Desmadre
From all outward appearances, the popular uprising that for nearly seven months in 2006 usurped the functioning of the government of Oaxaca, Mexico has been quelled. But not forgotten. That a citizenry could take over television and radio stations, set up thousands of defensive barricades and administer justice without resorting to violence weighs heavy on that nation’s federal government. It has resolved not to let the “desmadre” that threatened its control of the country’s political and economic life happen again. (“Desmadre” is a Mexican term for a catastrophe or other destabilizing event.)
Oaxaca is Mexico’s southernmost state, an expanse of nearly two million square kilometers extending from southern coastal plains bordering the Pacific into rugged mountain ranges containing isolated and virtually inaccessible rural communities. Over 80 percent of the state’s population, nearly half of which speak pre-Hispanic languages, live in poverty—nearly 50 percent without adequate nutrition, housing or health care. During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico’s federal government withdrew agricultural subsidies, particularly of fertilizers and seeds, and did away with government-operated rural loan banks. Nearly half of Oaxaca’s rural residents lost their lands and their ability to feed and clothe their families. Today an estimated 90 percent of the money coming into rural communities is generated by sons, daughters, husbands, wives and fathers working in the United States. They send more than $1.1 billion dollars back to the state in weekly and monthly remittances. Over half of the rural communities in Oaxaca lack electricity; an even higher percentage have no access to potable water. Priest Manuel Arias, the spokesman for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, winced as he described indigena life. “There are no hospitals. There is no potable water, no drainage. The roads are virtually impassable. Poverty and migration have disintegrated families. There are no father figures. The residents constantly are victimized by caciques and the police. Hundreds of them have been jailed and their situation as prisoners is horrible. The police collect money from family members who come to visit. Many of the prisoners wouldn’t eat if their families didn’t bring them food.” Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a so-called “noble elite” ruled Oaxaca. They were not actually members of royal families but were wealthy landholders and investors who separated themselves from the rural campesino culture. They occupied most of the important governmental posts and controlled commerce and politics. They did not try to alter Oaxaca’s image as the “alma indigena de Mexico” (“Indian soul of Mexico”) but exploited it as a regional curiosity. Their hold on the state diminished during the first part of the twentieth century, in part because the Mexican Revolution broke up many of the huge land holdings and in part because the newly forming middleclass pushed its way into control of the economy. Self-sustaining agriculture gave way to export products—coffee, cattle, eucalyptus estates for the production of pulpwood. Huge hydroelectric plants, uranium, gold and copper mines and transcontinental super highways brought millions of pesos to those in power but made migrants and slum dwellers out of campesinos. The disparity between haves and have-nots increased as governor after governor sacked the state treasury. When current governor Ulisès Ruiz refused to establish new base pay rates for the state’s educators, some 50,000 of the state’s 70,000 teachers occupied the city of Oaxaca’s central business district, which also is its cultural and tourism center, in mid-May 2006. Businesses closed, tourists cancelled hotel reservations, bus and auto traffic ceased to function or had to be diverted. Shortly after three o’clock on the morning of June 14 police wielding nightsticks and machetes slashed through the crowded encampment. Despite clogging clouds of tear gas, the teachers fought back, hurling bottles and paving stones, swinging mop sticks, chairs and tent poles, belts and rebar. By 9:30 their superior numbers overwhelmed the police and the attackers evacuated the area. What had begun as a legal sit-in overnight became a massive resistance movement. The representatives of over 300 separate organizations talked, urged, argued, and convoked their first reunion on June 20 and announced the formation of the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO for its initials in Spanish). For the first time in Oaxaca’s history urban dwellers and campesinos united in opposition to the autocratic and corrupt state government. Driven out of the city that was supposed to be his center of operations and with his police force humiliated, Governor Ruiz, the cacique, wielder of absolute power, became a ruler in absentia. He conducted state business from his limousine, hotels and, not infrequently, a state-owned helicopter. Both he and the APPO pleaded for federal government help, he for forceful intervention, the APPO for his removal and replacement with an appointed interim, an act which, if the federal Senate determines that a state is “ungovernable,” it has the right to do under Mexican law. During September and October, 2006, members of the state teachers union (Section 22 of the National Workers in Education syndicate—SNTE for its initials in Spanish) and various representatives of the APPO met with federal officials. Newspaper accounts of these meetings speculated that the Mexican Senate would depose Ruiz and appoint an interim governor to replace him. Many individuals within the federal government were in favor of replacing Ruiz; they were not, however, in favor of citizen groups taking over state governments. Not only that, but the country was in an uproar over allegations of fraud committed during the July presidential elections. President Vicente Fox and president-elect Calderón had their hands full with a massive Mexico City sit-in organized by losing presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and they couldn’t afford to lose Oaxaca to what they felt was a leftist rabble. López Obrador himself demanded Ruiz’s ouster and challenged the government to define if they were “with the people or with this cacique.” Fearing the opposition leader’s popularity, and needing the support of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI for its initials in Spanish) to which Ruiz belonged, the president and the president-elect decided to intervene on Ruiz’s behalf. On November 25, five days before Fox left office, militarized federal police, reinforced by Army units, state and local police and hundreds of armed vigilantes, stormed Oaxaca’s central district after the conclusion of an the APPO march through the city. “There was tear gas, there were gunshots, and afterwards the fires,” Oaxaca Noticias correspondent Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. “Oaxaca from five until eleven was ablaze. “At Seguro Social hospital two wings of attacking police converged and forced hundreds of people, men, women, old people onto the highway in front of El Fortín [the steep hill on which Oaxaca’s observatory is located]…I don’t know if they beat everybody but there were heartrending women’s shouts...As if we were delinquents, in order to save our lives we climbed Fortin hill, like refugees so they couldn’t find us.” Over 80 percent of the more than 300 persons who were arrested and tortured had nothing to do with the APPO. Nevertheless the following day 107 men and 34 women, manacled and terrorized by snarling police dogs, were herded onto airplanes and helicopters and flown to federal prisons. A number of both women and men reported they were beaten and raped while they were being transported from the airfields to the prisons. “All the better that they’re innocent,” a federal official commented. “It will make the rest of Oaxaca more afraid.” Despite complaints from throughout the world and thousands of pages of testimony taken by human rights organizations, both the state and the federal government denied that those arrested had been tortured or forced to sign false confessions. Major news wire services, particularly the Associated Press, disseminated government press releases. Armed police attacked groups of family members protesting outside Oaxaca’s prisons and government-paid paramilitaries continued to roam the countryside, terrorizing the APPO supporters. High-ranking officials of both Amnesty International and the International Red Cross made personal visits to President Calderón to present their reports and analyses of human rights violations. Calderón allowed himself to be photographed cordially smiling as he hosted their visits but neither he nor his government made any efforts to rectify the abuses. Quite to the contrary, the military and militarized police have stepped in immediately to crush incipient protests, particularly those involving students or indigenas. “The federal government will not stand for another desmadre like the one that occurred in Oaxaca!” student leader Luis González reported being told after heavily armed federal police overwhelmed normal school students who’d begun a protest over job placements in the neighboring state of Guerrero. Although the APPO spokespersons extol “non violence,” millions of people throughout Mexico, including high-ranking federal officials, view the APPO as a dangerous threat that only can be repressed by force. “Oaxaca,” Padre Arias told me, “has set an example for the rest of Mexico and that example will go forward. This is what scares the [federal] government the most.” La Jornada’s Julio Hernández told a March 2008 Día de Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca, “What happened here is an example, an example of action…that gave hope to the entire pueblo of Mexico.” He affirmed that the APPO’s takeover of government functions “awakened a sleeping giant” and sparked an immense empathy throughout Mexico for the APPO and great hopes for its success. Unlike many in Mexico’s federal government, Hernández understood how deeply rooted the movement is. The fact that it is a movement, not a mere political reaction, attracted empathy and support throughout Latin America. Pedro Matias countered assertions made by Ruiz and by Calderón’s former Government Secretary Francisco Ramirez that the APPO was funded by “revolutionary elements” and “outside agitators”: “What’s supporting the APPO? Poverty stricken people, that’s what!” In a separate interview, priest Manuel Arias agreed. “It’s a lie that money is behind the movement. What’s behind the movement are viveres—food and water--that the people lack, that the people need.” Those needs are not confined to Oaxaca. During the first two years of Calderón’s presidency, unemployment has increased, thousands of small and medium-sized businesses have folded (45 percent in the construction industry alone) and the price of the basic “canasta” (basket—the amount needed to support a family) has almost doubled. The pro-globalization government’s attempts to open the state-owned and operated oil industry—Pemex—to private investment has aroused increasingly larger protests, many of them modeled after the APPO’s system of decision-by-assembly and pacific takeover of government buildings and highway blockages. For all intents and purposes, the APPO no longer exists. The brutal crushing of their occupation of the city of Oaxaca drove many participants into the shadows and bickering among the groups that remained further decimated what had been a powerful communal movement. But their accomplishments, and the message they sent to Mexico’s governing officials, remain in force. That a citizenry could take over a capital city, appropriate its communications, alter its transportation and traffic systems and do so effectively, with a minimum of violence, even if only for a period of months, upended the value systems of both disadvantaged masses and those in power. Women aspiring to leadership, even in remote rural villages, now refuse to step down. Students view possibilities for the future that never existed before. “Fight for change” has replaced “We must accept” as a guiding principal. Vowing to prevent another “desmadre” like the one that occurred in Oaxaca, the federal government is pressuring state governments to approve a plan for a federal police force that would incorporate all law enforcement elements under one command. But physical force, like that used to break the APPO, succeeds only temporarily and does not resolve problems created by the lack of opportunity, the lack of food and the lack of adequate medical care. Fist published in Global Politics |
Usos, Costumbres--and ViolenceMarimba players move from restaurant to restaurant in the Oaxaca, Mexico’s newly repaved Zócalo, the sharp notes of their percussion vibrating off museum walls as they strive to be heard about the shouts of “Assassin” and “Tyrant” a young woman projects from the patio of the city’s sixteenth century cathedral. Ambulantes in indigena dress dangle beads and shawls in front of couples playing with their children and men perusing the latest arrests, assaults and fatal crashes in the evening Nota Roja. Clowns slapstick comedy routines, a battered top hat in front of them to receive donated coins. And ever present police walk in pairs, more interested in teenaged women’s swaying hips than in political denouncements or cultural offerings. Though there is laughter there’s also poverty, for one sees only the tip of the iceberg in the Zócalo. No one has any money or, as a scruffy looking artist with a loud voice and thatched gray hair proclaimed: “No one that is, except the governor! And he’s so corrupt the Devil won’t have him in Hell!” How close in contact the artist is with the Devil, I don’t know, but one doesn’t have to have lived a long time in Oaxaca to know that cell phones, women’s slacks and Internet are merely twentieth century window dressing on a colonial cacique system of hacendero and impoverished, dependent sharecroppers. Oaxaca’s government is one of most corrupt in a country noted for corrupt state governments. All the power is concentrated in the hands of a privileged few and very little money trickles down to the unprivileged. Oaxaca journalist Pedro Matias ruefully explains that Oaxaca does not require that a governor give an exact accounting of the billions of dollars available to him. Oaxaca’s ex-governors are among the wealthiest landholders in the state. But the state is one of Mexico’s poorest. The central valley, where nearly half of the inhabitants live and where its capital, the city of Oaxaca, is located, is ringed by a series of mountains intersected by deep canyons that isolate many rural communities. Nearly 45 percent of the state’s more than three million 500 thousand residents are indigena; 40 percent of them speak one or more of the fifteen different native languages and 76 percent of them earn less than seventy pesos—a little more than $6 U.S. dollars—a day. The main source of revenue for the majority of rural families is money sent to them from relatives working in the United States. “At first only the men went and they returned every winter. Then they started staying longer,” rural schoolteacher Thelma Leger explained to me. “Now the women are migrating too. Often a twelve- or thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl is left to take care of the younger children. Instead of going to school they work. It is sad. It is very, very sad.” So great is the expectancy that young people will go to the United States to seek work that another teacher told me that parents of some of her indigena students asked that she teach them English instead of Spanish “so they would do better when they got to the ‘Other Side.’” While officially Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz and his predecessors in office voiced consternation over the massive migration out of Oaxaca they quietly shifted government funding away from social programs. Oaxacans receive over $1 billion dollars a year in remittances of $50 to $500 sent from the United States, over 95 percent of which goes for food, housing, clothing and medical expenses that the state government no longer funds. Instead it has invested in marinas, new administrative offices, airplanes, helicopters and around-the-world visits by Ruiz and select Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI for its initials in Spanish) members. Attempts to break what many Oaxacans call “the tyrannical power” of the privileged elite have driven governors out of office and triggered a century-long push-pull of violence, protest and repression but the elite not only controls most of the material wealth but has had the backing of the federal government—also a power elite of a select privileged few—who since they came to power through revolution early in the twentieth century fear popular uprisings and act immediately and often brutally to detain them. How brutal and how violent was evident in October and November of 2006 when a force of nearly 5,000 federal police and military and that many or more state and municipal police swept through the city of Oaxaca, arresting, beating and torturing innocents and protesters without consideration of their ages, occupations or political affiliations. For nearly five months the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, led by the 70,000-strong Oaxaca branch of the national teachers union striking for better salaries and working conditions, had taken over the governing palaces of the city of Oaxaca and several other cities throwing the state into convulsions that forced the closing of thousands of small businesses. Tourism sank to its lowest level in sixty years nightly barricades throughout the state impeded the passing of police and paramilitary death squadrons and airlines and surface transportation severely cut back their services. The Popular Assembly burst into being after Ruiz ordered state police backed by helicopters spewing tear gas to break up a sit-in by the teachers’ union in May 2006. Women’s committees, priests, students, indigena organizations and human rights groups rallied to support the mauled strikers. Within two weeks the Popular Assembly not only had active spokespersons and a plan of action but tens of thousands of supporters. “That day was the parting of waters for Oaxaca,” Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. “There was only going forward, no going back.” Although the Popular Assembly seemed to have come together by magic, Miguel Vázquez, co-founder of Oaxaca’s Services for Alternative Education, insists that the attack on the teachers encampment provided a catalyst for uniting groups that had been organizing for over twenty years. Once organized, and with a center of control in the capital city’s historical district, the Assembly voted to restore the traditional “usos y costumbres” (uses and customs) participatory way of community government and social responsibility that had been the Oaxacan way of life before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. “Under usos y costumbres,” Miguel Vázquez explains, “every community member participates in every aspect of government. There are no caciques, no leaders or chiefs. Everything is decided by assembly. Whether the community is tiny — a few dozen members — or huge, with thousands of members, those within the community assemble and make their decisions. Whatever the majority decides, that is what the community does.” Not only are policy decisions made during the assemblies but those involved also decide what cargo (charge, or office) each community member will hold. Under usos y costumbres each male member of the community serves in a designated capacity for a predetermined length of time, usually a year. To fulfill these communal obligations an individual may serve as a policeman one year, be responsible for arranging traditional fiestas the next, be the street sweeper the year after that. (Migration has so decimated most rural communities adhering to usos y costumbres that many women now serve in their husbands’ places.) In addition to the assigned cargos all community members practice tequio — unremunerated community service. Much like in early U.S. pioneer communities, tequio involves everything from house and fence building to road construction and childcare services. Like all other community matters projects are determined by assembly vote. The third salient aspect of usos y costumbres is the guelaguetza: “giving.” To those whom God has been generous, and who have profited financially during the year, guelaguetza becomes a way of returning to the community some of the individual’s good fortune. The giver may build a community cistern, sponsor a fiesta or provide scholarships for high school students. And he does not expect anything but sharing in return. Over the past 450 years most Oaxacan communities have become Roman Catholic although evangelical Protestant congregations have multiplied throughout the state. Padre Manuel Arias, the spokesperson for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, sees no contradiction between either branch of Christianity and usos y costumbres. “Usos y costumbres,” he explains, “is a way of social organization. It is horizontal, rather than vertical. It is very similar to social conformations established by the early Christians. Many priests are, in fact, usos y costumbres advocates.” Oaxaca law currently authorizes community self-government by means of usos y costumbres. By vote communities elect either usos y costumbres or the partido (political party) system. But no matter which they choose their independence is very constricted. “Ruiz controls the finances. He controls the police. Communities can organize their tequios and have their fiestas but they really have very little authority,” Pedro Matias sighed. Although the teachers union abided by Popular Assembly decisions (many of which they instigated) both the leadership and the majority of members regarded the Popular Assembly as a support organization built around the union. Whereas the Popular Assembly advocated a “horizontal” governing structure (which in many cases resulted in no structure at all), the union maintained its traditional “vertical” organization with elected leaders who directed activities and assigned teachers to schools throughout the state. The union continued to act on its own apart from the Popular Assembly, coordinating with other sections of the National Workers in Education Union (SNTE) to protest the privatization of Mexican social security and to urge the deposing of federal education czar Elba Gordillo. The various regional indigena organizations also focused on their own activities while vocally supporting the Popular Assembly and sending participants to the assemblies and protest marches. The same was true for the smaller NGOs. The Popular Assembly’s primary goal was getting rid of Governor Ruiz. Elevated into office in 2004 after elections widely criticized as fraudulent, Ruiz controlled not only executive functions but also the legislature, law enforcement and the judiciary. Past governors, including Ruiz’ predecessor José Murat, successfully quashed potential uprisings but none had to deal with a force as large or as organized as the APPO. For five months the teachers’ encampments covered over fifty square blocks in the center of the city. They barricaded hundreds of streets and highways to prevent Ruiz-paid death squads from circulating at night. Even so, snipers gunned down José Jiménez while he was participating in a Popular Assembly march. Others waylaid and killed eighteen protesters before non-uniformed police stormed a barricade in Santa María del Camino, a city of Oaxaca suburb, and shot U.S. video photographer Bradley Will. The news of Will’s murder flashing around the world prompted Mexico’s federal government to demonstrate that it wouldn’t tolerate non-conformance. Outgoing president Vicente Fox sent over 4,000 soldiers and federal preventive police (PFP), along with dozens of armored vehicles and helicopters, to Oaxaca. Two days after their arrival they launched an all-out assault, destroying the barricades and occupying the center of the city. Four weeks later they caught the fleeing remnants of a protest march in a pincer movement and indiscriminately beat and apprehended everyone they could lay hands on, including many men and women who had not participated in the march. As Governor Ruiz proclaimed, “Oaxaca is again safe for tourists,” federal and state police and paramilitaries continued to intimidate and jail Popular Assembly leaders and participants. Others went into hiding. Thanks to brutal federal support Ruiz, the cacique, was in charge again. But despite the arrests, imprisonments and media control of reporting the events, the Popular Assembly remained a symbol throughout Mexico of the possibility for political change. Julio Hernández of the Mexico City daily La Jornada told a March 2008 Día de Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca, “What happened here is an example, an example of action… that gave hope to the entire pueblo of Mexico.” He affirmed that the Popular Assembly awakened “a sleeping giant.” Like the student rebellions of 1968 in Mexico City and the anti-Vietnam and integration movements during the same period in the United States, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca ruptured traditional mores, which is a grand precursor for permanent change. Women throughout Oaxaca began challenging the old order, even in indigena strongholds of machismo. The successes of the barricades, if temporary, convinced people who never had participated in any kinds of political act that they have rights and can exercise those rights. They exposed the PRI’s weaknesses and corruption and the teacher’s union, reorganized under new aggressive leadership in 2009, is challenging federalization of teacher placement and many indigena communities are expelling corrupt caciques and forcing multi-national corporations to curtail hydroelectric and mining projects. Marcos Leyva, one of the Popular Assembly founders, explained the movement’s sudden formation as “combustive” — Oaxaca had been a dry brush land waiting for a spark to ignite it and Ulisés Ruiz provided that spark when he ordered state and municipal police to break up the protesting teachers’ sit-in and drive them out of the city center. For nearly six months the conflagration raged and abated only when federal militarized police and army tanketas and troops overpowered the pacifist protesters by brute force. They crushed the outward manifestations — the symptoms — but they didn’t stamp out the disease. Oaxaca continues to be a crackling dry tinderland. When will the next spark set off a conflagration? And what will the consequences be? They will burn more than just Oaxaca. The entire country will feel the flames. First published in Dissident Voice. |
Oaxaca: Year of the dead
ON OCTOBER 27, 2006, just before Oaxaca, Mexico’s traditional Día de los Muertos holidays, armed gunmen stormed a barricade set up by members of the Peoples Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) and shot and killed American cameraman Brad Will. News photos flashing around the world triggered thousands of tourist cancellations. U. S., Canadian, and European governments warned travelers to stay away. The negative publicity jarred Mexico’s federal government into sending 4,000 soldiers and militarized preventive police (PFP) to tear down the barricades and occupy the center of the city.
From a tourist standpoint the federal police were worse than the striking teachers whose summer-long campout had resembled an extended neighborhood picnic. Kids, dogs, guitars, simmering bean pots, and pickup soccer games had filled the zocalo. The protesters had chatted with tourists and local residents, made up lyrics to their own songs and commuted back and forth to their home neighborhoods, often leaving their children to watch the makeshift camps while they were gone.
By contrast the PFP brought in huge tanketas (armored vehicles equipped with power hoses, video cameras, and snowplow-like rams), troop carriers, and supercharged police pickups to block street corners throughout the city’s main tourist and business district. Fully armored and in uniform, the PFP rifled through briefcases and backpacks. Many women refused to go past them because the guards would force them into doorways, paw them, and threaten them sexually. (With typical Oaxacan flair, locals dubbed the heavily armored PFP “Robocops” because of their resemblance to the automatons of Hollywood movie fame.)
By mid-November most of Oaxaca’s downtown hotels had shut their doors. Area restaurants laid off more than 9,000 workers. Schools throughout the state closed; teachers who usually were among the most consistent contributors to local economies hustled jobs as repairmen, street vendors, and musicians. Throughout the state graffiti labeled Governor Ulisés Ruiz “assassin,” “fascist,” and “thief.” Arrests of popular assembly leaders and night-rider harassment and intimidation of others failed to deter continuing protest marches and denunciations.
The leaders of the popular assembly insisted that Governor Ruiz had to go. So did politicians and churchmen throughout the country. Father Hugo Valdemar Romero, spokesman for the Archdioceses of Mexico, urged Ruiz to appeal to his Christian conscience and step down. “If he is the reason the conflict is continuing he should retire and not egoistically cling to power,” Father Romero insisted. But Ruiz ignored the Archdioceses and warned other governors from his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that they might be the next to be deposed if popular movements were allowed to overthrow elected state executives.
Mexican law grants the power to depose a governor to the federal senate but in late 2006 the conservative National Action Party (PAN) government had other problems. Opposition party candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed to be Mexico’s legitimately elected president and for months after the July 2 national elections he held Mexico City captive by turning its main thoroughfare, the Paseo de la Reforma, into a huge campsite, stalling business and blocking federal government activities.
Incoming PAN president-elect Felipe Calderón, perceived by many to be weak and to have won the narrow presidential election fraudulently, needed a public relations boost in order to appear decisive and strong. On November 25, five days before his lame duck PAN predecessor Vicente Fox left office, the PFP, reinforced by army units, state and local police, and hundreds of armed vigilantes, attacked Oaxaca’s central district after the conclusion of an APPO march through the city.
“There was tear gas, there were gunshots, and afterwards the fires,” the Oaxaca Las Noticias and Mexico City Proceso correspondent Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. He continued:m five until eleven was ablaze. At Seguro Social hospital two wings of attacking police converged and forced hundreds of people, men, women, old people onto the highway in front of El Fortín [the steep hill on which Oaxaca’s observatory is located]. We didn’t know what to do, we ran towards the hill and the people continued shouting…. I don’t know if they beat everybody but there were heartrending women’s shouts. I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t able to help, I remained impotent. As if we were delinquents, in order to save our lives, or at least keep from being beaten, we climbed Fortin hill, like refugees so they couldn’t find us.
Matias finally made his way back to his newspaper office but hundreds who’d been in the center of the city weren’t that fortunate. The federal police, abetted by civilian paramilitaries, spared no one. They apprehended more than 300 people and beat and teargassed hundreds more. By nightfall, 141 of the more than 300, bloody and without shoes and coats, were indicted for federal crimes and forced to sign false confessions.Over 80 percent of those arrested and tortured had nothing to do with the APPO march. Nevertheless the following day 107 men and 34 women, manacled and terrorized by snarling police dogs, were herded onto airplanes and helicopters and flown to federal prisons in Nayarit, Tamaulipas, and the Estado de Mexico. A number of women and men reported that they were beaten and raped while they were being transported from the airfields to the prisons. “All the better that they’re innocent,” a federal official commented. “It will make the rest of Oaxaca more afraid.
”
Fear continues to stalk the Oaxacan countryside. State authorities have filed apprehension orders for hundreds of persons involved with or sympathetic to the popular movement and have accused both human rights workers and Catholic priests of inciting citizens to revolt. Arrests continue and vigilantes identified as out-of-uniform police routinely sequester and physically manhandle APPO leaders and spokespersons like Florentino López, who was stopped after leaving a meeting, thrown into a pickup with two companions, blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten before finally being released.
"The biggest danger is that the government follows a doctrine that no changes should be prompted by popular movements, only by political parties,” Father Manuel Arias, the spokesman for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, told me. “They are criminalizing any attempts at changes. Every group that supports these movements becomes, by definition, criminal.” These include human rights organizations, the Catholic Church, and ad hoc citizens’ groups like those organized to take food and medicines to demonstrators and political prisoners. The state government-sponsored Radio Ciudadana attacked priests for giving medical aid and churches that gave sanctuary to those fleeing potential torture, Father Arias asserted. “They’re practically saying we’re criminals for denouncing the repression in Oaxaca.”
Announcers for the station, which operates without a legal federal license, urged parishioners not to go to mass and “not to give offerings to maintain guerrilla priests. “We won’t rest until these two-faced false redeemers are thrown out of Oaxaca!” they insisted.
Vigilante gunmen riddled an automobile that Padre Carlos Franco Pérez had parked in front of a medical facility set up in his parish to minister to those wounded by the November 25 police purge. Others threatened to kill Padre Francisco Alfredo Mayrén for participating in human rights negotiations involving APPO members.
Ruiz’s government is so restrictive of criticism of any kind, real or implied, that he dispatched armed state police to barricade the Santo Domingo temple in the city of Oaxaca’s central district to prevent Bishop Raúl Vera, one of Mexico’s most revered churchmen, from presiding over a scheduled ecumenical visit.
“To pray for peace is not a political act,” a spokesperson for Bishop Vera told the press. “It’s clear that the government does not respect organizations that defend human rights. It harassed and intimidated persons who otherwise would have participated in the event.” Bishop Vera’s Oaxacan hosts moved the visit to a site outside the barricades, where the bishop told reporters, “When the force of reason fails and there’s no other way to retain power, then the only thing remaining is the truncheon.”
Despite federal attempts to categorize the repression in Oaxaca as “a local matter” and Ruiz’s pronouncement that “Oaxaca is safe for tourists,” information about the brutal treatment of innocent civilians has worked its way into international awareness. The International Civil Commission for the Observation of Human Rights released a highly condemnatory account in March after spending nearly two months interviewing government officials and victims of the repression. A few days later, José Luis Soberanes, Mexico’s human rights ombudsman, filed a report that alleged widespread infractions, although Soberanes failed to mention Governor Ruiz by name. (Last fall Ruiz blasted Soberanes for “exceeding his authority” in rejecting a report of earlier violations and the ombudsman apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor.)
Mexican church officials led by the archbishop of Morelia Alberto Suárez reported that during their visit to the Vatican Pope Benedict had expressed concern about the violence in Oaxaca. And justices of Mexico’s Supreme Court have indicated that they are considering launching their own investigation of the repressions in Oaxaca, particularly the PFP’s part in the November 25 arrests. Mexican law authorizes the Court to make independent investigations but it seldom does so and when it does it moves very slowly, as it has in the case of the 2006 Atenco massacre and the indictment of journalist Lydia Cacho for publishing a book about politically protected pedophiles. Human rights commission reports are not binding on state governors, as evidenced by current federal government secretary Ramirez’s record when he was governor of Jalisco from 2002–06. He refused to act on any of more than 600 violations, including those involving protesters at the World Economic Forum in Guadalajara.
Forced underground after the November 25 repression, APPO nevertheless retained its identity. The November 25 Committee, primarily funded by Oaxaca artist Francisco Toledo, paid bail and legal services to obtain the release of a number of “prisoners of conscience” and the women of Coordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca defied state authorities and scheduled public forums on violence against women and formed advocacy groups to demand the release of those still incarcerated. Teachers throughout the state battled—sometimes physically—to regain jobs from which they’d been displaced by PRI-hired scabs.
Both they and APPO benefited when Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s conservative government passed legislation overhauling the government employee social security system in May 2007. The new regulations reduced benefits, extended the age at which one could retire and privatized funding. Teachers’ organizations throughout Mexico banded together in opposition and looked to Oaxaca’s embattled union for leadership. The state’s protesting teachers and APPO became symbols of effective resistance. Dissenting teachers’ unions adopted APPO slogans and embraced their social causes, including the prosecution of human rights violators and the release of prisoners of conscience.
Mexico’s federal government’s refusal to acknowledge that problems exist in Oaxaca and its insistence that its police acted in self-defense to quell a potential riot last November have enabled Ruiz to maintain his hold on his governorship and the millions of dollars that go with it. Nevertheless the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca continues to meet, to march, and to demand that he be deposed. In the meantime, thousands of small businesses have folded, tourism is the lowest it has been in forty years, and thousands of Oaxacans, unjustly criminalized, struggle to make sense of death squads, torture, PFP barricades, and illegal arrests.
International Socialist Review, Nove-Dec 2007