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Mexico: From Protest to Rebellion
Part 2: The Fightback
by Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui
Global Research, November 28, 2009
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The government’s blitzkrieg attack on the SME has failed to destroy the resistance.
Rather, the Mexican regime faces the broadest, deepest, and most unified resistance movement in decades.
And, as importantly, it is a national resistance movement that is working-class centered — in its leadership, central issues, and symbols.
The government has not been able to destroy the SME or the popular resistance.
While the fight back has been growing, it does not have the strength to force a quick reversal of the government’s actions.
A reversal by the government would stall the neoliberal project, alienate its already restless big business backers, and deepen the regime’s vulnerability.
If the SME loses, this 95 year old democratic union will have been “disappeared” along with all the jobs, benefits and rights held by its members and retirees.
And every other union or popular movement would know more clearly that its very existence is contingent on the whims and policies of the political elites and big business.
There is a “catastrophic equilibrium,” a stalemate without any clear avenue of compromise or of a negotiated way out.
The anger and despair built on decades of massive cuts in real wages as well as to the very limited social net that existed for some sectors is now being intensified by the deep economic crisis of Mexico.
The safety valve of jobs in the U.S. for millions of “excess” Mexican workers has been significantly reduced due to the U.S. economic crisis.
Remittances which have supported many families and communities in Mexico have sharply declined.
As well, the global economic crisis and swine flu have led to a great decline in jobs and income from tourism and Mexican oil income, which provides 40% of the Federal budget, has fallen with the decline in oil prices.
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And Mexico’s dependence on exports to the U.S. — 80% of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S., much of it as part of an integrated production process of the large corporations — has caused a sharp decline in employment in the maquila sector.
Mexico’s decades-long neoliberal restructuring and deliberate depression of wages and working conditions has now been compounded by the sudden and deep global economic crisis.
The depression itself has restructured the labour market downward within Mexico and for Mexicans working abroad.
But the big bourgeoisie in Mexico, as throughout the world, is seeking to use the crisis as a rationale for a further radical downward restructuring of the labour market.
The Mexican government’s new budget is an austerity budget with massive cuts to public spending and increases in regressive taxation against workers and the popular classes.
The fiscal class war became more public when López Obrador and the PRD members of Congress pointed out that the largest corporations in Mexico pay no taxes while the government seeks to impose even more of the tax burden on working people.
There has also been growing anger in communities over frequent blackouts, some that last for days, as a result of the inability of the government to keep the power company functioning without the expertise of workers who had long managed to keep a constantly and deliberately underfunded public utility running.
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Management and scabs have not been able to keep the power supply flowing and there have been spontaneous protests of various communities at the frequent blackouts.
The government has tried to blame these problems on sabotage but all the workplaces are under military and police control.
Community anger is also likely to increase sharply when people begin to experience higher power costs to go along with poorer and less reliable service.
The recent federal budget does not include any money for the LyFC nor does it include any extra money for the CFE, (the other public power company), the company that is slated to take over the jurisdiction of the LyFC (probably as a prelude to privatization by stealth or direct privatization).
Most of the budget for the LyFC went to subsidize cheap power for consumers and business, with consumers paying only one-third to one-half of the real costs of energy production and distribution.
This subsidy has been slyly eliminated along with the LyFC and residential consumers will certainly have to pay higher rates.
What business sectors will also have to pay to make up the gap remains to be seen but if past and recent policy is a guide, big business will be spared the burden.
All of these factors — the effects of the deteriorating economy, the anger at regressive taxes, the frustration with frequent power failures in central Mexico, the coming increase in utilities bills, the general inflation of basic goods, and the little legitimacy of the President, are producing propitious conditions for a breakthrough in workers’ militancy.
The challenge for the SME and for the movement of popular resistance is to create a viable strategy and program, one that provides understandings, hope, and direction for the growing anger and despair and can offset the systematic attempts of the capitalist media and the state to promote fatalism and individualism.
The SME itself can no longer act simply as a union.
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There is no path to regaining their collective rights without a change in the correlation of forces at the national level.
While the SME is pursuing all forms of legal challenges, there is little optimism that court decisions will prevail in the end.
The SME has been forced to become a political movement that, in addition to developing its strategy and tactics with its allies, has to redefine its own identity as an organization/movement.
It cannot survive without transforming itself and the government, if not the whole power structure of Mexico.
The attempt of the government and the capitalist class to break the solidarity and combativeness of the SME has failed so far.
The malicious and dishonest propaganda campaign against the workers carried out by both government and corporate media, the insistence on the irreversibility of the liquidation, the attempt to play on and sow new divisions in the union, the offering of special bonuses for accepting severance by November 14, the cutting off of medical care, the promise to SME pensioners that their pensions and benefits would not change, have all been in the service of dividing and demoralizing the SME.
But the union now has greater solidarity than ever.
The pensioners have denounced the government’s offer and are continuing to battle alongside their SME brothers and sisters.
On November 23, eleven female electricistas, some of them mothers, started an open-ended hunger strike outside the CFE headquarters in Mexico City and SME members have also started another hunger strike in Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Two-thirds of the members employed at the time of liquidation have filed one or more legal actions against the government.
Though around 50% of the workers accepted the severance money, many have said they did so under the coercion of economic hardship as well as threats and have challenged the legality of the whole process.
The union has taken a compassionate position toward those who took the payout and many, if not most of them, continue as union members to battle against the whole process.
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Small farmers have already sent tons of corn, rice and beans to the SME.
The PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática — Party of the Democratic Revolution) and members of the legislative assembly of the Distrito Federal (core part of Mexico City) have donated funds to the SME.
After six weeks of resistance — with no strike fund and with the government having cut off all access to the union’s own funds — the movement is holding solid with growing support from other sectors.
The SME union/movement has survived the blitzkrieg attack and is preparing for a long battle.
The SME has often been the organizer and fulcrum of broad fronts of class resistance, such as the Dialogo Nacional, started in 2004.
The Dialogo Nacional has been a space for gathering the various forces of the opposition to neoliberalism together — the democratic union movement, popular organizations, and the left — to discuss an alternative vision to that of neoliberalism.
It has not been an organizational structure but a once a year space for discussing and articulating a vision and ideas of struggle.
It was, as one militant described it, a space with a fever of ideas and programs and a paucity of common organization and action.
But the new situation demands more than ever that the national movement of popular resistance transform itself to an effective fighting organization or face annihilation.
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The room for talk and symbolic protests has disappeared.
The SME and National Front of Popular Resistance must deepen and spread militancy and class consciousness to wider circles of workers and more regions or be defeated.
These processes of agitation and organization will necessarily develop unevenly and their outcome is uncertain.
But it is essential for any effective challenge to the regime.
For while Mexico City and the traditional strongholds of the left have a basis for a “war of maneuver,” for a quick and intense fight-back, the movement of resistance does not have that immediate potential in other areas of the country, most significantly in the key industrial zone of the state of Mexico, still Mexico’s most important industrial zone, and in the other industrial zones, which remain under the joint control of PAN or PRI state governments and charro unions.
The systematic attempt by the main television networks, newspapers and the government, to portray the SME workers as privileged, inefficient, selfish and the union as corrupt, have to be overcome.
These deliberate attempts to divide and confuse the working class have to be combated ideologically to build working class solidarity.
The resistance movement has shown its awareness of this issue by making the two major television networks targets on their November 11 day of protest.
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There have now been two national assemblies of popular resistance as well as escalating mass mobilizations involving wide sectors of the population.
While workers are at the core of the resistance either through their unions or through currents inside charro unions, there is widespread and active participation from other organizations and sectors — campesino organizations, the APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca), students, intellectuals, popular movements, segments of “The Other Campaign,” and left parties and groupings.
A total of 700 organizations supported the November 11 paro civico nacional (national civic strike).
The November 11 paro civico nacional saw significant actions in at least 22 of Mexico’s 31 states.
The strongest actions were in Mexico City and in those surrounding states where the liquidated power company and the SME have a presence.
As well, there were strong protests in traditional strongholds of the left where the SME has no presence, e.g. Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Chiapas.
The teachers in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán shut down almost all the schools in both states.
These sections of the national teachers union are part of the CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de Educación), an organized national alliance of dissident teachers’ groups in the SNTE (the national teachers union), a gangster-charro union with close to 1.5 million members.
In Oaxaca, Section 22 of the teachers union and APPO closed down all the facilities of the CFE, the national power company which has a charro union and is being substituted for the LyFC.
Many sections of the SNTMM (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalúrgicos y Similares de la República Mexicana), the miners and steelworkers union, shut down workplaces for brief periods.
(The SNTMM itself has been severely persecuted by the government and its president is in exile in Canada.)
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The spread and variety of the actions make it hard to calculate the number of people that participated.
The SME estimates that 5 million people participated nationally; a more cautious estimate might be 3 million.
Nevertheless, November 11 indicates a greater national extension of the protest movement.
The SME along with the PRD and the López Obrador movement are promoting a mass consumer campaign to refuse payment of electric utility bills.
They argue that consumers have no contract with the replacement company, the CFE, though the government has announced that bills will now come from the CFE. This campaign to develop consumer solidarity with the workers could gain great traction as it meshes with the growing anger about blackouts.
This campaign unites the workers’ concerns for their jobs and rights with the concerns of consumers, most of them workers themselves, for an adequate and affordable public service.
As well it brings together the struggle for union rights with the López Obrador movement against electoral fraud and for the preservation of public ownership of energy.
The resistance has described the November 11 actions as a prelude to a general strike.
An effective general strike will have to spread to areas outside the traditional strongholds of the Left to include key industrial locations.
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Most of these industrial areas are controlled by regime-linked gangster unions, often with protection contracts.
An effective general strike would need to penetrate these areas that are walled off by authoritarian state governments and their gangster “union” allies.
The expansion of the movement to industrial sectors of the working class and other regions is as difficult as it is necessary.
It will not be an easy or quick effort.
It will take a daring political strategy and courage to overcome the tremendous obstacles that have led to failures in the past.
The workers’ movement and the Left have had brief moments of massive national fronts of struggle that have been defeated by repression and internal divisions.
In some of these attempts, as pointed out by Luis Hernández Navarro, “the logic of the immediate struggle of the sector with the greatest political force has ended up dominating and absorbing the demands of its allies.
And the worry of being used as a maneuvering mass by other political actors and their electoral and parliamentary agenda continues weighing on the diverse social actors.” (Luis Hernández Navarro, “La Asamblea Nacional de Resistencia Popular,” La Jornada, Oct. 27, 2009).
As well, a narrow trade union agenda of a strong component organization could be added, as is clear from the examples Hernández Navarro gives earlier in his column.
The challenge for the Left is to develop a program and process that helps protect the movement from this danger pointed out by Hernández Navarro.
But it should also be noted that dividing off part of the movement by concessions or electoral hopes involves an ability and a willingness to make concessions and an ability and a willingness to conduct (somewhat non-fraudulent) elections.
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Neither of these options seems likely in the present context and certainly is not possible in regard to the power workers without a big defeat for the government.
The danger that Hernández Navarro points to is real but is more of a danger in normal times.
Mexico is in a profound crisis of legitimacy and a deep economic crisis.
The movements that compose the national front of resistance are politically heterogeneous.
While some have revolutionary perspectives, most have reformist perspectives, often with a hope or nostalgia for the real or imagined good old days of revolutionary nationalism.
But there is a broad recognition that a change of direction is not possible without a change in the correlation of forces at the national level.
This means defeating the PAN/PRI coalition that acts in the interests of Big Capital.
As the government has slammed the door more and more on channels for redress and reform within the system, non-revolutionary movements are being driven toward direct action as the only way to reverse the recent actions and change the direction.
It has become more clear to many that only the removal of the government could lead to free, honest and democratic elections.
Some feel that a constitutional convention would also be a necessity.
The efficacy of a general strike depends on its strength, both in its immediate execution and its ability to achieve its goals.
An inadequately prepared or weak general strike is a potential disaster for the workers’ movement and the Left as the government will respond ferociously, unless its hand is stayed by the power of the movement.
The SME and the resistance movement are organizing brigades of workers to build support for a general strike nationally.
The challenges are huge but there’s no alternative to a national struggle to change the power balance within Mexico.
The fact that a workers organization is at the organizational and symbolic center of a growing movement of popular resistance is a sea change with enormous implications.
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The student revolt of 1968 and its crushing defeat had great repercussions for Mexico, leading to guerrilla movements and a liberalization of the political system.
The 1987-1988 neocardenista mass electoral and then anti-fraud movement set into motion new layers of activists despite its subsequent corrosion and distortion by electoral instrumentalism.
The 1994 Zapatista uprising created great hopes and encouraged new layers of activists and despite its subsequent political isolation, its inspiration continues to influence many indigenous and poor communities with the belief that another world is possible.
The 2006 electoral and post-electoral anti-fraud mass mobilizations deepened the challenges to the legitimacy of the regime and also brought into action new layers of people, many of them working class.
And now the devastation of neoliberal austerity, the economic crisis, and the lightning assault on the SME (and Mexican energy resources) have mobilized large layers of the population into renewed activity.
Mexico could follow the paths of Bolivia and Ecuador where revolts from below overthrew governments and paved the way for honest elections and the triumph of the Left.
Or it could continue to go in the direction of Colombia, to an increasingly repressive and authoritarian narco-state.
With its vast common border with the U.S. and one in every five Mexican workers living and working in the U.S., the implications are enormous not only for Mexico but also for the USA.
Edur Velasco Arregui is a member of the advisory committee to the Central Committee of the SME, an elected representative of university workers on the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration (JFCA), former Secretary-General of SITUAM (Sindicato Independiente de Trabajadores de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana — Independent Union of Workers of the Metropolitan Autonomous University], and a Professor of Law and Labour Economics at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.
Dick Roman is a member of Socialist Project and a retired professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.
He is also an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, York University, Toronto and a Founding Fellow of Senior College, University of Toronto.
Resources
David Carrizales and Roberto González Amador, “El Banco Mundial considera prueba de “madurez política’ el aumento de impuestos,” La Jornada, November 9, 2009.
Luis Hernández Navarro, “La Asamblea Nacional de Resistencia Popular,” La Jornada, Oct. 27, 2009
Office of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of Justice: “Former General Manager of Texas Business Arrested for Role in Alleged Scheme to Bribe Officials at Mexican State-Owned Electrical Utility.”
Richard Roman & Edur Velasco Arregui, “The Oaxaca Uprising: Implications for Mexico,” in Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints — Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008; also available as “The Mexican Crisis and the Oaxaca Commune.” |
Mexico Rises
The sea of yellow swept through the veins of Mexico City en route to the Zocalo on Sunday, the platelets returning to the heart.
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Yellow for clean elections; amarillo for democracy, as manifest in the candidacy of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who believes that his populist electoral victory in the presidential election three weeks ago was stolen from him and the working class and poor of Mexico who voted for him.
Unlike John Kerry, Obrador — the mayor of Mexico City — did not disappoint the perhaps 2 million people who completely filled the Zocalo and avenues in every direction for block after block after block.
He has presented evidence of fraud at 70,000 polling places to the Supreme Court.
And, as his voice echoed from loudspeakers everywhere, he called on his supporters to remain in the Zocalo (after apologizing to the thousands of street vendors who would be inconvenienced by the occupation), setting up dozens of large white tents — one for each Mexican state — for the vigil to use to organize itself and expand.
It was impossible to get to the giant central square (zocalo) until long after the rally had ended and the round-the-clock vigil had commenced with cultural festivities.
Three members of the Brooklyn Greens — myself, Cathryn Swan, and Robert Gold — along with a grouping of Mexican comrades who helped with the translation, found a shady corner a few blocks away and listened to the crowd's cheers as Obrador announced the occupation of the central square.
(Being mayor certainly helps here in Mexico City, as the police were all smiles and supportive of the protests despite the negative media barrage that batters Obrador and his working class base on a daily basis.)
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Mexico Rises
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
www.counterpunch.org By Mitchel Cohen, Mexico City August 3, 2006
Earlier, we inched our way down Avenida Juarez, where artists had hung dozens of dramatic paintings and historic quotations about the need for democracy.
A few days ago, right wing vandals slashed a number of the artworks, each around 12 feet wide.
When the artists returned to repair them, they found that hundreds of people had already shown up to defend the art and people from the neighborhoods had carefully stitched each tattered canvas back together, rendering them even more dramatic.
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While the amarillo waves washed down the streets, many focused not on Obrador himself but on the need for free elections, real democracy, an end to the corruption of all of the institutional political parties.
Obrador has become the symbol of that movement, that hope.
Not that he will be able to solve the momentous problems Mexico faces, particularly in the face of International Monetary Fund and U.S. economic pressures (which are intense).
But, they feel that at least Obrador is honest and will clean house.
It remains to be seen how this movement for democracy will play out.
The Zapatistas, for instance, were critical of Obrador as a candidate but many EZLN supporters were evident in the crowd demanding free elections and supporting the movement.
We stopped at one EZLN tent in which Zapatista supporters displayed pictures of numerous political prisoners in Mexico and raised funds for their defense.
Other tents contained literature from scores of political organizations, and giant banners sweated their slogans in the hot Mexican sun.
One political party even hung huge pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin across one section of the plaza, and elsewhere anarchist symbols and sentiments were much in evidence. |
www.counterpunch.org By Mitchel Cohen, Mexico City August 3, 2006
Mexico Rising
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
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"Voto Por Votos"
Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts
www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico CityAugust 2, 2006
Prologue: No Nos Moveran
Tens of thousands of people the color of the earth are encamped in the zocalo and a series of 47 encampments throughout the city.
They have become communities overnight, feeding themselves, holding meetings, passing out leaflets, standing in resistance to this unspeakable fraud upon the people.
More are coming from the provinces every day.
AMLO spoke to those gathered in the zocalo twice today.
Tonight's meeting brought the water to my eyes.
The rain was pouring down yet the compas stood strong under the downpour as lopez obrador updated them on whats to come.
"First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they beat us," he said, " then we win."
No estas solo", the pueblo roared back as they always do — you are not alone.
Then Gabino Palomares the troubador who has appeared on so many stages at watershed moments in this never-ending struggle, sang our old anthem, We shall not be moved, No nos moveran.
Thousands sang with him and our voices drown out the driving rain.
History is being made here.
It is the other side of the horror that Bush and his monsters have inflicted upon this world this slim beam of hope that people many people los de abajo can change this world — no nos moveran!
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Oaxaca continues
About 500 women armed with kitchen spoons laid siege to a state-run television station on Tuesday, trapping 60 employees inside for hours before broadcasting a message calling for the resignation of the governor.
The protesters accused Ulises Ruiz of rigging his 2004 election victory and of violently repressing opposition groups.
They surrounded Oaxaca's Channel 9 television station shortly before 1pm, and held employees for about six hours before releasing them and taking over the building.
They continued to occupy it late on Tuesday night, and it was unclear how long the siege would last.
Police were nowhere to be seen near the station on the outskirts of Oaxaca.
Violence threatened
Station director Mercedes Rojas said the state had filed a criminal compliant against the protesters with the federal attorney general's office, noting that the station has about US$54.5 million worth of equipment inside, and that the protesters had threatened the 60 employees with violence while holding them captive.
The standoff is the latest in a wave of confrontations related to the teacher's strike that has driven most tourists out of this southern Mexican colonial city. Tensions have been on the rise since June, when state police attacked a demonstration of striking teachers who occupied the historic central plaza, demanding a wage increase.
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Since then, thousands of teachers, unionists and leftists have camped out in the plaza, spray-painting buildings with revolutionary slogans, smashing hotel windows and building makeshift barricades.
The protesters also were victims of violence when at least 10 masked assailants shot out the windows of Oaxaca's university radio station, which supports the protests.
Tourism halted
The unrest has paralyzed one of Mexico's top cultural tourist attractions, where visitors normally browse traditional markets for Indian handicrafts, hike ancient pyramids and stroll along cobblestone streets to sample mole dishes.
Officials recently canceled a prominent cultural festival because of fears that violence could injure foreign tourists and residents.
Tourism is down by 75 percent, costing the city more than US$45 million, according to the Mexican Employers Federation.
Business leaders have asked the federal government to intervene several times, but aides to President Vicente Fox, who represents the National Action Party, have said the problem must be resolved at the state level.
Ruiz belongs to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has governed the state since 1929.
AP, Oaxaca, Mexico, Aug 03, 2006 www.taipeitimes.com
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www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico City August 2, 2006 "Voto Por Votos" Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts Act One: The Middle Class MEXICO CITY (August 4). Jacinto Guzman, an 80 year-old retired oilworker from Veracruz state plants himself in front of the headquarters of the Halliburton Corporation on the skyscraper-lined Paseo de Reforma here and recalls the great strikes of the 1930s that culminated in the expropriation and nationalization of Mexico's petroleum reserves. Dressed in a wrinkled suit and a hard hat, the old worker laments the creeping privatization of PEMEX, the national oil corporation, by non-Mexican subcontractors like Halliburton which is installing natural gas infrastructure in Chiapas but he is less agitated about the penetration of the transnationals in the Mexican oil industry, or even Halliburton's craven role in the Bush-Cheney Iraq war than he is about the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election here. |
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The sign he holds reads "No A Pinche Fraude" (No to Damn Fraud!) referring to Halliburton's membership in a business confederation that financed a TV ad campaign against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who insists that he won the July 2 election from right-winger Felipe Calderon to whom the nation's tarnished electoral authority, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) awarded a razor-thin and much questioned "victory."
Mr. Guzman's appearance at Halliburton on a Friday at the end of last month was one of myriad acts of civil resistance invoked by Lopez Obrador at a July 16 Mexico City assembly that drew more than a million participants.
The campaign is designed to pressure a seven-judge panel (the "TRIFE") which must determine a winner by the first week in September, into opening up the ballot boxes and counting out the votes contained therein "voto por voto."
Zeroing in on U.S. transnationals that purportedly backed Calderon, AMLO's people have invaded Wal-Mart, picketed Pepsico (its Sabritas snack brand was a big contributor to the right-winger's campaign), rented rooms in big chain hotels (Fiesta Americana) and dropped banners from the windows decrying the "pinche fraude", and blocking all eleven doors at the palatial headquarters of Banamex, once Mexico's oldest bank and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citygroup.
"Voto por Voto!" demonstrators chanted as the bankers smoked and fumed and threatened to call the police.
Demonstrators also blocked the doors at the Mexican stock exchange and surrounded the studios of Televisa; the major head of the nation's two-headed television monopoly, both heads of which shamelessly tilted to Calderon before, during, and after the ballots were cast.
"!Voto por Voto! Casilla por Casilla!" (Vote by Vote, Booth by Booth.)
Seated on a tiny folding chair outside of Banamex, Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico's most luminous writers and the recent winner of Spain's Cervantes Prize, reflected on the civil resistance: "We have always seen the workers demonstrate here in the Zocalo but this is all very new for our middle class.
The middle class protests too, but in the privacy of their own homes.
Now we are out of the closet."
Ironically, the concept of peaceful civil resistance by the middle class was pioneered by Felipe Calderon's own party, the PAN, after it had been cheated out of elections in the 1980s by the then-ruling PRI.
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The PANistas uncharacteristically blocked highways and went on hunger strikes, and even imported Philippine trainers, veterans of Corazon Aquino's civil resistance campaign against Ferdinand Marcos to teach their supporters new tricks.
Recently AMLO's party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, stole a page from the PANista bible by holding a rally at a Mexico City statue of the right-wingers' father figure, Manuel Clouthier.
During the stolen 1988 presidential election, Clouthier demanded a ballot-by-ballot recount and coined the now ubiquitous phrase "voto por voto."
The PRD gathered around the statue of "Saint Maquio" left Calderon and the PAN was speechless for once.
The PRD crusade could be labeled "civil resistance lite."
Led by Poniatowska, opera singer Regina Orozco, and comic actress Jesusa Rodriguez, public demonstrations have been more showbiz than eruptions of mass outrage.
Nonetheless, Televisa and TV Azteca, Calderon and the PAN relentlessly rag Lopez Obrador for "fomenting violence", purposefully ignoring the real daily violence that grips Mexico's cities as brutal narco gangs behead rivals and massacre their enemies in plain public view. |
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"Voto Por Votos"
Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts
www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico CityAugust 2, 2006
Act Two: Bad Gas
Hundreds of steaming AMLO supporters pack the cavernous Club de Periodistas in the old quarter of the capital where computer gurus will diagnose the complexities of the cybernetic fraud Lopez Obrador is positive was perpetrated by IFE technicians this past July 2 and 5 during both the preliminary count (PREP) and the actual tally of 130,000 precincts in the nation's 300 electoral districts.
The experts are as convinced as the audience that the vote was stolen on the IFE terminals but have many theories as to how. They speak of arcane algorithms and corrupted software.
Juan Gurria, a computer programmer who has dropped in on his lunch hour to audit the experts, recalls the 1988 election which was stolen from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by the long-ruling (71 years) PRI in the nation's first cybernetic computer fraud.
"In 1988, they had to shut down the computers and say the system had crashed to fix the vote but in 2006, the IFE kept the system running and we watched them steal it right before our eyes" Gurria contends, "the difference is they have better computers now."
18 years ago with computer fraud still in its infancy, the PRI had to resort to hit men to carry out its larceny.
Three nights before the election, Cardenas's closest aide Francisco Xavier Ovando and his assistant Ramon Gil were executed blocks away from the Congress of the country after reportedly obtaining the password to the PRI computer system upon which the results were being cooked in favor of its candidates, the now universally reviled Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
So far Computer Fraud 2006 has been less messy.
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Although the subject is dry and technical at one point excerpts of an analysis in the British Guardian by University of Texas economist James Galbreath was read into the record in English.
AMLO's supporters mutter and grumble and nod their heads vigorously.
"Asi es!" That's just the way it happened!
"Voto por Voto" they rumble, "Casilla por Casilla!" after each expert scores a point.
Whether or not the fix is in, they are convinced that they have been had.
The PRD is trying to keep a lid on the bad gas seeping from down below.
A few days after July 2, Felipe Calderon who AMLO's people have derisively dubbed "Fe-Cal", came to this same Club de Periodistas to receive the adulation of a gaggle of union bosses.
When he tried to leave the club, he was assailed by street venders howling "Voto por Voto!"
Calderon was quickly hustled into a bullet-proof SUV by his military escort but the angry crowd kept pounding on the tinted windows.
One young man obscenely thrust his middle finger at the would-be president.
The scene is replayed over and over again on Televisa and Azteca, sometimes five times in a single news broadcast, graphic footage of the kind of violence AMLO is supposed to be inciting.
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"Voto Por Votos"
Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts
www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico CityAugust 2, 2006 Act Three: In Defense of the Voto Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador fervently believes he has won the presidency of the United States of Mexico. He says it often on television just to needle his right-wing rival Felipe Calderon. The proof, he is convinced, is inside 130,000 ballot boxes that he wants recounted, voto por voto. The ballot boxes are now stored in the Federal Electoral Institute's 300 district offices under the protection of the Mexican army. Nonetheless, in Veracruz, Tabasco, and Jalisco among other states, IFE operators have broken into the ballot boxes under the pretext of recovering lost electoral documentation. AMLO is suspicious that the officials are monkeying with the ballots, adding and subtracting the number of votos to make them conform to the IFE's incredible computer count. |
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Hundreds of ballot boxes contain more votes than voters on the registration lists and more ballots have been judged null and void than the 243,000 margin of Calderon's as-yet unconfirmed victory.
To this end, Lopez Obrador has strengthened encampments of his supporters outside the 300 electoral districts.
In Monterrey, a PANista stronghold, thugs attack the encampment, beating on AMLO's people and tearing down their tent city.
Rocks are thrown at his supporters in Sinaloa, drivers speed by hurling curses and spitting on them.
Outside the Mexico City headquarters of the TRIFE, the seven-judge panel that will have the ultimate word as to whether or not the votos are going to be counted out one by one, a hunger strike has been ongoing since the PRD submitted documentation of anomalies in 53,000 out of the nation's 130,000 polling places.
Each night a different show business personality joins the fasters, eschews dinner and camps out in the guest pup tent overnight.
From Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska to painters like Jose Luis Cuevas and master designer Vicente Rojo, the arts and entertainment world has lined up behind Lopez Obrador.
An exhibition by Cuevas and 50 other top line graphic artists and writers has been installed on the Alameda green strip adjacent to the Palace of Fine Arts here. After midnight, Calderon supporters slash and savage the art work, leaving a broken jumble behind.
The next day brigades of AMLO's people from the surrounding neighborhoods rescue what they can of the exhibit, reassemble the broken shards, sew the torn art back together, and prop up the display panels.
This is what democracy looks like in Mexico on July 20, 2006. |
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"Voto Por Votos"
Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts
www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico CityAugust 2, 2006 Act Four: Se Busca por Fraude Electoral The integrity of the Federal Electoral Commission is in the eye of Hurricane AMLO. Lopez Obrador accuses the IFE of fixing the election for Felipe Calderon and then defending his false victory. The PRD has filed criminal charges against the nine members of the IFE's ruling council, most prominently its chairman, the gray-faced bureaucrat Luis Carlos Ugalde, for grievous acts of bias against Lopez Obrador, including refusing to halt Calderon's hate spots in the run-up to July 2. The IFE is mortally offended by the allegations that it has committed fraud and is using its enormously extravagant budget (larger than all of the government's anti-poverty programs combined) to run spots protesting the slurs on its integrity that are every bit as virulent and ubiquitous as Calderon's toxic hit pieces. Actors have been hired to impersonate irate citizens who allegedly were chosen at random as polling place workers July 2. "The votes have already been counted" they scoff. "We did not commit fraud" they insist. The idea is preposterous, an insult to their patriotism and to one of the pillars of Mexican "democracy", the IFE. Luis Carlos Ugalde, the president of the IFE council, has not been seen in public for several weeks except in large Wanted posters pasted to the walls of the inner city SE BUSCA POR FRAUDE ELECTORAL! Ugalde and two other IFE counselors are protégés of powerful teachers union czar Elba Esther Gordillo who joined forces with the PAN to take revenge on failed PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, a mortal enemy. The nine-member council is composed entirely of PRI and PAN nominees, the PRD is, of course, excluded. |
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Despite rumors that he had fled the country, Ugalde shows up July 27 at the first IFE meeting since the district tallies three weeks previous where he is confronted by the PRD delegate to the Institute (each party has one delegate.)
During an acrimonious seven-hour meeting, Horacio Duarte keeps waving 30 partially burnt ballots, most of them marked for AMLO, that he has just been handed by an anonymous source.
Duarte wants to know where Ugalde lives so he can nail one of the ballots to his front door to expose the "shame" of the fraud-marred election.
The gray-faced bureaucrat grows even grayer and threatens to suspend the session.
OK, OK, Duarte concedes, I'll just hang it on your office door.
Just then a score of protestors push their way past the IFE guards at the auditorium's portals, the meeting is a public one.
They are chanting "Voto por Voto" and carrying bouquets of yellow flowers, AMLO's colors.
A PRD deputy tries to hand one to Luis Carlos Ugalde who turns away in horror.
A bodyguard snatches up the blossoms as if they were a terrorist bomb, and disposes of them post-haste. |
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"Voto Por Votos"
Mexican Civil Resistance in Five Acts
www.counterpunch.org By John Ross, Mexico CityAugust 2, 2006 Act Five: We Shall Not Be Moved The clock is ticking. The TRIFE must declare a new president latest September 5. The seven judges, all in the final year of their ten year terms (three will move up to the Supreme Court in the next administration) have just begun to dig their way into the slagheap of legal challenges that impugn the results in about half of the 130,000 polling places in the land, the ham-handed bias of the IFE prior to the election, and the strange behavior of the Federal Electoral Institute's computers on election day and thereafter. The TRIFE, which has sometimes struck down corrupted state and local elections and ordered recounts in a handful of electoral districts, can either determine that the legal challenges would not affect enough votes to overturn the IFE's determination that Calderon won the election, annul the entire election if it adjudges that it was illegitimately conducted, or order a recount. If the judges determine that annulment is the only way to fix the inequities, a new election would be scheduled 18 months down the pike. In the meantime, the Mexican Congress would name an interim president, an unprecedented resolution in modern political history here. |
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Just the fact it is being discussed is, in itself, unprecedented.
Among those mentioned for the post are National Autonomous University rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente, former IFE director Jose Woldenberg, and three-time presidential loser Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of beloved depression-era president Lazaro Cardenas.
For Cuauhtemoc, who was defrauded out of the presidency in 1988 by the same kind of flimflam with which the PAN and the IFE seek to despoil Lopez Obrador of victory in 2006, an interim presidency would be a perfect solution.
Fixated on fulfilling the destiny of following in his father's footsteps, moving back into his boyhood home.
Los Pinos — the Mexican White House would be sweet revenge against his former protégé and now bitter rival on the left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
But AMLO does not want the election annulled and an interim appointed.
He is obsessed with proving his triumph at the polls and is not going to sit on his hands waiting for the TRIFE to reach its learned conclusions.
A gifted leader of street protest, he has summoned his people to the capitol's Tiennemens-sized Zocalo square three times since July 2, each time doubling the numbers of the masses who march through the city: 500,000 on July 8, 1.1 million on July 16, and 2.4 million this past Sunday, July 30 (police estimates) — Sunday's gathering was the largest political demonstration in the nation's history.
The "informative assemblies" as AMLO tags them, have been festive occasions but underneath there is palpable anger, the bad gas rising from down below.
Lopez Obrador's people come in family, arm babies and grandpas, often in wheelchairs are on canes.
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Some come costumed as clowns and pirates, dangling grotesque marionettes, lopsided home-made heads of FeCal, or pushing a replica of the Trojan Horse ("El Cabellito Trojanito".)
They look like they are having fun but their frustrations can well up to the surface in a flash, say when the hated Televisa and TV Azteca appear on the scene.
"QUE SE MUERE TELEVISA!" (THAT TELEVISA SHOULD DIE!) the people the color of the earth snarl and scream, pounding fiercely on the television conglomerate's vehicles.
At the July 30 "informative assembly", Lopez Obrador ups the ante considerably in his high stakes poker game to pry open the ballot boxes.
Now instead of calling for yet another monster gathering in the Zocalo (4.8 million?), he asks all those who had come from the provinces and the lost cities that line this megalopolis to stay where they are in permanent assembly until the TRIFE renders a decision.
47 encampments will be convened extending from the great plaza, through the old quarter, all the way to the ring road that circles the capital, snarling Mexico City's already impenetrable traffic, raising the level of greenhouse gases and urban tempers to the point of combustion.
When Lopez Obrador calls for a vote on his proposal, 2,000,000 or so "SI's" soared from the throats of the gargantuan throng, followed by the now obligatory roars of "No Estas Solo" ("you are not alone") and "Voto by Voto, Casilla by Casilla."
As if on cue, AMLO's people began assembling the encampments state by state and Mexico City neighborhood by neighborhood.
For a correspondent who once wrote a novel fictionalizing the stealing of the 1988 election ("Tonatiuh's People", Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, 1999), in which the people the color of the earth march on Mexico City and vote to stay in permanent assembly in the Zocalo, fantasy has turned into the actualities of daily reporting.
I am not surprised by this startling turn of events.
When I first arrived here in the old quarter days after the 8.2 earthquake that devastated this capital, the "damnificados" (refugees) were encamped in the streets, demanding relief and replacement housing and liberation from the ruling PRI and their movement from the bottom reinvigorated a civil society that today infuses AMLO's struggle for electoral democracy.
This morning, the damnificados of the PAN and the IFE, Calderon and the fat cats, are again living on these same streets.
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On the first evening of the taking of Mexico City, AMLO spoke to thousands crowded into the Zocalo in a driving downpour and invoked Gandhi: "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they beat you, and then you win."
And then Gabino Palomares, a troublemaking troubadour who has been up there on the stage at every watershed event in recent Mexican history from the slaughter of striking students at Tlatelolco (1968) to the Zapatistas' March of the Those the Color of the Earth (2001) took the mic to lead the mob in that old labor anthem.
"We Shall Not Be Moved" and AMLO's people thundered back in a roar that drowned out the weeping sky, "NO NOS MOVERAN!" |
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