* It’s even affecting his food, contrary to his customs

* Frayba denounces repeated obstacles by the government to his liberation

By: Hermann Bellinghausen
Periódico La Jornada

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, May 24, 2012

From the federal prison in Guasave, Sinaloa, Tzotzil Professor Alberto Patishtán Gómez sent a brief manuscript wherein he denounces attacks against his dignity by prison personnel, who have gone to the extremes of disdain and mistreatment that are too much even for an indigenous prisoner with 12 years in three Chiapas prisons, chained for months to a hospital bed and now punished in a high-security penitentiary 2,000 kilometres from his place of origin.

“Deprived of my freedom unjustly for more than a decade, I have always tried to preserve my indigenous essence, a thing that has not been so easy. Currently it now seems impossible that they are imposing on my customs (treatments) that not only denigrate my dignity as a human being, but begin to attempt against my health by means of food that in my person break the habits that my ethnicity has tried to maintain for centuries,” Patishtán exposes.

“The food regime to which the federal prison authority has submitted me against my will overflows into one more torment, to which I am submitted as a consequence of the injustice that prevails around my legal situation.”

“One more time,” he asks President of the Republic Felipe Calderón Hinojosa “to respect my rights,” and demands in the name of his prisoner compañeros in Chiapas “the immediate freedom of the Voice of El Amate (la Voz del Amate), those in Solidarity with the Voice of El Amate (Solidarios de la Voz del Amate) and Innocent Voices.”

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre (Frayba) denounced that the government has again impeded Patishtán’s freedom. It remembered that on February 29 in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the competent judge resolved the protective order (amparo) filed by the defence for returning him to Chiapas. “Nevertheless Felipe Calderón, by means of the Federal Secretary of Public Security, filed an appeal on April 3 to delay or annul his return.”

The teacher at a public primary school in El Bosque municipality, in 2000 “was involved in the homicide of seven police, besides ‘planning and carrying out’ the ambush with a member of the EZLN’s support bases” recapitulates Frayba. “Inexplicably” he was sentenced then, “despite the fact demonstrated in the trial that the one who accused him, the municipal president’s son, a minor of age, openly lied, for which reason the judge absolved the man co-accused,” but not Patishtán.

“During the more than 11 years of his unwarranted sentence, Alberto has been a model social struggler in favour of the cause of the most forgotten, generally poor and indigenous. His incessant struggle has allowed the liberation of hundreds of persons accused of non-existent crimes or crimes they did not commit, but all that work has not reached the point where they cease the incarceration of an innocent man, a social struggler, a political prisoner whose freedom Tatic Samuel demanded, and whose innocence Governor Juan Sabines Guerrero recognized,” the civil organism says.

In 2010 he was diagnosed with glaucoma (an irreversible disease that slowly clouds vision). “His health situation was aggravated by the lack of medical attention that exists inside the State Centres of Social Reinsertion and Re-adaptation” in Chiapas. “As punishment for the struggle for his freedom and for human rights defence, on October 20, 2011, while he was on a hunger strike with theSolidarios de La Voz del Amate, he was transferred to the Federal Re-adaptation Centre in Guasave,” at the request of the (Chiapas) Secretary of Government Noé Castañón León, as Frayba documented weeks ago.

Friday, May 25, 2012

En español:http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/05/25/politica/020n1pol

English translation by the Chiapas Support Committee for the:
International Zapatista Translation Service, a collaboration of the:
Chiapas Support Committee, California
Wellington Zapatista Support Group
UK Zapatista Solidarity Network