Lopez y Rivas on the Authentic Tomato Hurlers Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - PRENSA NUEVO AMANECER Originally published in Spanish by La Jornada Translated by irlandesa La Jornada Friday, May 28, 1999. The Neocolonial Forms of Coleto Intolerance Gilberto Lopez y Rivas In response to the information that I have been declared persona non grata in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, by the PRI Mayor Mariano Alberto Diaz Ochoa, leader of the "authentic coletos" group, I would like to state that, coming from whom it is coming from, I feel deeply honoured by the distinction. How good that the "authentic coletos," and those who think like them in the government house in Tuxtla, admit that the fight against the existence of paramilitary groups in the state has not been pleasant for them. It will be much easier in this way to distinguish the beginnings and ends of the fine lines of difference between the "tomato-ology of coleto violence," lynching by the media and the terrorism of paramilitary violence. It is also a distinction than a minority as isolated and discredited as the San Cristobal Civic Front believes that my presence as a Federal Deputy provokes instability in the royal city. One hopes that the exercise of that violence never becomes "stable": the violence that ranges from the accumulation of an arsenal of rotten eggs and tomatoes - probably symbols of the interim governance - to the accumulation of high powered weapons, which now appear to be returning to the hands of state authorities through the purported turning in of weapons by paramilitaries, dressed up as zapatistas, to Governor Albores. Fortunately, the concerns of the "authentic" ones are not shared by the majority of the residents of San Cristobal de Las Casas, a city which, day by day, has become open to tolerance and to plurality, and which has been host on various occasions to peace negotiations to resolve the armed conflict that exists in the state. If having attended a plural legislative forum on the Albores Indigenous Rights legislative proposal is "damaging" to these representatives of "pure coleto-ism," then may there be more and more forums such as the one that was held last Saturday with members of all the opposition wings in the State Congress, more than 20 indigenous organizations and officials from 35 municipalities, in which the proposal was emphatically rejected. The group of "authentic coletos" decided this Saturday to take a big step forward in their long history of repudiation, launching as many projectiles as they could find at any civic or legislative acts that take place on issues related to peace in Chiapas. Now they are trying to throw themselves into the right to receive violently everything that differs from their points of view. This intolerance has the restrictiveness that gives the coletos and their allies in the presidency of the Great Commission of the State Chamber of Deputies their minority nature. However it is also expressive of something very much more worrisome: the possibility that paramilitarism in the state has an ideological vanguard, based in the very racist and inquisitional thinking of the colony that supported the extermination of the indigenous as a common aspect of daily life. This new inquisition is now based on the constitutional presidency, and it is legalized in the official institutions of San Cristobal de Las Casas. The intolerance is is made even worse with the impunity and the nepotism of repression: among the heads of the group that attacked the state and federal legislators was Ricardo Diaz Martinez, the father of the San Cristobal mayor. There is no doubt that the issue of official protection and sponsorship of violence by the private elites, in whatever form it is adopted, is the symptom of most concern in the climate of ungovernability in the state. Everything could fit into that scheme: the military solution to the indigenous rebellion; one, several, many Acteals; an amnesty law for paramilitaries; a counterinsurgency indigenous law; a group expert in the accumulation of the most pernicious of neocolonial society; the racist hatred; intolerance as a way of life and the tumultuous actions of political cowardice. *********************************************************** NUEVO AMANECER PRESS-PRENSA NUEVO AMANECER-N.A.P. To know us visit our web page in Spanish in Mexico at: http://www.nap.cuhm.mx/nap0.htm E-mail: A Press in support of the work in defense of Human Rights ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-06.02.99-02:55:47-5515