TIME FOR CANADA TO GET UP TO SPEED ON MEXICO'S REALITIES

You don't have to have a bleeding heart to be disturbed by the way
Canada's refugee system deals with Mexicans. Almost overnight, asylum
seekers from that country have become the pariahs of Canadian
officialdom.

This is not to say there hasn't been a slew of inappropriate asylum
requests made by Mexicans who are simply economic immigrants hoping to
find work in Canada. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney calls them
"queue jumpers," and he's right.

But many Mexican refugee claimants are as deserving as any United
Nations convention refugee marooned in a camp on the edge of a war
zone. Mexico is, sadly, a war zone, especially for some of its best,
brightest and most honest citizens. The problem is that Canada's
refugee system hasn't caught up to the reality on the ground.

Many recent Immigration and Refugee Board member and court deportation
judgments are still based on the conclusion that the Mexican state is
capable of protecting its own people. This may have been true in the
past but it isn't true today. The government of Mexico is repeatedly
showing that it can only protect some of its people, some of the time.
Time and time again it finds itself embarrassingly incapable of
protecting the people who most need protection.

I don't doubt the Mexican government's sincerity when it claims that
it has launched an all-out assault on the drug cartels as well as
police and government corruption. But there is a wide gulf between
what the government would like to do and what it is actually capable
of doing. And too often there is a tragic failure in the system when
it comes to the protection of high-profile individuals, many of whom
are frontline fighters in Mexico's war against the cartels.

A recent case involving an elite special forces Mexican naval officer
highlights this failure to protect.

The Mexican government has made the military the cornerstone of its
war against the cartels and believed it was on the right track when it
sent 400 members of an army and navy assault team to raid the
headquarters of one of Mexico's three major cartels.

The special forces succeeded in killing the cartel's leader, Beltran
Leyva. It seemed like a victory, even though a young naval ensign,
Melquisedet Angulo Cordova, was killed in the raid. The state
responded to the officer's death with high honours. The secretary of
the navy presented the officer's mother with the flag that covered her
son's coffin. It was, according to a New York Times report, "a
stirring public tribute."

"Then, only hours after the grieving family had finished burying him
in his hometown...gunmen burst into the family's house and sprayed the
rooms with gunfire, killing his mother and three other relatives," the
Times reported.

There is a reason why Mexican police and military wear balaclavas when
they are participating in raids or acting in a very public capacity.
They know that if the wrong people identify them, they and their
families are no longer safe.

And that is exactly the point. The people who are most responsible for
carrying out public security in Mexico are no longer safe themselves.
The Mexican government is powerless to protect them. Yet when these
same people turn up in Canadian cities asking for asylum, they are
turned down.

Reading Canadian court decisions on Mexican refugee claimants is a
frustrating exercise in rearview mirror decision making. Canada's
courts and quasi-judicial Refugee Board are still acting on a
tragically outdated way of looking at security in Mexico.

Recent Federal Court appeal rulings uphold the immigration minister's
claim that "the state agencies in Mexico are making serious efforts to
combat crime, including corruption," and that Mexican asylum seekers
are failing to explore all the security options the democratic Mexican
state has available.

A typical ruling, this one on Dec. 1 and having to do with a Mexican
family of five, stated, "The Court is therefore of the view that
although corruption remains an issue in Mexico, the evidence
demonstrates in the circumstances that there are avenues, albeit
imperfect ones, for state protection that were accessible to the
Applicants, had they chosen to access it."

The quasi-judicial Refugee Board hearings, where decisions are made by
one judge-the board calls them "members"-follows the same pattern of
incredulity about all Mexican cases that is regularly stated by the
federal government and turns up in Federal Court decisions.

In the case of Juarez police detective commander Gustavo Gutierrez and
his family, as reported in Embassy on Dec. 16, Toronto IRB member
Louise Paquette-Neville wrote in her decision: "I am convinced that
state protection would be reasonably forthcoming to him in Mexico City."

She continued to argue that Mr. Gutierrez and his family would find
safety in Mexico City because it is so large.

"Mexico City is a city of over eight million people," wrote Ms.
Paquette-Neville, "the largest city in the country. And is one that
has made serious efforts to address crime and corruption. If by some
chance the claimant was located [by assassins], which I am not
persuaded to believe, documentary evidence demonstrates that state
protection would be reasonably forthcoming to him in Mexico City."

I know that Mr. Gutierrez, an experienced, ranking police officer,
wishes this were true so that his family could get on with its life in
the Mexican federal capital. Unfortunately it is not. He is willing to
sacrifice his experience and prestige to make a new life in Canada for
only one reason: his family's safety.

But Canada's courts and Refugee Board would like to send him back not
because they don't believe he is truthful but because they think he
can somehow avoid assassination.

This contradicts reality. The Mexican government has proved to be
powerless, reports the New York Times, "to protect many of its own
forces in the drug war, much less innocent bystanders."

The only option for Mr. Gutierrez and his family and other claimants
like Mexican lawyer Alfonso Vega and his family, whose story was
reported in Embassy on Jan. 6, is the sickening idea that they might
be safer if they gave up their principles.

Many foreign policy experts are starting to argue that Mexico is a
"failed state." Recently, this was the subject of national security
writer Thomas J. Rick's blog attached to the Washington Post-owned
Foreign Policy Magazine.

I don't think this is entirely true, but not because "Mexico is a
democracy," as Mr. Kenney likes to say. A democratic state that is
powerless to protect many of its most honest and principled citizens
is no better than a dictatorship-at least when it comes to the lives
of the families involved. Canada can't repair this serious Mexican
problem but it can help by granting asylum to those Mexicans who
fought the good fight and lost.

Today some of those most vulnerable Mexicans are middle-class
professionals, lawyers, policemen and others whose honest choices have
made them and their families assassination targets.

If Canada, particularly its courts and the Immigration and Refugee
Board, gets up to speed on this critical change in Mexican security,
it will have the honour of welcoming some very capable and principled
new Mexican-Canadians. If it doesn't, it will bear some responsibility
for the endangered lives of some very heroic people.