Mexico's 'Year of Revolution' : Zapatista Silence is Deafening

Zapatistas. Art from radicalgraphics.org.
Silence in Chiapas:
Zapatista rebels 'on vacation'

Is a new uprising on their agenda or does the Zapatista Army of National Liberation just want to be left alone?

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 21, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The pitch-black night suddenly came alive with darting shadows. The slap slap of rubber boots against slick pavement echoed throughout the hushed neighbors on the periphery of town. Sleepy chuchos stirred in the patios, stretched and bayed, their howls catching from block to block, barrio to barrio.

Across the narrow Puente Blanco, down the rutted Centenario Diagonal, up General Utrilla from the market district, dark columns jogged in military cadence. With their faces canceled behind ski-masks and kerchiefs and their collective breath hanging in the still mountain air like vapors from a cruel past many Mexicans have disremembered, the "sin rostros" advanced on the center of the city of San Cristobal de las Casa, the jewel box colonial city that crowns the Mayan highlands of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state.

So it began, the Zapatista rebellion, January 1, 1994, in the first hour of that beacon of globalization, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Sixteen years later, past midnight on January 1, 2010, a year in which many sense that the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution will be celebrated with new uprisings, there were no darting shadows or dark columns of Zapatistas marching on the center of San Cristobal and the howling of the dogs, rather than alerting the city to the arrival of the Indian rebels only marked the passing of a desultory drunk tottering home to sleep off the excesses of New Year's eve.

Each year since that first New Year's, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has commemorated its brief takeover of San Cristobal and six other municipal seats in southeastern Chiapas with militant speeches and fiestas thrumming with the herky jerky rhythms of the rebels' favorite cumbias, sometimes at the "Caracol" or public center in La Realidad on the edge of the Lacandon rainforest but more often at Oventic in Los Altos of Chiapas, 45 minutes as the crow climbs from San Cristobal.

But as 2010 tolled in, a hand-lettered sign posted to the gate of the highland Caracol advised visitors that Oventic would be closed to visitors until January 2nd. At the Ejido Morelia in the lowlands, a note tacked to the Caracol fence proclaimed that the rebels were "on vacation." Three other Caracoles -- La Garrucha, La Realidad, and Robert Barrios (in the north of the state) -- were similarly locked down tight for the first time since that first January 1, a clue that no new revolutions are brewing, at least here in the Zapatista zone, as Mexico ushers in the centennial of its landmark revolution.

Punctuated by long silences, the Zapatistas' resonance has plummeted precipitously in the first decade of the new millennium. The Indians' struggle lost a great deal of relevance after much of the urban left abandoned the Zapatista cause when the Mayan rebels' quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos lashed out at the left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the fraud-marred 2006 presidential elections and refused to support the millions who marched to rectify the results. The EZLN has never been able to recapture the initiative.

Since then, the Zapatistas have retreated to their villages and Caracoles, quietly defending their hard-won autonomy and only occasionally seeking to stir support in the outside world.

As an adjunct to their yearly in-house marking of the occupation of San Cristobal and the promulgation of the first Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle back in 1994, the EZLN and its supporters in the "Other Campaign" -- originally formulated in 2006 to thwart the electoral left -- have held Christmas week seminars to which European intellectuals are invited to present papers praising autonomy and the rebels' fierce resistance to globalization.

Last year's "Fiesta of Digna Rabia" ("Dignity & Rage") focused on the Mexican government's criminalization of social protest and the defense of Zapatista conquests. In 2008, the conclave was dedicated to the struggle of Zapatista women. The word fests were invariably followed by visits to the Caracoles and much cumbia dancing.

The 2010 edition unfolded at the University of the Earth, an alternative learning place on the fringes of San Cristobal. No Zapatistas were in attendance. Among the invitees were international "anti-systemics" such as Cristine Kummer, an East Indian writer on the demons of globalization who has long lived in Tunisia. On her first visit to Chiapas to sample in person the social movement that she describes as "the most important of our time," Kummer was disappointed to find Zapatista communities closed down to visitors.

Although the mandatory French intellectual Jerome Basent was on hand (the symposium is dedicated to the memory of Andres Aubrey, a French anthropologist beloved by the Zapatistas), headliners like Shock Doctrine guru Naomi Klein who was on hand last year, and French-English memoirist John Berger, who attended in 2007, were nowhere to be seen (Berger did send along a chapter of a new book denouncing the world as a prison.)

But the featured no-show was the near-mythical Subcomandante Marcos who has not been seen or heard from since he took the microphone to lambaste Lopez Obrador at last year's Digna Rabia fiesta. In fact, the Sup has been missing in action for a full year now and the endless stream of communiqués that he so assiduously cranked out in the first years the EZLN was on public display has dried up.

Despite the sort of conflictive year for Mexico that Marcos used to relish commenting upon, the Subcomandante did not issue a single public word in 2009. When the economy collapsed, driving Mexico into its steepest downturn since 1995 (for which then-president Ernesto Zedillo blamed the Zapatistas), the Sup remained speechless.

As the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) he so detests was riven asunder by internal conflicts and his nemesis Lopez Obrador relegated to roaming the outback of Oaxaca, the one-time Zapatista mouthpiece held his tongue. When Mexican president Felipe Calderon shut down the Luz y Fuerza power company and moved to privatize it, putting 42,000 members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union in the street, no note of solidarity was forthcoming -- despite the electricistas' installation of power lines that brought light to Zapatista communities in the jungle.

This December, Marcos's mother (if he really is Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente) dropped dead at the Mexico City airport. No memorial announcements were published in Mexico City newspapers as is funerary tradition here. Now as the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution looms, Sup Marcos, who once postulated a new constitutional convention in 2010, remains stonily mum.

Zapatista image from radicalgraphics.org.
Actually, the Zapatista leader's reticence is not unique. In 1995, after Zedillo vetoed the San Andres Accords on Indian Rights that guaranteed limited autonomy to Mexico's 20,000,000 indigenous peoples, an enraged Marcos went silent for 18 months. After the accords were gutted by the Mexican Congress in 2001, the Zapatista spokesperson clammed up for nearly three years, finally breaking his vow of silence to proclaim the opening of the Caracoles in 2004. But this time around, Marcos's absence feels like it is forever.

Whether Marcos, who is really only his mask, has abandoned his persona or retired from revolution or is lounging at a café on the left bank of Paris -- or worse -- his disappearance from the public arena is the subject of much perplexed speculation.

Although EZLN communities in the highlands and the jungle are still quarreling with their neighbors over land the rebels took back from Chiapas ranchers in 1994, the EZLN is no longer under siege from the Mexican military which now limits itself to perfunctory patrols in their territories. Nonetheless, the enemy may be more insidious.

Whereas Chiapas was once governed by tyrants like Roberto Albores who delighted in violently dismantling autonomous communities, the present governor, Juan Sabines, who was elected on the PRD ticket, is always inviting the Zapatistas to dialogue and promulgates flawed Indian Right laws. To burnish his image of benevolence, Sabines liberally spreads around large sums of cash to the very venial Chiapas media.

The largesse has even found its way into unlikely pockets: La Jornada, Mexico's only left daily and a vocal champion of the Zapatista cause for the past 16 years, is now allotted generous subsidies for running Sabines government publicity and publishing gacetillas, press bulletins that are published as if they were news stories. The fresh cash is a welcome source of revenue for La Jornada in a recession year when Mexican newspapers are being hammered, the management explains.

The Chiapas governor is a nephew of Mexico's most popular romantic poet, Jaime Sabines, and the son of a former governor -- unlike his father, also Juan, who is deemed responsible for the slaughter of dozens of indigenas at Golonchan in 1979, Junior has no Indian blood on his hands -- yet.

Juan Sabines aligned himself with the PRD after his own party, the once-and-future ruling PRI, rejected his candidacy. Since his narrow victory in the 2006 election, the governor has veered to the right, meeting frequently with Mexican President Felipe Calderon of the conservative PAN and has broken all ties with Lopez Obrador who once hailed his victory as a triumph for the electoral left.

Last November, as rumors generated by Sabines' media machine swirled that the Zapatistas would rise on the 20th of the month, the 99th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the Chiapas state congress under the baton of the Governor installed a commission to "dialogue" with the Zapatistas. The Chiapas "prensa vendida" (and La Jornada) reported that the rebels had approached Sabines seeking legal recognition in order to finance social projects.

News of this supposed deal provoked serious discombobulation among Zapatista supporters. Gloria Munoz, a columnist for La Jornada ("Los de Abajo") who spent many years living in rebel communities, received worried e-mails from the German solidarity movement demanding an explanation of the reported Zapatista sell-out to the "mal gobierno" (bad government.) Munoz and Magdalena Gomez, once an advisor to the EZLN during negotiations of the San Andres Accords and also a Jornada contributor, rejected the story as a Sabines' hoax -- the Zapatistas' most remarkable achievement has been their autonomy and Zapatista autonomy was not for sale, they wrote.

Indeed, the EZLN soon set the record straight. Although the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (JBGs) that administrate Zapatista autonomies and are based at the five Caracoles had not been very garrulous in 2009, all five juntas under the pen of the Oventic comrades issued an energetic denial of Sabines' "lies" which they termed "a counterinsurgency plot to confound public opinion…we have never asked for crumbs from the mal gobierno." After 16 years of lucha (struggle) for their autonomy, the Zapatistas would never sell out.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is still technically at war with the Mexican government although few shots have been fired in years. The rebels' refusal to deal with the State was sealed in 2001 after Congress -- with the vote of the PRD -- deep-sixed an Indian Rights law drawn from the San Andres Accords. The accords, which were signed off in February 1996 by Zedillo's representatives and would have guaranteed autonomy over everything from land use to the way Indian communities select their authorities by "uses and customs," were brokered by a congressional Pacification and Reconciliation Commission, the COCOPA, that has long since fallen into irrelevance.

Now, in a PRD ploy to revive a dead horse, the current COCOPA president Jose Narro Cespides flew into San Cristobal for the 16th anniversary of the rebellion issuing conciliatory statements to the rebels and taking out newspaper ads pleading with the Juntas de Buen Gobierno to receive him in the Caracoles. The EZLN, which has long regarded the COCOPA as an emissary of the mal gobierno, were not moved. Like Luis H. Alvarez, the 90 year-old government peace commissioner who spent six years cruising the jungle and the highlands without ever actually talking to a Zapatista, Narro Cespides returned to Mexico City unrequited.

Does the rebels' silence mask a surprise for 2010? Is a new uprising on their agenda or does the Zapatista Army of National Liberation just want to be left alone? Zapatologists such as this writer have always been notoriously off the mark in trying to predict what the compas will do next. Stay tuned.

[John Ross will be trekking Obamalandia with his latest cult classic El Monstruo -- Dread and Redemption in Mexico City ("a gritty, pulsating read" -- New York Post) from February 4-May 1. Send suggestions of possible venues (particularly CHICAGO and U.S. South) to johnross@igc.org.]

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Alice Embree : Remembering Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero

Mural at the National University of El Salvador depicting the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, assassinated in March 24, 1980. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
Liberation theologian and advocate for the poor, El Salvador's Romero was assassinated 30 years ago today.

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 24, 2009

[This article is part of a series on El Salvador being written by Alice Embree. Embree was an official observer during the recent presidential elections there and sent dispatches to The Rag Blog using the byline "Al."]

Twenty-nine years ago today, on March 24, 1980, Archibishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated in El Salvador. He was celebrating mass in a small chapel. As he raised the communion chalice a bullet tore through his heart.

Romero was an advocate for the poor, a defender of human rights and a proponent of liberation theology. His funeral on March 30th drew mourners from around the world. A crowd estimated at 250,000 packed the plaza in front of the Cathedral. During the funeral, the military fired shots into the crowd from the buildings above, killing more than thirty mourners.

Major Roberto D’Aubisson was identified as the man who ordered Romero’s assassination. D’Aubisson organized El Salvador’s infamous death squads, targeting political activists and carrying out civilian massacres. D’Aubisson also founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance Party, ARENA.

A memorial wall in San Salvador bears the names of nearly 30,000 of the dead and disappeared –- names gathered as part of a Truth Commission at the end of El Salvador’s civil war. Romero’s name is there as are those of the four U.S. churchwomen raped and murdered in December 1980. An entire panel lists the places where civilian massacres took place.

1980 was a turning point for El Salvador. Romero’s assassination brought the small Central American country to the attention of the world. It was also the year that the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) was founded. The five largest guerrilla movements in El Salvador united to form the FMLN as a single political-military force in October of 1980. With the signing of the U.N. Peace Accords in 1992, the FMLN was legalized as a political party.

October 1980 also saw the founding of the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in the United States. For nearly three decades CISPES has promoted solidarity with El Salvador and mounted opposition to the U.S. military aid and training, propping up El Salvador’s death squad government. During the 1980s, El Salvador became a Reagan experiment in “low-intensity conflict.”

The ARENA party has held the presidency of El Salvador since 1989, presiding over the signing of CAFTA and economic policies that concentrated wealth and privatized public services. On March 15th the FMLN won the national election. Mauricio Funes was elected president and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former guerrilla combatant, was elected vice-president. In his acceptance speech, Funes dedicated his victory to the memory of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

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Politics in El Salvador : Echos of Nicaragua

Special to The Rag Blog

'The Salvadoran Right has capitalized on the chaos in Nicaragua to further their negative campaign to defame the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party.'

By Leah Wilson / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2008

See 'Open Letter to Nicaragua Solidarity Activists' by Chuck Kaufman, Below.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The results of Nicaragua’s municipal elections on November 9, 2008, and the post-election violence and calls of fraud have saturated El Salvador’s newspapers throughout November.

The Salvadoran Right has capitalized on the chaos in Nicaragua to further their negative campaign to defame the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party and its presidential candidate Mauricio Funes and vice-presidential candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén who have a 13 point lead over the governing right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party. As ARENA -- which has had an openly close relationship with the Bush administration and implemented neoliberal and repressive policies under the Bush camp’s guidance -- realizes the likelihood of El Salvador taking a left turn in the presidential elections in March 2009, they have stepped up the efforts of their campaign.

Fuerza Solidaria is doing much of the dirty work. It's an organization that was founded by right wing Venezuelan Alejandro Peña Esclusa with the sole purpose of stopping the leftward turn that many Latin American countries have decided to take. The primary message of their print, TV, and pamphlet campaign is the same US-interventionist rhetoric seen in every Salvadoran election: if the FMLN wins, your relatives living in the US will be deported and remittances sent home from the US (which amount to over $3 billion dollars a year and sustain the Salvadoran economy) will come to an end. So far, the US government has made no attempts to clarify the lies being propagated using their name, despite declarations of neutrality for the 2009 elections.

The violence, chaos and accusations of fraud that followed Nicaragua’s November elections, along with the United States’ freezing of Millennium Fund social project money for Nicaragua after the elections, has added a new dimension to the campaign against the FMLN. While Fuerza Solidaria has played a part in this new effort, it is primarily the right-wing owned media that have taken the lead. I am including an open letter from the US-based solidarity organization Nicaragua Network that contains more information on the Nicaraguan government and the actual events of November 9 and the aftermath — something you will not find in the mainstream media.

La Prensa Gráfica and the Diario de Hoy (unaffectionately known as the Diablo de Hoy by many Salvadorans) are two of the most widely circulated dailies in El Salvador. They are also owned by right-wing businessmen who consistently do the work of the ARENA party in their coverage of national and international events. Throughout the month of November, articles highlighting the violence in Nicaragua were combined with references to the FMLN’s historic ties to Nicaragua’s governing Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) party. Accusations of FMLN participation in the post-election violence were rampant, often substantiated by photos of one person wearing an FMLN T-shirt in a group of masked Sandinistas and testimonies of journalists who supposedly saw cars with Salvadoran license plates. The story of the freezing of Millennium Fund money, of which El Salvador is currently a recipient, was also front-page news.

So, currently in El Salvador I found myself thinking a lot about Nicaragua. I knew that the Salvadoran Right’s use of the chaos there was just part of their campaign tactics (which judging by the polls have proved mostly ineffective in swaying the opinions of the people of El Salvador); however, I wanted a better analysis of Nicaragua outside of the El Salvador lens. In my efforts to make sense of the Nicaragua elections and better understand the very complex political situation there, I read lots of materials; but the open letter pasted below from the Nicaragua Network not only gave me that clarity that cannot be found in the mainstream media, but it helped me better understand the nature of international solidarity in general and Central American solidarity specifically.

Open Letter to Nicaragua Solidarity Activists
By Chuck Kaufman / December 9, 2008

[Chuck Kaufman is national co-coordinator of the Nicaragua Network.]

The Nicaragua Network has received many notes and emails about our coverage of Nicaragua in recent months. Some think we’re too supportive of the government of President Daniel Ortega, while others think we are too critical. Still others have written to thank us for what they consider to be balanced information in a highly polarized situation. We welcome the dialogue and constructive criticism and are encouraged that so many people are still paying attention to Nicaragua and the US role in that small, poor country.

In my more than 21 years on the national staff of the Nicaragua Network, it has never been more difficult to determine the best way to present the information and analysis we provide to solidarity activists in the United States. In the 1980s we saw our mission to be to explain to the US solidarity community the actions of the Sandinista government in the context of the brutal US-manufactured contra war and economic sabotage. That resulted in the appearance of uncritical support of the Sandinistas on our part.

In the era of the neoliberal governments, news and analysis was easy. We opposed neoliberalism, US domination, and the efforts to wipe out the gains of the Sandinista revolution. Today our work is more difficult because there are both positive and negative aspects of the current government’s political project, and there are divisions within Sandinismo about how to move forward. Our staff and board have had many long phone and email conversations in an effort to sharpen and balance our analysis.

Many people came to their love of Nicaragua after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and thus have no experience with the Sandinista revolutionary period. This is especially true in the Sister City movement which began in the 1980’s but it is the only sector of Nicaragua solidarity to add significant new members after the 1990 electoral defeat. I have the greatest respect for the sister city groups; they are the ones who have stuck with their partners in Nicaragua through thick and thin while many of those whose solidarity was motivated primarily by ideology have long since moved on to other progressive causes. I am not for a moment implying that people in sister city groups are apolitical; a conversation with our board, most of whom represent sister city groups, would dispel that error quickly.

Still, it is hard for anyone who joined the solidarity movement after 1990 to understand the historical importance of the FSLN to those of us who traveled to – and supported – Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. After 1990, the neoliberal Nicaraguan governments worked hard to eradicate the memory of the Sandinista revolution and the Sandinista struggles to protect the Nicaraguan people from attacks by the US-sponsored contras. Our government and corporate media worked equally hard to eradicate those memories in the United States. However, many of us in the Nicaragua Network haven’t forgotten.

I think it would be useful, both for new and older solidarity activists, if we review the roots of the Nicaragua Network to better understand the context in which we develop our current information and analysis.

The Nicaragua Network was born 30 years ago this coming February 24 at a conference in Washington, DC. A number of major cities already had solidarity committees working to support the Sandinista armed liberation movement. They decided they needed national coordination to make their work more effective. So, the Nicaragua Network was formed first and foremost to provide solidarity support to the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) and its struggle to overthrow, by force of arms, the brutal US-backed Somoza dictatorship.

The Sandinista triumph on July 19,1979 was met with joy not only in Nicaragua but here in the United States as well. The wedding of the Sandinista socialist program with liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor" created what Oxfam-Great Britain later called "the threat of a good example." The Empire was quick to strike back. I don't need to go into the whole history of the illegal and immoral contra war and the relentless efforts by the US government and the corporate media to vilify and delegitimize the Sandinista government, both before and after it became a duly elected representative democracy in 1984.

The campaign of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies was enthusiastically waged by the US corporate media, led by the Washington Post and New York Times. I was surprised when someone referred us to an article in the New York Times to demonstrate the Nicaragua Network's bias. When have we ever been able to believe a word about Nicaragua that was printed in the New York Times? When reporters like Raymond Bonner tried to report factually and impartially from Central America, they were demoted or fired. Bonner eventually received an apology, but the New York Times bias never changed.

So yes, there is no question that the Nicaragua Network has its own bias. Our bias is in favor of democratic socialism (not to be confused with social democracy) and a preferential option for the poor. We don't hide it, and we make no apologies. While the government of President Daniel Ortega may fall short in the area of democratic socialism, it is our judgment that it is demonstrating a proven preferential option for the poor. We view the mission of the Nicaragua Network to be to stop the US government from once again denying Nicaraguans the opportunity to achieve greater economic and social justice. The most fundamental mission of the Nicaragua Network is to stop our government from intervening in Nicaragua’s internal affairs.

As evidence of the Ortega government’s preferential option for the poor, I would cite as an example that it will have eliminated illiteracy by July 2009 and the majority of municipalities have already been declared free of illiteracy. That is due, in part, to the fact that the first action of the new government was to eliminate school fees. This bold action enabled more than 100,000 additional children to attend school. During the neoliberal years, many parents weren’t able to send their kids to school because of school fee policies dictated by the IMF and World Bank. For adult literacy the Sandinista government has implemented the Cuban literacy program “Yes, I Can!” and even extended it to the Miskito and Mayagna (Sumo) indigenous languages.

That is just one example. The free health clinics are once again staffed and stocked with medicine so that patients receive medicine, rather than prescriptions they couldn’t afford to fill under the right-wing governments of 1990-2007. Cooperation with Cuba and Venezuela has given several thousand people back their sight after cataract surgery, and free operations in the hospitals have saved uncounted lives. The Sandinista government has also resurrected the small and medium farming sector, the historic backbone of Nicaragua’s economy, which wasn’t even in the National Development Plan Ortega inherited from his predecessor Enrique Bolaños.

The Zero Hunger program has provided 32,709 poor families with animals, seeds, fertilizer, etc. so they could become food self-sufficient and sell their surplus. Zero Usury has provided low interest loans to small farmers and merchants so they can earn a livelihood and feed their families. Houses for the People is putting roofs over the heads of families that previously lived in shacks built of anything they could find. Project Love is working to eliminate the tragedy of child labor. The subsidized food distribution centers are all that stand between some families and malnutrition. The Sandinista government is taking steps to feed, clothe and house its people despite skyrocketing food costs and the greatest crisis in capitalism in 80 years. I think these programs mean something; and what they mean for the lives of real people is more important than the howls and outrage among the political class in Nicaragua and abroad.

Do we think the Ortega government is perfect? No, and even a casual reading of the information and analysis we have produced over the nearly two years of his presidency will demonstrate that fact. We continue to criticize Sandinista support for criminalizing therapeutic abortion. We have criticized violent excesses of Sandinista supporters during the recent electoral process. And we have cautioned that the effort to monitor foreign funding of nongovernmental organizations not be used as an excuse to persecute women’s rights groups.

But, do we think the Ortega government is better than another right-wing, neoliberal government beholden to US masters? Absolutely. Just imagine how much worse the people of Nicaragua would be suffering in the current economic crisis if US-favored Eduardo Montealegre had become president in January 2007 instead of Daniel Ortega. How much worse off in the current economic crisis would poor Nicaraguans be in the absence of the anti-poverty programs of the current Sandinista government? The answer should be self evident.

I personally find it hard to get excited about the claims by the right-wing of fraud in the recent municipal elections. I think the claims are much greater than the reality. Of course, the US advisers and funders of the right-wing parties know all about stealing elections. Maybe they assume that all elections are as crooked as the ones in Florida and Ohio. My analysis is that the FSLN received more votes than the opposition. The biggest stink was made about the mayoral election in Managua, but an independent poll right before the election showed FSLN candidate Alexis Arguello with a 5 point lead, and that’s what he won by. Frankly, I think the supporters of Ivy League trained oligarch Eduardo Montealegre just can’t believe that a barrio born former boxer beat him. I’m delighted, and I can’t imagine why any U.S. solidarity activist would want to see Montealegre, the corrupt banking buddy of the Bush regime, as mayor of Nicaragua’s capital city.

The FSLN played by the European-US "liberal democracy" rules in 1984, 1990, 1996, 2001, and 2006. In 1984 the US forced the major opposition candidate out of the race, when it was obvious he would lose, so they could claim the election was not legitimate. In 1990, the US spent more per voter on the Nicaraguan election than Democrats and Republicans combined spent per voter on the 1988 US presidential election.

In 1996 the election was blatantly stolen by the Constitutional Liberal Party with US technological assistance as well as funding. Jimmy Carter and Oscar Arias told Ortega he had to accept the fraudulent results to prevent a civil war. He did, just as he accepted the 1990 returns resulting in the first peaceful turnover of power from one political party to another in Nicaragua’s history. The result of the 1990 election doomed Nicaraguans to 17 years of hunger, poverty, and the loss of nearly everything they had gained from ousting the Somoza dictatorship.

Is it any wonder if some in the FSLN might have been determined not to suffer losses in this year's municipal election, or that certain international election observers, who had certified previous fraudulent elections as “free and fair,” were not invited to observe this one? (There were other certified international observers, however, and the political parties had poll watchers just like in US elections.) I find it hard to fault the logic even if I don't approve of all the methods. And if the fraud was as blatant as the charges claim, why won’t the Constitutional Liberal Party present its “evidence” to the Supreme Electoral Commission where they hold an equal number of seats as the Sandinistas? Sure, some of the media events were impressive and disturbing, but that’s not the same as following the constitutionally mandated mechanisms for proving fraud.

The FSLN won the majority of municipalities in the previous election and, by all account; most of the Sandinista mayors did a good job. With the additional boost of the Ortega government's anti-poverty programs over the last two years, I don't find it surprising at all that they made further gains this year. The surprise would be if they hadn't.

One of the tried and true tactics of the so-called democracy building programs of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID) is to manipulate polls, quick counts, and the corporate media to cast doubts on the legitimacy of elections. Look at the Ukraine election of 2003, where they succeeded, and the Venezuelan recount vote of 2004, where they failed, to see similarities to the reactions to the Nicaraguan municipal elections of 2008.

What does surprise me is that some people in the US continue to fail to recognize the treachery of our government and credulously read and listen to the US corporate media. How many times must it be proven that the US government and corporate media lack any commitment to democracy when the outcome doesn't conform with their perceived "interests” before some people learn to read the propaganda?

So the Nicaragua Network will continue to expose and oppose US intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere. We will continue to support governments that show a preferential option for the poor. And we'll continue to oppose right-wing neoliberalism wherever it rears its ugly head. We'll continue to fight disinformation by putting out true information about the Sandinista government's anti-poverty programs, and we'll continue to criticize its excesses of authoritarianism.

We won't get the balance right in each and every case, but I firmly believe that if you examine the body of our work from the perspective of our historical mission, on the whole we are right where we should be. We welcome constructive criticism when solidarity activists believe we are off the mark and we always welcome dialogue.

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BOOKS : 'The Art of Political Murder'

Activist Auxiliary Bishop Juan Girardi Conederal, murdered in April, 1988.
Mourners gather with can candles to mourn the murder of Bishop Juan Girardi: "Enough!"
The Novelist and the Murderers
By Nathaniel Popper

[This article first appeared in the July 7, 2008 edition of The Nation.]

Early last November, the novelist Francisco Goldman was shouldering his way through the Texas leg of a reading tour for his first nonfiction book, The Art of Political Murder. Published by Grove Press in September, the book had received glowing reviews in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it would soon be included by The New York Times Book Review in its list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. On Nov. 5 Goldman was relaxing in his hotel before a reading at a Houston Barnes & Noble when his BlackBerry pinged with an e-mail from an innkeeper in the Guatemalan town of Santiago de Atitlán.

One day earlier, Guatemalans had voted in a general election, and the winner of the presidential contest was Álvaro Colom, a self-proclaimed Social Democrat and head of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) Party. Quite unexpectedly, Colom had come from behind in the polls to defeat Otto Pérez Molina, a salt-and-pepper-haired general who had campaigned on the slogan of Mano Dura (Firm Fist), a sturdy platform in a country that was ruled by the military and repressive right-wing parties almost without interruption from 1954 until the late '90s. As it happens, the election was also the subject of the e-mail Goldman received from the innkeeper, David Glanville: The Art of Political Murder, Glanville wrote, may have been a decisive factor in Pérez Molina's loss.

Goldman's book is about neither the election nor the candidates. The Art of Political Murder is an investigation of one of Guatemala's most notorious and gruesome killings. On a Sunday night in April 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi had been bludgeoned to death just two days after publishing a report about the Guatemalan military's responsibility for civilian massacres in the country's recently concluded civil war. In the midst of investigating the case, Goldman found sources who told him that on the night of the murder, Pérez Molina was hanging out in a convenience store near Gerardi's church with a few conspirators in Gerardi's murder. That scrap of information is mentioned--but not heavily scrutinized--by Goldman in his book.

The Art of Political Murder was available only in English, but during the campaign the news it contained slowly spread through Guatemala: in some places disseminated by priests, in other places by UNE officials at election rallies. In Santiago de Atitlán, a small indigenous town on the shores of Guatemala's most beautiful lake, word had arrived in the form of a pamphlet featuring three photos--two of Gerardi and one of the cover of The Art of Political Murder--and a line from the book, translated into Spanish, about the general's alleged role in the crime. The pamphlets were handed out to people visiting Santiago's cemetery on the Day of the Dead, two days before the election. Dolores Ratzan, a local woman who had lived in exile in the United States during much of the civil war, says she saw the pamphlets when she went to the cemetery. What she noticed even more was the discussion they stirred up. "I just heard people talking about it--like, This Pérez Molina, he killed the bishop. That's what everybody talked about," she recalled a few months after the election. She says that on election day, "that's why a lot of people didn't vote for him, because he was a killer."

Pérez Molina's campaign of law and order had played well in Santiago, thanks to a wave of crime and lynchings last year. But as in many areas of Guatemala, the invocation of Goldman's account of Gerardi's murder had deep resonance. In 1981, at the height of the country's civil war, Guatemalan soldiers broke into Santiago's Catholic church and drove nails through the head of its priest--a transplant from Oklahoma who had been accused of siding too closely with the indigenous people.

Santiago has weathered the varied effects of US involvement in Guatemala. After the CIA-led coup d'état against Col. Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the US government funded and trained Guatemalan military officers, some of whom went on to serve at a base near Santiago. More recently, Santiago has been the site of American charitable projects. But the unexpected presence of Goldman's book, not just in Santiago but throughout the country during the 2007 election campaign, represented an inadvertent kind of American involvement in Guatemala. Edgar Gutiérrez, an old colleague of Bishop Gerardi's and a former foreign minister, calls Guatemala a "kingdom of impunity." Written to tell one story about that kingdom, The Art of Political Murder has become caught up in another story, one about the kingdom's possible reformation. More improbable still, the book has injected an element of accountability and consequence into a country where for decades there's been far too little of either.

During Guatemala's civil war, 200,000 people were killed--roughly 5 percent of the population at the outbreak of fighting--and nearly all of the dead were from rural indigenous areas. UN-monitored peace accords were signed by the Guatemalan Army and guerrillas in 1996, but since then a virtual narco-state has arisen, created and overseen largely by former military officers. The homicide rate in Guatemala is seven times that of New York City, and it recently surpassed the levels in Colombia and South Africa. The figure is roughly equal to what it was during the civil war--forty-five deaths per 100,000 people. Equally staggering is the fact that the Guatemalan police make arrests in about 5 percent of their homicide cases (in the United States, the figure is 62 percent). During the Colom-Pérez Molina presidential race, nearly sixty people affiliated with the campaigns were murdered, more than twice the number killed during the previous election, in 2003. During a recent stay in Guatemala City, I passed a man who was bleeding from a bullet wound in his abdomen at 1 pm in the middle of downtown. Several firemen, who are responsible for removing dead bodies, were on the scene, but the police were nowhere in sight.

Bishop Gerardi was renowned for defending a group often targeted by brutal political violence--Guatemala's downtrodden indigenous population. After working as the bishop in the rural province of El Quiché for six years, Gerardi was warned by locals that assassins were on his trail, and so in 1980 he fled to Costa Rica. But people who know him say that his exile never dulled his off-color humor or disdain for the risks involved with his work. After Gerardi returned to Guatemala in 1983, he helped found the human rights project of the Catholic Church, called Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado (ODHA). After the 1996 peace accords, ODHA launched an investigation dedicated to providing a thorough accounting of civil war-related crimes, including the massacre of civilians. By 1998 the organization had assembled a four-volume report documenting the toll of the war. Guatemala: Never Again concluded that the military was responsible for 80 percent of the civilian deaths during the civil war. The next year, ODHA's findings were corroborated by a UN investigation, which attributed 93 percent of the casualties to the military.

Gerardi would not live to see this confirmation of his work. On April 26, 1998, two days after a public presentation of Never Again in Guatemala City's main cathedral, the bishop was found in a pool of blood in the garage of his parish house, a jagged piece of concrete nearby. The crime occurred a little after 10 pm, and the bishop's wallet and gold ring were found with his body.

Gerardi's church, San Sebastián, is a modest, elegant structure within blocks of the National Palace and every major intelligence agency, and initially it appeared that the investigation of the bishop's murder would, like so many other cases, disappear into the thicket of impunity. The crime scene was a mess (gawkers were allowed on the scene, and some walked through puddles of blood), and the first arrest was a homeless man. The UN verification team stationed in Guatemala after the peace accords quickly raised the possibility of a cover-up and criticized the government prosecutor for withholding documents.

The theory was certainly a plausible one, since at the time only one human rights case against members of the military had gone through the Guatemalan courts, and in that case, when an officer was convicted, he quickly escaped--this after the investigating police officer was murdered in broad daylight. Members of Gerardi's team at ODHA had worked on that case, and when their boss was killed, the young team of ODHA investigators, which included Edgar Gutiérrez, quickly went to work. While the government prosecutor investigating Gerardi's murder stumbled, the ODHA team found a taxi driver who had driven past the church on the night of the crime and seen a car with men gathered around it. They traced the car to a mothballed military base. When the information was shared with the government, all public records of the car disappeared. It was the first clear signal in the Gerardi case that, as Goldman writes in his book, "the Army had many chess pieces to play with, and a very large board."

Born in 1954 to a Guatemalan mother and a Ukrainian-American Jewish father, Goldman has a round head of curly black hair and a ready laugh. He lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn, and when I met him there books and papers were strewn about his one-bedroom apartment. Goldman spent most of his early childhood in Guatemala, and the country is the setting of his first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, published in 1992. It's the story of a Guatemalan-American aristocrat from Boston who investigates the mysterious murder of his adoptive Guatemalan sister, who ran an orphanage in her home country. The Art of Political Murder covers similar territory--murder, paranoia, Guatemalan political intrigue--but it reads as though it were written by a different author. The Long Night of White Chickens is filled with florid poetic language that often doubles back on itself, exploring ideas of memory and dislocation. The Art of Political Murder, by contrast, is a study in spare storytelling, with Goldman rarely devoting more than a sentence to set a scene. Goldman is an ebullient, expressive man, but he says he felt the need to restrain himself while telling the Gerardi story in order to write "with the most diligent fidelity to the case itself."

Goldman began reporting on the Gerardi case a few months after the killing, initially on assignment for The New Yorker. He befriended the young team of ODHA investigators, joining them for long days of sleuthing and equally long nights of drinking. "When Frank wrote this book he was living with us--in all the time that we were suffering," Mario Domingo, the head of ODHA's legal team, recalls. As the ODHA team and a new, more ambitious government prosecutor pushed the case forward, Goldman quickly became a part of the story he was telling. When his piece appeared in The New Yorker on March 15, 1999, a small but respected Guatemalan newspaper, El Periódico, translated and printed the article in a special edition, and sent copies to 5,000 churches around the country. Several months later, Goldman showed up at the trial in Guatemala City, which had commenced after Gerardi's team at ODHA had assembled a case in concert with a new government prosecutor. In the halls of the courthouse, Goldman was menaced by taunts from the most colorful of the defendants, Capt. Byron Lima. During a break in the proceedings, Lima called Goldman a "faggot," leading to a brief verbal altercation. Soon thereafter, the defense lawyers called for the removal of Goldman from the courtroom--a motion that was rejected.

Other people involved in the case encountered more lethal forms of intimidation. Grenades were thrown into the backyard of a judge overseeing the case; masked men broke into the house of ODHA's director and assaulted his son and maid. Despite these threats--issued from Guatemala's kingdom of impunity--after a two-and-a-half-month trial the prosecutors and ODHA won convictions against two military officers, a sergeant and Father Mario Orantes, a priest who lived in the parish house with Gerardi and had colluded to let the killers into the church, according to the sentence. The judges determined that the crime had been planned and executed by the presidential intelligence unit, the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), which had long been a nearly independent unit of terror within the Guatemalan government, answerable only to the president. The court issued a list of thirteen others, including seven military officers, to be investigated further, a probe that continues to this day.

The four convictions did little to close the case. The officers denied any role in the crime and quickly appealed. At the same time, two European journalists, Maite Rico and Bertrand de la Grange, published an article in August 2001 in the Mexican magazine Letras Libres that claimed to contradict the findings of the court. According to the duo, who relied heavily on information provided by members of the military and their attorneys, the military defendants had been innocent and the murder had been committed by renegade military officers in cahoots with the Catholic Church. In 2003, Rico and de la Grange published a longer version of their article as a book, ¿Quién mató al obispo? (Who Killed the Bishop?).

The Rico and de la Grange argument won a wide following in Guatemala. Álvaro Arzú, who had been Guatemala's president when Gerardi was murdered and has since become the mayor of Guatemala City, handed out ¿Quién mató al obispo? to foreign diplomats stationed in Guatemala. Among the many television networks and newspapers to run laudatory coverage of Rico and de la Grange was El Periódico, which published an excerpt from the book. "Bertrand and Maite are rightist journalists working here in a conservative, Catholic country," a top editor at the paper, Juan Luis Font, told me. "I think most editors here wanted to believe that they were telling the truth."

The vituperative atmosphere created by Rico and de la Grange provoked Goldman to expand his article into a book. It also pushed two crucial sources to open up to him: the lead government prosecutor, Leopoldo Zeissig, and Rafael Guillamón, a reticent UN police investigator who had been in charge of a parallel inquiry into the Gerardi case. Guillamón told Goldman that he was "nauseated" by the coverage and showed him all his old notebooks about the case.

Goldman was not alone in pursuing the story that had been laid out by the judges. El Periódico had Claudia Méndez, a young, tenacious reporter, on the beat. Méndez, who had studied at one of Guatemala City's bilingual schools, was only 23 when the trial started, and she speaks with a mix of humility and confidence about the case. "I was like a child when I started working on this case. It was a real clash--a real wake-up. Like I had thought of my country one way and then, bam, I had to realize it is actually this way." Méndez used her guile and seeming innocence to engage the defendants in jailhouse interviews that brought them as close as they ever came to admitting their culpability in Gerardi's murder. But in the end it was Goldman, not Méndez, who wrote the book about the case, and she expresses no unhappiness about that. "Who would have the means to do it here?" she explained to me during a driving tour of the Gerardi crime scene. Even more important than resources, Méndez says, is the fact that only a foreigner would have any credibility with the authorities: "They knew that Frank was a power that they cannot buy and they cannot threaten. It's someone from the outside."

In early 2007, as Goldman was putting the finishing touches on The Art of Political Murder, he gave Méndez a version. Soon people in the office of Álvaro Arzú spotted printouts of the galleys on the mayor's desk. Similar reports came from the bishop's office. (How those two offices nabbed copies of the galleys remains a mystery.) Goldman had sent the copy to Méndez so that the editors of El Periódico could translate and print an excerpt from the book before its publication. For the editors, it was not hard to see which pages would be the most explosive. About two-thirds of the way into the text, on page 239, Goldman introduces Pérez Molina, describing him only as a "Guatemalan officer." But this suave political operator would not blend into the seemingly endless cast of characters who people the book. An excerpt featuring the passage about the "Guatemalan officer" appeared in El Periódico on June 10 along with a photo of Pérez Molina.

Read all of this article here. / The Nation /

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

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Oaxaca's Government Land Grab

Members of the Oaxaca People's Popular Assembly (APPO) take part in a demonstration against Oaxaca's governor Ulises Ruiz in Oaxaca on Nov. 5, 2006. At least a dozen people have been killed in the area since the protest movement began. Photo by Alfredo Estrella / AFP / Getty Images.
In villages across Oaxaca, where land has been owned communally for centuries, paramilitary groups are doing their bloody part to change the scene.
By Theresa Kleinhaus and Maya Schenwar / July 8, 2008

OAXACA and CHICAGO - On April 30, in the small village of Santo Domingo Ixcatlan, in Oaxaca, Mexico, a group of armed men from the paramilitary group the "White Guards" pulled over the car of carpenter Gustavo Castaneda Hernandez, a villager and vocal opponent of the sale of Santo Domingo's communal land. The group, led by Freddy Eucario Morales Arias, the ex-mayor of Santo Domingo, rapidly blocked off the entrance and exit to the road with pickup trucks. The men began beating Hernandez, still trapped in his vehicle. They then set the car on fire. Hernandez was burned alive.

Meanwhile, two other villagers, Inocencio Medina Bernabe and Melesio Martinez Robles - a leader in the defense of communal land - rushed onto the scene, ostensibly in an attempt to aid Hernandez. The armed group killed both men, then dismembered Robles from the waist down and dragged his body through the street. The attackers lingered on the scene, drinking alcohol and listening to music for approximately six hours, witnesses said.

At 2:30 a.m., the State Preventative Police arrived on the scene, detained no one, and permitted all the armed men to return to their vehicles and drive away. The police had close affiliations with Arias. Under the former mayor's guidance, from 2005 to 2007, the village had converted the local community center for children into a new headquarters for the State Preventative Police. Arias remains closely associated with the group.

Since the assassination, several more residents of Santo Domingo have been threatened. The community frequently hears gunshots at night and the paramilitaries - civilian groups armed and ordered by the government - have announced to the people that there will be further executions.

"Never in my 51 years have I seen anything like this," a long-time Santo Domingo resident told Truthout. "Our community was always a peaceful one until Freddy Eucario Morales Arias came to power."

However, this story of a village struck by government-entangled violence based on land disputes is, tragically, increasingly common in Oaxaca.

Only 29 percent of land in Oaxaca is privately owned - the rest is controlled by some form of collective system. In places like Santo Domingo, all agrarian issues are decided by those who work the communal land. Many government figures would like that reality to change, according to Suzy Shepard-Durini of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

"It would be in the interest of the government for communal land to be sold because the government can heavily tax any land that is not communal," Shepard-Durini told Truthout. "Officials can also profit off the land by charging the people who live there fees for use of that land. If the natives don't have legal ownership of the land, it is easy to exploit them or threaten them with relocation."

Although it is unclear what specific economic interest the government holds in Santo Domingo's land, the ongoing state-supported violence indicates that the government stands to profit from a sale, according to Maurilio Santiago Reyes, of the Center for Human Rights and Advice for Indigenous People.

Therefore, when land ownership conflicts emerge between villages or between individuals, self-serving government intervention often exacerbates the situation.

"This type of conflict is not uncommon in Oaxaca," Santiago Reyes told Truthout. "One part of the community wants to sell and another does not; the government gets involved and makes matters worse."

The turmoil in Santo Domingo originated from a conflict between the village and its neighboring town, Chalcotongo de Hidalgo, over a piece of communal land. The federal government offered to buy off participants in Santo Domingo's communal land organization, "bienes comunales," but most community members refused to abandon their way of life for a sum of money.

"We prefer to conserve our land," one villager told Truthout. "We prefer to use this land agriculturally. If we sell, maybe a factory comes, they have the capital and we do the work. But if we conserve the land, we own the land, and we also work it."

Several judicial orders have declared the land to be the property of Santo Domingo Ixcatlan.

In the state of Oaxaca alone, there are 656 similar documented agrarian conflicts. Of those cases, 53 are considered to be "hot spots," or at great risk of developing into armed conflict.

During his tenure as mayor, Arias took over a portion of the land that is in conflict and began storing weapons there. Only Arias' armed paramilitary followers were allowed inside that area. Arias then sought to sell the land in conflict to Chalcatongo. The current mayor of Chalcatongo, Guadalupe Susan Ruiz, is the cousin of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the governor of Oaxaca, with whom Arias also maintains ties, according to a piece written by his wife, published in La Jornada, a leading Mexican newspaper.

The government's discontent over land ownership coincides with a rise in paramilitary violence, particularly in heavily indigenous areas.

According to a June 28 op-ed piece in La Jornada, federal military extension groups are now "openly occupying indigenous communities."

"[Paramilitaries] act as a large fan of practices and processes of criminalizing social protest, with the purpose of containing the discontent of indigenous farming people," the editorial states.

Paramilitaries routinely exploit regional land conflicts. The recent history of the land conflict between Santo Domingo and Chalcatongo has not been violent. In fact, citizens of Chalcatongo offered sympathy and economic support to the people of Santo Domingo Ixcatlan after the assassinations. Community leaders of Santo Domingo emphasize that the homicides were committed by state-sponsored paramilitaries in order to further political goals and that the paramilitaries are merely using the history of land conflict between the two towns as a cover for the politically motivated violence.

The Santo Domingo tragedies follow the usual course of much Mexican paramilitary intervention: Arias trained his followers in a state-sponsored military program, approved by the Oaxaca state government. When the Santo Domingo-Chalcotongo land dispute arose, Arias kicked into gear, planning to reward his paramilitary followers' activism-suppressing efforts with 40 percent of the contested land and sell the other 60 percent to Chalcotongo, according to a Santo Domingo resident.

"Those paramilitaries want to push out anyone who does not want to sell the land to Chalcatongo so they can receive the government money," he said.

The power - and routine use - of paramilitaries has risen in recent years, especially since Ruiz Ortiz became governor.

Ruiz Ortiz was widely criticized for his militarized response to striking teachers in Oaxaca City in 2006. Several people were killed and hundreds were arbitrarily detained. Since that time, the Popular Assembly of Oaxacan Peoples, a large social movement comprised of many civil society groups and governed by traditional indigenous leadership systems, has continued to call for Ruiz Ortiz's resignation.

Santiago Reyes told Truthout that although the paramilitaries existed before the current governor's rise to power, their influence has never been as blatant as during Ruiz Ortiz's term.

Back in Santo Domingo, Arias is moving through a series of legal proceedings. Yet the town's residents doubt much retribution will be served, especially since Arias maintains connections to Oaxaca's governor.

Several weeks ago, police investigating the April assassinations were expelled from the community by the paramilitaries, leaving no police in town. Residents feared a nighttime massacre, ill-assured by the presence of the State Preventive Police - the same force that dismissed the assassinations at the scene of the crime. These days, Oaxacans find it difficult to trust any group linked to the state government to carry out peacekeeping duties.

"The Oaxaca state authorities have repeatedly used excessive force, sometimes lethal, to disperse protests against the controversial state governor," states a late June report issued by Amnesty International. The report also correlates with Santo Domingo's residents' doubts that Arias will be fairly prosecuted, stating, "Those responsible have not been brought to justice."

Meanwhile, last week, a group of paramilitary families who live on Santo Domingo's disputed land came down the mountain and fired guns in the town square. All of those opposed to Morales Arias and his paramilitaries gathered in one house for safety.

So far, the Mexican federal government has not met with the people of Santo Domingo or taken any security measures on their behalf. Governor Ruiz Ortiz recently did meet with residents, and denied any connection to Arias, despite the statements of Arias, villagers, Reyes and Arias' wife. Ruiz Ortiz also claimed that the conflict was merely one between two municipalities, and not a political struggle involving the state government or paramilitaries.

Mexican federal officials have not returned Truthout's requests for comment.

State government representatives assert that they are working steadily to resolve Oaxaca's agrarian conflicts.

"The government of Ulises Ruiz will never underestimate the importance of this subject," said Encar Manuel Zamora Dominguez, a state official in charge of "agrarian reconciliation," at a July 1 press conference.

Villagers across Oaxaca view such statements as doublespeak, pointing to the paramilitary-stoked and government-funded violence that persists in Santo Domingo and beyond.

[Theresa Kleinhaus is a peace activist and law student in Chicago, Illinois. She is working for the summer in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. Maya Schenwar is an editor and reporter for Truthout.]

Source. / truthout

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