Following our last La Parota post on June 29, when Mexican media reported that the project was postponed until 2018, things were looking good for the indigenous and campesino peoples defending the Papagayo River from destruction and their own communities from dislocation.

––When did you find out you were getting out of prison, don Ignacio? ––We’ve always known we’d get out, from the very first moment. ––Was that due to your trust in the people to free you? ––It had more to do with our rage. A rage we’ve stored up inside us. Maybe at first we felt fear. Anguish, along with troubles, uncertainty, rage, impotence. All that transcends pain. It overcomes suffering.

Four years have gone by since that vicious attack by the federal and state governments against our honorable, rebellious people in San Salvador Atenco. Since those savage beatings of men, women and children; the search and destroy of our homes; the murders of Alexis Benhumea and Javier Cortés; the imprisonment of more than 200 comrades; the humiliation and rape of dozens of our women comrades on the way to prison; the deportation from the country of our Chilean, German and Spanish friends who witnessed and suffered the repression. All this at the hands of state, federal and municipal police. All ordered, directed and personally supervised from a spot just a few feet away by State of Mexico governor Enrique Peña Nieto. All this set in motion by the President of the country to make us pay for the affront of having stopped him from grabbing our lands to close the biggest business deal of his regime: the inauguration of a new airport with a deluxe commercial corridor extending for several miles.

The human rights convoy is about to go into the community of Agua Fria, a community belonging to the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala, and the Oaxaca State Attorney General, Maria de la Luz Candelaria Chiñas, has announced she wants to establish negotiations between the coordinator of the PRD, Alejandro Encinas Rodriguez, however the decision is not partisan.