Police reports indicate the ambush occurred at a spot in the road that had been blocked by large mounds of dirt. Three of the trucks the victims were travelling in were set on fire.

A dispute has been festering in Choapam since December, when a local election was annulled due to irregularities. While the conflict may go beyond the simple politics of which political faction controls the town, details have been sparse. The town is a ten hour drive from the state capital, which prevents reporters with same-day deadlines from visiting the crime scene. This logistical detail also means that many of the comments on the situation cited in news reports come from politicians based in the state capital.

Choapan is located near Oaxaca’s border with Veracruz, a region that has experienced it’s share of drug violence. Most of said violence has been in and around the city of Tuxtepec. In the state capital, the massacre has led to furious finger pointing between members of the new reformist government and the party that controlled the state’s politics for 8 decades.

[dewplayer:http://www.fsrn.org/audio/download/6913/20100614SY.mp3]

(sound: barricade bottle rockets and chants)

The day of action kicked off at 4am local time with chants, bottle rockets, and barricades around the central plaza of Oaxaca City. While this has become an annual occurrence here, this year’s protests come just 3 weeks ahead of the elections to replace the governor the 2006 movement tried to oust.

During a pre-dawn rally in the central plaza, union representative Jose Alfredo Martinez, stopped short of calling for a punishment vote against the ruling party, but said the teachers’ union must continue to demand accountability for the political murders committed during the 2006 conflict.

Jose Alfredo Martinez: “We have to push for the political trial and imprisonment of the assassin of the people of Oaxaca. And we have to tell our rank and file membership regardless of whoever wins the state gubernatorial race, if we teachers of Oaxaca can’t deliver on our list of demands, the absence of accountible government will continue.”

(sound: mega-march chants)

The mega-march called by the teachers union today was miles long and drew at least 100,000 people. Due to its strength, the teachers’ union has the support of many of the state’s social and activist organizations. But the movement also has its critics.

An estimated 1.4 million schoolchildren miss class whenever the teachers mobilize en masse. Another common complaint is the vehicular chaos provoked by the frequent marches and blockades. Businesses in the downtown area often report losses whenever the teachers set up protest encampments in the central square.

Mr. Fernando, who runs a small sandwich stall in the center of the plaza says that his sales have declined by 30 percent since the protest encampment began 2 weeks ago. He just wants both sides to reach an agreement so he can recover economically.

Mr. Fernando: “We ask the authorities and the government to resolve this quickly. This always ends in an arrangement, but it always comes after they’ve been here awhile and they get tired or after the government says ‘fine, we’ll give you this much’ and they pick up their things and leave. So, why not do all this beforehand without dragging this all out and waiting for each side to wear down before negotiating?”

But negotiations between the teachers’ union and the state and federal government have stagnated. The teachers have announced they will triple the size of their protest encampment in the city center as of Tuesday morning.

Francisco López Bárcenas, an academic who has written extensively about Triqui history, traces the current crisis back to the 1940s when the government withdrew recognition of San Juan Copala’s status as a county seat municipality – Mexico’s only political district with a distinctly Triqui identity.

“The municipal county seat is the base upon which the political structure of Mexican society is organized” explains López Bárcenas. “They were divided among 4 districts and dismembered politically, but that’s not all. The army was sent in and stayed from 1940 to about 1999″.

The military campaign aganst the Triquis was particularly harsh and included an aerial bombardment of their territory in 1956. Francisco López Bárcenas says it’s the only bombardment he’s aware of in post-revolutionary Mexico prior to the Zapatista uprising of 1994.

The division of the Triqui Nation among 4 political districts has also reduced Triqui control over their territory’s natural wealth, including forests, rich farmlands, water, and minerals.

The author says that in the past few decades the state government has created organizations to dominate the Triquis; “One of them is the organization accused of perpetrating the ambush, The Union for the Social Well-Being of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) which was created in 1994″. The UBISORT paramilitary group was founded some months after Mayan rebels in the neighbouring state of Chiapas launched an uprising for indigenous self-determination.

Another major player in the Triqui conflict is the MULT; the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle. The group formed to resist local political bosses and landlords but repeated assassinations of its leadership has weakened the organization. Fighting turned inward with MULT and UBISORT mutually accused of murdering each other’s members.

It was in this context that the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala was born. Residents of the town include former members of both adversarial groups who decided to form a new organization and focus on self-determination and autonomy. The reaction has been violent, with targeted assassinations of Copala residents and a physical blockade of the town, home to at least 700 people.

Daniel Arellano, a Oaxaca City activist who survived last week’s ambush with minor injuries, says the purpose of the caravan was to break the siege and document the situation. “For the past 5 months the community of San Juan Copala has been held incommunicado, under siege by paramilitaries, without clean water, without electricity, without teachers – because they had to leave, without a doctor – because he abandoned them” says Arellano, “Every night paramilitaries fire shots into the town and this situation persists because people don’t understand or have information about what is happening there”.

Demonstrations to protest the paramilitary ambush on the aid caravan and to demand justice for the two dead were held over the weekend in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and in several European and US cities.

“We ask that all the attention awakened by the murder of our two friends be shifted to the situation of grave humanitarian crisis in San Juan Copala” says ambush survivor David Venegas. He hid in the bush for two days after the attack with two journalists and a wounded friend. While all persons who went missing in the attack have been accounted for, Venegas says the town of San Juan Copala remains surrounded by paramilitaries. Another survivor of the attack, Gabriela Jimenez, said the armed men who captured her bragged of having protection from the state governor.

Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz publicly denies having ties to the UBISORT paramilitaries or that the ambush was an incident of electoral violence. In an impromptu press conference this weekend, he said the conflict in the Triqui region “has been going on for more than 40 years” and that it’s “an issue that goes beyond elections”. The governor has also called into question why international observers were in the region and asked that the National Immigration Institute investigate foreigners who “come here to cause problems”.

The PRI ruling party has dominated state politics for 80 years and has fired up the formidable party machinery in favor of its gubernatorial candidate, Eviel Perez Magaña. A number of political opponents and their family members have already met violent deaths this election season in the Northern Cuenca region and along the Pacific Coast.

The April 27th attack on a caravan carrying human rights defenders, activists, international observers, and journalists has prompted concern that even more extreme incidents could occur ahead of the July 4th elections.

Four parties from the political left and right have formed an alliance in Oaxaca to challenge the PRI, a party that has dominated state politics for 8 consecutive decades. This hegemony was a frequent complaint among protesters in the social uprising that gripped the state for much of 2006.

In the neighboring state of Veracruz, a mayoral pre-candidate from the opposition PRD party is in critical condition. Unidentified gunmen opened fire against him and a local PRD organizer Tuesday night. Martín Aburto López reportedly received an anonymous death threat last week warning him to step out of the race.

Voters in both states head to the polls on July 4th.