CENTRAL NEWS – The German academic, of Kurdish origin, Erol Polat, invited to give lectures at educational institutions in Puebla and Guadalajara, was deported by immigration agents and Navy personnel from the Mexico City International Airport to Brazil, allegedly for being listed as persona non grata by the U.S. government.
Polat, who was deported last week, was coming to Mexico to participate in academic conferences at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) and in the Jorge Alonso Chair organized by the University of Guadalajara and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS).
In an interview, the doctor in anthropology Jorge Alonso said that what happened was a violation of the guest’s human rights and asked Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to intervene so that Polat can return to Mexico -where he has already been several times- to give his lectures.
“We invited Polat to speak to us about the revolution in Kurdistan and democratic confederalism; we sent him a letter of invitation, as did the BUAP, but upon his arrival the authorities did not even see it,” he explained.
“When he arrived at the airport they took away his passport; they did not read the letters nor did they care about them, they took away his cell phone and sent him to an incommunicado place together with migrants who wanted to pass to the United States. From there they deported him to Brazil,” Alonso added.
The letter from BUAP, signed by John Holloway, researcher at the Alfonso Vélez Pliego Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, was to invite him to participate in the seminar Subjectivity and Critical Theory; the letter from CIESAS, signed by Alonso, was for the chair that bears his name. The presence of the Kurdish specialist in both institutions would be in May.
Polat arrived in Mexico before May because he was also invited to participate in the 14th World Social Forum, to be held May 1-6 in Mexico City, organized by the Council for Popular Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. He also had a letter of invitation which the authorities ignored.
Alonso said that, in addition to him, two members of the Jorge Alonso Chair, Dr. Susana Street Naused and Dr. Andres Fabregas, asked Ebrard to intervene to solve this problem. They asked the Chancellor for “immediate action to remedy this undignified treatment” and for the academic to be able to return to Mexico to fulfill his commitments.
