ricardo dominguez on Tue, 10 Sep 2002 06:15:44 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Who is killing the Zapatistas of Chiapas |
FROM: JOHN ROSS 011-510-3376 johnross@igc.org MexBarb @1177 Big Trouble in Indian Country - 1 of 2 WHO IS KILLING THE ZAPATISTAS OF CHIAPAS? SOME SAY PARAMILITARIES, SOME SAY THE SAME OLD PRI MEXICO CITY (Sept. 11th) - Who is killing the Zapatistas of Chiapas? In the past month (August), four members of the civilian support base of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation have been killed in renewed conflict deep inside the rebels' Lacandon jungle zone of influence. The Zapatistas and their supporters blame the killings on a rejuvenated paramilitary presence and have mounted a national and international campaign against the Mexican government of Vicente Fox and Chiapas state governor Pablo Salazar. For its part, the Salazar administration claims that it has dismantled the paramilitary apparatus that flourished in the state when the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Chiapas and that the killing is being done by disgruntled PRIistas seeking to undermine Salazar, that southern-most state's first non-PRI governor. The paramilitary phenomenon is a long-standing one in Chiapas. Soon after the Zapatistas' surprise January 1st 1994 uprising, a group of generals at the Rancho Nuevo military base just outside San Cristobal de las Casas circulated a Chiapas Strategy Plan, designed to create and arm civilian counter-insurgency units in the 38 municipalities in which the rebels had influence. The bitter fruit of the Chiapas Strategy Plan was plucked at Christmastime 1997 when members of a paramilitary death squad thought to be named Mascara Roja ("Red Mask") slaughtered 46 Tzotzil Indian allies of the Zapatistas, "Las Abejas' or 'The Bees', in the highlands at Acteal. At the peak of their power, 11 distinct paramilitary formations were calculated to be active in Chiapas. The so-called 'Development, Peace &Justice' group, backed up by the commanding officer of the 31st Military Region, General Mario Rennin Castillo, a counterinsurgency expert trained at the Fort Bragg North Carolina Center for Special Forces, conduted a reign of terror in the north of the state, where human rights groups charge the paramilitary formation with more than 60 murders. Led by PRI state legislator Samuel Sanchez, 'Peace and Justice' drove Zapatista supporters off their land. closed down Catholic churches in the region, and is thought to have organized a failed assassination attempt on San Cristobal bishop emeritus Samuel Ruiz and his then-coadjutor Raul Vera in 1997. Sanchez eventually went to jail and was released by the new governor Salazar after agreeing to lay down his arms. But some 'Peace and Justice' stalwarts resisted pacification and the paramilitary split into three warring factions. The leader of the most violent branch, Diego Vazquez, was jailed last spring after he refused to abide by a non-aggression pact arranged by the diocese in the north of the Chiapas. In a recent interview with this reporter, Salazar's Indian Affairs Secretary Porfirio Encino, insisted that no paramilitary group was now active in the state, a position that was ratified by Chiapas Government Secretary Emilio Zabadua at a Geneva Human Rights conference in August - the affirmation is rejected by the Zapatistas and their supporters. The problem may well be one of definitions. There is no Mexican law that defines and sanctions a paramilitary formation. The strictest definition would be a group that is armed and trained by the military to carry out a military strategy, such as low intensity warfare, with the approval of the Mexican government - but few paramilitary groups actually fit this profile. Mascara Roja, responsible for the massacre at Acteal, for example, bought its weaponry on the black market and was trained by a Tzotzil Indian who had once been a low-ranking member of the military. A looser definition of a paramilitary group might be an armed formation with military characteristics such as uniforms, a description that would fit the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. An examination of five separate incidents of violence against Zapatista civil bases in the Lacandon jungle between July 31st and August 31st tends to debunk the hypothesis that paramilitary bands armed by the Mexican military and supported by the government of Vicente Fox, are responsible for the skein of killings. All of the incidents took place far away from public view with no neutral observers to challenge partisan interpretations of the events. All the killings seem to be more about cows and corn and timber poaching than ideology. In three of the killings, the aggressors are Indians and in all five of the incidents, the perpetrators were PRIistas, mostly with limited fire power (they sometimes used stones.) --- On July 31st, a group of PRI Indian farmers in communities just outside the Montes Azules biosphere reserve in an area the Zapatistas designate as an autonomous municipality named for the old anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon, rampaged through the Zapatista hamlet of La Culebra, injuring seven. The mob was led by Pedro Chulin, a member of the PRI delegation in the state congress and the head of that body's Indian Affairs Commission. Chulin is also the founder and leader of the Organization for the Defense of the Rights of the Indians and the Farmers (OPDDIC) which the EZLN considers to be a paramilitary formation - the OPDDIC's base community San Antonio Escobar is a few miles down the road from a military installation. But there is no other evidence that the Indian farmers who attacked the Zapatistas were either armed and trained by the military, or carried out a specific military strategy ordered by President Vicente Fox, both conditions for defining the OPDDIC as a genuine paramilitary organization. --- The next incident occurs on August 7th at a ranch named August 6th in the autonomous municipality of November 17th, when a Zapatista civil supporter Jose Lopez Santiz is murdered under mysterious circumstances. The details have not gotten less confusing as the case has progressed. Lopez Santiz's murderers are thought to be led by a local rancher, Baltazar Alonso, from the nearby mestizo town of Altamirano - but slow action by the police there allowed the alleged gunmen to escape and they are still on the lam. The killing does not seem to be a political one - the victim and his presumed assassin knew each other and drink and bad debt seem to be involved. Nonetheless, the rebels see the hand of paramilitaries in the Lopez Santiz murder and blame Governor Salazar and the 'mal gobierno' (bad government) of Vicente Fox, for failing to crack down on armed groups. A few days after the killing, Zapatistas marched through Altamirano behind a large banner charging that "Pablo Salazar is directly responsible for the counter-insurgency." Salazar, an ex-PRI senator who headed up the legislative commission that wrote an Indian Rights law favored by the EZLN, had arrived in Altamirano to try and 'dialogue' with the rebels. Hermann Bellinghausen, chronicler of the Zapatista rebellion who files for the left daily La Jornada, and who often compares this long-smoldering conflict to the Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realism classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude", captured the following colloquy for posterity: Pablo: "Hola, I'm your governor." Masked Zapatista: "Can you prove that you're the governor?" Salazar, who looks a little like the U.S. social commentator Michael Moore, takes off his baseball hat. "Do you recognize me now" Masked Zapatista: "Is your name Pablo Salazar?" Pablo: "That's my name but I don't have any picture identification with me today." Masked Zapatista: "There's no problem. We just want to tell you what we want." The Zapatistas explained that they were looking for Baltazar Alonso, the accused killer, to ask for money to support Lopez Santiz's widow, a community custom. The two sides parted amicably. --- The third incident of supposed paramilitary violence against the EZLN unfolds August 21st. Spurred on by Chulin, a band of PRIistas launch a stone-throwing assault on a Zapatista roadblock at Quixmil, just outside the Montes Azules reserve. The Zapatistas are masked and armed only with sticks. The rebels explain they have set up the roadblock to stop clandestine shipments of precious hardwoods to the county seat at Ocosingo. They also are looking for stolen cars and bar beer trucks from entering the zone - the EZLN prohibits alcohol consumption in their communities. The PRIistas claim the Zapatistas are charging a 'tax' of $150 USD to let the poached timber proceed to Ocosingo. One person is shot and six injured in the ensuing melee which Bellinghausen, whose headline writers are often given to hyperbole, calls the "biggest paramilitary attack sine Acteal." --- PARAMILITARIES EXECUTE TWO ZAPATISTAS was the frontpage Jornada headline when, on August 25th, two officials of the San Manuel autonomia were fatally wounded in a shoot-out whose origins are cloudy at best. Other state and national media were more circumspect, describing the gunfire as erupting between family members during a heated discussion over a bride price. The facts substantiate that the Zapatistas Jacinto Hernandez and Lorenzo Martinez came to the school house in Amaytik to settle a dispute involving a Zapatista girl who had eloped with a non-Zapatista youth - her family was demanding a high dowry in accordance with Indian uses and customs. Although the selling of women into marriage is prohibited by the EZLN's own Revolutionary Law of Women, the two officials had been called in to mete out justice. Apparently, all sides arrived at the session armed. When Bellinghausen reported the incident as yet one more instance of paramilitary vengeance against the Zapatistas, Governor Salazar grew choleric and took out full-page newspaper ads blasting the Jornada reporter: "it is irresponsibly simplistic to reduce every act of common delinquency to one of paramilitaries vs. Zapatistas." --- The final incident in this skein of blood took place August 23rd (but was not reported until the 26th) at K'an A'kil in the autonomous municipality of Olga y Isabel near Chilon in the north state where the rebels have been blocking a Pablo-sponsored road-building project, and bears more resemblance to a paramilitary killing than its predecessors. Antonio Mejia, a local Zapatista leader, is gunned down and his ears taken as trophies by the "Aguilares", a family of ex-military men with reported ties to the PRI - all the gunmen are still at large. Curiously, the Aguilares do not appear on a list of paramilitary groups that has long circulated in Chiapas. According to Enlace Civil, a non-government organization that distributes complaints or "denuncias" issued by the autonomous municipalities, 92 incidents were reported between January and July 2002, most of them catalogued as "intimidation" by either paramilitaries or PRIistas, although the distinction between the two is not always clear. There is little question that Chulin and the PRI are inciting Indian on Indian violence in an effort to destabilize the Salazar administration and take Chiapas back by hook or by crook. Chulin's agitation has found sympathetic ears in non-Zapatista jungle communities devastated by the collapse of the international coffee price and the PRI's limited abilities to provide agricultural subsidies in exchange for votes since the party lost the state house. On the other hand, Zapatista communities are doing a better job of surviving the coffee crisis because they are ideologically unified and have consistent support from national and international non-government organizations. A leaflet attributed to Chulin and widely distributed in the jungle, is a measure of PRI disintegration. The screed blasts the Zapatistas, Vicente Fox, Salazar, and even the military whose members are described as "bloodsuckers only interested in their paychecks", not exactly a typical paramilitary sentiment. Even though the PRIistas appeal to the Indians of the jungle to "stand up like men" to the hated Zapatistas' roadblocks, the leaflet also borrows a page from the EZLN playbook by lambasting Fox's grandiose development scheme, the Puebla to Panama Plan, as opening up the Lacandon jungle to transnational exploitation. Despite the PRI offensive in their bailiwick, the EZLN's top command has remained silent for the past 17 months, apparently awaiting a Mexican Supreme Court decision on the Indian Rights law for which they have battled many years. The court's surprise opinion that it has no competency in the matter handed down this past Friday (September 6th) is certain to ratchet up violence between Zapatistas and PRIistas in this already tense zone . *************************************** John Ross, whose "War Against Oblivion" covers seven years of Indian uprising in Chiapas, has written this piece to temper the alarm generated by national and international support groups who claim the EZLN is under paramilitary siege, a conclusion that leads to a dangerously skewed analysis of the actual political dynamic in Chiapas and Mexico today. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net