In opposition to the media blackout, The Bullet here presents an important
intervention and testimonial by the prominent Mexican writer, Aída
Hernández Castillo, on Atenco. It is accompanied by a letter of protest to
the Mexican government in support of the Atenco detainees. We urge readers
to add their signatures. Finally, an Atenco solidarity meeting is
announced.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
State Violence and Gender in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico

R. Aída Hernández Castillo

How can any honest woman in Mexico, regardless of her ideology, remain
silent?

May 3rd and 4th, 2004 will be remembered as some of the saddest and most
violent days in the modern history of San Salvador Atenco, on the
outskirts of the Mexico City megalopolis. This small town, home to 33
thousand people who still depend on peasant economy, witnessed a violent
clash between 300 unarmed civilians, members of the Frente de Pueblos en
la Defensa de la Tierra (Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land), and
some 4000 policemen from the state and various corporations. The police
put the demonstrators down and terrorized the whole community, raiding
houses, breaking down doors and arresting without warrants 207 people,
including children, women, and the elderly. At the end of the day, 20
people had been seriously injured and a minor was dead.

What had started as a demonstration to support eight street vendors from
the neighboring town of Texcoco became a violent clash which most of the
media described as the "return to the rule of law" after the arbitrary
actions of a "radical group." The image of a group of peasants from Atenco
battering a fallen policeman was shown again and again to justify the
State's use of violence. The loss of control and violence by a few were
used to disqualify a whole movement and to characterize it as a
destabilizing and dangerous force for the State and the population in
general. The attack on the policeman should have been punished according
to the law, and considering there were plenty of images of the event, it
would have been possible to identify the attackers. Instead, state and
federal authorities chose to unleash the full force and violence of the
state on innocent people, many of whom don't even belong to the group the
authorities aimed to disband.

The testimonies of the men and women arrested on these two days, which are
now beginning to emerge thanks to human rights organizations, speak of
physical and sexual violence on a par with the worst days of the
dictatorships in South America. But why use such a show of violence
against a group of unarmed, poor peasants? Why use sexual violence against
the women in the movement? Was it not against the state's own interests to
issue such a repressive response, now that Mexico has been chosen as
founding member of the United Nations' recently created Human Rights
Council?

Scholars who have studied the social effects of violence and terror have
pointed at the difficulty of analyzing and "explaining" them from a
scholarly point of view. Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig
(Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man,1987) refers to the effect of
terror by saying that the stories of violence confronted him with an
interpretation problem, until he realized that the problem of
interpretation is essential for the reproduction of terror; it not only
makes it very difficult to create an effective counter-discourse, but at
the same time it empowers the terrifying aspects of death squadrons,
disappearances and torture, because it causes demobilization and limits
people's capacity to resist. Since terror depends so much on
interpretation and sense, it ends up feeding on itself by destroying any
evidence of sense and rationality.

In the same way, the disproportionate violence with which those arrested
at Atenco were treated has the double effect of demobilizing and inspiring
skepticism about what happened, thus making it difficult to create a
counter-discourse, break the silence in which our indignation has left us
and shake off the indifference that has crept after some of the political
prisoners were liberated.

A Symbol of Resistance: Frente de Pueblos para la Defensa de la Tierra

The representations that the news media has constructed around the Frente
de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra show a movement of a violent and
intolerant nature while at the same time minimizing the numbers of its
adherents and their politics and discrediting their leaders. These
representations bear little resemblance to the men and women I had the
opportunity to meet this past April. They appeared a cheerful, supportive,
and inclusive group, well organized and capable of complex political
thought. I met them just a few weeks before the fateful clash, at La
Cañada de los Sauces, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, in one of the most festive,
socially inclusive resistance demonstrations I have ever attended.

During the memorial festivities of Emiliano Zapata, I was among the
supporters of the Otra Campaña in Morelos state, the name given to the
tour of Mexico by the Zapatistas (EZLN) during the Presidential campaign,
awaiting the arrival of Sub-Comandante Marcos to the town of Tetelcingo.
Suddenly it was announced that the meeting was moving to La Cañada de los
Sauces, in the residential neighborhood of Tabachines, where police were
about to force out a group of residents and environmental activists who
had chained themselves to trees. They were protesting the construction of
a road that would cross the area and required cutting down the ancient
willow trees. The arrival of the Otra Campaña at La Cañada forced out the
police, the ambulances, and the bulldozers which were ready to bring down
the trees and their guardians.

A little while later, about 200 men and women peasants from San Salvador
Atenco arrived, marching in order and keeping time with the metallic
clatter of their machetes. They came in support of the people of La Cañada
de los Sauces, just like they had in previous days supported the
indigenous community of Cacahuatepec, Guerrero, who oppose the
construction of the a dam that would expropriate their communal land, and
the people of Cuernavaca who resisted the construction of a COSTCO store
to protect the historical murals of the old Casino de la Selva, or the
people of Texcoco who protested the construction of a Wall Mart across
from the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan. The peasants of Atenco supported
the struggle of these communities and shared with them their experience
and strategies. Their success in 2002, when they managed to stop the
government building an international airport that would have expropriated
five thousand hectares of farming land, has made them into a symbol of
resistance against the blows of globalization. These local struggles share
a search for alternative ways of development that are respectful of nature
and of the historical heritage of communities. The success of the movement
in Atenco was proof that it is possible to say NO to the neoliberal
economic model which is indifferent to people's wellbeing and excludes the
majority of them.

This was the message that the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra
brought to the residents of La Cañada in Cuernavaca, a message that
encouraged them to continue resisting. In their speeches, they said that
the struggle to defend the old trees of La Cañada was similar to the
struggle of many indigenous and peasant peoples in Mexico. The words and
songs they brought seemed to melt the barriers between social classes. The
meeting became a great popular gathering. The housewives of La Cañada
cooked and fed everyone, the workers of the Pascual Boing co-op handed out
fruit drinks and the peasants from Atenco enlivened the evening singing
corridos about their struggles. The women danced in pairs, clashing their
machetes high above their heads in a slow, ritual dance reminiscent of
religious dances in indigenous communities. These were strong, extroverted
women who shouted out resistance slogans and wielded their machetes with
the ease of those who use them in everyday tasks. I could not help
thinking of the Zapatista women and of many other women who are fighting
from the bottom of society to build a fairer life. I felt inundated by
their political energy. I would never have guessed that a few weeks later
I would see these same women beaten, bloodied, humiliated, silenced... the
political energy I felt that evening in April was a danger the government
aimed to eradicate.

As an analyst of social movements, I was impressed by the organizational
expertise the Frente de Pueblos possessed. I was awed by their ability to
systematize the history of their struggle in songs, by the strength of the
women, who seemed to play a central role in the movement, and by the
obvious influence the group had over the young students who were at the
meeting. Among the crowd, I had the opportunity to witness an informal
"passing of the torch" ritual in which an elder from Atenco gave a young
woman student from the University of Chapingo his machete. A group of
young people crowded around, cheering and shouting slogans, while the man
addressed an improvised speech to the girl, who received the machete in
recognition of her solidarity with the peasant movement. I wonder now if
that girl was among the women who were raped and abused in the jail of
Santiaguito. Could it be that that was the punishment for taking on the
torch?

At the time I thought it would be a good idea to have one of my students
analyze this experience. Perhaps that is also what the teachers at the
National School of Anthropology and History thought. Two of their students
are now facing criminal charges for being in Atenco on May 4th.

That afternoon at La Cañada de los Sauces the police stayed away, and
eventually the residents were able to negotiate with the government to
save the willows. The political cost of upsetting a residential community
or breaking through the home of a Public Attorney that lives in that
neighborhood, would have been too high. But repression came later, in
lands of poorer people, where it seems it is easier to silence complaints
and break down a movement in the name of the rule of law.

State Violence: Breaking Down the Movement

My previous encounter with the group Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la
Tierra made me feel suspicious of the images of extreme violence that
showed some people of Atenco beating on a policeman. Up to now, the media
has failed to give the names or the histories of the attackers, and it is
not that far-fetched to think that the movement could have been
infiltrated by provocateurs that would then provide the cue to unleash a
campaign of repression. It may also be that years of accumulated grief and
struggle exploded in an incident of irrational violence for which the
movement will have to pay a high price. I do not know what happened, but
what is plain and what we have to say over and over again is that nothing
justifies police violence, or the violation of the human rights of those
taken into custody.

The State's legislature had significant foresight when it approved in February
1994 the Law to Prevent and Punish Torture, which establishes that any public
officer who inflicts "blows, mutilations, burns, physical or psychological pain,
or who withholds food and water" from a person in custody is guilty of torture,
as is "any public officer who instigates, compels, authorizes, orders or consents
to the aforementioned....torture is considered a crime and this is not
affected by exceptional situations, such as internal political
instability, urgent investigations, or other circumstances. Neither can it
be excused because it was carried out under superior orders." (See
www.edomex.gob.mx/legistel/cnt/LeyEst).

During the police raids in Atenco, houses were broken into and destroyed
without search warrants, 207 people were taken into custody without arrest
warrants, a minor was murdered, 20 people were severely injured--one of
whom is still in a coma, (a 20 years undergraduate student of the National
University (UNAM)). There were 23 sexual assaults on women, seven of which
were rapes. The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has received 150
complaints from residents of Atenco. The authorities, whether municipal,
state, or federal, have so far failed to accept responsibility for what
happened, and President Vicente Fox has justified the use of violence by
the police as "the means to bring peace to the people of this community in
the midst of rising violence" (La Jornada May 13 2006).

Of those arrested on May 3rd and 4th, 17 were freed, 144 were charged with
damage to public property, a misdemeanor for which they can be released on
bail, and 28, including the leader of the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de
la Tierra, Ignacio del Valle Medina, as well as his son, César del Valle,
have been formally indicted under charges of false imprisonment and damage
to public property. While authorities use the law at their discretion
against social leaders, those responsible for the violations to human
rights in Atenco are still shamelessly speaking of rule of law.

We need to take the government's discourse about using the full weight of
the law in the case of Atenco and make it our own: we must demand the just
punishment of government officials responsible for the abuses.

Gender Violence: Subjugating Women Social Leaders

If the women of Atenco waving their machetes in the air had become a
symbol of peasant resistance, their bloodstained faces and bodies now
represent the shame of a repressive Mexican state. The accounts that have
come to public light in the last few weeks show the specific form that
violence takes in patriarchal systems in which women are still considered
war booty. Both the National Human Rights Commission as the Centro de
Derechos Humanos Miguel Agusitín Pro A.C. have direct testimonies from the
women being held in custody which describe the sexual attacks they
suffered. Most of the victims have preferred to remain anonymous for fear
of reprisals, but the deported foreign students Valentina Palma, from
Chile, Samantha Diezmar, from Germany, and Christina Valls and María
Sastres, from Spain, have denounced the sexual assaults they suffered, as
well as those other women were subjected to.

The testimonies made public by the human rights organizations show that
the attacks were not isolated cases but rather a strategy of sexual
violence which was a key part for the police operation:

"They started to clubbing us on the head. Then they were touching my
breasts, my buttocks. Then I felt a hand touching my vagina and
penetrating me with the fingers."

"There are cases such as that of a 50-year old woman who was forced to
perform oral sex on three policemen in order to get them to set her free.
Hiding her face in shame and pain, she says she had gone shopping for a
gift for her son when policemen in uniform grabbed her. She says they told
her 'you have to give us each a blow-job if you want to go back home.' She
was afraid they would hit her, like they had done with the other women, so
she did what they asked. In the end they set her free."

"They shut the door of the van where they had us and one said 'that bitch
needs a wedgie' and started pulling on my panties. He realized I was
having my period, because I was wearing a sanitary pad, and shouted to the
rest 'look at this bleeding bitch, let's get her even dirtier' as he
shoved his fingers in my vagina, many times. I was not really there any
more, but I remember I could hear myself saying 'My God, what are they
going to do to me?"

Alicia Elena Perez Duarte, the special attorney in charge of crimes
against women, said that upon hearing about these testimonies she tried to
get in touch with the women held in custody, but the representatives of
the government of the locality said there were no women in custody (La
Jornada, May 12 2006). This lie points to a web of complicities which made
possible a police strategy of terror and sexual violence.

Marinana Selvas, an anthropology student among the 28 activist still in
jail, has contended that the rejection by the Public Attorney to consider
the testimonies of rape, as a strategy to allow time to erase any physical
evidence of the sexual abuses. This contention has probably put her at
risk as she is still under arrest.

Carlos Abascal, the Secretary of State, minimized the relevance of the
women's complaints and doubted their veracity. Other lesser officials,
such as the regional police chief, Wilfredo Robledo, and the Speaker of
the Department of State of the Estado de Mexico, Emmanuel Ávila,
disregarded the testimonies as part of a legal defense strategy.
Meanwhile, the human rights organizations have pointed out that this type
of crime is prosecuted by the state, so it is the job of the public
attorney to initiate the investigations.

The criminal law of the state of Mexico, in which the raids took place,
defines the crime of rape in article 273 by specifying that: "also guilty
of rape is the person who by force, whether it be physical or moral,
introduces any part of the body, object or instrument other than the penis
in the vagina, anus or mouth of the victim, regardless of gender." Article
274 of the same law establishes that the participation of multiple
attackers, that is, more than one person taking part or supporting the
aggressor, constitute an aggravating factor. Under these definitions, the
experiences described in the testimonies are not just sexual assaults, but
rape, and as such should be prosecuted by the state.

The attacks on the women of Atenco add to the long list of women who have
been the victims of sexual violence for political motives in the last two
presidential terms. For the more conservative sectors of Mexican
society-both mestizo and indigenous-any show of organization among women
in any community or region has become a synonym of Zapatista influence.
Organized women, whether they are Zapatistas or not, are a symbol of
resistance and subversion, and for that reason are placed at the center of
political violence.

The political use of sexual violence was one of the issues discussed
during the first series of talks between the EZLN and the government on
October 1995, in San Cristóbal de las Casas. At the Women's Table during
this meeting, the people invited by the government and those brought by
the EZLN agreed, in spite of their political differences, that rape should
be considered a crime of war as described by international law. There have
been no efforts, however, to act on the agreements reached then on those
negotiation tables.

Gender analysts from other militarized regions, such as Davida Woods in
Palestine or Betty Denich in Sarajevo, point out that in contexts of
political military conflict feminine sexuality tends to be transformed
into a symbolical space of political struggle and rape is instrumentalized
as a way of showing power and dominion over the enemy. Atenco was not an
exception: police repression has affected women in particular, as we can
readily see from their testimonies. In a patriarchal ideology that still
considers women sexual objects and repositories of a family's honor, the
rape and sexual torture of women constitutes a way of attacking all the
men on the enemy's side. Just like Serbian soldiers, the policemen of
Atenco "take possession of women's bodies one after another, as objects of
sexual abuse and as symbols in a fight against their male enemies, thereby
reproducing traditional patriarchal patterns where the male inability to
protect their women, to control their sexuality and their reproductive
capacities, is considered a symbol of weakness in the enemy."

In spite of the effectiveness of fear as a disintegrator of social
resistance movements, it is evident that the women of Atenco are
determined to continue fighting for their rights as women and as members
of a community. Their testimony before human rights organizations proposes
a counter-discourse that can break the silence of terror. It is our turn
to echo their voices and demand that justice be done.

Translated by María Vinós.

R. Aída Hernández Castillo is at the Center for High Studies in Social
Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City, and is author of Histories and Stories
from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico and Mayan Lives, Mayan
Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas.

**********************************************************************
**********************************************************************

LETTER OF PROTEST
TO: GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO
RE: IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ATENCO AND TEXCOCO DETAINEES

June 19, 2006
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

TO: President Vicente Fox
Governor of the State of Mexico Enrique Peña Nieto
Minister of the Interior Carlos Abascal
Mexican Ambassador to Canada María Teresa García
Segovia de Madero
Cc: Carmen Lira, Editor, La Jornada

We the undersigned people of Canada condemn the May 3 and May 4, 2006
police attacks against the people of Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco,
State of Mexico, resulting in the death of Francisco Javier Cortés
Santiago; the human rights abuses to which those arrested have been
subjected at the hands of authorities; and the sexual assault of female
detainees by police. We are deeply concerned that these types of
repressive and illegal police practices, which are inadmissible in any
democratic society, are becoming typical of the Mexican state response to
the legitimate right to dissent. We want you to know that we in Canada are
aware of and gravely alarmed by such abuses against Mexican citizens and
members of the international community, and we want to express our
solidarity with the families of victims.

We demand the release of all prisoners detained during these attacks and
other politically motivated attacks against dissenters. We demand that the
Government of Mexico, as called for by the United Nations Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, submit to an independent
public investigation into human rights abuses committed during the Texcoco
and Atenco attacks and documented by the National Commission of Human
Rights, the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center and Human Rights
Watch.

We demand that charges be laid against planners and perpetrators of
physical assault, sexual assault and torture against detainees. We demand
the right of safe return to Mexico of foreign nationals who have legal
migratory status in Mexico.

This letter has been coordinated by the Toronto Atenco Solidarity
Committee, a group comprised of concerned individuals, students, trade
unionists, professors, artists and activists. If you wish to sign this
letter, please reply to:

torontoatenco@gmail.com

Please include your name, occupation, affiliation and location.

Background: What happened in Atenco?

On May 3 and 4, 2006, there were violent police repressions in two
adjacent communities just outside Mexico City. While mainstream media has
reported that these were spontaneous events, it has become clear that the
government had targeted these communities for attack, and had lists of
people ready for arrest in the event that a "spontaneous event" could be
fabricated as an opportunity to arrest and intimidate.

It started in Texcoco, where flower merchants were setting up in a local
square, slated for development which many in the local community oppose.
Police violently and forcibly removed the flower vendors, and also
surrounded a building where leaders from the People's Front in Defense of
the Land from the neighbouring community of Atenco were meeting. Atenco is
known for its longstanding resistance to the government over corporate
development on its lands. In 2002 they forced the government to back away
from an international airport development on their lands, and they
continue to resist this proposal.

When the police began their attacks on the flower merchants in Texcoco,
and isolated Atenco resistance movement leaders, an appeal was sent up the
highway so to speak, asking the residents of Atenco to block the highway
in order to prevent the expected onslaught of more police. The people of
Atenco united and blocked the highway. Five hundred state police
confronted 300 or so Atenco residents and their supporters, among them
university students, who managed to drive away the initial police raid.
Several police were severely beaten, fourteen were taken hostage and later
released to the Red Cross. But eventually, by the following day state and
federal police, now numbering 2000, had occupied Atenco, and then the real
terror began. They went from house to house and rounded up people,
including those uninvolved locals who simply took people into their houses
to protect them from the violence.

People were severely beaten, intimidated and tortured. Thirty of 47 women
arrested have reported sexual assault by police, who they report came with
condoms in their pockets and a clear intent to rape. Journalists, both
foreign and national, were targeted for beating and arrest, and their
recording devices were confiscated. The leadership of the Atenco
resistance movement has been arrested; the top leader's family continues
to be terrorised; their house has been destroyed. Three police officers
who participated in the raids have confirmed that a fourteen year-old boy
was killed by a gunshot wound fired by police. A university student
activist initially in a coma with severe head injuries from an exploded
tear gas canister lobbed by police has died. Five foreign nationals,
including a Chilean documentary maker and student at a Mexico City film
school, and a German documentary maker, were deported following their
brutal arrests and have been banned from re-entry to Mexico for five
years. Around 200 people were arrested, about 100 remain in custody
without charge, and others still have been disappeared. Bail is
unaffordable for most.

These events have sparked an international campaign of solidarity with the
Atenco prisoners and people.

********************************************************************************************************************************************
An Evening of Testimonies, Poetry and Film

International Day of Action in Art, Culture and Communication called by
the "Other Campaign" for the Liberation of the Atenco Political Prisoners

**Erika Del Carmen Fuchs, witness to the attacks on San Salvador Atenco
will give her testimony and analysis of the current context of Mexico and
the 'Other Campaign'. Erika is a participant in the Other Campaign in Mexico,
as a member of the Committee Truth, Justice and Freedom Jacobo and Gloria,
and Justicia for Migrant Workers BC.

**Maka, an independent media journalist and activist from Mexico City,
will also present her testimony, images and film of the attacks in Atenco.

**The R.H.Y.M.E Poetry collective will share their spoken word in
solidarity with Atenco.

Monday June 12th, 2006
Time: 18:30-21:30
Seminar Room 4-414
OISE, University of Toronto,
252 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Donations to the legal fund of Atenco political prisoners are appreciated.

For more information:
j4mw@justicia4migrantworkers.org <mailto:j4mw@justicia4migrantworkers.org>
torontoatenco@gmail.com <mailto:j4mw@justicia4migrantworkers.org>

The B u l l e t is produced by the Socialist Project. Readers are
encouraged to distribute widely. Comments, criticisms and suggestions are
welcome. Write to socialistproject@hotmail.com
<mailto:socialistproject@hotmail.com>.

The Bullet archive is available at http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet.
For more analysis of contemporary politics check out 'Relay: A Socialist
Project Review' at http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay.