Dispatch from Oaxaca: ‘A Year Later’
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 01.31.08 | 3:39 PM ET
Ceci Connolly visited the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca recently to see how it was doing after the deadly riots of 2006. “It didn’t take long to realize that the answer is more complicated than I’d thought,” she writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Oaxaca is no longer the filthy, smoldering wreck of 2006. Nor, however, is it the bustling cultural center of years past. It appears safe and clean. But unresolved political tensions have prompted the U.S. State Department to keep it on a watch list.”
A frequent visitor told her efforts to clean up the Zócalo and surroundings have left the place feeling “antiseptic.” He added, “It feels as though it’s been prettied up and staged for the tourists.”
An AP story paints a rosier picture: “Poinsettias carpet the carefully tended gardens of Oaxaca’s arch-ringed main plaza, where smoking wreckage and barricades stood just over a year ago. Local bands and marimbas have replaced the sound of explosions, and the smell of gasoline bombs and tear gas have given way to the scent of coffee and mole sauce, two of Oaxaca’s specialties.”
That may be, but it couldn’t have been too pretty yesterday, when a local police chief and three others were shot to death while exercising in a city park. Officials are linking the attack to a turf war between drug cartels.
Oaxaca is one of my favorite cities in Mexico, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed the drug cartels quickly move along.
Related on World Hum:
* State Department Relaxes Warning for Oaxaca City
* In Oaxaca, a Different Kind of Day of the Dead
Photo by miss_rogue via Flickr, (Creative Commons).