While President Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon met in obscurity in New Orleans on Monday to sing the praises of NAFTA (4/21/08), Father Romualdo Francisco Wilfrido Mayrén Peláez, better known as Padre Uvi, a priest and human rights defender from Oaxaca, Mexico(right), told a very different story to a crowd at St. Joan’s.

Padre Uvi, is a parish priest in Oaxaca City, MexicoDetails, and the Coordinator for the Peace and Justice Commission of the Oaxaca Diocese. He is committed to promoting and defending human rights. He played a key role in non-violent mediation talks during the 2006 social conflict in OaxacaDetails, and continues to speak out against impunity and oppression of the poor. Padre Uvi is the founder of the BARCA Human Rights Center in Oaxaca and has spent years working in indigenous communities, where he witnessed the effects of economic and military violence and forced migration to urban areas and the United States.

Padre Uvi is traveling around the country as an invited guest of Witness for PeaceDetails and speaking about the causes of migration. Kristen Melby, Regional Organizer, and Rob Saper, International Team Member, accompanied Padre Uvi at his talk at SJA. Rob Saper translated.

Padre Uvi delivers a radical message. His message is that the neo-liberal economic and political system pushed by the U.S. is unjust and produces extreme poverty, destitution, bloodshed and death. Profit for corporations is its main objective. The U.S., as a proponent of this system, even engages in war to carry out its objective, like the war in Iraq where people are killed over it. But sometimes the means to the objective is not a direct war with weapons, but a war of politics, like treaties and trade agreements that result in slavery, domination, and control of natural resources.

The moral test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. The poor have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation. We are called to look at public policy decisions in terms of how they affect the poor. The "option for the poor," is not an adversarial slogan that pits one group or class against another. Rather it states that the deprivation and powerlessness of the poor wounds the whole community. Principle 3, Catholic Social Teaching
The U.S. uses its strong arm to manipulate Mexico’s politics and economics. Significant U.S. dollars were put into the last Mexican election campaign. The U.S. wants a president in power in Mexico who is more willing to privatize oil and enter into treaties and agreements that hurt the majority of people in Mexico. Mexico is experiencing a permanent, gradual erosion of sovereignty because of these treaties and agreements.

NAFTA, for example, which allows for the free flow of capital and goods, but not people, has resulted in much deprivation. Mexican laborers work for 50 cents a day in U.S. factories at the border. This, says Padre Uvi, gives the impression that “goods are better than people.” NAFTA has undercut local forestry and agricultural production in Mexico to a massive degree. Small Mexican businesses and farmers have been forced out of business and have had to migrate to the U.S. to survive. Of the 120 million people in Mexico, 60 percent live at poverty level, with 20 percent living at extreme poverty levels.

There is massive discontent among the people and even sometimes violence as a consequence of this deprivation. But, the Mexican government, instead of trying to resolve the problems, uses military type suppression. This is done with the blessing and money from the U.S. For example, the Merida Imitative is now working its way through the U.S. Congress. It would allocate 1.4 billion dollars to Mexico for the stated purpose of fighting drug trafficking and organized crime. It is really a military package. A major portion of the money would go for military equipment that will be used to suppress unrest that is caused by neo-liberal policies.

“Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” Article 23(1) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948
The consequences of these policies are that there are massive amounts of people who do not have the basic needs of life or ways to live with dignity. They have no income. Without income, they have no decent place to live, no clothes, no chance to go to school, no health care, and often not enough food – basic human rights. This provokes people to look for other ways to live lives with dignity. People leave their places of origin to seek a better way. They become migrants. Migrants suffer violence in their own lands and then a second violence in the countries they migrate to. This is true for Mexican migrants and migrants from other parts of Latin America in the U.S. where they are met with intolerance, abuse and exploitation.


and
Rose Grengshas been a SJA parishioner since 1982. She is an immigration attorney and passionate about the subject. She is a member of the choir and active in the Peace Movement. She and her husband, Paul, routinely attend the 11:00 Mass. She is the mother of four children and grandmother of three. She is looking forward to retirement, travel and enjoys music, especially singer, songwriter, Greg Brown.
We must start to see and understand the roots of migration. There are 130 million migrants in the world today, 40 percent of them undocumented. We need to find new ways of thinking and living to address the problems that causes this phenomenon. We are all part of one human family. Padre Uvi doesn’t advocate for any particular new system, but believes we can find it in the following of Jesus who created a revolution of love. He also believes that the Catholic Church plays an important role in human rights and that we need to tend to people in need in their origins so they don’t have to migrate.

We are one human family. Our responsibilities to each other cross national, racial, economic and ideological differences. We are called to work globally for justice. . . Principle 10, Catholic Social Teaching
Padre Uvi wasn’t always this radical. Even though he studied in a progressive seminary, his life changed when he held a child dying of malnutrition in his arms while working for 11 years in the southern mountains of Mexico. Since then his most important work has been in the defense of human rights. He does this work even though it results in hostility and threats on his life.

Back to Events in Review