Rape in Mexico: an American is the latest victim of the repression.

• Author: Banjac, Diana
• Position: Human rights activist Cecilia Rodriguez - Interview

On a placid October afternoon.. Cecilia Rodriguez--a Texas-born human-rights activist, mother of three teenagers, and the Zapatistas' U.S. representative--took a break from her work in southern Mexico's war zone to go walking at the Montebello Lakes, a tourist spot in a still-tranquil pocket of the state of Chiapas. Instead of a respite, however, it turned out to be another day of war. Four ski-masked men abducted Rodriguez along with her American male companion, separated them, and raped and sodomized Rodriguez. She remembers one of the men saying, "You already know how things are in Chiapas. Now shut up. Shut up! "

It was the latest act in the low-intensity war going on in Mexico. As Indian peasants lead a struggle for democratic change against a corrupt regime, women have become a favored target of official violence. The only difference this time was that the target was a U.S. citizen.

Who abducted and raped Cecilia Rodriguez? The attack "was clearly a political retaliation and a warning to others who speak for peace and human rights in Mexico," Rodriguez says. Although her attackers were not uniformed soldiers, she believes they were acting as agents of systematic repression in Chiapas. "They looked like local thugs. I think they may have some association with the local landowners," she says.

Peace activists in the area suspect the attackers work for Chiapan ranchers, who run virtual fiefdoms under the generous patronage of the Mexican government. Outraged at the indigenous Mexicans actively challenging the status quo, many have paramilitary "white guards" who carry out massacres and abuses against peasant organizers.

Rodriguez's colleagues believe that her high-profile work on behalf of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) did not escape the attention of Chiapas's most powerful. In Washington a month earlier, she had announced the opening of a Chiapas office where international supporters will work together with Zapatista peasant communities. Her visit to Chiapas in October coincided with, another round of peace talks between the Mexican government and the EZLN. It also happened to be the same period when alleged Zapatista member Fernando Yanez Munoz was illegally arrested by government agents, in violation of the peace agreements, and on charges many considered absurd: he "was supposedly carrying around an AK-47 right between his legs in broad daylight in the middle of Mexico City traffic," says Rodriguez. In an open statement to American citizens and a letter to President Clinton, Rodriguez condemned the arrest and the government's breaching of the peace accords. This protest was her last act as U.S. representative of the EZLN before her abduction.

Since the attack, activists in the United States and Mexico have rallied around Rodriguez, and she has received many letters of support. "The warm wishes counteract the cold wind blowing through my middle right now," she says.

Cecilia Rodriguez grew up in segregated El Paso, Texas, in the 1950s and sixties, the oldest of six children. Her mother was a librarian and her father--a U.S. citizen illegally deported to Mexico as a youth--worked in a shoe store and as a warehouseman. In 1969, the Rodriguez family moved to a new neighborhood, and Cecilia found herself among the Chicanos and Mexicans entering the all-white high school for the first time. "There were attacks on the Mexicanos by the football players. So I wrote an editorial when I was sixteen, and it got censored. The article led to protests and I fell into organizing from there.... I don't think I ever stopped." Awarded the Ruben Salazar Scholarship for Journalism, she attended the University of Texas in El Paso.

In the 1970s, community organizing in Texas, Chihuahua, and Mexico City was a path that led her further south. Rodriguez ended up in rural Chiapas in the early 1980s, working in public-health education on sanitation, water treatment, and other issues basic to women and children.

When she returned to the United States, Rodriguez headed Mujer Obrera in El Paso, a community working-women's organization. There, she instigated an eight-day hunger strike that spurred a Department of Labor investigation of the border garment industry, revealing that the garment companies owed $85,000 to hundreds of El Paso workers.

After ten years of border organizing, Rodriguez moved...