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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Mexican government announced on 9 March its latest ‘shock therapy’ plan. Finance minister Guillermo Ortiz decreed that value added tax, which hits the poor the hardest, would be increased by 50 percent. Petrol prices would be raised by 35 percent and social spending would be held to just under 10 percent.
The austerity package received backing from US business and financial leaders who sponsored the $53 billion international bailout plan President Clinton engineered in February. It has not calmed the money markets and is creating discontent among Mexican workers.
It is the price ordinary Mexicans are being asked to pay for the crimes of their leaders. Already 250,000 workers have lost their jobs in the economic crisis, which came to a head when the peso’s value plunged in December. Interest rates have risen by 66 percent.
The economic crisis has sharpened the political crisis at the top of Mexican society. The thieves in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) are turning on each other. On 13 March former president Carlos Salinas fled into exile in the US following the arrest of his brother Raul for masterminding the assassination of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the PRI’s deputy leader, last September.
Salinas, once the darling of the US government and the business press for launching ‘free market reforms’ in Mexico, is now held responsible for running the Mexican economy into the ground.
Mexico’s bosses have also been divided on how to respond to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas last year and to popular demands for greater democracy. The national assembly, under President Zedillo’s orders, has approved an amnesty for Zapatista National liberation Army (EZLN) rebels who surrender their arms.
But the amnesty masks the army’s conduct of a ‘low intensity’ war in Chiapas. Hundreds of cases of army torture have been reported.
Working hand in glove with the reactionary Chiapas landowners, the army expelled thousands of peasants from land they had occupied after the EZLN’s uprising. Until now the Zapatistas have refused government ‘peace’ overtures.
The (EZLN) does not have the military strength to hold out against a sustained offensive that involves the Mexican and Guatemalan armies (and US advisers). But the Zapatistas are hoping – and Mexico’s bosses are fearing – that the economic crisis in the rest of Mexico will undermine the government’s ability to suppress them.
A secret memo prepared for Chase Manhattan Bank in January recognised this threat: ‘The Mexican monetary crisis... raises the issue of whether or not the Mexican working class will accept a prolonged period of wage losses and diminished living standards.’ The memo’s author urged the bank to pressure Zedillo to crack down on the (EZLN) and Mexican workers.
Hundreds of thousands around the country have demonstrated their opposition to the government and their solidarity with the Zapatistas. Workers are fighting back as well. Two major wildcat strikes in January and February – at the TDK and RCA/Thomson plants in Ciudad Juarez – won wage increases above those negotiated by the pro-government unions. Employers at nearby plants closed their factory gates to stop strikers from influencing other workers.
Mexico today is a tinderbox. As Jesus Navarro, a marcher on a recent protest in Mexico City, said, ‘The people are against the government. We want a Zapatista administration led by Marcos and his comrades from Chiapas. Chiapas was first to rebel, but all the other states will follow.’
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