Bystanders

I got a call this morning that Robert was on the plane to Oaxaca. So I know that much. He might have to roll his suitcase a mile past striking teachers to Phil’s truck, which still has a half a tank of gas. I don’t know. The strike is supposed to end this weekend, when many of the teachers will take buses to Mexico City for a great protest march there. That should be a sight to behold. The Mexican teachers’ union is the biggest union in Latin America, with almost 1 ½ million members.

Oaxaca teachers are trained at various teachers colleges throughout the state, and as part of their training, they are expected to participate in classic Marxist “class struggle,” so they learn to live in constant antagonism toward the government. In Oaxaca they have traditionally held strikes each May, demanding better conditions and wages. In 2006, they ran afoul of the governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz, whom the teachers accused of repression and corruption, and things got ugly. In an attempt to dislodge the teachers from their nonviolent take-over of the historical downtown area, people got hurt, and in response, the teacher’s union joined up with other groups, forming the APPO, and together with local residents fed up with government tactics, they shut down the city for seven months, demanding the governor’s resignation.

They shut down city services including police, ambulance, firetruck, and in some parts of the city, they stopped garbage collection and water truck deliveries. They burned buses in major intersections and shut down all the major arteries of the city. Traffic snaked slowly through neighborhoods, and citizens created new speed bumps everywhere. It was one of these new speed bumps that took my daughter by surprise, on her way home from school on her bike, and left her with a wrist that looked like the letter z until the surgeon knocked her out to set it straight. A million kids lost an entire school year.

Many businesses in the center of town suffered devastating losses, and some went bankrupt. The tourist industry died away, as the US issued a travel warning, and the twice-daily flights into Oaxaca City dropped to two a week. According to friends who run businesses, the city has never recuperated from these losses. After seven months, the federal government intervened, sending in riot police, armed with batons, shields, water cannon, and tear gas, and these finally broke the hold of the protestors on the city. From our house we could see military helicopters overhead and the smoke from tires being burned in the intersections, and we could see the lines of marching riot police making their way downtown. A few weeks later, when we thought things had calmed down, we took a Mexican friend visiting us from Baja to lunch in the newly re-opened zocalo, or town square. We were surrounded by tin walls that had shielded the cafes on the square from the protestors. After we finished our meal and were leaving, we walked past the riot police on duty, straight into an oncoming APPO group ready to confront the police with roman candles set up on heavy placarded pick-up trucks. We had to cross between the two groups to get away, and though no one was moving quickly, we got throats full of tear gas as we hurried to find our car. No one had any interest in hurting bystanders, but my friend from Baja California was ready to leave Oaxaca that afternoon. 

Now, nine years later, as the confrontations heat up again, those of us that lived through that time remember 2006, and dread getting caught again between these two great forces in their struggle for power, a threatened union and a thwarted government. Do these pictures bring back memories for any of you?