I was in Oaxaca City last week for a workshop on the Security and Prosperity Partnership, Plan Mexico, privatization reforms to Social Security, and job insecurity. That sounds like a wide range of issues, and it is—especially considering the complexity of each one.
But that was the point—to give workers from the state a broad picture in which to understand what´s happening to them. It turned out to be one of those very fruitful gatherings where those of us who analyze “broad pictures” got a chance to work together with those who experience the worst consequences on a daily basis. The workshop was sponsored by the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and Mujeres Sindicalistas (Women Union Members), bringing together Oaxaca maquiladora workers, state employees from the Health and Transportation departments, and teachers.
Being back in Oaxaca was a strange experience in itself. I had been back since the uprising but still the images burned into my mind were from late 2006 when federal troops were sent in to put down the teachers’ strike that spread into a popular uprising.
Then it was a city occupied by machine guns and fear. Where you’d turn a corner on a quaint colonial street and run into a row of shield-yielding, riot-geared cops. Where groups playing music or selling crafts shared the sidewalk with heavily armed federal police looking like they didn’t quite know what they were supposed to be doing.
If those images are burned into my memory, they’re branded into the flesh of the participants of the movement. But despite lingering trauma from the torture, repression, assassination and imprisonment they faced, Oaxacans continue to fight back. Now the tourists have returned en force and the hated Governor Ulises Ruiz repeats ad nauseum that everything is back to normal. The crimes committed during and after the uprising have gone unpunished and in most cases the government has failed to carry out even a pretense of an investigation. Given the lack of response from the state government, the Mexican Supreme Court agreed to form a commission to investigate what happened. Oaxaca will be yet another test case of the highest court’s commitment to justice when entrenched political interests are involved.
Apparently “normal” in Oaxaca means a fresh onslaught of offensives. The women workers discussed the way privatization of social security is cutting back their hard-earned pensions and benefits, intensification of work in the maquiladoras means obligatory overtime under the threat of closure, President Calderon’s labor reform—on his checklist of neoliberal “reforms” after social security and privatization of PEMEX—would create “flexible” working conditions and further erode job security and working conditions. The Plan Mexico discussion was lively as participants asked about the plan and discussed the already dire situation of human rights violations in the state.
We just put up a new Human Rights section of the website that contains a series on Oaxaca. These are papers presented at the “After the Barricades” conference sponsored by Simon Fraser University a few months back. They cover many aspects of the conflict and its aftermath: the viewpoint of surrounding rural communities, the linkage between freedom of expression and rights the breakdown of the social compact in Mexico and the dynamics of the conflict.
We’ll be posting more there over the next few days, so check back in as documents from the Oaxaca Women’s Coalition, Section 22 of the Education Workers Union and the Human Rights Commission report go up.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5364
No comments:
Post a Comment