John Ross will be in San Francisco on October 27 for those of you in the Bay
area...
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Class and Race are Driving the Crisis in Mexico, Not Political Parties
Upheaval from the Bottom
By JOHN ROSS
The political cognoscenti on all sides of the border nonchalantly attribute
the massive resistance of millions of Mexicans to the stealing of last July
2nd's presidential election from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO)
by the ruling PAN party and its rightist candidate Felipe Calderon, to the
shifting weights of the right, left, and center in a post-PRI world -
whoever actually won the election July 2nd, the one-time ruling (71 years)
Institutional Revolutionary Party finished dead last, carving out its own
political tomb.
But, in fact, this surge of resistance to the imposition of Calderon, much
as the five month-long occupation of Oaxaca city by striking teachers and
members of the autonomous Oaxaca Peoples' Assembly (APPO) in an effort to
remove a despotic PRI governor and, to a lesser extent, the thrust of
Subcomandante Marcos's Other Campaign, blows in from a different direction -
up from the vast and restless bottom: the 73 million Mexicans (calculates
social economist Julio Boltvitnik), most of them of darker skin
pigmentation, who live in and around the poverty line, a quarter of them
barely surviving in extreme poverty.
The 2006 presidential ballot was about as close as this country has ever
gotten to putting the bad gas of class and race war that seethes just
beneath the stoic surface of society here, up for a vote. Lopez Obrador's
candidacy galvanized Mexico's brown underclass and as the months passed,
AMLO astutely articulated this fermentation, directing energies against
Calderon who was perceived to represent the tiny white elite that claims
ownership of this distant neighbor nation. Indeed, the right-winger used the
implicit threat of upheaval from down below to mobilize his middle and upper
class base.
But the bottom is always wider than the top on Mexico's social pyramid and
when the election was stolen. Lopez Obrador organized the largest political
demonstrations in Mexican history. Tens of thousands of his supporters
blockaded the capital's central thoroughfares for seven weeks. The massive
civil resistance prevented outgoing president Vicente Fox from delivering
his final State of the Union address and kept him away from Independence eve
ceremonies in the great Zocalo plaza where Lopez Obrador's people were
encamped.
Yet AMLO's control over his frustrated and tattered supporters - literally
"los de abajo" or those from down below - was always tenuous and often those
encamped in the streets during one of the hardest rainy seasons on record,
prevailed. In fact, although the independent left, which joined forces with
Lopez Obrador's three-party coalition throughout the post-electoral
struggle, takes credit for driving AMLO leftwards, it was the thrust from
down below that forced the former mayor of Mexico City into a more defiant
posture.
Despite the militancy of the massive resistance, unprecedented in modern
political annals here, the post-electoral period was almost entirely free of
violent confrontation, testimony to AMLO's commitment to peaceful civil
resistance as inspired by Gandhi and Dr. King, and an uncharacteristic
response from the most frustrated and ignored sectors on the social ladder.
This upsurge from down below challenges both the political parties and the
class they represent. AMLO's crusade left the three parties that sponsored
his candidacy in the dust - his support was far greater from those who
professed no party commitment than it was from his own home party, the Party
of the Democratic Revolution (PRD.) As testified to by his eternal campaign
slogan "For the Good of All but First the Poor", on the stump Lopez
Obrador's goal was always to change the class equation rather than the
aggrandizement of his party.
Similarly, the taking of Oaxaca by radical teachers and the APPO which
represents many of the 412 majority-indigenous municipalities in the state,
represents this same thrust from down below masquerading as a confrontation
between political parties. Governor Ulisis Ruiz, whose removal is at the
core of the conflict, is a PRIista popularly considered to have achieved
high office through wholesale vote fraud two years ago. Having resorted to
police repression and paramilitary death squads to break the occupation of
the state capital, he could be removed by presidential or legislative fiat
for destabilizing Oaxaca.
But Ruiz's backers, sensitive to their party's sinking fortunes that leaves
it few options other than to seek détente with the PAN, threaten to torpedo
a PRI-PAN pact that effectively hands control of the new congress to
Calderon if and when he is inaugurated December 1st, should either the lame
duck Fox or the PAN legislative bloc in the Senate vote to remove the
Governor.
If Ruiz were to be run out of office before December 1st, a new election
that probably would be won by the PRD would have to be ordered. If he
survives through the due date, the Governor will be able to appoint his own
successor.
But what appears to be just another Byzantine tug of war so endemic to
Mexican party politics is really an expression of the same class and race
wars that motored the great "planton" (encampment) up in Mexico City. Those
at the bottom behind the barricades in Oaxaca's old quarter are poor and
brown - the political class manipulating the tensions are white and wealthy.
A recent march of Oaxaca protestors on the capital drew tens of thousands of
AMLO's supporters, effectively joining the two struggles from down below.
In several key aspects, both the upsurge in Oaxaca and Mexico City borrow
precepts of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's Other Campaign. From
the outset of "La Otra". The EZLN's quixotic Subcomandante Marcos has urged
sympathizers to "look down" to the people on the bottom rung - where AMLO
was also assiduously toiling - rather than to "look up" to the political
class. Imbued with a sense of Mexico's history, the Other Campaign proposes
a new constitution - much as has Lopez Obrador.
Subcomandante Marcos's pre-election attacks on Lopez Obrador, which so
disaffected AMLO's people, zeroed in on the electoral process as being
futile, a position that many of Lopez Obrador's supporters might now agree
with.
After being derailed by the brutal police attack on the militant farmers of
San Salvador Atenco just outside Mexico City last May, and the
post-electoral furor that temporarily rendered the Other Campaign
irrelevant, "La Otra" is again on the move through the north of Mexico, the
part of the original itinerary suspended after the attack on Atenco, and
arrived in Tijuana last week where "Delegate Zero" (Marcos) met with
Chicanos and U.S. Zapatista supporters. Increasingly since the election,
which drove a wedge through the EZLN's Mexican support community, the Other
Campaign's most vocal support has come from outside the country.
To honor the Zapatistas' commitment not to abandon Atenco while 28 political
prisoners captured May 4th remain imprisoned, seven top EZLN comandantes
have traveled from Chiapas to take up residency in that farming town outside
the capital. The "Red Alert" which isolated Zapatista autonomous communities
in southeastern Chiapas has been relaxed.
Why the thrust from down below has blossomed at this moment in the Mexican
continuum is not yet crystal clear. Certainly, there is ample justification
for social explosion. After 12 years, NAFTA-ization has all but annexed
Mexico to Washington. Millions of farmers are forced to abandon their plots
because of huge agricultural imports from the U.S. and head north where they
run smack into Bush's Terror Wall.
The Aztec nation has been franchised and branded by the transnationals into
one immense strip mall. Real wages decline and the maquiladoras pull up
stakes and head for lower-wage China. Impunity for narcos and political
crooks reigns and more heads are whacked off in Acapulco than in Baghdad.
The forests are beheaded and transgenic corn threatens native species.
Thanks to fast food, childhood obesity and early onset diabetes are
pandemic. Three quarters of the population has little social protection.
But all this rot is the story that I have been writing for years. The
question is why this thrust from the long-enduring bottom is surging right
now?
AMLO's candidacy became, as the proverb goes, the sack ("costal") in which
those down at the bottom deposited their most cherished grievances and
history is really an accumulation of such grievances. When critical mass is
reached is really determined by national temperament.
In the Mexican grammar perhaps the most active verb is "aguantar" or "to
endure." Political and emotional metabolism moves slowly here, the "coraje"
(righteous indignation) builds incrementally. The people plot payback behind
the stoic mask that Octavio Paz made so much of and the Zapatistas wear
today - until suddenly they erupt, sparked by a stolen election or a student
massacre or some such egregious outrage. And when the shit does hit the fan,
the political cognoscenti stroke their chins and try and pin the explosion
on the struggle of the political parties for power.
However Mexico gets spun out here in the big wide world beyond its borders,
the surge from down below has a lot less to do with right, left and center
then it does with the bad gas of class and race war seeping 24-7 up from the
bottom of this lopsided society.
John Ross's ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible--Chronicles of
Resistance 2000-2006 will be published by Nation Books in October. Ross will
travel the left coast this fall with the new volume and a hot-off-the-press
chapbook of poetry Bomba!--all suggestions of venues will be cheerfully
entertained--write johnross@igc.org
Ross will speak FROM THE BOTTOM this Friday, Oct. 27th at New College, 777
Valencia St. SF (7 PM). Ross's latest opuses - ZAPATISTAS! Making Another
World Possible - Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006 and his explosive new
poetry chapbook BOMBA! - will be available for perusal by the general
public.
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