Fwd: Mexico Labor News and Analysis, November 2006
MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS
November 2006, Vol. 11, No. 11
About Mexican Labor News and Analysis
Mexican Labor News and Analysis (MLNA) is produced in collaboration with the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Auténtico del Trabajo FAT) of Mexico and the United Electrical Workers (UE) of the United States, and with the support of the Resource Center of the Americas in Minneapolis, Minnesota. MLNA can be viewed at the UE's international web site: www.ueinternational.org
For information about direct subscriptions, submission of articles, and all queries contact editor Dan La Botz at the following e-mail address: labotzdh@muohio.edu or call in the U.S.(513) 861-8722. The U.S. mailing address is: Dan La Botz, Mexican Labor News and Analysis, 3503 Middleton Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45220.
If there is no byline, republication is authorized if the reproduction includes the following paragraph: This article was published by Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a monthly collaboration of the Mexico City-based Authentic Labor Front (FAT), the Pittsburgh-based United Electrical Workers (UE) www.ueinternational.org, and the Resource Center of the Americas, www.americas.org.
Contact: Editor Dan La Botz at danlabotz@cs.com or 513-861-8722. For a free e-mailed subscription, send a message to International@ranknfile-ue.org with "subscribe MLNA" in the subject line.
The UE Home Page which displays Mexican Labor News and Analysis has an INDEX of back issues and an URGENT ACTION ALERT section.
Staff: Editor, Dan La Botz. Managing Editor Mary Turck. Frequent Contributors: David Bacon, Fred Rosen.
IN THIS ISSUE:
*Calderón Names Conservative Cabinet
*López Obrador Swears Himself in as “Legitimate President”
*López Obrador Names Cabinet of Shadow Government
*Mexico’s Crisis of Legitimacy by Dan La Botz
* Reflections: Toward An Independent Left by Adolfo Gilly
*Oaxaca State of Siege
*Chiapas 1994, Oaxaca 1996
Dear Union Sisters and Brothers, Activists and Friends:
This has been a year of turmoil in Mexico. Through Mexican Labor News and Analysis (MLNA) www.ueinternational.org – which has completed its tenth year, thanks to your support and the tireless contribution of editor Dan LaBotz – we covered significant events leading up to the Mexican election, such as the attacks on workers at SICARTSA and on flower vendors and their community supporters at Atenco. We reported in detail on election fraud, the virulent media campaign, and the certification of PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, despite evidence and a political situation that warranted a full re-count. More recently, we carried news and analysis of the constitutional convention, the installation of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his shadow cabinet, and the teachers’ strike and growing popular movement in Oaxaca.
It is against this backdrop that the FAT recently completed a major restructuring, putting in place a six-person team of younger leaders who have assumed responsibility for moving the organization forward. FAT organizers and rank and file leaders continue their difficult task of organizing against great odds with enthusiasm and determination. During the past year the FAT has successfully organized new locals and has expanded the municipal workers’ federation in Chihuahua. Other new efforts are also underway. While the organizing focus remains on industrial workers, growing numbers of public sector workers are joining the FAT, and through its workers’ centers—the CETLACS—it is also able to respond to the organizing needs of colonia dwellers and workers in the informal sector. This past Fall, CETLAC Juarez was one of the host organizations for the Border Social Forum and was deeply involved in planning the meeting and making it a reality.
Inside Mexico, the FAT plays a leadership role in important initiatives and national coalitions, including the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT)—the independent labor federation that is increasingly challenging the hegemony of the corrupt Congress of Labor. The UNT continues to play an important role in the new, rapidly-growing coalitions, such as the Labor, Rural Worker, Indigenous, Social and Popular Front (FSCISP), which actively protests the entire package of reforms proposed by the Fox administration, and also on Calderón´s agenda as he assumes office: regressive changes to tax and labor codes, and the privatization of the petrochemical and electrical power industries. Bertha Luján, a highly-respected former co-coordinator of the FAT, has accepted the position of Secretary of Labor in López Obrador’s shadow cabinet. We are sure that she will contribute to the development of a progressive labor policy and continue to be a strong voice for democratic trade unionism in that setting.
Meanwhile, our international work with the FAT and other unions is directly benefiting workers here in the U.S. Our growing understanding of the use of international law led us to create the North Carolina International Worker Justice Campaign, which combines organizing with innovative legal work to challenge the State’s prohibition on collective bargaining for public sector workers. In October, the FAT provided further support by filing a complaint in Mexico under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC). This was truly an international effort! The complaint was drafted collaboratively by a team of two lawyers from the U.S. and two from Mexico, and 53 trade unions and federations from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, along with two Global Union federations participated in launching it, generating press in all three countries. Benedicto Martínez, a national coordinator of the FAT, publicly expressed his outrage at the deeply entrenched violation of labor rights: “I traveled to NC and was shocked at the level of discrimination, and that a country that places such importance on democracy does not permit public sector workers in NC to bargain collectively. We are filing this complaint to support U.S. workers!"
We ask your support for continuing to make MLNA and the other UE/FAT cross-border work possible! Please send your contribution to UE, One Gateway Center, Suite 1400, Pittsburgh, PA., 15222. For a tax deductible contribution please make the check to the UE Research and Education Fund, or contribute on-line at: http://www.ueinternational.org/SolidarityWork/sponsor.html
In Solidarity,
Robin Alexander, Director of International Affairs, UE
CALDERÓN NAMES CONSERVATIVE CABINET; BRAWL IN CONGRESS; PRD THREATENS TO BLOC INAUGURATION OF NEW PRESIDENT
President-elect Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party named his new cabinet on the eve of his inauguration on Dec. 1 as the next president of Mexico. Meanwhile the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) continues to threaten to block his inauguration, claiming that his election was stolen and should have been overturned for violating Mexico’s election laws.
Security forces have been massed and a special wall built around the Mexican legislature where the inauguration will take place to keep protestors out. But inside there is already conflict. PRD legislators have been camped out in the lower house, prepared to drive Calderón from the rostrum. On Nov. 29, in a preemptive move PAN legislators seized the rostrum to prevent a take-over by the PRD leading to a real brawl—fist fights, kick-boxing, and furniture-throwing—between dozens of legislators of both parties.
Calderón’s Cabinet
While the PRD and the PAN legislators took strategic positions and prepared to seize the dais, Felipe Calderón announced his cabinet saying that it would work for rapid economic growth, job creation, and an end to poverty, while also keeping government spending in check. The new cabinet will push to privatize the electric energy industry and petroleum and to pass a labor law reform bill.
Calderón’s cabinet reflects his commitment to continuing the conservative economic and social policies of his predecessor. The economic appointments indicate his support for the program of neoliberal globalization adopted by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) beginning in the 1980s and continued by President Vicente Fox since 2000. One Mexican blog calls it a cabinet which is “plutocratic, oligarchic and made up of recycled Salinistas,” referring to the former president of Mexico Carlos Salinas of the PRI.
Many of the new appointees previously served in the PRI governments of Salinas or Ernesto Zedillo. (See: http://kikka-roja.blogspot.com/ A discussion of both the Calderón and the López Obrador cabinets can be found on this blog together with photos and videos. I have drawn upon it for some of the characterizations below.)
- Secretary of the Interior, the second most important position in the Mexican government, will go to former Jalisco Governor Francisco Ramirez Acuña. Gobernación as the position is known in Spanish, heads up Mexico’s police and acts as the prime political operative and fixer. A heavy-handed governor in his home state, his opponents have call Ramirez Acuña a “repressor and torturer.” Calderón said his choice of second-in-command would not be afraid to uphold law and order.
- Juan Camilo Mourino, a close advisor, will become Cabinet secretary, similar to the White House chief of staff.
- Patricia Espinosa Castellano, trained at Oxford and a career diplomat will head the Foreign Ministry, the second woman to do so.
- Arturo Sarukhan, the only cabinet member to have studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), took an advanced degree in foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University. He will oversee U.S.-Mexico relations, what Calderón described as Mexico’s “most important and sensitive relationship.” Sarukhan said of Fox, “That you had a Mexican president willing to stake and invest political capital in the relationship with the United States and that he has nothing to show for it puts everyone in a very tight spot in Mexico.” (His resumé can be found at: http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/200409/market_open_091604.stm )
- Secretary of the Treasury will be Agustín Carstens, an economist trained at the University of Chicago who has worked for the International Monetary Fund.
- Eduardo Sojo, who will serve as Secretary of the Economy, has been Fox’s political coordinator.
- Georgina Kessel, trained at Columbia University, will become Secretary of Energy, a department in which she previously held minor posts. She is the author of the “The South Also Exists: An Essay on the Regional Development of Mexico,” written with Santiago Levy and Enrique Dávila, a book which provided the theoretical foundation for Fox’s Puebla-Panama Plan, a scheme to create a maquiladora corridor from Central Mexico to the Isthmus of Panama.
- Luis Tellez, becomes Secretary of Communication and Transportation. He was Secretary of Energy under Zedillo and Under-Secretary of Planning in the Department of Agriculture in the government of Salinas, responsible for the reform of Constitutional Article 27 making possible the private ownership and alienation of formerly communally owned land. Tellez has connections to many Mexican and U.S. corporations, having been a co-director of Grupo Mexico de Carlyle which is involved in both energy and military investments and a board member of Bancomer, Grupo México, Sempra Energy and the GAP.
- Javier Lozano, to become Secretary of Labor, was a spokesman for assassinated PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. He also served in various posts in the Department of Transportation and Communication under Zedillo. He resigned from the PRI to become one of Calderón’s closest advisors. He has virtually no previous experience in issues of labor and social welfare.
- Rodolfo Elizondo, a former corporate director in the private sector, will continue as the Secretary of Tourism, the post he has held in the Fox administration. He is the only member of the PAN on the economic side of the cabinet.
- Juan Elvira becomes Secretary of Environment
- Abelardo Escobar will be Secretary of Agrarian Reform, an area in which he has little previous experience.
- Secretary of Health is José Angel Córdova, a former Congressman with a reputation for ultra-conservative positions and no previous experience in the health sector.
- Alberto Cárdenas, who ran against Calderón in the PAN presidential primary with the backing of the most conservative business interests, is the new Secretary of Agriculture. He has some background and a conflict of interest— in the state of Jalisco he has thousands of acres of agave dedicated to tequila production for export. He will have to deal with the controversial end of the tariff protections for beans and corn that are scheduled to end under NAFTA in 2007.
- Josefina Vázquez Mota, an economist and previously the Secretary of Social Development in the Fox government, became the political director for Calderon’s transition team, and now becomes Secretary of Education. She has the backing Elba Esther Gordillo, president of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE). Opposed by PAN conservatives, hers has been the most controversial appointment.
- Beatriz Zavala, a former Senator from the Yucatán and a protégé of Vázquez Mota, will be the new Secretary of Social Development. Fox, and now Calderón, have successively appointed three women to this post. All have been utterly ineffectual in eradicating poverty.
Calderon’s cabinet, drawn from the elite of the PRI and the PAN, will have to draw upon all of its resources if it is to overcome the crisis of legitimacy that face the opening of this new administration. The unresolved issues in Chiapas dating back to 1994, the civil unrest in Oaxaca at present, the weakness of the economy, the failure to create jobs, the low wages, and the continuing mass emigration of Mexicans to the United States, the challenge from Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s shadow government and the Other Campaign of Subcomandante Marcos—all of these will offer challenges to the new government.
First of all, the president-elect will have to be inaugurated, and it looks like even that may be a challenge.
LÓPEZ OBRADOR SWEARS HIMSELF IN AS
“LEGITIMATE PRESIDENT”
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who officially lost the race for President of Mexico, nevertheless took the oath of office on Nov. 20, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, declaring himself “the legitimate president” before more than 100,000 people gathered on the Plaza of the Constitution in Mexico City. Mexican Senator Rosario Ibarra, the first woman candidate for president of Mexico in 1982, pinned on the presidential sash.
López Obrador claims that the election was stolen by the country’s political “mafia,” what he calls its “neofascist oligarchy,” and that he is the rightful president. He promises to lead a peripatetic shadow government that will also head up a movement of civil disobedience to overturn the government of president-elect Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party. His goal he says is to create “a just, free and progressive country.”
“We are congregated together here,” López Obrador declared, “because faced with the electoral fraud of July 2, we decided to declare the reign of corruption and privilege to be abolished and to commence the construction of a new republic.”
Justifying his taking of the oath of office, he said, “To accept the existing regime implies not only an act of treason to the people of Mexico, but also to postpone indefinitely democratic change and to resign ourselves, impotent, to the assaults of the economic and political elites, the kidnappers of our public institutions.”
López Obrador reiterated his campaign promise to push at all levels for a plan for “social development to benefit the poorest and most excluded sectors of Mexican society.”
A Twenty Point Program
In a powerful speech full of historic resonance to former presidents Benito Juárez and Francisco I. Madero and laden with emotion, López Obrador laid out a twenty-point program for the nation, an amalgam of nationalist, populist and social democratic elements. He suggested he would have the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), made up of the PRD and its allied parties, push for this program. We summarize the program here:
1. The renovation of public institutions through a national debate and a plebiscite for the adoption of a new constitution.
2. The right to information and the democratization of the media.
3. The creation of jobs in Mexico to end the mass migration abroad. Opposition to the border wall.
4. The denunciation of injustice and the demand for fairness from all government institutions at every level. Solidarity with the people of Oaxaca.
5. Constitutional changes and new laws to fight corruption. An end to influence peddling and a limit on salaries and perks.
6. No more taxes on the poor and the middle class, while maintaining taxes on the powerful and influential. End taxes on food and medicine.
7. Increases in the budget for education, health, job creation and social wellbeing.
8. An attack on politically-connected monopolies and the implementation of price controls.
9. A truth commission to investigate the government’s bailout of the banks (Fobaproa) and highways and sugar mills. An examination and revision of government contracts.
10. A renegotiation of NAFTA to protect national producers, especially of corn and beans.
11. A living wage.
12. A fight for workers in the informal sector such as agricultural day laborers, domestic workers, and street vendors.
13. Union autonomy and democratization of the unions through secret ballot elections.
14. No to the privatization of the electric power and petroleum industries.
15. Defense of the national patrimony, such as archeological zones, ecosystems, forests, water and culture.
16. The construction of a womb to tomb welfare state, including food vouchers for the elderly, support for the handicapped, and scholarships for the children of single mothers.
17. The guarantee of rights of indigenous peoples, beginning with the fulfillment of the San Andrés Larrainzar Accords (a treaty between the EZLN and the Mexican government reached in Feb. 1996).
18. Higher education for all who desire it.
19. The right to public health care for all.
20. Assistance to all Mexicans living in poor urban and rural areas to provide them with housing and public services.
López Obrador “Trust Buster”
The “legitimate president of Mexico” puts special emphasis on fighting monopolies and monopolistic practices, both of which are prohibited under Article 28 of the Mexican Constitution. He has promised that the PRD, working with the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), will introduce legislation to end monopolies and to control prices. In his inauguration speech he compared the prices that Mexicans pay for goods compared to those paid in the United States:
“It is unacceptable that Mexicans pay 223 percent more for cement than U.S. consumers; 260 percent more for broad band; 312 percent more for cellular telephone service; 65 percent more for landline telephone service; 230 percent more for long distance national calls; 116 percent more for residential electric; 131 percent more for commercial electric; 36 percent more for high tension electric; 5 percent more for regular gas; 15 percent more for premium gas; 178 percent more for a bank credit card; 115 percent more for a Visa card; 116 more for basic cable vision; 150 percent more for a housing loan; and 26 percent more for credit card charges in department stores.”
His examples seemed to speak to middle class Mexicans. The forty percent of Mexicans who are poor cannot afford automobiles, computers, or credit cards.
Historical Resonances
A former history teacher in a country with a deep and abiding sense of its turbulent history with its three great revolutionary periods and many minor ones, it would not be surprising that López Obrador would make allusions to historical figures in his speech. What was surprising was that there was only one, to “president Benito Juárez the greatest in the history of Mexico.” López Obrador has also chosen to make the Mexican eagle of the Juárez era his symbol.
Why Juárez? Juárez, an Indian from Oaxaca who became a lawyer, led the liberal revolution, called the Reform (1858-1860), that broke the power of Mexico’s creole aristocracy and of the Catholic Church. He also headed up the struggle against the French intervention in Mexico and the imposition of the Hapsburg emperor Maximilian as the ruler of Mexico (1862-1867). Victorious in both the Reform and the anti-imperialist war against the French, he may be said to have ended the era of centrifugal disintegration and to have founded modern Mexico.
By choosing Juárez, López Obrador has also chosen a figure before the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that produced both the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN). By choosing Juárez as his hero, López Obrador rejects both the 70-year history of Mexico’s one-party state and the last six-years of the right-wing Fox government. Choosing Juárez also places López Obrador in Mexico’s anti-clerical tradition, which has so often substituted for genuine radical politics.
Yet surely as a history teacher he also knows that Juárez was a liberal in the 19h century sense of the word, a man who stood for private property, open markets and free trade. Juárez and his liberal collaborators broke the power of the church, but they also broke the power of many Indian groups in order to put their land on the market. Moreover Juárez’s victory against the French depended upon the consistent backing he received from the United States, which was anxious to keep the Europeans off the North American continent. So, like so much about López Obrador, his choice of a hero is fraught with ambiguities.
A Shadow Government on the Move
López Obrador promised to spend three days a week attending to the country’s business and four days a week traveling through Mexico “to create the greatest citizens’ organization to carry out the political, economic, social and cultural transformation that Mexico requires.”
He ended by saying, “The possibilities of change are in our hands, in our acts, in our commitments. We are free women and men and our destiny and the destiny of our country depends upon ourselves. Hands to the work, we will be all the government that our country needs. Long live the government of the people! Long live the Mexican Revolution! Long live Mexico!”
LÓPEZ OBRADOR NAMES CABINET OF HIS SHADOW GOVERNMENT
At the beginning of November López Obrador named his 12-member cabinet, six men and six women, most with titles somewhat different than those that have been traditionally used and with somewhat different responsibilities. Since this is a shadow government, they will be expected to develop alternatives to the policies being put forward by the government of Felipe Calderón. At the same time, they will also be charged with constructing the citizen organization throughout the country which López Obrador says will be the real government.
From the point of view of the labor movement, the most important appointment is that of Berta Luján, a former co-president of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) and Controller of the Mexico City government in López Obrador mayoralty, to become the Secretary of Labor. She is charged with carrying out a labor law reform that will end Mexico’s corrupt and corporativist system, create the legal basis for a democratic union movement, and improve wages and conditions for workers.
Other shadow cabinet appointment are:
- Secretary of Political Relations will be José Augustín Ortiz Pinchetti, the right hand man of López Obrador when he was Mayor of Mexico City. His most important job will be carrying out the agenda of the National Democratic Convention (CND) that “elected” López Obrador “legitimate president” by a hand-vote in the plaza in Mexico City. He will also coordinate the agenda of the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), the political coalition led by the PRD.
- Secretary of International Relations falls to Gustavo Iruegas, a retired career diplomat who has served for 38 years in Mexican embassies throughout Latin America as well as in the United States. He is charged with building a “relation of friendship and cooperation with the United States…without damaging [Mexico’s] sovereignty and national dignity.” He is also to work for peace and security and the development of strong relations with Latin America and the Caribbean.
- Secretary of Justice and Security will be Bernardo Bátiz Vazquez who served as the Attorney General of Mexico City in López Obador’s mayoralty.
- Secretary of Honesty and Republican Austerity will be Octavio Romero Oropeza, an agronomist from López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco. His job will be to promote honesty, transparency and austerity in government.
- Secretary of Public Finances goes to Mario Alberto di Constanzo Armenta who served from 1984 to 1988 in the offices of the Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the government President Miguel de la Madrid. He also served in a technical position in the Legislative Commission that in 2000 investigated the notorious bank bailout called Fobaproa.
- Secretary of Economic Development and Ecology will be Luis Linares who has served as a consultant to several departments such as the Secretary of Social Development, Secretary of Mines and State Industries, and the Director of Social Development of the Mexican oil company PEMEX. The new post combines what have historically been two different areas of responsibility.
- Secretary of National Patrimony falls to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, an engineer who served in López Obrador’s Mexico City government as Secretary of the Environment. Her job is to protect Mexico’s electrical energy industry and gas and oil industries from privatization, as well as to protect the country’s forests and its biodiversity. She will also oversee the country’s archeological sites.
- Secretary of Wellbeing goes to Martha Elvia Pérez Bejarano. She is charged with protecting the health and general wellbeing of the Mexican people, with special attention to the elderly, children, the disabled and single mothers. Her principal task is to fight poverty and social inequality.
- Secretary of Education, Science and Culture will be Raquel Sosa Elízaga. A former member of the Communist Party of Mexico she is a historian who served as both the Secretary of Social Development and later as Secretary of Culture when López Obrador was mayor of Mexico City.
- Secretary of Health will be Asa Cristina Laurell. An immigrant from Sweden who is both a medical doctor and a sociologist, she served in López Obrador’s government of Mexico City as Secretary of Health. She has been an advocate of strengthening the national health care system and of promoting workers’ health.
- Secretary of Human Settlements and Housing will be Laura Itzel Castillo Juárez, who served as Secretary of Urban Development and Housing for then Mexico City Mayor López Obrador. She is charged with developing housing and living spaces within the context of a healthy community and society.
MEXICO’S CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
By Dan La Botz
Felipe Calderón will take the oath of office as Mexico’s next president on Dec. 1. He faces a difficult situation. So does the left that opposes him.
Mexico has entered a period characterized by a profound crisis of legitimacy, that is, among many the government has lost its authority and the people have become more deeply skeptical than ever. Such a loss of authority can lead to further erosion of governmental power, a development which could benefit forces on the right or the left; either authoritarian solutions, such as a clamp down on popular movements, or democratic solutions, such as a greater opening to those movements, are possible. But Calderón’s neoliberal ideology, his elite backers, and Mexico’s existing institutions militate against the latter.
Calderón will have to find a way to reconstruct his government’s authority, and will probably attempt to do so while making as little significant change as possible. Whether he will be able to do so will depend upon the action of his government and the initiatives taken by other political parties and social movements.
The Antecedents of the Current Legitimacy Crisis
The causes of the legitimacy crisis can be found in both distant historical events and in more recent developments. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Mexican authoritarian populist political system constructed in the 1920s and 30s underwent a serious crisis as various social forces—students and workers, peasants and the urban popular movement—rose up to challenge the old system of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Nevertheless, the PRI endured and the movements subsided.
Soon a new element, the economic crisis of the early 1980s, was added to the longstanding political problems. The PRI, under Miguel de la Madrid, decided to undertake a profound change of direction: from economic nationalism to open markets and free trade. The center-piece of this new strategy was support for a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – which was eventually negotiated with Canada and the United States under President Carlos Salinas. Meanwhile, once again, new movements developed, leading the old ruling party to begin to come apart. In 1988 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas led the Democratic Current out of the PRI to form first the National Democratic Front and later the Party of the Democratic Revolution. While Cárdenas won the 1988 election, the PRI-government declared Carlos Salinas the winner, and the neoliberal economic process of privatization accelerated.
The wrenching effects of the economic transformation led to yet another economic crisis from 1994-1996, during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo. On January 1, 1994, the date that NAFTA went into effect, Subcomandante Marcos led the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the Chiapas Rebellion, demanding an end to NAFTA, the removal of Salinas, and a new Constitution. Zedillo combined military encirclement and containment with political negotiation and kept the Zapatista uprising confined to the mountains of Mexico’s southernmost state. Nevertheless, as his term came to an end it was clear that so had the old regime.
Each of the events and developments of the period from 1968 to 2000 had undermined the legitimacy of the PRI-state until finally its corrupt government officials, its corrupt, undemocratic, and bureaucratic labor unions, and its cacique-dominated peasant leagues could no longer hold the thing together. The legitimacy of the 70-year old regime unraveled and Mexico’s people looked for an alternative.
In 2000 Cardenas was once again a candidate of the PRD, but it was clear that he had significantly lost strength, and would be unable to win. Many Mexican voters on the left opted to cast a voto útil (useful vote), determined to end the PRI’s historic control and hopeful that a fair election would lead to greater democracy and a decrease in corruption. Consequently, Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party won the presidential election with votes from left, right and center. Many saw the election of Fox as the beginning of a new era of democracy for Mexico, and legitimacy was reestablished as Mexican citizens extended their good will to Fox.
Fox and the Legitimacy Crisis
However, Vicente Fox’s presidency (2000 to 2006) proved to be such a failure at every level that the deep legitimacy crisis dating back to 1968 soon reappeared and became more significant. The loss of legitimacy was a product of Fox’s failures, of sins of omission as well as of commission.
Early in the Fox years, the Mexican legislature failed to pass the legislation that came out of the San Andrés Larrainzar Accords to benefit indigenous peoples. All three major parties in the Mexican Congress contributed to gutting the proposed legislation of its most important features that would have granted greater autonomy to indigenous peoples. However over the course of his term, Fox and his Administration increasingly came to be viewed as politically inept, producing a deadlock in the Congress that paralyzed almost all important legislation including his own right-wing agenda of further privatization and labor law reform.
The Fox administration also failed to significantly expand the Mexican economy, which grew at a rate of less than 3% during his six-year term. The slow-growing economy could not produce the one million jobs needed per year to absorb the growing population, and usually produced less than half that number. Millions of Mexicans continued to emigrate, so that today one-tenth of all Mexicans live in the United States. At the end of Fox’s administration there are still about 40 percent of Mexicans living in poverty, almost 20 percent living in extreme poverty. More than 25 percent work in the informal sector and millions live on less than US$2.00 per day.
Meanwhile Mexico has produced a class of super-rich financiers and industrialists, a plutocracy that dominates the Mexican economy. A recent report of the world bank concluded that the old Mexican elite of the PRI had consolidated under the PAN. The report identified 20 Mexican multimillionaires worth about 25 billion dollars altogether. Carlos Slim controls 75 percent of the Mexican telephone service, 94 percent of the landline service, as well as most of internet and cable television. During the Fox presidency his profits have tripled from 2.3 billion to 7.1 billion dollars per year. Lorenzo Zambraon Treviño, the “cement king” who heads CEMEX, controls 90 percent of the market. His profits have risen from 5.5 to 16 billion dollars during the Fox years. Germán Larrez, the “copper king” who is CEO of Grupo México, controls 95 percent of the market. His profits during Fox’s term have gone from 70 million to 700 million dollars. The fabulously wealthy Emilio Azcárraga Jean, close to the leaders of the PAN, heads up Televisa which controls 70 percent of Mexico’s television market. The Servitje family controls 85 percent of Mexico’s bakery market. Modelo, headed by Carlos Fernández González, controls 65 percent of the beer market in Mexico and leads in exports. Mexico’s political system functions to ensure the continued power and profits of these men and their corporations.
Fox promised more honest and transparent government, but it was not forthcoming. During the last six years Mexicans learned of the corruption that was pervasive in all three major political parties PRI, PAN and PRD. The PRI had for decades siphoned off public money for its political campaigns, most notoriously with PEMEX oil money which was passed through the Petroleum Workers Union to Francisco Labastida in 1994. Fox, the PAN and the Friends of Fox campaign organization received illegal moneys from foreign contributors. And top leaders of the PRD—not including López Obrador but involving his closes advisors—were videotaped receiving payoffs.
The political deadlock and the economic stagnation blocked any possibility for improvement in the lives of at least one-third of all Mexicans. Their disappointment and frustration led to a series of social upheavals aggravated by Fox’s use of heavy handed political manipulation and finally of massive police force. After the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMM) leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia dared to take a more active role in challenging the PAN’s labor law reform proposal and in resisting employers’ attacks, including a declaration that a mine accident in Feb. 2006 was “industrial homicide,” he was removed as the leader of the union and replaced with a more pliant figure. Despite a national miners’ strike and many smaller strikes and job actions, the government continued to squeeze the union. Then in April of 2006 police killed two strikers at the SICARTSA steel plant.
Then, in May of 2006 in the town of Atenco, where a popular movement had earlier resisted the construction of a new airport, a police attack on flower venders involved massive human rights violations. José Luis Soberanes Fernández, president of the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, published a report which concluded that state and federal authorities had killed two people, mistreated 207 people, including 10 minors, arbitrarily arrested 145 people, sexually assaulted 26 women, and illegally expelled five people from the country.
Finally, in June of 2006 a strike by Local 22 of the Mexican Teachers Union supported by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) faced massive repression first from Governor Ulises Ruiz of the PRI and then from Federal police dispatched to Oaxaca by President Fox. In this struggle, which still goes on some six months later, somewhere between 12 and 20 people have been killed, scores have been shot, and more than 140 have been arrested and imprisoned.
The 2006 Election and the Legitimacy Crisis
Without a doubt, however, it is the presidential election of 2006 which has most significantly eroded the legitimacy of the government. In the July 2 presidential election, the Mexican election authorities and the election court ignored obvious violations of the election law—such as the president’s involvement in the election, illegal advertisements from corporations, and many irregularities in the voting and vote counting—and declared Felipe Calderón of the PAN to have won the election. Millions of Mexicans believe the election to have been stolen and consider Calderón to be an illegitimate president.
The legitimacy crisis has been aggravated by Calderón’s rivals. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had been leading in the polls before the violations of election law began to accumulate, believes that he was the real victor in the election and in a ceremony on Nov. 20 took the oath of office declaring himself to be “the legitimate president of Mexico.” López Obrador has formed a shadow government, appointed 12 cabinet ministers, and plans to run a peripatetic government that is also the organizer of a social movement of civil resistance. López Obrador refuses to recognize a Calderón government and calls for a national constituent assembly to create a new constitution and a new government.
As noted in the above article, López Obrador has committed to spending four days a week traveling through Mexico “to create the greatest citizens’ organization to carry out the political, economic, social and cultural transformation that Mexico requires.”
At the same time Subcomandante Marcos, who organized “the Other Campaign,” a non-electoral national organizing campaign based on an alliance among anti-capitalist groups, has vowed to continue his travels throughout the country also calling for a new constitution and government. While Marcos’s Other Campaign failed to attract the numbers that López Obrador did, nevertheless, he continues to build networks among Mexico’s many poor and downtrodden.
A Crisis of Legitimacy is Not a Revolutionary Situation
While Mexico has undergone a profound crisis of legitimacy, it would be a mistake to think of this as a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation, although one could develop. First, while the ruling elite has problems, it has not yet been tested in a serious way by a major challenge on a national scale. So far there have been mass dissident movements in Oaxaca, in the State of Mexico (Atenco), and in Michoacán (the SICARTSA plant in Lázaro Cárdenas), there has been no unified national challenge. The Mexican Miners Union came closest with its one-day national strike in several states, and the teachers also carried out national actions in support of Local 22 in Oaxaca. Still, no movement has proven capable of creating a national resistance. Nor is there a recognized national leadership organization, although it is important to note that during the Fox Presidency, increasingly broad alliances have formed in response to his policies.
López Obrador has proclaimed that he will build a national movement in Mexico. At present he does not have one. He received about one-third of the vote, and he and his PRD candidates did well in the southern half of the nation, home to more indigenous, peasant and poor people than the north. PRD governors will rule states with about 15 percent of the national population. López Obrador’s organization at present remains complicated and at the same time sketchy: there is the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), and there is the National Democratic Convention (CND). How these various organizations will function remains to be seen.
The PRD is a political party that functions within the legislature, negotiating with the other parties including the ruling party and its new leader, Calderón. In doing so, the PRD functions in alliance with the other parties on the left that form the FAP.
The CND was an impressive showing of strength, but was not a convention in any real sense: it had no delegates, no resolutions and no debates. Its leadership was chosen by López Obrador and it simply put resolutions before the body to be voted yeah or nay. Since the assembly that took place on the Plaza of the Constitution in September, the convention has disappeared from sight. While millions of Mexicans may have voted for López Obrador for president, they do not constitute a social movement. Even the million or so who filled the square in August and September and the tens of thousands who slept in the streets—overwhelmingly humble people of modest means—represent mostly supporters of a political candidate not activists for fundamental social change.
Subcomandante Marcos’s Other Campaign, an alliance of anti-capitalist groups that share some common goals and also many differences, failed to create the sort of national presence he had hoped for. Upstaged by López Obrador’s campaign (and suffering a loss in credibility for urging that voters abstain, a position which directly benefited the PAN) and then by the huge mobilization in Oaxaca under the leadership of APPO, Marcos too has failed to build an organization that represents the leadership of a national social movement. Marcos’s sectarian attitude both toward the National Democratic Convention and towards the Miners union suggests that he fears alliances with forces he cannot control. His moral support for the Oaxaca struggle has not involved having to work out a relationship with Local 22 or with APPO.
The Mexican crisis of legitimacy presents challenges to both Calderón and to Mexico’s forces from below, to be found in many of the existing organizations discussed here. The test for the underdogs will be whether they can find a way to build a common national movement which is not subordinated to a political leadership that they cannot control.
REFLECTIONS: TOWARD AN INDEPENDENT LEFT
By Adolfo Gilly
[This article originally appeared as “Reflexiones para una izquierda no subordinada” in the Mexico City daily La Jornada on Nov. 28, 2006. Translation by Dan La Botz]
1. Since the electoral fraud of 1988, through the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, and up to the manipulation of the whole electoral process in 2006, the neo-liberal social-economic order has not succeeded in finding its forms of political legitimacy in Mexico. We are today witnessing a breakdown in the rules governing the reproduction of power, and therefore facing a crisis in the relationship of command/obedience which forms an integral part of the equilibrium of any political regime.
In other words, we are facing a situation of a lack of legitimacy and of fragmentation of political power in Mexico, which has to do not with its form and ceremonies, but rather with the relationship between rulers and ruled which is recognized by all. The temptation to resolve this crisis by state violence is great. Each time in the past that that happened the results were catastrophic.
2. The most certain proof of the manipulation of the electoral results is, so far, the irremediably senseless decision of the Electoral Tribunal regarding the July 2 elections. This decision has been dismantled piece by piece in an impeccable essay by Jaime Cárdenas titled “Eleven Absurdities of the Electoral Tribunal.” The argument of the Tribunal should have led to a new vote count or to the annulling of the election. They led instead to the election of Felipe Calderón. A process manipulated in this way cannot give rise to a legitimate mandate.
This illegitimacy though extends to both branches of government that have been selected through this election, the executive and the legislative, since the manipulation affected the entire electoral process. So both the election of the president and the election of the Congress are illegitimate. It is not acceptable that the congressmen and senators of the Broad Progressive Front (FAP) say that the president is spurious but the representatives are not. This real fact, though no one refers to it, constitutes a crisis of reproduction of both branches of government.
3. The fragmentation means that power devolves upon its original components: the governors and the caciques [political bosses]. This gives rise to the impotence of the three branches of the Federal government when faced with the despotism of governors Ulises Ruiz, Mario Marín, Enrique Peña Nieto and others, and the importance acquired by the the National Conference of Governors (CONAGO) and its internal solidarity: the power of each governor, whatever his party, may not be touched. Within the interstices of this fragmentation, the power of the drug dealers proliferates, and if its effects are deleterious, we should not exaggerate its autonomy.
4. The fragmentation also causes other centers of real power to be pushed to represent themselves in their own person, rather than to resort to the traditional political mediations. Each of the four pillars of real power is speaking, each one with its own voice and without mediation: the Business Coordinating Council (and each one of the great impresarios and financiers); the Catholic Church and its hierarchies; the PRI-PAN conglomeration, never truly disunited since the great crisis of 1939; and the United States and its military financial complex which is quite active in the Mexican territory. In the midst of the crisis, these powers deliberate in public, while they relegate the political figures to a subordinate level.
5. On the other side, the fragmentation has broken up the networks of imaginary political power and devalued its symbols and rituals. This breakdown accentuates the presence and the importance of a series of movements. We can situate the three most important:
a) Obradorism [from López Obrador], which duplicates the symbols of power and from the plazas pressures for negotiation within the institutions (including among those the PRD) and brings together in the Zócalo [the national plaza in Mexico City] an enormous multitude of the aggrieved, the impoverished and exasperated Mexican men and women who have been robbed even of their vote;
b) APPO [the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca], organized as a network of autonomous popular organizations, which from that position of power sought to impose on the powers-that-be a negotiation under favorable conditions without giving-up its own autonomy;
c) the EZLN, together with its Other Campaign and the indigenous movement, which rejects all of these institutions (including their parties) and does not seek to negotiate nor to deal with them but rather to connect itself to the underdogs organized in many ways and today dispersed throughout the national territory, in order to organize on a national scale a movement which is alien to the governmental institutions and to all of its fragments.
6. Political observers, analysts and commentators concentrate on the vicissitudes of institutional politics, its parties, its politicians of all stripes, its institutions, its quarrels big and small. There is an obsessive discussion about what will happen or not happen on the Great Stage of the Congress and its environs.
On the contrary, for a left which does not subordinate itself to the institutional universe, it is essential to look at and to consider what is taking place among those multitudes, aggrieved and irritated to an extreme: those who have hopes in López Obrador; those who organize themselves in APPO in Oaxaca and in the National Indigenous Congress; those who will say their piece in the Other Campaign. In order to understand and to forsee, it is necessary to look there and to look from there. Everything else is a tide of poison foam.
7. Oaxaca and APPO are not an isolated case. They are like the escape valve through which the steam blows out at full force from a pressure cooker. As always, the authorities, the police and the politicians want to get rid of the valve and ignore the pressure cooker. In Oaxaca the experience of organization, of violence, of flexibility and of the capacity for negotiation which are the inheritance of the exploited, the downtrodden and the dispossessed of Mexico, are flourishing. They don’t fight for power, but rather for a different unsubordinated relation with the power, and for the consolidation of the autonomous internal relations of the people and their movement. They ask what the entire country demands: respect and justice. Today the situation of the Mexican nation is to be understood by looking at Oaxaca, not at the Congress and its battles in the desert.
8. In the political arena and in the superficial analyses, it has become the fashion to minimize and to deny any importance to the wanderings of Subcomandante Marcos and the Other Campaign; to the indigenous communities organized in Chiapas; to the tenacious resistance of Atenco, its prisoners and its persecuted, to the indigenous peoples assemblies which continue to meet and to articulate their grievances, exiles, dispossessions and resistances; the National Indigenous Congress its spokespersons and representatives. Those who give these movements up as weak or secondary may be surprised later.
It makes no sense to propose to these forces that they join the National Democratic Convention [led by López Obrador], that is to say, that they join a movement in which they don’t believe and subordinate themselves to its leadership and perspective, denying the very reason for being that they have proclaimed from the beginning. This would be nothing more than ethical, political and organizational suicide. However it is a different proposition to ask them from their own autonomous position not to ignore the size and to ask the reasons for the popular mobilizations which support López Obrador.
9. The mass electoral movement that gave 15 million votes to the For the Good of All Coalition has now been regrouped into the National Democratic Convention under the leadership of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. There was no Convention with political discussion and delegates. The real leadership remained concentrated in the person and the power of López Obrador. At no time has the CND called for, convened or proposed to organize any sort of autonomous organization from below to fight for the objectives that it has now established.
Those who have affiliated with the CND are declared to be direct “representatives” of López Obrador in his role as “legitimate president” and they are invested as such with a personal credential signed by the same López Obrador. That is to say, a “legitimiate president” will give his authority with his signature to millions of his representatives who will then be his servants as opposed to millions of voters designating as their servant the man they elect as president. This role reversal, beyond whatever was in the minds of those who created it may have intended, defines personalistic and totalitarian relation between leader and mass. Allow me to make reference here to Elías Canetti in Mass and Power and to the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.
The personal political leadership style of López Obrador is not inherited directly from Benito Juárez but rather from Tomás Garrido Canabal, the governor of Tabasco in the 1930s. The electoral mass movement centralized in the persona and the command of an individual corresponds to a typology defined in a situation of fragmentation and catastrophic equilibrium what was studied by Gramsci in Italy in the 1930s. [The reference here is to the fascism of Benito Mussolini.]
The scene of the swearing in [in Spanish the “taking of possession] on the Zócalo on November 20, with the President as the only person on the stage, his arm outstretched, the immense eagle behind him and all the other paraphernalia of the ceremony, seemed as if it was taken from a film from another era. These are not neutral symbols; they have a sense and a message, even though the designers of the scene don’t know it.
Great aggrieved and exasperated masses can move themselves in various directions and look for ways to resolve the demands which have been put aside by the politicians. It is
therefor necessary to take them seriously and to give attention to their motives and to their ways. But the shocking and troubling thing is that so many intellectual and political figures of the old left line up clueless and uncritical of this leadership.
10. The National Democratic Convention (CND), the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), and the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) [all led by López Obrador] are in an intrinsically contradictory situation. On the one hand they say that they place themselves outside the existing institutions and ally themselves with “the legitimate government” of López Obrador. On the other hand, they form part of the Congress whose legal documents have to be approved by the president, that is by Felipe Calderón. Whatever they may say, this is a dispute within the existing institutions, one that seeks to modify the relations of internal forces by external mobilizations in the plazas to exert pressure. That is to say, that this pressure and these organizational forms such as the CND, in this case remain subordinated to the logic of the very institutions that they have declared to be “spurious.” There seems to be no escape from this contradiction within view.
11. I want to note here, by way of conclusion, some of the premises for the organization of a left which would not be subordinated to the vicissitudes of the present implosion of the institutions and their political legitimacy which is taking place in slow motion.
a) To look from the point of view and in terms of the demands of the oppressed, the exploited and the subordinated.
b) To draw a clear line that differentiates from the institutional left: where they say “inequality” one must say “exploitation;” where they say “poverty” one has to say “dispossession” and “racism;” where they say “foreign politics,” one must say “alliance and unity with Latin America” and “organization with immigrants and workers in the United States.”
c) To understand the motives and the experiences which lead these multitudes to support and to follow López Obrador; and to explain it without subordinating oneself, without creating illusions and without contradicting oneself.
d) Connecting with the ideas, actions and reasons that have led people throughout the country to organize or to begin to organize.
Much more than one might think, among these people with their experiences and their lives, each on in his own way, they are doing this. These are the other fragments, those that are seeking to come together.
OAXACA: STATE OF SIEGE
At the end of November, the city of Oaxaca – center of a state-wide movement of opposition to Governor Ulises Ruiz – is in a virtual state of siege, with Federal police controlling the city center, other police carrying out searches of homes and organizations, and scores of activists being arrested, charged with felonies and sent to prisons in other states to await trial. In an attempt to end the repression, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), has agreed to enter into negotiations with the Mexican Minister of the Interior, according to an APPO leader.
The movement that began almost six months ago as a teachers strike and then became a broad movement to remove the governor, has now become a struggle to retain the most basic civil and political rights in the face of massive police repression. The struggle in Oaxaca takes place as the Mexican government is passing through a profound crisis of legitimacy, with many believing the recent election was stolen, with the loser of the election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, swearing himself in as “legitimate president of Mexico,” and with Subcomandante Marcos traveling the country calling for an anti-capitalist uprising to found a new Mexican state.
A Six-Month Struggle
Oaxaca is, at the moment, the expression and the symbol of the discontent of millions with the Mexican government. The movement began six months ago with a strike by Local 22 of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE). Faced with the obduracy of Ruiz, the strikers gained the solidarity of many organizations in the state which came together to form the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca or APPO. Local 22 and APPO then joined together to demand the removal of their common enemy, Governor Ruiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He refused to step down.
When Ruiz wouldn’t step down, APPO appealed to President Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN), but he said he didn’t have the power and threw the issue into the Senate. In the Senate, the PRI threatened that if Ruiz were removed, it would join the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) to block the inauguration of president-elect Felipe Calderón of the PAN. The Senate recommended that Ruiz re-think resigning, but took no action. Both the state and federal governments have failed to act, but many people in Oaxaca refuse to accept the continuation of Ruiz’s rule.
Movement Under Attack
While the teachers strike had ostensibly been settled, APPO continued the fight to remove Ruiz. On Saturday, Nov. 25, APP0 led a peaceful protest march—continuing to demand the removal of Governor Ulises Ruiz. When the march arrived at the city center, it was attacked by the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), according to the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (Limeddh). The police launched tear gas at the demonstrators and beat them with their clubs. APPO activists built street barricades, burned tires, and fought the police with whatever they found at hand.
During the course of the conflict arsonists set fire to several government buildings and several buses and cars. Molotov cocktails were thrown at hotels and shops. Many other buildings in the famous colonial tourist city, both public and private, were damaged. The government accused APPO of having set the fires; APPO accused Governor Ruiz’s henchmen of being responsible. Unidentified individuals fired into the APPO demonstration and APPO reported that the gunmen had killed three people and that there were 100 gun-shot wounds. The Red Cross reported that 53 people had been hospitalized. In addition, two dozen people disappeared and over 100 were arrested.
Systematic Repression of the Movement
President Vicente Fox’s government dispatched agents of the Federal Agency of Investigation to work with the Federal police to arrest APPO leaders and activists. Local and Federal courts have reportedly issued 300 arrest warrants. So far 141 activists have been arrested and, after being held briefly in local jails, have been transported to prisons in the states of Nayarit on the Pacific Coast and to Matamoros, Tamaulipas on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Many of those who had been arrested had been beaten in the course of conflict with the police and had injuries of varying degrees of severity. Mexican police agencies have been repeatedly criticized by both Mexican and international human rights organizations for their torture of prisoners. Most recently the PFP was accused of killing, raping, and torturing people in the town of Atenco. Relatives and friends of the prisoners, as well as Mexican and international human rights groups, have expressed concern for the prisoners’ welfare.
While APPO has pledged to continue the struggle, the Federal police repression has made it virtually impossible to do so.
CHIAPAS 1994, OAXACA 2006
By Neil Harvey nharvey@nmsu.edu
[His own translation of his article which appeared in La Jornada, Saturday November 4, 2006.]
The repression unleashed in Oaxaca in recent weeks calls for full condemnation and solidarity with the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The fact that local police and officials could act with such impunity demonstrates a lack of interest on the part of the federal government in achieving a true political solution.
These events reveal several worrying comparisons with Chiapas because they once again show the incapacity of the government to recognize legitimate demands, such as for example, the call for the resignation of a state governor who has ordered the use of force to try and put an end to social discontent.
In January 1994, the president at that time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, tried to suppresss the Zapatistas military until civil society mobilized to demand a political solution. A large part of the population recognized that the EZLN was and is a movement with just demands and that their rebellion opened up an important space in the struggle for democracy in the country and not only in Chiapas. In Oaxaca, the demand for dissolution of government powers is also something that seeks something more far-reaching than simply the alternation of parties in government. Participatory democracy, improvement of the educational system and attention to the needs of the most marginalized sectors are goals that contribute to a truly democratic transformation.
In Chiapas, the change in government at the end of 1994 occurred in a context of deep political and economic crisis. The state governor, Eduardo Robledo, could not avoid rejection by a significant part of the population that continued supporting a government in rebellion. During the six years between 1994 and 2000, Chiapas had three governors, including two interim governors, who made use of repression. For his part, President
Zedillo tried to overcome the financial crisis with the support of the Clinton administration, and carried out a new offensive against the Zapatistas in February of 1995. Once again thousands of citizens mobilized to demand dialogue and an end to the repression. It is worth noting that, just like the current Secretary of Government Abascal and President Fox, Zedillo’s government used a double discourse. Zedillo undermined dialogue and set in motion a process of militarization that is still having terrible effects for indigenous communities in Chiapas.
In Chiapas, the lack of political will on the part of the government was also reflected in the formation and actions of paramilitary groups linked to the old PRI regime and organizad and trained by the authorities in order to attack those who sympathized with the EZLN. Such was the protection for these groups that the denunciations made by human rights organizations weeks before the Acteal massacre in 1997 went ignored. On the contrary, the official response to the massacre was not the arrest of the intellectual authors of that crime, but the increase in federal troops in the highlands of Chiapas, based upon the argument that it was necessary to “re-establish order, peace and the law,” that is, the same discourse that the government is now applying in Oaxaca. Soon afterwards came the use of police attacks against autonomous municipalities, expulsion of foreign observers, and the clientelistic use of federal funds and medical services. As we have seen in Chiapas, it is imposible to live in this “normalcy” that the government has tried to impose by force. Militarization divides and polarizes communities, pushing further way the possibilities of peace.
During the past six years, the government and all the political parties failed to grasp the opportunity for ratifying the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture. Instead of recognizing indigenous autonomy as a constitucional right, the legislators left indigenous peoples without legal mechanisms to exercise their autonomy in the use of their resources and territories. At the same time, the government of Vicente Fox promoted its Plan Puebla-Panamá (PPP), with the aim of building the necessary infrastructure (highways, ports and airports, integration of energy suplies, hydroelectricity dams, etc.) in order to attract investors interested in exploiting natural resources, cheap labor and the strategic location of southeastern Mexico. This model benefits the groups in power and not the majority of the population. The PPP ran in to so much resistance in Chiapas and Oaxaca, as well as in San Salvador Atenco, that the government stopped generating much propaganda for the plan, although some of the works continued to be implemented. Now Felipe Calderón is promising to revive the PPP, which will provoke more conflicts in a region where there are already many conflicts. The common factor linking Chiapas, San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca is this resistance to the imposition of an exclusionary and unsustainable development plan that was formulated without the approval of the communities that are directly affected.
In recent weeks there have been many protests against repression held in Mexico and internationally. For example, on October 30, there were protests at Mexican consulates in more than fifteen cities in the US, and the embassy in Barcelona was occupied. For their part, the EZLN issued a call for popular demonstrations against repression on November 1 and November 20. These protests not only reveal the lack of democracy in the institutions, but also the great perseverance of social movements in the struggle for their legitimate demands.
End Mexican Labor News and Analysis Volume 11, No. 11, November, 2006.
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