May 15: A year after the
2006 teacher strike which set off the current movement, the new book by Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez of the Sociology Institute at UABJO was presented on Sunday night at the university by a panel of Oaxqueños, in front of an audience very much larger than anybody expected. The designated meeting room, which seats about two hundred, overflowed into the outside hallways where another two hundred people listened to sound-speakers. The book is called
Autoritarismo, Movimiento Popular y Crisis Politica: Oaxaca 2006.
The reading population, as I recall, is about one book per person per year is the relevant statistic. So why were so many present to hear about a book, and buy copies on sale at the tables? It’s a book about a struggle that is dear to the people here who perceive it to be a valid, and largely successful attempt to bring to light and open discussion the failures of government, the threats of neoliberalism, and the long-standing and increasing impoverishment and inequity among the public; or, to put it simply, social injustice.
And what I was thinking as I listened to the panelists, is that inevitably all five were well-educated middleclass people, and the audience was likewise. Of the five, the one who received applause ahead of her remarks, as well as after, was Jessica Sanchez, who heads up the Limeddh (League of Mexican Human Rights) office, and is widely applauded as a heroine, as they say, with pantaletas. The other person who spoke most to the point of ownership of the book –i.e. to the audience’s reason for coming– was Marcos Leyva, who heads EDUCA (Servicios para Educación Alternativa), and is an APPO activist. By ownership, Leyva pointed out, the book is “our” book; the struggle is “ours.” Leyva didn’t regard it merely as an academic recounting of social change from authoritarianism to democracy, as the author described his view. Martinez was himself a student activist in the seventies, and the book reflects that: the present struggle is a continuation of that student struggle, that is, against authoritarianism as it has been embodied in several of the past governors of Oaxaca. The authoritarian governor controls everything, and uses his office to further his own goals, with little regard for public needs or public opinions. That being so clearly the case now with Ulises Ruiz, it is not surprising that Martinez places the 2006 struggle within the framework of the 1970s.
However, and clearly I am writing completely personal and opinionated commentary, I think both Jessica Sanchez and Marcos Leyva stand for other goals than do the academic four (the well-known Margarita Dalton, affiliated with CIESAS, Victor Raul Martinez himself, Eduardo Torres Navarrete, from Centro de Apoyo al Movimineto Popular Oaxqueño or CAMPO, and Alberto Alsonso of Dialogo Parlementario. Also speaking was Ana Maria Hernandez, about the women’s role.) That role is an understandable cause for great pride and a clear indication of social change as women take on stronger presences, such as the capture of Channel Nine. Certainly she is in favor of participation, if not participative democracy in decision-making.
Martinez refers to the APPO as a “movement of movements“ because it expresses old and new social, union, indigenous, urban, student, youth, environmental, feminist and civil movements. And he also points out that those movements not only have different agendas but also different forms of pursuing them, which led me to began to think further. Everyone is against authoritarian government, one-party rule, corruption, bossism, etcetera. But on the one hand, there are those whose goal is social justice achieved by way of representative democracy, and those who want social justice achieved through participative democracy. The “goal” of social justice has carried the APPO a long way, especially in its specific anti-authoritarian demand for the departure of “the tyrant” Ulises Ruiz. But the method puts a bump in the road. The election process must (and will) go on, and one hopes that the PRI will be dumped. But what about democracy at the base?
I watched on Monday, May 15 as the teachers gathered after the Teachers Day march. This event was very reminiscent of marches and events in the streets before the repression, in the sense that the teachers usually peeled off after the march to hold their conferences of fifteen or twenty teachers with a delegate, and so it was again. I know that an assembly was scheduled to take place in the afternoon; the public speeches ended before 2:00 o’clock so people could rest and eat beforehand. And presumably share their ideas and have input by way of their delegates. Martinez is an expert on the history of the teachers’ movement; perhaps he sees this as “representative democracy.”
Incidentally, the Stalinist - Leninist contingent arrived into the zócalo late, not part of the main march, and with their red flags and banners were pretty much ignored. I guess about thirty people were involved.
The march itself was unimpeded by any uniformed police presence anywhere. The marchers came into the city to the zócalo from four different starting points, as usual holding aloft umbrellas against the sun, and shouting slogans. Las Noticias, on the following day’s issue of May 16, calculated the crowd at 50,000 teachers and APPO activists. The slogans had very little to say about Ulises. They focused on repealing the ISSSTE law (Insituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de las Trabajadores del Estado), solving the state and federal demands around social and labor issues, and the freeing of political prisoners.
The ISSSTE law is the rallying ground now for the national union movement, since it affects the financial situation and retirement of so many employees. The teachers of Section 22 and CNTE will affiliate with that struggle because it is also their struggle. It is a core issue against neoliberalism; that is, the privatization of pension management and health security cuts.
At the kiosko when the speeches focused on the political prisoners, an attempt was made to read out a letter from jail written by David Venegas, who is a member of VOCAL, an anarchist group opposed to participation in electoral politics. Internal struggle goes on, with accusations running in both directions: against VOCAL and against the APPO leadership. The accusations center on who is selling out. Venegas named three members of the APPO leadership (Florentino Lopez Martinez, Zenén Bravo Castellanos, Guadalupe Garcia Leyva, all members of the Frente Popular Revolucionario), for taking advantage of the social movement to enrich themselves.
Venegas also wrote that the Frente had spread accusations against him, Venegas, and VOCAL. (His letter appeared in Las Noticias on May 15, with the title “Breaking the Silence.” Personally, I doubt VOCAL, which is in accord with the original APPO decisions to decline participation in electoral politics, is as likely to betray as some individual leaders who might very well accept money from the PRI governor to fracture the APPO. (An article on this was written for Narco News by Oliver D., who has more access than I do.) I wonder if I am doing some disservice by alluding to the internal struggles of the APPO. But then I know I have no influence at all, nor do you. My interest in the discussion is to point out some of the ever-present pitfalls, not to assume they will be fatal.
Just as a side-bar, two PRD men (Jesus Romero and Lenin Lopez) were kicked out of the PRD as traitors. If Martinez’ book refers to authoritarianism, it must also refer to corruption. The combination of the two in Mexico has created a swamp.
The present acting secretary general of Section 22, Ezequiel Rosales Careño addressed the crowd in front of the kiosko. Rosales said that Oaxaca will join the battle, which is national, union, and popular, with the goal of having the ISSSTE Law thrown out. “We say to all of you that this is the right direction... to head up the just struggles of the workers and the people.” As Rosales attaches Section 22 to the national struggle he might be viewed as joining a winning team, one more likely to win than the APPO, simply by virtue of numbers. The nation has not come to join the APPO, so in this sense the APPO-teachers movement is aligning with the nation. Rosales exclaimed (he represents something of a demagogue in his speech making) that Felipe Calderón has just given the army a 48% pay hike and offered the teachers a 4.8% pay hike. That’s kind of a clue as to how Calderón expects to operate and survive. As Rosales said, it’s an aberration and an insult. But was Rosales also an indication of how the teachers will lessen heat on the governor Ulises Ruiz?
No uniformed police or barricades were evident anywhere. The teachers marched, orated and departed in an orderly way. The spray paint contingent was minimal. Martinez mentions in his book the student- youth propensity to use graffiti as a way to express their points of view, as indeed it is. He chalks up the intense amount of graffiti to young zeal, and an assumption that the writers will outgrow it. He does acknowledge some activity paid for by the government and carried out by thugs expressly to incite the population against the APPO. The government-allied news media always portrayed the APPO as “violent,” and when I would ask a person what that meant, they referred to graffiti and burned vehicles! In fact burning vehicles was more likely done by infiltrators, along with destroying the vaunted cultural patrimony – and I won’t speak of the government violations of murders, tortures, arrests and disappearances.
But is it a sign of sell-out that graffiti is being toned down on the walls, of private homes especially? As I was watching a group of skinny teenagers with aerosol paint cans all wearing masks, a man came over and began to speak to them. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but my impression is that first, he was a teacher-leader, and second, he was telling them to cool it. Graffiti had reappeared on the front of the palace museum, as well as the hotel wall the teens were touching up, but in response to his request they packed up and departed – at least from that spot. Over the course of the past three marches the effort has persisted to diminish the affront to property owners, and to also minimize the inconvenience caused by shutting down buses and traffic. I conjecture that the APPO, the teachers, and the government have all decided to lower the heat, which comes from confrontations and reprisals. Who is paying who remains unanswered.
While the teachers were marching on May 15, the governor held a meeting at the airport (his safest venue) with Calderón’s new Secretary of Government. The subject: what to give or not give of the teachers’ demands. The new Segob appointee, Francisco Ramirez Acuña, is reported to be a hardliner, as is his boss. But the elections are coming up in August and although they are mid-term elections with possible low turnout, perhaps if the PRI will get badly beaten for a second consecutive election. The new PRI leader, Beatriz Paredes, will quietly take aside Ulises and explain to him it’s time to hit the road. One catch-22 is voter turnout, which means hard-core regular PRI voters must come out while Ulises pretends that all is well and he’s making people happy. The non-voters have to come out because nothing is going well and Ulises is making everyone unhappy. The second catch is, if PRD or other parties’ members take over the PRI seats, will they too sell their support to the PAN?
I have not lost my confidence in the APPO, primarily because it is not a stand-alone operation. The social support around it is great, far beyond what the size of Victor Raúl Martinez’ audience suggested. The struggle is national and international; it has surpassed authoritarianism and gone on to confront transnational neoliberalism. The cost of living, and the diminishing value of wages are noted everywhere, not just in Oaxaca and Mexico. The enrichment of the few at the cost of peoples everywhere is so prevalent one must be truly deaf, dumb and blind not to see that this cannot go on, whether or not militarization and repression prevail. The strength of the Oaxaca APPO is not decisive any more.
