Mexico Week In Review: 09.17-09.23

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 09.17-09.23
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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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PAN SENATOR WANTS TALKS WITH EPR

A senator from Mexico's ruling party proposed talks with the leftist
rebel group Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which bombed fuel
pipelines last week. The EPR bombed state oil monopoly Pemex's
pipeline network in six places last week, the second attack since
July, cutting off natural gas to thousands of factories, disrupting
oil refining and costing Mexico hundreds of millions of dollars. The
EPR has vowed to continue its actions until the government releases
two activists it says were captured in May in the volatile southern
state of Oaxaca. The government denies the pair are in state custody.

"Congress could be a vehicle to allow this group to sit down and
talk, to begin to make agreements," said Ulises Ramirez, a senator
from President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party and head of
the Senate security commission. "We are going to tell all the Senate
about our intention to create a commission that could be the key to
opening the door to dialogue," he said.

Mexico's Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora has called the EPR
"terrorists" and says the group finances itself with ransom money
from kidnapping.

Source: Reuters: 09/19
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EPR WAGES WAR IN MEXICO

Edmundo Reyes is a slight, unassuming man of 55 who loves baseball
and children's literature. Until recently, he sold candy and soft
drinks from his family's corner grocery store in this city's
Nezahualcoyotl district. In May, he left to visit relatives in the
state of Oaxaca and never returned. His disappearance might have gone
unnoticed but for the fact that it has set off a small war that has
twice shut down a sizable chunk of the Mexican economy. Unbeknownst
to family and friends, Reyes was conducting a double life: He was a
leader of a group calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army, or
EPR in Spanish. His comrades are convinced that he has been captured
by "the enemy." To get back Reyes and another EPR militant said to
have disappeared with him, the Popular Revolutionary Army has started
bombing the pipelines of Pemex, Mexico's national oil and gas company.

The attacks are the most spectacular campaign by a guerrilla army in
Mexico since the 1994 uprising of the Zapatistas in the southern
state of Chiapas. Unlike the Zapatistas, the EPR has struck at a
critical element of Mexico's economic infrastructure: the pipelines
that transport petroleum products from the Gulf of Mexico to the
interior of the country and elsewhere. The attacks on 10 pipelines in
July and this month forced the temporary closure of some of Mexico's
largest factories, caused fuel shortages for millions of people and
pushed up the price of oil futures in New York. The economic losses
caused by the bombings total hundreds of millions of dollars,
according to business groups here.

Yet the EPR is an "army" probably consisting of fewer than 100
people, including several members of five extended families with
roots in Oaxaca, analysts and Mexican officials say. Intelligence
reports leaked to the Mexican media say the mild-mannered Reyes was
an EPR leader. "I'm not convinced that all the things they say about
him are true," said Nadin Reyes Maldonado, Reyes' 25-year-old
daughter, who is a nursery school teacher. "But when he appears again
there are some things he's going to have to explain to us."

The story of the EPR harks back to another chapter of Latin American
history, when leftist urban guerrillas inspired by Cuba's Fidel
Castro went underground to wage war against dictatorial governments.
Some alleged EPR members are said to have been operating
clandestinely for many years, though their struggle went largely
unnoticed until the Pemex bombings.

The EPR launched itself publicly in 1996 in Guerrero, a Pacific Coast
state with long traditions of armed resistance to the Mexican
government. As many as 100 masked EPR members armed with assault
rifles marched into the town of Aguas Blancas as residents were
gathering to commemorate the killings a year earlier of 17 members of
a peasants rights group by state police. Mexico was by then well into
its transition from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy. But
to the EPR, Mexico remained a country of political impunity ruled on
behalf of a wealthy few. "Our political constitution is . . . a dead
letter," read the first EPR communiqué, explaining the group's
decision to take up arms. "Individual rights are violated every day,
and the people are left out of the economic and political decisions
of the country."

Since then, the rebel group has split several times. It now appears
to be rooted in the adjacent state of Oaxaca, whose social inequities
and heavy-handed governing style have fed several militant movements.
Oaxaca remains one of the poorest states of Mexico: 68% of its
residents live below the government's poverty line, with monthly
income less than $90. And more than one-third of the population is
living in "extreme poverty," according to government statistics. On
Tuesday, a little more than a week after its most recent bombings,
the EPR issued a new communiqué denying widespread speculation that
the group was linked to foreign rebels, including the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. "We have never received any training or
financing from abroad," the communiqué said. "We are an expression of
the class struggle in this country."

The group has bombed banks and other targets since 2001. Mexican
authorities have identified most of the EPR leaders, but have been
unable to apprehend them, said Jose Luis Piñeyro, a security expert
at the Autonomous Metropolitan University here in the capital. "There
was a failure of civilian and military intelligence here," Piñeyro
said. "The EPR increased their technical and military capacity. They
expanded their support base. None of this was detected."

Authorities said the devices used against the Pemex pipelines were
made from a combination of plastic explosives and potassium nitrate,
also known as saltpeter. Mexican Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora said
that the explosives were of a "common" variety, used in many
industries. They may have been stolen from a Mexican mining
operation, or purchased on the open market.

"Historically, these groups have financed themselves through
kidnapping," Medina Mora said. "But you don't need a lot of money to
undertake terrorist actions like those we've seen in our country in
the last weeks." More impressive than the bombs themselves was the
logistical sophistication of the operation this month: Six targets
were struck simultaneously with 12 bombs. "To do something like this,
you have to have a minimal support base," said Jorge Chabat, an
analyst at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching. "You need a
people who will protect you, hide you, a place where you can melt
away."

Friends and relatives say Reyes, the grocer from Nezahualcoyotl, was
a member of an impoverished Oaxaca family. Too poor to complete his
studies, he was self-educated, and migrated to Mexico City in search
of work. "He traveled often to Oaxaca to visit his mother," said
Adrian Ramirez, president of the Mexican League for the Defense of
Human Rights. "No one suspected that he could be linked to an
insurgent group."

Intelligence reports say members of five extended families make up
much of the rank and file of the EPR faction responsible for the
Pemex bombings. Many of the leaders are said to be men in their 50s
with experience in the failed guerrilla groups of the 1970s. One is
Tiburcio Cruz Sanchez, also known as Francisco Cerezo and nicknamed
"the Professor." His wife, Emiliana Contreras, is also said to be an
EPR member. Both are natives of Oaxaca. Their son Francisco Cerezo
Contreras says his father was a university professor, "or at least
that's what they tell me," Cerezo Contreras said.  "It's been 17
years since I've seen my parents," said Francisco Cerezo Contreras, a
33-year-old Mexico City resident. "I have no idea where they went.
They just left." Cerezo Contreras said his parents never explained
why they left home. But he and his three siblings sometimes receive
letters from them. One, dated March 2006, is from their mother.
Contreras tells her progeny to rely on "the strength that comes from
having principles and the highest human values, including solidarity
and the love of justice, which you learned from the time you were
small." Two of Cerezo Contreras' brothers, Hector, 27, and Antonio,
30, are in prison, convicted of bombing a Mexico City bank building
in 2001. Cerezo Contreras says the charges were fabricated to make
his family a "scapegoat" for the EPR's actions. Cerezo Contreras says
he has never met Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sanchez, the EPR leader who is
said to be his uncle. EPR communiqués say that Cruz disappeared,
along with Reyes, in May. "These militant comrades are being brutally
tortured in the office of the attorney general by the army, the
federal police and by North American agents," read an EPR communiqué
released in June.

The Mexican government denies that the two men were arrested. "We can
affirm, without fear of being wrong, that no element of the Mexican
state, federal or local, has detained these people or has them in
custody," Medina Mora said this week. The fate of the two men is the
subject of much speculation here. One theory is that they were
detained by local authorities who tortured and killed them. Another
theory has it that they were killed by members of a rival guerrilla
group. "Whether my father is in the EPR or not isn't important to
us," Reyes said. "He's missing. And that causes us fear and anguish."

Source: Los Angeles Times: 09/20
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GUERRERO: JUDGE SUSPENDS DAM

On Sept. 13 Mexican federal district judge Livia Lizbeth Larumbe
Radilla, based in Acapulco in the southern state of Guerrero, ordered
the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) to suspend further
construction of the La Parota hydroelectric dam across the Papagayo
River. The judge's order came in response to an Aug. 14 request by
campesinos living in Guerrero's Cacahuatepec municipality for an
injunction against construction pending resolution of a lawsuit they
have filed to stop the dam. Larumbe Radilla ruled that continuing the
project might cause "irreparable damages" to the campesinos.

The National Water Commission (CONAGUA) granted the CFE the right to
build the dam on June 24, 2005, and the Secretariat of Environment
and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) approved the project, based on an
environmental impact study. But local campesinos charged that some
20,000 residents would be displaced by flooding and formed an
organization, Communities Opposing the La Parota Dam (CECOP), to
fight the project. Violence broke out between CECOP members and
residents supporting the dam; CECOP member Tomas Cruz Zamora was shot
dead by his own cousin in an argument over the project [see Update
#818]. During a visit in April 2006, "Subcomandante Marcos" of the
rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) warned the
government: "They can only build this dam with a war in the Mexican
Southeast." United Nations investigators Miloon Khotari and Rodolfo
Stavenhagen met with dam opponents on Sept. 9 this year and proposed
an independent commission to study the issue.

Although Judge Larumbe Radilla's order was only a suspension, not a
cancellation of the project, CECOP representative Felipe Flores
Hernandez considered the decision an important victory. "From now on,
we're not going to be silent," he told a reporter. "We're not going
to stand by with our arms crossed, because we're going to defend our
Mother Earth, which is what enables us to eat."

Source: Weekly News Update- Nicaragua Solidarity Network Of Greater
New York: 09/16
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FOX: BUSH IS "COCKIEST GUY I EVER MET"

George W. Bush "is the cockiest guy I have ever met," former
President Vicente Fox says in an autobiography that pokes fun at the
U.S. president's bad Spanish and false cowboy bravado. Fox, who
retired in December after a six-year term, worked closely with Bush
on immigration and trade in the pair's first year in office in 2001.
The two leaders referred to each other publicly as "amigos" but their
alliance soured after the September 11 attacks turned Washington's
attention toward Iraq and Afghanistan and away from Latin America.

Fox, a conservative and a rancher like Bush, says in his book,
"Revolution of Hope," that their first meeting in 1996 - when they
were both state governors - left a mark. "My first impression of
George W. Bush was one of total self-confidence. He is quite simply
the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life," Fox wrote, according to
an advance copy of the book. Except, perhaps, when it came to
language skills. Fox said Bush was "a bit sheepish as he tried out
his grade-school-level Spanish" at that meeting in Austin, Texas.

Bush raised hopes in Mexico when he said early in his presidency that
there was no more important relationship for the United States than
the one with Mexico. Many Mexicans were disappointed when Bush failed
to deliver on an immigration reform that would have favored the
millions of Mexican illegal immigrants north of the border. Bush had
charmed the Mexican president by visiting his family ranch in the
central state of Guanajuato in February 2001 "on equal terms." "This
was the great honor George Bush paid to Mexico, the reason I will
always be his friend, no matter how sharply we may disagree on Iraq,"
Fox said. It was Bush's first foreign trip as president and came
before Mexico, then a member of the U.N. Security Council, refused to
support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Fox, who often wore a trademark cowboy hat, was unimpressed when Bush
turned down his offer to ride his favorite horse, a big palomino,
during the Mexican ranch visit. "Even now, George will be the first
to admit that he's a "windshield cowboy," more comfortable driving
his pickup truck around Crawford than he is on the back of a horse,"
Fox said.

Source: Reuters: 09/20
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MEXICO'S PROPHETS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: WOMEN FOREST DEFENDERS

Celsa Valdovinos knew there was a serious problem when only about an
inch of water trickled from the irrigation hose. In the mountains of
southern Guerrero state where Valdovinos and her husband Felipe
Arreaga lived during the 1990s, the small farmers were becoming
increasingly alarmed about water supplies. "This was in January and
by the next year it was gone," Valdovinos recalls. As the rainfall
diminished so did the prospects of the mountain residents. Animals
died, crops withered, and the social fabric unraveled. Valdovinos and
her neighbors connected the environmental changes they were
witnessing to deforestation. More and more forest cover was
disappearing every year as farmers burned hillsides for corn patches
and pastures, drug growers torched forest cover to plant their
illicit crops, and contractors felled trees for a Boise Cascade
Corporation mill that operated on the Pacific Coast at the time.

Long before climate change became a trendy cause, the Campesino
Environmentalist Organization of the Sierra of Petatlan and Coyuca de
Catatlan (OCESP), emerged as a grassroots group dedicated to saving
Guerrero's forests. Soon, however, the movement faced repression from
loggers and the Mexican army. In 2001, jailed OCESP leader Rodolfo
Montiel and his friend Teodoro Cabrera were released by Mexican
President Vicente Fox after an international campaign was waged on
their behalf by environmentalists and human rights activists. Mikhail
Gorbachev and Hillary Rodham Clinton were among world leaders who
raised their voices for Montiel and Cabrera. Other OCESP supporters
were killed, arrested, or disappeared. Many like Valdovinos and
Arreaga were forced into temporary hiding in the mountains. Now, 10
years after the OCEP burst onto the world stage, Valdovinos and a
growing cadre of poor rural women quietly carry on the work of
defending and restoring Guerrero's forests, and are even taking the
struggle to new levels. Once in the background, women are now in the
forefront of the movement.

Founded in 2001, the Women's Environmentalist Organization of the
Sierra of Petatlan (OMESP) promotes sustainable and organic
agriculture, forest fire prevention, reforestation, water and soil
conservation, and recycling. The group has grown from 12 to 90
members, and Valdovinos serves as the president. Infused with a
strong self-help ethos, the women largely carry on their work with
little more than a great love for the land. "There's a lot of
consciousness among the people. For example, the majority of the
people in our group dispose of their garbage properly and don't allow
the children to trample too many trees," Valdovinos says. "It's not
uniform. We're not going to change from day to night, but there is a
lot of progress among the people." Valdovinos' group can take credit
for simple but groundbreaking accomplishments during the past six
years. In 2003 and 2004, members planted more than 175,000 red cedar
trees in the hills. The seeds came from a nursery run by the Mexican
army. Some members of the group have found that they can earn a
decent side income of as much as US$3,000 annually from selling tree
seeds.

Most of the women environmentalists have family gardens, and
Valdovinos and Arreaga are starting a new tree nursery. Beekeeping is
another new project viewed with great potential. "People are used to
cutting trees and taking away the hive and letting it go to waste,"
Valdovinos says. "What we're going to do now is put the hive in a
box; we're learning how to reproduce many hives from this box." An
environmental outlook is apparent even with young mountain residents
like 16-year-old Cristina Cabrera. A soft-spoken young woman, Cabrera
says more youth are hearing the green message she's absorbed and put
into practice. "We can make compost with organic trash and dispose of
inorganic trash, and we can take care of the trees because they give
us water," Cabrera says. "We have to plant a lot of them so there is
a lot of water in the future, and animals too."

Outside support for the OMESP has been spotty. The organization has
received some funding from two German foundations but is now seeking
additional sources of support. Dealing with government agencies is
difficult, Valdovinos says. "We're people who didn't go to school,"
she adds. "I, for example, didn't even study one year in school. The
little reading I learned was because I forced myself, asking others
(for help) when I was 12 years old. I was 28 when I learned how to do
numbers. That's why it's difficult for us to make applications." But
the OMESP's luck with the bureaucracy could be changing. Salvador
Anta Fonseca, the director of Mexico's National Forestry Commission
(Conafor) in Guerrero and Oaxaca, has pledged to help the OMESP
access federal programs that help finance tree nurseries and
plantations, soil conservation, and reforestation. Praising the work
of the rural women, Anta adds that Conafor can also assist groups
like the OMESP with strategic planning. "We can support them in doing
studies on rural participation so they can organize and identify
their problems," he says.

Forest conservation, which both former president Vicente Fox and his
successor Felipe Calderon have termed a matter of "national
security," remains a critical need in Mexico. According to Inter
Press Service correspondent Diego Cevallos, more than 100 million
acres of forest supply two-thirds of Mexico's fresh water supply, but
the country has lost half its forests in the last 50 years.
Interviewed by La Jornada environmental reporter Angela Enciso,
Miguel Martinez of the Biological Tropical and Conservation
Association estimated that only 5% of the nation's tropical forests
remain. Tourist development in places like Acapulco, which was once
covered with lowland tropical forest, has contributed to the ecocide.
The local consequences of tropical forest loss were tragically borne
out during tropical storm Henriette when mudslides and flooding
killed or injured victims in Acapulco. On a global scale, some recent
studies suggest that the cutting down of tropical forests could
account for upwards of 30% of global warming. The Calderon
administration has set a goal of planting 250 million trees this
year. Lorena Paz, an organizer for the Mexico City-based Maya
Institute, lauds the land-based OMESP for offering a shining example
to city-slickers. "There is a group of people that is taking action
to protect the environment in the zones where water and air is
produced and where biodiversity is abundant," Paz says. "Informing
the urban population about this has an enormous impact, because it
educates about the need to take care of the environment in the cities
too, of struggling against contamination, and above all of taking
care of the water, which goes to enormous waste in the cites."

Despite growing recognition for the OMESP's work, Mexico is still
dangerous turf for forest defenders. In 2004, Valdovino's spouse and
long-time forest activist Felipe Arreaga was arrested on trumped-up
murder charges and imprisoned for nearly 10 months before he was
acquitted and released. The detention severely disrupted the OMESP's
growing work. Like the Montiel and Cabrera case, Arreaga's arrest
sparked an international solidarity campaign. A free man, Arreaga
nevertheless has threats hanging over him. In 2005, OCESP supporter
Albertano Penaloza was ambushed while traveling in the mountains with
his family. Two of Penaloza's sons were killed, and nobody has been
arrested for the crime. "It makes me think that there is someone
who's getting revenge and wants to kill them off little by little
over sufficient intervals of time so the crimes aren't connected with
one another," says Yadira Rios of Petatlan's New World
Environmentalist Group. "We live in a state of impunity. Crimes are
committed across Mexico and if you don't have money or if you're not
from the political class, the crimes go unpunished."

It has been a bloody year in the forests. In March of 2007, forest
guard Juan Millan Morales was murdered in the Omiltemi reserve near
the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo. Known as a hot spot for
illegal logging, the forest zone was the scene of the 2003 murder of
federal environmental official Wilibaldo Sotelo. Acapulco's El Sur
newspaper recently reported that three murders last spring in
mountains of Coyuca de Catatlan were linked to decades-old logging
disputes. In one case, 16-year-old Justo Arroyo Salgado and a
14-year-old migrant indigenous worker named Calixto were shot to
death April 24 while trying to put out a fire allegedly set by
pro-logging forces. In neighboring Mexico state, meanwhile,
16-year-old Aldo Zamora, the son of well-known forest activist
Idelfonso Zamora Baldomero, was shot to death in a May 15 ambush
reminiscent of the 2005 attack on the Penaloza family in Guerrero.

Regardless of the setbacks and sorrows, Valdovinos is determined to
forge ahead with her fellow women environmentalists. "I feel very
happy about the organization. We have many problems and enemies, but
I still feel content because it's work I've done for years and I feel
that I cannot live without this work," Valdovinos reflects. Never
forgetting the big picture, Valdovinos urges governments and civil
societies everywhere to take immediate action in saving the earth's
resources. "I invite people to become conscious of the grave problem
we have on planet Earth that's affecting us all," she implores. "We
have to struggle to move our planet forward because we have to leave
something for those who remain, for the children who are our going to
live. What are we going to leave them? We're going to leave them
nothing."

Kent Paterson is a longtime freelance journalist and author who
covers Mexico and the U.S. Southwest for the Americas Policy Program
at www.americaspolicy.org.

Source: Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP): 09/13

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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: 09.17-09.23
--