The Mexican Democratic Party which descends from the Sinarquistas, Mexico's own quasi-fascist party of the 1930s, also got less than 2% and lost its registration. Out of tune with the times, this vestige of goose-stepping Mexican fascists seems to have gone out of business.
Posters saying "Don't vote for a politician vote for an ecologist!" touched the heart of the contempt which Mexicans have for the political fraud which permeates the political life of their country.
And the slogan "Mexico needs more green and less red" dramatised the violence which citizens suffer at the hands of the police and military. To hammer the point home, the Mexican Ecological Green Party (PVEM) held its
cipation and direct democracy. The perspective is one of rupture with the party-state, which will go far beyond the levels which those who are negotiating an "orderlv tran- those who are negotiating an "orderly transition" with the old regime expect.
Mexico is not in a process of democratic transition. Neither President Zedillo nor the PRI is committed to democracy. Democratic gains have been won through mass struggle, including the electoral rejection of the PRI, and through the existence of groups like the EZLN and EPR, which have opted for the armed struggle.
The old system is in irreversible decline. Those who stand with the exploited and oppressed can look to the future with hope and optimism! * Notes 1. In 1988, Cárdenas won most votes in the presidential election, but was cheated of victory by the PRI candidate, Salinas. 2. El Tercer Vínculo. De la teoría del caos a la teoría de la militarización, Carlos Fazio. except for the Greens closing rally at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where hundreds of students were murdered on October 2, 1968.
Above Mexico's streets dangled untold thousands of plastic banners of the other parties. PVEM was alone in sacrificing name recognition to its pledge to avoid using plastic. Instead, the ecologists relied on wall paintings and smaller numbers of paper and cloth posters.
Throughout Mexico, PVEM received well over a million votes, entitling it (by proportional representation) to a federal Senator, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, an outspoken critic of the PRI. The party also won ten seats in the Chamber of Deputies. According to results reported in the daily La Jornada, PVEM fell below 5% in only one district in the capital. In low income District 4, the party polled 14%.
PVEM is weakest in the northern states bordering the US. But the higher vote in Mexico City may well set the in Movie City may well set the trend for elections in 2000. During the next few years, resistance to US efforts to dump toxic and nuclear waste in northern Mexico may provide PVEM the opportunity it needs to grow. Its history of anti-nuclear organising is older than its existence. In the early 1980's, the group which would later become PVEM began environmental politics by opposing the nuclear power plant planned for Vera Cruz. An increase in cross-border contacts with US and
Canadian greens is expected.
[DLB/DF] *
The PRD and the social movements
The PRD was founded in 1989 through the merger of two tendencies. Cuautemoc Cárdenas and the Democratic Current of the PRI merged with the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), formerly part of the Communist Party. Cárdenas brought his own radical base in the form of militant peasants from Michoacan. The PSUM brought to the marriage not only the Communist Party's reformist tradition, but also former guerrilla groups and other more radical tendencies.
Since that time, the PRD has attracted many movement activists. Among those elected in July, for example, were three leaders of the debtors movement, El Barzón, lesbian activist and Fourth International supporter Patria Jiménez; two members of the Broad Front for the Creation of a National Liberation Movement (FAC-MLN); a leader of the Tepoztan struggle against the creation in that town of a private Golf Course; and a former candidate for secretary general of the National Teachers Union (SNTE).
One of the two FAC-MLN leaders elected to congress was Benito Miron, an advisor to the Mexico City bus drivers of Route 100 (SUTAUR), an independent union which spent over a year in a desperate struggle with the PRI-government of Mexico City.
The PRD has never had much of a strategy towards labour. But during this election, things began to change. For example, a group of executive, legislative and judicial employees of the Federal District placed an advert in newspapers on July 2 expressing their support for Cárdenas, "because he has been the only candidate who has solidarised himself with our struggle, has listened to us and has made our demands his...' [DLB] *
What's left of the Mexican left?
After ten years of regroupment and confusion, most of the Mexican left has collapsed into the mainstream parties. Dan La Botz asks whether the Zapatistas can break the mould. When Carlos Salinas de Gortari was elected president in 1988, he and his brother Raul began to draw various leftist groups, mostly Maoists, into their National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL) and then either into the PRI or into the puppet Workers Party (PT).
In 1988 most of the Communist left joined the National Democratic Front (FDN) supporting the campaign of Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas. Those on the left who attempted to resist the trend to electoralism and reformism were increasingly marginalised. There was a clear decline in electoral support for Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, presidential candidate of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT).
Then, in 1989, when Cárdenas organised the Party of the Democratic Revolution, former Communists, ex-Castroite guerrillas, some Maoists and some Trotskyists joined. Thus most of the left in Mexico dissolved itself into the new centre-left, nationalist and social democratic PRD. Many of those former leftists kept their former parties alive as organised tendencies with the PRD, hoping to fight for socialism within or through the PRD. But the various left groups with in the PRD impaired the PRD's effectiveness as a social democratic electoral party, while, in general, failing to carry out any meaningful socialist propaganda or agitation.
The crisis of the left deepened with the collapse of "Communism" in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many former Communists and other leftists lost a clear sense of political identity and purpose. * The author is editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis. For information about subscription, submission of articles, and all queries contact the editor at: <[email protected]> www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect/.
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Do the workers have a country?
by José Iriarte "Bikila"
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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Women's lives in the new global economy
Penny Duggan & Heather Dashner (editors)
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