Mexican Government Still Wrestling Brad Will’s Ghost

THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT is clumsily trying to put a lid on the Brad Will murder as well as crush or at least intimidate the movement that goes on centralized in Oaxaca to rout out the corruption that will not be contained so easily, not even by further murders.

October 17, 2008: Mexican federal police arrested five Oaxacan activists on Thursday afternoon. At least two were arrested for supposedly murdering US citizen and Indymedia journalist Brad Will on October 27, 2006.

Brad Will was assassinated while reporting and filming the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca. Multiple witnesses say he was shot by paramilitaries who are seen in photos shooting towards Will. The paramilitaries are: Juan Carlo Soriano, municipal police officer; Manuel Aguilar, council personnel chief; Able Santiago Zarate; and Pedro Carmona, mayor of Felipe Carrillo Puerto de Santa Lucia del Camino.

Do you remember the video? The one Brad Will shot that captured his own death? It was disturbing. Below is a screenshot from it, where you can clearly see employees of the state and members of the police shooting Wild West style at Brad Will and those in his general area.

Narco News Reporter Kristin Bricker continues laying out the story:

The government claims that Will was shot at close range, therefore implicating the APPO activists around him. To prove this claim, the government at one point stated that the autopsy found powder burns on Will’s body consistent with a close-range shooting. However, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy contradicted this claim, saying he did not find powder burns on Will’s body.

The man the government accuses of being the intelectual author of Will’s murder is Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno. Martínez Moreno has supported the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials). Martínez Moreno made headlines in 2007 when he was kidnapped along with two other APPO members while performing election observation in Santa Lucía del Camino, where Will was murdered in October 2006. The kidnappers beat the three APPOistas severely in the face and abdomen under a bridge and then dumped them in a community 38 kilometers from Oaxaca City.

Police also acknowledged arresting Octavio Perez Perez for covering up the crime. Perez participated in the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca. [...]

APPO activists and members of the Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca (CIPO) say the government is blaming activists for Will’s murder in order to cover up its own involvement in the crime. [...]

While we still don’t have complete names for the three other activists who were arrested on Thursday, there are unconfirmed reports that they were charged with assaulting a municipal president at a barricade in 2006, and not Brad Will’s murder.

This would mean that these arrests (both the Will-related arrests and those that are possibly related) are part of a broader crackdown on people and organizations who participated in the 2006 uprising and who continue to organize in Oaxaca.

There are also unconfirmed rumors that there are 250-300 arrest warrants out for Oaxacan activists. Regardless of whether this rumor is true or not, the five arrests on Thursday have obviously escalated tensions and fear in Oaxaca. This rumor means that many Oaxacan activsts are scared that there might be a warrant out for them, and as a whole, the movement is scared that the crackdown will continue with even more arrests.

With these continued coverups on the part of the Mexican Government, still running to hide the Ulises Ruiz Ortiz rot, I think of Bush, Cheney, Rummy…so many others. They steal, lie, kill, and try to run away from it and hide. For the Piper they cannot be bothered, all bloodmoney and Beautiful Mind.

You can lay an entire tree down on top of one tiny bubble of air in a lake and you can drop a mountain on top of that tree, but sooner or later, that bubble will rise to the surface of the water. So too, behaves Truth. Despite all your machinations, this accounting even now, is coming for you.