Mexico: The False Narco-Smear Against the Zapatistas

June 22, 2005
Gary Webb - Presente

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Dear Colleague,

The rapid-fire sequence of communiqués in recent days "from somewhere
in the
mountains of the Mexican southeast" by Subcomandante Marcos in the name
of
the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish
initials),
especially the Monday communiqué that announced that the indigenous
rebels
of Chiapas had called a "Red Alert," has placed various actors on all
sides
on tenterhooks.

My emailbox runneth over with pleas for "more information" or to
explain
"what is really happening" and I realize how cynical news consumers
have
become. Society is not used to newsmakers who do what they say, and
that,
alone, make the Zapatistas difficult for many to understand. My
response is:
Read the communiques! They're self-explanatory. You can find links to
English translations of the recent Zapatista comms in our report of
today,
via The Narcosphere:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/6/22/124158/124

On the other hand, governments, unlike the Zapatistas, never do what
they
say and rarely say what they do. The Zapatista "Red Alert" comes on the
heels of a massive redeployment of Mexican military troops surrounding
the
38 Autonomous Municipalities and 1,111 or so villages that openly
declare
themselves to be in rebellion and self-government with the Zapatistas.

The troop movements in Chiapas, in fact, are related to President
Vicente
Fox's new "Mexico Seguro" ("Safe Mexico") simulation of an anti-drug
campaign.

Perhaps government military commanders in Chiapas, fearing redeployment
to
someplace truly dangerous for them like Nuevo Laredo (where a military
convoy was ambushed and shot at by local police earlier this month) are
just
trying to "look busy" to justify their continued vacation way down
south in
scenic Chiapas. And that's why the Army made a (demonstrably false)
claim
that it found some marijuana plants last week in Zapatista territory.
In any
case, whatever the motives, the behavior of the Armed Forces in Chiapas
in
recent days has backfired and led to a crisis, now, in Mexico's
southernmost
border state, too.

Read fresh translations from Hermann Bellinghausen, reporting from
Chiapas
for La Jornada, undressing the knowingly false claims by the Mexican
Secretaries of Defense and State that the Zapatistas are somehow mixed
up in
the narco.

Read the clownish statements of those officials and the facts that
disprove
them.

The long confluence between repression of the indigenous in Chiapas and
a
false "war on drugs" is one of those pesky matters that few players
want to
talk about openly.

But oh how the mighty have fallen if we trace Vicente Fox's March 2001
declaration in favor of the legalization of drugs (precisely at the
moment
when the Zapatisas were pulling up stakes from Mexico City and turning
their
backs on the Fox government for its broken promises... and now, this
week,
the Zapatistas have turned around and faced toward his government for
the
first time since that moment four years ago...) to this month's
remanifestation of Fox as boneheaded gringo-style drug warrior from
Texas to
Tapachula, it's clear that the US-imposed drug war has something to do
- we
don't yet know to what extent - with the "Red Alert" in Chiapas.

Be on guard, kind readers: The drug war pretext is the flavor of the
month
in the halls of Mexican power. The Fox administration, entering its
final
year, unable to solve any of the problems he said he would resolve "in
fifteen minutes," is increasingly pulling out the narco-brush to
distract
from all other grievances of a public that has had enough.

And what does a failed government do when the illusion of control is
crumbling all around it? In the 21st century, it plays the narco card.

The drug-free Zapatistas, though, stand at stark contrast with the
government, which, now finds itself in another blossoming narco-scandal
along the Caribbean coast, where Mexican narco-traffickers worked hand
in
hand with the Fox and Bush administrations this spring to give
international
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles safe passage up to Gringolandia.

Pot, Kettle, Narco. The accusers are the narcos here. And their "Mexico
Seguro" simulation has now backfired on both borders, North and South,
of
the United States of Mexico.

http://www.narconews.com/

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Correspondent
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com
Email: narconews [at] gmail.com