Is Another World Possible? :

The Encroaching War in Mexico

By Soneile Hymn – December 2007

In the spring of 2006 Oaxaca exploded into an outbreak of discontent, ungovernability and all out war between the Ulises Ruiz Ortega (Governor of Oaxaca) regime and the people. What started out as the 27^th yearly sit-in strike of Section 22 of the National Educators Union was transformed into a historic battle between the deteriorating power from above and power from below - a battle firmly based in past and future. Besides the obvious implications this movement against the government of Oaxaca has for the Mexican political system, what has emerged from this vibrant Mexican city has breached a certain code of conduct and threatens the global social, economic and political system as a whole.

Ruiz had taken office in December of 2004, after what many believe was a fraudulent election. However, fraudulent elections are the legacy of Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolutionario Institucionál (PRI), who, with the support of the US government, virtually held one party rule for 70 years and continues to hold the majority of power throughout Mexico. After Ruiz’s violent repression of the sit-in strike backfired, rather than regaining control of Oaxaca, ¡Fuera Ulises! (Get out Ulises!) became the popular slogan of Oaxaca’s neighborhoods and streets. The teachers’ union, seeing the force of this popular movement against Ruiz, attempted to draw its energy together for their cause and for a movement against government corruption in Oaxaca. This manifested the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca), or APPO, which was immediately joined by hundreds of social and grassroots organizations. The teacher’s union’s then subordinated its leadership to the popular assembly and a huge popular movement emerged and flourished, if only briefly, not only because of its ability to unite hundreds of groups into one struggle, but also because of its tactics, including its appropriation and use of the media as a central tool for organizing, disseminating information, and connecting and uniting people in protest. In the summer of 2006 the people controlled Oaxaca. This self-governance was a feat that has only been realized for fleeting moments in the modern world, but moments that have pointed to future possibilities and hope for a new popular power.

The Other Mexico

Much of southern Mexico, as a result of the land redistribution after the 1910 revolution, maintains large ejidos, or communally owned lands. It is also teaming with communities that have a tradition of autonomous government, which are instituted and implemented to uphold traditional forms of governing and social organization based on indigenous values. These include a responsibility to the popular will, promotion of public interests, autonomy as well as what are called “usos y costumbres, (uses and customs)” which are a form of pre-modern community organization (Davies 2006b). These governments are based on traditional consensus and bottom-up governing styles. Oaxaca is the only Mexican state that has a majority indigenous population, largely of Zapotec and Mixtec origin, and has a majority of municipalities that function under these forms of autonomous government. Though these autonomous governments have been legally recognized in Oaxaca state law since 1995, the federal government has continued to harass them. The local and municipal indigenous governments of Oaxaca exist side-by-side with the Mexican federal and state governments, which has made a situation where the people have two governments that are continually at odds with each other; a government of the people and a government of power and modernity.

The formulation of the APPO has its roots in some of the traditional and indigenous forms of government but is also present in the politics of today while providing a vision for the future. According to Gustavo Esteva, a well-known Oaxacan writer and “de-professionalized” activist, three different democratic struggles have converged into a single one that is being waged by APPO. The first group is tired of the corruption and hopes for some reformation of the current state and federal governments. The second promotes more of a participatory democracy with more civil involvement (Gustavo 2006a).

The third struggle includes “a surprisingly large number of individuals and groups who want to extend or deepen the autonomous and radical democracy that lives in the autonomous governments of Oaxaca” (ibid.). The supporters of this autonomous and radical democracy are doing with the APPO and the mass dissent towards the government, is “inverting the struggle” (ibid.) by pressuring and harassing the state and federal governments and subjecting them to civilian surveillance and control; harassing the harassers and surveilling the surveillers. The hpe is that the community and municipal autonomous governments can converge into an autonomous coordination of groups of municipalities, and then to regions, and eventually to an autonomous form of government for the entire state (ibid). Of course the Mexican government is not willing to concede their positions of power and neither would the powers of the world socio-economic system allow for this. Not only is Mexico’s crumbling authority at stake here, but the deepening and spreading of autonomous and radical democracy in Oaxaca and Mexico directly threatens the current world capitalist system, its markets and the Mexican elites’ ideas for future development.

Neoliberalism and the Spectacle in Mexico

Mexico is a central site of struggle against the legacy of capitalism and capitalist accumulation, which has worn the masks of colonialism, corporate globalization, neoliberalism and US imperialism over the last centuries. In 1992, the World Bank peddled Mexico as an example to the world as a success of its neoliberal economic reform through which Mexico was to enter the first world. In 1993, the then President Salinas, who was a candidate for first director of the World Trade Organization promised that his 1992 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with US president Clinton, would be the means to catapult Mexico into the first world. As he was celebrating his neoliberal success on New Years Eve of 1993, the night before NAFTA was to go into effect, a racket from the south shattered the spectacle. Suddenly, the images of shiny new sky-scrapers, factories and super highways were eclipsed by images of the forgotten and discarded, rising from their place of poverty and misery, exclaiming, “Ya basta (Enough already)!” The Zapatistas were one of the first major counter attacks against corporate globalization in Mexico and was one of the most well know in the world. Central to their success was the media. From the first days of the rebellion, the Zapatistas have been vigilant in contacting media outlets and NGOs as well as using the Internet to send their rally for support and call to action not only across Mexico, but across the world. In their desperate circumstances, the Zapatistas still stood with dignity, their poetic words and guerrilla ski masks capturing the hearts and minds of young people and activists across the world with a message of hope for a new world. Support for the Zapatistas emerged from every corner of the planet. Also working to the Zapatistas’ favor, the uprising came during one of the most otherwise uneventful weeks in history, allowing images of Mexico’s dark secrets and resilient indigenous guerillas to dominate the media. The Zapatistas’ spectacular triumph shined a spotlight on the poverty that lives alongside Mexico’s skyscrapers and the injustice that swells and intensifies with each movement that capital makes. This uprising was not simply another leftist group trying to seize power from a right-wing government, but the beginning of a new phase in the war to exist in the face of capitalism; a war fought both on the ground and in the media.

In “Society of the Spectacle,” Guy Debord describes the spectacle not as “a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle is not a thing but a relationship between and among peoples; the image the mediator that establishes the nature of this relationship. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to mediate is to “to bring about, influence or transmit by acting as an intermediate or controlling agent or mechanism.” Mediate and media come from the same root word that means “middle.” The media(tor) is a central site of power and influence, and thus has throughout history been tightly controlled by those who retain power. It is also an incredibly powerful tool when it has fallen into the hands of the people.

In Mexico, the government controls most media outlets. A Mexico of wealth and prosperity is portrayed across the airwaves; the TV constantly blares beautiful rich Mexican families, nice wide and safe highways[1] and the image of Mexico as a place where one only need work hard to achieve the “good life.” On the ground one finds something all together different. However, to accept the poverty in Chiapas, the government and police repression in Oaxaca or even the murders of women and the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez as scandals perpetrated by capitalism or government mismanagement would be shortsighted. In Simulations, Jean Baudrillard discussed the construction of a simulacra that disguises the true nature of capital.

All that capital asks of us is to accept it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today the task is to conceal that there is none.

Baudrillard would argue that these moments of injustice are not scandals of Mexican politics, nor is the dark underside of Mexican politics a scandal of our capitalist system, but it is the very substance of capitalism, capital itself, that is the scandal. Our entire socio-economic system is scandalous and these so-called scandals of government are the mundane manifestations of our way of life.

Capital is based on accumulation of resources and products of labor. Corporate globalization, with its free trade agreements and structural adjustment programs, exists to facilitate cheap labor, products, resources and consumer markets to benefit a small group of capitalists in their endeavors of accumulation. A system based on capital necessitates it eternal growth, which necessitates eternal exploitation.

The free trade agreements of NAFTA, implemented by US economic interests, have taken a huge toll on poor people, particularly in Mexico. For instance, in the first 17 years after NAFTA took effect, minimum wage in Mexico dropped 40%, the gap between rich and poor grew by 30%, and real wages declined 10 – 20% while worker’s productivity soared by 45%. Falling wages and soaring profits amount to massive profits for corporations while at the same time 62 percent of working Mexicans live below the poverty line. (McNally 2004:50) To compound issues, these same neoliberal policies that cause lower wages for workers and higher profits for owners privatize Mexico’s services and resources making life in Mexico ever more expensive.

For many Mexican citizens, globalization is the emblem of a hegemonic project of domination and disparity. The Mexican power has sold out their county to the imperialist capitalism that reigns today. In the book Afflicted Powers, the San Francisco based intellectual activist group, Retort, speaks about the necessity of “weak states in the ‘world economy’, which the centre works endlessly to exploit. A weak state is one whose local defenses against imperial control have all been satisfactorily dismantled,” the centre being the world economic powers, centralized in the USA and protected by the US government. Mexico is not an unfortunate accident; it is nothing less than what the capitalist world economy requires of it. As the people of Mexico are feeling the intensifying social and economic strain that stems from the siphoning of capital and resources from their country, images of the luxurious consumerist lifestyles of the North are being piped directly into their homes. It is no surprise that Mexico is a center of so much social upheaval.

Repressive State Fists

Because we are the biggest beneficiaries of globalization, we are unwittingly putting enormous pressure on the rest of the world…producing powerful backlash from all those brutalized or left behind…the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist – McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United Stated Army, Air Force and Marine Corps.

- Thomas Friedman, New York Times correspondent

The US military holds bases in the majority of the world counties. Considering the military funding that our government pumps into the poorer countries of the south, we could expand on Friedman’s assertions by saying that the hidden fist also includes militaries of most US allied countries. Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank, says that “American hegemony in the hemisphere is crucial to US national security,” and calls the entire western hemisphere “America’s third border” (Carlsen 2007). As of late, US imperial authority is being advanced in Mexico through the new white-house led initiative between US, Canadian and Mexican governments called the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” (SPP), which is basically a merger of NAFTA and the homeland security complex, or what Naomi Klein has dubbed “NAFTA with spy planes.” The initiative is a response to the question. “How can we keep goods flowing while tightening the borders against terrorism” (Klein 2007)? Through the SPP, Mexico is being pulled in closer to the “spectacular centre.” The genius of this initiative is that there are no pacts or agreements to sign or protest[2]. Whitehouse.gov describes the SPP as merely “a dialog to increase security and enhance prosperity…[it will] better protect US citizens from terrorist threats and transnational crime and promote the safe and efficient movement of legitimate people and goods.” The site does not, however, define who are the “legitimate people”. While the US and Mexican governments use the media to incite fear of terrorism and drug related crime, which has gained them support for ever increasing military and security spending, they conceal the fact that as military funding has been increased in Mexico, violence and drug related crime has also increased.

The first accomplishment of the SPP is officially called “Mérida Initiative” but is more popularly referred to as “Plan Mexico” after its uncanny resemblance to disastrous “Plan Columbia.” The US government has slated 1.4 billion dollars in military funding over the next few years to the Mexican government under the guise of anti-terrorist and drug-war assistance. Some of us have seen what anti-drug war military spending equals; both in Chiapas and Oaxaca, some of the helicopters used by the police and government to repress and threaten the movements are the same ones that the US government gave to the Mexican government to fight “the war on drugs” (Petras 2007).

After the capture of power by the far-right Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) presidential candidate Felipe Calderón last year, the government is waging a full out offensive on grassroots movements to secure the nation as a terrorist buffer for the US as well as a land ripe in investment opportunity. Small uprisings are popping up all over Mexico and being crushed by Calderón. The government is forcibly displacing communities and expropriating ejidos.

2007 was a year of repression and new tactics of low-intensity warfare in Mexico. Paramilitary groups in Chiapas spent over 16 million dollars in government money forcibly appropriating over 30,000 acres of land from the Zapatistas. Paramilitaries masquerade as farmers’ interest groups and give the appropriated land to families linked to the PRI (Klein 2008, Alan 2007). These underhanded tactics are causing much internal strife among the indigenous campesinos of Chiapas as paramilitary groups are using the deep desire for land among peasants to divide them. Soon, the military might need to be called down from their barracks to “restore the peace.”

“The Other Campaign:” Towards Another Narrative

The latest evolution of Zapatista led resistance in Mexico is “The Other Campaign.” In this campaign, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the main spokesperson for the Zapatistas, traveled throughout Mexico gaining adherents and sympathizers to the Zapatista’s cause in an attempt to build a national infrastructure for organized dissent against the political and economic elite of Mexico. According to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, The Other Campaign’s ultimate goal is an attempt to form a united opposition to the "neoliberal capitalism” that dominates Mexico. During an interview in 2006, Marcos asserted that, “we’re on the eve of a great uprising or civil war.” And when asked who was going to lead the uprising, he responded:

the people, each in their place, in a network of mutual support. If we do not accomplish it that way, there will be spontaneous uprisings, explosions all over, a civil war ..If there is not a civil and peaceful way out, which is what we propose in the Other Campaign, then it will become each man for himself…for us, it doesn't matter what is above. What matters is what is going to arise from below. When we rise up, we are going to sweep away the entire political class, including those who say they are the parliamentary left…[In Oaxaca] there are no leaders, nor bosses; it’s the people who are organized. (Esteva 2007)

Part of what centralizes the struggle in Mexico as the struggle against capital and for the future are the comparatively large movements that stand outside polarized left/right politics and discourse, which never question the legitimacy of capital as a socio-economic basis. These movements have generally advocated for the decentralization of power. The dissolution of concentrated and hierarchical power threatens the system of capital. Capital needs a place of concentrated power from which to implement and enforce exploitation. Though the Zapatistas say they are from “below and to the left,” they do not support the institutional left. Because the Zapatistas and their supporters, as well as the bulk of the APPO in its heyday, do not support it, the institutional left has tried to isolate and marginalize them. This has proven the bringing together of the “pockets of resistance” that exist throughout the country into the “network of mutual support,” as the Other Campaign aims to do, extremely difficult.

As the Mexican government tries to appease the Mexican elite and transform its country from the misgoverned territory it is to the privatized and surveilled US “territory” as per SPP, they draw the map of the place it seeks to become. Baudrillard believed that the spectacle of Debord’s day no longer exists, that in fact the “map and the terrain are no longer distinguishable.” Used to steer society towards a predetermined “progress,” media is now the authority on reality. Many of us learn what is real from the media, creating a “hyperreality.” Reality is no longer lived nor created by the people, it is constructed, controlled and consumed. Hyperreality is the vessel of “progress.”

We are no longer in the society of spectacle…nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such…There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real (Baudrillard 1983)

The spectacle has been transformed into a simulacra of reality that lives in a simulacra of community. Baudrillard reads this divergence from the real as the beginning of the end of history. He saw history as a trajectory, and society as speeding faster and faster towards its end: into nothingness, non-reality. However, the end is still to be determined. The battles are still being fought, and the indigenous people of Mexico have been fighting these battles for centuries.

Soy Zapoteco.

Tu has querido negar mi existencia [. . . ]

Yo nací para ser hermano de mis hermanos pero

Esclavo a nadie.

Nosotros luchamos para todos. Nosostros sembramos para todos.

Mi voz celebrará el cielo y se unirá con mi voz y mas y

Juntos gritaremos: Somos Zapotecos!

I am Zapotec.

You have wanted to deny my existence [ . . . ]

I was born to be brother to my brother but

slave to no one.

We struggle for all. We plant for all.

My voice will celebrate the sky

and it will join with my voice and others’ voices and

together we will shout: We are Zapotec!

Poem from the “People’s Guelaguetza: Oaxacans Take it to the Streets” (Bishop and Cravey 2007)

Alongside the simulacra of Mexico as the terrorist buffer and resource of capital, exist the people with their own tactics to pull it in another direction.

Oaxaca and Community Radio

Community radio is illegal in Mexico, but this hasn’t kept the Mexican people from it. It is estimated that at any given time, there are more or less twenty community radio stations in operation (ibid), though the government routinely shuts them down. The media is a central tool for the dominant capitalist culture to engage in the simulacra of Mexican society. The consensuses based and participatory forms of government and life that still have a foothold in Mexico’s poor and indigenous territories are constantly undermining the neoliberal agenda in small ways through the expropriation of the media.

In Oaxaca, an integral part of the popular, indigenous and urban struggle has been the community radio movement. Indigenous communities use the radio a way to preserve and disseminate their languages and cultures as well as a tool of communication among people. In Oaxaca, the movement first emerged in Juchitán in the 1980’s when a coalition of campesinos, with the help of the radio to communicate tactics and ideology, drove out the PRI, leaving the town to it’s community government (Daria 2006).

Uprising in Oaxaca

The radio station of Section 22 of the National Union of educational workers is called Radio Plantón (plantón is the Spanish word for sit-in strike). The idea came in 1998, from the teachers assemblies of the educational union in reaction to the corporate medias monopoly of disinformation and its dissemination during the annual teacher strikes. With the help of many political organizations, individuals and community radio stations, on May 25^th, 2005, Radio Plantón was finally born. It was so successful it continued even after the Plantón. It was seen as an instrument of struggle not only for the teachers’ union but for the community as well. Being a radio station that was formed by such a diverse mixture of the Oaxacan community, Radio Plantón was later opened up to the direction of the community in order to be an educational, cultural, political and civic radio station. Section 22 utilized only 30% of programming time while the remaining 70% is occupied by a diverse mixture of civil society (ibid).

Before the Zapatistas came to Oaxaca during their tour of “The Other Campaign,” operators of Radio Plantón went to Chiapas to attend its first talks and formed the Media Network for the Sixth Declaration. There they broadcasted the Zapatista Plenary Assemblies live and continued the coverage of the Other Campaign nightly. In fact, one of the few forms of mass media that is continually disseminating the Sixth Declaration of the Zapatistas is radio.

In May of 2006, the routine 27^th annual sit-in strike of the teachers began. The teachers were again demanding better pay as well as better conditions for the children. Radio Plantón began its second annual broadcast covering the sit-in strike from the Zócalo, or central square, at the beginning of the strike. Radio Plantón had become the main source of information during the sit-in strikes. Nervous about repression by the police, some people listened day and night to make sure the radio stayed on the air (Un Poco de Tanta Verdad).

On June 14^th, when Ruiz’s several thousand state police violently repressed the striking teachers at 4am as they were sleeping, it was broadcast over the radio for 20-25 minutes before the station was destroyed by the police and the announcers beaten and arrested. People started coming out of their houses with the news of the repression and within two hours, students at the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez took over the university radio station, claiming it for the movement (Gause 2006, Davies 2006, Esteva 2006). The people took to the streets in protest of the violent repression of the teachers and by mid-day the police were driven out of the city center. In the days following, APPO was formed of the 350 organizations that mobilized alongside the teacher strike. The spontaneity of the movement was overwhelming. People mobilize themselves when they think their actions may bring about change; hope for real change was in the air.

According to Florentino, a member of the press committee, “APPO does not set out to impose any decisions, what we want is to integrate all the people so that together we can organize and govern the state” (Gause 2006).  This was not the typical left/right struggle that Americans are accustomed to, but a struggle to dissolve the pillars of power themselves. Relying on radio for communication, without leaders and using collective decision making, APPO advanced daily with announcements of new actions and strategies to force out the current governor. Radio programming included interviews with activists in the struggle, rallies for support of APPO, information about various actions that were happening across Oaxaca and they opened the phone lines for comments. Some of the teachers even conducted classes for their students over the airwaves. The radio became the lifeline between all the people in the movement, and the people knew it. The radio was the mediator of the movement.

On August 1^st approximately three thousand women flooded the street to protest the continued government repression in the style of the marcha de las caserolas (sauce-pan march), clanging together their pots and pans and spoons, drumming out their demands; “Ruiz fuera!”: “Governor Ruiz out!” A few hundred of them swarmed into Channel 9, a state run TV station that also housed a radio station, and demanded just an hour or less of time on the air, to tell their side of the story, as they were sick of seeing the government aligned untruth the station had been relentlessly broadcasting over the airwaves. After being refused permission to be on the air, the women kicked out all the employees from the station and ran it themselves, dubbing their new radio station “Radio Caserola.” It was then that for the first time any video footage of the violent repression of the sit-in strike was broadcast over the air, two and a half months after the fact (Esteva 2006, Davies 2006a).

The importance of control of the media for organizing and coordinating the ever growing APPO became more and more important in the weeks that followed the public TV and radio station occupation. Marina, a 25 year-old woman who had dedicated herself to Radio Caserola declared, “We have taken these spaces here to be the voice of all the people” (Davies, 2006a) Fidelia, another women in the take over said,

We are women who don’t usually have a voice because we are brown, we are short, we are fat and they think we don’t represent the people. But we do. We are the face of Oaxaca…it is too bad that the government doesn’t recognize the greatness, the heart and the valor of the women who are here. We are here because we want a free Mexico, a democratic Mexico, and we have had enough. (Stephen 2006)

The brave women who took over the states communication system had grown weary of watching the inconsistencies between their real-life experiences and the stories being reported by the media. In taking over the radio, the women hit upon a key ingredient for undermining the spectacle and also for supporting the movement as demonstrated by it’s success in mobilizing people quickly and also by the level of government repression subsequently aimed at the take-over. The people were not only challenging the physical government but were simultaneously confronting the “map and the terrain.” Without control of the media, the government could no longer maintain the spectacle nor its slipping grasp on state rule. Confrontation heated up more in the following weeks.

As the people took control of more of the city, and refused to be governed, it became obvious that the government was not necessary. They were relegated to the position of the underdog and couldn’t even go to work in the morning. Government officials were reduced to holding secret meeting in abandoned buildings. Between the months of June and November no police were seen in the city except in the night, when they conducted guerrilla style attacks on the people. Esteva reports that the first major attack on APPO was a convoy of 35 SUVs, which drove up to the sit-in and started shooting. APPO reported the situation instantaneously on its radio stations, and within minutes people started organizing barricades to impede the convoy. In one place, they were able to close the street with a truck and actually trap one of the SUVs and all its occupants, who then ran off.  The vehicle, with its official government insignia on the doors, was parked as an exhibit in Oaxaca’s central plaza for all to see (Esteva 2006). In the next few months more than 1000 barricades closed the streets from 11pm to 6am, to keep the people occupying the Zócalo and the Radio station safer. People with cell phones would call the stations with news of any suspicious activity and the station would broadcast it all over the state. Meanwhile, the mass media’s coverage of the barricades concentrated on the claim that APPO was denying citizens their basic human right to free movement around the city and would repeatedly play images of violence and vandalism that were a result of the anger of a few young people, though the huge majority of violence, destruction and human right violations were perpetrated by the government. APPO was committed to non-violence as a tactic.

Just three weeks after the take over of Channel 9 and Radio Caserola, at four in the morning, undercover police and mercenaries attacked and shot up the control rooms and antennas of the stations, injuring many of the broadcasters and the people who were guarding the antennas and as well destroying tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of government property.  The APPO had already anticipated this move from the government and had decided that in the case of an attack on the antennas and Channel 9, they would take over all other commercial stations, a task given to the people in different neighborhoods near these stations (Davies 2007). By nine in the morning, APPO occupied all private radio and TV outlets in the city. Instead of one, APPO suddenly had twelve options to disseminate information about the movement and to give voice to the people. That same evening, Ruiz continued to try to take down the popular media by shooting up the countryside around where the stations were located. One man died. That night Ruiz implied in an interview on Azteca TV, “No pasa nada en Oaxaca” – There is nothing going on in Oaxaca. He claimed that a few extremists and anarchists were up to their same old tricks of disrupting the peace. A couple of days later, government officials started an underground pirate radio station in the city of Oaxaca that disseminated anti-APPO propaganda[3] claiming to be “the voice of the people” and calling for violence against APPO (Un Poco de Tanta Verdad 2007).

After several days, APPO gave back all but one station to its owners. The one they kept was powerful enough to cover the whole state, but it too was successfully attacked and recovered by paramilitaries in October. However, the University Radio and others keep stepping up as the media of APPO.

The movement of APPO was a strong people’s movement like hasn’t been seen in decades. Oaxaca was lost to government rule. Political power is a relationship and in the world of the spectacle, this relationship is a relationship mediated by images. As images of Oaxaca under the control of the people were dispatched across Mexico and the globe, all that Ruiz could do was to deny it through his own media. Though corporations and governments still had control of the mass media, in Oaxaca there was a huge schism in the spectacle and the simulacra was disrupted, if only for a short while.

According to Mexican law, when a geographic location is in upheaval, the senate will travel to the area and determine whether the location is in a state of ungovernability. If it is found to be so, then the current government is removed. When the senate traveled to Oaxaca, they reported every condition that would deem the city and state to be in a state of ungovernability, however Ruiz was not required to, nor did he, leave. Oaxaca was, for a moment, a liberated city, but the Ruiz administration had a simulacrum of power on its side as well as money. A participatory and democratic state or territory cannot be ruled by capital. There were a few months where a real popular movement was running Oaxaca. When problems arose, it wasn’t the police or the law that were there to intervene, but APPO.

In early November, using the murder of American journalist Brad Will as an excuse, the federal government sent thousands of military and riot police to fight the APPO, creating chaos and more violence. They arrested, disappeared and killed hundreds of citizens. As the troops were descending upon Oaxaca, Calderón could be seen on TV Azteca declaring, “Peace has been restored to Oaxaca” (ibid, Esteva 2007). Under today’s global system, peace in Mexico is only equal to repression. APPO is not just a movement of the left, but a movement that challenged the legitimacy and function of centralized power itself. Much of what made it so dangerous to the Mexican Government and world economy is that is was the people themselves who were to govern. Had it merely been a movement of the institutional left it could have been dealt with; centralized power knows how to engage with centralized power because it plays by the rules. Power may change hands, but the institutional left always functions under the rules of capital.

…it is ‘enlightened’ thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game…as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules (Baudrillard 1983).

Because capital is so controlling of everyday life, we can’t even comprehend, and may even fear, life outside of its clutches. The institutional left does not try supercede capital, but place rules on it; to make it a kinder gentler capitalism. Capital will never behave. In fact it relies on governments, especially the imperialist and weak governments, to perpetuate itself. In Oaxaca, in the midst of the struggle, when it was young and full of hope, graffiti seen sprayed across the wall charged, “They’re trying to force us to govern, but it’s a provocation we’re not going to fall for” (Esteva 2007). APPO eventually did. The movement lost the day that APPO announced it would run a candidate in the 2008 elections.

Besides requiring weak states in the world economy, imperialist capitalism requires “weak citizenship in the spectacular centre” (Retort 2004:27). The mass media aims to create weak citizens and Mexico is a country dangerously close to the “spectacular centre.” US Imperialism needs weak citizens in the middle and upper classes of Mexico to act as a buffer between the government and the dissent stirring from below.

In Oaxaca, the people were winning, if only momentarily. Nevertheless, people have to feed their families, while the Mexican government receives millions of dollars in military aid from the US government. The Mexican government arrested, killed, disappeared and generally wore down the people, and after a year of struggle the APPO has largely come undone and gone underground. They still control some radio stations. The people’s frustration is still festering and their rebellious spirits are probably still intact for the most part. With the repression in Mexico only growing, full out war may be about to rear its ugly head.

More recently, in December of 2007, after declaring that he was headed back into the jungle as per his responsibility as a subcommander in the EZLN, Marcos’s warnings of impending war were even clearer. "Those of us who have made war know how to recognize the paths by which it is prepared and brought near," Marcos said. "The signs of war on the horizon are clear. War, like fear, also has a smell. And now we are starting to breathe its fetid odor in our lands” (Klein 2008).

According to Baudrillard, the future is inevitable. This impending war is the unavoidable trajectory of history and future according to capital. “It is tribal, communal, pre-capitalist structures, every form of exchange, language and symbolic organization which must be abolished. Their murder is the object of war” (Baudrillard 1983). There is no place in this future for a dissenting Mexico. The map is drawn. Debord had more hope; he believed one could contest and engage in the spectacle, but then, he ended his life with a bullet to the heart. These next years much will unfold as to whether the simulacra can be exposed for what it is. “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none” (Baudrillard 1983). Can we prove Baudrillard wrong and engage with and fight the simulacra? To critique Baudrillard’s defeatist viewpoint, it is completely anthropocentric and painfully Eurocentric. He regarded communists as the far left and disregarded ideals and thought that attempted to reach outside of capitalism, or merely reduced them to part of the spectacle. Though the entire world has been somewhat influenced by capitalism, I would argue that this does not mean we should give into this simulacra of the all-encompassing no-way-out capitalist system. It has not penetrated every core. The Zapatistas have often pointed out that we can’t change the world, but what we can do is attempt to build a new one. APPO functioned with many of the same ideas; they were largely attempting to build another world.

According to the Mayan calendar (the ethnicity to which the Zapatistas belong) this world ends in four years from the time I am writing this, December 21^st, 2012. Are we speeding into to nothingness as the real dissolves completely or do we have the option of writing a different story altogether? It is up to us to decide if another world is possible.

The Story of the Bay Horse

There once was a bay horse that was pinto like a bean, and he lived in the home of a very poor farmer and the poor farmer had a very poor wife and they had a very skinny chicken and a lame little pig. And so, one day the very poor wife of the very poor farmer said: “We have nothing more to eat because we are very poor so we must eat the skinny chicken." So they killed the skinny chicken and made a skinny soup of skinny chicken and ate it. And so for awhile they were fine, but the hunger returned and the very poor farmer told his very poor wife: 'We have nothing more to eat because we are so poor so we must eat the lame little pig. And so the lame little pig's turn came and they killed it and they made a lame soup out of the little lame pig and ate it.

And then it was the bay horse's turn. But the bay horse did not wait for thestory to end; it just ran away and went to another story. -Old Mayan Tale

Bibliography:

Alan. “State Terror and Dirty War: A Year of State Recuperation in Mexico.” Libcom. 8 October 2007. 7 November 2007. <http://libcom.org/news/state-terror-dirty-war-year-state-recuperation-mexico-08102007>

Baudrillard, Jean. “Precession of the Simulacra.” Simulations Simiotext(e). 1983

Carlsen, Laura. “Plan Mexico.” Foreign Policy in Focus. 30 October 2007. 15 November 2007. <http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4684>

Davies, Nancy. “The Communications War in Oaxaca.” NarcoNews, 2 November 2006. 7 November 2007 < http://narconews.com/Issue43/article2312.html>

---. “Dirty War for Control of the Media.” NarcoNews. 22 August, 2006. 7 November 2007 <http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2020.html>

Gause, Rochelle. “Community Radio Central to Struggle in Oaxaca.” Znet. 16 October 2006. 3 December 2007. <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11196>

Daria, James and Santamaria Dul. “Community Radio in Oaxaca Spreads the Other Campaign to the Four Winds” NarcoNews. 9 February, 2006. 23 December 2007. < http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1606.html>

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Red and Black, 1970

Esteva, Gustavo. “The Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, APPO: A Chronicle of Radical Democracy.” El Kilombo Intergaláctico. 6 November 2006. 23 October 2007 <http://elkilombo.org/documents/esteva.html> a

---. “The Other Campaign and the Left: Reclaiming an Alternative.” Znet. 18 December 2006. 30 November 2007. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11660 b

---. “The Other Campaign, APPO, and the Left.” Z Magazine March 2007. 20:3 c

Friedman, Thomas. “A Manifesto for the Fast World.” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999.

Indymedia NYC. “Friends of Brad Will Launch Intervention at Congressional Hearing on Plan Mexico.” 16 November, 2007. 18 November, 2007. http://nyc.indymedia.org/or/2007/11/92801.html

Klein, Naomi. “Big Brother Democracy.” The Nation 10 September, 2007.

---. “Zapatista Code Red.” The Nation 7 January 2008.

McNally, David. Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2002.

Petras, James. “Our ‘Man in Mexico’ and the Chiapas Massacre :Mexico is a virtual trade colony of the U.S.” Zmag December 1998. 28 December 2007. <http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/petrasapr98.htm>

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Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. U.S. Govt. 11 September 2007. <http://www.spp.gov>

Stephen, Lynn. “Oaxacan Women Democratize Media: Radio Carcerola and the APPO Movement.” Recombinant. August 2006. 7 November 2007. <http://osdir.com/ml/culture.internet.rekombinant/2006-08/msg00026.html>

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Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad. Jill Friedberg. Corrugated Films, 2007

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[1] The nice highways in Mexico have so many tolls that really only the rich can drive on them. I spent 180USD on tolls driving two days from Mexico City to the border. The average wage in Mexico is 400USD per month and the minimum wage is 100USD!

[2] Interestingly, at the most recent SPP “dialog” in Canada, no one came to address or listen to the protestors outside. The protesters were allowed to voice their dissent to some video cameras, and the recordings were then to be viewed and taken into consideration at a later time (Klein 2007). The media is the mediator in an even more literal sense.

[3] This propaganda was so malicious they claimed things such as that AIDS infected members of APPO were running around raping young women as a terrorist tactic.