In Chiapas, the incidence of incarcerated social fighters is astounding. In some cases, political enemies bribe legal officials and judges to incarcerate social fighters. In others, the government targets leaders of social movements. Some political prisoners report that they were tortured during interrogation, forcing them into self-incrimination. Others report that they were not provided with a translator and thus couldn’t defend themselves. All report some form of fabricated charges and lack of due process in court. Afterwards many political prisoners are physically and psychologically abused by prison guards and administrators. Their contact to the outside world is unlawfully restricted, preventing them from communicating with friends and family. Many file petitions for case revisions, but frequently the petitions are either delayed for long periods of time, or more often, arbitrarily denied.

Saturday, March 22nd, some of us from CASA went to interview Jorge Salinas Jardón, ex-political prisoner of the Atenco conflict whose legal proceedings ended a month ago.

Jorge had come to Chiapas to participate in one of the Caravans Against Repression making rounds in Zapatista communities. The Caravans are part of the “Worldwide Campaign in Defense of Autonomous Indigenous Lands and Territories in Chiapas, Mexico, and the World”, whose goal is to create a presence of Mexican social fighters in order to observe and denounce repression against autonomous communities.

On January 1, 2006, the Zapatistas proposed an initiative to tour all of Mexico in order to articulate broad networks of collaboration and solidarity among localized social movements “from the grassroots and the left”, putting into practice two central points of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of June 2005. The tour around different Mexican states was baptized as “The Other Campaign,” a counter-reference to the presidential campaign that was beginning at that time. The objective of The Other Campaign wasn’t, however, to make electoral promises, but rather to listen to different voices of social and popular movements at the margin of the system, whose struggles necessarily leave them outside the framework of political parties and institutions. This first phase meant learning about other ways of struggling against the oppression of the social, economic and political system imposed from above.

By Anna-Reetta Korhonen