Letter to the Editor, NYT (unpublished)

To the Editor:

While I appreciate your coverage of the EPR ("With Bombings, Mexican Rebels Escalate Their Fight," Sept. 26), you draw connections far too easily between them and the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, for its Spanish acronym). While the former is a revolutionary group fighting to overthrow the Mexican state, the latter is a broad coalition of civil society and political organizations that united to confront the notoriously corrupt and repressive government of the dinosaurian PRI in Oaxaca state. The assembly, which makes strives to make decisions based on consensus, formed spontaneously in response to the state's decision to repress a teachers' strike in June 2006 and has faced continued mortal attacks, unwarranted arrests, and propagandistic media blitzes to the present day.

Instead of identifying "anger among radical leftists" as the primary cause of these bombings, as well as the upsurge of progressive organizing throughout the country (the APPO and the Zapatistas are notable examples), I would have pointed to the devastation left by neoliberal economic policies and violent political repression.

Daniel Nemser

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Letter to the Editor, NYT (unpublished)

To the Editor,

Re "Hobbling Mexico's Democracy" (editorial, Sept. 13): I strongly disagree with your assessment of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE in Spanish). Not only did the organism ignore illegal campaign advertising, as you note, but it did nothing to prevent (or later punish) then-President Vicente Fox's unconstitutional participation in Felipe Calderon's campaign. Furthermore, even the IFE admitted that electoral fraud had occurred, that ballots had been fixed or miscounted -- the only response was that it wasn't enough to affect the results. How that was determined remains unclear.

A common graffiti I saw last year in Oaxaca when I was reporting on the Mexican election comes to mind: IFE = Instituto de Fraude Electoral.

Daniel Nemser

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Represión y resistencia en México y Estados Unidos. Entrevista a Gloria Muñoz Ramírez sobre robo de intimidación a su casa y situación de represión en el país. Reportaje sobre la comunidad 24 de Diciembre. Átaque paramilitar contra zapatistas del municipio Olga Isabel y desalojo de comunidades en Montes Azules. Represión contra migrantes en Estados Unidos. (56 min)

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