Zapatistas begin “march for dignity” to Mexico City

Zapatista rebels perform during their departure from the hamlet
of "La Realidad," the rebel stronghold in the Mexican state
of Chiapas on February 24, 2001.

By Diego Cevallos

San Cristobal De Las Casas, Mexico, Feb. 26 (IPS)— Twenty-four leaders of Mexico’s Zapatista guerrilla movement headed to Oaxaca City Monday on their way to the capital, after setting out from this city in the southern state of Chiapas in a colorful caravan.

Sunday’s farewell ceremony, in which they accused President Vicente Fox of being insincere in his desire for peace, was less solemn than the rally organized Saturday night in the central square of San Cristobal - the capital of Chiapas - which began five hours earlier than expected and stretched almost to midnight.

This is a “march for dignity,’’ not a “march of peace,’’ as Fox has been publicizing it, said ‘Subcomandante Marcos’, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), who maintained that the president wanted to arrange a “false peace.’’

Some 20,000 face-masked indigenous people - the Zapatistas’ support base -, foreign observers, and local and foreign reporters filled the square on Saturday to greet the rebel leaders. The organizers had been hoping for 40,000 sympathizers.

San Cristobal, a city of 140,000, was occupied on Jan 1, 1994 by the poorly-armed rebel group, to demand justice, democracy and respect for the rights of indigenous peoples, who account for at least 10 million of Mexico’s 100 million people.

As the EZLN convoy pulled out of San Cristobal Sunday on its march for justice and indigenous rights, hundreds of local Indians lined the road and cheered.

The Zapatista march is a profound expression of the desire for peace, Portuguese Nobel Literature prize-winner José Saramago, US linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, US filmmaker Oliver Stone, and Laura Bonaparte, a spokeswoman for Argentina’s Mother of the Plaza de Mayo rights group and others stated in an open letter Saturday.

In a televised national address Friday, Fox welcomed “this march, which will be the bridge for peace and the vindication of indigenous peoples...the government wants a real peace, not one of mere words.’’

But while Fox congratulated the marchers and wished them luck, Marcos continued to criticize the president and question his sincerity.

Marcos is mistaken about the political climate reigning in the country, and underestimates the popular support Fox has won in his attempts to find a solution for the simmering conflict in Chiapas. And that could isolate the guerrilla leader, warned analyst Carlos Ramírez.

In his less than three months in office, the president - whose election put an end to 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party - has submitted a bill on indigenous rights to Congress, as demanded by the rebel group, and designated people respected by the EZLN for key posts linked to the Chiapas question.

He also closed four military bases in Chiapas and secured the release of a number of Zapatistas from prison.

In addition, Mexico’s two leading TV stations, Televisa and TV Azteca, launched a campaign last week calling for peace, and are organising a Mar 3 rock concert in Mexico City to raise funds for the impoverished indigenous people of Chiapas.

Marcos insists, nevertheless, that three more military detachments must be withdrawn from Chiapas, all of the Zapatista inmates must be released, and the indigenous rights bill must be passed before the EZLN will return to the negotiating table.

The 24 rebel leaders whose caravan will travel through 12 states before reaching Mexico City on Mar 11 say the trip is not aimed at reviving the peace talks with the government, which broke off in 1996, but at lobbying Congress to pass the indigenous rights legislation and at drumming up popular support for their cause.

Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos talks
to townsfolk before the departure of rebels and
supporters from La Realidad.

The hotels, restaurants, and shops of San Cristobal did brisk business with the brief visit of the EZLN leaders, and poor indigenous people who live on the outskirts of town sold their arts and crafts to the foreign visitors who came to see the rebels off.

Decked out with cameras and indigenous dress or berets and t- shirts with the face-masked image of Marcos above the name of the rebel group, hundreds of visitors from abroad, mainly Europe, arrived in San Cristobal over the weekend to see the guerrilla chiefs or even join the convoy on its way to Mexico City.

The weapons that the rebels used for just 12 days in 1994 were left behind in the group’s jungle stronghold.

The Zapatistas rose up against the government of Carlos Salinas (1988-94), and in 1996 broke off the peace talks with the administration of Ernesto Zedillo when the government refused to accept a draft law on Indian rights that was based on the San Andres accords, the only agreement signed in the peace talks.

As their interlocutor in Congress, the group has named Fernando Yáñez, known in the past as ‘Comandante Germán’, a former leader of Marcos’ now-defunct National Liberation Forces, a small Marxist grouping that in the early 1980s went to Chiapas to help create the EZLN.

While 42 Zapatista prisoners have been released since Fox took office in December, the rebels are demanding the release of the rest, who number around 58 and are being held - most of them - in a prison in San Cristobal. According to Abelardo Méndez, who represents the inmates, the release of the prisoners was really the work of state governments.

Most of the alleged insurgents were arrested in 1995, when then- president Zedillo accused the EZLN of preparing armed actions, despite the fact that the rebels were involved in peace talks with the government.

US crews enter Colombia war

By Jeremy McDermott

Medellín, Colombia, Feb. 23— US Personnel have become involved in fighting in Colombia’s 37-year civil war for the first time, rescuing the crew of a helicopter brought down by left-wing guerrillas, it emerged yesterday.

The US is funding the world’s largest aerial eradication program in an attempt to destroy drug crops in Colombia. In an engagement during the weekend, guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fired on a crop dusting aircraft and supporting helicopters.

The pilot of a US-supplied Huey helicopter was hit in the barrage of small arms fire, but managed to land his stricken craft.

Two other helicopter gunships circled the grounded helicopter, firing on the guerrillas, while the crew of a third helicopter rescued the downed crew.

The pilots of some of the choppers in the rescue were Americans contracted by the US state department, a US Embassy source said.

“The FARC were 100 to 200 yards away,” Capt Giancarlo Cotrino, the pilot of the downed helicopter, said from his hospital bed in Bogotá.

“We fought for seven or eight minutes - one of my crewmen had a grenade launcher and I had a pistol - until the SAR [search and rescue helicopter] came in behind us, landed and picked us up in the middle of a very hot firefight.”

The rescue helicopter carried four US citizens and two Colombians, all armed with M-16s. Most of the SAR teams in Colombia are former members of the US special forces, the US source said.

Last year, when the $1.3 billion aid package to Colombia was approved by Congress, several rules were imposed.

One was that no more than 500 US military personnel could be stationed in Colombia at any time. Another was that they were not to become directly involved in fighting.

“The Department of Defense will not step over the line that divides counter-narcotics from counter-insurgency,” Maria Salazar, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for drug enforcement policy, told a US congressional subcommittee.

However, private US companies, paid by the state department and staffed by former US special forces and pilots, face no such restrictions.

US military personnel in Colombia conduct a variety of training and monitoring roles. Three US-trained and equipped anti-narcotics battalions have been created, while US Navy specialists train Colombian marines, who patrol the rivers that are the only means of transportation for much of the nation.

Five radar and listening stations are manned by US personnel, and others are liaison officers at the Colombian Joint Intelligence Center (JIC), which the US helped set up.

According to the letter of the law, the rules regarding US involvement in the civil conflict have not been broken, as serving military personnel have not been caught in active combat roles.

However, by providing intelligence on guerrilla movements and actions, the US is already taking an active role in the counter-insurgency war.

In March 1999 the US government issued new guidelines that allow sharing of intelligence about guerrilla activity in Colombia’s southern drug-producing region, even if the information is not directly related to the fight against narcotics.

The activities of private companies in the pay of the US are not covered under the rules imposed on military personnel.

“This is what we call outsourcing a war,” said one congressional aide in Washington, who asked not to be named.

The company involved in last weekend’s engagement with guerrillas is called DynCorp. It has been contracted since 1997 by the US state department to provide pilots, trainers and maintenance workers for the aerial eradication program.

What had not been known was that they piloted helicopter gunships that are used in an offensive capability when crop dusting aircraft came under fire. Three DynCorp pilots have been killed in operations, but one pilot said that at $90,000 a year tax free, the rewards were as high as the risks.

Another company, hired by the US defense department on a $6 million a year contract, is Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a Virginia-based military-consultant company run by retired US generals. Its 14-man team, holed up in an upscale hotel in Bogotá, refuses to speak to The Scotsman.

Brian Sheridan, the senior Pentagon official who oversees the work of MPRI, said in congressional testimony in March last year that the firm’s role in Colombia was not sinister, just “a manpower issue”, insisting the US southern command did not have the men to spare to give strategic and logistic advice to the Colombian army.

“It’s very handy to have an outfit not part of the US armed forces, obviously,” said the former US ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette. “If somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it’s not a member of the armed forces.”

Despite massive military aid to Colombia, the US has insisted it is not getting itself into another Vietnam. But an MPRI spokesman, Ed Soyster, a retired US army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency, compared the need for secrecy in Colombia with the need for secrecy in Vietnam.

“When I was in Vietnam, I wouldn’t want to tell you about my operation,” he said. “If the enemy knows about it, he can counter it.”

Human rights groups say the use of private contractors in Colombia is a ploy to ensure actions are carried out that US troops under congressional restrictions cannot perform. They say “deniability” is the name of the game.

“We’re outsourcing the war in a way that is not accountable,” said Robin Kirk of Human Rights Watch.

More information: http://thescotsman.co.uk/

NRC halts CP&L nuclear waste storage

Statement of NC WARN

Durham, North Carolina– The five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission has suspended its agency’s December 21st approval for Carolina Power & Light to load high-level nuclear waste into two new pools at the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant in Wake County, NC. The Commission also ordered the NRC staff to substantiate its support for the waste expansion.

Yesterday’s order represents another bizarre twist in the two-year legal struggle between CP&L and Orange County. The Commission’s order formally denied Orange’s appeal of the December approval by a high-ranking NRC staff official, saying its regulations do not permit such appeals. Nevertheless, the Commission used its discretionary authority to tell CP&L it cannot load waste into the pools until the NRC staff satisfies a list of questions about its review.

The December approval had startled observers because it appeared to undermine a separate NRC licensing board, which is still considering whether to require a trial-like hearing on nuclear waste accident risks. In January, Sen. John Edwards and Rep. David Price questioned the NRC’s actions.

Diane Curran, an attorney representing Orange County, said today “We are pleased that the Commission stopped CP&L from putting waste in the pools, but it’s only half a loaf. We still believe it was illegal for the NRC staff to issue the license amendment before a hearing is completed – and we are in a very strong legal position.”

Environmental group NC WARN said it believes the Commission’s unusual action means the panel is in a very difficult position. The group questioned why it took the full Commission so long just to decide whether to keep reviewing this matter, when the case was clearly made five weeks ago – in Orange County’s request for an emergency suspension – that the staff’s approval, and lack of defense for it, are illegal.

Jim Warren, NC WARN’s director, said today, “We’re concerned that the Commission may be stalling – hoping this problem will go away if the NRC licensing board rules that a safety hearing is not required. Or hoping that as time passes, the illegality of the NRC’s approval would become moot because they are allowing CP&L to continue pool construction as the clock ticks.” Yesterday’s order did not stop the company from continuing construction of the two new pools, which is expected to take until mid-year.

The Commission’s order also comes as the NRC staff is under fire for an alleged lack of independence and scientific integrity in its review of the CP&L expansion. NC WARN is seeking investigations by the US General Accounting Office and the NRC’s inspector general to determine whether the NRC staff has compromised public safety by succumbing to pressure from CP&L to approve the plan. The December approval came at a time when CP&L is running dangerously short of storage capacity at its three nuclear plants.

Warren added, “CP&L continues construction on the pools at its own financial risk – or rather that of its ratepayers. We have absolutely no doubt that an environmental impact study will confirm that CP&L’s massive waste expansion should be avoided in favor of a far safer alternative.”

Since it was exposed in October 1998, CP&L’s plan for high-density storage at the nation’s only four-pool site has been highly controversial. Orange County’s two nuclear experts have raised serious concerns about an increased potential for a very large accident – which could potentially release nearly 30 times the radiation as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. CP&L has spent an estimated $2 million to prevent safety hearings before the NRC licensing board, where they would have to openly address the experts’ concerns.

The NRC now estimates a 1 in 100 chance for a waste pool accident in the US – not including the most troubling risk factors represented by terrorism and sabotage. Also, it was recently learned that plants in Alabama and Iowa lost waste pool cooling last year for two days, during which time temperatures rose to levels where damage to safety equipment begins to occur.

Source: NC WARN: North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network: www.ncwarn.org