Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, Defender of Mexico’s Mayans, Dies at 86

http://nyti.ms/f4kipr

 

January 26, 2011
Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, Defender of Mexico's Mayans, Dies at 86
By JULIA PRESTON

Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, an impassioned defender of the Mayans in southern Mexico and a mediator in peace talks between Indian rebels and the government, died on Monday in Mexico City. He was 86.

The cause was respiratory failure and complications of high blood pressure and diabetes, said Bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel, Bishop Ruiz's successor.

During his 40 years of presiding over a Roman Catholic diocese in Chiapas State, Bishop Ruiz cast light on abuses suffered by the Indians and sought to bring them into the church as equals with other Mexicans, challenging the rigidly stratified social order.

His advocacy and egalitarian views, which were tinged with socialism, brought him into conflict with the Mexican government, which accused him of fomenting a violent uprising in Chiapas in 1994. He also rankled the Vatican, which said he had strayed from ecclesiastical principles to create a politicized ethnic church, and in 1993 publicly invited him to step down. Mexican clerics rallied to his defense, however, and he remained as bishop until he retired in 2000.

Bishop Ruiz attracted a fervent following among Indians in Chiapas, who called him "Tatic," which means "father" in a Mayan language. On Tuesday, Indian parishioners filled the cathedral in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial town in the Chiapas highlands, for a memorial Mass that also commemorated the 51st anniversary of Bishop Ruiz's ordination there.

Samuel Ruiz was born on Nov. 3, 1924, in Irapuato, in Guanajuato State in central Mexico, the conservative Catholic heart of the country. He is survived by a brother, José Ruiz García.

The federal government waged bloody anticlerical battles against Catholics as he was growing up. When he arrived in Chiapas in 1960, his beliefs were staunchly traditional.

But Bishop Ruiz was influenced by the Second Vatican Council, which in the 1960s called for bringing the Catholic faith to people in a way that reflected their own cultures.

"He became a representative of the poor and aggrieved in his diocese and also a protector of priests and nuns and lay brothers and sisters who were working with the poor," said John Womack, a professor emeritus of Mexican history at Harvard. "He wasn't a theologian. He was a doer and a practitioner."

Starting in 1970, Bishop Ruiz ordered translations of the Bible and other religious texts in the indigenous languages of Chiapas. He trained Indian catechists, or instructors, to organize village assemblies throughout the mountains and jungles of the diocese. By the end of his tenure, there were more than 20,000 Indian catechists in Chiapas, said Pablo Romo, a former Dominican priest who worked with the bishop.

"He made the word of God accessible to the people," Mr. Romo said.

San Cristóbal is named for Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican missionary from Spain who was one of the first bishops of Chiapas and an early protector of the Indians. Bishop Ruiz said he knew he was following that legacy.

As economic changes in the 1980s deepened the poverty and isolation of the Indians, many Catholics joined an uprising that erupted when the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a group of armed Indian rebels, occupied several Chiapas towns in January 1994.

Bishop Ruiz openly supported the Zapatistas' goal of fighting injustice, but he did not endorse their violent tactics.

For four years, beginning in 1994, Bishop Ruiz mediated peace talks between the government and the Zapatistas. Accords were signed in February 1995 in the Chiapas village of San Andrés Larráinzar.

But he clashed during the talks with President Ernesto Zedillo, who accused him of favoring the rebels and preaching a "theology of violence."

Bishop Ruiz's Zapatista sympathies also earned him enemies among the landed class in Chiapas and the Indians who opposed the rebels. In November 1997, he was ambushed by gunmen on a mountain road but escaped without injury.

Obeying Vatican rules, Bishop Ruiz retired, reluctantly, when he turned 75. In 2002, the Vatican ordered a halt to a program he had initiated that had ordained more than 300 married Indian deacons.

"In the last decades," Mr. Womack said, "he was always and very bravely on the defensive within the church."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/americas/27ruiz.html

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Long Live the Spirit of Bishop Garcia! Tatic!
Venceremos! We Will Win!
Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

Read: John Ross and Los de Abajo

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Venceremos! We Will Win!
Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

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From: Portside Moderator <moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG>
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Sent: Mon, January 24, 2011 6:50:27 PM
Subject: John Ross and Los de Abajo

John Ross and Los de Abajo

by David L. Wilson
24.01.11

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wilson240111.html

Most of the tributes to John Ross have stressed the
colorful side of the New York-born journalist,
activist, and poet, who died in Michoacan, Mexico, on
January 17.

"Colorful" is an understatement.  Tall, gaunt, with his
black beret and white goatee, a Palestinian keffiyeh
around his neck, John was an unmistakable figure at
demonstrations.  His prose matched his appearance.
Torrents of words poured out, puns in English mixing
with Spanish, Tzotzil, Yiddish.  The PRI, Mexico's
Institutional Revolutionary Party, became "the
longest-ruling political dynasty in the known
universe"; John's native country was "Gringolandia,"
or, more recently, "Obamaland."  Even his casual emails
were like no one else's: "the end is a little nigh,"
John wrote in September when he learned the liver
cancer had returned.

But all this shouldn't make us forget that John was
also a serious political thinker -- however hard he
tried not to sound like one.

Sounding Out the Base

John didn't usually parade his political thought in
heavy analytical pieces.  Instead, it came out in the
way he got on a story before anyone else.  As columnist
Luis Hernandez Navarro pointed out in the Mexican daily
La Jornada, John was always "in the place where things
happen."

John was covering Cuauhtemoc Cardenas' 1988 campaign
long before Cardenas astonished the pundits by winning
the Mexican presidency (in the real vote; he lost in
the official tally).  John made friends with another
officially losing presidential candidate, Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador, back in the early 1990s, when "AMLO" was
still a struggling local politician in Tabasco.  Most
famously, John wrote about the possibility that a
guerrilla movement was stirring in the mountains and
jungles of Chiapas many months before the Zapatista
National Liberation Army launched its "surprise"
offensive on January 1, 1994.

This prescience wasn't just because of John's strong
journalistic instincts.  Early on he realized that the
really important changes don't come from the people at
the top of the pyramid; they start with subtle changes
in the consciousness of los de abajo, the people at the
base.

He was still happy to chat with Lopez Obrador in the
early 2000s after AMLO had become mayor of Mexico City
and one of the country's most important political
figures, but John paid just as much attention to the
barbers and newsstand operators near his home at the
Hotel Isabel in the city's Centro Historico.  While
mainstream journalists (and too many writers for the
alternative media) would get their news from the great
men and their PR consultants, John was sounding out the
"ordinary people" -- an indigenous campesina in the
backwoods of Michoacan, an aging Palestinian farmer
amid his olive trees in the West Bank -- trying to
determine their mood, and how ready they were or
weren't to fight back.

When he'd visit the States to promote a book, John
traveled in late-night intercity buses, not just to
save money but more importantly to find out what was
going on with the people of "Gringolandia."

Tackling the IMF and World Bank

John's emphasis on the grassroots didn't mean he had
simplistic views on issues like the role of political
leaders or the value of intellectual work.

He would criticize politicians like AMLO or Hugo
Chavez, but at the same time he insisted that these
leaders could benefit the struggle by implementing
social reforms, or at the very least by giving the
grassroots movement room to maneuver.  Asked his
opinion of Chavez, John talked about the dangers of
caudillismo, the Latin American tradition of
concentrating power in charismatic populist leaders.
"Chavez is a caudillo," John concluded, "but he's our
caudillo."

John paid close attention to current economic and
sociological analysis -- but not the analysis from
officially designated U.S. experts.  John's sources
were the Latin American academics who back in the 1980s
were warning about the dangers of the neoliberal
economic policies that the World Bank, the IMF
(International Monetary Fund), and the New York Times
were busily promoting.

There's a myth among many U.S. leftists that the
anti-globalization movement started with the Seattle
demonstrations of 1999.  The reality is that outside
the United States people were analyzing and resisting
global neoliberalism at a time when people here still
believed in the "triumph of capitalism" and the "end of
history."  John was one of the few U.S. writers with a
more sophisticated view of economic dynamics, and he
spent much of the 1990s working to bring that analysis
to people here.

Bringing It Back Home

John approached his readers and potential readers in
the United States in much the same way as he approached
activists in Latin America.  A lot of leftists have
given up on the struggle here and now content
themselves with cheering for the home team south of the
border.  John too found the political situation in
"Obamaland" depressing, but from those late-night
Greyhound rides he'd sensed the sour mood of los de
abajo here, and he was determined to tell them that
people were still fighting back in other parts of the
world, that organizing was still possible.

For many U.S. leftists, social movements in the
Americas are a spectator sport; John felt they should
be a model and an inspiration.  You have to organize
here among your own people, he would say.  If you want
to support the Zapatistas, you have to be a Zapatista
where you live.

Our own past could be a model and an inspiration as
well, John felt.  In Murdered by Capitalism, a
picturesque melange of autobiography and U.S. left
history, John tried to introduce us to our activist
forbears, both the famous and the obscure, and to show
us their glory, their heroism, and, too often, their
failures, betrayals and sheer insanity.  It can happen
here, he was saying, and it can happen again -- and
better, if we learn from the mistakes of the past.

In the spring of 2007 John was invited to speak at the
annual Anarchist Book Fair in New York's Greenwich
Village, his home turf.  The panel was on zapatismo.
John had just walked over from the East Village, where
he'd been participating in a tenants' demonstration,
and he was full of enthusiasm for being a Zapatista
where you live.  Support the Zapatistas by joining a
tenants' protest here in New York, he told the
audience, mostly students and young academics.

Not too many of them caught John's enthusiasm.  At the
end of the question period, a young woman asked how
people in New York could show solidarity with the
Zapatistas.  John repeated his call for us to organize
where we are.  The questioner persisted: she wanted
"concrete solidarity," like writing our senators.  John
knew well enough that there are times when it's useful
to pressure the politicians: for instance, when
paramilitaries kidnap Latin American activists and we
need international action to get them released.  But
New York's senators then were Chuck Schumer and Hillary
Clinton, both diehard proponents of the policies that
had devastated Mexico -- how could they help the
country?  "Don't write your senators," John pleaded,
with a hint of exasperation.

A few of us in the audience applauded, but not as many
as should have.

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane
Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and
Answers (Monthly Review, 2007). He is also a co-editor
of Weekly News Update on the Americas, which published
John Ross's weekly columns (first Mexico Barbaro and
then Blindman's Buff) from 1996 through 2007. At Ross's
request, Wilson is working with others to put together
an archive of his writings and to make the weekly
columns permanently available online.

___________________________________________

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On Love for the People via Peta_de_Aztlán

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Peta_de_Aztlan

http://wp.me/prH9G-1I

First of all, we must be motivated by a sincere love for the people, not a phony love, but a true love for the people born of the love we have for ourselves. The desire to help other people, to raise consciousness up into higher levels of understanding and to participate in connected reality in positive ways comes out of our true compassion for people. Without a true loving compassion for people it is impossible for us to be sincere in our relationships. Revolution is motivated by our great love for the people. Each of us on an individual level is a single unit of that great collective we call 'the people'. We love the people, because we are one of the people and should try to live in harmony with the people.

Let our love for the people help guide us in all our ways. Nowadays the word 'love' is tossed around so lightly that in many cases it has lost the power of its true meaning. When we speak of love for the people we speak of the union between the people and our own individual self. It is logical that we put the needs of the people, the basic survival needs of billions of people, before our own individual needs. Our own individual needs are included in the needs of the people. Each of us as an individual is one of the people.

Many people do not have a strong love of the people because they do not have a strong love for themselves. If we learn to love ourselves better, if we learn to take care of ourselves better, if we learn to accept ourselves better, with all our flaws and faults, then we will naturally have a greater love for people.

Many people know of Che Guevara's famous quote: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."

It should never be ridiculous to be guided by great feelings of love, especially love for the people. In fact, our efforts at bringing about a Peaceful Revolution should always be guided by love, never by hate. Our true love has the power to conquer hate. There is always too much hate in the world today and never enough love.

Our love for the people should come natural to us as humane beings. A humane being will have a natural love of the people. To repeat a zillion times, a humane being has tender care, true concern and total compassion for the people. For us to evolve as a human being we must develop into being a truly humane being. That means we care about all people of all lands, of all cultures and of all orientations. It does not matter if someone is black, white or striped. It does not matter if someone is straight, gay or crooked. It does not matter if someone is left, right or center. Each of us is a human being, whether one is truly humane or not. As a human being one is blessed by having basic humane rights. Even if someone is an enemy combatant and has been captured as a terrorist, that person still has humane rights!

All of us upon mother Earth are one family of living beings. We have a huge family that includes all species of life, including insects, plants and trees. We are all on the same planet Earth. We must learn to live together, we must learn to respect each others space, and we must uphold our sacred right to life. When we expand our consciousness to comprehend that we are all one family, even though we have big family feuds we call wars, then we can better learn how to respect one another, how to work together despite our differences, how to settle our disputes without trying to kill each other.

There is so much negativity in the world on different levels and different realms. All these negative energies have resulted in great imbalances that threaten our existence as an already endangered species of life. Many scientists say that we are destroying Mother Earth. Our natural resources are drying out and running out. In the main, our governments are corrupt and rotten to the core. No single government can claim to be free of the corrupting capital influence of the great Amerikan Empire, especially because of its great military might.

The so-called People's Republic of China has betrayed the original vision of the Chinese revolution espoused by Chairman Mao. China is now a mega-corporate capitalist state and a major competitor of the almighty U.S. dollar. The former Soviet Union does not even exist. The great American Empire rules the world, especially because of its dominant military technology.

All these negative forces must be brought back into balance or we are all doomed to self extinction as a species under the threat of mutual annihilation. All these wars in the history of mankind and we still have no world peace. We must balance out the drive for war with the deep desire for peace. We must balance the hate in the minds of men with revolutionary love in the hearts of the people.

We must gather the positive forces of pure love to inspire us to come together in unity, to inspire us to change the world for the better and to inspire us to evolve as loving compassionate humane beings upon our one and only precious Mother Earth.

I John 4:7-8 "My beloved, let us love one another; for love is from God; and every one who loves is born of God and knows God."

c/s
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Venceremos! We Will Win!
Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

"The Black Power Mixtape" - Danny Glover Discusses New Doc Featuring Rare Archival Footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael

"The Black Power Mixtape" - Danny Glover Discusses New Doc Featuring Rare Archival Footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael

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