Mexico: San Blas Under Siege (Oaxaca)

Surrounded by 800 Heavily Armed Police Agents, San Blas Atempa, Oaxaca, Refuses to Surrender
The Autonomous Government Was Violently Expelled on Wednesday, but the “Official” Government Has Not Yet Returned to City Hall
www.narconews.com
By Al Giordano and Bertha Rodríguez Santos
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in San Blas Atempa, Oaxaca

March 2, 2006

SAN BLAS ATEMPA, OAXACA; MARCH 2, 2006: The town of San Blas is under siege, surrounded by 800 state troopers and other heavily-armed police who invaded the Popular Autonomous City Hall here at three o’clock on Wednesday morning. They came in the pre-dawn hours following the indigenous Zapotec town’s traditional Carnaval fiesta. By Wednesday night there were violent confrontations between townspeople and riot cops, gunshots, teargas canisters shot from cannons, attack dogs, and at least four arrests — people who once again, as occurred here 14 months ago, were imprisoned as a consequence of being wounded in the streets.

The siege came exactly fourteen months to the New Years Day in 2005 that the townspeople — tired of the simulation of democracy imposed upon them by a local political boss that is backed by a repressive state government — took the City Hall in a history that became known to the Republic and the world on February 6 when they welcomed Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos at the building. The rebel spokesman then visited five political prisoners from the town at the nearby penitentiary (a visit that is documented in the video newsreel “Marcos Goes to Jail” by the Other Journalism with the Other Campaign) and vowed that their local rebellion would soon turn national.

The violent occupation by state troopers came nine days after the arrest, on Sunday February 19, of Nicanor Salud — a local moto-tricycle driver (the primary form of transportation between San Blas and nearby Tehuantepec) involved with the town’s Civil Resistance Committee, and one of 72 local citizens with arrest warrants over their heads stemming from the January 2005 uprising. Police planted a pistol and a bag of cocaine on Salud and brought him to the federal prosecutor’s office in Salina Cruz. There, 500 indignant San Blas townspeople surrounded the building and threatened to occupy it if their compañero remained prisoner. Salud still faces federal charges for the pistol and drugs used justify that arrest. As he was being released on bail, state prosecutors arrived to detain him on the 2005 arrest warrant, but indigenous Zapotec women of the town, in their colorful huipil blouses and skirts, created a human wall around him and whisked Salud off to safety. Salud then addressed a multitude from the steps of the Autonomous City Hall, declaring himself a “Zapatista and adherent to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle.” And the townspeople, by public assembly, voted to do the same, en masse.