The facts are clear: indigenous communities in Mexico are being preyed upon by the US military with the help of Kansas University geographers. In 2005, the Department of Geography at Kansas University received $500,000 in Department of Defense funds to map communally-held indigenous land in the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca. With the help of the US Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), located at Fort Leavenworth Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, geography professors Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson ploughed ahead with the “Mexico Indigena” project, a part of the larger mapping project, the Bowman Expeditions.

The FMSO researcher assigned to the Bowman Expeditions, Lt. Col. Geoffrey B. Demarest, is suspected of using the maps as military intelligence against indigenous communities that assert autonomy and self-determination through collectively governing and owning their territory. According to Demarest, the only path to ‘progress and security’ in Latin America is through the privatization of such types of communally-held land.

In FMSO publications and a textbook titled “Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security and Property Rights,” Demarest claims that “informally owned and unregulated land ownership favors illicit use and violence,” and that the only solution to these breeding grounds of crime and insurgency is the privatization and titling of the land.

It should come as no surprise that Demarest was not only trained at the US Army School of the Americas—the facility famous for teaching torture and the creation of paramilitary death squads to Latin American military personnel—but also served as the US Military Attaché at the US Embassy in Guatemala between 1988 and 1991, a time of heavily US-backed military repression against indigenous communities in Guatemala and several high-profile cases of torture and murder.

Before his work on the “Mexico Indigena” project, Demarest was implementing his land data strategies in Colombia, at least up until 2003. A March 2003 FMSO essay written by Demarest titled “Mapping Colombia: Land Data and Strategy,” clearly states the ultimate use of the geographic data: “While the forensic value of land ownership data is relatively obvious, not so obvious is the correlation between land data and military strategy, but this correlation precisely marks an essential attribute of successful counterinsurgent campaigns.”

In the same essay, Demarest takes it a step further and exposes the imperialistic intentions for land data and strategy: “Strategic power becomes the ability to keep and acquire ownership rights around the world. National, sub-, supra- or transnational power can be measured accordingly.”

The FMSO’s primary mission is to assess asymmetric and emerging threats to the national security of the US. By asymmetric threats they mean guerrilla armies, and terrorist organizations. The FMSO is therefore evaluating indigenous-influenced-social movements as emerging threats to the security of US political and economic interests in Mexico.

Oliver Froehling, geographer and academic director of the Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth) in Oaxaca city, highlights the danger of these mapping projects when he states: “The Mexico Indigena project subscribes to a military/political strategy. We cannot forget that the mapping begins amidst talks for a US military funding packet known as the Merida Initiative. The control and displacement of indigenous communities intends to remove potential political hot spots, contribute to military control of the region, and ultimately ‘liberate’ natural resources for the benefit of the government and, in turn, its transnational allies.”

Indigenous resistance

Demarest’s notion that the greatest resistance to the neoliberal world order in Mexico comes from indigenous communities claiming autonomy and self-determination in the form of communal territory, is of course, no suspicion. It does.

In 1992, after then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari revoked Article 27 of the constitution that had legally given communal land grants to Mexico’s indigenous farmworker population, and in 1994, after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a series of indigenous-led-and-inspired uprisings in southern Mexico have been mobilizing for self-determination and self-defense of their territory.

One of the most notorious struggles, familiar to Left Turn readers, is that of the Zapatistas, who gained global attention by capturing a third of the state of Chiapas in the early hours of January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect. They called their armed indigenous uprising a fight against death and oblivion; a fight for peace with dignity, justice, and liberty. While the Zapatistas’ rifle barrels have remained silent for the last 15 years, they have continued to resist, and more importantly to inspire and listen to many struggles all over Mexico and the world.

On June 14, 2006 one of those many struggles, a teacher’s union strike in Oaxaca city, quickly blew up into a popular people’s uprising with a very strong indigenous base. The success of the ensuing 6-month-uprising was fueled by strong ideas of traditional forms of land tenure and the subsequent strategies for self-governance that indigenous communal life entails. Indigenous farm workers, teachers, students, housewives, and laborers came together in a standoff against the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, demanding his removal from office.

The Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly (APPO), that ultimately took over the state’s capitol city for six months, using a series of blockades and claimed itself the de-facto governing body, grew out of a strong indigenous base. The first general assembly of the APPO, in which 270 delegates participated, was organized under the Mesoamerican indigenous principle of “lead by obeying,” and the general assembly uses an indigenous form of consensus organizing that has existed in Oaxaca for thousands of years.

Exercising their self-determination, APPO members occupied state, local, and federal government offices throughout the city. Strategies of expropriation were employed immediately. Food, water, transportation, and communication were the primary targets of expropriation. At one point, middle-aged APPO women occupied a state-run TV and radio station. When the station’s antennas were attacked, the APPO responded by occupying 13 commercial radio stations. Oaxacans had never expected to hold the city as long as they did. But murder, disappearance, rape, torture and police led drive-by shootings on the part of the state eroded the social movement’s momentum. Oaxaca and the APPO continue to resist the brutal regime of governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and demand his removal.

The battle for Oaxaca is no small one. The state is strategic for neoliberal interests as it is extremely wealthy in natural resources. Already it has become a site of a series of industrial mega projects implemented through NAFTA and the Plan Puebla Panama. Highways, railways, ports of trade, wind energy corridors, mines, agribusinesses, and maquiladora-style assembly plants are some examples of the “progress” touted by the proponents of Plan Puebla Panama. However, over the last 15 years, these symbols of progress have only systematically displaced indigenous communities, which are no longer considered “economically viable.” Human life in Oaxaca is just another disposable variable in NAFTA’s equation for profit. To push indigenous people off their land, and to rob them of their means of subsistence is tantamount to genocide.

Curiously, in 2006, at the same time that the APPO was fighting battles on the streets of the capital, the “Mexico Indigena” mapping project quietly moved its operation from the state of San Luis Potosi to Sierra de Juarez, to a biologically diverse and mineral-rich-region the state of Oaxaca.

Question of identity

For the indigenous of southern Mexico, territory and culture are so intertwined in daily life that one without the other is like a bicycle with no wheels. Yet the ‘progress and prosperity’ of free trade inherently implies a loss of identity and tradition for indigenous communities. The constant bombardment of anti-indigenous propaganda in cartoons, TV shows, and newscasts is no accident. In the free-market, indigenousness is culturally devalued. Billboards on the highways between indigenous villages depict white-skinned consumers with absolutely no relationship to the land from which they consume. The mannequins in all the women’s clothing shops in Oaxaca City—the capitol of a state that is 70 percent indigenous—are all tall, skinny, and very, very white. The most prevalent cosmetic product sold to indigenous women is skin bleach. For indigenous communities in Mexico to claim their autonomy and territory is therefore a deeply urgent reclamation of identity.

In Oaxaca, the indigenous have always been more willing to die fighting for their territory than any government has ever been able to kill them and take it, because negating and criminalizing traditional forms of land tenure is to negate indigenous culture and life. Demarest, the FMSO, and the US military know this. But what they have also discovered in their studies of indigenous territory and resistance in Mexico and other regions of Latin America, is that the most dangerous weapon to neoliberalism is not necessarily struggles for state power, or the presence of physical force. Rather, it is the relentless belief in self-governance and self-determination, exemplified in the traditional form of horizontal power harvested by indigenous communities of Mexico, which poses the biggest threat to the world order. This is the key of cultural resistance, applicable to community-based struggles for self-determination everywhere.

Simón Sedillo is a chicano community rights defense organizer and a documentary film-maker whose work has centered on placing skills, cameras, and editing equipment in the hands of communities in resistance so that they may be able to document their own histories of struggle. Sedillo has spent the last 6 years documenting and teaching community based video documentation in Mexico, in immigrant communities in the US, and with youth of color across the US. Sedillo, who is a contributor to www.elenemigocomun.net, is currently on tour screening short film segments from Oaxaca and Chiapas, and presenting a workshop about neoliberalism and the self-defense of community rights.

On October 23, 2006 the Lawrence Journal World or LJ World published an article which silently uncovered a funding scandal within Kansas University, in Lawrence, Kansas. In 2005, the university’s department of geography received at least $500,000 in Department of Defense funds to map communally held indigenous land in the states of San Luis Potosi, and in Oaxaca, Mexico.

As a result of this original story, on November 26th, of 2007 elenemigocomun.net published a feature follow up story on the funding scandal titled “The Road to Hell”, which elaborates on the the potential dangers of this type of militarily funded mapping project. Since the publication of this 2007 article, myself and a growing number of community members and students from both sides of the U.S. Mexico border, have engaged in several extensive investigations into the details of this particular research project. Our growing concern has revolved around, academic ethics violations due to improper transparency with communities about the research funding, and serious U.S. Army violations of Mexican sovereignty, and of indigenous autonomy. Our collective research over the last year has resulted in several key pieces of irrefutable evidence, demonstrating both academic ethics violations, and serious violations of Mexican sovereignty and indigenous autonomy.

The Scandal:

Kansas University Geography professors, Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson received the funding for their mapping project, named the Bowman Expeditions, from the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) located at the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas. The Mexican incarnation of the project is named “Mexico Indigena” and began mapping in 2005 in an indigenous region known as “La Husteca”, which is partially located in the state of San Luis Potosi, and then moved their operation to the state of Oaxaca amidst the statewide popular uprising of the APPO – Oaxacan Peoples’ Popular Assembly, in 2006.

On the 14th of January, 2009, UNOSJO, the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, released a communique in which the organization expresses concerns of BioPiracy in the Mexico Indigena mapping project, and claims that communities were deceived, having no idea that a primary funder of the project was the FMSO. UNOSJO cites a clear lack of transparency and additional suspicions of implications related to the US Army’s controversial Human Terrain Mapping System. Indeed there is very compelling evidence that the FMSO is engaging in what they themselves define as “Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations.”

The Official Responses:

After the initial elenemigocomun.net article was published, the Mexico Indigena team released an official response to concerns raised by the military funding. Since then the scandal has ballooned, and several Oaxacan indigenous communities and organizers are demanding answers. Why were they not told about the military funding? What will the maps be used for by the military?
And is any of this ethical at all?

In the face of these very serious international concerns, The Mexico Indigena Team, KU Geography professor Jerome Dobson, and the American Geographical Society (AGS), of which Dobson is the president, have all three released separate statements about the situation. All the statements claim transparency, ethical standards, and the best of intentions for the indigenous populations being mapped. The AGS takes it a step further and denies any involvement in the US Army’s Human Terrain Mapping System.

The Contradictions:

First off, the Bowman Expeditions are aptly named after the father of American imperial geographic exploration and imposition, Isaiah Bowman. A new biography about Bowman by Neil Smith, “American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization”, provides us with a closer look at a very racist, and arrogant academic who used his science and the academy to advance imperial political and economic impositions around the world. Smith cites that Bowman captured several indigenous Quechua, and used them as pack animals during his explorations in Peru, which lead to the “discovery” of Machu Pichu. This is just one example of many in Smith’s book about Bowman, which illusrate the geographer’s arrogant nature.

UNOSJO cites that neither they, nor the communities they represent, were ever made aware of FMSO funding behind the Mexico Indigena mapping project. At a second UNOSJO press conference on February 19th, 2009, Aldo Gonzalez added that originally several Oaxacan communities had denied the Mexico Indigena mapping project in their territory because someone noticed a FMSO logo on some of the sample maps that were displayed to promote the project to communities. Aldo goes on to show that in UNOSJO communities, the maps that were shown to promote the project no longer had the FMSO logo, and at no point was this funding source ever mentioned to them.

On The Mexico Indigena project summary reports published in 2008, project coordinators clearly express time and time again, “We (the Mexico Indigena Team) continue to explore how best to display the complex geospatial data needed for understanding the “cultural landscape” or “human terrain” in a web-accessible, easy–to-use format.” Also on KU geography professor Peter Herlihy’s web page, it clearly states, “Our multi-scale GIS database aims at crafting the digital cultural landscape (so-called “human terrain”) of indigenous Mexico.”

Mexico Indigena team members have traveled to Colombia with FMSO agents. In Colombia, the counter insurgency and strategic military uses of this type of mapping project can not be disguised as altruistic, or otherwise intended. No one can possibly imagine happy little mapping in Colombia by the hands of the US Army. Either the Mexico Indigena team is lying or they are playing dumb, but the implications and intentions of the mapping project could not be any more self evident.

The Demarest Factor:

The Bowman Expeditions received their grant from the FMSO at Fort Leavenworth. The official assigned to the Bowman expeditions is Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey B. Demarest. Demarest is the IberoAmerica researcher at the FMSO. During a 23-year military career, Dr. Demarest served in multiple assignments in Latin America and is also a graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, the Defense Attaché Course, Foreign Area Officer’s Course, Defense Strategy Course, Defense Language Institute, and others. He has written numerous articles dealing with internal conflict including “The Overlap of Military and Police Responsibilities in Latin America.” Dr. Demarest’s first book, Geoproperty, considers property ownership as an issue of national security and strategy. His areas of academic interest include emerging threats and responses, new strategic alignments, military history, and international law. Dr. Demarest holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the Denver University Graduate School of International Studies, a J.D., has practiced as a civil attorney and lectures on the legality of espionage.

The Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), is a research and analysis center under the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 (Intelligence). FMSO manages and operates the Ft. Leavenworth Joint Reserve Intelligence Center (JRIC) and conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world. Asymmetric threats are defined as terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgent army’s, while emerging threats are being defined as social phenomenon and in particular, social movements.

Six declassified essays published by Lieutenant Colonel Demarest of the FMSO are the best evidence of sinister intentions for the Bowman Expeditions. Demarest’s essays, “Expeditionary Police Sevice” [1], “Tactical Intelligence and Low Intensity Conflict” [2], “The Strategic Implications of International Law” [3], “Mapping Colombia: The Correlation Between Land Data and Strategy” [4], “Geopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin America” [5] and “The Overlap of Military and Police in Latin America” [6] directly contradict any of the primary intentions made public, or ever expressed by the Mexico Indigena team, the Bowman Expeditions, or the American Geographical Society. Demarest also published an entire text book titled: “Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security and Property Rights”, which is available for anyone to purchase for around $150. It is this text that thoroughly expresses Demarest’s attitude toward the military uses of the Bowman Expedition’s Mexico Indigena project. A seventh essay by the FMSO’s Major José M. Madera, United States Army Reserve titled “Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations: A Case for the Use of Geospatial Information Systems in Colombia” describes with utmost specificity, the counterinsurgency and intelligence uses of open source GIS information, land data, for what the FMSO calls “Civil Information Management.” It is important to note that the bulk of the information provided by these texts, is in reference to the use of geographic data for ongoing US Military operations in Colombia. This military operation is financed by U.S. taxpayers through a funding packet known as Plan Colombia. Recently the U.S. government has voted to fund a similar operation in Mexico, known as the Merida Initiative. Communities and organizers in Mexico have dubbed the Merida Initiative, “Plan Mexico.” Both of these funding packets use the excuse of narco-terrorism, to further militarize communities. Plan Colombia has shown little to no results in the last ten years.

These FMSO essays, and Demarest’s text book on the matter, expose a very particular and sinister military ethic, attitude and strategy with regards to the control of large populations of poor people, indigenous people, and the disenfranchised in general. These specific attitudes include the systematic devaluation of any forms of indigenous self governance and self determination. Cultural identity as a whole is regarded as an impediment to prosperity. In particular, traditional forms of communal land usage and rights, or in Demarest’s words “informal land use”, is specifically cited as the primary impediment to progress, and security. In particular, the Demarest essays cite that informal property ownership in either rural or urban settings is the breeding ground for criminal or insurrectionary activity.

The solutions provided by Demarest to the security dilemma of “Informal Land Use” and poverty in urban or rural settings, is the systematic devaluation, segregation, and criminalization of these communities. Such communities include everything from “shanty towns” on the edges of an urban metropolis, to communally held indigenous farmland, or even urban ghettos with rows of rental property. In this worldview of the dispossessed, Demarest assesses poor communities as deserving of a systematic segregation because of their propensity towards criminal activity and self organizing. He specifically cites concerns about the criminality of large areas of the dispossessed, as they become separately governed autonomous zones. Demarest even admits that though this perception, attitude or strategy may not be as openly acceptable any longer in the US, it makes absolute sense to employ it heavily upon the people of Latin America. However, it is painfully obvious that the attitudes and strategies expressed by Demarest relate directly to systems of urban displacement, or gentrification, within the United States as well.

Demarest asserts that the privatization of property is the key to stability, prosperity, progress, and security in Latin America, and that formal land titling leads to effective government control of the land and its inhabitants. In Demarest’s approach to property and security, existing private property of real value, must be made secure from nearby and potentially unsettled poor communities, through a phenomenon he describes as the “architecture of control.” He concludes that unregulated and informally used land must be privatized, and titled for security and prosperity to take place. Through Demarest’s strategic analysis of private property, the communally held lands of indigenous farmworkers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the rented property of the working poor in Los Angeles are impediments to progress, development, and security. Demarest cites the 1992 LA riots, as a success story of “the architecture of control”, wherein the financial district was effectively able to seal itself off from the rioting masses, and suffer minimal high value property damage.

From the protection of existing valuable real estate to the systematic displacement of poor communities in order to gain formal ownership and titling of their “informally” owned territory, Demarest places the Bowman Expeditions, the Mexico Indigena Project, the KU Geography professors, and the American Geographical Society in a very uncomfortable ethical pickle. Furthermore, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey B. Demarest, and the FMSO, put the entirety of U.S. Academia in an ethical quagmire requiring immediate resolution.

A question about ethics for everyone, not just soldiers and academics:

Today, under a new and historical presidential era, US citizens are in a very unique position to reflect upon the immediate past and identify a series of great American mistakes. However easy it may be to point at the arrogance and volatility of the Bush administration, it is always challenging to ascertain the culpability of average everyday citizens, ranging from apathy, to arrogance, and everything in between. Some Americans protested lightly, and symbolically resisted the global atrocities and national defamation caused by the Bush presidency. Many more US Citizens hid behind the embarrassment of a federal government willing to engage in clearly unethical and unintelligent political, economic, and military strategies that have ultimately proven to be absolute failures for the American people. These failures have disproportionately affected the poor, while profiting and benefiting tycoons and their corrupt institutions. The entire world, with varying levels of access to education and information, recognizes that it is not OK to disregard national sovereignty, it is not OK to impose a single worldview or political economy, it is not OK to engage in preemptive military activity, and it is not OK to gather intelligence in violation of basic human and community rights. No matter how glaring George Bush’s excesses and crimes may be, the American people, more so than just their new president, still hold a serious responsibility to themselves and the world to be accountable for what has happened, for what is to happen next, and for how they are never going to allow these things to happen again. Americans owe it to themselves to save their own face.

The ethics of military funding for academic research may seem blatantly obvious to anyone with any sense of territory, sovereignty, autonomy, communality or self determination. Unfortunately after generations of constant war and fear mongering, it is clear that it has become more difficult for the American people to grasp this simple contradiction. No matter where one may lean on the subject, this particular case is a clear violation of some very basic ethical research standards for any educational institution. US Citizens, and academics in particular, should be very alarmed at the perception this incident, and incidents like it, will give the world about American researchers, and citizens in general. Can the American people afford any more global disdain for their country?

I normally would not be inclined to discuss or debate the ethics of any sort of military activity in which the United States of America is engaged in. My particular concern is the way in which, this fighting force has become less defensive and increasingly preemptive and offensive. For me personally this is a source of great national embarrassment. But for arguments sake, and just for a hypothetical moment, allow me to defend a nation’s right to defend itself. Shouldn’t the right of all nations, and more importantly of all communities, to defend themselves, be guided by a strict adherence to a set of norms, accords, and ethical standards which do not infringe on basic rights such as sovereignty, autonomy, self determination, self governance, cultural identity, and of course territory?

The Bowman Expeditions, the Mexico Indigena mapping project, and the American Geographical Society are directly aiding the FMSO in the gathering of preemptive military intelligence, in violation of Mexico’s national sovereignty and indigenous autonomy. More importantly, this type of intelligence gathering is a direct threat to the Mexican peoples’ personal and collective right to self determination. It is no coincidence whatsoever, that the Mexico Indigena team and the FMSO chose Oaxaca, Mexico as a “prototype” location for their Bowman Expeditions in the summer of 2006. They chose to map “informally owned” indigenous territories in a state amidst a popular social uprising with a very strong indigenous base.

The attitudes expressed in the seven FMSO essays attached to this article, and in Demarest’s book “GeoProperty”, clearly demonstrate a systematic devaluation of indigenous culture and identity, with a particular disdain demonstrated for indigenous or popular self determination, self sufficiency, self reliance, and more specifically self governance. Furthermore, the FMSO shows a deliberate intention to segregate, marginalize, and criminalize large portions of human society simply because they are poor. To the FMSO, it is imperative that territory and space occupied informally by the poor, be privatized and regulated in order for progress and security to be harvested. In the face of this military, political and economic strategy, it is no wonder that millions of indigenous and peasant farm workers, students, housewives, mothers, children, workers, and communities all over the world, are beginning to organize and train in a variety of different strategies for the self defense of their sovereignty, autonomy, territory, identity, and self determination.

End Notes:

The following articles are in PDF

1. Expeditionary Police Sevice
2. Tactical Intelligence and Low Intensity Conflict
3. The Strategic Implications of International Law
4. Mapping Colombia: The Correlation Between Land Data and Strategy
5. Geopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin America
6. The Overlap of Military and Police in Latin America

Other FMSO essays related to Mexico:

7. Law Enforcement and the Mexican Armed Forces: New Internal Security Missions Challenge the Military
8. US-Mexican Border Security: Civil-Military Cooperation
9. Mexican Security
10. Insurrection: An Analysis Of The Chiapas Uprising
11. Mexico’s Other Insurgents
12. Mexico’s Evolving Security Posture
13. Mexico’s Multimission Force for Internal Security
14. The Death Cult of the Drug Lords Mexico’s Patron Saint of Crime, Criminals, and the Dispossessed

Resources:

• México Indígena page at elenemigocomun.net
http://elenemigocomun.net/cat/mexico-indigena

• Dr. Zoltán Grossman’s website on the Geographic Controversy over the Bowman Expeditions / México Indígena:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/bowman.html

• The World Was Not Enough – Christian Parenti’s review of Neil Smith’s book on Isaiah Bowman, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

• Letter to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) from members Joel Wainwright and Joe Bryan:

[W]e ask that the AAG investigate (1) the evidence that [Professor] Herlihy revealed his funding source at the time of obtaining consent; (2) the extent that the FMSO shaped the design of the research itself; and (3) the extent to which [Professor] Herlihy has made the results from the research available to FMSO personnel.

We, the citizens of the community of San Miguel Tiltepec, through our Municipal Authority and Commissioner of Communal Goods, would like to let you know our position regarding an investigative project called México Indígena, begun in 2006 and finished in July of 2008, which produced a map containing information regarding place names as well as other cultural and geographical information furnished by people in our community.

The investigative researchers and students (Derek Smith, John Kelly, Aída Ramos and others), headed by Peter Herlihy, who appeared before the General Assembly in our community, only told us that the aim of the research was to find out about the impacts of the PROCEDE program on indigenous communities. They never told us that the data they collected in our community would be turned over to the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army, and neither did they inform us that that institution was one of the sources of financing for the project. For this reason, we believe that our General Assembly was deceived by the researchers, who intended to gather information for their own interests.

The community did not request the investigation; instead, the researchers convinced the community to approve it. Accordingly, the research did not arise from a felt need in the community. On the other hand, the investigators from the México Indígena project were the ones who designed the research method for gathering the kind of information that really interested them.

Information has been circulated in different news media and on the internet, alleging that our community agrees with the results of the investigation, when we were not even aware of what was going on. These statements were made by researchers from the México Indígena project (Peter Herlihy) and the president of the American Geographic Society, Jerome Dobson.

For the reasons stated above, we want to made our disagreement perfectly clear with regards to the investigation carried on in our community since we were never duly informed of the true aims of the project, the uses of the information furnished, or the sources of financing.

We demand that those responsible for the project México Indígena, the American Geographic Society, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army, the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, and the University of Kansas, as well as all other agencies whose participation has not come to our attention, comply with the following:

• Cease and desist from making any use whatsoever of the information collected in our community;
• Give us back the information that you took from our community;
• Immediately destroy all information about our community that you have in your possession and furnish us with the proof of destruction;
• Immediately eliminate all the information on the Internet that you published about the investigation carried on in our community; and
• Publicly apologize to us for having violated our rights as indigenous peoples and for having violated the very norms that appear in the Code of Ethics of the American Geographic Society that you profess to respect.

Lastly, we issue an alert to all the indigenous communities and peoples of Mexico and the world to not be caught unawares by the investigative researchers of the Bowman Expeditions, or by any other investigators who are only pursuing their own interests or those of the groups they represent; on the other hand, the communities and peoples ourselves should decide on anything that might be researched among us and who should do it.

San Miguel Tiltepec, Ixtlán de Juárez, Oax., March 17, 2009

RESPECTFULLY YOURS

Rogelio Hernández
Agente de policía municipal
San Miguel Tiltepec

Bernardino Montaño Mendoza
Presidente del Comisariado de Bienes Comunales
San Miguel Tiltepec

by John Stanton

“We call upon indigenous peoples in this country and around the world not to be fooled by these types of research projects, which usurp traditional knowledge without prior consent. Although researchers may initially claim to be conducting the projects in “good faith”, said knowledge could be used against the indigenous peoples in the future. “UNOSJO is against this kind of project being carried out in the Sierra Juárez and distances itself completely from the work compiled by the México Indígena research team.”

On January 14, 2009 the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) issued a press release accusing the principal researchers/managers of the Mexican Indigena—a program in the larger Bowman Expeditions —of unethical conduct for not fully disclosing that the US Army is a sponsor of the Bowman Expeditions. They also accuse the principals of geopiracy. According to a member of the anthropology community, “This is a nasty little story.”

“UNOSJO began looking into the México Indígena Project. The investigation revealed that México Indígena forms a part of the Bowman Expeditions, a more extensive geographic research project backed and financed by the FMSO [US Army's Foreign Military Studies Organization], among other institutions. The FMSO inputs information into a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others. Since 2006 the Human Terrain System (HTS} has been employed with military purposes in both Afghanistan and Iraq and according to what we have been able to determine Bowman Expeditions are underway in Mexico, the Antilles, Colombia and Jordan.

In November 2008, the México Indígena Project completed the maps corresponding to Zapotec communities San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila. Contrary to the often-mentioned promise of transparency, México Indígena created an English-only web page, a language that the participating communities do not understand. Before the communities received the work, said maps had already been published on the Internet. Furthermore, the communities were never informed that reports detailing the project would be handed over to the FMSO. In addition to publishing the maps, the México Indígena team created a database into which pertinent information was entered: community member names and the associated geographic location of their plot(s) of land, formal and informal use of the land, and other data that cannot be accessed via the Internet.

According to statements made by those heading the México Indígena research team, this type of map can be used in multiple ways. They did not specify, however, whether they would be employed for commercial, military or other purposes. Furthermore, as the maps are compatible with Google Earth, practically anyone can gain access to the information. Yet only community members can decipher information expressed in Zapotec (toponyms), unless, of course, one has the capacity to translate them, as in the case of FMSO linguistic specialists.”

What’s in a Name: Stone Cold Racist Isaiah Bowman

While UNOSJO’s claim of direct linkages between the Bowman Expeditions/Mexican Indigena (BEMI) and the HTS remain unsubstantiated at this time and may, indeed, be incorrect (a call to Lt. George Mace, PAO, of the HTS program could not returned in time for release), the fact is that US Army TRADOC owns the troubled HTS and a $500,000 chunk of the controversial BEMI–and the data that goes with both. As reported in prior pieces on the HTS, sources state that data from Human Terrain Mapping (HTM) for HTS does not remain compartmentalized but is shared with other US Army intelligence related databases. There is no reason to expect the BEMI data has been treated any differently. Furthermore, the BEMI appears to have accomplished what the HTS program promised but could not produce: a useful deliverable in the form of a user friendly geographic information system (GIS).

As one source put it, “Where HTS really dropped the ball was in successfully integrating the MAP-HT, which includes ArcGIS. HTT trainees are not even learning MAP-HT any more. It’s a total free-for-all in the field for HTS social scientists working on their dissertations or post doctoral research. AFRICOM teams will include geo-spacial analysts. Someone, or a software company is really pushing for geospacial intelligence. This is what the Mexico project is about. It all makes sense now.”

According to an October 2006 article by Sophia Maines of the Lawrence Kansas Journal, The Bowman Expeditions are the brainchild of Jerome Dobson. Dobson believes that the BEMI and related efforts are good for national security, K-16 geography education, and business in Kansas (visit http://www.amergeog.org/bowman-expeditions.htm) .

“Dobson, a geography professor and president of the American Geographical Society, believes the United States needs to use another way to understand the world. And, for $125 million, the United States can get started on a new track. Dobson’s idea — called the Bowman Expeditions — would have geographers and graduate students canvass the globe, gathering intelligence that can inform the government and the public about the world. In the process, the Expeditions also would help revive the stature of the oft-marginalized academic discipline of geography. The Kansas City nonprofit SmartPort Inc [www.kcsmartport.com] is pressing ahead with plans to turn Kansas City into an inland port for shipments from Mexico, allowing goods to pass over the Mexican border freely and to go through customs in Kansas City…the research in Mexico also can benefit SmartPort planners by offering information about the areas along the Mexican railway.”

The Bowman of the Bowman Expeditions is the notable Isaiah Bowman. Christian Parenti, reviewing Neil Smith’s book on Isaiah Bowman, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, for a 2003 edition of These Times, notes this about Bowman. “He helped draw up the modern border of Europe, helped shape America’s non-committal policy toward Jewish refugees from Nazism, and ran Johns Hopkins University and the Council of Foreign Relations. In all these capacities, he sought to harness ideas to the larger project of American commercial and political power on a global scale. But what strikes one most is Bowman’s opportunism: He was to the right of Roosevelt but subtly changed positions so as to always be in favor. He spent his life in the cloistered comfort of Ivy League universities and the inner sanctums of the executive branch. He was a stone-cold racist and anti-Semite who let Jews burn and talked of brown people in the global south as “smaller peoples” in need of control and guidance. One of his last acts of accommodation just before his retirement and early death was to passively allow a Hopkins colleague and social acquaintance, Owen Lattimore, to be red-baited by McCarthy and driven out of a job. It was the perfect, politely brutal end to Bowman’s career, which is to say his life.”

What is US Army TRADOC Thinking?

Programs like the Human Terrain System and the Bowman Expeditions are typical examples of human terrain harvesting necessary for effective, non-kinetic, counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and to the national security strategy/tactics of the United States. On that front, a flurry of COIN manuals and COIN OpEds appearing in the New York Times has been compiled by Wikileaks here http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Counterinsurgency. Reading through the US military manuals and between the lines, one discovers that cultural awareness/mapping is key to COIN which is key to defeating the “network of extremists”, as President Barak Obama puts it. And a key part of all that is the American people. At the US Government’s Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative (http://www.usgcoin.org/), Americans viewing the logo might be a bit perplexed. It reads “Whole of Government, Whole of Society.”

It has been determined by the grand brains of the USA, that Americans need to understand more about other people, like the Mexicans. Dobson claims that one of the Bowman Expeditions’ great by-products is that the human terrain data collected on another nation’s soil will be helpful in schooling Americans on the where and why of other people on the planet. Will Americans also be taught about Bowman the “stone cold racist”. The US Army TRADOC/FMSO paid $500K for an affiliation with Bowman without checking what’s behind the name. Perhaps human terrain mapping ought to start with the US education system both public and private, student and teacher, from K to civilian PhD, and Colonel on up. Further, virtually all human terrain programs are destined to fail until evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary cognitive neuroscience are included as baselines. Then again, 50 percent of the American people do not believe in evolutionary theory. And they are suppose to identify countries on a map and understand the human terrain there?

And Over at HTS

According to sources, nothing has changed and, perhaps has gotten worse. “The contract stated that when we reached Afghanistan that we would be paid on a 120 hour work week. Halfway through training that was changed to 90 then 80, and in January we were told that Steve Fondacaro (PM) has requested our contracting firm to cut our hours to 60. That is a 25% pay cut from what we had agreed on because of budget shortfall and mismanagement of funds. I will tell you that people are leaving the program in droves and those already in Afghanistan are furious. There are several who have quit also. We have sent memo after memo to Fondacaro and Steve Rotkoff (DPM) getting no response. Something is going on and it’s easy for management to cut off funds for those who are doing the work and sticking their necks out.”

The following statement sums up the feeling of many of the thirty sources behind this HTS series. It is shameful that the US Army TRADOC has allowed the current HTS state of affairs to persist. “As a former active duty officer I am utterly disgusted at the information I have received from various sources regarding the HTS program. This is certainly not the military that I once knew and I intend to do something about it. In the future, some of these people may be enjoying an extended stay in the Leavenworth area in government accommodations.”

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) – a longtime partner of Grassroots International based in Mexico – denounced a recently conducted study in the Zapotec region by U.S. geography scholar Peter Herlihy. Prof. Herlihy failed to mention that he received funding from the Foreign Military Studies Office of the U.S. Armed Forces. The failure to obtain full, free and prior informed consent is a violation of the rights of indigenous communities as codified in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations in 2007. In addition, UNOSJO fears that this in-depth geographical mapping of indigenous communities may be used in some harmful manner by the military.

See also: UNOSJO’s full statement | Original Story: “The Road To Hell”

According to UNOSJO, University of Kansas geography professor Peter Herlihy approached local communities of the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca, Mexico to collect information for his project and declined to fully disclose his purpose or his funding sources. In addition to this failure to fully inform indigenous communities of the nature of the study, Mr. Herlihy’s team took advantage of the good-faith of the Zapotec indigenous communities to undertake a study that appears to be of no benefit to the local people.

For 518 years, indigenous people in the Americas have been abused, lied to and exploited in the name of “progress,” including in the fields of education and research. It is regrettable that a U.S. scholar misled indigenous people in the Mesoamerican region in a way that undermines their sovereignty. Echoing the concerns of our partners and allies, Grassroots International hopes that these U.S. military-sponsored studies will be terminated immediately. Further, we request that the University of Kansas hold Prof. Herlihy accountable for his violation of ethics in research, including abusing of the rights of UNOSJO and the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Read UNOSJO’s full statement

source: http://www.grassrootsonline.org

TO ALL STATE, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA SOURCES:

Towards the end of 2008, the results of the research project México Indígena (Indigenous Mexico) were handed over to two Zapotec communities in the Sierra Juárez in the form of maps. Research had been undertaken two years earlier by a team of geographers from University of Kansas. What initially seemed to be a beneficial project for the communities now leaves many of the participants feeling like victims of geopiracy.

In August 2006, the México Indígena research team arrived at the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO, S.C.) to present research objectives and garner support to commence work in the Sierra Juárez region. At the time, the team included a Mexican biologist Gustavo Ramírez, an Ixtlán native well known in the area, who was responsible for initially approaching UNOSJO.

Project leader and geographer Peter Herlihy explained the project objectives to UNOSJO, S.C., initially stating that it was to document the impacts PROCEDE [a Mexican Government program] has had on indigenous communities. He failed to mention, however, that this research prototype was financed by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army and that reports on his work would be handed directly to this Office. Herlihy neglected to mention this despite being expressly asked to clarify the eventual use of the data obtained through research.

Herlihy mentioned that his team would collaborate with the following organizations: the American Geographical Society (AGS), Kansas University, Kansas State University, Carleton University, the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí and the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). He failed, however, to acknowledge the participation of Radiance Technologies, a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.

Although UNOSJO, S.C. participated in some of the México Indígena Project’s initial activities, the organization soon ceased participation due to unclear project intentions. The Santa Cruz Yagavila and Santa María Zoogochi communities also ended up feeling the same distrust and they too abandoned the Project. For these reasons, the México Indígena research team localized activities within the San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila communities, both located in the Zapotec region known as El Rincón de la Sierra Juárez.

In November 2008, México Indígena members Peter Herlihy and John Kelly attended a meeting of the UCC, the Unión de Comunidades Cafetaleras “Unidad Progreso y Trabajo” (the Union of Coffee-Producing Communities “Unity, Progress and Work”), held in the community of Santa Cruz Yagavila. They announced the completion of the Yagila and Tiltepec community maps and offered their services to other organization-member communities. They went on to mention that research had been carried out with the collaboration of UNOSJO, S.C.’s own Aldo Gonzalez, a fact that was immediately refuted.

Following the aforementioned UCC meeting, UNOSJO, S.C. began looking into the México Indígena Project. Investigation revealed that México Indígena forms part of the Bowman Expeditions, a more extensive geographic research project backed and financed by the FMSO, among other institutions. The FMSO inputs information into a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.

Since 2006 the Human Terrain System HTS has, since 2006, been employed with military purposes in both Afghanistan and Iraq and according to what we have been able to determine Bowman Expeditions are underway in Mexico, the Antilles, Colombia and Jordan.

In November 2008, the México Indígena Project completed the maps corresponding to Zapotec communities San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila. Contrary to the often-mentioned promise of transparency, México Indígena created an English-only web page, a language that the participating communities do not understand. Before the communities received the work, said maps had already been published on the Internet. Furthermore, the communities were never informed that reports detailing the project would be handed over to the FMSO.

In addition to publishing the maps, the México Indígena team created a database into which pertinent information was entered: community member names and the associated geographic location of their plot(s) of land, formal and informal use of the land and other data that cannot be accessed via the Internet.

According to statements made by those heading the México Indígena research team, this type of map can be used in multiple ways. They did not specify, however, whether they would be employed for commercial, military or other purposes. Furthermore, as the maps are compatible with Google Earth, practically anyone can gain access to the information. Yet only community members can decipher information expressed in Zapotec (toponyms), unless, of course, one has the capacity to translate them, as in the case of FMSO linguistic specialists.

UNOSJO, S.C. is against this kind of project being carried out in the Sierra Juárez and distances itself completely from the work compiled by the México Indígena research team. We call upon indigenous peoples in this country and around the world not to be fooled by these types of research projects, which usurp traditional knowledge without prior consent. Although researchers may initially claim to be conducting the projects in “good faith”, said knowledge could be used against the indigenous peoples in the future.

We hereby demand that Peter Herlihy honor his promise of transparency and that the Mexican public be made aware all his sources of funding and the institutions that received information on findings obtained in the communities.

We further demand that, in light of these facts, the Mexican Government, firstly the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources for having financed part of the research, as well as the Department of Internal Affairs, the Department of External Affairs, Deputies and Senators for possible violations of the Indigenous Peoples’ National Sovereignty and Autonomy, clarify its position on the matter.

Oaxaca de Juárez, Oax., 14 January 2009

source: http://www.grassrootsonline.org

by Simón Sedillo
November 26th, 2007

$500,000 in Department of Defense funding is being made available to the Department of Geography by the Foreign Military Services Office (FMSO), based out of Fort Leavenworth in Lawrence, Kansas. Geography professors Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy explicitly acknowledge the security and intelligence ramifications of their project, the Bowman Expeditions, citing the geo-political and cultural effects of the “neo-liberal property regime.” The home of the FMSO, Fort Leavenworth, was the command center of the western front during US expansionism into native lands in the early 1800s as well as the epicenter of the War Departments “control” over native populations after the civil war. Today, the FMSO focuses on emerging and asymmetric threats to the national security of the United States of America, which is a red flag as to their intentions in funding the Bowman Expeditions.

US military intervention in Mexico has seen a steady increase in the last decade, and now is set on a fast track through Plan Mexico, which like Plan Colombia, justifies further military funding for the “war on drugs.” The racist history of colonial rule and territorial occupation continues with a whole new set of conspirators seeking economic gain and academic notoriety. The maps produced by this project are not just of the physical landscape, but rather more intentionally of the cultural resistance to displacement. Through the rhetoric of unbiased science, and geographic exploration, the Bowman expeditions are actively paving in Mexico, the road to hell.

Kansas University
Lawrence, Kansas

“The Bowman Expeditions”

Quoting from the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas (LJWorld.com):

• The prototype for the Bowman Expeditions already is under way in the remote regions of Mexico.

• The research is supported by more than $500,000 from the Department of Defense through the Foreign Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. It involves researchers from KU, Kansas State and institutions in Canada and Mexico.

• The teams are tracing the transfer of property from communal “ejido” lands to private property, a process legalized by a change in the Mexican Constitution in 1992.

• Program Co-Director Peter Herlihy believes the PROCEDE, the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Patios, has caused a silent revolution. “I would say this is the most significant land tenure change in any Latin American country since colonial times,” he said.

• The researchers have traveled to La Huasteca in the state of San Luis Potosí and Oaxaca. They have taught the residents cartography and used their knowledge to develop maps of the area. Theyre gathering information about property, demographics and who buys and who sells each parcel of land. They share what they gather with the residents, but Herlihy also sees other uses for the information. Much of the ejido land is forested, he said, thus the fate of the land has implications for environmental conservation. And the land changes also affect immigration, he said

• Geoff Demarest, bureau Americas analyst in the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, said he hopes to see more projects like the one in Mexico. And a second team is planned to conduct research in the Antilles. “We live in a world where we’re now admitting that the knowledge base upon which the government makes decisions could be improved,” Demarest said.

Quoting the Mexico based project website for the Bowman Expeditions, “Mexico Indigena” at:

http://web.ku.edu/~mexind/role_geo.htm

excerpt from July 2006 preliminary report:

• In 2005, University of Kansas geographers Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy began an international collaboration with the American Geographical Society, the US Foreign Military Studies Office, and the Mexican Universidad Autnoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP) to bring together students and faculty from four universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to create a comprehensive national-level geographic information system (GIS) database that focuses on how neoliberal changes in Mexico’s property regime will affect indigenous culture and land use.

• Project PI Jerry Dobson conceived the broad idea of the project because he, like many others, was troubled over US intelligence failures and related conflicts around the globe.

• The prototype research project, called México Indígena, is directed by Co-PI Peter Herlihy, and demonstrates how good old fashioned regional geography can be re-tooled with digital technologies and humanistic methodologies. Dobson’s notion was embraced and supported by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) in nearby Fort Leavenworth from the start.

• The research team’s two goals were: 1) to develop a prototype for obtaining, interpreting and presenting current geographic information on a country from open source, publicly-available GIS data of all kinds; and 2) to determine, develop, and further research a topic having a significant connection to security and defense issues. Indigenous land tenure and radical neo-liberal property regime changes are the specific topic the project team has explored while constructing a broader GIS of Mexico.

• The project team is clear, on the one hand, that no single template can reflect the differences existing between the research conditions found in one country and those in another. On the other hand, the team believes that their experiences in implementing the first FMSO global GIS place-based field research project can provide useful guidance for structuring future projects, helping insure the success of the broader FMSO program to extend these projects around the globe. It truly is worth the investment!

Dobson claims that he is aware of the implications of the technical advances of his science with regards to what he calls geoslavery, or the abuse of geographic data to control populations, yet he contradicts himself in his own public defense of this science, claiming the need for more geography in the intelligence community. Dobson convinced the Department of Defense to fund the Bowman Expeditions with the intelligence and security implications in mind. As a geographer, Dobson must be very aware of the dangers of this information in the hands of military officials wishing to quell popular resistance to US corporate and political interests in Mexico. Cultural geography, unlike sociology, acknowledges with no objectivity the clear pitfalls of capitalist imperialism, and its detrimental effect on indigenous farm-working communities throughout the global south. If this were just a geographical survey of a cultural phenomenon to aid a community in surviving neo-liberalism intact then we could all applaud Dobson’s efforts, but his funding source exposes a more sinister monster behind his scientific rhetoric.

From the School of the Americas to Forth Leavenworth

Fort Benning
Columbus, Georgia

This November 16th and 17th, the 18th annual vigil at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia was held. The SOA, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is infamous for training Latin American militaries in “counter-insurgency tactics.” The School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) has been organizing the vigils for the last 18 years to protest a number of atrocities, which the SOA has been directly linked to, among them the murder of 4 American Catholic nuns, Arch-Bishop Oscar Romero, and 6 Jesuit Priests all in El Salvador. The SOAW website includes declassified copies of training manuals used at the SOA, which include unlawful and immoral counter-insurgency tactics such as rape, kid-napping, disappearance, torture, political and media manipulation, as well as propaganda. Vigil organizers list Argentina – Bolivia – Brazil – Chile – Colombia – El Salvador – Guatemala – Haiti – Honduras – Mexico – Peru – Paraguay and Uruguay as some of the countries, which have SOA graduates. The SOAW links major human rights violations to SOA graduates. Vigil organizers have always insisted that the SOA is not the only school of this sort, and that other military institutions throughout the US and the world may very well be engaged in similar training tactics.

One example is Fort Huachuca, in the state of Arizona. Since 2004, there have been allegations that Fort Huachaca has been linked to the teaching of abuse or torture techniques that were used in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. In October 2007, two Roman Catholic priests were sentenced to 5 months imprisonment for having knelt in prayer inside the installation after authorities refused to accept a letter from them making a link between Fort Huachaca and torture training. (TortureOnTrial.org)

Though the SOA is most notable for training soldiers from Central and South America, the school has shown a steady increase in Mexican graduates. SOAW.org states: “The sudden rise in Mexican graduates corresponds to the growing movement for economic justice in Mexico. In the first 49 years of the School, Mexico sent very few students 766 totalto be trained at the SOA. That number escalated sharply in 1996 and rose to 333 students in 1997, 1,177 in 1998 and close to 700 in 1999.”

“The School of the Americas is part of a larger project to protect and defend U.S. corporate interests in Mexico at the expense of workers and indigenous peoples. The movement to close the School of the Americas is an important expression of solidarity with the Mexican people.” Eduardo Diaz, Mexican labor leader.

Fort Leavenworth
Lawrence, Kansas

For 30 years, Fort Leavenworth was the chief base of operations on the Indian frontier. During the Mexican American War, Fort Leavenworth was the outfitting post for the Army of the West. For three decades following the Civil War, Fort Leavenworth was the epicenter of the War departments control of the Native American population.

Today, the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) is a research and analysis center under the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 (Intelligence). FMSO manages and operates the Ft. Leavenworth Joint Reserve Intelligence Center (JRIC) and conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world.

In allotting over $500,000 in DOD funding, funneled directly through the Foreign Military Studies Office, to map communally held indigenous lands, it is clear that the DOD is identifying Mexico as a staging ground for emerging and asymmetric threats. What is curious however, is that The Bowman Expedition’s initial focus in the Huasteca, has now shifted to Oaxaca, as opposed to one of the states which have outspoken armed insurgencies taking place, such as Chiapas and Guerrero. The LJ World article states, “The teams are tracing the transfer of property from communal “ejido” lands to private property, a process legalized by a change in the Mexican Constitution in 1992.” The fact is that, in 1992, then Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari broke Mexican federal law by revoking Article 27 of the Mexican constitution. Article 27 established permanent communal (ejido) land grants to Mexico’s 10 million indigenous peoples. These land grants were not reservations, but large parcels of land fought for by the indigenous during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 under the auspices of Emiliano Zapata. Gortari revoked article 27, effectively privatizing these communally held lands in preparation for the necessary structural adjustments imposed by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the eyes of the Mexican federal government, as well as Canadian and US officials, these communally held lands had to be privatized in order to allow for “foreign investment” and the deregulation of natural resource exploitation. The rhetoric used by the Mexican program PROCEDE, the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Patios, to convince indigenous farmers to allow these lands to be privatized, was that now, for the first time, farmers would have a title to their land, and could do with it as they wished. Immediately after the revocation of article 27, several less than silent revolutions began to brew throughout indigenous communities in Mexico. Most notably are the armed uprisings in Chiapas, by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and in Guerrero by the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). These two, as well as other armed and unarmed groups, responded to the privatization of communal lands on several grounds.

The granting of land titles was not intended to liberate the land for the people to own and control, but rather to pave a path towards indigenous communities selling their traditional lands and handing them to foreign investors. Before the revocation of article 27 the Mexican federal government would engage more blatantly in the use of military force and state sponsored brutality to displace communities from land wealthy in natural resources or of strategic importance to the US political economy. The signing of NAFTA would put the world’s eyes on Mexico and therefore would require new, and more creative methods of community displacement, land grabbing and natural resource exploitation. First off, with land titles, indigenous farmers who were once bound by their communities to keep and work lands for and by their indigenous peoples, could now be persuaded to sell these lands. Yet privatizations would not be enough to persuade sufficient numbers of farmers to give up their livelihood and traditions. Therefore, a second and more insidiously neo-colonial aspect of PROCEDE is the granting of overlapping land titles to neighboring communities or tribes, which if they were not already feuding over territorial limits, they most certainly would begin to feud now. PROCEDEs exacerbation of existing feuds and the creation of new feuds over territorial limits would not satisfy the need for communally held lands to be made available for foreign investment. This brings us back to the role of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth in Lawrence, Kansas, and to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. The rhetoric behind the role of the North American Free Trade Agreement was that of democratization, therefore the use of the military to enforce the necessary structural adjustments and land displacements in order to prepare Mexico for its bright new future, as a “developing” nation, would no longer be openly palatable. The role of the Foreign Military Services Office in identifying “emerging and asymmetric” threats in Oaxaca, Mexico is chilling to say the least. Fort Leavenworth has a vast array of knowledge with regards to how neo-liberal changes in Mexico’s property regime will affect indigenous culture and land use. As an outpost for the western expansion into native lands for over thirty years, and as an epicenter for the “control” of the native peoples, the military base must have acquired some knowledge on the political, economic, social, cultural, psychological and spiritual effects of displacing indigenous peoples from their land, by any means.

The Greatest Threat to the Security of the United States of America

There is nothing surprising about the involvement of the Foreign Military Services Office (FMSO) in assessing emerging and asymmetric threats to the United States neo-liberal agenda around the world. However, what is striking here, is what the FMSO qualifies as an emerging or asymmetric threat. In general, asymmetric threats are terrorist groups, or armed insurgent groups, but the FMSO’s extension of the classification of “asymmetric” to “emerging”, encompasses much more than terrorist and armed insurgent groups. The extension of asymmetric to emerging, inherently includes social movements themselves as threats; the Oaxacan Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO), its member communities and organizations being no exception. So what is it that is so threatening about social movements in Oaxaca to the United States? The same thing that was so threatening about Native Americans resisting displacement from their lands by force to meet the needs of the growing white settler population. The popular social movement within the APPO, its communities, and its member organizations is indigenous at its root. Over 3/5 of Oaxaca’s municipalities are governed by traditional indigenous methods of self-governance. These methods of government pre-exist communism, anarchism, socialism, democracy, and any of the other Eurocentric political ideals which dominate the geopolitical landscape of our world today. The traditional forms of government delineated by the indigenous principles of unity and resistance, which were synthesized by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, permeate throughout Mesoamerica, and not just Chiapas.

The Zapatistas presented the world with seven of these principles, and left the notion of them, as a guiding path towards the rediscovery of other “lost” Mesoamerican principles. In June of 2006, at the onset of a popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, the APPO made clear to the world that they too would aspire to these principles as the foundation of their proposed popular assembly, declaring publicly, as the EZLN’s Sub-Comandante Marcos had years earlier, that the APPO would “lead by obeying.”

The greatest threat to the neo-liberal political economy is not terrorism, nor armed insurgency, nor drugs. It has always been and continues to be, grassroots community based organizing for self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, self-empowerment, and self-defense. In Mexico, as throughout the growing popular movements brewing all over Latin America, this type of organizing can be broken down to just one word: “autogestion.” Autogestion is the greatest threat to neo-liberalism, and its benefits to the American people. When communities whose role within the neo-liberal political economy is that of a slave, a servant or worse yet, a disposable variable, begin to organize for self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, self-empowerment, and self-defense, that is the greatest threat to the security of the United States of America. In fact it is the only thing that has ever truly been considered a threat.

To have a blatant military response to this type of threat has become less and less workable for the United States, and during the 80s and 90s the US government has exponentially increased strategies for low intensity warfare in order to erode the support base of popular social movements who challenge the neo-liberal political economy. Today, as the US did in Colombia, President Bush is requesting additional anti-narcotics funding for Mexico through “Plan Mexico“, dubbed the “Merida Initiative” to avoid the negative connotations associated with the absolutely unsuccessful Plan Colombia. Again the threat to US corporate interests in Mexico, as in Colombia, are not drugs or drug dealers, but popular resistance to land displacements. In the case of Mexico, the Mexican military becomes the executer of US military operations in Mexico, receiving 80% of its financing and training support directly from the US government. The Mexican military then outsources brutality to the Mexican Federal Preventive Police and the various paramilitary forces found throughout the Mexican territory including, but not limited to, vigilante groups, trained death squads, and militarized civilians carrying out atrocities disguised as agrarian land disputes.

A profoundly depressing part of the story is how many Americans would be “surprised to hear” that this is “still going on.” Worse yet, are the “good intentions” of academics who like to play at sciences without really evaluating the consequences of their research. In 2002, one Oaxacan farmer asked and expressed to me: “Do Americans really think that the peace, comfort, tranquility, and prosperity they enjoy today has come about without grave consequences to the communities whose back, sweat, and blood has been and continues to be used to fuel this machine? Do Americans not realize that their peace, is our terror? And if they did, would they care?”