Its a Bird, its a Plane, Its a…Radio: the super adventures of The Radioheros

Spent the last few days in Santa Cruz Mixtepec and Compala setting up radios. A ragtag bunch from the organization CACTUS in a pickup truck bouncing on dirt roads across mountinous deserts. We are a Frenchman, 2 Oaxacan coordinators, a Cali gringo and myself.

Santa Cruz Mixtepec: Dancing to shame the conquestadors:In Santa Cruz Mixtepec we drive into town for just in time carnival, The town square is full of masked figures with tuxes on dancing to the sound of cumbia. Some of the masks are scary holloween type masks, like you see in the US but most are hairy, pink or white with dots all over. I ask what they mean. “They are a joke on the conquistadors and casiqilles with their facial hair, pink skin, pimples and tuxes”. Many of the men are dressed as women with fake blond hair, grotesqe caricatures of gringa beauty, and just as we arrive one of them wins the queen of the dance award and after exiting the stage comes through the crowd to dance with us. The music goes into the night with hundreds of people shuffling their feet, whole families standing on the side or dancing together. From the stage the musicians announce “Tommorow at 11am a new radio station will go on line at 94.5 fm, listen for it!” We are excited but nervous that we wont be able to set it the Radio up in time.The next mourning we rise earily meet with some high school kids and town representatives at an old clinic building on top of the highest hill in San Juan Mixtepec. Together we hoist the attena, clean out the clinic, hook up some electicity and setup the computers. We plug in the radio and drive around to see if it works but it doesn’t even reach to the bottom of the hill where the town center is. Its almost 11am and we arent quite sure why we have such poor preformance. We drive back up the dirt roads and check our power supply realizing that the power supply that I happened to bring from the US will actually work better. We plug it in again and sucess! The signal reaches across the moutains to 5 or six different towns and its only 30 mins late. The youth come up with the name for the station calling it “The voice of the clouds” becuase they, the Mixtec people have historically considered themselves people of the clouds. We drive around the town as a crew shouting out the station number to everyone who will listen. In Mixtepec there are alot of immigrant kids, many speaking English, Spanish,and Mixteco, one kid named Homie has a group of friends who all dress like sterotypical Chicano gangsters, tattoos and all. I dont know how they keep there socks and shirts white without running water while working in the constant dust but its amazing to watch them juggle the worlds, speaking with there elders in the community in Mixteco, joking with the other more traditional kids in spanish and kicking it with a couple of gringos in perfect slanged out English. With the sun still high in the sky we drive away like radio superheros with the new station blasting as the kids spin the latest in Chilanos and Cumbia and give shout outs to all the technicians. Our pick up bouces over the mountains dirt roads for a couple hours and we arrive in Copala.

Copala: Autonomus Armed Insurgent Radio

Copala is a small Triqui town in a tree filled valley that is an important spiritual and cultural location for the Triqui peoples. We were there to help them resolve a couple of technical problems with the radio that CACTUS installed a few weeks ago. The Triqui peoples have held on to many of their traditions, the women still wear their traditional red Hupil dress and they have maintained their forms of collective decisionmaking and have faced some extreme violence from the State in their fight for thier rights as indigenous people. Copala in particular has declared itself an autonomos municipality, breaking ties with the state and local government, and kicking out all government representatives, from police to tax collectors. It is exactly what the Zapatistas have done in Chiapas, but in Copala they don’t have international headlines and they have also cut ties with the leadership of larger statewide organizations, whos leaders they feel have been corrupted, like the MULT(Movement for Trique Unity and Liberation) . Since anouncing there own autonomus municipality a year ago they have stopped having people kidnapped, shot or arrested from their community. They have done this by creating there own local militia, who patrols the edge of town armed with the same types of weapons normally reserved for the military, police and paramilitaries. They are aware that the federal or state police and military forces might attack at any moment, and in the past they have been forced to defend the town from the special forces state police by having the towns women build blockades at the entrances to town and put their bodies in front of the attacking special forces vehicles. It is astonishing to realize that this is a community on the boarder with the state of Guerrero and Copala is supported in this type of armed resistance by its neighboring communities. Simply put this means that Mexico has at minimum 3 southern states that have active armed movements that are resisting state violence and organizing there own governments. I`m pretty sure that under international law Mexico more then qualifies as a country involved in a civil war. However we dont see any headlines announceing this dirty civil war because that would upset the stockmarkets, bring down the value of the peso and mean the politicians would have to admit that the %80 of the mexican military budget that comes from the USA is being used for alot more then chasing drug trafficers.It was great to work with youth from the commuity to fix some of the technical problems they were having with there appropriately titled “Breaking the Silence” radio. We were able to drive to neighboring towns and have the radio work far and wide. I was happy to see how interconnected indigenous resistance can be, finding this quote(see photo) from a Cree proverb on their municipal building:

“Only when the final tree is cut down,only when the final river is dammed,only when the final fish is caught,will they learn that that they cannot eat money.What ever People do to the earth they are doing to themselves”

I was also happy to find that the 2 high school age women that were working with us to set up the radio were much more assertive around the 3 gringos then I had seen in other towns, asking us directly all types of questions about where we were from and why we were there in Copala. I left Copala with many questions, more sure then ever that Mexico is much more complex then I though and that US resistance to “Plan Mexico” (giving 1.4 billion to the Mexican Military) is the only way to prevent a sure bloodbath for the people of Copala and most of the people of Southern Mexico.-Jonathan

Info in English on Plan Mexico, and actions to take: http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/planmexicoFor more info on Copala in Spanish: http://cml.vientos.info/node/12676 http://fridaguerrera.blogspot.com/2007/09/san-juan-copala-zona-triqui-con-larga.html

Refections on Someone Elses Movement

The inspiring part is that the movement is very much alive, subdued but clearly not repressed or depressed. There are marches, art shows, bar nights, and movie showings all about the movement. People talk about how the coming year will be a big one, casually predicting that the fall of the Us and Mexican economy will crack the national and international apathy for revolutionary politics. Organizers make an interesting comparison with the Zapatistas. Organizers here say people outside the country are missing how their organizing is something as big as the Zapatistas uprising for Mexico. Not to compete but just to compare, for example, they held their states capital city for 6 months without police or military but the zapatistas couldn’t take their state capital and were only in the other cities for a couple days. The APPO is a plural and popular organization that has many different ideologies and types of people involved, majority indigenous, and explicitly revolutionary and anti-neoliberal but with a plurality and popularity in urban and rural areas that the zapitistas have never really aspired to, with the Zapatistas having a clear army hierarchy, political line and use of armed force. 

 

In strategic conversations with organizers it becomes clearer and clearer that some of the weak points of the movement are areas that constantly plague the left. Lack of clear articulated and shared vision, sectarianism, and corrupt individualism, and anti-democratic practices of influential/powerful organizations.

 

This issue of negotiating with the government is very different then any thing I’ve seen in US movements. Here a key issues seem to be negotiating with the government.” Simply put, if you negotiate you are a traitor who is selling the blood of those who died in the movement to boost yourself up.

In the US most everything is a negotiation with the government, I can’t remember ever having a serious discussion about weather or not to negotiate with the government in the us.

Some other key concepts here are ¨protangonism¨ which basically means that you are putting yourself or your group as the center of everything, not being humble and working well with others.

Another key concept is that of the pueblo, the people. It is a huge part of movement language here. Pledges to and history of being with the Pueblo not with the government, is very important to political discourse in a way I never seen it in the us. Political positions often hinge on the simple understanding that ¨Somos Pueblo¨, we are all ¨the people¨and organizations define traitors to the movement as those who don´t work for the pueblo.

Paramilitarization is another key issue that splits and devides organizations here. A government strategy seems to be to offer the leadership of grassroots leftish organizations arms and impunity in order to turn them in to paramilitaries for the state, dividing them from their own more democratic bases and generally fracturing movments and multiplying violence and insecurity within society in general. There are at least 2 large organizations that at one time were deticated to grassroots organizing for justice that now have split because one group is using arms to kill

.

There is a huge amount of sacrifice in political work here, political meetings take literally all day, are often very difficult to hear and have many people who have there full say on most issues. Most people are very poor and the only work is hard and pays poorly. Political organizations don´t pay there organizers because it is a sign of dedication, responsibility and lack of corruption to work with out pay

¨She was strangled, Now through a barrel she breaths¨-Rage Against The Machine, describing the ZapatistasWhile the Zapatistas breath through their weapons and international solidarity, in Oaxaca people breath through the hands of others. They survive day to day through a faith in others, there own good luck and the rightness of there actions. A sense of solidarity, is how people tend to talk about the steel of the state against there flesh. In the city the people say ¨If they arrest our people we´ll get our friends to comedown from the mountains and shutdown the city¨. People in the mountains terrorized by paramilitaries camp out in Mexico, DF for months, then join groups that can bring hundreds of people there town if they get attacked again.

The best I can tell from a couple of movement meetings, a couple of marches and watching the political and media fallout from the assassination of a police director is that the strategy for state repression is to divide and buy off the movement with egotiations and corruption while avoiding confrontations cops where the state doesnt have overwhelming force. At the same time the state government is creating highly trained military style attack units that are directly under the preview of the local state governor and paramilitary forces that seem to be used to terrify and general cause uncertainty as to who is fighting who for what.

Violence that happens against the direct interests of the state seems to be placed under the label ¨narcotraficante¨. This serves a dual purpose because it means politicians don´t have to admit that there is a social movement that may be opposed to them and the solution for this violence is more weapons and training from the USA.

One very scary thing is that the state government has Oaxaca state forces that have been trained by the Israeli security agency, MOSAD and supposedly (I have a hard time believing this) by Iraqi/USA commanders from Iraq, they ride around on motorcycles and wear a dark camo uniform and only need orders from the state level government(ie. Ruiz). This is a whole different level of decentralization, highly trained military units under order from a state governor.

At one of the marches a special forces type police guy walked right up to another US solidarity activist and said in English something to affect of “what are you doing here, if you don’t stop playing around here you might get hurt, we are watching you”. Most people seem convinced that they are being watched at various places, and that the government already knows much about where they live and what their up to. Organizers tell me that the only reason why they haven’t been killed or imprisoned is because the government is scared to provoke more people. For example I’ve heard stories of organizational houses who thought they were going to be raided, whos main strategy was to put a table in front of the door so that it would slow the cops down while the people inside would be able to get on the Internet and send out a emails to other saying that we were being raided. Basically relying on solidarity in a local, national and international level to keep them from being beaten and from spending a long time in jail.

Random Movement Trivia:

Some interesting things that i’ve learned in conversation are: 1)that the movement has had concrete support from the rich, at key moments, like the university radio attack of nov 2 rich people hid people in their houses and brought supplies to the people fighting the police.

2)There isn’t a very well organized or popular Fascist opposition although there are random swastikas in places. the question for people who don’t support the APPO is more around supporting the government, and more out of reflex of family ties and habit, not about some fascist ideology.

3)As far as I know one thing the movement hasn’t done is really try to organize within the wealthy or the police, although people say that many of the police refused to attack the people at various times, and the government was forced to bring police from other states.

Arms, Impunity and a Beautiful View: Vista Hermosa

I spent the last week in a little village called San Isidro Vista Hermosa. They are havıng a serious problem wıth paramılıtarıes. It was intense. The Paramilitaries conveniently named the ¨National Front for Indigenous Farmers¨ Kidnapped and beat up 6 people in 2003, 40 people in 2005 and shot up a meeting with automatic weapons fire in 2006. They are basically a group of caciquiles(ruling families) from Santa Cruz Nundaco(the neighboring town) that use there ties to the PRI Party and the governor to get arms and impunity. They use the impunity and arms to terrorize there neighboring community of Vista Hermosa off the land and out of any hope of political independence. My time there was good in the sense that things seem to have calm down a little and there were no conflıcts with paramilitaries. It was dıffıcult to witness how torn up, but struggling campo communities are here. Almost all the men and many of the women are currently in, just got back from or were going to the USA. The poverty is serious, only a little running water, no paved roads or large machinery, but they had electricity, so its not as bad as Nicaragua (but they went through a civil war). We did alot of video interviews with them about there experience under attack from the paramilitaries. Many of them had been kidnapped for days, beaten up or shot at. It was hard listening to so much suffering while knowing there is so little that I can do to effect things. But I hope being there and video taping was important. Community member camped out in the zocalo(center) of Mexico city for 4 months and have been completly ignored. The town is less then 250 people and it is split from house to house, you would try to bring up “the problems” and they would politely whisper “no, next door they are “the others”, the bad ones, it is better that we talk out front.” We counldn´t walk across town with out a guide because they feared provocations. The cars with the decals of the paramilitaries would drive by and say “good morning” in English to us. it was disconcerting to realise your actions could have a huge impact on the people around you. For example I generally asked before filming anything because if paramilitary people saw me filming, the municipal building or their cars it might be taken as a provocation and might lead to them shooting up the house of the people we were staying with after we left.All the people hosting us were amazingly kind, we had three meals a day each cooked in a different house, corn tortillas , beans, and eggs all grown right out side. I was there with 2 other internationals, one from spain and the other from germany, and we tried to help out with little tasks like taking the grains off the corn. The towns people generally made it clear that the real work(Building houses, taking care of animals, fixing water pipes) was probably too hard for our unskilled hands. They follow the traditional Uso y Costumbres decision making structure. Using full community assemblies and collective work for everything in town from the school to the church. It was a culture shock for us to come into town and ask them where we would be sleeping and have them reply ¨we´ll have a meeting about it.¨ 2 hours later the came up with a perfect room for us. then we asked where we would for breakfast the next day. again ¨we´ll have a meeting about it¨an hour later they had figured our eating schedule for the whole week. impressively effective even if it seemed slow to the gringos at first. It was a strange mix of cultures, a 3 road town way up in the mountains, every-ones first language is Mixteco, they all want me to teach there kids english. It was super loud day and night, the Fields of maiz (corn) with the blaring of american and mexican pop music, the sound of fighting dogs, donkeys, roosters, cows, the bells of the little church and the announcements to pay your electricity bills. Such a strange twist of ideal farm life and hyper modern trash, culture and violence.