Two years after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican human rights abuses remain largely ignored in the Canadian mainstream news media. While NAFTA links the economic futures of Canada and Mexico, the social aspects remain largely unheard.
Sparce coverage of Mexican human rights abuses prompted Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin to write: "Now that we are in NAFTA along with Mexico, they matter so much (to us) that our government pledged $1.5 billion we thought we didn't have so U.S. bondholders wouldn't get upset... over their Mexican investments. Surely we need to know what¹s going on there."
Examples of recent events in Mexico include the mysterious deaths of babies at a hospital in Durango. Suspicions were raised, and never cleared, of organ-trafficking or other illegal activity. The hospital is the only one in the area for uninsured poor people.
Victor Janoff of Xtra West reported that Mexican homosexuals are demoralized by rampant police brutality, including extortion, beatings and rape.
Linda Diebel of The Toronto Star reported that an army intelligence blacklist of "presumed Zapatistas" led to the deportation of three foreign priests working with poor Indians in Chiapas.
Since February 1995, there has been rising violence in Mexico, including the arrest, detention, and proven torture of suspected Zapatista sympathizers. In his book The Other Mexico: The North American Triangle Completed, John Warnock said in Mexico, dissent is controlled through rampant human rights violations, including arrests, torture, and disappearances.
Salutin's article was sparked by the June 28 massacre of a group of peasants on their way to a public protest in Guerrero. The peasants were ambushed by Mexican police. Survivors said the police were intent on preventing the farmers from attending the protest rally in an attempt to crush a militant farmers organization whose membership is growing in Guerrero state. Eighteen peasant farmers were killed and 22 were wounded. Jorge Madrazo, director of the Mexican governments' National Human Rights Commission, said a six-week probe into the June 28 shooting indicates police opened fire "indiscriminately" on the peasants, though they were not armed.
Minimal coverage and the distortion of facts in the Canadian press prompted Salutin to compare the amount of coverage of the Guerrero incident with another "foreign massacre," the bombing on July 24 of an Israeli bus that killed five passengers along with the bomber. While the Israeli bombing received 1,790 words in The Globe and Mail, the Guerrero massacre received only 892.
Amnesty International released a report in November 1995 stating that massive human rights violations, including torture by electric shock and genital mutilation, continue in Mexico with "total impunity." The report also shows that nothing has changed with regard to human rights abuses since a similar report was released three years ago.
Sources:
€ Newsgathering and our Third Amigo, The
Globe and Mail, August 4, 1995 (Rick Salutin)
€ Mexico a top rights violator, group charges, Toronto Star, June 26, 1995
(Linda Diebel)
€ Life Under Siege, Xtra West, Oct. 19, 1995 (Victor Janoff)
€ The Other Mexico: The North American Triangle Completed, Black Rose Books,
1995 (John Warnock)
PCC Researcher: Suzanne Maier
Summary of Coverage
The key aspect of the nominated story
received little coverage in the mainstream press, although individual incidents
that refer to Mexico and its role as a recognized human rights abuser did
receive some mention. We found nine stories referring to the massacre in
Guerrero (first reporting it as a peasant massacre of police and then as
a police massacre of peasants), mostly in The Globe and Mail and The Montreal
Gazette; three stories that referred directly to an Amnesty International
report that identified Mexico as a leader in human rights abuses; but very
few that commented on Canada's trade relationship and the Mexican state's
treatment of its citizens (mostly columns and editorials and none prominently
placed). Only our nominated story (found in The Globe and Mail) commented
on the mainstream news media's lack of attention to Mexico in comparison
with other strategically significant parts of the world. CBC-Radio reported
on each of the incidents mentioned in the nominated stories, but did not
reflect on the media coverage of Mexico and its history of human rights
abuses. For example, CBC-Radio only had one story on the massacre in Guerrero;
the primary focus of CBC-Radio coverage of Mexico and human rights was
the treatment of Zapatistas.
Author's Comments:
Freelance journalist Victor Janoff said
that his story "was 'censored' and fits the classic example of how
the voices of minority journalists and researchers are often passed over."
"I applied for, and received, a CIDA North/South Grant for Journalists in December 1994. One of the requirements for the grant was a letter from an editor stating that he or she was interested in publishing the article. I approached [the editor of a major Canadian newspaper] who had published one of my feature articles in her Focus section earlier. She agreed to pay me $350 for a 2,500-word article. Before I left for Mexico in December 1994, she told me that I should just research it and submit when I got back, and that I should not expect any contacts or assistance from [the paper] in any way because of my freelance status.
"I returned in March 1995, called her and told her I was in the process of writing it, and would send it to her within a couple of weeks. She seemed much more reticent, and explained that she was taking a lot of heat for [an article the paper had just run on a gay issue]. She said that there was a feeling at [the paper] that too many gay articles had been running, and that she might have to put mine off for a while.
"I wrote the 2,500 word article and sent it to her with photos in late March/early April. By early May she still hadn¹t gotten back to me. When I phoned again she was still vague about when it would run. She said she liked it and would send me the promised cheque, which she did. I called again in June, since she hadn¹t called me back. This time she seemed impatient, and still non-committal. In July I told her that if it wasn¹t going to run I would try to sell it to other papers, and would she mind sending the photos back? Eventually she phoned to say she couldn¹t find the photos. I called again, asking her to check, at which point she became exasperated and said she¹d looked everywhere and that was that. Not only were my photos lost, but an excellent graphic: the front-page of a Mexico City daily paper with a headline that read in Spanish, '96 Faggots Arrested.'
"In September, I approached one of the gay newspapers, Xtra West, who liked it, but made me chop it down to about 180
