[Onthebarricades] Fw: [AUT] Oaxaca's Dirty War

[Andy]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Donald Vernon Kingsbury" <dkingsbu at ucsc.edu>
To: <aut-op-sy at lists.resist.ca>
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 5:05 PM
Subject: [AUT] Oaxaca's Dirty War


> please forward and repost all emails and articles!
>
> The Dirty War of Oaxaca
> http://elenemigocomun.net/622
>
> Acclaimed Muralist Among Oaxaca’s Disappeared
> http://elenemigocomun.net/621
>
> Rights activist held in Oaxaca prison
> http://elenemigocomun.net/618
>
> --------------
>
> The Dirty War of Oaxaca
> http://elenemigocomun.net/622
>
> Amongst flames of resistance came death, torture, and a movement forced
> into clandestinity
>
> December 2nd, 2006 - Barucha Calamity Peller writes: 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 
> [December 1,
> 2006]. 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
> [December 1, 2006].
>
> 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 Ciudana, 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 in 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 [December 1, 2006] 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.”
>
> sources: http://counterpunch.org/peller12022006.html
> http://indybay.org/newsitems/2006/12/02/18334698.php
>
> --------------
>
> Oaxaca solidarity:
>
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>
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>
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>
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