Mexico: Rights activists face threats, arbitrary detention - and worse

Francisco Jiménez, a member of the National Committee of Rural and Fishing Unions (CONORP) was arrested on Apr. 7 in the Mexican capital by agents from the southern state of Chiapas in what activists say is another case of arbitrary detention. Jiménez, who was seized by a group of armed plainclothes men while meeting with government officials and several fellow activists in a café to discuss the creation of a working group to respond to Chiapas peasant farmers' demands, is accused of the brief "kidnapping" of an agriculture ministry official in 1999. He is now in prison in the state of Nayarit, some 2,600 km northwest of the Mexican capital, far from his family, friends and colleagues. His case is illustrative of the situation faced by activists in Mexico - the focus of the third national meeting of human rights defenders, held Friday and Saturday in the capital. "We have been demanding that the state help create a national program for human rights defenders," Abel Barrera, head of the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center based in the southern state of Guerrero, told IPS. "There is an international framework that has to be enforced and applied in a precise manner." Threats and attacks against activists are so numerous in Guerrero that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has extended precautionary measures for 107 human rights defenders in the state.