Robert Joe Stout
Apartado Postal 361
Oaxaca, Oaxaca
CP 68001 Mexico
E-mail: mexicoconamor@yahoo.com
OAXACA: PROTEST AND REPRESSION
Robert Joe Stout
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 2
Table of Contents
Introduction
SECTION I:
Chapter 1: The Battle Begins
8
Chapter 2: The Barricades
35
Chapter 3: Arrests and Assassinations
43
Chapter 4: Violent Stalemate
56
Chapter 5. The Invading Army
69
Chapter 6: Divided Society, Divided Families
82
Chapter 7: The Night of Horror
98
Chapter 8: Innocence Becomes a Crime
113
Chapter 9: Treated Like Animals
121
Chapter 10: Anger, rage, indignation
136
Chapter 11: Back to (Ab)Normal
152
SECTION II
Chapter 12: The Noble Elite
170
Chapter 13: No Farms, No Jobs, No Education
187
Chapter 14: To Emigrate Is To Survive
195
Chapter 15: The Dinosaur
208
Chapter 16: “There Has To Be Reform”
217
Chapter 17: Beautiful Laws
230
Chapter 18: Killing Pigs in a Slaughterhouse
239
Chapter 19: Land of Job
254
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 3
Conclusion: “As Invisible as the Ghosts”
277
Postscript
284
Epilogue
286
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 4
Introduction
“Oaxaca never emerged from the Middle Ages. Living here is like living
in a medieval kingdom,” Sara Mendez, director of the Oaxaca, Mexico Human
Rights Network, told a human rights delegation in December, 2006. That she
was speaking figuratively nevertheless expressed the feelings and observations
of many of us who have had to deal with the corruption, abject poverty and
law enforcement impunity that vitiated the state.
For six years (2004-2010) this medieval kingdom was ruled by a political
adventurer named Ulisés Ruiz. His principal executioner was “El Chucky,” nee
José Franco, who in the minds of many residents bore a remarkable
resemblance to the Hollywood thriller killer. Franco functioned as King
(Governor) Ruiz’s Secretary General until he became head of the state of
Oaxaca’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Ruiz’s supposed heir to
the throne. He fell into disfavor near the end of Ruiz’s six-year reign, primarily
because of the notoriety his association with paramilitary bands had aroused
but also because he was accused of falsifying his educational credentials.
Ruiz and Chucky controlled a compliant legislature, the judiciary and the
state’s finances. Several outspoken opposition candidates and leaders were
assassinated without any prosecution of their killers. Ruiz’s control of Oaxaca,
a state the size of Indiana sprawled across Mexico’s southern coast and divided
by two steep mountain ranges, duplicated that of sixteenth-century Spanish
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 5
conquistadors with local and tribal chieftains endowed with political and
economic control of the disparate regions. Many of these caciques belonged to
and were leaders of indigena communities who exercised total control of the
distribution of resources, finances and electoral processes within their domains.
Vesting so much power in the executive branch of government “killed
dissent,” Mendez contended. It also nourished large scale corruption in
business, the judicial system and political elections. The repression of dissent,
often violent, and the federal government’s shielding of extralegal activities left
King Ulisés free to do as he pleased as long as he supported Mexican
presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón in national matters.
Oaxaca artist Hugo Tovar described Ruiz’s first two years as governor as
a time of constant repression. Government agents terrorized many indigena
autonomous communities, arresting and/or causing the disappearances of
those who spoke out against or did not cooperate with PRI-dominated local
authorities. PRI communities aggressively attacked neighboring areas that had
voted against the party in July 2004, kidnapping and raping women, destroying
buildings and ripping out crops.
“I could picture something drastic happening,” a teacher from the
Indigenous Promoters and Teachers of Oaxaca attested. “You could feel the
indignation, the anger, and the more of it that you felt the worse the
repression seemed to get.”
On June 14, 2006 the rumbling volcano erupted. Oaxaca was never
again to be the same.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 6
In presenting this explosion and its aftermath I’ve relied heavily on
interviews and conversations with those de abajo—“those from below”—as the
Peoples’ Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) described persons who did not
hold government or political positions but who found themselves involved in
the processes transforming the state. These interviews include testimony given
by citizens who appeared before two emergency human rights delegations of
which I was a member and conversations with journalists, government
employees and other persons close to the conflict. Incorporated into this
gathering of original information are newspaper, journal and published book
accounts dealing with the events and the political and social processes that
engendered them.
With only a few exceptions the interviews and research were conducted
in Spanish. The translations are my own. Much of the material contained has
been included in or has been the basis for articles and essays of mine that
appeared in U.S. and English magazines and journals from 2007-2010. Rather
than footnote them individually I have included them in the bibliography, which
also references articles and essays written and published by other educators,
journalists and witnesses to the events.
The first half of the book details the dramatic events beginning with the
police action ordered by Governor Ruiz to break up a camp-in by Oaxaca’s
Section 22 of the national education workers union, the formation of the
formidable social protest that the breakup aroused and the federal armed
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 7
repression that occurred five months later. The chapters that compose Section
II describe and analyze the social structure, history and living conditions that
preceded these events and summarize the aftermath of the militarized police
action. In the conclusion I relate Oaxaca’s situation to national and
international circumstances that have impeded and/or transmuted reportage of
these events and the importance that they have assumed in present day
Mexico.
Mexican journalist Diego Enrique Osorio described the events in Oaxaca
as “the first insurrection of the twenty-first century” intimating that other
insurrections were to come—an intimation that proved to be true. To many
people in Mexico the protest in Oaxaca—popular, spontaneous, pacific—was a
model, an inspiration, for what a grass roots movement could achieve. But to
many in the establishment—those in power—it was so threatening that they
crushed other incipient movements and popular protests without questioning
their validity or what had prompted their appearance.
”We won,” a protester who spent seven months in prison told me after
King Ulisés and his PRI consorts were resoundingly defeated in the 2010
gubernatorial elections. “Now to see what the future brings.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 8
SECTION I
Chapter 1: The Battle Begins
Mendez insists that Ruiz fraudulently won the governorship in 2004, an
assertion that many Oaxacans aver is true. Among irregularities reported by
Oaxaca’s daily Noticias and various human rights and election observers were
precincts in which more votes were cast for Ruiz than eligible voters in those
precincts, bags of ballots stolen from precincts that favored Ruiz’ opposition,
the buying of votes, physical intimidation and precincts in which every
participant was credited with voting for Ruiz despite assertions from many who
claimed that they’d marked their ballots for opposition candidates.
Once in office King Ruiz (like many rulers before him) tightened his hold
by expanding the size of the state police force and denying services to
communities that had voted for his opponents.
“You could feel the decomposition everywhere,” Mendez remembered.
“It was like living in occupied territory, like some foreigners had taken over the
state, foreigners who didn’t care what the people felt or thought.”
Helped by a legislature that rubberstamped his granting huge contracts
to construction firms, Ruiz moved many government offices out of the city of
Oaxaca’s historical district, had the hundreds-of-years-old stonework in the
city Zócalo replaced and ordered the cutting of many of the huge flowering
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 9
trees that shaded the Zócalo and Alameda (a block-square park in front of the
National Cathedral). His disregard for public opinion and the favoritism that he
showed to entrepreneurial supporters put his government at odds with large
segments of the population, including Oaxaca’s Section 22 of Mexico’s teachers
union, the National Workers in Education Syndicate (SNTE for its initials in
Spanish). Long considered throughout Mexico as one the most maverick and
non-compliant sections of the national union, which was dominated in Mexico
City by traditional PRI operatives and appointees, Section 22 consistently
challenged the failure of the state government to support education.
In May 2006 the teachers threatened to stage a sit-in in the capital
unless Ruiz’s government agreed to their demands for a reclassification of their
salary base (which would have raised the minimum wage to workers
throughout the state). There was nothing unusual about the teachers’ strike,
Mendez insisted, “that was an annual event.” But the 2006 request for
reclassification of the base salary of the state’s 70,000 member union was
more far-reaching than previous salary demands had been.1
Claiming that his government could not afford such expenditures, Ruiz
offered to have the state fund a portion of what it would cost to effect the
reclassification. The union rejected this proposal and organized a protest
march that drew over 110,000 participants, including members of the national
electricians union, the Democratic Organizations of Oaxaca’s Social Front and
various indigena groups. The demonstrators hoisted papier maché
Most Oaxacan teachers earned less than $10,000 pesos--$900 dollars—a month, out
of which they often bought supplies for their students.
1
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 10
representations of the governor that they hanged and burned in the Zócalo at
the end of the march. Ruiz responded by pulling his offer off the table and
announcing that salaries owed teachers participating in the takeover were
being cancelled.
According to Sara Mendez over 60,000 teachers initially were involved in
the protests and nearly 40,000 participated in the three-week-long sit-in. Many
family members joined them. Husbands accompanied many of the women
teachers who lived in areas a long distance away from the city of Oaxaca;
other profas brought their younger children with them since their husbands
couldn’t get off work or couldn’t leave their farms or businesses in the outlying
areas.2
Artist Francisco Toledo, founder of PRO-OAX, an organization dedicated
to bettering Oaxacan life, exhorted the government and the directors of
Section 22 of SNTE to establish a peaceful solution to “this conflict that affects
all of us” and offered his group’s negotiating services, noting that the entire
state was paralyzed by the standoff between the governor and the union. But
Ruiz had more than the teachers to worry about. He had committed not only
himself but the state of Oaxaca to PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo.
By early June national polls showed Madrazo trailing opposition candidates
2
The schools are centers of activities, not only educational but social as well, Mendez
explained. They are meeting places, work centers, centers of communication and
information. Teachers were the most influential persons in many rural communities.
Often they were the town mayors, finance officers, members of various commissions.
Because of their influence many residents respected and supported them and,
consequently, aligned themselves with the APPO.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 11
Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido Revolutionario Democrático (PRD)
and Felipe Calderón of Acción Naciónal (PAN) by substantial margins.
Both opposition parties used the “ungovernability” in Oaxaca in their
anti-PRI propaganda, focusing attention on violence occurring in the state and
the huge sit-in that Section 22 stubbornly continued to maintain. SNTE’s
national director Elba Esther Gordillo abandoned Madrazo and threw her weight
behind Calderón’s presidential bid, further aggravating political divisions within
Section 22. Some union teachers supported Gordillo, who was promised—and
received—lifetime leadership of the SNTE from Calderón. Many simply said “a
plague on all your houses!” and refused to back any of the three major
candidates.
The splits put Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda on the spot. He publicly
stated that he wanted the teachers’ demands to be met but that he didn’t want
to start a revolution or let the occupation of the Centro Historico and the blocks
that surrounded it last past Election Day, July 2. Besides establishing higher
base salaries for all teachers, he insisted that the state should devote to
education the full amount of tax monies authorized to improve rural schools,
increase the number of scholarships available to junior high school and high
school students from families with limited incomes and to provide books,
transportation and meals to those who needed them.
But like kings of old, and Mexican caciques of more recent times, Ruiz
responded to Section 22’s demands with a show of force.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 12
It was five o’clock in the morning [June 14]. Some people started
shouting—they’d gotten warning calls on their cell phones. ‘Get up! Get
up! The police are coming!’ I saw flashlights snap on. Then we heard the
helicopters. They came in so low their big rotors sent things flying
through the air. Then the whistling sounds as they fired tear gas. ‘What
are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ teachers were shouting. We
were coughing and choking, we were blinded, we tried to get our things
together, people were shouting for their children…
Then the police came. It seemed like there were thousands of
them. They were swinging their clubs, smashing everything. One of
them in front of me grabbed a little girl and hurled her against a bench.
Everyone was screaming. It was terrible. ‘Stop! What are you doing!’ I
confronted several police. I thought because I was a woman they
wouldn’t hurt me. But one of them jammed his club into my stomach so
hard I fell over. Another police kicked me, hard.
I scrambled away--the tear gas was so thick I couldn’t see where
I was going. I wanted to fight back but I had nothing to fight with.
Somehow I stumbled down a side street. I tried to call my husband on
my cell phone but when he answered all I could do was cry…” María
Elena, primary school teacher from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,
Oaxaca.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 13
Another person who witnessed the “dislodging,” as King Ruiz’s publicists
called the attack, shivered as she remembered thinking, “If they treat teachers
like that, like animals, how are they going to treat the poor of the pueblo?”
She shook her head as anger flashed through her expression.
“Worse. Worse than animals. That’s why we’re fighting back.”
According to witnesses police slashed through the crowded camp,
shredding tents and cooking facilities, firing tear gas and setting off explosive
devices that “lit up the sky like the devil’s inferno.” Two helicopters roared
across the Centro Historico’s building tops as police aboard fired tear gas
canisters directly at teachers stumbling and colliding against each other.
Despite the tear gas groups of teachers reformed. Shouting to each
other, “Don’t run!” “Man the barricades!” “Rocks! Get rocks!” they re-clustered
into resistant groups and from behind parked vehicles and the barriers they’d
set up across the intersections they fought back, hurling bottles and paving
stones, swinging mop sticks, chairs, tent poles, belts and rebar.
As daybreak shimmied through the acrid clouds of tear gas some of
defenders boarded and took over city buses, evicting drivers and passengers
and forcing the police to scatter as they accelerated towards them. This
brought most of those who’d fled back into the fray. Shouting encouragement
to each other and insults at the police they surged back through what had
been their campground and by 9:30, after nearly five hours of combat, they
regained what they felt was theirs and forced the entire contingent of over
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 14
3,000 police to evacuate the area.3 A member of Oaxaca’s municipal force
confided to me much later, “We could have shot and killed hundreds but we
had no orders. We never thought the fools would try to return.”
“It was stupendous—Oaxaca never had seen any event like it before,”
Mendez shook her head in admiration. Noticias reporter Pedro Matias called
June 14 “a parting of the waters.” Oaxaca, he prophesied, “never will be the
same.
“They [the teachers] showed the government for what it is—
authoritarian and with no concern for how most citizens live and suffer,”
teacher Genoveva López insisted.
2
What had begun as a legal sit-in—a plantón—overnight became a
massive resistance movement. Brought together by the mega-march on June
15 the representatives of over 300 separate organizations talked, urged,
argued and convoked their first reunion a week after the teachers had repelled
the armed police attack and announced the formation of the People’s Popular
Assembly of Oaxaca. Participants included indigena federations from
throughout the state, radical student and youth groups that espoused
According to Diego Enrique Osorno in Oaxaca Situated (Random House Mondadori,
Mexico, 2007) ninety-two people were hospitalized after the fray, including two who’d
been hit by gunfire. Three of them (two teachers and a student) were gravely
wounded. In addition, two women suffered miscarriages as a result of the attack.
3
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 15
revolutionary overthrow, human rights organizations and many Catholic
priests.
“It was an explosion!” a member of what became the women’s
coordinating committee told me. “One day there was nothing, the next day
there was this huge organization!”
“Mexico winning the World Cup couldn’t have generated more
enthusiasm than that first assembly!” I heard a delegate named Cabrera
exclaim.
“URO [Ulisés Ruiz Ortega] did something no other governor in Oaxaca
was able to do—he united the people,” Matias grunted. Then he added,
grinning, “United them against him!”
Most of the delegates to the APPO’s formative assembly on June 20
agreed that Oaxaca’s political system had to be changed, although not all
agreed how drastic those changes should be. However, they did agree that the
APPO would be an instrument for transforming the political and social systems
in Oaxaca non-violently. The declaration they issued included statements that
individual regional assemblies would be formed by people from all walks of life,
including campesinos, students, hourly wage earners and retirees and that
forcing URO out of office was the principal goal of the first stage of the
struggle.
“The APPO was born to obtain political and social rights,” educator and
the APPO negotiator Marcos Leyva told a December 2006 human rights
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 16
delegation. A portly, square-faced Oaxacan, one of the founders of the
Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA), Leyva explained that most of
the groups that rushed forward to support the battered teachers already had
experience dealing with caciques, repression and bureaucracy. Both he and
Cabrera perceived that the newly forming organization would be large enough
and complex enough to challenge the governor and his lackeys.
“There are thirty or forty years of integral development involved, thirty
years of learning, of working, of changes and gains and defeats behind the
formation of the APPO,” Leyva insisted. That it seemed to vault spontaneously
into life was an illusion. URO’s violent invasion of the Section 22 sit-in simply
had provided the catalyst for organized protest that had been brewing for
years.
“Oaxaca was a sleeping giant that Section 22 awakened when it formed
the APPO and the fight’s not going to go backwards,” insisted Section 22
teacher María del Carmen Vásquez. “I’m sure that the pueblo of Oaxaca isn’t
going to give up the fight until it has exterminated the anti-democratic,
authoritarian, repressive, ransacking government. We’re no longer willing to
continue living in poverty and abandonment. The teachers are witnesses to the
neglect in which the pueblos are living, for that reason we’re going to continue
fighting for the rights we have as persons.”
Many women teachers and teachers’ wives participated in occupation of
the Centro Historico. Women and women’s groups flocked to the APPO after its
formation. The movement provided an outlet for breaking the aggressive
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 17
machismo social control that had existed in Oaxaca for centuries. Professional
women like Patricia Jiménez, Dr. Bertha Muñoz, Aline Castellanos and human
rights attorneys Sara Mendez and Yésica Sánchez participated in the formation
of the influential Coordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca (COMO) whose members
were instrumental in the takeover of communications facilities and the
establishment of community barricades to obstruct night-riding escuadrones de
muerte (death squads).
But the idealistic fervor that enveloped Oaxaca didn’t expand past the
state’s borders. Nor did it include all of the state’s residents. The summer
encampment forced the cancellation of Guelaguetza, a traditional indigena
festival that over the years had developed into a commercialized tourist
attraction. Businesses and commercial activities came to a standstill and
merchants and service industries closed their doors.
“In the turbid political atmosphere following Mexico’s presidential
elections on July 2,” Laura Carlsen, director of the IRC Americas Program in
Mexico City, analyzed, “Oaxaca’s conflict has catalyzed a series of events that
threaten Mexico’s stability.”
Outgoing president Vicente Fox and president-elect Calderón shared
Carlson’s apprehensions. Despite the fact that Ruiz belonged to an opposition
party they ignored reports of killings and kidnappings by government-created
death squads, just as they were ignoring Zapatista protests about failures to
live up to signed accords and about intrusions by paramilitaries in Chiapas.
Federal officials refused to negotiate a settlement, sloughing off the teachers’
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 18
strike and formation of the APPO as a “state matter” that state officials needed
to take care of. As demanding as the situation in Chiapas seemed to be Fox
and Calderón wanted to minimize publicity that non-government-controlled
media was spreading around the world.4
“Because there were teachers and professors and professional people
involved [in the formation of the APPO] and because we are Mexicans and
Mexicans love words there were a lot of proclamations, a lot of avowals of
purpose and justifications, particularly during those first few weeks,” an
Autonomous Benito Juarez de Oaxaca University (UABJO) professor
remembered, “a lot of duplication. But probably they were important—they
gave participants a sense of having a voice.”
The assembly agreed to adopt the traditional pre-Hispanic usos y
costumbres system of making policy decisions at gatherings in which the
delegates of all the affiliated organizations would have an equal voice. Over
6,500 participated in the forum that determined that the APPO would advocate
reorganizing the state in ways that would conform to indigena concepts of
communal participatory rule. Journalist Matias called this pre-Columbia
philosophy “the soul of the APPO movement.” Basically it engendered:
Guelaguetza (“sharing”) The word derives from the Zapotec and dictates
that individuals share with others in the community the prosperity that the
gods have granted;
Both Oaxacan and federal officials voiced suspicions that defeated PRD presidential
candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador was behind the APPO. Several appistas who
were sequestered and tortured by paramilitaries stated that their captors had insisted
that they confess that they were being paid by López Obrador and his party, the PRD.
4
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 19
Tequio, required unpaid work done for and with others to benefit the
community;
Asemblea, or assembly, in which all the heads of households participate
and in which all community decisions are made; and
Cargos, community positions—policeman, mayor, fiesta manager,
treasurer, etc.—which are redistributed every year among heads of
households.
It also defined all Oaxacans as “hombres y mujeres del maíz” who
shared a rich cultural heritage connected to Mother Earth and endorsed
regional distinctions: foods, celebrations, handicrafts and traditions which the
government’s mass market practices had reduced to mere folkloric
spectaculars that had nothing to do with their cultural and religious origins.
To many observers the APPO appeared to be a government within a
government totally removed from the PRI-run state. It had its own
constitution, its own bylaws, its own communications system, its own police
force to marshal the mega-marches and prevent participants from painting
walls with graffiti or destroying property. As a governing unit the movement
formed a “state council” that included representatives of the indigena
organizations, campesino, student, worker and transportation groups, small
business owners and civil and social non-governmental institutions. Political
prisoners and those against whom orders of apprehension had been filed were
accorded “honorary” council membership as well.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 20
Nevertheless, many organizations and individuals that identified with the
APPO and/or opposed Ulisés Ruiz found it difficult to explain exactly what the
APPO was or by what mechanisms it operated. EDUCA’s Miguel Vásquez
admitted that this inability to define the new conglomeration hampered its
ability to deal with the media and with government agencies.
“There is no leader, there is no philosophy, what they do and what
they’ve done makes no sense whatsoever!” Spanish journalist Jacobo García
expostulated to a 2007 Oaxaca book fair audience as he described his attempts
to cover the APPO for El Mundo of Barcelona. “What are their goals? No one
can explain them! What did they hope to achieve? It’s impossible to tell!”
García contrasted the APPO uprising with that of the Zapatistas in 1994
which he also covered for El Mundo. That the Zapatistas had a charismatic
leader who clearly could state revolutionary goals enabled foreign
correspondents to provide sympathetic coverage. The APPO’s “revolution, if
that’s what the hell it is,” lacked “organization and direction” and was
“chaotically murky,” the veteran El Mundo correspondent insisted.
But for those who had lived in Oaxaca for many years the APPO’s
multiple leadership and determination to have major decisions made by
assembly vote opened public life in ways that previously hadn’t existed. For the
first time in the state’s history an anti-establishmentarian movement
advocated equality of race and gender and gave equal participation to indigena
and women’s organizations.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 21
It also attracted thousands belonging to “a new generation of high
school and university students sick of getting short shrift from governments
impoverished by structural adjustment and corruption,” Laura Carlsen
reported. Mothers who’d placed their hopes on their children becoming well
enough educated to earn decent wages, revolted by the brutal aggressions
against teachers whom they respected and whom they hoped their children
would emulate, joined the marches and the women’s groups that formed
within the APPO.
Outsiders and non-conformists who had been elbowed to the fringes of
society, hassled by police and repudiated by monied society, found expression
with the APPO—if only by spray painting anti-URO slogans on walls and
sidewalks. Those flocking to join the marches often described discovering “new
life,” “hope,” “a light in the darkness.”
On July 16, a month after URO’s attempt to demolish the teachers’
camp-in, seventy-two civil organizations and the Oaxaca-based chapter of the
Centro de Investigaciones and Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social
(CIESAS) presented the Mexican legislature with a legal document urging it to
remove URO from office. Many of those involved believed the federal
government would respond by replacing URO with a current or former PRI
deputy or senator, thus permitting the state and its residents to meld back into
their daily routines. But URO had support enough from the PRI, particularly
former party head Roberto Madrazo, his long-time “patrón,” to withstand
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 22
legislative moves against him. The legislature took the matter “under
advisement” and the complaint fluttered off to be archived.
At that same time the newly formed the APPO voted to stage a
Guelaguetza Popular, a traditional fiesta that the government and
entrepreneurs had remodeled into a lucrative tourist event. URO had called off
the government-sponsored version because thousands of tourist cancellations
had made staging it financially impossible. The city’s polytechnic university
granted the APPO use of its soccer stadium; indigenous musicians and dancers
from throughout Oaxaca’s seven regions performed before a reported “dozens
of thousands” of spectators who attended free of charge.
“It was marvelous! It was ‘guelaguetza’ in the real meaning of the
word—sharing,” a participant in the 2006 “People’s Guelaguetza” who later had
orders of apprehension filed against him for his the APPO activities told me:
That’s what the authentic pre-Spanish ‘guelaguetza,’ was all
about. At the end of the year the peoples of a community would come
together, those who had acquired the most during the year shared with
those who had acquired less—corn, chickens, whatever—and they would
come together, the entire community, and dance and sing and there
would be food and drink and laughter—much laughter. And the dances
had meaning—they described the plantings and the harvests and the
seasons—the sun and moon and rain and earth. For the first time since
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 23
anybody could remember here in the city there was a festival like that—
for the people, not for making lots of money from tourists.
EDUCA’s Miguel Vázquez categorized the APPO’s approach to politics and
government as “new and unusual” because it proposed a horizontal instead of
a vertical system in which all participants had equal voice. “We are the APPO
and the APPO is us,” emerged as a defining slogan.
The newly formed conglomeration of NGOs, civic and communal
organizations, students and would be revolutionaries reinforced the teachers’
takeover of the city of Oaxaca’s central business and residential districts,
issued policy statements and ultimatums and catalogued malfeasances of
URO’s two-year reign as well as those of governors who preceded him. To
demonstrate their unity and singularity of purpose they staged “megamarches” that jammed the city of Oaxaca’s streets with hundreds of thousands
participants. According to Pedro Matias, between 800,000 and one million
marchers overflowed into the Zócalo and surrounding areas during the fourth
of these mega-marches on June 28, 2006.
“As I watched those tremendous numbers of people expressing their will
I wanted both to laugh and to cry,” Matias told the Rights Action emergency
human rights delegation. “This pueblo agravado—these oppressed people—
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 24
coming together en mass to demonstrate their needs, their desires. It was
overwhelming to see, to watch.”5
“There was this tremendous voluntad, this desire to create, to forge
something new,” a teacher from the Coalición de Maestros y Promotores
Indígenas de Oaxaca (CMPIO) remembered. “You could feel it in the air, it was
something that made people want to participate, to challenge and not be
afraid.” As news about the APPO and its marches spread, “Oaxaca became
more than artesanias and mescal,” he insisted. Letters, telegrams and e-mails
flooded in from throughout the world.
“The pueblo wanted to participate!” a COMO activist named Itandehui
described the thousands of women who joined the marches and
demonstrations. The majority of them never had involved themselves in
protests before, or taken part in any political activities.
More experienced but equally exuberant were members of various social
and political organizations whose small memberships had limited their abilities
to demonstrate effectively until the APPO formed. They included the Frente
Popular Revolucionario (FPR), a national organization accused of being a
political front for the underground Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR), which
both Mexico and the United States officially labeled a terrorist group. During
the marches some FPR participants lofted huge banners depicting Lenin and
Stalin; many within the APPO resented their outspoken Marxism but adhering
5
Other estimates of the number of participants were lower than Matias’ but the most
conservative of them confirmed that at least 500,000 participated. (The city of
Oaxaca’s population is slightly less than that).
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 25
to the APPO’s stated philosophy of open admittance they had to accept their
presence.
Also claiming Marxist foundations were members of Partida Obrera
Socialista (POS), a group with an international membership that originated in
Nicaragua. Like the FPR they maintained a high profile during the marches and
sold copies of their publication El Socialista, published in Mexico City. Members
of the Partido Comunista Marxista-Leninista de Mexico (PCMLM) also
participated. While the percentage of Marxist organizations participants was
minimal compared to the hundreds of thousands of mega-marchers, their
visible presence fortified URO publicists’ labeling of the APPO as a “leftist-led”
danger to Mexico.
3
Driven out of the city that was supposed to be his center of operations
and his police force humiliated King URO, the cacique, wielder of absolute
power, became a ruler in absentia—he barely stepped foot in the Centro
Historico for over five months and conducted state business from his
limousine, hotels and not infrequently a state-owned helicopter. To counter the
APPO’s sudden popularity he and his cohorts El Chucky and “La Bruja,”
Lizabeth Caña, the state attorney general, initiated a “Plan Hierro”’ (‘Plan of
Iron’), a counterinsurgency utilized non-uniformed police, paramilitaries and
infiltrators:
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 26
“The police stopped wearing uniforms and drove through the city in
unmarked vehicles without license plates,” Mendez explained. Non-uniformed
sicarios [hired gunmen] validated arbitrary arrests by charging APPO leaders
and sympathizers with carrying concealed weapons or selling drugs. Under the
guidance of “El Kaibil” Manuel Moreno, a Guatemalan-trained expert in
counterrevolutionary tactics and director of the city of Oaxaca’s ministerial
police, non-uniformed police and hired paramilitaries made random arrests,
overnight kidnappings and assassinations.6
Longtime Oaxaca resident María Elena Castellaños, who had contacts
both with Section 22 teachers and the wives and families of many government
officials, told me that Moreno and another police official named Aristeo López
utilized a fleet of fifteen unmarked white pickups that they parked in concealed
garages during the day and drove only at night. As escuadrones de muerte
they cruised in groups of four to eight and included, besides civilian dressed
police, various members of the labor union CROC.
“First there were threats,” twenty-three-year old Florentino López, an
APPO spokesperson, explained. “That was in June right after the APPO formed.
Then they started infiltrating our organization.” He and others affiliated with
the APPO realized they were being followed, photographed and stopped on
various pretences. Section 22 head Enrique Rueda acknowledged that from the
day the APPO formed police infiltrators pretended to be participants, not only
In Oaxaca Sitiada, journalist Diego Enrique Osorno, after a visit to Guatemalan
government authorities, confirmed that kaibiles from that country had participated
with Oaxacan paramilitaries in intimidations and murders under the Plan Hierro.
6
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 27
to report on the APPO plans and activities but as instigators of confrontations
that the police could repress with beatings and arrests. These infiltrators
learned who was active in the APPO, where they lived and who their friends
and contacts were.
“They must have taken a million photographs!” one teacher told me.
Nancy Davies, Narco News online chronicler of the APPO events, asserted that
she could pick out “the plainclothes cops by their haircuts, their posture and
the bulges under their coats.”
Meanwhile, URO´s television and radio lackeys maintained a steady
bombardment of anti-the APPO propaganda “terrorizing anyone who tried to
improve their lives,” priest Manuel Arias asserted. Verbal attacks against
human rights organizations and ad hoc citizens groups like those organized to
take food and medicines to demonstrators and political prisoners increased in
frequency and intensity. Broadcasts even condemned priests for giving medical
aid and churches for providing sanctuary to those fleeing potential torture.
“They practically were saying we’re criminals for denouncing the
repression in Oaxaca!” Father Arias complained.
Announcers for the Radio Ciudadana, which operated without a federal
license, urged parishioners not to go to mass and “not to give offerings to
maintain guerrilla priests.
“We won’t rest until these two-faced false redeemers are thrown out of
Oaxaca!” they insisted.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 28
The reportage and commentaries so angered the women who organized
a “March of the Cacerolas” (“March of the Cooking Pans”) that they
commandeered taxis and buses and invaded the television station’s facilities on
August 1. Participants that I talked to described a force of nearly 15,000
women who’d paraded through the city of Oaxaca banging the cacerolas,
demanding Ruiz’s resignation and the end to government repression.
“You could feel their enthusiasm vibrate off the buildings, they felt
strong, empowered,” one young marcher enthused. Another exclaimed, “It was
something really beautiful, seeing thousands of señoras banging their skillets.
We were waking the people of Oaxaca to what really was going on!”
“We desperately needed to communicate with each other, and with the
public, with people who didn’t know what the APPO was, or why we were doing
what we were doing,” Samu Hernández explained the women’s insistence on
trooping en masse to the television station. URO’s propaganda machine had
convinced residents that the Section 22 teachers were lazy and had organized
the sit in and closed the schools because they didn’t want to work and that the
APPO was controlled by outside revolutionary forces connected to the EPR and
to López Obrador radicals from Mexico City.
“We hadn’t planned to take over Channel nine,” activist Itandehui
admitted. “But enthusiasm really was bubbling after the march. We felt we had
to do something more than we’d done. Suggestions went flying back and forth.
‘We should go on television!’ somebody exclaimed. ‘We can’t! The government
controls channel nine!’ ‘We need to make them listen to us!’ ‘How?’ ‘We can
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 29
ask them.’ ‘Ask them hell! We should just tell them!’ ‘Yeah! Demand that they
give us air time.’ ‘Hey, yes! An hour to give our side of the story!’ ‘Right on!
Let’s do it!’
“We looked around at each other. We were really pumped up. ‘Let’s do it
now!’ somebody shouted. Hundreds in unison agreed, ‘Let’s do it! Let’s do it
now!’”
“Oh God! It was beautiful!” a young participant named Antoneta
remembered. “We knew we could do it. We knew we had the power!”
“‘Take us to channel nine!’ we told the bus drivers. They looked shocked
but they chased their other passengers off and we piled on, hundreds of us,”
Samu Hernández grinned as she described the events. “There were cops
there—they saw us—but they were afraid of us, as they should have been, we
were determined women!”
“We asked for an hour of air time to explain what APPO was about,” she
told me. “They said ‘no,’ we insisted, ‘yes’ and wound up taking over the
station.”
(Marcos Leyva laughingly asserted during an interview four months
later, “An hour for a Oaxacan woman can last three months!”)
The takeover was eminently peaceful. The channel nine broadcasting
personnel simply left the station, assuming that the cacerolas women would do
the same when it became apparent that they could not broadcast without
technical help.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 30
“But we asked, threatened, begged” the technicians to establish
telecasting signals before they left, Itandehui explained. “None of us knew
anything about running a television station but, you know what? You get a
group of women like us together, we’re not afraid of anything! We can figure
out ways to make things work!”
Figuring out how to make telecasting work proved to be less difficult
than many of the women imagined. Within hours young communications
students from the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca were on
hand to manipulate the equipment. The “new channel nine” went on the air.
“Our joy was overwhelming!” Itandehui enthused. “To see the chicas
from the university operating the equipment was so inspiring! So much more
than we ever could have imagined!”
“At two o’clock that morning we were inside the station singing!” The
memories still were fresh in Antoneta’s mind six months later. “It was shared
emotion and it was enormous, something really, really impresionante!
“I felt ‘We are! We can!’ It was our channel! Now it belonged to the people of
Oaxaca!”
The first thing the new entrepreneurs did was announce that the station
and its telecasts were totally open to public access. They invited participation
and suggestions “and you don’t have to be professionals, just citizens who
want to get your voices heard,” inexperienced but enthusiastic announcers
added.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 31
Certain that if they left the station unoccupied they would lose it, the
cacerolas women sought Section 22 support. The teachers union responded.
Teachers and the APPO members spent their nights guarding the facility, “the
men outside and we women inside,” Samu Hernández remembered.
From August 1 until August 21 the “new” channel nine telecast
documentaries they acquired from the local university, the APPO news and
interviews with Oaxaca residents. According to Oaxaca educator Jonathan Teal
the number of viewers tripled. Throughout the viewing area people talked
about what they’d seen, about how real the untrained but dedicated
announcers seemed (“not like the lifeless marionettes we see on Televisa,” a
Oaxaca travel agent told me) and how stimulating it was to see local people
giving their opinions and sharing their worries and concerns.
Government agents and paramilitaries intervened wherever they could.
They sabotaged TV relay towers, followed and threatened persons going to the
station (including those carrying food) and provided announcers and
interviewers for national telecasts with “information” that linked the takeover
with leftist plots and revolutionary attempts to overthrow the legally elected
government. One night paramilitaries (or police) fired a tear gas canister at the
station. It rebounded off the outer wall and the husband of one of the women
ripped off his shirt and cap and dove on the canister, covering it to keep the
gas from spreading.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 32
“We knew there would be repercussions,” Samu Hernández sighed, “but
you can’t let fear stop you. One has to take chances in order to get something
done!”
The repercussions hit with decisive force on August 21. Nearly seventy
heavily armed paramilitaries broke past the APPO defenders and destroyed the
station’s antenna and telecasting equipment. According to longtime Oaxaca
resident María Elena Castellaños, a plump round-faced woman whose favorite
gesture while talking was to fling a huge beaded scarf from one shoulder to the
other, estimated the attacking force at fifty, all of them armed and many who’d
climbed the hill on foot. Shortly after three a.m. they opened fire, forcing the
few defenders to flee after one of them, a fifty-eight-year-old teacher named
Sergio Vale, collapsed, wounded by heavy caliber bullets. George Salzman,
who climbed Fortín hill to the antenna the following day, told me he counted
“hundreds” of high caliber bullet holes in the station’s operating equipment.
News of the attack crackled throughout the city.
“What are we going to do?’ those of us involved with channel nine asked
each other,” Leyla Centeno slapped her fist against her open palm as she
recalled the women’s desperation. An energetic whippet scarcely five feet tall,
with flashing eyes and glistening hair that she continually whipped away from
her forehead while she talked, she typified the spirit that made defying state
and federal authorities possible. “It was the dead of night but we got on our
cell phones, we talked to each other. ‘Why don’t we do this?’ ‘Why don’t we try
that?’ We realized that there was no way we could repair the antenna and we
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 33
needed something to replace it. Somebody suggested taking over a radio
station. Somebody else suggested, ‘Why not take over all of them?’
“Why not?
“In cars, in cabs, we careened through the city, there must have been
hundreds of us. By five that morning we’d taken over all twelve of the city’s
radio stations. You can’t imagine the joy we felt! It was tremendous! Despite
the death squads, despite the destruction of the channel nine antenna, we had
something that we desperately needed. Taking over the radio stations was a
defensive maneuver. It was a way for us to fight back.”
To impede excursions by esquadrones de muerte the teachers and their
APPO supporters barricaded the streets that surrounded the principal AM
station—Radio Ley--that they decided to keep as the voice of APPO. (For
several weeks following their takeover the APPO and the women’s organization
to which most of the March of the Cacerolas women belonged, the Coordinora
de Mujeres de Oaxaca (COMO), also broadcast from AM 1120, Radio Oro, but
for lack of technicians, broadcasters and security guards they decided to retain
only Radio Ley, located in Colonia Reforma, a large primarily residential area
close to the Centro Historico.
Not only did the March of the Cacerolas and the takeover of Oaxaca’s
communications systems play an integral part in the APPO’s five-month control
of the state, it empowered thousands of women to realize that they could
exercise their rights, achieve and even dictate policies and prerogatives. Over
half of the active participants in the APPO were women. They were the glue
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 34
that kept the APPO together, numerous delegates of the movement told me.
Other male participants admitted they might have dropped out “but how could
I? They were out there confronting the police, maintaining the barricades,
doing so much I would have been ashamed not to keep on going.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 35
Chapter 2: The Barricades
The idea of setting up “defensive” barricades after the takeover of the
radio stations “spread like wildfire,” Sara Mendez acknowledged. She told me
that over 1,000 barricades were erected. Oaxaca, Tiempo Nublado reported
1,800 in the city of Oaxaca alone but Leyla Centeno, effervescent with
enthusiasm, insisted, “Within two days there were 1,000 barricades. By the
third day after we took over Radio Ley there were 3,000!”
The barricades transformed the city—and much of the state for
communities throughout the wide central valley blockaded major highways as
well. Teacher Ruth Guzmán asked in Voces de la Valentia en Oaxaca “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.”
Photographs taken during August 2006 show burned out bus and truck
shells pushed across intersections, mounds of burning tires, huge rocks topped
with tires, canastas filled with rocks and other debris stacked on top of each
other, private cars parked across roadways, sheets of lamina propped against
oil barrels, bonfires heaped with old lumber and barbed wire strung from lamp
poles. Almost all were manned by the APPO supporters, the majority of whom
were women. Radios blared, many tuned to the APPO broadcasts and others to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 36
music stations. Reinforcements and replacements stumbled through at all
hours of the night. Every morning the appistas removed the obstacles they had
set up to let daytime traffic pass. So effective were the barricades in limiting
nighttime circulation that APPO organizer Arturo Díaz missed a meeting
because, as he shouted over his cell phone, “I can’t get out of my colonia! I
can’t get through the barricades!”
It seemed to me like things had gone past being normal. It was
grotesque to have to fight, and not against the state but against the
para-state…And we’re not a little group, like it says on television, we
Oaxacans are defending our integrity, defending ourselves against the
arbitrariness we live under. How can one fight this illegality? To whom
can we complain? To whom can we take our accusations? Oh, we all
know who, the problem is to prove it.7
Section 22 teachers intent on defending the sprawling conglomeration of
tents, communal kitchens and improvised shelters they had set up in the
historical district established some of the first barricades. (“Not that we had a
choice,” a teacher told me later. “The union made assignments and took role.”)
As the barricades multiplied throughout the city the majority of those manning
them were “everyday citizens without political connections, housewives,
members of various teenaged gangs,” APPO counselor David Venegas
7
Guzmán, Ruth in Voces de la Valentia en Oaxaca, Oaxaca, 2006
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 37
explained. (“People who didn’t have to go to work every morning!” an annoyed
storekeeper told me.)
High school dropouts and construction gophers, energetic and eager to
do anything (including create “bazookas” out of construction tubes to fire
skyrockets) also took up the cause. Venegas admitted being concerned that
the gangs would continue their turf battles at the barricades but quite to the
contrary they dropped old antagonisms and came together with each other and
with the “señoras that before had called the police or shouted ‘rateros!’ and
now became their mamás.”
The nightly repetition of setting up barriers (usually at ten o’clock) and
removing them shortly after dawn became “a household chore,” a sixty-two old
great-grandmother described helping to push an old pickup loaded with rocks
across the intersection where her barricade was located and buffering it on
each side with stacks of discarded tires chained together. Not only did the
barricadistas perform that repetitive chore but at least some of them had to
stay awake “easier for the chavos (youths) than us grandmas,” she laughed.
Many who didn’t spend the night guarding the barriers that had been set up
brought food to those who did, or helped erect the obstacles and take them
down.
Each barricade had its own personality, its own objectives and its own
rules. Those manned by university students and punkeros tended to be
militantly aggressive. The young activists stopped motorists and pedestrians,
demanded to know their names, where they lived and where they were going,
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 38
and often denied them passage. Some Oaxaqueños claimed that the barricade
guards were “worse than the police” for the aggressive manner in which they
forced those in cars to step outside their vehicles, identify themselves, state
why they were violating curfew and where they lived.
Persons returning home late from work, or from fiestas, or from funeral
wakes, often had to go through these procedures three or four times at three
or four different barricades before they could reach their homes. Many simply
rolled up their car windows, locked the doors and curled up on the seats to get
what sleep they could before the precocious barricadistas lifted the obstacles
after sunrise the following morning.
A thirty-three old mother of two voiced the sentiments of many non-the
APPO involved Oaxaca citizens, saying
I was sympathetic in a way, I mean with the teachers. But after
dark we couldn’t get through to our house. We had to park blocks away.
Twice parts from the car were stolen—mirrors, windshield wipers—and
once somebody drained out the gasoline and my husband had to walk a
long way to fill a can at a service station and on the way back he tripped
and badly bruised his knee.
I was afraid to walk alone at night. The children were afraid. The
barricades made everything difficult. Going to the store. Friends couldn’t
come to visit. I kept saying to my husband, ‘There has to be some other
solution!’ It was like living in an occupied city, like we were hostages. I
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 39
was glad when the police and soldiers tore the barricades down. I hate
to say it, but I was glad!
The barricades that blocked major thoroughfares leading into and out of
the city stretched from one side of the four-lane highways to the other. The
barricadistas’ vehicles, flaming oil barrels and construction equipment
prohibited passage by both incoming and outgoing traffic. But after midnight
the neighborhood mothers tending smaller residential barricades often reopened the streets they had blocked in order to take their children home and
put them to bed.
“People didn’t sleep, they kept their radios on all night,” Leyla Centeno
remembered. Despite government attempts to interrupt the signals, or jam
them with static, the news, warnings and comments broadcast by Radio Ley’s
volunteer announcers became an every-night part of barricades life.
”It was like a heartbeat, something pulsing through Oaxaca, like it was
part of you and you were part of it,” one participant remembered. Another: “It
was the glue that kept us together…” And still another: “It belonged to us, the
people, not the caciques, not the government…”
What gossip, information and communication with children, partners and
business couldn’t be flashed over the radio was transmitted by cell phone. A
young mother named Leticia Bautista told me, “It (our barricade) was like an
insane asylum. Everybody talking, nobody listening because they had cells
pegged to their ears.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 40
A resident of Colonia Reforma, the area in which Radio Ley was located,
remembered, “One morning, like at two o’clock, I heard this frantic knocking. I
opened the door and peeked out. A desperate voice begged, ‘Please! Please!
Can you recharge my cellular?’ and thrust it through the door. Whoever it was
woke me up later and I gave her the phone. Immediately, as she thanked me,
she started making calls.”
A downtown city of Oaxaca merchant told me that sales of cell phone
and cell phone time was one of the few businesses that prospered during the
Popular Assembly takeover. (They also were one of the first items that police
and paramilitaries took away from those they apprehended.)
But to call by cell phone meant knowing someone’s number and often it
was difficult for those at Radio Ley to give specific directions about the
escuadrones de muertes’ movements. But “we could trace where the sicarios
were moving by watching where skyrockets were bursting,” an activist named
Claudia laughed.8 Other barricadistas banged loudly on cooking pans when
they detected potential problems.
When nightriders seized three Popular Assembly members and carted
them to Pueblo Nuevo, which Venegas identified as “a priista colonia,” over a
thousand Assembly supporters responded to calls for help and headed towards
the colonia, “an extremely strong communal experience” that brought
teachers, punketas, laborers and women together for a common purpose.
The manufacture of skyrockets is a popular cottage industry in southern Mexico; they
often are surreptitiously fabricated in colonias populares.
8
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 41
“Because people from the colonias populares principally manned the
barricades they were hit hardest by the repression,” the APPO activist Claudia
told me. A chilango (person from Mexico City) told Venegas that he had
expected that the barricades would be manned by persons bien teorizados
(fully acquainted with political dogma) and was surprised to find that these
people of the pueblo lacked political terminology and political doctrines, much
less had read revolutionary manuals.
Even the chavos labeled as “leftists” and “revolutionaries” by the
Associated Press and other wire services depicted the struggle in which they’d
become involved simply as “us” against “them.” (Many had had experienced
law enforcement brutality firsthand and rallied to what they felt was an
opportunity to fight back.)
The barricadistas celebrated birthdays and holidays together, shared
pastries and chocolate or atole (a hot rice drink flavored with cinnamon),
played dominos, taught each other songs, told jokes and huddled together
during rain squalls.
Although they could protect themselves and their neighborhoods against
paramilitaries and death squads they were no match for heavily armored
federal forces. On October 29, five months after the first barricades appeared,
over 4,000 military and militarized police equipped with huge bulldozer-bladed
tanketas destroyed the major barricades, guided by maps that naval
photographers had made from the air during the weeks before the assault.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 42
Many who had spent night after night at the barricades reported that the
shared experience of defending the campamentos and radio station created “a
new sense of being” and “a sense of dignity I’d never known before.” A
Oaxaca attorney, whose clients include several state agencies, told me that he
believed that the women’s active role in the APPO had a great deal to do with
the detentions and torture of women during latter attacks by the police and
Mexican military.
“We learned that we could resist, that we could participate, that we
didn’t have to be subjective to a coterie of thieves and corruptos in power,” a
former barricadista told me three years after the barricades came down. A
smile revealed glistening white teeth as he tapped my shoulder with his
forefinger. “And amigo, I tell you, we haven’t forgotten. We’ll do it again.”
The barricades were gone. But the lessons they taught stayed on.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 43
Chapter 3: Arrests and Assassinations
Although the barricades prevented nightly depredations they didn’t
eliminate assassinations by Ruiz-paid paramilitaries. Heavily armed nonuniformed police roamed the city in pickups without license plates or other
markings. After the assault on the channel 24 antenna the APPO realized that
they had to defend the stations night and day to prevent assaults intended to
riddle their broadcasting equipment.
Oaxaca Tiempo Nublado reported firearm assaults by “unidentified
persons.” Killers presumed to be non-uniformed police from the examination of
the shell cases of the weapons they fired killed José San Pablo in front of Radio
Plantón. On August 10 as the APPO marchers trooped past the Hospital Santa
María, José Jiménez, a mechanic striding beside his forty-year-old wife Florina,
an active member of the teachers union, whirled and collapsed, blood spurting
from his mouth and chest. His wife heard “the explosions:
I looked around for him—I didn’t see him. Then I saw him lying on
the ground. I screamed for help. He was still alive—he embraced me.
Some people grabbed him by the hands and the feet and carried him
into the hospital. They wouldn’t let me follow. They wouldn’t let me see
him! I desperately wanted to be with him but they wouldn’t let me inside
the hospital!” [Three months earlier URO had dictated that no medical
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 44
attention be given to anyone involved in manifestations against the
government.]
When finally I forced my way inside I discovered that all of the
medical personnel—doctors, nurses, attendants, everybody—had run out
to the parking lot before the marchers had gotten to the hospital. The
only thing anybody had done was unbutton José’s shirt. All of his vital
signs were negative. Some students—members of the APPO who were
participating in the march—charged through the hospital. They didn’t
encounter anybody but they found guns and black military boots.
‘Stay with me,’ I begged my companions. I heard that two others
had been wounded by the gunfire, which had come from the top story of
the hospital and the roof of a bodega opposite it—a bodega that
belonged to the owner of the hospital.
“The gunfire—lethal gunfire—and the fact that the assassins had singled
out Jiménez who wasn’t a teacher put a new dimension on the confrontations,”
Yesica Sánchez, director of the Liga Mexicana de Derechos Humanos,
remembered. Many who had participated in marches before August 10 didn’t
participate again. As Florina testified, “I think there were many who were
afraid to talk, to relate what they’d seen.”
Relating what they’d seen meant countering La Bruja’s official report:
Jiménez, a brawler and ne’er-do-well, had been killed during a drunken fight.
URO’s henchwoman refused to alter this contention despite an autopsy report
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 45
that revealed that neither drugs nor alcohol were in Jiménez’s system and that
he had been struck by bullets from two weapons of different caliber. Radio
Ciudadaña, the government-sponsored station operating without federal
license, expanded upon La Bruja’s drunken brawler description and various
local newspapers picked up the falsified information “making it seem that we in
the APPO were a collection of hoods and drunks,” a friend of Florina’s
lamented.
When I talked with Florina four months after her husband’s assassination
she swiped at tears as she confessed, “I feel so impotent, so frustrated, I feel
so much despair.” She told me that the sounds of firecrackers exploding, or
the flight of a helicopter overhead, send her three children running into her
arms:
They are so frightened, so afraid of everything. Justice? You hear
talk about justice? To ask for justice from these enemies of the people is
useless! My husband is dead, I can’t bring him back to life. But the
things they said about him, the lies they told! It’s been one bitter
experience after another.
I shout but nobody hears me. Nobody listens!
Angered by her husband’s murder (“He wasn’t even a teacher, he was a
mechanic! He was participating because of me, because I was his partner, and
he believed in what I believed in!”) Florina Jiménez refused to back down from
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 46
her accusations. She insisted that hired gunmen executed José “to teach us [in
the APPO] a lesson, to intimidate us, to make us afraid” and claimed “we [the
APPO] are a mountain. We will keep going. I only can hope that his death will
become meaningful, will generate positive results.”
On August 10, 2007, the APPO staged a condolence march and
demonstration in remembrance of Jiménez’s assassination.
“The clamor for justice continues,” wrote Noticias columnist Ernesto
Reyes. “The impunity of the crime against José Jiménez continues to bore into
our consciences.”
The following day, August 11, four non-uniformed policemen dragged
Section 22 activist Evangelio Mendoza out of his car and hauled him to the
prison in Cuicatlán. Notified that he hadn’t returned to his residence, the APPO
radio announcers broadcast news of his kidnapping. Those barricading the
highways in and around the city of Oaxaca became even more assiduous in
stopping cars, forcing Mendoza’s kidnappers to bump over back roads, change
vehicles and finally load the teacher into a helicopter, which flew him to
Cuicatlán. The APPO announcers reported the helicopter’s departure from the
Oaxaca airport but they could not trace its evasive flight and armed police
deposited the handcuffed and blindfolded activist inside the prison.
During interrogation Evangelio Mendoza consistently responded to the
question, “Who is the governor of the state?” with pained but unremitting
determination, “We don’t have one, sir.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 47
The state charged him with burning a bus and other fabricated crimes.
He remained in prison for over eight months before finally gaining his release.
Shortly after Mendoza’s arrest priistas from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
community of Santa María Coyotepec violently attacked teacher-led
barricadistas in the neighboring community of San Bartolo Coyotepec after the
APPO supporters blocked the entrance to the community’s city hall to protest
government-backed aggressions. To emphasize their complaints, and to
support their comrades in the city of Oaxaca, the APPO supporters also
blockaded the highway that ran through the center of town.
Teacher Dalila Cerna told the Rights Action human rights delegation that
a number of truckers, forced to stop because of the blockade, supported the
teachers by parking their tractor-trailers across the highway to make passage
through the town even more difficult. The attack forced the truckers to reopen
the highway but aroused the anger of the San Bartolo appistas, anger that was
aggravated by police charges against them. Cerna, a strong determined
woman in her early fifties, explained that La Bruja’s prosecutors had filed
arrest warrants against her for sedition, burning buses and sacking
government buildings because of her participation, charges which she
emphatically denied.
“I get the impression that the sicarios enjoyed what they were doing.
They behaved like naughty kids whose parents didn’t give a damn and the
more they could get away with the more fun they had,” a teacher from a
nearby village in the Isthmus told me. Like schoolyard bullies these
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 48
government-sponsored nightriders reveled in the publicity they received. The
teacher said he could picture them breaking out a case of beer when their
night’s work was done and drinking, laughing and describing how their victims
had reacted to their threats and tortures.
Communication among the APPO organizations in the Isthmus, the
Sierras and the Mixteca was difficult. Within the city of Oaxaca and the
communities surrounding it the APPO countered the increased violence by
networking their radio station and opening its programming to citizen calls:
“Heads up all of you over in Santa Lucía del Camino. Just spotted
two pickups—eight or ten men, looked like they could be armed—
heading up Avenida Vasconcellos…”
“We’ve run out of sugar here at the
barricade on Juarez. Need more coffee, too…”
“Short of people outside
the station. Get over here as soon as you can, you young strong
men.”
“Just got a call on my cell phone from a neighbor. Saw two guys
she knows are Ruizistas at the barricade on Cinco de Mayo. Watch out
for the one wearing a Tecos jacket. We think he’s an infiltrator…”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 49
Despite the radio transmissions and the constant cell phone calls
relatively few people outside the state knew or understood what was
happening in Oaxaca. The nation’s two major television networks, Televisa and
TV Azteca, portrayed the teachers as huelguistas (strikers) and protesters and
the APPO as dissidents and leftists. Many who listened to the radio station did
so while working, either in their homes or workplaces, and preferred music to
news. And many of those who lived outside the city couldn’t pick up the Radio
Ley or Radio Universidad broadcasts or didn’t have time to listen. Or they
watched television instead.
Julio Hernández of La Jornada told those attending a COMO-sponsored
forum in the city of Oaxaca in March 2008 that a Federal District FM station,
Radio Huelga, transmitted Radio Ley broadcasts and was listened to “by those
of us eager to know what was happening in Oaxaca.” But only a very tiny
percentage of the Federal District’s population listened to Radio Huelga. Even
within Oaxaca during the height of the crises a large percentage of the
population was more interested in how the goalkeeper of the Chivas was
performing or what Marta Sahagún was wearing or how many tortillas eight
pesos would buy than in the APPO’s quest for better government.
Despite his unrelenting hold on the governorship—and with it control of
the state PRI party apparatus—King Ulisés spent most of his time in the
Federal District where he had extensive financial holdings, including a recently
constructed hospital with marble walls and an exclusive spa. He flew in an out
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 50
of Oaxaca to touch base with his underlings and on one occasion addressed the
state legislature in a secret session at a local hotel.
A contingent of the APPO supporters rushed to protest his appearance
but somehow surrounded the wrong hotel. Hotel guards and non-uniformed
police flashed weapons and ordered the appistas to disperse. In the midst of
the ruckus that included curses, threats and shoving shots rang out. One
protester fell, wounded; while others dragged him away the demonstration
organizers learned that that URO was not in the hotel. By that time URO was
on his way out of the city.
La Bruja’s prosecutors filed over 300 arrest warrants for people
associated with the APPO during the summer and fall of 2006. Between June
and the end of October vigilantes and snipers killed at least twenty APPO
members and/or supporters. Both uniformed police and paramilitaries took it
upon themselves to identify, hassle and threaten whomever they chose.
It was ten o’clock at night—maybe a little bit later. They said they
needed food at one of the barricades. I packed up half-a-dozen bags of
pasta and some yogurt to take to them. I noticed a pickup parked at the
curb but I didn’t think anything about it until its headlights suddenly
went on. That startled me and I turned. Three men jumped out and
grabbed me. They asked what I was carrying and I told them.
‘Explosives, you mean!’ they said. ‘Guns!’ They grabbed the bags
and yanked them away from me. They stuck their fists in the yogurt and
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 51
threw it in the gutter and ripped the bags of pasta apart and stomped on
it. They told me that if they ever saw me carrying food to the barricades
again they would throw me in jail for being a revolutionary—Oaxaca
resident Jaime Martínez.
David Venegas, “El Alebrije,” a charismatic and popular the APPO
counselor, laughingly admitted that his barricade encompassed two small chain
groceries who “loaned” the barricadistas shopping carts to haul the rocks and
other materials they used to block the streets. In an interview with Lucía
Antonio Monter published in La Batalla por Oaxaca El Alebrije described a visit
by “hundreds of reporters” who asked to be allowed to enter the barricades:
We let them enter on the condition that they wouldn’t take
photos. Among them was a young woman, a reporter, very attractive.
The chavos grouped around her and she took photos and took photos. I
told them, ‘How easily you’re bought off!’ They piled onto a bus and I
told them, ‘Get off, cabrones, she’s going to write whatever shit she
wants!’ and they said that wasn’t true. The other day I saw a report and
I laughed because the report said, well, various things. When they saw it
they shouted, ‘Pinche old bitch!’ because the report called them ‘reckless
youths playing with revolution.’ Bueno, they learned that the commercial
press doesn’t tell the truth.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 52
“Sicarios paid by PRI could do things the police legally couldn’t do—grab
somebody without cause, beat them, torture them,” Sara Mendez winced while
addressing the Rights Action human rights delegation. “The only authority they
had was the money they were getting but who was going to stop them? The
government? The government was paying them! They delivered at least fortyfive persons to state prisons, imagine! They had no right to do so but the only
rights in Oaxaca belong to the state!”
In early September non-uniformed police pulled biologist Ramiro Aragón
and his brother-in-law Elionai Santiago out of their car in San Felipe, a
gentrified town outside of the city of Oaxaca where URO and other political
figures had constructed luxurious homes. Aragón and Santiago were hoping to
uncover information about a paralyzed APPO participant, Germán Mendoza,
who reportedly had been sequestered the day before.
When the five civilian-dressed officers checked the pair’s identification
and learned that they were teachers they shoved Ramiro and Elionai into a
vehicle and contacted their police supervisors by radio. The two teachers
couldn’t hear the replies but after the police verified the orders they’d received
they ground lighted cigarettes into Ramiro’s face and deafened Elionai by
slamming their hands against his ears.
Not only was Aragón a university professor, he openly had committed to
the APPO, along with his wife, Ruth Guzmán. Apparently he blamed URO’s
police henchmen for the death of his sister, also a teacher, who vanished—
sequestered by presumed-to-be paramilitaries. Two weeks after her
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 53
disappearance searchers found her corpse and that of another teacher on a
riverbank. The police supervisors who ordered that Aragón and his brother-inlaw be detained obviously knew this history.
The arresting officers hauled both men to the prison in Zimatlán.
Elionai’s relatives paid 12,000 pesos to gain his release on bail but La Bruja’s
prosecutors refused to release Ramiro, an internationally respected authority
on migratory birds. The state charged him with carrying illegal weapons.
Should I need be thankful that they [the non-uniformed police]
didn’t kill my husband and my brother, or hold them as desaparecidos
forever or charge thousands of pesos for their liberty? In the prison in
Zimatlán they tortured both Ramiro and Elionai, they pulled Ramiro’s
hair out by the roots. Because they believed that we are ordinary
citizens, they hit both my husband and my brother in the face so we
would know that this would be the treatment anybody got, not just the
leaders. Of all of those who were detained, Ramiro and Elionai were the
first to be tortured. The police threatened to rape them and to come and
rape me because in the car the police found many documents of mine
and they were going to come and rape me, all of them, one after the
other, and then they were going to kill our children. The torture was to
let people like us, ordinary citizens, know that if we became involved in
any way they were going to beat us.” –Ruth Guzmán, biologist and wife
of Ramiro Aragón, Voces de la valentía en Oaxaca.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 54
A few weeks later a young university student named Francisco García
just had left the Radio Universidad station with four companions
when a blue pickup swerved in front of us. Some men jumped out,
pushed my compañero to the sidewalk. I ran and they fired their pistols
at me. When they caught up with me they beat me with their pistols and
threw me face down on the asphalt. They tied my hands behind my back
and threw me in the back of the pickup. When I tried to lift my head
they shoved it down again. They told me they had the names of the
people in my family and they were going to fuck them over too.
They took me to the prison in Tlacolula. They blindfolded me.
‘How much are they paying you?’ ‘Who are your companions?’ ‘Don’t
want to talk? Write it down.’ ‘We got your friend; she’ll talk. She’ll tell us
everything we want to know.
‘Write this down! I robbed trucks. I burned cars.’ Every time I
refused to write what they said they hit me. I started to write, then
paused and they kicked me in the back and in the stomach. They did
this about twenty times. They told me to write down the names of three
APPO leaders. They gave me the names to write down. I didn’t write
them down. They kicked me. They took my cell phone and went through
the directory name by name.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 55
One of them said, ‘Take his photo.’ They wiped my face so the
bruises wouldn’t show and stood me up against a wall to photograph
me. They made me hold a pistol, a .357, and a bag they said was
cocaine. They hit me when I refused to hold them up.
Among my papers they found a note that I’d written to my novia.
They said they’d find her and torture and rape her. They made me stand
up and take off my shirt and they sprayed my back with something and
lit it on fire. The pain was excruciating! They sent me to a nurse and
said they were detaining me for having robbed $5,000 pesos and an AK47. For eight days they held me incommunicado, then they released me
on charges of having committed simple robbery. Nevertheless I’m
considered a criminal and have to report to the authorities every fifteen
days.
Teacher Pánfilo Hernández wasn’t as lucky as either Francisco García or
Ramiro Aragón. According to COMO activist Claudia, Hernández was murdered
by members of an escuadrón de muerte financed by URO’s government.
“We’re asking for justice,” she described her participation in COMO.
“We’re asking for an end to the tyranny!”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 56
Chapter 4: Violent Stalemate
On September 21, 2006 a delegation of several thousand Oaxaqueños
left on foot to walk to Mexico City to present their case for “the “dignity of the
peoples of Oaxaca” to authorities and supporters there.
You can’t believe how difficult the march was! Even though I had
two pair of athletic shoes I got blisters right away—I could barely walk.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one who was suffering. Walking all day
made some of the women with me so thirsty they drank too much water
and got bloated and sick. A lot of us who were used to our beds and soft
mattresses didn’t sleep well. We were so stiff and creaky we’d look at
each other and laugh and say, ‘We’ll be old decrepit women before we
reach Mexico City.’
Yet almost all of us felt an intense camaraderie, a sharing that
went way down deep inside, that made us feel like sisters, like we
belonged to the same big family. We helped each other and joked and
laughed and when we came to some town or other and the people came
out to applaud us we hugged them and kissed them and thanked them.
It was a wonderful experience, despite what happened later. Despite the
horrible repression.”—march participant and later member of COMO
against whom arrest warrants were filed.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 57
Throughout the month-long peregrination the marchers received popular
support in most of the localities they passed through. Communities in Puebla
modeled citizen assemblies after the APPO. Others formed in Guerrero,
Michoacán and Morelos. Oaxacan expatriots throughout the United States sent
money to help finance the march, as did various teachers’ organizations and
labor unions in the United States. The PRD government of the Distrito Federal,
which had occupied the center of Mexico City to protest the election fraud that
elevated PAN candidate Felipe Calderón into the presidency, welcomed the
Oaxaqueño delegation and helped them set up a campamento in the center of
that capital.
The march to Mexico City in September and the mega-marches in the
city of Oaxaca brought thousands together in very positive and affirmative
ways. Like most of them Sara Mendez hoped and believed that negotiations
being conducted between the dissidents and Oaxaca’s state government would
lead to compromises that would enable the APPO to lift the barricades, the
teachers to go back to their classrooms and the hundreds of political prisoners
to be released. Artist Francisco Toledo and three others sent urgent requests to
senators, deputies and members of the supreme court pleading “that the social
conflict that we are experiencing in Oaxaca be resolved without the
intervention of the army, the federal police or any other armed corporation…”
Members of Section 22 and various representatives of the APPO met
with federal officials several times during September and October. Newspaper
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 58
accounts of these meetings speculated that the Mexican Senate would depose
URO and appoint an interim governor to replace him. (The Mexican constitution
authorizes the federal Senate to declare a “disappearance of powers” in any
state that it deems has become ungovernable. It then can name a new chief
executive to fill the deposed governor’s term of office.) But as negotiations
continued, with the federal government offering assurances but making no
concrete proposals, Mexican Navy planes flying over Oaxaca were mapping the
locations of the barricades and 10,000 Mexican soldiers, sailors and marines
were being transferred to the militarized federal preventive police (PFP).
Hugo Tovar speculated that many within the federal government were in
favor of deposing URO. They were not, however, in favor of citizen groups
taking over state governments. President Fox and president-elect Calderón had
their hands full with Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s massive Mexico City sit-in
and they couldn’t afford to lose Oaxaca to what they felt was a leftist rabble.
López Obrador’s party’s representatives in the federal senate wanted that body
to step in and replace Ruiz. López Obrador himself demanded URO’s ouster
and challenged PAN to define if they were “with the people or with this
cacique,” insisting that PAN’s senators, aligned with those from the PRD, would
have enough votes to depose Oaxaca’s governor.
Such a maneuver had the support of some PAN senators but neither
they nor Calderón were willing to alienate the PRI’s backing of Calderon’s
election victory. Even PRI senators who felt that URO was an albatross and an
embarrassment to their party were unwilling to take actions that might rupture
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 59
party loyalty. Writer and lawyer Louis E. V. Nevear speculated that had a
priista been president of Mexico he would have smoothed over the situation by
appointed Ulisés Ruiz to “become ambassador to Bulgaria or some other
country” and replaced him with a PRI Congressman or Senator.
The majority of PRI governors from other states, particular Marío Marín
of Puebla, fearing that deposing a governor by popular protest would set a
trend, urged the senators from their party not to take action against URO.
(Mexican law does not provide for recall of elected officials; once a governor is
elected only the federal government can separate him from his six-year term.)
Juan Balboa reported in La Jornada that Luis Figueroa, the executive secretary
of the National Organization of PRI Adherents, urged Secretary of the
Government Carlos Abascal to investigate the APPO instead:
“These movements cost money. This one is financed by political activists
and it’s imperative that the government lets us know who they are.”
Reactions within the city and state of Oaxaca also were mixed. Gisela
Vivanco, the spokesperson for the Organization of Independent Established
Merchants (OICE), asserted that all 800 of that organization’s members were
in debt, many of their businesses had folded and many more were in the
process of closing. Oaxaca’s Chamber of Commerce reported in January, 2007
that over 200 businesses had closed and urged the national Chamber to seek
an audience with the country’s newly installed president, Felipe Calderón. At
the same time, IMSS (Social Security Institute of Mexico) reported that 9,000
workers covered by social security in Oaxaca had lost their jobs.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 60
URO’s state director of schools notified Section 22 that any teachers who
did not return to their classrooms by a specific date in September would be
dismissed and substitute teachers would take over their duties. The union
called the deadline illegal, setting off confrontations in schools throughout the
state between parent groups who supported the sit in and those who opposed
it.
“It was like dominos falling and knocking each other over,” artist Hugo
Tovar told me. So divided were opinions about the sit-in and about the APPO
that fights and arguments erupted in workplaces, during social gatherings and
in stores. Business establishments throughout the Centro Historico tagged WE
SUPPORT THE APPO signs in their windows. Others threatened or fired
employees who took part in the APPO demonstrations or who belonged to
families from which members had been arrested. The private school that had
hired biologist Ruth Guzmán fired her for her participation in the movement.
“I believe it is a violation of my rights,” Voces de la Valentia en Oaxaca
quoted Guzmán, “but to tell the truth, to lose this job, where I earned fifty
pesos an hour, isn’t a big deal. I only earned enough to buy diapers for the
baby anyway.”
As workers and merchants’ incomes diminished they spent less, not only
in the Centro Historico but in their neighborhoods, forcing small businesses
there to close. Taxis couldn’t get through the barricades and consequently lost
customers. Constructions projects were postponed or abandoned. Conventions
and concerts were cancelled. Paramilitaries roamed the countryside and the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 61
“factories without chimneys”—tourism—withered, further depleting the
economy and desiccating social life. Many of the faithful stopped attending
masses at the downtown cathedral and nearby churches, putting Catholic
priests at odds with each other. Some Catholic clergymen even supported
governmental pleas for federal law enforcement help.
On October 13 the APPO sponsored a “Dialogue for Peace” in the city of
Oaxaca. Over 1,000 attended, including representatives from the various
indigena organizations. Samuel Ruiz, the former bishop of Chiapas who
espoused liberation theology and supported the Zapatista movement,
addressed the assembled delegates. Indigena leaders offered traditional
nature-centered prayers and hundreds of those attending drummed in unison
on folding chairs, cell phones and compacts.
By that time the positions of both the APPO and King Ruiz had become
fixed. The APPO demanded that URO step down, or be forced out of office, as a
condition for lifting their occupation of the Centro Historico. URO adamantly
refused. On October 19, the Mexican senate voted 74-31 not to remove the
controversial “medieval king.”
I was afraid that was going to happen—no, I knew they were
going to vote that way but I hoped, you see, it was our one chance, only
chance to get out of the mess we were in, Oaxaca I mean, peaceably,
without violence. I don’t think the cabrones in the Senate knew what in
hell they were doing, they had the solution right there, in their hands,
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 62
but they were pinches cowards, they gave in to the caciques.”— Oaxaca
factory worker Alvaro Martínez
A young indocumentado who abruptly left his job in South Carolina to
be with his wife in the Mixtecan community of San Isidro Vista Hermosa told
me priistas from the adjacent village of Santa Cruz had invaded his and his
neighbors’ lands, burned houses and for forty-eight hours sequestered the
wives and mothers of the San Isidro emigrants. Ruiz’s government provided
economic support to the Santa Cruz priistas “so they had good houses,
fertilizer, a town hall and things like that,” the young San Isidro resident
explained.
That the residents of San Isidro supported the APPO and sent
representatives to the marches heightened antagonisms between the two
communities “but those from Santa Cruz with their guns and their police
always have the upper hand. We hear shots at all hours. We never know what
is going to happen.”
Like many towns in the Mixteca, San Isidro Vista Hermosa no longer had
a majority of year-round male residents. Most of the male adults worked in
South and North Carolina and sent money to their families. Every year a few
male heads of household remained in the village “to take care of the town and
to protect the women,” the young indocumentado explained. Those working in
the Carolinas shared a portion of their wages with those who remained behind
“so that those who don’t migrate don’t suffer financially.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 63
The situation in San Isidro Vista Hermosa and Santa Cruz seems
incongruous because the residents of San Isidro individually owned their small
parcels of land while their priista neighbors in Santa Cruz exercised communal
ownership. Most communities that practice usos y costumbres in Oaxaca held
lands communally while the residents of communities that elected their leaders
by the party system (which with few recent exceptions meant the PRI)
maintained individual ownership of lands.
“Throughout the Mixteca one senses a great desánimo (despondency),”
human rights advocate Rolando González of Tlaxiaco told me in December,
2006. “It’s because no real justice for the people exists here.” For that reason,
hundreds of towns in the Mixteca rallied to support the APPO during the first
months of its formation. “It provided an alternative. Because we haven’t been
able to get results, two things have happened. The men have migrated and
those still here have joined the APPO.”
In the city of Oaxaca sicarios fired shots into to artist Francisco Toledo’s
residence in Oaxaca in October. An internationally known sculptor and painter,
and the founder of Oaxaca’s Instituto de Artes y Gráficas (IAGO), Toledo
played a major role in the formation and activities of PRO-OAX. A number of
Mexico’s leading writers and intellectuals protested directly to Mexico’s
president Fox demanding that such intimidations cease.
Vigilante gunmen also riddled an automobile that Padre Carlos Franco
Pérez had parked in front of a medical facility set up in his parish to minister to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 64
those wounded by the November 25 police purge. Others threatened to kill
Padre Francisco Alfredo Mayrén for participating in human rights negotiations
involving APPO members.
Ruiz’ government became so restrictive of criticism of any kind, real or
implied, that he dispatched armed state police to barricade the Santo Domingo
temple in the city of Oaxaca’s central district to prevent Bishop Raúl Vera, one
of Mexico’s most revered churchmen, from presiding over a scheduled
ecumenical visit.
“To pray for peace is not a political act,” a spokesperson for Bishop Vera
told the press. “It’s clear that the government does not respect organizations
that defend human rights. It harassed and intimidated persons who otherwise
would have participated in the event.”
Bishop Vera’s Oaxacan hosts moved the visit to a site outside the
barricades, where the bishop told reporters, “When the force of reason fails
and there’s no other way to retain power, then the only thing remaining is the
truncheon.”
Despite federal attempts to categorize the repression in Oaxaca as “a
local matter” and Ruiz’ pronouncement that “Oaxaca is safe for tourists,”
information about the brutal treatment of innocent civilians worked its way into
international awareness. The International Civil Commission for the
Observation of Human Rights released a highly condemnatory account in March
after spending nearly two months interviewing government officials and victims
of the repressions.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 65
A few days later José Luis Soberanes, Mexico’s human rights
ombudsman, filed a report that alleged widespread infractions although
Soberanes failed to mention Governor Ruiz by name. (Ruiz blasted Soberanes
for “exceeding his authority” in a report of earlier violations and the
ombudsman apparently decided that discretion was the batter part of valor.)
Human rights commission reports are not binding on state officials and Ruiz, as
the federal Secretary of Government Ramirez had done when he was governor
of Jalisco, cast them aside as “inaccurate and inappropriate.”
Mexican church officials led by the Archbishop of Morelia Alberto Suárez
reported that during their visit to the Vatican Pope Benedict had expressed
concern about the violence in Oaxaca. At the same time justices of Mexico’s
Supreme Court indicated that they intended to launch their own
investigations.9
Announcers for the government-sponsored pirate radio station, Radio
Ciudadana, urged “good Oaxacans” to attack the barricades. PRI loyalists
throughout the state took these urgings as carte blanche to use whatever
means they chose to tear down what the APPO was trying to create. In San
Bartolo Coyotepec their siege on the APPO barricades began with threats and
pistol shots by what Dalila Cerna described as “ten or twelve ebrios” and
escalated into an armed attack on October 27.
Mexican law authorizes the Court to make independent investigations but it seldom
does so and when it does it moves very slowly, as it did concerning the 2006 Atenco
massacre. Finally, over three years after the events in Oaxaca, it issued a verdict
accusing Ruiz of violations of human rights laws and regulations but left it up to state
legislature to take action. In 2010 the outgoing PRI-dominated legislature absolved
Ruiz of any wrongdoing.
9
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 66
“They pursued us as we tried to escape. They were firing their guns at
us, trying to kill us,” Cerna pressed her fingers over her mouth and took a
deep breath before continuing:
A truck came by, compañeros from a nearby town. ‘Get in! Get
in!’ they told us, ‘Come with us! You can’t do anything more here!’ We
hesitated. From where we were we could see militares dressed in
camouflage gear with rifles with telescopic sights. I saw that Emilio, one
of teachers, a good man, a wonderful compañero, had fallen. ‘Come on!
Come on!’ our friends urged but, ‘No!’ I shouted, despite the gunshots,
‘We can’t leave Emilio’s body here!’ I know the police, I know the PRI
and how they operate. They would have dumped Emilio’s body into a
clandestine grave and said he ran away and changed his name because
he was a criminal, because he had things to hide.
So I and some others stayed there, beside his body. We wouldn’t
leave. But nobody came for him. Not the Red Cross, not the
government.
Many of those who had been guarding the San Bartolo barricades spent
the night hiding in cornfields. Shortly after daybreak trucks from a neighboring
community came by to rescue them but “many refused to get in the trucks,”
Cerna elaborated. “’We’re not maestros!’ they contended. ‘We’ve done nothing
wrong!’
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 67
The people from the PRI raided everything. They burned cars
[that had been used to barricade the highway]. One person saw men
digging graves behind the Casa de Gobierno but he was afraid to try to
stop them, they had guns. Later we confronted officials of the
government but they said, ‘No, no one is buried there.’ The police
stopped many people. They grabbed one man who’d done nothing and
stripped him and carted him off to jail. It was grotesque! Horrible!
Police arrested at least eighteen community members, some of whom
were badly wounded, and transported them to the state prison in Miahuatlán.
“There was a state human rights representative there,” Cerna’s lips
twisted in angry disapproval. ‘You’re accused of assassination,’ he told them.
Can you imagine? It was the priistas who were doing the assassinating! Not
only did they kill and arrest innocent citizens, they accused those citizens of
being the killers!”
Early the next morning tow trucks showed up “to clean up everything
and haul off the burned vehicles” and the town mayor spent the day drinking
and riding around in his car “celebrating the PRI victory.”
Cerna claimed that thirty-three San Bartolo Coyotepec residents were
missing as a result of the priista attack. The relatives and friends of those
missing were afraid to speak out or file documents with the government. The
mayor continued to pay porros (“political hoodlums”) to terrorize anyone who
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 68
objected to PRI mandates or who supported the APPO, she insisted, adding
that at least one more San Bartolo Coyotepec resident was murdered and that
most of the town’s residents believed that some of those who were missing
had been killed and interred in clandestine graves.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 69
Chapter 5. The Invading Army
October 27, the same day that Santa María Coyotopec priistas attacked
the barricades in San Bartolo, other bands of priistas, paramilitaries and police
stormed barricades in the city of Oaxaca. Video and newspaper cameramen
photographed armed assailants charging the barricade in the suburb of Santa
Lucía del Camino. Many barricadistas fled but Indymedia photo-journalist
Bradley Will popped to his feet to tape the assault, then collapsed behind the
barricade, mortally wounded.
According to witnesses Brad Will didn’t die immediately. Companions at
the barricade cell phoned for a Red Cross ambulance but neither the Red Cross
nor any other ambulance company sent help “on orders from the federal
government,” the APPO spokesperson Florentino López snarled. Several
appistas finally loaded the mortally wounded Indymedia photo-journalist into a
private auto but Will died before he could receive medical attention.
Florentino López closed a press conference announcing that Will’s death
marked the beginning of the “Revolution of the Twenty-first Century!”
The special commission set up by Mexico’s federal government to investigate
crimes against journalists asserted on October 31, four days after the
assassination, that it didn’t find “legal reasons” to investigate Will’s murder.
“Will’s assassination was intentional, it was planned,” a woman active in
COMO told me. “They killed him in order to have an excuse to bring in the PFP
and crush the movement.” APPO directors claimed that the slaying of the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 70
American photojournalist prompted the U.S. government to order the Mexican
government to send federal troops to violently occupy Oaxaca.
One of the journalists who was with Will and who photographed the
attackers as they stormed the barricade was shot and wounded by the same
assailants. The photos appeared in both local and national newspapers but La
Bruja’s prosecutors released the assassins and over a year later announced
that they were going to file murder charges against one of Will’s companions at
the barricade. That revelation so infuriated Pedro Matias that he told the 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!”
Various the APPO delegates urged the federal government, through the
attorney general’s office, to take over investigation of Will’s murder, since La
Bruja announced that her investigators had determined that the Will had been
shot “at close range by part of the same group that accompanied Roland Will”
(Will’s complete name was Roland Bradley Will). In a press conference on
November 16 Florentino López commented “not that we have that much faith
in the PGR” and insisted that La Bruja was throwing up a smoke screen to hide
the government’s involvement. He added that Will’s murder was designed to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 71
put international pressure on President Vicente Fox to send the PFP to Oaxaca
“as ordered by the U.S. government.”10
Bradley Will wasn’t the only barricadista murdered on October 27.
Attackers shot and killed Esteban Zurita at a barricade in San Bartolo
Coyotepec and as Dalila Cerna witnessed they also shot Emilio Alonso Fabián.
Machete-wielding sicarios cut up several Section 22 teachers in Oaxaca, none
fatally. La Bruja’s minions reported that a woman named Endocia Olivera had
died in an ambulance transporting her to a hospital emergency room after
being attacked by the APPO members. But Luis Hernández reported in Noticias
that none of Oaxaca’s ambulance companies had any record of transporting
her and none of the emergency rooms to which she would have been taken
had any records of having seen her. Sara Mendez listed her as a victim of
sicario attacks.
Mendez confirmed that “officially” twenty-three persons died as a result
of confrontations between the government-paid death squads and those
manning the APPO barricades or participating in the APPO marches between
June and December 2006. Twenty, including Will, were murdered by stateIronically, efforts by Will’s supporters in the United States to reopen the
investigations and drop the charges against Martínez overlooked or ignored the fact
that Will was only one of three killed and more than twenty wounded by gunfire during
paramilitary assaults that day. I personally examined the area and given the
topography and distances corresponding to photographs of the assailants I determined
that it was highly unlikely that the attackers had singled Will out for assassination.
They had been drinking and were running over rutted ground. The fatal wound was
fired from a .38 caliber pistol and apparently ricocheted off a building or parked vehicle
before striking Will. I know from military experience that it is difficult enough to fire a
.38 from that distance accurately without being stationary and taking careful aim. It’s
also unlikely that any of the APPO barricadistas were armed; the photographs show the
assailants running directly at the barricade and taking no precautions to shield
themselves from return fire.
10
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 72
sponsored gunmen. The other three included a drunken taxi driver who
“apparently was shot by one of the sicarios” but whose death La Bruja’s office
attributed to the APPO and a man whose throat was cut. Since he was not
affiliated with the APPO and apparently had participated in barricade assaults
the state listed him as an APPO victim.
However, Ruiz’s government did not file charges against anyone for the
slayings of the APPO members. An angry Pedro Matias accused them of “doing
nothing, not even investigating, the murders of the Mexicans. Here it’s a crime
to write, it’s a crime to speak. It’s even a crime to think!
“Only with pressure from outside of Oaxaca will any changes occur,” he
told me.
President Fox and his PAN supporters in the Mexican Senate launched a
publicity campaign labeling the APPO as a “small group of leftist dissidents.”
Through the Secretary of Government they imposed a deadline of October 28
for the removal of all of the barricades. The APPO refused to comply and Fox
dispatched armored Army, Navy and federal police to “guarantee free
movement and the rights of private property, free expression and free
assembly.” Four-thousand five-hundred heavily armed troops swept through
the state—literally an invading army. Oaxacan teacher Jonathan Teal described
their arrival in the city of Oaxaca as “breathtaking.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 73
Down the highway they came, these huge slow-moving armored
vehicles equipped with power hoses, pepper spray and snowplow-like
rams, a procession that I thought never would end. With them I saw
troop carriers filled with fully armored soldiers, jeeps and pickups and
trucks. It was an invasion, like the Nazis moving into Poland or
Czechoslovakia.
As armor-wearing militaries ripped out barricades “young men, young
women flung themselves in front of the tanketas to try to stop them. At the
last minute—the last second—companions pulled them away, literally as the
blades hit their bodies.”
Low-flying helicopters battered buildings and vegetation with the gusts
generated by their rotors despite “people throughout the city coming out of
their houses and waving mirrors to blind the eyes of the pilots,” Claudia
remembered, and added, “Thousands of people—thousands of women--came
out to confront the invaders by forming human barricades.”
Hugo Tovar, accompanied by medical personnel, knelt in front of a
phalanx of glistening shields, extended his arms and challenged, “You want
blood? Here, take mine!” as a nurse extracted two pints of his blood. (The
militarized PFP refused to take it and Tovar later mixed it with paint to produce
an anti-repression poster.)
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 74
“It was like the whole pueblo had emerged and was saying, ‘Here we
are! Here’s what we want!’” Pedro Matias choked back tears, “but the
government didn’t listen, the government didn’t see us!”
Soldiers and military police tear-gassed barricadistas and passers-by. A
federal preventive policeman launched a tear gas grenade directly at protester
Jorge Alberto López. It struck him in the chest and exploded, fatally severing
his lungs. No effort was made then or later to identify or prosecute his killer.
Sara Mendez affirmed that two other the APPO participants also lost
their lives the day the PFP entered the city but Fox’s spokesman, Rubén
Aguilar, maintained that the eviction had been “clean.” Oaxaca, Tiempo
Nublado, however, confirmed López’s assassination. This confirmation
prompted the APPO’s Flavio Sosa, identified as a member of the movement’s
collective leadership, to shout to members of the press, “There’s your clean
eviction, Señor Vicente Fox and Señor Rubén Aguilar!”
The militarized police and their local backups arrested at least thirty
protesters. (Federal government sources acknowledged only twenty-three.) As
the armed assailants took over the Alameda and the Zócalo teachers and
appistas sought sanctuary in churches and on the university campus, leaving
the Centro Historico in the hands of the federal forces.
Unfortunately for the merchants who had remained open despite the
APPO occupation the federal government only had supplied the PFP with
weapons, armor, ammunition and tear gas but not food nor bedding. Federal
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 75
police and soldiers ransacked local businesses and not only carted off junk
food, soda and water but television sets and other appliances as well.
“The indignation was unsupportable!” COMO activist Claudia exclaimed.
But indignation wasn’t enough to stop the PFP, state police and functionaries of
URO’s government from attempting to block Radio Universidad’s emissions
which student technicians had managed to get back on the air after sicarios
ruined much of the equipment by pouring acid over it. The police cut off
electrical service to the university and the area surrounding it, darkening
businesses and residences. According to Narco News contributor Nancy Davies,
the rector of the university, Dr. Felipe Martínez, publicly praised the “heroic
attitude” of the resisters and called URO “a psychiatric case.”
The COMO women confronted the newly installed “Robocops” with
“thousands of white flowers—symbols of non-violence and peace—which we
tucked into their visors and put on their shields,” Claudia remembered. (With
typical Oaxacan flair locals dubbed the PFP and their Army counterparts
“Robocops” after characters in a science fiction movie.)
“We wanted them to feel ashamed,” explained one of the women, a
single mother whose employers fired her when they found out she was
participating with the APPO. “There they were in all their armor, trying to look
tough and brave and here we were a bunch of middle-aged women giving
them flowers and treating them like little boys.”
Nancy Davies reported, “The people are angrier than ever; lawless
shootings and abductions on the part of the PRI’s hired guns (possibly in
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 76
coordination with the PFP) have increased…” Artist Francisco Toledo dispatched
a pungent letter to the president of PRI, Mariano Palacios, exhorting him to do
everything in his power to pressure URO’s resignation. When Mexico City’s El
Universal published a declaration by the president of the PRI in Oaxaca, Héctor
Ramírez, urging Toledo to stop expressing public opinions about the conflict
the artist whipped out a missile to PRI’s Oaxacan membership expressing his
astonishment that a PRI official would try to curtail freedom of speech among
its militants and insisting that public statements aimed at reestablishing the
peace and avoiding further deaths in Oaxaca had nothing to do with party
politics.
Toledo wasn’t the only PRI militant to urge URO to step down. Influential
PRI senator Jesús Murillo exhorted his fellow priista to resign “in order to
reestablish governability, legal order and peace in Oaxaca.” So did
archconservative PAN senator Federico Döring, former Secretary of
Government Santiago Creel and Rafael Ochoa of PANAL. Nevertheless, URO
and a battery of lawyers challenged the Senate’s authority to depose him by
insisting that he had taken “firm and necessary” actions to curtail “the criminal
conduct of those who have sequestered the state of Oaxaca.”
Jesus Aranda reported in La Jornada that Ruiz insisted that the Senate
did not have the right to act against him, especially while the state was being
“terrorized by propaganda and disinformation spread by the Popular Assembly
of the Peoples of Oaxaca.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 77
“You want me or you want the APPO [to govern he state]?” Ruiz
purportedly told Carlos Abascal, Vicente Fox’s government secretary, noting
the close connections between the APPO leaders like Flavio Sosa, who was a
Oaxaca federal deputy in the late 1990s, and PRD presidential candidate
Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Documents presented by URO’s lawyers noted
that President Fox’s failure to attend to the financial demands of the teachers
of Oaxaca was a primary cause of the current problems.
Presidente legitímo Andrés Manuel López Obrador and PRD stalwart
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, a leading figure in the newly formed Frente Amplio
Progresista (FAP), urged groups and citizens throughout the country to unify
with the pueblo of Oaxaca. Thousands marched down Mexico City’s leading
thoroughfare, the Reforma, on November 1, brandishing banners and placards
reading “¡Ulisés ya cayó!” (“Ulisés has fallen!”), “¡Fox, él que sigue!” (“Fox is
next!”) and “¡Calderón, represor!” (“Calderón, repressor!”). Participants
included demonstrators from UNAM, the University of Chapingo, high school
students, members of the Mexican Electricians Union, the Francisco Villa
Popular Front, Pueblos in Defense of the Land from Atenco and Zapatistas.
APPO spokesperson Miguel Linares, one of seventeen appistas engaging
in a hunger strike at the time, Erangelio Mendoza, Germán Mendoza and
Ramiro Aragón told the press before the march began that the APPO planned a
“huge scale mobilization” to break the “military circle” that had occupied
Oaxaca. (The Mendozas and Aragón had just been released from prison.)
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 78
URO remained defiant. “I will not give in to the political maneuverings of
a minority that doesn’t represent the will of the people of Oaxaca,” he insisted.
“I was elected according to democratic standards established by the legally
constituted institutions of the state.”
On November 2, All Saints Day, the “invading army” of militarized police
forged out of the Centro Historico. Accompanied by tanks and five helicopters
roaring just over the housetops they headed towards the university to drive
out the APPO militants who had taken refuge there and to dismantle Radio
Universidad. A suddenly assembled force of teachers, students and the APPO
supporters intercepted the armed phalanx.
“It was fantastic!” newspaperman Matias’ enthusiasm bubbled as he
described his experiences. “Over Radio Universidad I heard the call, ‘They’re
attacking!’ I jumped in my car and drove there right away. But I couldn’t get
close. So many people had arrived so quickly I couldn’t even get close to the
University!”
Human rights advocate Yésica Sánchez confirmed that thousands of the
APPO militants, barricade workers, students, housewives and teachers rushed
to defend what they felt was “their radio.” Women, children and teachers
grabbed rocks to hurl at the approaching Robocops; students wielding
slingshots and marbles rushed to the forefront, as did others armed with bottle
rockets and Molotov cocktails. As the PFP pressed forward, “They tear-gassed
us,” Claudia exclaimed, “and many people were grabbed and detained.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 79
Among the most ardent of the defenders were a contingent of nonstudent adolescents—“street urchins”—who usually spent their time scrambling
for pesos washing windshields and hauling garbage. A teenager nicknamed “El
Dany,” dove into the pitched battle shouting “They can’t destroy us! We can’t
be defeated!” Students, teachers and women followed him. After what Noticias
described as a “pitched battle” between the defenders and the armed attackers
the federal forces retreated. Exhilarated, the APPO militants proclaimed “a
victory!” in what they touted as “The Battle of Todos Santos.” More neutral
observers cautioned that the federal forces withdrew in order not to violate the
University’s autonomy.
“We shouldn’t forget that the PFP could have killed every one of [the
APPO defenders] had they wanted to,” retired professor George Salzman told
the Rights Action emergency human rights delegation.
The director of a junior high school boarding school for students from
rural Oaxaca, a professor named Martínez, was walking near Soriana’s
commercial plaza when riot gear-clad federal police seized him. Without
presenting any order of apprehension they shoved him into a van and beat him
even though he offered no resistance. A portly, distinguished looking, welldressed professor with over thirty years teaching experience he called the
“soldiers of Fox as cruel as the soldiers of Cortez:
They took me to the military base beside the airport. They tied my
hands and forced me to my knees in the mud. They held a gun to my
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 80
head and laughed that they were going to blow my brains out. I could
hear helicopters overhead. The PFP kicked me if I started to droop. This
went on the whole night.
The following morning the PFP piled Martinez and a dozen or so others
they’d detained onto the floor of a helicopter.
We didn’t know where we were going. It seemed like we were
flying forever. I thought they might be taking us to a federal prison in
some other state. I’d lost all feeling in my wrists the plastic handcuffs
were so tight. When we finally landed outside a prison I saw that the
guards were all short and fat and I exclaimed, ‘We’re okay! This is
Oaxaca!’
Badly bruised and in pain Martinez said he nevertheless was relieved
when the PFP released him to prison authorities.
“They booked me, which meant my name was in the register, I could be
found. If they’d kept us at a military base that would have been different. On a
military base they can do whatever they want: kill, rape, torture. They can
make you ‘disappear.’”
No sooner was Martinez inside the prison than one of the guards
recognized him and loosened his handcuffs. “I was a student of yours in junior
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 81
high school,” the guard told him. Martinez later encountered another exstudent among the prison guards.
“They said they’d never imagined that some day they would be in this
kind of situation with me.”
Imprisoned with Martinez were waiters, construction workers and
students who had no connection with the APPO. He said he tried to explain to
them as much as he could about the movement and what it stood for but “I
couldn’t explain why they’d been detained and put in prison. Except that the
government that did it to them was worthless and corrupt.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 82
Chapter 6: Divided Society, Divided Families
Tanketas and huge camouflage-painted troop carriers lined the streets
bordering the Centro Historico’s Alameda throughout the month of November.
Armed military and PFP barricaded entrances to the Zócalo with barbed wire,
metal grates and military vehicles. Soldiers in clanking leg and chest armor
stopped pedestrians on their way to the post office and the nearly abandoned
downtown businesses, checking backpacks, purses and briefcases. Neatly
arranged riot gear—shields, helmets, truncheons—lay on the cobblestoned
streets behind them. Many women refused to pass the barricades for fear of
being shoved into a doorway and sexually molested:
One of them [the PFP] stopped me and said to me, ‘I’m going to
check those.’ ‘What is it that you’re going to check?’ I replied, ‘I don’t
have anything.’ He pointed to a folder I was carrying. ‘We’re going to
check because you could be carrying a slingshot and marbles.’ What
would I being doing with a slingshot and marbles? It was totally illogical!
But he crowded against me and shoved me into a doorway. Two others
joined him. I was so startled I didn’t know what to do. He grabbed me,
he tried to kiss me—I was filled with revulsion. They pressed me against
the wall, they grabbed my breasts and my intimate parts. They told me,
’Mamacita linda, you look delicious!’ I began to scream and they let me
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 83
go and began to laugh. ‘Go complain to human rights,’ they mocked.
‘We don’t care!’” – Marisela, Voces de la Valentía en Oaxaca.
That other women experienced similar molestations became evident to
me when I approached an intersection blocked off by armored PFP. A welldressed woman, probably in her late thirties, slipped her arm through mine.
“Buenos días,” she smiled. Then, in a whisper, “May I accompany you?”
Surprised but feeling complimented I assumed a businessman-like
manner as we squeezed through the tiny space between a sixteenth century
wall and the leering guards.
“Gracias,” she smiled as we separated half a block past the militarized
obstruction. “I was afraid to go through alone.”
Businesses that catered to the invaders—markets, food stands, internet
sites—remained open but hundreds of other establishments closed. The few
tourists who arrived quickly left. I heard comments like, “This is worse than
Baghdad,” and “I feel like I’m in a war zone.”
“What have the people done to deserve this?” a sturdy Missourian who
identified himself as a hunting and fishing guide asked. To my brief explanation
he shook his head and told me, “I saw enough of this in Korea. They should tell
tourists to stay away.”
Thousands of tourists didn’t have to be told to stay away.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 84
“The only business I’m doing right now is processing cancellations,” a
city of Oaxaca travel agent told me. By mid-November many downtown hotels
had shut their doors.
Salvador López, director of an organization of small Centro Historico
hotel owners, demanded that the PFP leave the city because their presence
had done nothing to reduce the tensions brought about by the teachers’ strike,
nor had it reduced depredations by paramilitaries. A city that has to be ruled
by bayonets, he insisted, wasn’t a city that tourists wanted to visit. A sturdy,
round-faced extravert whose effusive cordiality made him popular among both
business owners and visitors López urged the government to suspend the room
occupancy tax levied on hotel and bed and breakfast owners until tourism
returned to normal.
“As long as federal troops occupy the city with tanketas and highpowered weapons that intimidate, not protect, no tourist is going to visit,” he
insisted.
While the PFP and Mexican military were turning the Alameda and the
Zócalo into a mini-Baghdad and state police were deployed to guard Televisa
facilities, robberies and assaults that had no connection with the APPO
escalated throughout the periphery, including an unsolved two-person assault
on a city Banamex.
“As far as the government is concerned social protest and belonging to
the APPO are Oaxaca’s more dangerous criminal activity,” López complained.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 85
Thieves, rapists, kidnappers and drug pushers had free rein to do whatever
they wanted to do.
“If you were walking down the street and seemed suspicious, or had the
appearance of a university student, they grabbed you, threw you in their
pickups, beat you and carried you off,” Doctor Bertha Elena Muñoz, one of
Radio Ley’s and Radio Universidad’s most listened to announcers, compared
what was happening in Oaxaca with the repressions in Chile and Argentina
during the military dictatorships there. She told Bernardo Herrera of Noticias
that La Bruja had filed orders of apprehension for over 200 purported activists,
including her and human rights attorney Yésica Sánchez, and that at least
thirteen other women had disappeared, apparent victims of Ruiz-paid death
squads.
“The repression was much more extensive, much more profound, than
most people realized,” a teacher with the Indigenous Promoters and Teachers
of Oaxaca program told me. “There were assassinations. There were arrests.
Innocent people were beaten. How were we supposed to tell our children, our
students, what was happening? They would ask us ‘Why?’ and what could we
explain?”
“It’s inexplicable when a pueblo manifests itself the way Oaxaca has
done, filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of people, that the
government doesn’t listen, doesn’t respect, doesn’t respond!” Pedro Matias
shook his head as his fists tightened, then relaxed. “We’re screwed. Here in
Oaxaca we’re totally screwed!”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 86
Sara Mendez, citing a traditional Oaxaca concept—“In every family here
in Oaxaca there is at least one teacher and at least one policeman”—said that
many ministerial (local) police objected to the attack on the teachers’ sit-in. A
resident of barrio Xochimilco near the Centro Historico verified this in a
conversation I had with her:
It was very hard for each of them, my sons. As boys, growing up,
they were always together—playing football, climbing trees, getting into
trouble. My wife fretted but I told her it was normal and they weren’t
bad troubles, just things like, one night they stuffed an old pair of
overalls with corn husks and wired a head of cabbage on it to make it
look like a person and they tied a rope around it and climbed the hill that
overlooks the highway and when they saw a car coming they dropped
the dummy in front of it and, smash! the car hit it and the driver
slammed on his brakes and almost crashed into a tree.
When he got out he saw what it was and called the police. When
the boys came home—the car almost crashing into the tree scared
them—they told their mother and me what they’d done and we made
them call the police and tell them about it.
After high school the oldest went on to the teachers’ college but
the younger, he got married. He worked for a message service then
became a policeman. The two, they still were close, but after the
teachers’ strike and the police action they stopped speaking to each
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 87
other. They do not even come to see us at the same time. The oldest, he
is the most bitter. He calls his brother awful names. And the younger, he
is hurt. He says his brother is a criminal.”
When young José de Jesús Villaseca was jailed after state police broke
up a demonstration outside the Oaxaca state prison in Miahuatlán he told
reporters that municipal police [more or less equivalent to U.S. county sheriffs
deputies] not only treated him compassionately but told him that they
understand how the government worked and that they knew that he and
everyone else connected with the APPO who had been arrested were innocent
of the crimes of which they’d been accused.
“Everybody who works for the government—the police, the street
sweepers, the janitors, the secretaries—are caught in the same trap,” a former
government clerk told me.
They need their jobs—there aren’t any others to be found. Most of
the work that they do has no connection whatsoever to the repression or
the conflicts between the teachers and governor Ruiz. What they’re most
interested in is their families, their fiestas, improving the houses they
live in, maybe taking a little trip now and then. Or in the case of the
men, watching the Chivas or Tecos on TV.
If they lose what little they have, what can they do? Borrow
money in order to get to the Other Side and do manual labor!
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 88
To counter the publicity given “down-with-URO!” marches Ruiz’s
government organized a pro-PRI demonstration to show how “real Oaxacans”
felt about “these dirty itinerants that don’t bathe.” On November 7 an
estimated 5,000-7,000 participants hoisted professionally lettered WE
SUPPORT URO banners and trooped down the highway. Municipal police and
parade marshals trotted alongside, prompting shouted pro-PRI slogans.
Clerks and secretaries wearing high heels swayed together, wincing as
though they couldn’t wait for the march to end. Clusters of men wearing red
PRI jackets and hard hats laughed and waved towards curious onlookers. But
from what I could observe most of the participants appeared to be indigenas
and campesinos. Banners and placards identified rural regions that supported
URO and the PRI.
Groups of anti-URO spectators lining the sidewalks catcalled the
marchers. Some waved banners denouncing URO, the PRI and the PFP. These
actions so enraged PRI deputy Jesús Madrid that he ripped a placard out of the
hands of the woman holding it and began to lash her with it. Municipal police
who were accompanying the marchers pulled him away.
As I made my way up the incline towards Colonia Estrella where I lived
I was surprised to see a chain of buses parked bumper to bumper in the righthand lane of the two-lane thoroughfare. Two young men leaning against the
fender of one of the vehicles nodded as I passed and I paused to ask them
what was going on. Though disappointed that I had no cigarettes to offer they
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 89
told me that every time URO’s government needed support it sent lackeys to
hand out pesos to thousands of “pinches indios” and haul them into the city.
Later I learned that campesino leader Elpidio Concha had thrust the full
support of his PRI-backed organization behind URO.
“Those were the least animated, saddest bunch of marchers I ever saw!”
Jonathan Teal confided when I met him in a downtown restaurant a few weeks
after the demonstration. A university professor named Rafael, who asked that
his last name not be published, told me, “It’s what always is done. Anybody
dependent on the government, anybody with whom the government does
business, has to conform. If not, the road you wanted is left unpaved, the
fertilizer isn’t delivered, your taxi permit is rescinded.”
And Samu Hernandez, one of the dynamos from COMO, commented,
“People from the ‘March of Shame,’” as she described the pro-URO
demonstration, “told us that many of those participating had been paid 200
pesos and been given sandwiches to eat and bottles of water to drink.
“When some of them found out that they weren’t marching in support of
the APPO they deserted the pro-URO groups and handed the APPO people the
food and money they’d been given.”
Almost daily during early November 2006 the APPO or groups affiliated
with it staged “down-with-URO” and anti-PFP demonstrations. They weren’t the
only ones taking to the streets, however. The state taxi drivers union blocked
the center of Oaxaca on November 13. They parked their cars three-deep
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 90
across major intersections, forcing buses to alter their routes and making it
impossible for motorists to get to work, to school or make deliveries. The state
university, after trying to reopen for classes on November 14 despite limited
attendance by both students and professors, closed again when bands of prothe APPO youths invaded the campus.
In the Sierra Juárez representatives of the Zapoteca, Mixe and
Chinanteca communities met and hammered out a document that they
presented to the APPO and to the media demanding that the military and
militarized police leave Oaxaca, that all political prisoners be released and all
orders of apprehension cancelled. It also demanded that the state withdraw its
governing delegations in the Sierra Norte and threatened to take radical
measures if URO’s government didn’t comply. The assembly formally named
representatives to participate in all of the APPO’s assemblies and activities.
Two weeks after the APPO had been pushed out of the Zócalo I climbed
the steps into the Institute of Graphic Arts to meet a friend and noticed that
the patio and display rooms were blocked by sheets dangling from ropes tied
to the pillars and was told that there had been a “confrontation” with the police
the day before and the injured were being treated at the Institute.
As I left I asked several vendors and people outside the Institute about
the confrontation. Some were reluctant to talk to me but one of the women
who asserted that she was a member of the Popular Assembly explained that
neither federal nor state authorities were willing to haul those whom they’d
beaten and tried to arrest out of the Institute because they didn’t want to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 91
create a scandal that such an action involving “Maestro Francisco” would
invoke.
Because “Maestro Francisco”—Francisco Toledo—was so well-known and
had PRI political connections the military and the police conceded him
immunity from the persecutions they had no reluctance in imposing on
protesting teachers, students and members of opposition political parties. He
and the leaders of the Popular Assembly knew that armed soldiers and police
had swept through the city’s hospitals to arrest those who’d been wounded
during a previous confrontation; consequently, they felt that the Institute was
the only place the injured safely could be treated. Although plainclothes
operatives photographed those entering and leaving IAGO with cell phone
cameras to identify doctors and the relatives and friends of the injured, family
members and the Popular Assembly adherents gradually were able to safely
ferret the injured out of the building.11
On Sunday, November 19, a large contingent of women convoked by
COMO left the APPO sanctuary outside the Convent of Santo Domingo and
marched through the Centro Historico to confront the PFP phalanx surrounding
the Alameda. I saw dozens of upraised cameras as press photographers and
individuals with digitals snapped photos. As the protesters fanned out in front
Leniency similar to the immunity accorded Toledo extended to most foreigners,
although one had to be careful not to openly take part in Popular Assembly-related
activities since a foreigner accused of political participation could be deported. One also
had to guard against entanglements with government-paid porros, particularly at
night, since prosecutors and judges regularly passed them off as common criminals,
not political operatives, and released them shortly after they were arrested for “lack of
sufficient evidence.”
11
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 92
of the militarized police several of them lifted a large rectangular mirror on
which SOY VIOLADOR (I AM A RAPIST) was written backwards in what looked
like thick red lipstick so that the militaries, looking into it, would see
themselves reflected with that slogan across their chests.
“Oaxaca’s not a whorehouse! Get out, PFP!” the women chanted,
repudiating the sexual aggressions suffered when they’d tried to pass the
barriers. A group costumed as PFP aggressors pantomimed attacking a group
of amas de casa carrying pots and pans. Although I detected undertones of
anger most of the women laughed as the pantomimed PFP flung their hands
over their faces and pleaded for mercy as the amas de casa chased them
away.
Other women spray painted VIOLADORES in huge letters on the street in
front of the Robocops and waved banners in their faces. Through the
transparent visors I could detect gritted teeth; many of the fists clenching antiriot shields and meter-long clubs showed blanched knuckles. At an order given
somewhere behind them the police moved slowly forward, forcing the women
to retreat. The women regrouped and individual women stepped forward to
reprimand the phalanx as it obeyed a shouted order to halt.
One protester demanded that those who’d committed sexual abuses be
punished. Another, who I judged to be in her mid-fifties, faced the invaders
and in a clear, occasionally quavering voice, shouted:
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 93
If I could strip you of all of your armor, your weapons, your ugly
uniforms, the world would see that in your naked being you look just like
us! I hope someday your mothers are able to say to you that they are
proud of you for having decided to throw those uniforms aside so your
futures are not as gray as your vestments and so the bread that you
bring to the table you’ve earned by the sweat of your brows, not by
spilling blood! I feel sorry for you and your mothers for the way you’ve
profaned my land with your boots and tanketas. I am positive that we
will win, that we will triumph, that we will build a better world for our
children and even for yours. This will be our revenge!
Most of us crammed onto the sidewalks and in building entranceways
applauded. As I ducked away in order to circumvent the surge of people I
heard shouts of anguish. Women stumbled past covering their faces with their
hands. A news photographer who bumped against me as he tried to avoid
getting trampled told me the militaries were spraying the women with chili
powder dissolved in water.
The PFP pulled back to reestablish their barricade and did not pursue the
demonstrators, most of whom were crying and daubing their eyes. Others had
been burned so badly they had to be rushed to hospital emergency rooms.
During a rally in front of the ex-Convent of Santo Domingo after the
November 15 protest march several speakers confirmed that the APPO would
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 94
not negotiate further with the federal government unless Oaxaca governor
Ulisés Ruiz either resigned or was deposed by Mexico’s Senate. At the time the
Senate had other preoccupations, principally threats to disrupt President-elect
Calderón’s inauguration set for December 1. Speculation about the
inauguration, Calderón’s announced cabinet appointments and a legislature
divided among three political parties pushed events in Oaxaca into the
background as far as national and international media reportage was
concerned. But the military occupation and the APPO’s determination to
demonstrate against it remained the focus of attention locally.
On November 20 the APPO again trouped through the streets, backing
up traffic, waving banners, shouting and singing URO Asesino! and Justicia
slogans. Although security forces did not directly attack the assembled
marchers, confrontations erupted between separate participators in the
manifestation and the police and PFP resulting in over a dozen serious injuries.
According to testimony that Fabiano Juárez gave a human rights
delegation of lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, the International
Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Association of Democratic
Lawyers in Mexico, he was working in the market near the plaza where the
march culminated when police arrested him and charged him with auto theft.
Apparently angered because he couldn’t reply coherently (Juárez is Zapotec
and neither speaks nor understands Spanish well) the police beat him severely.
Human rights lawyers confirmed that the wounds to Juárez’s head required
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 95
several stitches to close. At his trial he was denied the services of an
interpreter.
The delegation also reported that paramilitaries or police seized a young
man named Pedro Garibo that same day and kept him face down for six hours
with his leg on a hot muffler before hauling him to prison. “The twenty
centimeter burn on his leg was left unattended for more than two and a half
months. When lawyers finally were able to visit him, they saw large areas of
exposed raw flesh on his leg. As a result of their demands, he finally received
medical attention,” delegation member Marjorie Cohn wrote.
On November 24 the APPO directors announced that their supporters
would form a “human chain” around the federal police camped in the Zócalo
and the Alameda and again would start barricading highways and occupying
government buildings. According to Victor Manuel Gómez:
The APPO council met on Friday, November 24, the day before the
march, to discuss two possibilities. During the meeting those of us who
attended learned that an APPO commission had been in contact with the
PFP. The PFP had indicated that they temporarily were willing to vacate
the Centro Historico and let the marchers enter, hold a meeting and
disperse. The other proposal was to maintain APPO’s original plan and at
the termination of the march to form a human chain to encircle the PFP.
Originally the APPO wanted to keep this human chain intact for forty-eight
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 96
hours but we realized that we couldn’t guarantee the safety of those
participating so we opted for a more symbolic surrounding of the federal
police. A commission was appointed to evaluate and modify the planned
actions of the participants.12
Despite warnings that “The APPO has detected an unusual amount of
PFP troop movements, perhaps to take positions outside of the Zócalo in order
to attack our companions during the Megamarch or after it has concluded” the
November 25 demonstrators pushed forward with the “symbolic” surrounding
of the military encampment.
Meanwhile, government forces had tightened their hold on the city,
making arrests and blocking the APPO’s radio communications with static.
President Fox’s federal government transferred over 4,000 personnel from
Army active duty to the militarized PFP, which put them directly under civilian
control.13 PFP and Army units blockaded many highways that connect rural
areas to the capital city, particularly those from the Mixteca in western Oaxaca
during the days leading up to the APPO’s planned November 25 mega-march
On November 25, buses filled with the APPO supporters from the Mixteca
that had carried thousands to participate in the city of Oaxaca protest marches
ran into PFP roadblocks.
“Elements for a Political Balance in the Popular Movement in Oaxaca,” La Batalla por
Oaxaca, Carlos Beas, editor, Ediciones Yope Power, Oaxaca, 2007
13
According to newly reassigned federal police that I talked to in Oaxaca’s Centro
Historico the transfers were made without giving those involved any kind of
orientation. “We just changed uniforms,” they shrugged.
12
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 97
“The PFP ordered us out of the buses,” Manuel Villegas, a teacher and the
APPO activist, recounted. “We protested but they jammed their toletes into our
ribs and said the buses had been stolen, which was a lie.”
The police stripped Villegas and his companions of their cell phones,
cameras and other possessions and accused them of conveying “dangerous
weapons”—bags filled with children’s marbles and slingshots—that they found
in the baggage compartment of one of the buses. When one of the APPO
supporters, a distinguished looking middle-aged psychologist, protested, half a
dozen armed PFP grabbed him and threw him face forward onto the asphalt.
They herded him and others whose IDs indicated that they belonged to the
teachers union into a nearby cornfield, tied their hands behind their backs and
kicked and stomped on them with their heavy boots.
“Who’s paying you?” they demanded. “Give us their names or you’ll never
get out of here alive!”14
Bruised, bloody and shivering from the cold, the detained Tlaxiacans lay in
the cornfield for nearly three hours before some of them were released and
others, charged with insurrection and robbery, were hauled to the state prison
in Tlacolula.
Plagued by droughts and the collapse of coffee prices the Mixteca had become “an
area of extreme discontent abandoned by both the federal and state governments,”
Villegas explained. Survival there depended upon the hundreds of thousands who had
migrated to the United States and were sending remittances back to what once had
been a prosperous agricultural area “forgotten by the government that now feels
cheated and impotent.”
14
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Chapter 7: The Night of Horror
Over half of the thousands sifting in to join the November 25
demonstration arrived after the scheduled starting time. They milled together
embracing old friends, unfurling parasols and waving banners and handpainted signs with anti-URO slogans. Students, indigenas, professors, white
collar workers, albañiles, housewives, many with young children strapped to
their chests in harness carriers, exchanged news notes, comments and
complaints. Patrol marshals—most of them teacher-members of Section 22—
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; others,
hurriedly done and crudely lettered, were attached to lathes and broom
handles. Many contained portraits of Brad Will; others emblazoned on red
backgrounds depicted Lenin and Stalin. Still others identified indigena, NGO
and human rights groups’ support of APPO.
The chorused “Ya cayó! Ya cayó! Ulisés ya cayó! became more and more
infectious as the chanting demonstrators neared the Centro Historico. Along
the parade route more and more supporters siphoned into the procession.
Marching teachers thrust their fists into the air and women who had
participated in previous marches banged skillets. Crowded into the narrow
streets leading to the Alameda and Zócalo they milled together, gesturing,
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 99
laughing, shouting, and fanned out to surround the armed PFP and their
military counterparts.
Unlike the demonstrations held before the armed takeover of what had
been the Section 22 camp-in the marchers did not congregate into a massive
audience for declamatory speakers. Instead they sifted onto the streets
adjoining the Zócalo to effect their symbolic surrounding of the PFP. Clusters of
high school and college students banded together to shout insults and taunt
the police and soldiers. Groups of Section 22 teachers and a number of women
who had been active during the barricading of the streets and the takeover of
the public TV and radio stations also confronted individual segments of the
occupying force “some of us affably, others—especially the women—more
vituperously,” a participant remembered.
Many of those who did not join the encirclement, individually and in
groups, dispersed; others filtered towards the Plaza Santo Domingo five blocks
away where the APPO vendors had put up stalls to sell paraphernalia and
videos of the June 12 and October 29 police assaults.
“At five o’clock the PFP and the soldiers began pushing people this way
and that,” nineteen-year-old Gonzalo told members of the Rights Action
emergency human right delegation. As dusk began to darken the Centro
Historico he, his mother, his novia and many people around them heard shots.
Startled, “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
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 100
canisters into the street. They fired rubber bullets at us as we were trying to
run away.”15
Through clouds of acrid teargas billowing along the streets of the Centro
Historico Gonzalo 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.”
Then, at approximately 6:30 p.m., the PFP 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. Some people ran towards Santo Domingo, others in the other
direction in order to escape. We covered our faces with rags and
handkerchiefs and grabbed some of the canisters and threw them back at
the Robocops. We picked up rocks and pavement stones. But the gas was
so thick we barely could see. People around me were choking and
vomiting. We ran towards Santo Domingo. 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
“On the day of the 25th the initial provocations were made by the PFP and infiltrators
among the march participants. The confrontations exceeded APPO expectations and
completely nullified any and all plans.”--Victor Manuel Gómez, “Elements for a Political
Balance in the Popular Movement in Oaxaca,” La Batalla por Oaxaca, ops. cit. Military
and state authorities denied that anyone connected with the PFP had or had used
firearms but they did not mention what paramilitaries participating in the purge might
have done.
15
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 101
Plaza [de Santo Domingo]. They began to hit us indiscriminately as they
moved in. There were police in civilian clothing with them, making arrests.
I heard one of them say that the civilian police were being paid $6,000
pesos cash for each person they brought in.
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 PFP 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 took my wallet and my cell phone and told me I was ‘number
20.’ 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 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
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did they pay you to march?’ they demanded. ‘Forget about “The Cause’
they told us. I lost all feeling in my body. I thought they were going to kill
us one by one.”
Gonzalo’s mother, forty-year-old Guadalupe Urrea, rushed back to the
Centro Historico to look for her son.
As we approached the Zócalo the PFP started releasing tear gas. I
could see a fire burning in the Camino Real hotel. Everyone around me
started running. The PFP was attacking. We turned to escape up Cinco de
Mayo but it was blocked off, the police were there, attacking. 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. The PFP grabbed
everybody, they hit my son, I saw people all around me being beaten.
They had blocked off the entrance to the Zócalo. They were kicking
the people they’d knocked down. Police wearing civilian clothes grabbed
us. They clubbed and kicked us. They took our sweaters and all of our
belongings and tied our hands. They separated the women from the men
and pushed us women, our hands tied behind our backs, against the wall
of the Cathedral.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 103
They grabbed our hair and yanked us backwards to photograph us.
‘Where are my children?’ I demanded. I was totally desperate. ‘Where is
my husband?’ I prayed. Then they hurled all of us women on top of each
other in a pickup. It was not a police car, it was a private pickup. All this
time the driver and the other cops—none of them uniformed—were trying
to stir up people against the PFP so the PFP would beat them and arrest
them.
According to reports included by Carlos Beas in La Batalla por Oaxaca the
confrontations continued for several hours, with over 100 wounded, dozens
detained and the APPO encampment in the plaza of Santo Domingo totally
destroyed. Groups of unidentified persons burned public buildings, vehicles and
private homes. According to La Jornada’s Opinion section editor Luis
Hernández
the mysterious fires that consumed public buildings and official documents
on November 25 and November 26 erased evidence that would have
shown how badly Ulisés Ruiz’ administration had managed its finances.
The fire in the offices of the Sistema de Administración Tributaria [State
Tax Office] erased incriminating evidence of the companies that grew in a
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 104
very irregular manner during the past years and that owed huge tax
bills.16
Although many who participated in the march remained in or near the
Centro Historico others, including Bernardo Ortiz and Alma Vara, decided to
leave but in order to circumvent the militaries encamped in the Zócalo they
zigzagged along side streets, laughing and joking about Alma’s dislike of the
military and Bernardo’s university student “hippie” appearance.
“That’s when we heard the shots,” Alma shuddered as she, Bernando and
I sat together in a downtown coffee shop a few weeks after the assault:
More than shots, roars. We almost had reached the corner when one
after another several white pickups, the kind the police use, careened past
us. Men with guns were riding in the backs of the pickups. Some of them
were wearing knit caps pulled down over their faces and they all seemed
to be yelling at each other.
Afraid to continue past the corner the young couple turned back towards
the Zócalo. They’d gone less than half-a-block, Alma said, before they stopped
again:
Luis Hernández, quoted by Carlos Beas, La Batalla por Oaxaca, ops. cit. Among
those detained by the federal police for being at the site of the fires were nine political
operatives from rural areas who had connections to Ulisés Ruiz. One of them was
identified as an assistant to PRI legislator Jesús Madrid.
16
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We couldn’t see anything in front of us, only a thick fog. ‘Back!’ Berni
shouted in my ear, ‘tear gas!’ We saw people running towards us. ‘They’re
killing everybody! They’re killing everybody!’ I heard some of them
scream. A woman carrying a little girl tripped and crashed onto the
asphalt right in front of us. We rushed over to help her up. ‘They’ve gone
crazy!’ she sobbed. ‘They’re killing everybody!’
Her little girl was crying and the woman’s hands and arms were bloody
where she’d scraped them on the sidewalk. We helped her up and she
grabbed her daughter and went stumbling off. The gas was getting thicker
and the noise was horrible. There were shouts and shots and besides the
tear gas I could smell smoke. ‘They’re burning the city!’ I heard people
say. ‘They’re burning it all to the ground.’
Somewhere east of Llano Park the young couple stopped. Not everyone
was running away from the conflict, she remembered; others—mostly young
people—were charging towards the center of the city.
Berni wanted to go with them but I wouldn’t let him. There was all
that awful noise and some of the people running away were holding their
heads and arms where they’d been beaten. ‘Maybe I can help.’ ‘Maybe I
can do something to help,’ he kept saying but I was afraid. I didn’t know
what was happening and I didn’t want him to leave me alone.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 106
Some of those who lived in or near the Centro Historico grabbed fleeing
residents and pulled them into their houses. Rene Mateo, who retired from the
Mexican army in the 1990s and moved to Oaxaca because “the climate is nice
and the cost of living low,” had developed a strong antipathy towards the
striking teachers after they turned the Zócalo “into a crappy nest of shitty
children and dirty clothes” and said he welcomed the military takeover despite
their portapotties, clanking ankle armor and leering grins.
Pudgy, balding and near-sighted despite thick-lensed plastic-rimmed
glasses he admitted that he suffered from health problems brought on by
“over-eating, over-drinking and an absolute lack of exercise.” As we conversed
outside a little asadero on Niños Heroes in March 2007 he explained that the
bar-restaurant where he liked to drink had closed because of the teacher
occupation of the Centro Historico “the majority of its customers driven away
by unpaid teachers who only sucked down bootleg mescal” he had gone out to
buy a bottle of brandy at a Piticó convenience store and was trudging past the
Alameda de León a block from the Zócalo when he smelled tear gas:
Of course I knew what it was. I wriggled out of my sweater and
wrapped it around my face and stumbled along as fast as I could, trying to
hold my breath but gasping and coughing. I had to stop—I can’t walk very
far very fast—and in a doorway I took a swig—I mean a big, big swig—of
the brandy. It seemed to help. There were people tripping and bumping
into each other, some going one way, others another, some shouting,
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 107
some bawling. The streetlights seemed to go out—I don’t know if they did
or not. My heart was beating like I was going to have a coronary—it’s
uphill to where I live—but I kept going, stopping to pant every few meters
like I’d just run a marathon.
I just had gotten to the door to my building when a bunch of people
surged downhill towards me. I was so exhausted and blinded I couldn’t
get the key into the lock. Somebody grabbed it out of my hand and
opened the door. He pushed me inside. Immediately the little hallway was
crammed with men and women. Somebody slammed the door shut to
keep tear gas from coming in. You could smell it even in the little patio. I
staggered to the door of my apartment and the man with my keys opened
the lock for me. I waved for some of those behind us to come in. I don’t
know why, I really didn’t want them there. But they were like me,
wheezing and crying and needing to go to the bathroom.
Most of those crammed into Mateo’s two rooms neither had participated in
the march nor belonged to APPO. One of the men—Mateo remembered him as
“forty-ish, weasel-faced”—doused rags with Pepsi-Cola from Mateo’s
refrigerator and passed them around to wipe faces and eyes in order to
mitigate the effects of the tear gas. Despite the shouts and sirens and
explosions outside some of those hunched on the floor of Mateo’s little
livingroom fell asleep, overcome by shock and drowsiness. Others punched at
their cell phones to get in contact with family or friends.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 108
One older couple huddled in a corner holding hands. Apparently the
husband had broken his glasses because he kept complaining that he couldn’t
see and his wife stroked his cheek and said everything would be all right, that
they could take care of things the next day. Those who had phones loaned
them to those who didn’t in order to make calls. One woman intermittently
burst into tears. Others coughed and whimpered because their eyes and lungs
burned and it hurt them to breathe.
By I don’t know when—midnight, one, two, three in the morning—
different ones among them worked out ways to get back to where they
lived. One woman’s brother came for her on a motorcycle. He took her to
a little park by the Gigante store, where someone was waiting in a car,
then came back for one or two others. A group of three or four decided to
walk—they’d found out by cell phone which way was safe—but four or five
stayed until morning.
Three or four days later a man rang the doorbell. I didn’t recognize
him at first, then realized he was one of those who’d stayed in my
apartment the night of the police attack. He gave me an envelope with six
or seven hundred pesos in it. He said some of those I’d ‘rescued’ had
taken up a collection and wanted to pay me back for the brandy and the
things they’d taken from my refrigerator.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 109
A woman who’d been arrested and carted to the federal prison in San José
del Rincón, Nayarit, hundreds of miles from the city of Oaxaca, told the human
rights delegation that she was a widow, fifty years old, and although she spoke
Spanish she neither could read nor write. Small, compact, with an oval face
marked by a long distinctive scar, short black hair, incendiary eyes, her wrists
still bore handcuff scars as she answered questions with stiff deliberation:
I work in the Centro Historico and I have to go there from where I live
by bus. My son also works and I was going to meet him but as I stepped
into the street I saw police on all sides. The smoke was thick,
asphyxiating, the gas was everywhere, I couldn’t breathe. I stopped; I no
longer was able to walk.
Some men grabbed me—police. They took my backpack. They
grabbed my hair and threw me face down on the sidewalk. They took my
money—the only money I had for the whole coming week—and kicked me.
They tied my hands and asked me questions. I told them, ‘I don’t know
what is APPO, I only came here to work.’
The night was very cold. The police yanked off my sweater. I was
crying and I was afraid. I was worried about my son and my nephew, I
didn’t know where they were. The police shouted violent and vile things at
me.
They forced me against a wall in the Zócalo. I tried to turn but one of
them shoved his knee against my shoulder and told me, ‘You do what we
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tell you to do!’ But even though I was pushed against the wall I could see
the police bringing some men past. They were all hurt and bloody and the
police were shoving them, beating them, treating them like animals.
There we were, they wouldn’t let us move, wouldn’t let us sit down,
wouldn’t let us look around. It was freezing cold. After two hours a red
truck pulled up and they threw us on top of each other in the back of the
truck. They said we were garbage and they were going to throw us in bags
and dump us somewhere. It was so dark I couldn’t see anything.
We drove and drove. Then finally the truck stopped. The police
grabbed us and pulled us out by our hair. All that I could see in front of
me was a huge door. I pleaded with them, ‘Let me see my son!’—I knew
he was looking for me. They pushed us against a wall and tied our hands
behind our backs. They led some of the men they had arrested past and I
saw my son. He wasn’t doing anything bad, he wasn’t a protester, he was
just going to work.
She gritted her teeth, trying to force back her tears, but couldn’t restrain
them. “It was terrible. Horrible. They were hurting them, twisting their arms,
ridiculing them and calling them names. ‘Here you’re going to die,’ they said.
‘Here you’re going to die!’”
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 obstructions like streetlamps, benches and curbs.
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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 APPO marchers from non-APPO participants: Their orders were to
treat everyone they came across as criminals. Among the most vulnerable
were mothers like the fifty-year-old widow who’d just gotten off work and
wanted to find her son and nephew and a confused itinerant vendor who spoke
no Spanish.
While police and paramilitaries were teargassing, beating and arresting
everyone they could get their hands on, federal journalism flaks were
contacting the media, including the wire services The Associated Press and
Reuters. El Sol de Mexico’s front page account 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
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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.”17
El Sol de Mexico, November 26, 2006. Despite the newspaper’s assertion only three
of those arrested came from outside of Oaxaca, the supposedly “wounded” officers
never were identified and the acts of vandalism never were confirmed.
17
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Chapter 8: Innocence Becomes a Crime
As the PFP began to move on the afternoon of November 25 porros
disguised as APPO supporters triggered the violence that culminated with the
police assault, Noticias, Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca reporter Matias told the
human rights delegation. “They started fires in several buildings, including the
offices that held the financial records of governors Ruiz and José Murat, his
predecessor:
We [reporters] were there the whole time. I had to run, you see,
there was no way to stop and say, ‘I’m with the press’ because they
were demolishing everything. They hit a companion of mine from El
Financiero with a nightstick and opened a wound that it took ten stitches
to close…
We heard, ‘They’re burning the federal judicial building’ and we
came through El Llano Park and saw that only one room of the building
was burning, plus the cars in the parking lot…
Then came the confrontation and then the battle, the tear gas, the
gunshots—there were gunshots—and afterwards the fires. Oaxaca, from
five until eleven was ablaze…truthfully in my twenty years of reporting
I’ve never seen a situation like that, where people go into the streets to
express themselves, protest, and without being previously organized
they organized on the spot.
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I was amazed—at five o’clock a group of rockeros and those who
wanted to fight with them rushed up ducking things being thrown at
them by people on the rooftops. We had to fall back but the fifteen-,
sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kids, in the first line of battle with their
rustic shields, so primitive, they made their challenge, and behind them
were a second line of those firing bazookas and behind them the women
beside a construction site breaking up hundreds of stones and bricks to
throw.18
They rose up, shouting, men and women. And behind them, in the
rear guard, were old people carrying water, carrying sanitary towels for
mouth coverings, and vinegar, and behind them young medical students
caring for those who’d been tear gassed and who’d been beaten. They
gave us cola, and vinegar, and helped people clean their eyes and as the
PFP came and we retreated the PFP burned what had been the APPO
encampment in Santo Domingo and forced us to head towards Seguro
Social.19
At Seguro Social two wings of attacking police converged, one
from El Llano and the other from Santo Domingo, and forced hundreds
of people, men, women, old people onto the highway in front of El Fortín
hotel. It was then about 9:30; we thought, ‘Now we must get out of
here.’ I’d hooked up with a group of journalists from France, New York,
The “bazookas” were metal tubes through which the defenders could propel ignited
skyrockets.
19
The Social Security hospital on the highway that runs through the center of Oaxaca.
18
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Spain; we were eight or nine and I said, ‘I’m going to stay with you
because you’re my defense, they’re not going to do anything to you,’
and they grabbed onto me and surrounded me until I was almost out of
sight.
We were at that corner where Hotel El Fortín is located, there was
a red pickup, ten or twelve people climbed aboard and it headed towards
Colonia Estrella but when the police tried to stop the pickup it swerved
and people fell out. I don’t know if they were run over or not.
We went forward some ten meters more to seek a taxi and from
that street, I don’t know if it was Crespo or Tinoco y Palacios, came
several federal and state police pickups and they surrounded everybody.
They beat me mercilessly, we didn’t know what to do, we ran towards
the hill and the people continued shouting…
Excuse me but the truth is that day is one that I’d rather not have
had. I was there during the EPR attacks in Oaxaca and there were
various killings and I’ve been in agrarian conflicts, I’ve seen
confrontations but that November 25 is something that, I don’t know, it
made me feel impotent, it made me afraid, we didn’t know what to do in
circumstances like that.
The international journalists were terrorized by what they were
seeing. One bus tipped over and they stopped others, the police arrived
and I don’t know if they beat everybody but there were heartrending
women’s shouts. We weren’t able to take photos, the photographers
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were afraid to take photos for fear they’d give themselves away and we
didn’t want the police to follow us.
I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t able to help, I remained
impotent. But afterwards, as if we were delinquents, in order to save our
lives, or at least keep from being beaten, we climbed FortÍn hill, like
refugees so they couldn’t find us, but not far away we heard the shouts.
People came out of their houses, they told us, ‘There are the police, get
out of there’ and for half an hour they protected us. I don’t think the
international reporters ever had seen anything like that in their lives and
I was worried because the next day I didn’t see them, I think they left
on the first flight out of Oaxaca…
I was able to talk by cell phone to the newspaper Noticias and I
told my director I couldn’t leave, I was trapped, the police were grabbing
everybody, they were beating everybody. Then Noticias sent a
motorcycle for me at 10 or 10:30 and I was able to pass through the
center of town—everything was burning.
When we were on the hillside everything was smoky, it seemed
like the whole state was burning. But what hurt the most was that they
said that innocent people had burned the buildings—no, no, no.
I can’t understand this government, I don’t understand why they say
what they do, with all the ways there are to solve the conflict they wind
up jailing the people, the people who ask for justice. And while Vicente
Fox lets the drug dealers escape, his fight against drugs never has
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worked, there you see no ‘firm hand,’ the ones who ask for change are
the dangerous ones.
Young Ofelia Robles, a university student who worked as an account clerk
to support her education, didn’t join those attempting to surround the PFP but
left the Centro Historico after she and the other marchers reached the Zócalo.
Several hours later, unaware that a melee was in full swing, she left home with
a neighbor and boarded a bus to return to the downtown in order to buy
tickets to an upcoming concert. The bus dropped them off just east of Llano
Park.
As we crossed the Park we saw some PFP but they let us pass, two
women, they said nothing. We saw that the hotel association building had
burned but we saw nobody. We started to turn back, then went forward to
see what was going on. We saw burned APPO stalls in front of Santo
Domingo, then we saw people running. We recognized some of them from
the march. Then we saw PFP pickups—there must have been at least
sixteen of them.
We were scared. Somebody shouted, ‘We’re surrounded!’ We didn’t
know what to do and we didn’t want to go off by ourselves so we stayed
with the people who were there. They told us the police we picking up
people who got separated from the groups. Some people we were with
started to run towards García Vigil Street. My neighbor and I followed but
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when we saw PFP pickups coming our way we crawled under a truck
parked by the curb. Some others did the same. One was just a kid, a
teenager. From under the truck we saw the PFP beat a woman and a kid
until they were unconscious.
The teenager, he was very chubby and very uncomfortable. The
PFP coming by saw him move or saw his feet. I heard one of them shout,
‘Hey! Under that truck!’ They grabbed the kid and pulled him out, then
saw the rest of us. They grabbed me and pulled me out. They tore my
pants, kicked me, hit me in the head, broke my glasses. Then they
photographed me and slammed me face down in the back of the pickup.
At Llano Park they dragged us out of the pickup. They said I was a
chilanga because of my perforations. They had their heads covered,
encapuchados, camouflaged. They weren’t from here, from Oaxaca, they
had ojos claros. They took my backpack, they insulted us—said vile
things, said I was a university student, said they were going to rape me.
I heard gunshots. Some state police came, they had dogs with
them, snarling, vicious dogs to attack any of us who tried to escape. They
made us sit with our hands behind our necks and our heads between our
knees.
I still had my cell phone, I got a call from a friend. The police heard
it and took my phone. I had to go to the bathroom really bad and they
said okay, but there, right in front of them and I refused. They were
recording everything, photographing everyone, insulting us all of the time.
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That the police and military actions were not “a spontaneous defense” as
federal and state officials maintained was evidenced by the immediate
availability of transportation, including helicopters and mobile health units
equipped with computers and printers on which the arresting officers could
fabricate warrants and other accusatory paperwork. As reporter Matias pointed
out the state and federal police had a “game plan” that included the pincer
movement he described. Other testimony made it clear that the government
intended to arrest not only the APPO supporters but citizens who weren’t
involved in the protest:
The parking lot where we’d left our car was closed. We decided to
take a bus but there was no bus service so we began walking. Three
pickups filled with PFP intercepted us. Six or seven police jumped out of
each one of them. Without telling us that we were being detained they
threw us on the pavement and beat us with their clubs and kicked us in
the back and legs…—Níckel Santiago quoted in La Jornada, December
28, 2006.
I had started towards town, walking. I went through Xochimilco
and down the steps and crossed Niños Heroes when I heard the clamor.
Then I could see smoke. I looked behind me and people were running
along Niños Heroes. Then there were pickups all around and some men
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grabbed me—I think they were police—but some people banged against
them and the men let me go and I ran back up the steps. There were a
lot of people around me, crying and wiping their eyes. Below us we could
see police grabbing and hitting people who’d fallen down or who were
trying to run away…”—Miriam González, interviewed by the author in
January 2007.
Police dressed in blue stopped me in front of Pochote [Park]
parallel to Alcalá [street]. One of them hit me in the head. They threw
me down, kicked me and dragged me to a pickup. They shouted at me
and made me climb into the pickup that had other people in it. They
took my cell phone and the digital camera I had in my backpack. In the
pickup they stopped hitting me but they hit the women beside me in the
head…”—Edith Coca, quoted in La Jornada, December 28, 2006
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Chapter 9: Treated Like Animals
In the testimony he gave to the Rights Action delegation reporter Matias
described fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds with cardboard and lamina shields
refusing give way to the heavily armed police despite flames, shots and tear
gas. A grandmother and teacher, despite being in great pain and weakened by
cancer “forgot her situation, she was so overwhelmed with anger and rage that
she stayed, she confronted the PFP,” a COMO admirer remembered. And COMO
participant Itandehui reported:
I looked up and there was this young woman running towards the
barricade where the kids were making a stand. She was cradling a baby
wrapped in a rebozo as she ran, stumbling and almost falling, her eyes
glazed from the gas. We shouted, ‘Are you crazy! Stop!’ but she darted
past us. When she got to the barricade she flung the rebozo aside. It
wasn’t a baby she was carrying, she was carrying rockets and gunpowder!
Everybody cheered when they saw what she she’d brought.
On November 27 Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” aired an account by
journalist John Gibler. He reported that the confrontation began when police
officers robbed a cooler filled with soda from the encircling protesters.
Enraged protesters
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...hurled rocks and fired bottle rockets through plastic tubes at the police…
As the APPO protesters drew close the police fired heavy amounts of tear
gas, forcing them to retreat one block back and fogging most of the city
center with thick clouds of gas.
Protesters and federal police fought along Alcalá for some two hours
before the police began to advance, firing more tear gas and [the
protesters were firing] glass marbles through slingshots. By eight p.m.
protesters had been forced out of the city center. Many were captured and
beaten along side streets by federal police. Once [the protesters were]
forced out of the center, uniformed and plainclothes state police officers
surrounded and captured dozens of protesters, brutally beating them with
batons and firing tear gas at close range. State and federal police also
opened fire with hand guns and assault rifles, wounding dozens. In
unconfirmed reports three people were shot and killed and their bodies
hauled off by police.
Throughout the night plainclothes gunmen, like the paramilitaries who
have killed with impunity for months in Oaxaca, entered hospitals
throughout the city looking for wounded protesters. Witnesses said the
gunmen threatened hospital workers at gunpoint and removed several
wounded people from hospitals. The Director of Hospital General, Dr.
Felipe Gama, acknowledged the gunmen entered his hospital and roamed
the halls with pistols drawn but he denied reports that they had removed
patients.
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Protesters in turn burned several government buildings and private
businesses and broke windows throughout the city center. The APPO
spokespeople later denounced these acts but defended the people’s right
to act in self-defense, using makeshift weapons such as Molotov cocktails,
bottle rockets and slingshots.20
On Sunday morning state and federal police patrolled the city,
controlling the Zócalo and Santo Domingo Cathedral, both sites of former
protester encampments, while dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of
protesters remained hidden in houses throughout the conflict area. The
APPO has called to reestablish their protest camp at Santo Domingo on
eight a.m. Monday morning.
Throughout the night law enforcement pickups and unmarked vehicles
sped back and forth between Oaxaca and state prisons in Tlacolula, forty
kilometers west of the capital city and Miahuatlán, eighty kilometers south.
Underneath the boots of the arresting officers lay the Oaxacans they’d picked
up during their sweep. Handcuffed and kicked or beaten if they moved or
looked up they had no idea where they were being taken or what their fate
was going to be. The teenager Gonzalo said that many presumed they were
“The government paid sicarios to burn the buildings and attack the PFP, of that I’m
absolutely sure,” artist Hugo Tovar told me. “The guardias blancas knew exactly what
they were doing. They instigated everything and the government then blamed the
APPO but it was exactly the other way around. The APPO was defending itself.”
20
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going to be tortured and killed. Others were in too much pain from the
beatings they’d received to presume anything.
The fifty-year-old widow who’d gotten off work in the Centro Historico
shortly before she was seized told the Rights Action emergency human rights
delegation:
At the prison [Tlacolula] they threw us in a tiny room and closed
the door. I was trembling so much from fear and the cold I hardly could
stand. I started praying—I didn’t know what else to do. Then some police
came. They grabbed me and took me to a different room to a médico who
was supposed to examine me but he didn’t do anything. While I was there
I could hear men screaming—screaming in pain—and I knew they were
being tortured…
One of those being tortured was Gonzalo. The police pulled him out of the
pickup that had carried him and a dozen or so others to the prison and threw
them face first onto the ground. “Drag yourselves like the dogs you are!” they
shouted as they yanked them by the hair and forced them to crawl one by one
to be photographed, then threw them into a holding cell.
“We had no water. There were bars on the window but it was open to the
air and a freezing wind was blowing.” Gonzalo and his cellmates huddled
together, shivering and trying not to aggravate their wounds by moving until
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police dragged them one by one to make “declarations,” which under Mexican
law are supposed to be free from coercion.
“I didn’t know how to answer,” Gonzalo told the Rights Action delegates.
“They wanted me to give names and confess to things I hadn’t done.”
Ofelia Robles underwent similar treatment. Crammed into the back of a
police pickup, shivering from the intense cold and in pain because she
desperately needed to urinate, mocked and threatened with rape, she felt “so
desperate I almost passed out, I almost stopped being able to breathe.” When
the pickup finally swerved to a stop in front of the Miahuatlán prison she and
some of those with her noted that a pickup they had been following was filled
with “chavos”—young men who were not being mistreated or tortured.
“Obviously they were infiltrators. They were laughing and joking with each
other.”
Forced out of the pickup, shoved and prodded with police nightsticks,
Ofelia and the women with her stumbled into a bodega where prison personnel
stripped them of the last of their personal possessions and herded them one by
one to be examined by “a supposed doctor, but all he had was a notepad and
pen and a mouth mask.”
“All that time, that night and the next day, they didn’t give us any food or
any water,” the fifty-year-old widow testified. “Some of the women in the room
with me were badly injured from the beatings they’d received. The police
accused me of participating in the march and wouldn’t believe me when I said
I had just gotten off work and was looking for my son.”
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Like Ofelia Robles and the fifty-year-old widow, Edith Coca was
photographed, interrogated and threatened. “They took us to a hanger,
interrogated us again and told us they were going to rape us. They were gross,
uneducated. They laughed at us, saying we wanted Che [Guevara] to be our
president and that socialism had failed throughout the world,” she told La
Jornada’s Victor Ballinas after she was released from federal prison.
One policeman tried to grab my breasts but I wrapped my hands
around my body…They packed us into a helicopter and while we were
flying they said they were going to throw us in the ocean…[after we
landed] they told us we were in a maximum security prison; they checked
us, stripped us and took photos. They cut my hair—mutilated it, I felt
terrible because it hadn’t been cut in twelve years. The cells were very
dirty and the guards insulted us. They accused me of sedition and
damaging motels and public buildings in Oaxaca. They humiliated us,
made us lower our pants and lift our camisoles and looked at us…
A report that the APPO sent to the federal House of Deputies (the
equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives) documented fifteen separate
instances of forced oral sex during which the perpetrators threatened to
assassinate or “disappear” their victims. The report issued by Iñaki García’s
CCIODH (International Civilian Commission for the Observation of Human
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Rights) detailed cases of simulated or actual rape using night sticks, in addition
to other tortures.
“We were really scared,” Ofelia Robles admitted:
When they brought us out together the following day two of the
women looked like they were wearing plastic helmets, then I realized that
it was their hair plastered down with blood where they’d been beaten. The
PFP came—the PFP from the day before—and took us one by one in front
of somebody they said was from derechos humanos (human rights) but
they didn’t do anything. The PFP accused us of firing rockets and setting
fire to buildings. What stupidity! The only thing I’d done was try to hide
under a car.
That night they took us out to where there were helicopters
waiting. They insulted us, they said they were going to rape us. They piled
us in the helicopter and flew us to a different landing strip. There they
forced us into an airplane. They made us walk with our heads down but I
saw a PFP logo on the side of the airplane. My neck hurt so bad I thought
my head was going to fall off. All the time I’m thinking, ‘What are they
preventing by arresting and torturing us?’ I couldn’t find an answer. No
one had an answer.
When we arrived in Tepic [Nayarit, where the San José del Rincón
prison is located] they took all of our belongings, all of our clothes. They
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made us put on ugly prison clothes. When they forced us to our cells I
heard screams from the men and knew they were being beaten, tortured.
The guards told us we were in a maximum security prison and had no
rights. They shaved our heads and didn’t let us see a doctor or give us any
kind of medical checkups.
The women prison guards were nasty. They insulted us, especially
they insulted the women from rural backgrounds, who had rural accents.
They told me to forget about my family, that no one was going to come
for me.
They treated us like animals. They only gave us fifteen minutes to
eat and the only meat they gave us was horse meat. In our cells we had
no cleaning supplies, we had to drink tap water, they didn’t even give us
toilet paper.
The only medical treatment we got was pain pills. Every time there
was a different doctor and none of them knew our medical histories or
what the previous doctors had prescribed. One of the women had broken
ribs and they didn’t treat her at all.
It was terrible! I prayed—all the time I prayed—and at the same
time I cried.
Testimony taken from the thirty-eight women who police arbitrarily
arrested and flew to the federal prison make one think of Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo. Prison custodians chopped their hair, leaving only tags and
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tatters around their baldness. They forced them to undress and to do deep
knee bends while calling them bitches, they beat them with nightsticks and
threatened them with rape.
They made them sit for hours without moving, hands behind their necks
and eyes on the ground, they burned them with lighted cigarettes, fondled
them and pinched them, they entered their cells at nights, pulled back the
hammers on their pistols and said they were going to shoot them. On the
helicopter flights to Nayarit the federal police threatened to throw them out the
door and laughingly described how they would splatter against the mountains.
Armed police herded Gonzalo and his cellmates onto airplanes after
manacling them hand and foot. “I lost the ability to feel my thumb the
handcuffs were so tight,” he remembered. “They didn’t tell us where they were
taking us but we knew it was a long way away. All the time they threatened to
throw us out and they made jokes about how nobody ever would find our
bodies, we’d splat! when we hit the ground and there wouldn’t be enough left
of us to scrape up with a machete blade.”
Once the planes had landed the police threw their prisoners into trucks
and hauled them to the federal prison. “Don’t look up!” the guards threatened
as they forced the manacled prisoners past snarling German shepherds.
“We were hurt, we’d been tortured and beaten, we didn’t know what was
going to happen to us,” Gonzalo recalled:
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We weren’t criminals, none of us. The PFP and the vigilantes had
picked up ambulantes, a guy driving through on a motorcycle, a guy
waiting for a bus. All innocents. And they beat us and tortured us. In the
prison, from some of the other cells, I could hear men moaning. I could
hear men saying that life no longer was worth living, that they wanted to
kill themselves.
“They wouldn’t tell us anything,” Guadalupe Urrea, one of those flown to
the federal prison, complained.
For five days we thought we were in the Estado de Mexico. They
forced us to make declarations but refused to let us ask questions. I said I
wanted to see a social worker but they said I had no right to see one.
They cut our hair and told us we had to cut our fingernails. When one of
us complained that we didn’t have any nail scissors the guards mocked us
and told us to use our teeth. But one woman who’d been arrested with us,
a poor hurt women whose fingers were swollen from the beatings she’d
received, couldn’t chew her fingernails because she had no teeth.
After 25 days in the Tepic prison federal authorities conveyed Robles back
to the Oaxaca state facility in Miahuatlán but they threatened to recommit her
when she insisted on having a lawyer present before she would sign a
confession. Although she was reunited with her family (“…they all looked
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skinny they’d lost so much weight, they’d been worried to death and very
depressed…”) Ofelia said the nightmare of her forced arrest hadn’t ended. She
had not been given her freedom but had been paroled and had been told that
she could be rearrested and returned to federal prison at any time. Her
employer refused her rehire her, explaining that he was under pressure from
clients not to have a convicted criminal working for him.
“So now we’re mutes, which is the worst thing that could happen to us.
People think we’re bad, they believe we did bad things.
“It’s not fair! The accusations were lies! Total lies! We’re being punished
and those who told the lies are going free!”
The state prisons where many APPO sympathizers were housed (primarily
those arrested before and after the November 25 purge) treated their inmates
more leniently than the federal installations but according to numerous APPO
supporters that I talked to the custodians made a point of discriminating
against “revolutionaries.”
Not only “did they treat us like animals,” a prisoner who’d been
incarcerated at Miahuatlán testified to the Rights Action delegation in February,
2007, “they tried to turn the other inmates—murderers, rapists, thieves—
against us.” Prison authorities stopped providing meals for the prisoners of
conscience, forcing relatives and friends of those being held to bring them food
daily. Family members camped outside both the Miahuatlán and Tlacolula
prisons and they and various the APPO representatives demonstrated daily.
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According to an attorney for those incarcerated the federal government had
agreed to release all of those held in Tlacolula by December 31 but URO
blocked the releases and permitted only seven to be freed from Tlacolula and
eleven from Miahuatlán.
“It would appear that Ruiz has more power than the federal justice
department,” the lawyer complained. “If spite of the agreement new charges
continue to be levied. None of those who’ve been released really is free.”
PFP and military personnel were under orders not to give interviews, to
talk to the press or to provide information of any kind to anyone in the
community. Nor were they allowed to divulge information to family or friends
over the telephone or by e-mail. Nevertheless, statements that some of them
made during private conversations were shared among friends and
acquaintances. Other comments were overheard by candy and cigarette
vendors, workmen and passersby.
A nineteen-year-old named Elida, a part-time hair stylist and part-time
student, told me she and several young women her age often hung out in the
Alameda or the Zócalo during breaks between classes and work. They
continued to do so after the two parks were taken over by the military and the
PFP and, of course, they attracted attention.
“It was kind of fun, you know, entertaining,” she admitted, explaining
that most of the soldiers were from other parts of the Republic. She and one of
them, a twenty-one-year-old who’d started college but dropped out and joined
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 133
the army because he ran out of money, slipped away from the others on
several occasions. “He said he didn’t want to emigrate, didn’t want to become
an indocumentado, that’s why he became a soldier.
“He was robust, you know, athletic, and funny—he made me laugh. He
had my cell phone number. We became intimate—not committed, just together
when we could be.”
The relationship changed, Elida said, after she questioned him about his
participation in the November 25 assault.
He admitted that he had taken part. At first he said they [the PFP] had
been attacked and were defending themselves but then he admitted that
they had done the attacking. Yes, he said, he had grabbed people and
beaten people. ‘How could you?’ They were the ‘enemy,’ he told me. Then
he said it was like a football game. Like being with the team on the field
and all one could think of was winning. Running after opponents. Catching
them. Knocking them down. All of the PFP felt the same thing, he said.
‘We’ve got to get them!’ ‘Arrest them!’ Tie them up so they can’t get
away!’ Like being drunk, he said. High on adrenalin.”
Asked if she though he felt any kind of remorse Elida shook her head. “He
put it aside like it had happened in a different dimension. Like it had nothing to
do with who he really was.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 134
A candy vendor overheard a group of soldiers (or PFP, she couldn’t
differentiate between them) describe those they’d arrested as “pitiful vermin.”
She said they joked about how “different” the “rebels” looked trudging off to
prison with their heads bowed “like cattle going in to be slaughtered.” A waiter
at one of the cafes facing the Zócalo confirmed that soldiers—as well as some
“well dressed” civilians—said that those who were arrested “got what they’d
been asking for” and that they had been “well paid” to stir up trouble.
“They claim to be teachers but most of them are just street people,
prostitutes and derelicts,” the waiter repeated what he’d overheard one of the
well-dressed civilians saying.
Although government spokespersons denied that the PFP and their state
and municipal cohorts fired lethal weapons or killed anyone eyewitnesses
reported at least three violent deaths. Artist Hugo Tovar, who lives in the area
ransacked by the police, told me that while he was working with a the APPO
first aid group he saw one person shot and another who’d been shot being
supported by two friends. Radio and newspaper communiqués on the two days
following the PFP attack mentioned “at least three” killings but official
summaries made no mention of them.
However, both the APPO and journalistic accounts listed dozens of
persons who had not been heard from since they had participated in the
protest march. Both accounts presumed that many had left the area out of
fear, since apprehensions of the APPO members and sympathizers continued
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 135
for weeks after the November 25 confrontations but that they also could have
included persons killed and secretly buried by the police.
Many of the recently released prisoners who testified before the Rights
Action delegation quoted PFP and paramilitaries demanding, “Who’s paying
you?” and “How much are they paying you?” as though they really believed
that the APPO was being financed by groups from outside of Oaxaca,
particularly Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Partido Revolucianario
Democrático. Whether their superiors also believed that or simply were
justifying counter-insurgency repressions I have no way of knowing.
Perhaps nobody does.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 136
Chapter 10: Anger, rage, indignation
“Judicially there was absolutely no valid reason for the PFP to make so
many arrests,” José Hernández, a former federal investigator, told me by
telephone from Guadalajara. Like many other journalists and political
commentators he termed the Night of Horror “a game of politics” designed to
intimidate other protest movements and noted that by accepting bail those
released from federal prison had admitted being guilty to the charges levied
against them, thus enabling the federal government to uphold its claim that
“the leftist led” protest had been successfully dealt with.
“The PFP planned the November 25 apprehensions,” the APPO advisor
Marcos Leyva asserted. He compared the Night of Horror to the massacre of
students and dissidents by Mexican army and police at Tlatelolco in the Federal
District on October 2, 1968.
“All of the state’s resources came down on the APPO,” human rights
lawyer Yésica Sánchez agreed. “There was obvious complicity between the
state and federal governments.”
Testimony given to human rights delegations made it clear that the FoxCalderón-URO governments couldn’t have had the amounts of personnel,
aircraft and land transportation available to process and fly 141 persons to
federal penitentiaries hundreds of miles away from Oaxaca had they not made
preparations to do so in advance.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 137
According to Sánchez federal and state police arrested fifty women
during the Night of Horror, most of whom were not the APPO members and
thirty-eight of whom were manacled and flown to federal prisons. These
imprisonments violated Mexican law which supposedly guarantees the right to
have attorneys present during sentencing procedures. But the authorities
didn’t hesitate, or show any confusion about their assignments: They whisked
their victims out of the city, processed them at the prison in Tlacolula where
empty cells were available despite the institute’s overcrowded conditions.
Mobile medical vehicles were on hand to whip out after-the-fact warrants and
there were no security leaks from any of the participating branches of
government.
The manner in which the arresting officers treated the victims also
violated international conventions against torture which Mexico had signed.
Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild and a human rights
delegate to Oaxaca, insisted:
Three of the techniques used by the police in Oaxaca apparently
originated in the United States. They include terrorizing people with
ferocious dogs, threats to throw prisoners from helicopters into the sea
and a humiliation technique of denying toilet privileges, leaving people
to defecate in their pants.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 138
Sixteen children between the ages of nine and twelve were beaten and
arrested on November 25. Although the PFP led the attack “they were the face
for all the other law enforcement units that participated at full strength—
including the AFI [Federal Investigation Agency], the Navy, the Army, state
and local police and paramilitaries,” Sánchez insisted.
“The APPO didn’t burn the Justice Building or the SAT (state tax office),”
Leyva snorted. “The only records burned were those that might have
incriminated Ruiz and Murat.”
“As oppressive as life in Oaxaca had become, nobody imagined the
repression would become this cruel,” Mendez sighed. “Not since the
dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in the nineteenth century—maybe not even then—
had measures like these been taken. Detentions, arrests, people transported to
prisons hundreds of miles away. People literally afraid to leave their houses.”
Other comments I heard or overheard the days following the purge
summarized popular feeling in the city of Oaxaca:
“Anger, rage, indignation. I keep saying to myself, ‘What can I do?
What can I do?”
“I told the police, ‘We’re the same people! We’re all from the same
pueblo!”
“I don’t know how or what we’re going to do but we women have to
keep fighting…”
“So much anger! So much pain! I feel like I’m coming apart!”
“We can’t give up! The fight has to go on!”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 139
The national and international media, fed accounts by government flaks,
most of them reporting from Mexico City, presented a very different series of
events. Jorge Fernández-Menendez, a nationally syndicated columnist who
presents ultra-conservative commentaries reported:
What occurred on Saturday was what had to occur: The march
became a shameless provocation orchestrated by the most hardcore (and
manipulative) members of APPO. Its principal directors, including
members of the opposition party in the state, and including those with
closest ties to the EPR, both of which have a strong presence among the
Section 22 leadership, decided to withdraw from the front of the march,
leaving the most radical sectors in front, those affiliated with communists
and other similar groups that are part of the complex mosaic of the far left
and the so-called revolutionary council that was responsible for the bombs
detonated three weeks ago in Mexico City, the same who manifest
connections with long standing armed groups.
They fulfilled their provocation attempts as planned. For hours they
harassed the PFP with rocks and Molotov bombs until finally the police
responded to orders from their superiors and with tear gas and antimutiny vehicles rapidly dispersed the protesters who were obliged to
retreat and regroup in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Abandoned by most
of their own leaders and in a move that turned out to be politically suicidal
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 140
they wound up burning their own camp and various vehicles, hotels and
businesses. At the moment that I’m writing these lines an unofficial report
indicates that some 200 are detained and three deaths resulted from the
confrontations.
Sunday morning while workers cleaned up the disaster that the
Centro Historico had become Ulisés Ruiz passed through those same
streets for the first time in six months. As far as the governor is concerned
once again the conflict has been resolved.21
Fernández-Menendez’s descriptions, like those filed by the Associated
Press’ Rebeca Romero, were based on government accounts. Whereas Matias
and thousands of other Oaxaca residents were in the city’s Centro Historico on
November 25 Romero and Fernández-Menendez obviously were not.
Throughout Romero’s reports the catch words “leftists,” “strikers,” “rampage”
and “gangs” describe the alleged “running battle.” Nowhere do they explain
that the APPO formed around the 70,000 member Section 22 of the federal
teachers’ union and incorporated nearly 100 registered NGOs nor that Oaxaca
had been the scene of numerous assaults, disappearances and assassinations
attributed to police and paramilitaries prior to the march.
As I can attest from my own journalism experiences reporters learn
quickly which news sources are most reliable—and which are easiest to
contact. Often it is the latter whose information gets into print. Foreign
21
Noticias, November 27, 2006
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 141
correspondents covering the teachers’ sit-in in Oaxaca that led to the
demonstrations and subsequent violent repressions found government sources
immediately accessible but told me that the APPO lacked authoritative
spokespersons that they felt confident about contacting.
Veteran Spanish journalist Jacobo García contrasted the APPO protests,
whose conflicts with the government he covered for El Mundo of Barcelona,
with those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. That the Zapatistas had a charismatic
leader who clearly could state the group’s goals, both pragmatically and
poetically, enabled García and other foreign correspondents to provide
sympathetic coverage. Thanks to his understanding of the media and how to
engage and manipulate it Subcomandante Marcos became a charismatic and
easily identified international figure. Not only did he respond to requests for
interviews and information he sought out and courted journalists, some of
whom, like Herman Bellinghausen of Mexico City’s La Jornada, stayed in
Zapatista communities and had news brought to them.
By contrast, in Oaxaca the APPO not only neglected press relations but
failed to give candid explanations of their activities to national and
international reporters. Their spokesperson often was twenty-six-year-old
Florentino López, who had no previous experience in journalism or press
relations and who communicated primarily by cell phone while darting from
one domicile to another to avoid being apprehended by state police.
In The Invention of Power Mexican journalist/essayist Federico Campbell
asserts that propaganda is a government’s most effective ruling tool.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 142
Government officials, politicians and information services create a false reality
that once in print becomes almost impossible to contradict. High-paid flacks in
well-financed offices not only stand ready to assist international reporters by
arranging interviews and providing documents they provide a continual flow of
“tips” and “inside information.”
The APPO needed to do what presidential candidates in both Mexico and
the United States have done: capsulize their philosophy in a few brief “López
Obrador is a danger to Mexico” or “Give free enterprise a chance” slogans to be
understood by wire service readers and TV viewers.
“The truth is, in any editorial job, you are so tied up with your program
and deadline, that you simply do not have the time to stand back and look at
the coverage as a whole," the online media monitoring agency Media Critiques
quoted the BBC’s Malcolm Balen. For over a year after the events of summer
and fall 2006 I was getting e-mail and calls from relatives and friends in the
United States expressing concern for my safety. Little that I could say or write
seemed to deter the impressions they had of roving leftist bands burning
vehicles and hurling Molotov cocktails while fearful citizens looked on in horror.
As testimony unfolded from those who were in the Centro Historico and
those who were apprehended and flown to federal prisons it became evident
that the PFP and their state and paramilitary cohorts had exercised a carefully
planned sweep of the Centro Historico. Infiltrators urged the APPO resisters to
aggressions in order to justify the tear gas implemented attack. (Many of the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 143
canisters were fired from building tops by snipers who were waiting there.) As
the armed and armored grenadiers surged north from the Zócalo pickup-driven
police sped along streets paralleling the Centro Historico. Like wolf packs
pursuing herds of fleeing pronghorns they isolated, picked up and arrested
stragglers, including some who’d broken away from the main group of
protesters and passersby who’d had nothing to do with the APPO.
Newspaper photographs showed Governor Ruiz in the Centro Historico the
morning of November 26 wedged among non-uniformed police and PRI
henchmen with his hand upraised and a toothy grin illuminating his wide face
as he asserted that Oaxaca again was “safe for tourists.” Meanwhile workmen
power-hosed bloodstains off buildings and pavement, scooped up the charred
remains of the APPO encampment and loaded dump truck with stones,
shattered window glass, skyrocket tubes and tear gas canisters. Others
wielding long-handled paint rollers swabbed the APPO slogans and anti-URO
graffiti from buildings throughout the area.
The heavy odors of burned wood and paint and the acrid tear gas
aftertaste seemed to cling to everything. When I paused to chat with a couple
of resting workers a balding supervisor wearing a open-at-the-neck white shirt
hustled towards me to ask me what I wanted and before I could reply, told me
not to molest the workers, they were busy.
Nevertheless, Ruiz’s assertion that law and order had been reestablished
did not diminish the repression.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 144
“All of us [identified as spokespersons or directors of the APPO] took
drastic means to stay out of the spotlight,” Florentino López told the human
rights delegation. “Everything we did we did on the sly. I was giving seven or
eight press conferences a day but only by telephone.” Reporters from Mexico
City and Oaxaca dailies reported that PFP pickups filled with armed men
surrounded the Justice Department as they assembled for an announced news
report.
For nearly a week after the Night of Horror the state and federal
governments refused to divulge information about those who had been flown
to federal prisons. State authorities refused to answer calls or give information
to the press. Speculation about the number of dead, arrested and wounded
varied widely. Some published reports indicated that the various law
enforcement agencies had arrested over 200 people, wounded over 250—an
estimated twenty-five by gunfire—and killed at least three. Desperate wives,
husbands, fathers, and children ransacked phone lists, internet services and
friends seeking the whereabouts of persons who failed to return to their homes
on November 26.
Luciano López was one of those desperate people. A Trique indigena
active in community affairs in the Sierra he knew that members of his family
had participated in the protest march and had remained in or near the Zócalo
afterwards. He described his anxiety and concern to the Rights Action
delegation.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 145
“I was sure they were being tortured,” he said, “I only hoped they hadn’t
been killed.”
When the government finally released the names of those who’d been
detained López was able to ascertain that his family members had been flown
to the medium security prison located in Tepic, Nayarit.
“It was horrendous,” he declared. “Hundreds of citizens wanted to see
their loved ones—loved ones they knew were innocent of federal crimes like
sedition and setting fire to government buildings—but they couldn’t afford to
go to Tepic.”
Some who had automobiles transported some who lacked
transportation. Others took a long and arduous bus trip over the mountains.
Once they got to Tepic many of them had to wait for days to see their
relatives; prison authorities denied visiting rights to many others.
“They required all kinds of identification,” López remembered:
They wanted marriage licenses, birth certificates, notarized
documents. Most people did not have the documents or if they had them
they hadn’t brought them with them to Tepic. Some had to sleep in their
cars. Those who had acquaintances or friends in Tepic stayed with them
while they waited and argued with prison authorities and prayed. Not
only that the authorities limited visits to one person from the family. And
they set a limit of one visit per month!
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 146
The police who arrested forty-six-year-old Ismael Sánchez beat him in
the testicles, broke three of his ribs and opened twelve- and fifteen-centimeter
cuts in his head. For nearly three weeks he received no medical attention
whatsoever, although the Nayarit state human rights commission denied this.
Prison officials refused to grant him access to an attorney and refused to allow
either him or his sister to see the list of charges filed against him until
December 13, nineteen days after his apprehension. Nor would they allow his
sister to visit his wife, Elizabeth, who had been taken into custody with him
because his wife was not the sister’s blood relative. She, too, had arrived at
the prison with contusions from having been beaten.
Many Tepiqueños took stranded strangers into their homes. For this the
Oaxacans were grateful but resentment against the prison authorities, the PFP
and the government ran high. Those turned away from being able to visit
husbands, fathers, children vowed never to forget what the government had
done to them during the Night of Horror and its aftermath.
Not all of those apprehended and jailed were in Oaxaca when they were
seized. Federal agents swooped down on four the APPO negotiators in Mexico
City on December 4. Flavio Sosa, his brother Horacio, Ignacio García and
Marcelino Coache had scheduled a meeting with the Secretary of Government
on December 5 but instead of meeting the four APPO representatives federal
officials ordered their arrests on charges that included robbery, robbery with
violence, damage to public property, arson, kidnapping and assault. They
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 147
dispatched Flavio Sosa to the country’s highest security prison, the infamous
La Palma, where he was held without bail for nearly a year before being
transferred to a state prison in Oaxaca.
“That the government was going to negotiate with him was a trick to
arrest Flavio!” human rights advocate Yésica Sánchez insisted in February,
2007. “The conference was a pretext to get him out of Oaxaca.”
“They think by arresting ‘the leaders’ they’re going to quash the
movement!” Musician and salesman Ricardo Colmenares told me that many in
the APPO felt that the arrests—particularly of Flavio Sosa—set the movement
back but “it was the press who made Flavio seem like the big cheese. I mean,
he is big and well-known, he always went charging here and there in politics
and was easy to find and easy to quote but there are thousands of us—we’re
all leaders! There aren’t enough prisons in Mexico to hold us all!”
Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, quoted Coache
telling members of her human rights delegation of U.S. and Mexican lawyers
after his May, 2007 release from prison
how he and three other activists had been arrested in Mexico City on
their way to meet with government officials to negotiate an end to the
strife. They were stripped naked, beaten, and guards walked on their
backs. Coache's finger was broken….Coache's wife and young children
told us how they were terrorized for months with death threats and
shots fired at their home.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 148
On December 10 the state council of the APPO announced a new policy:
“The Stage of Peace with Justice, Democracy and Liberty without Ulisés Ruiz.”
They condemned URO’s “baton and rifle” policy of the state government and
demanded the release of political prisoners, the return of the disappeared, the
withdrawal of the PFP and the departure of “the murderer” URO. Neither they
nor anyone involved with the APPO would publicly admit that the movement’s
back had been broken.
Government patrols continued to tightly monitor the APPO activities.
Flavio Sosa’s daughter reported that police or police informants followed and
photographed and videotaped both her and Sosa’s mother. She added that the
harassment included telephone calls at all hours and indecipherable text
messages left on their cell phones.
The APPO activist Carolina Cruz told human rights visitors that in Xanica,
two hours by winding roads north of the tourist resort of Huatulco, she
constantly was followed and that a policeman posted at the town’s internet
café checked the websites she opened. She also reported that she’d received
threats from persons she identified as PRI-imposed municipal authorities.
Also in Xanica sicarios identified as PRI operatives yanked the APPO
activist César Luis Díaz off the street and strung him up on a makeshift gallows
in the town plaza. Residents—primarily women and children—released him
before he strangled but the near lynching served as a warning to appistas in
that mountain community. (Police later arrested Díaz on trumped up charges
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 149
of aggravated manslaughter and resisting arrest. Like hundreds of others who
La Bruja and her prosecutors brought before URO-appointed judges he was
freed on bail as a common criminal.)
So pervasive was police and paramilitary surveillance—and so much a
part of the APPO life--that a rural the APPO delegate told me that he made
most of his cell phone calls in English and that he and several other delegates
periodically exchanged misleading and false information about the APPO events
because they knew their calls were being monitored. Journalist Pedro Matias
reported in Noticias that crimes like robbery, auto theft, family violence and
battery throughout the state (but particularly in the city of Oaxaca) increased
dramatically because law enforcement was so focused on pursuing and
harassing the APPO that criminals virtually had a free hand to do whatever
they chose to do.
Each of the forty-three persons returned to Oaxaca from the federal
prison in Nayarit on December 21 who confessed to reduced charges was freed
on bond but they were not absolved of their supposed crimes and were
required to report regularly to the court. (None of those released was a Section
22 cardholder or active the APPO member.)
“It was convenient for the government to release them when they did,
just before Christmas,” Mendez noted. A government press release credited
URO with ordering the state to pay their bail, a public relations move that
enabled him to take credit for negotiating their release. (It also enabled both
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 150
the state and federal governments to sidestep accusations about “prisoners of
conscience,” i.e. political prisoners, because they had pleaded guilty to some of
the charges.) Human rights lawyer Yésica Sánchez described the releases as
“random,” designed to divert public attention from ongoing repression and
arrests, many of which were designed to instigate fear and keep the population
in check. The mother of a university student abducted by non-uniformed police
told me:
For three whole days after my son disappeared we couldn’t eat,
we couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t think or talk about anything except,
‘Where is he?’ ‘Is he all right’ ‘Is he being tortured?’ ‘What can we do?’
Never had I felt such anguish, such worry, such hurt. The government
wouldn’t tell us anything. Nobody would tell us anything. Then on the
third day he called. He’d been released. They’d tortured him, there in
the jail they’d hurt him. For weeks afterwards he’d wake up screaming,
screaming ‘No! No! No! Don’t!’ and he’d be shaking and sweating. He’ll
never forget. Not for the rest of his life he won’t forget how horrible it
was. None of us will ever forget!
While Sánchez and other human rights advocates decried the
government’s failure to exonerate the innocent detainees OICE leader Gisela
Vivanco scored URO and his government for “wasting” the state’s resources on
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 151
convicted revolutionaries instead of supporting the “hundreds of merchants”
who were going bankrupt.
“The politicians don’t know how to govern nor represent us!” she
complained and pleaded that municipal president Manuel Esesarte “for the love
of Oaxaca help the merchants.” She also criticized URO for purchasing
“750,000 hours” of radio and television time to encourage tourists to come to
Oaxaca. URO painted a bucolic picture of life in Oaxaca during an interview on
Televisa’s “Hoy” nationally broadcast program. The APPO spokesperson
Florentino López labeled the presentation as propaganda that painted a totally
false picture of what really was happening in the state.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 152
Chapter 11: Back to (Ab)Normal
Private school teacher Noé Jiménez repeated what many in Oaxaca were
feeling and saying during a conversation he and I had in April, 2007:
A lot of people call URO stupid. I don’t find him so. He’s crafty.
Like a gambler. He knows which horse to bet on. I don’t think he spent
that money really believing that a lot of tourists would come to Oaxaca,
I think he did it as part of a campaign to make it seem he’d won, that
the APPO was busted. You see, that wasn’t the only thing he did. He set
up a commission to reform the constitution. He spread the word that all
the schools were operating normally. He shuffled some of his
administrative personnel. He invited business leaders to visit. Big signs
appeared on the highways, in the seaports, showing his grinning face
and announcing construction plans, state giveaways. ‘Oaxaca is safe for
tourists!’ was for dissemination to the rest of the country.
People believed it. Not here in Oaxaca maybe, but in the rest of
Mexico. I had people—people in education—tell me in e-mails, ‘You must
be glad the conflict is over, that things are back to normal.’
Unfortunately for many Oaxacans “back to normal” meant ongoing
harassment, apprehensions, searches. Protest marches continued—not only by
the APPO but also by merchants demanding governmental support, university
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 153
students and taxi drivers. While tourists—or people who looked like tourists—
could take snapshots of anything they chose Oaxacans—particularly those who
looked like non-conformists or university students—faced arrest if they lifted a
camera in the Centro Historico.
Police seized university art student Erick Nefatí Mendoza on January 22
because he was taking photographs of the historic ex-Convent of Santo
Domingo to use for sketches he was making. They handcuffed, blindfolded and
beat him, stole his camera and art supplies and demanded that he tell them
where the APPO was stashing its shields, rockets and munitions. After four
hours of brutal questioning the police forced him to be photographed holding a
pistol. They refused to let him contact either his family or an attorney and
ridiculing him by saying, “the only person you’re going to get to talk to is
Flavio Sosa!” (who was imprisoned in La Palma).
Dozens of university students protested his incarceration and marched
through the streets to the Plaza de la Danza a few blocks west of the Centro
Historico, banners denouncing governmental Fascism and demanding
Mendoza’s release. At several points during the march the students engaged in
shouted arguments with persons on the sidewalks. (One bystander commented
that it seemed like the students were enjoying the confrontations, another that
she thought at first they were celebrating some sports team’s victory.) The
police released Mendoza on $5,000 pesos bail but he announced that he was
going to formally charge the police for abuse of authority and for the injuries
they caused him.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 154
A day later four police dressed as civilians seized Alvaro Martínez, a
factory worker and father of three, as he was returning on foot to his home
from the big abasto (market) near the city of Oaxaca’s Periferico freeway. They
demanded that he identify and incriminate certain of the APPO participants,
shoved him against a wall and threatened to castrate him. But one of the
captors identified Martínez as a former player in one of the city’s baseball
leagues and they released him after warning him to stick with sports and not
get involved with “revolutionary saboteurs.”
Detentions continued throughout January and February of 2007. Those
yanked off the streets or out of their homes including students wearing APPO tshirts and persons identified by infiltrators as march or protest participants.
Municipal police seized Ramón Aquino in late January, apparently recognizing
him from photographs taken by infiltrators during the marches, and accused
him of attempting to murder a cab driver. They spread sheaves of photographs
in front of him and demanded that he identify specific persons. When he
refused the officers beat him so severely he had to undergo surgery while he
was incarcerated in the prison at Tlacolula.
PFP armed with high-powered weapons forced family members and
supporters of those being held in the Tlacolula state prison out of their
campsites. The protesters retreated to the top of the rise where they couldn’t
be seen from the prison itself. Guards told the incarcerated appistas that the
PFP had had severely beaten “your cowardly relatives” and they’d left the area
and weren’t going to return.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 155
On January 13 a force of over 100 state police stormed the encampment
outside the Miahuatlán state prison “beating whoever crossed their paths,”
young José de Jesús Villaseca told reporters. “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 they were raping my
girl friend right then.”
Although Villaseca presented a press pass from a Mexico City news
service the arresting officers sequestered his video camera and lenses and held
him incommunicado until the 25th of November committee arranged his bail.
Police also charged five of those who’d been outside the prison with
carrying concealed weapons and possession of cocaine. La Bruja’s prosecutors
then accused them of attacking and “savagely pistolwhipping“ a photographer
who was at the scene “fulfiling a political cultural assignment.“ Protesters
identified the photographer as Magdaleno Figueroa, a salaried policeman, who
fled with his camera when several of the protesters approached him. He fell
while scrambling over a wall into a private resident bordering the prison yard,
which caused minor scrapes and bruises, not the pistolwhipping that La Bruja
alleged.
Yolanda Gutiérrez, the mother of a young man being held in the prison,
accused the police of planting weapons and forcing the detainees to be
photographed holding them. She and several other protesters had escaped by
hiding in a house near the prison. Representatives of human rights
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 156
organizations, including the visiting CCIODH, responding to their phone calls,
organized a rescue effort and escorted them past scowling state police. But the
state’s Secretary of Citizen Protection, Lino Celaya, pompously told the press,
“Here in Oaxaca we respect the free expression of ideas, pacific
demonstrations and free access of movement but against violent acts that
harm communiities and third parties, the state government will apply full force
of the law.“
The following day, on less than twenty-four hours notice and without
benefit of newspaper or other commercial announcements, the APPO organized
a protest march. Led by members of the prisoners‘ families and members of
the organization Families of those Assassinated, Disappeared and Imprisoned,
thousands of Oaxacans carrying huge banners and placards filed through
streets surrounding the Centro Historico. As they tromped together, many with
fists raised, others chanting the APPO mantras, armed state and municipal
police barricaded the entrance to the Zócalo. I saw non-uniformed officers
weave their way along the sidewalk, camera cell phones pegged against their
ears or lifted above their heads. I accidentally blocked one’s passage and he
cursed as I jigged from one side to the other trying to get out of his way.
“What’s the hurry?“ I asked in Spanish, then, “Oh, you must be a cop.“
Cursing gutterally he shoved past me, over the chants of the marchers
shouting into his cell phone again.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 157
As always, during such marches, young appistas wielding spray cans
tagged slogans on the many-times-painted-over walls, one of which read You
can erase the paint, but not our blood!
For months after the Night of Horror the APPO continued to stage rallies
and demonstrations demanding the release of those detained and tortured. But
they no longer had a radio station to convey information about their activities.
Sara Mendez called this “a major loss” that contributed to an erosion of
participation in the APPO activities, particularly in rural areas where
transportation was a difficulty. Throughout the city of Oaxaca workmen spread
“tons of paint” over walls and sidewalks to obliterate constantly recurring antiURO graffiti “but the scars still show through,” human rights attorney Yésica
Sánchez attested.
Police not only arrested those they found spray painting slogans but also
anyone they found with a can of aerosol paint in his or her possession.
Nevertheless, the slogans continued to appear, particularly during and after
the APPO marches.
With the barricades eliminated, sicarios roamed the state at will,
threatening whom they pleased, beating whom they pleased, arresting whom
they pleased. Besides armed paramilitaries, most of whom were or had been
police, Governor Ruiz and El Chucky utilized bands of university and out-ofwork youths to sabotage the APPO activities and to provide harassment and
information. According to Sara Mendez these porros infiltrated organizations
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 158
affiliated with the APPO (particularly those with youthful memberships) and
reported their activities and plans to the police units that had trained them and
paid them.
“As far as the state is concerned I was there throwing Molotov cocktails
and burning buildings,” Yésica Sánchez described her activities as a human
rights attorney. “Recently I saw a photo of myself and I was astounded. ‘How
skinny I’ve gotten! What bags under my eyes!’ I scarcely could believe that it
was me!”
Being well known, not only in Oaxaca but throughout Mexico, provided
certain advantages. URO and his cohorts knew that they were better off
combating the work of higher profile people by disregarding them or by
belittling their efforts as the actions of “minority extremists” than giving them
prominence and publicity by indicting or arresting them. Nevertheless, five
appistas confined in the Miahuatlán prison signed documents that accused
Sánchez of instigating them to burn buildings and to riot. When they were
released the following day all five admitted they had been tortured until they’d
put their names on the documents. They told the press that the accusations
were totally false.
Sánchez responded by denouncing interrogators who forced prisoners to
sign blank documents or documents containing false accusations in order to
secure their release and the government for “taking advantage of the
desperation and pain” of those incarcerated to blaspheme an organization that
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 159
had done nothing more than point out assaults, the impunity of those in power
and ongoing human rights violations.
Sánchez wasn’t the only the APPO activist being monitored. All of those
identified as major participants constantly were in danger of be detained and
beaten or jailed. A government radio station, “Radio Ciudadana,” a pirate
outlet functioning without federal license, encouraged private citizens to attack
and burn homes and businesses that it identified as belonging to the APPO
members and the APPO supporters.
“The announcers called us ‘Urban Guerrillas and said we were a danger
to Oaxaca!’” COMO’s Claudia scoffed.
The campaign to sew fear by random apprehensions, beatings and
threats “imbued the entire state with a kind of paranoia. Even those not
affiliated with the APPO stiffened every time a police pickup passed or
somebody set off firecrackers,” a bookkeeper who’d moved to Oaxaca from the
Federal District in 2001 told me over coffee in a Oaxaca cafe.
A large number of the APPO members, particularly those associated with
Section 22 or who had participated in the radio and television broadcasts,
sought refuge with friends or relatives rather than returning to their homes
after the Night of Horror. Others temporarily went underground, uncertain
which of their friends and/or associates might have been arrested or killed.
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The APPO’s Zenén Bravo admitted that the repressions of November and
December caused the organization to lose active participants and had limited
its ability to bring new ones into the fold but he insisted that the APPO would
continue to mobilize and manifest the will of the people. URO, meanwhile,
pronounced the APPO “dead” and boasted that it no longer presented a threat
to the stability of the state government.
Some of the breakaway NGOs and political organizations became severe
critics of the APPO’s “timidity” and failure to push a strong anti-government,
anti-capitalism program. According to a former state official who declined
permission to publish his name, Ruiz encouraged the internecine attacks these
groups were making on each other and on members and policies of the
teachers union. State-paid agents infiltrated them and “Ruiz’s smile grew wider
every time they publicly denounced each other,” the ex-official remembers.
The exodus of many affiliated with the APPO’s militancy deepened a
gradually widening split between Section 22 of the teachers union and the
APPO. Many within the union leadership, particularly secretary general Enrique
Rueda, considered the APPO an organization that had formed and existed in
order to support the union while many the APPO delegates regarded Section 22
as a participating member—but not the primary decision maker--of the larger
movement.
Exiled activist teachers like María del Carmen Vásquez stridently
criticized Rueda and the union for not supporting them while they were in
hiding and insisted that Section 22’s leader had negotiated secretly with
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 161
federal government secretary Carlos Abascal to settle the strike without
complying to demands for a new salary base and URO’s resignation. (A small
group of Section 22 dissidents later broke away to form a separate union,
which federal education czar Elba Esther Gordilla immediately validated.
Section 22 directors branded the splinter union “illegal” and announced that
Section 22 would “defend its schools” against the new union’s attempts to staff
them.)
“The biggest danger is that the government has adopted the doctrine
that no changes should be prompted by people’s movements, only through the
political processes of existent parties,” priest Manuel Arias attested. “It is
criminalizing any attempts at change.”
“With deceitful declarations and radio and television campaign, the
authorities are trying to cover up the real situation here in Oaxaca,” Noticias
editorialized in its January 11 edition. “The more they pay out, the worse the
situation gets for both Oaxacans and the nation. To ignore the abuses being
committed could set lamentable precedents for the nation.”
To counter this rising anti-government publicity and to imitate
conformance with the newly installed conservative federal government of
President Felipe Calderón, URO’s PRI proposed sweeping reforms to the state
constitution and announced that a commission to suggest changes and
implement them would be formed. Among institutions willing to participate was
Oaxaca’s Diocese of Antequera-Oaxaca whose coordinator of justice and peace,
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 162
Father Romualdo Mayrén, an outspoken APPO supporter, urged that the
commission represent all sectors of Oaxacan society not just political elements
and that the reforms do more than merely “give a facial” to the justice and
legal systems. However, when reform measures passed the PRI-controlled
state legislature and state senate months later the “reforms” were superficial
and for the most part meaningless.
“Truth, honesty and the PRI seldom have had anything in common,”
María Elena Castellanos, the wife of a retired Oaxaca businessman told me.
That the APPO maintained its insistence on non-violence despite arbitrary
detentions, kidnappings and roving death squads seemed to her to be the
ultimate in restraint. Not only were the APPO and its supporters constantly
threatened by police and paramilitaries they faced ongoing criticism from many
city and state residents who felt that the barricades and marches had eroded
daily life.
“Why should everybody suffer just because the teachers are lazy and
don’t want to work?” I heard non-the APPO-involved persons ask.
“Oaxaca looks like a trash dump. Why doesn’t the government do
something?”
“What right does that rabble have to block the streets so working people
can’t get to their jobs?”
“There were abuses by some the APPO members during the time of the
barricades,” Sara Mendez admitted. “Not all of those affiliated with the APPO
are angels.” Certain of those manning the barricades developed “police
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 163
mentalities” and became belligerent with drivers trying to circumnavigate the
blockaded streets. Shoving matches and fisticuffs erupted when neighbors
objected to piles of debris or burning tires or when residents criticized blocked
driveways, torn up sidewalks or urine stains on walls. Vázquez wincingly called
this the APPO’s “darker side” and admitted that from both a local and
international standpoint the APPO had taken “justice in its own hands.”
University student Jaime Dominguez described Oaxaca’s mood during te
first months of 2007:
One could feel the anger, the resentment, everywhere one went.
The people who had lost jobs were angry. Many of them blamed the
APPO. The teachers were angry. Parents were angry. There were fights
in the schools. Those who wanted to get rid of URO were angry.
Government workers were angry. Police, university students. Everybody
felt pushed down. And afraid. Afraid even to talk about what was
happening.
That Oaxaca authorities refused to release the names of all of those
against whom the government had filed orders of apprehension enabled police
to stop anyone they wanted on the pretense of obeying judicial orders. By midDecember URO´s hirelings had incarcerated over seventy members of Section
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 164
22 of the teachers union and had issued over 600 warrants for teachers’ and
sympathizers’ arrests.
“It makes me furious!” Sara Mendez’s eyes flashed angrily. “Here there
is no justice, no personal freedom! We live under a totally authoritarian system
kept in place by sheer brute force! They are creating a situation that
encourages armed revolt.”
“Where was the federal government when all of this was happening?
Why wasn’t it helping the people of Oaxaca?”
Before I could reply Sara Mendez answered her own question. “One only
has to take a look at who they are, at what they represent, and it becomes
very obvious. President Calderón made Francisco Ramírez his Secretario de
Gobernación.” (Ramírez was the governor of Jalisco who ordered his police to
arrest hundreds of protesters at the World Economic Forum in 2005 National
and international human rights organizations filed more than 600 complaints
against the governor, none of which he acknowledged or answered.)
“This is the federal official to whom we’re supposed to appeal?” Mendez
scoffed. “President Calderón’s response to popular movements is to repress
them by force!”
Not only to repress them but to pressure the Mexican government’s
supposedly “autonomous” human rights commission to water down its
responses to over 1,200 charges of assassinations, kidnappings and torture of
innocent citizens in Oaxaca. Commission president José Luis Soberanes
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 165
criticized certain “excesses” by the government, the police and the military but
his official report in 2007 did not mention Ulisés Ruiz by name. Worse yet, he
responded to Human Rights Watch criticisms by pointing out that he and his
commission found forty-eight errors in the international organization’s report
on Oaxaca.
Mauricio Santiago, the president of Oaxaca’s Centro de Derechos
Humanos y Asesoría a Pueblos Indígenas, accused Soberanes of candy coating
the report in order not to make either the state or the federal government look
bad and Human Rights Watch shot back a reply accusing Soberanes’
commission of “reverting to defensive tactics, including cataloguing questions
as errors” and of distorting HRW’s text in order to create errors.22 While the
commission claimed that it had resolved 98.5 percent of the complaints
brought before it the HRW pointed out that many times these “resolutions”
simply consisted in archiving complaints without taking any action on them.
Many friends and relatives of victims of the repression, including the
American parents of Brad Will and the family of assassinated Oaxaca architect
Lorenzo Sampablo, expressed disappointment and dismay at the tepidness of
Soberanes’ report.
“What greater atrocities need to happen before they take notice?” they
demanded to know.
The alleged errors including HRW’s assertions that the commission had not done
enough to promote legal reforms and that the commission could be more efficient in
following up on cases.
22
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 166
The 2007 report wasn’t the first that Soberanes made concerning
Oaxaca. In March, 2005 Soberanes criticized URO for violations of human
rights, including mistreatment of his commission’s investigators. URO
arrogantly shot back a reply accusing Soberanes of confusing “firmness” with
rights violations and asserting that the commission had no right to interfere in
Oaxacan affairs, a charge that the PRI-dominated legislature backed by writing
Soberanes to mind his own business.
That numerous international agencies, including the Organization of
American States (OAS) and Amnesty International, condemned URO’s heavy
handed repressions did not faze the governor. He insisted that Oaxaca lived
under an “estado de derecho” and did not tolerate individuals or groups who
transgressed the law. He then accused Soberanes of encouraging dissident
groups who were attempting to overthrow the legally elected government.
The APPO announced in May, 2007 that it would go through every step
necessary in Mexico in order to take its appeal to the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights. Noticias reporter Octavio Vélez quoted the APPO spokesperson
Cástulo López that it would virtually be impossible for URO to castigate those
most responsible for the repression, Lizbeth Caña and former Secretary of
Citizen Protection Lino Celaya, because he needed to cover his own “dirty
actions in a dirty war.”
Two groups from the Sierra Juárez, the Center for Human Rights and
Consultants for Indigenous Pueblos and the Friends and Relatives of
Assassinated and Disappeared Political Prisoners of Oaxaca, took a separate
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 167
complaint on behalf of eight Sierra residents who were apprehended, tortured
and sent to federal prisons during the Night of Horror to a United Nations’
committee for arbitrary detentions and torture. In the United States friends
and relatives of Brad Will formed a NGO to pressure both U.S. and Mexican
authorities to investigate and resolve the Indymedia journalist’s death.
This is all very nice. But it’s like complaining about a wrong charge
by a cell phone company. There is no back up. No enforcement. What is
the UN going to do? Slap URO’s wrist with a ruler? He doesn’t care. He
laughs at them. ‘Ha! Ha! I’m a bad boy!’ Then he sends out more police.
More arrests. More torture. Just to show that’s he’s really is in charge!
—Antonio Bolaños.
High-ranking officials of both Amnesty International and the
International Red Cross made personal visits to President Calderón to present
their reports and analyses of human rights violations. Calderón allowed himself
to be photographed cordially smiling as he hosted their visits but neither he
nor his government made any efforts to rectify the abuses.
“Attempts by government authorities to define everyone who
sympathizes with the APPO as delinquents and subversives is nothing more
than a tactic to avoid their responsibilities to investigate human rights
violations,” the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, told
reporters in Oaxaca in August, 2007. After interviewing Ruiz she commented
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 168
“it is very clear” that he had no desire to do anything about the “grave
violations of human rights that we have documented.”
Not only had state and federal officials failed to investigate the alleged
crimes, including eighteen murders, they had obscured, destroyed or failed to
preserve material evidence. The Amnesty International report also insisted that
officials make “a complete and impartial investigation” of the presence of
“unidentified armed men and police dressed in civilian clothes that seem to
operate in Oaxaca with the support of government authorities.”
Oaxaca is the only state in the republic that has a state human rights
commission “but it’s absolutely shameful, a farce!” Mendez scoffed. It has no
authority nor autonomy; its director is appointed by the governor. A number of
the people violently transported to the Tlacolula and Miahuatlán prisons during
the Night of Horror testified that a “human rights representative” witnessed
and approved their detentions as police shoved them through interrogations
and pseudo medical exams. The presence of these representatives from the
state commission dissuaded many of those arrested from making declarations
about their treatment to legitimate human rights groups.
The director of the state human rights sub-secretariat, Rosario
Villalobos, admitted that the commission that she headed is not proactive in
defending human rights and its primary function is to process letters
concerning human rights violations and coordinate the task of following up on
replies directed to the state human rights commission. She insisted that
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 169
discussions concerning violations should include the “tremendous discomfiture”
thrust upon Oaxacan citizenry by the barricades, particularly areas permeated
by the smell of burning tires, and the mass occupation of the Centro Historico
that severely impacted “the normal progression of business.” Parrying the
human rights delegation’s questions about death squads and police torture she
cited injuries to police that had occurred during the confrontations and insisted
that the APPO caused the deaths of at least three citizens.23
The commission exists “to protect the back of the governor,” the APPO’s
Miguel Vázquez chided.
According to Noticias, Villalobos told the International Civil Commission of the
Observation of Human Rights in February, 2008, that her office “had complied with the
functions assigned to it by the state.”
23
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 170
SECTION II
Chapter 12: The Noble Elite
During the colonial period (1520-1810) Spain awarded enormous land
grants to friends and associates and imposed a European administrative
system over the huge territory that encompassed dozens of separate ethnic
groups, each with their own customs, languages, ways of government and
religious beliefs. They forced local caciques to pay tribute to the crown but
gave them freedom to rule their little fiefdoms however they chose.
The southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, separated by rugged
mountains from the central part of the country, retained much of their preconquest autonomy until well into the nineteenth century. Even today nearly
40 percent of its citizenry—more than a million and a half people—speak one of
sixteen different indigena languages, each of which has numerous dialects. The
history of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in particular is a history of indignant
uprisings and brutal retaliations, first by Spanish overlords, then by Mexican
federal authorities who pushed the indigenas into rugged mountainous areas
barely suitable for agriculture (and, according to Oaxaca history buff Rufino
Ricárdez, “into servitude and poverty”).
Their isolation, and what the IRC’s Americas Program director Laura
Carlsen calls “resistance and persistence” that the indigenous peoples
developed “permitted the survival of cultures that bucked a colonizing
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 171
mentality and rejected tacitly or explicitly the wholesale imposition of political
systems.” The various native cultures retained their customs, their language
and to a large extent their systems of communal government. Entire
generations lived and died without coming into contact with either their
Spanish or their Mexican governing authorities.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a so-called “noble
elite” ruled the state. They were not actually members of royal families but
were wealthy landholders and investors who separated themselves from the
rural campesino culture. Many were immigrants with non-Spanish surnames
who married into the dominant culture. These monied aristocrats occupied
most of the important governmental posts and controlled commerce and
politics.
They did not try to alter Oaxaca’s image as the “alma indigena de
Mexico” (Indian soul of Mexico) but exploited it as a regional curiosity and
encouraged indigena festivals, products, foods and customs. Nevertheless,
they excluded the state’s indigena population from participation in government
and business dealings. For them “the indigenas were a form of animal like
horses and goats that neither spoke the official language nor shared their living
areas,” a participant in an Instituto of Artes Gráficas forum commented in
2007.
Typical of the treatment accorded campesinos was that experienced by
workers in the Valley of Oaxaca a century ago after lucrative summer crops
filled granaries and storehouses through the area. When they assembled to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 172
collect their portions of the harvest the hacendado brought out his account
books and carefully checked off each item, then reported that he owed them
nothing but they owed him since during the year they had received more in
provisions, clothes, firewood and other items than they had earned. Federal
cavalry arrived to carry those who protested to prison, leaving their families to
die of starvation or acquire what they could through theft and prostitution.
The noble elite’s hold on the state diminished during the first part of the
twentieth century, in part because the Mexican Revolution broke up many of
the huge land holdings and in part because the newly forming middleclass
pushed its way into control of the economy. Military movements and the
conscription of full- and part-time civilians in the forces of Zapata and other
revolutionaries pulled men and women out of their home communities, either
as combatants or refugees. Women accompanied the troops; many
participated in combat. Often they did not return to their places of origin,
choosing urban and semi-urban life instead.
This trend escalated during the presidency of Lázaro Cardenas (19341940). Predominantly mestizo tradespersons and non-agricultural employees
(teachers, mechanics, engineers, architects, bankers, etc.) became the
backbone of an emerging dynamic based more on work- and trade-related
activities than heredity or social prestige. Rural life, defined by sun and rain,
daylight and dark, gave way to clock-regulated employment habits and values
associated with them. Children no longer automatically participated in their
parents’ work life on little self-sustaining agricultural plots where contact with
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 173
outsiders was limited. Church festivals and activities no longer dominated
social life and attendance and participation at mass and confession waned.
As members of the newly formed state political party which became the
PRI midway through the twentieth century this new non-agricultural
middleclass replaced the aristocracy as the holders of elected and appointed
offices. Indigena leaders who aligned themselves with the PRI replaced usos y
costumbres in their communities with Spanish-style administrative
government. Everything that took place between the community and the PRI
world of autocratic rule went through the PRI politicians, including state and
federal financing. Periodic local protests erupted but were subdued and the
families in power, whether mestizo or indigena, established hereditary
caciquedoms.
The PRI utilized mapaches (“raccoons”) to hustle votes for upcoming
elections. Those able to bring in winners were rewarded by being named to
high-paying government positions. Some mapaches like Ulisés Ruiz rose
through successive offices and became governors. (And became extremely
wealthy along the way.)
From 1946 until 1988 the PRI manipulated nation-wide election returns
from compliant yea-sayers and dominated both federal and state politics, now
and then ceding a few benefits to opposition parties from the left and PAN,
which was strongly pro-Catholic, on the right. A nationwide anti-PRI coalition
headed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas almost toppled the PRI regime in 1988 in an
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 174
election that he seemed to have won but that was awarded to the PRI thanks
to computer tampering and destroyed ballots.
An incumbent party in Mexico has a great advantage over its opposition
because it can use government employees, including the police, to coax, bribe
and strong arm its quest to stay in power. PRI functionaries routinely hustled
bags of cement, edibles and other “inducements” to rural communities to
assure that they would vote correctly. If they didn’t, they received nothing.
Theoretically such inducements were illegal and sometimes triggered
confrontations between the PRI and opposition parties but as Guadalupe
Loaeza points out in La Comedia Electoral all of Mexico’s political parties
engaged in similar practices.
Although PRI candidates Francisco Labastida in 2000 and Roberto
Madrazo in 2006 lost presidential elections to PAN opponents Vicente Fox and
Felipe Calderón PRI governor candidates won elections in the majority of
Mexico’s thirty-two states and a majority of seats in the national Senate and
House of Deputies. The party also controlled most state legislatures, enabling
them to authorize expenditures for a variety of programs (agriculture, school
and highway construction, health services, etc.) that they often failed to fully
fund. The money that wasn’t spent wound up in a caja chica (“little cash box”)
to be used for keeping their party’s candidates in office.
Governors like Ulisés Ruiz controlled rubber stamp legislatures, the
judiciary and state finances. Mexican law makes no provisions for recall; once
an individual is elected he or she has free reign to award (or sell) construction
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 175
contracts, appoint administrators and judges and divert funds intended for
social services into personal bank accounts. A governor’s access to wealth
virtually is unlimited and the wealth is shared with the political organization
that ushered him or her into office.
In the 1970s the PRI amended Mexico’s constitution to include
supplemental delegates and senators in federal and state congresses based on
the percentage of vote that each party received. These appointees became
safe seats since those filling them did not have to run for election. This enabled
party leaders to reward loyal operatives (often ex-governors, party officials
and relatives of one or the other) by naming them to legislative positions..
“A bunch of kids scrambling after candy from a broken piñata,” a Federal
District educator described the country’s politicians as he and I chatted at a
Mexico City eatery several years ago. The constant turnover and non-stop
electioneering creates an intense, almost hermetic competition—like that of a
fantasy sports league where participants close out the real world to
concentrate on the details of fantasy team competition.
Ulisés Ruiz seemed to many to live in such a fantasy world. He spent
much of his time as Oaxaca’s governor in Mexico City, where he maintained a
home and presided over the construction and operation of a modern hospital
built and equipped with “tecnología médica de vanguardia” reported Patricia
Dávila in Proceso’s January 3, 2010 issue. Most of his holdings (two luxurious
apartments, land, gasoline and diesel commercialization, diagnostic clinics and
real estate firms in addition to the Sedna Hospital) were registered in the name
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 176
of his wife María de Lourdes Salinas; others in the names of brothers, his
mother, aunts and his wife’s family. The hospital opened an eight-story annex,
including what Dávida described as “an elegant spa” in 2007, less than a year
after the Night of Horror.
Meanwhile Oaxaca accrued direct debts of one billion 157 thousand
pesos (approximately 9,250 million dollars) in bank loans repayable after
Ruiz’s term of office was scheduled to end. In 2009 thirty-five percent of the
state’s residents lacked running water and 72 percent lacked health services.
Fifty-eight of Mexico’s 100 poorest municipios (counties) were located in
Oaxaca. Poverty, sickness and lack of facilities in Coicoyán de Flores and San
Simón Zahuatlán in the Mixteca equaled that of sub-Saharan Africa, reported
La Mixteca Hoy in 2010.
Emigration to the United States and the northern states of Mexico
provided the principal income of hundreds of thousands of Oaxacan families.
Workers returning to their home communities after earning U.S. wages and
experiencing life in U.S. towns brought factory-made jeans, shoes and hand
tools with them. Families added hotdogs, hot cakes and hamburgers to their
diets. More and more autos appeared, many legally imported, others
surreptitiously slipped across the border. Hormigas—“ants,” small-item
smugglers of clothes, appliances, cosmetics, auto parts and other goods—
traipsed southward in ever increasing numbers to fulfill demands for U.S.made articles, many of them secondhand and acquired by the hormigas at
garage sales, Goodwills, Salvation Army stores, hospitals and mortuaries.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 177
Change, however, occurred more rapidly than belief in change. At least
in word if not in deed Oaxacans clung to traditional concepts of social structure
and religion. Both the noble elite and their less aristocratic successors
maintained close ties with the Catholic Church. Church authority over morality
was heavy handed, although the noble elite were accorded a great deal of
leeway, both in financial activities and personal morals. The dogmatic
separation of men’s and women’s functions corresponded with indigena
customs which relegated women to subservient roles.
Even after the Mexican revolution women in Oaxaca were considered
chattels and could not participate in usos y costumbres choices or
responsibilities. (Personal property reverted to the usos y costumbres
community when a male head of household died and no sons were alive to
inherit it.) Violence against women—including rape—continued into the twentyfirst century. In 2008 Oaxaca ranked second in feminicides in the Republic.24
The founders of “Revolutionary Mexico,” particularly President Lázaro
Cardenas, envisioned equality and political balance between the federal
government and the sindicatos (labor unions) that would represent the masses
and prevent government excesses. During the administration of Miguel Alemán
(1946-1952) the PRI co-opted the populist sindicatos, particularly the CROC
(Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Confederation), granted lifetime
permanency to their leaders and did away with popular representation. This
Between 1999 and May, 2007 487 women and children were murdered in Oaxaca,
the federal agency for statistics reported. Many of the culprits never were arrested;
others served brief prison terms before being released.
24
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 178
conjoining of union leadership with federal powers eliminated the checks and
balances that Cardenas had envisioned and enabled the PRI—the only existent
political party—to rule autocratically.
Unflinching loyalty kept the party faithful in line for awards, both within
the PRI party system and within the sindicatos. In Oaxaca PRI governments
cancelled freedom of expression and the right to protest. They turned a deaf
ear to those they ruled, since only the party mattered. What a governor could
not do legally he could have CROC or similar unions do for him—including
extortion, assassination and disappearing persons who had become an obstacle
or nuisance.
One of the victims was Guadalupe Ávila. A graduate of the Universidad
Autónoma de Puebla law school she became a PRD leader and in 2004 a
candidate for the municipal presidency of San José Estancia Grande, a
community located on Oaxaca’s southern coast. That her candidacy received
wide support infuriated local PRI leaders who for decades had dominated
politics in the area. When Ávila brought a young woman doctor to San José to
treat needy women in the town’s rural medical clinic the town’s PRI alcalde,
Cándido Palacios, stormed into the clinic waving a .38 revolver and demanded
to know what right Ávila had to engage in “these types of activities.”
‘I’m going to kill you!’ he shouted and fired four times, killing
Guadalupe Ávila and wounding the doctor, Georgina Solano, in the
abdomen…he then left but fired two more times, went to his house and
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 179
grabbed a shotgun but none of the municipal police did anything to stop
him. He jumped into a beer truck and left. The police never have
arrested him. – Voces de la Valentía en Oaxaca
Hamstrung by political appointees who had no experience in law
enforcement and weakened by bribe taking and corruption, Oaxaca’s police
units proved to be incapable of investigating crimes more complex than simple
cases of theft or violence. However, to justify the state’s increasing
dependence on tourism and paint a pretty face to show to visitors, police
officials needed to demonstrate some effectiveness in solving crimes. Often
they did this by wrenching confessions out of those most easy to apprehend—
campesinos, indigenas, persons without political connections.
Heavily armed police and military swept through towns which the
government contended were springheads of revolutionary threat, particularly
San Agustín Loxicha in Zapotecan eastern Oaxaca. In 1996 a commando force
virtually decimated that small mountain pueblo, killing several men who tried
to defend themselves, raping women and sequestering seven residents.
Arrests and detentions in and around San Agustín Loxicha continued
sporadically during the next twelve years. One of those arrested was Isabel
Almaraz:
A few days before my detention I left San Agustín Loxicha, a
poverty-stricken and forgotten pueblo where there are no doctors, much
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 180
less specialists. My mother was dying and I went to the city to put my
mother in the Hospital Civil. I fought against the impossible to save my
mother from her illness but luck wasn’t with me. Her death tore me
apart, even more than the hurt and sadness for being from Loxicha
where the state judicial authorities accused me of kidnapping and a
supposed connection with the armed group EPR, crimes of which are
totally false. Since my detention my two daughters, the oldest only four
years old and the younger a year-and-a-half, have been left in total
abandonment.” –Isabel Almaraz, Voces de la Valentía en Oaxaca.
Helped by a legislature that rubberstamped his granting huge contracts
to construction firms Ulisès Ruiz moved many government offices out of the
city of Oaxaca’s historical district to suburbs and nearby towns in 2005, had
the hundreds-of-years-old stonework in the city Zócalo ripped out and replaced
and ordered the cutting of many of the huge flowering trees that shaded the
Zócalo and Alameda--“symbols of what was Oaxaca,” according to Pedro
Matias. Immediately after his election, adhering to customary PRI practices, he
moved quickly against opposition leaders, communities that had voted for
other candidates and against the newspaper Noticias.
He first tried to engineer the newspaper’s closure, then dispatched a
chanting gang of yellow-shirted members of the state government-controlled
Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Confederation (CROC) accompanied by
municipal and state police to forcibly close the newspaper’s facilities two blocks
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 181
from Llano Park in the Centro Historico. They announced that Noticias was
being closed by a workers’ strike and threatened to attack anyone who tried to
enter or leave the buildings.
The strikers were not employees of the newspaper but CROC leader
David Aguilar had manipulated representing the workers through the state
Board of Arbitration, which was controlled by Ruiz. None of the newspapers
102 workers supported the strike. Thirty-one of them remained closed up in
the building, including members of the editorial staff but most of the writers
and reporters remained outside.
They phoned their stories to typists inside who sent the reports by
Internet to a printing establishment in a nearby town. CROC strikers tried to
intercept trucks conveying the daily to vendors throughout the state, creating
“incredible cat and mouse chases, constantly changed routes, fake deliveries
and help for vendors who CROC thugs threatened,” remembered reporter
Matias. The strike lasted for over three weeks, during which time Noticias’
sales increased by over 20 percent.
After the 1968 student-led strike in Mexico City the PRI governments
regarded the public universities as bastions of revolutionary Marxist thought.
Oaxaca’s PRI leadership was no exception. They considered the Benito Juárez
Autonomous University of Oaxaca a hotbed of anti-government activity, a
belief that they felt the university’s support of the APPO proved correct.
Hundreds of the most militant of the movement’s adherents were university
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 182
students and professors. The university gave sanction to the APPO after the
PFP and police ploughed through the encampment in the Centro Historico
(under Mexican law, neither police nor the military can enter university
campuses or churches). Radio Universidad was for many months the APPO’s
primary communications outlet.
To counter these “revolutionary elements,” URO’s minions organized and
paid groups of young porros—thugs—to monitor university events and the
APPO activities and to force the administration to deal with on-campus
assaults, beatings, robbery and destruction of property. After gunfire broke out
between two groups of porros on campus in December, 2007, René Trujillo,
director of the Frente de Organizaciones Juveniles Universitarias (FOJU) and
members of his organization told the press that porros leader Marcos Cruz was
a former police agent and Oaxacan bus and taxi entrepreneurs Josefina Gómez
and Erasmo Medina were paying Adrián Marmolejo, the leader of the another
group of porros.
The gunfight erupted after university students sequestered six city buses
to protest an abrupt (and previously unannounced) raise of bus fares from
$3.50 pesos to $4.50. Marmolejo’s porros, wielding pistols and automatic
weapons, attacked the student group, who tried briefly to defend themselves
with rocks and sticks, then fled. Apparently Cruz’s followers, also armed, tried
to usurp Marmolejo’s takeover. Hundreds of students sought shelter in
classrooms and behind cars as shots ricocheted across the campus.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 183
The ruckus barely had subsided when a heavily armed police
detachment arrived. Police sub-director Pedro Hernández reported that the
porros opened fire and the police responded with gunfire of their own. No
fatalities were recorded and the police took Marmolejo and other porros into
custody but released them shortly afterwards. Trujillo attributed the violent
interchange between the two groups of porros to the fact that the government
“financed one group and not the other, creating a conflict between sicarios and
their patrones.”
Former UABJO student Oscar Sánchez shrugged off the importance of
these conflicts.
“They [educators and university authorities] set you up. Give you this
great ideal. Then, ching! You find out it’s shit!” He pulled his lower lip between
his teeth as he peered around the restaurant in which he and I were sitting. “I
would’ve been better off not going to the university. I should have emigrated.
Or joined a drug cartel.”
He told me that twice while a student he was detained by armed police,
the first time at night with and two companions after he and they had left a
Popular Assembly rally.
“They weren’t in uniform—an escuadrón de muerte. They threw us in the
back of a pickup and took us somewhere—an abandoned building. They kicked
us, said they were going to rape us, demanded to know things—students’
names, professors who belonged to the APPO, who was paying us to organize
them.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 184
I asked him how he knew they were police if they weren’t in uniform and
he guffawed.
“Haircuts. Shoes. White pickup without license plates. I’m young but I’m
not stupid, I can see, I can hear.”
His second detainment occurred when he tried to photograph police
beating a protester during the 2007 Guelaguetza confrontation. Half-a-dozen
uniformados grabbed him, threw him on the pavement, took his cell phone
camera and charged him with attacking the officers.
“I was in jail for a week. Then they dismissed the charges.”
Both incidents caused him to miss classes and fail to complete
assignments.
“But chingada it didn’t matter. The university was closed half the time
anyway.”
Throughout the last two decades graduates like Sánchez struggled to
gain employment in their specialties even if they graduated with good grades.
Many of them wound up driving taxis, working as waiters or “trying to sell
products that nobody wants to buy,” a former honors student who now lives in
the coastal resort of Huatulco told me. Or they wind up as porros getting paid
under the table.
“Employment (for university graduates) goes to those who come from
well-to-do families and already have connections,” admitted a Mexico City
university graduate working as an investment counselor for the same financial
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 185
institution as his father. Like the sons and daughters of many other upper
middleclass parents he spent one of his high school years in the United States,
spoke English well and lived in a modern urban apartment.
“A university is not the army,” Sánchez insisted. “Students aren’t there
to ‘yes sir!,’ salute and blindly obey. They should be taught to think, not
become robots.”
But it was robots that the reigning powers seemed to want. Technicians
highly trained in mathematics, engineering and merchandising contributed to
the separation of society into consumer-workers and an aristocratic elite. Both
federal and state governments cut funding in the humanities and the arts while
colluding with private enterprise to grant scholarships in engineering, computer
science and systems management.
The humanities—writing, painting, theater and music—generate thought,
criticism, awareness of nature, human potential and aesthetic possibilities that
have no place in an autocratic world. “Culture” to the establishment meant
adherence to traditional values (often mythologized). The culture
demonstrated by contemporary art, street theater, political stencils,
community radio, documentary films and small press poetry editions perverted
establishment propaganda. It also went against the prevailing philosophy of
worth as defined monetarily.
Mexico’s federal government and most of Mexico’s state governments
regarded culture as a sales device defined by the revenue it generated;
consequently, enhancing Mexico’s archeological wonders (like enhancing its
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 186
primeval beaches, selvas and lagoons) with five-star hotels, golf courses,
multi-dimensional light shows and super highways was “cultural.” Anything
else that one needed to know—news, ideas, political philosophy—one could
acquire by watching television.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 187
Chapter 13: No Farms, No Jobs, No Education
With power concentrated in the hands of a privileged few there was very
little trickle down of the money they manipulated. Corruption, whether
benevolent or cruel, became the order of the day. Oaxaca’s ex-governors were
among the wealthiest landholders in the state.
“It [corruption] endangers everything,” Hugo Tovar said ruefully. “Once
accepted, once practiced, it seeps into every crevice. Nothing happens that
isn’t affected by it.”
Tovar explained that both Ruiz and his predecessor José Murat rode
Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s pro-neo-liberal coattails and helped open Oaxaca to
exploitation by foreign investors. Self-sustaining agriculture gave way to
export products that demanded huge acreages and many menial workers. The
huge hydroelectric plants, the uranium, gold and copper mines, the
transcontinental super highways benefitted mega-corporations rather than the
residents of the state. (And benefitted those like Murat and URO who greased
the skids so the exploitation could take place.)
The state is one of Mexico’s poorest. Seventy-six percent of the stfate’s
PEA (persons economically active) earned less than seventy pesos a day
(slightly more than six U.S. dollars) before the 2008 economic collapse. Nearly
40 percent lacked running water in their residences, over 50 percent were
without plumbing and over 40 percent lived in homes with dirt floors. Over 10
percent lacked electricity.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 188
Statistics like these didn’t affect URO or his predecessors. They
maintained control through local and regional satrapies with whom they shared
a percentage of the spoils, or whom they enabled to accumulate wealth
through government connections and write offs. These caciques, whether
regional landholders or impresarios who controlled businesses or industries,
participated in the PRI political system as financial contributors and as
beneficiaries of influence and wealth passed down from above. Throughout the
last half of the twentieth century, until 2000 when PAN candidate Vicente Fox
broke the PRI hold on Mexico’s presidency, many functions that should have
been governmental went through PRI political organization.
Agriculturists in the Isthmus of Oaxaca received governmentally allotted
fertilizers and pesticides through the party organization. If they did not support
the party, or lived in a district that had not voted for the PRI, they did not
receive their fertilizer or their pesticides. Construction and business contracts
also went only to PRI militants. Often these contractors received sizeable tax
breaks and kicked back a percentage of their profits to the PRI officials who
facilitated their obtaining the contracts. (In many cases the PRI official was
also a government official, but not always.)
Government positions went to the best mapaches (raccoons) who made
sure that government-approved candidates won local and state elections.
Roberto Madrazo, a national PRI executive and presidential candidate,
rewarded Ruiz for what newspaperman Matias called “his mapache work” by
shepherding Ruiz up the governmental ladder, seeing that he became a deputy
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 189
to the Oaxaca assembly, then a state senator. URO voted the way Madrazo
ordered and backed the programs of José Murat, governor from 1998-2004. In
the gubernatorial elections of 2004 URO grabbed the gold ring. Oaxaca became
his fiefdom to do with as he wished….
…until he ordered the police “to clear the bastards out” of the Zócalo on
June 16.25 Within two weeks, from June 12 to June 26, 2006 the 70,000member teachers union found itself a pivotal part of a reform movement that
numbered between 250,000 and 800,000 people. Indigena groups, already
well-organized and with clear political agendas, were among the first and
largest APPO supporters. The APPO assemblies were modeled on their “usos y
constumbres” ideal of communal government. During one of the APPO’s first
organizational assemblies the delegates determined that no groups should be
excluded from joining and participating. This may have been an error, Hugo
Tovar contended, because it opened APPO to participation from “some very
radical organizations.
The government has publicized how dangerous and revolutionary
these groups are, contaminating the concept of the APPO in many
people’s minds. Not only that the government paid people to burn buses
and buildings and blamed the APPO for the fires and other acts of
The quote was relayed to me by a police official who participated in the attempt to
drive the teachers out of their Centro Historico campground. “That was the command
he [Ruiz] gave,” the official insisted.
25
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 190
vandalism. Since June 2006 it has criminalized persons who were acting
peacefully, within their constitutional rights, and imprisoned them. It has
criminalized even artists who paint anti-government art work.
For many getting rid of URO, not overthrowing the system, was the
dominant issue. Asked in December 2006 what would happen if the federal
government removed Ruiz, journalist Matias grinned and spread his hands as
though manna was falling from Heaven.
“We’d have a fiesta!” he exclaimed. “We’d have one hell of a fiesta!”
Later, more seriously, he contended that had Mexico’s newly elected
president Felipe Calderón removed URO from Oaxaca’s governorship the
protest movement would have slid backward and interest in and support of the
APPO would have diminished. But Calderón ignored both local and international
appeals and URO, emboldened by the support he’d been given by the PFP and
Army, increased intimidation and repression.
During September and October, 2006, as transition teams were working
to transfer the presidency from Vicente Fox to Felipe Calderón, the APPO
representatives and delegates from both the federal government’s Secretary of
Government and the Mexican Senate met to negotiate a settlement that would
include Ulisès Ruiz leaving his governorship. Carlos Abascal, the transition
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 191
secretary, maintained that “in good faith” he sought a settlement but that the
APPO representatives refused to alter their demands that Ruiz be deposed.26
“Calderón was vulnerable, very vulnerable,” Miguel Vázquez explained.
Having narrowly won the presidency thanks to PRI turncoats and very
questionable vote tallies Calderón faced sit-ins of his own, particularly in the
Federal District. “Destituting Ruiz would set an extremely bad example, and
aroused some very pertinent questions. ‘What other governors might be
displaced by popular movements?’ Could Calderón himself be removed?’”
To gain and maintain control of the country’s politics Calderón needed to
enforce the status quo, repress any change. Crushing the protests in Oaxaca
gave proof of determination and power. So he crushed it. Little King Ruiz was
safe in his domain and Big King Felipe demonstrated how authoritatively he
could rule.
Many of those who surged onto the APPO bandwagon weren’t dedicated
to joining an anti-URO or revolutionary movement. A doctor I spoke to in
August, 2007, was willing to support any efforts that might benefit Oaxaca’s
rural poor:
Whether or not it was true that he sincerely sought a settlement seems doubtful: He
must have known that plans were being made to crush the sit-in while he supposedly
was negotiating. He certainly knew that incoming president Calderón had edged into
the presidency with the help of PRI governors and longtime PRI standard bearers like
Elba Esther Gordillo and owed the former governing party more than a few favors. One
of them seemed to have been keeping Ruiz in office.
26
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 192
They had walked for four or five hours—I don’t know how long—
carrying their two children, one just a baby, to reach the clinic. The
babies were emaciated, they had diarrhea, they had been vomiting, the
parents didn’t know what to do. They were teenagers themselves. There
are no doctors where they live, up there in the Sierra, and they had no
money for medicines. The clinic closer to where they lived had been
abandoned.
It’s something that happens every day in Oaxaca. The
government does nothing. It lets the people suffer and die…
“Right from the beginning a lot of doctors joined the movement,”
Swedish born Anna Johannsen, a naturalized Mexican citizen and long-time
resident of Oaxaca, confirmed. She described “countless, countless numbers”
of children suffering from malnutrition “everywhere one goes” in Oaxaca. The
APPO, she explained, “seemed to offer an alternative” to self-serving PRI
governments that for eighty years had ignored the needs of indigenas and the
poor.
Most campesinos who lived in rural areas were not eligible to use social
security hospitals or emergency rooms and rural clinics often were closed all or
part of the time. Even those that were open lacked basic medicines and the
doctors only could write out prescriptions that their patients couldn’t afford to
fill. Federal government statistics indicate that the infant mortality rate in rural
Oaxaca had climbed to over 50 percent by 2007.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 193
“Everyone works as campesinos and some days they eat and some days
not,” state agricultural representative Basilio Martinez told Pedro Matías. Over
half of the rural communities lacked electricity; an even higher percentage had
no access to potable water. Priest Manuel Arias, the spokesman for Oaxaca’s
Catholic presbytery, winced as he described indigena life in the Sierras:
There are no hospitals. There is no potable water, no drainage.
The roads are virtually impassable. Poverty and migration have
disintegrated families. There are no father figures. They [rural
communities] constantly are victimized by caciques and the authorities—
the police. Hundreds of persons have been jailed and their situation as
prisoners is horrible. The police collect money from family members who
come to visit. Many of the prisoners wouldn’t eat if their families didn’t
bring them food.
A Mexican government Human Development report verified that over 90
percent of the deaths in rural areas were from curable diseases, primarily
malnutrition related or aggravated, including pneumonia, tuberculosis and
gastroenteritis. Lacking public medical care and without money to pay for
private doctors or prescriptions many residents of isolated communities and
ranchitos sought aid only when a person seemed to be dying. A young doctor,
who at first glance I thought was a high school student hitchhiking down a
rutted mountain road in the Mixteca, told me:
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 194
I am the only doctor they have and I am only just out of medical
school, doing my public service. I beg medicines, I invent cures, the only
clinics anywhere in the region have no supplies. Polluted water, mold,
rancid meat—there are thousands and I’m only one. I can do so little.
And they need so much!
“And we receive so little.” Claudia, a single mother of three, grew up in
the Sierras near Oaxaca’s border with the neighboring state of Veracruz.
Echoing Pedro Matias’ “only one day a year—election day—do we mean
anything to the government,” she angrily accused both state and federal
authorities of “abandoning the people in the Sierra” because they are indigena,
poor and lack education.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 195
Chapter 14: To Emigrate Is To Survive
While officially Ruiz and his predecessors voiced consternation over
massive migration they quietly shifted government funding away from social
programs. Oaxacans received over $1 billion dollars a year in remittances from
emigrants from 2000-2008, a large percentage of whom lacked legal
documentation to work in the United States.27 Despite worsening economic
conditions in the United States Oaxacan men and women continued to cross
the border to seek work, primarily minimum- and below minimum-wage jobs
they obtained through relatives or recruiters. Miguel Vazquez, co-founder of
Oaxaca’s Services for an Alternative Education, confirmed that 150,000
Oaxacans migrated every year between 1990 and 2005; other sources
estimated that over 350,000 left the state in 2006 and 2007.
So great was the expectancy that young people would go to the United
States to seek work that a Oaxaca language teacher told me that parents of
some of her indigena students asked that she teach them English instead of
Spanish “so they will do better when they get to the ‘Other Side.’” Ninety-five
percent of the remittance money received by Oaxacan families went for food,
housing, clothing and medical expenses that the state government no longer
had to fund. Instead the state invested in marinas, new administrative offices,
airplanes, helicopters and around-the-world visits by Ruiz and select PRI party
members.
An amount that diminished by nearly 20 percent after the international financial
crisis.
27
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 196
“There was very little work before. Now there is none,” Mixtecan Omar
Cosme told me in 2009. Stocky and muscular, with a face that seemed to be
all ovals, he pushed a Cubs-logo baseball cap off his forehead and sighed as he
explained his decision to join his brother and nephews in Chicago. Yes, he
admitted in rapid bursts of Spanish, it will be a long and dangerous journey but
his brother and the community of immigrants in which he lives have good
coyotes, they know how to get past the migra and seldom are apprehended.
And, yes, it will be costly but his brother and nephews will pay the coyotes and
he will repay them from his earnings.
Like many Oaxacans that I’ve talked to Omar didn’t distinguish among
political parties or political programs but spoke in terms of what “the
government” or “the politicians” did or didn’t do as though they were an
abstraction, something one had to deal with but couldn’t change anymore than
one could change a mountain or the ocean.
When a bus in which I was a passenger broke down on a pitted, rocky
road in desolate western Oaxaca in 2008, I and five other passengers, men
between the ages of twenty-five and forty, hitched a ride in the back of an old
pickup. As we chatted I discovered that four of the five had been to New York,
four of the five to Los Angeles, all of them to Phoenix and the majority to Las
Vegas, Houston and San Francisco (in addition to MacFarlane, California, Rock
Springs, Wyoming and Farmington, New Jersey).
One of them sang snatches of BeeGees songs in English, another
remembered buying big buckets of delicious “Kentucky” (fried chicken) when
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 197
his crew got off work. They countered remarks about the migra (Border Patrol)
and their treatment of migrants with stories about Mexican police who took
bribes and beat up innocent indigenas, saying that one was no worse than the
other. One even laughed about having been abandoned with over twenty
others on the Arizona desert by their coyote and finally being picked up and
deported by the migra.
Like many other Oaxacans that I’ve met they accepted their parents’
and grandparents’ devote Catholicism, submission to authority and double
standards of morality without themselves subscribing to them. The vast
majority of those who’ve worked in the United States and returned to Mexico
no longer want to live in “Mexico Típico” weaving baskets, wearing serapes and
riding mules no matter how touristically appealing such traditions might seem.
They want a house, a job, a car, enough to eat and education for their kids.
Although they share many communal values they place their personal
interests and those of their families ahead of community needs. In the words
of Gustavo Esteva “the Mexican campesinos now have had direct personal
experiences with the United States and know what comfort is, know how to live
with the support of technology and want to combine it with the good life the
campo gives them.”28
I’ve attended a number of “homecomings” of immigrants who achieved
legal status in the United States. During one of them in a small town in Oaxaca
the vacationing immigrant threw a community-wide party: The Pope couldn’t
28
In Gutiérrez-Vivó, José, coordinador, El mexicano y su siglo, Oceano, Mexico, D.F.,
1999
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 198
have been treated with more respect than he was. He later confided to me that
he had a good job—as a cook in a hotel restaurant in California. In quite
passable English he told me, “You think I get treated this way in L.A.? Here
they give me a parade, everybody wants to shake my hand, kiss me. Hell!
They’re even going to name a park after me!”
He acknowledged that dozens of the town’s teenagers talked to him
about emigrating “so they could have the things I have. So they can send lots
of money to their mothers, sisters, novias.” He added that very few of them
mentioned returning to the impoverished conditions they wanted to escape.
Although many communities in the Mixteca and in other rural areas of
Oaxaca adhered to usos y costumbres as a form of self-government they did
not unite into entities strong enough or large enough to confront the PRI or the
regional caciques. Manuel Villegas, a teacher in Tlaxiaco, a poverty-strapped
colonial city in the heart of the Mixteca, described his frustration and
impatience with trying to organize communal groups. Only a few people
attended the meetings he scheduled in an attempt to redirect the anger and
discontent into social and political action.
“Everyone knew that URO seized power after the 2004 elections through
massive fraud,” he asserted, “but only a very few were willing to do more than
complain.” According to him most of the Mixteca was governed by “PRI
marionettes” who did nothing but divert state funds to their own pet projects
and pocketbooks. That over half of the adult male population had migrated was
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 199
a key factor in the failure of Mixtecans to organize effectively until URO’s state
and municipal police tried to crush the teachers’ sit-in in the city of Oaxaca.
“Suddenly there was something concrete, a real vehicle for expression. A
million people! Can you imagine? A million people participated in biggest of the
marches, including thousands from Tlaxiaco and the Mixteca. They filled buses,
they filled cars, they filled trucks that were so old the passengers had to get
out to push them up some of the hills! Just so they could get to the city, just
so they could march and shout ‘¡Ya cayó! ¡Ya cayó! ¡Ulisés ya cayó!’”
“The poor always are going to be poor and the rich always are going to
be rich,” one of young Gonzalo’s oppressors hissed as he was kicking the
young college student during his detainment on the Night of Horror. That was
the assumption, if not the actual philosophy, of both the nineteenth century
aristocracy and the post-revolution PRI domination. Both allowed a large
percentage of the indigena communities to govern themselves according to
usos y costumbres, to weave blankets and grow corn and beans and to fight
with their neighbors but not to share the state’s wealth or participate in its
financial growth.
Over 75 percent of state’s 3,500,000 residents live in extreme poverty.
Of its three major sources of revenue, one—coffee production--virtually has
disappeared and a second, “factories without chimneys” (tourism), plummeted
after the June 14 takeover of the city of Oaxaca’s Centro Historico by Section
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 200
22 and the APPO, leading to extensive business closings, layoffs and
foreclosures.
The third, emigration, increased. Most of those leaving headed for
agricultural, construction and service jobs in California, Washington, Oregon,
Florida, South and North Carolina, New York and New Jersey. What began as
principally seasonal or temporary work searches by young men and younger
heads of household became a permanent way of life for more and more
Oaxacans. Communities throughout Oaxaca became ghost towns. The few
residents who remained depended upon remittances they received from
fathers, husbands, sons and daughters working—for the most part without
legal documentation—in the United States.
Some migrant workers returned with enough money to built additions to
their houses, or construct new ones, or to buy a few head of cattle or set up a
small business—a beauty parlor, a car repair shop, an internet café. Others
became small-scale importers. They bought used cars, or televisions, or
computers and sold them when they returned to their home villages.
Many did not return, and their families were abandoned to survive as
best they could.
Martha Chavez smoothed her cotton skirt over her ankles so that
its folds completely concealed the squat, hand-made stool on which she
was sitting, then let her hands drop into her lap, the palms cupped as
though holding a bowl of fruit. Her oldest son, a leggy teenager with
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 201
sunken cheeks and myopia that caused him to crane his neck forward
and squint at objects in front of him, rocked back and forth on the
unevenly pegged legs of a stool beside her.
‘My son, Ernesto here, he is the only man. His father has not been
here for three years. He went north to find work. We do not know what
has become of him.
‘My husband's brother, he has been gone for three years too.
Twice my sister-in-law heard from him, one time when she received
some money that he sent to her, but that was--I don't remember--a
long time ago.
‘When we still lived in the Sierra, on the rancho, my husband
would be gone for weeks cutting trees for the lumber trucks. We had
melons and squash as well as beans and corn in our little ejido on the
hillside. I took care of it when he was away. But the crops all dried up
and my husband came here, to the city. He built this house saying he
would put windows in it, and a floor that wasn't just packed-down dirt.
And a separate place to do the cooking, and a place for washing clothes.
‘To make a little extra I started selling candies because when he
wasn't working we had no way to buy even masa or a few beans. Then
his brother came, with his wife, my sister-in-law, and their little ones,
and they moved in with us since they had no place else to go.
‘My sister-in-law works too--she sells dulces but on Sundays she
helps cook and wash dishes for unos ricos--and my son, my Ernesto
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 202
here, he works too, every day and often at night, when there are parties
at the big place where they hold dances, he parks the cars and scrubs
the floors and cleans up everything afterwards.
‘At times I think about the rancho. But, ni modo, it is gone. This is
the life that we have now.’29
It was not unusual in Oaxaca for children as young as nine, ten, eleven
and twelve to be left in charge of younger siblings while the father was absent
and the mother worked. In many areas, including the city of Oaxaca and other
larger towns, grandparents—even great-grandparents—inherited childcare
responsibilities.
Three of them trudging along the path. The oldest, perhaps eleven
or twelve, carrying a baby.
‘Where are your parents?’
A crooked, tired smile. ‘On “The Other Side.”’
‘In the United States?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who cares for the little ones?’
‘I do.’
‘You alone. No one else?’
‘No one else. My grandmother is sick.’
Excerpted from Stout, Robert Joe The Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives, Algora
Press, New York, 2003.
29
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 203
‘Your grandfather?’
‘On “The Other Side.”’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the house of my cousins. To get tortillas.’
‘Can’t you stay with your cousins?’
‘No. If I did someone would take our house away. Then we would
have no place to live.’ (encounter in the Mixteca, August 2007).
“There are children who don’t have houses in which to live,” teacher
Pedro Rodriguez told me. “There are children who don’t have food to eat, and
children who don’t have educations.” Conditions in many parts of Oaxaca are
worse than they were before the Mexican Revolution during the first quarter of
the twentieth century. Emigration has proved to be, at best, a partial
alternative to poverty.
A woman with banking and social connections who worked with the city
of Oaxaca’s DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia—Mexico’s federal and state
welfare system) told me about “the incredible variety of patched-together
family arrangements” that the agency encountered. They included a woman of
twenty-three whose husband had left as an indocumentado to the United
States, her two children, her husband’s sister’s two children, a pregnant
fifteen-year-old cousin, the cousin’s novio and the novio’s teenaged sister.
Another of the departed husband’s sister’s children had been living with
them but had run away. They lived in “a conglomeration of shacks” pegged
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 204
together with old electric cord, rope and clothes hangers and covered with
plastic tarpaulin. Various of them worked when they could; for medical care
they went to a crippled curandera who gave them poultices, herbs and mescal.
Other “families” that DIF workers encountered included children who had
no blood relationships with the providers and households headed by teenaged
children. Still other children had no homes at all and lived on the streets,
sleeping in doorways, wiping off car windshields with bits of rag, ferreting
through garbage cans.
I remember one little girl. I would see her some mornings peering
through the schoolyard fence, half-hidden by the tangled climbing vines
that had grown up around it. She wasn’t filthy but she wasn’t clean
either. I asked her where she lived and she shrugged. I asked where her
parents were and she shrugged. ‘You don’t know?’ She shook her head.
I asked if she’d ever been to school and she shook her head. I asked her
if she could read and she shook her head. I asked her if she was hungry
and she shrugged.
After that when I would see her I would give her fruit, tortillas, a
toothbrush. Sometimes the bigger boys, if they noticed her, they would
chase her away. Once when they threw rocks at her she fell. I picked her
up and asked if she were hurt and she shook her head, tears splattering
all over her face. ‘I just want to be like them,’ she said. –- private school
teacher Jaime Dominguez.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 205
Miguel Vázquez lists four prime reasons that Oaxaca is racked by
poverty:

Social exclusion which isolates campesinos and indigenas, preventing
them from having access to employment, education and medical
care;

Diversity and dispersion that has ruptured communal life as families
and villages are broken up by migration;

Social and political conflicts between ethnic groups and traditional
communities contesting land claims and property rights; and

Restrictions imposed by authoritarian governments which have
perpetrated a cacique system resembling Middle Age serfdom.
“When the prices paid for coffee hit rock bottom, migration increased
dramatically,” Ema González said ruefully. “People felt they had no choice but
to seek work on the ‘Other Side.’”
Too few Oaxacans had educations, she admitted, and too many who had
degrees and diplomas weren’t able to find employment or were paid less than
they would have been if they’d gone into jobs that didn’t require an education.
(Or as a teacher in a city of Oaxaca private high school told me “or if they had
become prostitutes or had started dealing drugs or had hooked on as porros
for URO.”)
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 206
A young woman who worked for friends of mine in the city of Oaxaca
laughed when a visitor commented on the importance of completing one’s
education and explained that her older brother had a college degree in tourism
but was working in a car body shop in North Carolina. Another brother who had
two years of college also was in North Carolina working as a short-order cook.
She had two years of college and said considered herself to be lucky to work
for people who paid her regularly and treated her well. Six evenings a week,
she added, she put in shifts in a retail shop and still barely could make ends
meet.
“To emigrate is to survive,” rural Oaxacans have repeated to me over
and over again. “There is no work for us here.” Unlike other parts of Mexico,
where mining and agriculture stimulated the founding of industry, the noble
elite living fashionably in rural or city estates in Oaxaca did not need to
generate sources of income beyond those which they’d already established.
Even after the 1930s distribution of unoccupied lands to rural residents most
ejido dwellers produced only enough for their own consumption. A rural
grandmother told me she was nearly fifty years old before she actually had
used money to make a purchase.
Gonzalo, who grew up in a rural Mixtecan village, recalls what a big
community event the arrival of a little traveling carnival seemed. He
remembers buying sticky cotton candy but also seeing “countless kids” wearing
old patched clothes huddled in little groups watching the rides and saying they
hoped “when they reached fourteen or fifteen that they could leave Oaxaca
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 207
and go work in the United States” so they would have money for such things
as cotton candy and carnival rides.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 208
Chapter 15: The Dinosaur
In 2006 the corrupt governor of Mexico’s state of Oaxaca
sent a force of armed police to drive striking schoolteachers out of the
city of Oaxaca’s central historical district. The action evoked a citizen
response—a “Popular Assembly”—that retaliated and drove the governor
and his minions out of the central city. I wrote about these events and
the armed federal intervention that followed and several years later
began investigating the political maneuvering that had preceded them,
including trying to learn more about the workings of the governor’s
political party which had ruled Oaxaca for nearly eighty years…
but I didn’t have to look for a dinosaur from the Old Regime. It appeared
beside my table in the Bar Superior, a workingman’s drinkery just west of city
of Oaxaca’s historical district. It—he—was wearing an open-at-the-collar white
shirt and neatly pressed slacks.
“Debes ser el gringo que busco yo.”
“I’m the only gringo in this bar,” I responded in Spanish.
He laughed. Jovially. Tall by Oaxacan standards, clean-shaven, with a
face that could have been carved out of mahogany, he wiped imaginary sweat
from his forehead and leaned towards me, voice lowered as if to convey
something intimate.
“I buy you a beer.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 209
I spread my hands—the universal gesture of acceptance. He laughed
again—a genuine laugh, not forced—and yanked the straight-backed wooden
chair next to mine away from the table.
“You are a periódista, no?”
“A writer. Not a journalist.”
“Chingada. Es lo mismo.”
“I write what I want. Journalists write what their newspapers want.”
A wink accompanied his “hago la calle” as he gestured towards the bar.
“Why is it you want to write about the PRI?”
“PRI? Partido, qué, Revolucionario Instituciónal, no? Who says I want to
write about the PRI?”
“In Oaxaca one doesn’t say. One knows. Instinctively. The winds speak
to us.”
“Well said. What else did the winds tell you?”
“Never trust an outsider!”
“The winds are smart.”
“And it is smart to listen to them!”
Shots of mescal appeared beside the bottles of cold Victoria that the
waiter slid in front of us. I smiled an acknowledgement, noting how practiced,
mechanical, the dinosaur’s movements seemed. Lifting my glass I returned his
toast and savored the liquor’s aroma, holding it in my mouth for a few seconds
before swallowing.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 210
“Here no one asks about the PRI. Here everyone knows. Everyone
understands. The PRI is like God—is God!” He rapped the table with his
forefinger. “There is nothing to question.”
“Simply conform?”
“No, pues. Like the Church the PRI includes everything. Divergent
opinions. Divergent ideas. Ricos. Pobres. A way of life. Of identity. Soy
mexicano. Soy priista. The same.”
“A way of control.”
He tilted his head, a gesture that might have been acknowledgment.
“Mira. What if there is no PRI? No Church? No control?”
Intimation of a wink.
“No business, no rules, we’re apes in the jungle, no? But communal, no?
Pues, so we organize. Rules. Laws. God,” he added, almost a smirk, “but laws,
rules, pues, and God are…” He tapped his forehead “…up here. Mire, en el
campo…pero, disculpa, you’re a perio-…, ah, escritor, you don’t know about—“
“I grew up en el campo. What has that—“
“Bueno, then you understand. To grow things one needs to clear the
land, plant, till, water, or no harvest, eh? This is control, no?”
“One could say so.”
“The PRI. Prepare, plant, nourish. A way of life.”
“Police. Assassinations. Jailings.”
The tip of his tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth, his carved
face’s only hint of expression.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 211
“It is not good to talk of such things.”
A warning? I looked away.
“Nor is it good to keep them hidden, debajo del agua, pretend they don’t
exist.”
“It exists. Rape exists. Incest. The invasion of Iraq.”
“Inva-..?”
“It is worse perhaps? Butchering thousands? For what? The oil?”
“I opposed the war in Iraq. But…” I leaned towards him to be heard
above ranchero music booming from the jukebox stereo. “Iraq? The campo?
Why this talk about other things?”
“Perhaps they are not, como dijiste, ‘other.’”
“Perhaps they are to avoid ‘things it is not good to talk about’?”
“Ah, you perio-..ah, escritores, always trying to stick a pin in some
detail. You are a good writer perhaps, but not a good actor. I see in your
face…”
“What?”
“You hold a piece of a puzzle in your hand. One piece. Perhaps it is not
the PRI you want to know about, just a piece of the PRI? One little piece?”
“One little piece that you don’t want to talk about?”
Again the tip of his tongue at the corner of his mouth. The waiter,
responding to some unspoken cue, slid two fresh traguitos in front of us. A
quick twitch of dinosaur’s finger acknowledged the service.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 212
“The malfeasance of one priest does not define the Church. A bad priest,
you might say. But also one finds bad non-believers, no? Disrupters. Samson
destroyed the temple but the temple was rebuilt: Samson was no more.”
“Samson? You mean the Popular Assembly?”
Again the almost imperceptible wink.
“The campo. You don’t get rid of the weeds they take over, destroy the
harvest, you lose everything.”
“If they really are weeds—”
“Someone comes in here, a ruffian, loud, vulgar, pushes those sitting
out of their place, bangs the table, makes demands. Then his amigos come in,
loud, nasty, break bottles, insult women, eh? It no longer is the same bar. The
ambiente is ruined. Destroyed. Better right away to throw him out. Keep the
bar the way it was: friendly, laughter, singing with the mariachis, watching the
TV. You do not want the change.”
“Muy bien amigo. But Oaxaca is not a bar. It is a state to which
everyone belongs. A state in which a few have everything, the rest have
nothing. It is not the ruffians who come in, the ruffians are in charge.”
“Pues, ruffians..?” He lingered over the word, then laughed and tapped
my chest. “Sí, escritor, ruffians—us, them. In our hearts, souls, ruffians, all of
us: That’s why we have laws. To control the ruffian in us. Yes, like a machine—
what is called ‘society’ is a machine, the parts all working together. Some parts
larger than others, more essential, ni modo, all working together. Not willynilly. One part breaks, the machine breaks…”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 213
“But if only a small part of the machine..?”
“Permítame, I finish. This machine needs to have a purpose, no? All
machines need to have a purpose. So to keep to the purpose, to do what the
machine is designed to do, it has to run according to rules. So it doesn’t, digo,
overheat, eh? Go berserk. For its own protection, no? Break the rules you
break the machine, entiendes?”
“Very fanciful, salud! A toast for your, ah, what shall I say? Ingenuity.”
Squint or wink, I couldn’t tell which. He tapped his glass against mine,
careful not to spill either’s contents.
“The machine is the PRI?” I persisted. “Many in Oaxaca—”
“No ’migo. The PRI is, what shall I say? Ah! The motor. The motor to
make the machine run…”
“And the Popular Assembly?”
“Oye, todos saben que the machine is not perfect. It needs adjustments.
But break it apart? Your ‘Popular Assembly’—“
“Not ‘break it.’ Stop it. Stop it from produc-…”
“Look around you, mano! Stores closed. Businesses bankrupt. Tourists
afraid to come. People angry. Afraid—“
“They were afraid before. Death squads….”
“Some—sí, pues, perhaps. But what I say is true. Businesses—I’ve seen
the figures—five hundred, maybe more—shut down. Schools? Closed. The
periodistas thought everybody was with the ‘As-sem-blea Pop-u-lar…’” Fingers
waving as though brandishing a flag he imitated a rally leader, of which the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 214
Popular Assembly had had many. “No ’migo, many—good people, solid,
suffered. Breaking the machine—“
“The machine that was stealing millions…”
With practiced deference he lifted his glass. “Mira, one does not throw
out the machine because some human-animal-ape operators—”
“The ‘human-ape-operators’ needed to be stopped. That’s why—“
“There are laws. Beautiful laws. Not by apes in the jungle. Breaking.
Burning. Throwing stones. By laws—”
“That the…operators…”
“The laws are good, the operators, pues, some not. So? You throw out
the machine as well? Start over? With what?
“With—”
“No, I tell you: More animal-ape operators. Fighting. Tearing down. Mira,
here we know, here in Mexico. The ‘Revolution.’ Ha! We celebrate one year
but, oye! the ‘Revolution lasted sixteen years! Everything torn down. Ruined.
Until, eschuca! Until the PRI! Organized. Built—“
“Repress-…”
“Permítame. Built. With laws. The Revolution—all apes, ruffians. But
after…no longer. People came together. The machine was good. It produced.
Was strong. Resistant. Rose up to defend oil that foreigners—your country—
tried to take away…”
Forefinger against his nose he paused as though reviewing what he just
had said, then with a brief, practiced salute acknowledged someone who’d just
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 215
entered the bar. Lifting my mescal I watched, trying not look directly at him.
How much of this does he actually believe? I couldn’t tell for sure: His
expressions, his mannerisms, revealed little. Again leaning towards me,
lowering his voice as though to confide some great secret, he tapped the table.
“Having three, four, five machines fighting for power—that is
destructive. There needs to be just one machine. Mexico was strong when it
was just the PRI. Now? Mafias. Crime. Mexico is splintered, parties fighting
each other, ‘Quiero yo ser el jefe! No! Yo! Yo!” instead of governing, working
together. Like a family. One father, not two, three, four.”
“And if the father is cruel, vicious, as you say, ‘ape-animal-ruffian’—”
“Mira, fathers die, sons become fathers but the law doesn’t die. What
now is happening is like the Revolution. Many different leaders, many different
armies. Calles, Carranza, Huerta, Obregon, fighting, killing, destroying the law.
Now? Pues, ‘Popular Assembly,’ PRD, López Obrador, the drug cartels, each out
for themselves, trying to take away from the others. That is why—“
“And the PRI? Trying to take away—“
“No unite. It is the strongest. It has—“
“Corruptos. Criminals. Like the ex-govern-...”
He laughed, laughter that again seemed genuine, unfeigned. “Sí. Un
pinche cabrón. But the others? PRD? The same. PAN? Worse. The Popular
Assembly? Grafiteros. Revolucionarios. Mira, I do not defend, I explain.
Ruffians: politicos, drug dealers, impresarios, priests, all the same. But with
many parties, many leaders, there is no control. With one party there is
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 216
control. Even the drogueros are controlled. The ruffians—“ Again he laughed.
“The ruffians are controlled. The machine works. You understand?”
I peered into my nearly empty mescal. “And nothing changes. The
corruption goes on—one ruffian after another. That is not the way—”
“—government should be,” he finished for me. “Ah! Idealists!
Democracy! Chingada, cabrón, democracy never has existed except in books
written by idealists! “He gyrated his hands above his head as though
beckoning some alien force. “Understand, the PRI is not this, this efímero, this
thing in the sky. It is dirty, gritty, real. Pragmático. Disciplinado. It is strong.
Not like what we have now. Naughty children fighting among themselves.”
“The father needs to take charge?”
The intimation of a wink. Hands pressed against the table he pushed his
chair back and rose. Instantaneously the waiter appeared with the bill. I
reached for my wallet but the dinosaur pressed his hand lightly against my
shoulder.
“My pleasure,” he murmured in nearly unaccented English and laughed
again, pleasantly, convivially. Before stepping away from the table he bent
towards me and with the almost imperceptible wink, “Ask questions, my friend.
Good questions. But—“he touched his forehead with his fingertips “—take care.
“It always is prudent to take care.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 217
Chapter 16: “There Has To Be Reform”
For centuries individual communities in Oaxaca shared communal fields
that they cleared among steep hills and treacherous barrancas. They depended
on summer rainfall to nurture subsistence crops like corn, beans, and melons
and they grazed goats and raised poultry. During the nineteenth century as
European and U.S. demands for coffee increased small-scale entrepreneurs,
many of them European immigrants, developed coffee plantations and hired
local campesinos to work on them. Gradually more and more small ejido
residents planted coffee trees on their own lands.
They could not, however, transport or sell their products without
submission to the caciques in charge of coffee production so small local
producers converted to producing organic coffee that large growers found
unprofitable to process and market.
They said the way to make money was to grow coffee beans. Lots
of people believed them and instead of corn and fruit planted coffee
trees. But coffee trees take a long time to grow and one can’t eat coffee
beans. One had to sell to exporters and they paid very little so at the
end of the season sometimes one had nothing. For the family to have
something to eat we men went off to work. You see, it cost more to
grow coffee than they paid us for the crops so we needed to work for
other people instead of having our farms. Finally we had to sell them
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 218
because they’d become worthless. Now our children have no land of
their own.” – former Oaxaca coffee grower Leonel Morales.
The cultivation of coffee, and the marketing and processing required in
growing and selling it transformed communal self-sufficient agriculture into an
owner-worker economy. Before 1988 Oaxacan campesinos sold their corn and
grain for prices that enabled them to provide for themselves and their families.
But in the mid-1980s the government began to eliminate agricultural subsidies
and did away with Conasupo, the program that furnished low cost basic
necessities to families throughout Mexico. According to Phil Dahl-Bredine of
Oaxaca’s Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca,
campesinos in that area showed a 75 percent income growth between 1960
and 1980 but from 1985 to 2005 they experienced zero growth and had to
battle subsidized imports that led to insupportable inflation.
Between 1997 and 2007 the price of tortillas jumped 550 percent but
farmers earned only 45 percent of what they had earned ten years before.
After the signing of NAFTA Mexico stopped subsiding agriculture but the United
States did not, enabling its producers to undersell what Mexican nationals were
charging. Two U.S. companies--Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill--controlled
over 70 percent of the corn exported from the United States to Mexico in 2007,
a percentage that has increased since then. Poverty in rural Oaxaca increased
to include nearly 90 percent of the population between the signing of the
NAFTA agreement in 1993 and 2008.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 219
“If one has no land, no job, one has no way to eat, to feed one’s family,”
teacher Ema González cited “the total disregard that the government of the
wealthy” has for the poor.
Salinas de Gortari powered an amendment to Article 27 of the Mexican
constitution through the PRI-dominated federal Congress in the early 1990s
that allowed the sale and purchase of ejido land which in the 1930s had been
granted “in perpetuity” to Mexican campesinos. The Salinas de Gortari
amendment opened the gates to the acquisition of huge acreages by the
timber and cattle industries. His Secretary of Agriculture, Santiago Levy,
following the dictates of international banking concerns, launched a project to
reduce the number of self-sustaining small farmers—campesinos—from
twenty-five million, nearly one-fourth of the country’s population, to a mere
three million.
Levy theorized that industry, agribusiness and maquiladoras would
provide employment for the displayed rural residents as Salinas’s proglobalization government “emptied the countryside of campesinos,” in the
words of Dahl-Bredine.
“A disaster!” Miguel Vázquez called the changes. The maquiladoras
foundered and hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans, many of them illiterate and
able to speak only an indigena language, lost not only their employment and
the land that had sustained them but their cultural ties as well. “That they
need to leave Oaxaca and seek a way to make a living is a reality,” Vázquez
insisted. Their labor as migrants and indocumentados enabled industry and
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 220
agribusiness in the United States to export to Mexico the same products that
those workers could have produced south of the border.30
Dahl-Bredine compared the turnover from small self-sustaining
agriculture to huge export-crop enterprises with changes forced on his former
hometown, Silver City, New Mexico, by WalMart. The giant chain sold goods for
considerably less than local businesses were able to do, forcing many of them
to close. It also paid substantially lower salaries while stocking its shelves with
items obtained through the chain’s international purchasing system. It
transferred most of the profits it accrued out of Silver City. Money that
formerly had circulated in Silver City ceased to do so as independent store
owners and producers no longer could compete.
“That’s exactly what happened with NAFTA,” Dahl-Bredine insisted.
NAFTA opened markets for large-scale producers of export crops and
manufactured items, most of which were shipped out of the areas in which
they’d been produced. Local small businesses sold out or went belly up and
their owners and workers either migrated or went to work for the
internationals. Throughout Oaxaca goods produced in the United States, from
handkerchiefs to underwear, from breakfast cereal to furniture, sell for less
than the same items made in Mexico. Except as artesanías, locally made goods
virtually ceased to exist.
As marijuana use increased in the United States during the 1960s, Oaxacan
entrepreneurs responded by growing more of the sacred herb for export. Although
small independent growers continued to provide la verdolaga sagrada for local
consumers, caciques controlled the export trade, abetted by handsomely paid officials
who made sure that the caciques’ business wouldn’t be foreclosed or interrupted.
30
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 221
Dahl-Bredine insisted that Mexico could produce all of the corn it needed
without having to rely on imports. To do so the country needed to fully utilize
the land it had available and to assure that what it produced stayed within
Mexico. He blamed much of the supposed shortages of corn on stock market
speculators and asserted that “Cargill and Monsanto are hoarding hundreds of
thousands of tons of corn” which they refused to distribute until prices for it
rose to a desired level.
“What do U.S.-educated bureaucrats who grew up in the Federal District
know about farming?” demanded the director of the Confederación Nacional
Campesina (CNC) in 2007. For the past half-a-century, he complained, they’ve
been the ones making the decisions about subsidies, production, land use and
markets.
Although Mexico’s federalized education system dictated that English be
taught in both public and private schools it made no such concessions to
indigena languages.
Even during recess they [the teachers] would not let us speak
Zapoteca. They would give us faltas [demerits] and when we got ten
faltas they would suspend us from school. I still can see my fourth-grade
teacher jabbing her forefinger at us and saying, ‘This is Mexico and the
language of Mexico is Spanish!’” -- Oaxaca music teacher Pedro
Hernández
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 222
Federal government attempts to “professionalize” primary and
secondary school systems by establishing higher requirements for teachers in
terms of experience and education and more strictly defining curricula during
the 1980s and 1990s had a negative effect on many schools. Those which had
given some classes in native languages ceased to do so. Few schools made any
formal attempts to deal with migration, although individual teachers counseled,
urged, and sympathized with families disrupted by absent parents, sudden
departures or the tensions created by an abrupt loss of income, a parent’s or
sibling’s deportation or criminal conduct.
Throughout Oaxaca “migration widows” became heads of household and
fought to keep their homes and lands not only against rapacious caciques but
also against usos y costumbres traditions that granted ownership of property
only to males. Many of these women, particularly in rural areas, spoke little or
no Spanish and had attended school only occasionally, if at all. Although the
majority of them encouraged—even insisted—that their children learn to read
and write, “illiteracy is a huge problem, particularly in rural areas,” Ema
González asserted.
He leans against the wheel of the wagon, already having fed
weeds to the burro that pulled it up a rocky trail that only a burro could
climb. “I can read,” he boasts, tugging a mutilated comic book from a
pocket of his ripped jeans. As he flips from page to page I realize that he
is inventing a story from the pictures, not following the words. I say
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 223
only, “That’s good, m’hijo. The more you study the more you will learn.”
(encounter in the Mixteca, 2007)
An activist in COMO, the women’s organization instrumental in the
takeover of Channel 9 and Oaxaca radio stations, told me the school she
attended as a child “only was half built and lacked everything.” The pueblo had
a health clinic but it seldom was open. There were no doctors or nurses or
health workers. “People there die of simple diseases,” she testified. Those who
didn’t die migrated to other parts of Mexico or to the United States in order to
work. “‘This is the life that God gave us,’ people tell me. Well, it’s not a good
life!”
Throughout rural Oaxaca stores have closed, businesses foundered.31
Many who don’t migrate, the COMO adherent asserted, “fall into perdition.”
They become drug addicts, alcoholics; young women slide into prostitution;
children refuse to attend school because they have no money, nothing to eat;
they wear ragged clothes.
Many educated Oaxacans, particularly those who teach and/or live in
rural areas, link illiteracy with another social problem--alcoholism and the
domestic violence that often results.
“No one truthfully can say that alcoholism hasn’t been a part of Oaxacan
life for generations,” Antonio Bolaños told me. The descendant of AfricanRolando González, director of the human rights organization Ñu Xi Candi in Tlaxiaco,
wryly told me the only businesses in the Mixteca that were prospering were the casas
de ahorros—the savings and loan institutions that converted dollars telegraphed from
the U.S. into peso accounts that the workers’ relatives could draw on.
31
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 224
Mexican residents of coastal Oaxaca, Bolaños jammed his forefinger against
the couch-side table in his tiny Oaxaca apartment and insisted:
The men worked. They worked hard. Morning until night. On
Sundays they would get together. They would drink. Mescal. Mescal or
pulque that they’d brewed themselves. They would play guitars. They
would sing. Some of them, pendejos, would abuse their wives. Usually
they paid for it—their neighbors, their relatives, their friends, would see
that they got back what they’d dealt out.
But they were there. Working. Planting. Weeding. Harvesting. It
was a way of life. Their women helped them. Their children. Their
neighbors. They belonged.
Now? Many drink because they are angry. Because they feel
ashamed. Feel worthless.
Before, always, they were men. Now I think they try very hard.
But life is not good to them.”
Oaxaca ranks among the worst in Mexico for violence against women,
much of which is overlooked by the police and the judicial system. Human
rights activist Rolando González pleaded that the state attorney general send
persons qualified to deal with sexual abuse and crime to Tlaxiaco in the
Mixteca after a young girl was found raped and abandoned near death near
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 225
that city in October 2007. (For reasons no one could explain local police did not
take her to the social security clinic for over two hours after finding her.)
With increasing poverty in the drought- and migration-strapped Mixteca,
alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution and assaults have reached what
González described as alarming and desperate levels.
For nearly twelve years COMO activist Claudia worked with rural women,
the majority of whom were single mothers, in cooperatives she helped set up
to manufacture belts and other items that the participants could sell.
Cooperatives of that kind not only provided small incomes but also gave moral
and logistical support to those involved. Although many women from the more
isolated rural communities migrated, others communally shared gardening,
childcare, making tortillas, tending chickens and goats. Many cooked group
meals and carried individual portions to their dwellings to serve to their
families.
Whether the “horizontal” usos y cosumbres system of government could
work effectively on a statewide level, even if it could be instituted, is
debatable. That it will work in a homogenous community of individuals who
share the same language, basic beliefs and customs had been demonstrated;
even so, communities governed by usos y costumbres were not—and never
had been—idyllic paradises.
Oaxaca’s history, before and since the Conquest, has been marred by
violence between ethnic groups and competing communities. The rugged
terrain throughout much of the state enabled different ethnic and language
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 226
groups to settle in regions that offered natural protection; nevertheless, one of
the considerations that usos y costumbres assemblies met to vote on was
whether to enlarge their agricultural or forest lands by invading neighboring
communities. Even today strong arm tactics often dominate the asemblea
manner of choosing local leaders. Voting is done openly, not by secret ballot,
and local caciques reward those who vote for them and punish those who
don’t. Many usos y costumbres communities have been governed by the same
families, or same power groups, for generations
In other areas, particularly those being developed for commercial or
tourism reasons, PRI officials imposed candidates on usos y costumbres
communities, creating caciquedoms the party could control. State officials,
including law enforcement, seldom interfered as long as the caciques they
supported brought in votes during elections for municipio (county) and state
offices. Until the 1980s this semi-feudal system maintained an uneasy but
workable status quo in which many rural residents lived and died with little or
no contact with other parts of Mexico or of the world.
“There has to be reform,” teacher Ema González echoed the feelings of
hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans in contending that mobilizing those
excluded from the social and political elite was the key to change. Those who
manipulate Oaxaca’s political and economic systems are a small minority of the
state’s population “but they are a powerful minority. There is no transparency.
The governor arranges, controls, dispenses as he wishes—he is the head
cacique, he has the legislature and the judicial system in his pocket.” Change
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 227
means overthrowing the governor and the system of government that he
manifests and represents.
Can it be done non-violently?
“The violence—repressive government violence—already has taken
place,” a retired federal government worker named Navarro, the father of a
teacher involved in Section 22’s occupation of the Centro Historico, answered
the question I asked many Oaxacans during the turbulent year following the
armed invasion of the Zócalo.
“No matter what happens, there will be violence. How can you effect
changes pacifically when those wanting to implement them are non-violent and
those resisting them are using tanks and truncheons and guns?”
It sounds impossible, I commented to Ema González. She admitted, “It
can’t be done using obsolete means.” Replacing a bad or corrupt governor
without replacing the system—or substantially renovating it—merely
perpetuates a situation that benefits only a few and oppresses the majority.
Like many affiliated with the APPO she insisted that there can be no turning
back.
The society is too divided—there are resentments everywhere, in all
parts of the society: in the churches, in the cantinas, in the homes.
There is no dialogue—it’s been cancelled. One encounters frustration,
frustration everywhere. Frustration that wants to break out, frustration
that fosters insurgence.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 228
The APPO’s segmenting into separate ideological groups after the Night
of Horror may have been the result of a “spontaneous coming together” based
on driving Ruiz out of office without functional plans for longer term change.
While some bemoaned this unthreading, others within the APPO told me that
frictions and separations should have been expected. Genoveva López
suggested that the different organizations “forgot lots of things in order to
come together” after police stormed the teachers’ sit-in. Although they
temporarily set aside individual quests and identities they did not abandon
them or change their organizations’ goals. The marches brought teachers,
Stalinists-Leninists, self-help groups, displaced coffee growers, labor unionists,
commune members and thousands of others together but after the marches
and the speeches and the cheering and the songs most of the participants
returned to their everyday lives.
As various community members told me:
Sometimes I feel guilty for not having done more but I have my
parents to take care of—they’re old, my papí was a teacher but he no
longer works, he is frail, and I have my own children and commitments.
I only missed one march but that was mostly all that I did…
My supervisor warned me to be careful, that if the owners saw me
on TV I could lose my job…
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 229
I was pretty militant at first then things seem to bog down, it was
all arguing and no action and I had work that I needed to do…
After my stroke it was just too difficult, I just didn’t care…
They did some stupid things. The deal was to get rid of URO and
when that didn’t happen the APPO didn’t seem so important any more…
I got to feeling really uncomfortable. Not paranoid exactly but like
people were watching me, like something bad might happen to me…
I got tired. Really tired. Discouraged. What difference does it make?’
I asked myself. Get rid of URO and probably we get somebody else just
as bad…
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 230
Chapter 17: Beautiful Laws
Throughout his six-year term as president Vicente Fox proclaimed that
Mexico was “a country pegged to the law.” His successor Felipe Calderón
parroted the same cliché. Even victims of illegal apprehensions and torture
whose testimony I heard didn’t argue that the laws were unjust. But as Oaxaca
teacher Pedro Rodriguez told visitors to the CMPIO campus, “Laws are beautiful
but they are a long way from us.”
Politicians like Fox, Calderón and Ulisés Ruiz manipulated the legal
system to redefine derecho de la ley to suit their own purposes. By labeling the
striking teachers, then the APPO, as “lawbreakers” and “delinquents” Ruiz
established a legal basis for taking punitive action.
Since Mexican jurisprudence based on the Napoleonic Code does not
authorize trial by jury, government prosecutors present “facts” to a presiding
judge and he or she makes a ruling based on their presentations and counter
presentations by the accused person’s lawyers. That an individual who has
been sentenced to prison later proves his or her innocence does not entitle that
person to any compensation for the time that he or she was incarcerated. His
or her record is cleared but as far as the law is concerned the person convicted
was guilty during the time that he or she served behind bars.
Ruiz’s babble about following the law might have seemed less
hypocritical if the PRI operatives hadn’t manipulated his election by shutting
down the computerized vote counting system when he fell behind opposition
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 231
candidate Gabino Cue during the 2004 gubernatorial elections. When electrical
contact was reestablished Ruiz was leading by thousands of votes in districts
he previously had been losing.32 The PRI-dominated state election board
declared him the winner and Ruiz demonstrated little or no willingness to obey
anything but his own dictates after taking office.33
That both state and federal governments thrust aside “beautiful laws”
further aggravated the frustrations of the poverty-strapped populace. Nowhere
was this frustration more evident than in the Mixteca. The drought-struck area
of western Oaxaca was “held together by widows and the dollars they received
from indocumentados in the United States,” a young social worker returning
from mountainous Mixteca told me. Journalist Matias grunted in dismay when
he described how both state and federal government propaganda attributed
the APPO’s organization and funding to “revolutionary elements,” “outside
agitators” and drug cartel “capos intent on overthrowing” legally elected
authorities.
“What’s supporting the APPO?” he asked rhetorically, then answered,
“Poverty stricken people, that’s what!”
The same thing happened during the 1988 presidential elections. PRI candidate
Salinas de Gortari had fallen behind opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas when
the computers shut down because of electrical failures. When power was restored the
results in many districts that Salinas de Gortari had been losing had been reversed.
33
International Association of Jurists investigators filed a damning report against
URO’s government’s repression of the APPO in November 2007, denouncing the
participation of the PFP as an “extreme violation of human rights” and emphasizing
that the use of military force against a civilian manifestation was absolutely prohibited
by international law.
32
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 232
In a separate interview, priest Manuel Arias agreed. “It’s a lie that
money is behind the movement. What’s behind the movement are viveres—
food and water--that the people lack, that the people need.”
As inflation and unemployment increased the federal government
suspended or severely restricted aid programs to farmers and small
businesses. A young Tlaxiaco campesino described purported aid programs
that eliminated subsidies, forced land sales and pushed loans with interest
payments so high that borrowers wound up forfeiting their property. Scarcely
in his thirties, clear-eyed and muscled from years of physical work, he said
what others in a cramped meeting room had shied away from telling a human
rights delegation.
“Campesinos are rising up, they’re fighting back.” Despite detentions by
police and death threats, which he said were constant, farmers from
throughout the region who
used to give in have stopped giving in, we are rising up. We are sick of
being pushed down, treated like inferiors. They’ve tried to take
everything. Our land. Our houses. Our dignity. They even want to take
away our dreams! Well I tell you, they’re not doing to do it! We’ve
learned that repression is a reaction to weakness and we’re not going to
be weak anymore! How can you help the campesinos? I’ll tell you how.
Give us guns!
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 233
Although that feeling was shared by many people throughout the state,
the guns remained in the hands of the caciques and the government
authorities that supported or condoned their activities. Nevertheless, the
subdued popular movement continued to meet, march, stage demonstrations
and fight for the release of its members who had been imprisoned;
simultaneously, URO´s police and paramilitaries continued to harass and arrest
persons it identified as the APPO leaders.
Between January and April 2007 the state issued warrants for the
arrests of human rights advocates and the APPO supporters Yesica Sánchez
and Aline Castellanos.34 Amnesty International criticized this harassment and
alerted Mexico’s federal government. An AI bulletin signed by Marilyn McKim
quoted a Mexican government obfuscation that she and the civil rights lawyers
classified as typical of federal responses:
The Unity for Promotion and Defence of Human Rights has as a
function to promote, coordinate, and to guide the actions of
promotion and defence of human rights that are carried out by the
Federal public administration. For this reason, we are attending to
the claims that we have received and as a consequence we are in
contact with the relevant authorities, with the aim of safeguarding
the full implementation of human rights in the country.
“We refuse to allow a few dissidents to destroy peace and prosperity,” Ruiz
proclaimed but by this time the two activists had a high enough profile that the
government merely kept the orders of apprehension open without executing them.
34
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 234
In May 2007 the Twenty-fifth of November Liberation Committee which
had been working for months to gain the release of those defined as political
prisoners reported that twelve persons associated with the APPO remained
incarcerated. They were being held in six separate Oaxaca prisons—
Matamoros, Cosolapam, Cuicatlan, Tlacolula, Ixcotel and Etla—to minimize the
presence of large protest groups like those that had set up encampments
outside Miahuatlán and Tlacolula in January. At that time the two Sosa
brothers still were incarcerated in a federal maximum security prison in the
Estado de Mexico.
State authorities released all except the Sosa brothers on bail on May
27. The Twenty-fifth of November paid slightly over $12,500 pesos—the
equivalent of approximately $1,025 U.S. dollars—for the release of each.35
Several of those who’d been incarcerated stated that they had been
apprehended by the PFP on November 26, the day after the Night of Horror,
and that during their imprisonment they periodically had been thrown into
cramped, dark “punishment cells” because of their connections with Section
22.
In June Noticias published a reported by Matias
35
However, Noticias reported in their May 28 issue that thirteen had been released.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 235
assassins killed teacher of indigena education Macario Narváez, who was
not a member of any political party nor any other organization. He
dedicated his life to teaching Trique youngsters and worked to create a
recognition of human rights among the communities.
The Unified Movement of the Struggle for Trique Independence
(MULTI) announced that, although the names of the killers are known,
the government of Ulisés Ruiz had done nothing to bring them to justice.
On the contrary he has protected this paramilitary group.
The MULTI accused the director of the opposition Unified
Movement for the Triqui Struggle (MULT) Heriberto Pazos and the local
deputy of the United Popular Party, Rufino Merino, as well as the
caciques of Putla de Guerrero and PRI legislative candidate José Mejia as
the ones who operate a paramilitary group in the zone.
MULTI insists that all of this is part of a government plan to do
away with the indigenous communities that denounce the injustices
under which they live and those that have declared themselves
autonomous municipalities.
For years it had been the policy of PRI caciques to ignore the indigena
communities and treat them as though they didn’t exist. They also actively
prevented those communities from acquiring outside aid or support. When
Oaxaca state police intercepted Sergio Ramírez putting up posters announcing
that Subcomandante Marcos and a brigade of EZLN followers were coming to
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 236
the rural pueblo of Xanica they dragged him to the church, chained him to the
railing and left him there for over three hours. Their message was clear:
“Revolutionaries are not welcome in Oaxaca.”
Speaking to a delegation of human rights activists from Berkeley,
California in 2007 Matias condemned URO’s government for letting communal
disputes continue instead of stepping in to negotiate firm agreements that
defined boundaries, compensations and responsibilities.
“As long as they fight each other they’re not trying to overthrow the
government,” one of the visitors noted. Months later Matias published an
account in Noticias citing collusion between URO and several candidates from
opposition parties vying for election to municipal offices. Matias described a
secret meeting in Mexico City where PRD candidate Lenin Nelio and several
other perredistas agreed that Flavio Sosa should be kept incarcerated so that
he could not gain leadership of that party. Fractures within the PRD hegemony
further divided voting during the August and October 2007 elections,
permitting URO’s PRI to sweep all of the legislative seats and most of the
municipal presidencies.
At the same time URO’s government leaped to defend a woman that
rural caciques had stripped of the presidency of a usos y costumbres
community. Reactions to the woman’s being deposed because of her gender
brought reporters from national newspapers and television to interview those
involved and to comment on the ways that the pre-colonial governmental
system, usos y costumbres, functioned. They described how URO’s
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 237
government’s defended “this human rights violation” but local observers like
myself believed that the governor was merely “cosmeticizing corruption” and
using the woman’s situation as part of a campaign to undermine usos y
costumbres and replace it with the PRI-controlled administrative system.
When residents of San Isidro Aloapam contested municipal authorities
from neighboring PRI-run San Miguel illegally logging forestland claimed by
both communities, a contingent of loggers from San Miguel aided by a force “of
hundreds” of men with guns and machetes attacked a delegation of San Isidro
residents who had come to negotiate the territorial dispute. The delegation
broke up and fled from “the drunken mob.”36 The armed force pursued them
through the thick forest growth, caught five or six of them, including a thirtyyear-old woman, and hauled them to the jail in San Miguel.
A committee that identified itself as part of the Consejo Indígena Popular
de Oaxaca “Ricardo Flores Magón” (CIPO-RFM) reported that those held were
beaten badly before they finally were released. The committee denounced the
PRI-affiliated paramilitary groups and insisted, “Ulisés Ruiz Ortiz is responsible
for the death and violence generated in San Isidro Aloapam since for years we
have been denouncing it and demanding justice, defending the forest from the
brutal ecocide brought upon it by the PRI-affiliated authorities of San Miguel
Aloapam.” They also demanded that the violence and arrests cease and
petitioned for “an end to San Miguel Aloapam’s exploitation under the pretext
of protection of the forest from the bark beetle and that the SEMARNAT [the
As recounted by a grandmother who fled San Isidro to stay with relatives in the city
of Oaxaca.
36
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 238
federal environmental agency] accept a program of restoration of the three or
four plagued hectares of the area.”
In 1948 the state government redistricted what had been a Trique
dominated municipality (county) by segmenting it into four distinct areas, each
of which was attached to a bordering municipality. According to Francisco
López-Bárcenas this made the Triques, one of Oaxaca’s indigena peoples with
their own language, history and culture, politically dependent on non-Trique
caciques and the state government. The re-division didn’t retard Trique
determination for autonomy and self-rule, however. Aggressions and disputes
increased throughout the following three decades and numerous journalists
and NGO leaders, including Matias and CIMAC director Lucía Lagunes-Huerta,
accused the state government of being behind powerfully armed paramilitary
invasions.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 239
Chapter 18: Killing Pigs in a Slaughterhouse
Despite harassments, land disputes and increasing crime, by early
summer 2007 the city of Oaxaca seemed to have regained a degree of
normalcy. Children zigzagged through the Zócalo hurling sausage-shaped
balloons over the heads of teenagers snuggling on the low wall surrounding the
cathedral. Vendors in indigena dress meandered among blonde tourists
focusing digital cameras on church spires and colonial balconies. A little
orchestra pumped out sentimental classics as militarily attired police—restless,
uncomfortable, most of them barely out of their teens—smoked cigarettes or
sucked lollipops and commented on the tacos de ojo (sexy young women)
dodging flocks of pigeons bursting into flight.
Festive one might have thought. Mexico típico. But if one looked closely
one perceived that those sitting at the sidewalk tables that bordered the Zócalo
had nearly empty cups and glasses in front of them. Waiters leaned against the
pillars watching, waiting, as painted clowns with false noses and oversized
shoes burlesqued for a circle of spectators. Around the central kiosk stoopshouldered men hunched slightly apart reading the evening Nota Roja.
“We come here because it’s so dismal at home,” a short, stocky Oaxacan
acknowledged as I sat down near him. His wife’s smile seemed pained as she
explained that she worked in a boutique nearby and that he worked most
nights as a private security guard after finishing ten-hour shifts in a vidrería.
Here in the Zócalo, she shrugged, their two children could run and meet others
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 240
their age while she and her husband relaxed and temporarily forgot how much
they owed and how much they needed.
“Rome in the time of the Caesars,” a thin, wiry university graduate
perched on a wall enclosing a flower bed across from us grunted mockingly.
“We live under a state of siege,” he lifted his hand to enumerate examples on
thin, almost child-like fingers.
Armed paramilitaries…arbitrary arrests…disappearances…bullet-riddled
community radio transmitters… My thoughts drifted back to interviews I
conducted in Central America twenty years before. Shopkeepers, taxi drivers,
schoolteachers, farm workers described the dictatorships with frowns, shrugs:
“We avoid them [the militarized police] as best we can…” “All the young men
are gone, there are shortages of everything, but we work, go to the market, go
to mass…” “If we protest we are arrested or killed so we don’t protest, we
endure, we hope things will change…”
Throughout Oaxaca, in rural communities succumbing to alcoholism,
beggary and premature death, one sensed that the infrastructure had been
gnawed away. In Huajuapan, in the Sierras between the city of Oaxaca and
Mexico City, I talked to a desolate mother crouched on church steps twisting a
torn shawl into tiny, tight knots. She’d started to go inside to pray, she told
me, but changed her mind because God, the saints, even the Virgin, mocked
her loss of her children, her newest grandchild dead because her daughter’s
car broke down and they couldn’t get to the hospital in time.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 241
An installer for the Federal Electricity Commission in the same city sold
his car and most of his furniture to pay ransom for one of his children. He did
not go through the police because the kidnappers, he complained, were police.
“Oaxacan justice!” he snorted, turning his head to spit a bitter taste out of his
mouth.
Yet in Huajuapan, as in other cities throughout the state, I heard music,
laughter, church bells ringing. Thin children with bulging eyes sat amid broken
curbing and parked motor scooters playing accordions and singing in loud,
scratchy voices, plastic donation cups on the sidewalk in front of them. The
restaurants seemed empty, only the cantinas that sold beer cheaply had
customers. Pedestrians paused in front of store windows, cups of steamed corn
or paper plates of tiny tostadas or napkin-wrapped hotdogs in their hands.
Many who held regular jobs moonlighted as ambulantes selling trinkets, food,
t-shirts or sunglasses to supplement their incomes.
Life in Oaxaca, the correspondent for a rural newspaper told me, was
sordid, the music, the laughter, forced, a dancing on the coffin of the dead. In
weekly homilies the Archbishop of Oaxaca reiterated that the deterioration was
the result of the breakup of families and family values but Ugo Cadevilla,
author of 2006-2009 The Adverse Juncture, insisted that citizens who
perceived that their leaders were corrupt and lying to them ceased to believe
in the system and began to feel that the only way to obtain what they wanted
was to become as corrupt, as lacking in morality, as those leaders.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 242
“Whether it’s day or night, or whether police are present, doesn’t matter
to the mafiosos who rob and kidnap,” a young law student named Cruz
lamented in a Noticias op-ed piece. “Meanwhile drugs gnaw the intestines of
those most valuable to society: the youth.”
Despite increasing drug use among teenagers, despite the police state,
thousands of closed businesses, mass migration and numbing inflation, lines
forty and fifty people long formed in front of the ATMs on paydays and in front
of the shopping mall cinemas on “half price” nights. Store owners moonlighted
as taxi drivers and taxi drivers complained that most Oaxacans “were too
cheap” to hire taxis. The abastos—centralized marketplaces filled with stalls
selling vegetables, flowers, cheeses, clothes, pottery and mescal—were so
crowded shoppers barely could squeeze through the aisles but “nobody buys
anything expensive,” the pudgy owner of a chocolate and spice stall told me.
“Or they just come here to see each other, to chat, to ask about prices, shrug
and move on.”
Relatively few tourists booked hotel rooms or signed up for tours.37
Section 22 teachers focused on regaining their positions in the schools and on
reoccupying those that had been taken over by PRI committees and by the
offshoot Section 59.38
Yésica Sánchez insisted that the calm was “a calm created by fear, by the constant
threats of disappearances and detentions.”
38
Parent committees in suburbs and in many communities that had strong PRI
connections had recruited replacement teachers and reopened their schools in the fall
of 2006 but since most communities lacked persons who could teach secondary (junior
high) or preparatory (high school) many of those schools remained closed.
37
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 243
Typical of the confrontations was one at Rosario Maza kindergarten,
located next to the state teachers college in the city of Oaxaca. Although
opinions—and loyalties—were sharply divided among the children’s parents the
padres de familia reopened the school with what Section 22 teachers called
scabs (actually members of the break-off Section 59). The union teachers
chained and locked access to the grounds. As the replacement teachers and
their supporters climbed the fence around the playground parents from each of
the factions shouted insults and threats as some parents hoisted their offspring
over the fence and others tearfully clung to pants legs and skirts.39
In Buena Vista, near Oaxaca’s border with Guerrero, Section 59 teachers
and their PRI backers sequestered four of the town’s administrators and kept
them locked and under guard for twenty-four hours until state delegates
arrived to negotiate the retaking of the schools by Section 22. In February
2007 Alma Delia Santiago, technical secretary of Section 22’s executive
committee, told Noticias’ Luis Ignacio Velásquez that the PRI had taken over
the schools in retaliation for the teachers’ participation in the APPO.
“It’s very, very clear that our lucha hit the PRI so hard it practically
destroyed them,” she pointed out that it was not padres de familia but PRI
municipal presidents, commissioners and party activists who led the takeover
of the schools—a total of over 250—because Section 22 continued to demand
Parent school committees—“padres de familia”—officially participate in school
functions throughout Mexico by collecting funds for special projects, including school
construction, setting agendas and acting as staff supplements. They are officially
recognized and their roles in education are defined and governed by the Secretary of
Public Education (SEP)
39
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 244
that URO leave Oaxaca. She claimed that the teachers who’d gone over to
Section 59 did so in order to take advantage of vacancies in better schools
than those in which they’d been teaching.
“Who,” she asked, “is teaching the students they abandoned in marginal
communities as they come to urban zones to teach?”
Eventually Section 59 was forced to give up most of the schools it had
occupied but some still were under contention five years after the initial
Section 22 walkout. The padres de familia of a number of others opted to form
private fee-charging institutions rather than have their children return to the
public primary schools and kindergartens.
Both the teachers and the APPO benefited when Calderón’s conservative
government passed legislation overhauling the government employee social
security system in May 2007. The new regulations reduced benefits, extended
the age at which one could retire and privatized funding. Teachers’
organizations throughout Mexico banded together in opposition and looked to
Oaxaca’s embattled union for leadership. Dissenting teachers unions adopted
APPO slogans and embraced their social causes, including campaigning for the
prosecution of human rights violators and the release of prisoners of
conscience.
On July 14 George Salzman reported in Narco News:
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 245
The teachers and the APPO have declared their intent to mount,
as they did a year ago, a free popular Guelaguetza. This people’s event
will be for three days, starting tomorrow afternoon, the first two days
with ceremonies at the plaza of the Carmen Alto Church followed each
day by marches to the Zócalo, and to culminate on Monday with a march
of several kilometers from a monument near where the PFP invaded the
city last October up to the Guelaguetza stadium on Fortín Hill, where an
all-day festival of traditional folk dance and music is planned. Moreover,
the popular movement has called for a boycott of the government’s
‘official’ Guelaguetza one week later, and indicated it may try to prevent
it from taking place. Yesterday afternoon I counted seventeen of the
state’s police on the plaza at the entrance to the stadium, and many,
many more on the road that climbs around the stadium and goes up to
the summit of the hill where the planetarium and the observatory are
situated. They were there, they said, to protect the stadium. Pickups
with uniformed police, some with heavy duty automatic weapons,
populated the road. And on the other side of the stadium on the stairs
(no road on that side) I saw other police surveying the scene below. I
am afraid there may be deliberate provocations intended to give the
state a pretext to once again try to clamp down on the movement.
Commercialized over the past three decades into a huge tourist
attraction the Guelaguetza had been drawing thousands of tourists to the city
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 246
and to the highly stylized extravagant performances of dancers and musicians
in an amphitheater overlooking the city.40 URO’s government zilched the 2006
event because the APPO occupation of the center of the city of Oaxaca
triggered thousands of tourist cancellations.
After the APPO had announced that it intended to stage a “real”
Guelaguetza a week before URO’s showcase event hackers mangled its
website. Throbbing heavy metal music obscured transmission of broadcasts
over the FM radio station that the APPO began utilizing on June 14. Noticias
notified its readers that police and military units were guarding the
amphitheater to prevent threatened violence by the EPR (although no
indications existed to suppose that the EPR would try to sabotage the facility).
Reluctantly the APPO moved their scheduled popular Guelaguetza to the
Plaza de la Danza facing the Basilica La Soledad in the Centro Historico. On
Saturday July 14 they organized a traditional calenda (parade of musicians and
dancers) that wound its way to the Zócalo, where amid fireworks and music
they gave a performance that they advertised was not “a celebration, but a
mourning” for political prisoners, those who had died and disappeared during
the conflict and for age-old traditions that the government had transformed
into a commercial event that benefited only the rich.
At noted previously “guelaguetza” is the usos y constumbres term for communal
sharing. In colonial and pre-colonial times a ceremony during which those who had
prospered the most during the previous year shared part of their wealth during a
celebration held during or after harvest.
40
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 247
Despite URO’s attempts to curtail the spread of information about the
APPO-sponsored “people’s event” nearly 10,000 spectators jammed the city of
Oaxaca’s Plaza de Danza on Monday morning, July 16.
“The air was full of joy, festivity, defiance,” Indymedia reporters Kelly
Lee, James Kautz and Michael GW asserted in an account that appeared online
on July 24. “The brass bands struck up a number, the dancers started to
dance…[then] the People’s Guelaguetza took to the streets….The march route
soon became a river of bodies with people chanting, dancing, singing and
playing music.”
The march soon became an attempt to invade the amphitheatre.41 As
the demonstrators approached Fortín hill chanting anti-URO slogans
the police line systematically pushed into the crowd, batons raised,
attempting to drive people back down the street. People held up open
palms. We are unarmed. We are families, children, old women and men.
We are the people of Oaxaca. But the police were charging, batons
swinging, striking bodies and cracking heads
Police reinforcements rushed towards the confrontation. The anger was
pervasive, like the tear gas itself, a simmering cauldron that suddenly had
exploded. Many demonstrators shouted, “Retreat! Don’t get yourselves killed!”
The APPO had requested use of the facility, which they claimed “belonged to the
people,” but URO denied them its use “because of damage that might occur” and
brought in federal forces to help seal it off from trespassers.
41
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 248
It began to rain, hard. Boys and girls stood in the rain, handing
each other sticks and masks for security. An empty Coke truck, burst
open and ransacked, sat lonely on an empty side street. As it turned
out, Coca-Cola, Inc., which had supplied sponsorship of the official
Guelaguetza, had also supplied the combatants with their cocktails and
the street medics with their solutions…
As I wedged my way through crowds bumping and stumbling against
those who were retreating I could see that militarized federal police had surged
against an angry throng of screaming cursing demonstrators, some of whom
were trying to fight them with rocks and sticks. Tightly packed groups of the
APPO supporters, most of them teenagers, were hurling bottles, rocks and
improvised gasoline bombs from behind two burning city buses; others were
dragging battered demonstrators out of the fray. Curdling black smoke
darkened the sky above the burning vehicles.
“Like killing pigs in a slaughterhouse…” the phrase from the Night of
Horror testimony flashed through my mind.
Late that afternoon Indymedia issued a bulletin confirming that
demonstrator Emerterio Cruz had died after being hit by a “petard”—
apparently a tear gas canister. Rumors persisted that the attacking police had
killed at two demonstrators. Cruz presumably was one of these and the
“young” demonstrator hit by a missile either had not died or his body was
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 249
whisked away and secretly buried. However, hospital reports later announced
that Cruz was in a coma after suffering a severe beating. The following day
Noticias published photos of Cruz before and after the beating but made no
mention of anyone being hit by a petard. A number of other demonstrators had
to be hospitalized for concussions, contusions and broken bones.
A mechanic named Alonso García, who joined the march to Fortín hill,
told me that the police and paramilitaries singled out certain participants and
arrested them and beat them. Besides Emeterio Cruz, who Noticias photos
show being led away by armed police, the victims included Jesús Alfredo López
and Cesar Grijalva, both members of painter Francisco Toledo’s 25th of
November Liberation Committee. Non-uniformed paramilitaries beat López so
badly he had to be ambulanced to a hospital and police cut Grijalva so severely
he had to undergo emergency surgery.
“They grabbed them, beat them, threatened to kill them yet did not
accuse them even of throwing a marble!” Alonso García exclaimed. “And will
anybody charge them with any wrongdoing? Ha! I saw them [bystanders] take
photos of them [the paramilitaries] beating the one man but will the
government do anything? Ha! Nothing except reward them with money!”
Throughout that day callers threatened to beat and perhaps kill
employees of Radio FM 92.1 which was transmitting news about the armed
police attack. Oaxaca human rights organizations filed an injunction to force
the state to release the names of those arrested, to allow them contact with
lawyers of their choice and to reveal where they were incarcerated.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 250
(Authorities did release the six adolescents on July 17, the day following the
confrontation.)
The APPO listed twelve more apprehensions than the state had included
in is accounting and told the press that two demonstrators faced life
threatening injuries as a result of police beatings. URO’s prosecutors charged
thirty-four of those being held with damaging public facilities, setting fires,
causing injuries, robbery and attacking public communications systems. All
thirty-four were released on bail after the original amount set by a judge--$1
million pesos per person—was reduced.
The police also jailed half-a-dozen minors and fourteen others who were
over eighteen but under twenty-one, some of whom they released without
having charges filed against them. One of those the police arrested was a
young journalism student who was taking photographs with a new Nikon. The
police beat him and stole his camera and he spent the next eight days in jail.
As a result of publicity given the beatings, particularly by the newspaper
Noticias, the state filed charges against five police for nearly killing Emeterio
Cruz but refused to release any information about where the five were being
held. (It was widely assumed in the city of Oaxaca that the “convicted” officers
had not, in fact, been jailed or otherwise punished.)
On July 18, two days after the Guelaguetza brouhaha, the APPO staged
a “March of Silence” to the Zócalo to protest the police action. Indymedia
reported:
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 251
Massive banners stretched the entire width of the street,
displaying the names and faces of all those detained, disappeared and in
police custody. Giant wooden crosses reading ‘Repression,’ ‘Poverty,’
and ‘Misery’ lined the march. There were puppets of fallen comrades,
displays of flowers, entire families all masked in black, linked together
by homemade chains. All silent.
Throughout the next two weeks, while the government was touting its
tourist attraction Guelaguetza, PFP and non-uniformed police escalated the
number of detentions and invaded and arrested or threatened the residents of
a number of private homes. Again hackers broke into the APPO’s website and
the blockage of FM 92.1, “Radio Plantón,” continued.
Opinions about whether the APPO’s crusade to retake the amphitheater
was wisely motivated and how to evaluate the brutal law enforcement reaction
varied widely. Many of those affiliated with the APPO felt that the violent
encounter demonstrated that the movement was still alive and could bring
thousands of people together to oppose URO’s repressive government. A
retired civil engineer from Veracruz named Tomás Calvo, who changed his
mind about attending the government Guelaguetza after witnessing the police
treatment of the APPO, shook his head in disbelief as told me that he thought
Ruiz and his government were trying to sabotage the tourist event.
“He seems to relish the chance to beat them up more. He must not give
a rat’s ass whether tourists come or not.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 252
But the melee also demonstrated what Spanish foreign correspondent
Jacobo García called “incomprehensible” actions on the part of the APPO. For
over a week before the event soldiers and police had barricaded access to
Fortín Hill, even forcing early morning runners like myself to detour off their
routes. Despite persistent rain—July is one of the valley of Oaxaca’s most
inclement months—the armed officers maintained round-the-clock vigils. An
APPO spokesperson revealed that many of the movement’s counselors knew
that the government was instituting a “Plan Disturbio” to provoke
demonstrators in order to justify a violent and decisive crackdown. Even
knowing this the APPO staged what many perceived to be a suicidal maneuver.
“The only result,” one local journalist told me, “was more injured and
more arrested. More martyrs.”
Even many persons involved in the protests and marches came to
believe that the movement, so brutally victimized on November 25, identified
with martyrdom as part of its state of being and indulged in acts like the
Guelaguetza assault of Fortín Hill in order to confirm that martyrdom. A
psychologist compared this assumption of victimization with human
relationships defined by an aggressor figure and a partner who somehow feels
that he or she deserves the victimization or seeks it in order to confirm
inferiority or guilt feelings. Presented with this comparison one Mexico City
journalist told me, “Then the submissive wife needs to kick the aggressor in
the nuts. It’s the only way to get things to change.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 253
The government held its gala—under heavy guard—the succeeding two
Mondays. Buses transported hundreds from other parts of the state to fill the
amphitheater and enable URO to declare the event “an enormous success.”
Neither he nor anyone in his administration revealed how much the
government spent on the event or what income it actually received from ticket
sales.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 254
Chapter 19: Land of Job
Shortly after nine o’clock at night on August 5, two weeks after the
Guelaguetza confrontation, a pickup load of armed police swerved in front of
five people strolling through the Centro Historico. The police piled out of their
vehicle, threw the two men and three women against a wall, then forced them
into the back of the vehicle and sped away without questioning them or
ascertaining their nationality. (One of the men and the three women were
Spanish citizens, the other man was Mexican.) At what appeared to be a police
facility the officers hooded the four Spaniards and stripped them of their
backpacks, documentation and money. The women reported that they were
sexually manhandled; all four were photographed and beaten.
After several hours of violent interrogation, during which the police
refused to allow the Spaniards to call their consulate, the officers hauled the
four before a judge. The judge convicted the four of being in Mexico illegally, a
finding she based on their inability to produce identification. She did not allow
the four to accuse the police of stealing their documents and ordered them
taken under guard to a deportation center in Mexico City.
Thirteen days after their apprehension, thanks to the intervention of
Mexican Senator Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the four were allowed to contact
their consulate. Spanish authorities quickly proved that the four had not
entered Mexico illegally and had been invited to attend the International
Zapatista conference in Chiapas. Two of the four also had participated in an
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 255
international human rights commission which had filed an extremely critical
report of abuses and violations that had occurred during the previous year in
Oaxaca.
Although the Spanish government filed official complaints with Mexico’s
President Calderón, neither his federal prosecutors nor state prosecutors in
Oaxaca took any steps to discipline or sanction the police involved in the illegal
detentions. The lack of appropriate action served to tell the world that those
who complained about conditions in King URO’s kingdom faced consequences
and no one—not even the president of Mexico—was going to stop them.
Despite what Oaxacans were calling “a reign of terror” URO and his
government spent billions on attempts to revive the tourism industry. Full page
ads about “Wonderful Oaxaca, Tourist Paradise” showed bikini-clad young
women strolling immaculately white beaches, smiling indigena women happily
weaving straw ornaments, peripatetic musicians pounding on their marimbas,
museums filled with wondrous treasures. They listed travel and hotel
information services and promised visitors the wonders of local cuisine and
hospitality, including mescal, “authentic” folk festivals and archeological ruins.
They didn’t mention poverty or social protest.
“If it were not for the fact that Oaxacans are good people we would have
had a massive and bloody revolution by now,” a teacher from a rural high
school told me. The United States provided a safety valve to pull the angry, the
disenchanted and the hopeful northward to work; otherwise they would have
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 256
taken up arms “to overturn a government so putrid it makes the murderous
drug barons seem like angels.” (Like many Oaxacans the teacher would not let
his name be published for fear of government retaliations against him and his
family.)
Retaliation can be swift and brutal, as evidenced by an unprovoked
attack on residents building a Dead of the Dead commemorative altar around
the city of Oaxaca’s Cinco Señores monument on November 2, 2007. Nicéforo
Urbieta described the scene in an e-mail I have in my possession:
At around seven a.m. people from various neighborhoods were
gathering to erect a traditional altar…with flowers, special bread,
candles, and food as well as sawdust, pigments and truckloads of sand
for creating figures on a funeral carpet.
Just then, a black car without license plates charged a group who
were beginning to organize the event, trying to run over them…About
five minutes later, many patrol trucks rushed in at high speed…Without
saying a word [the police] began to beat people…Grabbing people by the
belt, they threw them into the trucks, piling the bodies on top of each
other like sandwiches, men and women alike, including professors,
bricklayers, architects, students…
We are going to confirm the death of a comrade who was shot in
the back and run over by two trucks after he was killed…Afterwards, in
the police holding cells, [the interrogators] told people they were going
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 257
to shoot them or pour gasoline on them and light them on fire, showing
even greater cruelty to people with long hair.”
By vote of its general assembly the APPO determined to boycott the
August 2007 elections to select deputies to the state legislature and the
October elections for city and county officers. This seemed to many NGOs and
other organizations that had participated in the APPO’s formation to be a
turnabout in policy. In May 2007 Noticias reporter Octavio Vélez had quoted
APPO spokesperson Cástulo López saying “the magisterial and popular
movement needs progressive deputies in the upcoming local legislature and
they need to include complying with the recommendations of the CNDH by
castigating those responsible [for the human rights violations].”
A number of Mexican academics and intellectuals, among them awardwinning authors Lorenzo Meyer and Sergio Aguayo-Quezada, advocated a
“voto nulo”—the casting of blank or mutilated ballots in the national election of
senators and deputies—theorizing that the casting of a million or more of them
would force politicians to respond more closely to citizen demands.
Unfortunately Mexican academics and intellectuals (like their counterparts in
many other countries, including the United States) base their theories on ideals
and logic, not mapache reality. PRI mapaches encouraged voto nulo balloting
in areas that previously had supported opposition parties.
As a result the political parties competing against the PRI split what little
opposition vote surfaced and URO’s political machine scored what he termed “a
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 258
resounding victory” that “clearly expresses the will of the people.” PRI
candidates swept all twenty-one of the deputy posts, giving them unanimous
control over the legislature, and won the majority of municipal and city
presidencies.
Speculation that the August election would turn nasty may have affected
the APPO’s decision not to field a slate of candidates or to throw their support
behind any of them. Assassinations in May took the lives of Oaxaca PRD leader
Felix Cruz and Triqui activist Juan Antonio Robles. Although the killers never
were identified or brought to trial relatives and coworkers of both men accused
PRI operatives of engineering the murders. Yésica Sánchez openly stated that
the PRI winning in August “could spark a conflagration that could rip Oaxaca
apart.” URO’s government, she added, “is tremendously afraid of the people,
that’s why it has put its foot down so hard. Once the institution starts to
collapse it will go all the way and take them with it.”
José Pérez, a homeopathic practitioner, ardent López Obrador adherent
and PRD militant, offered a different explanation for the APPO’s failure to
support the PRD:
The PRD is new in Oaxaca—supposedly anti-PRI. But most of its
militants are ex-priistas. Some came over in opposition to URO but a lot
of those running for office were shoved aside by the PRI; they don’t care
about the PRD or its values, only about trying to get elected. Early on
the state PRD did the cozy thing, they got together and named
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 259
candidates from their little clique, excluding anybody from the [APPO]
movement.
He added that he and many others believed that these ex-priista
perredistas had cut a deal with URO and would be rewarded after their
candidates lost the August elections to URO’s hand-picked selections.
Pérez couldn’t—or wouldn’t—confirm that PRD’s national leadership,
which in summer 2007 was cracking into two combative factions, had a hand
in the selection of Oaxaca’s PRD candidates but admitted that it was “possible”
that national party head Leonel Cota had vetoed the candidacies of any known
APPO activists because he was trying to hold his organization together and
didn’t want to give PAN or PRI an opportunity to paint the PRD as a party of
disruptive rock-throwing revolutionaries.
Two months before the elections, in May, 2007, the PRD had responded
to National Commission of Human Rights recommendations by pushing for the
filing of charges of human rights violations against La Bruja. But the PRD
lacked legal justification to initiate proceedings against the ex-state
prosecuting attorney and like many things associated with justice in Oaxaca
the proposed charges slid aside, unnoticed and unfulfilled.
Former Mexican army office Oscar Jiménez rapped his forefinger against
my chest as he claimed not to advocate vigilante actions but praised the
effectiveness by which citizens of the Oaxacan town of San Blas Atempa dealt
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 260
with the assassination of a much admired doctor in 1993. Police corralled three
of the four killers and “apegado a la ley” deposited them in jail. But “half the
population” of San Blas broke into the jail, yanked the three murderers out of
their cells, strung them up in front of the municipal building and carted their
corpses to the river where they burned them and dumped the ashes into the
water.
“Not apegado a la ley?” I questioned Jiménez and he laughed and cited
an expression he attributed to revered nineteenth century president Benito
Juárez: “The power belongs to the people!”
When high-ranking officials of the PFP and AFI (Agencia Federal de
Investigación), responded to a student takeover of a toll booth near Acapulco
in the neighboring state of Guerrero they demanded to know what connections
the protesters had with “subversive” organizations, specifically “the APPO,” and
warned them “the same thing can happen to you that happened to Flavio
Sosa!”
“The federal government will not stand for another desmadre like the
one that occurred in Oaxaca!” the student leader, Luis González quoted an AFI
officer during an interview that González gave to La Jornada. (Desmadre can
be translated in various ways, all negative, but essentially means “disaster” or
“beating.”) Although the APPO spokespersons insisted that change had to be
effected through non violent means, millions throughout Mexico viewed the
organization as a dangerous threat to the existent government, a belief
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 261
fortified by media publicity and the automatic defining of all protest as being
“leftist,” “Chavista” (after Venezuelan socialist president Hugo Chávez) or
“terrorist.”
Groups as disparate as the Zapatistas, CISEN (Mexico’s secret service
agency), numerous sections of the national teachers’ union and organizations
protesting the privatization of ISSSTE acknowledged that the APPO’s protest in
Oaxaca set standards for resistance throughout Mexico. During 2007 millions
of citizens throughout the country participated in protest marches, the blocking
of highways and government buildings and the filing of detention orders
against implementing changes in the ISSSTE retirement system. Campesino
organizations barricaded highways and bridges leading to the United States in
protests against NAFTA and the lifting of import duties on grain and milk
products. Miners and their supporters closed facilities in Coahuila and Sonora
and Oaxaca indigena groups forced delays and closures of wind energy
projects which had been granted to foreign (predominantly Spanish)
entrepreneurs.
As layoffs increased protests became more strident. Rising costs of basic
goods, particularly fuel, eggs and tortillas, further impoverished millions
already doing without. The government’s failure to provide quality education,
potable water, flood control and traversable roadways while boasting about an
economy that has produced the world’s wealthiest individual triggered ever
increasing migration and ever increasing crime.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 262
A former campesino, Celestino Castañeda, now a grandfather who works
as a Oaxaca groundskeeper, expressed the frustrations felt by millions of
Mexicans:
There is no one we can trust. The police are brutal, they are paid
to keep those in power from losing their power. Nobody trusts them,
they are the worst of the criminals. Nor can anyone trust the politicians,
they are out to steal money. It doesn’t matter what party they’re from,
they’re all corrupt. And the judges? They sell their decisions to the
highest bidders. There is no justice in Mexico, we all know that. So what
do we do? Well, we try to keep small, stay away from the police, avoid
the politicians, earn what we can and rear our children and our
grandchildren as best we can.
El Chucky and La Bruja’s absence from King URO’s hierarchy didn’t alter
the government’s repressive policies. On December 2, 2007 paramilitaries
seized twenty-three-year-old Nancy Mota as she was walking through Colonia
Reforma, threw her in a van, blindfolded her and began to interrogate her
about her connections in the APPO and in COMO:
When I didn’t respond they grabbed my hair and twisted my
hands behind my back and pressed two pistols against my head. They
said they thought I was very cabrona and they were going to talk to my
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 263
family. I told them to do what they wanted with me but not touch my
family. One of them said they were going to shoot me and I heard him
pull the hammer back on his pistol and I told them if they were going to
shoot to go ahead and do it right now. Again they said I was very
cabrona and one of them began to touch my breast. I kicked him and
they hit me in the stomach and I curled up with my hands over my
stomach. I don’t know how long they detained me but the van made lots
of turns. Then they decided they’d done enough and told me this was
just the first of what was in store for me because I had a lot of
information about the APPO and they told me to stop participating or
they would get my brother and since I liked defending the rights of
women the next time I would be able to defend having been raped.
Mota later told human rights representatives that sicarios had waylaid
compañeras of hers, manhandled them and threatened them with rape and
with attacks on their families. However, these victims had not contacted
human rights representatives or initiated legal proceedings for fear that the
paramilitaries would carry out their threats.
Lázaro García, national leader and spokesperson of the Frente
Revolucionario Popular (FPR), told El Milenio’s Diego Enrique Osorno that the
country was not yet ripe for a full scale social movement. In Oaxaca Sitiada,
Osorno quotes García explaining that Mexico’s increasingly fascist government
was finding it more and more necessary to use a military presence to enforce
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 264
its doctrines but the masses hadn’t reached sufficient awareness of their
potential strength to unite and create a new national government.
“We [the FPR] have a presence and we’re working with the masses,”
Osorno quoted García. “They [the federal government] have the military—but
it’s not a totally indoctrinated military.” Its hold, Lázaro García maintained,
was tenuous and vulnerable but the masses needed to organize in order to
nullify its power.
Although the leaders of the FPR had not publicly acknowledged that their
organization was a legal political front for the underground EPR (Ejercito
Popular Revolucionario) which had attacked pipelines and other facilities in
Mexico, many journalists and political observers have noted a strong
connection between the two organizations. Since its formation in the 1980s the
FPR has had a strong presence in Oaxaca; the governments of both URO and
his predecessor, José Murat, imprisoned several of its members.
The FPR was one of the first organizations to openly back the striking
Section 22 teachers after the June 14 police attack and became one of the
formative members of the APPO. Many within the APPO criticized their
participation, particularly since the FPR was more openly antagonistic than
either the Section 22 teachers or most of the indigena organizations and NGOs.
The FPR’s leadership often clashed with Section 22’s leaders, who accused the
FPR of trying to dominate the assemblies and promote aggressive actions. The
FPR’s membership included a group of proclaimed “Stalinists”; Florentino
López, the most active the APPO spokesperson, was an FPR member.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 265
Like other organizations affiliated (or formerly affiliated) with the APPO,
the FPR continued to function on its own. In March, 2008 cars marked with the
hammer and sickle and marchers bearing the banners of the FPR and the
Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Mexico paraded through the streets of
Huajuapan. They closed highways and occupied the government center but,
reported Juan Pablo Mones in Noticias, “without anyone from Ulisés Ruiz’s
government showing up to negotiate with them.”
The protesters retired after occupying the government buildings for over
five hours.
Not every organization that advocated political change in Mexico agreed
with Lázaro García’s evaluation that the country was not yet ripe for sweeping
reforms. Marxist Leninist Communist Party leaders insisted that Oaxaca was
merely the first surge of a movement that eventually would overwhelm the
corrupt “government of, for and by entrepreneurs” and cited the APPO as the
model for subsequent uprisings.
The FPR broke with Section 22 in August 2007 after rejecting the
teachers’ organization’s call for a statewide assembly. Spokesman Florentino
López announced a separate convocation led by the FPR. COMO and the bulk of
imprisoned Flavio Sosa’s followers, who had aligned themselves with the PRD’s
Nueva Izquierda, supported the FPR breakaway.42
I asked numerous the APPO members how Florentino López became the
movement’s most accessible and quoted spokesperson and was told “because he chose
to be.”
42
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 266
The split dramatized differences of opinion that had existed within the
APPO since its beginnings. Section 22’s leadership (and the majority of its
members) regarded the APPO as a loosely structured support organization built
around the teachers’ union. Whereas the APPO advocated a “horizontal”
governing structure (which in many cases resulted in no structure at all),
Section 22 maintained its traditional “vertical” governorship with elected
leaders who not only directed protest activities but also assigned teachers to
schools throughout the state based on a “point system” that included longevity
and participation in union activities, marches and sit ins.
Section 22 continued to act on its own apart from the APPO,
coordinating with other sections of SNTE to protest the privatization of ISSSTE
and to urge the deposing of federal education czar Elba Esther Gordillo. Various
regional indigena organizations also focused on separate activities while vocally
supporting the APPO and sending participants to the assemblies and protest
marches. The same was true for most of the smaller NGOs and associations
that manifested support but became peripheral participants.
José Pérez, a slight thin-faced man with shoulder-length hair whose
ever-active eyes belied his placid demeanor, described the APPO’s meteoric
rise and almost equally rapid dissolution as “electrical”:
The spark caught, see. Whoosh! It was like an electrical storm, it
affected everybody. I think a lot of people got caught up in it without
knowing why, without being able to explain the urgency they felt, the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 267
emotion. But it was all geared on getting rid of URO. The chants. The
waving banners. The speeches. Electric.
When URO won out the current went off. There was a huge
relapse—you could feel it all over Oaxaca, it was in the air. People went
back to what they were doing before the electricity struck. Chauffeurs
went back to driving, teachers to teaching, bureaucrats to robbing,
prostitutes to whoring. One still felt loyal, one still felt committed, but
there was no electricity. It was just going through the motions. That
good feeling was gone.
In November 2007, a year after the Night of Horror, Silvia Chavela
reported in Noticias “between two and three businesses are closing daily in the
center of the city.” Many of them tried to keep going despite Oaxacans’
diminishing spending power and the failure of the tourism industry to revitalize
but fell into debt with Mexico’s social security system, with unpaid property
and sales taxes and with Telmex, the communications monopoly. In addition,
URO’s supposed road and street renovation projects closed corridors
throughout the Centro Historico for months. As Oaxaca mechanic Alfonso
García complained:
It was crap, total crap! They [the workmen] tore up streets, made
them impassable, then did nothing. Everybody—at least everybody I
talked to—knew URO and his compadres in the construction industry
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 268
were peeling off thousands—millions—of pesos that they claimed was
being spent for ‘renovation.’ They were stuffing their pockets and the
rest of us were going broke because of it!
Like Felipe Calderón, URO affably shook hands with human rights critics
and parroted phrases about “political accords to resolve problems…” and
“following the letter of the law” but neither he nor anyone in his administration
made any attempts to identify or prosecute assassins, torturers or sicarios.
Manuel García, who replaced El Chucky as state secretary general, shrugged
away suggestions that those incarcerated on and after the Night of Horror were
political prisoners.
He told legislators that those who’d been arrested were “common
criminals” against whom charges for robbery, destruction of property and other
offenses had been filed. They had been convicted and sentenced by competent
judges following the dictates of criminal law, he insisted. Their release from
custody had been effected through “legal processes.” As far as he (and URO’s
government) was concerned police brutality had not occurred because none of
the law enforcement personnel had been charged with any infractions.
“I cannot invent crimes,” he protested and told state legislators that all
141 of those flown to federal installations had signed admissions of guilt before
they were released on parole. He did not mention that on November 25, 2007
state prosecutors filed new charges against many of those whose year-long
probation was due to end. They were not sent back to prison but placed on
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 269
another year of probation for allegedly setting fire to the state tourism building
and the Teatro de Juárez.
García countered questions about human rights reports listing hundreds
of abuses and violations by explaining that the state prosecutor and his staff
were investigating the findings. If they determined that human rights violations
had occurred the state would take appropriate actions, García insisted. He did
not identify what actions he considered “appropriate.”
Although Ruiz had clout politically many in President Calderón’s
governing PAN considered him to be a loose cannon. In 2008 Calderón faced
soaring inflation, drug cartel takeovers of major cities, a rising unemployment
rate and pressure from foreign governments to open Mexico’s oil and electricity
industries. Government Secretary the late Juan Camilo Mouriño told Ruiz in no
uncertain terms that Calderón couldn’t afford another “desmadre” like the
teacher’s strike to affect these negotiations.
Police and paramilitary raids and sequestering diminished but the oncethriving tourism industry—“factories without chimneys”—never recuperated its
pre-repression popularity. Businesses continued to close, Oaxacans to migrate
to other cities or the United States, robbery, prostitution and drug sales to
increase. The teachers union turned its attention towards national politics as
Calderón’s government’s attempted to federalize union activities, including the
union’s right to assign teachers to schools. When militarized police violently
crushed a teacher-led takeover of highways and other public functions in the
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 270
state of Morelos, the leader of the protest movement accused the police of
“Oaxacanizing” their protest, the word “Oaxacanize” meaning to exert brutal
force against a civilian population.
A majority of those affiliated with the APPO realized that the lucha was
not exclusively local: national and international considerations and balances
also were at stake. Not only did Calderón and his government fear the effects
of a popular uprising, the United States and the transnational corporations
wanted to maintain the status quo (which they in effect controlled). As a local
alternative media journalist told me:
He [URO] has the police and the guns and the arrest warrants and
the money. We can march and shout and curse but it doesn’t do any
good except maybe to make us feel a little bit better. Some, I know,
have talked about assassination as the only way. Armed revolution. But
we don’t have arms. It would be shooting marbles out of slingshots at
Robocops armed with R-15s again. And nobody but us cares. Nobody in
the rest of Mexico cares. Nobody anywhere else in the world.
That the APPO tried to forge past the realization that not only was a
despotic governor oppressing them but the militarized force of the federal
government was equally determined to destroy them illuminated how deeply
rooted the movement actually was. Despite the setbacks, the changes, the
constant apprehensions and intimidations, the APPO managed to keep its
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 271
organizational core intact. Although it did not achieve its primary goal of
forcing Ruiz to resign or be removed from office “it transformed Oaxaca: The
state never will be what it was before June 14, 2006,” journalist Matias
predicted:
I think the movement will keep on going. It has survived some
disastrous experiences—one hopes that good will emerge as a result. I
think we can expect violence but I believe in the long run the people, the
popular movement, will come out on top.
“What happened here is an example of action that gave hope to the
entire pueblo of Mexico.”La Jornada’s Julio Hernández told a March 2008 Día de
Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca. He affirmed that the APPO’s takeover of
communications “awakened a sleeping giant in Oaxaca” and triggered an
immense empathy in the D.F. for the APPO and great hopes for its success.
Like the student rebellions of 1968 in Mexico City and the anti-Vietnam and
integration movements in the United States the APPO ruptured traditional
mores—opened Pandora’s box. The successes of the barricades, although
temporary, convinced people who never had participated in any kind of political
act that they had rights and could exercise those rights.
Nevertheless, when those rights threaten the status quo those in charge
react—often violently. Uniformed agents of Mexico’s Federal Investigative
Agency (AFI) yanked three inmates out of their cells in the minimum security
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 272
state prison at Ixcotel, Oaxaca in November, 2008 and transported them to
San Bartola Coyotepec, another Oaxaca state prison, for “interrogation.” One
of the three inmates, Victor Hugo Martínez, told activist friends that the federal
investigators beat him and threatened to “make your family pay” if he didn’t
confess in full to crimes of which he’d been accused two years before and for
which he’d been sentenced to prison.
Although they demanded a confession the federal agents made it clear
that Martínez’ in-prison activities prompted the beatings and threats. Martínez
and his two companions, Pedro Castillo and Miguel Ángel García, had formed a
political organization which prison authorities considered a threat to their
control of the inmates. Although both the AFI and prison authorities denied
that Martínez was held incognito, beaten and tortured his family’s prompt
notification of human rights lawyers pressured those involved to return
Martínez to Ixcotel where family members confirmed that his body was
covered with bruises from the punishment he’d received.
“The government can arrest five-hundred or more, but this movement is
invincible because when a people decides to transform itself, it succeeds,”
Gilberto López y Rivas recapped the APPO’s perseverance. While the Popular
Assembly lay moribund beneath ideological carping an impetus for social
change vibrated throughout the youth-dominated, computer literate mix of
students, artists, young activists and poets who’d witnessed or been victimized
by governmental repressions. University and high school students openly
advocated anti-government policies in their writings and campus activities
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 273
(although they often disagreed on the hows and whys of putting those policies
into effect) and formed allegiances with indigena and other minority groups
within Oaxaca.
This vitality—electricity—was evident when the state teachers’ union
held a general assembly of members in the fall of 2008 to elect new leaders.
Several teachers who took part told me that the competition was the most
intense they had ever seen with vote after vote taken until Azael SantiagoChepi, the youngest candidate for secretary general, won “by sheer
determination, he was inexhaustible, he wore everyone down.”
Within days after assuming the secretary generalship Santiago-Chepi
announced plans to reorganize the Popular Assembly with full union
participation. As the Popular Assembly, not just a teachers’ union, the newly
formed coalition ordered two-day walkouts and the takeover of the city of
Oaxaca’s Zócalo for a week-long cultural exhibition that spread for over a
square block from in front of the Cathedral to the recently repaved square with
its newly planted flower beds and spiffed up bandstand.
Popular Assembly and student vendors spread blankets to display
handmade jewelry, video cassettes, t-shirts and revolutionary tracts much as
students and activists had done during the late 1960s and early 1970s around
university campuses in the United States. Members of indigena organizations
affiliated with the Popular Assembly set up portable stalls to sell handembroidered clothing, hats and leather works and tables set up under trees in
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 274
front of the bandstand displayed books in Spanish, most of them selfpublished, written about the protests and repression.
Most impressive was the art. No longer were protesters passing out
mimeographed caricatures or angrily stenciling RUIZ ASESINO on church walls.
A corridor of twenty-foot-wide mantas ushered one towards the speakers’
platform. Each manta depicted aspects of the conflict, from starvation in the
Mixteca to violence against women to the use of brutal military force against
unarmed innocent civilians. Dynamic colors emerged from realistic and
impressionistic spatial arrangements of animals, people, mythology and
nature. Large prints depicting Popular Assembly events and martyrs (including
Bradley Will, the American assassinated by non-uniformed police at a Popular
Assembly barricade) reflected talent and craftsmanship and attracted not only
People Assembly and teachers’ union supporters but tourists, diners and
families with children as well.
The vitality that created the popular movement that was brutally
repressed by state and federal police and the military resurged during the
gubernatorial and state assembly elections in 2010 to defeat Ruiz’ hand-picked
PRI successor. Marcos Leyva, one of the APPO’s founders, described Oaxaca as
dry brush land that had been waiting for a spark to ignite it. Ulisés Ruiz
provided that spark when he ordered state and municipal police to break up
the protesting teachers’ sit-in and drive them out of the city center. Federal
militarized police and army tanketas and troops crushed the outward
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 275
manifestations—the symptoms—but they didn’t stamp out the disease. Oaxaca
continued to be a crackling dry tinderland.
Tinderland yes, but gradually it became apparent that the APPO had
abrogated PRI’s domination of state politics, exposed its weaknesses and put
its practices under scrutiny. Section 22, under its new Secretary General
Santiago-Chepi, openly supported political movements in other entities and
challenged the dictatorship of federal education czar Elba Esther Gordillo.
Indigena communities forced multi-national corporations to curtail
hydroelectric and mining projects.
“Popular movements confronted everything from colonialism to
homophobia to suffrage to slavery to unionizing, and those popular movements
live on in history,” online journalist Nancy Davies wrote in 2008, and added
when people travel eight or ten hours to a meeting of the state council
of the APPO one can imagine how dedicated they are to participating in
how the APPO will construct future guidelines for popular participative
government. At the moment, it's slow going, with considerable internal
dissent…that doesn't affect the Popular Movement, which doesn't rely on
the APPO.
The anticipated explosions never occurred—at least not with dramatic
violence. In 2010 voters handily defeated Ulisés Ruiz’ handpicked successor
Eviel Pérez in favor of coalition candidate Gabino Cue, ending eighty years of
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 276
PRI governorships in the state. “Ya cayó!” but this time voiced softly, with
smiles instead of clenched fists.
“We won,” the protester who spent seven months in a Oaxaca prison
told me. “Now to see what the future brings.”
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 277
Conclusion: “As Invisible as the Ghosts”
The reign of King Ruiz dwindling to a close after the 2010 elections left
Oaxaca with strange bedfellows as a governing coalition—the ultraconservative PAN, the more liberal Convergencia and Partido de Trabajo and
the ruptured PRD. Before and after the elections, in conversations with
Oaxacans, primarily in the city of Oaxaca itself but also with residents of the
Mixteca, the Sierras and the Isthmus, I sensed that most people felt relieved
that URO was leaving and nurtured a cautious hope that the new government
would respond to the state’s needs in a less authoritarian and more
sympathetic manner.
Those most political aware predicted that governor-elect Gabino Cue was
likely to encounter “an Obama effect” within the first six months of his taking
office. The legislative three-way split among PAN, the liberal coalition and the
dinosaurian PRI would engender two-against-one voting on a variety of issues
and force the governor to negotiate—if not compromise—his election promises.
Although Ruiz governed as though Oaxaca was his personal domain he did
so with the support of the PRI’s national organization and often with the
backing of PAN presidents Fox and Calderón. As a long-time PRI stalwart and
powerful governor Ruiz had attained national influence that enabled him to
forge agreements with political players like PRI legislative leader (and
anticipated presidential candidate) Manlio Fabio Beltrones and Calderón’s
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 278
secretaries of government Francisco Ramírez and Fernando Gómez-Mont. (URO
publicly envisioned himself as the next PRI national party head.)
Nevertheless as of December 2010 the playing field had changed and the
“Movement” that had battled Ruiz assumed more important dimensions. As La
Jornada’s Julio Hernández pointed out the summer 2006 successes of the
Section 22-led the APPO had proved that a citizenry could unite and forge a
popular political force capable of altering traditional political structures, much
as the Zapatista uprising had done in Chiapas in 1994. Although unsuccessful
in dethroning URO the sympathy they evoked was a major contributor to the
defeat of URO’s chosen successor in July 2010.
King URO did not gracefully accept the PRI’s loss of Oaxaca’s
governorship. He engineered the ascendance of losing candidate Eviel Pèrez
into the directorship of the state PRI and as a lame duck governor manipulated
a judgment through his all-PRI legislature that absolved him of any and all
human rights or financial transgressions. This did not prevent criminal
investigation agencies like the federal attorney general from levying charges
against him but did prevent the newly elected legislature from charging him
with governmental transgressions, including corruption, since Mexican law
prohibits double indemnity. However, the federal attorney general made no
efforts to investigate.
Mexico’s Supreme Court did launch an investigation and condemned URO’s
violations of human rights but lacked authority to levy charges and URO, silksuited and smiling, continued to appear among other ex-governors at PRI
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 279
political and promotional events. During his four-month lame duck period he
refused to allow transition teams from the newly elected governor access to
records or officials for over three months after the elections, during which time
several former URO operatives, including Heriberto Pazos in the Trique area
and university porro Adriàn Marmolejo were assassinated by unknown and
unprosecuted assailants.
Gabino Cue’s cabinet, a hodgepodge of ill-equipped political appointees
divided among the three contending parties, stumbled through attempts to
deal with campaign promises and undefined financial obligations. Although
Oaxaca slid into a period of relative calm it soon became apparent that the
new government was going to be content with not riling the waters. Cue
sought alliances with PAN’s Calderòn, appointed ex-URO operatives to
government posts and courted foreign investment by granting and/or
extending sweetheart deals to foreign entrepreneurs.
It was as though Oaxaca—Oaxaca as it actually exists—was behind a huge
movie screen on which the government was showing scenes of bikini-clad
swimmers, folk dancers in elaborate indigena costumes, richly adorned Mayan
ruins and forcing poverty, desperation, persecutions and crumbling
infrastructure out of sight and, consequently, out of existence, at least as far
as the rest of the world would be able to perceive.
“We are not a country, we are a network of families strung together who
cannot merge into a unified force,” a graduate student in economics described
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 280
the difficulties of organizing popular protest movements in Mexico. I found this
particularly true in Oaxaca where most rural communities were extended
families, traditionally patriarchal, with designated roles for every member.
Usos y costumbres is an outgrowth of that family structure, one in which
decisions traditionally were formulated mutually by the heads of household
who belonged to the extended family. Outsiders, women, unmarried sons were
excluded.
Until the APPO, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, forced its way into the news
(and consequently international awareness) the majority of the people in
Oaxaca were “politically as invisible as the ghosts that arise on the Dead of the
Dead” a Oaxacan mother of two complained during a conversation I had with
her. As of 2010 no one could accurately predict how much that might change
since the PRI, despite losing the 2010 elections for governor, remained the
single most powerful political entity in the state. Governors were kings but the
majority of their money came from above: the God that was the country’s
executive.
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 federal police did against innocent Oaxacan
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 281
citizens on November 25, 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 Ruiz
enforced the government’s defense of the status quo against all change even
though the status quo had become overly authoritarian and corrupt. In many
peoples’ minds this made the government of the United States an enemy of
the people, as corrupt and totalitarian as Ulisés Ruiz.
Noam Chomsky insists that one of the objectives of neo-liberal systems
is to erase all memory of social struggles, a process very evident during the
2006 protest and repression in Oaxaca. Television, the wire services and many
major daily newspapers in both Mexico and the United States described the
APPO as “a leftist rabble” that incorporated “rampaging youth,” “outside
agitators” and “striking dissidents” and the federal police as “restoring order”
and “normalizing the situation” as though King Ulisés’ repressive reign with its
paramilitaries, political assassinations and corruption were more laudable and
normal that the APPO’s citizen groups banding together to make decisions.
The hardening of anti-immigrant laws stimulated anger and resentment,
especially among intellectuals, academicians and educated young Mexicans
and heightened their affinity for the accomplishments of the Castros’ Cuba,
Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia. Newspaper opinion pages,
primarily written by academicians, accused the United States of being the
primary promoter of the economic system that had devastated Mexico’s
working class while enriching a few entrepreneurs.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 282
This antagonism, much like the antagonism towards Ulisès Ruiz in 2010,
webbed into an overall repudiation of politics and politicians and a distrust of
government and governmental institutions, including federally and state
financed human rights agencies and the judiciary (though not necessarily those
who worked for the various branches of government). “Están muy sucias!”
(“they’re very dirty!”) I frequently heard Mexicans refer to their political
processes and politicians described “son corruptos todos…” and “son puros
pendejos…” (“they’re all corrupt…” and “they’re nothing but imbeciles…”).
This repudiation, this distrust, has hampered large-scale communal action
in Oaxaca throughout its history. The APPO’s unifying the way it did—suddenly,
forcefully, with shared goals and effective means of achieving them—was an
exception that the country’s power structure considered extremely dangerous
because it threatened to balloon into a national movement that could severely
affect the elite’s control of the nation’s economy. Unlike the Zapatista
revolution in Chiapas the APPO’s centrifugal thrust was middleclass: unionized
teachers, many of whom held or had held appointive and elective offices,
academics, lawyers, human rights representatives.
Nevertheless, the glue that held the APPO together, that brought
hundreds of thousands to march and chant and protest, was to get rid of
Governor Ruiz. It was a concentrated drive against something, not for
something.
Also unlike the Zapatista movement the APPO had no physical territory to
control or defend other than their campamento and the neighborhood
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 283
barricades in the city of Oaxaca and other communities. In addition the APPO
lacked a spiritual leader, a figurehead, an individual who typified, physically
represented, what the movement was about as Subcomandante Marcos did the
Zapatistas and that Emiliano Zapata had during the overthrow of dictator
Porfirio Díaz in the early years of the twentieth century.
URO’s assault on the teachers’ encampment in June 2006 outraged a huge
percentage of the population who viewed it as a transgression by the
government against the people. Instinctively they supported the APPO and its
demands that “the tyrant,” “the assassin,” be dethroned. The APPO simulated
a huge extended family with a purpose and a moral definition: good versus
bad.
“Good” versus “bad” carried into the 2010 elections, offsetting other
political and economic considerations including what kind of government an
alliance among strange bedfellows could put together. But as Gabino Cue took
office in December 2010 the state was one of the poorest in Mexico, wracked
by conflicts among competing communities, deeply in debt, policed by corrupt
and ineffectual law enforcement, suffering from extreme flood damage and the
deterioration of its infrastructure. The bureaucracy remained essentially the
same as it had under the PRI governors, the PRI held a plurality in the
legislature and controlled over half of the municipalities. The serpent had a
new head but its claws remained untrimmed.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 284
Postscript
A published description of the 2006 sit-in by striking teachers in Oaxaca
that I wrote began:
“They occupied two spacious plazas, the Zòcalo and the Alameda, and
spilled into nearly fifty surrounding city blocks. They erected tents and lean-tos
and improvised kitchens, portable bathrooms and first-aid stations.
“Complete with children, dogs, guitars, simmering bean pots and pickup
soccer games the summerlong campout resembled an extended neighborhood
picnic….Businesses closed, tourists canceled hotel reservations and vehicles
were diverted from the area…”
Seven years later I could have written similar descriptions about the
Zòcalo in Mexico City. The APPO had disappeared but Oaxaca’s Section 22 had
not. Federal passage of a purported “Educational Reform”—in reality a unionbusting labor law involving changes to the country’s constitution—triggered
nationwide protest and the occupation of Mexico City’s central district by some
30,000 Oaxaca teachers and nearly as many from Michoacàn, Guerrero and
other state teachers’ unions. The desmadre that the federal government feared
had become a reality. If the only way for people to have a voice, to be heard
and to be seen, was by organizing massive demonstrations that disrupted
business, altered traffic and turned business and tourist districts into teeming
slums, then massive demonstrations had become the order of the day.
Such demonstrations are legal under Mexico’s constitution, although
protests often are crushed by police or the military, as happened in Oaxaca in
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 285
2006. Mexico City, however, is not Oaxaca: It is a center of international
trade; a New York-Chicago-Washington D.C. combined; a cultural center and
the nation’s capital. Despite a media blitz of defamation labeling the teachers
“provocateurs,” “rateros,” “turncoats” and dozens of other animal- and offalassocaiated insults the Zòcalo sit-in and the reasons for it couldn’t be swept
under the carpet as had been done in Oaxaca in 2006-2007. Nor could the
federal government physically contain the movement by surrounding it with
armed militaries and paramilitaries as it had done in Chiapas.
“Ya cayò!”
Win or lose the country was going to change.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 286
Epilogue
Festive Oaxaca. Festering Oaxaca. Just before Christmas, 2010, as I
turned to watch the waitress who’d brought me a beer in a noisy bar-eatery a
few blocks from the Zócalo sashay towards other customers a round-faced
little boy, perhaps five or six years old, appeared beside me, a tiny straw
basket filled with penny chewing gum in his hand. “Please sir,” he pleaded,
“buy a Chiclets. I haven’t sold a single one all day.”
He was lying, of course. And of course I bought and because I don’t like
Chiclets I gave them back to him and watched him work the same cute scam
at another table.
Oaxaca. The way things are and the things we do to survive.
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 287
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books and Documents
Beas, Carlos, ed., La Batalla por Oaxaca, Ediciones Yope Power, Oaxaca,
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Mexico, D.F., 2003
Castellanos, Aline, Hernández, Ana, Cuevas, Leticia, Vázquez, Marievna and
Jarquín, Soledad, Voces de la valentía en Oaxaca, Oaxaca, 2006
Carlsen, Laura, IRC Americas Program
Davies, Nancy, The People Decide, Narco News, New York, 2007
“Declaracion politica de la constitución formal de la Asamblea Popular del
Pueblo De Oaxaca,” Oaxaca, 2006
Gutiérrez-Vivó, José, El mexicano y su siglo, Oceano, Mexico, D.F., 1999
Loaeza, Guadalupe, La Comedia Electoral, Editorial Planeta Mexicana, Mexico,
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Osorno, Diego Enrique, Oaxaca Sitiada, Random House Mondadori, Mexico,
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Oaxaca, Mexico,” Oaxaca Solidarity Network, Oaxaca, 2006
Stout, Robert Joe, Why Immigrants Come to America Braceros,
Indocumentados and the Migra, Praeger, New York, 2008
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 288
Magazines
Martínez, Laura, “La APPO Vive, la Represión Sigue,” La Barrikada, June, 2007
“Oaxaca: Tiempo Nublado,” PRO-OAX, November, 2006
Periodicals, TV, Radio and Online Resources Consulted
Democracy Now
Indymedia
Media Critiques
Mexico City La Jornada
Mexico City El Sol de Mexico
Narco News
Oaxaca Noticias, Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca
Proceso
Interviews, Press Conferences and Human Rights delegation
testimonies
Arias, Manuel
Bautista, Letitia
Bolaños, Antonio
Cabrera, Fausto
Cadevilla, Ugo
Calvo, Tómas
Castañeda, Celestino
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 289
Castellaños, María Elena
Centeno, Leyla
Cerna, Dalila
Chávez, Martha
Colmenares, Ricardo
Cosme, Omar
Dahl-Bredine, Phil
Davies, Nancy
Dominguez, Jaime
Figueroa, Mónica
García, Alonso
García, Francisco
García, Jacobo
González, Ema
González, Miriam
González, Rolando
Hernández, José
Hernández, Julio
Hernández, Samu
Jiménez, Florina
Jiménez, Noé
Jiménez, Óscar
Johannsen, Anna
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 290
Leyva, Marcos
López, Florentino
López, Genoveva
López, Luciano
Martínez, Alvaro
Martínez, Jaime
Mateo, Rene
Matias, Pedro
Mendez, Sara
Morales, Leonel
Ortiz, Bernardo
Pérez, José
Robles, Ofelia
Rodríguez, Pedro
Salzman, George
Sánchez, Óscar
Sánchez, Yésica
Teal, Jonathan
Tovar, Hugo
Urrea, Guadalupe
Vara, Alma
Vázquez, Miguel
Vázquez, María del Carmen
Oaxaca: Protest and Repression / Page 291
Villalobos, Rosario
Villegas, Manuel