Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The organization Prisoners Defenders revealed that 500 Cuban military personnel recently entered Mexico. This was related to one of them who lived through the process. He said that they entered the country through Mexican military air bases without being registered by immigration and that their passports were confiscated to prevent them from escaping to the United States. The presence in the national territory of 500 Cuban military personnel represents a serious risk to national security.
They are supposed to be medical specialists, but the witness affirms that they have “general training; they are not specialists”. They are medical practitioners who work in primary care in doctor’s offices. They may accompany a pregnant woman or a child, but they have no further training.
The witness contradicted President López Obrador’s assertion when he said, in a morning press conference (Mañanera), that “Cuba has sent us the specialists that we don’t have in Mexico”. The witness affirmed that Cuba does not send specialists abroad for fear that they would flee to the United States and, thus, the Island would be left without specialists.
The witness affirmed that something similar happened when supposed Cuban “specialist” doctors came during the pandemic in 2021. He says that they were trained in 5 days to use Savina ventilators, “and it seems that Díaz Canel never knew that: that Mexico has a very advanced technology and that its technicians have a preparation that no technician in Cuba has”.
The witness added that, before leaving for a mission outside Cuba, they are offered a 5-day “intensive course” and another three-day course on Coronavirus. “Who in three days learns something about Coronavirus? Who in 5 days becomes an intensivist? When the intensive course in Cuba lasts up to two years. So when the medics arrived in Mexico, those who went with us were in a panic. You could see the panic on their faces when they entered therapy because they didn’t know anything!”
The witness concludes by assuring that the military medics did not know what to do because they are really nothing more than community medics at best. They simply told them, “You 15 are going to be pediatricians, you 15 are going to be obstetricians…”. That is how irresponsible and deceitful are both the Cuban authorities who prepare them to deceive Mexican patients and the Mexican authorities who do not ask for professional certificates and, therefore, allow themselves to be deceived or want to be deceived. All of them, in unison, commit fraud against the health of the Mexicans they are supposed to treat.
However, this testimony of a Cuban military man opens up several avenues of analysis.
The first concerns the apparent agreements between the Armed Forces of Cuba and Mexico. What is the degree of relationship existing between the armies for the Mexican forces to allow the entry of 500 Cuban military personnel who clearly entered Mexico disguised as doctors but, in reality, could have another intelligence mission in our country? Do the Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy know what this “other” mission of the 500 Cuban military personnel in Mexico is? Why did they allow them to enter the national territory in some clandestine way via their military airports? There is no public and legal record of their entry nor their true identities. Thus, presumably, they come to perform secret or ultra-confidential activities. The Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy must inform the Mexican people what they agreed with the Cuban military during their recent visit to Cuba, when they accompanied President López Obrador. Military silence is not acceptable, neither in the case of Ayotzinapa nor in this case of the Cuban military.
For the time being, the risks to national security are there and apparently increase with the complicity of Mexican civilian and military authorities.
Another issue to be analyzed is the complicity of López Obrador’s government with the hiring of alleged Cuban doctors under the model of human trafficking or forced labor, certainly condemned by the United Nations, primarily by its Commission on Human Rights and also by the International Labor Organization (ILO). Mexico takes responsibility for co-conspiring with the Cuban government to promote and encourage forced labor, which some even go so far as to describe as slave labor. In the Mexican case, it is violating multiple international obligations by allowing this trafficking of people in its territory.
Another vein of analysis is to what extent the “hiring” of Cuban doctors under the circumstances of lacking labor contracts, having surrendered their passports so that they would not flee to the United States, represents a violation of the agreements made by Mexico with its U.S. and Canadian partners regarding the USMCA. In Chapter 23.12 of the USMCA called “Cooperation”, paragraph 5 opens as areas of labor attention: A) labor laws and practices, including the promotion and practical application of the principles and rights outlined in the ILO Declaration on Rights at Work; c) the identification and movement of goods produced by forced labor; d) combating forced labor and human trafficking, including on fishing vessels”.
It is evident that having opened the Pandora’s Box of the lawsuit against Mexico for violations of the USMCA in energy matters, it is to be expected that the López Obrador government’s practice of financing, encouraging, and overlapping human trafficking and forced labor within its public labor policies will be challenged.
Finally, it is of concern that the Mexican proposal to head the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), in the person of Nadine Gasman, is a person with political and personal ties to the institutional model of promoting Cuban military medical brigades. Her candidacy, enthusiastically supported by Cuba, would imply if she wins the leadership, the possible endorsement of the Cuban model of forced labor throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Accelerated militarization is a fact in Mexico. It is the most important public policy of López Obrador’s government. In this context, the presence of 500 Cuban military personnel is a clear threat to national security by the government seeking to strengthen its control over the country.
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