[Ppnews] Atenco’s Political Prisoners: The Persistence of Resistance

[Political Prisoner News]

Atenco’s Political Prisoners: The Persistence of Resistance


Thirty-One Year Sentences for Protest (or Being Near It) in Mexico

http://www.narconews.com/Issue54/article3192.html


By Alejandro Reyes
Radio Zapatista

September 22, 2008

When the parents of Oscar Hernández Pacheco were 
told that their son would be free in late August 
or Early September, they were overwhelmed with 
happiness. At the prison of Molino de Flores, don 
Paco and other relatives of political prisoners ­ 
who since the violent repression in 
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1831.html>San 
Salvador Atenco on May 3 and 4, 2006, had faced 
uncertainty, fear, and indignation ­ celebrated 
the news. “You see, don Paco,” said the father of 
another young prisoner from the town of Texcoco, 
“the kids will soon be free, we just need to 
stick it out a little longer.” “We’ll celebrate 
back in our town,” answered don Paco.

But some days later, on August 21 this year, they 
heard the terrible news: their son, like all 
other political prisoners held at Molino de 
Flores, were sentenced to 31 years and 10 months 
in prison, accused of kidnapping, while 
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue45/article2651.html>Ignacio 
del Valle was given an additional 45 years, on 
top of the 67 which he had already been sentenced to.

When doña Francisca learned of the decision, she 
fell ill. At 63 years of age, both she and her 
husband suffer from diabetes, an illness, which 
has worsened in these two years of anguish. “My 
children didn’t want me to go to the prison 
because they were afraid for my health, but I 
went anyway. I was a bit calmer, but when I got 
there I felt like I was no longer myself. I felt 
very ill. The next day I went to the hospital and 
the doctor told me I had to calm down, or I would 
have to be hospitalized. But how? He’s 30 years 
old. In another 30, he will be 60. How can they 
do that to him? And with such young children
 the 
girl is eight years old, the boy is about three.”

As most of the prisoners sentenced, their son did 
not participate in the confrontations on May 3 
and was not even a member of the Peoples’ Front 
in the Defense of the Land (FPDT), the 
organization that in 2006 
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1761.html>was 
defending the flower vendors of Texcoco from 
being evicted from their place of work.

“The day they captured him he was going to see a 
relative that was very sick. They stopped him on 
the highway. They beat him; they injured his 
head, his face. We have a picture where the 
police are beating him, and one officer has a 
piece of concrete block with which he’s hitting 
him on the head. I didn’t know anything because 
that day he’d been at home. We were having 
breakfast, eating pozole, which is his favorite 
dish, and he told me that he would pick up the 
girl and he would come back to eat some. When the 
troops started coming into the town, we locked 
ourselves up. At around 3 pm my sons knew they 
had arrested him, but they didn’t tell me because 
they were afraid for my health. But then I saw 
him in the news, and that’s how I found out.”

Something similar happened with Julio César 
Espinoza Ramos, son of Maribel Ramos Rojas. At 
the time Julio was 18 and he hadn’t even heard 
about the FDPT. He liked to play soccer, worked 
in sales at the town of San Pablito Chiconcuac, 
and helped his grandmother take care of the 
cattle. On May 3, 2006, Julio César was riding 
his scooter on the highway that goes by San 
Salvador Atenco. Near the gas station of Tocuila 
he was detained at a police blockade. There he 
was brutally beaten, and then taken to the police 
station, before being transferred to the 
high-security prison of Santiaguito, in Almoloya, in the state of Toluca.

Julio César doesn’t understand why all of this is 
happening to him. Why was he sentenced to so many 
years in prison, if he didn’t do anything? And 
why such a heavy sentence, while the true 
kidnappers, those who maim people, those who 
murder and rape, are free? “He had so many 
dreams,” says his mother, “and now those dreams 
are truncated, locked up behind those prison walls.”

Juan de Dios Hernández, the FDPT lawyer who 
defends Atenco’s political prisoners, argues that 
the sentence was made without convincing proof, 
through legal proceedings full of irregularities 
and contradictions. One of the relatives even 
claims that, when he questioned the judge about 
the harshness of the sentences, he answered that 
he didn’t have full control over it and that the decision had come from above.

The political motives behind the sentences are 
evident in the fact that they were announced the 
same day that a highly publicized meeting of the 
National Council on Public Security was being 
held at the National Palace. In this meeting one 
of the topics that most concerns Mexican society 
was discussed: the insecurity that is currently 
lived in the country. There, a National Security 
Agreement was drafted, through which police and 
judicial institutions will be strengthened, with 
a focus on fighting kidnapping, money laundering, 
and organized crime. Among other legal reforms is 
a proposal for a general law on kidnapping. The 
sentences against Atenco’s political prisoners, 
precisely for kidnapping, should be read by 
Mexican society as a sign of alarm, since they 
criminalize dissidence and the defense of basic 
rights, equating political activism to organized 
crime. “We’re indignant,” says Trinidad Ramírez 
Velázquez, wife of Ignacio del Valle. “How dare 
they compare someone who defends the land and his 
rights to someone who kidnaps, murders, 
mutilates, rapes, and so on.” One of President 
Felipe Calderon’s proposals is to apply life in 
prison to convicted kidnappers. The sentence of 
112 years to Ignacio del Valle is nothing less than life in prison.

It’s important to note that, regarding 
insecurity, the wave of kidnappings that are 
increasingly the topic of front-page headlines, 
and the drug-related violence that plagues the 
country, state corruption and impunity are two of 
the main contributors. Practically all known 
kidnapper gangs have members who are agents or 
former agents of precisely the same police forces 
which are in theory in charge of combating them.

At the same time, while political prisoners are 
given these absurd sentences, those responsible 
for the blatant human rights violations committed 
in San Salvador Atenco enjoy complete impunity. 
The events of May 3 and 4, 2006, represent one of 
the darkest moments of state repression and 
violence in the history of modern Mexico: 
murders, mass 
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1827.html>sexual 
aggressions against women and men, breaking and 
entering without a warrant, destruction of 
property, beatings, torture, humiliations. The 
savagery committed in Atenco were not just the 
uncontrolled actions of unprepared police forces, 
but rather 
<http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1938.html>a 
premeditated act of state violence designed to 
provoke terror in the population and to set a 
precedent that serves as an example to other 
social movements. The sentences of August 21 are 
just one more ingredient of these politics of terror.

It is hard to describe the pain of the families. 
“I’m a single mother,” says Maribel Rojas. “My 
son is all I have, and I’m all he has. This has 
affected me a lot at work because I’ve had to 
miss work many times and I’m afraid to lose my 
job, but I can’t leave him alone. It’s also 
affected by my health because I have diabetes and 
I’ve been hospitalized numerous times. And of 
course, it’s been very hard economically. I have 
to take him food, there are many expenses, and if 
I don’t work, how am I going to get the money, 
especially being alone? It hurts me a lot seeing 
him there. The day he called after the sentence, 
he seemed strong because he didn’t want to hurt 
me. But when I went to see him, he seemed like an 
entirely different person, he was completely broken.”

Doña Francisca can’t hold back her tears when she 
speaks of her son. “I feel very bad when I can’t 
go see him, but it hurts me a lot when I go to 
the prison. Since he was in Toluca, I used to go 
see him. But I feel terrible when I see my son 
like that. That’s why he tells me, ‘Don’t come, 
mother, because I get very sad when I see you 
cry.’ And we both cry together. But God willing 
I’ll be able to go see him and I’ll be calm and I won’t cry.”

For don Paco, his son’s imprisonment has also 
been devastating. He is a farmer, he plants corn 
in Atenco. “These two years have been very 
difficult. There are times I can’t go see him, 
because I have to work. There’s no money. We have 
to take money and food to him, and we make every 
effort to do it. And we spend 500 or 600 pesos in 
just one day. Imagine that, and we have no money. 
So we go crazy trying to find a solution, because 
I can’t work like I should.” Doña Francisca 
explains: don Paco is also diabetic and he often 
falls ill for one or two weeks at a time.

For Trinidad Ramírez, these past two years have 
been a veritable ordeal. Her son César was in 
jail for almost two years. Her daughter América 
is in hiding. And her husband Ignacio faces a 
sentence of 112 years in prison. Nonetheless, she 
seems strong, firm, decided. “I think about 
them,” she explains. “I think of Ignacio in jail, 
always so optimistic. I’m afraid of falling into 
a depression and not being able to get up to 
continue fighting. But love can do so many 
things.” She says that, despite the sentence, 
Ignacio holds his head up. “He is very secure in 
his beliefs, in his ideals, in his cause. That’s 
why when I say that Ignacio is doing well, it’s 
not because he is well being there, because the 
conditions in prison are very tough, but because he believes in his ideals.”

But the repression and especially the sentences, 
which were intended to provoke fear and to 
silence people, had another effect. Maribel Ramos 
knew nothing about the FPDT, she had never 
participated in any struggle, and she had never 
expressed indignation against the injustices she saw.

“My vision has changed a lot,” she says, “because 
we used to be very shy about expressing what’s 
happening in our country, the repression we 
suffer. Because what the government is doing is 
repression. They want to use us as an example and 
tell people: if you rebel, this is what can 
happen to you, you can have the same fate as 
these people. But instead of intimidating me, 
this has made me stronger, and I think it’s 
really important for me to express my indignation 
as a mother, to defend my son, because he’s 
completely innocent, and to denounce all this 
injustice we’re living. It’s time to raise our 
voices. If they said, ‘You better be quiet,’ 
well, I don’t think so. We have to face them and 
denounce everything that’s happening.”

Doña Francisca and don Paco, like other relatives 
of political prisoners who had never participated 
in any struggle, have also approached the FPDT, 
joining forces to struggle together for their son’s freedom.

For Trinidad Ramírez, “all bad things have a good 
side.” The sentences reawakened indignation and 
gave a new impulse to the struggle, in Mexico and 
around the world. This September 15, the FPDT 
organized an Independence Day event in the main 
plaza of San Salvador Atenco, and on September 23 
a march is planned from the Angel to Los Pinos in 
Mexico City. At the same time, the Zapatista Army 
of National Liberation (EZLN) announced that the 
encampment in front of the Molino de Flores 
prison would be reinforced and that it would be 
transformed into a space of encounter for the 
Other Campaign. The EZLN also called for a 
renewal of the national and international 
campaign for the freedom of political prisoners.

For many people, demanding the release of 
Atenco’s political prisoners is an urgent 
necessity, because what is at stake, besides the 
lives of innocent people, is the right to 
resistance and the defense of basic rights. It 
is, in sum, a struggle for justice, democracy, and freedom in Mexico




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20080923/e41be338/attachment.htm>