“The so called ‘war on drugs’ has caused increasing and unstoppable violence. Homicide rates are skyrocketing. Human rights abuses have gone through the roof,” Sister Consuelo Morales told a packed banquet hall at Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort in November.
The small, vivacious 63-year-old Roman Catholic nun was being honored with an Alison Des Forge Award by Human Rights Watch (HRW) for “[putting] her life on the line to protect the dignity and rights of others.”
Based in the city of Monterrey, Mexico, an industrial and commercial hub two hours from the Texas border, Morales began “the only organization of its kind,” CADHAC (Citizens in Support of Human Rights), in the northeastern state of Nuevo León. It is a “state that has suffered a horrific descent into violence over the past two years,” declared Nik Steinberg, who investigates human rights abuses for HRW in Mexico. The city, once deemed the safest in Latin America, is now on the frontlines of the drug war and home to the notorious Zeta gang.