The PRI's Protection Racket: Maintaining Control at the Grassroots
Rosen, Fred
This past September 14, a drizzly Thursday preceding Mexico's September 15-16 independence celebration, a few hundred angry-looking pepenadores-garbage pickers who scavenge the huge...
...As the anti-Espinosa demonstration outside the police barricades grew in size and volubility, the pepenadores were heating tortillas and amiably mingling with the police...
...In 1993, the Salinas administration, in an attempted intra-party coup, tried to bypass the local leaders and power brokers and to install in their place "technocratic" leaders-loyal only to the "modernizing," neoliberal projects of the central government...
...A lot of our work has been institutionalized, officialized, incorporated and verticalized by the party...
...The structure is now facing multiple challenges, the most vigorous of which have come from the independent urban popular movements, like the Assembly of Barrios...
...Several people, including a few passersby, were injured...
...In the months leading up to this past Christmas, there were frequent clashes in Mexico City's Historic Center between riot police and street vendors...
...You pay a weekly quota of 30-50 pesos-more in the best areas...
...Since then, vendor mobilization has been constant, and in the year of the Crisis, it has become desperate and increasingly disorderly...
...If you don't belong to an official bando, you pay more to inspectors...
...It is the FNOC to which the priista leaders of the street vendors and the pepenadores belong, and from which they derive their power...
...Vendor negotiators, the traditional priista "leaders," were unable to control the situation, however, and on December 12, more than 10,000 vendors took over the streets around the Z6calo...
...Following the December 7 street fracas, city authorities backed down and allowed 1,200 PRI-affiliated vendors to sell in the city center-mostly around the central plaza, the "Z6calo"-from December 12 to January 6, Mexico's traditional Christmas season...
...The PRI learns from us, and makes our programs theirs...
...We want to democratize them...
...his struggle is by no means limited to the politically active...
...On Friday, the second day of the occupation of the Assembly steps, a truckload of tortillas and a band of nortefia musicians were allowed through the barricades to feed and entertain the garbage pickers...
...a militant housingfocused neighborhood organization called the Assembly of Barrios...
...Long-term vendors are facing growing competition...
...The genius of the long-ruling PRI has been its ability to organize groups like the garbage pickers, dole out benefits to them, and incorporate them-albeit in a subordinate role-into the ruling structure...
...By early Saturday morning, the various outside-the-barricades sitins and demonstrations had merged into a loosely organized rally of several thousand people in front of the 0 U 0 0 u NAC0LA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Fred Rosen is an editor on leave from NACLA...
...Even the most powerful of the vendors' leaders had their places destroyed...
...These local "informal" institutions of economic and social survival are increasingly being fought over by groups in what is loosely called "civil society...
...They tend to be organized as independent get c groups of mobile street sellers, working in the same place, or selling similar goods...
...The real powers-the rich, the army, the transnational corporations, the United States-would continue to rule...
...If I want a space with her, she will sell it...
...At the center of all this is the world's longest continuously ruling party, the PRI, in power since 1929, and hegemonic since the country's revered president, Lizaro Cirdenas, established its corporate structure in the mid1930s...
...When we have rallies, it's to pressure the authorities [for our own purposes], not to support one of their candidates...
...Recognizing the "informal" nature of urban life in a poor country, Cdrdenas made the "popular organizations" one of the four pillars-along with organized labor, the organized peasantry and the military-of the party...
...The Alameda demonstration was small by Mexico City standards, but in this period of economic crisis, it was angry, threatening, and very anti-Espinosa in tone...
...When Camacho left the city government in 1993, opening a rift that culminated with his departure from the party in late 1995, Ruta 100 lost its protection, The genius of the PRI has been its ability to incorporate different groul into the ruling structure...
...As one of their leaders, an imposing-looking man in a baseball cap, encouraged them through a bullhorn, they hung up two large banners denouncing endors on Juirez Avenue in downtown Mexico City...
...Guillermina [the priista leader] manages and manipulates very well...
...Guillermina Rico attempted to call the FNOC and city offices to stop the destruction of her vendors' stands, but, at three in the morning, no one answered the phones...
...They are our enemies today, but everybody is here for the same reason, to survive...
...Although Rodriguez, a leatherand-cloth craftswoman, is constantRI takes over the space for participation, and people onverted from activists to petitioners...
...Most people on the Z6calo, even the beggars, receive permission and pay a quota, but then all the middle people take a cut...
...These groups included the dismissed bus drivers of the dissolved municipal bus line, Ruta 100...
...While the world's attention has been transfixed by events involving Mexicans at the top, the structure of the country's ruling institutions can perhaps best be understood by looking at the struggle for this contested space at the bottom...
...Others were outbreaks from formally organized sitins and street occupations...
...The leaders get permission, credentials from the PRI...
...We keep our distance from the authorities here," says Berta Rodriguez, one of the toreros on the Z6calo...
...I didn't want to be a sheep anymore...
...Only the neighborhood activists had no evident ties to the PRI...
...you have less protection...
...and ultimately its existence in a restructuring of the city bus system linked both to privatization and the settling of scores...
...Most of them date from the post-earthquake flowering of civic The P institutions in the late social 1980s...
...The FNOC, in turn, has links to virtually all of Mexico's municipal governments, mediating the needs of local government and the needs of the various non-union "popular" sectors like the street vendors...
...Occupations of city space-festive or grueling, depending on the site, the amenities trucked in, and the weather-are so common in the city's Historic Center that for the most part they go almost unnoticed except by those who take part and, if well-organized, by those against whom they are directed...
...On December 7, police attacked a demonstration that had turned into a market, not because they objected to the street occupation, but because selling on that particular street corner (in front of the Legislative Assembly building) was illegal...
...The garbage pickers, in short, had been brought in as "shock troops" for the PRI...
...What we see on both sides of the barricades," said a neighborhood activist who gave her name as Filomena, "are groups of the poor, organized for their survival...
...Beyond that, as a paradigmatic corrupt and careerist PRI functionary, most likely taking orders from some of the powerful figures held responsible for the country's severe depression, Espinosa was an easy target for the crowd's frustration and anger...
...They were either independent, or linked to the center-left opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD...
...They found their way barred, however, by the police barricades...
...1995...
...Throughout Friday, observers were impressed by how gently the police were handling the occupiers of the Assembly steps...
...Then, when a candidate or an official shows up, you are given a green smock that identifies you, you go to the rally, and you 12NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASUPDATE / MEXICO Street vendors protesting attempts to reduce their selling space clash with riot police in Mexico City in September...
...The country's worst economic depression in 60 years, known here simply as "The Crisis," has, however, made this task somewhat more difficult...
...Throughout the morning, the streets continued to empty, and the system renewed itself...
...The inspectors come around and charge for space, for cleaning, for protection...
...This past September 14, a drizzly Thursday preceding Mexico's September 15-16 independence celebration, a few hundred angry-looking pepenadores-garbage pickers who scavenge the huge dumps around Mexico City-came to the city's center to begin a three-day occupation of the front steps of the Federal District's Legislative Assembly building...
...I worked with Guillermina Rico, selling shoes and sandals that I bought, but I quit because I didn't like the politics...
...The Mexican state corrupts these struggles...
...Where before there were a hundred, now you see a thousand...
...They say there are now 200,000 in the city...
...The pepenadores are desperate just like us...
...They also call us 'sheep.' That's what Guillermina does for the PRI-besides passing on our quotas to the party after she takes her cut...
...The first obligation is money, and then politics," Rodriguez confides...
...Trucking in their own rudimentary cooking equipment, along with two port-a-johns, the garbage pickers threatened to stay just long enough to disrupt Saturday's scheduled "State of the City" address by the city's appointed mayor, Oscar Espinosa Villareal...
...They arrived just before Mexico City's riot police barricaded a ten square-block area around the building...
...At the bottom, the real struggle for the nation is takpS ing place, in the form of the creation of an autonomous civil society...
...10UPDATE / MEXICO city's well-manicured central park, the Alameda...
...Just as the politics of sit-ins is intricately tied into the country's party system, the logistics of selling-or even begging--on the street can likewise be highly structured, and dominated by the PRI...
...The number of vendors is way up," says one vendor...
...We have some contacts with the PRD, but they are loose and distant...
...The street sellers' actions attracted public attention, at least in Mexico City, because they highlighted a sector of the country's faltering economy toward which many people-one way or another-see themselves heading...
...These non-affiliated bandos, however, are not out of the reach of the PRI...
...Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Sunday, January 7, the semi-permanent metallic structures used by street vendors in the contested city center were pulled or chopped down by city officials...
...After a year of meager sales, the vendors saw Christmas as a chance to recoup Vol XXIX, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 199611 Vol XXIX, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1996 11UPDATE / MEXICO some earnings...
...It would be unfair to allow only a few vendors to sell their wares," said Guillermina Rico, the most powerful of the priista leaders, making the best of an uncomfortable situation...
...Had the Alameda group attempted to break through the police barricades, the occupiers of the front steps would have been there as a second line of defense...
...The clashes were sometimes spontaneous, as vendors resisted being banned from their traditional-and not-so-traditional-street corners...
...It was charged with bringing a wide variety of people, including the street vendors and garbage pickers, and groups as disparate as taxi drivers, tenants, homeowners, beggars, the homeless, and the disabled, into the ambit of the ruling party...
...The military, unlike the other three sectors, was never formally incorporated into the PRI, but has remained a crucial base of support...
...The PRI put conditions on our membership-going to rallies, demonstrations, all that," he says...
...The current economic depression has made that task more difficult...
...He is working for the Mexico City newspaper, El Financiero International...
...Mid-level "political" leaders correctly perceived the threat to their power, resisted the move, and prevailed...
...She has an understanding with the authorities, and takes care of things...
...The dismissed bus drivers of Ruta 100, despite their radical commitments-they have openly supported the Zapatistas in Chiapas-were not long ago militant priistas themselves, and allegedly played the same "shocktroop" role for former mayor Manuel Camacho...
...ly on the lookout for the police, she says she is happy to be free of the obligations of the official bandos...
...you have problems...
...If you don't accept that, you're out of the bando, you can't sell...
...The greens are here,' they say, and send us to a corner of the crowd...
...Those who don't belong to a bando, and who have no official permission to sell in a particular place are called "toreros"-bullfighters-for the way they provoke and dodge the authorities...
...This has frequently forced them to invent and enlarge social, political and economic structures outside the country's formal institutions...
...Over the long term, all of these groups have been engaged in a struggle to live, to work, and to earn a living...
...The action met with little or no resistance...
...Cirilo Robledo, the leader of a bando called the Civic Association of the Artisans of the Historic Center, says his group came together in 1988 in an attempt simply to be independent...
...A spokesperson for the city, Jesus Davila Narro, said the early-morning operation showed "the willingness of all parties to comply with the accords," and "live in a society of consensus...
...They were there not to protest, but to protect the building-and' the Mayor's address-from the menacing demonstrators at the Alameda...
...and an ad-hoc collection of street vendors protesting their eviction from the most popular streets of downtown Mexico City...
...Now the bus drivers were unemployed and on the wrong side of the barricades...
...But "organizing in this PRI-dominated country is a constant challenge," says Francisco Saucedo, a former PRD federal deputy and one of the founders of the militant coalition of neighborhood groups...
...That same day, a number of other groups arrived on the scene to add their voices to the denunciations of the city and federal governments, both dominated by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...We don't charge the same quotas as the PRI, but our vendors still pay...
...At the top," said Filomena, "the party could be replaced without a real change in the way we live...
...Some of the protesters outside the barricades had their own ambiguous links to the PRI...
...Rico's group of sellers was allotted nearly a third of the 1,200 official permits, but as a savvy street politician, she immediately positioned herself as the protector of the unorganized, and ended up representing-protecting and collecting tribute from-a good proportion of the politically unaffiliated...
...The party would protect and defend their interests, and they would pay their dues, vote the right way, get others to vote the right way, and help keep the party in power...
...By midday, as they began taking up positions around the entire front of the building, their real mission became clear...
...The street vendors were a heavily priista group, incensed over the shrinking downtown territory in which they were allowed to sell...
...The name of the organization was changed to the National Front of Organizations and Citizens (FNOC), but its corporate structure remained essentially unaltered...
...here are now a number of vendor organizations--called "bandos" in Mexico Citythat are not affiliated with the PRI...
...To survive the Crisis, Mexicans are flocking to the cheaper street economy, both as buyers and sellers...
...The space for social participation gets taken over, and people are converted from activists into petitioners...
...The "popular" wing of the PRI was originally organized as a federation of public employees, but expanded into the National Congress of Popular Organizations (CNOP) in 1946...
...But I got tired...
...It was the Mayor, after all, who had fired the drivers, enforced the ban against the vendors, and dragged his feet on the construction of housing for the poor...
...Shouting slogans of solidarity and defiance, and singing spirited songs celebrating rebellious Mexicans, they began perhaps the thirtieth occupation of the year of those prominent steps...
...In Mexico City, things are seldom as they seem...
...you suffer more on the streets...
...Three years ago, the Mexico City government, at the urging of the administration of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, passed a city ordinance which prohibited street vendors from operating in several crucial square blocks of the city's center...
...cheer and applaud...
...The city is making money, even here [in this independent space]," says Robledo...
...They were ea in January the city for not complying with its promise to construct public housing near the dump sites...
...Authorities said they would notforce the unlicensed vendors to move, but that they would evict them, using riot police, from the Historic Center if they remained after January 6. The vendors accepted the deal...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 5
