councilor.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 00/07/09/23:46 |
| VICENTE FOX WINS MEXICAN PRESIDENCY, ENDS PRI RULE:
VICTORY FOR DEMOCRACY OR NEOLIBERALISM? By Dan La Botz Vicente Fox Quesada, the former Coca Cola executive, rancher and businessman from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) won Mexico's presidential election on July 2 ending 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Fox's victory was simultaneously and contradictorily an expression of Mexican people's desire for an end to the rule of the PRI and the establishment of a democratic political system, and a final triumph for the neoliberal counter-revolution that in the last 20 years has destroyed Mexico's nationalist political-economic system and replaced it with a system dominated by foreign multi-national corporations and integrated into the U.S. economy. Mexican citizens with the help of non-governmental organizations such as the Civic Alliance (Alianza Civica) have at long last created a multi-party political democracy, but the PRI-government has insured that the only possible winner (besides the PRI) was the National Action Party (PAN), and that the new system would exist to oversee the consolidation of the neoliberal economic system. The PRI did this by denying Cuauhtemoc Cardenas his 1988 presidential victory, murdering 500 PRD supporters, militarizing large sections of the country. The victory of Fox and democracy was based on the earlier victory of the PRI and authoritarianism. The election represented a stinging defeat for the PRI, which won only a little more than a third of the vote. In an election with a record high 65 percent voter participation, Fox of the PAN won 42.7 percent of the vote, while Labastida of the PRI won 35.8 percent, and Cardenas of the Party of the Democratic Revolution won 16.5 percent.. Altogether almost two-thirds of Mexicans voted for change and most of those voted for Fox. Fox's almost seven-point lead over Labastida represents a virtual landslide for the conservative candidate. Millions of Mexicans cheered Fox's victory and look forward to a new more enlightened and prosperous Mexico. His supporters hope that his victory will sweep away the PRI's authoritarian and corrupt regime, and usher in an era of democracy. But the winner's program and policies represent no fundamental change in the corporate and neoliberal policies pursued by the PRI for the last two decades, but rather a consolidation and deepening of the neoliberal project. The former governor of Guanajuato supports the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the maquiladora program and hopes like his PRI predecessors to attract more corporate investment into Mexico. His conservative, pro-business National Action Party (PAN) holds out little hope for progressive social change for the vast majority of Mexico's people. Fox and the PAN The National Action Party (PAN), founded in 1930s, emerged out of the most conservative currents of the Mexican Revolution as a party founded and led by bankers and Roman Catholic priests, with a reactionary ideology largely based on opposition to what it perceived as a socialist government led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). While the PRI and later the PRD often accused the PAN of being a fascist party, in fact, that was never the case. Mexico's real fascists were the Sinarquistas, a goose-stepping sect that reached its peak in the 1930s. But the PAN was a deeply conservative Catholic party nurtured in the northern states that were more influenced by the United States. During the 1960s to the 1980s the PAN moved away from the church and evolved into a typical modern conservative party allied with business organizations such as the Mexican employers' association COPARMEX. During the 1970s and 1980s the PAN began to create a militant mass following by mobilizing its members to defend its election victories at the polls, and won power in several cities and a few states in northern Mexico. Still some PAN leaders often took up Roman Catholic causes such as opposition to birth control and abortion, and were given to hysterical prudish outbursts, for example, against Maidenform bra billboard advertisements. This conservative and religious ideology proved to be an obstacle to winning votes in central and southern Mexico where the PRI and PRD dominated. As candidate for the presidency, Fox moved away from the PAN's far right and religious traditions and adopted more centrist rhetoric. With the help of former Communist intellectual Jorge Castaneda, Fox elaborated a discourse of compassionate conservatism not so different from that of Republicans in the U.S. Fox even went so far as to say that he favored independent labor unions, though there is no evidence for this in his record as employer or governor. Nevertheless, Fox's centrist and compassionate rhetoric proved to have a powerful appeal for millions of Mexicans who wanted to be able to vote against the PRI but feared voting for the old conservative PAN. In fact, Fox's victory can only be explained by the votes of millions of Mexicans from the PRI and the PRD who voted against Mexico's one-party state, as much as--or perhaps even more than--they voted for Fox. Thus Fox simultaneously captured the anti-PRI-vote and the conservative, pro-business vote. In that sense this election does represent a kind of caricature of a "bourgeois revolution," a capitalist led program for democratic reform of the bureaucratic and authoritarian state. Except that Fox and the PAN have no deep commitment to democracy. The History of a Victory: The Neoliberal Context While U.S. president William Clinton hailed Fox's victory as a "triumph of democracy," it might better be characterized as the culmination of a radical reorganization of Mexico's economic life. It is, moreover, the final step in a political process that has been based on fraud, militarization and murder on a massive scale. The story began with the economic crisis of August 1980 that left Mexico insolvent and forced it so go hat in hand to the bankers in New York. After that first in a series of economic crises, the U.S. government, international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and foreign private banks used their economic clout to force Mexico to accept a series of changes in its nationalist economic and political model and to adopt the system that has come to be called neoliberalism (i.e., economic conservativism). President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) began the process of economic transformation, and it accelerated under Presidents Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) and culminated under Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000). During those years Mexico entered the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), today the World Trade Organization (WTO), signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which took effect in 1994). Mexico sold off its telephone company, railroads, and other industries to private investors, frequently foreigners and often U.S. corporations. Two massive, multi-billion dollar "Mexico bailouts," one in the 1980s and the other in the 1990s, came with conditions and structural readjustment programs that forced Mexico to privatize its state companies, permit foreign investment and ownership, and open its markets to foreign commodities. The reorganization of the Mexican economy was accompanied by union busting and strike breaking on a massive scale, beginning with Salinas's attack on the miners' and petroleum workers' unions. (See Dan La Botz, MASK OF DEMOCRACY.) The History of a Victory: Political Realignment and Reorganization But economic change was not enough for the U.S. and the IMF, which also wanted a more business-oriented political system. Over a period of 20 years, Mexico gradually changed its one-party political system into the simulacrum of a modern multi-party democracy. The process of political change actually began during the 1970s when the PRI-government, which had always tolerated a right-wing opposition in the form of the National Action Party (PAN), decided it would also legalize a left-wing opposition, at that time led by the legalized Communist Party, which became the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico - PSUM. The PRI dominated politics in that decade with about 70 percent of the vote while the PAN won about 20 percent and the left around 10 percent. During the 1980s Ronald Reagan's government attempted to promote a conservative two-party model in Mexico that would be made up of the PRI and the PAN. The Republicans gave both money and men to aid the PAN in northern Mexico. But those plans for the bi-party model were shattered in 1987 when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Porfirio Munoz Ledo led the Democratic Current out of the neoliberal PRI and created what would later become the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PSUM and the left nationalist Mexican Workers Party (PMT) also joined the PRD, thus strengthening the nationalist populist opposition represented by the PRD, while at the same time eliminating the more traditional socialist or communist left from the political spectrum. Since 1989, socialism has never been a political alternative in Mexico. In any case by 1989 there had come into existence the system of three major parties that Mexicans have today: PRI, PAN, and PRD. The History of a Victory: Fraud, Murder and Militarization The PRD now became the leader of the democratic opposition in Mexico, a mass party with support from both poor peasants in rural areas and from the middle class and professionals in the city-a winning combination. In 1988 the PRD's founder and leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas almost certainly did win the presidential election, but president de la Madrid falsified the returns and relying on the implicit threat of armed violence installed Carlos Salinas as president. And the PRI and the PAN later voted to burn the ballots. The PRI's theft of the 1988 election, and Cardenas's refusal to launch the social upheaval-and perhaps even civil war-that it would have taken to claim his victory, led to the eclipse of him and his party. Salinas's fraudulent 1988 election thus laid the political basis for the victory of Fox. For the next dozen years, determined to eliminate the left-of-center opposition, the PRI government used all its repressive measures against the PRD. Since its founding 11 years ago, almost 500 PRD members have been murdered by PRI hooligans or by the PRI-government military or police. Those murders-virtually all of which have gone unpunished-represented an important part of the process that made possible the election victory by the conservative Fox. Yet despite the repression, the PRD survived, though it never again attained its majority status. During the 1990s the three-party system fleshed out as the PAN came to govern various state in the north of Mexico, while Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the PRD won the mayoralty of Mexico City. But all three parties moved toward the center under the pressure of international developments. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the emergence of U.S. as the world's one super-power, combined with the pressures of the IMF, to compress Mexico's political parties, and in particular to move the PRD toward the center. Carlos Salinas's negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s made Mexico part of the U.S. economic system in a way it had never been before. While Cardenas of the PRD initially spoke out against NAFTA and neoliberalism, by the 1990s he had tempered his positions, accepting NAFTA and proposing that Mexico City become a center of world finance. In any case, the PRI-government had made it clear by the theft of the 1988 election and the murder of 500 PRD members that it would never accept a PRD election victory or government. Salinas's radical reorganization of the Mexican economy along the lines demanded by the U.S. and the IMF led to an explosive reaction from below. On January 1, 1994, the first day of the implementation of NAFTA, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led the Chiapas Rebellion, an armed uprising by 2,000 Mayan Indian peasants in Mexico's southernmost state. After its rebellion was stopped and isolated by the military, the EZLN attempted to create a new left in Mexico, a radical populist movement based on the indigenous people, peasants, and the poor. For a while in late 1994 it seemed as if the Zapatistas, the Civic Alliance (Alianza Civica - AC), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) might join together to create a more democratic Mexico. (See Dan La Botz, DEMOCRACY IN MEXICO.) But despite National Democratic Conventions, consultas and the creation of a Zapatista Front of National Liberation (FZLN) as its political arm, the Zapatistas never became either a mass national movement or a genuine party, and therefore offered no political alternative. While the EZLN remained a great critical and moral force in Mexican society, it has been unable to translate that force into political power. The government's response to the EZLN uprising and to other social movements was the increasing militarization of Mexico. During the 1990s the Mexican government sent troops into Tabasco to stop the social movement there led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the local leader of the PRD. The PRI-government sent the army into Chiapas to fight and later to isolate the EZLN. The state also sent troops into Guerrero, Oaxaca, Hidalgo and other states to fight the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) and other guerrillas organizations. And military units were sent into northern states such as Baja California and Chihuahua supposedly to stop drug-traffickers. Paramilitary organizations, the police, and the military massacred civilians, for example at Aguas Blancas and Acteal. The militarization of Mexico has thus provided an essential element in creating the conditions that led to the victory of Fox. Democratic Mexico? Will Fox's victory lead to a democratic Mexico or is that even the idea? Certainly many millions of Mexicans voted for democracy in this election as best they could in the historic circumstances shaped by 71 years of PRI dominance and 20 years of neoliberalism. For example, in Mexico City tens of thousands of voters apparently split their tickets, voting for Fox for president, but also voting for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD for mayor of Mexico City. Similarly in other states many voters voted for Fox for president and for PRI or PRD candidates for other offices. After decades of voting a straight ticket for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, this represents a new kind of electoral sophistication. But of course this is choice within very narrow parameters as established by the PRI, the IMF, and the U.S. by a decade of turning the economic screws. Fox's presidential victory leaves him facing a parliament divided between the three major parties with the PAN, the PRI and the PRD each controlling about a third of the vote. With the PAN and the PRI sharing fundamentally the same neoliberal political-economic program, it should not be difficult for Fox to form alliances in congress to support his conservative program. What may be much harder will be to change the conservative governmental bureaucracy with its corruption, and the military with increasing involvement in the drug trade and its growing involvement in overseeing the troubled states of the south. In a very real sense the bureaucracy, the police, and the military are the permanent government of Mexico and Fox and the PAN have too few political cadres to undertake a wholesale replacement. Moreover many PANistas and PRDistas share the same bureaucratic and corrupt mentality as the PRIistas themselves. If Fox represents political democracy, it will be a long, slow and perhaps ultimately futile process to bring about institutional change from above. While both Mexican and U.S. pundits hail Fox's victory as the triumph of democracy in Mexico, it is only the narrowest electoral and political democracy. Mexican citizens and workers still do not enjoy many of the most basic political, civil and labor rights. Military, the police, and paramilitary organizations still suppress citizens exercising their civil rights, and the government and employers routinely suppress labor unions and workers. During the past three months for example, the Mexican government has invoked the "requisa" to seize a private airline and break a strike by flight attendants, while police have beaten and arrested strikers at maquiladora plants in order to suppress independent labor unions. In Baja California, Chihuahua, and Fox's own state of Guanajuato, workers have never been permitted to organize independent labor unions of their own choosing. While the PRI-state made possible the electoral victory of Fox, it has put every obstacle in the way of workers' voting for independent labor unions in their factories or on their farms. What Does Fox's Victory Mean for Unions and Workers What does Fox's victory mean for unions and workers? The Congress of Labor (CT) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the "official" labor organizations of the PRI-government of course supported Labastida, though labor demonstrations were notoriously dreary affairs and the unions could no longer dragoon all of their members into supporting the PRI. Leonardo Rodriguez Alcaine, head of the Sole Union of Electrical Workers of the Mexican Republic (SUTERM), of the CT and the CTM even threatened to call a general strike if Fox was elected, though no one believed he would and he has subsequently retracted the statement. Fox's victory will mean an end to state-party support for the "official" labor movement, and perhaps even an end to the very idea of an "official" labor movement. Fox may or may not punish the CT, CTM and other PRI-sponsored unions for their support for Labastida, but in any case, he will likely pursue an anti-union course. The PAN has historically been hostile to the CT and CTM, and to labor unions in general. While there are a few maverick PAN politicians who support genuine independent labor unions, such as Javier Paz, most PANists would like to see the dismantling of the old state-party-controlled unions and their replacement by conservative collaborationist unions that would work in "partnership" with the employres. The hardcore PAN business groups in the North would like to see the CTM replaced by company unions or the elimination of labor unions altogether. Still, Fox's election will disrupt the old state-party lines of control over the labor unions and may create an opportunity for independent unions to organize, though they will have to do so with their own power relying on the rank and file workers. Fox cannot be expected to lift a finger to help them, as he has never done so in the past. In his own state of Guanajuato the workers of Congeladora del Rio, S.A. (CRISA) have fought a long battle for an independent union, the governor Fox did nothing to help them. Much of the vote for Fox was in reality a vote against the PRI-government and 71 years of what the Peruvian author Vargas Llosa called "the perfect dictatorship." But the election of Fox has not brought about democracy, nor even a clear shift in the direction of democracy. What it has done is consolidate the twenty-year process of dismantling the nationalist political economy that arose from the Mexican Revolution, and replacing it with the corporate-dominated neoliberal regime. The fight for democracy remains to be won by Mexico's citizens, by its workers, farmers and the poor, and genuine democracy will only be won by an upheaval from below that rejects not only the PRI, but the whole political system it created, including the PAN and Fox. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho