AUT: Zapatistas Await Attack in Morelia (fwd)

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Date: Sat, 4 Sep 1999 12:44:19 -0700
From: irlandesa <irlandesa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: chiapas-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Multiple recipients of list <chiapas-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Zapatistas Await Attack in Morelia

Originally published in Spanish by La Jornada
______________________
Translated by irlandesa

La Jornada
Saturday, September 4, 1999.

Zapatistas Note Imminent Attack by Military Forces,
        Aguascalientes of Morelia,
        In Order to Prevent It, They Block Accesses With Rocks and Logs

Juan Balboa, correspondent.
Morelia, Municipality of Altamirano, Chiapas
September 3.

Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) sympathizers tightened
security around the Aguascalientes of the Morelia ejido, in response, they
said, to the threat of an imminent attack by the Mexican Army and by State
Public Security Police against one of the rebel movement's most important
political-cultural centers.

The highway that leads to the Canada of Altamirano was blocked with logs
and rocks in order to prevent the movement of military or police vehicles.
At the main entrance to the Aguascalientes, a hundred tojolabal indigenous
were keeping alert to every movement by the PRIs.  A human wall, made up of
women, was organized inside, in order to defend the facilities of one of
the five Aguascalientes built by the zapatistas in 1995.

Some 500 men from approximately 15 tojolabal communities were keeping guard
in the nearby mountains.  They are supervising every day the wire fencing
that protects the EZLN political cultural center.  They are gathered about,
impatiently, close to the auditorium, expecting the inevitable to happen
"at any moment."  "We will defend it even with our lives," Gabriel tells
the journalists.  He is one of the leaders of the zapatista 17 de Noviembre
Autonomous Municipality.

Along with three other members of the rebel council, Gabriel warned that
any military attempt to take and destroy the Aguascalientes will be met
with a response by the zapatista indigenous.  "If the Mexican Army comes
in, they will meet resistance."

The leaders of the zapatista 17 de Noviembre Autonomous Municipality
reported that residents have detected military and police movement on the
outskirts of the Morelia ejido, and they did not hesitate to point out that
the federal and state governments "have been making plans for quite some
time."

For the second consecutive day, the EZLN sympathizers blocked the Canada
highway, and they decided, at a popular assembly, to not allow the building
of highways or to allow municipal, state or federal transportation units
through.

The situation is tense in Morelia.  Noise from the helicopters alerts the
hundreds of sympathizers who are protecting the zapatista facilities.  The
house where the Civil Peace Camp was located is abandoned, its occupants
were threatened, and they left it in order to avoid an attack.  The
zapatista 17 de Noviembre municipal offices, located in the town center,
were looted by PRI militants.

"The attacks have been constant.  The PRIs and the government want us to
fall into the provocations, and to confront our indigenous brothers, that
isn't going to happen.  What we are not going to allow is for the army and
the state police to destroy the Aguascalientes," they reaffirmed.

They accuse Juan Villafuerte - one of the officials of Roberto Albores
Guillen's interim government, and identified as an advisor to the
Anti-Zapatista Indigenous Revolutionary Movement (MIRA) - of giving money
to several PRIs so that they would allow the intervention of the Mexican
Army in the Morelia ejido.



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