The Militant - Vol.64/No.30 - July 31, 2000 --back page :Mexico vote: more class conflict ahead
Text version of the Militant 
the Militant Socialist newspaper
about this site directory of local distributors how to subscribe new and in the next issue order bundles of the Militant to sell
news articles editorials columns contact us search view back issues
SOCIALIST WORKERS CAMPAIGN
The Militant this week
FRONT PAGE ARTICLES
Striking coal miners reach out for solidarity
Win support from PACE union at Chevron, call rally
 
UN committee backs Puerto Rico independence
 
Outspoken rightist to head Canada party
 
Minnesota meat packers press fight for union
FEATURE ARTICLES
Cop violence sparks protest in Philadelphia
 
Florida UNITE workers score gain in strike
 
forums
calendar
Submit Letter to the editor
Submit article or photo
submit forum
submit to calendar


A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people
Vol. 64/No. 30July 31, 2000

Come to the Active Workers ConferenceCome to the Active Workers Conference
 
Mexico vote: more class conflict ahead
(back page) 
 
BY PATRICK O'NEILL  
The July 2 elections in Mexico, which ended the 71-year grip on the presidency by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), register a political watershed in that country, the second-largest and one of the most industrialized in Latin America. In the vote Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN) defeated PRI candidate Francisco Labastida.

The U.S. rulers and decisive sections of the Mexican capitalist class greeted the election results with satisfaction. Washington and other powers are counting on a PAN-led government to break down further obstacles to the freer penetration of imperialist capital in Mexico, while domestic capitalists are hoping to profit as their junior partners.

Many working people, hoping that their living conditions would improve, voted for the PAN as a lesser evil to the PRI, which is widely despised for presiding over a deep-going economic and social crisis and spearheading an assault on the living standards and rights of millions.

There was a record turnout in the elections among the country's 58.7 million eligible voters, especially in the cities. The PAN gained its greatest support in the urban areas, much of it among the expanded middle classes, which have been shaken by the economic crisis and sought a change. The PRI's vote held up slightly better in the rural areas, where many working people living on the knife's edge have depended on government subsidies to make ends meet. But even in the PRI's strongholds, its performance was a far cry from the virtual political monopoly of the past.  
 
Expectatations, skepticism
Fox and his conservative PAN won 43 percent of the vote to Labastida's 36 percent. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the bourgeois liberal Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), ran a distant third at 17 percent.

The PAN captured 224 seats in Congress to the PRI's 209, although it failed to win an absolute majority. The PRD's share of seats declined from 125 to 67. The PAN added two governorships, increasing its total to seven out of the 31 states. The PRI had ruled all states up until 1989.

In ousting the PRI, many workers, farmers, and middle-class layers were looking for relief from the tightening economic squeeze. "There are millionaires, while everyone else in a town lives in poverty," said María Aurelia Bertha Trejo Cazabes, who voted for Fox. "We just want a change, nothing else," one student told reporters. "We are hoping for a change from the 70 years of oppression, misery, and corruption," said Luz María Padilla, 28, a Chevrolet salesperson in Mexico City.

Many, however, express distrust of all the major parties and politicians, including Fox. "I'm sure he's going to steal. They've all stolen lots," said Ursula Ruiz, 19, a student who voted for Fox.

Fox announced a multiparty "transition team" July 17, including such figures as Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, a former leader of both the PRI and PRD, and liberal professor Jorge Castañeda as foreign policy advisor. He has said he plans to choose a cabinet among all three major parties.

Outgoing president Ernesto Zedillo has called on his backers to support the president-elect as he prepares to assume office. The collaboration of the PRI tops is a precondition to the establishment of a stable regime. Despite the crisis wracking the PRI, the party still commands a powerful political apparatus nationwide and a network of labor and farmer organizations closely tied to it.  
 
Consolidating political police
Talk about democracy notwithstanding, capitalists in Mexico as well as Washington hope the president-elect will enforce a strong central executive power to maintain bourgeois political stability in the country, as the PRI largely did for seven decades. Just minutes after his election Fox announced he would establish a new cabinet-level Department of Public Security--equivalent to the FBI--to consolidate a strong federal police agency--in the name of combating corruption and the drug trade.

There were few differences in the PRI and PAN election platforms. On the economic front, Fox has called for strengthening the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Mexico entered under the previous PRI administrations. He has projected an economic growth rate of 7 percent to be gained by "doubling foreign direct investment and by helping small and medium-sized firms...so that more of them can be brought into the NAFTA supply-chain," according to the British Economist.

Fox proposes to sell off the petrochemical plants of the state oil corporation Pemex, and to open up the electrical industry to private firms. The PRI's Labastida put forward similar policies during his campaign. The president-elect backed off from a highly unpopular suggestion he had made earlier to privatize Pemex wholesale, however.

The Mexican oil industry was nationalized in 1938 by the Lázaro Cárdenas government, which expropriated the holdings of British and U.S. oil corporations by leaning on massive mobilizations of working people. Since then the national oil industry has been deeply viewed by millions of workers and farmers as Mexico's national patrimony. Encroachments on the oil, and even the electrical, industries, will require a more direct confrontation with the trade unions.

Fox has signaled his government will accelerate the shift in foreign policy, which began under the previous PRI administrations, away from Mexico's longstanding posture of independence from Washington, including its public opposition to U.S. intervention in other countries. But he declared his government would maintain "intense relations with Cuba" while criticizing the revolutionary government for lack of "democracy."

Fox declared he will negotiate with the Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas and consider withdrawing the army from that southern state, a demand of peasant and Indian fighters and their supporters nationwide. Meanwhile, the sharp polarization between rural toilers and big landlords and their paramilitary groups continues to bubble.

The long rule of the PRI was based on relative political and social stability compared to most other Latin American countries. This stability was based on several factors, including the history of the PRI, which claimed the mantle of the 1910 revolution; rising oil revenues for many decades after the nationalization of the country's natural resources; and the development of a relatively large middle class.

The PRI was forged in the second decade of the 20th century with the consolidation of bourgeois rule after the end of the Mexican revolution. In the 1910 democratic revolution, peasants and workers fought for a deep-going land reform, public education, democratic rights, and other gains. The various bourgeois factions sank their differences under the PRI, which presented itself as arbiter between the rebellious peasantry and the small but growing industrial working class on one hand, and the traditional landowning class and commercial capitalists most directly linked to U.S. and British imperialism on the other.

The PRI presented itself as the embodiment of the nation, standing above class conflicts. These Bonapartist methods of rule have marked the party from the start, allowing it to survive through a combination of concessions to social struggles, coopting protest leaders, and selective repression, which has been most brutal in the countryside. The PRI has relied on pro-government peasant organizations as well as the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the main trade union organization, which is closely tied to the party and the state.

Until the most recent government, each PRI president named his successor as leader of the party, who was assured to become president of Mexico--the notorious dedazo, "the finger," as it was called in popular humor.

This setup began to be undermined in the early 1980s with the onset of the international capitalist economic crisis, which hit the semicolonial world particularly hard. Mexico's foreign debt skyrocketed and imperialist bankers pressed the government increasingly to make concessions.

These pressures ranged from threats to "decertify" Mexico as a government deemed cooperative in Washington's "war on drugs," to demands for austerity measures to finance the never-ending debt payments. In response, the Mexican regime has among other moves sold off a range of state-owned companies.

Washington has pressed hard on Mexican governments to lower barriers to U.S. investment and goods. The 1994 NAFTA agreement codified the success of that effort, opening up Mexican markets preferentially to U.S. and Canadian investment and goods.

The social and economic crisis in Mexico accelerated when the value of the peso collapsed in December 1994. In return for a promised $50 billion "bailout" by U.S. banks, Washington extracted deeper inroads into Mexican patrimony and greater sacrifices imposed on the workers and farmers of that country. This included the agreement that all Pemex export revenues would be deposited in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before being transferred to Mexico--or seized in case of a loan default.

Through the late 1980s and '90s, opposition capitalist parties have made steady inroads into PRI dominance. The party's share of the vote in presidential elections, which was more than 90 percent in 1976, fell to 36 percent by July 2, 2000.

The PAN was formed in the late 1930s in counterrevolutionary reaction to the land reform, curbs on the wealthy Catholic hierarchy's privileges, and other progressive measures of the Cárdenas government. Since then, to be able to challenge the PRI, it has evolved away from its rightist origins and today functions as a mainstream conservative party.

Fox, a rancher and former head of Coca-Cola's operations in Mexico, served previously as PAN governor of Guanajuato.

The PRD itself came out of a section of the PRI, with much of the left dissolving itself into the PRD. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a PRI "reformer" and governor of Michoacán, left that party and mounted a strong challenge for the presidency in 1988. It is widely believed that the PRI stole that election through its control of the electoral system.

In 1997 Cárdenas was elected mayor of Mexico City, in another blow to the PRI. But since then, Cárdenas has been administering the city for the capitalist class, with policies almost indistinguishable from the PRI's.

This time around, Cárdenas finished a weak third. Many PRD supporters from left and liberal circles abandoned it in the rush to back one or the other major contenders. "Some from Mr. Cárdenas's party, and even a handful of former Communists, endorsed Mr. Fox, declaring that since the fall of the Berlin Wall their desire to oust the governing party had come to outweigh ideological considerations," wrote Sam Dillon in the New York Times.

Wall Street has given the newly elected regime the thumbs-up, both in the editorial pages and on the stock markets. U.S. capitalists expect the government's policies will allow them to squeeze even more profits through their domination of Mexico's markets and superexploitation of labor. Mexican capitalists, many of whom made a killing with the sell-off of state-owned companies, are licking their chops too.  
 
Class polarization
For working people in Mexico, however, the story is different. Since the 1994 peso crisis, millions of workers and farmers have been devastated and have not recovered, unlike the capitalists. Class polarization has deepened with soaring unemployment and real wages dropping yearly. The government-set minimum wage in real terms, fell by a third between 1990 and 1998; it is now the equivalent of $3 a day. Peasants have been driven off the land and into the cities to seek jobs, a development that spurs ongoing struggles for land in the countryside.

Of the country's 94 million people, 27 million are officially classified as "poor" according to a World Bank report. "Much progress of poverty reduction since the mid-1980s was wiped out by the 1994-95 currency devaluation crisis," say the report's authors.

These conditions bred by imperialist rule continue to drive millions of Mexican workers to immigrate to the United States, increasingly linking the fates of workers in both countries. In the last fiscal year, 75,000 immigrant visas were granted to people from Mexico-- more than to any other country. At the same time, an estimated 300,000 workers enter the United States each year without papers, seeking work.

To win popular support at home as a champion of immigrants, Fox is calling for Washington to increase its limit on yearly legal migration to 250,000.

Despite the champagne glasses clinking to Fox's electoral victory, some bourgeois commentators express a more sober view. The Economist points to "three challenges" it expects Mexico's economy must weather next year: "a likely slowdown in the United States, its main export market; a probable fall in the price of oil, its biggest single export; and an increase in debt payments." Mexico's foreign debt stands at $160 billion, roughly the same as it was in 1995 and equivalent to one year's exports.

The one prediction that can be made about Mexico today is that class polarization will sharpen, as the demands of finance capital and the national bourgeoisie collide with the heightened expectations of workers and peasants.

 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home