Posted on 07/27/2006 2:14:58 PM PDT by StJacques
I am posting this independent blog for the benefit of my fellow Freepers who have been watching the post-election controversy in Mexico, following a ping I received from Freeper SAJ -- thanks again SAJ -- to another thread posted earlier today on a Christian Science Monitor article reporting the closure of a popular foklore festival in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca due to local political protests and relating the matter to the larger post-election controversy in Mexico. To get to the point of why I am posting this separate from that thread, beyond the mere length of what I am writing, I am most unimpressed by the reporting in the article, which raises not only larger questions in my mind about the way the Christian Science Monitor reports the news, but about their reporters in particular, because in this case I see the overtones of an agenda. The article seeks to relate current political and social unrest in the southern Mexican State of Oaxaca to the larger political crisis now looming over Mexico in the aftermath of the presidential election. And I am going to state directly that Sara Miller Llana, the reporting journalist, is either very shallow or she may be attempting to deliberately misrepresent the Oaxacan situation as possibly legitimizing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's challenge to the election as an expression of "the true will" of the Mexican underclasses. For this reason I am pinging the list on this blog to permit me to flash an "MSM Alert" on this kind of reporting coming out of Mexico.
First; I would like to say that I am very disappointed in the article for its lack of depth in either its avoidance of the complexities of what is happening in Oaxaca and Mexico or perhaps its deliberate intent to deceive the reader when describing the "lines of conflict" it lays out; I really can't tell which is the case. What is going on in Oaxaca is a little more profound than a lot of people may realize, and certainly more so than the article's author appreciates. Right now, due to ongoing protests originating in a teacher's strike that began last May, Oaxaca has been forced to suspend its biggest tourist attraction, the annual festival known as the Guelaguetza, which I have seen described as the largest indigenous folklore festival in the Americas. It attracts almost a million visitors every year and, in a poor state such as Oaxaca, this is a very big deal. The festival celebrates the union of pre-Columbian Indian culture with modern Roman Catholic traditions and is particularly notable for the many and various indigenous dance performances and artisan handicrafts displayed from all around southern Mexico. Right now the Governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, says the festival is back on, but the city of Oaxaca says it's off, tourists have been scared away, and the whole thing is now winding down.
The origins of the surrounding conflict that have brought the festival to a halt go very far back and are truly traced to the incredibly corrupt rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in Oaxaca, which has controlled the state for over 60 years. The author of the linked article from which this thread originates mentions the PRI only twice, once in a comment of her own and once in quoting someone else's remarks on the PRI's history of corruption. She does introduce Ulises Ruiz, the PRI Governor of Oaxaca, as someone who has become most unpopular in the state because of the public perception of his corruption -- and I am in no doubt that he is genuinely corrupt -- but she does not tell her readers that Ruiz is a PRI party member nor does she make clear that the teacher's union in Oaxaca, whose "annual strike" began this upheaval, is an organization that had for years been dominated by the PRI, nor does she provide any information to show the way in which this controversy has been of great political significance in the election, carrying with it important implications for the PRI, and the post-election controversy between Lopez Obrador and the virtual winner of the election, Felipe Calderon. I want to assure all of you that the current context of the disputes within the teacher's union in Mexican politics is profound, but I'll get to that in a second. And it appears to me that the author does not want to present the political context in any depth because she prefers to focus upon what I will describe -- MSM Alert Everyone! -- as the "social context of mass movement protest in Mexico as made evident by the current situation in Oaxaca" (my description). I don't think anyone can deny there are class overtones to this upheaval, the the pure raw politics of the changing Mexican political landscape are writ much larger than Ms. Miller Llana has revealed.
Let me say a few words about the Mexican teacher's union, the SNTE (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), its role in the origins of the conflict in Oaxaca, and the present relevance of the teacher's union to the national political situation in Mexico before I go any further. The SNTE is a very powerful union in Mexico. Up until late last year it was a PRI-dominated organization whose director Rafael Ochoa, came into conflict with the head of the union's directing committee, Elba Esther Gordillo, over the presidential campaign and more recently the crisis in Oaxaca. The SNTE never endorsed a presidential candidate and many saw the organization as directly in opposition to PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo. On May 22 the SNTE's "Section 22" (local 22) in Oaxaca held its "annual strike" on the day their contract was renewed. This is usually a ceremonial affair in which they just give themselves a day off. But this year the situtation in Oaxaca became aggravated because Section 22 called down Governor Ruiz for his interference in the electoral process of the presidential campaign then underway, as Ruiz was using the powers of his office to support Madrazo; actions which under certain circumstances are illegal under Mexican electoral law. The strike then morphed into a much larger protest as local PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) agitators (Lopez Obrador supporters) decided to join in and expand the protest. Seeing this additional support, the teachers decided not to quit and stayed on strike. And of particular importance was the fact that the teachers had their own radio station, Radio Plantón, broadcasting their appeals for Ruiz's outright removal from office, embarrassing the PRI politician in full view of everyone.
On June 14 Governor Ruiz decided he had had enough and sent in at least 2500 state judicial police to break up the strike. It got ugly. Using teargas and brute force the police seized the teachers' hotel, raided their union office, arrested many of their leaders, and shut down the radio station, jailing many of its reporters as well. But the teachers numbered about 70,000 in all so they merely moved their strike into the center of the city, taking over the local college radio station to resume broadcasting. They set up roadblocks and drove the police away from the city's central district. (Note: I've got numerous sources in Spanish on all of this I am not linking. I can refer you all to one English site -- www.narconews.com -- that does accurately recapitulate the basic scenario of events, but these guys are decidedly leftist in their political views, and they have been particularly hard on Elba Esther Gordillo for not siding with AMLO, so I only mention them with great hesitation. But here is one link.)
The SNTE's national organization condemned the official reaction to the protest and rejected the charges the Oaxacan state government made against Elba Esther Gordillo for her "agitation" in this matter. (Article in Spanish on this.) The net result of the crisis was to push the SNTE even further away from the PRI, a split that Gordillo herself, once a PRI leader, had been contributing to since the previous fall. Now, roll the clock forward about six weeks to today, and after the terrible beating the PRI just took in the July 2 presidential election, and you will see that the PRI has officially "purged" Elba Esther Gordillo from the party for undermining Roberto Madrazo's candidacy and she has joined the fringe pro-education party Nueva Alianza (New Alliance), which has got to raise their stock within the Mexican teacher's union. In their first major demonstration in Mexico City after the election the PRD played a tape recording of Gordillo in a phone conversation about how PRI Governors were coming around to recognize Calderon as the winner, perhaps suggesting to the crowd that she was with them in spirit, a suggestion they would have associated with her support of the teacher's strike in Oaxaca. But just a couple of days ago Gordillo met with Calderon and left the meeting referring to him as the "President-Elect of Mexico." (Article in Spanish link). The PRD were livid at this statement, and for obvious reasons. They had been working very hard to associate the teacher's union, whose support in Oaxaca they have acquired, with their party and its challenge to Calderon's election AND they had used Gordillo's taped phone call as evidence to rally their supporters with encouragement. BOOM! It blew up in their face.
Now the important point about all of the information I have just related is this; the role the teacher's union has played in the conflict now underway in Oaxaca is central to the entire story and the conflicts surrounding the teacher's union are in no way an endorsement of Lopez Obrador and the PRD, far from it. The protests in Oaxaca are overwhelmingly in opposition to the corruption of the PRI, Calderon and his PAN party (National Action Party) are in no way involved. And what is really evident is that, in southern Mexico where the PRD is strong, they have become the opposition party to the PRI, as the details of the Oaxaca conflict make clear; while in northern Mexico where PAN is in the ascendant, they are recognized as the leaders of the PRI opposition. This is the "context" within which all of what is written in the linked article beginning this thread is related. But it is almost entirely ignored and it is time to return to that article to examine why this is so.
Okay everyone, dust off your copies of Das Kapital, grab your bags of twigs and berries and munch along while you read what Sara Miller Llana tells you what is going on in Mexico:
". . . While these flare-ups are driven by local circumstance, they share their origins in class friction and distrust of authority. These issues have long been part of Mexican society, but have now become overriding themes in the still-disputed July 2 presidential election. . . . The 2006 race, the closest in history, has the free-trade advocate Felipe Calderón winning with a little more than half a percentage point over Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an outspoken advocate of the poor, and has split the country along geographic and class lines. . . . "
So here we have it. The MSM is again telling us that we cannot understand what is going on in Mexico unless we realize that the deep divisions between the rich and powerful, who run the Mexican political establishment for their own benefit, and the millions of poor lower class Mexicans who have found their voice in the candidacy of Lopez Obrador, are now coming to the surface. It is presented as a two-sided conflict in which Calderon and the PAN are not even mentioned until the author has first introduced the class tensions, then associated those tensions with the election, and finally placed Calderon as the figure in opposition to Lopez Obrador, and by implication, the poor people of Mexico he represents. You would almost get the feeling that Calderon is of the same stripe as the PRI Governor Ruiz, which is exactly what Lopez Obrador and the PRD will try to tell you. I suspect, but I cannot absolutely prove, that this is the underlying motivation of Ms. Miller Llana's reporting, to legitimize Lopez Obrador in the eyes of Americans viewing the conflict in Mexico.
There are good reasons to present problems of class and poverty and their interrelationship to Mexican politics in news journalism. But once you introduce Mexican national politics into the equation, all its complexities and the local context of current events then becomes important. And trying to present Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to the American people as a democratic leader of a mass movement seeking to overthrow corruption in Mexico -- at the very same time that he is threatening to overthrow the rule of law itself in Mexico -- is an exceedingly dangerous piece of reporting. I'm still not sure whether this is the result of shallowness on the part of Sara Miller Llana -- you were not entirely off-base to call this a "non-story" SAJ -- or deliberate intent to slant our opinion of Lopez Obrador and what he represents. Either way, the judgement I make is the same. The MSM cannot be trusted to get it right when the Left is put under the microscope.
Now; I want to make some final comments that relate the controversy described here to the larger problem of Lopez Obrador's challenge to the recent presidential election. In the minds of most Mexicans, the charge of "vote fraud" and corruption attach to criticism of the PRI. It is an association Mexicans of all classes and in all regions of the country will make with ease. But the distinct attitudes Mexicans will express as to the best way to combat this corruption is differentiated by class and region. The very poor in Mexico and many living in the southern Mexican states and/or in the immediate vicinity of the capital will tell you it is the PRD who they turn to as an alternative to the PRI. But in northern Mexico and among the Mexican middle and upper classes you will hear the PAN spoken of as the true reforming impulse in Mexican politics. These two distinct attitudes present Lopez Obrador with his true dilemma in attempting to challenge the results of the election. On the one hand, when he cries "fraud" there is an audience among Mexican voters who are ready and willing to listen, because it has happened before. But on the other hand, fraud is something associated with the PRI, and Felipe Calderon is the leader of the PAN Party, who are viewed as reformers among the Mexican middle and upper classes and throughout most of the northern reaches of the country. Therefore; Lopez Obrador's goal is to convince a majority of Mexicans that PAN now represents what the PRI used to stand for and that goal may be difficult to achieve. In fact, PAN's successes in forcing the PRI to "play by the rules" are still the story present in the popular consciousness from the 2000 election, when Vicente Fox and PAN ended the decades long one-party rule of the PRI. This is why Lopez Obrador has launched a broad-based attack on practically every public official involved with handling the vote count. He is attempting to blur the lines of popular understanding of which party is responsible for fraud and to instead make it appear to be a common fault of everyone in the "establishment" of Mexican public life. And my general impression is that he is not succeeding among the Mexican middle class or in Northern Mexico either. So if conflict erupts, I would expect it to be concentrated in the southern and centermost regions of the country, where the PRD can use their own muscle in an attempt to divide the country. And that kind of strategy will almost certainly invoke a forceful response from the national government, bringing the PRD into open, and sadly, perhaps violent conflict with the federal authority. This is what I believe we are looking at as we watch Mexico attempt to deal with the crisis of the July 2 election.
A Mexican post-election ping for you all.
That's a heck of a lot better analysis than anything the LBM have put out, by a factor of 5 at least. Nice going!
Thanks for the analysis. I would love to see you on Hannity & Colmes because of your knowledge of the situation.
Those are kind words Enterprise. Thanks.
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