[News] Guerrero - Song of the Guerrilla

Fri Jul 24 12:54:51 EDT 2009

http://www.counterpunch.org/jross07242009.html

July 24-26, 2009

Reverberations in Guerrero

The Song of the Guerrilla

By JOHN ROSS

One day long ago in August 1974, the 25th to be 
precise, in the heat of the Mexican military's 
"dirty war" to root out subversion in the Pacific 
coast state of Guerrero, security forces under 
the command of General Mario Arturo Acosta 
Chaparo dragged the popular musician and former 
mayor of Atoyac Rosendo Radilla off a bus along 
the Costa Grande highway just north of Acapulco. 
His son, also named Rosendo and then 11, 
remembers that when the musician asked the 
"guachos" (local vernacular for federal troops) 
why he was being detained he was told that it was 
for "writing corridos (ballads) about Lucio 
Cabanas", a rebel Atoyac schoolteacher whose 
Party of the Poor was then roaming the sierras 
that soar above the Costa Grande. Rosendo Radilla never saw his father again.

This past July 7th, 35 years after the elder 
Radilla vanished off the face of the earth, 
Rosendo and his sister Tita sat in a San Jose 
Costa Rica courtroom as the Inter-American Human 
Rights Court (CIDH) opened hearings into their 
father's long-ago forced disappearance. The 
hearing was the first time an international court 
has agreed to put Mexico's "dirty war" (1974-78) on trial.

To be sure, the corridista was not the only local 
to have been disappeared during the military's 
long reign of terror. Families in Atoyac count 
more than 600 campesinos taken by security forces 
and never seen again. Acosta Chaparo was later 
convicted of dumping the bodies of 143 prisoners 
from Mexican air force Israeli Arava 201s into 
the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco. The names of 121 
other victims were attached to the Radilla case 
before the CIDH. Even Mexico's Interior Secretary 
Fernando Gomez Mont, who oversees internal 
security, concedes that the military was probably 
complicit in Rosendo's disappearance but argues 
that the CIDH has no jurisdiction in the case - 
the court did not exist in 1974 and Mexico only 
recognized its competence in human rights matters in 1998.

At any rate, Gomez Mont insisted before the 
court, Mexico has made great advances in human 
rights since 1974. "That was another Mexico. Mexico is different now."

Or is it?

Not a month before the CIDH convened to review 
Rosendo Radilla's shrouded fate, Mexican army 
troops occupied three towns in the very same 
sierra where Cabanas was eventually run to ground 
and executed in December 1974. 500 soldiers in 
three troop carriers, a dozen hummers, and 
accompanied by a brace of U.S.-manufactured 
helicopters invaded the high sierra municipality 
of Coyuca de Catalan under the aegius of 
President Felipe Calderon's White House-financed 
War on the Drug Cartels. In one village of 50 
families, the guachos threatened to burn down all the houses.

A group of advocates from the Tlachinollan Human 
Rights Center which reached Puerto de Las Ollas 
just as the troops were pulling out, recorded 
eyewitness accounts of torture. Among the abuses: 
a crippled man was pulled off his burro and when 
he refused to answer the guachos' questions, 
needles were inserted under his fingernails. The 
soldiers poured motor oil on maiz reserves the 
villagers had been storing to feed their families through the rainy season.

Although the incursion was reportedly ordered in 
pursuit of local marijuana and poppy growers, the 
solders repeatedly questioned villagers as to the 
whereabouts of one "Comandante Ramiro", leader of 
the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People 
(ERPI) that is said to be encamped in these mountain forests.

In a communiqué issued in early July, Comandante 
Ramiro took issue with the military's cover story 
that the guachos were hunting dope growers. Three 
times between June 9th and the 11th, the ERPI had 
confronted the Mexican army in the Sierra of 
Coyuca de Catalan, killing three troops and 
wounding one, the guerrilla leader claimed. To 
counter the ERPI's disclosure, Secretary of 
Defense officials displayed ten uniforms and a 
dozen long guns at a press conference in nearly 
Ciudad Altamirano, claiming that 16 members of a 
"gavilla" (dope gang) had been killed in the skirmishes.

If Comandante Ramiro's story can be corroborated, 
the face-off in the Sierra marks the first 
between the rebels and the Mexican military since 
11 Indian farmers attending an ERPI meeting 
across the state at El Charco were gunned down June 10th, 1998.

Other casualties during the six days (June 
7th-13th) that the military was storming 
communities in the Coyuca Sierra include 
liberation priest Habacuc Hernandez and two young 
seminarians cut down on the streets of Altamirano 
by unknowns under the nose of the local army command.

The military offensive was conducted under a 
press blackout. No reporter was invited to 
accompany the convoy and when, on July 14th, La 
Jornada de Guerrero published a front-page story 
under the headline "The Army Lays Siege To A 
Sierra Town", a thousand copies of the paper were 
seized by unidentified armed men on a mountain 
road north of Acapulco and the truck hijacked.

Who is this Comandante Ramiro and what does he 
want? According to press reports, the rebel 
leader, who has become the most visible 
spokesperson for the guerrilla option in Mexico, 
is an ex-prisoner named Omar Guerrero Solis. In 
recent months, Ramiro has become emboldened 
enough to call a press conference at an 
undisclosed Sierra location that was attended by 
the national media - one photo shows a group of 
15 women holding aloft their AK-47s.

The ERPI is preparing to resume its offensive 
against the "mal gobierno" ("bad government") in 
coming months, Comandante Ramiro disclosed to 
reporters but conceded that his fighters were 
short on arms. The Comandante also told the 
journalists that he thought he would be killed in 
the coming fighting. The only way he would come 
down from the Sierra was "slung over the back of a mule, dead."

The ERPI is one of several split-offs from the 
Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) that rose on 
June 28th 1996 on the first year anniversary of 
the massacre of 17 farmers at a lonely river 
crossing Aguas Blancas closer to the coast. The 
EPR was itself an alliance of 14 guerilla "focos" 
with many cadre drawn from the descendants of 
those who had once fought alongside Cabanas. 
Throughout 1996, the EPR battled the Mexican army 
at many points in Guerrero and several other 
states before their guns fell mysteriously silent.

In Guerrero, it is often difficult to sort out 
who is doing the shooting. The sparsely peopled 
outback up in the high country of the western 
Sierra Madre is the traditional stomping ground 
of both guerrillas and gavillas, bands of 
pistoleros who grow "mota" (marijuana) and 
"amapola" (opium poppies) destined for the U.S. 
market. The gavillas serve as mercenaries for 
powerful "caciques" or rural bosses usually 
associated with the long-ruling PRI party who 
scalp the forests, sell of the timber, and grow 
dope and run their cattle on the cleared land.

In the mid 1990s, farmers in the sierras of 
Coyuca and Petatlan mobilized against the PRI 
caciques, some of whom had struck a deal with the 
U.S.-based Boise Cascade timber giant, then 
operating on the Costa Grande. Two leaders of the 
"Campesinos Ecologistas" ("Ecological Farmers") 
Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera were run to 
ground by the Mexican military, tortured, and 
forced to sign false confessions admitting that 
they were dope growers. Montiel and Cabrera were 
imprisoned in Iguala State Penitentiary where 
they were designated prisoners of conscience by 
Amnesty International and were awarded the 
much-coveted Goldman Prize, an environmental 
Nobel, for their defense of Guerrero's forests.

Nonetheless, despite the international renown of 
the Ecological Farmers, the caciques continue to 
call the shots up in the Sierra - the 
all-powerful rancher and timber poacher Rogociano 
de la Alba has been accused of ordering the 
"suicide" of the Campesinos Ecologistas' lawyer 
Digna Ochoa in 2000. Villagers rousted up in 
Puerto de Las Ollas in June report that the 
guachos repeatedly chanted "Viva Rogociano!"

The state of Guerro has been the hot pot for the 
war of the guerrilla (literally "little war" or 
sometimes "the War of the Flea") since 
pre-conquest times when the undermanned Chontales 
bravely resisted the domination of the Aztec 
Empire. Jose Maria Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, 
the sons of Afro-Mexican muleteers, led guerrilla 
armies in the hot lands of Guerrero during the 
war of liberation from the Spanish Crown. Some of 
the most illustrious battles of that 
incorruptible revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and 
his Liberating Army of the South were fought in 
Guerrero during the 1910-1919 Mexican revolution. 
Indeed, Lucio Cabanas, who, in concert with 
another rural maestro Genaro Vazquez, kept the 
guachos busy back in the 1960s and '70s, was the 
grandson of one of Zapata's generals. The EPR was 
larded with the grandsons and nephews of 
Cabanas's fighters until it split into an 
alphabet soup of groups like the ERPI, the EPRI, 
the FARP, PROCUP, and the Comando Justiciero of 
the Clandestine Committee of the Poor-June 28th (CCRO-CJ28.)

The recent fireworks in the Sierra suggest that 
the story isn't done yet. 2010, the 100th 
anniversary of the start of the Mexican 
revolution and the bicentennial of liberation 
from Spain is seen by some as an historical 
platform for the resurgence of the armed option 
which, in light of the stolen presidential 
elections in 2006 and the return of the PRI to 
power in the recent July 5th mid-terms, seems 
more inviting in some quarters than the electoral one.

Until the firefight between the Mexican army and 
the ERPI in June, the guerrillas of Mexico had 
lapsed into a profound silence - often a sign 
that something is cooking down below. The 
fighters of the Zapatista Army of National 
Liberation in the highlands and jungle of Chiapas 
have long since abandoned their guns as they 
peacefully till their cornfields in self-declared 
autonomous territories and the EZLN's charismatic 
spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos has not been seen or heard from all year.

The EPR, which long ago moved its base of 
operations to Oaxaca, was jolted back to life in 
May 2007 when two of its historical leaders, 
Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Gabriel Cruz Sanchez were 
kidnapped by security forces from a hotel in the 
Oaxaca city market. To draw attention to the 
forced disappearances, the Popular Revolutionary 
Army bombed PEMEX oil pipelines in Guanajuato and 
adjoining Queretero state, suggesting that they 
have cadre in that central Mexican region. 
Negotiations with the Calderon government for the 
return of the EPR militants via a blue-ribbon 
commission of leftist notables headed by San 
Cristobal de las Casas Bishop Emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz have floundered.

Up until the June skirmishes in the Coyuca 
sierra, the ERPI, which was decapitated by the 
arrests of its maximum leaders, "Comandanta 
Aurora" (AKA Gloria Arenas) and Jacobo Silva, has 
limited itself to issuing firebrand manifestoes on the Internet.

Some years ago, Mexico's lead intelligence 
agency, the CISEN, estimated that 10 to 15 armed 
guerrillas operated in country. Today, the agency 
which certainly has its ear pressed firmly to 
ground in light of possible insurrection in 2010, 
does not quantify the number of rebel groups with 
an armed capacity in the field.

Rooted on the remote edges of the country like 
the sierras of Guerrero, guerrilla bands cannot 
inflict much damage on the highly centralized 
Mexican state but coordinated, simultaneous 
risings in various regions of the republic would 
certainly be a crucible for destabilization in 2010.

Such unified initiatives have had success in the 
past - the Mexican revolution, in fact, was the 
handiwork of three separate peasant armies that 
sometimes moved together to unseat dictators and 
despots. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in January 
1994 was originally conceived of as a coordinated 
insurrection to be carried out by the Zapatista 
Army of National Liberation in the south and the 
Francisco Villa Army in Chihuahua - but the 
northern force was never consolidated. On August 
28th, 1996, the EPR staged coordinated attacks in 
Guerrero, Oaxaca, Mexico state, Guanajuato, and 
Chiapas targeting federal troops and police. Just 
this past week (July 11th-12th), in west central 
Michoacan state, the narco-guerrilla known as La 
Familia gunned down 16 federal police officers in 
17 coordinated attacks. An alliance between 
guerilla groups and narco cartels like La Familia 
cannot be discounted as Mexico moves into 2010 mode.

In "La Violin", a 2007 movie that recreates the 
dirty war in Guerrero (in its opening scene, 
unseen guachos brutally beat a suspected 
guerrillero), the late one-handed fiddle players 
Angel Tavira, one of an elite family of hot land 
Paganinis, plays an itinerant musician who spies 
on the soldiers and buries guns for the guerrilla 
until he is finked out and tortured to death ("La 
Violin" is also the name of a torture technique.) 
Political columnists Julio Hernandez (La Jornada) 
recently imagined Don Angel up in heaven wrapping 
his stump as he prepares to strike bow to fiddle. 
But the old man is confused about what to play, 
Hernandez wrote. He doesn't know if what is 
happening in the sierras of Guerrero is the end 
of a long story or the beginning of a new chapter.

John Ross will present "Iraqigirl", the diary of 
a teenager coming of age under U.S. occupation 
Thursday July 30th at Modern Times, 888 Valencia 
Street, in San Francisco's Mission (7 PM.) Ross 
developed and edited the new Haymarket volume 
from IraqiGirl's blogs. He can be reached at: 
<mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org

Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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