Tag Archives: Mexico

Bloody Crackdown on Mexican Teachers Spurs Crisis

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  • [Latest News:  200,000 Mexican doctors plan to join the teachers on strike, on June 22: ”
    Doctors’ leaders have condemned the killing of at least eight people during a teacher’s protest last Sunday in the state of Oaxaca.

    As protests led by the militant CNTE teachers’ union in Mexico continue, the country’s doctors are set to join in the job action, calling for a national strike on June 22 to protest a neoliberal reform to the health system imposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto…..The group #YoSoyMedico17, which is comprised of doctors, pediatricians, surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses, has been joined by more than 200,000 physicians from 32 states in opposing the so-called Universal Health System reform by Peña Nieto. The medical professionals say the measure is a “disguised way of privatizing health in Mexico,” and said doctors were not consulted on the reform, according to Animal Politico…..The doctors’ protest will join the ongoing national general strike by teachers. (Report from Telesur)]

    Policemen clashing with dissident teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, June 19, 2016.

    Policemen clashing with dissident teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, June 19, 2016. | Photo: EFE

Special Report from Oaxaca by Frontera NorteSur,  June 21, 2016

The June 19 government crackdown on striking Mexican teachers culminated in deadly violence in the southern state of Oaxaca, transforming a showdown between the Pena Nieto administration and the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) into a larger political crisis that once again cast Mexico in the international human rights spotlight.

Even as the controversy over the still-unresolved forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa college students in 2014 simmers on the world stage, the Oaxaca episode garnered fresh denunciations from non-governmental organizations and activists in Europe, South and Central America, Australia, and the United States.  Jan Jarab, Mexico representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, condemned the latest violence.

Weeks of intensifying protests against federal government’s 2013 education reform, which many public school teachers and their supporters oppose as an infringement on labor rights and a step toward privatization, took a violent turn Sunday, June 19, when federal and state police attempted to dislodge CNTE members and supporters from the town of Nochixtlan, Oaxaca. Continue reading →

US Border Patrol troops’ free-fire zone over borders

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[Once, when a country attacked another by force of arms, it was called WAR, and human rights violations were identified as WAR CRIMES.  Now, as the US shoots Mexicans in Mexico, it is called an approved, acceptable, police action.  It is another obscenity of arrogance and impunity.  Frontlines ed.]

mexico

US border patrol agent looks towards Mexico from the bank of the Rio Grande River. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

US border agents shouldn’t have the courts’ permission to shoot people in Mexico

If you shoot an unarmed teenage boy in the head, 3 days of administrative leave isn’t nearly enough punishment

Guinevere E. Moore, The Guardian (UK), Tuesday 28 April 2015

A United States court has all but declared open season on Mexican nationals along the US-Mexico border. Border patrol agents may shoot foreign nationals in Mexico with impunity – provided that those at whom they aim are standing within feet of US territory.

According to a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last week, agents who shoot and kill people in Mexico while standing on US soil will never be held to account, except before their administrative agencies. No court will ever review these actions and the families of the victims will be left with no avenue for justice. An agent’s actions will not be governed or restrained by the constitution nor subject to review by US courts.

This isn’t a hypothetic situtation: all of this has already happened.

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Missouri museum censors Ferguson-Mexico solidarity event for including Palestinians

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[Editor:  This article focuses on the St Louis museum officials decision to censor and cancel an event which linked up the resistance to oppression in Ferguson, Mexico, and Palestine.  The action highlighted the standard reactionary response to all protests which reveal the hand of oppressive systems–reactionaries always try to turn protests inward, to break the linkages between common experiences, to make every voice follow the line of narrow self-interest and keep things contained to single-issue orientation.  But those who are repressed or find issues suppressed always seek more.  As one student spoke out against the Missouri museum, “When I heard that they were canceling the panel, I thought it was even more important to come out to voice the fact that we know this is wrong and we can still be united even if we don’t attend a panel,”one student said…..She also said she believed that comparing the various situations would be helpful in making progress toward social justice and unifying people of different races and backgrounds…..“I think obviously there are differences on each one, but it only makes us weaker to divide them, and I think we’re stronger if we find the similarities instead of focus[ing] on the differences between the events,” she added.” — Censorship will fail, as issues, and their linkages, continue to grow. — Frontlines ed.]

electronicintifada.com, 03/20/2015 

https://i0.wp.com/www.stl-psc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Ferguson-to-Palestine.jpgThe Missouri History Museum in St. Louis canceled a community event scheduled for Thursday after organizers refused to remove Palestinian panelists from the platform.

The panel, titled “From Ferguson to Ayotzinapa to Palestine: Solidarity and Collaborative Action,” was organized by the Washington University student group AltaVoz to draw parallels between the struggles against state violence in the US, Mexico and Palestine.

https://i2.wp.com/electronicintifada.net/sites/electronicintifada.net/files/styles/large/public/march_4_image.png

Missouri History Museum’s webpage, before they cancelled the event

AltaVoz was formed in response to the police kidnapping of 43 leftist student activists from the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college in Mexico. The students, who went missing in the city of Iguala while on their way to protest the state’s corrupt education policies, are believed to have been murdered.

Among the panelists were activists from an assortment of social justice organizations in St. Louis, including the Organization for the Black Struggle, Latinos en Axion STL, the Interfaith Committee on Latin America and the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee.

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Mexico and US actions link Ayotzinapa, Ferguson, Garner

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Weekly News Update on the Americas, December 9, 2014

Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and other activists held actions in at least 47 US towns and cities on Dec. 3 to protest the abduction of 43 teachers’ college students by police and gang members in Mexico’s Guerrero state in September; each of the 43 students had one of the actions dedicated to him.

The protests were organized by UStired2, a group taking its name from #YaMeCansé (“I’m tired now,” or “I’ve had it”), a Mexican hashtag used in response to the violence against the students, who attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa. The protesters focused on US government financing for the Mexican government—especially funding for the “war on drugs” through the 2008 Mérida Initiative—but they also expressed outrage over the US court system’s failure to indict US police agents in two recent police killings of unarmed African Americans. Continue reading →

Rage and Fury Sweep Mexico, the World: Justice for Ayotzinapa

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By Frontera NorteSur, Censored News, Friday, October 10, 2014

Swelling outrage over a police massacre and the forced disappearance of scores of students swept Mexico and the world this week.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators demanded justice for six people killed September 26 and 27 by municipal police officers and paramilitary gunmen in Iguala, Guerrero, as well as the safe return of 43 Mexican students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa reported kidnapped and disappeared by the same aggressors.

“Your dignified rage is our rage,” stated a communiqué from the general command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), shortly before 20,000 masked Zapatistas staged a silent march October 8 through the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

On the other side of the country, hundreds of people marched in Ciudad Juarez in the biggest local demonstration of its kind in more than three years. The demonstration was led by students from Ayotzinapa’s sister school of Saucillo, Chihuahua. At the march’s conclusion protesters blockaded the Bridge of the Americas connecting Juarez with neighboring El Paso, Texas, for a half-hour on the evening of October 8.

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Mexico: Students Walk Out In Mass Protest Over Curriculum Changes

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[The declining quality and conditions of education are being challenged throughout the world–from Puerto Rico, to Brazil, to Jadavpur University in India, students in Hong Kong, Colorado, many places.  What spurs people into action at each location differs, but they all turn into challenges to a bourgeois electoral system that cuts short on meeting the needs and interests of students.  Here, the latest from Mexico. — Frontlines ed.]

9/25/2014

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About 15,000 Students or more from the National Polytechnic Institute marched on the Interior Circuit northbound to the Zacatenco unit, to address the Directorate General of IPN.

On Thursday, the Unity Professional Interdisciplinary Engineering and Social and Administrative Sciences ( UPIICSA ) joined the strike along with the College of Engineering and Architecture (ESIA ).

From an early hour, students from different campuses CECYT concentrated outside various schools to join the mobilization.

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Israel’s Colonial Conquest at Mexican Book Fair Draws Protests

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Protest Israel’s honoured status at FIL!

Published on 12 November 2013
Written by Connie Hackbarth, Alternative Information Center (AIC)

 Israel was selected as guest of honour at the 2013 Guadalajara International Book Fair/Image: fil.com.mxIsrael was selected as guest of honour at the 2013 Guadalajara International Book Fair/Image: fil.com.mx

Mexico’s Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), slated for 30 November – 8 December, selected Israel as its guest of honour for this year’s event. A hasbara dream for Israel, the fair’s guest of honour “brings to the city its publishing industry and literary presence, as well as the best of its culture, including the performing and visual arts, music, cinema, gastronomy and folklore.” “Each night,” the Fair’s website notes “the Guest of Honour offers a performance at FIL’s Foro as well as several performing venues throughout the city that host events in an effort to display and achieve a transforming experience for the public.”

Prominent intellectuals in Mexico publicly condemned the selection of Israel as guest of honour, writing in the Mexican press that the creation of Israel “caused the tragedy of the Palestinian people, condemned to exile, oppression and dispossession…Coexistence was replaced by a state founded on ethnic and cultural exclusion which has denied the legitimate right of the Palestinians to a state and a territory.”

Signatories of the statement include Néstor Braunstein, an Argentine exile in Mexico and one of Latin America’s most prominent psychoanalysts, and Margit Frenk, the daughter of Jewish German refugees in Mexico and world expert in Spanish literature and Miguel Cervantes. 

Israel understands the importance of this honoured position, which according to fair organisers has over the years “consolidated the Book Fair’s international and multicultural character.” Israeli President Shimon Peres himself will be present to open the Israeli pavilion.

Statement signatories requested that a “pluralistic and representative roundtable on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” be conducted during this year’s fair, and that Palestine be invited as the honoured guest in 2015. It is unclear at this stage if the fair organisers have responded positively to this public request.

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