The referendum: the past that is present.
Massacres, militarization, imprisonment, extrajudicial executions, forced sterilizations and torture were the constant feature of the prophet of neoliberal globalization: Ernesto Zedillo.
Note from the translators:
Today, when executions and dismemberments populate the daily life of the collective imagination, with reactionaries that grow day by day and lead us to the "trivialization of numbers" so dear to the fascist experience (see Hannah Arendt and Elías Canetti), everything indicates that the most genocidal Mexican government of modern times has been forgotten, without much scandal: that of Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, the last president of the PRI and of the twentieth century.
Ernesto Zedillo currently resides in Connecticut. To this day, Yale University’s website lists him as:
Text by Luis Hernández Navarro.
The geography of Mexican horror reached its peak at the end of the twentieth century.
Atrocity became an everyday form of government. Terror established a new nomenclature.
It was called Acteal and Northern Chiapas, Aguas Blancas and El Charco, the Loxichas.
The atrocities were also baptized with the names of victims. Like that of teacher Magencio Abad Zeferino, a Nahua Indian from the Olinalá region. He was tortured by soldiers in the last days of 1996. "You will remember. This is what we are going to do to your son," they told him, while they beat him savagely and gave him electric shocks. For this and other cases, the CNDH issued Recommendation 100/97, on disappearance, torture and arbitrary detentions by the Army in Guerrero.
Massacres, militarization, imprisonment, extrajudicial executions, torture, forced sterilizations, police persecution were the constant feature of the last president to emerge from the ranks of the PRI in the last century, the prophet of neoliberal globalization: Ernesto Zedillo.
The invisible agent of genocide, as he was baptized by Canal 6 de Julio and Hermann Bellinghausen.
Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, among other states, became counterinsurgency hunting grounds.
Encouraged by the State, paramilitary groups flourished like mushrooms during the rainy season. Dozens of military barracks were built in the most remote regions of the country. Sweeping, the soldiers stormed into indigenous communities. Women became spoils of war.
Shameless, public officials, armed forces and members of the National Human Rights Commission denied the existence of the nameless war that was executed by paramilitaries.
After all, they had no need to be held accountable to anyone for committing these atrocities.
They were called armed civilian groups. In Chiapas they were baptized with the most diverse names: Peace and Justice, Opdic, Chinchulines, First Force, Red Mask, MIRA.
Between 1995 and 2000 alone, Peace and Justice murdered more than 100 members of the Chol indigenous community in the northern zone of Chiapas, expelled 2,000 peasants and their families from their respective communities, closed 45 Catholic churches, attacked the bishops Samuel Ruiz and Raúl Vera, stole more than 3,000 head of cattle and raped 30 women.
The high point of this offensive was the Acteal massacre, a State crime.
On December 22, 1997, paramilitaries savagely murdered 45 displaced people belonging to the group Las Abejas, who were peacefully praying for peace in a hermitage.
Outrage upon outrage, the massacres of Aguas Blancas, in June 1995, at the hands of the police, and of El Charco, in June 1998, at the hands of the Army, were very painful moments for the people of Guerrero. Mourning, impotence and rage prevailed.
The mafia power in connection with the military, the cabinet and the caciques showed its most bloodthirsty face. In Aguas Blancas 17 peasants were murdered, in El Charco 10 indigenous persons and a UNAM student. It did not stop there. The communities were harassed and many leaders of both movements were later disappeared or murdered.
Years later, during the government of Felipe Calderón, after the disappearance and execution of the Mixtecs Raúl Lucas and Manuel Ponce in 2009, the list of regional indigenous leaders assassinated mostly by criminal groups increased exponentially, in what is a subrogation of counterinsurgency.
The full weight of the State (Zedillo dixit) fell on the Zapotecs of San Agustín Loxicha, as of late August 1996. An occupying army was unleashed on the entire region.
One after another, illegal arrests, acts of torture, forced disappearances, clandestine executions and illegal searches followed one after another. More than 250 people, starting with municipal authorities, were initially detained by the military and police, accused of belonging to or collaborating with the EPR (The Popular Revolutionary Army or Ejército Popular Revolucionario is a left-leaning guerrilla organization in Mexico). Hundreds of judicial files against indigenous people were manufactured.
Despite this slaughter, the intellectuals who benefited during Zedillo's six-year term with juicy contracts and who enjoyed privileged treatment with the president, have wanted to present him as an apostle of democracy.
No authority was tried for these crimes. At most, it cost Rubén Figueroa and Emilio Chuayfett their jobs. Impunity was the name of the game. Worse, the past was not left behind. Without self-criticism, prominent figures of the Zedillista administration, such as Esteban Moctezuma (Secretary of the Interior and Social Development) and Olga Sanchez Cordero, in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation that was appointed as a result of the presidential coup to reform the Judicial Power and appoint new ministers, occupy prominent positions today.
Because of the horror of Zedillo's regime, and because of all the other horrors experienced over the last half century, it is important to turn it into a mobilization in favor of a truth and justice, to clarify the multitude of abuses committed by those in power against those who struggle and resist.
