Oaxaca City, Mexico—In the hours after nightfall, a shifting labyrinth rises from the streets of Oaxaca City. Men and women step into an emptied street pulling chain-link fencing, barbed wire, sand bags and old doors behind them. The hoarse roar of a diesel motor breaks the silence, as insurgents guide a commandeered city bus riddled with graffiti that calls for the ouster of Oaxaca state Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz into an the intersection, shutting off the street like a clamp.
Every night since late August, protesters with the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) build and stand guard over a thousand barricades throughout the city—a mass, decentralized effort to thwart the ever-rumored crackdown by federal police. Around piles of burning wood in the center of the blockaded intersections, middle aged men and women talk in low voices, watching for approaching vehicles. College-aged youths, their faces covered with bandanas and shawls, fill shopping carts with Molotov cocktails. "If they want to try to come in here, let's just see how it goes for them," says a man in his fifties as he leans on an old wooden ax handle, entrenched behind five blocks of barricades that protect one of the APPO's encampments outside an occupied commercial radio station.
The conflict in Oaxaca began as a teachers strike on May 22, but exploded into a massive uprising after a failed June 14 attempt to violently break up the teachers' protest camps in the town square. (See "Teacher Rebellion in Oaxaca," September). Tens of thousands of local residents took to the streets to fight alongside the teachers and join their call for the immediate ouster of Ulises Ruiz—now their sole, non-negotiable demand.
Within weeks, the APPO effectively shut down the state government and forced the governor into exile by stepping up their civil disobedience tactics—building camps around government buildings and sending "mobile brigades" to hound state government officials appearing in the city. But as the APPO's grip on the city solidified, gunmen linked to local and state police forces began to apprehend movement leaders and open fire on protesters.
During an August 10 APPO march to demand the liberty of two leaders—Catarino Torres Pereda and German Mendoza Nube—who had been arrested, gunmen fired into the crowd from the second story of a house, killing Jose Colmenares, a 50-year-old mechanic marching to support his wife, a member of the striking teachers union. Less than two weeks later, on the night of August 22, a convoy of some 40 cars and pickup trucks carrying heavily armed men, some in police uniform and others in civilian clothes and ski masks, attacked protest camps, killing 52-year-old Lorenzo San Pablo Cervantes. The gunmen also attacked TV reporters, stealing their tapes of the shootings, and opened fire on photographers from the national newspapers Milenio and Reforma. The photographers published photos the following day showing the men aiming their machine guns from the backs of pick-up trucks. A Reuters cameraman who filmed the convoy compared it to "the death squads in Africa or Haiti." Televisa, a national television station, aired footage of the convoy returning to the municipal police headquarters just before dawn.
The day after the death squad attacks, Antonio, a member of the APPO's provisional leadership, told the press: "We are going to respond with organization, not with guns." That night the APPO set up over 500 guarded barricades throughout the city. The convoy did not return. The following week, teachers' union and APPO representatives traveled to Mexico City to initiate a series of talks with the Minster of the Interior, Carlos Abascal. Abascal made offers to address education and social equity issues in Oaxaca, but the APPO turned them all down, maintaining their singular demand that Ulises Ruiz resign or be removed from office before any discussion of reforms. The talks stalled on September 20, with tension and rumors of a crackdown immediately filling the void. On September 25, President Vicente Fox's spokesperson Ruben Aguilar said the Fox had vowed to solve the conflict before his term ends on November 30, fueling speculation that a major federal police operation is in the works.
Senators from the governor's party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the discredited dinosaur of Mexican politics—warned that if Ulises Ruiz were to fall at the hands of the protesters, president-elect, Felipe Calderon, would be next. Calderon—who won the presidency by less than a percentage point over his rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud—and his conservative National Action Party will need the PRI votes to pass any major legislation.
On September 21, 4,000 members of the teachers' union and the APPO began a march to Mexico City to set up a protest camp outside of Congress. The protesters walked more than 300 miles through four states, arriving in Mexico City on October 9, where they set up a protest camp outside the Mexican Senate. On October 16, 21 marchers from the APPO began a hunger strike to demand Ruiz's ouster. Since Wednesday, September 27, the barricade guards in Oaxaca have been on red alert. Three days in a row, military helicopters and airplanes flew over Oaxaca City, in surveillance. Eight miles outside of town, at least 2,000 state police were training for a possible raid on the protesters' barricades.
Then, on October 19, the Senate refused the APPO's request to dissolve the state government, thus closing the only door to legally force Ruiz from office.
At 2 a.m. on a recent night, a handful of teachers smoked cigarettes and slowly fed cardboard and scavenged wood scraps to the barricade fire in a middle-class residential part of town. Three well-dressed people approached cautiously, and one woman said: "If anything happens, we live around the corner, behind the notary. We'll open up." Her husband added: "I've got piles of rocks ready."
