A LETTER FROM MEXICO

Is Calderon the next Pinochet?

BY STAN GOTLIEB

Things are so CLEAN here in Oaxaca; so PEACEFUL. There are hardly any Federal Preventative Police (PFP) in town (they have been relocated to a base a few kilometers away), and the town’s central square (Zócalo) is virtually empty of the state and city police who have resumed their duties now that the “rabble” have been removed, and their leaders are either in hiding or in prison.

All the downtown buildings sport a new coat of paint. The graffiti “Ulises (the governor) and the PFP, out of Oaxaca,” “Viva el APPO (the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca)” and those worrisome posters showing the rich robbing the poor and those charts showing that the politicians earn far more in a day than a peasant earns in a year are all gone, along with the messy tent city. The indigenous poor, who were showing their wares in the spaces in front of the expensive sidewalk cafés when APPO was in charge of the city center, have been sent back to their places on the fringe of the tourist area.

But of course the poverty, the exploitation, the marginalization and government indifference still plague the people of Oaxaca. Some 50 percent (or more) do not have adequate income, food, housing, running water, drainage, electricity, or any say whatsoever in the political and economic system, which keeps them functionally illiterate, plagued by preventable and/or easily treatable diseases. They are brutalized by the “forces of law and order” when they dare to object.
Seven months after a teachers’ demonstration and annual occupation of the center of the city was met by police brutality (which was repelled by popular reaction to this violation of the people’s right to free speech, and ultimately squashed by federal troops), things appear to be back to where they started. Appearances, however, as someone once said, can be deceiving.

For the worse
Things are, I believe, both better and worse than they were. Let’s take the “worse” first. Felipe Calderon, the new President of Mexico, is in office without any sort of popular mandate. If one accepts his own figures, he barely squeaked by his opponent, Andres Manual López Obrador (AMLO) by less than one-half of 1 percent. That means that over 40 percent of the electorate were against him to begin with. If one accepts the figures put out by AMLO and others, he actually lost the election, but won the presidency by electoral fraud and manipulation.

He was not allowed to accept the sash of office from his predecessor in the Chamber of Deputies, as Mexican presidents have done for centuries, opting instead to do so on television, from his heavily guarded office. He rarely travels the country, as did his predecessors: The demonstrations against him are too embarrassing. He has surrounded himself with cronies, most of whom are graduates of U.S. universities and many of whom are members of Opus Dei, the Yunques, and other ultra-conservative secret Catholic societies. As announced recently in Mexican newspapers, 40 percent of the entire 2007 budget for the Interior Secretariat, which includes all the federal police formations, will go for “intelligence.” This is in line with his self-described “total crackdown” on two classes of “criminal” activity: drugs and dissent.

Calderon is one of the few heads of state left south of the Rio Grande to continue to pursue the “Washington Consensus,” better known as the “neo-liberal economic model,” in which movement of capital in and out of the country is made easier, thus encouraging foreign “investment” in local businesses. Privatization of state-owned and managed enterprises (including schools, medical care, etc.) is a priority, and repayment of loans from U.S.-owned banks is guaranteed by cut-rate sales of non-renewable natural resources. This is an economic model that has been repudiated by an increasing number of developing countries because it has widened the gap between rich and poor, raised the level of unemployment, and generally beggared the nations subjected to its “austerity” programs (read, cut social services while increasing the military budget). He has already said he would place the “Plan Puebla Panama” development at the top of his agenda. PPP will destroy the ecology and culture of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec while delivering billions into the hands of transnational corporations. Lacking popular support (secretive and autocratic by nature) and hanging on to an economic philosophy whose time has gone, Calderon will lean more and more on the police and the army to “discipline the people,” with disastrous results.

For the better
What’s better about the situation here is the growing connections between groups dedicated to resisting the further destruction of their “patria” (inheritance). A national affiliation of social justice organizations is taking place. It is aided by the computer/communications revolution and philosophically led by the Zapatistas. Many things feed the affiliation: the massive repressions against small businesses and farmers in San Salvador Atenco, the mill workers in Michoacan, the native resistance to clear-cutting forest land in Guerrero, and now the brutal terrorization of the teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca. It is unlikely, in spite of the best efforts of Calderon and his neoliberal pals, to completely suppress this movement. Unlike Pinochet, Calderon can only serve for six years, but given his present policies, it is likely that his successors will inherit a more stable country, and that the repression will continue until the inevitable popular uprising takes place. The question is, how many thousands will be imprisoned, tortured, killed and disappeared in the meantime.

It took the Chilean people decades to get rid of Pinochet, and decades more to begin a legal process against him. He ended his life in virtual hiding, a pariah in his own country and the world. A generation of Chileans lived in fear and resistance, and now one of his victims has become the president. In Argentina, many of the “mothers of the plaza” have died of old age before seeing the “dirty war” generals indicted for their crimes. Here in Mexico, ex-President Echeverria may finally have to answer for the 1968 massacre of student protesters in Mexico City. The list is long, and the wait has been agonizing, but many of our southern neighbors are now investigating the “good friends” of the U.S. and its corporations for the heinous crimes they have committed against their own people. Does Felipe Calderon, a relatively young president (likely to live long after he leaves office), not feel the wind of history at his back?