Missing students force Mexico'€™s forgotten crimes to surface

Editor's note: This Shark believes that there are parallels between the Mexican drug cartels and the Nursing Home Cartel.  Both cartels cannot exist without the blinded eye of governmental agencies.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

 

Missing students force Mexico'€™s forgotten crimes to surface

Families and human rights workers question if high profile disappearances will bring overdue investigations and answers

October 31, 2014 11:30AM ET

by Kavitha Chekuru @KaviChek

Men’s shirts and khaki pants, freshly ironed, hang over a small rod. But there is no one in the house to wear them.
For the past three years, Oralia Guadalupe Villaseñor Vázquez has taken care to keep these clothes fresh. They belonged to her husband, José Fortino Martínez Martínez.
“I know that one day he will come back,” she said.
The last time Villaseñor saw José was on a summer night in 2011 in their home in Nuevo Laredo, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, just across the border with Texas. They were woken up by marines patrolling their neighborhood. Federal forces had arrived in the region a month earlier as the government attempted to control an escalating turf war between two drug cartels, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel.
Standing in the room where she and her husband slept that night, Villaseñor recalled how eight marines came into their home claiming they had received a report they needed to investigate. After speaking to the couple and looking around the house, they gave Villaseñor some money for damaging the door on the way in, apologized and left.

The last time Oralia Guadalupe Villaseñor Vázquez’s saw her husband José Fortino Martínez Martínez was the middle of the night on June 5th, 2011.

Víctor Tadashi Suárez for Al Jazeera America

But a few minutes later, they returned and said they needed to take José’s fingerprints. He complied and stepped outside. He would never set foot in his home again.
Villaseñor still doesn’t know if José is dead or alive. “This is the place where I cry, where I ask God to bring him back,” she told Fault Lines, while standing by the dresser where his photo is displayed next to pictures of their children.
José is one of tens of thousands that have disappeared in Mexico over the past few years, as the government struggles to battle cartels. Since assuming office in 2012, President Enrique Peña Nieto has attempted to project an image to the world of a Mexico that has turned the page on its violent past. TIME even heralded him for “saving Mexico.”
But in the past month, Peña Nieto’s curtain has been pulled back after 43 young students were detained and then forcibly disappeared in Iguala, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero. It might seem like the work of cartels, but as Mexican citizens told Fault Lines during the filming of the episode, “The Disappeared,” (which airs Saturday, November 1, at 7 p.m. Eastern time/4 p.m. Pacific on Al Jazeera America), it is hardly ever that black and white.
Last week, Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam stated that not only had police officers detained and then handed the students over to a cartel, but that they did so on orders from the town’s mayor and his wife.
“Iguala has been a surprise to people, and it shouldn’t be a surprise,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, a prominent economic and judicial investigator in Mexico. “You have to start from the premise that there are dozens of thousands of forced disappearances, and 97 percent of those have not been judicially prosecuted.”
In the more than three years since Oralia Villaseñor’s husband Jose—along with at least five other men—went missing in Tamaulipas, no one has been prosecuted for their disappearances.

Unearthing answers

As the search for the 43 students continues, much of it has focused on finding mass graves in the region. Many have been discovered, but none of them, according to the federal government, contain the remains of the students.
Families with missing relatives often give genetic samples to become part of a federal database that compares their DNA with that of bodies found in the hundreds of mass graves discovered in recent years. It’s a thin and grim line of hope for desperate families after years of not finding any traces of their missing loved ones. All of the families that Fault Lines interviewed gave DNA samples to the database, though none have matched yet—with the exception of one.

A forensic team exhumes a box in a Nuevo Laredo cemetery that the government claims contains the remains of Juana Solis' daughter Damaris.

Kavitha Chekuru for Al Jazeera America

Fault Lines accompanied Juana Solis, whose daughter Damaris has been missing for more than three years, to a cemetery on the outskirts of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, last month as she stood and watched a team of independent forensic experts dig through the desert heat to exhume a small box containing human remains.The state says its contents are what’s left of her daughter. But Solis did not believe them.
Part of her skepticism, amid many irregularities in the investigation, stemmed from the fact that local police were the last people to see her daughter alive, immediately after she had been in a car accident.
“She called us, and the transit policeman was telling her to turn off her phone,” Solis said about the last time she spoke with Damaris. “And she was saying ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ My son called her back, and she didn’t pick up her phone anymore.”
A year and a half later, with no one held responsible for the disappearance, Solis wa given a black plastic bag of bones that officials said were the remains of Damaris. They recommended she cremate the bones immediately.
That suggestion, along with Solis’ suspicion about police involvement, led her instead to bury the bag of remains in a box in the public cemetery and not the family’s traditional plot. It also drove her to seek out an independent forensic team to exhume and study the remains the government had identified as belonging to her daughter.
The experts will compare DNA from the remains to samples from Solis and her husband to confirm if it is their daughter. The results are not expected until next year.

Hope for change

Human rights defenders are waiting to see if the mass disappearance of the students in Guerrero could force the government to address its judicial vacuum. But they also believe that purging the corruption that has wrought such a deep level of impunity will also require outside pressure, as was done in other countries. But that could be difficult to achieve.

Juana Solis looks through photos of her family, including her daughter Damaris, who disappeared more than three years ago.

Kavitha Chekuru for Al Jazeera America

“It’s pure economics. When the most powerful businesses in Germany, like Volkswagen; the most powerful mining companies in Canada; the most powerful car companies in the US are praising the Mexican system because they are obtaining rates of return that are three, four times the ones they obtain in their countries, the international pressure will never be exercised against Mexico,” Buscaglia said. “So there is a conflict of interest. there is an international complicity that explains why Mexico is not moving forward.”
Juana Solis and other families of the disappeared believe that the Mexican government’s economic policies have taken priority over the crimes against their loved ones. Just beyond the desert mountains that surround Solis's home is where the future of Mexico's economic goals lie. Deep shale gas reserves are expected to be tapped in the coming years as the government opens up its energy sector to private companies.
As Solis waited to give DNA samples, her friend Leticia Hidalgo expressed concern about the government’s plans. Despite the economic potential, the prospects of a drilling boom worry Hidalgo and many of the families of the disappeared in the region. The drilling could interfere with the search for more mass graves.
"We've asked the government to wait [to drill] but they don't listen,” said Hidalgo, whose 18-year-old son Roy Rivera, disappeared in January of 2011. "We know there are more bodies out there."

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In "The Disappeared," Fault Lines examines the disappearances of thousands of citizens in Mexico, one of the worst humanitarian crises in Latin America. The film airs on Al Jazeera America Saturday, November 1, at 7 p.m. Eastern time. It will air again that evening at 10 p.m. Eastern and Sunday, November 2, at 2 a.m. Eastern.   

Meritocracy for sale

As a UN internship mistakenly goes up for auction, focus must be given to the nature of unpaid UN internships. Last Modified: 04 May 2013 09:30

Sarah Kendzior Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis. RSS

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Thomas Friedman continues to champion the supposed virtues of globalisation as a leveller [GALLO/GETTY]

On April 24, 2013, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights announced it was having an auction to raise money to “carry forward Robert Kennedy's dream of a more just and peaceful world”. Through the auction website CharityBuzz, bidders could compete for a variety of prizes: a visit to the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a personal meeting with Ryan Seacrest, a tour of Jay Leno’s car collection.  Or a six-week unpaid internship at the United Nations, where the recipient will “gain inside knowledge of just how the UN really operates.” Current bid? $22,000.  “This truly is the ultimate internship opportunity for any college or graduate student looking to get their foot in the door,” the ad proclaimed. For more than what many colleges cost in annual tuition, the highest bidder receives “tremendous opportunities to make invaluable connections.”  One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work 25 hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials. For students seeking jobs at certain policy organisations, the way to get one’s foot in the door is to walk the streets paved in gold. In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs. Unpaid and ”pay to play” internships have long dominated policy fields, but the $22,000 asking price signified a barrier to entry so galling the UN issued a statement in response. “Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted charitybuzz.com,” a UN representative wrote to Inner City Press, who reported on the case.  When the story broke on Wednesday, I contacted CharityBuzz, who confirmed the auction’s existence and said they would speak to their “contact at the UN” for details. The Robert F. Kennedy Center continues to list the auction under the tagline “Spend six weeks as a United Nations intern with Bruce Knotts and the UN Committee on Human Rights” while the UN continues to deny it without offering details. It is difficult to tell what is going on. Whatever the end game, someone is willing to drop $22,000 to play it. Barriers to entry  UN internships may not be up for auction, but they are, in essence, for sale. The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. The only thing that distinguishes the alleged auction from the UN’s normal practice is that the unspoken class discrimination is made blatant.  “Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organisation strives to serve,” wrote the group UnPaid Is Unfair in a 2012 petition calling on the United Nations to stop using free labour.  Their call went unheeded. The United Nations’ website includes a form for calculating the personal expenses an intern incurs – expenses the UN conservatively estimates at $2500 per month, not counting travel to New York City or health insurance. The intern is forbidden from taking other paid work during their two-month term, and they not allowed to apply for jobs at the UN for six months following the internship. “A possible source of employment would be the United Nations Volunteers Programme,” the UN website suggests. This programme pays no salary. “For an organisation that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very ideals,” writes former UN intern Matt Hamilton, noting that only 5% of UN interns come from the least developed countries. Young people who care about international justice – including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states – cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.   The United Nations is far from the only organisation refusing to pay its interns. Most human rights, policy and development organisations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if they lack the kind of experience an internship provides. Privilege is recast as perseverance. The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labour market but also restructures the market itself. Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labour to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience”. The promotion of unpaid labour has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity. Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do. Qualities that should be encouraged in society– like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others – are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care. “I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they've grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn't just for the money -- the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity, “ notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.” Fair and just On the day the story of the alleged $22,000 UN internship broke, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman assured us that our world is fair and just. After proclaiming that the world is “tailored for the self-motivated” and the “boundaries are all gone”, he argued, “We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.” While perhaps an argument unto itself on the erosion of meritocracy – some were fooled into thinking it was created by the parody Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator— Friedman’s column sheds light on how the wealthy tend to believe our economy works.  Friedman encourages young people to “invest in themselves”, seemingly unaware of how literal an investment this is nowadays, and how few young people have the resources to do so. He praises hard work, but he does not acknowledge the dreams deferred – the young people who would give anything for the chance to work hard and succeed, but cannot afford the cost of entry; the young people who gave everything, and are left jobless and in debt. What happens to the American Dream deferred? The UN internship auction – whatever it may actually entail – is in the end a good thing, because it made plain a system of privilege and bias few want to acknowledge. Economic discrimination is often not visible. Nor are the people it leaves behind.  What a relief it would be if every unpaid internship was an auction – if instead of a vague line about how the intern must “cover their own costs”, the organisation would tally up those costs and see who is able to pay them. The rest of us could watch, from the sidelines, as bias long denied plays out in public, as wealth morphs into merit before our eyes. Let them do their bidding in the open, and show us what it costs to succeed. Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis. Follow her on Twitter:  @sarahkendzior You can follow the editor on Twitter: @nyktweets 1389 The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.