Coahuila

“Pasta de Conchos is very important because it will set a precedent for how mining should operate, how workers should be treated, and [show] that companies should think twice before opening mines”, Cristina Auerbach.

Although the right to migrate is consecrated in article 13 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, it continues to be violated by different actors.

In Mexico, human rights defenders defend migrants by giving them humanitarian, legal and psychological attention which is often the only support migrants receive as they pass through the country that shares a border with the USA; the most transited border in the world.

“Whenever a Pasta de Conchos memorial comes up, people seek me out to speak to me and I tell them again why I collect rubbish… As if I did it for fun.  My son lived with me and was the one who sustained me… Because of the authorities, I have been working in a rubbish tip since my son died.  I leave at six in the morning after drinking a cup of coffee with biscuits.  I take a tin of tuna, tortillas or whatever I can eat in the rubbish tip… I get home in the afternoon… I make myself another coffee with biscuits and go to sleep.

Pasta de Conchos Family Organization (OFPC) focuses its fight against coal extraction activities carried out under irregular conditions, or where relevant legislation has not been properly applied.

There are brave and extraordinary women throughout the world, fighting against the patriarchy that in many countries has women silenced, marginalised, threatened and harassed.  PBI has the priviledge of accompanying women human rights defenders that fight for a fairer world, a world where rights are the same for everyone and a world where social justice is a reality.

In the State of Coahuila in the North of Mexico, for years hundreds of families have organised themselves in order to search for their loved ones who have been forcefully disappeared. According to the official statistics in Coahuila, between 1995 and 2018, 1,779 cases have been registered.

Photo: “The industrialisation of the countryside”, mural by Grace Greenwood in the Abelardo Rodriguez market, Mexico City

Photo: a mural at the Casa del Migrante Saltillo representing the countries of Latin America, painted by a migrant who passed through the Casa

Within the framework of the 12 years since the tragedy of the Pasta de Conchos mine in the coal region of Coahuila in Mexico, on 18th February 2018 representatives of the Family Organisation Pasta de Conchos presented the report “Red coal in Coahuila: here ends the silence”, in Mexico City.  This publication, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, tells “the story of the human and environmental cost that the extraction of coal has brought and left” in this northern region of the country; it also documents the struggle that the family members of the 65 miners who lost their lives 12 years ago in the mine have undertaken.

From the 9th til 13th April, a delegation of lawyers from Spain visited the North of Mexico and Mexico City in order to hear first-hand accounts and to draw attention to the situation that lawyers who defend human rights find themselves in, they also wished to understand the state of implementation of the general laws of torture and forced disappearance as well as the strategies that the organisations and defenders use against the Internal Security Law.