Mexico Week In Review: 01.30-02.05

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review:  01.30-02.05
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Published since 1994, 'Mexico Week In Review' is a service of the
Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS).  CIS is a Washington, D.C.
based activist group committed to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous
peoples in the Americas.  CIS is actively supporting the struggles
of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico while simultaneously combating
related structures of oppression within our own communities.

To request free searches of our news archive or to contact us
directly, write: cisdc at zzapp.org

"Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros Nada"
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OTRA UPDATE: "THIS SYSTEM IS GOING TO COLLAPSE SOON," WARNS MARCOS

"This is going to fall," said Subcomandante Marcos, referring to the
social and political system favored by capitalism in its most
advanced stage. He said this with urgency. The "Other Campaign"
proposes a new path, one that is "unprecedented" but will be the only
way to avoid going down with the system. Before speaking to thousands
of people in Lerdo Park in Veracruz, "Delegate Zero" met with more
than a hundred adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon
Jungle, some of whom raised issues that had not been expressed until
now. The Zapatista delegate responded to these questions analytically
and controversially, especially towards the supposed inevitability of
capitalism, and the idea that one must adapt oneself to it even when
in struggle. "We can build something else that is more inclusive. I
say this because there is nothing more exclusive than an armed,
insurgent political-military organization. Not just because of what
it represents, but also because of the destination that is chosen. We
had a feeling of duty toward all of you. If we were able to survive
and then work for the progress of the indigenous community without
interference from local and state governments, it was because of your
support and the support of many people in this country.

"But with every show of support we heard the question: 'and what
about us?' We felt that the task was too great for us, and at the
same time this decay was happening in our national life. It is not
true that capitalism is creating dependency in many peasant farmers
or small businesses, believe me, it is not true. The opposite is
true; capitalism's advance means their total disappearance. And it is
not that I am making this up or deducing it from some kind of
academic analysis, although those exist, too, and demonstrate the
same thing. It is the people themselves who say it. Peasant farmers
are losing their lands because of capitalism, and capitalism can't
offer them anything except to make them disappear." He spoke about
the legal traps and reforms to the constitution that are directed
towards stripping the peasants of their land and even causing their
extinction.

In the case of science, "it's not that the scientists depend on
capitalism for their own work; it means renouncing the ethical values
that make them follow that path. No one decides to become a scientist
in order to destroy nature, but this is happening nonetheless. The
'factory' of scientific knowledge expropriates that knowledge from
everyone and gives it a purpose that no one with ethics - I don't
just mean people of the Left or anti-capitalists - would want. Their
knowledge is used to destroy and to kill."

Marcos added that there are those who realize what is going on and
those that don't, and that there are people who, "realizing what is
happening, conform." This is where the Other Campaign comes in,
"because there are those who can say, 'yes, but who cares, because
what can I do?' and get a sort of cynicism 'light.' They don't dare
to admit that human ethical values are being diluted in exchange for
comfort, for a check. I'm not saying such people are selling out;
they have to work out their material needs." "The Other Campaign is
showing that there are those who will not sell themselves. I'm also
talking about those fighters, like those that were talking here about
'68, who went through all the experiments in political participation,
who were offered a way to give in to the system, that old trick of
telling them that they could do more from the inside. There were
people who said no, who could have gone over to the other side but
stayed. The Other Campaign is a space for those people."

The meeting was held in the offices of the group Matraca, the
Movement to Support Children and Home Workers. There, Delegate Zero's
arguments abounded: "There is an anti-capitalist current right at the
time when people are saying that capitalism can't be changed. The
definition 'anti-capitalist' is important, although we could all
argue about what the word really means. Some say, and argue
theoretically, that it is impossible to transform capitalism, and
that what we must do is humanize it. In fact, it's the corpus of the
electoral platform of a candidate who sits in the vanguard of the
Other Campaign." The audience laughed, as just yesterday the PRD
candidate [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] was in Jalapa. Marcos
mentioned that "just before the Sixth Declaration, if you remember,
the political class was fighting over the center. When the Sixth
appeared, some began to say, 'well, maybe I am of the left, but the
moderate left.' And there the spectrum began to open toward the left,
but before that everyone was fighting for the center, and it is from
the 'impossible geometry of power' that this "left but not left"
movement begins. Right at the time when the Other Campaign found
others who want that space."

Marcos said: "Our intuition, which we now know to have been correct,
was that there were people like us, who no only refused to conform to
existing options, but felt it was their duty to build something else.
And we can't say how it will all turn out; all we can do is draw a
general outline and see if anyone else is on the same channel, then
offer them the chance to decide on the characteristics of this other
effort." The Other Campaign, he added, "defines its enemy, not its
adversary. You can agree on some things with an adversary, but not
with an enemy. When the Other Campaign defines itself as
anti-capitalist, it says: 'we fight for our survival by bringing
about the death of what is in front of us.' Not the death of a
person, but of a system. The EZLN says 'we recognize your struggle,
as small or as individual as it may be,' and we are committed to the
fact that Other Campaign maintain that at all times. We are going to
use our moral and ethical authority, which we have earned, to defend
that position." "This thing that we are doing, compañeros, has no
precedent. Not even the past history of solidarity with the Zapatista
cause, as now we are not talking about solidarity with indigenous
communities. Nor do the 'respectable' social struggles serve as a
reference point, or the political struggles or any of that, because
we are proposing to walk in a direction where there is no road. No
one has even thought about whether it's possible to travel there.
Until today, the education we have received, the training, has been
that everything is obtained from above, and that which doesn't come
from above is destined to fail. So, the question that we bring to
you, which we have heard in the states we've visited, is: how many
more defeats are we willing to take?"

The Sixth Declaration, he said, "refuses to use other people's
language. We are speaking as we are, the Indian peoples of Mexico,
who talk to others and say to them, with our hearts in our hands:
'this is going to fall down.' The house is going to collapse, and the
problem is that we are right below the roof." People say, said
Marcos, that he "is promoting abstention in the elections. No,
compañeros , what has happened is that we have found an abstentionist
movement that identifies with us, because it is sickened by the
political class. And if in the past abstention was seen as apathy,
the Other Campaign is discovering that it really comes from a lack of
alternatives." "We are not opposed to those who fight for power; in
fact, many political organizations that are with the Other Campaign
intend to struggle for power. What we are proposing is that right
now, instead of looking up - because everyone is telling us, look up,
look up, or else we won't know what to do - we are going to unite
with all those people to see if we can build something else. "We are
seeing effervescence below that doesn't put its faith in anything
from above. There is a great social effervescence that is not looking
toward electoral politics and that is making the political campaigns
look innocuous. Neither Madrazo, nor Calderón, nor López Obrador is
rising, and it is not our fault, it is because of what they have
managed to build in all these years. That is not apathy. We are
looking at an effervescent movement, one that could explode at
anytime with no coordination, no support."

Dismissing the debate over whether he is a moderate or radical
anti-capitalist, Marcos said that the Other Campaign's proposal is
not to coexist with the Right: "Don't be fooled." He said this in
response to one young man who said that "we need to break down the
walls because we are all human beings." Marcos replied: "No. We are
all human beings, but some are sons of bitches and some aren't. That
is the truth. They built up their wealth on the misery, death and
exploitation of others. What we want is to organize, speak and raise
the consciousness of that sector in order to fight together. Because
if we don't, if we leave them alone, they are going to end up
destroying everything. They have already demonstrated that. If we
don't do something now there won't be anything left to struggle for,"
Marcos concluded.

Source: La Jornada: 02/05
====

NEARLY 43 PERCENT OF CHILDREN LIVE IN POVERTY

Mexican Organizations for the protection of children informed that
42.6 percent of Mexican children live in poverty. This situation was
presented by the organizations before the UN Committee on the Rights
of the Child and the results presented to the press.  According to
the organizations, President Vicente Fox´s government failed to
accomplish the goal of reducing the child death rate that in some
regions goes up to 30 deaths per 1000 live births. The government has
not performed actions to decrease the number of children under 14
without deprived of health services which is 64 percent while in the
Chiapas and Guerrero states it reaches 83 percent, said the report.
In 11 of the 32 states of the nation more than 50 percent of all
children live in poverty. Chiapas is in first place with 72.1
percent, then Oaxaca with 68.8 percent, Veracruz, 60.7 percent,
Tabasco, 59.8 percent and Hidalgo with 58.2 percent.

Source: Dominican Today: 02/01
====

JUAREZ FEMICIDE: A POLITICALLY EXPLOSIVE MURDER ROCKS THE CITY

Prominent Ciudad Juarez lawyer Sergio Dante Almaraz has been
murdered. The Chihuahua state president of the Convergence for
Democracy party (Convergencia), Almaraz was shot to death on the
afternoon of January 25 in downtown Ciudad Juarez while he was
driving in a Suburban vehicle with a companion. Conflicting, initial
reports indicated that Almaraz and his companion, who was only
identified as Miguel, were accosted by a gunman or gunmen firing
either 9 mm or AK-47 weapons from a Ford Expedition vehicle with New
Mexico license plates. Almaraz was killed in the attack but his
companion survived.

Luis Walton, the Guerrero state branch president of the Convergencia
party, said his political organization has sent a letter to President
Vicente Fox requesting that the nation's leader "get involved in the
matter" and clarify the circumstances of Almaraz's murder. "We demand
justice. (Almaraz) was a lawyer who had been distinguished as the
lawyer of the year in Chihuahua," Walton told Frontera NorteSur.
Walton added that Convergencia is demanding the Federal Attorney
General's Office take over the murder investigation. Representatives
of the Convergencia and PRD parties vow they will soon raise the
murder in the federal congress.

Almaraz perhaps was best known for his drawn-out but ultimately
successful defense of Victor Garcia Uribe, one of two bus drivers
accused in the 2001 murders of 8 women found raped and mutilated in a
Ciudad Juarez cotton field. The case was plagued from the start with
allegations of torture against Garcia and co-defendant Gustavo
Gonzalez, evidence tampering and botched DNA tests. Mario Escobedo
Anaya, the lawyer for Gonzalez, was shot to death in 2002 by
Chihuahua State Judicial Police led by the same police commander who
arrested Gonzalez and Garcia. A year later, Gonzalez was found dead
in his prison cell after undergoing a mysterious operation. Finally
released from prison in July 2005, Garcia was found innocent by a
judge who reversed his murder conviction and threw out a 50-year
sentence for the murders. Ironically, Almaraz was murdered in the
same zone of Ciudad Juarez where some of the cotton field victims and
numerous other young women had disappeared.

Born in Guanajuato state, Almaraz was a fixture of the Ciudad Juarez
legal scene. In 1987, he joined an opposition current within the
Institutional Revolutionary Party led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and
Porfirio Munoz Ledo. Almaraz was elected state president of
Convergencia's Chihuahua branch last December, and was mentioned as a
possible candidate for the federal congress this year. As president
of Chihuahua Convergencia, Almaraz was primed for a strategic role in
the presidential campaign of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Convergencia is backing Lopez Obrador in coalition with the PRD and
PT parties. Hector Barraza, the state head of the Chihuahua PRD,
called Almaraz  "a man committed to the alternative project of the
nation that's offered by Lopez Obrador."

During his career, Almaraz made many potential enemies. Besides his
broadsides against former Chihuahua Governor Patricio Martinez and
ex-Chihuahua State Attorney General "Chito" Solis, Almaraz was most
recently involved in a sensitive case involving two Ciudad Juarez
policemen, Jose Vicente Carbajal and Jesus Manuel Cortes, who are
accused of forming part of a suspected narco-commando. Reports
circulated from time to time that Almaraz was once detained in the
United States on narcotics charges, but the attorney denied the
accusations. In recent days, a highly-charged dispute between Almaraz
and  Ciudad Juarez District Attorney Cony Velarde over Almaraz's
supposed links to stolen vehicles went public.  Days prior to his
death, Almaraz declared Velarde, a 28-year-old former women's
homicides special prosecutor, would be responsible for anything that
might happen to him. A nephew of the slain lawyer disappeared in an
earlier, separate incident and is still missing.

Almaraz`s murder has raised the political temperature in Ciudad
Juarez. One of the slain man's brothers phoned a Ciudad Juarez radio
program to urge an international tourist boycott of the border city.
On January 26, the city's bar association held a symbolic firing of
Velarde outside her offices.  Almaraz was murdered just days after a
tour of Ciudad Juarez by a delegation of Spanish anti-femicide
activists and journalists, who visited the 2001 cotton field murder
scene as part of their itinerary.  Because of the victim's
prominence, Chihuahua Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez quickly
rushed to Ciudad Juarez to investigate. Like many other shooting
cases that happened in broad daylight, no suspects in Almaraz`s
murder were immediately apprehended.

Sources: Frontera NorteSur (FNS): 01/26; El Diario de Juarez: 01/26;
Norte: 01/26; lapolaka.com: 01/26; El Paso Times: 01/26
====

SPECIAL REPORT: GUIDE TO THE 2006 MEXICAN ELECTIONS

The so-called election truce over, Mexico's campaign 2006 is back on
track. Candidate rallies, promotional billboards, posters, and a
heavy barrage of media spots have appeared throughout the country.
Besides a new president, Mexicans will elect 500 new members of the
lower house of congress and 128 senators on July 2 of this year. Most
of the congressional representatives will be chosen by direct vote,
though a large number of seats will be allocated according to the
proportion of ballots received by each party or coalition of parties.

Thirteen state and municipal races for governors, local deputies,
mayors and city councilmen also will be held, including elections in
the border states of Sonora and Nuevo Leon. A new system allowing
Mexicans who live abroad the right to absentee voting will be
implemented, though with disappointing participation. When absentee
voter registration was cut off in mid-January, only about 25,000
Mexican expatriates had registered-less than 1 percent of the number
deemed eligible to vote. Migrants with current voter registration
cards will be allowed to cast votes at special polling stations set
up in border cities across from the United States. In the past,
irregularities like ballot shortages have cropped up at special
precincts.

The 2006 national elections, Mexico's first since the long-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was dethroned in 2000 by an
opposition party,  the center-right National Action Party (PAN), come
at a delicate juncture in the country's political landscape. Massive
migration, challenges to state power from organized crime and an
ongoing clash between democratic impulses and repressive backlashes
help create the political context. While many citizens complain that
nothing has really changed in the 6 years since the PRI lost, Mexican
political culture has undergone an important transformation since the
days when the word of the President was the gospel. A recent
photography street exhibit that toured several Mexican cities
captured a slice of the public mood.

Titled "La Polaka en su Tinta," the exhibit featured photos snapped
by many of the country's master photojournalists of political leaders
and their relatives in compromising or ridiculous poses: erstwhile
soccer star and former Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha
falling down on a soccer field, or President Fox almost sticking his
tongue into the camera.

Exhibit co-organizer and participating photographer Karina Tejada
said the purpose of the display was to show "politicians are as
vulnerable as all of us. Functionaries don't know the people and this
is the problem." Tejada said. Meant to reach people who normally
don't frequent galleries or museums, the exhibit celebrated the
erosion of censorship and the opening of political spaces during the
last few years. "Socially, the PAN didn't do anything, but it managed
to open up expression a bit," Tejada contended.

MEET THE PARTIES, COALITIONS, CANDIDATES
Five men and women will try to replace Vicente Fox in Los Pinos, the
Mexican White House, next December. They are: Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador, Roberto Madrazo Pintado, Felipe Calderon, Patricia Mercado,
and Roberto Campa.

Maintaining his front-runner status by about 10 points in the latest
polls, Lopez Obrador, a native of Tabasco state and former mayor of
Mexico City, is the standard-bearer of the three-party coalition
called For the Good of All, an electoral alliance that includes his
center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Convergence
for Democracy  (Convergencia) and the Labor Party (PT). Lopez Obrador
defines the central message of his campaign as "a preference for the
poor."

Commonly referred to as AMLO or "El Peje," in reference to a Tabasco
creature, Lopez Obrador presents his 50-point alternative project for
the nation as the best option for solving Mexico's multiple crises.
"We are going through decisive moments for the country. It's not just
about getting to the presidency, but transforming Mexico. That's the
real objective of this campaign," said Lopez Obrador on the kick-off
day of his campaign. "We're going to win the presidency and transform
Mexico."

In US terms, Lopez Obrador might be classified as a New Deal liberal.
He proposes greater public spending on social programs, cutting
officials' salaries, placing special attention on the development of
indigenous communities and respecting the San Andres accords signed
between the Mexican government and the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) in the 1990s. Some call AMLO's brand of politics
"social neo-liberalism."

Also a Tabascan and possessing a long-standing personal rivalry with
Lopez Obrador, Madrazo is a former governor of the southern state and
ex-national president of the PRI. Madrazo's PRI is united with the
Mexican Green Party (PVEM) in a coalition curiously titled the
Alliance for Mexico, the very same name of the PRD-led coalition that
ran Cuauhtemoc Cardenas for president in 2000. Madrazo's politics are
classic PRI- a combination of pragmatism, populism and nationalism
when suited. He is highly unlikely to rock the financial and economic
status quo. In Madrazo's words, the candidate supports "a market
economy where everyone fits."

Felipe Calderon is the man for President Fox's PAN party, which was
united in a coalition with the PVEM in 2000 but is going it alone
this year. Employing the slogan "Value and Passion for Mexico" as his
campaign theme, Calderon represents the continuation of the PAN's
conservative political project of the private over the public, with
some important exceptions.

Calderon portrays himself as the man with "the firm hand." As he says
in one campaign spot: "We're going to be tough with the narco. We're
going to be tough with fraud. We're going to be tough with
delinquents." Calderon emphasizes lean government, universal medical
insurance and "quality schools, a program launched by the Fox
Administration in more than 30,000 educational institutions.

Two smaller parties are also fielding candidates. Roberto Campa is
the presidential candidate of the New Alliance Party, a grouping
based in Mexico's National Teachers Union that grew out of the split
in the PRI between Madrazo and teachers' union leader Elba Esther
Gordillo. Campa is likely to draw some votes that normally would have
gone to the PRI, but Lopez Obrador and Calderon could make
significant inroads in the educators' vote this year.

The sole woman presidential candidate, Patricia Mercado represents
the Social Democratic and Campesino Alternative Party, another new
organization that suffered its own split when members of the
campesino sector rejected Mercado's nomination and tried to register
the controversial generic pharmacy chain store owner Victor Gonzalez
Torres, "Doctor Simi," as their candidate.

A longtime labor and human rights activist, Mercado is a feminist who
isn't afraid to address politically taboo issues. In 2003, Mercado
headed the Mexico Possible Party. The short-lived organization
promoted homosexual rights, favored reproductive freedoms and filed
legal charges against several Roman Catholic bishops for allegedly
intervening in the political process, an official no-no in Mexico.
Mercado announced her candidacy last year in an appearance at the
cotton field in Ciudad Juarez where the bodies of 8 raped and
murdered women were recovered in 2001. She recently returned to
Ciudad Juarez, speaking out against the cover-up of the femicides. In
a political system still dominated by men, Mercado's presence will
add a different dimension to the election, especially in light of
Michele Bachelet's presidential win in Chile. Although she isn't the
first woman to run for the Mexican presidency (Rosario Ibarra
campaigned in 1982 and 1988), Mercado's participation in the 2006
election could become a pivotal event in Mexican politics- if she
doesn't get bogged down in a media dispute with Doctor Simi over
alleged defamatory remarks, Interestingly, Felipe Calderon is
reaching out to Mexico's majority female population with a series of
campaign ads about gender equality.

OTHER KEY PLAYERS
Apart from the political parties and their candidates, other actors
and forces will play key roles in the elections. Although prohibited
by law from political engagement, the influence of the powerful Roman
Catholic Church is bound to be felt. A recent meeting, for example,
between the Cardinal of Guadalajara and the PAN's Felipe Calderon
might be interpreted as a stamp of approval by some church
followers.

The Church is an increasingly vocal critic of US immigration and
border policy, one of the hot topics in Mexico. The Fox
Administration's foreign minister, Enresto Derbez, has called on the
candidates not to politicize the issue, but his appeal is almost
certain fall on deaf ears as the election race heats up, especially
with the Church making regular pro-migrant proclamations.

A political ghost from the past is hovering around election-year
Mexico: Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Once considered the most hated-man
in Mexico, Salinas is back from his Irish exile reconstructing
networks in low-income communities that were put together during the
Solidarity Program of his 1988-94 administration and which,
presumably, could be utilized to promote Roberto Madrazo this year.

Although he tries to officially distance himself from the old PRI
tradition of the president naming and promoting his successor,
President Vicente Fox has emerged as a player in this election
process. Opposition political forces charge the President is
campaigning for Calderon, an accusation Fox denies.

However, with only ten months left in office, President Fox is giving
an unusual public push to his social and educational programs. He's
expanding the anti-poverty Opportunities program from its five
million beneficiaries to include street vendors and small business
people, who will be eligible for medical insurance, housing and
retirement savings accounts.  In his final year in Los Pinos,
President Fox announced that a new $260 million-dollar World Bank
loan will be used to help ensure that the "quality schools" program
in public education survives beyond his administration "until it is
in all the schools of the country."

In a publicity drive worthy-or better than- any enjoyed by previous
PRI governments, the President and his programs are receiving heavy
doses of publicity in the months leading up to the election. For
instance, one nationally broadcast radio news program follows up its
numerous Calderon spots with public service messages or "news
stories" about President Fox's anti-poverty programs. When President
Fox's Minster of Social Development Josefina Vazquez quit the cabinet
to work for the Felipe Calderon campaign, opposition politicians
complained she was taking intimate knowledge about the people served
by anti-poverty programs into the PAN's political campaign.
Bolstering Calderon's base, Vazquez coordinated a recent meeting
between Calderon and dozens of social organizations.

Big money will command a leading spot in federal elections that are
anticipated to cost more than $1 billion dollars in public and
private monies.  A great portion of the cash will flow into the
coffers of Mexico's television duopoly controlled by Televisa and TV
Azetca, which will profit from the campaign spots crafted by people
like former Clinton advisor and current Calderon coach Dick Morris.
At least two televised candidate debates are expected to be held.

In the run-up to the campaign, a group of businessmen headed by
billionaire Carlos Slim signed a document called "The Pact of
Chapultepec." Putting their influential names at stake, the business
owners propose political stability, economic growth and the creation
of human capital on their terms, sending a message to the candidates
about which way the business winds blow. Both Madrazo and Calderon
quickly announced their support for the pact.

Pollen from a different kind of wind could also blow in Mexico's
direction this year. Many of Lopez Obrador's supporters are impressed
by the recent election victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia, assessing
the Bolivian coca grower leader's triumph as another step toward a
more independent and popularly-governed Latin America, a trend they
want Mexico to join.

BORDER AND OTHER ISSUES
President Fox's record, public insecurity, poverty, and relations
with the United States are emerging as the burning issues in this
year's elections. Border and trade issues figure high on the
political agenda, especially the increasingly thorny relationship
with the United States over immigration and security. Mercado, for
instance, proposes that a binational human rights agreement for
migrants be signed between Mexico City and Washington.

By virtue of his political position and base, expect the PRD's Lopez
Obrador to take an aggressive stance on the immigration-border
debate.  He proposes to transform all the Mexican consulates in the
United States into activist "legal agencies for migrants." It's no
accident that during a campaign swing in Guerrero state, AMLO's
supporters played a taped version of "La Paloma," a song whose lyrics
mention Maximilian and Benito Juarez and blast racism and
imperialism. However, distancing himself from Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez, Lopez Obrador insists he will get along famously with the US.

On the economic front, energy resource privatization and the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are up for debate. In two
years, all remaining tariffs on US and Canadian produced corn and
beans will be lifted in Mexico, an issue that helped spark the
massive farmers' protest of 2003. While the "Countryside Can't Take
it Anymore" movement fizzled out, the tariff controversy is likely to
resurface soon. As one of his key campaign planks, Lopez Obrador
proposes renegotiating the corn and bean clauses of the NAFTA.

Calderon and Madrazo voice similar campaign rhetoric about the
economy, demanding a more competitive and efficient business sector.
As a former energy secretary, Calderon was close to initiatives to
open up Mexican energy resources to foreign investment. Madrazo is
less likely to tinker with PEMEX, the Mexican national oil company,
but he has been evasive in some public forums about the energy
privatization issue. Lopez Obrador is on record as stating there will
be no sell-off of state property. Neither Madrazo nor Calderon have
emphasized any great need to change the NAFTA.

For his part, Madrazo criticizes the way the Mexican government
solved the long-running Rio Grande water crisis with Texas last year,
contending water sources not subject to in the 1944 US-Mexico treaty
governing the river's water flows were improperly used by the Mexican
government to pay off its water debt. Madrazo's PRI is on record as
urging the intervention of international organizations in the case of
Guillermo Martinez's shooting near Tijuana by the US Border Patrol
late last year. Tagging the Fox Administration's approach to
US-Mexico border issues as "timid," the PRI urges the Federal
Attorney General's Office to invoke the legal assistance treaty with
the US and get to the bottom of the Martinez shooting.

Another phenomenon that could be called "copy cat politics" has
emerged in the presidential race. Lopez Obrador charges that the
federal government's small bi-monthly payments to senior citizens
enrolled in the Opportunities program is a pale imitation of the
program he began as Mexico City mayor several years ago. When Lopez
Obrador proposed cutting heating and gasoline prices recently, he was
seconded in the proposal by Madrazo.

THE ZAPATISTAS OTHER CAMPAIGN
As the election campaign heats up, another one of a far different
flavor is unfolding throughout Mexico. Launched by the EZLN and
dubbed "The Other Campaign," the movement proposes to peacefully
transform Mexican politics bottom-up from outside the electoral
system. The Other Campaign was announced last summer in the EZLN's
Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rain Forest. In their declaration,
the Zapatistas said they have successfully resisted 12 years of war
and attacks, but need to expand from their Mayan indigenous base in
Chiapas state or possibly risk losing everything they have achieved.
According to the Sixth Declaration: "The hour has arrived to take
another risk and a dangerous step, but it is worth the trouble,
because perhaps together with other social sectors that have the same
needs as we do, it will be possible to obtain what we need and
deserve. A new step forward in the indigenous struggle only is
possible if the indigenous people join together with workers,
farmers, students, teachers, employees...in other words, with the
workers of the city and the countryside."

Headed by Subcomandante Marcos, now renamed Delegate Zero, the Other
Campaign, also called the "The Zapa-Tour," is traveling throughout
Mexico and holding meetings with indigenous communities, farmers' and
workers' organizations and other groups and individuals identified
with the left and/or social movements. The Other Campaign will reach
all the US-Mexico border states at various points during the year.

Many Mexican media outlets ridicule the EZLN's campaign, even
portraying it as an outrageous, theatrical manifestation of Marcos'
alleged mid-life crisis. The EZLN insists The Other Campaign is a
serious effort to forge a new anti-capitalist Mexican left,
historically split by regionalism and sectarianism, and a first step
toward drafting a new Mexican constitution. How the Zapatistas and
their allies will get there is anybody's guess, a mystery even Marcos
recently admitted. For now, the Zapatistas are holding their public
meetings and hearing about local issues and causes. Supporters of The
Other Campaign are also convening state and local meetings in order
to figure out how to plug into the initiative.

The Other Campaign is stoking controversy in the left because of
Marcos' strident denunciations of the PRD and Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador as just as corrupt as the other candidates and parties.
Because the Zapa-Tour is reaching sectors of the population that form
part of Lopez Obrador's social base, some of the candidates'
supporters worry the Zapatistas will discourage people from voting
for the PRD-led coalition candidate. Marcos was quoted recently as
saying one purpose of the campaign is to keep the heat on politicians
and not necessarily boycott the election. A sort of mass candidates'
accountability session. Although downplayed by the big media, the
Other Campaign could strike a chord among segments of the fifty
percent or more of Mexicans who are thoroughly turned off by all the
political parties and might even abstain from voting this year.

One possible effect of The Other Campaign, combined with other
influences like the volatile US-Mexico border stand-off, might be to
push Lopez Obrador, who has declared himself a man of the center,
rhetorically to the left. Coming four years before the 100th
anniversary of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the 2006 election year
promises to be a landmark one for the future of Mexico.

Source: Frontera NorteSur (FNS): 01/31
(For a free electronic subscription email fnsnews at nmsu.edu)

====
The above articles were originally published and copyrighted by the
listed sources. These articles are offered for educational purposes
which CIS maintains is  'fair use' of copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

end: Mexico Week In Review:  01.30-02.05
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