by Stephen Lendeman
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_stephen__060830_courage_and_resistan.htmIt began on May 15 this year when teachers belonging to the 70,000 strong National Union of Education Workers in Oaxaca, Mexico took to the streets for the first time to press their demands to the state government to address their long-neglected needs. They included restructuring teachers' salaries, improving the deplorable educational infrastructure forcing teachers to conduct classes in laminated cardboard shacks, a lack of books and other educational materials and providing food for the many impoverished children who come to school each day hungry.
After Chiapas, Oaxaca is the poorest of Mexico's 31 states, each of which has its own constitution and elected governor and representatives to the state congresses. Both states share a common border in the extreme south of the country, and both are predominantly rural which exacerbates the impoverishment of their people. That poverty level worsened substantially in the 1980s and especially in last dozen years because of the neoliberal so-called "free market" policies adopted by President Carlos Salinas and maintained by successive presidents up to the present that included the destructive NAFTA trade agreement with the US and Canada. It followed from the IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies since the mid-1980s that included large-scale privatizations of state-owned industries, economic deregulation, and mandated wage restraint that held pay increases to levels far below the rate of inflation. The result is that the great majority of Mexicans for years have seen their standard of living decline, and more of them now live in poverty especially in the rural areas where farmers are unable to compete with heavily subsidized US grain and other food imports flooding the country since the NAFTA agreement ended agricultural import tariffs. It's the main reason so many of them and other impoverished Mexicans come el norte in desperation to find work unavailable to them at home.
Mexico's adherence to neoliberal Washington Consensus policies also added to the country's growing dependency on capital inflows that includes "hot money" free to enter and leave the country's deregulated financial markets. It led to an unsustainable current account deficit and collapse of the peso in early 1995 causing the worst depression in the country in 60 years and far greater impoverishment of the majority of the Mexican people. Those conditions still affect most Mexicans, they're not getting better, and there's a growing discontent and anger because of them. It's leading to acts of resistance and rebellion against a system of governance that's enriched a small minority of the country's elite (a handful of them to obscene levels of wealth) at the expense of the majority poor sinking deeper into poverty and the misery from it. It's playing out now in the mass-demonstrations in Mexico City's vast Zocalo Plaza de la Constitucion (where the country's first constitution was proclaimed in 1813) in the wake of another stolen presidential election and in the streets of Oaxaca where teachers, other working people, and many organizations and groups in solidarity with them are encamped and demonstrating daily for the rights they deserve. It shows that ordinary people anywhere will only put up with so much for so long before demanding change. In the Mexican streets today, it just remains to be seen how far these acts of resistance will go and what successes, if any, they'll have.
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If the people of Oaxaca stand firm and succeed in effectively running their state and getting redress for their demands which are quite reasonable, it will add momentum to the national campaign in the wake of the fraudulent Mexican presidential election now playing out simultaneously in Mexico City's vast Zocalo public square and elsewhere around the country. For weeks, Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) candidate Lopez Obrador (known affectionately as ALMO) and his supporters have maintained a 12 mile encampment in downtown Mexico City and effectively kept the city in gridlock. They've symbolically closed government offices, shut down whole sections of streets across the city for miles, taken over toll booths, for a time blocked Mexico's Stock Exchange, and held mass marches through the streets with as many as a record 2 million turnout at one of them to support their candidate. They demand a full and honest vote recount of the July 2 presidential election results that had clear rampant fraud and irregularities unsatisfactorily addressed. Unless they are, Obrador promised his supporters his campaign for an honest recount of all precincts "vote by vote, precinct by precinct" will continue indefinitely in the courts and on the streets where like in Oaxaca civil resistance will be used if their reasonable demands by peaceful protests are ignored which so far they have been.
At this point, there's no way to know for sure how the battle for electoral justice will be settled, but several key dates are approaching fast. The issue of resolving the election's official winner is in the hands of the Federal Election Tribunal (or Trife...prounounced Treefay). It has until August 31 to officially complete its final count and up to September 6 either to declare a winner, annul up to 20% of the precincts without annulling the entire election, or annul the whole thing which by law would mean the Congress would choose an interim president and have a new election within two years. A second key date is September 1 when current President Vincente Fox must give his annual State of the Union address. Lopez Obrador has said if the Trife declares National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon the winner, he and his supporters will protest in mass "civil resistance" at the halls of Congress on that date.
Two other fast-approaching dates must also be watched - Mexico's national Independence Day on September 15 and the following day when traditionally a military parade is scheduled through the historic center of the city. On September 15, the president always comes to the balcony of the Palacio National on one side of the square, rings the ceremonial bell and leads the "cry of pain" from the Zocalo. Lopez Obrador promises if Calderon is declared the winner he and his supporters will replace Vincente Fox with their own cry of pain and disrupt the traditional commemoration then and again the following day of the parade.
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