Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards
Democracy.� NOTE:� Thanks to Elizabeth Bell for this.� � � � � --
kl, pp
FROM: JOHN ROSS
011-5255-5510-3376
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blindman's Buff - A New Cycle
BLINDMAN'S BUFF (or BLINDMAN'S BLUFF) - is a 2000-year-old game
(sometimes described as a 'play') said to originate with the Greeks,
in which a "blindman" is buffeted, baited, tricked, and otherwise
humiliated when he or she seeks to unmask their adversaries,
For the better part of the past decade,
author-newshound-activist-poet-human shield-and-globetrotting
troublemaker John Ross has relentlessly cranked out MEXICO BARBARO,
his weekly screed documenting the demise of the dictatorship of
Mexico's long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) much in the same fashion as the great North American
investigative reporter John Kenneth Turner exposed the downfall of
the prolonged dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in the original
"Barbarous Mexico" published in 1910. In case the reader hadn't
noticed, three years ago, the PRI lost the presidency of Mexico and,
while it retains the lethal wallop of a dying dinosaur, its reign is
over.
Although Ross, now 66 and still based in Mexico City, is losing his
sight to the lingering trauma of police-inflicted beatings, even as
the light dims, his vista is broadening.�� BLINDMAN'S BUFF, the new
format for his resilient vision, will include the weekly MEXICO
BARBARO but will zoom in on more than the barbarities committed
against pobre Mexico ("so close to the Estados Unidos y tan lejos de
Dios") and its beleaguered peoples, as Ross stumbles through the
world at large to bring you first-hand accounts, actualities, and
analysis of the resistance of those who refuse to be Murdered by
Capitalism (the title of Ross's forthcoming memoir.) Much as in 2003,
when MEXICO BARBARO journeyed to Iraq and Palestine to report back
direct from the eye of the conflagration, BLINDMAN'S BUFF will focus
in on global hotspots from Bolivia to Baghdad and beyond as Ross
follows his nose for news like it was a well-traveled guide dog. We
hope our regular readers will continue to generously finance
BLINDMAN'S BUFF and its author's delvings into the world's past,
present, and future pockets of resistance.
********************************************
John Ross's unique style of participatory journalism will be
flagrantly on display in his upcoming memoir "Murdered by Capitalism
- 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left" to be published
by Nation Books next June.� Look for this instant cult classic at
independent bookstores everywhere.
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BLINDMAN'S BUFF #1
"WELCOME TO THE NIGHTMARE": 2004 - THE YEAR THAT WAS
MEXICO CITY (Jan 1) - Before dawn on July 4th 2004, a fast-moving
speed boat thought to have been crewed by Al Qaeda operatives plowed
into Bedloes Island at full throttle, detonating several thousand
pounds of TNT and tilting the Statue of Liberty into New York harbor
not unlike the monumental figure of Saddam Hussein in Paradise Square
or the paper-mache maque of George W. Bush in Trafalger in November
2003. Fortunately, Miss Liberty had been closed to tourists while the
statue is being retrofitted with an "early warning" transmitting
tower and only 11 workers were listed as dead or missing.
As was to be anticipated, President Bush, two months away from the
official kick-off of his re-election campaign at a Madison Square
Garden gala set for September 11th to coincide with the third
anniversary of the terror attacks on the World Trade Towers and the
Pentagon, pumped up patriotic indignation at the Qaeda assault and
launched "preventative" air strikes on Syria and Iran in retaliation
although no connection to the speedboat attack and those governments
was ever established. The dramatic events of July bolstered Bush's
re-election ratings which had dimmed considerably since Saddam's
capture at the end of 2003 failed to quiet the Iraqi resistance, and
the discovery last February of an apparently CIA-planted arsenal of
"weapons of mass destruction" near the Syrian border (the "weapons"
are thought to have been transferred from Libya.)
But Bush's bombing boost proved short-lived when Democratic contender
Howard Dean charged that, like the "WMD" scandal and Kean Commission
allegations that the White House had ample forewarning of the 9/11
terror attacks, the President had also engineered the Statue of
Liberty blow-up. Although the administration dismissed Dean's
challenge as lunatic fringe ravings, polls indicated that about half
the American electorate coincided with the former Vermont governor's
stance on Bush involvement.
U.S. presidents have been known to act recklessly when they are
confronted with both re-election and an unpopular war at the same
time. Witness Lyndon Johnson who faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident
that initiated the Vietnam war in August 1964 to out-hawk Barry
Goldwater in that year's presidential election, and then refused to
run again in 1968 when he realized the war was unwinnable. Or Richard
Nixon, who in 1972 still bogged down in Vietnam but smitten with a
hubris that bordered on madness, ordered the break-in job that became
Watergate.
There is little question that Bush has had a bad slog in Iraq.
Following a drugged Saddam's staged surrender, the Iraqi resistance,
hammered by a U.S. counter-offensive that took thousands of civilian
lives in the first five months of 2004, showed surprising resilience
in coordinated attacks on the occupation forces in ten cities that in
June alone caused more than 600 Coalition casualties- the attacks
included the downing of at least a half dozen U.S. Blackhawk
helicopters and a military transport plane ferrying G.I.s back to the
U.S.
The coordinated surge bore a remarkable similarity to the 1968 Tet
offensive of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and had much
the same impact on Bush's ratings as it had on LBJ's back then. As
the result of what has become known as 'Black June' around the White
House, the U.S. was forced to push back its time table for turning
Iraq over to an elected civilian government.
The July 15th assassination of Bush Proconsul L. Paul Bremer while
visiting a supposedly pacified Tikrit further deepened the
administration's despair, and by year's end, continually besieged by
the resistance with over a thousand U. S. dead since Bush declared
victory in Iraq May 1st, 2003, the Pentagon, now under Paul
Wolfowitz's command following Donald Rumsfeld's perjury indictment,
announced plans for a withdrawal of U.S. troops to Kuwait.
With the U.S. economy in tatters, Washington's position in Iraq has
become untenable, underscoring the military axiom that no occupying
army has been able to defeat an aroused nationalist resistance
movement in the history of modern warfare.
The conflagration in the Middle East has been no less diminished
across the desert to the south and to the west. Bush's "preventative"
strikes, apparently with the complicity of the Saudi oilogarchy,
provoked Wahabi retaliation with Osama Bin Laden appearing in public
for the first time in many years after Al Qaeda seized Mecca on the
anniversary of 9/11. The takeover, which was coupled with devastating
assaults on the Saudi petroleum infrastructure, has cut the flow from
the Arabian peninsula (after a year in the doghouse, Saudi Arabia had
once again become the U.S.'s chief supplier), pushing the price at
the pump up to $3 USD a gallon and further eroding Bush's popularity
by the autumn of '04. U.S. bombing and the on-going slaughter in Iraq
has inflamed the Arab street, with the Intifada in occupied Palestine
and Israeli Defense Force efforts to contain it, reaching new heights
of cruelty. Palestinian factions have been in a state of virtual
civil war ever since Yassir Arafat's fatal heart attack in September
and the assassination 15 days later of Ariel Sharon by an enraged
supporter of Mordicai Vananu, an Israeli scientist the Sharon
government refused to release after 17 years in prison for exposing
the Zionist state's nuclear arsenal.
The chaos on both sides of the wire set in motion a brief army coup
in Israel and on October 6th, the so-called Israeli Defense Force
launched a new Yom Kippur offensive to push the Palestinians into
Jordan with Bush's enthusiastic approval as the President entered the
final month of his re-election drive.
Despite his belligerent posture overseas, always a vote-getter with
the U.S. electorate, the bursting of Bush's economic bubble has
neutralized gains at home. From an astounding 8.4 growth jump in the
third quarter of 2003, the economy nosedived into negative numbers by
the second of 2004, due to the uncertainties of the continuing
imbroglio in Iraq. A new round of mass lay-offs has upped the
skyrocketing unemployment rate to near 7%, and cut-backs in social
services, in part to cover the escalating cost of the occupation of
Iraq, sparked the first urban insurrections in decades in cities
ranging from Orlando Florida to Detroit this past summer.
As a consequence of the on-going turmoil, Howard Dean, who had become
a lightening rod for disaffected constituencies all over the country,
went into election day as close to Bush as Bush had been to Al Gore
in 2000. We all know what has happened since then. Instead of
Florida, the election was stolen in California and instead of the
President's brother Jeb, former movie muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger
did Bush's dirty work. Nonetheless, the flimflam, which was
facilitated by electronic voting, was stopped in its tracks when
as-yet unidentified hackers destroyed the results. At the end of
2004, the United States still had no president.
One upside of these worst case scenarios: with Washington's tunnel
vision fixated on the exploding east, the south has been able to cut
itself some slack - particularly in Latin America.
When Che Guevara set up operations in Bolivia in the mid-1960s, he
did so because that Andean nation is situated at the strategic heart
of the continent. True to form, Bolivia, a majority Indian republic,
has been at the hub of the hubbub that has percolated throughout the
south in 2004. Having won crucial battles with the transnational
Bechtel Corporation which sought to privatize its water supply, and
big oil companies like Shell and Marathon which had plans to extract
huge quantities of natural gas for sale to California, the new-found
political clout of the Indian majority was best measured by the
recent installation of Evo Morales as president.
Morales, who played a pivotal role in the ousting of his predecessor
Gonzalo Lozano, "Goni", is the socialist leader of the "cocoleros" or
coca farmers and his election has alarmed the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.
The political euphoria in Bolivia has spread to other majority Indian
nations. An uprising this August in Ecuador toppled ex-army officer
Lucio Gutierrez who had betrayed his alliance with Indian farmer
federations, and in Peru, Alejandro Toledo's renewed efforts to
privatize the electricity industry, resulted in his impeachment after
multitudinous demonstrations all over the country.
Argentina too, under social democrat Nestor Kirschner, has moved to
re-nationalize its banking and petroleum sectors, reversing the
giveaways of the 1990s under the Menem kleptocracy.
In Brazil, although President Luis da Silva has proven to be "Lula
Light" in many voters' eyes, his victory over Bush at the ALCA
showdown in Miami in December 2003 and this powerful nation's
increasing influence in the World Trade Organization, has stalled the
corporate globalization of the planet.� Opposition to Lula's lukewarm
regime was amply demonstrated last month when 100,000 marched in
Brasilia to oppose yet another Bechtel scheme, this time to privatize
the Amazon.
Further north, combative Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez survived
one more half-hearted coup orchestrated by U.S. Undersecretary for
Latin American Affairs Roger Noriega and Bush Latin advisor Otto
Reich. Although persuaded by Jimmy Carter to allow a tainted recall,
Chavez won re-election handily when military "golpistas" hesitated on
the eve of the vote-taking.
Next door in Colombia, the exigencies of the U.S. war in the Middle
East forced Washington to cut back on counter-insurgency funding and
Green Beret "advisors" were re-deployed to Iraq. The U.S. pull-back
has allowed some breathing room for revived peace talks with the
long-lived rebels.
But Washington's inattention to Latin America was most glaringly
evident when, in May, Cuban premier Fidel Castro suffered a
paralyzing stroke that has left him unable to speak - reports
indicate that a frustrated silence has settled in over that embattled
island. Despite the Comandante's enfeebled state, Bush was unable to
make good on his vow to invade because of commitments further east.
The exception to the anti-Yanqui hullabaloo that washed over Latin
America in 2004 has been Mexico. Unable to pass reform legislation in
a congress controlled by the once-ruling (71 years) Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) and faced with a disaffected electorate
that lost him the legislature in 2003 mid-term elections, Fox, who
had become estranged from Bush over Iraq, snuggled up to the U.S.
president as never before.
Suckered by a Bush election year immigration scheme to win U.S.
Latino voters, Fox has given the North American commander-in-chief
carte blanche to station his troops on both Mexican borders and even
volunteered to send a contingent of Mexican soldiers to Iraq - in
addition to raising Mexican oil export quotas to 2.5 million barrels
a day to gas up Bush's war and replenish shortages caused by the
Saudi cut-off.
While Fox was playing footsie with George Bush, the PRI was busily
shooting itself in the head. The internecine feud that had been
brewing since the party lost power in the 2000 elections boiled over
with the gangland-style assassinations of party president Roberto
Madrazo and his once-upon-a-time lover and arch-rival Elba Esther
Gordillo, former PRI secretary general and teachers' union honcho.
The violence has dampened PRI hopes to recapture the presidency in
2006.
Front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-center Party of
the Democratic Revolution (PRD) Boss of Mexico City, now goes nowhere
without a phalanx of bodyguards said to be on the payroll of Mexican
tycoon Carlos Slim, the richest man in Latin America.
Living in an Alice-In-Wonderland world with his wife Marta, his
apparent successor as right-wing National Action Party (PAN)
presidential nominee, Fox has been unable to keep a lid on soaring
unemployment and armed dissatisfaction in an agricultural sector
destroyed by NAFTA-driven dumping of basic grains by U.S. agribiz
transnationals.
With nearly 10,000,000 farmers forced from the land in the past
decade and the immigration stream swelling (a record 700 Mexicans
died trying to cross the U.S. border in 2004), a dozen new guerrilla
formations, most split-offs from the highly fractious Popular
Revolutionary Army (EPR), appeared or sent e-mails from Guerrero and
Oaxaca in the past year.
Fox's troubles were compounded when an oil platform in the off-shore
Cantarell field blew up because of increased pumping pressures to
meet Bush's war quotas, spewing 2,000,000 gallons into the Caribbean
last summer.
On January 1st 2005, tens of thousands of ski-masked farmers and
workers marched into Mexico City and unsuccessfully tried to set fire
to the National Palace. They are now encamped in the great Zocalo
plaza, the heart of Mexico's political life. As the long-absent
Zapatista mouthpiece Subcomandante Marcos (he has not been heard from
since the rebels' tenth anniversary two years ago) once greeted
another Mexican president: "Welcome to the nightmare."
********************************************************************************
And welcome to Blindman's Buff, scion of Mexico Barbaro. If you like
what you've seen so far be sure to subscribe, re-subscribe, and tell
your friends and lovers about us. There's lots more to come in 2004 -
next week BMB will visit the Zapatistas' tenth anniversary party in
Chiapas and then move on to Iowa for a first-hand report from the
U.S.'s first primary. Finally un Feliz y Prospero Ano Nuevo. The
Management.� For subscriptions, rates, and other info write
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