By Tracy L. Barnett Seventeen years after 8-year-old Miguel Ángel López Rocha fell into the Santiago River and died from toxic poisoning, his death […]
Since 2006, Mexico has been living through a war known for its senselessness. The declaration of the war on drugs by former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) not only led the country into a cycle of violence and insecurity, but also marked the beginning of a process of militarization that has affected various sectors of society.
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was taken into custody by US officials in New Mexico on July 25. We still don’t really know what happened. We might never know.
The trial of Juan Orlando Hernández, once the seemingly untouchable and authoritarian president of Honduras, is officially set to begin on February 12 in New York.
“We are concerned about the family members, the impact of this tragedy, their state of health. The reparation of damage must be given to avoid re-victimization and stigmatization. For our part, we kept the investigation even when the crisis came in September 2022. But the refusal to provide information and the stubbornness weakened the investigation”, concluded Angela Buitrago.
Militarization, now institutionalized in the Constitution and in practice, extended for the next six years and quite possibly forever, is not just the latest bone of contention between political parties. It is an issue that has profound implications for Mexican society, democracy, security, gender equality and human rights. It has to be analyzed within the framework of these considerations, beyond the false and hypocritical positions of the political parties.
The news that the Mexican government had shut down operations of the elite DEA team in the country – the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) – provoked an avalanche of articles in the press, most of them defending the DEA in order to criticize the president. Hardly any of them spoke about the disastrous history of the Unit, much less about the perverse history and actions of the DEA in Mexico –and in all of Latin America. The agency has left a bloody trail of failures, incompliance with regulations, complicities and corruption in its mission to export the war on drugs as an instrument of social control and U.S. hegemony.
“The eyes don’t lie” repeats Ruth, a Salvadoran woman looking for her son in the city of Tijuana. She holds a large photograph of son Rafael, as two homeless men on the street watch her closely, searching their memories for a recollection of the face of the disappeared son. “He might have changed over the years, but the eyes don’t lie,” says the mother.
The brigades have unearthed hundreds of human remains and clues to the whereabouts of their loved ones, disappeared throughout Mexico. Their goal is to find them and return them to their families, and that in a context where the state and a large part of society have buried their very existence.
If this announcement, like previous ones, is merely a way of marking rhetorical distance from the U.S. government without charting a completely different and sovereign national security policy, we´ll be where we started–with uncontrolled violence in many parts of the country.
