There's
a strange tale unfolding south of the border in Pueblo, Mexico – a tale
of corruption, abduction and plots of assassination. Far from being the
inspiration of the next big Hollywood flop, this tale is for real, and
for those involved, it's deadly.

According to a report by John Gibler in Znet last week, the Mexican paper La Jornada published the transcription of some secretly recorded phone conversations between a maquila (sweatshop) magnate,
"Kamel Nacif, the governors of Puebla and Chiapas, and several
businessmen. The tapes containing the conversations were delivered
anonymously to La Jornada. Throughout the conversations these
men—in the crudest of language—celebrate the arrest and planned rape of
the independent journalist, Lydia Cacho."

Cacho
was taken from her office in Cancun on December 16, 2005. A well-known
reporter and novelist who runs a support center for women in Cancun,
Cacho published Los Demonios del Eden: el poder detras de la pornografia
(The Demons of Eden: The Power Behind Pornography) in 2004, a book
exposing an underground child prostitution and pornography ring in
Cancun. According to Gibler, the leader of the ring, Jean Succar Kuri,
is now under custody in Arizona, awaiting extradition.

"Cacho
mentioned Nacif in the book as a friend of Succar's who is helping to
finance his legal defense,' Gibler wrote. "In retaliation, Nacif
arranged to have Lydia Cacho arrested, beaten and raped through a
series of political favors—including a promise to deliver two bottles
of cognac, allegedly code for two underage girls, to the governor of
Puebla, Mario Marin. Puebla state police officers grabbed Cacho…on
criminal charges of "defamation" and "calumny" against Nacif and drove
her twenty hours to prison in Puebla where she was saved from rape at
the last minute by a female prison guard. The recorded phone calls took
place on the same day."

Just
two weeks after the arrest of Cacho, on December 29 2005, Martin
Barrios, president of the Human and Labour Rights Commission of the
Tehuacan Valley and a lawyer who provides legal counsel for maquila
workers, was beaten and thrown in jail, accused of bribery. The
"bribery" in question, according to Gibler, "was the legal defense of
163 workers fired without cause the previous November 22 by a
subcontractor for the maquila company Grupo Tarrant. Kamel Nacif is
president of Grupo Tarrant."

It
seems at the heart of this is the very shirts on our backs. Or at least
the jeans on our legs. The maquilas make everything from Levi-Strauss
to Gap, and are often places of abuse, overwork, underpay and
humiliation, and they have been growing in number since the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into place in 1994. It was
the first agreement of its kind at the time. None before it had dealt
with issues such as governance, limiting themselves instead to the
issues of tarrifs and quotas, not local content laws, industrial
relations and environmental regulations. "NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic
laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected
representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in
Congress, state legislatures or city councils," says the Public Citizen
Organisation. "…In fact, calling NAFTA a "trade" agreement is
misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core
provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and
privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the
privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water,
energy and health care."

Although
Barrios is now free, the Maquilas Solidarity network (ironically titled
MSN for short) is aware that he is still in great danger, and is
attempting to arrange protection for him, his family and others who
work with him at the commission. According to MSN, Barrios had "received
separate, but identical warnings from two trusted sources. He was told
that a local maquila owner has hired someone to kill him." If the tapes
transcribed for La Jordana are anything to go by, Barrios' safety is indeed in question.

With
the booming number of maquilas doing a face-off with China's increasing
competitiveness, human rights and access to fair labour laws have taken
a battering in Mexico. It has become all too frequent that those
fighting for human rights do so in the cold comfort of extreme danger.
Amnesty International, in its campaign to highlight the danger faced by
the human rights activist, Ernesto Ledesma Arronte, whose house was
broken into in February this year in what was thought to be a deterrent
from his human rights work, said that "social activists and human
rights defenders have frequently been the target of threats,
harassment, smear campaigns and spurious criminal charges, particularly
from the state and municipal authorities." Arronte is working with the
peaceful, nationwide campaign, Otra Campana (The Other Campaign), which was launched by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional
(EZLN), otherwise known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, in
January this year, to coincide with the Presidential elections.
According to Amnesty, the campaign "seeks to mobilise leftwing
grassroots organisations and raise social and political issues,
including indigenous rights." The organisation also mentioned two other
campaigners who had been detained or arrested on trumped up charges.
Both of them are also active participants on the Otre Campana.

It's
important to remember that those living over the border, who face
intimidation and abuse on a regular basis, are economically wed to
those who take their rights as a given. Their blood and sweat is woven
into the threads of the clothes they make, and as they are sold for
exorbitant prices just a few hundred kilometres away, the geographical
disparity is no match for the economic one. It pays to answer the
question yourself: how much power do consumers have?

Plenty, if you choose to use it.