2006 Oaxaca protests
The conflict emerged in May 2006 with the police responding to a strike involving the local teachers' trade union by opening fire on non-violent protests.
It then grew into a broad-based movement pitting the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) against the state's governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.
Multiple reports, including from international human rights monitors, accused the Mexican government of using death squads, summary executions, and even violating Geneva Conventions standards that prohibit attacking and shooting at unarmed medics attending to the wounded.
Students, teachers, anarchists, Marxists, churchgoers — everyone was invited.The APPO was born without a formal structure, but soon developed impressive organizational capacity.
A variety of commissions were established: judicial, finance, communications, human rights, gender equity, defense of natural resources, and many more.
The festivals, the 'Guelaguetza' thousands of people attended for free to see indigenous culture, dresses and dancing whilst graffiti artists packed the streets and covered the walls of the towns in anti-government and anti-capitalist messages.
On June 17 APPO reestablished encampments in the zocalo and declared itself to be the governing body of Oaxaca, plunging the city into a state of civil rebellion.
Though APPO did not boycott the Mexican national elections on July 2, Ulises Ruiz's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) suffered electoral defeat in Oaxaca, a state they had ruled for seventy years.
Protesters blocked access to the auditorium in which the festival is held using burned buses and miscellaneous trash, thus preventing the finalization of renovations to the facility.
After a few weeks of absence, the APPO assumed control of the city and started implementing their own law, while confrontations with State Police escalated.
APPO utilized the radio resources in order to communicate about possible threats from police and armed gangs, demand the removal of Ulises Ruiz and the release of political prisoners.
[4] Those attacks on the APPO-controlled radio stations represented an escalation of violence in a conflict that (despite constant rumors of threats) had remained relatively peaceful since the June 14 police raid.
[6][7] On September 14, striking teachers and APPO members took over the municipal building in Huautla de Jiménez, located in the Sierra Mazateca in northern Oaxaca.
The leader of Mazatecan APPO, Agustín Sosa, was elected mayor (presidente) of Huautla de Jiménez in November 2007, to a term beginning in January, 2008.
On October 27, 2006, Bradley Roland Will, a U.S. Indymedia journalist from New York who had entered the country under a tourist visa, was killed along with Professor Emilio Alonso Fabián and Esteban López Zurita, in what the Associated Press has claimed was a "shootout" between protesters and a group of armed men.
[9] The family of Brad Will visited Mexico to demand justice from the court system, and upon hearing the accusation that their son was shot at close range by a protester, they called it "ridiculous, false, without substance, biased, and unconvincing.
[10] A local news organisation, Centro de Medios Libres, claims that from Will's recovered videotapes,[11] they have found that Pedro Carmona, a paramilitary who was the mayor of Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Santa Lucía del Camino, was the person who shot Bradley Roland Will.
"[1]: 204 The death of Bradley Roland Will prompted President Vicente Fox to send federal police to Oaxaca[13] after months of attempting to stay neutral in what he considered a local issue.
An open letter written "to honor the memory" of slain journalist Brad Will and support "the Oaxacan people's efforts to establish a popular government that recognizes local traditions and values", was signed in early November by numerous academics and activists, including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Arundhati Roy, Starhawk and Howard Zinn.
[20] Federal Preventative Police advanced on the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca, occupied by students and displaced protesters from the Zocalo.
Opinions against the APPO are quickly taken off the air[22] After criticism by the private sector, political organizations and the press (specifically Grupo Formula's news anchor Denise Maerker) for his remarks towards the APPO the rector declared that he had requested respect for the rights of students and faculty[23] and that a tentative operation by the Federal Police would not be a solution to the issue[24] Three explosions in Mexico City destroyed a Scotiabank branch lobby, blew out windows at Mexico's Tribunal Federal Electoral (Federal Electoral Tribunal), and damaged the auditorium at PRI headquarters.
[26] Despite the presence of federal police in the city, the APPO has continued to organize, holding a Constituent Congress in order to discuss plans to rewrite Oaxaca's political constitution.
[27] On Saturday, November 25, 2006, a large clash between the federal police and demonstrators occurred in the evening following the seventh megamarch held by the APPO.
The march began peacefully, but the situation turned violent when the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets as protesters attempted to encircle the city's zócalo.
[28] It is unclear who instigated the violence, but the clash quickly spread through the city as protesters fought back with rocks and homemade PVC rockets.
[35][36] On Monday, December 4, hours after he said at a news conference in Mexico City that he had gone to the capital to negotiate a peaceful solution, Flavio Sosa was arrested by police on charges related to the barricades, vandalism and irregular detentions carried out by some protesters.
