La Jornada: Adolfo Gilly
Enrique Peña Nieto arrived well prepared, not anticipating any problems, at a meeting with students at the Ibero [Iberamerican University] on Friday, May 11. Students, women and men, posed questions--among others, what had happened in Atenco six years earlier.
The candidate gave an administrative response, which satisfied no one. Perhaps he might have been home free if, before leaving, it had not occurred to him to take the microphone again and, in the manner of the Holy Pope, to declare loudly:
"I assume full responsibility for what happened in Atenco. Those responsible were brought before the judiciary, but, I repeat: it was an action based on the legitimate right of the Mexican State to use the police to restore order and peace".
It was a bad hour, Black Friday. All hell broke loose. Students shouted repeatedly, "Atenco is not forgotten! Atenco is not forgotten!"
The candidate lost his composure. Pursued by the voices of young people, he took refuge in the bathrooms, which for sheer bad luck, happened to be the women's bathrooms. The cameras recorded his bewildered expression and similar expressions on the faces of those who accompanied him. He finally managed to get down the stairs amid shouts of: "Out! Out! Get out!"
Thus was born the unexpected, brash, hard-to-get-a-handle-on student movement that has now spread to [students in nearly a hundred public and private universities]. First, it was the 131 [students] from the Ibero that gave a face [to the movement] by displaying their student IDs on YouTube. With this act they challenged those who had in mind, perhaps as [happened at] Atenco, to find the guilty [ones] in order to apply to them "the legitimate use of public force". After that, attracted by this gesture of defiance, a torrent of [other students] came together to declare--each one and all together--"#YoSoy132".
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On May 28, as is known, a meeting organized by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity took place with the four presidential candidates at Chapultepec castle. Press accounts focused on what the candidates had to say and gave much less consideration to the testimonies of victims. It is this testimony that I want to write about today.
I want to take up another record of the meeting at the castle: the defiant allegation and accusation of Señora Trinidad Ramírez, on behalf of the People's Front in Defense of the Land of San Salvador Atenco, directed to the candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. Those words, and the tenacious activity of Doña Trini and her companions for years, until they gained acquittal by the Mexican Supreme Court and the release of twelve prisoners from Atenco. On July 2010, more than four years after being imprisoned, the twelve were declared to be innocent of any wrongdoing. These women explain exactly why today--in the spring of 2012--Atenco is not forgotten.
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At Chapultepec Castle, Trinidad Ramírez told Enrique Peña Nieto:
In Mexico, the people have learned to defend their homelands against the dispossession of the governments that have lost their moral principles. They have become mere handmaidens of the narrow interests of transnational corporations. They violate the Constitution, they humiliate the will of the people, and they commit all kinds of insults against the people who defend and organize themselves in order to resist the extermination of their inherited assets and cultural roots. Cherán, Ostula, Wirikuta, Temacapulín, La Parota and many others in our country are today engaged in this resistance. In response, all have endured repression, contempt, murder, deceit and systematic insults. All grievances against them have gone unpunished.
Atenco is a sample case. And you, Enrique Peña Nieto, you know it perfectly. You know that in 2001, they tried to seize our land for the construction of an airport. As a result of the people's legal and legitimate defense [of their lands], the decree that stripped us [of our lands] had to be repealed.
As governor of the State of Mexico, on May 3 and 4, 2006, you ordered the operation against our people. Your government provoked the violence. Despite reaching an agreement on May 2, you betrayed and ordered the beating of our comrades in Texcoco.
It was not a chance encounter. It was planned revenge on your part. Revenge against the people who resisted the dispossession of their lands. You intended to disappear the Peoples' Front in Defense of the Earth in order to seize what is ours, and this threat remains in force today.
You have repeated that it was your decision that was carried out in this operation, in which two young men were killed: Javier Cortés Santiago and Alexis Benhumea Hernández, (the latter) a UNAM student. [This operation was] at the hands of the forces that you call "order".
You have reiterated that you are responsible for what happened in Atenco, where forty-six women were sexually tortured, among them four foreigners. So Peña, you are responsible for two unpunished murders, you are responsible for a gang of rapists that continue to act under the protection of the police force that you created. These are your credentials for trying to be arrive at the presidency.
Besides being illegally detained and brutally tortured, our colleagues were imprisoned. You moved all the instruments of your government to condemn to 112 years in prison those who defended the earth. We had to go to the Mexican Supreme Court--it bears clarifying that [the Court] did not endorse the operation--but it admitted that there was sexual torture and grave human rights violations. The same Supreme Court ruled the release of our colleagues after four years of legal proceedings.
It was not important to you how many children and spouses suffered impotence before the abuse of their wives. Many families lost children, without their husbands and without income for the years of persecution and imprisonment these innocents suffered. It didn't matter to you because the pain and suffering of our people is a trophy for you. So also no one has been punished for these crimes, none of your agents has ever set foot in a prison. The dead, the injured and the prisoners were all ordinary people.
You try to cover the sun with a finger. Now you want to justify again your inexcusable suppression using the image of the policeman who was beaten. We remind you that the people's reaction was in response to the cruel murder of 14-year old Javier Cortés Santiago.
The networks showed again and again the scene of an event that should not have happened. Certainly, it should not have happened. But the networks never showed how our comrades were beaten and arrested, nor [did they broadcast] the illegal searches, nor our children sprayed with tear gas, and so on. From then on, the terrible alliance and manipulation of the television companies was evident.
Your police brutality was not due to individual 'excesses', as has been confirmed by dozens of agencies and institutions of human rights both national and international. The National Human Rights Center, the Miguel Agustín Pro Center, Amnesty International, the UN, the International Commission, eleven Nobel Peace prize winners, and the International Civil Commission for Observation of Human Rights, to name a few, agree that the Atenco operation, as a whole, involved gross human rights violations.
This is what the PRI represents.You treat the people and their leaders as criminals. You did it in 1968 and again in 1971, at the massacres of Aguas Blancas [Guerrero] and Acteal [Chiapas]. It doesn't matter how much you want to distance yourself, this [PRI] is your party.
What you represent is an arrogant and violent government, incapable of accepting criticism and accustomed to imposing [your will] by force and manipulation. Your campaign is a danger to this nation, especially for the people and for any critical and honest spirit.
We do not come to strike a deal, but to point out to you and to tell you that we know that justice will not come from you, the oppressors, but from the people.
* * *
So concluded the allegation of San Salvador Atenco in the voice of Señora Trinidad Ramírez, from the People's Front for Defense of the Earth, at Chapultepec Castle. Enrique Peña Nieto mumbled little or nothing. What could he say?
Nor must one forget that the Federal Police--acting on orders from then-President Vicente Fox, who is today allied with Enrique Peña Nieto--also participated in the repression at Atenco. Attorney Leonel Rivera, defender of Atenco, then declared [to journalists] Emir Olivares and Blanche Petrich (La Jornada, May 5, 2006):
"Since the popular mobilization blocked the international airport project in order to defend their land three years ago, a settlement of accounts has been pending by those within the circles of President Vicente Fox and former Governor [of the State of Mexico] Arturo Montiel, [1999-2005, and predecessor of Peña Nieto] who lost business worth many billions of dollars. These interests were not going to forgive the campesinos. And on Wednesday they billed it [to the 'popular mobilization', i.e., the people]".
It is clear, then, why today Atenco is not forgotten. Spanish original
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