Mexico City – Thousands of protesting teachers who have walked all the way from the southern state of Oaxaca arrived Monday in this capital to press legislators and federal authorities to remove the state’s governor from office.
After a 19-day trek of nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles), more than 3,000 teachers and their supporters vow to camp out in front of the Mexican Senate until federal authorities agree to remove Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz.
Leaders of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO, met with Interior Minister Carlos Abascal to convey their plan for resolving the conflict in Mexico’s second-poorest state.
APPO rejected three days ago an initiative from Abascal that his office described at the time as the government’s “definitive proposal.”
Several previous rounds of talks in Mexico City between the minister and APPO delegates produced no progress.
For years, springtime in Oaxaca has been synonymous with a strike by the state’s 70,000 unionized teachers for higher pay, followed – eventually – by an agreement to provide the educators with a small raise.
This year, when the teachers launched the traditional walkout in late May, Ruiz not only turned down the demand for salary hikes but ordered state police to forcibly dislodge strikers from the main square in Oaxaca city.
Scores of people were injured in the June 14 clash between police and teachers. The violence radicalized the opposition to Ruiz, leading to the creation of APPO and to the demand for the removal of the governor, who is accused of rigging the 2004 election that put him in office and who last year sent club-wielding thugs to smash the offices and printing plant of the state’s leading daily.
APPO members fought their way back into Oaxaca city, prompting the Ruiz administration to abandon the state capital, where normal commerce has largely ground to a halt amid mounting confrontations.
Four people have been killed since the start of the conflict – the latest victim a teacher opposed to the strike – and local businesses have suffered as tourists have stayed away from the picturesque colonial city that is usually a favorite of foreign visitors.
Meanwhile, more than a million students are being kept out of classes by the walkout.
In comments to W-Radio, APPO leader Flavio Sosa said Monday that Abascal had asked his group to turn over the parts of Oaxaca city under its control to federal police, excluding the state force that answers to Ruiz.
Sosa said APPO rejected that idea, proposing instead that senior federal officials be put in charge of security in Oaxaca, subject to oversight by a citizens committee.
“We would accept that a civilian at the level of deputy (Cabinet) secretary takes charge of the police in the state – of the police in general – and the idea is to form a citizens security forum that can supervise the functioning of this organ of vigilance,” Sosa said.
APPO will also demand a “purge” of the various law-enforcement agencies in Oaxaca, he said.
While Abascal has promised that force will not be used against APPO, military units have moved into position near Oaxaca city and navy helicopters have been spotted hovering over parts of the state capital.
Oaxaca poses a tricky problem for the conservative government of Mexican President Vicente Fox, whose PAN party spent years battling the hegemony of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, yet now finds itself relying on support from important blocs within that party.
Ruiz embodies the kind of corrupt, authoritarian politics the PAN has traditionally condemned, yet the Oaxaca boss is being backed to the hilt by his PRI colleagues in Congress and in governors’ mansions across Mexico.
Fox is grateful to some of those PRI governors for quickly endorsing PAN standard-bearer Felipe Calderon’s contested victory in the July 2 presidential election, and the future president will need backing from PRI lawmakers to get his program through Congress.
Monday’s arrival here of the protesters from Oaxaca evoked memories of the protracted demonstrations by supporters of the leftist who was narrowly defeated in the presidential ballot, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Mexico City police detailed 1,500 officers to monitor the APPO contingent, while federal officers took up positions around the Senate building.
The municipal government, which is in the hands of leftists generally sympathetic to APPO’s cause, plans to provide portable restrooms, drinking water and medical services at the site of the protest.
Even so, Mayor Alejandro Encinas told reporters that the problems of Oaxaca should have been resolved inside the state, not in his city, and he asked Congress and the Fox administration – set to step down Dec. 1 – to settle the conflict as quickly as possible.
He said he was confident the presence of APPO will not create major difficulties in Mexico City, which only last month saw the end of a 47-day sit-in by partisans of Lopez Obrador.
The capital chamber of commerce says that those protests cost area businesses some $700 million.
