Study says six out of 10 are looking for an ‘informal but honest’ way to survive

Compiled by Mexico News Daily

A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has found that 3.6 million Mexican children and adolescents between five and 17 years old are currently employed in some way or another, representing close to 50 percent of all working children in Latin America.

The report, published Monday for the World Day Against Child Labor 2017, states that six out of every 10 children in Mexico are looking for an “informal but honest” way to survive.

Víctor Inzúa Canales, a faculty member at UNAM’s national school of social work, told the newspaper El Universal that children and teenagers in that age range should not work because they have yet to fully experience childhood.

But families in extreme poverty turn to them for a contribution, she said.

According to INEGI, the national statistics institute, 5.7 percent of the population between five and 17 performs housework under inadequate conditions. By gender, 5.5 out of every 10 boys and six out of every 100 girls are employed in such a way.

Nearly 21 percent of that cohort of the population have abandoned their studies while 53.3 percent both study and do housework. Another 27 percent combine outside employment with housework.

According to Mexican labor laws, working hours for children under 16 cannot exceed six hours a day. However, 36.6 percent of the employed population aged five to 17 works 35 hours or more a week.

Of the child population that works, 42.5 percent do not receive any income for it; 19.1 percent receive up to twice the daily minimum wage (160 pesos) and three out of 10 receive only one minimum wage. Of those, 38.2 percent work from 40 to 48 hours a week.

Nearly one-quarter of the working children declared that they work in order to pay for schooling and/or their own expenses; another 23.5 percent said they do it for pleasure or to help at home.

As for the person they work for, six out of 10 (59.2 percent) said they do it for a relative and 3.85 percent work on their own.

Another sector of working children are homeless and are exposed to violence, drug abuse and delinquency.

An analysis performed by professor Inzúa found that 40 percent of homeless children are addicted to drugs and commit crimes. Their life expectancy is between 22 and 25 years, rather lower than the average in Mexico of 76.7.

‘Country is bleeding:’ church urges dialogue

Editorial supports peace agreements with organized crime

The Catholic Church in Mexico has expressed its support for dialogue with criminal gangs in the face of impotence on the part of authorities.

In yesterday’s issue of the church’s weekly publication Desde La Fe, the Archdiocese of Mexico endorsed the efforts of a bishop in Guerrero to engage in communication with gang members.

In an editorial titled El país se desangra, or “The country is bleeding,” the church notes the positive results obtained by the bishop of the diocese of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, Salvador Rangel Mendoza, who has declared that narcos in Guerrero are not like those found in northern states.

“Ijust call them farmers,” he said in March.

The archdiocese believes the church should promote peace agreements with criminal elements because the authorities have proven themselves incapable of guaranteeing security for the public.

The article recalled that in recent weeks violence has given no respite, leading to bloodshed in different regions of the country.

In the absence of authorities’ ability to control crime, “it is necessary that actors of moral repute come forward and obtain agreement on, for the least, some terms for peace and security . . . .”

Desde la Fe praised a meeting on May 28 that Rangel held with gangsters to reach “an agreement regarding what authorities no longer guarantee: public safety.”

Those meetings, the editorial declared, have annoyed the authorities, “who have brandished a triumphalist discourse, claiming everything is going well, that there are no problems or difficulties, when deep down what they are after is to conceal the truth.”

It said the clergy cannot escape the current “horror,” which is something that “wasn’t even seen during the communist era or in religious persecutions.”

The church said many priests are victims of extortion by criminals, through which they are allowed to continue celebrating the Catholic rites.

Lerma River: 15 km are ‘biologically dead’

Researcher says its clean-up should be a priority of state’s new government

The Lerma River — one of Mexico’s longest — is so polluted that one expert has labeled it “biologically dead” and environmentalists have described it as “an enormous stinking sewer” that requires an unprecedented effort to clean up.

The river originates in Almoloya del Río near Toluca in the State of México and empties into Lake Chapala in Jalisco and has long been plagued by wastewater contamination.

Excess rainwater mixed with sewage often bypasses outdated drainage systems and flows directly into the river.

Adding to the problem is that the Lerma’s upper basin is one of Mexico’s most developed industrial zones with around 2,500 factories, which produce chemical-containing wastewater that further upsets the river’s biological balance.

Carcinogenic heavy metals and trash are also present in the water.

He says the 30 treatment plants that currently treat water flowing into the Lerma are not enough to stop the damage.

The problems faced by the Lerma are indicative of a wider freshwater crisis that affects other parts of the country including Mexico City, where millions of people lack access to potable water.

by Jack Burns
Analysis

For the first time in US history, more Americans have died of drug overdoses in a single year than all those killed in the Vietnam War. The drug war has been exposed as a deadly and violent failure and the federal government shows no signs of backing down.

Last year’s death toll in the War on Drugs was 59,000 killed, while during the entire Vietnam War, 1955 to 1975, 58,220 American service members’ lives were lost. And, thanks to the immoral and futile police approach to the drug problem, there appears to be no hope in sight for the tide to change.

As The Free Thought Project had previously reported, drug overdose deaths outnumber the number of Americans killed in automobile accidents each year. Answering the question of who is responsible for so many overdose deaths requires a careful examination of the crisis which has now reached epidemic proportions.

The principal players appear to be pharmaceutical companies, who knowingly manufacture dangerous opioids — essentially synthetic heroin — which, alone, kills tens of thousands. Big Pharma has been caught time and again pushing the pills onto the nation’s physicians who prescribe the dangerously powerful painkillers en masse — even to children.

Then, there are the abusers, those who are addicted to opiates. Getting hooked on opiates is easy, according to the CDC, who recently recommended the powerful class of drugs be taken for no more than 14 days. According to the Washington Post:

Noting that “long-term opioid abuse often begins with treatment of acute pain,” the CDC said that “three or fewer days” of opioid treatment “usually will be sufficient for most non-traumatic pain not related to major surgery.”

Street pushers provide the missing source for the drugs when doctors will no longer prescribe the pills to patients who have demonstrated a pattern of abuse. Yet, thanks to the war on drugs pushing the sale of these drugs into dark alleys and the like, the quality of street drugs is questionable with every dose sold. Some opiates have even been laced with the powerful drug Fentanyl, a drug so dangerous even casual contact with it can prove fatal.

As the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP, US Treasury) reported, Insys Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Fentanyl, donated half-a-million dollars to keep marijuana from becoming legal in one U.S. state. One-third of the overdose deaths in Ohio were linked to Fentanyl, yet instead of creating a safer drug, the company was more concerned with combatting cannabis legalization.

Last, but certainly not least, is the government’s own Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The DEA’s only purpose is propping up Big Pharma while raining hell down on Americans for their choice of substances. The DEA even admitted, early this year, it has been trafficking large quantities of controlled substances into the country.

Any decision to ban opiates or remove them from the market, would likely further drive the drugs underground, increase crime, criminalize abusers, lead to growth in the prison industrial complex, and result in many more overdoses. In fact, that is exactly what’s happening. The war on drugs is creating a de facto prison state.

Some U.S. States are taking matters into their own hands. As TFTP reported recently, Ohio is now suing drug manufacturers for their role in the crisis, stating their desire to increase their bottom line profit margins have crossed ethical lines and led to the deaths of countless Ohioans.

Other states and police departments are also taking radical measures to fix the problem instead of prolonging and expanding it through the use of police violence.

As the Boston Globe reports:

“As Gloucester police chief, Leonard Campanello pledged in 2015 that drug users could walk into the police station, hand over heroin, and walk out into treatment within hours — without arrest or charges. The concept of help rather than handcuffs became a national sensation.”

Campanello is no longer police chief there, but the program is continuing in Gloucester. The concept of helping addicts instead of criminalizing them is such a success, it’s been adopted by 200 police agencies in 28 states. This encouraging phenomenon shows that it’s possible for law enforcement to listen to reason when it comes to drug abuse and actually helping communities.

“It puts police in the lifesaving business instead of the spin-drying business of arresting and releasing,” said John Rosenthal, a Boston resident fighting the opioid epidemic. “We estimate that approximately 10,000 people have been placed into treatment.”

In Gloucester, records show that 530 people have sought help at the police station since June 2015. Steve Lesnikoski was the first person to get help under the program, and now, after 18 months of being clean, he says without the Angel Program, “I’d probably be in jail or dead.”

Fatal overdoses and drug arrests have decreased in Gloucester. A study by Boston University and Boston Medical Center provided compelling evidence for the Angel Program’s efficacy.

“In 417 cases where a person who visited the Gloucester police station was eligible for treatment, police data showed that 94.5 percent were offered direct placement and 89.7 percent enrolled in detox or other recovery services, according to Dr. Davida Schiff, a BMC pediatrician who was lead researcher in the study.

Those numbers, reported in December by the New England Journal of Medicine, compared with less than 60 percent of direct referrals from hospital-based programs, which recruit patients who visit emergency rooms with substance-abuse disorders, Schiff said.”

Doing the opposite of the war on drugs is what truly helps people

It is also important to mention that the opiate addiction, overdose, and accidental death problems might simply be avoided if, ironically enough, marijuana is made legal nationwide. A little over half of the United States have legalized cannabis in some form, leaving nearly half of the remaining states and their residents with no access to legal weed.

As TFTP has documented on several occasions, cannabis holds the promise of helping opiate addicts kick their addiction by substituting their cravings for opiates with the non-addictive pain killing properties of marijuana. And it’s not folklore. Doctors have experimented with cannabis as a substitute for opiates with high degrees of success.

For now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the direction of Attorney Jeff Sessions and his staff, has threatened to roll back the progress cannabis activists have made in the last eight and a half years. Joining the DOJ is the DEA which refuses to reclassify cannabis, and remove its current status as a Schedule I narcotic, alongside cocaine, lsd, and heroin.

All of these moves and potential moves by the DOJ and DEA will only make the problem worse unless states like Ohio take measures into their own hands. Now that many in Congress have addicted family members, children, siblings, and friends, the matter has been taken much more seriously.