A la familia de Juan Vázquez Guzmán;

A los compañeros y compañeras de San Sebastián Bachajón;

A la Sexta;

La Comité del Solidaridad con las Zapatistas de Wellington expresamos nuestra condolencias a la familia del compañero Juan Vázquez Guzmán, y el Ejido de San Sebastián Bachajón. Hemos leido los cuentos del compañero Juan y su determinación para a defender su pueblo, su tierra y territorio. Expresamos nuestra admiración y le agradecemos para su trabajo y energía en su lucha incesante contra el despojo contra el gubernamental de las Cascadas de Agua Azul y contra la imposición de la Caseta de Cobro.

Aqui en Nueva Zelandia tambien estamos luchando para nuestra tierra, el derecho del pueblo a cuidar para Papatuanuku (Madre Tierra) y la cultura y derechos del Tangata Whenua (indigenas – Pueblo de la Tierra). Expresamos el horror al gobierno de Mexico de sus estrategias violentes y sus abusos de derechos humanos contras los de la lucha digna por la tierra y el pueblo. Mandamos justicia, y el cabo de la violencia y la represion de los de la digna rabia. Ya Basta! Solo luchamos para un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.

Mostramos al mal gobierno que no tenemos temor y para la memoria de compañero Juan Vázquez Guzmán y todos que han caído por la lucha digna, la lucha sigue

Democracia!

Justicia!

Libertad!

La Comité de Solidaridad de las Zapatistas de Wellington, Nueva Zelandia.

The Chiapas Support Committee (CSC) is involved in working against the bloody Drug War at home and in Mexico and throughout Latin America. We participate in aDrug War Working Group of the Latin American Solidarity Coalition. We are meeting locally with Bay Area organizations to form a movement against the Drug War.

It’s Time to End the “War on Drugs!”

More than fifty years after former President Richard M. Nixon started the War on Drugs in the United States, it has left a legacy in both the United States and Latin America of ruined lives, broken families, displacements, deportations, disappearances and deaths that is far worse than the effects of the prohibited drugs against which it purports to defend United States citizens. After spending billions of tax dollars, reduction of drug availability and usage is negligible to non-existent. The “War on Drugs” affects people in the United States and other countries as well, especially in Latin America, which is an area of special interest to United States citizens with family and roots in that region.

As President Obama visited both Mexico and Central America from May 2-4, 145 organizations, mostly in the United States, Mexico and Central America signed an important letter laying out drug and security policies preferable to a War on Drugs.
The letter is very important in terms of alternative regional security policy, reflecting a multi-national analysis. It’s posted here on our blog for you all to read.

If you are a member of a local organization or collective that would like to work against the Drug War in the Bay, please contact us at cezmat

Thanks and solidarity!

Chiapas Support Committee/Comité de Apoyo a Chiapas
P.O. Box 3421, Oakland, CA 94609
Tel: (510) 654-9587
Email: cezmat
www.chiapas-support.org
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chiapas-Support-Committee-Oakland/86234490686
http://compamanuel.wordpress.com

We are here and we are not going to leave, because even though they kill us and want to destroy us as indigenous peoples, the heart of the people is alive and will continue struggling whatever the cost

Enrique Peña Nieto, Manuel Velasco Suarez,Leonardo Guirao Aguilar and Francisco Guzmán Jiménez are those responsible for the violence and the dispossession of our lands and for the cowardly murder of our compañero JuanVázquez Guzmán

FROM THE EJIDO SAN SEBASTIAN BACHAJON, ADHERENTS TO THE SIXTH DECLARATION OF THE LACANDÓN JUNGLE, CHIAPAS, MEXICO, 6 MAY 2013

To the people of Mexico and the world

To the compañeros adherents to the sexta national and international

To the mass and alternative media

To national and international human rights defenders

To the Good Government Juntas

To public opinion

From the northern zone of Chiapas we greet all the compañeros and compañeras from organizations and groups who have sent messages of solidarity and love for our compa Juan Vázquez Guzmán, and for our resistance which continues in the struggle to defend what is ours and to tell the bad government that we are here and we are not going to leave, because even though they kill us and want to destroy us as indigenous peoples, the heart of the people is alive and will continue struggling whatever the cost.

The bad government wants to fill our lands with death and fear, so we get tired and no longer continue to defend our life, the people, our mother earth. Our struggle is for the life and dignity of our families and communities, we struggle for a world where many worlds fit, not for capitalism and money to be imposed on our land. The bad government wants us to disappear because we are in the way of its capitalist projects, and to give our land to transnational corporations so they can exploit our mother earth, the wind, the water, our seeds. The government is unable to do its job, it is a vile servant of those who truly have the power and money in the country, which is why they privatize education, electricity, Petróleos Mexicanos, and the land of indigenous peoples and campesinos with their structural reforms and their tax on food and medicines. The bad government for a long time now has not represented the people, but only their own interests, which means the people have to wake up and rise up to defend their rights which are being trampled on with total impunity.

Enrique Peña Nieto, Manuel Velasco Suarez,Leonardo Guirao Aguilar and Francisco Guzmán Jiménez are those responsible for the violence and the dispossession of our lands and for the cowardly murder of our compañero JuanVázquez Guzmán, they are mainly interested in silencing the voice of our organization, and keeping our compañeros Antonio Estrada Estrada, Miguel Vázquez Deara and Miguel Demeza Jiménez hostages without a crime in their prisons of death.

These people of bad politics say that they are authorities, but they are really criminals who sell our lands and the fate of our country, who award themselves the life of the rich at the expense of an increasingly marginalized and excluded population, without work or a dignified wage, and without access to health and education. Their famous crusades against hunger only serve to do business with companies like Nestle and Pepsi, they say they want to fight hunger in the community, but for us it is a lie because we know that all they want is to keep the people poor to take advantage of their need and buy their votes at the next election.

We know that we are not alone in our struggle, because there are many people who have opened their eyes and know the tricks of the bad government, and these people also are fighting to continue being who they are. We wish to greet and offer solidarity to the compañeros of the Ch’ol people of the ejido Tila, who have spent many years resisting like us. We greet the Community Police of Guerrero, and the Zapotec and Ikoots peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the teachers who defend free public education, students, housewives, migrants, and dignified women, children and men who know they want to transform this country, which has been hijacked by a group of criminals called the political class and their bosses the lords of money.

We ask you to remain alert to events which may take place in our community, and we will keep you informed about our actions in defence of our territory.

Have courage, compañeros and compañeras.

Long live our political prisoners, we will continue to make demands until all of them have their freedom, because our word is stronger than the walls of the prison, together we will break down barriers; health and greetings to them.

Our combative embrace from men and women

From the northern zone of Chiapas, Mexico

Adherents to the sixth declaration of the Lacandón Jungle

Respectfully

Land and Freedom!

Hasta la victoria siempre!

[Tin roofs aid brick walls. Photo: Hermann Bellinghausen]

By: Hermann Bellinghausen

Mezcalapa, Chiapas, May 3, 2013

The Emiliano Zapata Rural Village, one of the five sustainable rural cities that the previous state government promoted so much, without ever having finished it, is now found in ruins, inhabited by different groups, without any type of services but, yes, a solid brick construction, without roof and unfinished. This would be the rural city with the best construction. The failure leaps into view, and shows a history of corruption by many actors, governmental as well as campesino organizations, deliberately divided by state action.

“The government says that the rural village (RV) is now finished” a campesino ironizes that actually lives there. “With the ruins that are here it’s already finished, some houses are falling down. They are the ruins of Juan Sabines.”

It’s not easy to avoid a certain post-apocalyptic sensation in this group of 60 half-finished houses (there were going to be 270), which would now be covered by the vegetation of this tropical zone in northern Chiapas, near Tabasco and Veracruz, if it weren’t for its current residents. Some are ex members of the Emiliano Zapata Proletarian Organization-Movement for National Liberation (OPEZ-MLN, its initials in Spanish), for whose members this housing cluster would be destined. Other families are Zoques and campesinos from the region. To the OPEZ, which for now has abandoned the place, they are “invaders.”

Before it ended, the Sabinas administration didn’t want to know about this RV, to the degree that the Institute for Population and Rural Cities, created ad hoc for the ambitious project of 25 units like that in Chiapas, ignored it since 2012 and hardly even mentions it on its official web page. In January of last year, the government still had the impetus to create a new municipality here, previously part of Tecpatán: now Mezcalapa. Months later everything went downhill. OPEZ leaders were put in prison for misappropriation of funds and the head of the previously-mentioned institute, Alejandro Gamboa, was dismissed despite being one of the people closest to Governor Sabines, formally a PRD member like all the actors of this episode and of its debacle.

History of campesino resistance

The UNAM investigator Dolores Camacho Velázquez, who studies this case, exposes in a work (currently at the printer) a resistance and struggle that modified the government’s original idea original of rural cities.”

The famous “stoppage,” the product of the fall of a hill in October 2006 onto the Rio Grijalva and several population centers, caused damages in Ostuacán and other municipalities like Tecpatán and Malpaso, where the water stopped up by the disaster ended up flooding lands of communities that are adjacent to the rivers that empty into the affected zone. “Five localities were flooded in Tecpatán: Rubén Jaramillo, Los Guayabos, Ricardo Flores Magón, Genaro Vázquez and Nuevo Limón. Excepting the first, which is on lands recuperated in 1994 after the Zapatista Uprising, the other four communities are legally recognized properties, according to OPEZ leaders.”

Those affected were installed in shelters, the investigator adds. “The governor visited them and offered to resolve the problem. Six months after the promise they remained in shelters. Due to the fact that many of those affected belonged to OPEZ, they mobilized and organized the shelters to pressure the government to comply with its offerings.”

In 2010, an OPEZ leader told Camacho: “The government obviously moved its army of officials into the shelters to control everything. We said: ‘we are an organization and we control here, the government does not have to meddle in the community’s decisions.’” They began to take actions to pressure the authorities, roadblocks and demonstrations. The media barely made note of them, “but they achieved that the government would establish work groups. The construction of rural cities had already been decided, but for some reason all the governmental and media attention was put into Juan Grijalva.” It was the most celebrated community affected, and gave way to the first rural city, Nuevo Juan de Grijalva.

The government offered one more in Tecpatán, and OPEZ conditioned it on participating in the process. It was conceded to them, and they (OPEZ) took steps to obtain the participation of architects related (to the organization), belonging to the Francisco Villa Popular Front of Mexico City, where this organization has efficiently erected large residential units in Iztapalapa. It could be the best of worlds, but it all failed.

The “village” that wasn’t

The current residents of the shell of the “rural village” swarm spectral, completely outside of the great promise. They have no work, no electric energy and no water. And they are no longer members of OPEZ. The sun is inclement now and the water vats are dry. What’s left for them is the river. The greater part of the buildings are inhabited by families that do not own anything in the world, but they hope to stay here and convert it into a town, like its neighbor, the San Marcos ejido, where they rent 20 hectares for planting some milpas.

The mayor of the new municipality of Mezcalapa, from the PVEM (political party), has also made them promises, but only gave 10 sheets of tin to each family in exchange for their vote, and so now there is a roof. “Not one would be able to buy them,” a man says in the shade of those tin roofs with bitterness. About the lack of moldings and windows, the inhabited houses have curtains or boards nailed to the windows to avoid the inclement weather outside. There is almost no furniture, barely hammocks, wooden benches, and rustic chairs. Many sleep on the ground; “firm,” that indeed, as cement.

Some eight of the families are from the original group, now in a split from OPEZ called the Peace and Freedom Organization, A.C. The rupture was violent. One member of the new group, Luis David Sánchez Gómez, El Chocolate, was dead from a shot in 2011. “They also shot at me when I ran into the woods,” Roberto says, who laments the corruption of all, and admits:

“There is a saying that goes: ‘separate the group and you will win.’ [Divide and conquer?] They did their intelligence (from the government), they attained it and it’s better for them.” For a long time, the homeless victims lived in the Emiliano Zapata camp, on the Huimanguillo (Tabasco) highway, close to here. The authorities acquired 111 hectares so that the families would be temporarily installed, while the RV was being built. Today, that camp, although it continues inhabited by some OPEZ members and by “invaders” waiting for “something,” is an even greater ruin. It is flat terrain mined with square sections of cement where 273 wooden cabañas were, and they were demolished at the time of the debacle.

“No one could live there, everyone ‘bedeviled’ by the heat. The elderly and the children would suddenly wake up dead. There were no conditions,” Luis says, a young man in the RV. “They distributed 120,000 pesos to many and they returned to their communities. We couldn’t. The ground in flooded, one is not able to live there now,” adds Roberto, a native of Nuevo Limón. “They told us that we were going to have a clinic, school. They gave us nothing, not even a road.” In fact, to reach the RV one travels a dirt road in very bad condition, and the children completely lack a school.

The leader of OPEZ, Caralampio Gómez Hernández, and his son Pablo César, were incarcerated in 2012 for alleged fraud in the amount of 20 million pesos. The organization carried out protests and occupations. Roberto, dissident of theirs, considers them guilty, “but not only them; those from the government did the real robbery, and we don’t know if the ones from Francisco Villa also did. We don’t trust anyone now.”

He mentions the case of another OPEZ leader that left the RV “and now has 500 head of cattle on his ranch, in Buenavista.”

The impressive Cerro del Mono (Monkey Hill), a famous point in the La Sepultura Reserve, of great height and an unusual shape, like a barnacle, with a summit inclined at the peak, distinguishes this locality at its back that was going to be a dignified development of the “Millennium,” impelled by the State, philanthropic corporations, revolutionary organizations and the UN, and is now one more phantom hoy of progress.

** They only provoked community divisions, the loss of lands and frustration from the campesinos

[View of one of the steep streets in the ciudad rural sustentable
Santiago el Pinar rural sustainable city, which is practically uninhabited more
than one year after its inauguration. Photo: Hermann Bellinghausen]

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, May 4, 2013

The failed Emiliano Zapata rural village (RV), in northwest Chiapas, near the El Ocote ecological reserve, constitutes today, together with the much more publicized sustainable rural city (SRC) in the Tzotzil municipality of Santiago el Pinar, a tangible example of how the propagandistic illusion stumbles upon evidence of the acid of reality. The unfulfilled promises, community divisions, the partial or total loss of lands for the populations supposedly benefitted, and above all the final non-existence or non-operation of the announced urbanizations, bare not only the distance between the propaganda and the facts, but that imply a waste of money and work in which are usually evidence of corruption.

The campesinos’ frustration is expressed in the now semi-demolished model home that, after complicated negotiations, members of the Emiliano Zapata Proletarian Organization (OPEZ, its initials in Spanish) had built with government support at the side of the highway in Tecpatán (today Mezcalapa municipality) a couple of years ago. Despite the fact that the campesinos achieved respect from the authorities for their conditions and everything seemed to start out as an unpublished experience of self-construction and certain self-determination of the organized communities, bad financial management and deliberate governmental “neglect” led to OPEZ’ division, 110 families remaining in the organization while another 123 preferred to submit to the official line, and formed the Peace and Freedom Association.

Confronted and defeated now, some attempt to save the remains of the ambitious project in conditions not only of disenchantment but also of increased marginalization. The “model home” was destroyed a sledgehammer blow and frustration; now it’s a monument to failure.

La Jornada also toured the Jaltenango and Santiago el Pinar SRCs this week. The first, in the Frailesca region, was inaugurated in 2012 and, although the majority of the people don’t have work, lack medical services and the children go to school in the market (still not functioning), it is totally inhabited and the residents show that they are grateful to ex governor Juan Sabines because “he gave us a house,” as one mother of a family expressed.

On the other hand, in Santiago el Pinar the view is desolating. The SRC is abandoned, many houses sacked, and anyway it doesn’t seem apt for families with children. It is located on a steep slope, and the construction materials are not resisting the locality’s climate conditions.

In the study entitled “Chiapan Rural Cities: the end of dispersion and poverty or new forms of social control,” Dolores Camacho Velázquez, an investigator from the Program for Multi-Disciplinary Investigations about Mesoamerica and the Southeast (Proimmse, its Spanish acronym) at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), exposed in 2012: “With the exception of Zapatismo, the majority of the historic campesino organizations have stopped fighting and resisting, and are absorbed in a dynamic of demanding resources for productive projects framed as productive reconversion, which implies stopping the production of their own food and planting what the market requires. They no longer participate in the elaboration of projects according to their needs; they only demand what is offered. The Independent Central of Farm Workers and Campesinos (CIOAC, its initials in Spanish), the Emiliano Zapata Campesino Organization (OCEZ) and the OPEZ, among others, have abandoned the struggle for the right to land and the defense of traditional crops.”

The struggle of the OPEZ members affected by the Rio Grijalva flooding in 2007 in Tecpatán could be an exception. In view of what remains of the camp of displaced and of the failed RV, it is clear that wasn’t so, and the organization suffered a reverse. The project was a product of the government’s concessions to the OPEZ because of its pressures, but it was presented as an example of “democratic public policy” and citizen participation.

Rural cities, initially programmed for attending to the victims from Ostuacán and Tecpatán, were adapted to a strategy for rural development that implied a reorganization of production and population within the Chiapas government’s 2006-2012 Development Plan. The natural disaster permitted it to impel the SRC, inside of the UN’s “Millennium Development Objectives.”

In 2009, Nuevo Juan Grijalva SRC was inaugurated for more than 400 families left homeless (by flooding) that were in camps for almost two years. They finally had a house, although to receive it they had to renounce their lands. According to the official publicity, these individuals now would have access to health care, education and dignified jobs, “without taking note of the fact that the campesinos that would live there –not because of their own decision– would prefer their previous life, in simple but ample houses casas, in the midst of large terrains with trees and all kinds of seeds and their own fruit, and backyard animals for food, close to the farming lands where they obtained what was necessary to eat and to sell.”

Camacho found that said city “has no life,” the hothouse projects don’t function and the men returned to work the abandoned lands or migrate in search of work, the clinics have no medications, the houses were built with materials inappropriate for the zone.” The new residents told her: “The city seems beautiful and we don’t scorn a house, but one cannot live that way in the countryside.”

The government maintained its enthusiasm for the project, rejected the criticisms and “wasted enormous amounts” to promote them in the media. In 2008 it created the Sustainable Rural Cities Institute, which in 2009 was fused with the State Population Council, originating the Institute of Population and Rural Cities.

Soon, Santiago el Pinar, Tzotzil municipality in the Highlands (Los Altos) was named as having the worst human development in Chiapas. “The location and the form of construction demonstrate little return on the investment. They are houses of no more than five by five meters” on mountainous land and in the rainy season “it will be complicated to live there: it is another failure.” For another SRC, practically finished in Ixhuatán, “the same destiny is expected.”

Today, in the face of the high costs invested, Camacho Velázquez asks in an interview: “What motives are there behind these projects? Why was the Santiago el Pinar SRC constructed in a place where no one seems interested in it, with construction models that don’t withstand the test of real utility? If the intention is really to abate falling behind, why do it with strategies that are clearly going to fail? The social groups that are opposed to these projects have the answer: corruption, business and market.”

The investigator concludes that these “development” policies are “strategies for control of the marginalized groups, because in localities that depend on the market and government projects, organization and resistance turn out to be impossible.”

San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico

May 2, 2013

Press Release No. 11

Heightening of the risk to Human Rights Defenders in Chiapas

The recent assassination of community defender Juan Vázquez confirms the increase in violent acts directed towards people who defend human rights in Chiapas

This Centre for Human Rights expresses its profound indignation at the violent assassination [1] of Juan Vázquez Guzmán, General Secretary of the Other Campaign of the Adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle of the EZLN (hereafter Adherents to the Sixth); a criminal act which happened in the days before a regional meeting of the authorities, Adherents of the Sixth, of the ejido of San Sebastián Bachajón (SSB), to determine actions in defence of their territory and for the release of their political prisoners.

Juan Vázquez was known for inspiring and promoting the defence of territory in the Agua Azul region, he openly denounced the dispossession planned to take place through the project for the Integrally Planned Centre (CIP) of Palenque [2], part of the Plan Mesoamerica (formerly Plan Puebla Panama). In this context, while performing tasks on behalf of the Commission for the Defence of the Land and Territory, he was killed (on April 24, 2013) just outside his own house in the community of Bachajón, municipality of Chilón, Chiapas.

This action went beyond the limits of the marked repression faced by those people who are human rights defenders at the community level, Adherents to the Sixth, after suffering increasing violence for insisting on building processes of autonomy and defending their territory.

The increasing conflict and generalized violence, provoked by actors from the different levels of government in the San Sebastian Bachajón and Jungle (Selva) regions, has been documented by this Human Rights Centre; from 2006 until the present, various acts have been committed which constitute human rights violations, such as the arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, harassment, threats, forced displacement and disproportionate or undue use of government forces; all of these operated through incursions from the Public Security forces, the Police and the federal Army; unilateral agreements of officials and political operators; repositioning of local political bosses with the parties in power at the state and federal level; polarization, and the guarantee of empowerment and impunity to shock groups in the region.

Some relevant events in the memory of the people, and documented by this Centre, are listed below:

· April 2009: mass arrest for the defence of the territory, when 8 Adherents to the Sixth and a Support Base of the Zapatista National Liberation Army were taken prisoner; the Mexican government ordered a joint operation between the State Preventive Police (PEP) and the Federal Police (PF); while the campesinos were withdrawing, the police entered the ejidal lands and accused the detainees of various crimes, including committing robberies on the highway.

· February 2, 2011: Adherents to the Sixth were beaten and robbed by a group of "officialists" (supporters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI – and Green Party of Mexico – PVEM -), and the next day, February 3 , on the Federal Highway at the high point of the entrance to the waterfalls of Agua Azul, 117 ejidatarios from SSB were arrested by members of the Special Police from the Jungle District Regional Command and Agents of the Special Police from the Regional Indigenous District Command, as well as officers from the Tactical Group of Special Police, transferred to Pakalná police headquarters, and then to the offices of the Prosecutor of the Jungle District at Palenque. The charges were disproportionate: culpable homicide, attempted murder, offences against the peace, physical integrity, and State property and damages.

· December 24, 2011: Bachajón municipal police arrested Juan Vázquez Guzmán; after keeping him disappeared for a couple of hours, he was taken to the State Centre for the Social Reinsertion of the Sentenced (CERSS), in the municipality of Ocosingo, seeking to impute the false charge of homicide to him, which they could not sustain and, hours later, he was freed.

· April 17, 2013: ejidatarios of San Sebastián Bachajón, Adherents to the Sixth, publicly denounced new threats and a continuation of [the previous government’s] policy by the official authorities of the present government of the State of Chiapas.

It is important to stress that, faced with continued repression and criminalization of the Adherents to the Sixth, the compañero Juan Vázquez, along with other compañeros, have been tireless promoters in the organization of the defence and struggle of the Tzeltal people of San Sebastián Bachajón and the Agua Azul Zone, systematically denouncing the plans for territorial dispossession promoted by the Mexican government.

In Chiapas the interests of investors, backed up by the Mexican government, insist on implementing their neoliberal projects, which constitute territorial dispossession and which violate the collective rights of indigenous peoples, internationally recognized under ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Nevertheless, the fact that this territory is in continuing dispute from investment interests linked to neoliberal projects, has led to the original peoples in Chiapas organizing and re-vindicating their territorial rights, as did Juan Vázquez, who is part of the historic struggle for the construction of alternative ways of life to exercise the Right to choose ways of life consistent with the worldview of the people, living well (buen vivir) and a dignified life (vida digna).

This Human Rights Centre demands that the Chiapas government [undertake] a prompt and thorough investigation to locate the whereabouts, and determine the punishment, of the murderer who killed Juan Vázquez, a community leader and human rights defender who gave his life for the defence of territory.

[1] See urgent briefing note, available at:http://www.frayba.org.mx/archivo/noticias/130425_nota_urgente_ssb.pdf

[2] Slides of the Fonatur project:

http://www.cmic.org/mnsectores/turismo/turismo2007/ponencias/07-10-25%20MGM%20con%20Nuevos%20Proyectos%20FONATUR%20vmvg%28VERSION%20FINAL%29.pdf

** It demands the prompt clarification of the assassination of the community leader Juan Vázquez Guzmán

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chis., 2 de mayo.

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) denounced the increase in aggressions and threats against human rights defenders in Chiapas, as the assassination last week of Juan Vázquez Guzmán, leader of the ejido owners of the Sixth in San Sebastián Bachajón and defender of indigenous rights and political prisoners, confirms.

His assassination “exceeds the limits of the marked repression that people who defend human rights within the community ambit, adherents to the Sixth, have confronted,” after the increase in violence against them contra for “insisting on processes of autonomy and defense of their territory,” the Frayba maintained.

“The criminal act happened in the days prior to a regional meeting of authorities and adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle of San Sebastián Bachajón for defining actions of resistance and for the liberation of their political prisoners” (they have three, in three different state prisons).

The young Tzeltal leader “was outstanding in defense of territory in the Agua Azul region and denounced the dispossession that the Integrally Planned Center Project (Proyecto Centro Integralmente Planeado, CIP-Palenque), part of the Mesoamerican Plan (previously the Plan Puebla-Panamá) wanted to concretize.”

The conflict and violence in San Sebastián and the Jungle Region, “provoked by actors from the different levels of government, have increased” as the Frayba already documented. Since 2006, “arbitrary deprivations of freedom, torture, harassment, threats, forced displacement, the disproportionate or undue use of public force have occurred.” All of that occurred through “incursions of the Public Security, the Police and the federal Army,” besides “unilateral agreements of officials and political operators, repositioning of local political bosses with the parties in power, polarization, empowerment and impunity guaranteed to the shock groups in the region.”

The investors, backed up by the government, “insist on concretizing projects that constitute territorial dispossession and that violate collective rights of indigenous peoples, recognized in Convention 169 of the ILO and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Nevertheless, the Frayba indicates that it has followed closely the San Sebastián process that determines how the original peoples of Chiapas “organize themselves and vindicate their territorial rights such as Juan Vázquez did, who now is part of the historic struggle in the construction of alternatives for the exercise of the right to elect ways of life congruent with living well (a dignified life).”

They had already incarcerated him on December 24, 2011 when, after holding him for a couple of hours disappeared, the Chilón municipal police delivered him to the State Center for Social Re-insertion for those Sentenced (CERSS, its initials in Spanish) of Ocosingo, “seeking to impute the false crime of homicide to him, which they were not able to sustain, and hours later set him free.”

Last April 17, the ejido owners of the Sixth in San Sebastián denounced “new threats and the current state government’s politics of continuity.” In response to this, the Frayba today demanded: “a prompt and expedited investigation to find the whereabouts and determine the punishment of the murderer of Juan Vázquez, a community leader and human rights defender,” who “gave his life for the defense of territory.”

** They ask to stop the aggression

** They demand the immediate freedom of professor Alberto Patishtán

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, May 1, 2013

En Chiapas the cascade of pronouncements continue from organizations and communities for the death of Juan Vázquez Guzmán, leader of the Sixthin the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido, as well as to repudiate the violence and threats against the Zapatista support bases in San Marcos Avilés, and the urgent demand for the freedom of Alberto Patishtán Gómez, which should have been decided on Tuesday, April 30.

The ejido of Tila, in the Chol zone in the northern part of the state, points to the state government, as “the party truly responsible” for the death of the Tzeltal leader “and with the most responsibility in the Secretary General of Government, because he has (spent) years destroying the organization of adherents of San Sebastian and the defense of the Agua Azul Cascades’ land and territory.” The Tila peasants assert: “In that (government) agency they call upon corrupt leaders and hoodlums to offer programs and money, conditioned on creating confrontations against those who are organized and resisting their project of death.” They remembered that in December 2011 “they wanted to put Juan in prison but they couldn’t, therefore now they gave the order to kill him.

“The cowardly assassination is because the government wants to intimidate us and finish us off by means of its mafias. It does not want to see our struggle growing, but what we struggle for is our children,” as did “our parents and grandparents, therefore no matter who gets hurt, we will continue.”

The Autonomous Regional Council of the Coastal Zone demanded from the State’s Superior Tribunal of Justicia “the immediate freedom of Professor Patishtán Gómez, accused of crimes that he did not commit as has been fully demonstrated, because we have knowledge that April 30 is the deadline for said tribunal to dictate its decision.”

The council repudiated the assassination of Vázquez Guzmán in Bachajón and demanded that those materially and intellectually responsible be punished. In particular, the coastal organization expressed from Tonalá, Pijijiapan, Mapastepec and Jiquipilas: “We condemn the aggressions and attacks from the bad governments against our Zapatista brothers and sisters in San Marcos Avilés, and we demand that the attacks stop.”

The Tila ejido owners who are adherents of the Sixth, who have not stopped mobilizing for the restitution of their lands, usurped by the Chiapas government’s historic abuse with the permanent complicity of federal tribunals and the successive state legislatures, said they were “sad and hurt by Juan’s death, because he had his heart in hand for the territorial defense and learned to struggle supporting his compañeros.” Vázquez “fell in the defense of land and territory,” they emphasize, and identify with the ejido owners who are adherents to the Sixth in San Sebastián: “We have seen the Tzeltal and Chol peoples as the same struggle, we share a same history with the same oppressors, which have been the bad governments, the big landholders and impresarios, who share the ambition of being owners of our lands and our people.”

For your part, the dozens of organizations of the Chiapas Network for Peace emphasized that since 2007 the murdered leader was participating in the defense of his ejido, “a situation for which he maintained a protective order currently under review,” and they reported that last April 17, San Sebastián’s ejido owners made public “new threats on the part of authorities of the current Chiapas government.”

Finally, the Network against Repression emphasized “the interests of big hotel companies and ‘ecological’ tourism in sacking the zone and dispossessing the original inhabitants of their territory,” because “commitments exist between these capos of capitalism, pompously called impresarios, and the federal and local governments.” The governmental instances “will make it possible for the crime of Juan Vázquez to remain unpunished.” “We know that Governor Manuel Velasco Coello would prefer that indigenous peoples carry him on their shoulders in triumph through the streets, as happened the middle of April in Oxchuc.”

In Chiapas

1. Political Assassination of Pro-Zapatista Leader in San Sebastián Bachajón – On Wednesday, April 24, Juan Vazquez Gomez, leader of the pro-Zapatistas in San Sebastian Bachajon, was assassinated by unidentified individuals as he was entering his home. He led the ejido owners who are adherents to the EZLN’s Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle in their resistance to the government taking away their land to exploit for tourism purposes. This is the first political assassination in Chiapas involving Zapatistas or pro-Zapatistas in some time and could signal more repression now that the PRI has returned to power. Click here for more details.

2. Threats of Forced Eviction Continue in San Marcos Aviles, Caravan Threatened – On April 19, the Good Government Junta located in Oventik issued a denunciation that listed all the continuing threats and acts of harassment suffered by the Zapatista support bases in the San Marcos Aviles ejido since July 2011. The Chiapas Network for Peace then announced that on April 21 and 22, a Civil Observation Caravan would go to San Marcos to collect testimony from the Zapatistas. The Caravan was threatened by "political party members" in San Marcos Aviles. They threatened to take away the Caravan’s vehicles and that blood would run if the vehicles were not turned over to them. Fortunately, the threats did not turn into action and the Mission was able to collect testimony of specific continuing death threats, including threats to kill children, and land grabbing.

3. Chiapas March for Patishtan’s Freedom - On April 19, the movement to free Alberto Patishtan organized a march in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, to demand Patishtan’s freedom. The march of many Tzotzil supporters from the Highlands, the Catholic organization Believing People and Las Abejas was joined by the Democratic Block of Section 7 of the national education Workers Union, a total of 15,000 people. Marchers went to the Chiapas headquarters of the Federal Judicial Power, which is supposed to issue a decision on Patishtan’s case any day now. For more info about the march, see: http://compamanuel.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/chiapas-march-for-alberto-patishtans-freedom/

4. Mexico’s Supreme Court Releases Another 15 Men Convicted in the Acteal Massacre Case - On April 11, Mexico’s Supreme Court released another 15 of the men accused and convicted in the Acteal Massacre of 45 Tzotzil indigenous on December 22, 1997. The release and recognition of innocence was based on the use of illegal evidence, the same as in the prior releases of those condemned for the Acteal Massacre. Of the original 87 who were convicted only 6 remain in prison. Bishop Felipe Arizmendi of the San Cristobal de las Casas Diocese lamented the release of those convicted, many of whom had confessed to their crimes. In condemning the release of these men, the civil organization La Abejas noted that they are seen walking around Acteal and nearby towns. Moreover, Las Abejas reported hearing gunshots from several communities. Both Las Abejas and Bishop Arizmendi ask: "If the men convicted and now released are not responsible for the massacre, who is?"

In Other Parts of Mexico

1. Communities Form Their Own Police Patrols - As a result of the dramatic increase in organized crime and the utter inability of Mexico’s security forces to deal with it, a new phenomenon is emerging. Some communities are trying to protect their residents by forming their own community police patrols. So far, at least 40 communities in 8 states have formed such patrols. While much of the violence plaguing communities is connected to drug trafficking and government officials, police and military corrupted by the drug gangs, communities are also seeking protection from illegal logging and the encroachment of mining companies and their armed "guards." Some indigenous communities have a tradition of elected police/guards who protect the communities from common crimes like theft or public drunkenness and its associated crimes. They have been doing this for more than 15 years. These elected community police have their hunting rifles, machetes and clubs, none of which is illegal. However, other communities have police that are armed with high-caliber weapons that are illegal. The state and federal governments are worried about this new development and want to bring these community patrols under the control of local authorities in some official role, but the communities see the local authorities as part of the problem.

In the United States

1. President Obama to Visit Mexico and Costa Rica May 2-4 – United States President Barack Obama has plans to visit Mexico beginning May 2. While Mexico hopes to obtain an agreement on more money for the Merida Initiative, US Secretary of State John Kerry says President Obama also wants to focus on economic and trade issues. Human rights groups, however, sent a letter to President Obama, Mexican President Pena Nieto and the Central American presidents asking them, among other things, to re-think the regional security model (Drug War) and consider the regulation of drugs rather than their prohibition. Additionally, 23 US Congresspeople, of both parties, sent a letter to Secretary Kerry expressing concern over the five-fold increase in human rights complaints against military personnel over the last 6 years. Oakland Congresswoman Barbara Lee signed the letter.

** They warn that the struggle over the defense of land and the natural springs “will not diminish”

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, April 28, 2013

The San Sebastián Bachajón ejido owners, adherents to the Other Campaign of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, in Chilón, Chiapas, demanded that the assassination of their compañero and representative Juan Vázquez Guzmán, which occurred Wednesday, “is not left in impunity” and warned that: “after the compañero’s death, the struggle will not diminish: we will continue forward, because we know well that his death was because of the defense of our Mother Earth because the mountains and the natural springs are masters of those who care for them.”

Directing themselves to the Good Government Junta of Los Altos and the National Indigenous Congress, to which the assassinated leader also belonged, the Tzeltal ejido owners relate that last April 24, at to o’clock “hour of God” (11 o’clock, “national time”) [1], Vázquez Guzmán “was resting in his house when a person came knocking on his door and he was riddled with six high-caliber bullet impacts, and the guy fled in a red pickup truck in the direction of Sitalá.”

In the communiqué “they make known” who Juan Vázquez was: “An active member of the ejido and of the Other Campaign adherents. We walked with him for seven years after the Sixth. On April 18, 2010, he was named Secretary General of the three centers of the ejido.”

On December 24, 2011, municipal and judicial police detained him without showing him an arrest warrant, when he was entering his house, and he was taken to prison number 16 in Ocosingo.” Hours later the then Commissioner Francisco Guzmán Guzmán arrived, “carrying a file in his hand and pointing to Compañero Juan as the leader against the neoliberal project but, thanks to the mobilizations of organizations and the intervention of human rights defenders, he was released at midnight and they returned him to his house without making him sign any release paper asking for pardon and forgiveness.”

On November 26 and 27, 2011, Vázquez Guzmán, “accompanied by Compañero Domingo García Gómez, he participated in a National Indigenous Congress workshop of dialogue and reflection at San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca).” He was in charge of following up on the case of protective order (injunction) 274/2011 “against the Neoliberalism Project” and the accompaniment of the three political prisoners from his community.

He maintained his participation in the political prison forums and the mobilizations for the freedom of the political prisoners in Chiapas, in particular of Alberto Patishtán, “and in all Mexico;” also in mobilizations for the defense of land, like the one on May 7, 2011 in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and in the Tila and Mitzitón ejidos. He went to the country’s capital “in accompaniment of the liberation of the last five San Sebastián Bachajón political prisoners.” He also appeared in several video messages for distributing the community’s demands internationally.