Broadcast live on Ustream, June 24th 2009

Moderator: Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News
Panel:Ed Vulliamy, Guardian and Observer journalist and writer
Alex Tweddle<, director of Juarez City of Dreams
Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch

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.

THE BORDER REPORT

Is Caborca, Sonora, changing hands? If so, the latest would-be owners want everybody out, the narcos, the cops and the mayors of the Pinacate. And the new guys are backed by Macho Prieto, Mayo Zambada’s security chief.

What happened here last week was a sheer massacre, the carnage going far beyond what now passes for normal along the Mexican border.

The incident started with a mass kidnapping of four people in Plutarco Elias Calles, late Wednesday night. What happened next was pure Macho M.O., down to the matching cars, reminiscent of the Bazucaso de Obregón in early ‘05. On Thursday afternoon, a convoy of five Yukons stopped outside the state police substation, gunmen attacking the building with machine guns fired from the sunroofs. Nothing more than intimidation; only two hundred rounds and no serious injuries. The coup de grace came Friday when a Yukon blew past a federal checkpoint, headed north. The Policia Federal Preventiva chased the Yukon and found it abandoned on the side of road heading north to Sonoyta and the U.S. border. Inside the SUV, police found the bodies of eleven men, nine had been burned and chopped to pieces, the heads, arms and legs removed.

Read on….

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” It is an in-depth examination of the perceptions and realities of the crime problem in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

For about ten years there was a man who was known as the “go-to guy” in the Jewish community in case of a kidnapping. Before he retired from this activity, he negotiated 88 kidnaps, and in each the victim was returned alive. In 76 of the cases, at least some of the gang members were arrested and convicted. Due to his request for anonymity, I’ll call this man Jacobo.

He is about 70, slim, bald-headed and morbidly witty. I met him in his “office” – an elegant café off a hotel lobby. Jacobo blames the wave of kidnapping in Mexico to television coverage. He refers specifically to the news about the leader of a kidnapping ring named Daniel Arizmendi López, who before his capture was known as el mochaorejas (the earchopper) because of his proclivity for sending the ears of his victims to accelerate ransom payments.

“Before him,” said Jacobo, “a criminal would stick up a grocery store or rob people on the street, get 500 or 1000 pesos and then, after a hard day’s work, go home and watch TV. Thousands of these guys saw the reports about how much Arizmendi made and said to themselves, ‘I’m in the wrong business.’”

Jacobo refused to offer any details about how a kidnap is negotiated, explaining that if a kidnapper read this book, he would be tipped off to strategy. “How much is a life worth?” he asked. “Buying and selling shirts is an easy business. You know if you buy a shirt for ten pesos and sell it for twenty, you’ve made a ten-peso profit. If you sell it for nine, you’ve lost a peso. But how much a life is worth is the business of kidnap negotiation. They’ve got a person and they want to sell him. The family wants to buy him. It’s all about money. It’s not personal. They’re just trying to move merchandise.”

The father of another kidnap victim – whose son was returned to him for about $20,000 after the intervention of the AFI, Mexico’s equivalent to the FBI – was willing to go into more detail. He drew a triangle on a piece of paper. The line at the bottom represented the passage of time. The line on the left pointing upward symbolized the mounting pressure, both for the kidnappers and the victims’ families. The line pointing downward on the right stood for the diminishing financial expectations of the kidnappers. At a certain point, a convergence is reached for a sum of money.

If the family of the victim agrees to pay the first amount requested by the kidnappers, then the criminals will decide that they’ve asked for too little and demand more. As painful as it may be when the life of a loved one is at stake, professionals urge the victims’ families to start with an extremely low number, so the final price won’t be usurious.

“Violence is always a part of it, verbal or physical,” said Jacobo. “You can’t be a polite kidnapper or no one will take you seriously.” The longest period of captivity for one of the kidnaps he negotiated was 100 days, and the shortest 24 hours. The smallest amount of money ever handed over was about $5,000, and the greatest close to $100,000.

“And three fingers,” he added.

Journalists in Mexico can have a pretty hard time doing their jobs, especially those who cover Mexico’s narco-trafficking and organized crime problems.

A couple of non-profits who work on press freedom and protection issues here in Mexico, the Rory Peck Trust and Article 19, got together and ran a course just outside Mexico City this month for 18 journalists living and working here.

During the five-day course, the participants, who came from states all over Mexico, from Michoacan all the way to Tijuana in Baja California, were “kidnapped”, dodged tear gas, learned first aid, and received psychological training on how to deal with emergencies.

See the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Toluca, Mexico for La Plaza

Video: Mexican journalists put through their survival paces, by Deborah Bonello.

This video was made to go with this Los Angeles Times report.

The day started with a panel discussion about media coverage of the “drug war” in Mexico. I can’t help but put those two word in commas because, well, it just makes it sound so dramatic. Although it IS dramatic — the violence I mean — it’s not like the whole country is at war. Far from it.

The panel was filled by three representatives from local media, as well as three journalists from Mexico – none of whom spoke great English so a lot of the discussion was lost in translation.

The panel session was rather like a lot of television news – about a mile wide and an inch deep. It was frustrating because it focused so much on the current border violence plaguing the line between Mexico and the United States, without delving any deeper.

As I said pointed out during the discussion, the drug-related border violence between Mexico and the United States is really just the head of the beer – the violence is present in many of the country’s states and failing to report that misrepresents the problem.

Failing to report the U.S’s seemingly insatiable appetite for narcotics — which is the main driver between the illegal trade — is also problematic. One of the speakers described the responsibility of the U.S for the drug violence problems in Mexico as a “school of thought.” I’d say it’s a hard fact, not a theory. People buy fair trade coffee but then roll up a joint or have a few lines of coke at the weekend — chances are they haven’t stopped to think much about where their drugs come from and at what price in the same way that they worry about the origins of their coffee.

There was also a lot of concern over whether the border violence is “spilling over” into the United States. There was a lot of difference of opinion over that issue, and not one that I could apply any of my own experience to being based mainly in Mexico City. What I DO know that the Los Angeles Times (full disclosure:  I spend the majority of my time working for them) has reported drug-related incidents spilling over into the United States here and here.

It’s also been reported by the LATimes that the drug cartels are moving in on the people smuggling business.

The other thing the television reporters during the event in Texas were especially were keen to talk about was what they see as the similarity between Mexico with the Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was a hard one for me to sit still through. Although the drug-related violence around Mexico is widespread and brutal, there are also huge swathes of the country — Mexico City being one of them — where you wouldn’t even know that there was a “war” on between the drug traffickers, as well as between them and law enforcement .

It’s my understanding that the vast majority of the 7,300 or so people that have been killed in drug-related violence since the start of 2007, when Calderon’s offensive began in earnest, are either law enforcement agents, drug traffickers or people involved in some way with the drug trade. Innocent civilians have been caught in the cross-fire, but they’re in the minority.

The media coverage of the drug war shows us how now more than ever, in these times of media accountability and economic hardships, we have to balance information and news provision with a need to entertain and engage audiences.

Everyone wants to report accurately, but they also want good ratings / reading figures / hits. Good reporting takes time and money — the internet means that news rolls now, there ARE no deadlines. Blood and guts gets more viewers / readers. In a time and cash-poor world, its understandable that alot of coverage focuses on the blood and guts of the illegal drug story. Understandable, but is it forgivable?

Peter Gabriel, the musician and activist, implored Mexico President Felipe Calderon to show “real political will, muscle and budget” in investigating the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women in the border town of Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua Friday.

Speaking to a packed press conference through a translator, and flanked by Mexican film star Diego Luna and musician Saul Hernandez from the band Jaguares, Gabriel said that he asks no more young women have to suffer the same fate as more than the 300 girls and young women who have been murdered in the border town since 1993.

He also asked that “all those families who are still suffering an enormous pain have the chance to find out the truth of what happened to their kids, to their family members, and to get some kind of justice and reparation.”

Towards the end of the press conference, Gabriel was asked what he thought about the current levels of drug-related violence in Mexico and whether Calderon’s military strategy would be a success. The drug war in Mexico has killed more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2008 — read more about it here.

Gabriel answered that a new, global approach was needed to fight the illegal drug trade, and that, in his opinion, legalization of drugs is the obvious solution.

“I would rather the doctors were administering the drugs than the drug traffickers,” said the musician.

Peter Gabriel is a prominent human-rights activist, and in 1992 founded the nonprofit group Witness, which uses video and online technologies to bring human-rights violations to light.

A press release from the federal government about the meeting between Calderon and Gabriel reported that “President Calderón pledged to combat any abuse of authority and to promote the repairs of damage to victims. At the same time, he confirmed his government’s will to combat impunity. He said that federal forces are collaborating with the local authorities to solve the cases of feminicides.”

See the video for footage from the press conference.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

The music of Mexico’s drug trade has taken a beating lately. As we reported from Tijuana last year, some radio stations south of the border have stopped playing the songs and promoters have banned the music from many public events. Nightclub owners ask bands to turn down narcocorrido requests.

Richard Marosi wrote: Narcocorridos still draw legions of fans, despite government
efforts to squelch the music. Calor Norteña played the song about
Villarreal only because of repeated requests from hard-drinking
bar-goers. But it was a momentary exception to a backlash that has
succeeded like none before in changing people’s attitudes toward the
music, say members of several bands, nightclub owners, concert
promoters and government officials.

They describe a growing dislike, even revulsion, for music that critics
say celebrates the people terrorizing a community that has suffered at
least 207 violent deaths this year. Attendance at narcocorrido concerts
has dipped; bands say audiences request the music less and less,
preferring dance and romantic tunes that take their minds off the
city’s troubles.

But Mexican artist Cristina Rubalcava wasn’t put off by the controversy. After writing a song for los Tigres Del Norte about the controversial 670-mile fence project along the U.S.-Mexico border, she got to listening to some of the band’s narcocorridos and created a mural that illustrates phrases from more than 40 of their canciones. Watch the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza