La Violencia

One of the most disturbing things NMDers and people who work with deported migrants do is listen to testimonies of abuse. Many migrants who has been picked up by BP and deported has a story of mistreatment

As No More Deaths began working in Mexico, the volunteers would hear stories from migrants about how they were treated after being picked up by law enforcement on the American side of the border. Some were picked up and arrested by agents who saw them as fellow human beings, and who provided water and food. These people were performing a task that required them to send desperate people back to a country where they could not support themselves, yet tried to treat the people in their care as humanly as possible while carrying out their orders. I have spoken to migrants who have told me that while in custody they were fed and provided with water, and that no one hit them or insulted them or harmed them.

However, others have different stories, stories of abuse. A volunteer began compiling their testimonies, and in 2006, a report was released citing over 350 testimonies of mistreatment ranging from denial of food and water, to overcrowding in cells, to verbal and ‘mild’ ranging to severe physical and even sexual abuse. It can be read on the NMD website, and is quite chilling.

Between 2008 and 2011, volunteers began interviewing migrants and collecting stories of abuse and mistreatment. A report is due to come out halfway through September. I have been told it consists of 12,000 testimonies.

I spoke to Dave, one of NMDs long-term volunteers and who agreed to let me use his name. He has been working with group since it started, and has witnessed as well as heard stories of abuse of migrants by Border Patrol. A few years ago, Dave was driving down the highway on his way to Arivaca. He saw something something shameful and despicable. A BP agent arrested a family of seven people in the desert. It included an elderly woman, and three children aged 7 to 9 years of age in his estimation. The agent forced everyone to kneel on the hot asphalt, with their hands up behind their heads, like prisoners of war. No one was allowed to move. They stayed like this for at least ten minutes before a paddy wagon pulled up.

Dave has met migrants who have arrived from BP custody with broken limbs and fractured bones. This comes from a little game that some agents like to engage in. Arrested migrants are put into the back of a paddy wagon (also called ‘dog catchers’), where there are of course no seatbelts and people have to stand. Then the drivers ride their vehicles at fast speed over rocks, bumps, hills. It must be a thrill at the front for the officers wearing seatbelts and enjoying the view. Meanwhile, the terrified people in the back are thrown around like rag dolls. Fingers, arms, legs, ribs bruise and break as they are flung around. Sometimes air conditioning is turned on full blast, to a level where people are freezing. Other times hot air is released, to make the ride even more miserable and agony filled.

Migrants who are detained report agents calling them “putos” (bitches), “pendejos” (assholes), as well as racist terms. Often the agents doing this to them themselves are also Hispanic. Perhaps they are trying to prove their loyalty to their nation by showing they can be just as cruel as those who write laws targeting their brothers and sisters on the other side of the border.

I spoke to a migrant who reported being arrested with his friend. At the BP station, his friend was thrown to the ground by a white agent, who began kicking him in the stomach and yelling at him, calling him a “black shit”. That really offended his African American fellow officer- not that the man was being kicked, but that his fellow officer was using a slur that was offensive to members of his racial group. The agent stopped the racial insults but made sure to kick the man again before he left him alone. I spoke to another man who told me he was not mistreated.

Things are not much better in Mexico. Migrants are seen as a target of choice by a multitude of gangs, criminal networks, and now even the drug cartels have moved in. Nogales is a very dangerous place. Migrants are often kidnapped and held for ransom. Relatives living in Southern Mexico or Guatemala or other places where they are from get phone calls from the thugs demanding money for their loved ones’ release. Those whose families can pay are released, sometimes after suffering a beating. Those whose families cannot sometimes end up dead.

I remember hearing loud police siren wails and when I looked down the street, I saw five black police pick up trucks speeding by in a line. In the back, were black clothed officers clutching automatic weapons. I have never seen police this heavily armed anywhere in the world, except the West Bank. The drug cartels in Northern Mexico are extremely heavily armed and fight their wars against each other as well as against anyone who is opposed to them or suspected of being against them with Uzis, bombs, and the newest firearms. One young man I spoke to told me he fears for his life. Sicarios, hired killers, are known to open fire and machine gun people down on the streets for no explicable reason at times.

The few migrants I spoke to and asked what they think of the police all had low opinions. The police are corrupt, they said, and target the poor. It is far worse in Juarez, on the border with Texas. Whatever brutalities the cartels commit in Nogales, are magnified in Juarez. Thousands are murdered there every year. They include gang members and cartel members killed in crime wars, but also thousands of innocent bystanders who are gunned down in random attacks or killed in kidnappings. Drug rehab clinics have been sprayed with bullets. People are kidnapped and mutilated bodies are found days later on the streets, or they are simply buried in mass graves.

Juarez police officers have been known to take deported migrants aside, on pretext of having ‘wrong papers’ or just to conduct interviews. Then the victims were sold to extortion rings, who called up their families demanding ransom. Those whose loved ones could pay survived. The others didn’t.

August 24, 2010, saw the worst atrocity perpetrated against migrants to date. Seventy four men and women traveling from El Salvador, Ecuador, Brazil and Guatemala were stopped by members of the Zetas drug cartel in Tamaulipas, a province in northeastern Mexico. The migrants were ordered to smuggle drugs, and the younger men were told they would be paid $1,000 a day to be assassins for the cartel. What happened next is a testimony of heroism of the highest order. Every single one of the people refused. They were probably not naïve or ignorant of what the consequences would be of such a choice. But nevertheless their answer was unanimous- everyone said “no”. They were taken to a ranch and the shooting started. By the time the killers were finished, seventy two people lay dead. Two survived by pretending to be lifeless, and later escaped.

There are thousands and thousands of stories of tears and tragedy and inhumanity perpetrated against these people, whose only ‘crime’ is wanting a better life.