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Chiapas Highlands
San Cristobal De Las Casas
Indians Carrying firewood
Letter to Editors and Peace and Justice groups,
The indigenous women's cooperative that I represent at our Friday farmer's market has disappeared. I have their faces captured on a 9 minute video explaining how they need fair trade to survive with any dignity. But this week the entire town of Oventic, Mexico is deserted. June 19th, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, organized to protect indigenous rights, issued a Red Alert. It's the first since 1997 when paramilitary murdered 45 indigenous pacifists in a church in Acteal. (The massacre took place over 2 hours, with the government authorities as spectators a couple hundred yards away.) Now the Zapatistas have gone underground.
Since 1994 and the onslaught of NAFTA, the war against the peasant Mayans has been 'low intensity' enough to be on few people's radars. The government strategy is age-old. The native peoples live on resource-rich land, with petroleum, water, uranium, hardwood, and genetic bonanzas. Not to mention all those archeological sites just waiting for tourist development. The Mexican government, greatly in debt to the US and looking out for its own upper class, betrayed its poor masses with NAFTA. It changed 30 points of law to accommodate it, including Article 27 of its constitution which had protected peasant land for perpetual communal use. Now, if the campesinos find their lives intolerably threatened they can lose their land. And thus the pressure of 1/3 of Mexico's military camping out on their doorsteps, helicopter flyovers, rapes, disappearances, murders. And the devastating effect of the plummeting price of corn to the grower, down 80% since NAFTA's inception.
Recently, the pressure has been mounting. Each week I get e-mails of more families being threatened off their land only to join the other 8000 now homeless refugees. Of water supplies to towns being interrupted. Of the accounts of solidarity groups being frozen. A week into June it was reported that a military base had been deserted, and I wondered if Fox was finally fulfilling the San Andres Accords and withdrawing troops. But it seems the soldiers are massing in other places and a military offensive is now feared imminent. Using an MO as old as 'free trade', the government suddenly, last week, played the drug card. They assert that marijuana was discovered growing on land 'under some Zapatista influence'. It is a ludicrous charge, as Zapatistas are adamantly anti-drug/anti-liquor. But the stage is set for disaster.
I spend my springs in Chiapas as a human rights observer. I sit roadside in little Tzeltal Mayan towns so passing military see that a foreigner would be witness to any atrocities they may consider. I read to children in my lap. I hear the men’s hopes for reconciliation with their oppressors because “we are all brothers”. The women who bring me tortillas each day giggle and tell me their stories. I visit Augustin who tried to salvage something from his house that the paramilitary was burning and was shot in the back. At 24 he is a paraplegic. I agonize for these lovely people today.
I charge our government with complicity. Where is the condemnation and outrage as our neighbors and trading partners are involved in genocide? When convenient, the US will wage war against human rights abusers if it is to our financial gain. But in this case the abuse itself will be to the benefit of the multinational corporations and great for our bottom line, and we aren’t saying a word. Our government has leverage here, and unfortunately, that’s part of the problem.
-From an International Observer from Maine, USA
Wikipedia
Mexico pledges to bring peace to Chiapas
Acción Zapatista
Stop the War in the Chiapas!
Understanding The Revolt In Mexico