[News] Death of the Mexican Presidency
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Sep 6 13:09:28 EDT 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/
September 6, 2006
Adios, To the Fox!
Death of the Mexican Presidency
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.
The tableau of 155 leftist deputies and senators
storming the tribune of congress here September 1
to prevent President Vicente Fox from delivering
his sixth and final State of the Union address
(the "Informe") should be mandatory viewing for
members of both houses of the U.S. Congress who,
year after year, burst into servile applause for
George Bush when each January he imposes his own
infernal Informe upon the citizens of Gringolandia.
One crucial political distinction between these
two distant neighbor nations is the presence of a
third party in the Mexican mix, one that at least
purports to be left of the center. Swindled out
of the presidency by fraud this past July 2, the
party of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO)--the
Party of the Democratic Revolution or
PRD--appears to have broken with the political class and traditional cronyism.
It is not that the PRD's hands are clean its
legislators have regularly prostituted their
wares - but in the wake of the stolen election
and having been frozen out of any power positions
in the brand-new congress despite being Mexico's
second political force, the Party of AMLO has
little to lose, and is suddenly speaking its
truth to power, a singular position for any politico right or left.
Despite rampant corruption, regular vote
stealing, and authoritarian tendencies, Mexico's
multi-party system makes U.S. "democracy" with
its two-headed single party rule, look a lot more
like Idi Amin's Uganda than what the Boston tea
party had in mind for the future citizens of the
United States of North America.
The spectacle of elected officials being pissed
off enough to stare down tin-plate potentates
like President Vicente Fox topped off weeks of
scuffling in and around the 10 kilometer steel
wall Mexican troops had thrown up around the
Legislative Palace to keep Lopez Obrador's
die-hard supporters from congregating in shouting
distance of the congress of the country. On the
government side of the barricade, 6000
preventative police (drawn from the military) and
Fox's own presidential guard or the Estado Mayor
had turned the congressional precinct into a war
zone. One side in this standoff was equipped with
clubs, electric shields, tear gas, water cannons,
light tanks, live ammunition, and snipers up on
the rooftops. The other only with its dreams and
its "coraje" (righteous anger.) Guess which side won?
When I first touched down in this mile-high
capital a full generation ago, Informe Day was a
sacrosanct national holiday. Banks closed,
workers got the day off, the streets were lined
with adoring fans of the sitting president who
was always a member of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the confetti
drizzled down from the heavens above like
worthless manna. Each September 1, El Presidente
would be escorted into the PRI-controlled
congress by a military honor guard and a gaggle
of obsequious legislatures for sometimes six-hour speeches to the nation.
But little by little, this pompous ritual, which
is not contemplated by the constitution and was
first mandated by the PRI's founder General
Plutarco Elias Calles in 1928 with the sole goal
of aggrandizing an imperial presidency at the
expense of the other two houses of government,
has been stripped down to the bone largely due to
the incessant heckling of a third party, the PRD.
This year, Informe Day dawned dark and
apocalyptic, an evil wind snaking through the
deserted streets of the capital in anticipation
of violent clashes to come. At 4 in the
afternoon, Lopez Obrador summoned his followers
to the great Zocalo plaza, where he and 10,000
more have been encamped for five weeks now, to
issue marching orders to the left-leaning hordes
about to throw themselves against the military's
metal walls. But despite the masses' eagerness,
AMLO's marching orders were not to march after
all. His people now occupied
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the political heart of Mexico, he reasoned, why
give it up? Moreover, the Fox was pouring
hundreds of thousands of pesos every day in
policing costs just to keep them right where they
were, the most strategic space in the nation. So
should we march, Lopez Obrador asked the
assembly. The vote was mixed, with many hands
raised in favor of mayhem and AMLO had to cajole
the crowd into non-violence. As if on cue, Lila
Downs and Rita Guerrero, two of Mexico's stellar
songbirds, were brought out to warble for the born-again pacifist throng.
Nonetheless, bands of hot-hearted students and
workers set out for the nearby Legislative Palace
to do battle with the robocops. Although this
movement has been miraculously free of violence,
after a month of living in the streets, many are itchy for fisticuffs.
While ski-masked youths scrimmaged on the
barricades with Fox's cops and others shook their
bodies in the Zocalo, the 155-member
congressional delegation of AMLO's Coalition for
the Good of All was examining its options. Having
literally forced their way through the military
checkpoints and the metal detectors to enter the
Legislative Palace, they were in no mood for
symbolic protest, as has so often been the
antistrophe during the President's annual
address. "We come as aggrieved citizens" warned
Carlos Navarete, leader of the PRD in the senate
and an ex-communist, and they were going to let
the President, his bogus successor Felipe
Calderon, and the archly right-wing PAN party
know it. Besides stealing the election and
unconstitutionally cordoning off congress with
the troops, Fox's PAN, in league with
the PRI had rubbed salt in the PRD's wounds by
keeping AMLO's party out of the direction of
every committee in the new legislature. Now it was pay back time.
One after another, the parties, starting with the
most inconsequential--the so-called "Alternative
Social Democratic Farmers Party" (two
seats)--followed each other to the podium to diss
the Fox in the traditional run-up to the President's blahblah.
When it was Navarete's turn, the Senator seized
the microphone to denounce the constitutional
violations that had turned congress into an armed
camp and declared that he would not budge from
the podium until the barriers came down and the
robocops sent back to barracks. 154 more leftist
senators and deputies solemnly filed onto the
tribune and proclaimed their solidarity. In a
matter of seconds, the Mexican Congress had been
transformed into an extension of the seven-mile
encampment of AMLO's devotees that has clogged
the city's thoroughfares for a month and so enraged the motoring class here.
No matter how many times the frozen-faced PANista
president of congress Jorge Zerminio rapped his
gavel and ordered the leftists back to their
seats, AMLO's legislators would not be moved.
They proudly stood their ground up on the podium,
waving signs and banners labeling Vicente Fox "a
traitor to democracy" and much worse.
After weeks of being excluded from the cameras of
Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, Lopez
Obrador's message was suddenly being carried on
prime time. Both Televisa and its pipsqueak
partner TV Azteca, obligated by time constraints
and the imminent arrival of the President, could
not cut away. There in the eye of the nation,
newly-elected senators Rosario Ibarra de Piedra,
the grande dame of Mexico's human rights
movement, and the luminous actress Maria Rojo,
kept flapping their insolent signs and chanting that Fox was a traitor.
The President and his pouting wife Martita had
been helicoptered in from Los Pinos, Mexico's
White House to deliver his State of the Union
message. Guarded by hundreds of dark-suited
goons, they were then transferred to a fleet of
bulletproof SUVs, and warned that there was
trouble in the congress. When the convoy pulled
up to the principle door of the legislative
palace, the President tentatively emerged as if
not knowing what to expect--Martita was held back
by the bodyguards--and slowly, painfully mounted
the great steps of congress (he has a bad back.)
The tension was now as taut as a drawn catapult.
The sacred scenario of the Informe was about to go kaplooy.
The Fox got about a foot and a half inside the
lobby of congress before he found himself face to
face with the indignant leaders of the PAN
contingent in the new legislature who had the
unpleasant task of informing him that the tribune
was occupied by AMLO's dirty yellow scum and for
the first time in modern Mexican political
history, the President would not be allowed to
deliver his State of the Union bullshit to the
nation. Fox got gray real quick, his jowly face a
mask of indecision and befuddlement for all to
see. The cameras were grinding and the whole
country glued to the tube as Fox's authority and
what was left of the imperial presidency collapsed into dust.
After conferring with his attorney general, the
President must have realized that the final nail
had been driven into the coffin of this useless
ceremony, handed the text of his Informe to the
secretary of the Congress in completion of his
constitutional obligations, turned on his heels,
and phalanxed by the Presidential Guard, trudged
back down the steps of Congress. "ADIOOOOOS!"
AMLO's leftists crooned from the tribune.
Outside, Martita was waiting for the green light
to enter the Palace and flout the dazzling new
frock the taxpayers had bought her and when she
realized that her hubby had been rebuffed, her
little face crumpled up in a grimace of disgust.
The President and the First Lady were then driven
back to the whirlybirds and returned to Los Pinos
where Fox was rushed into the presidential
television studio to doctor up a tape of the
thwarted address pre-recorded for just such a
contingency. Broadcast an hour later on all
television and radio outlets and intercut with
footage of smiling Indians and exuberant school
children, the once-inviolable Informe was reduced to an info-mercial.
Meanwhile back in Congress, the leftist
legislators clung to the podium despite the
snarling insults of the PANistas, waving their
mocking signs and tootling little Fox-40 Classic
whistles as if they had suddenly all become
soccer referees, until they were finally assured
that the troops outside were being retired and
the metal barriers disassembled. By then, the TV
buzzards had long since lost interest in the
denouement and one by one faded back into regular
programming. Mr. Bean and Bart Simpson now filled the screen.
At the most nerve-wracking juncture in this
battle for the soul of Mexico, AMLO had won a
stunning propaganda victory, pyrrhic as it may
prove to be, and his people celebrated
accordingly. In the camps along the Paseo de
Reforma and in the Zocalo, supporters embraced
and jumped up and down ("he who does not jump is
a PANista"), yodeled "adiooooooses" at the Fox,
waved flags, detonated bottle rockets, and
rehydrated a movement that had been flagging
under a deluge of hard rain and bad news.
For Vicente and Martita this farewell fracaso
capped a disastrous plunge from grace. Elected in
2000 in a geyser of hope as the first opposition
candidate to take the presidency since the PRI
had franchised the office, things had soured
fast. After pledging to resolve the crisis in
Chiapas "in 15 minutes" and promising in his
inaugural address to make the Indian rights
accords that the Zapatistas had signed with the
outgoing PRI government the law of the land, Fox
had failed to deliver and the rebels had broken
off all contact with his government. Six years
later, that southern state still leaked blood.
Here at the end of his reign, Oaxaca was on
fire--a new guerrilla group had appeared in
public on the day of the Informe--and in the wake
of the stolen election, the tangled traffic, and
the military takeover of congress, Mexico City
was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
In the six years Fox had occupied the throne of
Mexico, the rich had grown exponentially richer
and the poor were just as poor as ever. During
his years in office, 4,000,000 of Vicente Fox's
fellow citizens had been forced to abandon the
country for El Norte because of zero job growth
and the depletion of the agricultural sector. The
President much hoopla'd "Whole Enchilada" i.e.
integral immigration reform had been flushed down
Bush's toilet and the nation had endured six
years of legislative gridlock. Hundreds of women
had been slaughtered in Ciudad Juarez and the
narco gangs were beheading their rivals in broad
daylight on the streets of provincial cities.
Meanwhile Martita's sons were about to be indicted for "illegal enrichment."
With the country divided in half between brown
and white, rich and poor, the future - the
imposition of Felipe Calderon upon an incredulous populace--looks dim.
The Informe and the display of military might in
which it had unfurled was a dress rehearsal for
December 1 when Fox will try and hang the
tri-color presidential sash around Calderon's
neck as if it were Coleridge's albatross. AMLO
himself is about to set up a parallel government
that will dog Fox's successor for the next six
years when the leftist convenes the Democratic
National Convention on Mexican Independence Day
September 16. A million delegates are expected to
attend this milestone in the heroic resistance of
AMLO's people to the imposition of Calderon.
Such a government would be illegal and constitute
usurpation of functions, a crime punishable by
many years in prison, threatens Attorney General
Carlos Abascal. The officious presidential
spokesperson, Ruben Aguilar, proposes that Lopez Obrador
be tried for rebellion, another felony. The
taking of the tribune of Congress by his senators
and deputies could result in the cancellation of
the PRD's registration as a political party, the
PAN advises. The criminalization of AMLO--Fox has
been trying to lock him up in La Palma, the
nation's maximum lock-up, for years--is in the wind.
But September 1 was a moment in this skein that
not many Mexicans of meager means and less power
will soon forget. "We sure showed those 'pinches
rateros' who this country belongs to, no
Juanito?" bellowed 71 year-old Isidro Garcia, a
former boxer who handymans here at the Hotel
Isabel, clapping me hard on my bum spine. I saw
that same twinkle now gleaming in Isidro's eye
long ago after Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had whipped
the reviled Carlos Salinas, the root of much of
this evil, out in Michoacan back in '88. Some
precincts had come in 600 to zero not so much for
Cardenas but against the PRI. When I asked the
colonos what had happened, they would gleefully
report "nos hemos chingada el PRI".
"Do you know what a pendejo (cuckold or idiot)
is?" Celia Cruz, an increasingly hunched-over
"camarista" (bed maker) here at the Isabel
laughed up at me, her eyes dancing to the top of
her head, "a pendejo is an "arrogante" (arrogant
person) who doesn't know he is a pendejo. Este Fox! Que pendejo!"
As I top off this chronicle, the seven judge
panel or TRIFE that must at last declare a winner
in this stolen election, is about to name Felipe
Calderon the next president of Mexico, although
the court's rotund condemnation of Fox's
unconstitutional intervention on behalf of his
fellow PANista would seem to have called for annulation of the July 2 election.
But for Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinajosa and his
elite white ilk, the TRIFE's confirmation would
seem to be another pyrrhic victory when the fury
of those who have been once again defrauded out
of their votes is measured. This battle for the soul of Mexico is not over yet.
John Ross's ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World
Possible--Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006 will
be published by Nation Books in October. Ross
will travel the left coast this fall with the new
volume and a hot-off-the-press chapbook of poetry
Bomba!--all suggestions of venues will be
cheerfully entertained--write <mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org
The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
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