From Mexico Corespondent Dori Rangel…

While world attention is focused on the U.S. plans to build a fence or wall along the border adjacent to Mexico, monitoring, land and air Increases each day in an effort to prevent the crossing of illegal Immigrants from different countries. What is sometimes left out is another border in Mexico Known as, The Forgotten Frontier – the border between Mexico and Guatemala in recent years has become a high risk crossing point.

Information released by WikiLeaks and published in Spain by in the newspaper “El Pais” said: while the U.S. has 30,000 agents along the border with Mexico, only 125 Mexican police are protecting the border with Guatemala. The Police are “ineffective or corrupt and people abandoned by the state for centuries, have decided to accept the protection of powerful criminal groups such as Los Zetas,” they add.

While the 3,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico is guarded by 30,000 U.S. agents (10 officers per kilometer), Mexico only has 125 officers for 1,000 kilometers from the southern border (eight kilometers a police officer), “Mexican officials repeatedly confirmed that they have no human resources to lead efforts to effectively along the southern border, “notes the information.

The border region shared between southern Mexico and Guatemala has a length of about 956 km.

Most of these people go to Mexico in order to reach the United States. The documents of most of the transmigrants put them in a position of helplessness and vulnerability, making it difficult to keep tabs on the conditions they endure on their journey. Migrants and transmigrants face serious risks in the migration process and are exposed to situations that endanger their lives, physical integrity or threaten their migratory project: assaults, robberies, accidents, injuries, rapes, extortion, cheating, and smuggling.

Migration, drug trafficking, arms trafficking and the violence stemming from organized crime are part of everyday life on the border and have created a series of efforts by both nations.

This institutional situation must be added the existence and proliferation of criminal groups, known as Maras and the Zetas, criminal groups operating in both countries. These gangs have emerged and develop in the context of poverty, unemployment and marginalization in which millions young and whose conditions facilitate the presence of a large number of veterans who participated in the civil war in Central America, and the presence of youth who have been deported from the U.S. and who are unable to readjust to life in Central American societies. These situations lead young people to join gangs that are inevitably associated with organized crime, violence, drugs and abuse of immigrants, among other crimes.

Human trafficking is another risk factor for migrants, who are often deceived by smugglers, who say they will lead those interested to the U.S., but in fact abuse the ignorance of many and leave them in the Mexico. Women and children are particularly vulnerable to trafficking, as they face the additional risk of being mixed up in prostitution.

Representatives of Mexico and Guatemala signed an agreement to improve migration policies between the two Nations; the agreement was drafted for the violations of human rights of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico.

At the end of last year, the government of Guatemala requested Mexico to improve its internal security, citing the disappearance of at least forty undocumented Central Americans, including many Guatemalans, kidnapped by organized crime. Commitment between the two countries to strengthen cooperation on migration and safeguard the rights of Central American immigrants who pass through Mexican territory en route to the United States.

 In Central America, each year about 300,000 undocumented people leave through Mexico, where at least 9,000 immigrants are victims of some form of abuse. Central American governments in Mexico have called for greater respect to immigrants and personal security guarantees to the harassment of criminal gangs.

The massacre of 72 undocumented Latin Americans had ​​a strong impact on public opinion; several activist organizations have urged the Mexican government to protect illegal immigrants passing through Mexico and purge of corruption in the institutions of migration, as 18,000 immigrants were kidnapped in 2009 alone.

All this for pursuing a dream, the American dream, a dream that becomes a nightmare for many immigrants trying to reach the United States. Those who make it across Mexico could be exposed to the fate of the northern border, but that’s another story…

From Tanzania Correspondent Lute wa Lutengano…

I have this tendency to surrender myself to the law enforcement officers in any town I visit and plan to spend a night or more. It is not that I am prone to breaking laws but rather I feel more secure when I know that the Police chiefs in my new destination do now of my presence. That is just in case. And luckily I am acquainted with many of them in the various Tanzanian towns.

So as I drove towards Morogoro town the other week I called the Police chiefs in that town to inform them of my arrival and overnight stay. I arrived in the evening and checked at a recommended newly established facility, Gwami Hotel. I must admit that this is a homely and clean facility which is very convenient to transit travellers like me, because it is near the Dar es Salaam , Dodoma and Iringa highways.

There is not much night life at this establishment, no wonder I found myself patronising the nearby Gold Park night club. It is here that my Police friends caught up with me and we sat down for some drinks and the attendant ‘nyama choma’.

Naturally the topics we discussed veered towards crime in the region. I was told they, the Police chiefs, had undertaken some heavy crackdown on crime in the region and now it was on the wane. Remember Morogoro, I was told, was always the main hideout or playground for Dar es Salaam criminals.

However, I must admit, some of the crimes I was told of must be unique to Morogoro only. Take this case of a young man who cut his own manhood after being told he could sell it, or rather it could fetch a cool 10 million/- on the market. I saw the naked picture of the young man without his pendulum. Poor him, I was told, he died before he could suffer more for his folly.

Then there were the Kilombero Bank robbers. Theirs was an enterprise which assembled criminals, who were actually prominent businessmen from Dar es Salaam , Morogoro and Dodoma . The group of a little more than ten formed a special committee on the Bank job. They also had special sub-committees on transport; security; gas works; gate-away; and financial matters. Little did they know that they had been infiltrated by the police.

On the grand day as they assembled the gas tanks and began cutting the iron grills to the Bank safe room, the police ambushed them all, except for the planner, a young man with expert computer knowledge who is still on the run. In the fire exchange that ensured they were all killed. Again I saw the pictures of the dead and heavily built ‘entrepreneurs’.

Another group of bandits was betrayed by the love of a woman who befriended one of them. This group specialised in robbing lorries laden with luxury goods on the steep slopes between Dodoma and Iringa. Little did they know that the woman, with a generous posterior, was actually a cop. The bandits were ambushed as they slept in a guest house with their ‘woman.’ They put up a gunfight and all perished in the resultant heavy police fire. Again pictures of their dead bodies were there to prove all.

The next day I proceeded to Makambako in Njombe district. The southern road from Mikumi is being done by some Scandinavian company. It is a great and amazing job they are doing. At the Iringa town escarpment, for example, the company has decided to widen the meandering road by cutting deep into the imposing rocky face of the slope.

I scaled the road into town amidst the heavy road – works. As is always the case, I proceeded straight to Miami Bar at Mlandege where all connoisseurs of ‘ugali’ and ‘nyama choma’ in Iringa town assemble for their lunch. It is here that I called the Makambako Police chiefs that I would there in the evening and naturally for several overnights.

When mobile cell phones with cameras first caught on, they spread through the world like wildfire. In conservative Saudi Arabia however, there was concern. Back in 2004 there was initially a ban on importing cells phones with cameras on what Saudi clerics called religious grounds, but this was later lifted.  Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheik, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority at the time, announced the religious edict in remarks to al-Madina daily newspaper. The devices, he said, were “spreading obscenity in Muslim society.” Something obscene did come from cell phone cameras arriving in Saudi, but not in the way you might think. RELATIVITY OnLine’s Saudi Arabian correspondent Eman Al Nafjan talks of the obscene nature of blackmail, all of it revolving around the seemingly simple cell phone.  

This is a quite expressive cartoon by a longstanding cartoonist, Al Rabea, from yesterday’s edition of Al Riyadh newspaper. It depicts a recurring and widespread situation in Saudi Arabia. In it a woman is backed against the wall in a helpless and hopeless fetalposition and a man is pointing his camera equipped cell phone at her. The man has his understanding and polite face mask pulled off to reveal the meanness and devil ears beneath. Around the couple are scattered Bluetooths. The story behind this drawing is that many men take advantage of the oppressive nature of this society by befriending and pursuing vulnerable Saudi women until they let down their guard and send photos of themselves to these men. These men then use the photos to blackmail the women, mostly for sex but also for money and sometimes just for the fun of it.

In many cases the photos are usually quite innocent and if seen anywhere else in the world, it would not mean much. But here the possession of a photo of a Saudi woman with only her regular clothes on and without an abaya or hijab is scandalous and could cause a lot of trouble for the woman. Husbands divorce their wives solely on that basis. Even worse, a woman’s children could be taken away because she would be considered an unfit mother and a bad influence on her daughters.

Two extremely high profile cases that happened a decade ago, just when digital photography started going mainstream here caused the government to issue laws against men who use these photos. The first case was of an average single Saudi girl who during a trip to Makkah visited a young man’s apartment after a phone relationship. The guy took photos, some of which were compromising and explicit. Later in the relationship he got mad at the girl for one reason or another and posted the photos with a map to her family’s home in Riyadh and her full name. The aftermath was tragic. The girl was taken to a remote part of the desert and burned to death by her own brothers. The other case was that a young man who belongs to a high status family got mad at his teenage girlfriend and asked his slave* to rape her while he filmed it on his cell phone. This particular Bluetooth really got around and only Saudis living under rocks haven’t seen it. The girl was still in her school uniform and begging the guy to call the slave off. These two cases got so much attention that they pushed the government to act. Now a man who is caught blackmailing or passing out photos of a Saudi woman can be prosecuted and punished. On the other hand, this will also need the woman or at least her family to come forward and press charges so it doesn’t work that well if the woman comes from an extremely conservative family. Note that these cases are handled with the utmost sensitivity on the part of the government and the name of the woman is kept secret throughout the process. But if the girl cannot confide in her family because they might literally kill her or at least inflict serious physical and emotional harm, how is she supposed to be able to confide in the authorities? I have heard of cases where more mature women skipped family support and went directly to the authorities via the vice patrol (muttawas). Surprisingly, the muttawas are very forgiving. As long as at the end of the day they have someone to prosecute, they will willingly overlook the woman’s original discrepancy that got her into trouble in the first place.

The comments that this cartoon got on the newspaper’s website were about 140 in less than 24 hours. I skimmed through them and a substantial number of them blame the women. They write that if women observed the correct hijab and cover then they would not have gotten into trouble. They go as far as to write that women are completely to blame because they seduce naïve and innocent men into doing these things. Some simply thanked the cartoonist for airing the topic. Many used terms like wolves to refer to men and condemned them. A few men wrote about how the sympathize with women and how sad and lonely life can get for women here.