R. Aída Hernández Castillo May 3-4 2006 will be remembered as some of the saddest and most violent days in the modern history of Mexico.
San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of the Mexico City is a small town, home to 33 thousand people who still depend on peasant economy. It witnessed a violent clash between 300 unarmed civilians, members of the Frente de Pueblos en la Defensa de la Tierra (Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land), and some 4000 policemen from the state and various corporations.
The police terrorized the whole community, raiding houses, breaking down doors and arrested peopic. including children, women, and the elderly. At the end of the day, one young person was dead and 20 people had been seriously injured. Twenty three women were sexually assaulted, including seven who were raped.
What had started as a demonstration SUDULL eight street vendors from the neighboring town of Texcoco became a violent clash which most of the media described as the "return to the rule of law" after The arbitrary actions of a "radical group."
The image of a group of peasants from Atenco battering a fallen policeman was shown again and again to justify the state's violence. The loss of control and violence by a few were used to disqualify a whole movement and to characterize it as a destabilizing and dangerous force for the State and the population in general.
The testimonies of the men and women arrested on these two days speak of physical and sexual violence on a par with the worst days of the dictatorships in South America.
The media has tried to show the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra as a small, irrelevant and violent movement.
These representations bear little resemblance to the men and women I had the opportunity to meet this past April. They appeared a cheerful,
and supportive, inclusive group, well organized and capable of complex political thought.
I met them just a few weeks before the fateful clash, at La Cañada de los Sauces, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, in one of the most festive, socially inclusive resistance demonstrations I have ever attended.
The success of the movement in Atenco was proof that it is possible to say NO to the neoliberal economic model which is indifferent to people's wellbeing and excludes the majority of them.
These were strong, extroverted women who shouted Our resistance socasano wielded their machetes with the ease of those who use them in everyday tasks. I felt inundated by their political energy.
I would never have guessed that a few weeks later I would see these same women beaten, Doodled. humiliated, silenced... the political energy I felt that evening in April was a danger the government aimed to eradicate.
The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has received 150 complaints from residents of Atenco. The adores a a evers -municipal, state, and federal -have so far failed to accept responsibility for what happened.
President Vicente Fox has justified the use of violence by the police as "the means to bring peace to the people of this community in the midst of rising violence" (La Jornada May 13 2006).
If the women of Atenco waving their machetes in the air had become a symbol of peasant THeN bloodstained faces and bodies now represent the shame of a repressive Mexican state. These attacks were not isoJated cases but rather a strat. egy of sexual violence which was a key part of the police operation:
"They started to clubbing us on the head. Then they were touching my breasts, my buttocks. Then I felt a hand touching my vagina and penetrating me with the fingers."
Alicia Elena Perez Duarte, the special attorney in charge of crimes against women, said that upon hearing about these testimonies she tried to get in touch with the women held in custody, but the representatives of the government of the locality said there were no
1n custody (La Jornada, May 12 2006).
This lie points to a web of complicities which made possible a police strategy of terror and sexual violence.
The attacks on the women of Atenco add to the long list of women who have been the victims of sexual violence for political motives in the last two presidential terms.
Their testimony before human rights organizations proposes a counter-discourse that can break the silence of terror. It is our turn to echo their voices and demand that justice be done.
This is an edited version of an article which appears at www.marxsite.com/spjeclatenco.htm R. Aida Hernández Castillo is at the Center for High Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City, and is author of Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico and Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas