Fear, questions of government’s legitimacy, now life as usual in Oaxaca

By Hope Bastian

People are scared in Oaxaca, Mexico, and this is not a new feeling. The last five months have been tense in Mexico, especially in the city of Oaxaca, where the public school teachers’ strike is now in its fifth month. Local and international headlines frequently list the names of teachers and community supporters who have been killed or detained by police and illegal militias supporting the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz.

U.S. journalist Brad Will and three Oaxacans were killed in October by militia members supporting the governor. In the same attacks, 23 people were injured and 20 teachers detained.

Teachers demand higher salaries

The conflict began in May when tens of thousands of teachers from all over the state of Oaxaca set up camp downtown in the state’s capital, Oaxaca, to demand higher salaries and more money for education in the second poorest state in Mexico. Although the teachers’ union has held similar protests for several years, they never lasted for more than a couple of weeks. This year, when the teachers went on strike, they vowed not to return to work until there were real changes.

When the strike began, I was living in Oaxaca. After a couple of weeks the strike seemed to become a part of everyday life for people in the capital city. Despite the fact that the historic center had become home to 40,000-70,000 teachers, local residents seemed to assimilate the strike as a normal part of the change of seasons, as unremarkable as the blooming flowers and arriving tourists.

There were some inconveniences: city buses had to be rerouted around the 60-odd downtown blocks occupied by the teachers, and many parents had to make alternative plans for their children. Otherwise, daily life and international tourism continued as usual. 

For the first month, there was a strange normalcy to the teachers’ encampment. People prepared their meals on open fires and sat under tarps strung across the narrow colonial streets that protected them from the hot sun and summer rain. They tended to small children and conversed with coworkers and their families in the downtime between marches and union meetings.

The teachers were friendly and happy to tell curious tourists about the strike. Street vendors set up shop, selling passing tourists everything from bootleg CDs and DVDs to socks and arts and crafts.

Schools lack basic resources

I often stopped to talk to the teachers on my way home from work in the evenings. Their stories of the rural communities where they worked portrayed a school system that lacked even the most basic resources: schools without walls, desks, bathrooms or books.

In marginalized communities, where kids come to the classroom with empty bellies, the teachers often had to use their own funds or ask students’ parents for money to pay for school supplies that should have been government provided.
In Mexico, the system for teacher placement assigns new teachers to rural schools, and most commute weekly between their homes and work places. The high cost of transportation adds up quickly and the teachers told me that their salaries don’t stretch far enough. For these reasons they came to Oaxaca to demand higher salaries and more money for the schools.

The police attack teachers

In the early morning hours of June 14, the calm was shattered when several thousand state police armed with riot shields, batons and tear gas attacked teachers sleeping on downtown sidewalks. It is unclear how many protestors died in the attack, but it is certain that the state’s use of violence backfired. Rather than breaking the movement, it made it stronger.

It quickly became apparent that the teachers’ union was not the only group in Oaxaca that wanted to see the governor gone. Still only partway through his second year in office, Ruiz has been criticized for the violent oppression of social movements in the state. The legitimacy of the election that brought him to power has also been questioned.

Just a couple days after the June 14 attack, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO by its initials in Spanish), a group made up of representatives of hundreds of local organizations, was formed. Its sole aim: removing the governor from power.

According to APPO supporters, Mexican law allows the Mexican federal government to intervene in the affairs of the state governments when there is substantial evidence that the state government has ceased to perform its functions or is unable to govern. Many of the group’s actions have focused on making it impossible for the state to perform its functions, by stopping the legislature from meeting and paralyzing the state’s bureaucracy.

Marches continue, put a dent in tourism

Through June and July, the teachers and APPO supporters continued their frequent “mega-marches,” rallying hundred of thousands of teachers and supporters to demand the governor’s removal. After protestors succeeded in canceling the Gueleguetza festival, one of the state’s largest tourist events of the year, local businesspeople began to politely suggest that the governor should resign before the protests further damaged the state’s tourism-dependent economy.

Since July, the atmosphere in Oaxaca has become increasingly tense. In August, state and federal police in plainclothes and unidentified gunmen began to shoot at the peaceful protest marches and arrest APPO leaders.
Supporters of APPO took over the state TV station and several local radio stations to help coordinate security. They used the airwaves to pass along information from listeners about suspicious vehicles seen heading toward areas controlled by protestors. They also set up evening roadblocks to avoid another June 14 by preventing traffic from entering downtown.

Second attack kills three

A second violent attack occurred Oct. 29 when Mexican President Vicente Fox sent armored tanks and 4,536 heavily armed Federal Preventative Police into the city. Water cannons pummeled APPO supporters with water and tear gas as helicopters circled the city, and police bulldozed APPO roadblocks. At day’s end, three people, including a 14-year-old boy, were dead. Ten people, including two police, were reported injured and more than 50 people were detained.

Fear and insecurity now pervade Oaxaca. Instead of protecting striking teachers from violence by illegal militia groups, the federal government is suppressing legitimate dissent by propping up a government that has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people it seeks to govern. Since June, the people of Oaxaca have been asking for the Mexican government to intervene to remove Gov. Ruiz from office. Instead the government came with its big guns to remove the people.

Hope Bastian is a native Tallahassean and freelance writer who recently returned from Oaxaca, Mexico, where she worked as an educator with Witness for Peace.