The following documentary is a collection of testimonies from the people of Nochixtlán who lived through the massacre of June 19, 2016, where the police assassinated at least 11 protesters. After several attempts of negotiation by the government, with the family members of the dead, the people of Oaxaca maintain their position of rejecting both the Educational Reforms and the Structural Reforms.

“We don’t negotiate with our dead, rather we ask the federal government to leave, and the state government to move aside, because they don’t know how to govern the people and communities of Oaxaca,” said a mother who was part of Nochixtlán’s committee to dialogue with the federal government."

Translated by Scott Campbell

It has been more than a week since the massacre of June 19, perpetrated by the Mexican state, which gave the order to the Federal Police to retake control of this state. There is still no justice. The toll continues to climb, 12 deaths recorded so far, dozens disappeared and at least 100 wounded by firearms. On top of dealing with the aftermath of the deaths, now the relatives of the dead and wounded are being threatened so they don’t take any legal action. This was reported by lawyers advising the families.

“There is fear because there have already been threats directed towards the families and the prisoners who were arrested. They even arrested twenty people who were in the municipal cemetery digging a grave to bury a family member who passed away on June 18 due to causes unrelated to this situation. They tortured them during transport and they were held in the state police barracks for more than two days and in the end they released them and told them to go, that nothing had happened. Things are not so simple", said Mariana Arrellanes, a lawyer with Section 22 (of the teachers union) in Oaxaca.

While preparing this report a neighbor from Nochixtlán approached us and gave us a list of those wounded by weapons fire, she did not want to give her name for security reasons. “There are at least five with bullet wounds, but they don’t want to go to the hospital out of fear. Because family members are already getting threats for filing complaints,” she said.

Later, research for this report led to the collection of statements from some inhabitants of Nochixtlán, whose names are not mentioned for security reasons, who maintain that those “at the ISSSTE (health clinics for government employees) in Nochixtlán told them that they had to be operated on in the city hospital and if not, they would die.” The wounded rushed to the hospital but were received by the state prosecutor to take their statements. Four of them returned to Nochixtlán and only one was operated on.

Torture and irregularities

The lawyer states that the Federal Police performed acts of extreme torture on all those arrested in Nochixtlán and in the city of Oaxaca. For the first four detainees, there is not even a document stating that they were arrested, she says. “They just opened the doors and let them go because they were the most badly injured, they could not physically hide the kind of torture they were subjected to. They are willing to file formal complaints but there are also fears due to the threats, but we are not going to allow more impunity,” Arrellanes adds.

The lawyer discusses the irregularities in the investigations being carried out by the authorities. Bringing the prisoners before the appropriate authorities took more than 24 hours, for example. According to the new criminal justice system, immediately upon arrest they should have been brought before the appropriate authorities. “For us, they had been disappeared. In that moment, we filed a motion seeking protection from forced disappearance and a complaint seeking protective measures for them, to be presented alive in front of an official and for them to be released,” she adds.

Arrellanes is concerned with the chain of investigation. She notes that the autopsies and chain of custody have been irregular. “We have realized that there are irregularities in the compiling of the investigatory file. There is no chain of custody for the objects that were used, such as bullet casings. They haven’t safeguarded any of these things and this worries us because we don’t want history to repeat itself, where they take away a body with one gunshot wound and later two or three more appear. The chain of custody is not working,” the lawyer said.

Access denied to justice and healthcare

According to the lawyer, the Federal Judiciary suspended its work on the days of the incidents and during those moments “they denied us access to justice, because we tried to file an injunction against forced disappearance and there was no district judge.”

It was the same with access to healthcare. “The hospitals closed and that went for everybody. The Oaxaca Health Ministry will have to answer for the people who died due to lack of medical attention.”

Strategy of war

It is clear that the operation carried out in Oaxaca by the Federal Police was premeditated from the start and nothing was spontaneous. It is not news that the leadership of the army and federal police have received training in the United States in line with the Mérida Initiative agreements for the war against drug trafficking, the same ones who carried out the orders in the State of Oaxaca.

The first strategy deployed in this operation is one of the principles of US military doctrine, a media war, carried out through the manipulation of information in the media. In this case, they use this strategy to legitimize the Educational Reform and so justify the use of public force, and delegitimize the demands of the teachers.

In a second phase, this strategy of social control turned into psychological terrorism in Oaxaca. They took over the signal of the teachers’ radio station (Radio Plantón) and later that of Radio Universidad. Meanwhile, on social networks and in the corporate media, information circulated that “the Marines and the army were having confrontations with the teachers,” that “trucks with heavy artillery” were advancing on the city of Oaxaca. Before the federal police killed demonstrators, is was already on social networks that some demonstrators had “died in the confrontations” and they had been “infiltrated by teachers firing at the police.” However, in the images taken by various independent media outlets, one can see the police firing their weapons at people while the demonstrators take cover. The false alarms were immediately disproven by updates from independent media.

“It’s a dirty war where they are using terrorism to try to scare us. I can say that our young fallen were outflanked by the army. The death of each one of them is not by chance. Young people, 17, 19, 18, 25, and 32 years old. The youth have gained a strong consciousness through this struggle. There are young people today against schools bearing the name of Gabino Cué Monteagudo – governor of Oaxaca – because they don’t want the name of a murderer on their graduating class. Of course this is a media war using terrorism to scare us",

SAID ADRIANA MARCELINA LINARES ARROLLO, A MOTHER FROM TAMAZULAPAN, OAXACA.

The weapons didn’t appear out of nowhere and it was not a decision taken at the last minute. “They not only wanted to break up the demonstrations and blockades but wanted to generate terror so that the people would stop coming out into the streets to join this resistance. But the strategy has failed, now the people are angry and are ready for anything,” says a contributor to Radio Plantón who did not want to give his name for his own safety, as several members of that station have been threatened because they continue broadcasting.

“We demand the right to the truth. Who were those who gave the orders? Who allowed them to leave the barracks armed? Someone gave the order and that person is a high-ranking official. Because they didn’t pick them up passing by the store,” said the lawyer, Mariana Arrellanes.

The organizing of the people tends to aspire not to throwing out the governor, but going beyond that. “In Oaxaca there are experiences of self-government and the lessons from 2006 were precisely the experience of the assemblies, but we have to be aware of opportunists and those seeking to hop on the struggle that today is not only of the teachers but of the people of Oaxaca. We have to create processes of self-government and to not take any more of these corrupt and murderous governments,” the lawyer adds.

“We will not pardon or forget”

By James North

Nochixtlán—Before the federal police opened fire, the church bells in this town high in the mountains of southern Mexico rang out a warning. Mariana Sosa, a 51-year-old primary school teacher, was already out that morning with other demonstrators, blocking the nearby national highway, part of a wave of protests against a government effort to impose a new education policy partly designed to weaken the teachers union.

It was Sunday, June 19, market day in this town of 18,000, with added festivities planned for Father’s Day. Sosa (her name has been changed) remembered: “Hundreds of federales started arriving in busloads. First, they fired tear gas and rubber bullets and pushed us back. The church bells alerted our people to the danger, and they came down from the market to reinforce us.”

At about 10:30, the federal police started firing live ammunition. A young man was killed right next to Sosa, shot in the head. Within hours, a total of 10 unarmed protesters were dead here, and the police had killed another man elsewhere in Oaxaca State. Overnight, the government attack on a militant union exploded into a much broader uprising that reverberated across Mexico.

Astonishingly, the US mainstream media have barely covered what everyone here calls “the massacre.” Make no mistake: If police in Venezuela had shot down 11 unarmed demonstrators, a pack of American reporters would have raced there.

Three days after the killings, tens of thousands of white-clad health workers marched in 19 of Mexico’s 31 states, both to support the teachers and to resist government plans to reorganize their sector. Thousands of others blocked major highways in southern Mexico to reinforce the protest. In Oaxaca, the state capital just over an hour to the southeast of Nochixtlán, hundreds more maintained a tent city that covered the central plaza, in a tactic reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street.

The nationwide outcry forced President Enrique Peña Nieto to pull the federal police back. So here in Nochixtlán, the striking teachers re-established their blockade of national highway 190. Over a long day of conversations, what stood out was the respectable, middle-class nature of the protesters.

At first, the teachers and their supporters were wary of outsiders. They are indignant at the government’s campaign to lie about the massacre, with the complicity of most of the regional and national media. The government insinuated that some of the blockaders that Sunday were armed “guerrillas” who had “ambushed” the “unarmed” police.

Mariana Sosa and her colleagues refuted every point of the government’s account, giving precise times and descriptions as though they were testifying in court.

The teachers stress that they suffered all the casualties; in addition to the dead, more than 100 people were wounded. Jorge Gutierrez, a soft-spoken history teacher in his 40s, explained: “It was planned in advance. The police put snipers in a couple of hotels. They used heavy weapons we have never seen before. We are teachers; we don’t use arms. Our weapons are our ideas.”

They added that some of the wounded were still too afraid to come forward, even to the local hospital, for fear of eventual reprisals.

Efraín Vera, whose subjects are English and reading comprehension, explained why the public is rallying behind the teachers: “Here, the teacher is a vital figure, especially in the rural areas. You are a second father or mother, an adviser, a psychologist. Just last week I gave one of my students 20 pesos [just over $1] because I could see that he was hungry.”

“What’s more,” he added, “every family has at least one teacher among them, and they are proud of that person.”

Vera, like the others, belongs to the now famous Section 22 of the CNTE, the National Coordination of Education Workers (for more background, see David Bacon’s recent report, “Why Are Mexican Teachers Being Jailed for Protesting Education Reform?”). He recognizes that there have been some abuses in union practices, but he is emphatic that the Mexican government’s stated concerns are not sincere. “The government never came to listen to us before imposing this so-called ‘reform,’” he said. “It only came to punish us.”

In an echo of one questionable trend in US education, the Mexican government also wants to start competency testing for teachers. Vera said, “We recognize that teachers, as public employees, should be evaluated. But then so should our president.” He gave a sly smile. President Peña Nieto’s lack of intelligence is notorious in Mexico, the subject of a steady stream of jokes and comic skits.

Adriana Marcelina Linares, the outspoken leader of a local parents’ organization, was not afraid to use her real name. “One more stripe on this tiger is not going to matter,” she said, laughing. Linares was hard at work in resistance headquarters, an elementary school in the center of town. Classrooms have become impromptu offices; volunteer lawyers were meeting with survivors and families of the dead, and an open-air communal kitchen prepared food. Hand-lettered posters were everywhere. The atmosphere was business-like and determined.

Linares expressed a common view here, that racism and prejudice partly explain why the national government felt it could open fire with impunity. This is a poor, indigenous area, in which more than half the people speak the Mixteca language. There is a feeling that the lighter-skinned rulers in Mexico City regard the people of Oaxaca and other southern states as colonial subjects. The federal police, who are from elsewhere in Mexico, are seen as an invading army.

Linares said simply: “As indigenous people, we have the right to be taken into account. And we think it is better for the federal government to simply leave.”

In Mexico, coverage of the massacre is ludicrously biased. Press and television continue to float slanders against the teachers and their supporters, while running alarmist reports about the shortages the highway blockades are alleged to be causing.

To counter, people here use Facebook, which some simply abbreviate to “Face.” Santiago Navarro, in his mid-30s, is part of an alternative news site called Avispa (Wasp), which publishes its own reports online. He points out that there is only a single trustworthy radio station, which the government has jammed in the past. “They quickly license a new, more powerful station to broadcast at nearly the same frequency, to drown us out,” he said.

For now, the Mexican government has backed down slightly, and opened negotiations with the teachers. Oaxaca City is a major tourist destination, and the US government has already issued a travel warning due to the unrest. Mariana Sosa noted bitterly, “You should start talking before you fire murderous bullets, not after.”

She says Nochixtlán, and Mexico in general, are at the beginning of a long struggle. “Our watchword is, ‘We will not pardon or forget,’” she said. “Until many years from now, when the last person who witnessed this massacre has died, we will keep the memory alive.”

Published by TheNation