|
| |
|
Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
|
|
| |
|
Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
|
|
| |
|
Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
|
|
| |
Domingo 3 de Marzo de 2002 -
Número 333
PROSTITUCIÓN | SUBASTA DE
NIÑAS
Subasta de niñas en el corazon de Brasil
RAMY WURGAFT. Mato Grosso
(Brasil)
|
| UN MILLÓN
DE NIÑAS PROSTITUTAS. Según un estudio de la Agencia de las Naciones
Unidas para la Infancia (UNICEF), en Brasil existen más de 800.000
prostitutas menores de edad. La cifra real puede superar el millón
en un país cuya población total está por encima de los 161 millones
de habitantes. La misma entidad calcula que la explotación de
menores es un negocio que mueve más de 120 millones de dólares (139
millones de euros) al año. Tras estas grandes cifras emerge otra
realidad. De acuerdo con la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS)
en el año 2000 se alcanzó en el gigante tropical un aumento del 3%
en el número de enfermos de sida.El número total de casos fue de
190.949. El número de portadores del virus VIH es de 536.000
personas. | La estancia se hallaba vacía
pero en el ambiente todavía flotaba un olor a sudores rancios, a tabaco
cimarrón y a miedo. Esparcidos por el piso estaban los papelitos en que
los compradores habían garabateado sus apreciaciones: gostosa (linda),
magrinha (esmirriada), dragao (dragón o fea)... Cuando quise llevarme uno
al bolsillo, Aparecido chasqueó la lengua en señal de negación. "El trato
era que usted echaba un vistazo y nada más", dijo.
Mi acompañante
estaba ansioso por retirarse de allí. Cualquier ruido proveniente de la
calle le hacía abrir mucho aquellos ojazos que destacaban en el fondo
oscuro de su piel. "Dése prisa que si esos bishos (animales) vuelven
estamos perdidos". Obviamente se refería a los hombres que un tiempo atrás
habían manoseado, olisqueado y aquilatado a una veintena de chiquilinas,
que ahora estarían haciendo su camino hacia los paraísos del turismo
sexual en Recife, Salvador o Fortaleza. La indignación me hizo apretar los
puños. Entonces, lo que aquel músico brasilero me había contado en un bar
de Madrid no era producto del alcohol que ingerimos, sino la pura y mísera
verdad.
En el corazón del Brasil persiste una forma de esclavitud
que tiene como víctimas a las niñas impúberes. Ni el heroico esfuerzo de
más de 60 ONG ni el aumento de los operativos policiales han impedido que
el mercadeo de menores réplica actualizada del tráfico de esclavos
africanos, que duró en Brasil hasta 1888 se propague como una epidemia,
con las dimensiones que tiene en Tailandia.
Equipado con estas
estimaciones y con una sana dosis de escepticismo me embarqué hacia
Brasil. Pensé en los aventureros que hace siglos partían al Nuevo Mundo en
busca de la mítica Ciudad de los Césares.Yo me tragué esos mismos 10.000
kilómetros con la sola diferencia de que la leyenda que había venido a
buscar cobraría realidad en tugurios, hoteles de lujo y pisos destinados
al amancebamiento de cuarentones y sesentones con criaturas que podrían
ser sus nietas.
En la zona donde Mato Grosso limita con el Estado
de Goias, en vez de bosques húmedos proliferan los pastos y el ganado. Es
una región rica, lo cual en Suramérica significa que también contiene
mucha pobreza, como la de los vaqueros, pastores y pequeños propietarios a
quienes la tecnificación del agro, a partir de los años 60, arrebató sus
fuentes de trabajo.
Los barones de la prostitución saben que los
retoños de esta gente arruinada morderán cualquier anzuelo con tal de
llegar a esos mundos rutilantes que ven en los reclamos de la
televisión.Por ello es que mandan a sus testaferros a localidades como
Guiratinga, un pueblito que queda al oeste de Cuiabá, capital del Estado
de Mato Grosso.
Hasta ese punto llegó también el enviado de
CRÓNICA, siguiendo la ruta de la infamia y buscando los contactos que le
señaló Leandro Gonzales, uno de los miles de brasileros que combaten la
prostitución infantil, una plaga que según estadísticas no oficiales ha
acabado con las vidas de 600 menores en los últimos años. "La mitad,
víctimas del sida; los demás, a manos de proxenetas, la policía o los
clientes", me contó Gonzales. Fue gracias a la ayuda de este abogado y de
sus colegas de la Asociación Brasilera contra la Prostitución Infantil que
conocí al bueno de Aparecido, un antiguo cartero que desde su jubilación
trabaja de vigilante en dos inmuebles. Uno de éstos, el que señalábamos al
principio, fue allanado por la policía al comprobarse que era un mercado
de esclavas.
EL ENGAÑO
"A poco de fallecer el señor que
administraba la imprenta, los nuevos propietarios dijeron que abrirían una
academia de baile", cuenta Aparecido. "La rutina era siempre igual.
Primero llegaban unos desconocidos. Su aspecto no era muy artístico, por
así decir.Las niñas aparecían media o una hora más tarde. Al principio la
gente del vecindario elogiaba la bondad de estos señores, de enseñar algo
útil a esas chicas andrajosas. Más tarde les empezó a extrañar que las
alumnas fuesen de tan corta edad. Casi todas de entre seis y 14 años. A mí
también me resultó curioso que al empezar las clases me dijesen: vete a
fumar un cigarrillo".Cuando los agentes coparon el inmueble, los negreros
y la mercadería humana se habían esfumado. Alguien desde dentro de la
comandancia les había puesto en aviso.
La Agencia de Noticias de
Derechos de la Infancia (ANDI) y la propia prefectura de Cuiabá (Mato
Grosso) han denunciado que en la cúspide de las redes se encuentran jueces
y policías. Y en una célula desarticulada en Río Verde figuraba ¡hasta un
cura!
Aparecido estuvo dos días bajo detención hasta que se
comprobó su inocencia. No hay que restar mérito al hecho de que me
mostrara la sala de las subastas, considerando el miedo que le tiene a las
mafias. "¿A qué temes?", inquirí. "Ellos tienen un poder mucho mayor que
el de la Ley. ¿Quién crees que maneja la ley si no es el dinero?", habló
con la lógica irrebatible de los débiles.
La esclavitud infantil
es un drama sin finales felices, pero los hay menos desafortunados. Es el
caso de las hermanas Sonia y Leticia de Freitas (nombres figurados), de la
localidad de Jaciara, que llegó a mis oídos por boca de María, una
asistente social de la que no doy mayores datos pues se encuentra en el
punto de mira de las redes de prostitución infantil.
Sonia tenía
11 años y Leticia 14 cuando en enero de 1998 un hombre las abordó en la
plaza de Jaciara, donde solían jugar con sus amigas. De acuerdo con la
versión de las propias niñas, el sujeto no tenía apariencia rufianesca.
"Era un joven con muy buena presencia y, pese a todo lo que sufrieron por
su causa, Sonia no olvida lo bonita que era su sonrisa", me dice María.
Sentados en un banco de la misma plaza, la asistente social y yo
traducimos el testimonio de las ex esclavas a una sucesión de imágenes,
como cuando se proyectan diapositivas. Junto a los columpios, haciendo
como si leyera el diario, vemos al proxeneta esperando a que se disuelva
el corro infantil. "Perdón pero hace rato que las he estado observando y
me han causado impresión vuestros modales". Las niñas se miran por lo bajo
y se sonríen.A continuación el embaucador les muestra una foto (quizás el
recorte de una revista) en la que aparece una mansión con piscina y jardín
donde unos niños rubitos juegan con sus mamás. Las hermanitas están
deslumbradas. ¿Así es la casa de sus futuros patrones, de esos señores
recién llegados de Francia que quieren contratarlas para el servicio
doméstico? Así mismito, y deberían ver el interior: un palacio. Pero antes
de recibir el trabajo tendrían que pasar unos exámenes. Las chicas
aprueban con entusiasmo y el rufián se sonríe pensando que ya las tienen
en su red: "¿Querrían sacarse ahora mismo unas fotitos para los
solicitantes?".
Comparada con la de sus vecinos, la situación de
la familia De Freitas no era tan mala. El padre, chófer de autobús, ganaba
lo justo y suficiente como para alimentar y educar a sus cinco hijos. No
había antecedentes de malos tratos uno de los catalizadores de la
prostitución en aquella familia, en que la madre había muerto por un mal
parto. Los problemas comenzaron cuando el conductor atropelló a dos
peatones, una desgracia que le hizo proclive a las depresiones. En esos
periodos, Sonia y Leticia dejaban de asistir a clases y pasaban la mayor
parte del día en la calle.
LA SUBASTA
Las hermanas
llegaron a la audiencia, en Guiratinga, con sus mejores ropas. La
encargada las mudó a unos vestidos escotados de falso percal, las maquilló
cual cacatúas y las montó sobre unos tacones de punta de aguja. Más tarde
la policía revelaría que la dama en cuestión, apodada Rose o Rosemarí,
también regentaba una agencia que exportaba a niñas menores de las
localidades de Maranhao y de Piauí a destinos europeos como Alemania y
España.
Las 10 o más chicas debutantes salieron a la tarima
trastabillando, y allí se vieron traspasadas por las miradas lascivas de
un público masculino. Sin demasiada ceremonia, la mujer que las custodiaba
apartó a una de las pequeñas del resto del rebaño y la hizo girar como a
un trompo. Un tipo, al que los agentes ya tienen identificado como Mario
Tokiro (a) el japonés, rompió a declamar sin darse respiro: "1.000 reales
es el precio para esta beldad de Caiaponia, sana y sin estrenar... ¿quién
dijo 1.500?... demonios, amigos que no estamos en una subasta de
melones... ¿2.000, nos quedamos en 2.000 [983 euros]?". Y sonó un
palmetazo y la palabra arrogada (adjudicada) que sellaron la suerte de la
desventurada chavalita, que vaya a saberse en qué burdel o calle estará
consumiendo sus días, si es que aún vive.
La primera en hacerse
cargo de la situación fue la menor. A Sonia le pareció que aquellos tipos
que escupían y blasfemaban sin cesar no podían ser los "diplomáticos" de
los que les habló el guapo en Jaciara. Además, ¿por qué las persianas
estaban cerradas y uno de ellos las entreabría cada cuanto para mirar lo
que ocurría en la calle?... Aquéllos eran unos cafetaos (cafiches), le
susurró a su hermana. ¡Debían huir!
Flotando aún en las fantasías
con las que las había intoxicado el maleante, Leticia no opuso resistencia
cuando, concluida la subasta y asignada la mercancía, la encargada y sus
ayudantes las arrearon de a dos en dos hasta los vehículos. Tras unas
cinco horas de viaje, lo que habría de situarlas al noreste de Brasilia,
las hermanas fueran hospedadas en una inmunda pensión. Alojadas en
habitaciones separadas, la una no pudo oír el llanto de la otra al ser
violada, repetidas veces, por los responsables del transporte.
En
este punto conviene señalar que las niñas no son las únicas ingenuas de
esta historia. "Más absurdo resulta que los clientes paguen entre 100 y
hasta 700 dólares por acostarse con una virgen.Cuando han llegado al
prostíbulo, la casi totalidad de estas criaturas ya ha sufrido abusos",
dice María.
Aprovechando un descuido de sus captores, Sonia pudo
darse a la fuga y llegar hasta una gasolinera, donde los empleados
escucharon, horrorizados, lo que le había acontecido. Sin embargo, cuando
los policías aparecieron en el hospital donde fue atendida, la chica
apenas fue capaz de balbucear su nombre y el de su Jaciara natal. Sólo
después de un año se recuperó de la amnesia traumática en que cayó.
EL TURISMO SEXUAL
Para Leticia el sueño de trabajar con
extranjeros se cumplió amargamente. Recife, la ciudad balneario donde la
llevó su amo, recibe cada año a miles de turistas ansiosos de disfrutar de
sus playas y de la bondad de su clima. Pero existe un número nada
despreciable que llega con el solo propósito de consumir prostitución.
Para este fin no deben recurrir al taxista ni aventurarse por los barrios
peligrosos: en los balnearios del noroeste de Brasil el turismo sexual es
una industria perfectamente organizada.
Según un informe del
Comité de Estudios de la Explotación Sexual y otro de la Comisión
Legislativa del Estado de Pernambuco (cuya capital es Recife) existen mas
de 30 agencias distribuidas por Europa que venden a sus clientes paquetes
eróticos que incluyen estancias en hoteles donde las prostitutas
prácticamente forman parte del personal. Incluso antes de embarcar, los
viajeros ya han consultado álbumes de fotos para no perder el tiempo
eligiendo cuando lleguen a Brasil.
Para los gustos más refinados
cabe la posibilidad de escoger niñas de entre los 10 y los 16 años. En
Recife mismo, una de cada tres prostitutas es menor. En Salvador (capital
de Bahía) de 100 prostitutas que buscaron atención médica en el hospital
público, 74 habían tenido su primera relación sexual entre los 10 y los 13
años. En Paraíba existe constancia de que el 61% de las menores que se
prostituyen tiene entre 12 y 14 años y que el 90% no utiliza
preservativos.
Volvamos por un momento al interior del país: en un
prostíbulo de la ciudad de Goiania, un bebé de tres años es explotado
sexualmente con el consentimiento de su madre, una de las internas del
local.Cuando la pequeña se enferma, sus empleadores la abandonan a las
puertas de un hospital. Hoy, con seis años ya, la nena por fin puede
balbucir algunas palabras. En la misma Goiana existen locales que
organizan bingos en los que se sortean mujeres, en muchos casos menores de
edad.
¿Qué ha sido a todo esto de Leticia? Lo primero que ha hecho
el administrador de la casa es propinarle una buena paliza para que
entienda dónde reside la autoridad, y amenazar con desfigurarle la bonita
cara si intenta escapar o denunciar a sus captores.Después se le obliga a
memorizar su nuevo nombre, el que ha brá de figurar en un parte de
nacimiento falsificado. Luego se le reducirá a un estado de servidumbre
bestial que nada tiene que envidiar a las jornadas que alguno de los
antepasados de Leticia cumpliera en los cañaverales del Brasil.
Según la información que maneja el ANDI, una prostituta joven se
ve obligada a atender a entre 10 y 15 clientes por noche.No más, ya que el
amo querrá postergar el inevitable deterioro, producto de la aparición de
enfermedades físicas o de trastornos mentales.
Siendo bonita,
Leticia puede llegar a recaudar hasta 4.000 reales por día (unos 1.965
euros). Todas las ganancias, claro, irán a engrosar las arcas del patrón,
un ciudadano a quien podremos ver en el palco del un teatro, en la tribuna
del club hípico o en un buen restaurante, sin sospechar jamás la vileza
que esconde bajo su traje de marca.
EN SILLA DE RUEDAS
María, la asistente social, relata que al cabo de dos años, es decir a
los 16, Leticia ya era considerada como una prostituta adulta y fue
vendida a un lupanar de baja categoría. "A mediados de 2000 la chica aún
no se había embrutecido del todo, y decidió escapar de su cautiverio. La
ocasión se le presentó al declararse un incendio que puso en fuga a sus
cancerberos. Sin dudarlo, Leticia saltó por la ventana rebotando en el
techo de un vehículo.La misma caída que la condujo a la silla de ruedas le
permitió ser libre otra vez. Pero la pequeña que jugaba en la plaza de
Jaciara ya no existe. Murió cobardemente asesinada un día de enero de
1998".
Los brasileros no se quedan de brazos cruzados ante el
recrudecimiento de la prostitución infantil. En las ciudades donde abunda
este fenómeno funcionan servicios de llamadas gratuitas para denunciar
estos atropellos. Las prefecturas (ayuntamientos) de Recife, San Pablo,
Salvador y Goiana han lanzado junto con las autoridades de Alemania,
Italia y Suiza campañas destinadas a concienciar a los turistas sobre las
tragedias que se ocultan tras las forzadas sonrisas de las prostitutas. El
número de procesos a proxenetas ha aumentado en un 75% en los tres últimos
años. "Y lo que es más importante, el brasilero comienza a ser menos
tolerante hacia el comercio carnal, especialmente cuando afecta a personas
de corta edad", dice María. Para Sonia y Leticia, la respuesta de la
sociedad llega demasiado tarde. A otras pequeñuelas es posible que las
salve de correr la misma suerte.
 |
Y en
África: cooperantes bajo sospecha por JUAN C. DE LA CAL
|
Alguien lo definió como el síndrome de
la soledad del cooperante.Sus síntomas: ansiedad producida por el
horror vivido diariamente, estrés por la urgencia de su trabajo,
nostalgia por la lejanía del país, la familia y los amigos... ¿Cómo
sobrevivir cuando vas de salvavidas al infierno? En las ciudades de
cualquier país sostenido por la ayuda humanitaria internacional
encontramos la clave. Por las noches, cuando el toque de queda o la
inseguridad devuelven a sus guetos a los soldados y cooperantes
blancos casi todos viven en las mejores zonas, donde están las
embajadas y los hoteles , cuando la soledad aprieta, llega el
momento del alivio, de quitarse el sofoco del día en buena compañía,
de cambiar el disfraz de samaritano por el atuendo de hombre
limitado por sus propias debilidades.
El informe publicado
esta semana por el Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los
Refugiados (ACNUR) sobre los abusos sexuales cometidos tanto por su
personal como por miembros de ONG con menores africanas 1.500 niñas
de Sierra Leona, Liberia y Guinea Conakry lo han denunciado ha
sacado los colores a los responsables humanitarios y abochornado a
la comunidad internacional.Sexo a cambio de comida, de trato de
favor al repartir la ayuda o de un dinero que en occidente no daría
ni para pagar una cerveza, es el contenido de estas denuncias.
Pero esto no pasa sólo en el ¡frica Occidental. También
ocurrió en Somalia, Filipinas y Ruanda. En la capital de este último
país, Kigali, la discoteca Cadillac, por ejemplo, se convirtió en el
mayor prostíbulo de una ciudad desangrada tras el genocidio.Blancos
de todas las edades persiguiendo negritas de edad incierta pero que
no llegaba a los 18 años. Escenas similares se vivieron en las
playas de El Salvador. Los misioneros llevan años denunciándolo
aunque nadie les hizo caso. Pero el hambre aprieta y no distingue
entre salvador y verdugo. Mayor delito cuando la basura acaba debajo
de la alfombra. |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
LibertadLatina
News /
Noticias |
|
|
|
Updated:
May 10, 2010
|
Mandanos un... |
Email |
|
Send us an... |
LibertadLatina
Búsqueda Google
Google Search
Últimas Noticias
Latest News
¡Feliz
Día de las Madres!
Happy Mother's Day!
Added: May. 10, 2010
Impunity
Mexico
|
|
|
On April 27, 2010,
Mixtec Indigenous human rights leader
Bety Cariño and
a Finnish international observer,
Jyri Antero Jaakkola,
were murdered in Oaxaca state by paramilitary soldiers affiliated with the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of Mexico's three top
political parties.
Members of the European Parliament, the Finnish Embassy, and the
United Nations Human Rights Commissioner have demanded a full
investigation.
Photo: Ms. Bety Cariño tragically killed in violent paramilitary attack in Oaxaca
Frontline - Protection of Human Rights Defenders
April 29, 2010
|
Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo
México, DF - Trabajar por la paz y el respeto a los derechos humanos, ha colocado en riesgo a las defensoras y defensores de estos derechos, un caso extremo ocurrió el pasado 27 de abril cuando una caravana por la paz fue emboscada en el estado de Oaxaca, México y dos de sus integrantes fueron asesinados: Tyti Antero Jaakkola , observador internacional originario de Finlandia y Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo, integrante de Centro de Apoyo Comunitario Trabajando Unidos (Cactus).
Beatriz Alberta fue una luchadora social que hizo de la defensa de la autonomía de los pueblos indígenas su motor en la vida, alentó a las comunidades mixtecas a luchar por su patrimonio cultural, por su identidad, sin sumisión y con dignidad.
Ese fue su andar por la sierra mixteca, al convocar a las mujeres triquis a tomar su papel protagónico en la historia de su pueblo, a mirar de frente y defender sus recursos naturales del saqueo de las grandes trasnacionales...
Erika Cervantes
CIMAC Women's News Agency
May 10, 2010
See also:
Mexico's State Of Impunity
When international human rights observers rounded a curve on a remote road in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, they found the way blocked by boulders. They decided going forward would be dangerous. But they didn’t know that going back would be deadly.
As the vans began to turn around, masked gunmen came down from the hills and opened fire on the vehicles. Some of the people scattered into the brush. Others got lucky and were freed by the assailants. Two were murdered, shot in the head — Bety Cariño of the Mexican rights group CACTUS (Center for Community Support Working Together) and Finnish human rights observer Jyri Jaakola.
The activists were traveling to the village of San Juan Copala in the Triqui indigenous region of Oaxaca. Local paramilitaries from a group called UBISORT, which is reportedly founded by Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had surrounded and cut off the village. The caravan of journalists, state activists, and international human rights observers wanted to investigate the worsening situation in the village. They knew the risks but decided to undertake the mission because the lives of villagers were at stake, and they saw a dangerous precedent in standing by as
an illegal armed group took an entire village hostage.
Killings are a common occurrence in the Triqui region for those who defend indigenous rights and resources. Scores of people have been assassinated, including two women from San Juan Copala's community radio station in 2008.
The leaders advised the state government of its intentions, but the state government provided no guarantees. Gabriela Jimenez, a member of the caravan who escaped, stated that
the paramilitary captors bragged of having the governor's backing...
Human Rights and U.S. Indifference
The April 27 ambush shocked even a nation accustomed to violence in the news. Drug war tolls of 30 or more victims a day are standard fare in Mexico. But the calculated assault on a human rights mission crossed some invisible line. Members of the European Parliament, the Finnish Embassy, and the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner have demanded a full investigation. Demonstrating the arrogance characteristic of his rule, Governor Ruiz announced he would carry out an investigation — of the migration papers of the foreigners on the caravan.
Human rights violations in Mexico have been on the rise in the last few years, with a sixfold increase in complaints against the armed forces since it launched the drug war. Civilian deaths have increased in the context of drug war militarization. The nation faces a crisis of confidence in the government’s ability — or willingness — to provide even the most basic human security.
The U.S. State Department has ignored this crisis to justify its support for the failed drug war of President Felipe Calderón. Security aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative required that a human rights report be presented to Congress showing progress in ending impunity for crimes committed by the armed forces, an end to torture, and progress in the Brad Will murder. The State Department delayed presenting the report until last year. When it finally submitted the report, it showed no progress.
Security aid to police and armed forces that violate human rights consistently empowers a system of violations. Human rights training by U.S. forces will make no difference whatsoever in that equation. The problem is obviously not a lack of training, but a lack of political will. As long as the same political forces that commit violations receive support and aid, they are encouraged to continue practices that damage society and destroy lives...
Laura Carlsen
Huffington Post
May 08, 2010
See also:
Mexico
Oaxaca Caravan Attack: The Militarization And Para-militarization Of Mexico
On April 27, gunmen opened fire on an international aid caravan that was bringing food, clothing, medicine, and teachers to the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca. The attack left two dead: Oaxacan indigenous leader and media organizer Alberta "Bety" Cariño and a Finnish observer, Jyri Antero Jaakkola. Gunfire injured three other Oaxacans during the attack.
The attack was the latest in a series of assassinations in a region where shootouts are a frequent occurrence. While the attack on the caravan attracted international media attention, the other murders (at least 23 since 2007) were lost in the wave of violence that has gripped Mexico. Ever since President Felipe Calderon deployed 40,000 soldiers to fight the US-funded war on drugs, all violent murders in Mexico are automatically chalked up to the drug war in the media and in the government's official numbers. Drug war violence provides a too-convenient cover for the political violence that also pervades Mexico.
The violence in the Triqui region is the direct result of government machinations aimed at dividing the indigenous people who live there. “The political organizations are dividing us,” says San Juan Copala spokesman Jorge Albino. “When we form organizations, the political parties come and they offer to make one of us a leader, or they offer us a position. And some of us wind up identifying with a political party and we kill each other as a result.”
The government has good reason to want to weaken the Triquis through division: the Triquis have historically put up some of the fiercest resistance to the colonial (and later neo-colonial) project in Mexico. For this reason, their territory is particularly rich in natural resources. John Gibler writes in his book Mexico Unconquered: "As a result of their armed defense, the Triqui region today is a green oasis in the midst of the eroded Mixteca region where centuries of clear-cutting and goat herding have decimated the land."
...
The Oaxacan government has denied all responsibility for the attack. Instead, it is attempting to blame the caravan organizers. "Whoever organized this caravan will have to answer for it, whoever invited these people ... without taking precautions, because I think these people did not know what the situation and problems in the area were," Oaxaca state Interior Secretary Evencio Martinez told the AP. "They (the caravan members) will have to answer, too, for having accepted the invitation."
However, sociologist Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez argues, "I believe that it was a deliberate act on the part of the government, with the idea to teach them a lesson and to dissuade those foreigners who want to help this town that is under siege, where they've closed the road to the community, they've cut the electricity. [The town] is running out of food."
...
Kristin Bricker
My Word Is My Weapon
May 6, 2010
Mexico
Keegan Smith: My friend Bety Cariño was killed by Mexican Paramilitaries in Oaxaca
A good friend of mine Bety Cariño... who I lived and worked with in Mexico was killed in southern Mexico by paramilitaries. The paramilitaries acted with the support of the State and National government to eliminate opposition to their plans and their way of thinking. Bety was one of the most charismatic and caring people I have come across in my 27 years. She has 2 young children and hundreds of friends who have been touched by her passion and courage. She was the leader of the
organization CATCUS which supported local indigenous communities and in securing projects for small business and agriculture initiatives. Together with the
organization she informed about women and children's rights to basic services. She also informed about the dangers of transgenic crops and pesticides and the damage caused by massive mining and damming projects which are proposed for Oaxaca.
Bety participated in various movements and forums in Mexico and Central America and traveled to Europe to increase awareness about the situation in Mexico and particularly the situation Oaxaca. Bety went to every length to make people feel welcome and had amazing power in her spirit to overcome personal loss and illness for the sake of her beliefs. This infectious passion will outlive her many lifetimes over.
This is one of many horrible crimes committed everyday in order to maintain the flow of capital, and the power it holds, in the hands of the few. While I am no longer inclined say eye for an eye and I don't want
vengeance for the pain this act has caused. The world needs very profound changes. This is not a call to arms but to reflect and change our minds. Our physical world is a reflection of our thoughts...
Keegan Smith
My Word Is My Weapon
April 28, 2010
See also - Video:
Discurso de Bety Cariño
en la conferencia de la organización Frontline - dedicados a defender a los y
las Defensores de los derechos humanos
Speech by
Bety Cariño during the 2010 annual conference
of the organization
Frontline - Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Dublin, Ireland.
(In Spanish)
Frontline - Dublin Conference 2010
On YouTube.com
Dec. 03, 2009
See also - Video:
Discurso de Bety Cariño. Kolectivo Azul. Embajada de
Canadá.
Speech by Bety Cariño during a protest against multinational
mining company exploitation of Indigenous lands in Oaxaca state. Held at the
Canadian Embassy in Mexico City - 2009.
(In Spanish)
Tecuán News
On YouTube.com
Dec. 03, 2009
See also - Video:
Declaración de una de los sobrevivientesdel ataque a la
carvana San Juan Copala.
News conference by Gabriela, a survivor of the ambush and murder
of Bety Cariño and
Jyri Jaakola.
(In Spanish)
Camaradaappo
On YouTube.com
April 28, 2010
See also:
Texas, USA
Children Kidnapped for Sex Trafficking
Rio Grande Valley - Four young children could have ended up as sex trafficking victims. Instead they're now back with their families in Mexico.
They were kidnapped. Suspected smugglers tried to bring them to the Valley.
The children were all under six.
San Juan Police Chief Juan Gonzalez says... human traffickers want children under 10.
"These children have been raped repeatedly more than 30 times a day. The more use they get out of a child, the more profit," he tells us. "They are using these children. The younger the better for the human trafficker."
Gonzalez trains officers around the country to recognize signs of sex trafficking.
Two women from San Juan and Edinburg tried to bring four children across the bridge illegally.
A customs officer suspected the women were going to sell the kids. The children ranged in age from less than a year to six years old. The women told officers the kids belonged to them.
They even had fake U.S. birth certificates.
An alert customs officer didn't believe their story.
“Officers are being trained to recognize force, fraud and coercion," the San Juan police chief says.
Gonzalez says if the suspected smugglers [had gotten] away with their crime, the children would
[have lived] through unimaginable horror.
"They’re utilizing them in bars and nightclubs, [and] even for individuals who are requesting them, to abuse them," he tells us.
Or traffickers might sell the children to pornographers.
"Traffickers seek young children, because they can abuse them for a longer period of time," Gonzalez explains. "This kind of crime is a money maker."
He adds, "Human trafficking [has become] more profitable [than drug smuggling, human smuggling
and arms] trafficking."
Human trafficking is hard to detect and harder to prosecute.
Gonzalez says children trafficked into this country are often taken to brothels. He says there are probably brothels around the Valley
[that] investigators haven't found yet.
...Officers will usually find human trafficking when they respond to a [noise violation or
a runaway case].
Farrah Fazal
KRGV
May 8, 2010
Added: May.10, 2010
Kidnapped
Arizona, USA
|
|
|
Karley Rivera Saucedo |
Woman kidnapped during home invasion earlier this week still missing
Phoenix - Police are asking for the public's to help find a woman who was kidnapped during a home invasion earlier this week.
According to Detective James Holmes of the Phoenix Police Department, Karley Rivera Saucedo was taken after four suspects broke into her home at about 3 a.m. on Wednesday, May 5.
Saucedo, 22, has the mental capacity of an 11- or 12-year-old.
Holmes said the suspects, Hispanic males who range in from 17 to 30, forced their way into the home near 59th Avenue and Indian School Road, which Saucedo shares with her 17-year-old sister and a baby.
The suspects were armed with handguns, police said, and demanded drugs and money. When they didn't get what they wanted, the four men took Saucedo and left.
They also stole a gray 2007 Chevy HHR. That vehicle was later recovered, but there's been no sign of Saucedo or the four suspects.
The descriptions of the suspects are limited.
The first is a 17-year-old Hispanic male who is 5 feet 6 inches tall. He has black spiked hair.
The second is an 18- or 19-year old Hispanic male. He's also 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighs about 140 pounds and has short black hair.
The third is an Hispanic male between 25 and 30 years old. He is 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighs 150 pounds and has acne scars.
The fourth is an Hispanic male who is 6 feet tall, weighing about 200 pounds. He has light skin, a skinny face and a chubby body.
Anyone with information about Saucedo or what happened the morning of May 5 is asked to call the Phoenix Police Department at 602-261-6151 or Silent Witness at either 480-WITNESS or 480-TESTIGO.
Catherine Holland
azfamily.com
May 7, 2010
Texas, USA
- Mexico
|
 |
|
Angel Rojas |
Texas Girl Who Was Focus Of Amber Alert May Be In Mexico
Austin - Karen Anastacio, 13, for whom Austin police issued an Amber Alert last week, is probably in Mexico with the 25-year-old man who abducted her from her middle school, authorities say.
The Amber Alert was canceled over the weekend.
Anastacio was last seen at around 8 a.m. Thursday getting into either a brown 1997 GMC Jimmy SUV with Texas license 84TFL4 at Bedichek Middle School in Austin.
She had told a teacher's aide she didn't feel well and would likely be going home.
Police think Angel Rojas Ambrocio was driving the brown and silver SUV.
They said they believe he previously committed a violent felony against the girl.
Anastacio is 5-foot-2, weights about 115 pounds and has black hair and brown eyes.
When she was last seen she was wearing a black shirt, black pants and carrying a pink backpack.
Ambrocio is 5-foot-3, weighs 135 pounds and has black hair and brown eyes.
Police are asking anyone with information about the missing girl to call 911.
KWTX
May 10, 2010
See also:
Runaway suspect charged with sex crime
Amber Alert suspect fled with 13-year-old
Austin - The 25-year-old man accused of abducting a 13-year-old Austin girl Thursday morning is now charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony.
Officials issued the Amber Alert Thursday morning after police said Karen Anastacio was last seen at 8:07 a.m. Thursday with suspect Angel Rojas, 25. Police said they fear he may be headed to the border to leave the country, and court documents indicate information pointed to Cuernavaca, Mexico.
The two were in a relationship police said was illegal, and authorities filed charges Friday against Rojas - a family acquaintance. In those documents, police said they developed information Rojas was going to be taking the victim to Mexico.
"We have reason to believe that she is in immediate danger," said Austin Police Department Cmdr. Julie O'Brien Thursday. "We're asking for the public's help in locating Karen."
Austin police said a teacher's aide saw Karen getting into a brown 1997 GMC Jimmy SUV across the street from Bedichek Middle School in South Austin with Rojas at the wheel. License plate number: 84TFL4
School Principal Dan Diehl said the incident happened just before the start of the school day across the street from the campus near the intersection of Bill Hughes Road and Thelma Drive.
Karen was walking to school with a group of other students when she said she felt ill, Diehl said. He said shortly after, the suspect arrived at that location, where Karen got in his car.
Karen is a 5-foot-2-inch tall Hispanic female and weighs approximately 115 pounds. She has black hair and brown eyes and was last seen wearing a black shirt and black pants, carrying a pink backpack.
Angel Rojas is described as a Hispanic male, weighing approximately 135 pounds. He is 5 feet 3 inches tall and has black hair and brown eyes. Rojas may also use the following names: Juan Alberto Espinoza-Ambrocio and/or Eduardo Lopez.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of the victim or suspect is urged to call 911 immediately.
Police said Thursday Karen's family was taking action in filing a criminal charge against Rojas for allegedly committing a violent felony offense against Karen, something officials said may be the motivator for Rojas to flee not only the area but also the country.
Police said they are working with various law enforcement agencies throughout the state and with border agents as well, but they are also asking for all eyes to be on the lookout.
KXAN
May 07, 2010
The Dominican Republic
Desmantelan en Dominicana red de pornografía infantil
Un estadounidense y tres dominicanas que tenían organizado una red de pornografía infantil fueron detenido por las autoridades que confiscaron equipos de filmación y una pequeña cantidad de droga.
Las pesquisas permitieron conocer que el estadounidense Williams Bonaparte tenía contratadas a las tres mujeres para que reclutaran adolescentes y a cambio de sumas de dinero filmarlas en actos sexuales, dice la información circuladas por la policía.
El grupo operaba desde hacía meses en la provincia de Puerto Plata (Norte) y las filmaciones se centraban en menores y adolescentes del sexo femenino, según los detalles del parte.
Las actividades fueron interrumpidas por una redada policial en el apartamento en el que residía el extranjero, en el cual se ocuparon cámaras de filmación y fotográficas, un reproductor de casetes, equipos de iluminación, decenas de discos compactos con material pornográfico y una pequeña cantidad de marihuana.
El año pasado la policía dominicana desmanteló una organización similar que se especializaba en filmaciones pornográficas a adolescentes y jóvenes haitianas, anexa a una red de prostitución que operaba desde un apartamento en una céntrica calle de esta capital.
Authorities break-up child pornography ring
A U.S. citizen and three Dominicans have been arrested in the Dominican Republic
for having organized a child pornography ring. The suspects were caught with
film equipment, still cameras, film reproducing equipment, and drugs.
According to police, American citizen Williams Bonaparte had contracted with
three women to recruit adolescent girls, who were offered money to be filmed
performing sexual acts.
Previously, police has dismantled a similar child pornography ring that had
targeted Haitian girls.
Prensa Latina
May 07, 2010
Washington, DC - USA
|
 |
|
Luis CdeBaca -
Ambassador-at-Large, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
-
U.S. State Department |
Trafficking Victims Protection Act: Progress and Promise
...In the mid-1990s, then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton became interested and focused on this issue through her work with women and children. At the time, the most visible form of trafficking was women and girls from the former Soviet Union. There were duped by false advertisements for work in Western Europe only to find themselves trapped in brothels and strip clubs. The image of the blonde, beautiful, and vulnerable victim, reminiscent of anachronistic approaches to this problem back in the 1800s, garnered worldwide attention, but also demonstrated the weaknesses of that old legal regime. In the meantime, cases in the United States still involved men, women, and children--United States citizens and foreigners alike--in both sex and labor trafficking.
It became clear that a holistic approach was needed, one that focused more on the exploitation than merely on the movement of people for immoral purposes. Then-First Lady Clinton, along with Attorney General Janet Reno and Secretary of State Madeline Albright, were instrumental in bringing this issue to the attention of policymakers in Washington. Out of it was borne the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA).
The TVPA emboldened states to pursue and enact legislation to combat trafficking at the state level. In fact, the successes of the TVPA and effectiveness of state law is clearly shown in a recent case, Ramos v. Texas where the legal pitfalls exemplified in the Shackney case were bridged. In fact, the Ramos case recognized that the threat of deportation is indeed coercion and a factor in determining a victim of trafficking in persons, even if the victim walked out through the front door rather than escaping through the window or in the middle of the night. The Ramos case is a prime example of what we can achieve through solid legislation and implementation of federal and state-level laws...
The TVPA helps us... with important new tools that stands for the proposition that ignorance is not an excuse. The strip club owner who looks the other way as so-called talent agents enslave women: that’s not a bystander; that’s an accomplice. The landlord who turns a blind eye and collects rent from "massage parlors" where foreign women are held for forced prostitution: that’s not rent; that’s complicity. So too for the grower who is comfortable with farm labor contractors using force and threats to harvest the crops as long as they get picked on time. To those who have turned a willfully blind eye to the exploitation in front of them, the updated law puts down a marker: whether you partake or profit, you're accountable. Period...
The promise we seek to fulfill will be bolstered by what has now been coined as the fourth "p" – partnerships. We must strive toward better coordination with our interagency partners within our "whole of government" approach, but also partners from unlikely or untapped resources...
Through partnership, we must secure the safe place of refuge the President referred to; we must "lead by example" as we are known and expected to do; and we must allow every victim to realize his or her God-given potential. The United States has made historic progress on this issue, still in its modern infancy. We must devote ourselves to never again letting a generation go by without forward progress. Bursts of activity, and successes, in the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the early 1980s were allowed to fall dormant. We must not allow that to happen again. We can, and we must, get it right this time. Working toward a world without modern slavery is no doubt a bold proposition, but it is one that we must work toward. Thank you again for having me here this morning and for all you do to fulfill the promise of freedom in America.
Luis CdeBaca
Ambassador-at-Large, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
May 3, 2010
Mexico
Group of People Rescued from Mexican Stash House
Matmoros, Tamaulipas state, Mexico - A tip to police in Matamoros led to the rescue of 17 people from two different stash houses this week.
Human traffickers took the people hostage. Officials say the traffickers extort money out of families. Border security analysts tell us it's big money.
"The human trafficking business is extremely lucrative. People can fetch up to $10,000 a person to transfer them to across the border," says one analyst.
Experts say due to the proximity to the border, there are probably a high number of stash houses here in the Valley.
Mexican military arrested Juan Ponce Ramirez in the raid on the Matamoros stash houses.
Soldiers also found just over 10 pounds of marijuana and a rifle in the raid.
Farrah Fazal
May 06, 2010
North Carolina, USA
|
|
|
Reyna Isabel Reyes Caballero fired on officers. |
Officers fired upon during human trafficking investigation
Greensboro — Five people were taken into custody Friday night after officers raided a home during a human trafficking investigation.
One suspect is accused of firing at a Guilford County Sheriff deputy during the incident. Reyna Isabel Reyes Caballero, 37, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
Caballero is being held at the Guilford County Jail. His bail was set at $250,000.
Caballero and four other people were also taken into custody at the scene and are being detained by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The other people being held are Jose Martinez-Cruz, 26, of Reidsville; Herculano Lopez-Garcia, 24, of Greensboro; Costanzio Aguileras Palmas, 25, of Reidsville; and Vinicio Arrazate Calderon, 31, of Greensboro.
Caballero has not been charged with human trafficking. The incident, which involves alleged prostitution, is still being investigated, according to law enforcement officials.
Officers conducting an undercover operation believed a female human trafficking victim was being held at a home at 700 N. English Street in Greensboro, according to the sheriff’s department.
Shortly before 11 p.m. Friday night, sheriff department vice officers, agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Greensboro Police entered the home. Caballero allegedly fired at a deputy with a semi-automatic handgun, according to law enforcement officials.
A deputy fired back. No one was injured in the shooting.
Officers discovered a woman they say is a human trafficking victim in the home.
“She is not being charged. We have moved her to a safe place,” Powers said.
For her safety, law enforcement officials would not give any information about the woman.
His arrest records say Caballero was “running a brothel,” although he has not been charged with crimes other than the assualt charge.
Caballero, who is a native of Honduras and was living in the English Street home, the victim and four other people were at the home at the time of the search.
Two of the men were believed to be customers, Powers said.
Caballero and the other four men are all being held in the Guilford County Jail because they are undocumented U.S. residents. ICE officials are handling that portion of the investigation.
“We’ve lodged detainers against them because they are in the country illegally,” said Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for ICE...
Amanda Lehmert
The News-Record
May 8, 2010
Louisiana, USA
4 arrested in Lafourche Parish murder
Thibodaux - Four men have been arrested in the death of a woman, whose partially-clothed body was found in the woods in Galliano.
The Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office said Sunday that 20-year-old Gonzalo Portillo Cortes, 21-year-old Esdras Sanchez Garcia, 23-year-old Jose Castillo Moreno and 28-year-old Luis Nava were booked with killing Angela Laudun less than 24 hours after her body was found. Each was booked with aggravated rape and first-degree murder.
A sheriff's spokeswoman says it's the parish's first homicide case this year.
Associated Press
May 9, 2010
New Mexico, USA
|
|
|
Juan Gonzalez |
Accused child rapist on ICE hold
Police said Juan Gonzalez raped 6-year-old girl
Albuquerque - An illegal immigrant accused of raping a 6-year-old girl at Midtown Sports and Wellness Club Tuesday night is on an immigration hold.
Juan Gonzalez, 20, allegedly assaulted the child while she was alone in a play room at the club. The girl’s mother was working out at the gym at the time.
Gonzalez is accused of criminal sexual penetration of a minor, kidnapping and tampering with evidence. Judge Benjamin Chavez raised his bond at $200,000 cash only.
Despite being under the federal hold by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gonzalez will not be sent back to his home country of Mexico until he goes through New Mexico’s judicial system.
Police said Gonzalez was a member of Midtown because his mother is an employee.
As for the health club’s child care center, it is solely responsible for managing it. The Children, Youth and Families Division regulates traditional day cares.
“Drop-in programs for children specifically that are for children whose parents stay on the same premises are exempt from the regulations,” Dan Haggard with CYFD said Thursday.
The playroom where the victim was attacked is unsupervised, and there is a sign that says so. Workers at the club said the playroom is for kids who are 7 and older. The reported victim in this case is 6.
There is also a child care center at Midtown for younger kids where there is always supervision and they are never left alone. Parents have to pay $3 an hour to drop their child off there while they work out.
“I believe regardless of the setting for parents to be as involved and as knowledgeable as possible about the program where they're leaving their children,” Haggard said.
In a statement, Sports and Wellness said its staff acted immediately after being told about the incident. It also said it has stringent hiring practices and complies with all federal and state laws.
Kaitlin McCarthy
KRQE
May 06, 2010
California, USA
Former Menlo Park Preschool Chief Charged For Pestering Girl
Menlo Park - The former supervisor of a San Francisco Bay area preschool is facing a misdemeanor charge for allegedly pestering a 13-year-old girl with unwanted gifts and letters.
Fifty-five-year-old Jose Adalberto Lopez was charged with one count of annoying or harassing a child under the age of 18 on Friday.
Prosecutors say the former supervisor at Belle Haven Child Development Center in Menlo Park gave the girl intimate clothing on her 13th birthday, a bracelet as a Valentine's Day gift and wrote her letters describing how pretty she was.
The girl was the daughter of another preschool employee.
Lopez resigned from his job shortly after his arrest on April 13.
He faces up to a year in county jail if convicted. He is scheduled to be arraigned on May 18.
The Associated Press
May -08, 2010
Southwest USA
U.S. Border Patrol Weekly Blotter: April 29 - May 5
Excerpt
May 5, 2010 - Yuma Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Blythe, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 and had been previously removed from the United States.
May 4, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Ocotillo, California. Records checks revealed the subject was a convicted sex offender and had been previously removed from the United States.
May 4, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Nogales, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for sexual intercourse with a minor under 18 in the state of California, and had been previously removed from the United States.
May 3, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Three Points, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for sexual assault/sexual battery in the state of Indiana, and had been previously removed from the United States.
May 3, 2010 - Yuma Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near San Luis, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for sexual assault of a minor in the state of Washington, and had been previously removed from the United States.
May 2, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested a national of Mexico in Cathedral City, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for molesting a child under the age of 14 in the state of California, and was a registered sex offender.
May 2, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested a national of Mexico in Indio, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for lewd and lascivious acts with a child in the state of California, and was a registered sex offender.
April 30, 2010 - Marfa Sector - An off-duty Border Patrol agent observed a 2005 Toyota Camry with a single male occupant watching children for an extended period of time at several locations near Midland, Texas. The agent notified local law enforcement officers, who responded and made contact with the subject. Officers found two loaded handguns, a stun gun, duct tape, a pipe, flex-cuffs, gloves, ropes, and maps of city parks in Midland in the vehicle. The subject, a USC, was arrested by local law enforcement officers and charged with unlawful carrying of a weapon.
April 29, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Calexico, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior felony conviction for rape of a child in the state of Washington and had been previously removed from the United States.
April 29, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Calexico, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior felony conviction for assault to commit rape and sex with a minor. The subject had also been previously removed from the United States.
April 29, 2010 - El Paso Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Lordsburg, New Mexico. Records checks revealed the subject had prior convictions for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 and burglary in the state of California. He had also been previously removed from the United States.
U.S. Border Patrol
May 5, 2010
Texas, USA
Amber Alert
|
 |
|
Karen Anastacio |
|
|
|
Angel Rojas Ambrocio |
Amber Alert Issued for 13 Year Old Texas Girl
The State of Texas issued the Amber Alert Thursday afternoon (May 5, 2010) after the girl was apparently abducted from her school in Austin earlier in the day. Police believe the suspect may try to take the girl to Mexico. According to Police felony charges are pending against the suspect resulting from a violent act he committed against the girl.
Karen Anastacio, an Hispanic female, 13 years old, 5' 2", 115 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a black shirt and black pants and carrying a pink backpack
The suspect is Angel Rojas Ambrocio, an Hispanic male, 25 years old, 5' 3", 135 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.
The suspect vehicle is a brown Ford Expedition or Explorer..
Anyone with information is asked to call the Austin Police Department at 512-974-0911 or dial 911.
CodeAmber.org
May 06, 2010
About 'Rapto'
In Mexico, an Unpunished Crime
Rape Victims Face
Widespread Cultural Bias in Pursuit of Justice
...A "machismo culture," instilled
through what is learned in the home, school and church, has
allowed many men to "believe they are superior and dominant, and
that women are an object." ...That mind-set has contributed to
making many men-including policemen,
prosecutors, judges and others in positions of authority-believe
that sexual violence against women is no big deal.
...A review of criminal laws in all
31 Mexican states showed that many states require that if a
12-year-old girl wants to accuse an adult man of statutory rape,
she must first prove she is "chaste and pure." Nineteen of the
states require that statutory rape charges be dropped if the
rapist agrees to marry his victim...
In the southern state of Oaxaca last
summer, the one-year-old, government-funded Oaxacan Women's
Institute persuaded the legislature to pass heavy criminal
penalties against a practice known as "rapto."
Laws in most
Mexican states define rapto as a case where a man kidnaps a
woman not for ransom, but with the intent of marrying her or to
satisfy his "erotic sexual desire."
The new law championed by the women's group established
penalties of at least 10 years in prison.
But in March, the state legislature
reversed itself and again made the practice a minor infraction.
A key legislator -a man- argued for the reduction, calling the
practice harmless and "romantic."
Human rights groups disagree. They
say it is not charming for a man to spot a woman he fancies
sitting in a park, pick her up and carry her away to have sex
with her. Yet to this day, that is still how some women meet
their husbands. The attorney general's office said there have
been 137 criminal complaints of rapto in the state of Puebla
since January 2000...
Mary Jordan
The Washington Post
June 30, 2002
California, USA
|
 |
|
Jose Perez
|
Fast Food Chef Arrested in Series of Attacks on Women
Other possible victims are urged to come forward
Los Angeles - Police have arrested a 23 year old fast food chef suspected in a
string of attacks on young women in the western
San Fernando Valley dating back over a year.
Jose Perez was arrested April 28 in connection with five crimes over the past 13
months, including two attacks last week, police said.
Police say Perez targeted petite teenage girls who appeared to be defenseless,
sneaking up during daylight hours and trying to assault them or drag them into
his vehicle.
According to police:
The first crime in which Perez is suspected occurred March 19, 2009.
A 15-year-old girl reported being abducted from
behind a Sherman Oaks school where she was a student.
The girl was dragged into the bushes, but she fought back as the man groped her,
and he eventually fled.
On May 8, 2009, a 15-year-old girl reported being
grabbed from behind outside her apartment building. Both fell to the ground, and
the suspect fled in a silver four-door Volkswagen.
On Nov. 11, 2009, a 13-year-old girl reported being
grabbed by a man who got out of a white GMC Yukon. But she also fought off the
man, and he fled in the SUV.
Perez is suspected in at least two other similar crimes in April.
On April 26, a 13-year-old girl was in front of a
Van Nuys school when a man drove up in a gray Volkswagen Jetta, got out and
started asking her questions. He then fondled the girl, who pushed him away. The
girl jotted down the license number as he drove away.
Two days later, an 18-year-old woman was walking
home when she noticed a white SUV rolling alongside her. The driver pulled over,
got out, grabbed her from behind and hustled her into the vehicle.
But the young woman's uncle, who happened to be nearby, heard the commotion and
ran off the man, while the woman got out of the vehicle, which was last seen
headed north on Lindley Avenue.
The license plate on the SUV in that case also pointed to Perez.
Detectives believe other possible victims may not have reported similar
encounters and urged them to come forward.
Anyone with more information was asked to call Lt. Edward Pape or Detective John
Doerbecker at (818) 374-7730.
KTLA News
May 4, 2010
California, USA
|
 |
|
Cesar Ysidro Fernandez |
Coach Accused of Having Sex with Student
Los Angeles - A basketball and volleyball coach for the Los Angeles Unified
School District has been arrested on suspicion of carrying on a sexual
relationship with a female student.
Cesar Ysidro Fernandez, 39, was arrested at his home, locked up in lieu of
$100,000 bail after being charged Friday with four counts of unlawful sex with a
minor, police said.
The investigation began in January when investigators learned that the sexual
relationship appeared to have started during the school summer break of 2009.
The student was 17 years old at the time of the relationship and is now 18,
according to police.
Fernandez, a teacher at 32nd Street USC Math, Science and
Technology High School, reportedly purchased expensive gifts for
the teen and allegedly brought her to hotel rooms and an
apartment to have sex.
According to police, Fernandez will not be put back in a Los Angeles Unified
School District classroom if he bails out before the case is resolved.
Fernandez also taught summer school at Carson High School.
He has been a teacher since 1993, and has been at the 32nd Street school since
1996. It's believed he has been placed on leave pending the outcome of the
case...
KTLA News
May 6, 2010
Mexico
Sentencian a 9 años a un hombre por trata de personas en Chiapas
Un juez federal sentenció a nueve años de prisión a un hombre que sometía a trabajos forzados a un grupo de mujeres centroamericanas en Tapachula.
El Juzgado Tercero de Distrito condenó a Calixto Celestino Plata, por los delitos de trata de personas y violencia contra las mujeres.
El sentenciado obligaba a nueve jóvenes guatemaltecas, de 14 y 16 años de edad, a realizar jornadas de trabajo de más de 10 horas diarias.
Calixto Celestino fue asegurado durante un cateo por policías federales, en una vivienda de la colonia centro de Tapachula, a principios del año pasado...
Man is sentenced to 9 years in prison for human trafficking in Chiapas state
Federal judge sentences the convict for forcing Central American women into
labore slavery in the city of Tapachula
The federal Third District Court has sentenced
Calixto Celestino Plata to prison fore engaging in human trafficking and
violence against women.
Celestino Plata forced nine Guatemalan girls between the ages of 14 and 16 to
work for more than ten hours per day in conditions of forced labor...
Rotativo.com
May 05, 2010
Mexico
 |
|
Street scene from Mexico City's 'La
Merced' red light district - from
Youtube.com |
67% de las prostitutas, explotadas desde niñas
En la zona, 20 por ciento de las trabajadoras tiene entre 12 y 18 años. Provienen de Oaxaca, Chiapas y Tlaxcala; además son analfabetas, detallan.
México.- Un estudio efectuado por el Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF), la UNICEF y el Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores reporta que “67 por ciento de las mujeres que trabajan en La Merced, se dedican a la prostitución desde niñas.
Indica que 95 por ciento de las personas, hombres y mujeres, que son explotados sexualmente, tienen antecedentes de haber sido agredidas física, sexual y mentalmente.
67% of women working in Mexico City's La Merced prostitution
district started in 'the business' as children
In La Merced, 20% of sex workers are between the ages of 12 and
18, They came from the [heavily Indigenous] states of Oaxaca,
Chiapas, and also Tlaxcala. Most are illiterate.
Mexico – A study conducted by the Nation System fore Integral
Family Development (DIF – Mexico’s main social services agency),
UNICEF and the Center for Investigation and Studies – reports
that 67% of women sex workers in Mexico City’s La Merced
prostitution tolerance zone started working when they were
children.
The study reports that 95% of female and male sex workers in the
zone experienced past sexual, physical or psychological abuse.
In Mexico, more than 20,000 children and adolescents are victims
of commercial sexual exploitation. [We assert that the number
run much higher – LL.] In Mexico City and specifically at La
Merced, child sex trafficking mafias control the prostitution of
Indigenous and other rural children and youth who were either
kidnapped or who were sold by their own parents.
The estimates vary in regard to the number of minors who are
prostituted in La Merced. Some statistics indicate that 20% of
sex workers are between 12 and 18 years-of age.
These are usually cases in which a girl has run away from an
abusive home, or their parents were tricked into believing that
their child was being taken to work in a legitimate job in
Mexico City that would provide her with food and shelter.
The girl children who are prostituted in the bars, clandestine
flop houses, street markets and alleyways [of La Merced] are most often found
to have originated in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas
and Tlaxcala.
The Latin American and Caribbean branch of the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women (CATW-LAC) reports that in La Merced, 56%
of sexually exploited women had faced aggression within their
families. Some 66% of them were abused by their spouses.
Ninety percent of the minors prostituted in La Merced have not
completed primary school. Eighty eight percent of these minors
become mothers to an average of three children each.
According to the report: “During the past
several decades the age of initiation into prostitution has
dropped from 15 to 11.
The daughters of prostituted women in La Merced
are obliged, without exception, to live a life of prostitution. Their
mothers typically sell their virginity for an average price of
10,000 Mexican pesos (US$760).”
Prostituted minors typically sell sex for 50 pesos ($3.85).
Child prostitution is visible to everyone [in Mexico City]. It
is irresponsible and undignified to fail to recognize it and
work to change the situation for the better.
Milenio
May 05, 2010
Virginia, USA
|
|
|
Leonel Torres-Lopez |
[Man] sentenced to five years for molesting two local girls
...Leonel Torres-Lopez, 24, was sentenced by York-Poquoson Circuit Court, substitute Judge Thomas Nance to five years in prison on two counts of aggravated sexual battery. His victims were two York County girls, ages 7 and 9.
Judge Nance actually sentenced Torres-Lopez to 20 years in prison on each count, only to suspend 15 years of each sentence. The sentences will run concurrently.
In 2007, Torres-Lopez molested the two girls, while they were sleeping. At the time of the assault, the children were being watched by a babysitter.
The girl’s parents were in court and stated that both young victims are now afraid to sleep, and have “persistent nightmares.”
To no avail, Torres-Lopez’ attorney Nora Misenti asked that he client only be sentenced to time served. For the last year, the Mexican national has been in the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer.
York-Poquoson Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Barbara Cooke told the courtroom that Torres-Lopez had a "history of freely moving across the border."
Dave Gibson
The Examiner
May 05, 2010
Mexico
 |
|
Tlaxcala state, located just east of
Mexico City, is a major source and 'distribution'
area for kidnapped sex trafficking victims. The
victims who are 'assembled' in Tlaxcala are first
taken to Mexico to be broken-in to a life of forced
prostitution. Many are then taken to brothels in
Mexico's border regions, the United States, Europe
and Japan. |
Prostitución Infantil en México
México.- Él, es líder de una red de trata de personas. Es miembro de una industria familiar dedicada a la explotación sexual que tejió sus lazos incluso en los Estados Unidos. Una cadena que apunta, invariablemente a Tlaxcala.
Tenía varias niñas en la merced y una de ellas en el 2005 se atrevió a denunciarlo por lenocinio. Él se entera, hace una reunión y delante de todas las demás la mata a golpes. Él dice que para ejemplo de todas las demás y que cuidado y otra se atreva a denunciarlo.
La fiscal de Delitos Sexuales de la Procuraduría de Justicia del Distrito Federal, Juana Camila Bautista Rebollar, narra así, los detalles de una investigación contra Alejo Guzmán, que sigue abierta...
Child prostitution in Mexico
He is a leader of a human trafficking network. He forms part of
a family-based criminal industry dedicated to sexual
exploitation. Their network extends its tentacles as far as the
United States. The network, like so many others, is based in
Tlaxcala state in central Mexico.
The child trafficking gang had a number of girls in the La
Merced area in 2005, when one of them dared to denounce the
network to police. The leader of the group found out, and calls
a meeting. In front of the other girls, he beats the girl who
went to the police to death. He said that he was giving the
other girls a lesson as to what they would face if they did the
same thing.
Juana Camila Bautista Rebollar, the prosecutor for sex crimes
for Mexico City, narrated these details to the press in regard
to her ongoing investigation of Alejo Guzmán.
Bautista Rebollar: “He killed this girl by beating her. He
later doused her with gasoline and burned her body under the
Congress of the Union bridge.”
Unfortunately, their was no way to discover who she was, to
notify next of kin, given that her body was burned to cinders.
Two other girl victims testified about the homicide. The
network’s victims were all young girls who had been entrapped by
the traffickers in
rural communities in Puebla, Morelos, Tlaxcala and
Veracruz states.
Bautista Rebollar: “We could only find one of the victims
[murdered by Alejo Guzmán]. The other has not been found. . These
are cases that we continue to investigate. Lamentably, there are
many [similarly] frightening cases.” ...
Guzmán
Flores, age 36, who is originally from the city of Tenancingo, in
Tlaxcala, was arrested in March of 2009 in Puebla state.
Investigators say that he has been involved in the
above-mentioned sex
trafficking network for 10 years. He has been charged with
aggravated promotion of prostitution (pimping) and homicide.
W Radio
April 27, 2010
Mexico
Migrantes michoacanos, víctimas de prostitución infantil, extorsión y trata
Una proporción importante de los migrantes, sufren violaciones a sus derechos ya sea en el tránsito por el estado u otras entidades
Morelia, Michoacán.- La prostitución infantil, la trata de personas y la extorsión son los principales delitos de que son víctimas los migrantes michoacanos, declaró Arnulfo Sandoval Cervantes, director regional (Michoacán, Colima y Guanajuato) del Centro de Atención a Víctimas de la Procuraduría General de la República (PGR).
Sin embargo, hace falta una cultura de la denuncia puesto que la mayor parte de los casos no son del conocimiento de las autoridades, de ahí que en el año 2009 sólo se dio atención a seis casos de connacionales, uno donde el agraviado de doce años de edad fue víctima de prostitución infantil, dos mujeres menores de 30 años de trata y tres más fueron extorsionados.
Migrants from Michoacán state are the
victims of child prostitution and extortion
A large number of state residents are subjected to human rights
violations as they cross Mexico in route to the U.S.
Morelia, Michoacán state - Child prostitution, other forms of
human trafficking and extortion are the most common crimes
faced by migrants who leave
Michoacán, declared Arnulfo Sandoval
Cervantes, regional director of the federal Attorney General’s
office for the tri-state Michoacán, Colima y Guanajuato area. A
lack of willingness to report these crimes on the part of
society contributes to their continuing impunity...
Ivonne Monreal Vázquez
Cambio de Michoacan
April 22, 2010
California, USA
Convicted Mexican Sex Offender Arrested At Indio Bus Stop - Border Patrol
Indio - A convicted sex offender from Mexico, with reputed ties to a Northern California gang, was found at an Indio bus station and
was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol, agents said today.
The 37-year-old man, whose name was not released, was arrested Tuesday at the Greyhound Bus station on Oasis Street in Indio during a check by Border Patrol agents, said spokesman Victor Brabble.
Border Patrol agents determined that the man was a citizen of Mexico with no U.S. immigration documents.
He was taken to the Indio Border Patrol Station, Brabble said, where a records check revealed that the man was an aggravated felon convicted of carjacking with a firearm and unlawful sex with a minor.
The man also had tattoos identifying him as a member of the Border Brothers, a Northern California street and prison gang that began in Mexico in the 1980s.
The alleged gangster was being held pending prosecution for entering the United States after deportation, Brabble said.
KESQ
April 28, 2010
See also:
Added: May. 5, 2010
Southwest USA
U.S. Border Patrol Weekly Blotter - April 22-28, 2010
Excerpt
April 28, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Indio, California. Records checks revealed the subject was a Border Brothers gang member, and had prior convictions for carjacking with a firearm and unlawful sexual contact with a minor in the state of California. The subject had also been previously removed from the United States.
April 28, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near San Miguel, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for involuntary manslaughter and indecency with a child in the state of Texas. The subject had also been previously removed from the United States.
April 27, 2010 - El Paso Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested a USC who illegally entered the United States near El Paso, Texas, avoiding the port of entry. During the investigation to determine the subject's citizenship, records checks revealed he was a registered sex offender with two active arrest warrants for burglary and theft issued in the state of California.
April 26, 2010 - El Paso Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for criminal sexual penetration of a minor and kidnapping in the state of New Mexico, and had been previously removed from the United States.
April 26, 2010 - El Paso Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Sunland Park, New Mexico. Records checks revealed the subject was a convicted sex offender and had been previously removed from the United States.
April 26, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Douglas, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior felony conviction for homicide in the state of Arizona and had been previously removed from the United States.
April 26, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Nogales, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had prior convictions for theft and a sexual offense against a child in the state of Washington. The subject had also been previously removed from the United States.
April 24, 2010 - El Centro Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Indio, California. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior felony conviction for attempted sexual assault on a child in the state of Colorado and had previously been removed from the United States.
April 24, 2010 - El Paso Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Las Cruces, New Mexico. The subject had an active arrest warrant for criminal sexual contact with a child under 13 issued in the state of New Mexico.
April 24, 2010 - Miami Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Guatemala near Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Records checks revealed the subject had an active arrest warrant for forcible rape of a child with the use of a weapon issued in the state of Massachusetts. The subject had also previously been removed from the United States.
April 24, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Nolia, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had an active arrest warrant for two counts of rape issued in the state of Oregon. The subject had also been previously removed from the United States.
April 23, 2010- Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Douglas, Arizona. Record checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for statutory rape in the state of California and had been previously removed from the United States.
April 22, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Guatemala near Tucson, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had an active arrest warrant for molestation of a minor in the state of Florida, and had previously been removed from the United States.
April 22, 2010 - Tucson Sector - Border Patrol agents arrested an illegal alien from Mexico near Tucson, Arizona. Records checks revealed the subject had a prior conviction for a sex offense against a child in the state of Indiana, and had previously been removed from the United States.
Office of Field Operations - U.S. Border Patrol
April 28, 2010
Alabama, USA
Huntsville police investigating rape of 14-year-old
Huntsville - A rape investigation is underway in Huntsville...
The victim is an underage girl.
The disturbing attack was unsettling for many women in the neighborhood, who said they're going to be extra cautious from now on...
...Police said early Sunday morning, a 14-year-old girl reported being raped by a Hispanic male while she was asleep in her bed.
Investigators said the man ran off after the victim woke up and began screaming.
Police are not sure how the man got into the house...
News of the rape put other neighbors on edge.
"I wouldn't expect it around here, that, that kind of blows my mind," said Shannon Stadler, who moved to the area just a few months ago...
Police said the suspect got away in a red Ford Mustang.
If you have any information that might help investigators, give Huntsville Police a call at (256) 722-7100.
Trang Do
WAFF
May 03, 2010
New York, USA
 |
|
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn at Cornell |
Nicholas Kristof Talks of Oppression of Women Worldwide
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof told a story yesterday afternoon to a packed audience in Statler Hall about two 15-year-old Cambodian girls trapped in the despairing shackles of prostitution. He had spoken to both of them for an article he was working on as a reporter and was struck by the fact that after his article ran, they would return to their lives of physical and emotional abuse.
“I had a great front page story and these girls were going to stay behind and die of AIDS,” he said.
So he made a call to the legal counsel at The New York Times and asked if the newspaper had a policy on purchasing human beings. “It turns out they didn’t!” he said to warm laughter from the audience. He bought the girls’ freedom for a total of $350.
“When you get a receipt for buying a human being, it’s a disgrace on our century,” he said.
Kristof, who was joined on stage by his wife, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Cornell Board of Trustees member Sheryl WuDunn ’81, continually walked a narrow line between journalist and activist.
While telling the stories of young women who have endured widespread abuse in third-world nations, they made a heart-tugging plea to end the violence. Their claim that their work to save young girls was “unusual” for journalists was one of many similar statements that defined the unique nature of their jobs.
Kristof and WuDunn’s appearance, part of the the 20th anniversary celebration of the President’s Council for Cornell Women, focused on what they called the century’s most pressing problem — the worldwide oppression of women. This is also the subject of Half the Sky, their bestselling book released last year...
Ben Eisen and Emily Cohn
The Cornell Daily Sun
April 30, 2010
See also:
The World
LibertadLatina
Commentary
 |
|
Chuck Goolsby |
The Latin American Gender Crisis Also Deserves Mainstream Coverage
Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are doing important work spreading the word about human trafficking and the oppression of women and girls around the world.
During the fall of 2009, I spoke with both of the authors during a public radio discussion of their book
on third world gender oppression, Half the Sky, on WAMU, public radio at the American University in Washington, DC.
I mentioned to Kristof, WuDunn and talk show host Frank Sesno that Asia and
Africa were not the only hot spots for gender oppression in the developing world. I said that Latin America also has a major gender rights emergency that rivals that found in India. I mentioned that southern Mexico has been identified by Save the Children as the largest region in the world for the crime of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC - child sex trafficking). I added that the United Nations-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in southern Mexico has reported that an estimated 450 to 600 women and girls migrants, mostly from Central America, are systematically raped each and every day on the Mexican side of the narrow border with Guatemala and Belize, while Mexico's government intentionally refuses to police that zone of complete criminal impunity.
Kristof and WuDunn responded that they had not studied Latin America when
writing the book Half the Sky, and said that they considered India to be the largest and most critical gender rights emergency globally, and that therefore it should be tackled first.
In following their interviews on the subject, I see that Kristof and WuDunn continue to discuss India
as the global priority. They rarely mention Latin America in their discussions
about the subject of third world gender oppression.
Each and every journalist and author has the freedom to choose any subject matter to focus on. A person can only do so much in the fight against global gender oppression. We call out the inconsistencies in Kristof and WuDunn's presentation of the issue of gender oppression because, as both are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists
and best selling authors, their views are used as a reference point for those
interested in gender oppression issues globally.
Kristof and WuDunn's views also represent the status quo among anti-trafficking organizations in that they, like most workers and volunteers in the anti-trafficking movement, are
of European and Asian descent, and they therefore tend to focus on gender rights and human trafficking issues that involve Europe and Asia (and to some extend the U.S. and Africa).
Our project,
Libertad-Latina, has for the past 9 years addressed the task of speaking out with documented facts to make the case that Latin America is home to one of the most severely critical gender oppression crises on planet earth.
We assert that the crisis of gender oppression and especially human trafficking
is just as severe in Latin America as it is in Asia. The fact that the Japanese Yakuza
mafias have been kidnapping and exporting women and girl children (and
especially Indigenous girl children) to Japan and other Asian nations from
Colombia (since the 1980s) and also from Mexico and other nations in the region, is
one clear indicator of the importance of Latin American victims as an
economically valuable cohort of slaves used to populate the world's brothels.
The International Organization for Migration has stated that Latin America generates $16 billion per year from sex trafficking. That number is around 50% of the best estimates of the illicit revenues derived from human trafficking globally.
Given that Latin America represents roughly 50% of the global human trafficking
marketplace, it deserves the focused attention of the world's women and
children's human rights defenders.
Veteran Mexican women' rights lawyer Teresa Ulloa, director of the Latin American and Caribbean branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW-LAC) has
reported that 17% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Latin America is generated from prostitution, most of which involves sex trafficking.
Ulloa also reports that Mexico alone has 500,000 victims of human trafficking.
In recent months, U.S. Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP), has acknowled-ged that an estimated 60% of U.S. trafficking victims are
from Latin America. Most of them have been trafficked across the Mexican border with the U.S. Yet most public pronouncements by Ambassador CdeBaca and his two predecessors failed to mention Latin America, even in passing.
We encourage everyone who works to end human trafficking: individuals, activists, non governmental organizations, government agencies and inter-governmental bodies to take a stand against gender oppression in Latin America. We also ask that the journalists and authors who cover gender oppression and human trafficking speak-up and join the tireless efforts of activists in the region and their supporters, who work day and night to end the mass gender atrocities that today plague Mexico and most of the other nations of Latin America.
End impunity now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
May 03, 2010
Massachusetts, USA
|
 |
|
Ismael Rivera (right) appears in court |
Springfield man arrested for vicious assault on 10-year-old girl
Sringfield - A 10-year-old girl is recovering after allegedly being viciously attacked inside of a Chestnut Street apartment building around midnight Wednesday, according to police, who have announced a suspect is in custody.
Ismael Rivera, 26, of 10 Chestnut St., is facing charges of assault and battery on a child with injury, unarmed robbery, kidnapping of a child, intimidating a witness and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in connection with the assault on the girl after allegedly punching her in the mouth, burning her with a cigarette and attempting to drag her toward the building's garage before she was able to escape and run for help, according to Springfield Police Department Sgt. John Delaney.
The girl had been sent from her home on the 12th floor of 10 Chestnut St., to the 8th floor to an apartment belonging to the her mother's friend to get some cereal and milk, according to Delaney. As the girl was walking down the stairwell, Rivera allegedly grabbed her by the arm, spun her toward him and then punched her in the mouth. According to Delaney, Rivera then allegedly ripped the girl's cell phone from her hand as she pulled it out in an attempt to call for help and then grabbed her by the throat and threatened to break her neck if she didn't stay quiet before burning her neck with his cigarette.
Rivera then allegedly attempted to bring the girl to down the stairs to the building's garage, according to Delaney, when she was able to free herself and run to a security guard in the lobby for him to call 911.
Police were able to obtain a description of the attacker from the girl and went through the building to speak with residents, according to Delaney, and were able to identify Rivera as a suspect. Rivera was later found allegedly attempting to get back into the building while hiding his face with a hooded sweatshirt, according to Delaney, who added Rivera had the young girl's blood on his clothing.
Rivera had been arraigned in Springfield District Court Wednesday and ordered held without right to bail. Police had requested he be held on $1 million bail as he had allegedly threatened to flee to Puerto Rico, according to Delaney.
Nate Walsh
WGGB
April 28, 2010
Mexico
|
|
|
Rupert Knox, de
Amnistía Internacional, recomendó al gobierno mexicano hacer
reformas legislativas para garantizar el acceso a la justicia para
los migrantes.
Rupert Knox of Amnesty International has recommended to the Mexican
government that it pass legislative reforms to guarantee
migrants
access to tMexico's justice system.
Photo: EFE |
AI: México viola DH como Arizona
El gobierno federal admitió la vulnerabilidad de los migrantes en su paso por el
país; actuará en pro de los indocumentados
La organización Amnistía Internacional (AI) demandó al gobierno de México ser
congruente en sus reacciones en temas migratorios y atender el problema de
abusos cometidos en contra de ciudadanos centroamericanos en territorio nacional,
como lo hace en la defensa de sus connacionales en Arizona.
Añadió que nada exime a las autoridades mexicanas para llevar ante la justicia a
los responsables de violaciones cometidas en la frontera sur, ya sean
funcionarios públicos o particulares...
Amnesty International: Mexico
Violates Migrants Human Rights "Same as Arizona"
Mexico’s Federal Government
admits the vulnerability of undocumented migrants; declares that it will work in
favor of immigrant rights
During a press conference and
report release: “Invisible Victims, Migrants in Movement Across Mexico,”
Amnesty International (AI) demanded that the government of Mexico be
consistent in its response to migration issues and abuses – and that it treat
abuses committed against Central American migrants on Mexican soil in the same
fashion as it treats its own complaints about abuses of Mexican citizens in
Arizona, USA.
Rupert
Knox noted that nothing exempts Mexican authorities from
bringing cases of migrant abuse long its southern border, be they committed by
public officials or others, before the justice system.
In response, the federal
government admitted the vulnerability of migrants during their trek across
Mexico, where they encounter dangers such as human trafficking and extortion.
At the conclusion of the press
conference, AI Mexico president Alberto Herrera stated that abuses occur that
are not being correctly addressed by the Mexican authorities.
Herrera: “These are the two
sides of the same coin. They are systematic practices of the Mexican state. On
the one hand, the government is making [pro human rights ] energetic statements
for international consumption [Blue heart campaign, etc.]. On the other hand, a
critical lack of attention to these domestic problems.
Herrera added that Mexico
should investigate both abuses committed by public officials, and those
perpetrated by individuals, including crimes that may be linked to organized
crime.
The AI report indicated that
90% of migrants crossing Mexico are Central Americans, especially from El
Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. 20% of that number of migrants are women
and girl children.
One in 12 of these migrants is
under age 18. Although the majority of those are teenagers, some have not yet
reached age 10.
The AI report also mentions
that in 2009, 64,061 foreign migrants were detained by Mexico’s National
Migration Institute. Some 60,383 of them were originally from Guatemala,
Honduras and Nicaragua.
Miguel Á. Sosa and
Gerardo Mejía
El Universal
April 29, 2010
See also:
Mexico
Mexico acknowledges migrant abuse, pledges changes
Mexico City - Amnesty International called the abuse of migrants in Mexico a major human rights crisis Wednesday, and accused some officials of turning a blind eye or even participating in the kidnapping, rape and murder of migrants.
The group's report comes at a sensitive time for Mexico, which is protesting the passage of a law in Arizona that criminalizes undocumented migrants.
The Interior Department acknowledged in a statement that the mainly Central American migrants who pass through Mexico on their way to the United States suffer abuses, but attributed the problem to criminal gangs branching out into kidnapping and extortion of migrants.
Rupert Knox, Amnesty's Mexico researcher, said in the report that the failure by authorities to tackle abuses against migrants has made their trip through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world.
"Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses," Knox said.
Central American migrants are frequently pulled off trains, kidnapped en masse, held at gang hideouts and forced to call relatives in the U.S. to pay off the kidnappers. Such kidnappings affect thousands of migrants each year in Mexico, the report says.
Many are beaten, raped or killed in the process.
One of the main issues, Amnesty says, is that migrants fear they will be deported if they complain to Mexican authorities about abuses.
At present, Article 67 of Mexico's Population Law says, "Authorities, whether federal, state or municipal ... are required to demand that foreigners prove their legal presence in the country, before attending to any issues."
The Interior Department said the government has taken some steps to combat abuses and Mexico's legislature is working to repeal Article 67 "so that no one can deny or restrict foreigners' access to justice and human rights, whatever their migratory status."
The Amnesty report said one female migrant told researchers that Mexican federal police had forced her group off a train and stolen their belongings. Forced to walk, she said, she was subsequently attacked by a gang and raped.
The Interior Department said it shares Amnesty's concern, and called the report "a valuable contribution."
Mexico has long been offended by mistreatment of its own migrants in the United States...
Mark Stevenson
The Associated Press
April 29, 2010
The United States
Hundreds Of Immigrants With Criminal Records Arrested
Arrests Made In Florida, Puerto Rico
Miami, Florida - Hundreds were arrested this week as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement searched for immigrants with criminal records living in the U.S.
ICE officials announced Friday that a total of 596 foreign nationals with criminal records were arrested during a three-day operation in the Southeast, including Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Puerto Rico.
Of the 596 arrests, officials said 258 were in Florida and Puerto Rico. Five were arrested in Monroe County, 48 in Miami-Dade and 24 in Broward.
ICE officials said investigators targeted immigrants who pose a threat to national security, are members of gangs or who have a history of sex crimes against children, although the immigrants were not necessarily fugitives. Some of those arrested who have serious criminal histories and prior immigration arrest records could face federal prosecution.
Arrestees who have deportation orders outstanding or who have reentered the U.S. illegally will be deported, officials said.
JustNews.com
April 30, 2010
See also:
The United States
596 criminal aliens arrested in targeted ICE operation throughout the southeastern U.S.
Operation Cross Check yields the largest-ever number of arrests
WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its law enforcement partners arrested 596 foreign nationals with criminal records during a three-day enforcement surge throughout the southeastern United States, making it the biggest operation targeting at-large criminal aliens ever carried out by ICE in the region...
U.S. ICE
April 30, 2010
New York, USA
|
|
|
Richard Figueroa |
'Manny' busted for sexually abusing 5-year-old
A Manhattan "manny" has been busted for sexually abusing a 5-year-old boy in his care, police said Friday.
Richard Figueroa, 23, performed lewd acts - which sources said involved oral sex - on a Morningside Heights boy over a period of several years, law enforcement officials said.
The mother called police last Tuesday after the boy asked her why "Richie always wants to kiss me on the lips" and perform sexual acts on him, sources said.
Figueroa, of East Harlem, was taken into custody at 10:30 p.m. Thursday, cops said. He was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court last night on charges of sexual assault on a child and committing a sexual act on a child, and held on $200,000 bail...
Kate Nocera and Joe Kemp
The New York Daily News
May 01, 2010
Ohio, USA
Cops: House guest got girl pregnant
Family took in illegal immigrant after meeting him at church
A 19-year-old illegal immigrant faces charges he impregnated the 13-year-old daughter of a family who helped him by moving him into their home after they met at church.
Estuardo Ruiz of Forest Park was booked into the Hamilton County jail Thursday on one count of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor.
According to court documents, Ruiz met the girl and her family at a church in Lockland that the family runs. The family reached out to Ruiz and moved him into their home.
That’s when he became sexually active with their teenage daughter, say Forest Park police.
The girl is pregnant with his child, which is due in October.
Her parents have made him move out.
Police say Ruiz, who does not speak English and is in the U.S. illegally, wrote a confession with the assistance of an interpreter.
Jennifer Baker
Cincinnati.Com
April 30, 2010
Washington State, USA
No suspects identified in reported rape at playground
Wenatchee - Wenatchee police say they have no suspects, but have asked other police agencies to attempt to locate the man and van described by a 16-year-old girl who reported she was raped at a school playground Saturday evening.
The girl told police she was walking on Orondo Avenue at about 8 p.m. when a man pulled up beside her in a light-colored van with tinted windows and began talking to her through the open passenger window, said Wenatchee Police Sgt. Cherie Smith.
She reported that she ignored the man and continued walking, but he got out and grabbed her, dragged her into the playground at Columbia Elementary School and sexually assaulted her, Smith said.
She told police she did not scream or call for help, and after the assault she walked home and told her mother.
Smith said they have not increased patrols at the school. Wenatchee School Superintendent Brian Flones said he hasn’t talked to his security officer, but doesn’t think the district has done anything specific in response, other than normal patrols around its schools...
The girl described the suspect as a man between 18 and 20 years old, about 130 pounds and 5 feet 8 inches tall, wearing a black tank top, dark blue jeans, and a black bandana. She told police he had a pierced tongue and goatee, tattoos across the knuckles of both hands, and a tattoo of barbed wire around his right elbow.
The girl identified the man as Hispanic...
K.C. Mehaffey
The Wenatchee World
April 27, 2010
Texas, USA
Peñitas man gets five years for molesting young relatives
Edinburg - A 25-year-old Peñitas man has been sentenced to five years in prison for molesting three female relatives.
Marco Antonio Molina Gonzalez pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.
One of his victims, 8, reported the continuous abuse to a counselor at her elementary school in March 2009. She said that he once had sex with her while she was locked in his room, according to court documents.
Her name as well as those of Gonzalez’s other 4- and 5-year-old victims have been withheld as it is The Monitor’s policy not to identify victims of sexual abuse.
Because he is an illegal immigrant, Gonzalez faces possible deportation after completing his prison term.
Jeremy Roebuck
The Monitor
April 26, 2010
New York, USA
|
|
|
Victor Hernandez-Perez |
Hernandez-Perez found guilty on 13 counts, including kidnapping
Ballston Spa - Victor Hernandez-Perez has been found guilty of kidnapping a 24-year-old woman last July, assaulting her and forcing her to undress while he threatened to rape and kill her.
After five hours of deliberation, a jury returned the verdict — guilty on 13 of 14 counts — just after 7 p.m. Friday night.
Hernandez-Perez now faces eight to 25 years in state prison for his crimes. He will be sentenced in Saratoga County Court July 6. Hernandez-Perez, who entered the country illegally from his native El Salvador, will be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at the end of his prison term.
“We’re going to ask for the maximum sentence,” District Attorney James A. Murphy III said. “This guy is a predator.”
...
The Saratogian
April 30, 2010
Mexico
|
 |
|
Impunity!
Father Alejandro Solalinde, director of the shelter "Hermanos en el Camino de la Esperanza "
[Shelter for
Migrant Brothers on the Road of Hope]
and the coordinator of the Southern Zone of the Pastoral Dimension
of Human Mobility of the Mexican Episcopal Conference - is thrown
into the back of a pickup truck
and taken away by corrupt police forces in Oaxaca state.
Amnesty International: "Father
Alejandro Solalinde has been repeatedly arrested, threatened and
intimidated by local authorities and criminal gangs [for his work
assisting migrants]..."
How is the Blue Heart Campaign going to
end the madness of corrupt police action against migrants, others
at risk of human exploitation and those who help them, President Calderón? -
LL
(From
a 7 minute video documentary
by Amnesty International) |
Los abusos generalizados contra migrantes en México
son una crisis de derechos humanos
(comunicado de prensa - 48 páginas
- en el Formate de PDF)
Amnesty: Widespread abuse of migrants in Mexico is 'human rights crisis'
[Amnesty: Authorities are complicit in crimes against
migrants]
The Mexican authorities must act to halt the continuing abuse of migrants who are preyed on by criminal gangs while public officials turn a blind eye or even play an active part in kidnappings, rapes and murders, Amnesty International said in a new report released on Tuesday.
Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico, documents the alarming levels of abuse faced by the tens of thousands of Central American irregular migrants that every year attempt to reach the US by crossing Mexico.
"Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses," said Rupert Knox, Mexico Researcher at Amnesty International.
"Persistent failure by the authorities to tackle abuses carried out against irregular migrants has made their journey through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world."
Kidnappings of migrants, mainly for ransom, reached new heights in 2009, with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) reporting that nearly 10,000 were abducted over six months and almost half of interviewed victims saying that public officials were involved in their kidnapping.
An estimated six out of 10 migrant women and girls experience sexual violence, allegedly prompting some people smugglers to demand that women receive contraceptive injections ahead of the journey, to avoid them falling pregnant as a result of rape.
On 23 January 2010, armed police stopped a freight train carrying over 100 migrants in Chiapas State, southern Mexico.
Veronica (not her real name) said that Federal Police forced her and the other migrants to leave the train and lie face down on the ground, before stealing their belongings and threatening to kill them unless they continued their journey by foot along the railway.
After walking for hours, the group was assaulted by armed men who raped Veronica and killed at least one other migrant.
Two suspects were later detained after a local activist helped the migrants file a complaint but no action was taken against the Federal Police, despite migrants identifying two officers allegedly involved.
"Mexico has a responsibility to prevent, punish and remedy abuses whether these are committed by criminal gangs or public officials," said Rupert Knox.
The report calls for immediate action to ensure migrants' access to complaint mechanisms regardless of their status and ensure effective investigations...
Despite some welcome measures in recent years, for example better protection of the rights of unaccompanied children and criminalization of people trafficking, this has often in reality failed to prevent and punish abuses against migrants.
[The above linked page at Amnesty International
includes an excellent 7 minute video report]
The full report in English (48 pages - PDF format)
Amnesty International
April 28, 2010
Mexico
A final end to another stark case of official impunity
targeting Indigenous women
|
|
|
Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice has freed two wrongly convicted
Otomi indigenous women,
Teresa González Cornelio
(left) and
Alberta Alcántara Juan - two months after
they were sentenced to prison for supposedly kidnapping six AFI
(equivalent to the U.S. FBI) agents - when a group of unarmed women
vendors at a street bazaar protested the confiscation of their
merchandise and surrounded the agents. |
Resuelve SCJN libertad para indígenas otomíes Alberta y Teresa
México, D.F., 28 abr 10 (CIMAC).- Por unanimidad, cinco ministros de la Primera Sala de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN) resolvieron hoy revocar la sentencia dictada el 19 de febrero del 2010 contra Alberta Alcántara Juan y Teresa González Cornelio, indígenas otomíes acusadas de “secuestrar” a seis elementos de la desaparecida Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI).
La sesión pública, en la que ambas indígenas fueron absueltas, convocó a una gran cantidad de medios de comunicación, quienes estuvieron pendientes del dictamen de la ministra Olga Sánchez Cordero, quien concluyó que no hay elementos suficientes para acreditar el delito de privación de la libertad en su modalidad de secuestro ni acreditar la responsabilidad de Alberta por delitos contra la salud, es decir, posesión de cocaína.
Por tanto, José de Jesús Gudiño Pelayo, presidente de la Primera Sala de la SCJN resolvió que de inmediato se mandaría un telegrama al juez Cuarto de Distrito en el estado de Querétaro, Rodolfo Pedraza Longi, para que este a su vez gire la orden de liberación.
Caber recordar que Pedraza Longi, impuso a Alberta y Teresa una pena de 21 años de prisión y el pago de una multa de 91 mil pesos, más 70 mil pesos por concepto de “reparación del daño”, luego de responsabilizarlas de haber “secuestrado” a seis elementos de la desaparecida Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI).
Anayeli García Martínez
CIMAC Women's News Agency
April 28, 2010
See also:
Mexico
 |
|
Teresa González Cornelio in her prison cell |
Mexico frees 2 Indians after 4 years in prison
Mexico's Supreme Court has overturned the kidnapping convictions and ordered the release of two Indian market vendors whose case received international attention.
Otomi Indians Alberta Alcantara Juan and Teresa Gonzalez Cornelio have spent almost four years in prison on 21-year sentences for the alleged kidnapping of six federal agents.
Prosecutors say the agents were confiscating pirated goods at a market in 2006 when angry vendors overpowered them and held them against their will.
The court ruled Wednesday there was insufficient evidence to convict the women.
Critics, including Amnesty International, contend prosecutors fabricated evidence.
A third woman convicted in the case, Jacinta Francisco Marcial, was freed last year.
The Associated Press
April 28, 2010
See also:
Mexico
Amnesty International Demands Release of 2 Mexican Indigenous Women
Mexico City - Amnesty International of Mexico said two indigenous women jailed since 2006 on charges of kidnapping six police officers are “prisoners of conscience” and called for their immediate release.
Alberta Alcantara Juan and Teresa Gonzalez Cornelio were arrested three-and-a-half years ago during a raid on pirate DVD vendors at a square in the central Mexican state of Queretaro, the home region of both women.
In the same operation, police also arrested another indigenous market stall holder, Jacinta Francisco, who was released last September due to what Mexican prosecutors acknowledged was a lack of evidence during a retrial.
In a joint press conference with the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, or Centro Prodh, – which is assisting in the defense of Alcantara and Gonzalez – the director of that latter organization, Luis Arriaga Valenzuela, said the jailing of the two women serves as a dissuasive measure against all marginalized Indian populations.
“In cases like this, they know that if they rise up, they run the risk of getting lost in the labyrinth of Mexico’s deficient justice system,” he said.
For his part, Gabriel Alcantara Juan, Alberta’s brother and Teresa’s husband, said this situation is common among “low-income families” like his and demanded the immediate release of his sister, his wife and their daughter, who was born in prison and is now one year old.
Centro Prodh said Alcantara and Gonzalez had previously been victims of ethnic, gender and class discrimination and were targeted during the police operation because they “demanded to see the identification of the officers taking part” in the raid.
The police arrived at the Santiago Mexquititlan square dressed as civilians and violently dismantled some market stalls and seized merchandise, an operation resisted by the vendors...
The Latin American Herald Tribune
Late
2009
Georgia, USA / Puerto Rico
Army Lt. Colonel Accused Of Making Child Porn
Atlanta - A lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Army has been indicted by a federal grand jury on child pornography production and possession offenses.
Edgar Pagan-Torres, 41, of Peachtree City, made his initial appearance before a U.S. Magistrate judge on April 15, 2009, and was indicted Tuesday afternoon.
"This defendant allegedly sexually abused his own daughter and niece and then produced videos of his crimes, mementos that he carefully organized into home-video-style DVDs," said U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates. "This shocking and tragic conduct has no place in our nation's military, nor anywhere else. I appreciate all the hard work the U.S. Army investigators did to bring this case to the FBI and to ensure that the defendant now faces these very serious charges."
...
WSB-TV
April 27, 2010
Nevada, USA
|
|
|
19-year-old suspect Juan Rivera |
14-Year-Old Identified as Murder Victim
Las Vegas - The Clark County Coroner's Office has identified the teen found murdered in a daycare parking lot as 14-year-old Diana Soto of Las Vegas.
No cause or manner of death has been determined.
Soto's body was found Sunday morning in the back parking lot of a daycare near Owens Ave. and Marion Dr. Officers were able to identify Soto through a missing persons report that was filed on April 24, 2010.
After interviewing family and friends, detectives arrested 19-year-old Juan Rivera in connection with Soto's murder. He has been booked into the Clark County Detention Center for murder, robbery and sexual assault. He will make his first court appearance on Wednesday.
KLAS
April 27, 2010
Ohio, USA
14-year-old indicted in rape of 64-year-old
Hamilton - A 14-year-old accused of robbing and sexually assaulting a 64-year-old woman has been indicted by a Butler County grand jury.
Alexis Ramirez of Liberty Township was indicted Wednesday, April 28, on charges of felonious assault, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, two counts of kidnapping, three counts of rape and tampering with evidence. According to prosecutors, he faces up to 83 years in prison if convicted.
Assistant Prosecutor Brad Burress said the rape charges stem from “three distinct places in the house he forced to have sex with him.”
Ramirez was indicted for tampering with evidence for allegedly ditching the gun used in the attack in the woods behind his residence in a Liberty Twp. trailer park.
According to Butler County sheriff’s detectives, the woman was attacked Jan. 11 after the 14-year-old Monroe student
- armed with a “pellet rifle” - entered her residence at Countryside Mobile Home Community on Ohio 4. Authorities say the teen demanded money, hit the woman in the head and raped her before forcing her to drive to an ATM.
In March, following psychological evaluations and a hearing, Butler County Juvenile Court Judge Ronald Craft transferred the case to adult court...
Dayton Daily News
April 28, 2010
Mexico
|
|
|
Migrantes
originarias de Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, y de otras
nacionalidades, continúan siendo víctimas de las redes de la
delincuencia organizada.
Migrant
women, hailing from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and
other nations, continue to become the victims of organized crime
networks.
Foto:
Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM) |
"Zetas" secuestran y venden mujeres en 40 dólares: ONG´s
Ciudad de México.- Organizaciones de derechos humanos que trabajan en temas migratorios sostienen que pese a las campañas de prevención que lleva a cabo el Gobierno federal para radicar la trata de personas, mujeres, hombres, niñas, niños y adolescentes que salen de sus países en busca de una mejor vida tienen que soportar el costo de sufrir todo tipo de agresiones y violaciones a sus derechos humanos a lo largo de su trayecto por territorio mexicano.
Organizaciones como Frontera con Justicia, Humanidad Sin Fronteras, Belén Posada del Migrante y el Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez afirman que de acuerdo a testimonios de mujeres centroamericanas, en nuestro país las mujeres migrantes que viajan en el tren son secuestradas por grupos delictivos como los Zetas y forzadas a ejercer la prostitución en bares, prostíbulos y casas clandestinas en donde las venden hasta por 40 dólares"...
"Zetas" kidnap and then sell [pimp] migrant women for $40
-
NGOs
Human rights
organizations who work on migration issues in Mexico say that, despite the
existence of federal initiatives to combat human trafficking, girls, boys,
adolescents, women and men who leave their homes in search of a better life must
face every form of violence and violations of their human rights throughout
their long journey across Mexican territory.
Non-profit
agencies such as Frontera con Justicia [Border with Justice], Humanidad Sin
Fronteras [Humanity Without Borders], Belén Posada del Migrante [the Bethlehem
Migrants Shelter] and the Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez [The
Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center] say that, according to the
testimonies of Central American women, many females who travel through Mexico by
jumping onto trains [the most common form of migration] are then kidnapped by
criminal networks such as the Zetas [a very powerful drug cartel founded by AWOL military men who apply
extreme violence during their criminal activities]. The Zetas and other gangs
force these kidnapped women to exercise prostitution in bars, brothels and safe
houses, where they are sold for up to 40 dollars.
Victims say that
these crimes are committed with complete impunity. “The authorities, instead of
taking action against the bars, actually work against us,” says a Honduran
migrant victim who was interviewed by a Honduran newspaper, and who has been
supported by NGOs in Mexico.
The advocacy
groups denounced the fact that migrants originating from Honduras, Guatemala, El
Salvador, Nicaragua and other nations continue to be victimized by these
crime networks, and by state governments who will not defend and protect their
human rights.
The human rights
advocates went on to add that government officials actually participate in the
commission of crimes against migrants. This is especially true in the many cases
where women have been kidnapped and taken to safe houses and brothels where they
are subjected to sexual exploitation and labor trafficking.
Because of this,
the above-named organizations energetically call upon the government of Mexico
to make good on the commitment and will expressed during the recent [April 14, 2010]
launch of the United Nations Blue Heart Campaign. The NGOs want Mexico’s federal
government to focus especially on the undocumented Central American migrant
population [as human trafficking victims].
At the same time,
the advocates are demanding that the rule of law and the statutes governing
human trafficking, the office of the federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Women and
Human Trafficking (FEVIMTRA), and programs to protect trafficking victims - stop
being, as they are today, a set of inoperable political actions that allow
neither the eradication of the root causes of trafficking nor the elimination of
related crimes.
Within this context, the
NGOs, who previously extended an open invitation for visits on these issues to
the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), are also calling on the Mexican
state to set solid dates for the visits offered, in response, by Felipe González,
the CNDH Special Rapporteur for Workers, Migrants and their Families.
Manrique Gandaria
El Sol de México
(OEM)
April 24, 2010
See also:
(Another report about the same press conference)
Mexico
Piden ONG contener creciente trata de personas en México
Organizaciones No Gubernamentales (ONG) reclamaron hoy al gobierno mexicano hacer efectivo el compromiso de contener la creciente trata de personas, ejercida básicamente contra inmigrantes centroamericanos en condición irregular.
Pese a los esfuerzos del Ejecutivo, el delito resulta frecuente y las políticas aplicadas no conducen a la erradicación de ese grave flagelo, señalaron ONG especializadas en la materia, entre ellas Frontera Con Justicia y los centros de derechos humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez y del Migrante "Beato Juan Bautista Scalabrini"...
Prensa Latina
April 22, 2010
LibertadLatina
Commentary
|
|
|
Chuck Goolsby |
|
Logo of the United
Nations Blue Heart Campaign Against Human Trafficking |
|
Is Mexico Finally Willing to Act to End
Human Slavery and Gender Exploitation?
The April 14th launch in Mexico City by President Calderón of
the world's first national-level (United Nations sponsored)
Blue
Heart Campaign against human trafficking offers the hope that
the Mexican government has finally turned a corner, and is now
willing to act positively to combat the crisis of modern human
slavery after a very long history of inaction.
While that is the hope, it is not unfair for the world to
maintain a skeptical eye on the activities of Mexican officials
as they work to put into effect such a radical change in
national policy.
During the past several years
LibertadLatina
has dedicated its efforts to bringing world attention to the
mass rapes, kidnappings and enslavement of women,
children and men that occurs with almost total impunity in
Mexico. While the global anti-trafficking movement -and
especially its powerful and pioneering English-speaking
contingent- have focused almost exclusively on fighting human
trafficking in other regions of the world (especially in Europe,
Asia and the U.S.), we have worked to close the gap in
English-language and bilingual coverage of the trafficking
crisis in the Spanish-speaking, Caribbean, Indigenous and
African-descendent communities of the Americas.
The United Nations is perhaps the only major entity
with the power to affect positive change - to have taken the
crisis in Latin America seriously during the past decade. It is
not by accident that the UN had previously developed an
anti-trafficking relationship directly with Mexico's border
state of Chiapas, the only UN-to-state relationship of its kind, in response to
the mass human atrocities that occur there. It
is also not by accident that Mexico was chosen as the world's
first nation to adopt the UN Office of Drugs and Crime's Blue
Heart Campaign against human trafficking.
According to the Southern Cone (southern South American) office
of the United Nations-affiliated International Organization for
Migration (IOM), an estimated $16 billion of the $32 million in
annual profits created by the human slavery industry globally
are generated in Latin America. That 50% 'share' of the criminal
marketplace for worldwide slavery victims has never been
responded to by the engagement of 50% of the global
anti-trafficking movement's energy, resources or focus.
That lack of attention, together with the willingness of past
U.S. administrations to effectively ignore Latin America's
crisis in human slavery, allowed a drug-profit fueled criminal
industry to grow exponentially in the region while the world
effectively looked the other way in apathy.
Mexico is home base for the largest problems in Latin
American human trafficking.
We have decided to focus on the crisis in Mexico because solving
that one single national emergency will have the most positive
impact on the entire regional crisis.
In the United States, 60% of U.S. trafficking victims are Latin
American. Most of them have been trafficked across the Mexican
border into the U.S. The population of Mexico (and especially
its poor and vulnerable Indigenous peoples), also suffer immensely from
modern slavery. In addition, Central American migrants are kidnapped, raped
and trafficked by the many thousands as they cross Mexico. Some
are also murdered.
Southern Mexico's narrow border with Guatemala and Belize is the
one 'bottleneck' where literally millions of South and Central
American migrants who seek to travel to the United States must
cross into Mexico. Human traffickers and also rapist thugs and
robbers await these innocent migrants like trolls under a
bridge. They rape an estimated 450 to 600 women and girls among
these migrants every single day of the year with complete
impunity on the Mexican side of its southern border, with no
discernable response from Mexican officials and authorities. In
fact, police and military forces have harassed migrants and
their NGO caregivers. Many of these victims are kidnapped
(10,000 during a 6 month period, according to a study by
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission). A number of those
victims are sold into slavery, often to be trafficked to
brothels in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe.
The NGO Save the Children has described the southern border of
Mexico as being the largest region in the entire world for the
commercial sexual exploitation of children. The city of
Tapachula, for example, has 20,000 persons engaging in
prostitution in its 1,500 bars and brothels. Half of that number
are children and underage youth at any given time. Local police
don't interfere with this 'business,' they focus on keeping
child prostitutes away from schools and upscale residential
neighborhoods.
Across Mexico, women, and especially those from
Mexico's traditionally discriminated against Indigenous peoples,
who are 30% of the population, are also raped with impunity. The
perpetrators are not only criminal thugs, but also military
soldiers engaged in the drug war. President Calderón has
steadfastly denied that any problem exists with military rapes
of civilians, and he has refused to allow accused soldiers to be
tried in civilian courts.
On April 15, 2010, one day after the launch of
the Blue Heart campaign, President Calderón sent his federal
lawyers to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to fight
against
Inés Fernández Ortega,
an Indigenous woman who was gang-raped by soldiers in her home
in 2002. The government lawyers denied that any rape took place,
and blamed the victim for the lack of justice (an assertion that
women's rights activists in Mexico are repulsed by).
Fernández Ortega, her family and her lawyers have faced
intimidation and death threats. Her brother, a witness in her
case, was murdered shortly after she began her now 8 year effort
to find justice in her case.
For Inés Fernández Ortega and many other women victims of
criminal impunity in Mexico, the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights has become the venue of last resort after having faced
institutional injustice, impunity, and a corrupt and uncaring
government response to their plight.
The Mexican government's actions in the Inés Fernández Ortega
case, just after kicking-off the Blue Heart Campaign,
raise a red flag of concern about the true
nature of President Calderón's level of commitment to truly
changing Mexico's long tradition of openly exploiting people for
profit while repressing the rights of those who dare to file a
complaint.
During the 500 year period since the Spanish conquest of Mexico,
Indigenous women have been easy target for rapists and human
traffickers. We who are Indigenous know this history inside out,
no matter what corner of the Americas we hail from. What is an
abomination in today's world is the fact that in Mexico and
across much of Latin America, Indigenous women and girls
continue to be enslaved and brutalized with the implied consent
of national governments. By extension, none of these women can
count on the protection of their national governments and local
police forces in the face of such gender atrocities.
In Mexico, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Indigenous children and
underage youth have been kidnapped and then sold to the Japanese
Yakuza mafias, who then transport the victims to Japan, where
they are enslaved as 'Geisha' prostitutes. Despite the existence
of this story during the past several years, there are no
visible signs that either Mexico or Japan have ever lifted a
finger to rescue the victims. In a similar case, a reporter in
Spain posed as a pimp, and was offered 6 Mayan Indigenous
girls for sale. They were all 13-years-old. The sale price
was $25,000 each, because Indigenous girl children were
considered to be "exotic" merchandise.
During the past 9 years,
LibertadLatina
has related many similar true stories of
impunity to our readers. We have backed-up our arguments with
the 1,300 pages of factual news articles, research reports and
essays that are available on this web site.
We have especially focused on
translating into English the many articulate voices for change
in Mexico and Latin America.
They are women and men; journalists, academics and activists who
have dared to speak the truth about the mass gender atrocities
that plague this region of the world, a region where exercising
your freedom of expression, especially as a journalist, can
easily get you killed.
We salute them all, and remain dedicated to presenting the truth
to the public about these institutionalized forms of gender and
ethnic oppression.
The United Nations Blue Heart Campaign's first national-level
effort will offer Mexico an opportunity to show its citizens,
its indigenous nations, its undocumented migrants, its children
and the world community that it is really willing to change.
Change will not come easily. We will not celebrate any victories
over impunity until we see real, consistent change on the
ground.
To make that change happen, human rights
organizations, activists, academics and concerned citizens
within Mexico and across the globe will all have to keep up the
pressure on Mexico's government. Many political and cultural
forces in Mexico will fight hard to block the effective work of
the Blue Heart Campaign and the imposition of the rule of law in
regions where it does not now exist.
Mexico has relied upon slave labor (farm labor
peonage and unpaid Indigenous domestic servitude for the middle
and upper classes) for 500 years. In addition, according to
veteran Mexican women's rights lawyer Teresa Ulloa, director of
the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women's Latin American
and Caribbean branch (CATW-LAC), 500,000 victims of human
slavery exist in Mexico. The great majority of these victims are
forced into prostitution. That economic sector generates great
wealth for criminals, corrupt police officers and politicians.
Raping, robbing and murdering migrants who attempt to cross
Mexico also generates significant illicit 'profits.'
Those who benefit from exploiting people will not give up
without a fight. It is not unlike asking people in Afghanistan
to give up growing opium poppies to make heroin. That is simply
how money is made in that part of the world.
The supporters of the lawless status-quo have included many
officials within the Calderón administration.
The 2007
Law to Prevent, Combat and Punish Human Trafficking
was effectively derailed by opposition within the
administration, and it is now referred to accurately as a "dead
letter" by congressional leaders.
Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez Mont was effectively in charge
of seeing to it that the 2007 law's required federal regulations were written,
and that the Commission and the Program to Prevent and Punish
Human Trafficking were set up. He dragged his feet for two years
before the law's regulations were written, and then delayed
setting-up the commission called for in the law. The National
Program, the last major element called for to actually implement
the law, was never created.
The aspects of the 2007 law that were put into effect only came
into being because of persistent agitation from members of
Congress. Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez Mont, for example,
only created the federal regulations required to implement the
law after Congress issued four stern warnings to President
Calderón, demanding that he act
to put the law into effect.
Congressional members are still demanding that
the 2007 law's required National Program to Prevent and Punish
Human Trafficking be created, as called for in the 2007 law.
In addition to these realities, the National
Action Party (PAN) has not had a stellar history in regard to
defending women's rights within many other venues.
The former mayor of Ciudad Juarez and later
Chihuahua state governor during the 1990s femicide crisis,
Francisco Javier Barrio Terrazas,
was rewarded by president
Calderón, (over the vocal objections of anti-femicide activists
who recalled his apathy in addressing the crisis)
with an appointment as Mexico's ambassador
to Canada in 2009.
Arturo Chávez,
who botched the investigations into the Ciudad Juarez femicides
and prosecutions of suspects, was roundly denounced by
anti-femicide activists when President Calderón named him to be
Attorney General, also in 2009.
Cecilia Romero, head of the national immigration service (INM)
and a long-time PAN party official, boasted in a
2009
press interview with El Universal,
a major Mexico City daily paper, that human trafficking is
"inevitable", and that, "the
existence of the smuggling of migrants, human trafficking,
pedophile networks, and the kidnappings and violence that affect
thousands of migrants are only
"evils of
mankind" that Mexico cannot eradicate.
The worst legacy of misogyny within the ruling
National Action Party is represented by El Yunque (the
Anvil) - an ultra-conservative Catholic secret society that has
been reported to be a major, if not dominating influence within
the PAN. As we have reported previously:
|
"El Yunque holds the belief that all social activists,
including those who advocate for improving the lives of
women, indigenous people and the poor, are literally
the children of Satan. They take aggressive political action
consistent with those beliefs.
During the 1960s, El Yunque perpetrated political
assassina-tions and murders targeting their opponents.
|
We are today being asked by President
Calderón to believe that his administration has made the radical
shift from policies that effectively matched those of El Yunque, to a now
enlightened, pro-women and pro-victim stance that aggressively
supports the war against human trafficking.
If President Calderón's lofty words, spoken at the April 14,
2010 launch of the "Blue Heart Campaign - Mexico - 2009-2010"
(see below articles), are sincere, we support those sentiments
100%
PAN congresswoman Rosi Orozco, who has just presented a new
anti-trafficking bill to replace the 'failed' 2007 law (see
below articles) is proposing a measure that appears to be a
truly groundbreaking piece of legislation. Her bill, developed
with input from the United Nations (and likely the United
States), appears to repair the many deficiencies found in the
2007 law that made its implementation such a political nightmare
for anti-trafficking advocates in Congress.
We
do insist, however, that the Mexican government dismantle ALL
forms of human exploitation, and that it do so effectively. We
echo the recently announced demands of NGO
agencies Frontera con Justicia [Border with Justice], Humanidad Sin
Fronteras [Humanity Without Borders], Belén Posada del Migrante [the Bethlehem
Migrants Shelter] y el Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez [The
Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center]
(see above article).
|
[We all demand that]
the rule of law and the statutes governing human
trafficking, the federal Special Prosecutor for
Crimes Against Women and Human Trafficking
(FEVIMTRA), and programs to protect trafficking
victims - stop being, as they are today, a set of
inoperable political actions that allow neither the
eradication of the root causes of trafficking nor
the elimination of related crimes. |
The wonderful words spoken by President Calderón and Deputy
Orozco during the Blue Heart campaign launch said nothing about
the 3,000 to 4,000 Mexican Indigenous children and youth
enslaved in Japan who are awaiting the president's action and their rescue.
Those words said almost nothing about the rape with impunity of 450 to
600 women and girl children by traffickers and thugs each and
every day on the Guatemalan border, an atrocity that Mexico's
Congress has demanded action to have resolved for years to no
avail. [Although efforts to assist migrant victims of
trafficking were mentioned by President Calderon on April 14th.]
Those words also said nothing about any federal action to
change conditions in Tapachula, a southern Mexican border city
where an estimated 10,000 underage children and youth are forced
to prostitute themselves with virtually no government
intervention.
Nothing was said about Save the Children's
observation that Mexico's southern border is the largest zone
for the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the entire
world.
We expect, at the very least, that the U.S. State
Department's 2010 Trafficking Persons (TIP) report, that applies
a rating to all of the world's nations, will be honest and
acknowledge these multiple crises. Were it not for the Blue
Heart Campaign and the positive anti-trafficking leadership and
actions of Deputy Rosi Orozco. the PAN party's new spokesperson on
human trafficking issues, Mexico would have rightly deserved a
downgrading of its 2009 rating from Level 2 to the Level 2
Watch List in 2010.
No nation wants to be on that 'trouble' list.
We have no doubt that the U.S. Government,
through Ambassador at Large Luis CdeBaca, played a major role in
bringing about such a major change in Mexican federal policy on
human trafficking. If that assumption is correct, we salute
Ambassador CdeBaca, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and
President Barack Obama for those important efforts.
Mexico has a lot of work to do to show the world that it is
serious about ending human exploitation and impunity. As it goes
through these first apparent baby steps of changing direction,
it is the responsibility of the world's peoples and governments
to "trust, but verify."
We cannot divert our attention from this crisis while government
actors in Mexico continue to be part of the problem, and while
thousands of innocents continue to be kidnapped and raped each
week with total impunity.
The whole world is watching!
End impunity now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
April 27, 2010
See also:
Central America and Mexico
María de Jesús Silva, Jackeline's mother
Trata de blancas en
Centroamérica
For non-governmental
organizations, the child kidnapping and sex trafficking case of
11-year-old Jackeline Jirón Silva fom Nicaragua is emblematic,
as the case shows clearly how the third most profitable criminal
enterprise in the world operates.
...Jackeline has been forced to work in brothels all over
Central America. Her pimps now have her in Tapachula, in
Chiapas state [near Mexico's southern border with Guatemala].
María de Jesús Silva [Jackeline's mother, who searched all over
Central America and southern Mexico for her daughter]: "I saw
things that I never imagined existed... The brothels are full of
children, sold by traffickers and abandoned by their parents. I
saw them prostitute themselves and wished that any one of them
would have been my daughter. I settled for caressing the hair of
these girls, and I imagined that in the 'next' brothel, I was
going to find my daughter. Everything that I have suffered
through is nothing compared to what my girl is going through."
Mexico -
The Hot Spot
Save the Children has identified the border region between
Guatemala and Mexico as being the largest hot spot for the
commercial sexual exploitation of children globally.
Ana Salvadó: "It the neck in the bottle, because many children
attempt to migrate from Central America [and South America] to
the United States, and they never get past [southern] Mexico,
where they are sold by pimps and sometimes are returned to
Central America."
A study by the international organization ECPAT (End Child
Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for
Sexual Purposes)... reveals that over 21,000 Central Americans,
with the majority being children, are prostituted in 1,552 bars
and brothels in Tapachula, Mexico (near the Guatemala border).
Traffickers sell these children to Tapachula's pimps for $200
each.
Prostitution in cities like Tapachula operates openly.
Contralínea Magazine has documented the fact that traffickers
work with corrupt federal and local officials in exchange for
bribes or as direct participants in the criminal networks...
According to ECPAT's report "Ending Child Prostitution, Child
Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes,"
from Tapachula, where these children are sold, the victims are
transported to the Mexican cities of Oaxaca, Michoacán,
Guerrero, Jalisco, Nayarit, Sinaloa and Mexico City.
More that 50% of these child victims are from [indigenous]
Guatemala. The rest are Salvadorans, Hondurans and Nicaraguans.
They range in age from eight to fourteen-years-old.
-
Ana Lilia Pérez
Revista Contralínea
Oct. 22, 2007
See also:
Undercover reporter in Spain
poses as buyer, is offered 6 Indigenous 'virgin' girls [all of
them age 13] by child sex trafficker. 'Sale' price in Europe
for Mayan girls kidnapped from Chiapas state in Mexico: $25,000
Each.
(In Spanish)
- Cronica
Feb. 29, 2004
See also:
Chiapas - State government
investigates the sale of young Mayan girls in Europe.
(In Spanish)
- CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
March 15, 2004
|
See also:
 |
|
Read the CIMAC Women's News Agency's
collection of
over 340 articles
published between 2007 and 2010 about the rape with impunity of [mostly
indigenous] women by soldiers in Mexico.
(In Spanish)
CIMAC Women's News Agency - Mexico
City |
See also:
Modern Day Slavery in Mexico and the
United States
...Ambassador [Luis] C. de Baca [Director of the U.S. State
Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) office]
believes that focusing on eradicating human trafficking
could improve U.S.-Mexican efforts to combat other forms of
transnational crime.
According to C. de Baca, human trafficking “appears to be an
area where the [Mexican government] is prepared to cooperate
with [the U.S.].” C. de Baca and others are hopeful that the
exchange of information on human trafficking cases will
build relationships between Mexican and U.S. officials that
might help further combat the drug war.
Megan McAdams
Council on Foreign Relations
Dec. 21, 2009
See also:
Mexico
Denuncian el "infierno" de unos 18.000 migrantes secuestrados al pasar por México
Washington, DC.- México se ha convertido en la trampa de miles de migrantes de Centroamérica y Sudamérica que son secuestrados cada año cuando atraviesan ese país, según denunciaron hoy activistas en la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH)...
Activists Denounce the “Hell” Faced by
18,000 Migrants per Year Who Are Kidnapped in Mexico
Washington, DC - According to activists who testified on March
22, 2010 at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) -
Mexico has become a dangerous trap for thousands of migrants
from South and Central America who are kidnapped each year when
they attempt to cross Mexico.
The religious and human rights activists testified during an
IAHRC hearing, held during its 138th period of sessions. In their
testimony, they accused the Mexican state of abandoning the
18,000 migrants who were kidnapped during 2009, which they
declared to be a terrible year for the phenomenon.
The director of the migrant shelter Brothers on the Road to
Hope, Father Alejandro Solandide, denounced the lack of
political will in Mexico to put a stop to the problem, as well
as the complicity and cover-up that state agents engage in – in
relation to these crimes.
Father Solandide: “It is very hard to see a line that separates
the authors of these kidnappings - be they organized criminals
or public
officials.”
Migrants begin their trek in their home countries, where
these criminal networks [first] coordinate their activities, said Oliver
Bush Espinoza, of the National Institute for Migration [Mexico’s
immigration agency].
When migrants reach Mexico, they are trapped, and are taken to
safe houses, where the coyotes demand their family’s phone
number [to allow them to extort the family], and they are beaten with sticks and suffer other
tortures.
“These safe houses are hell. The victims suffer tortures. If they
resist [the extortion], they are made examples of and are
mutilated or murdered, declared Reverend Pedro Pantajo Arreola,
of the Bethlehem Migrant’s Shelter.
The wave of kidnappings began in 2006,
says Father Solandide, but the problem became even larger in
2009, when it became like a “silent, low-motion massacre” – “due
to moral decay,” the increase in organized criminal
violence, and judicial impunity.
During the last three years, the ‘industry’ of mass kidnapping
has been perfected, especially in the state of Veracruz. In a
six month period of time, these kidnappings generate $50 million
dollars in revenue.
Aside from the Mexican government’s failure to investigate these
crimes, and the “immense defenseless-ness” of the victims, Father Solandide denounced the “insufficient actions taken and
mechanisms put into place” by the government in the face of
this reality. Scant resources exist to house, assist and restore the
victims.
The representatives of the organizations who testified directly
assist victims, a situation that has also placed them in
harm’s way.
“Our migrant shelters are being threatened
and attacked by both the Mexican authorities and by members of
organized crime, to such an extent that we have found in
necessary to seek the legal protection of this Commission,”
said Monsignor Raúl Vera, Archbishop of Saltillo, who is
also the president of the Council of the Friar Juan de Larios
Center.
[Oliver Bush Espinoza, of the federal National Institute for Migration,
and Alejandro Negrín, human rights representative at the Mexican
Chancellery, testified in opposition to the petition.]
Felipe González, the President of Mexico's National Human Rights
Commission of Mexico (CNDH) stated that he was in agreement with
the petitioners, and invited the IAHRC to visit Mexico to
determine the magnitude of the problem in person.
EFE
March 22, 2010
Mexico
|
 |
|
National
Action Party (PAN) Congressional Deputy Rosi Orozco (center) listens as
President Felipe Calderón (left) speaks during Mexico's April 14, 2010
national inauguration of the United Nation's Blue Heart Campaign against human
trafficking. |
 |
|
Deputy Rosi Orozco (left)and Actress Mira Sorvino,
(right) appointed in 2009 as Goodwill Ambassador on Human
Trafficking for the United Nations, at the Blue Heart Campaign launch in
Mexico City on April 14, 2010 |
Mexico se Suma a la Campaña Corazón Azul de la ONU - Contra la Trata de Personas
Una fructífera semana en avances sobre la concientización del delito de trata de personas y el apoyo que debemos darle todos a los niños y niñas, y mujeres y hombres víctimas de esta práctica catalogada como “la esclavitud del siglo XXI”, tuvimos en estos últimos días.
El Gobierno Federal, a través del presidente Felipe Calderón, emprendió la Campaña Corazón Azul para sensibilizar a la ciudadanía sobre este grave delito que flagela a la sociedad, y dio todo su apoyo a la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para que a nivel nacional se emprendan actividades de sensibilización y prevención.
Con el apoyo de todo el equipo de trabajo que me acompaña, desde hace un par de meses nos sumamos a la organización de la campaña Corazón Azul en nuestro país, junto con la oficina de las Naciones Unidas Contra la Droga y el Delito, la Comisión nacional de los Derechos Humanos, la Agencia de Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID) y el gobierno federal...
Mexican Congressional Deputy Rosi Orozco reports
on a productive week of activities during the launch of the UN Blue Heart
Campaign in Mexico
This past week was fruitful, in that major advances were made in raising
awareness about the crime of human trafficking, and about the assistance that
all of us need to be giving to boys, girls, women and men who are victims of
modern day slavery.
Mexico's federal government, through the actions of President Felipe Calderón,
has launched a national version of the United Nations Blue Heart Campaign to
raise public consciousness among citizens about this grave crime. President Calderón
offered his assistance to the UN so that national efforts at education and
prevention become successful.
Together with my staff, during the past two months I have joined the National
Human Rights Commission, the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), Mexico's federal government, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC-initiators of the Blue Heart Campaign) in coordinating efforts [to
begin this campaign].
I had the honor to represent the Special Commission for the Fight Against Human
Trafficking of the (congressional) Chamber of Deputies on the panel at the
Campaign launch. Joining me was [fellow PAN party anti-trafficking activist]
Senator Guillermo Tamborrel.
We can both testify to the fact that the struggle
to assist victims of human trafficking has now become a major focus on the
national Agenda, which redoubles our commitment to end this scourge.
President Calderón invited all Mexican women and men, civil organization, NGOs,
academic institutions, authorities across federal state and local governments,
officials from the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and all
political parties, without exception, to unite without conditions to defend the
freedom of millions of Mexicans and people around the world.
President Calderón stated: "Together we will generate, my friends, a new social
consciousness that leaves behind us forever the pain and violence the human
trafficking leaves in its wake. We must continue to work with dedication, not
only to honor the liberty that our ancestors conquered, but also to defend those
freedoms against any and all interests that threaten them. That is the legacy
that we must leave to future generations of Mexicans - a world that is more
free, more just, and more human."
Deputy Rosi Orozco
RosiOrozco.com
(Approx.) April 22, 2010
Mexico
Presenta PAN ley para prevenir trata de personas
Al advertir que al año cerca de 20 mil de niños son victimas de explotación sexual en nuestro país y 1.2 millones a nivel mundial, la diputada del Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), Rosi Orozco, presentó una iniciativa para expedir la Ley General para Prevenir, Combatir y Sancionar la Trata de Personas.
La también presidenta de la Comisión Especial de Lucha contra la Trata de Personas, explicó que la iniciativa busca cimentar la construcción de un marco jurídico que coordine los tres órdenes de gobierno y distribuya las competencias y facultades entre éstos...
National Action Party proposes new anti-trafficking legislation
National Action Party congressional deputy Rosi Orozco has presented a
legislative initiative to strengthen the [existing 2007] General Law to Prevent
Combat and Punish Human Trafficking.
Deputy Orozco, who is also president of the Special Commission to Fight Human
Trafficking in the Chamber of Deputies, explained that her proposal aims to
cement the construction of a legal framework that will coordinate the efforts of
the the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and will
assign responsibilities to each of these branches [such an effort was legislated
into the 2007 law, but was never enacted].
Deputy Orozco's bill contains 36 articles. If passed, the law will replace the
existing 2007 law [which legislators have referred to as a 'dead letter' because
it was not effectively implemented]. The bill takes into account recommendations
provided by the United Nations, and establishes coordination of action in regard
to prevention, prosecution, criminal penalties, and to provide assistance to
victims with the objective of quickly re-integrating them back into society.
Deputy Orozco stated that the bill defines human trafficking crimes in certain
terms, and establishes standards for the creation of federal and state programs.
It also includes requirements for evaluating results, providing compensation for
victims and including society in anti-trafficking efforts.
The proposal argues that existing [state and federal] legislation contains legal
loopholes and gaps, and therefore it is urgent that the efforts to fight human
trafficking be coordinated among the three branches of government.
At the same time the bill recognizes that a number of the legal concepts that
exist in current federal and state legislation differ with those found within
the international protocols and treaties to which Mexico is a signatory.
Therefore, is is necessary that existing laws at both the federal and state
level be revised and improved upon. Specifically, the concepts defining exactly
what constitutes criminal conduct, as well as standards for criminal penalties
and criteria for assisting victims must be established and standardized.
In regard to the fight against human trafficking, the law establishes clear
responsibilities between the federal government, the states and the federal
district, and also municipalities.
“The bill clearly lays out the
competencies among entities, their scopes of action, as well as dispositions
relative to coordination in regard to prevention, protection and attention to
victims and inter-institutional collaboration,” Deputy Orozco emphasized. In
that sense, it authorizes the nation’s federated entities [states and the
federal district-Mexico City] so that they are empowered to address these crimes
in their jurisdictions, which they deserve.
Roberto José Pacheco
Periódico Excélsior
April 20, 2010
New York, USA
|
|
|
Good Samaritan Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax lay bleeding for over an hour
on a sidewalk after coming to the aid of a female assault victim.
Passersby did not call police or rescue services.
This man is a hero. May he rest in peace!
Photo: New York Post |
Multiple Pedestrians Ignore Dying New York Hero
A homeless man who was stabbed while saving a woman from a knife-wielding attacker lay dying in a pool of his own blood for more than an hour while several New Yorkers walked past without calling for help.
Surveillance video obtained by the New York Post shows that some passers-by paused to gawk at Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax early Sunday morning and yet kept on walking.
One man came out of a nearby building and took a cellphone photo of the victim before leaving. Another leaned over and vigorously shook the dead man before walking away. But most people never stopped.
Firefighters arrived more than an hour and 20 minutes after Tale-Yax collapsed. By that time, the 31-year-old was dead.
"They needed to help and call the police. I don't get it," resident Ramon Bellasco, 46, told the Post.
The incident happened at 7:21 a.m. almost a week ago at 88 Road and 144th Street in the borough of Queens, but police didn't have a clear idea of what happened until recently.
Tale-Yax is seen on the grainy video approaching a man who was threatening a woman with a knife. The man turned and stabbed Tale-Yax but most of the action is out of the security camera's field of vision. Both the stabber and the woman then fled in different directions and Tale-Yax stumbled a few paces before collapsing face-down on the sidewalk.
Within a minute or so, the first of a long series of people begins walking by Tale-Yax without going to his aid.
Police told the Post they received four 911 calls at around the time of the attack reporting a woman screaming, but found nothing. They said they received no other 911 calls.
The incident is reminiscent of the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, also in Queens, in 1964. In that case, dozens of people witnessed some or all of the attack and yet no one did anything to stop it.
No arrests have been made in the latest slaying, and police have been unable to identify the woman Tale-Yax was trying to help.
AOL News
April 24, 2010
Mexico
|
|
|
Blanco
fácil - Migración, geografía, desigualdad social y discriminación han
convertido a México en un país con cierto grado de vulnerabilidad ante
este delito
Easy prey
- Migration, geography and discrimination have converted Mexico into a
nation that is vulnerable to human trafficking.
Photo:
EL Universal - archives |
CNDH apura acciones legislativas contra trata
Para erradicar la trata de personas, es necesario que los Congresos locales impulsen acciones legislativas, subrayó la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos.
Para el organismo, la falta de armonización en las legislaciones estatales abre una brecha de impunidad y dificulta la acción coordinada de las autoridades en la lucha contra la esclavitud del siglo XXI.
La CNDH y el Senado de la República instalaron el Observatorio Nacional contra la Trata de Personas, instrumento que concentra el trabajo de diez comités regionales mediante los que se promueve la armonización del sistema jurídico mexicano para combatir ese delito, proteger y asistir a las víctimas...
The National Human Rights Commission accelerates
legislative initiatives to fight human trafficking
According to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), the elimination
of human trafficking will only come about if Mexico's states push legislative
action.
For the CNDH, the lack of compatibility among the various state laws has created
a breech that allows impunity to exist, and makes coordinated government action
more difficult.
The CNDH and the Senate of the Republic have created a National 'Observatory'
Against Human Trafficking. This entity integrates the work of 10 regional
committees through which efforts to synchronize Mexico's anti-trafficking
efforts to develop [an improved] legal framework and victim protection and
assistance will be carried out.
The Observatory documents ongoing government actions in regard to prevention,
prosecution, victim assistance and victim compensation. They are also
considering ways to strengthen the 'culture' for reporting trafficking crimes...
Thirteen yeas ago, the CNDH put in place a program to combat human trafficking.
They have pioneered methods for denouncing trafficking, and for understanding
the modes of operation used by trafficking networks.
El Universal
April 19, 2010
The United States / Mexico
|
|
|
Regino Vasquez-Martinez (left) and Raul Ortiz-Caseres |
‘Rapto’ in the United States
The crime of kidnapping a woman for the purpose of marriage against her will, often raping her in the process, or "rapto," as it is known in Mexico, is actually considered by Mexican authorities to be a minor crime and rarely prosecuted. A Mexican legislator has even called the practice "romantic."
Along with a tidal wave of illegal aliens, this medieval practice has now made its way to the U.S.
This week, Mexican nationals Regino Vasquez-Martinez and Raul Ortiz-Caseres were arrested and charged with kidnapping, after allegedly abducting a woman in Kansas City.
According to police, Ortiz-Caseres has admitted to kidnapping a 25-year-old Kansas City woman because he wanted to take her to New Jersey to marry her, even after she had rejected him.
Ortiz-Caseres called the woman constantly, wrote her love letters, and even sent her an engagement ring, and her answer was always “no.”
Undaunted, Ortiz-Caseres showed up at the woman’s apartment on Tuesday, broke down her front door and dragged her to a van driven by his accomplice.
When her kidnappers stopped at a McDonald’s in Illinois, she convinced them to let her use the bathroom. The woman locked the door behind her and used her cell phone to call her sister. The restaurant manager eventually unlocked the door and called police.
Both Vasquez-Martinez and Ortiz-Caseres were taken into custody at the McDonald’s and now sit in a Fairway Heights,
Illinois jail cell. They are each being held on $150,000 bond.
Dave Gibson
The Examiner
April 24, 2010
More about 'Rapto'
In Mexico, an Unpunished Crime
Rape Victims Face
Widespread Cultural Bias in Pursuit of Justice
...A "machismo culture," instilled
through what is learned in the home, school and church, has
allowed many men to "believe they are superior and dominant, and
that women are an object." ...That mind-set has contributed to
making many men-including policemen,
prosecutors, judges and others in positions of authority-believe
that sexual violence against women is no big deal.
...A review of criminal laws in all
31 Mexican states showed that many states require that if a
12-year-old girl wants to accuse an adult man of statutory rape,
she must first prove she is "chaste and pure." Nineteen of the
states require that statutory rape charges be dropped if the
rapist agrees to marry his victim...
In the southern state of Oaxaca last
summer, the one-year-old, government-funded Oaxacan Women's
Institute persuaded the legislature to pass heavy criminal
penalties against a practice known as "rapto."
Laws in most
Mexican states define rapto as a case where a man kidnaps a
woman not for ransom, but with the intent of marrying her or to
satisfy his "erotic sexual desire."
The new law championed by the women's group established
penalties of at least 10 years in prison.
But in March, the state legislature
reversed itself and again made the practice a minor infraction.
A key legislator -a man- argued for the reduction, calling the
practice harmless and "romantic."
Human rights groups disagree. They
say it is not charming for a man to spot a woman he fancies
sitting in a park, pick her up and carry her away to have sex
with her. Yet to this day, that is still how some women meet
their husbands. The attorney general's office said there have
been 137 criminal complaints of rapto in the state of Puebla
since January 2000.
Mary Jordan
The Washington Post
June 30, 2002
The United States
Human trafficking mixing-up views on immigration to the United States
Victims of modern-day slavery are being brought here as human cargo, and destined for the most vile purposes as forced labor and prostitution.
Phoenix, Arizona. April 16, 2009 - There was a time when the common assumption about United States-bound immigration was about impoverished people crossing the border searching for work to improve their economic situation.
This drive about immigration based on the possibility of finding a job still plays a fundamental role in explaining the influx of human beings coming from Latin America into the U.S. However, the social and moral forces behind many of the new arrivals have been increasingly distorting the traditional concept of voluntary human migration by giving it a violent and criminal twist, and by disguising human trafficking as migration.
Contrary to people who migrate by their own will, human trafficking recruits and transports individuals generally under forced and deceitful tactics, evading the same immigration laws undocumented immigrants do. An immigrant is typically interested in getting a job, while victims of human trafficking are lured for the purpose of performing forced work or sex acts. However, many recent cases in the United States show human traffickers are using traditional immigration as a way to conceal their real intentions by hooking people up with false promises of work and dollars...
...Trafficking gangs are not concerned with helping people improve their economic conditions but in obtaining the maximum profit possible in spite of the inherent risks and dangers they place their victims in. In other words, what is presented to them as an opportunity to come to this country to work, is in reality a well organized criminal scheme that many times involves rape, assaulting and even murder.
We often hear news about busted drop houses where dozens of “immigrants” are found by police piled up in single homes in the most deplorable sanitary conditions, locked up against their wills. They are actually held as hostages until their relatives, in Latin American countries or the U.S. after being blackmailed and threatened, wire high sums of money to the traffickers in order to free them. Some are kept captive and forced to prostitute or work until they pay off their own debts.
Once again, this is not the standard scenario where immigrants come [at] their own risk...
Race-Talk - on AlterNet.org/
April 19, 2010
The United States / Mexico
Trafficking series by The Star wins Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award
For its five-part series on human trafficking in the United States, The Kansas City Star has earned the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
The award, known as the “Poor People’s Pulitzer,” recognizes outstanding coverage of injustice against the underprivileged.
In “A New Slavery,” reporters Laura Bauer, Mike McGraw and Mark Morris exposed America’s weak enforcement system that allows human trafficking to continue.
Last month, Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. gave an award to the same series.
“The team’s impressive reporting results in a distressing collection of individual narratives and a concise legal and policy-based explanation of the nation’s Trafficking Victims Protection Act,” read an announcement from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Calling The Star to relay the news, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the former attorney general, senator and presidential candidate, told one reporter: “You’ve given hope to a lot of people who didn’t have hope before. That’s right in line with Bobby’s legacy.”
Sixty judges, all media professionals, selected the winning entries in 11 categories, and a committee of seven advisers chose a grand prize winner. This year, winners wrote on subjects including infant mortality and Navy abuses against gay sailors.
The Star’s series won in the domestic print category.
“It’s a wonderful honor to win such a distinguished award for journalism that champions human rights and social justice. Those remain among the most important issues in the world today,” said Mike Fannin, editor/vice president of The Star. “This was inspired work, executed by a great team of journalists and well-deserving of recognition.”
The Wall Street Journal won in the international category for “Hearts, Mind and Blood: The Battle for Iran.” Photographers at The Washington Post won in both the domestic and international photography categories. Diane Sawyer from “20/20” on ABC News won in the domestic television category for her work on enduring poverty in Appalachia.
Ethel Kennedy will present the awards May 26 in Washington, D.C., where the grand prize winner will be announced.
Meredith Rodriguez
The Kansas City Star
April 21, 2010
LibertadLatina
Note
The Kansas City Star's anti-trafficking series focused on the
crisis among Mexican and Central American migrants to the U.S. It was therefore
a groundbreaking effort to raise awareness about the intensity of the modern
human slavery crisis affecting Latin American victims.
Thank you, Kansas City Star, for raising awareness of this issue!
End impunity now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
April 27, 2010
Texas, USA
Texas one of nation's hubs for human trafficking
The human trafficking industry, the second largest criminal industry in the world, is like a kaleidoscope, a speaker told a victim's training class.
Every time you turn it, there's a new picture.
"It doesn't always look the same," Tomi Grover said.
Grover serves as a specialist in resources to combat human trafficking for the Baptist General Convention of Texas and has worked to help trafficked victims for the past 5 to 7 years.
She was the main speaker Tuesday afternoon for a free training class sponsored by the Midland Victims Coalition to help provide information for local law enforcement and those who work with and alongside victims on a daily basis.
"Maybe it was an act of crime that was witnessed by our own family. Maybe it was someone we worked with who confided in us that they had been a victim of a crime," she said to the many investigators and advocates in the audience of why so many of them were interested in the class. "Crime exists and sometimes it happens in our own backyards."
Statistics show that Texas is one of the leading states across the country for human trafficking and serves as a hub for about 25 percent of those brought into the U.S. illegally.
"It's not just a global issue that other countries are dealing with, but an issue we're dealing with right here in the U.S.," she said.
The average cost of a slave, according to Grover, is approximately $90 or less and more than 20,000 people are trafficked into the States each year, with an estimated 27 million now considered slaves around the world.
"Not only is it all about the business, but it's about big business," Grover said...
She told a story of a young lady who first recalled being sexually used when she was just 5 years old.
"We should hear no little girl say that. We should not put up with this kind of behavior in our community," she said.
Audrie Palmer
Midland Reporter-Telegram
April 20, 2010
Egypt
House Members Press White House to Confront Egypt on Forced Marriages
Seventeen members of Congress are pressing the State Department to act on the "grim reality" faced by Coptic Christian women in Egypt, who frequently are coerced into violent forced marriages that leave them victim to rape and captive slavery.
The bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote on April 16 to Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, who heads up American efforts to thwart human trafficking around the globe.
In their letter, they exhort the State Department to confront the "criminal phenomenon" of forced marriage they say is on the rise in Egypt, where the 7 million Coptic Christians often face criminal prosecution and civic violence for their rejection of Islam.
"I think it is about as bad as it can be" for Copts and other religious minorities in Egypt, said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who penned the letter. "It is very tough to be a Coptic Christian."
The official communication to the State Department outlined just what women face when forced into marriages with Muslim men: "physical and sexual violence, captivity ... exploitation in forced domestic servitude or commercial sexual exploitation, and financial benefit to the individuals who secure the forced conversion of the victim."
Wolf and the other lawmakers say this bears all the hallmarks of human trafficking and want the State Department to include reports of the abductions in their next Trafficking in Persons report, which is due in June.
"Keep in mind that we have given Egypt about $53 billion since Camp David" — the 1978 peace accords between Israel and Egypt that were arranged by the U.S. government — "so we're actually funding them," Wolf said...
The State Department said Wednesday that a response to the lawmakers' letter was being crafted, but offered no word on whether the abduction of Copts would be included in the forthcoming report for 2010.
Wolf, however, does not expect to see much action from the State Department, which he criticized for failing to fill key human rights positions including the ambassador at large for religious freedom — a position mandated by law.
"I expect the State Department to do nothing," he said, "because that's the way the State Department has been responding."
Wolf was joined by 16 other members of the House in signing the letter, including: Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Chris Smith, R-N.J., Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., Donald Payne, D-N.J., Dan Burton, R-Ind., Rep. Albio Sires, D-N.J., Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Joseph Cao, R-La., Aaron Schock, R-Ill., Bob Inglis, R-S.C., Michele Bachman, R-Minn., Joe Wilson, R-S.C., Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., and Ted Poe, R-Tex. The delegate from Washington, D.C., Eleanor Holmes-Norton, also signed the note.
Joseph Abrams
FOXNews.com
April 21, 2010
Massachusetts, USA
|
|
|
Trafficking: Mei-Mei Ellerman spoke
Wednesday about human trafficking in the United States.
Photo: Nafiz “Fiz” R. Ahmed/The Hoot |
Panel discusses human trafficking, sex work in U.S.
Three leading experts and advocates in the field of human slavery and trafficking spoke Wednesday at the panel event “Slavery Today: Sex Labor & Pornography,” which focused on trafficking issues within the United States and the rise of pornography that features many enslaved women...
Mei-Mei Ellerman, a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and frequent speaker on the issues of modern day trafficking, Katherin Chon, a co-founder of the Polaris Project, an NGO that works with victims of sex trafficking, and Gail Dines, the author of the book “PORNLAND,” spoke about their experiences with these human rights violations at the panel.
“So often we think of trafficking as something ‘out there,’” Ellerman said
“There are 200,000 to 300,000 U.S.-born American [minors] who are in high risk
of ending up in forced prostitution every year. That is a huge number,” she
explained...
“Many people are confused when they hear trafficking because they think about it being someone crossing borders,” Ellerman said. “You can be trafficked without leaving your house.”
These victims are often abducted, however, they can also be lured into their situations with the promise of work, pay and a better life. In this kind of situation, especially, many victims are not aware of the extent to which they are being abused.
“Most of us know what freedom feels like, what freedom looks like, and there are so many people in our own neighborhoods and communities who don’t,” Chon said. “Most of those enslaved or trafficked won’t even raise their hands and say, ‘I need to escape from this, this is bad,’” she illustrated.
At the Polaris Project, Chon and her co-founder Derek Ellerman work to free victims of trafficking in the United States and Japan, help those victims overcome their experiences, push for anti-trafficking legislation and gather supporters as well as raise awareness for the cause.
“We find the most success when we’re just there with [the victims] as fellow human beings,” Chon said.
Pornography has become a cultural steppingstone to the extreme of human trafficking. It often features trafficked women and according to the event speakers, spreads a culturally-based dehumanization of and disrespect toward women.
“What pornography does, is it legitimizes the buying and selling of women’s bodies,” explained Dines...
Rebecca Carden
The Brandeis Hoot
April 23, 2010
Virginia, USA
|
|
|
Emilio Diaz |
Illegal alien arrested for multiple sexual assaults on 8-year-old Virginia girl
On March 23, detectives with the Prince William County Police Department arrested Emilio Diaz, 25, for multiple counts of molestation on an 8-year-old girl.
According to police spokeswoman Erika Hernandez, the alleged attacks took place between January and February 2010, in the girl’s home. Apparently, Diaz had access to the victim, as he is an acquaintance of the girl’s family.
Diaz has been charged with four counts of Object Sexual Penetration and two counts of Aggravated Sexual Battery.
Diaz is in the country illegally, and is being held without bond.
Dave Gibson
The Examiner
April 17, 2010
Texas, USA
|
|
|
Cesar Bazara |
Illegal alien suspected of child molestation arrested at U.S. / Mexican border
The U.S. Border Patrol has arrested a Mexican national accused of molesting a 10-year-old Texas girl. Cesar Bazara, 34, was apprehended on April 9, as he tried to re-enter the United States.
Bazara has spent the last four years on the run.
The alleged molestation took place on Christmas Eve 2006. The mother quickly reported the incident to Weslaco Police, but Bazara fled back to Mexico before he could be arrested.
Bazara, who lives in Valle de San Lorenzo, Mexico, now sits in the Hidalgo County jail on a charge of indecency with a child. Bail has been set at $250,000.
Dave Gibson
The Examiner
April 13, 2010
Missouri, USA
|
|
|
Eduardo Ortiz |
...Man accused of molesting daughter's friends at sleepovers
A 42-year-old man has been accused of molesting his daughter's friends during sleepovers at his house.
Police say Eduardo Ortiz, an illegal alien, faces charges for touching three middle school-aged girls. The girls reported three separate instances that happened in 2009. Two of the girls told police that Ortiz touched their breasts. The first of the victims came forward a year ago, but police say they didn't have enough evidence to make an arrest.
A third victim recently contacted police with more information. Police then re-interviewed Ortiz, and say he confessed.
One detective says that police are concerned because they fear there might be other victims. "If there is a parent that knows that their daughter stayed the night there, we don't want them to suggest anything to their daughter, but ask them, 'did anything happen to you when you were there,'" said Detective James Wethington of the Woodson Terrace Police Department. "Open the discussion and see what happens."
Woodson Terrace police say they've reported Ortiz to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is married and worked as a handyman. Police also say they've talked to Ortiz's daughter - detectives don't have reason to believe she was a victim of abuse.
Ortiz is currently behind bars in the St. Louis County Jail.
KMOV
April 19, 2010
Texas, USA
|
|
|
Jose Sanchez Balbuena |
Authorities need the public's help in searching for a man wanted for aggravated sexual assault of a child.
A 13-year-old girl told investigators that Jose Sanchez Balbuena had touched her inappropriately and had sex with her numerous times over a two-year period. Balbuena is a friend of the victim's family. The victim stated that Balbuena started touching her inappropriately at her house when her mom was at work. The touching soon escalated to sex. Balbuena threatened the victim and told her not to tell anyone about what he did to her.
An investigation was conducted and Balbuena was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Balbuena, 35, is an Hispanic male. He is 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 190 pounds. His last known address is in Southwest Houston.
Crime Stoppers will pay up to $5,000 for any information called in to the 713-222-8477 (TIPS) hotline or submitted online at Crime-Stoppers.org that leads to an arrest in this case. Tips can also be sent by text message - Text TIP610 plus your tip to CRIMES(274637). All tipsters remain anonymous.
KTRK
April 23, 2010
Maryland, USA
Seventh man arrested in connection with Waldorf gang rape
Charles County authorities have arrested an additional suspect and identified three others in the March 16 sexual assault of a woman in Waldorf.
Last week in Newark, N. J. police arrested Jose Maria Echebarria, 30, of Waldorf in connection with the assault. Police have also identified three other suspects, Jose Santos Portillo, 25, Balmoris Argueta, 26, and Lionicio Argueta, 29.
Police said 10 men were involved in the attack, seven of whom have already been arrested and charged. Police are also working with officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“This was a brutal attack and we are absolutely committed to bringing justice to the victim,” said Sheriff Rex W. Coffey said in a statement.
Keith L. Alexander
The Washington Post
April 6, 2010
Arizona, USA
Illegal alien sentenced to prison for re-entry
A Mexican national who illegally re-entered the country nearly a year ago and was found in the desert outside of Yuma has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison.
Adolfo Estrella-Yuan, 52, of Sonora, Mexico, was sentenced Monday in Phoenix by U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver to 101 months in prison.
Estrella-Yuan was found guilty of illegal re-entry after prior removal by a federal jury in Phoenix on Feb. 3 and was sentenced to a term of 80-months for his crime.
However, Estrella-Yuan had also been serving a term of supervised release related to a 1999 Southern District of Illinois illegal re-entry conviction, and was found in violation of that supervised release term. He received a sentence of 21 months to be served consecutive to his 80 month sentence.
Estrella-Yuan had been deported from the United States at least four times: August 1980, November 1990, December 1991 and January 2007.
He also has had a significant and serious criminal history that included, among other offenses, three immigration-related convictions — the last of which resulted in a 77-month sentence — and two convictions related to the molestation of young children.
Silva said she took Estrella-Yuan's criminal history in consideration while imposing his sentence.
James Gilbert
The Yuma Sun
April 19, 2010
Arizona, USA / Mexico
Border Patrol captures 7 sex offenders
Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended seven illegal aliens in separate incidents over the weekend; all later identified as sex offenders. Their criminal backgrounds were revealed after agents enrolled them into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).
According to records found using IAFIS, charges included rape and sexual assault. One individual from Mexico had been charged in New Castle, Delaware for "solicitation of a child under 16 to engage in a prohibited sexual act." He had also been arrested for child sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child, and attempting to induce sexual contact. All subjects were held for further processing.
Sex offenders and other criminal aliens are frequently among the thousands of illegal aliens apprehended while attempting to illegally cross the Arizona border. IAFIS technology helps agents identify those aliens who have a history of being involved in criminal acts. The Tucson Sector Border Patrol strives to improve the quality of life along the border by identifying and removing those aliens with a criminal background.
KGUN9-TV
April 12, 2010
California, USA / Mexico
Two deported sex offenders, one from L.A., arrested near Calexico
Two deported sex offenders, including one with an outstanding criminal warrant in Los Angeles, were arrested by border agents in separate incidents in Imperial County, authorities said Tuesday.
Federal agents Friday apprehended a man 29 miles west of the U.S.-Mexico port of entry in Calexico, the Department of Homeland Security said.
Record checks showed that the man, a Honduran citizen, had been convicted of a felony sex offense and sentenced to 365 days in jail and 60 months probation, the department said. He was wanted on an outstanding warrant in Hollywood by the Los Angeles Police Department for allegedly failing to register as a sex offender, according to a department spokesman.
Authorities were preparing to turn the man over to the LAPD for prosecution.
The second case involved a man arrested Saturday seven miles east of Calexico after agents said he crossed the All American Canal with seven other illegal immigrants. The man, a Mexican citizen, had been convicted of rape by force, oral copulation and assault to commit rape, according to the Homeland Security Department.
Federal authorities were holding the man for prosecution.
The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2010
The United States / Mexico
|
 |
|
Joaquin
Aguilar Mendez, right, a former altar boy, has sued the Rev. Nicolas
Aguilar, shown in photo at left
From:
Accused Priest Flees From Law in U.S. and Mexico
James C. McKinley Jr.
The New York Times
Oct. 21, 2006
Photo by Tomas Bravo/Reuters |
Attorneys sue LA, Mexico City cardinals over abuse
Los Angeles - A Mexican citizen filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday accusing Roman Catholic cardinals in Mexico City and Los Angeles of conspiring to shelter a Mexican pedophile priest in both countries.
The lawsuit alleges then-Bishop Norberto Rivera, head of the Diocese of Tehuacan, and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony shuttled the Rev. Nicolas Aguilar Rivera between the U.S. and Mexico in the late 1980s to shield him from prosecution. Parishioners in both countries complained he had molested young boys.
The Mexican bishop has since been elevated to cardinal for the Archdiocese of Mexico City. He has no relation to the accused priest.
Aguilar Rivera was defrocked last summer and remains at large in Mexico, where he was believed to be living out of his car in Puebla, in central Mexico. He has been wanted by U.S. authorities on 19 felony counts of lewd conduct since he fled his temporary post in Los Angeles in 1988 and returned to Mexico.
Once back in Mexico, Aguilar Rivera continued to work as a priest for at least another decade and molested more young boys in Mexico City and in the Diocese of Tehuacan, in central Mexico, attorneys said. One of those boys is the current plaintiff.
"This priest was not only a rapist, but remained a priest and at large and was allowed to rape this child and many others," attorney Jeff Anderson said at a bilingual news conference. "He was raped by this priest as a child in Mexico after both cardinals knew this priest posed a serious risk of harm."
The Rev. Hugo Valdemar, Rivera's spokesman, said the Mexican cardinal was not responsible for the priest's wrongdoing and said suing the cardinal made no sense. Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for Mahony, said any allegations that Mahony helped cover up Aguilar Rivera's crimes were "ludicrous."
"We're not losing sleep over this, we're very calm," Valdemar said.
Judges have thrown out two previous lawsuits filed against the Mexican cardinal in the U.S., saying a Mexican citizen cannot sue another Mexican citizen in U.S. court. Mahony settled his portion of an earlier lawsuit in 2007.
This time, attorneys have filed the lawsuit under the 221-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act, an 18th century law which allows non-U.S. citizens access to courts to challenge violations of international laws or treaties...
Gillian Flaccus
The Associated Press
April 20, 2010
See also:
Mexico / The United States
Suit alleges U.S., Mexican cardinals covered up sexual abuse
A Mexican resident who says he was sexually abused by a priest as a child is suing the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Los Angeles and Mexico's top-ranking Catholic cleric, alleging they aided and abetted the abuse by moving the priest between dioceses as allegations piled up against him.
The suit does not name the alleged victim, identifying him only as a Mexican citizen. It alleges that Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony and Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera knew the priest -- identified in the suit as Nicholas Aguilar Rivera -- was abusive but authorized him to move back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. and to continue serving in parishes...
In April 1988, the Los Angeles Police Department charged Aguilar with 19 felony counts of sexual abuse against children, but Mexico has declined to extradite or prosecute him, according to Mike Finnegan, one of the lawyers for the unnamed plaintiff...
The [plaintiff's] Minnesota law firm has represented previous Mexican victims of sex abuse against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in which the church wound up settling out of court. But this is the first in which the firm is also trying to sue the Catholic Church in Mexico.
The plaintiff's lawyers are relying on an obscure federal law that they say grants U.S. courts jurisdiction in foreign civil cases that violate treaties to which the United States is party...
Dan Gilgoff
CNN
April 22, 2010
Mexico
|
 |
|
Reporter Mariana Sanchez interviews 'Chabelita,' an
Indigenous Guatemalan child sex trafficking victim
|
Mexico sex trafficking soars
Mexico has become the top provider of sex slaves to the Americas, according to the United Nations.
In an effort to tackle the problem, the Mexican government has now signed onto the
United Nation's Blue Heart campaign, but so far it has had little success in prosecuting and convicting human traffickers.
One reason, according to some analysts, is confusion over which government agencies have jurisdiction over human trafficking cases.
In addition the Mexican government has yet to conduct any comprehensive surveys detailing the true extent of the problem.
...Mariana Sanchez reports.
Excerpt:
Chabelita is a playful child. She can't remember how old show was when she saw her father kill her mother in a remote indigenous village in Guatemala. That was only the beginning of her tragic ordeal.
Chabelita: "My uncle kidnapped me when I was six. He took me to Cancun. Some men would call him up. They would
pay him to harm me. I tried to escape, but they locked me up in my uncle's room, and in there, they harmed me too. It was a lot of men."
Mexican authorities believe that Chabelita was sexually abused for two years before she managed to escape.
Chabelita: "They took me to a place where there were a lot or stones. I took one, and hit the man who was touching me. I kicked him and ran. I walked for many days without eating.
Only then did police rescue her and bring her to this [federal government] safe house…
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mexico has become the number one provider of sexual slaves to Latin America.
|
 |
|
Anti-trafficking leader and protestant minister
Deputy Rosi Orozco talks with Mariana Sanchez |
(Chair of the Chamber of Deputies' Commission to Fight Human Trafficking) Rosi Orozco: "In Mexico, impunity is rampant. Organized groups and opportunists lie to their victims, telling them they'll live a life of riches, and then exploit them, making between $150 and $250 every day. They exploit human beings for economic benefits, turning human beings into slaves." …
|
 |
|
Deputy Rosi Orozco talks with rescued underage
former sex slaves at a federal safe house |
These girls who were once used as sex slaves are on the front line of the fight against human trafficking. While they are hiding in a federal safe house under federal protection, most have cases pending against their attackers.
But for these victims of modern slavery, the worst fear for now is to come to terms with the sexual abuse they suffered.
[The above link presents the video version of this
report.]
Mariana Sanchez
Al Jazeera
April 18, 2010
Haiti
|
 |
|
Cassandre St. Vil |
Haitian student had 'no chance to scream' when thugs raped her in earthquake aftermath
Cassandre St. Vil, 19, was raped by four men who broke into her tent after the Haiti earthquake. Months later, sexual violence remains a major concern in tent encampments. The four armed men came looking for Cassandre St. Vil in the dead of night.
The 19-year-old was asleep in the street under a canopy of sheets that had been her makeshift home in the two nights after the Jan. 12 earthquake.
"I couldn't fight back," said St. Vil, now living in a camp in Port-au-Prince. "They came in - we didn't have a door - and they asked my mother and grandmother to leave.
"My mother said, 'Don't do that to my daughter,' but they were armed and held a gun to my mother's neck. They threatened to kill her if she called for help.
"It took place in front of my mother and grandmother," she continued in a whisper.
"Four people raped me.
"I didn't have the chance to scream. They covered my mouth," she said, leaning in close. "While one had sex with me, the three others stood with my mother and grandmother."
St. Vil is a bright, articulate young woman who was attending a university in Port-au-Prince. The quake shattered dreams of completing her studies, finding a good job, getting married.
She has joined the growing ranks of women who have been sexually abused after the quake, which collapsed the Port-au-Prince jail and unleashed criminals into the streets.
"They took my virginity," she lamented. "I always dreamed of getting married a virgin - it was very important to me."
After the rape, she and her family moved to the sprawling Champs de Mars camp near the Presidential Palace. There, she sought help from a local women's group, KOFAVIV, which gives support to rape victims.
A founder, Eramithe Delva, says the group has helped 180 women raped since January. In the three months before the quake, there were just 25 cases...
A few shelters away from St. Vil is another victim, Helia Lajeunesse, 49, gang raped with her daughter during sexual depravity that accompanied the 2004 coup.
Her daughter became pregnant. The child was a girl, now 5 years old. She, too, was raped - in late January in the provinces where her mother fled after the quake.
"[The girl] was going to buy a cup of rice," LaJeunesse said. "A young man took the rice from her hands and she ran after him.
"He took her into the cemetery and a woman passing by saw him lying on top of her ... She shouted at him and he ran off.
"Now she doesn't eat, she has no appetite," Lajeunesse said, wiping tears as the girl stared ahead vacantly. "Each night you hear the cries of the rapes, almost every night."
...
Mario Joseph, a Haitian lawyer who is working to prosecute rapists, is hoping to set up a rape hotline and distribute whistles to women to call for help.
He says most of the attacks go unpunished, so perpetrators have little to fear.
"Judges are scared because prisoners are in the streets," he said. "We need to build files against people and when we have the chance, bring them to court. But the priority now is to get the camps more secure."
Christina Boyle
The New York Daily News
April 18,2010
Latin America
 |
|
Conference Poster |
The 2010 Lozano Long Conference – Republics of Fear: Understanding Endemic Violence in Latin America Today
Violence has become the signal threat to stability in Latin America in the new millennium. Kidnappings and murders generate lurid headlines from Mexico to Honduras to Argentina. Communities tired of statelessness and voicelessness set suspected criminals on fire in Guatemalan public squares. Hundreds of women die violent deaths in Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala City while the state remains either impotent or indifferent. Police raids into Rio’s favelas kill dozens of people while drug trafficking gangs stockpile more numerous and more powerful weapons. Prison gangs paralyze the megalopolis of São Paulo for days in retaliation for official measures taken against their imprisoned leaders.
Meanwhile, structural violence continues to condemn huge portions of the region’s population to poverty, disease, marginalization, and penury. If cold war ideologies set Latin America aflame in the 1960s and 1970s, a far more complex set of factors stokes the ordinary and extraordinary violence that burns in the region today.
In its Third Annual Lozano Long Conference, LLILAS hosted the academics who are exploring the causes and consequences of this conflagration. Researchers have only begun to respond to these new challenges to democracy, development, and human well-being. The time is ripe for a conference that brings together cutting edge research from different disciplines, perspectives, methods, and viewpoints, all united around a concern for the peoples of the region and the circumstances they face.
The conference hosted panels on topics such as gender violence; intimate violence; organized violence; the trafficking of humans, weapons, and drugs; political, state, and para-state violence; structural violence, including poverty, forced migration, racism, and discrimination; and the responses to violence, including representations of violence in the media, literature, films, and public discourse. The institute hopes in this way to foster and stimulate a new wave of theoretically informed, interdisciplinary, and culturally aware research into this crucial new challenge for Latin America.
Sponsored by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies.
Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
March 4–5, 2010
Mexico
Mexican Police Implicated in Killings, Kidnappings
Mexico City - Scores of police officers - including the entire department of one town - have been detained in Mexican probes of killings and kidnappings.
Mayor Alfredo Osorio of the Gulf coast town Tierra Blanca said Monday that about
90 city policemen were being held for questioning about the kidnapping of undocumented Central American migrants.
The officers - the town's entire local force - were detained by state police and soldiers and taken to the capital of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz for questioning. No formal charges had been filed.
The police allegedly kidnapped the migrants to shake them down for money. Central Americans frequently are robbed or abused by police or by drug gangs as they cross Mexico to seek work in the United States.
In the central State of Mexico, prosecutors announced the arrest of two policemen and two former officers on charges they participated in 11 killings related to robberies.
The officers, ex-officers and a fifth man posing as a police office, had been assigned to two towns on the outskirts of Mexico City. They were detained over the weekend.
Mexico State Attorney General Alberto Baz Baz said the men allegedly preyed on businessmen and professionals, snatching them off the streets to steal debit cards and other possessions, and then often killing them. Another ex-officer is being sought in the case. Some of the crimes were allegedly committed while the officers were on duty.
The suspects face possible prison sentences of up to 70 years. They had no attorney of record.
The Associated Press
Mar 16, 2010
Mexico
Mexican Troops Rescue 20 Migrants from Traffickers
Veracruz, Mexico – Mexican troops rescued 20 Central Americans who had been kidnapped by a gang of migrant smugglers that was holding them captive at a house in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.
The commander of Mexico’s 26th Military Zone, Miguel Gustavo Gonzalez, told a press conference that five suspected smugglers were arrested who were holding the undocumented migrants as hostages and were demanding $1,200 from their families to free them and allow them to continue on their way to the U.S. border.
The officer said that the operation took place in the municipality of Tierra Blanca, where members of the gang were arrested and forced to hand over 40,000 pesos ($3,200) in cash, two guns and four vehicles.
Gonzalez said the raid followed an anonymous tip.
He said that the 11 women and nine men from Honduras and Nicaragua were found being held captive in the community of Palma Sola.
Meanwhile, the undocumented migrants who were rescued received food and medical attention from the immigration authorities, who will settle their legal status.
EFE
March 19, 2010
We note with interest that this raid
occurred immediately after the Inter-American Human Rights Commission hearing of
March 22, 2010 on the mass kidnappings of migrants in Mexico, and especially in
Veracruz.
-
LibertadLatina
Mexico
Denuncian el "infierno" de unos 18.000 migrantes secuestrados al pasar por México
Washington, DC.- México se ha convertido en la trampa de miles de migrantes de Centroamérica y Sudamérica que son secuestrados cada año cuando atraviesan ese país, según denunciaron hoy activistas en la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH).
En una audiencia del 138 período de sesiones de la CIDH, organizaciones religiosas y humanitarias acusaron al Estado de México de abandonar a los 18.000 emigrantes secuestrados, que convirtieron 2009 en el "año maldito" del fenómeno...
Activists Denounce the “Hell” Faced by
18,000 Migrants per Year Who Are Kidnapped in Mexico
Washington, DC - According to activists who testified on March
22, 2010 at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) -
Mexico has become a dangerous trap for thousands of migrants
from South and Central America who are kidnapped each year when
they attempt to cross Mexico.
The religious and human rights activists testified during an
IAHRC hearing, held during its 138th period of sessions. In their
testimony, they accused the Mexican state of abandoning the
18,000 migrants who were kidnapped during 2009, which they
declared to be a terrible year for the phenomenon.
The director of the migrant shelter Brothers on the Road to
Hope, Father Alejandro Solandide, denounced the lack of
political will in Mexico to put a stop to the problem, as well
as the complicity and cover-up that state agents engage in – in
relation to these crimes.
Father Solandide: “It is very hard to see a line that separates
the authors of these kidnappings - be they organized criminals
or public
officials.”
Migrants begin their trek in their home countries, where
these criminal networks [first] coordinate their activities, said Oliver
Bush Espinoza, of the National Institute for Migration [Mexico’s
immigration agency].
When migrants reach Mexico, they are trapped, and are taken to
safe houses, where the coyotes demand their family’s phone
number [to allow them to extort the family], and they are beaten with sticks and suffer other
tortures.
“These safe houses are hell. The victims suffer tortures. If they
resist [the extortion], they are made examples of and are
mutilated or murdered, declared Reverend Pedro Pantajo Arreola,
of the Bethlehem Migrant’s Shelter.
The wave of kidnappings began in 2006,
says Father Solandide, but the problem became even larger in
2009, when it became like a “silent, low-motion massacre” – “due
to moral decay,” the increase in organized criminal
violence, and judicial impunity.
During the last three years, the ‘industry’ of mass kidnapping
has been perfected, especially in the state of Veracruz. In a
six month period of time, these kidnappings generate $50 million
dollars in revenue.
Aside from the Mexican government’s failure to investigate these
crimes, and the “immense defenseless-ness” of the victims, Father Solandide denounced the “insufficient actions taken and
mechanisms put into place” by the government in the face of
this reality. Scant resources exist to house, assist and restore the
victims.
The representatives of the organizations who testified directly
assist victims, a situation that has also placed them in
harm’s way.
“Our migrant shelters are being threatened
and attacked by both the Mexican authorities and by members of
organized crime, to such an extent that we have found in
necessary to seek the legal protection of this Commission,”
said Monsignor Raúl Vera, Archbishop of Saltillo, who is
also the president of the Council of the Friar Juan de Larios
Center.
[Oliver Bush Espinoza, of the federal National Institute for Migration,
and Alejandro Negrín, human rights representative at the Mexican
Chancellery, testified in opposition to the petition.]
Felipe González, the President of Mexico's National Human Rights
Commission of Mexico (CNDH) stated that he was in agreement with
the petitioners, and invited the IAHRC to visit Mexico to
determine the magnitude of the problem in person.
EFE
March 22, 2010
See also:
Inter-American Human Rights
Commission Hearing
Petitioner: Centro de Derechos
Humanos Agustín Pro Juárez (PRODH); Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes
en México; Centro Diocesano de Derechos Humanos Fray Juan de
Larios; Dimensión de la Pastoral de la Movilidad Humana; Casa de
Migrantes Hermanos en el Camino [Migrant Refuge]; Albergue de
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe A.C. [Migrant Refuge]; Albergue
Guadalupano de Tierra Blanca [Migrant Refuge]; Servicio Jesuita
de Jóvenes Voluntarios; Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías
de Córdova; Frontera Con Justicia A.C.y Humanidad Sin Fronteras
Inter-American Human Rights Commission
Organization of American States
March 22,
2010
See also:
20,000 Migrants a Year Kidnapped in Mexico
En Route to U.S.
Some 20,000 of the 140,000 illegal
migrants en route to the United States via the Mexico border to
find work and a better life are kidnapped each year and
subjected to rape, torture and murder, crimes that usually go
unpunished due to the corruption of the authorities, fear of
reprisals and distrust of authorities, according to Mexico’s
independent National Human Rights Commission.
Mexico City – More than 1,600
migrants, above all Central Americans en route to the United
States to find work, are kidnapped monthly and subjected to
humiliations that usually go unpunished due to the corruption of
the authorities, Mexico’s independent National Human Rights
Commission reported.
“The kidnapping of migrants has
become a continuous practice of worrying dimensions, generally
unpunished and with characteristics of extreme cruelty,”
commission chairman Jose Luis Soberanes said Monday at the
presentation of the report.
Between September 2008 and February
2009, the commission registered a total of 198 cases of mass
kidnappings of migrants involving 9,758 people...
EFE
June 16, 2009
Washington, DC USA
 |
|
Monsignor Raúl Vera, Bishop of Saltillo -
Photo |
Presentation: Kidnappings of Migrants in Mexico
Event: Monday March 22nd - 5:30-6:30pm - Washington, DC
Every year tens of thousands of migrants travel through Mexico en route to the United States. Often on their arduous journey these migrants are exposed to brutal violence, extortion, and kidnappings.
Join us for a forum with this exceptional group of speakers all of whom are highly recognized as leading moral authorities on migrant rights. These speakers will discuss the kidnappings of migrants in Mexico, the ways in which Mexican laws and policies make them more vulnerable and may prevent their access to justice, how authorities directly collaborate in this practice and the hearing on this issue that has been presented before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Featuring
Monsignor Raúl Vera, Bishop of Saltillo, is also President of the Counsel of the Fray Juan Juan d | |
/ Welcome
