TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO:

The Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army shows its sorrow for the death of Bishop Emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia.

Individuals with different beliefs and without any religious belief belong to the EZLN, but the human stature of this man (and that of those who, like him, walk side-by-side with the oppressed, the plundered, the repressed, the scorned), calls for our word.

Although the differences, disagreements and distances were not few nor superficial, today we want to focus on a commitment and a trajectory that are not only about an individual, but about a whole current inside the Catholic Church.

Don Samuel Ruiz García not only emphasized a Catholicism practiced for and with the dispossessed, with his team he also formed a whole generation of Christians committed to this practice of the Catholic religion. Not only was he worried about the grave situation of misery and marginalization of the original peoples of Chiapas, he also worked, together with a heroic pastoral team, to improve those undignified conditions of life and death.

What the governments purposefully forgot in order to cultivate death, became a testimony of life in the diocese of San Cristobal de Las Casas.

Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia and his team not only persisted in attaining peace with justice and dignity for the indigenous of Chiapas, they also risked and continue to risk their life, liberty and earthly possessions on that path cut short by the arrogance of the political power.

Even since much before our 1994 Uprising, the Diocese of San Cristobal suffered harassment, attacks and slanders by the Federal Army and the rotating state governments.

At least since Juan Sabines Gutierrez (remembered for the Wolonchan Massacre in 1980) and passing through General Absalon Castellanos Dominguez, Patrocinio Gonzalez Garrido, Elmar Setzer M., Eduardo Robledo Rincon, Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro (one of the authors of the Acteal Massacre in 1997) and Roberto Albores Guillén (better known as “doggie biscuits”), the Chiapas governors attacked those in the diocese of San Cristóbal who were opposed to their massacres and the management of the State as if it were a hacienda from the era of Porfirio Diaz.

Since 1994, during his work on the National Mediation Commission (CONAI, its initials in Spanish), in the company of the men and women that formed that peace commission, Don Samuel received pressures, attacks and threats, including attempts against his life by the paramilitary group wrongly called Peace and Justice.

And (while) being president of the CONAI Don Samuel also suffered, in February 1995, a threat of incarceration.

Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, as part of a strategy of distraction (like the one used now) to hide la grave economic crisis to which he and Carlos Salinas de Gortari had subjected the country, reactivated the war against the indigenous Zapatista communities.

At the same time that he launched a big military offensive against the EZLN (that failed), Zedillo attacked the Nacional Mediation Commission.

Obsessed with the idea of getting rid of Don Samuel, the then president of Mexico, and now an employee of transnational corporations, took advantage of the alliance that, under the tutelage of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, had been forged between the PRI and the PAN.

In those days, at a meeting with the Catholic Church hierarchy, the then Attorney General of the Republic, the PAN member and fanatic of clumsiest spiritualism and witchcraft, Antonio Lozano Gracia, brandished in front of Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia a document with an arrest warrant against him.

And they say that the attorney general and graduate in the Occult Sciences was confronted by the other bishops, among them Norberto Rivera, who went to the defense of the head of the Diocese of San Cristobal.

The PRI-PAN alliance (which the PRD and the PT would later join in Chiapas) against the progressive Catholic Church did not stop there. Attacks, slanders and attempts against members of the Diocese were sponsored from the federal and state governments.

The Federal Army did not stay back. At the same time that it was financing, training and supplying paramilitary groups, it was promoting the lie that the Diocese was sowing the violence.

The thesis at that time (and that is now repeated by idiots of the left at a desk) was that the Diocese had formed the EZLN's bases and leadership cadre.

A sample of these ridiculous arguments was when a general showed a book as proof of the link of the Diocese with the “lawbreakers.”

The title of the incriminating book is “The Gospel According to Saint Mark.”

To this day those attacks have not stopped.

The “Fray Bartolome de Las Casas” Human Rights Center continuously receives threats and harassment.

Besides having been founded by Don Samuel Ruiz García and of having a Christian inspiration, the “Frayba” has as “aggravating crimes” a belief in the Integrality and Indivisibility of Human Rights, respect for cultural diversity and the right to self-determination, integral justice as a requisite for peace, and the development of a culture of dialogue, tolerance and reconciliation, with respect for cultural and religious plurality.

Nothing bothers them more than those principles.

And this bother reaches the Vatican, where it is maneuvering to divide the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas in two, as a way of diluting the alternative in, for and with the poor, in an accommodating way that launders consciences into money. Taking advantage of the death of Don Samuel, that project of control and division is reactivated.

Because there above they understand that the option in favor of the poor does not die with Don Samuel. It lives and acts in all that sector of the Catholic Church that decided to follow what it preaches.

Meanwhile, the pastoral team, especially the deacons, ministers and catechists (indigenous Catholics from the communities) suffer the slanders, insults and attacks of the neo-lovers of the war. The Power continues yearning for its days of lordship and they see in the work of the Diocese an obstacle to reinstalling its knife and gallows regime.

The grotesque parade of personalities from the local and national political life in front of the casket of Don Samuel is not to honor him, but to para verify, with relief, that he has died; and the local communications media simulate lamenting what in reality they celebrate.

For on top of all those attacks and church conspiracies, Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia and the Christians like him, had, have and will have a special place in the dark heart of the indigenous Zapatista communities.

Now that it is in style to condemn the whole Catholic Church for the crimes, misconduct, commissions and omissions of some of its prelates…

Now that the self-named “progressive” sector is consoled by making jokes about and resenting the whole Catholic Church…

Now that seeing a potential or active pedophile in every priest is encouraged…

Now it would be good turn to look towards below to find those who, like before Don Samuel, challenged and continue to challenge Power.

Because these Christians believe firmly that justice must also reign in this world.

And like that they live, and die, in thought, word and deed.

Because while it is certain that there are Marciales and Onesimos in the Catholic Church, there were and there are Roncos, Ernestos, Samueles, Arturos, Raules, Sergios, Bartolomes, Joeles, Heribertos, Raymundos, Salvadores, Santiagos, Diegos, Estelas, Victorias, and thousands of religious and lay Catholics that, being on the side of justice and freedom, are on the side of life.

Within the EZLN, Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and non-believers, today not only honor the memory of Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia.

Also, and above all, we salute the consequent commitment of the Christians and believers that in Chiapas, in Mexico and in the World, not to keep a complicit silence before the injustice, nor remain immobile before the war.

Don Samuel is gone, but many others remain, many others that, in and for the Christian Catholic faith, struggle for an earthly world more just, more free, more democratic; in other words, for a better world.

Health to them! Tomorrow will also be born from their wakefulness.

Mexico, January 2011