No matter how hip I think I look, in my jeans and sandals, she spotted me for a tourist and stepped out of the march to explain what was going on. She spoke little English but her statement was as concise and accurate as could be. Tears welled up in my eyes.
"Yo se," I replied. "Soy muy simpatico."
But for most of the two weeks we've been in Oaxaca, the statewide teacher's strike has been a nuisance. Teachers have been camped all over the downtown tourist district, with low-hung ropes tied to every wall and lamp post, supporting tents and tarps of all descriptions, offering difficult passage to turistas and reduced incomes to stores and street vendors.
Most years they come, protest for a couple of weeks, then go home, with some small raise or other victory. This year has been different. They've been camped for more than a month and their negotiations with the state government have gone nowhere. It appears to have turned into a personal feud, with representatives of the teachers publicly referring to the governor as a bastard, a thief, and an assassin. I hear that teachers seek, in addition to money, increased local control of the Oaxacan schools. Some view the governor's intransigence as an attempt to break the teachers' union.
Link to background
(http://www.narconews.com/...)
Yesterday, police moved in early to roust them from their encampments. Guns may or may not have been fired, but there are reports, variously, of from two to ten deaths. Tear gas bombs were dropped from helicopters - not exactly smart weapons - and it appears that at least one child was hit by a canister of gas and killed, and, according to the strikers this morning, at least one woman died. Helicopters criss-crossed the city yesterday, and by this morning, all the signs of the teachers' camps were gone from the Zocalo, or main square downtown. Teachers were reported to have retreated to several outlying schools, waiting for a scheduled "megamarch" on Friday.
I walked downtown this morning to find the encampments gone and life returning to what I recall as normal around the Zocalo. I stopped into a small comedor for breakfast, then about 9:30 as I headed back toward the hotel, there was what appeared to be some kind of commotion on the other side of the square. With my camera in hand I walked over to find what looked like several hundred striking teachers chanting and waving signs. Many of them carried sticks and clubs and I saw a machete or two as well. There were a number of people gathered to watch and I joined them, taking some pictures as I saw others doing. Eventually, the few hundred were joined by thousands marching in from several directions. The teachers had returned!
Folks, these are ourselves. They are teachers: young, middle aged, some old. Their faces reflected everything from anger to determination to the joy of struggle, and I was instantly taken back to a time long ago when I and other graduate and undergraduate students and some faculty allied ourselves with the Service Workers International Union in a strike against the University of Rochester for health care benefits for the people who did the shit work on campus. And we won, by God!
As Don Rumsfeld said, democracy is messy. But as I planted my feet hard on the sidewalk, so as not to join the marchers today - not a helpful or smart thing to do in Mexico - my heart was with them. And I know that several of the passers-by must have wondered why I was wiping my eyes.
Here are a few pictures of the eighty or so I shot. This is the face of democracy in action against the reality of corrupt and boneheaded governments. It is an ongoing struggle for human rights and decency against those who would take more for themselves. I only wish I'd had a few Kossacks here to share the moment with.
(Thumbnails. Click for full size;)
The sign reads "Without guns, teargas, or violence."
"When the governor is rigid, people live in indigence"
Two teachers.
"Why does the violkence continue? Enough!"
What has this to do with winning elections in the U.S.? Damned if I know. But it does seem a good thing to know that folks in other countries face challenges to human dignity and progress and take them on. Like repression and maybe violence? Just as we will beginning in the fall.