Some 60 masked and mostly armed men, including "porros" (provocaterus) and municipal police, took over the local office of the Oaxaca daily newspaper Noticias in the town of Santa Cruz Amilpas Aug. 20. The municipal government is in the hands of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), but nine days earlier, a group loyal to the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO), which is demanding the resignation of the state's PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz, had seized control of the town hall. (La Jornada, Aug. 21 via Chiapas95 [2])
Noticias—the state's largest circulation daily, which has reported vigorously on the APPO struggle—has come under growing attack in recent weeks. On Aug. 9, two attackers, one armed with an Uzi submachine gun, assaulted the main Oaxaca City offices of Noticias. Six persons were wounded in the shooting, including newspaper vendors Isabel Cruz and Adrian Cervantes. After violent attacks were directed against Noticias in 2004, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered the implementation of protective measures. (FronteraNorteSur news service via The Newspaper Tree [3], El Paso, TX, Aug. 21)
On Aug. 18, some 80,000 workers, represenitng some 20 unions in Oaxaca, held a "civic strike," shutting down many services in the state for 24 hours. In addition to followers of the National Syndicate of Education Workers (SNTE), healthcare and hospital workers, federal social security workers and Oaxaca City municipal staff also walked off the job. Many local businesses and bus lines were also closed—whether out of solidarity or fear of violence. Two strikers were injured during the course of the day. Around noon, three people attacked a barricade set up by teachers and APPO members on the Cristobal Colon international highway. The teacher Benito Castro Juarez was shot in the chest and was hospitalized. The strikers say the attackers were plainclothes police, while the state government claims they were "apparently" common criminals making a getaway after a robbery. Later the teacher Antonio Marcos Ramos Sarmiento was knifed by an unidentified person at the end of a march. (La Jornada, Aug. 19 via Chiapas95 [4])
In the early morning of July 22 unknown persons threw three molotov cocktails into the home of Cruz Lopez, a leader of Indian Organizations for Human Rights in Oaxaca (OIDHO) and an APPO supporter. (La Jornada, Aug. 15, cited in Weekly News Update on the Americas [5], Aug. 20)
See our last posts on Mexico [6] and the struggle in Oaxaca [7]. See also our last report on attacks on the press in Oaxaca [8].
