by Leila Whitley

¨…I believe that there is one truth. This truth is that the use of violence to conquer another human is reproachable, inadmissible and something that cannot be viewed with indifference."
-Valentina Palma Novoa, detained in Atenco.

We have all heard the stories of the May 3rd and 4th massacre in San Salvador Atenco. We have seen the blood that poured from the beaten bodies of the flower vendors and their allies. We have heard and repeated the name of Javier Cortés Santiago, the 14-year-old boy executed by a .38 caliber police bullet. (While the police continue to claim that they were unarmed in Atenco, we have pictures and stories and this death that speak another truth.) We have mourned the death of Alexis Benhumea, the 20-year-old student who was doubly violated by the extreme police violence; first when he was hit in the temple with a tear gas canister, opening his skull, and second while he slowly died, trapped in hiding for hours, unable to go to the hospital because of the violence that continued to dominate the streets. Listening to the stories of the women of Atenco, we have shuddered in terror and empathy, imagining the sexual violence they endured. As these women continue to be held in the prison of Santiaguito, under the vigilance of their violators, we go on worrying for their safety and the daily fear and humiliation they face. We are also moved by their courage, and the courage of all of the people of Atenco who have endured atrocity and resisted.

The May massacre was not the Mexican state's first violation of the people of Atenco nor was it the first time the people of Atenco resisted. San Salvador Atenco has a dynamic history of state infringement and civil resistance.

**

In Atenco, the fields of corn grow high and lush. The plants are a deep shade of green in the afternoon's twirling light. It is late July, almost three months after the massacre. I am sitting in the back of a pickup truck, being bounced down a rutted road that winds through these fields, through a fertile countryside that the people of Atenco have defended over the years with their fierceness, their blood and their love.
Nestled amongst the corn leaves are houses, one painted a shocking tone of turquoise. A line of laundry cuts across the small yard, clothes from a morning's washing airing out in the sun. The road winds on, forever into these rich spaces. If the Mexican government had succeeded in its 2001- 2002 attempt to appropriate this land and transform it into a new sprawling airport and commercial centre, all of this ─ these lands, these homes, the loving endeavor of putting the morning's clean clothes out to dry ─ would have been bulldozed, crumbled back into empty soil and cemented over.
We arrive at a point deep in the fields and park our cars beside a hill that rises abruptly out of the flat land. In clumsy file, we scramble up the incline, cacti crunching beneath our feet. We are here to look out across all of these lands and to talk about what happened the day of the massacre. We can see, as the people point out to us, the distant shape of Mexico City, across the plains. Beneath our feet are fragments of pottery from some indistinct, ancient culture. It is rumored that the hill we stand on is a buried temple. It is also rumored that the Mexican military came at one point and mysteriously excavated a large object from this hill, although none of our hosts are sure what it was. I add this to my mental list of absurd violations perpetrated against the people of Atenco and to my list of invaluable treasures the government is willing to level in order to have its way.

On October 21, 2001 the government first announced its seizure of 4,500 hectares of the lands of Atenco, Texcoco and Chimalhuacán. On top of these homes and crops the government declared that it would build the new International Airport of Mexico, a project that would entail extending the already massive city of Mexico all across the intervening lands up until the town of Atenco; a distance that, on the highway, takes an hour to drive. This seizure violated not only the desires and rights of the land's residents and owners, but also the Mexican government's own code: article 115, which regulates municipal government, makes the seizure illegal.
The people of these communities responded with resistance, forming the People's Front in Defense of Land (Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, FPDT). "The land is life," as it is said, and being robbed of land is tantamount to being robbed of existence. Paving over the vitality of these fields - the corn, lima beans, string beans, alfalfa, barley, wheat, carrots, squash, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, hollyhock, and rosemary - would demolish the way of life of a community. The land and its people would be expelled and flattened into another stretch of anonymous pavement. The people, left to seek other pieces of land, and wondering how long before they too are expelled from these places, would become refugees in a world already overflowing with forced displacement.
On the morning of the government's decree the residents of Atenco blocked the Lechería – Texcoco highway for hours, clutching sticks and stones, and the symbol of their resistance: machetes. Their resistance endured for nine months, with the people declaring, "We will not give up our land, even if it means giving up our lives."
To this day, the fields and families of Atenco persist and the new airport has not been built.

"I asked her (the woman beside me) her name and she responded, 'If I die, don't cry for me, throw a celebration for me. Please.' I cried in silence, feeling myself alone in the company of the many other beaten bodies, thinking the worst: that they would bring us to who knows what place and there they would kill us and disappear all of us. For a moment I slept, but the odor of blood and death woke me again."
- Testimony of a woman detained in Atenco, speaking of the transport to prison.

On the hilltop, as we set up cameras and begin asking our questions, the air becomes tense with the emotional energy of the stories of the 3rd and 4th of May. I ask one boy if he was present when the massacre occurred, and he only shrugs and says, "I am from Atenco. Yes, I was here." For these people, the massacre was not a stunning piece of publicity, garishly fascinating; it was an appalling rupture in the fabric of their daily lives.
The stories, at this point, are well known despite the mainstream media's refusal to report on the police violence. Thousands of state and federal troops, who used systematic and severe violence against residents, were sent to Atenco over the course of the two-day massacre. Houses were raided, windows broken and doors kicked in, as police forced entry into buildings where civilians had taken refuge. Once inside, police beat those whom they encountered. Images of clusters of heavily armed cops relentlessly kicking individuals who huddle on the ground, defenseless, have been distributed by alternative media sources. The image of one man being dragged through the streets by officers, covered in his own blood, has become iconic of the extreme use of police force. (This man is now unable to care for himself as the police beating left the bones in his hands pulverized, rendering them unusable.)
The women of Atenco, arrested and piled into dark vans, were sexually tortured during the ride to the Santiaguito prison. Forty-seven testimonies of sexual abuse have been released. The women were forced to lie in pools of each other's blood, their clothes stripped from them. The officers beat them in the genitals, forced them to perform oral sex and raped them in a sickening variety of ways.
International human rights organizations all over the world have denounced the abuse, but the Mexican government has responded by deeming the offense forced "oral sex" and "abuse of authority," - the only offenses any officer involved in Atenco has been charged with are "minor offenses (delitos no graves)."
It has been suspected by some that the massacre of Atenco was the government's final vindication; it's vengeance upon the community of Atenco for the successful thwarting of the 2001/2002 airport project. It has also been theorized that the government expected its assault upon the community to go unnoticed since the citizens, being poor farmers, possess very little social currency in today's capitalist market of human value.

**

We descend from the hilltop, the distant outline of Mexico City's gray sky sliding from view as we do. The families who are hosting us bring us to a park and feed us tamales, Mexican rice and tortillas. We laugh together as we swat at the bees that are swarming around us.
I wander off through the park with one man, who tells me the history of the lake of Texcoco area that Atenco is nestled within, and of the ancient stories these lands possess. He gives me a gift of a key chain he has woven. I am struck by the community's warmth and cohesion, and that in the face of all of their struggles and suffering they are so generous with us, loving and jovial.
The day is calm; the dusty roads sprawl away as we traipse along them. I try to imagine them as they were; attempt to picture the violence, death, and blood that transpired here not so long ago.

**

"Companeros, companeras, Pueblo of Atenco, we bring with us a greeting from the men
and women, children and elders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. We would like to tell you that we continue in our promised struggle, together with all of you, for liberty and justice for all of the political prisoners of the 3rd and 4th of May."
- Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos

A few days later I am sitting with John Gibler, an alternative journalist who frequently writes for Znet, in a Mexico City café. It is raining, as it nearly always is this time of year, and we are drinking coffee so strong that our blood is racing. We are talking about his time with The Other Campaign's (La Otra Campaña's) caravan.
The Other Campaign is a political effort put forward by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejercito zapatista de liberación nacional, EZLN), whose first step is a caravan that has been travelling throughout Mexico since the beginning of this year, meeting with leftist political organizations and communities throughout the country. It is, more than anything, a listening tour, out of which it is hoped a national political network will be born. In the ideal, this network will then be able to organize an "other way of doing politics" outside of the realm of corrupt party politics and inefficient federalist democracy. Of course, for Gibler and I, it is impossible to talk about the caravan without returning to the massacre of San Salvador Atenco. The caravan stopped with Atenco and has not moved forward a day since.*
Gibler tells me of his day in Atenco, the 4th of May. Every new Atenco story that I hear I am shocked by, no matter how many times the histories of horror are retold. Gibler tells me that he saw Alexis dying on the floor of the house where he was trapped, brain exposed, bleeding to death.
In the face of this suffering, it was the FPDT that requested the solidarity and support of the EZLN. The Other Campaign had passed through Atenco the week before the massacre, and so the organization was physically, as well as politically, close at hand. The EZLN and the FPDT began their alliance in 2002 during the course of the Atenco airport resistance, during which time the EZLN also worked in support and solidarity with the people of Atenco in their struggle to defend their land. The FPDT are supporters of and adherents to the Other Campaign.
The EZLN responded to the FPDT's request with the announcement of an indefinite "Red Alert" in all Zapatista territory and the immediate suspension of the Other Campaign's tour. Marcos, the spokesperson of the EZLN, returned to Atenco on the 5th of May to lead a march publicizing and denouncing the police aggressions, and has since remained in the city of Mexico, working to organize the release of the political prisoners. In the weeks that followed, highway blockades, coordinated all across Mexico, were mounted in solidarity with those who suffered in the massacre of Atenco, demanding immediate attention to the grave problem. On multiple occasions, Marcos has returned to speak in and about Atenco.
Solidarity and resistance efforts have now expanded to an overwhelming international effort. More than 200 movements demanding the release of the political prisoners and the legal prosecution of the responsible officers now exist in more than 80 global cities. From Venice to Los Angeles, people are protesting in front of Mexican embassies and flooding consulates with letters of protests, while marches and information tables, presentations and video nights, are spreading the stories of the people.
While most of those arrested in Atenco have been released or allowed to post bail, 29 political prisoners remain incarcerated indefinitely. One of these prisoners is mentally ill and not receiving the treatment that his condition demands.
Due to the extreme irregularity in the apprehension of the political prisoners it is speculated that the 29 will be released before the presidential power is transferred. Mexico's federal elections occurred in July and while the electoral process has been denounced and is still contested due to extreme irregularity and likely fraud, the power transfer to the declared winner is scheduled to occur at the end of this year. The political baggage of Atenco may be too much to carry through into a new political term.
Of the nearly 300 persons arrested in the course of the massacre, nine were under the age of eighteen. These children were not members of any social justice organization, and so their detention appears to be arbitrary. The charges that were brought against the adults arrested in Atenco were general and, in some cases, clearly invented. The state possesses no proof against any individual. In many cases, it is impossible for the individuals charged to have committed the crimes they are accused of as they were not physically in the areas where the offenses purportedly occurred. In one case, a paraplegic was charged with armed kidnapping. Being fully paralyzed, it is unclear how the Mexican officials could have believed him responsible for this act. The five internationals who were arrested in Atenco were never charged with any offense, although they were immediately deported to their home countries – a proceeding that violated both Mexican and international law. Because of these irregularities, combined with the extreme abuse of the detained and internationally denounced human rights violations, the Mexican state cannot claim any validity in its apprehension of the political prisoners of Atenco.
At this point in the political struggle, it is fundamental to continue in the denunciation of the torture and human rights abuses that occurred in Atenco. Not a single officer has yet to be submitted to legal process for the sexual violations and gratuitous violence. The Mexican state has not responded to the condemnations of human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and the Mexican National Commission for Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos) and is therefore implicitly persisting in a legitimization of the force used in Atenco. Furthermore, the violation of human rights continues as 29 people are still illegally held in prison. The swift liberation of these prisoners is essential and something that we, as both national and international solidarity forces, must continue to demand.

"Pueblo, raise your voice until we have cured justice of deafness! May we also raise our reason and our sanity to be heard! If our hands here inside this prison cannot do anything, it will be our words that do it!
May our liberty be returned to us!
May we have justice for the physical and sexual abuse and the violations!
May no one remain indifferent to the suffering that all of us endured!
Freedom for Political Prisoners!"
-from the political prisoner's letter to the world

* A communiqué was released the 13th of September announcing that the Otra tour will shortly resume its travels throughout the north of Mexico. To remain in solidarity with the pueblo of Atenco, commanders of the EZLN will be moving into the country's centre to continue with the organizing for the liberation of the prisoners of Atenco.