Someone, perhaps it was the ubiquitous Sasha, asserted that if people from Mexico attempted to force their way across the border with the US, the US would respond with force equal to, and possibly even greater than, the force used by Israel against Palestinians on Sunday. I tend to disagree with him for several reasons, primarily because of the economic relationship between the US and Mexico as well as the social unrest that it would ignite within the US itself, particularly in states like California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But he has revealed an important aspect of the occupation that deserves more than the scant attention that it commonly receives, with the recognition of it limited to academia and international providers of security services.

Sasha has implicitly associated the occupation with broader issues of global border contral, and despite his Zionist stance, he is correct in doing so. It is an emerging narrative of the occupation that is as important as the dominant one regarding the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians for the land of Palestine. There is, in fact, a frightening symmetry between the evolution of the occupation and international methods of border control, so much so that the occupation often serves as a testing ground for policies and technologies utilized elsewhere, especially in the US. Prior to the mid-1990s, there was a time when the occupation took a somewhat more benign form in terms of the intrusiveness of social control measures and technologies, but, in the immediate aftermath of Oslo accords, Israel commenced the installation of a system of border checkpoints that has culminated with the ongoing construction of what critics have called the Apartheid Wall, as well as the militarization of daily life. The part of this process that gets ignored, possibly because it is contrary to the tendency of many around the world to hold Israel solely responsible for the abuses of the occupation, is the effort to integrate these measures into other border control situations.

One of the most obvious examples of this process was the attempted construction of a border fence, known as the Secure Border Initiative network, or SBInet, by the US along the border of the US and Mexico, cancelled last fall. Not surprisingly, the US looked to Israel in 2006 for its construction before abandoning the project:

For the SBInet project, the Boeing/Elbit consortium proposed the radical idea of 1,800 towers equipped with cameras and motion detectors stretched across the border. For possibly the first time ever, the words Israel and border are in the same sentence and it doesn't have anything to do with its own borders. The talent and expertise that Elbit Systems (NASDAQ ELST) has employed for years in protecting Israel's borders will now be put to use on US borders to keep Americans safe.

Kollsman Inc., an American-based subsidiary of Elbit, has been selected as a member of the winning consortium by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) to supply technology to identify threats, to deter and prevent crossings, and to apprehend intruders along the US borders with Canada and Mexico.

Kollsman, headquartered in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a development, manufacturing and support organization providing advanced electro-optical and avionics systems to the commercial aerospace, military and homeland security markets. The company's expertise includes enhanced vision systems, flight displays, head-up displays, thermal imaging systems, fire control systems, and advanced security and surveillance solutions.

The Secure Border Initiative is the latest attempt by the United States government to use technology to secure its borders, stop smuggling, and prevent illegal immigration. After September 11, illegal immigration is not just seen as a social problem, but also a national security issue. A unique aspect of this initiative was that Homeland Security gave the bidders total freedom to create new ideas of how to apply both new and old technology to secure the US borders.

Except that it is not really accurate to say that the US looked to Israel, as the consortium of corporations involved in the aborted construction of the fence, Boeing and Elbit, are transnational, with both companies listed on US stock exchanges. Accordingly, it is more appropriate to say that transnational corporations, many headquartered in the US and Israel, have utilized the occupation as an experimental testing ground for technologies with an anticipated global application. Given the proliferation of surveillance cameras and airborne surveillance in the United Kingdom to the extent that it is considered the most surveilled society among industrialized countries, I would not be surprised to discover that UK corporations are playing a prominent role in this effort as well. Of course, the deployment of technologies originally developed for border control for the purpose of mass surveillance shouldn't surprise anyone. Hence, the occupation, and the technologies associated with its imposition, are part of a global, transnational corporate effort to maintain the separation of the poor of the Global South from the wealthy of the Global North and monitor virtually every aspect of our daily lives. In this respect, Chicano activists in California have much in common with the Palestinians enclosed within the occupied territories, and they have supported the actions of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, as most recently expressed through the support of MECHA for the Irvine 11.

Furthermore, as you may recall, the US engaged in extemporaneous forms of occupation inspired border control within Iraq during some of the most intense periods of Iraqi resistance. Starting in late 2003, the US partitioned Iraqi cities, creating, in the words of Robert Fisk, a controlled populace. By August 2004, Toufic Haddad described US methods as synonymous with those of the occupation:

. . . the use of aggressive techniques of urban warfare with an emphasis upon special units, house to house searches, wide scale arrest campaigns (almost 14,000 Iraqis are now in prison), and torture; the erecting of an elaborate system of watchtowers, military bases, check-points, barbed wire, and trenches to monitor, control, and restrict transportation and movement; the clearing of wide swaths of land next to roads; the use of armored bulldozers to destroy the homes of suspected militants; the razing of entire fields from which militants might seek refuge; the heightened relevance of snipers and unmanned drones; and the attempted erecton of collaborator networks to extract information from the local populace about resistance activities -- both military and political.

Accordingly, an ethnic, sectarian emphasis upon the nature of the conflict in Palestine, while appealing to those seeking to organize among nationalistic Americans seeking to avoid US culpability in the actions of Israel, doesn't come close to addressing the real dimensions of the struggle.

Meanwhile, in regard to Europe, the occupation is consistent with an ideological belief in the necessity of rigorous border control to prevent the entry of people characterized as culturally dangerous. The governments of Italy and France are expressing alarm over the possibility of an influx of North Africans in the absence of Gaddafi's willingness to interdict them, but such xenophobia is not a recent development, as demonstrated by periodic statements by German politicians about the purported inability of Turkish immigrants to adopt German values, as if this matters. Several years ago, Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years in Europe interviewing Muslim immigrants, many of them imprisoned within refugee camps, and published a book about what they told him, Embracing the Infidel. In this book, he humanizes his subjects while exposing an impersonal system of social control across the European continent that restricts them to ghettoes and refugee camps. In a sense, the police methods of stopping people for their identity cards, detaining them and incarcerating them in refugee camps evokes a bygone era, one that predates the accelerated technological modernization connected to the occupation and US military operations in lesser developed countries, but it retains the cultural superiority and xenophobia at the heart of this project. Last week, the suppressed brutality of it erupted on the streets of Athens, as right wing Greek mobs attacked the undocumented.

Labels: American Empire, Europe, Germany, Greece, Immigration, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Palestine, Police, United Kingdom, US Military, Zionism

Despite his tendency towards hyperbole, John Ross has an interesting article over at Counterpunch. After observing that there has been a proliferation of armed leftist groups, he relates the following observations:

All this duel centennial year, ideologically driven leftists here have been waiting with baited breath for a resurgence of armed rebellion such as in 1994 when the EZLN rose up against the mal gobierno in Chiapas, or in 1996 when the EPR staged a series of murderous raids on military and police installations - but the leftists may be barking up the wrong tree.

If revolution is to be defined as the overthrow of an unpopular government and the taking of state power by armed partisans, then the new Mexican revolution is already underway, at least in the north of the country where Calderon's ill-advised drug campaign against the cartels (in which according to the latest CISEN data 28,000 citizens have died) has morphed into generalized warfare.

Although the fighting has been largely confined to the north, it should be remembered that Mexico's 1910 revolution began in that geography under the command of Villa and Orozco, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, and Francisco Madero, and then spread south to the power center of the country.

Given the qualitative leap in violence, Edgardo Buscaglia, a keen analyst of drug policy at the prestigious Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico now describes Calderon's war as a narco-insurgency - a descriptive recently endorsed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Daily events reported in the nation's press lend graphic substance to the terminology.

Narco-commandos attack military and police barracks, carrying off arms and freeing prisoners from prisons in classic guerrilla fashion. As if to replay the 1910 uprising in the north, the narco gangs loot and torch the mansions of the rich in Ciudad Juarez. The narcos mount public massacres in northern cities like Juarez and Torreon that leave dozens dead and seem designed to terrorize the local populous caught up in the crossfire and impress upon the citizenry that the government can no longer protect them, a classic guerrilla warfare strategy.

One very 2010 wrinkle to the upsurge in violence: car bombs triggered by cell phones detonate in downtown Juarez, a technology that seems to have been borrowed from the U.S. invasion of Iraq (El Paso just across the river is home to several military bases where returning veterans of that crusade are housed.) Plastique-like C-4 explosives used in a July 15th car bombing that killed four in downtown Juarez are readily available at Mexican mining sites.

Perhaps, it is worth recalling that the political movement that resulted in the electoral victories of Evo Morales in Bolivia partially originated amongst coca growers, including Morales himself, angry at US crop eradication efforts, although these growers insisted that they did want to grow coca for refinement into cocaine, and organized non-violently. Even so, we should be wary of media characterizations of the violence in Mexico that places it outside of any context other than criminality.

Labels: Mexico, Political Violence, Postmodernism

Have the novels of B. Traven been relegated to the literary periphery? His Jungle Novel series is difficult to find on the shelf, even at chain stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. I recalled, perhaps mistakenly, that smaller, lefty stores used to carry them, but I was surprised a few weeks ago when there were none available at Modern Times in San Francisco. I do remember, however, purchasing the first novel in the series, Government, at the anarchist bookstore in the Haight, Bound Together, several years ago.

Perhaps, this is because the man believed to have written under the pseudonym "B. Traven", Ret Marut, was an anarchist of the Stirnerite kind. Throughout the novels in the series, one encounters commentary that hints at Stirner's individualistic rejection of communal constraints. To the extent that it grounds Traven's hostility towards the role of the Mexican government and the Catholic Church in subjugating the indigenous people of southern Mexico, it enriches his work, although some may find it didactic. To the extent that it maligns the historical agency of these people, it doesn't, although, to be fair, the overall thrust of the series is the development of a social consciousness among the native peoples that lead them to rebel against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Upon first engagement, it is easy to dismiss the Jungle Novels as an anachronism. Traven calls the peoples of Chiapas Indians. He can't fully shake relating to them at times as noble savages, although his cynical practicality acts as a brake upon such sentimentality. He falls within a tradition of Europeans that emigrated to Mexico in the early 20th Century, and, like many of them, displayed a peculiar form of what Edward Said described as orientalism in the Middle Eastern context, a tendency to swing between romanticization and condescension of the culture as pre-modern.

But all of this is overcome by one thing: Traven's elevation of the experiences of his native protagonists to epic status. Despite their inability to read, write and perform basic mathematical calculations, he does not accept their relegation to a subordinate to non-existent one. He explains, with great empathy, how they are exploited by those who have these skills and, even more, how their communities often serve their needs quite well despite the lack of them.

More specifically, Traven profiles their dehumanization by Mexicans through debt peonage, a transaction whereby jefes lend out money at usurious rates to uncomprehending natives to buy goods at exponentially marked up prices resulting in debts that can never be repaid. Moreover, the debts are passed down through the generations because they are not discharged upon the death of the person who incurred them. Furthermore, he also recognized that it was the emergence of an embryonic consumer society in manufactured goods, however rudimentary, that expanded opportunities for debt peonage as a form of expropriation and social control. His Marxist recognition of debt peonage as a residue of a feudal society enables him to transcend romanticized notions of native peoples in the Americas.

Instead, the natives find themselves navigating their way through a semi-feudal society in which foreign capital is reorganizing Mexican production on a massive scale, with large logging operations as one of the most immediate manifestations of this process. Constraints of cost and transport in the global economy of this era require that local ruling elites squeeze every last dollar out of their native peons. It is to Traven's credit that he resists the demonization of his Mexican characters because of his awareness that they are acting in a manner consistent with their social conditioning as they seek to satisfy the demands of international capital.

Sounds pretty contemporary, doesn't it? In The Carreta, the second novel in the series, Traven interweaves these broader social themes through the story of Andres, a young boy who is sent away from his family to pay the debt of his father to the local jefe. Traven's description of his departure is one of the high points of the novel, as Traven relates his father's grief despite his outwardly stolid appearance. In other words, Traven does not mistake a failure to speak and display intense emotion as indicative of an absence of parental despair. Andres is fortunate enough to be sent to work for a family where he becomes educated, and then, after the merchant for whom he works loses him playing cards, he ends up as a carretero, a cart driver who transports goods for his new boss across the mountainous dirt roads of southern Mexico.

It is difficult, but rewarding work, marked by a degree of independence lacking for those who work on fincas, ranches, or monterias, logging camps where the survival rate compares, perhaps unfavorably, to the gulag. Traven was supposedly a former journalist, and his eye for what anthropologists call ethnographical detail is acute. For a typical example of his ability to utilize his eye for detail as part of a broader social analysis, see this quote within one of my posts a few weeks ago. His description of the work and lives of Andres and the other carreteros is rich yet precise, although one must remain wary for periodic trangressions of romanticization. He humanizes what he perceives as an emerging working class in the jungle, one that is developing a class consciousness day by day as they work. But, in this instance, Traven doesn't say it explicitly, he leaves it to the reader to recognize it through the accumulation of seemingly mundane detail that he provides.

In the concluding passages, Andres goes to a festival after making a delivery and finds a wife, a young native women who has been subjected to sexual abuse by previous employers while working as a domestic. While the middle and upper class men engage in their yearly Dionysian bacchanalia of gambling and sexual excess in honor of their patron saint, he encounters her cold and hungry against the wall of a home near the city square. Traven describes the courtship between two such vulnerable people in a matter of fact way that is all the more moving because of it. Andres takes her back to the carreta train soon to depart, and gives her the name Estrellita. Unlike many women, she adapts quite readily to the demanding life on the road required of carreteros, and travels with Andres around southern Mexico for four years, until, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, a chance encounter disrupts their rough, idyllic life together.

Labels: Anarchism, Book Reviews, Marxism, Mexico

The three whales, including Haida’s newborn calf, were sold to Sea World for five million dollars.

Of course, Counterpunch posted the article in response to the orca attack upon a trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando yesterday that resulted in the trainer's death. My wife, after reading the media coverage, was startled by the discovery that the killer whale in question, a whale named Tilikum, had a history of attacking trainers, even killing one in Vancouver in 1991. Indeed, SeaWorld acquired him after the attack by including him among the aforementioned three whales purchased upon the closure of the Vancouver facility.

In this instance, Tilikum was literally more valuable in dollars than the trainer who died, Dawn Brancheau, more irreplaceable, and hence, if forced to choose between commercializing Tilikum, and protecting the trainers from serious injury or death, SeaWorld predictably chose the former. Even worse, SeaWorld deliberately purchased a belligerent killer whale because of the lucrative income stream associated with him. And the trainers, including Brancheau, played along, working with Tilikum, despite the risk, as manifested by Tilikum's involvement in a subsequent 1999 death as well as an attack by a different whale at the San Diego SeaWorld location in 2006.

There is nothing new about this. The willingness of people to acclimatize themselves to abuse more readily than animals has long been recognized. Consider, for example, this passage from the B. Traven novel, The Carreta, wherein he describes the conditions by which cart drivers, carretas, and their oxen worked in order to transport goods around southern Mexico in the early part of the 20th Century:

. . . There was a limit, however, beyond which the oxen could be worked without a break. When they got too low and exhausted and were not given a rest at grass, they finally refused to rise to their feet while on a journey, and then not the best of feeds or any other persuasion could urge them to go any farther. Blows had no effect. Oxen will very often act as mules do. They lie down, refuse food, and die.

Oxen and mules required a break of three or four weeks in good grass three or four times a year; and they got them. Oxen and mules were costly, and therefore suicide on their part was expensive for their masters. The carretas never had a holiday. They worked day by day, Sundays and holidays, by day and by night, in rain or tropical glare, in sandstorms and thunderstorms of such violence that the sky seemed to burst. The carretas too sometimes lay down by the way; but they did not commit suicide by exhaustion. That was the privilege of oxen and mules. And if a carretero perished by the way, or fell down a ravine while hoisting a carreta out of a hole, or got under the wheels, he was no loss to his employer. Carreteros did not mean the outlay of a centavo, unless it was that the employer took over the debt of a carretero to a previous master; and this debt would be little compared with the money an ox cost, even if the employer were left with it unredeemed due to the mishap of a carretero.

Brancheau undoubtedly worked under conditions more favorable than the carreteros, but, in the end, she was less important to SeaWorld than Tilikum, enslaved as he is, and she accepted it. One shudders to imagine the liability waiver that she was required to sign before she was hired.

Clearly, it was, by capitalist standards, a rational approach for SeaWorld. Even if one accounts for a substantial wrongful death civil judgment, given that SeaWorld's insurance will likely account for most, if not all, of it, and that SeaWorld has made substantial profit off both Tilikum and Brancheau, the balance still comes out quite well in favor of SeaWorld. Add Tilikum's proficiency as a breeder to the ledger, and there is no longer any doubt.

According to SeaWorld, he was quite the stud, having bred 17 calves. It may be conservative to estimate the value of each of these whales at 1 million dollars each, given that Tilikum was part of a three whale purchase for 5 million 19 years ago. Tilikum and Brancheau found themselves ensnared in a web of exploitation at the cost of Brancheau's life and Tilikum's liberty. We can only hope that killer whale and dolphin shows at amusement parks go the way of bear baiting.

Labels: American Culture, Animals, Mexico, Neoliberalism

An excerpt from a typically masterful analysis by Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City:

The militarization of Mexico has led to a steep increase in homicides related to the drug war. It has led to rape and abuse of women by soldiers in communities throughout the country. Human rights complaints against the armed forces have increased six-fold.

Even these stark figures do not reflect the seriousness of what is happening in Mexican society. Many abuses are not reported at all for the simple reason that there is no assurance that justice will be done. The Mexican Armed Forces are not subject to civilian justice systems, but to their own military tribunals. These very rarely terminate in convictions. Of scores of reported torture cases, for example, not a single case has been prosecuted by the army in recent years.

The situation with the police and civilian court system is not much better. Corruption is rampant due to the immense economic power of the drug cartels. Local and state police, the political system, and the justice system are so highly infiltrated and controlled by the cartels that in most cases it is impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

The militarization of Mexico has also led to what rights groups call "the criminalization of protest." Peasant and indigenous leaders have been framed under drug charges and communities harassed by the military with the pretext of the drug war. In Operation Chihuahua, one of the first military operations to replace local police forces and occupy whole towns, among the first people picked up were grassroots leaders—not on drug charges but on three-year old warrants for leading anti-NAFTA protests. Recently, grassroots organizations opposing transnational mining operations in the Sierra Madre cited a sharp increase in militarization that they link to the Merida Initiative and the NAFTA-SPP aimed at opening up natural resources to transnational investment.

All this—the human rights abuses, impunity, corruption, criminalization of the opposition—would be grave cause for concern under any conditions. What is truly incomprehensible is that in addition to generating these costs to Mexican society, the war on drugs doesn't work to achieve its own stated objectives.

We know this not only from the relatively recent Mexican experience, but from other places— especially Colombia and the Andean region. As Plan Colombia goes into its tenth year, the cost of drugs on U.S. streets has gone down and regional production has risen. In Mexico, interdictions dropped between 2007 and 2008. The number of arrests went up but seems to have little effect on the hydra-headed cartels. Actual indictment and prosecution rates following arrests are suspiciously not reported. Illegal drug flows to the U.S. market appear to be unaffected overall.

Meanwhile, as noted by Carlsen, the US is providing assistance in the form of Plan Mexico, 1.3 billion dollars directed to U.S. defense, security, information technology and other private-sector firms.

Labels: American Empire, Mexico, Police, US Military

The Other Campaign, a campaign of inquiry and social organization outside the Mexican political system, conducted by the Zapatistas, is making its way through Northern Mexico:

December 1, the day that Felipe Calderón takes office, will be “the beginning of the end for a political system that, since the Mexican Revolution, became deformed and began to cheat generation after generation, until this one arrived and said, ‘Enough,’” warned Subcomandante Marcos during a press conference. Calderón, he added, “will begin to fall from his first day.”

He stated, “we are on the eve of either a great uprising or a civil war.” As to the question of who would lead the uprising, he responded, “the people, each one in his or her own place, within a system of mutual support. If we can not succeed in having it happen that way, there will have to be spontaneous uprisings, civil explosions all over, a civil war in which each person is only looking out for his or her own well-being, because the possibility is already there for things to cross that line.” He cited the case of Oaxaca, where “there are no leaders or political bosses; it is the people themselves who have organized. It will be like that across the entire country.”

Is it possible that the insurrection has already begun in Oaxaca? For background as to the continuing civil unrest there, go here and here. According to indybay.org, Federal authorities escalated the conflict on Saturday with attacks upon protesters, mass detentions and home invasions:

A peaceful protest in Oaxaca was repressed by the federal police stationed in the center of the city. By nightfall, a few people were reported killed, hundreds arrested and hurt and many disappeared.

Today, after the seventh megamarch in Oaxaca, members of the APPO attempted to form a human fence around the federal preventative police (PFP), but were attacked with gas. This unleashed a series of clashes with violence again igniting in the city. Many have been arrested and there are reports of many wounded, some by gunfire. It is confirmed that three people were killed.

The march unfolded in a festive atmosphere until it reached Oaxaca’s downtown. There began the attempt to form a human fence around the PFP forces in Oaxaca's zocalo. Groups of PRI members started provoking the demonstraters with insults and shooting slingshots with marbles. Later, the PFP began using tear gas to disperse the people. People started to withdraw, but police kept moving forward and then began the riot. While shooting off tear gas, police kept charging on. People tried to resist in a peaceful way, but couldn`t stand up against the tear gas. The people began to defend themselves with rockets, home made bombs and stones.

The situation became very tense toward the area north of downtown where the police attempted to surround the protesters. At some point, the PFP entered Santo Domingo, which is occupied by an APPO encampment, and then set fire to the camp. Many fires started throughout the city, which were set by saboteurs. A bus near the University City, a door of the Hotel Camino Real and then the legislative palace and external relationships buildings were all set aflame.

The police started using gunfire and also shot gas cans at the protestors. This practice has killed people before in Oaxaca on Nov. 2 and in other places like Atenco. Radio Universidad made a general call to withdraw and to get off the streets. Three people were shot by police from two pickup trucks using heavy gunfire near the College of Medicine. Reports indicate more than one hundred shots heard. The killers took two of the bodies and left the third one lying at the spot.

Near a place known as El Pochote, a big group of people were surrounded by the police. Also in the streets of Fiallo y Colón, a big number of teachers and workers of the health department were detained and removed in two buses. To the north of downtown, several reports indicate that there were massive arrests of up to thirty people who were sprayed with gas after being detained. In a place called El Fortin, witnesses report how police were beating up and torturing detained ones before moving them from the spot aboard pickup trucks. Radio Universidad keeps transmitting and making announcements and denunciations.

The pacific mobilization received an attack from the federal police with gases and gunfire. Then protesters faced a wave of represion by armed police officers and paramilitary which resulted in the deaths of three people, many injured individuals, more than 60 detained protesters and innocent bystanders and an unknown number of disappeared people. The numbers are increasing because violence has not ceased in the streets of Oaxaca.

People caught on the streets are looking for safe places to hide as the night promises more terror. Radio Universidad is asking its listeners to open their doors and allow people to hide. Now the PFP is entering people’s homes to ransack them and search for protesters. The APPO has made a plea for all national and international organizations in solidarity with the Oaxaca struggle to protest where they can against the brutality of the Mexican federal government in its support of Ulises Ruiz.

One can place this struggle in context by reference to a recent seminal column by Richard Gott, a journalist who has spent decades covering events in Central and South America:

A feature of all "settler colonialist" societies has been the ingrained racist fear and hatred of the settlers, who are permanently alarmed by the presence of an expropriated underclass. Yet the race hatred of Latin America's settlers has only had a minor part in our customary understanding of the continent's history and society. Even politicians and historians on the left have preferred to discuss class rather than race.

In Venezuela, elections in December will produce another win for Hugo Chávez, a man of black and Indian origin. Much of the virulent dislike shown towards him by the opposition has been clearly motivated by race hatred, and similar hatred was aroused the 1970s towards Salvador Allende in Chile and Juan Perón in Argentina. Allende's unforgivable crime, in the eyes of the white-settler elite, was to mobilise the rotos, the "broken ones" - the patronising and derisory name given to the vast Chilean underclass. The indigenous origins of the rotos were obvious at Allende's political demonstrations. Dressed in Indian clothes, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would have been apparent. The same could be said of the cabezas negras - "black heads" - who came out to support Perón.

This unexplored parallel has become more apparent as indigenous organisations have come to the fore, arousing the whites' ancient fears. A settler spokesman, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-now-Spanish novelist, has accused the indigenous movements of generating "social and political disorder", echoing the cry of 19th-century racist intellectuals such as Colonel Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, who warned of a choice between "civilisation and barbarism".

Latin America's settler elites after independence were obsessed with all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and excluding the majority from their nation-building project. Along with their imported liberal ideology came the racialist ideas common among settlers elsewhere in Europe's colonial world. This racist outlook led to the downgrading and non-recognition of the black population, and, in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous peoples. In their place came millions of fresh settlers from Europe.

Gott concludes: The outline of a fresh struggle, with a final settling of accounts, can now be discerned. On this, it appears, Gott and Marcos are in agreement.

Labels: Activism, Elections, EZLN, Hugo Chavez, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Police, Racism, Richard Gott

Yesterday, I posted an interview of a Oaxaca activist by Ron Jacobs. Now, it is increasing evident that the government has not reestablished control, despite calling upon the military to suppress the movement:

Thousands of protesters hurling Molotov cocktails forced riot police officers with tear gas and water cannons to retreat on Thursday, as clashes intensified here in this popular tourist city.

At least eight people were injured in the violence, including a newspaper photographer who was hit by fireworks launched from the grounds of Oaxaca State’s university, a center of the protests. More than a dozen people have died in the conflict.

The federal police, who took over downtown Oaxaca last weekend, were pushed back by hundreds of protesters guarding the entrance to the university.

The riot police had the upper hand at first, when reinforcements arrived in armored trucks and helicopters, spraying water cannons and firing tear gas canisters.

But as they pushed through barricades of burned vehicles, the activists, who have blockaded the city for five months and demand that Gov. Ulises Ruiz step down, threw gasoline bombs at them. Local residents joined the demonstrators.

Greg Burger of Narco News has provided a more detailed account:

As helicopters, tanks, and scores of armed federal police approached the University campus, “la doctora,” the now famous host of radio APPO, urged the citizens of Oaxaca to rush to the scene to aid in the defense of the campus and particularly, of the radio station.

Scores of neighbors and students reportedly surround the PFP troops. Simultaneously, APPO supporters in Mexico City marched from the hunger strikers’ encampment near the Senate to the offices of the PFP to demand a retreat from the campus.

Mexican law prohibits the incursion of law enforcement into autonomous universities, unless requested by the university rector. The rector of the Benito Juarez University categorically rejects the presence of the PFP and did not give his approval to the agency to enter the campus.

Although it is unclear whether or not the retreat will be followed by a return to the scene tonight, one thing is quite clear at this moment; the APPO has dealt an important blow to the PFP and has proven that they are indeed capable of defeating the invading army.

The assault also marked an increase in the brutality of the PFP’s methods; at least 40 protesters were injured, according to radio universidad. Another “innovative” technique by the PFP today was the use of a staining agent mixed into the water shot by tanks at demonstrators. The staining agent presumably marks protesters for subsequent arrest.

There are additional reports of more prisoners being flown off into custody in helicopters, and also word of tear gas having been shot directly into private homes in the vicinity of the University.

George Salzman, also affiliated with Narco News, personally witnessed the intensity of the conflict:

The battle raged on University Avenue while I was there. University Avenue is a north-south four-lane road a little over a half-mile long that runs from the Periferal highway junction at the north, the Cinco Senores intersection, to the Plaza del Valley junction at the south. University City occupies a roughly square block a little more than 1/4 mile on each side. This is the main campus of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UABJO in its Spanish initials), located about 1.1 miles southeast of the Zócalo. This area is supposedly “autonomous” in the strict sense that the university authorities have exclusive control over the area. Police, military, federal authorities, state officials, and so on are, in principle, not allowed to enter the grounds unless explicitly invited by the Rector of the university. It is located on the east side of University Avenue, about a block or two south of the intersection.

This morning we heard that the PFP was going to invade the university on the grounds that there were reported to be firearms there. That’s a typical pretext the police use. It’s easy enough to get some corrupt state official or PRI-affiliated thug (PRI is the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in its Spanish initials) to file a denunciation that firearms or other illegal possessions are in a particular location. Radio Universidad was calling for citizens to come to protect the university, with a great sense of urgency. A friend dropped me off a few blocks from the Cinco Senores intersection, which was blocked on all sides by the PFP. As usual, I was able to circle the blocked intersection on a few side streets and soon was “inside” University Avenue in a mass of people, most facing north towards the lines of shield-equipped PFP troops.

Many in the dense crowd were busy photographing and videotaping the then-still-peaceful confrontation, several of them perched atop a burned-out VW-bug. Some people on a raised platform with a loudspeaker were telling the troops that they were the same as the protesters and shouldn’t have been sent to Oaxaca. The PFP lines stood inert, as trained. Several older women in the crowd, right at the front, not more than a foot or two from the plastic shields facing them, forcefully told the troops right in front of them that they are citizens, without arms, capable of running their own lives, and the PFP should leave Oaxaca.

By about 11:30 I started south. After the first barricade, which was north of university property, students were passing pieces of split wood through the barred fence from the university grounds to others on the street side with shopping carts. They use the wood for fires at the barricades. Suddenly an alert spread that an attack was imminent at the south end of University Avenue, and people streamed past me, leaving, I supposed, a smaller crowd at the north intersection. The shopping carts barreled by, along with people with cameras, many folks adjusting their bandannas getting ready for tear gas. Apparently the PFP, who had been massed at the Plaza del Valle end of the road, began advancing in a solid front. Then fireworks began. From the distance I saw clouds of smoke and/or gas and the wobbly arched paths of the home-made rockets launched towards the police, which left a trace of white smoke as they streaked across the space between the protesters and the PFP forces.

When one of the projectiles hit the ground and burst into flame in front of the first line of troops a wave of adrenaline swept the protesters, many of whom ran forward and hurled rocks at the police. I’ve written a lot about the teachers and APPO maintaining a militant but non-violent struggle, which I remain convinced is correct. But this was a different matter: this was people trying to protect their own turf from being invaded by lethally-armed forces, and there’s no way the attempted defense could be described as non-violent. Had the police been ordered to shoot, it could have been a massacre. All that can be said is that the imbalance of power was incomparably in favor of the police; had it been used, it would have been overwhelming.

Most of the defenders were younger men. But not all. Their major weapon was a stream of rocks. I think that in addition to their homemade incendiary rockets they may also have had some molotov cocktails. As the police shot tear gas canisters and began a slow step-by-step advance, I headed back a ways and entered the university athletic fields, located on the west side of the avenue behind a fence, and then came forward again, close to but separated from the exchange. Not, however, separated from the tear gas. People were taking large rocks and smashing them against other rocks on the ground to break them up into sizes suitable for hurling a considerable distance. Their courage and determination not to yield to the PFP was incredible. I’ve never seen anything close to it before.

And, finally, Radio Universidad has provided a translated, curt chronology of events. A brief sample:

13:47 Judicial state police, dressed in grey, entered into the Institute of Communication Sciences of the university of Oaxaca

13:46 Another person detained at the Noria Avenue at the entrance to the Five Señores intersection

13:41 Felix Jiménez Fabián a carpenter's assistant, was detained and was visibly beaten. 2 helicopters are dropping tear-gas, trying to take out the Radio Universidad antenna. There is a house on fire set by the police attacks. David Jarramillo, photographer from the Universal, was wounded, in the police attacks.

13:38 A dramatic report from a woman on the Radio Universidad in Oaxaca, who explains how the judicial state police (Policia ministariales) attacked people in the streets- the helicopters flying above dropping tear-gas bombs. Two helicopters are dropping concution grenades.

Perhaps, this is the sort of unrest that one associates with Mexico every 5 to 10 years. But this seems much more serious.

Labels: Activism, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Police

Events in Oaxaca have loomed just over the horizon, obscured by the Mexican election, hard to understand, covered elliptically by Narco News, with a dizzying array of articles about specific aspects of the struggle that, much like the struggle itself, defy the imposition of intellectual notions of linear narrative. Oaxaca, as reported by Narco News requires the concentration associated with the most demanding film and literature, which is to most emphatically say that one should still make the attempt.

Ron Jacobs has published an excellent e-mail interview that provides valuable context from the personal perspective of one of the participants:

When I lived in Washington state, some of my closest friends were from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I have kept in touch with a few of them and they have kept me in touch with the rebellion unfolding in the streets of Oaxaca the past few months. After the escalation of the situation there on October 27, 2006, when paramilitary forces shot and killed four people (including Indymedia journalist Brad Will), I spoke with my friends David Abeles and Hilaria Cruz who helped me contact some of their people in Oaxaca city. Given the circumstances currently existing in the area and the uncertainty of the immediate future because of the military and police presence there, I felt that the best way to get firsthand information out to the wider world would be to conduct an email interview. The first interview is below. I hope to have another one ready in the next couple days.

Ron: Hey Tomas. Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Would you be willing to introduce yourself?

Tomas: Hi, I would like to salute all the readers of this electronic journal. My name is Tomas Cruz, I am a native from a community in Oaxaca in the highlands. I was forced by the economic situation to migrate to the States. Fortunately I gained an education at the Evergreen State College. I also went the University of Texas for a graduate degree in Latin American studies.

Ron: So, you've been in Oaxaca during the entire uprising? Can you tell us the sequence of events as you see them up to now?

Tomas: I am a Oaxacan native with graduate training at the University of Texas at Austin. I have been involved in diverse NGOs working for the communities in Oaxaca up until the time of the Oaxacan uprising.

What we are seeing in Oaxaca is a breakdown of political system that is completely corrupt and deliberately abuses its citizens at will, using the legitimacy of the state to impose a government that only uses power to advance a personal agenda and that of a very small political oligarchy. Since the start of the present government it was characterized by repression of political leaders, immediately killing them and imposing its repressive mode of government.

The result of the events which are occurring as we speak began with an every year demonstration by the teacher´s syndicate. In the 14th of June, the state police attacked the teachers which were at the zocalo in a permanent demonstration.

The response from the citizenry was immediate, hundreds of people joined the teachers strike and saw an opportunity to stop the continued abuses from the government.

I can only describe what is occurring as catharsis of the population, especially of the immense poor population of the city, which survive.

After the attack by the state and the immense response from the population the most remarkable event in the politics of the movement has been the formation of a popular assembly of the pueblos of Oaxaca also known as APPO.

The APPO organizations have been capable of resisting all the attacks from the state government, from spots attacking the protesters as a bunch of radicals to the death squads sent to kill people that were protesting at night.

The response from the APPO was to develop barricades to stop the death squads. This resulted in a historical and animated political culture, with also a strong popular support.

In the recent days, the violence escalated in one single day in which the international reporter died at the hands of the mercenaries payed by the governor.

Yesterday, there was an intervention from the federal police after the multiple deaths and probably also after the international pressure after the death of one international reporter. The federal police killed at least 4 people and raped one woman in the intervention. The response from the APPO is to maintain the protest until the governor resigns and the political system is reformed.

Ron: What groups were involved that you know of? Also, I imagine that many people were unaffiliated. What were their reasons for joining, in your estimate?

Tomas: This movement is composed of the poorest section of the population. Old housewives which think of this as a parallel to the revolution of 1910 and are ready to resist for years, beggars which are tired of the abuses by the police, or simply sympathize with the movement because they see no hope and future in their lives. Mechanics, civil servants, citizens from the neighboring neighborhoods which have had their municipal presidents imposed on them. Citizens from the poorest sections of the city.

Ron: From my understanding, PRI and its allies were responsible for the shootings that killed several people on October 27th. Is PRI the only party responsible for the situation in Oaxaca or are other political parties also responsible?

Tomas: No, the PRI is seeing its last days and with it, it has resorted to the only thing that they know, violence.

Ron: You're in Oaxaca right now. What the hell is going on?

Tomas: Hell is rising in Oaxaca, the force of the government against teachers, students, housewives, mechanics, peasants. The whole city and the whole state is filled with federal police, local police, military.

Ron: How are the spirits of those in the rebellion? Where do they get their food and water?

Tomas: There is ample popular support for this uprising which results in a steady flow of donations from communities and lay citizens that donate at different points. Mainly this has been coordinated by using radio stations. At this point theres is one station left which is being broadcast through the internet at www.indymedia.org you can listen to what is going on as we speak, (those that can speak Spanish)

The radio broadcasters which have little experience but a huge heart receive the needs of the people on the barricades as to what is needed. Yesterday for example they organized the installation of medical aid stations because the red cross got instructions from the governor and its director not to attend the flurry of people that were shot at by the governor's police.

Ron: Do you think there is a potential for armed conflict (beyond that seen already--which seems mostly to originate from the forces of the state)?

Tomas: Hmm, if the state continues on its support of a political figure which has lost completely popular support, especially from the poor, then we will see an escalate on violence. because the demands of the people after decades and some argue centuries have been unattended. Honestly I think that this would continue in the same degree, as peaceful opposition and hopefully we would see a more democratic state. Only if the government continues on its escalate of violence we would see a critical cyclical point in Mexico´s history.

If the federal forces are able to quash the rebellion, what kind of repression do you think will follow? Indeed, based on past experiences, after the media leaves the region, what do you foresee happening to the movement, its participants and supporters, and the region in general?

I think that the violence is going to be targeted at the organizers and the leaders of the movement.

Ron: In the greater scheme of things, how would you relate this to other struggles occurring in the Americas? What relationship do you see the demands of the protestors have, if any, to the anti-imperialist/anti-global capitalism movements in this hemisphere and around the world?

Tomas: This rebellion reminds me of Bolivia, because of its indigenous component. As in Bolivia, once the indigenous population determines that it needs to be overturned, we see that they gain a determination that has caused governments to fall. In the case of Oaxaca, the most likely scenario is that the governor is going to be overthrown. What we are seeing also is a political scenario that changes everyday. The news today is that the political parties at the national level are all calling for the governor to resign.

If the movement maintains the level and determination that we are seeing, then we have this movement playing an important role in the national politics and possibly a shift in the neoliberal government of Mexico.

Ron: Anything more to add?

Tomas: I was in the scene five minutes before the reporter from indymedia was killed. I remember hearing the shots, people running all over the place, unarmed mechanics, housewives. There was a woman there, I do not know if she was a teacher, I only remember her words " This is our moment, we cant go on living like this, it is enough. I went to school barefooted and It makes me cry to see what happens here. Our only future is the border with the United States, I makes me sad to see our young finish a University Degree only to work as taxi drivers. This is our moment, we can't let them continue to oppress us.

To follow events in Oaxaca, visit indybay.org and Narco News.

Labels: Activism, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Police

As long as I'm posting about Latin America (see previous post) for what it's worth, Amnesty International and Mexico's National Human Rights Commission have confirmed claims of sexual abuse by state and federal police forces during the Atenco conflict, according Bill Weinberg in WW4 Report who cites Spanish language sources. Background on Atenco can be found in this post of mine from last spring...

Labels: Latin America, Mexico

MEXICO, AGAIN: More about the turmoil in Mexico, as John Ross describes the certification of Calderon as President:

In an epiphany of how he might have to govern Mexico if the left opposition allows him to assume the presidency December 1, right-winger Felipe Calderon had to be helicoptered to the bunker in the deep south of this conflictive capital where the nation's top electoral tribunal, doing business as the TRIFE, was to hand him the certificate attesting that he had, in the judges' less-than-august opinions, won the July 2 election from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO.).

Upon emerging from the chopper which had been accompanied by a military gunship, the stubby, balding Calderon was quickly hustled into the TRIFE headquarters by the back door a full 90 minutes before the actual ceremony was to commence, a subterfuge necessitated by the presence by thousands of AMLO's enraged supporters, some of whom had already stripped naked.

Calderon's witnesses -- members of his campaign team and functionaries of the archly-rightist PAN party who had the misfortune to arrive by land -- were greeted by clods of earth and screams of "Rateros!" (Thieves) and "Fraude!" (Fraud.) The ritual unfolded under a steady barrage of rotten eggs and tomatoes which AMLO's people kept hurling at the TRIFE bunker, a kind of Aztec version of a U.S. missile silo, to express their unhappiness with the seven-judge panel that had neither heard nor seen any evil in the maladroit machinations of President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the PAN to steal the election from their candidate.

As with most of Ross' articles, it proceeds to provide a riveting account of the contentious faultlines within Mexican society.

BRZEZINSKI THE BAPTIST: Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has always been an anomaly, a blunt spoken person in a field, foreign policy, where subtlety and indirectness is normally prized. But, in an interview with the German publication Der Spiegel, he outdoes himself to an extent to where the simplicity of his speech takes on the aphoristic quality of prophecy:

SPIEGEL: Are there any conditions under which America could lose its current political supremacy?

Brzezinski: One would only have to continue the current policies and, also, in future not give a serious response to increasingly louder complaints of global inequality. We are now dealing with a far more politically active mankind that demands a collective response to their grievances from the West.

SPIEGEL: Is your demand to eradicate global inequality not as illusionary as Bush's demand that America free the world from evil?

Brzezinski: Achieving equality would indeed be an illusionary goal. Reducing inequality in the age of television and Internet may well become a political necessity. We are entering a historic stage in which people in China and India, but also in Nepal, in Bolivia or Venezuela will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition. That could well be the collective danger we will have to face in the next decades.

SPIEGEL: You call it a "global political awakening."

Brzezinski: Yes, and it is essentially a repetition, but now on a global scale, of the societal and political awakening that occurred in France at the time of the revolution. During the 19th century it spread through Europe and parts of the Western hemisphere, in the 20th century it reached Japan and finally China. Now it is sweeping the rest of the world.

A global political awakening! Brzezinski invokes the rhetoric of 19th Century Protestant evangelicalism, while simultaneously channeling Mike Davis, as American Leftist readers will recall this passage from his recent book, Planet of Slums:

In summary, the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go: down the road that logically follows from the abdication of urban reform. As in the past, this is a "street without joy," and, indeed, the unemployed teenage fighters of the "Mahdi Army" in Baghdad's Sadr City--one of the world's largest slums--taunt American occupiers with the promise that the main boulevard is "Vietnam Street." But the war planners don't blanch. With cold blooded lucidity, they now assert that the "feral, failed cities" of the Third World--especially their urban outskirts--will be the distinctive battlefield of the twenty-first century. Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor. This is the true "clash of civilizations".

Say, perhaps, someday in Mexico? In any event, I strongly encourage people to read the interview in its entirety, as Brzezinski addresses a broad spectrum of topics, including the necessity of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the variegated nature of Islamic fundamentalism and the absurd inflation of Bin Laden into a figure of global influence:

SPIEGEL: So it is exaggerated rhetoric which ensures that Osama bin Laden is elevated to the level of a Mao or Stalin?

Brzezinski: Correct. And that is of course a distortion of reality - notwithstanding the fact that bin Laden is a killer. He is a criminal and should be presented as such, and not intentionally elevated into a globally significant leader of a transnational, quasi-religious movement.

Here is the link again for anyone who wants to enjoy Brzezinski's ability to simply communicate complex ideas. Or, is it the inability of others to convey them in a straightforward manner that makes them appear complex?

Labels: American Empire, Elections, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Osama Bin Laden, Zbigniew Brzezinski

UPDATE: Lopez Obrador avoids conflict with the Mexican military:

Leftist opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced that he was temporarily ending a mass protest over disputed election results that had paralyzed much of downtown Mexico City since July 30.

Lopez Obrador, who officially lost the July 2 election by a razor-thin margin to president-elect Felipe Calderon, said the protest would be lifted to allow the popular September 16 independence day military parade to proceed.

The protest has "nothing against" the military, an "institution that guarantees our sovereignty," he told a downtown gathering of thousands of supporters.

However, in a challenge to outgoing President Vicente Fox, Lopez Obrador vowed to deliver a rival ceremonial public call for independence late September 15 at the Zocalo, the giant downtown square where the protests are centered.

TWO POPES IN MEXICO? Felipe Calderon has been declared President of Mexico, but the crisis persists, and may be intensifying:

Felipe Calderón, a former energy minister and onetime long-shot candidate, was unanimously declared president-elect of Mexico on Tuesday in a court decision that capped a two-month legal battle but did not end the nation's political crisis.

Calderón's opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refused to recognize the decision. During a fiery address before thousands of supporters in Mexico City's downtown square, the Zocalo, he mocked Calderón as an "illegitimate president" and pledged to create an "alternate government" to "refound the Republic and reestablish constitutional order" before the Dec. 1 presidential inauguration.

Backers of runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador protest at the electoral court in Mexico City. López Obrador had vowed to defy such a ruling and set up a parallel government.

Speaking moments later, Calderón called for conciliation, saying, "Mexicans can think differently, but we are not enemies." He declared that "the electoral process is over and the hour has arrived for unity." The dueling speeches were tracked minutely by Mexicans both puzzled and fascinated by the prospect of two men simultaneously claiming to lead the nation.

For an American Leftist evaluation of the nature of the vote fraud that appears to been have perpetrated in Mexico, go here. Anticipating this result, Obrador called upon his supporters to create an alternative government before the result was announced:

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, convinced he won't be awarded the presidency, has vowed to create a parallel leftist government and is urging Mexicans not to recognize the apparent victory of the ruling party's Felipe Calderon.

While his party lacks the seats in Congress to block legislation, Lopez Obrador can mobilize millions to pressure his conservative rival to adopt the left's agenda — or to clamp down and risk a backlash.

Both scenarios are possibilities as the former Mexico City mayor lays out plans to create his own government to rule from the streets, with the support of thousands who are already occupying protest camps throughout downtown Mexico City.

Some predict his parallel initiative — which Lopez Obrador's supporters call the "legitimate government" — could turn those protest camps into the core of a violent revolt, especially if the government tries to shut it down.

Such violence broke out in the southern city of Oaxaca after Gov. Ulises Ruiz sent police to evict striking teachers. Outraged citizens' groups joined the protests, setting fire to buildings and public buses, seizing radio and TV stations and forcing the closure of businesses in a city known throughout the world as a quaint tourist destination.

"Everything we do, from property taxes to permits to natural resources, will go through the 'legitimate government,'" said Severina Martinez, a school teacher from Oaxaca camped out in a tent in Mexico City's main Zocalo plaza. "We won't have anything to do with the official government."

Reading this makes me wonder: to what extent do many of the poor, the indigenous population of Mexico already live under an alternative government? In other words, with the implementation of neoliberalism in Mexico since the election of Carlos Salinas in 1988, to what extent do they already have to meet their daily needs of food, shelter, schooling, medical care, transporation and police protection independent of the government? Is it possible that, by depriving Obrador of the presidency, the Mexican elite is accidentally accelerating a decomposition of the Mexican state? Something much greater, much more significant than an electoral dispute could be developing south of the border.

THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE ISRAELI PEACE MOVEMENT:
As reported here at American Leftist, Uri Avnery confirms that there is no significant peace movement in Israel, describing, as I did here, the cynicism of left intellectuals in supporting, and then, abandoning, the war in Lebanon:

WHILE ANALYZING the Second Lebanon War, it is impossible to ignore the role played by the Leftists, with or without quotation marks, during the fighting.

The day before yesterday I saw on TV an interview with the playwright Joshua Sobol, a likeable person known as a regular leftist. He explained that this war has brought us important benefits, and sang the praises of the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz.

Sobol is not alone. When the government started this war, an impressive line-up of writers supported it. Amos Oz, A.B.Yehoshua and David Grossman, who regularly appear as a political trio, were united again in their support of the government and used all their considerable verbal talents to justify the war. They were not satisfied with that: some days after the beginning of the war, the three published a joint ad in the papers, expressing their enthusiastic backing for the operation.

Their support was not purely passive. Amos Oz, a writer with considerable literary prestige throughout the world, wrote an article in favor of the war, which appeared in several respected foreign newspapers. I wouldn't be surprised if "somebody" helped to distribute it. His two comrades, too, were active in propagating the war, together with a long row of writers like Yoram Kaniuk, assorted artists and intellectuals, real or imagined. All of them volunteered for the propaganda reserves without waiting to be drafted.

I doubt that the war would have attained its monstrous dimensions without the massive support of Leftists-but, which made it possible to form a "wall to wall consensus ", ignoring the protest of the consistent peace camp. This consensus carried away the Meretz party, whose guru Amos Oz is, and Peace Now, in whose mass rallies Amos Oz used to be the main speaker (when they were still able to stage mass rallies).

Some people are now pretending that this group was really against the war. To whit: some days before the end they published a second tripartite ad, this time calling for its termination. At the same time, Meretz and Peace Now also changed course. But not one of them apologized or showed remorse for their prior support for the killing and devastation. Their new position was: the war was indeed very good, but now the time has come to put an end to it.

Such conduct exposes the reality that Israel now has no intention to relinquish control of the West Bank and Gaza:

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres has reiterated that his government had abandoned plans to withdraw from most of the occupied West Bank.

"The idea of unilateral disengagement or realignment is over. It is over politically, psychologically as well as operationally," Peres was quoted as telling the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily on Friday.

"There will not be a manifold repetition in Judaea and Samaria (the southern and northern West Bank) of the withdrawal from Gaza. There will not be massive evacuation of the settlements," he added, giving three reasons.

He listed them as continued Palestinian attacks from Gaza despite Israel's withdrawal last year, fractured Palestinian politics with no one to take responsibility, and unfavourable public opinion in Israel.

Peres said Israel would instead hold talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, albeit bypassing the governing Hamas movement that does not officially recognise Israel's right to exist.

What on earth does Peres mean? Talks about what? The old favorite of American liberals appears to showing signs of senility, but they will no doubt find some obscure logic that evades the rest of us. And, again, here is yet another example of Israel's historic practice to select its negotiating partner, regardless of what the Palestinians think about it. A good way to make sure that Israel remains in the occupied territories permanently.

Zionism has now been officially reduced, as I posted here earlier, to a social enterprise of militarism and occupation, with the starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza the current objective:

"Women in Gaza tell me they are eating only one meal a day, bread with tomatoes or cheap vegetables," said Kirstie Campbell of the UN's World Food Programme, which is feeding 235,000 people. She added that in June, since when the crisis has worsened, some 70 per cent of people in Gaza could not meet their family's food needs. "People are raiding garbage dumps," she said.

Not only do Palestinians in Gaza get little to eat but what food they have is eaten cold because of the lack of electricity and money to pay for fuel. The Gaza power plant was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in June. In one month alone 4 per cent of Gaza's agricultural land was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers.

Labels: Elections, Israel, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Palestine, Zionism

UPDATE: Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic Policy Research, during the Democracy Now! interview referenced in the initial post:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And these massive demonstrations that have been occurring now in Mexico City for weeks, they have gotten very little coverage here in the United States. I’m thinking back to when the massive protests in the Ukraine and some of the other Russian republics over allegations of election fraud. But there hasn't been much coverage here in the U.S. press of these protests right with our southern neighbor.

MARK WEISBROT: No. Not very much. And especially the allegations, like the one I just said before. That's not even allegation. That's a verifiable fact, that you have the majority of ballot boxes where the votes don’t add up, the ballots aren't kept track of. So that hasn’t -- the media hasn't made an issue out of that. And they haven't made any issue out of the fact that the tribunal is withholding the results. And I’m actually worried that they're going to not even wait until the August 31 deadline. They’re going to announce the result before the public gets to see what happened in the two recounts that they already did.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this mean for the future of Mexico?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think it's huge. I mean, the issues in this election are very big. Mexico has had a terrible economic failure over the last 25 years. The total economic growth has been about 17% per capita over a 25-year period, as opposed to 99% from 1960 to 1980. And it's been a terrible failure, a terrible economic failure.

Apparently, Weisbrot is well-informed, if perhaps, only partially so, because, while the timing is accurate, the method seems to have been altered. From Reuters, about an hour ago:

Mexico's electoral court will give its verdict on Monday on a partial recount of votes in the July 2 presidential election, which leftists say was rigged against them.

The court will hold a public session at 8 a.m.to give the results of the recount this month at 9 percent of polling stations, a court spokesman said on Sunday.

It was not clear whether the court would also give a revised vote count for the overall election, in which ruling party conservative Felipe Calderon came out ahead with a margin of some 244,000 votes out of 41 million cast.

Mexico has been in turmoil since the election, with Calderon planning his cabinet while leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador calls rallies and sit-ins to push for a full recount of every vote cast.

The electoral court is widely expected to reject Lopez Obrador's demand for a full recount and most analysts expect it eventually will confirm pro-business former energy minister Calderon as president-elect.

It is hard to understand how this is going to persuade people to accept the initial results. It does, however, appear to be consistent with a strategy of marginalizing left opposition so that they can be violently suppressed.

INITIAL POST: Who won the Mexican election? It is hard to know. Narco News, a Central and South American grassroots journalism effort created by Al Giordano, has consistently asserted that Andres Manual Lopez Obrador, the left candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the PRD, was the victim of massive vote fraud orchestrated by the two parties who dominate Mexican political life, the National Action Party, the PAN, and the Institutional Revolution Party, the PRI:

Finally, the hard numbers are starting to come in. In the “partial recount” of paper ballots from the July 2 presidential election in Mexico, ordered by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (known as the Trife), the recount has been completed in 10,679 precincts of the 11,839 ordered by the court (about 9 percent of Mexico’s 130,000 precincts). From these precincts, Narco News has obtained the following preliminary numbers that confirm the massive and systematic electoral fraud inflicted on the Mexican people:

In 3,074 precincts (29 percent of those recounted), 45,890 illegal votes, above the number of voters who cast ballots in each polling place, were found stuffed inside the ballot boxes (an average of 15 for each of these precincts, primarily in strongholds of the National Action Party, known as the PAN, of President Vicente Fox and his candidate, Felipe Calderón).

In 4,368 precincts (41 percent of those recounted), 80,392 ballots of citizens who did vote are missing (an average of 18 votes in each of these precincts).

Together, these 7,442 precincts contain about 70 percent of the ballots recounted. The total amount of ballots either stolen or forged adds up to 126,282 votes altered.

If the recount results of these 10,679 precincts (8.2 percent of the nation’s 130,000 polling places) are projected nationwide, it would mean that more than 1.5 million votes were either stolen or stuffed in an election that the first official count claimed was won by Calderon by only 243,000 votes.

Among the findings of this very limited partial recount are that in 3,079 precincts where the PAN party is strong and where, in many cases, the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not count with election night poll watchers, one or more of three things occurred: Either the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) illegally provided more ballots than there are voters in those precincts, or the PAN party stole those extra ballots, or ballots were forged.

“Taqueo and Saqueo”

These preliminary recounts demonstrate mainly two kinds of fraud: “taqueo,” or the stuffing of ballot boxes with false votes as if putting extra beans inside a taco, and “saqueo,” or “looting,” that is, the disappearance of legitimate ballots cast.

A significant problem, now, for Mexican democracy (for those who claim that the election was fair, and also for those who view this evidence as proof of electoral fraud) is that there is no way to tell, inside each ballot box, which of the ballots were legal and which were not; nor which ballots were stolen and which were not.

In some past post-electoral disputes for state and local offices, the Trife electoral court has opted, based on this kind of evidence, to annul the results from those precincts where stuffing or looting occurred.

If the Trife follows the law and its own established precedents, and annuls the results in these 7,442 precincts where the fraud took place, it would reverse the official results and López Obrador would emerge the victor by more than 425,000 votes nationwide.

Greg Palast, discussed here previously in the context of the Republican effort to create a permanent electoral majority by manipulation of the franchise, is also dubious:

. . .The precinct-by-precinct returns were quite otherworldly. I used to teach statistics and what I saw in Mexico would have stumped my brightest students.

Here's the conundrum: The nation's tens of thousands of polling stations report to the capital in random order after the polls close. Therefore, statistically, you'd expect the results to remain roughly unchanged as vote totals come in. As expected, AMLO was ahead of the right-wing candidate Calderon all night by an unchanging margin -- until after midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting wins for Calderon of five to one, the ten to one, then as polling nearly ended, of one-hundred to one.

How odd. I checked my concerns with Professor Victor Romero of Mexico's National University who concluded that the reported results must have been a "miracle." As he put it, a "religious event," but a statistical impossibility. There were two explanations, said the professor: either the Lord was fixing the outcome or operatives of the ruling party were cranking in a massive number of ballots when they realized their man was about to lose.

How could they do it? "Easy pea-sy," as my kids would say. In Mexico, the choices for president are on their own ballot with no other offices listed. Those who don't want to vote for President just discard the ballot. There is no real ballot security. In areas without reliable opposition observers (about a third of the nation), anyone can stuff ballots into the loosely-guarded cardboard boxes. (AMLO showed a tape of one of these ballot-stuffing operations caught in the act.

The "9% solution" was the TRIFE's ham-fisted attempt to chill out the several hundred thousand protesting supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who had gathered in the capital and blocked its main Avenue. Lopez Obrador, the Leftist challenger known by his initials AMLO, supposedly lost the presidential vote by just one half of one percent of the vote.

I say "supposedly" lost because, while George Bush congratulated his buddy Felipe Calderon on his victory, the evidence I saw on the ground in Mexico City fairly shrieks that the real winner was challenger AMLO.

James K. Galbraith, a professor in government at the University of Texas at Austin, echoes Palast:

An analysis by the physicist Luis Mochán of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, based on the real-time evolution of the vote count and the distribution of vote totals by polling place, can be found on the Internet. It’s not easy reading, but is immensely worthwhile. It’s possible that Mochán’s work inaugurates a new era in real-time checking for vote fraud, made possible by the simplicity of Mexico’s first-past-the-post direct vote and the rich electoral data sets that can be made instantly available. Call it the age of transparency, in collision with an oligarchy of thugs.

Mochán’s work calls attention to at least four important anomalies in the count.

Calderón’s percentage lead in the count started at around 7 points and diminished steadily in percentage terms through the first part of the count. This corresponded to a remarkably constant absolute differential between Calderón and AMLO as the count progressed. Is this normal? The count depended on the arrival of the boxes; if this were random, then the proportions should have held roughly constant while absolute differentials widened, as actually happened to the differential between Calderón and the third major candidate, Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for most of the evening. Why did the Calderón-AMLO differential follow a different rule?

The PREP results went on view only after the first 10,000 boxes had been processed. If those boxes resembled what came later, then extrapolating backward should produce a line intersecting the origin—each candidate should have started with zero votes. For Calderón this is the case, but for AMLO it is not: The AMLO intercept is actually at minus 126,000 votes. Thus, the first 10,000 boxes were markedly different from those that followed. How?

There are gross anomalies in the number of votes counted per five-minute interval as the count finishes. Over the course of the evening, the pattern of vote counts set a normal range for this variable. As the last boxes came in, however, it was radically violated, with many more votes piled in, per interval, than normal for the rest of the count. Moreover, toward the very end, PREP reset the box count, which regressed from 127,936 at 1:17 p.m. on July 3 to 127,713 at 1:50 p.m., meaning that records for 223 boxes disappeared. Thirty-three minutes had by then passed with no updates. When they resumed, there were updates with absurd results: more than 6,000 votes per box at 1:50, and then updates with large negative votes per box at 1:57 and 2:03.

From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is. But for Calderón and AMLO it isn’t. In Calderón’s case, the distribution appears to be shifted out, with the shift localized among the last 40,000 boxes counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution tails off abruptly from its peak. It is in the difference between the slightly fat distribution for Calderón and the shaved distribution for AMLO that the final outcome is to be found. A graph of the differences in Calderón’s and AMLO’s votes per box, which ought to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a certain range, Calderón’s margins appear abnormally large.

Professor Mochán does not claim to explain these anomalies. More time and closer investigation remain necessary. But he does conclude that it “is reasonable to suspect that there could have been a manipulation of the results reported by the PREP.” It is true that the PREP is not an official count—that was done at the district offices, with equally serious anomalies alleged. But PREP reported the box-by-box results as they flowed in-and as such it constitutes a vital instrument for the detection of patterns of manipulation and fraud.

Let me go further than Mochán. The evidence he assembles is consistent with the following possibilities:

That Felipe Calderón started the night with an advantage in total votes, a gift from the authorities.

That as the count progressed this advantage was maintained by misreporting the actual results. This enabled Calderón to claim that he had led through the entire process—an argument greatly repeated but spurious in any case because it is only the final count that matters.

That toward the end of the count, further adjustments were made to support the appearance of a victory by Calderón.

Add these elements together, and there is no reason to accept the almost universal view that the election was close. AMLO might have won by a mile.

More recently, the Center for Economic Policy Research also recently issued a short study objecting to the lack of transparency in the counting of ballots, emphasizing some peculiarites that warrant further inquiry, with Mark Weisbrot describing their findings on Democracy Now!

Meanwhile, the perspective of the American press can be summarized in this passage from an Associated Press article published on August 10th:

The count must wrap up by Sunday, after which the Federal Electoral Tribunal will review the results and decide by Sept. 6 whether to declare a president-elect or annul the election.

The initial results gave Felipe Calderon, the pro-business candidate of conservative President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, a lead of 240,000 votes, or less than 1 percent, over leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City.

The partial count could change those results, but it was considered unlikely to tip the balance in favor of Lopez Obrador, whose supporters have been disrupting life in the capital for more than a week to press their charge he was robbed of an election victory by fraud.

The San Francisco Chronicle is an American newspaper that has actually called for a recount of all ballots, but, given the extent of fraud, ballot spoilage and other irregularities, as observed by Giordano elsewhere in his article, what, if anything, would it reveal? Contrary to the belief of the editorial page editors at the Chronicle, probably not anything that will induce people to have confidence in the Mexican political system.

Labels: Elections, Mexico, Neoliberalism

Generally, I try to avoid being just another portal, but, from time to time, I consider it worthwhile to identify some interesting articles. With the weekend upon us, here's some relaxed reading to provide context to the turbulent events of recent weeks and beyond.

First, Mother Jones has an informative interview with Tariq Ali. In his free ranging responses, Ali directly addresses many subjects of importance, such as his opinion of the Cuban revolutionary project, as implemented by Castro, the negative impact of NGOs around much of the world, the reform of Islam, the emerging implausibility of a two state solution in Palestine, and, the right of the Lebanese, and especially, Hizbollah, to resist the Israeli invasion:

MJ: How can you support Hezbollah’s actions—or those of Hamas—given both groups’ adherence to a fundamentalist ideology that you make no secret of disliking?

TA: Well look, I don’t agree with their religious views, obviously. I’m not a believer. That’s hardly a secret: I state it in public. However when a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it’s important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist. The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups, including for instance in Libya and the Sudan. There, the groups resisting the Italian invasion were ones that [Europeans] couldn’t support politically—but nonetheless they defended them against attack. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Albania in the name of European civilization and said he was going to wipe out these backward feudal despotisms, most people in the West defended the Ethiopians and the Albanians against the Italian onslaught and said they had the right to resist. So it’s on that principle—that when people, whoever they may be, you may not like them, but when they decide to resist, you have to defend their right to do so.

Second, John Ross describes the ongoing protests in Mexico City against the refusal to recount the ballots of the presidential election in Mexico:

The encampments stretch from the Periferico out in the ritzy Polanco district nine kilometers east to the Zocalo in the crumbling old quarter of the city. The great square has been sectioned off into 31 state camps where AMLO's [Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's] people live under enormous tents, the origin of which is uncertain. Some of the encampments function better than others. The Oaxaca delegation, veterans of such camp outs (striking teachers back home have been occupying the state capital's main plazas for three months) are said to have the best "cocina". Oaxacan cuisine is internationally celebrated. Meanwhile the folks from Campeche have run out of money and will soon be heading back to that far-off southern state.

AMLO sleeps with the delegates from the states--albeit in a fenced-off enclave under a private tent. It is not the first time that Lopez Obrador has encamped in the Zocalo. In 1995, after big-time electoral fraud in his home state of Tabasco, the leftist led hundreds of ragtag campesinos in a 1300-kilometer odyssey, "the Exodus for Democracy", which bedded down on these rain-soaked stones for weeks. Later, he would govern the capital from City Hall on one corner of the Tiennemens-sized Square and if he does ever ascend to the presidency, he has promised to move into the National Palace on another corner.

Extending west from the Zocalo, AMLO's people in the 16 delegations or boroughs of the capital have set up their own encampments. The Cuauhtemoc and Carranza delegations occupy Madero Street on a strip of the Centro Historico refurbished by Lopez Obrador in collusion with the third richest tycoon in the known universe, Carlos Slim. The contours of the old quarter or Centro Historico roughly correspond to the island of Tenochtitlan, the heart of the Aztec empire.

AMLO's encampments here bear more than a passing resemblance to those set up on these same streets by the "damnificados" refugees) from the killer 1985 earthquake that may have taken as many as 30,000 lives--the damnificado movement was the "caldo" (soup) in which Mexico's resilient civil society was brewed. In fact, some of those living on the streets now, lived on them back then. At a meeting in one of the tents on Madero and Motelinia to hash out food supply problems, Tona Lechuga from nearby Regina Street recalls how food stores were organized after the 1985 cataclysm. "We need to do this right" she insists, "We have an army to feed."

Lastly, we have another obituary for Murray Bookchin, by Mike Small in the Guardian:

His magnum opus was The Ecology of Freedom (1982). "The domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human," he wrote. "The long-term solution to the ecological crises is a fundamental shift in how we organise society, a new politics based on face-to-face democracy, neighbourhood assemblies and 'the dissolution of hierarchy'."

For Bookchin there was a clear distinction between ecology, which wanted to transform society, and environmentalism, which wants to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist economy. In Remaking Society (1990) he wrote: "To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing."

And, don't forget, there are protests against the Israeli attacks upon Lebanon and Gaza in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle this weekend.

Labels: Anarchism, Elections, Hizbullah, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Mexico, Murray Bookchin, Obituaries, Tariq Ali

The recent German election again highlights the resurgence of the left in Europe and South America. Looking South, Chavez has prevailed in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, and mass protest movements have emerged in response to the failure of pro-American economic policies of austerity and privatization in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina.

In Europe, a conservative, pro-American, Spanish government that supported the war in Iraq, and engaged in mililtary exercises in 2001, conducting a mock assault in which the United States and allied countries simulated an attack on western Venezuela from bases in Panama and Colombia, has been replaced by a socialist one that now ships CS gas there, commonly used for riot control, but possibly very useful in the event that US Marines decide to enter Caracas.

Meanwhile, the French have rejected a proposed European Union ("EU") constitution that would have enshrined neoliberal economic values and given the United States control over European foreign policy. Equally important, the Germans, in an election prior to the launching of the war in Iraq, reelected a socialist prime minister, Gerhard Schroeder, who vigorously opposed German participation in the impending conflict under any conditions, and, last week, although you would never know based upon US media reports, again provided center-left parties a majority of the seats in parliament. As noted by Apostate Windbag in his excellent commentaries, Germans rejected neoliberalism in an election that became a referendum on it.

Anti-imperialism, resistance to the avowed intention of the neo-conservatives to militarily and economically dominate the world, is the coarse thread that runs through all of these political developments. But Germany will not have a left government. Instead, despite a left majority, it has, in the words of the Guardian, "been plunged into uncertainty". Why? Because the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, and the Greens have flatly rejected the prospect of such a government, as has, admittedly, the new left party, the Linkspartei. Naturally, the media generally expresses the view that it is more acceptable for the SPD to enter into a coalition with its right wing opponent, the Christian Democratic Union, than with a party more ideologically compatible, the Linkspartei. While the refusal of the Linkspartei can probably be attributable to campaign necessity (after all, how can a small, new party hope to gain support if it starts with the proposition of displaying a willingness to enter into a coalition with ideologically similar parties that it purports to reject?), the refusal of the SPD and the Greens raises profound questions about the extent to which liberal democracies are intentionally structered to disenfranchise the left.

"Well, of course!" interject impatient readers. "Who doesn't know that liberal democracies are controlled by money, by corporate interests that use them to impose a neoliberal, finance capital economic model on the rest of the world?" Indeed, there is much truth to this, but, perhaps, the more indulgent will agree that a more thoughtful analysis is required. Based upon recent history, it is possible to understand the methods by which this disenfranchisement is accomplished.

A Preference for Two Party Federal Systems Over Parliamentary Ones

Here, the focus is, naturally, on the US and the Americas. The benefits are obvious: leftists find themselves submerged within a socially liberal, pro-business party, such as, in the US, the Democrats, which then proceeds to spend much of its time, frequently more than it spends confronting the opposition party, marginalizing them, to the extent that many economic liberals are likewise ostracized. Through their friends in the media, the general public is persuaded that there are no meaningful political organizations or political ideas outside these parties. Finding common ground on the desirability of militarism and neoliberal economics, despite substantial domestic opposition, the parties fight elections over local issues and personality conflicts. Anyone with the influence to challenge this system, like, say, the mildly reformist Ralph Nader, is subjected to the most embarassing forms of character assassination while paradoxically described as irrelevant. It appears that this kind of system, sometimes called a "duopoly", can only be successfully transformed as the result of an extensive social and economic meltdown, combined with very effective political organization, as occurred in Venezuela.

Within Parliamentary Systems, the Left is Ostracized

In Britain, New Labour was created on this principle, while in France, the left was subjected to hysterical political and media attacks during the referendum on the proposed EU constitution. As a result, there is really no electoral voice for Britons who oppose the shared Labour/Tory vision of a society based upon lesser protections for workers and human rights than provided in the EU. Meanwhile, in France, a substantial part of the left, even within the Socialist Party and the trade unions associated with it, find themselves trapped within institutions that malign its own members as xenophobes bent upon facilitating a resurgence of fascism. Likewise, most recently, in Germany, a similar phenomenon occurred, although one of the Linkspartei leaders, Oskar LaFontaine, did make some anti-immigration statements during the campaign, although, curiously, such opportunism is accepted, and even encouraged as a prophylactic measure against bigotry and possible violence, when parties such as Labour and the French Socialists engage in the practice. Again, the media, increasing concentrated in fewer and fewer hands globally, plays a central role, as in the US, by blaring a uniform message of social absurdity and unacceptability when it comes to left politics.

If the Left Wins, Steal the Election

No, I'm not talking about Al Gore and the 2000 election here, and the vicious struggles that sometimes erupt between competing governing elites. Indeed, the more common response to an electoral dispute, as both sides fear the loss of public confidence in the system more than a temporary loss of power, is John Kerry's refusal to contest the results in Ohio in 2004, despite having raised, and saved, millions of dollars to do it.

Instead, I am speaking of situations like the 1988 election in Mexico, where it is generally acknowledged that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the election, but was deprived of the Mexican presidency through a "computer shutdown" and widespread vote fraud. The United States accepted the election of Carlos Salinas, because NAFTA loomed just over the horizon, and Salinas rewarded them generously, denationalizing the banks, devaluing the peso, eliminating common land ownership, permitting foreign control of Mexican businesses, and, of course, approving NAFTA. For these actions, Salinas is, not surprisingly, viewed favorably in the US, even as he finds himself voluntarily exiled as a result of possible criminal prosecution and extremely unpopular in Mexico. One can only hope that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a strategy for avoiding Cardenas' fate in next year's election.

If the Left Wins and You Can't Steal the Election, Destabilize the Regime

Anyone still remember Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, the Contras, and the enormous sums of money the National Endowment for Democracy poured into the country? Another, more recent, equally tragic example, is the destabilization and removal by force of President Aristide in Haiti, and the violent suppression of his Lavalas supporters with the connivance of UN peacekeepers in advance of the upcoming elections. If violence is ineffective in preventing a Lavalas victory, expect recourse to the type of fraud experienced by Cardenas.

If the Left Wins, You Can't Steal the Election and You Can't Destabilize the Regime, Slander the Ruler as a "Strongman"

Of course, I am speaking of Chavez and Venezuela here. Chavez has won three presidential elections, survived a referendum for his recall with strong support and enacted a new constitution approved by the electorate. He has survived a coup in April 2002 and a strike/sabotage in the oil industry in the winter of 2002 and 2003, both of which were supported by the US. With this record, the US perpetually describes democracy to be at risk in Venezuela, describes Venezuela as a threat to its neighbors, predictably, in, you guessed it, Bolivia and Ecuador, and attempts to organize the members of the Organization of American States in support of possible military intervention.

By contrast, President Bush has launched a wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, continues to occupy both countries, continues to control the resources of both countries as the populace lives in poverty, captures people described as "terrorists" around the world and incarcerates them indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay under brutal conditions without charge and curtails the liberties of his subjects at home. If the US overthrows Chavez's government or kills him, it will no doubt lead many people around the world to believe that Lenin and the Bolsheviks weren't so wrong after all.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Elections, Hugo Chavez, Iraq War, Mexico, Neoliberalism