Mr. Obama Takes Sides in a Divided Country
In May of this
year Mr. Obama paid a state visit to Mexico to support the domestic reforms
being proposed by the country’s newly elected president, Enrique Peña Nieto, of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and gave a short speech to a
small, select audience of university and high school students and business
leaders at Mexico City’s famous Museum of Anthropology. Obama’s now familiar
message of hope and change, though greeted with skepticism from some members of
his young audience, was generally received with enthusiasm. His efforts at
broken Spanish and his concessions to Mexicans’ national pride and
sensibilities were met with repeated cheers and applause. He praised Mexico for its progress towards
democracy, technological and economic development and the growth of a middle
class. He noted with satisfaction that Mexico was beginning to take its
rightful place among the nations of the world.
He urged greater economic cooperation between the two countries working
as equals towards a bright future of mutual respect and prosperity. Obama also
urged the young Mexicans in his audience to leave “old mindsets” behind and
work towards a new and prosperous Mexico based on “new realities” and a new
relationship with the United States, which was no doubt a reference to the
difficulties which have plagued the history of Mexican-American relations in
the past. He urged the young, technologically savvy students in his audience to
use their talents and imagination to create the “next big thing”.
Although Obama’s message of hope and change
constantly holds immense attraction for his audiences, his words are somehow always
belied by the very facts and the reality of the situation in which they are spoken.
In fact, the more desperate their situation, the more people are disposed to
listen to such messages. In reality the new Mexican President, whose party is
returning to power after 12 years in the opposition is presiding over a deeply divided
country whose divisions between the haves and the have-nots go back for
centuries, divisions which, rather than disappearing or being mitigated by time,
have become more accentuated and deeply entrenched in all aspects of Mexico’s
modern society, culture, and political institutions. The pro-business, pro
free-trade National Action Party (PAN) which held the presidency from 2000 to
2012 only managed to exacerbate these divisions and to disillusion those voters
who believed that after 70 years of PRI governance, elections would finally offer
solutions to these age-old problems. Now, the PRI is hoping to overcome these
divisions by proposing a plan, a “Pact for Mexico”, which represents an
agreement between the three major political parties of the country, the PRI,
the PAN and the PRD, (the Democratic Revolutionary Party) to wage an aggressive
offensive against all those in the country that stand in the way of their
neoliberal program of further opening Mexico up to foreign investment and to
the vicissitudes of the global economy.
But there is
tremendous resentment and a rapidly growing resistance to the PRI’S “Pact for
Mexico”; a resistance which, like Popocatepetl, the dormant volcano that lies just
outside of Mexico City and has been spewing inordinate amounts of water vapor,
gas and ash into the air lately, threatens to erupt into open class warfare.
The Electoral Parties
Before the 2000 elections, the PRI had held a monopoly
on political power in Mexico for 70 years and was returned to power in the 2012
elections after 12 years in the opposition, during which time the PAN held the
presidency. The main alternative to these two bourgeois political parties, and
the great hope of many leftists in the country, that was once offered by the
newly formed populist left PRD and the candidacies of Andrés Manuel Lopez
Obrador (AMLO) for president in 2006 and 2012 has been at least temporarily
derailed since the election of Peña Nieto. During the 2006 campaign, AMLO and his populist
views were successfully stigmatized by his pro-business free-market opponents
and the corporate media as a “danger for Mexico”. The hostility to AMLO among
these same sectors only intensified after AMLO protested the largely fraudulent
election results of 2006, which gave the victory to PAN’s Felipe Calderon, by
calling on his followers to occupy the center of the capital, a protest which
eventually lasted for 47 days, causing hotels, restaurants and other businesses
in the area to suffer economic losses. Now the middle class views AMLO with the
same contempt with which they view Mexico’s president from 1976 to 1982, José
Lopez Portillo, who is vilified for nationalizing the banks at the end of his
term, and the contempt with which they once viewed Venezuela’s late president,
Hugo Chavez, a figure with whom AMLO’s opponents often compare him. These
electoral defeats of the PRD have led to demoralization, dissension and
opportunism in the party’s ranks and a faction of the party has signed on,
along with the PAN, to Peña Nieto’s “Pact for Mexico”. The PRI now not only
holds the presidency but a good share of the national congress and a majority
of the state legislatures. Finding the presidency denied to his political
movement, AMLO has now left the PRD and created an independent opposition
movement called the Movimiento de
Renacimiento, (MORENA)
The Teachers’ Union and the Education Reform Law
In February of
this year, Peña Nieto caused consternation and turmoil within the powerful
teachers’ union, the SNTE (Sindicato
Nacional de Trabajadores de Educación) and the dissenting, smaller and more
militant splinter group, the CNTE (Congreso
Nacional de Trabajadores de Educación), when he arrested the corrupt leader
of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo. He further aggravated the union
with his proposed Education Reform Law, which seeks to undermine the power of
the teachers’ unions in education and proposes to implement standardized
testing for teacher evaluation. Resistance to the reform law is particularly
strong in the underdeveloped, rural areas of the country.
The teachers’ struggles in
the PRI-controlled state of Oaxaca, it will be remembered, assumed historic
proportions and erupted into violent confrontations in 2006 when a militant
section of the teachers’ union, CNTE Section XXII, went on strike and occupied
the center of the state capital for several months. Out of this movement grew a
citizens’ political organization, APPO (Asemblea
Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca), which helped fuel the protest and vent
popular discontent. Confrontations reached a climax when an American reporter
for Indymedia, Brad Will, was shot and killed by unknown pro-government forces
of the PRI Governor at the time, Hector Ulises Ruiz. As always, the public, taking its cue from
the government and the corporate media, roundly criticized these tactics of the
teachers’ union, which received little or no outside support, at least
according to this same media.
We now see
this history being repeated as CNTE and thousands of public school teachers
from rural communities in the less developed areas of the country are going on
strike, mostly in the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas. Thousands of teachers, again mostly from
Oaxaca, have been converging on the nation’s capital, where they have organized
large marches and demonstrations. Confrontations with riot police have taken
place in front of the National Congress, where a general version of the new law
was being discussed and was passed. There is talk of provocateurs having
infiltrated the teachers’ ranks. These same teachers are now occupying the
Zócalo (Constitution Square) of the capital in front of the presidential palace
where they are living in tent cities and where they pledge to remain until
September 15, Mexico’s Independence Day. Meanwhile, the patience of the capitalinos is wearing thin because of
the almost daily traffic snarls that the teachers’ demonstrations in different
parts of the city are causing; AMLO is calling for public understanding and
indulgence towards the protests; the capital’s municipal PRD government, which
is relatively liberal, is pledging not to repress or dislodge the protestors; and
the rightwing PAN is asking for the protesters to be removed by force. There is
a form of limited dialogue between the government and the teachers’ union taking
place but Peña Nieto has pledged that an Education Reform Law will be passed in
any case.1
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| Tent city in Mexico City's Zocalo: from Omar
López/EL UNIVERSAL |
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| Omar López/EL UNIVERSAL |
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| Omar López/EL UNIVERSAL |
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| Union Banner in Zocalo tent city opposing the labor "reforms" (Alex Steiner) |
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| Union banner in Zocalo tent city (Alex Steiner) |
The Labor Reform Law, the Electrical Workers’ Union, and
PEMEX
There is also a growing discontent and
resistance to the “Pact for Mexico” among the union rank and file who have
vehemently opposed the anti-worker, anti-union Labor Reform Law which was
passed earlier this year, and there is still the smoldering resentment among electrical
workers over Felipe Calderon’s dissolution of the Electrical Workers Union (the
Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas) in October of 2009 which put over 44,000
unionized workers out of a job by dissolving the state run electrical power
company, busting the union and replacing the workers with non-unionized
employees of the Comisión Federal de
Electricidad.
Furthermore, the issue of the fate of
PEMEX and the exploitation of Mexico’s oil reserves, which were once proudly
proclaimed to be the patrimony of all Mexicans by the PRI’s Lazaro Cardenas in
1938, is still another bone of contention that threatens to erupt into open
political confrontation once again as the major political parties submit their
several proposals to the congress to
“modernize” the oil industry by opening it up to foreign investment, a move
which, in turn, could well require the National Congress to modify several
articles of the Mexican constitution. Emotions run high over the question and
while the PAN and the PRI have submitted their own plans, they have promised to
make common cause in their effort. The PRD is offering its own plan to
“modernize” the oil industry and threatening not to vote for the law, thereby
breaking with the PRI’s “Pact for Mexico”.
Once again, AMLO has captured the public spotlight by staking out a
position of his own as the head of an independent political movement, MORENA,
which promises to oppose any effort by the government to privatize PEMEX.
The Regional Self-Defense Brigades
In addition, there is a growing
socio-political movement in the states among poor rural communities in reaction
and opposition to the rise of corruption and organized crime and to the drug
lords who are infiltrating and taking over entire municipal governments all
over the country. No longer content to depend on the corrupt institutions of
the military and the police for protection, armed popular defense forces are
being organized in rural communities all over the country in order to take
justice into their own hands. The state of Michoacán has seen the most recent
example of this movement in which self-defense brigades are successfully
organizing and arming themselves in order to forcibly expel the drug cartels
from their streets and their communities.2 The federal and state governments are
anxiously trying to negotiate a peace with these vigilante groups and is
promising to take matters into its own hands to solve the problem by using
Calderon’s old, failed tactics of increasing police and military presence in
the region. Confrontations between the government and these groups have already
begun.
Student Discontent
No less important is the lingering
discontent among students. A student movement opposing the election of Peña
Nieto took shape during the last elections and led to demonstrations, marches
and confrontations with government forces on the very day of the president’s
inauguration, December 1, 2012. It also led to a period of several weeks during
which the Rectory of the National University (UNAM) was occupied by student
sit-ins or “plantones”. There has
always been the long standing problem of the lack of access to a university
education for broad masses of young people in Mexico who can neither find a
place in the public university system nor are able to pay tuition to gain
entrance into one of the more expensive private institutions.
Peña Nieto’s Record of Repression
Peña Nieto,
like Mexico and the PRI itself, has a record of violent repression and the
question is whether, under certain circumstances, he might not resort to brutal
repression of the kind for which he was responsible in 2012 against the
students and in 2006 against rural peasants when he served as governor of the
State of Mexico. At that time, Peña
Nieto was responsible for ordering the vicious attack by Federal and State
Police on peasant merchants and organized flower sellers in the town of Atenco
over their right to set up their popular markets in the town square. In this confrontation homes were broken into,
peasants, some of them armed with machetes, were beaten, detained and raped, and
at least two young men, one of them only 14 years old, were killed. The
governor had an additional score to settle with this community because it was
their organized resistance that had earlier prevented the government from authorizing
the construction of a second international airport in the same area some four years
before.
Mexico: At a Crossroads or an Impasse?
Surely, the
country is at some sort of threshold or crossroads. Obama’s now familiar siren
song and message of hope and change is very seductive to Mexico’s bourgeoning
young middle class, who are composed of young professionals who have gotten college
degrees usually in those areas of business, finance or high technology which
are most in demand on today’s market. The only alternative to the rosy picture
which Obama paints, it would seem, is despair. But instead of Mexico entering
upon a new era of prosperity and taking its rightful place among the nations of
the world, the country, contradictorily, seems to be entering upon a period of
uncertainty, instability and turmoil. There is even talk of it becoming a
“failed state”. The question is why?
Peña Nieto’s
new plan for the modernization of Mexico is really nothing new and consists of
a continuation of the old neoliberal policies of opening Mexico up to even more
private investment in order to make the country more “competitive” on the world
market. But as the world and the domestic economy continue to deteriorate, resistance
to the old neoliberal policies grows. The PRI’s program is really that of the pro-business,
free-market oriented PAN but by pushing through its new package of reforms, the
PRI (much like the Democratic Party in the U.S.) is using its populist
credentials to do what the PAN, in its few years in the presidency, could not
do. The PRI has simply co-opted the right wing’s program. The reason that they
have been able to do so and might even be able to implement it successfully is that
in the early XX century after the 1910 revolution, the PRI built a reputation
based on a sort of populist, nationalist-progressivism which at least claimed
to be all inclusive. The famous paintings of the Mexican muralist movement of
the 30’s eloquently expressed these progressive-nationalist aspirations. And
Mexicans are still fiercely nationalistic-- something that is exploited by the
country’s ruling classes. But the fact is that Peña Nieto and the PRI long ago abandoned
the roots of its own nationalist-progressive traditions and during its 70 years
in power proved itself to be hopelessly oppressive and corrupt. Another reason for the PRI’s success is that
it has used its traditional peasant base and a party machine based on compadrazgo, cronyism and patronage to
assemble a kind of coalition of the three major political parties which only serves
the interests of a ruling class elite whose loyalties are not to the nation or
its citizens but to international banks and financial institutions,
multi-national corporations and their stockholders and investors, all of whom
stand to gain from the so-called reforms. As Frantz Fanon pointed out in writing about
the Algerian revolution, the loyalties of the nationalist bourgeoisie, despite
what they avow, are always to the colonialist, imperialist powers. And what we
are seeing in the world today is a resurgence of imperialism and the rebirth of
colonialism.
The
anti-reform forces, on the other hand, composed of the more politically and
socially conscious sectors of Mexico’s poor and lower class working people and their
traditional working class institutions and organizations see themselves as the
sacrificial lambs of this promised prosperity of the future. Yet, at the same
time the anti-reform forces appear unable, at least so far, to muster substantial
support among the broad population against the reforms. In the eyes of the
Mexican middle class and what Marx calls the petty bourgeoisie, this is because
these forces cannot or do not offer any feasible alternative; they are simply
the cause of the problem-- the fly in the ointment. Their lack of widespread,
popular support, the middle class maintains, is only proof of this. Indeed the mobilization
against the proposed reforms organized by the teachers, the unions and AMLO’s
popular movement, MORENA, only manage to inspire rancor and hostility among the
vast majority of middle-class, tax-paying Mexicans, who, whether rightly or
wrongly, condemn the unions for their corruption, inefficiency and anti-free
market principles and place all the blame for the low quality of education in
the public school system squarely on the striking teachers. It would appear that the forces opposing Peña
Nieto’s reforms and his plans to modernize Mexico are simply regressive and backward
spoilers who instinctively hate any kind of progress, hope and change.
For the
moment, therefore, it seems that Mexico rather than being at a crossroads or a threshold
is actually at an impasse or a stalemate between two forces: the middle class, who
sees Peña Nieto’s opponents as the obstacle to Mexico’s progress, on the one
hand, and Mexico’s poor and lower class working people and their respective
organizations, on the other, who find that they have no alternative left in the
political arena but to resort to drastic extra-electoralist measures for the
sake of their own survival but have not yet found the broad popular support
that they need to seriously challenge or even change the status quo. The
stalemate itself shows that the social divide between the haves and the
have-nots has become almost total and complete, as if the two classes lived on
different planets. But if the popular opposition movement to the elected
government ever does find the support it needs among the general population, a fierce
class confrontation of historic proportions is very likely.
Mexico’s
future, however, does not rest with Mexico alone. Rather it is inextricably
entwined with the future of its northern neighbor and with the fate of the world
capitalist system as a whole, both of which are now confronting an enormous economic,
political crisis and indeed seem to be on the eve of yet another war. If, therefore,
there is an abrupt change in Mexico’s fortunes induced by a worsening of the
international economic crisis, which seems very likely, the political, social
relationship of forces inside the country could very quickly and drastically
change in favor of those who are, at least for now, only a vociferous and
vilified minority. If such proves to be the case, then the popular movement
against the domination of capitalist imperialism that is now growing in Mexico
will have been vindicated.
September
2, 2013
Ramón
Rodriquez
Mexico,
D.F.
NOTES
1 As of August 31 the National Congress in a much disputed vote approved
the Education Reform Law with 390 in favor and 69 against.
