On Tuesday, April 27th, a caravan of human rights observers, activists, and journalists was set to enter the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala.  They had been invited to the village by its Triqui population, which since the beginning of the year lacked water, food, electricity, medical care and basic supplies, as paramilitaries blockading the village refused entry to any aid caravans.

The Triquis, one of the most marginalized and impoverished indigenous groups in Oaxaca, declared San Juan Copala an autonomous village in 2007, and attempted to detach themselves from the state institutions that both neglected their needs and exploited their resources (mostly, an abundant supply of timber in the surrounding forests).  The response of the PRI government and its state head Ulises Ruiz – the most unabashedly violent and repressive governor in Mexico’s last decade – was to warn that the village wouldn’t have the resources or support to last on its own, mock the declaration as “a spectacle” and then promptly employ the paramilitary group Uníon de Bienestar Social para la Regíon Triqui (Ubisort, created by the PRI government in 1994 to keep the Triquis in line) to threaten Copala back into submission.  Ubisort is recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a paramilitary organization.

The Triqui’s selected their own authorities in a two-month-long electoral process that re-established the traditional Triqui system of usos y custombres, in which decisions are made in communal assemblies with the consultation of a council of elders.  Not surprisingly, the state government in Oaxaca City did not recognize the legitimacy of the Triqui government, and San Juan Copala has been a target of paramilitary violence ever since.

In one of the most tragic incidents, two young, female Triqui journalists who reported for San Juan Copala’s radio station “La Voz que Rompe el Silencio” (the voice that breaks the silence) were assassinated en route to a conference in Oaxaca City in April of 2008.  Paramilitaries surrounded their car and opened fire, killing the two women and wounding a man, woman and their three-year-old child.  Felicitas Martinez was 21; Theresa Bautista, 24.  The Director-General of UNESCO called their murders “a heinous crime which undermines the whole of society.”

Last year the violence escalated.  In June, paramilitaries opened fire on the pueblo of Copala for nearly two hours using high-caliber machine guns, killing a 13-year-old boy and gravely wounding his 16-year-old sister.  On the 28th of November, Ubisort denied the Frente de Pueblos En Defensa de La Tierra entry to Copala; soon after, the state government began a disinformation campaign in Oaxacan newspapers declaring alternately that the autonomous pueblo was nearing its end, that it had been disbanded, and that it had mounted an armed attack and failed, despite consistent evidence and statements from the Triqui government, still installed and still making decisions, to the contrary.  On November 29th the paramilitaries attacked the municipal government and also shot up a children’s shelter, where one boy was killed and two others were wounded.  They then set up a blockade in a nearby community called La Sabana, the same place where the peaceful caravan carrying the journalists, activists and human rights observers would later be attacked.

On the 10th of December, 2009, Ubisort, heavily armed with weapons supplied by the government, took over the municipal government and kicked out the Triqui authorities.  They shut off all access to Copala, and the village had no electricity and lacked water and basic supplies.  Children were not allowed to go to school.  Assassinations were frequent.  On March 10th of this year, women and children tried to take back the municipal government; the response of the Ubisort paramilitaries was to shoot freely out into the community, injuring a 64-year-old woman.  It is speculated that at least 19 people have been killed in Copala since January of this year, and hundreds more in the previous year.

This was the setting for the aid caravan that was to enter Copala last Tuesday, April 27th.  The caravan made public its intent to enter the village at the invitation of the Triqui authorities and community there.  It’s intent was to deliver food and blankets, to observe the situation in the pueblo (Belgian, Finnish and Italian human rights observers accompanied the caravan) and to express solidarity with the people.  Before entering Copala, the caravan held a press conference in Huajuápan de Leon, the capital of the Mixteca region, announcing their intention to peacefully enter the pueblo in the hopes of avoiding any unpleasant surprises.  Ubisort warned that they would not be allowed to enter Copala.

When the caravan was just outside of Copala, near La Sabana, they encountered a rock wall blockade.  When the first truck in the caravan began to back up, paramilitaries hidden in the nearby hills shot out the tires.  The truck tried to back up again and couldn’t.  The paramilitaries opened fire on the vehicles and fatally shot Alberta “Bety” Cariño.  She was sitting next to a Finnish human rights observer, Jyri Jaakkola, who attempted to come to her aid.  The paramilitaries approached the car and shot him in the head.  Meanwhile the remaining members of the caravan fled into the woods under gunfire.  Five people were wounded; one, Mónica Citlali Santiago Ortiz, a student at the UABJO (the autonomous university of Oaxaca) was gravely wounded with a gunshot wound to the back.  She was picked up later with the two dead and taken to a hospital in Juxtlahuaca, where she’s being treated.

Some of the caravan members were captured by the paramilitaries, questioned, issued death threats, and later let go.  One group was captured by several paramilitaries no older than twenty, who held them, questioned them, and ultimately released them with the warning that they would be consistently watched, as the organization had far-reaching power in Oaxaca City.  In a press conference held the 28th of October, survivor Gabriela Jimenez recounted the whole experience and explained that these young Ubisort paramilitaries told her and her fellow hostages  that they were going to take over Copala and “kick people out of their houses”, identified their leaders as the leaders of Ubisort and MULT (the other paramilitary organization fighting the autonomous government of Copala) and said, directly, unabashedly, that they had the support of Oaxacan governer Ulises Ruiz.

Two reporters from the Mexican magazine Contralinea, Érika Ramírez and David Cilia Olmos, and two activists, David Venegas Reyes y Noé Bautista, were meanwhile stuck in the forest and surrounded by the roving paramilitaries.  They made a video in which they explained their situation and what had happened to them so that there would be testimony in case they were assassinated.  One of the reporters, Cilia Olmos, had gunshot wounds in the leg and the ribs and was unable to walk; another, Bautista, had gunshot wounds in the butt and the shoulder.  They spent days in the forest, amidst speculations that they were dead or being held, frightened of moving for fear of being captured and shot.  Ultimately, they reached an agreement in which Noé Bautista and David Venegas Reyes left in the middle of the night with the hopes of reaching Huajuápan de Léon.  They made it eight hours later and presented their video to authorities.  David Cilia Olmos’ father, the director of Contralinea, and a small group of police went in search of the journalists and ultimately rescued them.

If the two activists hadn’t produced the video and been able to rally up support for the journalists, it’s arguable that the latter would have either been hunted down and killed or left to die.  Gabriela Jiminez, the aforementioned survivor, said that when she and the other caravan members held with her were finally released, they went to the police to tell them that there were still people missing.  The police answered that they wouldn’t go into the zone because they’d be shot at.  (Indeed, when an ambulance went to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded, it was shot at and forced to flee).  No one would deal with the situation.  It took the scandal of the dead Finnish foreigner to force the Oaxacan government to act, and even then it is most likely that only the video proving that the two reporters were still alive and explaining where they were and what had happened to them saved their lives.

Meanwhile, the event has finally blown up in the national and international media, creating an irritation for the Oaxacan government, which has shown once again its remarkable ability for ineptitude, callousness, and ignorance.  Ulises Ruiz’s first reaction to the situation was to blame the attack on foreigners who come to Oaxaca “to cause problems” and to threaten to expel all foreigners from the country.  He then took the opportunity to blame his political opponent, Gabino Cué, for having connections to the APPO and therefore causing all of this violence.  (Never mind that little verdict from the Supreme Court of Mexico, which condemned Ulises for grave human rights violations).

One of the many overlapping tragedies in all this is that it has taken the death of a foreigner to make the situation explode.  Once again, Ulises Ruiz is in the hot seat, irritated that someone who’s not an indigenous woman or a Mexican activist, someone who’s death or disappearence he can’t just make happen with impunity, has been killed by his henchmen.  And yet, as was the case with Brad Will, the American journalist assassinated by Ulises’ government thugs (one of the activists who was part of the Copala caravan was randomly accused of Will’s murder and thrown in jail for a year, and finally released after the government had to admit it had no case against him) surely this murder will go unpunished, and innocent people will go to jail, and/or be tortured, or beaten, or kidnapped.  There is already a call out to assassinate the husband of Bety, the woman killed in Copala, and Ulises has shown absolutely no interest in pursuing the paramilitaries.

The Secretary of Foreign Relations and the European Union have sent a commission to Oaxaca to look into the incident, but, if the cases of Brad Will and of so many other people thrown in jail, harassed, kidnapped and assassinated in Oaxaca are any indication, nothing will happen.

So what do we do?  What can we do?  My heart clenches and tightens and I want to slam my fists on the table again and again and again with the fury of it.  Jyri, the young Finnish activist who was shot in the head, was at my friends’ Susy and Mauricio’s wedding, where he danced all night.  Yesterday Susy and Mauricio told a story of how, at a ceremony at Monte Alban, Jyri – a devout vegetarian – watched a turkey be slaughtered and when he was offered a piece, instead of wincing and turning it down as another foreigner did, said with gratitude “of course, of course I’ll eat it.”  He was working with an organization that helped Triquis and was, according to Susy and Mauricio, an unbelievably peaceful soul, and one who ultimately tried to save the woman beside him and lost his own life in the process.  Their faces were full of confusion and sadness when they talked about him.  They were meant to go on that caravan to Copala and observe, but didn’t because they had planned their honeymoon for that week.

These events are not distant from us.  They are not far away.  They are realities that creep up in black smoke around the edges of our realities and at times suffocate them, and threaten to snuff them out.  And yet they are also The Dominant Realities – those of The Institutions, The State, The Governor, The System.  They are the systems under which we live all the time, only at times uncomfortably encountering their unpleasantness, their innate rottenness, only sometimes smelling the bodies and feeling the terror.

Last weekend, I translated at a conference dealing with violence against female human rights defenders.  There was one Filipina woman who didn’t speak Spanish, and I did my first simultaneous translation ever for her.  I therefore got to participate in a strange vicarious way in this conference of intense, remarkable women.  All but the Filipina, who was doing a fellowship at Rutgers on the topic of human rights defenders and had been sent to the conference, were from Latin America.  They were overwhelming at times in their strength and their conviction, and they intimidated me and adopted me like a stray kitten.  They told stories about the assassinations of friends, about death threats, coups, spies, narcos, gangsters, about what to do when a drug lord’s girlfriend comes to you asking for help, about what to do when the government has tried to kidnap you and you know you’re next on the list, about how to deal with defamation campaigns in the local media and your community calling you a whore, tearing down all the work you’ve done.  Their work seemed impossible, impossibly hard, and at the same time deeply and genuinely inspiring; these are women who, in the face of military dictatorships and torture and the “disappearance” of their coworkers, in the face of threats against their loved ones and their lives and the casual domination of Ulises’ Ruizes in pueblos all over North America and the centuries of systems and institutions and power stacked against them, are doing it.  Are going out every day and doing something about it, and believing in their part, their change, the human rights they fight for.

I left that day after the conference came to a close and walked down the hill from the Hotel Victoria watching the late evening light set the city aglow, watching the playful colorful buildings fan out into the valley and the hills shine gold and green.  I felt hope like a calm center – hope that even though everything can be so bad, that even though these women have so much stacked against them, they are doing it.  And then Copala happened, and the hope was burnt up by rage.

But after so much research into the events, after talking to Susy and Mauricio who were also so shaken by it and were so close to it, I have come back to those women.  They are back in their cities and pueblos now, back to the daily struggle of doing what they do, and they’ll keep doing it, just as Bety Carino’s family will keep fighting for the justice she sought.  I wanted to say “that’s all we can do” – but it’s not “all,” it’s not fatalistic and we aren’t fatalistically doomed to it – it is everything.  The continued belief that we are not doomed to this system and its terrors, and that we can make it just, is everything.  It is hope.  And even if I am filled with anger and frustration and grief for all that has happened in Copala, even if there is so much frustration at how hard it is, I think I owe it to those women with their firm laughing confident storied faces, dedicating their lives to the dignity and the human rights of their fellow human beings, to return to hope.  May Bety and Jyri rest in peace, may this battle for human rights, for dignity and justice, go on,  and may we place our hope with those who are risking their lives to fight it.