There won’t be a massacre if they know that we are all watching them. A form of power that these people have is us. It’s our jobs to insist on reliable coverage, to spread the word, to make information on how to protest available. It’s our job to tell the mexican government that we are watching.

I think there’s a lot of willful blindness and racism that allows this kind of tragic clash to continue so long.
absolutly. The clash is intimatly tied with indigenous liberation movements–when people see this, they see a bunch of brown indians acting like animals, not a group of organized human beings who won’t take anymore shit.

thanks for posting on this maia

en lucha

CNN has had predictably bad and biased coverage, but one comment the other day struck me as particularly poignant. Describing the reactions of the protesters–men, women, children–watching the federal police pouring in with their weapons, it quoted one woman as saying that the police didn’t need weapons; the protesters were armed only with flowers they had brought to present to the police.

This incredibly noble, human gesture gives me a measure of hope for change. It also hasn’t stopped me from repeatedly checking the news to see if there has been a massacre. I hope that the Mexican congress’s request for Ruiz to step down will help resolve the crisis, but it does nothing to address the culture of oppression that makes the poor invisible and inaudible unless they recur to “extreme” measures.

Thank you for your post. I’m glad to see that people are finally writing about this.