We are planning to go to Puerto Angel this weekend -- leaving Thursday afternoon. W're going with the bird watchers and planning to go out to sea to see sea birds. (hmmm. That's alliteration, right?) Puerto Angel is on the Pacific coast in the state of Oaxaca. This isn't the city of Oaxaca and we will be going on major roads so I am pretty sure all will be fine. I'm ambivalent about going not because it's to Oaxaca but because I am always uneasy about going on trips before hand.
If you have been reading about Oaxaca in the papers and seeing/hearing about it in the news, you are both wrong and right to have concerns. You don't need to have any about us. At least not too many. (I told you, I'm always worried about trips before I start on them.) The concerns for Oaxaca are actually concerns about the whole country. I am going to try not to spend a lot of time on sociopolitical issues in this blog/letter to family and friends, but I will mention here that Mexico in a way is a microcosm of globalization as well as a crossroads between first and third-world countries. As well it is at a crossroads with choices to be made for the future: will it be dominated (and some say destroyed) by trying to follow the Chinese model or will it try a different tack and take innovative steps to develop its natural endowments in a sustainable way on behalf of more of its citizens. Many years ago when Nixon was President of the U.S. he decided to inflict pomp and circumstance on the country and dressed up various branches of the armed services in fancy suits and so on. I barely remember anymore. Maybe it's still the same and has just drifted out of my awareness. But in those days, people said he was making the USA look like a banana republic. Banana republic implied then as now gaudy dictatorships in horribly unequal societies a few, very rich and powerful usually white people on top; very, very poor and of course seemingly powerless and darker people on the bottom. And dictators. Although with the press reporting the democratization of Latin America talking about Banana Republics has gone out of style, Mexico (and the US) is in danger of becoming a full-fledged banana republic. We have been used to hearing about the democratization of Latin America, but we are being fooled. Globalization, free markets, do not in anyway guarrantee democracy, much less economic well-being for a substantial number of people.
Interestingly enough, though Mexico was a dictatorship by party -- the PRI or Partido revolucionario institutional-- for seventy years, in some ways, more of the people were better served than, say, in Venezuela or Chile. Much, much larger percentages of the population are literate (I believe that more people are functionally literate in Mexico than in the US), had and have access to some health care, etc. etc. Also in Mexico, more people are obviously mixed: indigenous and Spanish with, especially in the East, a dash or more of African. There is a large lower-but-working (extremely hard) class and a middle class. You can see this not just in big cities but in smaller towns throughout Veracruz.
But there is severe poverty, too, stretching its fingers through rural areas and urban areas alike: poor indigenous farmers who have had land seized or who can no longer make it in the globalized market or whose land has died; formerly employed factory workers who've seen jobs go overseas; clerks, police, and teachers.
In Oaxaca, the first protest was by the teachers. Throughout Mexico teachers are paid very little and for instance here in Veracruz, they have to go to teach where they are sent by the government. They cannot afford cars and frequent bus trips are beyond their means. Here in Veracruz, teachers from Xalapa may be sent fifty or sixty miles down the road to Cardel, say, to teach. They take a room there, and on Fridays and Sundays you can see them hitching rides home or back to school.
Oaxaca is much poorer than Veracruz. I suspect most of the problems here are worse there, sometimes much worse. It is the canary in the mineshaft, if you will. It has a dictatorial (ironically, PRI) governor who, instead of attending to the teachers tried to clamp them down. He has been accused of corruption and stealing money. The Fox goverment reportedly left him alone because Fox's party, PAN needed the PRI to have any chance at the last election. THEN the Fox government moved in, rumor has it, at the governor's request when he couldn't bring things under iron-fisted control (and possibly at the urging of the US) to try with more force to put a lid on things. This failed. It also happened when, according to La Jornada, and the Catholic Church, negotiations were actually getting somewhere.
There has been very little violence on the part of the demonstrators, but the national and state police have reportedly taken a number of people prisoner without saying where they are and have killed several in crackdowns.
Anyway, I am reminded about when we would hear about brutal incidents in Uganda when we were in the Peace Corps. They would be reported in the US press and parents would panic. We often didn't know anything at all had happened until we got our very late editions of Newsweek. It's the same here. We do not feel endangered. But as Uganda was, so is Mexico as a country endangered. I might add, so are ordinary people throughout the world.