To all outward appearances, the popular uprising that for nearly seven months in 2006 usurped the functioning of the government of Oaxaca, Mexico has been quelled. But not forgotten. That a citizenry could take over television and radio stations, set up thousands of defensive barricades and administer justice without resorting to violence weighs heavily on that nation's federal government. It has resolved not to let the desmadre that threatened its control of the country’s political and economic life happen again. (Desmadre is a Mexican term for a catastrophe or other destabilizing event.)
Oaxaca is Mexico’s southernmost state, an expanse of nearly two million square kilometers extending from southern coastal plains bordering the Pacific into rugged mountain ranges containing isolated and virtually inaccessible rural communities. Over 80 percent of the state's population, nearly half of which speak pre-Hispanic languages, live in poverty - nearly 50 percent without adequate nutrition, housing or health care. During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico’s federal government withdrew agricultural subsidies, particularly of fertilizers and seeds, and did away with government-operated rural loan banks. Nearly half of Oaxaca’s rural residents lost their lands and their ability to feed and clothe their families.
Today an estimated 90 percent of the money coming into rural communities is generated by sons, daughters, husbands, wives and fathers working in the United States. They send more than $1.1billion back to the state in weekly and monthly remittances. Over half of the rural communities in Oaxaca lack electricity; an even higher percentage have no access to potable water. Priest Manuel Arias, the spokesman for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, winced as he described indigenous life.
"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 (because migration, both from the rural areas to cities as well as the United States, has created hundreds of thousands of single-parent families). The residents constantly are victimized by caciques (local chieftains or political bosses) and the police. Hundreds of them 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."
Political Control
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a so-called "noble elite" ruled Oaxaca. They were not actually members of royal families but were wealthy landholders and investors who separated themselves from the rural peasant culture. They 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 [Indigenous soul of Mexico] but exploited it as a regional curiosity.
Their 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. Self-sustaining agriculture gave way to export products - coffee, cattle, eucalyptus estates for the production of pulpwood. Huge hydroelectric plants, uranium, gold and copper mines and transcontinental super highways brought millions of pesos to those in power but made migrants and slum dwellers out of peasants.
The disparity between haves and have-nots increased as governor after governor sacked the state treasury. In mid-May 2006, when current governor Ulisès Ruiz refused to establish new base pay rates for the state’s educators, some 50,000 of the state's 70,000 teachers occupied the city of Oaxaca’s central business district, also its cultural and tourism center. Businesses closed, tourists cancelled hotel reservations, bus and auto traffic ceased to function or had to be diverted.
The People’s Popular Assembly Forms
Shortly after three o'clock on the morning of June 14th police wielding nightsticks and machetes slashed through the crowded encampment. Despite clogging clouds of tear gas, the teachers fought back, hurling bottles and paving stones, swinging mop sticks, chairs and tent poles, belts and rebar. By 9:30 that morning their superior numbers overwhelmed the police and the attackers evacuated the area.
What had begun as a legal sit-in overnight became a massive resistance movement. The representatives of over 300 separate organizations talked, urged, argued, and convoked their first reunion on June 20th and announced the formation of the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO). For the first time in Oaxaca’s history urban and impoverished rural dwellers united in opposition to the autocratic and corrupt state government.
Driven out of the city that was supposed to be his center of operations, and with his police force humiliated, Governor Ruiz, the cacique, wielder of absolute power, became a ruler in absentia. He conducted state business from his limousine, hotels and, not infrequently, a state-owned helicopter. Both he and the APPO pleaded for federal government help, he for forceful intervention, the APPO for his removal and replacement with an appointed interim, an act which, if the federal Senate determines that a state is "ungovernable," it has the right to invoke under Mexican law.
During September and October 2006, members of the state teachers union and APPO representatives met with federal officials. Newspaper accounts of these meetings speculated that the Mexican Senate would depose Ruiz and appoint an interim governor to replace him. Many within the federal government were in favor of replacing Ruiz; they were not, however, in favor of citizen groups taking over state governments. Not only that, but the country was in uproar over allegations of fraud committed during the July presidential elections. President Vicente Fox and president-elect Felipe Calderón had their hands full with a massive Mexico City sit-in organized by losing presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and couldn’t afford to lose Oaxaca to what they felt was a leftist rabble. López Obrador himself demanded Ruiz’s ousting and challenged the government to define if they were "with the people or with this cacique."
PHOTO: In nearby town Puebla, 2006
The Government Attempts To Crush the Movement
Fearing the opposition leader’s popularity, and needing the support of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to which Ruiz belonged, the president and the president-elect decided to intervene on Ruiz's behalf. On November 25th, five days before Fox left office, militarized federal police, reinforced by Army units, state and local police and hundreds of armed vigilantes, stormed Oaxaca’s central district after the conclusion of an APPO march through the city.
"There was tear gas, there were gunshots, and afterwards the fires," Oaxaca Noticias correspondent Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. "Oaxaca from five until eleven was ablaze."
"At Seguro Social hospital two wings of attacking police converged and forced hundreds of people, men, women, old people onto the highway in front of El Fortín [the steep hill on which Oaxaca’s observatory is located] … I don't know if they beat everybody but there were heartrending womens shouts ... As if we were delinquents, in order to save our lives we climbed Fortin hill, like refugees so they couldn’t find us."
Over 80 percent of the more than 300 people who were arrested and tortured had nothing to do with the APPO. Nevertheless the following day 107 men and 34 women, manacled and terrorized by snarling police dogs, were herded onto airplanes and helicopters and flown to federal prisons. A number of both women and men reported they were beaten and raped while they were being transported from the airfields to the prisons.
"All the better that they’re innocent," a federal official commented. 'It will make the rest of Oaxaca more afraid."
Despite complaints from throughout the world and thousands of pages of testimony taken by human rights organizations, both the state and the federal government denied that those arrested had been tortured or forced to sign false confessions. Major news wire services, particularly the Associated Press, disseminated government press releases. Armed police attacked groups of family members protesting outside Oaxaca's prisons and government-paid paramilitaries continued to roam the countryside, terrorizing the APPO supporters.
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. Quite to the contrary, the military and militarized police stepped in immediately to crush incipient protests, particularly those involving students or indigenous peoples.
"The federal government will not stand for another desmadre like the one that occurred in Oaxaca," student leader Luis González reported being told after heavily armed federal police overwhelmed normal school students who had begun a protest over job placements in the neighboring state of Guerrero. Although the APPO spokespersons extol "non violence," millions of people throughout Mexico, including high-ranking federal officials, view the APPO as a dangerous threat that only can be repressed by force.
An Example for Mexico
"Oaxaca," Padre Arias told me, "has set an example for the rest of Mexico and that example will go forward. This is what scares the [federal] government the most."
La Jornada's Julio Hernández told a March 2008 Día de Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca, "What happened here is an example, an example of action ... that gave hope to the people of Mexico." He affirmed that the APPO’s takeover of government functions "awakened a sleeping giant" and sparked an immense empathy throughout Mexico for the APPO and great hopes for its success.
Unlike many in Mexico's federal government, Hernández understood how deeply rooted the movement is. The fact that it is a movement, not a mere political reaction, attracted empathy and support throughout Latin America. Pedro Matias countered assertions made by Ruiz and by Calderón’s former Government Secretary Francisco Ramirez that the APPO was funded by "revolutionary elements" and "outside agitators":
"What's supporting the APPO? Poverty-stricken people, that's what!
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."
Those needs are not confined to Oaxaca. During the first two years of Calderón's presidency, unemployment has increased, thousands of small and medium-sized businesses have folded (45 percent in the construction industry alone) and the price of the basic canasta [basket - the amount needed to support a family] has almost doubled. The neoliberal government’s attempts to open the state-owned and operated oil industry - Pemex - to private investment has aroused increasingly larger protests, many of them modeled after the APPO system of decision-by-assembly and pacific takeover of government buildings and highway blockages.
For all intents and purposes, the APPO no longer exists. The brutal crushing of their occupation of the city of Oaxaca drove many participants into the shadows and bickering among the groups that remained further decimated what had been a powerful communal movement. But their accomplishments, and the message they sent to Mexico’s governing officials, remain in force. That a citizenry could take over a capital city, appropriate its communications, alter its transportation and traffic systems and do so effectively, with a minimum of violence, even if only for a period of months, upended the value systems of both disadvantaged masses and those in power. Women aspiring to leadership, even in remote rural villages, now refuse to step down. Students view possibilities for the future that never existed before. "Fight for change" has replaced "We must accept" as a guiding principal.
Vowing to prevent another desmadre like that of Oaxaca, the federal government is pressuring state governments to approve a plan for a federal police force that would incorporate all law enforcement elements under one command. But a security-based response is only ever temporary as it cannot resolve problems created by the lack of opportunity, the lack of food and the lack of adequate medical care.
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