It’s been two years since Rocío Mesino, environmental and human rights activist, was shot to death in broad daylight in the Mexican state of Guerrero while helping rebuild a community destroyed by a hurricane. It’s been two years of impunity, and a rise in violence against women human rights defenders, defensoras, in Mexico. Rocío is one of many defenders who lost her life for protecting others.
Thousands of people gathered at Mexico City’s symbolic Monument to the Revolution, demanding climate justice and respect for the environment in anticipation of the COP21 talks in Paris. A mix of environmental organizations, families and concerned citizens joined cities around the world, on Nov. 29 as world leaders from more than 190 countries arrived at the annual climate conference to discuss the current crisis and agree on plans to eradicate climate change.
Bishop Jesús Delgado, third in line from the Archbishop of El Salvador and the leader of the effort to canonize the martyr Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, has been suspended from all his functions in the Catholic Church after confessing to having sexually abused a nine-year-old girl.
The fact that Salvadorans form part of the mercenary armies operating in Yemen is an open secret. A military intelligence source from the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed to the Americas Program that there are 100 Salvadorans carrying out operations of that type in Yemen.
The defensoras, or women human rights defenders, embody courage every moment as systematic violence has broadened its target toward them as a way to disempower women activists, weaken movements for social change, and maintain the patriarchal, militarized Mexican State. Women human rights defenders risk their lives every day to create a Mexico where being a woman doesn’t inherently mean a doomed fate.
The wounds of war have still not healed in El Salvador. Twenty-three years after the peace treaty, victims of the armed conflict are still waiting for justice and looking for their missing loved ones.
The suspension of U.S. aid should indeed extend to all security aid to Mexico. Not only are serious cases of human rights violations piling up, but also because the militarized war on drugs model is in itself a violation of human rights.
Mexico just joined the growing list of countries that have moved towards legalization of marijuana. In a ruling last Thursday, the Supreme Court of Mexico granted injunctive relief to a group of four plaintiffs who had filed a complaint in 2013 requesting to be able to grow, transport and consume marijuana.
The mothers of Mexico’s disappeared have become experts in their own right—many have searched for their children on their own and have become the fiercest activists and critics of government impunity and state violence in Mexico.
In a virtually unprecedented development, labor protest is widening in the maquiladora industry of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. While worker dissatisfaction or protest is nothing new in the foreign-owned border factories that produce goods for export to the United States, previous manifestations of discontent in the generally union-free industry have usually been confined to one company at a time.
