Primed to Explode

In 2002, the Peace Development Fund launched the Cross Border Initiative, working with groups seeking justice and peace amid the exploitation of land, water and people along the U.S./Mexico border. The situation has not improved. Considering the El Paso/ Juárez border today, the ensuing drug wars, and ultimately the fence that the U.S. government built, the border has become a lightning rod for violence. Explains author, Charles Bowden, about his book, Murder City, “There are 400 foreign, mainly American, factories in Juárez, they pay at best seventy-five dollars a week, the cost of living in Juárez is about ninety per cent of what it would be on the U.S. side of the border. In addition to this obvious point—that the factories play slave wages and have a turnover on average of one hundred to two hundred per cent a year—the city has now had at least two generations of kids raised pretty much on their own as their parents work five and a half days a week in the factories. It was primed to explode.”

from Peace Developments, Spring 2002

“Supporting Cross-Border Alliances”

This winter in El Paso, Texas, the Peace Development Fund took a bold and new step in our work to support alliance building across the U.S. – Mexico border. On December 5-7, PDF hosted a weekend-long training in Strategic Communications, in Spanish, for more than 30 people from nine organizations: four based in Mexico and five from the United States. The training was designed and provided by the Mexico City-based organization Incide, which, like all organizations invited to the training, is also a PDF grantee.

Incide – whose name translates to “Incite” – is driven by the idea that communication has the power to create deep transformation in our everyday cultures. Incide trainers work with grassroots organizations to share communication and strategic thinking tools, in order to enable people to exercise what Incide believes is a fundamental right to communicate and be heard. This workshop was facilitated by trainer Cecilia Sanchez with the support of Gabriela Sanchez.

For PDF, underlying the content of this workshop was a deeper intention to foster relationship building and an exchange of strategies between a diverse group of organizations along the border and in Mexico. “This workshop brought us together,” PDF board member Teresa Juarez commented at the close of the training. “These workshops are not only about content and techniques – the most important part of this is the human connection.”

Participants shared a common experience of economic globalization’s negative impact on communities of Mexicans and Mexican immigrants to the United States. “We need to democratize the global economy,” explained training participant Gustavo Lozano. “I have witnessed how international economic treaties benefit multinational corporations, not workers. The treaties have facilitated the exchange of goods and services, not people. Mexicans have been demonized in the process.”

The fundamental problems brought on by economic globalization have now been compounded by the political climate of the War on Terrorism – the loss of civil liberties for immigrants, an increase in the militarization of the border, and the favorable political climate for future trade policies (such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and Plan Puebla Panama) that will affect communities throughout the hemisphere. Now is clearly a critical time to provide resources that strengthen the organizing of Mexican and Mexican immigrant communities who are working to ensure their means of survival.

During the training, participants divided into strategy groups that allowed for an in-depth look at pressing issues. One focused on the government’s refusal to investigate a pattern of brutal murders against an estimated 250 young women over the past eight years in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua (the sprawling city that mirrors El Paso on the Mexican side of the border). Another group brought together organizations to share experiences and strategies surrounding the militarization affecting Mexican immigrants in the U.S. border region and indigenous communities in southeast Mexico.

“The feedback we have received from this training has shown us that bringing these organizations together is an invaluable form of peer-to-peer technical assistance,” explained Reverend John Vaughn, executive director of PDF. “By creating a space for community organizations to interact with each other, PDF works to encourage movement building. This is where organizations work together – across borders and beyond specific issue areas – toward a common vision of justice and peace.”