Threat of Genocide: US Military Mapping Against Mexico’s Indigenous

[mexika]

Threat of Genocide: US Military Mapping Against Mexico’s Indigenous

Originally pubishled in Left Turn July/Aug 2009
By Simon Sedillo ?

The facts are clear: indigenous communities in Mexico are being preyed
upon by the US military with the help of Kansas University geographers.
In 2005, the Department of Geography at Kansas University received
$500,000 in Department of Defense funds to map communally-held
indigenous land in the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca.
With the help of the US Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), located
at Fort Leavenworth Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, geography
professors Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson ploughed ahead with the
“Mexico Indigena” project, a part of the larger mapping project, the
Bowman Expeditions.

The FMSO researcher assigned to the Bowman Expeditions, Lt. Col.
Geoffrey B. Demarest, is suspected of using the maps as military
intelligence against indigenous communities that assert autonomy and
self-determination through collectively governing and owning their
territory. According to Demarest, the only path to ‘progress and
security’ in Latin America is through the privatization of such types
of communally-held land.

In FMSO publications and a textbook titled “Geoproperty: Foreign
Affairs, National Security and Property Rights,” Demarest claims that
“informally owned and unregulated land ownership favors illicit use and=2
0
violence,” and that the only solution to these breeding grounds of
crime and insurgency is the privatization and titling of the land.

It should come as no surprise that Demarest was not only trained at the
US Army School of the Americas—the facility famous for teaching torture
and the creation of paramilitary death squads to Latin American
military personnel—but also served as the US Military Attaché at the US
Embassy in Guatemala between 1988 and 1991, a time of heavily US-backed
military repression against indigenous communities in Guatemala and
several high-profile cases of torture and murder.

Before his work on the “Mexico Indigena” project, Demarest was
implementing his land data strategies in Colombia, at least up until
2003. A March 2003 FMSO essay written by Demarest titled “Mapping
Colombia: Land Data and Strategy,” clearly states the ultimate use of
the geographic data: “While the forensic value of land ownership data
is relatively obvious, not so obvious is the correlation between land
data and military strategy, but this correlation precisely marks an
essential attribute of successful counterinsurgent campaigns.”

In the same essay, Demarest takes it a step further and exposes the
imperialistic intentions for land data and strategy: “Strategic power
becomes the ability to keep and acquire ownership rights around the
world. National, sub-, supra- or transnational20power can be measured
accordingly.”

The FMSO’s primary mission is to assess asymmetric and emerging threats
to the national security of the US. By asymmetric threats they mean
guerrilla armies, and terrorist organizations. The FMSO is therefore
evaluating indigenous-influenced-social movements as emerging threats
to the security of US political and economic interests in Mexico.

Oliver Froehling, geographer and academic director of the Universidad
de la Tierra (University of the Earth) in Oaxaca city, highlights the
danger of these mapping projects when he states: “The Mexico Indigena
project subscribes to a military/political strategy. We cannot forget
that the mapping begins amidst talks for a US military funding packet
known as the Merida Initiative. The control and displacement of
indigenous communities intends to remove potential political hot spots,
contribute to military control of the region, and ultimately ‘liberate’
natural resources for the benefit of the government and, in turn, its
transnational allies.”

Indigenous resistance
Demarest’s notion that the greatest resistance to the neoliberal world
order in Mexico comes from indigenous communities claiming autonomy and
self-determination in the form of communal territory, is of course, no
suspicion. It does.

In 1992, after then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari revoked Article
27 of the constitution that had legally given communal land grants=2
0to
Mexico’s indigenous farmworker population, and in 1994, after the
passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a series of
indigenous-led-and-inspired uprisings in southern Mexico have been
mobilizing for self-determination and self-defense of their territory.

One of the most notorious struggles, familiar to Left Turn readers, is
that of the Zapatistas, who gained global attention by capturing a
third of the state of Chiapas in the early hours of January 1, 1994,
the day NAFTA went into effect. They called their armed indigenous
uprising a fight against death and oblivion; a fight for peace with
dignity, justice, and liberty. While the Zapatistas’ rifle barrels have
remained silent for the last 15 years, they have continued to resist,
and more importantly to inspire and listen to many struggles all over
Mexico and the world.

On June 14, 2006 one of those many struggles, a teacher’s union strike
in Oaxaca city, quickly blew up into a popular people’s uprising with a
very strong indigenous base. The success of the ensuing
6-month-uprising was fueled by strong ideas of traditional forms of
land tenure and the subsequent strategies for self-governance that
indigenous communal life entails. Indigenous farm workers, teachers,
students, housewives, and laborers came together in a standoff against
the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, demanding his removal from
office.

The Oaxacan Pe
ople’s Popular Assembly (APPO), that ultimately took over
the state’s capitol city for six months, using a series of blockades
and claimed itself the de-facto governing body, grew out of a strong
indigenous base. The first general assembly of the APPO, in which 270
delegates participated, was organized under the Mesoamerican indigenous
principle of “lead by obeying,” and the general assembly uses an
indigenous form of consensus organizing that has existed in Oaxaca for
thousands of years.

Exercising their self-determination, APPO members occupied state,
local, and federal government offices throughout the city. Strategies
of expropriation were employed immediately. Food, water,
transportation, and communication were the primary targets of
expropriation. At one point, middle-aged APPO women occupied a
state-run TV and radio station. When the station’s antennas were
attacked, the APPO responded by occupying 13 commercial radio stations.
Oaxacans had never expected to hold the city as long as they did. But
murder, disappearance, rape, torture and police led drive-by shootings
on the part of the state eroded the social movement’s momentum. Oaxaca
and the APPO continue to resist the brutal regime of governor Ulises
Ruiz Ortiz and demand his removal.

The battle for Oaxaca is no small one. The state is strategic for
neoliberal interests as it is extremely wealthy in natural resources.
Already it has become a
site of a series of industrial mega projects
implemented through NAFTA and the Plan Puebla Panama. Highways,
railways, ports of trade, wind energy corridors, mines, agribusinesses,
and maquiladora-style assembly plants are some examples of the
“progress” touted by the proponents of Plan Puebla Panama. However,
over the last 15 years, these symbols of progress have only
systematically displaced indigenous communities, which are no longer
considered “economically viable.” Human life in Oaxaca is just another
disposable variable in NAFTA’s equation for profit. To push indigenous
people off their land, and to rob them of their means of subsistence is
tantamount to genocide.

Curiously, in 2006, at the same time that the APPO was fighting battles
on the streets of the capital, the “Mexico Indigena” mapping project
quietly moved its operation from the state of San Luis Potosi to Sierra
de Juarez, to a biologically diverse and mineral-rich-region the state
of Oaxaca.

Question of identity
For the indigenous of southern Mexico, territory and culture are so
intertwined in daily life that one without the other is like a bicycle
with no wheels. Yet the ‘progress and prosperity’ of free trade
inherently implies a loss of identity and tradition for indigenous
communities. The constant bombardment of anti-indigenous propaganda in
cartoons, TV shows, and newscasts is no accident. In the free-market,

indigenousness is culturally devalued. Billboards on the highways
between indigenous villages depict white-skinned consumers with
absolutely no relationship to the land from which they consume. The
mannequins in all the women’s clothing shops in Oaxaca City—the capitol
of a state that is 70 percent indigenous—are all tall, skinny, and
very, very white. The most prevalent cosmetic product sold to
indigenous women is skin bleach. For indigenous communities in Mexico
to claim their autonomy and territory is therefore a deeply urgent
reclamation of identity.

In Oaxaca, the indigenous have always been more willing to die fighting
for their territory than any government has ever been able to kill them
and take it, because negating and criminalizing traditional forms of
land tenure is to negate indigenous culture and life. Demarest, the
FMSO, and the US military know this. But what they have also discovered
in their studies of indigenous territory and resistance in Mexico and
other regions of Latin America, is that the most dangerous weapon to
neoliberalism is not necessarily struggles for state power, or the
presence of physical force. Rather, it is the relentless belief in
self-governance and self-determination, exemplified in the traditional
form of horizontal power harvested by indigenous communities of Mexico,
which poses the biggest threat to the world order. This is the key of
cultural resistance, applicable to community-b
ased struggles for
self-determination everywhere.

Urban ramifications
The implications of the Bowman Expeditions and the Demarest essays
extend beyond indigenous lands, reverberating throughout all sectors of
society, and in particular, the world’s urban poor. In a spring 1995
FMSO essay titled “Geopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin
America,” Demarest criminalizes and warns against the potential of all
Latin America’s urban poor:
“Moneyed interests in Latin America continue to isolate, physically and
socially, the sprawling poor communities. The shantytowns become
separately governed areas. They mark the physical dimensions of what in
some ways are autonomous nations within nations. At some point their
leadership may be seen as a national security threat as opposed to
merely a public security threat. Therein lies their geopolitical
importance.”

In a previous section of this same essay, Demarest lists anti-state
actors who find a home among the world’s poor:

“Distinctive features of the largest or so-called ‘world cities,’ of
which Latin America has several, include marked economic and social
polarization and intense spatial segregation. We also find what is
probably an effect of these conditions: the complementary agendas and
overlapping identities of a large array of anti-state actors.
Anarchists, criminals, the dispossessed, foreign meddlers, cynical
opportunists, lunatics,
revolutionaries, labor leaders, ethnic
nationals, real estate speculators and others can all form alliances of
convenience. They can also commit acts of violence and handle ideas
that provoke others. These ideas may be as specific as resisting a rise
in bus fares, as immediate as an opportunity for looting following a
mass celebration, or as broad as ethnic identity.”

Like communally held indigenous land, unregulated shantytowns are
considered precursors to crime and insurgency by the FMSO. In the US
and cities around the world, the privatization of poor communities
through gentrification is a similar multi-faceted strategy of
marginalization through devaluation, criminalization, and displacement.
To be poor and organize your community to survive by its own means, to
exercise self-determination, according to the Demarest essays, is to be
a threat to US political and economic interests, domestically and
abroad.
Simón Sedillo is a chicano community rights defense organizer and a
documentary film-maker whose work has centered on placing skills,
cameras, and editing equipment in the hands of communities in
resistance so that they may be able to document their own histories of
struggle. Sedillo has spent the last 6 years documenting and teaching
community based video documentation in Mexico, in immigrant communities
in the US, and with youth of color across the US. Sedillo, who is a
contributor to http://www.elenemigocomun.net, is currently on=2
0tour screening
short film segments from Oaxaca and Chiapas, and presenting a workshop
about neoliberalism and the self-defense of community rights.

Simón Sedillo is a chicano community rights defense organizer and a
documentary film-maker whose work has centered on placing skills,
cameras, and editing equipment in the hands of communities in
resistance so that they may be able to document their own histories of
struggle. Sedillo has spent the last 6 years documenting and teaching
community based video documentation in Mexico, in immigrant communities
in the US, and with youth of color across the US. Sedillo, who is a
contributor to http://www.elenemigocomun.net, is currently on tour screening
short film segments from Oaxaca and Chiapas, and presenting a workshop
about neoliberalism and the self-defense of community rights.