The people of Oaxaca vs. the dinosaur

Ripples on the surface of the Internet have started to swirl around the much loved city of Oaxaca as former visitors read of how its people have risen up in nonviolent protests and barricades to protest the repression, violence and incompetence of their governor, Ulises Ruiz, one of the last of the Mexican PRI party’s “dinosaurs.”

The story, which is now three months in the making, has just started to receive coverage in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and other major media. But it has become a preoccupation on the radar screens of many who are following e-mail listservers, blogs, youtube.com videos and the Mexican newspapers.

Virtually everyone who has visited the capital of Oaxaca state has at least gotten a bit of a crush on it – its enchanting music and festivals, its beautiful crafts, its incredibly diverse indigenous communities and its striking and often ancient architecture. And now, in the midst of those wonderful, stately stone buildings framing the central plaza and its surrounds, there is a strike going on which has spun out of control of the government and into the control of an “Assembly of the People of Oaxaca,” the APPO, which has achieved a mass mobilization with a single demand, the resignation of the state’s governor.

The strike began in May as a rather traditional and in some ways tired ritual. It was the annual protest of the teachers’ union, the SNTE, seeking salary raises that might lift them a bit up from the bottom of the national averages where they have long languished.

Gov. Ruiz was initially distracted from attending to the negotiations because he was preoccupied with efforts to elect his party’s Roberto Madrazo as president in the national elections in July. When he did become involved he ordered police repression of the strike which resulted in dozens of injuries. Since then, a cycle of nonviolent resistance and violent repression has spiraled upward to what has now become a major flash point and crisis.

Support for the teachers spread rapidly and members of many municipalities and more than 200 NGOs rallied to their support. Sympathy for the teachers was coupled with long simmering frustration, fear, anger and disgust with the fraud, repression and government mismanagement that many saw as endemic in the Ruiz administration.

By June 29 the multiple protests had reached the stage of mass mobilization that included parents, children and workers from all walks of life in a “megamarch” of 500,000 Oaxaque?os 12 kilometers long. Then, during the course of the summer, the governor lost control of the downtown. He canceled the famous “Guelaguetza” festival and stopped appearing in public at all.

At this point in late August, the downtown government offices have all been occupied or closed by protesters. Most businesses – especially those associated with tourism – are desperate for an end to the disruption and violence. Police and government-affiliated paramilitary now enter the area only furtively in jeeps and motorcycles for drive by shootings in the dark. The APPO has effectively occupied it with barricades and the establishing of a people’s curfew to limit the incursions of those nighttime attacks.

Calls for the federal government to intervene have so far gone unanswered. President Vicente Fox has his hands full with protests in Mexico City itself over alleged fraud in the July 2 election. The dynamics of party politics at the national and state level add to the complexity.

At the national level, Felipe Calderon, the presidential candidate for Fox’s party, the PAN, was declared the victor on July 2 by only the thinnest of margins. Manuel Lopez Obrador, his opponent from the PRD, has mounted a national protest campaign, alleging electoral fraud and continuing to demand a full recount of the votes. Fox is scrambling for allies in the defense of Calderon’s victory.

In states like Oaxaca, where the PAN base is small, he must consider turning to PRI bosses like Ruiz. But he can only do so with the profound ambivalence. Fox’s own election six years ago was fought for precisely to end the PRI’s 70 years of iron-fist and velvet-glove repression, cooptation and electoral fraud.

In Oaxaca, Fox faces the dilemma of either standing behind a governor who seems to have effectively lost functional legitimacy, authority and control of his capital or support a mass movement peopled to a large extent by folks he fears would support Obrador. This crisis will surely be one of the most important tests of Fox’s statesmanship in the declining months of his presidency.

It would seem that he needs to find a way to restore public order and public trust in Oaxaca by negotiating a peaceful, if not graceful, exit for its governor in order to preserve and enhance his own legitimacy as a good-faith broker in the stormy process of democratic electoral change which is buffeting Mexico this year.

For anyone who has sat in the central plaza sipping a cool drink, enjoying one of the huge tasty tortillas characteristic of Oaxaca and delighting in the happy people and joyful music filling the square, it is difficult to not feel compassion for the struggles of the folks now squatting there behind barricades as police and paramilitaries pass by in Jeep Cherokees to shoot randomly and then drive away.

Gray Cox lives in Bar Harbor. While teaching at the College of the Atlantic he has visited Mexico, including Oaxaca, extensively.