Teachers and residents of Asuncion Nochixtlan, Oaxaca clash with police on June 19, 2016. |
By
Ines Pousadela
Mexico is experiencing a monumental human
rights crisis. There is abundant evidence of widespread human rights violations
in the country, including torture, extrajudicial executions, enforced
disappearances and violence against journalists and human rights defenders.
As worrying as the hard data is, what’s even
more worrying is the Mexican government’s continued refusal to acknowledge the
situation. In the words of Yésica Sánchez Maya of Consorcio Oaxaca, a civil
society organization, the State “is investing more efforts and resources in
denying the existence of a problem that is apparent [to the whole world] than
in actually solving it.”
Despite constitutional guarantees, the rule of
law is incomplete and highly uneven in Mexico. In states such as Oaxaca, where
protesting teachers recently met violent repression, or Guerrero, where 43
students from a teachers’ college were disappeared and are presumed dead since
2014, civil society organizations and activists face powerful restrictions.
These include violence linked to drug trafficking, the infiltration of local
governments by increasingly diversified organized crime operations, pervasive
corruption, police repression, and severe human rights violations by the
security forces.
In June, Oaxacan teachers took to the streets to protest what
they see as questionable government “education reform”. Over the weekend of June
19 and 20, security forces killed at least nine and wounded dozens in attacks
on the teachers and local residents. A statement
cosigned by several Mexican civil society groups highlighted that Oaxacans live
in a context of “generalized” violence in which social movements – especially
those involving teachers – have been long criminalized by the courts, the
security forces and the media.
Teachers’ union leaders often face judicial
harassment, including arrest and detention. One such arrest took place on June
11, just as the protests climbed. The teachers denounced the arrest as a
politically motivated act of judicial harassment, dismissing the alleged
embezzlement and money laundering charges as mere excuses meant to deactivate
the protest, therefore redoubling their ongoing road blocking strategies. In
the days and hours before violence was unleashed, the authorities turned the
area into a war zone: as tension increased, an air fleet overflew the area and
large numbers of militarized police forces were deployed. Nothing but tragedy
could result from the heavily armed security units facing the crowds.
The same old discussion ensued regarding the
mobilized teachers’ moral virtues (were they peaceful enough?), their tactical
choices (how legitimate is road-blocking, one of their preferred methods of
disruption?), their policy preferences (were they right in opposing education
reform?), and even their subjective reasons for rejecting the government’s
proposed changes (were they afraid of losing their jobs if their performance
was evaluated?). While policy choices are for Mexicans to discuss – and one of
the main grievances expressed in the streets is that the government is trying
to impose a reform rather than submit it to public discussion – there is no
justification of the use of deadly force by state authorities.
Contrary to current best practices regarding
the management of public assemblies, Mexico’s federal government and the state
government of Oaxaca have once again resorted to punitive measures to maintain
public order. They treated roadblocks, historically a part of social movements’
tactics of resistance, as serious crimes. They used the criminal justice system
as a tool to both inhibit protests and punish protestors for engaging in them.
The violent government reaction against social protest on June 19 and 20
therefore came as no surprise. According to the authorities, it was when the
police tried to evict the protestors that unidentified gunmen, apparently not
linked to the protest organizers, opened fire, and chaos followed. Following
the incidents, eyewitnesses agreed that the protestors themselves had been
unarmed.
Read Human Rights, Page 2.
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