Violence in Mexico, the US Connection and the New Mexican Revolution

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.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/28101-violence-in-mexico-the-us-connection-and-the-new-mexican-revolution-an-interview-with-john-ackerman