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NGO Report
on the Situation of the Migrant Women
in Mexico
Presented at the 36th Session
of the
Committee for the Elimination of all Forms
of Discrimination
Against Women
(CEDAW)
By
María Cristina Hawley
UNANIMA International
In relation to the 6th periodic
report of the government of Mexico
as a State Party to CEDAW
7-25 August 2006, New York
This report was prepared with the assistance of the
Misioneras Catequistas de los Pobres of Coahuila, Mexico.
Translated from
the original Spanish
PREAMBLE
The present report is not written as a direct critique
of the 6th periodic report presented by the Government of Mexico
but rather as a positive commitment with the government to improve the
rights of migrant women. Its purpose is to provide a means for the
government of Mexico to reinforce its mechanisms to implement the
anti-discriminatory terms of the Convention so that it will be a clear and
efficacious element of all aspects of national policy.
INTRODUCTION
This report attempts to be
a complement to the 6th periodic report presented by Mexico in
November 2005 as well as to its response to the list of issues and questions
posed by the CEDAW Committee in its examination of the periodic report CEDAW/MEX/Q/6.
Specifically it will deal with the issue of migrant women.
In order to understand female migration, it is
necessary to place it in the context of industrialization, the models of
urbanization, the transformation of the peasant economy into a market
economy, the changes in the patterns of land ownership and the state
policies which influenced the social and economic changes in Mexico.
During the period 1950-1980, there was a trend of
female migration between the states of Mexico which coincided with the
process of urbanization which was incorporating women slowly but steadily
into the work force. Many of the women emigrated from the countryside to
the city entering into domestic work, business and the informal sector.
The recurrent crises experienced in Mexico and the
change of the “Welfare State” for the neoliberal approach, led women in
large numbers to emigrate to the United States. Beginning in 1990 the
incorporation of women into this undesirable migrant stream intensified so
that at the present time the number of women has reached 48 percent of the
total of 20 million of the latino and Central American immigrants who find
themselves far from the lands of their birth.
Data from the National Population Council affirms that
the migratory flow from Mexico to the United States rose to 400,000 persons
in the first years of the present century of which 20 percent is the female
population.
Women are more vulnerable in their crossing to the
United States. A study carried out by the organization Sin Fronteras
shows that migrants are the object of violence from the migration
authorities, the army, the police, employers and thieves who they meet on
their migratory path, especially when they travel alone. This applies as
much to Central American women who cross Mexico as to the Mexican migrant
women who live a physical and economic violence in the forms of extortion,
psychological and sexual violence. Unfortunately migrant women are also the
object of violence in their family environment and are vulnerable as well to
the mafias dedicated to sexual exploitation and criminality.
“The Mexican State has recognized the importance of
creating an integrated policy for human rights and the necessity of
harmonizing its national legislation with international treaties with regard
to human rights. However, there still exist laws and governmental practices
regarding migration which are regressive and violate the human rights of
persons who emigrate and which have been reported in United Nations special
reports on migrants”,
and, in the case which concerns us, by the UN
Special Rapporteur.
It is necessary to
recognize that one of the most important issues for the National Institute
of Women, created by President Vicente Fox Quesada on 12 January 2001 and
formally established on 8 March of the same year, is gender discrimination
and especially that which women migrants experience. In practice, though,
the migrant woman is continually the victim of sexual, psychological,
physical and economic violence which is even more aggravated when her
migratory status in Mexico is irregular or when she crosses the frontier
with the United States.
The problem of violence
along the border has sharpened as a result of the last proposals by US
Congress especially House Resolution 4437 or the Sensenbrenner Act which is
influencing the hatred and rejection of migrants. Every day the US Congress
seems further away from amnesty and legislative tolerance for migration,
strangling it diplomatically between the construction of the wall, the
militarization of the border and the weak concession for temporary migrant
workers.
With regard to the Mexican
authorities, it is often unfortunate that instead of harmonizing the laws
which arise from the international treaties and conventions that the Mexican
government has ratified with regard to migrants, they are more concerned to
throw the public security forces at them, increasing cruelty and
criminality, provoking deaths, mutilations, extortions and al sorts of cruel
and inhuman treatment.
In the 6th
periodic report of the Mexican government it speaks about a proposal they
are working to establish regarding the State’s immigration policy through
the development of diagnostic tools to be used by the 32 regional delegates
of the National Migration Institute and which we believe is indispensable.
It also speaks of the necessity of coordination with other government
entities, civil society organizations and international bodies to assist
victims of trafficking and migrants who are trafficked. All of this is very
good, but we urge that the programs of formation and workshops be given to
the police and local authorities because they are many times the ones who
treat women migrants worse than animals.
The Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was signed by
Mexico on 18 December 1979 and was ratified on 23 March 1981. The
Convention entered into effect as an international treaty on 3 September
1981.
In Article 2 it
states:
States Parties
condemn discrimination against women in all its forms, agree to pursue by
all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating
discrimination against women and, to this end, undertake:
(d) To refrain from engaging
in any act or practice of discrimination against women and to ensure that
public authorities and institutions shall act in conformity with this
obligation;
(e) To take all appropriate
measures to eliminate discrimination against women by any person,
organization or enterprise;
Article 1 of the Constitution of the
United States of Mexico in the
last paragraph which was reformulated at the insistence of President Vicente
Fox Quesada on 1 December 2000, and entered into force on 14 August 2001
says:
All forms of discrimination
motivated by ethnicity, gender, age, different capacities, social condition,
state of health, preferences, civil state or whatever other reason which
goes against human dignity and has as its object to annul or diminish the
rights and liberties of persons shall be prohibited.
The Mexican
law is distinct from its practice. The law speaks of a just and
equitable treatment for migrant women who enter into Mexico by its southern
border with Guatemala to reach their dream of reaching the other side of the
northern frontier. In fact the newspaper La Jornada of 15 April
2005 printed an article by the authors Laura Poy and Angeles Cruz: They
denounce State violence against women migrants.
Physical,
psychological, economic violence practiced by the Mexican State against
undocumented migrant women involves federal authorities, state and municipal
police forces who favor ‘State violence against this highly vulnerable
population.
Violence against women
“involves the authorities and society as was indicated by employees of the
Immigration department, customs, persons from the armed forces, the police,
employees in the countries of origin including even the men who travel with
them during their migration.”
In a joint study carried
out with the National Women’s Institute and the Ford Foundation, Sin
Fronteras indicates that to maintain this “pattern of abuse” it is
necessary to recognize that interfamilial violence is an element that is
strongly present in the general scheme of violence that accompanies the
entire migratory process of women.”
Many cases studied indicate
that physical and psychological violence against migrant women is
principally exercised by men with whom they live or cohabit, who threaten
them with accusations because of their migratory status. This is on top of
the violence suffered at the hands of the federal authorities which includes
verbal, physical, psychological and economic abuse – including even
extortion.
Between 2003 and 2004, the results of workshops in which 65 women from
Central and South America were interviewed at the immigration detention
center in Mexico City, a hostel in Rio Blanco, Veracruz, and a site in
Tapachula, Chiapas, it was learned that violence in its different forms was
present during the entire migratory process.
Regarding the destination
of women migrants, it stated that 57% were going to the United States and
43% indicated Mexico City as their destination. The interviewees were women
from Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina,
Honduras and Peru.
The study showed that 46% of
those interviewed (30 women) said that they had suffered come kind of
violence either from authorities, family members or persons unknown to them
during their migration. Out of this number, 23% said that the violence came
from the immigration authorities; 10 % from the federal prevention police
and the same percentage the judicial police and those of the municipalities.
The interviewees identified
the Army as the source of the violence in 6.6 % of the cases, the state
police and firemen each accounted for
3.3% of the cases; and 33.3% said they couldn’t identify the source of the
violence.
With regard to the type of violence experienced, 30%
stated it was physical violence; some said it was psychological aggression;
16.6 % said it was economic (extortion); 10% suffered sexual violence and
13.3% did not identify the specific kind of violence.
In this same study, the references to domestic abuse
occurred in about 24% of the cases, while 36% denied any such experience and
the remaining 4% gave no information on this point.
In addition, two sources, the newspaper El
Universal and the independent press Criterios, published a news
item on 22 July 2006 with the headline: “ CNDH
denounces official passivity towards the abuse of migrant women”. The
source of the article was José Luis Soberanes from the office of the
ombudsman. In it he criticized the Mexican Government for its “passivity”
and “unacceptable indifference” concerning the sexual violence being
experienced by thousands and thousands of migrant women in the border region
with the United States. Many different NGOs have denounced such and the
CNDH has urged “the federal government to undertake actions to deal with the
cases of these women, victims of increasing sexual violence.”
This office based its
information on the data gathered by the Border Patrol of the US which
indicated that 450 women enter the US each day or about 165,000 per year.
The flow intensified in 2004 and 2005 with 340 thousand women crossing in
those two years.
In those last two years there was also an increase in
sexual aggression towards women. Many times those who committed these acts
of aggression, extortion and abuse toward the women were federal, state or
municipal civil servants, using as their excuse Mexico’s General Population
Law.
This law in its Article 123 considers the entrance of undocumented persons
into the country as a crime and the majority of Central American migrant
women are undocumented.
Some deputies presented an initiative before Congress
that seeks to eliminate from the legislation “illegal immigration as a crime
which merits the deprivation of liberty”, but it is not know whether this
will be accepted or not since the initiative will be taken up in September
of 2006 by the new legislature elected on 2 July 2006.
On the other hand, El Mañana de Reynoso,
Tamaulipas published an article over the concern about the wave of violence
which is overwhelming
the northern border of Mexico including
specifically Reynoso, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros where there is a growing
number of homicides of women, especially migrant women.
On 5 April 2006, La
Jornada published an article with the headline: “Rate of women raped on
the border increases: NGO”.
Mexicali, B.C. The
Coalition for the Defense of the Migrant told us that on the northern border
of Mexico a significant increase in the cases of the raping of women
attempting to cross to the United States has been registered. (Although
there are no official statistics) whoever has any connection with migrants –
whether it is the staff of the inns, or the Border Patrol – can confirm that
there has been a significant increase in the number of migrant women
reporting sexual assault.
Information for the report was given by Esmeralda Siú, the spokesperson for
the coalition that is formed with 15 civil society organizations on the
border. Because of economic necessity or the desire to be reunited with
family, every day more women cross the frontier. “These most painful crimes
are added to many others committed against migrants, especially in the part
of the journey closest to the point of crossing – i.e. from Agua Prieta to
Sásabe, Sonora.”
Frontera
con justicia, A.C., in its second
report on the situation of Human Rights, interviewed 1003 migrants in
transit, principally Central Americans, between May 2005 and April 2006.
Out of these interviews 98% were men and only 2% were women. This is
because the hostel Belén, Posada del Migrante, in Saltillo, Coahuila,
has primarily a male clientele even though the number of women pass through
has increased in recent years. Also, for migrant women it is very unpleasant
to talk about their experience en route since they suffer much aggression
from men.
According to the
information received from migrants in interviews, it is chiefly the guards
on the trains and to a lesser degree the municipal police who bother them
while they are in transit. These authorities, abusing their power,
intimidate and extort the migrants in transit. Immigration agents had 100
complaints, and the Federal Preventive Police had 93 cases reported against
them. The next number of complaints was raised against the army especially
at the boarder and at road blocks. There were also complaints against the
State Police and the Judicial Police.
It is appropriate to
emphasize here that most of these assaults are committed on railroad lines
or in the trains or in the train stations and that the aggressors had been
identified by the migrants.
Here are
two pertinent cases where women were assaulted:
Maritza
Barrios, a Guatemalan women, was
traveling in the train with four male companions she met on the way to the
northern border of Mexico. On 14 April, near Saltillo, 3 guards came to
where the four were and asked them for money. They searched Maritza and
found $100 in her clothes. They beat up the men and made them get off the
train while it was still going fast.
The guard wanted to rape
Maritza and later threatened to kill her leaving her hung up between two of
the train cars. In the end, they let her go but one of her companions
succeeded in saving her. However, one of the train wheels ran over part of
her right leg. In the hospital they had to amputate it below the knee.
The Sisters Missionary
Catechists of the Poor at the Migrant Shelter knew about Maritza because she
stayed with them to recover from the irreparable harm done to her physical
and psychological integrity by the private security business COPSSA.
Sonia
Cáceres was a Honduran woman who
traveled in a train that was going through Saltillo on 24 September along
with other male companions from Honduras. Suddenly they saw that a white
pick-up truck was following the train and the guards were throwing stones at
it. Her companions rolled off the train to avoid the vigilantes but Sonia
stayed in the train and because of this she was pushed off the train by a
guard and as she fell the train crushed part of her foot. She, too, was
recovering in the Migrant Shelter.
In spite of the fact that
these crimes occurred more than a year ago and that those who did them are
known by the victims, in both cases there has been no case brought before a
criminal judge.
At the southern border of
Mexico, violence against the migrant women is more humiliating and degrading
than on the northern border. Martha Rebeca Herrera, a researcher with the
Department of Physical Anthropology of the Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia, indicated that her research focused on the state of
Chiapas where she found widespread prostitution networks tolerated both by
the authorities and the population in general. These set up adverse
situations for those persons who seek to enter Mexico without their required
documents.
On the border with the
United States there are migrant women, in the south there are illegals and
so the authorities and the smugglers treat them like delinquents. There is
a network of mechanisms for sexual exploitation of migrant women who are
principally young women, including girls between 10 and 12 years old.
The manner of practicing prostitution occurs in several ways: one of these
is located in a hospice near the capital of the state of Chiapas where they
offer services to migrant women who come primarily from El Salvador and
Nicaragua. The place is known as La Galatica and is guarded day and
night by police and private security. It has a health center to tend to the
women…but this is more than a benefit, it is a business to deal with any
problems that may arise. When the young women get sick or are no longer
attractive, they denounce them to the authorities and they are deported to
their country of origin.
In the municipality of Tapachula, there is another tolerance zone which
includes a place especially for homosexuals. This causes major problems of
discrimination but in this place prostitution is practiced on completely
adverse conditions, without health care or police protection. In this case
violence, humiliation and drug trafficking are constantly present. This
causes death and infections both to the women and to those who exploit them
resulting in terrible conditions for both men and women migrants.
In both of these cases
migrant women find themselves illegally in Mexico and the ages of the women
involved are ever lower – between ten and fifteen years old. For this
reason these same authorities can implement Article 123 of the Law of
Population which states that: “A punishment of up to two years in
prison and a fine of up to 350 thousand pesos will be imposed on a foreigner
who enters the country illegally.”
The objective of Herrara’s
research was to create a reference framework for future actions and changes
in migration policy.
It must also be recognized
that the National Women’s Institute in Mexico has given great importance to
the topic of the migrant woman. In fact, INMUJERES in December 2005
published a manual entitled Migrant Women and their implications from a
gender perspective” to facilitate the implementation of workshops to
help improve the conditions of the female migrant.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. We insist that the
government of Mexico implement General Recommendation 19, paragraph 6 of
CEDAW so that the physical, mental and sexual abuse suffered by migrant
women be considered as a specific form of violence against women.
2. We desire that as a State
Party to the CEDAW Optional Protocol (approved by the Senate and then by the
President on 22 January 2002) respond to all the questions that the
Committee asked regarding persons who allege that they are victims of any
type of discrimination.
3. We demand that the human
rights of migrant women, Mexican as well as foreigners, be respected in
their travels through Mexico.
4. We consider it
indispensable and urgent to incorporate a gender perspective in the analysis
of migration which implies that women be considered an active part in all
processes.
5. We urge the
closing of the brothel: La Gálactica.
6. We emphasize the need
to continue with awareness campaigns and workshops to combat violence
against migrant women in Mexico. Many persons have been involved in the
proposed workshops sponsored by the National Institute of Women in their
manual titled: “Migrant Women and their implications from a gender
perspective.”
7. We ask for the
implementation of the Federal Law to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination
which came into effect on 12 June 2003, especially Article 1 which says:
“The terms of this law are
concerning public order and the interest of society. Its object is to
prevent and eliminate all forms of discrimination which are practices
against whatever person in the terms of Article 1 of the Political
Constitution of the United States of Mexico to promote equality of
opportunity and treatment.”
8. We recognize the
tremendous work of civil society organizations who call on the authorities
to fulfill their responsibility of guaranteeing the respect for human rights
of migrant men and women, as well as monitoring the channels of
communication and interacting with them to ensure their improvement – an
obligation especially incumbent on Mexico as a State Party to the Convention
on the Protection of Migrants and their Families.
9. We ask for the
continuation of the National Program for Equal Opportunity and
non-discrimination against women (Proequidad) generated by the National
Institute of Women (INMUJERES).
10. We reiterate the demand
that the Governor of Coahuila, Humberto Moreira Valdez, implement
completely the recommendations made by the National Human Rights Commission
in its recommendation No 45/2005, of 6 December 2005, calling for the
investigation of the public servants of the Secretary of Public Security for
allowing the private security firm COPSSA to carry out acts reserved to the
National Migration Institute.
GENERAL
CONCLUSION
We have tried to demonstrate the migrant women,
principally from Central America live a situation of physical, economic, and
sexual violence from the moment of crossing the southern border between
Mexico and Guatemala, all throughout their passage through Mexico until they
cross the northern border with the United States.
We have pointed out that violence against migrant
women involves the migration authorities, judicial police, other police and
the personnel of private security firms. In the majority of these cases,
there is no justice for the demands presented by civil society organizations
regarding the violations of the rights of women migrant workers
Also, we note the need to ensure conformity with
treaties like CEDAW to which Mexico is a State Party with the implementation
of specific measures as in Article 1 of the Constitution as in other
national laws. There still exist laws and governmental practices as far as
migration goes which are regressive and which ought to be modified.
We can no longer tolerate what is occurring on Mexico’s
southern border: undocumented women are trafficked and the same persons who
smuggle them exploit them as prostitutes and then abandon them.
We acknowledge the interest of the National Institute
of Women in combating violence against migrant women and their desire to
develop tools to incorporate a gender perspective. However, we hope that as
many persons as possible will be available to facilitate such workshops.
We hope that this alternative report will help the
migration, judicial, police authorities and private security personnel to
change their laws and patterns of conduct to facilitate the generous and
committed work of many NGOs to combat the violence practices against women
in all of Mexico and during their passage from this country to the United
States.
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