[OPE-L] situation in Oaxaca (and a question about Chiapas)

glevy@PRATT.EDU

Elsewhere in Mexico: I realize that few members of this list watched the
"Miss Universe" contest from Mexico City on Monday night. I wouldn't have
either but family members had it on the television.  There was a rather
long (and very bad) segment about Chiapas - lauding it as a tourist
destination.  I wonder (perhaps John H knows): were there any protests
against the contest in Chiapas when they were filming segments for the
show?

In solidarity, Jerry

San Francisco Bay Guardian online

<http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=3711&catid=4&volume_id=254&issue_id=297&volume_num=41&issue_num=34
Too quiet in Oaxaca

This Mexican city's volcano of popular unrest has cooled -- but further
eruptions are expected

By John Ross

OAXACA, OAXACA (May 27th) -- On the first anniversary of the beginning of
last summer's feverish uprising here, the city's jewel-box plaza which had
been occupied for seven months by striking teachers and their allies in
the Oaxaca Peoples' Popular Assembly (APPO) from May until October when
federal police forced them into retreat, shimmered in the intense spring
sunbeams. The only massive police presence on view was the city police
department's orchestra tootling strident martial airs to a shirt-sleeved
crowd of gaffers. Here and there, handfuls of burley state cops,
sweltering in bulletproof vests and helmets in hand, huddled in the shade
quaffing aguas frescas (fruit water) and flirting with the senoritas.

Evidence of last summer's occupation has been obliterated. Surrounding
government buildings have been scrubbed clean of revolutionary slogans and
no marches were scheduled to commemorate last May 22nd when the teachers
first established their camp in the plaza. Indeed, militant members of
Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) were not
encamped in the stately old square for the first time since the section's
founding 27 years ago. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), the object of their fury,
was still the despotic governor of Oaxaca.

Despite the relaxation of U.S. State Department travel advisories and the
apparent calm, few tourists were strolling the cobblestone streets of
Oaxaca's historic center and the cavernous colonial hotels around the
plaza were virtually deserted.

The 2006 uprising has put a serious kibosh on the international tourist
trade, the backbone of the local economy. If the experience of San
Cristobal de las Casas after the 1994 Zapatista uprising is any lesson,
the tourist moguls will take years to recoup.

"Apparent calm" is a euphemism oft utilized to describe the uneasy lulls
that mark social upheaval in Mexico. True to the nation's volcanic
political metabolism with its fiery spurts of molten fightback and sullen,
brooding silences, the Oaxaca struggle seems to have entered into a period
of internal contemplation.

Government repression, which featured death squad killings and the jailing
of hundreds of activists, slammed the lid down on the social stew but did
not extinguish it. Discontent continues to brew and fester, the bad gas
building down below. The structures of the Popular Assembly and the
teachers union, which served to catalyze this discontent throughout 2006,
remain intact.

To be sure, the social movements that lit up red bulbs as far away as
Washington last year are not enjoying their best moments. Section 22,
which itself is a loose amalgam of left factions, is wracked with division
and dissonance, and its titular leader, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, is held in
profound contempt for having forced the strikers back into the classroom
last October and abandoning the APPO to savage government repression.

Moreover, in response to the 70,000-strong Section 22's rebellion against
the leadership of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), union
czarina Elba Esther Gordillo, a close confidante of President Felipe
Calderon, chartered a new Oaxaca local, Section 59, to diminish the
control that the militants exert over the state's classrooms.

The division has put a dent in the teachers' usual aggressive stance and
instead of walking out this past May 15th, National Teachers Day, when new
contracts are negotiated, Section 22 tentatively accepted a 4.8 percent
base wage increase (above the 3.7 percent Calderon had conceded to other
sectors) and 122 million bonus pesos to "re-zone" Oaxaca for cost of
living increases in this tourism-driven state.

Although the "maestros" did participate in a two-day boycott of classes in
May to protest the Calderon government's privatization of government
workers pension funds, whether the teachers will take part in an
indefinite national walk-out June 1st that has been called by dissident
education workers organized in the Coordinating Body of Education Workers
or CNTE, remains unresolved at press time.

Nonetheless, the teachers' disaffection with Ulises remains strong and
Section 22 spokesperson Zenen Reyes last week (May 23rd) called upon the
teachers and the APPO to push for cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an
"indigenous" dance festival in July that has become Oaxaca's premier
tourist attraction. Last year, the strikers and the APPO destroyed scenery
and denied access to the spectacle, forcing URO to suspend the gala event.
In its place, activists reclaimed this millennial tradition of Indian
cultural interchange by staging a "popular" Guelaguetza in the part of the
city they were occupying, and plans are afoot to repeat that celebration
this year.

The Oaxaca Popular Peoples Assembly, which came together after the
governor sent a thousand police to drive the maestros out of the plaza
last June 14th and which at one time included representatives of the
state's 17 distinct Indian peoples and many of the 400 majority indigenous
municipalities plus hundreds of grassroots organizations, is equally
fractured. Having borne the brunt of the repression - 26 killed, 30
disappeared, hundreds imprisoned - the Popular Assembly has been reduced
to a defensive posture when only months ago it was an aggressive lightning
rod for social discontent.

Even more debilitating than the government crackdown has been the prospect
of upcoming local elections August 7th to choose 42 members of the Oaxaca
legislature and October 5th balloting for 157 non-Indian municipal
presidents (majority indigenous municipalities elect their presidents via
traditional assemblies.) While the APPO considers that its goals transcend
the electoral process and rejects alliance with the political parties,
some Popular Assembly leaders engage in a quirky dance with the
left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which last July
almost catapulted Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) into the presidency.

Prominent APPO mouthpiece Flavio Sosa, jailed by Calderon as his first
political prisoner, is a former Oaxaca party leader and the PRD has
mobilized to achieve his release.

Perhaps the cruelest blow the APPO and the striking teachers struck
against Ulises came during July 2nd 2006 presidential elections. Although
URO had promised the long-ruling (77 years - at least in Oaxaca)
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a million votes for his political
godfather Roberto Madrazo, the popular movement inflicted the voto del
castigo (punishment vote) against the PRI, handing the state to AMLO's
presidential bid in addition to electing both PRD senators and nine out of
11 federal representatives to the new congress for the first time ever.

The left party seemed positioned to bump Ruiz again in 2007 by taking the
state legislature and neutralizing the tyrannical governor's clout. But
instead of rewarding the APPO and Section 22 for having dumped the PRI in
2006, the party has responded by excluding activists from its candidate
lists.

"If, at one time, there was hope that elections could provide a solution
to the conflict, exclusion of the APPO has canceled them," writes Luis
Hernandez Navarro who follows Oaxaca closely for the national daily La
Jornada.

One Oaxaca-based PRD insider who preferred not to be named confides that
APPO activists were vetoed by the left party's national leadership least
front-page photos of the candidates hurling rocks during last summer's
altercations lend credence to the perpetual allegations of the PRI and
Calderon's right-wing PAN that the PRD is "the part of violence." Most
local candidacies were distributed in accordance with the laws of PRD
nepotism and amongst the party's myriad "tribes."

The exclusion of the APPO activists so infuriated 50 members of grassroots
organizations led by Zapotec Indian spokesperson Aldo Gonzalez that they
stormed the PRD's Oaxaca city headquarters May 18th, leaving its fa�ade
a swirl of spray-painted anguish. The failure to select candidates from
the popular movement, Gonzalez and others charge, throws the elections to
URO, suggesting that the PRD has cut a deal with the APPO's arch enemy.

Given the hostilities the upcoming elections have sparked so far, the
August and October balloting could well signal another "voto del castigo"
- this time against the PRD.

The election season was in full swing by mid-Spring in Oaxaca. PRD leader
Felix Cruz, who had just coordinated Lopez Obrador's third tour of the
Mixteca mountains (AMLO was conspicuously absent during last summer's
struggle), was gunned down in Ejutla de Crespo on May 21st. Juan Antonio
Robles, a direction of the Unified Triqui Liberation Movement (MULT), a
participating organization in the APPO, met a similar fate the next day.
That same week, a car carrying a local candidate for Elba Esther
Gordillo's New Alliance Party was riddled with gunfire along the coast.
Drug gang killings have also jacked up the homicide rate in the state -
under Ulises' governance, drugs and drug gangs have flourished.

Meanwhile, in classic "cacique" (political boss) style, the PRI governor
is out and about dishing up the pork to buy votes, passing out cardboard
roofing and kilos of beans, building roads to nowhere and bridges where
there are no rivers to cross, to pump up his electoral clientele. Gifting
opposition leaders with pick-up trucks to enlist their allegiances is a
favorite URO gambit, notes Navarro Hernandez.

Despite the ambitions of some of its members, the APPO is not enthusiastic
about participating in the electoral process. At a statewide congress in
February, APPO members were allowed to run for public office as
individuals and only if they resign from any organizational function.

Miguel Cruz, an APPO activist and member of the directive of the CIPO-RFM
or Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magon (Flores
Magon was a Oaxaca-born anarchist leader during the Mexican revolution) is
not a partisan of the electoral process. Seated in the CIPO's open-air
kitchen out in Santa Lucia del Camino, a rural suburb of Oaxaca city where
police gunned down U.S. journalist Brad Will last October, Miguel explains
his disdain for how the elections have split the APPO "when they were
supposed to bring us together.

"Everyone is working on their own agendas now and the so-called leaders
are all looking for a 'hueso" (literally 'bone' - political appointment.)
This is a crying shame. The APPO is a mass movement, not a political
party. Our consciences are not for sale."

June 14th, the day last year Ulises sent a thousand heavily armed police
to unsuccessfully take the plaza back from the striking teachers, is a
crucial date. The APPO and Section 22 are planning one of their famous
mega-marches which last summer sometimes turned out hundreds of thousands
of citizens. Will June 14th signal a resurgence of massive resistance and
if it does, will the popular leadership be able to restrain hotter heads
and government provocateurs that last November gave the federal police the
pretext to beat and round up hundreds? Miguel Cruz is hopeful the APPO
will persevere. "Whatever the 'leaders' do and say, the APPO lives down at
the bases."

Up the steep, windy hill in San Pablo Etla, where the cognoscenti live
above the hurly-burly on the streets of Oaxaca, political guru Gustavo
Esteva views the popular struggle down below geologically. "The popular
movement in Oaxaca is like an active volcano" he writes in La Jornada,
"last year when it erupted, the movement left its mark in the form of
molten lava trails. Now the lava has cooled and formed a cap of porous
rock that marks the point through which the internal pressure will find
its way to break through to the surface again."

John Ross is in Mexico City hot on the trail of Brad Will's killers and
re-immersing himself in the real world. Write him at johnross@igc.org if
you have further information.

2007-05-28 06:04:30

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