San Francisco: March and Rally in Solidarity with Oaxaca and Against the Police

On Friday, July 15, 150 people took the streets in an unpermitted march in San Francisco’s Mission District against state-sanctioned police murders of Black, Brown and poor people in the US and in solidarity with the ongoing rebellion in Oaxaca, Mexico, which has become increasingly radicalized and widespread since it began with the teachers strike on May 15th against a new educational reform. The march highlighted the 14 comrades brutally murdered by the Mexican state and visited the sites of the murders of both Amilcar Pérez-López and Luis Góngora Pat at the hands of the San Francisco police department.

After visiting the sites of public execution, the march continued toward the Mission Police Station on Valencia St. About half a block past the station on Valencia St. towards 16th St., an argument developed between comrades participating in the march and corporate media filming the event. This led to a news reporter’s bodyguard attacking and pepper-spraying protesters. The police then quickly attacked the protesters, assaulting and arresting four people. The crowd held the street in a tense confrontation with a line of riot police on motorcycles where people chanted, challenged police, built barricades with garbage bins, painted anti-colonial and anti-police slogans, and lit a fire in the intersection.

We will continue to keep the spirit of resistance lit in the streets in solidarity with the anarchists, the teachers, the students and the people of Oaxaca who are resisting and risking their lives for their freedom and autonomy and the Black, Brown and poor who have been murdered at the hands of the state in the US. We draw great inspiration from the love, solidarity and resistance the people of Oaxaca demonstrate in their streets when standing together in the face of the Mexican state and the capitalist forces of privatization, so much so that it causes us to spill into our own streets to remember our dead here in the bay, and fight for the living, without compromise, and without borders.