Cipriana Jurado, a prominent Ciudad Juarez women’s rights activist, is now
free after posting a $700 bond. The director of the Worker Research and
Solidarity Center, Jurado was arrested by Mexican federal police outside
her home on Wednesday, April 2. The veteran activist was charged with
blocking a public roadway during an October 2005 protest sponsored by the
binational Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and
other organizations at one of the international bridges that link Ciudad
Juarez with El Paso, Texas. Also arrested on the same charges as Jurado
was Carlos Chavez Quevedo, who was reportedly picked up by federal police
in the city of Casas Grandes, Chihuahua.

Chavez is a co-founder of the National Agrodynamic farm organization,
whose leader Armando Villareal Martha was assassinated in Nuevo Casas
Grandes last month. According to Chihuahua state legislator Victor
Quintana, at least 40 other arrest warrants stemming from the October 2005
protest are pending. No additional word of Chavez’s detention status was
available as Frontera NorteSur went to press.

A former maquiladora worker and a member of the PRD political party,
Jurado has been active in a variety of labor, environmental and human
rights causes in Ciudad Juarez and the Mexico-US border region. A
long-time supporter of relatives of femicide victims, Jurado was
reportedly arrested after returning from forensic offices where she had
gone on business related to investigations of the women’s murders.
Interviewed by the local press after her release, Jurado contended that
she resisted officers who did not show her an arrest warrant. The
policemen were driving a vehicle without license plates and with tainted
windows (similar to the vehicles employed by drug cartel hit men) and
possessed dubious identifications, she said. As a result of the
stand-off, the police officers shoved her into their vehicle, Jurado
charged.

Jurado’s detention came in the middle of a major operation by Mexican
federal police and soldiers ostensibly aimed at organized crime in Ciudad
Juarez. On Friday, April 4, US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza visited
Ciudad Juarez to express the Bush Administration’s support for Mexico
City’s border military offensive. It wasn’t immediately clear why the
Mexican federal government suddenly acted on legal issues almost three
years old at a time when Mexican troops and federal police were supposedly
focused on dislodging the power of well-rooted drug cartels.

“(Government officials) are taking advantage of this situation to resolve
one thing with another,” said former Chihuahua Women’s Institute head
Vicky Caraveo. “We don’t know the purposes of the (arrests). We know we
are in a difficult situation and we know they are carrying out operations
against delinquency, but (Jurado) is not a delinquent. She’s an authentic
social activist. If this happens to her, it is a warning to us what will
follow.”

Jurado’s arrest quickly drew responses from US and Mexican supporters who
sent e-mails and organized a demonstration in front of federal court
offices in Ciudad Juarez. Individuals and groups who rallied to Jurado’s
defense included Casa Amiga’s Esther Chavez Cano and Nuestras Hijas de
Regreso a Casa. After leaving jail, Jurado charged that her detention was
a case of government repression.

“We are going to continue struggling for the causes we have struggled for
all these years,” she said, “because we have a commitment to the community
and to our children. We don’t want them to live with the repression and
the problems with which we are living.”

***

Additional sources:
-- Lapolaka.com, April 4 and 5, 2008.
-- La Jornada, April 4
and 5, 2008. Articles by Ruben Villalpando and M.Breach.
-- Norte, April 5,
2008. Articles by Luis Carlos Ortega and Felix A. Gonzalez.
-- El Diario de
Juarez, April 5, 2008. Articles by Gabriela Minjares, Juan de Dios Olivas
and Sandra Rodríguez.


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