Turmoil in Oaxaca—
and will Mexico get a new President?

BY STAN GOTLIEB

Oaxaca, Mexico, at the end of June.
At 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, it is warm and sunny, with a hint of rain in the air. Four expatriate Gringos are sitting in one of the sidewalk cafes circling the Zocalo (central park), having a drink and talking about the current situation, a “situation” which is up close and immediate.

The teachers are in town— tens of thousands of them. They have been here since May 22, and they show no signs of leaving. They are camped out in the park, and on the streets surrounding the park. They leave at night to sleep in schools, churches, houses of relatives and sympathizers and union halls, as they have ever since June 14, when thousands of padded and armed police using tear gas and attack dogs chased them off in a pre-dawn raid and burned many tarps and tents before being themselves chased off by regrouped teachers armed with clubs and machetes; and they return during the day to occupy the center, blockade crucial highway intersections, sit in at various government offices, banks, malls and in other ways to disrupt “business as usual.”

Later this afternoon, there will be another “mega march,” the fourth. The last one, a week ago, involved anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 demonstrators. It took almost six hours to clear the route. Oaxaca has a population of about 600,000. That’s like putting at least 300,000 people marching up Lake Street from the bridge to Lake Calhoun. Pretty dramatic.

A few days ago, the “anti-teacher” forces, consisting of the governor (the central demand of the teachers has switched from wages and working conditions to “the governor must go,” a theme that has a lot of appeal among the populace in general: This governor is seen by the vast majority as arbitrary, corrupt, repressive and destructive of what is unique in Oaxacan culture), the chamber of commerce, the hotel and restaurant owners’ organization (several of their members have closed their doors for the duration), and stalwarts of the PRI party to which the governor belongs and which has ruled Oaxaca state for almost 75 years, held their own march. Estimates of the crowd size varied from 10,000 to 100,000. Rumors abounded of marchers being paid up to 50 dollars for attendance; of government workers told to march or else, of shopkeepers and other businesses that rent space in government-owned buildings pressed into service.

By the time most of you read this, Mexico will have a new president. On July 2, results will indicate either a pro-NAFTA conservative or a very moderate Leftist social reformer who vows to renegotiate key parts of the much-hated “free trade” agreement. Whomever wins, little will change for the teachers, or for Mexico in general. If the teachers decide to go home after the election, it will be because the school year has ended, not because of changes at the top.

“I am the only able-bodied, working-age man in my village,” a teacher told me a couple of weeks ago. “All the men have left to find work. The trees are logged out and the soil has eroded, but even if there is good growing dirt, how can they compete with subsidized corn and beans being imported by U.S.-based multinational corporations? It costs more to grow them than to buy them in the store. All the government subsidies have been removed. We invented corn, and now we can’t afford to feed ourselves.”

The teacher, who commutes from a town in eastern Oaxaca state to a remote village of Mixtec indigenous to which he has to walk for three hours from the end of the bus line, must abandon his own family from Monday morning to Friday afternoon. He has to carry books, supplies, and his own food, on his back. He teaches school in a lean-to he has constructed in which he hangs his hammock at night. His students suffer from malnutrition and preventable diseases that make learning difficult. By age 14 they are gone. Alcoholism is endemic, made all the more common by the practice of feeding pulque—a mild fermentation of the maguey cactus from which tequila and mezcal are made—to children, to stop their crying from hunger pains, and for what little food value it contains. Shoes are rare and infections and infestations from various foot-seeking pests are common.

“The only help comes from the nongovernmental organizations, such as EDUCA (founded by Maryknoll lay workers), and even their resources are limited,” he says. “Right now, they are working to empower the women; to get them to move into the essential tasks previously done by their men. For example, the village has a bus. It has not run for several months. The reason is that nobody who is left knows how to drive it. A co-operative of women is being organized to learn how. A bus cuts the three-hour walk to about 20 minutes.”

Remittances from absent family members are the largest—and in some places the only—source of cash money; the Mexican version of AFDC. Displacement of farmers due to NAFTA and other socially destructive practices has created a new “welfare state,” in which the means of survival comes not from the government, but from ones’ own relatives, living far away under often oppressive conditions; and along with returning relatives comes AIDS and other social diseases. No wonder that teachers (like the one I was talking to) don’t care in the least about whether or not their occupation of the Zocalo adversely affects tourism in “far away” Oaxaca City. Tourism doesn’t do anything for them.

A commission of the national congress is now in possession of petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans, gathered by the teachers, asking for the forced removal of the governor. “We recognize that even if he is removed, the realities of daily life will not change much for most Oaxacans,” the teacher says. “The problem is much deeper, much more entrenched, than any governor or any president ... This strike is as much about dignity as about economics; as much about economics as it is about politics; as much about politics as it is about wages and working conditions. If we cannot prevail now, how will we ever find our way to democracy in this country?”