My partner and I only have a few more days in Oaxaca, and if one thing is clear from our time here, it's that it's impossible to have any comprehensive understanding of a place without a committing oneself to it for an extended period of time. I'm talking years. Anything less can end up being exploitative and touristy, which is a particularly salient risk for travelers from the Global North like myself.

When tourists cruise through a foreign country, harvesting souvenirs and selectively dispensing a few travelers checks, they often want a taste of "the local flavor." Leftists and radicals can do the same thing, backpacking through the Global South to glean inspiration from others' struggles before heading home at their leisure. Either way, that's gross.

I want to share a few observations from my time in Oaxaca, but I want to do it with these cautions in mind, in hopes that they'll help northern radicals stand in solidarity more effectively with the struggles of the Global South--where, believe me, they've got a lot cooking.

What's the Dish?

There are already a bajillion narratives of the 2006 Oaxaca rebellion online and in print [1], so I'll try not to rehash a tired timeline. The short version: in 2006, a not-so-unusual teacher's strike overflowed into full-scale rebellion when police cracked down on a protest encampment in the zocalo, or city center, of Oaxaca city. Astonished at the brutality of the repression visited upon a teacher's union fighting for higher wages and funding for students, a host of movements, organizations and everyday citizens mobilized to seize control of the state capitol.

For almost 6 months, a vibrant array of left groups controlled the city of Oaxaca and many of its surrounding towns, governing the area by popular assembly and demanding the resignation of the corrupt governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The movement maintained barricades throughout the capitol, defending encampments and several seized radio stations from paramiltiary attacks backed by the corrupt state government.

It eventually took 7,500 troops from the Federal Preventative Police [2], or PFP, to retake the city; clearing the mess of barricades took nearly a month. (The PFP is a militarized internal police force created in 1998, purportedly used to combat "crime" but more often deployed against popular social movements.) By November of that year, the Oaxacan popular movement had suffered numerous deaths, arrests and disappearances, knocking its activity down to the tense simmer that now permeates the region.

But how did such a striking uprising emerge? Events like these don't come pre-packaged or spring out of the ether, but develop organically from ingredients already present in the social fabric. So what were some of the ingredients to this particular popular rebellion?

Heat Three Cups Endemic Corruption

I think this is sometimes fuzzy for folks in the north, but in Oaxaca it's clear as crystal: the Mexican political system is so endemically corrupt that one hesitates to give it a special designation. That is, corruption in Mexico is not an exception to the rule, but a characteristic feature of the political structure.

Following the Mexican revolution of 1910-1920, a single political party--the Institutional Revolution Party [3], or PRI--controlled the government on all levels for over 70 years. Imagine that! Year after year, the same party bigwigs in power, appointing friends, laundering funds and legislating without political opposition or public accountability. It seems obvious that contemporary Mexican politics would be shaped more by underhanded dealings than democratic participation.

In 2000, the PRI was finally forced from the presidential office by a decade of economic collapse, democratic groundswells heralded by the Zapatista rebellion [4], and a host of other factors. But the same infrastructure of greed and impunity that ran the country for a near-century persists today on pretty much every other level. Pervasive government corruption, a fact of life in the state of Oaxaca, may have been the mulch for the 2006 rebellion.

And examples of government shadiness are all over the place in Oaxaca. For instance, unlike in the U.S, the Oaxacan state government is not bound to make internal documents available to the public, nor to release a yearly budget. Read: no Freedom of Information Act, and no bookkeeping! Without these simple democratic safeguards, governmental "oversight" amounts to "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Each year, public funds disappear into government coffers, local fat cats and power players grow suddenly rich, and those in power secure their positions with the backing of prominent businessmen and influential citizens.

Policing in Oaxaca is equally shady. Because the state is subject to so little scrutiny, the government can pursue extensive programs of repression while claiming publicly that nothing unusual is happening.

During the 2006 uprising, movement figures were often arrested by militarized cops in unmarked white vans, disappearing for days before resurfacing in maximum-security prisons hundreds of miles away on charges that were obviously false. Others never resurfaced. These operations were generally cast as crackdowns on "criminals" or "drug dealers," in an attempt to cover up the state terror, and present it as the type of counter-narcotics operation that keeps U.S. funding for the war on drugs flowing southward.

From just two weeks in Oaxaca, it's clear that a lot of violence is concealed by a few cosmetic gestures toward democracy. At the same time, it's clear that other state-sponsored violence is at work.

Add Two Cloves Paramilitaries, Minced

Beyond the sanctioned state agencies, Oaxaca also boasts a culture of paramilitarism. Many government officials in Oaxaca control pools of strongmen and thugs to exert power over their "constituencies," much like mob bosses each have a crew of loyal lieutenants. Are campesinos in your municipality getting uppity and demanding basic labor rights? Just get a friendly network of off-duty cops, right-wing students or local strongmen to put a bullet through the organizers' windows. If that doesn't work, a range of repressive measures are still available--from death threats and beatings to murders and disappearances.

This kind of thuggery is common not only in the countryside, but in urban settings and throughout the education system as well. In universities and even high schools, party-affiliated thugs known as porros (the masculine form of porras, or cheerleaders) receive money and influence to control or disrupt student governments, beat up leftist student groups, and generally sow fear and distrust among the non-state-friendly student population.

An organizer here described this phenomenon as "the cool kids in high school--the ones with expensive clothes, or the ones with a less money who aspire to be cool--attaining their power through violence and affiliation with the state." Like National Honors Society, but with a Hitler Youth twist. When my partner and I first arrived in Oaxaca, porros at the Benito Juarez Autonomous University had recently appeared at a student rally with automatic weapons, spraying the air with bullets and scattering the crowd.

Of course, not unlike the mob, internal conflicts can also develop in this political system. For instance, one official may rock the boat by arresting another's porros. But regardless of who does the threatening, beating, and shooting, violence in southern Mexico tends to get blamed on movement groups.

That is, not only may paramilitaries beat up a local community organizer, but the state may then arrest members of a different leftist group for the crime, thereby sowing fear and distrust in the movement. No matter what, the emails, memos and money supporting these operations will never be released to the local newspaper.

Bring to a Low Boil, Season to Taste

In the Oaxacan political context, a lot of violence takes place behind the scenes. This can make it difficult for folks from the North to engage in meaningful solidarity with Southern movement, or even know where to start. From a thousand miles away, different groups' affiliation with the state may not be immediately apparent, and there may be no way to verify the claims and counter-claims of leftist organizations or government officials. This makes it hard for folks from the north to know where to put their funds, organizing effort and material support.

But with more awareness of the lived realities of folks in the Global South, some of this Northern aloofness may fade. What's more, a fuller understanding of a different political context may reveal more similarities than were immediately apparent. Despite all these electioneers hollering about the American Dream (and the call to renew it by voting for so-and-so), pervasive corruption and government impunity is by no means limited to Mexico.

Just look at how the Democratic party has responded to eight years of neoconservative nightmares with a mix of lackadaisical stalling and outright cooperation! Furthermore, the history of paramilitary-style violence visited upon the movements of the 60s and 70s (see: COINTELPRO [5], the assassination of Fred Hampton [6], and the repression visited on the American Indian Movement [7]) indicates that extrajudicial violence common in the Global South may appear a little closer to home, too.

Wait, you're saying, this dish tastes pretty bad. Well naturally! That's because you haven't seen all of the recipe. Stay tuned...

Crossposted from Lines of Flight [8].