Socialist Action /August 2002
Peruvian Workers Resist Neoliberal Policies
- Will Mexico Follow?
By GERRY FOLEY
Throughout Latin America, revolt is growing against so-called free market
economic policies, a major article in the July 19 New York Times
lamented. The immediate focus of the article was the mass protests in the
southern Peruvian city of Arequipa against the planned privatization of
two state-owned electricity generators.
The newly installed government of Alejandro Toledo, himself raised to
the presidency by a popular revolt against the brutal neoliberal regime
of Alberto Fujimori faced a virtual insurrection in the key highland city.
In his turn, Fujimori had initially claimed to be a liberal when he ran
against the rightist ideologue Vargas Llosa. And then, once elected, he
proceeded to implement the policy that Vargas Llosa openly campaigned for.
Likewise, in his election campaign, Toledo had promised that he would
not privatize the electricity generators and after his election proceeded
to try to sell them to a Belgian conglomerate, Tractabel. Moreover, the
Peruvian courts are now investigating this same corporation on charges that
it bribed Fujimori.
The mass revolt forced Toledo to back off from his planned privatization.
But he has not abandoned it. He referred the question to the Peruvian Supreme
Court. The fact is that unless Toledo is prepared to break from capitalist
and imperialist domination, which he clearly is not, he has no choice but
to continue his privatization projects. The other bourgeois rulers in Latin
America are in the same dilemma.
In its July issue, Umbral ("Threshold"), the paper of
Socialist Action's Mexican cothinkers, the Liga de Unidad Socialista, featured
a report of the Arequipa uprising in its lead article, which denounced the
privatization plans of the newly elected Mexican president, Vicente Fox.
The article was entitled: "A Mexican-Style Enron Plan. "
The author of the article, Jaime Gonzalez, stressed the violence and
determination of the Arequipa uprising: "Hundreds of people were injured,
dozens arrested, at least one [protester] killed." He continued:
"Hundreds of soldiers tried to impose control after Toledo decreed
a suspension of constitutional rights for 30 days. But the population, enraged
by the repression, came back into the streets of Arequipa, the second largest
city in the country ... [and] they boldly defied the state of siege."
Moreover, the revolt started to spread. In the adjoining department [province]
of Tacna, huge crowds blocked the roads leading to the departmental capital,
threatening an explosion if the government tried to keep Arequipa under
military control.
In Mexico, Gonzalez pointed out, there was also a new government brought
into office by a revolt against an old regime that had abandoned its populism
to embrace the new capitalist offensive. In Mexico, like Peru, the new government
claimed to be offering a corrective to antidemocratic policies by its predecessor.
But Mexican president Fox's promises are proving equally empty:
"On April 13, on his radio program, Fox promised that he 'saw light
at the end of the tunnel,' that the economy would resume its growth in June.
... There are a number of reasons why he would have done better to be quiet.
One of the most important is one that all our readers are familiar with.
... Every time the president predicts growth, instead of the situation getting
better, we fall apart."
There are essentially two pillars of Fox's economic policy, Gonzalez
wrote-the privatization of the electrical industry and taxing food and medicines.
So, the rebellion in Peru was a very bad omen for the Mexican government.
In Mexico, as in Peru, the bourgeois opponents of the incumbent government
want to take advantage of the rebellion against neoliberal policies but
without offering a real alternative.
"The PRI [the former government party] and the PRD [a somewhat populist
bourgeois party] know that the question of electricity rates is very delicate,
that privatizations have a terrible image for the population, and that above
all it is necessary to prevent the sort of popular protests that happened
in Peru....
"But what may happen is that their plans will be no less privatizing
but will be seen as benign in comparison to the more aggressive plan of
Fox. A clear example is the bill presented by Senator Manuel Barlett, who
as a former minister of the interior was one of the leading neoliberals
in the PRI.
"Today he wants to present himself as a knight in shining armor
defending nationalized industry. What he offers might be called a Mexican
Enron scheme. It calls for keeping state ownership of distribution but leaving
private corporations wide margins to make extortionate profits from the
generation of electricity."
In other words, in Mexico, there is the same wiggling of bourgeois politicians
between the demands of the capitalists for greater profits and the rebellion
of the masses against their robbery.
The July 19 New York Times article put it this way concerning
Latin America in general:
"Sometimes-violent protests in recent weeks have derailed the sale
of state-owned companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The unrest
has made potential investors jittery, and whipsawed governments already
weakened by recession.
"The backlash has given rise to leftist politicians who have combined
pocketbook issues and economic nationalism to explosive effect."
Some bourgeois economists are even ready to concede defeat: "The
most worrying reading is that perhaps we have come to the end of an era,"
said Rafael de la Fuente, chief Latin American economist for BNP Paribas
in New York. "That we are closing the door on what was an unsuccessful
attempt at orthodox economic reforms at the end of the 90s."
The New York Times writer, Juan Forero, of course had to argue
that it was only "popular perception" that the free market policies
had not been beneficial for working people. But he had to recognize that
the "popular perception" was now becoming a real force.
"'We privatized and we do not have less poverty, less unemployment,'
said Juan Manuel Guillén, the mayor of Arequipa and a leader in the
antiprivatization movement here. 'On the contrary. We have more poverty
and unemployment. We are not debating theoretically here. We are looking
at reality.'"
Forero had to admit: "Indeed, 44 percent of Latin Americans still
live in poverty, and the number of unemployed workers has more than doubled
in a decade. Tens of millions of others, in some countries up to 70 percent
of all workers, toil in the region's vast informal economy, as street vendors,
for instance, barely making ends meet."
Forero did give statistics about a decline in the percentage of poverty.
But "popular wisdom" holds that "there are liars, damn liars,
and statisticians." And in Latin America, it seems that the hired economists'
statistics of economic improvement are no longer being believed by the masses
of people who are confronted with the reality of growing poverty and unemployment.
However, there is no longer any room for the populist half-measures of
the past. Within capitalism, there is no alternative today to neoliberalism
except socialist revolution. That is a lesson that the masses in Latin America
are learning.
It is why a popular slogan in Argentina is "all the bourgeois politicians
must go," and why the people are trying to build their own alternative
forms of government. Similar experiments are also beginning to develop elsewhere
in Latin America, including in Mexico, as the July issue of Umbral
notes.
Socialist Action /August 2002 |