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Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 13:34:06 -0600 (CST)
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Subject: ZNet,Notes from Other Oaxaca,Feb 28
ZNet | Mexico
Notes from the Other Oaxaca
The Other Campaign calls for a national movement to free prisoners of
conscience
by John Gibler; February 28, 2006
Walking across the central plaza in Oaxaca City time slows down.
Stepping into the expanse of cobblestone walkways that weave through trees
and flower beds, surrounded by old colonial government buildings and
sidewalk cafes, one feels one's hurry diminish like a drop in temperature.
Taking a stroll and then leaning back with an espresso seem to be the most
natural activities in the world.
And this is no accident, the state of Oaxaca spent 80 million dollars
in the past two years renovating the plaza, crafting the image that the
Mexican state so dearly loves to export: the perfect balance of an antique
culture represented in art and architecture and the conveniences and
luxuries of capitalism.
This is the preferred snapshot of the "new" Mexico and the "democratic
change" attributed to President Vicente Fox's six years in office. The
idyllic colonial plaza equipped with credit-card ready shops and
restaurants. The route of the Other Campaign through Oaxaca, however,
revealed a different image of this intersection between Mexico's elder
culture and its contemporary capitalism: the molded concrete of a prison
wall.
Throughout Oaxaca Subcomandante Marcos listened to hours of testimony
from family members and co-workers of indigenous activists who have been
taken prisoner. The charges range from belonging to the armed Popular
Revolutionary Army (EPR) to acts of murder and kidnapping. Yet the
evidence when there is any is reduced to a signed confession, extracted
under torture.
Human Rights Watch has found that over 40 percent of prisoners in
Mexico have never been formally convicted of any crime. Provisions of
Mexican law make it easy for prosecutors to detain suspects "preventively"
and to present judges with confessions, most often blank pages signed
under torture. In 2004, President Vicente Fox sent a criminal justice
reform package to Congress, avowing to patch these loopholes in Mexican
law, but federal representatives have yet to vote on the provisions
pertaining to torture and preventive detention.
In Oaxaca, the political prisoners are mostly indigenous people who
were easy to grab because they weren't running or hiding; because they had
not done anything. After the EPR appeared in southern Mexico 1996 on the
one-year anniversary of the Guerrero state police massacre of rural
farmworkers in Aguas Blancas the Oaxaca state government took over 100
prisoners in the Loxicha indigenous region. Many of those who remain in
the state prison in Ixcotel do not speak Spanish and, in ten years of
imprisonment, have never met with an interpreter.
On January 1, 2005, in the Zapotec indigenous community of San Blas
Atempa, gunmen shot from the balcony of City Hall into a thick crowd
protesting electoral fraud. Four young men fell wounded. In response, the
crowd doused the building and the cars parked around the block in gasoline
and set them alight, allowing the illicit officials to escape on foot
through the smoke and flames. The charred remains of automobiles still
ring the plaza over a year later, and the villagers still guard City Hall,
having installed an autonomous governing body.
The four men who were wounded in the gunfire, however, are in prison.
>From the hospital in Oaxaca City the men and a friend who accompanied them
to the hospital were taken to the state prison in Tehuantepec. The men who
shot into the crowd and the former mayor and current state representative,
Agustina Acevedo Gutierrez, who ordered the gunmen to fire, are all free.
In one of the more dramatic and odd twists in the Other Campaign,
Subcomandante Marcos has entered three state prisons to speak with
political prisoners, once in Tabasco and twice in Oaxaca. Recall: Marcos
wears a black balaclava at all times and leads an armed guerrilla movement
that twelve years ago declared war on the Mexican government and took over
seven major cities in the state of Chiapas. While the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) has publicly avowed to pursue unarmed political
organizing with the Other Campaign, they have neither surrendered nor laid
down their arms in Chiapas, as Marcos has made clear in public meetings.
This might be the first time in the history of the modern state that a
masked rebel has entered state prisons to talk with prisoners of
conscience. Accompanied by local defense lawyers and correspondents of the
alternative media covering the Other Campaign, Marcos entered the prisons
in Tehuantepec and Ixcotel, Oaxaca without so much as being asked to
present identification or pass through a metal detector.
In Tehuantepec, the five Zapotec men from San Blas Atempa sat in a row
facing Marcos across a small desk. About ten reporters hung around the
edge of the room taking pictures of the prisoners and Marcos while police
took pictures of the reporters. One prison guard went around the room
taking down the names of all the reporters in a spiral notebook.
The men Alfredo Jimenez Henestrosa, Feliciano Jimenez Lopez, Jorge
Reyes Ramirez, Roberto Ortiz Acevedo, and Jose Luis Sanchez spoke in
quiet, resolved voices, each echoing the same denunciation: we did not
commit the crimes they accuse us of; we'll do whatever it takes to make
sure that Agustina Gutierrez does not get back into City Hall.
At both the Tehuantepec and the Ixcotel prisons, crowds of several
hundred waited outside. In Ixcotel, while Marcos was listening to the
prisoners accused of belonging to EPR's guerrilla forces, local organizers
with the Oaxaca-based Committee for the Defense of Indigenous Rights
recounted over a mobile sound system their most recent encounter with
arbitrary detentions. Three days prior, four young men were putting up
fliers announcing the Other Campaign meetings in Oaxaca when nearly 20
local police officers trashed their fliers and took them off to jail for
two days.
"They hit us and took us to the municipal jail," said Cesar Luis Diaz,
"for the sole crime of putting up fliers for the Other Campaign."
While the representatives from the indigenous rights group told their
story, the major television stations had their cameras turned off, resting
by their sides, waiting only to film Marcos' exit from the prison
compound.
In addition to the over 25 political prisoners in the state of Oaxaca,
there are hundreds of arrest warrants against leaders of rural farmworker
and indigenous rights organizations across the state, creating a palpable
sense of apprehension: at any moment organizers might be picked off the
street and thrown in jail. And the charges against them are often so
ludicrous they are almost comical. Leaders of the Popular Indigenous
Council of Oaxaca (CIPO) have arrest warrants against them for stealing
electricity: they connected a sound system to an outlet on municipal
property during a protest.
Bertin Reyes Ramos, a 26 year-old lawyer and Oaxaca state
representative of the Popular Revolutionary Front (FPR), was accused of
kidnapping in March 2005 when he persisted in questioning a state
official. Three months later, out of the blue, he was nabbed and thrown in
jail for six weeks.
Arrest warrants, arbitrary detentions, and torture are signs that the
political class fears for the legitimacy of its power: from the Chilean
and Argentine dictatorships to Abu Graib to Oaxaca, the same story.
Subsistence farmers, teachers, and union activists are no military threat
to the state, but their demands for justice are a threat to its
credibility. Thus, with unrivaled aplomb for the theory and practice of
magical legalism, the political class criminalizes dissent and social
activism, striving to silence social movements rather than listen to them.
After visiting two state prisons and listening to hours of testimony,
Marcos and representatives of other social justice organizations stood
before a crowd of 5000 in the central plaza of Oaxaca. Bertin Ramos, now
one of a delegation of four FPR representatives accompanying the Other
Campaign across the country, asked the kind of questions that have landed
him in jail:
"How is it possible that the government spends 800 million pesos on
the so-called remodeling of the central plaza of the city when there are
villages, entire communities, that lack potable water, electricity, roads,
schools, and hospitals?"
Those who joined the Other Campaign in Oaxaca recognize the
opportunity to create strength in numbers. Alejandro Cruz, director of the
Indigenous Human Rights Organization of Oaxaca (OIDHO), has supported the
Zapatista struggle since 1994. He has been imprisoned three times in
fifteen years of human rights work, and at present, three members of OIDHO
are in prison on trumped up charges. "They have tortured us, several
co-workers have died," he said, "this is why we cannot afford to be
isolated, we have to seek alliances with other organizations."
Marcos proposed forming a statewide coalition in Oaxaca to ignite a
national movement for the freedom of political prisoners.
"The push for freeing political prisoners needs to come from Oaxaca,"
Marcos said. "Let us make a national call to everyone in the Other
Campaign to mobilize, demanding liberty for all and the cancellation of
all the arrest warrants" against social justice activists.
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