THE BORDER REPORT

Amnesty International released its report yesterday documenting abuses of Central American migrants passing through Mexico, throwing some brutal criticisms at Pres. Felipe Calderón's Administration at a very awkward time. Among the report's findings, more than half of the migrants reported abuses by public officials and an estimated 60 percent of women and girls reported being sexually assaulted while trying to cross through Mexico. On the one hand, good on Amnesty for speaking up but where were you guys when journalists, activists and rights groups throughout the Western Hemisphere have been clamoring for your attention on the matter throughout much of the past decade? I myself have written stories documenting these abuses as far back as 2004; some fine journalists have reported on the assaults for years prior to that; trying to show what these Central American migrants go through trying to cross through Mexico. For at least three years, the Gulf Cartel's Zeta faction owned migrant smuggling through east Texas and Mexico's Guatemalan border, kidnapping, beating, extorting and killing migrants. On the Southern Arizona border, people still speak of a "Casa Verde" in Nogales, Sonora, where young girls were being taken from Central Americans and trafficked in a ring that an old CISEN agent, Jose Nemesio Lugo, tried to bust up before his subsequent murder in 2007, Mexico City. Then there's the politics of the matter. Though I doubt they'll admit it; I don't think it's an accident that Amnesty released its findings days after Mexico started clamoring about Arizona SB 1070, the state's new law criminalizing illegal immigration. Mexico has roundly criticized the bill, announcing a travel alert for Arizona while Sonora Gov. Guillermo Padrés, in protest of 1070, cancelled an Arizona-Sonora Commission annual meetup that has existed for a half century. Amnesty has effectively, and rightly, diminished concerns of forthcoming abuses by law enforcement in Arizona, and placed the focus back where the most grotesque forms of abuse already exist, in Mexico. In the end, I won't minimize the entire sphere of blame in the abuse of people heading north. It's no more Mexico's fault, as a whole, than it is the migrants', or the U.S. employer who hires them on, or the consumer who chooses to remain happily oblivious. We're all responsible; we've allowed illegal immigration to become a standard practice sustaining our way of life and our economies. That's the embarrassment of the Western Hemisphere and I hope history remembers us for it. But Amnesty's report certainly puts into context the threat against Hispanics that 1070 presents. Never mind "papers, please," here we have rape. Protest that. Mexico, and Hispanics living in the U.S. are outraged that a threat against them exists here. Central Americans, who, admittedly make up a very small slice of the illegal migrant population (U.S. Border Patrol statistics report about seven percent of illegal migrants captured are Central American), are, as usual, ignored. Over the past few days, singers like Shakira, cities like San Francisco, and "activists" have taken to the streets in Phoenix, and, let's be honest, the Internet, raging against 1070 as if by eliminating this questionable law, the rights of the illegal migrant are somehow restored. 1070 has become a distraction to the very real situation of exploitative servitude. Amnesty International just brought us back to reality. Whether anyone listens remains to be seen. A cursory check of my news feed this morning suggests few will.