Radio and Revolution in Oaxaca, Mexico

Although it has fallen out of the US mainstream news, a people’s uprising is still going strong in Oaxaca, Mexico, spurred on by the June 14 attacks by Mexican government forces on the striking teachers’ tent city in Oaxaca City.

One main reasons for the attack was to destroy the teachers’ free radio station Radio Planton, which broadcast in support of their cause. In this, the government failed, because students of a local university turned over the school’s station to the cause of the teachers.

Since the attack and the widely disputed Mexican presidential election, a revolutionary peoples’ assembly has formed, and as many as ten commercial radio stations have been taken over, in part because the Mexican mainstream media all but ignored this popular uprising.

John at DIYmedia summarizes much of the radio action in a post from last Friday. Narco News has provided excellent and unflinching reports from Oaxaca, including this update on the radio situation, including a report of one man murdered by government thugs while guarding a station. And in CounterPunch, George Salzman puts the Oaxaca “revolutionary surge” in the Mexican national context.

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