The Star.com: Mexico’s ‘missing’ and a debate at Harvard

It’s a staggering figure: 26,121.

That’s the number of people who have “disappeared” in Mexico during the past six years as the government took its war against the country’s drug cartels into the streets.

And that’s the government’s own number.

It was released this week, hard on the heels of a Human Rights Watch report that was harshly critical of the government’s use of violence against violence in combating the country’s drug scourge.

But in conducting that war, HRW charges, the government threw fundamental human rights under the bus.

“Mexico’s security forces have participated in widespread enforced disappearances,” Human Rights Watch charged in a 176-page report.

The NGO documented some 250 “disappearances” from Dec. 2006 to Dec. 2012, and in 149 of those found compelling evidence of direct participation by state security forces.

None of that can be good for at least one lecturer at Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government: former Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

To read more

http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/02/mexicos-missing-and-a-debate-at-harvard.html

FUUNDEC’s February Meeting with State Authorities

On February 9th, the United Forces for our Disappeared in Coahuila (FUUNDEC) held a meeting with members of the Independent Working Group on Forced Disappearances, and several state and federal authorities.  State authorities included the Governor of the State of Coahuila, Lic. Rubén Ignacio Moreira Valdez, the Secretariat of Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Secretary of the Interior (SEGOB), Lia Limón Garcia, the Human Rights Department of the Attorney General Office (PGR), Ricardo Garcia Cervantes, the State Coordinator for the Federal Police in Coahuila Commissioner, Eduardo Valiente Hernández, and the Congresswoman Miriam Cárdenas Cantu.