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PRD
Reasonable and respectable?
During the last few years, the PRD has businessmen, and the U.S. government. First, the PRD became a member of the Socialist International, the world federation of social democratic and labour parties. By doing so, the PRD signalled that while it wanted reforms, it was not dangerously radical.
Second, the PRD held occasional meetings with U.S. legislative and executive organs, including the National Security Council. Such meetings were intended to convey the PRD's program, including its demands for democracy and a more progressive economic agenda, but also to make clear the party's pragmatism, its reformist character.
Third and most important, perhaps, was the PRD's proclamation of its acceptance of capitalism and even neoliberalism. In May in New York, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas told an assembly of bankers that he was prepared to follow the Chilean model. New York financiers reported that discussion was key in swinging capital to Cárdenas.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, president of the PRD, met with the Mexican Co-ordinating Council of Entrepreneurs at the Industrialists Club on June 11 to 6 International Viewpoint #292 taken several steps to reasure bankers, try to convince the country's commercial, financial and industrial elite that his party represented a reasonable approach to Mexico's problems.
"Let nobody make a mistake," said Lopez Obrador, reading from a prepared statement, "we are not against those who with tenacity and effort risk capital, create jobs, obtain legal profits and are committed to the development of Mexico...
"We are not advocates of a moratorium [on paying the foreign debt], nor is our economic program the extreme opposite of the government's. We are not talking about a night and day change. It is only a question of getting rid of some of the sharp edges of neoliberalism and giving it a social orientation."
Cárdenas and the PRD succeeded in convincing the important players--the international bankers and the U.S. government above all--that they could be trusted. The U.S. government and the banks then put pressure on Zedillo and the PRI to accept political power sharing. [DLB] * forces.
The PRT will propose, through the PRDled coalition, a commune and district-level policing policy, as a democratic solution to the problem of public security. The democratic rights of the population have to be respected, including through the use of referendums.
The party will also be proposing the introduction of a participatory budget, like that introduced by the left within Brazil's Workers Party, in which local communities fix the priorities for government spending, with the aid of technicians and economists from the town hall.
This is one way of breathing reality into Cárdenas' promise that "all will govern." A participatory budget for Mexico City would be a strong power-base for the next round of conflict over the introduction of neo-liberal policies in Mexico.
The PRT seeks to root its activities in the actual level of consciousness of the masses, participating in mass struggles with the goals of strengthening the left camp, creating new, higher forms of organisation of mass struggles, and supporting wherever possible unitary demands. The focus is on direct parti-
Small parties collapse,