Violence in Mexico, the US Connection and the New Mexican Revolution
Friday, 19 December 2014 10:07
By Jim Cohen, Truthout Tomado del Blog de:
John M. Ackerman
December 6, 2014: A march is held for the 43 abducted students. (Photo: Somos El Medio)
The US political and ideological establishment,
and liberal democracy in general, have been left celebrating their
"victory" of 1989 without being able to create new visions for the
21st century.
Over the past 20 years, it has become clear
that the end of the Cold War has meant more of a defeat for (neo)liberalism
than for progressive thought. Many people thought that progressive thought was
defeated in 1989 because we no longer had the communist referent and the
cleavage in politics that it represented; political discourse is dominated by
liberal, or rather neoliberal "democracy." In my view, it's quite the
opposite: Liberalism itself has become hollowed out over the past 20 years. It's
not so easy to claim that "really existing democracy" is about
liberty and freedom when the communist adversary has disappeared.
For the Financial Times he was the perfect
president, "the answer to Chávez" and the "populism" of the
South. They even said he was going to revive the "Washington
consensus." But after less than two years in office, that project has come
tumbling down and been exposed in all its hollowness. The people of Mexico and
the world are demanding something else. In Mexico, these demands are made more
powerful and pregnant by the revolutionary legacy.
People are wondering who is going to lead
today's uprising in Mexico. How will it be channeled? Will a new political
party arise? I'm not so concerned about that, precisely because of the legacy
of the Mexican Revolution. When you listen to the people who are taking to the
streets today and their leaders, in particular those in the state of Guerrero -
they're democratic and humble leaders - they are looking to recover the
revolutionary ideals and promises of equality, justice, rational and
egalitarian development, sovereignty and separation of church and state. We don't
really need a new ideology when so much of it is there already!
The first step was World War II. Already in the
1930s, Mexico cooperated in the US war economy through a combination of
coercion and willingness. But the break from the revolutionary sovereign legacy
of Mexico really began in 1946 with President Miguel Alemán (1946-52). The
first civilian president after a series of generals, he was a young technocrat
and an early neoliberal. With the birth of the PRI in the year he took office,
the revolution was transformed from a project and a compass for political action
into pure ideology and state myth-making. The Mexican political class, now
fully allied with Washington, used the revolution's legacy to support its own
legitimacy while undermining in practice all the revolution's principles.
Alemán was famous for purchasing his suits in
Hollywood and his Rolls Royce in London. He was an actor of global financial
capitalism. He was also perhaps Mexico's most corrupt president to date; the
comparison with Peña Nieto is striking.
We'll see what happens with Morena, but institutional
politics as such has run out of steam. One of its great weaknesses has been its
inability to link together social struggles and political action, or to provide
adequate connections between the local, national and international dimensions
of resistance. The left needs to take stock of these weaknesses if it is to
generate new spaces of convergence for a broad range of talented people and
interesting proposals, while refusing the corrupt clientelism of the parties,
the self-interested "solidarity" of the NGOs and the intolerant
sectarian politics of the ultra-left.
The real problem is more on the Mexican side. The
Mexican government has no humanitarian concern about its own people. The
Mexican state has assumed the US' priorities in the "drug war," under
Peña Nieto, just as under Calderón. The US government would not allow a similar
strategy in its own country, precisely because of all the violence it would
engender.
Los oligarcas
mexicanos están muy interesados en tener buenas relaciones con las empresas estadounidenses, ya que les da el
poder y la influencia, y las corporaciones estadounidenses también
están muy interesados en esa
relación, ya que pueden insertarse en el sistema mexicano y hacer
grandes ganancias. Nadie está realmente
luchando por el pueblo mexicano. La transición económica y política de México es comparable a la de Rusia, con la misma concentración de la riqueza y el poder entre un puñado de oligarcas,
comenzando con Carlos Slim.
Lo que el TLCAN ha hecho claramente es desestabilizar
el campo por lo
que es cada vez más difícil para
los pequeños productores campesinos para ganarse la vida, al tiempo que aumenta
el poder de la agroindustria.
La funcionaria indicó que tuvieron que usar la fuerza después de una
semana tratando de negociar el fin del bloqueo a la carretera
panamericana cerca de El Tule. Reconoció que sí utilizaron gases
lacrimógenos y balas de goma. 
El Coloquio Internacional “Epistemologías del Sur: Aprendizajes globales Sur-Sur, Sur-Norte y Norte-Sur”, organizado dentro del marco del proyecto ALICE: Espejos extraños, lecciones inesperadas, se realizó en Coimbra del 10 al 12 de julio de 2014.
12/17/14
Xochicuautla: Defender la tierra, defender la vida
