At first glance, Mexico would seem to be a lost cause for the Left. After the failure of the “Washington Consensus” to bring peace and prosperity to Latin America in the 1990s, almost every country joined the “pink tide” at some point over the last two decades, including Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Peru. None of these experiments were perfect, and many were cut far too short, but each one of these countries demonstrated enough political flexibility to at least begin to respond to citizen discontent through institutional channels.
Mexico’s congealed political system, on the other hand, has not even started to develop practical alternatives to neoliberalism. Since 1982, the country has glided without interruption towards a neoliberal dystopia of increased wealth concentration, radical labor “flexibilization,” and the privatization of almost everything and anything in sight. Simultaneously, Mexico has maintained the same old authoritarian politics grounded in government repression and censorship, fraudulent elections, and a reverse “cultural revolution” bent on expunging the country’s long tradition of social activism and community resistance.
The progressive governments of Latin America are now under fire. The 2015 victory of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, the politically motivated impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in August 2016, and the ongoing economic war against Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela—combined with the previous ousting of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012—imply a clear resurgence of right-wing politics in the region.
In this context, the possibility of a left-wing revival in Mexico would seem to be even more of a pipe dream. If Mexico wasn’t able to accompany the shift to the left when conditions were relatively favorable, with high oil and commodities prices and an opening up in the geopolitical context, it would seem to be simply impossible for it to do so now, in the middle of a global economic downturn combined with concerted efforts by the United States to lock down “rebellious” Latin American states.
Surprisingly, the situation appears to be precisely the opposite. The lack of political and economic change over the last three decades in Mexico has turned it into a prime site for the renovation and strengthening of the Left. Today’s global climate of economic instability and ideological transformation has put the status quo, whatever that may be, at a distinct disadvantage. In Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina, for instance, the Right has used profound feelings of discontent to oust or challenge sitting progressive governments. Meanwhile, countries with progressive governments, such as in Bolivia, are faced with the challenging task of simultaneously combatting the ideological apparatus of their local oligarchies and defending the status quo.
In contrast, in Mexico, anti-establishment politics has nowhere to go but left. Mexico’s democratic “transition” was already one towards the right. Presidents Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderón (20062012) were from the right-wing, Christian democratic National Action Party (PAN). Sitting President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) is from the old-guard Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which already ruled the country for decades during the past century. All three of these leaders have completely discredited right-wing politics, not only through their failed neoliberal economic policies but also by squandering the historic opportunity to use the alternation between political parties at the top as a lever to change the political system at the bottom.
The undisputed leader of the Mexican Left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, today therefore represents the only true opposition to the status quo. The former Mayor of Mexico City technically “lost” in the presidential elections of 2006 and 2012—both were characterized by grave irregularities and fraud. But recent electoral results and public opinion polling show that his chances of winning the 2018 presidential election are better than they have ever been before.
During 2016, López Obrador’s freshly minted party, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), achieved what neither Bernie Sanders in the U.S. nor Spain’s Podemos was capable of: the much coveted sorpasso, in which the old Left is “overtaken” by the new in terms of electoral presence. In the end, Sanders’ “political revolution” was defeated by Hillary Clinton and the establishment U.S. Left in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries. Almost simultaneously, in June of 2016, on the other side of the Atlantic, the emergent Podemos party of Spain was defeated for the second time in a row by the old “third way” Spanish Socialist and Workers’ Party (PSOE) in the second round of voting for the Spanish parliament. In contrast, that same June of 2016, MORENA quickly and quietly blazed past its establishment rival, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in elections that took place simultaneously in 13 states, thus proving it will be a major force in Mexican politics in the years to come.
MORENA was created in response to the decision of the PRD to ally in 2012 with Enrique Peña Nieto and his frontal attack on the progressive legacy of the Mexican Revolution and the remnants of the Mexican welfare state. By joining Peña Nieto, and through him the old authoritarian PRI and the rightwing PAN which support his policies, the PRD privileged access to corrupt power over its historic commitment to left-wing principles. López Obrador, along with most of the social movements and intellectuals who had previously been with the PRD, therefore broke with that party and set to the task of constructing a new party closer to civil society and committed to social change.
MORENA finally came into existence on July 18, 2014. Almost immediately thereafter, it placed a solid fourth place in the 2015 midterm elections, outpacing the numerous small, satellite parties that pepper Mexico’s political landscape. MORENA’s 8.4 percent national polling numbers in 2015 compare favorably to the 7.9 percent that the PRD received in its first election in 1991, also a midterm congressional election. And we should take into account that the PRD, founded in May 1989, at that time had been in existence for two years compared to MORENA’s one in 2015.
At its own two-year mark, during the June 2016 elections, MORENA left the PRD in its wake. These elections brought into play a dozen key governorships, hundreds of municipalities, as well as the Mexican Constituent Assembly. MORENA significantly increased its support in 2016, reaching 16 percent of total votes, thereby displacing the PRD as the most important leftwing contender for the 2018 elections. All of the national electoral polls today place López Obrador in first place in preferences for the 2018 presidential election.
MORENA is now the dominant party in Mexico City. It received more than 25 percent of the vote in key battleground states like Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas and surpassed the PRD in nearly all of the states where both parties competed without alliances. (The only exception was the small state of Tlaxcala.) Moreover, the only places where the PRD nominally performed well in 2016 were in those states in which the PRD allied with the PAN to support candidates who had recently abandoned the PRI, like Miguel Angel Yunes in Veracruz or Carlos Joaquín in Quintana Roo. To many this confirmed the ideological bankruptcy of the supposedly left-wing PRD.
Mexico’s Neoliberal Nightmare
After the election of Peña Nieto in 2012, the international press explicitly hailed him as the man who would be able to stop the advance of South American “populism” and bring back the “Washington Consensus” as the dominant ideology in Latin America. Indeed, Peña Nieto’s central, though unstated, objective since taking power on December 1, 2012, has been to dismantle the progressive legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He has drastically rolled back protections for labor, imposed neoliberal education reforms, and moved to hand over the enormous oil and gas industry to transnational petroleum companies. He has also turned Mexico into a servile client of U.S. foreign policy and its northern neighbor’s “national security” concerns.
Oil privatization has been the cornerstone of Peña Nietós reforms. The continued existence of the stateowned monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), created in 1938 after President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated foreign oil companies, was an unacceptable stain on an otherwise impeccable neoliberal record since Carlos Salinas took power in 1988. Previous governments had privatized banks, pensions, airlines, telecoms, and highways, but had not dared to privatize oil and electricity, out of fear of the social unrest such a move could create.
Under Peña Nieto all caution was sent to the wind and the job was done to the glee of the international press. “As Venezuela’s economy implodes and Brazil’s growth stalls, Mexico is becoming the Latin oil producer to watch—and a model of how democracy can serve a developing country,” wrote the editors of the Washington Post in December 2013.
Peña Nieto has also turned his back on the rest of Latin America and embraced Washington’s vision of regional power politics. In Mexico, domestic energy, migration, drug, national security, and foreign investment policies are today increasingly dictated by Washington. A recent Council on Foreign Relations study authored by former World Bank president Robert Zoellick and General David Petraeus, former Chief of Operations in Afghanistan and head of the CIA, on the future of relations between the United States, Canada, and Mexico is eloquent in this regard: “Near the end of the century, Mexico, which had maintained a working but distant relationship with the United States, made a courageous decision—to look north, to forge new economic links with the United States and Canada. In doing so, Mexico fused North and Latin America.” The authors then announce that their “Task Force believes that North America should be a central priority for U.S. policy. North America is the ‘continental base’ for the United States; it should be the starting point for its geopolitical and geoeconomic perspectives.”
Sadly, the idea of Mexico as the “continental base” for U.S. global dominance has also become the view of the Mexico City policy establishment. The invitation extended by Peña Nieto to Donald Trump to visit Mexico City at the height of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was an egregious illustration of this shift. Trump visited the Mexican President a few hours before giving a much promoted immigration and border policy speech in Arizona in which he would ratify his decision to deport millions of Mexican immigrants as well as make Mexico pay for an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall.”
But Trump received royal treatment in Mexico City. A Mexican Air Force helicopter flew him from the international airport to the official presidential residence. After their meeting, Peña Nieto and Trump gave a formal joint press conference, as if the Republican candidate was already president of the United States. Peña Nieto did not question Trump’s racist and xenophobic statements nor did he stand up for the rights of Mexicans living in the United States. To the contrary, the Mexican President applauded the two men’s “fundamental agreements” on policy and offered to work with Trump to “strengthen” both the U.S.-Mexico and the Mexico-Guatemala borders. During his turn at the microphone, Trump said Peña Nieto was his “friend” and later, during his speech in Arizona, called him a “wonderful president.”
Peña Nieto has also faithfully followed instructions from Washington to continue with the disastrous militarized “kingpin” drug war strategy, based on taking out leading narcotraffickers without attending to the root social and economic causes of the problem. The result has been a continuation of the bloodbath initiated under Felipe Calderón, at a rate of almost 20,000 violent homicides a year, according to official statistics.
Meanwhile, Peña Nieto has relied on violence, repression, and censorship in order to impose his neoliberal, neocolonial policies on a recalcitrant population. According to a long series of reports by both international and local NGOs, human rights violations and attacks on the press have skyrocketed under his administration. Since Peña Nieto’s inauguration, protests and marches have often been joined by government provocateurs and have been met by violent repression and arbitrary arrests. The beating of dozens of protesters, including women and children, and the arbitrary detention of 11 innocent students during the massive, peaceful protests of November 20, 2014, in solidarity with the missing Ayotzinapa students were particularly symbolic in this regard. The firing of Mexico’s most popular radio news anchor, Carmen Aristegui, in March 2015 signaled an end to the regime’s tolerance for critical journalism. And the massacre committed by the Federal Police in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca on June 19, 2106, in which nine unarmed protesters were killed and over 100 wounded, put the end to any semblance of respect for human rights by the Peña Nieto administration.
Rekindling Revolution
Despite the fact that Mexico today remains enshrouded in the dark night of neoliberal authoritarianism, there is still great hope for the future. Indeed, Mexico paradoxically stands today as a key site in Latin America to inspire the renovation of transformative democracy and social change in the twenty-first century, both because of its revolutionary history and the recent emergence of powerful, new social movements. The staying power of the Mexican Left outlined above is not due to the supposed “caudillo” style leadership of López Obrador, as the neoliberal ideologues repeat ad nauseum, but to the long tradition of popular participation and revolutionary ideals, which remain firmly embedded in Mexican political culture and public institutions.
The Mexican Revolution was the first great social revolution of the twentieth century. Just as Francés Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stands as the crowning achievement with respect to the defense of first generation civil and political rights in the eighteenth century, the Mexican Constitution stands with respect to the institutionalization of third generation social and economic rights in the twentieth century. This Constitution, still the law of the land and deeply ingrained in popular consciousness, is revered by comparative constitutional law scholars as the first in the world to formally grant citizens a wide array of substantial rights, including the right to work, education, land, and healthcare. It also established a radical separation between church and state, which goes far beyond that in existence in the U.S. or Europe, a solid defense of national sovereignty, and an innovative property rights regime designed to assure a free and equal society.
The Mexican Constitution is the original historical referent for the wave of constitutions and international covenants oriented around social rights, which spread throughout the globe during the rest of the twentieth century. And it has recently been updated to include highly advanced principles with regard to rights to a healthy environment, access to culture, defense of human rights, free and fair elections, public accountability, access to information, and pluralism in the media.
What’s more, since the Mexican Revolution predated both the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, these rights are articulated through a grammar that escapes the conceptual hardening of the superpower disputes that dominated the past century. Indeed, what previously appeared to be the great weakness of the Mexican Revolution—its supposed lack of “ideology”—is today perhaps its most important inspirational strength.
After the Revolution of 1910 and the Constitution of 1917, Mexico once again stood out on the global stage for the institutionalization of social gains during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). Cárdenas was not an ideological populist in search of personal glory, like Argentinás Juan Domingo Perón. Nor was he a liberal welfare statist trying to perfect the capitalist system, like Franklin D. Roosevelt in the U.S. In contrast, Cárdenas was a remarkably innovative and eclectic leader committed to political pluralism, grassroots mobilization, and structural change whose legacy lives on today both in Mexicós political institutions and its political culture. Extensive land reform, the privileging of labor rights over industrial objectives, a radical overhaul of public education, the collective management of strategic industries, and the nationalization of the oil industry in a pragmatic fashion through strictly legal, institutional channels were all achievements of Cárdenas.
Cárdenas’ enormous success in fashioning a modern revolutionary, participatory state is what explains the exceptional nature of Mexico’s political development during the twentieth century. In a region plagued by constant coups, foreign interventions, civil wars, and armed revolts, Mexico stood out throughout the twentieth century for its remarkable political stability, powerful government institutions and political discipline of its armed forces. Even after Cardenas’ departure from the political scene, waves of powerful grassroots movements organized by rural teachers, students, peasants, and workers inspired by and often even directly created by the Revolution, the Constitution, and Cardenismo, consistently held in check the abuses of the post-revolutionary authoritarian state founded by the PRI in 1946.
In recent years, the contemporary global upsurge in grassroots mobilization for justice—from the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the Arab Spring and more recent popular movements in the U.S., Chile, Spain, and Brazil—can be traced back to the historic uprising of indigenous peasants members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in southern Mexico in 1994 in response to the impoverishment and oppression that resulted from the application of neoliberal policies. In 2006, Mexico was home to some of the largest citizen mobilizations of the early twenty-first century, as millions of people flowed into the streets to demand a recount after the hotly contested presidential elections of that year. In 2008, massive street protests led by López Obrador successfully stopped cold the plans drawn up by the ruling class and its international allies to privatize the national oil company. In 2011, an unexpected mass movement led by a little-known poet, Javier Sicilia, whose son had been assassinated by criminals, quickly galvanized domestic and international support against the global drug war. And in the spring of 2012, an enormous student movement, called “Yo Soy 132” (I Am 132), emerged only six weeks before the election, smashing into pieces Peña Nietós carefully choreographed cakewalk to victory. As a result, even though Peña Nieto did officially win the elections by six percentage points (38 percent against the 32 percent received by López Obrador), he began his administration with the lowest popular approval ratings in recent Mexican history.
More recently, the abduction of 43 and murder of 3 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the city of Iguala, in the heart of the state of Guerrero, on September 26, 2014, worked like a spark in a dry field of illegitimacy. Most of the victims were students at the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college, renowned for its commitment to social change and community education. They are one of the groups that has been particularly active in defending the progressive ideals of the Mexican Revolution from today’s systematic attacks by Peña Nieto. Ironically, the unarmed students were fired on after having organized a collection of funds needed to travel to Mexico City to participate in the annual march in remembrance of the historic Tlatelolco student massacre of October 2, 1968.
The attack, torture, and alleged incineration of the students led to an enormous citizen rebellion with widespread international resonance. During the fall of 2014, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets throughout Mexico and in over 100 cities abroad, with particularly strong protests among the Latinx community in the United States. Students suspended classes on multiple occasions in dozens of schools throughout the country in solidarity. Over 20 municipal governments in the state of Guerrero were taken over by independent citizen groups, frequently armed although peaceful, who refused to be the victims of the next massacre. Parents and colleagues of the kidnapped students shut down airports, closed highways, destroyed government buildings, blockaded banks, and sat-in at shopping centers. Leading musicians throughout the globe, from Peter Gabriel and Manu Chao to Calle 13, Rage Against the Machine, and Lila Downs all publicly expressed their solidarity with the cause of the students. Not since the uprising led by the EZLN in Chiapas in 1994 had Mexico been convulsed by such a powerful independent citizen movement, which sought to transform the roots of the existing system of repression and inequality. The widespread protests in 2016 by the Mexico’s teachers’ union, the National Coordinating Committee of Educational Workers (CNTE), against Peña Nietós neoliberal education reform and in response to the massacre of Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, are evidence that the wave of protests will continue long into the future.
After four years in power, Peña Nieto is now the most disliked president in modern Mexican history. Polls show that at most 23 percent of the population approves of his performance, and an even smaller minority supports his policies. These numbers are particularly shocking because Mexican citizens are well known for their presidential reverence; one of the inheritances of almost a century of authoritarian oneparty rule is that presidential approval ratings only rarely dip below 50 percent.
The Struggle to Come
Mexicós so-called democratic transition of 2000, in which for the first time someone from a party other than the PRI won the presidency, did not lead to an opening up of the political system or a softening of neoliberal economic policies, as many had hoped. Rather, it served to further consolidate authoritarian neoliberalism. Moreover, the return of a younger generation of PRI leaders to the presidency in 2012, did not lead to policy innovation but instead to an even more aggressive application of the same old censorship, repression, and neoliberal policies that began during the 1980s.
Despite the failure of institutional politics to adapt and respond to social discontent, there are clear signals that change is brewing under the surface. Indeed, the enormous chasm which today exists between the political class and civil society makes Mexico increasingly look like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador before the rise of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa. According to the most recent Latinobarómetro study, only 17 percent of the Mexican population is “satisfied with the functioning of democracy” in general. This is the second lowest number in all of Latin America. Only Hondurans are less satisfied than Mexicans with their political institutions.
Demographic trends amplify Mexicós rebellious spirit. Urbanization, increased education levels, greater accessibility of information technology and a boom in the youth population have led to a more conscious civil society. Although television and radio continue to be as monochromatic and authoritarian as they were during the old days of Mexico’s “perfect dictatorship,” it is no longer necessary to hide in the hinterlands to develop networks of resistance, as was the case with the guerrilla movements of the 1970s. Anti-establishment organizing can now take place in the light of day.
We can expect the continuation of exemplary counter-hegemonic struggles—both violent and non-violent as well as legal and illegal—to continue long into the future in Mexico. The emergence of such a powerful societal coalition in response to the Ayotzinapa massacre was a clear example of this. The growth of support for MORENA also indicates the opening up of new opportunities for electoral change. Both Ayotzinapa and MORENA are constructing bridges in innovative ways between rural and urban activists and forging new ties of domestic and international solidarity. As old barriers crumble, new opportunities emerge which give hope for finally achieving the transformation of the Mexican regime.
The big challenge between now and the upcoming 2018 presidential elections is the construction of a vast “popular front” or “hegemonic bloc” between, on the one hand, the numerous grassroots social movements struggling for justice and in defense of their land, resources, and livelihood and, on the other hand, the politicians and civil society leaders, old and new, who have decided to strike out on their own through MORENA. In 2015, each side moved in opposite directions, with the parents of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students and the protesting teachers calling for an electoral boycott and even disqualifying MORENA as a supposedly “opportunistic” party. And more recently, the EZLN has reiterated its rejection of all political parties, including MORENA, and has announced that it may launch its own presidential candidate in the 2018 elections.
But there have also been other more encouraging signs of collaboration between social movements and the left-leaning political party. For instance, at the end of 2015, the Popular Assembly of the city of Tixtla, Guerrero, where the Ayotzinapa teachers’ school is located, established an electoral alliance with MORENA. The same occurred between the CNTE teachers’ union and MORENA for the 2016 gubernatorial elections in Oaxaca. And the vast majority of the MORENA candidates for the Mexico City Constituent Assembly, also in 2016, were leading intellectuals, actors, and leaders of civil society. The continuation and deepening of such bridge-building will be essential in order to make it possible for Mexico to finally turn the corner in 2018.
John Ackerman is a professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIJ-UNAM) and Editor-in-Chief of The Mexican Law Review. He is also a columnist for La Jornada and Proceso. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnMAckerman and read his blog at www.johnackerman.blogspot.com.
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