Mexico’s transition from the 20th century authoritarian state of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to an uncertain democracy has been a bloody affair. And it continues to be in the 2012 electoral year.
Por Kent Paterson La campaña para las elecciones federales en México comenzó oficialmente el pasado 30 de marzo, pero podría decirse que la contienda […]
Mexico’s federal election campaign officially kicked off March 30, but the contest arguably began in earnest days earlier when Pope Benedict XVI visited the right-wing stronghold of Guanajuato state. In a story worthy of Mexican surrealism, the daily La Jornada chronicled how all the presidential candidates joined with hundreds of thousands of people in the town of Silao to welcome the leader of an institution that is officially prohibited from participating in politics.
This post is also available in English Por Kent Paterson La historia no ha sido amable con los indígenas Rarámuri del estado norteño mexicano […]
History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.
The Dec. 11 slayings of students Jorge Alexis Herrera and Gabriel Echeverria de Jesus in Guerrero revived scenes from the Dirty War of the 1960s and 1970s, and added names to a modern-day list of dead, disappeared, tortured and wounded activists across Mexico.
Wages that have less buying power than in China, “temporary” work contracts, firings to undermine labor organizing, and phantom “unions” are just a few of the day-to day realities experienced by Mexican electronic workers,
Activistas mexicanos por los derechos humanos han emitido una solicitud de emergencia para aplicar estándares humanitarios internacionales en la provisión de auxilio a más de 150 refugiados -incluidos al menos 77 niños- que ha acampado en las montañas del sur de México por más de un mes. “No se puede negar que México está atravesando una situación de violencia en la cual los grupos armados de civiles (crimen organizado) siembran terror y muerte, provocando la huída de familias enteras para no ser asesinadas”, manifiesta una declaración de tres grupos de derechos humanos.
Mexican human rights activists have issued an emergency appeal to apply international humanitarian standards in providing relief to more than 150 refugees- including at least 77 children-who have been camped out in the mountains of southern Mexico for more than a month.
In the late 20th Century, a large commercial chile industry boomed in the southern part of the state near the Mexican border, drawing in thousands of immigrant farmworkers who earned a seasonal if precarious living from hand-picking the spicy pods that delighted connoisuers everywhere. Nowadays, the fortunes of New Mexico’s cherished chile crop are on the downside. Just ask Jose Rocha. A veteran farmworker with nearly four decades of experience in the fields of New Mexico and the US, Rocha says he once worked “first class fields” in a wide swath of the borderland chile-growing belt.
Global trade and investment patterns, coupled with mechanization, are at the root of the troubles of Jose Rocha and his fellow workers.
