by Maureen Welch

Roughly a month after the violent days in early May, San Salvador de Atenco has already become a case study in conflicting reportage and political spin. The tenor of the coverage immediately following the events focused on “machete-wielding” peasantry, but gradually shifted in the following days to the police brutality at the scene. This was in no small part due to the defiant stance of women detainees who denounced the sexual abuse inflicted on them en route to prison facilities in Toluca. By the 22nd of May, the Secretarìa de Seguridad Pùblica (SSP) was having to offer explanations for the report released by the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) that stated “No one can say that these women lied.” (1).

The context of the conflicts of the 3rd and 4th reach back to 2002 when the residents of Atenco gained national notoriety for fending off the proposed federal takeover of the town’s land for a new Mexico City airport. Out of this struggle the People’s Front in Defense of Land (Frente del Pueblo en Defensa de La Tierra) was formed. Zapatista subcomandante Marcos has been vocally supportive of Atenco´s autonomy struggle, and called upon the People’s Front to provide security for him during the May 1st Labor Day march to Mexico City. During this current election cycle, not all residents of Atenco are People’s Front supporters, which has added another layer of complexity to recent events there.

On May 3rd in Texcoco, state police blocked 60 flower vendors from setting up their stalls in the town market around 7 am. The flower seller’s resistance to expulsion from their market on this morning was met with beatings and arrests by the police. Word spread to the neighboring residents of Atenco, and several groups arrived to join in what was by now a violent conflict. About 150 Atenco residents responded by blocking the Lechería-Texcoco highway that leads between the two towns.

The violence continued to escalate as hundreds of state and federal police attempted to remove the barricade unsuccessfully five times throughout the day. Reporters and camera crews from the national and international press started transmitting images of police beating people already taken into custody, as well as images of protestors retaliating against police with beatings and Molotov cocktails. El Universal reported that around 3:30 pm protestors had taken some of the police as hostages, and John Gilber of ZNet reported they were later released to the Red Cross that evening (2). A police raid took the leader of the People´s Front, Ignacio Del Valle, into custody. The press managed to take photos of Del Valle, badly beaten, as he was brought in to prison later that night. Wednesday was also marked by the tragic death of 14-year-old Javier Cortés Santiago. Early reports claimed the fatality was caused by an exploding firecracker, implicating the responsibility of the protestors, but official autopsy reports released soon after determined the cause of death was a bullet from a .38 caliber weapon (3). Whether the police were armed during the conflicts of the 3rd and 4th remains a point of contention, as the SSP claims that none of the Policía Federal Preventiva were armed, whereas pictures taken at the scene and bullet casings collected afterwards indicate the presence of arms (4).

Atencans maintained the highway barricade throughout the night of the 3rd. After hearing news of the confrontation, students and union members from the state of Mexico began arriving to act as observers in solidarity with the residents of Atenco. Around 6:45 the next morning 3,000 police arrived and began shooting tear gas into the town. By 7 the police had breached the barricade and entered the town, as both residents and observers scrambled for shelter in the cloud of tear gas. Once the police had occupied the town beatings and arrests began immediately. As John Ross reported on Narco News, “In classic dirty war mode, police brought in ski-masked informers who went from house to house pointing out popular front sympathizers. Police broke down doors and invaded private homes without warrants, firing weapons beating the residents bloody, and smashing the furniture into kindling”(5).

In hiding was 23-year-old Alexis Benhumea, who had been hit in the left temple at close range with a tear gas canister, exposing his brain through two skull fractures. After lying unconscious attended by his father for 12 hours, contacts from Mexico City were able to usher him out of the town in a rented van. All told the “police operative” had taken 209 people into custody by Wednesday evening, many having sustained severe beatings in their arrest and transport. This much was known in reports made on the fifth.

Afterwards first-hand accounts of witnesses and detainees started to circulate. While the excessive beatings of detainees caused a cry of outrage, a focal point of denouncement emerged over the testimonies of 23 out of the 47 women arrested who reported that they had been raped or sexually abused by the police. The abuse was reported to have taken place at both the site of arrests and during the terrifying three hour bus trip from Atenco to Toluca´s Santiaguito prison. Sexual abuse of female detainees was first mentioned on the 6th on ZNet and Narco News, on the 7th in La Jornada, and on the 9th in El Universal and El Financiero.

One German, one Chilean, and two Spanish women were among those arrested. All four were summarily deported without full benefit of the legal deportation process. Once the women arrived in their home countries they released statements and gave interviews which began circulating widely on the internet. María Sastres from Spain told La Jornada in reference to the sexual abuse suffered by detainees, “They did everything to us, and since our faces were covered, we couldn’t see who they were. We could see the ground was covered in blood and we could hear people crying out in pain. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the sexual assault, but they took off our clothes, they tore them off us, lots of police put their hands all over us, and I would rather not say anything more. All of this happened in the truck on the way from Atenco to Toluca”(6).

The anthropology student and filmmaker Valentina Palma Novoa has also been very vocal about her experience after her deportation to Chile. She recounts, “Once on the bus, another female police officer asked me my name, while two male officers grabbed my breasts violently and threw me on top of the body of an old man whose face was nothing more than a crust of blood” (7). The Mexican women were kept for 10 days before human rights organizations were allowed to interview them(8). Then their stories began to come out, corroborating and extending the reports already given by the deported women. On May 17, Al Giordano of Narco News published an article featuring detailed excerpts from three women’s testimonies of rape and sexual abuse (9).

One of the most startling accounts that appeared in the daily El Pais in Spain, La Jornada, and corroborated directly by the victim Italia Méndez as quoted in Giordano’s article, was when police demanded to be called “cowboy” in the course of a beating (10). Méndez, 27, recounts, I found myself on my stomach with my face covered, they pulled my pants down to the ankles and my blouse over my head. They hit my buttocks hard, shouting at me that they were going to rape and kill me. Then a policeman shouted at me to call him “cowboy” and he struck my bottom even more violently, but now with his nightstick and he didn’t stop until he heard me say what he asked. He then penetrated my vagina with his fingers and squeezed my breasts hard, then violently pinched my nipples. Méndez was released from prison after 11 days, still facing charges of obstructing the Lechería-Texcoco highway, even though she was not at the highway site during her arrest. Giordano suspects the duration of her stay was intended to erase the physical evidence of abuse on Méndez’s body.

This account of abuse is disturbing on many levels, both in the action itself and the message it sends. Méndez, as an activist and photographer, is thrust into this unequal power dynamic because of her political participation. As a woman testifying against her abuse Méndez is also fighting against a tacit belief that she shouldn’t be involved in such dangerous public activities. The police can so wantonly abuse their authority because as in all such cases they know it will ultimately be her word against the officials and people in power. The police directly mock her agency by demanding participation in her own abuse. The association of the police with the masculine archetype of “cowboy,” jinete in Spanish, resonates as particularly humiliating at the moment of abuse because it evokes a gratification based on the act of dominance more than the non-consensual sex act itself.

In her testimony to the Comite Cerezo, a human rights group based in Mexico, 23 year-old Norma Aide Jimenez Osorio talks about receiving threats of murder and rape throughout her abuse, including a threat to “disappear” her. She states, They forced me off the bus with punches and kicks and put me on the back of a truck where they beat my thighs without stopping with their nightsticks. My head was still covered, facing down. When I couldn’t take it anymore I tried to cover my legs with my hands and they beat my hands until I took them away. Then [the police] put his hands under my underwear and forcefully spread my thighs, sticking his fingers in my anus. In a third testimony reprinted by Giordano, 18 year old Gabriela Tellez Vanegas is forced to give oral sex three times to officers, prevented from having to fellate a fourth officer only by their arrival at the prison. Vanegas also states, “[The police] said that if I wanted him to help me I would have to be his prostitute for a year and he would come see me whenever he wanted to.”

These accounts present a visceral experience in which a three hour bus ride, outside of the public eye, became the ideal venue for abuse of power. The official response from the Secretary of Public Security (SSP) to the CNDH report of human right’s violations was little more than a coded version of “they asked for it” with a twisted discourse on the “enjoyment of rights” (11). As reported in El Universal, “the agency responded to the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) with the argument that it intervened because a group that had raised its demands in a violent way needed to respect what was established in the Constitution.” In this way the PFP claims they were actually protecting “thousands” of people’s rights because, “the blockading of federal highways affected the means of transport, and that meant a restriction of the rights of thousands of people whose travel and habitual activities were impeded” (12).

This response does not elaborate on the methods the PFP used to carry out its proposed Constitutional mandate, nor does it explicitly deny the reports of abuse that were directly stated in the CNDH report. It operates as if the testimonies of the women did not exist at all, or did not warrant response. They also apparently did not resonate with any of the political candidates in Mexico’s upcoming political election. Reporter John Ross summarizes the political response to Atenco: Vicente Fox, his right wing PAN party, and its presidential candidate Felipe Calderon, along with once-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) standard-bearer Roberto Madrazo all endorsed the “hard hand” (“mano dura”) shown at Atenco. The repression was also tacitly approved by left-center challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who declined to condemn the police brutality (13). Twenty-three women standing up and testifying about their sexual assault at the hands of the police is inconvenient indeed for the official take on Atenco.

These firm declarations of assault complicate the “law and order” spin of the police involvement, where the police were there simply to protect the peace. Ross’ article as a whole does a wonderful job of situating sexual assault of female detainees in the context of an ongoing “dirty war” in Mexico. Sexual assault of this nature is less than a singular violent incident and more like a systematic and premeditated outcome. The two bloody days in Atenco created the perfect storm of confusion, deniability, conflicting accounts, and outrage. With the upcoming election and Atenco’s national reputation for resistance, all the pretext was there for political spin. But in this maelstrom of denial, the women are still here, still talking, still testifying, not being cowed by shame. Their testimony forces us to ask what kind of courage it must take for an 18 year-old to tell the story of how she was forced to have oral sex with police officers and then spit their semen out on her sweater.

These testimonies document the sinister threat of other reprisals. From their words we know they are speaking under a torrent of pressure to stay silent as the police threaten to rape and kill them, find them and make them their prostitutes. The SSP judiciously claimed that “the authorities cannot tolerate that which restricts the individual from the enjoyment and exercise of his/her rights”(14). Perhaps if this claim is to be believed, we should ask whose rights are enjoying the priority of protection.

Sources

1 “Nadie puede decir que las mujeres mienten.” En “CNDH Confirma abusos a mujeres en caso Atenco,” E l Universal, Liliana Alcántara, Martes 23 de mayo de 2006.

2 “Cronología: Enfrentamiento en San Salvador Atenco,” El Universal, Jueves 4 de mayo de 2006. “Police Brutality in Mexico,” ZNet, www.zmag.org, John Gibler, May 6, 2006.

3 “The State Attorney’s Office Confirms that Killing of the Youth in Texcoco May 3 Was Intentional Homicide,”La Jornada, Israel Davila, May 18, 2006. English translation at www.narconews.com.

4 “Asimismo, reiteró que en esa población ningún elemento de la Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP) se encontraba armado…” “Defiende SSP su intervención en Atenco,” El Universal, Lunes 22 de mayo de 2006.

5 “The ´Dirty War´ Returns to Mexico: San Salvador Atenco Attacks Follow Blueprint of Terror from the 70s and 80s,” Narco News, www.narconews.com, John Ross.

6 “Spanish Women Tell of Abuse at the Hands of Mexican Police,” La Jornada, Armando G. Tejeda. English translation at www.narconews.com.

7 Valentina Palma Novoa´s complete testimony can be found online in Spanish at El Universal´s website, http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/348084.html, and in English at www.narconews.com. Excerpts from her testimony and further reporting on her experience (in Spanish) are available in “Valentina vivió el Chile de Pinochet, pero en México,” La Jornada, Blanche Petrich, Martes 9 de mayo de 2006.

8 “Case Files: Testimonies of Rape by Police in the Aftermath of Atenco,” Narco News, Al Giordano, May 22, 2006.

9 Ibid.

10 “Historia de un ultraje en México: Dos activistas españolas, expulsadas del país latinoamericano la semana pasada por participar en una protesta social, denuncian que fueron golpeadas y vejadas por la policía,” El Pais, Andrés Aguayo, May 14, 2006. “Valentina vivió el Chile de Pinochet, pero en México,” La Jornada, Blanche Petrich, Martes 9 de mayo de 2006: “Una contó que el hombre que la agredía le ordenó decirle jinete y se burlaba.” “Case Files: Testimonies of Rape by Police in the Aftermath of Atenco,” Narco News, Al Giordano, May 22, 2006.

11 “Defiende SSP su intervención en Atenco,” El Universal, Lunes 22 de mayo de 2006.

12 Ibid. “De ese manera, la dependencia respondió a la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH) al argumentar que su intervención fue para que un grupo que planteaba sus demandas de manera violenta respetara lo establecido en la Constitución.” And, “La PFP indicó que los bloqueos de carreteras federales y la afectación a los medios de transporte significaban una restricción a las garantías de miles de personas que se veían impedidas para desarrollar sus actividades habituales.”

13 “The´Dirty War´ Returns to Mexico: San Salvador Atenco Attacks Follow Blueprint of Terror from the 70s and 80s,” Narco News, www.narconews.com, John Ross.

14 “Defiende SSP su intervención en Atenco,” El Universal, Lunes 22 de mayo de 2006. “En el documentó, la corporación estableció que las autoridades no pueden tolerar que se restrinja a ningún individuo del goce y ejercicio de sus garantías.”