By ROBERT JOE STOUT
ON OCTOBER 27, 2006, just before Oaxaca, Mexico’s traditional Día de los Muertos holidays, armed gunmen stormed a barricade set up by members of the Peoples Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) and shot and killed American cameraman Brad Will. News photos flashing around the world triggered thousands of tourist cancellations. U. S., Canadian, and European governments warned travelers to stay away. The negative publicity jarred Mexico’s federal government into sending 4,000 soldiers and militarized preventive police (PFP) to tear down the barricades and occupy the center of the city.
From a tourist standpoint the federal police were worse than the striking teachers whose summer-long campout had resembled an extended neighborhood picnic. Kids, dogs, guitars, simmering bean pots, and pickup soccer games had filled the zocalo. The protesters had chatted with tourists and local residents, made up lyrics to their own songs and commuted back and forth to their home neighborhoods, often leaving their children to watch the makeshift camps while they were gone.
By contrast the PFP brought in huge tanketas (armored vehicles equipped with power hoses, video cameras, and snowplow-like rams), troop carriers, and supercharged police pickups to block street corners throughout the city’s main tourist and business district. Fully armored and in uniform, the PFP rifled through briefcases and backpacks. Many women refused to go past them because the guards would force them into doorways, paw them, and threaten them sexually. (With typical Oaxacan flair, locals dubbed the heavily armored PFP “Robocops” because of their resemblance to the automatons of Hollywood movie fame.)
By mid-November most of Oaxaca’s downtown hotels had shut their doors. Area restaurants laid off more than 9,000 workers. Schools throughout the state closed; teachers who usually were among the most consistent contributors to local economies hustled jobs as repairmen, street vendors, and musicians. Throughout the state graffiti labeled Governor Ulisés Ruiz “assassin,” “fascist,” and “thief.” Arrests of popular assembly leaders and night-rider harassment and intimidation of others failed to deter continuing protest marches and denunciations.
The leaders of the popular assembly insisted that Governor Ruiz had to go. So did politicians and churchmen throughout the country. Father Hugo Valdemar Romero, spokesman for the Archdioceses of Mexico, urged Ruiz to appeal to his Christian conscience and step down. “If he is the reason the conflict is continuing he should retire and not egoistically cling to power,” Father Romero insisted. But Ruiz ignored the Archdioceses and warned other governors from his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that they might be the next to be deposed if popular movements were allowed to overthrow elected state executives.
Mexican law grants the power to depose a governor to the federal senate but in late 2006 the conservative National Action Party (PAN) government had other problems. Opposition party candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed to be Mexico’s legitimately elected president and for months after the July 2 national elections he held Mexico City captive by turning its main thoroughfare, the Paseo de la Reforma, into a huge campsite, stalling business and blocking federal government activities.
Incoming PAN president-elect Felipe Calderón, perceived by many to be weak and to have won the narrow presidential election fraudulently, needed a public relations boost in order to appear decisive and strong. On November 25, five days before his lame duck PAN predecessor Vicente Fox left office, the PFP, reinforced by army units, state and local police, and hundreds of armed vigilantes, attacked 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,” the Oaxaca Las Noticias and Mexico City Proceso correspondent Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. He continued:
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]. We didn’t know what to do, we ran towards the hill and the people continued shouting…. I don’t know if they beat everybody but there were heartrending women’s shouts. I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t able to help, I remained impotent. As if we were delinquents, in order to save our lives, or at least keep from being beaten, we climbed Fortin hill, like refugees so they couldn’t find us.
Matias finally made his way back to his newspaper office but hundreds who’d been in the center of the city weren’t that fortunate. The federal police, abetted by civilian paramilitaries, spared no one. They apprehended more than 300 people and beat and teargassed hundreds more. By nightfall, 141 of the more than 300, bloody and without shoes and coats, were indicted for federal crimes and forced to sign false confessions.
Over 80 percent of those arrested and tortured had nothing to do with the APPO march. 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 in Nayarit, Tamaulipas, and the Estado de Mexico. A number of women and men reported that 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.”
Fear continues to stalk the Oaxacan countryside. State authorities have filed apprehension orders for hundreds of persons involved with or sympathetic to the popular movement and have accused both human rights workers and Catholic priests of inciting citizens to revolt. Arrests continue and vigilantes identified as out-of-uniform police routinely sequester and physically manhandle APPO leaders and spokespersons like Florentino López, who was stopped after leaving a meeting, thrown into a pickup with two companions, blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten before finally being released.
“The biggest danger is that the government follows a doctrine that no changes should be prompted by popular movements, only by political parties,” Father Manuel Arias, the spokesman for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, told me. “They are criminalizing any attempts at changes. Every group that supports these movements becomes, by definition, criminal.” These include human rights organizations, the Catholic Church, and ad hoc citizens’ groups like those organized to take food and medicines to demonstrators and political prisoners. The state government-sponsored Radio Ciudadana attacked priests for giving medical aid and churches that gave sanctuary to those fleeing potential torture, Father Arias asserted. “They’re practically saying we’re criminals for denouncing the repression in Oaxaca.”
Announcers for the station, which operates without a legal federal license, urged parishioners not to go to mass and “not to give offerings to maintain guerrilla priests. “We won’t rest until these two-faced false redeemers are thrown out of Oaxaca!” they insisted.
Vigilante gunmen riddled an automobile that Padre Carlos Franco Pérez had parked in front of a medical facility set up in his parish to minister to those wounded by the November 25 police purge. Others threatened to kill Padre Francisco Alfredo Mayrén for participating in human rights negotiations involving APPO members.
Ruiz’s government is so restrictive of criticism of any kind, real or implied, that he dispatched armed state police to barricade the Santo Domingo temple in the city of Oaxaca’s central district to prevent Bishop Raúl Vera, one of Mexico’s most revered churchmen, from presiding over a scheduled ecumenical visit.
“To pray for peace is not a political act,” a spokesperson for Bishop Vera told the press. “It’s clear that the government does not respect organizations that defend human rights. It harassed and intimidated persons who otherwise would have participated in the event.” Bishop Vera’s Oaxacan hosts moved the visit to a site outside the barricades, where the bishop told reporters, “When the force of reason fails and there’s no other way to retain power, then the only thing remaining is the truncheon.”
Despite federal attempts to categorize the repression in Oaxaca as “a local matter” and Ruiz’s pronouncement that “Oaxaca is safe for tourists,” information about the brutal treatment of innocent civilians has worked its way into international awareness. The International Civil Commission for the Observation of Human Rights released a highly condemnatory account in March after spending nearly two months interviewing government officials and victims of the repression. A few days later, José Luis Soberanes, Mexico’s human rights ombudsman, filed a report that alleged widespread infractions, although Soberanes failed to mention Governor Ruiz by name. (Last fall Ruiz blasted Soberanes for “exceeding his authority” in rejecting a report of earlier violations and the ombudsman apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor.)
Mexican church officials led by the archbishop of Morelia Alberto Suárez reported that during their visit to the Vatican Pope Benedict had expressed concern about the violence in Oaxaca. And justices of Mexico’s Supreme Court have indicated that they are considering launching their own investigation of the repressions in Oaxaca, particularly the PFP’s part in the November 25 arrests. Mexican law authorizes the Court to make independent investigations but it seldom does so and when it does it moves very slowly, as it has in the case of the 2006 Atenco massacre and the indictment of journalist Lydia Cacho for publishing a book about politically protected pedophiles. Human rights commission reports are not binding on state governors, as evidenced by current federal government secretary Ramirez’s record when he was governor of Jalisco from 2002–06. He refused to act on any of more than 600 violations, including those involving protesters at the World Economic Forum in Guadalajara.
Forced underground after the November 25 repression, APPO nevertheless retained its identity. The November 25 Committee, primarily funded by Oaxaca artist Francisco Toledo, paid bail and legal services to obtain the release of a number of “prisoners of conscience” and the women of Coordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca defied state authorities and scheduled public forums on violence against women and formed advocacy groups to demand the release of those still incarcerated. Teachers throughout the state battled—sometimes physically—to regain jobs from which they’d been displaced by PRI-hired scabs.
Both they and APPO benefited when Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s conservative government passed legislation overhauling the government employee social security system in May 2007. The new regulations reduced benefits, extended the age at which one could retire and privatized funding. Teachers’ organizations throughout Mexico banded together in opposition and looked to Oaxaca’s embattled union for leadership. The state’s protesting teachers and APPO became symbols of effective resistance. Dissenting teachers’ unions adopted APPO slogans and embraced their social causes, including the prosecution of human rights violators and the release of prisoners of conscience.
Mexico’s federal government’s refusal to acknowledge that problems exist in Oaxaca and its insistence that its police acted in self-defense to quell a potential riot last November have enabled Ruiz to maintain his hold on his governorship and the millions of dollars that go with it. Nevertheless the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca continues to meet, to march, and to demand that he be deposed. In the meantime, thousands of small businesses have folded, tourism is the lowest it has been in forty years, and thousands of Oaxacans, unjustly criminalized, struggle to make sense of death squads, torture, PFP barricades, and illegal arrests.
Robert Joe Stout has written about Mexico for a variety of publications, including America, Commonweal and Notre Dame Magazine. He was a member of two Rights Action emergency human rights delegations to Oaxaca and witnessed many of the events described. His most recent book is Why Immigrants Come to America: Braceros, Indocumentados and the Migra is due out soon from Praeger. He can be reached at [email protected]
