Davies: Remembering the Repression in Oaxaca

Dear Colleague:

Nancy Davies reports on the one-year anniversary of the Mexican government's assault on the "Oaxaca Commune." On November 25, 2007, federal police swept through Oaxaca City, making mass arrests and clearing the hundreds of barricades that the movement behind the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca had maintained for months. Some saw it as the end of an historic popular uprising, but Davies reports that the Popular Assembly movement is far from over, though it struggles to overcome internal differences:

"The first event of the day marched into the Oaxaca zocalo around noon, a procession of peoples and banners reminiscent of all the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, in its Spanish initials) marches of the past year and a half. Nothing impeded their entry; a speaker's platform and various banners were set up in much the same way as we have seen them, both before and after the repression of November 25, 2006. The APPO refuses to give up...

"However, one APPO segment, consisting of the communist groups Popular Revolutionary Front (FPR) and Broad Front of the Popular Struggle (FALP), plus the New Left (Nueva Izquierda) and a split Committee of Oaxaca Women (COMO), did not attend the Third State Assembly of the APPO on November 17-18. The FPR/APPO spokesperson Florentino Lopez declared that no such meeting would take place. He was quoted in the local daily newspaper Noticias de Oaxaca, which accepted him as the APPO spokesperson. Instead, Lopez announced at the same press interview, there would be a November 25 march at 4:00 PM, leaving from Llano Park to conclude at the Pañuelito garden. He did not mention the morning march."

Read the full, detailed commentary on the current state of the APPO here:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue48/article2912.html

Also, Brenda Norrell writes in the Narcosphere on the recent revelations of drug trafficking by Arizona National Guard members:

"While those soldiers were being sentenced in recent months in Tucson, the Arizona National Guard announced its soldiers would be commanding an armed drone in Iraq by remote control from Tucson... Which brings us to the present, and the fact that Arizona National Guardsmen are helping build the border wall on the Tohono O'odham Nation. While an Indigenous Peoples' delegation was at the border on Tohono O'odham land, near San Miguel, on Nov. 8, 2007, the National Guardsmen were part of the crew building the wall."

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2007/11/27/134159/98

And finally, Narco News translates this weekend's column by former Colombian central bank chief Salomón Kalmanovitz calling for drug legalization. Kalmanovitz shows how recent developments only highlight the failure of prohibition, and expresses hope that with a change in the White House next year, Colombia and other nations suffering under a U.S.-imposed war on drugs might finally have a hope of sparking change...

http://www.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Editor-in-Chief
The Narco News Bulletin
www.narconews.com

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