La Jornada
March 15, 2002
By Hermann Bellinghausen

Denuncia that PFP Will Be Dislocating 35 Villages from Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas - Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities and various civil organizations have been repeatedly denouncing the imminent eviction of some 35 villages inside and around the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. The Information and Research Collective of the Selva Region announced yesterday that the expulsion-relocation operation "is only missing the day and the time, because the week when it is going to take place has already been set: this Holy Week, and its full moon."

In mid-February, the Ricardo Flores Magón Autonomous Municipality made public an escalation of events and threats of expulsion which various federal and state agencies had been making, in what the above-mentioned collective is now calling "media preparation for the event." The Autonomous Council had already requested civil society to mobilize in order to stop what observers consider to be the "geo-strategic expulsion-repositioning in the mountainous central massif of the Mayan Selva, which goes beyond the Selva Lacandona."

Autonomous authorities repeated that they will not allow the dislocation of their communities, nor will they allow the ejidal rights of the other 15 to be affected. Many of these communities are legal, and the most recent ones are made up of campesinos with land who were displaced by the military occupation and paramilitary violence in the Taniperla cañada. Could it be that the government, instead of handing them back their lands, is going to make them doubly displaced?

However, the bottom line is that last Saturday, March 9, hundreds of Federal Preventative Police (PFP) troops arrived at the Rancho Nuevo barracks, the seat of the military region, in dozens of commercial buses belonging to the Cristóbal Colón transportation company. Given the fact that the event coincided with the ruckus between merchants and the Judicial Police in the San Cristóbal market, it had been thought that the PFP was at the Rancho Nuevo military base as eventual support for an operation against the alleged market "pirates."

On the 11th, Enoch Hernández, Municipal President of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, reported that they were air transportation units who were carrying out parachute exercises at the Rancho Nuevo facilities. It is noteworthy that the lake district (northeast of the reserve and the richest region in the Mayan Selva) has a similar topography and climate to that of San Cristóbal, where Rancho Nuevo is located.

"We'll return by air" federal Army officials had threatened the women of the Laguna El Suspiro community, in the Selva, when a (military) detachment had gone in last January in order to intimidate the population and demand that the indigenous get out of there "willingly."

The plan for violent expulsion, which could already be underway, "is fundamentally a counterinsurgent focus, more or less like the escalation in Colombia, which is the entrance to the Amazon, and which has been going on since 1997," stated the Information Collective, which has been collecting and systematizing reports regarding the issue.

Residents of the region believed that the strike was going to come in April of 2000. It was assumed that it would be carried out by the PFP, a force created by a presidential decree from Zedillo in 1999, explicitly "for reestablishing and maintaining order in national parks, lake reservoirs and rivers (Article 5, Section 2, of its organic law)." However, the PRI defeat in July, and the loss of the chiapaneco governorship in August, would have caused the operation to be withdrawn, "and the deferment of the plans, which now, two years later and with the wholehearted incitement and backing of Washington, has been being prepared since September 12, 2001."

On that day Lacandón representatives formally requested Governor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía to expel the villages settled in the biosphere reserve which Luis Echeverría's government, in a populist measure, turned into a virtual latifundo of the small Lacandón people, therefore denying land to the other peoples, Tzeltales and Tzotziles, who are (today) demanding similar rights to those of the Lacandón.

This Friday Mexican officials will receive an international backing/mandate to carry out the expulsion. The United Nations, which designated 2002 "the year of the mountains," will declare through the Security Council, and at the request of Mexico (according to the March 1 National Forestry Council Bulletin), that the forests are a matter of international security.

This will give the green light to the "legal" and violent expulsion of a key region of the Mexican territory, lands which are being subjected to commercial and strategic pressures that are international and interventionist in nature. The increasing voices of alarm are seeking to disseminate what they think of this expulsion-occupation of the Mayan Selva in terms of human rights and indigenous cultures. And also regarding the forest vegetative cover, which, if it is plundered by the transnationals and the Plan Puebla-Panama Plan, will signify irreversible ecological damage for the entire world, paradoxically disguised as being environmentally motivated.

Translated from Spanish by Irlandesa