high-level officials. It is also about the jurisdiction of the civil justice system. At one point in the case, the military intervened and took control of the investigation, but thanks to pressure from the Human Rights Commission in Colombia and a finding by the High Judicial Council (Consejo Superior de la Judicatura),, the case returned to the civil justice system. The timetable for its continuation, however, has still yet to be resolved.

The case of Diego Felipe is only one of the more than 1,700 documented homicides that have been perpetrated by police officers and the military over the last 27 years in Colombia. These often anonymous victims are known only as “false positives” or collateral damage in the efforts against terrorism and subversion, giving the impression that a certain number of deaths is completely justifiable.

In 2008 the media revealed a shocking scandal where poor youth from impoverished neighborhoods had been coaxed into accepting fake jobs (some legal, some illegal) by a complex web of people, which included members of the armed forces. Those who accepted the “jobs” were never actually employed. They were murdered and passed for fallen anti-government guerrillas so that the military could make their claim to economic incentives and demonstrate results of their operations in the “Democratic Security” policy of ex-President Alvaro Uribe.

In public debate over the homicides, diverse positions arise regarding whether the armed forces should have jurisdiction. These arguments never have anything to do with what the constitution says, and, in fact, look more like the kind of corruption and criminality that should be the subject of prosecution itself. The crux of the issue is beyond the debate about jurisdiction, however. What’s really at the heart of the matter is the sense of impunity that follows the military and police forces when they apply sentences that are not only lax, but are also handed down through a secretive process that gives rise to all sorts of irregularities and corruption.

Paradoxically, the military needs the support of the people to carry out its mission of fighting crime, but it generates mistrust through its actions. Colombia went ahead and finished 2011 by passing a controversial bill that strengthens the role of the military in the justice system. This law not only is a step backward for guaranteeing human rights, but it also opens a dangerous new path to impunity.

This is the other side to the “successful” model of fighting terrorism and anti-government groups that has been showcased around the world and that some want to export to places like Central America and Mexico. It’s the guiding influence in projects like the Merida Initiative.

Alternative measures to combat crime and violence

But if not by force, how do we lower the levels of crime and violence that plague our countries? Colombia doesn’t only have the drug war model to offer the world; it is also home to initiatives that seek to connect at-risk youth to ways to regain self-esteem and to get them out of the only livelihood that doesn’t require academic credentials— crime.

A program called “Caring Legion” has connected with more than 2,000 youths from twenty violence-stricken areas in Colombia in the last eight years. The program, recognizing that inequality and the lack of opportunities are what push people into crime, helps to form young leaders through participation in art, music, and culture. This non-militaristic approach has not only been successful in raising spirits in the community and the country at large, but has also sparked a reduction in the number of violent deaths in the areas in which is has been implemented.

In the city of Barrancabermeja, located in the region that witnessed the rise of notorious 1990s paramilitary squads, a group of young people formed a peaceful organization named “The Fifth Commandment”. Named after the Christian commandment that declares “Thou shall not kill,” the organization has been a model of how a diverse group of people from different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientation, and political affiliation can work together to oppose violence. They stand together in conscientious objection against all types of recruitment, legal or illegal, because they believe that war cannot be a part of the country that they want to build. The Fifth Commandment emphasizes art and culture, and the idea that direct work with the community can rid them of the war and the violence. Their work is done voluntarily and in support of finding peace. Everything is done from the platform of “active non-violence,” taking a path that diverges from the passivity and helplessness that the proponents of violence try to force upon them.

The Fifth Commandment

One success for conscientious objectors in Colombia has been a favorable Constitutional Court finding. The Constitutional Court found that conscientious objection is part of the fundamental right to the “freedom of personal development” promised in the Colombian Constitution. Conscientious objectors can now choose to avoid military service, which is normally obligatory in Colombia. In the recent past, in fact, the Colombian military used to make raids into vulnerable, impoverished areas, mass detaining and forcibly registering young people into service.

But in Colombia, unfortunately, there are many enemies to peace, and harassment and fear are their best weapons. Fifth Commandment has been the recent target of the gang “Los Rastrojos (The Bearded Ones). This group started off as a paramilitary group and has also threatened other social organizations in Barrancabermeja, targeting them as “guerrillas,” “communists,” and “sissies” (see below). This is the same thing that has been happening elsewhere in the country where peace initiatives are harassed and pursued by different criminal gangs that are acting in zones where the guerrilla has been losing control, as they are battered by the military and Colombian government. It’s worth pointing out the recent operation that culminated with the FARC’s head man Alfonso Cano this past November.

Citizen support for the guerrillas has dropped precipitously. It’s not only because of the ongoing dramas of the kidnappings, but for the blind cruelty of using anti-personnel mines that mutilate and kill soldiers, peasants and children alike. The image of the altruistic and idealistic rebel has faded in step with their complicity in drug-trafficking and their perversions of a conflict that is approaching its 50th birthday. On the other side of the political spectrum, however, the extreme right has reduced every progressive citizen demand to “terrorism,” turning journalists, human rights defenders, social leaders, and even fans of the internet into “terrorists”.

The question that some figures in Colombian society have dared to ask—including members of the Catholic Church like the archbishop of Cali, Darío de Jesús Monsalve Mejía— is whether finding peace will require a total military victory over the so-called “terrorists” or whether reconciliation should arrive as a result of a national policy to overcome the deeper issues of inequality and impunity, guaranteeing better governance and institutional legitimacy.

It’s hard to believe that a country that condemns its working class youth to be either victims or victimizers, before the indolence of the privileged classes, will find an exit to its historic violence through a military conquest. Especially when the same military campaign has led to the birth of criminal organizations since the demobilization of the paramilitary in 2005. Today these organizations run a collection of scams: from controlling public finances with puppet politicians, to trafficking, to extortion of merchants and shopkeepers.

The security that Colombia provides today seems like something alien and long lost for the many citizens that suffer from the daily fear of organized crime and homicide. Last year there were a total of 13,155 murders as well as 74 arms seizures per day. The “advances” in security mostly came about in areas that were bloodily pacified for the exploitation of natural resources and foreign investment, generating the displacement of more than 3.8 million people, one hundred thousand of whom were displaced violently just last year.

Finding ways to provide opportunities for the thousands of young Colombians who are swept into the military and could otherwise be rebuilding the credibility of the country is a great challenge in the long journey that still lies ahead in finding true peace. The impunity in cases involving members of the armed forces is only the reflection of a weak government that creates victims instead of protecting them.

That same vital force of young people who are looking for alternative measures and space for real participation in the reconstruction of the country demand that institutional action be up to their expectations. They demand something more than education for the privileged and a model of citizenship that reduces each person to the worth of their production, negating everything about their creative capacity.

Perhaps the most significant social movement of the past year was led by public university students. Opposing a structural reform of higher education that was looking to give private capital a greater role in the system, the students called a meeting to discuss a change in their strategy (which had been called “belligerent” by the sensationalist media). They decided on a radical proposal—showing more affection towards the police. In an “abrazatón,” dozens and dozens of unarmed students were photographed hugging the police.

This strategy forced the media to not only focus on the damages and outrage of the marches, but also on a few of the obvious questions about the future of public education in the country. Finally the government removed their proposal, postponing, at least for the time being, what seems like an imminent transformation of the education model. The question of how to guarantee peace in a country of inequality and marginalization remains unanswered.

Alex Sierra R. is an anthropologist who has also worked as and independent investigator and consultant on issues such as human rights and international cooperation efforts for development and public policy in Colombia. He has worked in active conflict zones and with vulnerable communities in Colombia for the last twelve years. He is a monthly columnist with the Americas Program.

Translation: Mikael Rojas

This is a text version of a speech presented by the author to the ¡BASTA! Border Activist Summit for Teaching and Action Conference at the University of Texas/El Paso, October 13-14, 2011.

The cold, hard numbers are familiar: nearly 50,000 drug war-related homicides in under five years; thousands wounded, orphaned, displaced and traumatized.

If for no other reason, we should care about the violence in Mexico because it represents a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions.

Instead we are told that we should care—or rather, worry—about Mexico for a very different reason. The State Department, the Pentagon, the press and members of Congress tell us, with increasing shrillness, that Mexico poses a major threat to U.S. national security.

It’s incredible how quickly this meme has taken over. I’ve lived in Mexico for 25 years and in just the last four, the relationship between my country of birth and the country where my children were born has gone from being a relationship of neighbors– not without its contradictions and tensions–to a relationship completely dominated by the logic of war.

I don’t need to tell you, the residents of the world’s most integrated border area, that Mexico is our closest Latin American neighbor, with a tight web of personal, cultural, economic and historical ties between the two nations.

What should be seen as a far more nuanced and complex bilateral relationship based on shared human, geographical and environmental linkages now hinges on threat assessments and a Bush-era national security framework. The U.S. Merida Initiative and the militarization of Mexico and the border are the direct outgrowth of imposing this framework.

From a neighbor and a trade partner, Mexico is now portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security. From the hype on spill-over violence from the drug war (statistically false), to warnings of a “failed state” (also inaccurate), to statements that Mexican drug cartels not only seek to take over the Mexican government but also infiltrate and undermine the United States (a complete invention), alarmist and economically motivated rants have supplanted policy-making based on facts.

An expression of this feigned urgency to ‘control Mexico’ came on Oct. 4 when House committees held a hearing entitled “Merida Part 2: Terrorism and Insurgency.” The name itself sounds like a sequel to a horror movie, and if U.S. policy proceeds in this direction, we’ll continue to see the horrors that have characterized the drug war since it began.

At the hearing, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican bucking for the title of chief border warmonger, called drug cartels “terrorists” and requested they be classified as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This would place Mexico squarely within the Bush counterterrorism paradign of unilateral intervention. Even at the height of their power, Colombian Drug Trafficking Organizations weren’t formally classified as “terrorist”.

“These terrorists both in Mexico and the United States are a threat to national security and should be treated as such.” McCaul said. He called for fighting them with “every means possible”.  He added ominously, “There’s a war along the border and the enemy is covertly infiltrating our cities.”

Th Americas Program has been analyzing these kinds of statements and their relation to militarization and aggressive–and often illegal– involvement in foreign countries for more than three decades. It’s known as an “exaggerated risk assessment” and is invariably a prelude to the escalation of involvement in foreign conflicts.

Recent history has shown us that these militarist campaigns–which begin with hysterical discourse, enter Congress as bills to divert enormous amounts of public resources to the defense industry, and end up in foreign deployments and domestic boondoggles—heighten, rather than reduce violence and public insecurity both here and abroad. They end up sucking ever scarcer public resources into falsely framed and unwinnable wars.

In the case of Mexican drug cartels, this assessment is not only exaggerated—it’s downright wrong. Anyone who has looked at the dynamic of the violence there knows that there is a difference between political terrorist organizations seeking to undermine a political system and drug cartels seeking to protect an illegal and highly lucrative business. Their logic is different, their tactics and motives are different, their actions are different and their relationship to governments is different.

This purposely mistaken description and the errant “defense”policies that go along with it lead to terrible consequences.

Four years into the Merida Inititiative, we can see the results of applying the war logic to organized crime in Mexico. Every study we have shows a direct correlation between the beginning of the drug war in December of 2006 and the explosion, rather than control, of violence in Mexico. Drug war-related deaths have skyrocketed from an average of 2,000 a year since before the U.S. and Mexican governments launched this policy, to 15,000 last year.

A new study by Eduardo Guerrero in Nexos documents how the drug war model promoted by the Merida initiative leads to fragmentation of drug cartels and huge increases in violence. Typically, the government takes out a major operative from a single cartel, which triggers turf wars among cartels often involving attacks on officials considered linked to rival cartels, and the death of citizens.

Mexico now faces a very serious dual threat: from the illness and from the purported cure.

The illness: The illness we know all too well. The chain of transnational organized crime runs from the armed groups in Colombia–most paramilitaries formed under the counterinsurgency programs of the Uribe administration with U.S. support in the form of Plan Colombia–up through Central America, where street gangs join forces with drug traffickers, into Mexico, and throughout the United States.

Mexican cartels have become the major players in this scheme, as they have taken over not just the transit of cocaine, but also the link to retailers in the United States, along the traditional production and trafficking of marijuana and heroin, and more recently methamphetamines.

As their business has grown due to shifts in the globalization of the drug trade, these groups fight each other tooth and nail to maintain or gain control of drug trafficking routes and market shares. There is no question but that they are brutal and ruthless.

The cure: The drug war model is based on prohibition, criminalization and blocking supply of illicit substances to the U.S. market. This model, developed by Richard Nixon in 1971 has never worked—at all.

In Mexico, it has not reduced flows overall, U.S. consumption has gone up and public safety, in some regions, has eroded to the point of crisis.

In the United States it has diverted local police forces from control of violent crime to drug busts, and sent thousands of youth to prison for simple possession, mostly youth of color in a clear pattern of discrimination and repression.

The drug war is taking a huge toll on society, only to produce no positive results.

I take that back. There have in fact been positive result–for some very powerful people.

Those who win in the drug war by perpetuating it know very well who they are, although most of the rest of us do not. They are hawk politicians seeking to exploit public insecurity and draw federal funds to their districts by calling for hard-line policies. They are the mammoths of the defense industry. They are private security firms. Increasingly, they are also the producers of electronic surveillance and intelligence equipment that have joined as the newest members of this revised military-industrial complex.

They are also Pentagon agencies, especially the Northern Command, and other U.S. agencies. The Pentagon has long dreamed of gaining greater access to Mexico´s intelligence services and security apparatus. The Bush expansion of NAFTA into security had at its core the goal of creating a Pentagon-run regional security system by subsuming Mexico’s national defense system. The so-called “Security and Prosperity Partnership” placed the cornerstone of this ambitious expansion. Today U.S. agencies operate on Mexican soil–planning, equipping, directing and, according to numerous on-the-ground reports, executing operations throughout the country.

The private and public sector promoters of war reap hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. They grow stronger as their lobbyists buy off politicians with campaign donations and the Defense Department assures itself a lion’s share of taxpayer dollars.

Peace is their enemy.

That means that when we call for non-violent solutions to the drug war, we are their enemy. We have to understand, that to work for peaceful alternatives and against militarization places us squarely in their sights.

In a recent article on the winners and losers in the war on terrorism, Gareth Porter put it succinctly,

“Aggressive U.S. wars are not merely the result of mistaken policies, but of the national security institutions pursuing their own interests at the expense of the interests of the American people. The ‘war on terror’ is a means for those institutions to maintain the present allocation of national resources and power to the national security sector for the indefinite future.”

I would add that the “war on drugs” serves the same purpose and that the national security sector not only seeks to to maintain its present enormous allocation of resources, but to constantly expand it.

The Merida Initiative’s drug war offensive can only really be understood in light of the additional $3.6 trillion dollars lavished on the national security sector over the past decade. Today even with the budget cuts, the security sector has major plans for expansion and Mexico is the new frontier.

Our research has affirmed this dynamic. While basic human needs are not being met in the world’s wealthiest nation, efforts to fatten the war economy are in overdrive. We’ve seen active lobbying in Washington to continue and intensify the Merida Initiative by the defense sector and private security firms hungry for contracts in a fresh war. According to a  study by the Center for international Policy and Common Cause, the U.S. arms industry has more than 1,000 lobbyists and spent $22.6 million dollars on campaigns in the 2009/2010 elections. Although exact figures are hard to come by, given that the Merida Initiative forbids giving cash to Mexico for contracting, and State Department currently outsources much of its work, this means that a huge chunk of the $1.6 billion so far in Merida money goes to the military-industrial complex.

But there is another sinister reason behind Mexico’s drug war. Militarizing Mexico by putting the armed forces in communities to fight the drug war, also puts them in a position to put down grassroots rebellions, especially and strategically local battles over natural resources, such as anti-mining campaigns, water, land and oil conflicts.

We’re seeing a future taking shape in an age of scarcity and environmental crisis where it won’t be survival of the fittest, but survival of those who were most conniving and ruthless in gaining control of the natural resources we need to continue on this planet. What’s going on in with the land and water grabs, biopiracy, mining and oil concessions is much more than privatization of the commons—it’s the massive relocation of resources from communities to a small number of elites for a day when, if the current system continues, both cannot survive. Mexico is and will be a major stage for this battle. Local communities are fighting back and militarization provides a way of controlling them.

In talks on U.S.-Mexico relations around the country, I’ve met thousands of U.S. citizens who are watching the deterioration of binational relations with grave concern, and others who ask honestly—Why should we care?

* For those of you who live on the border, you care because just beyond this building–across the line, the river, the fence–live your relatives, your friends and your neighbors. We can’t stand by and watch as their lives are destroyed by fear, violence and repression, and young people are robbed of a real future.

* We should also care because our government has promoted, funded and sustained the drug war that is at the root of the violence and it is time to say NO MORE.

* We should care because if we work together we can find non-violent solutions on both sides of the border: drug policy reform, serious operations against financial crimes, community development, anti-poverty and education programs, jobs creation, regulation and mechanisms for the fair distribution of weath, citizen involvement, anti-corruption campaigns, and each country improving its own justice public safety systems on all levels.

This conference is the first step in translating caring into action. You have already joined the people of Mexico’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity to call for an end to the drug war and U.S. support under the Merida Initiative.

We must stop the drug war and call on Congress to stop funding the Merida Initiative immediately and fund these other options.

It’s true that there’s a lot to be worried about now, especially for young people just starting out in a world of threats and uncertainty. But we all have but two choices: we can turn away from what feels threatening to us, or we can turn into it, and ask ourselves what can be done, and find others who asking the same questions and building local and global responses.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a source of inspiration in this sense. Our work here fits in among those demands by demanding that the $1.6 billion in Merida funding go to human needs and public safety in the country and development aid to Mexico, instead of war. In a globalized world we have to end the false division between foreign policy and domestic policy. Foreign policy defines who we are in the world and policies like the Merida Initiative rob us of resources we need for schools and hospitals, even as they threaten and kill innocent people in foreign countries.

We’ve been told that foreign policy is the terrain of experts. But as responsible members of a democracy we have to believe in our own power to understand and confront threats like the new drug wars, and stop military build-ups before the sheer momentum of the weapons and cash consortium runs us over.

I have a tremendous amount of confidence in our ability to do that. I’ve seen the concern of you all, students and other border residents, here and around the country.

If we pool our knowledge and commitment here and reaching across the border, we can stop this bloodshed and begin to rebuild our crossborder community, and strengthen a relationship of respect between sovereign nations that has been ripped asunder by this war.

Laura Carlsen is the director of the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org

Then on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon launched his signature “war on drugs.” The new crackdown on illegal drug use shifted the issue from a local health and public safety problem to a series of federal agencies under the direct control of the president. President Ronald Reagan later doubled down on the drug war, ushering in an age of mass incarceration.

Like the film before it, the drug war model not only criminalized, but also demonized illegal drugs, dealing and use — and the individuals involved. The discourse turned to moralistic and military terms. In many states, selling marijuana carried longer sentences than murder. Although the abuse of legal drugs now kills more people than illegal drugs, the architects of the drug war continues to promote the view that it is some inherent evil of the substance, rather than the way individuals and groups use it, that determines whether a drug is a threat to society or an accepted social custom.

The Drug Policy Alliance has revealed that U.S. authorities arrest some 800,000 people a year for marijuana use. Two-thirds of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses are black or Hispanic, even though consumption rates for whites are equal. Largely because of drug laws and draconian enforcement, the United States has become the world champion in imprisoning its own people, often destroying the hopes and futures of its youth. The United States spends more than $51 billion a year on the domestic war on drugs alone.
Exporting the War

The export version of the drug war has an even darker side. It makes the implicit racism of the domestic war overt. Foreign drug lords are stereotypically portrayed as the root of an evil enterprise that, in fact, takes place mostly in the United States, where street sales generate the multibillion-dollar profits of the business. Under the guise of the drug war, the U.S. government has sponsored military responses in other countries that the Constitution prohibits domestically — for good reasons.

Attention is diverted from the social roots of drug abuse and addiction at home to a foreign threat to the American way of life — a way of life that, regardless of one’s moral beliefs, has always been characterized by the widespread use of mind-altering drugs. The false war model of good vs. evil, ally vs. enemy precludes many community-based solutions that have proven to be far more effective. U.S. taxpayers pay billions of dollars to fumigate foreign lands, pursue drug traffickers, and patrol borders as well as land and sea routes to intercept shipments.

None of this has worked. More than a decade and $8 billion into Plan Colombia, that Andean nation is the number-one cocaine producer in the world. Mexico has exploded into violence as the arrests and killings of cartel leaders spark turf battles that bathe whole regions in blood.

Last month, 52 people lost their lives in an attack on a casino in Monterrey, Mexico. The news shocked Mexico since it represents yet another escalation of violence, but it’s become almost routine alongside daily drug-war deaths. For U.S. citizens, it was further proof that Mexico is under an assault by organized crime.

According to some Mexican researchers, the sudden rise in violence in Mexico correlates directly to when President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown in the war on drugs by sending troops and federal police into the streets in 2006. Meanwhile, Mexican citizens have also taken to the streets to proclaim the war on drugs directly responsible for the growing bloodshed in their country and demand a change in strategy. Calderon has refused to consider alternative models.

Movement leader, poet Javier Sicilia, marched alongside the relatives of victims in white t-shirts, followed by university students, indigenous groups, an especially lively group of jaraneros (playing a traditional, guitar-like instrument called a jarana), citizens and press. The trail of several thousand marchers snaked up the downtown avenues to the gates of the Presidential residence, Los Pinos. Several veterans of Mexico City demonstrations commented that security forces had never allowed them to approach the entry to Los Pinos, let alone with so little security.

But this is a movement that has defined itself as a interlocutor, rather than an adversary, to power. The congregation listened quietly to Julian Le Baron’s warning against complacency, in his now-familiar, lilting Chihuahua accent. He recounted the events leading up to the kidnapping of his little brother and the murder of another brother and his friend, addressing the crowd from atop a truck. His speech was followed by the customary moment of silence led by Sicilia. The usual jeers and anti-government slogans were notably absent.

The march then wound back down the hill and came to a stop in front of the Senate building, after being joined by hundreds of marchers from the “No Mas Sangre” movement. Both houses of Congress have approved the national security reforms “in general” (meaning specifics will still be debated). Since the reforms were the main subject of the dialogue with the movement, The movement views approval of the measures in the midst of dialogue  as a betrayal of terms. However, Sicilia announced that a liaison committee will renew dialogue with the legislature this Wednesday.

Representatives of the peace movement stated the objections to the National Security law in a flier, summarized below:

1) It legalizes presidential decisions to attack insecurity with repressive measures that react to symptoms rather than address causes;
2) It is unconstitutional since it redistributes public security and national security functions among the Armed Forces and the police without adequately defining both.
3) The Armed Forces would be allowed to coordinate public safety activities when the constitution clearly only allows them to participate as auxiliaries in crisis situations.
4) The incorporation of military personnel in public safety opens the door to substitute local and state authorities for federal Armed Forces and security personnel, which affects states’ rights and sovereignty.
5) Federal security officials can declare states of exception, which permit authoritarian government.
7) Military personnel could be tried in civil courts only when the the military decides it is appropriate.

My analysis of the National Security Law coincides with this analysis. I believe there are very serious flaws not just in the particulars of the reforms but in the entire framework. Experts within Mexico, including the National Autonomous University (UNAM), have been working on models of a law of citizen and human security that replaces the Bushian concept of national security, and takes a look at the causes of insecurity in communities and long-lasting solutions. By promoting Calderón’s out-dated and repressive National Security law, with its obvious similarities to the Patriot Act in the suspension of civil liberties, the Congress has pre-empted the valuable efforts of the citizenry and academic experts to devise a more democratic alternative.

The proposed reforms deepen, rather than resolve, the confusion between police public safety functions and the army’s national defense mandate. This opens the door even wider to corruption of the armed forces, human rights violations without access to justice, and the militarization of Mexican communities. It also opens the door wider to Pentagon involvement under a pseudo-legal regimen that is constitutionally prohibited (for good reason) in the United States and most other countries and violates fundamental and constitutional precepts of national sovereignty in Mexico.

Most of the event in front of the Senate didn’t focus on the legal reforms to the National Security Law, but told the stories of the victims, by the victims. This has come to be the hallmark and the moral strength of the movement. The cases of assassinations, disappearances and abuses reflect an almost even split between suspected cartel involvement and security forces’ involvement, among a large number of unknown causes since most cases have never been investigated. The common denominators are pain and frustration with “a bunch of corrupt judges”, a legislature that “doesn’t know what it’s like to lose a son or daughter to this absurd violence” and government negligence “that is just the new way to cover up corruption”, in the words of the growing number of victims.

Diana Gomez, an analyst with the Americas Program and a victim whose father, Jaime Gomez, was disappeared and murdered in Colombia, spoke of the links between Plan Colombia and Plan Mexico, or the Merida Initiative, imposed by the U.S. government. Her father, she noted, was killed in the context of the “Democratic Security” plan of the U.S. and Colombian  governments.

“Colombia is not the model to follow”, she warned. She pointed out that militarization under the pretext of the drug war in Colombia led to the death of her father and thousands of others, including the “false positives” killed by the military, with many more disappeared and displaced.

Gomez is a leader of the organization Sons and Daughters for Remembering and Against Impunity. Her words as a victim, as an academic expert and in solidarity with the Mexican movement brought into focus the larger picture of the drug war. This is a model that benefits powerful interests at the expense of the people, especially the poor and opposition leaders. And it is a model that is being actively promoted by the U.S. government despite evidence of its failure to achieve its stated objectives.

As the dialogue is renewed and part of the Mexican movement engages Congress in a new round of dialogue, others are organizing public education and protest events around the construction of the U.S.-funded international police academy in Puebla, a Forum Against Militarization, and student discussions.

It will be interesting to see where the many initiatives for peace lead in Mexico’s unprecedented protests against the drug war.

For now, the explosion of debate in the public arena is a major victory. Giving victims a voice and a sense of collective identity and support is a major victory. Rousing people from the paralysis caused by violent images devoid of social context is a major victory. Revealing U.S. interests  in fueling a drug war that is not in the interests of the Mexican citizenry is a major victory.

As criticism of the drug war grows deeper so does the possibility to build non-violent alternatives. If the Mexican peace movement succeeds in stopping the drug war and reversing trends toward rising violence and human rights abuses, its communities wills suffer less bloodshed. And the rest of the world will have an example to point to, of how to reject military/police states in favor of security based on the guiding principles of human rights, citizen participation and strong democracy.

Migrants seek a place on freight train, Arriaga, Chiapas. By Francisco Arguelles

On Friday, June 23 a group of Central American migrants crossing Mexico by freight train en route to the United States were kidnapped at gunpoint in Medias Aguas, Veracruz. The kidnapping took place the day after the dialogue between members of the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity and President Felipe Calderón about security and spiraling violence under the president’s war on drug trafficking. In Mexico City, delegates of the Caravan demanded an end to the drug war while Calderón defended his strategy against organized crime and narcotrafficking, asserting that, if anything, the militarized strategy should have begun sooner.

The Insecurity of Security Policies

Migrant kidnappings reflect the inability and unwillingness of the Mexican government to protect vulnerable groups such as these Central American transmigrants in the context of the violence unleashed under the drug war. They also reveal the costs of a broader “security” policy in both Mexico and the United States that criminalizes migrants rather than defending their lives, security, and rights.

Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde denounced the kidnappings based on reports from migrants who managed to flee the captors. Solalinde is director of the shelter Casa del Migrante “Hermanos en el Camino” (Migrant House “Brothers and Sisters on the Road”) in Ixtepec, Oaxaca and Coordinator of the Pastoral of Human Mobility for Mexico’s Southern Pacific Region. A bulletin released from the shelter on June 24 reported that a freight train carrying about 250 migrants atop was stopped near the Medias Aguas station and met by a group of at least ten men armed with high power weapons.

“Some [migrants] ran into the bushes to save their lives and those that could not escape were captured by these people and taken in SUVs to unknown destinations.” Based on how many migrants were on the train when it was stopped, migrants and shelter workers estimated that 60 to 100 migrants were kidnapped, including women, men, and children.

Following the report of the kidnapping, the immediate response of Mexican government officials and institutions was denied. Officials from the state government of Veracruz, the Attorney General’s Office and the National Migration Institute (INM) stated that the kidnappings could not be confirmed and were nothing more than rumors. Several officials insisted that Father Solalinde himself present evidence of the crime.

When questioned by legislators of Mexico’s three main political parties, immigration commissioner Salvador Beltrán del Río admitted that there were pockets of corruption within the INM, but continued to deny any mass disappearance in Medias Aguas. Father Solalinde has proposed eliminating the INM altogether given the corruption within the institution and the involvement of its officials in abusing migrants.

At present the migrants remain unaccounted for while government officials continue to deny that the kidnapping took place and fail to carry out a serious investigation.

Subject to Abuse

Migrants travel atop freight train near Ixtepec, Oaxaca. By José Alberto Donis Rodríguez

What officials cannot deny is the extreme suffering and vulnerability of Central American migrants crossing Mexico. Without money to pay polleros (human smugglers) and to avoid checkpoints, thousands of migrants ride on the tops and sides of railcars where they are exposed to rain, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and electrocution. Many have lost limbs or their lives as a result of falling from the trains.

Traveling underground, migrants are vulnerable to assault, robbery, extortion, rape, and death. The recent kidnappings of migrants in Veracruz–whatever the number–are a small part of the thousands of kidnappings that take place each year, likely at the hands of narcotraffickers. In February of this year, Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights reported that over 11,000 kidnappings of migrants had taken place in the six month period from April to September of 2010, the largest number occurring in the state of Veracruz.

Of those presenting testimony to the Commission, 8.9% pointed to the involvement of government authorities including police and immigration officials. The kidnappings bear an eerie resemblance to the disappearances of the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries. The migrants are rarely found, cases remain unresolved, and fear is planted widely. The brutal massacre of 72 Central American migrants in Mexico’s northern state of Tamaulipas in August of 2010 confirmed death as a possible, if not likely, outcome of the kidnappings and also made it more difficult for authorities to deny the crisis.

I was at the shelter Hogar de la Misericordia (Home of Mercy) in Arriaga, Chiapas when the migrants heard the news of the kidnapping. The train begins its journey north in Arriaga, a small city near the border of Oaxaca. Migrants gather there as they wait to jump the next train.

Although concerned about the kidnappings and other violence they might face, the migrants were not deterred. Many told me that they had no choice but to continue their journey. They noted the vast disparity between wages in Central America and the United States, and the difficulty of finding work in their home countries. Some had family, including spouses and children, living in the United States. One migrant I spoke with said he was determined to reach the U.S., despite his poor health and the risks involved. Another man affirmed that if he could find work in his home country he wouldn’t migrate. Other migrants agreed.

U.S. Policy Places Migrants in Danger

The risks migrants face come not only from negligence and abuse from Mexican government agencies, but also from U.S. policy related to immigration, border control, and security. Rather than being protected by national and international security policies, migrants in Mexico and the U.S. are the direct targets of security policies. Increased immigration enforcement at Mexico’s northern and southern borders coincided with the North American Free Trade Agreement, which exacerbated the conditions for peasants to leave their lands due to the impossibility of competing with subsidized corn and other products from the U.S.

At the U.S.–Mexico border, policies such as Operation Blockade (launched in El Paso, Texas in 1993) and Operation Gatekeeper (San Diego, California) pushed migrants away from crossing at settled, urban areas toward dangerous regions including the Arizona desert. As a result, some 3,000 -5,000 migrants have died in the past 15 years in what immigrant rights activist Maria Jimenez labels “death by policy.”

In a 2010 report published by Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, “Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border”, Jimenez documents that U.S. authorities are aware of this outcome. As Timothy Dunn notes in Blockading the Border and Human Rights, these enforcement operations became the basis of the Border Patrol’s “prevention through deterrence” policy with the goal of stopping undocumented migrants from entering the U.S.

Deterrence policies have reached southern Mexico where migration officials have increased enforcement strategies, especially along the Isthmus de Tehuantepec, Mexico’s narrowest point. This is a security strategy encouraged by the United States to limit Central American migration. Most recently, the U.S.-backed Plan Mexico, also known as the Mérida Initiative, provided significant funding to Mexico with the stated intention of “security aid to design and carry out counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security measures.” As former assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon observed in April of 2008, “To a certain extent, we’re armoring NAFTA.” What he does not say is that in doing so, poor and working class migrants, among other groups, are left unprotected by the “armor” and even become targets of security measures.

In early June of this year Mexico’s Attorney General Marisela Morales declared that protecting Mexico’s southern border was an issue of national security. She stated that the “illegal flow of people and merchandise that exists and the delinquency it generates demand a strengthened institutional coordination to improve vigilance, security, and respect for human rights.”

If undocumented migrants passing through the region are part of the “illegal flow of people,” then rather than being the subjects of respect of human rights, they are viewed as generating delinquency. This framework partly explains the actions and inactions of the Mexican, U.S., and Central American governments that lead to the human rights abuses of migrants. These governments, along with transnational corporations, create the economic conditions that cause migration. Enforcement policies, including checkpoints on highways and along the U.S.-Mexico border, push people to travel in extremely dangerous conditions and create a market for human smuggling. Finally, impunity perpetuates abuses as those responsible are not prosecuted.

In the U.S. migrants are increasingly criminalized. A new wave of anti-immigrant laws are being pushed at the state and local levels, including a law recently signed by the governor of South Carolina to create an Illegal Immigration Enforcement Unit as part of the state’s public safety department.

U.S. national security is increasingly linked to immigration control. A report published by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in December 2010 titled “Injustice for All: The Rise of the U.S. Immigration Policing Regime” details the ways immigration control and policing in the U.S. have led to “racial discrimination and hate violence against immigrants and those perceived to be foreign born or ‘illegal.’” It also documents increased detentions and deportations, collaboration between police and immigration agents, workplace policing strategies leading to worker rights violations, militarization of border communities, and anti-immigration legislative proposals at all levels.

The Mexican and US government can deny human rights abuses of migrants, renounce responsibility, or blame non-state criminal elements and the harsh desert climate. But that doesn’t change the fact that the policies of these governments are directly linked to migrant death. From Hogar de la Misericordia in southern Mexico, the migrants insisted that looking for work should not be a crime.

The governments of North and Central America have a shared responsibility to stop the current human rights crisis faced by Central American migrants crossing Mexico and that of Mexicans crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Fundamental political and economic policy changes are required so that Central American and Mexicans will not have to leave their countries in search of work.

Several questions remain unaddressed. What would be necessary so that no migrant would have to ride the freight train or cross the Arizona desert? What would be needed so that no migrant would have to risk his or her life to search for work? Without safe ways for workers to move across borders, enforcement and militarization will continue to cause deaths. Economic policies that allow people to provide for their families without having to leave their countries would be not only more cost effective but much more humane than enforcement-only policies, negligence, and denial that end in death.

Christine Kovic is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clake. She has conducted research on human rights in Chiapas, Mexico for nearly two decades. Her current research addresses immigrant rights in Mexico and the United States. She writes on immigration and human rights for the Americas Program www.cipamericas.org

For More Information:

Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, “Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border”

http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/humanitarian-crisis-migrant-deaths-us-mexico-border

Dunn, Timothy. Blockading the Border and Human Rights. University of Texas Press, 2009.