I´m in an internet cafe and only have a few minutes to write this. We´re leaving oaxaca in half an hour for the intergalactic encuentro in Oventic, Chiapas. We´ve been here for a few days.
Meeting with members of the organizations here involved in the APPO has been incredibly difficult. We´ve been trying for days to meet with people from COMPA and CIPO and other people working on media projects, but so many people are in hiding and some of them cant answer their phones. The situation is still very tense. I feel lucky to be escaping the city without harm.
One teacher told us that they all used to proudly wear their APPO tshirts, but that now it is a crime and none of them can. He says that even showing their membership card for Section 22 of the teachers union anywhere will get them thrown in jail. Graffiti in support of the APPO or against ulyses is painted over, right next to other graffiti that is left alone. Still, people spray paint Fuera URO and APPO in the whit stripes of paint, showing that the campaign of repression continues and the resistance continues as well...
I had read reports that the APPO decided to take down the barricades and decided to hand over radio universidad. But the personal story is very different. One of the women teachers answers me when I ask why was the cinco senores barricade taken down? She says that it was because 25 people from the barricade were taken away by the police and had their shoes taken off and were shot at point blank with rubber bullets in their feet. So parents of people in the baricades didn´t want their children to be tortured and they decided to take them down. Again and again we are told how the struggle is among all generations, the elders, the youth, the parents and the children. Families all go to the marchas together.
When I ask why they gave up radio universidad, we hear another story of torture. When they were holding the police back from the university, the police took some protesters away and drove cactus spikes under their fingernails. Again, to stop the torture, the radio station was given back to the university. Still, people who were involved in the radio and tv station takeovers can´t even enter the center of the city. They are in hiding. Today, police line the front of Canal 9 and the radio stations are back to blaring christmas commercials.
I have to go now. So many people that we´ve met have given us so much hope. We meet person after person who were involved in the barricades. They are teachers today with button up shirts and short haircuts. They tell us of how they were on the barricades with bandanas on their faces, or throwing molotovs, or graffiting government buildings. They also tell us of how Ulyses represents neoliberalism and capitalism. How they´ve had their land robbed from them for centuries. How an indigenous person working in Oaxaca will make $6 a day, not enough to feed ones family, much less enough to ever buy a home. The thousands of police, tear gas, riot shields and baton strikes evicting the barricades from the Zocalo are the hallmark of neoliberalism. We watch the video from the june 14th eviciton and our Oaxacan friend says, "look, there´s my wife and daughter."
