Zapatistas again.
This time it's their call for a National Democratic Convention--boldly thrown up against the much-ballyhooed August 21 national elections, the centerpiece of Washington's and Mexico City's hope for continued control.
The Zapatista call--and the response from some 90 organizations--signals
that the January 1st uprising is not about to disappear into electoral
channels. Nor will the Zapatistas and their sympathizers let the
flag of Democracy slip into the hands of the pretenders,
Was the January 1st uprising the birth of a new Mexican Revolution?
Can the indigenous rebels go on to shake the world as deeply as
they have Mexico?
As dramatically as Chapter Two begins, it's the end of Chapter
One that offers a panoramic stop on the rising spriral of Mexican
political struggle: mid-June's news from Chiapas that the indigenous
population of Mexico's southernmost state overwhelmingly rejected
provisional accords between the Zapatista rebels and the national
government.
At first the vista might appear the same as at the beginning:
here lies a desperately polarized nation badly shaken by a remote
indigenous uprising against an aged, repressive regime.
But everything's different now, for matters have escalated far
above the point where the year began. Today, taking in the newly-clarified
scene, one word pops to mind: Chernobyl.
It's the same scenario: first, impossible incident slams smug
hangovers of those in charge; then arrogant efforts to reassert
control unleash forces thought long-tamed; next panicked attempts
to reverse catastrophe instead fuel disaster; then former powers
trample each other in the rush for the exits.
Now the last door slams shut.
What better framework to understand the dizzying events filling
Mexico's first half of 1994? Look at the New Year's Day Zapatista
peasant uprising in Chiapas state; the government's brutal military
response and the unprecedented mass protest against it; the nationwide
explosion of manifold movements for social change; the government's
proffering of negotiations and concessions; the multiple
assassinations--peasant
leaders, Luis Donaldo Colosio (Mexico's erstwhile next President),
and Jose Frederico Benitez (Tijuana's Chief of Police); and the
campesinos' principled rejection of a generous regional
payoff. Here is a picture of forces fissioning out of control.
Indeed, Mexico's slippage from top story into non-story parallels
press coverage of Chernobyl too: a few weeks of excitement and
then poof! on to the next hotspot. (And while the non-Mexican
media turn a blind eye to death squad violence, this blackout
itself goes nearly unmentioned even in the alternative press.)
True, the Chernobyl comparison, like all analogies, has its failings.
Certainly the popular upsurge in Mexico and its splintering of
the ever-ruling PRI(Institutional Revolutionary Party) is no disaster
for the 60% of the nation mired in hopeless and even deepening
poverty. For them the real disaster began some eight years ago
when then newly-elected President Salinas unleashed a campaign
of privatization and austerity that virtually eliminated both
the public sector and government social services. (And worse:
public assets were plundered by the PRI, giving Mexico more billionaires
than England or France. Similarly, decimated social services became
thin cover for political payoffs.)
Nor does the Chernobyl analogy capture the growing centrality
of Mexico to all politics, whether in Washington or New Delhi,
Toronto or Pretoria.
Mexico is "as important to U.S. strategic interests as the
Soviet Union," assessed the CIA in not-yet-distant Cold War
days. Now, riding the coattails of US emergence as the world's
only superpower, Mexico enters the central arena of international
politics--media coverage or not.
If infrequent and empty dispatches from Mexico are once again
the norm, still events of March 23 did make the headlines: the
bloody midday assassination of PRI candidate Colosio in a dusty
lot off the back streets of Tijuana, a major border city with
a world-class reputation for corruption, drugs, and poverty.
While one Mario Aburto Martínez was quickly seized, gun
allegedly in hand, "government officials have yet been able
to explain how he could have inflicted shots shown to be from
two opposite directions," according to U.S. National Public
Radio reporter David Welna.
Nor are explanations forthcoming for video evidence of security
officials apparently clearing a path for Aburto.
But if matters seemed simple to one local Deputy Attorney General
, who jailed six of Colosio's local security officials (including
one shown by tests to have just fired his weapon)--he was soon
set right by being quickly arrested himself while the alleged
conspirators were released.
Still his fate was kinder than that meted out to Tijuana Police
Chief Benitez, who was machine-gunned in an ambush on a busy highway
April 28, leaving behind a wife and two children. His enemies
may be too myriad to list since he foolishly attempted to enforce
the law--pursuing drug traffickers and firing one-third of his
police force for corruption--but his opposition to the government's
assassination story figures large in the public mind.
So, too, does an avalanche of evidence contradicting the official
account of Colosio's killing--an avalanche that makes the Warren
Commission report on the Kennedy assassination look solid as Newtonian
physics. "If an election on conspiracy was held today, 94%
would vote yes," writes noted author Pablo Ignacio
Taibo II in the U.S. magazine The Nation.
At the same time, fractures in the 65 year-old PRI unidad monolitica
spider-web far beyond the deadly internecine blows in Tijuana.
On the right, some leading PRI members jeer the new candidate,
Ernesto Zedillo, at the announcement of his selection; others
shout charges against security forces and against reformist PRI
figure Manual Camacho at Colosio's wake. And with Colosio dead
and Camacho now without a post, hard-liners have accomplished
removal of the key actors of the spring peace process.
On the other hand, Mexico City opera patrons--hardly a campesino
crowd--rise in honor of the Zapatistas; and the top drug enforcement
agent badly wounds the PRI by publicly resigning in disgust, calling
the government a hopeless "narco-democracy."
Meanwhile the caciques (PRI patronage beneficiaries), the
ganaderos (privileged ranchers), the coletos (Chiapan
elite) and the guardias blancas (death squads) mobilize
legal and illegal actions against peasant and religious leaders,
in efforts to reverse the government concessions to local peasants.
Thus does the ruling mechanism split apart. "We are on the
brink of something here in Mexico. Are these the death rattles
of the PRI monster?" writes Ignacio Taibo II.
Perhaps. But what's happening with the common people is even more
important, for their power's the only one capable of dislodging
the PRI system. After all, it's their growing privation, long-suppressed
anger and subsequent eruption on to the scene--through massive
demonstrations, land seizures, highway blockades, and the like--that
fuel the PRI meltdown.
And while currently popular struggles are not at the peak they
were, the peace accord rejection by 98% of peasants living in
areas sympathetic to the Zapatistas underlines the mood of "no
retreat, no surrender."
For despite the accords' offer of real gains for people in Chiapas,
its failure to deliver sweeping democratic, structural change
to the rest of the nation proved decisive. The campesinos
thus boldly raised the ante, even in the face of widespread intimidation
ranging from the murder of over a dozen peasant leaders since
early March to the recent deportation of a popular priest from
the nearby state of Puebla.
So if there's been no retreat by the now-unleashed peasantry,
what of the Zapatistas (EZLN--Zapatista National Liberation Army)
themselves? It was the spark of their bold New Year's uprising--some
ten years in the making--that ignited the Mexican tinderbox. "We
won the lottery," smiles leading spokesman subcommandante
Marcos, in an interview with New Yorker reporter Alma
Guillermoprieto,
explaining that "we expected death" on January 1st,
yet hoped to inspire the downtrodden.
So here matters stand: a crumbling structure of state power, an
insurgent population, and a talented and intransigent--yet
localized--leadership.
It's almost irresistible to call it all the old "Mexican
stand-off."
But this would miss the movement of events in Mexico, a trajectory
toward growing confrontation.
So, too, would it miss the significant, if overblown, upcoming August 21 presidential election. It's this election that's the focus of virtually everything written about Mexico.
Here lies both the media's operative bias (great men--not common people--make history) and the electoralist illusion through which the few rule the many. But if it all comes down to elections, how do you explain the following?
>the "Mexican miracle" was blown apart only through mobilizations by the Zapatistas and other popular, utterly non-electoral organizations;
>the popular upsurge grew from structural economic shifts of international scope, not events in the electoral arena;
>the Mexican workers and peasants can hardly expect
solutions through the August 21 elections since they have no party
running in that campaign;
So, too, does the electoralist focus obscure the perversely co-dependent
efforts by the U.S., the PRI, and the traditional Left to channel
popular discontent into the elections, derailing the very mass
mobilizations that brought matters this far.
The clearest heads on this question are found not among the commentators,
then, but among the Chiapan indigenous rebels. "We Zapatistas
have no opinion about the elections; we don't care who wins,"
one cadre told Guillermoprieto.
Later Marcos went much further, directly attacking the reformist
PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution): "[W]hat kind of
democracy, freedom and justice does the PRD offer us? One that
exercises a political con game, yesterday appearing on the left,
today on the center, and who knows where tomorrow? One that seeks
to ingratiate itself with the powerful...?"
Moreover, "what are the differences among the PRD, the PAN
[a right-wing party], and the PRI? Don't they offer the same economic
prospect?"
Nonetheless it's still impossible to dismiss the August national
elections, if only because illusions in change through electoral
channels are still extant. But more importantly, it's because
everything hangs on the question of democracy.
The PRI's long-refined mixture of corruption and repression is
the heart of plutocratic rule and its endemic landlessness and
poverty. Indeed, even under the intense pressure of the last few
months, the PRI conducted an election in Morales state just this
May that was rife with the grossest forms of fraud.
Recall that the success of the January 1 Declaration by the Zapatistas
rested not on a call for their own revolutionary ascension to
leadership of Mexico, but on the simple demand for the restoration
of democracy (while the rising itself was called constitutionally
justified).
Throughout Mexico, but especially for the 15-20% of the population
that is indigenous, the electoral question looks more like the
old South Africa: the right to vote and the right to function
politically are so desperately needed that even in the absence
of popular candidates, demands for democratic elections threaten
the entire mechanism of rule.
With the democratic question so central, "normal" electoral
fraud could detonate the organic popular rising to a higher level
despite the rulers' electoral gambit.
(But note that in the intricacies of Mexican politics, fear-mongering
of post-electoral anarchy serves primarily to drive the country
into the arms of the PRI and to justify repressive preparations.)
The real prospect of a failed or tainted electoral maneuver, together
with worries over the fragmentation of the PRI, has given rise
to profound concern in the Northern Colossus. Washington is on
a campaign to rein in its brazen southern junior partners. For
instance, from the New York Times, comes this directive:
"...Mexico must evolve rapidly from a one-party system dominated
by a powerful president into a full-fledged multi-party democracy...."
Cynics, mindful of the U.S. record on democracy in Latin America,
might add the words "must appear to [evolve]."
In any case, in May the never-subtle U.S. rulers dispatched nearly
half its Cabinet to Mexico City where Secretary of State Warren
Christopher indelicately declaimed, "To sustain trust in
democracy, governments must attack the scourges of corruption
and drug trafficking. Government cannot be held accountable if
its power can be bought....Now it is vital that the democratic
process underway in Mexico be carried out in the most successful
and credible manner."
At the same time, reports that "more than 3000 [purchased]
military vehicles have entered Mexico from the U.S. in 1994"
(UPI) and continued claims of U.S. Green Beret activity on Mexico's
southern (Guatemalan) border indicate what's in store should the
surface reforms fail.
Certainly U.S. worries goes back to the CIA assessment of Mexico's
paramount role. Who can believe that the spirit of 1776 is suddenly
resurgent in Washington, given its decades-old blind eye to murder
(over 300 seperate hits in the last decade) and electoral fraud
("atmospheric conditions" allegedly crashed the last
election's computers, which recovered only to crank out a--surprise!--
50.3% PRI vote 10 days later).
Truth is Washington senses a real threat to its "national
security"--for Mexico is no Nicaragua, the extreme measures
Washington undertook there notwithstanding.
After all, this is a land of 90 million people. Here at the rare
joint boundary of Empire and Third World, the 2500km length of
the border is emblematic of the extensive economic and population
interpenetration of the U.S. and Mexico.
Mexicans, along with other Latinos, close in on being the largest
U.S. minority group. Whole cities, as well as sections of Los
Angeles and Chicago, become indistinguishable from, say, Matamoros.
Mutual trade ranks third for the U.S. and first for Mexico, while
U.S. productive capacity is increasingly shifted to south-of-the-border
factories.
Thus the drowning grasp of the Mexican elite demands a returning
embrace by the U.S. Hence the centrality of Mexico to Washington.
And with the U.S. standing as the world's lone superpower the
elementary syllogism is inescapable: if Mexico is critical to
the U.S. and the U.S. is central to the world . . . .
Will the dispossessed overcome electoralism, long-enforced atomization,
PRI repression, and U.S. intervention? One thing is sure: the
twin impact of equally hopeless economics (massive austerity and
privatization) and politics (universal corruption and violence),
drives the long-silent peasants and workers of Mexico to sound
their voices. They now move to assert their own interests and
pick up the torch of the old Revolution.
The prospect of increasingly revolutionary turmoil looms, but
the outcome is far from certain.
True, despite killings and news blackouts, an organic leadership
has begun to emerge from the extremely savvy (if geographically
limited) Zapatistas and the overlaid religious, indigenous, peasant,
and worker communities.
But the critical ingredient is still missing: not even the nucleus
of a nationwide revolutionary organization exists today, even
if (in the words of Marcos) "there are people ready to give
their lives to the project of a party...."
Yet with the stakes so high, this unthreatening absence does not
buy relief for the common people. In fact the opposite: making
the most of the yet-missing organized national opponent, more
repression and increased U.S. intervention is already underway.
Whether the melting-down structure of control can hold runaway
reactions to near-Haitian levels of poverty and repression is
yet impossible to say. "The pressure for change is . . .
extraordinary," writes Luis Rubio in the July 1 Chicago
Tribune.
One thing is clear in the vista before us: sooner or later Mexican fallout is headed your way.
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