Migration | Mexico
How Much is a Migrant’s Life Worth?
Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the San Fernando Massacres, with human rights witness Camilo Perez-Bustillo
The Crime
In the wee hours of August 23, 2010, a young man clearly in distress, limping, dehydrated, and bleeding from his neck, approached a military checkpoint in the northeastern Mexican town of San Fernando, the last stop on the well-trodden route to the Texas border. He was the sole survivor of a massacre, he reported. The bullet that pierced his neck was intended to shatter his head in a little-remembered human rights crime that took place 10 years ago today.
Eighteen-year-old Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla, a Quechua-speaking farm boy, had traveled thousands of miles by land from his village in the Ecuadoran highlands. Forced to pay off people-smugglers all along the migratory trail beaten down by stumbling feet, tears, sweat, and blood, he was out of money. He was heading to the US in a desperate bid to find work to support his impoverished family. But just an hour-and-a-half shy of the Promised Land, he was one of 74 migrants abducted by armed men wearing hoods.
Their captors identified themselves as members of Los Zetas, a drug gang with links to the Guatemalan Military Special Forces unit, the Kaibiles. Known for their paramilitary discipline and particularly brutal tactics, the Kaibiles were declared guilty, in 1999, of the worst human rights abuses of Guatemala’s 36-year genocide by the UN-backed Truth Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
A decade later, Los Zetas’ territory stretched all the way to Texas, where they were engaged in an escalating turf war with the Gulf Cartel for control of lucrative drug and people-smuggling routes into the Rio Grande Valley. San Fernando was both the gateway for asylum seekers hoping to find safe haven in the US and ground zero of the cartels’ armed conflict.
The thugs offered the migrants work, as coke-mules or prostitutes or hitmen, for the handsome monthly salary of $2,000. Those who refused the work were told they’d have to buy back their freedom. And those who could not, like Lala Pomavilla, were tied hand and foot, blindfolded, and taken to a remote ranch in El Huizache, several miles down a gravel road from San Fernando and surrounded by nothing but farmland.
There, the defenseless souls, including 14 girls and women, were ordered to face the cinderblock wall of an abandoned shed with a tattered roof and a floor of grass. They were instructed not to turn around. And they were mowed down, en masse, in a hail of bullets.
The Cover Up
The bullet intended for Lala Pomavilla’s head miraculously missed its mark, entering his neck and exiting his jaw. Once the bad guys had fled the killing fields, and Lala Pomavilla realized he wasn’t dead, he pulled himself up and slipped, terrified, into the sweltering summer night. He followed the road to the west for about seven miles before veering north in the direction of a distant light. It belonged to a sorghum warehouse on Mexican Federal Highway 101. There, a night watchman directed the bleeding young man southward to the military checkpoint. In all, he traveled an estimated 15 miles before falling, near dead, at the feet of Mexican Marines.
On Tuesday, August 24, 2010, the Mexican government announced that its elite Marine Corps had discovered a drug-gang’s slaughterhouse, where 72 lifeless forms lay in a tangle, swarmed by flies. They were 51 Central Americans — 24 from Honduras, 14 El Salvadorans, and 13 Guatemalans — as well as five other Ecuadorians, four Brazilians and one Indian. The rest remain unidentifiable today. Another survivor would later emerge: an unnamed youth from Honduras. But he never surfaced publicly.
That day, the San Fernando Massacre became the worst known human rights crime in Mexico since the October 2, 1968, murder of 300-400 students, taken down in the prime of life by government snipers for protesting Mexico’s massive investment in that year’s Olympic Games, while the country’s laborers and farmers, and their families, went starving.
Fear and skepticism greeted Lala Pomavilla’s story. How could an executioner miss at such short range? How could anyone wander such a distance in that condition? A wall of silence surrounded the terrified town of 60,000. Both national and international press were kept away on the grounds that the State of Tamaulipas, where San Fernando is located, was “too dangerous to risk lives.” Before anyone could get a statement from him, Lala Pomavilla was spirited into a witness protection program.
Whispers could be heard from Mexico City to Matamoros: Did the cartel allow him to live to send a message? Or was the local government hiding something?
Days later, Josué Román García and his older brother stopped for dinner 90 miles south of Texas. His final known words went out via text message — from inside the trunk of a car.
“They just kidnapped us in San Fernando,” the 21-year-old student from Mexico City wrote to a friend.“If anything happens, just tell my parents, ‘thanks, I love them.’ ”
The two brothers were never seen alive again.
The Plight of the Stateless
Stories like these make Camilo Perez-Bustillo’s blood boil. A US law professor of Colombian origin, who has lived in Mexico for most of the last 20 years, he has been documenting human rights abuses there for decades. Camilo knew that such acts of impunity were becoming more and more commonplace; that many other massacres, without survivors, were hiding all over Mexico.
“Crimes, such as the San Fernando Massacre, represent a growing pattern of state and para-state terror and abuse against migrants, stemming from the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ and militarization of the US border,” says Camilo.
Even before the August 2010 massacre, Camilo believed Mexico to be a major human rights violator, and therefore lacking the moral and political legitimacy to host the IV World Forum on Migration and Development to take place in Puerto Vallarta in November that year. He coordinated a call, issued in 2009, to migrant advocacy groups and legal organizations as well as human rights defenders, academics, and allies throughout the world, suggesting they create a parallel event. In contrast, this one would “turn the tortilla on the legal process,” inviting individuals to stand in judgment of States whose systems and policies fed the migratory trail; and whose entities benefitted from, or turned a blind eye to, the miseries of the nameless stateless souls who set foot on it each year.
Called the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement (ITCPM), the event demanded the global defense of migrants, refugees, and the displaced, by identifying, denouncing, documenting, and ultimately holding accountable the States, governments, institutions, organizations, and groups guilty of crimes against humanity committed against these most vulnerable people. The ITCPM, in short, reminded the international community that the stateless, too, possess the “right to have rights.”
The event was deep into the planning stages when the crisis that almost took Lala Pomavilla’s life put Tamaulipas, Mexico, on the map for many. Suddenly exposed for its lackluster police enforcement, where criminals slipped through government checkpoints, while migrants were routinely forced off buses and disappeared, it was clear to the world that any urgency to bring the San Fernando executioners to justice was gallingly lacking.
The first convocation of ITCPM took place just six weeks later, October 8–12, 2010, in Quito, Ecuador. The resulting statement, signed by at least 136 individuals and organizations from more than 40 countries, demanded truth, justice, and reparations for the victims and families of the San Fernando Massacre. The foundation for such action had been laid, in May 2005, at the UN Global Commission on International Migration. Also held in Mexico, the issue of ‘rights for people on the move’ had then appeared on the international agenda for the first time — though Hannah Arendt had identified the need decades before. At that meeting, the creation of a permanent UN body was proposed, similar to the Permanent Indigenous Forum. But since that time, Mexico, which had been charged with its formation, had paid mere lip-service to the plight of the stateless, tacitly allowing the exploitation and abuse of the hundreds of thousands who follow La Bestia’s routes to the US border.
Police Complicity
Just months later, in April 2011, all eyes were drawn to San Fernando again. While investigating the abduction of several bus passengers in Tamaulipas, Mexican security forces stumbled upon a series of mass graves not far from the site of the August 2010 massacre. It was the third mass burial site found so far that year — the other two were in Mexico State and Guerrero, territories also contested by rival criminal gangs. There would be more. These “narco-graves” were the depositories of cartels. Their victims were people of far-flung origins, transiting through Mexico to the US, and an undetermined number of Mexican migrants as well.
In total, the San Fernando discovery turned up 193 bodies in 47 clandestine graves between April and May of 2011. (More recently, the migrant death toll in that one municipality for that one year was estimated at 268.) This hardened the perception, on the part of both the public and human rights groups, that northern Mexico, in particular the border state of Tamaulipas, had been lost to criminal gangs…and for quite some time.
That could only mean one thing: that authorities were involved.
In 2010–11, according to press reports, “where clearly state, federal and local authorities are not in control,” Tamaulipas was ungoverned. Los Zetas were then in open warfare with the Gulf Cartel, for whom they once worked as an enforcement arm. In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away from el Cartel del Golfo to form their own criminal organization. The split broke historic ties with drug suppliers and traffickers, so to thrive both gangs expanded their playbooks. They extorted local businesses, siphoned oil and gas off area pipelines, ran guns, and declared hunting season on people on the move.
All migrants passing through their territory now had a price on their heads. Whether as drug-runners or sex-slaves, new recruits or ransom-payers, cheap labor for unregulated factories or dead and stripped for parts, they had become commodities for both cartels. They were easy prey, for nobody knew they were there — except for the loved ones they left behind, of course.
National Complicity
To commemorate the third anniversary of the San Fernando Massacre, in August 2013, Camilo coordinated a special session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, in the spirit of the Bertrand Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–67) and Latin America (1973–76). Held in collaboration with the ITCPM in Mexico City, it brought to the international stage for the first time live testimony from witnesses and family members of the victims.
Angela Pineda of Chiquimula, Guatemala, spoke about the five loved ones she lost that night: her husband, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and cousin. Maria da Gloria Aires from southeastern Brazil shared memories of her young nephew, Juliard, 19, who died alongside his friend Herminio, 24. Fifteen-year-old Yedmi Victoria Castro, of Pasaquina, El Salvador, who was finally to be reunited with her mother, Mariluz Castro, was another of the many lives remembered that day.
An international jury of human rights scholars, defenders, and migration policy experts from several countries concluded that multiple governments were responsible for the atrocities committed against migrants abducted and killed in San Fernando:
1 Mexico’s failure to protect people in motion from drug and human traffickers suggested a generalized pattern of complicity with law-enforcement, military, and government at all levels, they stated. Human rights abuses constituted “a policy of state terror against migrants,” made even more vulnerable by their stateless status.
2 The governments of the migrants’ countries of origin were implicated for fostering the conditions of violence and poverty that paved the way for the commission of these mass crimes.
3 But the greatest burden of responsibility, the Tribunal stated, lay at the feet of the US, whose decades-long prioritization of corporate interests over the needs of people and rights of sovereign nations constituted the greatest violation of all: creating the economic impoverishment and brutal repression in migrant’s countries of origin that forced them to strike out in search of a more dignified life in the first place.
What’s more, though the US had stepped up aid, following the Mérida Initiative of 2007, to help Mexico combat its “War on Drugs,” the recipients of that aid — police and immigration agencies — were the most likely culprits in the continued commission of human rights violations. Arbitrary and abusive detention and other forms of inhumane and degrading treatment of people transiting through Mexican territory, including torture, were growing increasingly common.
Camilo’s timing was prescient again: A little more than a year later, the lid blew off the San Fernando Massacre and mass grave cases, proving the veracity of the Tribunal’s findings.
International Complicity
It started as an investigation into the September 26, 2014, murder of six and disappearance of 43 Mexican students. But it quickly exploded into an international scandal, symbolizing the violence, impunity, and broken rule of law caused by the US-instigated Drug Wars. Last spotted being forced into police trucks before vanishing altogether, the rural youth, all training to be teachers, were on their way to attend the annual remembrance of the October 1968 student massacre in Mexico City. When they reached the southern state of Guerrero, authorities packing high-powered semi-automatic and automatic weapons stopped their buses and ordered them off. Some of the students managed to flee and, this being 2014, used cell phones to alert the media, worldwide.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, ordered an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) to investigate the incident. But the Mexican Army stonewalled. The government followed suit, denying the GIEI permission to solicit testimonies from the soldiers of the nearby battalion in Iguala, Mexico, where the students had been disappeared.
In the face of widespread public outrage, the country’s federal prosecutor leaked key documents, mostly from US government agencies, that revealed the participation of Mexican police and military in the kidnapping and massacre of migrants in San Fernando throughout 2010–11.
Letters and memoranda, dating as far back as 2005, from the US Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the US Embassy and Consulates in Mexico, all analyzed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, illustrated that the Mexican and US governments were well aware of both cartel activity and the extent of the dangers faced by migrants. Yet it failed to act.
Instead of taking apprehended migrants to the San Fernando county jail, the leaked documents showed, police “would just deliver them to the Zetas.” The local cops and military forces actually worked for cartel, acting as “lookouts;” helping with “the interception of persons;” and otherwise turning a blind eye to the gang’s illegal activities — all for kickbacks.
Likewise, Mexican authorities handed over the 43 kidnapped students to a drug gang called Guerreros Unidos. Gang members then killed, burned, and disposed of the bodies they could not recruit.
US intelligence proved that by 2014, the nefarious activities of Central American drug cartels were widespread, and embedded at all levels of police, military, and government. Additionally, that their impunity had grown so out of hand, even Mexican citizens were no longer immune to the violence.
“THIS IS WHY WE WITNESS!”
The declassified US documents spin a compelling yarn about how drug cartels established control in northern Mexico as the 20th century gave way to the 21st. By targeting corrupt municipal officers throughout Tamaulipas — nine of whose municipalities run along the Texas border — the police became the enforcers of gang violence rather than the protectors of the rights and safety of citizens, from Matamoros to Ciudad Juárez. They turned the same county byways traveled by US-bound migrants into human- and narco-trafficking corridors, which became highly contested when the alliance between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas began to crack.
The San Fernando Massacre put the international spotlight on the plight of migrants journeying through Mexico, while proving the complicity of State-sponsored violence on both sides of the border. Forced to act, the Mexican government turned Los Zetas into public enemy number one, killing or capturing its top leadership in 2012.
But that didn’t stop the dangers suffered by stateless migrants. Rather, it left the Gulf Cartel to rule the territory without rivals. Little wonder the entire region running the length of the Rio Grande, from Brownsville to El Paso and beyond, remains to this day under a US State Department Level-4 travel advisory, along with Syria, Iran, and Iraq.
Yet, against this backdrop, Trump & Co rolled out the criminal Migrant “Protection” Protocol (MPP) — aka Remain in Mexico program — in January 2019, determined to intensify immigration enforcement. MPP sends all migrants who’ve lawfully requested asylum at the US southern border — per their international right — back to some of the most dangerous places on Earth to wait out the outcome of their claims. Contrary to its official name, it provides no protection at all. And with the border closed to COVID-19, all legal processes have stalled.
“THIS IS WHY WE WITNESS!” Camilo shouted into a mic at the kick off of the Witness at the Border #EndMPP Vigil in Brownsville on January 12, 2020, where we first met.
“Since its implementation, MPP has disappeared more than 60,000 people, including pregnant women, young children, and the very ill — all who have legitimate asylum claims — to live in squalor on the Mexican side of the border, where they are vulnerable to the same criminal gangs that took the lives of 72 people in an abandoned San Fernando barn, and hundreds more buried in dozens of mass graves just 90 minutes south of here. The US and Mexican governments are jointly responsible for those human rights crimes, and MPP is one more example of their complicity in crimes against humanity committed against migrants, refugees, and the displaced!”
Camilo beseeches us not to forget the victims of San Fernando, that they should not have died in vain. Though emblematic of a broad pattern of state secrecy, gang-related violence, and complicity in human rights atrocities by both the Mexican and US governments, the 2010-11 massacres have largely fallen from view. Ten years after the event that nearly claimed Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla’s life, not a single person has been sentenced, nor a single government official investigated, despite intelligence from both sides that proves multiple layers of official collusion.
The Only Silence is That of Justice
Since MPP rolled into Matamoros in July 2019, at least 636 cases of kidnapping, rape, torture, assault, and other violence against asylum-seeking families have been reported. But the numbers of deaths related to MPP are far higher. As I wrote this article, a 20-year-old father of two was found dead on the riverbank. The press said it was an accident — that he drowned in the Rio Grande, while helping two women to cross. Others say members of the Gulf Cartel perceived him to be encroaching on their business.
They cross the desperate, and for outlandish sums. So they decided to make an example out of him. They beat him lifeless and dumped his body in the river while officials of the local Instituto Nacional de Migración looked on.
Incidents such as these, and the cold-blooded execution of 72 migrants, should cause whole nations to stop and take notice, perhaps even observe a moment of silence before railing, like Camilo, against the crimes against humanity they represent. But, alas, the only silence for those massacred in San Fernando, as well as the asylum seekers living in tents and shelters under threat of the drug cartels — and now COVID-19 — is that of justice.
Meanwhile, on the US side of the border, innocent men, women, and children remain imprisoned in ICE detention centers “hot” with the virus. They are worth more locked up, to the for-profit prison-operating cronies of Trump & Co, than they are living with their sponsors, though they have committed no crime. Meanwhile, many of those released since the pandemic began have been deported to certain death on ICE-air flights whose companies are making a cool $35,000 per detainee.
So how much is a migrant’s life worth? That depends on whether you’re the cops, the cartels, or cronies of Trump & Co.
THIS IS WHY WE WITNESS!
Thank you for reading Episode 16 in my travelogue of a road trip gone awry: THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, rolling out on Medium as fast as I can write it because it’s Just. That. Urgent. For earlier episodes, click here.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.” — Toni Morrison, 1995
