Mexico's Electoral Court
has announced that it will begin ruling on the 375 challenges which both the liberal PRD-led coalition and the conservative PAN party have presented. Tuesday the court
anticipates ruling on congressional challenges.
Amnesty International insists that "illegal armed militias" associated with the state's security forces are operating in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, and are likely the ones to have killed and beaten protesters in the tense teacher-led strike.
And for the "free market" ideologues (in Mexico the "neoliberals") it's time to go: their NAFTA failed to help us and our peasant and Indian poor, says the leader of the official peasants' organization the CNC, a traditionally state-affiliated group connected with the formerly ruling PRI party.
Extended quotes below the fold. As usual please add additional news / opinions as comments for today's Roundup.
The Washington Post's excellent columnist / blogger Ceci Connolly has a great news roundup of what's been going on in Mexico's post-electoral crisis -- and unlike the Post's editors who just bark condemnations of any Latin American centrist, liberal, or leftist as "Stalinist", Connolly works hard to bring a broad view of the situation. (The commenters on her blog, however, have been nearly completely and demonically situated against liberal candidate Lopez Obrador, who is called AMLO for short.)
Mexico Waits While Election Tribunal Considers Complaints
from Washington Post Campaign Conexion blogger Ceci Connolly, posted 8/25/06
Real political news in this nation awaiting-a-president, is hard to come by these days. The seven-member election tribunal is apparently chugging along considering a hefty batch of complaints and mulling whether to declare Felipe Calderón as the winner of the contested July 2 election.
Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador who prompted this season of uncertainty by challenging those results, remains camped out in Mexico City's downtown square, known as the Zocalo. (Read all about Campaign Conexion's visit to the tent city below.)
Calderón, nominee of the ruling National Action Party (or PAN), is developing a transition plan that interestingly embraces some of the social policies his rival ran on. All of a sudden, the conservative who ran on promises to continue the policies of President Vicente Fox is talking about increasing cash handouts to poor, as well as reinvigorating housing and healthcare programs.
The coming weeks are a big test of this young democracy and the august Wall Street Journal editorial board argues that no less than Mexico's international reputation rests on the shoulders of the tribunal.
"Today, however, Mexico may be on the brink of undoing a generation of hard-won political reform," according to the editorial. "Amid the inevitable legal arcana that surround election challenges, the greater fear is political -- that the tribunal will bend beneath Mexico's notoriously backward-looking pressures.
"The tribunal's decision is a crucial test for Mexican modernity. Mexicans who had reason to believe that their country was evolving toward a pluralistic democracy supported by strong independent institutions are right to be worried, along with foreign investors and international creditors."
The Lame Duck
As Campaign Conexion has been reporting for some time, Fox is growing increasingly agitated with López Obrador's agitating. The latest whopper by the outgoing president was his statement that López Obrador is "messianic."
It's not that this is the first time someone has made that particular accusation. (Check out statements by noted historian Enrique Krauze.) But the president is supposed to be above this sort of thing.
Not one to be outdone in the whopper category, López Obrador declared this week that Mexico could wake up to "two presidents" on Sept. 17. His scenario: the tribunal certifies Calderón as the winner, while the national convention López Obrador is convening on Sept. 16 "certifies" him as the winner... [excerpted, follow link for full]
On the human rights front, the Oaxaca strike & anti-governor protests continue. Here is an exerpt from El Universal's English-language section, via the Miami Herald (follow link for full):
AI insists militias present
Wire services
El Universal
August 27, 2006
Amnesty International (AI) said it has strong evidence that illegal armed militias operating in conjunction with state security forces have attacked protesting teachers in Oaxaca city.
The state of Oaxaca has experienced a surge in unrest this month, including road blockades, the takeover of radio stations by a coalition of protesters and shootings that have left two dead...
...The London-based rights group noted that the conflict has left two dead since Aug. 10 and said "at least seven people are currently detained and seven have reported being tortured or otherwise ill treated."
It added that one of the slain demonstrators "was shot in the back by unidentified individuals who were, according to witnesses, accompanying a police convoy" and "died a few hours later."
Additionally, AI called attention to the detention of three individuals who were "beaten by unidentified individuals traveling in vehicles without number plates" and reported that "they were taken to a secret location where they were tortured and handed over to the Office of the Attorney General in Oaxaca."
Nice. Just great. Not a new technique. After all, state security forces in the state of Guerrero shot down 19 unarmed peasants in 1995 who were travelling to a protest while videotaping themselves doing so in color -- a massacre referred to be its location as "Aguas Blancas" which got the governor kicked out and the supposed planner of the massacre assassinated, and only now are they administering compensation to the victim's families if they promise to no longer protest.
Speaking of extra-governmental militias, the underground leftist guerrilla organization the EPR (Peoples' Revolutionary Army] spoke up on the Oaxaca and other crisis, offering a stark reminder that in Mexico, it isn't only the government which can use lethal force [excerpt from El Universal]:
EPR defends rebellion
Wire services
El Universal
August 27, 2006
OAXACA- The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), an armed group which first appeared 10 years ago, warned the government Saturday that when peaceful protests fail, an armed uprising is the only alternative.
"Military action is the last resort when the forms of peaceful protest fail, and in politico-military action we acknowledge that it will be the people´s organizations that determine the cause and development of the fight to achieve complete freedom," the EPR said in a communiqué.
It's not believed that the EPR is a large force, but then, small and unknown groups have carried out targeted actions in the past -- perhaps including the aforesaid assassination of the "intellectual author" of the Aguas Blancas massacre.
Meanwhile, the historically PRI-allied National Peasant Farmers' Confederation president vows to reconsider their political connection, because in his view the commitment to 'free market' orthodoxy has devastated rather than helped the rural and farming population, unlike they were promised in the heady days when NAFTA was signed in 1993 and went into effect on January 1, 1994 (which is why the Zapatistas chose to arise when they did).
But remember -- to be a good editor of a big U.S. newspaper, tell the rural poor to just basically shut up and die if necessary, because you're 100% sure that someday, even if someday means 1,000 years from now, you're very sure that a rabid devotion to whatever helps the richest of the rich and multinational investors must eventually somehow help everyone, that is, if they survive.
Ramirez Lopez: the "NeoLiberals" Didn't Know How To Run NAFTA
- National Peasant Farmers' Confederation (CNC) Will Readjust its Political Alliances, Despite "Historic" Pact with PRI, says Lopez
by Emir Olivares Alonso
[my own translation of excerpt from La Jornada]
The neoliberals [means free market orthodoxists like 19th century anti-regulation / anti-tariff 'liberals'] who have led our nation, PRI and PAN party memebers "trapped by the same ideology, know how to administer neither NAFTA nor their economic model for the benefit of the public -- rather in favor of a few consortia and transnational corporations," assured the president of the National Peasant Farmers' Confederation [and Senator-elect], Heladio Ramirez Lopez. In addition, he said that in light of the [voters'] abandonment of the [formerly 70-year ruling] PRI party, the CNC is analyzing how to realign its political alliances, including its "historical" pact with the PRI...
..."Neither CNC members nor campesinos have deserted the party -- it's the party who deserted us, the party which distanced itself from our principles when it turned its gaze toward the right and ceded part of its political capital to a point of view of a minority, politically irrelavant, and ethically questionable."...
..."NAFTA put the countryside on the edge of breakdown and food-supply dependency"; for this, he said, it's urgent to revise and renegotiate the agropecuarial [subsistence farming and small-herd livestock] chapter of this treaty [NAFTA] with the US and Canada, given that in 2008 they're going to open the gates to products like corn, beans, sugar, and milk, which will affect the entire Mexican countryside.
He assured that the reality is that the countryside "suffers a depressing historic abandonment" given that 7 out of every 10 campesinos lives in extreme poverty and 5 million of this population lives in indigency.
The CNC leader underlined that government funding for the countryside "are being reduced in an irresponsible manner," since today it represents only 3% of the annual federal budget; he added that less than 1% of total investment in the country is directed to this sector; 76% of the harvest production is seasonal, and in the past 10 years rural employment has dropped by 22%, which represents 2 million fewer rural workers.
The Senator underlined that the federal government and the neoliberals have failed in their drive toward a transition which was to produce a productive revolution to open opportunties to rural Mexicans -- on the contrary, they only "have made globalization a space for the dominant classes."...He considers that the nation and the rural economy are "confronting pressures from gigantic multinational corporations and the interests of the Empire which is placing at risk our sovereignty and our national project."