* AMLO NAMED "PRESIDENT" BY SUPPORTERS
* AMLO WEIGHING HIS NEXT MOVE
* CHIAPAS: REPUTED PARAMILITARY BOSS DECLARES FOR PRD GOVERNOR-ELECT
* BORDER NEWS: US HOUSE BACKS 700-MILE FENCE ALONG BORDER
* GENDER VIOLENCE CONTINUES TO CLAIM ITS VICTIMS
* 3,000-YEAR-OLD SCRIPT ON STONE FOUND IN VERACRUZ
Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS). CIS is a Washington, D.C.
based activist group committed to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous
peoples in the Americas. CIS is actively supporting the struggles
of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico while simultaneously combating
related structures of oppression within our own communities.
To view newsletter archives, visit:
http://lists.mutualaid.org/pipermail/mexico-week/
"Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros Nada"
AMLO NAMED "PRESIDENT" BY SUPPORTERS
Mexican leftists, who say the July 2 election was stolen, declared
their candidate their "legitimate president", a symbolic move
reducing the risk of street protests to make the country
ungovernable. Aides said Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly
lost the election, would use mainly political means rather than
widespread protests in leading opposition to conservative
President-elect Felipe Calderon.
Tens of thousands of supporters meeting in the capital's vast
downtown central square rejected a proposal to name Lopez Obrador
head of a civil resistance campaign that would have marked a more
aggressive strategy to try to stop Calderon from ruling. The election
sharply divided Mexico along class lines, a rift made worse by Lopez
Obrador's fraud accusations. There will still be protests but fears
of major unrest or violence have eased in recent days as Lopez
Obrador has apparently opted for an organized political movement to
challenge Calderon rather than cause chaos on the streets.
Supporters voted to swear Lopez Obrador in at a ceremony on November
20, just days before Calderon takes power. Lopez Obrador said he
would name ministers to his parallel government and that it would
operate from voluntary donations. "We won the presidential election.
I accept the post of president of Mexico because we reject an
imposition," he told cheering followers who gathered under torrential
rains. "We will never give up." "You are not alone," they shouted.
"This will continue until Andres Manuel is sitting in the
presidential chair," said Sergio Arredondo, a 32-year-old
agricultural day laborer from the western state of Sinaloa. Delegates
at the convention led by Lopez Obrador also voted to support a
boycott against some of Mexico's biggest companies, which they
believe backed Calderon's campaign. They included the Mexican units
of major U.S. firms such as retailer Wal-Mart and financial giant
Citigroup.
Earlier on Saturday, leftists protested against President Vicente Fox
at the nation's Independence Day military parade. They waved posters
that read: "Fox, traitor to democracy," in the Zocalo square as the
outgoing president reviewed columns of troops and military hardware.
Source: Reuters: 09/17
====
AMLO WEIGHING HIS NEXT MOVE
Losing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will ask
his followers Saturday (09/16) whether they want him to head a
parallel government or just chip away at the old one with a long
campaign of civil disobedience. A week after the nation's elections
tribunal declared Felipe Calderon the president-elect, the
summer-long protest movement by Lopez Obrador supporters demanding a
national recount is fading. Tents pitched by demonstrators on Paseo
de la Reforma, the capital's central boulevard, have started to
disappear. Despite apparently dwindling popular support, Lopez
Obrador maintains a firm grip on a loyal core eager to reshape Mexico
for its legions of poor. He's expected to chart their next move at
Saturday's National Democratic Convention, which he called to protest
the July 2 election, narrowly won by Calderon, and to revamp the
nation's institutions.
Lopez Obrador knows he lost the election fight, most analysts said.
What he wants now is a permanent opposition to the Calderon
government, and a lever to nudge his Democratic Revolution Party
cohorts in Congress. "He's trying to force changes on a double path:
one within the institutions and the other one on the street," said
Roger Bartra, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico. But Lopez Obrador will have to continue shaping hundreds of
thousands of election protesters into a thriving leftist movement
that can demand the attention of his party's congressional bloc, the
second largest in the Senate and the lower house. More than half a
million delegates have signed up for Saturday's convention,
organizers said, and tens of thousands more are expected to attend
the event in the capital's central square, or Zocalo. Delegates will
decide whether they want to reform the government or start a new one
- a choice loaded with patriotic symbolism when offered on Mexico's
Independence Day.
Simply declaring a new government doesn't give it any legitimacy. But
followers of the charismatic Lopez Obrador don't seem worried. The
buzz among those rooting for a parallel government here is not
whether the military will squash a nascent leftist rebellion or what
to include in a reworked Mexican Constitution or even whether it's
legal. It's over what to call their leader. The longest thread on the
convention's website forum concerns whether to declare Lopez Obrador
the president of Mexico or name him "head of the resistance."
A Broader Debate
There's more to the discussion than a name: The many comments,
protected by the forum's online anonymity, echo a broader debate over
how far left to steer Mexico's new movement. "He should be named
'Legitimate President' because it would be a very annoying
counterbalance to Felipe Calderon," wrote "Hackal," who added, "He's
already head of the resistance." Others said they preferred a less
provocative title than president, arguing that a direct challenge to
the Mexican government was asking for trouble and reflected badly on
their leader, who is often referred to by his initials. "It's makes
AMLO look like a dictator," said "Neon-Insurgents." "The key to the
campaign of defamation against AMLO is to make him seem like a crazy
person or a radical. It's important that we're not so much a
reactionary left but a left of center."
Rafael Hernandez Estrada, a member of the convention's organizing
committee, said he believed delegates would favor naming Lopez
Obrador the "elected president." "We're also going to ask to create a
parallel Cabinet," he said. "We won't vote on who'll be on the
Cabinet. That will be up to the president." None of the organizers
could say what such a government would do next, or how they planned
to govern. Lopez Obrador said the convention would draw its authority
from Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution, which gives citizens the
right to decide on their form of government. But legal experts said
the document does not envision changing the constitution by a show of
hands on a public square, as planned for Saturday. "Of course you can
modify the form of government, but it has to be through established
legal mechanisms," said Raul Carranca y Rivas, a law professor at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The registration of delegates, and their participation in the
convention, keeps a tether on supporters and a ready-made contact
list for Lopez Obrador as his recount campaign winds down. Some polls
show his support fading. Delegates could vote to keep the street
blockades, but it's more likely protesters will go home next week,
freeing up the Zocalo and several miles of Reforma after weeks of
detours and worse-than-usual traffic jams, said Jose Agustin Ortiz
Pinchetti, a member of the convention's organizing committee. "We'll
probably have new forms of civil resistance, but always peaceful
ones," he said.
Lopez Obrador has not disclosed any plans beyond those that echo his
campaign - to narrow the income gap between rich and poor, and revamp
the nation's justice system. Speaking to supporters this week, he
promised a "true purification" of politics that would oust
"domineering, ridiculous, mediocre, thieving politicians." Lopez
Obrador only hinted at using the pincer strategy of street protests
and the PRD congressional bloc to implement his agenda. "We'll govern
with one hand and transform with the other," he said in a speech
Tuesday. Bartra and other analysts are skeptical. "Lopez Obrador runs
the risk of losing his influence over the PRD," Bartra said. "He's
setting up all kind of confrontations, like when senators try to
negotiate with other political parties."
Neither President Vicente Fox nor President-elect Calderon have had
much to say about the planned convention. They have tried to drum up
national pride during a week of Independence Day celebrations and
turn attention away from Lopez Obrador's claim that the vote was
fixed in favor of Calderon. The threat of violent confrontation
dimmed this week when Lopez Obrador agreed to keep protesters from
the path of Saturday's Independence Day military parades in the
Zocalo.
Source: Los Angeles Times: 09/14
====
CHIAPAS: REPUTED PARAMILITARY BOSS DECLARES FOR PRD GOVERNOR-ELECT
For those who continue to follow events in Mexico's conflicted
southern state of Chiapas, there is an increasingly surreal sense of
being through the proverbial looking glass. On a national level, the
leftist PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is challenging his
narrow defeat in the presidential race as fraudulent with massive
protest movements; in Chiapas, Jose Antonio Aguilar Bodegas, the
candidate of the PRI (which ruled Mexico through blatant fraud and
corruption for 70 years) is attempting to emulate Lopez Obrador's
example - claiming his victory was stolen by the PRD candidate! The
conservative PAN (the party of President Fox and his apparent
successor Felipe Calderon) is backing Aguilar Bodegas out of mutual
enmity for the PRD - despite the fact that the PRI stole many
electoral victories from the PAN in its long tenure in power
nationally. Just to make the political bedfellows even stranger,
Jorge Kanter - the notorious conservative rancher long held to be the
mastermind of the White Guards, the brutal paramilitary force of
Chiapas' landed oligarchy - has declared for the PRD candidate, Juan
Sabines!
Kanter, now mayor of the southern colonial town of Comitan, is
traditionally a supporter of the PRI (which held a monopoly on power
in Chiapas until 2000), and says he views Sabines as an heir to the
PRI tradition. This may hurt Sabines as much as it helps him, but it
also speaks to the clear threat that the Chiapas PRD is becoming
co-opted by the oligarchy - which helps explain the bitter split
between the ostensibly left-wing party and Chiapas' Zapatista rebels,
who still maintain territorial control of much of the state. An
excerpt from a Sept. 9 interview with Kanter in the national weekly
Proceso, online at Chiapas95 states the following:
It appears contradictory but it is true: the apparent governor-elect
Juan Sabines Guerrero- backed by an alliance of the PRD, PT and
Convergence -could not have won without the support of the PRI", in
the words of the leader of the PRI mayors of Chiapas, Jorge
Constantino Kanter. "Juan Sabines is PRIista. He only obtained the
registration of the other party. Sabines was a deputy for the PRI, a
mayor for the PRI, and as the son of ex-governor Juan Sabines
Gutierrez, he continues being PRIista, and for this reason we support
him", he said in an interview after the election day on Aug. 20.
The mayor of the city of Comitan...is one of 25 of more than 50
elected PRI officials who support Sabines, in repudiation of the
official candidate of the PRI, Jose Antonio Aguilar Bodegas. These
words hearken to the Zapatista criticism that the PRD is starting to
mirror the PRI, from which it emerged as populist pro-democracy
offshoot after the stolen presidential elections of 1988.
The PRD achieved power in Chiapas with the election of Pablo Salazar
as governor in 2000, breaking the PRI's stranglehold on official
power in the state. His election was seen as a political
de-escalation in a state which had been harshly divided since the
1994 Zapatista revolt. It brought the state PRD, which had formerly
been allied with the Zapatistas' rebel government, back into the
official institutional life of Chiapas, with the "rebel governor"
Amado Avendaño agreeing to stand down. After 9-11, Salazar was quick
to publicly deny that the Zapatistas are terrorists, and he even
affirmed the legality of their parallel rebel government. On the
other hand, Salzar also engaged in actions which would endear him to
the likes of Kanter. He met with George Bush to discuss
counter-terrorism strategy, repressed a teachers' strike and sent the
state police to evict campesino squatters. The Zapatistas abstained
from the gubernatorial race, and have remained largely silent in the
subsequent electoral dispute.
Source: http://ww4report.com/
====
BORDER NEWS: US HOUSE BACKS 700-MILE FENCE ALONG BORDER
The U.S. House of Representatives authorized building a fence along
portions of the border with Mexico in a vote critics said had more to
do with election year politics than controlling illegal immigration.
The Republican-written bill, approved on a vote of 283-138, calls for
construction of about 700 miles of fence along the 2,000-mile border
with Mexico. Democratic opponents said the measure was a charade
designed to help Republicans ahead of the November 7 elections. "This
is to score political points that are going to be demagogued in
30-second ads," said Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat. He
accused Republicans of trying to appeal to the "fears and passions"
of people. He and other Democrats called for a broad immigration
overhaul along the lines of the bill passed by the U.S. Senate that
would create a guest worker program and legalize millions of illegal
immigrants.
President George W. Bush backs comprehensive legislation and a guest
worker program and spoke about the need for it during a meeting with
House Republicans at the Capitol. But the issue divides Republicans.
Many feel the Senate bill would grant amnesty to people who broke
U.S. law and it is unlikely a broad immigration bill will pass this
year. Instead, House Republican leaders plan to pass a series of
border security measures before lawmakers break at the end of the
month to campaign for the elections. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an
Illinois Republican, said the fence and other efforts would be added
to a domestic security spending bill for next year that the House and
Senate are hoping to finish by the end of the month.
Republican supporters of the fence said it was a step toward
controlling the borders and would help stem the flow of illegal
immigration while reducing drug smuggling and other crimes.
Luis Ernesto Derbez, Mexico's foreign minister, criticized the
proposed fence and said ordered, legal immigration was the only way
to solve the problem. "It is a shame that barriers are thought to be
the solution to immigration. They just make the process more
complicated for our citizens, but will not impede their passage," he
said.
An estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrants were arrested in the last
fiscal year trying to cross into the United States along the border
states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Sections of the
fence will be built in each state. "We have to know who is coming
across our borders and what they are bringing with them," said Rep.
Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who heads the House Armed
Services Committee. "If we build it, they will no longer come
illegally," Hastert said after the vote. But even some Republicans
opposed the piecemeal approach. "We're really not debating anything
of substance," said Rep. Jim Kolbe, an Arizona Republican. "This is a
feel good piece of legislation."
Source: Reuters: 09/14
====
GENDER VIOLENCE CONTINUES TO CLAIM ITS VICTIMS
No longer able to bear the physical and emotional violence she
endured for years at the hands of her husband, Amelia finally
committed suicide - just one more victim of gender violence in
Mexico, which cost the lives of more than 6,000 girls and women
between 1999 and 2005, according to official statistics.
Mexico's laws have failed to make a dent in violence against women,
psychologist Carla Moreno told IPS. Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB) figures show that seven out of every 10 Mexican women have
suffered some form of abusive treatment at some time in their lives.
Moreno has plenty of experience on this issue, as the director of the
non-governmental Association of Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse
(MUSAS), which provides legal and psychological support to an average
of 1,200 women a year, victims of violence at home or at work.
The latest abuse scandal in Mexico was the beating and repeated rape
of 13 women at the hands of 20 soldiers who were guarding ballot
boxes from the Jul. 2 national elections, in the northern state of
Coahuila, on the border with the United States. The local Catholic
bishop, Raúl Vera López, asked the non-governmental National
Commission on Human Rights to require the Vicente Fox administration,
the army and the courts to address the victims' claims. But so far
his calls have fallen on deaf ears, although the crime occurred over
a month ago. On Jul. 11, according to witnesses, 20 soldiers on guard
at a storage depot holding ballot boxes stormed a bar in a slum
neighborhood in Castaños, located 810 kilometers northwest of Mexico
City. The soldiers disarmed the local police and stripped them naked,
then beat and repeatedly raped the women who worked in the bar. One
pregnant woman miscarried as a result. Others suffered vaginal
injuries.
More than 800 women were killed in Mexico in 2004 alone. The wave of
killings, which includes the ongoing disappearance and murder of
large numbers of women in Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. border, led the
Chamber of Deputies to create a Special Commission on "Femicide",
also in 2004, which is due to be dissolved on Aug. 31. According to
the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information
Technology (INEGI), over 6,000 girls, teenagers and women were
murdered for gender-related reasons in the last six years, up to the
end of 2005.
"Mexican women are often seen as objects to be used and discarded, to
be thrown on the rubbish heap, as literally happens in Ciudad Juárez.
This has got to change, but no visible improvement is on the
horizon," Deputy Eliana García, of the leftwing Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD) and a member of the commission, told IPS.
Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.3 million people just across the border
from El Paso, Texas, has the dubious distinction of being known as
"the femicide capital" because of the constant disappearances and
murders of women since 1993, many of whom had been raped. Human
rights organizations say the total number of murders could surpass
4,000. "In Mexico, Spain and Guatemala, violence against women is on
the rise. But here the circle of impunity has not been broken, unlike
what is happening in Spain," the legislator added. Spain is
"attacking the impunity surrounding these crimes with laws cracking
down on gender violence," García added. "Violence is increasing in
'machista' and misogynist societies, where the authorities are in de
facto complicity and allow the aggressors to get off scot-free.
Women's advances in social, intellectual, economic and political
affairs annoy some men who are afraid of being left behind or pushed
aside," she said. That, she explained, is why "a state policy must
urgently be developed, to promote a new culture of gender and respect
through education." Such a strategy must include funding from the
national budget, to design, among other things, campaigns against
discrimination based on gender, she said.
The present administration which Fox, of the rightwing National
Action Party (PAN), has presided over since 2000, created the
National Institute for Women to concentrate on problems such as
domestic violence.
Furthermore, in February the office of the attorney general
established the Special Prosecutor's Office for Dealing with Crimes
Related to Acts of Violence Against Women, which replaced the
prosecutor's office that was previously investigating the Ciudad
Juárez murders. The office of the attorney general admitted that the
Ciudad Juárez investigations had shown that the murders of women are
just one of many manifestations of a nationwide phenomenon.
Presidential spokesman Rubén Aguilar said that the state is committed
to eradicating violence against women, and that this administration
had taken an important step in that direction. Although rape,
physical assault and murder are the most extreme forms of gender
violence faced by Mexican women, they also frequently have to deal
with sexual harassment in the workplace, Deputy García pointed out.
The lawmaker believes that the struggle for gender equality has made
only minimal progress in Mexico, and that this is why, a month after
the gang-rape of 13 women by soldiers in Coahuila, neither the
authorities nor society as a whole have reacted with indignation. She
compared the crimes in Coahuila with the rape of 16 women by
municipal police in May in the wake of disturbances in the town of
San Salvador Atenco, in Mexico state (in the center of the country),
where an all-out street battle between the townspeople and local and
federal law enforcement personnel was triggered by a dispute with
roadside flower vendors. Patricia Espinosa, the head of the
government's National Institute for Women, asked Fox for justice to
be applied "without gender discrimination, and with equal treatment
for women in the courts, whether they are plaintiffs or defendants."
She said women in Mexico face a justice system that devalues their
complaints, and that there is gender bias in the interpretation of
the law.
Violence against women is also a concern of the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB), whose Violence Reduction Group allocates
funds for research into its causes, in order to identify and support
successful government policies to combat the phenomenon. Figures from
the prosecutor's office in Mexico state indicate that they registered
19,150 complaints of physical assault and 9,984 of rape against women
and minors in the first half of the year alone.
Meanwhile, dead bodies continue to show up in Ciudad Juárez. Fifteen
women have been murdered so far this year, taking the total number of
such crimes in the area since 1993 to 400, according to official
statistics, although activists put the number much higher. In order
to gather facts about the incidence of violence against women, and
design strategies to stamp it out, INEGI is carrying out a nationwide
study, the results of which will be released this year, said PRD
legislator Marcela Lagarde, chairwoman of the Special Commission on
Femicide.
Source: IPS: 08/14
====
3,000-YEAR-OLD SCRIPT ON STONE FOUND IN VERACRUZ
A stone slab found in the state of Veracruz in Mexico bears
3,000-year-old writing previously unknown to scholars, according to
archaeologists who say it is an example of the oldest script ever
discovered in the Western Hemisphere. The order and pattern of carved
symbols appeared to be that of a true writing system, according to
the Mexican scientists who have studied the slab, along with
colleagues from the United States. It had characteristics strikingly
similar to imagery of the Olmec civilization, considered the earliest
in pre-Columbian America, they said.
Finding a heretofore unknown writing system is a rare event. One of
the last such discoveries, scholars say, was the Indus Valley script,
identified by archaeologists in 1924. The inscription on the stone
slab, with 62 distinct signs, some of them repeated, has been
tentatively dated to at least 900 B.C., and possibly earlier. That is
400 years or more before writing had been known to exist in
Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico through much of Central
America -- and by extension, to exist anywhere in the hemisphere.
Scientists had not previously found any script that was unambiguously
associated with the Olmec culture, which flourished along the Gulf of
Mexico in Vera Cruz and Tobasco well before the Zapotec and Maya
people rose to prominence elsewhere in the region. Until now, the
Olmec were known mainly for the colossal stone heads they created and
displayed at monumental buildings in their ruling cities.
The inscribed stone slab was discovered by Maria del Carmen Rodriguez
of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and
Ponciano Ortiz of Veracruz University. The archaeologists, who are
husband and wife, are the lead authors of the report of the find,
which will be published today in the journal Science. The Cascajal
stone, as it is being called, measures about 14 inches long, 8 inches
wide and 5 inches thick. The signs incised on the 26-pound stone, the
researchers said in the report, "link the Olmec to literacy, document
an unsuspected writing system and reveal a new complexity to this
civilization." Noting that the text "conforms to all expectations of
writing," the researchers wrote that the sequences of signs reflected
"patterns of language, with the probable presence of syntax and
language-dependent word orders." Several paired sequences of signs,
scholars said, have prompted speculation that the text may contain
couplets of poetry. Experts who have examined the symbols on the
stone slab said they would need many more examples before they could
hope to decipher them and read what is written. It appeared, they
said, that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later
Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have
been practiced for only a few generations and may never have spread
to surrounding cultures.
Stephen Houston of Brown University, a co-author of the report and an
authority on ancient writing systems, acknowledged that this was a
puzzle, and would probably be emphasized by some scholars who
question the influence of the Olmec on the course of later
Mesoamerican cultures. But Houston called the discovery tantalizing,
saying, "It could be the beginning of a new era of focus on the Olmec
civilization." Other participants in the research include Michael Coe
of Yale, Karl Taube of UC Riverside and Alfredo Delgado Calderon of
the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Mesoamerica
researchers who were not involved in the Veracruz discovery agreed
that the signs appeared to be a true script, and that the slab could
be expected to inspire more intensive study of the Olmecs, whose
civilization emerged about 1200 B.C. and had all but disappeared by
400 B.C. In an accompanying article in Science, Mary Pohl, an
anthropologist at Florida State University who has excavated Olmec
ruins, was quoted as saying, "This is an exciting discovery of great
significance."
A few other researchers were skeptical of the dating of the
inscription, noting that the stone was uncovered in a gravel quarry
where it and other artifacts were jumbled and may have been out of
their original context. The discovery team said that ceramic shards,
clay figurines and other broken artifacts accompanying the stone
appeared to be from a particular phase of Olmec culture that ended
about 900 B.C. But they acknowledged that the disarray at the site
made it impossible to determine whether the stone had originally been
in a place relating to the governing elite or to religious ceremony.
Richard Diehl, a specialist in Olmec research at the University of
Alabama and another co-author of the report, said, "My colleagues and
I are absolutely convinced the stone is authentic."
Source: New York Times: 09/15
====
The above articles were originally published and copyrighted by the
listed sources. These articles are offered for educational purposes
which CIS maintains is 'fair use' of copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
end: Mexico Week In Review: 09.11-09.17
--
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario