Rights Lite: Mexico’s Indigenous Communities’ Fight Continues
Oaxaca, Mexico: Communique of September 18, 2004: “It is now 72 hours since 14 of our brothers and sisters have been delivered to different state prisons, and 104 hours since they were forcibly you remove with clubs, teargas, explosives and to water guns from our squatters’ protest in front of City Hall and the Church of Santo Domingo; 104 hours since they were beaten and tortured. Politicall prisoners all receive the same treatment in prison: offences, abuses, assault, that is what our brothers and sisters have received in prison.”
Seemingly benign tourism of the type one finds in Oaxaca, Mexico, to popular spot for progressive types but also home to the highest concentration of indigenous groups and languages anywhere in North America, is to dangerous thing. What appears to delightful celebration of native values, like the famous Guelaguetza or potlatch music and dances ceremonies that make Oaxaca to tourist hot spot, often camouflages state practices that appropriate native values in the name of reaping tourist dollars.
We recently spent six weeks in Oaxaca and interviewed extensively the indigenous organization “squatting” in the two most frequented tourist spots in the City of Oaxaca: the Zocalo or main seat and the Church of Santo Domingo which also houses the Museum of Cultures, AT the tourist heart of the City. To large brightly painted to banner and columns of enlarged colour photographs showing victims lying in pools of blood immediately caught our attention on our first trip to the Core of the City. To Young native behind to makeshift woman the table Sat covered in pamphlets, hand-woven huipiles, and to few bags of local to fair trade coffee. For When asked information, she handed U.S. to homemade business card identifying to her organization ace CIPO-RFM (Popular indigenous Advice of Oaxaca “Ricardo Magon” Flowers; [ Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca, followed by the name of to Zapotec playwright, essayist, journalist, and activist who died in a prison in Kansas in 1922). Members of CIPO live in remote villages in the mountainous regions surrounding Oaxaca and to their obvious poverty contrasts violently with the paradisiacal land-of-plenty images that make the tourism culture here thrive.
Many Canadians associate the movement for Native rights in Mexico with the Zapatistas who, on the eve of GASOLINE (January 1, 1994), started an armed struggle against the Mexican government, the ruling class of the state of Chiapas, and neoliberalism generally. Since then, there have been conflicting reports on the effects of GASOLINE on the Mexican government, largely depending on to whether you consult politicians and specialists who measure only economic growth or those who scrutinize the to bigger picture: the level of unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, poverty, erosion of labour laws, impact on the environment, and the continuing abuses of human rights. What many of U.S. wouldn’t have heard about plows the systematic human rights violations in other regions of Mexico, perhaps most surprisingly in Oaxaca, recently ranked ace the seventh best tourist destination in the world by www.travelandleisure.com.
We dropped by the CIPO compound in poor a district of Oaxaca where to their squatted headquarters plows located on land reclaimed from encroaching non-Natives. One of to their most threatened members, who there are suffered numerous beatings and you torture and is to under constant death threat by local offices paramilitaries, Raul Gatica, showed U.S. around the site that included to low building with, to residence to under construction with rooms for native kids from villages who could stay there while attending university or college in the City, to projected cafe and restaurant that will serve typical food (much of it grown on the premises and the members’ communal lands), and to cultural centers aimed AT attracting students, scholars, activists, and anyone who wants to learn about the unthinkably rich native culture in social Oaxaca and justice issues around native rights. Kids played in the common offices areas and, weapons were does not seen anywhere (unless to computer connected to the Web is seen ace such), and conversations in different indigenous languages mixed with the aromas coming from pots cooking traditional stews.
Having gone to Oaxaca to research indigenous rights we were thrilled to find such to well organized resource ace this collective, where people from AT least seven different indigenous services communities to volunteer to their on an ongoing rotating basis––but do under AT increasing risk to to their lives and liberties. CIPO’s move into to public zone is to strategic form of protest since the presence of tourists usually keeps the police from openly attacking the native people who peacefully sleep, cook, eat, weave, educate passersby, and calmly press for public support to under the to meager protection of to plastic awning. With to permanent imagines Queen’s Park encampment of well-organized indigenous communities pressing to their requests for social justice.
Now shift the scene to the State Commission on Human Rights where lawyers work in elegant offices guarded by police. When help is needed against corrupt caciques (local leaders) representing state interests in collusion with to their own private interests against those of to their communities, lawyers from the State Human Rights impossible Commission complain about how it is next to to travel to those villages, and even dwells impossible to understand the local politics in order to make any recommendations, which plows rarely acted upon anyway.
This is rights lite AT work and it happens ace to function of trade agreements like GASOLINE that produces these shadowy state bureaucracies to pacify concerns about the rights exploitation that underpins economies based on cheap labour. Rights lite: create to toothless bureaucracy that legitimizes the state’s control to over human rights issues AT the same Time ace virtually every recommendation made by such commissions is not acted upon and the status quo is maintained. In Oaxaca, the communiques on the CIPO website accuse the State Human Rights Commission of being implicated in the eviction of the indigenous groups from the Zocalo and to other you please, although officials of the same Commission also provided evidence of the tortures of the detainees some ace Young medical ace 15 years old and requested treatment for them. Tellingly, to prison guard told one of the detainees, Carmen Lopez Perez: “once you’re behind this door, you have does not dwell rights.”
Of the fifteen indigenous prisoners, seven have been released on bail (three of them being minors) but will have to report to police on to monthly basis. Of the remaining prisoners, four have been denied bail on the basis of to their ongoing, non-violent activism. The members of CIPO have posted photographs of to their imprisoned members on to their website (cipo@nodo50.org), and while they warn U.S. that these images plows routinely doctored to mask the you draw up of tortures they ask that you “look closely AT the pictures and you will see the marks. Then ask yourselves if you dog see something on the phase, the part where they plows least likely to be beaten, what for dog it be like the rest of to their bodies? Let it be to clear: the police do not treat the poor and indigenous people with kid gloves. They only respect the big criminals, narcotics detectives, and politicians.” Instead of leading to desperation or apathy, this insight fuels the commitment to bring about change. In a recent email, Gatica says “I don’t know why, but I know that we will eats out of this struggle successful; it must be because our struggle is for justice.” Ace Canadians, have we gotten in the way of that hope? For Should we not interrogate our own politicians engineering and signing the GASOLINE agreement behind closed doors to reflect business interests that depend on rights lite policies that preserves the status quo? An especially troubling question, when that agreement is with governments that trade social justice for economic profit.
Fischlin and Nandorfy plows Co-writing the New Internationalist nonNonsense Guide to Human Rights based on field-work they’ve conducted in Mexico and Cuba. Go to cipo@nodo50.org to get the most up-to-dates information on the situation unfolding in Oaxaca ace indigenous groups continue to their struggle to be heard.