Mexican authorities announced Thursday that they are charging two leftwing activists in the shooting death of New York City Indymedia video journalist Brad Will.
Will, 36, was shot and killed on October 27, 2006 while filming street protests outside the capital city of Oaxaca, an impoverished state in southern Mexico that was the site of a months-long social uprising against that state's long-entrenched ruling party.
According to the El Universal newspaper, The Mexican Attorney General's office claims that Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno shot Will twice at close range—the first time while he was filming protests and the second time while Will was being transported to a nearby hospital. Martinez Moreno is a member of APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca), a grassroots coalition of more than 300 protest groups that led the 2006 movement.
A second APPO member, Octavio Perez Perez, has also been jailed on charges of covering up Will's murder. Three other APPO members are also reported to have been detained for their role in the 2006 protests.
Will's family and friends as well as Mexican human rights groups have long denounced the Mexican government's theory that Will was killed by protesters and contend instead that he was murdered by local paramilitaries who were filmed in the street that day firing their weapons in Will's direction. Nonetheless, Mexican authorities have refused to pursue any other lines of inquiry. With the second anniversary of Will's death approaching, it appears as if the Mexican government is determined to use the investigation as a club with which to attack the social movement that Brad Will gave his life to cover.
Comments
Not only that, but the National Human Rights Commission issued a report about two weeks ago which found that the federal and state attorneys general who have been pushing this 'theory' (really a cover-up) have violated ‘human rights, legality, judicial security and access to justice.’
More - with regular updates - here:
http://www.friendsofbradwill.org/2008/10/03/mexican-human-rights-commiss...
p.s. thanks for continuing to write about Brad's murder and the decision of the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress to provide lethal aid to the very Mexican government security institutions responsible for this attempted cover-up and many other murders of innocent people.
an article on this by the AP says:
....Will's mother, Kathy, called the detentions "ludicrous."
"They have done this since our son was shot," she told The Associated Press by phone from the U.S. "They've been trying to pin it on somebody close by instead of the paramilitaries who shot him."....
ludicrous is right. i've lived in mexico for over 15 years and this is just par for the course. i mean how corrupt and cynical can the political and economic elites in a country be?
The link to The Brad Will Foundation should be:
http://www.bradwill.org/foundation.htm
The members of APPO are nothing but a bunch of agitators. Thank god I don't live in Oaxaca.
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