|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 05/02
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Volume 1, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2000
Seattle South: Mexico’s New Radicalism
Mark Stevenson
*
When a disparate array of protesters took to the streets of Seattle for a few days in 1999, and a more disciplined group besieged the streets of Washington, D.C., in April, they sent a message that the world’s various trade and economic organizations, not to mention the press, are still discussing. But for ten months, between April 1999 and February 2000, a band of a few thousand Mexican student strikers did much more: They turned Latin America’s largest university, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), into a barricaded school of radical resistance. Their debates on strategy ran into marathon, all–night “consensus–style” discussions in the empty classrooms in which they ate, slept, and organized. They locked out over 250,000 classmates, repeatedly faced down the federal government, encouraged smaller uprisings at a half–dozen other schools, and dominated public attention in what was to have been the jubilee year for former President Ernesto Zedillo’s free–market economic policies.
Not bad for a motley group of anarchists, synarchists, Zapatista rebel supporters, and Stalinists who flipped a coin to determine who would speak for the group and forwarded an escalating list of demands that grew more maximalist as their movement grew more isolated. Their tactics, structure, and goals made them harder than any other traditional insurgent movement in Mexico for the government to control, battle, or co–opt. As Miguel Abraxas, a strike supporter who wore a Cuban–style military cap with a red star at the strike barricades, said, “We are inventing a new way of doing politics. We have no interest in the traditional left parties because of their involvement in electoral horse–trading. We are a resistance movement” against privatization, free trade, and globalization. “We feel we are the brothers of the Seattle protesters.”
Though many Mexican protesters like Abraxas identify with their counterparts in Seattle, the potential of this backlash movement to actually stir things up in Mexico is more powerful. The strikers rallied against more than just globalization; they protested Mexico’s woefully lopsided distribution of income, the dismantling of the last remnants of the social safety net, and the increasing privatization of Mexican industries. They revealed the government’s lack of interest in public universities and exposed ham–handed security agencies. Finally, after police broke up the strike, the student protesters entered Mexico’s deeply flawed penal system. All of these very real themes have much more potential to spark a wider movement than the strikers’ stated goals, what Zedillo has attacked as anti–globalism, or “globaphobia.”
This potential is even greater since Mexico’s social tinderbox has always needed only a middle–class, educated leadership component in order for it to burst into flames. The strike may, in the future, contribute to such a leadership from among the dozens of strikers in jail and the strikers’ parents drawn into the fray.
Most press reports about the student strike at UNAM depicted the radical strikers as unreasoning fanatics or pawns manipulated by some obscure political force. There was largely baseless speculation that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) kept the strike going to discredit the left or else to create an atmosphere of insecurity as the July 2000 presidential elections approached. Some reports maintained that strikers were egged on by the left–center Democratic Revolution Party. In fact, almost all the strikers–and certainly the radical core of 2,000 or so that kept the lockout going–reject all Mexican party politics with contempt. Nor are they tied up by old, established leftist politics. Alfredo Velarde, a twenty–nine–year–old “anarchist–communist” economics professor who joined the strikers, said: “The traditional definitions of Marxist–Leninist politics leave us completely cold.” Instead, Velarde described his goal as politics–as–process: The movement’s goals would be redefined as a wider circle of students was drawn into strike–sponsored debates, forums, and referendums.
That, in fact, didn’t happen, largely due to the strikers’ incompetence in dealing with the media; their complete failure to reach out to Mexico’s vast low– and middle–class; and their poor choice of tactics, like blocking main roadways during rush hour, preventing “alternative classes” from meeting, or forbidding students not already on their side from entering the campus.
But judging by Mexico’s past, like the 1968 student democracy movement, some of the 1999 strikers will turn up five or ten years from now leading the next guerrilla movement. It will not be the top leadership–in Mexico, such leaders are traditionally either co–opted or jailed–but rather, the middle ranks of strike participants who could move to states like Guerrero, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, or Chiapas and begin building rebel groups. Influenced and encouraged by the success of their tactics in closing the university, their methods, however, may differ from those of traditional rebel groups–looser, less hierarchical, less ideologically strict. Even during the strike, the Mexican government had a hard time identifying the strike’s real leadership channels and had little ability to negotiate with them or even predict their actions. The failure of Mexico’s intelligence agencies was displayed by clumsy efforts at surveillance and infiltration.
While guerrilla organizations like the EPR or EZLN (Zapatistas) operate in richer terrain (to date, rural, not urban, Mexico provides the troops for political mass action), they are basically “armed pressure groups” looking to build a regional constituency that they can then represent in negotiations with the government. The student strikers had no such plans. Thus, they are not as “localized” or as easily controlled as the guerilla groups.
Of more concern to the government, is the fact that they are urban–based. Perhaps most worrisome for the government was the involvement of thousands of middle–class, urban parents of students acting in a supportive role during and after the strike movement. Even under the glare of international scrutiny, Mexico can handle rural peasant uprisings, as it did in Guerrero in the 1970s and in Chiapas in 1994. What the PRI–or any other party in Mexico, for that matter–could not handle is unrest in major cities spreading among the 30 million strong, urbanized lower class. Occasional demonstrations by teachers, neighborhood groups, and even taxi drivers have shown that, on a routine basis, police in Mexico have no effective form of urban crowd control.
By the time the newly created (and militarized) Federal Preventative Police marched onto the UNAM campus in February, the strikers had already essentially conceded defeat and were gathered in an auditorium in anticipation of their arrest. But the student movement can spread. A wave of strikes, confrontations, and takeovers at rural teachers’ colleges that followed the end of the UNAM strike were, to some extent, part of past battles; a system of “socialist” rural education set up decades ago that is slowly being dismantled. To many, the UNAM, as a virtually free, open–admission state school, is also an anachronism. But such skirmishes could become battles as the Fox administration moves to perfect Mexico’s free–market reforms by eliminating the last vestiges of state support, subsidies, and handout programs. Zedillo erred by fundamentally underestimating the exact mood and conditions of the people he governs. Programs like free education, tortilla subsidies, and farm price supports–no matter how anachronistic they may appear–are crucial for Mexican social and political stability. Given Mexico’s extremely depressed wage scale, they often contribute to a family’s very survival and provide any slim hope for advancement. Moreover, Mexicans tend to see such programs as no less than a birthright. Cutting these programs is inherently dangerous, for they are precisely programs won or supported by a constituency accustomed to defending itself through political mass action like strikes or street protests.
Zedillo, his finance minister, and the central bank president seemed almost completely out of touch with these central truths, and are thus unwisely willing to take on such battles. Given this central disconnect–and Zedillo’s known reputation for petulance–one cannot rule out the possibility that Zedillo so liked the method of massive police intervention used to end the UNAM strike that he might be tempted to use it in other situations, like Chiapas or Guerrero. Nor are the recent reforms in Mexican campaign laws, which Zedillo saw as the legacy of his administration, capable of integrating the students, or many other Mexicans, into electoral politics. As striking students said repeatedly in interviews, they see all political parties as worn–out–either sold–out or incapable of effecting any real change.
The electoral laws, like so many other Mexican statutes, are fine on paper, but simply do not correspond with the country’s reality. The reality is that even the government uses organized, sometimes violent regional pressure groups like the Territorial Movement, the Antorcha Campesina, or the National Peasants Confederation to enforce its rule and get its candidates elected. If that is how the government does business on occasion, how then can it convince the students that ballots are better than street protests?
Endnotes
Note *: Mark Stevenson is a journalist who has covered Mexico for over seven years. Back.