MEXICO: No End in Sight to Civil Unrest in Oaxaca

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Aug 24 2006 (IPS) - In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, teachers are leading a strike that has dragged on for over three months, masked activists armed with clubs have occupied radio and TV stations, and the police have opened fire on demonstrators and journalists and are accused of abuses against protesters who have been arrested.

“The strife is getting out of hand, and could give rise to an armed civil uprising,” Adrián Ramírez, president of the non-governmental Mexican League for the Defence of Human Rights (LIMEDDEH), said in an interview with IPS.

The protest by the Oaxaca teachers, who are represented by the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, one of the country’s most combative unions, began with a strike demanding higher wages.

But as the weeks went by, the protest became more radical, as the teachers were joined by the Asamblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca (APPO), which brings together a number of social and leftist organisations.

The protesters began to demand that Governor Ulises Ruiz, who is accused of misappropriation of public funds, step down.

Although Mexico’s interior minister, Carlos Abascal, has offered to mediate in the conflict, and to meet with APPO representatives immediately, the organisation has refused to engage in talks until Ruiz hands in his resignation.

The movement has also expressed its solidarity with leftist presidential candidate Andrés López Obrador, who maintains that fraud was committed in the Jul. 2 presidential elections in favour of conservative candidate Felipe Calderón of the ruling National Action Party (PAN). According to the official tally, Calderón won by a narrow margin of 0.58 percent.

This week’s violent clashes were the most serious seen since the start of the conflict in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.

After a group of armed men, apparently police officers, destroyed the antennas of state-run TV and radio stations that have been occupied by APPO for the past three weeks, the members of that organisation expanded the camp that they had set up in the centre of the city.

The area around the camp is surrounded by barricades, barbed wire, trucks and men, some of whom wear masks and carry clubs and stones.

The demonstrators also took over a number of private radio stations in order to broadcast their demands, and they have insulted reporters who, in their view, are not telling the truth about the conflict.

Their actions, which have included the closure of several roads leading into Oaxaca, were clamped down on late Monday and Tuesday by hundreds of police officers in what was dubbed “operation clean-up”, in which they opened fire on the strikers, killing one, and on reporters and photojournalists as well.

LIMEDDEH and around 50 other human rights and social organisations have called on the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to intervene in the conflict, and urged the administration of President Vicente Fox to take steps to prevent further violence.

Ramírez warned that in Oaxaca there are small Marxist guerrilla groups, like the Popular Revolutionary Army, which could decide to act.

The rebel groups have barely showed up on the radar screen in the last few years, merely staging a few propaganda actions, and the state intelligence services say they have little capacity for action.

Last week, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) expressed its concern over the escalation of violence in Oaxaca, which it said has included murders, torture and violence, arbitrary arrests, threats and repression of social protests.

According to human rights groups, the conflict has so far left six dead and over a dozen activists in prison. They also report abuses against teachers.

The government has been attempting not to get its hands dirty in Oaxaca, and to allow the electoral court to reach a decision on the presidential elections, while hoping the unrest in Oaxaca would gradually die down, said political analyst Denis Dresser with the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

However, it cannot allow a violent group to overthrow a governor, she added, because that would only serve to encourage López Obrador of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and his protest movement.

López Obrador and his followers brought legal action claiming the elections were fraudulent. Mexico’s electoral court has until the end of the month to rule on the claims, and by September 6 must either name a president-elect or annul the Jul. 2 elections..

But the leftist candidate warned that if Cálderon is confirmed as the winner, the protests – like the camp installed by his supporters in late July in a central Mexico City district – will continue indefinitely.

Oaxaca today is one of the mirrors where both the Fox administration and the left are looking at themselves and evaluating the situation, political analyst Alberto González told IPS.

In the Jul. 2 elections, López Obrador carried the state of Oaxaca by a wide margin, with 45.9 percent of the vote, according to the Federal Electoral Institute.

González said the situation in Oaxaca escalated due to the ineptitude and narrow-mindedness of the state government, which is in the hands of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But he also blamed radical anti-establishment groups that belong to APPO, because they are not willing to negotiate.

Oaxaca state prosecutor Lizbeth Caña, who along with the police chiefs ordered “operation clean-up”, said APPO is acting like an “urban guerrilla movement.”

Human rights groups say the strife in Oaxaca is a reaction to decades of government by the PRI, which has ruled the state for over 70 years.

In the southern state, where poverty affects most of the population of 3.2 million, human rights are systematically violated, freedom of expression does not exist, and the legislative and judicial branches are at the mercy of the state government, the groups maintain.