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MEXICO CITY–Huge rallies and demonstrations demanding
a total recount, ballot box by ballot box, have been held in Mexico City since
the conservative Felipe Calderón was announced as having an advantage of
around 300,000 votes at the July 2 presidential elections.
One of the demonstrations was estimated
by Mexico City police as larger than one-million, and another with around
two million participants. Even though federal government sources have
downgraded these estimates, it is clear that these powerful mobilizations
are the largest in the country's history. As of the writing of this
article, thousands of protesters are still camping in a huge sit-down in
one of Mexico City's main arteries, Paseo de la Reforma.
The obvious reason for these protests is
that the followers of Calderón's main opponent, Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, perceive that a huge electoral fraud has taken place. A partial
recount ordered by Mexico's federal electoral court has clearly shown
there is ample reason to believe this.
According to the pro-Obrador daily La
Jornada, of the first 3074 packages (including the ballot boxes and
accompanying documentation) that were recounted, there are 34,890 more
votes than the total of participating registered voters; 80,392 ballots
are missing; in 80 percent of the cases, there were arithmetical errors.
In several cases (as happened in
districts 12 and 15 in Mexico City) the electoral packages were found
with their seals broken, and, even worse, in a district in the northern
state of Chihuahua the seals of the storehouse where the packages were
kept were found broken, and all packages had been opened.
The first person interested in a recount
should have been Felipe Calderón, even if his party, the Partido Acción
Nacional (PAN), contests La Jornada's figures: in the mind of any
reasonable person, even discounting a systematic fraud operation, simple
arithmetical mistakes could account for as thin an advantage as his.
Calderón, however, has been deaf to the huge protests that are actively
questioning his ascent to the presidency.
Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, has gone
as far as declaring Calderón the "clear winner," and committing
the very usual (but perilous) political blunder of minimizing the size
and depth of the conflict. In his messages, Fox considers the protest as
purely a "Mexico City problem." In the words of satirical
newspaper articles, everything is going OK in the country known as
Foxiland.
The electoral conflict, as serious as it
has been escalated, is only the surface of much deeper problems. Why
would three pro-capitalist bourgeois parties (the PRI, the PAN and the
PRD, each of whom, with their allies, hold around one third of the seats
in the Mexican Congress) fight so bitterly among themselves for the
presidency? A cynic would answer that this is just another power contest
among ambitious gangs that are capable of tearing each-other's eyes out
for a piece of the budget cake. But that is not the whole story.
Save a couple of years where the economy
has grown above four percent, for much of the last 12 years (the last two
presidencies, that is) Mexico has either been in the midst of a
horrendous financial crisis that brought the country to its knees (in
1994-1995), or has seen very weak growth. In the much-touted globalized
economy, the Mexican capitalists and the governments serving as their
executive political bodies have simply not been able to keep up with
international competition.
Their favorite formula for keeping their
companies alive has been a perfunctory pretense of attaining
world-recognized quality certifications, without understanding or wanting
to assume the real meaning or the real costs of what their first-world
senior partners mean by those standards, while keeping their employees
under unsafe conditions, long working hours, and low wages.
The tragedy of the 65 coal miners who were
victims of an explosion at Pasta de Conchos, in the northern state of
Coahuila, underlines what has been just stated: coal prices have doubled
during the last years, so mine operators put their personnel to greater
and greater risk, no matter the human cost. The main ventilator at the
mine was not working, and even though federal authorities knew of it they
did nothing, and permitted the company to operate the mine with just the
secondary ventilator.
Similar situations are happening in all
sorts of environments. I will never forget the answer that was given by a
very large company to a small firm I was collaborating with about two
years ago: "We have decided not to buy the system [a computer
package that would help them manage their inter-border customs
operations], because the way we do things here is to keep whatever
personnel is necessary until 11 o'clock in the evening (or later) in
order to administer these operations." He was talking of the
personnel that came in at 9 in the morning, of course.
Entire regions of the country are
controlled by the narco gangs, which enjoy protection from allied forces
inside the government. Last year, more than 1500 narco-related violent
deaths were reported. In July of this year, the 1000 mark was reached.
The list of alarming facts and figures
goes on and on: the Fox administration holds the national record for the
number of news reporters and analysts murdered or disappeared (25, in
total); the quality of primary and junior high-school education has
considerably decreased, with Mexican pupils holding consistently
next-to-last places in studies undertaken by the UN body in charge of
education and culture (UNESCO) as well as by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD, a rich-countries club to
which Mexico is grotesquely affiliated).
Very high unemployment and very few
opportunities help Mexican capitalists get away with it all. Small wonder
that more than half a million Mexicans are crossing the U.S. border each
year, even at the risk of their own lives by walking through the Arizona
desert, in order to get whatever employment they can obtain del otro lado
("on the other side").
Small wonder that so many workers feel so
vulnerable or discontented! Small wonder that so many large companies
publicly rallied behind Calderón in order to combat López Obrador's
"populism," since they sensed that people might get
out-of-hand! Small wonder why Fox and Calderon's political team have
staked everything on keeping a firm lid over the boiling-pot!
It will come as a surprise to many,
however, that López Obrador favors the same super-exploitation conditions
as his opponents, and is no friend of unionization (not to mention
workers’ power), whatsoever. As head of the government of the Federal
District (a very powerful political position in Mexico, due to Mexico
City's great concentration of wealth and population), he not only clashed
repeatedly with the city workers union but favored all sorts of
anti-labor schemes for workers laboring in new projects.
A case in point is his most famous social
program, the monthly (about US $70) pensions to the elderly, where
program workers are not contracted as such, but hired as recipients of
"scholarships." The young women who diligently carry out the
program for the elderly have no rights whatsoever; they can be fired
without justification, and have to put up with whatever hours or tasks
Obrador's unconditionals come up with (even delivering license-plates and
keeping people in line during a celebrity's visit). That's a new trick
that many a greedy employer would like to imitate!
The reasons why the conservative
capitalists in Mexico have tried many times to stop López Obrador are
simply their social prejudices (they see his followers as the
"populace"), their cronyism (the main source of
multi-millionaires in Mexico are government contracts and, or course, the
narco trade)—and, yes, U.S. pressure to keep out of office someone who
Washington does not trust as an ally.
To give López Obrador due credit,
however, there are also legitimate reasons for some capitalists to hate
him, since he opposed the greatest robbery (officially sanctioned, or
otherwise) in the country's history: the "rescue" of the
banking system, which the PRI's Zedillo administration undertook in alliance
with the PAN as a result of the 1994-1995 crisis.
On the international scene, Evo Morale's reforms in
Bolivia and (most importantly) his alliances with Fidel Castro in Cuba
and Chávez in Venezuela have lit up all sorts of warning signs in U.S.
government offices. Washington is wary of any new "populist"
government in Latin America.
But the problem with the U.S. and Mexican
ruling classes’ shortsightedness is that they originally did not have an
enemy in López Obrador (he has even invited the U.S. ambassador in Mexico
to public-works inauguration ceremonies), but are trying very, very hard
to make him one.
The results of an incompetent handling of
a political crises are visible in Oaxaca City, where the state government
tried to suppress the noisy (but peaceful) occupation of the city center
by thousands of teachers who were demanding a reclassification of their
wage levels (essentially, a wage rise). The state police were badly
beaten in the streets, the conflict got fierce, and the government has lost
all control of whole areas in the city and in several municipalities.
The teachers, now joined by thousands of
city poor and campesinos, have even taken control of the state TV and
several radio stations. A political analyst in the daily La Jornada even
spoke of a "Oaxaca Commune," which is exaggerated (because the
Oaxaca communards do not command the city government, institutions, and
main means of production—as did their celebrated antecessors in Paris in
1871); but, in any case, the adjective is not way off the mark.
President Fox has pledged that he will be
"firm, but prudent." You can bet that he will be neither. The
now battle-hardened Popular Assembly participants in Oaxaca, as well as the
peaceful campers in Mexico City's Reforma boulevard, had better be ready
for much more serious activity in the very near future.
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