Lead article
August-September 2000

Unrest beneath defeat of single party rule in Mexico

Mary Holmes

In the period since the July 2 national elections in Mexico terminated 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a great deal of maneuvering is going on. It all concerns who and what will constitute the new federal government headed by Vicente Fox who takes office as president on Dec. 1. But as important as the removal of PRI from power is, fundamental change in Mexico will not come from the electoral process alone.

Fox, candidate of an opposition coalition headed by the rightist National Action Party (PAN), won the presidential election with 43% of the vote. Despite the PRI's well-oiled machine-doling out washing machines, food and money here; threatening the cutoff of welfare and jobs there; and committing outright fraud when it had to-its candidate, Francisco Labastida, got 36%, considerably less than expected.

Significantly, the desire to defeat the PRI ran so deep that, early in his campaign, Fox was able to convince a segment of the Left that he was the only viable electoral alternative to the PRI and lure support away from the left coalition of the PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution). Its candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, got 17% of the vote, far less than in previous elections.

The PAN coalition also defeated the PRI in the federal legislative vote, although no single party has a majority now. PAN also won the two gubernatorial races, although others will be held this year, most notably in Chiapas, Aug. 20. Finally, while the PRD retained the mayoralty in Mexico City, the PAN will now be the largest party in the city council.

While the electoral defeat of the PRI represents an important defeat of a one-party state machine that intruded into every Mexican's life-through jobs, health care, education, social security-there was virtually no difference in the basic programs put forward by Fox and Labastida. Under prior PRI governments, Mexico was already well integrated into the neoliberal constructs which Fox will certainly continue.

The PRI began to lose credibility as anything other than a self-preserving, pro-capitalist party long before its army mowed down protesting students in 1968, and more recently, stole the 1988 election from Cardenas. The Reagan administration rewarded then-president Salinas for his theft with a $3.5 billion loan so Mexico would not default on its debt payments. The "reforms"-austerity measures-which the PRI then imposed fell entirely on the working class and the poor.

Their living and working conditions were further depressed with the 1994-95 economic crash. At that time, the Clinton administration came to the bail-out. In the wake of the July 2 elections, a computer hacker released a secret list of some 3,300 wealthy and corrupt PRI-connected beneficiaries whose salvaging the Mexican masses will be paying for, for years to come. From the U.S., the new government-elect has received bipartisan support.

HOST OF ISSUES JOINS HATRED OF PRI

While hatred of the PRI helped to fuel Fox's victory, what else explains this seeming shift to the right? Fox, while a right-winger, is not a hard-core loyalist of the PAN, a minority party founded on the base of northern conservatism, the reactionary church hierarchy, and an anti-land reform and pro-business stance. Fox was also able to appeal to younger, NAFTA-incubated, techno-oriented and expanding segments of the urban middle class, as well as an emergent entrepreneurial sector.

Part of Fox's pitch was also to a number of intellectuals, most tellingly from the Left, who quite willingly bought his anti-PRI "product." Fox, who rose to executive in Coca Cola de Mexico during his tenure there, said that "Like selling Coke, politics is a retail business," and did not hesitate to change his line when necessary. For the Left, he retracted an earlier position supporting the privatization of Pemex, the national oil enterprise.

Fox's program, like his PRI predecessors, is essentially a neoliberal economic course, but with some rough edges rhetorically smoothed over, such as promising investment in infrastructures and services to the poor. In 1997, Fox and a number of left intellectuals and social democratic state heads participated in drafting "A Latin American Alternative," which claimed to project a "third way" in a post-neoliberal world: "We are strongly determined to overcome neoliberal policies that have elevated the status of the market from that of an instrument to that of a religion."

An economic advisor to Fox, Eduardo Sojo, refined this further: "The model we're putting in place is one that believes in the private sector, that believes in markets, that believes in competition...But it is also one that believes in the need for selective and temporary intervention of the government to reduce inequities, that thinks that markets can't do everything." The kinds of state intervention referred to mean "leveling the playing field" for small and middle-sized entrepreneurs who can't compete with big-scale capitalists.

This also explains Fox's take on NAFTA, which he claims to want to expand along the lines of the European Union, a NAFTA free-trade zone stretching "from Alaska to Chiapas" in which not only capital and goods can move without restriction, but "human capital," that is, Mexican workers, as well.

Fox does have a record, as governor of Guanajuato state, from 1995 to 1999. During this period, foreign investment grew over $2 billion, 50,000 jobs were created, and the state's gross domestic product increased by a breathtaking 21%. However, this stellar capitalist report card did not translate into better conditions for workers.

While Fox started a state technical university to produce graduates with "marketable skills"-exactly the type of capitalist-driven education which UNAM students fought against last year-illiteracy rates in Guanajuato in 1998 ranked the ninth highest in Mexico. School attendance rates for youth aged 6 to 14 were 24th nationally, close to the bottom among the 32 states. Despite economic growth, wages have remained low. The high employment rate masks the unrecorded work of seasonal agricultural laborers, the underemployed, and the "export" of hundreds of thousands of workers who go to the U.S. for jobs.

While NAFTA, established in 1993 under the "third way" Clinton administration, has expanded U.S.-Mexico trade to well over $300 billion annually, none of this wealth has benefited the vast majority of Mexicans who are still suffering from the crushing $100 billion debt incurred after the 1995 peso collapse. The average Mexican's income has stagnated at levels below 1982, while the ruling class is producing billionaires at a remarkable per capita rate.The post-PRI government will not fundamentally alter this status quo.

Of the advisors and future government officials now surrounding Fox, few are hard-core PAN members, and a significant number have been in and out of the PRI and PRD. The rulers-in-waiting are busy trying to salve relations with the PRD especially, whose support Fox will need as he inherits a huge state bureaucracy, including the PRI-dominated trade unions and rural organizations, owing its existence, if not now its loyalty, to the PRI.

'SELF-NEGATING' LEFT

While this kind of political maneuvering is to be expected in a state power transition, a high-profile, ex-Mexican Communist Party intellectual like Jorge Castaneda-who supported Cardenas in 1994 but was among Fox's earliest boosters and reportedly may serve in his cabinet-is more emblematic of what one solidarity activist called the "self-negating left."

Many more leftists totally rejected the "defeat the PRI" bandwagon as they saw it veer sharply to the right. The Mexican feminist Marta Lamas reportedly said (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, July 2) that Fox represented such a danger to the gains of the Women's Liberation Movement there that six more years of the PRI was preferable. Fox's statements during the campaign were thick with misogynistic and homophobic remarks; he is opposed to a woman's right to abortion and is in favor of the Catholic Church whose oppressive privileges, getting tax breaks, and being allowed to form political organizations were broken by the Mexican Revolution.

Whether or not Fox in power turns out to be a nightmare of retrogression, a central question remains: why did so many leftists who opposed the PRI and whose vision was not clouded by the Fox-PAN anti-PRI campaign, allow their energy and theoretic creativity to be hemmed in, nearly exclusively, by the electoral process? It can't be for lack of ongoing movements from practice, be they the women's movement, the fight for independent unions, campesino struggles, a growing environmental justice movement, and the ongoing resistance and rebellion in the poorest regions of the south, especially Chiapas.

In Chiapas, Labastida won a 45% plurality, but together the opposition parties took around 55% of the votes. Now in the upcoming Aug. 20 elections for governor, an opposition coalition, the Alliance for Chiapas, seems poised to defeat the PRI, barring total, blatant fraud. Its candidate, Pedro Salazar, was a PRI senator until leaving the party last year, and was also involved in the official peace commission. While Salazar was neutral in the presidential elections, he has been endorsed by both the PRD and PAN. This is the first election for governor since the 1994 Zapatista uprising. The EZLN has taken a hands-off position towards the elections, although it officially views them as meaningless. But defeat of the PRI in Chiapas could make a difference in lifting the army's state of siege.

ALL EYES STILL ON CHIAPAS, LABOR

During the election campaign, Fox claimed that he could make peace in Chiapas "in 15 minutes," but what that means was never spelled out. One-third of the Mexican army occupies Chiapas, surrounding the EZLN. Fox has stated that his administration will not interfere with the military or call it to account in Chiapas or elsewhere, although they are responsible for arbitrary arrests, rape, torture, executions and other abuses under the pretext of combatting drug traders and guerrillas. The army has maintained a strong repressive force in Guerrero and Oaxaca states as well.

The guns of repression have not stopped grassroots organizing in the south. In Oaxaca, hundreds of women have maintained an encampment for three years, in support of their disappeared husbands and relatives. In Chiapas, indigenous community activists have created 38 autonomous municipalities, involving over 200,000 people in bringing schools, health care, electricity and water into their areas.

While they know that Fox-PAN is no friend of labor, workers and organizers in the independent union movement are seeing a breach in the state-dominated CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) after defeat of the PRI. For decades, the CTM was charged with repressing labor unrest and crushing independent unions, while signing contracts beneficial to business behind workers' backs. The weight of PRI-CTM-state control over labor has contributed to the dismal wage level of most Mexican workers. The urban minimum wage over the last 20 years has actually fallen by two-thirds to below $4 a day.

The independent union movement begun by FAT (Workers Authentic Front) and other organizing groups has continued and may now expand. Workers at the Duro paper bag maquiladora are in the midst of a struggle to establish an independent union against the CTM, the company and the PAN governor of Tamaulipas state. They are demanding reinstatement of their elected leaders whom the company, a producer for Hallmark and other corporations, fired. The workers were ejected by armed police squads on the first day of their strike. Cross-border solidarity campaigns like the one supporting the Duro workers are also increasing.

Far from the struggles in the maquiladoras, the PRI and PRD have been examining their options in defeat. As one PRD member said, "Vicente Fox seized our banners and left us stunned." Whether that accurately reflects what little the PRD had to distinguish itself against the PRI, the party leadership now seems ready to consider selectively compromising with Fox.

The post-election factionalism within the PRI may also prove fertile ground for Fox to siphon off the support he needs in the legislature. But as the PRI finds its state sources of patronage, cronyism and corruption cut off, it may either splinter into pieces, or "reinvent" itself in a mold similar to Communist Parties in East Europe, claiming to be the pole against globalization.

Even though opposition to the PRI has not delivered for those who continue to struggle for revolutionary change in Mexico, it may bring new openings with an end to the controlling reach of a one-party state. The question of a deeply rooted and far-visioned alternative to capitalism, not welded to the party and electoral forms, is still on the agenda.