[Marxism] As Mexico Awaits Vote Decision, Social Upheaval Is on the Rise (WSJ)

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

("But unlike 2000, when former vice president Al Gore accepted the
Supreme Court's ruling on the election, Mr. López Obrador refuses to
recognize judicial power. Instead, the former Mexico City mayor is
promising to make the country ungovernable. It's as if Al Gore had
called for revolution instead of calm.")
===================================================================

Yesterday I visited the encampments in the Zocalo, in the center of
the capital of this country. Everything was quiet. The camps appear
well-organized and clean. Delegations from every province in this
country were present there. A rally was held in the late afternoon
at which it was announced that a subsequent rally, to be held this
Friday afternoon - tomorrow - will have announcements of what the
plans are for the opposition coalition which has been protesting 
both the electoral fraud and the candidacy of PRD candidate Manuel
Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who heads the Coalition for the Good of All.
All of the Mexican mass media seems now to have turned completely
hostile to the protest movement, except for leftist LA JORNADA

The environment around the camps was quite peaceful, because both
of the self-organization of the protesters and the quiet assistance
given to the encampment by the local city administration. But is is
obvious that the government here can't allow such a giant, ongoing
declaration of its essential illegitimacy to go on forever. Can the
Mexican national government allow a massive, peaceful testimonial 
questioning its very legitimacy to be allowed to continue right as
the election commission is about to certify Calderon's presidenty?
Thus, a confrontation is inherent here. The only question: when?


Walter Lippmann
Mexico City

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Today's Granma: Month Long Protest Alleging Fraud in Mexico
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/54480
===================================================================

The Wall Street Journal                 

August 31, 2006
        
PAGE ONE

Disorderly Conduct
As Mexico Awaits Vote Decision,
Social Upheaval Is on the Rise
Calderón, the Likely President,
Will Face Mass Protests,
Challenge to State Authority
Radical Takeover in Oaxaca
By DAVID LUHNOW and JOHN LYONS
August 31, 2006; Page A1

MEXICO CITY -- With conservative Felipe Calderón now all but certain
to become Mexico's next president, he faces a critical issue that
will determine the success of his six-year term: How to prevent
growing political confrontation from undermining the country's
transition to democracy and free markets.

Mexico is coming off its version of the Florida 2000 election battle.
Mr. Calderón's narrow July 2 defeat of his leftist opponent Andrés
Manuel López Obrador also landed in a court, which this week rejected
Mr. López Obrador's contention that the balloting was marked by
fraud. The electoral court is now widely expected to name Mr.
Calderón the president by the legal deadline of Sept. 6. But unlike
2000, when former vice president Al Gore accepted the Supreme Court's
ruling on the election, Mr. López Obrador refuses to recognize
judicial power. Instead, the former Mexico City mayor is promising to
make the country ungovernable. It's as if Al Gore had called for
revolution instead of calm.

On top of dealing with his election opponent, Mr. Calderón faces
other violent challenges. Radical leftist groups have taken control
of Oaxaca, one of Mexico's most famous Colonial-era cities, shutting
down the local government in an attempt to force out the elected
governor. And in a sign of the growing reach of the drug trade,
decapitated bodies turn up regularly in cities where frightened local
authorities have largely given up police work.

The 44-year-old Mr. Calderón promises to deal with these challenges
through a combination of carrots and sticks. He wants to reach out to
Mr. López Obrador's supporters among the poor by promoting policies
aimed at creating a more equal society, including expanding to poor
urban areas a successful rural-welfare program that requires families
to keep their children in school to receive aid. At the same time, he
vows to strengthen a weakened Mexican state by confronting growing
mob rule, using police to crack down on political and drug-related
lawlessness around the country.

"I understand that people have the right to protest things, but only
so long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others," Mr.
Calderón said this week in a speech to women business leaders. During
his campaign, he promised he would not let groups of people "with
machetes" interfere with his government.

Mr. Calderón's first challenge will be simply getting to the
presidential chair. Mr. López Obrador's supporters have blockaded key
roads in Mexico City for the past month, and plan to step up their
campaign of civil disobedience. They pledge to block the country's
annual armed forces parade during Independence Day celebrations on
Sept. 16, and to prevent Mr. Calderón from being sworn in at Congress
on Dec. 1.

Mr. Calderón's success in toning down political confrontation will
shape his presidency, and determine whether he has the political
skills to tackle some of the long-term problems that have stunted
Mexico's development. Among them: reforming the energy sector,
confronting monopolists and union bosses who have an iron grip on the
country's largest industries, and asserting the rule of law in a
country where police, courts and Congress are often dismissed as
unjust or corrupt. The outcome will also determine whether the U.S.
has a politically stable and prosperous neighbor next door or has yet
another headache in its growing list of global problems.

Despite hard talk by the former energy minister, his camp is still
debating how tough to get with Mr. López Obrador's protest movement,
according to people familiar with the discussions. One key issue on
the table: Whether to urge President Vicente Fox to use force to
clear Mr. López Obrador's tent villages from Mexico City's main
boulevard and the central square.

While some advisers think a crackdown could ease Mr. Calderón's
transition to government, others worry that confrontation would play
into his rival's hands by inflaming a movement that is losing public
support. Polls show support for the protest movement waning and
moderates in Mr. Calderón's camp believe Mr. López Obrador's
supporters in his Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, are
likely to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular leader.

Meanwhile, Mr. Calderón faces some political weakness himself. Polls
show that a third of the voters believe he won through fraud. And
ideological inclusiveness doesn't come naturally to his National
Action Party, or PAN, a buttoned-down Catholic organization that's
tight with the business elite and often criticized as out of touch
with broader Mexico.

Before the vote, Mexicans and foreigners alike assumed that Mexico's
peaceful transition to a democracy was a done deal, completed when
President Fox ousted the former ruling party six years ago. The
prevailing wisdom was that the next government's challenge was how to
transform a sluggish economy to compete with more dynamic Asian
rivals. Even with Mr. López Obrador's ongoing challenge, the peso and
stock markets remain firm and foreign investors don't seem overly
concerned.

But the bitter post-electoral fight has revealed a side of Mexico
that many assumed was the stuff of history books. Mexico's political
transformation during the past decade is the country's third attempt
to build a lasting democracy, says Enrique Krauze, one of Mexico's
most prominent historians and a López Obrador critic. The first
attempt, by President Benito Juárez, lasted nearly a decade but
didn't survive his 1872 death in office. The second was the brief
tenure of Francisco Madero, which ended in 1913 with his
assassination and a complete breakdown in order, sparking one of the
most violent stretches of the period Mexicans now call their
"revolution."

"There should be no doubt that Mr. López Obrador represents a
revolutionary threat," Mr. Krauze argues. "This is no joke. I hope
that he will not succeed and democracy will prevail. But
nevertheless, it's important that people realize what the stakes
are."

Political analysts say the provincial politician from the rural state
of Tabasco is looking to re-enact recent events in Latin American
nations like Bolivia and Ecuador, where radical protest movements
forced out democratically elected leaders. In Bolivia, the leader of
those protests, Evo Morales, went on to win an election last year and
is now that country's president.

Indeed, Mr. López Obrador, 52, openly says Mexico "needs a
revolution" and has vowed to keep his protest movement going until
the nation's "simulated republic" is brought down. He has promised to
use mass protests to prevent Mr. Calderón from carrying out his
agenda -- saying, for instance, that he will block moves to allow
private industry to have a greater participation in everything from
oil and electricity production to pension funds. According to polls,
about 16% of Mexicans say they would be willing to take part in
actions like blockading roads or airports to help Mr. López Obrador.

César Yáñez, a spokesman for Mr. López Obrador, says the movement
intends to use street protests to force Mr. Calderón to respond to
the leftist's goals, such as ensuring that natural resources like oil
remain in the hands of the state. He rejected comparisons with
Bolivia and said there are no plans to use violence to bring down the
Calderón government. "For us, the Calderón government will be
illegitimate, but that's not the same thing as saying there will be
violence," he said.

Protest movements like Mr. López Obrador's have flourished in recent
years, finding fertile territory in a new democratic landscape swept
clean of the harsh tactics of the old authoritarian regime. The
graceful colonial city of Oaxaca offers a glimpse of the kinds of
tactics available to Mr. López Obrador. There, a protest movement is
trying to force out a democratically elected governor. For the past
three months, the 70,000-strong teacher union has laid siege to the
city demanding a wage hike. It has occupied the downtown area with
roadblocks and prevented all three branches of government from
working by blocking government buildings with protesters armed with
sticks, pipes and machetes.

Hotels in the one-time tourism magnet are largely empty and the city
is lawless. Small gangs of student radicals, their faces covered in
bandanas, roam the city center and question passersby whom they deem
"suspicious." Taking photographs is now banned. Police don't dare
work -- no one answers the local equivalent of 911 -- the state
Congress meets secretly at a hotel, and judges stay at home.

Oaxaca state governor Ulises Ruiz, from the former ruling PRI party,
tried to clear the protesters from the city in mid-June, but the mob
easily beat back his police, several of whom were briefly taken
hostage. After the attempted crackdown, the protesters got more
radical, demanding the governor resign as a precondition for talks.
They also burned buses and cars, stormed eight privately run radio
stations to urge citizens to take to the streets, briefly blockaded
the city airport and set a 10 p.m. curfew. Mr. Ruiz now wants federal
police to intervene, but Mr. Fox has indicated he doesn't want to get
involved.

"This place is no man's land," says Elpirio Velázquez, who owns a
stall that sells school supplies in the city's central market. Mr.
Velázquez says he supported the teachers' wage demands but thinks
they've gone way too far in taking up violence and calling for the
governor's ouster. "If they kick him out, then what happens? They
just kick out any governor they don't like?"

The parallels are striking between the Oaxaca protests and Mr. López
Obrador's Mexico City sit-in. Mr. Ruiz won a 2004 gubernatorial race
by a very narrow margin over his rival, a candidate of Mr. López
Obrador's PRD, which claimed the loss was due to fraud and threatened
to organize street protests.

Mr. Calderón's PAN party supported the PRD's candidate in the state
race two years ago against Mr. Ruiz, but is now throwing its weight
behind the embattled governor, arguing that his resignation would
undermine the rule of law. Top PAN officials also argue allowing Mr.
Ruiz to step down might encourage Mr. López Obrador to continue his
protests in the hopes of eventually forcing Mr. Calderón from office.
"What's happening in Oaxaca is a blueprint for the PRD to try to
force Calderón from office," says Dagoberto Carreño, the PAN's
secretary general in Oaxaca.

Mr. Calderón will have to make some tough decisions about the use of
public force that his recent predecessors have shied away from. The
government's reluctance to use force is partly explained by history.
A 1968 massacre of hundreds of protesters in Mexico City is the
country's version of Tiananmen Square. Mexicans tend to view the use
of force by the government as repression rather than law and order.
When President Fox took power in 2000, polls showed that 80% of
Mexicans were opposed to the government's use of force to put down
dissent. That figure has since dropped, but is still high at 60%.

Under Mr. Fox, the government's unwillingness to consider force had
its cost. Consider what happened to Mr. Fox's plans for a new
six-runway airport near Mexico City, a glittering symbol of Mexico's
climb into the global economy. Shortly after work on the project
began in 2002, peasants who were due to be relocated to make room for
the airport picked up machetes, blocked construction crews and took
15 state officials hostage, threatening to set them ablaze unless
construction was halted. They won.

After Mr. Fox killed the project, the Mexican press was rich with
debate about whether the move was a win for democracy or set a
troubling precedent for mob rule. Emboldened by their win, the
airport protesters next ran the mayor and police force out of the
nearby town of Atenco, and started a regular campaign of highway
blockades to demand goods and services. But when a newly elected
governor, Enrique Peña, decided to end the airport group's road
blockades with force this year, results were mixed. Ill-trained and
under-equipped police battled protesters for two days in a bloody
confrontation. The protest leaders were later jailed, but Mr. Peña's
career suffered after he was forced to respond to charges of
brutality and even sexual assaults by the police.

Mr. Calderón hopes to set a different tone, starting in the interim
period before his Dec. 1 inauguration. During that time, Mr. Fox
remains as a lame-duck president but must work with a new Congress,
which will be sworn in Sept. 1. Mr. Calderón wants to work with Mr.
Fox to pass some high-profile measures and show he can govern despite
the turmoil on the streets. Among the possibilities are a reform of
the state-owned oil company's corporate finances and a shake-up in
the federal police.

Many political observers say he must go far beyond that to send
strong signals that he is serious about addressing the core issues of
poverty and scarce job opportunity that gave rise to Mr. López
Obrador's movement. In private conversations, some business
executives are even urging Mr. Calderón to go after some of the
sacred cows of the Mexican economy, such as limiting the reach of the
privately held Mexican monopolies. They argue that this would prove
that he is not afraid to disappoint constituents in order to unblock
logjams to entrepreneurship and growth.

        


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