Laura Carlsen

With Immigration Reform Looming, Private Prisons Lobby to Keep Migrants Behind Bars (Updated)

2013-03-05T12:43:05-05:00

As the immigration reform debate heats up, an important argument has been surprisingly missing. By granting legal status to immigrants and ordering future flows, the government could save billions of dollars. A shift to focus border security on real crime, both local and cross-border, would increase public safety and render a huge dividend to cash-strapped public coffers.

This kind of common-sense immigration reform has the multibillion-dollar private prison industry shaking in its boots. Its lobbyists are actively targeting members of congressional budget and appropriations committees to not only maintain, but increase incarceration of migrants -- with or without comprehensive immigration reform.

While a broad public consensus has formed around the need to legally integrate migrants into the communities where they live and work, private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The GEO Group, thrive off laws that criminalize migrants, including mandatory detention and the definition of immigration violations as felonies. They are using their money and clout to assure that even if immigration reform goes through, the practice of locking people up for immigration infractions will continue.

Their No. 1 goal: to assure that Operation Streamline -- their goose of the golden eggs -- survives, with more money than ever.

Operation Streamline began in 2005, and it imprisons men, women and children for immigration violations, sometimes up to 10 months or more, and it channels more than $1 billion a year in federal funds to private-run detention centers.

It would seem contradictory for a program that rounds up undocumented migrants to be funded alongside comprehensive immigration reform. Yet both President Obama's plan and the plan put forward by the Gang of 8 senators call to increase Border Patrol enforcement programs.

Enlace, coordinator of the National Private Prison Detention Campaign, has compiled data on private prison industry money to pressure Congress for more enforcement business in any comprehensive immigration reform bill.

The Private Prison Lobby
First, a brief guide to the private prison lobby. Numbers are from their 2012 quarterly lobby disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate and Clerk of the House. The Center for Responsive Politics has a useful site where much of this information is posted.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, lobbyist for CCA, received $220,000 for its services for CCA in 2012.

Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc., received $280,000 to lobby for CCA in 2012. McBee Strategic Consulting received $320,000 in 2012 from CCA. CCA in-house lobby registered $970,000 in lobbying for 2012.

Navigators Global lobbies for GEO. GEO paid Navigators Global $120,000 for lobbying in 2012. Lionel (Leo) Aguirre was also paid $120,000 for lobbying for GEO.

Among the gang of eight senators, all but Lindsay Graham and John McCain have received significant money from the private prison corporations. The transparency watchdog, Open Secrets, compiled the figures by adding contributions from members, employees, PACs or immediate family members of the organization.

* Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.): Chair of the Rules Committee, Member of Judiciary and Chair of Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Enforcement. In 2012, Schumer received at least $64,000 from lobbyists Akin Gump et al, and $2,500 from Mehlman Vogel. He also received $34,500 from FMR (Fidelity), which owns 5.09 percent of CCA and 8.67 percent of GEO.

* Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): Member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Foreign Relations, received $29,300 from the GEO Group. Wells Fargo (also heavily invested in private prisons) gave Rubio $16,150.

* Bob Menendez (D-N.J): Finance Committee, new chair of Foreign Relations, received more than $39,000 in documented money from private prison lobbyists, with $34,916 coming from Akin Gump, $6,300 from Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc. and $1,000 from McBee Strategic Consulting.

* Michael Bennet (D-Colo.): Finance Committee, received at least $30,794 from
Akin Gump.

The prison lobby also targeted several key House members Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Budget committee and member of Appropriations, received $21,600 from Akin Gump; $74,700 from McBee Strategic Consulting.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is on the House Budget and Judiciary committees, received money from: Akin, Gump et al ($19,600); and contributions from Mehlman Vogel associates totaling $2,500.

What these lobbyists want for their money is an immigration reform bill that tightens, rather than loosens the criminal net for undocumented workers and their families.

The inhumane and illogical step of pre-deportation detention was invented by the private prison industry. Last year, the Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement, including detention, than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined -- a staggering $18 billion. The detention centers receive $166 per person, per day in government funds -- an amount that would be a godsend to a homeless family or unemployed worker.

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, director of Enlace, notes, "The private prison industry is swamping the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committees to try to buy them to keep Operation Streamline so they can incarcerate more immigrants in private prisons despite immigration reform." There is nothing surprising about that, he adds, "That's their business."

The national movement made up of local organizations against private detention centers has a simple demand -- stop funding private immigrant detention centers. They have blocked construction of new prisons and pressured investment funds and individuals to divest from private prison stock. They have also turned their sights on the politicians that feed federal money into the system.

Maria Rodriguez of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a member of the divestment campaign, explains that her group is meeting with Florida Congressional representatives to counteract the influence of the private prison lobby.

"In the broadest sense, what we're trying to do is to show the financial impact on policies and the conversation in the context of immigration reform," she says.

Are members of Congress being bought off? Rodriguez replies, "I think that when people are being heavily lobbied and when there's financial interests involved and when our representatives are benefiting from those financial interests directly through lobbying, it compromises their ability to do what's right for taxpayers and immigrant families."

There is a lot at stake for the private prison companies. CCA and GEO reported combined revenues of $3 billion dollars in 2011, with nearly half -- $1.3 billion -- coming directly from federal government, according to 2011 annual reports. They will fight hard for continued incarceration under immigration reform -- whether it makes sense policy-wise or not.

The human rights issues involved in locking up migrants for profit, separating families and detaining individuals in poor and humiliating conditions rarely even make it into the debate. Instead, politicians are tempted to curry support among the prison industry and conservatives, with more talk of "enforcement" as the trading chip for citizenship and less talk of human rights.

Meanwhile, citizen groups are hoping that greater transparency and public awareness of the role of private prison corporations will lead to a more lasting and rights-based comprehensive immigration reform, one where for-profit immigrant detention centers become a relic of a crueler past.

Update, 3/18/2013:

Mr. Steve Owen of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) writes requesting a "correction" to my article because he claims that: a) I wrote that CCA is lobbying on immigration reform and, b) that CCA never lobbies on immigration reform. No correction is warranted.

First, readers will note that I wrote "They are using their money and clout to assure that even if immigration reform goes through, the practice of locking people up for immigration infractions will continue," and "to maintain incarceration of migrants with or without immigration reform." I wrote that they are lobbying to continue to receive government contracts to detain people for immigration infractions regardless of what type of reform goes through, not that they are lobbying for one particular proposal over another. I made it quite clear that they work across the aisle to do this.

Secondly, exactly what Mr. Owen would define as lobbying on immigration reform is unclear. The filings on lobbying activities state the purpose of the CCA lobbying as in this Akin Gump statement: "Issues pertaining to the construction and management of private prisons and detention facilities; the Commerce, Justice, State appropriations bill; the Homeland Security appropriations bill; Freedom of Information Act legislation; monitor immigration reform; Safe Prisons Communications Act". Under the lobbying disclosure Act, McBee reported that it received $80,000 from CCA for: "Provisions and funding related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in FY2013 Budget Request, the FY2013 Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill, and the FY2013 Homeland Securities Appropriations Bill", along with Bureau of Prisons budget. Other filings are similar. Unfortunately, "border security", enforcement and immigrant detention have been intricately bound up with immigration reform in the legislation, thus making it difficult to define where one begins and the other ends.

Thirdly, the amounts refer only to the firms' lobbying activities for CCA, with the above intentions and the amounts these firms, who have as CCA a major client, have given to politicians. The questions as to whether the firms have other clients or the Congressional members work on other issues is merely a feeble attempt at reductio ad absurdum -- I never said or implied that. He also says nothing of the money CCA puts into lobbying directly, nor of the fact that many of those contributions are directly traceable to the individuals or family members of the lobbyists that handle the CCA account.

No one doubts that companies pay lobbyists to advance their interests. The interest of the private prison industry, like any industry, is to generate demand for its services and obtain governmental contracts. In this case "demand" means a steady stream of immigrant prisoners. CCA says so much in a part of the article that was included in the longer published version: In its 2010 Annual Report, CCA warns that "any changes [in the laws] with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them." When the company lobbies or pays lobbyists to maintain the flow of contracts and immigrant prisoners in its business, it is lobbying to maintain a structure of imprisoning immigrants on criminal charges -- this is the "service" it provides.

An informed citizenry must know who is working to influence their representatives and how. That was the legitimate concern that led to passage of the Lobbying Disclosure Act in the first place. No one knows what goes on behind closed doors. For this reason, we journalists and analysts provide straight information and a framework for understanding the implications. These amounts of money going through lobbying firms to members of Congress, whatever the particular route, present a clear source of influence that constituents should be aware of if we want public policy to serve the people, and not special interests.

Can Obama's Gun Control Plan Reduce Violence in Mexico?

2013-01-24T18:00:35-05:00

President Obama's moving speech to unveil his gun control plan opens up the possibility of devising -- finally -- more sane and healthy policies on limiting the destructive capacity of dangerous individuals. That's good news for U.S. communities.

Another consequence of fixing gun laws has hardly been mentioned though -- the impact it would have south of the border.

The package of 23 executive actions and three requests for Congressional action announced in the January 16 speech, streamed live and amply reported in the press, aim at stemming gun violence in the U.S. and could have major repercussions in Mexico, where cartel-related violence has claimed more than 100,000 lives in the past six years.

In some ways, the speech and the actions announced by Obama went beyond what many people expected. The bold call to reinstate the assault weapons ban -- a decision that falls on Congress -- shows a second-term president ready to speak his mind following a rash of massacres across the country.

Obama attempted to ground the new proposals in surveys showing broad public support for more gun control, portraying the powerful gun lobbies as not representative of majority views. He stressed the human costs of gun violence by describing details of the victims lives, especially the children of Sandy Hook, and appealing to a universal concern for children's safety.

In his speech at the White House, President Obama detailed three measures required of Congress and mentioned a few of his executive measures.

The three specific requests of Congress are:

Legislation to require a universal background check on all gun buyers. Obama noted that existing background checks have kept some 1.5 million guns from ending up in the hands of potentially irresponsible buyers. He noted that one survey found that 70 percent of NRA members favor universal background checks.

Restore the ban on military-style assault weapons and instate a 10-round limit for ammunition magazines. Obama stated that the shooter in the July 20, 2012 massacre in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater used an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine that enabled him to shoot 70 people, killing 12, in minutes. "Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in a movie theater," he said.

"Help, rather than hinder law enforcement," by getting tough on people who buy guns to sell to criminals. He did not refer to specific legislative changes here, but instead to the need to confirm the director of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATF), the agency charged with overseeing arms sales and preventing smuggling. Obama has nominated acting director Todd Jones.

As for the executive measures, the president called for the development of emergency preparedness plans, and reforms to give mental health professionals options to report threats of violence, while adding that mental health patients are more frequently the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence.

He also said he will direct the Center for Disease Control to conduct research into the causes of violence in U.S. society. Noting that there has been opposition to this type of research and commenting acidly that "no one benefits from ignorance," Obama called for studies that scientifically measure the impact of violent videos and other imagery on young minds.

The full list of the 23 actions signed by the president -- not all of which were included in the speech -- can be found here.

With the plan on the table, the battle begins. The National Rifle Association immediately promised "the fight of the century." Obama called on the U.S. public to support the measures and begin pressure on Congressional representatives, emphasizing districts heavily influenced by gun lobbyists and organizations.

Will the New Plan Help Reduce Mexico's Violence?

In many countries with far stricter gun laws, the NRA's argument that owning assault weapons is a fundamental liberty is almost inconceivable. In Mexico, the big question is: Can the new plan reduce the flow of arms south?

Mexico has long had a stake in gun control in the United States. Mexicans have demanded the U.S. act to control the flow of arms, because loose laws not only contribute to the mass shootings in the United States, but also fuel drug war violence in Mexico when smugglers take high-power weapons over the border.

The vast majority of guns confiscated in drug war crimes can be traced back to the U.S. From former president Calderon, who called for reinstatement of the assault weapon ban and an end to gun smuggling on the floor of the U.S. Congress in May of 2011, to Mexico's Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity that traveled throughout the United States last summer calling for stricter control on arms sales and trafficking.

Specifically Mexico's peace movement called for:

The president of the United States to immediately prohibit the importation of assault weapons to the United States. Assault weapons are often smuggled into Mexico, and have also been used too many times against innocent civilians in the U.S. We also propose increasing the regulatory capacity of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in the border regions where the arms smuggling is concentrated, especially in border states like Arizona and Texas.

President Obama did not mention the effect of out-of-control weapons sales in the United States on its southern neighbor.

It's understandable that with a major domestic battle looming, bringing Mexico into the mix might not be strategic. Racism and xenophobia against anything Mexican among some parts of the press and population means that mentioning Mexico in almost any context can cause polemics. Just take a look at the number of irate statements from Fox News and other right-wing outlets whenever Calderon called for reforming U.S. gun laws to control smuggling.

A close look at the reforms shows that the first six points relate to background checks. Congress has to legislate to require universal background checks, so these measures attempt to fill gaps within the existing structure, with greater information sharing and rigorous enforcement and definition.

Actions 7-8, 15 and 18 relate to public education and gun safety measures, and the development of the emergency response model.

Actions 9-11 and 14 announce additional efforts by federal law enforcement agencies to generate and share information on gun violence from the causes (CDC) to the source of guns. These include nominating the ATF director, which the president did with Jones and must be confirmed.

Actions 12-13 regard stronger, more effective law enforcement. Some press articles have interpreted #12 as placing cops in schools -- a terrible idea -- but that has not so far been stated explicitly in the list or the public event. Action 18 does refer to hiring "school resource officers" -- whatever that means.

The rest of the actions comprise measures to prevent and spot threats in mental health services.

What does this mean for Mexico?

* Increased background checks can effectively reduce smuggling. There is no question that greater vigilance over who is allowed to purchase guns, as Obama stated both from licensed dealers and gun-show sellers, will make it more difficult for straw purchasers to buy for smugglers. These measures must be fully and actively supported.

* The most impact by far would be the ban on sale and possession of assault weapons. Cutting off the free circulation of these weapons in the United States would help dry up U.S. supply for smugglers. This measure will be vigorously opposed by gun proponents.

None of the demands put forward by a group of U.S. and Mexican non-governmental organizations made it into the presidential actions. A petition signed by more than 12,000 people called to:

Immediately detain and prohibit the importation of assault weapons to the United States, because many of them are sent as contraband to Mexico.

Order dealers to report to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) the sale of multiple assault rifles to the same person over a period of five days.

Increase the regulatory capacity of the ATF in those regions of the United States that supply the weapons contraband to Mexico, especially in border states.

The petition actually fell short of what Obama did in calling for Congress to restore the ban. Now, with Obama's backing, Congress could and should include the import ban in the restoration of the assault weapon ban.

As to the demand for increased functions for the ATF, giving the agency more powers must be predicated on a thorough review and clean-up within. It makes sense politically at this point to first consolidate the agency and its leadership and then take on issues of giving it greater powers, since it has become a lightening rod for right-wing criticism based on the Fast and Furious scandal.

After the ATF has a confirmed director, it should immediately begin an overhaul of rules and practices, including more reporting and regulation. This is particularly needed following the famously failed and illegal operation "Fast and Furious," which allowed guns to be smuggled to Mexican cartels.

The Right to Live Without Violence

The president knows what he's up against now. He laid it out in the speech (a speech worth listening to, by the way): "Ask (your representatives) to do this and if they say no, ask them why not..." and added pointedly, "What's more important? Getting an A grade from the gun lobby that helps fund their campaigns or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade?"

The National Rifle Association's influence in Congress remains strong and extends into international policy as well. The NRA issued an ad calling Obama a "hypocrite" for accepting armed guards for his daughters, implying that the best way to keep children safe is to arm them (or adults around them). This fight won't be pretty.

Obama tried to preempt the criticisms by warning viewers that opponents would attack his plan on the grounds of violations of civil liberties. He reiterated his support for the Second Amendment.

Just before signing the actions, Obama noted that mass shootings enabled in part by a lack of regulation, are not only a tragedy but a violation of basic human rights. The right to assemble peacefully (for those shot in the theaters), the right to freedom of worship (for the Sikhs in Wisconsin) and basic rights to life and happiness are violated by violence.

A rights framework that recognizes and moves beyond the human tragedy, is a good model for understanding violence in both the U.S. and Mexico, because it lends a greater sense of urgency to the issue. The right to live without violence places responsibility for ending the killings squarely within the realm of the government.

Mexico prohibits most gun ownership, but as always enforcement is the problem. If fewer guns come over the border, the nation could have a small, but important, aid in reducing the bloodshed that has become a hallmark of daily life since the drug war began.

In the United States, citizens are mobilizing to support the measures. The politics have shifted, especially since among the rising demographic group of latinos only 29 percent think "gun owndership rights" are more important than gun control.

Obama's plan comes as welcome news in Mexico. It's a step forward, despite the fact that the black market for arms is international and "legitimate" arms in the hands of authorities are just as deadly when turned against the population as arms in the hands of criminals.

But especially in Mexico where violence is caused by organized crime and its accomplices, the dynamics of violence are far more causal than the tools. These killers will always find a way to kill. The U.S. government's support for Mexico's disastrous drug war embodied in the Merida Initiative foreign aid package feeds the dynamics of violence in Mexican border cities and throughout the country.

Obama's arms control plan could reduce gun smuggling over the border. But until the logic of militarization and defense through fire power -- whether on the personal or national level -- is replaced with real attempts at preventing and resolving conflict, violence will continue to claim lives on both sides of the border.

Killing Spree on the Border

2012-12-20T10:04:17-05:00

His name was José Antonio Elena Rodriguez. At 16, he was just finishing junior high and living with his grandmother on the Mexican side of the border city of Nogales.

On October 13, 2012, José Antonio was hit by a hail of bullets coming from the U.S. side of the metal fence that lacerates Nogales. Some seven shots penetrated the boy's body through the back and the head. He died instantly.

Sitting in a busy coffee shop in Nogales, Taide Elena, Jose Antonio's grandmother, shows a photo of her grandson. She breaks down when she talks about the dreams "Toñito" had.

"He wasn't even on the line. He was just walking on the sidewalk, three blocks from his house," she sobs as she recalls the night he was shot. "Why did they carry out this cruel assassination?"

The shots were fired by U.S. Border Patrol agents. The Border Patrol claims that the youth threw rocks at the unidentified agent or agents, who fired in return. The family reports that neither they nor their lawyer nor Mexican authorities have received information from the investigation on the U.S. side. As conflicting versions of the story circulate, the Border Patrol will not even release the names of the agents under investigation.

The Border Patrol authorizes its agents to respond to rock-throwing with lethal force. This is not the first time BP agents have fired on Mexico and killed young men for allegedly hurling stones toward the border.

The Southern Border Communities Coalition has registered 19 cases of people killed by the Border Patrol just since 2010. The Coalition, formed in March of 2011, brings together more than 60 organizations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to "Ensure that border enforcement policies and practices are accountable and fair, respect human dignity and human rights, and prevent the loss of life in the region."

On December 2, another person was shot to death by the Border Patrol 12 miles northwest of Sasabe, Arizona, in a killing that apparently would not even have been made public had an enterprising Tucson reporter not followed up on an anonymous tip. Add to that the incident on October 25, when Texas State Troopers in an armed helicopter fired into a truckload of immigrants, killing two Guatemalans, and the toll reaches 22 known cases.

The numbers themselves justify calling this a killing spree. The Border Patrol may contend that some of these killings were accidental, but in the current war-zone mentality among U.S. border security forces, it seems to matter little who died or how.

Mexico's Foreign Relations Department issued a statement following Jose Antonio's shooting calling such deaths "a serious bilateral problem." The violence has even attracted the attention of Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, who declared that the numerous reports of young people killed at the border show "excessive force by the U.S. border patrols."

The media turns its attention to what's happening only sporadically, when someone is killed. But the problem of Border Patrol violence appears to be endemic. The U.S. human rights group No More Deaths issued a report last year called "Culture of Cruelty," in which it noted 30,000 cases of abuse by the Border Patrol between November 2008 and March of 2011.

Other human rights groups have issued reports and presented grievances to international organizations, and the Mexican government complains briefly every time a Mexican is killed. But the deaths and abuses keep mounting.

Border Injustice

Not only are Mexican teens being killed by U.S. security forces on the border. Their deaths are usually not punished. An investigation by the Arizona Daily Star found that U.S. border agencies announce investigations and then frequently seal them off from public scrutiny. Often what happens is that months or years later they quietly announce years that their agents have been cleared of all charges and the case is closed.

During the same period studied by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, four Border Patrol agents were killed on duty in Arizona. Their deaths are as lamentable as those of the Mexicans and Guatemalans killed by other agents. But the response of U.S. government officials and the justice system to their deaths has been entirely different.

Border Patrol officer Brian Terry was killed in a shoot-out in December 2010. Mexican authorities picked up two suspects, one of whom confessed. Terry's death became a cause celebré among the Obama administration's critics when it was revealed that he was murdered by weapons "walked" across the border to criminals under a U.S. government program called "Fast and Furious." His relatives filed a wrongful death claim against those responsible for the program in February.

When Border Patrol agent Nicholas Ivie was killed on October 2 this year, the Mexican government again responded quickly, picking up two suspects within days. Apparently, too quickly. This eagerness to respond was soon called into question when the FBI reported that its preliminary findings showed that Ivie had been killed by "friendly fire"--that is, by a fellow Border Patrol agent whom he had shot in apparent confusion.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer came out on October 2 with a public statement seeking to use the fateful shooting to criticize the federal government for failing to support even more "security" on the border. "This ought not only be a day of tears," she said. "There should be anger, too. Righteous anger--at the kind of evil that causes sorrow this deep, and at the federal failure and political stalemate that has left our border unsecured and our Border Patrol in harm's way. Four fallen agents in less than two years is the result."

The two other agents were killed when they ran their patrol car into a freight train while chasing alleged drug traffickers.

So of the four agents, one was killed by another agent, one by U.S. weapons, and two more when they crashed their car into a train. With the exception of Terry, their violent deaths were not the direct result of "evil" Mexican smugglers, and much less of "federal failure" to secure the border.

The contrast in the official responses to the killings of U.S. agents and of Mexicans, and the muddled circumstances of the agents' deaths, reveals some of the deep contradictions in U.S. border security policies. The agents were "placed in harm´s way" not due to "insecure borders," but as a direct result of excessively violent and careless U.S. border security policies. When we add the 22 mostly unarmed Mexicans shot or beaten to death in circumstances that have never been fully revealed, these policies appear not only wrong but also criminal.

Lethal Force

"It's not fair that they take the life of a boy," says Elena, in tears. "They're not animals; they're killing human beings, people with a right to live. Do they think that just because they have a gun and a badge they can do whatever they want? Or maybe they think by doing this they'll be heroes in the United States?"

The Border Patrol's use of lethal force became a major issue two years ago, when Sergio Hernandez, another Mexican teenager, was killed when the Border Patrol fired shots across the border into Ciudad Juarez. Months later, the Border Patrol decided not to charge the agent who killed the boy. Hernandez's family, understandably upset, has decided to sue the agent who killed him. The U.S. government has refused to turn over video evidence that could clear up what really happened, despite the legal proceedings.

Two and a half years after Sergio was killed in Ciudad Juarez and two months after José Antonio's death, the U.S. government has finally called for a review of the rules regarding the use of lethal force on the border.

Border Patrol policies seem to justify the use of lethal force in virtually any situation deemed necessary by often skittish agents with impossible mandates, inadequate training, and racist beliefs; the decision to review them is certainly a step in the right direction. The next steps must include rules for making information available to the public, Mexican authorities, and affected families and communities; full and open investigations; prosecution, rather than cover-ups, of those found guilty of fatal and non-fatal abuses; and a new policy that significantly restricts the use of firearms.

Most importantly, unproven and ill-defined "national security" objectives must never be used to deny basic human rights, including the right to life. A real commitment to security must place human life and public safety above all else--no matter which side of the border you're on.

Killing the Messenger: Attacks Rise on Women Human Rights Defenders

2012-12-13T14:20:40-05:00

Juventina Villa knew her days were numbered. A leader of an environmental organization in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, she and other activists have been in the crosshairs of organized crime and government forces for years. Her husband and two nephews were murdered this year.

On Nov. 28, one day before International Day of Women Human Rights Defenders, Juventina was shot to death, along with her 17-year-old son and before the eyes of her eight-year-old daughter.

She had climbed a hill to make a phone call where she could get a signal. Villa had been granted protection by the state and was accompanied by police at the time of her assassination. Oddly, not one was wounded during the ambush. The state government, charged with guaranteeing her safety, shrugged off responsibility. Guerrero official Humberto Salgado stated, "She strayed outside the security perimeter."

His callous statement confirmed a common attitude -- when women cross the line, they deserve what they get.

Women human rights defenders are not only targeted by the interests they confront. They are often abandoned -- or worse, attacked -- by governments and sometimes by their own communities and families. No matter what they do or what is done to them, they are portrayed as having provoked their own murders, rapes or attacks.

The work of Juventina and her organization, Peasant Ecologists of Petatlán and Coyuca, made them marks for criminal organizations and their government accomplices who benefit from illegal logging and drug cultivation in the region. Over the past two decades, the government has harassed and unlawfully imprisoned activists to protect logging interests and stifle local grassroots organizing.

Juventina worked to defend the forests, rivers and communities in the mountainous region. Other women human rights defenders have been killed or threatened with death for defending natural resources from transnational mining and development companies, labor rights or, in the case of journalists, the truth.

Many have been murdered for standing up against military and paramilitary incursions in their communities under the drug war. Josefina Reyes of the Juarez Valley in Chihuahua, Mexico fought for years to protect communities on the U.S.-Mexico border. When the Mexican government sent in the army to confront drug cartels, she became an outspoken critic of the military's violations of human rights. On Jan. 3, 2010 Reyes was shot in the head by assailants. Five other members of her family have since been assassinated.

Margarita Chub Che -- a midwife, mother and human rights defender -- fought back when her community was displaced by private guards, police and soldiers to make way for agribusiness expansion. Chub also led local efforts to seek justice for crimes committed in the Polochic region during the dirty war in Guatemala. She was murdered in her Q'uechi indigenous community of Paraná by three masked men on June 4, 2011.

In Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, at least 24 women human rights defenders have been murdered in the past few years. Many more have received threats to their lives, have been forced to flee, or have suffered physical attacks, often including sexual violence.

Marusia Cruz, director of Just Associates, Mesoamerica, notes that violence against women human rights defenders is on the rise. "We've registered an alarming increase of threats and attacks against defenders in the region, in large part due to authoritarian policies and militarization," she noted.

As the war on drugs has led to an overall surge in violence in the region, attacks on women and particularly women human rights defenders have increased. Other factors include macho cultures and patriarchal systems of control over women, the coup d'etat in Honduras and the subsequent spike in human rights violations, and battles over control over natural resources. As women play prominent roles in organizing against powerful interests in protection of their cultures, communities and rights, they move into the danger zone.

Many have gotten together in networks of women human rights defenders to learn mechanisms of self-protection, self´care, advocacy and alert each other and the public when a defender is at risk.

As the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence come to an end Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, organizations of women throughout the world are calling for more protection for women human rights defenders and justice for those who have been assassinated. In most cases, the crimes against them have not been punished.

Juventina and scores of other women throughout the world are the messengers who warn the rest of society when human rights are violated and who have the guts to stand up and say 'no'. Powerful economic and political forces have a vested interest in silencing them. Often the public insulates itself with the versions given by the media -- "she died because she crossed the line," implying, if you don't cross the line, you are safe.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless we defend human rights defenders -- the women and men on the front lines of the defense of basic liberties -- we are not safe. They are our defense of the present, and guarantee for the future.

Obama Must Rewrite His Foreign Policy Legacy

2012-11-16T18:33:07-05:00

With a more than comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes, President Barack Obama held onto office on Election Day. Now the big question for foreign policy is whether Legacy Obama will be a bolder advocate for peace than the disappointing Campaign Obama.

The president will need to recast a foreign policy that has been weak or downright contradictory in standing up for the principles he himself has espoused. To do that, there are several key moves ahead. An agenda for change would have to include the following:

1. Put diplomacy first. This has been said many times before, but the absence of consistent follow-up places it in doubt. The idea behind real statesmanship (or stateswomanship) is not to speak softly and carry a big stick. It is to speak clearly and firmly -- and leave the stick as a last resort.

This means really being the boss of the Pentagon. A hammer sees every problem as a nail -- and sets out to pound. The mindset that the capacity to kill and destroy is a deterrent in favor of peace will never be uprooted among most military men, steeped in a patriarchal culture and trained to defeat enemies on the battlefield. Like the neocons, they believe a safe world can only be achieved through unquestioned domination and a permanent threat of, or use of, force -- with a self-referential response to the question of "safe for whom?"

This mentality inherently violates the principles of self-determination and mutual respect, as well as the emphasis on diplomacy that the president has expressed. It ignores the fact that a world that is more just and more equal is also more stable.

During the campaign, Obama heralded his withdrawal from Iraq, his incomplete drawdown in Afghanistan and his insistence on sanctions against Iran. He must now review his administration's actions on other fronts. A record $60-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia is not a step in the right direction.

The touted "pivot to the Pacific" includes last year's $5.8-billion arms sale to Taiwan, the basing of Marines in Australia and ringing China with a missile defense system. Placing priority on the region makes sense, but a military pivot just changes the sights of the gun. Obama's ambivalent portrayal of China as both a partner and an adversary increases tensions in a largely peaceful region.

It's the president's job to balance might and mind. In practice, he must rein in powerful interests. These include defense contractors and private security firms -- the mercenaries who increasingly fight our wars. Diplomacy does not generate juicy contracts for them, but it is the surest road to peace.

2. Rebalance fiscal priorities. The United States has unparalleled military strength in the world. As Obama noted in the foreign policy debate, we devote more resources to defense than the next ten countries combined.

This is not something to be proud of. In the United States there are millions of children who go to bed hungry. Others attend schools that lack basic educational materials, or where a talent for art or music withers because these subjects -- considered extraneous to the labor market but central to human development and happiness -- have been cut from the curriculum.

Twenty percent of the U.S. budget -- and more than half of all discretionary spending -- goes to defense spending, often against ill-defined and trumped-up threats. Scarce taxpayer dollars flow into defense industry boondoggles.

The Boeing virtual fence on the Mexico border is a good example. This project, which was abandoned in 2010 after costing taxpayers a whopping $1 billion, alerted the National Guard to "terrorist movements" like grazing cows and autumn gusts of wind and tended to fail on hot days (even though it was designed for the Arizona desert). In Iraq, Halliburton received millions in government payments that were never accounted for.

Every once in a while, we -- the forgetful citizenry of the land of one-day headlines -- remember these things. And we wonder where we would be if our families and communities had received those millions instead of the voracious defense industry and gluttonous security firms. Many of us would feel safer if we had jobs, modern infrastructure and a bright future for our children.

3. Take women's voices into account. A "gender gap" is usually the discrepancy that reflects inequality between men and women. In the 2012 elections, it referred to the overwhelming support Obama received from women voters.

Now the government should listen to these women. They do not speak with a single voice -- they are of different races, classes, and political parties. However, they do share some common concerns.

Women want to make decisions about their own bodies, and they punished candidates who threatened to take that right away. But they also generally favor more investment in their families and communities, and less in war. A gender perspective on foreign policy must consider the mounting number of women and children killed in the way we fight wars today and reverse the trend immediately. This includes ending the use of drone attacks and indiscriminate bombings of civilian populations. It includes halting security aid to allied forces that rape and kill women in their own countries.

It's time to design a foreign policy that puts the security of women and children above that of states and investments.

4. End the drug war. The so-called " war on drugs" has become a cloak for military expansion in Latin America. Military and counternarcotics spending (INCLE) have sucked up billions of dollars ostensibly to stop the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. That expenditure has been worse than useless, as 60,000 people have been murdered since the drug wars started in Mexico -- yet drugs continue to flow into the United States unabated. Prohibition is not just failing; it's killing and incarcerating America's youth and citizens in Mexico, Colombia and Central America as cartels turn more brutal and ruthless.

A new Obama administration must end the Merida Initiative to Mexico immediately. We must create a more balanced and logical way of relating to our southern neighbor, instead of spending millions of dollars on a violently counterproductive policy. Like the infamous "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq, "narco-terrorism" in Latin America is a term invented to justify a war -- it perpetuates senseless bloodshed and dangerously obscures the nature of the real threat from organized crime. The Obama administration must take responsibility for the thousands who have disappeared or been assassinated under this Bush-era policy that continues even today. In his second term, Obama must heed the calls of Latin American citizens and leaders to change it.

As William Hartung points out, the Obama military strategy unveiled in January shows "an expansion of U.S. military commitments that are more appropriate for a policy of global hegemony than they are for a policy of genuine defense." More recently, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's trip to Latin America revealed an agenda to beef up military-to-military ties while bypassing governments and diplomatic paths.

To stand up to a retooled and more powerful than ever military-industrial establishment requires boldness and a deep commitment to peace. If President Obama seeks to leave a meaningful legacy in his second term, this is the place to start.

Heart-to-Heart on the Drug War

2012-09-21T11:56:58-04:00

Margarita Lopez begins to speak about the horrible events that marked the end of her daughter's life in a low, even tone. Some 40 women in a plush Washington, D.C. meeting room listen silently as tears roll down their cheeks.

Lopez narrates how her 19-year-old daughter, Jahaira Guadalupe Vaena Lopez, was abducted in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. She describes her efforts to get the authorities to investigate the crime, how she was warned not to press the matter, how informants told her that her daughter was murdered in a turf battle between fractured drug gangs. Just days before leaving for the United States with the Caravan for Peace, she faced one of the assassins who had been apprehended and listened as he described in detail how her daughter was raped and beheaded.

Margarita has joined some 50 grieving family members to accompany caravan leader Javier Sicilia on a trip across the United States. Sicilia, a poet who lost his son to drug war violence in March of 2011, catalyzed a movement of victims and Mexican citizens fed up with the bloodshed that has claimed more than 60,000 lives and left tens of thousands more disappeared since former President Felipe Calderon launched the drug war five years ago.

Mexico's Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity decided to organize the U.S. caravan after taking two caravans from Mexico City--one north to Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border, and one south to the border with Guatemala. Both drew out victims of the drug war and registered their cases to provide support for family members seeking justice and solace.

The decision to take their pain across the border came after discussion with the San Francisco-based group Global Exchange. Soon a coalition came together that included Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the Latin American Working Group, the RFK Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, our CIP Americas Program, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, among the key players. The coalition later expanded to include the NAACP, and local organizations in each of the cities along the route.

A binational meeting in June defined five demands of the U.S. caravan: to open public debate on humane alternatives to drug prohibition, to ban the import of assault weapons and crack down on illegal gun smuggling over the border, to combat money-laundering with full investigation and strict enforcement, to suspend all aid to the Mexican armed forces and end the war on drugs abroad, and to halt the militarization of the border and criminalization of migrants.

I joined the caravan on the final east coast leg of its 6,000-mile trip. I had heard most of the stories before in Mexico, having accompanied the northern caravan and numerous marches and meetings.

I was curious to see the impact on people in the United States. As the women in the room told their stories, each one struck like a cold blade in the heart. Although women are a minority of the war's deaths, attacks on women usually include brutal sexual violence, and women make up the majority of those actively seeking justice and an end to the war.

Along the route, caravan members like these women have become confident and eloquent spokespersons to end the drug war. They speak from the heart and appeal to the heart. Their empowerment as leaders is one of the most important achievements of the caravan. Another is the sympathy and outrage their testimonies evoke.

And it's not a one-way street. Caravan members also listened to the stories of U.S. citizens. Like Kimberly Armstrong in Baltimore, whose 16-year-old son was shot and killed by a 14-year-old in endemic drug violence. Or Carole Eady, who struggled her way out of the stigma and life disruption of imprisonment for a drug offense in New York City.

The threads begin to come together. In her brilliant book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander notes that in Washington, D.C., the caravan's last stop, it's estimated that three out of four black men can expect to serve time in prison. She calls this mass incarceration of black people a new racial caste, the latest Jim Crow system of social control, where young black men and women are jailed, stigmatized, and in many cases disenfranchised for life by discriminatory drug laws.

Based on the shared sorrow of losing loved ones to jail, violence, death, or disappearance, Mexicans and Americas found they fight the same unjust system of social control of the poor and people of color. The drug war generates profits for the defense industry and siphons public funds into perpetuating itself. It rips apart families and communities, north and south of the border. The bogus attempt to eliminate rather than regulate something in great demand creates a multibillion-dollar black market run by groups that become more violent as they are selectively attacked. It pits security forces against the public, providing them with the tools to violate human rights and life with impunity. It erodes democracy and the rule of law it purports to uphold.

Whether it's through imposing a military/police state in Mexico or shunting youth into the margins of society, the drug war machine runs on the human lives it destroys.

A binational peace movement?

The caravan's call to end the drug war resonated in city after city. But has the caravan forged a binational movement for peace?

Not yet. As the Mexican caravaners go back home, their U.S. hosts return to daily life. Many will simply guard the memory of Mexico's pain and begin to read the news a little differently.

But others will act. The Peace Caravan has already achieved something remarkable. It brought together groups in U.S. cities that scarcely knew each other before. Some community organizers in the scores of cities from San Diego to the nation's capital plan to continue the dialogue with the Mexican movement and among themselves.

In New York City, the Latino and African-American communities plan a meeting to discuss the impact of mass arrests and detention. In Baltimore, the movement to block construction of yet another multimillion-dollar prison in one of the nation's most economically devastated cities is making common cause with movements for drug policy reform, racial justice, and youth rights.

In Texas, faith-based organizations advocating stricter enforcement of gun laws are intensifying their campaign against gun show sales and arms smuggling after seeing close up the human cost of the flow of guns to Mexico. In Arizona, human rights organizations working against the militarization of the border and the death and detention of migrants came face-to-face with activists protesting Mexico's militarized drug war in a cross-border reflection. In Washington, members of Congress received caravan lobbyists whose power to convince came not from money or influence, but from human empathy and reason.

The way many U.S. citizens understand the drug war has changed through meeting the Mexicans who bear the brunt of it. While U.S. politicians and media portray it as a necessary fight against the threat that organized crime supposedly poses to national security in both countries, the victims spoke of the violence that resulted from the war on drugs itself. Audiences and congressional representatives were surprised to learn that many of the victims on the caravan accused not gangs but the U.S.-funded Mexican police and military for the murder or disappearance of their loved ones.

Organizers now face the question of how the moral victory can lead to a political one. On the drug policy front, U.S. society seems to be moving toward a tipping point despite pushback from law enforcement and private prison interests that make big money off incarceration, as well as from politicians who convert insecurity into "law and order" votes. A recent poll shows Colorado could legalize marijuana in the November elections after a similar measure narrowly lost in California. The award-winning film The House I Live In presents a stunning indictment of the domestic drug war through the words of its enforcers, its participants, and its victims.

But the federal government continues to be on the wrong side of the trend. Some hope that President Obama, if he is reelected, could make bolder moves toward reorienting a policy that imprisons so many mostly African-American youths and costs the nation $51 billion a year, according to the DPA. I'm inclined to agree with a LEAP editorial that warns the reform movement to watch the actions, not the rhetoric, of the Obama administration. It will take a stronger push from constituents to get the administration to take on the interests that benefit from sustaining America's longest war.

Moral victories plant seeds that are often slow to bear fruit. Evaluating the experience on the last morning in a church hall, exhausted caravan members saw a mix of catharsis and consciousness-raising that gave them strength. Lopez noted that the "the tragedy I'm living through can be useful to a lot of people." Melchor Flores, whose son was arrested in January of 2009 in Monterrey and never seen again, stated that the caravan had "touched consciences".

He added, "Wherever my son is, he should be satisfied because he knew I wouldn't let him down."

Teresa Carmona, a tiny, white-haired woman whose son Joaquin was murdered in Mexico City, has become a powerful voice before the public and the media. She believes the caravan met its goal.

"We brought the faces of our beloved children, parents, and relatives all the way here, and so we legitimated this pain and this reality."

In the nation that first invented the drug war and exported it to their country with deadly results, the Mexican bereaved have left a mark in the hearts of thousands of men and women. Sometimes it takes tragedy to make change. The cumulative histories recounted in the peace caravan represent a tragedy of mammoth proportions.

That should be more than enough to act on.

It's Time to Abandon Nixon's War on Drugs

2012-09-04T08:29:00-04:00

It potentially affects half the U.S. population, men and women whose lives could be disrupted forever from one day to the next. It costs billions of dollars, at a time when schools are closing down and essential public services disappearing. It deepens the nation's racial divide and tears families apart. It kills tens of thousands of people, in the U.S. and abroad.

But as both major political parties lurch toward their national conventions, no one's talking about the drug war. Not even now, when policy issues that are usually ignored surface in efforts to promote or malign presidential candidates. Neither leading candidate has a coherent critique. Neither has proposals. Neither even publicly recognizes a need to stop the waste and bloodshed.

The drug war seems to have been written into the stone of U.S. politics and practice. Given its abysmal results, how did that happen?

There's nothing in the origins of the drug war model that would justify its status as immutable. Richard Nixon invented the war on drugs forty-one years ago, in 1971. His main concern was to shore up a weak presidency by making the war on drugs a diversionary tactic from the disastrous war in Vietnam. Nixon created agencies under his direct command to attack the new enemy and took the problem of drug abuse out of the hands of communities and into the federal government's.

The model focuses on enforcement of prohibition laws at home and interdiction of supply abroad. In both places it relies on soldiers and police, instead of healthcare or social workers. It defines youth as a criminal class, especially if they are poor or black or both. Health programs that used to treat addiction with compassion withered as battles between cops, who used to fight real crime, and inner-city kids became everyday events.

To the great misfortune of humanity, Nixon's ploy to make a public health issue into a "war" turned out to be starkly prophetic. The drug war in the U.S. and beyond its borders claims more lives every day on an ill-defined battleground, where who's fighting who and why is never entirely clear.

Nixon's drug war model not only bolstered his presidency, it had a number of hidden functions that served the interests of those in power. These interests lie at the heart of why the drug war grinds on, despite its obvious failure as a public policy. They also go a long way in defining the current silence on the issue.

From the outset, the drug war cast a wide net to capture youth -- a sector that scared those in government during the Vietnam war with its newfound tendency to rebel.

Prisons were expanded to house millions of mostly African American and Latino youth on simple possession charges. Off the streets and behind bars, their legitimate protests were silenced.

Today, the spread of private prisons encourages stricter anti-drug laws to build clientele. Political motivations for incarcerating young people of color have been joined by strong economic incentives. The result is the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a 550 percent increase in the number of people in states prisons for drug offenses over the past twenty years. The FBI reports that 83 percent of drug arrests are for possession alone. The cost to society -- and the profits to prisons -- is tremendous.

Abroad, militarization under the guise of counter-narcotics efforts also serves to quell protest while extending Pentagon presence. The international drug wars provide millions of dollars in contracts to what political analyst Tom Barry calls the "national security complex."

In this hemisphere, the $7 billion-dollar Plan Colombia began as a counter-narcotics program and was later formally extended into a counter-insurgency program, adding U.S. firepower to the nation's internal conflict. The results are still-thriving drug production and trade, now run by smaller paramilitary and guerrilla organizations; five million people displaced and one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Mexico became the next drug war battleground. Since President Felipe Calderon launched the drug war with U.S. backing, Mexican has seen an explosion in violence, with an estimated 60,000 dead, thousands disappeared, hundreds of thousands displaced and a rise in lawlessness in areas where drug cartels battle for control.

Academics like Eduardo Guerrero mark the direct relationship between a militarized strategy of taking out cartel kingpins and spikes in violence. The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed by drug cartels, also connects the drug war model and the brutal violence. That movement, now crossing the United States in a caravan of drug war victims and their supporters, accuses the U.S. government of contributing to the violence.

With reason. Like Plan Colombia, Mexico's colossal catastrophe has been actively supported by the U.S. government through the Merida Initiative, along with appropriations through the Department of Defense. The Initiative has poured some $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars into the Mexican quagmire, expanding U.S. presence in Mexico and security operations through the Mexico City embassy. U.S. support for highly corrupted armed forces and police has fueled violence and encouraged Mexican politicians to beef up the drug war alliance despite the domestic political cost.

The Obama administration has been an enthusiastic supporter of the drug war. In 2010, it announced support for the indefinite extension of Bush's three-year Merida Initiative and it has launched a similar program in Central America. This has soured relations with Latin America, where a growing number of leaders have called for an end to the drug war and a debate on alternatives, including legalization to regulate drugs and take the lucrative business out of the hands of organized crime. Obama remained obviously isolated in his insistence on maintaining the drug war at the recent Summit of the Americas in Cartagena.

If ever there was a time to reevaluate the drug war, the 2012 presidential elections are it. Marijuana legalization consistently tops the list of public requests for topics in Obama's twitter town halls, and the president consistently skirts the issue. Scan the platforms of the major parties and drug policy is conspicuous for its absence.

Republicans, when they mention drug policy at all, uphold the pseudo-moral arguments that consumption of illegal drugs is an individual, moral failing that should be punished by God and Society. At the same time, legal and illegal drug abuse among their staunchest supporters is rampant, with Rush Limbaugh's drug use being only the tip of the iceberg. Soon-to-be candidate Mitt Romney has claimed that the drug war "has been disappointing", but favors staying the course.

The Obama administration rode in on the "Change" banner with promises to modify the drug war model. In office, nothing effectively changed except for a decision to stop calling it a drug war -- a veneer that fooled nobody, given the lack of real change in policy and enforcement. The Democrats now have a chance to define a real change in direction that is in line with the beliefs of the majority that the drug war has failed.

The human and financial costs of the drug war are way too high to go on ignoring them. America's behind-the-scenes war kills as many if not more people than conventional wars and destroys many more lives through senseless prison terms, corruption and discriminatory enforcement. It takes courage to confront controversial issues. But a refusal to address the disastrous war on drugs and propose alternatives ignores public demands for change and places cowardice before the fundamental responsibility of creating viable and fair public policies.

This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.

HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at America's failed war on drugs August 28th and September 4th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.

Mexico's Real Movement for Democracy

2012-08-07T16:14:17-04:00

"We are the children of the ideals you couldn't kill."

A young woman carried the hand-lettered sign as she marched with tens of thousands of people in Mexico City last July 22. Twenty-something, with long black hair and jeans, her message captures the spirit and sense of history of Mexico's new movement for real democracy. At the same time, it reveals the resentment that especially youth feel about the presidential elections and a new government that for them represents an era of manipulation and repression.

Weeks after Mexico's presidential elections, thousands of people have turned out to protest the declared winner, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the imminent return to power of the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is slated to take office December 1, now faces increasing accusations of fraud, a legal demand to declare the elections invalid, and a youth movement that refuses to go away.

"Mexico, Without the PRI", "Electoral Institute, You Coward -- Correct the Elections!" and "Mexico Voted and Peña Didn't Win!" -- men and women chanted these slogans through downtown avenues in the latest demonstration, vowing that the politician best known for his hair-do and ties to old-style Mexican politics would never take office. Most of the marchers are university-age, but contingents of workers, neighborhood associations, and citizens of all ages take part.

Many support the opposition candidate and second-place finisher, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But the media spin that the entire movement is a contrivance of a poor loser falls flat when confronted with the actual messages and motives of the movement.

#IAm132

Mexico is seeing the birth of a movement for real democracy. It is led by a generation that wants to break through the cynicism of a nation accustomed to corruption and authoritarian rule. Its members challenge not just the election results, but the very definition of democracy.

The movement called "#IAm132" that arose in protest to Peña Nieto at a local university centers on the principle that democracy can't be bought. Young people with no adult memory of living under the PRI have looked at their nation's history and decided they don't want to go back there.

The "#IAm132" movement -- with the hashtag in its name marking its generational identity -- has a broad platform that includes: democratization of the media to guarantee the right to information and freedom of expression; "secular, free, scientific, pluricultural, democratic, humanist, popular, critical, quality education"; change in the neoliberal economic model with less emphasis on the market and more state involvement; transformation of the security and justice model and withdrawal of the army from public security; participative democracy and autonomy; and health as a human right.

PRI's Rocky Road to Power

Few people predicted Mexico's post-electoral protests or the rapid rise of the youth-led movement against Peña Nieto. The PRI learned from its loss to Vicente Fox in 2000 and the convulsive post-electoral protests of 2006, when conservative candidate Felipe Calderon was declared the winner with the slimmest of margins and widespread accusations of fraud. It set out to avoid both scenarios, grooming its candidate years earlier to position him as the image of the "new PRI."

The effort reportedly included secret deals with the major television stations for favorable coverage in the media dating back to 2009. Both the Mexican magazine Proceso and later the Guardian reported on these contracts, although the PRI denied the charges.

It also included rebuilding the political machine that served the party during its 71 years of uninterrupted rule over the country. That political machine suffered a debilitating blow with the election of Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000. The PRI not only lost the helm of a nation it had confidently controlled for years, it also lost its majority in the legislature and several state governorships to boot. It was a dramatic and ignominious fall from power, and the age of "the dinosaurs" -- as the PRI political elite is called -- appeared to be over for good.

But at least one insider and numerous analysts claim that the PAN agreed to leave the PRI political machine in place in return for support for its reform proposals in the legislature and the continued dominance of a small and powerful economic elite. The PRI was able to rebuild without fear of criminal charges for past acts of corruption and repression among its ranks.

The 2012 Elections

The 2012 elections proved that the machine has been well oiled and employs many of the same tactics used to guarantee electoral wins in the past. But the goal of building a solid margin of victory to assure legitimacy backfired due to citizen and some media monitoring of blatant abuses.

A coalition of progressive parties filed a legal challenge on July 12 to declare the presidential election invalid due to violations of articles of the Mexican constitution that call for free and fair voting. The demand specifically cites exceeding campaign spending limits as the cause. The legal limit is set at the unlikely figure of $336,112,084.16 pesos -- about $25.4 million dollars. The coalition says it has proof that the PRI-Green Party spent five times the allowed limit.

In the most potentially damaging aspect of the allegations, Lopez Obrador accused the PRI of laundering money through off-the-books campaign spending. The opposition has demanded an investigation into the possible use of public funds in PRI-governed areas and money from illicit sources, including organized crime. The use of pre-paid bankcards is a common form of money laundering. The PRI issued thousands of these cards from a bank called MONEX to voters in a presumed vote-buying operation. (One protest sign noted acidly, "Mexico's elections were so clean, even the money was laundered").

The legal challenge also cites evidence of buying off pollsters to create an impression that the election was in the bag. Many polling companies confidently reported double-digit leads for Peña Nieto,with up to an 18-point lead. The final count showed just over 6 points, with Peña Nieto at 38.21 percent, Lopez Obrador at 31.59 percent, and conservative candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota at 25.41 percent. Whether the discrepancy resulted from faulty methodology or giving the client what he wants has become the subject of daily conversation in Mexico.

U.S.-Mexico Drug War Alliance

President Obama called Peña Nieto to congratulate him on his victory even before Mexican electoral authorities had declared the victory. The White house issued a readout of Obama's call to Peña Nieto, heralding a continued partnership in "democracy, economic prosperity and security."

The Obama administration's rush to affirm support for the embattled candidate is not a sign of enthusiasm for the return of the PRI. The U.S. government clearly would have preferred another conservative government in Mexico. The National Action Party swung the door wide open to greater U.S. involvement in the country. Agencies including the DEA, ATF, CIA, and FBI as well as"retired" military personnel now participate in and operate Mexico's disastrous internal security policies. Felipe Calderon's war on drugs proved the perfect vehicle for breaking down resistance to U.S. intervention and making huge inroads in its regional security plan, which includes integrating Mexico into its "regional security perimeter."

But the Obama administration was eager to put the elections behindto get center-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador off the political stage as soon as possible. Lopez Obrador openly called for ending the drug war and "adopting a different strategy" during his final campaign speech.

Ignoring the post-electoral conflicts already brewing south of the border, the White House congratulated the candidate and the Mexican people for having "demonstrated their commitment to democratic values through a free, fair, and transparent election process."But well before Lopez Obrador filed the legal challenge, evidence of vote buying had surfaced and the "Iam132" movement and others were expressing accusations of fraud.

When asked by a reporter on July 9 if the State Department still maintained that the elections were "transparent," spokesperson Patrick Ventrell dodged the question, stating only that "we welcome the electoral authority's announcement of the final results, and obviously we look forward to working with President-elect Mr. Peña Nieto."

The administration accepted Peña Nieto when polls showed a significant lead and hurriedly arranged meetings with its soon-to-be new ally well before the elections. The Pentagon-driven Mexico policy requires a willing partner in the drug war. Mexican army troops are now stationed in strategic locations throughout the country, ostensibly to stop the flow of illegal drugs and capture drug kingpins. They have repeatedly acted to repress human rights defenders and subdue communities protesting the loss of natural resource control or army presence. The armed forces act as a form of social control, while army officials have been accused of being in cahoots with organized crime in several cases.

Continuing the drug war is at the top of the U.S. binational agenda. Congress has sustained it through consistent funding of the Merida Initiative since the Bush plan passed in 2008. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just recommended four more years and a billion more U.S. taxpayer dollars, despite the fact that the joint strategy has resulted in 60,000 fatalities in Mexico and no measurable decrease in the flow of illicit drugs to the U.S.

Nieto on Board

Peña Nieto repaid the favor the same day he received the premature congratulations from Obama. In a press conference he endorsed the strategy of using the army to attack the cartels head-on. He also announced his commitment to bringing about the major structural reforms that the U.S. government and national and transnational economic interests have been demanding for years. These include the privatization of the national oil company PEMEX along with fiscal reforms and labor reforms that would weaken unions and labor rights. He also called for the creation of a special police force made up of military personnel to overcome legal obstacles to the deployment of the armed forces for public safety. U.S. business organizations like the Americas Society have heaped praise on the "new PRI."

Pena Nieto stated, "Without a doubt, I am committed to having an intense, close relationship of effective collaboration measured by results," alleviating fears that the former nationalist party would distance itself from the new military/police alliance with its powerful neighbor. He has announced the appointment of a former chief of Colombia National Police, General Oscar Naranjo, as his top security adviser before the elections. Naranjo is a key player in Colombian security policy and very close to the U.S. security establishment.

There are four months until the inauguration. Mexico's overly long lame-duck period will be rife with protests. The IAm132 movement joined with other grassroots organizations in mid-July to lay out a series of mobilizations tied to the date the electoral authorities must ratify electoral results (September 6), inauguration (December 1), and beyond.

In questioning the role of media monopolies, publicity and public image, vote buying, campaign spending, and political operators, Mexico's new movement is raising serious questions about electoral democracy. The questions don't only apply to Mexico -- a nation emerging from and perhaps returning to authoritarian government. They also have much relevance to the United States as it heads toward presidential elections in November.

US Hand in Honduran Massacre

2012-06-26T17:44:57-04:00

Hilda Lezama was taking passengers back upriver to the township of Ahuas after a fishing expedition in a remote area of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. In the pre-dawn darkness, she could hear the helicopters buzzing overhead, but she thought nothing of it at first.

Suddenly, bullets shot from U.S. State Department helicopters with DEA agents and Honduran police aboard penetrated both her legs.

"I threw myself into the river so they wouldn't shoot me again," she said. She stayed there, grabbing onto a branch and keeping only her nose above the water, to avoid the hail of bullets.

Later, in a press conference, Lezama spoke on her daughter's cell phone from a hospital bed in La Ceiba. In a surprisingly calm voice for someone just shot, Lezama said she never imagined the helicopters would fire on her little boat, with its cargo of fishermen, women and children.

Lezama is one of the lucky ones in that boat the morning of May 11.

Juana Jackson and Candelaria Pratt -- both bearing unborn children -- were shot to death, along with 14-year-old Hasked Brooks and Emerson Martinez. Three other Mosquito villagers are in serious condition.

The State Department helicopters were carrying out a joint counter-narcotics operation with a unit of the Honduran police trained by the U.S. government and a "Foreign-Deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST)" of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Their side of the story is that the boat had received an illegal drug shipment from a small plane they had followed into the nearby jungle. Why there were no arrests from the alleged drug plane is one of the many open questions to the story, along with contradictory reports on confiscations and conflicting versions of how and why the villagers were killed.

Official Stonewalling

The State Department so far refuses to even open an investigation into the shootings. The killing of seemingly innocent Mosquito Coast villagers, questions about improper involvement in lethal operations targeting women and children, the anger of Hondurans, and petitions from U.S. human rights organizations have all failed to budge the State Department from this position.

Officials have deferred all concerns to the results of a Honduran government investigation that, more than a month later, have not been presented. The U.S. government, international organizations, and Honduran President Porfirio Lobos himself have publicly recognized that the Honduran justice system has serious deficiencies -- to say the least. Especially in cases that require prosecuting crimes allegedly committed by government agents, its track record leaves little expectation of a fair outcome. The DEA reportedly is also investigating.

The few brief statements to date from U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubiskie and the State Department have claimed that the dead were drug traffickers who fired on the helicopters -- without the benefit of any investigation whatsoever.

The administration's refusal to deal with the incident doesn't end there. In early June when a delegation on violence against women led by Nobel Laureate Jody Williams and Just Associates specifically requested that the State Department assure medical care to the wounded as a basic humanitarian act (the young boy is on the verge of losing his arm), the Department issued a communique notable for its callousness:

"All Honduran citizens are eligible to receive care through the Honduran public health system. You can direct specific questions about treatment for these individuals to the government of Honduras."

In a recent phone call, Lezama's daughter reported that her mother receives treatments to clean the wounds twice a day and will need at least one more operation. "We don't know where we'll get the money from," she said. Eyewitnesses reported to independent human rights investigators from the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) and the international group that tall, English-speaking agents they assumed to be U.S. prevented family members from rescuing the wounded for several hours. These investigations indicate that at least one of the dead could possibly have been saved with adequate response and attention when U.S. agents were already on the ground.

Drug War Run Amok

The Ahuas massacre is just the latest and most blatant example of another U.S. foreign policy gone terribly wrong. Some say that the drug war has backfired. Others argue that the drug war is succeeding, but in serving a different set of interests from those used to justify the billion-dollar expenditures. With more than 50,000 dead in Mexico and Central America sucked fast into the vortex of violence, almost nobody says that the drug war is working or that victory is just around the corner.

In an implicit recognition of mounting criticism of the strategy, State Department officials have attempted to portray a "kinder and gentler" drug war. They emphasize "soft" aid, while in practice the military component remains at the center of the security strategy in both the Mexican Merida initiative and the Central American Regional Security initiative (CARSI).

Both of these initiatives use the standard Nixon model of a war on drugs based on interdiction and enforcement. As noted in a February 21, 2012 Congressional Research Service report on CARSI, "the U.S. drug control budget remains largely focused on overseas supply-reduction programs and domestic law enforcement efforts."

In the United States, this strategy involves throwing millions of young people in jail--mostly poor, African American, or Latino. Abroad, it means militarizing the lands of mostly poor, African-descent, and indigenous peoples. There's a pattern here.

The Ahuas massacre lays bare the fiction of a "new" approach and demonstrates the human costs of the military strategy. With more and more U.S. agents and equipment on the front lines, the likelihood of similarly deadly incidents will only increase.

Preliminary reports show that the helicopters flew from the recently re-installed El Mocoron forward operating base. El Mocoron was a base for U.S. illegal operations to support Contra forces in Nicaragua. Since the shootings, more military forces have been sent into the region. The historic parallels have struck fear into Hondurans who suffered under the repressive regimes supported by the U.S. government in the 1980s.

Demanding Accountability

The Honduran human rights group COFADEH has demanded a full investigation of the massacre and aid to the victims. The U.S. government should fully investigate the shooting as well as subsequent acts including allegations of torture, blocking access to immediate medical care, and threats to family members who have protested the treatment of the survivors. Since taxpayer-funded personnel and equipment were directly involved in the massacre, U.S. citizens must pressure Congress and the State Department to investigate and then assign responsibilities.

As citizens we have a right to know who was in charge of this fatal operation, why they made the decision to unleash lethal force against a passenger boat, and what will be done to prevent the death of civilians in the future. We're told that the violence is all caused by organized crime. In this case, the shots fired came from security forces. As COFADEH points out,

"In the midst of the so-called 'war on drugs', the principal victims are Mosquito indigenous people, among them, women and children; the principal entity responsible for these very serious acts is the State."

These deaths must be treated with as much, or more, concern as those that result from drug cartel operations.

If the U.S. and Honduran governments sweep this case under the rug, it will be a travesty of justice and an affront to the grieving families. If we do not stand with the human rights organizations in the United States and Honduras to demand that the crime be fully investigated and the guilty punished, the war on drugs will enter a new phase of ignominy.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to channel hundreds of millions of dollars into confiscating prohibited substances rather than making people safer. Not only do these policies not make people safer, they often end up killing, maiming, exiling, and bereaving the poorest and most vulnerable. We can put a stop to the drug war before the toll rises. We owe that much to the victims. To people like Hilda Lezama.

50 Percent of the 99 Percent

2012-05-16T17:34:07-04:00

What's 50 percent of 99 percent?

Hint: This isn't a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: Where are women in the global economic crisis?

The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer the brutal inequality and injustice of an economic system that, in crisis, required them to sacrifice even more. The emphasis on deficits and big banks had relegated the human impact of the crisis to the feature pages or, worse, the obituaries. Women, who in many ways receive the brunt of the crisis, remain even more invisible. Economic planners leave out women as a group in their equations, except to implicitly rely on their unpaid work and the bonus that economies receive from gender discrimination.

Yet women, especially poor women, perform economic miracles every day to insure family survival. Their contributions go unregistered, and they themselves have little concept of the social role of their work. Economics has been mystified to shut out citizen participation and gender coded to exclude women. Ironically, the message that 'there is no alternative' is being actively enforced during a crisis that clearly demonstrates that there has to be an alternative.

The answer to the question "where are women in the global crisis?" is, of course, "everywhere." The problem is making that omnipresence visible, organized and active. The problem is assuring that the road to economic recovery isn't built on redoubling gender discrimination and the exploitation of women's labor.

Last April, some two thousand women from 140 countries met in Istanbul to discuss not just where we are in the global crisis, but how to transform how we see and how we wield economic power.

For those of us who have witnessed the vicissitudes of the feminist movement over the past 30 years, the most astounding and profoundly important achievement of the conference, organized by the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID), emerged the moment you walked in the door of the sprawling center on the strait of the Golden Horn. The women milling about the registration tables represented every region of the world. A grand diversity of religions and cultures was proudly affirmed in their dress. Various age groups, colors, culture, classes and beliefs came together at the Istanbul conference. The base of representation has broadened for a movement that might not always call itself "feminist," but defines itself by fighting for women's rights and equality in a world of multiple threats.

Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist who directs AWID, explained that now more than ever, women need tools to integrate economic issues into their many movements for human, economic and social rights across the globe. The women's rights agenda has become so broad and so urgent that there's a tendency to become entrenched in single issues, which presents the risk of missing the links and failing to grasp the broader meaning of what's happening at a critical moment in history, she noted.

Unity in Diversity

Amid the diversity in Istanbul, women came together witha surprising level of agreement on key premises. First, economic inequality is the sign of our times, and as economic inequality grows, women face even deeper inequality in a system designed to discriminate. The use of women's unpaid labor in what some feminist analysts call the "care economy" intensifies with inequality and is exploited to extremes under austerity measures.,

There is also agreement, as expressed in the first plenary session by Turkish researcher Ipek Ilkkaracan, that this labor cannot -- and should not -- be commoditized. That is, the tasks of caring for others that women do every day can't be entirely incorporated into the labor market and to do so would in many ways dehumanize what is essentially a labor of love. That work is one of the few spaces left that is organized along principles of solidarity, community and bonds between people, rather than profit. The basics of the solution, she told the audience, will have to be some combination of creating more social recognition and organization of these tasks and moving forward on stalled efforts to get men to share domestic work.

Gita Sen, a pioneer in the field of gender and development, pointed out that women are the victims of inequality in a global crisis that does not affect everyone equally across the board. She noted that when we talk about improving conditions for indigenous people and other pressing social needs, we're told there is no money, but there is always money for bailing out the rich.

"We need to move to the needs of the 99 percent," she told the crowd. "The welfare state is being hollowed out to continue with business as usual in the financial world, while the crisis is used as a means of blackmailing states and increasing the control of corporations."

Sen expressed the most important consensus among the women activists who came to learn about the global economic context that constrains and defines their work: There can be no gender equality within the current economic development model.She stated the problem in a rhetorical question: "Who wants a larger share of a poisoned pie?"

Life and Death Issues

Some speakers talked about development alternatives and others, like Lolita Chavez Ixcaquic, Quiché indigenous leader of Guatemala, talked about "alternatives to development."All agreed that the equation that macroeconomic growth means greater general well-being has been thoroughly exposed as false.

Chavez and other especially indigenous participants spoke of a battle between life and death, where women are often on the front lines:

How do we say yes to life? In many ways: Our community comes together around our meaning and existence and its close connection with nature -- the sun, land and everything that gives us energy. We are told that we have to have the latest model of Blackberry, and that's a kind of slavery. We identify what are our real needs are so we don't reverse what we are doing. We are told we're undeveloped, but are we? We don't want American development or the American dream.

Among feminists and women activists from around the world, "Mother Earth" is far from being a new-age moniker. Rather, she is a central precept in the struggle between basic values representing the need to reconnect human society with the environment in a mutually beneficial relationship. Many workshops examined climate change and the fight to conserve resources and a clean environment, as the crisis initiates a new level of degradation and depredation.

Srilatha Batliwala, an Indian academic and activist, explained some of the connections between gender and resource control:

Gender and social power structures uphold differential control over material resources, as well as intangible resources, knowledge resources and human resources. These are maintained through the ideologies of inequality, social rules and norms, institutions and structures and more and more, violence or the threat of violence.

Women from Mexico, Central America, Nepal, Colombia, the Middle East and other places testified to the increasing use of violence in land and resource grabs, increasing militarization in their regions and attacks on women human rights defenders, including those who defend the earth and its resources in indigenous territories and beyond.

More Questions

As usual, the conference raised more questions than answers. Women's participation in the formal labor force seemed to get short shrift, leaving major challenges regarding union organization in a hostile economic environment and a heavily male-dominated milieu.

Huge questions remained, to be worked out in the daily practice of on-the-ground organizing. How do we go about humanizing the economic model, when scarcity is driving it toward more fragmentation, militarism and aggressiveness? How can we build on concepts like the Andean indigenous "Buen Vivir" (Good living) and women's defense of human relations and Mother Earth, to create real development alternatives? How can we make gender equality and justice an integral part of a larger agenda to transform the economic system?

Most difficult of all, how do we make our alternatives politically viable?

Many speakers noted that the enemy of women's rights and visions of the future has shape-shifted in recent years. Economist Susan George noted that today "financial markets tell governments what to do" and that for that reason "the women's movement has to join more coalitions, speak to people we don't usually speak to--unions, education workers, faith, and environmental groups."

"No single group can win by itself," she concluded.

No one left the Istanbul conference with clear marching orders or a road map. Women activists left with tools to understand the economic environment they struggle in. We left with a greater understanding of the links between us -- from region to region, from sector to sector, from woman to woman.

And everyone left with a renewed commitment to figure it out, step by step, empowering women in their daily lives toward solutions that respect women's rights and build new paths toward strong and just communities, a healthy planet and a happy future for our children.

Honduras: When Engagement Becomes Complicity

2012-03-26T13:16:45-04:00

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.

The Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between Biden and Lobo, the vice president "reiterated the U.S. commitment to intensify aid to the government and people of Honduras, and exalted the efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years by President Lobo."

In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited "the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional order."

You'd think they were talking about a different country from the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women.

What we found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and a justice system in shambles.

Two-Year Slide

The crisis in human rights and governance in Honduras has become apparent to the world and is a fact of daily life within the country. In the two years since Lobo came to power in elections boycotted by the opposition, Honduras catapulted into the top spot in the world for per capita homicides -- the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) Global Homicide Survey found an official murder rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. There were 120 political assassinations in the country in 2010-2011. In the region of Bajo Aguan, where peasants are defending their land from large developers, 42 peasants have been murdered, and alongside 18 journalists, 62 members of the LGBT community, and 72 human rights activists have been killed since 2009. The Honduran Center for Women's Rights reports that femicides have more than doubled and that more than one woman a day was murdered in 2011.

An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on the Honduran coup found at least seven deaths, harassment of opposition members, disproportionate use of force by security forces, thousands of illegal detentions, systematic violations of political rights and freedom of expression, sexual violence, and other crimes, with almost no investigation or prosecution.

Despite the fact that security forces perpetrated many of these crimes, the response of the Honduran government -- with the support of the United States -- has been to beef up military presence. One of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras increased its military expenditure from $63 million in 2005 to $160 million in 2010. The Lobo government justifies the militarization saying that its own police forces can't be relied on. He told us in a meeting, "We're working on cleaning up the police but it's going to take some years. The corruption is deep."

The impunity with which common criminals, powerful transnational interests, and elements of the state violate the most basic principles of society with government complicity or indifference derives from the fact that the government itself is erected on the violation of those principles. The crisis in human rights and violence -- as deep as it is -- is but a symptom of a greater evil. When the 2009 coup was allowed to conserve power and seal itself off from prosecution, it immediately undermined governance, rule of law, and the social compact. Honduras' constitutional crisis has now become a prolonged social and political crisis.

A Coup for Criminals

The coup d'état on June 28, 2009 was not only a criminal act. It was an act designed to benefit criminals.

When members of the armed forces kidnapped democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya and took him to Costa Rica in his pajamas, they destroyed the the fragile democracy built since the era of military dictatorships. None of the convoluted discussions of what the president had supposedly done to deserve forcible removal changed the fact that the millennium's first coup d'état had taken place in the Americas. The OAS and every major diplomatic body in the world immediately realized that Honduras had become the symbol and the reality of the world's new battles for democracy.

What many people don't know is that the unraveling of the story is more tragic than the coup itself -- and holds even greater lessons for global governance.. To make a long story short, the Honduran coup regime incredibly survived international embargoes and diplomatic negotiations that in the end only served to extend its grasp on illegitimate power. The disturbing suspicion that the U.S. government, the historic godfather of the region, had given its blessing to the new regime became certainty when the State Department negotiated an agreement that paved the way for coup-sponsored elections without assuring the return of the elected government.

Porfirio Lobo came to power, and a nation pummeled by poverty splintered into an ungoverned free-for-all characterized by political polarization, a surge in crime, and widespread land grabs. Honduras is not a failed state. It's a violated state.

Crime -- common crime, organized crime, state crime, and corporate crime -- has thrived since the coup. Drug trafficking in the country has increased. The most recent U.S. International Narcotics report calculates that 79 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America use landing strips in Honduras. Reports that Mexican kingpin El Chapo Guzman and others use Honduras as a hideout surface frequently. Militarization of the country has taken place alongside the spread of organized crime -- a phenomenon that should provoke some reflection. But the Honduran and U.S. governments have been too busy promoting the drug war to pay attention to the correlation between militarization and organized crime.

Land grabs to transfer land and resources from small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects have generated violence throughout the country. Many of the testimonies of violence and sexual abuse that we heard from Honduran women regarded conflicts over land, where the regime actively supports wealthy interests against poor people in illegal land occupations for tourism, mining, and infrastructure projects, such as palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse's actions in Bajo Aguan.

The lack of investigation and prosecution for crimes -- and the evidence that state forces are involved in human rights violations against opposition and "undesirable" sectors -- creates a paradise for criminals and a hell for the majority of citizens.

U.S. Engagement or Complicity?

U.S. responsibility for what happened after the coup is a question that deserves far more analysis and soul-searching. By choosing not to support a return to democratic order and political healing before presidential elections, the United States helped deliver a serious blow to the Honduran political system and society. The United States has a tremendous responsibility for the disastrous situation, and the urgent question is what to do about it.

Biden stressed U.S. programs to vet police and justice officials. When we met with U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubiskie, she insisted that continuing to fund Honduran security forces would eventually lead to reform by "engaging" with government forces.

But even if that did happen, in the meantime those government forces are murdering, raping, beating, and detaining Hondurans -- with U.S. aid.

When does engagement become complicity? Citizen groups and members of the U.S. Congress have come to the conclusion that the line was crossed some time ago. So far, more than 60 members of Congress have signed a letter circulated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to cut off aid to the Honduran military and police, claiming that the funding of these institutions fuels the abuse.

There's no excuse for spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on security assistance to Honduras as human rights violations pile up. No amount of money poured into these programs will change the systemic corruption and human rights violations until there's a real political commitment to justice and reconciliation. And that does not appear to exist under the current regime.

Drug War Politics: Doing Biden's Bidding

2012-03-06T13:41:00-05:00

Vice President Joe Biden landed in Mexico City Sunday night for a two-day trip to that country and Honduras. He's left little doubt about his mission: to lock in the regional drug war. Biden's visit comes amid mounting calls to end prohibitionist laws and move away from the military-based drug war.

In Mexico City all day Monday, the vice president met with President Felipe Calderón and the three major presidential candidates. In Tegucigalpa, he'll meet with President Porfirio Lobo -- in need of support from his patron as his government is enmeshed in a major human rights crisis -- and have a "working lunch" with Central American presidents.

On a March 1 call with the press, a reporter asked whether the drug war would be on the agenda at the meeting with Central American presidents. Dan Restrepo, Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs, replied:

The Obama administration has been quite clear in our opposition to decriminalization or legalization of illicit drugs. At the same time, we've also been very open -- the president has said it on numerous occasions, in meetings with leaders and publicly -- of our willingness, our interest, in engaging in a robust dialogue with our partners to determine how we can be most effective in confronting the transnational criminal organizations, and, in this case in Central America, the gangs that are adversely affecting people's daily lives and daily routines.

Biden repeated the line in an interview with the Mexican newspaper Reforma, where he supported the Merida Initiative and said that the Obama administration opposes legalization but welcomes discussion. His own reason for opposing legalization is one that has been circulating recently in Washington to counter the popular (and patently logical) argument that legalization will remove a huge source of revenue for cartels: "I have serious doubts that decriminalization would have a major impact on the earnings of violent criminal organizations, given that these organizations have diversified into criminal activities beyond drug trafficking" (translation from Spanish).

In sum, the message is that the government that presides over the nation with the largest illegal drug market in the world and actively funds a global war to enforce ineffective prohibition policies will not consider any form of legalization. But it supports "dialogue."

Can that position really qualify as dialogue? A dialogue on how to "be most effective in confronting transnational criminal organizations" must start from the recognition that the current U.S. strategy has increased violence, done nothing to reduce crime or illicit drug flows, and had a devastating impact on "people's daily lives and daily routines" in Mexico and Central America.

A real discussion on effective strategies has to include the option of legalization. The Obama administration seems determined to block that option, despite a growing number of calls for discussion on legalization that include former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia and current presidents Santos of Colombia and Pérez Molina of Guatemala.

Biden is just the latest envoy in U.S. diplomatic offensive to bolster the drug war. On Feb. 27, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was in Guatemala with the same message. "The United States does not view decriminalization as a viable way to deal with the narcotics problem," she told Pérez Molina.

Pérez Molina recently called for decriminalization in the region, and he reiterated his position at the meeting with Napolitano: "We are calling for a discussion, a debate. And we continue to insist... We want to open a debate to find a more effective way to fight drug trafficking."

The Guatemalan government has begun to lobby other Central American countries on the issue in anticipation of the meeting today. Biden appears to have been charged on this trip with deterring any move toward legalization in the region and aligning nations in the war on drugs.

He has a tough road ahead of him. Latin American citizens and government leaders are openly protesting a model where their nations pay in blood and lives to fill U.S. defense contractors' pockets and spread the Pentagon's global reach -- with few, if any, positive results. In Mexico, thousands gathered in the Central Plaza to draw silhouettes of the 60,000 dead in the drug war on the large esplanade in front of the National Palace, and the citizen Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity is planning a summer caravan through the United States to protest U.S. aid for the drug war through the Merida Initiative.

The Mexican daily La Jornada published an editorial Feb. 24 calling for debate on decriminalization and commenting on a statement by Patricia Espinosa, Secretary of Foreign Relations, that the Mexican government is against decriminalization but would consider debate:

Perhaps if the debate on the decriminalization of drugs had been begun before adopting the present course regarding public security, the country would have saved countless lives, widespread social suffering, grave processes of institutional breakdown, and astronomical monetary resources. In whatever form, it is urgent and impossible to postpone the analysis of alternatives to the failure of a drug policy that is one only of the police, the military, and the judiciary. In that sense anyone who takes this position -- though it may be late and contradictory -- is welcome.

Central American countries that stand to receive millions in U.S. drug war aid under the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) are expressing misgivings. Despite the praise that has been and will be lavished on Calderón for his drug war, for other countries, Mexico has become the example of why not to pursue a drug war strategy.

When I asked President Pérez Molina and President Lobo how they felt about winding up like Mexico, both sought to distance themselves from the Mexican experience. I had the opportunity to speak with them as part of a fact-finding mission on violence against women led by the Nobel Women's Initiative and JASS that showed a huge increase in violence against women as militarization under the drug war has increased.

Pérez Molina answered that his country was in a different position: "Drug trafficking in Guatemala is different from in Mexico. We don't see a war situation. The cartels have to maintain control of territory in Mexico, but here it's traffic; there isn't occupation or control of territory. Here I don't see the army in a war against the narco..." In other interviews he has also been reticent about allowing the level of U.S. intervention that the Mexican government has permitted.

Lobo recognized the risks and failures of the model but dodged the question of alternatives:

I don't have the answer; people are dying, [drug trafficking] pollutes us, and there is violence. There's an increase in drug trafficking. The problem is, what's the solution? Colombia put up a major fight, and drugs keep flowing out. They have arms from the U.S., and the money keeps flowing. In this we have to find a solution so this won't end up being a war without end.

Instead of sitting down with its neighbors to find a peaceful solution and truly assess whether the current strategy is working for anybody, the White House is sending a strong message to hold the line on the drug war. And Biden brings much more than his personal power of persuasion to the mostly closed-door conversations.

It's disturbing to see that the Obama administration has taken such a hard line against opening up debate on alternatives to the drug war. From here in Mexico, we see the costs so painfully close that the expected endorsements from Biden and company, far from being support, are a stubborn denial of reality. We can't know what will happen in the private meetings, but statements before Biden's trip emphasize support for the Calderón drug war and the commitment to continue the present model of security cooperation until the last day of his administration.

One wonders what will be said at the separate meetings with the presidential candidates. If the stated purpose is to repeat the U.S. commitment to respecting the electoral process and results, why not simply announce that publicly to all? Will Biden pressure the candidates to do the U.S.'s bidding on security policy, bringing to bear U.S. political and economic clout to assure continuance of the drug war? So far, all we know is that the candidate who has been most critical of the drug war, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced that he planned to deliver a letter to Biden stating, "We do not want to continue to favor military cooperation in the relationship with the United States, but instead place cooperation for development at the center."

The U.S. has tremendous influence over Mexico and Central America, historically through aid and military presence, and even more now that free-trade agreements have created even higher levels of economic dependence. To use that influence to suppress debate on innovative and very possibly effective alternatives to the bloody drug war is bad politics and the opposite of the kind of "equal partnership and mutual respect" the Obama administration promised at the Trinidad and Tobago Summit in 2009. Part of the purpose of Biden's trip is to prepare for the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena in April. At that summit, the hemisphere's nations will be able to judge whether Obama's presidency has changed relations as promised three years ago. If Biden's trip focuses on locking in policies of drug war militarization and discouraging independent regional initiatives, the Obama administration will arrive in Cartagena having broken those promises and dashed hopes of a more just realignment of relations in the hemisphere.

The Drug War's Invisible Victims

2012-02-07T00:12:01-05:00

There are many kinds of war. The classic image of a uniformed soldier kissing mom good-bye to risk his life on the battlefield has changed dramatically. In today's wars, it's more likely that mom will be the one killed.

The UN Development Program states that by the mid-1990s, 90% of war casualties were civilians-- mostly women and children.

Mexico's drug war is a good example of the new wars on civilian populations that blur the lines between combatants and place entire societies in the line of fire. Of the more than 50,000 people killed in drug war-related violence, the vast majority are civilians. President Felipe Calderón claims that 90% of the victims were linked to drug cartels. But how does he know? In a country where only 2% of crimes are investigated, tried, and sentenced, the government pulled this figure out of its sleeve.

There is no official information on why these thousands were killed. When their bodies are found in unmarked mass graves, no one even knows who they were. With violence the norm, executions can--and do--target grassroots leaders, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, and rebellious youth under the cloak of the drug war.

Not Just Homicide

There are also war tolls beyond the body counts. The homicide number misses the disappeared, the thousands whose bodies--dead or alive--are never found to be counted. And it hides the mutilation of lives caused by "collateral damage": the loss of loved ones, families forced from their homes, permanent injury, orphans and widows, sexual abuse, lives lived in fear.

These costs fall primarily on the shoulders of women--the mothers, daughters, and sisters who are left with the nearly impossible task of seeking answers and redress in a justice system outpaced by the violence and overrun by the corruption. They are often re-victimized by government agencies that ignore, reject, or stifle their pleas for justice.

"Families that demand that our children be found face all kinds of threats... the loss of our property, isolation, rejection by our own families," said Araceli Rodríguez, a mother whose son, a young policeman, was disappeared on the job. His police unit refuses to give information on his disappearance. "I wake up and find that it's not a nightmare, that his absense is real and the impunity is also real."

It's rare to hear the voices of the women who bear the brunt of the drug war. Their pain doesn't make headlines. Some need anonymity to remain alive. Many have been granted protective measures by the government or international human rights organizations because of the extreme threats they face.

Telling Stories

Despite all these difficulties, some 70 women told their stories amid tears and despite fear for their lives in Mexico City on January 22. The meeting called by the Nobel Women's Initiative brought an international delegation led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams together with Mexican women victims of the violence and women human rights defenders.

From the sketchy statistics available, women make up a relatively small proportion of the murdered in Mexico, but they are the majority of citizens who denounce disappearances, murders, and human rights violations in the drug war. They work on the front lines of defending communities and human rights. For their efforts, they become targets themselves. In Mexico, six prominent women human rights defenders have been murdered in the past two years.

The last report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders recognized that threats and especially "explicit death threats against women human rights defenders are one of the main forms of violence in the region, with more than half coming from Latin America, most of those (27) from Mexico."

Sometimes it's the drug cartels that seek to silence women activists. But a recent survey of Mexican women human rights defenders revealed that they cite the government (national, state, and local) and its security forces as responsible in 55% of cases of violence and threats of violence to women defenders. Among government officials charged with public saftey and justice, they encounter at best indifference and at worst death threats and attacks. A human rights defender from the state of Coahuila explained that searching for a disappeared loved one implies "always having to be in the hell of the institutions, which are often infiltrated by crime."

Gender-based violence including femicide has skyrocketed in the context of the overall violence. The number of femicides in Chihuahua since sending the army in has risen to 837 for the period 2008-2011 June--nearly double the total femicides in 1993-2007. Women rights defenders report that the vast majority of threats and acts of violence against them include gender-based violence.

Silent No More

Olga Esparza, whose daughter Monica disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 2009, explains through her tears that the government simply doesn't care. "We're the ones who have to carry out the investigations, with our own resources." She adds that government officials often add insult to injury, "They say she's probably just gone off with her boyfriend or she's a prostitute or drug addict." In her case, as with so many others, there's no investigation, no results, no justice.

Another woman described how her work with indigenous communities led to her rape and torture by police agents. She continues to live in terror due to threats against her life and her family.

Alma Gomez of the Center for the Human Rights of Women in Chihuahua summed up what she sees in the center, "Women are the invisible victims, we are always at risk in this military and police occupation. We know of gang rapes by security forces that the women don't even report; arbitary arrests; women who make the rounds between army barracks and city morgues searching for their sons, fathers, or husbands... We are the spoils of war in a war we didn't ask for and we don't want."

"Victim" is really the wrong word for these women. The mother whose son disappeared more than two years ago said, "In the struggle to find my son, I joined the peace movement. I learned that I can transform my pain into a collective force and together we can help more people to have a voice and to now be empowered to defend their rights."

Valentina Rosendo, a Me'phaa indigenous woman from the State of Guerrero, was raped by soldiers and took her case all the way up to the Interamerican Court of Human Right. She sums up the reason for participating in the Nobel Women's forum, "It's really hard to speak out, but it's more painful to keep quiet."

Fiddling on Climate

2011-12-08T15:16:12-05:00

The image of Nero fiddling as Rome burned -- albeit apocryphal -- has stuck as the metaphor for willfully irresponsible government. Government representatives, gathered at climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, have been fiddling for the past week. Of the hundreds of closed-door sessions, official meetings and informational seminars, all that's come out so far is cacophony. By the looks of it, they plan to fiddle right through to the end, wasting one of the last opportunities to respond in time to a threat that affects not only their societies, but the entire planet.

With only a few days to go, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced the obvious on December 5th, telling delegates, "It may be true, as many say: the ultimate goal of a comprehensive and binding climate change agreement may be beyond our reach -- for now."

Tone-Deaf Deniers

As for the burning, the climate change deniers have -- finally -- lost the scientific debate. Reports from the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN World Meteorological Organization, the UN Environmental Program, and others confirm that the planet is already experiencing the worst-case scenarios of early predictions, showing the hottest decade on record and extreme dangers in the most vulnerable regions of the world.

But the deniers' message on global warming -- 'don't sweat it' -- has won the agenda-setting race. In the United States, especially, conservatives heavily backed by the fossil fuel industry have created a domestic political environment to do nothing. It's no longer politically acceptable to talk about climate change in apocalyptic terms. The term "global warming" has been replaced by the neutral "climate change," while concern about the planet has decreased in inverse proportion to the increase in the earth's temperature. The sense of urgency that once characterized the debates has slipped into complacency, despite the fact that in 2010, global emissions went up 6 percent.

There's also a global consensus on what has to be done to get off this suicidal course. Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases must be cut back immediately. For all its faults and omissions, the Kyoto Protocol brought developed nations responsible for the historic accummulation of gases into a binding legal agreement to cut emissions. The United States failed to ratify the agreement. Now Canada, Japan, and Russia want out, and prospects for renewing the agreement when the current period runs out in 2012 look dim, to say the least.

In Durban

World governments limped into the Durban talks with a new global economic crisis weighing heavily on their shoulders. This has bumped climate change down the ladder of global priorities -- a particularly convenient situation for oil companies and polluting industries. The argument is that current economic conditions preclude significant action on curtailing global warming.

Bickering has ensued over who will sacrifice competitiveness in the international economic system in order to deal with climate change. U.S. negotiators insist that China and other developing countries exempted from the binding rules of Kyoto should be included in a binding agreement, noting that China is now the number-one emittor of CO2 in the world. Yet the United States has blocked any move toward a binding agreement in favor of a voluntary "pledge and review" system of national commitments without sanctions.

China shook things up on Monday when its representative vaguely indicated willingness to join an international binding agreement. According to reports, South Africa, Brazil, and India made similar statements. These countries have insisted on a "common but differentiated" approach to emissions cuts. The Chinese government released ambitious national goals shortly before the conference. If the Chinese are serious about these goals, the country should have no problem with joining an international agreement on mandatory cuts. If it were to do that, and the European Union at least maintains if not improves on its current commitments, the United States would be practically isolated in blocking multilateral action.

Fourteen major international environmental groups became so frustrated with the U.S. position at the talks that they issued a statement reading, "America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress."

Global South Sings Different Tune

Observers note that the U.S. team has refused to consider real action before 2020, and U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing said as much on Monday. African environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey interviewed on Democracy Now!, had one thing to say about that: "Eight years is a death sentence for Africa."

Bassey recently published a book on Africa and global warming with the telling title, To Cook a Continent. Civil society organizations gathered in Durban have presented many testimonies on the effects of climate change on small farmers, poor people, women, indigenous peoples, and other groups not represented in official talks. Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, of Via Campesina, told the Americas Program, "The situation is really serious, because in Haiti we have six months of drought a year, and when there isn't drought, there are floods, so agricultural production is declining." He added that under present conditions, it will only get worse.

Bolivia took a lone stand against the agreement to disagree at last year's climate talks in Cancun. That heavily impacted Andean country hosted the Cochabamba Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April of last year. It offered a series of solutions that reject carbon markets and other market-based mechanisms, while supporting small farmers, agroecology and "the Rights of Mother Earth" -- a paradigm that views the planet as a unitary system of which the human race is but a single aspect.

Oddly enough, as Durban heads toward even more dismal results than Cancun, Pablo Solon, Bolivia's former ambassador to the UN and a leading world figure in the fight against climate change, found hope in the long view.

"It would be an illusion to think that through these processes we're going to arrive in the short term at a declaration that changes the paradigm of western civilization that has placed man at the center of a development model. What we're saying is you can't just put humanity there, you have to put all of nature," he said in an interview.

Durban, like Cancun, in the end will be mostly just another global showcase for this clash of worldviews. As nations continue to view the issue as a trade-off between saving the earth and saving the economic system, there is some hope in the long view.

To build on that hope, one of the most important steps will be to broaden the focus from once-a-year meetings in high-carbon conference centers, to the fields, communities and town halls where alternatives are already growing and a stronger political consensus can be built from the bottom up.

NAFTA Is Starving Mexico

2011-10-31T11:40:26-04:00

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became the law of the land, millions of Mexicans have joined the ranks of the hungry. Malnutrition is highest among the country's farm families, who used to produce enough food to feed the nation.

As the blood-spattered violence of the drug war takes over the headlines, many Mexican men, women, and children confront the slow and silent violence of starvation. The latest reports show that the number of people living in "food poverty" (the inability to purchase the basic food basket) rose from 18 million in 2008 to 20 million by late 2010.

About one-fifth of Mexican children currently suffer from malnutrition. An innovative measurement applied by the National Institute for Nutrition registers a daily count of 728,909 malnourished children under five for October 18, 2011. Government statistics report that 25 percent of the population does not have access to basic food.

Since the 2008 food crisis, there has been a three percent rise in the population without adequate access to food. The number of children with malnutrition is 400,000 kids above the goal for this year. Newborns show the highest indices of malnutrition, indicating that the tragedy begins with maternal health.

The dramatic change in Mexican eating habits since NAFTA is not only reflected in the millions who go to bed hungry. On the other side of the scale, Mexico has in just a decade and a half become second only to the United States worldwide in morbid obesity. Child obesity, overweight, and diabetes now constitute major health problems, alongside the more traditional problem of hunger.

It's not that the rich are getting too fat and the poor too thin, although inequality plays a role in the erosion of healthy diets for all. Fatness no longer represents abundance. It is the poor who drink cheap Coca Cola when they do not have access to potable water or who give their kids a bag of potato chips when local fresh food is no longer available. The International Journal of Obesity finds that worldwide the spread of what they call "the Western diet" ("high in saturated fats, sugar, and refined foods but low in fiber) has meant that "the burden of obesity is shifting towards the poor." The NAFTA generation reflects the paradigm so eloquently described by food researcher and activist Raj Patel of "stuffed and starved".

With another food crisis looming due to rising international prices, Mexico could face food riots as well as the spread of starvation and its consequences over the coming year. Unless the riots turn violent or spark more widespread social upheaval as they did in Arab countries, it's not likely that the news media will pay any attention.

NAFTA's Food (In)security Model

Something has gone terribly wrong. The nation that was slated for prosperity when it signed NAFTA has become an international example of severe structural problems in the food chain, from how it produces its food to what and how much (or how little) it consumes.

Mexican malnutrition has its roots in the way NAFTA and other neoliberal programs forced the nation to move away from producing its own basic foods to a "food security" model. "Food security" posits that a country is secure as long as it has sufficient income to import its food. It separates farm employment from food security and ignores unequal access to food within a country.

The idea of food security based on market access comes directly from the main argument behind NAFTA of "comparative advantage." Simply stated, economic efficiency dictates that each country should devote its productive capacity to what it does best and trade liberalization will guarantee access across borders.

Under the theory of comparative advantage, most of Mexico was deemed unfit to produce its staple food crop, corn, since its yields were way below the average for its northern neighbor and trade partner. Therefore, Mexico should turn to corn imports and devote its land to crops where it supposedly had a comparative advantage, such as counter-seasonal and tropical fruits and vegetables.

Sounds simple. Just pick up three million inefficient corn producers (and their families) and move them into manufacturing or assembly where their cheap labor constitutes a comparative advantage. The cultural and human consequences of declaring entire peasant and indigenous communities obsolete were not a concern in this equation.

Seventeen years after NAFTA, some two million farmers have been forced off their land by low prices and the dismantling of government supports. They did not find jobs in industry. Instead most of them became part of a mass exodus as the number of Mexican migrants to the United States rose to half a million a year. In the first few years of NAFTA, corn imports tripled and the producer price fell by half.

Conversion to other crops turned out to take years in most cases. Prices were volatile and harvests unreliable. It was not feasible at all on many small, often rocky plots where corn guarantees a subsistence diet for farm families. Niche markets failed to grow to much more than 2 percent of total agricultural production.

The areas that adapted successfully to industrial agriculture and agroexport crops are characterized by flagrant violation of the labor rights of migrant farm workers, widespread pollution and water waste, and extreme concentration of land and resources.

For the hungry, this means that prices set on the international market determine who eats and who starves. Mexican consumers now pay more for tortillas and food in general. Price hikes on the international market push basic food out of reach for the millions of poor in the country.

Food Dependency

In post-NAFTA Mexico, 42 percent of the food consumed comes in from abroad. Before NAFTA, the country spent $1.8 billion dollars on food imports. It now spends a whopping $24 billion. In an interview, rural researcher Ernesto Ladrón de Guevara noted that in some basic foods, the dependency on imports is dramatic: 80 percent in rice, 95 percent in soybeans, 33 percent in beans, and 56 percent in wheat. The country is the world's number-one importer in the world of powdered milk. NAFTA decimated Mexico's once-thriving dairy sector, and the market takeover by transnational powdered milk is linked to the crisis in infant malnutrition.

Mexico imports 33 percent of its consumption, a figure that belies the reliance on imports because the sheer volume of consumption is so large. Ladrón de Guevara stated that it has gone from importing around 250,000 tons before NAFTA to 13 million tons. Transnational traders often favor imports over national production because of the attractive credit arrangements offered by the United States, making it "a double business--importing corn and money."

The U.S. department of agriculture estimates that if current trends continue Mexico will acquire 80 percent of its food from other countries (mostly the United States). The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization calls a country food dependent when the cost of its imports exceeds 25 percent of total exports. Peasant farmer organizations have criticized the definition as ludicrous in an oil-producing country that nonetheless has seen serious erosion in its capacity to feed its people and guarantee access to basic foods for all.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

The corporate takeover of Mexico's food system has led to the food and health catastrophe. Transnational food corporations not only import freely into Mexican food markets, they are now the producers, exporters, and importers all in one, operating inside the country.

Since NAFTA, corporations have gobbled up human and natural resources on an almost unbelievable scale. Livestock production has moved from small farms for local markets to Tyson, Smithfield, and Pilgrims Pride. The massive use and contamination of water and land has led to health and environmental disasters across the country. Millions of jobs have been lost to concentration and industrialized farming methods.

Take the case of Corn Products International (CPI). The transnational filed a NAFTA claim against the Mexican government in 2003, claiming a loss to its business due to a tax levied on high fructose corn syrup in beverages. Mexico's reason for imposing the tax was to save a sugarcane industry that provided jobs for thousands of citizens and played a crucial economic role in many regions. The government was also frustrated by its failure under NAFTA to access the highly protected U.S. sugar market.

A 2008 NAFTA tribunal ruled that Mexico had to pay $58.4 million to CPI. The government paid up on January 25, 2011. CPI posted $3.7 billion dollars in net sales the year of the decision. The fine paid by the Mexican government could have provided a year's worth of the basic food basket to more than 50,000 poor families.

CPI's wholly owned subsidiary Arancia Corn Products is among the most powerful food transnationals operating in the country, along with Maseca/Archers Daniel Midland and Cargill. Large agribusiness companies allegedly played a key role in the 2007 tortilla crisis by hoarding harvest as the international price went up, artificially drying up the national market and selling at nearly double the price they paid for the harvest. That crisis brought tens of thousands of poor Mexicans out into the streets to protest a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas.

NAFTA and other FTAs give corporations the power to define what we eat, what we buy at the store, who will have a job and who won't, and whether a village sustained by local food production will survive or witness the end of generations of livelihoods.

Feed the Hungry, Fix the System

Mexican organizations have begun to come together after years of divisions to respond to the food crisis and fix the badly broken system. They recently succeeded in reforming the Mexican constitution to include the right to food. Now the battle is on to adapt the rural budget to make that right a reality.

Small farmer organizations have joined with family farm organizations in the United States and Canada to call for the renegotiation of NAFTA to remove basic foods and agricultural production from the agreement. They recognize, though, that the Obama administration's about-face in its stated commitments to fair trade reforms has left little political space for change.

Instead, peasant organizations in all three countries are looking to grassroots efforts and movements to fix the food system before the crisis worsens. As Mexican organizations struggle for programs to address threats to food and agriculture, U.S. organizations are seeing an opportunity to join their demands to the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country. One of the grievances listed in the OWS Declaration of the New York City General Assembly reads: "They (large corporations) have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization." Food activists are now bringing issues of corporate concentration in food, commodity speculation and price hikes, and free trade to the general protests.

Corporate control of the food system locked in by NAFTA not only starves people in Mexico. It locks in a profoundly unhealthy food system for the entire region. No one expects the situation to get better by itself. As the crisis deepens, citizen movements are again heating up and seeking each other out across borders to protect their health, their livelihoods and their rights. In the future, what we eat, how we eat, and if we eat will depend on their efforts.