NEW: Columban priest tells New Mexico officials about human rights violations in Lomas del Poleo 

March 6, 2008 

Columban Father Bill Morton was part of a delegation that was invited to make a presentation at a meeting of the Doña Ana County (New Mexico) Commissioners meeting on Tuesday, February 26, about the human rights violations of residents of Lomas del Poleo, Mexico, by those seeking the land for binational business development.

Fr. Morton told the story of residents' years-long conflict with the business interests of Pedro Fuentes Zaragoza that has led to violence, including a murder, and which has turned the agrarian community located just south of Sunland Park, New Mexico, into a camp controlled by Zaragoza's illegally armed employees.

A five-minute podcast of KRWG public radio's report about the meeting can be heard here: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/krwg/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1234589

A two-part, 20-minute video of the presentation, which included testimony Fr. Morton and long-time Lomas del Poleo residents, can be viewed at http://www.pasodelsur.com/news/commissionerhearing.html.

The County Commissioners are looking into the ongoing dispute between residents and developers and plan to see what they can do to help resolve this land dispute that has led to multiple human rights violations.

For more background on the dispute, please read this report from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome: http://www.eileenwelsome.com-a.googlepages.com/lomasdelpoleo

Murguia is a member of the Paso del Norte Group and was in office and refused to intervene when Luis Guerrero was killed and when two children in Lomas del Poleo were burned to death under suspicious circumstances. When asked directly about the land dispute, Murguia said it was just a “local” problem and that it had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. (You can view the entire interview at www.pasodelsur.com/news/murguiavideo.html and judge for yourself).

It is becoming more apparent that the land disputes near the Texas-New Mexico-Mexico border is a human rights issue for both the United States and Mexico and that it is far from being resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

Two weeks ago, Barbara Zamora, a well-known Mexican human rights lawyer with extensive experience in human rights and land issues in Chiapas, Mexico, came to Lomas del Poleo to assess the situation and possibly take on the case. Carlos Avitia is the lawyer from the Mexican Agrarian Attorney General’s Office who had been handling the case for the people of Lomas. He was suspended last November under unusual circumstances, leaving the people’s cases in limbo.

It seems that Pedro Fuentes Zaragoza and his surrogates, who are seeking to control the land of Lomas del Poleo, are increasing the intensity of the conflict to get the poor people off the land. They also are using Mexican government mechanisms to get people like me and other advocates for the people out of the picture, but others keep coming and taking our places.

On Monday, January 14, residents and supporters from Lomas del Poleo and Segundo Barrio held a bi-national protest here at the border. The El Paso folks went to the Mexican Consulate in El Paso with petitions in support of the people in Lomas del Poleo, and the Lomas del Poleo people went to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez with petitions supporting the people of Segundo Barrio.

The protest received good media support and helped demonstrate the cross-border connections between these development schemes in which wealthy elites push projects without consulting those affected—or, in the case of Zaragoza family, commit outright abuses of those they are attempting to displace.

Recently, the Zaragoza-paid and hired guards, whom are Los Angeles gang members and members of the Azteca gang in Juárez, are more aggressively harassing people still living inside the fenced-in area and are keeping U.S. and Mexican human rights groups from the area so they can’t meet with residents and document abuses.

A communication received January 27 said that Catarino del Rio Camacho, the former head of public relations for Grupo Zaragoza and now on-site overseer of the vigilante group, has threatened Ms. Guadalupe Pineda. He said he will knock down the home of her son, Margarito, house and have him put in jail. The human rights group called for a press conference on January 28 to draw attention to these latest abuses and to garner public support for the victims and possibly shaming the Zaragoza family.

You can learn more about the land disputes in Lomas del Poleo and other border areas at alertalomasdelpoleo.blogspot.com in Spanish. Also, the El Paso-based group Paso Del Sur www.pasodelsur.com has regular updates in English. You can read Eileen Welsome’s three-section report on her assessments of the situation in Lomas del Poleo at www.eileenwelsome.com-a.googlepages.com/lomasdelpoleo.