Hugo Blanco ' the attacks on Zapatista communities are intensifying'

Peruvian campesino Leader asks #YoSoy132 to Support Zapatistas 

 ** The leader urges them to defend the “island of freedom” created by the EZLN

by: Hermann Bellinghausen

Hugo Blanco, campesino leader and director of the Peruvian publication Lucha Indígena (Indigenous Struggle), denouncedfrom Peru “the real reasons and forces” that want to destroy what he calls the “zone liberated from neoliberalism, where the people govern themselves”, in a message of support to the communities of the Zapatista National Liberación Army (EZLN, its initials in Spanish), which speaks “to those who search for a free world”. “In 1994, at the full culmination of the neoliberal system that oppresses us, a voice of rebellion arose, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas”.

Blanco calls on the #YoSoy132 movement to “understand that it is their fundamental task to defend the isle of freedom that is in their own country. Crushing the Zapatistas would make it easy to crush #YoSoy132.” Considering that “it is in the direct interest of humanity” to defend that “island of freedom,” Hugo Blanco calls for the “actions in defense of San Marcos Avilés, and against the other attacks in the zone” and in the struggle for the freedom of Francisco Sántiz López and Alberto Patishtán Gómez.

And he recalls: “Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then president, launched a bloody military offensive thinking to quickly smash the rebellion. It wasn’t so. The combatant indigenous population resisted. Faced with the bloodletting, the people of Mexico were indignant and demanded that the attacks cease. The United States government became alarmed, because with the number of oppressed Mexicans and Chicanos in its territory there could be the danger that the rebellion might be extended to the heart of the empire. Therefore, it ordered the Mexican government to stop the attack,” while “the rebels demonstrated that they would obey the people of Mexico who ordered the war to stop.”

Blanco remembers: “The government offered talks, the Zapatistas accepted. With the democratic spirit that they have, they didn’t want to be the ones who would speak in the name of indigenous Mexicans, and they called to the indigenous and indigenists of the whole country so that they could set out the demands. Their arguments were so convincing that the governmental commission had to accept many of them. Both parties signed the San Andrés Accords. As they had to take legal form in order to be approved by the parliament, it named a commission with the responsibility of putting them into the appropriate format. The commission completed its task and presented it to the parties. The Zapatistas accepted, but the government did not. Instead of that it presented another document, betraying the accords that it had signed.” The (political) parties in the Congress “bowed to the outrage.”

In its time, the government of Ernesto Zedillo “launched a treasonous military attack, seeking to liquidate the EZLN’s leadership.” It failed, Blanco points out, “but (whoever may be president for a term) does not abandon the intentions of disappearing that island of freedom that exists in the world. Let us not forget that the first international meeting of those oppressed by the neoliberal system that is crushing the world was called by the indigenous Zapatistas and was held on Chiapas soil years before the World Social Forum.”

The campesino leader from Peru emphasizes: “Lately the attacks on Zapatista communities are intensifying, the principal and strongest one is the one that the autonomous Zapatista community of San Marcos Avilés is suffering.” The Good Government Juntas towards Hope and Heart of the Rainbow of Hope have denounced other attacks, he says. “These attacks and the continued detention of Francisco Sántiz López and Alberto Patishtán Gómez, are the spearhead of the attack to crush the zone liberated from neoliberalism, where the people govern themselves through the Good Government Juntas. These (the Juntas) are seen as the great enemy by the transnational corporations as they are a living example of the fact that “Another World is Possible”, “A World where Many Worlds Fit”.”

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