August
20, 2002
The People of
Atenco, Machetes Held High
Photo
Courtesy of IndyMedia Mexico
Narco News '02
How
the Victory at
Atenco
Was Won
The
Death of the Texcoco Airport
...and
the Struggle Goes On and On
By Maria
Botey Pascual
Special
to the Narco News Bulletin
With
Historic Photos of Insurgent Mexico
By Tina
Modotti
Part
I of a series
On
August 1, the Mexican people won a new victory
against the corrupt and authoritarian system that still rules
this country, a victory of international proportions against
the advance of neoliberal looting of the most humble for the
economic enrichment of the greedy.
With the precedents of the struggles that
halted the golf club in Tepoztlán, Morelos, or that stopped
the hydroelectric project in Alto Balsas, Guerrero, among others,
and above all the light that was turned on by the Zapatista uprising
beginning in 1994 in Chiapas, the people of the former lake of
Texcoco, with those of San Salvador Atenco as the spear, had
the courage to say it anew: "Enough Already!"
They took another step to stop the abuses
by those who govern, in a process that unmasked the political
simulation by three levels of government (that hide, of course,
behind the supposed "rule of law"), awakened consciences
and gave root to a new force in the fight for a more just world,
where there ought to be a balanced distribution of wealth and
governmental authorities must allow a role for the true representatives
of society.
On October 21, 2001, in the morning's
first hour, the church bells rang throughout the affected towns
to announce the terrible news: A large part of their lands had
passed into government hands through an eminent domain decree
that had, as its goal, the construction of a new International
Airport in Mexico.
With an investment, in its first phase,
of $2.8 billion dollars, they tried to build a giant infrastructure
for an airport on 5,400 hectares straddling three towns: Atenco,
Texcoco and Chimalhuacán, the first was the most affected
in terms of the percent of land expropriated (70-percent), where
some of its inhabitants would lose almost all of their crops
as well as many of their houses.
Tearful, but also enraged and indignant
because they had not been consulted on the matter - in violation
of Chapter V of Mexico's Article 115 governing municipal governments
and land use - hundreds of townspeople blocked the road between
Lechería and Texcoco for various hours on that same morning.
They were armed with sticks, stones and machetes, the rural tool
used by the multitudes in these latitudes that became the symbol
of this struggle. The slogan during nine months of conflict was:
"We will not give up our land, even if it means giving up
our lives."
Anyone who investigates the causes of
this spontaneous and generalized attitude against the construction
of this airport project will hear many reasons that converged
in a word - Dignity! - a word that emerged from each mouth, youth,
adult or elder. Behind it, the famous phrase of Emiliano Zapata:
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,"
and the histories of the struggle by Pancho Villa and he, of
the communiqués of the 1970s guerrilla movement articulated
by Lucio Cabañas and Genero Vásquez, and of the
words of Subcommandante Marcos and the indigenous of Chiapas,
the most recent Mexicans to turn the world downside-up again.
The most basic is "The land is life,
because it feeds us." In spite of being one of the most
forgotten regions in the Valley of México, the inhabitants
of the land that once held, before the conquest, the great green
lake of Texcoco, they have survived by farming, raising domestic
animals, cultivating corn, beans, lima beans, string beans, alfalfa,
barley, wheat, carrots, squash, onion, tomato, lettuce, and also
wild plants like verdolagas, quelites, quintoniles, hollyhock
and rosemary, and medicinal plants that above all are utilized
and understood by the women, and they have produced all this
at a level more or less equal to their level of consumption.
They
spent more than eighty years recuperating this former lake bottom yard-by-yard - using ashes and dung (and without
government aid) - the salty lands were delivered at the end of
the Revolution, with its history of blood spilt for "Land
and Liberty" (beforehand the zone belonged to just five
gigantic haciendas), lands that were passed on from ancestors
to grandparents who, bequeathing their parcels, said, "Never
ever sell it, the land is worth more than gold."
Faced with the seizure of their lands,
the farmer men and women asked themselves: "We're already
poor. If they take away the land, how will we eat? Where are
they going to send us to live? Will there be water in those lands?
If they send us to other lands will be able to take those lands
from us, too? Will they rob other farmers for the lands where
they put us? If they send us to the city, how will we live, when
all we know how to do is farm the land? Will we be able to leave
our children a place to live and build their homes? Who will
we have to ask for help if they leave us without land?"
Here, we arrive at the most basic reason:
"The land is my life, my identity, and to lose it is my
death." And in spite of the gigantic advance of the largest
human headquarters in América (Mexico City and its satellite
cities), Texcoco's land has maintained its rural essence, organized
among communal lands most of which are divided in family ejidos,
where the titleholders, peasant farmers and day laborers work.
Above all, the area of Atenco maintains the community organization
of collective life during important feasts and moments marking
life or death, traditions whose origins go back to the pre-hispanic
era (with pride, they speak of the park of Los Ahuehetes, where
the Texcoco-born philosopher-king and poet Nezhualcóyotl
walked amidst its millenarian trees).
Conscious that the siezure of 5,400 hectares
would be only the first phase of a larger number of land-takings
and the spreading urban development and a brutal infrastructure
to connect the new International Airport with the industrial
corridors that are part of the larger "Plan Puebla Panamá,"
strongly pushed by President Vicente Fox… the inhabitants
of this place saw themselves being sucked up by a hurricane of
development and later expelled like garbage on the side of the
highway, surrounded by cyclone fences (in Atenco, the project
would take 80-percent of its terrain and almost the entire town
of Ixapan). They saw their families would be dismembered, the
inevitable increase in alcohol and drug addiction, and being
sent to live in apartments, risen up in the air of places largely
unknown to the farmers called cities: "We don't want it,
we would drown there."
"And who really believes that later
they will employ us in their luxury hotels, or even allow us
into the airport with a little cart of tamales or atole? The
only time they'll come for us will be when, on the other side
of the fence, they'll be looking for some criminal," was
the final comment of one of the Atequenses interviewed by your
correspondent.
But
the principal cause of the rage and indignation that filled the
town of Texcoco last April 22nd, was
the cynicism and trickery they suffered at the hands of three
levels of government that did not notify nor consult with them
at any time about what was planned. This, in spite of multiple
solicitations for information to the different agencies based
on a suspicion, and reports in the media for some months before
hand, that it was possible that the invasion would fall upon
their heads.
Also, of course, the pay granted by the
land-taking decree was 7.2 pesos (about 73 U.S. cents) per square
meter, whether seized from farms or developed areas (without
any other subsidy or secure proposal for their laboral and habitational
relocation). "It doesn't add up to enough for our families
to live on," said an elderly man. "Let the rich of
this country give up their haciendas (maybe five-percent of the
Mexican public has been on an airplane), and see which of them
will give up their land for seventy cents per meter," said
an elderly woman, shedding tears of a powerlessness felt. To
all this you could add the lack of confidence that the Mexican
public has in its own currency that, they know from experience
and awareness of the current economic situation of the continent
that the peso may be devalued at any moment.
The idea of building a new International
Airport in Mexico began in the 1970s and was pushed by the Atlacomulco
group presided over by the late Carlos Hank González.
He achieved it when President Ernesto Zedillo approved, as his
government was passing to the openly neoliberal administration
of Vicente Fox, who, up to his neck in his commitment to build
the airport project - a necessary step to achive the completion
of Plan Puebla Panama in the South - kept this powerful branch
of Zedillo's PRI party in the government by naming Pedro Cerisola
as Secretary of Transportation and Ernesto Velasco León
as head of the national Airports and Auxiliary Services.
Under the direction of Governor Arturo
Montiel Rojas of the State of México, the current chief
of the Atlacomulco group with the constant "collaboration"
of the state attorney general, Alfonso Navarrete Prida - the
one who scorned the dissidents and threatened them with arrest
warrants - all of them were cornerstones, among others, of the
frustrated mega-business of the Fox presidency in which huge
Mexican and foreign corporations (and, it is supposed, a handful
of private speculators) had hoped to reap juicy benefits on the
backs of the most humble. If the people had not risen up against
it, they would have been kicked off their only goods by a corrupt
action that is sadly common in this country, where there are
hundreds or thousands (depending on which source does the counting)
of examples of common farmland zones ("ejidos") in
many states that were never economically compensated for the
expropriations in spite of having had been legally established
at their foundation. Or they were paid not seven pesos but twenty
centavos (two U.S. cents) per meter, or after being kicked off
their lands they were charged rent to have a smaller parcel in
the same place and at a high price, or, as recently happened
in Acapulco, where although the court ruled in their favor, the
businessmen didn't want to let go of their dam. In fact, the
former farmers of lands taken for the Lechería-Texcoco
highway say they were never paid anything.
Suspecting the possible construction of
the famous airport in Texcoco back in the 1970s, say some leaders
of the Atenco uprising, and at least once in 1997, the communal
lands of the region were divided among the residents with the
objective of counting with more communal farm councils ready
to fight for the land.
This
was the first strategy of resistance against the airport from a social movement that, in spite of the reports
broadcast by the media, was not born in October 2001, but long
before. By the end of the 1970s, various towns of Atenco together
with other municipalities expressed their dissent over a rise
in housing taxes in a zone that is among the most marginalized
in the State of México, and back then without the minimum
services that would merit the exaggerated sum that the authorities
tried to collect from townspeople who basically live from meal
to meal. The police squashed the protests by students and farmers,
but the tax was eventually cancelled.
A number of the participants in the resistance
to the airport project by the peoples of the former lake of Texcoco
had already participated in the social struggles to improve the
conditions of life of the residents of the area. In the 1990s,
they were able to organize into, first, the Popular Regional
Front of Texcoco, and after that the Popular Front of the Valley
of México, with the goal of uniting the communities through
its local representatives and pushing social development against
the existing lack of the most elemental services such as electricity,
potable water, drainage, schools, health centers or projects
to stimulate farming.
It was at the end of 1995 when, with these
demands, they blocked the Lechería-Texcoco highway and
when the Atenquenses experienced a trick pulled on them by the
government, which agreed to a dialogue. The farmers lifted the
blockade but the government only sent police in, and never showed
up at the negotiating table.
Although the organization lived through
a crisis due to the crudeness of this event, and some of its
leaders then suffered manipulations by the government through
slanders promoted by some of the most corrupt individuals within
those communities, some of those social fighters, at the end
of 2000, began to pay attention to the publicity, according to
many of them, of the "supposed" competition between
different States to have the airport located within their territories.
There, from the first months of 2001,
some inhabitants of Atenco began asking for information from
the local governmental authorities, which pled total ignorance
of any airport matter (false statements, as they would later
come to know, and that's why they consider these authorities
to be sell-outs and traitors). They began to assemble facts collected
through the media and Internet, although it still wasn't clear
if the ex-lake of Texcoco would be the airport construction site
"because the maps published on the Internet were imprecise
and kept changing."
It should be stressed that in this time
the media manipulation had already begun, above all on television
news, that presented the airport project as an opportunity for
progress that would noticeably improve the lives of the residents
of the area selected and that would generate thousands of jobs
and a great economic boom that would benefit the people and the
environment: propaganda based on supposed studies (later it would
be known that there weren't that many) that never took the opinion
of the majority of the townspeople into account. (This can be
proved in the document that the State of México published,
but that was not made public, which spoke of airfields, highway
infrastructure, soils and fauna, but never referred to any human
problems, those humans whose small towns didn't even appear on
the map.)
According to statements by one of the
leaders of the movement, it was in the summer of 2001 that a
representative of the government finally came to the town (the
only time that any authority came near the community, although
many townspeople didn't know about it at the time) to promote
the airport plan with the same tone that it would be a project
of "progress." In a meeting "in which it was never
determined what land-area would be affected but they told us
that if some communal land-owner resulted to be outside of the
perimeter, the farmer would be paid commercial prices for the
land," as well as other confusing, tricky and shameful messages
by the authorities who have been involved throughout this process.
(The government would later come blasting into the community,
trumpeting the decision to put the airport in Texcoco as if the
locals had won the lottery, saying that with the airport their
sons would have the opportunity to gain careers as jet pilots.)
While the pressure from the media began
to take root among some residents of the zone, and others doubted
that it would really be brought about in Texcoco, a small group
of people organized Sunday assemblies in the municipal auditorium
of Atenco to question the consequences of the possible airport.
They invited professors from a nearby university to inform about
the potential impacts, and tried, together, to plan actions that
might be necessary for any contingency. At the same time the
tension rose in the community after the discovery, on the lands
of various communal farmers, topographers that, upon being questioned
about their presence, answered only that "we're just looking,"
but never explained the reason for being there, and a mayor who
never answered the questions that the populace had for him.
These suspicious actions culminated in the discovery, in early
October last year, of soil-extraction machinery in lands adjacent
to San Salvador Atenco without any permission from the property
owners. Angry already about the violations to their rights while
the government had still not given them the courtesy of communicating
openly about the new airport (although some political leaders
were made suspicious by the secret nature of media questions),
the communal farmers drove the trucks and the soil drill to the
Town Square, where they were guarded night and day by what became
the first Popular Guardians. It was then that various residents
of the towns held the first marches in the region demanding an
explanation from the government for the trespass upon their lands
and demanding that the airport project be stopped. Meanwhile,
the mayor of San Salvador Atenco claimed he knew nothing about
the protests, and accused the participants of being outside agitators.
When
the order finally came to sieze the lands, the non-believers
awoke from their dream, and the opposition
to the construction of the International Airport in Texcoco rose
in volume: Hundreds of neighbors blocked the highway, while declarations
against the airport multiplied. The opposition included the government
of nearby Mexico City, as well as university students and environmentalists
who warned about the dangers of flooding in the city caused by
the destruction of the natural drainage of the area. They also
warned of the disappearance of a migratory bird sanctuary where
birds from Canada and the United States stop to rest, and this
later provoked a legal complaint under the environmental clauses
of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The issue of the
birds launched a national joke, after the Secretary of Transportation
Pedro Cerisola y Weber said that if the birds had accepted the
airport in Mexico City, they then also accept the new one.
Those who were not in agreement were never
consulted nor duly informed at any moment, and they were the
residents of the towns affected. From the first day they established
a permanent occupation of the Town Square of San Salvador Atenco
and they organized to resist. But they were also opposed because
it was already clear that, because of the powerful interests
at play, they would have to take effective measures against the
project before the first shovel of dirt was removed.
There, they constructed the first barricades
and walls to impede the passage of the machines, and they organized
in a more or less spontaneous form with distinct commissions
for vigilance, collection of supplies and funds, a kitchen to
feed the popular guardians and communications, while support
from other towns in the region began to arrive, as well as from
the first national civil organizations that declared solidarity
with the movement.
Next,
in Part II:
Maria Botey Pascual
is the author of "A la recerca d'El Quemado" ("In
Search of Burnt Mountain") (2002, Columna Press, Barcelona),
is a correspondent for the Mexican daily Por Esto!, and participant
in the journalistic coverage by Narco News of the 2001 Zapatista
Caravan. She reported this story from San Salvador Atenco.
For More Narco
News, Click Here
The
Newspaper of América Insurgente
Sign Up for
Free Mailing List