Today, Global Workers accompanied Bernardo Bautista, Director of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, FIOB, and FIOB staff member Isabel Reyes, to a couple of mountain communities to conduct interviews with migrant workers as part of the Jornaleros project. It turned out that the workers were not H-2A agricultural workers, but had worked on the H-2B visa planting pine trees in the Southern U.S. Although information on H-2B is not entered into the database of the Jornaleros project, it is still important to identify cases of labor exploitation. In this case, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization Global Workers often partners with, had recently won a $2.75 Million against Superior Forestry on behalf of these workers.
Today, the executive committee of the project Jornaleros met for a daylong meeting. The committee is comprised of two representatives of each of the four entities, Human Mobility Commission of the Catholic Church, CITA, United Farm Workers, and Global Workers.
A major point on the agenda was to prepare for the upcoming meeting in September, which will bring together all of the defenders for an evaluation of the two months pilot project. Already, field investigator have been collecting data on H-2A migrant workers that have worked in the United States, categorizing the labor violations and abuses that most commonly occur with Mexican recruiters.
The second day of the Indigenous conference, Griselda and Bernardo listened to several specific examples of U.S. lawyers, both private and public, that successfully defended the rights of members of indigenous communities. First, a private attorney discussed how language was the primary reason a Guatemalan indigenous woman of Mayan Mam descent had her parental rights terminated. The court assumed she spoke Spanish. When she was unable to follow-through with the court-designated parenting plan, prepared in Spanish, at which point she was deported, the Court decided that it was in the best interest of the children to stay in the US and lead a better life, than returning to Guatemala with their mother. The lawyers were able to regain custody of her children, and establish the precedent that immigration status should not be a basis for terminating parental rights. It was also decided that a state agency has the obligation to provide legal documentation, such as parenting plans in the parent’s native language.
Some legal services lawyers from
The conference was a good opportunity for both Global Workers and its Defender to hear about what is happening in both the US and Mexico, since Global Workers Defender Network primarily works in the part of Mexico with the highest number of indigenous communities in Mexico . We were happy to discuss our work and network with the larger community of advocates, at both the national and transnational level, all in the hopes of providing better services to such an underserved community. Global Workers hopes that this meeting is the beginning of many productive collaborations.
In order to learn about the deteriorating security situation, Dirk had a meeting with the staff member in charge of security at the UN Refugee Agency in Mexico ACNUR, a UN entity that assists human trafficking victims from Asia and migrants from Central America. ACNUR maintains an office in Tapachula at the border to Mexico. He held another meeting with the director of the international desk at Centro ProDDHH, a Mexican human rights organization that takes cases to the Inter American Court for Human Rights.
Griselda, the Attorney-Mexico Program Director, joined by Oaxaca Global Workers’ Defender, Bernardo Ramirez of FIOB, attended “La defensa de los indigenas mexicanos y centroamericanos en los Estados Unidos de America – el caso del estado de Washington,” or “The Defense of Mexican and Central American Indigenous Communities in the U.S.A. – the case of Washington State.” About 80 people attended the conference, which focused on discussing the challenges and obstacles of defending the rights of these indigenous communities in both Mexico and the U.S. On the first day representatives from the
In the meantime, Dirk met with the human rights official at the German embassy informing them about the work of Global Workers. The embassy maintains strong ties with the Mexican human rights community, for instance, traveling that week to Aula, Guerrero to attend a hearing against Raul Hernandez, an Amnesty International recognized prisoner of conscience who is deliberately framed for defending the rights of indigenous people.
Most of the day was spent travelling back to Mexico City, an overland trip of about 7-8 hours. At night, Griselda and Dirk met for dinner with Global Workers’ board member, Patricia Pineda, a Mexican Labor Attorney. As of late, the independence of unions and their right to bargain collectively has been put in jeopardy, because of Mexican President Calderón’s intervention in the process of how unions select their leaders. The case of the National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Allied Workers is currently under review by the Mexican Supreme Court. Global Workers submitted a “letter of interest” in support of an amicus curiae on the union’s behalf union’s case.
Centro Morelos, a Global Workers’ Defender in Guerrero , located in Chiapas. It is the capital of the Region Centro, one of seven administrative entities in the state of Guerrero. Chiapas was once an important trading post, bigger than Acapulco or Chilpancingo, but today is a rather sleepy mid-size town surrounded by small rural hamlets where people survive by subsistence farming and producing local crafts. As of late, however, it has become a central focus of Mexico’s war on drugs, an effort hugely supported by the U.S.’s Merida Initiative, a multi-billion dollar, multi-year program that fights Mexico’s major drug trafficking organizations and has cost the lives of 28,000 people. For the last six months, Chiapas was heavily militarized, with state police and military roadblocks in and outside the city. Because of Chilapa’s strategic significance, which allows easy entry and exit to the surrounding mountains, drug laboratories began operating within the city limits that refine coca paste shipped from Colombia into cocaine powder.
It is in this atmosphere of fear and militarization that Centro Morelos is conducting its investigations of human rights violations. Today, Griselda and Dirk accompanied two of Centro Morelos’ Jornaleros researchers to a small town outside of Chilapa to interview H-2A workers. For the last four years, a number of workers from this area have been travelling to Yuma and Salina, Arizona to work in the seasonal harvest of lettuce. It became evident during the interview that these workers were dealing with an exceptional employer, since year after year he provided the requirements as the H-2A program stipulates. Aside from minor infractions, such as failing to present the workers with pamphlets in Spanish and neglecting to put the company’s address on the worker’s paystub, the workers had no complaints about being charged illegally for any service or a lack of proper living conditions. It was greatly surprising to hear of such an example, because our experience tells us that this is certainly the exemption to the rule. Many workers simply suffer the abuses in order to be able to work in the U.S.
Attorney-Mexico Program Director, Griselda Vega, and Program Assistant, Dirk Ewers travelled today to Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero. The two are conducting a follow-up visit on the SAFE-Jornaleros project. Jornaleros is a three-year investigation of H-2A agricultural guestworker recruitment abuses in Mexico. Researchers began collecting data in July 2010. A preliminary evaluation will be conducted in September before the project gets fully on its way in seven different states.
Guerrero, located in the Southwest is one of Mexico’s 31 States. Though most famous for its tourist destination, Acapulco, Guerrero is one of the most conflictive states in Mexico. It is here where social and political movement took their roots, where the opposition party, PRD (Partido Revolutionario Democrático) won its first governorship and where brutal state suppression and human rights violations, in the form of forced disappearances and torture, are common scenarios for human rights defenders of Guerrero.
The day was spent with meetings, introducing the project to organizations that work on migrant issues in Mexico and learn more about the unsettling security situation in Mexico. Recent security incidents included the killing of a candidate for the governorship in Tamaulipas, the assassination of a journalist in Michoacán, and most disturbingly the failed attempt to abduct migrants in two trucks at a migrant shelter. A group of armed men in uniforms arrived in two large trucks, blocking the access street to the shelter and loading migrants onto the vehicles. The incident was widely covered in the media but the identity of the armed actors is still unknown.
Griselda and Dirk me with Valeria Scorza, the Executive Director of ProDESC (Proyecto de Derechos Economicos, Sociales y Culturales, A.C.). ProDESC focuses on human and labor right violations of migrants in Mexico. The meeting was an exchange of information on current projects,. Global Workers told ProDesc about the Jornaleros SAFE project, and ProDESC , the CDM (Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc.).
During a meeting with members of Peace Brigades International – Mexico, an international non-profit organization that provides physical and political accompaniment to NGOs in Oaxaca and Guerrero, we learned that organized criminal groups act with impunity in most of the country, oftentimes with the collaboration and tacit approval of local governments, combined with a widespread hand-off approach by the federal government. Implementing a security strategy for the three-year long Jornaleros SAFE project that covers seven states in ten regions and the participation of a number of groups that already face a high level of risk because of their work in human rights, will surely be one of the greater challenges.
While in Mexico City, the Global Workers team met with other organizations that work on migration-related issues and attended several presentations. Mexico has been suffering from a wave of kidnappings that extort payments from relatives in the United States, but the depth and extent on how it affects migrants from Central America became evident during a presentation of a new report on “Violations of Human Rights of Central American Migrants” that Dirk attended at the Center for Protection of Human Rights (Prodh).
For some years, violent extortion schemes by organized crime in Mexico that extort ransom from relatives in the U.S. have become a lucrative business “Kidnappings in Mexico send shivers across the border,” NYT, 05/01/09). Unbeknownst to the U.S. public, however, the kidnapping infrastructure south of the border systematically also preys on the vulnerable population of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Mexican federal agents contribute their part by violently pulling migrants from trains, to deliver them en masse to safe houses where criminal elements then torture, rape and kill. An estimated $50 million dollars is extorted yearly from relatives in the U.S., most of this money sent via Western Union. In April of this year, Amnesty International documented this human rights crisis in Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico. And today, the Diocesis of Saltillo, Humanidad sin Fronteras and Fronteras con Justicia published its sixth report on the situation of human rights of migrants in transit through Mexico. Approximately, 18,000 such kidnappings occurred in 2009. Dirk spent the rest of the day, investigating postal and monetary services in Mexico, information that will be incorporated into a manual Global Worker’s is drafting to assist U.S. advocates to send correspondence and settlement monies to their clients who have returned to Mexico
Griselda attended an Organizing Committee meeting of the People’s Global Action on Migration and Development, and Human Rights Forum (PGA) at the office of the Instituto de Estudio y Divulgación Sobre Migración A.C. (INEDIM). The Committee is charged with the coordination and organization of the PGA’s programming for the 3-day forum being held in Mexico City, Mexico on November 3-5, 2010. The in-person meeting was attended by all the Committee members, along with the newly hired Forum Director, Jorge Romero, and the head of the Mexico Working Group for the forum, Fabienne Venet. The meeting was very productive and they decided on concrete next steps to solicit workshop proposals from the public, and to involve the public in the various pre-forum workshops that will take place leading up to the November forum.
The next meeting took Griselda to Sin Fronteras, an NGO that focuses on migration within Mexico. As part of our coalition building Global Workers always makes an effort to meet with groups that work with migrants and have a strong presence in the local communities. She met with two of the staff attorneys to discuss current and upcoming projects, and the potential for future collaboration.
In order to turn the theory into practical use, the second day of the training integrated interactive participation into the agenda, including a role-play that showed a local Mexican official offering work visas and in turn getting kickbacks from the workers. Later, interviewers acted out a variety of field investigation scenarios, thereby testing out a questionnaire created for the project. Finally, the defenders headed back to their communities, while executive committee members stayed for another round of meetings to finalize the steps for the ensuing months. Follow-up reunions are planned for mid-September to evaluate the first two-months of the project.
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