Source: www.cipamericas.org

30 January 2012

By Laura Carlsen*

There are many kinds of war. The classic image of a uniformed soldier
kissing mom good-bye to risk his life on the battlefield has changed
dramatically. In today’s wars, it’s more likely that mom will be the one
killed.

CIP Americas Program (Mexico)

UNIFEM states that by the mid-1990s, 90% of war casualties were civilians–
mostly women and children.

Mexico’s drug war is a good example of the new wars on civilian
populations that blur the lines between combatants and place entire
societies in the line of fire. Of the more than 50,000 people killed in
drug war-related violence, the vast majority are civilians. President
Felipe Calderón claims that 90% of the victims were linked to drug
cartels. But how does he know? In a country where only 2% of crimes are
investigated, tried, and sentenced, the government pulled this figure out
of its sleeve.

There is no official information on why these thousands were killed. When
their bodies are found in unmarked mass graves, no one even knows who they
were. With violence the norm, executions can —and do— target grassroots
leaders, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, and rebellious youth
under the cloak of the drug war.

Not Just Homicide

There are also war tolls beyond the body counts. The homicide number
misses the disappeared, the thousands whose bodies–dead or alive–are never
found, never counted. And it hides the mutilation of lives caused by
“collateral damage”: the loss of loved ones, families forced from their
homes, permanent injury, orphans and widows, sexual abuse, lives lived in
fear.

These costs fall primarily on the shoulders of women–the mothers,
daughters, and sisters who are left with the nearly impossible task of
seeking answers and redress in a justice system outpaced by violence and
overrun by corruption. They are often re-victimized by government agencies
that ignore, reject, or stifle their pleas for justice.

“Families that demand that our children be found face all kinds of
threats… the loss of our property, isolation, rejection by our own
families,” said Araceli Rodríguez, a mother whose son, a young policeman,
was disappeared on the job. His police unit refuses to give information on
his disappearance. “I wake up and find that it’s not a nightmare, that his
absence is real and the impunity is also real.”

It’s rare to hear the voices of the women who bear the brunt of the drug
war. Their pain doesn’t make headlines. Some need anonymity to remain
alive. Many have been granted protective measures by the government or
international human rights organizations because of the extreme threats
they face.

Telling Stories

Despite all these difficulties, some 70 women told their stories amid
tears and despite fear for their lives in Mexico City on January 22. The
meeting called by the Nobel Women’s Initiative brought an international
delegation led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams together with
Mexican women victims of the violence and women human rights defenders.

From the sketchy statistics available, women make up a relatively small
proportion of the murdered in Mexico, but they are the majority of
citizens who denounce disappearances, murders, and human rights violations
in the drug war. They work on the front lines of defending communities and
human rights. For their efforts, they become targets themselves. In
Mexico, six prominent women human rights defenders have been murdered in
the past two years.

The last report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human
rights defenders recognized that threats and especially “explicit death
threats against women human rights defenders are one of the main forms of
violence in the region, with more than half coming from Latin America,
most of those (27) from Mexico.”

Sometimes it’s the drug cartels that seek to silence women activists. But
a recent survey of Mexican women human rights defenders revealed that they
cite the government (national, state, and local) and its security forces
as responsible in 55% of cases of violence and threats of violence to
women defenders. Among government officials charged with public safety and
justice, they encounter at best indifference and at worst death threats
and attacks. A human rights defender from the state of Coahuila explained
that searching for a disappeared loved one implies “always having to be in
the hell of the institutions, which are often infiltrated by crime.”

Gender-based violence including femicide has skyrocketed in the context of
the overall violence. The number of femicides in Chihuahua since sending
the army in has risen to 837 for the period of 2008- June 2011 —nearly
double the total femicides in 1993-2007. Women rights defenders report
that the vast majority of threats and acts of violence against them
include gender-based violence.

Silent No More

Olga Esparza, whose daughter Monica disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 2009,
explains through her tears that the government simply doesn’t care. “We’re
the ones who have to carry out the investigations, with our own
resources.” She adds that government officials often add insult to injury,
“They say she’s probably just gone off with her boyfriend or she’s a
prostitute or drug addict.” In her case, as with so many others, there’s
no investigation, no results, no justice.

Another woman described how her work with indigenous communities led to
her rape and torture by police agents. She continues to live in terror due
to threats against her life and her family.

Alma Gomez of the Center for the Human Rights of Women in Chihuahua summed
up what she sees in the center, “Women are the invisible victims, we are
always at risk in this military and police occupation. We know of gang
rapes by security forces that the women don’t even report; arbitrary
arrests; women who make the rounds between army barracks and city morgues
searching for their sons, fathers, or husbands. We are the spoils of war
in a war we didn’t ask for and we don’t want.”

“Victim” is really the wrong word for these women. The mother whose son
disappeared more than two years ago said, “In the struggle to find my son,
I joined the peace movement. I learned that I can transform my pain into a
collective force and together we can help more people to have a voice and
to now be empowered to defend their rights.”

Valentina Rosendo, a Me’phaa indigenous woman from the State of Guerrero,
was raped by soldiers and took her case all the way up to the
Interamerican Court of Human Rights. She sums up the reason for
participating in the Nobel Women’s forum, “It’s really hard to speak out,
but it’s more painful to keep quiet.”

* Laura Carlsen is the Director of the Americas Program and is currently
corresponding from the Nobel Women’s Delegation as it tours Mexico,
Honduras, and Guatemala.

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