[Three bombs exploded on July 5, blowing up a steel pipeline which supplies natural gas from Mexico City to the state of Guanajuato. A fourth exploded on July 10, severing another pipeline supplying natural gas to Querétaro. Both pipelines belonged to Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state-owned national oil company. Also on July 10 the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR, its Spanish initials) issued a communiqué taking responsibility for the bombings. Below is Part I of a two-part analysis by Carlos Montemayor, an expert in Mexican guerrilla movements. Part II will follow later. CSC (translator)]
[The EZLN declared that the assessment repeated here by Montemayor that "Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez" had been "an EZLN military advisor" is not true. SI Marcos said that "El EZLN no ha tenido, no tiene, ni tendrá asesores militares" ("The EZLN has neved had, doesn't have and will never have any military advisor").
See note in La Jornada -- de tod@s para tod@s]
__________________________________________________________________See note in La Jornada -- de tod@s para tod@s]
I
July 14, 2007
The guerrilla is always a social phenomenon. It is a detached and icy part of certain regional or supra regional processes. Nevertheless, because of its clandestine structure, because of its war ability, because of its configuration as a self-defense force or a popular army, public opinion, official discourse and government analyses systematically eliminate the link between the guerrilla and the concrete social processes and convert it into delinquency or unjustifiable criminality. By eliminating its social nature as one of its essential traits, it relieves the official or governmental attitude of the obligation to begin a deeper social and political analysis and reduces its response to measures of selective repression or loss of restraint.
This vision reduces the analysis of subversive movements to a simple mechanism: evaluate them for their firearms capacity, not for their political meaning. Therefore, the governments seek to annihilate them without proposing any political change. And said decision to annihilate them appears as the only possible solution and at the same time as justification of unlimited arbitrary acts.
Because of that I have been explaining for many years that the National Security flaws cannot be reduced to slow or failed military or police detection of guerrilla centers. Because there is a previous violence, a political and economic violence that debilitates, impoverishes and confronts society. The risk that the country runs with armed groups is not as grave as that which it runs with the political and economic power elite that have generated corruption in Mexico. More serious than the guerrilla groups is the economic policy which has impoverished the country. The guerrilla does not initiate this violence; the guerrilla is the armed and final phase of a violence unleashed, in a cruel and lethal way, by the policies that the power groups impose.
Military measures are not enough to make organizations like the EPR disappear. With the hypothetical disappearance of the guerrilla groups the social and political needs of Mexico would not disappear, nor the poverty and corruption that are indeed the basis of permanent and institutionalized injustice which we call social peace and social stability.
The EPR’s attacks on Pemex installations and the harassment campaign which the July 10 communiqué expresses are precisely the result of the reduced vision of considering the guerrilla movements from a police perspective and not starting from and social and political analysis. This restricted vision facilitates the resurgence of some dominant traits from the dirty war: the forced disappearance of individuals. The EPR’s communiqué asks for the presentation alive of two members of that organization: Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez, this latter also called Raymundo Rivera Bravo. The communiqué considers them “detained-disappeared since May 25 in Oaxaca.” The Oaxacan and federal authorities immediately denied that these two people are among those detained for local or federal crimes. But we are not dealing specifically with detainees, but disappeared. From there origi-nates the demand that they be presented alive.
In his July 11 column “Political Indicator,” Carlos Ramírez remembered that the Oaxacan columnist Pedro Ansótegui reported a police and military operation carried out last May 24 in the city of Oaxaca. We reread some paragraphs from Carlos Ramírez’ column. It goes like this: “around noon of that day (May 24) the state police Special Operations Unit arrived at the Hotel del Arbol due to the alleged presence of an ‘armed group.’ A little later, an Army unit arrived. A bulletin reported the apprehension of four people, officially revealed as ministerial police from Chiapas who had not yet delivered their commission letter to the state prosecutor’s office. Nevertheless, data from political organizations concluded that we are not dealing with police, but an armed guerrilla cell. There they detained Gabriel Cruz Sánchez, an EPR chief, and brother of Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez, better known as Tiburcio Cerezo, also a guerrilla chief, an EZLN military advisor, and linked to the Committee for the Liberation of the Cerezo Brothers, prisoners charged with guerrilla actions with bombs. If the local authorities talked about a confusion with ministerial police, the EPR’s communiqué points out that Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Raymundo Rivera Brava (Gabriel Cruz Sánchez)
are disappeared since May 25. That is to say, since the May 24 operation.”
We observe that Carlos Ramírez emphasizes: “that is to say, since the May 24 Operation.” But the communiqué points out, on the other hand,: “since May 25 in Oaxaca,” not since the 24. In effect, in Oaxaca the walls not only hear, they also look. The infiltration of information in that state and in many regions of the country are not a new thing, they are something natural in a social weave as complex as that of our country. Well then, it was leaked in certain police circles of Oaxaca that on May 25 in the dungeons of the Oaxacan Attorney General were found, detained and in very bad condition, two EPR members. The entry and exit of doctors was an indication of the grave condition of the detainees. That same day both were taken out of the dungeons on stretchers and transported to Mexico City, presumably to Military Camp Number One, given the presence at that time of members of the Army.
Because of that, the EPR’s communiqué talks about those “detained-disappeared” on May 25, not May 24, because the 25 was the last day on which the two were seen. The demand that they be presented alive has a precise logic: they intend that the government show the dirty war is not reemerging,
whose relevant data, although the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past no longer exists, is precisely that of the forced disappearance of individuals.
It is curious that one day before the operation mentioned by Carlos Ramírez and Pedro Ansótegui, May 23 2007, Amnesty International, Mexico Section, headed by Lillian Velásquez, would present the chapter of its 2007 report, where the following was enumerated: “torture, arbitrary detentions, excessive use of force and judicial proceedings without guarantees continue, above all in the states: also, the actions failed to clarify past violations and to process those responsible.” Also Liliana Velásquez observed that the
“massive police operations against demonstrations were paid for with grave human rights violations.” In relation to the Oaxaca conflict, the report referred to the fact that “the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) was constituted to support the teachers and demand the resignation of the head of state, and they occupied official buildings, radio and television trans-mitters. Reports tell that police dressed in civilian clothing shot against APPO’s partisans, causing the death of at least two people. During the crisis there was torture, arbitrary detentions and lack of communication to teachers and partisans of that civil organization. In October, police attacked several barricades, resulting in three dead and many injured; 4 thousand, 500 members of the Federal Preventative Police entered the city. In November 140 people were detained; many had not participated in the acts of which they were accused.”
As for the police operation effectuated on May 3, 2006 in San Salvador Atenco, the report pointed out that “police used tear gas and firearms against members of the community and detained, during the days that the operation lasted, 211 people, many of whom were repeatedly beaten and tortured while they were being transported to the prison.”
It pointed out that of the 47 women who were detained and transported to prison, “at least 26 of them denounced before the CND that they were the object of sexual aggression or rape by police. At the end of the year, they had only brought minor charges against one of the aggressors.”
It is significant that Amnesty International should express that President Felipe Calderón “has not shown the will to elaborate programs which attend to the grave violations” in human rights and that “what’s most important is to demonstrate with acts that he will not tolerate another Atenco or Oaxaca.”
Very well, the origin of the EPR’s communiqué and of the attacks on Pemex still derives, as we will see in the next delivery [2nd part of the article], from the case of Oaxaca.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, July 14, 2007
www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/07/14/index.php?section=opinion&article=008a1pol
Translation: Mary Ann Tenuto Sánchez
Chiapas Support Committee
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