Events in Oaxaca have taken a turn for the worse (see here and here). A brief summary:
In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to
public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and
against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.
The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack
the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca. The teachers,
without guns, repel this attack.
A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the
teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported
by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or
removal of the corrupt governor.
At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government,
many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local
self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO,
to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin
respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority
indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power
and left in poverty.
The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal
respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious
population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs.
They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year
since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to
function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to
leave). Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the
city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.
A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and
access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile
radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began
broadcasting from a public university. Supporters of the movement took
over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while
state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some
stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long
excluded from public conversation.
The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is
an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will
of Indymedia. Days later, the Mexican federal government sends
militarized police into the state. They do not go after the murderers,
but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent
social movements from the city of Oaxaca. At least one boy is killed
by a federal police tear-gas canister.
This
disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple
of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent
invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article
by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme. You know the routine
by now. First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in
particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in
the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist
income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put
their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the
future. Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't
say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is
being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the
riot troops. Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed
wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:
The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos
as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and
barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.
This video
of the invasion tells a more accurate story. Cast your eye upon the
row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down
upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with
their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as
big as a two-story house. We've seen those outfits before, of course,
in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those
in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics
are typically on their side.
Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot
police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your
people!"). These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps
because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be
mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently
oppressing. Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human.
Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in
five, ten years?---to robots of war.
