[h3][font color="red"]A Citizenry Took a City Hall by Storm… Thirteen Months Later, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos to Visit the Still-Occupied Government Palace[/font][/h3]
By Michael Kummer
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Oaxaca, México
February 6, 2006

On January 1, 2005, the people of San Blas Atempa, Oaxaca, tired of a dozen years of single-party rule under a political boss named Agustina Acevedo Gutierrez, threw her out of City Hall with rocks, sticks, gasoline and fire.

Today, thirteen months later, the government palace remains under rebel control while the official administration – still receiving state and federal budgets – works in exile out of a different building, with the political boss now a state legislator, trying to get back in control on her home turf.

It is into this volatile situation that Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos – on his six-month tour of all of Mexico as “Delegate Zero” – enters tonight, Monday, February 6, at the invitation of the fighting people of San Blas Atempa.

(snip)

It was on the Eve of New Year 2005 when the citizenry of San Blas Atempa “rose up with stones.” Acevedo’s hand-picked successor as mayor was about to be installed, so the woman known locally as “La Tina Guada” (in the native Zapotec language it means “Tina who is not from here,” but in a play on words common to these lands, in Spanish it phonetically says “the tub already filled with water”) chose to sleep overnight in the palace – the city hall – on her final night as mayor. She appeared the next morning from the palace balcony in an arrogant show of power. At one point that morning, say local residents, she stuck her tongue out, mocking the seething crowd. To install her lackey in the mayor’s chair, she had bypassed state election laws and simply issued a fiat, via a “public assembly” in which – they cannot forget – police forces under her control let her supporters in and kept opponents out.

According to townspeople, as the political boss known as Tina taunted the public, first came the hail of rocks and bricks, hurled up toward the balcony. Then her own security forces – with AK-47 automatic weapons – fired into the crowd. Four bullet-wounded citizens and the man who brought them to the hospital were then arrested and remain, today, political prisoners.

more: http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1592.html
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more on The Zapatistas, "The Other Campaign," and "The Other Politics" on this PI [a href="http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=165&topic_id=111&mesg_id=111"]thread[/a].