Every now and again, a story finds you. For me, one of the most moving stories that found me during my time in Mexico was that about people from Central American who cross Mexico on their way to the United States as undocumented migrants. It was something I reported on frequently, and when Marc Silver, a British filmmaker, came to Mexico City looking to make a series of films about the issue for Amnesty International, I was thrilled he planned to focus on the issue.

Marc had Gael Garcia Bernal on board as his presenter, and has produced some excellent advocacy work. “Los Invisibles” (the invisibles) series is beautifully produced and shot, giving voice to a community rarely asked it’s opinion.

The tone of these videos is not journalistic – Silver and Bernal have a very strong point to make on behalf of Amnesty International. They tell the stories of this group of people excellently. As media budgets diminish, we’re likely to see a lot more of this sort of work fill the information space left.

On how he and Bernal were received when they were making the film, Silver said:

“We were received very warmly. It is not often anybody asks their opinion or story, so people were very keen to share their experiences with us. It seemed to be a very empowering experience for people to talk about the horrors of the journey because it’s almost like these are taboo topics that no-one wants to discuss at home because they don’t want to scare their families, particularly their mothers.”

The films were shot mainly on DSLR using the Canon EOS 7d with a Canon EF 50 mm F1.2L USM lens, and a Canon EF 14 mm F2.8L II USM lens.

Click on the video to see the first of the four films, and that link will also take you to the rest of the series.

Also, do check out another film in the making from Marc called “Who Is Dayani Cristal?”, which is about the quest to identify an anonymous body found in the Arizona desert whose only identifying feature is a tattoo reading ‘Dayani Cristal’. Part drama, part documentary, the film again features Gael García Bernal. See the trailer here.

Mexico’s second annual human rights film festival, supported by a number of organizations here including the Mexico branch of Amnesty International, the Ambulante documentary film project and Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, opens at the end of the week.

The series of documentary and fiction features, as well as short films, come from 23 countries and will run on screens Aug. 14-20 in two of the city’s Cinepolis cinemas. The cinema chain’s Fundacion Cinepolis is the event organizer.

Unlike last year, this year’s festival will have two competitive sections: best Mexican documentary and best Mexican short.

Mexico has no shortage of human rights issues for documentarians to tackle, and among the fare at this year’s festival are themes such as migration, global warming, freedom of expression, child prostitution and the slayings of women in Ciudad Juarez.

Productions included in the program range from films such as “Los Que Se Quedan” (“Those Who Remain”), “Voces Silenciadas” (“Silenced Voices”) and “Sin Nombre” (“Nameless”), which have already made the film festival rounds, to less prominent documentaries.

Last year’s event attracted fewer than 4,000 visitors, and about 1,000 of those attended an open-air film broadcast in Mexico City’s Zocalo. In a city of more than 20 million people, that’s not a great turnout.

This year, organizers are going to charge 20 pesos per ticket, unlike last year, when screenings were free.

It’s hoped that charging for tickets might encourage more people to come and see the films. Lorena Guille, executive director of Fundacion Cinepolis, said, “There is a cultural perception here that what’s free isn’t of good quality.”

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Immigration, women’s rights, illegal detention and human trafficking are some of the themes that will be examined next week during Mexico’s first human rights film festival.

The weeklong event, which is to take place in two branches of the Cinepolis chain of cinemas in central Mexico City, is an attempt by a range of groups, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Mexico City’s own human rights commission, to advance the issue of human rights in Mexico.

Although the language of rights figures heavily in Mexican popular culture, political discourse and civil rights movements, there is still a lack of understanding about the details.

Liliana Valiña, the representative from the United Nations Commission for Human Rights here in Mexico, noted that most people haven’t read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was speaking at an event Thursday to launch the festival.

“They don’t know their rights,” Valiña said.

Film viewings, which kick off on Monday, are to be free to encourage the attendance of people across the social spectrum, said organizers, who are expecting up to 8,000 visitors to watch films throughout the week.

“Bajo Juarez,” a documentary about the murdered women of Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, will be featured in the festival, along with Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour”. Accompanying events such as open-air film showings in Mexico City’s Zocalo and Parque Mexico in La Condesa are also planned.

Of the 29 films on the program, 20 are Mexican. The other nine come from France, Chile, Spain, the United States, Britain and New Zealand, and they explore themes as diverse as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Guantanamo in Cuba and the victims of Liberia’s civil war.

This is the first of what is planned as an annual event, and organizers hope to expand the festival to other major cities in Mexico in the coming years.

Stay tuned for views and reviews of the films on show, and you can watch the trailer for the event here.

This post was written for La Plaza.

Photo: A promotional poster for the First International Festival of Human Rights Cinema, provided by the organizers.

The arrests have infuriated supporters of the dead journalist, who have campaigned for justice since his death and complained about official investigations into his murder.

They claim that Will, who was reporting for IndyMedia,  was shot dead by government agents in October 2006, while he was covering an anti-government protest in Oaxaca involving the People’s Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO).

Mexican government investigations, however, say that Will was shot at very close range, suggesting his assassins had to be fellow protesters or at least those in the crowd near him at the time of his death.

A deputy prosecutor said they identified the alleged shooter based on witness statements.

“All agree in identifying the suspect as the person who was about two meters in distance from the victim,” said the deputy prosecutor, Victor Emilio Corzo Cabañas.

Officials identified the suspected gunman as Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno. The other arrested man, Octavio Perez Perez, and at least eight other people are accused of helping hide Martinez.

Both were supporters of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, known in Spanish as APPO. The group’s leaders denied the allegations. LATimes

But as our friend Daniel Hernandez points out on his blog Intersections, stills from the final footage on Brad Will’s camara suggest otherwise.

The arrests of Martinez and Perez has prompted the National Commission for Human Rights in Mexico to label the investigation riddled with “omissions, deficiencies, irregularities, and delays.”

Amnesty International this afternoon called for the protection of Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno, currently in custody in Santa María Ixcotel, where the human rights organization claims the activist is at risk of being tortured in order to procure a confession to the crime of which he is accused. Amnesty also raised doubts about the thoroughness of the investigation into the journalist’s death.

Estas fallas incluyen la incapacidad para evaluar las pruebas forenses y la investigación de todos los posibles sospechosos, entre ellos funcionarios del Estado.

These failures include the inability to evaluate forensic evidence and the investigation of all of the possible suspects, amongst them, government employees. (Amnesty International statement).

For past posts on Brad Will, click here.

“Suddenly I heard a loud thud,” said Maria Luisa.

“When I ran inside to see what it was, my mother was on the floor crying. I said to her, ‘What is it? What is it?’

“The cell phone was on the floor and she was yelling: ‘Not my daughter! Not my daughter!’ ”

Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade disappeared on Feb. 14, 2001, when she was leaving the maquiladora, or factory, where she worked in Ciudad Juarez, which sits on the United States/Mexico border with Texas.

The 17-year-old mother of two never reached home. Five days later, her body was found on waste ground wrapped in a blanket, displaying signs of physical and sexual abuse, according to Amnesty International. She had been held captive for several days before she was killed.

Lilia Alejandra is one of the 370 women who have disappeared in Mexico’s Chihuahua state since 1993. Her story is the main focus of Bajo Juárez, a documentary film that was five years in the making and that opened here in Mexico this weekend.

Directors Alejandra Sánchez and José Antonio Cordero follow Alejandra’s mother Norma Andrade –- housewife turned activist -– in her unsuccessful campaign for justice over the death of her daughter in what is a moving and fair portrait of a community that feels utterly abandoned by its legal system.

The directors took a photojournalistic approach to the documentary, which features poignant video portraits of young women in Ciudad Juarez on their way to work or going about their daily business. The women stop for a few seconds to gaze into the lens of the video camera as life goes on around them.

But that’s the only beauty to be found in the film, which offers another necessary but ugly account of the repeated failure on the part of the Mexican authorities, local and federal, to put a stop to the killings and bring all of those responsible to justice.

The multitude of directors and film crews who have made films about the situation in Ciudad Juarez have reported hostility from authorities in the city, but director Sanchez said that wasn’t the problem in making the documentary, which was filmed discreetly with a very small crew.

“The biggest difficulty was giving order to what is universal chaos –- that was the hardest thing,” said Sanchez, who started work on the film with co-director Cordero in 2001.

As with the scores of young women who have been abducted and killed in Ciudad Juarez over the last decade, Alejandra’s unsolved case probably won’t be the last. And this documentary is one of dozens of other films, plays and other artistic projects to take up the cause –- the latest and most high profile project was a movie called BorderTown that starred Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas. That played across cinemas in Mexico earlier this year.

Although Bajo Juárez was finished more than two years ago, the documentary only made its commercial cinema debut this weekend. Sanchez said that it was “complicated” trying to get the film released earlier than that. Former Mexico President Vicente Fox, who refused to be interviewed for the film but whose administration provided archive footage, was the focus of Norma Andrade’s campaigning efforts. But Sanchez argues that it’s not important that Fox’s “sexenio,” or six-year term, ended before the film got its commercial release.

“I think [current Mexico President Felipe] Calderon has the same responsibility that Fox or [his predecessor] Ernesto Zedillo. This year alone, 35 women have disappeared,” says Sanchez.

Although the situation in Ciudad Juarez has persisted for more than a decade, inspired numerous media and Hollywood movie projects and become an international scandal for Mexican authorities, human rights groups say that many of the cases remain unsolved. Amnesty International also claims that “those responsible for the systematic failure of investigations have not been held to account.”

So the question is: Will this documentary make any difference?

“I think it’s really important that people see an X-ray of the system of impunity that exists in Mexico,” said Sanchez, adding that her expectations, nevertheless, are limited.

“My most realistic hope is that it leaves a record, on celluloid, of one of the blackest stories in Mexico’s history,” she says.

And while Bajo Juarez is an eloquent, honest account of these grim crimes, the killings of women in Ciudad Juarez are far from being part of history. Not yet.

Image: A screenshot from the documentary Bajo Juarez, provided through http://www.bajojuarez.com/
– This post was written for La Plaza, Los Angeles Times, by Deborah Bonello.

“Mr Calderón should also accept the conditions. Co-responsibility is
more than just sharing the financial and logistical burden of fighting
the war against drugs. In its broadest expression, it encompasses many
related spheres, including human rights. If he is to use the argument
of co-responsibility as a way to get the US to pay more, he must also
accept that it implies doing more to improve his country’s human-rights
performance”, writes the newspaper’s Mexico correspondent, Adam Thompson.

The Merida initiative was approved by house lawmakers earlier this month and the Senate is expected to follow suit. You can read all about the controversial package here, which is being opposed by groups on both sides of the border and all parts of the political spectrum. From Amnesty International and Friends of Brad Will (who campaign for justice after the journalist was shot dead in Oaxaca last year), to Republican groups.

The main worry is that the cash boost will place more arms and power in the hands of an already corrupt police and army in Mexico, and that the money should instead be spent on poverty-reduction programmes or, in the case of the Republicans, strengthening the border.

Meanwhile, as Ken Ellingwood reported earlier this month, opposition is also coming from within Mexico. Senior Mexican officials have called the provisions a form of U.S. interference and threatened to turn down the first-year installment if the conditions survive in a final version yet to be worked out by the
House and Senate. They want the human rights provisions on the Initiative deleted.

Luckily, the border’s Minuteman border group already have a plan in case the Merida Initative doesn’t pan out…

This post also appeared on La Plaza, the Los Angeles Times blog.

But unless the gap between their policies internationally and their performance at home is closed their credibility as human rights champions will be challenged, according to this week’s report from Amnesty International on human rights around the world.

You can access the report here and click on the links at the top for specific country reports.

Techniques traditionally used by Latin American countries to oppress political dissidents have been turned on human rights defenders and, in countries such as Mexico, journalists.

The war in Colombia continues to hit civilians the hardest:

“Civilians continued to bear the brunt of Colombia’s long-running internal armed conflict. Although the number of those killed or kidnapped continued to fall, all parties to the conflict – the security forces, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups – continued to commit serious human rights abuses. Hundreds of thousands of people were again displaced by confrontations between the warring parties.”

The United States seems to be softening on th death penalty:

“For many years, US policy on the death penalty has run counter to the abolitionist trend in the rest of the region. While 2007 saw death sentences imposed in the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the USA, the USA was the only country to carry out executions. However, even in the USA, there are signs that support for the death penalty is softening.”

And there seems to have been some progress on women’s rights:

“Latin America continued to take important and innovative steps to stamp out violence against women and make gender equality a reality. Mexico and Venezuela, for example, passed new laws to combat violence against women. These laws broaden the definition of violence against women and provide a more comprehensive framework of protection mechanisms. Some initiatives to tackle violence against women – for example the pioneering women’s police stations in Brazil – continued to be hampered by a lack of adequate resources and continuing misconceptions about the nature and extent of the problem.”

Impunity however, is still rife in the region due to corruption, inefficiency and a lack of political will on the part of each country’s justice system.

Although there are some effective justice processes taking place in Argentina, Peru and Chile for past abuses during the dirty wars on those countries – see this week’s post La Plaza on that – perpetrators of human rights abuses, particularly agents of the state, went unpunished:

“Human rights violations committed by agents of the state continued to be poorly investigated in most countries. In Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Jamaica, for example, human rights violations committed by law enforcement officials were rarely, if ever, prosecuted.”

See last year’s post on Amnesty’s Mexico Report.

In February this year, the car of Mexican journalist Estrada Zamora was found empty on the side of the road in the southern state of Michoacán with its engine running. Zamora was not inside and has not been seen since.

Click on the link above to read the full article, published today by Index on Censorship.

‘The [Mexican] government generally respected and promoted human rights at the national level by investigating, prosecuting, and sentencing public officials and members of the security forces. However, impunity and corruption remained problems, particularly at the state and local level. The following human rights problems were reported: unlawful killings by security forces; kidnappings, including by police; physical abuse; poor and overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency in the judicial system; confessions coerced through physical abuse permitted as evidence in trials; criminal intimidation of journalists leading to self-censorship; corruption at all levels of government; domestic violence against women, often perpetrated with impunity; violence, including killings, against women; trafficking in persons, sometimes allegedly with official involvement; social and economic discrimination against indigenous people; and child labor.

Read the full report here.

‘For the first time – and assuming that a majority of the country’s 31 local legislatures approves the constitutional change – defendants will be presumed innocent until proved guilty. Trials will become open and more transparent, with judges and lawyers having to work in public and under the scrutiny of the media.’

But according to human rights groups, some of the elements of the reforms threaten to undermine human rights by allowing prosecutors to enforce house-arrest on suspects or to put suspects in jail before they’re charged.

Alberto Herrera, executive director of , said: “We want the judicial system to be efficient but this can mean permission to violate human rights.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, ’71% of convicted defendants [in Mexico] said they never saw a judge before receiving their sentences. And about 47% of inmates in Mexico City’s prisons are serving sentences for robbery involving sums of less than $20.’

Lawyers will be allowed to make oral arguments to speed up trials, and authorities will be allowed to record private conversations to use as evidence – supposedly in for use in the Government’s fight against drug trafficking and organised crime.