William Paul Simmons - Binational Human Rights: The U.S.-Mexico Experience

Binational Human Rights

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

BINATIONAL
HUMAN RIGHTS

The U.S.-Mexico Experience

Edited by

William Paul Simmons and Carol Mueller

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-4628-5

CONTENTS

William Paul Simmons and Carol Mueller

PART I
MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES IN BINATIONAL CONTEXT

Miguel Escobar-Valdez

William Paul Simmons and Michelle Tllez

Timothy J. Dunn

PART II
THE MEXICAN DRUG WAR IN BINATIONAL CONTEXTS

Julie A. Murphy Erfani

Luis Alfredo Arriola Vega

PART III
STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN CIUDAD JUREZ

Carol Mueller

Clara Jusidman

PART IV
TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Kathleen Staudt

Alejandro Anaya Muoz

Maureen Meyer

William Paul Simmons

Binational Human Rights

Introduction

The news of the ongoing and widespread human rights crises in Mexico is shocking even to hardened human rights workers. Over 60,000 people were killed in the drug war in the years 20062012. Hundreds of these killings involve beheadings or other gruesome mutilations and tortures often paraded prominently on the Internet. The well-known feminicides in Ciudad Jurez, despite unprecedented international pressure over the past fifteen years, have not declined but have reached record rates, with over 1,500 young women and girls killed since 1993 (Gupta 2011). Journalists covering the drug war are routinely targeted, with over thirty killed since 2006. Not surprisingly, they increasingly exert widespread self-censorship out of fear of the drug cartels. One Jurez newspaper even declared the cartels the de facto authorities of the city and asked what they would like to have published (Committee to Protect Journalists 2011: 104). Migrants from southern Mexico and Central America are routinely victimized (robbed, raped, kidnapped, and killed) on their way to the United States. The Mexican Human Rights Commission reported that in the first six months of 2010 more than 11,000 Central American migrants were kidnapped in Mexico (BBC News 2011c).

Amnesty International (2010) reports that approximately 60 percent of migrant women are sexually assaulted along the journey, while Simmons and Tllezs chapter in this volume cites on-the-ground workers who place the number closer to 100 percent. The terror faced by immigrants and the way they are treated as commodities or objects by the cartels and others is perhaps exemplified by the seventy-two migrants mostly from Central America who were killed execution-style in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, when they reportedly refused to work for the cartels as assassins.

These tragedies are fueled in part by widespread impunity and corruption in the legal system. Dozens of cases are reported of authorities aiding the cartels because of threats or bribes. Major prosecutors have been arrested for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars (U.S.) in bribes. And Mexican law enforcement officials who refuse to be corrupted are routinely targeted by the drug cartels and gangs. Two officials, including a police chief, investigating the Tamaulipas massacre were gunned down less than a week after the crime. Under such pressure, entire police forces have resigned or have been fired and replaced by military units. In an especially poignant example, in Praxedis G. Guerrero, a small town in the northern part of the state of Chihuahua, the cartels tortured and killed the mayor and police chief, leading most of the police officers to resign. Marisol Valles Garca, a twenty-year-old criminal justice major at the University of Guadalajara, became police chief when no one else was willing to serve. After receiving numerous threats by the drug cartels, she and her family have now fled to the United States, where they are seeking asylum.

This list increases exponentially when we consider the related human rights abuses occurring regularly at the U.S.-Mexico border, especially in our home state of Arizona, where U.S. policies have funneled tens of thousands of undocumented migrants. Thousands have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since 1998, with an average of more than 200 dying in the Arizona desert each year since 2002, including a near record 253 confirmed deaths in the Tucson sector in 2010. Add to these the enormous human costs inflicted by the U.S. governments deportation procedures, including the routine separation of family members, frequent migrant sweeps or roundups, streamlined removal procedures, long-term detentions without legal representation, and the broken and overwhelmed immigration court system. Migrant workers on both sides of the border, especially the undocumented, also endure abysmal working conditions and exploitation. in Guatemala (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies 2005), staggering amounts of domestic violence and sexual assault, the exploitation of street children, and rampant poverty.

Some of these abuses, especially the gruesome killings in the Mexican drug war, receive extensive, often overly sensationalistic coverage by the national and international media. Others, like the feminicides in Ciudad Jurez, formerly received a great deal of attention (Staudt 2008) but have been overwhelmed by recent events. Yet others, such as the migrant deaths in the U.S. desert and the failed detention and deportation system, have become routine and are mostly ignored by policymakers and the media. Indeed, these human rights abuses have slipped from, or evade, the consciousness of the public and elites in Mexico, the United States, and around the globe. They grind on, year after year, abuse after abuse.

Localizing Human Rights Across Borders

This book focuses primarily on three of these abusesthe feminicides in Ciudad Jurez, the drug war in Mexico, and the plight of migrants trying to come to the United States from Mexico and Central America. While each of these occurs in a specific, mostly Mexican context, we argue that they need to be understood in a broader binational context. Neoliberal trade policies, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 (NAFTA), have led to unprecedented movements of Mexican peoples from rural areas to urban areas, and also to large-scale emigration, especially to the United States. With the crackdown on drug cartels in Colombia and across the Caribbean, Mexico became the number one transit region for drug shipments to the United States and one of the largest producers of illicit drugs in the world. Estimates are that 90 percent of all cocaine shipments to the United States cross Mexican territory, and Mexico is a major supplier of heroin and largest foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 2012). At the same time, immigration policies in the United States, at both the national and local levels, heavily influence the movement of people throughout the region, as well as the actions of drug cartels and other organized crime groups in Mexico.