The Oaxaca Commune: Struggling for Autonomy and Dignity
Poole, Deborah & Rénique, Gerardo
The Oaxaca Commune: Struggling for Autonomy and Dignity By Gerardo Rénique and Deborah Poole F or almost six months in 2006, an unstruc tured coalition of workers, students, peasants,...
...there was a total, radical transformation of women...
...The teachers’ union police kept order in the city, particularly at night...
...Under the initiative of those involved in the media initiative, women coalesced to form the Coordinating Committee of Oaxacan Women (COMO...
...Along the lengthy route to the national capital, thousands lined the road to cheer, feed, and assist the marchers...
...means to centralize and institutionalize popular organizations in Oaxaca...
...Many emotionally recounted how the June 14 events had “opened their eyes,” giving them courage to speak out for the first time about their experiences of government abuse and impunity...
...But it is the people who have to start thinking about this and not wait for the leaders to do it for us...
...therefore, inspired a bit by this experience, we decided that we would not form a collective, nor an organization, nor a front of organizations, but rather a space in which everyone who fights for autonomy from the political parties, those who want to reorganize, those who want to pursue whatever initiative for autonomy can meet regardless of whether they come every week, every two weeks, once or month, or every day...
...In the meeting, a broad array of popular organizations, including neighborhood associations, unions, indigenous communities, NGOs, ecologists, artists, women, youth, and media activists coalesced to form the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, or APPO...
...Neighbors and merchants organized block committees and patrols...
...With a crowd estimated at more than 400,000, the June 28, 2006, march NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Voices From the Oaxacan Insurgency people were tired with the plantón, fed up with us teachers encamped in the zócalo...
...Then, in July 2007, the APPO and Section 22 again organized a festive, participatory, and well-attended In this respect it is important to remember that Oaxacans have not only actively contested the abusive policies of their current PRI governor...
...To ensure order and security in the city, APPO activists created the Honorable Cuerpo de Topiles, a group of civilians appointed by communal authority to enforce APPO resolutions, modeled on indigenous traditions of community policing...
...Fox’s decision to deploy federal police and military to Oaxaca in October 2006 came on the heels of other savage police operations against workers and activists in Atenco (May 2006) and striking workers in Michoacán (April 2006...
...Following a call by the APPO to cast a Toledo said it was ers and dancers tried to enter the auditorium, “punishing vote” against the ruling parties, the they were met with tear gas and bullets from as if a “great fear” PRI was soundly defeated in the July 2, 2006, the armed state and federal police who had sur national elections by a margin of four to one in had descended rounded the auditorium...
...More than a governing body, the 30 consejeros (advisers) who sit on the APPO’s Provisional Coordinating Council organize actions and disseminate ideas and information...
...It is here as well that the indigenous histories and cultures of Oaxaca come into play...
...Two people were killed and more than 100 detained...
...On the other hand, the libertarios want the APPO to remain a broad space of decision making and organizing that respects the political autonomy of its members...
...favor of the center-left opposition Party of the The continuing resilience and creativity with upon the city...
...Although Ruiz remains in power, the movement that took shape in the summer of 2006 continues to thrive in the form of recurring mobilizations, collective initiatives, and political debates...
...APPO activists, however, maintained control of Radio Universidad and the Plaza Santo Domingo, a few blocks from the zócalo...
...Teachers and activists were picked up from their classrooms and labor centers in broad daylight and sent to distant high-security prisons in northern Mexico...
...Since 1989, the teachers had staged a plantón each year as a negotiating tactic during the union’s annual collective-bargaining drive...
...Closed out of their offices and unable to move easily around the city, legislators and other government officials abandoned their SUVs for less easily identifiable rental cars and held furtive meetings in private residences and hotels where they felt safe from the daily mass mobilizations demanding an end to their hold on power...
...Almost immediately after taking office in January 2005, Ruiz moved to preempt popular unrest with a decree banning political demonstrations in the city’s center...
...After women activists were denied airtime at the government-controlled radio and TV stations, they took them over...
...Most recently, in January, youth groups and collectives from all over the state met in the opposition municipality of Zaachila...
...MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i The Mexican federal police “liberated” oaxaca’s central plaza for tourism and the city’s elite, cordoning it off...
...Although the PRI walked away with a pyrrhic victory, it had retained its control of state government with only a small percentage of the popular vote...
...everyone who wants to can come regardless of whether they are oaxacan or not, because the barricades were made by people from all different walks of life...
...Rather than electoral participation, libertarios aim to radically transform politics through horizontal and nonhierarchical relations between participants in the struggle...
...At the same time, it also struggles to build modes of political autonomy that do not depend on either state handouts or government recognition...
...Once back in power, the old PRI caciques moved quickly to regain lost terrain from the APPO, leading in many cases to violent confrontations...
...On October 29, a force of 4,000 federal policemen, nine helicopters, 70 troop carriers, 15 combat vehicles, and at least 10 anti-riot vehicles distributed in two columns destroyed many barricades, while elements of the army and the navy set up checkpoints in the most conflictive areas of the state...
...Although the APPO continued to press for such specific demands, including the removal of Ruiz from the governorship and a resolution of the teachers’ strike, its members soon came to understand that what united them was a widely shared conviction that what Oaxaca (and indeed the whole of Mexico) needed was a new, more participatory, and open democratic order...
...During the renovations, century-old trees were uprooted and picturesque cobblestones replaced with cheap paving...
...Demonstrators closed Oaxacan state government offices and occupied the municipal police headquarters, padlocking its doors...
...In the face of the government’s attempts to break the union by handing over resources, appointments, and schools to a new pro-government union, teachers from Section 22 are holding their ground as the government is trying to break the union, handing over resources, appointments, and schools to a new pro-government union, the Section 59...
...Within this bleak scenario, the Oaxacan struggle speaks of the unique resilience and creativity of Mexico’s popular political movement...
...Police forces vanished from the city streets...
...Rather than taking power, the APPO seeks a new mode of governance and a new constitutional regime that respects “human rights, indigenous communal life, and municipal autonomy...
...Far from “liberating” the zócalo for tourism and the city’s elite, the Federal Police cordoned it off with razor wire, looted shops in the zócalo, hung their laundry out to dry from the plaza’s trees and central gazebo, and used streets and doorways as public bathrooms...
...They held massive demonstrations in February, followed by a 10,000-strong march leading to the installation of a plantón in Mexico City on March 3. Together, these collective acts of defiance reveal the extent to which PRI hegemony has been effectively broken in Oaxaca, although the party still retains nominal control of public offices and the state Rather than taking legislature...
...4 Not a single week goes by without a march, demonstration, or other collective action defending democratic liberties, freedom for political prisoners, and public goods, or protesting impunity and the abuse of power in Oaxaca...
...Their massive campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was sparked by outrage at the June 14 police offensive against an encampment, or plantón, which striking teachers had set up three weeks earlier in the capital city’s historic central square, or zócalo...
...in the barricades, in the sit-ins, it was the women who were there...
...Gaby, Colectivo Mujer Nueva we don’t believe in political militancy, and the people do not want to be militants...
...Renamed Radio Cacerola (Radio Pots and Pans), the public radio station joined Radio Universidad in opening its microphones to callers...
...Furthermore, Ruiz’s policies, which ranged from the self-serving to the ridiculous, broke the patience of a society whose tolerance for the PRI’s “traditional” strong-arm tactics of rule had already been tested by the extreme impunity and corruption that characterized the tenure of his predecessor, José Murat...
...Familiar with the disruptions in commerce and traffic caused by the annual plantón, most city residents were initially either hostile or indifferent to the teachers’ strike...
...The most recent took place in November, when four columns of marchers converged on the zócalo to repudiate Ruiz’s annual government report...
...The diversity of such initiatives, and the proliferation of spaces within which “politics” unfolds, represents a move away from vertical, party-like organizations...
...In this debate, the APPO and other Oaxacan groups have insisted on moving beyond the limited temporal horizon of the electoral sexenio (or six-year presidential term) to create forms of autonomous action and organization that can avoid being captured by either political parties or the state...
...F ollowing the formation of the appo, which has been aptly described as a movement of move ments, the teachers’ plantón expanded to include a broad spectrum of political, religious, neighborhood, and social organizations...
...The Oaxacan experience also carries lessons for understanding the direction of Mexican national politics...
...In Oaxaca, for example, the government continues to threaten APPO members with beatings, rape, and death...
...Court to rule in favor of a legislative decree that would have unseated Ruiz, the APPO organized the March of Dignity from Oaxaca to Mexico City...
...After a seven-hour pitched battle, demonstrators fought back the police with stones and Molotov cocktails...
...i believe the majority is looking for a total change, not simply for a change of governor or president...
...Although many opposed the boycott, most callers to Radio Universidad condemned the government’s cynical commercialization of Oaxaca’s indigenous traditions...
...Like the EZLN in Chiapas, the Oaxacan movement goes well beyond the traditional domain of “ethnic politics” by acknowledging and incorporating indigenous political traditions and philosophies as a source of political renewal...
...Since taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderón has given clear signs that the federal government will escalate NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS the militarization of Mexican society and apply counterinsurgency doctrine to repress organized opposition...
...In the city of Oaxaca, lawyers, doctors, artists, and intellectuals, as well as a number of businesspeople, voiced their support for the APPO’s democratic demands...
...When a contingent of teach violence...
...W ith both state and municipal authorities in hiding, the APPO assumed de facto respon sibility for the control and policing of public space...
...In the countryside, Ruiz’s mArio vAzquez de lA torre / mvt / lAtinPhoto MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i first year in office was marked by an aggressive campaign of political containment in which at least 36 opposition, community, indigenous, and grassroots leaders and activists were assassinated.1 The first mass mobilization against Ruiz occurred in summer 2005, when Oaxaca’s urban middle classes and intellectuals joined popular protests against the governor’s unilateral decision to transform the Palace of Government into a museum for tourists and to “renovate” the zócalo...
...To counter delinquency and to control for government infiltration, the APPO decreed its own laws on public order and security, festivities and celebrations, and mass mobilizations...
...One month later, he moved his own offices out of the Palace of Government on Oaxaca’s zócalo and set up shop in a police barracks on the outskirts of the capital...
...In the months since June 2006, Oaxacans throughout the state have met to discuss media politics, rights to water and other natural resources, cultural resistance, and the need for a new constitution...
...They have also launched a debate regarding the political future of Oaxaca...
...In the considered oaxaca paramilitary violence and police repression local elections of 2007, popular disillusionment on the brink of a suggests that the APPO, and the many other with the Oaxacan PRD’s support for federal po groups that make up the Oaxacan movement, “civil war...
...Opposing the APPO’s decision not to participate in electoral politics, those identified with this position participated in the past 2007 state congress elections in alliance with the PRD...
...if you invite them to militate, they will reject you...
...we are looking to create a new type of government, a new constitution...
...In indigenous regions with long histories of resistance to both federal and state governments, authorities and communal organizations pledged their support to the democratic struggle...
...Spreading over 50 square blocks, the 2006 plantón—which served as a temporary home for some 50,000 teachers, many accompanied by their families—was the largest in many years...
...Human rights groups, NGOs, sectors of the Catholic Church, professional and academic associations sponsored the creation of a broad-based committee to mediate between the APPO and the federal government...
...The festive cumbia “Son de las barricadas” became the emblematic hymn for the Oaxacan movement...
...In late September 2006, in an attempt to gain momentum from growing public disapproval of Ruiz’s handling of the conflict and to pressure the Mexican Supreme mArko jokiC (www.CAlmyoureyes.Com) NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS APPo protesters create a barricade to protect themselves against the federal police, november 2006...
...After a few days of cautious retreat, 5,000 APPO supporters marched on December 1, 2006, and again a week later, to demand the release of all Oaxacan political prisoners...
...Ruben Valencia, Voces Oaxaqueñas Construyendo Autonomía y Libertad (VOCAL) From interviews conducted by Benjamín Alonso Rascón in August 2007 attracted the largest multitude ever in Oaxaca’s political history...
...lice intervention and its failure to respect vot will continue to play an increasingly important role in shaping the political ideals and aspirations of the region...
...Voters did not, which Oaxacans have met and moved past the however, hand the PRD a blank check...
...He considered Oaxaca on the brink of a “civil war...
...Driving this rejection of “politics as usual” is an understanding, gained from experience on the barricades and in the plantones, that politics is rooted in the social and ethical responsibilities of daily life, and in promoting new forms of social engagement, media activism, art, and democratic participation...
...Four days later, with indigenous authorities at the front of the demonstration, thousands of APPO supporters again marched...
...Thousands of Oaxacans from diverse walks of life joined teachers in sit-ins and human chains targeting local government institutions...
...The protests, together with growing awareness of the Ruiz government’s corruption and impunity, led to widespread opposition to the privatization of the city’s historical and cultural patrimony...
...Perhaps even more significant than the occasional public marches are the impressive number of meetings, discussions, assemblies, exhibitions, and workshops in which Oaxacans reflect upon their experiences and assess the challenges ahead...
...But public opinion shifted rapidly after the violent attack on June 14, when the governor sent state police to beat and tear-gas sleeping teachers and residents in the plantón...
...the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to a virtual standstill...
...2 D espite the government’s massive display of force, the APPO quickly regrouped...
...Contrary to its intended goals of isolating the teachers, the police repression generated an unforeseen outpouring of public outrage against Ruiz’s government...
...The Forum called for peaceful resistance and the strengthening of the APPO...
...Eschewing traditional forms of vertical authority, the APPO quickly took shape as a space for discussion and coordination among its various participating organizations and individuals...
...In different parts of the state, APPOs were established at community, municipal, and regional levels...
...It has done so, in part, by creatively incorporating indigenous political forms, like the consensual assembly, the philosophy that authorities “rule by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo), and the agreement that no single leader or group could speak for or represent the movement...
...More than 400 activists were detained and many others were forced to flee...
...Paramilitaries descended on the barricades in an unusually violent attack, during which Indymedia videomaker Brad Will and two members of the APPO were killed...
...Patricia A., schoolteacher i believe that we are making oaxaca’s history, but a very different history, a history where women have played an important role...
...He Democratic Revolution (PRD...
...A week after the police attack, activists called for an open assembly to rally support for the teachers’ union...
...Many communities have also rejected the imposition of PRI candidates to local office...
...The state legislature was also moved from the city center...
...ers’ preferences in the municipal primaries led to a record-setting 70% electoral absenteeism in the state...
...After government goons violently evicted the women from the TV and radio station and destroyed the publicly owned equipment, other APPO activists retaliated by briefly occupying all 12 of Oaxaca’s commercial radio stations...
...Indigenous communities that mobilize to resist the illegal incursions of international mining, power, and lumber companies into their communal lands are criminalized and in some cases have been killed...
...we are the ones, as we demonstrated during 2006, who can realize important actions and also devise strategies to defeat the system...
...Many were defended by workers, women, and youth who had never before participated in mass political actions...
...The Oaxaca Commune: Struggling for Autonomy and Dignity By Gerardo Rénique and Deborah Poole F or almost six months in 2006, an unstruc tured coalition of workers, students, peasants, women, youth, indigenous peoples, and urban poor brought the government of Gerardo Renique is Associate Professor of history at City College, CUNY, New York...
...The police randomly and indiscriminately beat, detained, and raped people in the streets...
...During the early months of the insurrection, when Oaxacans still held out hope that the federal government might intervene to unseat Ruiz, the APPO launched several mass political actions designed to highlight the Ruiz administration’s inability to govern...
...human rights, These debates are dominated by two broadly defined positions: indigenous On the one hand, the verticalis communal life, tas, backed by more traditional and municipal Leninist political parties and groups, sees the APPO as the autonomy...
...The response was massive and immediate...
...For almost three weeks, they reconfigured public television to educate listeners about Oaxacan history and the ongoing struggle, to coordinate mass actions, and to broadcast the whereabouts of government goons and paramilitary patrols...
...Finally, during yet another mega-march on November 25, government agents who had infiltrated a demonstration provoked a fight with the Federal Police, leading to a mArko jokiC (www.CAlmyoureyes.Com) MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i bloody confrontation...
...In a recent article Zapotec activist Carlos Beas Torres aptly describes the current situation in Oaxaca as that of an “underground war...
...Singing and poetry contests for barricade participants were broadcast on Radio Universidad, contributing to the formation of a diffuse barricadero/barricadera identity...
...On August 1, 2006, thousands of women took part in a “pots and pans” march demanding that the governor resign...
...Although members differed in their assessment of strategies and goals, most agreed that the APPO should function as a space within which its members maintain their political autonomy...
...Defying the Ruiz administration’s violent persecution of all independent media, the community station Radio Guela broadcast the event in its entirety...
...Through workshops, encounters, and assemblies, dif and a new ferent groups, communities, and constitutional re-collectives have been actively engaged in a lively discussion gime that respects and debate on the APPO’s future...
...Bogged down in its own electoral scandal, the PAN government of then president Vicente Fox turned a deaf ear to Oaxacan demands and moved to consolidate its strategic alliance with the PRI by showing unwavering support for Ruiz...
...Outside the city of Oaxaca, more than 30 communities recovered control of their municipal governments from corrupt authorities imposed by Ruiz...
...Since then, despite government violence and assassinations, some occurring during the marches themselves, the APPO has coordinated at least 12 other megamarches...
...Instead, the discussions and political initiatives constitute—as the Peoples of the Isthmus Regional Assembly aptly calls it—the “spider’s web” that binds together the diverse movements, initiatives, individuals, collectives, and organizations that give life to Oaxaca’s democratic resistance.3 This new approach challenges the network Famed oaxacan Guelaguetza Popular, despite the government’s of PRI caciques, or political bosses, who “gov refusal to allow the event to take place in the painter Francisco ern” through a combination of clientelism and public auditorium...
...Following the attack, Oaxacans came together to demand the resignation of Ulises Ruiz Ortíz, the latest in a series of famously corrupt governors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...In response, the APPO launched a 48-hour strike and blockaded the main roads across the state...
...In this way, the APPO—which includes labor unions and traditional leftwing parties, as well as human rights organizations, artists, anarchist collectives, feminists, ecologists, and street youth—has contributed to a renewal of Oaxacan political culture...
...Established as a means of self-defense and security, the barricades quickly emerged as a crucial space for political discussion...
...Long lines formed outside the radio station, where people patiently waited their turn to denounce the government’s abusive practices, corruption, and arrogance...
...As the state with the largest indigenous population in the country, the importance of the Oaxacan movement for understanding emerging popular politics resides in its ability to unite around principles of autonomy that are not restricted to either “identity politics” or the politics of recognition...
...While these conflicts persist, power, the APPo the APPO is going through a seeks a new mode process of evaluation and reorof governance ganization...
...Although the defense of indigenous territorial and political autonomy, cultural rights, customary authority, and cultural patrimony are all central to the Oaxacan political struggle, Oaxacan demands for autonomy are not restricted to indigenous communities or organizations...
...Despite the sometimes bitter exchanges between the two sectors—inviting press speculation as to the APPO’s decline or even collapse—both agree on the need to strengthen the APPO...
...From that point forward, what began as an act of solidarity with a teachers’ strike transformed into a broad-based mobilization...
...Finally, in late October, Fox mobilized the military and federal military police to repress the Oaxacan insurrection...
...And several community radios, defying repression, have recently linked efforts through the Oaxacan Radio Com0 mune...
...Although the Oaxacan resistance was galvanized by the police offensive, distrust of Ruiz had been building since his appointment by the PRI-dominated state legislature, following an election in which federal electoral authorities had found clear evidence of fraud...
...During his surreptitious visits to the city, he was transported by helicopter from the airport to a “safe house” where he made regular—and increasingly surreal—statements reassuring the national press that nothing was amiss in Oaxaca...
...Outside the city’s historic center, residential neighborhoods formed more than 1,000 barricades at key intersections throughout the city to protect themselves from both the paramilitary “caravans of death” and from thieves emboldened by the absence of state and municipal police...
...the spaces in which they meet are their own spaces...
...Abroad, organizations like the Binational Indigenous Oaxacan Front (FIOB), which has a strong base in California and elsewhere, joined with exiled members of the Indigenous Popular Committee of Oaxaca (CIPO) and Canadian supporters to establish an APPO in Vancouver...
...But with the repression, ulises ruiz energized and woke up the whole society...
...Famed Oaxacan painter Francisco Toledo said it was as if a “great fear” had descended upon the city...
...Declaring culture a common good, the teachers’ union, with the APPO’s support, organized an alternative and free Guelaguetza in July 2006 and again the following year...
...After police destroyed the teacher’s radio station during the attack, students occupied the university radio station (Radio Universidad) and opened the microphones around the clock...
...On November 2, as the federal police (PFP) descended on the university, thousands rallied to defend Radio Universidad...
...In February, farmers and indigenous communities in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec renewed their struggle against concessions given to multinational corporations to build 5,000 windmills on community-owned land...
...Oaxacans have a centuries-long history of rebelliousness grounded in local struggles for municipal and territorial autonomy...
...Ruiz eventually fled to Mexico City, where he set up office in a hotel and worked to guarantee federal government support...
...the barricades were that space: a non-militant space where everybody dropped by, and everyone had a common purpose: to defend oaxaca from the death squads...
...Through such actions, the APPO emerged as the central space for coordinating popular discontent and for defending neighborhoods, organizations, and activists from government repression and, in particular, from the caravanas de la muerte—death squads composed of government goons patrolling the city in police pickup trucks...
...In a bold move, popular organizations agreed to boycott the Guelaguetza, an annual statesponsored celebration of Oaxacan culture widely viewed as a cornerstone of the city’s tourist industry...
...Under the slogan “The fear is over,” the APPO organized its ninth mega-march to demand an end to the military occupation of Oaxaca...
...Many denounced the zócalo’s new modernist aesthetic for disrupting the architectural integrity of Oaxaca’s internationally famous historic center...
...Two days later, about 10,000 people marched to protest the federal police occupation...
...Ita, schoolteacher, member of Colectivo Mujer Nueva people should forget the idea that a leader, or a group of them, can give direction to a movement...
...Deborah Poole is Professor of anthropology and Director of the Program in Latin American Studies, Johns Hopkins University...
...Among the more important forms of protest drawing together diverse participants were the “mega-marches,” which brought whole communities and organizations from across the state to Oaxaca city...
...The continuing popular expressions of political struggle in Oaxaca today suggest that the debates have, if anything, consolidated the APPO as a site and symbol of the Oaxacan insurrection and as a vital center for creating new political positions, opposition, and resistance to the PRI’s attempt to reclaim control over Oaxaca’s social and political future...
...The 2006 plantón mounted by the Oaxacan Section 22 of the national teachers union (SNTE) thus coincided with a period of growing resistance to the clientelistic and authoritarian politics of Oaxaca’s PRI-led government...
...Defying the siege, members of Oaxaca’s indigenous groups convened the Forum of Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca, representing the first time the state’s 14 different indigenous peoples in the state had converged on their own initiative...
...Twenty-eight political prisoners from the 2006 and 2007 mobilizations remain in jail...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 3
