August 19, 1999

The Complete History of Amador Hernandez

Originally published in Spanish by La Jornada ________________________ Translated by irlandesa

La Jornada
Thursday, August 19,1999.

Military Blockade in Amador Hernandez Reinforced, Payan: the Government Goes to War; PAN Criticizes "Military Escalation"

Hermann Bellinghausen, correspondent.
Amador Hernandez, Chiapas
August 18.

At the current moment, the situation in this Selva ejido is grave, tense and complicated. A detachment of 500 Mexican Army troops, made up of elite troops and Military Police, are keeping the access blocked leading to the road that joins Amador Hernandez with San Quintin, where the chiapaneco government and the soldiers are trying - at all costs - to build a highway.

Hundreds of tzeltal indigenous from the region have been holding, for seven days now, a protest sit-in at the entrance to the community, which is also the entrance to the vast and splendid Amador Valley, at the foot of the San Felipe Sierra, in the Montes Azules.

Two groups of students have now joined in the sit-in, the majority from the ENAH [National School of Anthropology and History]. Nonetheless, Governor Albores' press offices have decreed that they are the fearsome "ultras" from the UNAM , who are "manipulating" the indigenous, so lazy and stupid, poor little things, led, according to the outlandish version, by that well-known student leader, Ofelia Medina.

And so, then, the slander, the media lynching and the threats have turned their sights on civil society, most of them from the Federal District, who went there in order to support the indigenous resistance.

After moments of great tension and scenes of indignation on the part of the indigenous, the sit-in by the zapatistas took an unexpected turn today. The sticks were followed by tear gas and the building of impenetrable barriers of a camp in continuous use.

This morning, hundreds of tzeltal men and women, with their faces uncovered and armed with sticks that also serve them as walking sticks in the well-trodden mud, appeared in front of the blockade the federal Army is maintaining, armed with flowers - the fantastic orchids, violets, birds of paradise and wild gardenias of the Selva Lacandona - and they hung them along the sharp barbed wire of the barrier, that today dawned double (one spiral over the other). Then, they tied colored balloons to those lines. They sang Las Mananitas to the soldiers, Cartas Marcadas, by Pedro Infante, and various Catholic hymns in tzeltal.

But the circumstances are dramatic. The wounded and gassed now number ten. More than 300 indigenous mobilized, and more than several thousand indigenous affected by the overwhelming and sudden military occupation.

An incessant thunder of helicopters assaults the Selva with its strong wind. Their engines are never turned off, all the take-offs and landings are done on the run, like in a war movie.

But this is not a movie. Nor an ad campaign. It is truly an invasion.

"It's a provocation," says Abel, a zapatista representative from Amador Hernandez, with no beating around the bush.

Now they are saying that they are blocking the road. But it was the reverse. Since August 12, the federal Army has been occupying ejidal lands and keeping the road closed. Since then, and since the siege, the tzeltales, EZLN support bases, have been protesting in many ways and with everything against them.

A veil of outlandish and doctored reports are covering up the attacks against the campesinos. Perhaps taking advantage of the fact that the public has had its attention turned elsewhere of late, and not here, to the last corner, the most distant and solitary of the patria: Amador Hernandez in the Amador Valley, Emiliano Zapata rebel municipality (and the constitutional one of Ocosingo), Chiapas, Mexico, August of 1999.

The Occupation From the Beginning

A hundred soldiers and an engineer suddenly arrived in the community, out of nowhere, to this place that is seven hours away "by Indian foot," from San Quintin, and, since it's the rainy period, spectacularly muddy. It was Wednesday, August 11. To the campesinos' surprise, the visitors bought supplies in the store, walked through the village, and the engineer took some measurements. Then they left. What was curious is that no one had known they were coming down the road, they simply appeared.

That night, a new moon, was completely dark. On the dawn of Thursday, the 12th, two kilometers from the village, on Amador Hernandez ejidal lands, the first campesinos who went out to the fields discovered that they could not get through the road that leads south, to Nuevo Chapultepec and San Quintin, all along the edge of the Montes Azules biosphere reserve. A cordon of soldiers were blocking the way.

At one side, towards the east, at the edge of the river, the hundred visitors from the previous day had erected a makeshift camp, and they had spent the night there. Starting in the early hours of the 12th, the soldiers set about the task of cutting down a circular area, resulting, a few hours later, in a clearing, that ended up being a heliport.

And successive waves of helicopters began arriving, transporting troops, supplies and axes, many axes. To be doing this at the very threshold of the Montes Azules is to be saying the wrong thing.

Dozens of times a day, since last Thursday through today, the thunderous and extremely violent din of the machinery silences the Selva for interminable minutes. They are no longer bringing troops, but they are bringing kilometers of coiled barbed wire, that is double-edged and razor sharp. Each helicopter that lands brings - in addition to hundreds of cans of Cocoa Cola and of Ciel water - fruit, refrigerators, motors, boxes, and two or three rolls of that frightening wire. They need up to ten men just to unload them.

But the history, like all histories, had begun before, exactly one week back, on Wednesday, the 4th. Starting on that day there had been intense, continuous and low flights by military helicopters over this tzeltal village of 609 residents.

Or, rather, the calm had already been lost. But it was on the 12th, when they found their only access to the outside blocked off, that the residents of Amador Hernandez went out into the road to protest.

Days before, one of many helicopters landed on the crude landing strip that crosses the village, where it remained, without turning off its engines. No one came out. Then it lifted up in flight, ripping the clinic roof, in addition to knocking down the kitchen of an ARIC family, and leaving several houses without their palm roofs.

It was the preamble to the military occupation that now appears to have been consummated. The explanation that the federal Army and the Chiapas government is giving is that the operation is in order to "protect" the topographers who are taking the measurements for the Nuevo Chapultepec-Amador Hernandez stretch of road. It so happens that the zapatista support bases of this community, in the Emiliano Zapata Autonomous Municipality, are opposed to this road, that they did not ask for it.

Those from the ARIC-Independent in the same town were in agreement, but, upon seeing the aerial invasion, they changed their minds, and they have now notified the federal Army and Governor Albores' envoys that they do not want the road.

Too late. It does not matter that the residents of the different surrounding communities (Pichucalco, Guanal, Plan de Guadalupe and others) are also opposed. The government has already said it will not take one step backwards.

The Hour of the Gas

A hundred zapatistas carried out the first protests, men, women and even children, throughout the day of the 12th, at the entrance that the federal Army assault troops had chosen to make their advance.

On Friday, the 13th, when there were already 500 soldiers positioned there, the cordon of military police that were blocking the way already had anti-riot helmets and shields. There were more and more indigenous, from other communities. Amid cries against the Army and militarization, vivas to the EZLN, and all kinds of messages in tzeltal and Spanish, the soldiers ears were covered, silently and firmly. Behind them, the flurry of helicopters and the occupation of large areas of land by the soldiers continued without let up.

That night, the EZLN support bases set up - yes - a makeshift guard camp, made up of simple, low plastic roofs, and bonfires, on a promontory just above the entrance occupied by the federales.

Some 30 young persons also arrived that night, from La Realidad, after having walked twelve hours from San Quintin. They were mostly students from the National School of Anthropology, a few from the UNAM, and the actress Ofelia Medina.

They were the first of two groups of participants from the National Encuentro in Defense of the Cultural Heritage in La Realidad, who had organized in order to go to that distant village in serious trouble.

The 50 kilometers of Selva that separates La Realidad from Amador Hernandez are, by land, a terrible trip. The residents of the ejido received the civil observers in the community's school, they fed them, let them rest their feet, which were a wreck, and rest themselves after the crossing.

On the morning of Saturday the 14th, the students accompanied the zapatista residents of Amador Hernandez to the entrance the federal Army had been (and was) guarding, and they began the second day of protest.

The mud was growing heavy under the restless footsteps of the hundreds of persons, shouting with all their might at the soldiers. From a loudspeaker being run from a car battery, came the speeches of the men and women who stepped up to the microphone.

The anti-riot military police, equipped with belts with small canisters of paralyzing gas, that, according to the label, are deadly weapons.

Meanwhile, the campesinos, armed with sticks, began striking the shields of the troops with growing force, for several hours. The indigenous women were the bravest.

Then, two more helicopters landed, with 50 more soldiers and a journalist taking photographs.

Throughout this entire time, the soldiers were rigorously filming and photographing the indigenous and the students. The officials were pointing at some of them. From behind the cordon of military police, a soldier appeared, pointed at one of the ENAH students threateningly, crouched down, and then reappeared with a tear gas canister that he fired at the young man, who felt as if he had been blinded and who suffered an incredible burning of the flesh, especially on his left arm, which had been the one he had raised to protect his face.

It was the signal. Other soldiers repeated the same operation against the indigenous, who, with their faces covered with scarves and ski-masks, did not stop shouting.

During the struggle, some of the soldiers were also hurt.

The indigenous women affected by the gas cried out in pain, saying "Ay, I am dying, I am dying."

Their companeros led them to the river, a few meters away from the quagmire where they had been, and washed off their eyes and bodies. The men, equally affected, were more stoical in their suffering, but they were also very badly off.

That night another 30 students and professors arrived, also on foot, from San Quintin.

Some students joined in the indigenous watch at the promontory at the edge of a field. And it rained oceans, Selva-like.

The military camp, at that point, was no longer makeshift in the slightest. It was now another village, with shops and other company facilities, trenches, parapets, and the previously mentioned, and hectic, heliport.

The Other Blockade

On Monday, August 16, when they returned in the morning to the muddy entrance where the Army was, the campesinos and students found a pole fence, well put together, across the entire road. Behind it, a spiral of the barbed wire the helicopters had brought, and, further back, a line - no longer of military police - but of combat troops.

The heliport was surrounded in the same way.

Behind the barriers put up by the federal Army were Governor Albores' civil representatives, Public Ministry Agent Miguel Angel Utrilla Robles and the Colonel in charge of the operation.

Then numerous campesinos from the ARIC-Independent reached the town of Amador Hernandez. They crossed through the military circle and met with Ivan Camacho, who later introduced himself to this correspondent as Governor Albores "political operative." They also delivered a document in which ARIC members from this and other communities withdrew their request for the road.

They displayed a banner demanding the withdrawal of the federal Army, and they returned to their communities. Meanwhile, the protest by the zapatistas, students and people from civil society, continued, with shouts, vituperations and speeches.

The morning of Tuesday, the 17th, they went to the entrance again, now a huge bog, constantly trampled, the earth renewed each night by the downpours, and each day by the feet, generally bare (even those of the students).

Towards noon, Army helicopters brought in a large pool of reporters from various media, especially print. Some of them crossed over the barrier of barbed wire and poles to talk with the dissidents, but they were received with mistrust, even rejected. Nonetheless, the journalists took pictures and notes, and went back to where they had come from.

Some of them were dispatched to Nuevo Chapultepec, PRI community, where Antonio Chulin Mendez, forewarned by the military ("the general is going to be coming," they had told him, a farmworker from that town had revealed to La Jornada), stated that they did want the road, that a short time before two children had died due to the lack of timely medical attention. Regardless, the stretch of road that will serve Nuevo Chapultepec is not being blocked by anyone, since it is further "outside" the Selva. In fact, the road from San Quintin ends in Amador Hernandez.

It was by way of that road - perhaps one of these days, a highway - that we journalists from La Jornada arrived, until we ran into a guard of soldiers from the federal Army that prevented us from going through. From further ahead - less than one kilometer of dense jungle away - the cries of hundreds of voices could be heard, shouting vivas to the EZLN and to Subcomandante Marcos.

A lieutenant, in charge of the post, told us: "You can't pass thorough, this is a military occupation." He immediately told us we should look for a path in order to gain access to the village.

We were not in a good mood, and we were tired and up to here in sweat, but we looked for the path. To no avail. We were then insistent with the soldiers, claiming our rights in the second article of the Constitution, to freedom of movement.

Then there appeared a young Colonel and Ivan Camacho Zenteno, director of Political Affairs for the state Department of Government, and they kindly led us around the new heliport, in such a way that we would not be following the road.

And we crossed to the other side of the looking glass.

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