7-30-07, 10:54 am

“They [the heavily armed Mexican federal police] began to hit us indiscriminately as they moved in. I was carrying my friend who’d fainted from the tear gas they shot at us. Seven police were hitting me with their billy clubs. They took my wallet and my cell phone, then threw me on top of a mountain of people. They took off everybody’s shoes and tied our hands behind our backs. For an hour and a half they spit on us, kicked us, tortured us, then they grabbed me and threw me in the back of a pickup. I was covered with blood. They questioned us, kicked us, jumped on us. We drove for two hours. I lost all feeling in my body. When they finally stopped they pulled me out of the pickup by my hair. ‘Drag yourselves like the dogs you are!’ they reviled us.”

The 19-year-old Oaxaca college student shuddered as he recounted the events of November 25, 2006 to the Rights Action emergency civil rights delegation in the city of Oaxaca. Along with nearly 150 others, including his mother, he was charged with sedition, instigating a mutiny, robbery and destruction of public property. The day after his apprehension he was helicoptered to a federal prison in Nayarit, hundreds of miles from Oaxaca. During the flight the federal police left a door of the helicopter open and threatened to throw the shackled prisoners out one by one. “Say your prayers!” the police joked. “You’ll never be heard from again!”

None of the nearly 150 persons arrested during that night of terror was questioned before their arrest nor was asked to show any form of identification. All of them were beaten before and during their apprehension, some so brutally they suffered broken ribs, arms and skulls. All were manacled, refused medical treatment and spirited out of Oaxaca despite the fact that no justification for their arrests existed. Many of the detainees had not even participated in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO for its initials in Spanish) march that preceded the police attack. Those beaten, manacled and sent to prison included a 50-year-old illiterate woman who’d just gotten off work, a man walking towards a bus stop and a woman who’d been shopping near the Zocalo and in trying to escape the tear gas had broken the heel of one of her shoes and fallen.

The violent apprehensions did not begin or end with the November 25 assault. Supporters of current governor Ulisés Ruiz beat a retired professor to death when he participated in an attempt to block a roadway near Huautla to prevent Ruiz from making a campaign appearance in 2004. Authorities then jailed the retired professor’s closest friend on murder charges despite videos that identified the killers. When Oaxacan teachers declared a strike for higher wages and better school conditions and set up an encampment in the center of the city of Oaxaca last June, Ruiz dispatched state police to break up the protest. The teachers fought back and forced the police to retreat. Various non-aligned NGOs and indigena groups backed the teachers and formed APPO.

Ruiz’ government responded by subsidizing death squads that included former and current municipal and state police to attack and intimidate APPO members and human rights workers. To counter these nightly depredations APPO supporters barricaded streets throughout the city, making transit virtually impossible after dark. Nevertheless, snipers hiding in the Hospital Santa María shot and killed José Jiménez during an APPO-sponsored march in August. The husband of an activisit teacher, Jiménez had taken part in a number of anti-Ruiz protests. Despite the fact that hundreds saw Jiménez fall, and despite the fact that autopsies showed that he’d been hit by bullets of two different calibers fired from two different directions, Oaxaca’s attorney general announced that he’d died during a drunken fight which he’d instigated.

Two months later armed off-duty municipal police attacked an APPO barricade in Santa Lucía del Camino, a city of Oaxaca suburb, and shot and killed American photographer Brad Will. Despite the fact that reporters photographed Will’s killers as they were attacking and published them in both local and national newspapers, Oaxacan authorities released the assassins and announced that they were going to file murder charges against one of Will’s companions at the barricade.

That revelation so infuriated Oaxaca journalist Pedro Matias that he told the human rights delegation, “The department of justice changed the settings, changed the legal opinions, changed the investigations and after all that what’s going to happen here in Oaxaca is that it’s going to turn out that Brad Will killed himself. That’s the kind of justice we have here.”

For the past 80 years Oaxaca has been governed by a tight coterie belonging to Mexico’s dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI for its initials in Spanish). Though PRI lost the past two presidential elections the party nevertheless remains strong and controls the majority of governorships within the country. Both Ruiz and his predecessor, José Murat, have been under investigation for fraud and misappropriation of funds. During the November 25 federal police assault a building housing the financial records of Ruiz and Murat went up in flames and the records were destroyed. State officials accused APPO members of setting the fire by throwing Molotov cocktails into the building but a tour of the damage indicates that that would have been impossible. The fires were set from inside.

The arrests and detainment of APPO leaders, threats against human rights activisits and continuing disappearances of APPO supporters continue. In January over 100 heavily armed state police swept through an encampment of relatives of the political prisoners incarcerated at the Miahuatlán state prison. Without warrants and wielding billy clubs against everyone whose paths they crossed the police destroyed the encampment. They arrested nine persons, including several who’d driven away from the prison. One was a photojournalist with a valid press pass who reported: “They grabbed me, they hit me, they yanked me by the hair and threw me in the back of a pickup. They sprayed me with tear gas and held a knife to my back. They said they were going to rape me and throw me in the ocean. They said other police were raping my novia right then.”

The photojournalist, José de Jesús Villaseca, was released on bail but still has criminal charges pending against him. So do all of those imprisoned on November 25. State and federal police have jailed over 400 citizens, many on charges that the justice committee of the state legislature since has confirmed were fallacious. Death squadrons have assassinated at least 20 and an estimated 100 other Oaxacans have disappeared. The state has filed orders of apprehension for hundreds more, including human rights activists Yésica Sánchez of the Liga Mexicana de Derechos Humanos. Five of the political prisoners incarcerated in Miahuatlán signed accusations stating that Sánchez had urged them to take violent actions against the state. All five repudiated those assertions after they were released, saying they had been tortured into signing in order to gain their release from prison.

“The government has taken the position that no changes should be prompted by popular movements,” explains priest Juan Arias, the spokesman for the state’s Catholic presbytery. “and is criminalizing any attempts at change.”

According to Arias, the state’s propaganda station, Radio Ciudadana, (Citizens Radio), attacked priests for providing medical aid and sanctuary to APPO members. “They practically said we’re criminals for denouncing the violence and repression in Oaxaca,” he told a Rights Action emergency delegation in February.

Announcers for the same station urged Oaxaca residents to attack and burn the facilities belonging to the Services for an Alternative Education because members of that group were APPO supporters.

Although the federal police force is under the jurisdiction of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderón and Government Secretary Francisco Ramirez neither has made any effort to investigate the violent apprehension and torture of innocent civilians. Various officials from President Calderón’s Partido Acción Naciónal, including Senator Felipe Gonzalez, applauded the PFP actions, citing the need to show “a firm hand” against lawbreakers like the APPO protesters.

The federal government has admitted that Ruiz is a problem. But they view a popular uprising that could depose a governor a third of his way through his term as an even greater problem. The governors of at least half-a-dozen other states face opposition similar to what Ruiz had created for himself. Better that Oaxaca be subdued than a third of the nation combat citizen takeovers has become the government’s stance.

Despite Ruiz’ insistence that “everything is under control” and Oaxaca is a safe place for tourists to visit, teachers who supported the strike are yanked out of their classrooms, arrest warrants are filed against human rights activists and the squadrons of death roam the streets knowing they can stop, detain, torture and even kill anyone who disagrees with the status quo.

Oaxaca may be safe for tourists but not for Oaxacans. Especially not for those who protest. --Robert Joe Stout is a journalist by trade, and he freelances for a variety of magazines, including The Retired Officer Magazine, Notre Dame Magazine, Smoke and Army Magazine. He has published a novel, Miss Sally (Bobbs-Merrill) and has half-a-dozen poetry chapbooks to his credit. His non-fiction The Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives, a mosaic of Mexican faces, places and experiences, was issued in 2003 by Algora Press and Why Immigrants Come to America: Braceros, Indocumentados and the Migra is due out soon from Praeger.