RT | October 8, 2026
Brussels is steering Europe toward totalitarianism and a “Euro-Gestapo” while lecturing Russia on democracy, Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha has warned.
Blaha made the remarks during a European Parliament debate on Tuesday, responding to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who denounced Russia’s recent parliamentary elections as undemocratic.
The politician questioned why Brussels was focusing on Russia while cracking down on dissent within the bloc.
He cited arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany and the imprisonment of Estonian opposition figures, who he claimed were jailed for opposing war with Russia.
“Are you going to set up the Euro-Gestapo here, Mrs. Kallas, and lock up everyone who wants peace?” he asked.
The Slovak lawmaker also questioned why Brussels was debating Russia’s elections while Europe faced mounting unrest.
“You may not have noticed, but Spain is in the streets, France is in the streets, and you are here dealing with Russian elections. You must be joking,” he said.
Blaha went on to accuse Brussels of double standards over Ukraine’s suspended presidential elections.
“You blame the Russians for having elections, but you don’t mind that [Ukraine’s Vladimir] Zelensky has been governing for three years without any elections, without a mandate,” he said. “You are hypocrites!”
Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024, but elections have remained suspended under martial law.
Blaha also cited the annulment of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, claiming the vote was canceled because “the wrong candidate won.” Romania’s Constitutional Court scrapped the result over alleged irregularities and accusations of Russian interference after EU- and NATO-skeptic Calin Georgescu won the first round. Pro-EU candidate Nicusor Dan won the rerun in May 2025.
The MEP argued that Russia had held elections despite the ongoing conflict and daily Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on its territory.
The September poll saw the ruling United Russia party win nearly 58% of the party-list vote.
Blaha also defended Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrasting his popularity with that of Western European leaders.
“You have nothing to criticize Putin for, Mrs. Kallas,” he declared. “Unlike you and your Merzes and Macrons, he has the support of his own population.”
Recent polls have put German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval rating at a record low of 10% in October, while French President Emmanuel Macron’s support fell to 17% in September. Neither Kallas nor European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was directly elected to her current position by voters, having assumed office through the EU’s institutional appointment process.
Blaha belongs to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party, which opposes EU sanctions on Russia and has criticized Western military assistance to Ukraine.
IMEMC | October 7, 2026
Nearly 22,000 Palestinian students and education workers were killed during three years of Israeli attacks, according to a statistical report released Wednesday by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education. The report documents Israeli violations against the education sector from October 7, 2023, through October 7, 2026.
Issued under the slogan, “Three Years After the Genocide: Education Is a Will That Cannot Be Broken,” the report said Israeli forces killed more than 19,189 school students and 1,386 university students in the Gaza Strip. Another 28,586 school students and 3,082 university students suffered injuries of varying severity.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed 134 school students and 39 university students and injured 871 school students and 283 university students. The forces also abducted 416 school students and 481 university students.
Among educational and administrative personnel in Gaza, Israeli forces killed 805 school employees and 246 university lecturers and staff members.
The report also documented the injury of 3,298 school employees and 1,493 university personnel. In the West Bank, Israeli forces killed seven school staff members and injured 26 others, while abducting more than 176 teachers and school employees and 21 university staff members.
Regarding attacks on educational institutions, the ministry said Israeli forces completely destroyed more than 179 public schools in Gaza and more than 105 schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). More than 63 university buildings were also completely destroyed.
In response to the widespread destruction and in an effort to maintain the educational process, 700 teaching and learning centers were opened throughout the Gaza Strip, along with 12 virtual schools serving students from Gaza inside Palestine and abroad.
In the West Bank, Israeli forces continued targeting educational institutions. They issued a final demolition order against the Janba School in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, and closed four schools in Hebron’s Old City for several days: Yasser Amr, Al-Faiha, Qurtuba, and Al-Ibrahimiyya schools.
Israeli authorities also denied work permits to teachers at private schools in occupied Jerusalem, preventing them from reaching their workplaces, and continued invading Palestinian universities, most recently Birzeit University.
By Junaid S. Ahmad | MEMO | October 7, 2026
There are careers that end in triumph, careers that end in scandal, and careers that achieve the rarer distinction of staging their own final indictment. António Guterres has found his in Islamabad.
After nearly a decade as Secretary-General of the United Nations, he arrives in Pakistan in the twilight of his tenure and performs the ritual that has come to define him: smile warmly, praise generously, deplore abstractly, and avoid saying anything that might seriously inconvenience the powerful men standing beside him. His record is littered with eloquent concern, grave warnings and solemn appeals. What it has lacked, again and again, is the one quality that gives moral language meaning: courage when courage carries a cost.
In Islamabad, the performance is almost indecent. Guterres praises Pakistan as a source of “solidarity and solutions,” commends the “resilience” of its people, and assures them that the United Nations stands with them. Meanwhile, former prime minister Imran Khan remains imprisoned after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his detention arbitrary.
UN experts have raised concerns about his treatment, prolonged isolation and conditions of confinement; the UN Committee Against Torture has separately highlighted broader allegations of politically motivated detention, torture, intimidation and repression.
Guterres does not need opposition politicians or troublesome journalists to brief him. He could simply read his own institution’s reports. But that would ruin the choreography.
So the Secretary-General moves through meetings with Pakistan’s political and security establishment while one of the country’s most popular and persecuted political leaders sits behind bars. Outside the diplomatic bubble, Khan’s supporters confront barricades, arrests and the familiar machinery of coercion. The Pakistani state, chronically incompetent at governing, once again discovers astonishing administrative efficiency when citizens decide to protest.
And Guterres praises their resilience. The euphemism is almost grotesque. A population is subjected to repression, institutional decay and coercive politics, and the world’s senior international diplomat congratulates it for enduring the experience. It is the diplomatic equivalent of praising a prisoner’s fortitude while refusing to ask who locked the cell.
But Islamabad is not a lapse in the Guterres record. It is the culmination of it.
The same moral evasion has defined his response to Gaza. For years, Guterres has described the catastrophe in increasingly apocalyptic terms: mass death, starvation, displacement, destroyed hospitals, shattered families, collective punishment and violations of international law. He has rarely lacked adjectives for horror.
What he lacked was willingness to name its most consequential possibility. Genocide.
When confronted directly, Guterres retreated into procedure, insisting that such a determination belonged to the courts. It was bureaucratic cowardice dressed as juridical sobriety. Apparently, a Secretary-General may describe the destruction of a people in exhaustive detail, denounce their starvation, mourn their children and warn of their dehumanization — but the moment the facts threaten to crystallize into the politically dangerous word, he develops an almost priestly devotion to institutional restraint.
The absurdity became complete when UN experts explicitly warned of genocide and a UN Commission of Inquiry later concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The institution Guterres leads could say what Guterres himself repeatedly would not. This was not neutrality. It was evasion refined into method.
That is the essence of the Guterres tenure: moral vocabulary without moral escalation. He has perfected the art of sounding anguished while remaining politically non-threatening. His speeches travel bravely to the edge of the necessary conclusion, stare into the abyss, invoke international law, then retreat into another carefully worded appeal to governments that have already demonstrated their contempt for it.
Gaza became a theatre of catastrophic adjectives without commensurate political naming. Pakistan now becomes a festival of diplomatic compliments beside a prison cell.
The parallel is devastating. In Gaza, the UN system could document devastation while its Secretary-General recoiled from the word that carried the greatest political charge. In Pakistan, UN mechanisms can document arbitrary detention, abuse and repression while their chief shakes hands with the authorities presiding over the system they have condemned.
That is not merely institutional contradiction. It is leadership failure.
No serious person expects a UN Secretary-General to command armies, free prisoners by decree or compel governments into decency. But the office possesses one form of power that cannot be dismissed so easily: moral authority. Guterres has spent much of his tenure conserving it so carefully that, when history demanded its expenditure, there was often nothing to show for it.
He has confused caution with wisdom and diplomatic acceptability with statesmanship. But statesmanship is not the art of saying only what power can comfortably tolerate. Its purpose, at decisive moments, is precisely the opposite.
And so Islamabad is a fitting final tableau: Guterres praising resilience while surrounded by evidence of why resilience is necessary; representing institutions whose own findings he seems unwilling to embody; smiling through repression in Pakistan after years of speaking around genocide in Gaza.
History will not care how many statements he issued, how solemnly he frowned, or how often he invoked international law.
It will ask what he said when speaking plainly became dangerous. Too often, António Guterres chose not to. He saw almost everything. He described almost everything. And when history demanded courage rather than description, he chose cowardice.
Palestinian Information Center – October 6, 2026
RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) has warned that Israel is expanding its use of the charge of “incitement” into a tool for controlling education, expression and collective memory in Palestinian institutions.
The warning followed the recent arrest of a school principal in al-Eizariya and the demolition of a martyrs’ memorial at Birzeit University on Monday. The PPS said both incidents reflect a wider policy targeting spaces where Palestinian awareness is shaped and where the memory of prisoners, martyrs and national symbols is preserved and passed to new generations.
According to the society, prosecutions under the label of “incitement” are no longer limited to social media posts or personal statements. They now extend to educational content and symbols inside institutions, placing schools and universities under direct threat of surveillance and punishment.
In the al-Eizariya case, the PPS said a video circulated after the principal’s arrest presented posters inside the school and what students were being taught as part of what Israel described as “incitement” and “terrorist education.”
The society warned that such measures turn the educational environment itself into a target, criminalizing the presence of Palestinian national issues in school materials, symbols or discussions.
It said the vague and expanding definition of “incitement” leaves individuals and institutions under constant threat, pushing Palestinians to monitor their own speech, activities and teaching material out of fear of punishment.
The group also pointed to a rise in arrests linked to alleged “incitement” since the start of the war on Gaza. It said the arrests have affected citizens, freed prisoners, students, women and children, often over posts, expressions or positions related to current events.
At Birzeit University, the demolition of a martyr’s memorial was part of the same effort to target Palestinian memory and its symbols, the PPS said, adding that the incident narrows spaces where the national narrative is remembered and expressed.
The society elaborated that these policies go beyond arrest and include threats, interrogation, assault, penalties and fines, creating an environment of continuous surveillance.
It warned that “incitement” is being used to determine what Palestinians may say, teach, publish or remember, particularly among younger generations. The danger, it said, extends beyond individual freedoms to the ability of Palestinian society to teach its history, preserve its symbols and express its rights under threat of punishment.
MEMO | October 6, 2026
Paris police chief Patrice Faure on Tuesday banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration planned for Wednesday, the third anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, over “risks of public disorder,” Anadolu reports.
“At the request of Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, I issued an order banning a demonstration ‘against the genocide in Gaza and for respect for the ceasefire’ in Paris on Wednesday,” Faure said on US social media platform X.
He noted that such a demonstration could pose “significant risks of public disorder,” citing a “high terrorist threat” and antisemitic acts that “remain at historically high levels” across France.
“In light of this, and in view of all the risks identified, it is my responsibility to ensure everyone’s safety. I have therefore decided to ban this demonstration,” Faure added.
Israel’s genocidal war launched three years ago in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 people, injured many more and destroyed most of the enclave’s infrastructure.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 5, 2026
Employees of Georgia’s largest healthcare system have until Nov. 1 to get the flu vaccine or an approved exemption, or they will be suspended without pay. If suspended employees don’t submit proof of vaccination by 4 p.m. Nov. 15, they will be fired.
According to the Emory Healthcare website, the vaccine mandate applies to all employees, including contractors and remote workers.
Employees suspended for missing the first deadline, Nov. 1, 11:59 p.m., will not be allowed to use their paid time off.
COVID-19 shots are not mandated, but employees are “encouraged to engage in shared decision-making with their provider” on whether or not to get the vaccine.
A spokesperson for the healthcare system said the requirement is intended to protect patients and staff and to encourage everyone to get vaccinated.
Dr. Sherika Newman of Doctor in the Family, a physician-led patient advocacy and health consulting service in Atlanta, told CBS News that flu vaccine requirements are common in healthcare.
“Asking health care providers or people who interact with patients to take the flu vaccine early every year is what we always mandate so that we are protecting ourselves from spreading viruses to vulnerable populations,” Newman said.
She said everyone should get vaccinated, not just healthcare workers, although only healthcare workers will lose their jobs if they don’t get the vaccine.
Cleveland Clinic: 2024-2025 flu shot increased risk of getting the flu
Flu vaccine effectiveness can vary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which cites studies since 2009-10 showing effectiveness between 19% and 60%. The major factors influencing vaccine effectiveness are a person’s age and health and how well the vaccines match the circulating virus strains.
According to a Cleveland Clinic study published last year, people who received a flu vaccine formulated for the 2024-25 flu season had a 27% higher risk of getting the flu than those who didn’t get the vaccine.
It wasn’t the first study to find that flu vaccines could actually increase the risk of becoming ill.
A 2023 study co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that “viruses replicating in the respiratory mucosal environment continue to present a particular challenge for developing effective vaccines with strong protection.”
“The flu shot has never really prevented transmission of the flu and in some years (i.e., last year) the efficacy of preventing the flu is actually negative,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense. “Flu would blow through a vaccinated population with nearly the same ease as it would an unvaccinated population.”
A 2012 peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that children who received the flu vaccine were at significantly increased risk of contracting non-flu respiratory virus infections.
Moderna’s mRNA flu shot added to the mix this year
According to the CDC’s FluView vaccination chart, as of Sept. 26, flu cases were at “minimal” levels across almost all 50 U.S. states, including Georgia.
Flu season typically begins in October and ends in May, with highest transmission rates in December and February.
The CDC recommends flu shots for people age 6 months and older, assuming they have no medical conditions that make vaccination risky.
Flu shot formulations differ each year based on information about which strains may circulate that year. The formulations aren’t tested for safety or efficacy before they’re distributed to the public.
In March, vaccine advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended trivalent vaccines to protect against two influenza A and one influenza B viruses.
In the past, most flu vaccines were made from a flu virus grown in eggs, and then inactivated and made into a vaccine. Or, they were made from recombinant protein vaccines, which have pieces of the flu pathogen that the immune system learns to recognize and fight.
This year, Moderna’s controversial mRNA flu shot, mFLUSIVA, approved in June, is also available for people age 50 and over.
Number of healthcare workers getting flu, COVID vaccines declining
Manufacturers say they will produce up to 135 million doses of flu vaccine for the U.S. market this flu season.
In recent years, many healthcare workers have been resisting flu shot mandates and declining the shot.
For example, record numbers of frontline health workers in the U.K. refused the flu vaccine in 2024-25.
Rates of U.S. healthcare workers who take the COVID-19 and flu shots have also been declining in recent years.
Numbers are lowest among health professionals who work in nursing homes. In the 2024-25 flu season, only about 42% of those workers got the shot, compared with about 81% of workers in acute care hospitals.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Cam Wakefield | Reclaim The Net | October 3, 2026
So what does it take for a police force to stop using a “trial” deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology? Apparently, scanning the faces of more than half a million people and catching nobody is not it.
In fact, it gets you an extension of four months and an expanded area to “hunt” in.
The British Transport Police (BTP) has now revealed that its initial six-month LFR deployment at London railway stations produced one alert – that was false.
The trial cost £320,786 ($425k) to carry out. That was just the cost of equipment hire and police officers’ time, and the figure comes from a freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates.
It ran from February to July across 18 deployments, which the BTP’s own register says resulted in 537,697 people having their faces scanned.
The single alert was raised on February 24 at Kings Cross, against a watchlist of 455 people. The alert was false, and the false alert rate was 0.00517 percent.
The story doesn’t end there, because the BTP’s own register doesn’t stop at the end of July. It goes on to September 24, and now includes 27 deployments – and a total of 926,912 people who have had their faces scanned.
This extension has produced alerts. On August 20 at Kings Cross St Pancras Underground, there was one true alert, unconfirmed. On September 4 at Waterloo, there was one true alert, confirmed, and the outcome was no action. And on September 24 at London Bridge, there were two true alerts, both confirmed, with the outcome again being no action.
The arrest column in the register still reads zero.
In other words, the machine has now correctly identified three people – but the police have not found any reason to arrest any of them.
The register also shows that the number of people on the watchlist has grown. On February 11, it was 381, and by September 14 at Victoria Underground, it had more than doubled, to 862.
This is where things get even better. The expansion was “welcomed” by Transport for London (TfL), who said the technology “will target and identify people on police watchlist at key stations chosen for maximum impact.”
TfL also justified the move by saying it would “specifically tackle violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences.”
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy is not impressed. “Tackling violence against women and girls on public transport must be an urgent priority, but that means investing in what actually works; not spending more than £320,000 on a measure, which when piloted, resulted in zero arrests and a single false alert,” she said.
“Live facial recognition technologies are a serious invasion of our privacy. The government should be suspending their rollout until there are stronger safeguards in place, including a proper legal framework,” the MP added.
This is not one force experimenting on its own. We have reported London Mayor Sadiq Khan approving live facial recognition for Oxford Street, London police using it at a protest for the first time, the High Court clearing the way for police use of it, and Greater Manchester Police joining the rollout. Liberty Investigates found that more than half of police forces in England and Wales have now deployed it.
Meanwhile, biometric images that do not match those on the watchlist are deleted immediately, while those that do match are deleted within 24 hours, as is the watchlist itself, once a deployment is finished.
BTP’s own policy makes clear that the surveillance is not limited to the cameras that are part of the LFR system. Footage from the LFR camera masts will be kept for up to 31 days, “in line with general police retention periods for CCTV.”
It seems that no matter how many times these deployments are extended, and how many people are scanned, the watchlist will just keep growing.
The police will keep getting more money to throw at this tech, that has not yet proven itself as useful for anything but wasting public money.
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | October 3, 2026
A new US bill, Ban Flock Act, has been introduced, with the aim of stopping the federal government from using automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
“Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, who is planning a Senate version.
“Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching,” he continued.
According to the text of the House bill, H.R. 10691, federal agencies and officials are to be banned from acquiring, possessing, accessing or using ALPRs, or data collected by these devices, without an Act of Congress that explicitly authorizes it.
This would include data collected by private security networks, homeowners’ associations, commercial parking operators, and data brokers.
Any such authorization must set data retention at no more than 48 hours, and “rigorous protections for due process, privacy, free speech and association.”
State and local governments that have ALPRs would not be eligible for grants from the Justice, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security departments.
The bill, whose sponsors in the House are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and in the Senate Jeff Merkley, also seeks to make sure that no federal money is used to buy, lease, or operate ALPRs, while evidence obtained in violation of the proposed legislation would be inadmissible in federal court.
Individuals would be able to sue for actual and punitive damages, while state attorneys general would be able to sue to enforce the ban.
Toll systems would be exempt from the ban, but the data collected would have to be deleted within 48 hours of payment, and could not be checked against a law enforcement hot list.
“AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Merkley noted that the right to privacy includes the freedom to move around the community without every move being monitored.
The Ban Flock Act is not the first attempt of its kind – in early September, Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison introduced the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, that also seeks to cut federal funding to state and local governments that use ALPRs, as well as biometric surveillance cameras.
In August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered Flock cameras to be removed from state highways within 30 days, a year after the state approved $4.6 million for 440 of these devices.
Earlier in the summer, Senator Josh Hawley launched an investigation into Flock, and later expanded it to include Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada.
“Flock does not stand alone in this industry; you and others are building large camera networks, assisted by artificial intelligence, that intrude on the privacy of all Americans,” Hawley said at the time.
Hawley has his own anti-Flock bill that has been announced but the text of the bill has yet to be filed.
Republicans and Democrats are now going after the same cameras, and the bill cuts off the federal money and the data trade, not just the cameras.
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – October 3, 2026
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 2, 2026
If you are a British citizen and you criticize a government program online, that criticism can be collected and stored by a government-linked body.
At least that seems to be the upshot of the actions of the Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU), “a body linked to the Home Office,” that has been keeping “observations” of those who speak against the government’s Prevent counter-extremism program on the internet.
The “evidence” of this comes from documents the group Rights & Security International (RSI) obtained under freedom of information law.
The group has now revealed that in the year from March 2024 to February 2025, StaCU made 77 “observations” of people who were critical of the program online – and that most of these “observations” came from X, with some from Reddit. Mainstream media articles were also included, as were posts from or about several organizations, including Hope Not Hate, Maslaha, and the Open Rights Group.
The “observations” are filed as “open-source complaints” and stored internally by StaCU. RSI is unsure what happens to this data next, and who the government may be sharing it with. What is known is that the process involves “attempting to independently verify claims.”
As RSI’s Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader Jacob Smith put it, “You should be able to criticize government policy without getting put on a list.”
Smith also noted that the fact that the government “has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent” should serve as “a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”
The Home Office tried to keep this secret and refused to hand over the documents at first, but RSI won an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and the documents were released.
As RSI noted, it is unclear if any automated tools were used to find the posts, and if not, how the unit “found” them, or what it does with the data it collects.
The case is not the first time Prevent has been in the news for its controversial nature and the way it is implemented, but it is a stark reminder that the British government has no problem treating criticism of its policies as potentially dangerous.
For the last several days, Israeli forces have blocked the main entrances and exits to the central West Bank governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh, further restricting Palestinian movement.
The punitive measure was taken after a Palestinian man carried out a shooting attack near the illegal settlement of Halamish, located to the northwest of Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank, on Sunday, September 20.
The attack resulted in the killing of an Israeli settler. The assailant was also injured and later identified as Qadri Samara (37). Samara was shot at by Israeli soldiers stationed at an army post near the site of the attack.
Although Samara managed to withdraw from the scene, later in the day Israeli forces carried out a raid at the HClinic Hospital in Ramallah and arrested him.
Following his arrest, the Israeli army also stormed Samara’s town of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem, on Sunday evening, raiding his home and surrounding worshippers inside a mosque.
In a security meeting held on Monday, September 21, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for the controversial death penalty law, mandated in March, to be used against Qadri Samara.
The law has faced widespread condemnation from international human rights groups for multiple reasons, mainly because it applies exclusively to Palestinians, while exempting Israelis convicted of the same offenses from the same penalty.
Both Israeli soldiers and illegal settlers have enjoyed total impunity despite murdering thousands of Palestinians over the past two decades in the occupied West Bank, a territory regarded under Palestinian jurisdiction in accordance with international law.
Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):
Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.
We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.”
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