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News :: Human Rights : International : Organizing : Politics |
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Human Rights Violations in Oaxaca |
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by Amanda Aquino
(No verified email address) |
10 Nov 2006
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Oaxaca is living a brutal government represión of the social movement, where there are disappearances, torture, detentions, killings, and many injured. Given the situation, it is difficult to know exactly how many people have been affected, but there is no doubt that there are severe violations of human rights. According to one list, compiled by local activists, from June 14th through November 5th, there were 145 detained, 34 of who have been freed, 17 dead, and 33 seriously injured, including 5 journalists injured and one killed. Some sources speak of 65 disappeared. There are numerous people who have also received death threats.
Below is an interview with one of the members of a collective working to defend human rights and documenting cases of violations. |
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From the “planton” of Santo Domingo, Oaxaca:
What is the human rights situation here in Oaxaca?
Human rights basically do not exist here anymore. All human rights are out of order. You can be at any moment kidnapped by people who call themselves police. They can be mercenaries. They can put you in jail. They can make you disappear. And you don´t have any human rights.
This is ironic because Mexico, this year, is in the human rights leadership in the UN. They should watch and guard human rights, but they are the
first to do away with them.
What violations of human rights have there been?
The violations can be killing them, torturing them, beating them. We have now reports of people who were in jail. They were kept for two, three days without any food, nothing to drink. They wanted to go to the toilet but they didn´t give them a toilet, just made them urinate in their pants, this kind of abuse. They are threatening their families.
And we also have numbers. We are talking about at least 45 disappeared people. We have the first report of people who saw with their own eyes how a teacher was thrown out of a flying helicopter. Also we have a report, not verified yet, of a doctor who works in a hospital, who saw twenty dead people the 2nd of November (the day of a major confrontation between government and popular forces). This was in a hospital of Oaxaca.
We are still in the process of verifying all this. There is a danger that days go by and that a lot of these crimes cannot be proved anymore. Therefore, it is very very important that everybody join us, gives us a hand to document this.
Is it known how these people were disappeared?
Some were kidnapped from their houses. The police entered in the middle of the night, at one, two in the morning, without arrest warrants, and they took our compañeros away. Others disappeared from the barricades. Others we know were walking on the street and they took them away also. Others disappeared last Sunday, when there was a march here in Oaxaca and there was great national support. People came from Mexico City, Chiapas, and there were military checkpoints. There they also disappeared various compañeros.
Do you have documented cases of people who have been killed or detained?
We know that from the 14 of June (when the government repression began) until today, November 9th, there have been 17 dead people. We have the names of all of them, their age. Two were children, one a 14-year-old child and one a 12-year-old child. Detained, from the 29th of October (when the federal police force came in) until the 5th of November, we have 87 people who were detained. But one should say they were kidnapped because there were no arrest warrants. 34 of them have been freed.
What information is there in terms of who is responsible for these killings?
We know that the responsible is the government of the state of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz (the “governor”), and some of his police force, dressed in civilian clothes killed some of the 17 people. Some of the 6 people who have been killed in the last few days were killed by the PFP, the federal police force, which was sent in on the 29th of October.
Besides this, we are getting everyday reports of shootings at the university campus, where Radio Universidad is. It´s almost a daily affair. People come and take out their guns and shoot at the students.
What are the efforts that are being done to protect human rights?
Here, we are working hard with volunteers and lawyers. We have a collective. First we try to locate the prisoners in the jails, and to liberate them. But the work has to go much further. We have to find the disappeared! The liberated come back and can report on the abuses, the violence, the beatings. But we are very very worried about the disappeared.
What would you ask of people listening to you from other parts of the world?
We ask for solidarity. You can create committees in solidarity and put pressure on your local politicians where you live and also demand from the Mexican embassies and consulates wherever you are that human rights be respected here and to call an end to this violence.
Aside from the detained, the disappeared, I already have seen with my own eyes, people who are obviously traumatized, and who have psychosis due to the violence they have witnessed. Yesterday, a woman came here who was crying, and the next minute she was laughing. This was the effect of the trauma that these people are suffering. Two days ago, a woman came by who was participating in a peaceful woman´s march, which passed the zocalo, where the police threw rocks and she ended up with her nose and mouth torn up and bloody.
There are many abuses. And here we cannot expect anything from the government, from the judicial branch, because they are the same people who are commiting these crimes.
Anything else you would like to share?
I would like to call on all the compañeros and compañeras of the world, who hear this: international solidarity live on! The struggle of the people of Oaxaca is for a better world, and this is the same struggle that people in the United States, in Europe, wherever they are carry on.
To view all Amanda Aquino's photos, go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16573131@N00/
[Many activists from Boston and other U.S. cities have traveled to Oaxaca in the past weeks/months to help record, report on, and work in solidarity with the people's movement there. Below is one many reports to come from one such Boston indy reporter who is currently in Oaxaca. BIMC Editors.] |
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This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license. |
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Oaxaca and Managua : The Latin American 1848 |
by Semper Indomitus
(No verified email address) |
16 Nov 2006
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Oaxaca in Flames
APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca) is a legitimate social and political movement that has evolved into a parallel government on the model of the 1848 Revolutions; the classical call for national democracy with a social content. What is of particular interest to anti-capitalists, is that this movement is based entirely on the grassroots and governed by direct participation from the rank and file. Popular Democracy is barricaded in Oaxaca. APPO emerged from a general strike by teachers and students against privatisation and wage cuts, this fact is what encapsulates it anti-capitalist substance. That APPO exploded as an expression of popular will against capital inside the NAFTA zone is a direct challenge to the imperialist hyenas in the Bush regime. Insofar as APPO challenges U.S. economic, political and cultural domination of Mexico in its denunciations of the Fox regime and its acolytes in the Oaxaca governorship it is a anti-imperialist movement. As civil society, workers and students joined it became a mass pro-democracy movement with an anti-capitalist orientation. It is important to note that this movement takes place in context of the 'Gold Revolution': the movement against the electoral fraud (perpetrated by the PAN and PRI) that stole the presidency from PRD candidate Perez Obrador this past summer.
The brutal repression of APPO by the Federal Army and the Oaxaca police were not a surprise given the direction the social movement was taking. According to the Spanish language/Sweden based Left Socialist weekly “Liberacion” :
( http://www.liberacion.press.se/ )
"En gran parte de Oaxaca el gobierno no despacha, los tribunales de justicia y la policia dejaron de funcionar los partidos majoritarios del senado decidieron no declarar la desaparicion de los poderes publicos en ese Estado y ratificaron el mandato del Governador Ruiz" – ibid.
In the absence of a functioning government and in a legal vacuum in Oaxaca (a product of mass civil disobedience), APPO was beggining to legislate social policy. It was in fact beginning to evolve into a proto-Soviet, similar to those that briefly emerged in Argentina in January of 2002 and before that in Paris during the 1968 Student and Worker uprising. This is what the Bush regime and Fox fear the most; that a proto-Soviet might evolve into the real thing. APPO should have declared Oaxacan independence from Mexico on an anti-capitalist basis. If only to radicalize the situation in such a manner as to negate and undermine the legal basis of Burgeoise rule in the Oaxaca region. What the APPO experience shows is that barricades, demonstrations and declarations are not enough, it is necessary to constitute an alternative system of governance and defense to protect the gains of the movement. An authentic (not symbolic) parallel government has to be constituted and it autonomy defended. This necessitates an armed militia and a political infrastructure to support it: That means REAL Soviets.
Managua Resurrected ?
'Reformed Sandinistas' supported by Hugo Chavez and the Carter Center, and headed by radical has-been Daniel Ortega Saavedra, won the first round of national elections in Nicaragua. The U.S Embassy refuses to recognise the result - but OAS, the EU and Carter Center observers ratified its transparency. The Ortega/FSLN (Sandinista Front) associated center-left won with 38,59%. The opportunist MRS (Sandinista Renovation) obtained 7,25%. Neither FSLN nor MRS represent a solution to the problems of the Nicaraguan poor and marginalised. The FSLN has long ago renounced its past “revolutionary” agenda in favor of a neo-liberal center-leftism similar in disposition to that of Lula da Silva in Brasil or the ‘Frente Amplio’ in Uruguay. The FSLN only manipulates its past “revolutionary” image to fool the Nicaraguan poor . Its platform is by no means anti-capitalist. While it calls for palliative measures to curve the worst excesses of neo-liberalism, it does not offer a clear anti-capitalist program for independent socialist development. The FSLN accepts Nicaraguan membership in CAFTA and has refused to include the renegotiation of free trade agreement terms in the language of it platform. On the other hand, the MRS is an opportunist formation. In the 1990’s it posed to the RIGHT of the FSLN associated Sandinistas, seeking alliances with ‘soft’ neo-liberals as a means both undermine the appeal of the real FSLN and white-wash the excesses of the neo-liberal regimes that dismantled all the social gains of the 1979-1990 period. Today the MRS poses to the “Left” of the FSLN vaguely appealing to Chavismo and the Zapatistas, but not offering any concrete proposals. The Sandinistas are NOT ''back''. What is back is an apology for Neo-liberalism dressed in the colors of the Sandinista flag. Keep in mind that the Sandinista leadership acted to “modernize” the lyrics of its anthem by removing the quatrains in it that (rightly) denounced the United States government as the ‘Enemy of Humanity’. The solution for Nicaragua is not going to be found in elections held in context of the Burgeoise state. The Solution for Nicaragua is a mass anti-capitalist pro-democracy movement that seeks to negate the neo-liberal capitalist state and its legality. That can only be accomplished from below and implies a clean break with the failed politics of the paleolithic Sandinista “left” ; by taking the streets, the schools, the workplaces, and the land; in open disrespect of Burgeoise “legality” and the wishes of the American Embassy. That is what Sandino stood for.
Semper Indomitus !
Anti-capitalist Discussion Forum:
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See also:
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