by Jorge Mujica Mexico del Norte
I read the whole note, courtesy of my dear friend Gato Álvarez in an e-mail, and I just could not believe it. I had to look it up, old habit from an old journalist who wants to report the truth and not gossips, and I found it in several news agencies (not Mexican, actually, but from Guatemala and even Spain, in the digital edition of El Mercurio.)
“The Mexican Superintendence of Administration of Taxes (go figure why this agency!) revealed the intention to build a wall in the estate of Chiapas. According to the institution, the barrier would seek to control the influx of illegal merchandise. Superintendent Raúl Díaz said the state of Chiapas has the intention to build the wall alongside the Suchiate River, by the border between México and Guatemala. The reason to build it would be to stop smuggling boats. Besides, Díaz added, it could also work to stop the free transit of illegal immigrants”.
I still don’t believe it, despite the confirmation. Even worse, some reports link the announcement with assassination of 72 immigrant brothers and sisters in the state of Tamaulipas.
But I realize than not believing it is just a shock reaction. It is all real. The announcement is there. And the bodies are there, “piled up”, as our friend Raúl Dorantes says, “as used-up things”. In a second reaction, I realize how truthful was that sentence, wrongly attributed to Joseph Stalin but really authored by the German
journalist Kurt Tucholsky, “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”. In this case there are 72 deaths, but the real number goes up to 10 thousand; 10,000 immigrants whose lives has been wrecked, one way or the other, trying to make it o the United States.
And no, I am not even talking about the 10 thousand who have died trying to cross the border since President Bill Clinton started “Operation Gatekeeper” and put up the first wall in the border in the mid 1990’s, but about the 10 thousand kidnapped in México by gangs, traffickers drug lords and Mexican authorities.
The other 10,000
The number was given by the “Special Report of the National human Rights Commission (CNDH) on the Cases of Kidnapping of Migrants”, issued in México on June 16th, 2009. According to the CNDH “kidnappings of Central American immigrants by armed groups is commonplace”. The report documents the kidnapping of 9 thousand 758 migrants, just between September of 2008 and February of 2009, cases “in which Mexican police and other authoritiesacted in unison with organized crime, particularly the (drug dealers) Los Zetas, and members of the Mara Salvatrucha”.
The official Mexican response to the Report was simple until today: “It’s Los Zetas” and that’s it. Starting today is the wall in Chiapas. “And there is not”, says Fernando Batista, regional director of the CNDH “a reduction on the number of cases”, due to “the impunity”, and the lack of a “particular public policy in favor of immigrants by the three levels of government, specially the federal level”, despite the fact that the Mexican Immigration Institute, Mexican equivalent of ICE, “counted last month, in Tamaulipas alone, 815 rescue actions of Central American immigrants”,and another 130 in the rest of the country. The kidnappers made, as profits from their actions according to the CNDH, “an average of fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars per immigrant”, a grand total of some “25 million dollars” in six months.
Besides the killing climate in the desert, the drowning currents of the Rio Grande, police persecution, ICE, the smuggling mafias, or the corruption in the sale of contracts by state authorities for temporary workers who sell visas at a higher price than what the smugglers charge at the border, now immigrants have to deal with kidnappers who want them to pass drugs or just for the rescue money.
Some say the killers just sent a message to the U.S., México and Central American that reads “Here we decide who crosses the border, enters and leaves the Mexican territory”. The New York Times editorial agrees, stating that given the lack of a working immigration system “we left to the Drug Lords, just like in the case of our drugs, the flow of our immigrant workers”.
They are right. It was not Los Zetas. It was Barack Obama, the gringo Senators and Congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, Felipe Calderón, Carlos Slim, the Guatemala and Honduras governments, the Mexican Immigration Institute, Janet Napolitano and John McCain, and the American people who rejoice when they pay one dollar for then limes harvested by working hands without See COLUMN page 4 working documents. They all created the system that does not allow international workers to legally go where jobs are waiting for them; who turned the movement of people into a deadly crime and a profi table business. h t t p : / / mx.groups.yahoo.com/ group/mexicodelnorte/
