Online Video: "Atenco - Breaking the Siege"

A new, outstanding documentary on the May 3 and 4 Atenco incidents has been released by our friends at Canal 6 de Julio and Promedios: "Atenco: Romper el Cero," or "Atenco: Breaking the Siege." While already available on the BitTorrent file sharing network, Narco News has agreed to use our server to help make this important video more accessible.

While an English-language version has not yet been released (but the filmmakers are hard at work with members of our video team on putting out a subtitled version, which will be posted to Narco News as well as soon as it becomes available), the images in this 47-minute documentary speak for themselves. Much of the violence in Atenco was captured by television cameras, but few outside of Mexico have seen this footage. The filmmakers present not only the in-the-street shots of police savagely beating “anything that moved,” but also clips of the commercial news anchors flagrantly calling out for more repression of the popular movement from the state. Combined with Canal 6 de Julio and Promedios’ own work investigating the scene in Atenco and interviewing many of the townspeople, this is a powerful document of a turning point in Mexican history.

A synopsis from the Canal 6 de Julio website:

"This video analyzes the events in San Salvador Atenco during the first days of May, 2006 and denounces the violation of the civilian population’s human rights by state and federal police forces. The documentary deconstructs the mass media’s operating methods, which were responsible for creating a climate of fear and an information blockade on the events in San Salvador Atenco, in the midst of an especially delicate situation: the 2006 process of presidential succession in Mexico."

The film is available for download from this website as a large, high- resolution AVI video file or broken down into three parts, in lower- resolution Windows Media and QuickTime formats for faster download. Watch it here:

http://www.salonchingon.com/cinema/otra_canal6atenco.php?city=ny

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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