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((La Jornada photo by Sanjuana Martinez))

What is common practice in US violates Mexican labor laws

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for February 5. See original here.]

By Sanjuana Martínez

It is 6:30 in the morning and workers are arriving at the corner of Gómez Morín and Roberto Garza Sada Streets. It is a place known for hiring temporary workers. There are bricklayers, drywall workers, plasterers, tile setters… Most of them are contracted by the day to work on construction projects for mansions in the city of San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León.

Don Gregorio Saldaña, 68 years old, is sitting on a wheelbarrow. He is wearing a baseball cap that hides his gray hair. His hands are covered with calluses and they look like stone, a result of working as a bricklayer, which has also given him hernias from carrying heavy loads. He has been unemployed for two months but a few days ago “an engineer” finally hired him for one of his projects . “We are hired by the day. It is slow. Sometimes you don’t know if they are going to pay you or not but what else can we do? That’s what we live on,” he says. (more…)

((La Jornada photo by Jesús Villaseca))

Many leave food distribution event empty handed and still hungry after traveling miles

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for January 19. See original here. Over the weekend of January 14 and 15, several news sources reported that some 50 members of indigenous Rarámuri communities in the Sierra Tarahumara, or Sierra Madre Occidental, in the northern state of Chihuahua, had committed suicide during the month of December as a result of extreme hunger brought on by the serious drought, which has resulted in the failures of staple food crops like corn and beans.]

By Arturo García Hernández

Creel, Chihuahua, January 18 – Nobody has to starve to death to prove that there is a food emergency in the Sierra Tarahumara. The serious part is that it happens every year and no basic solutions are offered. The worst is that there is always somebody trying to take advantage politically. At least that is what was seen today in the Rarámuri community of San Ignacio de Arareko, adjoining Creel, where Governor César Duarte held the first distribution of food to ease the situation after the scandal brought on by the spreading of the rumor on Twitter and Facebook that there had been mass suicides because of the hunger. (more…)

‘Nothing to celebrate’

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for December 29. See original here. With considerable power vested in the executive branch, politics in Mexico is often described as cyclical, with six-year cycles, or sexenios, corresponding to the six-year terms for which presidents are elected.]

By Fernando Camacho Servín

As assassinations and disappearances of activists continued, the year that is about to end may have been the worst in this sexenio in terms of human rights, which positions the country “in a serious democratic deficit” and with an exponential increase in the number of victims of violence, warned members of organizations that defend individual rights, as they assessed 2011.

Gloria Ramírez, president of the Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos, declared, “This has been the worst year of the sexenio because the serious conditions that we have been through are getting worse. There are still assassinations, femicides and forced disappearances. It has been a brutal year and there is nothing to celebrate.” (more…)

Only one communal leader survives

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for December 22. See original here.]

By Blanche Petrich

The minutes of the last meeting that federal and state authorities of Michoacán held in Morelia last November 28 with community leaders from Ostula in an attempt to curb the criminal activities of armed groups that ravage the coastal region bear at the bottom the wavering signatures of Trinidad de la Cruz Crisóstomo and Santos Leyva, the aging leaders, in their 70s, of the Nahua indigenous movement who for decades kept alive the desire to recover the lands on the edge of the town of Aquila that had been taken from them.

Santos Leyva was president of the commons. His son, Pedro Leyva, had been an outstanding leader in recent years and had carried the struggle to other venues of resistance, like the Congreso Nacional Indígena and the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad. He was assassinated on October 6. He was victim number 27 of the unrelenting process of extermination suffered by that people, who had decided three years earlier to establish a new settlement, which they named Xayacalan, “Place of the Masks,” after their ritual dance of the Xayakates. (more…)

((José - Diario Tiempo photo))

[Translation of an Agence France Presse article as published in Diario Tiempo of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for November 25. See original here and related article here.]

Tapachula, Mexico – Lying on a bed in a shelter for the undocumented, Honduran José Paz is recuperating from the amputation of his right foot, which occurred when he was pushed by a policeman and fell under the wheels of the “Train of Death,” which at the same time cut off his American dream.

“It is very painful when you remember how things happened. That federal policeman pushed me and I fell under the train, the wheel cut off my foot. This happened and now, today, I don’t want to go to the United States for that damned American dream. That is what fucked me up,” he told AFP in an angry tone.

José is one of the tens of thousands who every year board, on the run, the so-called “Train of Death” or “La Bestia,” a long, slow freight train on an uncertain schedule which, starting in Arriaga, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, takes a northern route toward Oaxaca and Veracruz with its load of corn, cement and undocumented migrants. (more…)

((José Francisco Blake))

Second interior minister dies in suspicious plane crash

[Translation of an article from El Faro of San Salvador, El Salvador, for November 14. See original here.]

By Blanche Petrich

Important pieces of the puzzle that is Mexico these days have again fallen into place. Faced with a new calamity – a helicopter crashed on a hillside, the bodies of eight officials and military officers amid the twisted metal – the figure of President Felipe Calderón is weakened even more. In a period of three years, mourning has befallen his cabinet on two occasions. First a secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño, dies in a plane crash (September 21, 2008) [sic. -- it was in fact on November 4, 2008] and now José Francisco Blake, his successor, dies in another airplane accident, last November 11.

But can lightning strike twice in the same place? Science and common sense would say that the probability is minimal. But nevertheless…

In fact we can speak of three bolts of lightning, three air “accidents” that kill three cabinet members in a period of only six years and leave strategic national security ministries leaderless during the past two Partido Acción Nacional administrations, if we include the helicopter crash in which José Ramón Huerta, the public security minister in the previous administration of Vicente Fox (September 21, 2005), died. (more…)

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for November 11. See original here.]

by Víctor M. Quintana S.

It looked as though the elaborate operation, directed personally by the head of Public Safety for Ciudad Juárez, Lt. Col. Julián Leyzaola Pérez, submachine gun in hand, was for the purpose of taking on a group of bloody hit-men. But what happened at a downtown intersection in Juárez on Tuesday, November 1, was that municipal and traffic police repressed, with night-sticks, a demonstration by young people of the Frente Plural Ciudadano in remembrance of the victims of this “war” against organized crime. Several journalists and graphic reporters were also beaten and had their cameras confiscated. (more…)

[Translation of an article from Diario Tiempo of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for October 17, from an Agence France Presse dispatch. See original article here and related articles here, here and here.]

Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico – A proposal to create a document granting safe-conduct to Central Americans who enter Mexico on their way to the United States was offered by the governor of the Mexican state of Chiapas during a ministerial meeting of the Grupo de Tuxtla, made up of representatives of ten countries.

“We respectfully offer a proposal to create biometric identification, passports, official identification cards or some kind of document for entering our country and thus to combat the most despicable of businesses, which is the trafficking and dealing in persons,” said Juan Sabines, governor of the state of Chiapas, the capital of which is the site of the meeting, being held in preparation for a presidential summit planned for November. (more…)

((In a Canadian owned mine in Oaxaca -- La Jornada photo by María Meléndez Parada))

San Xavier and Blackfire said to have forced repeal of laws they had violated

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for September 15. See original here and related article by Mandeep Dhillon, mentioned below, here.]

Canadian mining companies are not only the prinicipal producers of gold in Mexico but are also those most often involved in social and legal conflicts. Currently, of the 279 foreign corporations involved in mining, 210 are Canadian, with concessions in 26 states.

The Canadian firm Goldcorp is the number one producer of gold and in 2010 it extracted 680,000 ounces in four mines. At the same time, Minera San Xavier, owned by New Gold, which operates in Cerro San Pedro, San Luis Potosí, without environmental permits, in that same year attained production valued at 145.6 million dollars, according to information from the Cámara Minera of Mexico. (more…)

“Brazil’s solutions won’t work for Mexico”

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for September 4. See original here.]

By Arturo Cano

The subject is Brazil, that “miracle” so admired by Mexicans of the left and the right, of the top and the bottom. And João Pedro Stédile, founder and leader of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST – Landless Workers’ Movement) of Brazil talks about it: “Mexicans think that we have solved all our problems and we haven’t even solved the soccer problem.”

Stédile has been in Mexico for only a few days now but he knows this country well because he was here a few decades ago as a graduate student in the Universidad Nacional. With that familiarity, he is surprised that Mexican governors and intellectuals never tire of talking about Brazil and Petrobras as models. “Don’t take us as a model for anything. You are okay here with the Under-17 [World Cup soccer games],” this white bearded man says laughingly, looking like a university professor, the descendant of Italian immigrants, born in Rio Grande do Sul where Brazilians, he agrees, look like Argentines and Uruguayans. (more…)

A demonstration against violence in Monterrey

[Translation of an editorial from El Faro of San Salvador for August 29. See original here. Atlántida is a state on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, best known as a luxury tourist attraction but recently also a center of drug trafficking and other organized crime, and of the violence that results.]

The recent attack on a casino in Monterrey, which left more than 50 dead, raised even higher the level of horror that drug trafficking gangs have unleashed in Mexico in their delivery of drugs to the United States.

President Felipe Calderón, besieged by a population fed up with so much bloodshed, pointed rightly toward the United States, asking that country to begin the task it has never been willing to take on: that of decreasing the drug use and toughening its control over the sale of fire arms. (more…)

Charges made before UN International Labor Organization

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for June 13. See original here. Pasta de Conchos, in the northern state of Coahuila, is the site of a coal mine in which an explosion in 2006 killed 65 miners. See more on the Pasta de Conchos mine here.]

Mexico City – Carlos Rodríguez Rivera, a member of the Organización Familia Pasta de Conchos (Pasta de Conchos Family Organization), submitted a charge to the [United Nations] International Labor Organization (ILO) that child labor in mines “for the purpose of lowering production costs” is common in Mexico.

While taking part in the World Day Against Child Labor, he explained that in the so-called pocitos [small pits] at coal mines children and youths who have not reached adult height are very useful because they can move through narrow spaces.

In addition, Rodríguez Rivera said, because of the shape of the mines it is easy to hide them when inspectors from the Secretariat of Labor appear and, of course, it is cheaper to hire them because they are paid less than adults.

Evidence of this is the case of 14-year-old Jesús Fernando Lara, who survived an accident in Pocito Tres of the Beneficios Internacionales del Norte mining operation in Sabinas, Coahuila, last May 3.

The young man, who has just turned 15, had one of his arms amputated as a result of the accident. In addition, they have proof that he was no longer studying mining as an occupation and that he was being paid 900 pesos a week.

Rodríguez Rivera also referred to the Ferber case, in which a mine was inspected in 2009. Several under-age miners worked there three years before being registered with social security at the age of 19.

He reported that the Organización Familia Pasta de Conchos has identified at least six locations inspected last year by the Secretariat of Labor and Social Security in which 15 youths between 14 and 17 years of age worked.

Carlos Rodríguez Rivera commented that all of this constitutes a flagrant violation of  ILO Convention 182, which Mexico has ratified.