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<h1><b>U.S. Political Consultants Dick Morris and Rob Allyn Are the
Virtual Rapists of
Atenco</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1817.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1817.html<br>
</a></font><h2><b>Fox’s Government Tortured, Raped and Expelled Foreign
Journalists as His Own Gringo Political Handlers Violated Article 33 of
the Mexican Constitution<br><br>
<br><br>
</b></h2><h3><b>By Al Giordano<br>
Special to The Narco News Bulletin</b></h3><font size=3>May 16,
2006<br><br>
The Atenco atrocity has become the international news story that not even
the most cynical U.S. political consultants could cover up. Here is part
of the news that Dick Morris and Rob Allyn, U.S. citizens both, are
frantically trying to keep you from knowing:<br><br>
Mexican police raped 30 of the 47 women political prisoners arrested this
month in San Salvador Atenco
<a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/14/008n1pol.php">according to
legal complaints</a> filed with Mexico’s National Human Rights
Commission. And the Mexican government acknowledges that it expelled five
foreign nationals (four of them women, each of whom has testified that
she was sexually tortured by police) after the now-deported visitors
heroically documented the police raids and brutality there on May 4. To
cover up the atrocity, the government of Vicente Fox stole their cameras
and film (along with their passports and money) then shipped them back to
their home countries Spain, Germany and Chile on one-way flights,
expelled, each of them, from Mexico for five years.<br><br>
Hiding behind the political curtain as the women were raped and tortured
were the two gringo political consultants: Dick Morris and Rob Allyn.
They advise President Vicente Fox and his favored presidential candidate,
Felipe Calderón, of Fox’s National Action Party (PAN, in its Spanish
initials) on how to manipulate the mass media and in the art of “crisis
management.”<br><br>
The testimonies of sexual torture by the expelled journalists shock and
compel. After the Atenco arrests, the same bestiality was inflicted on
Mexican women and men, including one young Mexican man anally raped with
a nightstick, but the foreigners expelled before most of the Mexicans
were able to tell their stories to the outside world were merely the
first voices able to speak about the horror inflicted upon them by Fox’s
regime. The coming weeks will bring a cascade of similar horror stories.
We will translate some of the testimonies already offered here.<br><br>
But first, we offer a trip down amnesia lane: Because one of these U.S.
political consultants, Rob Allyn, is, as we reported here six years ago,
an electoral delinquent in Mexico, who admittedly broke the same Mexican
law that was used, illegally, to expel the five foreigners this
month.<br><br>
The other gringo is Dick Morris, the very same political consultant who,
while running U.S. President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in
1996, resigned in disgrace when it was revealed that he a married man
paid a woman that was not his wife $200 an hour for sex.<br><br>
So when Fox advised by U.S. political mercenaries Dick Morris and Rob
Allyn sent federal police earlier this month to Atenco to wage an
illegal (<i>sans</i> search warrants) house-to-house hunt for dissidents;
when hundreds were rounded up, beaten, tortured and dozens were sexually
penetrated, some by penises, others by fingers, billy clubs and other
weapons; when, then, the Fox regime expelled the few foreigners swept up
among the more than 200 arrested, all this occurred under the command of
a president that doesn’t make a move without consulting his gringo
handlers. At moments of crisis, Fox turns to the advice and counsel of
the two gringos, Morris and Allyn, whose clients have also included U.S.
presidents George W. Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bill
Clinton.<br><br>
There is no nice way to say it: Their role as advisors to Fox during the
Atenco crisis makes Dick Morris and Rob Allyn into virtual rapists of at
least thirty women this month by the police sent by their
client.<br><br>
And their other client, the candidate Felipe Calderón, now sputters to
the press in frantic denial of the evidence that now boomerangs back
upon him that the rapes never happened. In opting for this strategy of
denial, he and his U.S. political consultants Allyn and Morris are
gang-raping these women a second time.<br><br>
<br>
</font><h5><b>Meet Rob Allyn, Electoral
Delinquent</b></h5><font size=3>Six years ago, during the 2000
presidential elections in Mexico, this newspaper reported that a United
States political consultant named Rob Allyn was dishonestly meddling in
Mexican politics. At the time, he was as a clandestine paid advisor to
then-presidential candidate Vicente Fox. But he denied it first to
Narco News, and then to other media that inquired.<br><br>
<img src="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/images/Rob_Allyn_aaf.jpg" width=200 height=252 alt="[]">
<br>
Rob Allyn<br>
Allyn <a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//pollreply1.html">in a
series of emails to your correspondent</a> at first tried to lie his
way out of it. He had come to Mexico City in June 2000 where he had
called a press conference, falsely representing himself as an impartial
election observer for a paper organization he called “Democracy Watch.”
Later, after Fox won the July 2000 election, Allyn, eager to take credit
for the victory,
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//roballyn1.html">publicly
boasted to the
</a><a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//roballyn1.html"><i>Dallas
Morning News</a></i> that, yes, he did work for Fox’s campaign
clandestinely. He said he did so on a tourist visa and that, during three
illegal years in Mexico, he also used at least three false sets of
identification under the names “José de Murga,” “Francisco Gutiérrez,”
and “Alberto Aguirre.”<br><br>
Use of forged identification by foreigners in Mexico is a crime
punishable by up to ten years in prison. But the law was never applied to
Rob Allyn. To the contrary, he was rewarded handsomely for his crime.
Allyn was paid millions of dollars as the agent who placed Fox’s
advertisements on Mexican television, at the same time that he
represented himself to the Mexican press as an “impartial election
observer.” And now, in 2006, this electoral delinquent, Rob Allyn, is
back, helping to run the campaign of presidential candidate Felipe
Calderón, of Fox’s PAN party.<br><br>
Allyn a Republican Party consultant from Texas who has advised both
George W. Bush and his father George Herbert Walker Bush, as well as a
Texan energy billionaire with obvious interest in seeing Mexico’s
electricity and oil privatized is joined in Mexico today by U.S.
political consultant Dick Morris.<br><br>
<br>
</font><h5><b>Morris the Menace in Mexico</b></h5><font size=3>Morris was
the top political advisor to U.S. President Bill Clinton until August of
1996, when Morris, a married man, was caught with a $200-dollar-an-hour
prostitute and had to leave the Clinton campaign in disgrace.<br><br>
<img src="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/images/fn_morris_dick.jpg" width=200 height=203 alt="[]">
<br>
Dick Morris<br>
<i>Photo: Fox News<br>
</i>Morris recently penned
<a href="http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/61879.htm">a
column</a> in the <i>New York Post</i> in which he admitted, “I have
worked as a consultant for Fox and PAN.”<br><br>
A fish is caught from the mouth, first: Article 33 of the Mexican
Constitution prohibits participation by foreigners in Mexican electoral
campaigns. It says:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>“Foreigners may not involve themselves in any way in the political
affairs of the country.”<br><br>
</i>
</dl>This article of the Constitution prohibits involvement by foreigners
in Mexican electoral politics. It says nothing about taking photographs
or shooting video. But in recent days it was wielded using an illegal
interpretation of the law by Morris’ and Allyn’s Mexican client,
Vicente Fox, to expel five foreign journalists from the country, although
the journalists were not involved in any way in this year’s election
campaign.<br><br>
Not content to merely expel two Spanish women, one German woman, and a
woman and man from Chile who were photographing, filming and observing
human rights in the town of San Salvador Atenco on the morning of May 4,
the Fox government according to documentation by respected human rights
organizations and to the victims’ own testimony first beat them
savagely, tortured them sexually, stole their cameras, film and
passports, kept them incommunicado and tortured for two days, and then
dragged them onto airplanes that dumped them, bruises and all, in their
home countries.<br><br>
But these communicators have refused to be silenced. Read their words and
listen to their sincerity, their conviction, their commitment against
injustice, and compare that with the mercenary stance of virtual rapists
Rob Allyn and Dick Morris. Because it is true that there are foreigners
meddling in Mexican politics, in violation of Article 33. But it is not
the journalists or human rights observers who volunteer their time to
document the non-electoral Zapatista Other Campaign, or the atrocities of
Atenco and other parts of the country. The violators of the law are Rob
Allyn and Dick Morris. They are the bad foreigners responsible for what
happened to the five good foreigners this month outside of Mexico City:
the commanders-in-chief of the media war against human rights in
Mexico.<br><br>
<br>
<h5><b>Sexual Torture and Tourism Under
Fox</b></h5>
<img src="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/images/005n1pol-1.jpg" width=200 height=300 alt="[]">
</b></h5><font size=3><br>
Valentina Palma Novoa<br>
Photo: La Jornada<br>
</i>Doctors at the Emergency Public Assistance Hospital in Santiago de
Chile examined 30-year-old film student Valentina Palma Novoa upon her
imposed return to her country last week.
<a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/14/005n1pol.php">According to
the Mexico City daily
</a><a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/14/005n1pol.php">La
Jornada</a></i>, she suffered, at the hands and batons of Mexican police,
“contusions and hemotomas in the abdomen, the left rib region, right
shoulder and breast, as well as on her thumb and leg.” The accompanying
photo documents many of those wounds.<br><br>
Her eye-witness account
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//Issue41/article1802.html">
“They Ordered Me to Lay My Head in a Pool of Blood”</a> vividly
documents the beatings she received upon arrest, in the bus transporting
her and other prisoners to jail, and once inside the prison.<br><br>
She had lived 11 years in Mexico, at every moment her migratory status in
the country legal and covered by visas. A student of cinematography at
the prestigious Center for Cinematographic Study at Mexico’s National
School of Anthropology and History (ENAH, in its Spanish initials), she
studied with world-renowned director
<a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/novaro.html">
Maria Novaro</a>, who, according to the
<a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=104703">
New York Times</a></i>, “has created an impressive body of work that is
outstanding for its often political portrayals of women living within two
realities.”<br><br>
Palma’s Mexican visa specifically authorized her to study cinema and make
films. And that’s what she was doing on the morning of May 4, in Atenco,
when Vicente Fox’s regime grabbed her, beat her, and deported her from
Mexico.<br><br>
It was politics, and not law, that led the Fox government to expel her.
Who made the decision to send her and her testimony far from Mexican
soil? The gabacho Rob Allyn? The gringo Dick Morris? Her deportation
occurred in violation of a court protective order, known under Mexican
law as an amparo</i>. That is the authoritarian Mexico of Vicente Fox and
Felipe Calderón, as guided by the U.S. political consultants Allyn and
Morris: a plea for “law and order” that disregards its own judicial
decisions.<br><br>
The other Chilean expelled, Mario Aguirre, fared no better.<br><br>
Also student at Mexico’s National School of Anthropology and History,
upon his return to Chile, Aguirre reported to the same hospital, which
found “bruises on the thorax, contusions under his scalp, lesions on the
left knee and scrapes on the right knee, all as the result of an
aggression.”<br><br>
Aguirre’s <a href="http://vientos.info/cml/?q=node/3116">testimony</a>
corroborates that of the four women expelled from Mexico and that of many
Mexicans who are beginning to be released either for lack of evidence
against them or on bail. Regarding the sexual tortures, he
writes:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>“I am an eyewitness to the abuses to which a woman seated beside me
was subjected. She was stripped naked at the chest while the officers
insulted and beat her on her breasts. Another woman who was on top of me
in the pile of bodies that we were stuck in was brutally beaten and her
head slammed repeated times against my back. The beatings she received
were with kicks, slaps, she was stamped upon and beaten with a
nightstick.” <br><br>
<dd>“We were witnesses to another case of abuse, against one of the
Spanish women who screamed, please, that they leave her alone because
they were suffocating her. After a few minutes her legs had numbed and so
she needed to move them. But each time she tried the police hit her hard
with the nightstick. The time that it took for all this to happen was too
long to justify a trip to the nearest jail. The torture began to be
psychological: as if they were taking us to an unpopulated place to be
killed and disappeared.”<br><br>
</i>
</dl>Compare the treatment that these good people received at the hands
of the Fox administration to the testimony of Fox’s gringo political
consultant Rob Allyn about the “hardships” he faced while running Fox’s
2000 presidential campaign, in the breathless prose of the Dallas Morning
News</i> on July 9, 2000:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>MEXICO CITY Oftentimes, Rob Allyn’s biggest challenge was trying to
remember his covert identity. If he slipped, he risked his role in a
secret mission to push along Mexico’s first bloodless revolution.
<br><br>
<dd>Puzzled waiters and hotel receptionists would stare as Mr. Allyn, a
well-known Republican political consultant in Dallas, painfully pondered
the many fake names before signing a bill. Who was he this time, José de
Murga, Francisco Gutiérrez, or Alberto Aguirre?<br><br>
<dd>“Basically, for three years I’d go home from my real job to a secret
job,” Mr. Allyn said. “I led a second life for that period.”<br><br>
</i>
</dl>As foreigners like Allyn face the dilemmas of which credit card to
whip out (in those restaurants that accept them) and how to spend the
fortunes he makes off of Mexico’s corrupt political system, others, like
the Chileans Valentina Palma and Mario Aguirre make a lie out of the
political consultant’s claim to be participating in a “bloodless
revolution.”<br><br>
Or take the testimony of Catalonian citizens Maria Sostres and Cristina
Valls, deported the same day as the Chileans on El Cinco de Mayo back
to their home city of Barcelona.<br><br>
<img src="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/images/maria_cristina_elpais.jpeg" width=200 height=200 alt="[]">
<br>
Maria Sostres and Cristina Valls<br>
Photo: El País<br>
</i>“It was a fiesta for the police,” Sostres told the Madrid daily
<a href="http://www.elpais.es/articulo/internacional/Historia/ultraje/Mexico/elpporint/20060514elpepiint_8/Tes/">
El País</a></i>, about her experience being arrested in Atenco May 4, in
an interview published on Sunday, May 14. “They passed us from hand to
hand and enjoyed themselves as they beat us.”<br><br>
“I tried to run but every street was full of police. Getting out of there
was impossible. They began to beat up everyone they found passing by,”
Valls recounted to the newspaper.<br><br>
“My face was over a pool of blood and there were six people piled on top
of me who were being violated,” testified Valls.<br><br>
Sostres witnessed various rapes by police against the detainees: “They
stuck objects, fingers and keys in their vaginas. They forced one girl to
say ‘Cowboy! Cowboy!’ while a police officer smacked her ass.”<br><br>
They spoke of people that the authorities allowed inside the jail who
claimed to be attorneys, offering free advice to the women: “One told me
not to file a complaint for the sexual abuse because it would cause more
problems for me in going free and could lead to my being in prison for a
year. I believed him. Later I retracted and wanted to widen my
declaration but they wouldn’t let me,” said Sostres.<br><br>
“We have photos of girls with their thighs black and their breasts
covered with bruises from the blows,” said Guillermo Ibarra of Mexico’s
National Human rights Commission to the Spanish daily.<br><br>
Think about the treatment that these Spaniard women, both human rights
activists, received as tourists in Mexico compared to that of Fox’s
foreign political consultant Rob Allyn. From his 2000 interview with the
Dallas Morning News</i>:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>The campaign over, the media savvy strategists talked of once
drinking brandy Mexico’s Presidente label with the future president
of Mexico in the back of a bullet-proof Suburban and of the many safe
houses, which always included an empty swimming pool.<br><br>
</i>
</dl>As Rob Allyn was back on the Mexican campaign trail, guiding Vicente
Fox and Felipe Calderón in their every move this election season, another
foreigner, Samantha Dietmar, 27, of Germany, was paying a high price for
the crime of… taking photographs. As she left her 100-peso (less than ten
dollars) hotel room early the morning of May 4, in Atenco, she was
immediately attacked by a horde of club-swinging police.<br><br>
This is part of her testimony, published on
<a href="http://mexico.indymedia.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=39&postId=1951">
Mexico Indymedia</a>:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>“‘She’s not from here,’ they shouted. My identification papers fell
to the ground and I was brought toward a vehicle. There, my hell began…
<br><br>
<dd>“I was pulled by my arms and hair to be put into the vehicle, where a
mountain of people were already piled on top of each other. There was
blood everywhere, and the people cried out in pain…<br><br>
<dd>“The police insulted us and spit on us… they stepped on top of me and
others with their boots… beating our backs, heads and feet with their
nightsticks. I felt hands upon my buttocks and back that were trying to
pull my skirt up. When I tried to put my clothing back on, they shouted
at me, ‘Gringa,’ and someone hit me in the face. My nose bled….<br><br>
<dd>“Again and again police came onto the bus and asked for the German
girl… they wanted to see my face. I was told not to move. Some hands were
touching my breasts. They asked me what I was doing there…<br><br>
<dd>“They said I had pretty eyes, and asked if I wanted to go out with
one of the police, and immediately they began to beat a man behind me,
who doubled over in pain. They pulled my hair and strands of it flew all
over the bus…”<br><br>
</i>
</dl>This is Rob Allyn’s Mexico and this is Dick Morris’ Mexico: the
return of the authoritarian state that rules with fear and violence,
arbitrarily, with two sets of laws: one that afflicts the good people,
and another that comforts the bad.<br><br>
It’s a Mexico that many a commentator in the Commercial Media recently
has complained about, blaming the atmosphere of violence on the people
who resist and protest.<br><br>
But the real blame for the heightening of tension and violence rests on
the shoulders of Dick Morris and Rob Allyn and the tone that they set for
the 2006 campaign. The truth is and the record reflects that the
political climate in Mexico began to rarify weeks prior to the bloody
conflicts of early May in Atenco and nearby Texcoco. It began before the
police displaced peaceful flower sellers and attacked those who defended
them. It began… on TV…<br><br>
<br>
</font><h5><b>The Gringos Who Opened Pandora’s
Box</b></h5><font size=3>When this year’s presidential campaign began,
some hoped for a peaceful and democratic process. After all, this is the
first presidential election to be held after Fox’s 2000 victory ended
seven decades of one-party rule. At first, the Fox administration
welcomed the Zapatista “Other Campaign” and national tour by
Subcomandante Marcos as the peaceful protest and fact-finding mission
that it is.<br><br>
But under all this flowery waxing about love and peace and democracy, the
injustices continued to seethe. And when the polls revealed that former
Mexico City Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the Democratic
Revolution Party (PRD, in its Spanish initials, a party that represents
itself as “center-left” in ideology) is headed to an irreversible victory
on July 2nd, Fox and his pet candidate, Calderón, called in the dogs from
the North.<br><br>
Dick Morris and Rob Allyn set to work feeding red meat to the corrupt
Commercial Media in Mexico: incendiary television spots, falsified public
opinion polls, and “reports” based on rumor and innuendo, to sow fear and
loathing into the election campaign. And to ensure that the Fox
administration would get the spin it wants out of the two national TV
networks Televisa and TV Azteca it rammed a new law through Congress
giving special privileges and monopoly powers to the two networks,
disintegrating the smaller media competitors.<br><br>
The Washington Post</i>
<a href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/2006/05/dick_morris_back_on_the_mexica.html">
reported on May 3rd</a>, as the police-incited violence began in Texcoco
and Atenco:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>A solid dose of negative campaigning has tightened up Mexico’s
three-way presidential race, generating a spate of stories about the
influence of controversial U.S. political strategist Dick Morris.
<br><br>
<dd>Reports in the Mexican press are raising questions about how
connected Morris might be to the campaign of Felipe Calderon. The
conservative Calderon is competing with leftist Andres Manual Lopez
Obrador and populist Roberto Madrazo in a contest to lead a nation of 105
million people whose exodus of migrants, legal and illegal, are reshaping
U.S. politics and society.<br><br>
<dd>Last month, Calderon overtook Lopez Obrador for the first time in the
polls when a survey done by the Reforma newspaper gave him a 38 to 35
percent edge over Lopez Obrador. Madrazo held 23 percent. Lopez Obrador
has retained a slight lead in other recent polls compiled by
opinamexico.org.<br><br>
<dd>Calderon’s surge followed a saturation television advertising
campaign aimed at eroding the positive image Lopez Obrador has forged as
a popular mayor of Mexico City by linking him to Venezuela’s leftist
president Hugo Chavez. In a story headlined “Mercenary Strategists
Without Rival,” the newsweekly Proceso (in Spanish by subscription)
reported this week that Calderon has contracted Morris and Texas-based
political consultant Rob Allyn “to handle not only his image, but the
development of his campaign.”<br><br>
</i>
</dl>But Morris’ advocacy on behalf of Fox and Calderón was visible a
month earlier, on April 3, when he penned
<a href="http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/61879.htm">a
column</a> for the New York Post</i> that sums up perfectly his
inflammatory approach to political campaigning. It was titled “Menace in
Mexico” and sounded like a Red Scare tract from the 1950s:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect
ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next
president. <br><br>
<dd>Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador’s campaign is
getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last
month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz), a moderate Republican, told several
Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing
support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD)…<br><br>
<dd>Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be
the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its
knees before the newly resurgent Latin left…<br><br>
</i>
</dl>Based on what he himself called “rumor,” Morris screeched:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico?
Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and
Castro.<br><br>
<br>
</i>
</dl>That was essentially the script for what came next in Mexico: TV
spots claiming that López Obrador was a stooge of Chávez and Castro,
followed by polls which claimed that Calderón was gaining on, and, later,
leading the opposition candidate. <br><br>
Another U.S. political consultant, pollster Dan Lund, wrote
<a href="http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=30912&tabla=articulos">
a column</a> for the Miami Herald</i>’s Mexican edition, an
English-language insert in the national daily El Universal</i>, analyzing
the influence of Dick Morris on this year’s Mexican campaign:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Dick Morris, the well-known consultant who boasts a brilliant track
record in electing Republicans and Democrats in the United States. He is
most well known for the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign and an
interesting sexual preference for which he was busted in a Washington
hotel. By the way, it is fair game to mention such things, for after all
he is the master of the negative campaign, featuring the use of personal
at tacks; actually, I could have used more innuendo or just made
something up, and that would have been fair game on his terms as well.
<br><br>
<dd>Morris is the guy who claims to have written the “campaign book” for
Fox in 1999-2000, and is now spreading tail feathers about his role in
the Felipe Calderón campaign….<br><br>
<dd>With this conflictive operation, the Morris book is the script
keeping it together for now, because it is all about winning, no matter
how.<br><br>
<dd>The book is that of a relentless negative campaign, using all forms
of media, electronic and informal all, at a cost that simply cannot be
met by other campaigns. This campaign book has become the choreography of
a strange Morris dance that enables the very different factions and
interests to hold together and focus on the real enemy, namely Andrés
Manuel López Obrador.<br><br>
<dd>And yet all of this was predictable: the Gringotization of the
Mexican election and the primacy of negative campaigning based on rumor
and innuendo at the hands of U.S. political consultants was the script
from the beginning. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in
its Spanish initials) warned of it almost a year ago, in the
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//Issue38/article1371.html">
Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle</a>, and set to work building
the “Other Campaign” a non-electoral effort to pull the cloak off the
scam.<br><br>
</i>
</dl>On January 1st, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos began what was
originally slated as a six-month visit to all of Mexico to hear the
testimony of the people who struggle “below and to the left.”<br><br>
The recent violence in Atenco led to the suspension of the Other Campaign
while Marcos holds what is essentially a kind of sit-in at the true seat
of power: the media capital of Mexico City. He has gone on the offensive,
selectively granting interviews to Commercial Media outlets on the
condition that they broadcast his words “uncut and unedited.” (That the
rebel spokesman has been able to impose this condition, so far, on
Televisa, CNN and Telesur, as well as the daily La Jornada</i>, is an
important fact that goes unspoken by some who complain about Marcos’
media blitz: Who has been able to impose that condition before? Who has
even tried?)<br><br>
What the “Other Campaign” has accomplished is to rip up the gringo
consultants’ script. Because while Dick Morris and Rob Allyn believe that
they can hear public opinion mediated by pollsters, Marcos has just spent
more than 120 days listening endlessly to the voices of people from every
sector of Mexican society in 19 of its 31 states plus the Federal
District of Mexico City and has developed a keener ear for what is
happening on the ground than the candidates or their consultants are able
to hear.<br><br>
That, according to national columnist Carlos Ramírez (not at all an
adherent, nor sympathizer, of the Zapatista “Other Campaign,” but a keen
political analyst), has taken the Mexican zeitgeist out of the hands of
the parties and their consultants, and put it squarely in those of the
rebels. Ramírez
<a href="http://www.lacrisis.com.mx/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2411">
writes</a>:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>The most relevant fact is that the 2006 presidential campaigns are
alienated from the reality that bothers the citizen. The promises to
create jobs, lower prices and taxes, and raise subsidies for popular
programs are far from the reality of the citizens. Atenco exploded as the
most serious problem for governability, for the administration, and for
the stability of the country, but the candidates have turned their backs.
Marcos jumped into the electoral process, assumed the initiative and is
dictating the political points of reference. And none of the candidates
have dared to analyze the role that the chief of the EZLN has assumed or
warned of the possibilities and limitations… <br><br>
<dd>This is the hour in which they have not understood that the political
analysis of Marcos is different than the traditional one of weights and
counter-weights. His strategy is to take advantage of the space created
by Atenco to construct a network of uncontrollable social
groups…<br><br>
<dd>In spite of it all, Marcos is the only one who knows what he wants
and what he must do to obtain it.
<a href="http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/la-otra-campana/335/">His
speech yesterday</a> in the Che Guevara auditorium of UNAM (the National
Autonomous University of Mexico) is coherent with his goal of social
organization. He is going to stay here in the Federal District until the
authority of the State collapses. And each day small social organizations
with goals that don’t include negotiating with the state are joining
him…<br><br>
<br>
</i></font>
</dl><h5><b>The True Foreign Meddlers in Mexico</b></h5><font size=3>The
true foreign meddlers in Mexican politics are Dick Morris, Rob Allyn and
their ilk. They not only seek to rarify the air with conflict and rumor,
creating a cloud of dust, confusion and fear out of which their clients
emerge. They do it with brazen willingness to violate the law, to invent
facts out of dark fantasies and fictions, to falsify polls, to unleash
violent police offering them the opportunity to rape and sexually torture
women as the booty of war, and, if need be, to do what was done in
Mexico’s 1988 elections, as occurred in recent years in the United
States: they and the Fox administration will resort even to
computer-generated election fraud to impose their regime’s
continuance.<br><br>
And they do it in clear violation of Article 33 of the Mexican
Constitution, against foreign involvement in electoral</i>
politics.<br><br>
But the gringo electoral delinquents in Mexico, Dick Morris and Rob
Allyn, are in over their heads.<br><br>
The victory they seek on July 2nd, no matter how achieved, will be
pyrrhic, in that Fox, following their advice by promoting violence, fear
and repression, has ensured the ungovernability of the country,
post-election, by his rooster Calderón and probably by anyone
else.<br><br>
As the Other Campaign has showed, day after day, for the past four and a
half months, the lid simply is not on tight when it comes to controlling
the Mexican populace from above. The false promises of change by the
Morris-Allyn Frankenstein named Fox raised expectations and then broke
them. And for anyone who still clung tight to that illusion by May 2nd,
the violence of May 3rd and 4th has ripped from them that innocence with
the speed at which Fox’s police raped and sexually tortured a majority of
the women they arrested in Atenco.<br><br>
The protestors chant “We Are All Atenco.” The truth is that those words
also translate to “We Have All Been Raped.” The virtual rapists of
political technique and manipulation have violated democracy
itself.<br><br>
And the nation that exists below, under their technocratic radar, cannot,
will not, rest until justice be done. Fox and his police, Calderón and
his gringo consultants, had their fiesta as Maria Sostres testified
on May 4th. Now comes the response. The Other Mexico that rises from
these ashes will include a space, anew, for Valentina Palma Novoa, for
Mario Aguirre, for Samantha Dietmar, for Cristina Valls, for Maria
Sostres, and for every decent Mexican citizen and internationalist in
solidarity with them.<br><br>
But the Mexico to come, as a result of what happened this month in
Atenco, will not include a place not even a cabaña on the beach for
the virtual rapists Dick Morris or Rob Allyn.<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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