[Socialism Today, No 21, September 1997, p. 22-24]
Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRD suffered its worst electoral defeat in 68 years on 6 July when it lost its overall majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Not only that but the left-centre PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) replaced the right wing PAN (National Action Party) as the leading of the opposition force. Phil Hearse writes.
The leader of the PRD, Cuauthémoc Cárdenas, won an overwhelming victory in the race to become mayor of Mexico City. Cárdenas won 47.8% of the votes. In Mexico City’s 40 constituencies, the PRD won 38, the PAN two and the PRI none.
In the Chamber, the PRI, with 39% of the vote, now has 250 seats the right-wing PAN (National Action Party), which won 28%, has 12 . The PRD’s 26% of the vote won them 125 seats. The PRD vote would have been bigger had it not been for the Boycott of the elections called by the Zapatista leadership in Chiapas. The national presidency was not been contested, and thus the PRI’s Emilio Zedillo remains in place. For the first time a Green coalition made a measurable impact, getting 3,5 % of the vote.
The election was a spectacular confirmation of the decline of the PRI which has run a virtual one-party state since 1929. That decline accelerated rapidly in 1994, when the emergence of the Zapatista guerrilla movement and internal warfare in the PRI leadership led to a slump in the value of the Mexican peso and a stock market collapse. But the PRI’s crisis was developing long before 1994. and is rooted in the failure of the PRI regime to adapt to the needs of capitalism in the era of neo-liberal ‚globalisation‘.
Traditionally the PRI’s tentacles reached into every corner of society The main union federations are controlled by the PRI. Employers, professional, youth and other organisations are also affiliated to the PRI. In all the main cities the party has branches in every neighbourhood – including in the vast poverty-ridden shanty towns. The PRI’s system of clientelism and patronage ensured that for hundreds of thousands of local and national government workers, career advancement depended on loyalty to the ruling party. Money for local city and rural developments depended on loyalty to the PRI, and such a system was naturally prey to corruption at every level.
The economic system which underlay this was based on a heavy dose of ‚corporatist‘ state capitalism, with an ‚import substitution‘ development strategy. Major industries like oil, airways and railways were nationalised in the 1930s. The land was also nationalised, and leased to peasant communities. High import duties defended local industries, especially against imports from the United States. All this was tied together with a strongly nationalist ideology, with demagogic references to the 1911-20 revolution, whose main leaders like Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata were incomparably more radical than today’s PRI leadership.
Major changes in the world economy – the neo-liberal offensive, the debt crisis and ‚globalisation‘ – undermined the PRI’s system of rule. Mexico borrowed heavily from the world’s banks to promote economic development, but when the price of oil collapsed for the second time in 1979, the country lost its ability to repay the debt. In 1982 Mexico became the first country to literally go bankrupt, and had to accept harsh austerity conditions for the subsequent IMF-World Bank bail-out.
In Mexico’s ruling class one response to this was to openly accept that the old nationalist and protectionist methods wouldn’t work, and opt for active co-operation with the neo-liberal methods sweeping the advanced countries. When Miguel de Madrid became president in 1982, he advanced the policy of de-nationalisation and deregulation – a policy intensified by his successor Salinas, elected in 1988, and culminating with the entry of Mexico into NAFTA, the free trade area with Canada and the US.
In the long term the shift to an open acceptance of neo-liberal, austerity policies was bound to undermine the PRI system of rule. Patronage and clientelism depends for it’s success on having ‚clients‘ who get some perceived benefits from the arrangement. For example, the PRI domination of the unions in the Congress of Labour (CT) and federation of Mexican Workers (CTM) was premised on regular – if minor – increases in living standards for workers in the cities. When neo-liberalism began to undermine these arrangements, the PRI consensus broke down. The result was a left split to form the PRD in 1987.
* *
*
The figurehead of the PRD is Cárdenas, son of the revered 1930s president Lazaro Cárdenas who nationalised the land and the oil industry. Other key figures, like Porfirio Muñoz Ledo – effective leader of the PRD’s right wing – had previously been top PRI leaders, so-called ‚dinosaurs‘. These leaders were strongly attached to the original nationalist and populist traditions of the PRI.
The crisis of the PRI also led to the growth of the PAN (National Action Party) – a party which had existed on the sidelines for 30 years, but took on new force as former right-wing PRlistas opted for an openly right-wing, pro-American party.
Mexico’s entrance into NAFTA, the continuing burden of the debt and the collapse of the peso have impoverished millions of Mexicans during 1995 and 1996. The flood of American imports has collapsed thousands of small businesses. Pedro Salcedo, president of the ANIT small business organisation claims that another 300,000 small and medium-sized enterprises face bankruptcy in the next five years.
Workers have suffered both a collapse of manufacturing and a sharp decline in wages. The ILO says industrial workers now earn on average just $1.7 an hour – in the countryside of course it is much less. In an economically active population of 36 million, only 9.3 million have permanent jobs, the rest have been forced into begging and street trading – the ‚informal economy‘. Forty percent of all Mexican wage earners get less than a day. The United Nations development programme says 372 million of the 91 million population live in ‚extreme poverty‘. Ten million people have no access to any form of healthcare.
The denationalisation of the land by Salinas and opening up the market to US agribusiness has savagely affected the peasantry and agricultural labourers. It is this mass poverty in the countryside which brought about the rebellions of the Zapatistas in Chiapas in 1994 and the EPR (People’s Revolutionary Army) in Guerrero, Oaxaca and other southern states in 1996.
Mexican politics have been transformed by the events of the last three years. A split has developed in the CT and CTM union federations with a bureaucratic opposition bloc (the ‚Foro‘ group) operating in both federations and likely to form a new labour federation. This would not be a ‚class struggle‘ group, but would represent an important break in PRI union domination. To the left of the Foro group is the May First Union Coalition, which is independent of the major confederations, but lacks their membership or social weight.
There has been an important radicalisation of the workers‘ movement in the last few years. Hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike and demonstrated throughout Mexico in 1996. Steel workers, hospital workers, bus drivers, social security workers and many other groups followed suit. Mexico has become a country of permanent political upheaval and agitation.
For the Mexican ruling class and political elite it is obviously necessary to begin to forge a new way forward out of this mess. To stand still is to allow the country to fall prey to growing social unrest and political rebellion. The outlines of a new strategy are beginning to emerge supported at least by a section of the bourgeoisie, and encouraged by the US. It involves leaving the NAFTA economic system intact, but combining limited political reform with militarisation and repression against those who overstep the mark in rebelling against the state. It is in the context of this strategy that the outcome of the July 6 elections has to be seen.
The growing role of the army – creeping militarisation – is obvious all over the south of the country, where army roadblocks proliferate. The army’s formal rationale for this massive presence is the fight against the EPR guerrillas and the EZLN. But the army in the past year has been given a new role in policing Mexico City and the ‚fight against drugs‘. Senior army officers are increasingly being trained in the US, and its previous nationalist ideology is on the wane. In Opposition to this, a small group of more ‚traditionalist‘ top brass have gone over to the PRD.
Military repression is not just a threat. In the past five years more than one hundred PRD activists have been assassinated by death squads, and dozens of peasant activists – especially in the state of Guerrero – have suffered the same fate. Politically, it is clear that a section of the ruling class sees the need for a limited ‚democratic‘ transition beyond PRI rule. This involves allowing more-or-less free elections, and allowing other parties – primarily the PAN, but also the right wing of the PRD – a share of power.
Before July’s elections there were extensive discussions, and an eventual agreement, on electoral reform between the PRI, the PAN and the PRD. It was this agreement which allowed the elections to go ahead without major fraud. This course has been urged on Mexico by the US State Department, which wants to promote the PAN and experiment with the possibility of ‚integrating‘ the right wing of the PRD.
So far, there are signs that this strategy has some chance of success. Muñoz Ledo has stressed that the PRD will co-operate with other parties, and not seek use its position in the Chamber to promote short-term radical change. Today the PRD says that it only wants to ‚amend‘ the NAFTA agreement, not reject it outright. Discussions have already been held between the PAN and PRD leaderships on ways to collaborate in the new parliament. On the other hand the PRD left is still powerful, and likely to contest the adoption of a moderate course by the party leadership.
Allowing a ‚democratic‘ transition in Mexico is filled with dangers for the ruling class, particularly the danger that as PRI domination declines, a larger space will open up for mobilisations of the left, radical and popular organisations of the oppressed – despite the military repression aimed at guerrilla and peasant organisations. However, in this situation, the working class and the political left suffer major strategic weaknesses. While popular and community organisations abound, the grip of the PRI on the trade unions is still strong. The radical mass organisations of workers and peasants lack a clear and coherent focus of united political action, such as would be provided by a nationwide workers‘ party.
The left is divided between the PRD left wing, the Zapatistas‘ political arm (EZLN), the guerrilla organisations and a number of small revolutionary organisations, of which the best known is the PRT (Revolutionary Workers Party). If these forces could come together to form a single democratic workers‘ party, it would pull in thousands of local and national popular organisations of struggle.
The key to this is breaking the PRD left away from the right-wing and centre-left leadership. The one grouping which had the possibility to take major steps down this road in the last two years was the Zapatista leadership around Subcommandante Marcos. In 1994-5 the Zapatistas built a massive coalition called the CND (National Coalition for Democracy). The CND could have been the basis for a broad new political movement. If Marcos had opted for creating a broad, multi-tendency, political party that would have put severe pressure on the PRD. But instead Marcos and his comrades chose a narrow political ‚front‘, directly under their own control – and, it should be said, permeated with a bad case of postmodernist political rhetoric about the power of ‚civil society,‘ rather than any ambition of taking political power. This choice has ironically weakened the position of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, which finds itself with few means to exert pressure on the national government.
None of these difficulties for the left should obscure the historic nature of the outcome of these elections (nor the immensely positive political role played by the Zapatistas in deepening the PRI crisis and pulling the Latin American left out of the doldrums). With Cárdenas the mayor of Mexico City, and the PRI without a parliamentary majority, Mexico is entering a further period of political and social turbulence.
Schreibe einen Kommentar