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

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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.