Thread: Thousands of Mexico police and teachers clash ahead of polls

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14213693.htm

Mexico police and teachers clash ahead of polls
14 Jun 2006 22:28:10 GMT
Source: Reuters


OAXACA, Mexico, June 14 (Reuters) - Thousands of Mexican police firing tear gas fought a running battle with striking teachers in a southern city on Wednesday in the latest violence between protesters and security forces before July elections.

Backed up by a helicopter clattering overhead, police on foot briefly dislodged teachers from the main square in the city of Oaxaca where they had been camped for three weeks demanding higher wages.

Witnesses and press reports said shots were fired during clashes in downtown streets. One policeman was shot in the leg before the teachers retook the square, popular with tourists visiting the picturesque city.

State Gov. Ulises Ruiz denied a report by the teachers' union that police had killed three or four people and then taken away the bodies.

"They should tell us where they are because no policeman knows anything about this and no hospital has it registered. I think this is another lie," he told a radio station.

The incident, and others, have fanned tension in the run-up to the July 2 presidential vote, a close battle between leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon.

Oaxaca is the highland capital of the southern state of the same name which is run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, running third in the presidential race.

The 40,000 teachers vowed to continue the strike.

By midday on Wednesday, downtown Oaxaca was a ghost town other than the teachers in the square, with shops shuttered and residents holed up inside their homes.

The teachers have threatened to disrupt voting in Oaxaca for the presidential election. This week they blocked employee access to the state office of the Federal Electoral Institute.

LEFTIST URGES DIALOGUE

Lopez Obrador, often accused by conservatives of being a populist rabble rouser, called for dialogue.

"It's best to avoid conflict, like in medicine it's best to use preventive medicine," he said in the border city of Tijuana. "Yes to dialogue, yes to agreement, yes to negotiation," he told a rally.

In May, police put down riots in San Salvador de Atenco, a town near Mexico City. Demonstrators, opposed to efforts to evict illegal flower vendors, had attacked and abducted police officers. Two protesters died in the crackdown.

Two steel workers were killed in April in battles with police sent in to break up a strike, part of a long and bitter work stoppage by miners and metal workers nationwide.

President Vicente Fox's spokesman Ruben Aguilar said the upheaval in Oaxaca, like the previous trouble, was not a sign of instability around the presidential vote.

"In no way does the government consider them hot spots or insoluble problems, much less do they put at risk the electoral process," he told reporters.

Enrique Rueda Pacheco, head of the teachers' union, told local radio: "We must resist, we are used to ... years of struggle and to the repressive government."

(Additional reporting by Lorraine Orlandi and Martha Villela)

http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1896.html

Teachers Repel 3,000 Police from Oaxaca’s Historic Center
Thousands of Police Surround the City Center as Strikers Hold Their Ground


By Geoffrey Harman
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Oaxaca
June 14, 2006

OAXACA CITY: In a scene that is starting to look all too familiar in Mexico, the police attempted to disrupt the Oaxaca teachers strike in downtown Oaxaca City this morning. At roughly 3 a.m. a police helicopter flew low over the tent city where the teachers have been camped for the past 23 days and shot canisters of tear gas. Meanwhile, 3,000 state police armed with riot shields and clubs entered the chaos and tore apart the roughshod shelters where the teachers had been staying. During the course of the six-hour police intervention three people were reported to have been killed (this is unconfirmed), two women and one child.

Radio Plantón (the teachers’ pirate radio station, which had been broadcasting from the Zócalo, or central square, since the strike started and had been the main source of information for the striking teachers) was dismantled and has been off the air since the first police attack. (Four journalists from the station were among the first to be arrested: Arcelio Ruiz Villanueva, Ociel Martínez Martínez, Eduardo Castellanos Morales and Roberto Gazga.) The teachers are now broadcasting on the college radio station 89.7 FM and 113.95 AM. At roughly 10 am the police retreated and the teachers re-took the Zócalo. During the course of the struggle unconfirmed reports have said four people were arrested (three of which were from Radio Plantón), 20 people hospitalized and three police taken hostage.

It was a blow that many of the 70,000 teachers who have been on strike since the 22nd of May were expecting. Rumors had been circulating that federal police had arrived to Oaxaca several weeks ago and were lying in wait. The police that attacked this morning are believed to have been a Oaxaca state force. However, four airplanes of Federal Preventive Police (PFP in its Spanish initials) have since arrived and the 30,000 people who currently occupy the city center are waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it did in Atenco (it was the PFP that, along with state police, staged the bloody invasion of San Salvador Atenco on May 4).

As of 1:00 pm the mood in the center is one of tense anticipation. The teachers have set up road blocks that span roughly 30 city blocks and are anxiously watching the helicopters that are now circling. The noise of the helicopters’ engines echos through the now car-free streets. The purpose of the early morning attack seems to have been to clear the streets of the tents, tarps and improvised shelters where the teachers had been staying. The streets are now blocked off with damaged busses and trash trucks and some of the shelters are being rebuilt.

It is all too familiar, and leaves one wondering how two obvious human rights abuses can come on the heels of one another. This the first time that such tactics have been used against the teachers during a strike and that it would happen so soon after the atrocities at Atenco and only a month before an election shows both a complete disregard for human rights and a contempt for the national and international outcry that the first incident provoked. There is a sad fatalism that is now pervading the city — as if the thousands of teachers now occupying the center, and the thousands of teachers and supporters who are currently traveling from their homes to take part, have a collective premonition of what is to come.

There are roughly 30,000 teachers currently in the center, but upon hearing about the attack, other teachers, NGOs and other groups rushed to the city. The police force that occupied this morning was roughly 3,000 but the reinforcements that have since arrived put the number much higher. It seems that Atenco was just a warm-up in many ways. The people in the city center are digging in and waiting. To all those who oppose the draconian repression currently underway: the more observers that witness what now seems inevitable the harder it will be for the government to deny it.


Ed. Note: Narco News has received confirmation that the four planes were of the model Hercules, the same kind used by US military forces to transport troops. Each carries 92 persons.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/ ... 185948/465

Downtown Oaxaca, 1:50PM
By Nancy Davies,
Posted on Wed Jun 14th, 2006 at 06:59:48 PM EST
The center of the city looks like a war zone. On the tourist street, broken glass and broken bricks and stones lie everywhere. Torn and crumpled tents lie destroyed, flattened in every street, along with personal belongings, trash, and burned objects.
The teachers have regrouped. According to Enrique Pineda Rios, a physical education teacher sitting with a group of five men armed with sticks on Porfirio Diaz about two blocks north of the zocalo, about 80% of the zocalo has been reoccupied by the teachers.


Pineda Rios told me that three teachers and one of their children were killed by the gas used in the attack. More than twenty teachers have been wounded. Pineda Rios told me that the teachers were unarmed but the federal police (and I asked him twice, was it local police or federal; he says federal. He told me that more federal police are on the way.) accompanied by the state troops entered with gas, clubs and guns. He also told me the teachers were awaiting a renewed police attack at 2:00PM. An older teacher was circulating with surgical masks , handing them out to everyone.
The radio station of the university, which is acting as a news station for the strikers, reports 10 dead.

I saw one teacher cleaning the broken glass off his car. The back window was shattered when a gas cannister shot through it, landing on the front seat beside the teacher. Helicopters are circling.

The teachers remain defiant and are sending out requests for citizen assistance. The radio stations reporting for the gov say stay home, the teachers are burning, breaking rioting, etc. That's clearly not true. They look shocked but not violent -grim, I would say, including the women who remain.

Some who received the worst of the tear gas retreated several blocks and were washing out their eyes with water. The radio reported many injurred arriving at the hospital.

Every business in the center is closed, with their metal doors padlocked.

Sounds like LA. I guess the place can change, but the behavior stays the same.

evict illegal flower vendors

Mexico can evict "ILLEGAL' flower vendors by force, but the United States can't peacefully evict ILLEGAL aliens

Am I reading this right. The teachers routed the police?

I know, I was thinking the same thing. Teachers???

Dixie

As long as "What happens in Mexico, Stays in Mexico."

Ah, Butterbean, but this type of behaviour is coming here!

What's the difference between Vincente Fox and Sadam Hussein? I'm having trouble differentiating.