In an operation that bears all the marks of drug war-style repression, state and federal police detained six adherents to the Other Campaign, one Zapatista, and one unaffiliated man in Agua Azul, Chiapas. The military was also involved; it shot six warning shots into the air with live ammunition at a protest blockade, and it provided military intelligence that Chiapas state officials say was used to detain the men.
The Agua Azul region is an area that in recent years has been the site of violent attacks against Zapatistas perpetrated by members of the paramilitary Organization For Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC). OPDDIC members allegedly participated in the operation.
The state government reports that it intends to charge the detained men with aggravated robbery, assault, and organized crime. Additionally, the government intends to charge the man without organizational affiliation, Juan Alfredo Gomez Moreno, with the kidnapping of a Guerrero senator. The senator, David Jimenez Rumbo, wrote a letter to the national daily La Jornada explaining that he was never kidnapped and that he never filed any charges to that effect.
Troubles began on April 13 when an Other Campaign adherent from San Sebastian Bachajon in the Agua Azul region, Jerónimo Gómez Saragos, went to the city of Ocosingo with five other residents from his ejido (communally owned land) to run errands. The group agreed to meet up at the Caballo Negro store in Ocosingo to leave for their community together. Jerónimo never arrived. At 4pm fellow edijadatario Carlos Hernández Bilchis informed the group that he saw state police grab Jerónimo.
That night, a commission made up of Antonio Gómez Saragos, Miguel Demeza Jiménez, Sebastián Demeza Deara, Pedro Demeza Deara, and Gerónimo Moreno Deara (also referred to as Jeronimo Deara Junto) set out from the Bachajon ejido to investigate Jerónimo's arrest. According to ejido authorities, state police pulled them over in Temó (Chilón municipality), severely beat the five men, and took them to the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez where some of them were tortured.
Once the men were in Tuxtla, the state government announced that it had detained a gang of robbers that operated along the highway between the Palenque and Agua Azul tourist destinations. The men, the government claims, stopped busses and robbed passengers at gunpoint.
In paid inserts designed to look like newspaper articles, the government printed large pictures of the detained men and the "weapons" it claims it confiscated from them: pliers, balaclavas, machetes, a walkie-talkie (there is no phone service available in many indigenous communities), and car keys. The paid inserts, which appeared in the national daily La Jornada and the Chiapas newspaper Cuarto Poder, were designed to look like newspaper articles announcing the detention of drug barons.
It is worth noting that the government has not announced the decommission of the guns it claims the men used in the robberies: .9mm and .38 caliber pistols.
Torture
In President Felipe Calderon's fight against organized crime, "organized crime" is commonly assumed to refer to Mexico's notorious drug trafficking organizations. However, as documented in the Narco News article "Regime of Exception: Mexico's Two-Track Justice System," Mexico's legal system distinguishes between organized crime and other crimes, ceding significantly fewer rights to the former. Human rights organizations have criticized the system, saying that a two-track justice system that separates suspects into citizens with rights and supercriminals without rights leaves everyone at risk for violations of internationally consensed-upon due process and human rights.
Because the six men have been accused (though not formally charged) with organized crime, the government has put them under arraigo, or pre-charge detention, for a period of 30 days. The Chiapas-based Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) says that it has "repeatedly denounced that the State Attorney General's Office systematically uses arraigo as an instrument of subjugation and torture in order to extract confessions, not only against members of organized crime, but also against social organizations and movements." Under Mexico's recent judicial reform, which has yet to be fully implemented, arraigo is reserved for people accused of organized crime, rape, homicide, kidnapping, violent crimes, and crimes against national security.
Jerónimo Gómez Saragos told Frayba that his torture begin the moment he was detained. He said that when the state police grabbed him, they punched him in the throat and back. They also planted a cell phone and a camera in his pants pocket (presumably to accuse him of having robbed them from a bus). After the police took him to Tuxtla Gutierrez, they blindfolded him. Utilizing a torture method that sounds strikingly similar to waterboarding, they put a wet towel over his nose and put a bag filled with water over his head. When the government finally permitted human rights observers to see Jerónimo, he had difficulty moving his left arm and he walked with a limp. He says government agents forced him to sign a confession that they didn't read to him. Jerónimo's first language is Tseltal, and he doesn't speak Spanish well. The government says that the confession Jerónimo signed says he participated in at least 20 highway robberies.
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