Número De Teléfono De Alguien Que Pueda Pagar Por Ellos

Violencia crónica en México: su reproducción en el espacio y el tiempo 3 ¿Un ministro del interior acusado de agresión sexual y un ministro de justicia que se disculpó con 10 los violadores? Will The Reckoning Over Racist Names Include These Prisons? 11 Millions of Leaked Police Files Detail Suffocating Surveillance of China’s Uyghur Minority 20 ACCESSIBILITY FOR ALL 56 Tortura, asesinatos, violaciones: lo que CNDH ha ocultado sobre secuestros a migrantes en 2019 61 y 2020 The Black Radical You’ve Never Heard Of 77 Aprueban diputados ley de consulta a los pueblos indígenas 99

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Violencia crónica en México: su reproducción en el espacio y el tiempo

La seguridad no puede reproducir más violencia. Al contrario, debería mostrar la cara humana de la sociedad, afirmando la posibilidad de superar el deseo de la venganza.

PorJenny Pearce

@InsydeMx

Estamos ‘acostumbrado/as’ a las cifras dolorosas de las violencias en México. Estas cifras muy a menudo crean un sentido de impotencia y/o distancia de las realidades. Se convierten en cálculos, mediciones y comparaciones. Por ejemplo, promedios de actos violentos en diferentes años permiten interpretar un relativo descenso como un problema superado. O cuando un país tiene menos homicidios que su vecino, se le ve como un país con ‘menos’ problema de violencia. Así se pensó México por mucho tiempo cuando se le comparaba con Colombia. El problema de contar cuerpos es que en México y en otros partes, desaparecen: una de las formas más crueles y extremas de violencia que existen. Yo prefiero para comprender estas realidades las historias personales que nos invitan a entender quiénes, cómo y dónde se sufre la violencia y no tanto, cuánto. Aunque la proximidad me hace sentir de manera más palpable y profunda el dolor y trauma que produce la violencia, nunca me permite acostumbrarme a su existencia.

No niego que las cifras nos dan un arranque para apreciar ciertas dimensiones del problema. Las cifras narran una historia, aunque incompleta. Entonces, y con tristeza, voy a empezar este artículo con algunas estadísticas. Esta opción tiene doble finalidad: primero, ilustrar cómo reconocer la ‘violencia crónica’ para mostrar que se puede ‘medir’; segundo, que no tiene sentido medir la ‘violencia’ si seleccionamos solo las expresiones de violencia que nos importan. Todas las violencias importan. Hay que comprender la violencia como un fenómeno en sí mismo y con múltiples expresiones que se reproducen en el tiempo y en todos nuestros espacios de socialización. De ahí que podamos comenzar a imaginar una política de seguridad que no reproduzca la violencia, una política más humana que logre interrumpir los ciclos intergeneracionales que la alimentan.

Conocemos bien las estadísticas de la violencia en México. Como lo dije ya, aspiro a repetirlas para reconocer en ellas también, en lo posible, todas las expresiones temporales espaciales que reflejan. Un reciente informe de ONU Mujeres revela las estadísticas sobre feminicidio o Defunciones Femeninas con Presunción de Homicidio (DFPH) en México. 56,571 ocurrieron entre 1990 y 2019; 33,501 han sucedido desde 2007 cuando se disparó la violencia en el país. En todo el periodo analizado, 2019 registró la tasa más alta de DFPH. En términos de violencia homicida (que incluye feminicidios), las estadísticas del Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (SESNSP) demuestran que los homicidios se mantuvieron en 2020 en los niveles récord de los últimos dos años que le precedieron: 32,759 hasta noviembre del año pasado. De ese total, había 28,445 hombres y 3.455 mujeres. En otras palabras, un promedio de 98 personas asesinadas todos los días, una tasa de 25.7 víctimas por cada cien mil habitantes.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

No todas las violencias son letales. El mismo informe de ONU Mujeres habla de 300,414 atenciones a mujeres por lesiones que ocurrieron en el ámbito familiar entre 2018 y 2019; 25.3% de los casos se trató de violencia física, 10.8% de violencia sexual, y 63.9% de violencia psicológica. La discusión sobre dónde mueren las mujeres revela un descenso en los asesinatos en la vivienda desde 2004, de 55% aquel año hasta 29.3% en 2019. Hoy en día las mujeres enfrentan peligros mayores en áreas deportivas, granjas, zonas comerciales, centros de recreo, escuelas, centros de trabajo, entre otros. El mayor peligro que viven las mujeres de entre 20 y 24 está en la vía pública.

¿Cuáles otros patrones encontramos en términos de ‘dónde’ se sucede la violencia? El espacio íntimo y la escuela siguen siendo peligrosos para los niñas y niños. Según Save the Children México, 7 de cada 10 niñas y niños en el país son víctimas de algún tipo de violencia. México es el primer lugar de violencia y abuso infantil en países de la OCDE. Cada día mueren tres niñas o niños a causa de la violencia. En los últimos años, fueron atendidas en servicios de salud 317,996 niñas por violencia sexual. Tampoco es muy seguro el espacio de la escuela. Un informe del OCDE en sus resultados PISA 2015, encontró que 20% de las y los estudiantes en México experimentan acoso escolar, bullying verbal y físico. En las cárceles -otro espacio de socialización-, sucedieron 1,821 ‘incidentes’ en 2020, según el Observatorio de Prisiones, que incluyeron 501 agresiones a terceros, 15 homicidios, 64 suicidios y 52 intentos de suicidio, entre otros.

En el espacio público la violencia sigue siendo horrorosa. México es el país más peligroso del hemisferio occidental para la prensa, desde hace mucho tiempo. En 2020 fueron asesinados como mínimo cuatro periodistas, y otro fue asesinado a disparos cuando informaba desde la escena de un delito. Protestar es arriesgar la vida en México. En Jalisco durante 2020, 28 personas fueran detenidas con amenazas de muerte por protestar contra la muerte con señales de tortura de Giovanni López, quien supuestamente había sido detenido por no usar cubrebocas según se difundió en las redes sociales, versión que fue negada tanto por la Fiscalía General de Justicia como por las propias autoridades municipales. En la esfera política, el último periodo de elecciones fue el más violento en la historia reciente de México. La campaña política de 2018 registró 152 precandidatos y candidatos asesinados, 774 agresiones contra políticos y 429 contra funcionarios no electos. Y en la esfera de las instituciones del Estado, el uso excesivo de la fuerza pública por parte de agentes de seguridad, ha sido bien documentado por la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH) y por académicos y académicas especializados en el tema. Al mismo tiempo, Causa en Común ha registrado 1,389 policías asesinados en México entre enero 2018 y el 30 de noviembre de 2020.

Para contar esta historia de la reproducción de la violencia en sus diversos tiempos y espacios de socialización, opto -como lo he referido ya- por hacerlo desde las experiencias y sufrimientos vividos. Una de esas miles de historias es la de una mujer que entrevisté en 2017 en un municipio de la región de Tierra Caliente, tan golpeada por la violencia. Ella tuvo que salir huyendo de la casa con su niño después de otra ronda de golpes de su marido. Quería denunciar lo que pasó a la policía, pero su madre no quería acompañarla por falta de confianza hacia esta institución. Se fue sola y al agente policial que levantó su denuncia le gustó ella y le decía que la iría a visitar. La mujer volvió a la casa donde dormía y el agente policial fue asesinado por la pandilla del barrio. Tras el asesinato llegó la policía para saquear la casa de la mujer. En este cuento, la violencia trasciende al espacio íntimo, la calle y al Estado. Los impactos potenciales, intergeneracionales y en el tiempo en la vida del hijo de esta mujer, testigo de todo lo vivido, son inconmensurables. Esto es a lo que llamamos violencia crónica.

El reto es la violencia y cómo se vuelve crónica, constituida tanto por el carácter de la esfera pública como por la esfera íntima. En un libro publicado el año pasado, propongo una herramienta para pensar la violencia

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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que denomino: actos y acciones de daño somático, cargados y generadores de significados, que construyen, destruyen y normalizan ordenes.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Cuando hablo de acciones me refiero a la repetición de comportamientos de humillación a la otra o el otro, que resultan en daños somáticos, ya sean psicológicos o físicos, o lo que el sociólogo Pierre Bourdieu llama violencia simbólica. Unas mujeres indígenas mexicanas me hicieron entenderla en una conversación en Palenque hace algunos años. Me contaron cuanta distancia tenían que caminar embarazadas al momento de dar a luz, para llegar a una clínica donde se les hacía esperar por ser indígenas y donde se sucedían casos de muerte de bebés por ello. El significado que comunica esta violencia es que las mujeres indígenas no importan como seres humanas. Otros actos de violencia comunican mensajes más directamente. La potencia de la violencia, como lo descubrieron los narcotraficantes con sus violencias performativas espectaculares o el Estado y los actores criminales al usar la desaparición forzada, son mensajes a la víctima directa, a su familia y a la sociedad en su conjunto.

La violencia no es natural. La agresión sí. La violencia surge por la forma en la que nos relacionemos.

El cuerpo biológico es un cuerpo social. El espacio no es un lugar vacío. Es un lugar donde nos relacionamos, por eso el espacio íntimo, de la calle, de la escuela, de la cárcel y el espacio público y político son espacios de socialización. Cuando reconocemos esto, podemos reconocer la importancia de la acción social que moviliza a la ciudadanía contra estos actos y acciones de daño somático. Esa acción social, ciudadana y colectiva sensibiliza a la población (tal como lo hacen las organizaciones y los movimientos sociales contra la desaparición, la violencia sexual, el abuso infantil, etc.) y posibilita que aprenda que la violencia no es inevitable ni normal. De ahí que se puede y debamos repensar la seguridad.

La seguridad no puede reproducir más violencia. Al contrario, debería mostrar la cara humana de la sociedad, afirmando la posibilidad de superar el deseo de la venganza. Una seguridad humanizada camina de manera conjunta con la construcción de un sistema de justicia restaurativa. La seguridad que queremos en vez de reprimir, hace posible la participación cívica, capaz de impulsar los cambios sociales y económicos que podrían establecer los condiciones para convivir en un mundo sin violencia.

* Jenny Pearce es Profesora Investigadora del Latin America and Caribbean Centre, London School of Economics.

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Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

https://www.animalpolitico.com/seguridad-180/violencia-cronica-en-mexico-su-reproduccion-en-el-espacio- y-el-tiempo/

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

inna shevchenko

@femeninna

Un ministre de l'intérieur accusé d'agression sexuelle et un ministre de la justice qui a présenté des excuses aux violeurs ?

Le message est bien reçu. A très vite...

¿Un ministro del interior acusado de agresión sexual y un ministro de justicia que se disculpó con los violadores?

El mensaje es bien recibido. Hasta pronto...

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Will The Reckoning Over Racist Names Include These Prisons?

Many prisons, especially in the South, are named after racist officials and former plantations.

Prisoners from the Ferguson Unit picking cotton outside of Huntsville, Texas, in 1968. The unit was named after James E. Ferguson, a governor in the 1910s with a troubled record of condoning anti-Mexican violence. Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

By KERI BLAKINGER

Not long after an Alabama lawyer named John Darrington began buying up land in Southeast Texas, he sent enslaved people to work the soil. They harvested cotton and sugarcane, reaping profits for their absentee owner until he sold the place in 1848.

This article was published in partnership with The Texas Observer.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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More than a century and a half later, men—mostly Black and brown—are still forced to work in the fields. They still harvest cotton. They still don’t get paid. And they still face punishment if they refuse to work.

They are prisoners at the Darrington Unit, one of Texas’s 104 prisons. And not the only one in the South named after slaveholders.

Prisoners from the Darrington Unit in Texas work on a farm in early 2020.

TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

While the killing of George Floyd has galvanized support for tearing down statues, renaming sports teams and otherwise removing markers of a (more) racist past, the renewed push for change hasn’t really touched the nation’s prison system. But some say it should. Across the country, dozens of prisons take their names from racists, Confederates, plantations, segregationists, and owners of slaves.

“Symbols of hate encourage hate, so it has been time to remove the celebration of figures whose fame is predicated on the pain and torture of Black people,” said DeRay McKesson, a civil rights activist and podcast host.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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Some candidates for new names might be prisons on former plantations. In Arkansas, the Cummins Unit— now home to the state’s death chamber—was once known as the Cummins plantation (though it’s not clear if the namesake owned slaves). In North Carolina, Caledonia Correctional Institution is on the site of Caledonia Plantation, so named as a nostalgic homage to the Roman word for Scotland. Over the years, the land changed hands and eventually the state bought that and other nearby parcels.

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The Caledonia Prison Farm in North Carolina circa 1925-26. NORTH CAROLINA PRISONS REPORT

Prisoners from Caledonia Prison harvest crops on a prison farm outside of Tillery, N.C., in 1996. ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN/CORBIS, VIA GETTY IMAGES

“But the state opted to actually keep that name in what I would say is a kind of intentional choice,” said Elijah Gaddis, an assistant professor of history at Auburn University. “It’s so damning.”

Among several state prison systems contacted by The Marshall Project, only North Carolina’s said it’s in the early stages of historical research to see what name changes might be appropriate. Spokesman John Bull said the department is “sensitive to the cultural legacy issues sweeping the country,” but its priority now is responding to the COVID pandemic.

Two of the most infamous and brutal plantations-turned-prisons are Angola in Louisiana and Parchman in Mississippi—but those are their colloquial names; neither prison formally bears the name of the plantation that preceded it. Officially, they’re called Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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In some parts of the South, many prisons are former plantations. Unlike Darrington or Cummins, the vast majority at least bothered to change the name—but that isn’t always much of an improvement.

In Texas, for example, most of the state’s lock-ups are named after ex-prison officials and erstwhile state politicians, a group that predictably includes problematic figures. Arguably one of the worst is Thomas J. Goree, the former slave owner and Confederate captain who became one of the first superintendents of the state’s penitentiaries in the 1870s, when prison meant torture in stocks and dark cells.

“Goree was a central figure in the convict leasing system that killed thousands of people and he presided over the formal segregation of the prison system,” said Robert Perkinson, a University of Hawaii associate professor who studies crime and punishment. “Even though he thought of himself as a kind of benevolent master, he doesn’t age well at all.”

In his book “Texas Tough,” Perkinson describes some of the horrors of the convict leasing practices of Goree’s era. Because the plantation owners and corporations that rented prisoners did not own them, they had no incentive to keep them alive. If you killed an enslaved person, it was a financial loss; if you killed a leased convict, the state would just replace him. For decades, Texas prison laborers were routinely whipped and beaten, and the leasing system in Goree’s day sparked several scandals, including one involving torture so terrible it was known as the “Mineola Horror.” Goree defended the system: “There are, of course, many men

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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in the penitentiary who will not be managed by kindness.” Plus, he explained, prisoners in the South needed to be treated differently because they were different from those in the north: “There, the majority of men are white.”

The present-day Goree Unit is in Huntsville, an hour’s drive north of Houston, but his family’s former plantation in Lovelady—about 20 miles further north—has been turned into another prison: The Eastham Unit, named for the later landowners who used it for convict leasing.

Prisoners from the Eastham Unit in Texas head to work in 1963. TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

A prisoner at the Eastham Unit in Texas doing farm work in 2020. TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

James E. Ferguson—namesake of the notoriously violent Ferguson Unit, also near Huntsville—was a governor in the 1910s who was also an anti-Semite and at one point told the Texas Rangers he would use his pardoning power if any of them were ever charged with murder for their bloody campaigns against Mexicans, according to Monica Muñoz Martinez, historian and author of “The Injustice Never Leaves You.” 16

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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Ferguson got forced out of office early when he was indicted and then impeached. Afterward, he was replaced by William P. Hobby, a staunch segregationist who opposed labor rights and once defended the beating of an NAACP official visiting the state to discuss anti-lynching legislation.

Hobby, too, has a prison named after him.

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“In public he tried to condemn lynchings, but then when you look at his role in suppressing anti-lynching organizing he was trying to suppress those efforts,” Martinez said of Hobby. “It’s horrific to name a prison after a person like him. It’s an act of intimidation and it’s a reminder that the state is proud of that racist tradition.”

Northwest of Abilene, the Daniel Unit takes its name from Price Daniel, a mid-20th-century governor who opposed integration, like most Texas politicians of the era. As attorney general he fought desegregating the University of Texas Law School, and later he signed the Southern Manifesto condemning the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

The namesakes of the Billy Moore Unit and the frequently-sued Wallace Pack Unit were a pair of prison officials—a major and a warden—who died in 1981 while trying to murder a Black prisoner. According to Michael Berryhill, a Texas Southern University journalism professor who wrote a book on the case, it was such a clear case of self-defense that three Texas juries decided to let the prisoner off.

“They should not have prisons named after them,” Berryhill said. He called it “a stain” on the Texas prison system’s reputation.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Correctional officers searched prisoners at the Darrington Unit in Rosharon, Texas, after they returned from working in the fields, in 1978. The unit was named after slaveholder John Darrington, who once owned a plantation on that same land.

BRUCE JACKSON

In Alabama, the Draper Correctional Center is named after Hamp Draper, a state prison director who also served as an interim leader—or “imperial representative”—in the Ku Klux Klan, as former University of Alabama professor Glenn Feldman noted in his 1999 book on the state’s Klan history. The prison closed for a time in 2018 then re-opened earlier this year as a quarantine site for new intakes.

In New York City, the scandal-prone Rikers Island jail is one of a few that’s actually generated calls for a name change, based on the namesake family’s ties to slavery. One member of the Dutch immigrant clan, Richard Riker, served as a criminal court judge in the early 1800s and was known as part of the “Kidnapping Club” because he so often abused the Fugitive Slave Act to send free Blacks into slavery.

To be sure, most prisons are not named for plantations, slave owners or other sundry racists and bigots—at least not directly. Most states name their prisons geographically, using cardinal directions or nearby cities.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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But some of those geographic names can be problematic. In Florida, Jackson Correctional Institution shares a name with its home county. But Jackson County is named after the nation’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson, who was a slave owner obsessed with removing Native people to make room for more plantations. Less than an hour to the south, Calhoun Correctional Institution also bears the name of its county, which is in turn named after John C. Calhoun—Jackson’s rabidly pro-slavery vice president. The same is true of Georgia’s Calhoun State Prison.

Also in Georgia, Lee State Prison is in Lee County, which is named in honor of Henry Lee III, the patriarch of a slave-owning family and the father of Robert E. Lee. A little further northeast, Lee County in South Carolina—home to violence-plagued Lee Correctional Institution—is named after the Confederate general himself.

In Arkansas, the namesake of Forrest City—home to two eponymous federal prisons—is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan who also controlled leased convicts in the entire state of Mississippi at one point.

To many experts, the idea of changing prison names feels a bit like putting lipstick on a pig: No matter what you call it, a prison is still a prison. It still holds people who are not free. They are still disproportionately Black and brown.

“If you are talking about the inhumanity, the daily violence these prisons perform, then who these prisons are named after is useful in understanding that,” Martinez said. “But what would it do to name it after somebody inspiring? It’s still a symbol of oppression.”

But to Anthony Graves, a Texas man who spent 12 years on death row after he was wrongfully convicted of capital murder, the racist names are a “slap in the face of the justice system itself.” New names could be a powerful signal of new priorities.

“At the end of the day the mentality in these prisons is still, ‘This is my plantation and you are my slaves,’” he said. “To change that we have to start somewhere and maybe if we change the name we can start to change the culture.”

Keri Blakinger is a staff writer whose work has focused on prisons and prosecutors. She previously covered criminal justice for Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News and NBC News. She is the organization's first formerly incarcerated reporter.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/07/29/will-the-reckoning-over-racist-names-include-these-prisons

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

CHINESE POLICE DATABASE

Millions of Leaked Police Files Detail Suffocating Surveillance of China’s Uyghur Minority

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A police officer stands guard as Muslims arrive for the Eid al-Fitr morning prayer at the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, a city in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, on June 26, 2017. Photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

Yael Grauer

January 29 2021, 2:00 a.m.

THE ORDER CAME through a police automation system in Ürümqi, the largest city in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. The system had distributed a report — an “intelligence information judgment,” as local authorities called it — that the female relative of a purported extremist had been offered free travel to Yunnan, a picturesque province to the south.

The woman found the offer on the smartphone messaging app WeChat, in a group known simply as “Travelers.” Authorities homed in on the group because of ethnic and family ties; its members included Muslim minorities like Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, who speak languages beside China’s predominant one, Mandarin. “This group has over 200 ethnic-language people,” the order stated. “Many of them are relatives of incarcerated people. Recently, many intelligence reports revealed that there is a tendency for relatives of [extremist] people to gather. This situation needs major attention. After receiving this information, please investigate immediately. Find out the background of the people who organize ‘free travel,’ their motivation, and the inner details of their activities.”

Police in Ürümqi’s Xiheba Precinct, near the historic city center, received the order and summarized their work in a 2018 report. The one person rounded up as a result of the order, a Uyghur, had no previous criminal record, had never heard of the WeChat group, and never even traveled within China as a tourist. He “has good behavior and we do not have any suspicion,” police wrote. Still, his phone was confiscated and sent to a police “internet safety unit,” and the community was to “control and monitor” him, meaning the government would assign a trusted cadre member to regularly visit and watch over his household. A record about him was entered into the police automation system. 20

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Based on their notes, police appear to have investigated the man and assigned the cadre members to “control and monitor” him entirely because of religious activities, which took place five months earlier, of his eldest sister. She and her husband invited another Uyghur couple in Ürümqi to join a religious discussion group on the messaging app Tencent QQ, according to police records. The other couple bought a laptop and logged onto the group every day from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.; the husband stopped smoking and drinking, and the wife began wearing longer clothes. They began listening to “religious extremism information” on their laptop, the report said. Between the two couples, police recovered 168 religious audio files deemed illegal, likely because they were connected to an Islamic movement, Tablighi Jamaat, that advocates practicing Islam as it was practiced when the Prophet Muhammad was alive.

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The fate of the eldest sister and her husband is unknown; the report simply states they were transferred to a different police bureau. The other couple was sent to a re-education camp.

Details of the investigations are contained in a massive police database obtained by The Intercept: the product of a reporting tool developed by private defense company Landasoft and used by the Chinese government to facilitate police surveillance of citizens in Xinjiang.

The database, centered on Ürümqi, includes policing reports that confirm and provide additional detail about many elements of the persecution and large-scale internment of Muslims in the area. It sheds further light on a campaign of repression that has reportedly seen cameras installed in the homes of private citizens, the creation of mass detention camps, children forcibly separated from their families and placed in preschools with electric fences, the systematic destruction of Uyghur cemeteries, and a systematic campaign to suppress Uyghur births through forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control.

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The database obtained by The Intercept contains police reports from Ürümqi, the capital and largest city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

It offers an inside view into police intelligence files and auxiliary community police meetings, as well as the operation of checkpoints that are pervasive in Ürümqi. It also details phone, online, and financial surveillance of marginalized groups, showing how granular surveillance purportedly on the watch for extremism is often simply looking at religious activity. Additionally, the database spells out how Chinese authorities are analyzing and refining the information they collect, including trying to weed out “filler” intelligence tips submitted by police and citizens to inflate their numbers and using automated policing software to help prompt investigations like the one into the WeChat travel group.

Among the revelations from the database is information on the extensive use of a tool that plugs into phones to download their contents, the “anti-terrorism sword,” deployed so frequently that Chinese authorities worried it was alienating the populace. It shows authorities tracking how their policies succeeded in driving down mosque attendance. It also offers evidence that the “Physicals for All” biometric collection program, which authorities insisted was solely a health initiative, is intended as part of the policing system. And it quantifies and provides details on the extensive electronic monitoring that goes on in Xinjiang, containing millions of text messages, phone call records, and contact lists alongside banking records, phone hardware and subscriber data, and references to WeChat monitoring as well as e-commerce and banking records.

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The database also sheds light on the extent of policing and detention in Xinjiang. It details how former residents who went abroad and applied for political asylum were flagged as terrorists. In some cases, it appears as though fixed-term sentences were assigned to people in re-education detention — undercutting the idea, promulgated by the government, that the lengths of such detentions are contingent on rehabilitation or vocational training.

Surveillance cameras are mounted to the exterior of a mosque in the main bazaar in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, on Nov. 6, 2018.

Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Ürümqi Police Database Reveals:

▪ How Chinese authorities collect millions of text messages, phone contacts, and call records, as well as e-commerce and banking records, from Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

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▪ Invasive surveillance techniques watch for signs of religious enthusiasm, which are generally equated with extremism.

▪ Evidence that biometric data collected under the “Physicals for All” health program feeds into the police surveillance system.

▪ Police use community informants to collect massive amounts of information on Uyghurs in Ürümqi.

▪ Applying for asylum abroad can result in being classified as a terrorist, as part of an initiative to prevent the “backflow” of foreign ideas.

Taken together, the materials provide a broad overview of how the extensive surveillance systems deployed in Xinjiang fit together to repress minority populations and how extensively they impact day-to-day life in the region.

“Overall, this testifies to an incredible police state, one that is quite likely to place suspicions on people who have not really done anything wrong,” said Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist and researcher who focuses on Xinjiang and Tibet.

The investigations stemming from the WeChat travelers group offer a concrete example of this intense policing, said Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “You can see the muddled thinking in here, where people are being jailed for nothing, but also the process is so arbitrary.”

The revelations underscore how Xinjiang is an early look at the ways recent technology, like smartphones, cheap digital camera systems, and mass online storage of data, can be combined to monitor and repress large groups of people when civil liberties concerns are pushed aside.

“The mass surveillance in Xinjiang is a cautionary tale for all of us,” said Wang. “Xinjiang really shows how privacy is a gateway right, where if you have no privacy, that’s where you see that you have no freedoms as a human being at all. You don’t have the right to practice your religion, you don’t have the right to be who you are, you don’t even have the right to think your own thoughts because your thoughts are being parsed out by these incessant visits and incessantly monitored by surveillance systems, whether they’re human or artificial, and evaluated constantly for your level of loyalty to the government.”

Landasoft and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.

CENTRAL STORAGE FOR THE PUBLIC SECURITY BUREAU IN ÜRÜMQI

The database obtained by The Intercept appears to be maintained and used by the Ürümqi City Public Security Bureau and the broader Xinjiang Public Security Bureau. It also contains documents from units of the national Internet Safety and Protection Bureau.

Landasoft has branded the software that appears to be behind the database as “iTap,” a big data system it markets publicly.

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The database spans 52 gigabytes and contains close to 250 million rows of data. It is fed by and provides data back to various apps, roughly a dozen of which appear linked to the database. These include:

• Jingwang Weishi, an app for monitoring files on a mobile phone, which police in China have reportedly forced Uyghurs to download.

• Baixing Anquan, which roughly translates to “people’s safety app” or “public safety app” and appears to be used by both citizens and police, including to enable citizens to snitch on one another to the authorities.

• Quzheng Shuju Guanli, or “Evidence Collection Management,” which collects “evidence” from apps like WeChat and Outlook.

• ZhiPu, a graphic interface of people’s relationships and the extent to which authorities are interested in them (the database contains only sparse information on ZhiPu).

The database contains evidence of extensive monitoring by Chinese authorities. In some cases, like SMS text messages, it contains actual communication captured by authorities. In others, like WeChat, there are fields, reporting code, or references to monitoring in police files.

One of the database’s major components is an extensive collection of minutes from “community stability” meetings, in which de facto police auxiliaries, or citizen-staffed neighborhood police, discuss what took place the week prior across their area. The database also contains various associated documents outlining policing and intelligence priorities and summaries of intelligence collected, local facilities checked, families of detainees visited, and updates on people of interest in the community. There are also weekly intelligence and detention reports, which include information on investigations of tips and on suspicious people.

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Left: A police-issued smartphone. Right: Login screen for one of the apps on the smartphone, Public Safety App. Screenshots: Obtained by The Intercept

1. 1Public Safety App. Used to submit intelligence reports or tips, among other things.

2. 2People Inspection App. Used for facial recognition.

3. 3An app linking to a police automation system, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP.

4. 4Registration screen for the Public Safety App

5. 5Password

6. 6Login button

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The database provides information on numerous other tools used to analyze the digital surveillance it contains. For example, documents in the database reference a Chinese government system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. IJOP, which has been the subject of extensive interest and discussion by human rights groups, gathers together surveillance about the residents of Xinjiang, stores it centrally, and uses it to make automated policing decisions referred to in the database as “pushes,” or push notifications. IJOP was the platform police said issued the order to investigate the WeChat free travel group.

Other documents give information on the use of the label “three-category people,” who are deemed terrorists or extremists, with three varying degrees of severity.

The database itself repeatedly uses a marker to query for Uyghur people, “iXvWZREN,” which groups them with terrorists and ex-convicts. There is no marker for Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China.

A computer monitor shows many faces at an inspection point in Kashgar, Xinjiang, on June 28, 2018.

Photo: Yomiuri Shimbun via AP

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FROM CHECKPOINTS TO CHAT MONITORING: SURVEILLANCE IN ÜRÜMQI

The surveillance in Xinjiang was known to be extensive, creating one of the most watched regions in the world. What the database reveals is how this spying machine is used: what surveillance looks like on the ground (unrelenting) and what specific ends it is intended to serve (often to curb any unsanctioned influence, from the practice of Islam to ideas from foreign countries). People are watched up close and at a distance, with some information directly sucked out of their digital devices, other data collected from taps and sensors, and still more from relatives and informants in the community. The campaign against Uyghurs and their practice of Islam is laid out in stark and aggressive terms in police documents, and paranoia about outside or otherwise malign influence of many sorts manifest repeatedly.

Some of the most invasive data in the database comes from “anti-terrorism sword” phone inspection tools. Police at checkpoints, which pervade the city, make people plug their phones into these devices, which come from various manufacturers. They gather personal data from phones, including contacts and text messages, and also check pictures, videos, audio files, and documents against a list of prohibited items. They can display WeChat and SMS text messages. The data extracted is then integrated into IJOP.

A 2018 report from a neighborhood just northeast of the center of Ürümqi mentions authorities conducting searches on 1,860 people with an anti-terrorism sword in just one week in March. In the same report, detailing a single week in April, 2,057 people in the area had their phones checked. Around 30,000 people live in the area, the Qidaowan neighorhood, according to government statistics.

People are watched up close and at a distance, with some information directly sucked out of their digital devices, other data collected from taps and sensors, and still more from relatives and informants in the community.

This pattern of frequent police stops is seen in other parts of Ürümqi. Documents discuss police checking people’s phones upwards of three or four times in one night, and how this makes it difficult to stay on the good side of the populace, which is clearly becoming annoyed.

For example, an August 2017 police report said that “due to overly frequent phone inspections conducted by certain checkpoints, which caused some people to be inspected over 3 times, people complain about this work.” An October 2017 “social opinion intelligence report” stated that “some people reflected that the current checkpoint is too overpowered. Often they would be checked 3 times during one night. It wastes their time when they are in an emergency.”

The documents discuss people who switched to older phones to prevent the inconvenience of these phone checks.

Rune Steenberg, an anthropologist in Denmark focusing on Xinjiang and Uyghurs, who spent time in Kashgar as a researcher as late as 2016, said he switched to using a simple phone rather than a smartphone in 2014 and that many Uyghurs did the same. “It’s not just about them discovering stuff on your phone,” he said. “They can place stuff on your phone in order to incriminate you. And there’s no way you can afterwards prove that that was placed on your phone and it wasn’t from you. So it became really dangerous, actually, to have a smartphone.”

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And, Steenberg said, police would often scam people into giving up their smartphones, falsely stating the phone had religious content and asking people if it was theirs, knowing they would disown the device. “They would be like, ‘No, that’s not my phone, no, I didn’t bring my phone here,’” said Steenberg. Then, he said, the police would hold onto the phones and sell them afterward.

Residents pass by a security checkpoint and surveillance cameras mounted on a street in Kashgar, Xinjiang, on Nov. 5, 2017.

Photo: Ng Han Guan/AP

The database also helps quantify how broadly phone surveillance was deployed around Ürümqi. For example, in the space of one year and 11 months, Chinese authorities collected close to 11 million SMS messages. In one year and 10 months, they gathered 11.8 million records on phone call duration and parties involved in the call. And in a one-year, 11-month period, they gathered seven million contacts and around 255,000 records on phone hardware, including the IMSI number that identifies phones on cellular networks; phone model and manufacturer; a computer network identifier known as a MAC address; and another cellular network identifier, the IMEI number.

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Phone call information that is tracked in the database includes people on the calls, name of the recipient, and the start and stop times of each conversation. Fields in the database indicate that online dating information, e- commerce purchases, and email contacts may also be extracted from phones.

“You cannot feel safe anywhere because of your cellphone,” said Abduweli Ayup, a linguist and poet who lived in Kashgar, Xinjiang. “You have to turn your cellphone on 24 hours, and you have to answer the phone at any time if police call you.” He said that with chat apps also monitored, Uyghurs can never experience privacy, even at home.

The database contains phone surveillance records, helping to quantify police monitoring of communications in Xinjiang.

Chart: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Beyond passively watching phones, the government worked to coerce people to participate in a biometrics program purported to be a health initiative. Under the “Physicals for All” program, citizens were required to go have their faces scanned and voice signatures analyzed, as well as give DNA. Documents describing the program indicate it is part of the policing system.

Darren Byler, an anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that while the “Physicals for All” program has long been known about and suspected to be a form of surveillance, authorities have always denied it and said it was simply a public health

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initiative. “How clearly this is part of the policing system is made clear in the documents,” Byler said. “It’s very clear, it’s obvious that that’s a part of how they want to control the population.”

Reports in the database show “Physicals for All” work is routinely conducted through the police “convenience stations,” leading to complaints from citizens about sanitary conditions. (The convenience stations purportedly bring the community and police closer together, featuring amenities like public Wi-Fi and phone- charging, but are hubs for surveillance.) They also discuss how citizens who fail to submit biometric and biographical information are reported to police, face fines, and are sometimes made to formally renounce their behavior. Some documents about the program focus on migrants or the “ethnic-language people.” One indicates that physical exams conducted on students are used for policing:

(09-MARCH-2018) (QIDAOWAN COMMUNITY)

(2) Houbo Institute, which is part of the second hospital of Xinjiang Medical University, is going to start a new semester soon. The list of names of returning students is not known to us.

Method: After the semester begins, we will immediately conduct “physical checkup” work on the returning students using the IJOP platform. We will report to the national security team immediately if we find any suspicious labels.

Documents in the database also show heightened surveillance of people as they move about in public through the growing use of facial recognition, directed by the IJOP system. The police report on use of the anti- terrorism sword also details the use of facial recognition, showing that over 900 people were checked using facial recognition across 40 police convenience stations in Qidaowan Precinct.

(17-APRIL-2018)

(FOUR) Convenience Police Station Operational Notes:

There are 40 convenience stations in Qidaowan Precinct in total. … This week we searched 2,057 people with the anti-terrorism sword and did facial recognition on 935 people. No suspects. We sent 237 intelligence reports using the Intelligence Reporting System.

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It’s clear, Byler said after reviewing the numbers, that “face recognition has become an increasingly important aspect of the surveillance system.”

Some of the most intriguing evidence of personal data surveillance comes from computer programming code stored in the database and seemingly designed to generate reports. This reporting code references a good deal of material not included in the database obtained by The Intercept, making it impossible to confirm how much of it is actually collected by authorities or how it would be used.

Still, these so-called tactic or evidence collection reports give clues as to what information the database, on its own or as part of a broader collection, is intended to include. The report code contains references to data on online services like Facebook, QQ, Momo, Weibo, Taobao’s Aliwangwang, as well as actual phone call recordings, photos, GPS locations, and a list of “high-risk words.”

Documents in the database also confirm police access to information on people’s use of WeChat. Discussion of WeChat surveillance appears in records of auxiliary community police meetings and accounts of police investigations.

Surveillance in Ürümqi:

▪ Police use a tool known as an “anti-terrorism sword” to download the contents of Ürümqi residents’ phones, sometimes three or four times a day.

▪ Uyghurs who travel outside of China, as well as their relatives and friends, are monitored to stifle desire for greater freedom or autonomy.

▪ Authorities keep tabs on who participates in weekly “flag-raising” ceremonies as a litmus test for loyalty to China.

▪ Contact with areas outside Xinjiang, or with people in contact with those areas, is extensively monitored and is grounds for suspicion.

▪ Practicing Islam is considered a red flag that has led to further investigation.

In an example of how police document their WeChat capabilities, one document — from the national Internet Safety Bureau — demonstrates a police search drill in which a police officer was marked as a suspect for the purpose of the exercise. He drove throughout the city while other police traced his vehicle using his WeChat history and location data. Authorities appeared to read the mock suspect’s WeChat texts, with one “WeChat Analysis” reading, “He said he’s having lunch at the petrol area.”

The aim of much of the surveillance is to curb any influence that could conceivably lead to a desire for greater freedom or autonomy among Uyghur and other minority groups in Xinjiang.

For example, the material corroborates reports that Uyghurs are monitored outside of China and that it’s not just people who travel abroad and then return who are surveilled, but also their relatives and friends.

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Police in the Shuimogou district of Ürümqi investigated a young woman because her high school friend went to study at Stanford University and because the woman sometimes talked to her on WeChat. “According to the investigation, we did not find any violation of rules or laws while she resided and worked in our area,” read a 2018 report from the neighborhood of Weihuliang. “While she resided in the area she actively participated in community works and actively participated in other activities in the community, and actively participated in the raising of the flag ceremony in the community. We do not see any abnormality and she is cleared from suspicion.” Byler called the incident “important confirmation on the way people outside the country are being monitored by those in the country, and the way these connections produce ‘micro-clues’ of suspicion.”

In another example of how outside influence is grounds for suspicion, a document from the community of Anping, also in Shuimogou, mentions that all phones and computers of workers who have visited family outside of the city should be inspected for unauthorized content.

Clearing violent and terrorist audio and video has always been a very important part of stability work. Our community pays a lot of attention to this work. Because the Chinese New Year break is coming to an end, people will increasingly come back to work, therefore our community decided to conduct a large-scale computer and cellphone inspection for workers who are coming back. We inspect stored information on every household and every person’s cellphone and computer. To date, we did not discover violent and terrorist audio and video among the residents in the area. We will continue this work later and will record the results.

Chinese authorities’ fear of outside influence on citizens of Xinjiang is connected to an initiative called “backflow prevention,” or fanghuiliu. The idea is to prevent the “backflow” of extremism or other malign ideas from abroad.

A possible example of this initiative is the 2018 imprisonment of Feng Siyu, a Chinese academic who came to Xinjiang University’s Folklore Research Center as a translator the previous February. Feng is part of China’s Han ethnic majority and is originally from Hangzhou in eastern China, far from Xinjiang. But she studied abroad — including at Amherst College, SOAS University of London, and Indiana University — and came under police attention in Ürümqi, according to an October 2017 police intelligence note in the database. The note recorded that Feng had “foreign obscure software” on her OnePlus smartphone. The note further stated that the software came with the smartphone and that Feng did not use it.

Feng is believed to have been sentenced to two years in prison in February 2018. Her imprisonment is tracked on shahit.biz, the Xinjiang Victim’s Database, a website that documents instances of incarceration in the region.

Steenberg, the anthropologist, said he believes Feng was under scrutiny because she traveled between the U.S. and Ürümqi and spoke good Uyghur, and because of her work at the folk research center and with its founder Rahile Dawut. A celebrated academic, Dawut collected ethnographic data, including folktales and oral literature in southern Xinjiang and information on Sufi Islamic practices. Dawut disappeared in December 2017 and is believed to be in detention. 33

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The drive for “backflow prevention” is also reflected in the identification of those who leave China as security threats. One report from Saimachang, a Uyghur stronghold in the historic center of Ürümqi, discusses former residents who have gone abroad and applied for political asylum as terrorists, corroborating reports that Uyghurs are monitored outside of China.

“It’s really clear evidence that charges of terrorism or extremism don’t meet international standards of terrorism or extremism,” said Byler. “Applying for political asylum is not a sign of terrorism by most definitions, but in this context it is.” This also demonstrates the amount of detailed information Chinese authorities keep about Uyghurs abroad.

Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur, linguist and activist at his home in Bergen, Norway on January 21, 2021.

Photo: Melanie Burford for The Intercept

Ayup has experience with this sort of monitoring. While in Kashgar, Ayup operated a Uyghur-language kindergarten and promoted Uyghur-language education. He fled China after 15 months of detention, during which he said he was interrogated and tortured. After leaving, Ayup said at one point he joined a WeChat group for the Chinese embassy. “When I went to the Chinese embassy, they asked me to join their 34

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WeChat group, and when I joined, a Chinese spy in Ürümqi found me; he talked to me and he threatened me,” he said.

Even holding a passport is considered suspicious. Documents in the database indicate Uyghur passport holders are checked on by authorities more frequently than those without passports.

Indeed, any knowledge of life outside of Xinjiang can be flagged as suspicious. For example, police in Weihuliang took note in one weekly report, among “people who need special attention,” of four people who had traveled to Beijing “to reflect local issues.” “The rest have never left the region, so they’re seen as safer,” Byler said.

Even phone calls or text chats involving outside countries invite scrutiny from authorities in Xinjiang. In Tianshan, the historic and majority-Uyghur center of Ürümqi, authorities reported sending a professional driver to re-education following an unusual phone call to a “key country.” Zenz believes the “key country” is one in a group of 26 largely Muslim “focus” countries watched by authorities. Xinjiang authorities have targeted people with connections to these countries for interrogation, detention and even imprisonment, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. The countries include Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

SUZHOULU COMMUNITY STABILITY WEEKLY JUDGMENT REPORT (FEB 12 - FEB 14)

2. While doing home visits, a community worker learned that [name redacted], who lives in [address], national ID number [redacted], female, Uyghur, has no job and stays home to care for her young children. … Community police searched on the police net and found out that the person was arrested in [hometown] on September 21, 2017. The reason for arrest: Cellphone contains obscure chat program. …

3. Social workers learned while doing home visits that [name redacted], who lives in [address redacted], Uyghur, national ID number [redacted] … his mother, [name redacted], female, Uyghur, national ID number [redacted], has been detained in Tianshan District on September 20, 2017. Reason for arrest: face covering. …

4. Community workers learned during home visits that [name redacted], who lives in [address], male, Uyghur … driver … has strange phone call behaviors during the night, and communicates with key countries. He has been detained in his hometown and is currently educated and converted (Shule County). … Mother: [name redacted], female, Uyghur. … Currently the community is monitoring her husband and children according to the detainee relative conditions.

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The database also shows increased use of artificial intelligence, coupled with human intelligence, in directing surveillance in recent years. Documents from authorities in the Ürümqi districts of Tianshan and Shuimogou show IJOP sending push notifications directing investigations by local police. In 2018, one police precinct alone received 40 such notifications, according to one document.

While news reports in recent years have depicted Chinese police automation systems like IJOP as rudimentary, relying heavily on human intelligence, evidence in the database indicates use of machine- learning technology is growing, said Byler, who received his Ph.D. in Uyghur technopolitics in Chinese cities of Central Asia.

A police smartphone app used in Ürümqi during a police stop or at a checkpoint shows facial recognition results, along with information about the top matches from police records. On the left, five possible matches are shown, with the top match rated 95.58 percent likely correct. Screenshots: Obtained by The Intercept

1. 1Search result

2. 2Name 36

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3. 3Sex: Male

4. 4ID number

5. 5Identity characteristics

6. 6Process result

7. 7Face database: Long-term residents

8. 8Note

9. 9Person details

10. 10Date of Birth

11. 11National ID number

12. 12Identity: Border control subject of “backflow prevention.” (Indicates the person was flagged as part of an initiative to curb the influx of dangerous ideas from foreign countries.)

13. 13Process: Arrest immediately if it’s the person, otherwise collect information.

“What your data shows is that it’s beginning to automate in some ways, especially around face surveillance,” Byler said. “If they’re using 900 checkpoint [scans] around face surveillance, they are using AI to a significant extent now,” he added, referring to the 935 facial scans in one week in Qidaowan Precinct.

Documents show police are also adding into IJOP a significant amount of checkpoint data, including phone downloads from anti-terrorism swords. Documents from 2018 and 2019 show mounting push notifications from IJOP. “It’s clear that that system is beginning to alert them and direct their policing in new ways, and so it is starting to come online,” said Byler.

The documents also make clear the extent to which authorities try to assess the psychology of people under suspicion, with a keen eye in particular toward loyalty and even fervor. This is exhibited at so-called flag- raising ceremonies: community events in which participants proclaim their loyalty to China and the ruling regime. Documents show that these events are extensively monitored by police and their proxies. Authorities watch not just former detainees but their relatives as well, to confirm they are participating and to determine how passionate they are about doing so.

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A security officer looks on as a woman passes through a checkpoint, equipped with a metal detector and facial recognition technology, to enter the main bazaar in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, on Nov. 6, 2018.

Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Authorities used participation in these weekly ceremonies as a way to monitor three people, likely Uyghurs, on a community watchlist, according to one of the documents. Participants are asked to perform a vow of loyalty involving the phrase “Voice your opinion, raise your sword” (or “Show your voice, show your sword”). If their participation is not wholehearted and patriotic, employers and others inform on them to police, Byler said. Also scrutinized at the ceremonies are “surplus laborers,” people on a coercive labor track that blends work on community projects with re-education. The surplus labor program has ramped up sharply over the last four years.

The documents make clear the extent to which authorities try to assess the psychology of people under suspicion, with a keen eye in particular toward loyalty and even fervor.

Documents show that the police officers and neighbors doing this monitoring at flag-raising ceremonies are also making recommendations about who should be sent to re-education camps. 38

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Although China has insisted its policing in Xinjiang is directed at stopping terrorism and extremism rather than persecuting the practice of any religion, the database confirms and details how surveillance homes in on many common expressions of Islamic faith, and even on curiosity about the religion, leading in many cases to investigations. The government considers it a potential sign of religious extremism to grow a beard, have a prayer rug, own Uyghur books, or even quit smoking or drinking.

Surveillance directed at Islamic practice in the region also involves watching mosques. Authorities surveil mosque attendance, tally which worshippers are migrants and which are residents, and monitor whether prayers are conducted in an orderly way, according to police reports in the database.

Ayup said mosques have cameras inside too, and people are surveilled for the way in which they pray.

“If people use a different style of praying … the camera takes a picture,” he said, adding that a friend was arrested for this. Ayup said that some Uyghurs pray in very old styles, and some use new styles. “In the Chinese government’s eyes, the new style is threatening, is extremism,” he said.

Even the use of natural gas in a neighborhood mosque was monitored, according to a document from Quingcui, a community in the Liudaowan neighborhood in the district of Shuimogou.

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Security cameras are seen on a street in Ürümqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, on July 2, 2010.

Photo: Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

CITIZENS INTEGRATED INTO SYSTEM OF “HYPERPOLICING”

The relentless surveillance in Xinjiang has been the best understood component of the repressive environment in the region. More difficult to study and understand, particularly for human rights groups abroad, has been how and to what extent it drives enforcement. As it turns out, the intensity of policing in Xinjiang matches the hyperaggression of the surveillance: closely integrated and every bit as pervasive. The database obtained by The Intercept reveals evidence of a deeply invasive police state, concerned with people’s thoughts and enthusiasms, entering their homes, interfering with their daily movements, and even seeking out crimes in activities perfectly legal at the time they were undertaken. Authorities in the region direct investigations and other police work using an approach one expert, after examining portions of the database, described as “hyperpolicing,” cracking down on any aberrant behavior. The tactics used are all-encompassing, involving civilian brigades, home visits, and frequent checkpoints. As extensive as this work is, it is also conducted in a way that targets people according to perceived danger. Minorities of all sorts — be they linguistic, religious, or ethnic — are disproportionately patrolled.

Discrimination against so-called ethnic-language people, or Muslim minorities with their own languages, is a key component of policing in Xinjiang.

“Hyperpolicing” in Ürümqi:

▪ A wide range of activities and behaviors among Muslim minorities has been considered criminal, even if they were legal at the time of the incident.

▪ Vigorous policing of mosques, including tight regulation of who can enter and observation of how congregants pray, with the goal of lowering attendance.

▪ Other examples of hyperpolicing: watching people’s online behavior, requiring knives in restaurants to be kept on chains, regular home visits to inspect for religious items like prayer mats and books.

▪ Community informants received extensive guidance on what kind of intelligence to feed to police.

Many detainees and former detainees are referred to as “three-category people.” The label, applied very liberally, refers to purported extremists and terrorists of three levels of severity, ranked according to the government’s perception of their mindset and potential to cause harm. Relatives of detainees and former detainees are also labeled, ranked, and tracked by police. Another system categorizes people as trustworthy, normal, or untrustworthy.

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Police categories and rankings implicitly draw attention to minority groups, but in some contexts, this focus is made explicit. For example, minutes from the community stability meetings show that these meetings specifically put a focus on “ethnic-language people,” who are under stronger surveillance than Chinese- speaking Hui Muslims. The meetings also focus on relatives of primarily Uyghur detainees.

Uyghurs are also policed in their practice of Islam. Documents show that police at times conduct security checks on everyone attending a given mosque.

Indeed, the government tightly controls who is allowed into mosques. One police document detailed an incident in which three students tried to go to a funeral for a friend’s father at a mosque. As Byler described it, the three students “were just hanging around the entrance trying to find a way to walk in because they had to scan their ID cards to go inside, but they were worried that [the front gate checkpoint] would contact the police and they didn’t know what to do.” The police questioned the students, held them for hours, and put them on a watchlist at school, “even though they explained everything they were trying to do,” Byler said.

More recent reports indicate that authorities set a goal of lowering mosque attendance and met it. Many police documents mention that mosque attendance is lower, and some explicitly describe this as indicating success. One report indicated that at one mosque, total visits in a four-month period declined by 80,000, compared to the same period in the prior year: more than a 96 percent decrease. This appears to be partly due to the departure of an imam and temporary closure of the mosque, but the report states that “there has been a drastic lowering of religious practitioners” over two years. It adds that this is partly because visitors left the city, were sent to camps, or were afraid to practice Islam.

(12-NOVEMBER-2018)(XIHEBA)…

There are 167 religious practitioners in the jurisdiction. … In the past two years, there has been a drastic lowering of religious practitioners. … The remaining practitioners are by and large long-term residents of advanced age.

Reasons for changes in believer numbers and composition: …

The jurisdiction strictly followed the anti-extremism work ordered by the regional officer. …

The mosque has a strict real-name policy and conducts religious activities following the law. People who work in the public sector and some young people no longer enter the premises. …

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Since the beginning of the 2017 Strike Down and Detain operation, the problematic people in the jurisdiction have either been detained or re-educated. The total population has decreased.

Mosque activity that the Chinese government views as signs of extremism, said Ayup, can include praying without a Uyghur doppa, wearing perfume in the mosque, or even being relaxed while praying. Anybody who doesn’t praise the Chinese Communist Party after their prayer is also considered suspicious, he said.

One system categorizes people as trustworthy, normal, or untrustworthy.

In police notes, Byler said, “it’s interesting that they’re describing citizens as enemies, and it makes it clear that they see this as a sort of counterinsurgency, when really they’re just trying to detect who practices Islam or not.”

Notes from a police station in Weihuliang describe a “large-scale investigation … focused on areas where migrant populations congregate,” concentrating on people from predominately Uyghur southern Xinjiang. The notes said that in one week, police had registered 605 people from southern Xinjiang, investigating 383 of them and people they lived with. In the same sweeps, authorities inspected 367 phones and nine computers.

Xinjiang authorities’ policing of Islam is particularly zealous in its hunt for “wild imams” or “illegal preaching.” The terms refer to Islamic preachers whose work is not sanctioned by the Chinese government; rights groups have said Chinese authorities draw this legal line arbitrarily, to serve political needs. These imams can be prosecuted for sermons delivered either online and in mosques.

The Weihuliang police station notes list 60 people involved in so-called illegal preaching, 50 of whom are in custody. The same document said that “illegal preaching” in the WeChat group “Group 1 teach (Qur’an ABCs)” led to the capture of a 41-year-old Hui woman and the administrative detention of a 62-year-old Hui man.

More recent documents, from 2017 through 2019, reflect mounting difficulty by the police in continuing to find violations to enforce and people to place in detention or re-education camps. That’s because in 2017, the first wave of detentions swept Xinjiang, leading to the expulsion of a large portion of the population from Ürümqi. Xinjiang party leader Chen Quanguo told officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” extending a hard-line approach Chinese President Xi Jinping began organizing after a mass stabbing at a train station and an attack on an outdoor market with cars and explosives, both in 2014.

Police documents from this period, after the first wave of repression, reflect an intent to hunt down suspicious behavior of any kind.

“You’re being policed on a micro level, both by human policing and by the application of the technology to you and your life.”

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“The system is set up in a way that’s producing hyperpolicing,” Byler said, “where any strange or any kind of aberrant behavior is reported, and if you’re a minority, you’re ‘ethnic,’ which is how they refer to Uyghurs and Kazakhs, then you’re very susceptible to this kind of stuff and you’re being policed on a micro level, both by human policing and by the application of the technology to you and your life.”

In some instances, people are being persecuted for violating laws before the laws were even instituted.

One police document describes how Hui women were detained because of evidence they had studied the Quran in an online group — which was legal at the time they did it but became illegal prior to their detention. They had been inactive in the group for at least a year before they were detained.

Such uncertainty about laws in Xinjiang, and when one might run afoul of police, echoes Ayup’s experience. “After people get arrested, then they will find out that ‘Oh, that [activity] is dangerous,’” he explained.

Wang said the hyperpolicing has become more pervasive over time.

“It’s basically a crackdown of everything,” Wang said, spreading from repression of Islamic practices to drug abuse and mental illness. “They just want to make sure they have such control over that region, general overall control.”

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People walk on the street of Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar on June 25, 2020, in Ürümqi.

Photo: David Liu/Getty Images

One illustration of how policing became increasingly aggressive and ubiquitous in Xinjiang is a police report discussing how one knife at a dumpling shop was not chained to a secure post, as per regulation. The report said the violation needed to be rectified within a day. Laws in Xinjiang require not only the chaining of knives, the document indicated, but that knives also have QR codes identifying their owners. “It’s just a way of showing how tightly everything is controlled, that even knives that are used in cooking have to be thought of as potential weapons,” said Byler.

To maintain the maximal vigilance entailed in “hyperpolicing,” authorities in Xinjiang enlisted ordinary citizens to inform on one another — not unheard of in China but practiced in the region more extensively, particularly against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.

Helping to enable this, citizens are rewarded for reporting on one another. The documents in the database include some details on this previously reported fact. Informants are rewarded for passing along information, but people are also rewarded for more specific actions. Linking their WeChat account, passing a verification, and posting an image can all result in a cash reward. All of this is tracked and reflected in the database.

This type of policing, bubbling up from the grassroots of the populace, “is about recruiting and considering ordinary people as part of these surveillance teams.”

One document, a public announcement from police, indicates that police and auxiliaries faced pressure to submit large quantities of intelligence to authorities. It chastised citizens in the high-tech zone within Ürümqi’s Xinshi district for sending in tips that are “filler created just to make report numbers seem large, and cannot be used, and occupy a large amount of manpower and time to process.” For example, “residents reported that there are often kids urinating in the elevator” of one building. Also: “A few citizens reported that they are scammed while buying crabs or mooncakes online. Quantities lost are generally not big.”

The announcement then went on to extensively detail 10 “categories of intelligence that are forbidden to report,” including tips having nothing to do with “policy about anti-terrorism, minority policy,” or with something called the “Xinjiang Management Agenda,” or with “policies that benefits citizens.”

Essentially, as Byler put it, authorities “were like, ‘That’s not the intelligence we want, we want intelligence about the Muslims.’”

This type of policing, bubbling up from the grassroots of the populace, “is about recruiting and considering ordinary people as part of these surveillance teams,” Wang said. “And in that way, it spells out quite an interesting philosophy of surveillance and society and engineering that I don’t think a lot of people understand outside of China.”

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When Ayup lived in Xinjiang, he said, groups of 10 families were required to report somebody once a week in a feedback box, which existed before the app. “The problem is, if you cannot find something to write, you have to make it up to avoid being sent to the camps and to the center, so it’s obligatory. That’s the problem, but you cannot blame someone who reports because it’s his or her obligation,” he said.

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The Public Safety App is one way authorities in Xinjiang draw ordinary citizens into the work of alerting, monitoring, and law enforcement.

Chart: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

In addition to drafting ordinary citizens individually to report on neighbors, authorities in Xinjiang also organized them through more formal community groups known as “safety units” or “brigades.” These units are segmented into groups of 10, according to documents in the database. For example, 10 households or 10 businesses might be organized as a brigade, with one volunteer from each group responding to calls like an emergency medical technician and doing drills in opposition to “terrorism.”

Each business in a community “safety unit” must install a “one-click police alert button,” according to documents in the database. Once triggered, the auxiliary police and other businesses in the “safety unit” are required to show up within two minutes.

Photo: Obtained by The Intercept

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The safety brigades hark back to a historical Chinese tradition known as the Baojia system, in which 10 households formed a bao (or later a jia, 10 of which in turn formed a bao). This fractal structure formed a social safety system and is heavily associated with policing and the militarization of the population.

In modern times, similar systems have been branded as “grid management.” Several years ago, the Chinese government rolled out grid management nationwide; the density of citizen watch units in Xinjiang, however, has remained much higher than in other parts of the country, and safety units there are used for different purposes.

The Xinjiang safety units have not been seen in previous government documents, Byler said, but are pretty obvious if you’re in the region, where you’ll see drills, people marching in formation, and business owners wearing red armbands to show their affiliation.

“It’s the militarization of the population as a whole,” Byler said. “To this point we haven’t had a full description of what it’s supposed to do.”

Hyperpolicing also reaches into people’s homes through regular visits by authorities; those deemed at risk for extremist, terrorist, or separatist influence receive frequent visits. This typically means Uyghurs, dissidents, and those who have gone through re-education camps, as well as anyone related to any of those people.

Minutes from community stability meetings give a granular look at the type of information recorded in these home visits. They include professions, place of employment, former jobs, relatives (and relatives’ national ID numbers), travel, location of children, schools the children are attending, and what the community is still monitoring.

Some residents are discussed as being monitored or controlled by the community; that means a neighborhood watch unit is assigned to monitor them. This can include visits as often as every day, or once or twice a week, from one or more cadre members living in close proximity.

Some relatives of detainees are visited daily by local police. Even those considered trustworthy are visited, “to show them warmth and pull them into the Chinese patriotic fold,” as Byler put it. “It’s like winning hearts and minds.”

In one account from a police document, an older woman whose son was held by authorities befriended a police officer who visited her. Police claimed that the woman had become like a mother to the officer. She treated him like her son and opened up about all of her actual son’s activities. She was the ideal type of person who has been re-educated through the system, the document indicated.

Some home visits are for inspection purposes, to find religious items. Documents show police searching for religious books and removing prayer mats and even, as mentioned in a July 2018 police document, a picture of the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The documents indicate this effort originates from 2018 and is connected to a government initiative known as the “three cleanups” to encourage people to purge material considered extremist from their homes. “This is one of the first times I’ve seen that mentioned explicitly, that they’re going through people’s homes,” Byler said.

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A document from October 2018 described how these home inspections unfold:

First, the personnel from the police station should gather all the people in the house into the living room in order to verify their identities one by one. Second, the cadres responsible for the household and members of the patrol team will conduct a careful inspection of all rooms of the house, especially under the carpet, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and under the bed. Suspicious areas such as corners of the sofas, etc., are to be inspected one by one using a “turning over the boxes, emptying out the cabinets” approach, and the house number where the suspicious objects were found and photo of the owner of the objects are to be taken as evidence.

The authorities also monitor phone calls between detainees and their family members back home. One document detailed such a call that lasted four minutes and 20 seconds, describing the contents of the conversation and how grateful the relatives were that the government allowed it. “It’s an inflection point documenting how people are receiving the re-education,” Byler explained. “If they cry or act angry that their relative can’t be released, that’s a sign that the re-education hasn’t been received.”

In many cases, relatives were asked to record their call and share it with the police, or they were interviewed immediately after to see how they were doing after the call.

Citizens in Xinjiang are also routinely stopped outside their homes by authorities. The database contains records from more than two million checkpoint stops in Ürümqi (population 3.5 million) and the surrounding area in a two-year period. It includes a list of nearly three dozen categories of people to stop, such as “intelligence national security important person.” When a person is stopped at a checkpoint, they go through an ID check, typically including processing via facial recognition. Facial recognition is sometimes performed through automatic scanning by a fixed surveillance camera. It can also be performed through a manual scan using a smartphone camera; these are often used on people deemed to need the extra scrutiny of an up-close facial scan, for example, because they lack ID. If a person’s face is displayed with a yellow, orange, or red indicator on a computer, showing the system has deemed them suspicious or criminal, they are questioned and may be arrested.

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Four people flagged with various colored “inspection levels” based on authorities’ perception of how dangerous they are. Screenshots: Obtained by The Intercept

1. 1ID

2. 2Type: People inspection

3. 3Level: Released

4. 4Result: All seems normal

5. 5Type: Verify national ID

6. 6Level

7. 7Inspection result: Drug-related person nationwide. Process method: Special inspection, collect information.

8. 8Inspection type: Stability-related inspection

9. 9Inspection level: Released

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10. 10Inspection result: Subject to stability-related investigation. Work process: Collect information, check suspicion, report to precinct of original residency [their Hukou].

11. 11Result: Person incarcerated for July 5 riot [reference to 2009 Uyghur-Han civil unrest]. Process: Transfer to the sub-bureau of inspection location and detain.

Categories of people often stopped at checkpoints include relatives of offenders and relatives of detainees.

Data retained from these stops include photos of those stopped, the latitude and longitude of the stop, the name of the collection point, vehicle and license plate if applicable, the search time, the search level, whether the person was released, and the result of the search. Those who were stopped are categorized in the database as people who were immediately arrested, those who were returned to their original residence, psychiatric patients, relatives of detainees, relatives of offenders, and individuals who were listed as participants of the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, in which Uyghur–Han violence at a toy factory in southeast China led to a broader outbreak of civil unrest involving attacks against largely ethnically Han residents.

Security cameras are installed above the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a “vocational skills education center” in Dabancheng, Xinjiang, on Sept. 4, 2018. This center, situated between the region’s capital Ürümqi and tourist spot Turpan, is among the largest known ones.

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Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters

A DETENTION SYSTEM BUILT ON UNCERTAINTY AND INCONSISTENCIES

Beyond surveillance and policing, the database provides a close-up look at how various forms of incarceration are used to control the population, particularly minority groups and perceived dissidents in Xinjiang. It reveals a system moving to adapt its rhetoric and policies to a reality in which the length of incarceration, even under the guise of “training” or “re-education,” is often so uncertain that relatives of the imprisoned are grateful when detainees are granted fixed-term sentences.

Documents illustrate Xinjiang’s complex system of prison-like facilities, which roughly speaking break down into four categories: those for temporary detention; “re-education”; a more lenient form of re-education referred to as “vocational training”; and long-term prison.

Detention in Ürümqi:

▪ Complex incarceration system in Xinjiang of temporary detention, re-education camps, “vocational training,” and long-term imprisonment.

▪ Some evidence indicates that rates of detention are higher by a “shocking” degree than previously known, compared to less harsh forms of incarceration like re-education.

Detention centers, which are said to have the harshest conditions and worst crowding, are essentially interrogation and holding facilities. People are kept there while waiting for an investigation to be completed. Re-education facilities are officially known as “transformation through education” camps. They practice “highly coercive brainwashing” in the words of Zenz, who has investigated the camps using government documents. The training centers are purportedly intended to transmit vocational and other skills but are clearly prison-like, with barbed wire, high walls, watchtowers, and internal camera systems.

It is common for a given citizen to travel through multiple types of incarceration in a sort of pipeline fashion. One police document from the Tianshan district of Ürümqi describes a mother involved in a “national security incident” who was put into re-education, then a vocational training school.

The re-education was conducted through the public security bureau’s internal security division, a domestic security force that investigates transnational crime. It is “a very tough unit,” often used against dissidents, said Zenz. “I totally expect that to be a place where torture is practiced, without knowing it for sure,” he added.

Authorities then sent the mother to a vocational training center, which would have been “still plenty unpleasant and coercive,” said Zenz, but “the most lenient” and eventually leading to release into forced labor. “In the police state, it’s the most desirable place to be because you’ll eventually get out,” he said. (These types of so-called vocational training centers are distinct from real vocational training centers existing in China that do not involve forced stays where people are removed from their families and subject to indoctrination.) 51

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Nejmiddin Qarluq, an ethnic Uyghur and political activist who fled China and was given asylum in Belgium, pictured at his new home in Brussels on Jan. 21, 2021.

Photo: Johanna de Tessieres for The Intercept

Nejmiddin Qarluq, a Uyghur who obtained asylum in Belgium in 2017, said the reason for detention isn’t always clear, since people are often arrested casually and have their property confiscated. When Qarluq was 6 years old, his father was released from prison. He himself was sentenced to three years in prison, then served another five-and-a-half-year term. One of his brothers was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996, he said, and another brother was sentenced to six and a half years and is still in prison. His brother, ex-wife, and sister were locked up in an education camp in 2018.

Because Qarluq was sentenced when he was 14, he said his entire life after he was released was under Chinese Communist Party police supervision, and he wasn’t ever able to feel safe at all. And, he said, there is no freedom or privacy — even privacy of thought — beyond the country’s control. “I am the lucky one who got the chance to flee the country,” he said.

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The database contains evidence that rates of detention, compared to re-education, may be significantly higher than outside observers believed. That would mean Uyghurs and others in the system were enduring significantly harsher conditions while incarcerated.

A police report from Weihuliang Precinct provides information on the number of people held throughout Shuimogou, one of seven districts in Ürümqi, in detention and re-education. At the time, in February 2018, the district had 803 people in re-education and almost as many, around 787, in detention. In Weihuliang specifically, the ratio of people in detention was even higher: 348 detained versus 184 in re- education.

Byler called this “a really shocking proportion, if we take this to be normative across the region.”

“That’s showing us that almost half of the people detained are not even in the re-education camp system yet, they’re just being processed,” Byler added. “Conditions in these spaces are really bad. If what these reports are telling us are true, that these larger numbers are being held in these spaces, it is really concerning.”

Byler described detention as often “very crowded, from what we’ve heard from people, and the conditions in them are really bad, because of the overcrowding. … People sometimes, because of the crowding, aren’t able to sleep at the same time because they can’t all fit on the bed (actually a platform with a wooden top called a ‘kang’) at the same time.” Cameras in the cell watch constantly, and lights remain on all night.

Re-education, in comparison, offers somewhat better conditions, including larger inner courtyards for marching or teaching, and more importantly, the hope of potentially quick release — whenever “transformative” education is complete. But documents from the database indicate this may be, at least in some cases, a false idea. In over 100 cases, they discuss fixed-length sentences for re-education, such as two- year or three-year terms.

(WENXI COMMUNITY)

On November 5, 2018, police officers and household-assigned cadres accompanied [name redacted] (female, Uyghur …), wife of re-educated individual [name redacted] (male, Uyghur …), to Daban City re-education node to have a face-to-face with [her husband]. At the same time, they received the announcement from the re-education center and the procuratorate [prosecutor’s office] that her husband was sentenced to three years in re-education. The vocational training center told [the wife] that her husband could potentially be released early if he has good behavior inside the center. [The wife] told the cadre that she can accept the fact that her husband was to be re-educated for three years, although her mood is very down, but at least she and her husband have some hope. She also hoped that her husband could have good behavior inside the re-education center and hopefully reunite with the family early. Police and cadre comforted [the wife] that she shouldn’t worry too much, take care of herself and take care of the two children, and that the community would help her to solve any problems she would face.

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The sentences appear to be assigned to people in the vocational form of re-education, often after they have been in incarcerated for an extended period of time. They come, documents show, through a program called “Two Inform, One Advocate,” with “inform” apparently referring to information about extremism (as provided in re-education) and “advocate” referring to advocacy of a policy to provide sentences.

Under this system, relatives and cadre members typically meet the person in re-education and a judge issues a “pre-judgment” and “pre-sentence,” usually of two to four years in documents from the database. Sometimes, certain requirements come along with the sentence, such as acquiring Chinese language skills. An October 2018 report stated that “some relatives of three-category people are very happy after they learned about ‘Two Inform, One Advocate’ work; because of this, at least they know how long it would take for their relatives to come out, and they can arrange many business-related things beforehand.”

In one of many examples of this policy in the database, from a November 2018 report, a Uyghur woman traveled to Daban City Vocational Center to receive a verdict with her brother:

Her younger brother [name redacted] Uyghur, male … on September 27, 2017, due to living and traveling with a convicted person, was taken by Badaowan Precinct for re-education. Yesterday at the “Two Inform, One Advocate” activity at the center, the verdict was sheltering criminals, and the sentence was to study for three years at the vocational school. The relatives did not dissent from the verdict and thanked the care and love of the party and the government for her and their help to her [brother].

“We’ve never heard of people getting sentences for re-education,” said Byler. “They tell you that you have to earn points to be released, and so you’re supposed to try really hard to get re-educated, but now they’re saying actually that these people have been given a sentence, their course of re-education will take three years or what have you. So it’s actually like a prison term. That’s one of the tyrannies of the system, is that once you’re in the camps, you’ll never know when you’ll be released.”

Re-education also seems to be closed off as an option for some of the most heavily persecuted activities. The Weihuliang police station notes that homed in on “illegal preachers,” listing 50 in detention, said only two were in re-education.

Much of Zenz’s work has focused specifically on internment camps officially portrayed as “vocational skills education training centers” (zhiye jineng jiaoyu peixun zhongxin). The government positions them as a more benign alternative to prosecution for those who have committed minor offenses, but they are often cover for detention on minor grounds. Despite the emphasis on the word “training,” the facilities can practice coercive indoctrination just as re-education centers do.

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Government documents previously obtained by Zenz had described the re-education as using, in Zenz’s recounting, “assault-style transformation through education” (jiaoyu zhuanhua gongjian) to “ensure that results are achieved” on those who have “a vague understanding, negative attitudes, or even show resistance.”

The impact of widespread detention is not limited to those who are in prison. One document indicates 326 children in one of the seven districts in Ürümqi have one or both parents in detention. The population of the district was around 43,730, according to 2010 government figures, but only around 12 percent of the population in Ürümqi are Uyghur. “If you take the adult population of that [ethnic group] and note that 326 students have one or two parents in detention, that appears to be quite substantial,” said Zenz.

Documents: The documents published with the story are available here.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/29/china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance- police/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

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Q&A: An Inclusive Revolution

ACCESSIBILITY FOR ALL

Valentina Vargas Ricca speaks at a workshop for women with disabilities in Sololá, Guatemala, on September 21, 2019. © Huayra Bello/Claudia Castellán

In Guatemala, women with disabilities face outrageous rates of violence. One local collective, Mujeres Con Capacidad de Soñar a Colores, is pushing for systemic reforms through organizing, research, and art. Open Society Foundations’ Rachele Tardi recently spoke with Open Society’s Feminist Fellow Valentina Vargas Ricca and collective members Floridalma Bocel and Vivian Quisquiná about their work.

What is life like for women with disabilities in Guatemala?

Our lives are very complicated in Guatemala, especially for women with disabilities in rural areas who have little access to education, work, health care, and other services. We are more vulnerable to violence because of the multiple and intersectional oppressions that we face. For example, services that provide support for 56

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victims of gender violence, such as physical accessibility and sign language, are rarely accessible to us. Also, in traditional families, we are seen as of “lesser value” to the family, as we’re not expected to have a job or leave the family and therefore become a “burden.”

Furthermore, while Guatemala did ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, there aren’t any domestic laws that specifically protect us. For example, the national law intended to curtail violence against women does not mention at all violence against women with disabilities, which we know must be addressed in specific ways. Although there is no specific data on violence against women with disabilities in Guatemala, we know from other countries that 80 percent of women with disabilities are victims of violence and that women with disabilities are four times more likely to experience sexual violence than women without disabilities.

Our own research processes have shown us that all of us have experienced violence and know of other women with disabilities who have experienced violence, from being forced to stay home by our families who hide our mobility aids to being sexually assaulted by strangers. We also consider the way in which we are excluded from education and workspaces to be a form of violence, another experience that is shared by all the women in our collective.

Because of these reasons, we cannot access all our full human rights and are excluded from participating in different political, economic, and social spaces, especially if we are Indigenous.

What issues did you explore as an Open Society Feminist Fellow?

When we began our research, we were interested in understanding more about violence against women with disabilities in Guatemala. Because traditional research processes seem to us very distant from our voices and our lives, we sought alternative research and distribution methods, where we can be full participants of all the processes and really understand the results.

For example, our first research project was a weeklong gathering of 14 women with disabilities (most of them young women) using the Theater of the Oppressed methodology. This methodology allows groups to play out unjust situations experienced in order to seek concrete alternatives for change: a tool that gives us the ability to respond to and resolve conflicts. In our gathering, we explored our experiences and the different types of violence that women with disabilities face in their daily lives. We then made a collective decision to make a theater play on two main forms of violence: exclusion from education and access to work. The results and process of our work can be seen in our documentary Vernos Florecer.

We have also had small research projects that focus on specific rights and how they are or are not accessible to women with disabilities, such as digital rights and the right to social and political participation. We share our results through a series of comics and podcasts called Guardianas de la Diversidad (Guardians of Diversity), to raise awareness about the situation.

Through this process, we found that even the few women with disabilities who have access to computers and smartphones were left out of education processes and other basic services during the pandemic because of the lack of accessibility and/or reasonable accommodations in online spaces. We also found many cases of exclusion from decision-making spaces in general and also within organizations for persons with disabilities.

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Most importantly, experiences of exclusion and discrimination are not unique to one woman, but consistent patterns found in the experiences of women with disabilities in general.

Floridalma Bocel shares artwork she made during a theater workshop in Sololá, Guatemala, on January 15, 2020. © Huayra Bello

How did the pandemic affect your work and fellowship?

Initially, the pandemic had a negative impact on women with disabilities and their families, and our collective’s projects. We could not present the Theater of the Oppressed play that we worked so hard to create. There was a strong emotional impact on women who had started to participate in our research projects with us. For the first time, they were leaving their houses and suddenly, because of the pandemic, they had to go back to always being at home. Additionally, life at home became harder, as people lost jobs and sources of income, which also reduced access to health care and other essential services.

We had to rethink our projects and plans, which ultimately strengthened our work. For example, by being forced to work digitally, we provided women in the collective with phones and training on using them, which has a long-term impact on access to communication and reducing isolation. We executed a COVID-19 response project where we were able to reach 26 women in different communities, who are now part of our network and continue to participate with us politically. The pandemic also gave Mujeres Con Capacidad de 58

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Soñar a Colores more visibility, as we were able to participate in different online spaces learning about others, making connections and sharing our work. Finally, we created different types of content to communicate our issues and demand our rights, like a documentary, podcasts, and comics.

What inspires you to pursue your work?

Since 2018, we have seen our collective grow and reach more women with disabilities: we began as a group of five friends and now have over 36 women involved in our projects. Each woman’s experience is unique and in working together we create realities that are more inclusive and where we all feel more comfortable. We have seen the impact of individual empowerment and how, little by little, the women in our collective are strengthening their voice and making our collective knowledge and opinions heard. Some people who were at first nervous about presenting our collective in front of peers are now speaking at international webinars about the work we do.

Members of the women’s collective participate in a theater workshop in Sololá, Guatemala, on January 15, 2020. © Huayra Bello/Claudia Castellán

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In fact, the women we work with are motivated to learn more about their own rights and participate in organizing activities for more women with disabilities. Some of the women who participate in our COVID-19 emergency project of family gardens are actively seeking out connections of their own with other local organizations to support the entire group with, for example, seeds.

One story that stands out the most is that of Flory, who did not leave her house at all before she met the collective. However, by inviting her to join us and providing all her accessibility needs, she participated in the collective and now represents us in national and international spaces, motivating more women with disabilities to get involved in knowing and defending their rights and sharing our experiences and opinions in different spaces. Through her active participation, Flory has been able to gain training and work opportunities, such as creating and managing our blog. She is an upcoming leader in Guatemala’s disability and gender movement with incredible potential to change the realities of countless women with disabilities in our country.

What role do you believe the arts play in supporting women with disabilities?

While the work with each woman is personal and individualized, art is a way through which every woman can show her reality, feelings, and opinions. Women who have participated in our processes dance, sing, and draw.

In addition to being very accessible, art allows us to share the lived experiences of women with disabilities with society. Other people are drawn to our work and through it learn about the barriers and violence we experience, and they often join us in our fight.

How can we learn and work with the disability movement in Guatemala to increase solidarity and power with other movements in Guatemala and worldwide?

The revolution will be accessible! Women with disabilities should not be left out of any social or community decision-making. Our work has shown that, if given the chance, women with disabilities have a lot to share and to say about issues that affect them, and this should be considered in all spaces.

The first step is being open to having a conversation about how we can be included, and we’re happy to participate! We know that inclusive societies will only be created if we all participate in the process.

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/q-and-a-an-inclusive- revolution?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_012921&utm_content=fpNyAAt ps2x5taoCPC5EqIbfOMbTH-fDoWXaqze1AiI

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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Tortura, asesinatos, violaciones: lo que CNDH ha ocultado sobre secuestros a migrantes en 2019 y 2020

Aunque la CNDH conocía del secuestro y extorsión a migrantes ha preferido mantenerlo oculto durante más de un año y no hablar de ello ni en sus informes ni en comunicados.

Andrea Paredes y Jesús Santamaría

PorManu Ureste y Alberto Pradilla

Esta nota la leyeron antes nuestros suscriptores. Suscríbete a Animal Político y lee contenido antes que nadie.

Secuestros masivos y extorsiones, lo mismo a manos de grupos armados que de servidores públicos. Cuerpos policiales que capturan a migrantes y los entregan al crimen organizado. Familias aterrorizadas que miran cómo sus compañeros de tránsito hacia Estados Unidos son torturados hasta sacar el número de teléfono de alguien que pueda pagar por ellos.

Son escenas de lo que personas migrantes han vivido en México cada día de los últimos dos años, en el gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador, y que la actual Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) se ha encargado de silenciar y ocultar.

El asesinato de 19 migrantes ocurrido el pasado 24 de enero en Camargo, Tamaulipas, es solo el último ejemplo de una larga historia de violaciones a los derechos humanos de quienes van en ruta hacia Estados Unidos.

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Pero esta violencia no es un hecho aislado.

Entre septiembre de 2019 y febrero del año pasado, la CNDH elaboró 32 documentos con testimonios que narran torturas, amputaciones, violaciones, y asesinatos de personas migrantes, entre las que habría mujeres, niños, niñas y adolescentes. En las agresiones estuvieron involucrados integrantes del crimen organizado, pero también funcionarios estatales y federales de la policía, según el relato de las víctimas.

Los documentos a los que Animal Político tuvo acceso muestran que los testimonios fueron tomados por la CNDH en seis estaciones migratorias y estancias provisionales de detención, así como en 12 albergues de la sociedad civil en el norte, centro y el sur del país.

Y que las autoridades actuales de la CNDH tienen pleno conocimiento de los casos.

La propia titular de la Comisión, Rosario Piedra Ibarra, recibió por escrito el 20 de noviembre de 2019, tan solo cuatro días después de asumir el cargo, copia de los testimonios de agresiones a migrantes recabados entre el 24 y 26 de septiembre en Tapachula y en Arriaga, en la frontera sur de México. Así lo prueba el oficio OF/TAP/573/2019, elaborado por la Oficina Foránea de la CNDH en Tapachula.

Lee: CNDH: oportunidad perdida

El 4 de febrero de 2020, Elizabeth Lara Rodríguez, la nueva directora general de la Quinta Visitaduría, recibió copia del oficio SE/DOI/0140/20, elaborado por la directora de Organismos Internacionales de la CNDH, Ángeles Corte. En el escrito, que este medio obtuvo por transparencia pública, se expone que Médicos Sin Fronteras informó del secuestro de 11 jóvenes hondureños que fueron agredidos “física y sexualmente” en Tabasco, advirtiendo, además, que “los métodos de tortura” y “la violencia” contra los migrantes en la zona “no son aislados”.

El 13 de mayo de 2020, la Dirección General de la Quinta Visitaduría también recibió por escrito una nota informativa de personal de la propia CNDH, donde se advierte que las agresiones y secuestros de migrantes en el país siguen sucediendo con los mismos niveles de violencia que hace una década, cuando la Comisión publicó en 2009 y 2011 sendos informes especiales sobre agresiones sistemáticas a migrantes en México.

A pesar de lo anterior, la CNDH ha optado por mantener oculta la información por más de un año, y no dar a conocer públicamente estas violaciones. No lo ha hecho en comunicados, ni en recomendaciones, ni en un informe especial. Ni siquiera hizo mención a un solo caso de secuestros de migrantes en el primer informe de actividades de Rosario Piedra al frente de la CNDH, el pasado 20 de noviembre.

La CNDH, incluso, clasificó como información “reservada” los testimonios, alegando que transparentarlos pondría en riesgo la vida de los migrantes, a pesar de que esos testimonios son anónimos; es decir, no incluyen nombres, ni direcciones, ni ningún otro dato personal de la víctima, salvo la nacionalidad, y la fecha y el lugar donde fueron recabados los casos. 62

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Mientras la CNDH reserva la información, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador insiste que, en su gestión, “ya no se violan los derechos humanos de los migrantes”. Aunque los testimonios silenciados por el órgano autónomo lo contradicen.

“En el lugar donde nos encerraron había cadáveres de niños y adultos regados por el piso”, relató uno de los migrantes entrevistados por la CNDH en un albergue de Tijuana, Baja California.

Lee: La CNDH contrató a un capacitador electoral para defender a víctimas de tortura

“Nos hicieron caminar por el monte hasta una cañera, y ahí nos robaron todo. Nos golpearon y nos pidieron los números de nuestros familiares. Mis sobrinos dieron el número de mi hermana, su mamá, porque estaban espantados. Empezaron a golpear fuerte a mis sobrinos para que su mamá escuchara los gritos mientras le pedían el rescate. Mi hermana terminó pagando tres mil dólares por nosotros”, dijo otro migrante hondureño en un albergue en Tenosique, Tabasco.

“Me pegaban con las manos en la nuca y en las piernas con un garrote repetidamente para sacarme información. Me amarraron toda la noche y marcaban de mi teléfono a mis contactos para torturarlos y exigirles dinero para no matarme”, relató un guatemalteco en un albergue en Torreón, Coahuila.

Desde el pasado 7 de enero, Animal Político ha buscado hasta en cuatro ocasiones a la CNDH para conocer su postura.

Si bien no concedió entrevista, la CNDH envió el 8 de enero un resumen de 44 comunicados de prensa con diversas recomendaciones emitidas en defensa de migrantes. No obstante, ninguna de esas recomendaciones está relacionada con los casos de secuestros masivos.

Listado de comunicados de prensa CNDH

ARCHIVO PDF (93 KB)

Este mismo lunes 1 de febrero, ante la insistencia de este medio en obtener una entrevista, la CNDH envió otro escrito en el que, por medio de cuatro puntos que puedes leer íntegros aquí, defiende su labor de protección a migrantes, señalando que realiza visitas periódicas tanto a estaciones migratorias, como a albergues de la sociedad civil.

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Además, apuntó que en 2020 emitió 10 recomendaciones al estado mexicano por violaciones de derechos humanos a migrantes. Y aseguró que actualmente se encuentra realizando un “análisis” para “evaluar las capacidades institucionales del Estado mexicano para cumplir con los derechos” de los migrantes, “a fin de exhortar a que se fortalezcan las instituciones que deben atender a las personas (migrantes)”, tanto a las que son víctimas de secuestro, como a quienes viajan en caravanas, solicitantes de asilo, etcétera.

Sin embargo, la CNDH tampoco explicó en este último escrito por qué no ha dado a conocer los testimonios de secuestros masivos, de los que, a continuación, se revela una muestra.

Respuesta CNDH a Animal Político

ARCHIVO PDF (150 KB)

Este es el México al que decenas de miles de migrantes se enfrentan a diario, la situación que la CNDH ha mantenido oculta.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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“Ya no recuerdo cuántas veces ni cuántos me violaron”

País de origen: Honduras

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 1 octubre 2019, Santa Catarina, Nuevo León

“Tuve que huir de mi país con seis meses de embarazo porque el marero con el que vivía ya tenía vendido a mi hijo cuando naciera.

Llegando al municipio de Vanegas, cerca de San Luis Potosí, unos policías municipales subieron al camión donde viajaba y me quitaron el dinero. Después me entregaron a otras personas con uniforme oscuro con un mapa de México en la parte alta de la manga. Ellos me llevaron a otro lugar donde había otras ocho mujeres. Supe que era un secuestro porque nos obligaban a hablarles a nuestros familiares y a pedir dinero por nuestras vidas.

Practicaban el snuff: violaban a una entre todos mientras la acuchillaban. Yo recuerdo ver pedazos de cuerpos y a ellos masturbándose. Nos pegaban y violaban en repetidas ocasiones. Ya no recuerdo cuántas veces ni cuántos me violaron porque casi siempre me desmayaba. Les imploraba para que pararan, pero no servía de nada. Al contrario, me hacían más daño. Me decían que me matarían si gritaba.

Enfrente de mí mataron a algunas mujeres. Nos trataban como si fuéramos sus juguetes eróticos. Por mí pagaron 850 dólares.

Por las armas y las claves que utilizaban para hablar, casi puedo asegurar que eran policías los que me secuestraron. Salí de ahí totalmente perdida, humillada, golpeada, hinchada y desmoralizada. Tuve que acogerme a un programa de protección de víctimas. He tardado mucho en poder recuperar mi vida. 65

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Me tocó recorrer mucho y vivir muy malas experiencias en México. Mi hija tuvo que nacer en México, y nació bien gracias a los cuidados que me dieron en el albergue”.

“Éramos 75 en cada casa de seguridad. Pedían 5 mil 500 dólares por cada uno”

País de origen: Guatemala

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 25 septiembre 2019, Huixtla, Chiapas

“Esto fue el 15 de febrero de 2019, cuando entré por la Mesilla con 50 personas y un pollero. Llegamos a Villahermosa (Tabasco) y ahí nos reunimos con más gente. Éramos en total alrededor de 425 personas. A todos nos metieron en tráileres.

Recuerdo que salimos un martes por la noche. Como llevaba mi celular, el jueves me di cuenta por el GPS de que estábamos en Altamira, Tamaulipas. Ahí de repente el tráiler se paró. Abrieron las puertas y aparecieron muchos hombres armados. Nos bajaron y nos metieron a otro camión sin techo, de esos donde llevan ganado. En el mío íbamos como 70 hombres. Todos hacinados.

Tardamos alrededor de seis horas en llegar a Heroica Matamoros (Tamaulipas). Ahí, nos quitaron los teléfonos y el dinero que cargábamos, y nos metieron en diferentes casas pequeñas. Éramos como 75 por casa. Todas bien encerradas. Luego nos dijeron que nos iban a cruzar (a Estados Unidos), pero querían antes 5 mil 500 dólares por cada uno. Creo que eran los del Cártel del Golfo. Gente muy violenta, bien armada, y con chalecos antibalas, gorros, y pasamontañas.

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Fue un secuestro muy grande, de ahí que las autoridades se dieron cuenta. Yo pienso que les pusieron el dedo y el domingo en la noche llegaron los de la Marina a rescatarnos. Pero los del cártel tienen gente en cada esquina que les informa, y por eso siempre encuentran la manera de escaparse. Nunca los agarran.

(Las autoridades) nos llevaron a un albergue. Estuvimos tres días en el refugio y luego nos llevaron a la estación migratoria Siglo XXI (de Tapachula, Chiapas). Allí, al ingresar, el personal te dice: ‘Bienvenido al infierno’.

Me devolvieron a mi país el 1 de marzo de 2019. Pero volví a intentar cruzar en septiembre de ese mismo año. Le pagué 25 mil quetzales a un pollero por dejarme en la frontera y me volvieron a agarrar. Ahora estoy detenido en Huixtla (Chiapas) y me van a deportar otra vez.

México cuesta cruzarlo. Dejas mucho dinero aquí y ni así logras llegar a tu destino”.

“Me secuestró la policía”

País de origen: Honduras

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 24 septiembre 2019, Tapachula, Chiapas-

“En junio de 2019, entré con cuatro amigos por La Mesilla (frontera sur entre Guatemala y México). Un día íbamos caminando cerca de un retén por San Cristóbal (Chiapas) y nos detuvieron unos agentes uniformados y armados. De repente, levantaron el retén, nos subieron a una patrulla, y nos llevaron a una estación de policía muy cerca del retén. Estacionaron la patrulla y nos dejaron ahí adentro. 67

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Luego, uno de los agentes llegó y nos dijo: “Si quieren salir libres tienen que pagar 60 mil pesos o los entregamos a Migración”.

Nos exigieron números de contacto y nos obligaron a hablarle a nuestras familias para pedirles que les hicieran los depósitos a cuentas de otras personas. Nos retuvieron más de un día y medio adentro de la patrulla. Sin comer, sin beber, y con amenazas y maltratos. Entre ellos se turnaron para cuidarnos hasta que nuestras familias negociaron con ellos, les depositaron el dinero, y nos dejaron ir.

No sé qué tipo de agentes eran. Pero yo creo que eran de la policía estatal por lo cerca que estaba su estación del retén que improvisaron.

En mi país también corro peligro. Lo único que busco es poder trabajar”.

“Me cortaron el dedo meñique”

País de origen: Nicaragua

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 26 septiembre 2019, Tapachula, Chiapas.

“Salí de mi país, Nicaragua, porque quería llegar a Estados Unidos para buscar el famoso sueño americano.

En noviembre del 2018 entré a México por el río Suchiate (Chiapas). Viajé a veces en tren, otras en bus, y también caminé mucho. Así logré llegar hasta San Luis Potosí.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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En ese lugar fui secuestrado por un grupo de cuatro personas armadas. Me llevaron a una casa donde había otros tres hombres, dos mujeres, y un niño. A todos nos preguntaron si teníamos familiares para pedir rescate. Como les dije que no, me mandaron a otro cuarto con otros que estaban igual que yo.

Me torturaron para que hablara y les diera el número de un familiar. Pero no lo hice porque mi única familia es mi esposa y mis dos hijos que están en Nicaragua. Y ellos no tienen dinero. Por eso me voy a los Estados Unidos. Así que, como no hablé, me cortaron el dedo meñique de la mano derecha.

Después de cinco días de estar encerrado, una noche, mientras los cuidadores estaban distraídos golpeando a los nuevos, logré escaparme con otros tres migrantes. Corrimos hasta que amaneció y llegamos a una ranchería donde nos regalaron agua y comida.

Decidimos no denunciar porque temíamos por nuestras vidas, así que avanzamos rumbo a Tamaulipas, hasta que en el trayecto nos agarró migración. A mí me regresó a mi país. Sin embargo, aquí ando de nuevo. Haciendo la lucha otra vez”.

“Ellos nos gritaban: “cállate, o te matamos a ti y a tu hijo”

País de origen: Honduras

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 3 octubre 2019, Tijuana, Baja California.

“Mi madre salió de Honduras en 2017, para buscar un mejor futuro en Estados Unidos. Al día de hoy no sabemos qué fue de ella. No sabemos si está desaparecida, muerta o secuestrada en algún lugar de México.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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Allá en mi país no hay trabajo y a uno ya no le alcanza para sobrevivir. La violencia se ha vuelto insoportable, por lo que decidí irme el 13 de mayo de 2019, con la ilusión de volver a ver a mi madre y darle una mejor vida a mi hijo.

Salí con seis mujeres, cada una traíamos a un hijo. Entramos por Frontera, Tabasco. El pollero nos subía a los buses como si nada. Él pagaba los boletos y se sentaba en el asiento delantero; teníamos que estar atentas para que no se escapara.

El 1 de junio veníamos avanzando, yo estaba medio dormida, cuando de repente sentí que el bus paró abruptamente. Abrí los ojos y vi como subieron unos hombres cargando armas muy grandes en las manos y otras en las piernas, con chalecos antibalas y encapuchados. Nos hablaban muy fuerte y ponían sus armas en nuestra cabeza.

Cuando nos bajaron no nos dieron tiempo de nada. Antes de que me cubriera la cabeza, pude ver que había muchas camionetas y miré que había policías. Lo sé por el traje color negro. Sólo nos bajaron a las seis mujeres con nuestros hijos.

Nos llevaron en tres camionetas con la cabeza agachada y siempre cubierta. Mi hijo venía conmigo temblando y llorando. Yo le decía: “vamos a salir de esto”. Pero ellos nos gritaban: “cállate, o te matamos a ti y a tu hijo”. Creo que nos llevaron a una casa muy lejos, porque nos agarran en la mañana y llegamos ya de noche. Yo digo que ocurrió en Veracruz, porque vi un rótulo en el camino antes de que nos secuestraran. Lo más duro fue cuando me quitaron el gorro. Pude ver que había mucha gente, en ese momento pensé que podía encontrar a mi mamá.

Me quitaron todas mis pertenencias. Ahí vi cómo torturaban a varones dándoles “chavelazos” con una raqueta de fierro, muy pesada; les pegaban fuertísimo mientras les decían: “habla con tu familia, queremos respuesta hoy mismo”. Nunca había visto ni oído eso.

Nos pedían mucho dinero. No podíamos llorar porque el jefe se molestaba. En la casa que yo estaba había como 45 personas torturadas, atada de pies a cabeza, se escuchaban balazos a cada momento, la gente estaba tirada en el suelo. En una ocasión pude escuchar a un hombre que mientras golpeaba decía: “mira, quiero un rancho o 50 mil dólares”.

La casa en la que estaba tenía cuatro cuartos. Un día pude ver por un ventanal que alrededor había casas bonitas, era como una colonia. Los torturados gritaban: “regálenme agua, me estoy asfixiando”.

A las mujeres nos ponían a cocinar y a fregar. En las noches, los que nos cuidaban se juntaban para drogarse, se meten una bolsita con polvo blanco en la nariz. Escogían a las mujeres que les gustaban para meterlas en un cuarto donde entraban unos y salían otros para abusar de ellas repetidamente.

Por las noches siempre había puras “humasonas”, ¡mucho humo! Sólo una vez me dieron oportunidad de hablar con mi hermana mientras me apuntaban un arma sobre mi cabeza, diciéndome: “no vas a llorar, ni a decir nada, sólo le vas a decir que necesitas 20 mil dólares. También dile que se porte bien porque nosotros controlamos México y nos enteramos de todo, hasta en Honduras sabemos todo”. De nada sirvió porque ellos le hablaban y le decían: “está rica tu hermana, la hago mujer cada que yo quiero y el niño se va a morir”.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

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Le hablaban cada dos días. Logró juntar 100 mil lempiras (algo más de 80 mil pesos) y le dijeron que viera la forma de mandar el resto. Ellos me decían: “nunca te vas a ir de aquí, te vas a quedar a trabajar con nosotros”.

Yo estaba desesperada hasta que supe que Dios existía por la respuesta que me dio. Desde que llegué me di cuenta cómo uno de los sicarios no me dejaba de mirar. Un día se me acercó y me dijo: “tú estás galana, quédate conmigo. Yo te arreglo papeles, no te va a faltar nada”. Noté que era hondureño. Le dije: “Soy mujer de pueblo y estoy casada”. Pasaron más días y se me volvió a acercar diciendo: “me caes bien, no te pongas triste. Vas a salir de aquí”. Le contesté: “¿cómo? Mira alrededor cuántos hay aquí”. Me dijo: “así como te agarraron, a mí me secuestraron hace 10 años. No quiero estar aquí, pero ya saben todo sobre mi familia en Honduras. Estoy obligado con ellos, no me pagan mal y ese dinero se los puedo enviar. Si yo me logro escapar tendría que buscar la forma de que mi familia huyera o los matarían. Tantos secuestrados han pasado por aquí que quizás hasta en Estados Unidos me encontrarían”.

Ya llevaba ocho días en esa casa. A mí no me hicieron nada, pero sólo nos daban de comer dos veces al día. Muchas veces se les olvidaba. De repente, una mañana me llegó el hondureño y me dijo: “te voy a ayudar a escapar, me la estoy rifando porque me pueden matar. Vas al baño y te subes a la camioneta”.

Agarré a mi hijo y me fui, nos hizo agacharnos y taparnos la cara. Llevaba la pistola cerca del timón y no nos dejaba quitar el gorro. Dijo: “¡Con el cartel de los Zetas no se juega!” Cuando llegamos a una calle pavimentada dijo: “bájate rápido, me dio 500 pesos y me dijo agarra el primer bus que pase”. Eso hice y cuando me bajé en una terminal vi que decía Cárdenas.

Ya era mitad de julio, una señora me dejó hablar y nos dio posada. De ahí me entregué en Reynosa y me mandaron a San Diego. Me deportaron a Tijuana el 26 de julio. Estando aquí decidí acudir a la fiscalía para levantar una denuncia sobre mi secuestro, se me negó en la FGR, diciéndome que fuera a la Procuraduría General del Estado. Fui y señalaron que no eran competentes, ya que los hechos habían ocurrido en otro estado, por lo que me recomendaron volver a ese estado para poder presentar mi denuncia.

Por obvias razones me es imposible hacerlo, y cada día que pasa tengo más miedo y me siento totalmente vulnerable. Es increíble ver cómo el crimen son todos, que pasa todo y no pasa nada. A nadie pareciera importarle el dolor humano. Mi hijo está muy lastimado. Ya no supe nada de las mujeres con las que salí. Hay muchas víctimas migrantes en el camino. En el año 2010, muchos de los 72 muertos eran de mi municipio. Aquí en el albergue han secuestrado muchos, pero nadie quiere hablar”.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

“La policía municipal nos entregó al CJNG”

País de origen: Honduras

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 27 de febrero, CDMX.

Iba en un camión de pasajeros de Acayucan, Veracruz. Todos los que íbamos ahí éramos migrantes, solo que unos parece que ya habían pagado al cártel para pasar y otros, como nosotros, pues no.

Ahí conocí a otros compañeros que también fueron secuestrados conmigo, ellos son de Guatemala. Iban también en ese camión.

Saliendo de Acayucan nos topamos con un retén de policías municipales. Detuvieron el camión y, fue raro, porque nos buscaron justo a los que veníamos viajando sin pollero. Como que a todos los demás ya los tenían bien marcados.

Nos bajaron del camión, a los dos de Guatemala, a mí, y a otros dos que no supe de dónde eran. No subieron a una patrulla de ellos, de la Policía Municipal, y nos dijeron que nos llevarían a Migración, pero todo eso fue mentira porque nos llevaron directo a una casa de seguridad y nos entregaron con gente del cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG).

Nos recibieron como 12 personas armadas hasta los dientes, andaban 45 mm, 9 mm, M16 y pistolas manuales. Parecían mexicanos. No se cubrían la cara ni nada, se ve que estaban bien de acuerdo con toda la policía de

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

ahí. Muchos de ellos traían gorras rojas, pero también andaban unos con gorras negras o azules que tenían bordadas las letras CJNG.

Nos amenazaron de muerte y nos quitaron nuestros teléfonos celulares. Ya que tuvieron nuestras claves para desbloquearlos, de ahí sacaron los contactos de nuestros familiares para empezar a extorsionarlos. De inicio a mi familia le sacaron mil 500 (dólares) para que no me hicieran daño, y después otros 2 mil para soltarme.

De los cinco que entramos al mismo tiempo, los familiares de tres pagaron el rescate, pero de los otros dos no sabemos qué habrá pasado.

Esto sucedió el 8 de febrero, ahí nos tuvieron hasta el 10 de febrero que nos soltaron por la tarde, después de hacer el segundo cobro.

Cuando llegamos había otros dos secuestrados en ese lugar, y cuando nos estaban sacando ya venían con otro grupo de 10 personas, todos migrantes. Incluso, se veía a una mujer con su hijo como de seis años, y también llevaban a un chamaco que viajaba solo. Se veía como de unos 14 o 15 años.

Mientras nos alistaban para sacarnos, vimos cómo empezaban a torturar a los que acababan de llegar porque no querían dar los teléfonos de sus familiares. Les quitaban la ropa y empezaban a “tablearlos” (pegarles con unas tablas), ahí frente a todos los que estábamos. También agarraban un plástico largo y les pegaban en la espalda, como si fuera una especie de látigo. Les estaban preguntando si traían pollero en el momento en el que nos estaban subiendo al coche.

El coche era un Volkswagen Jetta blanco. Ahí iba el chofer y el copiloto, los dos bien armados. Uno manejaba y el otro nos llevaba agachados y nos apuntaba con un arma en la nuca, nos decía que si mirábamos tantito nos mataba. Nos dejaron cerca de la estación de autobuses, donde los estaba esperando otro que se suponía también que era de ellos.

Después nos enteramos de que habían cobrado otros dos mil (dólares) a nuestras familias, supuestamente para que el pollero nos llevara a Estados Unidos. Pero eso fue otro engaño, sólo nos subieron a otro camión rumbo a Saltillo.

Y ahí es donde nos agarraron, en un retén de migración. Pero al pollero lo soltaron porque decían que tenía papeles mexicanos.

Al final le quitaron a mi familia 5 mil 500 dólares. Ya me quiero regresar a mi casa, no quiero saber nada de este país.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

“Me metieron en una bodega donde tenían secuestradas a otras 100 personas”

País de origen: Cuba

Fecha y lugar donde la CNDH tomó el testimonio: 6 de septiembre, CDMX.

“Salí de Cuba el 8 de junio de este año (2020), en avión, con destino a Panamá. De ahí empecé a moverme en autobús. Crucé todo Centroamérica hasta llegar a la frontera entre Guatemala y México. Durante este tramo no tuve problemas reales, solamente un par de retenes militares en Honduras donde me quitaron 30 y $40, respectivamente.

En Chiapas tomé un camión directo a Puebla, donde me estarían esperando para llevarme hasta la frontera con Estados Unidos. Una hermana mía iba pagando lo del viaje a las personas que me llevaban.

Fue como a la una de la mañana que el camión se detuvo, ya estábamos en el estado de Puebla, pero aún no llegamos a la ciudad. En alguna parte de la autopista, un grupo de 10 o 12 personas vestidas como policías detuvo el camión de pasajeros. Ahí me quitaron 1 mil 500 dólares, que es todo lo que traía.

Todo ese camión estaba lleno de migrantes, algunos cubanos, pero la gran mayoría centroamericanos. Después de mí, agarraron a tres guatemaltecos que no quisieron dar dinero e intentaron escaparse, pero ahí mismo los mataron. Les pegaron un tiro en la cabeza, ahí, enfrente de mí. Mientras hacían los cuerpos a un lado, otro cubano y yo logramos echarnos a correr en el monte y nos escapamos.

Agarramos rumbos distintos, pero después de dos días metidos ahí entre los árboles nos encontramos. Fue como si fuera un milagro. Antes de reencontrarme con el otro cubano, estuve durmiendo entre los árboles, sin probar una gota de agua ni comer absolutamente nada. 74

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Mira, yo me pongo nervioso hablando de esto, ya me están comenzando a temblar las manos.

Te voy a contar algo, sólo lo sabe mi esposa que está en Cuba porque yo le conté, y la psicóloga que me estaba atendiendo en este lugar. Yo tuve un ataque de pánico después de que logré escapar, no recuerdo muchas cosas, sólo que cuando volví a la realidad, yo me había cagado y orinado en los pantalones. Aún ya a salvo en este lugar, continúo con problemas de incontinencia provocados por el miedo, por el terror de las cosas que yo presencié.

Cuando me encontré con el otro cubano en el monte, estábamos cerca de un lugar que creo que se llama charco Buenaventura. El hermano del otro cubano ya le había mandado un coyote para que fuera por él y lo llevara con la gente que lo movería a Estados Unidos. Pero no me dejaron solo. Este chico me dio hasta dinero para que me las arreglara en el camino y su coyote nos llevó juntos hasta un lugar en Pachuca, Hidalgo. Ahí nos metieron en una especie de bodega donde había mucha gente, tenían más de 100 personas secuestradas compartiendo el espacio con nosotros. Cerca había un panteón, me parece, pero no estoy seguro porque habían tapado con lonas y bolsas las ventanas de la bodega. El espacio tenía un solo baño para todos los que estábamos ahí y las puertas siempre estaban cerradas con cadenas y candados. Además, había gente armada cuidándonos todo el tiempo.

Cómo me daba dolor ver a los niños. Había muchos, casi todos enfermos. A mi amigo cubano se lo llevaron y hasta donde sé, él sí logró llegar hasta Estados Unidos. Yo todavía estuve ahí como ocho días más. Recuerdo que sólo nos daban un tiempo de comida, generalmente de una especie de sopa con frijoles y agua sola. Si querías algo de comer te lo tenías que pagar.

Era una situación extraña porque había muchos que parecía que estaban secuestrados, y muchos otros que sólo estaban ahí unos días y después los movían, los llevaban para el norte.

En esa bodega me dejaron hablar con mi familia en Cuba. Ahí tengo a mi esposa y a mi hija de 12 años. Le conté lo que me había pasado en el camión.

Mi esposa habló con un pastor importante. Y él, a su vez, habló con alguien aquí en México. No entiendo bien qué pasó, ni cómo sucedió, pero un día el religioso de México, cuyo nombre no voy a mencionar porque no lo quiero poner en riesgo, pactó mi entrega en el centro de Ciudad de México. No sé cuánto le cobraron por el rescate.

Cuando me entregaron en la plaza del centro de la ciudad, el religioso me trajo aquí, a casa Mambrú, donde me han tratado con amor, paciencia, y con un profesionalismo increíble.

Los hombres armados me devolvieron con la condición de que mi entrega se hiciera en la Ciudad de México, no en Pachuca, como había propuesto inicialmente el hombre religioso. Yo no sé qué habrá pasado con los demás, no he vuelto a verlos.

Aquí en la ciudad todo ha estado más tranquilo, hasta ahora. Desde entonces, sólo tuve un problema con policías de la ciudad de México, que me agarraron aquí en la esquina de fuera del albergue y me quitaron todo el dinero que me habían mandado mis familiares. Me vieron en la calle, me preguntaron de dónde era, y

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

cuando notaron que era extranjero, de inmediato me subieron a la patrulla y me empezaron a buscar el dinero hasta que me quitaron todo.

Ahora le he cogido más miedo a los policías que a los propios secuestradores”.

#YoSoyAnimal

https://www.animalpolitico.com/2021/02/migrantes-cndh-informe-oculto-secuestros-tortura-asesinato- violaciones/

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

The Black Radical You’ve Never Heard Of by Adam Serwer and Jasmine Walls

POSTED ON FEBRUARY 22, 2019

T. Thomas Fortune changed Black History, and seems to have been forgotten.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

This comic is a co-production with The Atlantic. https://thenib.com/the-black-radical-you-ve-never-head-of/ 98

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Aprueban diputados ley de consulta a los pueblos indígenas

Enrique Méndez y Georgina Saldierna

Periódico La Jornada Miércoles 21 de abril de 2021, p. 5

La Cámara de Diputados aprobó ayer en lo general la Ley de Consulta a los Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas y Afromexicanas con 466 votos favor, cero en contra y tres abstenciones, la cual tiene el objetivo de que estos sectores de la población puedan opinar sobre proyectos administrativos y legislativos que pudieran afectarlos.

También avaló las adiciones presentadas de última hora por el partido Morena por 309 a favor, 146 en contra y 3 abstenciones. De ellas resalta que no habrá incremento al presupuesto para este tema en el presente ejercicio fiscal y que la suspensión de proyectos y legislaciones sólo será posible si hay una mayoría absoluta a favor de ello.

La diputada Martha Tagle, de Movimiento Ciudadano, acusó a Morena de echar a perder el trabajo de un año a través de las reservas presentadas y metiendo por la puerta de atrás temas que van en contra del espíritu de la ley.

Sin presupuesto

También sostuvo que el partido mayoritario cae en simulación y comete una traición al aprobar una iniciativa sin presupuesto para las consultas.

Las morenistas Irma Juan Carlos y Araceli Ocampo rechazaron que en su partido haya simulaciones y aseguraron que no se niega presupuesto. El propósito de su reserva es que se vayan asignando recursos de manera gradual, pero sin afectar la economía nacional y tomando en cuenta la emergencia sanitaria, así como que las entidades y dependencias también tienen la obligación de otorgar dineros.

Durante la aprobación en lo general, diputados de todos los partidos resaltaron que esta legislación es resultado del consenso con las comunidades y tiene la virtud de cumplir con los estándares internacionales en la materia.

Calificaron de histórico el aval dado al proyecto, si bien, recordaron que se legisló en acatamiento a una sentencia de la Suprema Corte.

Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

El documento plantea que la consulta deberá efectuarse a través de mecanismos y procedimientos apropiados a las culturas, lenguas y formas de organización de las comunidades indígenas y afromexicanas. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2021/04/21/politica/005n4pol

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Gaceta Universitaria de Derechos Humanos No. 451 mayo 2021