Juarez Youth in Revolt

At least 20 individuals were killed in yet another bloody weekend in the Mexican murder capital of Ciudad Juarez. According to the AP, the deaths included seven people gunned down outside a small family party Saturday night. Local estimates now put Juarez's death toll at more than 2,600 this year, already surpassing 2009 homicide numbers (2,575 killed), according to a figures collected by the local television station XHIJ. As so many have written, the fear of violence continues to disrupt daily life in the border city. The AP:

“Few residents now venture out to bars and restaurants. And like those attacked on Saturday, others have discovered that they aren't even safe in their own homes: Last month, gunmen stormed two neighboring houses and massacred more than a dozen young people attending a party for a 15-year-old boy.”

Given this situation, recent student protests against the militarization of Ciudad Juarez are particularly noteworthy. The largest such protest came last week when over one thousand university students marched through the streets of Juarez (see an impressive video up at You Tube which documents the march) in response to the Oct. 29 shooting of student activist José Darío Alvarez Orrantia by the Federal Police. As independent journalist Kristin Bricker reported at the Huffington Post last week, that shooting occurred during the International Forum Against Militarization and Violence in Juarez, and just before Alvarez Orrantia was scheduled to speak on a panel about “Youthicide.”

Over the weekend, the nascent, and very vocal, student movement that is demanding social and economic improvements in Juarez, as well as the removal of the military, gained the renewed support of the Juarez human rights community. In a statement, rights groups, including the Centro de Derechos Humanos Paso del Norte, offered their full support to UACJ students while also demanding justice in the high profile shooting of Dario Alvarez.

As Frontera NorteSur puts it, the mass protests of last week represented “a university movement that hasn’t occurred in Ciudad Juarez since the beginning or middle of the 1980s.” “We are trying to find an exit,” one Juarez student activist tells the New Mexico State University-based news organization. “Nobody has a manual on how to survive a social war, on how to survive the war of a government that doesn’t want to listen, that doesn’t want to see what it is causing-especially in the young part of society.”

On the last part of that statement – the high price being paid by Mexico’s youth in the drug wars – TIME also reports over the weekend, suggesting that only when social issues like youth unemployment are resolved will violence begin to decline.

In other Mexico-related stories this weekend:

· The AP reports on the growing incursion by drug cartels on the distribution of basic services and government activities in various pockets around Mexico. The AP: “Not only do [cartels] maintain checkpoints and kill police or mayors to control territory, they now try to keep everyone from midlevel officials to delivery truck drivers and meter readers out of rural areas they use to transport drugs, stash weapons and kidnap victims, and hide from authorities. In the process, they are blocking deliveries of gasoline, pension checks, farm aid and other services to Mexicans.” The CS Monitor takes the story further, writing on the increased influence that organized crime has over Mexican politics. Alberto Aziz Nassif, a specialist in democracy and civil society at the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology in Mexico City says:

“Organized crime has not just penetrated police bodies but [also] government spaces at all levels.… It is one of the biggest problems complicating the fight against drug trafficking. There are no clear boundaries. The boundaries have been erased by corruption and impunity.”

· Mike O’Connor at Global Post says the Zetas have deepened their grip on power by establishing their own “public relations arm” which “issues stories the local papers are under orders to run.” In what Global Post says is the first such formal arrangement, Tamaulipas newspaper editor Marta Lopez is being obligated to publish press releases from the Zetas themselves, rather than conducting actual reporting.

· In Matamoros, reports on the killing of Gulf Cartel leader Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén by Mexican marines on Friday. In Guerrero, confirmation that the 18 bodies pulled from a mass grave in Acapulco are indeed those of Michoacan tourists who disappeared one month ago. [Two individuals have yet to be found]. And two reviews (New York Times and the Guardian) of veteran British journalist Ed Vulliamy’s latest book on the drug wars, Amexica.

· The CS Monitor says an attempt to crackdown on cartel activity in both Mexico and Colombia is sending the drug trade to the Dominican Republic, “the center of the Caribbean's drug-trafficking business and a turnstile for cocaine shipments reaching as far north as Massachusetts.” Approx. 10 percent of US cocaine and as much as 40 percent of European cocaine now passes through the Caribbean according to the report. And the balloon effect seems to be alive and well. Here’s Makila James, director of the US State Department's Office of Caribbean Affairs:

“As you are successful in [Mexico and Central America], you see drug trafficking pushed toward the Caribbean. Our partners in the region say crime is increasing at a rapid rate, and they're deeply concerned.”

· In Cuba, the “deadline” to release all 52 dissidents imprisoned in a 2003 crackdown came and went over the weekend. While most of the 52 were released after this summer’s deal brokered by the Catholic Church, 13 individuals have refused to accept the Cuban government’s conditions for release – namely accepting asylum in Spain. According to the BBC, the Ladies in White protested the unmet promise in Havana Sunday while Guillermo Farinas, the recent recipient of the EU’s top human rights prize, says he is prepared to restart his hunger strike as an act of protest.

· Other Cuba news in the major papers: the New York Times on US ballet performers who in Havana as part of a new wave of cultural exchanges between the US and Cuba. And, from the Miami Herald, a profile of Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski who traveled to Havana last week to attend the opening of the island’s first Catholic seminary since the 1959 Revolution began.

· Tim Rogers, for the Miami Herald, has a good report on the bizarre border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Also following the story closely, Boz on what role Google Maps may or may not have had in sparking the conflict.

· The New York Times’ Simon Romero has an interesting piece this weekend on a new wave of immigrants who are coming to Venezuela – just as many businessman and professionals are on their way out. Romero writes that “[M]any new immigrants” – merchants and laborers, in particular – “continue to arrive [in VZ] on tourist visas…drawn by incomes that are still higher than those in some of Venezuela’s neighbors and by a broad array of social welfare programs for the poor championed by Mr. Chávez’s government.” This has included nearby neighbors like Haitians and Colombians [some 4 million now live in VZ], as well as individuals from as far away as India, China, and the Middle East.

· Also on migration, IPS has a good report on the “tens of thousands” of Central American migrants who have disappeared during their journeys North. Among those missing, the Network of Committees of Migrants and Relatives of Honduras (Red COMIFAH) says some 800 Hondurans have disappeared in Mexico over the last decade. Red COMIFAH joined migrant rights activists from around the world in Mexico City over the weekend for the Alternative World Forum for Peoples in Movement, says IPS.

· The UNDP released its annual human development reports last week. Among Latin American and Caribbean countries, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Brazil were among the UNDP’s “Top Movers” (country’s who have made the greatest HDI gains since 1970).

· Haiti dodged the worst of Tropical Storm Tomas over the weekend, but flooding keeps worries about cholera very much in the forefront of public health officials’ concerns. Latest figures show just over 500 individuals have died from the disease thus far while nearly 7400 have been reported infected.

· In a long editorial over the weekend, the Washington Post strongly criticized the slow movement of international aid to Haiti, arguing that Washington and other donor countries have treated the Haiti as “a routine development task, akin to improving an irrigation system or extending rural electrification” – an approach which “makes no sense given the extent of ruination, the scale of needed reconstruction and the ongoing humanitarian suffering in Haiti.” Other weekend opinions in the major papers: Peter Hakim on Brazil and Dilma Rouseff, in the LA Times, and Mary Anastasia O’Grady with her take on Argentina and “Big Labor” after Nestor Kirchner.