My friend Max waxed recently about living in Oaxaca City.

“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why most Oaxacans aren’t deaf. I mean, take Charlie the drummer over there:

Charlie got deaf playing rock and roll, in band after band, for decades. After all those years of having huge pounding speakers near his ears, he ended up with speakers in his ears: he has to wear a hearing aid when he wants to listen; a lot of the time, he’d just as soon tune out.

Us old folk, who have been hangin’ in Oaxaca for a while, but are still sensitive to loud noise, have for the most part figured out how to avoid much of it (if you think you’ll be able to dodge all of it, you just don’t know Mexico). Some of us own a bit of acreage out in the Etlas, with a good-size house on it. Others opt for separate bungalows in compounds – with or without gate – in residential suburbs. Still others are in townhouses, apartments or bungalows in the center of one of the downtown blocks, far back from the traffic.

The less fortunate among us, either because we made bad choices or just can’t afford the Gringo luxury of peace and quiet, have to live with the noise. There are only two advantages to this: after a while, you stop noticing it so much; and you can still grumble about it to anyone who hasn’t heard your story before (or the forgetful folk who have). Usually they lodge with families, or in a family compound, or small apartments in working class neighborhoods. These are the ones most likely to hear the ‘Courtyard Music.’

Courtyard Music is a blend of two or more loud radios tuned to different stations, shrieking kids, barking roof dogs, and people yelling back and forth at each other. This is a more or less constant accompaniment. The bass line; the left hand on the piano.

The melody constantly changes. Motorcycles are revved up. People wander in from the street and stand in the courtyard hawking 5 gallon bottles of water, tortillas by the handful, tanks of propane gas, and other more exotic items. There may be a carpenter’s shop in the courtyard: sawing and nailing provide the percussion. One poor unfortunate lives next door to a recycling center where they do cans and bottles.

From time to time there will be a wedding or a birthday party, accompanied by a three piece, amplified electric band adept at the three traditional Oaxacan party music modes: Marriachi, Tex-Mex and Oompah.

A musically inclined friend who lives in a noisy, two or three hundred year old courtyard with a big extended family, a dozen kids and four neurotically barking poodles, has become resigned to this aural environment after two years there. He has this to say:

“Sometimes the courtyard music is just annoying – if you’re trying to sleep or think deep thoughts. Sometimes, it all comes together, the children’s singing and laughing blends with the vendors cries and all the rest into a kind of counterpoint that is as complex and beautiful as anything Bach or Villa Lobos could do. Sometimes…”

Of course, this is someone who is clearly a little crazy. Not that he wasn’t a little weird when he got here. Probably, it was the courtyard music that drove him around the bend.”

Marches in Oaxacas continue to call attention to the occupation of 128 schools by section 59 and the PRIistas, the continuing incarceration of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and to commemorate the assassination of APPO and teacher sympathizers by the local and federal police in October of 2006.

October 18: 16:00 leave Fuente de los Siete Regiones and march to zocalo
October 27: 7:00 Santa Maria Coyotepec
8:00 march leaves from office of Procuraduria Gral. de Justicia and Callicanto, Santa Lucia del Carmen and goes to zocalo
October 29: October regional marches
November 2: political cultural “jornada” and I don’t know exactly what that means
November 25: teacher-popular march

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 <a href="<a href=" 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.”

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.”

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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