Early on our second morning in Oaxaca, my sleep was interrupted by sounds of shouting and explosions outside our second floor hotel room. In my semi-sleep, I thought the noise must be related to la Copa Mundial, the quadrennial world soccer tournament underway in Germany. But as I became more conscious, it occurred to me that none of the 2006 World Cup matches this year started this early on western hemisphere TV. And Mexico was not scheduled to play its second game for another day or two.
With my ear-plugged wife sleeping soundly beside me, I got up to check out what was going on. Opening our door to the early morning darkness, I smelled something that I assumed to be firecrackers and wondered what kind of event was generating this. Closing the door, I hesitated. The shouting and explosions continued. Confused and still a little cloudy from sleep, I began sensing something unusual was happening. With my sandals on, I opened the door again and stepped outside to descend the stairs to the ground floor courtyards and the hotel front desk. Immediately, my eyes began to burn.
With something acrid clogging the air, I took half breaths as I made my way through the first courtyard. As I entered the second, main, courtyard, I saw the young night manager on the telephone holding a white towel to his face. As I approached, I heard him say in an urgent voice to someone on the phone: “¡Están dealojando los maestros! ¡Está peligroso en la calle!” (“They are dislodging the teachers! It is dangerous in the street!”) Holding my breath and blinking my stinging eyes, I returned quickly through the courtyards, no other hotel guests around, and up the stairs to our room. Rousing my sleeping wife, rubbing my eyes, I said: “Something bad is going on outside. They are tear-gassing the teachers.” It was around 5:30am.
We had arrived in Oaxaca on June 12, one-and-a-half days earlier. Situating ourselves at a modest hotel in the city’s Centro Histórico, we headed out our first late afternoon to explore the two nearby main public squares of the city. We immediately encountered on our walk the large encampment of thousands of striking public education workers from all around the state of Oaxaca. We would discover that this protest camp covered both large plazas and spanned at least a dozen square city blocks.
Ducking our heads beneath the ropes and the tarps of the several weeks-old tent community, we observed men, women, and children clustered in groups talking, eating, and (later) sleeping under the low-hanging tarps (some inside camp tents). There were political posters and hand-made signs everywhere, some of them quite detailed and imaginative. On the façade of the state Government Palace in the Zócalo, the biggest of the two adjoining Historic Center squares, was a huge colorful poster caricaturing Oaxaca state Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox sitting on adjoining toilets, holding hands, and urging each other to “Push”. (I learned later that the state government operated out of offices in a nearby town.)
Our first evening in the city of Oaxaca we ate early dinner at a restaurant, Como Agua Pa’ Chocolate, inspired by the Laura Esquivel novel (and film). The “Like Water for Chocolate” restaurant is located on one corner of the Alameda de León, the other main city plaza that is anchored by a large Catholic cathedral. Our second floor balcony table provided us an aerial view of the strike community as we dined on cactus leaf soup, quail with rose petals, and black mole Champandongo. We were tourists, through and through. At the same time we were tourists who did not feel at all bothered by the large teachers’ protest in the public squares of our vacation getaway.
Around 7am the next morning I took a morning walk around the encampment on the Alameda and the Zócalo. Some people were up, brushing their teeth, chatting. I stopped at a place where a group of men were watching a morning TV news program. As I walked away, a middle-aged man came up to me and asked me what I thought of their protest. I responded generally and affirmatively.
In the course of our conversation, the man told me that the Mexican government does not serve teachers well; that among the candidates for the upcoming Mexican presidential election on July 2 he favored Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-of-center candidate of the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), because he believes he supports the teachers; and that George Bush is a “criminal” (he said this twice) for killing women and children (I assumed he meant in Iraq). When I asked, the man said he was from a town four hours from the city of Oaxaca. When I wondered about showers for the teachers who had been camped out for more than three weeks, he laughed and said they were sometimes able to use hotels for washing.
My wife and I spent a large part of our first full day in Oaxaca several blocks from the city center at the Santo Domingo Church and in the sprawling cultural museum and ethno-botanical garden that are on the grounds of the former monastery. During our main meal that day, I had my first shot of mezcal with worm salt and orange wedges.
That evening, we attended a Guelaguetza dance show at a local restaurant. As taken as we were with the colorfully costumed dancers from seven different regions of the state of Oaxaca, we were equally entertained by the energetic throng of cheering school children from Mexico City who were in Oaxaca for a field trip. We went to bed Tuesday night ready to get up the following morning for our eight hour guided tour to the famous Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán and to craft villages near Oaxaca.
We awoke instead to tear gas and to the sounds of confrontation on the streets.
After I woke my wife on the Wednesday morning of the police crackdown on the public education workers, we turned on the TV to see if there was any coverage of the bedlam that we continued to hear outside. Nothing. Around 6am, with things seeming to quiet down a bit, we went out on our flat hotel roof to the edge overlooking Avenida Independencia, one of the streets leading into the Alameda plaza.
On this street, now illuminated by daylight, we saw clusters of displaced teachers at the intersections to our right and to our left. The intersection a half block to our left was the nearest edge to our hotel of the now destroyed twenty-four day protest camp. Soon after this first view of the street, I spoke with the hotel night manager who said that the police action had lasted from 5 to 6am and that he believed it was now over.
Sometime before 7am, however, a police helicopter started ominously flying over the city center. During this period, I also returned to my hotel room long enough to catch a brief news report on Canal 2 from a reporter on the telephone from Oaxaca talking about the “confrontation” intended to remove striking teachers that had started “minutes before five” causing “pandemonium” in the Central Historic District of Oaxaca. Before the reporter had time to say more, the anchor cut him off and switched to a news story about Bush and Iraq.
I went downstairs to the courtyard and began chatting with other hotel guests. Just as I was thinking about venturing out to the street (a little after 7am), the police helicopter flew very low near our street and dropped tear gas grenades (or was it pepper gas?). Some of the other hotel guests and I saw people on the street rushing to doorways. We all retreated to our courtyard as the hotel manager quickly locked the hotel front gate and front door behind us.
A little later, on the second floor roof overlooking the street, we directly observed someone in the helicopter – flying less than two hundred feet from the ground and less than a block away from our hotel – continuing to drop some type of crowd-deterring chemical agent on the streets below. After several minutes of this eerie close-up viewing, our hotel manager asked us to retreat from our lookout because of the danger that the helicopter would get “confused” and drop tear gas on the flat hotel roof. This was a roof that one “No Smoking” sign had already informed us was flammable.
Over the next few hours, I alternated between taking pictures of the relentlessly circling, but now higher flying, helicopter, and returning to my hotel room to watch TV and to take notes on what we were experiencing. I could not find any further coverage of the Oaxacan situation but there was plenty of news about the most recent Mexican presidential election polls. These polls, released eighteen days before the July 2 election, showed the PRD’s López Obrador with a razor-thin lead over his nearest challenger, Felipe Calderón, of Mexican President Fox’s center-right National Action Party (PAN).
Meanwhile, we continued to hear explosions and to see smoke (tear gas? home-made explosives? smoke bombs? intentionally set fires?) in the direction of the nearby public squares. A few of the hotel guests thought they heard gunfire.
Between 10 and 11am we heard rumors (fortunately never confirmed) that three people had been killed in the crackdown. Around 10:45am, a female hotel worker who had arrived to work not long before told us that the city center was shut down; that she had seen (or heard about?) two vehicles on fire and an injured police officer; and that the Zócalo plaza was “very ugly”. A few minutes later, we observed from our hotel roof, now reopened for us by the staff, some marchers heading down our street toward the Alameda square, chanting loudly, several holding sticks and one a baseball bat. Most were not armed with anything except surgical masks. I saw one carrying a radio.
I started checking the Internet from the sole hotel office computer for news of the situation, but had little luck. (From what I could eventually gather, Reuters was the first major news service to report on the situation. I found their two short but timely reports a little later in the afternoon). My spouse took time to write an email to family and a few friends to let them know about the situation and that we were OK, safe in our hotel. Around 1pm, I caught a thirty second segment about the Oaxacan situation on CNN en Español. I believe the reporter said there were 3000 police involved in the operation. He concluded the short segment saying there was no word on the number of injured.
Around 1:20pm, with things quieter I decided to finally venture out to the street. Earlier someone from the hotel had gone out to bring back fresh tamales for the hotel guests which we shared among ourselves along with cups of instant soup. I walked the block and-a-half down Avenida Independencia to the Alameda square and witnessed the destruction of the protest camp, tarps and tents and posters torn down and strewn about everywhere in an unsightly mess. There were small groups still on the street and around the Alameda. When asked, they all gave the same answer: “It’s not finished.” On my way back, a couple people standing in the doorway of a youth hostel, relayed a rumor that more police were on their way. With dogs. I hurried back to our hotel.
Soon after this, with a few other hotel guests, I watched/heard Oaxaca’s Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz on TV giving an emotional and meandering address by telephone that praised the police for defending the “rule of law.” The governor, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI – that had dominated Mexican politics for more than seven decades before losing their political monopoly in the late 1990s, castigated “radicals” in the teachers’ movement whom he noted had some days earlier blocked the road to Oaxaca’s airport and whom he argued were acting on the “margins of their authentic struggle.” He called on the teachers to go back to work.
In another TV interview with the governor that I heard later in the day, he argued that since Oaxaca depended on tourism as a major source of income, the state government had needed to act to restore order to the tourist sector. It was sometime around this time that my wife and I, feeling upset and uncomfortable with maintaining our regular vacation plans in the midst of this repressive situation and disgusted with the governor’s suggestion that he was trying to make Oaxaca more appealing for tourists, began looking into the option of changing our flights home.
In the same TV news segment in which the governor spoke of protecting tourism, a national government spokesperson strongly emphasized that the government actions in Oaxaca were matters of the PRI-led Oaxaca state government, not of the PAN-led Mexican national government. The report also included brief criticisms from two teacher unionists, including the head of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) with which the striking Oaxacan teachers were affiliated and a local union member who called the government’s actions that morning “criminal”.
Whether criminal or not, the police crackdown on the teachers protest – that had been threateningly authorized by a vote in the Oaxaca state Senate on June 1 (Friedberg) – turned out to be unsuccessful. We learned later that the teachers had returned to both city squares by Wednesday evening but that they chose not to set up camp there that night as a demonstration of support for the resumption of negotiations between union and government representatives that ended up beginning on Thursday morning. The teachers, I later confirmed from reading Friday morning Mexican newspapers, began retaking the two main public squares mid-morning on Thursday chanting “¡Estamos golpeados/ Pero nunca derrotados!” (“We are knocked down/But never defeated!”) (Martínez).
The eventual teacher reoccupation of the Alameda and the Zócalo was not at all clear when I went to those squares around 7am on Thursday morning to look around. At that early hour I observed cleaners spraying down the plazas and garbage crews sweeping and collecting trash in the areas where thousands of teachers had been sleeping and living for the previous twenty-four days. A Mexican TV crew with their media van and equipment was interviewing someone on one corner of the Alameda but, as far as I could tell, there were few if any teachers around the square.
With this transformation, the protest and confrontation had the appearance of being over. But when I asked the woman selling newspapers and magazines at a kiosk on the corner of the Alameda what she thought of the removal of the teachers, she immediately replied: “They are going to return. “ I asked when. She said: “Soon.”
When my wife and I dropped by the Alameda again around 9am on Thursday morning, before heading out by taxi to our delayed tour of the famous pre-Hispanic archeological sites near Oaxaca, the plazas were still very quiet. Ten hours later when I returned to the public squares – after exploring the amazing Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán and the impressive architecture and stonework at Mitla; taking a look at the biggest tree in the world at Tule; and saying good-bye to my dear wife at the Oaxaca airport – the teachers and their supporters, thousands and thousands of them, were back in full force. Some tarps had been re-hung (though few tents) and there were numerous new signs calling for the immediate resignation of the state governor.
The extra day I chose to spend in Oaxaca after my wife returned to the States allowed me to observe the teachers’ remobilization in the public squares; to listen to and watch people while trying not to intrude too much; to take some more digital photos; and to collect Friday’s fast-selling local and national Mexican newspapers that all had front page features and multiple reports on the violent police action in Oaxaca and the quick rebound of the teachers’ movement.
As I walked around the public protest area Friday morning, I saw coffee and atole being dipped out and distributed from large common pots. I observed people clustered in their organized delegations and locations listening to group leaders with microphones and discussing the situation. Everywhere I walked, I felt the pulsing power of an invigorated and growing social movement. And I could not help but be impressed by the courage of people who having experienced police violence just two days before continued to insist that “public squares” were worth fighting for. Among the many posters on the plazas, one large one stood out: “The struggle of the teachers is the struggle of the people.”
Another thing that struck me about activity on the Alameda and the Zócalo that morning was the large number of people who had their heads buried in newspapers. Many of them were reading the front page articles about the aftermath of the police raid, the teacher remobilization, and the reinitiated negotiations. Others were concentrating on the stories previewing Mexico’s World Cup game with Angola that was scheduled to start at 2pm that afternoon, another major event to which the entire nation was affixed.
From my observations on the public squares Friday morning and from reading multiple news reports that day and after, I was able to begin answering some of the questions that were on my mind. First, what were the immediate consequences of the police crackdown? As news photos and eyewitness accounts attest, the police who raided the teacher’s community early Wednesday morning were well-armed and, besides using tear gas and pepper gas, also utilized dogs and billy clubs. According to the Red Cross, the injury toll of the confrontation was 92 people, seventy of them hospitalized. Despite rumors and contrary to some early reports, there were no confirmed reports of any deaths. According to an “urgent action” appeal from the non-governmental organization Global Exchange, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada reported that “a pregnant woman among the teachers miscarried as a result of the attacks (Global Exchange).” Many sources also reported the destruction of the alternative media radio station, Radio Plantón.
The other main consequence of the failed police crackdown was the resumption of negotiations between the government and the teachers that had broken down on May 25. These new talks started on Thursday morning and were facilitated by the intervention of a high-level federal official from the Secretaría de Gobernación and by several concessions made by Governor Ruiz including release of the ten teachers who had been arrested during the raid; suspension of twenty-five “orders of apprehension” against other strike leaders; and a promise of reparations for physical damage that resulted from the police crackdown, including to Radio Plantón. In return, the teachers released six police officers and two suspected intelligence agents whom they had detained during the street battle (Sánchez and Jiménez, Mendez and Velez, and Matias, June 16).
However, the secretary general of Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), Enrique Rueda Pacheco, also made it clear in his Thursday public pronouncements that the Oaxacan teachers would continue occupying the public squares and proceed with their plans for a third “mega march” the next day, Friday, June 16 (Sánchez and Jiménez, Mendez and Velez, and Matias, June 16).
Second, how large is this public education workers’ protest and what are their demands? Different sources put the number of striking public school teachers of SNTE Section 22 at between 40,000 and 70,000. An earlier “mega march” on June 2 that included the teachers along with their civil society supporters was reportedly the biggest mobilization in Mexico in more than a decade (Friedberg). With regard to demands, most journalistic reports emphasized the teachers’ salary-related demands: an across the board salary increase and an adjustment (rezonificación) of the salary scale to account for the higher living costs for teachers in the tourist areas of Oaxaca. The governor’s offer on the salary matter earlier in the strike had been rejected as insufficient.
However, signs in the public squares and more comprehensive media sources pointed out that the economic demands of the teachers extended beyond salaries to include demands for spending on public school infrastructure and for “school breakfasts, school supplies, shoes, and eyeglasses” for school children in the poorest areas of the state (Friedberg). The teachers also had political demands, including the end of repression of teachers and the release of people they believe have been held for political reasons. The strongest demand of the teachers in the aftermath of the police crackdown was vehemently political: the resignation of the state governor.
Third, what do Oaxaqueños think of the teachers? Among the non-teachers I spoke with in Oaxaca, the magazine kiosk woman who told me the teachers were returning to the squares seemed to have the most sympathetic view of the teachers. When I pressed her on what she thought of the teachers’ protest, she made a reference to the government “not keeping its promises” to the teachers.
A few other Oaxaqueños I spoke with were less sympathetic. Our taxi driver (a father of school children) who took us to the ruins, for example, complained that he thought teachers were already well-paid and that some of them, he claimed, took a large number of sick days except when it came to their strike. He told us that he liked the PRI and thought Governor Ruiz was doing a good job. When I, revealing that I was a public education worker myself, challenged him a bit on the unrecognized work of teachers outside the classroom, he conceded that some Oaxacan teachers do work hard. Finally, our hotel staff seemed to wish, rather predictably, that the teachers would leave the downtown tourist area although they refrained from strong criticism perhaps because they sensed that some of their guests sided with the teachers.
Like most protesters in most nations, the striking Oaxacan teachers have had to contend with quite a bit of unsympathetic mainstream media coverage and a “blame the teachers” campaign, in this case led by a conservative “Parents Association” and local PRI politicians (Friedberg). Yet a local Oaxacan newspaper also reported on significant support from parents and children for the teachers as well as unsolicited gifts of food, refreshments, and supportive signs from local citizens (Velásquez). The three “mega-marches” on May 15, June 2, and June 16 – that each drew tens of thousands of participants – demonstrated very impressive civil society support for the teachers. And according to one report, the Friday, June 16 march that took place two days after the police crackdown included parents and businesspeople who came out on the streets to cheer on the marchers (Mendez and Velez, June 17).
Fourth, why did this strike last longer than previous strikes and what is the state of the current negotiations? As many sources noted, teachers in Oaxaca had gone on short strikes for many previous years. That this strike has lasted much longer may be partly due to the political atmosphere generated by the hotly contested presidential elections on July 2. While the state governor suggested that the extended strike was due to “radical” leaders with other agendas, one newspaper report argued, suggesting the complexity of the situation, that the impasse this year was in fact a result of the breakdown of the historical “complicity” between Section 22 of the SNTE and the state government (del Valle). On the Thursday of the resumed negotiations and the release of arrested teachers, the PRI state governor claimed he had addressed all the demands that were within his power to address and challenged the PAN-led federal government to come up with the money to meet the teachers’ salary adjustment demands (Sánchez and Jimémez).
The teachers’ stance as negotiations proceeded was to vociferously demand the governor’s resignation. To demonstrate their resolve, the teachers organized their march of tens of thousands of teachers and supporters on Friday, starting in the middle of Mexico’s second World Cup match and lasting until late into the evening. On the day of this march, the same day I departed Oaxaca, federal government spokespeople, while generally optimistic about finding a resolution to the Oaxacan standoff, warned that the federal government did not have enough money to meet the teachers’ demands and that the resignation of the governor “cannot be on the table” (Galán).
By the Monday following the violent police crackdown and the resumption of negotiations, the new talks had already broken down over the teachers’ demand that the governor resign (McKinley). If the state governor is forced to resign, he will be the fourth Oaxacan governor to resign from office before the end of their terms, the first since 1977 (Mendez and Velez), but to date the governor has defied this demand. To encourage continued talks, some notable Oaxaqueños including the artist Francisco Toledo and a few priests joined the negotiations in late June in some sort of mediating role. Meanwhile, the teachers and the broad civil society movement of which they are a part held yet another “mega-march” on Wednesday, June 28 (Friedberg, June 29), exactly two weeks after the police crackdown and just five days before the presidential elections.
Regarding the teachers’ situation, one Oaxaqueña said to me: “It is all about the elections.” If this is at least partly true, what then is the larger political context of this protest? As a student of Mexican politics for the last dozen years or so, the mobilization of the teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca seems to me another clear example of the growing robustness of civil society in Mexico. Beginning in the mid-1980s with the community organizing that occurred in the aftermath of the Mexico City earthquake; catapulted by the broadly popular Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994; and coming to include a wide variety of social movements and organizations (including a few formerly co-opted unions), Mexican civil society has continued to grow stronger over the last decade even as the old single party-dominated corporatist system, once a relatively viable system of interest representation, has continued to deteriorate and to collapse.
This expansion and vitalization of civil society has coincided with the growing competitiveness of electoral politics. Since the stunning 1997 elections that ended PRI’s domination in the national legislature and the historic 2000 elections that brought PAN’s Vicente Fox to the presidency, Mexico has continued its evolution toward a three-party system dominated by PAN, PRI, and PRD. The candidates of all three of these major parties fought very hard, at times brutally hard, for votes in the presidential elections that took place on July 2. How did this hotly contested campaign affect the teacher protest and government actions in Oaxaca (a state where the two most popular parties are PRI and PRD)? One expert on the Oaxacan teachers’ protest suggests that the PRI governor-ordered police crackdown on June 14th can be seen “in terms of the political benefits that certain parties stand to gain from generating a climate of fear, a climate in which they can then appear to be maintaining and restoring law and order (Friedberg interview).”
As is now well known, the July 2 Mexican presidential elections ended in a race so close between the top two candidates that a winner was not officially declared until September. Among teachers, of course, López Obrador of the center-left PRD was the preferred candidate although teachers’ movement leaders before the elections were somewhat divided about what stance to take toward the elections themselves (McKinley). PAN’s youthful Calderon – the candidate who was declared the winner in September – has advocated a continuation of Mexico’s post-1980s private market-oriented political economy, an affirmation of the approach taken by the Fox administration.
The strong showing by López Obrador, by contrast, represented the longing of many Mexicans for a revaluation of the public sector and of public goods after almost two decades of emphasis on privatization and economic “liberalization”. This view is consistent with the recent trend throughout Latin America toward social democratic or populist left policy approaches. Even though Mexico’s PRD did not ultimately win the presidency, their “best ever” showing in both the presidential and legislative elections this year (including in Oaxaca) signal a fundamental realignment in Mexican politics. Among the thirty-four promises López Obrador made to the people of Oaxaca on a campaign promotional newssheet I picked up on Friday, June 16, number eight stood out for its relevance to the events of that tumultuous week: “We will give priority to public education, free and of high quality at all the scholastic levels (López Obrador).”
Who, in the end, will get to occupy the “public squares” of Oaxaca – and of all of our societies? For citizens everywhere who wish to protect and promote public goods like education and health care against the unrelenting forces of private privilege and political authoritarianism, the outcomes of the still ongoing social movement protest in Oaxaca and of the tumultuous July 2 Mexican elections matter a great deal. I guess one could say that this is the real World Cup grand match, the one that affects us all.
With my ear-plugged wife sleeping soundly beside me, I got up to check out what was going on. Opening our door to the early morning darkness, I smelled something that I assumed to be firecrackers and wondered what kind of event was generating this. Closing the door, I hesitated. The shouting and explosions continued. Confused and still a little cloudy from sleep, I began sensing something unusual was happening. With my sandals on, I opened the door again and stepped outside to descend the stairs to the ground floor courtyards and the hotel front desk. Immediately, my eyes began to burn.
With something acrid clogging the air, I took half breaths as I made my way through the first courtyard. As I entered the second, main, courtyard, I saw the young night manager on the telephone holding a white towel to his face. As I approached, I heard him say in an urgent voice to someone on the phone: “¡Están dealojando los maestros! ¡Está peligroso en la calle!” (“They are dislodging the teachers! It is dangerous in the street!”) Holding my breath and blinking my stinging eyes, I returned quickly through the courtyards, no other hotel guests around, and up the stairs to our room. Rousing my sleeping wife, rubbing my eyes, I said: “Something bad is going on outside. They are tear-gassing the teachers.” It was around 5:30am.
We had arrived in Oaxaca on June 12, one-and-a-half days earlier. Situating ourselves at a modest hotel in the city’s Centro Histórico, we headed out our first late afternoon to explore the two nearby main public squares of the city. We immediately encountered on our walk the large encampment of thousands of striking public education workers from all around the state of Oaxaca. We would discover that this protest camp covered both large plazas and spanned at least a dozen square city blocks.
Ducking our heads beneath the ropes and the tarps of the several weeks-old tent community, we observed men, women, and children clustered in groups talking, eating, and (later) sleeping under the low-hanging tarps (some inside camp tents). There were political posters and hand-made signs everywhere, some of them quite detailed and imaginative. On the façade of the state Government Palace in the Zócalo, the biggest of the two adjoining Historic Center squares, was a huge colorful poster caricaturing Oaxaca state Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox sitting on adjoining toilets, holding hands, and urging each other to “Push”. (I learned later that the state government operated out of offices in a nearby town.)
Our first evening in the city of Oaxaca we ate early dinner at a restaurant, Como Agua Pa’ Chocolate, inspired by the Laura Esquivel novel (and film). The “Like Water for Chocolate” restaurant is located on one corner of the Alameda de León, the other main city plaza that is anchored by a large Catholic cathedral. Our second floor balcony table provided us an aerial view of the strike community as we dined on cactus leaf soup, quail with rose petals, and black mole Champandongo. We were tourists, through and through. At the same time we were tourists who did not feel at all bothered by the large teachers’ protest in the public squares of our vacation getaway.
Around 7am the next morning I took a morning walk around the encampment on the Alameda and the Zócalo. Some people were up, brushing their teeth, chatting. I stopped at a place where a group of men were watching a morning TV news program. As I walked away, a middle-aged man came up to me and asked me what I thought of their protest. I responded generally and affirmatively.
In the course of our conversation, the man told me that the Mexican government does not serve teachers well; that among the candidates for the upcoming Mexican presidential election on July 2 he favored Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-of-center candidate of the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), because he believes he supports the teachers; and that George Bush is a “criminal” (he said this twice) for killing women and children (I assumed he meant in Iraq). When I asked, the man said he was from a town four hours from the city of Oaxaca. When I wondered about showers for the teachers who had been camped out for more than three weeks, he laughed and said they were sometimes able to use hotels for washing.
My wife and I spent a large part of our first full day in Oaxaca several blocks from the city center at the Santo Domingo Church and in the sprawling cultural museum and ethno-botanical garden that are on the grounds of the former monastery. During our main meal that day, I had my first shot of mezcal with worm salt and orange wedges.
That evening, we attended a Guelaguetza dance show at a local restaurant. As taken as we were with the colorfully costumed dancers from seven different regions of the state of Oaxaca, we were equally entertained by the energetic throng of cheering school children from Mexico City who were in Oaxaca for a field trip. We went to bed Tuesday night ready to get up the following morning for our eight hour guided tour to the famous Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán and to craft villages near Oaxaca.
We awoke instead to tear gas and to the sounds of confrontation on the streets.
After I woke my wife on the Wednesday morning of the police crackdown on the public education workers, we turned on the TV to see if there was any coverage of the bedlam that we continued to hear outside. Nothing. Around 6am, with things seeming to quiet down a bit, we went out on our flat hotel roof to the edge overlooking Avenida Independencia, one of the streets leading into the Alameda plaza.
On this street, now illuminated by daylight, we saw clusters of displaced teachers at the intersections to our right and to our left. The intersection a half block to our left was the nearest edge to our hotel of the now destroyed twenty-four day protest camp. Soon after this first view of the street, I spoke with the hotel night manager who said that the police action had lasted from 5 to 6am and that he believed it was now over.
Sometime before 7am, however, a police helicopter started ominously flying over the city center. During this period, I also returned to my hotel room long enough to catch a brief news report on Canal 2 from a reporter on the telephone from Oaxaca talking about the “confrontation” intended to remove striking teachers that had started “minutes before five” causing “pandemonium” in the Central Historic District of Oaxaca. Before the reporter had time to say more, the anchor cut him off and switched to a news story about Bush and Iraq.
I went downstairs to the courtyard and began chatting with other hotel guests. Just as I was thinking about venturing out to the street (a little after 7am), the police helicopter flew very low near our street and dropped tear gas grenades (or was it pepper gas?). Some of the other hotel guests and I saw people on the street rushing to doorways. We all retreated to our courtyard as the hotel manager quickly locked the hotel front gate and front door behind us.
A little later, on the second floor roof overlooking the street, we directly observed someone in the helicopter – flying less than two hundred feet from the ground and less than a block away from our hotel – continuing to drop some type of crowd-deterring chemical agent on the streets below. After several minutes of this eerie close-up viewing, our hotel manager asked us to retreat from our lookout because of the danger that the helicopter would get “confused” and drop tear gas on the flat hotel roof. This was a roof that one “No Smoking” sign had already informed us was flammable.
Over the next few hours, I alternated between taking pictures of the relentlessly circling, but now higher flying, helicopter, and returning to my hotel room to watch TV and to take notes on what we were experiencing. I could not find any further coverage of the Oaxacan situation but there was plenty of news about the most recent Mexican presidential election polls. These polls, released eighteen days before the July 2 election, showed the PRD’s López Obrador with a razor-thin lead over his nearest challenger, Felipe Calderón, of Mexican President Fox’s center-right National Action Party (PAN).
Meanwhile, we continued to hear explosions and to see smoke (tear gas? home-made explosives? smoke bombs? intentionally set fires?) in the direction of the nearby public squares. A few of the hotel guests thought they heard gunfire.
Between 10 and 11am we heard rumors (fortunately never confirmed) that three people had been killed in the crackdown. Around 10:45am, a female hotel worker who had arrived to work not long before told us that the city center was shut down; that she had seen (or heard about?) two vehicles on fire and an injured police officer; and that the Zócalo plaza was “very ugly”. A few minutes later, we observed from our hotel roof, now reopened for us by the staff, some marchers heading down our street toward the Alameda square, chanting loudly, several holding sticks and one a baseball bat. Most were not armed with anything except surgical masks. I saw one carrying a radio.
I started checking the Internet from the sole hotel office computer for news of the situation, but had little luck. (From what I could eventually gather, Reuters was the first major news service to report on the situation. I found their two short but timely reports a little later in the afternoon). My spouse took time to write an email to family and a few friends to let them know about the situation and that we were OK, safe in our hotel. Around 1pm, I caught a thirty second segment about the Oaxacan situation on CNN en Español. I believe the reporter said there were 3000 police involved in the operation. He concluded the short segment saying there was no word on the number of injured.
Around 1:20pm, with things quieter I decided to finally venture out to the street. Earlier someone from the hotel had gone out to bring back fresh tamales for the hotel guests which we shared among ourselves along with cups of instant soup. I walked the block and-a-half down Avenida Independencia to the Alameda square and witnessed the destruction of the protest camp, tarps and tents and posters torn down and strewn about everywhere in an unsightly mess. There were small groups still on the street and around the Alameda. When asked, they all gave the same answer: “It’s not finished.” On my way back, a couple people standing in the doorway of a youth hostel, relayed a rumor that more police were on their way. With dogs. I hurried back to our hotel.
Soon after this, with a few other hotel guests, I watched/heard Oaxaca’s Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz on TV giving an emotional and meandering address by telephone that praised the police for defending the “rule of law.” The governor, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI – that had dominated Mexican politics for more than seven decades before losing their political monopoly in the late 1990s, castigated “radicals” in the teachers’ movement whom he noted had some days earlier blocked the road to Oaxaca’s airport and whom he argued were acting on the “margins of their authentic struggle.” He called on the teachers to go back to work.
In another TV interview with the governor that I heard later in the day, he argued that since Oaxaca depended on tourism as a major source of income, the state government had needed to act to restore order to the tourist sector. It was sometime around this time that my wife and I, feeling upset and uncomfortable with maintaining our regular vacation plans in the midst of this repressive situation and disgusted with the governor’s suggestion that he was trying to make Oaxaca more appealing for tourists, began looking into the option of changing our flights home.
In the same TV news segment in which the governor spoke of protecting tourism, a national government spokesperson strongly emphasized that the government actions in Oaxaca were matters of the PRI-led Oaxaca state government, not of the PAN-led Mexican national government. The report also included brief criticisms from two teacher unionists, including the head of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) with which the striking Oaxacan teachers were affiliated and a local union member who called the government’s actions that morning “criminal”.
Whether criminal or not, the police crackdown on the teachers protest – that had been threateningly authorized by a vote in the Oaxaca state Senate on June 1 (Friedberg) – turned out to be unsuccessful. We learned later that the teachers had returned to both city squares by Wednesday evening but that they chose not to set up camp there that night as a demonstration of support for the resumption of negotiations between union and government representatives that ended up beginning on Thursday morning. The teachers, I later confirmed from reading Friday morning Mexican newspapers, began retaking the two main public squares mid-morning on Thursday chanting “¡Estamos golpeados/ Pero nunca derrotados!” (“We are knocked down/But never defeated!”) (Martínez).
The eventual teacher reoccupation of the Alameda and the Zócalo was not at all clear when I went to those squares around 7am on Thursday morning to look around. At that early hour I observed cleaners spraying down the plazas and garbage crews sweeping and collecting trash in the areas where thousands of teachers had been sleeping and living for the previous twenty-four days. A Mexican TV crew with their media van and equipment was interviewing someone on one corner of the Alameda but, as far as I could tell, there were few if any teachers around the square.
With this transformation, the protest and confrontation had the appearance of being over. But when I asked the woman selling newspapers and magazines at a kiosk on the corner of the Alameda what she thought of the removal of the teachers, she immediately replied: “They are going to return. “ I asked when. She said: “Soon.”
When my wife and I dropped by the Alameda again around 9am on Thursday morning, before heading out by taxi to our delayed tour of the famous pre-Hispanic archeological sites near Oaxaca, the plazas were still very quiet. Ten hours later when I returned to the public squares – after exploring the amazing Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán and the impressive architecture and stonework at Mitla; taking a look at the biggest tree in the world at Tule; and saying good-bye to my dear wife at the Oaxaca airport – the teachers and their supporters, thousands and thousands of them, were back in full force. Some tarps had been re-hung (though few tents) and there were numerous new signs calling for the immediate resignation of the state governor.
The extra day I chose to spend in Oaxaca after my wife returned to the States allowed me to observe the teachers’ remobilization in the public squares; to listen to and watch people while trying not to intrude too much; to take some more digital photos; and to collect Friday’s fast-selling local and national Mexican newspapers that all had front page features and multiple reports on the violent police action in Oaxaca and the quick rebound of the teachers’ movement.
As I walked around the public protest area Friday morning, I saw coffee and atole being dipped out and distributed from large common pots. I observed people clustered in their organized delegations and locations listening to group leaders with microphones and discussing the situation. Everywhere I walked, I felt the pulsing power of an invigorated and growing social movement. And I could not help but be impressed by the courage of people who having experienced police violence just two days before continued to insist that “public squares” were worth fighting for. Among the many posters on the plazas, one large one stood out: “The struggle of the teachers is the struggle of the people.”
Another thing that struck me about activity on the Alameda and the Zócalo that morning was the large number of people who had their heads buried in newspapers. Many of them were reading the front page articles about the aftermath of the police raid, the teacher remobilization, and the reinitiated negotiations. Others were concentrating on the stories previewing Mexico’s World Cup game with Angola that was scheduled to start at 2pm that afternoon, another major event to which the entire nation was affixed.
From my observations on the public squares Friday morning and from reading multiple news reports that day and after, I was able to begin answering some of the questions that were on my mind. First, what were the immediate consequences of the police crackdown? As news photos and eyewitness accounts attest, the police who raided the teacher’s community early Wednesday morning were well-armed and, besides using tear gas and pepper gas, also utilized dogs and billy clubs. According to the Red Cross, the injury toll of the confrontation was 92 people, seventy of them hospitalized. Despite rumors and contrary to some early reports, there were no confirmed reports of any deaths. According to an “urgent action” appeal from the non-governmental organization Global Exchange, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada reported that “a pregnant woman among the teachers miscarried as a result of the attacks (Global Exchange).” Many sources also reported the destruction of the alternative media radio station, Radio Plantón.
The other main consequence of the failed police crackdown was the resumption of negotiations between the government and the teachers that had broken down on May 25. These new talks started on Thursday morning and were facilitated by the intervention of a high-level federal official from the Secretaría de Gobernación and by several concessions made by Governor Ruiz including release of the ten teachers who had been arrested during the raid; suspension of twenty-five “orders of apprehension” against other strike leaders; and a promise of reparations for physical damage that resulted from the police crackdown, including to Radio Plantón. In return, the teachers released six police officers and two suspected intelligence agents whom they had detained during the street battle (Sánchez and Jiménez, Mendez and Velez, and Matias, June 16).
However, the secretary general of Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), Enrique Rueda Pacheco, also made it clear in his Thursday public pronouncements that the Oaxacan teachers would continue occupying the public squares and proceed with their plans for a third “mega march” the next day, Friday, June 16 (Sánchez and Jiménez, Mendez and Velez, and Matias, June 16).
Second, how large is this public education workers’ protest and what are their demands? Different sources put the number of striking public school teachers of SNTE Section 22 at between 40,000 and 70,000. An earlier “mega march” on June 2 that included the teachers along with their civil society supporters was reportedly the biggest mobilization in Mexico in more than a decade (Friedberg). With regard to demands, most journalistic reports emphasized the teachers’ salary-related demands: an across the board salary increase and an adjustment (rezonificación) of the salary scale to account for the higher living costs for teachers in the tourist areas of Oaxaca. The governor’s offer on the salary matter earlier in the strike had been rejected as insufficient.
However, signs in the public squares and more comprehensive media sources pointed out that the economic demands of the teachers extended beyond salaries to include demands for spending on public school infrastructure and for “school breakfasts, school supplies, shoes, and eyeglasses” for school children in the poorest areas of the state (Friedberg). The teachers also had political demands, including the end of repression of teachers and the release of people they believe have been held for political reasons. The strongest demand of the teachers in the aftermath of the police crackdown was vehemently political: the resignation of the state governor.
Third, what do Oaxaqueños think of the teachers? Among the non-teachers I spoke with in Oaxaca, the magazine kiosk woman who told me the teachers were returning to the squares seemed to have the most sympathetic view of the teachers. When I pressed her on what she thought of the teachers’ protest, she made a reference to the government “not keeping its promises” to the teachers.
A few other Oaxaqueños I spoke with were less sympathetic. Our taxi driver (a father of school children) who took us to the ruins, for example, complained that he thought teachers were already well-paid and that some of them, he claimed, took a large number of sick days except when it came to their strike. He told us that he liked the PRI and thought Governor Ruiz was doing a good job. When I, revealing that I was a public education worker myself, challenged him a bit on the unrecognized work of teachers outside the classroom, he conceded that some Oaxacan teachers do work hard. Finally, our hotel staff seemed to wish, rather predictably, that the teachers would leave the downtown tourist area although they refrained from strong criticism perhaps because they sensed that some of their guests sided with the teachers.
Like most protesters in most nations, the striking Oaxacan teachers have had to contend with quite a bit of unsympathetic mainstream media coverage and a “blame the teachers” campaign, in this case led by a conservative “Parents Association” and local PRI politicians (Friedberg). Yet a local Oaxacan newspaper also reported on significant support from parents and children for the teachers as well as unsolicited gifts of food, refreshments, and supportive signs from local citizens (Velásquez). The three “mega-marches” on May 15, June 2, and June 16 – that each drew tens of thousands of participants – demonstrated very impressive civil society support for the teachers. And according to one report, the Friday, June 16 march that took place two days after the police crackdown included parents and businesspeople who came out on the streets to cheer on the marchers (Mendez and Velez, June 17).
Fourth, why did this strike last longer than previous strikes and what is the state of the current negotiations? As many sources noted, teachers in Oaxaca had gone on short strikes for many previous years. That this strike has lasted much longer may be partly due to the political atmosphere generated by the hotly contested presidential elections on July 2. While the state governor suggested that the extended strike was due to “radical” leaders with other agendas, one newspaper report argued, suggesting the complexity of the situation, that the impasse this year was in fact a result of the breakdown of the historical “complicity” between Section 22 of the SNTE and the state government (del Valle). On the Thursday of the resumed negotiations and the release of arrested teachers, the PRI state governor claimed he had addressed all the demands that were within his power to address and challenged the PAN-led federal government to come up with the money to meet the teachers’ salary adjustment demands (Sánchez and Jimémez).
The teachers’ stance as negotiations proceeded was to vociferously demand the governor’s resignation. To demonstrate their resolve, the teachers organized their march of tens of thousands of teachers and supporters on Friday, starting in the middle of Mexico’s second World Cup match and lasting until late into the evening. On the day of this march, the same day I departed Oaxaca, federal government spokespeople, while generally optimistic about finding a resolution to the Oaxacan standoff, warned that the federal government did not have enough money to meet the teachers’ demands and that the resignation of the governor “cannot be on the table” (Galán).
By the Monday following the violent police crackdown and the resumption of negotiations, the new talks had already broken down over the teachers’ demand that the governor resign (McKinley). If the state governor is forced to resign, he will be the fourth Oaxacan governor to resign from office before the end of their terms, the first since 1977 (Mendez and Velez), but to date the governor has defied this demand. To encourage continued talks, some notable Oaxaqueños including the artist Francisco Toledo and a few priests joined the negotiations in late June in some sort of mediating role. Meanwhile, the teachers and the broad civil society movement of which they are a part held yet another “mega-march” on Wednesday, June 28 (Friedberg, June 29), exactly two weeks after the police crackdown and just five days before the presidential elections.
Regarding the teachers’ situation, one Oaxaqueña said to me: “It is all about the elections.” If this is at least partly true, what then is the larger political context of this protest? As a student of Mexican politics for the last dozen years or so, the mobilization of the teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca seems to me another clear example of the growing robustness of civil society in Mexico. Beginning in the mid-1980s with the community organizing that occurred in the aftermath of the Mexico City earthquake; catapulted by the broadly popular Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994; and coming to include a wide variety of social movements and organizations (including a few formerly co-opted unions), Mexican civil society has continued to grow stronger over the last decade even as the old single party-dominated corporatist system, once a relatively viable system of interest representation, has continued to deteriorate and to collapse.
This expansion and vitalization of civil society has coincided with the growing competitiveness of electoral politics. Since the stunning 1997 elections that ended PRI’s domination in the national legislature and the historic 2000 elections that brought PAN’s Vicente Fox to the presidency, Mexico has continued its evolution toward a three-party system dominated by PAN, PRI, and PRD. The candidates of all three of these major parties fought very hard, at times brutally hard, for votes in the presidential elections that took place on July 2. How did this hotly contested campaign affect the teacher protest and government actions in Oaxaca (a state where the two most popular parties are PRI and PRD)? One expert on the Oaxacan teachers’ protest suggests that the PRI governor-ordered police crackdown on June 14th can be seen “in terms of the political benefits that certain parties stand to gain from generating a climate of fear, a climate in which they can then appear to be maintaining and restoring law and order (Friedberg interview).”
As is now well known, the July 2 Mexican presidential elections ended in a race so close between the top two candidates that a winner was not officially declared until September. Among teachers, of course, López Obrador of the center-left PRD was the preferred candidate although teachers’ movement leaders before the elections were somewhat divided about what stance to take toward the elections themselves (McKinley). PAN’s youthful Calderon – the candidate who was declared the winner in September – has advocated a continuation of Mexico’s post-1980s private market-oriented political economy, an affirmation of the approach taken by the Fox administration.
The strong showing by López Obrador, by contrast, represented the longing of many Mexicans for a revaluation of the public sector and of public goods after almost two decades of emphasis on privatization and economic “liberalization”. This view is consistent with the recent trend throughout Latin America toward social democratic or populist left policy approaches. Even though Mexico’s PRD did not ultimately win the presidency, their “best ever” showing in both the presidential and legislative elections this year (including in Oaxaca) signal a fundamental realignment in Mexican politics. Among the thirty-four promises López Obrador made to the people of Oaxaca on a campaign promotional newssheet I picked up on Friday, June 16, number eight stood out for its relevance to the events of that tumultuous week: “We will give priority to public education, free and of high quality at all the scholastic levels (López Obrador).”
Who, in the end, will get to occupy the “public squares” of Oaxaca – and of all of our societies? For citizens everywhere who wish to protect and promote public goods like education and health care against the unrelenting forces of private privilege and political authoritarianism, the outcomes of the still ongoing social movement protest in Oaxaca and of the tumultuous July 2 Mexican elections matter a great deal. I guess one could say that this is the real World Cup grand match, the one that affects us all.
References
Del Valle, Sonia. 2006. “Pide SNTE auditar a gobeirno de Ulises,” Reforma, June 16, p. 22.
Friedberg, Jill. 2006. Email letter from Jill Friedberg, director of “Granito de Arena,” a documentary about the teachers’ struggle in Oaxaca. June 4.
___________. 2006. Interview of Jill Friedberg by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now radio program, June 17.
___________. 2006. “Update on the Teachers Situation, June 29th” “Granito de Arena” webpage, www.corrugate.org. Retrieved on June 30.
Galán, José. 2006. “La salida del gobernador no está en la mesa,” La Jornada, June 17, p. 1.
López Obrador, Andrés Manuel. 2006. “Mis compromises con Oaxaca,” Campaign promotional newssheet, no specific date.
Martínez, Raciel. 2006. “Y volvieron hechos miles y miles,” Noticias, June 16, p. 3A.
Matia, Pedro. 2006. “‘¡Que renuncie!’: Sección 22,” Noticias, June 16, p. 1.
McKinley, Jr., James C. 2006. “Teachers Strike May Influence Mexican Vote,” The New York Times, June 22.
Mendez, Enrique and Octavio Velez. 2006. “Ulises Ruiz libera a 10 maestros y suspende órdenes de apprehension,” La Jornada, June 16, p. 14.
___________. 2006. “Decenas de miles de oaxaqueños exigen la renuncia de Ulises Ruiz,” La Jornada, June 17.
No author. 2006. “Mexico Update,” Global Exchange, June 16.
Sánchez, Virgilio and Benito Jiménez. 2006. “Dobla manos Ulises,” Reforma, June 16.
Velásquez, Luis Ignacio. 2006. “Manifestan padres de familia a profesores en plantón,” Noticias, June 16, p. 2A.
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