A Land of Beauty and Poverty

It is home to the majestic Sierra Madres mountain ranges -- a phenomenal landscape on Mexico's southern tip.It has coastal resorts, booming tourism, lush valleys blooming with medicinal herbs, and arid mountain villages that people are abandoning in record numbers.

It is a state that has everything or nothing, depending on where you're standing - its beauty matched only by its devastating poverty. "It's hard to describe the state," said Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa of EDUCA, a research and education organization in Oaxaca de Juárez. "It is a series of contrasts and contradictions, an unsolvable puzzle."

The economy of the state is driven by tourism, coffee production and money sent from abroad, but figures are hard to come by because public- records laws have yet to be established. More than 75 percent of people in Oaxaca live in "extreme poverty" which, as defined by the United Nations, means that what they earn today is needed to live another day, Vasquez said.

This year, the United Nations ranked Oaxaca as Mexico's second-poorest state, behind Chiapas, and likened its pueblos to rural African villages, Vasquez said. One-quarter of the 3.4 million people cannot read or write, and schooling is only available up to sixth grade in most villages. People in the state speak 16 languages and 154 dialects.

Electricity, running water and paved roads don't exist in most communities. The minimum wage is 44 pesos ($4.40) a day, and for those 14 and older, the unemployment rate is 1.8 percent, according to data from the Oaxaca Secretary of Economy.

That figure is low because it includes the "informal economy" -- children playing the accordion for tips from tourists or washing windows for pocket change. Less than 30 percent of Oaxaqueños have access to health care -- a crisis that is visible on the front steps of the state's seven hospitals. Outside of the hospitals, cardboard boxes draped with trash bags or sheets house family members who are either awaiting care or the discharge of a loved one.

Mules, ox-drawn carts and buses can take a full day to get someone from a remote village to the valley of the state. "A sick person never travels alone," said Araceli García Casas, executive director of Clínica del Pueblo, in the capital city.

Lack of government support is only part of the problem. Internal strife also takes a toll, Vasquez said. Land conflicts are common as people fight over parcels to plant food. Of the 653 currently registered "agricultural conflicts," 53 were "focos rojos" (red light) meaning the dispute likely would be settled by death, he said.

And each year, hundreds of thousands of people leave to seek work in the United States.

Vasquez said the families of migrants left behind struggle to survive.

"It's a historic and moral crisis."

As reported by Salem Statesman Journal.