Mexico

Among civil wars and resistance
by Claudio Albertani

Two hundred years since independence and one hundred years since the revolution..

In the early morning hours of September 16, 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, parish priest of the village of Dolores, called the uprising that began the movement for independence from Mexico. Two hundred years later, the question is still on the table. The lavish ceremonies of commemoration - an expensive mixture devoid of historical content and popular features - have failed to hide the reality of a country prisoner of multiple addictions, violence-torn and immersed for decades in a terrible economic crisis. A country in which a group of power, particularly predatory and irresponsible, requires a model of social dispossession that has previously only in the era of Porfirio Díaz.

Vlady, Tepeyacm, drawing (1947). Vlady is the pseudonym of Vladimir Kibalchich (Petrograd, 1920, Cuernavca, Mexico, 2005), son of Victor Serge. It is the painter who painted the revolution in all the possible expressions: social, political, spiritual, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, scientific, philosophical and even music. His principal work is La revolución y los elementos, a mural painted around 2000 square meters, almost alone, some with the technique and some oil (on canvas), between 1973 and 1982 ( Biblioteca Lerdo de Tejada, Mexico City).

Order and progress

During 1910, just before he celebrated the first anniversary of Independence, the American journalist John Kenneth Turner published several articles there at the end of that year collected in a book, Barbarous Mexico (Mexico barbarian), initially in England and shortly after the United States. Turner was not a journalist, like many, but a close associate of the Flores Magon brothers, who, by the United States where they were in exile, trying to create a socialist revolution and libertarian. Posing as a respectable businessman, Turner was able to document the appalling situation in which they were employed under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. The result was one of the most devastating ever written about a country, and while in Mexico was published only much later, the scandal was caused colossale.1
Diaz, as the current rulers, was very sensitive to the image that you had with him abroad. On July 1, had just been elected president for the eighth time through electoral fraud and demanded to convince investors that, due to its motto Order and Progress - not much different from that of Felipe Calderón, law and order -, Mexico had become a prosperous country, where peace and social stability.
The tyrant had squandered a real chance in the celebrations for the centenary of Independence, which had culminated Sept. 16 with military parades and patriotic ceremonies. Díaz wanted to show off its progress in terms of modernization: more than twenty thousand miles of railways, an extensive telegraph network, telephone lines, electric lighting and great public works such as the new ports of Veracruz, Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz. Similarly, the wealthy citizens could buy expensive goods imported from Europe and the U.S. businesses in El Palacio de Hierro and El Puerto de Liverpool.
In that same time Turner revealed the existence of another Mexico, a Mexico fierce formerly dominated by a brutal inequality, a country with no political freedom, freedom of speech, which lacked a free press and free elections, without a legal system worthy of the name, without guarantees for the individual and without the freedom to achieve happiness, a country in which the executive ruled by corruption and an ever-present army, a country where political office had a price and sell at the best judges bidder.
Most people she was living in deplorable conditions. The farms were transformed into a model of exploitation in the country. Yucatan Mayan slaves died faster than they were born, and two-thirds of the slaves imported from Sonora Yaqui died during the first year after their arrival in the region. In the Valle Nacional (Oaxaca), the situation was even worse: all slaves, except for a very small number - perhaps five percent - were buried in a period of seven or eight months. The situation was no better in the mines and factories, where workers put up with days of more than twelve hours, without freedom to strike and no other freedom.
Turner did not just draw up an inventory of national disgrace, thought that slavery, laborers, poverty, ignorance and killing the General People have first and last name: he was responsible for the economic and political organization in the country, a particularly perverse form of capitalism and harmful.
The book ends with a prophecy: Mexico was a powder keg about to explode. When the prophecy came true, very fast, the revolution erupted in Mexican history with unprecedented violence. In 1910 in the country, there were 15.2 million people, over the next ten years there was at least a million dead (some sources speak of two million) and a million migrants in the United States.
Data are terrifying, even for the twentieth century as an explosive. With what results? "A victory of paper" as he said James Cockroft.2 Article 1 of the Constitution promulgated in 1917 prohibited slavery, and Article 3 establishes the public elementary education, secular and free, the 27 established the right to land and allowed expropriation "because of public interest," thus opening the possibility of legal recovery of indigenous communities, the 123 established the eight-hour working day, the right of association and the right to strike and prohibition to work in the children.
The constituents thus sanctioning the removal of Porfirio Diaz and, fearing another uprising, they made significant concessions to the popular movements. However, the dream of Flores Magon to link the struggles of indigenous farmers community - those men and women who "did not want to change and that for this they made the revolution" 3 - with the struggles of workers in both industries and the movement Libertarian International, remained a dead letter. Soon the Mexican Revolution became the dictatorship of one party - the longest dictatorship in the twentieth century - going to swell the already massive list of failed revolutions.
The people never forgot all of his dreams of emancipation and hence originated the armed revolt that bloodied Mexico after the revolution: the movement of Cristeros, Jaramillo of the insurrection, the September 23 Movement, the Partido de los Pobres, the Unión Popular, the Frente Civic guerrerense, to name only the most note.4 The latest expressions of this might be called the underground history of Mexico - the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in Chiapas, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR) el'Ejército insurgent Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERPII) in four or five states of the republic - are an example of the persistence of guerrilla cadres who were active for several generations and which connect with the current struggles.

Vlady, Emiliano Zapata, oil on canvas (1988).

Mountains of Money

How to explain this situation in a country that is part of the OECD since 1994, the exclusive club of wealthy nations? The answer is simple: the fierce Mexican Turner described with such toughness has never ceased to exist. The difference is that now, with the poor as ever, people are extraordinarily powerful and rich.
In an era of wrenching inequalities, there are few economies so polarized as the Mexican one. According to World Bank data, the ten percent of Mexicans who are at the top of the pyramid monopolizes 439 597 200 000 dollars, or 41.3 percent of the total national income while the poorest population receives a , 2 per cent. Mexico is the thirteenth in the world economy, but is located on the seventy-fifth place out of 186 countries according to their purchasing power of its abitanti.5
If we imagine the social landscape like a steep mountain range, its highest peak there is the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, the magazine "Forbes" defines the richest mondo.6 has a value of $ 53 million and sells the service Internet slower than the world price more expensive. Many billions more down, but they also present the list, we find, among others, the king of the television duopoly, Emilio Azcárraga, Televisa, and Ricardo Salinas Pliego, TV Azteca, who vie for the dubious honor sleep of the people and poison the political debate.
The richest woman is Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala, owner of Cervecería Modelo, which produces Corona beer, known throughout the world (and GM). Lorenzo Zambrano, king of cement (Cemex), has increased its capital by selling at high price in the Mexican market, where it enjoys a near monopoly, and value for money abroad, where he must contend with competition. Jeronimo Arango, king of the supermarkets, is a member of Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world and a world leader in cutting wages. It was he who invented an ingenious system using vouchers to pay the salaries of the supermarket, re-establishing the company stores abolished by the revolution.
The millionaire is a most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin Guzman Loera, head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel, which, with assets estimated at one billion dollars, occupies a modest 937 th place in the list of the rich, but a striking 38 ° in that of potenti.7
 It escaped from a maximum security prison in 2001 and is listed as the preferred drug trafficker of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), currently in power. A native of the Sierra de Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Guzmán Loera, 54, did not finish primary school, but the star of a national myth, namely the songs written in his honor, known as narcocorridos.8
Banks are nearly all trans-national consortia. Raking in unimaginable interests, they pay little axes savings and sell their services at a very high price, obtaining useful unthinkable in other countries. Even the agricultural industry (Monsanto), water (Vivendi) and energy (Fenosa, Iberdrola and Repsol, the latter a dealer for Cuenca Burgos, one of the largest natural gas reserves in Latin America) are foreign hands. The most coveted prize is the oil industry (PEMEX), legally owned by the nation, but a couple of decades, partly given in concession to private initiative, through legal stratagems. There is nothing new: as in the past foreign investment came from a single country, the United States, is currently the major presence - no less greedy - the capital of Europe, particularly Spain, which gives it a grotesque tone of the rhetoric of the bicentennial government and explains why the "socialist" Rodríguez Zapatero has been one of the first to congratulate the "liberal" Felipe Calderon when he took over the presidency in 2006, through electoral fraud.

Control of the workforce

The mining industry is worth a separate discussion. For the most part is captured by Canadian companies such as Minera San Xavier to San Luis Potosi, Black Fire in Chicomuselo, Chiapas, and the Continuum, a San Jose del Progreso, Oaxaca. All are characterized by a dark path on the repression in the workplace and environmental pollution, but the situation is better in Grupo Mexico, the third largest producer of copper, whose chairman and majority shareholder is the Mexico Germany Larrea. And this is so true that in February 2006 sixty-five workers died following an explosion caused by the negligence of the mine in the Pasta de Concho, Coahuila. The tragic incident has given rise to a struggle unsuccessfully to recover bodies and improved working conditions. In June 2010, has given rise to a motion to strike, resulting in an open clash, which resolved on 6 and 7 with the evacuation of workers by the police from the Pasta de Concho and also from Cananea, Sonora, and the violence was such as to bring back to mind the bloody events of 1906, including those held in Cananea, considered one of the previous revolution messicana.9
Of course, the present scenario is different, and some believe that the mining industry is trying an experiment in social engineering. The units in building power conflicts and to encourage mining companies maintain control over the workforce. "The system is known: to make the authorities take the parts of the corporation; fomenting division in the community, look for the best time to mount a challenge and be ready to kill even their fellow members in order to weaken the community who resists, and then so that is the subject of numerous allegations, even to imprison members ".10
Continuing our social altitude, far below, we find a middle class squeezed, exhausted and in a permanent state of exhaustion, but still prone to voluntary servitude. At the bottom of the abyss, relegated to the margins of the metropolis, on the slopes of the mountains or desert wasteland are the Mexicans who are doing badly or very badly. Are the majority. According to official figures, only 18 percent of the total population (105 million inhabitants) may have sufficient income to meet basic social rights (food, housing, education and health). In return, 47.2 million Mexicans live in extreme poverty and another 35 million are at risk of being victims of weaknesses. Some of these can be fatal, as in the case of the fire Asylum ABC, which occurred June 9, 2009 in Hermosillo, Sonora, which ended with the death of 49 children and wounded 76. The reason? For lack of funds, of the Instituto Mexicano Seguro Social rely on private companies and public administration of these kindergartens, conniving with the authorities, do not fulfill the minimum conditions of safety. Who is affected? Certainly not the children of the rich. La Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) report that Mexico focuses on 18 percent of the entire child population of Latin America, namely, 15.8 million people, four of them in extreme poverty .11
The Catholic hierarchy, eternal ally of power, blesses injustice. Likewise, strengthening its old battles against human beings, covering the abominable wickedness of its pastors pederasts, denigrate homosexuals, and conducting a heated crusade against the decriminalization of abortion. Recently, the clerical government of Guanajuato sentenced to 35 years in prison for seven women, "the crime of murder by reason of kinship, namely abortion. Fortunately, all were released on 7 September, thanks to a long struggle for reform of the Criminal Code state that now provides for sentences of three to eight years "only" for the same offense. One of the women freed, Yolanda Martínez Montoya, has served seven years behind bars. "We will not defeat. There is much still to do and change, "he said leaving the prison with his fist alzato.12 is good to throw in the face of the Church and her pimps the right words of the priest Hidalgo:" Open your eyes, Americans, do not be seduced from our enemies: they are not Catholic, their god is money, and their warnings are only subject to oppression ".(13)

Side Damages

President Felipe Calderón (del pan), lacking legitimacy, elected in 2006 thanks to a dirty game and a shameless media manipulation of the vote, has invented a crude war against organized crime, aware that "the security of power is based the insecurity of citizens "(Leonardo Sciascia). This war, which is monopolizing the world's attention is engaged between drug cartels that are competing for control of territory and among some of them and Stato.14 According to official data, despite the absence of ideologies and heroes, has left some 28 000 deaths between December 2006 and oggi.15 How many of them are innocent, without any connection to drug trafficking? There are no data on the subject, although we know that the army had killed "by accident" a lively child, an unhappy family, a reckless driver.
Since 2000, sixty journalists have been killed, eleven of them in the current year, while eleven others continue to turn up missing. The last, tragic event is the death of Luis Carlos Santiago, a photographer from the age of 21, was killed by gunmen on Sept. 19 in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. He worked in "El Diario de Juárez", which in 2008 had already suffered the murder of an employee, Armando Rodríguez Carrión, while his colleague, Jorge Luis Aguirre, requested and was granted political asylum in the United States following the threats ricevute.16 According to the International Press Institute, based in Austria, if he is a professional journalist, Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world. Using Orwellian language used by Bush in Iraq and that Obama continues to use in Afghanistan, Calderón speaks of "collateral damage".
Currently, 96,000 soldiers are patrolling the streets claiming to fight Mexico's drug cartels. We need something? Absolutely not. The war of Calderon is not credible because the drug cartels rely on the complicity of police officers, army officers belonging to the Special Forces, retired or active. Some intelligence reports reveal that about 62 percent of police officers is controlled by drug trafficking and that the sums they receive monthly reach the 70,000 pesos (about € 3500) .17 The journal Contralínea "indicates that between December 2006 and February 2010, the courts have issued only 735 final judgments for the crime of organized crime. This represents only 0.6 percent of the 121,199 people detained in the same period for alleged links with crime organizzata.18 the others? They are innocent and rely on the complicity of some authority which will eventually release.
The most serious offense is to be poor and the punishment includes imprisonment, torture, disappearance and murder. Behind the war against drug trafficking lies another war, war of the state against the company, which dates back to the seventies, when one hundred Mexicans were made to disappear from the army or police. A recent newspaper investigation indicates that between December 2006 and today there were three thousand political disappearances, human trafficking and combating narcotraffico.19 The date marks the unfortunate return of the dirty war is May 25, 2007, when two EPR leaders, Raymundo Rivera Bravo and Edmundo Reyes Amaya, were detained in Oaxaca and then are scomparsi.20
What is the social base of organized crime? In Mexico there are seven and a half million young people not working and not studiano.21 have a dream: to emerge from poverty. Some are pinning their hopes on supernatural entities such as Santa Muerte, a skeleton with a long robe and scythe, releasing miracles in Tepito, the rebellious district of Mexico City. On the other hand, the drug produces, annually, the income equivalent to forty thousand millions of collars (70 per cent of which is reinvested in the formal economy), something like the equivalent of the remittances of migrants earn more than the total export petrolifere.22 is the only sector where labor is abundant, because Mexico is not only a country of transit, but also a major consumer goods (primarily cocaine, but also opiates, amphetamines, ecstasy and new synthetic drugs ).
The film Infierno, just come on the screen, captures perfectly the charm unfortunate that the world of drug trafficking carries on youth. A migrant, Benjamín García, returns to his village after being expelled from the United States. Comes with many illusions, but faced a bleak landscape becomes part of a gang of drug traffickers, reaching a high at first, as ephemeral prosperity. The ending is tragic, and the message clear: organized crime has always existed, but now overlaps with a particularly greedy political class and a devastating economic crisis, creating an apocalyptic environment.
The alternative is to emigrate. How unfortunate die trying to cross the northern border? The sources are conflicting, what is certain is that amounted to thousands every year. Nevertheless, the migration policies of the United States - the infamous SB1070 Arizona law that criminalizes the undocumented migrants, the Guardian operating system and the construction of the wall of shame along the border - can not stem the flow of migration, because pressure is enormous. The only thing I get is the search for forms by migrants increasingly risky to cross the border and fell into the hands of increasingly murderous gangs. In recent years there has been a multiplication of the murders of immigrants, mostly women, not only in the United States, but also within the country. Many are not Mexican, but young Central and South America in search of that dream. In Ciudad Juárez, a place of passage in the direction of the United States, there were 7649 murders of women from 1993.23 Who owns the murderous hands that have cut their lives? No one knows for sure, even if the complicity of local authorities, state and federal regulations is an open secret.
The most recent and shameful crime against migrants has been perpetrated on August 24 last year, when 72 people (58 men and 14 women, the worst massacre occurred in Mexico since 1968), which were directed in the United States, were brutally murdered in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, by gunmen belonging to the Zetas, a particularly vicious cartel, which integrates with the proceeds from narcotics trafficking umani.24 The reason? Have not paid for their ransom. The seizure - it is useful to remember - is a lucrative business in Mexico for the bicentennial. According to the President of the Comisión Nacional de los derechos humanos (CNDH), Raul Plascencia Villanueva, in the first half of 2010 there were only ten thousand cases in the field of migranti.25
While all this happens, it is strange to note that the international agency investment Morgan Stanley raises its recommendation for Mexico to "market weight" to "great weight" .26 In other words, the country is in ruins, but business going well.

Vlady, Zacapu. Represents a campesino from Michoacán (Zacapu is a village in that state).

The other wars in Mexico

In recent years - from the memorable 1 January 1994, the day of the indigenous rebellion in Chiapas, to the no less glorious uprising led by the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos Oaxaca, APPO (2006) - Mexico was not only a country of cruel injustice, but also a social and political laboratory of international significance. Today social movements are beaten and injured, but not submissive. Given the failure of the Other Campaign - which in 2006 had tried, without success, not an electoral alternative to large national problems - the community joined the EZLN withdrew to their territories in the mountains south-east and remain there, despite the war underground that the government has never ceased to wage against them. Organized in so-called juntas de buen gobierno or Caracoles, strengthen their autonomy, are implementing productive projects, and improve alternative education and health. The prolonged silence of Subcomandante Marcos must not mislead, apparently has run its function as a spokesperson for the EZLN rebels and the communities have agreed to assume more direct control of its affairs. It is a wise decision in the current situation. It is true that now their national and international presence is less significant, but it is equally true that continue to be an example of libertarian struggle, mainly to fifteen million indigenous people who, in different places, are still vulnerable to ethnocide silent, if not directly to physical extermination.
San Juan Copala, a community of Triqui Oaxaca, was transformed into the Latin American branch of the Gaza Strip. Why? Because its inhabitants have committed the double crime of fighting against the caciques affiliated Unión de Bienestar Social de la región Triqui (ubisort) - local adoption of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the party that has monopolized the federal authorities until 2000 and who finished to lose the state elections - and to proclaim itself independent.
The reaction of Governor Ulises Ruiz, notorious for having suppressed the movement in 2006, it was decided: to organize and cover heavily armed paramilitary groups that accerchino the village, cutting through the electric power, closing schools and eliminating the health service in total impunity. Not satisfied, they cowardly murdered fifteen people so far (including two human rights activists, Beatriz Cariño and Jyri Jaakkola) and an unknown number of women raped. Even now prevent the delivery of food and water and control the entry and exit of people. On 13 September, while the media spotlight focused on a national holiday, have seized the town hall and threatened to massacre all the self-employed if they had not left the region shortly. The 18 have kept their promise and killed two members of the community, Paulino Ramirez and David García Ramírez and disappearing Eugenio Martínez López.27
This situation is not unique to Oaxaca. Similar scenarios are found in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, Nayarit, Jalisco and Michoacán and Guerrero also, states ruled by the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, which is defined on the left. A Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero, the people fight against caciques amuzgo protected by the governor Zeferino Torreblanca, a member of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, and Radio Ñomndaa (the word water), a broadcaster who gives voice to indigenous peoples, mestizos and blacks of region, lives in a perpetual state of siege.
In Santa María Ostula, Nahua village on the coast of Michoacán, in June 2009, residents of the community have published a manifesto of historical significance, laying claim to the right of indigenous peoples to defend life, liberty, culture and land. Soon after, they have recovered more than 700 acres of municipal property, illegally occupied by mestizo caciques. Since then, live harassed by the army, police and paramilitary formations. The result is regrettable, eight community members killed and three others missing.

Social dispossession, environmental disaster

n Mexico City, ruled by the left since 1997, the crackdown is directed mainly against young people belonging to the libertarian collectives and anarcopunk, which in recent years have increased and are perceived as a threat to the current head of government, Marcelo Ebrard. The latter, with the advice of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, is implementing the plan "zero tolerance", because of the hours which young people are considered guilty until they prove their innocence. The political irresponsibility is significant. In June 2008 a police organizations in the News Divine nightclub ended with three policemen dead and nine boys, three of them minors.
Many activists who exercise their right to protest end up being arrested because the only crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not having money to buy justice. Currently there are five young anarchist prisoners in the prisons of the District Federale.28 Their names are: Abraham López Martínez, Fermín Gómez Trejo and Carlos Orozco de Silva, detained 15 December 2009 on charges of throwing Molotov cocktails at some cars; Adrian Magdaleno, accused of trying to blow up homemade bombs inside a subway car, Víctor Herrera Gove, a student jailed for exercising their right to protest against the repression during the event on 2 October 2009.29
The social dispossession goes hand in hand with environmental catastrophe. From time deforestation causes havoc in the world, but especially in Mexico, where it feeds an infernal cycle of disasters "natural", in which periods of drought alternating with those of flooding. On the one hand, and desertification on the other hand, every time it rains more than normal, the hills landslide, the river overflow and entire cities are submerged. (The last time there was only one million victims in the State of Veracruz.) Moreover, the federal government is promoting a Programa de Reducción de emisiones por deforestación y degradación de los Bosques (income), because of which companies highly toxic buying and selling legal right to pollute under the guise of planting trees in another part of mondo.30
These serious environmental problems are aggravated because of mega tourist devouring natural resources and call into vogue the slavery era profiriana: privatization of water services in whole bioregions, construction of dams and diversion of rivers that destroy micro-climates (La Parota, Guerrero, Paso de la Reyna, Oaxaca, and El Zapotillo Arcediano, Jalisco, El Cajon, Nayarit), wind farms that destroy plants and eat communal lands (La Ventosa, Oaxaca), open dumps that contaminate crops and groundwater groundwater (Tlaquiltenango, Morelos, Tulum, Quintana Roo; Guadalcazar, San Luis Potosi and Tlaxcala, among many others) that transgenic crops poisoning mother earth. They are all profitable business, but can become factors of revolt, as can be seen by the proliferation of movements in defense of water, earth, air, biodiversity, food and health. Some will meet in the Asamblea nacional de afectados ambientales (Anaa) that coordinates and gives visibility to their struggles. The government's response is same as always: to imprison or kill those who fight to protect the environment and, under the pretext of combating organized crime, militarization of entire regions.
Even the factories are in peace. The offensive against the workers of the government of the Partido de Acción Nacional is terrible: every day we see the disappearance of a workplace, a trade union or a collective agreement. Stands out the heroic struggle - and largely solitary - for workers of the Sindicato Mexicano de electricistas - one of the oldest organization in the country - who want to keep their jobs in the Luz y Fuerza Centre, public industry, illegally closed by the federal government .
Today Mexico is a precipitate of all the calamities that threaten the planet: economic totalitarianism, environmental devastation, social polarization, obscene, parties "rogue" who vie for power in order to enrich themselves, broadcasters that elect governors or knock, bloody mafia , corrupting the social fabric. It would be risky to conclude taking the prophecy of John Kenneth Turner impending revolution of a redemptive or betting on the centenary of the metabolism renewal policy: 1810, 1910, 2010.31
But our story does not end well. "The highest stage of commodity production and the design of its total negation, equally rich in contradictions within them, are growing together," wrote Guy Debord.32
Mexico has a strong background and a dialectic and complex for many incomprehensible, because it is in the eye of the storm. Remember the words of B. Traven: "We are tomorrow. In our continent will decide the fate of the next millennium, is preparing the cradle of a new culture. It will be born in Mexico, because this is where you will experience the pain of childbirth ".33 This does not end tomorrow are born. But a short time.

(September 2010)