Category: Human Rights

THE BRIDGE OF STONES: A MIGRANT CHRISTMAS STORY

January 9, 2023

Carefully treading a crossing of slippery stones strung across the shallow Rio Grande between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, trickles of migrants climbed up the embankment on the U.S. side.

Joining with others who had crossed from down river, the asylum seekers waited peacefully to surrender to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. Watching the evolving ritual were a gaggle of Mexican journalists and local residents. A young man from Venezuela with one leg hopped around on crutches while a pair of municipal cops observed the drama from a parked truck. Standing atop the Mexican embankment, a young girl gazed across the narrow river at the forming line of asylum seekers of all ages, tears welling up in her sad eyes.

Mexico got rid of the DEA’s most elite unit. Now it should get rid of the DEA.

May 30, 2022

The news that the Mexican government had shut down operations of the elite DEA team in the country – the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) – provoked an avalanche of articles in the press, most of them defending the DEA in order to criticize the president. Hardly any of them spoke about the disastrous history of the Unit, much less about the perverse history and actions of the DEA in Mexico –and in all of Latin America. The agency has left a bloody trail of failures, incompliance with regulations, complicities and corruption in its mission to export the war on drugs as an instrument of social control and U.S. hegemony.

Search for missing persons goes international

May 23, 2022

“The eyes don’t lie” repeats Ruth, a Salvadoran woman looking for her son in the city of Tijuana. She holds a large photograph of son Rafael, as two homeless men on the street watch her closely, searching their memories for a recollection of the face of the disappeared son. “He might have changed over the years, but the eyes don’t lie,” says the mother.

In the Search for the Disappeared, the Seeds of a New Society

March 7, 2022

The brigades have unearthed hundreds of human remains and clues to the whereabouts of their loved ones, disappeared throughout Mexico. Their goal is to find them and return them to their families, and that in a context where the state and a large part of society have buried their very existence.

Senate Investigation on COVID handling bad news for Bolsonaro re-election bid

January 12, 2022

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) that investigated president Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the Covid 19 pandemic presented its report in October 2021. The conclusions of the investigation are bad news for the Brazilian president. The Covid CPI calls for the indictment of the president for at least nine crimes, among them crimes against humanity.

Indigenous Peoples in Latin America, between States’ criminalization and the violence of armed groups

December 20, 2021

Indigenous Peoples in Latin America are facing a profoundly grave situation. They are on the losing end in the gap between the development of national and international normative standards for the protection of their rights and their lack of implementation on the ground. They not only face the State’s force, imposing “development” projects and dispossessing them from their lands; but also illegal armed groups that dispute their territories with deadly force.

Latin America: In Search of Lost Sovereignty

August 24, 2021

Two recent events have activated the possibility of relaunching Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and coordination, so neglected during the last five years: Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) speech during the meeting of Foreign Ministers during the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and that of the newly appointed Foreign Minister of Peru, Héctor Béjar, during his inauguration at the Torre Tagle Palace in Lima, who recently made a 180-degree turn in Peru’s foreign policy.