The demonstrations and barricades are gone. The graffiti have been whitewashed. The police stand around the zocalo. If I didn't wonder what had happened to the 8 people who were killed, and the hundreds who were injured, arrested or disappeared during almost six months of protest in Oaxaca, I could begin to join in the collective forgetting. I could wonder whether anything at all had happened in Oaxaca. I could even think that whatever it may have been, it wasn't all that important. More below the fold.
It's not that hard to forget. It's not in my newspaper today. Or on my radio station. The high tourist season in Mexico is about to begin. It's in everyone's apparent self interest to yawn and forget Oaxaca.
Except that today there is supposed to be a march to the center of the city to continue to demand the resignation of Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz and freedom for the more than 200 people who have been arrested and sent to prisons across Mexico. And last night there was a murder apparently related to the demonstrations.
Today from Ojitos-in-Mexico there's a first person account:
It's as if APPO, and the violence, and the deaths, and the struggle, and the voices of hundreds of thousands of people together calling for change never happened. The PFP is still there in force, but now they merely loiter, helmets and bulletproof vests scattered on the ground, buying popsicles and sodas and killing time sifting through souvenirs. Every bit of graffiti has been scrubbed from the walls, all of the stains of smoke and fire on the pavement washed away, the razor wire rolled up again, the pavement stones replaced. Many buildings, even private homes, sport new paint jobs (administered by crews who all seem to be using the same equipment; it's almost surely funded by the government). Fresh poinsettias bloom throughout the zocalo.
Ojito's continues that
[T]hose thrown in prison remain there, most of them thousands of miles from their homes and denied access to counsel or to communication. The 150-plus men and women still unaccounted for - "disappeared" - remain missing. The APPO members who have not yet been arrested remain in hiding, afraid of being snatched from their homes or jobs or classrooms. And those who died remain in their graves.
The preconditions to forgetting are all in place. Widespread reprisals might be coming under cover of forgetting. But first there will be the forgetting. I am reading nothing about human rights organizations observing events in Oaxaca or the treatment of those from Oaxaca imprisoned elsewhere in Mexico. To nobody's surprise, the topic appears to have faded from scrutiny in US main stream media. And it won't resurface unless something truly extraordinary happens.
This past Tuesday, Flavio Sosa, the leader of APPO (Popular Assemblies of People of Oaxaco, in English) was arrested in Mexico City after a news conference. According to Simon Fitzgerald, Sosa let it be known that if Ruiz would take some time off, the barricades would be taken down. He was then imprisoned and sent to La Palma, hundreds of miles from Oaxaca. So much for discussions and a negotiated resolution of the remaining issues.
Meanwhile, the Central Government has apparently decided to step in and begin an investigation of the violence against the demonstrators. Is this window dressing or something serious? The federal raid on the State Attorney General's office and police was within hours of a meeting between APPO's representatives in Mexico City and the federal Government:
The new sweep came just hours after APPO representatives presented Interior Secretariat officials in Mexico City with a letter alleging human rights abuses against the arrested protesters, most of whom are being held outside Oaxaca, in the state of Nayarit.
According to the APPO allegations, the detainees have been subjected to sexual harassment, psychological torture, having their heads forcibly shaved and being held incommunicado.
Whether there is follow-through with this investigation, or whether this story is now dropped is something that will not be evident in my daily newspaper. Nor do I expect any significant coverage of today's march. I expect as in most things having to do with the neighboring country to the South the forgetting to begin in earnest.