Globalization and Resistance: The Remaking of Mexico
Rosen, Fred & Barkin, David & Ortiz, Irene
Mexico is transforming itself through the interaction of two very powerful forces-the neoliberal project, which is imposing a new set of social and economic relations from above, and the...
...While the Convergence itself may fade away like many other attempts to organize the Mexican opposition, its size, scope and diverse composition highlight the country's current state of affairs: Mexico is transforming itself through the conflictive interaction of two very powerful forces-the globalizing project imposed from above, and the resistance to that project, welling up from below...
...7. Francisco Saucedo, interviews with Rosen, November 25, 1995 and July 21, 1996, Mexico City...
...2. "Inexistentes, los 10 principles bancos," La Jornada (Mexico City), October 31, 1996...
...To borby Teresa Rend6n and Carlos Salas domestically produced goods...
...The central bank, the Banco de M6xico -long proud of its reputation for "technocratic" and de-ideologized monetary management-has been given political and functional autonomy as part of a broader effort to remove economic policy from accountability to popular a representation...
...One of the rea- between the sons Mexico's unemployment rate has been so low and the new throughout the economic crisis-hovering around L6pez Obradl 6%-is precisely the safety valve of the easy-to-enter would work t informal economy, at home and north of the border, able to do bef This has created a powerful downward pressure on gressional ele wages...
...It is also a sign of the delicacy of the issue...
...95-100...
...The new movement deliberately evoked the classic liberal commitments-individual rights, civil liberties, private property-and placed these commitments in the context of the late twentieth-century global economy...
...It is also home to one of the city's oldest and most socially active Catholic parishes, the Parish of Los Angeles...
...In attendance-and therefore "members" of this incipient organization-were groups and organizations of all stripes...
...This all leads to a loss of dignity and identity, and to increased rates of alcoholism, family dissolution, feelings of impotence and fights among communities...
...18 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON MEXICO imilar stories are told in places as dissimilar as working class colonias in the center of Mexico City and impoverished indigenous communities in rural Chiapas...
...This celebration of the individual was embedded in the institutional setting of the North-South divide...
...These small organizations, if not linked to some larger olitical impact...
...cess by setting a way of mopping up the unemployed...
...As a result, the non- maquila manufacturing sector is no longer able to generate new jobs...
...Luis Potosi and all While not all of this job creation ra.Cuz and all states has taken place in the border states, there has clearly been a deepening of regional differGraduate Studies at ences, as jobs move northward...
...III left has emerged over the past ten years as onse to this disassembling of the country's and economic networks from above...
...The problem of insuffi- of those seco cient domestic savings is thereby being addressed with their jobs, ho a program that places the private savings of workers at something not the disposal of private investors, at the same time that it is no place lef encourages workers to think of themseves as financial labor has reac entrepreneurs...
...border, 29.7 31.3 their growth has led to a move- ic Census...
...More often they represent a resistance that has been gestating for years, the result of the carefully laid groundwork of social activists...
...factories as well as neighborhoods...
...The organizers issued the call around two very broad and fundamental demands: for a new political economy (against neoliberalism) and against corruption and impunity (against the corporatism of the PRI...
...NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20REPORT ON MEXICO Low costs of production (i.e...
...The organizations are local and small and fighting for the same small things...
...Mexico is transforming itself through the interaction of two very powerful forces-the neoliberal project, which is imposing a new set of social and economic relations from above, and the resistance to that project, reorganizing society from below...
...It also declared that the country's principal problem was a lack of internal savings, and therefore set itself the task of developing markets capable of receiving foreign capital, and a business environment capable of attracting global producers and financiers...
...We organized in And it still needs time to mature in practice...
...From Marcos' point of view, such nust be embedded in a broader alliance of "If we had to choose a political force to NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON MEXICO which to give our support," said Marcos in a talk to members of El Barz6n, "that force would be civil society, a force independent of the political parties, or which, including them, was greater than the sum of its parts, more generous than the egoism of their leaderships, more inclusive than particular sectarianisms...
...Barz6n advisor Carlos Marichal, an economic historian at the Colegio de M6xico, says that technicality or no technicality, the banks and the government are taking the situation very seriously...
...If the Zapatista uprising had never taken place, the emergence of civil society would have been a much slower process":' Berlanga becomes momentarily pensive, his thoughts drifting to a group of students assisting in the difficult birthing of a goat...
...In the process, community organizations-both church groups and the spontaneously created groups of victims-forged new links with international relief donors...
...Cheap products from U.S...
...A hundred miles and disruptive power cultural light years of the Mexican removed from Jos6 Imaz's offices in the comdebtors' fortable Tlalpan district of movement...
...It is no longer the only political actor...
...and an attempt to provide a relatively high degree of social security to Mexican citizens...
...His trip was motivated by a ruling handed down by the fifth circuit federal tribunal of Mexicali, Baja California...
...Marcos PRD general secretary Andr6s Manuel or have announced that the two groups ogether-something they have not been ore-to ensure success in the 1997 conctions...
...Embarking on the "free-market" path pioneered by the "Chicago boys" employed by the Chilean dictatorship, Mexico reversed all four directions and entered into a period of reform that privatized and deregulated the economy, opened it to international investment and trade, and cut loose the workforce-especially the peasantry-from its traditional protections and supports...
...And his organization sent him abroad because real economicand therefore political-power in the country has accrued to transnational corporations, U.S...
...Indeed, implementation of the elements of the model is so frequently a condition of receiving IMF support that the term "IMF conditionality"-along with the synonomous "Washington consensus"-has entered the vocabulary of planners and politicians across the region...
...Manufacturing Commerce Region 1980 1993 1980 1993 Central States Southern States 59.6 47.4 52.7 48.7 10.3 9.0 15.5 17.4 Northern States 29.9 43.6 31.6 34.0 Source- Authors' calculations based on the 1981 and 1994 Econon states include Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, San states further north...
...8 The basic ideas of what has become the on-theground neoliberal economic model are embodied in the development strategies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and, in Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB...
...In the meantime, there has been an increase in low-paying, unstable jobs that carry no benefits...
...The banks have hired some big legal guns, and knowing the Mexican legal system, they will probably get some favorable ruling, but only after hard political negotiations...
...Many U.S...
...The urban popular There is a great difference between the project that former student activists took into Colonia Guerrero and the one they ended up with...
...There's not enough land or capital to produce even for self sufficiency...
...This "social left" is a nonelectoral left, even though it is linked to-and now dominant within-the country's leading leftist electoral force...
...For sources, see note 16...
...This has led to the growth of these two sectors as sources of new jobs...
...This downward displacement of hed the point where there are large numng-age people who are doing absolutely has obvious public-safety implications...
...members into the workforce to bolster household income...
...Declining real wages, meanwhile, are impoverishing Mexican workers and The Workforce of the 1990s O ver the past decade and a half, the structure of Mexican employment has undergone deep changes...
...I bers of worki The lending agencies have also placed great empha- nothing...
...The real minimum wage peaks in 1978 at 2. 12 (212% of its 1960 value), and drops to 0.64 (64% of 1960 and only 30% of the 1978 peak) in 1996...
...The global trend of financial deregulation has placed unprecedented amounts of capital at the disposition of these agents, who turn out to be accountable to virtually nobody, as we continually learn when their errors of judgement or corrupt practices provoke failures of a magnitude that require taxpayers in their home countries to bail out the financiers and their agents...
...Berlanga says the other colonias to same of his compaifero Marcos: "There is a great diflating Group...
...This is happening just as Mexico's small-scale farmers face a sharp deterioration of their living standards and the unraveling of their communities...
...The victims' movement became the vanrish, for example, guard of the social left...
...a strategy of "stable development" which attempted to keep prices, interest rates and the exchange rate under control...
...Yet the faltering national banking system has never been up to the task...
...Manufacturing wages based on series constructed by Jeffrey Bortz for 19391885, using wage rate in Mexico City, deflated using Mexico City consumer price index...
...They went with a project of guerrilla warfare to of popular move- seize power...
...5 The savvy barSThe IMF is zonistas, fighting for their own survival, had found clearIv worried their opponents' weak about the point...
...The movements bubbling up from below are sometimes the result of spontaneous reactions to unbearable situations-as in the case of El Barz6n...
...9. See John Williamson, ed., Latin American Adjustment (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics), 1990...
...By the late 1970s, the old radicals had dispersed but by no means disappeared...
...Its supporters outside of Chiapas have organized the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN), but realize they have to join forces with other groups in order to have any real effect...
...V says Francisc "Zapatismo cannot represent everything...
...stripping the country's government-controlled union movement of its legitimacy...
...And all of our forces were strengthened when the armed struggle broke out in Chiapas...
...Residents forr Neighbors of Colonia Guerrero whi had linked up with similar groups in become the city-wide Tenants Coordin in 1981, a group called the Coordinat Urban Popular Movements (Conamu Guerrero to coordinate the struggles ments throughout Mexico City...
...6. Benjamin Berlanga, interviews with Ortiz and Rosen, July 20-23, 1996, Zautla, Puebla...
...II Until the early 1980s, four components guided Mexican economic policy: a high degree of state participation in the economy...
...Of course, overnight devaluation could Since the wipe out the dollar earnings of peso-denominated investexport-oriented ments, but the magic of firms employ Salinas' relationship with the world press and financial cheap Mexican community conquered any reservations...
...They are told to stop being campesinos and to adapt to another mode of life, but there is no room for them in the cities, and there is no policy to incorporate them elsewhere:' Berlanga and his colleagues arrived in the Sierra in 4orelos to commemorate the April the early 1980s, veterans of the radical struggles of the 1960s, whose defining moment was the 1968 massacre of hundreds of protesting students in Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza...
...But with the 1995 collapse of Mexico's domestic market and the consequent shrinking of the demand for labor, there has been a downward displacement of workers, and both sources of work are drying up for migrant campesinos...
...The groups represented in the still-gestating Convergence reflect different aspects of the Mexican crisis and, above all, civil society's response to that crisis...
...8 and has since declined to levels lower the populist 1930s...
...Finally, the maquiladora industry has expanded continuously Services since 1980, and especially in the past few years...
...Of course, the lack of access to land and capital has long been a problem in Mexico...
...Dotted line shows the real average wage in the manufacturing sector...
...given form to a new try at an alliance EZLN and the center-left PRD...
...178-192...
...It was just like this (he snaps his fingers) and we got it done...
...government-all of whose representatives can most easily be found in New York and Washington...
...With the demise of the socialist bloc and the emergence of eastern European markets, the leading companies in these centers have gained even more freedom to concentrate and then redistribute money from one country to another with a simple order transmitted by voice or computer...
...Microenterprise-the informal family the dirt-poor i firm-has become the model's safety net, and has It has also created an enormous reserve labor pool...
...In an especially egregious example, Telmex, the state-run phone system, was privatized in 1990 in an insider deal in which one man-the wellconnected billionaire Carlos Slim-was allowed to create a huge financial base with foreign partners, tender a large international public stock offering, and still retain a very profitable controlling interest...
...This sis on what they call "human resource development"- Crime is risin agency terminology for the neoliberal model's labor policy...
...Our vision is a country in which campesinos continue to exist, but in a different kind of society from the one that's developing now...
...He came to the seats of power to negotiate on behalf of Mexico's powerful debtor's movement, El Barz6n, which has made itself so independent of the country's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), that it has become the first major opposition group since the days of the Mexican revolution to negotiate with foreign powers about Mexico's future...
...Maybe we've been mistaken for the last ten years...
...Internal documents of the National Minimum a partnership Wage Commission show that the real minimum wage social forces...
...Mexico City's working-class Colonia Guerrero, for example, has given life to one of the city's most militant-and still independent-neighborhood organizations, the Assembly of Barrios...
...In 1982, Berlanga, along with several colleagues-many from a feminist umbrella group that works with poor women in the countryside-founded a school called the Center for Rural Training and Development (Cesder...
...And it's like the lottery...
...were terrains of struggle...
...And beyond that, "Mexico is entering into another electoral dynamic in which other parties are appearing, occasionally winning, and demonstrating that the PRI no longer has an absolute monopoly on the direction of the country...
...Globalization and Resistance 1.Jose Maria Imaz, press conference, November 20, 1996, Bronx, New York...
...The average real manufacturing wage is 1.87 in 1960 or 187% of the minimum wage...
...Just a few years ago, he says, "on the one hundredth anniversary of the parish, the Padre invited all the colonia's social and civic organizations to participate in the celebration...
...Social-security pensions, for example, Declining r( are now being turned over to privately managed, indi- lies to send m vidually chosen pension funds...
...Many Mexicans, of course, feared that the "reformers" also had some venal interests in mind when they accelerated the privatization process and tried to make it irreversible...
...The significance of the "flowering of civil society," she says, is that it is "breaking the state's monopoly of political mediation...
...Northern ment northward of employment...
...stinging attack on the region's "statist" economies...
...Southern states include Guerrero, Oaxaca, Ve further south...
...Deals with labor unions officially incorporated into the long-ruling PRI have allowed the export sector to take advantage of peaked in 197 labor discipline and a cheaper labor force...
...At the lowest levels, there t to look...
...When their speculative investments and policies turned out to have been based on poor judgement or, worse, used to finance frankly corrupt activities and practices, they were still able to demand-and receive-government support...
...They There was some new investment in export-oriented Trends in Real Manufacturing and Minimum Wages, 1939-1995 3.503.40- 3.30 3.20- . . 3.103.00- Real Average Wage in Manufacturing 2.902.80 - 2.70 ..-- ' 2.60- 2.50- 2.40- 2.30-- 2.20- 2.10- 2.00- 1.90- 1.801.70- 1 1.60- 1.50- 1.40 1.30 1.20 1.10-3 1.00.90- .80 .70 eal Minimum Wage .60 .50 1939 '41 '43 '45 '47 '49 '51 '53 '55 '57 '59 '61 '63 '65 '67 '69 '71 '73 '75 '77 '79 81 '83'85 '87 '89 '91 '93 1996 YEAR Solid line shows evolution of the real (adjusted for inflation) legal minimum wage in Mexico from 1939 to 1996...
...Subsequent events have done nothing to extinguish those fears...
...But he captured the moment and the circumclosely connected stances and reworked his discourse into what it is now...
...They become competitive ition, combined with the severity of the mic crisis has given form to some politithat in an earlier day would have been his past July, for example, 300 once-midonistas held a two-day conference in the alidad, Chiapas, under the "protection" of ndigenous Zapatista guerrillas...
...The relationship with nature is jodido [screwed...
...The opening of the economy in 1982 brought with it a slowing down of the growth of domestic demand, and the substitution of imported for Table 2 REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE EM POPULATION (All figures are percentages...
...Both series are three-year moving averages (the two previous years are averaged in to smooth out statistical anomalies), and have been normalized so that the minimum wage is equal to 1.00 in 1960...
...The result was not what Marcos envis was the birth of sioned...
...Along with privatization, the economic restructuring promoted by the last three Mexican administrations has called for the creation of an autonomous monetary authority, like the private banks, free from popular pressures...
...Promete L6pez Obrador convertir al PRD en primera fuerza politica," La Jornada (Mexico City), July 22, 1996...
...He is angry because small and medium property owners like himself, despite their "natural" conservatism, have been decimated by the economic restructuring of the past 15 years...
...All this car late 1980s as a current of the PRD, which distinguished itself from an older, more party-oriented left...
...2 If the banks have no legal existence, then neither, of course, do the debts owed to them, and on the basis of the ruling, El Barz6n is filing for the dismissal of all court proceedings initiated by the banks to enforce the collection of past-due debts...
...In its place they used policies of slow money growth and fiscal austerity to generate high rates of return for foreign investors...
...All these spaces In a similar way, there is a great difference between ne together in the the project that former student activists took into Vol X)(X, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 19 Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 19REPORT ON MEXICO Mexico City's Colonia Guerrero and the one they ended up with...
...The privatization of state firms has been financed by a combination of on-the-ground and financial foreign investment, and the return of the "flight capital" that had been sent abroad by wealthy nationals...
...2 The EZLN clearly cannot organize such a national force by itself...
...The campesinos don't fit into the government's project-not as producers and not as citizens...
...Such is the power of Mexico's massive cooperative movement...
...In the early 1990s, reports the Bank of Mexico, foreign portfolio investment was the country's main source of foreign-capital inflows...
...Marcos and I are of the same generation," he says...
...dollars poured into Mexico, oblivious to the profound Unlike the multilateral financial institutions emerg- disequilibria that were gestating in the productive strucing from the Bretton Woods accords of 1946, which ture, and oblivious to the growing hardships of daily built up large staffs of professionals who counselled life for the majority of Mexicans [see "Why the recipients on the management of their economies to Recovery is Not a Recovery," p. 24...
...What is necessary is a different type of policy that takes these regions into account...
...For the official perspective, see Banco de Mexico, The Mexican Economy (Mexico City), 1996, pp...
...Salinas, in effect, had decreed the bank privatizations after the expiration of a 360-day limit established by the 14 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14REPORT ON MEXICO Members of the Assembly of Barrios march in Mexico City to demand access to unused land for the construction of new housing...
...The goal was the development of an export-based economy, driven by private capital, with a major role n for transnational companies and international portfolio investors, all with little regard for domestic productive chains...
...They are under constant pressure since they shareholders, to new investors and to regulatory bodies know that they not only have to search out new prof- on a quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis...
...It has the experience also meant the encouragement of microenterprise, not of Barrios sho so much as a model of private-sector development, but crete demands as a substitute for state-sponsored social security-i.e...
...Mexican Congress, leading the court to declare that the privatization decrees were "extemporaneous...
...Integral to this development is the growing labor-force par"ticipation of women and OYED Iteenagers...
...15 5 S a Just how this social left is developing could be glimpsed at a meeting in Mexico City this past summer called the "Convergence," organized by the EZLN-EI Barz6n alliance...
...According to the government statistics agency INEGI, about 50% of the urban workforce now earns twice the minimum or less...
...The stock marlabor but don't rely on Mexican purchasing ket was awash in money, but little new productive investment was occurring, real incomes were falling, underthey employment rising and power, they social malaise deepening...
...Policy makers saw the project as part of a global movement which, in Latin America, had come to be known as "neoliberalism," a word which came into vogue in the early 1980s when its advocates, led by the eloquent Mario Vargas Llosa, spearheaded a "nily in Chiapas...
...Index numbers for graph constructed by Barkin...
...he Jesuits led the "We came here and we learned from the people," say is was a period of both Berlanga and Saucedo...
...The only thing campesinos can now sell, he says, is "their ability to work-their labor power...
...Neither the government nor the community organizations of the ruling PRI proved capable of organizing rescue actions, post-earthquake relief or housing reconstruction...
...Sau ery" is much like Berlanga's realization slow and painstaking nature of organic communities, many Mexican activist groundwork for one another...
...People are thirsting for new initiatives," said Garcia, representing the PRD at the Convergence...
...1 4 The idea has been taken up by some of the older currents within the party...
...Protheir own fessor Benjamin Berlanga, survival, have a middle-aged veteran of three decades of radical found their struggles, teaches his young campesino students why opponents' communities like the one in weak point, which they live--communi- ties in which perhaps 20 million Mexicans earn their living and make their homes-have become unlivable...
...Banco de Mexico, The Mexican Economy (Mexico City), 1995, pp...
...The social left grew in the aftermath of the massive 1985 earthquake that killed at least 10,000 people in Mexico City...
...Small and midscale entrepreneurs, increasingly squeezed by the ongoing economic crisis, and bank debtors like El Barz6n participated alongside housing -advocacy groups and streetvendor representatives...
...See Jeffrey Bortz, "Politica salarial en Mexico," in J.W Wilkie and Jesus Reyes Heroles, eds., Industria y Trabajo en Mexico, Vol...
...NGOs, typically organized around specific issues, and human rights groups were present, as were feminist groups, Christian base communities, groups formed around the movements for dialogue and peace in Chiapas and other conflictive zones, and a variety of social, cultural, religious and phil- Cardenista Campesino anthropic "civil associa- tgh Tuxtla Gutibrrez, the tions...
...The size of their investments is such that a recom- on the social and economic structures or the environmendation about a particular company or country can mental health of the regions they are entering...
...I Deep down, we don't want to bankrupt the system," says Jos6 Maria Imaz to a small "press conference in New York City, "but if it comes down to it, we will have to keep our word...
...I (Azcapotzalco, Mexico: Universidad Aut6noma Metropolitana), 1990, pp...
...For the barzonista, these are not difficult questions to answer...
...15% These trends, together with 6% the consistent decline in real 19% wages, have led families to send 35% an increasing number of family nal de Empleo, 1995...
...The socially corrosive forces of globalizing neoliberalism have helped give these movements a more unified shape...
...Declining inflation, a stable currency and high interest rates were the anchors of a financial policy that converted Mexico into the wunderkind of international finance...
...At the same time that he went with his people to the guerrilla movement in Chiapas, we came here with a very different perspective having nothing to do with armed struggle...
...the protection of domestic industry with high tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade and investment...
...13 This seems to be the direction that the recently elected leader- Pro-EZLN members of ti ship of the PRD wants to take...
...A reporter asks Imaz why a middle-class, selfdescribed middle-of-the-road businessman like himself would threaten to shut down his country's financial system...
...eal wages has made it necessary for famiore than one member out to work...
...Cesder, with the expressed aim of allowing campesinos to remain on the land, teaches techniques of land management and small-scale craft production and marketing...
...But the possibility of this armed group-this new discourse-only appeared after years of working from below with local organizations who gave no thought to armed struggle...
...Every year we realize that these campesino regions fall outside the scope of government plans," says Cesder's Berlanga...
...All these tasks were left to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), informal neighborhood groups and the parish...
...In Mexico, this has meant the growth of privately controlled technical training and education, a social "residual" social-welfare policy to replace the "institu- . a resp tional" social welfare of the previous model, labor flex- . social ibility and the renegotiation of union contracts...
...Beginning with the reforms of President Miguel De la Madrid in 1983-reforms dictated in large part by the international lending agencies which were "helping" the country emerge from its moratorium on international debt payments-economic policy took a 180degree turn...
...Marcos did it, why didn't we...
...El Barz6n wants the government to nationalize some 300,000 mortgages which, explains advisor Marichal, would be held by a state housing agency...
...Now we want the banks to get us back on our feet," Imaz told Salomon Brothers...
...With tremendous accumulations of wealth to be distributed and invested every day, the global financiers-corporate bankers, underwriting firms, mutual funds, insurance companies and even stockbrokers-have NAC7LA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8 22REPORT ON MEXICO become key decision makers in the so-called "emerging have to report competitively attractive results to their markets...
...Their peritable opportunities and anticipate future trends, but sonal fortunes depend upon these performance reports, that each decision will influence the attractiveness of which are insensitive to long-term considerations of the rest of their portfolio, and those of their competi- stability-or to the impact of their investment decisions tors...
...There is a loss of social organization, a degradation of the conditions of life...
...Successive local governments, who see the modest endeavors of Cesder graduates as threatening, have tried to shut the center down...
...Imaz, the dapper-looking director of a Mexican smallbusiness group called the National Entrepreneurial Alliance, spent this past November in New York and Washington, meeting with officials of the leading brokerages doing business in Mexico, representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), key antiNAFTA congresspeople and members of a wide range of think tanks...
...In both case, the linkmed the Union of ing with popular struggles-for land, work, housingch, by the 1980s, has narrowed the organizers' agenda...
...a) r- E E LU -I w Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 23REPORT ON MEXICO automobile production, in the maquiladoras and in a few other manufacturing sectors, but most of the resources were channeled into the stock market, where profits are not taxed and transactions need not be reported to fiscal authorities...
...The principal financial centers-New York, London, Tokyo and, perhaps, Frankfurt-have become centers for attracting and redistributing financial assets throughout the world...
...We demanded land and housing...
...down side...
...the global dominance of (mostly) northernbased transnational corporations, which quickly incorporated the wealthiest of the Third-World corporate elites...
...On a global scale, the neoliberal era has seen the rising power of financial capital...
...The new team, one of whose key players was president-to-be Carlos Salinas de Gortari, declared that government had no business in production, but rather should limit itself to creating the conditions within which private groups could operate profitably...
...See "The than those of Cracks in PRI Unionism," p. 16.] now takes 4.8 The strategy has also called for a shrinking of the four to rise ab welfare state: cuts in social spending, and the encour- is between tw agement of market-rather than state-solutions to an increasingl social problems...
...The privatized banks-and the semi-autonomous central bank-are meant to efficiently manage the flows of private international capital that are the driving forces of the new Mexican economy...
...had agendas of their own, and in the interaction, new d for housing and forms of political action emerged...
...Berlanga, lecturing to a class of entering students in a sprawling adobe building built by a previous generation of students, explains that this precariousness means that very little of the campesinos' output can be sold outside the community...
...9 The course of neoliberal reform has been embodied by Mexico's determined insertion into the global economy-most dramatically by way of NAFTA-and by the growing importance of foreign private investment as a driving force of economic growth and development...
...In the 1960s, ti social movement," says Saucedo...
...The work is very slow," he muses, "but we have all been preparing the ground for each other...
...In addition to being a teacher of alternative agricultural techniques, Berlanga is one of a few hundred "advisors" to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN...
...T he globalizing strategy has been accompanied all along by a loosening of price controls, exchange-rate controls and interest-rate controls, though not surprisingly, the model has never called for the absence of wage controls...
...the movement grew along with victims' groups, and in ere we came from April, 1987, the Assembly of Barrios was formed as a cedo's "rediscov- city-wide organization to fight against evictions and for on that despite the better housing and reconstruction...
...Javier Elorriaga, interview with Ortiz, August 30, 1996, Mexico City...
...The banks, which had been nationalized in 1982, were reprivatized in 1990 as part of the market-oriented restructuring of the economy...
...4 The brokerages and lenders were dubious when Imaz called, but none refused the soft-spoken businessman a Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 15 C C Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 15REPORT ON MEXICO meeting...
...Campe- Campesinos gather in the state of AM sins face the market 1919 murder of Emiliano Zapata...
...See Table 1.] While this has brought about the creation of larger firms in these two sectors, the proliferation of tiny, two or three-person businesses, typically employing nonOR waged family and individual labor, continues unabated...
...For decades, rural workers have been streaming into the cities to sell their ability to work, both as permanent migrants and as weekday workers who return to their villages on weekends and holidays...
...The court's ruling may be based on a technicality, but it highlights the overlay of neoliberal economic restructuring on the traditional corruption of the PRI...
...Very little of the promote capital accumulation and development, these foreign savings was used for productive purposes...
...In both cases leftist orgawas a need to do nizers brought certain agendas to communities which acre at Tlatelolco...
...high interest rates) have brought in the "hot-money" portfolio investors, and disappearing tariff barriers have allowed international retailers to set up shop throughout the country...
...Thi the social left," says Saucedo, "a left to the daily struggles of the workers...
...And ference between the project Marcos and his people iniing Committee of tiated in Chiapas 15 years ago and the project they have p) was formed in now...
...TI fare, the economic justification is labor discipline, dle-class barz Mexico's comparative advantage in the new global divi- town of La Re sion of labor...
...They are terrified," says Marichal...
...The "technocratic" economic team that rose to power under Miguel De la Madrid during the latter half of the 1980s consolidated the neoliberal reforms...
...5. Michel Camdessus, press conference, October 4, 1996, Washington, D.C...
...But there are more initiatives now than it's possible to coordinate...
...Imaz was in town with one big bargaining chip: Help us restructure the internal debt so that it is payable, and we won't close down the system by legally refusing to make payments on all bank debt...
...The banks would simply keep the money and the government would keep the mortgages and charge at a lower rate...
...They developed a new discourse-one that was narrower and more concrete-and more opportunities for small successes...
...Irene Ortiz is the co-author Asi es Pues: Trabajadoras Domesticas de Cuernavaca (Atabal, 1991...
...The process has meshed with the old personal connections of the Mexican regime...
...And since portfolio investment is sensitive to perceptions of very short-term gains and losses, in a lightning-quick loss of confidence, investors reacted to the government's awkward peso devaluation of December, 1994 by removing at least $5 billion of foreign (and a good deal of domestic) capital in a matter of days...
...Under the neoliberal model of social welfare, the project, lack p state will step in only residually-in emergencies of and parochial...
...These political transformations will continue, linked to the continuing social crisis of the country-a A campesino f, social crisis linked to its economic policy...
...They face double exploitation: jodido on the labor market andjodido in the markets for the goods imported into the village...
...While there is a great deal of philo- current econo sophical talk among neoliberals about how individuals cal alliances (or perhaps families) are responsible for their own wel- impossible...
...Zapatismo cannot represent everything...
...The production-based workforce-the source of stable jobs that pay wages above the poverty line-has ceased to grow...
...3. Carlos Marichal, personal communcation to Rosen, December 1, 1996...
...We did what we said...
...They also "captured the moment" and developed a new discourse, one that was a good deal narrower and more concrete, and with more opportunities for small successes...
...As of groups like Cesder and the Assembly ws, this left has formed around very conand proposals...
...Campesino and farm- peace in the region, worker organizations, dissident trade unionists and members of opposition political parties-the PRD as well as the smaller Workers Party (PT)-also attended the late-August meeting...
...That would be the political force the EZLN would support...
...Modestly, we want to be one more force, to build a space that is genuinely democratic...
...While it has achieved sucitself narrow, achievable goals, there is a ve were successful with the early stages," o Saucedo of Colonia Guerrero...
...Since 16.0 16.2 most maquiladoras are still located near the U.S...
...But the banks are stupid and avaricious, and the fight will be tremendous...
...Today, their closest collaborators seem to be the Zapatista guerrillas...
...7 The Jesuits of the Los Angeles Pa have long taken a leading role in C social organization...
...See Graph, p. 23.] It minimum wages for an urban family of ove the poverty line, but the average wage o and three minimum wages...
...Neoliberal reform moved into high gear in the early 1990s under the presidency of Carlos Salinas...
...new financiers have very short-term horizons...
...We were olonia Guerrero's not strictly known as the left, but that's who we were...
...On October 30, the court ruled that Mexico's ten largest banks had been illegally constituted when privatized in 1990 by then-president Carlos Salinas and thus had no "legal existence...
...A force of forces...
...the government-like role played by the major international financial institutions...
...Indeed, the Latin American banking systems have been called the "Achilles' heel of the global economy today" by IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus, whose institution is clearly worried about the disruptive power of the Mexican debtors...
...Data from 1987-1995 are from the Monthly Industrial Employment Survey of the Inst tute for Economic and Geographic Statistics (INEGI), using national wages, and deflated using national consumer price index...
...One year there's plenty, the next year nothing...
...as sellers of labor power and buyers of just about everything else...
...Th reflection, a great feeling that there something, especially after the mass We began to organize around the nee the rights of tenants...
...Organization march thr( The idea, says party leader L6pez Chiapas state capital fo Obrador, is to "build the party both to win elections and defend popular causes...
...g in all sectors of neoliberal Mexico...
...1 0 Money-even "cautious" money-was drawn to Mexico by a government securities market that offered rates of return four or five times higher than prevailing interest rates in the United States or Europe...
...Driven first by desperation, these debtladen entrepreneurs are now holding regular strategy sessions with previously marginalized groups from virtually all sectors of Mexican society...
...See Table 2.10 Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 Table 1 LABOR FORCE ACCORDING TO SEC 1979 Working Population (in thousands) 19,177 Total 100% Agriculture 29% Manufacturing 19% Other industries 8% Commerce 14% Services 30% Source: Encuesta Continua sore Ocupaci6n, 1979...
...Between 1988 1980 1993 and 1993, 41% of all new waged 54.2 52.5 jobs in manufacturing were cre- ated in the maquila sector...
...One of the defeated, "old-left" candidates for party leadership, Amalia Garcia, is now a member of the PRD executive committee with the specific responsibility of reaching out to this social left...
...4. Carlos Marichal, personal communication, December 1, 1996...
...Suddenly we were all in the idea of sharing who we were and whe led to a process of rediscovery...
...have been well The massive injections of new money--especially in placed to take the early 1990s-created a advantage of speculative boom that fed upon itself...
...low wages) have become the magnet which attracts transnational direct investors, high rates of return (i.e...
...The new team of Mexican technocrats oversaw the dismantling of the state apparatus that had promoted industrial and agricultural development over the previous four decades...
...Many nd and third family workers are losing wever, and find themselves looking for quite as good...
...Because there the country's were so few players, the financial boom could be economic cleverly manipulated by collapse, knowledgeable brokers to produce sudden cyclical swings that allowed for great fortunes to be made...
...often determine the success or failure of corporate Under the Salinas administration, tens of billions of strategies or national economic policies...
...Men have typically sought work in the construction industry, while women have found work as live-in domestics...
...Doubts within the official delegations notwithstanding, the treaty was designed to make economic integration irreversible, forging a hoped-for unbreakable alliance of transnational capital...
...This leads to precarious productivity-a little corn, a little beans, and it all stays in the community...
...That way the government would get points for the 1997 local elections and also resolve part of the problem of the money advanced to the banks to save them...
...6 "The relations that campesinos in a community like this have with nature is precarious," the professor tells his students, "because of the fragile conditions of the ecosystems-poor hillside lands, little rain, accelerated processes of erosion and deforestation...
...same space...
...As the manufacturing workforce shrinks in size, only about 12% of non-agricultural workers earn the average manufacturing wage or more...
...Nearly half the bank debt in Mexico is overdue, and much of it is unpayable...
...In Mexico such controls have been "semi-voluntary," achieved through the cooperation of the trade-union hierarchy within the PRI corporate structure...
...315-332...
...We want them to let us pay what we can afford...
...High real interest rates are crowding out domestic businesspeople, and radicalizing-at least temporarily--the small business owners of El Barz6n...
...We had tens of thousands of people, almost in permanent mobilization...
...The El Barz6n movement also underwent a profound transformation as its struggle unfolded...
...And why would his organization of debt-ridden property owners send him to another country to carry on negotiations...
...Fred Rosen is editor of NAC LA Report on the Americas...
...We succeeded and we constructed the Assembly of Barrios...
...We want to be one more force building a space that is genuinely democratic...
...The result is y desperate, "available" workforce...
...We want to build a popular force which one day can become the government, not through an armed revolution, but a social revolution in which the people take the destiny of the country in their own hands...
...8. For a collection of early neoliberal arguments, including Vargas Llosa's widely reprinted "America Latina y la opci6n liberal," see Barry B. Levine, ed., El Desafio Neoliberal (Bogota: Grupo Editorial Norma), 1992...
...21REPORT ON MEXICO row Berlanga's turn of phrase, the whole country is jodido...
...The airing of the issue will be somewhat uncomfortable for the Mexican government since the privatization process involved the substantial enrichment of still-powerful priistas...
...Amalia Garcia, interview with Ortiz, September 2, 1996, Mexico City...
...one kind or another that might call the system's legiti- This recogn macy into question...
...The housing-rights group, formed in 1987, is one of the city's most active popular movements...
...The move from social protection to a market-driven globalization has torn the fabric of Mexican society, leaving it to the radicals-of one sort or another-to remake the country from below...
...investors shared this goal, and negotiations to create NAFTA soon became a priority for leaders in all three North American countries...
...portfolio investors, international financial institutions and the U.S...
...A force of forces must be based on the principle of nonexclusion," says Javier Elorriaga, a leader of the FZLN who spent over a year in jail for being an "alleged Zapatista"-he acted as a go-between for the EZLN and the government in the early days of the uprising...
...There were none of izing within small those interminable discussions of the left," says s were laying the Saucedo...
...There 1995 has thus been a growth of 33,721 employment in very small-scale 100% enterprises as well as a weaken- ing of the trend toward the cre- 25% ation of a wage-labor force...
...El aguascalientes de El Barz6n, muy distinto al de los zapatistas," La Jornada (Mexico City), July 21, 1996 13...
...And Mexico City, at an agricultural training center in Mexthe savvy ico's rugged Eastern Sierra Madre, another sign of barzonistas, political transformation-fighting for and another fight for survival-can be found...
...Minimum wage index based on data from Mexican National Wage Commission, deflated using national consumer price index...
...David Barkin is professor of economics at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM)-Xochimilco, Mexico City and recipient of Mexico's National Prize in Political Economy...
...The parish is the key to the colonia's long and continuing role in the social struggle, says Francisco Saucedo, a colonia resident and official of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD...
...agribusiness are depriving campesino producers of a market, providing fertile organizing ground for groups like Cesder...
...Encuesta Nacio Teresa Rend6n and Carlos Salas are economists in the Division of the Nationa Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM...
...The 'modem' propositions and technologies are useless for this kind of land, and the campesinos have lost the technologies that had served them for centuries...
...The government has kept the banks afloat with a series of "debtor-aid" plans, but the deeply indebted small farmers and entrepreneurs who make up El Barz6n claim that these plans have used public money to bail out the banks-and their wellconnected owners-while doing nothing to alleviate the burden on the debtors...
...The banks' rapid integration into the oligopolistic structure of the economy made them-at least until the current playing out ot El Barz6n's lawsuit--ndependent of political pressure...
...When the Zapatistas emerged in Chiapas, for a moment we wondered whether we should have been armed revolutionaries and fought here, for example, in the Sierra...
...Now the government has penetrated us and divided us...
...and the continually changing global division of labor, in which low wages had become many countries' sole comparative advantage in the international economy...
...3 El Barz6n's international-level negotiations seek to convince the brokerages and lending agencies to opt for social and financial stabilityand to pressure the Mexican banks to do the same...
...Marcos couldn't have existed if we hadn't existed...
...That way, the "bitter medicine" of austerity can be more efficiently imposed through a policy of tight money...
...The contraction of domestic demand has led Mexican investors to look increasingly to commerce and services as vehicles of investment...
...This goal-rebuilding an independent campesino economy and community-runs directly counter to the IMF, World Bank and Mexican government policies which call for the development of larger, more profitable enterprises on the land...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 4
