Testimony and Human Rights Violations in Oaxaca

Theorizing Human Rights and the Social Movement of 2006

While the Mexican constitution provides for freedom of speech, rights for women, and racial equality, with specific mention of indigenous peoples, these rights are juxtaposed with a contradictory reality in Oaxaca (see Martínez Vásquez, 2007; Hernández, 2007; Stephen, 2007; Osornio, 2007). There a long-standing political elite has maintained control of politics and economics through a regional political culture that is built on a contradiction between claims to equal citizenship rights for women, indigenous people, and the poor and the lived reality of people who lack the resources, public spaces, and legitimacy to exercise such rights. Awareness of rights for these silenced sectors is at an all-time high because of contact with rights discourses coming both from federal and state human rights commissions and from social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

As Mark Goodale (2007: 157) has suggested for Bolivia, in Oaxaca human rights consciousness came to “serve as a kind of normative standard against which social and economic relations can be measured (and resisted if needed).” Human rights and more specifically indigenous rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the poor are expressed as an idea, “as a kind of floating signifier that represents a new form of human dignity and moral worth.” Thus human rights “can reinforce—and embolden—existing normativities, even if their provisions or rules or ‘laws’ do not, strictly speaking, conform to specific human rights instruments” (160). Rights discourses, an important strategic resource for social movements in Oaxaca since the late 1980s, came to the fore in 2006 and 2007, when a repressive political system made the expression of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitution and international accords to which Mexico is a party increasingly dangerous (see OAS, 1969; Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1966; Latin American Studies Association, 2007: 4—5).

The rights claims expressed through the testimony of survivors of human rights abuse in Oaxaca in 2006 reflected both a connotative sense of “human rights,” in which reference is made to a moral universe in which each person is granted dignity and respect, and a denotative sense of “human rights,” in which gestures are made toward specific perceived human rights provisions (Goodale, 2007: 149–150). As Goodale and others have noted, when individuals express their rights claims as part of a larger testimony, they do not distinguish between these senses of the term, nor do they necessarily distinguish between ways of claiming rights that are specifically legal or extralegal. As discussed by Speed (2007: 184) in relation to the Zapatistas, conceptualizations of rights can emerge “in their exercise, not as designations from God/nature or the state/law.”

In the case explored here, testimony became the primary vehicle for legitimizing the victims’ claims. The forums in which they testified outside of Oaxaca courtrooms included radio, video, rallies, and press conferences. The life of testimony extends far beyond one event, one telling, or one text in terms of how it travels, works, and may resignify “the truth” and official and unofficial versions of history. Testimony travels and can influence in many venues outside of its origin.

While all three men appeared before judges many times, their courtroom testimony was not taken seriously and was trumped by police testimony. It was outside the courtroom that it gained credibility and traction. This has often been the case in Latin America, where human rights violations were first documented by social movements and human rights organizations such as the Comité de Madres y Familiares de Desaparecidos y Asesinados Políticos de El Salvador ‘Mons. Romero’ (Committee of Mothers and Family Members ofthe Disappeared and Politically Assassinated of El Salvador “Monsignor Romero”—CO-MADRES) of El Salvador (Stephen, 1994), the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina (Bouvard, 1994), and the Coordinador Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (National Committee of Widows of Guatemala—CONAVIGUA) (Schirmer, 1993). Only later was testimony integrated into truth commissions and commissions of inquiry. In these more official venues as well as others, testimony represented the right of “recountability” (see Arias, 2001; Beverly, 2004), which according to Richard Werbner (1998: 1) is “the right, especially in the face of state violence and oppression, to make a citizen’s memory known and acknowledged in the public sphere.” Fiona Ross (2002: 27) describes “this coming-to-voice in a public sphere” through testimony as holding “the promise of new subjectivities in the aftermath of disrupted social formations or in establishing fresh forms of sociality.” The use of testimony in grassroots venues can help to build legitimacy with a larger public that may then transfer to more formal legal spaces.

In the trial of nine men who ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982 and were accused of “organizing and ordering massive kidnappings, torture, and killing of anonymous individuals” (Jelin and Kaufman, 2000: 93–94), testimony was a crucial part of the process, particularly in the absence of substantial material evidence. The use of testimony as a political strategy for more than three decades by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo had helped to establish it as a legitimate source of information in the formal court proceedings. As Jelin and Kaufman point out, because the construction of juridical proof was based on the testimony of victims (military records having been mostly destroyed), “this implied juridical recognition of their voices and their right to talk.” In the courtroom, testimony is broken down into specific components that fit into the judicial framework—”the requirement of personal identification, the pledge to tell the truth, the description of circumstances, and relationship with the case” (94). Testimony in court legitimizes the testimony that is often already circulating in society. While the disappeared, for example, can cease to exist as subjects of rights, since they are not present in the court as “victims” converted into witnesses, the testimony in court of those who have been searching for them is legitimized through its entry into the legal record. If opportunities to testify in such legal forums are lacking, as in the case of human rights abuses committed in Oaxaca, the use of grassroots venues for documenting abuses is an important part of building a record for eventual legal proceedings. In demonstrations and meetings and on the radio, testimony that has been circulating on the street, in the markets, in social interactions, and in people’s homes becomes legitimized by being incorporated into the official records of events and disseminated to the larger listening community associated with radio broadcasts. While testimony givers in such situations are not necessarily subject to a pledge to tell the truth, the requirements of identification, location in a larger social field and community, and the description of circumstances and relationship with the case are similar to those in legal proceedings.

The Emergence of Rights Discourses in Mexico

The Oaxaca social movement of 2006 can be understood as part of a historical process of violence and reconciliation in Latin America and as intimately linked to the globalization of human rights discourses during the past 20 years. This globalization has been accompanied by the institutionalization of human rights and other rights discourses in many Latin American countries. In Mexico and elsewhere, many indigenous, urban, women’s, and other types of social movements and NGOs began to institute their own human rights committees to defend their organizers and participants in the 1980s, before the widespread growth of organizations dedicated purely to human rights in Latin America.

In Mexico, three kinds of rights (cultural, agrarian, and human) have come to be recognized in legislation since the 1990s, and nongovernmental and civil-society organizations have emerged in relation to these rights. Cultural rights are recognized to some degree in the Mexican constitution through the rewriting in 1990 of Article 4 (Mexico, 2006), which states:

The Mexican nation has a multicultural composition originally found in its indigenous peoples. The law protects and promotes the development of their languages, uses, customs, resources, and specific forms of social organization and guarantees their members effective access to the full range of the state’s legal authority (jurisdiction). In the agrarian judgments and legal proceedings they are part of, their own legal practices and customs shall be taken into account in establishing the law.

The San Andrés Accords signed by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation with then-President Ernesto Zedillo in 1996 would, if they had been made law, have recognized traditional indigenous systems of governance and justice, provided indigenous peoples with the opportunity to design their own economic development plans, and created opportunities for indigenous organizations and communities to build larger political blocks. Instead of implementing these accords, the successor government of Vicente Fox facilitated much weaker legislation, passed in April 2001, that granted states the right to limit indigenous-rights proposals, confined “indigenous autonomy to communities within single municipalities, denied constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples as subjects with the right to decide upon their own forms of governance and development, and maintained a paternalistic relation in which the federal government would provide social services to indigenous communities” (Harvey, 2001: 1048).

Agrarian rights were articulated under the rewritten Article 27 of the constitution, which facilitated but did not require the privatization of land held communally in social tenancy. Invoking Emiliano Zapata’s dictum “The land belongs to those who work it,” the neoliberal governments of Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo harnessed “land and liberty” to a modernist discourse of individual rights. Slogans such as “Defend Your Rights to Your Individual Parcel” and “Guarantee Your Individual Freedom” were associated with the government surveys that accompanied the agrarian counterreform (Stephen, 2002: 62–63). While the rights granted were centered on the individual, reactions to the government effort to encourage privatization of communally held land recentered discourses of collective and indigenous rights in Oaxaca and elsewhere.

Human rights discourses were institutionalized at the national level with the establishment in 1990 of the CNDH. The CNDH has some 200 lawyers working full-time (Dezalay and Garth, 2002: 231) and, in addition to handling thousands of complaints every year, maintains relationships with other human rights entities abroad and the ever-growing number of such organizations in Mexico. A few years after it was established, state-level counterparts were set up. The CDDHO (originally known as the State Commission of Human Rights) was established by law in 1993. Its web site states: “With the creation of this commission the necessity of the people of Oaxaca to have their rights and liberties guarantied as well as the prompt and impartial procurement of justice is satisfied.” The specific human rights mentioned are “the right to life, to physical integrity, equality, liberty, dignity, and judicial security of all persons, property, as well as the greatest possible efficiency in the provision of public services” (CDDHO, 2008).

The 1990s saw a major increase in the number of organizations carrying out work that they called human rights monitoring and defense. The defense of the human rights of indigenous peoples in Oaxaca is rooted in the experience of organizations such as the Coalición Obrero Campesino Estudiantil del Istmo de Tehuantepec (Isthmus Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students—COCEI), the Unidad de Comunidades Indígenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus—UCIZONI), and Servicios del Pueblo Mixe (Services of the Mixe People—SER), formed in the 1980s and dedicated to gaining power at the municipal level, defending indigenous land rights, promoting community-based grassroots development, and establishing links with national networks and movements for indigenous rights and self-determination (see Stephen, 2002: 235–237; Rubin, 1997). Initially, organizations at the grassroots level focused on indigenous and peasant rights, but because their work made them subject to harassment, death threats, illegal detention, and imprisonment, they became increasingly concerned with the defense and protection of their members. In the 1990s, with the militarization of several regions of Oaxaca, specific human rights organizations formed, such as the Flor y Canto Center for Human Rights, the Siete Principes Center for Human Rights, and the Oaxaca Network for Human Rights. The Bartolomé Carraso Regional Center for Human Rights links a number of organizations, mainly supported by the Catholic Church. These groups have undertaken campaigns to defend the rights of communities and individuals in the face of military and paramilitary occupation and harassment as well as individual cases of detention, torture, and illegal incarceration. In 1998, the Liga Mexicana de Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights—LIMEDDH) formalized its statutes in Oaxaca and quickly became one of the foremost human rights groups, particularly in relation to indigenous communities.

In addition to indigenous rights and human rights, women’s rights have become institutionalized in communities, NGOs, and government agencies. The historic feminist Grupo de Estudios Sobre la Mujer Rosario Castellanos A. C. began in 1977, and in the 1980s it sponsored weekly radio shows, conducted workshops on health, and worked to bring women’s rights to state and city politics. In 1991 it opened La Casa de la Mujer Rosario Castellanos, and in 1995 it began giving scholarships to young indigenous women to help them continue their education in high school and the university. In the 1990s, many indigenous, peasant, urban, student, and other organizations had “women’s” committees that functioned as internal human rights committees had in the 1980s. In 2003 women’s groups from around the state, including both independent groups such as the Grupo de Estudios Sobre la Mujer Rosario Castallanos A.C. and the women’s committees and caucuses of other groups, formed the Huaxyacac Collective. The purpose of this alliance-building network was to pressure candidates in the 2004 elections (in which Ulises Ruiz was “elected” governor Oaxaca) to sign the Oaxaca Agenda for Gender Equity, which would have obligated Oaxaca to adhere to the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ratified by the Mexican Senate in 2001 (Dalton, n.d.; Magaña, 2008). The collective pressured the Ruiz administration to take action on the alarming number of femicides in the state, which it estimated to number 351 between 1999 and 2003 (Davies, 2006). From 2006 on the collective was an active member of the APPO.

Human Rights Violations Under Conditions of Repression

Elected amid widespread charges of electoral fraud in 2004, Governor Ruiz took office with a pledge that there would be no more social protests in the streets and public spaces of Oaxaca. His moving the state senate and the governor’s palace to the sleepy pottery-producing town of San Bartolo Coyotepec and his brutal treatment of protesters and critics set the stage for a prolonged period of conflict, polarization, and violence (see Latin American Studies Association, 2007; Martínez Vásquez, 2007). After state and local police attempted unsuccessfully to evict thousands of teachers from Oaxaca’s central plaza on June 14, 2006, efforts by the teachers of Local 22, members of the APPO, and others to force the governor’s resignation intensified, as did protests of official state cultural events and the occupation of state and federal buildings. By the time I arrived in Oaxaca in July, the teachers and the APPO controlled the center of the city. The conflict intensified through July and reached the boiling point in August.

On August 1, between 2,500 and 5,000 women participated in a march known as La Marcha de las Cacerolas (the March of the Pots and Pans). After the march the women decided to take over the Corporación Oaxaqueña de Radio y Televisión (Oaxacan Radio and Television Corporation—COR-TV). The APPO and Local 22 responded by sending people to guard the station and ensure the safety of the women inside. The approximately 300 women who ran the station renamed it Televisión para el Pueblo Oaxaqueño (Television for the People of Oaxaca) and Radio Cacerola. Women were organized into brigades that rotated among six security posts in and around the station and the transmission towers, programmed radio and TV, prepared food, received visitors, and maintained contact with movement activists to monitor events, marches, and security concerns (see Stephen, 2011).

On August 10, after filming the radio show of a friend, Conchita Nuñez, on Radio Cacerola, I started walking with my friend Domingo, who was a teacher and had just finished a 24-hour security shift, toward a large march that was approaching the station. Conchita had just announced that Ramiro Aragón, a biologist, and two teachers, Elionai Santiago Sánchez and Juan Gabriel Ríos, had disappeared and their families had been looking for them since the night before. Their names and the names of others who had disappeared and/or were imprisoned were featured prominently in the march. The march went by us for about 8 minutes and then, as I watched through the camera lens, about two or three blocks away people turned around and started running back in confusion. It was clear that something terrible had happened. Domingo commented, “Some kind of provocation.” For about 10–15 minutes the march stalled, and then some people began to move forward. Domingo and I walked around the edge of the march and began to double back to the middle where we had seen people running. I smelled smoke, and suddenly we saw a huge crowd and an ambulance with a much-bloodied person inside. Everyone was clearly upset. We asked a woman, “What happened?” With tears in her eyes she responded, “There has been a death. Someone has already died. The bullet went into his heart. They didn’t want to take him in an ambulance. They took him to a clinic nearby where he died. There were various shots and there are others wounded.” Later we found that the person we had seen die was José Jíménez Colmenares, a mechanic, who had been marching with his wife, who was a teacher, and his children. Four suspected shooters were surrounded and detained by the APPO and Local 22 police. One remained in a building attached to a medical clinic, and when he did not emerge enraged marchers set fire to the building. The four who were detained were put in a local bus commandeered by the APPO and driven to the television and radio station.

August 10 became a turning point for me and many others in Oaxaca. There had been very little press attention outside of Oaxaca to what was going on, and this situation continued until Bradley Will, an independent American journalist who worked for Indymedia, and four Oaxacans—Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteba Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Eudacia Olivera Díaz—were shot and killed on October 27 in Santa Lucía del Camino, just outside of Oaxaca City. After August 10, however, everyone became much more fearful. If you could be shot at while walking in a peaceful protest march, then anything was possible. While the governor appeared on television in Mexico City assuring the nation that everything was under control in Oaxaca, he and his staff could not set foot in the city of Oaxaca or, increasingly, in other parts of the state as well. The APPO supporters who were holding the state senate, the offices of the governor, the television and radio station, and other installations redoubled their security measures and prepared for further repression. The Oaxaca city police refused to leave their barracks and attack their fellow citizens. Increasingly unofficial “police” in plain clothes traveling in convoys of pick-up trucks began to patrol neighborhoods and intimidate anyone who appeared to be associated with antigovernor activities or simply looked suspicious. People were shot at during protests and detained unofficially at night, tortured, and eventually jailed. Such was the fate of Ramiro Aragón and his companions.

Ramiro worked for Grupo Mesófilo, an NGO dedicated to the sustainable management of natural resources and improvement of the quality of life in the villages and indigenous ejidos (communally owned and managed lands) of Oaxaca. He was not a political activist or a member of the APPO or Local 22. At approximately one in the morning on August 1, 2006, he was forcibly detained, along with his brother-in-law Elionai Santiago Sánchez and Juan Gabriel Ríos, primary schoolteachers and members of Local 22, in San Felipe del Agua. They had gone there in search of two childhood friends of Ramiro’s who had disappeared the day before in the company of the teacher and long-time activist Germán Mendoza Nube. Noticing a car following them, they turned around to go home but were blocked by another vehicle, a truck. Five men got out of the two vehicles and proceeded to ask them for their identification and question them about what they were doing. After finding an identification card on Elionai that identified him as a teacher and a flyer from a leftist organization in Oaxaca, the men bound the friends’ hands and beat them for more than 30 minutes. In an interview in July 2007, Ramiro described the experience as he earlier done for the LIMEDDH staff, Amnesty International, the press, and others:

They threw us in the truck, and we started to drive, and they started beating us again. They threatened to kill us, told us that they were going to rape us and that after they raped us that they were going to go to my house and do the same thing to my family. They took all of my documents and had my address. . . . Then they began to pull me by the hair. One of them asked one of the others for a knife to cut my hair, but they didn’t give it to him because he would have done something crazy. In that moment they were really enjoying themselves in their fiesta of violence. It was a party for them. They were beating us and kicking us. Wham! They would hit us and then say, “Hey, look, this fucking guy is squirting blood all over me. He got my new shirt all bloody.” They were really enjoying it, and we were bleeding all over the place. Then one of them took a cigarette and burned me with it on my face. . . . They cut my neck and pulled out a lot of my hair. They were playing with us, and having an orgy of violence and laughing. They were putting into practice what they had learned in their courses. . . . Then they asked for the glass that they cut Elionai with, and the other guy wanted to cut my throat, but he didn’t have time.

They stopped then, and we got down. Then they pushed us into the back of a police truck. There we saw a policeman. They kept on driving. We were really beat up and wounded. My face was really swollen, and they were braking suddenly and jumping over these speed bumps while we were still tied up. . . . We had no idea where we were. Finally, they stopped and they put us in a jail. We asked the jailer, “Where are we?” He said,” You are in Ejutla.” They threw us into that jail at about three-thirty in the morning.

From the jail in Ejutla de Crespo the men were transferred to a jail in Zimatlán de Álvarez, south of Oaxaca City. When Ramiro went through the federal attorney general’s office in San Bartolo Coyotepec on August 12, he was charged with possession of a mosquetón, a 1924 musket that was for the exclusive use of the Mexican armed forces. He was also charged with possession of bullets that were not compatible with the gun. Juan Gabriel and Elionai also faced invented weapons charges.

On August 5 Mexico had held a hotly contested national presidential election, and for more than a month afterward the results of it were not known. While some of the votes were being recounted, the national focus was on the election rather than on the violence in Oaxaca. Manuel López Obrador, who was ultimately declared the loser to Felipe Calderón by less than 1 percent of the vote, organized a massive campaign of resistance, taking over much of the center of Mexico City. In Oaxaca the state government had begun to escalate its repression efforts through the use of paramilitaries. During the three months that Ramiro was in jail, he kept up with the movement by listening to Radio Cacerola and other radio stations that the APPO took over. From his jail cell he heard López Obrador talking on the radio:

He was talking on the radio and he was saying, “Vote by vote, ballot by ballot box we will go.” . . . It sounded absurd to me—knowing that we were part of a terrible violation of human rights going on, really revolting, and in the meantime here they are worried about voting, saying “ballot box by ballot box.” This was what the political parties were saying, and I was asking, “Why did I go to vote? What did it matter?”

For Ramiro, this moment captured the contradiction of legal rights versus actual rights that he and many others were living. While one had the right to vote and participate in a democracy, freedom of assembly was disregarded as marchers were shot and civilians looking for friends in the night could be arbitrarily detained, beaten, tortured, and then imprisoned on false charges. For him, Juan Gabriel, Elionai, and others, the rights guaranteed under Mexican law became meaningless. Legal protections had no meaning in Oaxaca in 2006. The CNDH (2006: 5) reported that 20 people had been killed, 370 injured, and 349 imprisoned between June 2 and December. While the Supreme Court later named a special commission to investigate the violation of human rights in Oaxaca, that commission had no authority to punish anyone found guilty of human rights abuses. In the meantime, those who had been falsely imprisoned had witnessed a justice system in crisis. For example, the policeman who accused Ramiro of carrying a weapon reserved for the army stated in a preliminary hearing that Ramiro had been found running through the street with a gun and had been in a street fight. The swelling and contusions left from the severe beating he had received were attributed to this supposed fight. When the firearm he was charged with possessing was tested for fingerprints, his prints were not found on it. The judge found the evidence inconclusive and sent him back to prison.

Ramiro was freed at the end of October 2006 as a result of an agreement worked out between Carlos Abascal, who had been secretary of the interior in the Vicente Fox administration, and Enrique Rueda Pacheco, the secretary general of Local 22. Early in the morning of October 30, he was flown by small plane to Mexico City and released in a press conference that included representatives of the APPO, Local 22, and the federal Ministry of the Interior. He received no documentation, and all of the false charges were left on his record. He fled for safety to the United States with his wife and children. Although he has reported his case to the federal and state human rights commissions, no action has been taken to investigate his illegal detention, torture, and imprisonment, and he fears that he may be attacked or arrested if he returns to Oaxaca.

Juan Gabriel, who had been teaching in a small town in the district of Sola de Vega, was an active member of Local 22. He had been tear-gassed in the attempt to dislodge the teachers from the central plaza on June 14 and had been actively participating in the sit-in and occupation of the plaza that followed. In his testimony in a July 2007 interview he emphasized that it was when his tormenters found flyers advertising an APPO march and a small biography of Joseph Stalin on his fellow teacher and friend Elionai that they decided to beat them up. The right to free speech was clearly violated in his description of their detention:

I have been an active sympathizer and participant in our [teachers’] struggle, but I have never been a leader or part of another organization. I am part of Local 22, of course, but I don’t belong to any other organization. Something important that happened is that when they found a socialist piece of literature on my friend Elionai, that was what made them really beat us up. Why were they so violent toward us? The torture lasted a long time. Then one of them said, “Who wants to put out my cigarette? Stick your tongues out. I want to put out my cigarette.” I stuck out my tongue and so did Ramiro, but they decided not to burn my tongue. Instead they began to burn Ramiro in the chest with the cigarette. They grabbed him by the hair and began to pull his hair and beat him up around the face. They beat him really, really badly around the face—his face was terribly hurt. They began to beat me to from behind, beating me on the ears with their hands open. This resulted in the rupture of my eardrum. It made a terrible sound, and then I had a terrible pain. It was really, really ugly. Then they grabbed me by the neck and began to beat me on the face. I don’t know what they were hitting me with, something really hard like a bottle. I still have a scar where they broke open my eyebrow and a lot of blood poured out. At that point the pain was so terrible that I just became resigned to it and gave up. . . . I was tied up, and they continued to beat me. I couldn’t do anything, being tied, and they were verbally assaulting us too, telling us they were going to do [to us]. I have never felt so afraid in my entire life.

While Juan Gabriel was being beaten, Elionai was being strangled and cut with a broken bottle. Elionai had been teaching elementary school in the southern part of the state. Like Juan Gabriel, he was an active member of the teachers’ union and had supported the occupation of the plaza. He had also been caught in the state police attempts to evict the teachers from the center of the city and had gone on to support other actions that the teachers and the APPO undertook. He had helped to guard the transmission towers of the television and radio station and had attended conferences, marches, and other activities. While not a leader, he had felt confident of his ability to participate freely:

After the attempt to remove the teachers from the plaza a lot of activities started. But our spirits were very, very high because we [the teachers] had tremendous support from the people. People would arrive in the plaza with blankets, with food, with money to support us. This kind of experience really made a difference and motivated us. We realized that our struggle was supported by the people of Oaxaca. There were marches that came down from the different neighborhoods in the city, and people came to tell us that we were not alone. Little by little there were more and more activities like conferences, talks, other things. I was really into it because my family was participating too. My mother, my sister, we had grown up in this atmosphere, because my mother is a teacher, too, and she had suffered a lot in the past as well. We were also really angry about what had happened with the attempted eviction and how people were treated.

Confident that he could freely exercise his rights to free speech and free assembly, Elionai had spoken with the many different people who congregated daily in the plaza. Many groups from a wide range of leftist and progressive perspectives had set up booths there, and thousands of teachers were sleeping and living in and around the plaza in what became a tent city. Hundreds of meetings, exchanges, cultural events, and activities were going on. Many of the groups that established a presence there set out books, brochures, DVDs, CDs, and other materials for sale or for small donations. Elionai had bought a book and was distributing flyers for an APPO march. When the men who detained him and the others found a biography of Stalin and an APPO flyer on him, the three of them were immediately tagged as “suspicious” and treated as if they had no civil or human rights. Elionai offered this testimony in July 2007:

They had Ramiro on one side and Juan Gabriel on the other, and they pushed me up against the side of a truck with hands up in the air. They patted me down, like a routine check, and then they stopped and said, “What’s this?” They found my teacher’s ID and a book, a biography of Joseph Stalin that I had bought from a stall in the plaza. I saw a red book that said Life and Works of Joseph Stalin, and I bought it. I had this with me, and I was also passing out the last accords of the APPO, which said that they were going to have a march for children. . . . So I had these documents, and when they found them, their attitude changed. One of them said to me, “What are you doing with Stalin? Now you are going to really get fucked up, teacher. What are you doing here? What are you looking for?” I told them, “I am just moving about here freely. We were looking for a place to eat.” “Looking for a place to eat at this hour?” They kept asking us what we were really doing. After that they stopped asking me anything. They took my cell phone, all of my documents, my credit card, only leaving me my teacher’s ID. Then they tied us up with really heavy rope. . . . They were beating me really hard in the front of my body, and another person was beating me on the neck. The blows were really hard, and I asked for help, but who was going to help me? . . . Then they started to pull on a rope. The one who was behind me began to strangle me. I tried to grab it. . . . For a while I was able to use my hands on the rope to keep them from strangling me . . . “Talk! Talk! Talk!” they kept saying. They were telling me that I was guilty of something. I don’t know what their intentions were. . . . Then they grabbed me by the hands, and I heard them break a bottle. They said, “Now we are really going to fuck over the three of you.” Then I heard Ramiro and Juan Gabriel screaming, and I felt really bad. I started to get really very, very nervous, hysterical, and I started to scream. Their screams were really terrible. . . . After they broke the bottle, that is when I thought, “Now they are going to kill me.” And they said to us, “Now you are going to die.” . . .

I thought they were going to cut my throat or something, but no. I started to feel an intense pain in my ear, and I felt lots of blood flowing. I said, “Oh, no, they are going to cut my ear.” I started to scream because the pain was unbearable. That’s all I remember, because after that I received a blow that rendered me unconscious. Then I only remember vaguely that they loaded me into a new truck, a Nissan that the State Preventative Police [Policia Preventitativa del Estado] used. Then I remember that Ramiro was beside me. I touched his hand and he moved. The three of us were there. I remember thinking, “Well, at least all three of us are alive.”

Elionai and Juan Gabriel were released on 12,000 pesos bail (about US$1,200) each and were later tried and convicted of the charges. After they had exhausted their appeals, they paid large fines and received three-year suspended sentences. If they are ever arrested again for any other offense, the three years will be added to whatever new jail time they receive. This has effectively silenced them and kept them from going to any political demonstrations or events. This solution has been used with many others who were falsely charged as well. The worst of this terrible experience has been the psychological damage it has caused them. For Elionai, his experience of torture and detention has affected his daily life. He continues to be afraid to go out alone:

Sometimes in the mornings I don’t want to wake up because I still know what happened to me. . . . I stopped doing a lot of things that I used to do before: visit places, go to the movies, read books. I stopped doing these things because it seemed like they didn’t have any meaning. Sometimes I even have a moment when I feel peaceful and then I feel guilty because I am having a peaceful moment because so many people are suffering.

The Ironies of Rights

For Elionai, Juan Gabriel, and Ramiro, the rights they are guaranteed in the Mexican constitution and through international rights agreements ring hollow. Their feelings might be summarized by the words of Shannon Speed (2007: 180), speaking of the Zapatista movement’s experience: “Rights-based claims can be seduced into a system where legal process is an empty signifier for the resolution of immediate conflict, while the heavier architecture of power that created those conflicts remains unquestioned.” For the three men, the power of the human rights discourses they interacted with is double-edged. A sincere belief in the moral authority of human rights gave them and many others the confidence to support a powerful social movement that swept through the city of Oaxaca like wildfire in the summer and fall of 2006. Their disbelief at the false charges, the torture, the apparent impunity for those who acted against them, and the total stagnation of the Mexican justice system has left them in a state of suspension. While Juan Gabriel and Elionai are out of jail and reporting to a judge and Ramiro has fled the country, they are still imprisoned by fear, doubt, and anger. Juan Gabriel explains:

In spite of the fact that we have demonstrated that our fingerprints were not on those weapons, that we demonstrated that we were tortured—because we have submitted torture charges—that I was beaten so badly my eardrum broke, that one of us had cigarette burns on his chest, that we were terribly beaten, that we were treated so horribly in order to make us completely afraid—in spite of all of this, nothing has happened with our cases. We continue to be accused. . . . This has also affected our families, like Ramiro’s wife, Ruth, and our families. We had to come forward and make public denunciations about what happened, to do interviews with the press, to go to the official human rights offices of the government, to go to the LIMEDDH, Amnesty International, and the international human rights organizations. We had to do this because we had to declare what had happened. We had to declare again and again what happened. We have pictures, an infinity of photos showing what they did to us, and in spite of all this the government says, “You are accused of a crime, you are guilty, and that’s the end of it.”

Oral testimony is crucial for documenting human rights abuses that gain little or no traction in the legal system. Not only does testifying provide psychological relief for survivors of human rights abuses but oral testimony can be the foundation for building an alternative archive of violations that can be mobilized through the media, the Internet, and human rights organizations to defend those survivors. In Ramiro’s case, the alternative archive of testimonials compiled by the teachers’ union, Amnesty International, and other groups was critical in helping to legitimize his case for political asylum in the United States.

The experiences of Juan Gabriel, Elionai, and Ramiro can be multiplied by hundreds to include all of those who were treated similarly by state police and security forces in 2006 and 2007. The families of those imprisoned and of the 23 or more people assassinated will never forget how they were treated. The discourses of human rights that helped them to take to the streets and take over large parts of the city are connected to a very present moral outrage that is going to fuel future actions in the city of Oaxaca. When the disconnect between consciousness of rights and the inability to act on them is clear and long-lasting, movements for social justice are likely to emerge. Elionai’s words in a July 2007 interview point to fertile ground for such a movement:

All of this that happened to us and many others has resulted in a lot of disillusionment and sadness for everything that happened. . . . After the death of José Jiménez Colmenares we understood what was going on. There were more then 20 other deaths after that. This has put us in a situation of despair with the Mexican system of justice, the federal as well as the state. Our justice system is controlled by a government that is super-corrupt. We are profoundly disillusioned with the system we live under. We have seen so many injustices committed in the light of day, and now this situation has become normalized. It is still happening. Just yesterday there were more detentions, more tortures. We have seen how this works right here in Santa Lucia. We saw the same police running with weapons [a reference to the death of Bradley Will and others in October].

We want to get rid of this whole system, this system of assassins. The only way we can really relax and calm down is if this government leaves. Until there is justice for all of us, the tortured, the unjustly imprisoned, for the families of those who were assassinated, until all are punished, all of these who carried out these acts against the people—until that happens, we cannot rest.

In May and June 2007, Ramiro and his family came directly into my orbit. He and a member of my family knew one another, and through this tie I began to talk with him, his wife, Ruth, and their extended families in Oaxaca. They are all trying to draw continued attention to his case and those of Elionai, Juan Gabriel, and others and to receive recognition, restitution, and justice from the Mexican legal system. On July 31, 2007, Governor Ruiz dismissed an Amnesty International (2007a) report documenting “grave violations of human rights” between June 2006 and April 2007, describing it as “one-sided.” According to Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan (Amnesty International, 2007b),

The meeting with the state authorities was disappointing. . . . The governor and his colleagues refuse to recognize that serious human rights violations have taken place. One year down the road they appear not to have drawn any lessons from the prolonged crisis to improve the protection of human rights. Although they claimed to have opened investigations, they could not provide any tangible proof of progress in bringing to justice those responsible for criminal offences in the context of the protests or human rights violations.

Oral testimony from Ramiro, Elionai, Juan Gabriel, and many others was part of this report, and it was partly because of this testimony that Ramiro received political asylum in the United States in July 2009. If a political asylum case can hold up and receive a positive decision by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, it should certainly receive similar treatment by the Mexican justice system. So far there has been no investigation of the people who abducted and tortured Ramiro and his companions and no compensation for the emotional and physical damage they suffered or for the time they spent in prison on false charges. While free in the United States, Ramiro is still waiting for justice in Mexico.

In the absence of a functioning justice system, human rights are documented and defended through grassroots organizations. In the case discussed here, testimony disseminated on the radio, on television, on the streets of Oaxaca, and through organizations such as the LIMEDDH and Amnesty International was critical in granting it legitimacy and truth value. While transformation of Oaxaca’s justice system does not seem possible at the moment, the political and cultural space that opened for six months in Oaxaca in 2006 created a deep synergy between rights discourses that had been circulating for almost two decades among a limited public and the majority’s longstanding tradition of testimony. The verdict is still out on the outcome of the Oaxaca social movement of 2006, but what we can already clearly see is the resonance of rights discourses with a cultural form that empowers those who have been silenced and makes what they have to say understandable to others who are hearing their voices for the first time.