The defensoras, or women human rights defenders, embody courage every moment as systematic violence has broadened its target toward them as a way to disempower women activists, weaken movements for social change, and maintain the patriarchal, militarized Mexican State. Women human rights defenders risk their lives every day to create a Mexico where being a woman doesn’t inherently mean a doomed fate.
Mexico just joined the growing list of countries that have moved towards legalization of marijuana. In a ruling last Thursday, the Supreme Court of Mexico granted injunctive relief to a group of four plaintiffs who had filed a complaint in 2013 requesting to be able to grow, transport and consume marijuana.
The mothers of Mexico’s disappeared have become experts in their own right—many have searched for their children on their own and have become the fiercest activists and critics of government impunity and state violence in Mexico.
In a virtually unprecedented development, labor protest is widening in the maquiladora industry of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. While worker dissatisfaction or protest is nothing new in the foreign-owned border factories that produce goods for export to the United States, previous manifestations of discontent in the generally union-free industry have usually been confined to one company at a time.
Americas Program interview with Gonzalo Molina, Tixtla community police leader and current political prisoner.
The signatory organizations address The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to provide information, as a result of their research, documentation and accompaniment of cases, that show the widespread, and in some cases systematic, violations of human rights committed in Mexico.
Despite recurrent pronouncements of death by some U.S. and Mexican officials, high-profile organized crime groups continue operating and shedding blood south of the border. Tijuana, where control of both the local and export drug business is the prize of contention, figures once again as a significant flashpoint of violence.
The report of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) charged with investigating the assassinations of six people and the forced disappearance of 43 students of the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa concludes that the version of events presented by the Mexican government is false.
The victims of this extraterritorial policy are Central American migrants who cross every day, seeking to save their lives and their families from the violence and hunger plaguing their countries.
Members of the US Congress have once again called on the Obama administration to stop funding Honduras’ security forces due to massive human rights violations. Will Kerry listen?
