A teachers’ strike is an annual event in Oaxaca, Mexico. Usually it just lasts a week or two and the teachers get a token raise. But this year, it lasted and lasted and escalated into a street battle with the police. The trouble shows no sign of ending, and at least one American journalist has been killed. Analysis from The Nation.
What is this really all about, other than school funding?
What are its implications for Mexico’s future?
As you can see from my location, I am in the middle of this situation. I haven’t got time to come up with a comprehensive report just this minute- have to finish a large order of kaleidoscopes for a gallery in Monterrey, not to mention that I write slowly and incoherently and have to spend a lot of energy editing my glurge, but I will give a few quick impressions and try to organize a more complete report in the next couple of days.
My wife and I moved to Oaxaca in 1987, (I first visited when I was fifteen, in 1966) and have loved living here. It’s a beautiful, fascinating city with the best climate in the world, , a large and vibrant international community, and probably the most corrupt PRI-ridden government in the entire country. The last election was the first in at least fifty years where the PRI didn’t win what they like to call “El Carro Completo”, every post in every town from governor to the equivalent of dog catcher, which they don’t have, and the “winning” candidates have never been shy about buillding mansions and buying Lincoln Navigators as soon as they take office. This election was so blatantly rigged, the actual winner, Gabino Cue, so overwhelmingly popular, and Ulysses Ruiz of the PRI so widely hated that people finally said A La Chingada and refused to sit quietly and be robbed for another six years. Hence the riots.
There is also a lot of somewhat mysterious behind-the-scenes manuevering between various ex-governors, Felipe Calderon and Vicente ,Fox, which no gringo is ever going to really understand, (actually all Mexican politics are pretty surreal from a non-Mexican point of view) so I won’t try to explain.
Anyway things aren’t exactly as bad as they may seem on Fox News; it’s annoying to have the streets blocked in an unpredictable way so you never can be sure you’re going to get where your trying to get, but there has been absolutely no danger for foreigners from either side as long as we don’t get caught in the middle of a street fight (the reporter from New Jersey who was killed was filming a battle and just got in the way of a couple of bullets).
One quick sketch before I head out to the cemetary - it’s Dia de los Muertos and we are visiting some departed friends: my wife is an evangelistic Christian who has been against the strike from the start. A lot of her friends are small businesswomen whose shops and travel agencies and so forth are being ruined because there aren’t any tourists, and she’s also upset because the strikers paint revolutionary slogans all over the walls of her church along with any other flat surface that isn’t moving, and some that are- they were on TV last night spraypainting FUERA ULYSSES on the riot shields of the cops, who didn’t seem to object very much. Elena is also studying Cinema production at a local school, so yesterday morning she took her video equipment downtown planning to make a documentary about the Commie Barbarians taking over the city. The strikers are used to being spied on by PRI thugs pretending to be journalists, and they don’t like it much, so they “arrested” her and were going to take her to one of the tribunals they have set up around town to deal with, mostly, petty criminals and PRI spies. Usually if they decide someone is guilty they tie them to a post for a few hours with a sign around their neck describing the crime, and then make them clean up the street and carry off some garbage, then they let them go.
(half the regular police hate Ulysses as much as everybody else does, so they are efffectively on strike, and the other half is strutting around …in face masks and black helmets shooting at people, so the only law enforcement downtown is in the hands of the strikers).
Anyway Elena managed to persuade her captors that she wasn’t a spy, and hung around with them until about three a.m. listening to their stories and sharing their tortillas and beans, and came home totally converted to their side.
Gotta go now, los Muertitos are waiting. I’ll try to be a little more coherant and give more details about what’s going on when I have time. Que les vaya bien…
Thanks for your thoughts, Mapache; I’m looking forward to the second version. It really brings clarity to what looks, from the outside, like an armed revolt over teacher’s wages.
Wow! On the spot reporting from the street! Abso-fam-lutely-tastic! Keep it coming!
So, it has nothing to do with the disputed presidential election? I had thought it might.
Take care, Mapache, history is full of situations that everyone assumed was going to simmer rather than explode.
A couple of trivial questions, in the hope that circumstances will permit you the luxury…
Los Muertitos? The little dead ones? That like “trick or treaters”, kids?
And Mapache? Not wryly named after the sleazy pustule of a generallisimo in The Wild Bunch?
It began weeks before the election.
November the 2nd is the Day of the Death, it´s specially… uniquely celebrated in Mexico; people visit cementeries, bring flowers, candies, food and other presents for the death. It´s almost like a carnival.
Looking forward to it. Nothing like getting the Real Deal from a firsthand perspective.
Actually it does have a lot to do with the electoral fraud that went down in August, in a convoluted Mexican way.
I’m not going to be able to come up with cites, since almost everything I report is based on rumor, second and third hand reports, talks with people on the street, and some converations with political types who don’t want to be quoted, but then almost everything in Mexican politics has a Through the Looking Glass kind of complex surrealism. (Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s best known novelist, said several years ago that he was abandoning his surrealist style of wriiting- he called it Magical Realism- because real life Mexican politics are so impossibly surreal that nothing he could imagine would be as outrageous as reality…)
There are supposed to be three main political parties: the Partido de la Revolucion Institucional- PRI, the Partido de Accion Nacional- PAN, and the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica- PRD. The PRI is the old guard, has run Mexico on its own for seventy years, and is and has been for a long time nothing but a kleptocracy. PAN is the right wing, Catholic party, allied with a lot of the newer ultrarich families in the North (most of whom got ultrarich at least partly through narcotrafico) and the PRD is the left/populist party, strongest in the South where the very large majority are desperately poor. The PRD candidate for President, Andres Lopez Obrador, had lead all the preelection polls by a wide margin, while the PRI had splintered into at least three main groups: “PRInosaurios”, who thought they could keep on with the old style of winning elections by massive fraud and force, lead by Roberto Madrazo; a not-very-effective group of would be reformers lead by nobody in particular, and the so called modernizers whose leader was Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the teacher’s union, who started out as one of Madrazo’s chief allies but became his bitter enemy and broke from the PRI just before the election. She apparently made some kind of deal with the PAN to help defeat Lopez Obrador. The PAN and the PRI then joined forces with the powerful business owning families and launched an enormous (and illegal) propaganda campaign to persuade Mexicans that LO was some kind of combination of Kim Dae Jung, Fidel Castro, and Satan.
The teacher’s strike and accompaning violence was supposed to be blamed on LO,
and deliberately set up to outtrage as many citizens as possible.
The problem with the above scenario is that the teacher’s unions, in Oaxaca and Chiapas especially, consider themselves at least partly independent of the national union and often don’t behave the way the party leaders tell them to. So it’s complicated, right? More in a short while.
(bolding mine)
For the non-Spanish speakers out there, this roughly translates to a hearty “Fuck THAT!” It made me chuckle to see it thrown, untranslated, into the middle of the English paragraph, because it’s such an essentially Mexican expletive. Love it. 
The photo sequence circulating on the internet looks very much to me like the photographer was deliberately targeted. One photo sequence shows a gunman pointing something directly at the camera, (presumably from the photographers lens) the next is a posthumous photo of the photographer recently ventilated right in the chest… Hm.
You are quite right, 'luci (may I call you 'luci wwithout offending?) Things might get a lot worse, or they might not. A well-known saying down here goes “In Mexico, nothing ever happens until it happens” meaning that what’s going on right now might not hold any clues to what’s going to go on next week. Anyway there’s nothing I can do about it, and I can’t leave. I’m sixtyfive years old* and partlydisabled, I have a family, and since I have either been self-employed or worked outside the USA most of my life my total Social Security benefits amount to $72 per month. All my assets are in my house and workshop; the best I could do in the USA is apply for a job as a WalMart greeter or the like, so I just have to hang on and hope things get better.
*Minor typo in my first post- I came to Oaxaca for the first time in 1956, not 1966.
Los Muertitos: the suffix can mean little; like gato/cat -gatito/kitten. It can also indicate the feminine version of a name like Juan/Juanita; and in this case it’s an indication of afffection, kind of like -chan in Japanese, so it translates as “the dear dead ones”. Mapache just means raccoon; I used to have a pet coon and I wanted a seven letter name for a password before I joined the SD.
Yes, that’s true, only I don’t think the killer had any idea he was an American, and probably wouldn’t have shot him if he had. The were shooting from a fair distance, mostly with pistols, and aren’t very good shots anyway.
Here is a link to the video of the victim’s death, taken by his own camera.
What it shows is some protesters were at one of their barricades when some porros or armed goons of the PRI started taking popshots at them. The protesters chased them down the street and into a building where the goons continued firing. Eventually they came back out of the house and started firing at the retreating group of protesters and unfortunately the photographer was fatally wounded.
Several local low level government officials were detained for the shooting but have since mysteriously diasapperaed. This type of blatant disregard for justice and immunity from prosecution is what is at the root of the problems in the area. It was very common during the whole time the PRI ran the country but people aren’t as willing now to accept it as fate.
Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists is demanding a federal investigation into the death of Brad Will.
If anyone is still interested, here are a few comments on what’s been going on the past few days.
Wednesday and Thursday were the Dias de los Muertos, and very depressing. These festivals are at the heart of Mexican and especially Oaxacan tradition (I won’t try to describe them, but if anyone wants to know more googling Day of the dead brings up 163,000,000 references, and Dia de los Muertos 5,700,00 more). Usually on both nights (November 1st is the Dia de los Angelitos, dedicated to dead children, and the 2nd to all the other friends and family that have gone beyond) the cemetaries are jammed with people; families spnd the nights sitting by their family graves, eating and drinking and listening to Mariachis, while the children play a kind of hopscotch from one tomb to another and tourists and foreign TV crews roam around admiringly. This year, maybe one out of ten graves was decorated; a few more had a withered bunch of wild flowers but no altars, sand paintings, food offerings, and there weren’t more than a handful of tourists and no TV cameras. Outside on the road to the cemetery was the usual carnival with rides, music, taco and tamale and candied fruit stands, and no customers. Even the flower sellers weren’t getting any business, and these are usually their biggest nights of the year.
Aftter we visited the cemetery I took the family downtown to where the strikers had set up their alters as best they could. One of the customs is to place a portrait of the Muertos on the alter and I was surprised to see that instead of a few pictures of grandfather Wilfredo and greataunt Josfa a lot of the alters had fifty or sixty photos of mostly young people. Asked why, and we were told that, while the government claims five, or seven or twelve people have been killed by the paramilitaries, they count at least fifty, with a lot more “disappeared”, which amounts to the same thing.
Thursday was the Battle of the Shopping Mall, which there is only one of in Oaxaca, and which had been occupied by the strikers. All night Wednesday the airport was closed (by the government, not the strikers) while a wave of C130s arrived carrying several thousand federales, along with arms, ambulances, and “tanquetes”, heavy armoured trucks with water cannons, tear and pepper gas launchers, and things like snowplows on the front, kind of like the “scoops” in Soylent Green, and early Thursday morning they lined up on the street in front of the local University and started trying to push the strikers out. The protesters responded in force, throwing stones mostly, and overhead helicopters were pumping out more tear gas and making a lot of noise over loudspeakers. The most sophisticated weapons the strikers had were pieces of PVC pipe wrapped in wire, which they used to fire skyrockets- the kind they let off hundreds of at fiestas- at the cops. Eventually they escalated to Molotov cocktails, with which they set on fire a couple of the tanquetes (the crews got out unharmed). I have to admit the federales were pretty restrained in their responses; Fox and Calderon absolutely cannot afford to finish/start their terms with a massacre and although the feds all carried AK47s and pistols they were obviously under very strict orders not to shoot anyone, at least not while the TV crews were around. Crowds of people were converging on the scene from all over town, and by about noon the federales could see that they weren’t going to persuade everyone to shut up and go home so they more or less declared victory, pushed some of the burnedout busses blocking the avenue to one side with the tanquetes’ cowcatchers, and marched off. They anounced on all the TV stations that the streets were now clear and that Peace Was At Hand, while the strikers pushed the busses back on to the street as soon as they left. One of the few things the feds did accomplish was to teargas the Archbishop, who promptly filed a complaint with theCivil Rights Agency.
Meanwhile the Mexican Senate was passing a resolution, unanimously, telling Ulysses Ruiz that he should quit right now, which had never happened before in Mexican history, so UR sued the Senate.(?!) and was instantly told by the Supreme Court that he couldn’t. All this is absolutely unprecedented, especially the fact that all the PRI senators joined with the opposition parties to denounce one of their own, so nobody knows how it will come out.
Anyway on Friday I drove over, through a lot of obscure back streets that I discovered a few years back when the main road to the Mall was flooded, and saw that things were quite peaceful, that the streets were still blocked by hulks of trucks and busses, and that the strikers were busy piling up rocks and treetrunks to block more streets. Today was about the same.
Is anyone still interested? If so I’ll send more info whenever anything new happsns; if not I’ll shut up. Thanks for listening.
Mapache
I’m horribly interested, but have nothing useful to add. Stay safe.
Thanks for posting, Mapeche. It’s very interesting to hear something like this that hasn’t been filtered through umpteen layers of journalists/editors or of a government public affairs team.
