Strikes spread in Mexico, thousands of police deployed to capital

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/01/06/mexi-j06.html


Strikes spread in Mexico, thousands of police deployed to capital

By Neil Hardt

6 January 2017

Police made up to 600 arrests throughout Mexico yesterday as protests continued against President Enrique Pena Nieto’s cut to gas subsidies, known colloquially as the gasolinazo. One police officer was killed during confrontations in an impoverished neighborhood of Mexico City, and the mayor deployed 9,000 police to guard commercial centers throughout the city.

Yesterday also saw indications that localized protests by workers may be developing into a broader strike movement. Fourteen thousand bus, truck and taxi drivers in the oil-producing state of Veracruz announced a statewide strike of indefinite length, with many leaving their trucks, cabs, and buses parked on the street.

Workers in Veracruz, located on the Atlantic coast, joined transportation workers in the Pacific coast city of Guadalajara, who also struck yesterday, though initial reports show the strike as only partial. Truck drivers and demonstrators continued to block several key highways and tollbooths linking major inland Mexican cities.

The protest continued as US President-elect Donald Trump threw further doubt into Mexico’s US-export-based manufacturing industry when he tweeted a threat to penalize Toyota for its plans to build an auto plant in Baja California.

In Morelia, 2,000 transportation workers marched demanding the resignation of President Pena Nieto and the revocation of the subsidy cut. El Financiero warned that there are “signs of a total strike of transport” in Michoacan. In Acapulco, Guerrero, taxi drivers are encircling Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil trucks, forcing them to stop and taking turns siphoning the gas from their tankers. When a group of soldiers attempted to stop one group of taxi drivers yesterday, the drivers said that if the soldiers intervened they would light the tanker on fire. The soldiers backed down.

The trade unions are stepping in to prevent the demonstrations from coalescing into a nationwide strike. Trade union bureaucrats who announced the recent strikes stated explicitly that they were forced to do so by workers, who in the words of one trade union official, are becoming “violent.”

Castelan Cruvelli, president of the Veracruz transport workers union ASTRAVER, denounced striking workers for threatening scab drivers and appealed to the government for help: “This has not gotten out of control, we are hoping that a government liaison will engage in dialogue with us, as always in a peaceful way.”

Alfredo Dam Ham, leader of the Mexican Transport Workers Alliance (AMOTAC), pledged to the government that the strike would remain peaceful and appealed to drivers to refrain from blocking any roads.

The entire ruling apparatus—including the trade unions, the corporate press, businesses and the capitalist parties—are fearful that the gasolinazo protests have the potential to ignite into a movement of millions of Mexican workers. Last night, police arrested up to 600 people as riots and looting spread throughout the country, including youth as young as 13 years old.

The main national association of gas stations, shop owners and department stores called for the government to send the armed forces to crush demonstrations. The group’s president, Manuel Cardona Zapata, told the television program Despierta yesterday, “We need federal intervention, and if necessary the army, because this situation is out of control.”

According to Cardona, rioters have looted 250 stores in recent days as protests spread throughout the state of Mexico, Michoacan, Hidalgo, Mexico City, Veracruz, Tabasco, Queretaro and Quintana Roo.

Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), said the subsequent police deployment was “to guarantee the free expression of ideas.” Video circulated yesterday, however, showed police looting stores in the State of Mexico.

Though looting has undoubtedly occurred, it is minuscule compared to the Pena Nieto administration’s looting of the oil industry, which was nationalized in 1938 after a major strike by oil workers against British oil corporations. The oil subsidy cut is part of the Mexican ruling class’s efforts to privatize Pemex and to hand the country’s oil resources over to private corporations.

Protesters, led by transportation workers, have continued to block several oil processing centers, creating what Pemex described as a “critical situation” for oil production. Heavily armed riot police confronted demonstrators in at least one location and were able to “liberate” the Pemex facility when the workers peacefully retreated from the barricades after a tense standoff.

Transportation workers and demonstrators also reportedly established a new blockade around a facility near the border city of Mexicali. Elements of the federal and state police, as well as the army, are guarding other key facilities. Pemex also announced that the blockades are causing severe gas shortages in Baja California and Chihuahua.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, ex-candidate for president and leader of the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), issued a video statement yesterday afternoon and warned of “chaos” caused by demonstrators who he said were following “fascist strategies.” “We want to put order in the chaos,” he said. Lopez Obrador told viewers to put their faith in a legislative resolution to overturn the gas hike, saying, “Congress represents the people.”

Morena and AMLO are expected to poll well in next year’s presidential elections, with many commentators anticipating a Morena victory. Morena is an ostensibly “left,” populist bourgeois party that plays a key role in Mexican politics by directing demonstrations back into the safe channels of the Mexican state and away from the class struggle. Morena helped suffocate opposition to the Pena Nieto government’s education reforms, paving the way for the government to cover up its role in murdering 43 student teachers in Guerrero in 2014.

The protests in Mexico have been blacked out by the corporate media in the US, despite the fact that millions of Mexican citizens currently reside north of the border. As of Thursday afternoon, the online front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, Fox, and CBS all failed to mention the demonstrations. This is not an oversight. The American ruling class fears that the development of a movement of the working class in Mexico will ignite a parallel struggle by workers of all nationalities in the United States.

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/01/07/mexi-j07.html


Four dead, 1,000 arrested as demonstrations continue across Mexico

By Eric London

7 January 2017

The Mexican government on Thursday declared that it would not rescind its gasoline subsidy cut, as clashes at protests against the measure in recent days left four dead, dozens hurt and over 1,000 arrested.

The cut, known as the gasolinazo, will result in a 20 percent gas price hike in the coming year. Although Mexico is a leading oil producer, it imports over half its refined oil and domestic consumers pay just under $4 per gallon, more than in the United States. The gas price hike is already increasing the cost of basic consumer goods such as tortillas, further squeezing the impoverished working class and peasantry.

“Not one step back,” Interior Secretary Jose Antonio Meade said in an interview with Radio Formula yesterday. Speaking at a separate event, President Enrique Pena Nieto said, “Protesting and looting will not bring about a change in reality.”

In an official video released Thursday night, Pena made the absurd claim that “to artificially maintain lower prices would mean cutting resources from the poorest Mexicans and giving resources to those who have the most.” He said the government would have slashed funding for education and other social programs if it had decided against the cut in the gas subsidy.

His challenge to the Mexican people—“What would you have done?”—was widely denounced on social media.

On Thursday, two protesters were killed in clashes with police in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo during a demonstration of several thousand people. That night, over 20,000 marched through the northern industrial city of Monterrey, Nueva Leon in one of the largest protests to date. A demonstration scheduled for Monday afternoon in Mexico City will serve as a major test of the protest movement’s strength.

Roadblocks were set up on highways leading to Mexico and a strike by transit workers broadened to include the city of San Juan Del Rio in Quintana Roo. The strike was also joined by some 3,000 truckers in Monterrey.

Demonstrations continued along Mexico’s northern border, where protestors blocked railroad crossings to the United States at Nogales. Protests also took place near the border with Guatemala.

Overall, the demonstrations appeared to have been more limited Thursday, in part due to the Three Kings Day holiday.

Recent days have seen a significant increase in the police presence, with 9,000 police occupying commercial centers in Mexico City and 18,000 deployed to the State of Mexico, where looting is widespread. Federal police were also deployed to Veracruz.

As of Thursday afternoon, 300 people had been arrested in Veracruz, 139 in Chiapas, 537 in the State of Mexico, 182 in Nuevo Leon, 106 in Mexico City, and dozens more elsewhere. In Chiapas, relatives of the detained clashed with Navy sailors guarding a prison and demanded medical attention for those beaten by the police.

The gasolinazo protests have begun to attract the attention of the ruling class in the United States, which until now has largely blacked out press coverage for fear the protests will generate sympathy among American workers. The intelligence-linked web site Stratfor wrote that the demonstrations were spontaneous and had “largely remained regional” and “not yet coalesced into a coordinated national movement.” Stratfor noted that taxi, truck and bus drivers had called strikes “in several states, lending weight to the demonstrations.”

“There is a risk,” the web site warned, “of violent demonstrations spiraling out of control and sparking further protests. Supply disruptions could also occur as looters attempt to hijack gasoline trucks.”

Fears in the American and Mexican ruling classes of “supply disruptions” underscore the strategic necessity of uniting Mexican and American workers. An increasingly prominent section of the Mexican ruling class, led by National Regeneration Movement (Morena) leader and former mayor of Mexico City Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), is attempting to undermine the protest movement with the twin poisons of nationalism and class collaboration.

AMLO issued another Youtube appeal yesterday afternoon in which he called for “all Mexicans to come together in the great task of national transformation.” A “rebirth of Mexico” would take place only through electing him president in the 2018 election.

“There will be opportunity for change in 2018,” he said, calling for “a new national project” to be achieved not through class division, but “agreement.”

The Mexican pseudo-left operates in the orbit of Morena, propping it up with “left” phraseology. While criticizing AMLO’s attempts to limit strikes and protests, the Pabolite Socialist Workers Movement (MTS) issued a statement Wednesday calling for “a defense of national sovereignty” and a “break with the dependence of the country on the government of Trump.” The statement calls for various trade unions and student groups to gather “to discuss a plan for national struggle” to address “the present situation in our country.”

It is impossible to address the poverty and inequality that dominates Mexican society on the basis of a nationalist perspective.

It is not due simply to its leaders’ cowardice that Mexico remains even more subservient to American banks and corporations today than in the years preceding the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. The Stalinists and trade unions--both corporatist and independista— paved the way for the current social catastrophe by disarming the working class with nationalist demagogy and subordinating the workers to the Mexican state in the name of supporting the “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie.

This nationalist program is all the more bankrupt today under conditions where technology and transportation have bound the Mexican and American economies together more closely than ever.

A November 2016 report by the US Congressional Research Service reads: “The expansion of trade has resulted in the creation of vertical supply relationships… the flow of intermediate inputs produced in the United States and exported to Mexico and the return flow of finished products greatly increased the importance of the US-Mexico border region as a production site. US manufacturing industries, including automotive, electronics, appliances, and machinery, all rely on the assistance of Mexican manufacturers.”

United objectively in the productive process, increasingly facing the same transnational exploiters, confronting right-wing oligarchic governments on both sides of the border, the Mexican and American workers’ fates are inextricably linked. Workers on both sides of the border must emphatically reject all attempts to sow divisions and instead unite in a common struggle against Yankee imperialism and the Mexican capitalist class. The banner of this struggle is the fight for the United Socialist States of the Americas.

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http://insurgentnotes.com/2017/01/letter-from-mexico-3/?utm_source=subscribe2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=postnotify&utm_id=2678&utm_title=Letter+From+Mexico


Insurgent Notes
Journal of Communist Theory and Practice

Letter From Mexico

JAN 8, ’17 12:46 PM

AUTHOR
Anonymous

CATEGORIES
Uncategorized

Editor’s Note: We recently sent a couple of articles on Mexico from the Financial Times to our Mexico correspondent to check their accuracy. The following is his reply.

Here in Mexico, Trump’s victory was seen as a disaster for our government and its begging bowl, which views the chains of nafta as a blessing. The government and the Mexican political parties went to ridiculous extremes, even distributing T-shirts with Hillary’s picture. Today, January 1, the government imposed a major increase in the price of gasoline, because with the fall of oil prices and the imbecilic privatization of pemex,[1] it has run out of resources, and thus prefers to charge higher taxes through the gasoline price. This will set off inflation. At the same time, they are preparing laws to legalize the presence of the army in the streets, presumably to pursue the “war on drugs” but in reality preparing for repression and the next electoral fraud in 2018. The recent article in the Financial Times reflects the perception of Mexican people: the debacle of Peña Nieto[2] and of the pri,[3] and global winds which are setting the stage for amlo[4] as the next winner.

The price rise of gasoline and the announcement of further monthly price hikes, together with the impact of the slow but persistent devaluation of the peso relative to the dollar, will have an inevitable inflationary impact. Further, the government and the Mexican elite seem to feel completely orphaned and abandoned by the rise of Trump. In fact, at the moment, it appears that a national storm is erupting out of the gasolinazo[5] (the 20 percent increase in gasoline prices and the following uproar). At the world level, Mexico appears as one of the big losers in Trump’s triumph, and the docility and submission shown by the Mexican president led to disgust and rejection even in the ranks of his own party.

Confronted with the gasolinazo and its context (devaluation, growth of the public and foreign debt, probable return of Mexican migrants, ever-increasing insecurity and criminality, inflation, slow growth and low wages, privatization of the oil rent, tax increases), some analysts think that the social unrest could reach the levels of the greatest disaster of recent times: the devaluation and crisis of 1994–95.

Meanwhile, a large part of Mexican public opinion oscillates between guilt and cynicism, with self-accusations of being an indolent, cowardly, resigned, submissive and apathetic people, repeatedly saying: “What is happening to us, why do we do nothing?” and “How much will we take?”

For myself, I think that:

People continue forgetting the obvious, and I wish to insist on this: civil war already started in Mexico in 2006, after the flagrant electoral fraud of that year and the explosion of class struggle at the national level: miners’ strikes throughout the country, following the “accident” in the Pasta de Conchos mine, in which several miners were buried alive, and especially in the Lazaro Cardenas steel works where the workers blocked police repression (two workers killed), the brutal confrontation between the police and the peasants of San Salvador Atenco (following years of defending their land against plans for a new airport), and the Oaxaca Commune,[6] which culminated in the invasion of that state by naval personnel and by a mobilization of infantry (which the government did not want to use, since the latter was not “trustworthy,” given that a large part of the soldiers were…Oaxacans!) Meanwhile, the “radical” campaign of amlo distanced itself from the social agitation to avoid frightening the middle class.

amlo won the elections…but the middle class took fright again (“amlo is like Hugo Chavez and not like Lula!”) and an agreement between the pan and the pri wound up imposing a president that no one wanted: Felipe Calderón.

The militarization of the country begun by Calderon on the pretext of fighting the drug trade was interpreted in two ways: (1) as a way of acquiring political legitimacy, which supposedly led to a “strategic error,” the intensification of violence, and (2) as a militarization and intensification of violence as geopolitical objectives by the United States and the Mexican government: arms sales, business for the drug trade, social and political cleansing, and the spread of fear and psychological terror.

In 2012, the pan[7] returned the favor to the pri, allowing Peña Nieto to win the elections.

As in 2006, voices were heard even in the business class and the political establishment to the effect that amlo could be a “transitional” option, on the condition that he moderate his attitude.

As in 2012, amlo has adopted a conciliatory stance, arguing that he does not want to take power in a country sinking into anarchy, in keeping with which he declared that he does not want to excessively pressure the Peña Nieto government. Confronted with the teachers’ movement in primary and secondary education, his attitude was: they should not radicalize or attack the government! Thus amlo seeks to appease and lower the temperature so he can make it to the presidency and begin a “real change.”

But I insist: this is an induced “low intensity” civil war which has made it possible to militarize the country and intimidate the population. On the other hand, it is a war for Mexico’s oil and natural resources; there is no room for a tepid “left” government representing even the slightest risk for US interests. In 2016, it is clear that US imperialism and the rootless local bourgeoisies will not tolerate even governments of the “Lula” variety (now nato and Colombia are holding negotiations…).

Faced with this scenario, opinions on the left are divided: those who believe there are possibilities with amlo, and those of us who think that not only are a “reformist” and “nationalist” politics already unviable, but that there will not even be an opportunity to attempt anything of the kind.

Moreover, although amlo may come to power, I do not think he is up to the demands of the times: the world is geopolitically fractured and is heading on steroids towards a conflagration. Being president of a country means defining oneself relative to the colliding major powers and defining oneself militarily.

I therefore consider articles of the kind run by the Financial Times (very similar in fact to those published by the Mexican left) to be lacking in range and in depth…in fact, they only deepen my anger, because I have no time to read and deepen my thinking, and I get really pissed at all these journalists and analysts with lots of time for study and analysis, and who only repeat bullshit!

[1] pemex is Mexico’s national oil company, nationalized in 1938 from various Anglo-American oil majors, and recently privatized under Peña Nieto.
[2] Enrique Peña Nieto, current president of Mexico.
[3] Partido Revolucionario Institutional, which ruled Mexico from 1930 to 2000, after which it has alternated in and out of power. Peña Nieto is from the pri.
[4] Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, main candidate of the center-left prd (Revolutionary Democratic Party).
[5] Mexican term for the current ferment and strikes in response to the gasoline price increase (January 2017).
[6] The Oaxaca Commune of April 2008 was a weeks-long uprising of the people of the southwestern state of Oaxaca, set off by a militant section of the national teachers’ union, against the corrupt governor of the state (whom it failed to dislodge).
[7] Partido de Acción Nacional. The pan is a center-right party openly committed to a neoliberal agenda, in contrast to the pri, which has statist and nationalist rhetoric but which increasingly implements neoliberal policy.

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