Kill the Teachers

*Human rights repression in Oaxaca, Mexico reached a bloody climax in 2006. *An attack by heavily armed Mexican federal police on unarmed civilians supporting striking teachers culminated nearly eighty years of repressive political rule that impoverished the state of Oaxaca and made virtual kings of its governors. *Politics and crime went hand in hand in this agonizing period of contemporary Mexican history, much of it told in the exact words of the participants. It began with the decision by the 70,000 member Section 22 of the national teachers' union to stage a sit-in in the city of Oaxaca's Zócalo. First hand accounts and chronicle the brutal state police attack on the strikers, which included the beatings of women and children. *In late October police gunmen storming citizen barricades in the city of Oaxaca shot and killed American news photographer Brad Will and several others. A month later a force backed by armored vehicles, state police and hundreds of non-uniformed vigilantes attacked a fleeing crowd which included street vendors, workers, passers by, women and children. The police and paramilitaries arrested, tortured and sent over 140 innocent civilians to maximum security prisons "to each the protesters a lesson.". *Billions of pesos missing from the state's treasury depleted health and education services as conflicts continued to erupt throughout the following decade. They culminated in another armed police attack in 2017 on unarmed protesters in the town of Nochixtlan. Militarized forces killed eight teachers and townspeople and wounded over 140 others. *Despite urgent appeals taken directly to Mexico's presidents by the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and other human rights groups, the Mexican government refused to bring any of the perpetrators of the killings, tortures and false imprisonments to trial. Worse yet, federal police and local collaborators have brutally repressed non-violent popular protests in other parts of the country.