In 1990 General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro published his report entitled Subversive Movements in Mexico, with a succinct analysis of the Mexican guerrilla for something more than three decades. In that report the general pointed out the following: “With respect to the PROCUP, it can be said that it is, perhaps, the most dangerous organization in Mexico, above all for the type of activities that it carries out in clandestinity, as well as for the violent line that characterizes it with the management of explosives. Its
record demonstrates that: acts of terrorism and sabotage against military installations, as well as offices and agencies of the state and federal governments, including also private companies in several states of the country. It has been eight years since one has trustworthy information about the component members of this organization or its members.”
In spite of the lack of trustworthy information from 1983 to 1990, the general knew, nevertheless, that the PROCUP aided the Party of the Poor (PDLP) and had formed relationships with the National Revolutionary Civic Association
(ACNR), the National Workers, Campesinos and Popular Assembly (ANOCP), the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) and the People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FRAP); also, that the party circulated pamphlets in study centers about prolonged popular war.
In effect, the Clandestine Revolutionary Worker Party Union of the People (PROCUP) was one of the more outstanding and constant guerrilla organizations. From the beginning it counted on the participation of the Guatemalan militant José María Ortiz Vides, founder of the Union of the People, an organization active in the states of Mexico, Puebla, Oaxaca, Jalisco, among other regions, during the decade of the 1970’s. The distinctive trait of Chema Ortiz Vides and the Union of the People was precisely the management of explosives, a trait that later characterized, as General Acosta Chaparro pointed out, the PROCUP. We must emphasize this trait not only as episodic data, but as a sign of identity and continuity in the later alliance of the PROCUP with the Party of the Poor (PDLP) and in the later conversion of the PROCUPPDLP into the Popular Revolutionary Army, EPR, which constituted the first large experiment of national guerrilla coordination in Mexico.
The recent attacks with explosives on Pemex installations represent, then, a demonstration of the historic continuity of the initial elements of the Union of the People and they have as an antecedent the 1994 explosives attack on the Pemex oil pipeline in Tula, Hidalgo. They reveal, on the other hand, the EPR’s precise objectives: first, not to provoke deaths of human beings; second, to affect only strategic installations; third, to affect such installations because Pemex now constitutes, since at least four federal administrations ago [24 years ago], a preserve of “oligarchic” interest submitted to fiscal extortion, corruption and perhaps irreversible privatization.
The attacks reveal other additional data. Independently of the fact that actions were carried out in Queretaro and Guanajuato, currently PAN territory,
they had to be carried out with technical advice relevant to only damage installations at strategic points and to not provoke damage to human life. The paragraph of the EPR’s communiqué perhaps refers to this technical advice [where it says] “counting on the support of popular militia from the whole state.”
It is difficult to know of what future actions of harassment “to the interests of the oligarchy and the illegitimate government” will consist or what magnitude they will have. But the communiqué is clear about the cause of such actions: the forced disappearance of two of their members in Oaxaca. In this respect we must point out that the EPR’s participation in the process of Oaxacan social confrontation protagonized by the APPO in 2006 was a theme in the public domain. But it is necessary to emphasize that, if it is the case that the EPR had truly intervened in APPO’s barricades, it did not intervene as an armed force, as an organization capable of war, as an insurgent group that would threaten, attack or be disposed to act with weapons or with its now demonstrated capacity in the management of explosives. In any case, the EPR’s alleged intervention in the Oaxacan conflict was circumscribed to the contribution of civilian cadre or social bases, not armed commandos. It was, if this participation should be proven, a kind of diplomacy, an intensive course of political organization and mass action for possible EPR cadre and for independent indigenous organizations, feminists or teachers. In this sense, we can consider, then, the police and military operation of last May 24 in the Hotel del Arbol in the Oaxacan capital as one additional episode of the conflict in Oaxaca.
The investigation and analysis of the Oaxacan journalist Pedro Ansótegui during the last week of May and the first days of June permitted him to identify that the operation consisted in the capture of two EPR members, one of them Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez, who he identified by photographs as the brother of Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez, also called Tiburcio Cerezo because of his defense of the Cerezo Brothers.
Gabriel Alberto also used another name: Raymundo Rivera Bravo; in other circles he was likewise called “El Gordo.” We are dealing with a long-term militant: he participated in the 1968 student movement at UABJO (Oaxaca’s Autonomous University of Benito Juárez), later he joined the Union of the People, afterwards in the formation of the PROCUP-PDLP and finally in the EPR. It is attributed to him having been a military advisor to the EZLN’s General Command in 1994. [Translator’s Note: The EZLN denied this in La Jornada, July 16, 2006.] The forced disappearance of he and Edmundo Reyes Amaya is a clear dirty war operation.
On the other hand, and lastly, we must point out that one of the most outstanding effects of the EPR’s attacks was the unexpected reconversion of Pemex into “the patrimony of all Mexicans.” Throughout the last four presiden- tial administrations Pemex has been submitted to a process of exhaustion, extortion, privatization and indebtedness that tends towards its total disap-pearance as a public business. Sufficient fiscal, financial and commercial indicators make Pemex’s total privatization seem imminent. Its use as a revolving fund for the federal government’s expense, its partisan advantage, its constant ceding to private consortia and the constant corruption are converting this enterprise into something foreign to the country’s industrial and technological development. In this context, the EPR’s communiqué is not lacking in meaning: “the national campaign of harassment against the oligarchy’s interests.” In other words, from the EPR’s perspective, Pemex stopped being “the patrimony of all Mexicans” a long time ago and has been converted into one of the “interests of the oligarchy and of this illegitimate government.”
One more effect of the attacks is not so visible: the associates, co-investors or present buyers, immediate or potential, will see with other eyes the security conditions at Pemex. The experience of the transnational oil companies in security systems is broad, particularly starting with certain sectors of the war industry that count on private armies or on technology assistance and of security in different regions of Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. This would facilitate a greater bending to the United States criteria of hemispheric security that transforms the national armies into complementary forces with regional police functions. Such an industry of private armies that can assume, with the character of specialized technical support, security over the ducts, oil pipelines, distributors and the petroleum industry’s different installations, could cheapen the privatization of Pemex or favor a bi-national coordination in “antiterrorist” security plans which is now so important to the United States government.
In that case, we would be dealing with the security of wealth which formally they wish to be considered private or transnational businesses and not “the patrimony of all Mexicans.” Would it be one step more in the modernization of Mexico?
----------------------- Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Mexico City, Sunday, July 15, 2007
Section: Opinión
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Translation: Mary Ann Tenuto Sánchez
Chiapas Support Committee
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