2006-12 The Battle for Oaxaca: Repression and Revolutionary Resistance [Gogol]

by Eugene Gogol | WFA

(My participation in an Emergency Human Rights Delegation in Oaxaca in the third week in December served as the catalyst for this essay.)

Oaxaca is a land of revolutionary upsurge, repression and resistance. At the present moment, (the end of December), repression with a mano dura (hard hand) is the order of the day as Oaxaquenos, who have been active in the upsurge, are picked up on the streets, beaten by local or state police as a warning to spread fear in the community, and then released. Others remain imprisoned weeks after they being swept up by the federal prevention police, who viciously broke up a protest march in late November. Ulises Ruiz, the fraudulently elected, corrupt governor and the undoubted author and manipulator of the present repression, still remains in power.

Nevertheless, on the day I began this essay, December 22, thousands took to the streets in Oaxaca, as the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, (Assamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca), APPO, organized a march with a large contingent of teachers, as well as activists recently released from imprisonment and family members of those still detained, participating in resistance to the state and federal police occupation of the city. This same day, supporters in some 37 countries held demonstrations on a Day of World Mobilization for Oaxaca, originally called by the Zapatistas, (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional), EZLN. The date was also the 9^th anniversary of the massacre (la matanza) of 45 Indigenous in the community of Acteal, Chiapas, an obscene horror, which goes unpunished to this day, including the intellectual authors of this crime, who remain uncharged.

This continuous repression must not obscure what has occurred from May/June through November, and continues in open and underground ways—the emergence of a Oaxaca in revolt, first responding to Ruiz’s crude attempt to crush the teachers’ strike, and then blossoming and developing in a multitude of ways, encompassing the dimensions of Indigenous, of women, of youth, all joining the labor dimension of the striking teachers. Indeed, one often finds Indigenous, teacher, woman, within a single person. Further, in at least one of the mega-marches in Oaxaca City, the number of demonstrators far exceeded the population of the entire city as tens of thousands came from hundreds of municipalities in the state of Oaxaca, claiming the struggle as their struggle. It was truly the population to a woman, man and child taking matters into their own hands.

How can we comprehend this new moment of emancipatory struggle in Mexico with its multiplicity of creative forms? Some have spoken of the Oaxaca Commune, finding historical echoes in the 1871 Paris Commune, where the population seized the city and began to create a "non-state state" including attempts to reorganize work and move toward freely associated labor. Marx would note that the greatness of the Commune was "its own working existence," which encompassed, not a reform of the state, but smashing the old state-machinery and replacing it with the Commune. Oaxaca has not at the present moment reached such a stage. While some may have such a vision, others have argued that only a reform of the state machinery is needed.

Another commentartor writes of moving "toward dual power" in Oaxaca, intimating the Soviets of Russia 1917. Is APPO a 21^st Century form of the soviet, embodying within, not the industrial proletariat, but the multitude, here encompassing many different subjects of social change?

Before we label the events historically, or for that matter globally, we need to probe the Oaxaca uprising in and of itself. Among its important dimensions:

1) the creation of APPO, rooted in an Indigenous tradition, which, as we will see, became the most crucial forum to organize action and express ideas from below; 2) the multi-faceted participation of women: from a group of APPO women who took matters into their own hands and seized a radio and television station, thus finding and speaking with their own voices, to many women building barricades in the streets together with the men to defend their new voice and halt the "death squad" caravans that sought to intimidate, injury, and at times shoot the population who were protesting and doing so in a peaceful manner without arms; 3) the youth, particularly from the university, who fought to defend and extend the gains of the struggle, including the important act of  seizing the university radio station when the teachers’ Radio Planton was destroyed; 4) the neighborhood activists, who, particularly in poor areas, defended their streets, building barricades in the evening to stop the caravans, and pouring out to participate in the mega-marches that stretched from the summer into the fall; 5) the teachers, tens of thousands strong, who had catalyzed the rebellion with their initial strike and occupation of the central plaza, and continued to remain at the heart of the occupation of Oaxaca City, until, through lack of pay and faction fighting within their hierarchal union structure, finally felt forced to return to work; 6) the teachers, campasinos and others from outside Oaxaca City who created their own assemblas  where they lived, and traveled to the capital to join the protests; 7) And always, always, the Indigenous dimension, the heart and soul of Oaxaca.

Let us begin at the beginning, with a brief survey of the immediate social-economic-political background, then trace the unfolding of the revolutionary upsurge with concentration on the organizational form of APPO, the role of women, and the participation from Oaxaquenos living outside the capital—all occurring in face of, indeed catalyzed by, direct governmental, or government-sponsored, repression. Perhaps then, we can return to situating the specificity of Oaxaca within a historical and global context, including its contributions and limitations for the present moment.

(For the following I am indebted to the many presentations and testimonios, which I was privileged to hear while in the State of Oaxaca.)

The Background

The origins of the crisis lie far deeper than Governor Ruiz’s attempt to break a teachers’ occupation of the central plaza of Oaxaca on June 14. In a political sense, they can be traced to the seven decades-long domination of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI, in Oaxaca. While the mid-1930s era of Lazaro Cardinas was a limited, progressive consolidation of the Mexican Revolution, that heritage was transformed in the decades that followed into a single-party authoritarian, repressive governmental state apparatus, nowhere more suffocating then in Oaxaca.

The origins of the crisis lie far deeper than Governor Ruiz’s attempt to break a teachers’ occupation of the central plaza of Oaxaca on June 14. In a political sense, they can be traced to the seven decades-long domination of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI, in Oaxaca. While the mid-1930s era of Lazaro Cardinas was a limited, progressive consolidation of the Mexican Revolution, that heritage was transformed in the decades that followed into a single-party authoritarian, repressive governmental state apparatus, nowhere more suffocating then in Oaxaca.

The limited "opening" in Mexican politics in the 1990s and 2000s was repressed in Oaxaca, where the PRI continued its single-party rule. A particular egregious manifestation of this was the fraudulent election of Ruiz as governor in 2004, and his subsequent corrupt and increasingly repressive rule. If there is one slogan that has united the masses of Oaxaca it has been Afurera Ruiz (Out with Ruiz!).

The origins of the rebellion encompass not only the political, but the economic-social. Oaxaca’s population of three and a half million is more than two-thirds Indigenous, with 16 different groups, 15 languages and many additional dialectics spoken. For decades a social exclusion has been practiced, resulting in deep poverty. Statistics indicate that some three-quarters of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty. The majority of the poor don’t even earn the poverty minimum wage of $6 a day.  The crisis is greatest in the campo, the countryside, where, for much of the population, it has become impossible to earn a living. There is little government investment to assist the rural population. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which has permitted U.S. government-subsidized farmers to flood the marked with cheaper agricultural products, has cut the ground out from Mexican farmers being able to making a living in southern Mexico, particularly from corn production.

Economic devastation in the country-side has contributed substantially to large-scale migration. Some have gone to the city, in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico. Others, hundreds of thousands, have been forced to survive by leaving to find work in the United States. This vast social dislocation has meant that in some communities in Oaxaca upwards of 50% of the population has left. Those migrants are both men and women, with women making up an estimated 45% of the migrants.

Some 85% of Oaxacan land is communal in one form or another. Only 15% is private property. The Indigenous communities have fought to preserve their land and their ways of organizing their communities, through rules and traditions called "usos y costumbres." Oaxaca is the one state in Mexico where the government has been compelled to recognize "usos y costumbres" in hundreds of communities. These autonomous organizing centers around fiestas, communal work, certain governmental and religious services. Even this limited self-rule, often decided in community asambleas, has been subject to continual government pressure and fragmentation, played out in the economic whirlpool of neo-liberalism, and the change in the Constitution implemented by Salinas to open up the collective lands of the ejido to division and individual sale. It was the historical form of the asamblea that would be infused with a content of rebellion and resistance when Ruiz chose to try and break the teachers’ strike and occupation.

The Unfolding of the Oaxaca Rebellion

The Teachers’ Strike and Occupation of the Central Plaza

The Teachers’ Strike and Occupation of the Central Plaza

On May 22, after a week of unproductive negotiations with the state government,   tens of thousands of teachers, other educational workers, family members and supporters marched to the central plaza in Oaxaca to set up an occupation and express their demands which included a salary increase and educational improvements. This was by no means the first time the teachers had taken such an action. For more than 20 years their fight for wages and improved educational conditions had resulted in the occupation of the central plaza for a few days as a way of compelling the state government to negotiate a settlement. But this year, events would unfold in a different manner.

The Oaxacan teachers are organized under section 22 of the National Union of Educational Workers. (El Sindicato Nacional de Trabajdores de la Educación, SNTE). Some 70,000 strong state-wide, the union has a militant, fighting history often at odds with the national union, whose hierarchical structure has done the bidding of the ruling PRI for decades.

On May 22, after a week of fruitless negotiation, the teachers and their supporters occupied the central square and dozens of surrounding blocks. Rather than a settlement in a few days, the teachers’ found themselves in a battle with the Ruiz regime. Over the next three weeks the confrontation grew. Faced with a government-influenced near monopoly over the means of communication, the Oaxacan teachers broadcast information to the community through their Radio Planton. Support for the teachers grew dramatically as the occupation continued, with two "mega-marches" of June 2 and June 7 drawing supporters of 75,000 plus and 120,000. The call was no longer only for a settlement of the teachers’ demands, but for the removal of Ruiz from the governor’s office.

In the pre-dawn hours of June 14 Ruiz gave his response, sending state police to attack the sleeping teachers, many of who were encamped with their families. Facing physical force, including large amounts of tear gas, the teachers were driven from the central plaza, their encampment broken up, Radio Planton destroyed. But the teachers refused to yield,       battled back, and after several hours, took over the center of the city.

The government’s unprovoked attack, designed to terrorize and break the teachers,  proved to be a major turning point in the battle of Oaxaca. Not only did the teachers in a courageous and determined manner hold their own, but an outraged citizenry throughout the state of Oaxaca came to the aid of the teachers and saw the battle as their own. Two days after the attack a third mega-march was held. The more than 300,000 who poured out included members from Indigenous communities from the coast to the sierras. In support of the teachers workers from other government unions, Indigenous groups and campesinos participated. Zapoteca, Mezateco, Mixes, and Mixteca traditional authorities joined with political organizations, students, human rights activists. The following day the movement created a revolutionary form to catalyze its struggle—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca).

APPO—The Indigenous Asamblea Infused with New Content

APPO is the synthesis of many movement organizations. Hundreds of organizations would eventually come together "in all colors and flavors" to become part of APPO. The central demand was the removal of Ruiz. As the movement developed, this came to mean not only his person, but all the representatives of the political authoritarian system which had been in power for some seven decades. APPO was anti-systemic. At the same time there was the beginning of the construction of popular power.

How to communicate with Oaxaca’s multitude was central to this construction. With Radio Platon smashed, students at Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca took over the University radio station. It became one of APPO’s principle ways of reaching the cities masses, informing them of news of the movement, of marches and other protest activities, as well as warning of state police threats. Communication as governmental manipulation and propagation of falsehoods from above was replaced with a communication desde abajo, from below. As we will see shortly, this was particularly true in the action of a group of APPO women, who seized and ran a national television and radio station, a crucial high point in the development of the movement.

Because the state government greatly feared this revolutionary communication from below, they organized their police force and their "private" underground forces to carry out assaults on the movement-controlled communications. This included "death squad" car caravans roaming the streets of Oaxaca at night. To protect themselves, APPO organized its own security forces and used their communications media to defend the rebellion. They appeals when out over the air to guard the radio station(s) and resists government attacks. One form of resistance was the building of barricades to protect the occupation of the center of the city, the radio stations and transmission towers in the movement’s hands, and in general to prevent secret night attacks by the government-sponsored forces. Sometimes these were fortified permanent-type barricades including using commandeered buses. Others were temporary barricades to stop the movement of caravans in the evening. These were constructed anew each night. When a call went out to construct such barricades, it was answered immediately with the construction of several hundred the first night, a thousand the second and hundreds more the third night.

The barricades also meant a new form of communication within neighborhoods. Neighbors went out at night to construct and occupy the barricades. They began speaking with one another in a way they had never done before—discussing questions of radical reform, how to transform the state, and beyond reform: what did it mean to not only transform institutions but take to the streets.

APPO’s form of representation was simple and direct, born from Indigenous practices. Decisions were taken in asambleas in which all participated. While there are spokespersons, the organization is horizontal, not with a hierarchy of leaders. Activists speak of APPO not only as an immediate form of organization, but as a spirit of rebellion and communalism that has grown over many, many years.

The formation and practice of APPO brought forth the creative activity of many social subjects. Two of the most important were the women in APPO and the mobilizations outside Oaxaca City—of Indigenous communities, campesinos and teachers.

Women in APPO—Finding Their Own Voices

August 2 marked an important leap in the movement. It was on that day when a group of APPO women seized the state television and radio stations whose signal covered the state. They had gone to the station with a simple request—to have 15 minutes a day in which to present the movement’s point of view. But when they were refused, they responded by taking over the entire station. A new stage in the struggle had arrived. Now working women, Indigenous women, who never had had a chance to tell their stories in public, to present their ideas, were able to speak, to find their own voices and be heard in a way they had never been heard before.

The television station was in the hands of the movement for three weeks: "What a vision of hope sprang from the screen those three weeks! Ordinary people in everyday clothes spoke of the reality of their lives as they understood them, of what neo-liberalism meant to them, of the Plan Pueblo Panama, of their loss of land to developers and international paper companies, of ramshackle rural mountain schools without toilets, of communities without safe water or sanitary drainage." (George Salzman, Oaxaca resident.)

The women were everywhere, in front of everything. Not alone the radio and television, but in the numerous mega-marches as well as La marcha de las caserolas (the march of women beating their pots and pans with wooden spoons). They were building the barricades and defending them. They brought food to those operating the radio stations. Women in APPO formed Cordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca (COMO) and held their own general meeting at the end of August.

 

Outside Oaxaca City

If Oaxaca City was the storm center of the upsurge, the countryside was by no means passive. During the months of the uprising, many communities in Oaxaca took the initiative to form there own local APPOs. They traveled to Oaxaca City to participate in the mega-marches. These communities had as well felt the repressive hand of the state government for decades. The Emergency Human Rights Delegation traveled to the community of Tlaxiaco, several hours outside Oaxaca City to hear presentations on the conditions in the countryside and testimonios from teachers and campesinos who had participated in the movement and felt the government’s heavy hand. What was clear from the presentations by a local human rights organization, Nu-Ji-Kaandi, were the difficult conditions faced by Indigenous communities. Particularly powerful was the presentation by an Indigenous woman human rights worker on the continual violence against women.

We hear stories of the self-organization of the community as teachers organized to have their own asamblea to voice their concerns and to support the activities occurring in Oaxaca City. Many traveled to Oaxaca City to participate in the marches. It was when a group of teachers organized a contingent of several hundred to travel to the city and participate in the mega-march of October 30 that they were directed confronted by the Federal Protective Police, the troops sent in by the Fox government to try and crush the movement. Traveling in several buses, the contingent faced a blockaded highway manned by hundreds of the federal police. The police pulled people off the buses, roughly interrogated and detained those who they thought were the leaders and prevented the members of the Tlaxiaco community from traveling further to join the protest march.

During the testimonios a discussion/debate occurred which perhaps reflects some of the battle of ideas occurring in the movement today. A campesino activist, in telling of his experiences in the protest bus caravan that was stopped by the federal police, argued for the need to directly confront the repressive state authorities. A teacher quickly responded that the only way the movement could success was through a peaceful route. The unresolved question is what happens when the peaceful protest is continually met with repression?

The Authoritarian State in Oaxaca

Our concentration on the creativity of the movement in not meant to minimize the repression which Oaxaqueños face day in and day out, and which is being expressed with particular viciousness, brutality and outright murder in the battle for Oaxaca over the last seven months. At least 17 people have been murdered directly during, and because of, their participation in the movement. Hundreds have been arrested and many of those remain as political prisoners. The emergency human rights delegation heard numerous testimonies to this effect. One student who had been arrested, beaten, made to pose falsely with arms while the police took pictures, forced to write a "confession" of  a crime he did not commit, was imprisoned for several weeks. After testifying before us in the morning, he was later in the day again kidnapped by police with two other activists, beaten and then released!

We heard testimony from a woman teacher who was participating with her husband in one of the protest marches. Suddenly shots rang out and her husband fell mortally wounded.

Another woman, a mother of three, was just leaving work, not participating in the protests but simple in the area when the police on a rampage rounded her up: "I couldn’t see, I was trying to find my son…they [the federal police] grabbed me, shoved me against the pavement, handcuffed my hands behind my neck and hurled me onto a pile of other women. They kicked and beat us if we moved and kept us that way for almost two hours." (translation by Bob Stout, Emergency Human Rights Delegation)  She, together more about 140 others, were taken by helicopter to a prison in Nayarit, hundreds of miles away. The charge? "Sedition." At the end of her testimony she said that after this experience she now wanted to join the protest movement.

The Battle of Ideas; Questions for the Movement

What is the meaning of the battle for Oaxaca?

1) It is clear that the vast majority of Oaxaqueños call for the immediate removal of Ulises Ruiz as governor. The wholesale repudiation of the PRI in the July 2 federal elections spoke strongly to this. Furthermore, removal of Ruiz has come to mean more than the mere change from one governing face to another. After all, the federal government may find it convenient for its own purposes to oust Ruiz. The call demands as well a removal of the federal and state police occupation of Oaxaca, a dismantling of the repression nature of the state apparatus and reform of the state government in Oaxaca. But how deep that reform will go, whether the battle for Oaxaca will reach to challenge the very nature of the state remains an unanswered question. However, should it be an unexplored question?

The question of the state of course, is inseparable from the social-economic composition of the society. This would mean a probing of the nature of capitalism, particularly in underdeveloped lands, and even more concretely in poverty-stricken regions such as Oaxaca within those lands. The Zapatistas, in their 6^th Declaration from the Selva Lacondona and in the La Otra Campaña, have called for a movement that is anti-capitalist and from the Left. What does it mean to be anti-capitalist today? Is anti-imperialism sufficient, or do we have to reach deeper? Do we see capitalism as for more than mere property forms—private vs. state or nationalized forms—and centered instead on the extraction of value and surplus value in the labor process? To be anti-capitalist in full comprehension is to recognize the necessity to destroy value-producing, commodity production, and begin to implement freely associated labor. Communal, collective labor of Indigenous groups, as in Oaxacan communities, will have much to contribute here if we recognize that that this cannot "co-exist" with value production. Rather it is only the destruction of the capitalist mode of production that will allow a freely associative mode to arise on its ashes. If instead we remain in the reform or remaking of existing institutions, won’t we be trapped in a "self-limiting revolution" that does not reach the fullness of a new human society? Let us beware of our own "mind-forged manacles."

2) What the battle of Oaxaca has brought to the fore is the creativity of mass self-activity as an emergence of diverse social subjects. Indigenous, worker, women, youth and other human dimensions, not as fixed essences, but as self-developing individuals and groups, as, paraphrasing Hegel, individuality which let’s nothing interfere with its quest for universality. What Oaxaca demonstrates, as so many other creative movements have bore witness to historically and globally, is that masses are not alone muscle, but Reason of social transformation. Their actions, ideas, questions are not limited to moments of revolutionary practice, but a form of revolutionary theory. This is one of the lessons from the movement. Oaxaca has much to teach here. It is a lesson we need to study over and over as each new revolutionary moment from below arises.

3) As crucial as is the emergence and recognition of the creativity of new social subjects of revolutionary transformation, is it in itself sufficient? Some have argued that such social subjects within non-hierarchical forms of organization are sufficient to allow for uprooting social transformation. That is, that the active organizational participation by a multiplicity of revolutionary subjects can of itself bring forth new beginnings.

Here, form of organization, in this case the popular assembly of APPO, but other forms as well—the autonomous communities and juntas del buen gobierno in Chiapas, or historically such magnificent mass organizational forms as the Commune of Paris, the soviets of Russia, the workers’ council of Hungary 1956—have become transformed from a crucial particular to a universal. However the only absolute universal is the creation, the absolute becoming, of a new society. We cannot substitute a particular, as revolutionary as it may be, including a particular form of organization, for the universal reaching toward and entering a new society. The particular is a necessary concretization of such a reaching, but it is not in itself the totality of the reaching. For that we need not alone the practice of reaching toward a new society, but the mind, the philosophic vision that is part of the journey.

An emancipatory philosophic vision worked out concretely— thus a concrete universal—can arm us against the imposition of false ideological solutions.

In place of eliminate this word: such end of elimination ideological obfuscation lies the need to theoretically work out the meaning of Oaxaca’s revolutionary upsurge. It is precisely here that being rooted in emancipatory philosophic thought is central to the present moment. The double rhythm of revolutionary transformation, the negation of the old society and the creation of the new, is not alone the action of practice. It is as well the act of cognition, of the emancipatory Idea, and it is precisely the unity of the two, of practice and of theory/philosophy, which opens the door fully to a new society.

December 29, 2006