The language of oppression

By Stan Gotlieb

Back in the mid-nineties, not too long after I moved to Mexico, I ran across an article published in Sierra Magazine, by John Ross. It provided the background that explained the then-most-recent massacre, in a place called Aguas Blancas. The mainstream U.S. media had covered it as either a land dispute, a long-standing feud, or a clash between government forces and dissidents. Horrible, regrettable, but what did it have to do with us? These things just happen among the peasants.

Ross documented it differently. The problem, he said, was deforestation. U.S.-based international lumber companies, most noticeably Boise Cascade (who of course denied all responsibility) were clear cutting the forest in the area. Invasion of property, erosion, loss of water retention, destruction of habitat needed for food purposes—all in the pursuit of a quick buck—had moved the local peasants to form a local organization to stop the clear cutting.

On their way to the state capital to join with other mountain peasants, labor leaders, ecologists and others to form a larger organization, and to present their complaints to the state government of then-governor Rubén Figueroa, the caravan of pickups in which they were riding was stopped at gunpoint by agents of the state motorized police. They were ordered out of the trucks, forced to kneel on the ground, and shot. Seventeen died and 20 more were injured. Grainy video pictures of the scene (the police were apparently using this as a “training exercise”) appeared to show paramilitary troops also firing, from cover behind some trees, with consent of the police. After the shooting stopped, the cops distributed some guns among the corpses and called it self-defense.

Reubén Figueroa, who was later shown to have ordered the killing (on tape telling his chief of police to stop the protesters by whatever means necessary: “Am I not the Governor?” he shouted), after firing his police chief, was removed from office by the President of Mexico—and never made to answer for his crimes. The international hue and cry was at high volume; and the newly formed guerrilla army calling itself the People’s Revolutionary Army (EPR), began to attack the police. Boise Cascade went away—for a while...

Thanks to Ross, and no thanks to the mainstream media, we found out that Figueroa, like his father before him, used his governor’s chair to make sure that the great majority of all log hauling in the area was done by a company he controlled—and that the log hauling business comprised the largest portion of his company’s revenues. So, one could conclude without too much difficulty that 17 men and youths were killed to insure that the governor’s family could continue to rake in the bucks.

Jump forward to 1999, when Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, activists in another peasants’ ecological group, were arrested on trumped up charges of possessing drugs and illegal firearms and thrown into the state’s maximum security prison. Of course they “confessed” to the crimes, having been tortured into signing blank pieces of paper which were later filled out by prosecutors.

nce again, the mainstream media treated it as a land dispute. Once again, the company benefiting from the clear cutting was Boise Cascade. Once again, the hue and cry went up. Amnesty International declared Montiel and Cabrera to be prisoners of conscience. They won the prestigious (and remunerative) Goldman Award. They were released in 2002 for “humanitarian reasons” but never exonerated. Under Mexican law, they could be arrested again at any time.

In 1988, 13 activists from the same area, fighting the same cause against the same U.S. transnational corporation, were arrested for killing the son of local cacique (boss) Bernardino Bautista, a ruling-party stalwart with connections to the Figueroa family. Since, all but one—ecologist farmer Felipe Arreaga—have been released for lack of evidence. Arreaga has been declared a prisoner of conscience by AI. One of the released peasant leaders was Alberto Peñaloza.
Last week, 12 armed gunmen drove up to Peñaloza’s home and opened fire on his family. Two sons were killed, and Peñaloza and two other sons were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. In an article datelined May 21 by AP correspondent Natalia Parra, in the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald, we were informed of most of this history, in a reasonable if perfunctory manner. We learned that the Army, while searching for the perpetrators, arrested three members of Peñaloza’s group for weapons violations, and failed to identify any of the killers. All pretty straightforward reporting of a typical whitewashing. Until the last paragraph.

“Activists have expressed hope that new Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca, who defeated the old ruling party and took office on April 1 **with the backing of a leftist party**, will reexamine the case and take steps to end the **feud**. (emphases mine)

C’mon, Natalia! “Leftist” is a scare word, and you know it—or you should. Why not “progressive,” a good word, or “socially conscious”? Or at least “Left-of-Center,” or “Left leaning”? Or, name the party (PRD) and correctly label it only-slightly-left-of-the-current-center, which is not really the center but actually pretty much the right, making it look pretty centrist to most of us.

And “feud,” Natalia? What, like the Hatfields and the McCoys? Like the Capulets and the Montegues? How about “repression”? “slaughter”? “corruption”? “massacres”? Feud implies a somewhat even playing field. How does that compute when the peasants have .22 rifles and the Army has helicopter gunships? Feud implies “tit for tat.” How does that work when mercenary thugs armed with assault weapons are hired by bosses to do the dirty work for international corporations, thus allowing the slaughter to go on while providing the corporations with “plausible deniability”?

Whomever among us still believes that “words can never hurt you” has never been a victim of the corporate media disinformation machine. “Populist,” the latest buzz-word for politicians such as Mexico City’s mayor, a front-runner for the presidency in 2006, is a pejorative (bad word) these days. It is applied to anyone who advocates spending money to feed and shelter the poor, rather than to enrich the corporations and their already over-fed CEOs.

AP wire service does not have a very good record when it comes to fair reporting. It has led the propaganda charge against virtually every progressive, independent (of the U.S.) new government in Latin America while writing supportively about every later-replaced political dinosaur. We are ill-served by the media manipulators.