Oaxaca Roundup

Despite all the fun we've had with my new do, it's not all peaches and cream in Oaxaca. The city, as always, is roiled in contradiction.

By outward appearances things are good. Tourism is up overall, though there's a momentary, post-spring break lull now before the summer season begins in earnest (this from a long time Spanish teacher who tells me that May enrollment is always tranquilo before June and July bring the summer backpackers and vactioners to town). Cafes and galleries are all open, and there's plenty of street art, music, and fireworks to be enjoyed on the weekends.

Get beyond the main blocks of the centro, however, and things are slightly different. Shots were fired this week between rival gangs at the UABJO, the big, ever turbulent Benito Juarez University in Oaxaca City. You may remember this account of elections for the director of the law school, which involved some 200 police in riot gear. It seems now that the fighting is between the former general director of the Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales and the man who attempted to replace him. It's harder to follow then the election results coming out of Zimbabwe, and fighting broke out on campus this past Tuesday. Police responded with gas and carted people away.

On a different, and fairly disturbing note, two indigenous radio show hosts were reported murdered Wednesday in the Triqui town of San Juan Copala read an English article here). Here's a blurb from the Oaxaca Study Action Group which summarizes the events, though I can't vouch for accuracy:

Two indigenous triqui women who worked at the community radio station La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (The Voice that Breaks the Silence), in the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala (Mixteca region), were shot and murdered while on their way to Oaxaca city to participate in the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of Oaxaca. Three other people were injured.

. . . According to prelimary reports, the women had left the station, which is part of the Network of Indigenous Community Radio Stations of the Southeast (Red de Radios Comunitarias Indígenas del Sureste), around 1:00 PM. They were travelling in a truck on their way to Oaxaca city, but were ambushed on the outskirts of the community Llano Juarez.

The two community radio activists were supposed to coordinate the working group for Community and Alternative Communication: Community Radio, Video, Press, and Internet, at the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the People of Oaxaca, which was to begin today (Wednesday) in the auditorium of Seccion 22 of the teachers union in Oaxaca.

This obviously has people concerned, though most of the chatter is limited to the Internet, as far as I've seen, and not any actual activity on the streets.

In the meantime, a pair of public school teachers I've spoken with are dreading the upcoming, annual teacher planton scheduled for May. For those who don't know, the teacher strike of 2006 was unusual not for the strike itself but for the severe government response and ensuing community resistance. The teachers' union strikes every year to demand pay and benefits increases, as well as school supplies, school infrastructure, and greater resources for students. Each year the demands are met with a show of resistance by the government, the teachers camp in the zocalo for a month, and then everybody agrees to settle. Not so in 2006, but most of us know that story by now. If not, click here and here for background.

One of the reasons teachers may not be looking forward to the event is because their attendance is compulsory, including the part where everybody sleeps on the cold stones of the zocalo overnight or takes turns keeping vigil. One more example of political might in Oaxaca: teachers don't take to the streets simply to support the cause, but because their livelihoods depend on it. Much like government employees who are required to sit in the amphitheater seats every year for the Guelaguetza: the governor makes sure there are no empty spaces in front of the cameras.

One last item of interest in Oaxaca right now: security patrols have increased significantly in the past two weeks. Convoys of pickup trucks run in threes throughout the city, loaded down with the black clad, machine gun toting security agents of the Federal Preventive Police. The increase in forces, some 150 patrols, coincides with the appointment of a new director of the PFP (Spanish initials), and is said to be specific to Oaxaca. My guess is it has to do with increased drug violence, but is also inextricably related to whatever madness is going on with the high profile kidnappings of businessmen in the city over Semana Santa (Easter week). I haven't heard anything recently, but the guesswork ran the gamut from pointing the finger at disgruntled terrorists to the governor himself disappearing people who may know too much or have simply become inconvenient to have around. Either way, it makes for interesting reading.

Okay. Gotta go eat fresh tamales from the organic market. So it's not all bad in Oaxaca after all. Like I said, a city of contradictions.

Fire

The hills are burning west of Oaxaca. A band of fire has been aggressively advancing along the mountainside since midday. So far it's on the sparsely populated part, as best I can see. Perhaps there are homes in jeopardy on the other side, the side we can't see and never think about. Farther south, and closer to the city, there are definitely homes that could be in danger if the blaze blows the other way. Flames were visible in the daylight, even. I cannot even venture a guess at the distance between our apartment and the hillside, but I would not be surprised to learn that it is 10-20 miles. Then again, maybe it's only five. How can you tell these things from the porch rail?

My friend Santiago says it's not an accident. There are two villages up there in the mountains that have political differences; this is one of the ways these things get settled. Somebody started the fire with a specific purpose, and probably due to the extreme dryness and steady winds today it has spun out of control. Maybe tomorrow, Santiago says, we'll hear about the gang battles between the village politicians. In the meantime we watch fire consume the night, we stand back, we wonder, and we worry for the desert and the homes that dot the hillside.

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.

Section 59 Hunger Strike

A couple days ago I posted an update from Nancy Davies on the efforts of Section 59 of the teachers' union to recoup backpay promised by the government since 2006 when the teachers of Section 22 went on strike. The irony, as Nancy pointed out, is that the strike-breakers are now every bit as disillusioned with the governor as the original Section 22 strikers were back in '06.

Today Section 59 is at it once more. I've just come from the zocalo, where two dozen or so teachers from Section 59 are encamped on the stone plaza, lying on sleeping bags, blankets, and cardboard boxes amid a raft of signage announcing their hunger strike in the face of a lying and unjust government.

Just so everybody understands: Section 59 teachers were recruited by the state government--promised money, school improvements, and what have you--to report to work and to denounce Section 22, in 2006, when Section 22 protested against the government's tactics of first ignoring teachers' complaints and then committing human rights violations amid the escalating, state sanctioned violence as the government attempted, repeatedly, to break the strike over a period of five and a half months. (See here and here for background.) As the situation in the capital deteriorated, Governor Ruiz needed some friends from the teachers' union on his side; thus Section 59 was given plenty of incentive and public visibility. And now they don't feel they've been dealt with squarely.

Their demands include immediate payment of all promised salaries, an opportunity to buy lands on which to develop schools (I have no idea where this comes from; perhaps it was mentioned at one point as an incentive to get them to work when their brethren were striking), and, if I understand correctly, which is never a guarantee, immediate action by the government to resolve the current condition of a government "held hostage" by the political maneuverings of Section 22. I mentioned all this to Jenna today, and her response was "They're gonna starve!"

It's true, too. There's something preposterous and beautifully ironical to Section 59 teachers camping out in the zocalo to demand their due. This is exactly how the conflict of 2006 began. First the teachers camped out and were ignored. Then the government laid the early morning bum-rush on the encampment, and the teachers fought back. Then* the governor called up Section 59 to help save a little public face and maybe put a good spin on things, which didn't really happen. And now Section 59 is crying foul?

Seriously. You couldn't make this up any better. If the two dozen or so teachers of Section 59 who are in the zocalo tonight are serious, then they better get ready for the long haul. All this reeks of a publicity stunt, but who knows. Maybe they've finally seen how Ruiz treats his people, and they're determined to protest the abuse. I'm not saying that's how it is. Just maybe one explanation.

*A dramatically stream-lined version of events