Rights Lite: Mexico’s Indigenous Communities’ Fight Continues
Oaxaca, Mexico: Communiqué of September 18, 2004: “It is now 72 hours since 14 of our brothers and sisters have been delivered to different state prisons, and 104 hours since they were forcibly removed with clubs, teargas, explosives and water guns from our squatters’ protest in front of City Hall and the Church of Santo Domingo; 104 hours since they were beaten and tortured. Political prisoners all receive the same treatment in prison: offences, abuse, assault, that is what our brothers and sisters have received in prison.”
Seemingly benign tourism of the type one finds in Oaxaca, Mexico, a popular spot for progressive types but also home to the highest concentration of indigenous groups and languages anywhere in North America, is a dangerous thing. What appears a delightful celebration of native values, like the famous Guelaguetza or potlatch music and dance ceremonies that make Oaxaca a tourist hot spot, often camouflages state practices that appropriate native values in the name of reaping tourist dollars.
We recently spent six weeks in Oaxaca and interviewed extensively the indigenous organization “squatting” in the two most frequented tourist spots in the city of Oaxaca: the Zócalo or main plaza and the Church of Santo Domingo which also houses the Museum of Cultures, at the tourist heart of the city. A large brightly painted banner and columns of enlarged colour photographs showing victims lying in pools of blood immediately caught our attention on our first trip to the core of the city. A young native woman sat behind a makeshift table covered in pamphlets, hand-woven huipiles, and a few bags of local fair trade coffee. When asked for information, she handed us a homemade business card identifying her organization as CIPO-RFM (Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca “Ricardo Flores Magón” [Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca, followed by the name of a Zapotec playwright, essayist, journalist, and activist who died in a prison in Kansas in 1922). Members of CIPO live in remote villages in the mountainous regions surrounding Oaxaca and their obvious poverty contrasts violently with the paradisiacal land-of-plenty images that make the tourism culture here thrive.
Many Canadians associate the movement for Native rights in Mexico with the Zapatistas who, on the eve of NAFTA (January 1, 1994), started an armed struggle against the Mexican government, the ruling class of the state of Chiapas, and neoliberalism generally. Since then, there have been conflicting reports on the effects of NAFTA on the Mexican government, largely depending on whether you consult politicians and specialists who measure only economic growth or those who scrutinize the bigger picture: the level of unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, poverty, erosion of labour laws, impact on the environment, and the continuing abuse of human rights. What many of us wouldn’t have heard about are the systematic human rights violations in other regions of Mexico, perhaps most surprisingly in Oaxaca, recently ranked as the seventh best tourist destination in the world by www.travelandleisure.com.
We dropped by the CIPO compound in a poor barrio of Oaxaca where their squatted headquarters are located on land reclaimed from encroaching non-Natives. One of their most threatened members, who has suffered numerous beatings and tortures and is under constant death threat by local paramilitaries, Raúl Gatica, showed us around the site that included a low building with offices, a residence under construction with rooms for native kids from villages who could stay there while attending university or college in the city, a projected café and restaurant that will serve typical food (much of it grown on the premises and the members’ communal lands), and a cultural centre aimed at attracting students, scholars, activists, and anyone who wants to learn about the unthinkably rich native culture in Oaxaca and social justice issues around native rights. Kids played in the common areas and offices, no weapons were seen anywhere (unless a computer connected to the web is seen as such), and conversations in different indigenous languages mixed with the aromas coming from pots cooking traditional stews.
Having gone to Oaxaca to research indigenous rights we were thrilled to find such a well organized resource as this collective, where people from at least seven different indigenous communities volunteer their services on an ongoing rotating basis––but do so at increasing risk to their lives and liberties. CIPO’s move into a public zone is a strategic form of protest since the presence of tourists usually keeps the police from openly attacking the native people who peacefully sleep, cook, eat, weave, educate passersby, and calmly press for public support under the meager protection of a plastic awning. Imagine Queen’s Park with a permanent encampment of well-organized indigenous communities pressing their requests for social justice.
Now shift the scene to the State Commission on Human Rights where lawyers work in elegant offices guarded by police. When help is needed against corrupt caciques (local leaders) representing state interests in collusion with their own private interests against those of their communities, lawyers from the State Human Rights Commission complain about how it is next to impossible to travel to those villages, and even more impossible to understand the local politics in order to make any recommendations, which are rarely acted upon anyway.
This is rights lite at work and it happens as a function of trade agreements like NAFTA that produce these shadowy state bureaucracies to pacify concerns about the rights exploitation that underpins economies based on cheap labour. Rights lite: create a toothless bureaucracy that legitimizes the state’s control over human rights issues at the same time as virtually every recommendation made by such commissions is not acted upon and the status quo is maintained. In Oaxaca, the communiqués on the CIPO website accuse the State Human Rights Commission of being implicated in the eviction of the indigenous groups from the Zocalo and other places, although officials of the same Commission also provided evidence of the torture of the detainees some as young as 15 years old and requested medical treatment for them. Tellingly, a prison guard told one of the detainees, Carmen López Pérez: “once you’re behind this door, you have no more rights.”
Of the fifteen indigenous prisoners, seven have been released on bail (three of them being minors) but will have to report to police on a monthly basis. Of the remaining prisoners, four have been denied bail on the basis of their ongoing, non-violent activism. The members of CIPO have posted photographs of their imprisoned members on their website (cipo@nodo50.org), and while they warn us that these images are routinely doctored to mask the traces of torture they ask that you “look closely at the pictures and you will see the marks. Then ask yourselves if you can see something on the face, the part where they are least likely to be beaten, what can it be like for the rest of their bodies? Let it be clear: the police do not treat the poor and indigenous people with kid gloves. They only respect the big criminals, narcos, and politicians.” Instead of leading to desperation or apathy, this insight fuels the commitment to bring about change. In a recent email, Gatica says “I don’t know why, but I know that we will come out of this struggle successful; it must be because our struggle is for justice.” As Canadians, have we gotten in the way of that hope? Should we not interrogate our own politicians for engineering and signing the NAFTA agreement behind closed doors to reflect business interests that depend on rights lite policies that preserve the status quo? An especially troubling question, when that agreement is with governments that trade social justice for economic profit.
Fischlin and Nandorfy are co-writing the New Internationalist No Nonsense Guide to Human Rights based on field-work they’ve conducted in Mexico and Cuba. Go to cipo@nodo50.org to get the most up-to-date information on the situation unfolding in Oaxaca as indigenous groups continue their struggle to be heard.