Kill the Teachers

By Robert Joe Stout

*Human rights repression in Oaxaca, Mexico reached a bloody climax in 2006.

*An attack by heavily armed Mexican federal police on unarmed civilians supporting striking teachers culminated nearly eighty years of repressive political rule that impoverished the state of Oaxaca and made virtual kings of its governors. 

*Politics and crime went hand in hand in this agonizing period of contemporary Mexican history, much of it told in the exact words of the participants. It began with the decision by the 70,000 member Section 22 of the national teachers' union to stage a sit-in in the city of Oaxaca's Zócalo. First hand accounts and chronicle the brutal state police attack on the strikers, which included the beatings of women and children.
*In late October police gunmen storming citizen barricades in the city of Oaxaca shot and killed American news photographer Brad Will and several others. A month later a force backed by armored vehicles, state police and hundreds of non-uniformed vigilantes attacked a fleeing crowd which included street vendors, workers, passers by, women and children. The police and paramilitaries arrested, tortured and sent over 140 innocent civilians to maximum security prisons "to each the protesters a lesson.".
*Billions of pesos missing from the state's treasury depleted health and education services as conflicts continued to erupt throughout the following decade. They culminated in another armed police attack in 2017 on unarmed protesters in the town of Nochixtlan. Militarized forces killed eight teachers and townspeople and wounded over 140 others.
*Despite urgent appeals taken directly to Mexico's presidents by the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and other human rights groups, the Mexican government refused to bring any of the perpetrators of the killings, tortures and false imprisonments to trial. Worse yet, federal police and local collaborators have brutally repressed non-violent popular protests in other parts of the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Joe Stout
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386888963

Book preview

Foreword

Located in the southern part of the Mexican Republic, the state of Oaxaca is bordered on the north by the states of Puebla and Veracruz, to the east by Chiapas, to the west by Guerrero, and to the south by the Pacific Ocean, comprising 95,364 square kilometers. The great valleys of the state are located between the Sierra Madre del Sur and the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca. The name of the state as well as the capital City, Oaxaca comes from the Nahuatl word Huaxacac, meaning in the nose of the squash. – Mexconnect

Introduction

Oaxaca never emerged from the Middle Ages. Living here is like living in a medieval kingdom, Sara Mendez, director of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico’s Human Rights Network, told a human rights delegation in December 2006. That she was speaking figuratively nevertheless expressed the feelings and observations of many of us who have had to deal with the corruption, abject poverty and law enforcement impunity that vitiated the state.

For six years (2004-2010) this medieval kingdom was ruled by a political adventurer named Ulisés Ruiz. His principal executioner was El Chucky, nee José Franco, who in the minds of many residents bore a remarkable resemblance to the Hollywood thriller killer. Franco functioned as King (Governor) Ruiz’s Secretary General until he became head of the state of Oaxaca’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Ruiz’s supposed heir to the throne. He fell into disfavor near the end of Ruiz’s six-year reign, primarily because of the notoriety his association with paramilitary bands had aroused but also because he was accused of falsifying his educational credentials.

Ruiz and Chucky controlled a compliant legislature, the judiciary and the state’s finances. Several outspoken opposition candidates and leaders were assassinated without any prosecution of their killers. Ruiz’s control of Oaxaca, a state the size of Indiana sprawled across Mexico’s southern coast and divided by two steep mountain ranges, duplicated that of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors with local and tribal chieftains endowed with political and economic control of the disparate regions. Many of these caciques belonged to and were leaders of indigena communities who exercised total control of the distribution of resources, finances and electoral processes within their domains.

Vesting so much power in the executive branch of government killed dissent, Mendez contended. It also nourished large scale corruption in business, the judicial system and political elections. The repression of dissent, often violent, and the federal government’s shielding of extralegal activities left King Ulisés free to do as he pleased as long as he supported Mexican presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón in national matters.

Oaxaca artist Hugo Tovar described Ruiz’s first two years as governor as a time of constant repression. Government agents terrorized many indigena autonomous communities, arresting and/or causing the disappearances of those who spoke out against or did not cooperate with PRI-dominated local authorities. PRI communities aggressively attacked neighboring areas that had voted against the party in July 2004, kidnapping and raping women, destroying buildings and ripping out crops.

I could picture something drastic happening, a teacher from the Indigenous Promoters and Teachers of Oaxaca attested. You could feel the indignation, the anger, and the more of it that you felt the worse the repression seemed to get.

On June 14, 2006 the rumbling volcano erupted. Oaxaca was never again to be the same.

SECTION I

Chapter 1: The Battle Begins

Sara Mendez insists that Ruiz fraudulently won the governorship in 2004, an assertion that many Oaxacans aver is true. Among irregularities reported by Oaxaca’s daily Noticias and various human rights and election observers were precincts in which more votes were cast for Ruiz than eligible voters in those precincts, bags of ballots stolen from precincts that favored Ruiz’ opposition, the buying of votes, physical intimidation and precincts in which every participant was credited with voting for Ruiz despite assertions from many who claimed that they’d marked their ballots for opposition candidates.

Once in office King Ruiz (like many rulers before him) tightened his hold by expanding the size of the state police force and denying services to communities that had voted for his opponents.

You could feel the decomposition everywhere, Mendez remembered. It was like living in occupied territory, like some foreigners had taken over the state, foreigners who didn’t care what the people felt or thought.

Helped by a legislature that rubberstamped his granting huge contracts to construction firms, Ruiz moved many government offices out of the city of Oaxaca’s historical district, had the hundreds-of-years-old stonework in the city Zócalo replaced and ordered the cutting of many of the huge flowering trees that shaded the Zócalo and Alameda (a block-square park in front of the National Cathedral). His disregard for public opinion and the favoritism that he showed to entrepreneurial supporters put his government at odds with large segments of the population, including Oaxaca’s 70,000-member teachers union, CNTE Section 22 of the National Coordinator of Educational Workers.

Long considered throughout Mexico as one the most maverick and non-compliant sections of the national union, which was dominated in Mexico City by traditional PRI operatives and appointees, Section 22 consistently challenged the failure of the state government to support education.

In May 2006 the teachers threatened to stage a sit-in in the capital unless Ruiz’s government agreed to their demands for a reclassification of their salary base (which would have raised the minimum wage to workers throughout the state). There was nothing unusual about the teachers’ strike, Mendez insisted, that was an annual event. But the 2006 request for reclassification of the base salary of the state’s 70,000-member union was more far-reaching than previous salary demands had been.

Claiming that his government could not afford such expenditures, Ruiz offered to have the state fund a portion of what it would cost to effect the reclassification. The union rejected this proposal and organized a protest march that drew over 110,000 participants, including members of the national electricians union, the Democratic Organizations of Oaxaca’s Social Front and various indigena groups. The demonstrators hoisted papier maché representations of the governor that they hanged and burned in the Zócalo at the end of the march. Ruiz responded by pulling his offer off the table and announcing that salaries owed teachers participating in the takeover were being cancelled.

According to Sara Mendez over 60,000 teachers initially were involved in the protests and nearly 40,000 participated in the three-week-long sit-in. Many family members joined them. Husbands accompanied many of the women teachers who lived in areas a long distance away from the city of Oaxaca; other profas brought their younger children with them since their husbands couldn’t get off work or couldn’t leave their farms or businesses in the outlying areas.[1]

Artist Francisco Toledo, founder of PRO-OAX, an organization dedicated to bettering Oaxacan life, exhorted the government and the directors of Section 22 to establish a peaceful solution to this conflict that affects all of us and offered his group’s negotiating services, noting that the entire state was paralyzed by the standoff between the governor and the union. But Ruiz had more than the teachers to worry about. He had committed not only himself but the state of Oaxaca to PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo. By early June 2006 national polls showed Madrazo trailing opposition candidates Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido Revolutionario Democrático (PRD) and Felipe Calderón of Acción Naciónal (PAN) by substantial margins.

Both opposition parties used ungovernability in Oaxaca in their anti-PRI propaganda, focusing attention on violence occurring in the state and the huge sit-in that Section 22 stubbornly continued to maintain. Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of Mexico’s national Syndicate of Educational Workers (SNTE), abandoned Madrazo and threw her weight behind Calderón’s presidential bid, further aggravating political divisions within Section 22. Some union teachers supported Gordillo, who was promised — and received — lifetime leadership of the SNTE from Calderón. Many teachers simply said, a plague on all your houses! and refused to back any of the three major candidates.

The splits put Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda on the spot. He publicly stated that he wanted the teachers’ demands to be met but that he didn’t want to start a revolution or let the occupation of the Centro Historico and the blocks that surrounded it last past Election Day, July 2. Besides establishing higher base salaries for all teachers, he insisted that the state should devote to education the full amount of tax monies authorized to improve rural schools, increase the number of scholarships available to junior high school and high school students from families with limited incomes and to provide books, transportation and meals to those who needed them.

But like kings of old, and Mexican caciques of more recent times, Ruiz responded to Section 22’s demands with a show of force.

It was five o’clock in the morning [June 14]. Some people started shouting — they’d gotten warning calls on their cell phones. ‘Get up! Get up! The police are coming!’ I saw flashlights snap on. Then we heard the helicopters. They came in so low their big rotors sent things flying through the air. Then the whistling sounds as they fired tear gas. ‘What are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ teachers were shouting. We were coughing and choking, we were blinded, we tried to get our things together, people were shouting for their children...

Then the police came. It seemed like there were thousands of them. They were swinging their clubs, smashing everything. One of them in front of me grabbed a little girl and hurled her against a bench. Everyone was screaming. It was terrible. ‘Stop! What are you doing!’ I confronted several police. I thought because I was a woman they wouldn’t hurt me. But one of them jammed his club into my stomach so hard I fell over. Another police kicked me, hard.

I scrambled away—the tear gas was so thick I couldn’t see where I was going. I wanted to fight back but I had nothing to fight with. Somehow, I stumbled down a side street. I tried to call my husband on my cell phone but when he answered all I could do was cry..." – María Elena, primary school teacher from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Another person who witnessed the dislodging, as King Ruiz’s publicists called the attack, shivered as she remembered thinking, "If they treat teachers like that, like animals, how are they going to treat the poor of the pueblo?" She shook her head as anger flashed through her expression.

Worse. Worse than animals. That’s why we’re fighting back.

According to witnesses, police slashed through the crowded camp, shredding tents and cooking facilities, firing tear gas and setting off explosive devices that lit up the sky like the devil’s inferno. Two helicopters roared across the Centro Historico’s building tops as police aboard them fired tear gas canisters directly at teachers stumbling and colliding against each other.

Despite the tear gas, groups of teachers reformed. Shouting to each other, Don’t run! Man the barricades! Rocks! Get rocks! they re-clustered into resistant groups and from behind parked vehicles and the barriers they’d set up across the intersections they fought back, hurling bottles and paving stones, swinging mop sticks, chairs, tent poles, belts and rebar.

As daybreak shimmied through the acrid clouds of tear gas some of defenders boarded and took over city buses, evicting drivers and passengers and forcing the police to scatter as they accelerated towards them. This brought most of those who’d fled back into the fray. Shouting encouragement to each other and insults at the police they surged back through what had been their campground and by 9:30, after nearly five hours of combat, they regained what they felt was theirs and forced the entire contingent of over 3,000 police to evacuate the area.[2] A member of Oaxaca’s municipal force confided to me much later, We could have shot and killed hundreds but we had no orders. We never thought the fools would try to return.

It was stupendous — Oaxaca never had seen any event like it before, Mendez shook her head in admiration. Noticias reporter Pedro Matias called June 14 a parting of the waters. Oaxaca, he prophesied, "never will be the same.

They [the teachers] showed the government for what it is — authoritarian and with no concern for how most citizens live and suffer, teacher Genoveva López insisted.

What had begun as a legal sit-in — a plantón — overnight became a massive resistance movement. Brought together by the mega-march on June 15 the representatives of over 300 separate organizations talked, urged, argued and convoked their first reunion a week after the teachers had repelled the armed police attack. The hundreds of delegates announced the formation of the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO). Participants included indigena federations from throughout the state, radical student and youth groups that espoused revolutionary overthrow, human rights organizations and many Catholic priests.

It was an explosion! a member of what became the women’s coordinating committee told me. One day there was nothing, the next day there was this huge organization!

Mexico winning the World Cup couldn’t have generated more enthusiasm than that first assembly! I heard a delegate named Cabrera exclaim.

URO [Ulisés Ruiz Ortega] did something no other governor in Oaxaca was able to do — he united the people, Matias grunted. Then he added, grinning, United them against him!

Most of the delegates to the APPO’s formative assembly on June 20 agreed that Oaxaca’s political system had to be changed, although not all agreed how drastic those changes should be. However, they did agree that the APPO would be an instrument for transforming the political and social systems in Oaxaca non-violently. The declaration they issued included statements that individual regional assemblies would be formed by people from all walks of life, including campesinos, students, hourly wage earners and retirees and that forcing URO out of office was the principal goal of the first stage of the struggle.

The APPO was born to obtain political and social rights, educator and the APPO negotiator Marcos Leyva told a December 2006 human rights delegation. A portly, square-faced Oaxacan, one of the founders of the Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA), Leyva explained that most of the groups that rushed forward to support the battered teachers already had experience dealing with caciques, repression and bureaucracy. Both he and Cabrera perceived that the newly forming organization would be large enough and complex enough to challenge the governor and his lackeys.

There are thirty or forty years of integral development involved, thirty years of learning, of working, of changes and gains and defeats behind the formation of the APPO, Leyva insisted. That it seemed to vault spontaneously into life was an illusion. URO’s violent invasion of the Section 22 sit-in simply provided the catalyst for organized protest that had been brewing for years.

Oaxaca was a sleeping giant that Section 22 awakened when it formed the APPO and the fight’s not going to go backwards, insisted Section 22 teacher María del Carmen Vásquez. "I’m sure that the pueblo of Oaxaca isn’t going to give up the fight until it has exterminated the anti-democratic, authoritarian, repressive, ransacking government. We’re no longer willing to continue living in poverty and abandonment. The teachers are witnesses to the neglect in which the pueblos are living, for that reason we’re going to continue fighting for the rights we have as persons."

Many women teachers and teachers’ wives participated in occupation of the Centro Historico. Women and women’s groups flocked to the APPO after its formation. The movement provided an outlet for breaking the aggressive machismo social control that had existed in Oaxaca for centuries. Professional women like Patricia Jiménez, Dr. Bertha Muñoz, Aline Castellanos and human rights attorneys Sara Mendez and Yésica Sánchez participated in the formation of the influential Coordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca (COMO) whose members were instrumental in the takeover of communications facilities and the establishment of community barricades to obstruct night-riding escuadrones de muerte (death squads).

But the idealistic fervor that enveloped Oaxaca didn’t expand past the state’s borders. Nor did it include all of the state’s residents. The summer encampment forced the cancellation of Guelaguetza, a traditional indigena festival that over the years had developed into a commercialized tourist attraction. Businesses and commercial activities came to a standstill and merchants and service industries closed their doors.

In the turbid political atmosphere following Mexico’s presidential elections on July 2, Laura Carlsen, director of the IRC Americas Program in Mexico City, analyzed, Oaxaca’s conflict has catalyzed a series of events that threaten Mexico’s stability.

Outgoing president Vicente Fox and president-elect Calderón shared Carlson’s apprehensions. Despite the fact that Ruiz belonged to an opposition party they ignored reports of killings and kidnappings by government-created death squads, just as they were ignoring Zapatista protests about failures to live up to signed accords and about intrusions by paramilitaries in Chiapas. Federal officials refused to negotiate a settlement, sloughing off the teachers’ strike and formation of the APPO as a state matter that state officials needed to take care of. As demanding as the situation in Chiapas seemed to be Fox and Calderón wanted to minimize publicity that non-government-controlled media was spreading around the world.[3]

Because there were teachers and professors and professional people involved [in the formation of the APPO] and because we are Mexicans and Mexicans love words there were a lot of proclamations, a lot of avowals of purpose and justifications, particularly during those first few weeks, an Autonomous Benito Juarez de Oaxaca University (UABJO) professor remembered, a lot of duplication. But probably they were important — they gave participants a sense of having a voice.

The assembly agreed to adopt the traditional pre-Hispanic usos y costumbres system of making policy decisions at gatherings in which the delegates of all the affiliated organizations would have an equal voice. Over 6,500 participated in the forum that determined that the APPO would advocate reorganizing the state in ways that would conform to indigena concepts of communal participatory rule. Journalist Matias called this pre-Columbia philosophy the soul of the APPO movement. Basically, it engendered:

Guelaguetza (sharing) The word derives from the Zapotec and dictates that individuals share with others in the community the prosperity that the gods have granted;

Tequio, required unpaid work done for and with others to benefit