Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Oaxaca, Mexico: Letter from a Zapotec


The Mexican democratic system allows Mexican people to enjoy the constitutional rights of free education, freedom of speech and manifestation of our ideas; but throughout the last five months the citizens of Oaxaca have been under the abuse of a badly called radical group named asamblea popular del pueblo de Oaxaca. This group does not represent the entire population of Oaxaca, they are just a radical- extremist minority, that is expanded by the size of their criminal acts.

Oaxaca has been kidnapped by this organization over the last 5 months. What you may need to ask to these people is, where are they from?

The movement once started by teachers asking for a rise in their wages (which they may need to ask themselves if they deserve it, since Oaxaca is always in the last place of national education evaluations, besides the fact they only work less than 200 days a year and get paid for almost 450 working days a year - i whish i could earn that for doing as little as they do), is now corrupted by people from other movements like atenco, panchos villa radicals, epr, erpi (guerrilla), and others.

I am writing this comment since over this time the national and international media reporters have been focusing their attention into one single voice, and that is appos, or the one of some teachers (the ones that continue on strike, some regions of the state already returned to their classrooms and some others have been replaced by people paid by the own parents of these children whose teachers refuse to return to their classrooms), Most of us, working people who was born here in Oaxaca and loves the peace of our state; and that, in numbers, represents most of the people, we don’t speak, we just stay quiet while the parts involved in the conflict acts affecting our work and peace in all senses.

We do not march every day or paint the exterior of our own houses with insults (as appos does; some of them with an awful orthography - by reading some graffiti, u can see the ones who wrote them are not teachers, because if they are, they should feel ashamed of their lack of knowledge in Spanish language), we live in the 570 districts of the 7 regions of our state, so different one to the other, from the mountains to the coast, from the isthmus to the central valleys, all of us united by only one great idea: Oaxaca.

Me, im a zapotec born person, that by my own effort (nobody gave me anything) earn an sponsorship from the government to study abroad. i know, as most of the people born in Oaxaca knows, that in order to achieve a better wellbeing for our families and for our towns, we have to work every single day, Saturdays and Sundays included. This people with their stupid barricades deny the freedom we have to go from one place to another, from our houses to the place we work in. As they have nothing to lose with their attitude, they don’t care; as they don’t care about what us and about how the greatly affect us, we know they are not from here, t

Juan Sin Tierra |11.01.06 - 3:20 am |




(The Zapotec are the natives most common to this area. They would call themselves the indigenous peoples of the Oaxacan valleys. They had just about all been overrun by the Mixtec when Cortez arrived.)


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