In perhaps the most crystallized example of uninformed activism, Marshawn Lynch actually protested police brutality by standing for the Mexican national anthem and sitting for The Star Spangled Banner.
Apparently, Mr. Lynch hasn’t heard much about Mexican police.
His dissonant display was the moral equivalent of an everyday liberal protesting fascism while wearing a Che Guevara shirt. Newsflash: Guevara was a totalitarian, mass murderer. Breaking: Lynch is about as privileged as they get in America. Reminder: Mexico is the Afghanistan of North America.
I think, like the liberal activists sporting the Che shirt, Lynch and pretty much everyone on the political left need a reminder just what they stand for when they stand for Mexico.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s party, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is best known for setting up the “Federal Security Directorate,” a modern day Gestapo, meant to internally suppress militant revolutionaries. Instead, they terrorized Mexican citizens. Later iterations of the group, called “white guards,” were found to have detained, tortured, and executed hundreds of “students, laborers, peasant farmers or teachers,” The New York Times reports.
One victim recalled how “white guards” strung up her, her husband, and even her 1-year-old child and tortured them with electrical shocks. That’s right, in at least one case, the current Mexican president’s party oversaw the extrajudicial torture of a Mexican baby.
Mexicans still refer to the victims of this group as “los desaparecidos,” or “the disappeared.” At the turn of the century, members of Nieto’s party viciously opposed the formation of a “truth commission” to investigate the disappearances. Families of the victims insisted the opposition was a result of party members having a direct hand in the disappearances.
Since then, it seems, not much of America’s wokeness has rubbed off on Mexico.
Criminal cartels took over in 2006 and now pretty much run swaths of the country, to include the government. As a result, Mexico is now the second deadliest country in the world, ahead of, ironically, Afghanistan.
If these cartels aren’t killing each other, they’re killing anyone who opposes them. They’re killing journalists. They’re kidnapping students and slaughtering them. And when they can’t get close enough, they just have police do the dirty work.
The case of one of the most recent “disappeared” should give even the wokest American pause about protesting police brutality by standing for Mexico.
Nepomuceno Moreno’s death sentence was his allegation that police kidnapped his son, Jorge Mario, in 2010. In a tense phone call at the time, Jorge allegedly described to his father how Mexican police were pursuing him. It was the last Moreno had heard from his son.
Moreno, a local seafood vendor by trade, joined the thousands of voices in Mexico protesting the involvement of police in disappearances and cartel operations. He became an activist with the “Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity,” a group dedicated to cleaning up corruption in government.
Moreno alleged that since he started voicing his dissent, the police who disappeared his son visited him several times to intimidate him into keeping quiet.
Roughly a year into his activism, Moreno was shot and killed while getting out of his car. Activists alleged it was the police. The police said Moreno was involved in cartel operations. Which seems more likely?
The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning report pointed out that American police killed approximately 1,000 citizens in 2016, similarly in 2015. Regardless of the outcome — a big reason for the NFL police protest being lack of “justice” — in America, every shooting is investigated under due process.
In Mexico, there have been tens of thousands of deaths as a result of corrupt policing and cartel operations since 2006. The Associated Press’s E. Eduardo Castillo and Javier Quintero summed up the government’s response to such statistics in one killer kicker, “Charges are never filed in most of the deaths.”
In America, you can be a millionaire protesting police brutality, and the worst you’ll get is a headline or two on a conservative news site. In Mexico, you’re a regular guy protesting police brutality, and you get “disappeared.”
The truth is the Mexican police state is shockingly corrupt and, Mr. Lynch, that’s something no one should stand for.
