El Enemigo Comun

by Scott Campbell
December 30, 2010

On December 16, a freight train left Arraiga, Chiapas, with 300 migrants from Central America riding on top of it. While passing through Oaxaca the train was stopped twice. First, around 100 people were detained at an immigration checkpoint. Twenty minutes later, those remaining on the train were attacked by a gang of armed men, presumably Zetas or Maras, two groups known for preying on migrants and robbing or kidnapping them. Kidnapped migrants are usually held for ransom or forced to become gunmen or drug mules. The Zetas are likely responsible for the massacre of 72 Central American migrants in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas on August 24 of this year.

During the attack, at least 40 migrants were kidnapped and have not been heard from since. Of the 300 people to depart from Chiapas, only 20 made it to Ixtepec, Oaxaca, a common layover stop where a Catholic-run migrant shelter is located. A short video with testimonies from some of those who survived the events is posted on YouTube. I translated it and added the subtitles, so any errors in those departments are mine.

Along with insinuations that immigration was aware of the attack awaiting the migrants, the Mexican government has been extremely crass in its handling of the situation, at first outright denying what occurred and later acting only after concerted pressure from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.  An entire week passed before Mexico agreed to investigate the “supposed kidnappings.” Previously, Mexico’s Interior Ministry had informed El Salvador’s Deputy Foreign Minister that El Salvador’s “stance was unfounded, that [it] had no basis to claim that there was a kidnapping.”

While the Mexican government was sitting on its hands regarding the December 16 kidnapping – despite the fact that family members of those kidnapped reported receiving calls demanding ransoms of 10,000 dollars, as well as indications that the victims were being held near the site of the kidnapping – four more Central American migrants were kidnapped on December 21, and a fifth, from El Salvador, was killed during the attack.

According to Honduras’ Deputy Foreign Minister, Alden Rivera, 20,000 Central Americans have been kidnapped in Mexico on their way to the United States in the past twelve months.  Of those, half were from Honduras.  A staggering 30 out of every 100 Honduran migrants in Mexico are kidnapped.

As well, Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, the Catholic priest who runs the migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, has come under increasing threats and harassment as a result of his work assisting migrants and denouncing the disgraceful and dangerous treatment which undocumented Central American migrants face in Mexico.

These kidnappings, and the failure of the Mexican government to act – or even worse, the complicity of some government functionaries in these acts – are emblematic of the impunity that reigns in Mexico.  However, though not a focus of this summary, it is important to note that when examining the causes of Central American migration, as well as the rise and power of organizations such as the Zetas and the Maras, one’s gaze must firmly rest on the political and economic policies of the United States.  While it is certainly desirable and should be demanded that the Mexican government protect migrants crossing through its territory, upon making that journey these migrants then must again risk their lives to cross into the U.S., only to face massive discrimination and human and labor rights violations upon arrival.  The root causes are the neoliberal policies emanating out of Washington and foisted upon Central America and Mexico alike.

On December 20, 2010, one of the most powerful members of Mexico’s ruling class, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, appeared in public after being held captive since May 14, 2010. During the past seven months, a group called the Mysterious Disappearers released photos of Fernández de Cevallos and a number of letters signed by him to his family and political associates begging them to pay the ransom and not “act like they are poor.” On December 17-18 a long communiqué in three parts entitled “Epilogue of a Disappearance” was circulated on the internet and published in some Mexican newspapers. Signed by the Ex Mysterious Disappearers / Global Transformation Network, it details the motives for the apprehension. It is reproduced in full below:

EPILOGUE OF A DISAPPEARANCE

Ex misteriosos desaparecedores / Red por la Transformación Global

Part One

The classic theoreticians didn’t establish a principle that forbade killing. They were the most compassionate of all men, but they recognized that they faced enemies of humanity who were impossible to conquer through persuasion. Their efforts were aimed at the creation of circumstances in which killing wasn’t advantageous for anyone. They struggled against abusive violence and against violence that impedes movement. They didn’t hesitate to oppose violence with violence.

Bertolt Brecht

In Mexico we’re immersed in a climate of increasingly destructive violence that the government mafias permit and foment because it’s the only way they can hide systematic repression, try to control social discontent, and prevent the spread of people’s struggle, at least for now. The forms of violence are increasingly cruel and atrocious; the conflict has not only left tens of thousands of people dead, but has also spread terror and uncertainty among the living. The disparity between the government’s discourse and its corrupt practices shows clearly that the highest functionaries and institutions of the Mexican State are in collusion with the very crime they say they are fighting.

This initial contradiction has unleashed a continuous chain of lies that are widely broadcast on complicit news media; such coverage is part of the cultural violence that promotes, legitimizes and justifies the direct violence that the government sustains, as well as the violence of hunger, unemployment, migration, juvenile crime and human trafficking. It is part of the silent violence that leads people to shout “Enough is enough!”

Day after day, we witness military impunity, police kidnappings in which victims are turned over to drug traffickers, and the obvious social relationships that the President of Mexico, governors, senators, judges, generals, and police chiefs carry on with the big drug lords, to the extent that it’s possible to affirm that the top bureaucracy and the reactionary sectors of the political class are the very ones who make up the most criminal mafias in our country. The “war” that the government professes to wage for the sake of peace doesn’t go to the root of the problem and doesn’t touch the true white-collar criminals who get rich perpetrating Fobaproa-type swindles, bail-outs for corporations, privatizations (highway concessions, secret contracts dealing with oil, fiber optics and other natural resources) at the same wield that they wield the authority to impose and depose governments.

The most sophisticated violence, however, which hits us every day and may well be what we least recognize as violence, is the kind doesn’t seem to come from a particular person. It’s the “invisible” structural violence that’s always referred to as “devastation”, “heavy blows” or “international crises,” seemingly endless for the people; in fact, such forms of violence are presented to us as “advances.” The TV and government duopoly tries to make us believe in these “advances” and in “modernity,” as We face more job cuts, fewer opportunities to find productive employment, and a salary that is worth less every day. Such “modernity” is not what we’ve dreamed of and is not what we want to hand down to our children.

Poverty, which is dire for many of us, is a constant death threat and is much more powerful than all the groups of hired assassins put together. Life is reduced to a condition of survival without any possibility whatsoever of authentic human development. These conditions bring millions of people closer to death than to life, and in the face of this danger (from which They, the privileged groups, benefit by functionalizing poverty to the maximum extent), no concrete solutions are found unless We produce them ourselves.

Thus, the visible direct violence and the invisible structural and cultural violence (for which nobody seems to be responsible) are promoted and sustained by the governments. These are not the political representatives of all Mexican people, but entities that protect the interests of a small segment of the population and that especially favor a limited number of families at the top of the structure of power and control. They make up the privileged class that is part of a highly sophisticated and efficient framework of key figures and groups which, through meticulous planning and long careers, continue to be placed in strategic positions for their own benefit at the expense of the entire country. The government is a mafia because it protects the interests of the super rich, of the owners of everything, of the companies that loot our natural resources and traffic in everything from people, to arms to drugs to influence. It’s a government that serves the mafias allied with transnational capital, which itself is a mafia.

Major economic and political interests operate both inside and outside the law in a multidimensional framework of family ties, godfatherships, mutually convenient arrangements, secrets, pacts and complicities, all blessed by the powerful upper echelons of the Catholic church and by a certainty that identifies them as belonging to a defined group to which they are loyal, fully aware that They hold all the power and wealth in their hands.

For Us, violence (both visible and apparently invisible) is translated into an ongoing death threat, due on one hand, to the intensification of the conflicts that mafia looting generates as it seeks higher profits, and on the other, to the everyday conditions of poverty and misery that reduce life to a struggle for survival and everyday experience to a narrow runway defined by scarcely 60 pesos per family. People live from hand to mouth and there’s no possibility of getting ahead.

We live under threat of death with access restricted to food, health, basic services, rights and justice. With things as they are, we always lose out, and since we’ve resigned ourselves to it, we stop feeling the violence of not being able to live well. In this sense, We also make violence “normal.” Violence is not only exemplified by the dead; violence is also what we, the living, cover up.

Mexican society, as we can see, is divided in two: They and We. They the rich and We the poor, whose worlds and realities are in total opposition, but exist and develop at the same time. It’s the history that They propagate in their discourse as the evolution of a single project to which all Mexicans supposedly belong “equally and on the same level.” They applaud government speeches that always allude to progress and well-being in Mexico, and They themselves are the proof that the quality of life is constantly improving (better food, clothing, education, health, real estate, personal property, luxuries, vacations, rest, etc.), except that progress is a reality only in their own closed circle.

They accumulate wealth by all possible means, some of which are legal and permissible and others which are illegal and criminal. They’re one and the same. Since They are the ones who make the laws, they always have the possibility of transforming what’s illegal into law and vice versa. In truth, it’s not surprising that in most cases, those who live to accumulate riches don’t distinguish between the people in their circles who “respect the law” and those who don’t. What happens is that some people hold positions in State institutions and can operate from within for their own benefit and be “totally legal.” Political and economic interests are two fronts of the same strategy that is wedded to and defended by violence. The Mexican government sustains itself with the legal and illegal use of direct and indirect structural and cultural violence constructed to safeguard its self-engendered luck of the devil.

In their discourse, the heads of State allege that they will attain “perpetual peace and well-being” in a future (that will never come at this rate), and thereby justify their own use of destructive violence. This utopia of state peace is the basis of the argument that legitimizes death in our times. The danger of death that We experience is the product of the confrontation of economic power groups struggling for political power. The way They act within the state apparatus depersonalizes decisions that have repercussions in the lives of real people. Bureaucratic decisions broaden the distance between the functionaries and ordinary people, and the fiction is publicly maintained that they are “making policy” for “the common good,” even though the community is excluded, in every sense of the word, from decision-making activity.

That “the world of politics is always synonymous with corruption and injustice” is a commonplace observation that synthesizes what people generally think and a reality that the State apparatus and its functionaries reinforce day after day. Yet political activity should be conducted differently, taking into consideration the capacity of everyone to make real, direct decisions about basic issues of life in this society and to establish and alter the legality that rules human coexistence with a view to collective well-being. Society shouldn’t exist to keep people subjugated all their lives, but instead to serve as a form of organization defined by the decisions of all its members. Organization, teaching, and discipline are effective arms, but up until now, They are the ones who’ve known how to use them.

How is it possible that They, being so few, can subjugate Us? One of the most accurate answers is their exclusive use of “State force”; yet the idea that they have a total and definitive monopoly on the use of violence and employ it “only when it is just and necessary” for “the good of all” is a lie that we’ve set out to expose.

As paradoxical as it may seem, the history of humanity shows that, in order to generate humane living conditions, it’s necessary to use violence at certain moments as a suitable social measure that allows for ending some forms of life and generating others. Destructive violence, like the kind the government uses, only conceives of destroying without building something else that’s better and different that would really constitute a better state of life, and not just for a few. Violence is constructive when it is an act of rebellion against the threat of death, when it confronts the death personified by those who condemn us to misery. Violence is presented to us as unjustifiable, above all if it’s used against established power.

The government discourse repudiates it and calls for the preservation of order or for protests within institutional frameworks that don’t even operate in accord with their stated purposes. To maintain the guise of “legality” and “democracy,” the government is presented as the historical result of past struggles. The only permissible political acts are essentially non-political, accompanied by resignation. Cultural violence is the most sophisticated of all because it gives the State a veneer of “acceptability.” People who struggle against the bad government are presented as enemies of the entire society.

But is this mafia-style government the only one that’s possible in our country? We know that it’s not, that another Mexico is possible and that we at the bottom of the heap must build it with our own organizations of workers, campesinos, ecologists, neighborhood people, and victims of both organized crime and crimes committed by the army and the police. It’s up to all of us, to the people of Mexico organized in different ways and using all means, armed and non-armed, to use our organized rebelliousness to build a new Mexico where we can all live in dignity.

In our opinion, the use of violence is an unavoidable resource, but it must be part of a project and not just a necessary means; a project can’t be reduced to destroying another one. Our project is to recover what the vile acts of the powerful have taken from us ––our human condition. Our project is the rehumanization of all of us who are not part of their select circle, unlike their project, which is strictly for their own benefit. Thinking and acting politically means evaluating our conditions of existence and our social and inter-personal relations, transforming them with each and every act, and assuming responsibility for public life. The State interprets all dissidence as an enemy to be exterminated and puts everyone in the same box of criminality, thereby preventing the development of organizational forms that resolve our needs and satisfy our expectations and legitimate demands. This leads us to a point where it’s impossible to do anything at all, and the rules of the game, which they themselves do not follow, are applied to us with the full weight of their destructive State violence. Their existence as a powerful, dominant minority and their forms of operating only persist to the extent that We make them acceptable.

Part Two

The powerful call their own violence “law”, and that of the oppressed, “crime”… that’s why we, the oppressed must struggle for the establishment of a new law in the face of the crimes of the powerful, by every means possible, including violence…

In Mexico, two different countries coexist. One is inhabited by less than 10% of the population. They are the people who participate in politics and applaud government speeches on progress and well-being, because that’s what they are experiencing. It’s a business directed and sustained by those who possess and enjoy the large part of the country’s wealth. By contrast, the other Mexico is inhabited by more than 90% of the population, and even though we’re the great majority, we have no weight when it comes to making political and economic decisions.

Is it possible to identify the individuals who have determined the fate of the whole country? The neoliberal project was concretized in Mexico due to action taken by several key figures who agreed with it and were complicit in it. The figure of Carlos Salinas de Gortari clearly stands out at the beginning of the destructive stage, in which a number of interests and processes came together; he is a key actor and a member of the tightest circles of controlling power in this mafia framework. Salinas imposed transformations (designed at the top of the capitalist power structure) together with the United States, which has not abandoned its historical political interventionism, and with the support of the political and corporate elite of Mexico of his own party (PRI) along with important political allies; Salinas has worked behind the scenes since he left the Presidency. Among his most valuable allies, one key accomplice is a prominent member of the loyal opposition party (PAN), Diego Fernández de Cevallos Ramos, an immensely rich power boss, thanks to his triple role as State functionary, businessman, and lawyer who has specialized in filing lawsuits to accumulate public moneys.

“El jefe Diego” is another node where numerous shady stories come together. We can now verify his modus operandi, the people he does business with, and some of his most successful enterprises. With nothing to hide, members of the mafia have been named in letters written and addressed by Diego himself to his benefactors, demanding economic support in payment for his loyalty and services: Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Carlos Slim, Roberto Hernández, Alfredo Harp, Alberto Bailleres, Claudio X González, Lorenzo Servitje, Lorenzo Zambrano, Emilio Azcárraga Jean, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Bernardo Quintana, Ignacio Loyola, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, Emilio Gamboa Patrón, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Onésimo Cepeda, Norberto Rivera Carrera, Roberto Madrazo, Jorge Hank Rohn, Santiago Creel, Enrique Peña Nieto, Carlos Romero Dechamps, and Elba Esther Gordillo, among others. A number of different relationships have been established between businessmen, politicians, the church, drug traffickers, organized crime networks, paramilitary groups, television networks, etc. These relationships are ruled by extra-legal understandings, both inside and outside the realm of regulated activities; they are the strongholds of a tangled web of factions vying for power, which are in control of the entire country.

Diego Fernández de Cevallos has built a long dishonorable career of impunity and enrichment. For example, as a friend and lawyer of the millionaire Alberto Bailleres (President of Grupo Bal and owner of El Palacio de Hierro and Seguros GNP), he defended the MetMex Peñoles company against the mothers of 11,000 children poisoned by the pollution emitted from the company’s foundry in Torreón Coahuila. Neither the mobilizations nor the suits filed by the affected people were successful because the powerful company was judicially shielded from the suits thanks to the legal skills of its lawyer, to whom justice was of little or no concern.

One of the main accomplishments in the history of Mexico was the separation of the Catholic Church from the State. The textbooks must now add a chapter on the affable reconciliation between the two, mediated by none other than Diego Fernández de Cevallos himself, in complicity with the higher ups in the Catholic Church and Carlos Salinas de Gortari. En 1992 they amended Articles 3, 5, 24, 27 and 130 of the Constitution, and in July of the same year, the Religious Associations and Public Worship Law was passed, as well as the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the Mexican State and the Holy See, representing the beginning of an unprecedented stage in the history of contemporary Mexico, whose political and social consequences are now being felt. The Church, an apparatus allied with the elites and a fundamental part of them throughout the country’s history, is also an interface with the poor; it is, in fact, a supra state that is highly centralized, feudal, totalitarian, and ultraconservative. With the help of “el jefe Diego” and Carlos Castillo Peraza of the PAN party, a new pact was sealed between Church and State, allowing the Church to accumulate property that can be inherited and also to intervene in education. To achieve official recognition, the churches must apply to the Ministry of the Interior. It’s not surprising that the first church to be registered, with number 001, is the Roman Catholic Church; a framed copy of the certificate hangs in the office of Diego Fernández de Cevallos with the following handwritten dedication: “To Diego Fernández de Cevallos. With thanks and affection. G. Prigione” This law replaces the 1927 law in which Calles sealed the separation of Church and State initiated by Benito Juárez.

We now know that the relationship between the Mexican government and drug traffickers has been constant. What was initially a juicy business controlled by agreements and pacts establishing quotas has turned into a disputed marked in which the government continues to favor the branch that has nourished it. At the end of the ‘80s, the distinction between the drug cartels and the government began to fade, and it has been hard to tell one from the other. Raúl Salinas (with the consent of his brother Carlos), Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo, Nazar Haro, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Rubén Figueroa (father and son), Diódoro Carrasco, Ulises Ruiz, Mario Marín, Jorge Tello Peón, Genaro García Luna, just to mention a few of the main actors, have been both contacts and beneficiaries, and we can’t fail to mention Diego Fernández de Cevallos. His relation to the death of “el Señor de los Cielos” (denied by García Calderoni) and the fact that he has received millions of dollars of drug money seem like minor matters in comparison to the tight connection of the government to the development and consolidation of the drug trade in Mexico. The country is now going through the most violent circumstances since the Mexican Revolution as a consequence of the Iran-Contra affair initiated by the United States government in the ‘80s, by means of which it allowed the flow of drugs from Latin America into the United States in pacts with figures like Pablo Escobar, Caro Quintero and “el Señor de los Cielos himself”, in exchange for resources used to combat insurgent movements in Central America. The government of the United States fomented the drug trade with no regard for the implications of this activity in places where it was promoted (above all in Colombia and Mexico) in exchange for wiping out political dissidence; the legacy of the Iran-Contra affair is the immense economic and military power accumulated by the drug cartels in our countries. Mexico was accomplice to this plan and now We are paying the consequences of a growth in the drug trade that not even the State can control in spite of the fake war it is fighting; it’s absurd to fight against a product of your own creation.

Through this powerful, complex mafia, Diego Fernández de Cevallos was a central figure in concretizing the change of Mexico to a minimal State (without social responsibilities and marked by an open economy, privatization and a trade opening to transnational corporations), and in making any number of changes in the law that implied historic breakdowns for Mexico. These range from the legitimization of the voter fraud against Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas to the sale of semi-public businesses, the privatization of the Mexican bank, the signing of the Free Trade Agreement of North America, the legal recognition of the Catholic Church (rolling back a hundred years of struggle for the separation of Church and State) and the changes in Article 27 of the Constitution (considered as the maximum triumph of the Revolution of 1910), annihilating not only a form of economic production (the ejidos), but also the basis of the identity of many cultures. We know the names of the people directly responsible for the reality we are now experiencing in Mexico.

These people, true to a logic that is a de facto denial of the right to a life of dignity for most of the people of Mexico, have prostituted the goods, property and resources of the nation; helped themselves to its wealth; and twisted, mutilated, and betrayed its history…, gorging themselves with political and economic power. It is high treason to continue with such operations and just as serious to legalize them, thereby guaranteeing their impunity with their own brand of justice. They’re not even innocent according to their own logic. They’ve had the audacity to champion an anti-patriotic project that declines to honor the country’s historic memory and confines people to dire poverty as a general form of existence.

The country is falling apart as They look on in amazement and disbelief. It is collapsing because of all They have done, and their speeches and media fanfare fail to convince us that we’re on the right path to resolving the numerous problems that have historically persisted in the country. The nation is being bled dry, and They refuse to admit that They and only They have satiated their thirst for unbounded wealth and immeasurable political power at the cost of an exhausted, anemic nation.

More than 30,000 deaths without counting anonymous victims; more than 200, 000 people imprisoned for having turned to crime as a life option; almost 8 million young people unemployed and ready to join criminal enterprises or enlist as scab labor or enter the ranks of drug dependency. The gradual loss of a vision and prospects for the future for young people who see their life option as getting rich quick in the magical world of TV culture or in the armies of the drug cartels. The extinction of work forces to defend Their interests due to the privatization of the country’s businesses and resources. The pauperization of working conditions and wages to maintain sources of employment. The militarization of the country, the criminalization of political dissidence; the extinction of human rights based on deceptive legal and extra legal arguments; impunity for military personnel under protective laws; and the violation of Constitutional rights and individual guarantees, paving the way for the unconstitutional practice of holding people without charges in unofficial detention centers.

This is a fragment of the Mexico in which the political balance left to us has been a long dictatorship and a pseudo transition, with countless examples of the complicity of the political parties. If we focus only on the last 25 years…surprise, surprise! We find the same criminals we’ve just denounced, among them Diego Fernández de Cevallos.

These white-collar criminals have plundered the country, organized special groups, and taken action to protect Themselves so they can continue to hold power and get rich as they see fit. They’ve used their terms of office in state institutions to obtain illegal and illegitimate economic, political and ideological benefits for Themselves and only Themselves, the only beneficiaries, the eternal beneficiaries.

They assure the designation of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Public Safety, the Attorney General, governors, municipal presidents, senators, representatives, and other elected officeholders in order to gain more advantageous positions politically and economically. They negotiate and agree upon special awards and privileges to assure their places in the scheme of political and economic power. They defend political, economic and judicial frauds and support them economically, ideologically, politically, and judicially. It’s as if a police artist had made a composite sketch that resembles them all. Impunity shelters them their whole life long like a halo of saintliness. They tell themselves that the people and our organizations and action networks will never reach them with our long arm of justice and legitimacy. That, however, is not the case.

They are guided by principles and values that reject the possibility of a satisfying life for the rest of us. They have enjoyed using violence, both legally and illegally, visibly and invisibly, not only against organized armed groups, but also against any demonstration of social insubordination or expression that people are fed up. Their principles and values are reproduced every day by individuals with local power (in neighborhoods, towns, and villages) who brutally mistreat and scorn people, taking advantage of the constancy of their poverty. The transformation of all this resides in eradicating the kind of behavior that comes from the impunity of economic, political, and religious power ––their habitat for guaranteeing their own privileges at the expense of others.

The accusations against them are not for abstract responsibilities, but instead for concrete crimes, for engineering or covering up deeds that are unjustifiable even by their own laws; crime is their practice and cynicism their seal. As We build peoples’ power and create new forms of justice and sanctions, We can show that nobody, not even Them, will enjoy impunity forever.

Part Three

National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people. All public power comes from the people and is instituted for their benefit. At all times, the people have the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.

Article 39, Constitution

It’s time

ah, my friends, artisans,
painters, astronomers, sailors,
we’re wide awake. It’s our job
to settle a few things.

It seemed like Diego Fernández de Cevallos was untouchable until that night when his past caught up with him. And even though he really didn’t want to, he had to respond for some of his deeds and see himself in the mirror of our gaze… a mirror that reflected our prisoner’s corrupt, domineering, voracious expropriator’s makeup, and left one thing clear: Whenever we dare to fight against injustice as a people, there’s no felony that will go unpunished.

Diego Fernández de Cevallos Ramos (DFCR) is one of the politicians most responsible for the long, drawn-out process of the economic, political, and social disaster that the power elite has imposed and deployed in our country from 1982 up until now through a mafia structure that operates both inside and outside of state institutions. Under the criminal neoliberal banner, this predatory process has intensified the already deteriorated living conditions experienced by the men and women of Mexico, generating the most extensive counter-reform and the longest step backwards ever taken in our country with regards to social well-being.

DFCR is one of the politicians most representative of the abuse of power, the traffic in influences, and personal enrichment at the expense of the national treasury and resources; he has a long history of legislating in favor of the huge monopolies (finance, communications, food products, construction, transportation, etc.), giving advice to the mafias in power and handling the legal defense of big drug lords. He is one of the main accomplices and operators of the fraudulent electoral processes that have been systematically perpetrated in our country, ranging from the cover-up of the 1988 fraud that imposed Carlos Salinas de Gortari as President by ballot burning, to the 2006 voter fraud that imposed Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. DFCR is one of the main accessories in covering up the deeds of the authorities responsible for the dirty counterinsurgency war waged by the PRI regime and now being continued by the PAN against social movements, regardless of whether they are armed or not. These acts make him one of many accomplices in practices resulting in countless people being pursued, tortured, murdered, imprisoned and disappeared for political motives. He is one of the leaders directly responsible for inserting Mexico as a subordinate in the block of countries on our continent headed by United States imperialism, which has led to industrial dismantling, agricultural ruin, massive migration, the pauperization of life in general, and the plunder of our resources.

To sum up, Diego Fernández de Cevallos Ramos is an operator of the neoliberal oligarchy and the fundamentalist far right, a trafficker of influences, mercenary of the court system, congressman for hire, investor in the crisis, and defender of big drug lords. For all of these reasons, his apprehension was an activity planned and carried out as an act of redress.

Taking him prisoner, exhibiting him, and forcing him to give back a millesimal fraction of all he has robbed is a political strike against the plutocracy and its institutions; a demonstration of the will to struggle and of the operative capacity of the “riffraff,” as he calls us; a demonstration that nobody, regardless of how powerful he or she may be, is untouchable; a demonstration that with unity of action, it is possible to break the will of the enemy and combat impunity.

Seldom have we witnessed the fear, confusion, and anger that an image can produce in the powerful ruling elite as did the first photo of the captive “jefe Diego”, that began to circulate on the internet and that the news media were obliged to exhibit. In it, there was none of the arrogance and cynicism that the anachronistic encomendero [colonial trustee with rights to the labor and tribute of indigenous people] has proudly projected throughout his personal and political career. On the contrary, he appears in a state of total defenselessness, somewhat like the one in which the majority of Mexican people live, but with one noteworthy difference: Diego’s physical integrity was respected and he wasn’t exposed to the scorn for human life with which We are treated by the powerful.

Based on the results of this action, we consider it necessary to share our conviction that if We the people can organize ourselves with a single national political will into a colossal, organized social force, together we will be able to confront injustice and impunity with the aim of defeating our oppressors and reaching an agreement on the organization of a truly humanized society. And even though there are countless accusations against Diego Fernández de Cevallos and even though thousands of citizens demand his legitimate execution, we are aware that the real solution to the country’s crisis does not lie in his extermination, but instead in the ability of the people to get organized and take back the reins of our own destiny, using all available means.

As part of the organized people, we decided to take on a task; the responsibility is ours. We firmly believe that taking back the constructive use of violence is legitimate and we have acted on our beliefs.

This task is part of a larger and more important project: participating in building people’s power in order to transform this transnationalized country into a truly free and honorable homeland of our own. Or is it too much to dream that the wealth of Mexico can belong to the majority of Mexican people? Is it too ambitious to dream of a productive country that can give jobs and a decent wage to its own children? Is it a pipedream to think that We, the 90 million poor people should have a real chance to make important decisions about the economic, political, and cultural model that we want? Is it too much to ask for a Mexico for all Mexican people?

Fraternally yours,

RED POR LA TRANSFORMACIÓN GLOBAL (GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION NETWORK)

DOWN WITH INJUSTICE AND IMPUNITY! NO FORGIVING, NO FORGETTING!

Winter of 2010.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redporlatransformacion

By Lydia Cacho
December 20, 2010
[Spanish original]
Translated by Scott Campbell

I received a message on Thursday: “It’s December 16, they murdered Marisela Escobedo. What do we do now, Lydia?” The shock was immense; I knew Marisela, an admirable woman, as one of the mothers and sisters of women who for more than a decade have dedicated their lives to getting to the bottom of the crimes that have snatched their loved ones away from them.

The day that her sixteen-year-old daughter Rubí turned up dead, Marisela and her family knew that the killer was her boyfriend, Sergio Rafael Barraza Bocanegra. He himself admitted to having killed her “out of jealousy.” Ever since, Marisela had devoted her days and nights to tracking down evidence like the best criminologist (which she wasn’t); to finding witnesses and corroborating facts like the best prosecutor (which she wasn’t). Like a force of nature in the face of every failure of the justice system, Marisela and her lawyers knocked on doors that never opened. And so, with that closed door as a symbol of what has happened to Mexican society, an assassin shot Marisela three times in front of the state government building. Two days later, while Governor Duarte gave vacuous speeches of indignation, criminals burned down her husband’s business and kidnapped her brother-in-law.

Who would dare to murder a known human rights defender in front of the state government building where there are cameras? Who would dare, in such a well-publicized case, to go after the husband? Common criminals who over time have learned that the inefficiency of the state is always on their side would dare. A man who was released from jail and who had made death threats against Rubí’s mother would dare. He who knew there wouldn’t even be an arrest warrant issued for him would dare. Those who sensed that the governor would be distractedly talking instead of immediately protecting Marisela’s family would dare.

Perhaps the great tragedy for this country is that a good part of civil society: activists and human rights defenders, carry out their work thinking it is a collaborative effort with the state, that in spite of the criticisms there is a shared goal: a better country. But in reality, the shared goal is between the criminals and organized crime and the Mexican state. They know that while blood runs through the streets, politicians, entertained in their games of gossip behind the closed door, will send condolences through the media or on Twitter. Meanwhile, the criminals consider human rights defenders a threat, but not the state.

Mothers and fathers continue forsaking everything to pursue the memory of their dead, they follow the footprints of the rapists, murderers, gunmen, narco-traffickers, dealers or police who, banking on this impunity, go ahead and exterminate their girlfriends, wives, friends, employees, slaves or strangers. And they kill them because they want to and because they can. Because, for decades, the government of Chihuahua and its prosecutors ignored the growing violence, colluded with the offenders, brushed off as crazy the mothers who shouted for the lives of their daughters, discredited and closed the door in the faces of the human rights activists who demanded that the state do its job, to create the conditions to reduce poverty, to promote education, to create a safe city.

I’ve been traveling to Chihuahua for 15 years; I’ve documented the disgraces of the bad and the power of civil society. I marched across the bridge and the parks alongside courageous women like Marisela. I learned to keep believing in spite of everything; I discovered what a mother is capable of when her daughter has disappeared, and I learned that we are all in a small way the mothers of all of Mexico’s girls. Never in my entire life have I seen a community so capable of surviving pain, so united in spite of their differences, so strong as to never give up, as Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez. In this land I’ve met the most courageous women, the most supportive men, poets and academics, journalists and workers. Drying tears with newspapers, with hands joined, no one will give up in Chihuahua – that was made clear during Marisela’s burial. Beyond the indignation, the rage, the desperation of this case, the question is: When will the rulers of Mexico have the courage and strength of these women?

By Daniel Arellano Chávez, Neri Martinez Hernandez and Ricardo Trujillo Gonzalez
November 29, 2010
Translated by Scott Campbell

Long ago the government and transnational corporations declared war on the peoples of Mexico, and yet from 1810 to 1910 to 2010 the peoples’ struggle has not been defeated and has shown itself to be a long-lasting breath of unwavering, permanent resistance.

Now this war has been officially titled the “war against organized crime,” a declaration which becomes more shameless with each passing day; advanced by a federal executive who came to power through electoral fraud, deploying the army and security forces to every corner of Mexico to prey day in and day out not just on social movements, unions, popular struggles, human rights defenders, peoples and communities, but also on a population that has committed no other crime than crossing the streets, going to a meeting hall, attending school, or driving on the highway.

Today human rights violations, intimidation, harassment, censorship, torture, secret detention centers, forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, executions, and massacres are common occurrences in a Mexico where 77 people are murdered daily. [1]

Two high school students riddled with bullets by soldiers in San Luis Potosí, two children murdered by soldiers in Tamaulipas at a checkpoint while on vacation [2], families gunned down by soldiers in Sinaloa [3] and Nuevo León [4], the massacres of teenagers in Ciudad Juárez and Durango – which the government justifies by saying they were gunmen and drug dealers.

A shooting attack by Federal Police on a march demanding an end to military and police abuses in Ciudad Juárez resulted in a seriously wounded student.  Out of control violence that has reached those who “should not be affected,” including the murder of students from the Monterrey Technological Institute (one of the most expensive private schools in the country), which has led to protests by those who previously complained about the protests of the “poor and inferior.”

Industrial murder, official cover-ups and repression in Pasta de Conchos, Coahuila in order to protect Grupo Mexico; a daycare center in Hermosillo, Sonora, set on fire with 49 babies and children inside, a crime of negligence pardoned by the government; the explosion of a toxic fertilizer factory in Izucar de Matamoros, Puebla, releasing its carcinogenic contents on the population, as happened ten years ago in Córdoba, Veracruz; in both places covered-up by the Dragón corporation.

This setting repeats itself daily, from Baja California to Campeche.  In such a manner, one day the government decides to suspend the catch of white sea bass in an area declared as a nature reserve on the land of the Cucapá people of Baja California, indigenous territory that for millennia was sustained by this resources; however, as the indigenous note, “the reserve’s director, José Campoy Favela, is the owner of twenty fishing boats and gives preference to Sonoran fishers, who have nearly 1,000 boats and extract up to 30,000 tons of fish, as opposed to the 500 tons on average that the Cucapá catch each season.” [5]

With this same logic of extermination and exclusion, then-Governor of Campeche, Jorge Carlos Hurtado Valdez, with the help of paramilitary and state police, cleared out the San Antonio Ebulá land parcel, inhabited by Mayan peasants and adherents to the Other Campaign, denying entire families the right to housing, just to protect the interests of businessman Eduardo Escalante, father-in-law of the former Interior Minister, Juan Camillo Mouriño, and who has various contracts to build highways throughout the state. [6]

Around the country the Federal Preventive Police (called the Federal Police under this administration), have no time to rest: one day they remove teachers from the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee in Mexico City, during one of dozens of protests in front of the Interior Ministry; two days later they kick out electrical workers in Cuernavaca, Morelos; the repressive work offers no rest, a few days later in Lázaro Cárdenas they attack protesting miners.

The violence of the state shows itself against “dissatisfied troublemakers,” while the daily violence of exploitation and death continue at the same time, whose victims are the thousands of men and women who try to cross into the United States for various reasons, though with one objective – to escape; while the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán and Central America break rocks from sun up to sun down for Spanish buildings, as if it were the colonial era, but this is 2010, and the stones they break are not to build temples for the Church in honor of a triumphant Crown, now it is for the great hotels and tourist corridors of corporations coming from the other side of the ocean.  The slavery remains even though much time has passed since it was declared that the chains must be broken. [7]

While peoples join together to fight in defense of the land, territory, water, wind, forests and jungles, plants and animals, in defense of their natural environment, of their ancestral heritage as communities and peoples; the government and transnationals defy and spurn the “ignorant who reject progress and development” and threaten to use their machinery of repression to defend the benefits of capital offered up in hundreds of projects and megaprojects which treat Oaxaca like a mass of energy to be used for dams, wind farms, mines, hydroelectricity, and if necessary to dig a canal, splitting it in two, to allow for the free circulation of capital and goods, while at the same time impeding the passage of people on the painful route of northward migration.

Municipal and state preventive police; special operations units; banking, industrial and commercial auxiliary police; the State Investigation Agency; agents from the State and Federal Attorney General’s Office; the Special Operations Group of the Federal Preventive Police; the Federal Investigation Agency; Federal Support Forces; the Army’s Special Forces; the Marines; and the Air Force, have not been enough the crush the peoples’ struggle, so one more element of repression is deployed: paramilitaries, murderers-for-hire, like in previous eras.

“The label ‘paramilitary’ – in legal terms – alludes to direct connections between these armed groups and state forces, through the provisioning or sale of armaments, the training of its members or the participation in operations or control efforts.” [8]

The paramilitaries in Oaxaca besiege communities, close highways, assassinate defenders of the land, occupy towns, attack humanitarian caravans, threaten and make political statements with guns in hand, and form part of a new era of “low-intensity warfare” against autonomy.  For a long time they have acted with impunity, carrying out massacres that are finished off with a coup de grâce by the Supreme Court, which gives them impunity by setting free the few who have been detained for these crimes.

Paramilitaries: From the classic French anti-subversion doctrine to the mountains of Oaxaca

It was after two in the afternoon on Tuesday, April 27, 2010, when a humanitarian caravan on its way to the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala entered the town of La Sabana, on whose town hall an announcement proclaims “La Sabana: Birthplace of UBISORT.”  The vehicles continued on their way – San Juan Copala, the town besieged by paramilitaries since the end of November 2009, was a few minutes away.  However, they came across stones blocking the road and a few seconds after stopping and trying to turn around, a hail of bullets from high-caliber weapons enveloped all the vehicles, taking the lives of Bety Cariño Trujillo and Jyri Antero Jaakkola, an act which turned the eyes of the world on the Triqui region and gave international visibility to the existence of paramilitaries in Oaxaca.

What links the French experts of pain and suffering, veterans of World War II, and the paramilitaries in the mountains of western Oaxaca?

Presented in the official history or Hollywood films as a fight for democracy and freedom, and not as the war between capitalist powers that it really was, a war for the natural resources and wealth of a large portion of the world, especially the European colonies in Africa and Asia, and in which Soviet-British and Soviet-U.S. meetings at the end of 1944, the end of World War II led to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin dividing up the world.

Even so, several European countries remained at war, one of them being France, which continued its efforts at spreading “liberty, equality and fraternity” through the world, first in Indochina and then in Algeria.  Their tools included the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment, a regiment of the Foreign Legion which fought in the Battle of Algiers, bringing together old enemies, as it was made up primarily of former Nazis and Hungarian fascists conscripted the day after World War II.

Trained at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, French officials developed the idea that there existed a danger inside their territory of “hidden and subversive forces…potentially wicked and deadly – to be referred to as the ‘internal enemy,’” which “is an object of study and multiple conferences at the end of the 1940s.”

From their “schools” and barracks, but above all, the battlefield, this group of officials gave shape to what would become known as the “French Doctrine,” which, in the words of one of its advocates, Colonel Lacheroy, director of the Center of Asian and African Studies in the Lourcine barracks, which trained young lieutenants and captains heading to Indochina and Algeria, said, “We are facing a new kind of war, new it its conception and execution.  It is a kind of war we call ‘revolutionary war.’…The main problem is control of the population, which supports this war and in the midst of which it develops.  Who controls it and who retains it has won.”  This interpretation changed the French officers’ way of seeing the enemy, no long identified as “the uniformed soldier, brandishing a rifle and flag from the other side of the border; from now on the enemy can be anyone, since it is present in the very heart of civil society.” “From the moment in which the Dutch agreed to the independence of Indonesia, followed by the emancipation of the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma from their colonial tutelage, France has been definitively plunged into a war that has become the frontline of the Cold War.”

For the military high command – always keenly attentive as to the particulars of their victories and failures – the defeat of the French army during the re-conquest of Indochina in 1945 generated a serious sense of the need to reconfigure the basic principles of confrontation and to avoid the kind of humiliation to which they’d borne witness.

According to French veterans who had fought the Viet Minh in 1945, their experiences pointed to an internal enemy which knew how to use the people, indoctrinating them, and that given the knowledge they had of their own surroundings were able to dissipate into the most well-hidden spaces. Given this new confrontational dynamic, which they called modern warfare, it did not make sense to speak about regular armies, perfectly grouped in identifiable rows: “They don’t wear an identifying uniform. On the contrary, they dress like their countrymen, like the common man, the man on the street.  They are everywhere.  Managing a shop, attending classes at the university, teaching as professors.  They could be a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, a worker.” [9]

After the defeat of the colonial French army in Vietnam, its officers called on General Massu, of the Second Bureau of the General Staff in Algeria, to be part of this new “race of officers” which, to use General Bigeard’s blunt expression, “has balls.”

For the Algerian War of Liberation (1945-1962), the French army, taking into account its observations from the battlefield, organized itself territorially and innovated technically.  The army was deployed into each of the areas which Algeria had been divided into: the objective was that through carrying out police work they would be able to penetrate into each region and in this way take total control of the country.  These police bodies were under the control of General Bigeard, who described the operations carried out in Algiers plainly: “we did rapid police work in a paramilitary style.” [10]

The French Doctrine showed that paramilitary-style police work meant that in trying to annihilate an enemy which, according to them, does not show itself solely through violent actions, it was necessary to carry out heavy surveillance at all times and in all spaces, but also guided by intelligence techniques which included groups specialized in detention, interrogation and possible elimination (death squads).

In this military-paramilitary action plan, the interrogation is seen as the most efficient means of acquiring information that aids in the dismantling of an enemy organization.  But its efficiency evidently consists of the use of torture.  A good apprentice would say, “How can you get information if you don’t press for it, if you don’t torture?”

It’s clear that the clandestine nature of these official-paramilitary armies allows them to hide themselves in a space where the exceptional becomes the everyday and where the most atrocious becomes the absolutely possible or even necessary.  Secrecy becomes the executioner’s sphere of protection, re-signified alongside official denial and constantly fed by impunity.  The hood stops being just a descriptive symbol of the paramilitary and turns into the terrorizing uncertainty of its victims.  For a complicit officialdom, if there is no identity there is no responsibility…however, on the ruined bodies the encrusted threat of return lingers.

The above shows the importance of psychological warfare in the new doctrine. It is used to demonstrate that a potentially subversive enemy can be co-opted as a result of government actions, to conclude that in reality everyone is the other: “the enemy could be the kind of guy you would drink whiskey with.”

Consequently, such warfare requires, considering their suspicious nature, the consistent education of social groups.  For that reason, psychological war, far from being reduced to the use of propaganda, expresses itself through the demonstration of state force and its impact on the victims of massacres, torture, sexual violation, forced disappearance, or raids – a widely-sent message which between the lines screams: “this is what happens to those who mess with me.”

This technical-military innovation would be broadly promoted by the French through their war institutes, and the first consumers were the Argentinean and U.S. armies. The French Doctrine provided on-the-ground resources for the counter-insurgency project that the United States designed in the context of the Cold War as a means to eliminate the political participation of the popular classes and to consolidate the hegemony of capitalism.

In this way, the France’s lessons, experimented with in Indochina and Algeria, arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia (infantry and Rangers); Fort Bragg, North Carolina (psychological warfare and Special Ops); Fort Bliss; Fort Knox; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (Command and General Staff College); Inter-American Defense College (Washington); Fort Belvoir, Virginia; and, Fort Gulick, or “The School of the Americas,” based in the Panama Canal Zone, where they were learned and perfected, and deployed in the war against the people of Vietnam.

In the words of U.S. Colonel Carl Bernard, France’s military influence “arrived at a historic and opportune moment: when the United States was reformulating its national security doctrine in order to relay it to the Latin American countries which had become a primary strategic challenge following the Cuban revolution.”

“Our primary objective in Latin America is to help where necessary in the continued development of local military and paramilitary forces so that they are capable of providing, together with the police and other security forces, the internal security necessary,” stated Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Congress in 1967.

To confirm the link between a country’s level of development and the risk of a “rebellion,” strategists from the White House and Pentagon decided to jointly promote military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic policies in order to prevent any popular insurrectionary tendency in Latin America.  This translated itself into economic aid to allied governments in the southern hemisphere and in U.S. military academies the molding of a uniformed elite, capable of assuming political control of a country should a social crisis threaten to turn into a revolutionary situation.

That is to say, the “French anti-subversion doctrine” which came about during France’s wars against Indochinese and Algerian independence, forms the basis of the U.S.’s national security doctrine, which the Pentagon teaches to the armed forces of the American continent (including Mexico).  Through years of permeating these armies with advisors and military missions, they have absorbed the idea of an internal enemy, allowing them to reject constitutional regimes and carry out coups, to take control of government and impose bloody dictatorships, incorporating into these military uprisings old French advisors, such as General Aussaresses, who served as military attaché in Brazil in October 1973 during the height of the dictatorship.

This style of war “would be the Bible for numerous French officers during the war in Algeria – and would be broadly exported afterward, primarily to North and South America.”  And so began the theorization of the use of criminal tactics by the armed forces, which military advisors would then spread around the world.

The School of the Americas

The “School of the Americas” is a military school that has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers, “who have been taught using anti-guerrilla, extortion, physical and psychological torture, and military intelligence manuals, among others; with courses on commando operations, sharpshooting, interrogation techniques, terrorism, urban guerillas, counter-insurgency, low-intensity warfare, irregular warfare, jungle operations, counter-intelligence, internal defense, psychological operations, and anti-drug operations, among others.” [11]

The consequences of this “molding” of Latin American army officers have been devastating for their peoples. More than 10 military dictatorships arose, headed by graduates of the School of the Americas, who in turn filled their staff with more than 100 graduates occupying positions of command in the dictatorial regimes.

In the cases of Central American countries such as Guatemala or El Salvador, their populations were subjected to extremely brutal repression in the 1980s.  The United Nations’ Truth Commission confirmed that in the majority of cases it was former students from the School of the Americas who during this time were the heads of governments, such as General Efraín Ríos Mont in Guatemala, or far-right paramilitary groups, such as Roberto d’Aubuisson in El Salvador.

These results are not events now in the past. The officers molded at the school remain in positions of command in Latin American armies.  Meanwhile, the school moved from Panama to Fort Benning in 1984, rechristening itself as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

The emergence of dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, or “democracies” maintained by force of arms and tools such as paramilitaries, does not represent a deviation by a group of lunatics who betrayed their “unbreakable loyalty to these institutions,” but in reality a reproduction of the knowledge learned in the world’s most “influential” schools of war.

Using that same logic, paramilitary armies who carry out police work in our communities and towns are not uncontrollable actors who emerge from a monstrous mix of deviant soldiers, caciques and drug traffickers; these groups are financed and trained by official forces and turned into a hidden arm of the state and large transnational corporations trying to appropriate territory.  The violence they practice, their methods, is not the excess of government: it is the most concrete manifestation of its long tradition of extermination.

Thus, although military concepts have mutated and have been redesigned, the methods practiced by governments in order to maintain their hegemony have survived; plans for anti-subversive warfare turned into counter-insurgency and became low-intensity warfare.  That face of terror which is the common policy of governments has not ceased to show itself from Algiers to South America, passing through Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, arriving in the Andean region and coming up through Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia; relocating itself in Mexico and penetrating Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca…

——————–

[1] On Friday, June 11, 2010, 77 people were murdered in the states of Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sinaloa, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco, Michoacán and Querétaro. La Jornada, Saturday, June 12, 2010, p.2.

[2] On April 6, 2010, upon passing a checkpoint on the Ribereña highway, members of the Mexican army fired shots and threw fragmentation grenades at a SUV in which two families traveled on their way to the beach in Matamoros.  Martín and Bryan Almanza Salazar, nine and five years old, died, and two adults were wounded.

[3] In June 2007 in Culiacán, Sinaloa.  On a Saturday morning, members of the army killed six people, among them two children, and left three seriously injured at a checkpoint in the community of Los Alamillos, in the municipality of Sinaloa, according to sources from the State Attorney General’s Office.

[4] September 6, 2010. On Sunday evening, members of the Seventh Military Zone killed Vicente de León Ramírez, 45, and his son, Alejandro Gabriel, 15, on the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway, in the municipality of Apodaca. Five more members of the same family were wounded in the incident, which occurred when they were returning to their homes in San Nicolás de los Garza and Escobedo after a party. La Jornada, Tuesday, September 7, 2010, p.3.

[5] La Jornada, April 21, 2005 p.36. It is fitting to mention that also at this moment, Xochilt Gálvez Ruiz noted that: “it’s been detected that the white sea bass has reduced in size. If this continues, there won’t be sea bass for the gulf fishers or the Cucapá.”  He commented that they began monitoring the fishers coming from Santa Clara Gulf and that there were more than 140 illegal vessels; “we want to know who the Cucapá are, because everyone has started calling themselves Cucapá in order to get special rights.” He also proposed to “raise the consciousness” of the Cucapá so that they would recognize the mission of the ecological reserve and train them in other work opportunities, such as eco-tourism. La Jornada, March 30, 2003 p. 33.

[6] Report by the Civil Mission for Peace for a Just Solution in San Antonio Ebulá, Campeche. San Antonio Ebulá: Displaced by Violence. September 16, 2009.

[7] “La nueva esclavitud maya”, Gloria Leticia Díaz, Proceso, December 23, 2007.

[8] Pau Pérez Sales, Cecilia Santiago Vera y Rafael Álvarez Díaz, Ahora apuestan al cansancio. Chiapas: fundamentos psicológicos de una guerra contemporánea, Grupo de Acción Comunitaria-Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, A. C., México, 2002.

[9] Statement by Diaz Bassone in the documentary by Marie-Monique Robin, Escuadrones de la muerte, la escuela francesa.

[10] Statement by Bigeard. Made before the officer who instructed the Argentinean army, Robert Bentresque.

[11] S.O.A La Escuela de las Américas. Gustavo Castro Soto, November 5, 1999 CIEPAC.

By: Silvia Ribeiro. November 21, 2010
Translated: Erica Lagalisse

The 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16) will be held in Cancun between November 29 and December 10, 2010 – the climate crisis is serious and there is much at stake.

Despite this, the most powerful states – which pollute the most and bear the highest climate debt – decided beforehand with hosts’ collaboration that Cancun will be merely a parade, where there will be no failures because they will not even attempt a new global accord. Such a declaration on the part of these few parties functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy as summit decisions are made by consensus. Once again, as they did in Copenhagen, they propose to hijack the whole United Nations Convention to serve the interests of transnational corporations, while the climate crisis worsens.

That there is no binding global accord regarding emissions reductions – beyond false solutions such as carbon markets or new technological development – allows the spurious “Copenhagen Accord” to ride, an accord that was not endorsed by the UN and whose voluntary commitments will nonetheless bring about an average increase of 3-4 degrees – a foreseeable catastrophic scenario for many Southern countries.

But there are a few issues – of enormous relevance due to their horrific implications – on which the climate mafia does wish to come to accord in Cancun. The main ones are: The privatization of air by way of de facto privatization of forests around the world through REDD+ programs, the creation of financial mechanisms implying the inauguration of a new era of Climate Adjustment Programs (following the Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF and World Bank); and the creation of a Technologies Committee for climate change – an opaque theme that may serve to veil the promotion of very harmful technologies such as transgenic cultivars, bioengineering and other technological adventures with heavy environmental and social impacts, as well as function as a patent protection agency for transnational corporations.

There are also proposals to include soils and agriculture in carbon markets, a new attack against peasant and subsistence agriculture, which is essential to feed the world and cool the planet.

The most serious threat of COP 16 is the effort to globalize REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programs, which constitutes one of the largest global assaults to the commonwealth of communities, indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers. REDD+, as I explain in previous articles, is a coin that on one side rewards the biggest culprits of deforestation (if they leave standing a ridiculously meager 10 percent of the forests they log), and, with the other side, buys forest communities for their environmental service of absorbing carbon with their forests. Although forest-dwellers may keep their property titles, REDD signifies an expropriation of their land because the communities that live there no longer have decision-making power regarding said land.

Forest Environment Services Programs have already existed in various countries. There is a history of territories being stripped from communities as a consequence. But forests are not yet accepted within the Climate Change Convention as valid for generating carbon reduction certificates or bonds because it is impossible to calculate with certitude precisely how much CO2 they absorb and decrease in the atmosphere.

What COP 16 purports to do on a global scale is precisely to validate forests as generators of carbon bonds by way of the REDD+ programs. If this is approved, it will turn the forests of the world into hunting grounds for speculators.

It would be a banquet for a market depressed by the financial crisis: What would be paid to communities would be a minimal fraction of the re-sale value of these carbon absorption rights to other companies and speculators. The dirtiest corporations, those that generate the most greenhouse gases, would be able due to REDD+ to continue polluting with the justification that there are forests which are absorbing their emissions, alongside increasing their profits with the resale of bonds.

The problem with this business is that these forests are inhabited, throughout the world, by indigenous communities. For this reason, the corporations, alongside conservationist NGOs and governments, have raged to sell REDD+ as recognition of and benefit to these communities, when in reality it will constitute a massive plundering.

Without a doubt, indigenous communities and subsistence farmers have a fundamental role to play in stabilizing the climate. Precisely for this reason they cannot be left to the mercy of the speculative market of transnational corporations or to the beneficence of NGOs. They and their rights must be wholly supported and recognized, not considered part of a commercial transaction nor treated as cards in the games of politicians and NGOs. To speak of REDD+ without the intervention of the market or alongside indigenous rights, a maneuver some have tried to justify their involvement, is a trick. If rights are the issue, then the program should not be conditional on external certification or a mechanism designed for the market, as is REDD+.

Finally, the poisoned cherry on top: Within REDD+ the measuring of carbon would be done with a combination of satellite and infrared technology as well as meticulous on-site sampling (advanced geopiracy). Beyond alienating them from their land, this would permit unprecedented surveillance of indigenous communities. It is not surprising that the government of Chiapas plans to sign alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, to advance REDD+ in the Lacondon Jungle, where Zapatista communities continue to struggle.

26 PEOPLE ARRESTED AND HELD IN THE COUNTY JAIL ON MULTIPLE CHARGES

Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Action Followed by Indiscriminate Arrests and Targeting of Journalists. Among those arrested by Columbus Police were three Journalists, including TV News Crew from RT America and Unrelated Bystanders.

Thousands of human rights activists, torture survivors, veterans, faith-based communities, union workers, students, musicians and others from across the Americas are gathered today at the gates of the U.S. military base Fort Benning to call for the closure of the School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

Following the SOA Watch rally, human rights activists brought their nonviolent witness to close the SOA into the street leading onto the military base. The activists briefly shut down the road with a large sign that said, “Stop: This is the End of the Road for the SOA.” Their action is part of a longstanding tradition of creative civil disobedience to call attention to the atrocities committed by graduates of the School of the Americas. 10-12 people were arrested, and others charged, including the 90-year old Jesuit priest Bill Brennan, and ordained Catholic priest Janice Sevre-Duszynska.

Two human rights activists crossed onto Fort Benning through the highway entrance. They have been charged with federal trespass and face up to six months in federal prison and a fine up to $5,000.

When the rally participants tried to leave the vigil area, the police blocked off all exit points. After a few minutes, the police allowed people to leave on the sidewalk, only to follow them, indiscriminately arresting people who had neither committed any crimes nor engaged in civil disobedience. Among those arrested was the RT America TV crew, who was filming the police misconduct and bystanders. All arrestees are currently being held in the Muscogee County Jail for up to a $5,500 bond.

SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots organization that works for the closing the School of the Americas and a change in U.S. foreign policy – www.SOAW.org

By David Bacon
Watsonville, CA 11/19/10

The California coast, from Davenport south through Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Castroville, is brussels sprouts country. Most of this vegetable in north America comes from these fields, although a growing harvest now takes place in Baja California, in northern Mexico.

In both California and Baja California, the vast majority of the people who harvest brussels sprouts, like those who pick other crops, are Mexican. In Baja they’re migrants from the states of southern Mexico. In California, they’re immigrant workers who’ve crossed the border to labor in these fields. On a cold November day, this crew of Mexican migrant workers picks brussels sprouts on a ranch outside of Watsonville.

Many people love this vegetable, and serve it for dinner on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Native people in the U.S. point out that Thanksgiving celebrates the beginning of the European colonization of north America, which drove them from the lands where they lived historically. The brussels sprouts came with the colonizers. While the Romans probably grew and ate them, the first plants came to this continent with the French to the colonies of Quebec and the Atlantic seaboard.

Today the people picking in this field may be immigrants to the U.S., but in a longer historical view, they are the descendents of indigenous people whose presence in north America predated Columbus and the arrival of the brussels sprouts by thousands of years. Now they cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. as migrant workers, many speaking indigenous languages as old, or even older, than those of the colonizers – Mixteco, Triqui or Nahuatl. In the soft conversations among the workers of this picking crew, and other crews harvesting the sprouts, you can hear those languages mixed with that of the Spaniards.

Brussels sprouts may be a colonizers’ vegetable, but it has many healthy properties. It contains sulforaphane and indole-3-carbinol, both of which are believed to play a role in blocking the growth of cancer. In yet another irony, in non-organic fields, picking crews often get exposed to the agricultural chemicals that are one important cause of the explosion of cancer in the U.S. Farm workers get much higher doses than the supermarket patrons who buy the produce they pick.

But it’s a job. Putting the food on the table is really one of the most important jobs people do, and one that gets the least acknowledgement and respect. So the next time you decide on brussels sprouts for dinner, first, don’t boil them. It removes those healthy anti-cancer chemicals. And don’t overcook them either – that’s what produces the sulfur taste many people don’t like. But then, when they’re out there on the table, remember who got them there.

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David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

November 18, 2010

The Interamerican Human Rights Commission (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos – CIDH) announced on November 10, 2010 the granting of Precautionary Measures in favor of Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno and his family in order to protect their lives and personal integrity. The petition he
presented this past March, due to constant acts of harassment, has therefore come to fruition. Let us remember here that the most recent act of aggression he suffered was the raiding of his house, whereupon various documents and personal affects were stolen (AU September 24).

Let us also remember that Sr. Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, here with us today, was unjustly accused of the assassination of Roland Bradley Will for which he remained in prison 16 months, from which he was released once the federal justice granted a writ of amparo (lit. protection; similar to a writ of habeas corpus) due to a lack of evidence against him. His case being a clear example of criminalization of social protest, Sr. Martinez Moreno has received a constant show of solidarity from local, national, and international organizations, including the Center for International Law and Justice (Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional – CEJIL), which has also offered support during the petition procedures.

The Center for International Law and Justice (CEJIL), accompanying us today, is an organization that defends and promotes human rights: Its prime objective is to insure full implementation of international human rights standards in those states that are part of the Organization of American States (Organización de Estados Americanos – OEA), by way of effective use of the inter-American system of human rights as well as other mechanisms of international protection.

The November 25th Liberation Committee (Comité de Liberación 25 de noviembre), which has stood by Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno and his family since the moment of his arrest, has declared their concern for his personal security and integrity due to the fact that the aggressions he has suffered have been on the increase. We reiterate: It is the Mexican State that is responsible for his security and his life, as well as those of his family.

Together with CEJIL and the Martínez Tejada family we exhort the Mexican State to comply with and follow through on the ruling of the Interamerican Human Rights Commission (CIDH); to effectively protect Juan Manuel Martínez and his family; and to complete a serious and exhaustive investigation ascertaining the origins of the jeopardy Sr. Martínez Moreno and his family have faced, with the purpose of pursuing and punishing those responsible such that the acts putting him and his family at risk do not continue.

By: Daniel Arellano Chávez, November 17th, 2010.
Translated: Erica Lagalisse

On November 17 2010 at 9 o’clock in the morning, a meeting was held in the Criminal Courts of the Judiciary of the State of Oaxaca, which is located right behind the Central Prison of Santa María Ixcotel, to express indignation due to the liberation of five policemen that had been arrested for the torture of Emeterio Marino Cruz on July 16th 2007.

It was denounced in these Criminal Courts of the Judiciary of Oaxaca that Juan Cuevas Venegas, Agent of the 4th Table of the Public Mininstry, had announced the end of the trial of the policemen Alejandro Franklin Ortiz, Nemesio Vázquez Matus, Alfredo Luis Santos, Eugenio Silva Santiago y Javier Díaz Miguel, at which point the Judge of the Second Criminal Court issued them an in-progress sentence of 3 years, 3 months and 9 days that freed them that same day.

Among the participants in this meeting was Trinidad Cervantes, sister of Lorenzo Sampablo Cervantes (assassinated by the Caravana de la Muerte [Death Caravan] August 22nd 2006), who reiterated the people’s demand for the punishment of the assassins of more than 26 people in Oaxaca, and who emphasized that rather than being afraid it is important to continue the struggle and push forward the demands of the people of Oaxaca. Among others who spoke were the displaced townspeople of San Juan Copala who denounced how they were pressured to leave the Zócalo (main plaza) between the night of Nov. 15 and dawn Nov. 16 by functionaries, dozens of Preventative Police and the Special Operations Police Unit (UPOE). They warned that they would continue their struggle from wherever they happened to be, which at that point was a few blocks from the Zócalo in the San Agustin Church, and that they would return to the Zócalo of the Oaxaca city.

Emeterio, during his two turns at the microphone, thanked the Sección 22 (22nd section of the National Union of Education Workers – SNTE) and the people of Oaxaca that were gathered there, and reminded everyone that the policemen arrested so far, although surely responsible, are “scapegoats” of both the police functionaries and civil authorities that ordered the repression, who have not been brought to trial, and that all remain unpunished.

By: Octavio Vélez Ascencio, Nov. 16th 2010
Translated: Erica Lagalisse

Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) activist Emerito Marino Cruz said that he will protest the liberation of the five municipal and state police officers accused of the beatings he suffered on July 16, 2007 in the vicinity of the “Guelaguetza” auditorium.

“It is not just, it makes me furious; I can’t speak or walk properly because I was left in such a bad way.”

The police officers: First Commandant of the Municipal Police of Oaxaca de Juárez, Alfredo Luis Santos; sub-official Alejandro Franklin Ortiz (bodyguard of the assassinated coordinator of Public Safety, Roads and Transit of the City Council of Oaxaca, Aristeo López Martínez); Agent Nemesio Vásquez Matus; State Preventative Police Agent Javier Díaz Miguel; Eugenio Silva Santiago, Agent of the Commercial, Industrial, Banking and Auxiliary Police; and Alejandro Barrita Ortiz, member of the escort of this corporation’s director who was likewise assassinated, were all freed two nights ago from Tanivet state prison thus ending their sentence of three years, two months and 9 days as dictated by the Second Judge of the Criminal Court.

The APPO activist said that this conviction reflects the decision of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz because it is absurd given the neurological and linguistic damage provoked by his beating.

“He’s leaving (his mandate) and does not want to leave traces of what he did”, he assessed.

Furthermore, he underlined that the Second Judge of the Criminal Court had promised to not liberate the officers until they had covered reparations payments for the harm he suffered.

“They beat me, they tortured me, they almost killed me, without having committed any crime; they left me in a horrible state”, he pointed out.

He highlighted that his family along with teachers from the Sección 22 of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE – National Union of Education Workers) and followers of the APPO will meet this coming Tuesday outside the Second Criminal Court to protest the freeing of the police officers and to demand reparations accordingly for the harm he has suffered.

Not even 300 thousand pesos are enough because I have been left in a condition unfit to work; that’s nothing. I have to take pills every day, and one little box costs 1500 pesos”, he pointed out.

The five police officers were tried for aggravated assault and abuse of authority – criminal record 123/2007, but every last one was acquitted.

Video: REPRESION EN OAXACA (July 2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO6_av7yK3E