San Cristobal 2

I woke up yesterday morning and started checking up on the news. One of my favorite pages for this is Narconews (www.narconews.com), which started out as a news site monitoring the drug wars in Latin America, but have since grown to include everything from US meddling in elections to the Zapatista movement. On their Otro Periodismo page, there was a story about a well known local activist, Damaso Villanueva, who it appears was arrested on Friday morning.
Villanueva set up an information booth about the Zapatistas in front of the church in the main square (the same church that local elites protested because of Priest Samuel Ruiz’s support for the Zaps) in 1995, and for eleven years has been selling magazines, posters, and CDs about the EZLN, as well as dispensing free information to passersby. On Friday morning, as he was setting up his booth, and the soldiers were conducting their military procedures across the street, three police officers grabbed Damaso and threw him into the back of a squad car.
The charges, which had to be wrested out of the police by local activists, assert that Damaso had something to do with toppling a cell phone tower two years ago. Apparently this is somewhat common in certain neighborhoods around here (maybe having something to do with people not wanting their kids to get cancer).
I asked Tom about the arrest, and he explained that it is common procedure in México for the police to issue an arrest warrant, and then not exercise it, so they can hang something over the heads of political types in order to keep them in line. Damaso, for instance, had his issued two years ago, and has been in public every day since then, but it wasn’t until the other campaign had begun to heat up that the police decided to move.
Damaso is not alone, of course. Activists and supporters of la otra across the country have been arrested or harassed by the police for their support. Some of them have been freed by means of mass protests in front of the jails, but Damaso hasn’t been so lucky.
I asked Tom why he didn’t tell the group, and organize some sort of field trip to the jail to protest.
“Because that’s how I got expelled from the country.”
Point taken.