Mexico: The earth is shaking

By Alfredo Peppard

The year 2010 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. The word is that 2010 is going to be a hot year, made so by the resistance. The economy in the U.S. and our treatment of Mexican immigrants have driven tens of thousands of migras back to impoverished Southern Mexico. Neo-liberalism, made law by NAFTA, has forced two million small farmers off the land and has devastated Mexican manufacturing industries. In Oaxaca and Chiapas it is capitalist agriculture destroying an essentially peasant, mostly indigenous rural economy.

In losing their U.S. jobs, these returning workers have lost the income that was crucial to their families here. Now they are coming home and finding no work. The price of tortillas is going up and the Federal Government is talking about a 2% sales tax on all consumer items. Two per cent might not sound like much in the Imperial Center, but here in the colonies, where malnutrition is widespread, the people say it is better to die fighting than to starve to death.

Floating on tourist and expat money, the City of Oaxaca is a relatively prosperous island surrounded by a sea of dire rural poverty. Even here, there are many barrios of improvised shacks with palm leaf roofs and cardboard walls. In the countryside of Southern Mexico, there are thousands of empty villages whose men have gone north in search of work. The lands lie fallow and are being bought up by speculators hoping to turn them into the sort of factory farms that blight Northern Mexico.

My Spanish is still inadequate to learn much from talking to those who don’t speak English, so I am reliant upon those who do. I had the privilege recently of being introduced to an older man. Like me, he was a lifelong socialist; like me he was waiting for the revolution; and like me, he wanted to live long enough to see it.

He told me that he hadn’t pinned any hopes on Obama, but that he had friends who had been stripped of their illusions by the Honduran coup. He had no doubt that the first task of the Mexican revolution was to free the nation from U.S. neo-imperialism. As is common among the people here, especially the more educated, he was conversant with the history of American interventions and invasions. Obama to him was just one more enforcer of an interventionist policy that runs back in a straight line from Obama to G. H. Bush, through Reagan and Eisenhower, to Woodrow Wilson.

The victims of aggression have much longer memories than the aggressors.

Most of the Mexican people are quite forgiving of the individual American. A few days ago, a man in his forties stopped me on the street to tell me that he had just been deported after 15 years in Los Angeles and he was hungry and could I help him. I gave him a few pesos and apologized for the vicious stupidity of my government. He was embarrassed by my apology. He told me it was not necessary; that he knew from his 15 years in the States that the decent people of our country had very little effect on government policy.

One of the more outstanding contrasts between the situation here and that in Seattle is the frequency of protest marches. Paradoxically, in this repressive environment they don’t need a police permit to gather peacefully and petition the government – that is, unless the authorities fear international embarrassment, as when the Orator in Chief was in Mexico City arming the repression under the guise of the War on Drugs. The organizers let the cops know they are going to march, and when and where, and a few traffic cops show up to stop traffic at intersections. No squads in riot gear or bicycle cops pushing people around.

We recently witnessed a march of a couple of hundred people, tiny by Oaxaca standards. The marchers were carrying dozens of red flags and posters calling for the ouster of the governor. As we stood watching them go by, and grinning from ear to ear, my eyes met those of one of the participating taxi drivers. He gave me a big smile and thumbs up. We exchanged clenched fist worker salutes and even bigger smiles.

Not that the forces of repression are not omnipresent. The streets are patrolled by the municipal, state and Federal police in pickup trucks, with policemen in the back wearing helmets and flack vests and armed with assault rifles. The Federal police are the most ominous – they frequently wear masks.

At a festival in the Zocalo before Christmas, thousands of people were present and TV cameras were set up to cover the governor as he addressed the crowds. Heavily armed police were on the rooftops and in the crowds. Riot squads were in nearby side streets. When Pauline and I witness these events, we feel like volcanologists monitoring tremors. We will keep you informed.

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