Spent the last few days in Santa Cruz Mixtepec and Compala setting up radios. A ragtag bunch from the organization CACTUS in a pickup truck bouncing on dirt roads across mountinous deserts. We are a Frenchman, 2 Oaxacan coordinators, a Cali gringo and myself.

Santa Cruz Mixtepec: Dancing to shame the conquestadors:In Santa Cruz Mixtepec we drive into town for just in time carnival, The town square is full of masked figures with tuxes on dancing to the sound of cumbia. Some of the masks are scary holloween type masks, like you see in the US but most are hairy, pink or white with dots all over. I ask what they mean. “They are a joke on the conquistadors and casiqilles with their facial hair, pink skin, pimples and tuxes”. Many of the men are dressed as women with fake blond hair, grotesqe caricatures of gringa beauty, and just as we arrive one of them wins the queen of the dance award and after exiting the stage comes through the crowd to dance with us. The music goes into the night with hundreds of people shuffling their feet, whole families standing on the side or dancing together. From the stage the musicians announce “Tommorow at 11am a new radio station will go on line at 94.5 fm, listen for it!” We are excited but nervous that we wont be able to set it the Radio up in time.The next mourning we rise earily meet with some high school kids and town representatives at an old clinic building on top of the highest hill in San Juan Mixtepec. Together we hoist the attena, clean out the clinic, hook up some electicity and setup the computers. We plug in the radio and drive around to see if it works but it doesn’t even reach to the bottom of the hill where the town center is. Its almost 11am and we arent quite sure why we have such poor preformance. We drive back up the dirt roads and check our power supply realizing that the power supply that I happened to bring from the US will actually work better. We plug it in again and sucess! The signal reaches across the moutains to 5 or six different towns and its only 30 mins late. The youth come up with the name for the station calling it “The voice of the clouds” becuase they, the Mixtec people have historically considered themselves people of the clouds. We drive around the town as a crew shouting out the station number to everyone who will listen. In Mixtepec there are alot of immigrant kids, many speaking English, Spanish,and Mixteco, one kid named Homie has a group of friends who all dress like sterotypical Chicano gangsters, tattoos and all. I dont know how they keep there socks and shirts white without running water while working in the constant dust but its amazing to watch them juggle the worlds, speaking with there elders in the community in Mixteco, joking with the other more traditional kids in spanish and kicking it with a couple of gringos in perfect slanged out English. With the sun still high in the sky we drive away like radio superheros with the new station blasting as the kids spin the latest in Chilanos and Cumbia and give shout outs to all the technicians. Our pick up bouces over the mountains dirt roads for a couple hours and we arrive in Copala.

Copala: Autonomus Armed Insurgent Radio

Copala is a small Triqui town in a tree filled valley that is an important spiritual and cultural location for the Triqui peoples. We were there to help them resolve a couple of technical problems with the radio that CACTUS installed a few weeks ago. The Triqui peoples have held on to many of their traditions, the women still wear their traditional red Hupil dress and they have maintained their forms of collective decisionmaking and have faced some extreme violence from the State in their fight for thier rights as indigenous people. Copala in particular has declared itself an autonomos municipality, breaking ties with the state and local government, and kicking out all government representatives, from police to tax collectors. It is exactly what the Zapatistas have done in Chiapas, but in Copala they don’t have international headlines and they have also cut ties with the leadership of larger statewide organizations, whos leaders they feel have been corrupted, like the MULT(Movement for Trique Unity and Liberation) . Since anouncing there own autonomus municipality a year ago they have stopped having people kidnapped, shot or arrested from their community. They have done this by creating there own local militia, who patrols the edge of town armed with the same types of weapons normally reserved for the military, police and paramilitaries. They are aware that the federal or state police and military forces might attack at any moment, and in the past they have been forced to defend the town from the special forces state police by having the towns women build blockades at the entrances to town and put their bodies in front of the attacking special forces vehicles. It is astonishing to realize that this is a community on the boarder with the state of Guerrero and Copala is supported in this type of armed resistance by its neighboring communities. Simply put this means that Mexico has at minimum 3 southern states that have active armed movements that are resisting state violence and organizing there own governments. I`m pretty sure that under international law Mexico more then qualifies as a country involved in a civil war. However we dont see any headlines announceing this dirty civil war because that would upset the stockmarkets, bring down the value of the peso and mean the politicians would have to admit that the %80 of the mexican military budget that comes from the USA is being used for alot more then chasing drug trafficers.It was great to work with youth from the commuity to fix some of the technical problems they were having with there appropriately titled “Breaking the Silence” radio. We were able to drive to neighboring towns and have the radio work far and wide. I was happy to see how interconnected indigenous resistance can be, finding this quote(see photo) from a Cree proverb on their municipal building:

“Only when the final tree is cut down,only when the final river is dammed,only when the final fish is caught,will they learn that that they cannot eat money.What ever People do to the earth they are doing to themselves”

I was also happy to find that the 2 high school age women that were working with us to set up the radio were much more assertive around the 3 gringos then I had seen in other towns, asking us directly all types of questions about where we were from and why we were there in Copala. I left Copala with many questions, more sure then ever that Mexico is much more complex then I though and that US resistance to “Plan Mexico” (giving 1.4 billion to the Mexican Military) is the only way to prevent a sure bloodbath for the people of Copala and most of the people of Southern Mexico.-Jonathan

Info in English on Plan Mexico, and actions to take: http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/planmexicoFor more info on Copala in Spanish: http://cml.vientos.info/node/12676 http://fridaguerrera.blogspot.com/2007/09/san-juan-copala-zona-triqui-con-larga.html