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Violence

US Cities Organize To End Plan Mexico

For over three months, Mexicans have organized demonstrations in the country’s cities and towns, demanding justice for the disappeared college students from Iguala, Guerrero. Yet since October, protestors have not only called for the appearance of the 43 disappeared students (now presumably 42 since the remains of one student were identified among ashes found near the scene of the crime), but also the resignation of President Enrique Peña Nieto and justice for the tens of thousands of disappeared and hundreds of femicides nationwide that have occurred, especially since the war on drugs was launched in December 2006. At the core of their criticisms is the impunity and corruption at local, state and federal levels. While protestors in Mexico have amplified their demands, multiple protests have been organized abroad in more than fifty countries. One of the largest and most notable is in United States, known by the hashtag #USTired2.

We Are Tired Of Supporting Militarized Police At Home & Abroad

The #USTired2 Campaign Demonstrates How The Us Is Not Only Supporting Militarized Police In Ferguson and Across the United States, but Around The World As Well. This December 7th Join In Protested the Killing of 43 Students In Mexico, a Crime in Which the US is Complicit For many in these United States, images of mass graves in Mexico or stories like that of the 43 missing Normalista students of Ayotzinapa are disturbing, but far away. For others of us, Mexico is not just a “foreign policy issue.” Mexico es familia. Inspired by our friends, family and loved ones in Mexico, #UStired2 is a nationwide effort involving students, local Mexican and Latino and other communities, immigrant rights activists, religious organizations, concerned scholars and many others from across the entire United States. Our effort has one goal: working in the United States to promote peace as an alternative to the catastrophically failed drug war that has left more than 100,000 dead and 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico. More than 43 cities in the United States—one for each student disappeared in Ayotzinapa—have joined our effort—all in less than a week after the call to action was made.

Occupy Kenya: Protesters March For End To Violence

Apathy and thuggery greeted an attempt to kickstart an Occupy movement in Kenya to protest against government inaction in the face of rising insecurity and terrorism. The march and sit-in dubbed #Tumechoka, meaning “We are tired” in Swahili, was called on Tuesday after the execution of 28 people on a bus in Mandera in the far northeast of the country over the weekend. That attack, claimed by Somalia’s Al Shabaab militants, left some Kenyans questioning their government’s capacity and willingness to prevent terrorism. “The government does not recognize that this is a religious battle,” said Stephen Omodia, a 39-year-old businessman, who clutched a red-painted wooden cross in his hands to symbolize the lives lost in terrorist attacks in recent years.

Fear And Justice In The Battle For Mexico’s Future

I woke up in fear, and for the rest of the day it controlled my life the way fear tends to control people’s lives. It dominated my thoughts the way it dominates people’s thoughts and actions, paralyzes them until they are deprived from all hope and the very basic human capacity to change the world around them. My fear was provoked by a nightmare, not one I saw in my dreams, but rather a nightmare I have been unfortunate enough to observe with my own eyes and come to know intimately. It was the fear of waking up and realizing my friends have disappeared at night; lifted from their beds by men in uniforms, leaving friends and family behind who from that day on can only guess after the fate of their loved ones. This fear is not imaginary. This is the fear I struggled to understand when talking to my friends and fellow students when I lived and studied in Mexico. It is a fear that is incomprehensible for someone who has not lived in a country where more than 100.000 have been killed and disappeared in less than ten years.

Narrow-Minded Focus On Military & Weapons Makes Us Less Secure

Researchers for some time now have been able to understand how freedom from violence and the threat of violence, community-based economic development, authentic democratic processes and transparency increase human security. Violence and security have often been linked; human security research suggests they are mutually exclusive. Choosing violence to attain security precludes that very security for anyone who critiques violence, as thousands have learned in Ferguson. Clanging claims that we live in a great democracy that protects everyone’s rights sound awfully hollow to an unarmed protestor who has just been injured and arrested by a jack-up cop strapped with an official lethal sidearm and a legal system that affords him every benefit of every doubt. Democracy is not just a system of voting but an approach to governing that recognizes obstacles to participation and development and listens, trying to hear what communities need.

Protests Against State Violence Go Worldwide

Mexican activists were joined yesterday by solidarity protests in the United States and around the word. Under the banner of “Todos Somos Ayotzinapa – Todos Somos Ferguson,” a number of demonstrations in the States were intended to stand with Mexican organizers and the 43 students abducted, along with the U.S. community of Ferguson, Mo. Any day, a grand jury there is expected to decide whether or not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. At a rally in New York’s Union Square last Sunday, protesters held signs in Spanish saying, “Your son could be number 44” — eerily reminiscent of an earlier rallying cry: “I Am Trayvon Martin.” Protesters also called attention to the role of U.S. policy and trade agreements — including the proposed and controversial “Plan Mexico” — in fueling the drug war that has terrorized the country over the last several years, and was accelerated under the presidency of Felipe Calderon, beginning in 2006. Simultaneous protests for Ayotzinapa were held in France, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries.

Dear White People: Our State Of Emergency

As you know, a preemptive State of Emergency has been called in Ferguson, Missouri as the country waits to hear if officer Darren Wilson will be charged with the murder of Michael Brown. Let’s focus on another State of Emergency for a moment. Like me, you are the beneficiary of unearned white privilege. I’m not going to insult your intelligence, nor should you insult other members of this club we were born into, by cataloguing the laundry list of data that point to the clear fact that, taken as a whole, people who are or who present as white, experience privileges that are regularly denied to people who do not present as white. It is a fact. Deal with it. It is from that place of privilege that you and I will watch events unfold when the grand jury comes back with, as all indications seem to point, something less than a murder charge for another member of the white privilege club, Officer Darren Wilson.

Transgender Day Of Remembrance: Stop The Deaths

Today is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance when we memorialize those who were killed by anti-trans violence in the past year. Here is this year’s list of those we’ve lost and here is where you can find an eventhappening in your area. As Morgan Collado wrote at Autostraddle, trans women of color dominate the list of lives lost — this year and every year — and simply spending one day honoring them after they’ve been killed is not enough. “The names of trans women of color will be in the mouths of the queer community after they’ve been murdered,” Collado wrote, “but support for us while we are still alive is sporadic at best.” Last year at Jacobin, Samantha Allen echoed that idea that remembering must be paired with “interrogating the present” and imagining a different future. She asked the vital question: “How could we shorten this list of the dead? What kind of politics would that goal require?”

Contact Mexican Embassy: Justice For Ayotzinapa

We scholars, students and academics from Mexico and elsewhere who live and work outside of Mexico join the voices of concern and distress for the violence that prevails in Mexico. The events that took place in Iguala on September 26, 2014 are one of the most deplorable moments in the country’s history. There are no words to express the horror and fury that we feel at the murder of six people, three of them students at the “Raúl Isidro Burgos” Normal School in Ayotzinapa (one of them by the most savage of means), and by the disappearance, at the hands of the government and the local police, of another 43 students. We express our solidarity with the demands for justice being expressed and we share in the pain of the families, friends and colleagues of the Ayotzinapa students. We are profoundly indignant at the magnitude of the events and the fact that the Mexican government has offered contradictory statements and presented results that are not only meaningless but actually quite worrisome: the irregularities of the investigation grow by the day without shedding any light on the capture of the perpetrators or the whereabouts of the 43 students and, instead, more mass graves are discovered and many more bodies found.

‘We Want Them Alive:’ Search For Mexico 43

The flames started to engulf the municipal palace of Chilpancingo in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero as the rage built within the students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College who, for over two weeks, have received no answers concerning the whereabouts of 43 of their fellow students. The last time the group of missing students were seen was in the custody of Mexican municipal police forces, who detained them after opening fire on their caravan in an attack that killed six people and injured dozens more. This massacre and subsequent disappearance of the students, known as “normalistas,” has sparked an international movement demanding that the 43 students be found alive. But it has also called into question the deep ties between drug cartels and Mexican politicians. To understand the political significance of the Ayotzinapa case, it’s important to understand who the students are.

San Fernando Migrant Massacre: Governments Share Responsibility

The jury concluded that the US and Mexican governments are jointly responsible for a generalized pattern of grave human rights violations committed against migrants in transit on Mexican territory, on their way to the United States, between 2010 and 2014. The jury also concluded that the massacre was the predictable and thus preventable result of actions and omissions by Mexican authorities responsible for systematic, egregious and recurrent human rights violations against migrants in transit. These violations include the Mexican government's failure to protect migrants in transit from death or injury due to serious abuses committed by drug traffickers and human traffickers in complicity with Mexican authorities.

Report: 40,000 Migrants Have Died Since 2000

“Our message is blunt: migrants are dying who need not,” said IOM Director General William Lacy Swing, “It is time to do more than count the number of victims. It is time to engage the world to stop this violence against desperate migrants.” The research behind “Fatal Journeys,” which runs to over 200 pages, began with the October 2013 tragedy when over 400 migrants died in two shipwrecks near the Italian island of Lampedusa. The report, compiled under IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, indicates Europe is the world’s most dangerous destination for “irregular” migration, costing the lives of over 3,000 migrants this year.

Understanding Our Many Fergusons

One way of looking at this conflict from the perspective of European-American police officers and vigilante-type individuals who kill African-American youth is as a very highly racialized and macho game of lines drawn in the sand. Here the lines in the sand are drawn in blood and the game is over when they get to shoot to kill with impunity. Indeed it is useful to think in terms of there actually being three lines: The will to kill line - based on highly racialized and genderized emotions of anger and hatred; the right to kill line - what that person can reasonably expect to get away with based on existing norms, laws, policies and practices, and their enforcement, and the need to kill line - rooted in a threat to that person's life or the lives of others.

When Trust Breaks Down: We Must Turn Unrest Into A Movement

The events of the past few weeks in Ferguson and the surrounding St. Louis community have forced us to ask ourselves some tough questions. Many young African Americans are asking themselves, “How do I feel about my city? And how does my city feel about me?” Many white St. Louisans – who have long considered themselves “liberal” or “progressive,” yet have been surprised by the unrest they’ve seen on their televisions – are asking themselves, “Why are they so angry?” and “Has this anger been there all the time? And if so, how did I not see it?” All of us should be asking questions about the role of government and police departments, and the danger that arises when those bodies so grossly do not reflect the populations they are supposed to serve. What we have witnessed these past few weeks is the result of broken trusts. The trust between government and the people is sacred. Trust between a community and their police is absolutely required for police to effectively serve and protect it. Without it, police become something more similar to an occupying force, which is what the images from Ferguson last month resembled. People need to trust that if they call police for help, the police will arrive ready to serve and fairly enforce the law. People should not fear that their call to report a simple shoplifting could result in a young man being gunned down on the street by the very officers they called for help.

Protest In Albuquerque Over Killer Cop Competition

A group of anti-police violence activists and family members of victims of police violence gathered at City Hall yesterday to demand Mayor Berry cancel the “Killer Cop” competition scheduled for next month. The Albuquerque Police Pistol Combat Tournament is designed to test efficiency in the lethal techniques that police use. Protesters claim that it celebrates militarized policing and the use of lethal force, and are demanding that the competition be shut down. A letter to the mayor signed by family members of victims condemns his insensitivity to the human cost of police violence. Family members emerge from City Hall after trying to deliver the letter to the Mayor. After the press conference, family members went to the 11th floor of City Hall hoping to tell the Mayor why he should cancel the police shooting tournament. They found the offices closed, the doors locked and police guarding the foyer outside the elevator. Once again, Mayor Richard Berry refused to meet with grieving families of victims of his police department. Sylvia Fuente’s son Len was killed by APD. “This militarization of police must stop,” she said. “My son didn’t have to die. And the Mayor says he’s met with family members of victims. He’s lying. He hasn’t met with me. I haven’t met a family member he’s met with.”
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