This article first appeared in the Flagler College Gargoyle. You can view the original here. 

Behind the chain-link fence off State Road 312, hardly a stones-throw away from the Matanzas River, three caterpillar bulldozers amble in the sun.

Construction is underway for the Antigua Development, a sprawling housing complex set to overlook to Intercoastal Waterway—a fate which, within the next year, could befall the pristine Fish Island property across the road to the south.

It’s a prospect that’s put many environmentally minded St. Augustinians on edge.

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view the original article here. 

Shot seven times, Catarina Mendez-Paciencia bled out helplessly in the church in the village of Acteal as right-wing paramilitaries rampaged through the village on December 22, 1997—the penultimate act of a massacre that would consume 49 lives. The memory of that massacre, whose roots lie in the low-intensity Zapatista conflict, haunt Mendez-Pacienia to this day. She watched her mother die before her very eyes. Image by Jared Olson. Mexico, 2018.

Memory Defiant

One of the survivors lost his sister. Another, his entire family. A third one explains, her thin voice barely audible against the melancholy hush of mountain rain, how she was shot seven times, and watched helplessly as the paramilitaries used bayonets to slit open the stomachs of the pregnant women around her.

“When I saw all the people around me dead,” she says, “I began pleading for God to help save my life.”

Seated in a spartan and empty church in the remote village of Acteal, high in the scalloping blue-green mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, three survivors of the Acteal massacre recall the gruesome details of the fateful day, nearly 21 years ago, when 49 people were murdered by a state-allied paramilitary less than 20 yards from where we now sit.

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view the original article here. 

Gustavo Esteva before the Unitierra (short for Universidad de la Tierra, or “University of the Earth”) the alternative education school he founded in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Rooted in the radical educational philosophy of Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire, Esteva has helped develop close ties to the Zapatista movement through the school he founded. Image by Jared Olson. Mexico, 2018.

1994

When the Zapatistas first exploded into the public eye in an armed rebellion nearly 25 years ago, Gustavo Esteva found himself at a crossroads.

It had been decades since he’d renounced violence as a means of pursuing social justice. The Mexican philosopher, economist and educator—who’d spent nearly forty years working to improve the lives of Mexico’s campesinos—had come a long way towards developing a philosophy that could help his country’s peasants escape the wrenching poverty in which they’re trapped. Now, as the army of indigenous Mayans broke into an unexpected war with the national government, Esteva saw that philosophy crumbling apart.

“In the first week of 1994, I was in a very serious conflict with myself,” Gustavo tells me of that era, when he joined thousands of protesters in the streets demanding the Mexican Army cease attacking the Zapatistas. “I was telling myself, ‘Gustavo, why are you so enthusiastic (about the Zapatistas) if for thirty years you have been against the use of violence?’”

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view the original article here.

The Predicament

You would be hard-pressed to imagine anything of importance ever taking place here.

On any other day, approaching it on the cracked roads leading through the rolling ocean of pine, it would’ve seemed little different from the thousands of similar communities which scatter this rugged, mist-cloaked cordillera. The village of Morelia—a soaking-wet redoubt of clapboard wood shacks, high in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state—doesn’t at first glance look like a viable locale for a political meeting in which hundreds of international visitors would be drawn to spend three days in the country’s remote southlands.

But to believe such a thing is to be deluded.

Continue reading →

This article appeared originally in the Flagler College Gargoyle. You can view the original here.

By Jared Olson. Photos by Adriana Cabezas

Just past 9:30 a.m. last Sunday, September 9^th, protesters gathered in the sweltering late summer heat before the Hamilton Correctional Institute Annex—a remote prison complex in the pine woods near Jasper, Florida, seven-and-a-half miles south of the Georgia border.

Armed with signs and megaphones, roughly 15 activists gathered in the tangled grass roadside facing the jails north entrance that morning to express solidarity with inmates inside, who were then on the final lap of a 20-day, nationally coordinated strike. The strike—organized to protest deteriorating jail conditions and calling for an end to “prison slavery”—was one of the longest, largest acts of civil disobedience by prisoners in US history, and involved inmates incarcerated in 19 states.

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view the original article here

Agustin Gomez Munoz, one of the few Spanish speakers in the Tzotzil speaking group, and thus its de facto leader. Image by Jared Olson. Mexico, 2018.

In the smooth-stone square before the Cathedral of San Cristobal, beneath snarls of pigeons drifting like grey clouds of smoke and a roof of tarps luffing softly in the wind, the people of Nicolas Ruiz–a remote farming village in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico–have gathered to demand land, reparations, and justice for crimes committed against them.

As Tzotzil speaking indigenous Mayans, they are but one of many groups of Chiapas’ “dezplazados” (displaced) who’ve been forced over the years to leave their home following threats and invasions by armed intruders.

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view the original article here

Oventic, a central Zapatista village, or “Caracol,” high in the misty Cañadas mountain region of Chiapas. Image by Jared Olson. Mexico, 2018.

In the months following the political earthquake caused by the landslide July 1 victory in the Mexican presidential election of center-left populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as “AMLO,” the Spanish world’s most-populous country has been electrified by levels of hope unseen in nearly two decades. After the last six years of deepening violence and corruption under President Enrique Peña Nieto- the establishment-scion of whose very party was the one scrapped 18 years ago- many exhausted Mexicans are now anxiously waiting to see whether, following his Dec. 1 inauguration, the maverick López Obrador can follow through on his sweeping campaign promises to purge corruption and gear down theblood-drenched war on drugs.

Compared to Hugo Chavezas frequently as he is to Donald Trump, the wildly popular AMLO, as a candidate, was singular in his power to draw massive crowds and generate voter excitement in a time when faith in national politics has descended to abysmal lows. Now that he’s secured the presidency, some have even suggested that a “New Revolution”is underway in the United States’ southern neighbor.

Continue reading →

Reportage made possible by financing from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.

You can view my author page with the Pulitzer Center here

Pasted onto the walls of the quiet streets of Oaxaca lie eerie reflections of a country descending into chaos.

That chaos often remains unseen within the relative safety of tourist cities like Ciudad de Oaxaca, where I’ve come to interview a writer who’s worked with the Zapatistas, and where rivers of foreigners throng the streets in cool summertime dusks, free from the omnipresent violence which stalks Mexico and the majority of its population like a specter. But even when you don’t see it, even in the tourist zones of carefully cleaned cobblestoned streets, that reality is there. Continue reading →