The more interesting question is what happens to the corrupt PRI-dominated labor unions. Will the more militant independent unions now gain the advantage if they PRI unions no longer have the privileges gained through state coercion?
-Andy English
-----Original Message----- From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 10:25 AM Subject: Re: Mexico
>Chris Burford:
>> At 12:18 03/07/00 -0700, you wrote:
>> >>Any thoughts on Fox's win in Mexico?
>> >>
>> >>Doug
>> >
>> >Wish that it had been Cardenas instead of Fox, but a successful
>> >transfer-of-power-via-election is something to cheer loud and long
about...
>> >
>> >Brad DeLong
>>
>>
>> Clinton's praise for the election is the acceptable face of the global
>> neo-liberal human rights agenda of interfering in other countries
internal
>> affairs in the name of human rights.
>>
>> Indonesia, Montenegro, and the election in Croatia were also acceptable
>> faces of this policy. The interventions in Zimbabwe and Serbia are the
less
>> acceptable faces.
>>
>> Russia and Chechnya the unacceptable face of *non*intervention.
>>
>> Should progressive people still welcome this, or does it just prepare the
>> ground for more rational economic domination by the global forces of
>> finance capital?
>>
>> As I am out of touch with Latin American events, I do not know the
>> significance of Brad's reference to Cardenas.
>
>Cardenas was the leading leftist candidate. Fox, who defeated
>the candidate of the ruling PRI*, as well as Cardenas and
>several other persons, is apparently a sort of Whig.
>_Norteamericano_ media are naturally ecstatic at this turn of
>events, and news reports in CNN and the New York Times have
>generally cast the election as a two-party contest, thus making
>Sr. Cardenas an unperson and constructing the PRI as the
>mainstream left party, the Mexican equivalent of the Democrats,
>compromised, bureaucratized, bloated and corrupt.
>
>Interestingly, the reports say that large numbers of the
>Mexican working class voted for Fox as a sort of anybody-
>but-the-PRI candidate; Cardenas had this role in a prior
>election, but failed to win. The Mexican Green party also
>supported Fox. Had Fox not succeeded, there was danger that
>the next, perhaps successful move against the PRI would have
>come again from the Left. The ecstasy alluded to above tells
>us that Mexico has been saved. What's _Anschluss_ in Spanish?
>+--------------
>| * PRI: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the ruling
>| party of Mexico for the last 70 years or so.
>+--------------
>