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.