Untitled Document
Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads rolled through the cobblestone streets of
this colonial Mexican state capital, the pistoleros of a despised governor, peppering with automatic
weapons fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded,
or imprisoned in
the summer and fall of 2006.
Brad Will, a New York Indymedia video journalist,
felt that he had to
be there.
Hatred of foreigners, especially journalists from the
United States, was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara,
mátalo!” the radio chattered.
“If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!”
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been
filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He
was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all
around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot. And he found it: On his final bits of tape, you see
two killers perfectly framed up, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot
and the camera tumbling from his hands and bouncing along the sidewalk.
Photos taken by El Universal, the Mexican newspaper, at the same time show the same gunmen,
and they’re perfectly identifiable.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own
murder, but this is Mexico, where justice is spelled i-m-p-u-n-i-t-y
— and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of
Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable. There is a reason.
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Perched atop the Fifth Street squat
where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the
wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a
sunflower to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child
of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate
street hero in the years before the World Trade Towers collapsed and the
social-change movement in New York City went into the deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the pirate
station “Steal This Radio” and was an early part of Indymedia,
the Web-publishing experiment born during the Battle of Seattle, the World
Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999. With his long hair parted down the middle and neatly
tied back, his granny glasses and fringe beard, and fierce commitment to
building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian
time in America. An independent journalist, Will was one of the
growing number of people who used the Internet and their own video cameras
to track and report on social moments and injustice. His journey to the
land where he would die began right after 9/11. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte
journalist, met Will in the elevator coming down from the WBAI studios in
the South Street skyscraper from which Amy Goodman used to broadcast soon
after the terrorist attack.
“We walked down the piles. They were still
smoking,” she remembers in a phone call from Humboldt County, Calif.
“We were both really scared. We thought
this was not going to be resolved soon — maybe never — so we
thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still
fighting.”
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming
the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they
confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia, too, and interviewed Evo
Morales, not yet the president, and traveled in the Chapare with the coca
growers’ federation.
They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Oliviera, the
hero of the battle to keep Bechtel from taking over the city’s water
system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate-radio projects and
offered their support. In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of
social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near
the city of Goiania, in Goias state, when the military police swept in,
killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the live
ammunition zinging all around him as he captures the carnage. Will was
savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his U.S. passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back
through Peru and Bolivia and, when the money ran out, flew back to New York
to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, like a moth to the flame, he was back,
tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign
through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as
he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the
Internet from his room in Williamsburg, across the river in Brooklyn. (The
rent gougers had forced him off the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but
worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way. In the
end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day
ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to JFK and flew south
Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He didn’t make the plane.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by
seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is up at the top of most of the
nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition,
unemployment, and illiteracy. It’s also Mexico’s most
indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich
tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca
vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising
and repression. The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI,
ruled Mexico from 1928 through 2000, the longest-running political dynasty
in the known universe.
The corrupt organization was dethroned by the
right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential
candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca-Cola Mexico, in 2000. But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While all
over the country voters were throwing off the PRI yoke, in Oaxaca one PRI
governor had followed another for 75 years. In the latest installment,
Ulises Ruiz Ortiz won a fraud-marred gubernatorial election over a
right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz had proved
spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for
social justice. When on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a
maverick militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as
Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on
May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding
blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning, the maestros would march out of
their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon
smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans. Ruiz retaliated before dawn on June 14, sending a
thousand heavily armed police into the plaza to evict the teachers.
Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s
police had taken up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the
plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio
Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent
city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city. Four hours later, a spontaneous outburst from
Oaxaca’s very active community and the force of the striking
teachers, armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and
sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed police officers would be seen
on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after
the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to
repudiate the governor’s “hard hand.” The megamarch was
said to have extended 10 kilometers. John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising
as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, writes that the surge of the
rebels on June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The
Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted a week
later, on June 21. The APPO would have no leaders but many spokespersons,
and all decisions had to be taken in popular assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED For the next weeks, the APPO and Section 22 would
paralyze Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead,
the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election
in which a right-wing PANista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a
narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the
candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD). López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into
the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican
history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes. But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination,
and the APPO and Section 22 had closed down the tourist infrastructure,
blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to close their doors. On
July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza,
an “indigenous” dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s
premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the
scenery and blockaded access to the city. Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks in August, Ruiz had launched what
came to be known as a “caravan of death” — a train of 30
or 40 private and government vehicles — rolling nightly, firing on
the protesters. The governor’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of
the city police force and the state ministerial cops. To keep the caravan of death from moving freely
through the city, the APPO and the maestros threw up barricades — a thousand were built in
the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels
piled up dead trees, old tires, the carcasses of burned-out cars and buses
to create the barricades, which soon took on their own life — murals
were painted with the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the
barriers. In fact, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the
romantic aura of the Paris Commune and attracted droves of dreadlocked
anarchists to the city.
Oaxaca was in the grip of an uneasy lull in the
action when Brad Will arrived at the bus terminal on the first of October
and found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last
long.
ON THE BARRICADES Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves
independent reporters, Brad Will had no Mexican press credential and
therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and
subject to deportation. So that he would have some credential other than
his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited
at Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously. On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García
Hernández was cut down at a downtown barricade. Will joined an angry
procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16,
Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: “Now [Alejandro] lies
there waiting for Nov. 2, the Day of the Dead, when he can sit with his
loved ones again to share food and drink and song . . . ”
“One more death. One more time to cry and hurt.
One more time to know power and its ugly head. One more bullet cracks the
night.”
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten
“sketchy,” Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda
Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a
back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and
payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the
barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing
down wasn’t in the Popular Assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO
voted to make Oaxaca really ungovernable. Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs
armed with lead pipes and boards with nails driven through them who
hijacked what buses were still running in the city, forced the passengers
off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks
sprouted on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were
reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27. The escalation proved a terrible miscalculation. Up
in Mexico City, the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided and the PAN
was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the Oaxaco governor was the
PRI’s price of admission. It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced
foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the
hostels for “inconvenient” internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if
they joined the protests. The local U.S. consul, Mark Leyes, warned
Americans that he would not be able to help them out if they got caught up
in the maelstrom. To add to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate
radio station popped up at 99 on the FM dial on Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana
(Citizens Radio) announced that it was broadcasting “to bring peace
to Oaxaca” and to celebrate the honor of “our macho, very macho
governor.” The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents.
Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriol
— stuff like “We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades.” The extranjeros, the radio said,
were stirring up all the trouble. “They pretend to be journalists but
they have come to teach terrorism classes.”
More frightening was this admonition: “If you
see gringo with a camera, kill him!”
This poison spewed from local radios all day Oct. 26
and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and, if he did hear
them, knew what they meant — is unclear. Brad Will didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On the 27th, Will went out to do interviews on the
barricade at Cal y Canto. That outpost, along with two others at Santa
María Coyotepec and La Experimental, was crucial to closing down
Oaxaca. The broad Railroad Avenue, where the barricade was stacked, was
empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked onto the next barricade at La
Experimental to check out the action. Shortly after the Indymedia reporter
left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 supporters of
the governor stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought
was a Chevy Blazer. The car was moving very fast. “We thought it
would try and crash through the barricade,” Miguel Cruz, an activist
with the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca (CIPO), recalls. But the
SUV stopped short and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO
people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and
kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the
counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle
rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and, with the
gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their car. Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal
y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3
p.m. Will climbed under a parked trailer to shoot the
shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist came
running by (we never see who it is on Will’s last tape), Will
indicated the shooter: “Camisa blanca.”
While all this was going on, his camera captured a
bicyclist pedaling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large
dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as
a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue. Suddenly the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez,
and took refuge in a windowless one-story building in the second block. The
only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the
reporters followed the APPO militants, many of them with their faces
masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will actually stood to one
side of the door for a minute, poised for the “money shot.”
Then the compas tried
unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian
dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s colors) and three
others in white — appeared at the head of Juarez Street, about 30
meters away, and began shooting at the rebels. The two red shirts were later identified by Mexican
news media as Pedro Carmona, a local PRI political fixer and cop, and
Police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of the white shirts
crouched down behind Carmona was Abel Santiago Zárate. Santiago
Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal
bodyguards of PRI Municipal President Manuel Martínez Ferrea. The
other two white shirts would be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano and Juan
Sumano, both Santa Lucia police officers.
You can see the gunmen in the film Brad Will shot
just moments before the bullets hit him, and they are clearly framed in a
picture taken at the same time that ran on the front page of El Universal. When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the
opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the press. He was
crouched against a lime-green wall when his bullet came for him. You can
hear the shot on the soundtrack and listen to Will’s cries as it
tears through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashes into his heart. A second
shot catches him in the right side, destroying his innards. There is little
blood, the first slug having stopped his heart from pumping. On film that
Gustavo Vilchis and others took, the entrance wound looks like a deep
bruise. The second shot is not recorded on the soundtrack and
may have been fired simultaneously with the first one. Others were hit in the pandemonium. Oswaldo
Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed in the fusillade. Lucio David Cruz, described
as a bystander, was shot in the neck and died four months later. As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position,
Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. His Section 22 credential
had flown off, and no one really knew his name. With bullets whizzing by,
the compas picked
him up and dragged him out of the line of fire, around the corner to
Arboles Street, about 35 paces away.
“Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve
shot a journalist!” Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an
Italian comic actor, shouted desperately. A man named Gualberto Francisco
had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Arboles and pulled up alongside where
Will was laid out on the pavement. Leonardo and Gustavo loaded a dying Brad Will into
the backseat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “You’re going to make it . . .
you’re all right” they kept telling him — but
Will’s eyes had already receded to the back of his head, perdido (lost), as they
say here. The vochito ran out of gas, and as the three frantic young men
were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad it began to
rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the
driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally they flagged
down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he
arrived at the hospital.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising.
Four others were killed besides Will; their names were Emilio Alonso
Fabián, Estevan Ruiz, Estevan López Zurita, and Eudacia
Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered
international outrage. Because he was so connected — and much of the
episode was recorded on film — the shot of the mortally wounded
Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of an Oaxaca street went worldwide
on the Web in a matter of minutes. There were instant vigils on both coasts. On Monday
morning, Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were arrested trying to lock
down the Mexican Consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue. Anarchists
splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos
sent his condolences and called for international protests. Amy Goodman did
an hour-long memorial. The official reaction to Will’s death was more
cautious. “It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of
hand and result in violence” a U.S. spokesperson told the press,
seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled
to Oaxaca “at their own risk,” Ambassador Tony Garza commented
on the “senseless death of Brad Will” and how it
“underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order. “For months,” he said, “violence
and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups
have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations. . . . ”
Garza’s statement sent President Fox the signal
he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to
act. The next morning, Saturday, Oct. 28, 4,500 Federal Preventative
Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca to
break the back of the rebellion and keep Ulises Ruiz Ortiz in power. On Sunday the 29th, the troops pushed their way into
the plaza despite massive passive resistance by activists, tore down the
barricades, and drove the Commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico, the dead are buried quickly. After the
obligatory autopsy, Will’s body was crated up for shipment back to
his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the
family had Brad Will’s remains cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY Killing a gringo reporter here in plain view of the
cameras requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29, Ruiz’s
state prosecutor Lizbeth Caña Cadeza announced that arrests warrants
were being sworn out for Abel Santiago Zárate and Orlando Manuel
Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film firing shots at Brad
Will, and they were subsequently taken into custody. The scam lost currency two weeks later, when, on Nov.
15, the prosecutor dropped a bombshell at an evening press conference: The
cops hadn’t killed Will, she said — he was shot by the rebels. Will’s death, she insisted, had been “a
deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict” and was, in
fact, “the product of a concerted premeditated action.” The
mortal shot had been fired from less than two-and-a-half meters away,
Caña said — although there is nothing in the autopsy report to
indicate this. The real killers were “the same group [Will] was
accompanying.”
In the prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the
shots was reversed: Will had first been shot in the side in the street and
then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in
Gualberto’s vochito. Caña’s plot was immediately challenged
by the APPO, and, in fact, there is very little evidence to support
Caña’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the
Mexican press, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in the chest on
the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound
had been inflicted well before he was dragged into the car where he was
supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the
prosecutor’s suggestion: Nobody on the scene saw any of the APPO
members — or anyone else except the authorities — carrying
guns. I have talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all of them tell the same
tale: The rebels at the Cal y Canto barricade that day had no firearms, no
weapons with which to have shot Brad Will. Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will,
first at the CIPO headquarters and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and
Juarez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded on the
kitchen table vehemently when he addressed Lizbeth Caña’s
allegations. “The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had
slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRIistas and the cops had their
.38s, and they were shooting at us. We were trying to save Brad
Will’s life, not to kill him.”
And if Caña had any proof of her allegations,
she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or
Will’s companions has ever been formally charged with the killing.
Ruiz’s prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder
weapon.
But by the time Caña told her story, of
course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the
distance from which they had been fired would be to exhume Brad
Will’s body, and there was no body — he had been cremated the
week before.
On Nov. 28, as expected, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar
Coello were released from custody because of “insufficient
evidence” by Judge Vittoriano Barroso, with the stipulation that they
could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Lizbeth Caña, who is now running as a PRI
candidate for the state Legislature (with Ruiz’s strong support),
collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca Secretary of Citizen
Protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of
government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to Ruiz.
There seems little doubt that the state prosecutor’s accusations of
murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of
innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL Dr. Luis Mendoza Canseco is otherwise occupied when I stop by CEMEFO,
the Oaxaca city morgue, to ask him for a copy of the autopsy report upon
which the state of Oaxaca has based its allegations.
“Will died eight months ago,” the coroner
complains testily. “Do you know how many others have died since, how
many autopsies I’ve performed?” He gestures to the morgue room
where the cadavers are piled up. The coroner is scrunched over his desk, filling out
paperwork. He doesn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I
am not the first reporter to ask him about the document. “What paper
are you from anyway?” he asks suspiciously, and when I show him my
press card he tells me that it doesn’t sound like a real paper to
him. “I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your
country” he snaps defensively, waving me out of the office. I walk into the police commissary under the
first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucia del Camino Municipal Palace. The
small room is crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers
are in full battle gear, and the rest are all plainclothes. I have been
warned not to ask for Pedro Carmona, the most prominent red shirt in
Will’s photo. Carmona is described as prepotente — a thug with an attitude — who is always
packing.
Instead I ask the desk clerk if I could get a few
minutes with security supervisor Abel Santiago Zárate and police
commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. For all I know, the two are
sitting in the same room behind me. The desk clerk studies my card. “¡Qué lástima! [What a shame!]” he exclaims. The supervisor has just left
and won’t be back until after 6. The comandante is off today. When I call back after 6, Santiago Zárate is still not available. Nor will he or Aguilar Coello ever
be available the dozen-or-so times I call back.
This sort of stonewalling is nothing terribly unusual
for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their service to local political
bosses and go back to work as if nothing has happened. Those who direct this mayhem from their desks in
the statehouses and municipal palaces — the “intellectual
assassins,” as they are termed — are never held accountable for
their crimes.
THE POLITICS OF OIL There are larger geopolitics at work here. The U.S. State Department has a certain conflict of
interest in trying to push Mexican President Felipe Calderón to
collar Brad Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a
political deal between Calderon’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: Save
Ruiz, and the PRI would support the president’s legislative package
— indeed, the PRI’s hundred votes in the lower house of
Congress guarantees Felipe the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the
Mexican Constitution. And at the top of Calderon’s legislative agenda
is opening up PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation expropriated
from Anglo and American owners in 1938 and a patriotic symbol of
Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that
requires a constitutional amendment.
“Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX
has been brutal,” observes John Saxe-Fernandez, a professor of
strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, UNAM.
During the run-up to the hotly contested July 2,
2006, presidential elections, the two candidates debated the privatization
of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of
Commerce in Mexico City; former U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated
the debate. When leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador insisted
he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business suits
stared in stony silence. Felipe Calderón’s pledge to open
PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderon was, of course,
Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election. The Bush administration, whose interests in Mexico
Ambassador Tony Garza represents, is eager to see PEMEX privatized, an
opportunity for Exxon and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest
subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s
eighth-largest oil company. Pushing President Calderón too hard to
do justice for Brad Will could disaffect the PRI and put the kibosh on the
deal. It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in
anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and the killing and
the killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is
becoming.
John Ross is the Mexico City correspondent for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Author of eight books on Mexican politics, Ross has lectured on Latin
America on college campuses from Harvard to University of California at
Berkeley. This story was commissioned by the Association of Alternative
Newsweeklies, including Illinois Times.
Killing the messenger
Many journalists have come to bloody ends in Mexico
Brad Will was the latest victim in a string of U.S.
reporters who have traveled to Mexico to document the struggle for justice
here — and perhaps assuage their personal demons — and have
wound up in a shallow grave or the receiving end of assassin’s bullet
under enigmatic circumstances. One of the first was Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary,
who came to Mexico on assignment for the Hearst papers in 1913 to ride with
Pancho Villa and cover his revolution. “The Old Gringo,” as
Carlos Fuentes dubbed him in the novel of the same name, disappeared at the
Battle of Ojinaga, and his bones long ago blew to dust out there in the
northern desert. Will made other lists, too. He was one of 26 people
to die on the barricades of Oaxaca from May to January 2006-2007 and the
ninth reporter working in Mexico to have been killed or disappeared during
the last year, most under the guns of the narco gangs. Forty have been slain since 2000 and 63 in the
past two decades, according to the Inter American Press Association. Reporters Without Borders lists 81 confirmed kills of
journalists around the world during 2006. That represents a 20 percent
increase over 2005 (63) and is the highest since 1994, when revolutions
were roaring in Sri Lanka and Algeria. Killing the messenger is becoming more and more
popular. — John Ross
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2007.
