Mexican workers have much to be angry about. Despite labor laws that look great on paper and two-plus decades of presidents extolling the virtues of trade liberalization and anti-inflationary measures, job quality has stagnated and in some ways worsened. The charro (cowboy) unions, as critics dub the "official," government-linked labor associations, are trapped in a model left over from Mexico's former one-party state, and deliver little for workers. Independent unions like Gutierrez's seek to chart a different course, but so far their numbers remain small and their impact limited. May 1^st in Mexico may have shifted from a ceremonial parade to a cry of protest; it is still far indeed from a celebration of working-class victories.

Laws and realities

On May 1^st, we joined up with the contingent of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), a small (they claim about 1/18 the membership of the charro Mexican Confederation of Labor) but feisty independent union confederation. A sea of union militants in tan t-shirts and red baseball caps converged on the gathering point, near the corner of Lázaro Cárdenas and Articulo 123 in the center of Mexico City. The symbolism of the intersection was potent. Cárdenas was the fiery populist leader of the 1930s who nationalized key industries (notably oil) and fused workers and peasants with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) via labor law and land reform. Article 123 is Mexico's basic statement of labor rights, enshrined as an article of the Constitution; it opens by stating, "Every person has the right to decent and socially useful work...."

The scope of Mexican labor law can be startling to the casual US observer. Left-wing legal scholar Néstor de Buen recently described the law's requirement of six days of paid vacation after one year as "a miserable amount"; in the United States, of course, the amount required by law is zero. Mexico's labor law also restricts firing and requires a holiday bonus of two weeks' pay, a dozen official holidays, overtime pay, the right to form unions, profit-sharing, provisions for worker health and safety and labor-management committees to address issues of mutual concern such as training. In fact, the law is so strong-on paper-that previous president Vicente Fox (2000-2006) tried unsuccessfully to gut it, and Calderón has promised business he will finish the job.

But two problems prevent this legislation from turning Mexico into a workers' paradise. First, the law is barely enforced. Workers commonly work extra hours, not only without an overtime premium, but without any pay at all; one convenience store employee told us he works an average of four unpaid extra hours a week. Companies dodge the profit-sharing rule by using accounting tricks to declare zero profits, as Volkswagen's extremely successful Mexico division did this year.

From chambas to changarros

An even bigger problem is that increasing numbers of Mexicans fall outside the scope of the law altogether, because instead of having chambas (jobs), they have changarros (self-employment or marginal employment in a kaleidoscopic range of microbusinesses and hustles). Unemployment proper has drifted up from 3.6 to 4 percent since Calderón has taken office. But outright unemployment is not a viable option for most, given that Mexico has no unemployment insurance system. Instead, Mexicans join the ranks of those heading north to the United States (about 500,000 a year) or, in even larger numbers, join the informal economy of changarros. Experts estimate that today about 26 million of Mexico's 41 million workers labor without legally required benefits (including social security) or an employment contract. Even in the industrial powerhouse city of Puebla, Rita Amador, head of the union of vendors at the informal Hidalgo Market, reports that unemployed job seekers have increased the group's ranks by ten percent in the last year alone. Over the last four presidential terms, the percentage of workers without benefits soared from 25 percent to 63 percent.

The benefits gap offers one window on how appallingly bad most Mexican jobs are. There are many others. Even among benefited workers the percentage who are temporary has leaped from 8 percent in 1997 to 18 percent in 2006. Prominent labor lawyer Arturo Alcalde states that of workers fired or laid off in Mexico, four out of ten had been compelled to sign a blank sheet upon being hired, allowing the employer to compose a letter of resignation that voids any complaint about the firing. In the case of Mexico's new budget airlines (such as Azteca, which just went bankrupt), according to Alcalde, the company goes one better and requires pilots to sign a paper acknowledging receipt of a fictitious "loan"-insuring the company against severance claims.

A March UN report pronounced Mexican child labor laws a "dead letter" in Mexico. Pint-sized street vendors, cashiers in family markets, and grocery baggers working only for tips, can be seen in every Mexican city. Recent press reports have spotlighted large numbers of children among miners in Guerrero (working 12-hour days for about $7 a day), melon harvesters in Michoacán (where kids reportedly make up more than half of the crews), coffee pickers in Puebla, and clothing maquiladoras in the Puebla maquila center of Tehuacán. The mayor of coffee-producing Xicotepec, Puebla commented, "Lately I've seen commercials saying it's against the law, but here work comes very naturally to the children, because it's their daily bread Children have accompanied their elders to the harvest here all their lives."

Natural or not, such work has consequences. In the dusty rural community of Analco, Tlaxcala where we are working on a community project, large numbers of children-especially boys-drop out after primary school to devote full-time to farming. Mexico, where the median level of education falls between 7^th and 8^th grade, can ill afford these dropout rates.

David Salgado, a nine-year old Mixtec boy from Guerero, paid an even higher price when he was crushed to death last January by a tractor while working the tomato harvest with his family in the fields of Sinaloa. Safety and health is another area where Mexican laws look better on paper than in reality. The most dramatic recent incident was the explosion and cave-in at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, where 65 miners perished in 2006. A church-sponosored investigative commission found a history of negligence at the mine dating back to 2000 and continuing up to the time the investigation wrapped up more than a year after the tragedy.

The deindustrialization of Mexico?

Globalization and trade liberalization (a concerted government policy since the early 1980s) have had mixed effects on Mexican jobs. The influx of (often subsidized) U.S. agricultural goods and the spread of supermarkets that crave large-scale suppiers able to guarantee uniform quality have hammered small farmers. Mexico has become a net food importer. The textile industry, likewise, is in free-fall, shedding nearly 50,000 jobs a year during the Fox sexenio (presidential term). Southern Tlaxcala state, where we are living, is ground zero for textile job losses. Numerous factories are shuttered or entangled in prolonged "strikes" that have devolved into desperate struggles to extract some amount of severance pay. When we admired finely made wool rebozos at a local shop, the shopkeeper said, "Better buy them while you can. There used to be six factories here that made these; now there are none left." He shrugged, "We can't compete with the Chinese."

Apparel maquiladoras, once a huge growth industry are slipping away to Central America and the Far East as well. Even in Mexico's "Silicon Valley" in the western state of Jalisco, 60 percent of transnational companies have reportedly begun outsourcing, and Hitachi recently announced a plant closing that will idle 4,500 workers. Still, Mexico does continue to briskly export oil, autos and parts, and mano de obra in the form of migrants. Overall, the country's impressive $80 billion trade surplus with the United States is offset by trade deficits with every other major trading partner (a $62 billion deficit with Asia alone), leaving Mexico billions of dollars in the hole each year. While workers struggle to cope with the resulting layoffs and stagnating wages, Mexico's wealthy-like Carlos Slim, owner of the privatized TelMex phone company and recently declared the world's second-richest man-are doing just fine, thank you. According to an Economic Policy Institute study, Mexico's corporate profits grew 18 times as fast as the economy as a whole over the just-ended sexenio.

For decades, public employees were relatively protected from the economic ravages that rocked other Mexicans. But no longer. In mid-2006, when Oaxaca teachers mobilized their annual strike for higher wages, Governor Ulises Ruiz chose to forego the customary negotiation and instead unleashed savage repression that over the next six months escalated to mass arrests, disappearances and killings. In March 2007, ignoring worker protests, Mexico's Congress enacted a law to privatize government workers'pensions and convert them from guaranteed payouts to "defined contribution" plans dependent on investment returns.

Paper unions, charros, and independents

Mexican labor laws also codify workers' right to join a union. But only about ten percent of Mexican workers are unionized (around the same rate as in the United States). Even worse, as the former CEO of a supermarket chain explained to Chris, "In Mexico, it's very easy to have a union that's a paper union." Labor lawyer Alcalde estimates that over 90 percent of unioin contracts are contratos de protección, designed to shield the company from authentic labor representation in return for a dues rakeoff for union officials. Workers are often unaware they even have a union. Government control of whether unions get a registro permitting them to recruit workers in a given sector impedes independent organizing. When that fails, according to the Center for Labor Research and Union Advising (CILAS), the "official" unions often unleash armed goons to smack down opposition. (We spoke with a CILAS researcher the day his report on "union terrorism" hit the media; "I'm glad they didn't mention my name," he remarked wryly.

Napoleon Gómez, president of the "official" Miners'Union, refused to play the game and led a militant strike last year. The federal government twisted arms and managed to get him removed. This year it was discovered that some of the union officials' signatures on the document used to replace Gómez were forged, and he was reinstated. Advocates of union democracy rejoiced in the victory over government meddling, but the triumph was bittersweet. Gomez's militancy does not translate into a commitment to democracy or transparency. In fact, "Napoleon II" inherited his post from his father, and appears to have siphoned off tens of millions of dollars from the union's pension fund. (His temporary replacement has also been accused of looting the fund.) Gómez is currently running the union from Vancouver, where he is fighting extradition on embezzlement charges.

Moreover, as a knowledgeable observer of the Mexican labor scene commented to us, "Even the independent unions are not doing much to organize workers who aren't already unionized. They're fighting to divide a shrinking pool." And with a few exceptions (most notoriously Elba Esther Gordillo, the charro leader of the teacher's union who cut a political deal to accept the pension reform that puts her members' retirement at risk), both the official and the independent unions remain male-led despite the growing numbers of women in the workforce.

Two, three, many May Days?

The fractured and weakened state of Mexican labor was much in eveidence on May 1^st. Gone are the days when hundreds of thousands of workers marched in lockstep with each other and with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for over 70 years. Mexico City saw four separate commemorations of the workers' holiday. The Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM), the largest and most charro of the labor groupings, organized a small, half-hour long, and low-energy rally featuring mainstream political leaders like Beatriz Paredes, the current chair of the PRI (and perhaps the only woman speaker heard at any of the union-sponsored events that day). Independent unions, including the FAT, but also telephone and electrical workers, miners, firefighters, teachers, and many others, rocked the Zócalo with angry speeches, guerilla-theater, and a burning in effigy of teachers' union chief Gordillo and Calderón, arm in arm. Spirits were high and the turnout overshadowed the official celebration, but the numbers appeared to be in the thousands, not the tens of thousands.

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) and a number of other unions derided by some independents as "neo-charros" chose to boycott both marches and hold their own demonstration, where they naturally called for labor unity. Supporters of the Zapatista rebels followed yet another route, promoting the demands of indigenous and poor people, single mothers, prostitutes, and street vendors. In state capitals in Chihuahua, Guerrero, and our own Tlaxcala, pro- and anti-charro teachers' factions traded shoves and punches.

Nonetheless, May 1^st brought hopeful signs as well. The independent unions massed alongside organizations of peasant (including one historically linked with the PRI) and migrants, plus leftists from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Mexico's second-largest party, reflecting new alliances that grew out of the tortilla price crisis of January-February. Slogans included food sovereignty as well as labor rights.

Winning better wages and working conditions depends on much more than the number of co-sponsors of a May Day demonstration. It will take local organizing, mobilizing for this fall's gubernatorial elections, creation of cooperatives and other "solidarity economy" outposts, and direct action. The scope of the problem is huge-even megabillionaire Carlos Slim acknowledges that widening inequality marks one of Mexico's greatest challenges. But the flowering of independent unionism is an important step toward a solution.

It was an all-too-familiar experience for Mexicans trying to cross into Arizona, California, or Texas. Except this raid did not take place in any of those states, but in Mexico's southern-most state of Chiapas. And those detained were not Mexicans, but Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and one Cuban.

Welcome to Mexico's other immigration problem. In the words of Isabel Vericat, a filmmaker working on a documentary spotlighting illegal immigration across Mexico's southern border, "The northern border of Mexico begins in the south." An estimated 350,000 undocumented immigrants--a majority Central American, but also including many from South America--crossed from Guatemala and Belize in 2005. They came not to seek a living in Mexico's sputtering economy, but to find a way to El Norte. Of the 350,000, it is estimated that about 40,000 made it to their objective. Another 10,000 ended up staying in Mexico. The rest were detained and deported.

Between Mexico's northern border problem and its southern border problem, Mexico is caught in a difficult squeeze. The Mexican government of Felipe Calderón complains that its US counterpart does not sufficiently take into account the needs nor respect the human rights of Mexican immigrants. But at the same time, Mexican authorities are implicated in brutal repression against migrants from farther south…at the behest of the US government.

Survival strategy
The number of Mexicans in the United States is estimated at 11-12 million, with about half a million crossing each year. The Banco de México (Mexico's central bank) claims that the real numbers are substantially larger than these official statistics, citing as evidence the fact that the population in a number of Mexican states has stopped growing despite no drop in the birth rate.

Migration's impact on communities, particularly declining rural ones, is enormous. One window onto this is the family saga of our friend Angelina, a market woman in Michoacán's capital city of Morelia who lives in an agricultural town about one hour to the north. Her aging father has gone to el otro lado repeatedly to work in agriculture, injuring himself on the job there in 2004. Her husband was crippled there in a car accident. One sister crossed illegally, only to be deported. Four other siblings are working in Texas and Rhode Island. Her son just went to join relatives in Ohio and do yarda work, a Spanglish word meaning landscaping. Millions of families across Mexico have similar stories.

Border wall or not, immigration reform or not, nobody in Mexico expects this to change soon. (The only noticeable changes in recent years have been increasing rates of immigration from Mexico's more remote southern states, of women, and of unaccompanied children, many of them looking for their parents.)

The Banco de México projected in February that even if Mexico achieves a 5% annual growth rate (higher than it has seen since 2000), the pay differential will continue drawing migrants to the north "for two or three decades." Héctor Rangel, the president of the board of Mexican bank BBVA Bancomer, remarked not long afterward that Mexico has been "unable to create the number of jobs necessary to hold onto our population."

NAFTA has been a bust for most Mexicans. The current example of trucking is indicative. In early 2007, with much fanfare, the Mexican government announced that Mexican truck drivers could now haul their loads into the United States. But a couple of weeks into the pilot program, the Mexican trucking association demanded that the agreement be scrapped and a new one negotiated. With long delays at the border plus fines for "safety" infractions, the operators said the current agreement is worthless. But the problem goes well beyond trucking.

Overall, Mexico's average wage level is only marginally beyond where it stood in 1994 when NAFTA went into effect, and slow economic growth has driven millions into informal sector jobs, ranging from selling on street corners to sewing in the home. The maquiladora (export assembly) industry grew over the 1990s, but then shrank as cost-conscious transnationals shifted sourcing to Central America or China.

Meanwhile, US agricultural imports such as poultry have swept the Mexican market, putting tens of thousands of small producers out of business. Looking ahead with dread to 2008, the deadline for removing all remaining restrictions on US corn, beans, and wheat (with low prices supported by US government subsidies), Mexican peasant associations and their allies have called for re-negotiating NAFTA, but the government remains staunchly pro-free-trade.

Perhaps the only "bright" spot, according to researcher Huberto Juárez of the Autonomous University of Puebla, is that as Mexican wages stagnate and Chinese wages grow, Mexico's wage levels are becoming cost-competitive with Chinese ones in some manufacturing sectors. In this context, the remittances sent home by Mexico's millions of migrants are vital not only for the economic survival of their families, but also for the economic survival of the country.

Migration is Mexico's second largest source of export earnings (in this case, via the export of labor), yielding $24 billion US in 2006, second only to petroleum. But like Mexico's oil, which is projected to run out in twenty years or so, remittances can form a deceptive cushion that allows the government to shirk its job-creation responsibilities-temporarily.

Raúl Delgado, director of the International Network on Migration and Development, criticizes governments of immigrant-sending countries for over-dependence on remittances at the expense of developing a well-rounded development policy "following alternative strategies" and "fighting to transform the asymmetrical and unjust relations that characterize the current global order."

The southern border
If the pay difference is a magnet for Mexican migration, it is an even stronger magnet for people struggling to survive in the poorer Central American countries, which over the last twenty to thirty years have been ravaged by civil wars, hurricanes, free trade, and the global coffee glut. Deals between corrupt border guards and polleros (traffickers whom migrants pay to escort them across) make it easy to cross the border itself. But once in southern Mexico, immigrants from Central America or farther south are easy prey for those same polleros and police, along with maras (Salvadoran gangs active in the border area), Mexican organized crime, and freelance robbers and con men. Migrants with money can pay to travel north by car or even plane.

But most have no choice other than the train. The train in question starts in Arriaga, Chiapas, 180 miles north of the border. (It began at the border until Hurricane Stan devastated a long stretch of it in 2005.) Migrants must walk for ten dangerous days to reach Arriaga. If they succeed, they climb onto train cars, holding on any way they can. The rail voyage to the northern border takes another 10 to 12 days. That's if everything goes right. But usually it doesn't. In the 180-mile gauntlet from the border to Arriaga, in addition to deportation, migrants run the risk of extortion, robbery, assault, rape, and even murder.

According to first-hand accounts from migrants collected by film-maker Vericat, the perpretrators are often the uniformed police who are charged with enforcing immigration law. Thousands of women, mostly young Central American mothers with one or more children to support, many under 18, have been lured or forced into prostitution in the Soconusco border region of Chiapas when the option of going further north evaporated. Vericat reports that Soconusco has become the third largest center of prostitution in the world, behind only border regions in Brazil and Thailand.

And getting on the train does not mean they are home free, either. The train ride is exhausting and dangerous. Mounting or dismounting-or falling-from the moving train can cause serious injury or death. Police raids are frequent (the February 10, 2007 raid described in the introduction to this article targeted the train in Arriaga; reportedly there were 500 migrants aboard). In that raid, one woman fell under the train and lost a foot. And of course, the travelers must sometimes get off to get food, water, a little sleep in some place where they don't have to hold on for dear life.

Apizaco, in the state of Tlaxcala where we are spending six months, marks the halfway point in the journey. The Casa del Migrante in Apizaco, a charitable organization that provides assistance with no questions asked, reports that migrants are often out of money and desperate. Confused, some of them make the tragic error of re-boarding the train heading south instead of north.

And of course, at the US border they face another set of obstacles. Even once on the job in the United States, they are not safe, as we saw in the March New Bedford, Massachusetts raid that nabbed hundreds of undocumented Central Americans. But many of those who are deported keep trying, again and again.

The immigration debates in Mexico
The policy discussion of immigration in Mexico is split. Looking north, everybody agrees that the US should allow more Mexicans to enter legally and that the border wall is a barbarity. Everybody recognizes the hypocrisy of the wealthy northern neighbor that depends on large numbers of Mexican laborers but insists on selectively enforcing a law that is completely out of step with reality. The only disagreement is between the Calderón administration, which is pressing the Bush administration in the most cautious of ways, and critics who call on the government to stand up more forcefully for opportunities for Mexicans.

The debate about the southern border is much more wide-open. Legislators from the center-to-right PRI and PAN parties, which make up a majority in congress, have called for stronger sanctions against undocumented immigrants from the south in phrases that could have come from US Republicans. But the government of Calderón (who was the PAN's candidate for president) has announced plans to decriminalize illegal immigration (that is, deport them but don't fine them, in order to decrease the incentives for extortion by officials) and to expand legal immigration channels, increasing the number of Guatemalans permitted to enter for agricultural work and issuing visas of up to five years for professional workers.

At the same time, they have promised the US government to tighten up the "porous" southern border, by means they have yet to specify. And Mexico's federal agents continue to deal out violent treatment to migrants.

Meanwhile, a chain of Casas del Migrante located at strategic points in the migration from the south, such as Arriaga and Apizaco, offer temporary shelter, food, counseling, and small amounts of cash, defying legal restrictions. And many ordinary Mexicans offer the immigrants from the south a meal or place to sleep.

In a highly publicized case, María Concepción, who lives in a community along the south-north train where it passes through the central state of Querétaro, was recently sentenced to two years in prison for human trafficking after being caught feeding supper to six migrants from Honduras in 2005. The government claimed to have witnesses who testified that Concepción worked for pay with a network of traffickers. Concepción and her family members insist she was just offering charity, and that everybody in the community "would give them a taco or some water," in the words of her daughter. Because they have concluded that for the government "it's a crime even to give them a glass of water, now we don't even give them a glass of water."

But for most Mexicans, unlike the issue of the northern border, the issue of the southern border remains a bit remote. Arturo, a neighbor of ours in Tlaxcala who runs a laundromat, commented, "Mexico is just a 'trampoline' for the Central Americans, because there's nothing for them here, no jobs." Still, with the growing volume of migrants and increasing media coverage, there is growing consciousness of the human rights issues involved.

On a visit to the hospital, Arturo had met a Guatemalan who had fallen under the train in Apizaco. "The police picked him up and beat him. He was at the hospital, under armed guard, and once he was better they were going to deport him. That's not fair, that's a violation of human rights! If the man wants to work, let him try to get a job."

Burning questions
The week leading up to Easter is a time of school vacations and colorful celebrations all across Mexico-not a time when many are thinking about the grim issues of immigration. But we saw the issues flare up-literally-at the Holy Saturday celebration (the night before Easter) in San Cristobal, Chiapas, about 80 miles from Arriaga as the crow flies. Mexico has a Holy Saturday tradition of burning los Judas, papier-mâché dummies named after Judas, often crammed with fireworks and representing the ills and evils the community would like to purge.

San Cristobal hosts an annual Judas contest. This year the competition was brisk, with two effigies of George Bush (one as a rat, the other as a sea monster), two of President Calderón, two of environmental pollution and global warming, and two of a Grim Reaper-like figure of Abortion (conservative Mexicans are appalled that Mexico City is on the verge of decriminalizing abortion), among others.

But the winner was "El muro de la vergüenza" (the wall of shame), as Mexicans call the barrier the United States is erecting along the border. Less noticed, however, was an evocative sculpture showing a faceless figure with a club beating down a second faceless figure who was trying to clamber up onto a boxcar. "The plight of the Central American immigrant" said a simple label scrawled in chalk.

We watched as they lit up the boxcar. The flames leaped up, the fireworks shot off, but as the fire died down again the crowd could see that the figures and the boxcar were still there. The celebrants tried twice more to relight the Judas, but it stubbornly refused to be consumed, and they finally gave up and moved on to the next one. For Mexico as for the United States, the treatment of migrants from the south will not be an easy Judas to burn.

Resources
For more information pleasse see Isabel Vericat, "La otra frontera (México-Guatemala)", Jornada Semanal, March 4, 2007 and the Casas del Migrante-Scalabrini web site.

This is the latest piece in an occasional series from longtime Grassroots advisors Chris Tilly and Marie Kenned, who are currently working and writing in Mexico .

A land of laws but no justice

In a February statement, Amnesty International described Mexico as a country with "laws but no justice." They were talking about the criminal justice system, but the statement describes Mexico more broadly, in a couple of ways.

First, the application of laws in Mexico is often arbitrary and driven by covert or overt economic and political interests.

Second, Mexican society (like most others, including the U.S.) institutionalizes injustice toward a number of groups of second-class citizens-such as indigenous people, the poor and women.

But the story is more complex. Mexico today also is registering some unexpected breakthroughs in civil rights, including gay/lesbian rights. And popular organizations, sometimes with allies in the mainstream parties and sometimes without, are continuing to push forward the struggle for social justice.

Whose law?

Totalitarianism, according to one description, is a situation in which laws are constructed so that absolutely everyone must violate them in the course of daily life, rendering everyone vulnerable to selective application of the law.

Mexico does not meet this definition of totalitarianism, but the country certainly has some things in common with it. Tax evasion is virtually universal. There are often multiple land ownership claims based on conflicting government policies or actions-agrarian reform, indigenous reservations, patronage gifts by some governor or other, eminent domain, and so on. And politicians often interpret broadly written laws to their own advantage, as well as supplementing legal actions with extralegal and illegal ones.

Perhaps the most celebrated recent example of arbitrary application of the law took place in 2004, in the political jockeying preceding the 2006 presidential campaign.

The popular center-left mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), was leading in early polls. The government of President Vicente Fox, of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) contrived charges against AMLO for taking a small slice of private land by eminent domain for a hospital access road.

An open criminal proceeding would have barred López Obrador from being a candidate. AMLO responded by organizing a protest movement, and the federal prosecutor finally dropped the charges.

Fox stirred up a furor a couple of weeks ago by commenting that López Obrador had beaten him that time, but "I got even when my candidate"-Felipe Calderón, the PAN's presidential candidate-"won at the polls." López Obrador and his supporters maintain the election was stolen with Fox's collusion.

AMLO's plight is just one of many such cases. Journalist Lydia Cacho, who accused the governor of Puebla of shielding powerful political and business figures who were procuring sex with minors, spent a year in prison awaiting trial on libel charges before a judge finally ordered her released last month.

In the case highlighted by Amnesty International, indigenous activists in Oaxaca languish in prison on trumped-up charges for taking part in the movement against that state's governor. Environmental activists in Morelos and elsewhere have suffered a similar fate. Because Mexico's laws do not include a presumption of innocence, people accused for political reasons have limited tools to fight their incarceration.

Unjust imprisonment is bad enough, but those with political power sometimes go well beyond that in clamping down on dissidents. Mexico, historically a land of caudillos (regional political-military leaders) and caciques (local bosses controlling patronage and enforcement systems), has not completely escaped its legacy.

In San Salvador Atenco (Mexico State) and Oaxaca, where governors savagely repressed demonstrations last year, human rights observers have documented cases of detention without charges, beating, torture, rape of women and men, disappearance, and assassination.

Some such actions are targeted, others appear designed to indiscriminately sow terror-one account describes apolitical ice cream vendor Ismael Cruz, who was unlucky enough to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, was beaten and tortured, and remains under detention.

In Chiapas, similar tactics have been used against the Zapatistas and communities suspected of being sympathizers.

The National Human Rights Commission recently reported that in the last six years, 31 journalists have been assassinated and five disappeared in Mexico-more than a third of these in the last year-making it the second-most dangerous country for journalists after Iraq (some of the killings are presumed to be the work of organized crime).

Typically the worst abuses are carried out by non-uniformed troops or police, paramilitaries, or thugs, giving government officials "plausible deniability." Those ordering and carrying out such acts of violence generally enjoy impunity. In fact, it's only in the last few years that the Mexican system of justice has begun to investigate the "dirty war" the Mexican government pursued against militants in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Multiple jeopardy

The most vulnerable groups suffer most. Indigenous people, many of whom are among Mexico's poorest-start out with three strikes against them: race, class, and language. This combination disadvantages them in property rights-land thefts from indigenous communities are legion-and in the courtroom as well.

Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the UN's special rapporteur on indigenous people's rights, issued a February report that condemned the state of Yucatán's treatment of the indigenous, who make up the majority of the state's population. Stavenhagen highlighted the case of Ricardo Ucán, currently serving 22 years in prison.

Ucán, who speaks no Spanish, killed a man who was pointing a gun at him and his family. Because his court-appointed lawyer spoke only Spanish and the proceedings were never translated, the fact of self-defense was never raised.

Women, who only gained the vote in Mexican national elections in 1953, also suffer more violations of their rights. An anthropologist colleague commented that, "In Mexico, men can accept women being politicians, professionals, even their bosses-but they are machos in the home."

Domestic violence is a serious problem-suffered by 44 percent of women living with a partner, according to a survey by the National Institute on Women. The hundreds of killings in Juárez remain unsolved, leading many to suspect official complicity. And criminologist Rocío Santillan Ramírez characterizes the criminal justice system as "patriarchal and misogynist," pointing out that women murderers receive longer sentences on average than men, even though they have often killed a partner after years of abuse and violence.

In both substance and symbolism, Calderón's government is giving off signs of worse things to come. Calderón has done a phenomenally large number of photo-ops with the military, including one occasion when he posed in fatigues (maybe he's getting PR lessons from George W. Bush?).

He gave troops a 46 percent raise while refusing to raise the minimum wage. The president's most visible policy initiative has been a series of military raids-so far without significant success-against the organized criminals running the drug trade.

The violent acts of these gangsters are indeed a serious public concern, but given the range of economic and social problems facing Mexico, making this priority number one sends a clear message (as well as winning points with the United States). Calderón is not alone in playing the law-and-order card.

Marcelo Ebrard, current mayor of Mexico City and a stalwart of AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution, has been carrying out mass evictions of public housing projects where drug-dealing is allegedly taking place. The state of Guerrero just authorized its state legislators to carry arms and is paying for bodyguards.

Calderón's rhetoric targets not just criminals, but dissidents. "In this country, we will no longer confuse illegality with respect for rights," he intoned ominously in late January.

It's true that in Atenco and Oaxaca protestors broke the law by violating police orders to disperse. But one could argue that when protest and criticism are made illegal, protestors and critics will necessarily become criminals.

In any case, Calderón's Presidential Guard (Estado Mayor) went well beyond punishing illegal acts when he visited the National Governor's Conference here in Oaxaca. The Estado Mayor roughed up seven reporters-all from mainstream publications-without warning, throwing one to the ground and kicking him in the head, breaking his nose and sending him to the hospital.

"We've never known the Estado Mayor to act like this," one friend commented. Calderón's officials have also blocked AMLO's TV talk show from going on the air.

Meanwhile, the Assistant Attorney General for Human Rights, Juan de Dios Castro, as much as threw his hands in the air when he declared in mid-February that "We have a problem of violation of human rights that unfortunately the federal government…so far does not have in its hands the possibility of totally eliminating."

He blamed state governments, complaining that in some states, "a climate of impunity is facilitated because democracy doesn't exist," but claimed that Mexico's federal system limits the central government's ability to intervene. (If the U.S. federal government had adopted this view in the 1960s, we'd probably still have Jim Crow in the South today!)

Human rights advocates slammed Castro the next day for abdicating federal responsibility.

Though the actions of Calderón and his cabinet anger and worry government critics, they have gained favor in other quarters. Columnist Julio Hernández López reports that mega-capitalist Alberto Bailleres (major stockholder in financial, mining, commercial, and agribusiness interests), commented publicly in mid-February that the rule of law requires a strong government that compels all to obey, "even in the face of factional interests…. The civilizing way of law," he continued, should not be detained by "the hesitations of any actor or any political tendency."

Interesting words coming from a major stockholder of Peñoles, in whose coal mine 65 miners perished in an explosion a year ago after years of safety violations. One year later, no action has been taken against the company.

Surprising breakthroughs

But the news on human rights from Mexico is not all bad. Mexico's governments are naming domestic violence (violencia interfamiliar), and conducting educational campaigns to raise consciousness about it. The federal government passed a law criminalizing domestic violence last year, and is conducting a hard-hitting radio campaign to publicize it ("Señor Martínez, you are sentenced to two years in prison for hitting your wife!").

Perhaps even more surprising in a land where machismo is so deeply rooted, laws recognizing gay and lesbian rights are taking new strides. The first same-sex civil union in Latin America, between two lesbians, was celebrated at the end of January in the gritty border state of Coahuila, best known for coal mines (including the Pasta de Conchos mine were last year's disaster took place) and maquiladoras. (Coahuila's law was championed, not by the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, but by the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000.)

The Distrito Federal (the federal district containing Mexico City) passed a similar law that takes effect in March, and already hundreds of same-sex couples have symbolically registered their intentions. Of course, Mexicans have long had an ambivalent relationship toward homosexuality. On the one hand, there are few insults harsher than puto (a derogatory slur for gays).

On the other hand, perhaps the most popular marchers in the recent Carnaval parade in Santa Ana, where we are living, were the dozens of lindas marinas (drag queens)-a fixture in many Mexican Carnavals. Some were clownish objects of ridicule, but others were glamorous figures (including quite a few androgynous sylphs of ambiguous gender) who attracted appreciative whistles and propositions from male onlookers.

Mexican laws and views on reproductive rights, the rights of the HIV-positive, and even ex-offenders' rights are also changing. The morning-after pill was approved in Mexico in 2004, two years before the U.S. FDA finally gave it the nod. Abortion is illegal but tolerated. The Mexican Supreme Court just ruled that the Army may not discharge soldiers for being HIV-positive, and the Secretary of Health has initiated legal action for "crimes against public health" against the National Movement for the Refocusing of Science, which promotes a theory that the AIDS virus doesn't exist. The state of Coahuila even passed a law prohibiting discrimination against ex-convicts in government employment (with the exception of the police).

And in the shadow of brutal repression in Oaxaca and Atenco, in spite of the echoes of Calderón's tough-guy speeches, Mexicans continue to organize for basic human rights. A "citizens' jury" of well known cultural and political figures traveled to Oaxaca to hear testimony from victims of the government crackdown there. A crowded field of human rights organizations pursues its crucial work of documentation and denunciation. Brave journalists face down death threats and worse to tell the stories of Ismael Cruz, Ricardo Ucán, and many others. And ordinary Mexicans, including growing numbers of indigenous people and women, challenge arbitrary power by lobbying, litigating, meeting, demonstrating, and creating autonomous, community-based institutions-building alternative structures of power founded on recognizing the rights of all.