The Heart Of The Day

A friend’s report on the grito: “My observations are that indeed the zocalo was turned into an armed camp; I counted ten policemen on each corner of Garcia Vigil, and at the Alameda, along Independencia. Given that atmosphere, I went instead to the popular grito, which was held on Carmen Alto Plazuela, with about two hundred attending. It was staged early to avoid confrontations. The event began with a calenda from Simbolos Patrias and by eight PM the plazuela was filled with people. As is common, the children recited and were applauded, followed by cries of More! More!. The kids were followed by singers who sang the struggle ballads (More! More! Otra! Otra!). Then the “cry” came, consisting of the names of the dead from the past year. The person giving the cry was a woman, and I never heard who she is, but ! I have photos. Then the national anthem, then Venceremos…it was what I expected, and am never unmoved by, a people’s event.”

My expat friend in Oaxaca says “an opinion piece by Ricardo Rocha and published in the Oaxaca Noticias on Friday the 14th of September, has a few points I think worth calling to the attention of people outside of Oaxaca. Rocha points out that if the guerrilla group Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR), a small, rural-based Marxist guerrilla group that had been inactive for years, after a series of spectacular attacks on police in 1996, explodes oil pipelines, it is not a small casual act to be sloughed off with a shrug. The EPR has opted for armed revolution. The EPR resurfaced last year amid the civil unrest that shook the capital city of Oaxaca state, where protesters over many months paralysed the city and demanded the ouster of the governor. At that time, the EPR claimed responsibility for several bank bombings in Mexico City.

Despite URO (governor) saying “no pasa nada”, a lot is happening. Those of us here can see the state is in chaos, held together mainly by armed local and federal police. But the federal investigation units cannot foresee or control the guerrilla attacks which grow more sophisticated.

Rocha accepts that URO is responsible for the two EPR people who were disappeared last month. He refers to a return of the dirty war, which human rights activists here say is not a return but a continuation of government tactics employed since the seventies.

Meanwhile, Rocha points out, nobody is paying attention to the structural causes of rebellion. The APPO, we know, is non-violent, but the EPR has no such commitment, nor, I think do other groups around the nation. Rocha refers to Explosive Mexico, not just Explosive Oaxaca. He refers to the extremes of poverty, destitution of populations and communities, children suffering with parasites, bloated bellies , etcetera —while the political and business elite increase their already elevated salaries and perks.

And to add fuel to the fire, Rocha points out, a federal judge condemned an activist from Atenco to 67 years in prison.”

An article about the EPR’s bombing of Mexico’s gas pipelines appeared on economist.com September 13 and can be found here.“>

My friend goes on to ask “Why does no middle class or affluent person pay attention to the real situation? I can say that reforms to guarantee an independent human rights commission and a electoral reform law are on the right track–but are they? Or are they irrelevant and unenforceable? Do they address the underlying causes of why armed guerrillas operate in Mexico?”

We go about our lives, but with great unease.”

In two days, Mexico will celebrate Independence Day on September 17. It is traditional for the governor to enter the Governor’s Palace, now a museum since the teacher strike of last year, and utter the “cry for Independence” at midnight. This is done in Mexico City and all over Mexico.

An expat reports “I have not gone today (Saturday) to personally look at the scene, but the usual is to place heavy barriers of metal, cement or razor wire in the roadways of all streets that enter the zocalo. The sidewalks permit entry of single persons who in the past have had their bags searched. The police stand at the barricades in riot gear.

A description of the “safety”, brought to us by a website in support of the government, ADA Sureste describes the event. It is a safety measure to have ready water tanks (high pressure hoses) and teargas, all the police units available as well as firefighters, and to patrol the streets and towns around the area. Inside the museum palace there will be units of police, with a total of ten strategically placed.

This is to continue through the independence day celebrations on the 17th. Since the grito ! will be given at midnight (or 1:00 AM on daylight savings, I don’t know which hour will be used) it will be dark, adding to the need for ‘safety.'”

This article also confirms that a separate “popular grito” will be given at Santo Domingo Church…the people refusing to participate in the official event. A friend in Oaxaca says “I would suggest that any foreigner who chooses to attend either the governor’s ceremony or the popular event do so with circumspect behavior, whatever that means.”

An expat in Oaxaca City has reported that “yesterday the campesinos from the Frente de Communidades of the Cordillera Norte descended into the Zocalo at the center of Oaxaca. they took out all the flowers lining the cement-walled plant areas and planted native corn. In the Alameda, the area didn’t have any plants under the trees anyway (waiting for URO’s next move), so seeding it was easier. It’s been raining, and the “corn fields” look like big mud flats, protected with string fences supported with posts. – well, at least the bird didn’t eat the seed! The Oaxaca people have declared their opposition to transgenic corn by planting the real thing.

Since corn was cultivated first in Oaxaca, corn is considered a cultural patrimony. The campesinos are asking people to grow their own, and maintain the pure thing without purchase from the USA of the yellow corn which undercuts the price of local corn by transnationals like Monsanto, Cargill, Dow AgroSciences and Novartis, plus US farm subsidies. Transgenics have contaminated the local plants, to a degree which is not known – but the farmers are seeking a denial for their import and use in Mexico.”

Today, she reported that “the criollo corn planted in the zocalo and Alameda by the united communities of the Cordillera mountain range to protest transgenic corn by Monsanto, has been dug up. Instead, the government is once again planting hundreds of flowers, petunias, begonias and such, in the mud of the much-rained on plant beds. There is one corn patch which may have survived on the north side of the Alameda- at least it was today. If anyone sees sprouts, let us know.

I have no proof, but my guess is that tearing up the seeds was a kind of pay-back for the 10,000 person march three days ago. But maybe not. Maybe the government just likes flowers. Too bad they never last more than a week, since they are not native to this climate — and I’ve been told by a worker at Carmen Alto Plazuela, that the government refuses to plant native cactus or succulents, which tolerate heat and drought, and last forever. But then, maybe petunias are not too bad, since they must be a big source of income for whatever nursery supplies them….

I have to admit this kind of symbolic warfare is better than disappearing people, but I felt really sad. There’s something about seeing plants sprout -especially food plants, -that can’t be matched by potted flowers.”

Met in Forest Grove for lunch

The following is taken from an article by John Ross written for the Fort Worth Weekly August 22, 2007

The mountainous southern state of Oaxaca sits at the top of most of Mexico’s poverty-indicator lists — for infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It also is home to Mexico’s heaviest concentration of indigenous peoples, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.

The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico for most of the last century, until its corrupt dynasty was overthrown in 2000 by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola-Mexico.

But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters all over the country were throwing off its yoke, Oaxaca was electing that party’s Ulises Ruiz Ortiz — known as URO — in a fraud-marred gubernatorial election in 2004.

In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. He turned a deaf ear in May 2006, when a militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands. A week later, tens of thousands of teachers took over Oaxaca’s plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning, the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-URO slogans.

Ruiz retaliated before dawn on June 14, sending a thousand heavily armed police into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. From the balconies of colonial hotels that surround the plaza, police tossed down concussion grenades. Radio Planton, the maestros’ pirate station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.

Four hours later, community members and striking teachers, armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent URO’s cops packing. No uniformed police officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s “hard hand.” The demonstration reportedly extended for more than six miles.

John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a fellow for the international human rights organization Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of rebels on June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly or APPO was formally constituted a week later. It would have no leaders but many spokespersons, with all decisions to be made in popular assemblies.

For the next several weeks, APPO and Section 22 would paralyze Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the suspect July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PANista, Felipe Calderón, was awarded a narrow victory over coalition candidate and leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. When López Obrador cried foul, millions poured into the streets, in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca seemed like small potatoes.

But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shut their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the “Guelaguetza,” a dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premier tourist attraction.

Ruiz began to fight back.

During the first weeks of August, he launched what came to be known as the “Caravan of Death” — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles, rolling nightly, filled with city and state police officers firing on the protesters.

To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through the city, the APPO and the maestros threw up a thousand or more barricades in the working-class neighborhoods of the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and the carcasses of cars and buses, and the barriers soon took on their own life. Murals were painted with the ashes of the bonfires that burned atop the piles, and the barricades lent an air of the Paris Commune to Oaxaca’s struggle.

An uneasy lull had gripped the city when Brad Will arrived at the bus terminal on the first of October and found himself a cheap room. But the break wouldn’t last long.

Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves independent reporters, Will had no Mexican press credential and only a tourist visa, meaning he was working illegally and susceptible to deportation. But he got himself accredited by Section 22 and wore the rebel group’s credential around his neck with his Indymedia press card.

On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was killed at a barricade downtown. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken. In his last dispatch, on Oct. 16, Will’s words caught this very Mexican whiff of death: “Now [Alejandro] lies there waiting for November 2nd, the Day of the Dead, when he can sit with his loved ones again to share food and drink and song,” he wrote. “One more death. … One more time to know power and its ugly head.”

The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten “sketchy,” Will wrote to Neary. A Section 22 leader had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried, amid charges of sell-outs and pay-offs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’ gunmen. But backing down is not in the Popular Assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
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Last week the Governor of Oaxaca went to the United States as part of a group of Mexican governors where he was confronted with protests in several cities, including New York. Protesters in the street threw tomatoes at the restaurant where URO and other governors were said to be dining. Oaxaca human rights violations are so widely known that even in Finland Oaxaca is regarded as an example, according to a man just returned from there, of the struggle for human dignity; information about Oaxaca has reached global levels although I don’t know what good it is doing. Mexico doesn’t seem to care.

The following remarks were taken from an article by an expat in Oaxaca:
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After a year in Oaxaca Mexico I drove through Mexico City (without getting killed) to Queretaro where my old Mexican-American friend, Patsy and her husband Jose, were waiting for me. Patsy and Jose are in Mexico trying to get legal papers for him. Jose helped me get the car repaired and repainted and then Patsy and I took off for the Texas border. We crossed at the Columbia Friendship Bridge about 30 miles west of Loredo..a great option to the Loredo crossing. New, park-like, very few cars; bright friendly border guards. Think it was built as part of the NAFTA trade agreement…

Let me tell you, Texas is a BIG state with not much to see in it! Twelve hours later we hit Las Cruces, New Mexico. Then the next day we drove another twelve hours to Las Vegas where my oldest son, Greg, was awaiting our arrival and where we lounged in comfort and convenience. When Patsy and I went to Vons, a nearby clean orderly grocery store we flew in all directions…excitedly choosing yogurt WITH NO SUGAR, blueberries, raspberries, bagels, familiar cheese! Do you feel like you just crawled out of a hole, I asked Patsy. Yes, she agreed! No in-your-face corruption (just hidden), no late-night apprehensions, arrests and killings! No bullshit bureaucracies..at least not yet.

The next day Patsy flew to Portland Oregon and I stayed behind a couple days to enjoy Greg and a casual catered buffet dinner at his home with his friends…Andy, a Mexican ex-marine from LA and his fiance…two apparently very successful female real estate developers…Las Vegas being the real estate capital of the country at the moment…and the witty gay black caterer and his partner. And Greg’s very best friend…an Iranian anesthesiologist…and his sister. Around the pool that night, after a few lemon-drop martinis, we had a very spirited conversation about immigration…the black guys providing an added dimension to the debate. And best of all, a nice long telephone call from son Josh who was traveling through western China for a few weeks to sample the Sichuan cuisine before returning to Beijing where he is the chef de cuisine at one of the restaurants in the Hilton Hotel. Meanwhile, his wife Amy visited her family in the States during a month-long break from her job as a teacher of history in the International School. The next day Greg treated me to sushi…a belated birthday and mother’s day gift. That night we enjoyed a wonderful Lebanese dinner with Greg’s Iranian friend, Bob for short, who, Greg said, had to court his wife, who he met in London, for three years…he being Iranian and she being Lebanese…before the families would agree to let them marry. Their two small lively squealing children crawled all over Uncle Greg from the moment we arrived. A truly lovely family and I feel very privileged to have met them. And told Greg he should date Bob’s beautiful sister…

The night before I left Las Vegas Greg and I were invited to the home of the sister of his latest girlfriend, Vanessa. Vanessa’s mother, a lovely woman who joined us, is Costa Rican and her father Cuban. Needless to say, Las Vegas rivals New York City in it’s diversity. The next day I drove non-stop from Vegas to Salem…from 9am to 2:30am…never again.

I enjoyed a week with my son Doug who was waiting for me at the house in Salem…before his return thursday to his wife, Luk, in Thailand. Luk and Doug’s father, who lives south of Pattaya, were to join Doug in Bangkok today. In a couple days Doug and Luk will fly down to their home overlooking the Gulf of Thailand on Ko Samui.

Now, for me, it’s back to the reality of Oregon…few people on the streets, no Zocalo to meet friends over coffee to watch the latest march or music concert or candela…visual and auditory feasts. No pesky colorful vendors many of whom ended up my friends. I can even laugh now about the really old and ugly woman beggar who owns two apartment houses. And the guy who, after a drinking binge, makes everyone groan when he “sings” “Oaxaca, Oaxaca!” with his battered guitar. And the wandering trombone player, with his plump wife sitting faithfully on a stool next to him, who makes you plug your ears. Apparently no one has told him trombones aren’t supposed to be solo instruments. The two saxaphone players weren’t so bad…one better than the other who was always asking me “vamos a mi casa!” Right! And Jorge, the raboso vendor who knew everything about everyone. And the two retired one-eyed Viet Nam vets, the retired right-winger with a big heart who used to be the police chief in a small Colorado town and who has adopted a poor Oaxaca family to support. An eccentric police chief, he once did a traffic stop, he told me, with a big red clown’s nose attached to his face! The guy, with a Ph.D in French literature who lives on $70 a month and plays chess every day at five o’clock in front of the Cathedral after sitting all afternoon with one coffee in a sidewalk cafe. The Mexican kids, many of whom are excellent players, pay him 10 cents to use his chess board and clock…and many of whom just hang around to practice English with us. And they admire the tall, unusual gringo who voluntarily lives on so little. He would often walk me back to my apartment late at night after the Marimba Band had finished up in front of the Del Jardin Restaurant. Good times with my retired friend from San Francisco who arrived in Oaxaca on the same plane as me and helped me fill out my visa application. Bilingual, she had previously lived three years in Veracruz. She is helping facilitate the erection of FM community radio transmitters around the state. Community radios, although legal, are essentially enemies of the hated state governor. I worry for her. And Elvira, the soft-spoken Zapotec woman who organized a woman’s coffee bean collective. She travels five hours down from the mountains by bus to sell her coffee at the organic Pochote Market and stays thursdays and fridays overnight with this same friend before she goes back to her home at 5am Sunday morning. Lester, who was worried about his young son who was volunteering at the CIPO house…an indigenous volunteer organization, stayed with me two pleasurable weeks. And my gentle Swiss friend, Willy, an industrial engineer by training who is trying to make a living on the local economy by making incredible lamps out of debris from his backyard and as an eco-landscaper. I told him he could sell his lamps for hundreds in NYC. He wasn’t interested. Many good times with Charly from Canada who introduced me to Mica and Bardo…all coffee roasters…and in whose adobe home in Huayapam we enjoyed many delicious Sunday afternoon cenas. And the several visitors Charly met on Sweet Maria’s coffee home-roasting web site and sent down to visit Oaxaca. One of them, Jennifer, when I picked her and her husband up at the airport, said that I looked familiar and asked if I ever went to the Beanery in Salem where she used to work. Of course, I said! And Hector and Lulu, my landlords with a new baby, and eternally cheerful Adelina, the apartment maid, and her lively bright daughter Fernanda, who watched out for me and would never let anyone inside the courtyard gates that she didn’t know. Adelina makes $200 a month…so I am putting Fernanda through school…no big feat…only $30 a year for registration and another $20 for shoes. I will miss Adelina the most. And the friends who came and went in the other two apartments that were configured such that we could all talk to each other without leaving our apartments. Joe, a retired CPA from Chicago, who helped us organize the badly sung Norteno Christmas Party for the landlords and their families, twenty-something Canadians Ana and Steve, Roy and Eileen from San Francisco. Peter, a funny Australian guitarist and his wife Mirella who have come to live in Oaxaca. The two absolutely delightful woman interns I met at the Casa de los Amigos Guesthouse run by the Quakers in Mexico City who came to stay with me a few days. When I was in Chiang Mai Thailand, I used to go to a nearby guesthouse for a $2 buffet breakfast where I met “Sharkey”, a twenty-something firefighter from Eugene Oregon. He told me he used to live with a paraplegic Viet Nam vet in the mountains above Miahuatlan near Oaxaca City Mexico. So one night in the zocalo, when I met Judy, a friend of a paraplegic Viet Nam vet who lives in the mountains above Miahuatlan, I told her I had met Sharkey in Chiang Mai. “You know Sharkey?” she exclaimed. Small world indeed. And then there were the many wonderful long conversations with my anarchist friend, Max, also a classicist who enjoys high mass in the cathedral. Now, I’ll have time to read Mikhail Bakunin, Max. Sigh. Re-entry always the most difficult part.

The Governor’s people handed out money to those who attended the commercial Gueleguetza. The Governor wanted to make sure the auditorium was filled.

Well, I left Sunday morning at 2:30am and made it across Mexico City without getting killed! Made it to Queretaro about 1pm in the afternoon. We’re planning on leaving for the border on the 5th…then to Las Vegas to see my son Greg…and then to Oregon.

An expat said by email on Monday that “the radio reports that the Popular Movement in Oaxaca will meet at the market (I didn’t hear which, but out near Branamiel) very early this morning. They will go to the foot of the hill. Others are supposed to go singly (hormigas) like ants…A different report says they will avoid Crespo, and circle around by Porfirio Diaz, to the zocalo.

I would imagine that it will be very difficult to attack people, wherever they go. Tourists are witnesses. I also hear that no public transportation is coming into the city.”

Or one of many other countries I have been in!

How to be a Taxi Driver in Saigon – Vietnam, Asia
By: Graham Price
www.bootsnall.com

Positions Available: Applicants Sought
Job Title: Taxi Driver
Location: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Qualifications Required: Driving license or some previous experience of having driven a car preferred, but not essential.

Skills Required
1. Excellent Spatial Awareness – you must be able to know exactly where your vehicle begins and ends. This will become apparent when you draw to a halt (from speed) precisely one millimeter away from the scooter in front, or when driving (at speed) through a red light that requires a death-defying manoeuvre between traffic coming from either side.

2. A Strong Right Thumb – this is a must for successful horn operation. The horn has many uses; the following list is by no means exhaustive. Creativity and resourcefulness in this area are particularly welcome. The horn should be sounded when you wish to:

– Hurry vehicles in front along
– Bully smaller vehicles into the slow lane [or onto the shoulder]
– Warn any bikes in the right-hand lane of your intention to turn right from the left-hand lane
– Warn other users of your presence (especially when overtaking on a busy street, driving the wrong way down a one way street, running a red light, or taking a corner on the wrong side of the road.)
– Scare pedestrians who have become stranded in the middle of the road (purely entertainment value)
– Inform drivers ahead that the traffic lights have changed. In this instance, the horn should be sounded precisely half a nanosecond after amber turns to green.
– Apologise to someone whom you have cut-up whilst changing lanes
– Show your distress and distaste if any other road user should be inconsiderate enough to run red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road, etc.

3. The ability to “read” your passenger’s “type” – Passengers tend to fall into one of four main groups:
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I have been invited to Max’s this afternoon for pork loin. I know it will be good…he used to be a chef. But first I’ll go the zocalo to watch still another march enter from the airport. Then I’ll go home, make a salad and take off for Max’s apartment. Meanwhile apparently the commercial Guelaguetza, heavily guarded by police, will be going on this morning…far away at the auditorium on Fortin Hill.

But first I want to post Max’s ironic message to me this morning:

The voice of an American expat with family here who is invested in the life of Oaxaca:

My comment: Very well put. And now many of the teachers and others find themselves caught in the middle. It’s a very complicated business going on here…not just a two-sided conflict although at times of clashes with the police it may appear that way.

Here is an email exchange with a dear friend in Oregon. My answers are strictly from the point of view of an outsider…one who has only lived here one year and with limited intimate knowledge and understanding of what it means to be a Oaxaqueno.

On Jul 22, 2007

Here’s your first question — one which has been discussed among us and we await your answer! You said you wanted to write about what traveling reveals about the human heart. Why Oaxaca in a time of political unrest?

I came here to live for a year not knowing anything about the political situation. I arrived in the middle of a teacher strike.

I read your blogs and thank God every time you have arrived back home without taking a bullet.

I was never anywhere where it would be possible to ‘take a bullet.”

I was on the edge of a riot once (Vietnam in Century City) and I saw how quickly people who just came to watch could be injured… some badly.

I have only watched the peaceful marches…nothing else.

So you must have a purpose?

I am here to experience the wonderful people and learn about their lives…I loved the Oaxaquenos that I worked with in the States. I wanted to see where they came from and what drove them up north. I have seen people with no jobs, education that sucks, no health care for anyone that doesn’t work for the government etc, etc, etc. and how in the world they survive in the face of incredible corruption and repression…and unspeakable poverty. There is no economic development here. Just tourism, such as it is, and government. The people in the pueblos farm corn to eat…that is priced out of the market now that cheap corn (that they don’t like) is coming from the States.

Are you there as a reporter?

Just reporting what I and others witness on the ground. The US and international media stinks…portraying what happens here all out of proportion. Clashes last for short periods of time in very very limited geographical areas. Many people don’t even know anything has happened until they read about it in the next day’s paper.

Or to change history?

That would be pretty presumptuous

What does being a participant in such potentially dangerous environs do for your human heart.

I am not a “participant” in any way. It is against the law here for foreigners to get involved in the political life. And it is not dangerous here as I have said many times in my blog entries. (It will take some reflection to know what it’s all done for my heart.)

What I’m really wanting to say… is Come home!!! but I want to know why you’re not.

I committed to staying for a year…leasing an apartment. I had no reason to leave before the year was up.

You’re an intelligent, communicative person — you must have some reason other than that you like your apartment??

I’ll get there when I get there. I have been fighting with the insurance company to get a fair settlement on the damage to my front bumper. It has been four months. Probably will be back in Oregon sometime after the first of August.

Please be safe,

I am, I assure you, and all the other 2000 expats and the tourists that are here. No tourists or expats have ever been hurt. Many of the locals who do participate in the activities are putting themselves in great jeopardy for what they see is a struggle to end corruption and injustice. They are not doing it perfectly. The resistence is very controversial…some people innocently, peacefully and conscientiously working for justice and others with many hidden and counterproductive agendas.

Without actually being there with you, it’s hard to mentally see what the scene is.

I have never seen any violence in Oaxaca first hand or been anywhere near it. On November 25, when thousands in the streets were teargassed and beaten, a friend and I drove four hours in the mountains to a small village..which I reported.

I did walk to the zocalo several times to see the marchers, which is always a celebratory event, and I did film some of the aftermath of the violence…like the morning after the June 14 attack and the morning after the federal police took over the zocalo in October. You can click on the “Photos and videos of Mexico” in my links to see my videos. Some of the pictures imbedded in the videos of the violence were taken by other witnesses…not me. It is true…I guess this makes it appear that I was a direct observer near the fighting. Sorry if this created some confusion.

Of course we are safe. I have not talked to one tourist or expat who says they feel unsafe…on the contrary we all feel perfectly safe.

Thousands of tourists are staying away and everyone here is hurting…businesses, employees and vendors alike. When a business closes down all their employees are on the street. Most of the tourists that are here are European…scarcely an American. Expats laugh among themselves about the purported “danger” here. But as you say, if you are outside Oaxaca there is no way to know what it is like here. Hence my blog entries on the subject. If I heard there was a demonstration in downtown Portland against the war in Iraq that resulted in a clash with police…and some of the demonstrators got hurt, should I be worried that your son who lives there was in danger? Of course not…unless he was in the demonstration.

Oaxaca depends almost entirely on tourism. The tragedy here is the economic crisis. Many people blame the resistors. Many people blame the governor. Many people blame them both. Many of us also blame the media that only report the blood. I have never seen one indepth analysis in the media of the causes of the disruption here…which is deeply historical by the way.

Everyone here in Oaxaca, whether they are sympathetic to the Governor/resistors or not, is trying to get the word out that tourism is safe here and to come and support the poorest of Mexico’s people.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate the concern of a dear friend.

I need to correct the record on the July 16 clash between the police and protestors in Oaxaca as I keep seeing mainstream and alternative media reports that the police were preventing people from entering the Fortin Hill auditorium where the dance festival was being held.

My understanding, having lived here for the last year, was that the Popular Guelaguetza was going to be held, like last year, someplace in the city. Then the APPO announced it would be held at the auditorium on Fortin Hill. However, over the weekend, police fortifications began gathering on the hill. To avoid a bloodbath of innocent people and performers, Noticias printed a last minute notice that the popular guelaguetza would be held in the Plaza de la Danza, which many of my friends attended although I did not. At some point, apparently during or shortly after the dance at the Plaza, several thousand protestors began marching to the auditorium with the intent to occupy it to keep the commercial event from happening on the two following mondays. They were met by the police of course and the rest is history.

(If any of this scenario is not correct please let me know. You know how difficult it is to know what exactly is happening in Oaxaca even when “you see it!”

I have no idea why the APPO press statement would say that the police launched an attack against the people “who were celebrating…in the auditorium” and that police surrounded the auditorium “in order to prevent people from entering the festival.” They wanted to make the attack look worse? Or maybe the release was manipulated by the translators?

Now the English language (at least) media and bloggers have picked up the following translated APPO press release exerpt that is patently untrue.
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Saturday, July 21, 2007 2pm

“Urgent” bulletins flying over the internet warn of the governor’s plan to incite a violent showdown (see bulletin below, in Spanish) around Monday July 23, of the Guelaguetza, now being referred to as the “guerraguetza”.

The facts we observe on the ground:

* military or state police (dark blue uniforms) occupying Fortin are practicing military exercises.

*the zocalo is heavily occupied by PRI vendors, Noticias says 700 puestos.

*Noticias says outlying roads are all blocked with military checkpoints through which no-one “suspicious” can pass.

*The governor is bussing in people from the rural areas (paying them to attend the commercial Guelaguetza), and advising government employees to not bring their children.

*the APPO, the teachers, the civil society organizations and even Dra Bertha Muños are sending messages warning of the government’s intention to provoke an excuse for military crackdown.

* the teachers assembly scheduled for Saturday afternoon has been cancelled to avoid further arbitrary arrests (I gather at least two “leaders” have been arrested and warrants are out)

Another expat 6:40pm: “Word on the street is that two “symbolic” marches will take place as the “boycott” is too dangerous. On Sunday July 22 the march will go from Cinco Señores to the zocalo at 10:00 natural time, 11:00 AM daylight savings time. On Monday, a “megamarch” will go from the office of the Procuradura to the zocalo, also 10:00 natural time/ 11:00 daylight savings.

I don’t know where the office of the Procuradora is??? but the idea is to avoid Fortin and to avoid any provocation.”

According to Víctor Manuel Gómez Ramírez of MAS, (editorial in Noticias) the leaders of the teachers popular movement are taking the movement into a dead end. He sees a lack of coherent policy and lack of such a policy’s enforceability (I believe he means a policy of confrontation). The State Council of the APPO has been unable to prevent people from falling into provocations. (Note: I take this to mean how can APPO keep from falling into the hands of provacateurs.)
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I received this information on a discussion site just now from a local expatriot who lives here:

“For those of you who might not know, Dr. Muñoz, a medical doctor, became the preeminent voice of the popular movement on the university’s radio station throughout the period of the most intense conflict in 2006. She and her two sons were forced to go into hiding shortly after the massive attack by the militarized PFP (the so-called Federal Preventive Police) the night of 25-26 November 2006.”

The expat says: “I received a note that Doctora Berta Elena Muñoz sent yesterday evening with the following message:”

Dr. Berta says:

One of my old comrades tells me that URO will require that people in whom he has confidence in the government sectors go to the hill [Cerro Fortin, where the Guelaguetza Stadium is located] on Monday in order to show the public that Oaxaca is in support of him. Furthermore, he will seek to be attacked in order to impact and damage the image of the APPO and to make use of repression….I think you can make use of this information in order to prevent and evade Uro’s plans.”

The expat says he wrote back to her and a few others:

Skirmishes should be avoided if at all possible. Of course many of the older people in APPO and Section 22 and in allied groups realize all this, but among younger people in the movement I think there’s still a great need for education. Che ought no longer be an idol for the youth.”

Rumors are circulating that as much as 50% (or perhaps more now) of reservations for the commercial Guelaguetza and tourist amenities like hotels have been cancelled. Attacking an unarmed and peaceful march exactly one week before the biggest week for the state’s economy, in front of BBC and other international news cameras was a blunder.

Amnesty International issued a call to action this morning. Will it do any good? Will the presence of another set of human rights observers change anything? The CCIODH (Mexican human rights organization) reports did virtually nothing. Will the national human rights commission’s investigations change anything? Last time they held APPO just as responsible as Ulises.

The protestors were unarmed. Seems like the police could have just guarded the entrances to the tunnels leading into the auditorium like they did the zocalo…standing at attention with shields would have disallowed anyone from entering. It was the teargas cannisters that wounded many and killed at least one. And why arrest and beat up the people? Protesting is supposed to be legal here. But the protestors had to know they were pushing the envelope on this one. No one is surprised at what happened.

The clash was limited to the area around Fortin Hill. Meanwhile the city went about it’s business as usual.

Saturday night I got a ticket for parking in the wrong place in the Centro, so a bilingual friend in my apartment house generously accompanied me this morning to Santa Rosa on the outskirts of the city to pay my $15 fine and get my “placas” back. When you get a ticket in Oaxaca they take your license plate from the back of your car which forces you to pay your fine. There were no “no parking” signs or indicators. And none of the other cars, front and back, were issued a ticket. Hmmmm.

So I missed the Popular Guelaguetza that was held this morning in the Plaza de la Danza. Then about 10,000 protestors marched to the auditorium on Fortin Hill. Police, deployed in the area since Saturday, forced the protestors back when they tried to enter the auditorium and a bitter clash followed with teargas. A government employee told a friend in my apartment house that they were told that the protestors wanted to occupy the auditorium in anticipation of stopping the commercial Guelaguetza planned for the next two mondays.
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Last year, the resistance “movement” (principally the APPO) that c0-0pted the annual teacher strike, boycotted the government-sponsored Guelaguetza, a traditional indigenous dance exposition that has been held at a specially built auditorium on the Fortin Hill… I think for only three years previous. The movement felt that the people, who performed for free as part of their contribution to their communities, were being exploited by the $40 entrance fee that the typical Oaxaqeno cannot afford. So an alternative “Popular Guelaguetza” was performed at a site on the outskirts of the city last year…free to all attendants.

This year, the commercial event is being boycotted again. No one is sure if it will take place the last two mondays of July as usual. Someone recently said they heard that hardly any tickets had been sold. Such is the difficulty of getting current information that seems to change moment to moment in Oaxaca these days.

Meanwhile, the APPO and the teachers had kicked off a “symbolic” strike this year on June 14, the first anniversay of the police attack on the teachers in the zocalo. Teachers have been maintaining a presence, rotating in and out of the zocalo, but are not sleeping and cooking there. Barricades have been set up around the city, often changing locations, to remind the government that the resistance is still alive.

Talks with the government have been held off and on…the average person not really sure of outcomes…and some people feel there are probably hidden “deals” that have been taking place.

There has been no police presence (except for plain-clothed police) in the zocalo but recently heavily armed police have been showing up in nearby areas as planning for the Popular Guelaguetza continues for this morning, June 16. At first we heard it would take place at a site near the city. Then we heard it will take place at the auditorium on Fortin Hill. Then we heard it will take place in the Plaza de la Danza.
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I am waiting for the parts to arrive so I can get the bumper fixed on my car. In the meantime I am wondering how I am going to know who to vote for in 2008 and beyond.

I have realized in the last year, during which I have had the time to scour the internet for news, is that in order to ascertain the truth of events (at least the most truth possible) it is imperative to get your news from multiple sources…daily. Daily because one investigative article builds on another and may even be an answer to someone else’s article in another media report.

You learn which writers and which news sources have what biases. One writer may have some investigative information that others don’t have. Some writers get their information from the ground. Others simply parrot government and military press releases with no added critical analysis derived from independent fact checking.

Television news reports skim over the top and are even more subject to bias in the way that it is presented and there is no time for background investigative detail unless it is a special report.

Internet political blogs (right and left) have the added advantage of being able to compare other blog reports, mainstream press articles & pronouncements by politicians and others that often reveal conflicting statements, inconsistencies, denials, biases and even outright lies. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert do this on Comedy Central using videocasts. (Read what I wrote earlier.)

And you know what the biases are upfront. No hidden agendas. And it is time-saving. You don’t have to sift through hundreds of blogs and media articles…the bloggers do it for you, although I do screen out rants from ideologues. Then you can compare the blogs with your own knowledge and biases. It’s civic discourse…the engine that drives democracy.

Bertrand Russell once said: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

This human tendency is what we are up against with information that cuts against the conventional wisdom or prevailing media narrative. This is particularly true when it comes to issues like media bias, where isolated examples that contradict the prevailing view are easy to explain away as aberrations. The only way to change our biases that conform to conventional wisdom is to keep piling up the evidence until its aggregate weight becomes impossible to ignore.

The complication for the reader is that politicos with an agenda know this so they will continue to get their message out…repeatedly. So how do we know we are “piling up the evidence” (somtimes dubious at best) or just succumbing to propaganda? Deciphering the “Fourth Estate” is hard work.

Of course all this takes time away from family or the latest ball game. I usually skim media alerts in my email inbox with headlines from several media outlets like the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, New York Times and the LA Times. Certain journalists have more credibility with me than others. For example, in the WaPO I read anything by Robin Wright, fluent in Arabic and an expert on the Middle East. The LA Times often covers Mexico. William Kristol, Editor of the Weekly Standard, is the neocon voice of the current administration. Then I check a few good blog sites that often reference and link to other pertinent blogs and media sources.

I read mainstream media reports mainly to ascertain what news most people are getting that help inform popular opinion. However, there are many weekly alternative newspapers. There are international news sources that help balance the editorial positions of mainstream U.S. media. For example, Al Jazeera is one that helps me to know what news the Middle East is getting even though I cannot read Arabic news sources. Blogs also frequently draw on international sources. International news also helps me understand foreign views of the U.S and it’s policies.

The oft-quoted Salon.com includes The Blog Report, Your Guide to the Political Blogosphere-Left, Right and Everywhere with links to liberal sites like the award-winning Hullabaloo and moderately conservative sites like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, a blog for The Atlantic magazine. If you want a libertarian viewpoint go to the widely read Instapundit written by a University of Tennessee law professor.

There are hundreds of others. I try to find the ones I feel I can trust. And even then I know that writers often tend to leave out things (intentionally or unintentionally) that do not support the point of their piece.

Whether you are for or against a particular issue, Jeff Greenwald, a respected and often quoted blogger on Salon.com has laid out a good case for the critical importance of political blogging. He says in his latest blog entry that
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Pedro Matias, a journalist with 20 yrs of experience watching governmental abuses here in Oaxaca said recently that every hundred years Mexico seems to explode in revolution: in 1810 with Independence, 1910 with the Revolution, and people are now wondering what is in store for 2010.

My one year visa in Mexico expires August 8. After visiting my son Greg in Las Vegas I should be back in Oregon by the middle of August…driving from Oaxaca to Queretaro to pick up my friend Patty who will be my traveling companion along the way. I have mixed feelings of course. Returning to my home country will be the measure of things great and small. In the fall I will return to Asia to visit son Josh and his wife Amy in Beijing and son Doug and his wife Luk in Thailand.

In the meantime I am reading my irreverent, indepensible, if tattered, “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” by the consummate journalist Robert Young Pelton. After Asia, maybe a visit to Syria? Or…? Then maybe a return to Oaxaca to get that language down after all.

A regular columnist for National Geographic Adventure, Pelton produces and hosts a TV series for Discovery and the Travel Channel and appears frequently as an expert on current affairs and travel safety on CNN, FOX and other networks.

“The United States has a very comprehensive system of travel warnings,” says Pelton, “but conveniently overlooks the dangers within its own borders. Danger cannot be measured, only prepared against. The most dangerous thing in the world,” he says, “is ignorance.”

Welcome to Dangerous Places…”no walls, no barriers, no bull” it says in the preface. “With all the talk about survival and fascination with danger, why is it that people never admit that life is like watching a great movie and–pooof–the power goes off before we see the ending? It’s no big deal. Death doesn’t really wear a smelly cloak and carry a scythe…it’s more likely the attractive girl who makes you forget to look right before you cross that busy intersection in London…

It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won’t. It is the baby boomers’ slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be that drives the survival thing. Relax: You’re gonna die. Enjoy life, don’t fear it.

To some, life is the single most precious thing they are given and it’s only natural that they would invest every ounce of their being into making sure that every moment is glorious, productive, and safe. So does “living” mean sitting strapped into our Barca Lounger, medic at hand, 911 autodialer at the ready, carefully watching for low-flying planes? Or should you live like those folks who are into extreme, mean, ultimate adventure stuff…sorry that stuff may be fun to talk about at cocktail parties, but not really dangerous…not even half as dangerous as riding in a cab on the graveyard shift in Karachi.

[A big part of] living is about adventure and adventure is about elegantly surfing the tenuous space between lobotomized serenity and splattered-bug terror and still being in enough pieces to share the lessons learned with your grandkids. Adventure is about using your brain, body and intellect to weave a few bright colors in the world’s dull, gray fabric…

The purpose of DP is to get your head screwed on straight, your sphincter unpuckered and your nose pointed in the right direction.”

I love it.

The Mexican Solidary Network said today that undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are prohibited from claiming Social Security benefits to date accounting for unclaimed Social Security deposits that may be as much as US $400 billion.

July 5, 2007

Commerce and Immigration News

In the past decade, remittances from migrant workers in the United States emerged as one of the pillars of the Mexican economy. From north to south, entire communities became dependent on the flow of money from relatives laboring away in El Norte. Current trends, however, suggest that the remittance boom could have hit a peak. Recent statistics from the official Bank of Mexico (Banixco) report a slowdown in remittances entering the country.
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By Nancy Davies:

Saturday Noticias printed an article saying an attack in the Zocalo was “suspended.” Two organizations are involved: Consejo Ciudadano para el Progresso, which was quoted as saying, “the peaceful expulsion planned for this Saturday was cancelled at the request of the governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz ‘to maintain the peace’.” The other group, Organización Independiente de Comerciantes Establecidos (OICE) has thus far not announced their agreement with the CCP.
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MEXICO SOLIDARITY NETWORK
WEEKLY NEWS AND ANALYSIS
JUNE 18-24, 2007

4. SUPREME COURT WILL INVESTIGATE OAXACA GOVERNOR AND FORMER PRESIDENT

The Supreme Court will investigate Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz, ex-President Vicente Fox and 15 other federal and state officials for human rights violations and excessive use of force by police during a popular uprising in Oaxaca last year. The investigation will cover May 2006 to January 2007, which could also implicate the Calderon administration. Ruiz tried to derail the court decision at the 11th hour by submitting a statement claiming he complied with recommendations issued by the National Human Rights Commission last year, but judges rejected the appeal as flatly untrue. At least 26 people died at the hands of police and paramilitary forces under the control of Ruiz, more than 200 people were arrested, and an unknown number of people remain disappeared. The Supreme Court initiated a series of special investigations during the past year, including the May 3 and 4, 2006, police actions in Atenco and the arrest of journalist Lydia Cacho by Puebla Governor Mario Marin, leading many experts to question the functionality of a justice system so highly politicized that state and federal Attorneys General are incapable of carrying out investigations that involve political actors.

Meanwhile, the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca) and teachers from Section 22 of the SNTE continued their permanent encampment in the historic center of Oaxaca City, recalling events that led to two massive police operations last year that eventually dislodged protestors from the city center. And an international human rights commission condemned recent dramatic increases in arrests of APPO activists.
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Tourists looking around for smiles on the subway won’t find them…this is why:

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: June 25, 2007
New York Times

It’s nearly always a mistake to think of the subway as a public conveyance. This is a mistake that out-of-towners often make. They overlook the essential privacy of the subway, and by that I don’t mean the young woman at my end of the car who has made up her face in a compact mirror between 86th Street and Times Square. I mean the very fact that this is my end of the car at my end of the train. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and this isn’t just a subway ride. This is going to work. Nearly all the people on this train are in their usual spots, within a few minutes of their usual time, and the ride is not separable from the larger and more complicated rhythms of our private lives. It is possible to be on this train and not yet be in public.
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There are no uniformed police in the Zocalo where a new planton (encampment) of teachers and the APPO constructed its plastic awnings and banners on Monday June 18, but there are plenty of undercover police. You can tell…beefy well-fed hombres…nice new polished shoes…cell phones in use or on hips.

Teachers have not closed the classrooms this year. Teachers and APPO have established a rotating presence in the Zocalo…there are no tents and participants retire elsewhere for the night. But the Zocalo is alive with vendors, disco music, crowds of people watching video replays of government attacks.

Less confrontational now, civil society groups just seem to be keeping up a slow steady pressure.

Local watchers are watching cautiously. Nancy, a local expat, explains: “The Supreme Court of Mexico has decided to appoint a commission to investigate serious violations of human rights which occurred in Oaxaca between May 2006 and January of 2007.

Those violations included the attack on sleeping protesters on June 14, 2006, and the subsequent murder of at least 25 sympathizers of the popular movement, along with 575 arbitrary detentions and more than 300 wounded. No-one has been charged with any of those crimes. The alleged murderers of the American Brad Will were jailed and promptly released.

According to Noticias of June 20, the Court justices rejected the attempt by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, (URO) to prevent the investigation after, he said he “accepted the recommendations” of the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH). URO’s lawyers argued that such “acceptance” was sufficient.

The Court stated it is not. Nor is the court limited by CNDH recommendations, nor is it limited to wrongdoing by state officials –federal persons such as the Federal Preventive Police were also denounced by the aggrieved APPO activists for violations including sexual assault and torture.
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by Diana
June 16, 2007

It’s 4am in Oaxaca on June 14, 2007, which marks one year since the protesting teachers were violently evicted from the zócalo. And this year, no one is going to sleep through it. Firecrackers sound throughout the city, one louder than the next, a steady crescendo that lasts several hours. All over the city, the dogs howl.

Last year at this time exactly, a thousand police armed with dogs, clubs, rubber bullets and indiscriminate quantities of teargas invaded the teachers’ sit-in and violently evicted protestors as well as destroying the radio that represented them, Radio Plantón.

Teachers had camped out in the center of the city, demanding government investments to improve quality of public education in Mexico. The attack on the teachers union sparked one of the biggest, most inclusive social movements in Oaxaca’s history, which, in spite of continuous repression, has bravely mobilized over the last year demanding the resignation of state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and attention to collective discontent over lack of transparency, accountability and basic human rights.

La lucha sigue…

A year later, despite the arbitrary arrests, torture, and assassinations as well as divisionism, infiltration and attempts of political parties to co-opt the APPO, the popular movement commemorated their triumph in the face of last year’s repression in an impressive show of numbers.
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Even though my birthday was last wednesday, I had preferred to stay in the zocalo to watch the June 14 commemoration. So last night I picked up friends Sharon and Max and we went to Mica and Bardo’s for cena (afternoon meal eaten at 4pm). Sharon brought a gift of a big jar of chopped garlic from Sam’s Club for Mica as the garlic cloves here are tiny and labor intensive to peel. Max brought a gallon of helado (ice cream.)

I had requested Mica’s shrimp sauteed in olive oil, chili, tomato salsa, garlic, oregano and the juice of oranges…cooled and eaten with fingers…heads and all. mmmm! We also had a juicy mixture of tuna, tomato, chili, garlic and I don’t know what all…wrapped in a flour tortilla and sauteed…also eaten with fingers. mmmm. We all ended up muy satisfecha (satisfied) and muy lleno (full). Mica had bought a chocolate cake soaked in rum with strawberries and my name written on top. We decided six candles were sufficient…I am 63 now. (Wow, how did that happen? Sounds old!) They didn’t even push my face in the cake…mordida…the price you pay for the fiesta…or cake…or your birthday? But they did sing a very long birthday song in Spanish. I felt like a very respected third-ager (last third of your life-span) and very celebrated.

Meri and Mary Rain, volunteers at the Casa de los Amigos where Barbara and I stayed in Mexico City came to visit me this week. They were great fun and kept me company on my birthday as we sat in the zocalo to watch the march and commemoration activities of the June 14, 2006 police attack. Mary Rain, incidentally, is from Oregon and will begin a graduate program in urban planning & community development at Portland State in August. Meri will take a consulting position in San Francisco with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit providing leading-edge management strategies, tools and talent to help other nonprofits and foundations achieve greater social impact.

After siesta yesterday, we spent the evening with Mica and Bardo and a Zapotec weaver from Xachilla and one of his 10 young sons. Over mescal, beer, tacos and ranchero songs, and many laughs, Meri and Mary Rain inspired them with their fluent Spanish to expound on Uses & Custumbres, village life and Mexican politics. Bardo, baracho by this time, kept getting Meri and Mary Rain (who calls herself Lluvia…Spanish for rain) mixed up so Meri solved the problem this way:

Anyway, Meri turned me on to this web site:

Guy named Matt dances a goofy dance all over the world.

From “About Matt” on his website:
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On May 1 there was a peaceful immigration reform rally in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles when the LAPD, in a downright military style action, swept in and chased everyone, men, women and children, not only out of the park but down several streets…with teargas, batons and rubber bullets. They even attacked journalists, including those from Mexico, destroying one filmmaker’s camera. The FBI has been called in to investigate. Go to YouTube to see amateur videos of the melee. This generation didn’t experience the violent police action of the 60’s…the worst being the killing of five students at Kent State in 1968. I was happy to see the outrage. The brutality was mild compared to what happens in Mexico, but the slope is slippery.

The new immigration bill has been stalled in Congress by a small band of Republicans. Don’t know if I agree with everything David Brooks says this morning in the New York Times but he makes an interesting, if generalized, point.
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On June 14, this thursday, there will be a megamarch at 10:00 am (daylight savings time) from the crucero of the aeropuerto to the zocalo.

There will be a symbolic strike encampment in the zocalo, the teachers say 10% of their number, which mean 7000 people. There is no info on how long they plan to stay.

Barricades, installed from 17:30 to 21:00, will be installed in commemoration of last year’s blocking of several major streets.

The Popular Guelaguetza will take place on Cerro del Fortin on July 16.

Tourists!!!: Come for the Popular Guelaguetza, it’s free!

Below is an excerpt from the historic chronicle of the movement, translated by Nancy Davies from the book by Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez.

The teachers movement in 2006 and the 14th of June, 2006 (book text page 60)
by Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez

As in every year, in 2006 Section 22 on the first of May presented its annual document of demands, this time containing 17 general points and others relative to each specific education level and methods.
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When Barbara and I were in Mexico City last week it almost felt as if the resistance had moved to that city. We stayed in a Quaker guesthouse about two blocks behind the Monument To The Revolution. A striking planton was layed out for blocks on Juarez Avenue in front of the monument. Many of the groups were from Oaxaca. Someone (who?) decided to knock hundreds of windows out of the ISSSTE (union) glass building nearby whereupon a couple hundred strikers marched in protest down Reforma.

A couple days later the hop on hop off bus I was on pulled over by the side of the road and stopped near the Bellas Artes…the driver conferring on the phone. Turns out that the strikers took over the Zocalo and all roads around it were blocked. So the bus just continued on back to the Monument where I had picked it up. Actually the 3 hour open air bus under the hot sun was tedious…just drove down tree-lined Reforma Avenue to Chapultepec Park and back through Polanco (high end shopping) Condesa (best place for sidewalk cafes) the Zona Rosa (cheesy tourist area with bars) around the Zocalo, Bellas Artes (a must) and on to the Monument To The Revolution.

However, you could spend weeks visiting the historical buildings and museums…the most highly recommended being the Museum of Anthropology that covers acres just off Reforma Avenue.

The Zocalo taken from the rooftop restaurant of the Holiday Inn.

In the corner of the bare treeless, chairless Zocalo I spent two hours watching some young guys performing an amazing breakdancing/gymnastic routine on bare pavement.

“Ciudad de México, México, D.F., or simply México is the capital city of Mexico. It is the most important economic, industrial and cultural center in the country, and the most populous city with 8,720,916 inhabitants in 2005. However, Greater Mexico City (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México) extends beyond the limit and covers 58 municipalities of the State of Mexico and 1 municipality of the state of Hidalgo, according to the most recent definition agreed upon by the federal and state governments. In 2005 Greater Mexico City had a population of 19.2 million, making it the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere and the second largest in the world. In 2005, it ranked as the eighth-largest urban agglomeration GDP in the world.

Mexico City is also the Federal District (Distrito Federal in Spanish, and hence the abbreviation D.F. that officially follows the name of the city). The Federal District is coextensive with Mexico City: both are governed by a single institution and are constitutionally considered to be the same entity.

Mexico City is at an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,349 feet). It was originally built by the Aztecs in 1325 on an island of Lake Texcoco.

It was built on a swamp and is sinking.

The Historical Center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I highly recommend the Casa de los Amigos Guesthouse in Mexico City run by the Quakers on Ignacio Mariscal No. 132
in Colonia Tabacalera Mexico D.F.
Tele: 5705-0521
email: amigos@casadelosamigos.org

The guesthouse is a short metro ride to Bellas Artes and on to the Zocalo.
Minimum stay 2 nights and max 4 nights unless you make a special request.
Full breakfast for $1.50 except Sundays

If you only have a little luggage you can take the Metro from the airport for two pesos and avoid an expensive taxi ride. You will have to make two transfers. Best to get written instructions from the guesthouse staff. Mexico City’s Metro is the cleanest, nicest and least expensive subway I have experienced in the world.

This morning’s news…for the benefit of the English-speaking reader…
El Universal
Lunes 28 de mayo de 2007

High ranking judge calls for inquiry

Federal, state and municipal authorities committed grave violations against fundamental civil rights during the Oaxaca conflict that began in May 2006, Supreme Court Justice minister Juan Silva Meza said Sunday.

Silva Meza recommended that the Court create a committe to investigate the public officials responsible for the violations.

Among the high-ranking public officials who could be investigated are former President Vicente Fox, Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz and Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, who served as Secretary of Public Safety in 2006.
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My friend Barbara and I hitch-hiked Europe the summer of 1965. Then I didn’t see her for thirty years. Then I found her on google about ten years ago…living 30 minutes from my house in Oregon. She has been here four days.

Today she, Mica, the kids and I drove to the Tlacalula market to pick up some hippy headbands for Charly to sell in Canada. Barbara had her first chivo (goat) barbecoa con consumme which she loved. The goat is cooked underground under hot rocks overnight.

Walked by the colorful indigenous vendors from all over the mountains who come down on sundays for the market, bought some more alebrijes, surveyed the live pavo (turkeys) lying on the ground with feet tied together and picked up some fruit and flores (flowers.) It was hot so we dragged ourselves back to the car early in the afternoon to take off for Huayapam where we ate again…delicious caldo de res, (beef bone soup) that Bardo had waiting for us. A man that Bardo sells coffee to was there…owns a coffee finca (farm) in Pluma Hildalgo, south of here. Pluma Hildalgo is considered the primo coffee of Mexico. Bardo’s nephew was there too…from Teotitlan del Camino. Then a mescal vendor from Miahuatlan came by with plastic barrels of pechuga (chicken breast) mescal. We bought five liters to fill Bardo’s mescal barrel.
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I am still thinking about the information we get and how to think critically about it. After reading the lead stories I love to go to The Daily Show on Comedy Central and get Jon Stewart’s satiric take.

“Stewart and his team often seem to steer closer to the truth than traditional journalists. The Daily Show satirizes spin, punctures pretense and belittles bombast. When a video clip reveals a politician’s backpedaling, verbal contortions or mindless prattle, Stewart can state the obvious — ridiculing such blather as it deserves to be ridiculed — or remain silent but speak volumes merely by arching an eyebrow.” This from an article entitled “What The Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart” by Rachel Smolkin in American Journal Review. Read the rest of the article here.

More from the article: “A colleague says that “one thing he [Jon Stewart] does do is fact-checking: If somebody says, ‘I never said that,’ and next thing you know, there’s a clip of the same guy three months ago saying exactly that, that’s great fact-checking,” and a great lesson for journalists.

Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune’s media columnist, thinks part of the reason “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report,” resonate is that they parody not only news but also how journalists get news…He adds that “so much of the news these days involves managing the news, so a show like Stewart’s that takes the larger view of not just what’s going on, but how it’s being manipulated, is really effective. I think there’s a general skepticism about the process that this plays into… The wink isn’t so much we know what’s really going on. The wink is also we know you know what we’re doing here.

A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people age 18 to 29 cited comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” as places where they regularly learned presidential campaign news, nearly equal to the 23 percent who regularly learned something from the nightly network news or from daily newspapers.

Even if they did learn from his show, a more recent study indicates Stewart’s viewers are well-informed. An April 15 Pew survey gauging Americans’ knowledge of national and international affairs found that 54 percent of regular viewers of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” scored in the high-knowledge category, tying with regular readers of newspaper Web sites and edging regular watchers of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” Overall, 35 percent of people surveyed scored in the high-knowledge category.”

And what percentage of the U.S. population reads any news at all? And which of these don’t read the news because they have just given up trusting it?

In August of 2002, next door to a restaurant in the small village of Taunggy, Burma, I struck up a conversation with a young university student who was tending a small bookstore. “Can everyone speak (out) in America,” he asked. “Yes, we can,” I said, thinking I will not tell him about “politically correct” speech. He nodded sadly.

A few people, forbidden to talk about politics with foreigners, tried oblique approaches to the subject. One man with delicious donuts on a platter came up to me at the market and said to me in perfect English that he used to be an English teacher. Then he disappeared and returned a few minutes later with his wife who wanted to meet me. “She wants to go to America-so bad,” he said. I made several attempts to ask him to have tea and then dinner with us but was disappointed when he looked furtively around him and told me he couldn’t do that. The government has forbidden the people to talk to foreigners about politics but they are afraid to be seen talking to you (a foreigner) at all as it could mean trouble for them.

However, in Bagan our hired tour guide for a day to view the pagodas, told me that some Americans once told him that that there was a lot of fighting in Burma but that he reassured them there was no fighting in his country. I bit my tongue thinking of the BBC special the night before on satellite TV (that few in Burma can afford). It described the fighting between the ethnic minorities and the military near the Thai border where camps harbored thousands of refugees. American and European doctors regularly cross the border under cover of fire to care for the Karen and Shan tribal people who are suffering from a government policy of ethnic cleansing by burning their villages and killing the people outright or overworking them to death in forced labor groups. I’ll bet he is a government informer,” I said to Bob. “I think so too,” Bob said.

I have been watching the efforts of the international community to free Aung San Suu Kyi, the freely elected leader who has been under house arrest for 4 years and now for a 5th.

Suu Kyi’s Freedom Struggle
The Boston Globe
Published: May 21, 2007
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Sharon and I went shopping for furniture for her new digs when we came across this tired fruit vendor who had probably been up before sun-up. Sharon is moving from a third-floor bird’s-nest apartment to a ground-floor house in the centro..for less money.

Last tuesday the teachers kicked off their usual June strike with a march to the Zocalo. It was pretty low key with teachers entering in small groups and with a few speeches and songs in the kiosk. APPO showed up about noon and promised they would be boycotting the government-sponsored Gueleguetza again this year…but that there would be a “Popular” Gueleguetza sponsored by the people as there was last year.

As I was about to leave the zocalo tuesday the governor showed up. The guy on the right is URO…guy on the left is the mayor of Oaxaca City. Didn’t notice the time but it was about dusk. Even though the zoc was pretty well thinned out he paraded more than once around the zocalo followed by video cameras and security… kissing babies, shaking hands and talking with a few people who came up to him. Interestingly, he never went near the west side. The place was crawling with security. Then for about 20 minutes or so he casually sat with the mayor and 3-4 others and had something to drink at a sidewalk table in front of one of the cafes (the one in front of the sushi restaurant) on the east side. Then he left with cameras in tow.

Pissing on his territory I guess.

This is the title of a paper issued this month by Seth Holmes with an M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in cultural and medical anthropology from UCSF and U.C. Berkeley. His paper, “‘Oaxacans Like to Work Bent Over’: The Naturalization of Social Suffering Among Berry Farm Workers,” captures the grinding details of what it takes to get strawberries out of the fields in Washington State, and in the equally challenging task of figuring out what it all means — and what to do about it.

Find this paper on Salon.com. In the posted review of the paper you will find a link to a PDF file that can be downloaded with Acrobat Reader.

Holmes says: “I began my fieldwork in a one-room shack in a migrant camp on the largest farm in the valley, the Tanaka Farm, during the summer and fall of 2003. I spent my days alternately picking berries with the rest of the adults from the camp, interviewing other farm employees and area residents, and observing interactions at the local migrant clinic.

In order to understand the transnational experience of migrant labor, I migrated for the next year with Triqui indigenous people from the Mexican state of Oaxaca whom I had come to know on the farm. I spent the winter living with nineteen of them in a three-bedroom slum apartment, pruning vineyards, and observing health professionals in the Central Valley of California. During the spring, I lived in the mountains of Oaxaca with the family of one of the men I knew from the Tanaka Farm, planting and harvesting corn and beans, observing the government health center, and interviewing family members of migrant workers back in the U.S.

Later, I accompanied a group of young Triqui men through the night as they hiked through the desert into Arizona and were caught by the Border Patrol. I then migrated north again from California, through Oregon where we picked up false social security cards, and once again to the farm in Washington State in the summer of 2004. Since then, I have returned to visit my Triqui companions in Washington, California, and Oaxaca on several shorter trips.”

Many of the conditions he describes on this Washington farm have been outlawed in Oregon by an omnibus bill I helped introduce, as a lobbyist, to the legislature in the 1990’s. This bill was pulled together by a coalition of farmers and farm labor advocates and one dedicated legislator who actually composed the bill that was passed unanimously that session . I have a sneaking suspicion that he is letting the Tanaka Farms off lightly unless this farmer is unusual. Farmers are usually loath to allow outsiders onto their farms…one of the issues addressed in the omnibus bill. He somehow gained their trust. Very tricky.

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.

Have been thinking that I need a new way of thinking. Like comics. Not Donald Duck or the Road Runner although those have their virtues. In Salon.com I came across an interview of Alan Moore, who the author, Scott Thrill, thinks reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our (whose?) day.

Some thoughts of his: “Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette…I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries..We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.”

He goes on: “Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature…If you can find a new synthesis…you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves…”

Hmmm. This need to make sense of our world…to find meaning…I think, is part of what is giving rise to the popularity of radical religious fundamentalism in the world today. Simple. Just pick up the Bible or the Koran. The “connections” are all there…or at least the ones some of us are looking for. Or we could read the comics. Or…

But this all assumes we have the the money and the “luxury” of taking time out from putting food on the table. In other words, how do we access relevent information and when do we think about it? And what if we don’t have the language and education to understand the terms. And what if you are a Trique, or Mixtec indigenous living in the mountains of Oaxaca and all you know is that your land is being taken away?

My sons and daughters-in-law, Luk, Doug, Josh and Amy on Koh Samui in Thailand for a week. Bob, their dad, took the picture. Doug and Luk live on Koh Samui. Greg, in Las Vegas, and I, of course, missed out. Amy flew back to her job teaching history in an international school in Beijing after a week. Josh had dental work in Bangkok (much cheaper than Beijing) and is staying a few days with Bob at his house in Johmtien which is south of Pattaya on the east side of the Gulf of Thailand before flying back to his job as Chef de Cuisine at the One East On Third restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing.

Found this video on Bootsnall.com web site. It takes a while to preload so be patient. Turn the volume up and enjoy. And may it inspire you.

18,000 people disrobed (from a distance) in the Zocalo in Mexico City.

Photo Washington Post by Claudio Cruz — Associated Press

International Workers Day is traditionally a big holiday in Mexico with workers getting the day off to celebrate. Oaxaca had a huge march…thousand walking to and out of the Zocalo. The APPO contingent showed up about noon…a few speeches and songs…not a lot of interest. But observers say things are heating up.

But you know those nice pretty newly painted walls that the Governor paid for? They are now all full of graffiti again. The APPO spokesperson said the APPO has been instructed to only spray paint government buildings. The APPO apparently is assuming that many marchers are government-paid infiltrators when they graffiti private homes.

So the APPO has asked the masked young people (encapuchados) to unmask assuming that those masked would then be identified as provocateurs or government-paid infiltrators. Seems silly to me.

Today there is supposed to be highway blockades and strikes. I will definitely not be taking my car out today.

May Day is coming up. An op-ed piece was printed in the Oaxaca Noticias daily newspaper criticizing the employment practices of WalMart and VIPS.

I and many expats here usually tip 20% to help make up for their small salaries and for all the people who don’t tip at all. I talked with a woman expat from Europe who has lived here 30 years and now makes sausage and baked goods to sell. She was trained as a nurse. The working conditions are terrible she said….nurses are expected to contribute out of their salaries to the electricity and janitorial services of the hospital…among other expenses.

In the year that I have been in my apartment I have found out that Adelina, who works for the landlord 12 hours a day (cleaning, cooking) and is supposed to clean all our apartments once a month (free cleaning the landlord said when I moved in) and does all the washing by hand, gets about $7.00 a day. (However, instead of buying a washing machine for her, the landlord has bought a gas lawn mower so he can mow the postage stamp lawn in the courtyard.) Adelina lives in a rusty tin-hut at the end of an ally on the other side of the Periferico…no water…no cooking facilities…just a room barely big enough for a double bed for her and her daughter. She walks to work and back home at 9 at night in the dark…about 2 miles.

The landlord owns several business/office spaces in my block and another apartment house on another street…at least that I know of. They are well to do by anybody’s standards. Ana, who is bilingual, found out from her regular vendor at the market that our landlord, whose son has a chilli stall and lives downstairs, is very powerful in the market. The way our landlords have made their money, the vendor says, is by lending money to the sellers in the market at 25% interest…which may be their only option…I have no way of knowing.

For my part I have told sweet cheery Adelina she doesn’t have to clean my apartment. Before she returned home to Canada, Ana, who lived next door, used to give Adelina $20 a month for a tip for apartment cleaning. When I leave I will give Adelina money for her services (answering the gate and providing security) during the year so she can send her 5 year old daughter to school next year.

Foreigners, at least those not living on the local economy, get charged more for everything, which would be ok, except that it drives up the cost of living for the locals. It’s not that I want do-good credit for this…it’s to warn other travelers what to expect who come here to live short-term. I am retired and fortunately don’t have to live on the local economy. I have no idea what it is like for foreigners who live and work here.