Atenco: Never Again

The report demonstrates the premeditated and organized character of the rapes, the beatings, the humiliations, the raids without warrants carried out by the federal and state police. It proves the existence of a will to intimidate, demoralize, and tear apart a Mexican town as an example, as vengeance, and as a norm for the future. It makes evident the responsibility of the state and federal authorities and the complicity of the justice system in the commission and covering up of those abominable acts.

Atenco has exceeded the limits of earlier repressions in which there were indeed dead, tortured, disappeared, and imprisoned political opponents or social organizers. But not even Gustavo Díaz Ordaz [translator’s note: president of Mexico from 1964–1970, overseeing the Tlatelolco massacre] ordered his troops to engage in the widespread rape of the women in a Mexican town. These are actions in the same savagery as the occupation armies in Lidice, in My Lai, in Bosnia, but committed, in this unprecedented case, against the violators’ own national community and against an entire rural town. This is the limit now passed – not by paramilitaries, but by the uniformed forces of the same nation to which those humiliated, imprisoned and (in the case of two of them) murdered men and women belong.

Atenco is an attempt to morally push the limit for future repression. As the report says, in the police tucks, whose personnel can be identified perfectly well from the police’s own records, “a special space was created from the time of the arrests until the turning over of the detained to prison authorities, where all the guarantees and rights of the detained disappeared.” There, the sexual and physical violence against the women and also the men was unleashed. During the six endless hours of transport to the prisons, those trucks were a national replica of Abu Ghraib, but one where Mexican police committed mass rape against Mexican women.

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http://narconews.com/Issue42/article1938.html