From Nancy Davies at Narco News on 9/28

[Wiley50]

http://narconews.com/Issue43/article2102.html


Teachers declare “maximum alert” was the headline. At the very same time, the Secretary of Internal Affairs, Carlos Abascal Carranza, stated “we are neither anticipating nor ruling out the use of federal forces”. What’s going on?

The URO’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has only the power of alliance, it’s too small now to carry off anything on its own.

The President Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) needs the PRI to beat back a surge against its president-elect Felipe Calderon whose victory the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) believes was fraudulent. If the PAN lets URO fall, that would be taken as a sign that the PAN won’t support any of the other PRI officials whose heads would roll if a popular movement sweeps the country. Thus far, historical political rivals the PRI and the PAN have been united by their common fear of a widespread uprising of some kind led by López Obrador. On the other hand, Fox has been reluctant to overtly support the unpopular URO.

The PRD is quick to point out what is going on. If the PAN cuts loose the PRI, it cannot out-vote the PRD.
The PRD, we may recall, was formed not two decades ago, mostly by dissident PRI members, so it’s not as if the PRD is the knight in shining armor. That is to say, it knows how to kick the ball.

Many of the Oaxaca APPO back the PRD, and expect to be backed in return. This puts pressure on the PRD. But many of the APPO follow other political currents, many to the left of López Obrador, who, after all, is another capitalist in populist mode. What kind of currents? Well, the APPO itself is a movement without political pretensions. It’s in a daily battle to rein in the socialist, communists, Trotskyites, and PRD elements, along with adherents to the Zapatista Other Campaign, so that a focus will be placed on its own popular assemblies.

It is the APPO politic that attracts the indigenous and campesino adherents. The socialists tend to be urban intellectuals. The APPO model is being presented in other states, and the APPO has sent out delegates to further that work, much as have the Zapatisas to further their position.

Of the above named groups, all have a political agenda with a clear political leader or aspirant thereto, except for the Zapatistas. Like the Zapatistas, the APPO is horizontal in structure, or at least it’s trying to be. The “movement leaders” supposedly are dispensable, and like the union assemblies, from which the teachers move their consensus up the ladder from the base, this is what the APPO is all about. That’s why the teachers, the Zapatistas and the APPO fit. The issues of each group, not the method, constitute their differences. Nevertheless they all are concerned with the poverty of the many and the wealth of the few, and the disregard for the indigenous population. The APPO is openly anti-neoliberal, as are the Zapatisas