It isn't easy being a Zapatista, and it isn't safe being a supporter of the Zapatista either. Many around the world have long forgotten about Chiapas, its fight lost somewhere in the midst of all the drug killings and wars between cartels and military.
Well, folks the incredible story of Chiapas continues and support remains very much in need.
As the post below indicates paramilitaries and death squads operate throughout the region. People die in their beds and disappear in the night. Others who struggle for a free space are just officially locked away in the State's prison.
The Empire understands the nature of the threat the Zapatista represent. That threat goes far beyond guns and bullets.
What to do with a rebellion that is simply not trying to seize state power, but is actually building a new society in the midst of the old.
The Empire resorts to all the old methods.
We must look to the new.
The following is from The Flower of the World Will Not Die.
Paramilitaries threaten Cintalapa Women
** They say that they will go today to carry them away to kill them today if they have not abandoned the community
“On May 16, the paramilitaries threatened to come to kill the compañeras that continue in la comunidad,” denounced Armando Méndez Núñez, native of Cintalapa community, Ocosingo municipality, representative of a group of families displaced from the village since March 2007. The threats were made last Mat 10 by Herlindo López Pérez and Domingo Gutiérrez Hernández, PRI leaders and members of the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (Organización para la Defensa de los Derechos Indígenas y Campesinos, Opddic, for its initials in Spanish).
“They told the compañeras that if they don’t leave their homes, they are going to enter on Wednesday to take them to the mountain to kill them,” adds the Tzeltal campesino, belonging to a group of 13 families displaced by the Opddic from the neighboring Cintalapa and Busiljá ejidos, who are part of the Other Campaign.
In Busiljá, the little girl Gabriela Sánchez Morales was kidnapped in July 2011 and continues to be disappeared. The last time that anything was known of her she was found in conditions of slavery in the home of another Opddic member, an organization pointed to as paramilitary in many communities in the state’s Northern Zone and the northern part of the Lacandón Jungle.
Armando Méndez Núñez, the former “political prisoner, also demanded freedom for Amílcar Méndez Núñez, of Cintalapa, a prisoner since December 2008, and Elías Sánchez Gómez, of Busiljá, detained in December 2011. Both are imprisoned in the State Center for Social Reinsertion of the Sentenced (CERSS) Number 17 in Playas de Catazajá “unjustly,” the denouncer maintains.
Weeks ago, on March 24, Busiljá residents denounced that the para-militaries “passed into each one of our houses, came to the natural spring, after they attacked us by throwing stones on top of our houses and they intimidated us because they were strongly armed and uniformed with bullet-proof vests.”
Afterwards, they went down to the highway “with the intention of murdering a transport driver so that our compañero Elías Sánchez Gómez (padre) would be blamed, but at that moment they encountered a private truck in which soldiers were traveling.” The paramilitaries “began to shoot, to which the soldiers responded, leaving a paramilitary Enoc Gómez Gutiérrez, injured.” After the incident, the soldiers found two long arms and a red motorcycle owned by the paramilitaries from the Busiljá ejido.
The displaced families warn about the danger that their compañeros run that remain in their homes, ask for the detention of those who have been their aggressors, plunderers and expellers without punishment for five years, as well as guarantees to be able to leave exile and return to their communities.
“We demand punishment for the paramilitaries from these ejidos, who are the ones responsible for the kidnapping and for all the crimes that they are denouncing to the public ministers of Palenque, Ocosingo and San Cristóbal de las Casas.”
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