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.

You may recall that last year, I published this video about a group of Honduran mothers who came to Mexico looking for their missing family members and friends.

Since then, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has a carried out it’s own investigation into the problems Central and Latin American migrants encounter when they try to cross or enter Mexico, usually on route to the United States.

The report found 198 cases of migrant kidnappings during that time, with an average of 33 kidnappings a month – that’s more than one a day. During that period, 9,758 migrants were deprived of their liberty. More than 60 percent of kidnappings involved groups of migrants travelling together. The majority of those kidnapped were from Honduras (67 %). 18% of the victims were from El Salvador and 13% from Guatemala.

Who’s doing the kidnapping?

More than 9,000 of the victims were kidnapped by gangs that operate along Mexico’s migrant routes, 35 of them were kidnapped by police, migrant officials or other Mexican authorities, and 56 were taken by a combination of the two working together. In 6 of the cases, migrants were kidnapped by a single kidnapper.

According to the Commission’s research, the various kidnappers asked for a ransom of between US$1,500 to US$5,000 for their hostages, who were often blindfolded, driven to various locations, and in some cases only fed one meal a day, sometimes consisting of little more than bread or stale tortillas. The average price they demanded was around US$2,500, meaning that over the six-month period, kidnapping gangs or authorities made around US$25 million from ransom money out of the 9,758 victims detected by the study.

The president of the Comision Nacional de Los Derecho Humanos (CNDH) Dr. José Luis Soberanes Fernández, made a speech at the unveiling of the report here in Mexico City on Monday. Needless to say I wasn’t there in person due to my foot injury, but was sent the speech.

“These figure clearly show that the frequency and magnitude of migrant kidnappings represent an enormous level of this criminal activity, which means high earnings from delinquency.

He also said that the reaction of the Mexican authorities hasn’t been proportional to the severity and volume of the crimes against migrants in Mexico, leading to an increase in the impunity enjoyed by those who commit these crimes.

Gigi Bonnici, an independent human rights consultant, specializing in immigration and asylum issues who has six years of experience working with migrants and refugees in Mexico for a number of organizations including Sin Fronteras, said of the findings:

“The statistics are frightening, given that we are probably talking about thousands more, since this is obviously a very difficult issue to assess, primarily because the overwhelming majority of cases are not reported to anyone. The migrants often consider these crimes as part of the cost of migrating, part of the tax one has to pay for being poor and for crossing through Mexico and into the US without legal documents.”

She said that the fact that many migrants don’t know their rights combined with the indifference of the majority of the Mexican population compounds the problem.

“The international migrant population traveling through Mexico by train, by bus or on foot is by and large an invisible one to the majority of the Mexican population – invisible in the sense that they are essentially undocumented and live in fear of being discovered by any type of authority; invisible in the sense that they themselves are often unaware that as human beings they have the same rights as all of us to physical integrity and to be protected from criminal acts, whether they have legal status to be in the country or not; invisible in the sense that in the eyes of the authorities charged with protection they have no rights and so are not subject to protection by the state (which also means that criminal perpetrators who harm migrants are not subject to state investigation); invisible in the sense that (unlike other so-called vulnerable groups) migrants do not exist to the Mexican population at large – because they are considered criminals who are simply using passage through the desert to get to the north (in fact sometimes even considered as “competition” for those Mexicans who are trying to do the same thing), the public also does not believe that they should be owed protection by the state.”

Finally, Bonnici picks up on a point that explains why I choose to highlight this issue so frequently. Mexico and the Mexican Government have worked hard to gain recognition of the migrant rights of Mexicans in the United States. The issue of Mexico’s northern border with the United States and the thousands of migrants (of many nationalities) who die trying to cross it each year is a humanitarian tragedy. That said, it’s only fair that Mexico’s government and people turn their attentions to those migrants suffering within Mexico’s own borders and pay them the same respect they demand for their paisanos / countrymen abroad.

“Undocumented migrants have no access to justice in Mexico; at most, access to justice for migrants is conditioned on a regular legal status,” says Bonnici.

“If an undocumented migrant wishes to approach the police or prosecutor in order to lay a charge for a crime committed against him or her, or to provide witness testimony, he or she would risk being detained and deported. According to Article 67 of the General Populations Law and section 201 of its Regulations, the authorities are obliged to first confirm legal status of the claimant, and if the person cannot prove legal status in Mexico, he must be transferred to the migration authorities (which means, being detained in immigration detention prison and most likely deported). Why on earth would any migrant who already has suffered at the hands of criminals, expose himself to these risks, especially when there is strong evidence to suggest that the authorities are in collusion with the kidnappers, and when it is abundantly clear that the migrant will get no redress or restitution.

“This is obviously a significant violation to the right to equality before the law, and is also something Mexico has fought hard to get for its own migrants in the US.”

The CNDH’s investigation took place between September 2008 and February 2009 this year, and was carried out by Comission employees who toured migrant shelters throughout Mexico, from Chiapas all the way to Baja California and Nuevo Leon.

A group of Honduran men and women came to Mexico looking for their missing loved ones earlier this year. They claim that there are nearly 600 Honduran migrants who are missing in Mexico who disappeared whilst crossing Mexico to get to the United States.

Their visit coincided with a report that was published by Mexico’s federal human rights commission that alleged attacks against Central American migrants trying to cross Mexico were increasing.

Deborah Bonello and Ken Ellingwood reporting for the Los Angeles Times:

Ada Marlen was 17 and already the mother of two children when she set out from her home in Honduras to seek work in the United States. That was in 1989; her family hasn’t heard from her since.

“Nineteen years ago my daughter started her journey, in search of her American dream, and to this day I don’t know anything about her,” said her mother, Emeteria Martinez.

The 70-year-old was among a group of 15 Hondurans who traveled to Mexico recently to search for missing relatives and draw attention to the perils Central American migrants face en route to the United States.

Tens of thousands of Central Americans traverse Mexico illegally each year on their way to the U.S. border. The trek, which can involve perilous journeys by boat and through isolated countryside and mean city streets, often ends unhappily.

Emeteria Martinez, 70, from Honduras holds a photo of her daughter Ada Marlen, who disappeared nearly twenty years ago during a visit to Mexico City. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

See more photos for this story here on Flickr.

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.

Since 2000, 45 journalists have been killed in Mexico, according to the latest missive on the issue from the human rights body. Those who cover organized crime are especially at risk.

The appeal from the CNDH follows the recent murders of Miguel Ángel Villagómez Valle, editor of the newspaper La Noticia, in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán state; David García Monroy, columnist from El Diario, Chihuahua; and José Armando Rodríguez Carreón, from El Diario in Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua.

The largest number of killings of journalists has been in Tamaulipas, where nine cases were recorded since 2000. Six journalists were slain in Chihuahua, and four in each of the following states: Veracruz, Oaxaca and Michoacán.

The CNDH also refers to the recent attack on the offices of the Culiacán newspaper El Debate earlier this month, which it said was an attack on the fundamental rights of the newspaper’s workers. Two grenades were thrown at the offices in the early hours of the morning of Nov. 17. No one was hurt.

Towards the end of last week, the global non-profit Reporters Without Borders issued a statement appealing to the international community, and especially the United States and Canada, to grant asylum to journalists fleeing Mexico.

Violence against journalists in Mexico has become increasingly intense over the last few years. In 2007, Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report that the country in 2006 was second only to Iraq in dangers for journalists.

Today, the CNDH said that it “deplores…the lack of results from investigations to identify and apprehend those responsible.”

This post was written for La Plaza.

Will was filming violent street battles in the southern Mexican state two years ago when he was shot dead, and controversy has surrounded the search for those responsible.

In Oaxaca City yesterday, more that two thousand people marched across the state capital to the big central plaza, or Zocalo, in memory of the dead journalist. Their protest was mirrored across the border in the United States, where protesters staged a hunger strike outside Senator Hilary Clinton’s office in New York City, demanding a full investigation into the murder of Will.

The journalist’s family, friends and supporters believe that Will was gunned down from a distance by government-backed thugs and have rejected past official investigations into his death by the Mexican authorities.

But earlier this month two members of the protest movement the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, known in Spanish as APPO, were arrested in connection with Will’s murder. The official investigation into his death alleges that Will was shot at close range, not from far away, as his supporters claim.

The arrests were condemned by human rights groups including Amnesty International and Mexico’s own human rights commission, which claims that both the state and federal investigations into the death of the journalist included “irregularities”.

Click here for more on Mexico.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

According to El Universal, the Commission called for tolerance yesterday and voiced concern that attacks against emos violate the right to freedom of expression, equality, freedom of expression and the right to association.

The move by the human rights body follow disturbances which have taken place both inside and outside Mexico City, in which emos have been violently targeted. A peace rally staged last week did little to diffuse tensions, which this weekend were apparent during a march for tolerance through the city.

Since the first attack against the group of youths who identify themselves as ‘emos’ happened in Queretero at the beginning of the month, animosity has been growing amongst those who resent the ‘emo’ look and attitude.

Mexico’s City government now wants to create what it calls a round-table meeting to allow the various actors involved to exchange ideas and points of view, and to try to bring an end to ‘confrontations between youths who have a right to express themselves as they wish.’

Hernandez, again blogging, this time for LAWeekly, points out how Mexican television personalities are adding fuel to an already burning fire, one presenter referring to the emo social movement as ‘fucking bullshit.’

Hostility against emos in Mexico is being generated via the internet, and punks and skaters are currently being blamed as the perpetrators of the aggression towards them. But intellectuals and youth leaders interviewed in La Jornada on Friday said that the aggression is in fact way deeper than that.

Rather than a mere reflection of rivalry between different social movements or fashion groups, the aggression is the result of a deeply conservative society, according to Ignacio Pineda, the head of a cultural forum that is a meeting space for many different youth groups. It’s convenient for the government that there are growing divisions between youth movements, he continues.

Down at the glorieta on Mexico City’s Insurgentes today, where confrontations between emos and punks took place last week and where the emo’s generally hang out, things were quiet. Observers from the city’s Human Rights Commision were in attendance, as was a heavier than usual police presence in the area. But the young people themselves were keeping a low profile.

So where did this all start? And where is it all going? Hopefully, more will surface in the coming weeks and watch this space for video content on the issue….

Identifying himself as José Sánchez, the caller asked to speak to the publisher “for personal reasons.” The call was transferred to the editor, who said Castro was in a meeting and unavailable. The caller replied: “Tell her she has information, she knows what I am talking about, and if she publishes it, she will be killed.”

A few moments later, the editor took another call from someone identifying himself as Gumercindo Hernández, who said that he had been “nice until now” but “the situation could soon change” if his demands were not heeded.

According to NGOs, the aim of the threats is in fact coming from the authorities themselves. Reporters Without Borders says ‘the aim of the threats appears to have been to deter the newspaper from reporting that a local police inspector helped the town’s former police chief to evade arrest.’

The story behind the threats was revealed in an editorial in the newspaper yesterday: local police inspector Pedro Angel Márquez allegedly helped the town’s former police chief, Alvaro Mendoza Morales, to evade arrest. Mendoza is wanted for the 16 March shooting of a traffic policeman, Héctor Rafael Sorcia Reyes, who tried to take him to the police station when he was caught driving while drunk.

A complaint has been filed with the Veracruz state prosecutor’s office naming Márquez as main suspect in these threats. The newspaper also promised in yesterday’s issue that it would not let itself be intimidated. “We will not be silenced, neither now nor in the future.”

Local media, Governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán and the National Commission for Human Rights have also come out in support of the newspaper, which unlike some of its contemporaries, is as yet refusing to be silenced by the threats.

The development illustrates the role that the Mexican state authorities play in the repression and intimidation of journalists in the country.

While traveling home through Pánuco, Veracruz with his 16 year old son in late January this year, Octavio Soto Torres, journalist and director of the Mexican daily Voces de Veracruz, was shot at by four masked gunmen. This was just the latest in the ongoing litany of attacks against journalists in Mexico. Torres, who escaped alive, is known for his harsh criticism of local authorities.

As Mexico continues its transition towards a real democracy and the administration of President Felipe Calderon ups its fights against narco-traffick and organized crime in the country, journalists who cover politics, drugs and crime take huge risks. Attacks take place nearly every week and few are ever investigated, according to NGOs monitoring freedom of expression issues in the country.

Although fewer journalists were murdered in Mexico last year than during 2006, the levels of violence and intimidation against them have increased, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) and Mexico’s own National Human Rights Commission.

So what are editors and journalists doing to avoid serious harm? Mostly nothing – literally.
“I go around the country and journalists tell me they don’t cover things like this and have closed down the office in charge of police issues,” says Dario Ramirez, head of Article 19’s programme in Mexico.

In May last year, Cambio in the Northern State of Sonora closed its doors after two grenade attacks and what its editor said was a failure on the part of the Government to protect its 250 employees. In October, journalists of the Oaxacan newspaper “El Imparcial del Istmo” resigned out of fear for their lives following the killing of three of the newspaper’s employees and repeated threats after the newspaper reported the finding of a grave containing seven corpses.

In February 2006, the offices of El Mañana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo were attacked by men wielding grenades and assault rifles. A reporter was left paralyzed and the paper later announced that it would cease producing investigative reports on drug trafficking.

Much of the time, reporters don’t put their names to articles. But on a wider scale, violence against journalists has led to a widely used policy of self-censorship – a policy that was endorsed by the Attorney General of Mexico, Eduardo Medina Mora last year acknowledging the Government’s failure to address the problem and provide some form of protection for journalists by investigating crimes against them.

Leonarda Reyes, director of the Centre for Journalism and Pubic Ethics (CEPET) in Guadalajara, says: “Radio stations, newspapers and of course television news have stopped actively covering security and things linked to that issue and now only publish what is said in press conferences and press releases.”

Although she acknowledged the grave implications of such a policy for freedom of expression and information in Mexico, Reyes said that it was completely understandable. Neither the media nor reporters can solve a problem that corresponds to corruption within the police force across the country and Mexico’s violent drug wars, she says.

The pressure on journalists from corrupt state officials and drug-crime networks as well as very low wages makes it tempting for reporters to collude with the darker forces at work. Experts hint that some journalists are not targeted for their work, but as a result of personal grudges and for taking payoffs from dangerous types. If you can’t beat them, join them.