Mexicans confront a “social war� disguised as a fight against narcotraffic
Help us to make visible the war that is happening in Mexico. Mexico is living a hidden war for over eight years ago that has killed over 190,000 people and which have disappeared over 47,000 as a result of violence, many of them innocent. However, the Mexican government has hidden these numbers to deny that there is a war and prevent the world know what is happening The government has said they are only drug traffickers and soldiers dying, but the reality is that thousands of innocent women and children have
been victims of impunity, prostitution and violence. Many of these people have died or disappeared by being in the wrong place and time in this conflict that reaches the streets and all the places where they are in the midst of the fighting. The rate of reported disappearances in Mexico during President Enrique Peùa Nieto’s administration has more than doubled since he took office, raising questions about the security achievements trumpeted by the president, as well as the methods of collecting data on these issues.
Proceso said that on average 13 people were reported missing every day in Mexico from when Peña Nieto took office in December 2012 through October 2014. The number is more than twice the rate of 6 per day during the presidency of Felipe Calderon (2006 – 2012). These figures are based on a revised system engineered by Mexico’s National Public Security Secretariat, according to Proceso. In total, 40 percent of the 23,272 disappearances — or 9,384 — that Mexico’s missing persons registry (RNPED) reported between January 2007 and October 2014 came during the administration of Peña Nieto.
The violence is concentrated in specific areas where we have OIL and gas SHALE.
Mexico in Crisis: Ayotzinapa Plus 23,270 More Disappeared Persons A country of graves. A country of burned bodies. A country of bone fragments. A country of more than
23,270 disappeared people. Years, weeks, days of nameless bodies. Our constant absences that resonated little until Ayotzinapa. A case that is unique yet similar to the thousands Mexico has seen since the start of the “war on drugs”. Unique because the government was forced to respond, similar because it has failed to do it well. Therefore the suspicion about and the conversion, in public opinion, of the “historic truth” into a governmental tactic destined to close the case, turn the page, overcome the burning of our children, forget the dead.
Impossible to do with all the unanswered questions. Impossible to “overcome” because there is no scientific certainty about what happened in the Cocula garbage dump. Because of the inconsistency in the statements made by those involved, many of whom were tortured. Because four months after the incident, the Mexican State has not arrested all those presumed responsible. Because the government refused to recognize what happened as a forced disappearance. Because the military’s involvement in that fatal night hasn’t been investigated. Because the attribution of responsibility due to the
context of political corruption in Guerrero that allowed this to happen has not begun. And because the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team distances itself from the results presented by the PGR and exposes their flaws. Despite the specific nature of the case, Ayotzinapa reveals a pattern. Ayotzinapa already happened and continues to happen to thousands of families in search of a lost child, a kidnapped daughter, a father no one can find. Therein lies the perverse pattern of forced disappearances that no one investigates, of federal and state
authorities that don’t start criminal investigations, don’t provide justice, don’t offer reparations to the families. The perverse pattern of impunity that provides incentive for more kidnappings and more people at risk. The perverse pattern derived from the lack of mechanisms, protocols and resources to deal with a problem we can no longer ignore. Documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Prodh Human Rights Center. By many other organizations. A story of debts and doubts, criminals and accomplices, broken hearts and living dead, negligent governments and graves discovered every day.
A bleeding that does not seem to bother the State. As was pointed out by the report of four NGOs specializing in the field, including Red Guerrerense de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos [Guerrero Network of Civil Human Rights Organizations], the investigations for forced disappearances don’t start immediately or in a formal manner. Often, decisive moments that would clear up what happened are let go by the wayside. Institutional responses are insufficient, irrelevant, unable to deal with an ever more scandalous
phenomenon. And the speech by Ambassador G贸mez Robledo in Geneva, full of platitudes but lacking in answers, confirmed it. The Mexican State simulates. Doesn't fulfill. Buys time. Evades. Postpones. While more Mexicans disappear, and more mothers desperately search for them.
THE MASSACRE OF AYOTZINAPA IS A STATE CRIME!! Enrique Peña Nieto STOP KILLING OUR STUDENTS It was a crime of the State. The events of Iguala, where six people were killed, three of them students; twenty were injured –one of them with brain death- and 43 young students of the Normal Rural School for Teachers “Raul Isidro Burgos” of Ayotzinapa were detained and forcibly disappeared, constitute crimes against humanity.
The attacks, one after the other, by municipal police and a group of armed civilians against the students, the extrajudicial executions, the mass forced disappearances and torture, the mutilation and death of Julio Cesar Fuentes, who, like in the times of the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), had his eyes and facial skin removed, was all a well-planned act of barbary, ordered and executed deliberately. It wasn’t caused by an absence of the State, nor was it an isolated incident. It is part of the systematic persecution, harassment, and classist and racist stigmatization, by all three levels of government (federal, provincial and municipal), against the normalista students.
On duty state police acted with a total lack of respect for human rights, violating the right to life of three of their victims, one of them having been previously tortured in a vicious manner. Furthermore, the 43 disappeared students were arrested by State agents who used physical violence and transferred the detainees in official police cars. They later denied the facts and refused to disclose the whereabouts of the students, which constitutes the crime of forced disappearance. According to Article 149 bis of the Federal Criminal Code, the crime of genocide can also be found to be present, due to the fact that a distinct national group (the students of the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa) was
discriminately targeted for elimination. Furthermore, the students have long been harassed in a systematic, continuous and prolonged way by the mass media, with government agents planning and committing the crimes in question. Here, it is worth mentioning that on December 12, 2011, two students at that same school were summarily executed at the El Sol Highway in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. Four more were wounded and 24 were tortured and subjected to cruel and degrading treatment by police agents. At that same place, the student Gerardo Torres was arrested and held incommunicado before being transferred to a safe house in Zupango, were he was stripped of his
clothes and tortured. Later, with the intention of creating a scapegoat, he was given an AK-47 rifle and forced to shoot so as to leave traces of gun powder on his hands; this in order to accuse him of of having killed his two school mates. On that occasion, there was found to have been excessive use of coercive force and of firearms by the State. That is, the State acted outside the margins of established anti-riot protocol and used restricted firearms to deal with a public demonstration. Two agents indicted in the two homicides are free today. Two and a half years later, there is enough testimonial evidence to reveal widespread
contempt and criminal hate towards the Ayotzinapa students among the police officers and military personnel of Guerrero. Now like then, and like many times since the massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968, we are seeing a joint action by State agents and death squads whose mission is to eliminate all opposition to the dominant regime. The use of forced disappearances as a repressive instrument of the institutions of power is not the result of some excessive behavior by particular out-of-control groups, but a repressive technique adopted in a rational and centralized manner with the purpose, among others, of spreading terror.
Considering the seriousness of the situation and the attention it has received worldwide, the PeĂąa Nieto government is experiencing a deep crisis due to pressure by the UN, the OAS, the US State Department, the European Community and many different humanitarian organizations demanding the 43 detained/disappeared young students be presented alive. State and federal authorities have been filtering the facts before the press, pushing the hypothesis of “organized crime and mass graves," points which are spouted repetitively as a way to guarantee impunity, confuse the evidence and wear out the news story. It is a perverse scheme that, in the case of Iguala, seeks to phase out responsibilities
and to cover up official complicity; it plays with the grief and the dignified rage of the families of the victims and their schoolmates. As the parents of the 43 missing say, “the authorities are seeking dead bodies while what we want is to find our children alive.” The idea that this situation is the result of an isolated action by a group of police officers acting without permission is simply not credible. From the outset, it would seem most suspicious to consider that Guerrero Seguro's chain of command (in which the Army, Navy, Federal police, and General Attorney all participate) was not involved. Or even that the escape of Iguala’s police chief, Francisco Salgado Valladares and his
boss, Iguala’s mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, was unassisted by them. Conveniently, everyone now says they knew all along of the mayor's ties to the criminal group, Guerreros Unidos. 16 out of 22 municipal police officers who were examined came out positive in a sodium Rhodizonate test -which is to say they fired their weapons- and could well have perpetrated the killings. It is yet to be known who the masterminds were, as well as what the motives behind the crimes were, including the detention/disappearances.
43
forced
According to Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer at the Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre, the ministerial authorities in charge of the
investigations did not act in a professional and prompt manner to gather the information needed to locate the missing youth. Agents from the Public Ministry acted negligently and insensitively and could well be considered accomplices in the manipulation of evidence and the confusion of facts. Amnesty International deemed the judicial investigation "chaotic and hostile" toward the family members and schoolmates of the victims. This hostility was also directed toward the expert team of forensic investigators from Argentina, which family and students have trusted as the only reliable mechanism of certainty in the effort to identify their relatives were they to be found dead. It is worth reiterating that the excessive use of coercive force was directed by the State. The
implication of the aforementioned chain of command must be insisted on. The events occurred in the presence of state and federal police, as well as agents of CISEN (which can be seen as the politically aligned police force of the regime.) There were also members there of the 27th Infantry Battalion, which belongs to the 35th military zone. Notably, the Third Battalion, a special-forces unit that is mainly in charge of intelligence gathering was also there. Both battalions have their barracks in Iguala. Moreover, if what the governor of Guerrero, Angel Aguirre Rivero, publicly stated is true, namely that he had previously (before September 26th) informed the Army, CISEN, and the Attorney General of the links between the mayor Jose Luis Abarca and the drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos, then the Assistant
Attorney General's Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO, in its spanish acronym) should have been watching that municipality closely. In view of all the inconsistencies and gaps in the official story, it is important to point out that, between the first and second shooting there was a three hour interval, plenty of time for the Army to have intervened to prevent further violence. The reasons behind the army's behavior remain unknown. Student Omar Garcia, who was there on the night of the shootings, denounced the actions of military personnel and described how they held the normalistas captive after having opened fire on them. Garcia told of how, when he and others took student Edgar Andres Vargas to Cristina Hospital to be treated for a shot wound on his
mouth, soldiers to arrived immediately, yelling at the students, aiming their rifles, subjecting them with violence and confiscating their cell phones. The soldiers prohibited the doctor from attending to the wounded student. In Guerrero the army has control of the territory. It acts under the doctrine of counter-insurgency -that is to say, within the logic of an "internal enemy." The army is obsessed with the presence of guerrilla groups. It is clear that the military chain of command is responsible for the actions of police and military groups in Iguala. These events expose once again how the State partially delegates its monopoly on the use of force to paramilitary or organized crime groups. Some signs suggest that this is a great act of provocation. It may be the case that a major
crime was committed to cover up another one, that of Tlatlaya, where 22 people were extrajudicially executed by the army. Since 2006, the armed forces have been eliminating internal enemies within the framework of a de facto state of exception. The events of Iguala confirm the rule that it was a State crime. The Ministry of national Defence lied in the case of Tlatlaya in recent months. They could all be lying now. In this context, and one of escalating conflict, it is important to remember and emphasize the pain that parents and students are going through: We demand the return with their lives of the 43 detained/disappeared students. We demand punishment to those responsible and support for the Normal Rural Schools, which are facing being closed down due to the education counterreform approved in 2013.
Alive they took them and alive we want them back! They are young people, mostly the children of farming families, students in a rural normal school. That is why they were forcefully disappeared. They defend public education, rural normal schools, teaching to serve the most needy and the social transformation of Mexico. This is why they shot at them and kidnapped them. The forced disappearance of the students from Ayotzinapa was a joint effort of the municipal police and hitmen working for the Guerreros Unidos cartel. There is no difference between one and the other. During the day the criminals work in a uniform; at night they do it dressed as civilians. In the criminal state that is ruling over
vast parts of Guerrero, drug traffickers and police officers are two sides of the same coin. They kidnapped and shot the young people from Ayotzinapa because they could. It was not at all hard for them to take away their lives or carry them off illegally. The current atmosphere in which the normal school students are demonized and in which there is general impunity and a criminal state made them think that nothing would happen to them; that they had the license to kill. As it is, since before September 26 the rural normal school students have been demonized both in the region and the country. Tons of lies have been spread about them, without any need of proof. They have been spread by the state's businesspeople, the business owners led by Claudio X. Gonzรกlez and his Mexicanos
Primero [Mexicans First] initiative, the current education civil servants and politicians from every party. In Guerrero, impunity is the name of the game. The victims of the massacres in Aguas Blancas (1995) and El Charco (1995) are still awaiting justice. Armando ChavarrĂa, leader of the Guerrero Congress and candidate for state governor, was killed in 2009. His case is still unresolved. In December of 2011 several police officers killed two students in Ayotzinapa. The murderers are free. Many of the state's regions are full of clandestine cemeteries that house the bones of unidentified bodies. Acapulco, Iguala, Eduardo Neri and many other municipalities in the state are drug trafficking territory.The Guerreros Unidos, Los Rojos and La Familia criminal organizations and their detachments are fighting over the marijuana and
poppy growing business, drug routes and markets, and the kidnapping and extortion industries. This is why community police forces and self-defense groups have been popping up all over. Just last September 12 a group of 100 hooded men invaded the community of Carrizalillo, where an enormous mine, owned by the Canadian company Goldcorp, is operated. They shot at civilians as they made sure that the town belonged to them. As the cases in Iguala and OlinalĂĄ, among others, show, those cartels benefit from the protection and support of politicians and police in the municipalities and in the state government. When JosĂŠ Luis Abarca, the mayor of Iguala, was accused of being responsible for the assassination of three opponents of his government, the case was closed. The mayor was protected by the local Congress, by members of the state government and by at least
one federal congress member. Nestora Salgado, commander of the community police of Olinalﾃ｡, was jailed in a high-security prison in August of 2013 because she published a press release in which she pointed to the involvement of her municipality's mayor and other government employees in the trafficking of drugs. Those networks of complicity make the state's powers disappear. With them there is no way for justice to be brought. ﾃ］gel Aguirre Rivero's administration was inaugurated with the murder of two normal school students from Ayotzinapa. The new crime against them committed on September 26 makes his exit necessary. As it is now, he is an absent leader. Governor Aguirre does not hold the reins of the government in Guerrero. For all practical
purposes, above all in matters of security, the person in charge of the state's administration is his nephew, Jesús Ernesto Aguirre Gutiérrez, the first coordinator of Strategic Projects for the state administration and now external consultant, with offices in the governor's house in Guerrero and personnel under his command. Before he became the 'super operator' of his uncle's government, Jesús Ernesto Aguirre Gutiérrez was a second-rate government employee at the Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers (ISSSTE), which he left ( La Jornada Guerrero,5/16/09) when he was accused of diverting millions of monetary resources from the institution to back the campaign of his first cousin, Ángel Aguirre Herrera, the PRI candidate for federal congressman for district 8 of the Costa Chica.
In the hands of Aguirre GutiĂŠrrez are the relationships with the press, political actors and the key powers that be of all kinds in the state. He also makes decisions on purchases, education and tourism. He is in fact the hand that rocks the cradle of the state government. With that power, he cannot be disconnected from what happened in Iguala. Those who shot at the students from Ayotzinapa and arrested them were police officers. It was the Iguala director of public security, Francisco Salgado Valladares, who ordered their arrest. The young people were taken away in official vehicles. For all practical purposes, the state authorities allowed the mayor of Iguala, JosĂŠ Luis Abarca, and the director of public security to flee. The Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD) took a week (one week!) to expel the municipal president from its ranks and, in spite of the serious complaints made against him since he was nominated, in 2012, it always protected and supported him. And even now it continues to defend ﾃ］gel Aguirre Rivero. If the drug trafficking powers are camping out in the region, it is because the three levels of government allow them to do so. However you look at it, Ayotzinapa is a State crime, but it is also a crime against humanity, as is stipulated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. There is no other way to describe the murder of six people at the hands of police officers (three of them students), the torture and the forced disappearance of 43 young people, mostly the children of farmers and students at the Rural Normal School Isidro Burgos. They
took them away alive, we want them back alive! Spanish Original The Mexican government, welcomed as a partner of the Canadian and U.S. governments in continental economic development and security, also happens to partner in the slaughter of its own people. The murders and disappearances of the students from the Rural Normal “RaĂşl Isidro Burgos,â€? of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, was a crime of the state, as hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have claimed in their protests. The governmental investigation that followed the September 2014 attack on these students has been deliberately incompetent and not aimed at getting to the roots of the crime that are, in fact, the tangled web of state-drug gang corruption
and the state’s dirty war in defense of the neoliberal transformation of Mexico. The investigation has been staged, quite ineffectively, as a public relations operation to calm foreign investors and to cool protests, efforts that have completely failed within Mexico. By claiming that the blame was at the local level (the corrupt collusion of a local mayor and his avaricious wife with a brutal cartel) the national government seeks to present itself as the defender of justice. But as Luis Hernández Navarro shows in his article “La matanza de Iguala y el Ejército” (The Iguala Massacre and the Army), there is—and has long been—a deep entanglement between the army, the local government of Iguala, and drug production. Guerrero accounts for more than 60% of the Mexican production of poppies
and opium gum for making heroin, and the cities of Iguala and Chilpancingo are key centers for its storage and transportation. Many in Mexico view the army as the de facto government of the state. As Francisco Goldmanwrote in the New Yorker: “The Mexican Army, according to many journalists and other commentators, is the real government authority in Guerrero State. ‘The army knows that state millimetre by millimetre,’ a Mexican legislator pointed out in a recent speech, ‘and they know minute by minute what’s happening there.’” The intertwining of the government and armed forces with the drug gangs has a long history in
Guerrero. Josﾃｩ Luis Abarca, the mayor of Iguala, Guerrero, who is now under arrest, was accused of ordering the attack and having links to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang. Last year he was also accused of ordering the murder of three protesters, but the investigation was not pursued. Colonel Juan Antonio Aranda Torres, commander of the 27th Battalion in Iguala, claimed that he and his troops knew nothing of the Ayotzinapa attacks, although they took place within 100 meters of the army barracks. At the time, he was attending a fiesta organized by Marﾃｭa de los ﾃ］geles Pineda Villa, the wife of Mayor Abarca, now also accused of ordering the attack and being connected to drug gangs. Though Aranda Torres was trained as an intelligence and counter-intelligence officer, he
claims to have seen nothing, heard nothing, and has said nothing. This was not an isolated event. Unfortunately, torture, killings, and assassinations have become commonplace in Mexico with different levels of police or armed forces involvement, as well as drug gangs. The 27th Battalion participated in the dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s. Additionally, Human Rights Watch, in a 2011 report, “Ni Seguridad, ni derechos� (Neither Security Nor Rights), wrote that there is strong evidence that the 27th Battalion participated in the disappearance of six young people in Iguala in March 2010. These state crimes against humanity, sadly, are the rule, not the exception, in Mexico.
Several months earlier, in June 2014, the federal army carried out a mass execution of 22 young people in the town of Tlatlaya, in the neighboring state of Mexico. The army and the federal government then attempted to cover up these executions in Tlatlaya. After journalists and human rights groups exposed the cover-up and mass execution, the government arrested some low ranking soldiers. Though we may never know the immediate motives for the killings and disappearances of the teachers college students, we do know that there has been a pattern of ruthlessly destroying opposition to the neoliberal transformation of Mexico. This has been as true in the sphere of education as it has been in natural resource development. The push by the World Bank as well as key business organizations in Mexico—
as is also happening in Canada and the United States—to destroy teachers’ unions and teachers’ rights and privatize education, has led to an intensification of the attacks on the normales, the rural teachers colleges. These attacks have been underway for several decades but have recently intensified. The Rural Normal “Raúl Isidro Burgos,” was part of a system of teachers’ colleges set up to recruit students from poor rural communities to become teachers and community organizers, a system founded during the Cárdenas presidency (1934-1940). These schools have a history of developing community leaders and union activists as well as a tradition of fighting for social justice and for the preservation of the land rights of their communities. Seventeen of the original 29 normales have already been shut
down in spite of militant resistance from students, alumni, and the local communities. Ironically, the students from the Rural Normal “RaĂşl Isidro Burgosâ€? were only passing through Iguala en route to Mexico City to participate in the annual October 2 march commemorating the 1968 massacre of student protesters in Mexico City. These events, however, should not be viewed as simply related to the internal dynamics of repression, resistance, and the drug wars in Mexico. They are tied to the neoliberal transformationimposed on Mexico by its own capitalist class and state in conjunction with the capitalist classes and states of Canada and the United States, most vividly expressed in NAFTA. The neoliberal capitalist transformation of the Mexican economy
requires repression to prevent or quell resistance to the massive destruction of socio-economic rights, livelihoods, and hope for a better future. Just as the neoliberal transformation of Chile came through the bloody repressions of the U.S.-supported dictator, so the neoliberal transformation of Mexico is accompanied by the bloody slaughter of tens of thousands of Mexicans. The violence is an intensification of the dirty war of the 1970s, a war that was aimed at defeating resistance to the regime in the ‘70s, and is now being carried out to discourage or defeat resistance to Mexico’s neoliberal transformation. While the most powerful business organizations in North America—Business Roundtable (BRT), the Canadian Council of Chief Executives CCCE), and the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres
de Negocios (CMHN)—propose deeper and closer ties within North America, the Mexican state continues terrorizing its own population. The image of Mexico promoted by these three peak business organizations, their related thinktanks and the three governments of North America, is that of a Mexico at the edge of a great leap forward in economic development, democracy, and socio-political stability, developments being propelled by the “opening of Mexico” and the “free market.” The punishing reality for the vast majority of Mexicans is state-enacted and state-tolerated slaughter of its own population to complement deteriorating living standards, deteriorating social rights, the loss of land rights, and the selloff of natural resources. Mexico has been en route to becoming a paradise for foreign
investors and a hell for the vast majority of Mexicans. Theconstitutional reforms passed in 2013-2014 and their implementing legislation have openedMexico’s oil to private development and increased the ability of the government and mining companies to dispossess rural communities from their lands. These recent reforms will continue attacks on the rights of the Mexican people unless they are derailed by the growth of today’s massive popular response to the Ayotzinapa massacre. The Mexican national state has become more repressive while at the same time increasingly losing its monopoly on coercive power. The armed forces of the national state have grown tremendouslysince the Zapatista uprising of 1994, from 216, 943 in 1994 to 265,812 in 2014 (212,208 members of the army and 53, 601, of
the navy). If we add the 57,000 members of various federal security agencies, which include 40,000 members of the counter-insurgency national police force, the PFP, created in 1999 largely from officers and soldiers from the armed forces and the five thousand members of the new federal gendarmerie, the federal forces now amount to 323,000 members. However, there are several interrelated processes that undermine the monopoly on violence of the national state: 1) the fusion and/or co-optation by the drug gangs of local governments, including police forces, as well as sections of the national police and armed forces; 2) the growth of private-for-profit military forces working for big business (domestic and foreign) and the rich to protect them against sections of the state-cartel complex or to keep
workers or local communities in line. The number of these private security personnel officially recognized by the government is around90,000, including administrative personnel. However, there may as much as seven times that number if we include unlicensed security companies and many of their employees are thought by some analysts to be working with criminal gangs; 3) the massive size of well-armed drug gangs, now estimated to be about 500,000, though divided into many different irregular armies; and, 4) the significant and escalating growth of non-governmental community self-defense militias. Many of these militias are genuinely community-organized and have organized themselves to protect their communities against army and gang violence. Others started as or have been co-opted to be power instruments of local political bosses or economic elites. The government has developed
others as counter-revolutionary paramilitary forces. Over the past twenty years, Mexico has become a society in arms, with most of the arms in the hands of state and private forces that continually carry out human rights violations with impunity. The atrocities of September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, shocked Mexican society as never before. Though Mexicans are sadly accustomed to constant reports of disappearances, killings, and mass graves, this event was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Shock was followed by outrage and protests grew weekly, especially those of other college and university students. The tenacious militancy of the 43 missing students’ parents and relatives, who have been at the forefront of mobilizations, has inspired the protesters. Three caravans of parents and other
family members of the 43 have traveled all over Mexico to share stories of losses and repression, and to demand the return of the 43 alive. They have received great solidarity on their journey. On November 20, the 104th anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution, these three caravans converged on the Z贸calo of Mexico City, joined by marches from three different points in the city. Other demonstrations took place throughout Mexico and in many parts of the world. The national government has tried many tactics to undermine the growing protests. First, it remained silent, then declared it a local problem, then feigned great efforts to find the culprits and the missing students, finally declaring the that the students were dead based on nothing but confessions, perhaps under
torture, of members of the local drug gang. These tactics have backfired and have made people even more indignant. The government’s hope that the protests would fade with time has not happened. The recent revelations that the president received a $7,000,000 house as a gift from a recipient of government contracts has also hit a nerve. The government is now employing a classic tactic of the Mexican regime—the use of provocateurs to carry out violent acts in order to prepare the justification for the possible use of violent repression, as the President recently threatened. teleSUR interviews the investigative journalists whose explosive revelations show higher levels of official involvement in student disappearances.
Explosive allegations published in Proceso, one of Mexico's leading news weeklies, this past Sunday, revealed strong evidence pointing to direct participation of federal authorities in the presumed killings of dozens of education students from the drug war-torn state of Guerrero. The investigation also revealed that Mexican federal, state and municipal authorities were tracking the exact movements of the students on the same night of the massacre in question this past Sept. 26. According to the government's own documents, and in at least five clear instances, key testimony obtained by officials to sustain their version of the events was actually induced via illegal interrogation techniques that amounted to
torture, including electric shocks to testicles and extreme beatings. The investigation's revelations are not only a stark contrast with what has been officially maintained by the Pe単a Nieto administration, but also contradict most of what most mainstream news has reported from Mexico and beyond.
The new investigation, penned by acclaimed Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez and the University of California at Berkeley-based journalist Steve Fisher, blows the lid off the official accounts in a number of ways.
It says that federal, state and local officials were quite aware of the whereabouts of the students and were closely tracking and monitoring them. According to the investigation, key testimonies, obtained by officials, were garnered through illegal torture techniques; federal police and soldiers from the military were present at the scene of the killings; and the government has deliberately withheld this information in an attempt to maintain their own official accounting of the events in question. The allegations also come during a time in which the government's version of the events was already being questioned by other sources.
A research team, headed by a group of scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, argued that the government claims that the “Guerreros Unidos” gang incinerated all 43 students lacked any “scientific explanation.” In an extended interview via a three-way telephone call with the authors of the investigation with teleSUR English, Anabel Hernandez and Steve Fisher discussed and detailed their findings. Journalists Discuss Disturbing Findings The ever-passionate and expressive Hernandez is no stranger to explosive investigations and allegations, so much so that her home was raided by official authorities late last year. The
award-winning and internationally-acclaimed journalist has also been subjected to harrowing, threatening acts, such as having found animal body parts at the doorstep of her home. In her latest investigation, however, Hernandez makes the case that her co-authored findings starkly reveal that governmental responsibility for the presumed massacre is much higher than what has been previously admitted. “The point is that we know that the federal police were there, we know that they knew when the students abducted and we know that many of the testimonies that the PGR [Mexico's Attorney General's Office] were obtained and acquired through torture techniques. But in Mexico, evidence obtained through torture is illegal,� Hernandez told teleSUR.
In contrast to the official version, which maintains that the federal government was unaware of the massacre, Hernandez and Fisher allege that federal police and military soldiers directly participated in the presumed massacre itself and were one of three levels of government closely monitoring the students whereabouts throughout the night of the presumed massacre. According to Hernandez and Fisher's account of the unedited Guerrero state report they obtained, which was drawn up for the Interior Ministry and obtained by the magazine about a monthand-a-half ago, the students were monitored as soon as they left their school grounds at 5:59 p.m.
Both federal and state police were monitoring the students while they traveled from the Chilpancingo-based Control, Computational and Communications Center (C4). The article goes into further detail, noting that at 8 p.m., the federal and state police arrived at the highway where the students were fundraising; at 9:21 p.m., a federal police chief – Luis Antonio Dorantes – was advised of the student's arrival; and at 9:40 p.m. the C4 center reported the first gunshots. The report was also based on 12 videos recorded by surviving students on their cell phones. One of those, now publicly released, has audio clearly recording one of the surviving students yelling in distress: “The police are now coming,
the federales are staying and they are going to want to screw us over!� The student clearly makes the distinction between local police and federal police. In sum, various levels of government were much more aware of the students, and more present at key points throughout the evening in question, than has been previously admitted. Hernandez made it clear to teleSUR, however, that their investigation didn't reveal whether or not the United Warriors gang were involved with the massacre. Her partner Fisher said: “We cannot say whether or not Guerreros Unidos was ultimately involved with this, or
not, but we can say that the evidence we have acquired was that they were tortured [before their testimonies were given]. It is thus suspect that they could actually get proper testimonies considering the fact that they were tortured brutally, including electric shocks to testicles and extreme beatings.” Hernandez added that other telltale signs of torture were uncovered in their investigation, including bruised ribs, blackened eyes and black-and-blue marks on the neck. Such findings were especially damning, Hernandez pointed out, considering that, “the attorney general’s version was based solely on testimony by presumed drug traffickers.” Fisher expanded, telling teleSUR, “I would say that in any case where there is torture involved,
it brings into question the entire investigation. It would be interesting to know why the PGR would base this very important investigation on, according to their own documents, information obtained through people that were brutally beaten and tortured.� Hernandez and Fisher wrote that the Peùa Nieto administration has withheld the information they reported on. Soon after the disappearance of the education students, the Guerrero Attorney General's Office requested that the Mexican Federal Police hand over extensive documentation related to the potential participation of federal police agents, including the exact registries of when agents clocked in and out while on the job the night of the attack.
However, the investigation added that since the Peña Nieto's administration took over the investigation this past Oct. 4, the requested documentation was never handed over to the Guerrero office. “It is clear that the PGR has been manipulating the case, that the federal government has been manipulating the case, and that now, the official version of the case has been shown to not be trustworthy,” Hernandez passionately asserted during the extensive interview, adding that in subsequent conversations with government officials, none of their allegations were officially denied to either of the reporters.
Investigation Implications
Points
to
a
Number
of
Considering the many contradictions between the investigation and official accounts, many questions can be asked. Since Mexican officials have long-claimed that United Warriors was the group which took custody of the students from local police, who had initially detained them, have there been any false arrests among the some 74 people that have been rounded up since Sept. 26? The accused leader of the United Warriors, Sidronio Casarrubias, is among the many detained, who include an array of local law enforcement officials. Casarrubias has since
revealed to officials the kind of relationship he had with Abarca while he was mayor, but it is not clear whether or not he was among the five people tortured in Herandez and Fisher's account. “United Warriors has sewn a web of complicity with several mayors and above all with security officials,” Murillo previously told the press. “In Iguala, the complicity was between the authorities, the local police and the United Warriors,” Murillo added. If there is one official acknowledgment which Hernandez and Fisher do not dispute, it is the systematic relationship that exists between drug cartels and the Mexican state.
It is that very relationship which has served as a spark plug to a nation that has undertaken a significant amount of resistance since Sept. 26. Nationwide Movement Continues to Wage Protest The revelations by Herandez and Fisher come at a time that the nation's ire was already raised to a feverish boiling point. In one of the largest countries and economies of Latin America, Mexico has witnessed near-daily, and nationwide, actions of resistance. Since the disappearance of the “normalistas� on Sept. 26, the country has been brimming with mass marches, candle-light vigils, university and labor-union-led strikes, occupations of
official and university buildings, riot police-led arrests of demonstrators, property destruction of official buildings, sit-ins, panels ruminating over the ills of narco-state violence and international bridge closings. Most recently, at least 22 people were injured this past Sunday during protests in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, in which police opened fire on demonstrators. teleSUR reported that three parents of the forcibly disappeared, a journalist, a student from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a member of an education union were among those injured. The violent law enforcement response to the protests, specifically that of Sunday's occurrences, prompted the National Human
rights Commission to demand that authorities conduct themselves within the law. The disappearance clearly served as the catalyst for the movement's inception, much of the country has long been weary of the systematic problem of disappearances, and the eery official impunity which has often surrounded them. Conservative official estimates put the disappearances at nothing less than 22,000 over the course of the last three years alone. Other analysts estimate the actual total as being higher than that. Mass Graves Point to Narco-State Crimes
The disappearances of the “normalistas” are emblematic of a long-running problem in Mexico: thousands upon thousands of cases of disappearances, many of whose investigations were found 'inconclusive' and long ago closed, exist throughout the country.
Some estimates range as high as 24,000 disappearances having occurred since 2011 alone, the overwhelming amount of which were “unsolved” and/or “closed” cases. In another case of official law enforcement involvement in a crime, 22 alleged kidnappers were summarily executed by Mexican soldiers in Tlatlaya in June 2014. A federal judge recently charged three soldiers with murder and four others with abuse of
authority and other charges in relation to the massacre. At least a dozen mass grave sites have been discovered since the time of the Ayotzinapa disappearances. Meanwhile, movement activists and organizers alike have alleged that many more mass grave sites exist than those officially acknowledged. Regardless of the real total of mass graves, their undisputed existence still points to a problem more familiar to locals and residents of the area: Guerrero is not only a drug war-torn state, but a complex nexus of
corruption and corroboration between local, regional and state authorities and their allies in street gangs and powerful drug cartels. Even federal officials have since admitted that the case of the disappeared students points to a larger, narco-state reality. While the troubles of living under a narcostate have long-been familiar to residents in Guerrero, in the wake of what seemingly is a never-ending case of the disappearances of the Guerrero students, it has now become a reality with which the whole nation of Mexico, and well beyond, are becoming familiar with as well.
But now, in light of the explosive allegations revealed by Hernandez and Fisher, it will become yet a more complex reality with which the nation will have to come to grips and to which the government may have to provide yet more answers during tiring press conferences. A scientist from Mexico’s largest university, the UNAM, published a detailed report that showed the 43 missing students couldn’t have been burnt in a Cocula waste dump.
Every day, more statements or proof come out showing that the Mexican General
Attorney’s claim that the missing 43 were killed and burnt in a rubbish dump isn’t true. Attorney General Jesus Murillo, claimed that people who had been arrested for allegedly partipcating in the kidnapping said the Ayotzinapa students were taken to a garbage dump in Cocula where they were killed and incinerated by the Guerreros Unidos group on the night of September 26. However, scientists of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) published a detailed report on Thursday that refutes the government’s version, They explained that to have burnt that many
people, it would have been necessary to use enormous quantities of fuel. “The hypothesis that the students were burned in Cocula has no scientific explanation,” said Jorge Montemayor, researcher at UNAM’s Physics Institute, during a press conference. Montemayor explained that 33 tons of four inch logs (two trailers of logs) would have been needed to burn the bodies. He also said that 116.6 pounds of gas for each body would also have had to have been used. The professor added that if the bodies had been burned with tires, then the criminals
would have needed to use 995 car tires. Futher, 2.5 tonnes of barbs would have been left over, and a big column of black smoke would have been visible from very far away. “It is impossible that (the missing 43) were burned in Cocula and authorities have a serious problem, because if they were not burned there, then who did it and where?� asked Montemayor. It is not the first time that experts criticize government's investigation, but nobody so far has refuted it in such detail. On the night of September 26, Iguala police shot at several buses taken by the
Ayotzinapa students, killing three of them and another three civilians. According to authorities, the police then “arrested” 43 students and handed them over to the ‘Guerreros Unidos.’ That gang, according to the Mexican attorney general, is controlled by the former mayor of Iguala and his wife, who were recently captured by the police. They are accused of being the masterminds behind the violent incidents of September 26. Since then, only the remains (ashes) of one student, Alexander Mora, which according to the authorities were found inside a plastic
bag that was thrown to a river, have been identified. The UNAM’s report was published just days after the Argentine forensics team that is helping the parents of the missing 43 to identify the remains found in Guerrero, said that, despite Mora’s remains having been identified, the team cannot confirm the government’s version because they did not witness where the remains were found.
Merida Initiative South of the US Border, the War on Drugs Is Really a War on People
Mexicans confront a “social war” disguised as a fight against narcotraffic
Is the CIA behind Mexico’s Bloody Drug War? What Are the U.S.'s Real Motives for Launching a Drug War in Mexico? Are Mexico’s Missing Students the Victims of U.S.-Backed Drug War? Amidst outrage in Mexico over the disappearance of 43 students, we look at the U.S. role in the country’s violence. According to the Center for International Policy, the United States has spent
approximately $3 billion to fund the socalled war on drugs in Mexico. Since the war on drugs began under President Felipe Calder贸n in 2006, more than 100,000 people have been killed in drugrelated violence. U.S. support includes $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds through the Merida Initiative, launched as a threeyear aid program for Mexican security forces under the administration of George W. Bush. The Obama administration has extended the Merida Initiative "indefinitely." Plan Mexico and the War on Drugs The U.S. gives hundreds of millions of dollars to Mexico each year. The vast majority of this aid is
funneled into the disastrous and failed war on drugs. Plan Mexico (officially known as the Mérida Initiative) began as a three-year plan under the administration of George W. Bush in 2007 and was first funded by the U.S. Congress in 2008. Its stated goal is to support Mexico’s security forces, especially (but not exclusively) for counter-narcotics efforts, ostensibly aimed at disrupting the flow of drugs and dismantling drug trafficking organizations. President Barack Obama has extended “indefinitely”. The facts:
Plan
Mexico
The Mérida Initiative has already cost U.S. taxpayers $2.4 billion dollars. The Obama administration has requested another $115 million for Mérida in its FY2015 budget. The Department of Defense has spent $214.7 million on the Mexican drug war just since 2011 (the years for which data are available). Additional public funds for Mexico’s drug war come through the Department of Justice for extensive Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) operations in Mexico.
The U.S. government has spent approximately $3 billion dollars since 2008 on the war on drugs in Mexico alone. What have been the results of Plan Mexico?  More than 150,000 murdered in widespread drug war-related violence;  More than 45,000 disappeared, hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes, tens of thousands of orphans and incalculable psychological trauma;
Numerous mass graves in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and many other states – each with dozens, even hundreds of unidentified bodies; A dramatic increase in human rights violations committed by Mexican security forces, including thousands of documented cases of torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions; A huge rise in violations of the rights and physical safety of transmigrants in the country;13 and an
increase in violations of the rights of women and sexual crimes, including femicides. The evidence of CIA involvement in the drug trade is vast, documented and compelling. Still, does that mean that there is some nefarious 3-way connection between the Sinaloa Cartel, the Peña Nieto administration and the CIA? ”What does Washington want from Mexico? On the security side, the U.S. seeks total control of Mexico’s security apparatus. With the creation of NORTHCOM (Northern Command) designed to protect the U.S. landmass
from terrorist attack, Mexico is designated North America’s southern security perimeter and U.S. military aircraft now has carte blanche to penetrate Mexican airspace. Moreover, the North American Security and Prosperity Agreement (ASPAN in its Mexican initials) seeks to integrate the security apparatuses of the three NAFTA nations under Washington’s command. Now the Merida Initiative signed by Bush II and Calderon in early 2007 allows for the emplacement of armed U.S. security agents – the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, and ICE – on Mexican soil and contractors like the former Blackwater cannot be far behind. Wars are fought for juicy government contracts and $1.3 billion in
Merida moneys are going directly to U.S. defense contractors – forget about the Mexican middleman. On the energy side, the designated target is, of course, the privatization of PEMEX, Mexico’s nationalized oil industry, with a particular eye out for risk contracts on deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico utilizing technology only the EXXONs of this world possess.” (John Ross, “The Big Scam : How and Why Washington Hooked Mexico on the Drug War) The drug war is the mask behind which the real policy is concealed. The United States is using all the implements in its national security toolbox to integrate Mexico into a North America Uberstate, a hemispheric free trade zone that removes
sovereign obstacles to corporate looting and guarantees rich rewards for defense contractors. As Ross notes, all of the usual suspects are involved, including the FBI and CIA. That means the killing in Juarez will continue until Washington’s objectives are achieved. Today the Alliance for the Prosperity and Security of North America, organized by the governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico in 2005, serves as a militaristic weapon. The Alliance is an expansion of the Plan Puebla-Panamå of 2001 that aimed at the integration of southern Mexico with Central America and Colombia. In 2008 the Alliance was strengthened by the Merida Initiative/Plan Mexico, an international
security treaty established by the United States with Mexico and Central America ostensibly to fight the narcotraffic and integrate Mexico and Central America with the Northern Command of the United States.
These plans better Washington’s chances of firming up energy security: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Colombia are oil countries. The plans also make it easier for the United States, Canada, and Mexico to use their arms against both outside threats and, above all, internal opposition. They represent a new phase of contemporary imperialism.
What are the real targets of these plans for the international coordination and militarization of the struggle against supposed terrorists and narcos? The plans are aimed at immigrants, original peoples, guerrilla resistance, political dissidents, and social movements protesting transnational corporations that take over water and cause mining pollution. These plans, financed by billions of dollars, have made Mexico a security priority for the U.S. ruling class. They serve to “justify� sending U.S. personnel into Mexico to take part in intelligence operations and to tighten control over the populations of both nations.
They do not know that this war is an excuse for militarizing the nation. Only 2 percent of Mexicans read a newspaper; only 4 percent ever buy a book. Everyone has television, and the two television monopolies, Televisa and TV Azteca, known as the media “duopoly,” are under the iron control of two of the billionaires topping Mexico’s wealthy elite. The TV duopoly, a powerful propaganda machine, is a key player on the neoliberal stage, saluting Calderón’s war, spewing ultraconservative pap, and warning about “the danger to Mexico” posed by such honest political figures as Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the real winner of the stolen 2006 and 2012 presidential elections.
Five transnational corporations control the U.S. mass media for imperialist interests. They say nothing or spread lies about the people’s uprisings in Mexico and the Mexican immigrants in the United States.6 The U.S. government is focusing its gun sights on the rising Mexican opposition. Uncle Sam wants control over Mexican oil, minerals, uranium, water, and biodiversity. And he wants to keep that cheap immigrant labor cheap. So he works with the Mexican business elite and its government. The elite loves Uncle Sam like kids love Santa Claus. The elite’s Business Coordinating Council of big capitalists is crying for
more aid in fighting the cartels. And the aid is pouring in. It does not come in a reindeer sleigh, mind you, but as Blackhawk helicopter gunships that spit fire and death. The Mexican government is not a “failed” state. It is, rather, a state of “failed law.” It is not a failed state because it carries out well the tasks assigned to it in the empire’s design. All Washington’s propaganda backs up the militarization of Mexico in order to protect the interests of transnational corporations and foreign banks. The problem of narcotraffic has to do not only with militarization, bad government, or “failed states.” Washington’s decades
of all-out campaigns against narcotraffic in Colombia and Mexico, in Bolivia and Afghanistan, and in the United States itself, have repeatedly ended in failure. All the experts say so. You catch a capo and another takes his place; you knock out a drug route to the United States and other routes open up; the forbidden but highly profitable stuff is in the merchandise flowing north under free trade. Yes, endless failure. But haven’t the repressive campaigns really succeeded? They enrich (mainly U.S.) bankers through secret arrangements to launder drug money, while recycling phenomenal amounts of dirty money into many sectors of the legitimate economy. They also keep up huge profits in the international drug
market for the exporting countries and their governments, a large part of which is recycled into the international arms market for the benefit of mostly U.S. arms manufacturers. The United States sells more weapons than all the other arms-producing countries put together. It is the arsenal of death. The “failures” of the campaigns against the narcotraffic help to justify war, state violence, and massive repression in whole societies. The “war against drugs” sponsored by Washington and its allies has nothing to do with “national security” or ending the drug traffic. The “war on drugs” has everything to do with profits—and with the forging of
strategic alliances against democratic anti-imperialist governments such as those in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The key alliance for the United States in Latin America is the chain of neoliberal governments on the Pacific Coast: Chile, Peru, Colombia, all of Central America (except Nicaragua where Washington is fomenting a “failed state”), and Mexico. The chain is made of iron: each government is an enemy of its people.
Here is the evidence and—you guessed it —another Plan! In fourteen documents, recently declassified by the Presidency of the Republic about “Plan Mexico 2030, Project of Great Vision,” are the details of
thematic workshops convoked by Calderón in October 2006. Plan Mexico 2030, says political scientist Gilberto López y Rivas, violates the 1917 Mexican Constitution and guarantees the future “integral occupation of the country” by the United States. The Plan calls for the privatization of the energy sector, biosphere reserves, education, social security for state employees, and other public services. It calls for the repression and cooptation of social movements. López y Rivas maintains that the plan is inspired by imperialism and that Mexicans confront a “social war” disguised as a fight against narcotraffic. The aim of the plan and the dominant political class, according to López y Rivas,
“is to finish off the Mexican state.” Journalist Carlos Fazio adds that what is happening in Mexico is a “low intensity war that combines intelligence work, civic action, psychological war and control of the population….The center of gravity is no longer the battlefield as such, but rather the social-political arena.
Drug War, Militarization, Violence and Human Rights Violations under the Peña Nieto Government Home Facts Drug War, Militarization, Violence and Human Rights Violations under the Peña Nieto Government
Background: Then-President Felipe Calderon (20062012) aggressively escalated the “war on drugs” in Mexico in December of 2006, with the encouragement of the U.S. government. He deployed more than 45,000 soldiers, and more than 96,000 at peak deployment throughout the country. During his administration, spending on security rose 600% including increased funding to police, army and navy – to the detriment of spending on basic needs and infrastructure.[1] President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued the militarization of Mexican
society that his predecessor began, increasing support to the armed forces for law enforcement to double 2007.[2] Human rights violations including arbitrary detention, kidnapping, torture, and extra-judicial killings by security forces have continued. Even the U.S. Department of State’s 2013 Human Rights Report concludes: “Despite some arrests for corruption, widespread impunity for human rights abuses by officials remained a problem in both civilian and military jurisdictions.�[3] Homicides, Massacres:
Clandestine
Graves
and
In the first 20 months in office (between December 2012 to June 2014) 57,899 people have died in acts of violence related to the war on drugs (homicides and manslaughter). This estimate far exceeds Peña Nieto’s predecessor, Felipe Calderon’s first 20 months in office (43,694).[4] The San Fernando Migrant Massacre and police involvement: In August of 2010, 72 migrants were found murdered in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Recently, declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive under Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act reveal the active participation of local police in the abduction of the migrants, along with the
Zetas.[5] Internal cables indicate that both the U.S. and Mexican federal governments were aware of the collusion between police and the Zetas, one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels. FOIA requests have been necessary due to the Mexican government’s refusal to provide basic information to the public. Mass graves: In the search for the students around Iguala, more than 30 unidentified bodies were found in mass graves. This is considered the tip of the iceberg.[6] The discovery of mass graves in San Fernando in 2011 (196 bodies) and in
Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon in 2012 (49), to mention only the larger cases, proves that the San Fernando massacre and the Iguala attacks are not isolated incidents. [7] Disappearances: The Federal Attorney general’s office reported that there are 22,322 persons “missing”; 12,532 under the Calderon administration and 9,790 during the Peña Nieto administration up to July 31, 2014. [8] Even the government’s figures do not match however, and human rights organizations say the numbers could be far higher. In August 2014 the office of the
UN high Commissioner on human rights in Mexico warned of a “critical situation� in terms of forced disappearances in Mexico, with recent cases on top of the impunity of cases dating back to the seventies dirty war. Mexico ratified the International Convention on enforced Disappearances on March 18, 2008. However, a 2014 report denounces three common types of disappearances: by state agents, by state agents acting with members of organized crime and by organized crime with the authorization, support or acquiescence of state agents. Of 291 cases brought to trial, only six resulted in sentences since 2006. [9]
According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2014, “Members of all security force branches continue to carry out disappearances during the Peña Nieto administration, in some cases collaborating directly with criminal groups. In June 2013, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said it was investigating 2,443 disappearances in which it had found evidence of the involvement of state agents.”[10] Extrajudicial Executions: Tlatlaya, Mexican Army accused of extrajudicial executions in death of 22 youth.
On June 30, the 102 Battalion of the Mexican Army confronted an alleged delinquent gang in San Pedro Limon, municipality of Tlatlaya, Mexico State, leaving 22 young people dead and no casualties on the side of the army. An investigation by AP and human rights groups and confirmed suspicions that the youth were shot at close range. Later, local witnesses came forth who stated that the army executed the majority of the youth after they gave themselves up. Witnesses say 21 were executed, while the National Commission on Human Rights recognizes 15 victims with clear signs of execution.[11] Witnesses and physical evidence shows that Army personnel altered the crime scene to reinforce the
pretext of an armed confrontation. The unit was under the command of Lt. Ezequiel Rodríguez Martínez. General José Luis Sánchez León, commander of the 22nd Military Zone responsible for Tlatlaya, was subsequently removed from his post without explanation or trial. One officer and seven soldiers are under arrest and currently being investigated. A Mexican Congressional Committee has been formed to investigate. The State Department confirms that 5 members of the 102nd Battalion were trained by U.S. agencies. A witness who was sent to highsecurity prison and later release for lack of evidence reported that she was tortured and beaten to confess and corroborate the Army’s account.[12]
The Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of Guerrero includes the Ayotzinapa case (see Fact Sheet 3) among extrajudicial executions by state forces, stating in an urgent alert Sept. 29, “These events demonstrate an excessive use of force and an intention to deliberately extrajudicially execute students by the Municipal Police and an omission on the part of state and federal authorities for failing to implement appropriate security measures that would have prevented a second aggression and the disappearance of 55 local students.� (12 were subsequently located alive).
“These [Iguala and Tlatlaya] are the worst atrocities we’ve seen in Mexico in years, but they are hardly isolated incidents. Instead, these killings and forced disappearances reflect a much broader pattern of abuse and are largely the consequence of the longstanding failure of Mexican authorities to address the problem.” – José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director, Human Rights Watch Military Abuses: According to Human Rights Watch, “From December 2006 to mid-September 2013, the National Human Rights
Commission (CNDH) received 8,150 complaints of abuse by the army, and issued reports on 116 cases in which it found that army personnel had committed serious human rights violations.�[13] Police Corruption and the Failure of Police Reform: A March 2009 cable from the Monterrey, Nuevo Leon Consul reported “no real improvement� as a result of U.S.-funded police vetting and other police reform aid and reported estimates that 50-60% of both local and state police were infiltrated by drug cartels.[14] In Guerrero, a
quarter of the police force failed to pass vetting and in other states the figure is above 40%, and many remain on active duty.[15] Despite this information and its own human rights reports on Mexico, the State Department has irresponsibly refused to critically analyze the abysmal results of Plan Mexico spending. Impunity and Lack of justice: In 2013, 93.8% of crimes went unpunished or uninvestigated. Many crimes are not being reported to the authorities for lack of confidence in results, fear of re-victimization and discrimination in the case of women and
indigenous peoples, or concern that the authorities operate in collusion with the criminals.[16] Only 1% of disappearances reported to authorities in Mexico are even investigated.[17] According to the 2014 Americas Barometer regional poll, Mexico ranks among the highest in the region in both public perceptions of impunity and public distrust of law enforcement.[18] Criminalizing Protest and Activism: During Peùa Nieto’s administration, 669 human rights defenders have been arbitrarily detained.[19]
State Use of Torture: The use of torture by members of the police and armed forces rose 600% over the past ten years of the war on drugs, according to an Amnesty International report released in September 2014. The report notes a “serious rise of torture and other ill-treatment and a prevailing culture of tolerance and impunity” and documents that “Only seven torturers have ever been convicted in federal courts and even fewer have been prosecuted at state level.”[20] According to Human Rights Watch, “Between January and September 2013,
the National Human Rights Commission received more than 860 complaints of torture or cruel or inhuman treatment by federal officials.� According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2014 profile of human rights situation in Mexico: [21] Investigative reports have found evidence of torture in the Tlatlaya and Ayotzinapa cases.[22] In both cases, torture was used to extract false confessions and testimony to support the government version of events. The government has not responded to these accusations.
Manifest Failure to Guarantee the Physical Safety and Basic Human Rights of its Citizens: More than 100,000 murdered in drug war-related violence More than 25,000 disappeared, tens of thousands forced to flee their homes, thousands of orphans and incalculable psychological trauma Mass graves in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and other states with unidentified bodies Rise in violations of the rights and physical safety of transmigrants in the country
Increase in torture and extrajudicial executions Gender Violence Unpunished:
–
Unchecked
and
The National Observatory on Femicides reports nearly 4,000 femicides in the first two years of the Peña Nieto administration.[23] The state of Mexico where he served as governor is among the most dangerous in the nation for women. Rise in violations of the rights of women and sexual crimes, including femicides. State Violence, Repression and Torture While Enrique Peña Nieto was Governor of Mexico State:
The repression of social protest under President Enrique Pe単a Nieto should come as no surprise, since he has shown himself willing to viciously crackdown on communities in resistance when he was a governor. Atenco, an indigenous community in the State of Mexico, was brutally repressed in 2006 by state police under command of then-governor Enrique Pe単a Nieto. During the attack, police inflicted cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment on hundreds of innocent people, arbitrarily arrested nearly 150 people, raped or otherwise sexually assaulted dozens of women (and men), and killed at least two individuals (including one minor).[24]
Drug War, Militarization, Violence and Human Rights Violations under the Peña Nieto Government President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued the militarization of Mexican society that his predecessor began, increasing support to the armed forces for law enforcement to double 2007. Human rights violations including arbitrary detention, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings by security forces have continued. Even the U.S. Department of State’s 2013 Human Rights Report concludes: “Despite some arrests for corruption, widespread impunity for human rights abuses by officials remained a problem in both civilian and military jurisdictions.”
Drug War, Militarization, Violence and Human Rights Violations under the Peña Nieto Government President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued the militarization of Mexican society that his predecessor began, increasing support to the armed forces for law enforcement to double 2007. Human rights violations including arbitrary detention, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings by security forces have continued. Even the U.S. Department of State’s 2013 Human Rights Report concludes: “Despite some arrests for corruption, widespread impunity for human rights abuses by officials remained a problem in both civilian and military jurisdictions.”
The energy reform law, adopted in December 2013, is a bonanza for environmentally destructive international oil and gas companies. The law opens the oil and gas industry to private and foreign investment, and allows “licenses”, or concessions, to companies for certain unconventional projects, primarily shale. The head of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute described the law’s passage as “Christmas arriv[ing] early” for transnational oil and gas companies.As NACLA states, “International investors and corporations have been allowed to further accumulate and control the country’s natural resources, no small
matter for the world’s sixth largest producer of oil.” Peña Nieto’s energy reform requires that energy extraction take priority over agricultural production and that farmers must give up their lands. Protestors say the slew of recent reforms will “lead to the eviction and appropriation of fertile lands for big companies.” Telecommunications Law Erodes Internet Freedom, Increases State Surveillance and Benefits Big Telecoms Companies With the passage of the telecommunications law, Mexico became
the first western democracy to adopt a law curtailing internet freedom. The law allows government to censure television and block internet service, and benefits telecoms giants like Televisa and America Movil.The law eliminates net neutrality by allowing service providers to charge different rates for different levels of service; creates a Federal Institute of Telecommunications that has vast surveillance powers; allows for geolocalization and warrantless surveillance of telecommunications; gives authorities the power to block internet content in violation of the constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression; allows authorities to suspend all telecommunications in cases of supposed
threats to national security; requires service providers to keep two years of records of users’ online activities – data to which government security agencies have access; and increases significantly the amount of advertising allowed on public television. Privatization of Education The education reform aims to privatize public education in Mexico. Opponents believe the law will result in decreased teachers’ job security; the introduction of, and overreliance upon, standardized testing; and deepening inequality between richer and poorer schools. Teachers who
miss work on three days in a row or within a month “without a valid reason” can be fired; because “valid reason” is ambiguously defined, the law will lead to the arbitrary termination of good teachers. The law does nothing to improve curricula, grading systems, or textbooks – much less the knowledge, skills and abilities that students are expected to obtain. In fact, by relying heavily on standardized testing, it promotes a mechanical form of teaching and ignores the proposals of teachers, parents, and indigenous people’s community representatives, who mostly think these changes will turn children into robots ready for low-wage labor and make teachers too afraid to think creatively.
Finance & Tax Reforms Favor Big Banks, Restrict Access to Credit and Likely Will Increase Inequality Opponents of the financial reform believe it will favor big banks, while at the same time denying access to credit for millions of Mexicans. With a supposed goal of injecting capital into Mexico’s economy and stimulate lending to small and midsized businesses (which produce half of the country’s wealth and 70% of its jobs), the reform has so far had the opposite effect: enriching big lenders, who have withheld credit to most small and midsized business (since such loans are less profitable than consumer banking). Only
one in four of such businesses actually received financing since the reform’s passage. Credit has also been denied to small agricultural producers.
Similarly, many believe the tax reforms, ostensibly aimed at increasing Mexico’s historically low tax base, will end up increasing inequality and increasing taxes for Mexico’s middle class. So far it clearly has not lived up to its promise of increasing economic growth, since predictably Mexican consumers are spending and investing less. Although the tax reform has resulted in some increases
in revenues collected, these increases are similar to past years prior to reform. Moreover, the widespread perception among the Mexican public is that they are not nearly receiving their monies’ worth back in services for what they are paying in raised taxes – suggesting a continued need to address corruption, improve transparency, reduce excessive or unnecessary public spending and improve the quality of such spending. Labor Reform Designed to Break the Back of Authentic Organized Labor The first structural reform adopted, the labor reform, undermines any and all
forms of authentic labor unions (e.g. those not coopted by the state apparatus), in an attempt to eliminate likely political resistance to the rest of Peùa Nieto’s economic program.] It also lowered the minimum wage. Transnational Corporations Continue to Profit From Failed Drug War Under Peùa Nieto
The failed drug war results in thousands of deaths and disappearances each year in Mexico. Yet transnational business and other economic interests have been
profiting from these devastating policies – and continue to do so under President Peña Nieto.
Military contractors and agencies of both governments benefit from ongoing drug war. Private U.S. military contractors, like DynCorp International, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC, are among the leading beneficiaries of Plan Mexico, much like Plan Colombia a decade ago, scoring “lucrative federal counternarcotics contracts amounting to billions of dollars, without worry of oversight or accountability.” U.S. has
been key in Mexico’s increasing surveillance state, the danger of which has only increased after passage of Peña Nieto’s intrusive telecoms reform. Meanwhile, the widespread violence of the drug war, coupled with Peña Nieto’s economic reforms, have actually resulted in a more comfortable and profitable environment for global corporations than ever before.The reinforcing nature of Peña Nieto’s economic and drug war policies are described by Canadian journalist Dawn Paley, who argues that there is a pattern of displacement of poor, largely rural communities from their territories by transnational corporations and government forces, which in turn
exploit resources and open areas up for investment. As Paley states:
If the U.S. went into Mexico and said “OK, we’re going to fight a war for territory because we want to take all of these resources away from the people,” you’d have widespread resistance throughout the country. With a discourse that says “we’re fighting these drug cartels that are violent and out of control,” they’re invited in and welcomed. Terror plays a huge role in the kind of social control that is exercised in Colombia and Mexico. I think it’s
discursively a very effective way of allowing for accumulation through dispossession. Drugs have often been used as a way to get an exception or a trump card. It’s a very effective way to legitimize accumulation through dispossession.
Peña Nieto’s Policies Have NOT Benefitted the Majority of Mexicans Conclusion: Something has gone terribly wrong in Mexico. US policy has supported and encouraged this path to humanitarian
disaster. Since 2007, the Merida Initiative has propped up presidents who sought to repress social protest, cover up corruption and benefit from criminal activity, rather than fight crime or increase public safety. Our tax dollars have gone to fuel high levels of violence and provide specialized combat and intelligence training to corrupt police and military forces. These cases are the most recent and among the most egregious cases of crimes by Mexican security forces, but they are by no means the only ones. U.S. aid to these forces, far from improving the situation is increasing abuses. It should be halted immediately.
Article 39 of the Constitution grants the people national sovereignty and “the inalienable right to change or modify the form of their government.� With a Constituent Assembly, anything is possible, as we have seen in Bolivia and Ecuador. All major political parties have become neoliberal and corrupt. The independent unions include electrical workers, miners, university students and workers, and a breakaway union of schoolteachers. All of them are currently resisting fascistic repression and the right-wing offensive
Created by Rodrigo Vazquez
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