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.

Deborah Bonello reporting for MexicoReporter.com

My breath is tearing out of my lungs and my leg muscles are screaming for a reprieve. I just scaled a 60-degree hill coated in thorny brambles and poisonous plants whilst being pounded by rain. In the dark. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. Later that night, my fellow journalists and I were kidnapped by masked guerillas who jumped onto our bus.

Our only comfort? That none of this was real. But it could have been, which is the point of the survival course 18 journalists who live and work in Mexico attended last week in Toluca, just outside of Mexico City.

During the five day survival program, the journalists dodged tear gas and Army tanks and learned how to survive in the wilderness. The psychological stresses were addressed, too; they learned strategies for dealing with emotions.

In Mexico these days, that may be the most important lesson of all.

“Once in Apatzingan a cameraman and I were taken,” says Miguel Garcia Tinoco, a 40-year-old journalist and owner of the Notivideo video news website based in Michoacan.

“They took us to talk with a drug-trafficking boss on a street in Apatzingan, and they wanted to make us write what they wanted, what they wanted to communicate.”

This group of traffickers gained infamy three years ago when they tossed the severed heads of six enemies onto the dance floor of a nightclub.

“They wanted us to publish an explanation of why they’d murdered those six people. What we told them was that we couldn’t make a decision in terms of what we published or didn’t publish in the newspaper – that it was up to the editor. And in the end my editor decided not to publish anything at all.”

Antonio Ramos Tafolla, a 58-year-old reporter in the same state as Garcia, was kidnapped and beaten up by a group he says he was never able to identify.

“It limited me and the boldness that I had before to write. It limited me but it didn’t shut me up or stop me thinking, but I have more reservations now.”

Some don’t get granted any conditions. Ramos said that a colleague of his went missing two years ago and has never reappeared. Garcia says the same of two other fellow journalists in Michoacan. They are three of the eight journalists currently listed as missing in Mexico.

It’s not only reporters covering Mexico’s drug traffickers and organized crime networks that run the risk of reprisals. These journalists recounted tales from covering everything from car accidents, massacres and assassinations, to shoot-outs, kidnappings and election campaigns.

Run-ins with the federal police, the army and local governors are common for any reporter who questions local power networks.

“Sadly, the army has seen us, to a certain point, as enemies,” Garcia said.

“They close their operations and don’t let us film, they don’t let us into some crime scenes to get information … And they also take away our gear and they assault us.”

Back in the classroom Dr. Ana Zellhuber gives the journalists some practical guidance in dealing both with people who have just come out of emergency situations, as well their own emotional reactions to tough circumstances.

“You’re not heroes,” she says. “You’re reporters. Everyone has a duty to perform – do yours. Don’t turn yourselves into one of the victims.”

Stories unfolded in the classroom. One of the four women on the course, a reporter from Tijuana, talked about  the time she was approached by a man who said the Mexican Army had massacred people in his town.

She didn’t know what to do because as the man told her his story she knew she was going to cry but she worried that crying would draw attention to herself.

“There are no wrong emotions,” said Zellhuber. “And there are always emotions.”

Monica Franco is a 31-year-old journalist working in Puebla.

“Intimidation is a daily reality for us,” she told me.

“We’re not just intimidated by the police – we’re intimidated by government spheres, by press officers, intimidated by politicians and by civilians who now don’t see us as allies.

“A lot of co-workers end up losing the point of why we’re here, which is to inform and give a voice to those people who don’t have one. And that’s what leads a lot of people to see us as enemies of society.”

Franco hits on an interesting point. Some of the journalists that have been killed here in Mexico over the last few years (see here for more numbers) were targeted as a direct result of reports they’d filed.

But in Mexico, where training is in short supply, wages are pitifully low and reporters aren’t protected or helped by their employers, it’s easy to see how they themselves can fall prey to corruption.

Franco says that someone broke into her home in Puebla. The burglars only stole journalism gear, nothing else.

“Instead of helping us we were intimidated by the police and told that due to our jobs, they could break into our homes, she said.”

They never learned who did the break in, Franco says.

“We just put up a stronger gate on the front door.”

Article 19 and the Rory Peck Trust organized the survival course, which took place between May  17th – 22nd in Toluca, Mexico.