Demand for Accountability for Migrants

 Together, we are too powerful to ignore. 

Last Friday, June 30th, we took to the streets from Tapachula, Mexico to New York City, USA and online to make our demands heard - demands to bring accountability, justice, and transparency to the U.S./Mexico policies that impact our communities and lives on both sides of our shared border. 

In concert with civil society organizations across the United States and Mexico, the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice organized actions in Tallahassee, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; and across Mexico in Mexico City, Tapachula, Chiapas, Puebla, and Tlaxcala calling for justice for the victims of the devastating fire in Ciudad Juárez, which left forty dead and ALL victims of the current cruel and ineffective U.S./Mexico immigration policies.

Our voices have made a difference!

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has made a recommendation in favor of our demand for justice for the migrant victims of the devastating fire in Ciudad Juárez. (Available here in Spanish.)

We also received the commitment from the Federal Government in Mexico to establish a working group with the Ministry of Interior to follow up on the agreements of the Peace Summit from earlier this year. 

These commitments and recommendations represent a significant step forward in the ongoing movement towards finding justice and building a lasting peace throughout the region. We could not be more pleased with the outcome of this day of action - and we’re excited to keep putting pressure on the governments of both the United States and Mexico to demand the policy changes that will make these goals possible.  

We recognize that there is yet more work to be done - and we will not rest until the full demands of the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice are not just heard, but realized. 

We are calling for more just and humane immigration policies in both the United States and Mexico, an expansion of asylum, justice for the disappeared and commonsense policies to reduce gun violence. 

Thank you for making this (first) victory possible.

We will not stop until the work is done. 

In Solidarity,

Accountability - Why History Matters

Rodolfo F. Acuña

What is so frustrating about politics is that there is so little accountability. We can continually screw up as my students would say and are not held accountable. Because we as a society are ahistorical, we are unable to sort out the lies that our leaders tell us or correct our own errors. Millions of dollars are spent to distort reality making elections a sham.

Let’s take a minute and review this thesis in light of California Propositions 30 and 32. Proponents made every effort to sway voters through emotional appeals rarely putting their arguments in a historical context.  Up to the last day I had people calling me and asking me for advice.

The truth be told, neither side was honest about the propositions, and very few people know the historical context for Props 30 and 32. Their geneses begin before most Americans were born, reaching back to the post World War II era when American corporations tried to regain the political and economic hegemony they had lost during the Great Depression. The nation’s plutocracy wanted to continue tapping into the national treasury while returning to the laissez faire of the 1920s. In order to accomplish this goal, the economic royalists as President Franklin Roosevelt used to call them had to neuter labor, which they did with the passage of Taft Hartley Act of 1948 and a purging of militants from labor.

This war was about power and the transference of wealth. Organized labor, however, continued to be a thorn in the side of the plutocracy that resented the high taxes necessary to educate Americans. During the 1960s, a war broke out over the funding of public education, which has lasted to the present and has led to the transference of the cost of social production from the plutocracy to working and middle classes.  

The economic royalists in recent times have had major victories. They seized  control of the state of Arizona by neutralizing labor, and it has tried to do the same in Wisconsin and Ohio. The big prize is California where teacher and public sector unions are still a factor. This is where Prop 32 comes in.

Proposition 30 is 32’s cousin. It is a sibling of Prop 13 (1978). It was 13 that underfunded K-12 and higher education in California and dismantled a premier educational system, making our schools competitive with Mississippi and Arizona.