Chiapas Support Committee
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The education project of the new right
[Admin: This article shows the importance of autonomous (self-governed) educational institutions, like those the Zapatistas are constructing in their communities.]
Zapatista primary school in the Caracol of Oventic, Chiapas.
By: Raúl Zibechi
A new right appropriate for extractive times and for exploitation-piracy against the peoples has been born; a right after the Welfare State, which no longer aspires to development, but rather to consolidate inequalities, segregation of the half that is poor, mestizo, Indian and black on our continent. An implacable right formed in rejection of the popular, in national sovereignty, in laws and constitutions.
In the terrain of education, that new right seeks to rid itself of prior commitments, among them the laity and freedom of the teachers, for accommodating the educational system to the period of war and confrontation that we travel through. The objective is to retake control of the whole of the education system, from the ministers to the classroom, consolidating an anti-emancipatory education and one in which control of the population is almost exclusively the objective.
The non-governmental organization School Without Party was born 12 years ago in Brazil, very active on the social networks and the big media, articulated with deputies and councilors from the most diverse parties to get their proposals approved. On its website (escolasempartido.org/) one can access the six-point program entitled Teachers’ obligations, in which it emphasizes that the teacher shall not promote his own ideas in the classroom, prejudice the students that profess different ideas or make political-party propaganda and shall be limited to exposing the program in a neutral way; and it grants parents the selection of the “moral education” that they want for their children.
Some “principles” of School Without Party appear compatible. Nevertheless, they bring with them objectives that make us go back more than a century. On the one hand, it differentiates between the act of educating and that of instructing. For them, education is the responsibility of Church and family, while teachers should be limited to instructing; in other words, to transmitting knowledge as if it were neutral, ahistorical, de-contextualized.
The second is what they consider as “indoctrination” in the classroom. Talking about feminism, homophobia or reproductive rights, for example, would be like imposing “gender ideology” in schools. Everything that might deviate from the subject is considered “indoctrination,” a situation that en los proposed legislation that School Without Party has presented in various municipios and in state parliaments would be classified as a “ideological assault crime” and “abuse of authority,” punishable with prison and aggravated sentences.
In the part “capturing the indoctrinator” on its web page, appears a long list of common classroom situations, like “defaming historic, political or religious personalities,” among many others. The teacher would have to mention Hitler, Pinochet or Mussolini without more, like any other personality, without establishing differences, leaving opinion exclusively to the parents. It’s the same with respect to genocides, femicides and so on, because mentioning values is rigorously prohibited. They consider that debates about sexual diversity, contemplated in the curricula of many countries, would in this case be “unconstitutional.”
One of the more serious practices School Without Party promotes is spying on the teaching practice to denounce it afterwards. Under the epigraph “Planning your denunciation,” it asks the students and parents to carefully take notes or film the moments in which the teacher would be “indoctrinating” the students. They promote attitudes that lead the youths to police the teachers.
One of the central objectives of the new right within the educational terrain is the disqualification of the teachers that would be guilty of all the evils of education, from scholastic failure to low quality of instruction. In that way they get to divert attention from the structural problems in education, focusing only on the consequences and hiding their causes. The teacher is always suspected of leftism. In parallel, they consider that the students don’t have the capacity to form their own convictions and that they must be subject to paternal, church or teaching authority.
As was expected, the teachers have reacted with campaigns denouncing the project, since it was approved in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, and will be brought up in others. But we should not forget that what is proposed in this conjuncture, not only in Brazil, is to stop short the growing student movement, in particular the secondary students, who are the least susceptible of being coopted by the state institutions and the electoral left.
In effect, the Brazilian political crisis is modeled by the mobilizations of June 2013, a crisis that is far from having been closed with the illegitimate removal of President Dilma Rousseff. Even Chile, the exemplary neoliberal regime for its stability, travels through a crisis of legitimacy as a consequence of the powerful student movement that since 2011 opened spaces through which diverse social actors are passing. One of the most important impresarios, Andrónico Luksic, recognizes that “the country is falling” and emphasizes the role of the movement for education in this crisis (goo.gl/qpXIsA).
Something similar is happening in other countries. In Paraguay students are shown as a powerful actor in the middle of the reactionary government of Horacio Cartes. New nests of young rebels are present in almost all countries. To say nothing of Mexico, after the parting of waters that was Ayotzinapa.
A good part of the objectives that School Without Party proposes in Brazil may seem utopias in that they have scarce support. Nevertheless, they should not be underestimated. When the political crises deepen, powerful bifurcations appear; the right takes off the veil to show itself for what it is: the party of order, disposed to run over everything. The lefts are the ones that must decide if they opt for the institutions or for accompanying the resistances.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Thursday, September 29, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/09/29/opinion/019a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNI & EZLN communique: Party to war and resistance #44
Standing Rock Water Resistance in North Dakota.
To the peoples of the world
To the alternative, free, autonomous or however they are called means of communication
To the National and International Sixth
Party to war & resistance # 44
And the other 43? And the ones who are next?
It turns out that this country is not the same as two years ago when the bad government committed one of the worst crimes possible when it disappeared 43 young indigenous students from the rural student-teacher school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. This deed made us aware of the profound darkness in which we find ourselves and troubled our individual and collective heart and spirit, illuminating the night with rage, with suffering and with hope that is embodied now in the families and compañeros of the 43, and which shines in the face of millions of persons in all the geographies of Mexico and the world of below, and of the international civil society that is in solidarity and conscious.
As neighborhoods, tribes, nations and original peoples that we are, we see and make our word now as before, from the collective heart that we are.
From the geographies and calendars from below, where the mirrors of who we the Indigenous National Congress (CNI, Congreso Nacional Indígena) are, made with our resistances, rebellions and autonomies; from the places and directions from where we the original peoples are and understand the world, that is to say, from the ancient geographies where we do not cease to see, understand and resist that same violent war that the powerful implement against everyone, who suffer and resist, from who we are with an individual and collective face, we see and make the face of the 43 absent ones our word, who are present in all the corners of our country in search of truth and justice, the face that is drawn with the faces of millions of others and that shows us in the middle of the night the sacred directions, because our suffering and hope is sacred. That collective face multiplies and sees the geographies of resistance and rebellion.
From the geographies of below
The disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa continues in impunity, and to search for the truth in the midst of the putrefaction of power is to rummage through the worst of this country, in the cynicism and perversion of the political class, which only pretends to look for the disappeared compañeros, but in the face of growing evidences that demonstrate the guilt of the terrorist narco-state, those responsible for lying and trying to deform the truth even more are rewarded – as is the change of Tomás Zerón, responsible for planting supposed proof of his historic lie in the trash dump of Cocula, to the Technical Secretariat of the National Security Council (Secretaría Técnica del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad) ‒ giving us another example of the criminal nature of the bad government.
To its lie, farce and impunity, the bad government adds the outrages and injustice it commits against those who have offered solidarity and shown their support for the struggle of the families and compañeros of 43, like the youth Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano, who was always in solidarity with the struggles of the original peoples – like those of Cherán, the Yaqui tribe, the indigenous prisoners, the Zapatista communities – who was condemned by a judge to a sentence of 33 years and five months for the sextuplet crime of being young, a student, poor, being in solidarity, a rebel and being consistent.
This is what we see when we look upward to who is Power: for who murders, covers up and lies, rewards and protects, for who becomes indignant and protests against injustice, attacks and jails.
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And when we see ourselves:
In the south, the struggle of the peoples in defense of their territories against bosses and businesses, dissolves into the struggle for security and justice against the organized bands of delinquents, whose intimate relationship with the political class is with certainty, as a people, the only relationship we have with whatever state organ.
The formation of the shock groups that act against the mobilizations permeates the towns and the government plays at generating conflicts that ignite the internal weavings. Which is to say, it tries to make mirrors of its war planting discord in the communities and betting on the destruction of the most sensitive fibers. Nothing is more explosive and dangerous for this nation.
In the west, the struggles for land, security and justice are taking place in the middle of the administration of the drug cartels, which the state disguises as combating delinquency or as development policies. In turn, the peoples that have resisted and even brought down criminals through organizing from below must struggle through the permanent attempts of the bad governments to allow organized crime and its preferred political parties to take possession anew of the territories through diverse forms.
The autonomous organization of the communities, their unwavering struggle for the sacred places and ancestral lands does not cease. The defense of our mother is not negotiable. We pay close attention to the struggle of the Wixárika of Wauta-San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán community for the recuperation of close to 10,000 hectares of land surrounding the settlement of Huajimic, Nayarit, where, in spite of proving their rights in land courts, the judicial authorities have been remiss; and the bad governments make the false geographies official that divide the states, a pretext to incentivize the dispossession of the original peoples. To the Wixárika people, in their rebellion and autonomy we say: we are with you.
In the north, where the struggles for the recognition of territories persist, the mining industry’s threats, the expropriation of land, the robbery of natural resources and the submission of the resistances by the narco paramilitaries, the original peoples continue constructing every day.
The original peoples of the tribes of the north, where the Sioux nation weaves its own geographies that go beyond the official false geographies that places them in another country – but that for us we are daughters and sons of the same mother – are resisting the invasions of its sacred lands, burial sites and ceremonial centers by the construction of oil pipelines carried out by the Energy Transfer Partners company, which seeks to transport through their territories the oil that has been gotten through fracking in the Bakken region in North Dakota, which has inspired the solidarity and unity of the original peoples of the north. To them we say that their rage is ours and as the Congreso Nacional Indígena we raise and will continue raising our voice with yours. Your dignified struggle is also ours.
In the peninsula, the Maya peoples resist being disappeared by decree, defending their lands from attacks by tourist and real estate companies, where white guards proliferate and operate with impunity to dispossess the peoples, where the invasion by the transgenic agro-industry threatens the existence of the Maya peoples and the filth of magnates who are taking over agricultural lands, archeological cultural sites and even indigenous identity, attempt to convert a living people like an extension of their tongue, into commercial fetishes. The peoples that struggle against high tariffs for electricity are persecuted and criminalized.
In the center, the infrastructure projects, highways, gas pipelines, aqueducts, re-zonings, are being imposed violently and human rights are every day weakened and made more distant by the laws being imposed. The criminalization, cooptation and division outlines the strategy of powerful groups, all linked tightly in a corrupt and obscene manner with the criminal who believes he is governing this country, Enrique Peña Nieto.
In the east of the country, the violence, the fracking, the mining, the trafficking in migrants, the governmental corruption and dementia are the current against the struggle of the peoples, in the middle of entire regions taken by violent criminal groups orchestrated from the highest levels of government.
From dialogue and betrayal
Just as has been done by the teachers’ struggle, the original peoples have looked to dialogue with the bad government with our urgent demands regarding our territories, with the presentation of the disappeared, the liberating of prisoners, of justice for the murdered, of getting the police or the military out of our lands or of our demands for security and justice. But the government always refuses until it detains our spokespersons throughout the country, the military opens fire against children in Ostula, the bulldozers destroy the houses of those that resist in Xochicuautla, the federal police open fire against the dignified people that accompany the teachers in Nochixtlán. The bad governments pretend to dialogue and simulate for years agreements with the Wixárika people to achieve the peaceful restitution of its territory, while configuring the violent reordering of the region.
And the government talks as if nothing has happened and offers the will to cede, as long as both sides agree. The government cedes a part of what it has just finished destroying, frees a prisoner, compensates the family of a murdered one, pretends to look for the disappeared. And in exchange asks that the peoples cede their collective patrimony, which is their dignity, their autonomous organization, and their territory.
In various geographies of our country we are resorting to consultations when we say that we do not want their mines, their wind turbines, their transgenic seeds, their dams and we demand that they ask the peoples, but the bad government always responds pretending that it “consults how to consult if it consults or not the form of consulting” (or something like that), which is full of simulation, the supplanting of our word, the manipulation and cooptation of our people, of threats and repression. And it’s this way until it says that’s enough and that we have already said that yes we want their projects of death, or that we are divided and should attend to all the positions.
And while they pretend to keep us pacified with their lying agenda and the NGOs “experts” in “consultations” fill their pockets, advancing quickly to concretize – even before beginning their supposed consultation – the robbery of the water from the Yaqui river, the mining companies and their rights to destroy Wirikuta, the wind turbines to invade all the Isthmus and the imposing of transgenic seeds on the Maya Riviera.
The directions of the world are our geographies and in them we find and recognize each other, because we know that the struggle is not just for today or today only, we do not struggle for power or folklore that lying campaigns offer, but to weave and reweave what we are, were and will be as original peoples.
The faces of the 43 missing and the tenacity of their families and compañeros, are the 43 other parties to war and resistance. To them we add our suffering, our rages, the resistances of the original peoples and the rebellion of millions in Mexico and the world.
And the parties of war and resistance of the persecuted and stigmatized other, of the abused, disappeared and murdered women, of infancy converted into merchandise, of the criminalized youth, of exploited labor, of the persecuted rebellions, of the polluted natural world, of the suffering humanity are next.
With all that humanity, with this land that we are, today we reiterate that truth and justice are an indispensable demand and that the punishment of the guilty ones, of all the guilty ones, will be born from the struggle from below, where, now more than ever and as original peoples of the CNI, we know that there is no room for surrender, or selling out, or wavering.
Truth and Justice for Ayotzinapa!
Freedom for Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano!
Free all political prisoners
For the full reconstitution of our peoples
Never again a Mexico without us.
Congreso Nacional Indígena (Indigenous National Congress)
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation).
Mexico, September 2016.
En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/22/parte-de-guerra-y-de-resistencia-44/
Ayotzinapa: the government rewards those responsible
EZLN support for the Ayotzinapa students. Photo: Saúl Kak
THE GOVERNMENT REWARDS THOSE RESPONSIBLE and THOSE THAT LIE and IT PURSUES THOSE THAT SEEK TRUTH and JUSTICE
[Admin: the recent joint comunicado from the EZLN and the CNI has not been posted in English on Enlace Zapatista, so we translated a very good article about it. A link to the Spanish is below and we’ll post the English translation when it becomes available.]
By: Isaín Mandujano
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the National Indigenous (CNI) announced today that two years after “the bad government committed one of its worst crimes” by disappearing 43 young indigenous students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa,” it rewards those responsible for lying and trying to distort the truth even more and it pursues and incarcerates those who seek truth and justice.
In a joint comunicado, [1] the EZLN and the CNI remembered that this act only confirmed the profound darkness in which we find ourselves in the country, and it stirred the heart and the individual and collective spirit illuminating the night with rage, with pain and with the hope that the family members and compañeros of the 43 now embody, “and that shines in the face of millions of people in all the geographies of Mexico and of the world of below, and of international civil society in solidarity and aware.”
“The disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students remains unpunished, and seeking the truth in the midst of the power’s decay is to delve into the worst of this country, into the cynicism and perversion of the political class, which not only continues pretending to look for the disappeared compañeros, but that before the growing evidence that shows the culpability of the terrorist narco-state, rewards those responsible for lying and trying to distort the truth even more ‒as is the change of Tomás Zerón, the one responsible for planting alleged proof of their historic lie in the Cocula garbage dump, to Technical Secretary of the National Security Council‒ giving one more account of the bad government’s criminal nature,” both organizations of an indigenous profile pointed out.
They add that to the lie, the simulation and the impunity, the bad government adds outrages and injustices against those who have been in solidarity and demonstrated in support of the struggle of the family member compañeros of the 43, like the youth Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano [2], always in solidarity with the struggles of the original peoples –like those in Cherán, the Yaqui tribe, the indigenous prisoners, the Zapatista communities-, who a judge has sentenced to 33 years and 5 months in prison for the sextuple crime of being young, being a student, being poor, being in solidarity, being rebellious and being consistent.
“We see that when we look at who above is the Power: at who murders, covers up and lies, rewards and protects; at who is indignant and protests against injustice, coups and prison,” they point out.
The EZLN and the CNI refer to the long struggles that exist in the south, the west, the north, the Peninsula, the Center and the east of the country, where the struggle is against political bosses, against the dispossession of territory, against the big transnational mining companies, against shock troops, against the onslaught that threatens to extinguish the peoples of Mexico in resistance.
They explained that just like the teachers have done in their struggle, the original peoples pueblos have sought dialogues and answers from the bad government to their urgent demands with respect to the territories, about the presentation of the disappeared, about the liberation of prisoners, about justice for the murders, about getting the police or the soldiers out of our lands or about our demands for security and justice.
But the government always denies that they even detain the spokespersons all over the country, the Army shoots at children in Ostula, machines destroy houses of those who resist in Xochicuautla, the federal police shoot at the dignified people that accompany the teachers in Nochixtlán. “The bad governments make like they dialogue and simulate for years agreements with the Wixárika [3] people to attain the peaceful restitution of their territory, while they configure a violent reordering of the region.”
And the government talks as if nothing had happened and offers a willingness to yield, always so that both parties agree. The government yields a part of what it just destroyed; it releases a prisoner, indemnifies the family of the one they murdered and feigns looking for the disappeared. And in exchange it asks the peoples to cede their collective patrimony, which is their dignity, their autonomous organization and their territory.
That in various geographies of the country they are resorting to consultations when they say no to their mines, their wind farms, their GMOs, their dams and demand that they must ask the peoples, “but the bad government always answers feigning that: “it consults how to consult, whether it consults or not and the form of the consultation” (or something like that), which is full of simulation, supplanting of our word, manipulation and cooptation of our people and of threats and repression.”
“The faces of the 43 absent and the tenacity of their families and compañeros, are the 43 other parties of war and resistance. To them are added the pains, the rages, the resistances of the original peoples and the rebelliousness of millions all over Mexico and the world,” the EZLN and the CNI said.
And for all that, the parties remain at war and the other’s resistance persecuted and stigmatized, women raped, disappeared and murdered, infancy converted into merchandise, youth criminalized, labor exploited, the rebel persecuted, nature dishonored and humanity in pain.
“With all that humanity, with this land that we are, we reiterate today that truth and justice are an inalienable demand and that punishment of the guilty ones, all the guilty, will be born from the struggle from below, where, now more than ever and as original peoples pueblos of the National Indigenous Congress, we know that it’s not appropriate to surrender, sell out, or give in,” says the writing.
[1] The joint comunicado is entitled Parte de guerra y de Resistencia #44.
Para leer en español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/22/parte-de-guerra-y-de-resistencia-44/
[2] Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano – A young man that participated in the 3rd day of global action for Ayotzinapa. Police arrested him in the vicinity of a bus stop that was burned during the protest.
[3] Wixárika – Native Mexicans, also known as Huicholes.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Ayotzinapa on the threshold of two years without the 43
By: Magdalena Gómez
In the last report of the Group Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) on the Iguala case, issued April 24 of this year, announced photographs and a video in which Tomás Zerón de Lucio appears at the bed of the San Juan River along with Agustín García Reyes, an alleged member of Guerreros Unidos, in work that was never integrated into the investigation. Consequently the GIEI considered that the head of the el titular de la Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC, its initials in Spanish) of the PGR twisted information about efforts at the San Juan River that was carried out on October 28, 2014. The following day they allegedly found in the very same place some black bags with fragments of bone remains fragments that, after expert testing at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, it was determined that they corresponded to Alexander Mora Venancio, one of the 43 disappeared students. The functionary Zerón unsuccessfully tried to defend himself, because he wanted to involve the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, pointing out that it attended the work, but it was immediately clarified that neither its representative nor any other accompanier went to the San Juan River.
The gravity of the accusation, at least the strong indicia of planting evidence, didn’t merit the slightest insinuation of a resignation so that the full clarification and demarcation of responsibilities would be freely processed, as the parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students demanded. After intense pressure, it was reported that the Inspector General’s Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) would carry out an internal investigation to determine whether Zerón incurred omissions, alteration of a crime scene, abuse of authority or any other responsibility of an administrative or criminal type, due to having carried out work related to the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students without having given an account of that to the Federal Public Ministry. Faced with zero results from that, the family members broke off dialogue with the PGR last August 18.
Surprisingly, last September 14 Tomás Zerón de Lucio resigned from the leadership of the Criminal Investigation Agency in the PGR, and had also strangely presented his resignation two days before César Chávez Flores, who was in charge of the inspectorate charged with the investigation into the Zerón case. Now he must also explain whether there is a nexus between his conclusions and the resignation of “the person being investigated.” What’s certain is that the head of the PGR accepted Zerón’s resignation without any reference to the internal investigation underway and, in a virtual exoneration, recognized his work at the front of the agency, which integrates three substantive areas of the institution, like the Federal Ministerial Police, the General Coordination of Expert Services and the National Center of Planning, Analysis and Information for the Combat of Crime (Cenapi), strategic areas for the fate of any investigation.
The success that the prosecutor presaged in his personal and professional projects materialized three hours later: President Enrique Peña Nieto designated the ex functionary of the PGR, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, technical secretary of the National Security Council. The Secretary of Governance pointed out that: “the naming is a recognition of his actions and responds to the experience and ability that he has demonstrated in his previous positions.” The following day, at a press conference in the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, the parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students said well that the President gave him an award instead of investigating him, and their lawyers noted concern for the message of impunity, because they had rather demanded his resignation, which ought to be accompanied by the limitation of responsibilities and sanction, in his case. These days the press once again lined up against the GIEI’s expert José Torero, who showed investigative results that reiterate the impossibility of the incineration of the 43 youths, as Murillo Karam maintained during his time. A lot of haziness that doesn’t impede pointing to a pattern of impunity in this and other cases, because Zerón de Lucio resignation is added to that of Enrique Galindo as commissioner general of the Federal Police, which happened in the midst of indications of an extrajudicial execution of 22 people in Tanhuato, Michoacán, which occurred in May 2015, according to a report of the National Human Rights Commission. He resigned without clarifying his responsibility in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca. This pattern is certainly not new; we remember that the massacre in Acteal, Chiapas, motivated the resignation of Emilio Chuayffet as head Governance and justice has not arrived. It does not augur well for the start of the IACHR’s special follow-up mechanism for attending to the recommendations formulated by the GIEI. As this group noted, there are very strong and very high-up interests, determined to impede the clarification of these brutal disappearances.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, September 21, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/09/20/opinion/015a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
EZLN gives the Grito in Chiapas!
THE GOVERNOR of CHIAPAS GIVES the GRITO AT AN ALTERNATE SITE; THE EZLN GOES AHEAD OF the MAYOR and GIVES IT IN PALENQUE
EZLN Sympathizers arrived in Palenque’s principal plaza. Photo: Isaín Mandujano
By: Isaín Mandujano
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas. (apro)
While Governor Manuel Velasco Coello had to give the Cry of Independence (Grito de Independencia) in Tapachula as an alternate site, because the plaza of the state capital is occupied by striking teachers, in Palenque hundreds of men and women sympathizers of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) took over the plaza and gave the Grito, assaulting the balcony of the municipal presidency where the mayor of Palenque would be to give it.
In Tapachula, hundreds of citizens that sought to irrupt at the Cry of Independence, were repressed with clubs and tear gas, prior to the event that Governor Manuel Velasco Coello headed.
Municipal and state police contained residents that since the morning through the social networks started to call for a boycott of the Cry of Independence. So, in the midst of a strong security circle, the governor came out on the balcony waving the flag and intoning the names of each one of the country’s heroes at the same time that the bell was ringing.
Meanwhile in Palenque, men and women came from different communities, many of them with ski masks. After the march, folks who were identified as teachers, campesino parents and adherents to the EZLN’s Sixth Declaration arrived in the central plaza.
There, the contingent realized honors to the flag and the masked escort marched. Later, they put up a ladder and climbed up to the balcony where everything was ready for the mayor to come out to give the Cry of Independence. But the masked ones advanced and intoned slogans against “the bad government,” read the names of the heroes of Independence and made a pronouncement against the structural reforms, among them the education reform.
In Tuxtla the teachers celebrated a popular evening festival in the central plaza where the striking teachers’ continue their encampment. They gave the “Anti-grito” there by intoning slogans against the government of Enrique Peña Nieto and rendered honors to the flag.
In Tila, ejido authorities celebrated the expulsion of the municipal authorities and they celebrated the Cry of Independence (Grito de Independencia).
“We had to recognize that it isn’t easy to carry out our ejido autonomy, but conscious of that we must continue although stumbling blocks may exist, but always with our head held high in our conscience of struggle; since during the stay of the municipal council in our ejido, besides the dispossession and paramilitary violence, the municipal council illegally increased expenditures for alcoholic beverages by authorizing licenses to liquor stores, bars and cantinas; as well as the increase of prostitution, drug addiction, local drug dealing and burglary. Bars and cantinas can be observed a few meters from the schools and one has to be working little by little to avoid that our people continue being poisoned and now we are doing different tests as the general assembly agreed,” says the letter read by the ejido owners says.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Proceso.com
Friday, September 16, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Zibechi: the black bloc as tactic and excuse
Zapatista March in San Cristóbal.
By: Raúl Zibechi
In recent weeks we have attended a debate in the wake of black bloc activity in Brazil, which involved leaders of social movements and collectives of militants. The black bloc tactic (destruction of glass panes and windows of banks and private companies by masked youths during demonstrations) has been habitual in Chile and in Uruguay, among others, and was installed in Brazil in June 2013, reappearing with force in the demonstrations against the illegitimate government of Michel Temer.
Ever since the black bloc tactics appeared, a polemic was generated in social organizations about the pertinence of those actions. Some maintain that they are negative, because they give the police arguments for repressing and thus alienate and frighten real or potential demonstrators. Others emphasize that it’s about symbolic violence against big companies and other representations of the system, and that it has dissuasive effects on repression. The electoral parties usually condemn them adamantly.
In Brazil the polemic includes one of the more prominent referents of the most combative movements, like Guilherme Boulos, coordinator of the Homeless Workers Movement (Movimiento de Trabajadores Sin Techo, MTST). A day before the largest march against the government, Boulos asserted that: “there is no space for those practices in our demonstrations,” and said that they ought not participate in the mobilization on Sunday the 4th (goo.gl/GUDSMi). He was harshly criticized for defending the “criminalization” of those who employ the black bloc tactic.
A little later Boulos published a note on his blog, in which he explains: “I disagree with the tactic because it separates people from the mobilizations and they make isolated decisions, but decisions that affect us all.” He rejects the accusation of criminalizing the tactic and remembers that the MTST has been “severely criminalized for practicing direct action,” noting that the movement has members in prison and with on-going criminal proceedings (goo.gl/zxqzST).
Some 100,000 people participated in the demonstration on Sunday, September 4 in Sao Paulo. The organizers, the Fearless People Alliance, in which the MTST plays a preponderant role together with some 30 social movements and political organizations, and the Popular Brazil Front, dominated politically by the PT and the CUT union confederation, told the masked ones to show their faces or they would abandon the march. No incident occurred. Nevertheless, the military police attacked them when the demonstrators were dispersing and arrested 26 youths, because “they sought to practice violent acts.”
There was not the least black bloc “provocation” on this occasion, but the repression was equally relentless. The polemic continues its course with arguments that range from questioning the violence to the convenience of its use when families with children participate in the demonstrations, including the supposition that they always use infiltrators to provoke police repression. Some considerations seem necessary.
The first is that talking about a tactic isn’t good or bad in the abstract, but can rather be convenient, or not, according to the circumstances. We are not faced with a question of principles. It’s necessary to comprehend that not all of those who cover their face are adept at the black bloc tactic, that they don’t form an organization, nor are they necessarily anarchists, nor do they use the tactic always and everywhere. Those who use it today may not do it tomorrow, and vice versa.
The second is that those who employ the black bloc tactic are radical youths, anti-capitalists, who reject the economic system and police repression. Counter to existing prejudices, they do not belong to the comfortable middle classes; they live in the peripheries, and have studied and worked since they were very young. From what I am familiar with in Uruguay, because of the data that they contribute from Chile and from the research of the authors of Mascarados (Geração Editorial, 2014), we’re talking about individuals around 20 years old, many of them women, who suffer from police persecution in their barrios. Although they are few, they show “the profound crisis in which the Brazilian left is debated” (p. 19).
The third turns around the principal argument that is used against that tactic: it facilitates police repression and frightens a part of the demonstrators, either because the callers make it clear that the marches are peaceful or rather because the repression that follows the black bloc tactic affects individuals that don’t want to suffer police violence. It classifies them as “provocateurs.”
The argument is solid, especially when the masked ones act and withdraw before the police arrive and end up randomly repressing people. But the problem is not only in those who use that tactic, but also in the very same demonstrators, who aren’t used to being organized and attend individually. Does anyone imagine that a group of youths would use the block bloc tactic during a demonstration of the EZLN support bases in San Cristóbal de las Casas?
The fourth question is related to the use of similar tactics on the part of police or military infiltrators in demonstrations. As a youth from Sao Paulo pointed out in an excellent report for the Brazilian edition of El País, “I believe that one who breaks a newspaper stand or burns a bus, for example, either didn’t understand anything or is an infiltrator” (goo.gl/2G6lck). It’s possible to differentiate between black bloc actions and police provocations, because an interest in doing it always exists.
Lastly, the theme that the journalist Eliane Brum outlines: “While destruction of the demonstrators’ bodies by military police is naturalized, the destruction of material goods is criminalized” (goo.gl/mdRPKj). In her opinion, we’re dealing with a “heritage of slavery and genocide” that has still not been overcome. In other words, the black bloc tactic, agree with it or not, proposes a dilemma for us: do we accept, without further ado, the state’s monopoly of violence?
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, September 17, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/09/17/opinion/018a1mun
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
EZLN: One House, Other Worlds
July/August/September, 2016
To whom it may concern:
Topic: Invitation to “CompArte and ConCiencias for Humanity.”
Yes, we know. Days and nights go by in which bitterness is the only thing that appears on the horizon. Our steps drag along in pain, rage, and indignation, stumbling every so often over the impertinent gaze of cynicism and our own disappointment; over the stupidity exalted in government positions and polls; over simulation as a way of life; over the substitution of frivolity for culture, art, and science; over the multiple tiers of disrespect for the different (the problem isn’t that the other exists, but that it shows itself”); and over a wholesale resignation in the political market sphere (“oh well, the only option left is to choose not the lesser evil, but the least scandalous”). Yes, things are hard, harder every day. It is as if the night has become longer. It is as if the day has postponed its stride until no one and nothing is left, until the path is empty. It is as if there was no breath left. The monster lies in wait in every corner, countryside and city street.
Despite all this, or precisely because of it, we send you this invitation.
It may seem that it is not the moment or the matter at hand, but we Zapatistas invite you to participate in the festivals “CompArte and ConCiencias for Humanity.” So, respecting etiquette, we have to send an invitation. This should be something that details a calendar and geography, because we know that you have your own path, your own pace, your own company on that path, and your own destiny. And we don’t want to add another difficulty to those that you already confront. Thus, an invitation must include the when and where.
But you know who we are. You know how we are, that is. And the question that we think an invitation must address is not the when and where, but rather the why. Perhaps that is why this invitation does not comply with the etiquette of the occasion and does not arrive on time, but rather too late or too early. But as you’ll see, it doesn’t matter. That is why this invitation is very other, and why it includes as a crucial element this little story:
One House, Other Worlds
It’s more of a legend than a story. That is, there’s no way to confirm the truthfulness of what is told here. This is partly because it details no specific calendar or geography; it could have happened, or not, in any undefined time or place. It is also because the supposed non-protagonist of this story is dead, deceased, done, defunct. If he was alive, we could just ask if he actually said what it says here that he said. And as he was always tenacious in his wanderings through the treetops, it is likely that he would go on at length to describe this imprecise calendar.
In any case, since we don’t have the exact date, we’ll just say it was more than two decades ago. The geography? The mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
It was Comandante Tacho who told us the story in the wee hours of the morning at the EZLN headquarters. He was describing the house of the system, the home of capital, the storm, and the ark. We were in our headquarters, the headquarters where what would later become the seedbed/seminar was born. We think we took a coffee break… or that we adjourned the meeting in order to continue the next day… to tell you the truth, we don’t really remember. The point is that we were talking to Tacho and it was he who told us what we’re going to tell you now. There is of course a little bit of finagling involved because we have added to and rearranged Tacho’s original words. We did this not out of bad faith, disrespect, or an attempt to mend faulty memories, but because both of us who are writing now knew the deceased quite well and can reconstruct his words and feelings. Here goes:
This is Comandante Tacho speaking:
“I don’t remember very well when it was, but it was when the deceased Sup was not yet deceased. He was just the Sup, staying up all night and smoking his pipe. Yes, chewing on the pipe, as usual. We were in the shelter that was the EZLN headquarters, although it wasn’t a shelter because it wasn’t finished yet. That is, it wasn’t EZLN headquarters yet. Perhaps it was going to be, but not yet.
We were telling funny stories, things that happened in the communities, in the meetings, in the work of the struggle. The Sup was just listening, sometimes laughing, sometimes asking more about what happened. Before I really knew him I didn’t understand why. Later I realized that these accounts would appear later as stories in the communiqués. I think he called them ‘postscripts.’ I asked him once why he called an account of what had really happened just a story. He said: ‘The thing is that they don’t believe the accounts, they think I am making things up or imagining things. So I write it like it’s a story because they are not ready to see the reality.’
Anyway, so there we were.
So then he asked the Sup…”
Yes, Tacho has used the third person singular: “he.” In order to clarify we asked him if by “he” he meant the Sup. “No,” he answered us, annoyed, “he asked the Sup.” We didn’t want to insist because we thought, perhaps mistakenly, that that wasn’t the point of the story, or that it was merely one piece of a puzzle still being sketched out. So Comandante Tacho used the word “he.” Not “she,” not “I,” not “we.” He said “he” in referring to the person who was questioning the Sup.
“Hey Sup, how come every time we are building a house, you ask if we are building it according to traditional custom or by scientific method?”
Here Tacho took the time to clarify:
“Every time that we built a house, the deceased SupMarcos would come and stare at the beams and rafters. Then he would always ask:
‘That crossbeam that you’re putting there, are you putting it there because it is necessary for the construction of the house?’ Then I would respond, ‘Yes, if you don’t put it there the roof will fall in.’
‘I see,’ the Sup said, ‘but how do you know that if you don’t put it there that the roof will fall in?’
I just looked at him because I knew that wasn’t the real question. It wasn’t the first time he had asked it. He continued, ‘do you put it there because you know scientifically that if you don’t the roof will fall in, or do you put it there because it is traditional custom to do so?’
‘Because it’s traditional custom,’ I answered him, ‘because that is how I was taught. That is how my father built houses, and he learned from my grandfather, and so on going way back.’ The Sup was not satisfied, and always ended up climbing up onto the central beam before the supports were finished and, balancing as if he were riding a horse, would ask, ‘so if I get up here, is the beam going to fall?’ And boom, he would fall. ‘Ouch!’ was the only thing he’d say. He’d take out his pipe from where he landed on the ground, light it, and with his head resting on the broken beam, gaze up at the roof. We would all laugh of course.
So that’s why he asked the Sup why the Sup was always asking about whether something was done by traditional custom or scientific method. The thing is that it wasn’t just that one time. Every time that our headquarters had to be moved and I had to oversee the construction of a new structure for the headquarters that’s what happened. The Sup would come, he would ask that question, I would respond, he wouldn’t be satisfied, he would climb up on the beam, it would break, and he would fall to the ground.”
(Note: in discussing this between the two of us, we have concluded that the approximate dates for what Tacho is recounting were the first months of 1995 when there was such heavy governmental persecution against us that we had to continually pick up and move our headquarters, accompanying the community of Guadalupe Tepeyac in exile. End of note and Tacho continues):
“I am telling you this so that you understand why he asked the Sup this question. At other times I had also asked him this question, but he hadn’t responded fully. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to respond, but that always at that moment they called him on the radio, or someone came to talk to him. So I wanted to know the answer too.
The Sup took his pipe out of his mouth and put it to one side. We were sitting on the ground. It was very hot like it always is before a hard rain. I knew the answer would take a while, because when the Sup answered quickly, he didn’t even take the pipe out of his mouth; the words would just come out all chewed up.
So then the Sup said… well really, he asked:
‘Hey Tacho, how big is this house?’ ‘3 by 4 [meters],’ I answered quickly, because it wasn’t the first time he asked.
‘And if it were 6 x 8, would it need more rafters for support?’ he asked me.
‘It would indeed,’ I responded.
‘And if were 12 x 16?’
I didn’t respond quickly, so the Sup continued:
‘And if it were 24 x 32? Or 48 x 64? What about 96 x 128?’
Then, to tell you the truth, I laughed. ‘That’s a really big house, I don’t know,’ I answered.
‘Correct,’ he said, ‘houses are made according to one’s own or one’s inherited experience. Traditions and customs, that is. To make a bigger house, one would have to ask or try something different.’
‘But let’s say that no one has ever built a house measuring 192 x 256…’
I laughed right before the Sup finished:
‘kilometers.’
‘Umm, who would want a house that big?’ I asked laughing.
He lit his pipe and said, ‘well, let’s make it easier: what if the house were the size of the world?’
‘Ah no, that’s rough. I don’t think we can imagine a house that big, nor what it would be for,’ I said, more serious now.
‘We can,’ he said. ‘The arts can imagine this house, and can put it into words, sounds, images, figures. The arts can imagine what seems impossible and, in this process of imagination, sew doubt, curiosity, surprise, admiration—that is, they make it possible.
‘Ah, okay,’ I replied, ‘but it’s one thing to imagine and another thing to do. I don’t think a house that big can be made.’
‘It can,’ he said, and put the broken pipe aside.
‘The sciences know how. Even if a house the size of the world has never been made, the sciences can say with certainty how a construction that size would be built. I don’t know what it’s called, but I think it has to do with the strength of the materials, geometry, economics, physics, geography, biology, chemistry, and who the hell knows what else.
But even without previous experience, without traditional customs, science can in fact say how many beams, supports, and rafters are needed to make a house the size of the world. Scientific knowledge can determine how deep the foundation needs to be, how high and how long the walls need to be, what angle the roof should have if it is a pitched roof, where the windows should be given the climate, how many doors there should be and where, what material should be used for each part, and how many beams and supports it must have and where.’”
Was the now-deceased already thinking about the transgression of the law gravity and all of the straight lines linked to it? Did he imagine or already know about the subversion of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate? No, Tacho didn’t ask him. To tell you the truth, the two of us wouldn’t have asked either. It is hard to imagine, in those days of no tomorrow, with warplanes shaking the earth and sky, that there was time to think about art, much less science.
Everyone remained silent, Tacho recalls. Us, too. After a moment of silence and tobacco, he continued:
“The Sup took up his pipe again and saw with sorrow that there was no more tobacco. He looked in his pockets. Smiling, he pulled out a little plastic bag with some black strands. It took him awhile to light the pipe, I think because the tobacco was damp. Then he continued:
‘But I’m not concerned about whether the arts can imagine this house, its colors, its shapes, its sounds, where the day comes in, where the night falls, where the rain falls, where the wind blows, where the earth sits.
Neither am I concerned about whether science can solve the problem of how to make it a reality. Of course it can. It has the knowledge… or it will.
What concerns me is that this house that is a world not be the same as the one we live in. The house must be better, even bigger. It must be so big that it can hold not one world but many, those that already exist and those yet to be born.
Of course, one would have to meet with those who do art and science. That won’t be easy. At first they won’t be willing to help, not because they don’t want to but because they will be skeptical. Because we have a lot going against us and because we are what we are.
Those who are artists think that we will constrain the subject, form, and pace of their work; that their artistic horizon will hold only males and females (never others), members of the powerful proletariat showing off their muscles and bright shining gazes in images, sounds, dances, and figures; that they could not even insinuate the existence of the other; that if they comply they will receive praise and applause, and if not, seclusion or repudiation. In other words, they think we will command that they not imagine.
Those who do science think that we are going to ask them to create mechanical, electronic, chemical, biological, and interstellar weapons of mass (or individual) destruction. They think that we will force them to create schools for exceptional minds where of course one will find the descendants of those currently in power who have a salary guaranteed before they are ever conceived. They think that what will be recognized is political affiliation and not scientific capacity, and that if they comply they will receive praise and applause, and if not, seclusion or repudiation. In other words, they think that we will command them not to do science.
In addition, because we are indigenous peoples, there are some [un@s and otr@s] here and there who think that what they do is art and culture, and that what we do is folk art and ritual. They think that what for them is analysis and knowledge, for us is belief and superstition.
They are ignorant of the fact that we have produced colors that, hundreds of years later, still challenge calendars. They do not know that when “civilization” still believed that the earth was the center of the universe, we had already discovered celestial bodies and numerical systems. They think that we adore ignorance, that our thinking is simple and conformist and that we prefer to believe rather than to know. They think that we do not want advancement but rather regression.
In other words, they neither see themselves, nor do they see us.
The issue then is going to be to convince them to see themselves as we see them, to make them realize that, for us, they are what they are and also something else: hope. And hope, friends and enemies, cannot be bought, cannot be sold, cannot be coerced, cannot be contained, and cannot be killed.’
He fell silent. I waited to see if he would ask something else of the Sup, but since he didn’t say anything, I asked: ‘so what must we do?’ The Sup just sighed and said:
‘Our job is first of all to know that this house is possible and necessary. Then comes the easier part: to build it. For this task we need knowledge, feeling, imagination—we need the sciences and the arts. We need other hearts. The day will come when we will meet with those who make art and science. On that day we will embrace them and welcome them with one sole question: “And what about you?”’
I wasn’t satisfied with this answer though, and I asked the Sup: ‘And after we meet with these people, what are we going to do?’ The Sup smiled and said:
‘Etcetera.’”
_*_
That is where the story or the legend that Comandante Tacho told us that morning ends. All of this is relevant at the moment because we want to invite you to come, or to be present in some way, in this earth that we are.
We have this curiosity, you could say, that has been nagging at us over the course of many pages of the calendar and we think that perhaps you will accept this invitation and help us to resolve a particular doubt:
What do we need to build a new house, a house so big that it holds not one but many worlds?
That’s all. Or not, depending on you.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast,
In the name of the Zapatista children, elders, women, and men,
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés | Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano
Mexico, July/August/September of 2016.
En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/12/una-casa-otros-mundos/
After meeting with Miranda Nava, the CNTE seeks “political exit”
CNTE banner, apparently from the Central Region of Chiapas. Note on the bottom a portion of the slogan: “Ayotzinapa Vive, La Lucha Sigue!”
By: Isaín Mandujano
The National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in Chiapas agreed early this morning to seek “a political exit” to the teachers’ movement, after meeting with the former Assistant Secretary of Governance and now the Secretary of Social Development (SEDESOL), Luis Enrique Miranda Nava, who traveled to Chiapas yesterday (Monday) to meet with the leadership of this dissident bloc of the SNTE.
Miranda Nava arrived from Mexico City at the Ángel Albino Corzo International Airport in a small jet belonging to the Presidency of the Republic. Governor Manuel Velasco Coello, Juan Carlos Gómez Aranda, the state’s Secretary general of Government, Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca, Secretary of Public Security and Citizen Protection in Chiapas and Roberto Domínguez Castellanos, Secretary of Public Education in the State traveled there, some 50 kilometers from the state capital.
Pedro Gomez Bamaca, one of the CNTE leaders, arrived later accompanied by 30 teachers from Sections 7 and 40. There, in that meeting, Miranda Nava corroborated the verbal offers made to the CNTE in Chiapas; in other words recognizing the 11 points that had already been sent for consultation last week, but were held in suspension.
Among these points are: no application of the education reform for the rest of the presidential term (sexenio) of Enrique Peña Nieto, cancellation of the arrest warrants, unblocking of the union’s bank accounts, payment of withheld wages to teachers commissioned in the union, 150 million pesos in school infrastructure material and other agreements.
One of the teachers’ leaders told Proceso that after listening to the federal government’s offer from the president’s crony, they moved to the Che Guevara Auditorium of Section 7 of the SNTE, where after holding their state assembly from Monday night to the early morning of Tuesday, the CNTE decided to seek the “political exit” to the teachers’ movement, which would imply ending the strike and taking the mechanism for a political exit and the date to a consultation with the las mobilized bases.
They will consult again with rank and file teachers
The state assembly will meet today September 13 at 6 pm to gather proposals from the base and the Sectional Executive Committee seeks interlocution with the state government beginning from there.
The official resolution points out that “the national teachers’ strike continues, adopting another modality of struggle.” It also says that this State Assembly decides to give a political exit to the movement.”
It also agreed to open “a recess to carry out a round of delegation assemblies and report on the situation that the movement holds in this stage.” Section 7 of the SNTE unionizes some 57,000 teachers in more than 800 union delegations in 24 teacher regions.
That same official resolution, besides calling the State Assembly for this Tuesday at 6 pm in the Section 7’s Che Guevara Auditorium, ordered all Chiapas teachers to withdraw from the occupation in Mexico City and to concentrate in the state capital.
Today, the Pueblo Creyente of Simojovel, headed by Father Marcelo Pérez Pérez, marched to repeat their support for the teachers’ movement faced with the threat there was of using federal and state for evicting them from their occupation in the state capital.
Last night, thousands of federal and state police, as well as functionaries from the services for the procurement of justice, civil emergency services and others were mobilized in an “intimidation action” towards the teachers’ movement.
The police patrolled through the north and south sides of the city, which put the CNTE teachers in the occupation on alert all night and early morning.
Today the teachers, once again hold the State Palace, the federal building, the Municipal Palace, the State Congress and two offices of the Treasury Secretariat of the state government in their possession, all these buildings in the center of the city.
The Secretary of Public Security, Roads and Municipal Transit, Sergio Severiano Dionisio, announced that a group of approximately 60 people wearing ski masks (pasamontañas), kidnapped a Transit vehicle, and therefore an operation to find those responsible has been implemented.
“The acts occurred on Second Avenue South at 11 East Street, the individuals were aboard a small white truck. At this time it is not known who might be responsible, but that is already being investigated.”
Finally, the municipal functionary announced that the vehicle belonging to “Transit” carried the economic number 493 and that the investigations for finding the vehicle’s whereabouts started immediately.
Faced with the possible arrival of the federal and state police forces last night, teachers used the patrol car as a barricade. They used several trucks of companies like FEMSA, Pepsi Cola and others in the same way.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Nochixtlán nurse: we attended to injuries like in a war
June 19, 2016: Federal Police attack teachers in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, Mexico.
By: Blanche Petrich
Nochixtlán, Oaxaca
Last June 19, the Nochixtlán community hospital existed as if it were suddenly in the midst of a war. Almost eight hours of shooting left more than one hundred injured in the surrounding. With 12 beds available, five nurses and two doctors on rotating shifts, the hospital received 45 people with bullet wounds; four of them died within two or three hours.
The police fired tear gas from helicopters onto the roof of the building. As a consequence, three newborn babies suffered respiratory crises. Intermittently, the uniformed [police] encircled the clinic. Early in the afternoon, a group of police attempted to enter the hospital kicking on the door and threatening the guard that impeded their entry.
The nurse Juan Nicolás López, who played a double role, documented all that, aware that besides assisting in the emergency it was important to document what was happening. He shares his story with La Jornada.
He says that he checked in at the Nochixtlán de la Community Hospital, financed by the state government, a little before 8 am. Juan Nicolás has the title of general nurse, with 24 years of experience.
A few meters from the hospital the police attack on the Section 22 teachers’ checkpoint had already started. With some other compañeros the nurse attempted to approach the site of the conflict in order to lend aid in case there were injuries.
“When we realized the magnitude of the confrontation we ran back to the clinic to prepare for the worst. But we couldn’t even imagine what happened. Fateful!”
Hospital personnel quickly started hanging serum, arranging healing material and stretchers, preparing the only operating room, applying mattresses and sheets. By the end of the day nothing was enough.
Many of the injured, light or grave, had to be rejected. Two of them were taken in ambulances to the hospital in Huajuapan de León, but they didn’t arrive at the hospital alive.
The Oaxaca Human Rights Office has a list of 98 injured by firearms, more than double the hospital’s census. And it recognizes that its list can be low.
According to the census of the Oaxaca Health Services (SSO, its initials in Spanish), of which this newspaper has a copy, ten injured entered the Expanded Services Health Center (Cessa) and 14 entered the local clinic of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).
Clinics and hospitals in Huajuapan de León, Tehuacán, San Andrés Sinaxtla and Juxtlahuaca also attended to those injured in Nochixtlán and sent all their available ambulances.
Jesús Cadena Sánchez was the first injured man to die –before noon– at the community hospital; he was only 19 years old and is the
Paramedics and nurses try to revive injured man at the Nochixtlán Hospital.youngest of the victims. He approached the site of the battle attending to the call of the parish priest of his colonia (district) to go to pick up the injured.
He arrived in agony at the hospital. A bullet entered through his lower bowel and traveled to the bladder, it destroyed the iliac vein and part of the intestine. His mother, Patricia Sánchez Meza, who was present during the autopsy, says that they trained the bullet on him. “He was in pieces. I suppose that it was an expansive bullet, because it caused a lot of damage inside of my son’s body. That was evident in the written record of the autopsy.” And, it wasn’t the only case.
Anselmo Cruz Aquino died a little later. He was a plumber and electrician, a native of Tlaxiaco. According to his brother José Luis, a bullet penetrated through the point of his chin, crossed his tongue, trachea and lodged in his lung. Attempts to revive him were useless. Nicolás, the nurse interviewed, supposes that it could be another case of an expansive bullet.
At 10:30 in the morning the hospital was already overflowing. There were injured on the floor of the two waiting rooms and in the hallways. They removed the seats from the waiting rooms in order to attend to the patients there on cardboard or sheets. The noise from police helicopters overhead was heard outside.
Suddenly, two strong hits were heard, one on the roof and the other by the neighboring soccer field. “They were large tear gas bombs. We were full of smoke in an instant. In the midst of the chaos we realized that the three newborns that we had were presenting signs of asphyxia, the same as their mothers, who had given birth the previous day or night. There was nowhere to protect them. We were only able to cover the cracks of the doors and windows with wet sheets,” Juan Nicolás remembers. Of the eight that died during the police attack, four died in that little hospital. Their bodies were safeguarded in the hospital, on the floor.
Two more victims died instantly at the site where they fell, in front of the Hotel Juquila. Residents maintain that sharpshooters dressed in civilian clothes shot from the flat roof against the crowd. Juan Nicolás assures that no injured police arrived at the community hospital. Now the hotel sports an impeccable facade, renovated and recently painted. It operates normally and no one has investigated its owners.
It was not evident to Juan Nicolás that an order was received at the community from the state government hospital to not give care to the injured. “Yes we closed the doors. But that was when some 20 police arrived wanting to enter. The guard closed it. The police started to kick against the door. I saw them. They were out of it like drunks.”
Panic spread inside and as soon as the front was clear many people took their injured family members, grave or not, and took them away for fear that the police would return and would want to arrest them or kill them.
Maybe because of that fear, when Juan Nicolás returned the next weekend to cover his shift, Saturday and Sunday, only one of those injured in the confrontation remained, independent of the gravity of the rest of the injured.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/08/31/politica/005n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNTE: the strike isn’t over…
CNTE: THE STRIKE ISN’T OVER and THERE WILL NOT BE A RETURN TO CLASSES, PROTESTS CONTINUE
CNTE protest with parents and social organizations in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas.
Teachers of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) agreed this Friday night to continue with the teachers’ movement and not return to classes on Monday, September 12, because there are no guaranties that the 11 agreements the federal government offered will be respected.
After holding a State Assembly all afternoon in which representatives of the 800 union delegations in the 24 regions of the state of Chiapas participated, teachers of Section 7 of the SNTE agreed not to end the strike and that the protests will continue this Saturday with a large march and occupation of government offices in Tuxtla.
They pointed out in their resolution that the consultation process with rank and file teachers continues, but that the results that emanate from them are postponed.
They also proposed: “to immediately demand the opening of negotiations with the federal government with the presence of the state government so that it complies with the offers it outlined and with the presence of social organizations that support the teachers’ movement.”
The teachers had already obtained 11 agreements that launched the consultation with rank and file teachers that make up Section 7 of the SNTE, some 57,000 teachers. These political agreements outlined that the education reform would not be applied during the rest of this presidential term, paying back wages, 150 million pesos for school infrastructure, unblocking bank accounts of the Section’s executive committee, eliminating arrest warrants, as well as some other agreements that the federal government now publicly denies having offered to end the labor strike.
The teachers made a call to the rank and file to gather in Tuxtla and march this Saturday and take over government offices like the state Government Palace, the Federal Palace, the Municipal Palace and the state Treasury offices.
The next state assembly where all the leaders of the Chiapas teachers’ movement are together is foreseen for next Monday, September 12 starting at noon in the Che Guevara Auditorium of Section 7 of the SNTE.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Friday, September 9, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 