Letter to the Editor, NYT (unpublished)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