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Chiapas Bishop Emeritus Brings Hope to Central Valley’s Indigenous
Community
"Voice of the Valley" News Report
By Eduardo Stanley, Pacific News Service
Traducción al españolFRESNO, CA - December 14, 2004 - When Samuel
Ruiz, three-time candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and Bishop Emeritus
of Chiapas, Mexico, visited Fresno on November 19, he saw some of the
same problems that indigenous populations face in Mexico.
“They used to say we should give a voice to the voiceless, but
indigenous people talk. The problem is that most people don’t listen to
them!” Ruiz said to an attentive audience. He was invited to Fresno by
the Binational Oaxacan Indigenous Front (FIOB, in Spanish), where he was
awarded the "Xini Nuu" (Community Leader) prize. Last year, the
organization honored Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu and
artist Lila Downs.
Mr. Ruiz’s visit to Fresno began with a meeting at Casa San Miguel, a
neighborhood occupied by indigenous families from the Mexican state of
Oaxaca. This neighborhood was built four years ago to relocate families
living in a precarious area south of Fresno, which was highly
contaminated due to toxic dumping by the Chevron company. FIOB played an
important role in the collective effort to relocate these residents.
Mr. Ruiz chatted with neighbors, showing interest in their working and
living conditions in California. "Governments should help eliminate the
economic problems that create the conditions for migration," he said. He
added that this is not a phenomenon unique to Mexico and the United
States, where the "unequal and combined development" between the two
societies leads one to provide cheap labor to the other more "developed"
country. "Nevertheless, immigrants don’t come here empty-handed; they
bring their culture, their traditions, and their skills."
Samuel Ruiz was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1924, and became a priest
in 1949. Ten years later, he was named Bishop of Chiapas, an extremely
poor region with 80 percent of the population is indigenous. In 1992, he
presented Pope John Paul II with his Pastoral Letter, "In This Hour of
Grace," in which he summarizes part of the social situation of Chiapas.
A year later, the Mexican ecclesiastical bureaucracy asked him to
resign, a move that was protested by the thousands of indigenous people
who supported him.
The rise of the National Liberation Zapatista Army (EZLN, in Spanish) in
1994 produced a radical change in Mexico. Mr. Ruiz, who speaks three
indigenous languages, played a crucial role during the peace talks. In
1998, he quit his position as peace mediator in an act of protest
against the Mexican government for its aggressive behavior in the area.
A year later, he renounced his role as Bishop of Chiapas. However, he
continues to remain active at different levels, working toward peace and
the defense of indigenous rights.
“Many people think Mexico is a Third World country because it has so
many indigenous people,” he said ironically. “Now Mexico is starting to
realize what it has lost by not respecting them.”
Mr. Ruiz believes that the social system, which generated the current
social inequalities, has reached its limits. "For indigenous people, the
relation with mother earth comes from within. Western culture, instead,
values it as legal property [for] its economic value."
He cited the importance of recovering language to create new concepts of
values that are absent in the dominant individualistic culture. "For
example, indigenous cultures’ concept of 'citizen' is translated as 'one
who has the right to walk on the land that belongs to him or her." He
added that human rights should not be limited to the rights of
individuals, but should include the community’s rights.
Mr. Ruiz showed optimism about a more just society. "It amazed me the
human creation of computer viruses to destroy data and hard drives. We
need to create an antivirus, a social vitamin to affect the
establishment’s hard drive, to change it in a positive way." Such a
vitamin, said Mr. Ruiz with a smile, would come from the socio-cultural
values of indigenous people.
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