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 News from Around the Americas | March 2008 
Mom Fears for Jailed Canadian's Life
 Joanna Smith - The Toronto Star
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| | Marjorie Bletcher (The Toronto Star) | | |
Marjorie Bletcher was already worried because she had not heard from her daughter in months when she received a frightening telephone call.
"One day she called and she said 'Mom, are you sitting down?'" Bletcher, 69, said from her Trenton, Ont., home yesterday. "She just said, 'I'm here. Get me out. I'm innocent. I haven't done anything. Please help me,' and then she hung up."
By that point, in 2006, her daughter, Brenda Martin, 51, was already several months into an international mess that has kept her behind bars in Guadalajara, Mexico for more than two years. She will likely stay there a few months longer after she lost a bid Monday to have charges against her alleging her involvement in one of the biggest online investment schemes in history dismissed on humanitarian grounds.
The federal government, under fire from critics to take a more active role, escalated the case's profile late yesterday by sending a diplomatic note to Mexican authorities laying out Ottawa's concerns about Martin's case, the Star's Bruce Campion-Smith reports.
"The note reiterates Canada's continued deep concern about the status and well-being of Ms. Martin in light of her lengthy imprisonment," Neil Hrab, spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, said last night in an email.
"In the note, Canada also seeks the Government of Mexico's assurances that Ms. Martin's rights under the applicable Mexican laws and international legal instruments are respected," Hrab said.
The two-year ordeal is a life far different from what Martin expected when she moved to Mexico in 1998 to satisfy her wandering spirit and love of the sun.
She worked her way up from washing boats to running a large restaurant before she landed a job in May 2000 as a cook for Alyn Richard Waage, an ex-Edmontonian. She was fired 10 months later.
"I had differences with his mother and his wife and sister," Martin said over the phone from prison yesterday. As to rumours she had been fired for excessive drinking, she said: "I drank. I drank every day."
Bank records the prosecution has entered as its only evidence show she received roughly $25,000 from Waage which she and her lawyer say was severance she was entitled to under Mexican laws and then reinvested about $10,000 into what she maintains she believed was a legitimate business opportunity.
That was Tri-West Investment Club, later revealed to be a multimillion-dollar Internet-based pyramid scheme masterminded by Waage. Some 15,000 people in 57 countries fell victim to the scam from 1999 to 2001.
Waage, who returned Martin's investment, was arrested several weeks after she was fired. He received a 10-year sentence in 2005, which he is serving in a U.S. federal prison. He has since signed sworn testimony that Martin had no knowledge of his scheme.
Martin moved around a lot at a young age before settling into a trailer park in Trenton where her mother worked in the offices of several trucking companies.
Paul Macklin, a former Liberal MP for Northumberland-Quinte West who had taken up her plight, said as a "blue-collar woman" with an admitted drinking problem, Martin makes an unlikely cause cιlθbre. "She was not what you call your poster child for human rights," he said this week.
"To me she's just the epitome of a hard-working, Canadian citizen who tried to go into another country and make a living for awhile and ultimately found herself, through no fault of her own, in a situation where she now has lost two years-plus of her life and may even be losing her life."
Martin, who has always maintained her innocence, fears she may take her own life as her lawyer's bid to have charges dropped because her rights were violated she never had access to a proper court interpreter was denied.
"I can't do this anymore," she said from prison, where she was put into hospital under 24-hour guard and under a suicide watch. "I'd prefer to be dead. I don't want to live."
Earlier yesterday, Bernier told the House of Commons he had appealed to his Mexican counterpart. "I expressed to her the concern of our government and that we want this case to be resolved as soon as possible," he said in response to a question.
Meanwhile, former prime minister Paul Martin expressed his concerns to the Mexican vice-minister for foreign affairs while attending a conference in Mexico City yesterday.
Brenda Martin said she has already told her mother goodbye.
Bletcher sobbed while talking about the possibility of losing the second of three daughters. Her daughter Angela died at 34 after a traffic collision in 1999.
"I never got a chance to say goodbye," she said. |
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