Mexico
Mexico: Oil privatisation halted due to mass protests
by John Ross
Global Research, May 23, 2008
http://counterpunch.org,
“The Adelitas have arrived/To defend our oil/Whoever wants to give
it to the foreigners/ Will get the shit kicked out of him!” yodelled
the brigades of women pouring onto the esplanade of the Mexican
senate. The demonstration was to protest a petroleum privatisation
measure President Felipe Calderon insists is not a petroleum
privatisation measure — and which he sent onto the Senate for
fast-track ratification at the tag end of the session this April.
Inside the small, ornate Senate, leftist legislators aligned in the
Broad Progressive Front (FAP), some dressed in white oil workers’
overalls and hard hats, were camped out under pup tents arranged
around the podium for the eighth straight night. They paralysed
legislative activities and demanded an ample national debate on
Calderon’s plans to open up the nationalised petroleum corporation
PEMEX to transnational investment.
Sneak privatisation
The hullabaloo, which has been brewing for months, exploded when
rumours circulated that Calderon’s right-wing PAN party and allies
in the once-ruling (71 years) PRI had cooked up a secret vote
approving the privatisation measure.
Such covert manoeuvring is called an “albazo” or “madruguete’ — a
pre-dawn ruse to approve legislation in the dark when there is
significant opposition, often behind locked doors and military and
police barricades. Seizing the podiums in both houses of congress
and the timely arrival of the Adelitas prevented a madruguete and
derailed plans to fast-track the privatisation.
Under Calderon’s “energy reform” package, building and operating
refineries and pipelines will be opened up to the private sector —
37 out of PEMEX’s 41 divisions would be subject to partial
privatisation.
In an analysis anti-privatisers label “catastrophic”, which Calderon
sent on to congress to back up his initiative, the president pinned
salvation of PEMEX on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that
would necessitate the “association” of private capital.
Mexico’s petroleum industry was expropriated from an array of oil
companies known collectively as the “Seven Sisters” in March 1938 by
then-president Lazaro Cardenas — an act that remains a paragon of
revolutionary nationalism throughout Latin America.
But down the decades, PEMEX has subcontracted out important parts of
its structure to transnational drillers and service corporations
like Halliburton, now its number one subcontractor, that suck
billions of dollars in profits from Mexican oil each year.
The appearance of the Adelitas and their male counterparts (“Los
Adelitos”) is the latest gamble by the left populist leader Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) to monkey wrench the government’s plans
to return PEMEX to the contemporary version of the Seven Sisters.
Organised by neighbourhoods and by workplaces, the Adelita brigades
are the lineal descendants of the groups of AMLO supporters who came
together after the stolen 2006 election in a seven-week sit-in that
shut down the capital’s main thoroughfares. At last count, there
were 41 registered brigades — 28 Adelitas and 13 Adelitos, about
50,000 citizens in all.
Operating in shifts, 13,000 “brigadistas” have been encamped off and
on for a week in front of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.
The brigades are named after significant political events — “18th of
March”, marking the day Cardenas expropriated the oil — or to honor
social activists such as Jesus Piedra, the long-disappeared son of
left senator Rosario Ibarra. Women warriors like Leona Vicaria and
Benita Galeana are similarly remembered.
Citizens’ army
The creation of so large a citizens’ army pledged to carry out civil
disobedience to prevent the passage of legislation it thinks
detrimental to the republic is unprecedented in Mexico’s political
history.
Similar brigades, led by women, have invaded local congresses
outside of Mexico City and one band of activists closed Acapulco’s
busy airport last week. Shutting down Mexico City’s Benito Juarez
International Airport is the Adelitas’ ultimate threat.
The Adelitas, like most of the weapons in AMLO’s arsenal, are drawn
from Mexico’s revolutionary history. Las Adelitas were “soldaderas”,
or women soldiers who fought shoulder to shoulder with the men in
Pancho Villa’s “Northern Division” during the 1910-1919 revolution.
With their long skirts, broad sombreros, bandoleers strung across
their chests, and toting .22 carbines, the Adelitas were emblematic
of the many courageous women who participated in that epic struggle.
AMLO’s crusade has not been confined to one house of congress. On
April 8, when Calderon sprung his initiative on the legislature, FAP
members stormed the tribune in the Chamber of Deputies while
lawmakers were preparing to grant Calderon permission to travel to
New Orleans for the April 21-22 summit of the North American
Security and Prosperity Agreement. Mexican presidents must solicit
congress for permission to travel.
Calderon was eager to attend the summit with the re-privatisation of
Mexican oil in hand.
Suddenly, the FAPos unfurled a 60-foot banner that announced
Congress had been closed and cast it over the entire presidium —
trapping president Ruth Zavaleta in its folds. The ensuing chaos
prevented her from calling for a vote on the President’s travel
arrangements.
Eight days later, the tribune was still draped in the banner and FAP
deputies had chained shut the doors of the chamber and moved the
desks of the PAN legislators to the podium to barricade themselves
from attempts to take it back.
Zavaleta, a member of AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD) but not friendly to him, has called for the use of “public
force” to remove the rebel lawmakers.
AMLO is the target of extravagant vitriol delivered by the media,
reminiscent of the public lynching he was subjected to during the
tumultuous 2006 presidential campaign. TV tyrant Televisa’s coverage
of the takeover of congress was so venomous that thousands of
Adelitas, wearing bandaleros and wielding facsimile .22s, descended
on the conglomerate’s Mexico City headquarters, provoking one
prominent PAN politico to label them “paramilitaries”.
In violation of constitutional amendments banning “black” political
hit pieces, a PAN front group “Better Society, Better Government”,
is running primetime Televisa spots comparing AMLO to Hitler,
Mussolini, and Pinochet. The Empresorial Coordinating Council, the
nation’s elite business federation, takes out full-page ads blasting
AMLO for staging a coup d’etat.
PRD divisions
Despite the anti-AMLO media blitz, or perhaps because of it, Lopez
Obrador remains the only figure on the Mexican political stage who
is able to convoke tens of thousands of supporters, often with
virtually no notice.
Three times since March 18, when he kicked off this crusade, AMLO
has filled the great Zocalo plaza, the heart of Mexico’s body
politic. What makes the turnouts even more impressive is the fact
that AMLO has built this massive movement while the PRD has been
reducing itself to rubble.
In-fighting since a corrupted March 16 party presidential election
has divided the PRD down the middle. The party is roughly split
between an activist wing headed by Lopez Obrador and party
bureaucrats who see the PRD as an instrument for political and
personal advancement. The latter seek to demobilize the Adelitas.
The “Chuchus” (many of their leaders are named Jesus) eschew AMLO’s
rallies and sit-ins and instead conduct their own private hunger
strikes to protest privatisation. The Chuchus portray themselves as
the “reasonable” left and are only too willing to “dialogue” with
Calderon — a president Lopez Obrador resolutely refuses to recognise,
due to the fraudulent nature of his “victory” in 2006.
Whoever wins, the tussle over the bones of the PRD may be a moot one
— after two years of grassroots campaigning, ALMO’s base has grown
wider than the PRD’s.
Although Calderon’s scam to fast track privatisation through
congress was blunted by the Adelitas and the FAPs, the PAN and the
PRI still have plenty of room in which to connive. Now the PRI,
seconded by Calderon’s right-wing minions, proposes an uninterrupted
50 day “national” debate to be restricted to the two houses of
congress with a congressional vote by mid-summer.
Calderon’s initiative can only pass if at least half of the PRI’s
120-vote delegation goes along with the game. Even if the
privatisation measure eventually passes, the legislation is bound to
wind up in the Mexican Supreme Court the moment it clears congress.
Meanwhile, AMLO’s people are clamouring for a very different kind of
debate, one that would unfold over the next four months and be
conducted inside and outside congress in every state and
municipality with the prospect of a national referendum to decide
the issue — one poll has 62% opposed to the privatisation.
Such grassroots decision-making would be a revolutionary step in the
land of the albazo and the madruguete.
Out on the esplanade of the Senate, the Adelitas were shaking their
bodies to “La Cumbia del Petrolio”. “Are you tired, companeras?” the
companera with the bullhorn asked and brigadista Berta Robledo, a
nurse about to retire from the National Pediatric Hospital, came to
her feet with a loud “No!”
“Sure the sun is hot but so what?”, she responded to a gringo
reporter’s stupid question, “the sun can’t stop us, the rain can’t
stop us, the cold can’t stop us and you know why? Because we are
right! We are fighting for our oil and for our country. This is the
resistance. We don’t get tired.”
[Abridged from http://counterpunch.org, April 28.]
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