February 14, 2008

Feliz día del amor a todos. For the past week the beaches of Puerto Escondido have been covered by strange gelatinous creatures that somewhat resemble fish. They have what appears to be a rudimentary eye (or maybe a heart), and sometimes appear in a row, possibly attached to one another. One of the pescadores on la Playa Principal said that they show up under conditions of what he called, “mal agua.” Needless to say, my exercise walk on Playa Zicatela is not as pleasant as it had been. Since the ocean is not healthy at the moment, I won’t swim in it.

Life is slow in Puerto Escondido, compared with Cuidad Oaxaca. The atmosphere here is definitely laid back, but “touristy.” Lately, I’ve been catching up on my reading and my Spanish lessons. With the help of Marcel and mi diccionario, I’m working my way through a book about APPO entitled Autoritarismo, Movimiento Popular y Crisis Politica: Oaxaca 2006, (Victor Raúl Martinez Vásquez, 2nd Ed., Impresiones y Barniz, U.V. de C.V., Oaxaca, Oax.). It provides a chronology of events in Oaxaca from May though November, 2006. It’s a concise, yet fairly comprehensive introduction to the situation as it unfolded in Oaxaca over that six-month period, as well as an analysis of some of the antecedents of the uprising. There are also several online articles about the conflict, written from various perspectives, to which I’ll provide links in my next posting.

Two people I know were in Oaxaca during the six-month period when APPO (and then government forces, and then APPO, and then government forces again) occupied an area extending several blocks in every direction from the zócalo. They described hellish scenes of buses set on fire at intersections to block the advance of police; of burning buildings (one person told me that about 30 buildings were destroyed by fire around the zócalo); and of pitched battles, with teargas and molotovs, between the people and the police. They viewed all of this from rooftops (when they were unable to exit their hotels), from the windows of locked-up (locked down) restaurants, and sometimes from the streets.

Other people, Oaxaqueños/as, talked about the hardships they endured during the occupation, most (including small business owners) holding URO responsible, but some blaming APPO. A waiter at the Camino Real restaurant said that he has three children in school and that his family found it difficult to get by during the time he was out of work because of the occupation. He said that APPO supporters did a lot of damage to the restaurant and hotel, one of the finest in Oaxaca. It had been completely restored by the time I was there, and I haven’t come across any written reports that the hotel had been badly damaged; but I did read later that the hotel was attacked (windows broken, the front door fire-bombed, graffiti sprayed on the walls) because APPO supporters believed that URO was inside. I’ve read that APPO supporters entered the hotel and did a room-by-room search (which was probably terrifying to the hotel’s upscale clients – if, indeed, there were any left). A journalist sympathetic to URO’s government escaped through a side door, and was probably lucky to have gotten away alive and uninjured.

Why do so many people hate URO and want him to step down as Governor? To begin to understand the current situation, you first have to understand a little about Mexican history. I’ll work on that for my next post.

feral@renegaderesearch.org