As I advocate for a U.S. policy towards the region based on justice and
human rights, I’ve had easier years during the Bush Administration. For
an administration that promised hope and change, both are in short
supply.
Director of The 800 Mile Wall, John Carlos Frey, is asking all the right questions of our U.S.-Mexico border.
"Do we need to spend billions of dollars on fencing and technology?
Does it work? Should the thousands of migrant lives lost on U.S. soil
be recognized and taken into account? Should we do anything about the
deaths? Is there a solution?"
If you're wondering when the opportunity will arise to demand that our
legislators begin asking these questions, the time is now!
As a final reflection for the month, Leslie Berestein of the San Diego
Union-Tribune has called attention to another function of the fence: a
place for artistic expression.
Elections took place Sunday, November 29th in Honduras with National Party leader Porfirio Lobo declared the winner.
But
elections carried out under a state of emergency, with visible military
and police presence, by a government installed by coup, with a
significant movement opposed to the coup calling for abstention, and
with the deposed President still holed up in the center of the capital
city in the Brazilian Embassy, are no cause for celebration. As we wrote to the State Department
on November 24th, “a cloud of intimidation and restrictions on assembly
and free speech affect the climate in which these elections take place…
basic conditions do not exist for free, fair and transparent elections
in Honduras.”
I have just returned from Honduras, and I can tell you, there is no
possible way that there are the basic conditions for free and fair
elections on November 29th.
“Vote? Me? No way? For what?” said the young man, almost spitting out the words. “What is there to vote for in this election?”
All over Honduras, youth “in resistance,” women in resistance, artists
in resistance, lawyers in resistance, well-dressed and blackberried
political party leaders in resistance, campesinos in resistance, are
saying no to these November 29th elections. While the word
“resistance” may conjure up images of masked guerrillas, this image is
totally misleading. As I could see in a trip this week to Tegucigalpa,
it is, so far, in general an extraordinarily peaceful, civic
resistance.
This year, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) gave its annual Human Rights Award to the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center from the state of Guerrero in Mexico. This award honors the bravery and dedication of organizations and individuals defending human rights in Latin America.
LAWG has great respect for Tlachinollan’s work and we were moved by the beautiful words that Abel Barrera, the director of Tlachinollan, used in his acceptance speech. The following is an excerpt from that speech. To read the full speech click here. Para leer todo el discurso, haga clíc aquí.
On Friday, November 13th, some influential thinkers from both
the United States and Mexico gathered at the Woodrow Wilson Center
Mexico Institute to discuss how our two nations must begin Rethinking
the U.S.-Mexico Border.
The current model, as described by former Deputy Foreign Secretary of the Government of Mexico Andrés Rozental, is a system characterized by “irritation, inefficiency, illegality, and now, violence.”Moving forward, he stated, we need “cooperative solutions to shared problems.”
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