Goodbye Marcos, For Now

According to Naomi Klein, at the conclusion of last week's international colloquium in memory of Andrés Aubry, Subcomandante Marcos remarked that it would be his last public appearance for some time because of the grave new threat of a counterinsurgent attack against the Zapatista communities.

For those wondering what is going on with the Other Campaign, amongst other things, Marcos gave an illuminating interview at the end of November that was just recently published in the Colombian magazine Gatopardo. Since you can only read that interview in its entirety if you actually pick up the magazine itself, below is my translation of the on-line report from Mexico's El Proceso. With the Womyn's Encuentro beginning today, this report brings us up to speed and also serves as a good follow-up to last year's "Thoughts on Marcos and Leadership" post...

Calderón enlists counterinsurgent attack: Marcos

Protagonismo and attacks against AMLO [the center-left candidate in Mexico’s 2006 presidential elections] have isolated zapatismo, he admits in an interview given to the magazine Gatopardo

Mexico City, December 14. The public reappearance of Subcomandante Marcos in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, this past Thursday the 13th, coincided with the publication of an interview in which the Zapatista leader confesses that the movement “is already out of style”; confirms that the government is preparing a counterinsurgency strategy, and says that there is no hunger now in the Zapatista communities and that women play a more important role in the Councils of Good Government.

In addition, he recognizes that the struggle has been worth the trouble, and anticipates that in 2008 the EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation] plans to launch a new form of action that aspires to be, he says, “a new revolution to that of one hundred years ago, not through the armed option but through an other one that junks the political system and refounds the country.”

The interview appears in print in the most recent edition of the magazine Gatopardo. Interviewed by the reporter, Laura Castellano, at the beginning of November, in La Garrucha, Chiapas, Marcos recalls that he and the EZLN were the center of attention in 1994, with the uprising, but recognizes that “we are now out of style.”

It’s like we are in 1993, but the other way around. Then we prepared the uprising without the media and without people [outside support]. Now the government is the one that is preparing the offensive,” he warns.

According to Marcos, the government of Felipe Calderón is preparing a counterinsurgency strategy. In this strategy, he explains, the government has intentionally encouraged polarization locally in giving other indigenous groups land that has been appropriated by the EZLN. “In this way an artificial social conflict is created, cultivated as if in a laboratory, and thus then government forces enter to bring peace.”

The reporter asked him what would be there response in the case of a possible attack, and the Zapatista leader responded that for now they are only taking preventative measures. Nevertheless, he warned that they are not going to remain with their arms crossed.

In the interview, Marcos speaks later of the remarkable overcoming that is actually taking place in the Zapatistas communities, in relation to the absolute marginalization that they experienced before 1994. “It is not that the Zapatista communities are rich, but there is no longer hunger,” he says.

He points out, also, the noticeable drop in the indices of infant mortality and the active participation of women in the Councils of Good Government. “The question of gender begins to concern itself with where resources go,” he emphasizes.

On the decline of the Zapatista movement in the media, Marcos places the beginning of the descent when he made critiques of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, within the framework of the 2006 presidential campaign, which, he says, he took to break with the intellectuals who supported Obrador.

He says that the decision was made during the legislative failure of 2001: “I felt the responsibility and pain of having failed, of not having foreseen what was going to happen.”

Marcos confesses that then the possibility of taking up arms again was considered, but clarifies that after analyzing the situation at great length, they desisted.

He relates, nevertheless, that they decided it was better to break with the political class and intellectuals that supported this [political failure], knowing full well that that was going to isolate them.

In the final part of the interview, the reporter gets Marcos to talk about Marcos.

--Is it a lot of work being Marcos?

The Subcomandante, who accepts that he’s already lost his “little waist”, but even so will agree to pose in exchange for some dollars, responds, sharply: “Yes.”

He explains that the name weighs on him now, that it is a great weight because, he states, (the idea) still prevails that the errors of the EZLN are due to Marcos and the successes are due to the communities.

Marcos mentions that, sometimes, he also feels vulnerable, mainly, he clarifies, when he leaves to [work on] "the Other Campaign." I feel disinclined because it is not my territory, I don’t have the means, my compañeros, the resources…”.

Twenty-four years after having arrived in the mountains of Chiapas, to realize his dreams, Marcos maintains that the struggle has ultimately been worth the trouble. “If I had to do it again, I would do it without changing a thing.” Without finishing the idea he soon makes a clarification: “If I would think of changing something it would be this, that I had not been such a protagonist with respect to the media.”

*

Sunday December 30, 2007, 1:38 pm

Many thanks to activist Dorinda Moreno for passing along these words from tierra_y_vida@yahoogroups.com

from TierrayVida

Subcomandante Marcos fo the EZLN said at a recent gathering in Chiapas:

"I will recommend this book to you. It is this one. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. It is one of those books that is worth having in your hands. It is also a very dangerous book. Its danger resides in that it is possible to understand what it says.

As I write this I suppose Naomi Klein has already explained the central axis of what's exposed in her thought, so I won't repeat it. I only note that it deals with aspects of capitalist functioning that
are overlooked or ignored by more than a few theorists and analysts from the left in the world."......

"The signs of war in the horizon are clear.

The war, like fear, also has a smell.

And now we can begin to breathe its stench in our lands.

In the words of Naomi Klein, we need to prepare ourselves for the shock."

Women’s rights, sexual and reproductive health and….revolution?

La Garrucha, Chiapas
December 28, 2007

Mexico’s indigenous people suffer serious disadvantages related to sexual and reproductive health. Most Mexican women in urban areas now have access to modern family planning methods and reasonable hospital care in case of emergencies related to labor and birth. But rural women, and particularly rural indigenous women, lack access to these services to ensure their reproductive and sexual choice and rights. These gaps in services are on of the main reasons that Mexico may not achieve the Millennium Development Goal for reducing deaths associated with labor and birth (maternal mortality).

In indigenous communities, poverty, limited health services, long-distances to hospitals, and in some cases, the lack of value given to women’s health, contribute to these needless deaths. International experts agree that ensuring women’s rights and full participation are cornerstones for improving sexual and reproductive health and promoting human development. The Mexican government has affirmed its commitment to these goals through various international conventions, including the International Conference on Population and Development (1994) and the Millennium Development Goals (2000).

Independent of the Mexican government, Zapatista women and their communities are seeking to improve sexual and reproductive rights on the foundation of women’s rights and participation. Not very long ago, the situation for these rural indigenous women from Chiapas was grim. Adriana, an unmarried Zapastista woman says: “In the past we were only good to look after the family and the house and they sold us like animals.” On the coffee plantations, women suffered sexual harassment from the landowners, and if the women or their parents resisted, they were rounded up and punished and the women were raped. Women weren’t allowed to choose their own husbands. If they were lucky, their father chose their husband. If they were unlucky, a suitor asked the landowner for the woman’s hand. In this case, many of the women had to have sex with the boss until he tired of her and passed her on to the spouse.

Today, Adriana says: “Our parents have started to learn that we have the same rights as men.”
Commander Rosalinda of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) states that before the establishment of the autonomous communities: “Only men had rights, even our parents said that women weren’t worth anything. Our rights were crushed. If we participated in meetings, the men made fun of us. We weren’t allowed to go out in the street. We only worked in the house and taking care of the animals. Our grandmothers worked in the corn field (milpa) and then came home to work and wash the clothes, while the men had time to go out and have fun.” She goes on to say that: “Part of the collective work after the uprising was to help women see that they have rights, the same as the men.” These changes are having an impact in women’s lives, and promoting community respect for their sexual and reproductive rights.

Grandmother Elisa says that today: “Our daughters marry as they wish, they are not forced. The go where their destiny and their luck leads them. Now we know our rights as women, to go where we want and to work, not only the men.” Mireilla, a young married Zapatista says: “I married after ’94 [the armed uprising] and no one made me marry. I chose my husband. We also give freedom to our children because children also have rights, just like adults”.

Rosaura, a Zapatista community health promoter says that before the 1994 uprising women’s health wasn’t a priority for the government or for the community: “Sometimes the men didn’t worry about our health, they just waited to see if we would get better.” Medical attention in their communities was very limited and many women died during or after labor and birth, or because of sexually transmitted infections. Transporting women to hospitals in obstetric emergencies was and continues to be a problem because of lack of roads and limited radio communication. Traditional midwives lacked training and materials, such as gloves.

Today the Zapatistas run a health system autonomous from the Mexican government that includes community educators, trained midwives, community clinics and an autonomous hospital. Sexual and reproductive health is a priority supported through ongoing community based education on sexually transmitted infections, diagnosis for the human papiloma virus and cervical cancer, family planning, and preventative health care before, during and after pregnancy and birth. However, there are ongoing economic and human challenges: they lack sufficient specially trained personnel, medical equipment and essential medicines. And what about condom use in Zapatista communities? Rosaura says “Yes, they are recognized and some men and women use them, but it is the decision of each individual.”

Armed uprising may not be the path to ensuring women’s rights for all communities, but it is clear that since 1994 the Zapatistas have made considerable gains in transforming an extremely macho indigenous culture into one where women participate fully and their rights, including their sexual and reproductive rights, are promoted.

-cenutrio

Venezuela economy grew 8.4 pct in 2007-central bank

CARACAS, Dec 30

Venezuela's economy expanded 8.4 percent in 2007 despite a contraction in the oil sector, the backbone of the South American nation's economy, the central bank said on Sunday.

The bank said the oil sector had shrunk 5.3 percent in the year, but 9.7 percent growth in non-oil parts of the economy had compensated.

In its end-of-year statement, the bank said the public sector grew 15.7 percent in 2007, while the private sector, which represents 60 percent of Venezuela's gross domestic product, grew 8.2 percent.

The left-wing government of the oil-rich nation has used income from high oil prices in recent years to fund social spending and expand the state.

Consumer spending grew 18.7 percent in the year due to lower unemployment and increased household incomes, the banks said.

First day of the Women´s Gathering in La Garrucha

by cenutrix | 30.12.2007 08:08

Compañeras of the 5 Zapatista Caracoles, among them children, shared their testimonies of how they where living with the landlords before they organized themselves. They also spoke about the process of the struggle to gain more participation in all the areas; in education, health, community responsibilities, and high level military ranking. They also commemorated the important work the Comandanta Ramona as an example of struggle to be followed.

December 29th - Morning session

The Gathering began with the participation of the compañeras from the Zapatista base communities, authorities of the Good Government Committee, and comandantas and insurgentas from the Caracol, La Garrucha.

The dialogue began with the Zapatista women explaining how life was before and how it is now. The 5 minutes for questions were not enough and there was only enough time to answer a few. This dynamic carried on all morning.

Two compañeras continued on to explain their process in organizing.

After a break we came back to listen to the words of the promoters of health and education of the Caracol who described all the advances that have been made throughout the last years in each of their areas of work and about the difficulties they have found as women, along the way.

The auditorium was filled with women of all areas of the autonomous and rebellious Zapatista municipalities, women from other places as well, in addition to a large number of photographers and video makers. The only ones using the equipment were women as the men were not permitted to film or even be present in the auditorium. All of the men were standing outside and listening close to the windows and through the cracks between the wooden boards but keeping their distance. They were more then expected, and it is surprising given the small presence of men in other movements when it comes to listening to the voice of their compañeras.

Afternoon...

After lunch came the participation of the compañeras of the Good Government Committee, the Autonomous (advisory) Council, and two compañeras, receiving the most vibrant applause, who talked about how their lives are thanks to the struggle of their elders.

Next, a compañera spoke carrying the voice of the Zapatista mothers and concluded the participation of the representatives of the Caracol of La Garrucha. She spoke on the subject of woman and the Other Campaign and highlighted the situation of the persecuted, repressed, and incarcerated compañeras of struggle. The women made clear that they are not against men; “agreement has to be reached from both sides, the man and the woman, and the family, otherwise we cannot struggle. Unity is necessary for a better life for all”.

At one point they announced that the men who had come to work on media coverage could enter to document the participation of the women. They were not allowed to interview, but they were permitted to film and record, "if they respect to us", said the Zapatista compañeras.

After the participation of the compañeras of Caracol III, we listened to the women of the Zapatista base communities, promoters of health and education, different committee members, comandantas and insurgentas, and children of Caracol IV, Morelia.

As the compañeras of La Garrucha did, many women from the Zapatista base communities began to talk abut how they used to live before the uprising of 1994 and how they are living now.

Comandanta Sandra described their organizing process and what kind of difficulties they had to overcome. On the inequality between men and women she underlined: "we don´t blame the compañeros, the damn system has to be blamed, women without men cannot struggle and men without women can’t either". Sandra thanked "our warriors", the first women of the Zapatista struggle, the ones who have fallen, she thanked the legacy they have left behind.

One comandanta talked briefly on how the work of the compañeras is organized at regional and local levels.

Comandanta Míriam, when answering a question from the public regarding the meaning of the Revolutionary Women´s Law, stated that it encourages a new space for the participation for the compañeras.

Other posts from the Womens' gathering

30.12.2007 11:57

Women’s rights, sexual and reproductive health and….revolution?
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/388598.html

A Women´s Gathering called Comandanta Ramona
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/388584.html

Cuban Adjustment Act costs lives

CUBA condemned Thursday the policies of the United States that incite illegal emigration by residents of the island to that country, with resulting human fatalities, as occurred this past December 22.

According to a communication from the Ministry of the Interior, read out yesterday on the Cuban “Roundtable” TV program, two Cubans perished on Saturday, December 22 after the speedboat in which they were attempting to leave the country capsized one kilometer off the northern coast of Havana province.

Autopsies performed at the Legal Medicine Institute in the capital determined that Yosvani Vera Alvarez, aged 29 and Zuleika Rodríguez Pérez, 43, died from drowning.

The text also reported that another nine citizens, women and children among them, who boarded the boat that came from the United States for the purposes of human trafficking, managed to reach the shore alive.

The survivors said that as soon as they embarked, water began to leak into the boat which also had problems with one of its two engines.

This situation required their return to land within a few minutes. However, the speedboat, manned by two crewmen, changed direction abruptly, turned over and began to sink, stern first.

Cuban authorities are searching for the two crew members, who apparently managed to escape into Cuban territory after abandoning the shipwrecked immigrants.

At the same time, the communication concludes, investigations are continuing into this unfortunate accident whose root cause is the murderous U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act, which incites illegal emigration and the lucrative activities of the Cuban American mafia in South Florida.

Zapatista village - San Cristobal

From: http://troutalerttravels.blogspot.com

The dreaded night bus was actually ok, and I arrived high up in the mountains at San Cristobal de las Casas at 9am yesterday. It was freezing. I piled on the layers, including my thick woollen poncho, and set out discovering the town. By 11am I was feeling sick with heat and sweat and had to go back to the hotel to take my shoes and socks off and change my jeans for shorts. Holy mother it gets hot here during the day. It's a very traditional town with most locals wearing traditional dress. There are lots of other traveller/backpackers wandering around, a large portion seem to be Scandinavians, so I'm getting my Scando-fix with so many marvevllous fringes and knitwear about. The cafes are great and do loads of lovely fruit and yoghurt combos for breakfast, and there is a coffee museum which I visited yesterday which has a very good cafe selling its wares.

This is now in the Chiapas region of Mexico, which is (or aims to be) autonomous in many ways, especially with workers unions etc getting together to sell regional goods as collectives. I went to the Mayan Medicine museum which was very interesting, but highly scary. It had a video showing a woman giving birth in the Mayan style (on her knees kneeling on the floor, hanging her arms round the husband's neck who is sitting on a chair facing her) with the midwife behind yanking away. Then just in case you didn't get the message there was a papier mache model re-enactment in a mock up hut. It has only heightened my phobia of childbirth and I didn't think that was possible.

Today I went to visit a Zapatista stronghold, high up in the mountains. The Zapatistas are identified by the Bush administration as a terrorist group. They are indigenous communities, originally from the Chiapas region but their support and allies are now worldwide, who are fighting the Mexican government for recognition of their lifestyles and customs. The govt arrest Zapatistas as they protested and took over several towns in this region (including San Cristobal) in 1994 because the govt was ignoring them and threatening their way of life. It sounds like the govt is trying to ignore and/or exclude the indigenous communities by not providing them with schools, amenities and sending out of date food supplies to them. I also know that by taking several towns in 1994 a war was fought for over two weeks and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people died in the conflict. The Zapatistas used weapons and will do so again. Therefore I wanted to find out more about this whilst I was here and in a relatively peaceful period.

We were met by village leaders wearing balaclavas who took our passports and were taken to a small room for a basic lecture on the movement. From this I could gather that after the 1994 uprising against poverty and exclusion of the indigenous people, a treaty was drawn up where the govt agreed to certain conditions, most of which it has since failed to honour, The Zapatistas now live completely separately from the rest of Mexico, running their own schools (bilingual with native language Tzotzil and spanish), clinics and communities. The govt gives them no support so they have to make everything themselves. They are keeping their languages and traditions alive but it seems they are struggling. I felt completely safe up there today and understand their cause absolutely, but I don't know enough to comment on the morality of this situation. As far as I could tell, they still have weapons just in case. They will use them again if the govt doesn't budge. The likelihood of them taking San Cristobal again in the future is very real.

So all in all it's a typical terrorist quandry. I wouldn't call them terrorists but they are a movement that uses force and kills. I'm going to have to do a lot more reading on this before I can say, write or think any more on the subject.

On the way back I went to a strange church which is Catholic mixed up with Mayan beliefs - a product of the scheming Catholic missionaries who noticed the local population coincidentally used crosses and other Catholic images in their traditional worshipping. So they introduced Roman Catholicism as a form of the local beliefs. It is totally bonkers now and has principles from all sorts of influences. The people worship St Christopher mainly and Christ is on the sidelines as less important. In the church there was healing going on with medicine men and women cleansing people with eggs, or chickens, if their illness was more severe. The strangest thing is that everyone drinks Coke in the church because burping releases the bad spirits, and plastered all over the villages in the area are Coca-Cola ads/signs. I also noticed in the town that many people had metal teeth - a side effect from drinking so much Coke??? I shudder to think. Whatever, I'm sure Coca-Cola are very happy about their dominance in the area.

This post sounds like an anti-establishment rant but I'm just reporting what I've seen today. Despite all this San Cristobal is a lovely place - possibly my favourite so far. Am heading to the complete opposite tomorrow AM - down to Palenque, a huge Mayan ruin in the middle of the jungle. I have been told to expect bugs, mosquitos, hideous heat and humidity, and howler monkeys who steal things. I'll be there for 2 nights so will be seeing new year in wrestling my beer from monkeys and trying not to get eaten alive by insects. Bravo!

posted by Trout Alert

Conflict over Bolivia's new constitution

Pepe Escobar: Morales constitutional reforms meet opposition from rich Bolivian lowland states (1 of 2)

Thursday December 27th, 2007

Part two coming on Friday

Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Pepe Escobar writes The Roving Eye for Asia Times Online. He has reported from Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, US and China. He is the author of the recently published Red Zone Blues. Pepe is a regular analyst for The Real News.

Anarchy and Game Theory

Doug Newdick

1. Introduction.

In any discussion of anarchism, or the conditions for a stateless society, sooner or later a claim like this surfaces: " people are too selfish for that to work". These, I believe, are based upon an assumption (or theory) about human nature, that is taken to be evidently true, rather than argued for. Often I hear a version of "I'm sorry but I just have a more pessimistic view of people than you." This purpose of this essay is to show that even if we grant the assumptions of selfish rationality then cooperation without the state is still a possibility.

2. The anti-anarchist/Hobbesian argument.

2.1. The intuitive argument.

With these sorts of objections to anarchism ("people are to selfish to cooperate without laws" etc) I think people are tacitly appealing to an argument of the form:

1 People are selfish (rational egoists).

2. Selfish people won't cooperate if they aren't forced to.

3. Anarchism involves the absence of force.

4. Therefore people won't cooperate in an anarchy.

The opponent of anarchism can then say either; as anarchy also requires cooperation, it involves a contradiction; or, a society without cooperation would be awful, therefore an anarchy would be awful.
...

LINK

Venezuela Enters Fifth Consecutive Year of Economic Growth

Paraguaná
December 20, 2007

The Venezuelan economy enters its fifth consecutive year of sustained growth in 2008, according to predictions from the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL). Venezuela had the third fastest growing economy in the region for 2007, but the growing demand of the domestic market could create problems of undersupply in 2008, say some analysts.

Venezuela led the region in 2007 with a growth rate of 8.5 percent, surpassed only by Argentina (8.6 percent) and Panama (9.5 percent), a CEPAL report said last week. The region as a whole grew by 5.6 percent, finishing its fifth consecutive year of economic expansion, in spite of high levels of inflation and social spending that were criticized by some experts.

The economic expansion is the greatest in 40 years and should continue through 2008, although at a slightly slower rate, said the report. CEPAL attributes the growth in part to the growing demand from China and India, as well as the recovery of Brazil. As a result, since 2003, around 31 million Latin Americans have been able to pull themselves out of poverty.

The economic growth has allowed Venezuela to improve in many respects, including an improved purchasing power among its population of around 8 percent annually from 2004-2007, only surpassed by Uruguay at 10 percent annually.

The unemployment rate reached its lowest point in November at 6.3 percent, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), a decrease of 2.5 percent from 2006, and the formal sector of the economy showed an increase from 2006, reaching 55.6 percent of the work force. Venezuela also maintains one of the highest minimum wages in the region.

The situation has also allowed Venezuela to drastically increase its social spending, as well as reduce its external debt. Venezuela led the region in social spending with an expansion of 37 percent in 2006-2007, surpassed only by Argentina with 43 percent.

The Venezuelan government has approved a budget for 2008 of Bs. 137.5 billion (US$ 63.9 billion) with an emphasis on increased social spending. 46 percent of the 2008 budget is directed toward social programs and projects, reported Prensa Latina, with the government “missions” alone receiving Bs. 5.6 billion (US$ 2.58 billion), a 61.5 percent increase from the 2007 budget.

External debt was reduced by US$ 1 billion during 2007, according to the director of the National Office of Public Credit, Luis Davila. Total external debt is currently US$ 26 billion, said Davila, and will not be increased in 2008. Internal debt will also be maintained around the current level of US$ 6 billion in 2008, he said.

But Venezuela’s sustained growth has created an increased demand among the population that could create problems in 2008, according to some analysts. Ex-director of the Central Bank of Venezuela, Domingo Maza Zavala, warned that 2008 will be a “difficult, complicated, and unpredictable” year for Venezuela for various reasons, and recommended that the government change its policy on price controls.

Zavala warned about the increase of imported goods in recent years, and insisted that the government needs to take measures in 2008 to assure supply in the domestic market. In his opinion, the most urgent measure to be taken is increased flexibility in the government price controls.

“If effective measures aren’t taken to supply the market of the most-demanded goods, the situation will continue as it is now, with the consequence that the sectors with lowest income suffer the most,” he said.

The ex-director of the Central Bank insisted that the government will need to have dialog with the various productive sectors of the economy to achieve a successful policy of price controls and supply. He also warned of continued high inflation (18.6 percent in the first 11 months of 2007) for which he said the causes have not been attended to.

However, Venezuelan Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas announced on Wednesday that the national government was analyzing the possibility of increasing the flexibility of price controls on some goods. Although he didn’t give details, Cabezas explained that they would be developing an “extraordinary plan” for 2008 to supply the domestic market and control inflation.

Cabezas noted that last week’s decision to loosen the price controls on some types of milk is a part of the government’s plan to make price controls in general more flexible, but he assured that they would not totally remove controls.

Since 2003, the national government has maintained price controls on around 400 basic goods and services to guarantee their supply to all sectors of the population. National production has increased in recent years, but imports have also increased due to the growing purchasing power and demand of the Venezuelan population.

The Venezuelan economy is expected to continue to grow in 2008 at a rate of between 7 and 8 percent.

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol

by Greg Palast / December 26th, 2007

[Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the States — in a jail.”

He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” — and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States.”

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called — who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America — to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest — by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one — NO ONE — has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude — which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production — benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice, fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.

Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” — Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.

Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

Bolivia's president slams U.S. for smearing Argentine gov't

LIMA, Dec. 24

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Monday accused the United States of fabricating the so-called suitcase affair to undermine the prestige of Argentine government, reports reaching here said.

Speaking at a public event in Chapare, a province in the central Bolivian department of Cochabamba, Morales said he had frequently been warned of possible emergence of money and drugs when he was a union leader.

Such suspected gifts were like the Trojan horses that were intended to undermine his career or even send him to prison, he added.

Venezuelan-U.S. entrepreneur Guido Antonini Wilson was arrested in August with a suitcase allegedly containing 800,000 U.S. dollars at the Argentine customs.

The suitcase was taken on Dec. 12 to a court in Miami, Florida, where three Venezuelans and a Uruguayan were accused of trying to cover up a "scheme" to bring 800,000 dollars in cash to Argentina.

U.S. prosecutors have claimed that the seized fund was meant to finance the election campaign of Argentina's new President Cristina Fernandez.

The former first lady has accused Washington of using a "vile trick" to smear her government for its close ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has dismissed as "big lies" the allegations by U.S. prosecutors.

Mexico Arrests Man in Massacre

MEXICO CITY

Mexico has rearrested a man accused of ordering the killings of 45 Indians in the southern state of Chiapas, a massacre that shocked the country 10 years ago and which rights groups say remains unsolved.

The Chiapas government said in a statement on Sunday that it had arrested Antonio Santiz, a paramilitary suspect who had previously been imprisoned. The arrest was made Saturday, hours after the state appointed a special prosecutor for the long-running investigation of the killings.

Right-wing paramilitaries killed the Tzotzil Indians, including pregnant women and children, in the village of Acteal on Dec. 22, 1997. The Indians were sympathetic to the indigenous, armed Zapatista movement.

The state justice minister, Amador Rodríguez, said Mr. Santiz was considered to be “the intellectual author of the massacre at Acteal.”

Mr. Santiz was arrested for his suspected involvement in 2000, but a judge threw out the charges in 2001, ruling there was not enough evidence, The Associated Press reported.

Hundreds of people have been arrested in the killings since 1997 but only a few have been sentenced. Rights groups say those sentenced are innocent scapegoats and accuse successive governments of protecting the perpetrators.

10 Years Later, Chiapas Massacre Still Haunts Mexico

Estela Luna Vásquez at a recent Mass in Acteal for women whose husbands were accused of involvement in the 1997 massacre.

By MARC LACEY

Published: December 23, 2007
ACTEAL, Mexico

It was 10 years ago that gunmen crept down the hillside into the center of this impoverished Indian village in Chiapas State. By the time they fled hours later, the attackers had littered the ground with bullet casings and killed 45 innocent people, including 21 women and 15 children.

The New York Times

The Acteal massacre, on Dec. 22, 1997, killed 45 people.

Since the Acteal massacre, on Dec. 22, 1997, dozens of people have been arrested and convicted. But the case remains as foggy as the community, which is so high in the hills that clouds sometimes linger at ground level and the lush vegetation can disappear into the haze.

Then-President Ernesto Zedillo, reacting to international outrage over the killings, ordered an aggressive investigation. What prosecutors found was ugly: While local government officials and police officers had not wielded the weapons that day, they had allowed the slaughter to occur and tampered with the crime scene afterward.

The killers had been members of the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The victims were Roman Catholic advocates from a group called Las Abejas, or The Bees, who sympathized with the Zapatista rebels who were in open revolt in Chiapas.

All involved were poor Tzotzil Indians, many of them related.

A decade after the massacre, the Tzotzil live side by side but divided. In one group, the one that backs the PRI, many of the men have been sent to prison for the killings. The others, from the Abejas group, who live down the road, insist that even more killers are at large.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s courts struggle to handle what has grown into one of the country’s longest and most complex cases. A dozen judges have been involved in the trials and, now, the appeals of their convictions.

A year ago, the public interest law clinic at Mexico City’s Center for Investigation and Economic Studies began defending those convicted of taking part in the massacre. Lawyers say they have found that outrage over what happened to the innocents that day led to more abuses. They describe an effort to round up anyone, which sent many other innocent people to prison. “The Acteal case shows all the problems of Mexico’s criminal justice system,” said Javier Angulo, who teaches constitutional law at the center and supervises a team of students who are representing the Acteal defendants. “We solved the problem of the Acteal massacre by creating other problems and arresting people who did nothing at all.”

The case is an ideal one, Mr. Angulo argues, to show law students that every defendant ought to be treated fairly, even if there is great public dismay over a particular crime.

“This is the most complicated case in Mexico,” he said in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas State, as he prepared to appeal the convictions of some of the men. “It’s possible that in 10 more years we’ll still be talking about what really happened in Acteal.”

The details of the case have been exaggerated and mythologized in so many ways, he said. The number of killers, which he puts at nine, has grown to hundreds in some people’s estimation. Witnesses who in their first interviews could not name any of the attackers later gave authorities detailed lists of the men who fired the guns. The early version of the attack, that the victims of Acteal were gunned down while praying in a church, had been exaggerated to give an awful act an even more sinister resonance, he said.

Advocates for the people who died at Acteal express fury at those who dare to defend the accused. “They tell so many lies,” said Diego Pérez Jiménez, president of the Abejas group, who is pushing the government for compensation for the families of the deceased. “These guys in jail were killers, and there are more killers out there. That’s the truth.”

One thing is clear, that the long judicial process has done little to ease the tension in the hills.

Estela Luna Vásquez, 39, whose husband received a 36-year sentence for taking part in the Acteal massacre, insists that he was home with her on the afternoon of Dec. 22 when she heard all that gunfire down the road.

She struggles, she said, to contain her hatred of those who accused her husband, including a cousin of hers who backs the Zapatistas. “They want us all in jail,” she said, speaking through a Tzotzil interpreter.

As she spoke recently, her two teenage daughters were scurrying around the kitchen preparing corn tortillas over an open fire. “I’d never allow my daughters to marry one of them,” she said of the Tzotzil Indians who live down the road. “I’d tell them: ‘They put your father in jail. How could you love one of them?’”

At the maximum security prison in Cintalapa, the director, Fernando Estrada Reyna, denied a visitor access to any Acteal prisoners without written permission from the governor.

“This is a delicate case,” he said. “We can’t let you in. They’ll take my head off. They won’t just take my job. They’ll throw me in this jail as a prisoner if I let you in.”

He could not stop a prisoner, however, from calling out.

Agostín Gómez Pérez, sentenced to 36 years for taking part in the massacre in Acteal, insisted on a prison telephone that the judge who had heard his case had ignored his alibi and considered him guilty from the start. His case is one of those the defense lawyers are appealing.

“What happened in Acteal is very sad,” he said, adding that he had learned many of the details from four fellow convicts who had confessed to taking part. “But I wasn’t involved in it. I didn’t kill a soul. I’ve been here for 10 years paying for the sins of others.”

But the words of a survivor of the attack are just as haunting.

“Nothing calms the pain, from 10 years ago to today,” Catarina Méndez, who was shot seven times in the massacre, told El Universal newspaper recently. “Bad leaders organized that which we lived back then. For the good of everyone, we need help pushing justice and truth.”

Zapatista Code Red, by Naomi Klein

[from the January 7, 2008 issue]

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas

Nativity scenes are plentiful in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. But the one that greets visitors at the entrance to the TierrAdentro cultural center has a local twist: figurines on donkeys wear miniature ski masks and carry wooden guns.

It is high season for "Zapatourism," the industry of international travelers that has sprung up around the indigenous uprising here, and TierrAdentro is ground zero. Zapatista-made weavings, posters and jewelry are selling briskly. In the courtyard restaurant, where the mood at 10 pm is festive verging on fuzzy, college students drink Sol beer. A young man holds up a photograph of Subcomandante Marcos, as always in mask with pipe, and kisses it. His friends snap yet another picture of this most documented of movements.

I am taken through the revelers to a room in the back of the center, closed to the public. The somber mood here seems a world away. Ernesto Ledesma Arronte, a 40-year-old ponytailed researcher, is hunched over military maps and human rights incident reports. "Did you understand what Marcos said?" he asks me. "It was very strong. He hasn't said anything like that in many years."

Arronte is referring to a speech Marcos made the night before at a conference outside San Cristóbal. The speech was titled "Feeling Red: The Calendar and the Geography of War." Because it was Marcos, it was poetic and slightly elliptical. But to Arronte's ears, it was a code-red alert. "Those of us who have made war know how to recognize the paths by which it is prepared and brought near," Marcos said. "The signs of war on the horizon are clear. War, like fear, also has a smell. And now we are starting to breathe its fetid odor in our lands."

Marcos's assessment supports what Arronte and his fellow researchers at the Center of Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigations have been tracking with their maps and charts. On the fifty-six permanent military bases that the Mexican state runs on indigenous land in Chiapas, there has been a marked increase in activity. Weapons and equipment are being dramatically upgraded, new battalions are moving in, including special forces--all signs of escalation.

As the Zapatistas became a global symbol for a new model of resistance, it was possible to forget that the war in Chiapas never actually ended. For his part, Marcos--despite his clandestine identity--has been playing a defiantly open role in Mexican politics, most notably during the fiercely contested 2006 presidential elections. Rather than endorsing the center-left candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he spearheaded a parallel "Other Campaign," holding rallies that called attention to issues ignored by the major candidates.

In this period, Marcos's role as military leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seemed to fade into the background. He was Delegate Zero--the anti-candidate. Last night, Marcos had announced that the conference would be his last such appearance for some time. "Look, the EZLN is an army," he reminded his audience, and he is its "military chief."

That army faces a grave new threat--one that cuts to the heart of the Zapatistas' struggle. During the 1994 uprising, the EZLN claimed large stretches of land and collectivized them, its most tangible victory. In the San Andrés Accords, the right to territory was recognized, but the Mexican government has refused to fully ratify the accords. After failing to enshrine these rights, the Zapatistas decided to turn them into facts on the ground. They formed their own government structures--called good-government councils--and stepped up the building of autonomous schools and clinics. As the Zapatistas expand their role as the de facto government in large areas of Chiapas, the federal and state governments' determination to undermine them is intensifying.

"Now," says Arronte, "they have their method." The method is to use the deep desire for land among all peasants in Chiapas against the Zapatistas. Arronte's organization has documented that, in just one region, the government has spent approximately $16 million expropriating land and giving it to many families linked to the notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party. Often, the land is already occupied by Zapatista families. Most ominously, many of the new "owners" are linked to thuggish paramilitary groups, which are trying to force the Zapatistas from the newly titled land. Since September there has been a marked escalation of violence: shots fired into the air, brutal beatings, Zapatista families reporting being threatened with death, rape and dismemberment. Soon the soldiers in their barracks may well have the excuse they need to descend: restoring "peace" among feuding indigenous groups. For months the Zapatistas have been resisting violence and trying to expose these provocations. But by choosing not to line up behind Obrador in the 2006 election, the movement made powerful enemies. And now, says Marcos, their calls for help are being met with a deafening silence.

Exactly ten years ago, on December 22, 1997, the Acteal massacre took place. As part of the anti-Zapatista campaign, a paramilitary gang opened fire in a small church in the village of Acteal, killing forty-five indigenous people, sixteen of them children and adolescents. Some bodies were hacked with machetes. The state police heard the gunfire and did nothing. For weeks now, Mexico's newspapers have been filled with articles marking the tragic ten-year anniversary of the massacre.

In Chiapas, however, many people point out that conditions today feel eerily familiar: the paramilitaries, the rising tensions, the mysterious activities of the soldiers, the renewed isolation from the rest of the country. And they have a plea to those who supported them in the past: don't just look back. Look forward, and prevent another Acteal massacre before it happens.

Please visit www.naomiklein.org to see photos from Naomi's visit to Chiapas.

Ten Years After Acteal New Massacres Loom in Mexico

by John Ross

The men milled about on the shoulder of the mountain road, their faces hooded and masked. Christmas was just three days away but first they had some killing to do. When the signal was given, they picked up their weapons--at least five AK-47s were included in their arsenal--and began firing downhill into the trees. A detachment of 40 state police officers posted at a school 200 meters down the road seemed to take no notice.

After an hour, the shooters advanced downhill, firing their weapons as they pushed forward through the wounded trees. At the bottom of the hill, the dead were spread around a wood plank chapel where they had been fasting and praying for several days. Most were women, their dead children still clinging to them. The shooters continued down the ravine, taking their time, killing their victims slowly, slicing them open with machetes. Four of the women were pregnant. Marcela Capote, the wife of the catechist, was nearly at full term and they hacked open her womb and yanked out the baby inside and dashed its skull against the rocks. They told each other that they had come to kill "la Semilla"--the seed.

Although the press regularly reports that the number of those massacred at Acteal was 45, "Las Abejas" ("The Bees") have always said 46 of their comrades died December 22nd, 1997, including Marcela Capote's baby. Last year, on the ninth anniversary of the massacre, they upped the count to 49 to honor the three other pregnant women murdered by the paramilitaries--21 women, 15 children, nine men, and four unborn babies.

The Abejas are a devoutly Catholic association of Highland Maya--Tzotziles, "the people of the bat"--based in rural Chenalho county where they have acquired a well-deserved reputation as excellent coffee growers and honey gatherers. Their formation during a bitter land battle in the early 1990s was mid-wived by San Cristobal de las Casas Bishop Emeritus Samuel Ruiz Garcia and they have always shared Don Samuel's liberationist leanings.

Although the Abejas backed the demands of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EXLN) when they rose in armed rebellion in the highlands in 1994, they did not support the rebels' use of violence. Nonetheless, by the 1997 coffee harvest with paramilitary gunsills from surrounding communities--mostly affiliated with the then-ruling PRI party--stealing their crops and their farm animals and burning Abeja families out of their homes, they appealed to the pro-Zapatista village of Acteal for protection and were given a piece of land down below the highway, "Los Naranjos", where they would be massacred December 22nd, 1997 by their persecutors.

In the ten years since the killings shocked a shaken nation, the Abejas have become a moral touchstone reaching far beyond the Chiapas highlands. Liberationist Catholics make pilgrimages to Acteal where a chapel covering the graves of the martyrs has become a shrine. Each year on the anniversary of their sacrifice, a memorial Mass presided over by Bishop Ruiz or his former coadjutor Raul Vera or the current bishop of San Cristobal, Felipe Arizmendi, draws thousands to this anonymous bend in the ill-paved highway that connects up the county seats of Chenalho and Pantelho. Nobelist Jose Saramago mourned here, as did former U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson and the late U.S. author Susan Sontag. In their grief and dignity, the Abejas have come to symbolize for many the cruel suffering of Latin America's indigenous peoples.

Horrendous as it was, the Acteal massacre was not the most lethal in a history that is stained with such mass killings--the Conquistadores and the Revolution saw to that. Under the governance of President Ernesto Zedillo, four massacres occurred between June 1995 and June 1998 that took a total of 87 lives. Acteal was not even the bloodiest mass killing in recent Chiapas memory--that dubious honor goes to the massacre by the Mexican military of at least 60 Indian farmers at Golonchan in 1979 during the regime of PRI governor Juan Sabines, whose son, also named Juan, is the current governor of the state.

But because the Zapatistas have a national and international network and the horror of the killings at Christmastime attracted the glare of Big Media, Acteal became synonymous with human rights abuses in Mexico. Bill Clinton, former French premiere Lionel Jospin, and the late Pope John Paul condemned the murders, so agitating Zedillo that he accused the world leaders of intervening in Mexico's affairs and subsequently deported 400 non-Mexican human rights observers from Chiapas in a xenophobic rage.

Now as the tenth anniversary of the Acteal massacre approaches, the martyrdom of the Abejas is being called into question by an orchestrated chorus of revisionist voices bent on altering the narrative and absolving then-president Zedillo, the PRI, and the Mexican military of any culpability for the notorious mass killings, and, instead, shift the blame to the victims--the Abejas and their Zapatista allies.

Last spring, the national committee of right-wing president Felipe Calderon's PAN party called for the reopening of judicial proceedings against more than 80 persons convicted of participating in the slaughter. Most are evangelicals whose release is being demanded by their churches and the PAN is accused of an opportunistic ploy to attract this fast-growing constituency by Luis Hernandez Navarro, op ed editor at the left daily La Jornada and a former Zapatista advisor.

To compliment the PAN gesture, Hugo Eric Flores, a spokesperson for those convicted, will soon publish "The Other Injustice" to coincide with the anniversary of the killings--the book posits that the prisoners were railroaded by federal and state prosecutors to tamp down the visibility of the scandal and that rather than a massacre, the Abejas were caught in a deadly crossfire between Zapatistas and anti-Zapatista "self-defense" fighters, the "pojwanejetic" in Tzotzil.

Perhaps the lead voice in this revisionist choir is a high profile journalist and author, Hector Aguilar Camin (he has his own late night show on Televisa) whose three-part series "Return to Acteal" published in Nexos, the glossy highbrow monthly he co-edits, seeks to debunk the Zapatista "legend" that the "mal gobierno" (bad government) was responsible for the murders of the Abejas. Aguilar Camin was the house intellectual during the reigns of Carlos Salinas (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) and has had a continued presence under PANista Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and his successor Felipe Calderon. "Aguilar Camin always serves the princes," sneers Hernandez Navarro.

Aguilar Camin's lengthy chronicle not only redeems Zedillo, who now heads Yale's Institute for Globalization Studies, but also neglects overwhelming evidence of his government's involvement in the events of December 22nd, 1997, instead ascribing the cause of the massacre to long latent "inter-communal" and religious disputes that he suggests are inherent in Highland Maya culture and which were exacerbated by the Zapatista uprising.

Not unsurprisingly, Aguilar's version invokes the Zedillo government's much-discredited "White Book of Acteal" issued weeks after the massacre that pinned the onus on "disputes inherent in highland Maya culture" and traced the route to Acteal from a family conflict back in the 1930s. The White Book was compiled by Zedillo's attorney general to provide a more "anthropological" assessment of the murders.

Anthropologist Aida Hernandez Castillo, then director of the CIESAS research institute in San Cristobal, recalls being offered funds by Zedillo government investigators to study "the manner in which the cultural practices of Chenalho can help us to understand the rituals of war utilized in the Acteal massacre" (sic.) Sensing that the investigators were trying to whitewash the government's role in the killings, CIESAS refused to participate in the study.

Aguilar Camin's sources for his revisionist chronicle are instructive: the aforementioned White Book and bulletins from the Attorney General's office where the White Book was concocted. The writer also borrows liberally from Gustavo Hirales, an ex-Marxist guerrillero in the 1970s who was tortured and defected to the "mal gobierno" where he fingered former comrades and prepared scenarios for intelligence agencies. Hirales' "Road to Acteal", based on his dispatches from Chiapas for a government-run newspaper and published on the heels of the massacre, endorsed the White Book's "inter-communal" skew and accused the Zapatistas of inciting homicide in Chenalho.

Also cited by Aguilar: an unpublished manuscript by Hirales's ex-guerrilla crony Manuel Anzaldo, whose political faction had been given a franchise to exploit a sand and gravel bank that the EZLN claimed belonged to a nearby Zapatista village. Anzaldo's Internet page, "The Farmers Information Service" (SIC by its Spanish initials) spread anti-Zapatista venom throughout the highlands during the hostilities in Chenalho.

But the vertebrae of Aguilar Camin's narrative is Flores's "The Other Injustice" which argues the Abejas were killed in a gun battle between the EZLN and its enemies and that the 83 prisoners being held for the killings are as innocent as the driven snow.

In assembling "Return to Acteal", Hector Aguilar Camin disregards in-depth reports on the situation in the Chiapas highlands regularly issued between 1995 and 1997 by the San Cristobal-based Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center of which Bishop Ruiz remains the guiding spirit, maintaining that the information is "loaded" in favor of the Abejas and the EZLN.

The "FRAYBA" negotiated disputes between Zapatista autonomias and official municipalities during that period and meticulously documented the skein of killings that gripped Chenalho between May and December 1997 in which 35 Indians were gunned down (18 associated with the PRI, 17 with the EZLN and/or Las Abejas.) Despite the wholesale mayhem, no local, state, or federal government raised a hand to stop the bloodshed. "They just let Acteal happen," concludes Hermann Bellinghausen, a veteran correspondent who covered the killings day by day for the left tabloid La Jornada.

Responses to the Nexos pieces were sharp and swift. The Abejas accused Aguilar Camin of being "the voice of the killers." La Jornada assigned Bellinghausen to write a 21-part series exposing the gross distortions in "Return to Acteal." The Jornada reporter recalled that in the days following Acteal, Aguilar Camin had written a front-page letter to the leftist daily accusing it of "black and white journalism." "No one in his right mind can accuse Zedillo of engineering this crime," Aguilar avowed.

Despite the writer's exculpation of Zedillo, there is overwhelming evidence that his government committed crimes of omission and commission at every level before, during, and after the Acteal massacre and that the killings of the 49 Indians constitute a crime of state.

Acteal was, indeed, the bitter fruit of the Chiapas Strategy Plan, a counter-insurgency plan cooked up at the Seventh Military Region in the Chiapas state capital of Tuxtla to combat the uprising in the 37 municipalities where the EZLN had influence by arming and training "patriotic" paramilitary units. The Chiapas Strategy Plan was implemented by General Mario Renon Castillo, a graduate of the Center for Special Forces at Fort Bragg North Carolina in counter-insurgency warfare.

Least there be any question, the "pojwanejetics" who attacked the Abejas were themselves trained by an Mexican Army corporal, officially placed "on leave" who had been ordered to show the paramilitaries how to use their newly-acquired weapons. Mario Perez Ruiz told the court he thought he would be killed if he refused to carry out the orders of his superiors.

Aguilar Camin, on the other hand, denies military involvement in the attack on the Abejas and describes the "pojwanejetic" as a "self-defense" squad that developed "spontaneously" in reaction to the Zapatista uprising.

Evidence that the "mal gobierno" and its state and local affiliates were up to their necks in the Acteal massacre abounds. The PRI municipal president of Chenalho bought the weapons that would be used against the Abejas. The weapons were transported by police through military checkpoints and distributed to the killers--the police even donated their uniforms to the "pojwanejetic."

On the day of the lethal assault, a detachment of state police witnessed the killing and did nothing to stop it. A noontime phone call from the San Cristobal diocese to Governor Julio Ruiz Ferro's office advising his Secretary of Government (Ruiz Ferro was on vacation in California) of the on-going massacre at Acteal elicited a promise to investigate. But there was no investigation.

When the wounded began to arrive in San Cristobal on the night of the 22nd, Chiapas state security chief Jorge Enriquez Hernandez and the under-Secretary of Government Uriel Jarquin drove to Acteal where they ordered the bodies of the Abejas stacked and burnt before the press appeared the next morning but the police took too long and daylight forced them to load the corpses in dump trucks and drive them to the state capital for "autopsies."

Forced to resign as governor, Ruiz Ferro, who had full knowledge of the dangerous standoff in Chenalho and refused to intervene, was promoted by Zedillo to agricultural attaché at Mexico's Washington embassy and is now reportedly a functionary of the Calderon regime.

Putting Indians on Indians--there are more than a million indigenous peoples in Chiapas, a third of the population--has always been the fulcrum of PRI control of the state.

As noted, 83 people have been processed and convicted for the Acteal massacre. All of them are Indians. No state or federal official has ever been indicted for the killings. Two generals, who served as police commanders and were charged with dereliction of duty, fled the state and have never been brought to justice. Zedillo is at Yale. The Indians are in jail.

Are they the real killers? All 83 are charged with murder and using prohibited firearms which seems a stretch--no more than 40 "pojwanejetics" took part in the massacre (Aguilar Camin insists it was only nine.) Two key leaders of the paramilitaries have been freed. Antonio Santis Lopez who organized the death squad is alive and free in Chenalho. Antonio Vazquez Secum, who contracted the killers after his son was murdered, either by his own comrades because he refused to kick in to the paramilitaries' gun fund or by Zapatista sharpshooters because he was driving a pick-up filled with the Abejas' stolen coffee, was sentenced to 25 years in prison but was released when he fell ill and died shortly before the tenth anniversary of the massacre.

In 1999, United Nations rapateur Asma Jahngar, now under house arrest in her native Pakistan, visited Chiapas to take testimony from witnesses. The U.N. official interviewed some of the prisoners and concluded that many of the Indians had been rounded up and framed to get Zedillo off the international human rights hook. "At least that's they way they do it in my country" she observed to this reporter.

Ten years after Acteal, the paramilitary scourge is still a malignant feature of the Chiapas landscape. Groups like "Red Mask" (the name the pojwanejetics took in Chenalho) and the incongruously named "Peace & Justice", responsible for over 100 murders in the north of the state, have just changed their initials. The Popular Organization for the Defense of the Rights of Indian Farmers (OPDDIC) is the latest avatar of the Chiapas Strategy Plan, staging intermittent attacks on Zapatista autonomous communities in the lowlands.

Three times in November, the OPDDIC invaded the tiny rebel hamlet of Bolom Ajaw, firing long guns and slashing the villagers with their machetes in an effort to drive 70 families off land they have reclaimed from the hacienda where they once slaved. "If you don't leave here, we will cut your bodies to pieces and throw the pieces in the river," one paramilitary threatened. The violent attacks in Bolom Ajaw spark fears that they are prelude to another Acteal. Just as it did ten years ago, the mal gobierno does nothing.

Contact: johnross@igc.org

A Lesson from Two Towns, Standing Up to NAFTA

By LAURA CARLSEN

Every hour, Mexico imports $1.5 million dollars worth of agricultural and food products, almost all from the United States.

In that same hour, 30 people-men, women, and children-leave their homes in the Mexican countryside to take up the most dangerous journey of their lives-as migrants to the United States.

No matter what one's stance on these two fundamental phenomena of our age-economic integration and immigration-one thing is absolutely clear: they are related.

As the final phase of implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) approaches, the debate remains disappointingly stuck in ideologically defined terms. Proponents of the free trade model point, not surprisingly, to increased trade as proof of its success. Opponents cite negative impacts from the point of view of their respective sectors, issues, and interests.

In January 2008 NAFTA enters its last stage of implementation in which all remaining tariffs on corn, beans, and other sensitive agricultural products will be eliminated. With severely negative impacts predicted for Mexican farmers and an accumulation of social problems in all three countries, this phase obliges policymakers to finally take NAFTA to task for how it has affected the daily lives of North American citizens.

Applying the NAFTA model elsewhere in the world, U.S. negotiators have hammered through "free trade agreements" (FTAs) bent on prying open new markets for U.S. products and guaranteeing favorable conditions for investors. These are laudable objectives, but for too long they have ignored the fact that this narrow focus has high social costs in our country and in the partner countries.

There comes a time when we have to determine whether those social costs are worth the benefits and consider a change in course.

To do this, we need comprehensive studies that look at the macroeconomic data and statistics, but also at livelihoods, communities, and families.

Two Towns

The reality reflected in carefully selected numbers too often hides the devastation in human lives. Two towns-El Paso, Texas and Nochixtlan, Oaxaca-illustrate some of the real costs of NAFTA.

Shortly after NAFTA went into effect, companies located in El Paso began an exodus over the border. The textile industry was the hardest hit. The community organization Mujer Obrera reports that between 1994 and 2007 some 50,000 apparel workers lost their jobs. Two-thirds of them were women, mostly of Mexican descent. As companies closed shop, women workers lost their jobs and the county of El Paso, now tied for the third poorest county in the nation, never found a way to compensate.

As a result, poverty has increased by over 30% since 1999 and today nearly one of every three El Paso residents lives in poverty, 57% of them women. Federal money under NAFTA for retraining programs has been insufficient and misdirected, as former workers are either poorly trained or trained for jobs that do not exist in the community. Year after year, El Paso drops down in average income.

What has happened is no longer due primarily to job loss. Most of the poor are working poor, according to the 2005 census. They have lost income because employers are paying less and more people are employed in the informal sector. Under this post-NAFTA scenario, women and children bear the brunt-a full 45% of women-headed households live below the poverty level.

Nochixtlan, Oaxaca also suffered under NAFTA, but in a very different way. In the small Mixteco Indian community of southern Mexico, corn farming supported nearly all the inhabitants in one way or another.

After centuries of misuse, the land suffered from one of the worst erosion rates in the world and chemical farming had depleted the soil. Then, lower yields were combined with the impact of increased imports under NAFTA that drove the domestic price of corn down 59% between 1991 and 2006. Nochixtlan farmers began to abandon their farms, and today the Mixteca region of Oaxaca has one the country's highest rates of out-migration. Here, too, no government programs came to the rescue or even attempted to soften the blow.

But El Paso and Nochixtlan have something else in common besides tragedy-the tremendous will of the community to pick itself up and move on. In El Paso, the seamstresses have created a community development plan that includes food gardens, a restaurant, an import business, and a daycare service. All are small scale but they are serious attempts to create sustainable jobs that fulfill human needs.

In Nochixtlan, a farmers' organization has built trenches to stop erosion, started a reforestation program that has planted three million native variety trees to date, and instituted sustainable farming techniques. As they attempt to save their village, they are also contributing to the global battle against global warming and environmental decline.

The efforts of both are slowly reviving their communities. But they need help.

U.S. trade policy sent these communities into deep crises. A new trade policy can help pull them out, and avoid a similar fate for other communities.

The terms of NAFTA must be modified to permit government regulation of basic food production and supply, and provide policy instruments so poor Mexican farmers are not forced to compete with subsidized large companies for their own markets. The petition to withdraw corn and beans from the free trade agreement and support small farmers and food sovereignty is not a blow against free trade precepts but a common-sense demand for public policy that places lives and livelihoods first.

There must be mechanisms of flexibility when the terms of trade threaten livelihoods, food security, or health. This flexibility has been lacking in NAFTA and other FTAs. Negotiations have been inflexible, with developing countries finally giving in to terms they know will harm part of their population. The pound of flesh exacted from poor countries in exchange for access to the U.S. market in the end hurts both partner countries and the United States , since the terms of the agreements exacerbate inequality and close off opportunities, leading to increased immigration.

U.S. negotiators call this success but the long-term price in international relations will be high and the immediate price is the rejection of U.S. trade policy we see in many Latin American countries, accompanied by resentment of the United States for the terms of imposition.

There is a false dichotomy presented to us that divides protectionism-seen as an evil of the past-and free trade as the only path to the future. Free trade has even been presented as synonymous with freedom in the political realm and the Western Hemisphere portrayed as divided between the democratic open-market supporters and nations searching to mitigate the polarizing effects of trade and investment liberalization. Until we reject ideological posturing and analyze the real impact of FTAs we will never arrive at more just and viable trade policies for all our countries and a more prosperous and stable hemisphere.

To develop a sustainable and fair trade policy this debate must become less dogmatic and more pragmatic. It's time to take a close look at what really is happening under these agreements and be open to corrections or creative changes in course. Communities have already begun to do that and a new trade policy can find many pointers in these local experiences.

1) Trade policy should be accompanied by aid for sustainable development:

U.S. aid to Mexico should be used to encourage efforts like Nochixtlan and compensate for damage done by NAFTA by funding new economic initiatives. NAFTA's extension, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) has gone off in the complete opposite direction. Instead of directing aid and programs to regions negatively affected by the agreement, it has facilitated terms for transnational corporations-the only sector of society directly represented in its negotiations. Most recently, the SPP process has led to Plan Mexico and a tenfold leap in proposed U.S. aid to Mexico-but for enforcement, intelligence, and military equipment. This creates a grave danger of militarizing a politically polarized Mexico and increasing the possibility of conflict. Creating healthy employment in the United States and Mexico would have a far greater impact on reducing the illegal drug trade than surveillance planes.

2) We need comprehensive studies:

For too long we have ignored or sought to patch over the serious problems generated in the United States and Mexico by NAFTA. We have abundant information on trade flows from the USTR, but little on the real consequence on real human lives. It's past time to call for studies that assess the economic data but also report on changing social indices even when direct cause and effect with NAFTA is difficult to ascertain.

The results then should be heeded. One of the very few studies of NAFTA in Mexico by the General Accounting Office concluded years ago that there was a pressing need for rural compensation funds. Nothing was done. Since then many of the predicted negative impacts have occurred, and there has been no policy response whatsoever.

3) A moratorium should be called on all new FTAs, including the three remaining before the U.S. Congress: South Korea, Panama, and Colombia.

The moratorium should last until new studies of the immediate and long-term impact of FTAs have been thoroughly evaluated so as to determine whether this model works. The three FTAs before congress should be rejected not just for the particular circumstances of each case but because the FTA model is seriously flawed as an instrument of a constructive trade and foreign policy.

What we already know about NAFTA-style Free Trade Agreements is that along with increasing trade, they generate inequality. Adopting a trade policy that widens the gap between rich and poor here and abroad does nobody a service in the long term. Unless we change course, the social costs of our current trade policy will grow over the years and what we already see-unemployment and underemployment in our communities and abroad, environmental degradation, natural resource depletion, and growing gaps between those who benefit and those who are harmed-could develop into more serious problems of instability and widespread poverty.

A new policy would assure predictability and stable markets for U.S. producers, guarantees-not privileges-for U.S. investors, and basic rights for workers everywhere. It will imply a more active role of governments in balancing a competitive open-market system with protection of weaker sectors and the common good.

It will also mean denying some of the demands large corporations make in the name of competitiveness. But that's healthy. If there is one thing we've learned from the growth of inequality under NAFTA, it's that trickle down doesn't work unless you squeeze from the top. Companies must recognize responsibility for the communities whose labor and resources go to make the products they sell and the profits they reap.

Powerful interests will complain, but greater fairness for all-between employers and employees, the United States, and its partner nations-will build a more peaceful and stable world for the future.

And that will benefit all of us.

Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org) is director of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico where she has worked as a writer and political analyst for two decades.