What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation:
Have Journalist Been Deliberately Murdered in Iraq by the US
Military?
Our new
CounterPunch newsletter, just out, Christopher Reed examines
the growing body count of journalists in Iraq and documents numerous
incidents where US troops have deliberately targeted reporters.
Charles Glass offers a
stark comparison of the uprooting of Palestians in the Galilee
during the 1948 war to the lush compensation of Israeli's living
on the same land who were displaced by the war on Lebanon. Remember, we are funded
solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
Amongst Flames of Resistance, Came Death,
Torture and a Movement Forced into Hiding
The
Dirty War of Oaxaca
By BARUCHA CALAMITY
PELLER
Latin Americas' ¨dirty war¨
of the 70s and 80s has reemerged in its most blatant form in
the case of Oaxaca, Mexico in the final days of November.
The APPO, the Popular Assembly
of The People of Oaxaca, whose struggle to oust the PRI party
governor Ulises Ruiz and to replace power with that of popular
assemblies began on June 14th with an attempt to violently evict
a sit-in of striking teachers. Six months later they find themselves
living clandestinely with federal warrants on their names and
on the run from the police.
In this past week, the government
of Mexico has adopted a ¨gloves off ¨ policy and has
clearly stated in the press its plans to do away with the popular
movement in Oaxaca before Friday, the 1st of December, when PAN
party Felipe Calderon was to take presidential office despite
protests by millions of voters around the country amidst the
fraudulent summer elections that stole the vote from PRD (Democratic
Revolution Party) candidate Lopez Obrador.
Thousands of Preventive Federal
Police, PFP, forces who entered the city of Oaxaca on the 28th
of October, prompted by the death of Indymedia journalist Brad
Will, are now in control of the local, state, and investigative
police branches, and have expanded their operations to outside
of the capital, Oaxaca City. A special operations department
of the PFP joined the existing force there, and armed patrols
circle the city.
The past week has resulted
in over 171 detained, a number that rises everyday. 142 of those
detained during weekend clashes were transported to a high security
prison in Nayarit, a state over a hundred miles north of Oaxaca.
The majority of these prisoners are out of communication with
the outside and are assumed to be suffering torture. Human Rights
organizations in Oaxaca and Nayarit say that they are aware of
at least 36 cases of torture, and the few families who have been
able to speak with their detained relatives say that they are
badly beaten and that women are being threatened with rape. There
is at least one report of a prisoner being tortured in order
to sign a false confession of having participated in the damages
to the capital under the pretext that the APPO paid him. Amongst
those detained there are many accounts of arbitrary detentions,
and prisoners who have nothing to do with the APPO. Human Rights
organizations in Oaxaca say that the combined number of women
raped by police or disappeared is over 60.
Participants in the Oaxacan
social movement only expect the conditions of repression to worsen,
especially with the entrance of Felipe Calderon of the PAN (National
Action Party) into presidency today. A week and a half ago Calderon
stated that upon entering into office he would do away with all
social movements, no matter how many dead would have to fall.
During the Saturday night roundup,
which resulted in at least 3 people killed and another 25 disappeared
in the same twenty four hours, a hotel worker said that he came
across a group of PFP officers who boasted to him that they had
already killed 13 people, and that the press would never know
because the bodies had been disappeared.
A Week of
Hunting
The form in which the government
is carrying out the operation to do away with the movement makes
it apparent that it is not only an operation, but a spectacle
of repression meant to cause psychological trauma and a widespread
fear to prevent further uprising.
The government has banned marches
in Oaxaca, and promised severe repression if mobilizations of
any kind are carried out, making it impossible to rally for the
200 political prisoners arrested over the weekend, or to demand
that the upwards of 25 people disappeared on Saturday and Sunday
be returned alive. Despite this, a small number of family members
of the detained and disappeared carried out a march in Oaxaca
City today.
Moreover, the last APPO radio,
Radio Universidad, was handed over to Benito Juarez Autonomous
University officials on Wednesday. The APPO sympathizers said
that the reason for their withdrawal was because of the lack
of people wiling to protect the radio under the threat of arrest
or disappearance, and because of the rumor that the Federal Preventive
Police would enter before five that night. Indeed, different
police forces operating in the city had been patrolling near
the Cinco Señores barricade at the entrance to the university
for days, and on Monday arrested three people leaving the radio,
including a French woman, Mille Sarah Ilitch Welch, who faces
deportation on Friday. Apparently there were many warrants out
on the radio hosts as well.
The radio was the artery of
communication and coordination for the movement in Oaxaca. Without
the radio, disappearances and arrests can go unnoticed, and Oaxacans
are left without a forum in which to organize and distribute
information. For the past month in Oaxaca, the only other radio
operating was Radio Ciurana, a PRI (Industrial Revolution Party)
supported radio whose hosts and callers often threaten APPO sympathizers.
In the days leading up to the "Mega Marcha" on the
25th of November, the radio was calling for PRIistas to throw
hot water and hydrochloric acid on marchers. The radio often
calls for movement offices to be burned and blatantly threatens
violence against many of the participants.
And while PRD and PAN parliamentary
representatives exchanged punches inside the Congress to gain
a space for governance in the days leading up to the inauguration
of Calderon, police forces in Oaxaca continued to carry out "cateos",
or house raids in Oaxaca, a regular practice that has gained
speed in the past days.
On Thursday November 30 there
were house raids throughout the city and in surrounding towns,
and 8 anarchists from the Ocupa Oaxaca collective were arrested
in Colonia Reforma.
Police claim that they have
a list and photos of 100 foreigners that they are searching to
arrest for their participation in the movement. Immigration officials
arrested an Argentinean. Beatriz Ana Livinter, and a Spaniard,
Alfonso Gutierrez Ferrando, yesterday.
The PFP also entered Zaalchia
on Thursday, a town 11 kilometers outside the capital where the
people ran the mayor and the local police out of the town months
ago, in protest of neoliberal policies threatening their land
and water. The invading PFP were ran out of Zaalchia, but not
before arresting 4 teachers.
In Ocatlan, the PFP entered
schools and suspended classes, leaving the school children terrified.
On Monday Frederick Carmona
Splinkter and a student were forcibly taken at gunpoint and tied
up in a neon red car outside the Faculty of Medicine and shots
were fired at the building of the faculty. The two kidnapped
later turned up in a detention center on Oaxaca.
People have seldom left their
houses this week in Oaxaca, and those involved in the movement
have only left to buy food, others have attempted to leave the
state to find refuge in other parts of the country. However,
police have set up roadblocks on highways leading to Mexico City,
and there are reports of people being taken off of buses, to
be searched and arrested.
The disappearances, arrests,
and rapes seem to be part of a government plan to force the popular
movement into a state of fear by causing the movement's thousands
of participants into geographical dispersion and into a state
of living clandestinely. Under these conditions, it is difficult
for people to organize, mobilize, or even communicate.
Night Terror
The heavy repression came after
a mega march on Saturday, November 25th. The APPO had called
for a peaceful march from a town outside of Oaxaca city to the
Zocalo, the center square occupied by the federal police since
their entrance into the city a month ago. The vision of the march
was to surround the police by creating a chain of marchers in
the streets around the Zocalo, essentially to reoccupy the city
by closing in on the occupying federal forces. The marchers planned
to camp in the streets for forty eight hours, to demand the exit
of Ulises Ruiz from power and the PFP from Oaxaca City.
Only an hour after the march
had arrived and surrounded the Zocalo, protesters built barricades
in the streets, handed out food, and yelled insults at the police
a block down. Not soon after, the first rounds of tear gas could
be heard on Acala Street, near the APPO sit-in of Santo Domingo
Plaza. This set off a six hour battle between protesters and
police, in which both sides retreated and advanced on the downtown
streets of Oaxaca City. The APPO stole city buses and cars and
drove them into police lines or burned them to create barricades
to defend Santo Domingo. Police shot continuous rounds of gas
at the heads and bodies of protesters.
During the course of the confrontation,
36 buildings were burned, Among the targets were; the Benito
Juarez Theatre, the Secretary of External Relations, the Superior
Tribunal of Justice, a number of banks and upscale hotels and
dozens of cars and busses to use as burning barricades.
Around eight o'clock that evening
protesters finally retreated from Santo Domingo, after PFP water
tanks began to advance from parallel streets and it seemed that
it was no longer possible to defend the space that APPO had occupied
for a month.
During the retreat, hundreds
of protesters ran up a narrow street in the direction of Benito
Juarez Boulevard. At least three gunshots rang out, and a young
man was shot in the leg, presumably by paramilitaries on the
roof. Upon reaching the boulevard, a few hundred protesters attempted
to regroup, while blocking the street with 18 wheelers and buses.
In other parts of the city, groups of protesters sought refuge
in houses or attempted to fend off police and paramilitaries
circling the city.
In the course of the night,
police beat and arbitrarily arrested almost anyone they found
on the street, including people who were in neighborhoods far
away from the conflict in the center of Oaxaca City.
Unmarked cars could be seen
passing through the same streets over and over again, presumably
containing PRI party supporters and government paramilitaries
who were carrying out disappearances.
At approximately 11 o'clock
at night, automatic weapon gunshots were heard for ten minutes
straight. The shots were fired towards the Faculty of Medicine,
just north of the Center, where protesters ran to seek refuge.
According to a witness, when teachers and other protesters attempted
to leave the faculty, a group of porros (government backed paramilitaries)
ordered them to stop at gunpoint.
The group refused and the porros
opened fire, killing three people.
Some of the teachers began
to fire back in defense as they were retreating.
And at 7 am on Sunday morning,
as APPO sympathizers hid out in houses around the city and the
police and PRI paramilitary groups disappeared people off the
streets, PRI party outlet Radio Ciudana was naming out neighborhoods
and houses where protesters could be found.
¨We know of one house where
there are six Americans who have been helping the APPO¨,
the host said, creating a fear for anyone who had an American
in their house that paramilitaries would arrive to massacre everyone
inside.
How to Continue?
Many people wonder what the
past week's repression will mean for the movement in Oaxaca and
what its effect will be on a national scale.
Comparisons have been made
to the siege of Atenco in the first days of May this year, where
3,500 PFP police entered the town to quell an anti-neoliberal
movement. The Atenco siege resulted in two deaths, 40 unconfirmed
disappearances, and 218 political prisoners, 35 of which were
women who suffered rapes at the hands of the police.
Indeed Oaxaca has prompted
many contextual questions on part of both the movement and the
government. On Monday, as the PFP in Oaxaca patrolled Santo Domingo
plaza, the APPO encampment lost during the Saturday battle, popularly
ousted Governor Ulises Ruiz appeared at the scene to assess the
damage to the burned buildings downtown. He said that the detentions
carried out in the previous nights meant a step towards stability.
For months the federal government has been calling the "ungovernability"
of Oaxaca a local problem that has no significance to Mexican
society as a whole, even so, paradoxically Ruiz blamed outsiders
from other states for the damages in Oaxaca.
Activists in Mexico have had
the task of assessing the situation in Oaxaca in comparison to
the rest of the country, and there remain many questions of how
different movements can relate to that of the APPO in terms of
coordination and solidarity. While those suffering repression
in Oaxaca remain isolated by the mainstream Mexican media, who
have hardly reported on deaths, disappearances and torture, there
is also a danger coming from some of those on "the left"
in Mexico who isolate the Oaxacan movement as a protest against
the governor Ulises, and not a broader struggle against neoliberalism
and capitalist exploitation whose context is surely national.
Despite this, at the moment there are still organizations and
collectives around the country who are strategizing their modes
of solidarity for Oaxaca, particularly concentrating on the grave
human rights situation for those incarcerated and those remaining
inside the city.
Calderon took presidency today
in a veritable coup d'etat, accompanied into the parliament by
military and PAN party supporters. Meanwhile, social movements
around Mexico brace themselves for the "mano duro",
or hard-hand, of repression that is sure to come.
Yet an APPO member from the
Section 22 teachers union, the same union that set off the Oaxaca
uprising when the government violently attempted to evict their
sit-in in June, said on Thursday night outside of a human rights
coordination meeting, "What they don't realize is that it
doesn't matter who they arrest, who they disappear in Oaxaca.
There will always be more that come from behind and rise up,
after all, they can't detain the whole state."
Counter Punch readers in the
Bay Area: Barucha Calamity Peller will be giving a presentation
on the situation in Oaxaca on December 6th in San Francisco.
For more information go here: www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/11/30/18334349.php
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
