After the Repression in Atenco and More than Six Months Setting up the Protest Camp, Only Five People Maintain It

By Juan Trujillo
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

February 1, 2007

“It could be that this is a cycle
and, if like many people say,
coming in here is the end,
this means that the beginning
will come back
and that it won’t be like starting from scratch,
we’ll only have to take it back up
and take up the struggle which, from here,
Can many times seem incomplete.”
– extract from the poem ‘Principio y fin’ (Beggining and End)
by Norma Jiménez, polítical prisoner in Atenco

Santiaguito, Penal de Almoloya de Juárez, Estado México, November 2006: A bit less than two hours from Mexico’s capital, minutes run by while the clothes and flags move along with the wind’s caress coming up the highway. Minutes escape and cars and buses travel from corner to corner within the penitentiary. Warm days say their goodbyes as the cold winter arrives. These months outside the jail are lived vividly by Jesus and five other activists from the Other Campaign that wait to, someday, see their struggle companions free.

The recent events of May 3 and 4 are fresh in Jesus’s memory. In those days, a counterinsurgency operation occupied the town of San Salvador Atenco, causing the deaths of Javier Cortés Santiago and Ollin Alexis Benhumea, along with multiple illegal detentions, torture, unlawful entries in private homes, illegal searches, burglaries, incommunication of the detainees and cases of rape. The orders and their fulfillment ran in charge of state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the security team of ex-president Vicente Fox and the high official of the police agency in the state, Wilfrido Robles Madrid. The carrying out was completed by members of at least three police corps: members of the third brigade of the Military Police (of the Ministry of National Defense – this brigade from the town of San Juan de los Jagueyes), 700 elements of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP, in its Spanish initials), one thousand 815 elements from the State Security Agency (ASE, in its Spanish initials), and many municipal police from different parts of the state. The result in numbers of this operations was savagery and death mixed together: two deaths, 207 illegal detentions (many of them tortured and beaten) and 27 women brutally raped. Justice has been disdained by state and federal authorities, ever since the days immediately after the events up to now, considering that the recommendations made by the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH, in its Spanish initials) haven’t been taken in.

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