A new Amnesty International report displays the sick industry of human trafficking created by Draconian U.S. immigration law. Mariana Sanchez reports of the ‘kidnapping, torture, rape and murder’ at Al Jazeera English (2:54):
Six out of ten Mexican migrant women and girls are sexually violated in their effort to cross the U.S. border, Amnesty International reports.
A report from the human rights group, “Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico” [.pdf], documents “alarming levels of abuse faced by the tens of thousands of Central American irregular migrants that every year attempt to reach the U.S. by crossing Mexico”, it said in a statement, adding that “public officials turn a blind eye or even play an active part in kidnappings, rapes and murders”.
“Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses,” said Rupert Knox, Mexico Researcher at Amnesty International.
“Persistent failure by the authorities to tackle abuses carried out against irregular migrants has made their journey through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world.”
The statement adds:
Kidnappings of migrants, mainly for ransom, reached new heights in 2009, with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) reporting that nearly 10,000 were abducted over six months and almost half of interviewed victims saying that public officials were involved in their kidnapping.
An estimated six out of 10 migrant women and girls experience sexual violence, allegedly prompting some people smugglers to demand that women receive contraceptive injections ahead of the journey, to avoid them falling pregnant as a result of rape.
On 23 January 2010, armed police stopped a freight train carrying over 100 migrants in Chiapas State, southern Mexico.
Veronica (not her real name) said that Federal Police forced her and the other migrants to leave the train and lie face down on the ground, before stealing their belongings and threatening to kill them unless they continued their journey by foot along the railway.
After walking for hours, the group was assaulted by armed men who raped Veronica and killed at least one other migrant….
Ruben Figueroa, a Mexican human rights defender who provides shelter and food for migrants, told Amnesty International: “They leave their homes because of the extreme poverty where they come from, the journey north is a nightmare for them but they do it for the families they have left behind.”
Tim Johnson at McClatchy reports today:
Much of the abuse occurs in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, where criminals who are in cahoots with conductors and local, state or federal police halt freight trains, which often are carrying hundreds of illegal migrants, it said. Problems are also severe in Tabasco and Veracruz states.
Many migrants who pass through those states, Knox said, “suffer abductions, sexual abuse, mistreatment, extortion, murder and other abuses that they endure in this voyage of terror.”
Last year, Mexican immigration authorities detained 64,061 migrants, about a fifth of them women or girls, the report says….
Criminal gangs are behind most of the abuses but “there is evidence that state officials are involved at some level, either directly or as a result of complicity and acquiescence,” it adds.
Yesterday, Little Alex and I wrote a response to an op-ed advocating against free migration that the “illegality of this migration, like drugs, create the human rights abuses of the human trafficking industry. At the risk of being trite: open borders would make this industry non-existent overnight”.
The trafficking industry presents the sad truth. The immigration policy of the U.S. creates an inhumane market where psychopaths can make a living for themselves brutally assaulting, raping, kidnapping for ransom and killing human beings with impunity.
Contrary to all—not some, but all at their roots—arguments to prohibit immigration are guilty of the sick mindset that, as Charles Johnson describes the conservatism, “Only American citizens were created equal, because God only cares about Americans.”
Little Alex in Wonderland 
[…] The reactionism has cause the public to briefly forget the immorality of all immigration law, the torturous human trafficking industry it creates and the earlier-mentioned Draconian conditions of immigrant jails. The focus of the […]
You acknowledge that the government of Mexico is not only incapable of running government and controlling or dealing with the drug cartels in any fashion, but also implicit in the crimes against humanity in Mexico. Next there are the drug cartels, murdering and raping and preying on every aspect of Mexican society, as well as working their way into the American fabric of life in over 1000 citys as of this date with this adminstration’s concerns leaning more to gay marriage and the NCAA basketball brackets, or trips to Spain. And you are capable with your liberal mindset to grotesquely angulate these facts into an argument that it is somehow the fault of the United States and it’s immigration policy with Mexico that has caused these perversions. You and your children deserve to live with what we would be faced with if our borders were ever freely open with Mexico. As for me, I’ll fight this every step of the way in deference to our children who have never had to see a beheaded corpse lying in their streets. You people are truly insane.
Amnesty International calls this journey across Mexico the most dangerous in the world? Have they ever heard of a couple of reporters who ventured into a Norfold Virginia neighborhood on a weekend evening? Now THIS is a dangerous journey. It’s a place where the cops are so used to the roving black gangs that they don’t even deal with it apparently, even when someone is volently beaten just for being white in the wrong neighborhood. Even more disturbing is that the media doesn’t even report it. At least the violence in Mexico is finally getting on the radar. Amnesty could do a little research and reportling in certain sections of our American cities and learn a little something if they were capable of opening their eyes.