Change Rocks Mexico

Change Rocks Mexico

by Phillis Engelbert and Jeff Gearhart

On the road AGENDA staffers, Engelben and Gearhart, sent this story from Oaxaca, Mexico.

   "Mr. President, this chamber of the people...We have a right...We have a right to speak before this chamber.. .and you, Mr. President, must address the will of the people, the will lost in the electoral fraud." 

-The Mexico City News, 9/2/88

   These were the words of Porifiro Munez Ledo, opposition leader of the National Democratic Front of Mexico (FDN) and newly elected senator from Mexico's Federal District (which encompasses Mexico City). Munez Ledo shouted his statement above fellow legislators' cries of "traitor, traitor!" halfway through Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid's Sept. 1 State of the Nation address. After interrupting the President's speech fifteen more times, 69 FDN members of the legislature walked out.

   As stated the following day in The Mexico City News, "Never before had a Mexican president been so abused and insulted during a state address . . . Never before had there been a political opposition to the [ruling] Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that felt strong enough to confront directly the country's political stability. . .On Thursday [Sept. 1 ] shouts were heard and people left. .. It will never be the same again."

   This is a time of great political activity and change in Mexico. For the first time since the PRI's consolidation of power 58 years ago a serious political oppostion has emerged. (In the 58 years preceeding this summers' elections, the PRI had never lost a presidential, senatorial or gubernatorial race).

   The PRI, which has become synonymous with "the government," maintains control over the military, the courts, the legislature, and even oversees elections. The key to the PRI's control has been the integration of representatives of all sectors of society (business, labor, agriculture, etc.) into its party structure.

   Now, however, the PRI is being challenged on the right by the National Action Party (PAN) and on the left by the National Democratie Front (FDN), a coalition of four leftist parties.

   On July 6, after months of intense campaigning, national elections were held for president, senators, and deputies (representatives). Amid widespread accusations of electoral fraud, the PRI claimed their presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had received 50.36% of the vote, and thus was the winner. Both PAN and FDN presidential candidates maintained they had been victorious, and called for Salinas de Gortari to step down.

   Until Sept. 1, the date on which the new legislature was installed, the battle raged on in the Electoral College over the results of elections for seats in the Senate and House of Deputies. The PRI finally conceded the only two senatorial positions in the Federal District to FDN candidates. The final tally indicates, however, that although the PRI received only 27% of the vote for deputies in the Federal District, they claimed 51% of the seats (La Jornada, 9/28/88).

   Charges of electoral fraud and worsening economic conditions have sparked recent demonstrations by Cardenistas (supporters of FDN ex-presidential candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas) all across the country. In response to the threatening political climate, the government has undertaken increasingly repressive measures. There are almost daily accounts of demonstrations being dispersed by police with clubs. For example, on Sept 26 in the northern city of Saltillo, 800 Cardenistas demonstrated over land distribution issues. The Mexico City News reported that police broke up the demonstration with clubs, injuring at least three people in the process.

   In addition, recent headlines have reported political assassinations of leftist organizers. From mid-July to mid-September there were at least seven such occurences. "Although the actual number of 'missing persons' in Mexico appear to be declining in recent years, political assassinations continue to stain the landscape - particularly of journalists, political workers, and campesinos in the country's rural areas," according to Rosario Ibarra, Mexican human rights worker and former presidential candidate of the Revolutionary Worker's Party (The Mexico City News, 9/6/88).

   "Most of them have been shot," Ibarra said, "and their assailants have been invariably identified with the government - either through local police and Judical Police, or through their military and paramilitary wings. They kill journalists because they speak for the people, and they kill the poor because that is what they have always done." Ibarra added that the violence has not yet escalated to the point of that which exists in El Salvador and Guatemala, and that victims of political assassinations in Mexico are merely shot, and not tortured as they are in the aforementioned countries.

   The current upsurge in political activity by the people of Mexico is rooted in the most recent economic crisis, which began in the early 1980s. Triggered by declining oil prices in 1981-82, declining exports of other products, and increasing interest rates on foreign debt, the country plunged into the worst economic crisis since the PRI's consolidation of powers in 1930. Historically in Mexico, political stability has been equated with economie growth. Thus, in 1982, when the economy ceased to grow, predictions were made that political change would follow.

   Mexico's economic development over the past five decades has been based on the imposition of intensive industrialization on a country traditionally composed of subsistence farmers. The inherent contradictions in this mode of development have led to the establishment of one of the most inequitable distributions of wealth in the world. "Some 10% of the wealthiest households earn nearly 40% of all income while the poorest 10% earn 0.9%," according to the Federation of Mexican Workers. In addition, over one-half of Mexico's working population have no full-time employment and over one-half of the population suffers from malnutrition.

   Mexican workers have been caught between rapidly declining wages and skyrocketing food prices. While the average salary for a Mexican worker was $ 1.70/hour in the 70s and $ 1.90/hour in 1982, salaries crashed in the mid 80s. In 1985 the average salary fell to $.70/hour and is currently $.40/hour.

   During the same period, 1982 to mid-1986, the price of basic food commodities increased incredibly: tortillas, 416%; bread, 1,800%; beans, 776%; and eggs, 582%. From March through Sept. 1988, prices of basic foods increased from 20% to 75%.

   Recently, it has become increasingly apparent that the path of development which the PRI-controlled government has been following for almost 60 years has finally triggered an economic and political crisis which threatens the PRI's control of the nation. The dependence on a modemization model based on private capital investment, especially foreign capital, and export-based production, has left the vast majority of Mexicans in poverty. As a result, opposition parties both conservative and progressive, are calling for a prioritizati on of domestic needs and democratization of the country's entire political and economic structure.

   This latter demand strikes at the heart of the PRI political machine. As the corrupt practices of the PRI have come under intense criticism, the party itself has become weakened. Indeed, the institutional corruption of the PRI, from its traditional electoral fraud to political favors, threats, and other forms of cooptation, has become a rallying point for the political opposition.

   Increasingly now, the PRI and the PAN are forming alliances in the face of the forceful and dynamic FDN. With the Unes being drawn as such, the FDN is attempting to define itself as a political entity and to outline its strategy in the struggle for political dominance.

   The Cardenista Front, part of the FDN, is composed of various leftist parties, ranging in ideology from middle-class Social Democrats to Marxist-Leninists. The three strongest forces in the coalition are Cardenas, a charismatic leader who has drawn over 35,000 people to a rally in Mexico City and has mobilized hundreds of thousands of activists across the country; Movement to Socialism, anew group which concentrates its organizing in low-income urban areas; and Punto Critico, an intellectual leftist dissident group

(see MEXICO, page 10)

  On Oct. 14 and 15, Fast for Life-Ann Arbor collected 700 signatures at Kroger Westgate on a petition demanding that the store stop stocking California table grapes. The petition drive was part of a 26-hour vigil designed to support farm workers in their battle against the use of deadly pesticides in grape production and to warn consumers of the dangers of eating these grapes.

MEXICO (from page one)

formed eighteen years ago. According to The Mexico City News, the FDN represented "a massive bloc of millions of economically andsocially disenfranchised Mexicans - from marginal paris of both urban and rural areas - led by a small hard core of hungry political activists and survivors."

  Although the FDN is still discussing what the structure of their organization will be - either a single opposition party or a federation within which individual parties would maintain their separate identities - they have outlined what is to be their political strategy over the next several months. The FDN will first focus its energies on the upcoming municipal and gubematorial elections across the country which begin in November. Beyond that, the FDN will work within the legislature, where FDN senators and deputies will work to slow the legislative process. The FDN will also continue with a grassroots mobilization ' effort, and will expand their efforts to focus international attention on "the struggle for democracy in Mexico." (The Mexico City News, 9/28/88)

   Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas describes the future of nis movement as "a growing political will of the people channelled into a specific driving force which will eventually change the entire structure of Mexican society"