On December 22, the international day of action for Oaxaca, we went to the consulate with other members of the Other Campaign in Vancouver to protest government violence against the APPO and community resistance to corrupt government happening now in Oaxaca.

We also took this opportunity to work a travel advisory campaign that has been ongoing for the past months to raise awareness about travel to Mexico among the travelling public in Canada. Travellers should be aware of the Human Rights abuses that the state government of Oaxaca under governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz has been perpetrating against citizens in the state. Felipe Calderon and the federal government of Mexico are fully aware of these illegal abuses, are fully complicit in them, and have deployed 5,000 federal police to Oaxaca in order to help repress peaceful resistance to corrupt government.

To this end, we have produced an activist travel advisory for travellers to Mexico with help from No One Is Illegal. We have handed it our to passengers at the check-in counters for flights to Mexico at YVR (Vancouver International Airport) as well as handing it out at Travel Agencies around town. You can download the travel advisory here.

In addition, we have written a letter to accompany the handout for the travel businesses we visit giving a brief outline of the situation in Oaxaca and a sense of what can be done. As you can see from the image, we have submitted a copy of the letter to the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver so that they are aware of our campaign. You can download a copy of the letter here.

We encourage any organization or individual to mount their own campaigns to inform tourists to Mexico about the situation, as well as to communicate the potential risks of travelling in a militarized zone, a message that the Mexican government is not sending out because of the damage it could do to the profits of its tourist industry.