Potrero Burns, Can Oaxaca Be Saved?

You may have heard that one of the burned areas is Potrero, a small, bucolic town in San Diego county. I was out there a few weeks ago to help the residents protest the plans for Blackwater International to build a new mercenary training camp in Potrero, and it was a lovely place. I'm glad I had a chance to see it before it burned. You probably know that Blackwater International has gotten into some difficulties in Iraq, and is now competing for a new source of income, a multi-billion-dollar contract to help Mexico wage war on drugs. The war on drugs in Colombia has resulted in the deaths of many indigenous people and an increase in drug trafficking. There is no reason to think it would be different in Mexico, particularly since many Blackwater mercenaries have been recruited from CIA-trained right-wing death squads in Central and South America, and their priority is killing leftists, not drug traffickers (with whom they are often aligned). Having a new training camp in Potrero, which is not too far from the Mexican border, would be an asset in landing this contract.

The Zapatistas, the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, have been resisting attempts by the Mexican government to force them off their lands so that multinational corporations can exploit their resources. They recently issued a new statement, the ViCam Declaration, that they are prepared to die rather than be forced off their lands or have their sustainable way of life destroyed. Many of their villages have been surrounded by the Mexican army for years, but despite widespread arrests and assassinations, the people are still resisting. As you recall, when the CIA killed Che Guevara, they first flew in high-tech equipment, planeloads of arms, tracked his group with heat-sensing detectors on planes, and flew in 600 U.S. Marines in case they were needed as back-up. Without this sort of technological and numerical superiority, the cowards who hire themselves out as corporate mercenaries are usually afraid to attack. The multi-billion-dollar contract with Blackwater would give the Mexican government precisely this kind of technological and numerical superiority over the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca.

As part of the protest against the new camp in Potrero, residents had managed to get enough signatures to have a recall election against their planning board, which had approved the project against the will of the majority of residents. To make it easier to rig the election, San Diego's new Registrar of Voters, Deborah Seilor, a former Diebold spokesperson, has decreed that it will be a mail-in election. That way nobody can know for sure how many ballots were received or watch them being counted, as they will not be counted all at once. But that may not be necessary, as there are not likely to be many residents left in Potrero after the fires burn out, and those remaining will be busy attempting to repair their homes.

Fires broke out in other areas, possibly to distract attention from the primary target, and there has been much collateral damage. All the fires are likely to be blamed on "illegal aliens," and several mainstream media new stories appear to be laying the groundwork for that spin. No attention whatsoever is likely to be directed towards who stands to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars from these fires.

Since most of the evacuated residents are white, both the Governor and the President have been very helpful, and the evacuation centers have plenty of cots, food, and water. Residents have not been held at gunpoint to prevent them from evacuating, as was the case in New Orleans. There has, however, been widespread harassment of non-white evacuees, including ICE grabbing evacuees without papers, and much harassment of those attempting to help non-whites. The National Guard has been called in "to prevent looting" instead of Blackwater,  which is a very good thing, as Blackwater mercenaries often have no ties or loyalties to anyone in this country and are trained to shoot first if they feel threatened, so they would be very likely to mistake residents with hammers in their hands who were attempting to repair their homes, for looters, and shoot them. Neither Blackwater itself, nor the President or the Governor, appear to want Blackwater to have any more bad publicity at this point, and they apparently do not have any contract employees they can trust not to shoot residents.

So I am well, but it looks to me like the residents of Potrero and the Zapatistas may be toast, and that Blackwater is about to land a new major contract. La lucha sigue!