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Posted on 03/04/2002 4:22:44 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
For all the Mexican government's talk about human rights, it did little to protect the rights of the 21 Cubans who sought refuge in its Havana embassy. For all of Mexico's embrace of well-known Cuban dissidents, the Mexican government handed the voiceless young men to a police state famous for beating and torturing political prisoners.
Given Cuba's information monopoly, little can truly be known about who these men are. They may be ordinary Cubans who, like most, can't see a future in a corrupt, totalitarian system. Some may have ''criminal'' records, not unusual where speaking your mind is a crime. Yes, some even may be Cuban intelligence agents.
If these youths were nonpolitical, all that changed when they crashed a bus into the Mexican embassy gate and began shouting ''Down with Fidel!'' The Cuban regime quickly categorized them as ''anti-social'' pariahs -- jargon long used to describe enemies of the Cuban regime and its political prisoners. If not persecuted before, they certainly became prime targets then.
Meantime, the Cubans became an embarrassing problem for Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, who early on denied that they were asylum seekers. Did the Mexican authorities independently check the men's histories? No, they relied on what the Cuban regime told them.
The Cubans' stay in the embassy lasted less than 30 hours. In a pre-dawn raid, the Cuban equivalent of a SWAT team extracted the 21 men at the behest of the Mexican government. The men were then carted off to parts unknown.
Mexican authorities said they asked the Cuban government to ''consider humanitarian factors'' in these men's cases. But they should know better than to expect humanity from a dictatorship. Mexicans had only to look outside their embassy gate to see the regime's para-police and police forces beating and arresting residents who have no human rights.
Perhaps Mexican President Vicente Fox and Mr. Castañeda have forgotten what happened in 2000 when Mexico forcibly deported a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer when he sought asylum there. Pedro Riera Escalante has since disappeared into Cuban jails. We haven't forgotten that Mr. Fox's man in Havana, Mexican Ambassador Ricardo Pascoe, declared embassy doors closed to dissidents only a year ago.
Is Mexico's human-rights rhetoric just that -- rhetoric? President Bush should remind President Fox that promoting human rights requires more than talk. ''Inasmuch as they are universal values, human rights in any state are a legitimate concern of the international community,'' Mr. Castañeda said in a speech last March to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Promoting human rights ''is a task common to all governments and all people.'' Mexico should practice what it preaches.
Dqban22 posted Mexico and the Cuban terrorist regime close ranks.
President Bush is visiting him next month (I believe) and I hope there is a lot of diplomacy and blunt talk going on now.
I'm hoping for more movement from Fox. He needs to make some overt move.
Mexico: Party leadership election seen as key to PRI's future
With one of Castro’s subrogates in power in Venezuela, his support to the guerrillas in Colombia and in Chiapas, Mexico, we can understand how the Latin American governments tremble every time that Castro shows any displeasure if they waiver in their unconditional support of the Cuban tyrannical regime. There is hardly a single one that has dared to stand up to his meddling into their internal affairs or to condemn his reign of terror over the Cuban people.
This is a joke coming from Castañeda.
Some quotes: "He's also taken a different a different tack on Mexico's relations with Cuba. A long time Cuban ally, Mexico has traditionally abstained from votes to censure Cuba's human rights record. But while Mexico abstained from the vote last April, during the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Castaneda blasted Cuba's record on human rights. He drew praise from some - and ire from old friends in Havana. Castaneda eventually met with Helms, a one time critic, to iron out issues raised by Mexican abstention. …………… For the last seven, eight years, his democratic credentials are indisputable. He was one of the first leftist intellectuals who began to call Cuba what it is, said Oppenheimer, best speech I've heard from any foreign minister on Cuba but I would like him to follow through on that."- The Latino Reporter Story by David Cisneros (June 21, 2001)
The majority in the Mexican Congress are PRI.
It must be pointed out that when ambassador Pascoe was nominated to his post in Havana the first thing he did was to declare publicly that the Mexican Embassy was going to be closed for any Cuban opposed to the Castro’s regime.
Whether those seeking asylum were Castro's agents or Cubans in the pursuit of freedom is totally irrelevant. The fact is that President Fox allowed Castro's henchmen to violate Mexican territory and detain those inside the embassy in gross violation of the Inter-American Asylum Treaty of 1954 and of the sovereignty of the Mexican Nation.
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