June 23, 2009

Mexicans Cry for Justice in Day Care Fire

By Elisabeth Malkin

MEXICO CITY — As smoke and fire filled the ABC day care center in northern Mexico, a neighbor moved quickly. Ramming his pickup truck into the concrete again and again, he gouged three holes in the front wall to clear an escape route for the children trapped inside.

Next to those ragged holes is a wide metal gate — sealed shut long ago for who knows what reason.

In just over two weeks since the fire at the day care center killed 47 children in Hermosillo, evidence has piled up suggesting a chain of negligence that may have abetted the tragedy. The revelations have led to outrage and, in this culture of widespread corruption and legal impunity, resignation.

Every morning, some 200 babies and toddlers were dropped off at a converted warehouse where a gaily colored tarpaulin passed for a ceiling and small, substandard doors in two cluttered corners served as emergency exits.

The day care center was a firetrap, critics say, and one that had been inspected repeatedly. It passed every time, except once. Last Tuesday, prosecutors reported that the federal authorities had ordered ABC’s owners in 2005 to get rid of the tarp, widen the main entrance and add more emergency exits with regulation fire doors.

Nothing happened. A few months later, the same federal agency that ordered the changes renewed its contract with the center. And without having made the needed repairs, the center continued to pass inspections.

Critics say the mix of negligence and incompetence that contributed to the high death toll is a symptom of a deeper failing. In a country where corruption is taken for granted, shrugging off regulations is the norm.

“In this country, we have a whole package of justifications not to follow the law,” said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political analyst. “There is an idea that the law is an imposition from outside. By going outside the law, we find a kind of fraternity.”

Since the fire on June 5, bureaucrats and politicians have repeatedly promised investigations to root out those at fault. But many people here suspect a more typical Mexican outcome: an endless investigation that will ultimately point fingers at many and hold no one responsible.

On Sunday, the federal agency in charge of overseeing the privately run center said it planned to sue the Sonora State government and the center’s owners for the lack of fire safety measures.

On Monday, the Sonora State prosecutor announced the arrests of seven employees of the state’s Finance Department. The fire first started in a storage area next to the day care center that was rented by the department. Arrest warrants have been issued for six more people, the prosecutor said.

Even if the case eventually gets to court, which is not a given, Mexican trials can take years and often do little to clarify the facts.

City officials, meanwhile, note that it was a federal inspector who ticked off every line in the safety column of her report just 10 days before the fire.

Five local employees of the federal agency overseeing the center, as well as Hermosillo’s fire chief, have been removed from their jobs.

There is “a political war that is deaf, that is insulting, that offends everybody, between the city, the state and federal government, because everybody is trying to throw dirt to cover up their own responsibility in the tragedy,” Ricardo Alemán, a columnist for the newspaper El Universal, wrote last week.

The first sparks of the fire may have come from a faulty cooling unit in the state government’s storage space next door to the day care center, officials say. Smoke crept up over the separating wall and collected above the tarp. Once the tarp caught fire, it gave way, and the day care center filled with black smoke.

No alarm sounded. The main entrance was barely wide enough for one teacher holding a child to squeeze through.

The news that the center’s owners were the wives of two top state officials and a businessman with close links to Gov. Eduardo Bours added to fears of a perfunctory investigation and stoked anger among working-class Mexicans that a program for their children was at bottom another subsidy for the wealthy.

The private contractors who run most of the government’s day care centers collect about $200 a month per child from the state.

The two officials whose wives owned the center have resigned, but so far no charges have been brought against the owners, and the arrests and dismissals, mainly of low-level employees, have done little to satisfy public demands for accountability.

The government has said it will provide preliminary compensation of about $11,600 to families who lost a child and about $17,400 to families with injured children, who are presumed to have greater expenses. There are few precedents in Mexico for civil lawsuits that would fix responsibility and award damages.

“Let’s hope that the effect will be that the state has to pay the costs of its bad services,” Mr. Silva-Herzog, the political analyst, said. But he added, “I feel as though I have seen this movie various times before.”

Over the past three weekends, the victims’ parents and other Hermosillo residents marched through the city streets to honor their children and demand justice. In one of those marches, Roberto Zavala, the father of 2-year-old Santiago, exploded in anger in front of the statehouse.

“Nobody has accepted their share of the blame,” said Mr. Zavala, a worker at Hermosillo’s Ford plant. Then, in bitterness, he railed against Mexico’s culture of corruption.

“I am to blame for trusting, I am to blame for paying my taxes, I am to blame for voting, I am responsible for the death of my son,” he said. “They make fun of us. I am to blame for allowing them.”

Daniza López, who worked at the center, managed to hand four of her charges out the front door before she turned back into the black smoke to look for her 2-year-old son, Luis Denzel. She never saw him alive again. The ceiling had fallen on him as he slept, she told Excelsior, a daily newspaper in Mexico City.

“True justice for Luis Denzel, who I want to remember smiling and not as he was, all burned,” she said, “will come when they punish those who are responsible for the fire.”

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Our new diversity

Source: The Ottawa Citizen / June 26, 2009


Ontario's overall population is constantly being renewed, enriched and transformed by immigration.

The situation is no different for Ontario's francophone community, which benefits from newcomers who chose the province as their new home.

Why should our Franco-Ontarian community not evolve with this increased diversification and benefit from the rich contribution of immigrants, just like the English-speaking population does? The new inclusive definition of francophone reflects this new diversity.

Many newcomers are from countries where French is widely spoken or taught, and where it might even be an official language. So, yes, they may have Lingala, Arabic or even Russian as a mother tongue, but they speak French fluently, and use it in their daily lives. Many consider themselves Francophones, and have shared their concerns with me about being excluded from a narrow definition based solely on "mother tongue."

The new definition is mostly symbolic. It is not a new program accompanied with additional funding. It will not give a "new francophone" any new rights or services -- although I have had the opportunity to observe that this "symbol" carries a strong emotional weight for some people.

Having data that better reflects the realities of the francophone community will simply allow the government to better plan French-language services.

The government strives to respond to the needs of a changing world, a changing economy, a changing population. And contrary to what Randall Denley's column claimed, enrolment in French-language schools is not on the decline. Following the success of the implementation of the Politique d'aménagement linguistique, enrolment in French-language schools has increased by about 1,600 students over the period of 2006 to 2008.

The new inclusive definition of francophones is one of the ways the government has adapted to new realities, and in particular to the evolution of its francophone population.

Madeleine Meilleur,

Minister responsible for francophone affairs

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