Mexico Week In Review: 02.19-02.25

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 02.19-02.25
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Published since 1994, 'Mexico Week In Review' is a service of the
Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS).  CIS is a Washington, D.C.
based activist group committed to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous
peoples in the Americas.  CIS is actively supporting the struggles
of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico while simultaneously combating
related structures of oppression within our own communities.

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"Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros Nada"
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ZAPATISTAS PROTEST NARCO-MILITARIZATION; ESTABLISH PEACE CAMP IN BAJA
CALIFORNIA

In a new communiqué, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)
denounced Mexican President Felipe Calderon's escalated campaign
against narco-trafficking as a "farce" and a "mere pretext to augment
the already disproportionate militarization of rural Chiapas." The
communiqué, signed by Subcomandante Marcos, draws an analogy between
the new crackdown and last year's contested elections, saying, "the
supposed campaigns against narcotrafficking carried out by the
government are a farce. Just like that which brought Mr. Calderon
Hinojosa to power."

Marcos charges that when the federal army discovers a marijuana
plantation, they only destroy the mature plants, leaving the
seedlings, "with the aim of having a pretext to return and try to
intimidate the Zapatista villages." He charges that the drugs are
grown with the connivance of the "official" municipal governments in
the divided state, rather than the rebel Zapatista "autonomous
municipalities." He also charges that the "official" municipalities
provide cover for organized car theft rings and other criminal
networks.

"What's more, the authorities don't even know the geography of the
state," Marcos writes, "as they map the destruction of plants as if
they were in Zapatista territory, when everyone knows that these are
lands governed by PRI and PRD authorities and inhabited by their
followers." Marcos reiterates that the EZLN have banned the
cultivation or use of all drugs and alcohol in their communities.

In another communiqués, Marcos announced the Zapatistas will
establish a peace camp in a community of Cucapa (Cocapah) near the
U.S. border in Baja California, Mexico. The Cocopah and Quilihua
peoples are struggling to survive because of the loss of fishing
rights. A second peace camp will be established near San Cristobal in
March.

Sources: www.ww4report.com: 02/18; www.infoshop.org: 02/24
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INDIGENOUS TONGUES AT RISK OF EXTINCTION

Dozens of authors who write in Mexico's indigenous languages say
those idioms will disappear if the government doesn't do more to
implement a 2003 law aimed at protecting the tongues spoken by
roughly 10 percent of the country's more than 107 million
inhabitants. Eliac, a group comprising some 50 writers, said that
only 63 of the 140 languages known to have been spoken in Mexico
prior to the Spanish conquest remain in existence. And of those 63
languages, "90 percent are in danger of extinction and some already
are spoken only by a small number of families," said Eliac's Juan
Gregorio Regino, who writes in the Mazatec tongue. "The law was
passed on March 13, 2003, and it says the study of indigenous
languages must be promoted from pre-school on, but the government
hasn't fulfilled its commitment," Regino said.

The gradual disappearance of the indigenous languages and dialects is
"a natural change, but if there's no coherent policy and society
doesn't assume responsibility, the outlook would be disastrous,"
Francisco de la Cruz, Eliac's president and a writer in the Zapotec
language, told reporters. The group of writers urged the government
"not to favor Spanish, as has occurred for the past five centuries,"
but rather to design a multilingual policy "that transcends
education." "Our languages should coexist with Spanish or English in
the social, cultural and educational spaces so that all Mexican
children - including mestizos (those of mixed Spanish and indigenous
ancestry) - can adopt their regional tongue," the writer said.

Eliac has asked the congressional committee on indigenous affairs for
a budget of 4 million pesos (US$363,700), said De la Cruz, who added
"the development of our projects for this year greatly depends" on
that funding. "The problem with this committee is that it hasn't
entered into a dialogue with the people, with the main figures, and
has (just) continued with its tutoring (at the institutional level),"
Nahuatl writer Natalio Hernandez said at the news conference. He
leveled the same criticism against the National Institute of
Indigenous Languages, or Inali, which was created by the 2003 law but
"has not fully gotten going because it has a very academic vision."

Inali director Fernando Navas, however, told EFE that the work the
institution has carried out since its founding has led to the
development and promotion of these languages. "It's important to note
that this year we've implemented a program for training, certifying
and accrediting bilingual people as interpreters in the health
system, in judicial trials and as instructors," Navas said. He
offered a more optimistic outlook for indigenous languages here than
that described by Eliac, adding that "although approximately 20 of
them are at great risk of disappearing, some are quite vigorous, such
as Nahuatl and Maya," the language in which Mel Gibson's latest film,
"Apocalypto," was exclusively filmed. For example, he noted that in
the area where the eastern states of Veracruz, Hidalgo and San Luis
Potosi' converge, there are municipalities where 98 percent of the
people proudly speak Nahuatl.

Regarding the effect urban migration has had on indigenous languages,
Navas said people tend to leave behind their indigenous tongues when
they move to the big cities. "There are communities, like the Mixtec,
who are notable for preserving their language wherever they go. But
that's the exception; normally they adopt the language of the place
and lose their own," he said.

Source: El Universal: 02/22
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CHIAPAS: PROSECUTOR APOLOGIZES TO FAMILY OF MAN KILLED BY POLICE

The attorney general of southern Chiapas state, Mariano Herran,
formally apologized on behalf of the state to the relatives of a man
allegedly killed by police in 1995. Former state attorney general
Jorge Hernandez Aguilar allegedly ordered police to capture and kill
farmer leader Reyes Penagos, whom authorities at the time apparently
suspected of supporting leftist rebels. Neither Hernandez Aguilar,
currently a newspaper columnist, nor the police were ever tried in
the case.

After Penagos' relatives filed a complaint with the Inter American
Human Rights Commission - a branch of the Organization of American
States - Mexican authorities agreed to offer the apology as part of a
settlement in the case. But human rights groups were angered when,
last week, the Chiapas state government sent a lesser ranking
official to offer the apology. Herran appeared in person in the state
capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez, to apologize in the name of the state.

Penagos, a leader of the Francisco Villa People's Farm Union, was
captured Dec. 16, 1995, held in a dark cell with two other people;
one of his fellow detainees says he saw Chiapas police kill Penagos.
The Inter American Human Rights Commission carried out its own
investigation and concluded that the former prosecutor bore
responsibility for the killing. Herran acknowledged that human rights
abuses were committed against Penagos and others in Chiapas during
that era, shortly after the 1994 armed uprising by leftist Zapatista
rebels to demand Indian rights. He pledged to reopen investigations
into the killing and require all those involved to testify. Chiapas
Gov. Juan Sabines, who also attended the event, called the killing
"part of the sad events in the dark history of Chiapas," and pledged
"the commitment of the government to punish all those responsible."
Penagos' widow, Everilda Robledo, asked Herran to arrest Hernandez
Aguilar and other former officials allegedly involved in the case.

Source: Associated Press: 02/20
====

THE PLOT AGAINST MEXICAN CORN - BIG BIOTECH IS FORCING FARMERS TO BUY GMO SEEDS

By JOHN ROSS

The "diableros" (hand truck hostlers) from Lagunilla market clustered
around La Lupita's Ricos Tacos in the rough and tumble barrio of
Tepito were not smiling. "Yesterday these cost me six pesos. Today,
it's eight. Tomorrow, who knows, ten?" complained Rodrigo Aldama, 28,
pointing at the three greasy tacos on his paper plate, "Vitamin T is
rich man's food now." Vitamin T, a staple of urban diet here,
includes tacos, tostadas, tamales, tortillas, and most any kind of
street food concocted from corn. The steep jump of tortilla prices
here this January to as high as 18 pesos a kilo (they were six in
November) have unleashed a storm of protest and suspicion. "Someone's
getting rich on my 'ricos tacos' but it isn't me" lamented Lupita
Perez. Many point fingers at the corn distribution system, which is
run by transnationals.

Rodrigo had another theory: "the tortilla is Mexico but now they want
us to eat white bread like the gringos." Others see even more
sinister motives behind the sudden spike in tortilla prices which the
government of freshman president Felipe Calderon blames on short
supply and high prices for white and yellow corn - the opening of the
Mexican milpa or corn patch to genetically modified corn.

World corn prices are currently at an all-time high due to burgeoning
interest in ethanol production as a petroleum substitute. In Mexico
the price of corn has been pushed upwards by the cost of diesel and
petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides despite the fact that Mexico
is a major oil producer. Crop failures due to drought, flooding, and
even ice storms have contributed to the price surge. But whatever the
immediate causes, the dismantlement of government agricultural
programs and the brutal impacts of the North American Free Trade
Agreement have deepened the crisis in Mexican corn production.
Competing with highly subsidized U.S. farmers is driving their
Mexican counterparts into bankruptcy. Whereas south of the border,
guaranteed prices for farmers' crops is a thing of the past,
corporate corn growers north of the Rio Bravo can receive up to
$21,000 an acre in subsidies from their government, enabling them to
dump their corn over the border at 80% of cost. The impact of this
inundation has been to force 6,000,000 farmers and their families
here to abandon their plots and leap into the migration stream,
according to a 2004 Carnegie Endowment study.

This assault on poor farmers down at the bottom of the food chain
will be exacerbated at the end of 2007 when all tariffs on U.S. corn
are abolished. Meanwhile President Calderon seeks to tamp down
tortilla prices by importing up to 2,000,000 duty-free tons to
augment what Mexican farmers can or cannot produce. Such a solution
is guaranteed to drive more farmers off the land. Even worse is that
much of the new influx of NAFTA corn will be transgenic. A great deal
of the 36,000,000 tons of corn Mexico has imported from the U.S. in
the past six years is genetically modified - 40% to 60% estimates the
environmental group Greenpeace, reasoning that U.S. producers, barred
from dealing GMO corn in Europe and Japan are using Mexico as a
dumping ground for the grain. GMO corn began pouring into Mexico in
1998 and by 2001 was being detected in the remote sierras of Oaxaca
and Puebla, a region in which maize was first domesticated seven
millenniums ago - both BT and Starlink strains (Monsanto and Novartis
brands) were found in Oaxaca's Sierra de Juarez in 2001 and 2002. 11
out of 22 corn-growing regions in the two states registered readings
of contamination as high as 60% in a 2002 government study that was
suppressed by the Secretary of Agriculture.

Although Mexico imports millions of tons of transgenic corn, it
remains a crime here to plant genetically modified seed. In 1998, the
National Biosecurity Commission, an interdisciplinary body that
involves the health and agricultural secretariats, declared a
moratorium on planting genetically modified corn until its impacts
could be determined, and the ban remains in place although under
heavy attack from big biotech and agribiz and transnational grain
purveyors like the Cargill Corporation which now controls much of
Mexican corn distribution. To keep the industry at bay, the
Biosecurity commission now grants permits for "experimental" stations
where the grain can be grown under government supervision - the
Monsanto corporation is now testing its "YieldGuard" brand corn on
hundreds of hectares in Sinaloa state, the most prolific
corn-producing state in Mexico. A spillover of YieldGuard in Sinaloa
could contaminate a big chunk of the existing corn supply.

Despite the prohibitions on planting, there is plenty of transgenic
corn tassling up in the Mexican milpas these days. Some of it is
accidental. Massive imports of NAFTA corn distributed in rural
regions through state-owned Diconsa warehouses threaten vast swatches
of the Mexican "campo." Diconsa trucks are old and the roads rough
and the GMO corn blows off into the wind contaminating cornfields for
miles around. Although more and more licenses are issued every year
for experimental planting, producers groups are now threatening to
plant GMO corn without government permission - "If the moratorium is
not relaxed, we will start planting the transgenic corn in the spring
cycle" warns Perfecto Solis, director of the U.S.-Mexican
agribusiness giant Corn Products Systems. Despite the prohibitions,
big corn growers have been sewing transgenic maize without government
permission for years. Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, "El Rey de la
Tortilla", whose Maseca-Gruma, now a third owned by the Archer
Daniels Midlands conglomerate, rules the corn flour and tortilla
market (between 60 and 80%), once boasted that he had thousands of
hectares under transgenic corn. Maseca-Gruma is indeed a major player
in the "transgenization" of the tortilla industry. During the
administration of the now-reviled Carlos Salinas (1988-94), Gonzalez
Barrera began marketing an instant corn flour mix milled from both
genetically modified and natural corn. Taco shells milled and
confected by Gruma and marketed by Kraft were found to contain
Starlink corn, then not yet authorized for human consumption,
resulting in the largest call-back of any transgenically contaminated
product in U.S. history.

The Maseca mix has largely supplanted the traditional Indian way of
preparing corn for tortillas - the "nixtamal" in which the "granos"
or kernels are put to soak overnight in a brew whose main ingredient
is quicklime. As payback for market domination, the King of the
Tortillas flew Salinas into self-exile in his private jet in 1995
after the ex-president's brother was arrested for murder. Barrera and
his ADM partners and their transnational associates at
Cargill-Consolidated Mexico and Mimsa-Corn Products now control the
Mexican maize market. It is that monopoly, which has caused the
current panic, considers Luis Hernandez Navarro, op-ed editor at La
Jornada, the national left daily, and a writer intimately familiar
with agricultural issues. When ex-president Ernesto Zedillo
(1994-2000) closed down CONASUPO, the state grain distribution system
in 1997, the transnationals moved in and have taken control, says
Hernandez. "When Mexican corn is in danger so is Mexico" he cautions,
echoing the old refrain "no hay pais sin maiz" - there is no country
without corn. Hernandez and other veteran observers of the Mexican
"campo" strongly suspect that the current corn crisis is being
manipulated to end the moratorium on planting transgenic corn in
Mexico. "The transnationals want to end the moratorium and are using
this made-up crisis to pressure the SAGARPA (Agricultural
Secretariat) to do away with it" figures investigator Antonio
Serratos at the prestigious College of Mexico think tank. "It is part
of their strategy for taking control of the entire agricultural
sector."

As if to confirm Serratos' hunch, Big Agro is already petitioning the
Biosecurity Commission to permit widespread planting in 2007.
"Bio-tech is the only solution to growing more corn and keeping the
tortilla affordable" advises Jaime Yesaki, director of the National
Agriculture and Livestock Council or C.N.A, the principal
agri-business federation in the country. The C.N.A. was joined in its
petition to the Secretary of Agriculture to vacate the ban on growing
GMO corn by the National Association of Supermarkets and Retail
Stores which is controlled by the U.S. transnational Wal-Mart -
Wal-Mart is now Mexico's number one retailer of tortillas and other
foodstuffs and, with 700 mega-stores, the nation's largest employer.

The subtext of the corn conflict is control of the seed market. "We
have been patiently waiting to end the moratorium for ten years now"
complained Eduardo Perez Pico, director of Monsanto-Mexico, the St.
Louis-based conglomerate that dominates world seed markets.
"Meanwhile Mexico is falling behind the rest of the world in applying
new seed technologies that can better feed its people" the magnate
recently told La Jornada. The Mexican geography produces hundreds of
varieties of corn that have adapted to the country's myriad
bioregions over millenniums. The introduction of transgenic seed will
work to homogenize these strains, reasons Dr. Ignacio Chapela, the
University of California-Berkeley biologist who was the first to
locate GMO contamination here while doing fieldwork in the tiny
Oaxaca sierra town of Calpulapan in 2001. "Millions of years of
biological history will be lost if transgenic seeds are allowed to be
planted in the Mexican milpa" Chapela affirms. Big Biotech with
Monsanto leading the pack wants to replace those millions of years
with seeds like the Terminator (named for the action hero governor of
California) which goes sterile after one growing cycle and obligates
farmers (they sign binding contracts with Monsanto) to buy more, a
process Mexican investigator Silvia Ribiero tags "bio-slavery".

Corn is not just nutrition and livelihood in Mexico but also culture
and religion. Maiz came from the gods and the Aztecs and Mayas
nourished those gods with sacrificial victims to keep it coming. The
transnational attack on corn stirs passions and paranoias amongst the
descendants of Mexico's first peoples. At a meeting of NAFTA
scientists a few years back, some with deep ties to Big Biotech, and
charged with investigating allegations brought by 17 Mexican NGOs
that GMO corn was a threat to the nation's 57 distinct indigenous
peoples, an Indian farmer from Oaxaca seized the mic and accused the
scientists of practicing genocide by pushing transgenics. "First you
killed your own Indians and now you want to kill us!" the farmer
shouted angrily.

The Zapatistas are Mayans and the Mayans are the People of the Corn.
According to their sacred books, the Popul Vuh and the Chilam Balaam,
they are actually made from maiz. Manuel, a member of the
ecology-agricultural commission at Oventic, the most accessible
Zapatista "caracol" or public center in the mountains above San
Cristobal de las Casas, venerates these roots. "We are the corn - if
it is poisoned so are we" he insisted during this New Year's
"Encounter Between the Peoples of the World and the Peoples of the
Zapatista Communities" up at the Caracol "Resistance and Rebellion
for Humanity." Now the Zapatistas are freezing their seed corn to
preserve pure Mayan germ plasma so that there will never be a world
without it. You can even purchase the seeds on the World Wide Web.
Check out http://www.schoolsforchiapas.com.

Source: Counterpunch: 02/14

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The above articles were originally published and copyrighted by the
listed sources. These articles are offered for educational purposes
which CIS maintains is  'fair use' of copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

end: Mexico Week In Review: 02.19-02.25
--