Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights

August 26, 2010

Murdered Migrants near the Border: Incovenient Truth for the US


By Brenda Norrell
Narcosphere
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2010/08/murdered-migrants-near-border-inconvenient-truth-us
Photo: California border by Brenda Norrell.

The 72 people murdered at a ranch in Tamaulipas State, about 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, were migrants. A survivor from Ecuador, shot in the neck, said those murdered were migrants from Ecuador, Brazil, Honduras and El Salvador. The bodies of 58 men and 14 women were found in a one room.

Most migrants are Indigenous Peoples from Central and South America. They have nothing and are walking north through Mexico trying to survive. They are often kidnapped and help for ransom. Those who have no way of paying the kidnappers are shot, one by one, or tortured in front of the others. They are asked to give a phone number of a person in the US that can pay the ransom, if they have no one, they are killed. This is revealed in the new documentary "The Invisibles," which just premiered in Tucson.

The US news media fails to point out that the most vicious killers in Mexico, the Zetas running the drug trafficking, were trained by the United States as Special Forces at the US School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Ga. The US Army Rangers Special Forces were part of this training. It was after this training that they became the Zetas and began their torturing and murdering rampage through Mexico.

The other fact that the US fails to admit is this: It is the US appetite for drugs that creates the drug war in Mexico.

No one tells this part of the story.

The US media fails to tell another story. It is the truth of the displacement of Indigenous Peoples, primarily corn farmers in Central and South America, from their homelands by NAFTA and other trade agreements. The corporate takeovers of their lands for dams, energy development and corporate enterprises, using military and paramilitary units, have created homelessness for masses of Indigenous Peoples.

US corporations, including Chiquita Bananas in Colombia, have admitted in US court that they use hired assassins to eliminate Indigenous Peoples and poor farmers from their land.

Those who walk north are desperate people trying to survive.
UPDATE: On Friday, the lead investigator and a police officer were missing following the ranch massacre of 72 migrants. Two car bombs exploded, one at a police station and another at a television station.

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