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July 17, 2005
What the Oaxaca?!
For the fifth week in a row, 31 employees at Noticias, a newspaper in Oaxaca, remain locked inside their offices to work in spite of a strike called by a union which they claim has ties to the government. The journalists insist that the strike is a sham, instigated by the government and intended only to stop publication of the paper, which has been critical of the government in the past.
Ericel Gomez Nucamendi, the newspaper's owner, claims that the strike is part of a campaign against Noticias by state governor Ulises Ruíz, a priísta. The head of the union, la Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos, David Aguilar Robles, is also a priísta, but he claims that the workers requested the union's assistance in negotiating a contract. Yet workers say that they already agreed to a 6% pay increase, and refuse to go along with the union in demanding a 25% increase.
To read more about this story in English, see the Los Angeles Times article, Newspaper Office Standoff Persists.
Para leer más sobre este asunto en español, vea el artículo de La Opinión, Publican diario pese a bloqueo.
Posted by crispy at July 17, 2005 04:17 PM
Comments
According to an article from Inter Press Service News Agency:
A spokesman for the besieged Noticias journalists told IPS that they were evicted Monday night by "plainclothes police officers who covered their faces, and people with ties to the Oaxaca government," as part of an operation that he described as "an attack on freedom of expression."[...]
The reporter said the masked men broke into the building and demanded, with threats and blows, that the employees leave. They also stole telephones and daily planners and destroyed computers, he added.
The Noticias staff has been able to continue publishing however, by utilizing other offices and sending reports via the Internet.
Posted by: Chris Coen at July 23, 2005 11:08 AM