Tuesday, October 31
4:00 PM at the US Federal Building
Kennedy Plaza, Providence
Our slogans:
–US, Mexico: Hands off Oaxaca!
–Troops and police out of Oaxaca!
–For a government of the APPO
and the workers organizations!
–For a general strike in defense of
the people of Oaxaca!
The Workers International League has called for a picket in defense of Oaxaca at the same location on Monday, October 30, at 5:30 PM. We support this effort and encourage people to participate in both demonstrations.
Since June fourteenth, a teachers’ strike in this southern Mexican city has grown into a general uprising demanding that the governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), step down. Representatives of the teachers, women’s organizations, and other
workers’ and poor people’s organizations have formed the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), which for months now has governed most of the city.
Paramilitaries loyal to the government have attacked barricades staffed by the workers and poor people of Oaxaca.
On Friday October 27, paramilitaries shot and killed Emilio Alonso, a teacher and union activist, APPO activist Esteban Ruiz, an unidentified woman, and Bradley Will, an independent journalist from New York City.
In the past month, federal troop and federal police forces (PFP) have surrounded the city, and paramilitary death squads have besieged the people of Oaxaca.
While the teachers. union leaders are dining with government officials in Mexico City, President Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party), with the support of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the PRD (Democratic
Revolutionary Party), is preparing a bloody massacre of the teachers, workers, women and youth of Oaxaca. He has ordered the PFP, militarized police, to enter the city and has demanded the immediate surrender of the barricades.
The US and Mexican governments cannot allow Oaxaca to become an example for workers and oppressed people worldwide. They want to drown the Oaxaca Commune in blood because they know that in every city workers and youth face the
same problems of poverty, racism, and police brutality. They don’t want us to think that workers, allied with the poor people of the city and the countryside, can take the power into our own hands and solve the problems that no bosses. government can
ever solve for us.
The struggle is not over. Despite the month.s-long siege, the attacks of the government and its paramilitary goons, and the betrayals of the teachers. union leaders, Oaxaca has not fallen. The APPO and the workers. organizations can win if
their struggle spreads throughout Mexico, the US, and the world, if they are surrounded by the active solidarity of the workers and the oppressed. Long live the Oaxaca Commune!
We call on all the unions and workers. organzations to mobilize their members for this emergency protest! Build solidarity committees in the unions, workplaces, and schools!
