CANADA-MEXICO: Lack of United Protest in Mexico Puzzles Academics

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Dec 11 1996 (IPS) - Just why the dire economic circumstances Mexicans face have not ignited political anger in the form of a solid worker-peasant alliance is a puzzle, according to University of Toronto sociologist Dick Roman.

Roman blames the confounding situation on the fragmented nature of the opposition in Mexico and the nation’s lack of a strong, independent labour movement.

The most coherent protests are being played out in the countryside among peasants and indigenous peoples fighting for land rights, Roman said at a Dec. 7 conference, ‘Rebuilding Mexico and Canada: People Confront Globalised Chaos’. “We don’t have an equivalent urban working class movement,” he stressed.

The most prominent rural movement is the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), whose armed uprising in the state of Chiapas on New Year’s Day in 1994 — timed to coincide with the official start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — galvanized support and excitement across Mexico and elsewhere.

The revolt has led to protracted negotiations between the Zapatistas and the government of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

While there has been talk of the Zapatistas translating their public profile into a national political movement, it has not yet materialised. “The Zapatistas,” Roman noted, “have not been successful in reaching out to the labour movement.”

The seeds for discontent should exist in Mexico’s once-robust industrial and urban working class, he said, as it is now experiencing declining wages, desperate working conditions, precarious employment, and competition from the expanding non- union maquiladoras in the north of the country.

But with a few notable exceptions, the labour movement has historically been co-opted by the PRI, which has ruled Mexico for 66 years with no opposition, until recently. The majority of Mexican workers belong to the ‘official’ Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CTM), which is not really a union but simply an extension of the state apparatus used to stifle dissent beyond certain approved limits, Roman said.

Although there are smaller, vigorous independent unions, he adds, they haven’t been played a major political role because they historically have emphasised short-term economic gains, rather than long-term political change.

Despite its failures to date, Roman does hold hope for the Mexican labour movement, largely because the “decomposition of the Mexican state” resulting from the current economic crisis has eroded the PRI government’s ability to buy out radical elements.

With the state-sanctioned unions now lacking the financial resources once used to purchase worker complacence, some people “have broken away and are exploring a new concept of unionism,” he said.

If a broad opposition linking peasants and workers does emerge, it will happen without much assistance from the left-of-centre Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), according to Roman, who expressed doubts about the party’s ability to be a catalysing force now, even though it has rallied popular movements in the past.

The PRD has lost its lustre since the 1988 presidential election, which, it is widely believed, the party would have had it not been for fraud by the PRI. Roman blamed its decline on the “not unprincipled, but not unslippery” PRD leadership, which sought to court foreign capital in the 1994 election by supporting NAFTA with a social clause.

The controversial 1988 election did give rise to a significant political development, as it mobilised Mexicans to demand institutional changes in their political system.

But York University political science professor Judith Adler Hellman is concerned that an emphasis on institutional reform can end up postponing consideration of other political issues.

“The democratic reform process is being posed as a prior condition without which nothing else can change,” noted Hellman, who served as an the international observers with the non-partisan Civic Alliance in the 1994 Mexican election.

On the other hand, she added, social movements that are focused solely on specific goals, such as clean water or the building of health clinics, are insufficient ingredients “for an alternative political project.”

In terms of whether Mexican activists have much to offer their Canadian counterparts — the original theme of this conference — Hellman is sceptical because circumstances in the two countries are very different. “I am uncomfortable with forced comparisons,” she said.

While political corruption and violence are endemic in Mexico, Hellman noted, in Canada they aren’t. Pointing to the recent election that brought a rightist government to power in the Canadian province of Ontario, which is now busy dismantling social, labour and environmental legislation, she said, “People voted freely. It’s something we (as Canadians) have to deal with.”

Hellman added that indigenous peoples in Canada and Mexico also face very different circumstances.

The concept of communal land use — central to the concerns of the Zapatista fighting for the indigenous inhabitants of Chiapas — is shared by all Mexicans, she noted. In contrast, the smaller and more geographically scattered indigenous groups in Canada base their fight for land rights on treaties signed with the British during colonial times.