There's plenty of news articles available too:
One of the women, a Chilean cinematography student studying in Mexico, said she was robbed and beaten by officers, and that one policeman used his boot to push her face into a puddle of blood on the floor of a police van following the clashes last week in San Salvador Atenco."They insulted me, groped me, anything they wanted," the Chilean, who identified herself as Valentina Palma, was quoted by the La Jornada newspaper as saying. "When they jailed me that was when I saw the girls with their pants and underwear torn, sobbing."
Mexico City, Mexico (AHN) - Guillermo Ibarra, an official with the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, said Tuesday that seven women reported being raped and 16 others, including three foreigners, said they were sexually abused by Mexico police who detained them after clashes last week in San Salvador Atenco.
A Mexican human rights group has accused police of raping or sexually abusing almost two dozen women during riots in San Salvador Atenco last week. The National Human Rights Committee, a government agency, said police raped seven and sexually abused 16. The assaults are said to have occurred when the women and many others were held during the unrest, sparked by a round-up of unlicensed street vendors. The Mexico state police chief has denied the charges.
A massive police round up of unlicensed vendors in Texcoco caused a dramatic reaction in Texcoco. Locals, armed with machetes, detained the police that had been holding the unlicensed vendors, though the captive police were later handed to the Red Cross. A massive police operation to retake the town resulted in 200 arrests, and up to 50 police injuries, according to official statements. The people of San Salvador Atenco suffered an even greater loss. Javier Cortas Santiago, a 14 year old youth, was killed. According to the BBC, "Television images of police beating bound demonstrators caused a national outcry after the riots." While others are still reported as "disappeared," human rights groups have documented 16 rapes of women in police custody and sexual assaults (including the introduction of foreign objects into the bodies of both men and women).
For many, the town of 10,000 was already a flash point even before this month's police raid. In 2002, a peasant revolt led by a rebel group known as the Community Front in Defense of the Land stopped a plan pushed by Fox to build an international airport on their farmland. The Community Front also organized the defense of the flower vendors.
Mexican police attacked flower vendors in San Salvador Atenco on May 3 as the vendors tried to sell in their usual area, now a future site of a Wal-Mart.The government-initiated attack against the group of flower producers and their supporters was actually a result of a rarely seen collaboration among Mexico's three leading political parties--the PRI, the PAN and the PRD--which supported the municipal president of Texcoco in his opinion that the vendors "looked ugly."
Virtually all of these dirty war characteristics were on display in San Salvador Atenco May 4th when 3000 armed state police and elements of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), a force largely extracted from the Mexican military, slammed into that dirt-poor town of 30,000 out on the dried lake beds east of the capital, killing one 14-year-old, leaving a 20-year-old student hovering between life and death, and arresting 209, all of whom required hospitalization from the beatings they received under security force batons although only some prisoners actually received it (and they were chained to their hospital beds.) Of 47 women arrested, 23 reported that they had been raped or were otherwise sexually abused. One 53 year-old mother who had gone to a local store to buy a birthday present for her son was forced to perform oral sex on three police officers to avoid arrest.
The unrest broke out May 4 in the town of San Salvador Atenco, which has a history of resisting the government, after some residents were arrested for selling flowers without permits.Hundreds of people blocked roads, threw Molotov cocktails and held six police officers captive for several hours, beating them and cutting them with machetes. Police responded with tear gas and batons, and a 14-year-old Atenco resident was shot dead during the clashes.
Police swept the town for two days, rounding up and arresting more than 200 suspects, including 49 women. At least six of the women who said they were abused while in police custody are still in jail.
This video analyzes the events in San Salvador Atenco during the first days of May, 2006 and denounces the violation of the civilian populations human rights by state and federal police forces. The documentary deconstructs the mass medias 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.
on 3 May at around 7am, two days after the residents of Atenco provided protection for Subcommandante Marcos of the EZLN Other Campaign for the May Day march in Mexico City, a confrontation was initiated by municipal police against legitimate flower sellers arriving to work at the Texcoco market, ordinary workers, trying to make an honest living, who were acting within their permits.
Police arrested more than 200 people after violence exploded over officials' attempts to evict unlicensed flower sellers from a market in Atenco. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police and kidnapped several officers. Television footage showed townspeople stamping on a fallen policeman. Amnesty and other rights group say crimes were committed on both sides but that the police crackdown was excessive.
Today more than ever we need to strengthen the unity among us, the true people with one objective: to fight for the people that suffer, that cry out and shout for justice. We demand the release of all those arrested, who are incarcerated together with dangerous criminals. We demand they cancel all arrest warrants and punish the beasts that raped, killed and suppressed the town of Atenco. ...Punishment for Wilfrido Robledo, Enrique Pena Nieto and Vicente Fox, the true intellectual authors of the massacre of our people.
One striking thing about the list of articles above is that some media organisations simply do not publish articles on certain issues. Both Murdoch and Fairfax have decided that they say it best when they say nothing at all. It makes sense that opinions would differ on the details, on who is to blame and who deserves support but what we see is that some news outlets simply believe that the events never happened at all.
A handy side-effect of modern technology is that most newspapers publish online and there are a number of search engines scanning those online publications. Thus we can easily detect who is selectively suppressing which stories. Bias in the tone or details of the story is fiddly to detect, and sadly impossible to automate with our currently limited AI technology. On the other hand, complete omission of the story (which seems to be the popular modus-operandi) is very easy to measure and tabulate. There's an excellent project for techno nuts who want to improve our visibility into the political underworld.