Trying to heal in Oaxaca

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U.S. and European tourists are slowly trickling back to Oaxaca city, the beautiful southern Mexican state capital renowned for its colonial architecture, distinctive cuisine and handicrafts, and large, networked community of expatriate Americans.

But the aftermath of a bitter months-long showdown between Oaxaca state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and a coalition of striking teachers, trade unionists, leftist activists and indigenous people persists. That conflict came to a head last October when former Mexican president Vicente Fox sent in federal police to break an occupation of the city center by the teachers and their supporters. The police were dispatched just hours after U.S. activist and independent journalist Bradley Roland Will, 36, was gunned down in the street while shooting video of the conflict for Independent Media Center, an Internet-based alternative news agency.

Scores of strikers were arrested during the subsequent melee, and human rights groups have protested what they say have been numerous incidents of torture, unlawful detention and denial of legal counsel, charges that local authorities have denied.

While Oaxaca and the outside world wait for official and/or independent investigations of last fall’s events, street theater is keeping the debate alive. On Saturday a ‘popular tribunal’ made up of human rights lawyers and the author-intellectual Elena Poniatowska, among others, issued a not-unexpected verdict against Ruiz for what it called the ‘atrocities’ that occurred during the conflict. You can read about it here in the left-leaning Mexico City daily La Jornada.

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City