La Jornada Friday, April 21, 2000.
by Gilberto Lo'pez y Rivas

{Gilberto Lo'pez y Rivas is a PRD legislator and a member of the Commission of Concordance and Peace (Cocopa) who recently visited the conflict zone}

The virtual military recolonization of the Selva Lacandona is part of the counterinsurgency strategy put into practice by the government of Ernesto Zedillo against the EZLN peoples, communities, support bases and insurgents.

As we were able to confirm during our recent trip, it is an issue of saturating the war theatre through increasing the density of troops; establishing the maximal number of fixed army positions, including barracks, garrisons, camps, observation points and checkpoints - in addition to those belonging to the Department of Government, the state police and paramilitaries; and exercising air and land control of roads and transportation.

But, in addition to the strictly military siege of penetration and harassment, the army is trying to change the internal dynamic of the communities through paramilitaries and the subjugation of indigenous residents, by imposing economic subordination to the military machine, by making them dependent on the presence of soldiers, and by breaking the ties that hold indigenous culture together through sexual aggression against the women, who are the carriers of the language and the ones in charge of the communities' cultural socialization.

Because of that, the rape and prostitution of indigenous women are not just the result of the incursion by soldiers into the besieged communities, but part of the counterinsurgency strategy to damage the "enemy's" morale. In that way it forms the very essence of a tactic that seeks to militarize consciences, to destroy ethnic identities, attacking the cornerstone of family and community organization, and, with that, perpetrating a new kind of ethnocide.

The approximately 200 families of Amador Herna'ndez have understood this very well. They do not want to end up like the community of San Quinti'n, where a complex of modern and costly military facilities has been built, which is an affront to the poverty and needs of the nearby villages. Around the military base swarm the "shops" and "service centers," which are aimed at the occupants who control all the matters the community assembly once resolved.

The army took illegal possession in Amador Herna'ndez of an ejidal predio of six hectares, widening its area permanently through the felling of trees and the raising of barbed wire fences which obstruct the roadway. The assembly realizes the significance of the military presence in the community's lands: the removal carried out by the force of arms; the constant threat against the women, who are unable to gather firewood or to go to the river in search of additional food; the terror they provoke in the children and the enormous collective fatigue.

In the community assembly, the women state, time and again, that they do not want "the armies," that their presence has destroyed the freedom of movement they enjoyed before, that they are living in a permanent state of tension, since they [the soldiers] leave the camp at nighttime in order to prowl around the population. The men express the reasons for their resistance every day at the sit-in where they take turns in order to reproach the soldiers for their usurpation. They wish to remain united as a zapatista community. In San Quinti'n they assert that customs and traditions have broken down, that the children no longer respect their parents, that there are many children of soldiers who are growing up without an acknowledged father, that one of the men in the community was murdered recently because a soldier had raped his wife.

Are there no national and international laws that will protect the indigenous victims of the counterinsurgency war? Can the Department of National Defense remain deaf and mute to the daily complaints that predios are being illegally occupied, that the rivers are being deliberately poisoned, that they are systematically deforesting, that the national budget is being spent to maintain an occupation army against the will of the residents? How long are the rapes of indigenous women as a means of breaking down resistance and community structures going to go unpunished? How far do they want to go in Chiapas with this dislocation of communities, to be replaced by the new military colonization? Will the military be the new reorganizers of the spaces that capital aspires to, the order-givers and protectors of the neoliberal program? How long are they going to pretend that "nothing-is-happening-in-Chiapas," while there is a form of ethnocide under way in Chiapas every single day?

Translated by irlandesa