Mexicans contemplate International Workers Day

May Day in a post-Soviet, post-Iraq world just doesn’t feel the same anymore. As jobs disappear and benefits shrink while international fast-food outfits proliferate and global agribusiness moves into markets until recently receptive to small domestic providers, the average Juan—like the average Joe here at home—finds little to celebrate.

Not long ago, the unions turned out millions of workers across the country to celebrate the meager gains and the inflated hopes of their memberships. The gatherings were upbeat, boisterous, sometimes contentious circuses which were meant to complement the stingy wages of the workers. (The big unions were largely “company unions” run by the government in the interests of the rich industrialists: the Institutional Revolutionary Party—Spanish acronym PRI—ruled Mexico for over 70 years.) The middle class was growing, and the average wage was higher (although, many pointed out, it bought less in the inflated economy).

When I came to Mexico in 1994, the first year of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Zapatistas had just emerged as a force for social change in the mountainous state of Chiapas, the southernmost—and the poorest—state in the union. A year later, floating interest rates that rose to over 100 percent per year, and the three-fold devaluation of the peso, were creating the highest number of middle class suicides in history. Banks were being occupied by debtors’ movements. Headlines were being made by increasingly violent and frequent confrontations between “ambulantes”—licenseless street sellers, many of whom had fallen out of employment due to closings of 100,000 small businesses—and the police trying to clear them out of the tourist districts.
Still, there was some hope. The government continued to subsidize the price of tortillas, the national health system functioned after a fashion, electricity and gasoline were affordable, and Mexicans regarded themselves as citizens of an independent and sovereign nation. Whatever one might say about national pride, and however misplaced such sentiments might have been, my neighbors believed their country to be master of its own fate. One of the ways in which they proved it to themselves was by their unequivocal support for the people of Cuba, and their dogged opposition to the U.S.-sponsored blockade of that island.
A friend who went to Cuba a few years ago reported that in the “dollar stores,” where only hard currency is accepted, Mexican-made products were prominent on the shelves along with Argentinean. On his flight to Havana from Mexico City, most of the passengers were Mexican. Everyone I have talked to on the streets of Mexico about the issue, is absolutely anti-embargo. Mexico led the struggle in the Organization of American States to resist the U.S. government’s pressures to further marginalize president Castro and his people. Until the current president, Vicente Fox Quesada, took the reigns of power in 2000.

Fox, a retired Coca Cola executive and large-scale rancher with his own “company town” where his workers live much like they did in the colonial haciendas, appears to most Mexicans to be a wholly owned puppet of U.S. corporate interests. Under his regime, social programs have been cut deeply; withdrawal of badly needed subsidies on corn, beans and other crops have put hundreds of thousands of peasants off their lands and into the surplus-labor pool that feeds the maquiladora assembly plants and the illegal immigration to the U.S.; universities and secondary schools have been opened to privatization—and therefore made unaffordable to the poor; and only unions have so far prevented electricity, and the oil industry, from being sold to foreign interests.

In the last year, Fox has ended the public policy of safe haven for political dissidents of other nations that had been supported by past presidents for generations. He expelled Basque dissidents to Spain and interfered in Cuba’s internal politics when a Mexican ambassador in Havana refused funds for Mexico—Cuba Solidarity day and his Secretary of State declared the Mexican Embassy a safe haven for Cuban dissidents who then drove a truck through the embassy gates and precipitated a political incident which was finally settled by forcibly ejecting them through the gate they came in by. It should be remembered that Fidel himself was a guest of Mexico during the Batista dictatorship, as were Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberto Menchú during the reign of U.S. friend Rios Montt in Guatemala, and ex-Federal Prosecutor of Columbia Eduardo de Grieff who had a change of heart and now opposes the U.S.-run “drug war” in his country. Finally, late last month, Mexico (now holding the temporary presidency of the Security Council) called for a visit to Cuba by representatives of the International Human Rights Commission. Mexican history is replete with arrests, torture and long prison terms for opposing the government, and most Mexicans think that this move was yet another case of Mexico on its knees before the northern colossus.

While refusing to endorse the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Fox put 18,000 troops along his borders (the third largest force in the “coalition”) to “repel terrorists”; increased the oil output from already strained oil reserves significantly; and held “joint exercises” with the U.S. Navy off Chiapas.

Fox is a booster of the next step in globalizing the region, the so-called Free Trade Act of the Americas, a move which is opposed at the grass roots in most of the countries of the region. He is accused of taking money from U.S. interests for his campaign funds, an act which is not only illegal but a violation of the Constitution.

While Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Lula de Silva in Brazil are talking about a “new sphere of influence” in Latin America, Fox seems to be giving away the store, and Mexicans are deeply disturbed by this. All the more so as the traditional day of international worker solidarity approaches. A couple of weeks ago, 60,000 anti-war marchers in Mexico City stopped along the way to attack McDonalds and KFC stores. May Day 2003 in Mexico will likely be a lot more about angst and confrontation than about solidarity and celebration.

[Written for deadline on April 25, this Letter is a “best guess”. If you want to discuss what actually did occur with Stan, he will be celebrating May Day this year at Powderhorn Park. His Web site is http://www.realoaxaca.com and he takes e-mail at stan@realoaxaca.com]