Sunday, November 26, 2006
Mexico, November 26
The march in Oaxaca did start out peacefully. But then... Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Three dead, 140 injured by tear/pepper gas including 3 journalists, 100 detained, and dozens of cars and buses burned as the APPO and the police fight it out in Oaxaca. The shots are reported to have been fired by non-uniformed men (i.e., death squads). The correspondent of El Financiero, Abundio Núñez Sánchez, got an 8 inch gash from being clubbed by a federal policeman. Public buildings damaged by fire included the External Relations Secretariat, the Public Registry of Property, the Sociology Department at the university and the Mexican Association of Hotels and Motels. The hotel Camino Real and two cottages were damaged by Molotov cocktails. The Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT) was just firebombed, but without any damage. Give Ruiz Ortiz credit for taking a tour of the town at more or less the same time as the clashes.
The APPO blames the Governor Ortiz and the PFP for the violence. They have also been blocking collection of tolls on the highways from the capital to Cuernavaca and to Puebla. Ojitos in Mexico says that "The chief of Government of the Federal District, Alejandro Encinas Rodriguez, has issued a statement declaring that there is much evidence of deliberate provocation" by agent provocateurs. Another blogger says that as soon as the APPO march reached the Zocalo " the thugs at the gov. service started shooting pellets and pebbles from rooftops."
Governor Ortiz's Attorney General Lizbeth Cana Cabeza is getting tripped up in her own lies. According to the IHT, Authorities in the southern state of Oaxaca insisted that an American journalist-activist [Bradley Will] killed during violent protests last month was not shot at point-blank range as they had indicated earlier....At a news conference last week, however, Attorney General Lizbeth Cana Cabeza said state investigators had found that both of the bullets that killed Will were fired from the same gun and one of them was fired at point-blank range... Yet in a news release issued Thursday, the state Attorney General's office said that "neither the state attorney general nor any official from the department has told the news media that the shots fired against Bradley Will were fired at close range."
The site OaxacaLibre.org claims that Telmex is blocking access.
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