[IPSM] Death, Mayan Women and Free Trade

[usman x]

http://www.portside.org/showpost.php?postid=1805

Death, Mayan women and free trade -- (posted on March 30, 2005)
Please Circulate..

Submitted to Portside by,
Cindy Forster, Associate Professor of History
Scripps College, California

Four women with only their words for protection were
the ones who finally persuaded Guatemalan soldiers and
police to stop firing on unarmed protesters in the
Indigenous municipality of Colotenango, where at least
one was killed and between nine and 50 were wounded
Tuesday before last. One of the women asked me to share
her words since news of Mayans killed by the
authorities is often buried or inaccurate if it reaches
people in the United States. The nationwide
demonstrations of early March were called to protest
backroom deals that led to the approval of the free
trade agreement with the United States, legislated at
breakneck speed under unrelenting pressure from the
U.S. embassy. On March 15 on my way to Mexico I
arrived above the roadblock mounted by hundreds of
peasants and a handful of teachers. I had collected
the history of the township several years ago so I was
anxious to find out what was happening and made my way
down the canyon. Police were speeding past in pickups
but otherwise all was calm. Soon after midday the army
and police started firing below the curve in the road.
Repeated blasts of tear gas alternated with a torrent
of shots that went on and on and on. People were
screaming. Under the United Nations sponsored peace
accords of 1996, security forces are prohibited from
firing on civilian protests. Under the Geneva
Conventions, all of us are called on to protest
offences against human rights.

"I am one of the organizers of this demonstration,"
said a woman leader who requested anonymity, "and the
soldiers attacked us." Like most of the women there
she wore the traditional maroon and white huipil of the
region. "We are campesinos of Colotenango and
Ixtahuacan and we have the right to participate under
the peace accords through a referendum on issues of
grave concern to the public. We stand against the free
trade agreement because it is going to destroy our way
of life as campesinos. I am a campesina woman, for my
entire life I have worked the land. With free trade it
will be impossible for small farmers to compete against
the subsidies that the United States awards to its
agricultural sector. We are united in demanding our
rights as a people, and for that they came with guns
and shields to repress us. We saw the soldiers moving
in three columns down the river canyon and up the
mountainside to surround us like a pincer. They
started shooting even though people were everywhere."

Colotenango lies deep in the heart of Mam-speaking
territory where many people hardly speak Spanish. Next
door, Ixtahuacan has been in the news recently
protesting plans for strip mining by a Canadian company
with close U.S. ties. Because of its fiercely proud
Indigenous identity, the entire region has long
organized for changes on behalf of the poor. When
campesinos struggled to found public schools in the
1970s, the military governments of that era read their
efforts as communist and unleashed a campaign of
torture and disappearances; nationwide the elite killed
thousands, all during peacetime. The practice had full
U.S. support, and indeed Washington educated the
security forces in such tactics. The outcome in
Colotenango was overwhelming enthusiasm for the
revolutionaries who appeared in 1980, and who were none
other than people's cousins and nephews who had been
drawn into a resurgent national guerrilla movement.
Genocide was the military's solution in the early 80s.
All adult males were forced by the army to serve in
"civilian self-defence patrols" (the same model that
reigns today in Colombia). In Colotenango, Mayan
values inspired some of the first efforts to dismantle
the civilian patrols. This resistance was initiated by
the peasant and farmworkers union, the Committee for
Campesino Unity, working clandestinely inside the
patrols. Colotenango's case against forced patrolling
went all the way to the Interamerican court, where it
won. But not before the people of Colotenango
demonstrated unarmed and were killed and injured by the
same military-elite alliance that unleashed mayhem this
month.

In short, in full knowledge of the price they might
have to pay, the people of Colotenango persist in
demanding their right to govern their destiny. Their
opposition to free trade is informed by the disastrous
experience of the Mexican countryside - for the poor,
that is - and their resolve is steeled by a style of
consensus self-government via general assemblies that
has made them one of the most engaged and well-informed
municipalities in Guatemala. They have repeatedly
elected a leftist mayor, the campesino who was the
plaintiff in the Interamerican court case. So the
United States with this free trade treaty finds itself
in its historic role, generating a tide of destruction
against Indigenous communities rooted in ancient
loyalties to the land. Campesino groups in Guatemala
call this genocidal.

Security forces mostly aimed into the air but in the
deep canyon carved by the river, this meant they were
aiming at hundreds of protesters ranged over the
mountainsides, hardly a preventive sort of policing.
Passing tourists with digital cameras (their photos may
be viewed on the web) at that moment were at ground
zero, hugging the pavement because, they say, the
state's agents took aim directly at them. When the
shooting finally stopped I walked down to the bridge.
One corpse lay guarded by civilians with wooden stakes
because the soldiers and police were trying to remove
the evidence of their bullets and the body before
civilian authorities could arrive to make a report of
the scene, crucial for any legal proceeding. The woman
next to me said, "It was the police who killed the
viejito, I saw it, and the bullet entered right here in
his ear." An adolescent crouched nearby, I thought he
might be intoxicated from the way he was holding
himself, but no, he was bleeding from the head and had
a bullet wound in the leg, he had come down from
wherever he had run to and had told no one he was
wounded until people noticed his pooling blood. By
that point the demonstrators were massed in a line
against the soldiers and police to prevent them from
leaving before civilian authorities arrived. A woman
leader guided the wounded youth out to where the
soldiers could see the medic cleaning his wounds as she
implored, "Look at what you've done, look at this,
would you want someone to do this to your family? Look
at what you've done to this muchacho." An older man
wild-eyed came running back and forth, I thought he was
drunk, but no, it was the young man's father searching
for his son. Other wounded campesinos came off the
mountainside one by one and were taken out by
ambulances; one was in danger of bleeding to death that
night.

"Here we are all Guatemalans, we aren't doing anything
wrong, we have the right to demand a referendum," a
woman teacher among the leaders shouted at the line of
soldiers and police. "Why are you shooting at us? For
the love of Jesus Christ what are you doing? We are
brothers and sisters, where is your conscience?" A
male teacher negotiating with the provincial
authorities who had finally arrived reported back to
the demonstrators, "Who ordered them to fire? We hold
the governor responsible for the murder of our
compañero Juan Lopez Velasquez, who was a teacher and a
campesino, and for everything else that happens here
today." National organizers have accused President
Oscar Berger of promoting attacks on demonstrators, a
policy that in theory ended with the dictatorship that
however has never been dislodged or brought to trial
for some 200,000 civilian deaths. Last week, the Bush
administration made their position clear by renewing
military aid after a 15-year hiatus. The teachers and
campesinos organize through the vehicle of their
unions, joining shantytown dwellers, students and
rights activists across the country in challenging the
government's increasingly harsh "dictocracy." Often
led by women, protestors are facing off against the
anti-democratic practices of their government with no
assurance that anyone other than themselves will ever
know about it. Maybe it is time for trade unionists and
citizens in the United States to start doing the same.


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"The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely
the oppressive situations which we seek to escape,
but that piece of the oppressor which is
planted deep within each of us." Audre Lorde
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/margins-to-centre