BREAKING
http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2339.htmlToday, Monday, November 13, presumed paramilitaries committed a massacre in the Montes Azules jungle region of Chiapas, killing nine indigenous women and men and two children.
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The details of the massacre, in a very isolated area, far from urban and media centers, are still sketchy, but the warning signs that violence on this scale was brewing in the region have been known by state and federal officials all along. They were specifically warned by human rights organizations last July and August, but in lieu of taking positive action, their police and other agencies merely aggravated the problems since then.
The dead lived and worked in the Ejido Dr. Manuel Velasco Suarez II, known as Viejo Velasco Suárez, a farming community established in 1984 through an agreement with the Mexican government. They and their previous generations had lived in other parts of the Lacandon Jungle that, in 1972, had been declared a “nature preserve.” Then, as now, the ecological imprimatur turned out to have more to do with looting Mother Nature than protecting her: the creation of the Montes Azules biosphere served to grant the Mexican government monopoly control over exploitation of hardwoods and other natural resources. As part of the environmental show and simulation, 66 families of the Lacandon indigenous group – a population that today numbers in the hundreds, descendants of Maya peoples of the Yucatan Peninsula that had emigrated to Chiapas centuries ago – were declared sole stewards of more than 600,000 hectares of rainforest, but on the condition that they cede economic rights to the government over the land.