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OAXACA: A STATE UNDER SIEGEHaz clic aquí para modificar.
Attack and Burn!
THEY GRABBED ME, THEY HIT ME, they yanked me by the hair and threw me in the back of a pickup. They sprayed me with tear gas and held a knife to my back. They said they were going to rape me and throw me in the ocean. They said other police were raping my novia (girlfriend) right then. Mexican photojournalist José de Jesús Villaseca had driven with two companions to cover a demonstration outside the Miahuatlàn state prison ninety kilometers south of the city of Oaxaca when state police, reinforced by non-uniformed paramilitaries, brutally attacked the relatives and friends of political prisoners being held inside the institution. They yanked Villaseca out of the car in which he was riding, and despite the fact that he displayed a press pass from a Mexico City news service they arrested him and held him in the prison until an Oaxaca non- governmental organization paid his bail. He and the eight others arrested with him still have criminal charges pending against them. So do 141 other Oaxacans arbitrarily arrested on November 25, 2006, during a sweep by over 4,000 militarized police through the city of Oaxaca's centrally located historical district after a protest march. Like Villaseca all 141 were beaten, robbed and humiliated and all 141 were flown to federal prisons outside of Oaxaca without first being charged and tried. During the past year, state and Mexican federal police have jailed over 400 citizens, many on charges that the justice committee of the state legislature has confirmed were fallacious. Death squadrons have assassinated at least 20, and an estimated 100 other Oaxacans have disappeared. The state has filed orders of apprehension for hundreds more, including human rights activists whom they have accused of inciting persons belonging to the Peoples Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) to commit violent anti-government acts. Political supporters of current Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz beat a retired professor to death when he participated in an attempt to block a roadway near Huautla to prevent Ruiz from making a campaign appearance in 2004. Authorities then jailed the retired professor's closest friend on murder charges despite videos that identified the killers. When Oaxacan teachers declared a strike for higher wages and better school conditions and set up an encampment in the center of the city of Oaxaca two years later, Ruiz dispatched state police to break up the protest. The teachers fought back and forced the police to retreat. Various non-aligned NGOs and indigena groups backed the teachers and formed APPO. Ruiz's government responded by subsidizing death squads that included former and current municipal and state police to attack and intimidate APPO members and human rights workers. To counter these nightly depredations, APPO supporters barricaded streets throughout the city, making transit virtually impossible after dark. Nevertheless, snipers hiding in the Hospital Santa María shot and killed José Jiménez during an APPO-sponsored march in August 2006 The husband of an activist teacher, Jiménez had taken part in a number of anti-Ruiz protests. Despite the fact that hundreds saw Jiménez fall, and despite the fact that autopsies showed that he had been hit by bullets of two different calibers fired from two different directions, Oaxaca's attorney general announced that he'd died during a drunken fight, which he had instigated. Two months later armed off-duty municipal police attacked an APPO barricade in Santa Lucía del Camino, a city of Oaxaca suburb, and shot and killed American photographer Brad Will. Journalists photographed Will's killers as they were attacking and published this in both local and national newspapers, but Oaxacan authorities released the assassins and announced that they were going to file murder charges against one of Will's companions at the barricade. That revelation so infuriated Oaxaca journalist Pedro Matias that he told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation, "The department of justice changed the settings, changed the legal opinions, changed the investigations and after all that what's going to happen here in Oaxaca is that it's going to turn out that Brad Will killed himself. That's the kind of justice we have here." For the past 80 years Oaxaca has been governed by a tight coterie belonging to Mexico's dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI for its initials in Spanish). Though PRI lost the past two presidential elections the party nevertheless remains strong and controls the majority of governorships within the country. Both Ruiz and his predecessor, José Murat, have been under investigation for fraud and misappropriation of funds. During the November 25 federal police assault, a building housing the financial records of Ruiz and Murat went up in flames and the records were destroyed. State officials accused APPO members of setting the fire by throwing Molotov cocktails into the building, but a tour of the damage indicates that that would have been impossible. The fires were set from inside. The arrests and detainment of APPO leaders, threats against human rights activists, and continuing disappearances of APPO supporters continue. On July 16th assembled state and federal police attacked demonstrators approaching the Guelaguetza auditorium and beat one of them so badly he was in a coma for weeks and no longer can walk, talk, or feed himself. Immediately Ruiz's prosecuting attorney issued arrest warrants for ten APPO leaders, two of whom were outside of the city when the incident happened, for inciting violence. Six weeks passed before five of the police responsible for the brutal beating were arrested. Their defense attorney insists that they merely were doing the jobs assigned to them. "The government has taken the position that no changes should be prompted by popular movements," priest Juan Arias, the spokesman for the state's Catholic presbytery, told me, "and is criminalizing any attempts at change." The state's propaganda station, Radio Ciudadana (Citizens Radio), attacked priests for providing medical aid and sanctuary to APPO members. "They practically said we're criminals for denouncing the violence and repression in Oaxaca," he told the Rights Action. Announcers for the same station urged Oaxaca residents to attack and burn the facilities belonging to the Services for an Alternative Education because members of that group were APPO supporters. Although the federal police force is under the jurisdiction of Mexico's president Felipe Calderòn and Government Secretary Francisco Ramirez, neither has made any effort to investigate the violent apprehension and torture of innocent civilians. Various officials from President Calderòn's National Action Party (PAN), including Senator Felipe Gonzalez, have applauded the repressive actions, citing the need to show a firm hand against lawbreakers like the APPO protesters. Despite Ruiz's insistence that everything is under control and Oaxaca is a safe place for tourists to visit, teachers who supported the strike are yanked out of their classrooms, arrest warrants are filed against human rights activists, and the squadrons of death roam the streets knowing they can stop, detain, torture, and even kill anyone who disagrees with the status quo. Oaxaca may be safe for tourists but it is not safe for Oaxacans. Especially not for those who protest. CHaz clic aquí para modificar. New Politics, Winter, 2008 ”Situation “Normal,” Repression the Same
Mexican Federal Preventive Police (PFP) criminalized hundreds of innocent Oaxaca, Mexico residents after breaking up a peaceful rally in the city’s historical center last November 25. In full riot gear, supported by armored vehicles blanketing the area with tear gas, they brutally attacked and arrested street vendors, shoppers, workmen, local residents and passers by along with members of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). A 19-year-old victim told Rights Action emergency human rights delegates, “They spit on us, beat us, tortured us. I was covered with blood…they threw us face-down in a pickup and jumped on us…I lost all feeling in my body.” After interrogating their victims and giving them aspirin to relieve the pain of broken ribs and multiple bruises, the militarized police flew them to federal prisons in Nayarit, Tamaulipas and the Estado de Mexico. All of the 141 detainees transported to federal facilities had been handcuffed, beaten, stripped of most of their clothing and robbed of all their personal possessions. Over 80 percent of them had no connection whatsoever with the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO for its initials in Spanish). Those incarcerated included a man who’d come to the center of town to pick up his daughter from dance class, a man walking down a side street to a bus stop because his car was locked in a parking garage and a woman shopping for Christmas gifts who, in trying to flee the tear gas, broke the heel of one of her shoes and fell. Like the others she was handcuffed, beaten and thrown into the pile of detainees. Federal officials in Mexico City announced that all of the prisoners were “high risk” and “dangerous” despite the fact that 80 percent of them had not participated in the protest march. “The situation has been normalized,” Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz announced the day following the armed assault as work crews with power hoses scrubbed blood off the cobblestone streets surrounding the historic ex-Convent of Santo Domingo. Ruiz and the political and business interests that support him were determined to have the city ready for December tourist visits. But over half of the city’s 400 restaurants remained closed and many of those still open were deeply in debt to the federal government for delinquent social security tax payments. They had laid off or dismissed 9,000 workers and were expecting to discharge more. Travel agencies and tour companies reported huge losses and thousands of street vendors had given up or migrated as indocumentados to the United States. Meanwhile the arrests, beatings and intimidation continue. Warrants filed against human rights workers falsely accuse them of inciting protesters to riot and police and paramilitaries acting on behalf of the state government have assassinated at least 20 persons, including American photographer Brad Will. An estimated 100 other persons have disappeared and are presumed to be either imprisoned or dead, teachers have been dragged out of their classrooms, handcuffed and arrested and persons associated with the Popular Assembly have been detained and beaten. A government-sponsored radio station openly encourages Oaxacans to burn buildings associated with the Popular Assembly and attack Assembly members in their homes. The Popular Assembly came into being after Ruiz sent armed police into the city of Oaxaca’s Zocalo to violently dislodge a sit-in by the state’s striking teachers’ union. The teachers struck back and retook the Zocalo the following day. “Suddenly tens of thousands of people—professionals, housewives, NGOs, indigena organizations—not only took up the teachers cause but amplified it,” remembers Sara Mendez, director of the Oaxaca Human Rights Network. APPO marches through the city grew from 20,000 to 800,000—some estimates reported over a million—participants. APPO occupied the city’s historical center and APPO supporters set up nightly barricades to prevent government-paid death squads from terrorizing residential neighborhoods. Not only did the popular movement threaten Ruiz’ governorship by demanding that he resign, it menaced the 80-year-long stranglehold by which his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had turned state politics—and finances—into a private resort for an elite few. Police and death squadron attacks increased as Ruiz not only refused to resign but announced, “Only God can replace a governor!” The state legislature appealed to federal authorities for help. In October, after Brad Will’s assassination, lame duck President Vicente Fox’s government sent 5,000 heavily armed federal preventive police (PFP) to Oaxaca. They came with tanks and helicopters, water cannons and pepper spray, tore down the APPO barricades, beat and arrested those who protested and established military camps in the center of the city and in various strategic outlying districts. For a over a month the federal police and the Mexican army maintained their occupation. Tourism withered but APPO support increased. Finally, in late November, federal and state forces played their trump card. They surrounded the participants and observers of a peaceful march, set up ambushes on building tops, and attacked. Besides the 141 men and women hauled to federal prisons, several hundred others were arrested, over a thousand reportedly beaten and several thousands teargassed. Witnesses reported seeing at least three persons shot and killed but the PFP or their paramilitary reinforcements apparently disposed of the bodies. The Ruiz government’s response to a report released by an international human rights delegation investigating the massacre has been to insist that the report has “no relevance” and resulted from what actually was a “leftist political intervention,” not a human rights investigation. The report blasted both the federal and state governments for “recurrent and massive arbitrary and illegal detentions against the civilian population…using disproportionate physical and psychological violence including sexual violations of those detained, both women and men.” Earlier, when Mexico’s human rights director José Luis Soberanes filed violations against Oaxaca’s state government, Ruiz responded by publicly denouncing Soberanes for exceeding his authority. Although the federal police force is under the jurisdiction of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderón and Government Secretary Francisco Ramirez neither has made any effort to investigate the apprehension and torture of innocent civilians. When the newly appointed Ramirez was governor of the state of Jalisco he ordered the arrests and incarceration of globalization protesters during the World Trade Organization meetings in the capital city of Guadalajara. His human rights record included over 600 unanswered human rights violation complaints. The federal government has shoved human rights violations under the table with promises to “investigate” and punish “those responsible for the use of excessive force.” The two-year old investigation of a similar massacre at San Salvador Atenco, in the Estado de Mexico, still has produced only platitudes and no convictions of any federal or Estado de Mexico officials. Despite the beatings, the jailings, the false charges and the refusal of Mexico’s federal government to acknowledge that problems exist in Oaxaca and its insistence that its preventive police acted in self-defense to quell a potential riot, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca continues to meet, to march, to insist on human rights and to demand that Ulisés Ruiz resign. In the meantime, small businesses continue to fold, tourism is the lowest it has been in 40 years and thousands of Oaxacans, unjustly criminalized, struggle to make sense of death squads, torture, PFP barricades and illegal arrests. “I never was part of the blockades. I never took part in the marches,” a 50-year-old widow who was arrested after leaving work on November 25 told the Rights Action emergency delegation. “But now I’ll march! I’ll support APPO! Innocent people suffered terribly!” Both Inaki Garcia of the International Civil Commission for Human Rights and human rights workers in Oaxaca warn that beatings and arrests of November 25th may only have been a prelude of greater violence to come. The City in Revolt OAXACA, JULY 2006: CENTRO HISTORICO An occupied city. Occupied but without police except in residential colonias fringing the mid-city historical district. The Zòcalo a Jacob’s coat of plastic tarpaulins, camp tents, canvas, mantas denouncing the elected government; around them a confusion of portable stoves, bedrolls, guy ropes, overturned boxes, port-a-potties. On the low wall bordering the now untouristed sixteenth-century cathedral a thin gray-haired man and a corpulent middle-aged woman playing chess. As I approach the man flings one hand upward and yanks a crumpled cigarette pack from his short pocket. “Never play chess with a woman!” he admonishes. “Or with one who plays better than you,” the woman chides. Both are teachers: he in a high school in a mid-sized city in the Valley of Oaxaca, she “music and everything else” in a primary school in a resort city on the Coast. Along with twenty or thirty thousand others they participated in the teachers union’s sit-in two months earlier, an annual bid for higher salaries and working conditions. Along with those thousands of others they were awakened by roaring helicopters, shouts and teargas as police stormed their encampment. And like those thousands of others they reassembled, fought back and reclaimed the center of the city. “More than reclaimed,” the highschool teacher insists. “We started a revolution.” “Not to overthrow the government,” she interrupts. “To make it responsible. We don’t want to rule. We want to teach.” After the police attack “and their running away, tails between their legs!” a chaotic citizens organization called the APPO (Asemblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca) paralyzed bureaucratic functions and fractured the state’s tourist industry. Stores closed; construction was suspended; the tent city surged through the streets leading away from the Zòcalo like some uncontained amoebic growth. On a streetcorner just outside the tent perimeter a thirtyish type, sportily dressed, regales me with epithets about “lazy incompetents…they don’t want to work…they all should be fired..!” and half a block further on a solidly built young man, one of those Oaxacans who seems incapable of saying anything without grinning, “Maybe we’ll get rid of them all: governor, legislators, cops! Become people again!” Not all of the striking teachers want to be sleeping on concrete, eating out of Styrofoam cups and standing in line in front of smelly portable toilets. Those unable to find childcare have young children with them; others have guitars, portable TVs, video games. Opportunistic ambulantes squiggle through the congestion selling bread, tortillas, empanadas, wrist bands, toilet paper. One hears complaints but not dissention. There are hardships but also gaiety. Several of the striking teachers tell me that they are there for the sake of their profession, for the sake of children they’re trying to educate. Others for the sake of the union which has tried to organize the chaos by geographying the sprawling tent city into sections that correspond with the areas in which the teachers work. A tall young maestro picking at an incipient beard explains that each section leader takes roll and reports absences and non-participation, a sword of Damocles since the union controls teacher placements and salaries. Nevertheless, a sense of unity prevails, a cohesion very much like that of an athletic team or theater cast that binds disparate participants into a common effort, a shared goal. Many outside the tent city object to what the owner of a travel agency insists is a “desecration” of the historical district, its elegance and traditions. “It is like a dirty gypsy caravan taking over the Louvre!” Though the teachers police their own they aren’t law enforcement for the areas surrounding those that they occupy. Thievery and petty crime prevail. The usual early summertime vacation upswing in store sales and hotel accommodations has bottomed out. Governor, legislators, health officials are nowhere to be seen. “How long will it last?” I ask. “Until the governor gives in,” I’m told. “Until the governor resigns,” another insists. SANTA LUCÌA DEL CAMINO In this pegged-against-the-city pastiche of one- and two-story cement houses, vacant lots, vendors’ stalls, cubbyhole workshops, bars and warehouses dusk brings with it the odors of burned trash. Half-a-dozen laughing chavos, one wearing a torn Che Guevara t-shirt, another with glistening spiked gelled hair, roll what appears to be the shell of a 1940s school bus across an intersection. An older man and two women emerge from a taquerìa to help. Throughout the area access roads are blocked with mounds of smoldering tires, canastas filled with rocks and industrial debris, laminated sheet metal propped against oil barrels, barbed wire strung from lamp poles. The city of Oaxaca and its suburbs have become an impassable maze after dark. Even on foot one can’t enter a neighborhood without being challenged: “Where are you going?” “Why?” “Show us your ID.” Many barricade sentinels are young—students, dropouts, albañiles savoring first-in-their-lives authority; others, older, grimly humorous, trying to stay awake. “It’s our own defense,” the wife of a teacher explains. “Defense against what?” “Escuadrones de muerte!” she snaps. Those three words are part of everyone’s vocabulary. Death squads--out-of-uniform police, ex-police, “enforcers” from with the government-aligned labor union CROC (Confederaciòn Revolucionario de Obreros y Campesinos)—carom through the streets in unmarked white pickups without license plates after dark threatening, beating, arresting teachers and students or persons who resemble them. “They have our addresses,” the teacher’s wife complains. The death squad members’ identities aren’t secret: Those in the barricades know them. Ex-police who served jail terms for assault, for taking bribes. Political henchmen. Army deserters. Identifying them does no good, the teacher’s wife tells me. Those who filed complaints wound up with broken car windshields, bullet holes in their walls. Infiltrators learned who was active in the APPO, where they worked and who their friends and contacts were. They validated arbitrary arrests by charging those they stopped with carrying concealed weapons or selling drugs. “We barricade the streets so they can’t get through. If we see them we photograph them with cell phone cameras. It’s the only way we have of fighting back.” The barricades transformed the city—and much of the state, for communities throughout the wide central valley blockaded major highways, forcing truckers and night travelers to sleep in their vehicles until the barricadistas removed the roadblocks the following morning. Teacher Ruth Guzmán wrote “to confront para-police, paramilitaries, what negotiation, what dialogue is possible? They stop people, they step out of cars without license plates, they dress as civilians, they fire pistols with total impunity…that’s why the people decided to set up barricades…The barricades weren’t a whim, they were a defense for our companions in the sit-ins.” And a way for the disenfranchised to rise above victimization. A sixteen-year-old nini (ni estudia ni trabaja—neither in school or employed) grins as he swipes a fury of tangled hair off his forehead and tells me, “Now it’s the police who are afraid of us!” CENTRO DE ABASTOS A hand brushes my arm and pushes me gently aside as a shirtless, scrawny twelve-year-old nearly rams me with a hand truck stacked with teetering crates of produce. “Diabolitos rule,” Josè Alejandro chides. A Oaxacan truism, I know, but like most truisms untrue. The diabolitos--street kids, dropouts, orphans, runaways—are lowest on the abasto totem pole. In this jungle of interconnected stalls, ambulantes, propane fumes, chispas sparking from tangles of improvised electrical outlets and extension cords they substitute for delivery vans and conveyor belts. Paid by the hand-truck load they fight each other, shoppers and stall keepers, beg tortillas and cigarettes, mock tourists and give themselves nicknames like changuito, mudito and pìpì. Some sleep at night in alleyways; many in patched together chozas on steep hills overlooking the cities. They seldom earn enough to buy more than food and used clothing; most of what many earn goes to their widowed or abandoned mothers. They know about the APPO, one tells me. They also know about the policias who beat and rob diabolitos. (“For entertainment,” Padre Fulgencio, a barrio priest insists.) For them the barricades, the escuadrones de muerte, the tourists—like cockroaches, rats, dysentery—merely are more obstacles in lives filled with obstacles: to be avoided, rammed into, ignored, shoved aside. For life goes on in Oaxaca. Shops in the Centro Historico have locked their doors but along the Perifèrico that veers through formerly residential neighborhoods the tire repair shops, vidrerìas, bicycle shops, taquerìas, cell phone stores are open. Trucks and motor scooters dodge jaywalkers crossing to the big Chedraui supermarket; vendors on three-wheeled bicycles shout atole! and bolis! Though midday young hookers lounge in open doorways—Guatemaltecas, Salvadoreñas, Hondureñas, most of them, Josè Alejando tell me. Albañiles piled ten to a pickup-load whistle at them but get no response. A harried looking mother puffs, squalling child in hand, to catch a bus that turns out not to be the one she wants. Like the diabolitos, like the bicycle vendors and tire repairers and the woman trying to catch a bus, Josè Alejandro knows about the APPO and about Ulisès Ruiz, the governor (hiding in his penthouse in Mexico City) whom he calls “the most corrupt of a long line of corrupt politicians.” A big man with bulky shoulders, barrel chest and a round face highlighted by perpetually startled eyes Josè Alejandro laughs when I ask him what he hopes the outcome of the teachers’ “revolution” will be. Hand against my chest he brushes me out of the way of an even younger, scrawnier diabolito, “That the APPO throws the government out. Totally,” he says. “Then that others of us throw the APPO out.” Oaxcaca: the way it is. The way it will continue to be. http://www.northernlibertiesreview.com/work.php?id=73 |
Oaxaca's Night of Terror
In the city of Oaxaca,Mexico over half of the thousands sifting in to join the November 25, 2006 Popular Assembly demonstration arrived after the scheduled starting time. Students, indigenas, professors, white collar workers, construction gophers, housewives, many with young children strapped to their chests in harness carriers, milled together embracing old friends, unfurling parasols and munching breakfast burritos and fruit from paper cups. Patrol marshals—most of them teachers of the striking public teachers’ union—hustled up and down the column as it moved forward, warning participants not to respond to harassment from bystanders. Professionally lettered banners four meters wide swayed aloft; teachers and students waved placards attached to lathes and broom handles. Some contained enlarged photographs of Brad Will, the American Indie media journalist who’d been killed by paramilitary police; others depicted Zapata with the slogan “Zapata lives!” beneath the portraits. Youthful members of a leftist group displayed Lenin and Stalin photos. Several others dressed in mock armor parodied the “Robocops”—as Oaxacans called the armored police for their likeness to characters in a science-fiction movie. The chorus “Ya cayó! Ya cayó! Ulisés ya cayó! became more and more infectious as the chanting demonstrators neared the Centro Historico. They chanted,“He’s fallen He’s fallen [Governor Ulisés Ruiz] has fallen!” Marching teachers thrust their fists into the air and women who had participated in previous marches banged skillets. As they funneled into the narrow streets leading to the Alameda and Zócalo they fanned out to form what the Assembly leadership had announced would be a symbolic surrounding of the armed federal police and soldiers barricading the central business district. Clusters of high school and college students banded together to shout insults and taunt the armed sentinels and groups of teachers and a number of Popular Assembly women confronted individual segments of the occupying force “some of us affably, others—especially the women—more vituperatively,” a participant told me afterwards. Shortly after taking positions outside the sentries guarding the north side of the perimeter, the marchers that I had been following separated into smaller groups, some to seek compatriots in other places along the perimeter and others to head home or buy hot coffee or seek bathrooms somewhere in the Centro Historico. I had come down with a bad cold a day or two before and decided to head up the hill to my bungalow since the march had broken up and not much more appeared to be happening. I was mistaken. “At five o’clock the PFP [Federal Preventive Police] and the soldiers began pushing people this way and that,” a nineteen-year-old named Gonzalo told members of Rights Action emergency delegation of which I was a member. He, his novia and many people around them who were close to the Zócalo heard shots: We looked up and saw armed men on the rooftops of buildings. They weren’t wearing uniforms but they had guns and they began firing tear gas canisters into the street. They fired rubber bullets at us as we were trying to run away. Through clouds of teargas billowing along the streets of the Centro Historico Gonzalo testified that he heard infiltrators urge, “The El Camino Hotel. Break into it! Set in on fire!” “We refused to follow them,” the teenager affirmed, “and they shouted, ‘Banamex! Burn down Banamex!’ but again there were no followers. We weren’t there to destroy things. That wasn’t the point of the march.” At approximately 6:30 p.m. the federal police advanced. They had their helmet visors down and clubs in their hands. There were a lot of us, mostly young people—students, teachers—massed together. We covered our faces with rags and handkerchiefs and grabbed some of the canisters and threw them back at the Robocops. But the gas was so thick we barely could see. Everyone was panicking. My amiga fainted from inhaling tear gas. I had to carry her. I tried to find some place to get some fresh air but the police had trapped us in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. They began to hit us indiscriminately as they moved in. There were police in civilian clothes making arrests. I heard one of them say that the civilian police were being paid $6,000 pesos cash for each person they captured. We gave in, we couldn’t go any further. The cops were hitting me, my mamá was pleading with them to stop but they hit me and kicked me more. The police pulled Gonzalo away from his mother and novia and forced him to stumble away from Santo Domingo with a group of other men they’d corralled. They threw us together in a mountain of persons and threw others on top of us. They took off our shoes. They tied our hands behind our backs. They continually beat our bare feet with their clubs. One of them told us, “You’re stupid to be trying to change things. The poor always are going to be poor, the rich are always going to be rich. See what trying to overthrow things gets you!” For an hour and a half they spit on us, kicked us, tortured us. Then some vans came and they threw me into one of them with some others. I was covered with blood. Some police got in the van and kicked us and questioned us. I was shivering so much from the cold I couldn’t answer. They jumped up and down on top of us with their heavy boots. “How much did they pay you to march?” they demanded. “Forget about The Cause they told us. I thought they were going to kill us one by one.” Gonzalo’s mother, forty-year-old Guadalupe Urrea, had left the demonstration but she, her husband and their daughter rushed back and caught up with Gonzalo near the Zócalo: As we approached the Zócalo the PFP started releasing tear gas. I could see a fire burning in the Camino Real hotel…We turned to escape up Cinco de Mayo but it was blocked off…The tear gas was so thick we couldn’t see. I was desperate. I was trying to wipe my face, my eyes, and I let go of their hands. Then I saw that the PFP had my son. They were hitting everybody with their clubs, beating everybody. I was afraid for my son, I threw myself against him…They were kicking the people they’d knocked down…They took our sweaters and all of our belongings and tied our hands…Then they hurled all of us women on top of each other in a pickup. As dense smoke from burning buildings combined with the tear gas clogging the Centro Historico it no longer became possible to identify intersections, stores or streetlamps. Those fleeing the heavily armed federal police stumbled against each other, tripped, gagged, fell and got up to run again, many not sure which streets they were on or which way they should turn. Mothers were separated from their children, wives from their husbands. The police and their military and civilian counterparts made no attempts to distinguish Popular Assembly members from non-Popular Assembly participants. Their orders were to treat everyone they came across as criminals. Among the most vulnerable were a fifty-year-old widow who’d just gotten off work and a confused street vendor who spoke no Spanish. The confrontations continued for several hours with over 100 wounded, dozens detained and the Popular Assembly encampment in the plaza of Santo Domingo totally destroyed. Groups of unidentified persons burned public buildings, vehicles and private homes. Meanwhile Oaxaca Governor Ulisés Ruiz’s spokesman gave twisted view to the media. The following day El Sol de Mexico reported: The Policía Federal Preventiva today issued a communiqué informing the public that they had brought before the Procuraduría General de Justicia 152 persons responsible for wounding four agents and several civilians. The PFP spokesperson maintained that members of the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) and groups who came in from outside the city attacked the federal agents with skyrockets, Molotov cocktails, rocks, sticks, firecrackers and burning vehicles. ‘The PFP repelled the aggression and initiated armed patrols throughout the city of Oaxaca to ward off further illegal acts and detain those groups responsible for committing them.’ They confirmed that those arrested, most of whom came from outside of Oaxaca, would be put at the disposition of appropriate authorities to answer to the crimes they committed. They added that they would go forward with identifying and arresting other participants in the confrontations of November 25. The spokesperson noted that during the confrontation the protesters damaged the Tribunal Superior de Justicia, offices of the Poder Judicial Federal and Relaciones Exteriores, the Teatro Juárez and the Hospital Molina. These acts of vandalism severely affected the people of Oaxaca, particularly those who live near the Centro Historico. Judicial accounts later confirmed that none of the 152 arrested were from outside the city and eye witnesses described a coordinated police and military operation that instigated a pre-planned purge supported by paramilitaries firing teargas canisters and wielding firearms. The Popular Assembly had burst into being five months before that “Night of Horror” after Governor Ruiz had ordered municipal and state police to break up an encampment by striking public school teachers. The teachers fought back and retook their encampment which had spread across the city of Oaxaca’s Centro Historico. Already unpopular for allegedly having won his election as governor by fraud and for having torn up the Zócalo in a “modernization” that included moving the governor’s palace and other governmental buildings to the city’s suburbs, Ruiz ordering the wanton attack on unarmed teachers and their families aroused the wrath of a huge segment of the state’s populace. Enraged by what they considered to be a violent transgression by the government against the people they instinctively supported the Popular Assembly and its demands that “the tyrant,” “the assassin,” Governor Ruiz be ousted. Ruiz refused to deal with their demands and for nearly five months hardly set foot in the city. Finally he convinced outgoing Mexican president Vicente Fox and newly elected (also allegedly by fraud) Felipe Calderón to send federal troops to Oaxaca. Helicopters, tanketas, tear gas and 4,000 armed soldiers and federal police aided by Ruiz’ law enforcement forces leveled Popular Assembly barricades and pushed the teachers out of the center of the city but the Assembly continued to hold marches, demonstrate and challenge what they considered to be the government’s illegal and abusive practices. Although I was able to publish a few accounts about the “Night of Horror” and events preceding it the mainline U.S. media issued only whitewashed reports culled from Mexican government sources. To a number of Mexican and U.S. journalists and academics I proposed the question: “If a riot that included burning buses, Molotov cocktails, brutal beatings and indiscriminate arrests had occurred in Iran, Venezuela or Palestine would media disregard have been the same?” The almost universal response was: Journalists report the news, editors amend or delete it and corporate owners determine policy. In other words an anti-government uprising in Cuba or Venezuela is not the same as an anti-government uprising in Colombia or Mexico. This lack of coverage—actually misrepresentation of the news—persists in major media reportage in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Although Mexico’s president Felipe Calderón loftily has proclaimed “in Mexico the government does not manipulate the media” results speak otherwise. Mexico’s television duopoly—Televisa and TV Aztec—have become so entwined with Calderón’s federal government that some Mexican academics and journalists question whether the government is controlling the Televisa/Azteca duo or Televisa/Azteca is controlling the federal government. With few exceptions, principally online journalism circulating in the United States and the Mexican daily “La Jornada” and weekly “Proceso”, coverage of the so-called “War on Drugs,” anti-government demonstrations in Oaxaca, Atenco in the Estado de Mexico and Ciudad Juárez and the repression of Mexican labor unions is highly adulterated. Carlos Payan, founder and longtime editor of La Jornada, insists that the Mexican media, following a worldwide pattern, has ceased to be operated by journalists and has passed into the hands of entrepreneurs who “deform and erode information and any attempts at objectivity.” News like cabbages, immigrant workers and purified water has become merchandise to be peddled at the highest available prices—or held off the market if it does not satisfy entrepreneurial needs. The final openly violent—and militarily quashed—confrontation in the city of Oaxaca occurred eight months after The Night of Horror when armed federal, state and local police crushed a Popular Assembly-led attempt to hold their version of the traditional Guelaguetza festivities at the amphitheater on the slopes of the city of Oaxaca’s Fortín hill. Ruiz had denied them access to the amphitheater but after assembling at a nearby church plaza the teacher-led Popular Assembly surged towards the amphitheater. Clouds of tear gas, burning buses, ransacked soft drink trucks, shouts and clubbing erupted as the federales, instead of maintaining strictly defensive positions, charged and violently repelled the Assembly “invaders.” Participation in Popular Assembly marches and protests noticeably dwindled after the melee. Harassment of those who dared criticize the government continued but not open conflict; Ruiz was back in the driver’s seat passing lucrative construction contracts to friends and associates and spending millions of pesos on propaganda designed to reactivate the state’s “factories without chimneys,” the tourism industry. But it was a return to normal latinamericano-style: a police state benevolent to those who didn’t rock the boat, didn’t challenge authority and who went about their daily lives focused on trying to make ends meet while Ruiz’s political establishment diverted public funds to private causes and quashed investigations of illegality or corruption. The escalation of battles among the drug corporations and Mexico’s military in northern Mexico pushed local issues to the sidelines; poverty, unemployment and petty crime increased as the economy stagnated and more and more people transitioned to the non-taxed, non-licensed “informal sector” to eke out a living. Musicians—folkloric, traditional, mariachi—competed in the Zócalo, clowns reenacted age-old gags, children in indigena dress peddled candy and cigarettes or pumped out songs on their accordions. Makeshift vendors’ stalls heaped with pirated CDs, cut-rate clothing, made-in-China knickknacks and cheap cosmetics crowded the streets and alleyways leading to the Zócalo and the adjoining Alameda; improvised portable kitchens offered empanadas, tacos, pozole and traditional tlayudas (huge crisp flour tortillas filled with melted cheese, shredded cabbage and chilis). Teenagers sauntered among the stalls and among anxious-faced parents warding off their younger children’s badgering for balloons, ice cream and roasting ears. Oaxaca típico. What tourists come to see. But there were too few tourists for the weavers, rug vendors, hotel owners. Too few tourists and too many trying to escape the deprivations of daily life. “Oaxaca’s a shadow of what it used to be,” a laid-off account clerk told me. A tourist guide admitted, “It’s all a simulation. Nobody has any money so people try to forget, be part of a crowd, do something,” much like I remembered seeing in Guatemala under the military dictatorships and in Spain under Franco, a forging of fake normalcy despite constantly being aware of the deprivations, the incarcerations, the corruption in which their societies were immersed. The political domination of Oaxaca by Governor Ruiz and his PRI machine dwindled to a close after the 2010 elections left the state with strange bedfellows as a governing coalition. The ultra-conservative Action Party (PAN) of President Calderón, the more liberal Convergencia and Partido de Trabajo and what remained of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) banded together to defeat Ruiz’s handpicked “delfin” (“dolphin,” a term popularly used to describe a front man) to promote the candidacy of Oaxaca Senator Gabino Cue, the loser in the contaminated election of Ruiz six years before. This time Cue won handily, a victory attributed by most observers to repudiation of Ruiz and Ruiz’s corruption-tainted mandate. The popular movement that had battled Ruiz achieved legitimacy despite the uncomfortable association between newly elected Governor Cue’s liberal support base and President Calderón’s rightwing PAN. Nevertheless, Oaxaca remains wracked by agrarian conflicts, policed by corrupt and ineffectual law enforcement, deeply in debt and suffering from extreme flood damage and the deterioration of its infrastructure. Un- and under-employment, poverty, authoritarian regional caciques, inadequate support of education and migration continued to exist. Frequently I’m asked why “my country”—the United States—does nothing to help the people of Oaxaca “except to beat and deport poor workers who are trying to keep their families from starving.” I have no doubt that had military police in Cuba, or Venezuela, or Iran, launched as brutal an attack against its civilian population as Mexican soldiers and federal police did against Oaxacan citizens in 2006 the U.S. government would have spared no efforts to demand reparations and justice. The United States’ backing of Calderón and Calderon’s support of Governor Ruiz enforced an authoritarian status quo against all attempts to modify it. In many peoples’ minds that made the government of the United States a partner in the oppression and human rights violations, an enemy of the people, as corrupt and totalitarian as Governor Ruiz. Meanwhile media propaganda continues to identify the protests as leftist-led, a threat to the nation’s stability and a dangerous precedent for other repressed groups in Latin America. The governments of both Mexico and the United States reacted as though the Popular Assembly’s unifying the way it did—suddenly, forcefully, with shared goals and effective means of achieving them—could have expanded into a national movement that would have altered the way the country was being governed—and altered U.S. economic and political control of one of its two conservative allies in Latin America. Oaxaca, like the country of which it is a microcosm, continues to be a tinderbox that could erupt at any moment. First published in Southern Pacific Review.
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