By Jonathan

 

 

"They came from Nundaco. Many people came to where I lived. They hit me with a rock in my face.  Everything was full of blood, my face, and my nose. Then they decided to kidnap me." 

 

We sat in a small grey building in the town of San Isidro Vista Hermosa as Sara Hernandez Gonzales gave her testimony. Old and young, men and women, sat next to each other as babies cried and dogs barked outside. Eighteen community members took the afternoon off from the harsh sun of the fields to have their testimonies videotaped by a group of foreigners. One after another they introduced themselves and testified about the horrors they had experienced from the paramilitaries in the town of Santa Cruz Nundaco, a neighboring town just over the hill. Over four painful hours, this story of violence and impunity emerged.

 

 On July 4, 2005, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the municipal leader of the neighboring town of Santa Cruz Nundaco and a leader of the organization FNIC (The National Indigenous Farm-worker Front, a misleadingly named violent paramilitary organization) gathered a crowd of 500 people outside San Isidro Vista Hermosa.  They entered the town carrying sticks, stones, machetes, and firearms and shot at people with high-powered weapons as they marched into town. Three townspeople were injured from gunshot wounds, one of them a seven-year-old child named Aldair Reyes Hernandez. By five thirty, the mob led by the FNIC had attacked the town hall, taking out all the archives and documents, destroying the doors and throwing all the furniture into the street. After this first attack, the mob continued its rampage destroying seven houses and a store and burning four cars. As community member Esperanza Reyes Santiago told us, "They burned all of the doors of my house, burned the doors to my shop.  They basically wreaked havoc, destroying my refrigerator and my child's bed.  They made a huge mess of everything—the radio, television, clothes, everything. "

 

Unsatisfied with simply terrifying the people of Vista Hermosa, the FNIC-led mob then kidnapped thirty-eight residents.  The mob held the people at the municipal hall, torturing them physically and physiologically for more than twenty-four hours and tried to obtain information to undermine and destroy the leaders of Vista Hermosa, which is governed by Usos y Costumbres, a traditional form of governance based on town hall meetings and consensus. 

 

Upon their release, the thirty-eight people who had been kidnapped went to the government delegates, local deputies, and ministerial agents in the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. The people had clear signs of shock and wounds caused by the physical torture.  Nine people went to the emergency room for treatment. Charges were filed with the authorities. 

 

On August 29^th 2005, 500 people- mostly from Santa Cruz Nundaco and led by the FNIC- again took control of the municipal building and started moving throughout the community. The people in the community assembly ran to the mountains and hid in terror, sleeping out in the forests and mountains for the night. When the residents returned, people realized that two townswomen had been kidnapped, and they went to the Tlaxiaco public minister. The women were kidnapped for three days, then let go near another town forty-two kilometers from Vista Hermosa. The women had been raped and had to be hospitalized.  When they were released, one of the women- Roselia Matill Opheillia- told of how she had been kidnapped in the center of the city of Tlaxiaco by three masked men with guns. She was thrown in a green van, beaten and raped.

 

As she testified, "The men came and they began to tear at our clothes and locked us inside the van.  We couldn't defend ourselves because we were only two women. They called two more men and they began to rip our pants saying, you sons of bitches, there are no men here, so we'll be your men now, and they took off our pants and started ripping at our undergarments and said they were going to rape us because we don't follow the orders of the (Santa Cruz Nundaco) municipal president."  

 

 

Oaxaca is one of the poorest Mexican states, and is eighty percent indigenous. Vista Hermosa is a town in the mountains of Oaxaca about twenty minutes from the city of Tlaxiaco.  It has a population of nearly 300 people who live on three dirt roads. The people are a mix of Mixteco indigenous and Spanish descent. Most people speak Mixteco as their first language and Spanish as their second. They each have their own farm fields where they grow corn, beans, and squash and raise pigs, cattle, and chickens. In many ways, it is a beautiful rural community, nestled on a ridge below a larger mountain, a stream flowing in the ravine below. 

 

When I visited in January of 2008, the town seemed calm on the surface. There were no obvious signs of destruction or brutality. But in talking to townspeople, I soon found that the calm is similar to what you might find in a graveyard. The town was divided from house to house.  If I brought up "the problems," community members would politely whisper, "No, not now. Next door they are ‘the others,’ the bad ones, it is better that we talk somewhere else."  

 

The two other internationals that were part of our delegation and I could not walk across town without a guide because they feared that supporters of FNIC and Nundaco would try to provoke us into a confrontation that would end in more violence for the community. The cars with the decals of FNIC, the paramilitaries, would drive by and say "good morning" in English to us. The Vista Hermosans we stayed with were worried about my filming the cars of the paramilitaries or the municipal building that is still held by leaders of FNIC because, if paramilitary people saw me, they might take it as provocation. This could lead to them shooting up the houses of the people we were staying with after we left.

 

In response to the kidnappings, terror, and impunity on the part of the people of Nundaco and the FNIC, the entire community of Vista Hermosa mobilized.  On September 7^th, 2005, 221 people left Vista Hermosa for Mexico City.  They set up camp in the zócalo, the central plaza, to demand justice for the people kidnapped and attacked. 

 

As one of the community leaders, Abelano Reyes Aguilar, tells it, "We went to the federal government because we hoped we would get justice in a way that we couldn't with the state government.  We were there for three months. We went to the secretary of the government and to the federal senate.  We went to the presidential house of Vicente Fox.  We went to the human rights organizations, to the national defense secretary, to the UN. We stayed there for three months living in the zócalo, the central plaza, of Mexico City, living in tents, sleeping on the hard ground and eating out of the trash. But each office told us something different then the last one.  They said they had other work, or that they didn't have time for us and our problem." They were told that there was little that could be done to ensure their safety in the future, prosecute those responsible for the kidnappings and brutality, or resolve the underlying issue of municipal authority and land rights.

 

Because of the potential of violence, my companions and I couldn't even go near the Municipal Building, even though it was only a block away from where we were staying.  When we asked about justice for those responsible, an elder community leader, Patricio Reyes Santiago told us, "How come the kidnappers have not been detained? We don't know.  We know who they are, but because of the friends and relations they have with the PRI, no one has been detained. The kidnappers have many contacts in the PRI, and with the government. We ask the government for justice but they have detained no one."

 

 

The key to understanding Vista Hermosa is to see that this is not an isolated occurrence but rather a fundamental practice of the elite of Oaxaca. As Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Irene Khan, reported after the organization’s 2007 investigation in the state of Oaxaca, "Impunity is so endemic and so entrenched that the authorities seem to tolerate that no one has been held responsible for 18 deaths and the hundreds of cases of unfair detentions, torture and harassment." 

 

 

Paramilitary violence is part of a larger strategy which uses the rhetoric of “The War on Drugs and Organized Crime” to create the perception of instability, dependence, and violence. Once paramilitary violence takes its toll on a community, the Mexican military steps in to impose compliance and control on society. On June 20, President Bush signed into law the “Merida Initiative”- better known as Plan Mexico- legislation to provide $1.6 billion in US taxpayer money and equipment to the Mexican military, police, and intelligence services. This will no doubt reward and expand the strategy of counterinsurgency violence and legal impunity to all areas of Mexican politics.

 

Paramilitarization is a counterinsurgency strategy in which the government gives civilian groups weapons, legal impunity, and specific orders to attack social movement and citizens groups. In Vista Hermosa, these groups have high powered weapons and complete impunity from prosecution. Their impunity does not mean that they do whatever they want; like any police or military organization, they have clear orders which they follow in order to accomplish their goal of sowing terror. Part of their current orders in Vista Hermosa seems to be that they do not kill anyone or leave many visible marks on those who they attack. Kidnappings, property destruction, rape, and shooting up buildings seem to be their chosen tactics for terrorizing Vista Hermosa. The threat of violence has split the community and forced the traditional government to give up control of town hall. 

 

The residents of Vista Hermosa are organized into a traditional democratic form of government called Usos y Costumbres, a legally recognized form of decision-making for communities under Oaxacan law. Unlike the neighboring town of Nundaco, Vista Hermosa practices a town hall meeting style of directly democratic local government, free from the party-based corruption of the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party).  PRI dominated Mexican federal politics for 80 years and continues to dominate politics in Oaxaca. The Nundaco elite refuse to allow the people of Vista Hermosa to practice their traditional democracy.  As kidnapping survivor Esperanza Reyes Santiago testified, "They yelled many curses at us saying, ‘You are rats.’  Then they took us hostage.  They said we are disobedient because we didn't obey them and return our traditional government to their municipality’s control."

 

One international human rights organizer, Simon Sedillo, has written in detail about the origins and leadership of the Nundaco paramilitaries. He writes, "The leaders of the paramilitary from Nundaco are part of an organization called FNIC, the National Indigenous Farmworker Front. FNIC receives PRI funding and backing and has quickly become a paramilitary organization. FNIC has taken hold of Nundaco and convinced its people that they are a part of a popular struggle for indigenous autonomy and communal land rights.  FNIC, along with the PRI government in Nundaco, has handed out concessions to the people of Nundaco, including but not limited to building materials, roads, schools, a town hall, fertilizers, public transportation permits, and now, more than ever, high powered assault rifles and handguns.

 

The price the people from Nundaco have had to pay in exchange for these concessions is strategizing and implementing the assimilation, occupation, and eventual displacement of Vista Hermosa.  Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the governor of Oaxaca, has assigned and imposed an unrecognized PRI municipal president in Vista Hermosa and approximately a fourth of Vista Hermosa has given up their land deeds to FNIC and the people of Nundaco in exchange for communal ownership and the supposed benefits that come from an imposed municipal government. However, the imposed municipal president, like all PRI politicians, is pocketing all the municipal resources intended for his community. So, the people that gave up their land to ‘communality’ have no rights to reclaim these funds, as the PRI takes control through FNIC."

 

 

The fight for municipal control and against local corruption is even more difficult because so many people from Vista Hermosa have migrated. Many leave because they fear for their safety, others because their taxes are stolen by corrupt politicians, and others because trade policies like NAFTA make it nearly impossible to survive as farmers. Almost all of the men and many of the women from Vista Hermosa are either currently in the United States, or they have recently returned from or planning to go to the US sometime soon.

 

 

The poverty in Vista Hermosa is serious.  There is running water only a few times a week; there are no paved roads or large machinery. Many people find that the only way they are able to pay for basics is to migrate. A recent survey found that nearly two in three families in Oaxaca's Central Valley have sent a family member to the US. The same survey demonstrated that remittances typically go to the very basics of daily survival, with sixty percent covering immediate household expenses- such as home repairs, food, and utilities such as electricity, gas, and firewood. Nationwide, the 27 million farmers who remain on the land in Mexico are sustained by the $22 billion in remittances that those who go north send back.  

 

This migration is happening everywhere in rural Mexico. The Mexican countryside has been virtually emptied by the "free trade” policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  Mexican small farmers are forced to sell to a market that devalues their products by making them compete with the heavily subsidized US-based industrial agribusiness. According to a Carnegie Endowment impact study, by the treaty's 10th anniversary in 2004, NAFTA had driven 1.2 million farmers off the land. Since each farm family averages out to six people, approximately seven million people have fled the Mexican countryside.  During ex-president Vicente Fox's six-year term in office, 2.4 million Mexicans- seventy percent of them reportedly displaced farmers- migrated to the US despite the border wall erected by Washington.  According to CONAPI, Mexico's Council on Population, 29 million Mexicans and Mexican descendants now live in the United States.

 

When we asked community members what could help stem migration and resist paramilitaries, Abulano Perez, a former migrant and community leader, echoed so many of his fellow community members.  "We are farmers, and we know how to work the land.  There are many things we could grow here all year; we could raise fine cows and chickens, and grow squash, tomatoes, and corn.  But we need water more than anything. Sometimes the rains come for only fifteen or twenty days, and we lose everything we are growing for the year. But to get water we need a pump, and to buy a pump we need money. The corrupt Nundaco government doesn't give us our tax money. We want to be our own autonomous municipality, not under Nundaco’s control. We try to work collectively to build everything in our municipality ourselves, but we are forced to immigrate to the US to get money to eat."