South of the border, down Mexico way

I mentioned the unrest in Mexico a while back, and wondered why there's not much attention being paid to what's going on. Well, there's a little more attention now. Some things look a little brighter: Lopez Obrador hasn't sparked a revolution. Fox delayed a confrontation by moving the Independence Day festivities out of Mexico City, to avoid the square Lopez Obrador's folks occupied. Which left them all sitting with their thumbs up their butts. Saw a good point somewhere that *somebody* has to be paying for the tent city; Fox has evidently decided that the best way to go is to sit back and let somebody's purse empty while nothing happens, on the grounds that funds they spend on sit-ins now can't be spent on bullets later. In the meantime, the Bush/Gore-esque election that sparked all this has been ratified. This puts more institutional weight against Lopez Obrador.

Meanwhile, the unrest in Oaxaca -- briefly, a teachers' strike coupled with anarchist blockades (including guys armed with guns, molotov cocktails, and (I can barely believe this one) improvised rockets -- has gotten to the point that President Fox has decided to send in the federales. If you're hearing about this now, it's because an American anarchist who was writing about the strike on Indymedia got shot and killed. You didn't hear about it when a teacher who went against the strike and the anarchists was murdered, but he wasn't an American tourist, was he?

The utter failure of the American media to cover unrest in the country RIGHT NEXT DOOR has led me to abandon the MSM for the foreign press and informal online accounts. You can get the leftist/anarchist view from Indymedia, while a conservative American language teacher in Oaxaca offers a more jaundiced view of the anarchist cause. via BoingBoing, I found an excellent round-up page with massive links.

Keep an eye out, folks; this promises to be interesting.