CHIAPAS: 11 PEOPLE MASSACRED

Please recirculate far’n’wide. If you want on-off this elist:
info@rightsaction.

Since 1995, Rights Action has funded a small number of community-based,
indigenous groups carrying out human rights, legal defense, women’s right,
community development and integral health work in Chiapas.

Over the next few days, we will consider ways to provide direct support to
the families and communities members of these massacre victims. For more
info: info@rightsaction.org, www.rightsaction.org, 860-352-2152

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MASSACRE IN CHIAPAS: SIX WOMEN, THREE MEN, TWO CHILDREN, ASSASSINATED IN
MONTES AZULES: Indigenous Communities and Human Rights Organizations Warned
State and Federal Governments of Threats, but Authorities Failed to Act
By Al Giordano, The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Chiapas,
November 13, 2006

Today, Monday, November 13, presumed paramilitaries committed a massacre in
the Montes Azules jungle region of Chiapas, killing nine indigenous women
and men and two children.

The assassinated, according to a hand-written document received by Narco
News from inside Zapatista civilian communities in the region, are:

Marta Pérez Pérez, María Pérez Hernández, María Nuñez González, Petrona
Nuñez González, Pedro Nuñez Pérez, Eliver Benítez Pérez, Antonio Pérez
López, Dominga Pérez López, Felicitas Pérez Parcero, Noilé Benítez (8 años)
and a recently born infant yet to be baptized.

The details of the massacre, in a very isolated area, far from urban and
media centers, are still sketchy, but the warning signs that violence on
this scale was brewing in the region have been known by state and federal
officials all along. They were specifically warned by human rights
organizations last July and August, but in lieu of taking positive action,
their police and other agencies merely aggravated the problems since then.

The dead lived and worked in the Ejido Dr. Manuel Velasco Suarez II, known
as Viejo Velasco Suárez, a farming community established in 1984 through an
agreement with the Mexican government. They and their previous generations
had lived in other parts of the Lacandon Jungle that, in 1972, had been
declared a “nature preserve.”

Then, as now, the ecological imprimatur turned out to have more to do with
looting Mother Nature than protecting her: the creation of the Montes Azules
biosphere served to grant the Mexican government monopoly control over
exploitation of hardwoods and other natural resources. As part of the
environmental show and simulation, 66 families of the Lacandon indigenous
group – a population that today numbers in the hundreds, descendants of Maya
peoples of the Yucatan Peninsula that had emigrated to Chiapas centuries ago
– were declared sole stewards of more than 600,000 hectares of rainforest,
but on the condition that they cede economic rights to the government over
the land.

Since then, members of other Maya indigenous peoples – primarily Tzeltal and
Chol – have lived under siege by the government, its police agencies, its
Armed Forces, the Lacandones, and other communities of Tzeltales (from the
town of Nueva Palestina) and Choles (from the town of Frontera Corrazal)
that had allied with and benefited from the deal. The remaining indigenous
communities in the region found themselves under permanent attack since
then.

Conflicts in the zone led to the 1984 agreement that created Viejo Velasco
Suarez and other communally farmed communities, protected, supposedly, by
law: Flor de Cacao, Nuevo Tila, Ojo de Agua and San Jacinto Lacanja, all in
the same region as the world-renowned ancient Maya temples and ruins at
Yaxchilán, near the gigantic Usamacinta River that is Mexico’s border with
much of Guatemala.

The eleven deaths in today’s massacre come – as massacres often do – at a
time when the Mexican federal government has returned to the bad old days of
large scale repression (in Atenco last May, and in Oaxaca at present). At
times like this, paramilitaries and police agencies are emboldened by the
signals sent from the top, and increase their historic aggressions against
those – especially indigenous – communities perceived as being in the way of
economic interests.

The federal government of Vicente Fox and his Interior Minister Carlos
Abascal (“the Butcher of Oaxaca”) was warned as recently as this year about
the time bomb of violence threatening Viejo Velasco Suarez and the other
communities in the Montes Azules regions.

EARLY WARNINGS
On July 19 of this year, the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center
issued an alert titled “Threats of Eviction and Harrassment Against
Indigenous Peoples in the Lacandon Jungle.”

Known as “the Frayba Center,” this organization was founded by former
Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruíz and is respected throughout the world as
thorough and honest in its work. The human rights organization alerted that
it had received reports that:

“…on Saturday, July 14, the (state of Chiapas) Public Security police
installed itself near the community of Ojo de Agua in El Progreso,
threatening to violently evict the families of that community, families that
are defending their right to the land as indigenous peoples… We who live in
San Jacinto Lacanja, Flor de Cacao and Viejo Velasco are also threatened
with eviction.”

The Frayba Center stated in its July 19 alert:

“In the opinion of Frayba this is an historic problem with a series of
irregularities and clumsiness by institutions and functionaries that
disregard previous agreements, manipulate parties to the conflict generating
more problems, threaten violent eviction to force the communities and
organizations to ‘sit down and negotiate” or don’t understand the
commitments assumed during negotiations with the communities in dispute.”

The Frayba Center demanded that government authorities take measures to
“guarantee the personal security and integrity of the families” of the four
threatened indigenous communities, that they respect the 1984 agreement and
others that granted them their lands, and that international treaties
guaranteeing such protections for indigenous peoples be respected.

A few weeks later, representatives of that organization, together with a
delegation of North Americans from Global Exchange, as well as the NGOs
Maderas del Pueblo (“Hardwoods of the People”) and Xi’ Nich, went on a
fact-finding mission to the afflicted communities. Global Exchange issued a
detailed seven page report, which explains much of the background history of
the conflict and, also, interestingly, the difficulties and obstacles
presented to their attempts to visit the communities.

THE REPORT CONCLUDED:

“While the exact reasons for the exclusion of these four communities from
the land legalization process are unclear, geographical and political
factors offer an important clue. Three of the communities — Flor de Cacao,
San Jacinto Lacanja, Ojo de Agua el Progreso — are located in a terrain
where there are still precious woods that the Lacandon community wants to
exploit, according to Miguel Angel Garcia from Maderas del Pueblo.

“They are also on the banks of the Usumacinta River, one of the most
important sources of pristine drinking water in the region. “Plan
Puebla-Panama,” the government’s proposal for economic “modernization” for
the country, also contemplates the construction of hydroelectric dams on the
Usumacinta.

“Additionally, many of the individuals who testified believe the reason that
the Lacandon community and comuneros want the land for themselves is so they
can develop it for tourism purposes, as the archaeological site of Yaxchilan
is located nearby, and the Lacandon community engages heavily in the tourism
business.

“The fourth community, Viejo Velasco, because of its affiliations with the
EZLN, also is likely perceived by the Mexican government to be an impediment
to the maximization of profit. Indeed, shortly after our visit to El
Desempeno, government officials violently evicted the EZLN civilian support
base community Chol de Tumbala that was similarly in the process of securing
their land claims.

“Federal, state, and local government officials should take immediate steps
to guarantee the integrity and safety of Ojo de Agua El Progreso, Flor de
Cacao, San Jacinto Lacanja, and Viejo Velasco. These communities are
entitled — under both the covenant of 1984 and the agreements reached at the
Limonar roundtable — to land security. The local, state, and federal
government should immediately take action to stop the threatened illegal
evictions and restore the families who have fled to their lands, if those
families wish. Fairness and justice demand nothing less.”

***

The international human rights organization sent its findings to Mexican
president Vicente Fox, his Interior Minister Carlos Abascal, to Chiapas
Governor Pablo Sal azar Mendiguchía and various bureaucrats under each of
them.

Instead of taking action to correct the wrongs, the state and federal
governments set in motion the events – and gave signals that would be
received as impunity by the opponents of these communities that have
violently threatened them – that brought about, today, the massacre of
eleven indigenous civilians.

ESCALATING AGGRESSIONS
According to a hand-written chronology of the events since then, received
today by Narco News, authored by members of the afflicted communities, the
aggressions against them increased after the Fox and Salazar governments
were informed:

- September 19: “At 4:30 p.m. comuneros from Nueva Palestina came armed with
machetes, rifles, shovels, pickaxes and stones.” They destroyed the home of
one family. At 8 p.m. they shot bullets into a building where women and
children slept.
- October 4: Comuneros from Nueva Palestina attacked two farmers in their
bean field with guns, destroying the crops.
- October 8: Members of the government-allied Nueva Palestina community met
and agreed to attack the inhabitants Viejo Velasco Suarez.
- October 9: The attack was carried out and the home of one family razed;
that afternoon they kidnapped a community member who was “seriously wounded”
in the altercation.

And in another handwritten document sent to Narco News, dated Saturday,
November 11, community members explain that the comuneros from Nueva
Palestina shut off their water supply, leading the community of Viejo
Velasco Suarez to turn the water back on and expel eleven of the occupying
comuneros from their community. The document contains the names and
signatures of the 11 men expelled.

It says: “We ask the Palestinas, the state and federal governments, to
respect this agreement to cease the violence in both parts of our community.
We hold the government responsible for anything that happens… “On Wednesday,
November 1, 2006, the Palestinas began to close the tap for piped water
through today, Saturday, November 11 of this year. That is why the original
groups of this community take the following action… we totally disassociate
ourselves from the Palestina groups and we don’t want them to keep harassing
us in this community of Viejo Velasco, where each one of them signs his
agreement to leave and to never return so as not to cause more problems with
the original residents.”

According to an email just received from the families of the dead:

“The aggressors have been residents of the community of Nueva Palestina, and
in common with the sad occurrences of the Acteal Massacre (of December 22,
1997, also in Chiapas) the families of the victims confirm that there are
now various police roadblocks put up around them.”

According to a communiqué tonight from Maderas del Pueblo, the attackers
were from Nueva Palestina, and they came at dawn: “four sub-comuneros from
the aggressor group who came to the community strongly armed with intentions
of violently evicting the families that lived there.”

Two days later, today, six women, three men, and two children from this
afflicted community are dead. At press time, various human rights
organizations and the Good Government Council in Roberto Barrios of the
civilian bases of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its
Spanish initials), as well as the Other Journalism with the Other Campaign,
are investigating the details of another massacre forewarned.

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