Oaxaca: - A Sign of What May Be to Come for the Rest of Mexico?

The whole event began as a fairly routine teacher’s strike, but when state police violently attacked an encampment of striking teachers on June 14, 2006, killing at least three teachers and children, a popular uprising broke out in their support. The teacher’s bread and butter demands for higher wages and more funding for dilapidated schools were joined to a growing mass movement broadly united under the APPO, that had one non-negotiable imperative: state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz must leave office.

Police and other authorities were driven out, and government offices occupied or blockaded, in cities, towns and villages across Oaxaca. Commercial and government-run radio stations were taken over by teachers and other activists to serve as the movement’s primary form of communications. Following months of paramilitary violence and harassment conducted against teachers and the APPO, resulting in dozens of disappearances, arrests and deaths, Mexican federal police forcibly reoccupied the state capital of Oaxaca City in November 2006, at which point the entries of the book conclude.