Innocent Blood Stained the Hands of the PRI and PAN Political Parties

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

Video translation is as follows:

Innocent blood stained the hands of the PRI and PAN political parties, while they filled their pockets with money from the people. Violence was for them an instrument to stay in power; it is the violence to which today they intend to resort to try to recover it.

Some say that I exaggerate when I speak of this fondness for the violence of the conservative right and argue that, by resorting to memory and the causes of bloodshed in Mexico, I live clinging to the past.

To those who think this, I answer with José Saramago: "Without memory we do not exist and without responsibility we may not deserve to exist." I do not forget, I am not satisfied, nor do I forgive; I take responsibility for finding and pointing out the culprits.

Back in El Salvador, in the 1980s, "whoever raised his head, they would cut it off." I filmed the bodies of trade unionists, human rights defenders and opponents who had the death squads practiced the sinister “vest cut”, that is, they cut off their heads and arms.

I never thought that this barbarism would be installed in my homeland, where covert repression and blatant corruption raged. Less did I imagine that, by dint of massacres and massive beheadings, we would end up losing the capacity for astonishment in the face of horror.

For the bloodbath in which he plunged Mexico and the "normalization" of barbarism, I blame directly and openly Felipe Calderón. The truth is that the PAN escalated to an apocalyptic dimension what was already a common practice of the PRI governments.

For decades, selectively, silenced by the media, masked by a simulated democracy, the PRI made constant use of violence from power.

The repression against the student movement in 1968 and 1971, the dirty war, the crushing of the union movements. Massacres such as El Charco, Aguas Blancas or Acteal and then Atenco, Villas de Salvárcar, San Fernando, Tanhuato, Tlatlaya, Nochixtlán or Ayotzinapa tell us about a Mexico that criminals with the complicity of other criminals have subjected for decades.

From the hand of the PRI the narco was born; from the cellars of the State came the big bosses. By corruption they got rich. Thanks to impunity, they consolidated their power until they became the other face of the regime.

Vicente Fox Quesada ceded the territory to them and Calderón, under the pretext of recovering it, unleashed the massacre, used it to gain a legitimacy that it lacked and - with the deployment of troops and annihilation operations - turned them into a fearsome force of combat. Dedicated to finishing off the nation's assets, Enrique Peña Nieto continued the war.

As with votes it is impossible for him to return to power and aware that, as Cicero says, “amidst arms the laws are silent,” the coup right will try to return to what it knows best: the use of violence.

In the media and in the networks, it will exacerbate even more —at the point of slander and insults and with lynching campaigns— verbal violence, it will sow fear and hatred, seeking to incite its fans to turn to physical violence.

On the ground and at the hands of the drug trafficker, with whom he has always had a high degree of complicity (of which García Luna is but the most recent example), it is presumable that he will increase coordinated actions to destabilize the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and, if possible, derail the electoral process.

With violence they ruled, until society lost its fear of them. Today, with more violence they intend to return.

Source: Milenio Television (YouTube)