Kill the Teachers
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Kill the Teachers takes readers through this agonizing period of contemporary Mexican history. It begins with the decision by the 70,000 member Section 22 of the national teachers’ union to stage a sit-in in the city of Oaxaca's Zocalo and chronicles the brutal state police attack on the strikers, which included the beatings of women and children. The teachers fought back and not only retook the Zocalo but aroused the sympathies of hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans. In late October gunmen storming citizen barricades in the city of Oaxaca shot and killed American news photographer Brad Will. Photos of his assassination flashing around the world provoked the federal government to send over 4,000 heavily armed soldiers and federal police to tear down the barricades and attack a fleeing crowd which included street vendors, workers, passers by, women and children. Eyewitness accounts and on the spot interviews, including testimony given to members of a human rights delegation of which the author was a member, dramatize this miniature war that rivaled events in Afghanistan and Iraq for brutality, bloodshed and mendacity that culminated in another armed police attack in 2017 on unarmed protesters in the town of Nochixtlan.
