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Pronunciamiento desde Lille Francia, sobre las agresiones a bases de apoyo zapatistas en el ejido « 10 de abril » y la comunidad “17 de Noviembre”
Reunidos en la ciudad de Lille, departamento Nord de Francia, un grupo de individuos de diversas nacionalidades y horizontes politicos acordamos constituir un Comité de apoyo a las comunidades zapatistas en rebelion, en el contexto de la denuncia hecha por el Consejo de Buen Gobierno “Corazon del Arcoiris de la Esperanza” luego de las agresiones sufridas por miembros del ejido “10 de abril”, la comunidad “17 de Noviembre” y por personal del hospital San Carlos de Altamirano al final de enero pasado.
Reconocemos en esas acciones una continuacion de la constante campana de hostigamiento, provocacion e intimidacion practicada desde hace varios anos por las organizaciones ORCAO y OPPDIC. Manifestamos nuestra preocupacion dada la magnitud de los hechos y el numero de agresores, que segun denuncia de la junta de buen gobierno, se aproxima a 300 personas, armadas con machetes, piedras y al parecer algunas de ellas con armas de fuego. A esto se agrega una falta grave, que es el haber impedido a personal medico del hospital San Carlos asistir a los companeros heridos, ademas de extender las vejaciones en sus personas, retener un vehiculo de servicio de ambulancia ademas de haber perpetrado el robo de documentos de identidad de una mujer durante su labor como asistente medica.
Reprobamos igualmente el robo y despojo del que son objeto los companeros y companeras del Ejido 10 de abril. Es de nuestro conocimiento que miembros de las dos organizaciones indicadas en esta denuncia, se apersonaron para talar arboles y apoderarse de madera con el fin de revenderla, constituyendo asi un acto reprensible por ley.
Consientes de que estos hechos se inscriben en una campana permanente de agresion y provocacion acordamos permanecer vigilantes al desarrollo de los hechos, informar de la evolucion en redes europeas de y coordinarse con las innumerables organizaciones en todo el mundo que apoyan solidariamente la practica de la autonomia zapatista
Despues de haber conocido declaraciones del gobernador del Estado de Chiapas Velasco Coello, donde hace constar su voluntad de respetar la autonomia zapatista y de cumplir los acuerdos de San Andres, lo emplazamos firmemente a ser consecuente con su palabra y detener la disimulacion de una escalada de violencia y la recreacion de un clima de confrontacion.
A las autoridades de nivel municipal, estatal y federal, que va de sindicos y mandos policiacos, el gabinete de gobierno del senor Velasco Coello, hasta al presidente actual de Mexico Enrique Pena Nieto los instamos y exigimos en las atribuciones de sus cargos respectivos a tomar toda medida necesaria a garantizar el respeto de la ley COCOPA aun vigente y la seguridad de todos y cada uno de los miembros de comunidades bases de apoyo zapatistas. Toda omision, mentira o inaccion sera considerada como una complicidad flagrante y sera senalada y denunciada, con todo rigor y firmeza. La sociedad civil internacional nunca ha dejado de observar de cerca la realidad de los pueblo zapatistas y en estos tiempos el interes es un mayor. Cuenten con nosotros para descreditar y desarticular la estrategia de contrainsurgencia elegida, y que bien lo sabemos incluye tambien la operacion de grupos paramilitares.
Estamos en alerta escuchando y observando, organizando la merecida respuesta. Los zapatistas no estan ni estaran nunca solos. Nosotros tampoco. Si tocan a uno nos tocan a todos
Comité Lille Tierra y Libertad! 20 febrero 2014
Déclaration depuis Lille, Nord de la France, sur les attaques suivies par les bases de soutien zapatistes dans l’ejido «10 Avril » et la communauté « 17, Novembre »
Réunis dans la ville de Lille, un groupe de personnes de nationalités et d’horizons politiques divers a décidé de créer un comité pour soutenir les communautés zapatistes en rébellion, dans le cadre de la dénonciation fait par le Conseil de Bon Gouvernement ” Cœur-Arc en Ciel de l’Espoir » après les attaques contre les membres de l’ejido ” 10 Avril “, des autres membres de la communauté « 17 Novembre » et par le personnel de l’hôpital San Carlos Altamirano à la fin de Janvier dernier.
Nous reconnaissons dans ces actions une poursuite de la campagne de harcèlement, de provocation et d’intimidation pratiquée depuis plusieurs années par les organisations OPPDIC et ORCAO. Nous exprimons notre préoccupation face à l’ampleur des événements et le nombre d’assaillants, qui, selon la dénonciation du conseil du bon gouvernement, arrivé a près de 300 personnes armées de machettes, de pierres et apparemment certains d’entre eux avec des fusils. Le personnel médical de l’hôpital San Carlos a été empêché de soigner les camarades blessés via la violence dans leurs personnes, et ils se sont vu dépourvus d’un véhicule pour le service d’ambulance et a tout ça s’ajoute un vol de documents l’identité d’une femme pendant son travail comme assistante médicale.
Nous tenons en compte également le vol et la dépossession qui font l’objet les camarades de l’Ejido « 10 Avril ». Il est entendu que les membres des deux organisations mentionnées dans la présente plainte, se sont présentés à abattre des arbres et de bois prise afin de le revendre, constituant ainsi un acte répréhensible par la loi.
Conscients que ces événements font partie d’une campagne d’agression et de provocation nous avons accordé de rester vigilants à l’évolution des faits, rejoindre les discutions dans les réseaux européens et la coordination avec les nombreuses organisations du monde entier qui soutiennent conjointement la pratique de l’autonomie zapatiste.
Après avoir fait des déclarations connues Chiapas gouverneur de l’Etat. M. Velasco Coello, qui exprime sa volonté de respecter l’autonomie zapatiste et respecter les accords de San Andres, nous lui demandons fermement d’être fidèle à sa parole et à arrêter la dissimulation de l’escalade la violence et la recréation d’un climat de confrontation.
Les autorités de niveaux municipales, étatiques et fédérales, allant de syndics et les commandants de la police , le cabinet de M. Velasco Coello , jusqu’à ce que l’actuel président du Mexique M. Enrique Pena Nieto nous leur exigeons dans les pouvoirs de leurs bureaux respectifs à prendre toutes les mesures nécessaires pour assurer le respect de la loi COCOPA toujours en vigueur et garantir la sécurité de tous les membres des communautés de soutien zapatistes . Toute omission, mensonge ou de l’inaction seront considérés comme une complicité flagrante et seront signalées et rapportées, avec rigueur et fermeté. La société civile internationale n’a jamais manqué d’examiner de près la réalité du village zapatiste et en ces temps l’intérêt est encore plus élevé. Comptez sur nous pour discréditer et démanteler la stratégie de contre-insurrection choisie, et nous le savons bien, qui comprend également le fonctionnement des groupes paramilitaires. Nous sommes en état d’alerte en écoutant et en regardant, nous préparons ainsi l’organisation d’une réponse méritée.
Les zapatistes ne sont jamais seuls. Nous non plus. Si l’un seul est touché, on est touchés tous!
Comité Lille Terre et Liberté ! 20 février 2014
The community recuperation of Xayakalan on the Michoacán Coast is about their lands, guards and autonomy
Source in English: Chiapas Support Committee Blog
All kinds of interests cross each other within their territory: the governments seek to implement highway projects that facilitate the shipment of merchandise and stimulate tourism at the beaches; the mining companies want to exploit the vein that originates in San Miguel de Aquila; the small property owners want to plant their lands or subdivide and sell them; and, the drug traffickers have and important point for circulation of their merchandise here.
Self-defense forces (autodefensas) enter Xayakalan, Michoacán
By: Adazahira Chávez
Organization of the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, in its struggle for land, was renewed in February of this year. Later, in June 2009, the comuneros activated their Policía Community Police and took back the place known as La Canaguancera (renamed Xayakalan). They confronted a wave of murders and disappearances —especially against members of the traditional guard of of the communal wealth (commission)— that established a climate of terror and obliged the displacement of entire families.
But they are returning now and, as they declared in 2009, assert that they will not abandon their lands. Recently, accompanied by self-defense groups from Tierra Caliente, the community guards re-entered their territory —many of them, like their commander Semeí Verdía, were exiled— and the displaced comuneros also returned to Xayakalan, which continues in a legal dispute with the small property owners of La Placita, who invaded it four decades ago. The urgent task, they point out, is to construct anew the assemblies and to work the lands that gave them sustenance and that they had to abandon.
The task does not look easy, and the Nahuas know it. They tell that all kinds of interests cross each other within their territory: the governments seek to implement highway projects that will facilitate the shipment of merchandise and stimulate beach tourism; the mining companies want to exploit the vein that is born from San Miguel Aquila; the small property owners want to plant their lands or subdivide and sell them; and the drug traffickers have an important circulation point here for their merchandise. In this state —according to the denunciations that the comuneros have made for years— many times these actors are the same subjects. And the comuneros of Ostula are the owners of this coveted land.
Rich land, dispossessed [stolen] land
The communal capital de Ostula and its 22 administrative districts encompass more than 28,000 hectares (approximately 69,000 acres) of Aquila Municipality, one of those of greatest marginalization in Michoacán. The Nahuas have populated the portion of their territory that extends to the Michoacán Coast little by little.
Municipality of Aquila, Michoacán, which lies along the Pacific Coast, is in red.
The lands corresponding to the district of Xayakalan, the comuneros report, are located inside of their land titles that in the 18th Century were the very first and also inside of the Presidential Resolution that recognized part of its territory in 1964. Despite that, they confront agrarian litigation over some 700 hectares that six small property owners of La Placita invaded “not only for the planting of papaya, mango and tamarind, but also to sell it to the highest bidder” in spite of precautionary measures in favor of the indigenous. The Commission for the Defense of the Communal Wealth of Ostula points out that some of those invaders are heads of organized crime in the region.
Aquila’s land has an abundance of minerals (silver, zinc, gold and copper), besides iron deposits, which the Ternium, Sicartsa and Metal Steel companies currently exploit, and it contributes one fourth of the national production. The vein that runs through San Miguel Aquila —a community from which members of the traditional guard and the comuneros also had to leave due to conflicts with the mine and with organized crime— arrives in the lands of Ostula, and the Argentine company Ternium has in sight its future exploitation. Ternium is the owner of half of Peña Colorada, the mine in Ayotitlán, Jalisco, which has also provoked persecutions against leaders of the Nahua comuneros like Gaudencio Mancilla.
Inside of this invaded territory pass not only the rich mineral veins, but there are also beaches with animal species in danger of extinction. There, they contemplate the expansion of the Coahuayana-Lázaro Cárdenas Highway, and even the construction of a port for transporting the materials that Ternium extracts from San Miguel Aquila.
Pristine beach in Aquila Municipality, Michoacán.
On June 13 and 14, 2009, the National Indigenous Congress published the Ostula Manifesto, which vindicated the right to self-defense. After several fruitless attempts at negotiation and upon feeling mocked by the government, the comuneros took back the lands of Xayakalan in 2009, established their community guard “to care for the territory that belongs to us” and around 250 people, belonging to 40 families, settled here.
Los comuneros decided not to participate in the 2011 official (national) elections, just like their Purépecha brothers of Cherán, Pómaro and Coíre, in rejection of the authorities’ lack of efficiency and the divisionism that, they denounced, the political parties promote.
The response to their challenge was deafening. In the last three years, 32 residents of Ostula were brutally murdered or disappeared. The executions in 2011 of the leaders Trinidad de la Cruz Crisóstomo, known as don Trino or el Trompas, in charge of the community guard, and of Pedro Leyva stand out. The Navy bases —that were established after 2009— did not help to stop the wave of violence. Judicial authorities did not resolve even one single crime. Bullets from the “goat horns” (AK- 47s) populated the crime scenes, and the threatened families fled.
Few residents stayed in Xayakalan, but those displaced occupied themselves with planning their return and the reconstitution of their autonomous organization, which was concretized this 2014. On February 8, “a group of comuneros of Santa María Ostula, in coordination with self-defense groups from the municipalities of Coalcomán, Chinicuila and from the capital of Aquila, took control of the tenancy of Ostula,” they reported in a public document.
Xayakalan
Coincidentally, since that day “groups of federal ministerial police and members from the public ministry, in a totally illegal way, have been threatening the comuneros that live in Xayakalan with evicting them.” For the indigenous it is “the continuation of the grave conditions of an undeclared war that Ostula has lived through precisely since it resolved to guard the lands of Xayakalan, on June 29, 2009.”
This February 10, a federal Army platoon attempted to disarm the community guard and the self-defense groups that were supporting them, but residents made the soldiers return the weapons. On February 13, more than 1200 comuneros in an assembly decided to formally reorganize the Community Police. Now, efforts are centered on strengthening community decision mechanisms, reconstructing the material base for their organization and survival —food and scarce resources— and on maintaining security within their territory. Despite the years of terror, they indicate to Ojarasca from Ostula, “the people respond to their ancestral organization.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by Ojarasca #203
La Jornada Supplement, March 2014
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/03/08/oja-costa.html
