Communiqué from Xanica prisoners after 4 years held captive

TO THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND LABOR UNIONS
TO THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATIONS
TO THE NEWS MEDIA
TO THE PEOPLE IN GENERAL

From San Pedro Pochutla prison in Oaxaca, the university of crime and violence, we raise our voices, our feelings, our rebellious spirit, our anger and courage.

Today, January 15, 2009, marks the fourth year we’ve been held captive by tyrants protected by laws that give them the right to kidnap, kill, and disappear our brothers and sisters who go against their projects. We say to the neoliberal puppets headed by the killer Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) and to his scroungy dogs turned loose on a crime spree to fill the prisons with innocent people, that our people’s only crime is demanding their rights. As these killers well know, our rebellion comes from the heart and we’ll never just sit back and watch this injustice go on. All their chains and cells and walls aren’t strong enough to keep our voice from being heard.

URO can’t talk to us about a State of law when there are hundreds dead, whose deaths are still not accounted for. He’s using the news media to attack our people, our own sons and daughters, raising them to be killers with those television cartoons of blood and death. All different kinds of weapons are used to transmit this violent message and then they have the gall and the most nauseating hypocrisy to tell us they’re fighting crime. They sell our resources to the highest bidder while our people bear the brunt of the direst poverty, and then they act like they’re so concerned about how terrible the economic crisis is. If they really cared about the people, why haven’t they used half the money allotted for their salaries to help out the most dispossessed class in our state? No. Just the opposite. The people foot the bill for everything, even for the security guards that protect their children. While all this goes on, they trick us with crumbs from the table, sending us programs that keep us in this same wretched state of poverty at the same time they brag about all the progress our state is making. I ask myself, what kind of progress is this? There’s simply no answer.

This is why we raise our voices, and they pay us back with jail time and threats to our families for going up against the dismal reality we experience in our country, in our state. And we keep speaking out against all this, maybe in a letter, a demonstration at a government office, a denunciation, a song, a poem, a painting. We must always remember, people, that if we bow down to this treatment, our children will suffer the consequences. We were born free. We love freedom. So seeing as how all those puppets still don’t wear chains, we’ll never slack off in our struggle. And since so many of us have been killed, disappeared, or locked up, we can’t take one step backward.

And finally, just in case anybody feels offended by the way we think and talk, because, yes, maybe we’re a little bit rude, all we can say is that you have to talk to hypocrites in the only language they understand. History tells us that the great Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón once said that to be a diplomat, you’d have to have been a hypocrite first.

Abraham Ramírez Vásquez

San Pedro Pochutla prison, Oaxaca, January 15, 2009.