One of the more interesting things going on right now is the revolt in Mexico's city of Oaxaca. while NarcoNews has the more recent news that the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) has declared itself sovereign not just over the city, but the entire province. The revolution started when the government tried to smash an annual teacher's sit in in the capital - and the teachers, with aid from others, defeated the police attack. The teacher's had had their own radio station, but the government destroyed it.

In a coup or revolution the first thing you do is take over the radio, TV stations and newspapers. And in a large sense the Oaxaco revolution is a history of the fight to control radio broadcasting. After the first destruction APPO took over the university radio station and broadcast. When that was sabotaged by an acid attack, they then took over the government's own radio station and when that was destroyed by a paramilitary attack, they then took over commercial stations.

Meanwhile, the local economy has been rather badly damaged (such as it is).

People living in Oaxaca have made it known to the APPO that they feel severely inconvenienced by this revolutionary movement, not only by the loss of income, but by having to drive blocks out of their way to navigate blocked streets. Furthermore, the children are not in school and no municipal police are on the streets; there’s a curfew to discourage roving paramilitaries and ordinary thieves. Public transport is never certain, and the bus routes are regularly changed to avoid blockades.

The reason the streets are blocked is to protect the radio stations from attack...

The Secretary for Citizen Protection, according to Mateo Benítez, has started to hire some 8,000 people from different parts of the state to constitute reinforcements for the state police, with a goal of massive attack on the movement’s encampments, to dislodge them “at the moment when the federal government intervenes.”

My guess, and it is a guess, is that the attack will succeed. And if it doesn't, then what is likely is that the governor is forced to step down, and that the army is called in and it's made clear that Oaxaco can accept a new governor and some of its grievances met, or things will get bloody.

If the attack succeeds, or if a later chance to accept limited gains is refused, then APPO will be crushed. Mobs or early stage militias are capable of standing up to police and paramilitary, but I don't see any indication that the revolution is developing the sort of militia capable of standing up to a military:

The “mobile police” of the APPO, if one can call them that, have been cruising the streets, aided mainly by cell phones and calls to radio stations to issue alarms. The new police force is “members of the Honorable Body of Topiles of the APPO and of the Magisterial Police of Oaxaca.” Topil is a word from colonial times now used for a volunteer guard or messenger under the indigenous system of usos y costumbres that governs many of the state’s small towns.

We'll see how this plays out. The south of Mexico appears to be something of a tinderbox, with two full provinces now where the writ of the state essentially doesn't apply. Even if crushed it is likely to lead to a long term resistance movement, as anger and hatred and vengeance for the fallen leaves behind those with a harder edge, willing to commit violence for their cause.

We'll see. But meantime, it remains a place to keep an eye on and a reminder that Mexico is really no longer one country, but two - split North and South with the south increasingly restive against the ruling polity of the north.