PRI wins in Oaxaca elections, 2 Catalans and 1 mexican taken off the streets by police

Last night, while the votes were being counted that confirmed a PRI sweep of the state legistlative elections, three people were taken off the streets of the Zocalo in Oaxaca City by police at approximately 10 pm. Among them were two Catalans and one Mexican woman. Their status is still unknown over twelve hours later, and they have not been found in any jail. There is no other confirmed information surrounding their arrests.

The elections, in which almost 80% of the Oaxacan population abstained from voting, came as a dissapointment for the APPO’s “punishment vote” campaign against the PRI.

Police presence was extremely heavy in the streets of Oaxaca City last night and today.
By midnight last night one could see over 30 trucks of armed state and judicial police drive through the streets surrounding the Zocalo, and men in plain clothes came through the Zocalo with machetes and cut down the political banners remaining from the section 22 teachers sit-in that ended yesterday. Even later at night state workers came to paint over political graffiti and stencils covering the walls of the buildings in the Zocalo.

With 80% of the state abstaining from voting the legitimacy of the state democracy is questionable, and the low-turn out shows the collective disillution in Oaxaca with the electoral process that has left the heavily contested PRI party, to which Ulises Ruiz belongs, in power for over 70 years.