We started our day by heading down to Santo Domingo; it is a large Catholic church in town. The church is nearly 400 years old and you can tell from the outside however the inside is beautiful. However more importantly right now this is where the resistance is staying. There are tents and other structures that have been put up to house each of the organizations, which make up the APPO. Also in this area you have lots of people selling anything and everything you could want from clothing to DVD’s of the movement. Both the demonstrators and the merchants moved to Santo Domingo a few weeks ago when 4,000 PFP (Federal Police) stormed town and violently forced everyone out of the Zocalo (center of town). We spent some time walking around the Santo Domingo area where it was very busy. While there we met up with X who would take us around town and show us what was going on.
X took us to the Zocalo where you can only enter by foot. The police have erected barricades at all entrances. Most of the barricades have a line of PFP in full riot gear and behind them 2 armored trucks with water canons, which have a bulldozer front. There were thousands of PFP in the Zocalo many of which were very young. The PFP doesn’t have any housing they must sleep in makeshift tents out of tarps or on cardboard only some seemed lucky enough to have real tents. There were also many transport trucks that had dozens of PFP on them ready to go somewhere. It was very weird and tense, thousands of armed men occupying the center of town. Some of the people that sell goods in the Zocalo have returned and more then a few of the PFP were ogling the local women in the Zocalo. The PFP did not seem to happy about photos or video but we able to take some. The photos I took are on my flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffrae/sets/72157594381854132/
After the Zocalo, X took us around town so that we could get a local cell phone and some other things. The night was much more interesting, X had gone home and we were on our own. We made a contact that told us to meet them at 8:00PM at Santo Domingo to discuss the movement. When we arrived at Santo Domingo there were still many people there, a good number of people stay the night to watch over the encampment. Our contact introduced us to a few people that knew Brad Will (the NYC Indymedia guy who was murdered by police in Oaxaca last month). I had met Brad in NYC once and in Miami another time. The people told us that there is a great fear from people about interviews on camera due to the disapearences of people in the movement.
It is getting late here and I don’t have time to write all that I had hoped. Tomorrow we must be up very early to go to Santo Domingo where the women in the movement have planned a march to the Zocalo to confront the PFP about rapes and sexual assaults that have happened to local women.
Siempre en la lucha!
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