In Oaxaca, 10th Caravan of Central American Mothers Calls for Unity Martha Pskowski - CIP Americas
go to original December 5, 2014

For 19 days in 2012, family members of missing migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala toured 14 states to talk about the problem and seek clues as to the whereabouts of their missing sons and daughters. (AlJazeeraEnglish)

The central plaza of Oaxaca is plastered with posters and banners denouncing one atrocity after another, the layers of social movements overlapping on every wall available. Ayotzinapa, the struggle of the Section 22 teachers union, the recent murder of a teenage girl. In this cacophony of protest, on Nov. 30, the caravan of Central American mothers searching for their disappeared children arrived in the plaza and called for unity among the movements of Mesoamerica. Representatives of the teachers’ union, family members of disappeared Oaxacans and womens rights organizations accompanied the mothers, showing the growing convergence of movements.

Marta Sanchez, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement (MMM), said in her opening remarks, “All of our struggles should be one unified struggle, because all of these problems have the same root. Out with the bad government!”

Sanchez estimates that there are 70,000 to 150,000 disappeared migrants in Mexico, yet the government has no database or official national mechanism to search for them. Echoing the cries of “Because they were taken away alive, we want them back alive!” resonating across Mexico with the case of the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, the mothers chanted in downtown Oaxaca, “Because they came here alive, we want them back alive!”

This year, in the tenth caravan, the group traveled through ten Mexican states. The caravan began Nov. 20 in Tenosique, Tabasco on the border with Guatemala, headed north to Guadalajara, then through Mexico City and south to Oaxaca City. The Caravan concludes Dec. 6, after visiting the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca and San Cristobal and Tapachula, Chiapas. The southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas are especially important because many of the Caravan members last heard from their loved ones from southern Mexico. Oaxaca is historically one of the Mexican states with the highest rates of migration.

So far the Caravan has united three participants with their family members. In every state they go through, Caravan participants visit migrant shelters, prisons and other locations in the search for people who might have information about their relatives.

Read the rest at CIP Americas

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!