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.
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments »
x carolina
––When did you find out you were getting out of prison, don Ignacio?
––We’ve always known we’d get out, from the very first moment.
––Was that due to your trust in the people to free you?
––It had more to do with our rage. A rage we’ve stored up inside us. Maybe at first we felt fear. Anguish, along with troubles, uncertainty, rage, impotence. All that transcends pain. It overcomes suffering. We were never sorry, never repentant. This kind of anger knows no human limits. It builds up inside you and, in a way, helps you avoid physical pain… The rage I’m talking about is recent and has also been with us during years, during centuries, of latent suffering… On the question of whether or not we were going to get out, we knew we would because the struggle was not going to let up. It may have fallen back a little bit out of fear, anxiety. But even though we were separated, with people on the run or in jail, we all thought the same way. We had one thing in mind to begin with. Not to give up. Because our pain was overcome by our rage, our unrest, and the confirmation of what we, as people from the bottom of the heap, have always known.”
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments »
by Simón Sedillo
I was asked to write a piece about people of color organizing to attend the 2009 SOA Watch vigil and about our plans for 2010. I believe everything happens for a reason.
I am writing this from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas.
I find it serendipitous simply because when we talk about people of color organizing, I think it is always important to remind ourselves about painful pasts, in order to remove any blinders we are wearing in the present. Haskell University was originally a U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs Native American “Boarding School.” Secretary of War John C. Calhoun set up the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824, which became the War Department’s main agency for dealing with Native Americans until 1849 when it was transferred to the Department of the Interior.
The Boarding School program was developed by a U.S. Army Captain by the name of Richard Henry Pratt In 1879. At the time, the Army was concluding that assimilation into white settler society by most Native Americans was impossible, because they simply would not “give up their traditions and ways of life.” So Richard Pratt developed a strategy he called “kill the Indian, save the man.” The idea was probably stolen from the various Christian boarding school programs developed during the Spanish occupation of the Americas. The main idea behind Pratt’s program was that Native families would be forced to send their children to live in these so-called “boarding schools.”
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments »
To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples at the edge of the water, Atenco:
To my mother, father and brothers:
To all the organizations and people struggling for freedom and justice in our country:
Four years have gone by since that vicious attack by the federal and state governments against our honorable, rebellious people in San Salvador Atenco. Since those savage beatings of men, women and children; the search and destroy of our homes; the murders of Alexis Benhumea and Javier Cortés; the imprisonment of more than 200 comrades; the humiliation and rape of dozens of our women comrades on the way to prison; the deportation from the country of our Chilean, German and Spanish friends who witnessed and suffered the repression. All this at the hands of state, federal and municipal police. All ordered, directed and personally supervised from a spot just a few feet away by State of Mexico governor Enrique Peña Nieto. All this set in motion by the President of the country to make us pay for the affront of having stopped him from grabbing our lands to close the biggest business deal of his regime: the inauguration of a new airport with a deluxe commercial corridor extending for several miles.
related: No Confidence that Mexico’s Supreme Court Will Do Justice in Atenco Case
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments »
By: Damián D. Martínez Vásquez.
Last Saturday, April 2, 2010, the movie Heart of Time, a journey to the heart of zapatista resistance was presented in the basketball court in Tlahuitoltepec, Mixe, Oaxaca, with the presence of director Alberto Cortés and producer Ana Solares, as part of the Cine Libre Mixe et ääw activities.
Those participating in the introductory panel are: Municipal President C. Antonio Martínez Gómez; Mayor C. Cirilo Díaz Jiménez; Education Director C. Isaías Gutiérrez Gómez and Damián D. Martínez Vásquez of Cine Libre Mixe et ääw, who presented the film club’s project and spoke of its importance to the Tlahuitoltepec community.
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments »
