Oaxaca’s Unrest Echoes America’s Civil Rights South

MERIDA, Yucatan – Mexicans were both apprehensive and relieved to see Federal forces seized control of Oaxaca City’s central square last Sunday, where thousands of protestors had occupied since May demanding the resignation of Oaxaca State governor Ulises Ruiz.

In the nation’s decade-long evolution into a multi-party democracy – Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, defeated the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled undefeated for seven decades, in 2000 – it is Mexico’s impoverished South where change has come most slowly.

Mexicans have long been frustrated by the persistent poverty of the southern states, not unlike Americans who were stunned to see the level of poverty and oppression in the American South during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. In 1994, when the Zapatista launched a “rebellion” in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, Mexicans were as horrified by revelations of the poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition that characterized the lives of the Maya highland peoples.

Other regions of in Mexico are witnessing the blossoming of democratic institutions – opposition candidates were being elected to governorships, city halls and both houses of Congress from around the nation- but in the southern states the PRI’s oppressive hegemony seemed untouchable.

Not unlike the American South, where the vision of black men lowering their eyes in the presence of whites and muttering, “Yes, sir,” made many cringe, the continued practice of PRI governors busing thousands of into their state capitals for “spontaneous” rallies made Mexicans in the rest of the country enraged with shame.

Critics long complained that Vicente Fox turned his back on the democratic aspirations of the Oaxacan people by ignoring them. One of the poorest regions, Oaxaca has grown more impoverished under NAFTA which flooded Mexico with cheap U.S. agricultural imports. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of Zapotec and Mixtec peoples from Oaxaca have migrated to the United States over the past decade, becoming a major source of undocumented workers. For those who have remained, their standard of living has continued to decline, prompting greater resistance to the status quo.

Fox preferred to remain distant for two reasons. First, he believes each state’s democratic evolution should reflect its internal dynamics and history. Second, unlike Ernesto Zedillo, Fox could not “order” a PRI governor to resign his post – something Zedillo could do simply by demanding that the PRI party leadership broker a deal behind closed doors.

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