[News] Mexico - Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10202009.html

October 20, 2009


"Aqui Se Ve la Fuerza del SME!"

Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

Monday morning broke broodingly over Mexico 
City.  The headlines on a score of newspapers 
hanging from Vicente Ramirez's kiosk were 
universal loas for Calderon's heroic seizure of 
Luz y Fuerza del Centro.  As usual, La Jornada, 
the capital's left daily, was the 
exception.  Political columnist Julio Hernandez 
noted that on the eve of the centennial of the 
Revolution of 1910-1919, Mexico stood at a 
decisive moment: if Calderon was allowed to 
validate the takeover of the company and destroy 
the SME, the left's goose was cooked.

Around the counter at the Café La Blanca, sullen 
faces were buried in their newspapers. Isidro 
Zuniga talked about putting 34 years in at a box 
factory before being shown the door - "I gave 
them my youth for a handful of pinche lentils. 
This is how the bosses fuck us.   Chinga su Madre 
Senor President! We will stand with the SME
"

Benito Ruiz, the driver at the hotel where I've 
lived for 25 years, was steaming.  Calderon was 
like the dictator Porfirio Diaz who was dumped by 
the Revolution, like the president Gustavo Diaz 
Ordaz who had ordered the massacre of hundreds of 
students on the eve of the Olympics in 
1968.  "Watch your back, Senor John," he warned, 
"these bastards will stop at nothing
"

Others had less sympathy for the workers.  Don 
Juanito Lopez, a tailor here in the old quarter, 
was dismissive of Luz y Fuerza which he thought 
rotten to the core with corruption.  When you 
complained about your light bill or wanted to get 
something fixed, employees demanded a "stimulus" 
bribe. Sky-high electric bills have driven a 
wedge between Luz y Fuerza workers and the general public.

I walked over to the neighborhood Luz y Fuerza 
office on Carranza Street.  It was locked up 
tight but the Mexican flag was still flapping 
from the roof.  Handwritten signs ("Listen up 
people! The SME is fighting for you!") were taped 
to the dusty windows.  A young woman who said she 
was the daughter of an electricista, handed me a 
leaflet that explained what Calderon had done "is 
called fascism just like under Hitler and 
Mussolini and Pinochet and Diaz Ordaz."

At five in the afternoon, Felipe Calderon's 
arch-nemesis Lopez Obrador had called a rally 
outside the Chamber of Deputies to offer 
legislators an alternative budget that would chop 
government officials' salaries in half, cancel 
their million pesos perks, and double the tax 
rate on Mexico's 400 top corporations that now 
pay only 1.7% of their total earnings.  Three 
years after the stolen election, AMLO is still 
able to drum out thousands but lately attendance 
has dipped and the die-hards' energies dampened.

Today, however, the crowd outside Congress was 
swollen by word of the takeover - for AMLO, the 
SME would be a force multiplier.  Several 
thousand electricistas packed the street, 
chanting and pumping their fists into the dank 
afternoon air: "Aqui se ve la Fuerza del SME!" 
("Here you see the strength of the SME!")

Andres Manuel helped Martin Esparza mount the 
podium and embraced him.  He would put his 
movement at the SME's disposal.  The opposition 
would consolidate for a "mega-marcha" on Thursday 
the 15th.  "!Aqui se ve la Fuerza del SME!"

Esparza took the mic.  He is not a brilliant 
speaker but he made some pertinent points, 
rattling off the names of companies and 
institutions that were exempted from paying their 
electric bills: the Torre Mayor, the nation's 
tallest skyscraper; luxury tourist hotels in the 
Zona Rosa and the ritzy Polanco district; 
"Reforma" and "Uno Mas Uno", newspapers that back 
Calderon to the hilt; the Chamber of Deputies and 
Mexico City's City Hall; Eight distinct federal 
Secretariats and Los Pinos, the Mexican White 
House.  Electricity rates were high because 70% 
of the juice is sold to 46,000 private 
corporations at 45 centavos the kilowatt while 
home consumers shell out one peso 50 
centavos.  Esparza's fist shot up.  "!Aqui Se Ve 
La Fuerza del SME!"  When he drove away from the 
rally, the union leader was shadowed by seven carloads of federal police.

Out at Los Pinos, the Estado Mayor, Calderon's 
elite military guard, was installing even more 
forbidding metal fences around the presidential 
palace and shutting down all access streets.  Los 
Pinos has always been a bunker but now it was 
impenetrable.  The President has declared "a 
state of exception" Mayor Marcelo, a prominent 
figure in Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic 
Revolution, worried.  "We have returned to the 
19th century of Porfirio Diaz.  I have never seen 
such disrespect for the workers."

Tuesday, October 13th: It rained hard all Monday 
night, a cold late season downpour that always 
spells trouble for the city's circuits. Most of 
Luz y Fuerza's transformers are at least 50 years 
old - the company has been starved for 
investments for decades - and the Federal 
Electricity Commission engineers who had been 
brought over to operate the plants had no idea of 
how to deal with such antique 
equipment.  Blackouts spread into 22 colonias - 
the prensa vendida suggested sabotage.

Federal Police visited the neighborhoods where 
SME workers live.  One electricista, as reported 
in La Jornada, says he was offered 25,000 pesos 
to return to the plant he had been forced out of 
in the Saturday Night Massacre.  He turned down 
the bribe.  Many SME members have climbed into 
the lower middle class.  They have an apartment 
and a car and payments to make every week.  Now 
they had no work and no paycheck yet they wern't 
going to give up their union without a fight.  "!Aqui Se Ve la Fuerza del SME!"

Weds. October 14th: By Wednesday morning, the 
blackouts had radiated into 72 colonies in 12 out 
of the city's 16 delegations (boroughs.)  90,000 
residents in Milpa Alta, a rural delegation, 
hadn't had power since Saturday night.  The 
system was said to be on the verge of 
collapse.  When irate customers called Luz y 
Fuerza, no one answered the phones.

A hundred families in Ocoyouapac, Mexico state on 
the western flank of the capital had 
enough.  They marched out to the busy federal 
highway that connects up Toluca with Mexico City 
at morning rush hour and stood there with their 
arms folded across their chests, the women 
holding squirming babies, neighborhood dogs lay 
at their feet.  Auto horns blared.  Traffic was 
backed up for 18 kilometers.  The Federal police 
arrived and threatened arrest.  The colonos stood 
there for two hours and refused to yield until 
the juice was turned back on.  The colonos were 
not alone.  754 manufacturing businesses in 
Mexico state had to close shop because of the 
rolling blackouts. Governor Enrique Pena Nieto, 
the PRI presidential candidate in 2012, told the 
prensa vendida that he had proof of SME sabotage.

The Calderon government opened up 
indemniification pay-out centers on Wednesday 
morning with terrific fanfare - four pages 
printed in green ink ran in every newspaper 
instructing workers where to sign up for their 
checks.  The pay-outs would be conducted under 
the aegis of the SAE or System for the 
Liquidation of Embargoed Goods, an agency that is 
usually charged with auctioning off property 
seized from narco traffickers.  Gomez Montt 
warned that the if the union tried to intimate 
workers into refusing the checks, its leaders 
would be met with the full force of the law.

Despite the offer of spectacular bonuses for 
those who signed up to be liquidated before the 
end of the month, the lines were thin outside the 
centers, mostly administrative personnel who were 
not even members of the SME, some older workers 
on the verge of retirement plus a few ex-wives 
who showed up to see if husbands who owed them 
child support and food allotments had cashed 
out.  Others lined up just to find out exactly 
how much they would receive.  Carstens had 
promised that the government would counsel former 
workers where to invest their windfalls and 
provide them with incentives for business start-ups.

Those who were inclined to buy the government 
package waited from 9 AM through mid-afternoon 
and gave up.  The computers had crashed and the 
system was down.  A few lucky sell-outs received 
checks only to discover they were post-dated and 
needed to be approved by arbitration and 
conciliation commissions before they could spend 
them.  "Esquiroles!" SME militants yelled at them 
despite Gomez Montt's warning, "Scabs!"  "What 
will you do when the money runs out?" one veteran 
worker called out.  "Calderon has created 60,000 
quesadilla venders - there won't be enough tortillas to go around
"

That morning, Felipe Calderon addressed a 
convention of radio and television executives 
whose networks had been spouting his government's 
calumnies against the SME for weeks.  The event 
had been moved up a day so that the president 
wouldn't get caught up in Thursday's 
mega-march.  Calderon's conscience was still 
clear, he told the execs.  He was fighting for 
Mexico's poor, the victims of his own neo-liberal 
regime.  When he had done, the executives gave 
him a ten-minute standing ovation.  I punched off 
the TV.  The prolonged applause of the owners of 
the prensa vendida brought back bitter memories 
of the standing ovation the Mexican congress had 
given Gustavo Diaz Ordaz after he slaughtered 
hundreds of students 41 years ago at 
Tlatelolco.  Such servility and authoritarianism 
are old stories around here.

Thurs. October 15th: I awoke to the racket of 
Federal Police helicopters buzzing the Centro 
Historico like giant gnats.  Ever since 1968 when 
Diaz Ordaz's helicopters dropped flares to signal 
the start of the student massacre in the Plaza of 
Three Cultures, the government has deployed these 
infernal machines to intimate those who stand 
against it.  I stood on my balcony and waved my 
fist at the intruders.  "!Aqui Se Ve La Fuerza del SME!"

When I went out for breakfast, it felt like the 
Centro had been emptied out in preparation for 
the big march.  The banks had not even bothered 
to open.  In the Zocalo, the big tents housing 
the annual book fair had been dismantled and the 
books carted off to avoid conflict with the 
marchers.  Mayor Marcelo likes to fill the great 
square with public spectacles, a skating rink in 
the winter, an exhibition of dinosaur bones all 
summer.  The mega-march would be an occasion to 
reclaim this public space to demonstrate the 
pueblo's enormous displeasure with the mal gobierno ("bad government.")

By lunchtime, you could hear the rolling steel 
curtains that protect storefronts in the Centro 
being slammed shut.  There were not nearly as 
many Mexico City cops in the streets as there had 
been for the October 2nd commemoration of the '68 
massacre when students tend to maraud.  SME 
workers are not apt to spray paint nasty slogans 
on the KFCs or plunder 7-11s.

I joined a gang of cultural workers in front of 
Bellas Artes, the rococo fine arts palace just 
outside the Centro Historico, captained by Paco 
Taibo II, the quintessential Mexico City novelist 
and historian, and Enrique Gonzalez Rojo, a 
revolutionary poet who is even more ancient than 
this correspondent.  For two hours we stood there 
behind our banner as an endless river of 
protestors streamed by, waiting for a space to 
insert ourselves in the line of march.

The demonstration was clearly the densest since 
the protests after Lopez Obrador had been robbed 
of the 2006 election but it was distinct from 
AMLO's recent "informative assemblies" that have 
become stagy and ritualistic.  October 15th was 
indeed a spontaneous response not only to 
Calderon's grotesque union busting but also a 
long painful laundry list of his government's 
abuse of social movements in this conflictive city and country.

The spontaneity was made manifest by the 
thousands and thousands of hand-scrawled signs 
the marchers waved calling "Fecal" every name in 
the book of imprecations from dog to snake to rat 
to asshole to the reincarnation of Gustavo Diaz 
Ordaz and the dictator Porfirio Diaz.  "Feed The 
Poor!" one sign counseled, advising that Augusto 
Carstens' corpulent frame should be rendered into 
"carnitas" (roast pork.)  "If there is no 
solution, there will be a revolution!" UNAM students bellowed.

The fists punched at the autumn air: "!Aqui Se Ve 
La Fuerza del SME!"  A baby stroller drifted by 
with a sleeping child aboard, her little fingers 
curled around a sign that asked "Mommy, why has 
my daddy lost his job?"  Many marchers called 
upon rate-payers to withhold their 
payments.  Others hollered for a "Huelga 
General", a general strike. "1810-1910-2010! The revolution will come again!"

 From 4 PM through 9:20 that night on my cheap 
chronometer, the masses poured into the 
Zocalo.  Police estimated the crowd size at 
150,000, the organizers 350,000.  As a veteran 
Zocolologist who has been estimating the size of 
crowds here for a quarter of a century, I'll go with a quarter of a million.

By 6 PM, the floor of the great plaza was 
jam-packed and many contingents had not yet even 
decamped from the starting point at the Angel 
five kilometers down Reforma.  Lopez Obrador and 
his thousands of brigadistas who had volunteered 
to bring up the rear of the mega-march did not 
even reach the Zocalo before the masses inside 
that Tiennemen-sized square intoned the National 
Hymn which is how such rallies wind down around here.

Despite its enormity, Mexico's largest, longest 
social outburst in years didn't even got top 
billing in the prensa vendida - Televisa led the 
nightly news with a story about a kid who was 
thought to have flown off in a runaway balloon 
somewhere in Gringolandia.  But in a symbolic nod 
to the strength of the SME, Gomez Montt announced 
that a "dialogue" would soon be entabled between 
the mal gobierno and the union.  Mayor Marcelo volunteered to mediate.

I joined my friend Berta Robledo, one of AMLO's 
"Adelitas", at the Blanca for coffee.  We sat at 
the counter with five very serious farmers from 
Zacatecas.  They all owned cows but they couldn't 
get a price for their milk anymore so they had 
taken to dumping it out on the highway. The banks 
were threatening to foreclose.  Sure, they 
supported the SME but they had really traveled 
500 miles to manifest their desperation at the 
worsening conditions of their lives.  "Our 
fathers and grandfathers fought and died for this 
land," Don Geronimo Amaya muttered, "we don’t 
want to see more blood spilled.  But if we have 
to
."  His small voice trailed off into the café chatter.

Such is the mood of "los de abajo" on the eve of 
the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution.

John Ross’s  "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption in 
Mexico City" will be published by Nation Books in 
November.  You can get an earful at Northtown 
Books in Arcata Calif on Friday the 13th and at 
Modern Times in San Francisco's Mish on the 
18th.  During his upcoming "Ross & Revolution In 
2010" book tour, the author will also be 
traveling with his recently-published "Iraqigirl" 
(Haymarket), the diary of a teenager coming of 
age under U.S. occupation. Any bright ideas about 
venues? Write <mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org




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