The Current Struggle of Oaxaca

by Nancy Romer

I have been in Mexico City for the last week observing and participating in the struggle that has captured the dreams and fears of the Mexican people—the struggle for workers rights and democracy in Oaxaca, a poor state with a mostly indigenous population. Reeling from the movement of international capital and the concomitant movement of people from the Mexican country side to the cities, the people of Oaxaca have created a struggle that has wide implications. Beginning in May, the teachers of the “democratic” wing of the national teachers union (section 22 of the SNTE), began a strike and encampment in the zocalo (main square) of Oaxaca, fully supported by parents and students, demanding higher salaries and support for buildings, supplies and money for students so they won’t have to work. Teachers in Oaxaca as teachers everywhere are civic and political activists who participate effectively in their communities; particularly in Oaxaca, their relationships to their communities are part of their everyday lives. The dynamic coalition of parents, teachers, and students is a model for all of us who want to see the schools be transformed into institutions that serve the needs of the people, especially the poor, instead of creating testing factories that sort people for the corporate economy. It also presents a model of how unions can engage in societal demands greater than the narrow confines of their contracts. Met with violent repression from the Mexican government, the teachers’ struggle expanded into a mass-based coalition, APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca), that includes people from over 935 groups of unions, civic organizations, neighborhoods, churches, universities, and beyond. Their demands have expanded to include the removal of the hated conservative governor Ulises Ruiz, who has given rich state contracts to construction companies of his friends and relatives to the detriment of the people’s basic services and has sold off historically significant publicly-owned works of art for his own aggrandizement. Oaxaquenos report that the city has become much more difficult to transverse with Ulises’ expensive and hated construction projects. His administration is considered so corrupt that the people of Oaxaca have developed an alternate government structure to provide basic services. APPO has also demanded a new state constitution that would use traditionally indigenous decision-making processes that they view as more truly democratic than the present state constitution. In Mexico, a parallel struggle has ensued calling for the recount of the federal election vote for president, charging vote fraud (sound familiar?) in the (s)election of Felipe Calderon who has the support of the US government and the International Monetary Fund . While some APPO activists support the progressive candidacy of Manuel Lopez Obrador over Calderon, most are skeptical about any electoral candidates and see their struggle as distinct from some of their supporters outside of Oaxaca who are more likely to conflate these parallel struggles; some Oaxaquenos fear that their struggle is being used by the electoralists. APPO has formal meetings in which important decisions are made, representing a bottom-up participatory structure; implementation of decisions is decentralized. When state and local police were sent in to tear down the encampment in Oaxaca’s zocalo last June, the battle began and continued throughout the summer, with an intense crescendo last week with a massive incursion of federal “preventive” troops, many in plain clothes, in Oaxaca. APPO estimates that nearly 30 people have been killed in Oaxaca since June, at least 8 in the last week, including teachers, students, parents, and at least one American, Brad Will, an Indymedia journalist. Many more have been wounded and more yet detained by the local police. Early on in the struggle, APPO activists erected barricades throughout the city as protection from attacks from armed thugs. Later they were appropriated by the people to create spaces of resistance—for kids to play soccer, for families to share meals and make music together; this in a culture with a tradition of “tequio” which requires every adult to perform some kind of ongoing community service as a contribution to the society. The zocalo was transformed into a performance space, featuring new videos of the recent events and struggles with the police and federal troops, music of the struggle, and people testifying about their lives and the troubles. These events were marked by a great outpouring of creativity and expression often by ordinary people, expressing joy, fear, and hope. The city of Oaxaca has been an intense dialectic of liberated zone and battleground. Each neighborhood, each union, each group of people engaged in the struggle runs their own process, controls their own barricades, creates their own ways of being. The central APPO represents and reflects the desires of these participating groups but the people themselves carry out the plan and create the details on the ground. The people are empowered by their own actions, communities and ideas.

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