Potrero Burns, Can We Save Oaxaca?

Perhaps you've read in the news that Blackwater is competing for a multi-billion dollar contract to help Mexico's "drug war," a war that usually, as in Colombia, ends up killing a lot of indigenous people and increasing the trafficking in drugs.

In order to land and fulfil this contract, Blackwater would benefit if it had a new training camp in Potrero, not far from the Mexican border. But some pesky Potrero residents had been protesting against having a mercenary training camp in what was, before the fire, a bucolic, rural, peaceful town.

After the fires, and the "collateral damage" fires which were set to direct attention away from the primary target, have burned out and been blamed on "illegal aliens," there may not be many pesky Potrero residents left, and those remaining may be too busy rebuilding to protest Blackwater. And well, gosh darn, the Governor and even President Bush have been so kind and concerned and helpful to the fire victims, that it would be sheer ingratitude not to let them have their training camp. They didn't ignore San Diego, they let people evacuate (well, sure most of them are white), and they got cots, food, and water to evacuation centers. They didn't even call in Blackwater mercenaries to prevent looting as they did in New Orleans, they called in the thinly-stretched National Guard. That's a good thing because Blackwater mercenaries are trained to shoot first if they feel threatened, and residents trying to repail their homes with hammers in their hands could easily be mistaken for looters with guns, even if they're not black.

When the CIA killed Che Guevara, they first made sure they outnumbered him several hundred to one. Although the Mexican army has had many Oaxacan towns surrounded, they have not had that kind of numerical advantage up until now, but this is something that Blackwater mercenaries backed with billions of U.S. dollars can give them. With a brand new training camp close to the Mexican border, Blackwater is certain to win that multi-billion-dollar contract to help Mexico "fight drugs."

Oh, wow! I must have been having a nightmare! What a crazy conspiracy theory that was! Sure, landlords sometimes burn down buildings for the insurance money, but thinking that mercenaries would burn down part of middle America just so that they could get billions of dollars with which to kill off indigenous peoples? Whooooo -- no wonder people tell me I'm crazy. Tell you what, you pass along this story to Comandante Zero, and I promise to start taking my meds again, okay? All I do is take drugs (prescription only), I don't fight them like the U.S. government does. But I can't really blame them. When you wage war on people, they can resist, but I've never seen a drug shoot back when you shot it.