Mexico adrift in a U.S. designed boat

In what everyone down here sees as a resounding defeat for Mexico’s President Vincente Fox and his National Action Party (PAN), more than 50 percent of the Mexican electorate refrained from going to the polls on July 6, the smallest turnout in modern Mexican history. In a scathing rejection of his policies and his party’s legislative positions, the PAN garnered the votes of only 8 percent of the Mexican population in an off-year election which cost the PAN more than 40 legislative seats and several governorships previously believed to be “safe.”

Fox, a strong supporter of the globalization of trade and the unprotected free market as proposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has seen the Mexican economy shrink by almost half a million jobs since his upset victory over the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) longest running (70-plus years) modern rule in 2000. Considering his promise to exceed the minimum job growth needed to keep up with growth in working-age people of 1 million per year, this has been truly an abysmal showing. While U.S. columnists for the New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Associated Press keep the myth of the modern Mexican miracle alive, the average Juan, whose son just graduated from law, engineering, accounting or any other professional school and then left for the United States because there is no work, knows better.

Fox promised to punish high officials of the national oil cartel PEMEX and the oil workers’ union, for laundering more than $100 million and redirecting it to the coffers of his PRI opponent in the 2000 election. Not only has he failed to do so, he has joined them in the same leaky basket. Millions of U.S. dollars (illegal by Mexican law) were secretly donated to his own 2000 campaign, using cutouts and false fronts, according to the National Election Commission (IFE).

Fox promised to keep the energy sector free of foreign control, while seeking investment without strings. In fact, he has “outsourced” everything he could get away with. Revelations of huge contracts being let to Halliburton and other U.S. multinationals for development of Mexican oil fields and management of Mexican production facilities are just the tip of the iceberg. Just this last week, in an article in the magazine Progressive, John Ross revealed that when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez called Fox and asked him for the loan of some Mexican oil tankers during the wildcat shutout of workers by “striking” bosses last winter, Fox told him that he was sorry, but all the tankers had been leased out to U.S. companies.

Last year, Fox stated that he was in favor of legalizing marijuana. Not a single major opposition politician came out against this position. There was no outcry in the press. Many legislators, when interviewed about this rather surprising statement, applauded, saying it was about time to at least put the issue into the public debate. Public opinion polls were taken showing the average Mexican, while not exactly in favor of legalization, thought that the current criminalization and prohibition of drugs at the behest of the U.S. government was overdone. Since then, Fox has become a vociferous drug warrior. There are now more DEA and FBI agents operating in Mexico than ever before, and many Mexicans attribute that to Fox’s slavish obedience to U.S political powers.

On top of everything else, Fox has made an alliance with ex-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the man who is generally acknowledged as the greatest thief in Mexican history, surpassing the record held by José Lopez Portillo, who once said that any politician who did not get rich in office was either cowardly or stupid. Brought back from self-imposed exile in Ireland after a series of meetings with Jorge Castañeda, then the Foreign Minister in Fox’s cabinet, Salinas is the poster boy for Mexican corruption—and a favorite of every U.S. president since Bush One. He was the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which most Mexicans see as the instrument of all the bad things that have happened to their economy in recent years. No wonder the voters stayed home.

No reputable national political analyst thinks Fox’s party the PAN, can win in the next presidential election in 2006, after Fox’s three years of bluster and lackluster performance. The most likely contest will be between old rivals and deadly enemies: Roberto Madrazo, the president of the PRI, and ex-governor of Tabasco state, whose own demonstrated predilections for corruption and election stealing are well known; and current mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador, a populist leftist whose Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) is in tatters throughout the country in spite of Lopez’ 85 percent support in the city that holds 20 percent of Mexico’s voters. Lopez says he has no intention of running in 2006, but hardly anyone believes him.

Meanwhile, the soldier poet known as Subcomandante Marcos, speaking for the Zapatista army and the “autonomous villages” of Chiapas state, has suddenly come alive after almost a year of relative silence. Sending out his e-mails from his mountain hideaway, he has declared that the Zapatista high command will have nothing further to do with any politicians or political parties, once again proving that he has his hand on the pulse of the Mexican people.

Stan Gotlieb lives and writes from Oaxaca, Mexico. He publishes a subscriber Newsletter, a sample of which can be seen at http://www.realoaxaca.com/newsample.html. His e-mail address is stan@realoaxaca.com