Our Life and Times

Oaxaca repression unites Mexican movements

President Vicente Fox and Oaxaca's Governor Ulises Ruiz decided to militarize the conflict in Oaxaca by sending in the PFP (Policía Federal Preventiva) Oct. 28. Since then about 5,000 of them have occupied the central square that had been the property of the mass movement that started in May. They have also instituted virtual martial law, randomly detaining and torturing activists. They act in concert with plain clothes police and armed members of the PRI (Ruiz's party) who have killed 17.

Thousands of students at Oaxaca's National Autonomous University Benito Juarez and members of APPO (Asociación Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca) battled the PFP forces for seven hours on Nov. 2, successfully preventing the government forces from entering the university grounds and taking over barricaded streets outside of it.

SPEAKING SAME LANGUAGE

Since the government sent in the PFP, a militarized police force created in the late 1990s, the mass movement in Oaxaca, which started out as a teachers' strike, has become a national crisis and has also garnered support from activists around the world. Teachers in the state of Michoacan have struck in solidarity. In the state of Mexico, teachers have initiated their own Asociación Popular del Pueblo de Mexico. Numerous solidarity marches and rallies have taken place in Mexico City as well as a dozen other states.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who lost the fraudulent presidential elections and is scheduled to assume the oppositional post of "legitimate president" on Nov. 20, has come out solidly in support of the activists in Oaxaca, something he refrained from doing while he was campaigning for the July elections.

Subcomandante Marcos, still touring the country as part of the Other Campaign, has also been rallying support for APPO. Prior to the July elections Marcos seemed as if he was bent on totally isolating the EZLN from the movement supporting López Obrador. Now it appears that APPO, and the state repression being meted out to the people of Oaxaca, is getting various national progressive forces to speak the same language.

NO NORMAL TRANSITION

The coming period will be crucial as the new PAN leader, Felipe Calderón, tries to take the presidential reins on Dec. 1 and prove that he can lead the country in some normal manner. AMLO'S Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) for its part has vowed to do everything possible to prevent Calderón from taking power that day, and the movement in support of AMLO still seems serious about its promise to make it impossible for Calderón to govern effectively.

Who, or what, is APPO? That is a question that APPO is seriously trying to define even as the PFP attempts to round up those who have acted as its "provisional leadership" in the past few months. During the weekend of Nov. 9-12, APPO is holding a "Constituent Congress" to define statutes and draft a declaration of principles. Its provisional leadership was dissolved with the opening of the Congress.

Since it was formed June 17, in response to police attacks on the teachers' strike, APPO has functioned as an umbrella organization that for the first time in southern Mexico has successfully united numerous organizations of students, teachers, campesinos, women, and guerrilla groupings. It makes decisions based on consensus, and each time Ruiz and Fox have rejected their attempts to have a dialogue on Oaxaca's problems they have radicalized their demands.

The specific demand for Ruiz to be removed and the general demand for "desaparición de poderes" (literally "disappearance of powers") has increasingly become a problem that the government can't tiptoe around. They tried to divide the movement by making it possible for teachers to return to classes, but when APPO made it clear on Oct. 24 that a return to classes would not stop the movement and instead called for a "united plan of action" and a "popular peaceful insurrection" to coincide with Calderón taking power Dec. 1, the PFP was brought in four days later to crack down.

A sense of where APPO is headed was given by Zenen Bravo, president of the "debate table" at the meeting Nov. 11, who declared, "We intend to initiate a serious and profound process of discussion with all sectors of the mass movement in order to elaborate a program of struggle and government that will reclaim the aspirations of the great masses of people, with the end of conquering power and putting it at the service of all."

Marcos Leyva, one of the "provisional leaders," characterized the movement as a "gestating unarmed revolution." He continued, "The people have demonstrated that they can carry out a struggle in the streets, at the barricades, with the government forces, but also with a set of ideas, and concrete proposals."

--Mitch Weerth