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tomorrow lands in washington DC the delegation of the Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico (MNDM). They have come to receive the 46th Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Since 2015, the MNDM has been helping families across the country in search of justice for their missing loved ones. It is made up of more than 80 groups from 24 states and conducts extraordinary efforts, from digging mass graves to passing the first legislation on the subject, while confronting organized crime, institutionalized corruption and an incapable and indifferent bureaucracy.
The national Letelier-Moffitt award will go to the first union of workers at the giant and exploitative Amazon company. The awards ceremony will be on October 13 (in my next installment I will share a link to the video). The IPS has granted them since 1976, in honor of his colleagues Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, assassinated by agents of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by means of a bomb planted in the car in which they were traveling, while traveling through Sheridan Circle in Washington.
It is a prestigious award. Only this year two of its winners have been elected presidents of their countries. Gabriel Boric, whose Chilean Student Movement, of which he was a leader, received him in 2012; Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first progressive president, received it in 2007. And this month, Lula, winner of the award in 2003, is about to return to the presidency of Brazil. In Mexico, it has been awarded to Bishop Don Samuel Ruiz and the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, the Civic Alliance and the Saltillo Migrant House.
Susan George, president of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam, reflects that Letelier It was deeply political. A socialist since his high school days and a fervent supporter of Salvador Allende. Forced to leave Chile, from exile he continued to fight the horrors of the Pinochet regime and returned to Washington where he had been Allende’s ambassador.
(https://bit.ly/3Me6hVo). He found his work trench in the IPS, from where he helped found and direct the TNI in 1974. Ronni Moffit died at just 25 years old, when he dedicated himself from the IPS to raise funds to bring musical instruments to disadvantaged sectors.
The MNDP delegation to Washington is made up of: Diana Iris, representative of the United Forces for Our Disappeared collective in Coahuila, looking for her son Daniel; Martha Camacho, representative of the Union of Mothers with Disappeared Children of Sinaloa in the 1970s, is a survivor of forced disappearance in 1977; Virginia Garay, representative in Nayarit of the Warriors in Search of Our Treasures collective, is looking for her son Bryan, and Marisol Esquivel, representative in Guanajuato of the Butterflies Searching for Hearts and Justice collective, is looking for her daughter Irma. They will be accompanied by the renowned peacebuilding organization Servicios y Asesoría para la Paz (Serapaz) in their activities in Washington and by the Latin American Working Group, a network of organizations that nominated them for the award.
Diana Iris says, in a press release (https://bit.ly/3CCZ12n), that “more than 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, most of them in the last 16 years. The Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico is born from the need to legislate on forced disappearances and for the government to recognize that the victims are not a number, but people with names and faces. […]. We have coined the phrase ‘not without families’ to reinforce the strength and power of our voice and our demands”. Tope Folarin, director of IPS, is pleased to honor this year’s winners of the Letelier-Moffitt Awards for their historic contributions to the labor rights movement in the United States and the movement for justice for the disappeared in Mexico
. The MNDM award will be presented by Congressman Jesús Chuy García (D-Illinois), who says that when we stand up together, we can make our voices heard. That has been a resounding message as ordinary people in Mexico and the United States have come together in solidarity to seek justice and defend their rights. Both the Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico and the Amazon Union exemplify the solidarity and courage that drive progressive change. As a Mexican immigrant and former trade unionist, I am proud to present the Letelier-Moffitt Award to these organizations
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The MNDM delegation will also carry out advocacy actions against the US government this week, in which the need for the National Search System to work with better inter-institutional coordination and collaboration of the prosecutors with the Extraordinary Forensic Identity Mechanism will be highlighted; the urgency of a government strategy to implement the recommendations of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances; and that the prosecutor’s offices investigate and prosecute cases, since so far only 36 sentences have been given out of the tens of thousands of pending cases.
As Mariano Machain from Serapaz tells me, There have been advances in the fight against forced disappearances, but they are still very insufficient. The recent setbacks in the Ayotzinapa case should serve as a wake-up call to the Mexican State on the need to rethink its response to these 43 families and to the more than 100,000 families who are looking for their loved ones throughout the country.
. Like every year, the Letelier-Moffitt award will serve to reinforce the struggles and work of the most courageous causes.
*Researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies www.ips-dc.org (@ManuelPerezIPS)
