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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch WeerthCrises pervade Mexico as election approachesThe July 2, 2006 Mexican presidential election is taking place in a climate of an ongoing social crisis that is wreaking havoc on the lives of working people. Six years of a disastrous Fox administration is coming to an end amidst frequent worker revolts, increasingly more brutal repression of those revolts, and deteriorating conditions for indigenous peoples and campesinos, despite the prior gains of the Zapatista uprising. Two miners were killed and 41 injured April 20, when 800 police attacked about 500 workers who had been occupying the Sicartsa mine in Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan since April 2. The occupation was part of a strike of 3,000 miners, organized partly to prevent Fox from replacing the head of their union with someone more to his liking (Elias Morales), and partly to show their current leaders that their 30-year struggle for a truly independent union is ongoing. Despite the fact that the brutality of the police led the Mexican Senate to condemn the action, 3,000 police cracked down on another movement in the town of San Salvador Atenco, in the state of Mexico, May 4, resulting in the death of a youth and more than 200 jailed. This town has been at the forefront of the effort for the past five years to stop Fox's Plan Puebla-Panama, which would make all of Southern Mexico and Central America one miserable inter-connected string of maquiladora factories. So far that plan has been a failure, thanks to the residents of San Salvador Atenco, who have successfully fought against the construction of a $2 billion airport that would displace more than 4,000 families from ejido (communal) land. The PRD candidate for president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (aka AMLO), has been making a weak effort to maintain his populist image. To the workers he says he will not continue the practice of appointing union leaders. To the campesinos he says the solution to conflict is dialogue rather than police repression. But he refrains from actually embracing these movements, as he once did as governor of Tabasco. Into the election fray has marched "The Other Campaign," up from Chiapas, passing through the entire country in its effort to "unite" all of the struggling social movements, and through them to "unite all of the Left." The tour has been successful in expressing solidarity with the many ongoing struggles in Mexico, but Marcos, unarmed and re-named subdelegado Zero, is leading the Campaign's effort to chastise all the presidential contenders, insisting that there is really "no difference" between any of them. He says this despite his admission that AMLO is an "honest" politician who made genuine improvements in the lives of ordinary folk as mayor of Mexico City, one who represents an effort to administer the crisis in the manner of Lula of Brazil, while PAN candidate Felipe Calderon represents nothing but further state repression of all social movements, the "mano dura." In an interview with LA JORNADA (05/10/06), Marcos states: "The administrator can be whomever, the business is the same: Mexico, Inc." To the nonviability of bourgeois politics he offers "The Other Campaign" as the "only really leftist national movement...the only possibility that the needed change be nonviolent." In a talk to workers in Mexico City the day before May Day, Marcos/Zero spoke of the need to "destroy the capitalists and deprive them of their ownership of the means of production," but said nothing of what would replace the decayed system. |
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