Since we've moved here in August, things seemed relatively calm, considering the events of 2006, when the most active wing of the school teachers' union organized government protests which caused full-scale social chaos and violence between May and November 2006. The federal government sent in troops and people were killed, including an American journalist. Commerce and tourism, the bread and butter industry of Oaxaca, were destroyed and took a year to even start to recover. People who've lived here for a while said that the Day of the Dead 2007 was a coming back party of sorts for Oaxaca. But still the City is 200,000 short of the tourism goal as of now, according to an article in Noticias, the local paper.
Starting late last year, there has been a slate of violent incidents involving police officials as victims. A police chief of a neighboring town was gunned down as he jogged in a park. Another local police chief was killed and his shoe shine man injured in a drive-by shooting in one of the most-visited parks in the center of town, where I just had a play date for the kids.
My Spanish teacher says this type of violence has been happening in the rest of Mexico, but were not in Oaxaca until this year. She says there is entrenched police corruption tying their interests to drug cartels and other illicit businesses because they are never paid well for their services. Because of this situation, the police do not protect the interests of people, and make the society more dangerous, she says.
She told me that she knows people who are in hiding for fear of kidnapping. She says there are more for-sale signs for houses because some folks are trying to leave town. She herself is contemplating leaving to Queretaro, another state and city that she says is safer and is nice. The footnote to this is that under the corrupt state government headed by the governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (known by his initials URO), who was the main object of teachers' protests, some people have profited illicitly. It's easy to wonder why there are so many late-model cars in a town full of poor people, the capital of one of the poorest states in the country. Such people might be afraid of reprisals in this lawless atmosphere.
My Spanish teacher is a person of considerable means, who used to own two homes. She just sold one of them and is weary of holding on to the money. She also says there are rumors of protracted teacher protests returning to Oaxaca. Without having more intensive conversations with other friends who are not so well-off, it's hard to say her characterizations of the security situation are fair. My guess is most of the population of the city doesn't have the luxury of mobility even in the face of serious security problems. Or rather, they don't want to move whatever happens in teh city because to move would mean leaving family and friends behind, and that is just not done. Because of this, I'm reluctant to ask my middle- and lower-middle friends what they think of the situation. They may dismiss the murders as isolated incidents because they do not have a choice.
Because of these incidents, the departure date we have now set for June 28 does not seem so bad anymore
. It's nice to be temporary residents, sometimes. But this feeling also makes me feel like a flake, after spending a lot of energy trying to feel like a bona fide resident here. Oaxaca is a place of contrast, of poverty and wealth, of beauty and ugliness, of the ingenuity of people in the face of extreme challenges and the debilitating dysfunction of corrupt and incompetent government that claim to represent the people. It is a privilege to have had the opportunity to experience some of it directly. The politics of the place is amazingly complicated, owing to years of bad governance.
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