Thank you very much. We deeply appreciate your time.
I'm here on behalf of the Americas policy group of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation. I started my career as a journalist in Canada and then in Mexico. I lived in Mexico in the early 1990s when the NAFTA was first being negotiated, and when violence against women—the targeted killing of women, particularly in the north where the maquiladoras, the factories, are concentrated—was first becoming headline news around the world.
Sadly, since the 1990s, the targeted killing of women and so much more violence in Mexico has spread from the north to many other parts of Mexico; some have called it a poison. This really has reached crisis proportions. This morning, you will hear from people on the front lines of that crisis—four human rights defenders—and we're proud to have them here with us today.
We thank you for your interest in their testimony and remind you that the situation for human rights defenders in Mexico is extremely well documented, including by Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders, who visited Mexico this past January and did issue a press release and a report.
We ask you on this subcommittee to do what you can to ensure that Canada makes the human rights situation in Mexico a priority in its diplomacy and indeed in its trade relationship with Mexico, and to ensure that Canadian government officials speak out on the dangerous situation for these four defenders and countless others who could not be here with us today.
We also ask that Canada of course abide by and expand upon its own new guidelines for protecting human rights defenders: a very important tool that Canada should and can embrace.
Last but not least, we would like to encourage you to hold a series of hearings focused on the situation of the human rights crisis in Mexico, and to include in that series a focus on women human rights defenders, which would be very much in line with the new feminist foreign policy and the rights-based approach of that policy.
Thank you.
Now Santiago will start us off.