El Enemigo Común

Those attending this protest rally: collectives and individuals from the Other Campaign, anarchist and libertarian collectives and individuals, people committed to justice and therefore outraged at the injustice of this self-styled “leftist” government.

We call on the Head of Government Marcelo Ebrard to stop criminalizing youth who aspire to and struggle for a more just world; they are singled out just because of the way they think, dress and protest. We stand against this bad capital city government which holds hostages such as Víctor Herrera Govea, showing that it is not much different than the PRI or PAN governments when it jails youth who live in this city of “hope”; evicts poor vendors; grabs the lands of the last peasants remaining in the Federal District and of the residents of neighborhoods and towns where the government is carrying out its tourist projects, highways, and metro lines; and looks down on and represses sex workers.

We proclaim that in this “City of Hope” those at the bottom are not able to aspire to live, to work with dignity, to protect the earth, to commemorate struggles and to travel freely without being exploited, looked down on, repressed, evicted and – like Víctor – unjustly imprisoned.

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Mexico is bleeding. Along with the so-called “war against drug-dealers” we see the whole Mexican territory turn olive green. The militarization is part of the global war driven by the United States, which began with the 9-11 events and created new enemies: terrorism and drug trafficking. Attuned with the Lords of the north, the Mexican government has launched its own war creating a police-ruled state and criminalizing social protest.

The militarization leads to social-control practices which have nothing to envy from those used by the dictatorships of the 70′s: from video cameras to torture chambers, via disappearances and massacres, the regime uses all its resources to establish new conditions for slavery. In addition to the barbarism of the beheaded, the “wrapped” (encobijados), those cooked in soup (“pozoleados”) and other expressions of savagery which the media use to feed the social fear, we find the technology of electronic espionage (phones and internet) as well as the offers for mercenary imports which “will accomplish” the extermination of the criminals. This is how fear and silence appear as the “magical recipes” (extracted from the manuals for psychological warfare) for habituating the media to censoring itself, managing to also desensitize the population towards state and paramilitary-driven violence against social movements.

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x carolina

Today Thursday, April 29, members of the National Front of Journalists for Freedom of Expression, family members of reporters David Cilia and Erika Ramírez, and other activists marched from the Juarez Monument to the offices of the federal Attorney General’s Office to demand the live presentation of the two journalists of Contralínea magazine, as well as two members of Oaxacan Voices Constructing Autonomy and Freedom (VOCAL) and the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), David Venegas and Noé Bautista.

Around 400 people stayed outside the building while a group of journalists and activists went inside to get information and call on the Attorney General to guarantee the live presentation and safety of the disappeared people; these demands were denied. The demonstrators blocked Reforma Avenue and chanted slogans: “Right now, right now, what you have to do is bring them home alive and punish those to blame!” and “David, hang on, we’re ready to rebel!”

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x carolina

Wednesday, April 28, 2010. Some hours after getting the news that comrades were fired upon, killed, wounded, and disappeared by UBISORT paramilitaries yesterday afternoon in the La Sabana community in Oaxaca, two different rallies were held in Mexico City.

Around 1 p.m., approximately twenty members of the Women Weaving Resistance collective, La Otra Cultura, La Otra Obrera, and a family member of ex political prisoner Adán Mejía, protested the attack on the Caravan outside the Oaxaca Government Headquarters in Mexico City with chants, music and graffiti.

A few hours later, the demonstrators joined about 200 other protesters outside Mexico’s Interior Ministry in a rally called by graduate students in Rural Development of the Metropolitan Autonomous University at Xochimilco and members of the Triqui community in the capital city.

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Gloria Arenas visited the Otro Plantón at Molino de Flores and voiced her commitment to speak in all possible places for the freedom of the 12 political prisoners of Atenco now that the case is in the hands of the Supreme Court. She and others present also participated in an act of protest outside the prison, denouncing prison conditions such as a lack of water for more than three days, telephones that haven’t worked for more than three days, and the total lack of attention to dormitory classification. People who are not senior citizens or disabled or mentally ill are placed in areas reserved for them, resulting in violence among the prisoners and worse conditions for those who have a special condition.

Gloria also received a phone call from Inés Rodolfo Cuellar who has become the spokesperson for the imprisoned comrades. Several other individual prisoners sent out letters to Gloria and Jacobo, which Gloria gladly promised to answer.

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

THE OTHER CAMPAIGN GOES ON!

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