Tensions boil after showdown in Mexico

OAXACA, Mexico -- After dark, the city's beautiful colonial center was eerily quiet. A few leftist activists were making an altar on a stone-paved street honoring their dead comrades. Within a stone's throw, federal riot police watched silently, poised to keep the protesters from trying to reoccupy Oaxaca's vast main plaza.

Tensions remain high after the military-style operation Sunday that expelled members of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca from the square they had occupied for five months to press for the resignation of the deeply unpopular state governor, Ulíses Ruíz. Police and protesters have developed an uneasy coexistence in recent days, but many fear the festering political conflict could reignite at any moment.

For many Mexicans, the showdown offers a taste of many more such crises to come as the decades-old authoritarian order gives way to a still evolving and fragile democracy.

"There could be other 'Oaxacas' all over Mexico," said Jorge Zepeda, a political analyst and newspaper commentator. "It reflects the deep inequalities and injustices of Mexican society that institutional politics is finding very hard to channel."

Zepeda said the difficulties stem from Mexico's incomplete transition to democracy that began in 2000 when opposition candidate Vicente Fox won the presidency. That ballot ended 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The PRI still governs many southern states, including Oaxaca. The heavy-handed methods the PRI often used to quash or co-opt Mexico's protest movements are no longer acceptable. But so far, democracy has proved too weak to fill the void.

"With the PRI in the presidency this would have been resolved, one way or another, in two weeks," said political historian Lorenzo Meyer of the prestigious Colegio de Mexico. "There have been hundreds of movements like this in the past, but never one that controlled a major city for five months."

The Oaxaca conflict began in May as a strike over pay and conditions by teachers, many of whom work in Indian areas of the mountainous state where the only alleviation to pervasive poverty often comes in the form of remittances sent home from migrants in the United States. The state and its capital city are both named Oaxaca.

The protest expanded and radicalized after Ruíz botched an eviction attempt on June 14. Known by opponents as a political dinosaur from the PRI, Ruíz governed Oaxaca much like his party used to rule Mexico, with little regard for the changing national political landscape. In the recent presidential election, the candidate from Fox's center-right party, Felipe Calderón, narrowly defeated an opponent from a leftist party, while the PRI's candidate ran a distant third.

The hard-line protesters in Oaxaca came from a loose collection of left-wing groups unified only by their anger and insistence that Ruíz should go. Then, several protesters were killed, some dying at the barricades in paramilitary-style drive-by shootings.

Unable to appear in public in the city, Ruíz began calling on Fox to send federal security forces. Fox had ignored the conflict for months, saying it was a local issue.

Fox deployed federal police after three people were killed Friday, including an American activist journalist, bringing the death toll to 17 over the five months. By Sunday, 4,000 riot police were pushing through burning barricades, quelling resistance with water cannon and tear gas.

The state prosecutor's office said yesterday that two people were in custody in the journalist's killing, the Associated Press reported. A judge was expected to decide this week whether to charge them in the case .

Ruíz returned to his offices in Oaxaca on Monday for the first time in months. Supporters dressed in white have held marches, urging him to hang on.

"Ulíses [Ruíz] is the worst of the old regime. Corrupt, repressive, a liar," said Sergio Aguayo, a prominent commentator and rights activist. "And even so, Fox ends up obliged to send in the militarized police to put him back."

For Zepeda, Meyer, and Aguayo, the escalation of the Oaxacan conflict highlights Fox's political clumsiness and limitations as a democratic reformer. Fox made history by beating the PRI in 2000, but he prepares to leave office this month with a reputation for sticking his head in the sand.

Allowing the Oaxacan conflict to worsen underlined this impression, as did his contention that "social peace has been restored," at the same time that police were still clashing with protesters throwing Molotov cocktails. The city of Oaxaca, founded in 1532, boasts one of the most gracious Spanish colonial centers in the Americas, with convents and mansions that won it UN recognition as a World Heritage Site. During the crisis, many of those buildings were closed and covered in revolutionary graffiti, all but quashing the city's vibrant tourist trade.

The political commentators say the conflict also holds lessons for the Mexican political left.

"Oaxaca represents the extreme of the debate on the left over whether it is better to take to the streets or remain within the institutions," said Aguayo.

This turns the spotlight on Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the defeated left-wing presidential candidate who insists he was cheated out of victory in July's elections officially won by Fox's protégé, Calderón. López Obrador also set off weeks of disruptive protests in Mexico City after his defeat -- and this week spoke in support of the Oaxaca protesters.

The analysts are watching Calderón to see how he will tackle the challenges posed by Oaxaca.

Meanwhile, the conflict sizzles. The movement's leadership is holed up in the university campus, protected by barricades, including a gas tanker some say will be blown up if the police approach.

Ruíz remains defiant, though some in his own party approved a Senate resolution urging him to "reconsider his position."