A prominent Mexican activist has emerged from more than four years in hiding to seek asylum. América del Valle arrived at the Venezuelan Embassy in Mexico City Wednesday to ask the South American nation to take her in as a political refugee. Del Valle – along with other members of her family – gained national recognition for leading a fight against land expropriation for the construction of an international airport in the town of San Salvador Atenco. The battle played out in both the streets and in the courts and became a symbolic victory for the power of popular organization in Mexico. But in May of 2006, federal, state, and local police cracked down on the town and its land defense activists – arresting more than 200 people and killing 2 others.

América del Valle was the only leader of Atenco’s land defense movement to evade capture and has been living underground ever since, facing the same “kidnapping” charges that resulted in a 112 year prison sentence for her father, Ignacio del Valle. While she has not made any public appearance, América del Valle has periodically sent letters and audio recordings like this one recently played at a rally to demand a favorable Supreme Court ruling for the 12 Atenco activists who remain in prison.

“The freedom for Atenco and all social movements and fighters is in a decisive moment. Finally, after 4 years on a torturous judicial path, the case of our twelve brothers is before the Supreme Court who can rule on their upcoming release. And what comes out of this case will affect other political prisoners and other social fighters also accused of kidnapping for being in the crosshairs of the oppressors.”

América del Valle’s mother, Trinidad Ramírez went to see her daughter yesterday in the Venezuelan Embassy and described the experience in this morning’s edition of the Mexican newscast, “Hoy por Hoy”.

“She told me she was no longer willing to continue living in the situation she’s been living in for more than 4 years – in hiding and with the uncertainty of knowing that she could be detained at any moment. And she told me ‘I’ve made this decision, mama and the only thing I’m asking right now’ – and she said this with tears in her eyes – ‘is that you support me and that you support this decision because otherwise, I won’t feel good about it’. She went on to explain her situation to me and of course, of course I support my daughter. And well, I was finally able to hug her and I was so happy in that moment. We were able to cry together and to speak a little about the many things that we haven’t been able to say to each other in more than 4 years.”

In a letter released yesterday, América del Valle said that while she’s leaving, she not giving up. She also thanked the people who protected and hid her over the years, saying “I don’t have anything to pay you with except my struggle and my strength”. The government of Venezuela is expected to need some time to decide on her petition for asylum.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling on the fate of the 12 Atenco prisoners by the end of the month.

The call for the second aid caravan to the town of San Juan Copala came just days after paramilitaries opened fire on a convoy of human rights defenders, teachers, activists, international observers, and reporters. The April 27th ambush killed a prominent Mexican activist and a Finnish observer.

A second aid caravan to San Juan Copala is due to leave Mexico City on Monday evening. Organizers say 350 people have signed up to participate and deliver 13 tons of donated aid.

The paramilitary group accused of perpetrating the April attack has been linked to the PRI, the party that has ruled Oaxaca without interruption for the past 80 years. Survivors of the first caravan say no police investigators have contacted them for their eyewitness accounts of the ambush.

Members of the European Parliament have called on the government of Mexico to guarantee the safety of next week’s caravan. A leading Congressman who is planning to participate says requests for security guarantees made to the Oaxaca state government have gone unanswered.

In Mexico, a “municipality” has the same political status as a county seat. Yosoyuxi is located within the territory of the 3 year-old self-declared autonomous municipality.

Timoteo Alejandro Ramírez and his wife, Cleriberta Castro, ran a small store in the front portion of their home. According to a press release from the autonomous municipal authorities, eyewitnesses saw men in a 3-ton truck pull up to the store front run by the couple under the guise of selling merchandise. Ramírez and Castro were found dead later by a neighbour.

San Juan Copala has been blockaded by paramilitaries since November of 2009. Teachers were refused re-entry into the town in January. On April 27, paramilitaries opened fire on an international humanitarian aid caravan travelling to the besieged area. Two people died and at least 3 others suffered gunshot wounds.

Members of the Triqui autonomy movement (MULT-I) have been camped out in Mexico City’s main square since May 3rd, calling for an end to the paramilitary blockade of San Juan Copala and for official action against the perpetrators of violent crimes against supporters of the autonomy movement. They are calling for a march in Mexico City this afternoon and have announced a second humanitarian caravan scheduled to arrive in San Juan Copala on June 8th.

Francisco López Bárcenas, an academic who has written extensively about Triqui history, traces the current crisis back to the 1940s when the government withdrew recognition of San Juan Copala’s status as a county seat municipality – Mexico’s only political district with a distinctly Triqui identity.

“The municipal county seat is the base upon which the political structure of Mexican society is organized” explains López Bárcenas. “They were divided among 4 districts and dismembered politically, but that’s not all. The army was sent in and stayed from 1940 to about 1999″.

The military campaign aganst the Triquis was particularly harsh and included an aerial bombardment of their territory in 1956. Francisco López Bárcenas says it’s the only bombardment he’s aware of in post-revolutionary Mexico prior to the Zapatista uprising of 1994.

The division of the Triqui Nation among 4 political districts has also reduced Triqui control over their territory’s natural wealth, including forests, rich farmlands, water, and minerals.

The author says that in the past few decades the state government has created organizations to dominate the Triquis; “One of them is the organization accused of perpetrating the ambush, The Union for the Social Well-Being of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) which was created in 1994″. The UBISORT paramilitary group was founded some months after Mayan rebels in the neighbouring state of Chiapas launched an uprising for indigenous self-determination.

Another major player in the Triqui conflict is the MULT; the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle. The group formed to resist local political bosses and landlords but repeated assassinations of its leadership has weakened the organization. Fighting turned inward with MULT and UBISORT mutually accused of murdering each other’s members.

It was in this context that the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala was born. Residents of the town include former members of both adversarial groups who decided to form a new organization and focus on self-determination and autonomy. The reaction has been violent, with targeted assassinations of Copala residents and a physical blockade of the town, home to at least 700 people.

Daniel Arellano, a Oaxaca City activist who survived last week’s ambush with minor injuries, says the purpose of the caravan was to break the siege and document the situation. “For the past 5 months the community of San Juan Copala has been held incommunicado, under siege by paramilitaries, without clean water, without electricity, without teachers – because they had to leave, without a doctor – because he abandoned them” says Arellano, “Every night paramilitaries fire shots into the town and this situation persists because people don’t understand or have information about what is happening there”.

Demonstrations to protest the paramilitary ambush on the aid caravan and to demand justice for the two dead were held over the weekend in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and in several European and US cities.

“We ask that all the attention awakened by the murder of our two friends be shifted to the situation of grave humanitarian crisis in San Juan Copala” says ambush survivor David Venegas. He hid in the bush for two days after the attack with two journalists and a wounded friend. While all persons who went missing in the attack have been accounted for, Venegas says the town of San Juan Copala remains surrounded by paramilitaries. Another survivor of the attack, Gabriela Jimenez, said the armed men who captured her bragged of having protection from the state governor.

Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz publicly denies having ties to the UBISORT paramilitaries or that the ambush was an incident of electoral violence. In an impromptu press conference this weekend, he said the conflict in the Triqui region “has been going on for more than 40 years” and that it’s “an issue that goes beyond elections”. The governor has also called into question why international observers were in the region and asked that the National Immigration Institute investigate foreigners who “come here to cause problems”.

The PRI ruling party has dominated state politics for 80 years and has fired up the formidable party machinery in favor of its gubernatorial candidate, Eviel Perez Magaña. A number of political opponents and their family members have already met violent deaths this election season in the Northern Cuenca region and along the Pacific Coast.

The April 27th attack on a caravan carrying human rights defenders, activists, international observers, and journalists has prompted concern that even more extreme incidents could occur ahead of the July 4th elections.

They had run into a canyon and hid with Oaxacan activists David Venegas and Noe Bautista. The two activists emerged Thursday afternoon with videotaped evidence that the reporters had not been killed in the hail of bullets that riddled both sides of their car.

An official search and rescue operation found the reporters not far from the crime scene. Both reporters are receiving treatment for dehydration. David Cilia also has two gunshot wounds.

Human rights organizations and pro-autonomy activists are marching this afternoon in Oaxaca City to call world attention to the situation in San Juan Copala, the town where the aid caravan was headed.

The indigenous town has been harassed by paramilitary forces since it declared autonomy more than 3 years ago. More recently the paramilitaries sealed the town off completely, blockading the only access road and severing communication and electrical lines. Paramilitaries who briefly held caravan survivors hostage expressed they were ready to move into the town and take it over with violence.

In a 7 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a recently reformed internal policy of the Attorney General’s office that limits the National Human Rights Commission’s access to case files. The wording of the new policy allows the Mexican equivalent of the Justice Department to deny human rights investigators access to information that could “put ongoing investigations or the security of persons at risk”. The Attorney General’s Office itself will determine which case files meet the criteria for denial.

The National Human Rights Commission argued the policy restricting their oversight of the federal law enforcement agency was unconstitutional.  The Commission published a report earlier this month in which the Attorney General’s Office ranked second only to the Armed Forces in citizen complaints of human rights abuses.

Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling is the second in as many weeks to restrict the scope of the federally-funded human rights ombudsman’s office. Last week, the high court ruled that the National Human Rights Commission can only cite the Constitution – and not international law – in legal challenges.

(From the March 10, 2010 broadcast of Free Speech Radio News)

Non-governmental groups can still work on human rights cases based on international law, but the exclusion of publicly-funded institutions from this type of work is significant.

The founding of government-funded human rights institutions in Mexico was a requirement of the North American Free Trade agreement – or NAFTA. Supporters of NAFTA often cited this “watchdog” requirement to argue that the trade agreement would improve the human rights situation in Mexico.

A report published by Mexico’s Human Rights Commission shows that close to 10,000 migrants were kidnapped for ransom in Mexican territory between September 2008 and February 2009. That’s an average of 50 kidnappings a day for 6 months. The commission based its statistics on information provided by migrant shelters, migrant testimonies, press accounts, and legal records, while noting that the actual dimensions of the kidnapping problem are likely much larger.

More than half of the nearly 10,000 kidnappings documented by the National Human Rights Commission occurred in the southern states of Veracruz and Tabasco.

Friar Blas Alvarado, who runs a migrant shelter in the southern border town of Tenosique, Tabasco, said the commission’s statistics are just the tip of the iceberg because his shelter has had “hundreds more cases that we haven’t documented or reported because, at this point, we don’t know where to take them”. He says he doesn’t trust the National Human Rights Commission to do anything beyond crunch numbers and that he doesn’t trust any other government agency because “they know very well – and have known for a long time – where these crimes are taking place, and they don’t do anything”.

Ties to organized crime

Migrant kidnappings in Tabasco and Veracruz are mostly attributed to the “Zetas” organized crime group. Friar Blas Alvarado says officials take no action against kidnappers either out of fear or because they are in collusion with the criminals. “The Zetas started out trafficking drugs and weapons, then got into kidnapping…and now they’ve taken over smuggling the undocumented. There used to be groups of coyotes that worked almost like independent contractors. Now, they’re all controlled by the Zetas.”

The Zetas group is often referred to as the paramilitary wing of the Gulf Cartel. Beyond controlling organized crime activities in the southern states of Tabasco and Veracruz, the Zetas have also tried to muscle their way into migrant smuggling and kidnapping in Oaxaca.

Running a gauntlet of dangers

Reaching the United States as an undocumented Central American has never been easy. Countless migrants have sustained permanent injuries while jumping onto – or falling off of – the freight trains that provide free transportation north. Corrupt Mexican authorities are notorious for giving the undocumented the choice between deportation or paying a bribe. And the well-worn migration paths are habitual targets of highway robbers. But a new danger has emerged in the past 3 years; that of kidnapping migrants for ransom.

The most highly trafficked migration routes in Mexico are the railways that carry freight from one end of the country to the other. In the busy seasons, each train can carry hundreds of migrants – riding on top of or in between the cars.

That’s how Jose Gabriel Aguirre was traveling when he and others were attacked near the state line between Oaxaca and Chiapas by armed men in military uniforms.

Father Alejandro Solalinde, who runs the migrant shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca, urged Jose Gabriel to file an official complaint to document his case and solicit a visa to cross Mexico legally…but the young Salvadoran didn’t anticipate the grinding pace of Mexican bureaucracy.

Jose Gabriel said he “never imagined it would take so long” to process his paperwork and that “there comes a time when one becomes impatient and wants to just leave”.

The time involved in filing a formal legal complaint is dissuasive to many migrants who just want to reach their destination as quickly as possible.

Food and shelter as bait

Church-run shelters in Mexico are crucial to migrant safety. In the areas without shelters, migrants are vulnerable to attack while sleeping in the open, waiting for the train, or searching for food. Exhaustion and hunger in these unprotected areas can make an invitation for a hot meal in private home very appealing…but it’s one of the primary methods used to trap the unsuspecting.

Jaime Curri from Honduras already knew to be wary of the seemingly friendly invitations after his brother was assaulted in La Arrocera, Chiapas.

“The women there help to make the assaults possible” says Jaime, “they’ll call to you from the line of houses next to the tracks saying ‘Hey, come over here – wouldn’t you like something to eat?’ Once you’re inside eating, they’ll draw their weapons on you and strip you naked right there – right in the house where they fed you! They’ll strip you naked and leave you with nothing.”

Friar Blas Alvarado says the same trick is used in Tenosique to lure groups of kidnapping victims into safe houses. Once closed up inside, armed men threaten and even torture their victims to extract telephone numbers of family members in the US or in home countries. Then, the extortion begins.

Ransom money and complicity

The National Human Rights Commission says the average ransom is $2500 and that kidnapping networks make upwards of $50 million a year. The report includes testimonies of migrants who witnessed killings of other kidnapping victims when their ransoms weren’t paid.

But Friar Alvarado says shelter workers can do little to free kidnapping victims, especially when kidnappers seem to always get tipped off before a police raid. Aside from teaching prevention, Friar Alvarado says the best way to combat the kidnapping rings head-on is through military action.

“We have a military base here in Tenosique” says Friar Alvarado. “If they really wanted to do something about the problem, there would be a military operation. So be it – send in the military to sweep and clean up all of those neighborhoods where migrants are kidnapped. And even if they detain and deport the migrants, I think many would prefer that to being held in captivity with kidnappers taking money from their families… but they haven’t taken that kind of action. I wish they would.”

Whether the military is less susceptible to corruption than the Mexican police isn’t clear. The founders of the Zetas themselves came from the ranks of the military’s special forces.

But doing nothing has allowed the kidnapping industry to reach its present-day proportions, nurtured by impunity and official disinterest.

In its report, the National Human Rights Commission recommended the creation of mechanisms to coordinate a police response to the wave of kidnappings, as well as explicitly giving undocumented migrants the same rights as Mexican crime victims. But, like all recommendations from the commission to the Mexican state, they are not binding.

(A version of this report produced for radio is available here)