Mexico: Doubts arise over alleged indigenous suicides
On Monday night, Ramon Gardea defended claims that 50 indigenous people facing starvation had committed suicide in Mexico. But accounts by government officials and community workers in the region cast doubt on his claims. (screen capture: Youtube)
By MANUEL RUEDA
Channel: Latin American Affairs
After further probing into reports that 50 Indigenous people in Northern Mexico committed suicide to avoid starvation, Univision News has come across information that casts a cloud of doubt over these claims.
To begin with, Ramon Gardea, the union leader who initially announced indigenous suicides in the region and talked about people jumping off cliffs, has now denied any acts of mass suicide. Gardea denied the original report in a second interview aired on Monday night on Chihuahua’s channel 28, claiming he was misquoted.
However, Gardea still claims that at least 50 people committed suicide in different incidents over the year 2011 and said on Monday that he obtained this information from anecdotal evidence and from an article published in December 2011 by the Chihuahua newspaper El Heraldo, which reports that according to the Chihuahua State Attorney’s office, 50 Raramuri farmers killed themselves in 2011 due to several reasons, which include famine, but also alcohol-addiction and family problems.
After obtaining a copy of this article, Univision News spoke with Carlos Gonzalez, the spokesman for the Chihuahua State Attorney’s office, who vehemently denied these figures. According to Gonzalez, the figures were taken out of context by El Heraldo and wrongly reported by members of his office due to an “internal problem.”
Gonzalez said that there were not 50, but 26 suicides in the Sierra Tarahumara in 2011, and that these figures apply to the general population of the region and not just to the Raramuri community.
He called Gardea’s accusations a “vile lie,” adding that, according to official statistics, only 2 of the 26 suicides in 2011 were amongst the Raramuri, and claiming that these two suicides were related to family problems and not to famine.
With a population of some 600,000 people,the 23 municipalities of the Sierra Tarahumara would still have a high suicide rate compared to the rest of Mexico if these figures are correct. In Mexico, there are approximately 4 suicides for every 100,000 people.
Priests who work in the area, who have been interviewed by local radio stations sided with Gonzalez’s account.
“I have personally not seen any suicides,” Father Javier Avila said on Mexico’s MVS Noticias. Avila runs the Catholic Social Ministry in the town of Creel, and helps to run programs for indigenous communities in the area.
However, Jesus Antonio Quinones a deputy mayor interviewed by Univision News had contradictory things to say about the issue of indigenous suicides.
While he denied in a phone interview with Univision News that there were any suicides in his municipality of Carichi, Mexico’s Excelsior newspaper quoted him in a December 5 article on the drought in Northern Mexico saying that “some (indigenous people) get despaired, many are taking their lives.”
Sergio Valles, the TV journalist who initially aired Gardea’s claims of Raramuri suicides, told Univision News that it is difficult for the government to keep stats on how the Raramuri die, or whether they die from illness, suicide, or murder.
“There are few official reports on how the Tarahumara people die,” Valles said. “They die far from anywhere where there is an official and are buried before accounts can be taken.”
However he said that he decided to air Gardea’s original claims on Saturday, because he had also heard of such reports, and because Gardea had backed up his particular claims with the El Heraldo article, which goes as far as to provide details on which were the most suicide heavy months in the year among the Raramuri community.
“My story would’ve gone unnoticed if someone had not tweeted it” Valles said, when asked why his channel’s interview with Gardea drew so much attention around the country, while El Heraldo’s December report had remained largely unkown.
“This (story) was driven by social media.” he said.
All of the sources Univision News spoke to confirmed that there is a food emergency in Raramuri territory, with government agencies delivering emergency food rations, that can last for up to a month, but that are not expected to outlast the current drought in Northern Mexico.
