Jenny Richards
Mexican state police unleashed a wave of terror on
the towns of San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco, about 25 kilometres north-east of Mexico City, after residents staged highway blockades on May 3 in solidarity with 60 flower vendors in Texcoco who were assaulted by municipal police earlier that day.
The flower vendors had set up their stalls in their usual area, now the site for a future Wal-Mart supermarket, a development opposed by San Salvador Atenco's People's Front in Defence of the Land (FPDT).
On May 4, thousands of Mexico state police and paramilitary Federal Preventive Police surrounded and invaded San Salvador Atenco, firing teas-gas canisters and beating anyone standing in their way. Photographers and television camera crews from Associated Press (AP), Reuters and the Mexican news media all reported beatings and police attempts to confiscate their cameras.
Then the terror began. The police went house to house, breaking windows and doors, pulling residents into the streets, beating them and then piling them into pick-up trucks. "Television broadcasts showed officers repeatedly beating protesters, including some who already had been taken into custody", AP reported.
Police gunfire killed Francisco Javier Santiago, a 14-year-old boy, and left Alexis Benhumea, a 20-year-old economics student at the Autonomous University of Mexico, in a coma after a tear-gas canister struck him in the left temple.
Since then, leaders of the FPDT, or what is being called the "Atenco movement", have been illegally detained by police, along with hundreds of their supporters.
The Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Centre in Mexico City has reported that many of those detained have been savagely beaten and tortured by police. According to relatives and supporters, at least 47 female detainees say they were gang raped or sexually abused by police.
On May 23, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) delivered a preliminary report on the San Salvador Atenco raid that documented at least 200 serious human rights abuses by police against San Salvador Atenco residents and supporters, including seven rapes and 16 sexual assaults. Four of the victims were foreign nationals who were first allegedly sexually abused by police officers, and then quickly deported from Mexico.
On May 27, America del Valle, leader of the FPDT, in hiding since the May 3-4 police assaults, spoke to the Latin American Telesur TV network from a clandestine location. She said the human rights violations against the people of San Salvador Atenco demonstrated that Mexican President Vicente Fox wants to show he "maintains a firm and strong hand over those at the bottom" of society, before he steps down from office.
She said the police violence was an attempt to intimidate Mexicans who stand up for their rights. "In this country, when someone stands up for their rights, when they fight for the rights of their people, the system feels attacked and responds by persecuting those people and their causes", she said. "It wants to annihilate them."
On May 28, 8000 people gathered in Mexico City's Angel of Independence plaza for a rally led by Zapatista Subcommander Marcos to demand freedom for the San Salvador Atenco detainees.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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