Update From Oaxaca

Things are quiet in Oaxaca, if you don't count the heavily armed police helicopter circling the city, presumably looking for culprits or clues as to the daylight disappearances of two wealthy politico/empresario (politician/businessman) types over the long weekend.

Nancy Davies posts the following:

A helicopter has been circling overhead for three consecutive days with
armed (armed with what? I don't know what weapons but surely either high powered arms or tear-gas launchers) [sic] Abductions took place on both Friday and Saturday, and I assumed that the chopper was trying to locate a car (Is that silly? Yeah.) The kidnapped men were taken by the same m.o., which was that hooded men entered on Friday a restaurant and on Saturday an auto sales place, and simply hauled away their targets, both of whom are men with money (why kidnap a poor person, eh?) but I do not know if they are wealthy by the sweat of their brows or by some other method -the first one was a former PRI legislator and the uncle of former governor Diodoro Carrasco, so that's a clue.

I don't actually know anything about the kidnappings, so I pass all this on without comment.

I will comment on another statement she makes, however:

I truly believe that Oaxaca is ungovernable. My own opinion, for what it is worth --and I think that what has happened, is that the APPO and the
teachers opened the lid on what has been underneath simmering along. It is total corruption, free impunity to break all laws, repression and/or authoritariansim over the distant pueblos, buying votes, etcetera. Once the lid was off, although URO has done all he could to break Section 22, break the PRD, break the social movement --in other words, to regain control, I believe it is a hopeless task. Although he can destroy more, and install more repression, the box is open, the cows are out of the barn, whatever metaphors you choose, violence and agitation are rampant. Some of it is instigated by people who see a chance to improve their situations, and some of it is instigated by "bad guys" who are threatened with loss of control (and hence loss of income).

I generally turn to Nancy's writing first for a clear idea of events that take place in Oaxaca. Her politics are quite left-leaning, as is evidenced by the appearance of her work almost exclusively on the Narco News website, and in her characterizations of the beautiful struggle in her book, The People Decide. Her politics generally figure secondarily, for me as a reader, to the informational content of her writing. As a friend of mine recently said to me about other news outlets, "These newspapers agree with my prejudice." I can let the rest go by because Nancy Davies offers consistent, English language analysis of issues in Oaxaca and, while I am not a leftist and certainly not an anarchist, I can more or less accept the tone of the work that comes out of the Narco News mill.

Today however I have to take issue with Nancy's perspective and ask what, exactly, she means when she says that "Oaxaca is ungovernable." Does this mean there is a failure of governance, law, and order in Oaxaca? Because except for the run of the mill Mexican political corruption in the state, I fail to see this. Certainly, the people who control the city appear to be above the law. And that's about par for the course, since they control, if not how the law is written, then certainly how it is executed and enforced.

I do not share Nancy's view that because the APPO and the teachers' strike of 2006 opened the lid on issues that have been simmering beneath Oaxaca´s surface, then Oaxaca therefore is at present devolving (or evolving, depending on your perspective) to a state of ungovernability. Yes, that lid appears to have been cracked, but by all accounts the unresolved problems are happily stuffed back inside to roil and ripple beneath the surface, likely not to rear their heads forcefully again until the next gubernatorial election in two or three years, when the PRI plots how to retain their hold on the Governor's Palace and the various groups of the broad people´s movement--or of the APPO, if you prefer--unite once more under the banner of hatred for a common enemy.

By the accounts of those I've spoken with (people whom, I must confess, by and large agree with my particular prejudice), the majority of Oaxacans identify neither with the teachers nor the APPO nor the government. This majority simply wants the city to be tranquil enough to attract the tourists who fuel Oaxaca's economy, and thus maintain the availability of work in the city. No work equals no security, and that comes across as the biggest factor on most people's minds.

So will Oaxaca's "ungovernable" nature lead to another round of skirmishes in the streets in 2008? Friends here suspect that when the teachers of Section 22 rally in May to renew their annual list of demands, the demands will not be outrageous and the government will be quick to oblige a much compromised version of whatever list is submitted, which the teachers will in turn be quick to accept. In this way both sides of the unresolved conflict will walk away quietly. APPO remains the wild card, potentially, but I repeat: without a common cause or enemy to unite all the wildly divergent groups represented across the pueblos, there is little to suggest that the leaderless APPO can inspire so many parties to agree upon and rally around any common message.

I will not go so far as to make my own predictions. The one thing everybody here will bet on is that you can't bet on anything. I imagine it a flight of fancy, however, to suggest that Oaxaca is out and out ungovernable. That, to me, suggests Oaxaca is also unpoliceable, and anyone here to witness the state's aggressive police patrols would likely argue the opposite. I simply find myself saying, again as many times before, "Vamos a ver." We will see.

Oaxaca Today, Part 2

CORRECTION:I say below that we walked by the law school on Saturday night and saw hundreds of police in riot gear patrolling the University election. That actually took place on Friday night, January 25.

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In a follow-up to her informal update last week, which I republished here, Nancy Davies offers the latest on what's happening at the federal level regarding Oaxaca and Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. She summarizes an article by Luis Ocejo Martinez from Sunday's Noticias, stating that we now know Ruiz did indeed meet with Secretary of Government Juan Camilo Mourino, and that the expectations for Ruiz run as follows:

1. guarantee governability in the state and attend to the teachers and social movement demands before there's another uprising; 2. free Flavio Sosa as a way to lower the temperature of the APPO; 3. re-establish normality in the government and re-occupy the palacio gobernmental which was turned into museum by URO and used for private fiestas; 4. deal with the problems of University Autonomous Benito Juarez of Oaxaca (which just suffered an election for rector of the Law School. Each candidate hired his own thugs. I happened to be walking outside the law school building Friday night and saw a couple of hundred armed riot police waiting on the sidewalk. The two who spoke with me said they were waiting for the election results and the explosions. The police actually arrested four known porros (hired thugs), but later released them. Apparently all elections at UABJO are conducted in a similar way, the rival groups represent the faculty, the students, and the union of university workers. The fourth group, hidden from view, is the governor. UABJO is considered to be among the worst public universities in the nation because of corruption and lack of resources.) The big number 5 is that Governor Ruiz consider accepting an ambassadorship to some foreign country. This was slipped into the conversation as a measure to re-establish governability, and Ocejo offered no further details about this federal government proposal, except that it seems genuine. Rumors of such offers abounded under Fox, too, along with URO's refusal.

I have heard this rumor about the governor maybe leaving town, and have no sense of whether it's any more likely to happen now than was rumored in the past. Davies goes on to cite the candidates vying for the post of interim-governor, since Ruiz still has three years left on his term. By the look of it, things don't exactly improve for Oaxacans if Ruiz takes on the ambassadorship to nowhere. The picks to follow him are pretty grim, and Nancy articulates why in her update. I tend to think the list of names could change a couple dozen times, too, between now and whenever an interim candidate is needed, however this may be naive. Like everywhere, the political community in Oaxaca is deeply entrenched, so you see the same handful of faces vying for the same handful of positions for decades, as is the case with one of Ruiz's would-be successors, a loyalist to former governor Carrasco, who, Nancy argues, is the real force pushing for Ulises to be removed.

On a sidenote: We unwittingly walked by the Law School on Saturday night as well, and had a similar experience of arriving between columns of troops in riot gear with machine guns bordering the entire facade of the building, working at various outposts all around the block, and standing ready at staging areas across the contiguous streets. Also present were the requisite support squads for each candidate, made up largely of youth. A Oaxacan law student friend of mine told me that candidates pay youth, who may not even be students at the law school, to rally on the candidate's behalf, and also promise to deliver the youth their law degrees, regardless whether they are students in the university or not. Incidentally, my friend is not a student at UABJO, but at URSE, a different (and more highly regarded) law school in Oaxaca.

Quiet Anniversary Weekend

Nancy Davies on anniversary weekend events, and, perhaps more interestingly, the current state of the APPO.

Quien Sabe? (Who Knows?)

When Nancy Davies, whose writing I turn to again and again for insight into the tenor and tone of Oaxaca's muddled politics, doesn't know what's happened or what's going on, then I just don't know where on the Internet to turn anymore for reliable information about Oaxaca. The irony being, of course, that even when you're right here it's pretty difficult to tell what's going on.

Days later I am left wondering what exactly happened. Having shown that the government retains absolute control, did Ruiz let the few brave enough to return in the afternoon have their crumbs of commemoration? Or did Ruiz back down? Did the APPO win again on the anniversary of the battle for Radio Universidad?

Read the whole, confusing non-episode here.