Ciudad Juarez

Update

It's been a busy past couple of weeks down in Tucson.  It took me awhile to regroup from my delegation, through a lot of rest, catching up on tv shows, and downtime.  We celebrated Emily's birthday with a picnic in the nearby park (where I got this awesome chicken riding a bike tattoo!), I attended the annual meeting for Catie's CHRPA site, went to a presentation about women in Ciudad Juarez, was horribly sick on Valentine's Day weekend, missed a delegation, and just returned from a desert sojourn in Cascabel where we celebrated Catie's birthday.

Ciudad Juarez

The presentation on Ciudad Juarez was organized by a local organization called Tierra y Libertad, who brought in speakers from the Mexico Solidarity Network which is based in Chicago.

It started with talk about an Arizona bill called HB 2008 that was passed into law this past November by Arizona governor Jan Brewer.  The Bill requires DES to verify the legal status of all people who go to collect benefits (specifically food stamps), even if their children are U.S. citizens.  In a state like Arizona, this is big news because there are many U.S. citizen children whose fathers or mothers have been deported and going for food stamps is a last resort.  And while the law doesn't eliminate the eligibility for services, it could cause a caseworker to report on a parent if they find out about their undocumented status, even in a casual conversation.  This penalizes the children in so many ways.

The speakers from the Mexico Solidarity Network talked about the femicides that have occurred in Juarez and some of the causes and implications of the violence.  There was a lot of talk about NAFTA and free trade.  One of the most important points that the speaker brought up was that "people are always ready for economic capital, but not human capital."  The implementation of NAFTA caused a huge influx of migration in that huge factories called maquiladoras increased in number in the border areas and demanded more and more workers.  But, while the companies were ready for the work, they were not ready for the people and all of the social services and support that would be needed.

The talk ended with the reminder that we can't just leave the course of the world up to just our governments, but that we have to organize from the community, and we have to "globalize solidarity". 

It was an interesting talk, although a bit generalized (and I feel like my translations would have been a bit better!).  It reminded me of my time in El Paso and Juarez at Annunciation House a few years ago, where we learned about the femicides and visited the graves of women who had been killed.

Tomorrow, I head to a lecture at the University of Arizona called "In the Eye of the Storm: Ciudad Juarez, Violence and a Failed Drug Policy," which will hopefully go into more depth on some current issues.