(@Proyecto ambulante)
In a communiqué released on 10 May, ejidatarios from San Sebastián Bachajón who are adherents to the “Other Campaign” denounced that on 6 May, members of the Indigenous Campesino and Forest Union (Uciaf) who are affiliated with the Green Ecologist (PVEM) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) used firearms in an ambush of two residents of the ejido, leaving Javier Pérez Jiménez gravely injured, being 17 years of age. He is now suffering in a hospital in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. His brother, also present, survived the attack without injury and identified one of the four aggressors as Manuel Vázquez Ruíz, leader of Uciaf, and one of the “principal agitators of the society of this community, a product of the intense campaigns taken by these political parties which have caused several violent incidents.”
They indicated furthermore that in a previous event on 29 April 2011, the same Vázquez López fired on Florentino Pérez Gómez and that “there exists in this sense an arrest-order against Vázquez López and those who are responsible, regarding whom the authorities have been negligent.” They noted that Pérez Gómez “had the opportunitiy to be able to demand justice for what had happened to him, but this never arrived. As they are people with few resources, one day they came to the offices of the State Attorney General’s Office in Yajalón toward the end of soliciting aid from the authorities to request an arrest-order against those responsible. To their surprise, these authorities said to the indigenous family that to go arrest the responsible would require 6,000 pesos, insisting that justice requires money.” This is the reason for which the communiqué identified as principally responsible for the violence in the zone the authorities supposedly imparting justice.
They warned also that “It is very clear who it is that is responsible; if the relevant authorities do not take on this affair we will do it ourselves, because this is not the first time that we have been victims of injustice that seeks only to degrade our organization and intimidate us so that we give up our struggles for defense of territory and land. This is yet another example of how the political parties are generating violence, confrontations, and social alienation with their projects.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Comunicado de ejidatarios de San Sebastián Bachajón adherentes a la Otra Campaña (10 de mayo de 2012)
Paramilitares atacan a ejidatarios de San Sebastián Bachajón; uno agoniza, dicen (La Jornada, 10 de mayo de 2012)
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
Chiapas: Sit-in of the Front of Ejidos in Resistance in San Cristóbal de Las Casas (6 January 2012)
Chiapas: Ejidatarios de San Sebastián Bachajón retoman la caseta de cobro de Agua Azul(2 de diciembre de 2011)
Chiapas: Press conference by ejidatari@s from San Sebastián Bachajón (20 March 2011)
Chiapas: Special report by Frayba: Government creates and administers conflicts (8 March 2011)
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