David Sasaki on recent violence in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico:

This much we know for sure. On May third and fourth [2006], in the Mexican town of San Salvador Atenco, riots broke out which resulted in 200 arrests and 50 injured officers according to an official statement. We also know that a 14-year-old youth named Javier Cortés Santiago was killed in the violence. Those small details, however, are about the only facts that all sides agree on. Disagreed upon is 1.) whether Cortés was killed by a bullet of the police or protesters 2.) whether protesters were raped by police officers or if such claims are fabrications 3.) whether the government was justified in using force, and 4.) most importantly, just what actually set off the riots?
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John Ross @ Guerilla News Network: “The “Dirty War” Returns to Mexico”:

MEXICO CITY: Between 1970 and 1982, three Mexican presidents waged a “dirty war” against dissidents from one end of the country to the next. Recently compiled documentation lists 15,000 illegal detentions during that terrible period, thousands of instances of torture, and the forced disappearance of more than 700 Mexican citizens …

Nowhere was the dirty war more cruelly fought then along the Pacific coast of Guerrero state where farmers had risen in rebellion behind the rural school teacher-turned guerrillero Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor. Carlos Montemayor, author of “War In Paradise”, perhaps the most vehement expose of that repression, is an assiduous scholar of how the dirty war in Guerrero was organized and carried out.

Writing in the left daily La Jornada, Montemayor recently described the characteristics of that counter-insurgency campaign against farming villages along the Guerrero coast, and the striking similarities to the May 4th assault on San Salvador Atenco just outside of Mexico City by thousands of highly militarized police to quell a campesino rebellion.

According to Montemayor’s description, first an overwhelming force is assembled with the primary mission of totally subjugating a recalcitrant population. Then informers are introduced into the village to identify and eliminate rebel community leaders and those associated with them. If the leaders evade capture, their families are held hostage. Young men are rounded up and selectively tortured to extract information and to turn them into “soplones” (informers.)

Meanwhile, shock troops terrorize the civilian population into submission. Indiscriminate beatings, home invasions, the theft of personal items of value, and the systematic destruction of property are encouraged by police commanders. Women are raped and sexually abused to underscore the occupation force’s total domination over the rebellious villagers.

Virtually all of these dirty war characteristics were on display in San Salvador Atenco May 4th when 3000 armed state police and elements of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), a force largely extracted from the Mexican military, slammed into that dirt-poor town of 30,000 out on the dried lake beds east of the capital, killing one 14-year-old, leaving a 20-year-old student hovering between life and death, and arresting 209, all of whom required hospitalization from the beatings they received under security force batons – although only some prisoners actually received it (and they were chained to their hospital beds.) Of 47 women arrested, 23 reported that they had been raped or were otherwise sexually abused.
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