Death In The Time Of Repression

October 27th is the second anniversary of the death of Brad Will, an anarchist who was killed by paramilitaries in Oaxaca. Brad was a unique and wonderful human being who holds a special place in the heart of the C.S.A. He exuded a non-judgmental warmth and kindness along with an instinctive bravery and an astute mind. Like everyone, Brad was imperfect, but his presence in the anarchist milieu was a powerful inspiration to many. He is missed every single day.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember last year's post on the same subject, in which the C.S.A. discussed memorializing Brad by marking the anniversary of his death with autonomous direct action. While there have been a few mentions of actions coinciding with the anniversary this year, the greatest potential for this concept lies in unannounced actions that are uncoordinated, unclaimed, and unforeseen. Just as petty arsonists have Devil's Night and stoners have April 20th, those who wish to ensure that Brad's death becomes a rallying cry rather than a faint memory can continue to claim October 27th.

With that said, the C.S.A. would like to take a moment to reflect on the struggle in Oaxaca and the role played by anarchists from the U.S. Almost two years after the Mexican Federal police stormed Oaxaca City, largely on the pretext of restoring order after Brad's death, organizing there has not ceased. But a great deal has changed, and, sadly, it has not been for the better.

The coalition of forces that brought the city to a standstill has been torn apart in predictable fashion; indeed, the various factions now spend more of their time struggling against each other for power than resisting state repression. Some leaders of APPO--the Leftist social democratic coalition--have used their visibility to run for state office, which they had promised not to do, drawing the ire of anti-electoral elements and those who passed up similar opportunities. APPO has responded by ex-communicating its critics and even calling for police action against them, tacitly implying that the police would face no resistance if they were to target APPO's enemies, which they did and which APPO witnessed in smug silence. The Popular Revolutionary Front (FPR), a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist organization, has made its own play for state favor by collaborating with the police to arrest its own critics, along with other Machiavellian maneuverings favored by the authoritarian Left. Oaxacan anarchists, a comparatively small but disproportionally effective cluster of collectives, have largely born the brunt of their former allies back stabbing, and yet they continue, with great difficulty, to organize and build the infrastructure of resistance.

The role of anarchists from the U.S. in the Oaxacan conflict illustrates the dangers of sloppy international solidarity. APPO came to embody some anarchists' romantic vision of a people's uprising. Portrayed as a consensus-based council of regular people seeking a direct democracy, APPO became synonymous with the uprising itself, as though the conflict in Oaxaca, a place with a byzantine political history, could be reduced to a four letter acronym. The nature of APPO's coalition, which consisted of every civil society element with a beef against the state's governor and plenty of opportunists who knew a good thing when they saw it, was almost completely misunderstood. Images of Oaxacans in indigenous dress taking to the streets, who were assumed to represent APPO, seemed to validate the unequivocal support for the group.

The fact that uprisings of varying intensity are cyclical events in Oaxacan political life was also unknown. A look back through decades of Oaxacan newspapers shows that uprisings like that of 2006, and some even more militant than that, have been a regular occurance. Organized groups take an uncompromising position against the state or city government, engage in direct action--often blocades--and then mysteriously disappear from the headlines, only to appear weeks or months later on the receiving end of a state concession. This game has been played metronomically in Oaxaca since the Mexican revolution and is well understood by Oaxacan political elements.

What was missing from the solidarity work of U.S. anarchists was almost any communication with Oaxacan anarchists. Perhaps it was hard to believe that some of the most inventive and militant actions and projects in Oaxaca were organized by teenagers in anarcho-punk band collectives, cliché as that may seem. For whatever reason, many U.S. anarchists preferred the romantic narrative pushed by the Leftist groups, which capitalized on the actual participation of average people to create a false image of universal support for their aims. This lead to the ironic result that many U.S. anarchists in anarcho-punk band collectives threw their weight behind the very Leftist organizations that were seeking to co-opt and marginalize patch-wearing Oaxacan anarchists.

The failure to understand the situation on the ground in Oaxaca led to more than just vocal support for APPO. In one particularly horrendous example, popular poster-makers Just Seeds held a benefit for a "Oaxacan street art collective" called the Oaxacan Assembly of Revolutionary Artists (ASARO), a student front group of the FPR. ASARO was in the habit of spray painting giant stencils of Stalin's head all over Oaxaca City and served as the recruitment arm for the FPR at the city's art school. In this case, the failure to grasp the situation on the ground led a U.S. anti-authoritarian group to give money and support to an organization that violently targeted Oaxacan anarchists and promoted a Stalinist agenda.

It is difficult to understand why U.S. anarchists didn't seek out Oaxacan anarchists for support and guidance. Were U.S. anarchists to approach a similar situation in their own context, they would be no more likely to support APPO and the FPR than they would UFPJ and ANSWER, with the difference being that the stakes are considerably higher in Oaxaca, where such support can literally mean life or death. Inexplicably, U.S. anarchists often take more care investigating situations in other U.S. cities before lending their help than they do with international solidarity. While it is impossible to say what it would have meant and could still mean for Oaxacan anarchists to receive support from U.S. anarchists, it is clear that in the future greater care must be taken before jumping into complex events abroad.