[NYTr] Chiapas: Zapatista Encuentro on Contested Turf

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Milt Shapiro (mexnews)


World War 4 Report - Jul 26, 2007
http://www.ww4report.com/node/4270

Chiapas: Zapatista Encuentro meets on contested turf

Representatives of peasant organizations from across the globe have 
gathered in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for the "Encuentro 
with the Peoples of the World," hosted by the Zapatista National 
Liberation Army (EZLN). Participating groups include Brazil's 
Movement of the Landless, Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and the 
international NGO Via Campesina. Meetings are being held in the 
Zapatista "autonomous municipalities" of Oventic, Morelia and La 
Garrucha, where Comandanta Delia articulated the conditions that led 
the Zapatistas to take up arms in 1994: "Our grandparents lived in 
slavery, without salaries. We asked for land, but we were always 
denied by the evil government. Persecutions, imprisonments, houses 
burned. There has never been good justice." (La Jornada, July 25)

Meanwhile, conflicts over political control of lands and communities 
in Chiapas continue to simmer. Days before the Encuentro opened, an 
ambulance belonging to the Zapatista Autonomous Health System (SAAZ) 
was attacked with stones by a group of apparently drunken men who 
called the driver and crew "Zapatista bandits" when the vehicle broke 
down while transporting a gravely ill patient from the clinic at 
Oventic to the hospital at the regional city of San Cristobal de Las 
Casas. Some of the health workers were pinned down under the car 
during the attack. A statement from the SAAZ said the assailants were 
presumably members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). 
(La Jornada, July 15)

Following a long campaign by the EZLN's Sixth Commission, a civil 
support network, the Zapatistas met with a tentative victory July 12 
when the Agrarian Tribunal in the state capital Tuxtla Gutierrez 
issued a ruling dismissing claims to Zapatista-held lands at El 
Nantze by the PRI-linked Organization for the Defense of Indigenous 
and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC). La Jornada's Hermann Bellinghausen 
writes that the decision "tacitly recognizes the legitimacy of the 
autonomous communities and their lands." (La Jornada, July 13)

Bellinghausen also reported that since the arrest of OPDDIC leader 
Pedro Chulín Jiménez earlier this year, many of the organization's 
adherents have defected to the center-left Party of the Democratic 
Revolution (PRD). This may loan credence to Zapatista claims that the 
PRD is coming to mirror the PRI as a corrupt political machine, but 
also seems to signify a weakening of the most militant anti-Zapatista 
organization in Chiapas. (La Jornada, July 15)

A San Cristobal-based NGO, the Center for Political, Social and 
Economic Study and Analysis (CAPISE) issued a document in July 
entitled "Face of War," accusing the Mexican federal army of 
expanding its positions in the Chiapas rainforest over the past 
year-in a pattern of collaboration with local anti-Zapatista forces. 
The study charges that "military elements have held meetings and 
visits with settlements and families opposed to the Zapatistas" in 
the jungle, "guaranteeing the penetration" of the OPDDIC into the 
lands of rebel-loyal communities. (La Jornada, July 18)

On July 6, the Fray Bartoleme de Las Casas Human Rights Center 
announced that its investigators, working with residents of the 
now-abandoned jungle settlement of Viejo Velasco Suárez, had 
uncovered the remains of two of the four indigenous campesinos who 
were presumed killed in the armed attack on the community last 
November. (La Jornada , July 7) The Fray Bartoleme Center and other 
rights groups, as well as the Zapatistas, had named the OPDDIC as 
behind the attack.

Following allegations in the Mexican press, the EZLN also issued a 
statement earlier this month denying links to the EPR guerillas, who 
re-emerged with dramatic attacks on pipelines in central Mexico.