Socialist Action /January 1999
Native Peoples Face Terror in Chiapas
By GERRY FOLEY
The greatest single outrage of the Mexican government's "low intensity
war" against the native people's liberation movement came a year ago
with the massacre of 45 unarmed pacifist Indians in Acteal, Chiapas, by
a paramilitary mercenaries.
Despite the outcry in Mexico and throughout the world against this savage
slaughter, the regime has not relented in its campaign of terror against
the Indian communities that are trying to organize their own local governments.
At the same time, it has multiplied the obstacles to foreign observers coming
into the state of Chiapas who could get out the news of what it is doing
there.
Virtually on the anniversary of the Acteal massacre, the Chiapas state
government, run by the ruling PRI party, threatened an attack on the town
of San Juan de la Libertad, Chiapas, where 10 people were killed in an army
and police raid last June 10 and the population was driven into the mountains.
This town was one of the examples of local self-government that the regime
is determined to stamp out.
Once again, in the middle of this December, the people of San Juan de
la Libertad were driven into the rain-soaked wooded mountains with only
the clothes on their back. In fact, over the past year the Mexican government
has continued to build up paramilitary gangs at the same time that it has
maintained military and economic pressure against the rebel Indian communities.
"Counter gangs" are in fact one of the features of strategy
of "counterinsurgency" warfare theorized by such specialists as
British Major Gen. Frank Kitson, a veteran of the British war against guerrillas
in Malaya. They have been seen since in virtually every case of social unrest
that threatened capitalist or imperialist interests, from the "death
squadrons" in several Latin American countries to the "Ninjas"
in Indonesia today.
The advantages of using such groups, as Kitson and others have pointed
out, are basically two: (1) Such "counter gangs" are not bound
by any of the formal legal restrictions that apply to the official forces
of the state. (2) Using them makes it possible for the authorities to claim
that the conflict is between "uncontrollable" groups in the society
and that the police and army are only trying to maintain law and order.
The "counter gang" that carried out the Acteal massacre was
a particularly savage one. Twenty-one of those killed were women and 15
were children, some very young. An unborn child was cut from its mother's
womb and hacked to pieces. The slaughter was so bestial that Mexican and
world public opinion forced Zedillo to arrest and charge some of the participants.
There can be no doubt, however, that the Mexican government connived
in the massacre. Sixty men blazed away with high-powered guns for seven
hours, obviously not fearing that the police and the army, thick on the
ground in the area, would interfere with them.
It later came out that there were 40 police not 200 meters away from
the site of the massacre. Information has also been published in the Mexican
press about state financing of the paramilitaries.
In the case of the recent threats against San Juan de la Libertad, it
was actually fighting between rival gangs among the paramilitaries that
provided the pretext for threats to attack the local population, who protested
that they had no part in that conflict.
The Mexican government has been able to maintain its pressure against
the Indian rebel movement in the state of Chiapas because of the lack of
any strong, well-organized challenge to its reactionary and repressive rule
on the national level. However, it has not been able to prevent the spread
of the movement for self-rule to Indian communities outside Chiapas.
Despite intimidation from paramilitary gangs and corrupt local political
bosses, Indian self-government slates were recently put up in a series of
towns in the state of Oaxaca. In one, Mazatlan de las Flores, where some
months ago a PRI gang carried out a military occupation, the self-government
candidate, Raimundo Rosas Carrizosa, won 2500 votes, or 60 percent, against
two PRI slates, which together got about 1500 votes.
The PRI attacks in Mazatlan de las Flores were well publicized. There
has been less reporting of the situation in other towns in the area, where
PRI intimidation has continued unabated. It is vital that the spotlight
of international public attention be kept on the Mexican government's crimes
against the Indian peoples.
In an attempt to do this, many commemorations were held internationally
this Dec. 22 to commemorate the Acteal massacre.
In San Francisco, a rally was organized by the Dec. 22 Coalition, which
can be contacted through Socialist Action or directly at (415) 550-1101,
(415) 674-1859, (510) 654-4302. E-mail: dec22coalition@yahoo.com.
Socialist Action /January 1999 |