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News :: Agriculture : Civil & Human Rights : Economy : Elections & Legislation : Globalization : International Relations : Labor : Latin America : Political-Economy : Right Wing |
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CAFTA Terror In the Highlands: Death, Mayan women and free trade |
Current rating: 0 |
by Cindy Forster repost from global Indymedia
(No verified email address) |
23 Mar 2005
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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 last Tuesday (March 14) where at least two civilians lost their lives and many more were wounded. |
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 last Tuesday (March 14) where at least two civilians lost their lives and many more were wounded. One of the women asked me to share her words in light of the fact that the news of Mayans killed by the authorities is often buried or inaccurate if it reaches people in the United States. The nationwide demonstrations of last week were called to protest backroom deals that led to approval of the free trade agreement with the United States, rammed through their congress 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 campesinos 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. Police were racing past in pickups and soon after midday the army and police started firing below the curve in the road. The hail of bullets went on and on and on – it was beyond belief how long it lasted. Amidst the torrent of shots were repeated blasts of tear gas. 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 offenses 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 guipil of the region. Some of the elderly men also wear the woven cloths of the township. “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 and we believe that 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 campesinos of Colotenango and Ixtahuacán, united in demanding our rights as a people. We have the right to participate under the peace accords through a referendum on issues of grave concern to the public. We were peacefully protesting when they came with guns and shields to repress us. We saw the soldiers moving in three columns down the river canyon and up the mountainsides to surround us like a pincer. They started shooting even though people were everywhere.”
Colotenango lies deep in the heart of Maya-Mam-speaking territory; many people in the hamlets do not speak Spanish. Ixtahuacán has been in the news recently protesting plans for strip-mining by the usual foreign suspects who won a mining concession approved by the politicians practically by stealth. Probably because of its fiercely proud Indigenous identity, the entire region has long organized for changes on behalf of the poor. Struggles to found public schools in the 1970s brought down the wrath of the military governments of the era, acting together with plantation owners. The elite’s anti-communist reading of campesino organizing achieved sociopathic dimensions and led them to carry out a series of massacres and disappearances of thousands of organizers, all during peacetime. The practice had full U.S. support, and indeed the U.S. educated the security forces in such tactics. The outcome in Colotenango was overwhelming enthusiasm for the revolutionaries who appeared in 1980 and 1981, and who were none other than people’s cousins and nephews who had been drawn into a resurgent national guerrilla movement. However the military’s genocide broke the unanimity of campesino support for revolution; some one million mostly Indigenous males were forced by the army to serve in “civilian self-defense patrols” (the same model reigns today in Colombia under U.S. tutelage). In Colotenango, Indigenous values undergirded painstaking organizing against the government’s patrols. This resistance was initiated by the 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 in Washington, DC, 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 week.
Inotherwords, in full knowledge of the price they might have to pay, the people of Colotenango persist in demanding the 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 active 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 U.S. with this free trade treaty once again finds itself in its historic role of generating a tidal wave of destruction against Indigenous communities rooted in ancient loyalties to the land. Campesino groups in Guatemala call this genocidal.
Soldiers and police 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 so it was hardly a preventive sort of policing. Passing tourists with digital cameras (their videos and photos may be viewed at http://www.freedomsojourn.com/Naranjales.htm) 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 and 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 a judge 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 was 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 for whatever reasons he had told no one he was wounded until people noticed him bleeding profusely. 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, at first I thought he was drunk but no, it was the young man’s father searching for his son. Other wounded campesinos came off the mountainsides one by one and were taken out by ambulances; one bled 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 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 civilian authorities – who arrived after what seemed an eternity – reported back to the demonstrators, “Who ordered them to fire? We hold the governor responsible for this murder and for everything else that happens here today.” The teachers organize through their union, while the campesinos’ vehicle is the farmworker union to which those killed on Tuesday belonged. Across Guatemala, trade unionists and campesinos who are often led by women 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.
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/03/821209.shtml |
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U.S. May Renew Military Aid to Guatemala |
by AP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Mar 2005
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Rewarding repression and submission to "free trade" neoliberalism
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) -- The United States is considering stepping up military aid to Guatemala, a decade after it cut off arms assistance to the Central American nation due to human rights abuses.
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has held up $3.2 million in military aid because of abuses that took place during Guatemala's decades-long civil war. It has provided a relative pittance in recent years, with $350,000 approved for tightly controlled purposes, such as maintaining U.S.-Guatemala contacts, in 2005.
The Bush administration is proposing to ramp that up to $900,000 in 2006, in addition to the possible lifting of sanctions.
Still, the amount of money is less than the millions provided overtly and by the CIA to support repressive right-wing regimes in their wars against leftist guerillas. At least 120,000 people disappeared in Guatemala before a peace was signed in 1996, 36 years after the war began.
On Wednesday evening, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in Guatemala after visits to Argentina and Brazil earlier in the week. He was to meet with President Oscar Berger on Thursday before returning to Washington.
U.S. defense officials say renewing aid is appropriate given military reforms undertaken by Berger's administration. The military has decreased in size from 27,000 to 15,000, and is transforming its forces for cooperative peacekeeping missions instead of internal counterguerilla warfare. Berger has also altered some of the legal code governing the military and changed the chain of command.
Guatemala has contributed peacekeepers to the mission in Haiti. Rumsfeld has pushed for more security cooperation between Central American nations despite their history of squabbles and internal strife. Guatemalans have also taken part in several U.N. operations in Africa.
During the 1980s, overt U.S. military aid to Guatemala totaled about $30 million, less than that supplied to the governments of El Salvador and Honduras, which fought similar conflicts.
But the killing of an American innkeeper in 1990 and the subsequent cover-up prompted the U.S. government to cut off that aid, though millions more dollars kept flowing secretly from the CIA to Guatemala's military commanders until 1995.
Since then, the U.S. government has provided only a small amount of security money, some for counternarcotics assistance, to Guatemala. Economic aid has exceeded $100 million a year.
But Guatemalans have had continued problems with crime. According to the federal attorney general's office, violent crime killed 8,120 people in 2001 and 8,767 in 2002.
Guatemalan Defense Minister Carlos Aldana said possible topics of discussion with his U.S. counterpart include violent youth gangs, or maras, that are plaguing Central American countries and have ties to the United States.
The gangs have become increasingly violent, carrying out beheadings and grenade attacks in Central America and hacking their enemies with machetes in cities along the U.S. East Coast.
``The subject of the maras is regional,'' Aldana said. ``They're being used by groups close to drug trafficking and they now have technology and are global. Whether they have ties to terrorism is a subject that could come up in discussions with the secretary.''
Berger has made combatting gangs and rehabilitating gang members a top priority of his administration, while classifying links between gangs and terrorists as ``rumor.''
John Hamilton, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, said Rumsfeld's visit presents an opportunity to discuss drug interdiction efforts.
Earlier this month, Berger signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, prompting some protests in his country. At least one demonstrator was killed. The measure must still be ratified by the U.S. Congress.
The United States has reached agreements on the accord with El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Guatemala is third nation to ratify it. |
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