Mexico: News & Updates

On behalf of IRTF's Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.

IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.

Antonio de la Cruz, 47, was shot on Wednesday as he was leaving his house with his 23-year-old daughter, who was seriously injured, according to state prosecutors and the newspaper that employed him. This brings the number of journalists killed this year in the country, one of the world’s most dangerous for media workers, to 12. Attacks on the press have increased 85% in the three years since president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power. Seven journalists were killed in the whole of 2021, compared with 12 so far this year.

Abortion pills smuggled into the United States from Mexico inside teddy bears. A New York home used as a pill distribution hub. A small apartment just south of the U.S.-Mexico border converted into a safe place for women to end their pregnancies. Networks of Mexican feminist collectives working with counterparts in the United States are ramping up their efforts to help women in the U.S. who are losing access to abortion services to end their pregnancies. With the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the landmark decision that gave women the right to access abortion last week, these networks of activists are preparing to be busier than ever. So far this year, according to the organizations, they have helped at least 1,700 women living the U.S. who have sought their help.

by Daniela Rea

This article was originally published in English and Spanish by Pie de Página. Translated to English by Dawn Paley.

This Week:

• Several data points across border sectors—including a shocking 10 drownings in El Paso’s irrigation canals since June 9—point to a historically high number of migrants dying in the Rio Grande and on U.S. soil this year, mainly of drownings, dehydration, and falls from tall segments of the border wall.
• The Supreme Court was expected to issue a ruling this week on the Biden administration’s effort to end the “Remain in Mexico” program, but no decision came. Media reports this week revealed that one woman assigned to Remain in Mexico attempted suicide in June, and three men were kidnapped in April.
• Migration levels remain very high in June across the border. A court filing showed that CBP is increasingly granting parole—which doesn’t include an assigned immigration court date—while releasing migrants with tracking devices. Remnants of an early June caravan are arriving near the U.S. border, though Mexican states have been preventing the mostly Venezuelan migrants  from boarding buses.
• Mexico sent hundreds more troops to the border cities of Tijuana and Matamoros in response to outbreaks of violence. A document from Mexico’s Defense Department shows the current extent of the military’s border-security and migrant-interdiction mission.

Three asylum seekers were kidnapped in April while in a U.S. migration program that had placed them in the care of Mexican officials in the city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Texas, one of the victims and the U.N. migration agency said. The case is the first known kidnapping under the revamped MPP, said Dana Graber Ladek, Chief of Mission in Mexico for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a United Nations agency that helps transport people under the program. U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, ended MPP soon after taking office last year as part of a push to reverse the hardline immigration policies of his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, but was forced to reinstate it in December under court order. In re-implementing the program, the Biden administration promised new measures would enhance protection for migrants.

As the largest caravan of migrants so far this year journeys into central Mexico, the continued enforcement of a public health order barring their admission into the United States threatens to exacerbate already deteriorating humanitarian conditions on the southern border. The caravan, largely composed of asylum seekers from Venezuela, could add as many as 11,000 people to the population of migrants currently stuck in limbo near the U.S.-Mexico border—estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them have been living in dangerous conditions for months or longer awaiting the final repeal of Title 42, the public health order that has effectively halted asylum admissions into the United States from Central and South America.

As delegations from countries in the Western hemisphere are set to arrive in Los Angeles, California for the Summit of the Americas, Mexico’s president said Monday he would not attend the gathering at which the administration of US President Joe Biden will try to advance a vision of a “secure, middle class and democratic” region, according to the White House. The ambitious, if broad, agenda – which is expected to include efforts to boost US leadership through economic cooperation, combating public health crises, countering climate change and stemming migration – has been overshadowed for weeks by rumblings that Washington planned to exclude Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela from the event, citing human rights concerns and lack of democratic rule. On Monday, the Reuters news agency reported that the White House had finalised the guest list excluding the three countries. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced soon after he would boycott the summit because it did not include all countries in the Americas.

Mexico's ruling party won four of six state elections held on Sunday, preliminary results showed on Monday, strengthening President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's grip on power ahead of the contest to succeed him in 2024. Lopez Obrador's leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) and its allies captured the governorships in the states of Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Hidalgo and Tamaulipas, according to preliminary vote counts by electoral authorities. Meanwhile, opposition candidates had big leads in the central state of Aguascalientes and Durango in the north, broadly in line with results anticipated by opinion polls. All six states holding elections began Sunday in opposition hands.