A key political test A SHARP class confrontation is shaping up for the Mexican presidential elections in July 1988. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party in what for 58 years has been virtually a one-party state, has chosen a candidate who personifies its right-wing evolution and an attempt to solve the country's economic crisis at the expense of working people. GERRY FOLEY
IKE A MONARCHY, in the L
Mexican bonapartist system it is the incumbent head of state who chooses the heir to the throne. As his successor, President Miguel de la Madrid named Carlos Salinas, Secretary of Planning and the Budget, the man directly responsible for the regime's economic policies.
Even the US journal Newsweek, sympathetic to Salinas's "modernist" economic program, commented in its October 19 issue that his record was "a load of political baggage to carry into any campaign." His record includes a sharp devaluation of the peso that drove up the price of imports. The Mexican currency is now exchanging at 1,500 to the dollar. Inflation has risen to nearly 200%. Since 1981, real wages have fallen by 50%
Consumption of basic foods such as meat, milk and eggs has fallen. Two million workers are without jobs, of whom 675,000 were thrown onto the heap of the chronically unemployed over the last four years. Some 56% of the state budget is drained off for payments on a foreign debt of over $100,000 million.
The "reconversion" of Mexican industry demanded by the International Monetary Fund, of which Salinas is an acolyte, has meant the multiplication of
"maquiladoras" along the US border. These are units of production specially designed by transnational corporations to have no independent viability, whose function can be shifted easily to other plants if the local workers rebel against sweat-shop conditions, and which are useless if nationalized
Salinas also openly favors privatization that would undermine the basic gains of the Mexican revolution, as well as opening up the country to imperialist imports. All of this has made him popular with the Mexican capitalists. The day after his nomination, the stock market reflected their rejoicing. Trading mounted so rapidly that the authorities had suspend it to keep the frenetic activity from getting out of hand. Flying the right-wing banner too high
From working people, there was different reaction. Even the PRI trade-union bureaucracy choked on him, and it has an extremely strong stomach. The official unions operate largely as strong-arm labour lieutenants of the state. They serve to regiment the workers, to keep them from organizing independently and fighting for their own interests. Workers who challenge their dominance or the government's economic directives are apt to face the official unions' goon squads, and even assassination.
Nonetheless, Fidel Velázquez, the patriarch of the official union bureaucracy, which has kept the majority of the workers tied down while the government has been fleecing them, felt obliged to make a demonstrative exit from the platform during Salinas's acceptance speech.
Moreover, like the party of the capitalist offensive in Britain, the PRI also has its equivalent of wets, a current that fears that the party is flying the right-wing banner too high and risking explosive confrontations. It is the so-called Democratic Current, one of whose principal leaders is Cautehmoc Cardenas, the son of the radical PRI president, Lázaro Cardenas, who presided over the great nationalizations of the 1930s.
In its September 28 issue, Bandera Socialista, the paper of the Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT), Mexican section of the Fourth International, analyzed this current as a follows:
"The first question that arises is why did its promoters think that it was necessary to form the Democratic Current (DC)? The concerns of the members of the DC are those of many religious, peasant, trade-union and business leaders of the PRI, including sections of imperialism. How to maintain the in-
MEXICO stitutions of the PRI regime and first of all the party itself, in the face of its growing incapability to cope with the country's crisis and to control the process of class struggle.
"Muñoz Ledo, one of the founders of the current, reflected this situation, saying that the country is facing a grave problem, which he called "the political legitimacy of the regime'
"'We might reach the conclusion,' Muñoz Ledo said in this respect, 'that the number of voters who...are supporting those who govern the country amounts to barely 20 per cent'." AdJustments, however, are very difficult in the corrupt and authoritarian PRI machine. The PRI president De la Vega Domínguez denounced the DC as a "fifth column," and Muñoz Ledo and Cautehmoc Cardenas were suspended. The October 19 Newsweek quoted the reaction of Adrián Lajous, an important defector from the PRI: "Even the political pros are saying, 'this can't go on, this has got to change, it has got to become more democratic.' But it's not that simple. Some people in the system fear that if you start to open [it] up, it will fall apart."
Two left coalitions run candidates
Despite the PRI grip, important struggles have developed in recent months. Hundreds of thousands of university students mobilized in a four month struggle at the turn of the year against plans to "re-convert" higher education to serve the needs of business. (See IV 117, April 6, 1987.) The Electrical Workers' Union (SME) staged a six-day strike, the first national industrial strike for long years, for better wages and working conditions. Thousands of strikers supported the students and participated in their mass rallies in February. In March, teachers in Chiapas, a state on the Guatemalan border, fought a 60-day strike for higher wages. At the Volkswagen plant in Puebla, 10,500 workers have been one strike for two months against the management's attempt to cut wages by 15% and lay off 250 workers.
Two left coalitions will run candidates against Salinas. They represent quite different responses to the crisis of Mexican capitalism and its political system. The Unidad Popular coalition was formed on July 22 by the PRT and three other left organizations. Its position was described as follows in an editorial in the September 28 issue of Bandera Socialista: "Its campaign is based on class independence, in particular from the PRI and the PAN [a historically right-wing bourgeois partyl, defence of the 3 independent mass organizations; sup-
October 26, 1987 • International Viewpoint
MEXICO port for the basic demands of the people; and popularization of socialism.
"The revolutionary campaign proposed by the Unidad Popular is reflected in its candidate for the presidency — Rosario Ibarra de Pieda. Her intransigent opposition to the government, the militancy she has maintained throughout their political life, the rebelliousness that she has infused into the struggles in which she has participated, the spirit of unity that she has brought to all organizations she has had dealings with will also be the features of the political and electoral work of the Unidad Popular.
"Unidad Popular identifies with the main struggles that have been developing since 1985 with a special dynamism. It identifies with the intransigence of the earthquake victims and those demanding housing; with the militancy shown by the strikers at the Hermosillo Ford plant and by the SME strikers; with the indomitable fighting spirit of the teachers in Chiapas and Oaxaca; with the rebelliousness of the University Student Council [the leadership of the student struggle]; with the firm and united advance of the peasants throughout the country." The UP will be represented on the ballot by the PRT, which has legal status and six seats in parliament.
Unidad Popular fights for class independence
Such a campaign, the editorial said, reflected the concrete need for the left to march in the same direction as the Mexican workers. But it also involved a struggle against the conceptions of part of the left "that want to lead the workers to ally themselves with sections of the PRI and even the PAN. The Mexican Socialist Party (PMS) has insisted that it is a good idea for the left to ally itself electorally with the Democratic Current of the PRI and the PAN, and has in fact turned itself into a spokesperson of the PRI opposition."
The PMS is a fusion stemming from a regroupment dominated by the Mexican Communist Party, the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) and four other parties. The implications of its policy of alliances with bourgeois forces has already been shown by its opposition to the student struggle at the turn of the year. At that time, the PMS's candidate for president, Heberto Castillo, attacked the student leadership as "reactionary" and "unrepresentative of the students." Leading intellectuals in the PSUM lined up behind the university rector, who led a red-baiting and violence-baiting campaign against the students. The PRT, on the other hand, International Viewpoint • October 26, 1987
Rosario Ibarra, Unidad Popular presidential candidate (DR) threw itself completely into the students' fight.
The parties forming the PMS called on the PRT to join in an all-inclusive union of the left. The PRT rejected this proposal in April in a statement entitled "Left unity must be forged in class struggle." (See IV 119, May 4, 1987.)
However, the PRT and the UP have proposed a coalition with the PMS for the upcoming elections. In its September 28 editorial, Bandera Socialista wrote: "In contrast with proposals of alliances of the left with sectors of the PRI or the PAN, Unidad Popular proposes another kind of alliance, one of all the independent left through a total electoral coalition between the PMS and the Unidad Popular, an alliance that would clearly distinguish itself from the government and bourgeois parties, and which through a process of primary elections organized by all the forces in the alliance will choose its presidential candidate, as well as its candidates for the Congress and the Senate.
"So far, the PMS has responded negatively to this proposal, saying that it would accept it only if Unidad Popular immediately endorsed its presidential candidate, Heberto Castillo.
"We think that such ultimatums have no place in the left if unity is desired. Just as Unidad Popular is not trying to impose its candidate, Rosario Ibarra, it will not accept the imposition of a candidate not chosen democratically by all the left. Therefore, we say, without any sectarianism, that we must form an electoral coalition of all the left under a program of class struggle and independence."
The PRT congress on July 25-August
2 prepared the party for the political struggle around the elections. It reflected a period of rapid growth for the PRT, which in ten years' time has been transformed from a relatively small nucleus of radicalized students to a small mass party with
3,400 members and many more thousands of supporters, a party rooted in key sectors of the mass movement. The congress rally on
July 25 drew nearly 4,000 people.
"PRT peasant delegations came by buses and trucks from as far north as
Sonora and as far south as Chiapas,"
Alan Benjamin reported in the September issue of Socialist Action, a
US Fourth Internationalist newspaper published in San Francisco. "As they entered the auditorium, they were loudly cheered with deafening chants of 'PRT, PRT,!"" In the Swedish Fourth Internationalist paper Internationalen, Lars Kjellander wrote that as the peasant delegations arrived "some shouted, 'Long live the land occupations!' There was powerful applause for the peasant delegates from Sonora, who a month ago were in the forefront of extensive land occupations in the big northern state. Every delegation that arrived was greeted with applause. Some had travelled more than 30 hours to reach the capital."
"Make the voices of the oppressed heard"
Speakers at the rally included two PRT members of Congress, Rosario Ibarra, leaders of the parties in the UP and a representative of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Rosario Ibarra stressed that "the earthquake victims — together with all the victims of this oppressive system - need an electoral coalition that will serve as a vehicle to strengthen the mass movements and to make the voices of the oppressed heard." She said that any presidential campaign that genuinely tried to promote the mass struggles had to be totally independent of the bourgeois parties and personalities.
The keynote speaker was Edgardo Sánchez, a member of the PRT Political Committee, who described the party's election program. He summed it up by saying: "Our overall objective in these elections is to stimulate the independent activity and organization of the masses and in this manner build the party as a necessary instrument to advance our revolutionary goals.
"The PRT is not willing to trade its political objectives for a mess of potage. It is not willing to dissolve itself for a mere electoral agreement." *
(A full report of the PRT congress will be published in the next issue).