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Dirty War in Oaxaca
Carla - 03.12.2006 19:15
The Dirty War of Oaxaca
 http://elenemigocomun.net/622
Amongst flames of resistance came death, torture, and a movement forced into clandestinity
December 2nd, 2006 - Barucha Calamity Peller writes: Latin Americas' 'dirty war' of the 70s and 80s has reemerged in its most blatant form in the case of Oaxaca, Mexico in the final days of November.
The APPO, the Popular Assembly of The People of Oaxaca, whose struggle to oust the PRI party governor Ulises Ruiz and to replace power with that of popular assemblies began on June 14th with an attempt to violently evict a sit-in of striking teachers.
Six months later they find themselves living clandestinely with federal warrants on their names and on the run from the police.
In this past week, the government of Mexico has adopted a 'gloves off' policy and has clearly stated in the press its plans to do away with the e are reports of people being taken off of buses, to be searched and arrested.
The disappearances, arrests, and rapes seem to be part of a government plan to force the popular movement into a state of fear by causing the movement?s thousands of participants into geographical dispersion and into a state of living clandestinely. Under these conditions, it is difficult for people to organize, mobilize, or even communicate.
Night Terror
The heavy repression came after a mega march on Saturday, November 25th. The APPO had called for a peaceful march from a town outside of Oaxaca city to the Zocalo, the center square occupied by the federal police since their entrance into the city a month ago. The vision of the march was to surround the police by creating a chain of marchers in the streets around the Zocalo, essentially to reoccupy the city by closing in on the occupying federal forces. The marchers planned to camp in the streets for forty eight hours, to demand the exit of Ulises Ruiz from power and the
PFP from Oaxaca City.
Only an hour after the march had arrived and surrounded the Zocalo, protesters built barricades in the streets, handed out food, and yelled insults at the police a block down. Not soon after, the first rounds of tear gas could be heard on Acala Street, near the APPO sit-in of Santo Domingo Plaza. This set off a six hour battle between protesters and police, in which both sides retreated and advanced on the downtown
streets of Oaxaca City. The APPO stole city buses and cars and drove them into police lines or burned them to create barricades to defend Santo Domingo. Police shot continuous rounds of gas at the heads and bodies of protesters.
During the course of the confrontation, 36 buildings were burned, Among the targets were; the Benito Juarez Theatre, the Secretary of External Relations, the Superior Tribunal of Justice, a number of banks and upscale hotels and dozens of cars and busses to use as burning barricades.
Around eight o'clock that evening protesters finally retreated from Santo Domingo, after PFP water tanks began to advance from parallel streets and it seemed that it was no longer possible to defend the space that APPO had occupied for a month.
During the retreat, hundreds of protesters ran up a narrow street in the direction of Benito Juarez Boulevard. At least three gunshots rang out, and a young man was shot in the leg, presumably by paramilitaries on the roof. Upon reaching the boulevard, a few hundred protesters attempted to regroup, while blocking the street with 18 wheelers and buses. In other parts of the city, groups of protesters sought refuge in houses or attempted to fend off police and paramilitaries circling the city.
In the course of the night, police beat and arbitrarily arrested almost anyone they found on the street, including people who were in neighborhoods far away from the conflict in the center of Oaxaca City.
Unmarked cars could be seen passing through the same streets over and over again, presumably containing PRI party supporters and government paramilitaries who were carrying out disappearances.
At approximately 11 o'clock at night, automatic weapon gunshots were heard for ten minutes straight. The shots were fired towards the Faculty of Medicine, just north of the Center, where protesters ran to seek refuge. According to a witness, when teachers and other protesters attempted to leave the faculty, a group of porros (government backed paramilitaries) ordered them to stop at gunpoint.
The group refused and the porros opened fire, killing three people.
Some of the teachers began to fire back in defense as they were retreating.
And at 7 am on Sunday morning, as APPO sympathizers hid out in houses around the city and the police and PRI paramilitary groups disappeared people off the streets, PRI party outlet Radio Ciudana was naming out neighborhoods and houses where protesters could be found.
'We know of one house where there are six Americans who have been helping the APPO', the host said, creating a fear for anyone who had an American in their house that paramilitaries would arrive to massacre everyone inside.
How to Continue?
Many people wonder what the past week?s repression will mean for the movement in Oaxaca and what its effect will be on a national scale.
Comparisons have been made to the siege of Atenco in the first days of May this year, where 3,500 PFP police entered the town to quell an anti-neoliberal movement. The Atenco siege resulted in two deaths, 40 unconfirmed disappearances, and 218 political prisoners, 35 of which were women who suffered rapes at the hands of the police.
Indeed Oaxaca has prompted many contextual questions on part of both the movement and the government. On Monday, as the PFP in Oaxaca patrolled Santo Domingo plaza, the APPO encampment lost during the Saturday battle, popularly ousted Governor Ulises Ruiz appeared at the scene to assess the damage to the burned buildings downtown. He said that the detentions carried out in the previous nights meant a step towards stability. For months the federal government has been calling the 'ungovernability' of Oaxaca a local problem that has no significance to Mexican society as a whole, even so, paradoxically Ruiz blamed outsiders from other states
for the damages in Oaxaca.
Activists in Mexico have had the task of assessing the situation in Oaxaca in comparison to the rest of the country, and there remain many questions of how different movements can relate to that of the APPO in terms of coordination and solidarity. While those suffering repression in Oaxaca remain isolated by the mainstream Mexican media, who have hardly reported on deaths, disappearances and torture, there is also a danger coming from some of those on 'the left' in Mexico who isolate the Oaxacan movement as a protest against the governor Ulises, and not a broader struggle against neoliberalism and capitalist exploitation whose context is surely national. Despite this, at the moment there are still organizations and
collectives around the country who are strategizing their modes of solidarity for Oaxaca, particularly concentrating on the grave human rights situation for those incarcerated and those remaining inside the city.
Calderon took presidency today [December 1, 2006] in a veritable coup d'etat, accompanied into the parliament by military and PAN party supporters. Meanwhile, social movements around Mexico brace themselves for the 'mano duro', or hard-hand, of repression that is sure to come.
Yet an APPO member from the Section 22 teachers union, the same union that set off the Oaxaca uprising when the government violently attempted to evict their sit-in in June, said on Thursday night outside of a human rights coordination meeting, 'What they don't realize is that it doesn't matter who they arrest, who they disappear in Oaxaca. There will always be more that come from behind and rise up, after all, they can't detain the whole state.'
sources: http://counterpunch.org/peller12022006.html
http://indybay.org/newsitems/2006/12/02/18334698.php
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email 'announcement' list, http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/oaxaca
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| Read more about: anti-fascisme / racisme globalisering Oaxaca vrijheid, repressie & mensenrechten | | supplements | | | Ooggetuige verslag | Carla - 03.12.2006 19:21
Hello again friends,
I've missed a bunch of days of reporting, for as many reasons as there were days.
Other than being sick with the lovely traveller's malady, and a bad case of it, we've been trying to figure out how to deal with the massive repression in Oaxaca.
Since November 25 the dirty war has escalated. People from the movement have either left Oaxaca, are hiding, or moving around the city with enormous caution. There are death squads, which conduct night-time raids of movement leaders' houses, or of anyone else known to be associated with the movement. There are reports that human rights workers have been detained in the daytime, by groups of men climbing off of a passing pickup truck and waving pistols. These human rights workers were subsequently charged with sedition (this report is from a newspaper, tho I am not sure if it has been confirmed).
The streets of Oaxaca seem to have returned to "normal". The intersection where the Cinco Senores barricade was located has been completely cleared and cleaned, and is now filled with fast-moving traffic and painted-over graffiti. The Radio University encampment has also been cleaned, although some graffiti still decorates walls, saying "Hasta la victoria siempre" and "Live for freedom, or die to end slavery"
As we left our hostel several days ago, we talked with the owners (who, we believe, may have been keeping a little too close of an eye on us), who said "we just want to put this all behind us." This seems to be the attitude of many of the wealthy and the politically powerful here. Those who can forget, are trying to. Those who still see a threat from the people's movement hope to make the superficial life in Oaxaca go back to "normal" while they detain, torture, disappear and terrorize the people who rose up against the corrupt and repressive forces in power in Oaxaca.
I can't say more about my own situation now, only that I am safe and am taking many precautions to stay that way. I have the privilege to find places that are safer, and thus this situation is inestimably easier for me than it is for many Oaxacan and Mexican people.
My reports may come less frequently now, because I do not want to put myself or anyone else in unnecessary danger.
Once again, please keep the people of Oaxaca (many still continue to fight, though a bit less publicly), and others around the world struggling for justice, in your hearts.
Cuidense,
Xochitl
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