October 28, 2001
Narco News 2001
Shadows
& Light
Communiqué
on the Assassination of
Mexico
Human Rights Attorney Ochoa
By Subcomandante
Marcos
Publisher's Commentary:
The unsolved crime
of the assassination of Mexican human rights attorney Digna Ochoa
y Plácido strikes at the conscience of the world and at
the credibility of the regime of Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Ochoa's assassination had been threatened many times before.
The attorney for ecologists Rudolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera
-- framed
drug war prisoners
-- and for dubiously accused young activists charged with the
August bombings of Banamex branches in Mexico City -- in
protest of the bank's sale to Citigroup -- Ochoa had been kidnapped, tortured, left tied
to a chair in a house with the gas turned on, meant to explode,
but had miraculously escaped death many times. The Fox government
and its backers in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City knew her life
was in danger, did nothing to protect her or to find her assailants,
and two Fridays ago their negligence wrought her assassination.
This is the first public
statement by Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos since April 2001.
We re-publish it here to, once again, share with the English-speaking
world the sentiments of the other Mexico -- not of narco-bankers
and cynical politicians -- but the Mexico of the people, the
Mexico from below.
Translated by irlandesa
To the relatives of Digna Ochoa
y Plácido:
To the members of the Miguel
Agustín Pro Human Rights Center:
Brothers and sisters:
I
am writing you in the name of the old ones,
children, men and women of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
We have just heard of the assassination
of Digna Ochoa y Plácido, so long foretold and so irresponsibly
discounted. The crime that blotted out this life reaches and
is enough to shock any honest person into indignation. When
social fighters are eliminated, the Powers hold parties, sport
their best finery, and let drop a few coins so that their charity
might purchase indifference. There is no change above other
than that dictated by fashion, and, below, injustice and poverty
are repeated in faces and steps. There will be sadness and anger
below, but no longer will there be impotence.
The crime committed against Digna will
most certainly cast a shadow over the steps of all those men
and women who have made the defense of human rights their path
and goal.
But we must everywhere build that collective
light which will dispel that shadow, and which will prevent the
clock from once again marking the yesterdays of impunity, cynicism
and indifference, which are nothing but the clothing of forgetting.
We cannot find the words that would serve,
at the same time, to hurt and to relieve the grief that is veiling
our, and your, eyes, but not our course.
Anyway, our silence goes as timid embrace,
because you know that you are accompanied in silence as well.
Vale. Salud and long life to she who
carried vocation and destiny in name.
For the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous
Committee - General Command of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.
Mexico, October of 2001.
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"What we seek, what we need and want,
is that all the people without a political party, without an
organization, come to agreement in what we want and what we don't
want, and organize themselves to achieve it (preferibly for civil
and peaceful means), to to take power, but to exercize it. I
know that you will say that this is utopian. But that is the
style of the Zapatistas."
--
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos