MEXICO'S "INDIGNADOS" HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE
By David Bacon
TruthOut Photoessay, 9/10/11
http://www.truth-out.org/mexicos-indignados-have-had-it-here/1315597112
MEXICO CITY - Last week Mexican President
Felipe Calderon gave the fifth state of the
nation speech since his (many say fraudulent)
election in 2006. He didn't have an easy time
finding a positive spin for the escalating toll
exacted by his war on drug gangs -- 50,000 dead,
mostly innocent civilians, in the last five
years. Making his job even more difficult, just
days earlier the war's bloody cost was
highlighted when 52 people, mostly working women
and retirees on their lunch hour, were burned to
death in a fire set by the Zetas in a Monterrey
casino. Since then Mexican newspapers have
exposed a web of corruption linking businessmen,
narcos and politicians from Calderon's own party
in the enormous proliferation of gambling houses
over the last several years.
Tombstones memorialize victims of repression and violence.
Mexican casinos don't attract the
wealthy, who congregate instead in Mexico City's
rich neighborhoods, filled with glittering
restaurants and shiny Hummers, patrolled by
bodyguards to prevent the frequent kidnappings.
Casinos are the refuge of Mexico's working poor,
who hope a miracle of luck will pull them from
the abyss of falling incomes and disappearing
jobs.
That truth didn't make it into Calderon's
improbably rosy assessment. But it did bring
over fifty thousand Mexicans into the capital's
main square, the zocalo, where they publicly
ridiculed the gulf between his speech and their
reality. Humberto Montes de Oca, international
secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union
(SME), denounced Calderon for "trying to justify
what he's done to the country. The people
gathered here," he declared, "are the ones who've
suffered under him. We know the way things
really are. You can see the consequences of this
terrible government in our lack of security and
public safety, and our economy. The truth is
that he's destroying our country."
Humberto Montes de Oca
The SME has been occupying over half the
huge square at the city's heart since May, and
they've been at war with Calderon since the
government fired the union's 44,000 members in
October of 2009. The national company that
employed them, the Power and Light Company,
provided electrical service for central Mexico,
where a majority of the population live.
Calderon dissolved it by executive fiat, and
brought in soldiers and police to expel the
workers from the generating stations.
A fired electrical worker
Successive governments have sought to
privatize the electrical grid, although such a
move is barred by the Mexican constitution. The
union repeatedly mobilized the opposition of
hundreds of thousands of city residents and
prevented it, at least until that October. Once
the company was dissolved, the government
declared the union non-existent (a decision later
overturned by the courts, but ignored by
Calderon). Over the last two years, this fight
over the privatization of electricity, and the
smashing of one of Mexico's oldest and most
democratic unions, has become a symbol of the
administration's war on unions.
Protestors fill the zocalo, listening to speakers condemn the government
Other unions have also felt the
government's wrath, and came to protest in the
zocalo. One was the Mexican miners' union. In
Cananea, a tiny mountain town south of Arizona
with one of the world's largest copper mines,
miners have been on strike for four years. The
mine's owner, Grupo Mexico, belongs to the Larrea
family, political allies of Calderon who
contributed heavily to his election. This year
he repaid the debt. In the face of court
decisions upholding the workers' right to strike,
the government brought heavily armed police into
Cananea and reopened the struck mine.
Striking miners from Cananea
Hundreds of ex-employees of the country's
national airline, Mexicana, joined miners and
electrical workers as they marched into the
zocalo. This year the administration forced the
company into bankruptcy, and thousands of pilots,
stewards and ground crew members suddenly found
themselves out on the street. Their union
charges that the bankruptcy was a sham. Instead,
they say, Calderon's cronies stood to gain from
the airline's eventual privatization. Meanwhile,
the wealthy families who own Mexico's mushrooming
private airline industry won the removal of their
biggest competitor, at the cost of thousands of
jobs.
Unemployed workers from Mexicana Airlines
The hundred organizations that cooperated
in organizing the zocalo protest called their
rally the National Day of Indignant Mexicans.
Their purpose was to present an alternative to
the "official" picture painted by Calderon, and
to call for a different direction for the
country. They charged that in five years, the
number of Mexicans in poverty has grown by 10
million, that working income has dropped by a
third, and that 3 million more people find
themselves jobless. The crisis has hit
especially hard at young people, who are the
fastest growing segment of the population. Seven
million of them can't find work and have no money
to go to school.
"No blood, no hunger!"
Calderon's policies, which have produced
these results, are part of a program of economic
liberalization opening Mexico to private,
domestic, and especially foreign capital. Former
Mexico City Mayor Manuel Lopez Obrador, who ran
against Calderon five years ago and, most people
believe, defeated him, says these reforms have
been "imposed on Mexico from outside over the
last two decades, including labor law reform,
energy reform, fiscal reform and education
reform." By outside, Lopez Obrador means from
the colossus of the north - the U.S. In the wake
of the implementation of the North American Free
Trade Agreement in 1994, Mexico underwent a
terrible economic crisis in which it lost a
million jobs in a single year. The Clinton
administration bailed out the government and its
bondholders, and in the end, Mexico lost its
financial system to Wall Street and London banks.
Since then, the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank have indirectly written Mexico's
economic policies.
Angry farmers protest corn dumping by U.S. companies
"At the same time," Lopez Obrador
charges, "the fight against inequality and
poverty is not on the national agenda." In 2010
Mexico had 53 million people living in poverty,
according to the Monterrey Institute of
Technology. Half the country's population lives
in poverty, and almost 20% in extreme poverty.
Some estimate that there are more workers in the
economy's informal sector than in the formal one.
Even for those working, according to the Bank of
Mexico, 95% of the 800,000 jobs created in 2010
paid only $10 a day. Yet in a Tijuana or Juarez
supermarket, a gallon of milk can cost even more
than it would on the U.S. side.
In a recent diplomatic cable published by
Wikileaks the U.S. government admits "The net
wealth of the 10 richest people in Mexico - a
country where more than 40 percent of the
population lives in poverty - represents roughly
10 percent of the country's gross domestic
product." Carlos Slim became the world's richest
man when a previous president, Carlos Salinas de
Gortari, privatized the national telephone
company and sold it to him. Ricardo Salinas
Pliego, who owns TV Azteca, is now worth $8
billion, and Emilio Azcárraga Jean, who owns
Televisa, is worth $2.3 billion. Both helped
Calderon get elected in 2006.
Veterans of Mexico's socal upheavals
This is what the zocalo protestors want
to change, and why they call themselves
"indignant Mexicans." Next year, in July, that
chance will come again, as the country goes to
the polls to elect a new president. The
constitution prohibits reelection, but Calderon's
National Action Party will undoubtedly nominate a
candidate who will defend the government's record
and call for more of the same. Mexico's old
ruler, the Party of the Institutionalized
Revolution (PRI) has the support of many wealthy
interests who have abandoned Calderon, and is
growing stronger after a decade in the political
wilderness. It criticizes the president, but in
practice, its representatives in the Chamber of
Deputies and Senate propose and vote for the same
policies.
Ismail Lopez, a retired electrical union member
Lopez Obrador has fought with Mexico
City's current mayor Marcel Ebrard, and other
factions in the leftwing Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD), over both his own future
candidacy and his insistence on a total rejection
of the government's policies and direction.
Every week he travels back and forth across
Mexico, holding rallies in town after town,
building a political coalition he insists isn't a
new party, but could be an electoral base for
change.
In the zocalo, Lopez Obrador had a lot of
support, but many unions and popular
organizations don't want to simply collapse into
campaigning for a political party or its
candidates. According to Montes de Oca, "We're
in a building process. We're trying to speed
that up, but we also need to consolidate our base
and make it broader. What we really need is a
social movement strong enough to force a change."
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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