ricardo dominguez on Fri, 5 Apr 2002 16:48:07 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Indian Communities in Chiapas' Jungle Are Threatened With Expulsion |
[Via www.americas.org/LASC mail list] Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 5:54 PM Subject: En;LASC,Call to action on Montes Azules situation,Mar 29 To: CIS Members and Pasamontanas From: Phil Wheaton, Milt Shapiro and Ricardo Subject: Summary of Bellinghausen's articles from La Jornada Dear CIS members and Ricardo/Maite, In preparation for Ricardo sending out a Letter Signing Petition, we felt this background material was important for CIS to see first. We have already started soliciting organizational names of groups that might sign on. Please suggest others to us. Note: The full moon this month falls today and the expulsion of 16 communities from Montes Azules may begin today, Good Friday and full moon. This is very serious. Please share any ideas you have. Thanks, Phil, Milt and Ricardo Crucifixion At Full Moon! Indian Communities in Chiapas' Jungle Are Threatened With Expulsion Note: Between March 14 and 27, 2002, a series of six articles appeared in La Jornada, a national newspaper of Mexico, written by the well-known investigative journalist Hermann Bellinghausen concerning the imminent threat of expelling 16 Indian communities from the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas. What follows are excerpts from these articles, revealing a dangerous precedent initiated by the USA and backed by Mexico which has asked the United Nations and has received its backing to mandate this expulsion based upon the false charge that indigenous presence in the Lacandon represents a problem of ungovernability and to declare all forest areas a matter of "international security." This is an extremely dangerous global precedent. Please forward. Thank you. Signed, Ricardo Jua'rez, Pasamonta~as, Arlington, Virginia Philip Wheaton, Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS), DC Milton Shapiro, Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS), DC Warning: This Indian "Crucifixion" Is Set To Happen "During Holy Week" The expulsion of 16 Indigenous communities was announced "for Holy Week when the moon is full," which occurs today, Good Friday, 2002. So this is a Red Alert. Please send this message out to your networks immediately. La Jornada, Mar.16: Security Forces Are Readying to Remove 35 Communities Autonmous Zapatista municipalities and diverse civil organizations have denounced the imminent removal of 16 of some 35 Indigenous communities from the interior and edges of the biosphere reserve called Montes Azules in Southeastern Chiapas, Mexico. On March 13, the Information and Analysis Collective of the Jungle Region announced that only the day and the hour are left to be sychronized, "because this expulsion is set to beginr during Holy Week, 2002, when the moon is full..." Many of these Indian communities are legal and the most recent ones are made up of campesinos with land but who have been displaced through military occupation and paramilitary violence, as in the Canyon of Taniperla. On Saturday, March 9, hundreds of Federal Preventative Police (PFP) arrived at the Rancho Nuevo base, headquarters of the military zone, on board dozens of commercial buses belonging to a bus company called "Cristobal Colo'n," that is, Christopher Columbus! The United Nations has designated 2002 as "the year of the mountains" and at the request of the Mexican government--according to a bulletin dated March 1 from the National Forestry Council of Mexico--the UN has declared, through its Security Council, that "forests are [now] a matter of international security." This is a generic policy, meaning it could be applied to any forest area anywhere in the world. This is an extremely dangerous policy aimed at expelling people from any forest area in the globe so exploiters can get at its natural resources. La Jornada, Mar.14: Regional Geostrategic Policy Is Linked to Plan Puebla Panama The Autonomous Zapatista community of Ricardo Flores Magno'n has made public that the removal of these Indian communities, this forced "expulsion-relocation"process, is part of a "regional geostrategic" plan targeting the whole central mountain range of the Mayan jungle which goes beyond the Lacandon. According to the Mexican government agency Profepa, its "two priorities are: Montes Azules (the Lacandon jungle) and El Vizcaino (a whale reserve in the Sea of California)." The goal of exploiters and foreign corporations alike is to get at the surface and sub-surface resources in this vast virgin territory, to develop maquiladoras and dams for energy in Chiapas and Guerrero and to create a new tourist industry throughout the region. They see this as linked to the Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP), a development corridor involving dry canals, highways and maquiladoras which will run from Puebla, Mexico, through the narrow neck of Mexico at Tehuantepec and all the way through Central America to Panama. The PPP is the priority project of President Vicente Fox whose government is determined to implement it whatever the cost in money and lives. Within Mexico, the Plan Puebla Panama route passes from Beneme'rito de las Americas to Palenque, along the northern edge of the Lacandon jungle. In the coming months, several industries will be opened as well as a four-lane highway which is already built, a brand new frontier roadway system that borders Mexico and Guatemala and passes within a few kilometers of Montes Azules. La Jornada, Mar.17: The Governor of Chiapas Will Decide Who Is to be Expelled To better understand the drama of this removal, forced relocation and possible inprisonment of indigenous peoples who live in these areas deep within the Lacandon jungle, it is necessary to understand who some of the protagonists behind this strategy are. At the international level, Bellinghausen has identified the following names which are surprising. They include: NASA, the UN, Coca Cola, USAID, the World Bank and "other international stars." At the national (federal) level, within Mexico, those interested in this expulsion process include several key persons, among them: Ramo'n Aguirre, member the Chiapas Environmental [Board] (La Mesa Ambiental), has called for "the broadest possible removal of delinquents from Montes Azules. Another is Rodolfo Di'az Arvide who has a long history in the Salinas-Zedillo PRI governments and is charged with involvement in the counterinsurgency war against the Indians. A third is Ivan Azuara who has already directed several "removal and relocation" operations against dozens of indian communities, a number of them pro- Zapatista. At the Chiapas State level, the responsibility for deciding who is to be removed from the Lacandon jungle will fall to the Govenor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchia who must resolve the "hot potato" issue of ungovernability. For this purpose, a new state body was set up called the "Environmental Table to Annul the Denunciation of the Plunder and Ecological Damage" and possible re-location and indemnization to the settlements. What is most revealing about this rapid response team is that it was established on Sept.13, two days after the Twin Towers implosion. La Jornada,Mar.19: Indians Fear They'll Be Removed via Environmental Disasters Since 1998, several suspicious fires have destroyed forest areas in Montes Azules and some of the ARIC Independiente communities have practiced "clear cutting" of all the trees in a given area as over against the traditional Indian practice of selective tree cutting and careful burning for farming. Now the campesinos within the Biosphere Reserve fear that new fires will break out, not set by them, which could result in driving them out of the forests. Not far from the heart of the Lacandon, lies the Chajul jungle which is joined to the Guatemalan Ixcan. It is here that one of the principle trans-frontier corridors has been built in an vast region which those in government circles, along with investors and environmentalists, are calling the Mayan Jungle, which would unite the prodigious Guatemalan Pete'n with the Lacandona and the Ixca'n jungle. This vast area represents the "regional strategic plan" of the United States which includes five jungles in Belice, Guatemala and Mexico." Bellinghausen says "it is clear that the plans underway are considering, where possible, to empty the Mayan people from the Mayan Jungle." To accomplish this, the Mexican government has already committed itself, according to the numerous declarations and manifests from functionaries in recent months, to act energetically against this new type of "terrorism" recently defined by international conclaves as "environmental terrorism." La Jornada, Mar.24: "False Charges of Ungovernability Mask Corporate Greed Environmental issues, biosphere inspection, ecoturism and birth control projects (birth control means eventually sterilizing indigenous women) are all part of an opening wedge in a long-term strategic and military project. According to Mexican authorities, this is a matter of "international security," a grave problem of "ungovernability" and a "war operation." According to the government of Chiapas, approximately half of these communities are bases supporting the EZLN [Zapatistas]. Another percentage belong to ARIC Independiente [an agrarian network], two are PRI-backed and one is from CIOAC [a peasant coop]. During recent years, diverse independent groups in Mexico have pointed to the fact that military and geostrategic interests are using environmental concerns to justify these expulsion whereas what they are really after is the wealth which these biosphere reserves contain. In October, 2001, while president Fox was visiting New York and met with president George W. Bush, a delegation of US diplomats was travelling from Mexico City to Montes Azules. The Americans involved included a military attache, a person in charge of economic and commercial relations and a representative of political affairs from the US Embassy in Mexico. Durig the visit, members of Compitch--an independent environmemntal organization--heard the commercial attache from Washington say: "I come in the name of my government and of our companies. We want to carry out a biosphere inspection in the Lacandon jungle, but we are also interested in doing this throughout Chiapas and throughout the world. Our interest is, basically, commercial and strategic." La Jornada Virtu@l, Mar. 27, Indians Speak the Truth: their Removal is Iimminent The atmosphere in the Montes Azules Reserve has changed dramatically. Even though the government covers up the truth, rumors are rampant. The Mexican government claims that public opinion believes conditions in the Reserve are improving and that concord exists between the communities and the other organizations. Indians claim this is untrue. They say, campesinos from San Antonio Escobar have been cutting down cedar trees and the mahogany for a long time. Now, the rebel authorities are warning that the government is taking avantage of this time of drought when the indigenous are preparing the earth for seeding to attack them. And, they are using the few Lacandon Indians--the original tribes, but who in fact came from outside the Lacandon--to denounce other Indians as the ones carrying out the forest destruction. To the contrary, the autonomous Zapatista authorities say the goal is to remove our communities from the jungle so that the Plan Puebla Panama strategy can go forward. Indeed, they point out that the PPP "is a conterinsurgency strategy aimed at removing us, because neoliberal interests seek to obstruct our different cultures because we see the land as sacred, as our mother, as a communal benefit, something that cannot be used just to benefit the few." The goal is cultural extermination. Towards the end of not allowing the development of our communities, the goal--according to the autonomous council, "is to create Centers of Strategic Development"(CEDs) by concentrating their support forces and obliging campesinos to leave their communities through lack of survival opportunities. In these CEDs, people will have to look for work in the maquiladoras or in tourism. "The idea is that they want to stop us from being campesinos and indians... but to do that they have to first divide us. That is the purpose of the counterinsurgency, the same old manipulations, the same threats; the same political pressure, the economic pressures and, worst of all, extreme poverty." - 30 - A Petition to Protest these actions will follow shortly. In the meantime, call the Mexican Embassy at 202-728-0694 (or the Mexican Consulate nearest you) and send in your e-mail support confirmation to: <PASAMONTANAS@cs.com> and <cisdc@zzapp.org> The Latin American Solidarity Conference website can be found at www.americas.org/LASC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net