Sacramento: Protest Mexican Police Brutality during President Fox's visit today!!!:Thursday, May 25, 2006

Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 03:26:25 -0700
To: CAUIL@mail.zsc.org, hr4437@mail.zsc.org
From: "Zapatista Solidarity Coalition"
Subject: [HR4437] Protest Mexican Police Brutality during President Fox's visit today!!!

Please forward! Adelante!
(Please also forgive any duplications! Due to the short notice, we have taken the liberty of copying addresses from other messages about President Fox's visit. - Mario)

URGENT NEWS ADVISORY
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Contact: Mario Galván 916 207-7198

The Zapatista Solidarity Coalition calls on the community of Sacramento and the people of northern California to demonstrate its outrage at the brutal repression by Mexican police in San Salvador Atenco on May 4, 2006 by joining us in a protest during Mexican President Vicente Fox’s visit today.

Where: The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts, 1020 O Street, Sacramento.
When: 6:00 pm, Thursday, May 25th, 2006.

SACRAMENTO - While a national debate rages over the impact of immigrant labor on the U.S. economy, and Congress wrestles with conflicting proposals for immigration reform, little or nothing is being said about the causes driving the flood of immigrants. Few Americans understand the destructive impact of neoliberal economic policies behind “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), that have decimated the Mexican economy, destroying farms, businesses, and jobs. Left with no other alternatives but poverty and starvation, Mexican workers are forced to leave their homes and travel north in search of a living. No matter what legislation results from the current debate in Congress, if the economic factors driving immigration from Mexico and other Latin American nations are not addressed, the tide of immigration will continue unabated.

On top of the economic devastation Mexico is suffering, a brutal class struggle is raging as the poor (over 70% of the population) are continually shoved aside to make room for new developments, often financed by foreign investors. With no employment to be found, people create their own jobs in what is referred to as the “informal” economy. However, the street vendors and impromptu marketplaces that make up this alternative economy are viewed as “illegal” by authorities, and continually repressed.

Early this month, on May 3rd, police moved to close down an “informal” flower vendors’ market in San Salvador Atenco, just outside of Mexico City, sparking violence as vendors defended their right to make a living in the only way left to them. The next day, over 3,000 police descended on the town, dragging hundreds of people – in some cases entire families – from their homes, beating and kicking them savagely in the process, and literally stacking their bleeding victims in piles aboard trucks. On the way to the jail many women were abused, some of them raped and forced to commit sex acts by police. Authorities have denied the women, still in custody, the medical examinations necessary to verify their charges.

As President Fox visits the California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts today, we will be outside in protest, to let him know that we know – and will not forget – the sad history of Mexican injustice: economic, political, and sexual. We hope that, as President Fox views the exhibits honoring the women of California, he will give some thought to the women of Mexico as well… to the raped and abused women of Atenco, to the hundreds of mutilated, murdered, and disappeared women of Juarez, and to the hundreds of thousands of Mexican women who raise their families alone, sustained only by the money sent home by their menfolk who have been forced to leave their families behind, in order to keep them alive.

-30-
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Zapatista Solidarity Coalition
Member, Campaign Against Unjust Immigration Laws
909 12th St. # 118 Sacramento, CA 95814
Telephone: (916) 443-3424 E-mail: zapa@zsc.org
---------------------------------------------------------------
+++++++++++++++++++++
De Todos Para Todos Blog
+++++++++++++++++++++



c/s
+++++++++++++++