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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10202009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10202009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">October 20,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>"Aqui Se Ve
la Fuerza del SME!" <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JOHN ROSS
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Mexico
City</font><font size=3>.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">M</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>onday 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.<br><br>
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…"<br><br>
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…"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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!")
<br><br>
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!"
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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!"<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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…"<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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!"<br><br>
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.")<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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!" <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Such is the mood of "los de abajo" on the eve of the 100th
anniversary of the Mexican revolution.<br><br>
<b>John Ross’s</b> "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
<a href="mailto:johnross@igc.org">johnross@igc.org</a> <br><br>
<br><br>
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