Mexican Standoff

MEXICO'S OLD ORDER IS DECOMPOSING. The party-state regime that guided the country for the last seventy years is at the end of its road, and the historical parallels are ominous. As at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries, the nation's rulers are inadvertently paving the way for fundamental social and political reshuffling. In the 1790s, Bourbon economic reforms and peninsular haughtiness laid the groundwork for the Wars of Independence. And this century's Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) gestated during the 35-year Porfiriato, when sclerotic, authoritarian rule and savage capitalism produced the worst communal bloodbath in the nation's history. Now, through its embrace of global capitalism (or neoliberalism) while failing to adequately open the nation's political processes, the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) has created the conditions for its own demise. But such an event is by no means a done deal. What comes after the PRI -- or whether the party can adapt and survive -- will be determined by the mobilization of national and international political forces.

Much depends on the PRI's willingness and ability to share political power, for it is no longer the sole master of Mexico's house. While the party's steps toward democratization have been, at best, half-hearted, its monopoly on politics is now irretrievably broken. New social and political forces, emerging to a large degree from the ravages of neoliberalism, are challenging the PRI-state and fighting to create a new regime responsive to popular demands for economic and political justice. These forces are embodied in an array of organizational forms ranging from political parties to labor and peasant organizations to the grassroots groups broadly known as "civil society" or the "social left" to armed formations such as the Zapatistas and the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). At the same time, PRI hard-liners, powerful national economic interests, and the international financial system all oppose one or another of the concessions the regime must make if it is to reach an accommodation with the popular opposition.

The next few years will likely determine Mexico's direction well into the next century. The opportunities are great, but so are the dangers. While the PRI-state has traditionally preferred cooptation to repression, it has not hesitated to exterminate opponents when necessary. If things reach a point where the regime believes it is about to be swept away, it could well unleash a massive counterrevolutionary repression that would make the current grim human rights picture appear positively rosy. With guerrillas already in the hills (and the shanty towns), revolutionary war would then become a distinct possibility. And the adherents of socialist revolution via the gun notwithstanding, the end result of a full-blown civil war is by no means clear. What is certain is that it would be very, very bloody.

The Continuing Crisis

IF 1994, WITH ITS UPRISINGS, ASSASSINATIONS, AND FINANCIAL DISASTERS, was Mexico's year of living dangerously, three years later the nation has yet to recover its balance. The twin forces driving the upheaval then -- the protracted, painful, and by no means assured birth of a democratic politics, and the imposition of neoliberal economic orthodoxy -- continue to propel Mexico along a dangerous and uncertain path. Although Mexico paid back early (with funds borrowed in Europe) the emergency loan engineered by Bill Clinton after the peso collapse, and the GDP shows healthy growth in recent quarters, cheers for the Mexican recovery resound much more loudly in the boardrooms of New York, Paris, and London than in the barrios of Mexico City or the highlands of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. While international investors have recovered their losses, the majority of Mexicans have not. Thousands of businesses failed and more than a million workers lost their jobs in the depression that followed the peso's implosion. At the same time, peasants, increasingly hard put to compete with international agribusiness under the NAFTA rules, were being driven off the land and into the cities by the thousands.

In fact, the "recovery" is extremely localized -- and tied almost exclusively to the export sector. Mid- and small-scale industry geared to the domestic market has largely vanished, its products replaced by imported goods from even lower-wage countries. The much-lauded growth in GDP can be traced primarily to the boom in maquiladoras, the border-region assembly plants tied to the U.S., not the Mexican, national economy. Maquiladoras now account for almost all new manufacturing jobs. The other bright spot in the Mexican economy -- the auto industry -- is also almost entirely export-driven, and the profits go to Detroit or Tokyo, not Mexico.

Mexican economists estimate that a third of the work force is unemployed, and even those fortunate enough to retain jobs have seen their real wages plummet. In fact, their earning power has declined to only two-thirds of what it was twenty years ago. Half of all Mexican families now live below the official poverty line

In the face of widespread poverty and joblessness, the government appears to have abandoned job creation to the "safety valves" of immigration and the informal sector. With traditional manufacturing unable to deliver new jobs and peasants being pushed off their lands, the government has effectively written off the domestic market in favor of an export-driven economic policy.

Narcoeconomy

ALTHOUGH NOT COUNTED IN OFFICIAL STATISTICS, ANOTHER EXPORT-DRIVEN INDUSTRY is booming: the illicit drug trade. With an estimated annual income of roughly $30 billion, the four leading Mexican drug cartels have become a major -- and highly destructive -- force in national politics. Beneficiaries of sustained assaults on their Colombian competitors and the insatiable gringo appetite for their illicit wares, the cartels are largely above the law. With their wealth and ruthlessness, the cartels make an offer Mexicans cops can't refuse: plata o plomo (silver or lead, bribery or the bullet). Whether murdering uncooperative peasants in Sinaloa, assassinating federal drug agents in Tijuana (fourteen since 1996), or buying protection with massive bribes, the cartels have found virtual impunity -- although, when pressure from the U.S. grows too unbearable, the Mexicans will serve up a human sacrifice to temporarily appease the gringos.

Along with Colombia, Mexico is bearing the brunt of American efforts to displace what is fundamentally a U.S. problem. Not only is the U.S. the world's largest drug market, it is also almost single-handedly responsible for imposing the disastrous regime of global prohibition. (It is ironic that the cheerleader of the global free market fails to understand supply and demand when it comes to illicit drugs.) The cartels are Frankenstein monsters created by the American response to its drug problem, but it is nations such as Mexico that most suffer their deeply corrosive effects.

The drug trade has unleashed corruption on a scale never before seen in Mexico, which has been no stranger to corruption. One sign of the moral rot emanating from efforts to stem the trade was the firing last summer of a full third of the Federal Judicial Police (the dreaded federales) for corruption, or as the then attorney general (since fired, the latest in a long line) delicately put it, "failing to meet the required ethical profile." More spectacular was this year's arrest of Mexico's drug czar for being in the Juarez cartel's pocket. These and countless other similar incidents have only deepened widespread popular cynicism about law enforcement, which further delegitimizes the PRI-state regime.

The increasing involvement of the Mexican military in the drug war raises more concerns. Supposedly incorruptible, the military is rapidly proving that it, too, can be bought off, as dramatically indicated by the case of the arrested drug czar, a Mexican army general. Of equal concern, however, is the growing resort to the military to solve law enforcement and political problems. A chilling example of the nexus between the drug war and politics was the military's anti-marijuana campaign in Chiapas. Ignoring veritable marijuana plantations controlled by the cartels in the north-central states, military "anti-drug" units instead sweep down on small patches grown by peasants on the fringes of the Zapatista zone, in a clear effort to increase tension among the insurgent population. (And, incidentally, another instance of the state supporting agribusiness over small producers.)

Unfinished Business

AS IF RAMPAGING DRUG TRAFFICKERS, CROOKED POLITICIANS, ECONOMIC catastrophe, and creeping militarization weren't enough, a trio of unsolved high-level political assassinations continue to fester in the national psyche. Multiple investigations into the murders of the Archbishop of Guadalajara (1993), PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and PRI party head Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu (both killed in 1994) have failed to resolve these headline-producing cases. Along the way, however, the investigations have opened a window into violence and corruption at the very top of the political system. Most sensationally, Raul Salinas, brother of the now widely-despised ex-president, is in jail on corruption charges, with murder charges pending in the Ruiz Massieu case. Salinas' wife was briefly jailed in Switzerland as she attempted to withdraw $80 million from a secret account.

In another sensational case, Ruiz Massieu's brother, who for a short while headed the investigation into his death, fled the country after decrying obstructions in the investigation. His claims, however, were undercut when a federal court in Houston seized $11 million from his bank accounts after finding that it was drug money. The net result of this lethal politicking -- and the state's inability or unwillingness to resolve these murders -- is a tremendous popular cynicism, along with a growing acceptance of conspiracy-style explanations. Neither bodes well for the continued health of the political system.

Meanwhile, President Zedillo's much-touted transition to democracy moves at a glacial pace. Even so, it has provoked turmoil at the heart of the ruling PRI, as well as pitched battles between PRI militants and activists of the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which has seen hundreds of its militants killed in the last few years. The talk of democracy has also invigorated local efforts to redress grievances across the country, whether about land, crime, work conditions, or any number of other issues. As a result, outbreaks of political violence, usually orchestrated by landowners or state authorities against land-hungry peasants, have claimed hundreds of lives. Likewise, the overall human rights picture is deteriorating, with an increasing number of "disappearances" (some linked to the military's anti-drug campaigns), political murders, violent evictions, and instances of torture being reported.

The social and political problems that exploded so dramatically in 1994 continue to fester and even worsen. Their effects are as sparks from a pinwheel, any one of which could ignite a conflagration. Mexico slouches toward the millennium as a nation divided -- by race, class, region, and importantly, access to the global economy. With the common understanding that they have reached the end of an era, Mexicans on all sides are mobilizing, some to defend their wealth and power, others in self-defense against the ravages of neoliberalism or the barbarisms of the recalcitrant rich.

The array of opposition to the current regime is vast and differentiated -- and increasingly organized. It includes the electoral opposition, labor and the peasantry,^* civil society (or the social left), and reformist or revolutionary guerrillas. These groupings are not, of course, mutually exclusive; one may be a unionist, a PRD activist, and a member of a neighborhood association, and even the guerrillas support electoral political action to varying degrees.

The Party of the Aztec Sun

AND WITH REASON. ALTHOUGH MEXICO'S POLITICAL SYSTEM wouldn't qualify as democratic until the PRI actually lost a presidential election, electoral politics has proven useful for the Mexican left. PRD members sit in the congress, and the party controls hundreds of municipalities across the country. Even defeats such as the stolen presidential election of 1988 have had their silver linings, namely an increasing clamor for real democracy and a shrinking space for the PRI to practice its traditional election frauds. After reaching a nadir in the disastrous 1994 presidential elections, the party's fortunes are improving. It put up strong showings in state elections in Morelos and Guerrero this spring, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the party's most popular figure, is leading the polls in the race for mayor of Mexico City, probably second only to the presidency as the most important political office in the land. That there will be an election for mayor at all is a novelty; one more indication of the PRI's loosening grip. Past mayors were imposed by the president

The party has also laid the groundwork to do well in the July congressional elections. Together with the rightist PAN (National Action Party), it could deny the PRI a congressional majority for the first time ever. Since the 1994 debacle, the PRD has worked to broaden its alliances and rein in bureaucratic tendencies. Although a proposed PAN-PRD coalition to defeat the PRI was stillborn (probably a good thing since they are ideological opposites), more tenable coalitions have formed. In the state of Nuevo Leon, for example, the PRD has joined with the Mexican Green party and the debtor's group El Barzon to support a joint senatorial candidate. El Barzon's national leader, Juan Jose Quirinos, is also running for the senate under the PRD banner.

The party has also made serious efforts to reach out to the grassroots organizations sprouting throughout the nation. Members of these "social left" groups have places on the PRD's electoral lists, and the party insists it is making a real effort to address their demands and aspirations. But it may find itself hard-pressed to do so if and when it wields power, for it presents no radical alternative to Mexico's place in the international order. As the strongest electoral force on the left, all it can promise is a kinder, gentler neoliberalism.

The Social Left

THAT MAY NOT BE ENOUGH FOR SOME OF THE PEOPLE with whom it is working in the upcoming elections. Perhaps best defined as grassroots organizing independent of the state or the party system, "civil society" is rapidly emerging as a force in Mexican politics. In Mexico City, Asembleas de Barrios (neighborhood assemblies) take on local authorities over housing and safety issues. In rural Mexico, peasants band together in marketing co-ops to strengthen the weak hands they hold in the international economy.

But probably the most powerful example of the emergence of civil society is the debtors' movement known as El Barzon (the yoke). With a rhetoric reminiscent of American agrarian Populists of a century ago, El Barzon has now garnered nearly a million members and forced its way into the anterooms of power. While its core membership is among small capitalist farmers and small business owners, El Barzon also counts hundreds of thousands of middle-class homeowners and credit card debtors. Using imaginative tactics -- everything from road blockages to semi-nude demonstrations ("this is all the bank left us") to voluminous legal challenges to adroit use of the mass media -- El Barzon has blocked foreclosures, thrown the banking system's very legal basis into doubt, and forced the government to at least pay lip service to its demands for debt relief.

Despite its earlier refusal to have anything to do with political parties, El Barzon is now moving closer to the PRD. (This is partially related to a change in the movement's leadership. Original leader Maximiliano Barbarosa was a disaffected priista, while current leader Juan Jose Quirino is a long-time PRD member.) Barzonistas now hold several places on the PRD's July election lists. The organization has also been busy cementing an alliance with the Zapatistas. Last summer in Mexico City, the two groups organized a meeting, the "Convergence," around two broad demands: against neoliberalism and for an authentic democracy. In addition to the debtors and the guerrillas, a broad spectrum of civil society groups, including human rights organizations, various civic leagues and alliances, feminists, and peace groups, also attended. Here we are seeing the seeds of a potent new progressive social and political force.

Workers and Peasants

WHILE THE PRI HAS TRADITIONALLY CONTROLLED BOTH THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND the peasantry through sectoral organizations integrated into the party, its economic policies have both created huge fissures in official labor and peasant organizations and opened up space for independent dissident groups. The PRI's labor central, the CTM, is symptomatic of the party's internal rot. Led by one man, 90-something Fidel Velasquez (aka the mummy) for the last half-century, the CTM lately serves more as a tool of labor discipline than as representative of its workers. For the last decade, its main achievement has been the signing of a series of "pacts" with the government in which Velasquez pledged to hold down labor costs in return for very little. When it could deliver the goods, workers could overlook the CTM's authoritarianism and corruption, but with the free fall that began in 1982 and has intensified since 1994, the mummy's grip grows ever more feeble.

Dissident independent unions are emerging (or reemerging) in the maquiladoras, in traditional manufacturing, and among historically combative groups such as the teachers. The dissidents' umbrella organization, the May 1 Interunion Coordinator, managed to put 100,000 people on the streets of Mexico City on May Day 1996. Even more ominous for the old regime, the independents were joined by a like number of CTM dissidents marching in defiance of official orders to stay home. The CTM dissidents have organized into "the forum,"a grouping of ten officialist unions and a handful of independents. Ongoing contacts between dissident official unions and the growing independent unions could augur a new labor militance from the grassroots.

In the countryside, the situation is similar. The PRI monopoly there, never as complete as in labor, is disintegrating. Across the country, a plethora of independent, increasingly radicalized peasant organizations, such as the Peasant Organization of the Southern Sierra (OCSS), are engaged in deadly serious struggles with local authorities and the priista rural backbone: the large landowners and caciques, or local political bosses, now joined by agribusiness interests eager to gobble up indigenous communal lands made available by the widely-despised repeal of Article 27 of the revolutionary constitution.

As the rural situation deteriorates, land tenancy conflicts simmer everywhere, and in the southeastern states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, violent clashes are now a chronic condition. These are the states -- poor and heavily indigenous -- where guerrillas flourished in the 1970s, and now the guerrillas are back.

Guerrillas I

PRIOR TO LAST SUMMER, THE ZAPATISTAS WERE THE NATION'S only serious armed opposition (there are at least a dozen self-proclaimed guerrilla movements, but they seem most practiced at combat through manifesto), but that changed when the political heirs of the 1970s rural guerrillas emerged. After making an initial appearance last June at the anniversary commemoration for 17 peasants massacred in Guerrero, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) burst into the spotlight in August with a night of coordinated military actions across central and southern Mexico, including the luxury tourist resort town of Huatulco, thus guaranteeing international press attention. The initial toll was a relatively small 12 dead, but the reverberations from the attacks have been profound.

The government's response was massive and immediate. Tens of thousands of army troops poured in to Guerrero, Oaxaca, and the Huasteca region northeast of Mexico City, where they joined various state, local, and federal police forces. Hundreds of residents have been arrested, others have been "disappeared," and especially in the indigenous communities of Oaxaca, whole village councils have been swept up as EPR members or sympathizers.

For the Mexican government, the emergence of the EPR is a nightmarish return of the repressed. The EPR is the lineal descendent of such legendary rural guerrillas as Lucio Cabanas, leader of the Party of the Poor, and Genaro Vasquez, head of the Guerrero Civic Alliance, both of whom were hunted down and killed in the 1970s, their organizations largely dismantled. Unlike the Zapatistas, who reveled in being called post-modern, the EPR is old school. Unifying within a single armed organization a number of small guerrilla fronts and clandestine political parties such as PROCUP (the Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Party -- Popular Unity), the EPR is unabashedly Marxist and espouses the doctrine of prolonged popular war to seize power and institute a socialist revolution.

The organization is the result of twenty years of clandestine organizing, and it has shown that it has a national clandestine infrastructure. In fact, the Mexican military admits to at least twelve focos rojos (red zones) in Mexico City and the southern states. The massive military response, however, has largely forced the EPR back underground. Since its coordinated attacks last August, there have been only sporadic clashes. Clearly, the EPR does not yet represent a military threat to the regime, but its emergence is a dark omen -- yet one more sign that the countryside is close to catching fire.

Guerrillas II

THE ZAPATISTAS, MEANWHILE, ARE IN A DAILY MORE PRECARIOUS SITUATION. They remain at root a small guerrilla movement, impoverished, geographically isolated, and surrounded by thousands of Mexican army troops. In fact, it is difficult to argue that the Zapatista uprising has improved the lives of its members or of neighboring communities. After three years in rebellion, the Zapatista are ever more tightly hemmed in, with constant military and police pressure on their perimeters and without delivery of material and financial assistance promised by the government. The rebellion has, however, sparked a sharp increase in land conflicts just outside the rebel-controlled zone. Nervous landowners, their hired thugs, and the state's repressive apparatus regularly attack land-hungry leftist peasants and their sympathizers. Tit-for-tat reprisals have left dozens dead and hundreds of families homeless.

Where the Zapatistas are unarguably successful is the national stage. Other than the fact that the government is talking to them instead of wiping them out, the rebels have won few concrete concessions. Still, the interminable negotiations between the masked comandantes and the government negotiators have kept the Zapatistas -- and their progressive democratic agenda -- on the front pages. Despite some sniping from cafe society, the Zapatistas continue to excite popular fervor. Last year's anti-Columbus Day march in Mexico City, with its crowd of a 100,00, was a virtual Zapatista rally. The fledgling national political movement of their supporters, the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN) continues to mature. Despite a past coolness toward the PRD, the Zapatistas have announced that they will work with the party of the Aztec sun in the July elections.

The PRI Responds

BATTERED BY ECONOMIC DEBACLES, BESET BY DEMANDS FOR DEMOCRACY and economic justice, tarnished by scandal after scandal, the ruling PRI is in deep crisis. The party is decomposing under the strain, degenerating into competing factions in a dog-eat-dog struggle to end up on top of whatever new system emerges.

As President Zedillo and his supporters within the party stubbornly attempt to continue and deepen neoliberalism, they paint all party opposition as "dinosaurs," their name for the old-style, authoritarian, anti-democratic party bosses. But that moniker only covers one of the anti-Zedillo party factions. Certainly, some PRI machine bosses, such as insurgent Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo and Agriculture Secretary Carlos Hank Slim, and their clients oppose Zedillo because they rightly fear that even his timid, halting moves toward democratization will destroy their power bases.

But much of the PRI's internal opposition is motivated not by fear of democracy but by rage. Rank-and-file priistas have not escaped the rigors of the economic crisis; in fact, the privatization of state assets has especially wounded loyal militants who have lost their sinecures and party bosses who have lost their sources of patronage. It is precisely PRI dissidents opposed to neoliberalism who have most effectively challenged President Zedillo, and in so doing, exposed the growing chasm between Zedillo's technocrats and party militants. In a slap in the face to their titular leader, last fall PRI militants pushed through a resolution at the party conference expressly repudiating neoliberalism. The rebellious priistas added insult to injury by amending party rules to require a long history of party militance in order to be nominated for national political office, a measure that would have prevented the last three presidents -- technocrats all -- from being nominated.

As disturbing to party loyalists is the steady erosion of their monopoly on national elected office. While not a sudden, dramatic collapse, the party's electoral strength grows weaker by the day. Recent elections in Morelos, Guerrero, and the state of Mexico saw significant gains for both the right opposition PAN and the center-left PRD. Now party militants are beginning to whisper about the prospect of losing control of the national congress in the July mid-term elections

Even so, reports of the party's demise are exaggerated. For seventy years, it has maneuvered around crisis after crisis, displaying a flexibility surprising in such an authoritarian party. The party also represents significant sectors of Mexican society and still maintains the ability to mobilize its sectoral organizations as a potent counterforce to its opponents. The PRI may decompose and recompose, but it will, in one form or another, remain a force to be reckoned with.

Prospects

MEXICO APPROACHES THE MILLENNIUM GROPING FOR A NEW social and political order. Its current rulers have before them the tricky task of revamping the political system with a democratic facade while replacing the statist-populist economy with one aligned with global capital. It's a tough act to pull off, and so far the PRI has not been up to it. The party leadership has delayed or watered down widely-demanded democratic reforms, and still, the opposition parties stand a good chance of gaining control of the lower chamber of congress in July.

Whether the party can yield power gracefully or instead resorts to blatant fraud in July will be a key early indicator of the prospects for reform within the existing political system. Even if that hurdle is passed, the struggle for electoral democracy will be long and uncertain.

And as violence flaring in the countryside and on the main squares of Mexico's towns and cities augurs, reform of the political system is necessary but not sufficient to forestall social chaos. A formally democratic system that ignores economic justice will not quiet the clamor among Mexicans; it will only inspire acts of greater frustration and desperation.

All of the popular ferment has not benefitted the parties of the left. In fact, the opposite is occurring. Popular energy is manifested in alternatives -- the social left, the PRD, labor and peasant groups, and especially the guerrilla movements -- spawned by the PRI's forced opening and the economic crisis. A decade ago, the revered and recently deceased socialist leader, Heriberto Castillo, brought the descendants of the Mexican Communist Party into the PRD, arguing that they could swing the latter to the left. He was wrong. Instead, the PRD pulled the socialists toward the center, leaving them in the awkward position of defending a "kinder, gentler" neoliberalism.

Still carrying the red banner, however, is the Workers' Party (PT), a left nationalist refuge for those socialists who couldn't swallow the PRD's equivocations. The PT has managed to win a few seats in the congress, and shows its electoral flexibility by participating in local coalitions with the PRD and the social left. The Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT), led by Rosario Ibarra, continues its long trek through the wilderness. But between them, and even adding in votes for puppet socialist parties linked to the PRI, the electoral left has never managed more than roughly ten percent of the vote. The "new" party on the left is the Party of the Democratic Popular Revolution (PDPR), the political arm of the EPR guerrillas. Because of its associations, however, the PDPR exists in clandestinity, its estimated 20,000 militants staying close to ground and its actions limited to spray paint and manifestos.

Mexico is at the fulcrum. If the Mexican elites are far-sighted enough to willingly cede some power, both the PRI and its high-rolling allies can survive as players in a new, more equitable, perhaps social democratic, but essentially capitalist Mexico. But if they attempt to reverse the irreversible, they could reap the whirlwind. The Mexican southeast is already in a state of low-level civil war. A full-blown outbreak of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence -- with all its horror and uncertainty -- looms in the medium term. It is up to the popular opposition to keep the pressure on for meaningful reform to prevent it. The alternative is the cataclysm.

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* "The peasantry" is a necessary shorthand for a widely variegated rural population including communal landholders, individual smallholders, tenant famers, sharecroppers, wage-earners and combinations of the above. return

Contents of No. 23