Waiting for the other shoe to drop

BY STAN GOTLIEB

Oct. 3, Oaxaca de Juarez, Mexico–I wrote the following dispatch a few days ago. Since then, little has changed, although there have been helicopters (usually the precursor to an attack) flying overhead, and some troops have been shifted to bases closer to Oaxaca City, and the Interior Ministry has made menacing sounds about a Wednesday deadline for a negotiated settlement. Truthfully, I can’t tell if tomorrow is “it,” or if it’s another move in the “feint and threaten” strategy of the government. All I know is that what I wrote below was—and is—a true description of what it’s like to be me, here, now.

It’s quiet, as dawn breaks over this colonial city in southern Mexico. There isn’t the faintest whiff of teargas in the air. No church bells are ringing to warn of approaching soldiers or police. No bullhorns are shouting marching orders to the squatters camped out in the city’s main square, directing them to one or another “choke point.” Another relatively peaceful night in what used to be—and will be again, some day—one of the most beautiful, safe, and historically significant cities on the continent.

The occupation, entering its fifth month, started with a peaceful—if obnoxious—strike by the state’s teachers that took over the town square and many blocks of the central city. After about three weeks, it was attacked by state and local police, who were in turn repelled by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens incensed by what they saw as a violation of the teachers’ right to demonstrate (however obnoxiously). It has since grown into an amalgam of teachers, grass roots organizers, nongovernmental social self-help organizations and other dissident groups, whose central demand is that the governor, responsible for ordering the attack, must go.

Today is the second day of a 48- hour general strike by the merchants and service providers. No bus or taxi service. No large restaurants or department stores. No tour guides (or tourist sites, for that matter). No gasoline or cooking gas. The first day was a failure for the forces aligned with the “bad government” of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The buses ran, the taxis circulated, most stores and restaurants were opened. Still, the streets, already thinly populated, were even emptier yesterday. The tension will mount.

Everyone knows that for the next two days conditions will be ideal for an invasion by the army and the state judicial police, the local cops, the paid goons and the death squads. Most people expect the attack to come at any time. Unsubstantiated rumors of massive troop movements into the surrounding areas, endlessly repeated by “rebel radio” (the dissidents have taken over several local broadcast facilities), fueled by unannounced “drills” (Comrades! The enemy has been spotted, and they are coming our way! Everyone to the barricades! Prepare the Molotov cocktails for our defense, take your sticks and pipes, pick up a paving brick on the way, this is IT!) make for frayed nerves. Like most of my neighbors, I go to sleep with the expectation of invasion. Every morning that I wake up, look around, and discover that nothing much has changed, I wonder why not. It takes a certain toll …

My nerves are frayed, and I live in a small compound of dwellings behind a very heavy gate (We are not a “gated community” in the sense of the wealthy hunkered down behind private security police. In Mexico, everybody in the middle class and most in the urban working class live behind walls and a lockable gate.), about seven blocks from the encampments in the center of town. Far enough away to feel sheltered and safe. Imagine what it must be like for the striking teachers and their supporters from all strata and geographical sections of Oaxaca state, sleeping on pieces of cardboard placed on the sidewalk under plastic tarps, with nearby intersections blocked by burned out cars and buses, and patrols circulating constantly looking for agents, provocateurs and thieves who easily penetrate the security perimeter. Women and children, mostly, waiting for the next teargas attack, the next water cannon, the next round of clubbing, stabbing, and shooting. Embattled leadership with little else to expect but arrest, imprisonment, disappearance, death and injury.

There is another scenario, and while everyone hopes for it, not many believe it will come to pass: that the oligarchy that rules Mexico behind its façade of Democracy will decide it has more to lose by attacking the dissidents than it does by meeting their demands; that the last unresolved bone of contention (all other points, mostly having to do with pay, services for schools and students, etc., have been met by government negotiators), the resignation of the current governor, is seen to be preferable to a possible general insurrection should massive force be used against the strikers.

The key to this possible solution lies in the current political upheavals going on all over Mexico. Local issues, combined with a general disillusionment with the outcome of the fraudulent election that put a right-wing ideologue in the president’s chair (sound familiar, folks?). Peasants being killed and disappeared in Guerrero for objecting to illegal concessions awarded to U.S. transnationals for clear-cutting of old-growth forest on land owned by indigenous co-ops; miners in Guerrero attacked for occupying a steel mill operated by the same company that has been poisoning their aquifers and brutalizing the open-pit workers in northern Mexico; grassroots political workers objecting to stolen elections and corrupt officials bought off by the narcotics traffickers in several states on both of Mexico’s land borders and along the gulf coast; massive military repression of a group demonstrating against destroying a hundreds-of-years-old market in Mexico state to make way for a Wal-Mart; aid organizers threatened for exposing the massive theft of relief supplies bound for hurricane victims in Chiapas; the list goes on and on. So much unrest, enough that real change is possible in “the System,” as the long-ruling PRI party called their neo-fascist construction of interlocking punishments and rewards. If you were a cacique (boss, strongman, the basic building block of the PRI patronage system), wouldn’t you be nervous without the military (or the paramilitary national police) to back your rule?
The question for the oligarchy, and the political class that has always supported them, is whether they can get away with yet another massive round of repression. There are international considerations, as well as national. Clearly, if they give in in Oaxaca, it will encourage other dissident movements to rise up. Clearly, if they squash opposition in Oaxaca, it will create a broader, more determined opposition in other places. It’s a great dilemma for the super-rich, most of whom will go on feeding off the narco-trafficking and the industrial institutions, and some of whom will be forced to swallow the poison pill of exile and loss of income. We are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Stan Gotlieb lives in and writes from Mexico.