A new student movement in Mexico

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, February 13, 2000

Young and Anarchic, the Angry Left Is Reborn in Mexico

By JULIA PRESTON

MEXICO CITY -- During The Cold War, when Latin American leftists gravitated
toward communism, it was easy for them to identify their enemies: local
military dictators or U.S. corporate imperialists. They had an economic
system to demonize -- capitalism -- and an alternative -- socialism -- to
put in its place. And they had a playbook, written by Marx and Lenin and
Fidel Castro, to guide their thinking and strategy.

But times are different. There still is an activist left in Latin America,
and it still does battle with inequality and poverty and undemocratic
government. But the recent nine-month strike at Mexico's national
university revealed a new kind of leftist movement, one whose new foe is
the global economy. The strike, which devastated Mexico's most important
university and divided its society, gave a preview of the vexing challenges
the new leftists may pose to the region's young democracies.

The striking students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
declared that their fundamental purpose was to oppose the worldwide spread
of free trade and the lean government, pro-business policies that promote
it. But the conundrum for their movement was that the new adversary --
globalism -- was faceless. It was a product of commerce and technology more
than of government or guns. It was emerging everywhere at once, with no
clear alternative in sight.

If the students were confronting anarchic change, they met it with an
anarchic movement. The strike steering committee took over the campus,
using barbed wire to keep other students out. They elected no outstanding
leaders and took their decisions in chaotic all-night assemblies. Over the
months the university conceded demand after demand, but the strikers only
upped the ante.

The strikers confounded everyone who dealt with them, from conciliatory
university administrators to conservative intellectuals to lifelong
leftists. In the end, after the federal police marched in on Feb. 6 and
hauled the remaining strikers away to jail, it seemed that the strike had
been an end in itself, a form of complete resistance against social and
economic changes they could never hope to control.

The new leftism probably emerged in Mexico because this country has led the
charge in Latin America into the globalized age. Since signing on to the
1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has seen its international
trade explode, its business middle class rise like a phoenix and the
country's northern half become an industrial export powerhouse.

Complete article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/021300mexico-leftists-review.html


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/