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Brutal State Violence Against Students in Chiapas Inspires Widespread Protests

Original posted on It’s Going Down.

By Scott Campbell

On Tuesday, May 18, around 120 students from the Mactumactzá Rural Normal School blockaded the Chiapa de Corzo-San Cristóbal highway in Chiapas, Mexico. The students were protesting changes to the admissions process to the school that would disadvantage working class, rural and Indigenous students. Seen as an attempt to change the makeup of the student body or as a step towards closing the school (which has already been closed four times by the Mexican state), students took to the streets, along with others who joined in solidarity.

In response, Chiapas State Police brutally attacked the blockade, firing tear gas and beating students with batons. In total, 95 people were arrested, 74 women and 19 men, all but two of them students. All 95 were moved to the high-security prison of El Amate. During the course of the arrests and transfer, the women students were forced to strip naked and were sexually assaulted by police. All those arrested are facing charges of rioting with a gang enhancement, violent robbery, damages, and attacks on the public peace and the bodily and cultural integrity of the state.

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Mexico: “They are Literally Killing Us” – Call for a National Caravan for a Dignified Life for Indigenous Peoples

Originally posted on It’s Going Down.

Via the National Indigenous Congress (CNI)
Translated by Scott Campbell

As men, women, boys, girls, grandfathers and grandmothers of the Indigenous communities that we are: Na Savi, Me´pháá, Nahua, Ñamnkué, mestizos and Afro-Mexicans from the state of Guerrero, and who are organized in the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero – Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ), together with our comradely communities in the National Front for the Liberation of the Peoples (FNLP) and the Campesino Organization of the Southern Sierra (O.C.S.S.), we have not forgotten that we are suffering a war against our peoples. A war that began 527 years ago and one that continues. Governments come, governments go, be their logos of one color, two colors or three colors, it doesn’t matter: their boss is the same.

We continue dying from hunger, from the lack of hospitals and doctors, and from poverty, but not just that: they are literally killing us. As if we were animals, as if we were something worthless, something that isn’t human. The narco-paramilitaries hunt us on the roads, in our homes, and our families have to flee. They are the ones they call the displaced, and they go, walking, uprooted from their land, entire communities without a home, with the pain of their murdered relatives, and without knowing if they will eat tomorrow or if they will sleep under a roof, worse off than animals.

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Insumisión: From Teachers’ Strike to People’s Rebellion

Originally published by It’s Going Down
By Scott Campbell

With the ongoing teachers’ strike that has morphed into a widespread rebellion, primarily in Oaxaca and Chiapas, we haven’t put together a more general roundup of resistance and repression in Mexico in some time. While that struggle is very much alive and well, the intensity with which it is unfolding has diminished some. This column will first take a look at the past three weeks of that conflict (if you need to get up to speed, check out this piece) and then cover some of the other recent events around the country.

The teachers belonging to the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) have now been on strike for more than two months. Since the massacre by federal and state forces in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca on June 19, in which eleven people were killed, the conflict has taken on an increasingly popular dimension. This has looked like direct actions, marches, material support and expressions of solidarity from across Mexico and beyond, in numbers far too large to recount individually.

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