InSight Crime brings you part of statement issued Sunday by the Network for Global Transformation, a clandestine group that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a political operative of the National Action Party (PAN), who was released earlier this week.
Fernandez de Cevallos refused to give any details about the group, other than to say that he’d been treated with “warmth.” In earlier statements, the group identified itself as “the ex-mysterious disappeared [ones].”
From the beginning, speculation was the group had more to do with organized crime than guerrillas. But the mystery of who the group is continues. The document, titled “Epilogue of a Disappearance,” gives some clues as to the group’s thinking, if not its ideology.
It is in three parts. This is part of the third part. See El Milenio newspaper’s account for the full version in Spanish.
Epilogue of a Disappearance:
National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people. All power emanates from the people and is instituted for their benefit. At all times, the people have the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government …
Diego Fernandez de Cevallos seemed untouchable until that night when his own dark past caught up to him. And, much to his regret, [he] had to answer [for] some of his actions and look in the mirror… To make him a prisoner was our way of making him look in a mirror that reflected his own ways of being corrupt, arrogant, greedy and selfish, and demonstrating a fundamental fact: That if we as a people dare to fight against injustice, no felony will go unpunished.
Diego Fernandez de Cevallos Ramos (DFCR) is one of the politicians who is most responsible for the sustained process of economic, political and social calamity the ruling elite has imposed and deployed in our country from 1982 to today, through a mafia network that operates inside and outside the state institutions; this process got worse under the criminal, neoliberal banner, making our already deteriorating living conditions of men and women living in Mexico even worse, [and] creating the largest and the biggest drop in social welfare in our country’s history.
DFCR is one of the politicians that is most characterized by abuse of power, influence peddling and enrichment at the public’s expense and property of the nation, based on his pro big monopolies stance (financial, communications, food, construction, transport, etc..), advising the power brokers and litigating in favor of the big drug lords. He is one of the main accomplices and operators of the electoral fraud that has been systematically perpetrated in our country, from the concealment of fraud that prevailed in the 1988 [election of ] Salinas de Gortari as President when they burned ballots, to the 2006 elections of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. He is one of the main accomplices… of the dirty war and counterinsurgency waged by the PRI regime and now by the PAN against social movements, armed or not, making him another of the many accomplices that have left countless politically persecuted, tortured, murdered, imprisoned or disappeared people. He is directly responsible for Mexico becoming subordinate to the block of capitalist countries in our continent, led by the U.S. imperialists, and, by extension, the dismantling of our industry, the death of our rural areas, the mass migration of the poor and the plundering of our natural resources.
In short, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos Ramos is an operator of the neoliberal oligarchy and the far right fundamentalists; a power broker, a mercenary of the courts, a legislature for hire, a financier of the crisis and a defender of the great drug lords. Thus his detention was a way for him to say sorry.
Taking him prisoner, display him and making him return a thousandth of what he’s stolen was also a political blow to the plutocracy and its institutions, a demonstration of the will to fight and operational capacity of the “underwearless” as he called us; a demonstration that no one, however powerful, is untouchable; a demonstration of unity of action that can break the will of the enemy and fight impunity.
There has seldom been the fear, confusion and anger that the internet image of ‘Jefe’ Diego generated …in the powerful ruling elite, and that the media were forced to divulge. That image did not have the arrogance and cynicism of those who have partied night and day their whole personal and political lives with our earnings, but rather total helplessness, almost like how we Mexicans have been living our whole lives, and one notable difference: Diego was not injured, and [we didn’t show] any contempt for human life, which demonstrates our power.