LATIN AMERICA
Mexico City has a shortage of millions of homes
In Mexico, one of the most industrialised, and one of the big three' in terms of debts to western banks.
has been intensified following the recent generai election, in which the PRI resorted to blatant ballot-rigging to defeat a breakaway bourgeois candidate.
of the Mexican Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), which is
THERESA CONWAY from Socialist Outlook spoke to a leading PRT member, HEATHER DASHNER.
Can you say something about the econonur suaton in the country?
Over the last six years what used to be chronic unemployment and under-
As the political and economic crisis unfolds in Latin America, eyes have been turned to the sharpened situation The crisis of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) The radicalisation has also opened the door for rapid growth now one of the largest organisations of the trotskyist Fourth International. To find out the PRT's analysis of the situation, employment, charactenstic of an underdeveloped country, has increased carminusly hecause of the policies the govemment has introduced to try and deal with the economic crinis. Wages, which once accounted for 42 per cent of Cross National product have been cut back to only 27 percent, and there has been an enormous concentration and centralisation of capi tal. People who were already living on what would he considered poverty level in a developed country are now at the level of serious malnutrition.
In Mexico, one of the most industrialised countries in the sub-continent, government investment in health and education has gone down to 17th and 25th place in Latin America. This is because of the goverment's "moderisation policy. which aims to foder massive foreign private Investment and to open Mexico to the world market.
Cardenas, the renegade presidential candidate, echoed mass sentiments
Imperialism and the leading fac tion of the government party, the PRI think we should be ahle to overcome the crisis and pay the debt, by producing goods for the world market rather than for consumption at home: this 1s the generalised policy of imperialism all over Latin America. Minimum wages have gone down enormously over last 10 years and the average family in the cities (which has 5.3 members) hastolive on the equivalent of E12 per week. The minimum wage in Mexico City is 8(0K) pesos per day which Is about E2. The real wage has dropped by 50 per cent - a brutal change over a period of 10 years.
In terms of housing, there is a shortage of several million homes in Mexico City, with a population of 18 million, There are enormous sections of the city which we call land invasions - places which have been taken over by the homeless, on which they build shanty towns. The first fight is to remain on such land -whether it is govemment or povale. Then there is the fight for services -first water, then electricity and rads, then schools, markets, transport and
All of this has been going on for many years since the agricultural crisis of 1965 which meant an enormous migrution to the cities. It has accelerated after 1985, when the carthquake struck central downtown Mexico City. There were 400,000 people on the street from one day to the next One third of hospital bed
M N
BENV
HALUNTER DEN capacily was destroyed, and 250
What was already an enormous housing shortage was increased by that crisis. The International Year of the Homeless decreed by the United Nations in 1986 provided some funding to replace some of the homes. The movement that arose in Mexico City had to fight hard for this funding and maintain its independence from the state. This movement changed the urban political spectram, because it fostered the creation of organisations where none had existed before.
There has been a crisis in the countryside since 1965, but it has increased hecause of the modernisation programme and cuts in subsidies: guaranteed prices for agricultural products fell way below production costs. That has meant that peasants have tumed to production crops and there is a deficit in corn and beans which we have to import although the country is perfecily capable of producing them.
In the recent period there has been quite a conflict over raising the guarantee prices for basic grains. The products are priced by decree below even what the PRI-dominared peasant organisations consider they should
The only caregory where goverment spending has been increased is in population control, where they have been able to keep promises made to IMF in 1975, and lower the birth rate from 3.5 to 2 per cent year. Between 1970 and 1982, 1.3 million women were sterilised, mauly in the urban areas. There has also been some evidence of sterilisation in the mural ureas but news of this has been suppressed. The goal is to lower the birth rate to 1 percent by the ycar 2000. This will require spending a lot of money persuading younger women not in have children or to get themselves
Except for that, health spending ir in crisis. IF you go to hospital in Mexico City you had better take a relative with you, because the nurse will say 'I don't have any cotton wool, go to the corner and buy some: Idon't have a syringe, I can't give this man
There is a basic list of medicines that the public health system has - and it's gelting shorter and Can sou say something abour the employment situation? percentage of the arban population is underemplosed and what percentage
We have a population of 80 mil Ton. According to goverment statistes. approximately 15 million of those we in what we call the informal sector. Over half the population is under 16, so there are less than 40 mil Lion people who are in the labour market, More than half the population lives in the cities. Twelve milhon people List themselves as housewives in the censusand many of those would be a part of the 15 million. Ten mil-
Lion of those in the informal sector are women. In the 1970s several studics estimated unemployment and underemployment as being from 40-60 per cent - It's a structural thing. Can you say something ahout the political system that operates in
The Mexican system is based on a semi-corporatist, semi-police control of the mass organisations. in the 1930s, after the revolution of 19101917, the state was consolidated through the populist nationalist policy of President Lazaro Cardenas who basically formed the state as it is today. He divided the working class organisations from the peasant organisations and incorporated both of them and the any into a mass party whose pillars were those three sectors.
The PRI has been in power for 60 years - since it was founded in 1928: it is all-pervasive in the state institu Lions and controls all areas of social and political life. However the PRI has been based not only on populist and police control but also on concessions. The population has hoen incrcasingly disaffected from it, both because of the PRI's octopus-like existence which has smothered all sorts of democratic openings, but also because over the last ten years it has been almost completely incapable of giving any economic concessions.
Although it considers the Mexican economy a mixed cconomy, hased on the social role of the state and on private capital, it is very definitely a walchdog for private capital which it has fostered for over 50 years. The new policy means de nationalising cnormous numbers of very important productive industries. This is being demanded by the strengthened bourgeoisie, which had very little political role over the last 40 or 50 years but has increasingly acquired one.
The Mexican capitalist class now feels sufficiently strong and sufficiently related to American imperialist interests to start to make its own independent cxpressions as class. Until now, the weight of the PRI hureaucracy and of the state has always been stronger than of any section of the bourgenisie.
Now the bosses are also clamouring for are vamping of the union structures. This is very difficult for the PRI because the unions, along with the peasant organisations, are the too major levers for their mass control over the population.
The hourgeoisic wants unions which are geured to 'moderisation", organised to increase production rather than defend workers. In order to make such changes the goverment need to attack one of their own sup
UPPLE porters. The PRI union bureaucracy is not going to sit back and allow them just to do this - they would sacrifice their financial privileges and their power. The oil workers' union leader is one of the few people in the country who can defy the president.
This conflict of interest creates an insoluble problem for both the government and the union leaders. They can't go back to the patemalist stato because the cconomic crixis and the foreign debt proclude that: but neither can they go forward to the modernised stato without a total and complete defeat and revamping of the PRIunion hureaucracy-jeopardising the Party's domination of the masses.
So they are in gigantic crisis; and this has been best exemplified by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (son of the former President) leaving the PRI in September last year after making an unsuccessful bid for its presidency -and running as a breakaway candidate under the banner of a small satellite bourgeois party. Basically his project and outlook is to return to the old PRI tradition. He is not yet moving hack towards the PRI hut aims to revive the policies of the "Mexican revolution". arguing for a return to the kind of state his father fashioned.
From the bourgeoisie's economic point of view that is extremely difficult. But Cardenas has also come out against the anti-democratic behaviour of the PRI. This choos and gives: voice to sentiments among the masses, who have identified with this man and came out in the elections, crealing a snowball effect in favour of his can-
This is a very complicated and contradictory process. Many millions of people who voted for Cardenas, voted for him breaking with the PRI, and that represents a step forward in their conciousness. They are supporting an altemative to the PRI which includes: championing a higher minimum wage, a higher guaranteed price for agricultural products, some sort of change of policy on the foreign debt, and all sorts of questions of basic democratic nghts.
However this democratic populist policy and programme has also attracted socialists, as well as an important part of the university youth which would normally be an important breeding ground for socialists, and in that sense in that part of the movement from my point of view it is a step backwards in.
If has also attracted sectors that were previously independent from bourgeois polities, who now identify themselves with Cardenas' project, from differing points of view, and with differing emphasis. We are talking here ahout one of the major sectois which rose out of the 1986 year of the homeless, and other sectors in the provinces of urhan and peasant movenients, as well as trade union people who were originally socialists but now consider that unity of the mass movement has to begin with unity under Cardenas's programme
So as I say this is a very contradictory movement. However, we would say that in gencral it has heen positive. in that it has meant the defeat of the PRI in the ballor boxes for the first time in 60 years. The PRI has always practised fraud, but it never had to practice fraud in order to win the presidental election. It practiced fraud before in order to secure a bigger majority, or in orderto lower the number of absentions, or in order to legitimise itself - but not in order to say that it had won the presidency.
This is a major defeat - and it has accentuated the intemal crisis in the PRI to an unprecedented extent. So deep is the crikis that we think the PRI could actually fall apart. There is another democratising current within the PRI of people who were originally with Cardenas but didn't leave the
There is enormous conflict between the oilworkers" union and the president. The union has accused the governor of the state of Mexico of frand when he was the director of PEMEX, the state oil company, So wc see members of the PRI attacking a PRI governor: this is unheard of in Can vou say something abour the perspectives and priorities of the PRT
We recognised Cardenas the polls and came out in immediate defence of it as soon as it became clear. Many of his supporters said we can't he sure, we don know, we have to be responsible, but we said very clearly that the man has won at the polls and the PRi is not allowing him to take charge of the administration. Now the movement has more or less been unified round that question.
But the PRI has implemented the fraud, blatantly insisting that they won: they have fixed the votes by use of the computer, and invented votes in more than 25,000 polling stations mainly in the countryside where there were no oppostion ballot watchers.
The movement against the fraud was quite strong for a couple of months hut has now begun to decline. This is not only because of the natural tiredness of the movement, but mainly because the PRI has held fim and imposed its pyhric vitory. Though Cardenas's supporters consider the
"The PRI has always practised fraud, but it never had to practice fraud in order to win the presidental election."
"The PRI has been in power for 60 years -since it was founded in
1928: it is all-pervasive in the state institutions and controls all areas of social and political life.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 11 December 1988/January 1989 Page 19
15 million Mexicans depend upon the informal sector new PRI president" Salinas to he a usurper, and Cardenas has as much on several occasions, the fight to stop Salinas taking office on Doc Ist has not been as strong as it could have
When Cardenas made the call for a new party, the PDR (Party of the Democratic Revolution) he made no reference to the usurpation. In spite of that the mass movement has been enormously revitalised. There is huge potential for united action around democratic, economic and sectoral demands as well as the question of the
Our policy is to continue the struggle against the usurpation because we consider that this is a basic question around which the Mexican masses have made major steps forward, and to leave it out is unacceptable. However we are also trying to unify m N the mass movements that already exist, especially in the urban and peasant movement.
It ismore difficult in the unions, hut we try to do work there, as much as our forces will allow, working for unity around the question of salaries. At the end of each month the minimum wage is reviewed hecause of inflation, and we are trying to make the struggle for the minimum wage coincide with the struggle for the contract wage as the reviews on this are duc toward the end of this year. This of course would be combined with the Fight for democracy in the unions. We think it is quite possible in have a unified movement.
The same is true in the peasant movement, around guaranteed prices, and it seems possible to involve the forces who support Cardenas in such a project. The urban movement can also be unified around all sorts of demands; for public services, for example.
If we unify these organisations that are independent from the PRI we can also altract the organisations that arc breaking from the PRE we can start a whole dynamic. We think that there in a change in the entire period; the PRI has never been in this sort of situation before.
Our perspective in to strengthen the moss movement to prevent Cardenas leading workers down a ten-corporatist path. We have also proposed the creation of a political front with Cardenas and his new party around democratic demands, including the Tall of the usurper. I we can extend this to raising of salaries and the independent organisation of the unions we ure in favour of doing this.
While we are in favour of working on aunified basis with there forces we consider it absolutely necessary 10 maintain an independent political focus, This is where the majority of socialist forces in Mexico today dn not agree: they have been so attracted to the Cardenas project they are now discusing dissolving themselves into his new party, Therefore we have.to swim against the current, proposing an orientation of unity orientation lor the mass movement and united politi cal action, but keeping a very clear socialist and revolutionary profile of
Within the mass movement this has been well understood. socialists said that we would he pushed to one side when we refused to withdraw our comrade Rosario Ibarra as candidate for President they said we would be seen as divisive. When it come to defending the Cardenas victory which Rosario and we did, we found that this was wrong.
People were quite ahile to understand that we did not agrec with Cardenar but that we were democtatic fighters. I can give you an example where five days after the elections there was u demonstration where one of our comrades was a speaker. There were forces there who had neverheard us before, and our speaker said 'we are not Cardenistas, we are socialists". She explained what our progtamme was, and why we were fighting for democracy; she was the most ap-
Normal people who are taking up political action for the first time are interested in what we have to say. It is the ex-socialists who are the most critical of us. We think there is not only a historical need to maintain an independent socialist profile, but a big opportunity to do this and build the
PHOTO: Julio Etchard/Retlex Page 20 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 11 December 1988/January 1989
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After General Pinochet's brutal military coup ended the *Popular Unity' government of Salvador Allende in September 1973, over 2000 refugees were welcomed into Britain and a serious solidarity campaign was created. Political discussion took place among a wide layer
Before and after the coup, debate about Chile brought up a lot of the key questions of revolutionary tactics and strategy - how to build political alfiances: the nature of the state and the role of the army (especially after Allende brought military chiels into his government): and how to prepare the masses for the bourgeoisie's violent reaction. It seemed to crystallise many of the debates going in Europe at the between reformists
Today the situation after the
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Placards from the successful 'no' campaign against Pinochet
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