Οι δάσκαλοι και η Αμφισβήτηση

>Ομάδα Μαθηματικών Δυτικής Αττικής 2008 – 2009 Το πρόγραμμα έως τα Χριστούγεννα

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>Aνακοίνωση της ΟΛΜΕ Δελτίο Τύπου

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>Οι δάσκαλοι της Oaxaca (καταγραφές από το ZNet | Activism)

Chapter 1: SCENES FROM THE OAXACA REBELLION, by John Gibler, 4 August 2006

Once gathered in the central town square—where teachers and other protestors have been camping out since May 22—the women decided to take over the statewide television and radio company known by its Spanish initials as CORTV. Some women walked, others hopped on buses. Thousands of them met at CORTV’s broadcasting headquarters outside the colonial town center, where they walked right in, and took it over. Not a shot was fired. Not a punch was thrown. While the station’s director had fled, the women gathered the station’s employees and demanded that they hook up the cameras for a live broadcast. Outside the building, about 50 women and a handful of men with clubs (one had two nails sticking out of it) guarded the entrance. They would not let any men enter the building (with a few exceptions of well-known reporters who were escorted in by groups of women). When reporters from the national television station Televisa arrived on the scene, the men and women gathered at the gates marched them right back to their cars shouting: “Get them out!” and “Liars!” The three reporters walked dejectedly back to their cars with their faces drawn long, followed by a rowdy crowd of about a hundred.

It took several hours of negotiation before the women were able to fix a live broadcast, during which—still clutching their pots and wooden spoons, dressed in aprons and work clothes—they set out to correct the mistakes in the station’s reporting on the violent June 14 attempt by state police to lift the teachers’ encampment and demand on the air that the press “tell the truth” about the social movement that is taking over Oaxaca.

The women are all part of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO, an organizing body that was created after the June 14 police raid with the objective of concentrating local residents’ outrage over the violence into the single demand that the governor step down, or get the boot, and the TV station take-over was only the latest in a series of in-your-face civil resistance tactics aimed at shutting down the state government.

On June 16, just two days after the raid, some 500,000 people marched to demand the governor’s resignation. The APPO then organized a “punishment vote” (voto de castigo) campaign against the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which led to the first time the PRI lost the state of Oaxaca in a presidential election. The APPO also organized a boycott of the state’s largest tourist event, the Guelaguetza, and convoked an alternative, and free of charge, Guelaguetza that drew a crowd of 20,000. Throughout July, members of the APPO took over the coordination of the town square encampment and began to organize sit-ins at government buildings, which became permanent encampments on July 26.

The strategy of the APPO is to generate “ungovernability” to force the resignation of Ulises Ruiz. The complete absence of uniformed city or state police at the APPO’s actions is a testament to the power they have achieved. I have not seen a single uniformed police officer during a two-week stay in Oaxaca City. (Nor have I heard testimony or read newspaper stories of street crime in the area controlled by the APPO.) The APPO has surrounded and essentially taken over the office buildings of the three branches of state government. They took over CORTV, a private company, and released the station employees to the Red Cross—as if the APPO were a recognized belligerent force.

On July 31, the APPO captured, detained, and turned over to federal investigators a plainclothes police officer that, witnesses said, had fired shots into the air during a protest. A ballistics test conducted on the spot by federal agents proved that the man, Isaías Pérez Hernández, an ex-soldier now with the state police, had indeed fired a pistol within the last 24 hours, but agents were unable to find the gun. Isaías Hernández told me in an interview before the test results came in that he did not know how to fire a pistol.

What most impressed me in this scene was not that state police would send a plain clothes cop to scare or provoke the protestors by shooting into the air, but that the federal agents (members of the elite Agencia Federal de Investigación, or AFI) did not for a moment question the authority of the APPO members who had detailed Hernández and carried him off to their headquarters. IN fact, the AFI—who were called by the APPO organizers—could only approach the APPO headquarters once organizers had beckoned the crowd to let them through. Here again, the federal government seems to tacitly recognize the APPO as something like a belligerent force. (Hernández was unscathed and constantly in the presence of the press. Though he received considerable taunting and the APPO members had made him carry a sign that read, “I am the aggressor sent by Ulises Ruiz,” he was treated rather well considering the tension).

In press conferences and interviews APPO members have stated repeatedly that their movement is non-violent, exclusively targeting the ability of the state government to function, while leaving local businesses and tourists out of the fray.

The current conflict in Oaxaca is at least 26 years old, if not 500. In 1980, teachers in the Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers—then the largest union in Latin America—decided to wage a fight against corruption in the union’s national leadership and demand an increased federal budget for education in Oaxaca state, long one of the poorest and most abandoned regions in Mexico. Oaxaca’s highly organized teachers have been holding protests every year since.

This year things changed. First, the state governor, Ulises Ruiz, has crossed various sectors of Oaxaca’s working and middle classes by spending millions to move the state government offices outside of town and remodel the historic town square. He has also been ensnared in scandal, accused of siphoning tens of millions of dollars from the state budget to finance the PRI’s presidential campaign in Oaxaca. Ruiz had created many enemies by the time he clumsily sent 1000 state police into the town square at dawn on June 14 to beat up sleeping teachers. His timing was also apocryphal. Mexico had been rocked in preceding weeks by overwhelming police violence against protestors in Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan, and San Salvador Atenco, Mexico State.

Ulises Ruiz’s botched raid—after a few hours the 1000 police were facing about 30,000 teachers and local citizens armed with rocks, boards and iron rods; the police retreated and the teachers took the town square back—catalyzed deep social discontent and offered an attractive, and seemingly achievable, objective: ousting Ulises.

As the APPO steps up its civil disobedience tactics, the movement appears more and more like the class struggle that has mobilized millions behind Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s call to protest vote fraud in the July 2 presidential elections. Mainly poor and working class people fill the encampments and the marches, while more middle and upper class locals start to criticize those in the movement for “not getting back to work.” As tensions rise between locals, the danger increases that provocations, such as the police officers that fired shots in the air, could lead to violent confrontations between citizens that could then be used as a pretext for federal police intervention.

At present, Oaxaca remains an occupied city, where thousands of citizens camp out in the streets, blocking access to state government buildings, where tourists browse through hand-woven shirts a few yards from protestors’ tents, and day after day the APPO accelerates the pace of the civil disobedience to force the fall of Ulises Ruiz.

Chapter 2: OAXACA’S DANGEROUS TEACHERS, by David Bacon, 20 September 2006

At 8:30 AM on October 21, 2002, Oaxaca state police arrested a dangerous schoolteacher.

Romualdo Juan Gutierrez Cortez was pulled over as he was driving to his school in the rural Mixteca region. Police took him to Oaxaca de Juarez, the state capital, where he was held for days on false charges. Gutierrez is the state coordinator for the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (the Frente), which had organized a loud, embarrassing protest during a visit to Oaxaca by Mexican President Vicente Fox not long before. Oaxaca Governor Jose Murat was out for revenge.

As Gutierrez languished in jail, Oaxacan migrant farm workers north of the border in California’s central valley reacted quickly. They picketed the Mexican consulate, held press conferences, and clogged Murat’s phone lines with calls and faxes. In Oaxaca itself, other Frente members organized similar protests. After a week, the governor succumbed to the pressure: Gutierrez was released.

That binational campaign to defend the Frente leader has since been repeated many times. Cooperation across the border is today one of the most important tools Oaxacans have for defending human rights in their home state.

Thousands indigenous people migrate from Oaxaca’s hillside villages to the United States every year-among Mexican states, Oaxaca has the second-highest concentration of indigenous residents. They leave inpart because of a repressive political system that thwarts economic development in Mexico’s poor rural areas. Lack of development in turn pushes people off the land. From there, they find their way to other parts of Mexico or the United States, where they often live in poverty even as they send money home. This economic reality was the central issue in this year’s heated presidential election, which was marred by charges of vote fraud.

The people who have been driven from Oaxaca to the United States by economic crisis have carried a tradition of militant social movementswith them. By organizing across the border, the Frente and other Oaxacan organizations increase their power.

Binational pressure freed Gutierrez from Murat’s jail, where local efforts alone might nothave succeeded. Many other human rights violations in Oaxaca over thelast decade have resulted in cross-border resistance, and the Frente was at the heart of many of these protests.

Winning political change in Mexico itself is central to the Frente’s activity. For Oaxaca’s indigenous residents, greater democracy and respect for human rights are the keys to eventually achieving a government committed to increasing rural family income. That in turn might make it possible for people to make a living at home, instead of heading to California for survival.

Migration: A Consequence of Economic Reforms

“Migration is a necessity, not a choice,” Gutierrez explains. “There is no work here. You can’t tell a child to study to be a doctor if there is no work for doctors in Mexico. It is a very daunting task for a Mexican teacher to convince students to get an education and stay in the country. It is disheartening to see a student go through many hardships to get an education here in Mexico and become a professional, and then later in the United States do manual labor. Sometimes those with an education are working side by side with others who do not even know how to read.”

Lack of economic opportunity in Oaxaca’s villages is a result of Mexican economic development policies. For more than two decades, under pressure from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and conditions placed on U.S. bank loans and bailouts, the government has encouraged foreign investment, while cutting expenditures intended to raise rural incomes. Prices have risen dramatically since the government cut subsidies for necessities like gasoline, electricity, bus fares, tortillas, and milk.

The government also closed the CONASUPO stores, which bought corn at subsidized prices from farmers to help them stay on the land and sold tortillas, milk, and food to the urban poor. The North American Free Trade Agreement’s subsidies to U.S. farmers have forced Mexican agricultural prices down. The end of the ejido land reform system has allowed the reconcentration of land ownership and rural wealth. The sale of government enterprises to private investors led to layoffs and the destruction of unions. Foreign investors may now own land and factories anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners.

The Mexican government estimates that 37.7%, or 40 million, of its 106 million citizens live in poverty, with 25 million, or 23.6%, living in extreme poverty. According to a representative of EDUCA, a Oaxacan education and development organization, 75% of the state’s 3.4million residents live in extreme poverty. It is the second-poorest state in Mexico, after Chiapas. Meanwhile, President Fox boasts that Mexicans in the United States-often working for poverty wages- are sending home over $18 billion a year. “Migration helps pacify people,” Gutierrez says. “Poverty is a ticking time bomb, but as long as there is money coming in from family in the United States, there is peace. To curb migration our country has to have a better employment plan. We must push our government to think about the working class.”

The economic reforms of the last two decades are deeply unpopular, and people like Oaxaca’s teachers would change them if they could. But those who have benefited from them have a big stake in suppressing any dissent or advocacy of political and economic alternatives. Governor Murat’s campaign to stifle change by silencing Gutierrez is only a small part of Oaxaca’s long history of human rights violations.

Teaching Resistance

Oaxaca has many dangerous teachers like Gutierrez. In the in the 1970sand 80s, more than a hundred Oaxaca’s teachers were killed in the struggle for control of their union, Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers. Today Section 22 is one of Mexico’s mostmilitant, and in many villages, these teachers are also community leaders and repositories of Mexico’s most progressive traditions.

On one recent afternoon, Gutierrez stood at the back of a classroom in rural Santiago Juxtlahuaca, dapper in a pressed white shirt and chinos. Two boys and two girls, wearing new tennis shoes undoubtedly sent by family members working in the north, stood at the blackboard, giving a report and carefully gauging his reaction. As they recounted the history of Mexico’s expropriation of oil in 1936, a smile curved beneath Gutierrez’s pencil mustache. The expropriation was a highpoint in Mexican revolutionary nationalism.

“Education is a very noble field, which I love,” Gutierrez says. “But today it means confronting the government. You have to be ready to fight for the people and their children, and not just in the classroom.”

Not just in the classroom, but throughout Oaxaca and also the United States. Today over 60,000 Oaxacans labor in California’s San Joaquin Valley alone. Many times that number are dispersed in communities throughout the United States. In the countryside of the Mixteca, village after village has been emptied of working-age residents. Gutierrez’s role in the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations illustrates his understanding of the need to challenge human rights violations on both sides of the border. If Mexico’s indigenous migrants succeed, they may be able to help force a change in the political structure at home, and thereby influence the migration of Mexican citizens abroad.

Suppressing the News

Today, though, Oaxaca’s political system is still controlled by Mexico’s old ruling Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI).The PRI lost its control over the national government to the National Action Party (PAN) in 2000. While the PAN has more direct ties to Mexico’s growing corporate class, and received the bulk of that class’s campaign money in the 2006 election, both parties pursue thesame neoliberal economic policies that line party leaders’ pockets and those of their corporate allies. Efforts to change this system bring down their wrath, as Gutierrez discovered.

“Before my arrest I thought we had a decent justice system,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I thought it worked. Then I saw that the people in jail weren’t the rich or well educated, but the poor and those who work hard for aliving.” In prison, Gutierrez met members of a local union who had been there for months, along with other political prisoners. “There are over 2,000 complaints of political oppression in the statethat have not been investigated,” Gutierrez charges. His own case adds one more.

The news outlets that expose these abuses also find themselves in the government’s crosshairs. Noticias, an independent newspaper founded in 1978, learned this the hard way. In 2004, the paper exposed public works fraud in the Murat administration. And in that fall’s gubernatorial election, Noticias supported the left-wing candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PRD lost amid charges of vote rigging. On December 1, the same day Murat’s PRI successor, Ulises Ruiz, took office, hooligans broke into Noticias’s building and threatened the reporters.

More provocations followed, and six months later state police and dozens of thugs belonging to the Revolutionary Confederation ofWorkers and Peasants (CROC) surrounded Noticias’s offices. CROC is a labor federation founded by the PRI in the early 1950s.Though in some areas it functions as a normal union, but often it is avehicle for the party’s brutal bullyboys, who it uses to intimidate opponents.

Amnesty International reports that 102 of Noticias’s 130 employees belonged to CROC, but their relationship with the union had been strained, and CROC leadership called a strike “against theexpress wishes of the Noticias workforce.” The Ruiz administration ordered it to stop publishing. Thirty-one workers decided to defend the office, where they were barricaded in for daysand not permitted visitors, or even food and water.

Facing a news blockade in Oaxaca, the journalists hit the phones. From inside the besieged newsroom, reporter Cesar Morales got on the air in Fresno, California. He was interviewed by Rufino Dominguez, a Frente coordinator, and journalist Eduardo Stanley, cohosts of a bilingual program for Mixtec migrants on community radio station KFCF. Morales described “an assault by more than a hundred plain-clothes police,and thugs brought in to beat us.” He called for help, and lettersand faxes from California deluged Oaxaca.

In this case, binational pressure was not enough. The PRI eventually evicted the journalists and closed the paper’s offices. Noticias is still distributed in Oaxaca, but it is written, edited, and printed elsewhere. Nevertheless, Oaxacans in California had developed a new ability to use media in their binational campaigns.

The Frente’s Cross-Border Social Movement

Oaxacans abroad don’t just protest conditions at home. The Frente defends worker rights in California fields, has convinced the state’s courts to provide indigenous language interpreters, and helps keep alive the traditions that are the cultural glue binding together Mixtec, Zapotec, Triqui, and Chatino communities.

The Frente was, in fact, founded in California. Leaders like Dominguez have a long history organizing strikes and other movements in Mexico. When they arrived in California in 1987, they started the group withmeetings in the San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. At first it was called the Mixtec/Zapotec Binational Front, because organizers wanted to unite Mixtec and Zapotec immigrants, two of the largest indigenous groups in Oaxaca.

Soon it had to change its name. Triquis and other indigenous Oaxacans wanted to participate, so the organization became the Indigenous Oaxacan Binational Front. Then Purepechas from Michoacan and indigenous people from other Mexican states also joined, and it became the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Through all the changes, its binational character has only grown stronger.

Oaxacans have formed many other organizations during their long migration through Mexico and the United States. Most of these organizations are composed of members from a single town. The Frente is different and more political, in that it unites people speaking different languages, from different indigenous groups, in order to promote community and workplace struggles for social justice.

Racism against indigenous people in Mexico required them to develop ahistory of community resistance, and to fight for their own cultural identity. Centolia Maldonado, one of the Frente’s leaders inOaxaca, recalls her bitter experience as a migrant in northern Mexico.”They called us ‘Oaxaquitas’-Indians,” she remembers. “The people from the north were always valued more. There is terrible discrimination when people migrate.”

In 1992, the Frente used the celebrations of the 500- year anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas as a platform to dramatize its call for indigenous rights. Dominguez denounced “people who say that Christopher Columbus was welcomed when he came. They never talk about the massacres or the genocide that occurred inour villages, on the whole of the American continent. We wanted to tell the other side of the story. That was the object of the Frente Mixteco/Zapoteco Binacional: to dismantle the old stereotype,to march, to protest.”

The Frente’s response to the Zapatista uprising on January 1, 1994, strengthened its commitment to cross- border action. The Frente pressured the Mexican government to refrain from using massive military force in Chiapas. From Fresno, California, across the border to Baja California and Oaxaca, Frente activists went on hunger strikes and demonstrated in front of consulates and government offices. That action, Dominguez says, “helped us realize that when there’s movement in Oaxaca, there’s got to be movement in the United States to make an impression on the Mexican government.”

The Frente uses an indigenous institution called the tequio to organize indigenous migrants. In Oaxaca “we must participate in collective work to support our community,” Dominguez explains. “That understanding of mutual assistance makes it easier for us to organize.” Part of this culture is also participatory democracy, with roots in indigenous village life. The frente’s binational assemblies discuss its bylaws and political positions in detail.

The organization’s political platform also maintains a focus on the problems faced by transnational communities. It condemns the US proposal for new guest worker programs, arguing that they treat migrants only as temporary workers, rather than as people belonging to, and creating community. Instead, the Frente calls for legalizing undocumented migrants in the US.

It also demands that the Mexican government fulfill the right of Mexican citizens living in the United States to vote in their country’s elections. The Fox administration agreed to create a system to handle those votes in the 2006 election, but there were so many restrictions that only about 40,000 of the estimated 12 million Mexican citizens in the United States were able to cast ballots.

Attacks on Human Rights Escalate during an Election Year

In the late 1990s, the Frente in Oaxaca began an alliance with thePRD. Dominguez explains, “Mexican electoral laws don’t permit asocial organization to run independent candidates, so we have to make an alliance. Within the PRD there are divisions and internal problems,but it’s all we have.” Within this alliance, the Frente keeps its independence. “We should have a relationship with political parties without losing our identity and being dependent on politicians,” Dominguez says.

Gutierrez himself was elected to the state chamber of deputies on the Party’s ticket in 2000. “We joined because we felt strongly about their fight for justice for all people in our state. I became the first elected official to go against the PRI in ourregion.” Although Gutierrez and his allies fought for legislation protecting migrants and indigenous cultural rights, the legislature’s PRI majority killed their proposals. He served one two-year term – Mexican electoral law forbids re-election.

In the recent presidential campaign, the Frente supported the PRD candidate, former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Frente activist Leoncio Vasquez said the country faced a clear choice in political direction. “Lopez Obrador declared openly that he’d put poor people first,” Vasquez explained. “He’s against corruption and corporations who violate workers’ and human rights. “Raising rural income was the centerpiece of Lopez Obrador’s proposals on migration. He was particularly critical of President Fox’s support for the Bush guest worker proposal.

During the campaign, attacks on human rights in Oaxaca escalated. On May 19, Moises Cruz Sanchez, a PRD activist in the Mixtec town of San Juan Mixtepec, was gunned down in front of his wife and children as he left a local restaurant. The two gunmen fled, and police couldn’t seem to find them.

That month in Fresno the Frente organized demonstrations against aplanned visit by Governor Ruiz to California. Response to the protests revealed increasing cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities. After receiving a copy of a letter sent to the Mexican consulate to protest Ruiz’s visit, Detective Dean Williamson of the Fresno Police paid a surprise visit to the Frente’s office on Tulare Street.”It’s an official procedure,” said Williamson, “in which we’re trying to clarify possible threats affecting public security.”

Then violence escalated again in Oaxaca. In early May, the state’steachers struck for higher salaries and an end to human rights violations. Thousands of teachers occupied the main square in the state capital. Over 120,000 Oaxaca residents joined them in the largest rally in the state’s history. On June 11, Ruiz promised business owners he would use a heavy hand to put down the protest. Atfour in the morning on June 14, helicopters began hovering over thetents of the sleeping teachers. As parents woke their children, billowing clouds of tear gas filled the cobblestone streets. Hundreds of police charged in. Within minutes, scores were beaten, and on pregnant woman miscarried. But Ruiz underestimated the teachers. They retook the square at the end of the day, and the following morning 300,000 people marched through Oaxaca demanding Ruiz’s resignation.

In the following weeks, teachers and other groups calling for Ruiz’ removal formed the Oaxaca Popular Peoples’ Assembly (APPO). Doctors and nurses joined, shutting down clinics. In a desperate reaction, violence against protestors increased. A state university was killed in the street, and then the husband of a striking teacher, Jose Jimenez Colmanares, was gunned down during aprotest march. Pistoleros shot protesters guarding the transmittter for the Channel 9 radio station, after it had been occupied by demonstrators and used to broadcast news of the uprising. Gunmen also fired bullets at two reporters from Noticias, which recently opened another editorial office in the capital.

Indigenous communities, including FIOB, have been heavily involved in APPO. In the Mixteca, protestors occupied the Huajuapan de Leoncity hall. Ruiz issued arrest orders for 50 leaders, including three FIOB statewide officials.

On July 2, Mexicans went to the polls. The results gave a microscopic 200,000-vote majority to PAN candidate Felipe Calderon. Demands for are count and accusations of fraud were immediate.

A million people rallied in Mexico City’s main square on July 16,and two million on July 30, to demand a recount. The PRD and its candidate refused to accept the results without one, as they did in1988, when it appeared that fraud robbed leftist candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of victory. Pointing to attacks on striking steelworkers in Michoacan and Sonora, the police assault on Federal deputies and the stationing of tanks outside the Mexican Congress, and the raging conflict in Oaxaca, Dominguez says, “Mexico is approaching a situation of ungovernability, which is spreading to all parts of the country. A tiny group is trying to hold onto power by increasingly violent and illegal means.”

Despite the demands of thousands of people encamped for weeks in downtown Mexico City, and continued rallies in the zocalo, Mexican election authorities refused to make a complete recount, and certified Calderon as Mexico’s next president. Nevertheless, millions of Mexicans see a clear difference in political direction between the party and the social forces that support it, and the current political establishment.

More importantly, they are challenging thelack of human rights that keeps that establishment in power. The Frente is an important part of that movement. “Indigenous people are always on the bottom in Oaxaca,” Vasquez says. “The rich use their economic resources to maintain a government that puts them first. Big corporations control what’s going on in Mexico, and those who criticize the government get harassed constantly, with arbitrary arrest and even assassination. That’s one of the reasons why people from our communities have been forced to leave to find a means of survival elsewhere.”

Chapter 3: PARAMILITARY ATTACKS CONTINUE IN OAXACA, by John Gibler, 15 October 2006

In the past week, gunmen have killed one and wounded four protesters from the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). The recent killings heightened tensions as the conflict again enters into a critical moment with the Minister of the Interior threatening to withdraw the federal government’s settlement offer if teachers do not end their strike by Monday, October 16.

Meanwhile, the Mexican Senate is poised to make a definitive decision this Tuesday, October 17, on the APPO’s central demand that the state government be dissolved.

The teachers union, Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers, stated that they will not return to classes on Monday, but will wait for the Senate’s decision the following day.

The conflict in Oaxaca began as a teachers’ strike five months ago, but exploded into a massive, statewide civil disobedience up-rising after a failed attempt to violently lift the striking teachers’ protest camp during the pre-dawn hours of June 14.

Since then the teachers union and the APPO, which formed in response to the failed police raid and groups together hundreds of local organizations, have held onto their occupation of Oaxaca’s historic central plaza; blocked state government office buildings; painted most of the city with graffiti calling for Governor Ulises Ruiz’s ousting; led a march of several thousand people over 250 miles from Oaxaca to Mexico City; taken over television and radio stations; and built thousands of barricades throughout the city.

Since August gunmen and civilian-clad police have shot at protesters in marches and at their camps, killing six people and wounding fifteen. Paramilitaries have also abducted movement leaders and participants and held them incommunicado for days before being taken to jail or released. Those abducted testified to having been tortured—with visible scars still covering their faces and bodies. (See ‘Pistol Policy’ ZNet, August 16, 2006)

The recent shootings began on October 11, the day that a “sub-commission” of three senators from the Senate Committee on the Interior was scheduled to arrive in Oaxaca City to analyze whether or not the state government has ceased to function. Since June 14, Section 22 and the APPO have conditioned all their demands upon the renunciation or ousting of the Governor.  Ruiz has refused to resign, and the only legal mechanism for the protesters to force his ousting is to request that the Senate declare that the state government has already, in effect, disappeared, a process known as the “desaparicion de poderes” in Spanish. Hence the APPO’s strategy has been to “create ungovernability” by blocking government buildings and shutting off highways and roads.

In anticipation of the sub-commission’s visit, APPO protesters commandeered four city buses on October 11 and drove throughout the city in “mobile brigades” to take over more state government offices and cover walls, buildings, road signs, other buses, and pretty much any available surface with graffiti calling for Governor’s ousting. The protesters had nearly concluded their mobile brigade when, shortly after 4 in the afternoon, outside a police station, un-uniformed police and gunmen shot into a crowd of protesters who were preparing to get back on their bus and move on.

The gunmen fired for several minutes, wounding four people, who were taken to the hospital and released later that evening. A photographer for the local newspaper, Noticias, and the national newspaper, Excelsior, captured clear images of one of the gunmen firing into the crowd. Gunmen fired over 60 rounds, forcing the protesters to seek shelter under fire. Three hours later a caravan of police trucks arrived to “rescue” the gunmen, allowing them to escape without being apprehended by the APPO protesters. As a result of the violence, the sub-commission suspended their visit until the following day.

The senators’ visit was an exercise in contradictions. Inside the empty state legislature, surrounded by a few hundred protesters, state legislators told the federal sub-commission that they had not stopped working and had passed four laws in the past five months of the conflict.

The Governor, accompanied by his entire cabinet, testified that he had continued to work “as normal,” and presented the sub-commission with box-loads of documents to support his claim. Most poignant however, was the location of the Governor’s meeting with the sub-commission: a gated and guarded hangar at the Oaxaca City airport a few miles out of town. Ulises Ruiz has not been able to walk freely in the capital city since the June 14 raid.

During a four-hour meeting with organizations from the APPO, people gave testimony about the police raid and paramilitary violence. Instead of handing over boxes of documents, the protesters submitted bullet shells, exploded gas grenades, and police batons and helmets that they have gathered during the months of conflict as proof of the impunity with which the state government and paramilitaries beaten, shot, and killed protesters.

The senators repeated in the meetings with state government officials and protesters that they would not be “deciding” to dissolve the state government, but merely reporting their findings as to whether the government had already lost control or not. The sub-commission will turn their report into the Senate Committee on the Interior on Monday, October 16. The full Senate will vote on the matter on Tuesday, October 17.

In this context, the Minister or the Interior threatened to withdraw the offer to increase teachers’ payments and open the way for institutional reforms in Oaxaca if the Section 22 does not return to classes by October 16. The teachers responded that they would wait for the Senate vote. The Minister or the Interior’s ultimatum once again fueled rumors that a federal crackdown is imminent.

Then, at about 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, October 14, soldiers in civilian clothes who tried to make their way through a barricade on the outskirts of the center of town, opened fire on APPO protesters guarding the barricade. One soldier, 22 year-old Johnatan Ríos Vázquez, dropped his wallet before fleeing, thus leading to his identification and later apprehension by local police.

Ríos Vázquez fired upon the protesters with a 22-caliber pistol, hitting Alejandro García Hernández twice in the head. García Hernández, a nearby resident who nightly took coffee to the APPO protesters guarding the barricades, was serving coffee with his wife and son when the soldiers opened fire.

“My father was bleeding from the head. I held him and they kept shooting, but now at me,” his son Johnatan Halil told a reporter from the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. “A compañero [Joaquín Benítez] jumped in the way to protect me. That is why they shot him in the shoulder.”

García Hernández languished in the hospital for over 8 hours without receiving medical attention. When the surgeons finally attempted to aid him, he had already gone brain dead. He died a few hours later. García Hernández was the sixth person to die in paramilitary shootings against protesters in Oaxaca.

This number does not include one teacher who opposed the strike, Jaime Rene Calva Aragon, who was hacked to death with ice axes two weeks ago. His colleagues immediately blamed the Section 22 and the APPO, while these organizations denied the accusations, in turn blaming Ulises Ruiz for trying to create the conditions necessary for a federal intervention. While APPO protesters have beaten people caught stealing in the city center and, on one occasion, a local journalist, there have been no cases of premeditated or targeted violence against strike opponents.

The coming days will be decisive for the conflict in Oaxaca, with the federal government withdrawing their settlement offer with one hand and voting on the dissolution of the state government with the other. The APPO has called for national strikes and marches in solidarity with the Oaxaca movement. On Sunday, October 15, some 40 members of the APPO will begin a hunger strike to be carried out until Ulises Ruiz leaves office. The hunger strikers will join a protest camp in front of the Senate in Mexico City where several thousand teachers arrived on foot from Oaxaca this past Monday, October 9.

Chapter 4: OAXACA IS NOT ALONE, by EZLN (Zapatista Movement), 1 November 2006

CLANDESTINE REVOLUTIONARY INDIGENOUS COMMITTEE-GENERAL COMMAND

of the ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION MEXICO.

October 30, 2006.

To the people of Mexico:

To the people of the world:

To the Other Campaign in Mexico and the other side of the Rio Grande:

To the entire Sixth International:

Compañeros and compañeras:

Brothers and sisters:

It is now known publicly that yesterday, 29th of October 2006, Vicente Fox’s federal forces attacked the people of Oaxaca and its most legitimate representative, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).

Today, the federal troops have assassinated at least 3 people, among them a minor, leaving dozens of wounded, including many women from Oaxaca. Dozens of detainees were illegally transported to military prisons. All this comes in addition to the existing total of deaths, detainees and missing persons since the beginning of the mobilization demanding that Ulises Ruiz step down as Oaxaca’s governor.

The sole objective of the federal attack is to maintain Ulises Ruiz in power and to destroy the popular grassroots organization of the people of Oaxaca.

Oaxaca’s people are resisting. Not one single honest person can remain quiet and unmoved while the entire society, of which the majority are indigenous, is murdered, beaten and jailed.

We, the Zapatistas, will not be silent; we will mobilize to support our brothers, sisters and comrades in Oaxaca.

The EZLN’s Sixth Commission has already consulted the Zapatista leadership and the following has been decided:

First: During whole day of November 1, 2006, the major and minor roads that cross Zapatistas territories in the southwestern state of Chiapas will be closed.

Consequently, we ask that everyone avoid traveling by these roads in Chiapas on this day and that one make the necessary arrangements in order to do so.

Second: through the Sixth Commission, the EZLN has begun making contact and consulting other political and social organizations, groups, collectives and individuals in the Other Campaign, in order to coordinate joint solidarity actions across Mexico, leading to a nationwide shut-down on the 20th of November, 2006.

Third: the EZLN calls out to the Other Campaign in Mexico and north of the Rio Grande, so that these November 1st mobilizations happen wherever possible, completely, partially, at intervals or symbolically shutting down the major artery roads, streets, toll booths, stations, airports and commercial media.

Fourth: The central message that the Zapatistas send and will continue sending is that the people of Oaxaca are not alone: They are not alone!

Ulises Ruiz out of Oaxaca!

Immediate withdrawal of the occupying federal forces from Oaxaca!

Immediate and unconditional freedom for all detainees!

Cancel all arrest warrants!

Punish the murderers!

Justice! Freedom! Democracy!

From the North of Mexico.

For the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

For the EZLN Sixth Commission.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, October, 2006.

Translation: Radio Pacheco

Chapter 5: SHOWDOWN LOOMS AS MEXICAN RIOT POLICE MOVE IN ON CITY OCCUPIED BY PROTESTERS, by Jo Tuckman of “The Guardian”, 31 October 2006

Oaxaca – Riot police look on as a protester waves a national flag during demonstrations in the Mexican city of Oaxaca yesterday Riot police look on as a protester waves a national flag during demonstrations in the Mexican city of Oaxaca yesterday.

Thousands of federal riot police backed by armoured trucks and helicopters pushed into the Mexican city of Oaxaca yesterday as a protest that began over teachers’ pay spiralled into a major confrontation.

Police wearing body armour and carrying riot shields and submachine guns were accompanied by water cannon and helicopters as they moved from the outskirts of the city towards the central plaza that has been occupied by a leftwing movement for months.

Hundreds of protesters shouted their fury as the wall of police advanced, sometimes managing to push it back a few inches. Housewives, workers, students, teachers and others chanted: “The people united will never be defeated” as they were pushed back.

Police in the line stared impassively ahead towards a large green sign over the road inviting tourists to enjoy the colonial and indigenous charms that have made Oaxaca particularly popular with European visitors. But most tourists have been scared away from the picturesque centre, which has been occupied for months by a movement that began as a dispute over teachers’ pay and conditions in May, but has since grown into a social revolt.

The protesters have occupied the city’s central plaza, seized radio and television stations, and blocked main roads. To reach the movement’s stronghold in the central square, police will have to get through dozens of barricades made from pieces of corrugated iron, burnt-out buses and lorries driven across the road.

The protesters’ main demand is the removal of the governor of Oaxaca state, Ulises Ruiz, whose failed attempt to evict the teachers in June led to the radicalisation of the movement.

Organised into a loose coalition of unions, residents’ associations, indigenous and student groups, the so- called Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, Appo, accuses Mr Ruiz of everything from electoral fraud to murder. According to some members, the coalition includes representatives of small armed guerrilla groups active in the state.

Appo, which has made it impossible for Mr Ruiz to appear in public in Oaxaca, says the governor has set up paramilitary groups to attack its members. It claims that 14 people have died since the occupation began, with several killed at the barricades at night in drive-by shootings.

The federal government of President Vicente Fox stayed out of the conflict for a few months, claiming it was a local matter. When it failed to go away, the interior ministry sponsored talks, which led to a deal with teachers’ leaders. In the first real sign that a peaceful end to the conflict might be possible, most of the teachers voted last week to go back to work today. However, the tension rocketed on Friday again when a day of violence throughout the city left two protesters dead, along with a US journalist sympathetic to their cause who was shot in the chest twice as he filmed an attack by armed men on one of the barricades.

A national newspaper later identified the gunmen as police in civilian clothes.

The protesters accuse Mr Ruiz of stepping up the attacks in order to force the federal government into quashing their movement in the name of restoring order.

If so, the strategy appears to have succeeded, with the government announcing it was sending in the police on Saturday.

“Shame on President Fox,” said a retired builder Arbado Corteza. “How can it be that the job of one governor is worth more than the entire population of Oaxaca?” But the claim that the entire state backs the movement is belied by some residents who are frustrated by the closed schools and the occupation that has devastated the local economy.

Others balk at what they see as anarchy taking hold, with instances of alleged thieves beaten and tied to lampposts with signs around their necks.

However, Appo does have significant support among ordinary people, who responded to calls on a radio station controlled by the movement to provide non- violent resistance to the military-style police operation to retake the city. Elsewhere there were reports of protesters stockpiling stones and petrol bombs for a more active resistance to any police advance.

“They will be able to get through, what can we do, we don’t have the weapons to stop them, we are peaceful,” said 33-year-old Rosa Jiménezas she stood a few metres from the police frontline. “But while we can’t stop them going in, perhaps we can stop them getting out.”

The end and a beginning…

On Tuesday, August 1, about 3,000 women marched through downtown Oaxaca City banging metal pots and pans in an oddly melodious cacophony that served as the background for their chants demanding the ousting of governor Ulises Ruiz. They stopped by a hotel where state senators are rumored to hold sessions (the state legislative building has been surrounded by protestors for over a week) and taped black ribbons on the closed doors before pelting the glass panes with raw eggs. There was not a security guard or a uniformed police officer in sight.

Sited from http://www.zmag.org