Neoliberal Projects and the Unresolved Oaxaca Conflict

“We all feel like we are in a pot held over a fire, and we’re not sure when the lid is going to blow off,” said Nora Martínez of the Oaxaca City based Regional Human Rights Center Bartolome Briseño Carrasco (BARCA), referring to the turbulent unresolved conflict that officials still attempt to scrub clean from the city walls. In a recent meeting with Witness for Peace, Martínez and other members of the BARCA expressed that U.S. policy issues in Oaxaca, such as the import of basic food items instead of local production, the privatization of land and water, mining, logging, and paper pulp production are all fanning the fire under the pot, as waves of people without any opportunity in the state head north, expelled from their communities and traditions, leaving behind a broken social fabric. According to the extensive report by the International Civil Commission of Human Rights Observation on the Oaxaca situation, the majority of people interviewed said that poverty was one of the fundamental root causes of the conflict in 2006. They pointed specifically to “the lack of attention to basic necessities such as education, health, work, and food”, saying that public funds were instead diverted to “create new police forces.” For many in Oaxaca, the most tangible and repressive representation of this economic model that has exacerbated the historical poverty suffered in the state is disputed governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, whose resignation is still the principal demand of the APPO.

In late March, Mexican President Felipe Calderon made his first official visit to Oaxaca to inaugurate a wind energy-generating project in the town of La Venta in Oaxaca’s isthmus region. This project is a part of the neoliberal Plan Puebla Panama, and its objective is to integrate energy networks from Panama to Mexico to meet the increasing demands for energy in the U.S. market. On March 3 of this year the Federal Preventative Police forcibly evicted the community Ejido 3 de Abril to make way for this project. The constitutional protection of ejidos, or communal land holdings, was dismantled in 1992, when Mexico made over 120 constitutional revisions to pave the way for NAFTA. Critics of this constitutional change warned that large foreign companies would come in and buy up land for projects such as this. In the case of La Venta, the most significant investor is Spanish multinational Iberdrola.  Controversial Oaxacan governor, Ruiz Ortiz, was present at the inauguration, accompanied by an operation of 2,000 police and military personnel to guard the new foreign investment. During the event, Calderon said they must stop “problems such as corruption, impunity, abuse; problems such as hate and violence between brothers” in the state of Oaxaca.

In early April, Ruiz Ortiz was also present at a conference in the Mexican state of Campeche where Calderon met with all Central American Presidents, except for Nicaragua who sent their Vice President, and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, to discuss the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). The PPP, with funding from both the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank, was first proposed in an initiative by ex Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2001 to create the necessary infrastructure to attract foreign investment in a region spanning from Southern Mexico to Panama, and now, most likely, Colombia. The PPP has huge implications for Oaxaca, including the creation of industrial zones filled with assembly plants and a dry “Panama Canal” in the form of a super-highway between Tehuantepec, Oaxaca and Coatzacoalcos, Vera Cruz, to transport products coming from Asia to the U.S. According to the Oaxaca City daily Noticias, “militarization is a constant associated with huge business projects [like the PPP] in Latin America and is one of the principles under which Calderon is basing his presidency. The need to guarantee stability for investment and, at the same time, stop any social uprisings that are a product of this looting [natural resources, land, etc.] go together.” During the conference Calderon promoted the further militarization of Southern Mexico with the pretext of stopping Central American migration. However, many fear that military and police units will be repositioned, much like in Chiapas, to allow them to quickly smash any social movements in the region, like Oaxaca’s powerful APPO or anything else that might develop out of the unresolved conflict.

In Oaxaca City, the official discourse and the on-the-ground analysis of civil society continue to collide. Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior Francisco Acuña recently said that the Oaxaca case was “resolved.” A few days later, Davíd Venegas of the APPO’s State Council was detained by State Police while walking through a city park, the third such incident to occur in the last two weeks. The Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights reports that State Police have resumed house searches during this time. The already boiling conflict seems to be escalating again. The upcoming Municipal and State Congress elections in Oaxaca bring predictions of heightened violence. And the month of May is not only the anniversary of the beginning of the movement (last year the SNTE Section 22 Teacher’s union took over Oaxaca City’s center square on May 22) but also the traditional month for mobilizations of the teachers, who say that agreements made with the federal government last year have not been met. As international media has become next to silent on the Oaxaca situation, and with the underlying issues of US policy that create much despair and desperation in Oaxaca, it is more important than ever for U.S. citizens to keep a close and critical eye on the situation.

Sources:  La Jornada, Noticias: Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca, Interview with BARCA members on 10 April 2007, "Informe Sobre los Hechos en Oaxaca,” A Report from the Comisión Civil Internacional de Observación por los Derechos Humanos, 2007.