Wednesday, October 15, 2014

CIW list header

Fear and Fair cannot coexist…
mx_grave
Last month’s horrific massacre of student human rights activists in Guerrero serves as an awful reminder of why there will be no “Fair Food Program” in the foreseeable future of Mexico’s tomato industry…
Mass graves.  Horribly disfigured corpses.  Police complicity in the ultraviolence of all-powerful drug gangs.
Since 2005, stories like these have played out across Mexico’s headlines day after day, month after month, year after year.  But the details of last month’s mass killing and disappearance of student activists in the southern state of Guerrero stood out above the ever-growing body count in Mexico’s drug and corruption wars. [...]
mx_families
Source:  Time Magazine
[...] The victims of last month’s massacre were young human rights activists, their particular focus the rights of small farmers and farmworkers.  They dared to question the powers that control the area’s agricultural economy and for their efforts they were kidnapped and killed.  They were good, young people committed to justice — like the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement — who were willing to take on grave risks to demand fair treatment for the poor agricultural workers of Guerrero.  They stood no chance, however, against the police/narco anarchy of that embattled state.  Like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner — the three young men who dared to take on the entrenched powers of rural Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 — their quest ended in a shallow grave.
And so Mexico’s small farmers and farmworkers continue their long, unrequited wait for justice.
No peace, no justice
The Fair Food Program that is having such remarkable success today addressing and eliminating longstanding human rights abuses in Florida’s fields wouldn’t have stood a chance in rural Florida back in the heyday of the Klan, either...

No comments:

Post a Comment