Mobilization at El Bosque for the liberation of Alberto Patishtán gathers one thousand indigenous people
** They also demand the release of Francisco Santiz López, Zapatista support base
** They ask: Don’t they realize that the protest is now worldwide? Actions grow in other places
Good Photo: Moysés Zúñiga Santiago
By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy
El Bosque, Chiapas, May 18, 2012
It all happens in Tzotzil, here where Alberto Patishtán Gómez is called Beto, or Compañero Teacher. “Beto, endures, may the people rise up” his countrymen shout past noon, upon starting a march around the municipal headquarters. At least a thousand indigenous join together, the majority from this municipality, but also from San Andrés, Simojovel and Huitiupán, and even from more distant places like Venustiano Carranza, demanding immediate freedom for their compañero, brother, cousin, teacher, neighbor, incarcerated 12 year ago for a crime that everyone knows he did not commit.
The mobilization also demands the liberation of their “Zapatista brother” Francisco Santiz López, from Tenejapa, a prisoner since six months ago in San Cristóbal de Las Casas “for no reason.”
The announcements from the people, a large number of women of all ages –many older women, and even young students–, have an emotional charge close to affection. The routine chants: “Alberto, brother, the people shake your hand, Alberto, friend, the people are with you,” acquire a literal resonance, like what comes from inside the venerable elders in trousers (made) from a blanket, the teachers, a vast family of Patishtáns and Gómez and Ruiz that walk through the town under a grey but severe sun. The people begin to appear at doors and terraces (they abound here, because the landscape is very high) and look at that river of people passing with sympathy or curiosity and pretty umbrellas of many colors shouting the word “freedom.”
The perhaps 300 persons that started the march in the municipal auditorium, when they returned to the enclosure had been converted into a thousand. The march had a car in front with sound and a big banner with Patishtán’s face, and followed by a group of family and friends of the other political prisoners in Chiapas, adherents of the Other Campaign. They carry signs with enlarged portraits, set in corrugated cardboard frames and with a stick to raise it up, of Rosario Díaz Méndez, Pedro López Jiménez, Juan Collazo Jiménez, Alejandro Díaz Santiz, Rosa López Díaz and Enrique Gómez Hernández.
After the crowd fills the auditorium in the town’s center, the people applaud themselves, happy with being so many. Elderly relatives of the professor, now incarcerated in Guasave, Sinaloa, and deprived of his freedom for 12 years, preside over the assembly/meeting. From there (Sinaloa), he wrote for the occasion: “The Mexican governments have wanted and still want to shut me up by separating me from my lawyers, friends and family, with the unjust transfer, more in response to this I want to say that while injustice exists not even death can shut me up, because dying is living near the others. Good, compañeros, have much spirit that you are not alone, continue forward, the people need you, I will pray for you here.”
Teachers, mothers, old ejido authorities speak, testifying for their compañero. Doña María Gómez Gómez proclaims his innocence and breaks into tears. The congregation listens to a recording in Tzotzil of Alberto greeting his people. The teacher Martín Ramírez, spokesperson for the El Bosque People’s Movement (Movimiento del Pueblo de El Bosque) for the teacher’s freedom, would next remember that from the first moment of his detention, in July 2000, the people protested, mobilized, and took over the municipal palace. Governor Roberto Albores Guillén promised to free him, and instead of that he was sentenced.
It’s clear that the people feel offended and betrayed, “they made false accusations when he was seeing the people’s needs.” Ramírez holds up a document and points: “This was the compañero’s crime, the cause of his incarceration.” And he reads a letter dated May 26, 2000, three weeks before the police massacre on June 12 for which the professor is condemned to serve 60 years in prison. Directed to the then governor, dozens of ejido and community authorities enumerate resoundingly the crimes and bad management of the municipal government and ask for its removal. “They made a list of those names to detain everyone, but in the end it only touched the compañero. They threatened us with using it against the rest if we continued protesting.”
They have not stopped demanding justice, and that ya demonstrates a lot of endurance; no one in the government ever pays attention. Now they appeal to Governor Juan Sabines Guerrero, to the President of the Republic, to the judges: “When are you going to listen? Don’t you realize that the protest is now on a worldwide level?” They are willing to march to Mexico City within the coming weeks to take their demand for Pathishtán’s “health, move and freedom” to the federal government.
Within the worldwide week for his freedom and that of Santiz López, this act is not the only one. Actions and mobilizations have been or will be carried out this weekend in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, New Zealand and Holland. Collectives from those nations have been added to those of Great Britain, the United States, France, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Argentina, the Sin Tierra (Landless) Movement (MST) of Brazil, and in Mexico City and Oaxaca.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, May 19, 2012
English translation by the Chiapas Support Committee for the:
International Zapatista Translation Service, a collaboration of the:
Chiapas Support Committee, Oakland, California
Wellington Zapatista Support Group
UK Zapatista Solidarity Network
