"Aún Tiemba-It Still Trembles"
"IF I OVERDRAW MY ACCOUNT AT THE bank, the bank charges me. When those in power overdraw on their accounts, they ask all of us to pay. Is that fair?" a taxi driver asked me in April 1987, not...
...high-school students joined rescue brigades...
...It is in this context of an unavoidable, complex but beneficial relationship that the United States will have to reconsider its attitudes toward its southern neighbor...
...But opposition forces are gaining strength...
...Still not formally recognized, however, is the need for redirection of the nation's resources...
...anything else is democratic folklore or rhetoric...
...Aguilar Zinser et al, pp...
...Each week the media runs numerous stories of violence by local power-holders and official forces, as " I think that we have to begin to measure the Mexican labor movement not in terms of its workplace victories but in relation to the development within the working class of a series of anti-capitalist propositions.'' -Paco Ignacio Taibo II, writer peasants block roads, mount protest marches and hunger strikes and demand the right for which the revolution was waged: land to those who work it...
...267-296...
...Although these organizations to date represent only an estimated 200,000 people, their voice is amplified by their solidarity with other insurgent groups, notably the CNTE.Z 2 On May Day independent unions and democratic unionists joined in an entirely separate march, to protest the politics of austerity, U.S...
...So are the campesinos: without sufficient land and financial support, peasants are unable to produce a surplus...
...In the months before passage, a carefully orchestrated media campaign portrayed Mexican immigrants as a threat to the security, culture and well-being of the United States...
...Land becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of these large firms, and rural unemployment mounts every day, swelling an already steady stream of immigrants into the cities or north across the border...
...wrote social scientist Pablo Gonzilez Casanova in 1970...
...M ORE THAN THE SUBSTANCE OF THE BILL assaulted Mexican sensibilities...
...The response was repression, but the movement was sufficiently intense to force concessions from the Echevarria Administration, including massive new investment in the ejido sector and new land distributions...
...Pedro Moctezuma, "Breve semblanza del Movimiento Urbano y Popular y la CONAMUP," in Testimonios (Universidad de Guerrero, Chilpancingo), May 1983...
...Mexico's development is only partly so...
...Raymundo Riva Palacio in Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Cesreo Morales and Rodolfo Pefia, Adin Tiembla (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1986), p. 23...
...Like paper, like castles of sand, hundreds of schools and dozens of public buildings and housing units fell...
...In the Yaqui Valley of Sonora, peasants initiated a massive occupation, demanding hundreds of thousands of acres * Listen, father, your children are with you...
...From this almost royal position, a president is never subjected to ridicule and disrespect, at least not publicly...
...2 5 The CONAMUP, 80% of whose membership are women, has revitalized the concept of political organizing that begins with the needs and demands of the COCEI demonstration in Oaxaca local community and builds toward a more politically defined movement against systemic oppression.26 Today, member organizations defend neighbors from eviction through lightning rallies at victims' homes, petition UNICEF on the lack of adequate government services for children, organize marches to protest the limits on government-issued coupons for subsidized tortillas and organize educational events...
...enforcement, though the coming election campaign could provoke a more dramatic response...
...During this period the states of Sonora and Sinaloa were sites of explosive mass actions and only the Army was capable of maintaining control, albeit minimal...
...Its major demand is the reformulation of Mexico's economic policy and the suspension of debt payments...
...lowest wages and highest under-employment...
...Agenda Item BY PRIMITIVO RODRIGUEZ M IDWAY INTO THE REAGAN ERA, IT BEcame clear that the time had come "to regain control of the borders...
...FNCR activists with photos of the disappeared American Bishops' message to his audience, "rise up...
...The widening popular movement now incorporates Christian Base Communities, human rights activists, a re-awakened student sector and a myriad of cultural projects...
...Despite public and media indignation, government relations with Washington have not changed significantly...
...Seamstresses were the first to organize, first to demand the rescue of their companions and then to establish an independent democratic union to defend their interests in the future...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICASOver a thousand workshops and factories crumbled in the two earthquakes, revealing the brutally exploitative conditions underneath...
...A few hours after the first earthquake, the president announced that the city was under control...
...On hunger strike in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral 34 guages as well as Spanish...
...Despite this, independent unions have organized huge protest marches demanding wage hikes and changes in the government's economic policies...
...We say this is our land, our territory, we must be the ones who decide what to do...
...The INS estimates that there are about 3 million undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the United States...
...controlled by 800 owners, ultimately forcing the government to cede 250,000 acres to the occupiers in 1976...
...From the pulpits, priests and lay ministers articulate unusual interpretations of imperialism and the nature of systemic oppression, applying the lessons of Christ the Liberator to Mexican reality...
...SEPTEMBER/DECEMBER 39 SEPTEMBER/DECEMBER 15...
...One of these in Mexico City, Nezahualcoyotl, houses an estimated of 2 million people-larger than the populations of 19 of Mexico's 31 states...
...Mexico City's medical center, the largest in Latin America, collapsed, with infants, patients, nurses and doctors trapped inside...
...2 7 D URING THIS TIME OF ACUTE CRISIS, THE impact of each strike, land seizure or urban protest is no longer restricted to its own political space, but now resounds throughout the progressive movement...
...It is in the rural areas where the worst conditions of Mexico are manifested: estimates of up to 80% malnutrition...
...Cooperatives, community projects and publications have proliferated...
...La Jornada February 25, 1987...
...If we are to die from hunger on our land, we might as well do it here-in protest...
...demonstrating mothers hold up photos of their disappeared children...
...Although the percentage of the rural population has decreased from 65% in 1940 to 35% in 1980, in absolute numbers that population has doubled over this period-from 13 million to 27 million (or more than Mexico's entire population in 1950...
...His case is still under investigation...
...In 1975, the "democratic tendency" of the electrical workers' union sparked a revival of an insurgent labor movement...
...Veldzquez is considered perhaps the most powerful politician in Mexico and the lack of labor militancy is often attributed to his iron-clad control of the CTM since the early 1940s...
...N Primitivo Rodriguez is director of the Mexico-United States Border Program of the American Friends Service Committee...
...Repression mounted throughout the country as campesinos refused to become wage laborers and migrant workers...
...Forced out of the area on Labor Day, they joined the alternative march of the independent unions...
...Cornelius, Political Economy, p. 35...
...Democratization is now on the agenda in Mexico, placed there by the disillusioned middle class and the actions of the popular movements...
...At the inauguration of the 1986 World Cup soccer championships in Mexico City something extraordinary occurred: President de la Madrid's opening remarks were drowned out by the whistles and boos of the capacity crowd...
...By the year 2000, there will be an estimated 35 million people in Mexico's countryside-more than the population of Spain...
...La Jornada, January 28, 1987...
...When the repression did not stop, 50 organizations joined the CDPPDEP to found the National Front Against Repression (FNCR) which continues to press for the release of prisoners and demand information on the whereabouts of over 500 documented "disappeared...
...As a journalist reported, "When the factory owners preferred to rescue their machinery and materials first, leaving over 400 seamstresses to die, their co-workers understood that they were alone . . . 70,000 were left without work or legal protection...
...Few issues touch the feelings of the Mexican people toward this country as directly as immigration policy...
...In the 1970s the October Second community built its own schools and demanded teachers from the Ministry of Education...
...3 2 Out from the rubble of the earthquakes new resistance was born...
...7. Rosa Albina Garavito, "Democracia econ6mica, democracia politica," La Jornada, April 12, 1987...
...Despite intimidation by the union bosses, some 150,000 members are active in the insurgents' national coordinating body, the CNTE, founded in December 1979...
...A government chauffeur put it clearly: "You know, I never made it through primary school, and I am not educated to make grand analyses, but this is very clear to me: I can no longer afford a house, find a job, or educate my children, while the officials and those they serve borrow more and more, not to provide for the poor but to continue paying the rich...
...Jeffrey Rubin, "Elections, Repression and Limited Reform: Update on Southern Mexico" LASA Forum, Vol...
...Popular disgust with the government response to the catastrophe, its fear of independent popular initiative, is palpable...
...After the first indication of this rupture between state and society was revealed in 1968, that sense of illegitimacy grew substantially through the 1970s and 1980s, and has skyrocketed since the earthquakes of September 1985...
...65-69...
...Yet they are growing increasingly alone in this belief, as the perception grows that the SEPTEMBER/DECEMBER 37Mexico majority shares only in the consequences of the crisis, not in the decisions that brought it about...
...4 Peasants and farmworkers demanded fair price guarantees for crops, improved wages for agricultural workers and land-the perennial demand...
...By the end of Echeverria's term in 1976, some 64,000 requests were pending for some 17 million hectares...
...Mexico's economic growth is a fact...
...Their strike went on for 20 days before they won their primary demand-an audience with the president to discuss landlessness, political repression and broken government promises...
...In May 1980, 700 members from 20 of the most important urban popular organizations participated in the First National Meeting of Popular Colonias, in Monterrey...
...Not only has the government lost popular confidence, it has lost legitimacy...
...Recent years have seen the growth of democratic currents within national unions as well as new independent unions that organize outside the official structures...
...The independent labor movement, rooted in the democratic labor struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s (such as the railroad workers' movement), has suffered severe setbacks during the last five years of economic crisis, because of both political repression and increased employer leverage during a depression...
...She finds it appalling that Mexico's "economic dictatorship pretends to include a democratization of the political system," and concludes that "without respect for the right to strike, without a wage and labor policy that shares the costs of the crisis . . . it is possible that within a few years we will be witnessing not only the absence of economic democracy but also a dangerous diminishing of political democracy...
...Official unions have allied with management to expel dissidents from shops around the country...
...134-135...
...The so-called reconversion of industry-which refers to privatization as well as the creation of a more "efficient and productive" industrial base-has meant thousands of jobs lost, declining real wages and diminished state assistance for low-income housing, health care, education and subsidized basic foods...
...It maintains continuous pressure on the government...
...Today, two years later, many say that aan tiembla, it still trembles...
...La Jornada, December 28, 1986...
...Luis HernAndez is an organizer for the teachers' union and author of books on class relations and on the teachers' movement...
...2 3 Vast urban slums, ciudades perdidas, now surround these urban areas-with little or no basic services...
...Some 150 independent and democratic labor organizations have recently formed their own umbrella organization, the Union Cooperation Board, to serve as a joint front for coordination and political unity...
...a taxi driver asked me in April 1987, not really expecting a reply...
...Armando Bartra, director of the Institute for Rural Development Studies, is a project adviser to peasant organizations and author of histories of peasant movements...
...This is salvation, Christian liberation...
...It is not enough," GonzAlez Casanova reminds us, "to establish democratization formally in the underdeveloped countries in order to accelerate development, nor to imitate all the specific forms of classic democracy in order to have democracy: democracy exists to the extent that the people share the income, culture and power...
...2 4 In the "lost cities," and other working-class colonias in urban centers, independent movements have taken shape over demands for housing, employment, health, education, basic services (light, gas, water, sewage) and public assistance...
...economy rely on immigrant labor to stay alive and competitive, entire regions in Mexico depend on emigration to avoid widespread poverty and unemployment...
...Just as key sectors of the U.S...
...When a reporter asked him why, he retorted, "Because I felt like it...
...many of its victims to this day have not received promised assistance and much of the relief sent from countries around the world has mysteriously disappeared...
...Ibid...
...Quoted in Gabriela Videla, Un Sefior Obispo (Cuernavaca, Morelos: Correo del Sur, 1982), p. 115...
...On April 10, the 68th anniversary of Emiliano Zapata's death, independent peasant organizations marched on state capitals around the country to protest their conditions and to demand land distributions, credit and fair prices for their products...
...For a time, the city was run by its people-a fact that frightened the government...
...Will they continue to be portrayed as a threat, or can they be welcomed as an asset...
...the result was the first open debate between the authorities and a social group in Mexico's history...
...Paco Ignacio Taibo II is a labor organizer, journalist and author...
...Ibid...
...over 1,700 new migrants enter Mexico City every 24 hours...
...The L6pez Portillo government broke with its base of landless peasants, renounced its role as regulator of land tenure and shifted rural allegiances to the more modernized sector...
...Its slogan underlines its militancy: "Today we fight for the land, tomorrow for power...
...At a massive rally, student leader Antonio Santos asked: "What role do we want for the university...
...Yet the likelihood that the labor market will continue to regulate immigration in spite of the new law is only part of the reality...
...When Salinas was tapped to be the next president, Fidel Veldzquez, 86-year-old patriarch of the CTM, stormed out of the announcement ceremony...
...Genaro Dominguez is a leader of an Indian organization, the Coordinadora Nacional de Pueblos Indios...
...The law itself contains provisions allowing growers to import thousands of farmworkers to harvest perishable commodities...
...5 The shift was a significant one...
...food and medicine found their way to where they were needed...
...The two earthquakes left about 150,000 homeless and thousands more without jobs...
...La Jornada, February 21, 1987...
...Labor bosses, led by Veldzquez, are calling for a return of the good old days, defending the PRI's roots in the revolution and labor's privileged position in the business-labor pactprecisely the position that this Administration has so successfully attacked...
...attitudes toward them and their country...
...In the name of Jesus," spoke M6ndez Arceo, interpreting the Puebla Latin SEPTEMBER/DECEMBER 35 I11)a IRqo4 on* te Am4 eriAca Mexico The Human Rights Movement N RESPONSE TO POLITICAL REPRESSION-- torture, persecution, disappearances and assassina- tions--relatives of victims formed the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Exiles and the Politically Persecuted and Disappeared (CDPPDEP) in 1977...
...4. La Jornada, April 25, 1987...
...to determine how much to raise prices and set wage constraints, to determine personnel cuts and how many families to throw into misery, to propose the sophisticated budget adjustments and decide on what are the proper proportions of the people's hunger to pay the interest on the foreign debt . . . ?"29 Rejecting the university's proposal, students staged continual marches and rallies and then closed down the university in a strike...
...Ibid, pp...
...The Other Side of Mexico, July-September 1987...
...This is not my responsibility, or any citizen's...
...La Jornada, April 23, 1987...
...In Mexico's case, the absolute number of those marginalized, those who do not participate in the economic or political life of the country, has grown steadily since the 1940s...
...They fought with land occupations, strikes and work stoppages...
...In addition, the law provides for increased enforcement at the border, which, along with growing abuse and crime against immigrants and the perception of reduced job opportunities, is expected to dramatically cut the numbers willing to risk a trip to El Norte...
...Since 1982, with half the labor force un- or underemployed, more than half a million people joining the labor market every year, and low or negative economic growth, immigration to the United States has become an integral part of Mexican development...
...Although most of these movements were ultimately defeated due to the lack of a common strategy, the banner of union democracy has remained a crucial part of the labor struggle...
...This "safety valve" has been particularly important during the 1930s, after World War II and most recently with the slowdown in the world economy beginning in the early 1970s...
...Armando Bartra, Los Herederos de Zapata (Mexico: Era, 1985), p. 112-113...
...A university . . . of 'super efficient' professionals, without conscience, ready to serve the interests of the powerful and of foreign investors who invade us with maquiladora industries...
...Today, immigrants send back an estimated $2 billion in foreign exchange annually...
...But the tent colonies, while shocking, are only one sign of the profound rupture between the people of Mexico and its ruling elite, first visible in 1968, and glaringly exposed by the earthquakes...
...Elena Poniatowska is one of Mexico's leading journalists and cofounder of FEM, a feminist journal...
...To re-channel the peasant movement back into official structures and institutions, the government in turn attempted to turn defeat into victory...
...The forecast is that real wages will be lower in 1990 than in 1981, and that their share of GDP will decline from 34% in 1981 to 25% at the end of the decade...
...3. Galileo Econometric Model projections, cited in Hector Aguilar Camin, "El Canto del futuro," Nexos (Mexico City, April 1986), p. 22...
...Gestures of solidarity came " The experience of the seamstresses is very important, because first of all they are women, and second they are so combative in their attitude to the authorities.'' -Elena Poniatowska, journalist Evangelina Corona, leader of the seamstresses' union a second quake rocked the city...
...What is so striking in Mexico today is the popular consciousness about why the country is where it is, and who is responsible...
...The reality of immigration concerns the interchange of ideas and values, population growth, investment and financial opportunities, and foreign and security policies, in both countries...
...NACLA interview, April 1987...
...2 8 * The Church hierarchy and the burgeoning evangelist missions from the United States denounce this message, and organize opposition (although they do not work in " The organization of women immediately reveals the problems of democracy, and thus it is an interesting moment politically . . . today there is no progressive organization that has not had to define their position on women and organizing.' ' -Itziar Lozano, feminist tandem...
...The next year over 2,000 community activists, representing 60 organizations from 14 states, attended the Second National Meeting...
...5. Economist, (May 2, 1987...
...minimal health care, education and basic services...
...Led by internationally reknowned figures such as the former Archbishop of Cuernavaca, Sergio M6ndez Arceo, and the bishop of San Crist6bal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, a key figure in the popular support for Guatemala's refugees, the expansion of the popular Church has had a powerful impact in a country that is over 90% Catholic...
...Teachers begin to question the problem of content, the problem of the methods of education, the language that they teach in.'' -Luis Hernindez, teachers' union On March 12, 1987, in Tuxtla Guti6rrez, 40,000 teachers, parents, peasants and supporters from popular organizations joined to protest the corrupt national union leadership and its repressive policies...
...Punto Critico (Mexico City), March 1987, p. 41...
...6. La Jornada, April 19, 1987 and January 2, 1987 (statistics...
...7 HE DECLINE IN LABOR'S ORGANIZED political power is causing shifts in the old statePRI-worker alliance, however...
...it moved quickly to reconsolidate the major official campesino organizations by expanding its financial support, and it proclaimed that land redistribution was, indeed, not over...
...After a 65day strike the democratic teachers, victims of physical SEPTEMBER/DECEMBER 31Rei04ot , te America Mexico assault (two strikers were killed) and exhaustion, were only too aware, as one leader expressed it, that "Our fallen colleagues are the price for 65 days of struggle, of teachers who are hungry, thirsty and in misery...
...Among the victims are 21 journalists killed since 1982, including the infamous assassination of Mexico's most distinguished political columnist, Manuel Buendia, on May 30, 1984...
...In the summer of 1977, university workers (STUNAM) mobilized up to 200,000 people in a 19day strike over wages and union democratization...
...3 The impact of these deteriorating conditions on the organized labor movement has provoked a distinct rift with the de la Madrid Administration: in June 1983, salary disputes caused over 3,000 simultaneous strikes-a record level, exceeding the total number of strikes between 1976 and 1982...
...Pablo Gonzilez Casanova, Democracy in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 147...
...The clothing industry, an appalling system of sweatshops and piece rates, built with the collusion of union leaders, industrialists and government authorities, was left naked to the world as owners rushed to their sweatshops to rescue machinery from demolished buildings...
...140-141 17...
...Mexican officials are still waiting to judge the law's impact and the extent of U.S...
...The Indian population lives in the most desperate economic situation of all Mexico, and because of its militance is usually the main target of repression...
...0 The democratic movement within the 750,000member national teachers' union (SNTE, Latin America's largest union) is one of the most vital forces of the national labor movement...
...Two days later the two were chatting together, however, and the labor boss insisted that he never was at odds with the next president...
...2 (Summer 1987...
...XIV, no...
...Judith Matloff, "Mexico's Juchitdn," Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Over 400 major buildings, many of them government owned, fell while 5,728 others were damaged...
...Simpson-Mazzoli, as the law is known, is now the law of the land...
...Made up almost entirely of women, the union garnered such support that the president was forced to legalize its status...
...Genaro Dominguez, Indian leader Popular urban movements began to appear throughout the nation, and by 1979 urban struggles had become a generalized phenomenon...
...But instead of the usual crowds, the march was the least attended in decades...
...TUDENTS, TOO, HAVE RECOVERED FROM the shock of 1968 and the career-oriented concerns of the 1970s...
...SEPTEMBER!DECEMBER I 33 rAeJVi!!V11.VyRMexicort 4 Amei Mexico ican history, since New Spain, never have there been more campesinos without land...
...The disaster left over 10,000 people dead and an estimated 30-40,000 more injured...
...IN THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE 1970s the peasant struggle once again erupted throughout the nation...
...At the main square in Mexico City, representatives of Indian peasant groups, primarily from two independent organizations (the Coordinadora Nacional de Pueblos Indios and the Unidn de Comuneros Emiliano Zapata) went on hunger strike in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral...
...8 Calling for union democracy and a redirection of national economic policy, it gained wide support among the rank and file...
...MEXICO'S GOVERNING ELITE CONCEIVES of itself as representing the majority, the "national interest...
...T WO EARTHQUAKES, MEASURING 8.1 AND 7.3 on the Richter scale, shattered the life of Mexico City in September 1985...
...In Juchitin, Oaxaca, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI), in alliance with the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), won municipal elections in 1981, immediately implementing far-reaching reforms in support of labor and peasant demands...
...In Mexico, however, it was seen as a slap in the face, promising harsher conditions at home and increasing tension with its northern neighbor...
...Walls and ceilings came down burying the living and the dead...
...Arturo Warman, "La fuerza del pasado," Nexos, no...
...104-117 9. Radl Trejo Delarbre, "Historia del movimiento obrero en M6xico, 1860-1982" in Historia del movimiento obrero en America Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1984, Vol...
...Less than 1 million of these will get legal status under the law, and an estimated 30% to 50%--fired from their jobs or deported by the INS-will be forced to return to Mexico...
...Luis Ortiz Monasterio is a PRI party official...
...Organize, proceed forth before the structural challenges...
...One of the hunger strikers explained, "My husband is in jail . . for organizing . . . and I cannot feed my family...
...Extract Identifications Hector Aguilar Camin, novelist and historian, is director of the monthly NEXOS, and assistant director of La Jornada...
...In the following years the government refused to negotiate with workers at the Metropolitan University...
...Led by Nobel Peace Prize nominee (and PRT presidential candidate) Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose own son disappeared in 1975, the FNCR spearheads the human rights movement in Mexico...
...Perhaps most noteworthy is the National Plan of Ayala coordinating body, CNPA, launched in 1979 under the auspices of Emiliano Zapata's son, Mateo, and the symbol of Ayala.* The CNPA's first action was to prevent the transfer of Zapata's remains to the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City, arguing that as long as the demands he fought for are not implemented, his body should not accompany those of his assassins...
...Expelled from office with the assistance of the Army in 1983, they mobilized sufficient popular support over the next three years to force a PRI-COCEI compromise government in December 1986.2' This year, in Cuetzalan, state of Puebla, the independent peasant cooperatives have been elected to run the municipal government, again garnering enough support to force the local PRI to endorse them.22 THOSE WHO CAN NO LONGER WORK THE land come to the cities, to Monterrey, Guadalajara, Cuernavaca, Acapulco and of course Mexico City...
...Some 600 land occupations took place in 1972 and 1973...
...The awareness of an end and a beginning stirs Mexico today...
...By 1986 something had changed.' The next year on Labor Day, May 1, Mexico City seemed strangely quiet...
...And as always only REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30officially recognized unions participated...
...Bartra, Herederos, pp...
...Information provided in NACLA interview with Clara Brugada and Pedro Moctezuma of CONAMUP, May 1987...
...Earthquake victims throughout the poor neighborhoods of Mexico organized a coordinating body of earthquake victims, CUD, to fight for restitutions from the government and to demand the rebuilding of their communities...
...During the early 1980s the organization achieved a national presence through its mass demonstrations, strategic legal battles, and the tactical defense of ejidos...
...8. For an examination of this movement see Baird, Beyond the Border, "Who Will Control Labor's Power," pp...
...Peasant organizations in a number of states have decided that trying to wrest concessions from government is not enough and have also begun to concentrate on taking over municipal government themselves...
...This debt is not ours...
...4 But the walk-out gesture was typical: he threatens radical actions but continues to maintain party discipline...
...Government statistics, La Jornada, May 3, 1987...
...9 " How are we going to say that we want to be democratic in the conduct of our union if in the classroom we are the ones who rule...
...By the summer of 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and Reagan signed it into law...
...declared the telephone workers' strike illegal and took a very hard line against the electrical workers in 1987, refusing to recognize a nationwide strike...
...Walk with the people and in everyday reality...
...The next year an average of 20 peasants were killed each month.' 6 Mexico's modern agribusiness industry, which exports strawberries and flowers and imports corn and wheat, is failing to feed the malnourished majority of the population...
...each year they are forced to borrow more money, often at high interest rates, until debt causes them to lose their land, generally to large agribusiness firms...
...3 4 "Aun Tiembla"-It Still Trembles 1. NACLA interview with an eyewitness...
...La Jornada, April 2, March 11, April 25, 1987...
...They also built a guest house and invited peasant leaders from around the country to come see for themselves the brutalities of urban life-so they could report back to those who had dreams of making it in the city...
...Those that do continue to come, moreover, are, under the new law, deprived of almost all rights, making them easier targets of abuse by employers, landlords, public service agency personnel and law enforcement officials...
...painted slogans appear on walls throughout Mexico and international campaigns draw attention to human rights violations in Mexico...
...Through it, Mexicans experience personally--as students, tourists, residents and most of all, as immigrant workers, U.S...
...The final declaration, however, affirmed the social and political commitments first set forth at M6dellin in 1968...
...Private report for NACLA by Gabriela Videla...
...from every region and every movement as the new union, the "19 of September Seamstresses," became a symbol of resistance throughout Mexico...
...2 0 Their demands were painted on big, brightly colored banners-one in English for tourists, others in Nahuatl and Mayan lan* Zapata's agrarian manifesto of 1911 was called the Plan of Ayala...
...Mexico's president has always been nearly omnipotent during his six-year term (no re-election is permitted...
...Through local actions in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Morelos, Guerrero and Hidalgo, among others, the CNTE has mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters, staging hunger strikes, 24-hour national solidarity strikes and participating in peasant and independent labor actions...
...Itziar Lozano is a staffperson at CIDHAL, one of Mexico's oldest women's organizations...
...Cesdreo Morales is a political philosopher and dean of philosophy, National University of Mexico...
...intervention in Central America and political repression...
...La Jornada, April 25, 1987...
...17 Social historian Arturo Warman writes: "In all MexREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32Simpson-Mazzoli: A Key U.S...
...The movement expanded between 1973 and 1976 throughout the country, giving birth to new independent regional organizations...
...or so many with insufficient land for sustained production...
...The essence of the message is simply that Zapata's struggle continues...
...1), pp...
...E (Newsweek, September 17, 1986...
...engineers, bus drivers, doctors, electricians, lawyers, welders, teachers, shopkeepers became as one...
...Nobody has the right to study us because we are not objects...
...meanwhile, the PRI-affiliated unions, representing some 6 million members (about a quarter of the workforce) settle for far less than they demand.' VelAzquez insists that "the Administration does not have an anti-labor policy," despite the fact that in 1986, 1 million workers were left jobless, raising unemployment to 17% of the working population, and purchasing power decreased by more than 50%.6 What is surprising, Mexican labor analyst Rosa Albina Garavito points out, is that labor's economic condition "is generated without a military dictatorship," given that Mexican workers are worse hit than those that live under dictatorships...
...instead of demonstrations of gratitude to the president spread across banners and placards, there were scattered signs of protest...
...2 L ABOR, THE MOST SEVERELY HIT BY THE IMF austerity program, has paid dearly for Mexico's modernization...
...But as many immigration specialists argued before passage, as long as sectors of the U.S...
...122-125...
...as is evident throughout the Third World, economic growth does not equal development...
...In the state of Hidalgo alone, 312 land invasions in one month-March 1977- were followed by an additional 257 five months later, resulting in a virtual military occupation of the state...
...Out of that sense the future is to unfold...
...Labor and political activists, within and outside the ruling PRI, point out that the United States is having it both ways: getting Mexican money while rejecting Mexicans...
...NDEPENDENT PEASANT ORGANIZATIONS reacted to the anti-peasant policies of the 1970s with new energy and determination, seeming to grow in number in direct proportion to the restricted range of political action...
...But the solution to the crisis is not economic growth...
...Now that economic growth is no longer a fact, its recovery has been the sole objective of the government and foreign bankers...
...3 The next day * The 1979 Latin American Episcopal Conference, held in Puebla, Mexico, renewed the debate about liberation theology between traditional and progressive bishops...
...In the United States its passage was heralded as an historic compromise...
...It all started," writes a witness, "with a warning tug at 7:18 on the morning of September 19...
...It was then that they decided to organize themselves...
...6 (November-December 1982...
...however, the new L6pez Portillo Administration decided that rural policy had failed and declared the end of land redistribution...
...Outside the stadium, and for weeks before, such slogans as Queremos frijoles, no goles (We want beans not goals) were common in the streets...
...They insist the annual debt service of more than $10 billion should be cut or written off to create jobs for returning migrants...
...Organized labor paraded through the city center as always...
...As the Indian hunger strikers ended their action in front of the Cathedral in April, the seamstresses moved in to demand recognition from the shops they have organized...
...Even the government showed displeasure, declining to comment on the legislation once introduced in Congress...
...there they formed a national coordinating body, CONAMUP, which has since coordinated the popular urban movement on a national level...
...XVIII, no...
...And how can we say that we want to fight against the policies of the state if we are the reproducers of an ideology that dominates...
...In Mexico, the picture is even more complicated...
...p. 194...
...The following year, the CDPPDEP staged a widely supported hunger strike in Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral, which successfully pressured the government to grant a limited amnesty to political prisoners, many held since 1968...
...100 (April 1986...
...Other analysts point out that while migration to the north helps Mexico to withstand its economic crisis, it also drains the country of valuable human resources...
...Meyer & Sherman, The Course, p. 676...
...Although the' CNPA's numbers are still small and so far limited to the poorest and most militant, it represents a new force in Mexican politics, one that has reclaimed the banner of independent radical agrarianism...
...More specifically, the United States will need to reexamine its perceptions of Latinos and Latino immigrants, particularly Mexicans...
...Independent of official agencies and political parties, the CNPA has united the most impoverished rural Mexicans around the principles of land and liberty...
...residents broke into the city's water system to hook up their own hydraulic network, then hooked up electricity lines from a nearby street light-they became engineers, architects, teachers and political activists...
...They demanded that all negotiations be public, and be broadcast live...
...Although the government has built tens of thousands of new apartments, many are still without homes, camped in tents in parks and plazas...
...Christian Base Communities have sprung up in both urban and rural areas throughout Mexico...
...But this rift has been enormously widened due to several major political assaults: in 1983 de la Madrid broke a strike by the Nuclear Workers' Union, among the most militant in the country, by closing the state uranium company, virtually destroying the union...
...Early this year university students renewed their long-dormant political activism by protesting plans to revamp the 350,000-student National University into a more "elitist" project...
...Ever since, the official unions and the government have attempted to sabotage its organizing efforts...
...Bartra, Herederos, pp...
...Public opinion in Mexico was further enraged by the process itself, widely referred as a "unilateral act in a binational relationship...
...Ana Maria Prieto, "Mexico's National Coordinadoras in a Context of Economic Crisis," in Carr & Anzaldlia, The Mexican Left, p. 85...
...economy, notably agribusiness and service industries, continue to rely on massive amounts of cheap labor, undocumented immigrants will keep coming...
...With telephone, electricity and water knocked out in many areas, the city was virtually severed from the world.31 The popular response was immediate: taxi-drivers volunteered to transport families, shovels, equipment...
...Anyone who stops me, oppresses me...
...I have the right to be free, to do what I want with what is mine...
...2. La Jornada, May 2, 1987...
...As ex-President L6pez Portillo stated at the end of his term in 1982, "Mexico's history cannot be understood without Fidel Velizquez...
...Auto workers, miners and textile workers also began to mobilize around these demands...
...Yet, the onslaught of the crisis and the clarity of the message have created a new popular consciousness that regenerates itself through action and reflection in Mexico's communities...
...On January 27, thousands marched on the Presidential Palace, preceded by some 200 children of strikers at a brewery chanting, Padre, escucha, tu hijo esta en la lucha.* Upon arriving at their destination the workers raised a huge sign to the president: "We are hungry...
Vol. 21 • September 1987 • No. 5
