Gunshots echoed through city streets as the police helicopter shot tear gas down into the crowd of men, women, and children. Fires burned, and people lay bloodied in ambulances. As dawn broke, ordinary citizens barricaded the streets, keeping the police out of the city’s central plaza. A young man looked into a cell phone camera and said, “If somebody dies today, it will be the fault of that helicopter.”
This bedlam erupted on June 14, 2006 in Oaxaca, the capital city of the Mexican state that bears the same name.
For three weeks prior, teachers and family members — mostly from the state’s poor rural areas — camped out in the city’s central square for the twenty-fifth annual national teachers’ union strike. Traditionally, the Oaxacan governor sends the teachers home with a meager salary increase or some resources. But last June, Governor Ulises Ruiz did not offer collective bargaining; he ordered the police to forcibly remove the strikers. This backfired, and within days, thousands of people representing over three hundred disparate organizations came together to form the Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca (APPO), which occupied the barricaded plaza for months, demanding that Governor Ruiz resign and that Oaxaca institute democratic reforms.
The violence subsided immediately after June 14, but APPO supporters still occupied a large part of downtown when UNC professor Altha Cravey arrived there in late June. She researches how globalization affects geographic locations, especially in Latin America, and has been to Oaxaca several times over the past thirty-five years. Last July, she found herself there at a peculiar time — typical citizens demanded their governor’s resignation while they celebrated Guelaguetza, an annual festival of Oaxaca’s sixteen indigenous cultures.
“It was like I was in an electrical storm with lightning touching down all around me,” Cravey says. “Ordinary people were doing very extraordinary things.”
Of the people, for the people
In the last few years, Guelaguetza has become an overly commercialized state-sponsored festival that charges money for the main events. Due to the uprising in 2006, though, the governor cancelled the festival and APPO quickly organized a free Guelaguetza.
With camcorder in hand, Cravey and friend Elva Bishop — a video technician with WUNC-TV — videotaped the festival and interviewed participants, and wound up with a thirty-minute documentary called People’s Guelaguetza: Oaxacans Take it to the Streets. They captured traditional dances, parade floats, and musical performances at the same time that APPO leaders gave speeches, and protesters marched and chanted Ya cayó; Ulises ya cayó — He has already fallen; Ulises has already fallen — which means that Ruiz has no moral authority to govern, Cravey says. Men and women held signs calling Ruiz a repressor. They carried puppets mocking the governor — one had him sitting in a papier-mâché helicopter.
On August 1, Cravey and Bishop filmed hundreds of women of all ages marching through the streets, banging pots and pans, and chanting again, Ya Cayó!
Cravey, who wrote a book in 1998 entitled Women and Work in Mexico’s Maquiladoras, says that Oaxacans aren’t known for speaking out against the government so vehemently, especially the women. “They’re usually very reserved.”
But Oaxacan discontent is deep-seated. In the documentary, one protester says, “There are people in the mountains dying of hunger. Children do not have good schools or clothing or shoes. Our relatives have to travel to the United States and send money back, and this is how some people survive. And when we protest, the governor sends police to attack us.” Then in English she says, “The news says nothing about this problem.”
After the march, some women took over the Channel 9 television studio and aired video footage of the June 14 attack several times before the signal was cut off two days later. Cravey says, “This was the only time that the attack was broadcast in Oaxaca.” By then, a homemade DVD of the attack had been widely distributed, but the state-sponsored television station had refused to air it.
Radio-free Mexico
During the June 14 attack, the police destroyed Radio Plantón, an independent radio station. In the documentary, Cravey interviews Oliver Frohling, director of the Centro Intercultural de Encuentros y Dialogo in Oaxaca and professor at the University of Kentucky, who said that Radio Plantón had been the only radio station critical of the government. Radio Plantón reported that Ruiz tried to shut down Oaxaca’s largest newspaper due to unfavorable coverage. It reported widely-held suspicions that Ruiz fixed the 2004 election and that he sponsored murders and disappearances of people who opposed him.
“All this was reiterated over and over again on Radio Plantón,” Frohling says. The station also raised awareness of social issues. “And people began realizing that they all had similar concerns.”
When police destroyed Radio Plantón, Oaxacans were furious. Cravey says that some citizens built pirate radio stations, and as police destroyed these low-power transmitters, citizens built another and another.
Mexico’s ethnic minorities have been using local radio to connect communities more and more often over the past fifteen years, says Lucila Vargas, a UNC professor who specializes in the use of radio in Mexico’s indigenous communities.
“In Oaxaca, people have been learning to use radio, so that now, when there’s a political movement, they already clearly understand the value of radio broadcasts.” And Cravey says that’s what she witnessed in 2006 — radio broadcasts helping solidify support for APPO’s democratic ideals.
When assembly leaders used Radio Universidad at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca, police tried to seize that station, too. But students and citizens fended them off, and Radio Universidad allowed APPO supporters and other citizens with different opinions to broadcast freely throughout 2006. The women protesters, meanwhile, created a pirate station called Radio Cacerola (saucepan).
Women beat on saucepan lids while one holds a sign that reads, “Ulises Ruiz, murderer, repressor.” Ruiz is the governor of the state of Oaxaca. Many citizens there are calling for his ouster. Photo by Elva Bishop, ©2007 Endeavors magazine; click to enlarge.
Gonzo journalism
There was little violence in the two months after the June 14 attack, and Cravey says that downtown Oaxaca was as lively as usual, which is one reason she and Bishop made the documentary — to show a side of the story that the mainstream media missed. Downtown felt like an open-air market, she says, not a dangerous area, which is how the government and media characterized it. Cravey saw no evidence of checkpoints, which had been reported. “No one asked me for an ID. It felt very festive, as usual. It’s always been a big crafts area, where people sell rugs and embroidered blouses. There were marimba bands and people singing. It was like an all-day party.”
Some Mexican and U.S. media reported that protesters started the violence, when in fact it was the June 14 attack that sparked peaceful protest marches. Before traveling to Oaxaca, Bishop says, she saw U.S. media reports about the governor canceling the Guelaguetza, “but the media didn’t mention that the APPO organized a People’s Guelaguetza that was even better.”
Cravey says, “It’s frustrating that the media is telling a completely different story, especially about the violence and the desires of the APPO to have a democratic state — something we take for granted. I felt like there was something really positive going on there, very goal-oriented. Kind of like the Civil Rights Movement.”
The formation of a people’s assembly was a long time coming, Cravey says, which is another reason she wanted the documentary to include the protests and interviews with ordinary citizens. Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in Mexico, and one of the most politically corrupt. For the past seventy-eight years, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has been in power. That’s the longest single-party domination the modern world has ever seen, she says. “It’s run sort of like a political fiefdom. There really isn’t any representation of the people in Oaxaca.”
Instead of using open referenda and transparent voting to pass laws, the state government casts secret ballots during legislative sessions. APPO, on the other hand, uses open meetings and governs by consensus; this is common practice in Oaxaca’s indigenous cultures, which have influenced the way local municipalities are governed throughout the state. Cravey says this is why a large majority of Oaxaca’s population immediately recognized the assembly’s legitimacy, and why they continue to support it. Another reason is that APPO calls for gender equality, political accountability, and the recognition of indigenous rights and autonomy. It demands better education policies and democratic media, and opposes neoliberal economic policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Two of Mexico’s three major political parties, including Ruiz’s PRI, support NAFTA agreements that Cravey says have caused economic hardship for most of Mexico’s population, especially citizens in the poor rural areas.
No end in sight
APPO controlled Oaxaca’s main plaza through the summer of 2006 despite clashes with police, who killed six APPO members in August. Assembly members met with federal government officials several times but there was no resolution. APPO demanded that Ruiz resign. Ruiz refused, even though the Mexican senate suggested that he step down. Then-president Vicente Fox stayed neutral until October, when state-sponsored paramilitary shot and killed independent U.S. journalist Brad Will and two APPO members who were trying to defend a barricade. Two days later, Fox sent four thousand federal police to clear out the plaza. Protesters hurled rocks at the police, and the police responded by firing water cannons and using pepper spray and tear gas to disperse the crowd. Several protesters died, and hundreds were detained by the state and federal authorities in the two months that followed. Some APPO supporters reported being tortured.
In January, Bishop returned to Oaxaca for three days and saw police — four officers deep, each with a machine gun — guarding the plaza’s entrances.
“People could go in and out of the plaza and the businesses were open, but there was no burst of life and creativity,” Bishop says. “No venders or even the women selling blouses, none of Oaxaca’s creative character.”
Meanwhile, APPO supporters are sticking together. The teachers, who went back to work last October, released this statement: “The education workers have not and will not renounce the struggle to oust Ulises Ruiz. We don’t forget, and we don’t forgive the assassinations, torture, persecution, disappearances, and arbitrary arrests committed against the people of Oaxaca, and in particular against the democratic teachers.”
And APPO supporters still marched — thirty thousand strong on February 3 — and still call for Ruiz’s resignation.
APPO also formed the State Council of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (CEAPPO), which consists of two hundred and sixty representatives from across the state. Their hope is that Oaxacans will gather in their own communities, and be represented at the state level in the CEAPPO. It’s being copied as a model of democratic governance in other parts of Mexico, and this gives Cravey hope.
“I do take an optimist’s view,” she says. “I’m hopeful that something positive has been started there that won’t be easily turned around.”
Altha Cravey is an associate professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences. She created a teaching guide to accompany the documentary People’s Guelaguetza so it can be used in classrooms. For a copy, contact Cravey. Elva Bishop is a video technician for WUNC-TV. Lucila Vargas is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the author of Social Uses and Radio Practices: The Use of Radio by Ethnic Minorities in Mexico.