Will Obama Sacrifice Human Rights For Re-Election Votes?
By Rocky Neptun
Guadalajara, Mexico…… Maria Libia Martinez Moreno sits in her modest home in Oaxaca City, Mexico and waits anxiously for her husband’s return. Her children, his parents, all the in-laws of the Martinez Tejada family go to Mass daily and pray for justice for Juan Manuel Martinez; a simple baker and volunteer teacher, held hostage by a corrupt government to appease the gods of dollars in Washington, D.C.
The Olympian in-chief, President Obama, who traveled to Guadalajara on August 10th to meet with the illegitimate President of Mexico Felipe Calderon, ignored the pleas of Martinez’s fellow citizens and a formal letter from his family, assuring Calderon that the State Department will prepare a “good” report on Mexico’s human rights abuses to secure the $100 million dollars being held up by Congress.
Obama, seemed to do a Mexican hat dance around the wide-spread human rights abuses by Mexico’s army as part of their anti-cartel crackdown that began in 2006, in an effort to impress the Yankees. With an eye toward solidifying the Latino vote for his re-election, he sought every opportunity to cuddle up to the corrupt Calderon in this magnificent colonial city. The two presidents, surrounded by tanks and one-tenth of the armed might of Mexico , sat in a two-hundred year-old hacienda, like parent and teenager; “can I have the money, please, dad? Then get lost!”
It is all political theater; a farce. Mexico’s war on drugs is a ploy, like fighting ants with a broom, to suck American dollars into the hands of wealthy Mexican contractors and their political benefactors. In Guadalajara , Obama promised Calderon the continued implementation of the Merida Initiative, a three-year U.S. publicity scheme to funnel $1.4 billion into this corrupt administration, without any accountability.
Meanwhile the legitimate President of Mexico, former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who’s 2008 election was stolen by the ruling party’s wide-spread voter fraud, with help from the Bush White House and Republican Party operatives, toured Oaxaca and met with union officials about Juan Manuel Martinez’s plight. Lopez Obrador was trailed wherever he went by the armed militia of the sadistic Governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. These thugs of the local bosses, called caciques, wantonly terrorize and plunder indigenous communities and compensino villages; routinely turning in fraudulent votes to keep the corrupt politicians in power.
It was Ruiz that ordered the attack on a Lopez Obrador rally at the village of Guelato, the birthplace of Benito Juraez, during the election. Ruiz has ordered the assassinations, beatings and arrest of hundreds of community leaders and union organizers that may pose a threat to his party’s lock-down on the state. In addition to destroying the historical center of Oaxaca City, to the world-wide outcry of historical preservationists, so his wealthy cronies and relatives can profit from new construction, Ruiz has shut down newspapers, suppressed union activity, including ordering his vicious State Preventive Police (PPE) to shoot down unarmed protesters in the streets of Oaxaca City in October, 2006.
One of those killed was an American citizen, Indy Media journalist Brad Will. Now, being responsible for the death of a 36 year-old American dose not play well in North American media; especially when you are expecting billions of dollars from them; so Calderon leaned on Ruiz, who then ordered his Attorney General, Lizbeth Cana Cadez, to find a scapegoat and Juan Manuel Martinez, who was standing near Will in video at the fateful demonstration, was arrested by state police.
Obama needs Calderon, to snuggle with the symbolic homeland chief of the Mexican Diaspora; while Caldron from the PAN party needs Governor Ruiz from the PRI party and his thugs, through violence and fraud to keep the Oaxaca vote in PRI hands and siphon votes, legitimate or otherwise, away from popular Lopez Obrador of the PRD alliance, who is sure to run again for President.
Trading One Man’s Freedom for Millions in U.S. Dollars
Will Obama sacrifice the freedom of Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno for Latino votes? Will he try and ignore the facts, the reality of an innocent man framed to cover-up a brutal politician’s reign of terror so that American dollars flow south?
Like an emperor with no clothes, the case against Martinez is an illusion perpetrated by those in power; a surreal manipulation of bogus facts to make the suspect fit the crime. Just before he was shot, Brad Will’s video camera captured his true assassins, pointing their pistols directly at him. [See accompanying photos] Two PRI thugs; Aguilar Martinez Perez, a police officer and friend of the Ruiz family, and Abel Zarate an important vote fraud-er in the nearby community of Santa Lucia del Camino, were immediately arrested by Oaxaca City municipal police based on eye-witness identifications.
Before Will’s video photos could be processed and released, Governor Ruiz ordered municipal authorities to release the two killers, while his Attorney General took over the investigation. Based on the testimony of two nephews of important local PRI officials, who weren’t even there at the time, but heard from “others” that Martinez, who had no gun and wasn’t even facing Will, shot the journalist, he was arrested a full two years after Will’s death.
Martinez’s frame-up has outraged human rights groups and clerics throughout Mexico. Also, the family of Brad Will has called for the release of this “innocent man” and the prosecution of the protected murders. Eighty-one priests and human rights leaders from Mexico have sent a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State (is that Lady Kissinger?), asking for a review of Martinez’s case, noting that the Mexico National Commission for Human Rights has recommended dropping charges.
Yet, Martinez continues to be held in jail; two years without a trial so that pipeline of U.S. dollars for the Merida Initiative will continue flowing. With no jury trial available in Mexico, he has been passed from one corrupt Judge to another, suffering four different “judicial hearings” and a transfer to the infamous prison at Santa Maria Ixcotel. Corrupt prosecutors take advantage of Mexico’s archaic Napoleonic codes where the accused bears the burden of proof and trials are in secret.
As the international outrage continued to build, and as the the Will family continued to lobby the media for the truth and the blatant tyranny of Oaxaca’s executive and judicial systems became ever more apparent; President Calderon became nervous.
After the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights examined the evidence and concluded that the wounds to Will’s body and damage to his clothing were consistent with long-range shots, between 130 to 165 feet (exactly the distance the two PRI thugs who were photographed shooting their pistols); while Martinez was standing close by, Calderon paid three Canadians to form an “independent inquiry” to clear his fellow political conspirator, Governor Ruiz, and his bungled cover-up.
Suppressed witness testimony by threats began to emerge. In a sworn statement, one protester reported that he was crouching in front of Will when he was shot. The witness stated he heard and felt the bullet pass by his head before striking the journalist. In addition, respected Mexican journalists at the scene have sworn that it would have been impossible for anyone to shoot Will at close range without their noticing it. The unarmed Martinez was just a few feet away when Will was fatally struck. In addition no firearm has ever been found. Martinez never owned a gun; yet several pistols mysteriously disappeared from police headquarters that same week.
Canadians James Stephen, a for-hire forensic pathologist and two broke, retired Canadian Mounted Police officers, Phil Ziegler and Gary Buerk were wined and dined in Mexico City before being conducted on a staged tour. All three, none of which spoke Spanish, relied on agents from the Attorney General’s office to interpret, read only “official” police reports, and were not permitted to interview protesters who were at the actual scene nor review independent findings by the Physicians for Human Rights or local Mexican human rights groups. Their bought-and-paid-for report, of course, supported the cover-up. The Will family, in a released statement, said the Canadian report continues the Mexican government’s “pattern of biased, unscientific and manipulated investigative efforts” and justifies “a deeply flawed inquiry into the true circumstances of Brad’s death.”
Yet, the Calderon government lied to the press and Mexico’s citizens by claiming that the white-washed report was a result of an investigation by the official “Royal Canadian Mounted Police.” The report was immediately condemned by Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and all human rights organizations in Mexico. All of these groups, in addition to the Will family, have called for a complete investigation of the deaths of 17 other people, most local union folks, who were massacred during the demonstration.
How U.S. Dollars Pay for Human Rights Abuses
Day after day, a growing amount of evidence shows widespread human rights abuses by the Mexican military in its so-called “battle” against drug cartels. Shootings, disappearances, forced confessions, torture, rape, theft, illegal sweeps and trumped up charges are included in the over 2,000 “official” complaints filed with Mexico’s Human Rights Commission.
Yet, Hillary Clinton goes to Monterrey on her first trip south of the border and ignored human rights issues to tour a military base equipped with new U.S. bought Blackhawk helicopters. Obama, likewise, in Guadalajara , winked at Calderon and said that he would allow the State Department to lie about the many atrocities carried out by the military.
For years, Mexico has drooled over the vast sums of money that goes into Columbia in a failed effort to kind of buy off U.S.’s drug addiction. Mexico’s oligarchy, that ten percent which controls 80 percent of gross national product, jealously watched as Columbia’s oligarchy, its wealthy generals and powerful politicians, successfully skim most of the funds; which, no doubt, accounts for why cocaine production has steadily increased, averaging a 27% increase each year. So in the summer of 2008, Mexico, after intense lobbying and waving around the Latino vote card, got the Merida Initiative, a total of $1.4 billion with no accountability where the funds go - which shows why no one is questioning the fact that Calderon has only spent $700 million on the “drug war.” Where’s the rest of our dollars?
The legislation passed by Congress also included a requirement that the State Department issue a report on human rights abuses. It also requires that $73.5 million must be used for judicial reform, human rights and rule-of-law issues. So far those funds seem to be going toward building new prisons and paying handsome salaries to well-connected wardens.
In the rest of the southern tier of Mexico, like Oaxaca, paramilitary groups operate along-side the military and the federal police to do much of their “dirty work.” From Union busting to the assassinations of prominent human rights attorneys and journalists to the vote stuffing, election intimidation efforts that keeps the left from winning elections; they are funneled millions in U.S. dollars to keep the locals in line. From the kidnapping and abuse of teachers who don’t preach the government misinformation to the subjugation of activist women, including the brutal assaults and rape of hundreds of female union members in police custody; these right-wing torture squads operate with impunity.
U.S. security firms like Blackwater and Haliburton are fanning out across the country to suck hind tit of the porky Merida Initiative. Creating mini-schools-of-the-americas in large cities; they teach violence and torture. In Leon, Guanajuato, a U.S. Security firm, Risk Incorporated, of Miami, was caught on tape instructing local police officers in torture methods in July, 2008. Mexican army units accused of rape and torture are not handed over to civilian courts, forcing an accuser into the dangerous choice of staying on a military base during the trial.
Local political bosses and wealthy merchants are using U.S. tax dollars from the Initiative to escalate repressive measures against union organizers, youth groups, women’s collectives and peasant organizations throughout the country. In Tijuana, the federales and military are routinely used to round up the homeless, indigenous women and children, street kids and unemployed laborers looking for work; so the streets will be uncluttered of human verbiage for the ambiance of tourists.
Calderon, with the apparent approval of Obama, is moving toward even greater police-state measures against his party’s opponents. In March, he announced that police may detain suspects for 80 days without charges and that judges would be severely restricted in allowing bail or suspending the detentions. In Oaxaca, he allowed his fellow conniver, Governor Ruiz, to order his paramilitary thugs to attack two Mexican Senators of the PRD Party that were traveling with Lopez Obrador on his visit to Oaxaca. In Mexico City police attacked a summer party where heavy metal and punk rebellious teenagers were drinking beer, killing nine, aged 13 to 22 in a military type assault taught by former New York Mayor Rudi Gulliani and financed with U.S. dollars.
The poor and working-class people of Mexico are suffering today because U. S. funds are being used to allow the Mexican oligarchy to stay in power through repression, torture and intimidation. These bluebloods and militarists tremble in fear of a Lopez Obrador administration, looking over though shoulders, south, toward the liberated nations of Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and most of the rest of Latin America. They will stop at nothing to stay in power.
We, as people of conscience, must contact our federal representatives and President Obama and demand that the U.S. end the financing of entrenched power and wealth, under the guise of fighting a war on drugs. The continuing repression of the Mexican people and the final end of Mexico’s fragile democratic possibility are at risk because of U.S. tax dollars.
Also, the family of Juan Manuel Martinez, who was a simple baker, respected by his neighbors, chosen for the local education commission in his municipality of Santa Lucia, pleads for the end of his hostage-ness.
Stop our tax dollars going south, into the hands of assassins and corrupt politicians; in the name of justice and Manuel Martinez!

Rocky Neptun, a simple San Diego gardener by trade, is volunteer director of the San Diego Renters Union and spends half the week at his home in Tijuana, Baja Norte with his family, all Mexican nationals. He writes for the website MediaLeft and has traveled over 25,000 kilometers throughout Mexico by car or bus. In 2000 he marched into Mexico City with the Zapatistas. His book, San Diego: First City of Empire, will be published in the summer of 2010.