More On The EPR

Posted on by Laughingnomad

New York Times
September 26, 2007
With Bombings, Mexican Rebels Escalate Their Fight
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and ANTONIO BETANCOURT

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 25 — The shadowy Marxist rebel group that has rattled Mexico three times in recent months by bombing natural gas pipelines has a long history of financing its operations with the kidnappings of businessmen, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors say the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, or Popular Revolutionary Army, a Marxist guerrilla group, has committed at least 88 kidnappings since 1999, collecting millions of dollars in ransom.

Just this year, the rebels have taken at least four people hostage, including two prominent businessmen and the relative of a reputed drug dealer, law enforcement officials and anticrime advocates say.

The bombings of gas pipelines are a drastic escalation in the group’s tactics. Seemingly overnight, the rebels have evolved from an organization devoted mostly to kidnappings into a much larger threat to the stability of Mexican industry and, by extension, to the state itself, officials say.

“The E.P.R. is a guerrilla organization with a political vision of taking power, and in this sense, has carried out violent acts,” Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said last week. He added, “It’s a severe worry for the government of Mexico.”

On two days in early July and again on Sept. 10, several bombs went off simultaneously at junctures on the pipelines and disrupted gas supplies to factories and businesses. Together, the attacks shut hundreds of factories in 10 states, some for as long as a week, including Volkswagen, Nissan and Honda plants. Losses have been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In all three attacks, the bombers filled fire extinguishers with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, then detonated them with plastic explosives wired to digital watches and batteries.

The power of the bombs and the logistical skill in setting them off at the same time took many top officials here by surprise. Before the blasts, the Popular Revolutionary Army was considered a moribund group that had peaked in 1996 and then splintered into several smaller groups.

After each bombing, the group issued communiqués demanding the return of two of its members. The group maintained that the men — Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez and Edmundo Reyes Amaya — disappeared last May in Oaxaca, a state that has a long history of peasant insurgencies and brutal government repression. Mr. Medina Mora and Oaxacan officials insist that the men are not in government custody.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the guerrillas are using the men’s disappearance as a pretext to destabilize Mexico and set off a leftist revolution. The bombings, they theorize, probably stem from anger among radical leftists over the federal crackdown on violent political protests in Oaxaca last year and the outcome of the presidential election, in which the leftist candidate narrowly lost.

The Popular Revolutionary Army has deep roots in Oaxaca, having been founded there in 1994 when 14 small insurgent groups banded together. The core leadership came from an extremist Marxist organization known by the acronym Procup, the Spanish initials for the Clandestine Revolutionary Workers’ Party-Union of the People.

Founded in the 1970s, Procup waged a campaign of kidnappings and executions against other leftists in the 1980s.

The Popular Revolutionary Army made its presence known in June 1996. At an event in Guerrero State commemorating the first anniversary of a massacre by the state police, masked guerrillas in the group read a manifesto calling for a socialist revolution. Many leftist politicians believed at first that they were government provocateurs.

But two months later, the group mounted coordinated attacks on police and military posts in five states, killing 13 people. Small columns of rebels continued to ambush police convoys and skirmish with soldiers for the next two years.

By late 1998, the military, the federal police and the Oaxacan authorities had made strides in dismantling the group, arresting several leaders and scores of people suspected of being tied to it, mostly from Oaxaca.

The group splintered into several factions after a shootout with the army in 1998 in El Charco, Guerrero. While the splinter groups continued to carry out bombings, the Popular Revolutionary Army seemed to slip into the background.

“They have been really quiet for the past several years,” said Bill Weinberg, a New York author who has written a book on Mexican insurgencies, “Homage to Chiapas.” “A lot of us thought they were finished.”

Law enforcement officials here say the group has only been underground, not dead. Its fortunes revived in late 2000 after the governor of Oaxaca, José Murat, granted amnesty to about 135 people suspected of being members who were being held in state prisons, officials say.

Today, officials say the rebels’ main base of operations is not in the mountains of southern Mexico, but in the teeming slums of Xochimilco and Tláhuac in Mexico City. Active members are believed to number no more than 100, officials say.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the leadership of the group includes figures like Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez, a Oaxacan whose involvement goes back to the 1970s when he was a member of Procup. “Most of the leadership is Oaxacan,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about a continuing investigation.

Felipe Canseco, a former Procup member who is now a lawyer, said the Popular Revolutionary Army is organized in underground cells, so that the members do not know the names of the upper echelon of commanders. “These groups are very clandestine and compartmentalized,” he said. “The E.P.R. does not recognize a chief.”

Mr. Canseco said he worried that the government would use the bombings as an excuse to harass peaceful left-wing organizations, like his group, the Democratic Popular Left, a collection of former guerrillas trying to participate as a political party.

“These bombings make it clear that after 40 years the military insurgents continue to exist and that they have become strong,” he said. “More than anything else, this gives the government a motive to start up the dirty war again.”

The Art Of Obfuscation

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I wondered what my Iranian friends were thinking as I sat squirming in my chair during the indelicate introduction to President Ahmadinejad’s remarks at Columbia University yesterday.

And I squirmed some more trying to follow Ahmadinejad’s obfuscated logic.

And I squirm some more wondering how all this is playing out on the streets of the middle east. If he is trying to “lead the charge” against the U.S. how will this event affect how the Arabic world sees him? And us?

I did laugh, though, when he said Iran didn’t have any gays. But perhaps this isn’t so funny if Iran is hanging them.

And yes, what does the holocaust directly have to do with Palestine? But then my history is fuzzy.

I would have liked to ask him why so many journalists were in jail. And what his ideas are about how to stabilize Iraq.

And I wonder how the women of Iran reacted if they heard his remarks about them.

In the midst of his outrageous denials no one seemed to hear his message to us about our troubling foreign policy. Today he will be at the UN.

The Washington Post this morning has a couple articles with details about the Columbia and National Press Club appearances here.

Guerrilla Band Wages War In Mexico

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When I was living in Oaxaca during the teacher strike in 2006, people would often speculate about whether the EPR (Popular Revolutionary Army) in Guerrero was also operating in Oaxaca. At the height of the rebellion, when we were expecting the Federal Preventive Police to descend on the city, there would sometimes be rumors that the EPR was coming in. Most people doubted it. No one seemed to know. But then during the rebellion that lasted from June until the “hard hand” of the federal police came down on November 25, 2006, very few ever really knew exactly what was going on behind the scene.

Now that the APPO (Popular Assembly) consisting of thousands of teachers, activists, Unions etc have moved it’s activities from Oaxaca City to the pueblos around the state, it would seem that if the EPR is in Oaxaca, it is a significant development. It is also significant to the U.S. where the bombings of the pipelines pushed up the price of oil futures in New York.

Eduardo Verdugo / AP
The national oil and gas company’s pipelines were bombed this summer in attacks by leftist guerrillas that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses. The rebels are seeking the return of two missing militants. A rebel group responsible for costly attacks on pipelines accuses the government of having a role in disappearances.

By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 20, 2007

MEXICO CITY — — Edmundo Reyes is a slight, unassuming man of 55 who loves baseball and children’s literature. Until recently, he sold candy and soft drinks from his family’s corner grocery store in this city’s Nezahualcoyotl district.

In May, he left to visit relatives in the state of Oaxaca and never returned. His disappearance might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that it has set off a small war that has twice shut down a sizable chunk of the Mexican economy.

Unbeknownst to family and friends, Reyes was conducting a double life: He was a leader of a group calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR in Spanish. His comrades are convinced that he has been captured by “the enemy.”
Read More

Power To The People

Posted on by Laughingnomad

It is ironic that people who suffer from the worst oppression seem to be the most able to thrive and “find themselves and their calling,” a woman friend from Iran recently said to me as we were discussing the release of Haleh Esfandier, the Iranian American who was recently released after 7 months in jail in Iran. And there is Sharon Ebadi, the Iranian attorney who has been incarcerated for defending over 200 jailed journalists and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Recalling the take-over of a television station by a group of women in Oaxaca last year, I am so proud of the women of the world who are courageously fighting for justice.

But of course, as in Oaxaca, it is usually the destitute that have the least to lose, except for their lives. You won’t see an uprising in the U.S. anytime soon. We have the most to lose…jobs that provide 401Ks destined for retirement and education of our children are more important to us in the short term than holding corrupt leaders accountable. Witness the University of Florida journalism student who was tasered after being handcuffed and removed from a venue where he was vociferously questioning Senator Kerry. See video here. Safer to hold leaders in other countries accountable.

Cambodia
Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people, was charged by an International Tribunal Wednesday with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Nuon Chea, considered the right-hand man to Pol Pot, was arrested early Wednesday morning at his home in Pailin in northwestern Cambodia near the Thai border and flown to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where he was put in the custody of a U.N.-supported genocide tribunal. The late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 and his former military chief, Ta Mok, died in 2006 in government custody.

The tribunal is investigating abuses committed when the communist Khmer Rouge held power in 1975-79. The Khmer Rouge have been blamed for the deaths of their countrymen from starvation, ill health, overwork and execution.

Officers later took the 82-year-old Nuon Chea – who denies any wrongdoing – into custody and put him into a car and then a helicopter for the capital, Phnom Penh, as his son and dozens of onlookers gathered to watch the historic scene in silence, witnesses said.

Burma
UPDATE Sunday September 23, 2007
The AP has reported that 20,000 March in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) Myanmar…double the number that marched yesterday in Mandalay.

The monks shouted support for Suu Kyi, while about 10,000 people protected them by forming a human chain along the route but riot police and barbed wire barricades blocked hundreds of monks and anti-government demonstrators from approaching the home of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi

Plainclothes police trailed the marchers. Some, armed with shotguns, were posted at street corners. Sunday’s security presence came after several days of a hands-off attitude by the authorities, who had clearly been trying to avoid provoking the well-disciplined and widely respected monks. One observer said “the military is not prepared, unless things get worse, to directly confront the monks in their uniforms but violence on a significant scale is not to be discounted.”

UPDATE Saturday September 22, 2007
London’s Guardian reported that witnesses say that upwards of 10,000 monks marched through the city of Mandalay in the 5th straight day of demonstrations against the iron-fisted military junta, the largest demonstration in a decade.

September 19, 2007
The associated press today reported that the Myanmar monks were taking to the streets for the second day in a row, marching in disciplined ranks as they extended a series of spirited demonstrations against the country’s military government into a second month.

The marches on Tuesday by thousands of monks in Myanmar marked the 19th anniversary of the 1988 crackdown in Myanmar in which the current junta took over after crushing a failed pro-democracy rebellion that sought an end to military rule, imposed since 1962.

The junta held general elections in 1990, but refused to honor the results when pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won. Suu Kyi has been detained under house arrest for more than 11 years.

The Yangon march and rallies in other cities Wednesday were to protest hardship brought on by the government’s economic policies, especially a sudden hike in fuel prices. The hike last month sparked the persistent protests – first by pro-democracy activists and now primarily by monks. The rallies also reflect long pent-up opposition to the repressive military regime.

The authorities know that restraining monks poses a dilemma. Monks are highly respected in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and abusing them in any way could cause public outrage.

In addition to protests, monks have threatened to cut off contact with the military and their families, and to refuse alms from them – a humiliating gesture that would embarrass the junta.

Monks have nothing to lose…except their lives.

Vicente Fox On Bush

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Past President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has written a new book called “Revolution Of Hope. In it Fox found the legal fight over the 2000 U.S. election “ironic.”

“At our request the United States had sent election monitors to protect the balloting process in Mexico,” Fox says. “But where they might have been more useful that year was in Florida.”

Which is an ironic statement in itself, of course, because the next election that gave Mexico Felipe Calderon is considered by many to have also been fraudulent.

The following has been taken by an article by The Washington Post this morning:

Mexico’s Fox, in Book, Chides and Praises Bush

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; Page A19

ANTIGUA, Guatemala, Sept. 18 — President Bush and Vicente Fox once portrayed themselves as diplomatic allies and close friends, but the former Mexican president takes some jabs at Bush in a new autobiography, calling him “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life” and a “windshield cowboy” afraid to ride a powerful horse.

Fox sprinkles anecdotes about Bush and other world leaders throughout “Revolution of Hope,” recounting disagreements with Bush over the Iraq invasion and a shared hope for immigration reform that was undercut by security concerns after Sept. 11, 2001. The former Mexican leader also chides Bush’s administration for unilateralism.
……
Fox left office in December, six years after his election ended seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico. His book, written with Texas political consultant Rob Allyn and scheduled for release by Viking on Oct. 8, is likely to rattle Mexican traditionalists accustomed to former leaders quietly fading away.

“We’re going to get this done,” Fox recalls Bush telling him [about the immigration reform package before Congress]. Three days later, planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and “our revolution of hope came face to face with the walls of fear,” Fox writes.
…….

Fox, who writes that one of his aunts is a cloistered nun in Cincinnati and that his son, Rodrigo, attends the University of California at Santa Barbara, says that years before entering politics he passed up an executive job with Coca-Cola in the United States. (He had been a supervisor of Coca-Cola’s operations in Mexico.) “I didn’t want the Statue of Liberty, the streets paved with gold,” he says.
……..

Thoughts After Re-entry

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have been back in the house in Salem Oregon nearly a month now…a house I lived in for 35 years while raising the children…after traveling for over four years. Re-entry…always the most difficult part of traveling.

In Mexico, as in Asia, people practically live outdoors which offers great opportunities for interaction and friend-making. Here in Salem, I am savoring the fresh clean air and the QUIET! I can actually choose whether to listen to TV or not. Even the massage parlors in Thailand and the “comida corridas” (luncheon cafes) in Mexico were blaring with afternoon soaps. And driving here is heavenly! I totally understand why some people are objecting to Mexican trucks driving in the States! But I have to make an appointment to see old friends…no place to go to mix with people. I loved the Zocalo in Oaxaca…when I wanted to be with people I could just walk a couple blocks and always see someone I knew and could sit and talk for hours over a coffee. Even with my Mexican friends. I think though, even for Mexico, the layout of Oaxaca City, with the Zocalo and even the Centro as a whole, is a unique place and one of the reasons people love it there. I do miss it.

And then of course there is the shock of coming face to face again with a consumer society even though I am relishing the efficiency and customer service that comes with it. But the shock will never be as devastating as it was when I returned from Europe in 1965…a very radicalizing experience that shook me to my core. There is so much I could say about this… In the states we generally keep ourselves so insulated from death. I just groan and roll my eyes when I listen to people here complain about the most minute inconsequential things.

In Mexico you hear a lot of vitriol about global trade and NAFTA. The price of corn, the staple food for the poor in Oaxaca (the birthplace of corn), has risen and tortillas are 7% more expensive this year…a huge increase for people whose minimum wage is 50 cents an hour…even if they qualify. What’s worse, the people favor criollo (heirloom corn) which has a wonderful taste and the hand-made tortillas are delicious and moist…unlike those horrible sawdust-tasting things made by machine that you get in the states. The imported corn is cheaper than the criollo corn now and most people can’t afford the good stuff. And even worse, it is putting criollo corn farmers out of business which will cause the price of it to rise even more.

Yes, many people in Mexico are mad…except for the ones whose jobs and perks are tied to the power structure and benefit from the favors and the money creamed off the top by the government…money that never trickles down to the most destitute. With little rule of law, separation of powers, corruption and no transparency, the poor feel they have little choice other than to openly rebel. The middle class (many of whom are actually lower class by our standards) feel they have little choice other than to hold onto the status quo by it’s finger tips and was the most threatened by the 2006 uprising. It’s short term thinking, I thought to myself. If they only realized that if they were in solidarity with the calls for reform, justice and the end of corruption they too would benefit in the long term. But I also understand their desire to keep their distance from the internal disputes that have arisen within the rebellion because of the pursuit of personal and political agendas. The political and social implications are incredibly complicated and after a year in Oaxaca I felt I knew and understood little more than when I arrived.

And many expats in Oaxaca suspect that the CIA was afoot during the teacher strike last year…it is in the interest of the US and the Mexican governments to keep uprisings down because of the fear it could spread all over Mexico and to other leftist-leaning Latin American countries. And that is another story entirely!

For the moment I am occupied with tree trimming, pruning an overgrown yard, moss on the roof, resealing the deck, utility bills, auto maintenance. The housing market is in the tank right now so no time to sell. I am sorting through boxes and boxes of ___t that have been stored in the basement…stuff that I never needed in the first place and am now wondering what to keep and what to throw out…or give away. Four years living out of a backpack..a few t-shirts, couple pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes…taught me we certainly can live just fine without a lot of stuff in our lives although I do admit that half of what I carried was tangled computer and camera parts. Life was people centered those four years… I am struggling with incorporating perspective.

While traveling I got my news over the internet. After years of no TV I am now aghast at the trivia that is called news. I am noticing that almost every single maddeningly repetitious ad takes place in million dollar homes. “Average” families in the movies are filmed in million dollar homes. No wonder many people in the whole world, most of whom have never been out of their neighborhoods much less their countries, have a skewed view of beyond rich Americans! Even though by their standards we ARE rich. But when I told my motorcycle taxi driver in Viet Nam that one of my jobs here before retiring was managing a homeless program he was shocked. “Why they no work?” I didn’t even know where to begin. And “retirement?” Incomprehensible to most people in the world. “Jubilado” is the word in Spanish…I certainly didn’t have to live off the local economy where the minimum wage is 50 cents an hour and 68% of the people live on less than $90 a month.

In the zocalo in Oaxaca one day, I brazenly told an older Mexican man that I was amazed that the poorest of people living in squalid conditions all over the world could still laugh and be joyful. He just looked at me with incomprehension. That one look told me about all the preconceptions I was still unknowingly harboring about what is necessary for a person to be happy. This moment I will never forget.

Calderon Wants Raise

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From the Mexico Solidarity Network:

“President Felipe Calderon called for a 25% raise in the presidential salary, to more than US$20,000 per month. Calderon presented the request to Congress on September 10. The presidential salary is in addition to benefits for clothing, entertainment and travel which can easily surpass the official salary. The request comes after Calderon reduced his own salary immediately after assuming the presidency in an effort to gain popular support after a fraudulent election.”

El Grito in Oaxaca

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A friend’s report on the grito: “My observations are that indeed the zocalo was turned into an armed camp; I counted ten policemen on each corner of Garcia Vigil, and at the Alameda, along Independencia. Given that atmosphere, I went instead to the popular grito, which was held on Carmen Alto Plazuela, with about two hundred attending. It was staged early to avoid confrontations. The event began with a calenda from Simbolos Patrias and by eight PM the plazuela was filled with people. As is common, the children recited and were applauded, followed by cries of More! More!. The kids were followed by singers who sang the struggle ballads (More! More! Otra! Otra!). Then the “cry” came, consisting of the names of the dead from the past year. The person giving the cry was a woman, and I never heard who she is, but ! I have photos. Then the national anthem, then Venceremos…it was what I expected, and am never unmoved by, a people’s event.”

Mexico’s Pipe Bombs

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My expat friend in Oaxaca says “an opinion piece by Ricardo Rocha and published in the Oaxaca Noticias on Friday the 14th of September, has a few points I think worth calling to the attention of people outside of Oaxaca. Rocha points out that if the guerrilla group Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR), a small, rural-based Marxist guerrilla group that had been inactive for years, after a series of spectacular attacks on police in 1996, explodes oil pipelines, it is not a small casual act to be sloughed off with a shrug. The EPR has opted for armed revolution. The EPR resurfaced last year amid the civil unrest that shook the capital city of Oaxaca state, where protesters over many months paralysed the city and demanded the ouster of the governor. At that time, the EPR claimed responsibility for several bank bombings in Mexico City.

Despite URO (governor) saying “no pasa nada”, a lot is happening. Those of us here can see the state is in chaos, held together mainly by armed local and federal police. But the federal investigation units cannot foresee or control the guerrilla attacks which grow more sophisticated.

Rocha accepts that URO is responsible for the two EPR people who were disappeared last month. He refers to a return of the dirty war, which human rights activists here say is not a return but a continuation of government tactics employed since the seventies.

Meanwhile, Rocha points out, nobody is paying attention to the structural causes of rebellion. The APPO, we know, is non-violent, but the EPR has no such commitment, nor, I think do other groups around the nation. Rocha refers to Explosive Mexico, not just Explosive Oaxaca. He refers to the extremes of poverty, destitution of populations and communities, children suffering with parasites, bloated bellies , etcetera —while the political and business elite increase their already elevated salaries and perks.

And to add fuel to the fire, Rocha points out, a federal judge condemned an activist from Atenco to 67 years in prison.”

An article about the EPR’s bombing of Mexico’s gas pipelines appeared on economist.com September 13 and can be found <a href="<a href=" here.“>

My friend goes on to ask “Why does no middle class or affluent person pay attention to the real situation? I can say that reforms to guarantee an independent human rights commission and a electoral reform law are on the right track–but are they? Or are they irrelevant and unenforceable? Do they address the underlying causes of why armed guerrillas operate in Mexico?”

We go about our lives, but with great unease.”

“El Grito” Cry For Independence

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In two days, Mexico will celebrate Independence Day on September 17. It is traditional for the governor to enter the Governor’s Palace, now a museum since the teacher strike of last year, and utter the “cry for Independence” at midnight. This is done in Mexico City and all over Mexico.

An expat reports “I have not gone today (Saturday) to personally look at the scene, but the usual is to place heavy barriers of metal, cement or razor wire in the roadways of all streets that enter the zocalo. The sidewalks permit entry of single persons who in the past have had their bags searched. The police stand at the barricades in riot gear.

A description of the “safety”, brought to us by a website in support of the government, ADA Sureste describes the event. It is a safety measure to have ready water tanks (high pressure hoses) and teargas, all the police units available as well as firefighters, and to patrol the streets and towns around the area. Inside the museum palace there will be units of police, with a total of ten strategically placed.

This is to continue through the independence day celebrations on the 17th. Since the grito ! will be given at midnight (or 1:00 AM on daylight savings, I don’t know which hour will be used) it will be dark, adding to the need for ‘safety.'”

This article also confirms that a separate “popular grito” will be given at Santo Domingo Church…the people refusing to participate in the official event. A friend in Oaxaca says “I would suggest that any foreigner who chooses to attend either the governor’s ceremony or the popular event do so with circumspect behavior, whatever that means.”