'Y las paredes siguen hablando,' photo by Mauricio Magaña. Oaxaca, 2010.
I will try my best to be brief precisely because it is almost impossible to think of brevity after spending hours and hours listening to people weave stories into tapestries of esperanza. Last week was probably one of the hardest and most fruitful weeks of my life. I have had little time to think or wallow in 'foreigness' lately. I have been overwhelmed with emotions rushing gushing and spilling out of me; laughter, happiness, uncertainty, impotence, sadness, rage, and so, so much esperanza it poured out in tears several times. Too much has happened and I had been unable to write anything out of sheer exhaustion. This is my first attempt at reflecting on some of what was lived last week and I have chosen to begin by writing about Aurora and Antonio.
On Friday we went to a local university to hear two ex-commanders of a guerrilla group called the Insurgent People's Revolutionary Army (
Éjercito Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente - ERPI). The ERPI grew out of another well known guerrilla group here in Mexico, the
EPR with whom these two commanders broke from to form the ERPI in 1997. Both Gloria Arenas Agis and Jacobo Silva Nogales, known as
Coronela Aurora and
Comandante Antonio were political prisoners until late October of 2009 a little over ten years after being
apprehended in late October 1999. Curiously the year before their arrests was the year the Mexican government formed the
Federal Preventive Police (Policía Federal Preventive - PFP). The PFP was in fact the unit responsible for their arrests just as they were in charge of bringing order to Oaxaca in late
2006 during the APPO rebellion.
Both Gloria and Jacobo were arrested without warrants, both were severely tortured, and both were accused of a long list of crimes including rebellion, sabotage, murder, terrorism, etc. When apprehended neither denied their identities and both were presented to the public at a rueda de prensa in an effort to show the government's efficiency at dealing with crime. Finally both were sentenced to over 50 years in prison.
Being accused of a crime in Mexico, especially if done for political reasons, means guilty until
proven innocent, or to put it bluntly it means guilty with a stroke of a pen and regardless of a person's innocence. Piles of evidence in a person's favor will do nothing to reverse sentencing and will most likely, depending on the judge, never leave a person's file to be reviewed. A case in point here in Oaxaca is the case of
Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno currently in prison accused of shooting the American Indymedia journalist
Brad Will in 2006.
The talk on Friday was inspiring. Walking into the room I recognized Gloria. Something about her was so familiar to me I felt I knew her, I tried to recall why I felt this way while rationalizing in my mind the impossibility. I decided I must have seen her picture or seen a video of her somewhere at some point. Like Jacobo's, Gloria's face reflected an enormous sense of peace that made the idea of them spending 10 years in a maximum federal state penitentiary seem unimaginable. The room was full and the conversation focused largely on how to conceptualize and live fundamental social change without 'taking power,' ( to recall Holloway's 'How to change the world without taking powers'). Gloria and Jacobo spoke quietly yet with resolution while answering questions, showing an unfledging support and speaking of their incorporation into the continuing lucha for fundamental social change.
What was most surprising however, to most of us listening and asking from the audience was how these two ex-guerrilleros, Aurora y Antonio, political prisoners just recently released, having endured torture, and ten years in a maximum security prison, were tremendously moved by the people of Oaxaca. Their respect for the Oaxacan movement was unprecedented. I have heard reporters, NGOs, people disappointed by the movement, and a slew of academics discuss, speculate, and make conclusions over what exactly happened in the southern Sate of Oaxaca in 2006. The controversies extend from the usual arguments over semantics, (was this a movement? was this a rebellion? was this an uprising? and does it even matter?), to the aloofness of many who decided to shock-it-all-up to a few power hungry individuals pulling their usual puppetry tricks in the name of social change, in other words the tendency to reduce peoples participation to merely political manipulation. Ah but if only it were that simple... If only we could homogenise real life like we do often in our minds or on paper... Pardon me as I celebrate the fact we can't!
Gloria and Jacobo spoke with great admiration about the many lessons Oaxaca had shown the rest of Mexico in 2006, despite the aftermath and the current apathy that seems to permeate the Oaxacan landscape. It was clear that they had taken much from what was experienced in Oaxaca, not in the defeatist sense that many seem to have taken, or in fruitless arguments over whether or not what happened can be considered a movement, but by focusing on the glimmer of esperanza the Oaxacan movement was able to reveal, simply put, by imagining the possibilities.
To them the Oaxacan movement is exemplary of what el pueblo can accomplish, how it can organize, and even how it can surpass more than one would-be leader. Yes some people within the movement sold their soul to the devil, yes there was repression, yes the same governor is still in power in large part due to the Federal Government's complicity, but beyond the materially and academically measurable how did people move, react, defend, fight, or even understand their own process etc. There will always be those who take the route of politics, who are able to gain materially by taking advantage of movements, but at the same time there will also always be those who will not follow, who will make their own paths, who will challenge through their actions, and surpass movement structures. That was more than evident in 2006.
Yet in a sense those of us in that room needed to hear it, not from the countless NGOs, reporters, or academics who have tried to speculate, but from Aurora and Antonio who have spent a lifetime working, fighting, and believing in social change. Their voices echoed in those walls louder and more clearly than the voices of those of us who spend a lifetime behind desks analyzing data, deconstructing and reconstructing Babylon. In a sense their presence here in Oaxaca served to re-ignite a lingering flame amongst many Oaxaqueños whose participation in 2006 has been either elevated to misunderstood heroics or diminished to an anomaly. And so the flame of esperanza shines bright in the torn up streets of Oaxaca.
