LVC Statement | From Melilla to San Antonio, migrants’ lives matter!
DECLARATION OF LA VIA CAMPESINA, FOR THE LIVES OF MIGRANTS AND THEIR FAMILIES
Bagnolet, 30 June: Once again, the borders are filled with the bodies of human beings desperately seeking to escape misery, dispossession, institutional repression, and the violence of the criminal gangs that traffic with their lives, protected by the official impunity and with the connivance of the states of the North. Just on Friday, June 24, 37 migrants lost their lives at the Melilla border with Spain at the hands of border agents and three days later, on Monday, June 27, 53 migrants were found dead locked in a cargo truck in San Antonio, Texas.
These most recent deaths, of dispossessed people who can no longer live on their land and desperately seek their survival, are added to the long list of thousands of deaths at the borders since the states of the North decided to confront migration with a military and repressive strategy and which has deepened since the approval of the so-called Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in December 2018 and from which the principle of human rights was bypassed.
The images of what happened in Melilla showed the world the cruelty with which the Moroccan and Spanish border forces repressed the impotent sub-Saharans. In San Antonio, Texas, the dead were 39 men and 12 women, mainly Mexicans, as well as Guatemalans, Hondurans and other nationalities… and children.
In the face of these painful tragedies, La Via Campesina International cannot remain silent. We join in the worldwide indignation. We join the public denunciations of human rights organizations, such as the Moroccan Association of Human Rights. We join the demand of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights for an investigation into the violation of human rights by the States under the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers.
We also join our voices in calling for an end to the complicity of governments such as Morocco and Mexico, and others, who do the “dirty work” of implementing policies and actions against migrants imposed by the North such as the United States and the European Union.
We urgently call on our organizations of La Via Campesina and our allies to mobilize to carry out concrete actions for the protection and in defense of the lives of migrants.
Finally, we call on society as a whole to come out of global indifference and to demand, through action, the protection of migrants’ lives.
THE LIVES OF MIGRANTS MATTER! NO MORE DEATHS AT THE BORDER!
LET’S BUILD AN URGENT GLOBAL UNITY OF ACTION AND SOLIDARITY FOR THE PROTECTION OF MIGRANTS EVERYWHERE!