By Maureen Welch

The quality of alternating tension and patience during the ongoing magisterio protest is best evoked by the name of their encampment of the downtown: the plantón. In Spanish, plantón translates to seedling, or in the common colloquialism estar en un plantón, to be standing around in one place for a long time. Beginning on May 22nd, the teacher strike slowly unfurled until events reached a fever pitch on June 14th when state police were called in to violently eject the protestors from the city center. Now the regrouped plantón has settled in for another time of uneasy waiting and gestation, punctuated by large popular marches the likes of which Oaxaca has never seen and the creation of 350-organization strong Asamblea Popular de Pueblo de Oaxaca (APPO).

In the first weeks after Section 22 of the National Teachers Union (SNTE in its Spanish initials) strung up their tarps in the city center most Oaxaqueños appeared unperturbed. I was told that this had been an annual event for the last 25 years, and while disruptions in the transportation and the tourist industry were to be expected, everyone assumed the teachers would be placated before the time summer recess approached.

By the end of the second week of the plantón awareness grew that this year might be different. The most noticeable change was an increasingly insistent demand for the resignation of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the PRI governor of Oaxaca. By the second megamarcha on June 7th this demand was front and center. Ruiz,va a caer, “Ruiz is going to fall,” was a persistent rallying cry for the estimated 150,000 marchers. Sometimes this cry was changed to
Ruiz ya cayó, or, “Ruiz has already fallen.” There have been four megamarchas in support of the SNTE in all, with the last two drawing 400,000 to 500,000 participants after June 14th’s failed desalojo or “displacement” garnered considerable public sympathy for the teachers.

Ruiz has only been in office for eight months but has managed to alienate a significant number of the population. Several expensive renovation projects of the Zócalo , Plaza de la Danza, Paseo Juarez Park, and widening of the Cerro Fortin road were conducted without local consultation over planning and cost. The newspaper El Impartial published amounts spent on the renovation projects as well as public monies used for political campaigning.

The former amount especially enraged the union, who readily accuse Ruiz of using it to “destroy the cultural patrimony” with the renovations. The latter budget item gave rise to at least two occasions of civil disobedience where groups of teachers swept through the streets of Oaxaca pulling down the ubiquitous campaign banners.

The turning point of the teacher’s strike came as Oaxaca woke to the sound of helicopters circling downtown. Late on June 13th the teachers received word of a possible attack near dawn. State police first arrived at 4:55 in the morning at the teacher’s hotel where many leaders of the magesterio were taken into custody. Concurrently, 3,000 state police streamed into the center of town. With full-body riot shields and batons, the police entered into confrontation with the more than 30,000 teachers who were encamped there.