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Sep 25, 15

All The News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

Originally posted to It’s Going Down

Clashes and riots broke out in Mexico leading up to the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 Normalista students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College located in Iguala, Guerrero. The Mexican state was also working overtime to keep the movement and potential rebellion under wraps. In an attempt to put the blame for the murder of the students on someone other than themselves, it appears that the government has found a group of poor construction workers which it tortured until they confessed they were cartel hit men. From a recent article:

Four men named by Mexican authorities as drug cartel members who allegedly killed 43 missing students are actually impoverished construction workers who confessed only after being tortured, according to a report published Sunday in Mexican magazine El Proceso.

The investigative report by journalists Anabel Hernández and Steve Fisher casts further doubt on the Enrique Peña Nieto administration’s already widely discredited investigation into what happened to the missing students. On Sept. 6, a panel of experts fielded by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced that the Mexican government’s version of events has no basis in forensic science.

 

In the face of this fuckery, violent clashes between students, parents of the 43 missing students, and pigs broke out on a freeway in Tixtla, Guerrero, when police attempted to search a convoy of Normalistas who refused. In response, Normalistas burned trucks and threw molotov cocktails at police:

A dozen Normalistas and six state police, including two women, were beaten, besides a cargo truck burned, during a confrontation that occurred this Tuesday morning on the Chilpancingo-Tixtla federal highway.

The quarrel started in the zone of Los Túneles (The Tunnels) around 8 o’clock in the morning, when the police impeded passage towards Mexico City to a convoy of 11 trucks and some private vehicles in which were traveling the parents of the 43 disappeared normalistas, the majority from the Ayotzinapa Teachers College.

The parents attempted to convince the police, but they said that they would first inspect the vehicles, which the normalistas rejected. The confrontation began at that moment; the youths set fire to a soft drink truck that they had “taken” last Monday and then put it across the highway.

The police that were in the nearby hills started to launch tear gas at the civilians, who answered with stones and large fireworks, which resulted in six state agents and a dozen students injured.

Felipe de la Cruz, spokesperson for the Ayotzinapa families, said that two students were hospitalized with head trauma.

https://twitter.com/ori_no_co/status/646400824969691141

Also in Guerrero, Normalistas attacked the local prosecuters office in Chilpancingo. As one report wrote:

Local media reports said protesters arrived aboard several buses and proceeded to break windows and destroy computer equipment at the government offices, which were empty at the time.

President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto also faced protests during Mexican Independence Day celebrations:

It’s one of the most patriotic events of the year. But those watching the national broadcast of the event on Tuesday saw a massive banner calling President Enrique Peña Nieto a “murderer.” The banner appeared at least three times as the camera panned over the 40,000-person crowd, and can also be seen in the video of the event that Peña Nieto posted to his Facebook page.

The image symbolized the difficulties that Peña Nieto is experiencing. His popularity has plummeted over his administration’s mishandling of the abduction of 43 students from the city of Iguala last year. The high-profile case has fueled a major national protest movement in a country where an estimated 100,000 people have died because of drug war violence.

With major demonstrations and marches scheduled to take place in Mexico tomorrow, it looks like things may only continue to escalate. Be sure to keep checking back here for future reports and updates.

In Northern Ontario, local indigenous leaders confiscated and burned a shipment of illegal booze into their communities and then kicked out the smugglers. As one report wrote:

A remote Ontario First Nation’s chief and council seized an illegal alcohol shipment, burned the booze and gave the alleged bootleggers 24 hours to leave the community on Monday.

“If I know something is coming up here, I will stand up for my community, and I know my council will be right there with me,” said North Caribou Lake First Nation chief Dinah Kanate.

“There’s so much destruction caused by alcohol in our community.”

Leaders of the First Nation are fed up with alcohol being sold illegally in their community, where there has been a ban on booze for years.

Also in Ontario:

The brother of a native protester shot dead by an OPP sniper 20 years ago was engulfed in flames Sunday during a flare-up between native factions as they marked the return of a disputed former federal military camp.

While Pierre George’s serious burns weren’t life-threatening, they’re a reminder that smouldering tensions at Ipperwash, which errupted in violence in September 1995 when native protesters clashed with a heavily-armed OPP force, haven’t washed away.

In British Columbia, a planned logging project could spark a ‘war in the woods,‘ members of the Cree Nation are fighting to protect the Boreal Forest, and in Honolulu protests and arrests continued as indigenous Hawaiians stayed fast in their fight against the construction of a mega-telescope on a sacred site.

In the US, protests and blockades continued against pipelines, with activists carrying out actions at the White House and other places. In light of the recent push to stop the Keystone XL and other major oil projects, Hilary Clinton recently came out against Keystone (the pipeline, not the beer). However, as The Guardian pointed out:

But while politicians have been dithering over the increasingly unpopular Keystone XL, international tar sands development and other carbon-intensive pipeline projects have been charging ahead.

And if Keystone XL were approved by a future president, its 800,000-barrel-per-day capacity would complete the fourth and final phase of TransCanada’s international Keystone Pipeline System, which already consists of almost 3,000 miles of operating pipeline, built over the last five years.

But that’s far from the only controversial crude oil project TransCanada has been working on while Keystone XL made its way through Congress.

One way TransCanada might get around what Clinton called the Keystone “distraction” and pump more tar sands crude into the US might be the Upland pipeline, which the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has termed a “mini Keystone”. In On Earth magazine this month, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) policy consultant Joshua Axelrod expressed concern that Upland “has more to do with crossing the border than building this particular pipeline”.

In April, the Canadian energy company submitted an application for a new Presidential Permit to authorize the construction and operation of 240 miles of cross-border pipeline. The Upland Pipeline Project would connect the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to an area near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. The company said that the pipeline would allow 300,000 barrels of crude from the Bakken oil fields to reach “transportation connection points” in Canada.

In Oklahoma, where fracking for oil is booming, the practice has lead to earthquakes happening nearly twice a day. According to one report:

The Sooner State has jumped from two earthquakes a year to roughly two a day, with scientists once again pinning the recent uptick on fracking.

Earthquakes continue to rattle the frack-happy state of Oklahoma. The Sooner State has jumped from two earthquakes a year to roughly two a day, with scientists once again pinning the recent uptick on fracking.

Scientists have identified that the injection of wastewater byproducts into deep underground disposal wells from fracking operations are very likely triggering the major increase of seismic activity in the central U.S. state.

Oklahoma, which is not near any major fault lines, has felt 585 earthquakes that were a 3.0-magnitude or greater in 2014—three times the 180 quakes felt by California last year, the AFP reported. Last month alone, Oklahoma experienced more than 600 quakes that could shake homes and cars, with the town of Crescent hit hardest with a 4.5 whammy…

In Tacoma, activists blockaded an immigrant detention prison:

Northwest Detention Center Resistance Coalition members locked down to protest deportations at the private facility. Protesting the criminalization and scapegoating of immigrants, the protest highlights the moral injustice of privately-run for-profit detentions centers and their collaboration with local police departments creating a road to detention, and call for an end to all immigrant deportations and detentions.

Across the US, the number of people killed by police at the time of this writing is 878. Protests and demonstrations continued across the country.

https://twitter.com/KhaledBeydoun/status/647451124996378624

https://twitter.com/rebecabagdocimo/status/646757034453540865

In Baltimore, a police vehicle suspiciously caught fire as tensions rise around the trial, due to start next month, for the officers who killed Freddie Gray.

In Chicago, hunger-strikers formally declared an end to their protest aimed at reopening a shuttered school and now vowed to focus on being elected into the school board.

In Philadelphia, the public portion of the Torch Anti-Fascist Conference has been announced and in Denver the Anarchist Black Cross hosted a panel discussion of former political prisoners as a lead up to the 5th Annuel Anarchist Black Cross Conference.

Speaking of Antifa, in Gallipolis, Ohio, not far from Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and other cities, the ‘Militant Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ are hosting a rally. Please share this information and get organized.

In labor news, Fiat Chrysler workers rejected a sell-out UAW contract at Caterpillar announced it will slash up to 10,000 jobs. Also, health care deductibles continued to out pace wages.

That’s it for us, thanks for everyone who sent us in articles this week for the roundup, keep it up!

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In search of new forms of life. It's Going Down is a digital community center and media platform featuring news, opinion, podcasts, and reporting on autonomous social movements and revolt across so-called North America from an anarchist perspective.

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