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HUIMAN TRAFFICKINGGod Bless Kimberly GuilfoyleMarch 6th, 2013 |
Wednesday, March 6, 2013 | 
Borderland Beat Reporter un vatoPatricia Mayorga Proceso (3-3-2013)
Translated by un vato for Borderland Beat
One day, in a moment of carelessness by her kidnappers, she fled
from the place where she was being held captive and rejoined her family.
Days later, the woman received a threatening message on her cell phone.
Her captors warned her that if she did not return, they would go for
her sister and all her family.
Afraid, the woman went back to her victimizers. To this day, her
whereabouts are unknown. She never mentioned the place where she had
been held.
In the same border area in Chihuahua, another woman managed to
escape the nightmare that she was subjected to for months and denounced
her partner, the leader of a criminal organization involved in human
trafficking.
There were adolescent and adult females, she later claimed. She was
in charge of feeding them, but could no longer tolerate the abusive
treatment. She said that each of the kidnapped or recruited women was
forced to have between 30 to 40 sexual encounters a day.
Like Maria, she went to the Human Rights Center for Women (Cedehm:
Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres), where they provided support.
Her case was referred to the Special Prosecutions Unit for Crimes of
Violence Against Women and Human Trafficking (Fevimtra: Fiscalia
Especial para Delitos de Violencia contra Mujeres y Trata de Personas.
After that, she never went back to her birthplace.
In August, 2011, two sisters were deprived of their freedom in San
Juanito, Bocoyna municipality. Weeks later, it was discovered that
members of the crime organization “La Linea” took them to a
“concentration camp” to exploit them. He parents filed a complaint for
their disappearance.
Ledesma demanded the search of an area that a criminal — under
arrest for another crime — indicated was the place where the sisters (20
and 26 years old) had been buried.
Ledesma Ortega warned authorities that crime groups based in the
mountains had built “concentration camps” where they had several women
from that area captive.
“They are recruiting them,” she warned, while they were looking for
Nancy and Daisy. They found the women’s voter’s certificates in a
warehouse along with weapons and other items.
Before cases of human trafficking became known in this capital
city, that hell had been going on for some time in Ciudad Juarez. Two
years before the war against drugs promoted by Felipe Calderon started,
the former deputy chief of Ciudad Juarez Criminal Investigations
Department, Hector Armando Lastra Munoz, was accused of operating a
network that sexually exploited minors.
Guadalupe Mortin Otero, in charge of prevention and eradication of
violence against women in that locality, asked for a thorough
investigation.
In March of 2004, First Penal Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, ordered
Lastra Munoz incarcerated for the crimes of prostitution and
contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A few hours later, the
deputy chief, also the operations coordinator for 159 Public Ministry
agents commissioned in Ciudad Juarez, left the Cereso prison (Cereso: Centro de Readaptacion Social) after posting bond set by the court in the amount of 300,000 pesos (approximately $24,000.00).
Lastra Munoz declared himself innocent when he gave his preliminary
statement before Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, and claimed not to know the
four young girls involved in the case. In addition, he asked for
conditional release.
He claimed that the statements given by Mayra Janneth Mejia Romero
against him were fantasy, and stated that he had known her for four
months. In addition, he claimed that she was the one who introduced
Karla Alexandra Vargas Ortiz to him as her cousin and he claimed not to
know the other two minors who accused him of hiring them for
prostitution purposes.
 |
| Entombed in a clear plastic trash bag, a nude femicide victim is disposed at a Chihuahua dump |
According to the Cedehm, the Lastra case showed the symbiosis
between organized crime groups and the police agencies that provide
protection for them.
On the former official’s person, “they found a catalog (sic) of politicians and narcos. It was evident proof of abuse of authority and of the existence of human trafficking,” points out Luz Estela Castro Rodriguez, the director of Cedehm, in an interview.
“In a patriarchal culture, all crimes against women increase, it is easier to subdue them,” she adds.
The problem is that, despite the evidence, mainly in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities, there are no investigations into human trafficking. It was only two years ago that authorities began to recognize the existence of the crime, but until today, not a single case has been investigated, much less anybody sent to trial or prison.
On March 28, 2008, authorities from all three levels of government announced the start of the Chihuahua Joint Operation to “dismantle networks and logistics of organized crime.”
More than 10,000 Army and Federal Police troopers arrived in Juarez. Months later, more federal police forces arrived in the capital and mountain municipalities like Bocoyna, Guadalupe y Calvo, and Madera, among others.
In the first four months of the operation, there were 33 abductions (“levantones”), according to the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Cosyddhac: Comision de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos).
In the face of an increase in complaints brought against the military before the State Commission on Human Rights, on April 18, 2008, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena: Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional) issued a communique alerting the public of the existence of a “false army” financed by drug traffickers operating in the state, for the purpose of disparaging the Armed Forces.
Five years later, Castro Rodriguez asks: “How many armed men were there,
or are there now, in the state? There’s a policy of simulation. The
strategy that the authorities have is only marketing to say that
everything’s all right. One must recognize that , to begin with, where
there’s weapons and drugs, there’s human trafficking, and there are
already cases filed with Fevintra.” She points out that when the 10,000
men were sent to Juarez, they arrived at a time when the society
already saw women as disposable, in a maquiladora (assembly plant) sector with operating policies that were not appropriate for them.
“They sent them (the soldiers) out to hunt and forced disappearances also increased, but to this day those are invisible phenomena,” she claims.
The same thing happened in the mountains and in other cities in the state. “It’s terrible, because if the sicarios (gunmen) like a woman, they take her without a worry. There’s a great deal of forced sexual prostitution; it increased because communities live with crime. Since last year, priest Javier “El Pato” Avila, has charged that there’s a gang of adolescents and young men in Bocoyna engaged in molesting and sexually abusing indigenous people when they walk the long trails of the Tarahumara Mountains.The complaint against the authorities, once again, is the impunity, exclaims the prelate, because all they do is say that violence has decreased when it is not true. “No matter how much they cluck, it’s just clucking, like chickens that have laid eggs,” he underlines.Norma Ledesma Ortega, the president of the association Justice for Our Daughters, says she has clear indications that from 2009 to 2011, organized crime groups used the Valle de Juarez to bury dozens of young women. The disappearances of adolescent and young women continued during 2012, most of them in downtown Juarez. And just in January, 2013, the Committee of Mothers of disappeared young women noted 14 cases.
Authorities have not investigated, or at least they haven’t given the results to family members, who most of the time become the investigators due to the absence of information. According to Justice for Our Daughters, the investigation to punish those responsible should focus on organized crime and human trafficking, including the complicity of government officials.
“The Department of Justice has been indifferent to this hypothesis and has refused to perform an effective investigation. The recent cases of those girls who were found in the Valle de Juarez remain unpunished,” notes Ledesma. (David Meza)
She adds: “Case files from ten years ago, in the case of the state
capital, and from up to twenty years ago in the case of Juarez, one can
assume today, had the characteristics of human trafficking violations.
We did not have awareness before, we were not prepared as parents to
demand that authorities investigate the crimes as human trafficking
cases. All they did was question the immediate families of the victims.
They knew what it was about; we didn’t, and they did nothing.”
They took the mothers of the first four women who disappeared in Chihuahua (the capital) to Piedras Negras (Coahuila) or to Nuevo Casas Grandes, telling them that (the girls) were together and had run away voluntarily, but that was not true, recalls Ledesma. “Authorities look for girls who run away, not girls who are taken away. If the crime of human trafficking is increasing, it must be because police agencies are involved,” she declares.
The official numbers from the Office of the State Attorney General, according to page number UIFGE-I-028-2013094932012 of the Infomex System, show that in 2012, 255 women were murdered, 10 of them less than 11 years old. Throughout the state, there are 526 disappearance reports open, 219 of them involving women. Despite that, last January, prosecutor Jauregui Venegas assured us that there are only 120 cases of disappeared women being investigated.
Regarding the skeletal remains of disappeared women that have been found, in March of 2011, in a meeting with authorities from the three levels of government and with civilian organizations, the Fevimtra stated that there were in the Medical Examiner’s Office (Semefo: Servicio Medico Forense) the remains of 143 unidentified female persons.
This past January 16, the director of Investigative Services of the Office of State Attorney General, Daniel Ricardo Jaramillo Vela, disclosed that they have secured 59 genetic profiles from around the state that are unidentified. Days later, prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas stated that they actually have only 44 genetic profiles.
Jaramillo Vela reported that the remains found between January and February of 2011 had 24 elements that pertained to 11 women: seven (remains) have already been delivered, two were delivered and rejected by their families, and two more are inconsistent with the data bases of families who are looking for women in the state.
The bodies rejected by the two families are those of Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, who disappeared on January 31, 2009, when she was 17 years old, and Idali Jauche Laguna, who disappeared on February 23, 2010. When the bodies were delivered to the two families in April, 2011, they asked for a second opinion and demanded that the remains be sent to a specialized laboratory because they did not believe the authorities.
Almost a year later, and under pressure from a group of mothers who marched from Juarez to the capital, Jaramillo announced that they sent samples of bones found in Arroyo Naranjo to the Bode Technology 15 laboratory.
With respect to the remains not yet identified, he said that because this involved Juarez, a transient border area, they have to request cooperation from other states or countries to determine whether they belong to women who disappeared there.
According to Infomex, the North Zone Attorney General’s office, to
which Juarez belongs, had 101 women reported missing from 1995 to the
middle of January, 2013. In 2012 alone, he indicated, 17 disappeared,
the majority of them in downtown Juarez, according to newspaper
archives.
He pointed out that the majority of the disappearances in the zone (60) took place between 2008 and 2012. To those cases, one must add the 17 bodies found in the Juarez Valley from 2009 to 2011, which were delivered to their families more than two years after they were found.
That is the case with Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, who disappeared on January 18, 2008, when she was 15 years old. She was found in the Valle de Juarez in November of 2009, and was delivered to her family two years later, in 2011….continues on next page The West Zone Attorney General’s office has reports of 58 disappeared women, 47 of them between 2008 and 2012. The majority of them (20) are from last year and the municipalities that reported the most cases are Cuauhtemoc, Guerrero, Bocoyna, Madera and Carichi. The ages of the disappeared women are from eight to 48 years of age.
The South Zone Attorney General’s office reports 11 cases from 2007 to 2012, five of them from last year, and the majority from Parral, Guachochi and Jimenez. The ages of the disappeared females range from three to 62 years old.
The prosecutor as well as the governor responded through the media that the skeletal remains that are still at the Semefo are inconsistent with the genetic profiles of the disappeared women from the families who are claiming them.
“We have been conducting an investigation in which many of the cases are from ten or more years ago, and they want to pressure (the government) into inventing things, and my government will never do that,” said Duarte in response to media questions.
When the marchers reached the capital, the governor was not there. They chose to return and pushed for Duarte to meet with them in Ciudad Juarez. When the public hearing was scheduled, the mothers who took part in the march were not allowed access.
After four days, forced by the pressure, Duarte attended the meeting with the mothers from the march.There, they reproached him for the lies they have been systematically told and for the nonexistent investigation of their daughters’ cases.
The one who questioned the governor most was Karla Castaneda, the mother of Cinthia Jocabeth Alvarado Castaneda. After the meeting, Karla Castaneda reported harassment and threats by municipal and state officers, who searched her home without a court order.
Because of the risk that those actions represent, she requested political asylum in the United States, which was granted this past February 13. She left with her four children.
Subsequently, another initiative was introduced by the governor, which proposed amending some provisions in state law to define human trafficking as a criminal offense and the creation of of two congressional commissions to follow up on the matter. This proposal was approved by the Congressional plenum the last week in January.
PAN congressman Raul Garcia Ruiz, who introduced the first legislative proposal, pointed out that for the majority party in Congress (the PRI), the governor’s orders take priority, “they do whatever he wants, and we’re left with trying to do whatever we can to push the matter forward,” he said.
He explained that the legislation that was approved does not provide, for example, for the persons who investigate these crimes to have prosecutorial powers. With a prosecutions unit, he added, they would have had to have a Public Ministry and a specialized police force, which is not contemplated by the enacted legislation.
The legislator stated that during the meetings he held on the legislative proposal, he discovered that, “there is no reliable official diagnostic on point, — by civilian social organizations, by academic institutions or from authorities –, focused on the problem as such.”
He added that authorities have avoided the subject for decades and “have barely managed to institute tenuous reactive, not proactive, measures.”
He points out: “In the State of Chihuahua, officially, the existence of human trafficking as a public security issue is not recognized, nor (is it recognized) as a phenomenon or product of organized crime, although we suffer its effects to a considerable degree.”
He used as an example the cases of women who disappeared in downtown Juarez. “From a simple a priori observation, it can be deduced from the circumstances of method, time and form under which these disappearances occur, that they obey clear organized crime strategies, and may have different causes: prostitution, drug trafficking, immigration.”
However, due to the way they are investigated, it’s not possible to find their link with these criminal activities.
The PAN legislator explained that the investigating authorities lacks the statutory tools to investigate this kind of crime, and it appears that the executive authority, he says, lacks the political will to provide them with such legal instruments.
The reforms that were approved add as a criminal offense the statutory definition of human trafficking, as well as the creation of two special Congressional commissions, one local and the other national, to follow up on the cases. Meanwhile, impunity prevails. NOTE: An element that is rarely spoken about is the men who are wrongfully convicted incurring long sentences for femicide murders they had nothing to do with. In the top photo collage is a 16 year old student who disappeared named Neyra. Her cousin, David Meza, was 1500 miles away when this occurred in the southern state of Chiapas. Upon hearing his cousin was gone he raced to Chihuahua to help in her search. Shortly after his arrival he was picked up by police, brutally tortured into confessing, arrested and imprisoned.
On the former official’s person, “they found a catalog (sic) of politicians and narcos. It was evident proof of abuse of authority and of the existence of human trafficking,” points out Luz Estela Castro Rodriguez, the director of Cedehm, in an interview.
“In a patriarchal culture, all crimes against women increase, it is easier to subdue them,” she adds.
The problem is that, despite the evidence, mainly in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities, there are no investigations into human trafficking. It was only two years ago that authorities began to recognize the existence of the crime, but until today, not a single case has been investigated, much less anybody sent to trial or prison.
On March 28, 2008, authorities from all three levels of government announced the start of the Chihuahua Joint Operation to “dismantle networks and logistics of organized crime.”
More than 10,000 Army and Federal Police troopers arrived in Juarez. Months later, more federal police forces arrived in the capital and mountain municipalities like Bocoyna, Guadalupe y Calvo, and Madera, among others.
In the first four months of the operation, there were 33 abductions (“levantones”), according to the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Cosyddhac: Comision de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos).
In the face of an increase in complaints brought against the military before the State Commission on Human Rights, on April 18, 2008, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena: Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional) issued a communique alerting the public of the existence of a “false army” financed by drug traffickers operating in the state, for the purpose of disparaging the Armed Forces.
“They sent them (the soldiers) out to hunt and forced disappearances also increased, but to this day those are invisible phenomena,” she claims.
The same thing happened in the mountains and in other cities in the state. “It’s terrible, because if the sicarios (gunmen) like a woman, they take her without a worry. There’s a great deal of forced sexual prostitution; it increased because communities live with crime. Since last year, priest Javier “El Pato” Avila, has charged that there’s a gang of adolescents and young men in Bocoyna engaged in molesting and sexually abusing indigenous people when they walk the long trails of the Tarahumara Mountains.The complaint against the authorities, once again, is the impunity, exclaims the prelate, because all they do is say that violence has decreased when it is not true. “No matter how much they cluck, it’s just clucking, like chickens that have laid eggs,” he underlines.Norma Ledesma Ortega, the president of the association Justice for Our Daughters, says she has clear indications that from 2009 to 2011, organized crime groups used the Valle de Juarez to bury dozens of young women. The disappearances of adolescent and young women continued during 2012, most of them in downtown Juarez. And just in January, 2013, the Committee of Mothers of disappeared young women noted 14 cases.
Authorities have not investigated, or at least they haven’t given the results to family members, who most of the time become the investigators due to the absence of information. According to Justice for Our Daughters, the investigation to punish those responsible should focus on organized crime and human trafficking, including the complicity of government officials.
“The Department of Justice has been indifferent to this hypothesis and has refused to perform an effective investigation. The recent cases of those girls who were found in the Valle de Juarez remain unpunished,” notes Ledesma. (David Meza)
They took the mothers of the first four women who disappeared in Chihuahua (the capital) to Piedras Negras (Coahuila) or to Nuevo Casas Grandes, telling them that (the girls) were together and had run away voluntarily, but that was not true, recalls Ledesma. “Authorities look for girls who run away, not girls who are taken away. If the crime of human trafficking is increasing, it must be because police agencies are involved,” she declares.
Numbers war
For Jose Luis Armendariz Gonzalez, the president of the State Commission on Human Rights, the subject of disappeared persons is crucial and complex, because there is a numbers war going on and, therefore, it is difficult to come up with a diagnosis and more difficult yet to eliminate the problem.The official numbers from the Office of the State Attorney General, according to page number UIFGE-I-028-2013094932012 of the Infomex System, show that in 2012, 255 women were murdered, 10 of them less than 11 years old. Throughout the state, there are 526 disappearance reports open, 219 of them involving women. Despite that, last January, prosecutor Jauregui Venegas assured us that there are only 120 cases of disappeared women being investigated.
Regarding the skeletal remains of disappeared women that have been found, in March of 2011, in a meeting with authorities from the three levels of government and with civilian organizations, the Fevimtra stated that there were in the Medical Examiner’s Office (Semefo: Servicio Medico Forense) the remains of 143 unidentified female persons.
This past January 16, the director of Investigative Services of the Office of State Attorney General, Daniel Ricardo Jaramillo Vela, disclosed that they have secured 59 genetic profiles from around the state that are unidentified. Days later, prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas stated that they actually have only 44 genetic profiles.
Jaramillo Vela reported that the remains found between January and February of 2011 had 24 elements that pertained to 11 women: seven (remains) have already been delivered, two were delivered and rejected by their families, and two more are inconsistent with the data bases of families who are looking for women in the state.
The bodies rejected by the two families are those of Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, who disappeared on January 31, 2009, when she was 17 years old, and Idali Jauche Laguna, who disappeared on February 23, 2010. When the bodies were delivered to the two families in April, 2011, they asked for a second opinion and demanded that the remains be sent to a specialized laboratory because they did not believe the authorities.
Almost a year later, and under pressure from a group of mothers who marched from Juarez to the capital, Jaramillo announced that they sent samples of bones found in Arroyo Naranjo to the Bode Technology 15 laboratory.
With respect to the remains not yet identified, he said that because this involved Juarez, a transient border area, they have to request cooperation from other states or countries to determine whether they belong to women who disappeared there.
He pointed out that the majority of the disappearances in the zone (60) took place between 2008 and 2012. To those cases, one must add the 17 bodies found in the Juarez Valley from 2009 to 2011, which were delivered to their families more than two years after they were found.
That is the case with Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, who disappeared on January 18, 2008, when she was 15 years old. She was found in the Valle de Juarez in November of 2009, and was delivered to her family two years later, in 2011….continues on next page The West Zone Attorney General’s office has reports of 58 disappeared women, 47 of them between 2008 and 2012. The majority of them (20) are from last year and the municipalities that reported the most cases are Cuauhtemoc, Guerrero, Bocoyna, Madera and Carichi. The ages of the disappeared women are from eight to 48 years of age.
The South Zone Attorney General’s office reports 11 cases from 2007 to 2012, five of them from last year, and the majority from Parral, Guachochi and Jimenez. The ages of the disappeared females range from three to 62 years old.
Pretense and harassment, the answer to the march
On January 15, a group of four family mothers, accompanied by legal representative Francisca Galvan, began a march from Juarez to the city of Chihuahua to demand a public audience with the governor, Cesar Horacio Duarte Jaquez. They were asking to be told how many more skeletal remains there were in the Semefo (office of medical examiner) and asked for their identification to be expedited. They also demanded an investigation of the cases that showed characteristics of human trafficking or organized crime and, in addition, they demanded the dismissal of government officials who had committed irregularities or who had been negligent.The prosecutor as well as the governor responded through the media that the skeletal remains that are still at the Semefo are inconsistent with the genetic profiles of the disappeared women from the families who are claiming them.
“We have been conducting an investigation in which many of the cases are from ten or more years ago, and they want to pressure (the government) into inventing things, and my government will never do that,” said Duarte in response to media questions.
When the marchers reached the capital, the governor was not there. They chose to return and pushed for Duarte to meet with them in Ciudad Juarez. When the public hearing was scheduled, the mothers who took part in the march were not allowed access.
After four days, forced by the pressure, Duarte attended the meeting with the mothers from the march.There, they reproached him for the lies they have been systematically told and for the nonexistent investigation of their daughters’ cases.
The one who questioned the governor most was Karla Castaneda, the mother of Cinthia Jocabeth Alvarado Castaneda. After the meeting, Karla Castaneda reported harassment and threats by municipal and state officers, who searched her home without a court order.
Because of the risk that those actions represent, she requested political asylum in the United States, which was granted this past February 13. She left with her four children.
Initiative cut short
In the local Congress, there has been a legislative proposal for two years now to create a special prosecutions unit and a state law on human trafficking. The proposal was supported by the National Action Party (PAN: Partido Accion Nacional) faction.Subsequently, another initiative was introduced by the governor, which proposed amending some provisions in state law to define human trafficking as a criminal offense and the creation of of two congressional commissions to follow up on the matter. This proposal was approved by the Congressional plenum the last week in January.
PAN congressman Raul Garcia Ruiz, who introduced the first legislative proposal, pointed out that for the majority party in Congress (the PRI), the governor’s orders take priority, “they do whatever he wants, and we’re left with trying to do whatever we can to push the matter forward,” he said.
He explained that the legislation that was approved does not provide, for example, for the persons who investigate these crimes to have prosecutorial powers. With a prosecutions unit, he added, they would have had to have a Public Ministry and a specialized police force, which is not contemplated by the enacted legislation.
The legislator stated that during the meetings he held on the legislative proposal, he discovered that, “there is no reliable official diagnostic on point, — by civilian social organizations, by academic institutions or from authorities –, focused on the problem as such.”
He added that authorities have avoided the subject for decades and “have barely managed to institute tenuous reactive, not proactive, measures.”
He points out: “In the State of Chihuahua, officially, the existence of human trafficking as a public security issue is not recognized, nor (is it recognized) as a phenomenon or product of organized crime, although we suffer its effects to a considerable degree.”
He used as an example the cases of women who disappeared in downtown Juarez. “From a simple a priori observation, it can be deduced from the circumstances of method, time and form under which these disappearances occur, that they obey clear organized crime strategies, and may have different causes: prostitution, drug trafficking, immigration.”
However, due to the way they are investigated, it’s not possible to find their link with these criminal activities.
The PAN legislator explained that the investigating authorities lacks the statutory tools to investigate this kind of crime, and it appears that the executive authority, he says, lacks the political will to provide them with such legal instruments.
The reforms that were approved add as a criminal offense the statutory definition of human trafficking, as well as the creation of two special Congressional commissions, one local and the other national, to follow up on the cases. Meanwhile, impunity prevails. NOTE: An element that is rarely spoken about is the men who are wrongfully convicted incurring long sentences for femicide murders they had nothing to do with. In the top photo collage is a 16 year old student who disappeared named Neyra. Her cousin, David Meza, was 1500 miles away when this occurred in the southern state of Chiapas. Upon hearing his cousin was gone he raced to Chihuahua to help in her search. Shortly after his arrival he was picked up by police, brutally tortured into confessing, arrested and imprisoned.
AS REPORTED BY BORDERLAND BEAT
AGREEMENTS
February 21st, 2013
The tentacles of the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin El Chapo Guzman have reached the Asian continent.
El Capo, one of the most powerful men in the world, according to Forbes magazine, is a drug entrepreneur operating as a holding company
with operations in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina,
which provides not only the logistics and protection, but a
sophisticated network of complicity and environments for drug
trafficking.
In Peru, for example, the Fourth Organized Crime Prosecutor has open an
investigation into the presence of the Sinaloa cartel in Ecuador, where
the structure of El Chapo organization consists Colombians,
Ecuadorians and Peruvians protecting production of cocaine and
maintaining control over the routes for trafficking (Proceso 1888).
As in every business, the criminal organization also has different facilitators to develop their merchandise products.
Three of them, according to the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) are
Asian criminal organizations that supply the Sinaloa cartel of
precAccording to a report by the agency, the Deputy Attorney Specialized
Investigation of Organized Crime (SEIDO) found, in meetings with
representatives of Latin American countries, there are three Asian
criminal transnational organizations that supply the Sinaloa cartel led
by El Chapo.
They are: Sun Yee On (New Virtue and Peace), Sap Sze Wui or
“14Karat” -which is also known as the Organized Criminal Group Huen Tai
Wo-and Tsai (Great Circle). Éstas también mantienen vínculos con los Caballeros Templarios , que dirige Enrique Plancarte, de acuerdo con la PGR. They also maintain links with the Knights Templar, led by Enrique Plancarte, according to the PGR.
Research conducted by the agency headed by Jesús Murillo Karam
confirmed the link with Asian criminal organizations with the Mexican
cartels, and warned the Asian groups are much like the Mexican Cartels.
AS REPORTED IN BORDERLAND BEAT
MAKING BILLIONS
February 18th, 2013
Making Billions
“The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 80,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever
“The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 80,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever
“ ‘Chapo always talks about the drug business, wherever he is,’ one
erstwhile confidant told a jury several years ago, describing a driven,
even obsessive entrepreneur with a proclivity for micromanagement. From
the remote mountain redoubt where he is believed to be hiding,
surrounded at all times by a battery of gunmen, Chapo oversees a
logistical network that is as sophisticated, in some ways, as that of
Amazon or U.P.S.—doubly sophisticated, when you think about it, because
traffickers must move both their product and their profits in secret,
and constantly maneuver to avoid death or arrest. As a mirror image of a
legal commodities business, the Sinaloa cartel brings to mind that old
line about Ginger Rogers doing all the same moves as Fred Astaire, only
backward and in heels. In its longevity, profitability and scope, it
might be the most successful criminal enterprise in history.”
As reported by Slate and the New York Times Magazine
As reported by Slate and the New York Times Magazine
VACATIONS –MEXICO
February 15th, 2013
Beautiful beaches, lush hotels, private bungalows, good food and
warm people, what more could you ask for a grand vacation? This is all
available in Mexico except security and the elimination of fear. With
the rape of six Spanish women that happened the same time Mexico’s
minister of tourism was in Spain attempting to promote tourism. “This
is Mexico’s moment,” was her theme.
Deadly violence has haunted Mexico for years and has had a big impact on tourism. Government officials and trade executives are trying to find ways to eliminate or minimize the damage that has been done to an industry that is a top income-earner and employer. Their revenues have fallen from a all-time high of $13.5 billion in 2008 to a low of $11 billion. Cruise lines have also eliminate some of the ports of call.
The U.S. State Department has issued warnings about visiting Mexico and not to venture too far from your hotel and avoid the cities. The Texas Department of Public Safety will be issuing its annual travel advisory in the coming weeks. Texas college students were warned not to travel south of the border for spring break in the 2012 season. I see no reason why the advisory will be different. This type of violence is not common against tourist but times are changing and I would not take a chance. You must be your own judge.
Deadly violence has haunted Mexico for years and has had a big impact on tourism. Government officials and trade executives are trying to find ways to eliminate or minimize the damage that has been done to an industry that is a top income-earner and employer. Their revenues have fallen from a all-time high of $13.5 billion in 2008 to a low of $11 billion. Cruise lines have also eliminate some of the ports of call.
The U.S. State Department has issued warnings about visiting Mexico and not to venture too far from your hotel and avoid the cities. The Texas Department of Public Safety will be issuing its annual travel advisory in the coming weeks. Texas college students were warned not to travel south of the border for spring break in the 2012 season. I see no reason why the advisory will be different. This type of violence is not common against tourist but times are changing and I would not take a chance. You must be your own judge.
DRUG TRADE—HEZBOLAH
February 12th, 2013
A beleaguered Hezbollah is partnering with brutal Mexican drug gangs
in order to raise cash and further its aspirations for attacks on the
United States, it has been reported today.
Recent US intelligence has suggested however, that Mexico is home to some 200,000 illegal Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, many of which have established links with Mexican drug cartels.
Ynet reports:
Western intelligence agencies have been able to gather ample evidence suggesting that the drug cartels in Mexico – which are the de facto rulers of the northern districts bordering the US – are in cahoots with Islamic terror organizations, which are eager to execute attacks against American, Israeli, Jewish and western targets; but most of all, the Islamic terror groups are eager to make money, so they can fund their nefarious aspirations.
Hezbollah has previously been implicated with the Los Zetas cartel, the most advanced and dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. The Zetas are known for their brutality which has recently included public beheadings, torture and mass slaughter.
Hezbollah is thought to be using Mexican drug money to fill the gap created by the recent sanctions on Tehran which has caused Ahmadinejad’s regime to seriously cut back in its funding to the terrorist outfit. In return for access, Hezbollah stands accused of helping drug cartels with establishing underground tunnel networks, assisting with logistics and improving cartel weapons and explosives production. Hezbollah is said to be interested in utilising the tunnels into the United States for its own terrorist activities.
In 2009, a Department of Homeland Security wiretap derived a recording of Professor Abdallah Nafisi, a Kuwaiti clergyman and a known al-Qaeda recruiter, boasting about the ease by which nonconventional warfare and weapons of mass destruction can be smuggled into the US, through the Mexican drug tunnels.
He said, “Ten pounds of anthrax in a medium-size suitcase, carried by a Jihad warrior through the tunnels can kill 300,000 Americans in one hour,” he said. “It will make 9/11 look like peanuts. There’s no need for plans… Just one courageous man, to spread this confetti on the White House lawn. Then we will really be able to celebrate.”
In October 2012, Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina stated, ”I don’t have a lot of faith in the Department of Homeland Security,” said Myrick. “They should be looking at these groups [Hezbollah/Al Qaeda] in Mexico much more closely.”
In the southern-most state of Mexico, Chiapas, a local militia known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) continues is armed resistance against the Mexican government.
Founded on a disjointed philosophy stemming from Mayan tradition, socialist libertarianism and Marxism, the Zapatistas came into being in 1994 and are outspoken against globalisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement and oddly, Israel.
It would perhaps therefore come as little surprise if a financially waning Hezbollah chose to partner with the EZLN in an attempt to raise cash for terrorist activities against the Jewish state. Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the EZLN said in January 2009 (on behalf of the organisation):
“The Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.” He described the actions of the Israeli government as a ”classic military war of conquest”. He said: ”The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.”
Chiapas has recently been targeted by Muslim missionaries, though the effects on the population are so far thought to be negligible.
Recent US intelligence has suggested however, that Mexico is home to some 200,000 illegal Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, many of which have established links with Mexican drug cartels.
Ynet reports:
Western intelligence agencies have been able to gather ample evidence suggesting that the drug cartels in Mexico – which are the de facto rulers of the northern districts bordering the US – are in cahoots with Islamic terror organizations, which are eager to execute attacks against American, Israeli, Jewish and western targets; but most of all, the Islamic terror groups are eager to make money, so they can fund their nefarious aspirations.
Hezbollah has previously been implicated with the Los Zetas cartel, the most advanced and dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. The Zetas are known for their brutality which has recently included public beheadings, torture and mass slaughter.
Hezbollah is thought to be using Mexican drug money to fill the gap created by the recent sanctions on Tehran which has caused Ahmadinejad’s regime to seriously cut back in its funding to the terrorist outfit. In return for access, Hezbollah stands accused of helping drug cartels with establishing underground tunnel networks, assisting with logistics and improving cartel weapons and explosives production. Hezbollah is said to be interested in utilising the tunnels into the United States for its own terrorist activities.
In 2009, a Department of Homeland Security wiretap derived a recording of Professor Abdallah Nafisi, a Kuwaiti clergyman and a known al-Qaeda recruiter, boasting about the ease by which nonconventional warfare and weapons of mass destruction can be smuggled into the US, through the Mexican drug tunnels.
He said, “Ten pounds of anthrax in a medium-size suitcase, carried by a Jihad warrior through the tunnels can kill 300,000 Americans in one hour,” he said. “It will make 9/11 look like peanuts. There’s no need for plans… Just one courageous man, to spread this confetti on the White House lawn. Then we will really be able to celebrate.”
In October 2012, Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina stated, ”I don’t have a lot of faith in the Department of Homeland Security,” said Myrick. “They should be looking at these groups [Hezbollah/Al Qaeda] in Mexico much more closely.”
In the southern-most state of Mexico, Chiapas, a local militia known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) continues is armed resistance against the Mexican government.
Founded on a disjointed philosophy stemming from Mayan tradition, socialist libertarianism and Marxism, the Zapatistas came into being in 1994 and are outspoken against globalisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement and oddly, Israel.
It would perhaps therefore come as little surprise if a financially waning Hezbollah chose to partner with the EZLN in an attempt to raise cash for terrorist activities against the Jewish state. Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the EZLN said in January 2009 (on behalf of the organisation):
“The Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.” He described the actions of the Israeli government as a ”classic military war of conquest”. He said: ”The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.”
Chiapas has recently been targeted by Muslim missionaries, though the effects on the population are so far thought to be negligible.
As reported by The Commentator
NOTICE!!!!!!!!!!!
January 27th, 2013
DO NOT CLICK ON ANY OF THE COMMENTS THAT GET TO THE
PUBLISH PAGES. I HAVE A BIG PROBLEM AND I AM TRYING TO GET IT
RESOLVED. THANK S TO ALL OF MY READERS. SID
DRUG CARTEL VIOLENCE
January 14th, 2013
A total of 9 unidentified
individuals have been killed in ongoing drug and gang related violence
in Jalisco and Zacatecas states since last Friday, according to Mexican
news accounts.
A report which appeared on the website of El Sol de Zacatecas news
daily said that three unidentified bodies in an advanced stage of
decomposition were found Friday near a mine entrance in Noria de Angeles
municipality.Security forces were dispatched from nearby Fresnillo municipality to aid in the recovery of the bodies. The mine was reportedly near the village of La Tinaja. Noria de Angeles is halfway between Fresnillo and San Luis Potosi cities in the eastern part of Zacatecas state.
The bodies were all male and appeared to have been shot and dumped at the scene.
Meanwhile in Jalisco state six unidentified individuals were killed, including three men found dead in Guadalajara, according to Mexican news accounts.
A news report posted on the website of El Siglo de Durango news daily Friday said that the three victims were found near the intersection of calles Inglaterra and Quetzal in Moderna colony.
The bodies were all male and had been stuffed into black garbage bags. Three victims had been decapitated. The news report said that it is possible more bodies were included in the find.
The report said witnesses watched as armed suspects travelling aboard three vehicles dumped the bags at the scene at around 0000 hrs Friday morning.
At around the same time in southern Guadalajara, police agents found the body of a man inside an abandoned Volkswagen Jetta sedan. The find was made on a road leading to the village of El Verde in El Salto municipality, part of the Guadalajara metropolitan area. The report fails to mention how the victim was killed, only that he was found stuffed in the trunk of the sedan with a plastic bag over his head.
In Zapopan municipality an unidentified 33 year old man was shot to death at a grocery store near the intersection of calles Paseo de los Manzanos and Paseo de las Jacarandas in Praderas de San Antonio colony. According to the report, the victim was separated from a group of friends who were held at gunpoint, then was shot and killed on the spot.
Both .223 caliber and 9mm weapons were used in the shooting.
Lastly, in Zapotlanejo municipality an unidentified man was found shot to death in Los Altos de Jalisco colony near the intersection of calles Abasolo and Independencia.
Jalisco state and its border with Michoacan was the main location in Mexico that the interior ministry said would be reinforced with additional Policia Federal troops in the wake of a large uptick in shootings and gang violence.
STORY AS REPORTED BY RANTBURG.COM
DRUG TRADE AND COCAINE
January 10th, 2013
After reading the new report from Stratford Global Intelligence,
I must report to you their analysis of the drug trade and the economics
of cocaine. You may also read the full report from the mentioned
author but this will be condensed. Understanding the cartels actions
and the interactions between them, needs to acknowledge that at their
core they are businesses and not politically motivated militant
organizations. This means that although violence between and within the
cartels grabs much of the spotlight, a careful analysis of the cartels
must look beyond the violence to the business factors that drive their
interests — and their bankrolls.
Several distinct factors have a profound impact on cartel behavior. One example is the growing and harvesting cycle of marijuana in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Another is the industrialization of methamphetamine production in Mexico and the increasing profit pool it has provided to the Mexican cartels in recent years. But when we are examining the transnational behavior of the Mexican cartels, the most important factor influencing that behavior is without a doubt the economics of the cocaine trade.
Growing the cocaine leaves is popular in Peru, Bolivia and Columbia. Farmers receive from $1.30 to $3.oo per kilogram. Producing one kilogram of cocaine base takes about 450 to 600 kilograms of coca leaf. After processing, a kilogram of cocaine base cost $585 to $789. The cocaine base is converted to cocaine.
Cocaine increases in value from $2,200 a kilogram to $200,000 per gram. Cocaine leaves the countries that accomplished the processing are in purity of 85 per cent and when the “cutting” starts it has reached 30 percent at the retail level. So you can see where the profits are and how the money flows to the cartels. I suggest that reading the report by Stratford will give you a better insight as to the ” how and whys” of the cartels. Cocaine selling at 10 times the cost of acquisition and more after production, you can understand why there is competition among the cartels for the smuggling corridors through Mexico to the United States and other countries.
“<a href=”http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/mexicos-cartels-and-economics-cocaine”>Mexico’s Cartels and the Economics of Cocaine is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Several distinct factors have a profound impact on cartel behavior. One example is the growing and harvesting cycle of marijuana in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Another is the industrialization of methamphetamine production in Mexico and the increasing profit pool it has provided to the Mexican cartels in recent years. But when we are examining the transnational behavior of the Mexican cartels, the most important factor influencing that behavior is without a doubt the economics of the cocaine trade.
Growing the cocaine leaves is popular in Peru, Bolivia and Columbia. Farmers receive from $1.30 to $3.oo per kilogram. Producing one kilogram of cocaine base takes about 450 to 600 kilograms of coca leaf. After processing, a kilogram of cocaine base cost $585 to $789. The cocaine base is converted to cocaine.
Cocaine increases in value from $2,200 a kilogram to $200,000 per gram. Cocaine leaves the countries that accomplished the processing are in purity of 85 per cent and when the “cutting” starts it has reached 30 percent at the retail level. So you can see where the profits are and how the money flows to the cartels. I suggest that reading the report by Stratford will give you a better insight as to the ” how and whys” of the cartels. Cocaine selling at 10 times the cost of acquisition and more after production, you can understand why there is competition among the cartels for the smuggling corridors through Mexico to the United States and other countries.
“<a href=”http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/mexicos-cartels-and-economics-cocaine”>Mexico’s Cartels and the Economics of Cocaine is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Mexico’s Strategy
January 7th, 2013
By George Friedman
A few years ago, I wrote about Mexico possibly becoming a failed state because of the effect of the cartels on the country. Mexico may have come close to that, but it stabilized itself and took a different course instead — one of impressive economic growth in the face of instability
Discussion of national strategy normally begins with the question of national security. But a discussion of Mexico’s strategy must begin with economics. This is because Mexico’s neighbor is the United States, whose military power in North America denies Mexico military options that other nations might have. But proximity to the United States does not deny Mexico economic options. Indeed, while the United States overwhelms Mexico from a national security standpoint, it offers possibilities for economic growth.
Mexico is now the world’s 14th-largest economy, just above South Korea and just below Australia. Its gross domestic product was $1.16 trillion in 2011. It grew by 3.8 percent in 2011 and 5.5 percent in 2010. Before a major contraction of 6.9 percent in 2009 following the 2008 crisis, Mexico’s GDP grew by an average of 3.3 percent in the five years between 2004 and 2008. When looked at in terms of purchasing power parity, a measure of GDP in terms of actual purchasing power, Mexico is the 11th-largest economy in the world, just behind France and Italy. It is also forecast to grow at just below 4 percent again this year, despite slowing global economic trends, thanks in part to rising U.S. consumption.
Total economic size and growth is extremely important to total national power. But Mexico has a single profound economic problem: According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico has the second-highest level of inequality among member nations. More than 50 percent of Mexico’s population lives in poverty, and some 14.9 percent of its people live in intense poverty, meaning they have difficulty securing the necessities of life. At the same time, Mexico is home to the richest man in the world, telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim.
Read more: Mexico’s Strategy | Stratfor
Read more: Mexico’s Strategy | Stratfor
A few years ago, I wrote about Mexico possibly becoming a failed state because of the effect of the cartels on the country. Mexico may have come close to that, but it stabilized itself and took a different course instead — one of impressive economic growth in the face of instability
Discussion of national strategy normally begins with the question of national security. But a discussion of Mexico’s strategy must begin with economics. This is because Mexico’s neighbor is the United States, whose military power in North America denies Mexico military options that other nations might have. But proximity to the United States does not deny Mexico economic options. Indeed, while the United States overwhelms Mexico from a national security standpoint, it offers possibilities for economic growth.
Mexico is now the world’s 14th-largest economy, just above South Korea and just below Australia. Its gross domestic product was $1.16 trillion in 2011. It grew by 3.8 percent in 2011 and 5.5 percent in 2010. Before a major contraction of 6.9 percent in 2009 following the 2008 crisis, Mexico’s GDP grew by an average of 3.3 percent in the five years between 2004 and 2008. When looked at in terms of purchasing power parity, a measure of GDP in terms of actual purchasing power, Mexico is the 11th-largest economy in the world, just behind France and Italy. It is also forecast to grow at just below 4 percent again this year, despite slowing global economic trends, thanks in part to rising U.S. consumption.
Total economic size and growth is extremely important to total national power. But Mexico has a single profound economic problem: According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico has the second-highest level of inequality among member nations. More than 50 percent of Mexico’s population lives in poverty, and some 14.9 percent of its people live in intense poverty, meaning they have difficulty securing the necessities of life. At the same time, Mexico is home to the richest man in the world, telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim.
Mexico ranked only 62nd in per capita GDP in 2011; China, on the other hand, ranked 91st. No one would dispute that China is a significant national power.
Few would dispute that China suffers from social instability. This
means that in terms of evaluating Mexico’s role in the international
system, we must look at the aggregate numbers. Given those numbers,
Mexico has entered the ranks of the leading economic powers and is
growing more quickly than nations ahead of it. When we look at the
distribution of wealth, the internal reality is that, like China, Mexico
has deep weaknesses.
The primary strategic problem for Mexico is the potential for internal instability driven by inequality. Northern and central Mexico have the highest human development index, nearly on the European level, while the mountainous, southernmost states are well below that level. Mexican inequality is geographically defined, though even the wealthiest regions have significant pockets of inequality. We must remember that this is not Western-style gradient inequality, but cliff inequality where the poor live utterly different lives from even the middle class.
Mexico is using classic tools for managing this problem. Since poverty imposes limits to domestic consumption, Mexico is an exporter. It exported $349.6 billion in 2011, which means it derives just under 30 percent of its GDP from exports. This is just above the Chinese level and creates a serious vulnerability in Mexico’s economy, since it becomes dependent on other countries’ appetite for Mexican goods.
This is compounded by the fact that 78.5 percent of Mexico’s exports go to the United States. That means that 23.8 percent of Mexico’s GDP depends on the appetite of the American markets. On the flip side, 48.8 percent of its imports come from the United States, making it an asymmetric relationship. Although both sides need the exports, Mexico must have them. The United States benefits from them but not on the same order.
But Mexico had two problems. The first was internal instability caused by the social factors that remain in place, namely Mexico’s massive, regionally focused inequality. The second was that the lands north of the Rio Grande line (referred to as Rio Bravo del Norte by the Mexicans) were sparsely settled and difficult to defend. The terrain between the Mexican heartland and the northern territories from Texas to California were difficult to reach from the south. The cost of maintaining a military force able to protect this area was prohibitive.
From the American point of view, Mexico — and particularly the Mexican presence in Texas — represented a strategic threat to American interests. The development of the Louisiana Purchase into the breadbasket of the United States depended on the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri river system, which was navigable and the primary mode of export. Mexico, with its border on the Sabine River separating it from Louisiana, was positioned to cut the Mississippi. The strategic need to secure sea approaches through the Caribbean to the vulnerable Mexican east coast put Mexico in direct conflict with U.S. interests.
The decision by U.S. President Andrew Jackson to send Sam Houston on a covert mission into Texas to foment a rising of American settlers there was based in part on his obsession with New Orleans and the Mississippi River, which Jackson had fought for in 1815. The Texas rising was countered by a Mexican army moving north into Texas. Its problem was that the Mexican army, drawn to a great extent from the poorest elements of Mexican society in that country’s south, had to pass through the desert and mountains of the region and suffered from extremely cold and snowy weather. The Mexican soldiers arrived at San Antonio exhausted, and while they defeated the garrison there, they were not able to defeat the force at San Jacinto (near present-day Houston) and were themselves defeated.
The region that separated the heart of Texas from the heart of Mexico was a barrier for military movement that undermined Mexico’s ability to hold its northern territory. The geographic weakness of Mexico – this hostile region coupled with long and difficult-to-defend coastlines and no navy — extended west to the Pacific. It created a borderland that had two characteristics. It was of little economic value, and it was inherently difficult to police due to the terrain. It separated the two countries, but it became a low-level friction point throughout history, with smuggling and banditry on both sides at various times. It was a perfect border in the sense that it created a buffer, but it was an ongoing problem because it could not be easily controlled.
The defeat in Texas and during the Mexican-American War cost Mexico its northern territories. It created a permanent political issue between the two countries, one that Mexico could not effectively remedy. The defeat in the wars continued to destabilize Mexico. Although the northern territories were not central to Mexico’s national interest, their loss created a crisis of confidence in successive regimes that further irritated the core social problem of massive inequality. For the past century and a half, Mexico has lived with an ongoing inferiority complex toward and resentment of the United States.
The war created another reality between the two countries: a borderland that was a unique entity, part of both countries and part of neither country. The borderland’s geography had defeated the Mexican army. It now became a frontier that neither side could control. During the ongoing unrest surrounding the Mexican Revolution, it became a refuge for figures such as Pancho Villa, pursued by U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing after Villa raided American towns. It would not be fair to call it a no-man’s-land. It was an every-man’s-land, with its own rules, frequently violent, never suppressed.
The drug trade has replaced the cattle rustling of the 19th century, but the essential principle remains the same. Cocaine, marijuana and a number of other drugs are being shipped to the United States. All are imported or produced in Mexico at a low cost and then re-exported or exported into the United States. The price in the United States, where the products are illegal and in great demand, is substantially higher than in Mexico. That means that the price differential between drugs in Mexico and drugs in the United States creates an attractive market. This typically happens when one country prohibits a widely desired product readily available in a neighboring country.
This creates a substantial inflow of wealth into Mexico, though the precise size of this inflow is difficult to gauge. The precise amount of cross-border trade is uncertain, but one number frequently used is $40 billion a year. This would mean narcotic sales represent an 11.4 percent addition to total exports. But this underestimates the importance of narcotics, because profit margins would tend to be much higher on drugs than on industrial products. Assuming that the profit margin on legal exports is 10 percent (a very high estimate), legal exports would generate about $35 billion a year in profits. Assuming the margin on drugs is 80 percent, then the profit on them is $32 billion a year, almost matching profits on legal exports.
These numbers are all guesses, of course. The amount of money returned to Mexico as opposed to kept in U.S. or other banks is unknown. The precise amount of the trade is uncertain and profit margins are difficult to calculate. What can be known is that the trade is likely an off-the-books stimulant to the Mexican economy, generated by the price differential created by drug prohibition.
The advantage to Mexico also creates a strategic problem for Mexico. Given the money at stake and that the legal system is unable to suppress or regulate the trade, the borderland has again become — perhaps now more than ever — a region of ongoing warfare between groups competing to control the movement of narcotics into the United States. To a great extent, theMexicans have lost control of this borderland.
From the Mexican point of view, this is a manageable situation. The borderland is distinct from the Mexican heartland. So long as the violence does not overwhelm the heartland, it is tolerable. The inflow of money does not offend the Mexican government. More precisely, the Mexican government has limited resources to suppress the trade and violence, and there are financial benefits to its existence. The Mexican strategy is to try to block the spread of lawlessness into Mexico proper but to accept the lawlessness in a region that historically has been lawless.
The American position is to demand that the Mexicans deploy forces to suppress the trade. But neither side has sufficient force to control the border, and the demand is more one of gestures than significant actions or threats. The Mexicans have already weakened their military by trying to come to grips with the problem, but they are not going to break their military by trying to control a region that broke them in the past. The United States is not going to provide a force sufficient to control the border, since the cost would be staggering. Each will thus live with the violence. The Mexicans argue the problem is that the United States can’t suppress demand and is unwilling to destroy incentives by lowering prices through legalization. The Americans say the Mexicans must root out the corruption among Mexican officials and law enforcement. Both have interesting arguments, but neither argument has anything to do with reality. Controlling that terrain is impossible with reasonable effort, and no one is prepared to make an unreasonable effort.
Another aspect is the movement of migrants. For Mexicans, the movement of migrants has been part of their social policy: It shifts the poor out of Mexico and generates remittances. For the United States, this has provided a consistent source of low-cost labor. The borderland has been the uncontrollable venue through which the migrants pass. The Mexicans don’t want to stop it, and neither, in the end, do the Americans.
Dueling rhetoric between the United States and Mexico hides the underlying facts. Mexico is now one of the largest economies in the world and a major economic partner with the United States. The inequality in the relationship comes from military inequality. The U.S. military dominates North America, and the Mexicans are in no position to challenge this. The borderland poses problems and some benefits for each, but neither is in a position to control the region regardless of rhetoric.
Mexico still has to deal with its core issue, which is maintaining its internal social stability. It is, however, beginning to develop foreign policy issues beyond the United States. In particular, it is developing an interest in managing Central America, possibly in collaboration with Colombia. Its purpose, ironically, is the control of illegal immigrants and drug smuggling. These are not trivial moves. Were it not for the United States, Mexico would be a great regional power. Given the United States, it must manage that relationship before any other.
Given Mexico’s dramatic economic growth and given time, this equation will change. Over time, we expect there will be two significant powers in North America. But in the short run, the traditional strategic problems of Mexico remain: how to deal with the United States, how to contain the northern borderland and how to maintain national unity in the face of potential social unrest.
The primary strategic problem for Mexico is the potential for internal instability driven by inequality. Northern and central Mexico have the highest human development index, nearly on the European level, while the mountainous, southernmost states are well below that level. Mexican inequality is geographically defined, though even the wealthiest regions have significant pockets of inequality. We must remember that this is not Western-style gradient inequality, but cliff inequality where the poor live utterly different lives from even the middle class.
Mexico is using classic tools for managing this problem. Since poverty imposes limits to domestic consumption, Mexico is an exporter. It exported $349.6 billion in 2011, which means it derives just under 30 percent of its GDP from exports. This is just above the Chinese level and creates a serious vulnerability in Mexico’s economy, since it becomes dependent on other countries’ appetite for Mexican goods.
This is compounded by the fact that 78.5 percent of Mexico’s exports go to the United States. That means that 23.8 percent of Mexico’s GDP depends on the appetite of the American markets. On the flip side, 48.8 percent of its imports come from the United States, making it an asymmetric relationship. Although both sides need the exports, Mexico must have them. The United States benefits from them but not on the same order.
Relations With the United States
This leads to Mexico’s second strategic problem: its relationship with the United States. When we look back to the early 19th century, it was not clear that the United States would be the dominant power in North America. The United States was a small, poorly integrated country hugging the East Coast. Mexico was much more developed, with a more substantial military and economy. At first glance, Mexico ought to have been the dominant power in North America.But Mexico had two problems. The first was internal instability caused by the social factors that remain in place, namely Mexico’s massive, regionally focused inequality. The second was that the lands north of the Rio Grande line (referred to as Rio Bravo del Norte by the Mexicans) were sparsely settled and difficult to defend. The terrain between the Mexican heartland and the northern territories from Texas to California were difficult to reach from the south. The cost of maintaining a military force able to protect this area was prohibitive.
From the American point of view, Mexico — and particularly the Mexican presence in Texas — represented a strategic threat to American interests. The development of the Louisiana Purchase into the breadbasket of the United States depended on the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri river system, which was navigable and the primary mode of export. Mexico, with its border on the Sabine River separating it from Louisiana, was positioned to cut the Mississippi. The strategic need to secure sea approaches through the Caribbean to the vulnerable Mexican east coast put Mexico in direct conflict with U.S. interests.
The decision by U.S. President Andrew Jackson to send Sam Houston on a covert mission into Texas to foment a rising of American settlers there was based in part on his obsession with New Orleans and the Mississippi River, which Jackson had fought for in 1815. The Texas rising was countered by a Mexican army moving north into Texas. Its problem was that the Mexican army, drawn to a great extent from the poorest elements of Mexican society in that country’s south, had to pass through the desert and mountains of the region and suffered from extremely cold and snowy weather. The Mexican soldiers arrived at San Antonio exhausted, and while they defeated the garrison there, they were not able to defeat the force at San Jacinto (near present-day Houston) and were themselves defeated.
The region that separated the heart of Texas from the heart of Mexico was a barrier for military movement that undermined Mexico’s ability to hold its northern territory. The geographic weakness of Mexico – this hostile region coupled with long and difficult-to-defend coastlines and no navy — extended west to the Pacific. It created a borderland that had two characteristics. It was of little economic value, and it was inherently difficult to police due to the terrain. It separated the two countries, but it became a low-level friction point throughout history, with smuggling and banditry on both sides at various times. It was a perfect border in the sense that it created a buffer, but it was an ongoing problem because it could not be easily controlled.
The defeat in Texas and during the Mexican-American War cost Mexico its northern territories. It created a permanent political issue between the two countries, one that Mexico could not effectively remedy. The defeat in the wars continued to destabilize Mexico. Although the northern territories were not central to Mexico’s national interest, their loss created a crisis of confidence in successive regimes that further irritated the core social problem of massive inequality. For the past century and a half, Mexico has lived with an ongoing inferiority complex toward and resentment of the United States.
The war created another reality between the two countries: a borderland that was a unique entity, part of both countries and part of neither country. The borderland’s geography had defeated the Mexican army. It now became a frontier that neither side could control. During the ongoing unrest surrounding the Mexican Revolution, it became a refuge for figures such as Pancho Villa, pursued by U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing after Villa raided American towns. It would not be fair to call it a no-man’s-land. It was an every-man’s-land, with its own rules, frequently violent, never suppressed.
The drug trade has replaced the cattle rustling of the 19th century, but the essential principle remains the same. Cocaine, marijuana and a number of other drugs are being shipped to the United States. All are imported or produced in Mexico at a low cost and then re-exported or exported into the United States. The price in the United States, where the products are illegal and in great demand, is substantially higher than in Mexico. That means that the price differential between drugs in Mexico and drugs in the United States creates an attractive market. This typically happens when one country prohibits a widely desired product readily available in a neighboring country.
This creates a substantial inflow of wealth into Mexico, though the precise size of this inflow is difficult to gauge. The precise amount of cross-border trade is uncertain, but one number frequently used is $40 billion a year. This would mean narcotic sales represent an 11.4 percent addition to total exports. But this underestimates the importance of narcotics, because profit margins would tend to be much higher on drugs than on industrial products. Assuming that the profit margin on legal exports is 10 percent (a very high estimate), legal exports would generate about $35 billion a year in profits. Assuming the margin on drugs is 80 percent, then the profit on them is $32 billion a year, almost matching profits on legal exports.
These numbers are all guesses, of course. The amount of money returned to Mexico as opposed to kept in U.S. or other banks is unknown. The precise amount of the trade is uncertain and profit margins are difficult to calculate. What can be known is that the trade is likely an off-the-books stimulant to the Mexican economy, generated by the price differential created by drug prohibition.
The advantage to Mexico also creates a strategic problem for Mexico. Given the money at stake and that the legal system is unable to suppress or regulate the trade, the borderland has again become — perhaps now more than ever — a region of ongoing warfare between groups competing to control the movement of narcotics into the United States. To a great extent, theMexicans have lost control of this borderland.
From the Mexican point of view, this is a manageable situation. The borderland is distinct from the Mexican heartland. So long as the violence does not overwhelm the heartland, it is tolerable. The inflow of money does not offend the Mexican government. More precisely, the Mexican government has limited resources to suppress the trade and violence, and there are financial benefits to its existence. The Mexican strategy is to try to block the spread of lawlessness into Mexico proper but to accept the lawlessness in a region that historically has been lawless.
The American position is to demand that the Mexicans deploy forces to suppress the trade. But neither side has sufficient force to control the border, and the demand is more one of gestures than significant actions or threats. The Mexicans have already weakened their military by trying to come to grips with the problem, but they are not going to break their military by trying to control a region that broke them in the past. The United States is not going to provide a force sufficient to control the border, since the cost would be staggering. Each will thus live with the violence. The Mexicans argue the problem is that the United States can’t suppress demand and is unwilling to destroy incentives by lowering prices through legalization. The Americans say the Mexicans must root out the corruption among Mexican officials and law enforcement. Both have interesting arguments, but neither argument has anything to do with reality. Controlling that terrain is impossible with reasonable effort, and no one is prepared to make an unreasonable effort.
Another aspect is the movement of migrants. For Mexicans, the movement of migrants has been part of their social policy: It shifts the poor out of Mexico and generates remittances. For the United States, this has provided a consistent source of low-cost labor. The borderland has been the uncontrollable venue through which the migrants pass. The Mexicans don’t want to stop it, and neither, in the end, do the Americans.
Dueling rhetoric between the United States and Mexico hides the underlying facts. Mexico is now one of the largest economies in the world and a major economic partner with the United States. The inequality in the relationship comes from military inequality. The U.S. military dominates North America, and the Mexicans are in no position to challenge this. The borderland poses problems and some benefits for each, but neither is in a position to control the region regardless of rhetoric.
Mexico still has to deal with its core issue, which is maintaining its internal social stability. It is, however, beginning to develop foreign policy issues beyond the United States. In particular, it is developing an interest in managing Central America, possibly in collaboration with Colombia. Its purpose, ironically, is the control of illegal immigrants and drug smuggling. These are not trivial moves. Were it not for the United States, Mexico would be a great regional power. Given the United States, it must manage that relationship before any other.
Given Mexico’s dramatic economic growth and given time, this equation will change. Over time, we expect there will be two significant powers in North America. But in the short run, the traditional strategic problems of Mexico remain: how to deal with the United States, how to contain the northern borderland and how to maintain national unity in the face of potential social unrest.
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Natural Gas Competition, Part 2: A Shift in Asian Markets Australia Links to Mexican Drug Cartels
January 4th, 2013 Australia has always been a “Macho” country for outlaws and ruffians. Now there is a new type of outlaw. The bikers and Mexican Drug Cartels have infiltrated into Australia.The Mexican Drug Cartels are shipping large amounts of narcotics via the United States to Melbourne. The outlaw motorcycle gangs are distributing the drugs to Australian Citizens. Prevailing drugs are meth, cocaine and heroin. These drugs are the new “HIP” for the elite, musicians, actors, models and designers. These being the richest in Australia and can afford the drugs. A kilogram of cocaine in Texas sells for $16,000, while in Sydney a kilogram sells for $250,000.
The Drug cartels are operating in Mozambique, Congo, Ghana and Nigeria. Not only do they operate in Europe but throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Shipping their drugs to Italy’s crime families has also been very profitable and distributed by La Cosa Nostra. In all of these countries there is the local distributors and the Asian crime syndicate. Most prevalent is the Chinese connection. It seems many people have their hand in the pot, money streams in and they all prosper.
The flow of drugs from Mexico will not slow down, it will increase as more people use the drugs. The Australian Government is fighting back and must use their budgets to stop this influx of death. While the monies are being spent fighting the Drug cartels, the citizens are being deprived of their tax dollars.
Chihuahua, a hell for women
Wednesday, March 6, 2013 |
Patricia Mayorga Proceso (3-3-2013)
|
| words from a grieving mother about her 16 year old child |
Translated by un vato for Borderland Beat
One day, in a
moment of carelessness by her kidnappers, she fled from the place where
she was being held captive and rejoined her family. Days later, the
woman received a threatening message on her cell phone. Her captors
warned her that if she did not return, they would go for her sister and
all her family.
Afraid, the
woman went back to her victimizers. To this day, her whereabouts are
unknown. She never mentioned the place where she had been held.
In the same
border area in Chihuahua, another woman managed to escape the nightmare
that she was subjected to for months and denounced her partner, the
leader of a criminal organization involved in human trafficking.
There were
adolescent and adult females, she later claimed. She was in charge of
feeding them, but could no longer tolerate the abusive treatment. She
said that each of the kidnapped or recruited women was forced to have
between 30 to 40 sexual encounters a day.
Like Maria, she
went to the Human Rights Center for Women (Cedehm: Centro de Derechos
Humanos de las Mujeres), where they provided support. Her case was
referred to the Special Prosecutions Unit for Crimes of Violence Against
Women and Human Trafficking (Fevimtra: Fiscalia Especial para Delitos
de Violencia contra Mujeres y Trata de Personas. After that, she never
went back to her birthplace.
In August,
2011, two sisters were deprived of their freedom in San Juanito, Bocoyna
municipality. Weeks later, it was discovered that members of the crime
organization "La Linea" took them to a "concentration camp" to exploit
them. He parents filed a complaint for their disappearance.
Ledesma
demanded the search of an area that a criminal -- under arrest for
another crime -- indicated was the place where the sisters (20 and 26
years old) had been buried.
Ledesma Ortega
warned authorities that crime groups based in the mountains had built
"concentration camps" where they had several women from that area
captive.
"They are
recruiting them," she warned, while they were looking for Nancy and
Daisy. They found the women's voter's certificates in a warehouse along
with weapons and other items.
Before cases of
human trafficking became known in this capital city, that hell had been
going on for some time in Ciudad Juarez. Two years before the war
against drugs promoted by Felipe Calderon started, the former deputy
chief of Ciudad Juarez Criminal Investigations Department, Hector
Armando Lastra Munoz, was accused of operating a network that sexually
exploited minors.
Guadalupe
Mortin Otero, in charge of prevention and eradication of violence
against women in that locality, asked for a thorough investigation.
In March of
2004, First Penal Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, ordered Lastra Munoz
incarcerated for the crimes of prostitution and contributing to the
delinquency of a minor. A few hours later, the deputy chief, also the
operations coordinator for 159 Public Ministry agents commissioned in
Ciudad Juarez, left the Cereso prison (Cereso: Centro de Readaptacion Social) after posting bond set by the court in the amount of 300,000 pesos (approximately $24,000.00).
Lastra Munoz
declared himself innocent when he gave his preliminary statement before
Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, and claimed not to know the four young girls
involved in the case. In addition, he asked for conditional release.
He claimed that
the statements given by Mayra Janneth Mejia Romero against him were
fantasy, and stated that he had known her for four months. In addition,
he claimed that she was the one who introduced Karla Alexandra Vargas
Ortiz to him as her cousin and he claimed not to know the other two
minors who accused him of hiring them for prostitution purposes.
|
| Entombed in a clear plastic trash bag, a nude femicide victim is disposed at a Chihuahua dump |
According to
the Cedehm, the Lastra case showed the symbiosis between organized crime
groups and the police agencies that provide protection for them.
On the former official's person, "they found a catalog (sic) of politicians and narcos. It was evident proof of abuse of authority and of the existence of human trafficking," points out Luz Estela Castro Rodriguez, the director of Cedehm, in an interview.
"In a patriarchal culture, all crimes against women increase, it is easier to subdue them," she adds.
The problem is that, despite the evidence, mainly in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities, there are no investigations into human trafficking. It was only two years ago that authorities began to recognize the existence of the crime, but until today, not a single case has been investigated, much less anybody sent to trial or prison.
On March 28, 2008, authorities from all three levels of government announced the start of the Chihuahua Joint Operation to "dismantle networks and logistics of organized crime."
More than 10,000 Army and Federal Police troopers arrived in Juarez. Months later, more federal police forces arrived in the capital and mountain municipalities like Bocoyna, Guadalupe y Calvo, and Madera, among others.
In the first four months of the operation, there were 33 abductions ("levantones"), according to the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Cosyddhac: Comision de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos).
In the face of an increase in complaints brought against the military before the State Commission on Human Rights, on April 18, 2008, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena: Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional) issued a communique alerting the public of the existence of a "false army" financed by drug traffickers operating in the state, for the purpose of disparaging the Armed Forces.
Five years later, Castro Rodriguez asks: "How many armed men were there, or are there now, in the state? There's a policy of simulation. The strategy that the authorities have is only marketing to say that everything's all right. One must recognize that , to begin with, where there's weapons and drugs, there's human trafficking, and there are already cases filed with Fevintra."
She points out that when the 10,000 men were sent to Juarez, they arrived at a time when the society already saw women as disposable, in a maquiladora (assembly plant) sector with operating policies that were not appropriate for them.
"They sent them (the soldiers) out to hunt and forced disappearances also increased, but to this day those are invisible phenomena," she claims.
The same thing happened in the mountains and in other cities in the state. "It's terrible, because if the sicarios (gunmen) like a woman, they take her without a worry. There's a great deal of forced sexual prostitution; it increased because communities live with crime.
Since last year, priest Javier "El Pato" Avila, has charged that there's a gang of adolescents and young men in Bocoyna engaged in molesting and sexually abusing indigenous people when they walk the long trails of the Tarahumara Mountains.
The complaint
against the authorities, once again, is the impunity, exclaims the
prelate, because all they do is say that violence has decreased when it
is not true. "No matter how much they cluck, it's just clucking, like
chickens that have laid eggs," he underlines.
Norma Ledesma Ortega, the president of the association Justice for Our Daughters, says she has clear indications that from 2009 to 2011, organized crime groups used the Valle de Juarez to bury dozens of young women. The disappearances of adolescent and young women continued during 2012, most of them in downtown Juarez. And just in January, 2013, the Committee of Mothers of disappeared young women noted 14 cases.
Authorities have not investigated, or at least they haven't given the results to family members, who most of the time become the investigators due to the absence of information.
According to Justice for Our Daughters, the investigation to punish those responsible should focus on organized crime and human trafficking, including the complicity of government officials.
"The Department of Justice has been indifferent to this hypothesis and has refused to perform an effective investigation. The recent cases of those girls who were found in the Valle de Juarez remain unpunished," notes Ledesma.
(David Meza)
She adds: "Case
files from ten years ago, in the case of the state capital, and from up
to twenty years ago in the case of Juarez, one can assume today, had
the characteristics of human trafficking violations.
We did not have awareness before, we were not prepared as parents to demand that authorities investigate the crimes as human trafficking cases. All they did was question the immediate families of the victims. They knew what it was about; we didn't, and they did nothing."
They took the mothers of the first four women who disappeared in Chihuahua (the capital) to Piedras Negras (Coahuila) or to Nuevo Casas Grandes, telling them that (the girls) were together and had run away voluntarily, but that was not true, recalls Ledesma.
"Authorities look for girls who run away, not girls who are taken away. If the crime of human trafficking is increasing, it must be because police agencies are involved," she declares.
The official numbers from the Office of the State Attorney General, according to page number UIFGE-I-028-2013094932012 of the Infomex System, show that in 2012, 255 women were murdered, 10 of them less than 11 years old.
Throughout the state, there are 526 disappearance reports open, 219 of them involving women. Despite that, last January, prosecutor Jauregui Venegas assured us that there are only 120 cases of disappeared women being investigated.
Regarding the skeletal remains of disappeared women that have been found, in March of 2011, in a meeting with authorities from the three levels of government and with civilian organizations, the Fevimtra stated that there were in the Medical Examiner's Office (Semefo: Servicio Medico Forense) the remains of 143 unidentified female persons.
This past January 16, the director of Investigative Services of the Office of State Attorney General, Daniel Ricardo Jaramillo Vela, disclosed that they have secured 59 genetic profiles from around the state that are unidentified. Days later, prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas stated that they actually have only 44 genetic profiles.
Jaramillo Vela reported that the remains found between January and February of 2011 had 24 elements that pertained to 11 women: seven (remains) have already been delivered, two were delivered and rejected by their families, and two more are inconsistent with the data bases of families who are looking for women in the state.
The bodies rejected by the two families are those of Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, who disappeared on January 31, 2009, when she was 17 years old, and Idali Jauche Laguna, who disappeared on February 23, 2010. When the bodies were delivered to the two families in April, 2011, they asked for a second opinion and demanded that the remains be sent to a specialized laboratory because they did not believe the authorities.
Almost a year later, and under pressure from a group of mothers who marched from Juarez to the capital, Jaramillo announced that they sent samples of bones found in Arroyo Naranjo to the Bode Technology 15 laboratory.
With respect to the remains not yet identified, he said that because this involved Juarez, a transient border area, they have to request cooperation from other states or countries to determine whether they belong to women who disappeared there.
According to Infomex, the North Zone Attorney General's office, to which Juarez belongs, had 101 women reported missing from 1995 to the middle of January, 2013. In 2012 alone, he indicated, 17 disappeared, the majority of them in downtown Juarez, according to newspaper archives.
He pointed out that the majority of the disappearances in the zone (60) took place between 2008 and 2012. To those cases, one must add the 17 bodies found in the Juarez Valley from 2009 to 2011, which were delivered to their families more than two years after they were found.
That is the case with Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, who disappeared on January 18, 2008, when she was 15 years old. She was found in the Valle de Juarez in November of 2009, and was delivered to her family two years later, in 2011....continues on next page
The West Zone Attorney General's office has reports of 58 disappeared women, 47 of them between 2008 and 2012. The majority of them (20) are from last year and the municipalities that reported the most cases are Cuauhtemoc, Guerrero, Bocoyna, Madera and Carichi. The ages of the disappeared women are from eight to 48 years of age.
The South Zone Attorney General's office reports 11 cases from 2007 to 2012, five of them from last year, and the majority from Parral, Guachochi and Jimenez. The ages of the disappeared females range from three to 62 years old.
The prosecutor as well as the governor responded through the media that the skeletal remains that are still at the Semefo are inconsistent with the genetic profiles of the disappeared women from the families who are claiming them.
"We have been conducting an investigation in which many of the cases are from ten or more years ago, and they want to pressure (the government) into inventing things, and my government will never do that," said Duarte in response to media questions.
When the marchers reached the capital, the governor was not there. They chose to return and pushed for Duarte to meet with them in Ciudad Juarez. When the public hearing was scheduled, the mothers who took part in the march were not allowed access.
After four days, forced by the pressure, Duarte attended the meeting with the mothers from the march.There, they reproached him for the lies they have been systematically told and for the nonexistent investigation of their daughters' cases.
The one who questioned the governor most was Karla Castaneda, the mother of Cinthia Jocabeth Alvarado Castaneda. After the meeting, Karla Castaneda reported harassment and threats by municipal and state officers, who searched her home without a court order.
Because of the risk that those actions represent, she requested political asylum in the United States, which was granted this past February 13. She left with her four children.
Subsequently, another initiative was introduced by the governor, which proposed amending some provisions in state law to define human trafficking as a criminal offense and the creation of of two congressional commissions to follow up on the matter. This proposal was approved by the Congressional plenum the last week in January.
PAN congressman Raul Garcia Ruiz, who introduced the first legislative proposal, pointed out that for the majority party in Congress (the PRI), the governor's orders take priority, "they do whatever he wants, and we're left with trying to do whatever we can to push the matter forward," he said.
He explained that the legislation that was approved does not provide, for example, for the persons who investigate these crimes to have prosecutorial powers. With a prosecutions unit, he added, they would have had to have a Public Ministry and a specialized police force, which is not contemplated by the enacted legislation.
The legislator stated that during the meetings he held on the legislative proposal, he discovered that, "there is no reliable official diagnostic on point, -- by civilian social organizations, by academic institutions or from authorities --, focused on the problem as such."
He added that authorities have avoided the subject for decades and "have barely managed to institute tenuous reactive, not proactive, measures."
He points out: "In the State of Chihuahua, officially, the existence of human trafficking as a public security issue is not recognized, nor (is it recognized) as a phenomenon or product of organized crime, although we suffer its effects to a considerable degree."
He used as an example the cases of women who disappeared in downtown Juarez. "From a simple a priori observation, it can be deduced from the circumstances of method, time and form under which these disappearances occur, that they obey clear organized crime strategies, and may have different causes: prostitution, drug trafficking, immigration."
However, due to the way they are investigated, it's not possible to find their link with these criminal activities.
The PAN legislator explained that the investigating authorities lacks the statutory tools to investigate this kind of crime, and it appears that the executive authority, he says, lacks the political will to provide them with such legal instruments.
The reforms that were approved add as a criminal offense the statutory definition of human trafficking, as well as the creation of two special Congressional commissions, one local and the other national, to follow up on the cases. Meanwhile, impunity prevails.
NOTE:
An element that is rarely spoken about is the men who are wrongfully convicted incurring long sentences for femicide murders they had nothing to do with. In the top photo collage is a 16 year old student who disappeared named Neyra. Her cousin, David Meza, was 1500 miles away when this occurred in the southern state of Chiapas. Upon hearing his cousin may be identified when a body discovered, he raced to Chihuahua to help in the identification. search. Shortly after his arrival he was picked up by police, brutally tortured into confessing, arrested and imprisoned.
The story is in the video below. It outlines the injustice, impunity and corruption in these disappearances. At Neyra's school 7 or 8 female students "disappeared". 7-8..., inconceivable.
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America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don’t Let Freedom Slip Away
By: Kitty Werthmann
What I am about to tell you is something you’ve probably never heard or will ever read in history books.
I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide – 98% of the vote. I’ve never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.
In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.
Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.
The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna, Linz and Graz were destroyed. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted.
We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had
been in power since 1933. We had been told that they didn’t have
unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. Nothing
was ever said about persecution of any group — Jewish or otherwise. We
were led to believe that everyone was happy. We wanted the same way of
life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the
end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that
businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back.
Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany
and have Hitler for our ruler.
We were overjoyed, and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.
After the election, German officials were appointed, and like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.
Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family.
Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage.
Hitler Targets Education – Eliminates Religious Instruction for Children:
Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,” and had physical education.
Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail. The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had.
My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it.
Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.
Equal Rights Hits Home:
In 1939, the war started and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men.
Soon after this, the draft was implemented. It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps. During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.
Hitler Restructured the Family Through Daycare:
When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children.. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.
Health Care and Small Business Suffer Under Government Controls:
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.
As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.
We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.
We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.
“Mercy Killing” Redefined:
In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness.
As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.
The Final Steps – Gun Laws:
Next came gun registration.. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.
No more freedom of speech:
Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up.
Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.
After World War II, Russian troops occupied Austria. Women were raped, preteen to elderly. The press never wrote about this either. When the Soviets left in 1955, they took everything that they could, dismantling whole factories in the process. They sawed down whole orchards of fruit, and what they couldn’t destroy, they burned. We called it The Burned Earth. Most of the population barricaded themselves in their houses. Women hid in their cellars for 6 weeks as the troops mobilized. Those who couldn’t, paid the price. There is a monument in Vienna today, dedicated to those women who were massacred by the Russians. This is an eye witness account.
“It’s true..those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.”
On the former official's person, "they found a catalog (sic) of politicians and narcos. It was evident proof of abuse of authority and of the existence of human trafficking," points out Luz Estela Castro Rodriguez, the director of Cedehm, in an interview.
"In a patriarchal culture, all crimes against women increase, it is easier to subdue them," she adds.
The problem is that, despite the evidence, mainly in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities, there are no investigations into human trafficking. It was only two years ago that authorities began to recognize the existence of the crime, but until today, not a single case has been investigated, much less anybody sent to trial or prison.
On March 28, 2008, authorities from all three levels of government announced the start of the Chihuahua Joint Operation to "dismantle networks and logistics of organized crime."
More than 10,000 Army and Federal Police troopers arrived in Juarez. Months later, more federal police forces arrived in the capital and mountain municipalities like Bocoyna, Guadalupe y Calvo, and Madera, among others.
In the first four months of the operation, there were 33 abductions ("levantones"), according to the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Cosyddhac: Comision de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos).
In the face of an increase in complaints brought against the military before the State Commission on Human Rights, on April 18, 2008, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena: Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional) issued a communique alerting the public of the existence of a "false army" financed by drug traffickers operating in the state, for the purpose of disparaging the Armed Forces.
Five years later, Castro Rodriguez asks: "How many armed men were there, or are there now, in the state? There's a policy of simulation. The strategy that the authorities have is only marketing to say that everything's all right. One must recognize that , to begin with, where there's weapons and drugs, there's human trafficking, and there are already cases filed with Fevintra."
She points out that when the 10,000 men were sent to Juarez, they arrived at a time when the society already saw women as disposable, in a maquiladora (assembly plant) sector with operating policies that were not appropriate for them.
"They sent them (the soldiers) out to hunt and forced disappearances also increased, but to this day those are invisible phenomena," she claims.
The same thing happened in the mountains and in other cities in the state. "It's terrible, because if the sicarios (gunmen) like a woman, they take her without a worry. There's a great deal of forced sexual prostitution; it increased because communities live with crime.
Since last year, priest Javier "El Pato" Avila, has charged that there's a gang of adolescents and young men in Bocoyna engaged in molesting and sexually abusing indigenous people when they walk the long trails of the Tarahumara Mountains.
Norma Ledesma Ortega, the president of the association Justice for Our Daughters, says she has clear indications that from 2009 to 2011, organized crime groups used the Valle de Juarez to bury dozens of young women. The disappearances of adolescent and young women continued during 2012, most of them in downtown Juarez. And just in January, 2013, the Committee of Mothers of disappeared young women noted 14 cases.
Authorities have not investigated, or at least they haven't given the results to family members, who most of the time become the investigators due to the absence of information.
According to Justice for Our Daughters, the investigation to punish those responsible should focus on organized crime and human trafficking, including the complicity of government officials.
"The Department of Justice has been indifferent to this hypothesis and has refused to perform an effective investigation. The recent cases of those girls who were found in the Valle de Juarez remain unpunished," notes Ledesma.
(David Meza)
We did not have awareness before, we were not prepared as parents to demand that authorities investigate the crimes as human trafficking cases. All they did was question the immediate families of the victims. They knew what it was about; we didn't, and they did nothing."
They took the mothers of the first four women who disappeared in Chihuahua (the capital) to Piedras Negras (Coahuila) or to Nuevo Casas Grandes, telling them that (the girls) were together and had run away voluntarily, but that was not true, recalls Ledesma.
"Authorities look for girls who run away, not girls who are taken away. If the crime of human trafficking is increasing, it must be because police agencies are involved," she declares.
Numbers war
For Jose Luis Armendariz Gonzalez, the president of the State Commission on Human Rights, the subject of disappeared persons is crucial and complex, because there is a numbers war going on and, therefore, it is difficult to come up with a diagnosis and more difficult yet to eliminate the problem.The official numbers from the Office of the State Attorney General, according to page number UIFGE-I-028-2013094932012 of the Infomex System, show that in 2012, 255 women were murdered, 10 of them less than 11 years old.
Throughout the state, there are 526 disappearance reports open, 219 of them involving women. Despite that, last January, prosecutor Jauregui Venegas assured us that there are only 120 cases of disappeared women being investigated.
Regarding the skeletal remains of disappeared women that have been found, in March of 2011, in a meeting with authorities from the three levels of government and with civilian organizations, the Fevimtra stated that there were in the Medical Examiner's Office (Semefo: Servicio Medico Forense) the remains of 143 unidentified female persons.
This past January 16, the director of Investigative Services of the Office of State Attorney General, Daniel Ricardo Jaramillo Vela, disclosed that they have secured 59 genetic profiles from around the state that are unidentified. Days later, prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas stated that they actually have only 44 genetic profiles.
Jaramillo Vela reported that the remains found between January and February of 2011 had 24 elements that pertained to 11 women: seven (remains) have already been delivered, two were delivered and rejected by their families, and two more are inconsistent with the data bases of families who are looking for women in the state.
The bodies rejected by the two families are those of Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, who disappeared on January 31, 2009, when she was 17 years old, and Idali Jauche Laguna, who disappeared on February 23, 2010. When the bodies were delivered to the two families in April, 2011, they asked for a second opinion and demanded that the remains be sent to a specialized laboratory because they did not believe the authorities.
Almost a year later, and under pressure from a group of mothers who marched from Juarez to the capital, Jaramillo announced that they sent samples of bones found in Arroyo Naranjo to the Bode Technology 15 laboratory.
With respect to the remains not yet identified, he said that because this involved Juarez, a transient border area, they have to request cooperation from other states or countries to determine whether they belong to women who disappeared there.
According to Infomex, the North Zone Attorney General's office, to which Juarez belongs, had 101 women reported missing from 1995 to the middle of January, 2013. In 2012 alone, he indicated, 17 disappeared, the majority of them in downtown Juarez, according to newspaper archives.
He pointed out that the majority of the disappearances in the zone (60) took place between 2008 and 2012. To those cases, one must add the 17 bodies found in the Juarez Valley from 2009 to 2011, which were delivered to their families more than two years after they were found.
That is the case with Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, who disappeared on January 18, 2008, when she was 15 years old. She was found in the Valle de Juarez in November of 2009, and was delivered to her family two years later, in 2011....continues on next page
The West Zone Attorney General's office has reports of 58 disappeared women, 47 of them between 2008 and 2012. The majority of them (20) are from last year and the municipalities that reported the most cases are Cuauhtemoc, Guerrero, Bocoyna, Madera and Carichi. The ages of the disappeared women are from eight to 48 years of age.
The South Zone Attorney General's office reports 11 cases from 2007 to 2012, five of them from last year, and the majority from Parral, Guachochi and Jimenez. The ages of the disappeared females range from three to 62 years old.
Pretense and harassment, the answer to the march
On January 15, a group of four family mothers, accompanied by legal representative Francisca Galvan, began a march from Juarez to the city of Chihuahua to demand a public audience with the governor, Cesar Horacio Duarte Jaquez. They were asking to be told how many more skeletal remains there were in the Semefo (office of medical examiner) and asked for their identification to be expedited. They also demanded an investigation of the cases that showed characteristics of human trafficking or organized crime and, in addition, they demanded the dismissal of government officials who had committed irregularities or who had been negligent.The prosecutor as well as the governor responded through the media that the skeletal remains that are still at the Semefo are inconsistent with the genetic profiles of the disappeared women from the families who are claiming them.
"We have been conducting an investigation in which many of the cases are from ten or more years ago, and they want to pressure (the government) into inventing things, and my government will never do that," said Duarte in response to media questions.
When the marchers reached the capital, the governor was not there. They chose to return and pushed for Duarte to meet with them in Ciudad Juarez. When the public hearing was scheduled, the mothers who took part in the march were not allowed access.
After four days, forced by the pressure, Duarte attended the meeting with the mothers from the march.There, they reproached him for the lies they have been systematically told and for the nonexistent investigation of their daughters' cases.
The one who questioned the governor most was Karla Castaneda, the mother of Cinthia Jocabeth Alvarado Castaneda. After the meeting, Karla Castaneda reported harassment and threats by municipal and state officers, who searched her home without a court order.
Because of the risk that those actions represent, she requested political asylum in the United States, which was granted this past February 13. She left with her four children.
Initiative cut short
In the local Congress, there has been a legislative proposal for two years now to create a special prosecutions unit and a state law on human trafficking. The proposal was supported by the National Action Party (PAN: Partido Accion Nacional) faction.Subsequently, another initiative was introduced by the governor, which proposed amending some provisions in state law to define human trafficking as a criminal offense and the creation of of two congressional commissions to follow up on the matter. This proposal was approved by the Congressional plenum the last week in January.
PAN congressman Raul Garcia Ruiz, who introduced the first legislative proposal, pointed out that for the majority party in Congress (the PRI), the governor's orders take priority, "they do whatever he wants, and we're left with trying to do whatever we can to push the matter forward," he said.
He explained that the legislation that was approved does not provide, for example, for the persons who investigate these crimes to have prosecutorial powers. With a prosecutions unit, he added, they would have had to have a Public Ministry and a specialized police force, which is not contemplated by the enacted legislation.
The legislator stated that during the meetings he held on the legislative proposal, he discovered that, "there is no reliable official diagnostic on point, -- by civilian social organizations, by academic institutions or from authorities --, focused on the problem as such."
He added that authorities have avoided the subject for decades and "have barely managed to institute tenuous reactive, not proactive, measures."
He points out: "In the State of Chihuahua, officially, the existence of human trafficking as a public security issue is not recognized, nor (is it recognized) as a phenomenon or product of organized crime, although we suffer its effects to a considerable degree."
He used as an example the cases of women who disappeared in downtown Juarez. "From a simple a priori observation, it can be deduced from the circumstances of method, time and form under which these disappearances occur, that they obey clear organized crime strategies, and may have different causes: prostitution, drug trafficking, immigration."
However, due to the way they are investigated, it's not possible to find their link with these criminal activities.
The PAN legislator explained that the investigating authorities lacks the statutory tools to investigate this kind of crime, and it appears that the executive authority, he says, lacks the political will to provide them with such legal instruments.
The reforms that were approved add as a criminal offense the statutory definition of human trafficking, as well as the creation of two special Congressional commissions, one local and the other national, to follow up on the cases. Meanwhile, impunity prevails.
NOTE:
An element that is rarely spoken about is the men who are wrongfully convicted incurring long sentences for femicide murders they had nothing to do with. In the top photo collage is a 16 year old student who disappeared named Neyra. Her cousin, David Meza, was 1500 miles away when this occurred in the southern state of Chiapas. Upon hearing his cousin may be identified when a body discovered, he raced to Chihuahua to help in the identification. search. Shortly after his arrival he was picked up by police, brutally tortured into confessing, arrested and imprisoned.
The story is in the video below. It outlines the injustice, impunity and corruption in these disappearances. At Neyra's school 7 or 8 female students "disappeared". 7-8..., inconceivable.
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85yr. old Austrian, Lived Under Hitler, Says We’re Screwed!
America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don’t Let Freedom Slip AwayBy: Kitty Werthmann
What I am about to tell you is something you’ve probably never heard or will ever read in history books.
I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide – 98% of the vote. I’ve never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.
In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.
Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.
The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna, Linz and Graz were destroyed. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted.
We were overjoyed, and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.
After the election, German officials were appointed, and like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.
Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family.
Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage.
Hitler Targets Education – Eliminates Religious Instruction for Children:
Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,” and had physical education.
Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail. The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had.
My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it.
Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.
Equal Rights Hits Home:
In 1939, the war started and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men.
Soon after this, the draft was implemented. It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps. During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.
Hitler Restructured the Family Through Daycare:
When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children.. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.
Health Care and Small Business Suffer Under Government Controls:
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.
As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.
We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.
We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.
“Mercy Killing” Redefined:
In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness.
As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.
The Final Steps – Gun Laws:
Next came gun registration.. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.
No more freedom of speech:
Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up.
Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.
After World War II, Russian troops occupied Austria. Women were raped, preteen to elderly. The press never wrote about this either. When the Soviets left in 1955, they took everything that they could, dismantling whole factories in the process. They sawed down whole orchards of fruit, and what they couldn’t destroy, they burned. We called it The Burned Earth. Most of the population barricaded themselves in their houses. Women hid in their cellars for 6 weeks as the troops mobilized. Those who couldn’t, paid the price. There is a monument in Vienna today, dedicated to those women who were massacred by the Russians. This is an eye witness account.
“It’s true..those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.”
Share it:
45 Borderland Beat Comments:
'Dreamers' Argue for Driver's Licenses
Judge will rule on governor's executive order
Ted Houston
Attorneys for Gov. Jan Brewer's office and young adults who
qualify for federal work permits under President Obama's "Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) program – often referred to as
"Dreamers" because they would fall under the "DREAM Act" if it ever
passes – squared off in federal court on Friday. At issue: Brewer's
executive order denying Arizona driver's license to "Dreamers".
Arizona law currently allows for the issuance of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants who have been issued federal work permits and deportation deferrals, because those conditions make them "lawfully present" in the U.S.
However, Brewer says that as far as she's concerned, "Dreamers" are not legally present in the U.S.
Attorneys for the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center argued to a federal judge in Phoenix that there is no difference between the immigration status of Dreamers and the immigrants who have been granted Arizona driver's licenses.
Federal judge David Campbell asked attorneys for Brewer what the difference is. The governor's attorneys responded that it's a matter of interpretation – Brewer does not consider Dreamers to be in the U.S. legally because their legal status was granted by the Department of Homeland Security, not by Congress. They added that states have the authority to decide which of their residents are eligible for a driver's license, and which are not.
Judge Campbell said he will issue a written ruling in the next few weeks.
PHOTO: "Dreamers" address reporters outside the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix after Friday's hearing.
Arizona law currently allows for the issuance of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants who have been issued federal work permits and deportation deferrals, because those conditions make them "lawfully present" in the U.S.
However, Brewer says that as far as she's concerned, "Dreamers" are not legally present in the U.S.
Attorneys for the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center argued to a federal judge in Phoenix that there is no difference between the immigration status of Dreamers and the immigrants who have been granted Arizona driver's licenses.
Federal judge David Campbell asked attorneys for Brewer what the difference is. The governor's attorneys responded that it's a matter of interpretation – Brewer does not consider Dreamers to be in the U.S. legally because their legal status was granted by the Department of Homeland Security, not by Congress. They added that states have the authority to decide which of their residents are eligible for a driver's license, and which are not.
Judge Campbell said he will issue a written ruling in the next few weeks.
PHOTO: "Dreamers" address reporters outside the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix after Friday's hearing.
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One of 5 international psychics hired for the Delos international 'psychic think tank' team.
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I just don't understand. Does it cost too much? Surely not everyone can be corrupt. Surely the MAJORITY cannot be corrupt?
Such a shame. Your own daughters
The Juarez Femicides are a national disgrace,they should have moved heaven and earth to stop this to the women.Who else could stop it?
The picture above is haunting,,fuck all the videos,that picture hurts me more.Misogynist violence against women,specially women who work or don't want scrubs like these,,,,sad,inadequate little men assert themselves on women through violence.We are supposed to protect them,,,,,,,
i have great difficulty to actually realise that all this that i read here, is actually going on in the real world.
i think that if i would be living there, i would do EVERYTHING possible to get the hell out of there, which is apparently, even more dangerous than staying.
it seems a giant nightmare thats really happening for thousands of mexicans everyday.
it deeply saddens me.
Why has this not been investigated? My thoughts are that this cancer of mens souls goes to high levels - not only within the cartels, but within the military and the Mexican Government itself. They do not speak out or investigate - because important men in power are themselves implicated.
I am working on the story, I have not had much time to do so, but I am almost finished with the translation of his words which I wanted to include in the post.
A good man lived and died a hero....paz chivis
http://www.periodicocorreo.com.mx/seguridad/87601-secuestran-a-mujer-en-san-migu\
el-de-allende.html
There is something wrong with humanity.
This is so incredibly shameful. And to think the police and politicians spend their time pretending to combat something so stupid as drugs when they should focus on this.
There is something wrong with humanity.
March 6, 2013 at 7:51 PM "
whats the problem? you doing your drugs and these drug dealers doing what they do put you too close to the problem?
The solve this problem ... Mexico badly needs a series of special facilities for women where they can live and sleep - and be 100% safe off the streets. These buildings would need to have very high security (with armed guards) and be completely trustworthy. If such places could be built and run properly - it would be a great step forwards for the women and children of Mexico at the current time. This is a solution that CAN be done ... it is practical. It just needs the right people to make it happen!!
It touches all of us bro,wherever we are from,how women can be treated this way is,,,i cannot possibly understand this.It literally leaves you to shocked for words,how a man can do this?We are capable of some horrors,but this.It is disgraceful to Mexico,disgraceful that the government or authorities didn't use every single resource they could muster to end this,find who did it and use the strongest possible deterrent to make a statement.I remember when a story was on here about a rapist getting hung,some people said the usual"you cant use vigilante justice"I tell you what,the rapist is never going to rape another woman,,,ever.
We should be way past treating women this way,then you see this?
"you doing your drugs and these drug dealers doing what they do put you too close to the problem"
Thats right ballbag,don't focus on the women killed,way to go guey.
How sad and pathetic are you?What about the story,the women?
This is a story that needs telling,again and again and again,its absolutely unacceptable.Its not bad enough these women sometimes working long hours in bad circumstances,then have to worry about bastards roaming the streets.
Good work in keeping people informed about this fuckin atrocity.