Why Mexico Sucks
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Re: Mexico's "Dirty War"
<font size="5"><center>Mexican Presidency Linked to 'Dirty War'</font size></center>
Washington Post
By JULIE WATSON
The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; 4:07 PM
MEXICO CITY -- A leaked draft of a government report on Mexico's "dirty war" alleges that the country's presidency orchestrated an anti-insurgency campaign in which soldiers carried out summary executions, raped women, and set entire villages on fire.
Based partly on declassified Mexican military documents, the report was prepared by a special prosecutor assigned to investigate alleged atrocities by soldiers. Prosecutors said the report has not yet been officially released and was undergoing changes.
The report was leaked to several prominent Mexican writers and published Sunday in the Mexican magazine, Erme-Equis.
The unedited draft states the alleged crimes were committed during the administrations of presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria, Jose Lopez Portillo, and Adolfo Lopez Mateos.
The most brutal period allegedly occurred under Echeverria's rule from 1970-76, when military bases allegedly served as "concentration camps," according to the report, and hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero were killed or disappeared.
Under Echeverria's so-called "Friendship Operation" launched by the military in 1970 in Guerrero, the report says it has evidence the army conducted "illegal searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, the raping of women in the presence of their husbands, and the possible extrajudicial executions of groups of people."
"With this operation, a state policy was established in which all authorities connected to the military _ the president ... the presidential guard, the commanders of Guerrero's two military regions, officers and their troops _ participated in human rights violations with the justification of pursuing a bad fugitive," the report said.
"Such an open counter-guerrilla strategy could not have been possible without the explicit consent and approval of the president," it added.
The Washington-based National Security Archive, a private, nonpartisan research group, also posted the report on their web site Sunday, saying it believed all Mexicans should have access to it.
"This is the most extensive documented description of how the state unleashed a savage counterinsurgency campaign that targeted a tiny armed insurgency and swept up thousands of civilians in its wake," said Kate Doyle, director of the research group's Mexico Project.
Jose Luis Contreras, a spokesman for Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo, said Carrillo planned to present the report to President Vicente Fox this week.
But Carrillo first planned to make changes _ including erasing the words "concentration camps" from the draft.
"Obviously this does not apply to this country," Contreras said.
The special prosecutor also is revising the report's allegations that Echeverria's presidency was directly behind the abuses, Contreras said.
Carrillo did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman from Fox's office said the president had not yet received the report and could not comment.
Fox has vowed to prosecute Mexico's past crimes, but has done little so far.
Carrillo's office has unsuccessfully sought to bring genocide charges against Echeverria for mass killings committed during two anti-government protests of mostly university students, in 1968 and 1971. The former president has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
But until now, there has been little more than witness accounts of what took place in Guerrero's villages.
The report for the first time names soldiers and cites telegrams from the Defense Department describing exactly who would be targeted in Mexico's war against guerrilla leaders Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vazquez.
It gives a grisly account _ during the administration of Lopez Mateos _ of soldiers in 1963 mutilation killing of a leader of coffee farmers in the community of El Ticui.
The report states that when Echeverria came to power, the government "implemented a genocide plan that was closely followed during his reign." During that time, guerrillas were blamed for a series of kidnappings and attacks on soldiers.
The report describes soldiers dressed in civilian clothes gunning down five men in the community of Los Piloncillos in front of their families, friends and neighbors.
After guerrillas ambushed and killed 18 troops in 1972, the army detained at least 90 men in the village of El Quemado and took many of them to three different military bases that served as "concentration camps," according to the report.
Seven of the men died from being tortured, the report states.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022800889.html
<font size="5"><center>Mexican Presidency Linked to 'Dirty War'</font size></center>
Washington Post
By JULIE WATSON
The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; 4:07 PM
MEXICO CITY -- A leaked draft of a government report on Mexico's "dirty war" alleges that the country's presidency orchestrated an anti-insurgency campaign in which soldiers carried out summary executions, raped women, and set entire villages on fire.
Based partly on declassified Mexican military documents, the report was prepared by a special prosecutor assigned to investigate alleged atrocities by soldiers. Prosecutors said the report has not yet been officially released and was undergoing changes.
The report was leaked to several prominent Mexican writers and published Sunday in the Mexican magazine, Erme-Equis.
The unedited draft states the alleged crimes were committed during the administrations of presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria, Jose Lopez Portillo, and Adolfo Lopez Mateos.
The most brutal period allegedly occurred under Echeverria's rule from 1970-76, when military bases allegedly served as "concentration camps," according to the report, and hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero were killed or disappeared.
Under Echeverria's so-called "Friendship Operation" launched by the military in 1970 in Guerrero, the report says it has evidence the army conducted "illegal searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, the raping of women in the presence of their husbands, and the possible extrajudicial executions of groups of people."
"With this operation, a state policy was established in which all authorities connected to the military _ the president ... the presidential guard, the commanders of Guerrero's two military regions, officers and their troops _ participated in human rights violations with the justification of pursuing a bad fugitive," the report said.
"Such an open counter-guerrilla strategy could not have been possible without the explicit consent and approval of the president," it added.
The Washington-based National Security Archive, a private, nonpartisan research group, also posted the report on their web site Sunday, saying it believed all Mexicans should have access to it.
"This is the most extensive documented description of how the state unleashed a savage counterinsurgency campaign that targeted a tiny armed insurgency and swept up thousands of civilians in its wake," said Kate Doyle, director of the research group's Mexico Project.
Jose Luis Contreras, a spokesman for Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo, said Carrillo planned to present the report to President Vicente Fox this week.
But Carrillo first planned to make changes _ including erasing the words "concentration camps" from the draft.
"Obviously this does not apply to this country," Contreras said.
The special prosecutor also is revising the report's allegations that Echeverria's presidency was directly behind the abuses, Contreras said.
Carrillo did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman from Fox's office said the president had not yet received the report and could not comment.
Fox has vowed to prosecute Mexico's past crimes, but has done little so far.
Carrillo's office has unsuccessfully sought to bring genocide charges against Echeverria for mass killings committed during two anti-government protests of mostly university students, in 1968 and 1971. The former president has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
But until now, there has been little more than witness accounts of what took place in Guerrero's villages.
The report for the first time names soldiers and cites telegrams from the Defense Department describing exactly who would be targeted in Mexico's war against guerrilla leaders Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vazquez.
It gives a grisly account _ during the administration of Lopez Mateos _ of soldiers in 1963 mutilation killing of a leader of coffee farmers in the community of El Ticui.
The report states that when Echeverria came to power, the government "implemented a genocide plan that was closely followed during his reign." During that time, guerrillas were blamed for a series of kidnappings and attacks on soldiers.
The report describes soldiers dressed in civilian clothes gunning down five men in the community of Los Piloncillos in front of their families, friends and neighbors.
After guerrillas ambushed and killed 18 troops in 1972, the army detained at least 90 men in the village of El Quemado and took many of them to three different military bases that served as "concentration camps," according to the report.
Seven of the men died from being tortured, the report states.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022800889.html
Mayor says immigration keeps Mexico from social unrest
By Manuel Durán
(EDITED TRANSLATION FROM REFORMA, DECEMBER 28, 2004, MEXICO CITY)
Inequality in Mexico has not resulted in social unrest due to, among other things, Mexicans immigrating abroad and the responsibility of citizens, said Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mayor of Mexico City.
In agreeing with Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, on the need to change Mexico’s economic model before there is a civil conflict, López Obrador said that the only explanation for people in Mexico not having protested in light of more than 20 years of economic stagnation is because escape valves, such as immigration, have been found.
(Note: López Obrador said this in response to a reporter who asked about recent statements by Cardinal Rivera, the Archbishop of Mexico, who warned of conceivable social disorder if changes are not made in Mexico’s economic model.)
“But how else can one explain 20 years without economic growth, (with) jobs not being created, and political stability being maintained without having had social unrest?” López Obrador asked rhetorically. He explained that while the annual departure of 500,000 Mexicans to the U.S. is not what is best stability has been maintained.
”That which is depopulating the country, that is leaving women, children and senior citizens in the towns because the younger people must leave, is not what is best. Of course that represents the failure of the economic policy,” López Obrador said during his morning press conference. The effects of migration are twofold, López Obrador said. On one hand the pressure is removed with regard to zero economic growth, and on the other those who are in the U.S. send about US$17 billion to Mexico annually.
”That helps to reactivate the economy, but clearly it is not due to economic policy,” he
explained.
__________
Mexico labor unrest could get worse -- maybe a lot worse, some warn
Web Posted: 05/02/2006 04:49 PM CDT
Sean Mattson
Express-News Mexico Correspondent
GUADALAJARA, Mexico - In the early hours of April 20, some 1,000 riot police raided a striker-occupied steel mill in the Pacific port city of Lázaro Cárdenas.
A tumult of Molotov cocktails and burning vehicles ensued. Police shot and killed two steelworkers, left a dozen more with gunshot wounds - but failed to oust the strikers.
The botched raid stoked nationwide union unrest that had first flared in February with the deaths of 65 miners in a coalmine explosion in Coahuila state.
Strikers have since shut down the steel mill and four mines. Union members paralyzed Mexico City streets Friday to support them. And critics say outgoing President Vicente Fox's administration is being ham-fisted in its attempts to defuse the growing unrest.
It's an election year and upsetting Mexico's unions is never a good idea, politically. But experts are divided over how much worse things could get. The presidential candidate most unions support, Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, needs a boost to improve his third-place spot in the polls. He warned last week that "a great worker-employer crisis" could spiral out of control if something wasn't done soon. At a Labor Day rally Monday in Mexico City, the leader of one union umbrella group, Francisco Hernández Juárez, threatened a nationwide strike if Labor Secretary Francisco Salazar did not resign.
Labor unions are nine parts threat to one part action, said Ricardo Pascoe, a political expert with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who thinks widespread the unrest is unlikely.
"The only thing that could change the situation is (that) the PRI, thinking that it needs to radicalize its discourse in the face of its electoral fall, might propose a strike in solidarity with the miners to recover its image as a party of opposition and struggle," Pascoe said.
The PRI established its tight relationship with Mexico's unions during seven decades of rule that ended when Fox won the presidency in 2000. But presidential politics would not be the only motive behind a broader strike, said Jephraim P. Gundzik, the president of Condor Advisers, a California-based consulting firm specializing in emerging markets.
"My opinion is that this type of industrial action will probably spread into other sectors of the economy," said Gundzik, pointing at years of declining social welfare, stagnant salaries and deteriorating industrial safety conditions. "You could be faced with a nationwide strike across many industries."
Ousted union leader
When the Pasta de Conchos mine exploded at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning in February, the union leader who appeared on the scene was Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who essentially inherited the post from his father, who had it for four decades.
But the government said it had documents proving the union voted in a new boss two days before the explosion and Gómez was no longer the leader.
Some miners back the new chief, Elias Morales, but his control is tenuous. Miners and steelworkers striking in four states say the government imposed Morales to benefit Grupo Mexico and Villacero, operators of the striking mines and the steel mill, respectively. They want Gómez reinstated, plus better wages and working conditions.
"The government deposed (Gómez) illegally," said a union member by phone from Mexico City, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Because he had fought for salary increases and benefits."
Company spokesmen said the strikes are the only illegal part of the dispute, and said they can't negotiate with a handful of union dissidents because the government no longer recognizes Gómez as union leader.
Reinstating Gómez "has nothing to do with collective contracts, the conditions of the mine or labor relations," said Juan Rebolledo, a Grupo Mexico spokesman.
"The company in this case has absolutely nothing to do with it," agreed Villacero spokesman Ignacio Treviño. "We are facing an illegal act. It is an illegal work stoppage."
Gómez is also being investigated for suspicion of embezzling part of a $55 million payoff to the union for a mine privatization deal, which his supporters deny.
Fox spokesman Rubén Aguilar said last week the strikers were blackmailing the government. But after videos surfaced showing riot police shooting at striking steelworkers, the government said it would begin talks.
The investigation into who was responsible for the shooting has state and federal authorities pointing fingers at each other.
Economic, social uncertainty
Grupo Mexico is one of the world's leading copper producers and the strike at one of its copper mines may force it to suspend deliveries, Rebolledo said.
Villacero spokesman Ignacio Treviño said the steel mill, Mexico's largest, normally produces $3 million worth of steel daily but has lost more than 100 days of production since 2004 due to strikes.
"The signals we are sending abroad ..... are harmful and detrimental to the development of investments and job creation," Treviño said.
Neither corporate spokesman could guess when the strikes might end or if they might spread.
Gundzik, the consultant, said Mexico's economy could be put at risk by a prolonged dispute. Investor uncertainty is already high given the prospects of presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist who some fear could threaten Mexico's recent economic stability.
But stability has come with a price, said Gundzik, who traces the origins of the present industrial action back to the early 1990s.
Mexico "is moving forward in industrialization but backwards in social welfare," he said, pointing to the poor enforcement of safety regulations at Pasta de Conchos as the most recent example.
"There's a backlash going on and the government is so weak it doesn't even have the capability to respond," Gundzik said. "It doesn't know what to do."
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA050206.strike.EN.24296bb.html
-----------------------------------------
MEXICO:
Zapatista Leader Reaches Out to Neglected Minorities
Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, May 3 (IPS) - "They torture and kill us because we are different. But we are going to put an end to that from below, where the best people are found," Zapatista guerrilla leader ‘Subcomandante' Marcos said in the Mexican capital Wednesday, addressing a crowd made up of transvestites, homosexuals, prostitutes and indigenous people, who cheered him on.
Sporting his trademark black ski mask and military-style outfit, Marcos said his six-month tour of Mexico, which began in January, is the seed of "a great movement that will rise up to put an end to the hypocrisy" of the political parties, the government and "the powerful."
The spokesman for the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), an indigenous group that rose up in arms in January 1994 in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas, is leading what the rebel group calls "the other campaign," by contrast to the ongoing campaign for the Jul. 2 presidential elections.
The aim of Marcos' tour is to bring together "the true left" and marginalised sectors of society in a front seeking to bring about "change from below" through peaceful social struggle.
The barely-armed insurgent group scorns traditional electoral politics and all of the country's parties, including the leftwing Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
"We have learned to respect the struggle of sex workers," Marcos said Wednesday, the last day of a six-day visit to the capital, where he also met with organisations of students, campesinos (peasants) and slumdwellers.
He said prostitutes and others who are exploited and "looked down upon" form part of "the other campaign" and are the seed of structural changes that he believes must be brought about on the political, economic and cultural fronts in Mexico.
Marcos urged his listeners not to put up with mistreatment "from above," and to fight for their rights.
Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the early 20th century Mexican revolution, "Lives, and the struggle continues on and on!", "Long live ‘the other campaign'!", and "EEEZZZLLLNNN" were the chants heard during the rally, which was addressed by representatives of organisations of transvestites, sex workers, gays and lesbians.
With his ever-present pipe hanging from his lips, and flanked by two prostitutes, Marcos listened attentively to each speech, while journalists, tourists and Zapatista followers elbowed each other aside to snap photos of the charismatic Zapatista leader.
"The struggle to be different is the struggle for life," said Marcos. From a distance, a handful of police officers kept watch over the rally, where security was in the hands of a group of young people wearing black t-shirts and red scarves around their necks.
The meeting with the representatives of sexual minorities, held in Alameda Park in the capital, was attended by around 200 people. The crowds have been of a similar size in most of the meetings and rallies held by the EZLN in towns and cities around the country in the last four months.
The small number of participants and the scant media coverage that the Zapatista nationwide tour has received contrast sharply with the massive crowds that the group drew in the past and the position it once enjoyed in the international limelight.
"It doesn't matter that it looks like there are few of us, because there are actually a lot of usàMarcos isn't alone, and the Zapatistas aren't alone," Diego Martínez, a university student taking part in the rally, told IPS.
Juana García, a young indigenous woman who stood with a baby in her arms during the more than two hours of speeches, told IPS that Marcos - the EZLN's only mestizo (mixed-race) leader - "is a good guy, and looks out for those of us who are poor." (The rest of the Zapatista leaders are indigenous).
But in other circles that in the past respected Marcos and saw him as a vital component of the Mexican political scene with an important role to play, he has lost backing. Supporters of the PRD and of the party's presidential candidate, former Mexico City mayor Andrés López Obrador, criticise him harshly.
For his part, Marcos, who is touring the country unarmed and on foot or horseback or by car or motorcycle, has described the PRD as "the left hand of the right," and says the party's political leaders are "shameless scoundrels" and that López Obrador is "ambitious and sinister" as well as "neoliberal."
Writer Guadalupe Loaeza, who backs the PRD candidate and who saw Marcos in 2001 as a brave, idealistic and youthful leader, now says he is "old and paunchy" and that "he can't stand fading out of the spotlight, he needs a leading role, and he needs people to talk about him."
In 1995, Mexico's intelligence services said Subcomandante Marcos was really Rafael Guillén, a former university professor with a degree in philosophy who would be turning 49 on Jun. 19. However, Marcos has consistently denied that he is Guillén.
Most of the members of the EZLN are holed up in the remote hilly jungles of Chiapas. The group has not fired a single shot since the second week of 1994, when the government of then president Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) was pressured by public opinion to stop cracking down on the rebels and adopt a ceasefire.
The Zapatistas broke off peace talks with the government of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) in 1996.
Up to 2001, the EZLN continued to organise high-profile political initiatives, such as international conferences in the jungles of Chiapas attended by renowned personalities like U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone and former French first lady Danielle Mitterand.
The activities organised by the group, which had allies all over the world, called for in-depth democratic reforms in Mexico that would include the recognition of the rights and culture of indigenous peoples and their right to autonomous control over their territories.
But as Congress and the government gradually began to respond to the demands of the country's indigenous people - who account for approximately 10 percent of the population of 106 million - the previously strong support enjoyed by the Zapatistas became less enthusiastic, and the group began to fade into the background.
When for the first time in 71 years Mexico began to be governed in 2000 by a president from a party other than the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) - conservative President Vicente Fox - steps were taken towards the official recognition of indigenous rights and some of the EZLN's demands were met.
But little has changed in Chiapas, which continues to be one of the poorest, most neglected areas of Mexico, despite its enormous wealth in natural resources.
Marcos went on an earlier tour in 2001, when he and other EZLN leaders visited the capital amid great fanfare, to directly ask the legislature to approve several constitutional reforms.
However, despite the changes promised by Fox and the political parties, the new legislation ended up leaving out key aspects of the only agreement that had been reached in the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Zedillo administration, involving the self-determination of indigenous communities and the collective use of the natural resources in their territories.
Although he no longer draws huge crowds, Marcos says that "the other campaign" will lead to a true revolution in the next few years. (END/2006
By Manuel Durán
(EDITED TRANSLATION FROM REFORMA, DECEMBER 28, 2004, MEXICO CITY)
Inequality in Mexico has not resulted in social unrest due to, among other things, Mexicans immigrating abroad and the responsibility of citizens, said Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mayor of Mexico City.
In agreeing with Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, on the need to change Mexico’s economic model before there is a civil conflict, López Obrador said that the only explanation for people in Mexico not having protested in light of more than 20 years of economic stagnation is because escape valves, such as immigration, have been found.
(Note: López Obrador said this in response to a reporter who asked about recent statements by Cardinal Rivera, the Archbishop of Mexico, who warned of conceivable social disorder if changes are not made in Mexico’s economic model.)
“But how else can one explain 20 years without economic growth, (with) jobs not being created, and political stability being maintained without having had social unrest?” López Obrador asked rhetorically. He explained that while the annual departure of 500,000 Mexicans to the U.S. is not what is best stability has been maintained.
”That which is depopulating the country, that is leaving women, children and senior citizens in the towns because the younger people must leave, is not what is best. Of course that represents the failure of the economic policy,” López Obrador said during his morning press conference. The effects of migration are twofold, López Obrador said. On one hand the pressure is removed with regard to zero economic growth, and on the other those who are in the U.S. send about US$17 billion to Mexico annually.
”That helps to reactivate the economy, but clearly it is not due to economic policy,” he
explained.
__________
Mexico labor unrest could get worse -- maybe a lot worse, some warn
Web Posted: 05/02/2006 04:49 PM CDT
Sean Mattson
Express-News Mexico Correspondent
GUADALAJARA, Mexico - In the early hours of April 20, some 1,000 riot police raided a striker-occupied steel mill in the Pacific port city of Lázaro Cárdenas.
A tumult of Molotov cocktails and burning vehicles ensued. Police shot and killed two steelworkers, left a dozen more with gunshot wounds - but failed to oust the strikers.
The botched raid stoked nationwide union unrest that had first flared in February with the deaths of 65 miners in a coalmine explosion in Coahuila state.
Strikers have since shut down the steel mill and four mines. Union members paralyzed Mexico City streets Friday to support them. And critics say outgoing President Vicente Fox's administration is being ham-fisted in its attempts to defuse the growing unrest.
It's an election year and upsetting Mexico's unions is never a good idea, politically. But experts are divided over how much worse things could get. The presidential candidate most unions support, Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, needs a boost to improve his third-place spot in the polls. He warned last week that "a great worker-employer crisis" could spiral out of control if something wasn't done soon. At a Labor Day rally Monday in Mexico City, the leader of one union umbrella group, Francisco Hernández Juárez, threatened a nationwide strike if Labor Secretary Francisco Salazar did not resign.
Labor unions are nine parts threat to one part action, said Ricardo Pascoe, a political expert with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who thinks widespread the unrest is unlikely.
"The only thing that could change the situation is (that) the PRI, thinking that it needs to radicalize its discourse in the face of its electoral fall, might propose a strike in solidarity with the miners to recover its image as a party of opposition and struggle," Pascoe said.
The PRI established its tight relationship with Mexico's unions during seven decades of rule that ended when Fox won the presidency in 2000. But presidential politics would not be the only motive behind a broader strike, said Jephraim P. Gundzik, the president of Condor Advisers, a California-based consulting firm specializing in emerging markets.
"My opinion is that this type of industrial action will probably spread into other sectors of the economy," said Gundzik, pointing at years of declining social welfare, stagnant salaries and deteriorating industrial safety conditions. "You could be faced with a nationwide strike across many industries."
Ousted union leader
When the Pasta de Conchos mine exploded at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning in February, the union leader who appeared on the scene was Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who essentially inherited the post from his father, who had it for four decades.
But the government said it had documents proving the union voted in a new boss two days before the explosion and Gómez was no longer the leader.
Some miners back the new chief, Elias Morales, but his control is tenuous. Miners and steelworkers striking in four states say the government imposed Morales to benefit Grupo Mexico and Villacero, operators of the striking mines and the steel mill, respectively. They want Gómez reinstated, plus better wages and working conditions.
"The government deposed (Gómez) illegally," said a union member by phone from Mexico City, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Because he had fought for salary increases and benefits."
Company spokesmen said the strikes are the only illegal part of the dispute, and said they can't negotiate with a handful of union dissidents because the government no longer recognizes Gómez as union leader.
Reinstating Gómez "has nothing to do with collective contracts, the conditions of the mine or labor relations," said Juan Rebolledo, a Grupo Mexico spokesman.
"The company in this case has absolutely nothing to do with it," agreed Villacero spokesman Ignacio Treviño. "We are facing an illegal act. It is an illegal work stoppage."
Gómez is also being investigated for suspicion of embezzling part of a $55 million payoff to the union for a mine privatization deal, which his supporters deny.
Fox spokesman Rubén Aguilar said last week the strikers were blackmailing the government. But after videos surfaced showing riot police shooting at striking steelworkers, the government said it would begin talks.
The investigation into who was responsible for the shooting has state and federal authorities pointing fingers at each other.
Economic, social uncertainty
Grupo Mexico is one of the world's leading copper producers and the strike at one of its copper mines may force it to suspend deliveries, Rebolledo said.
Villacero spokesman Ignacio Treviño said the steel mill, Mexico's largest, normally produces $3 million worth of steel daily but has lost more than 100 days of production since 2004 due to strikes.
"The signals we are sending abroad ..... are harmful and detrimental to the development of investments and job creation," Treviño said.
Neither corporate spokesman could guess when the strikes might end or if they might spread.
Gundzik, the consultant, said Mexico's economy could be put at risk by a prolonged dispute. Investor uncertainty is already high given the prospects of presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist who some fear could threaten Mexico's recent economic stability.
But stability has come with a price, said Gundzik, who traces the origins of the present industrial action back to the early 1990s.
Mexico "is moving forward in industrialization but backwards in social welfare," he said, pointing to the poor enforcement of safety regulations at Pasta de Conchos as the most recent example.
"There's a backlash going on and the government is so weak it doesn't even have the capability to respond," Gundzik said. "It doesn't know what to do."
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA050206.strike.EN.24296bb.html
-----------------------------------------
MEXICO:
Zapatista Leader Reaches Out to Neglected Minorities
Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, May 3 (IPS) - "They torture and kill us because we are different. But we are going to put an end to that from below, where the best people are found," Zapatista guerrilla leader ‘Subcomandante' Marcos said in the Mexican capital Wednesday, addressing a crowd made up of transvestites, homosexuals, prostitutes and indigenous people, who cheered him on.
Sporting his trademark black ski mask and military-style outfit, Marcos said his six-month tour of Mexico, which began in January, is the seed of "a great movement that will rise up to put an end to the hypocrisy" of the political parties, the government and "the powerful."
The spokesman for the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), an indigenous group that rose up in arms in January 1994 in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas, is leading what the rebel group calls "the other campaign," by contrast to the ongoing campaign for the Jul. 2 presidential elections.
The aim of Marcos' tour is to bring together "the true left" and marginalised sectors of society in a front seeking to bring about "change from below" through peaceful social struggle.
The barely-armed insurgent group scorns traditional electoral politics and all of the country's parties, including the leftwing Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
"We have learned to respect the struggle of sex workers," Marcos said Wednesday, the last day of a six-day visit to the capital, where he also met with organisations of students, campesinos (peasants) and slumdwellers.
He said prostitutes and others who are exploited and "looked down upon" form part of "the other campaign" and are the seed of structural changes that he believes must be brought about on the political, economic and cultural fronts in Mexico.
Marcos urged his listeners not to put up with mistreatment "from above," and to fight for their rights.
Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the early 20th century Mexican revolution, "Lives, and the struggle continues on and on!", "Long live ‘the other campaign'!", and "EEEZZZLLLNNN" were the chants heard during the rally, which was addressed by representatives of organisations of transvestites, sex workers, gays and lesbians.
With his ever-present pipe hanging from his lips, and flanked by two prostitutes, Marcos listened attentively to each speech, while journalists, tourists and Zapatista followers elbowed each other aside to snap photos of the charismatic Zapatista leader.
"The struggle to be different is the struggle for life," said Marcos. From a distance, a handful of police officers kept watch over the rally, where security was in the hands of a group of young people wearing black t-shirts and red scarves around their necks.
The meeting with the representatives of sexual minorities, held in Alameda Park in the capital, was attended by around 200 people. The crowds have been of a similar size in most of the meetings and rallies held by the EZLN in towns and cities around the country in the last four months.
The small number of participants and the scant media coverage that the Zapatista nationwide tour has received contrast sharply with the massive crowds that the group drew in the past and the position it once enjoyed in the international limelight.
"It doesn't matter that it looks like there are few of us, because there are actually a lot of usàMarcos isn't alone, and the Zapatistas aren't alone," Diego Martínez, a university student taking part in the rally, told IPS.
Juana García, a young indigenous woman who stood with a baby in her arms during the more than two hours of speeches, told IPS that Marcos - the EZLN's only mestizo (mixed-race) leader - "is a good guy, and looks out for those of us who are poor." (The rest of the Zapatista leaders are indigenous).
But in other circles that in the past respected Marcos and saw him as a vital component of the Mexican political scene with an important role to play, he has lost backing. Supporters of the PRD and of the party's presidential candidate, former Mexico City mayor Andrés López Obrador, criticise him harshly.
For his part, Marcos, who is touring the country unarmed and on foot or horseback or by car or motorcycle, has described the PRD as "the left hand of the right," and says the party's political leaders are "shameless scoundrels" and that López Obrador is "ambitious and sinister" as well as "neoliberal."
Writer Guadalupe Loaeza, who backs the PRD candidate and who saw Marcos in 2001 as a brave, idealistic and youthful leader, now says he is "old and paunchy" and that "he can't stand fading out of the spotlight, he needs a leading role, and he needs people to talk about him."
In 1995, Mexico's intelligence services said Subcomandante Marcos was really Rafael Guillén, a former university professor with a degree in philosophy who would be turning 49 on Jun. 19. However, Marcos has consistently denied that he is Guillén.
Most of the members of the EZLN are holed up in the remote hilly jungles of Chiapas. The group has not fired a single shot since the second week of 1994, when the government of then president Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) was pressured by public opinion to stop cracking down on the rebels and adopt a ceasefire.
The Zapatistas broke off peace talks with the government of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) in 1996.
Up to 2001, the EZLN continued to organise high-profile political initiatives, such as international conferences in the jungles of Chiapas attended by renowned personalities like U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone and former French first lady Danielle Mitterand.
The activities organised by the group, which had allies all over the world, called for in-depth democratic reforms in Mexico that would include the recognition of the rights and culture of indigenous peoples and their right to autonomous control over their territories.
But as Congress and the government gradually began to respond to the demands of the country's indigenous people - who account for approximately 10 percent of the population of 106 million - the previously strong support enjoyed by the Zapatistas became less enthusiastic, and the group began to fade into the background.
When for the first time in 71 years Mexico began to be governed in 2000 by a president from a party other than the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) - conservative President Vicente Fox - steps were taken towards the official recognition of indigenous rights and some of the EZLN's demands were met.
But little has changed in Chiapas, which continues to be one of the poorest, most neglected areas of Mexico, despite its enormous wealth in natural resources.
Marcos went on an earlier tour in 2001, when he and other EZLN leaders visited the capital amid great fanfare, to directly ask the legislature to approve several constitutional reforms.
However, despite the changes promised by Fox and the political parties, the new legislation ended up leaving out key aspects of the only agreement that had been reached in the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Zedillo administration, involving the self-determination of indigenous communities and the collective use of the natural resources in their territories.
Although he no longer draws huge crowds, Marcos says that "the other campaign" will lead to a true revolution in the next few years. (END/2006
Last edited:
----------------------
<font size="+3">The War With Mexico</font></font><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1"></font></font></b>
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">The actual circumstances
of the war were far different from today's conventional wisdom.</font></font></b>
</p><p><i>by Erik Peterson</i></p></center>
<p><font size="+3">A</font>pril 25, 1996 will mark the 150th anniversary
of the outbreak of the Mexican War. Today, most Americans have been taught
that it was an imperialistic war of aggression, and Mexicans cite the "illegal
seizure" of their territories to justify the current colonization of the
American Southwest. In fact, by contemporary and even by today's standards,
the war was far from unjustified.
</p><p>The conflict began with Texas. When the colony of New Spain broke free
from its European namesake in 1821 and christened itself Mexico, it inherited
vast lands north of the Rio Grande that had been only nominally under Spanish
control. Texas was a remote wilderness, constantly terrorized by Commanches,
with a Mexican population of only 3,500.
</p><p>Mexico could have concentrated on subduing the Indians and settling
its northern territories. Instead, almost from the first days of independence,
the country was wracked by a series of political upheavals. The small,
predominantly white, Spanish-speaking elite consumed all of its energies
in fratricidal power struggles, while the Mestizo and Indian majority remained
mired in poverty.
</p><center><img src="map.gif" height="329" width="390"></center>
In order to legitimize its claim on Texas, Mexico needed to occupy it.
Since it was unable to do this itself, the Mexican government enlisted
the help of immigration agents or <i>empresarios</i> to recruit settlers
from the United States. The <i>empresarios,</i> chief among them Steven
F. Austin, acted as representatives of the Mexican government. They were
authorized to offer immigrants cheap land in return for accepting Mexican
citizenship and converting to Roman Catholicism. The Americans appear to
have made a good faith effort to fulfill the first requirement but often
sidestepped the second.
<p><table align="left" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">"Mexico</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">wanted [war]; Mexico
threatened it,</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">Mexico</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">issued orders</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">to wage it."</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
<td width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
The new settlers created a frontier version of the plantation-based,
slave-owning society of the neighboring Southern states. By the early 1830s,
however, Mexico began to fear that the <i>empresarios</i> had been too
successful: American immigrants outnumbered Mexicans four to one, and seemed
likely to identify with the land of their birth.
</p><p>General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna became President of Mexico in 1833,
and in 1835 abrogated the constitution and declared himself dictator. This
act alone provoked rebellion in seven Mexican states, including Texas,
but Texans had additional reasons for discontent. Determined to reverse
the Americanization of the territory, Santa Anna had decreed an end to
American immigration, abolished slavery, repealed the local political autonomy
Texans had enjoyed, and announced he would forcibly settle the land with
Mexican convicts.
</p><p>It is hard to imagine policies better calculated to rouse the ire of
free-spirited Texans. In 1836 they overthrew local Mexican garrisons and
declared independence. Santa Anna promptly invaded Texas with an army of
3,000 men, but after several engagements was decisively beaten by Sam Houston's
men at the battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna was captured, and in order
to gain freedom agreed to recognize Texan independence, with the Rio Grande
as its border. He later disavowed this treaty, and Mexico waged a nine-year
guerrilla war against its former territory.
</p><p>The United States recognized Texas as an independent republic in 1837,
and recognition soon followed from France, Great Britain, Holland, and
Belgium. Despite strong Texan sentiment to join the Union, the American
government demurred; Mexico threatened war if Texas were annexed, and the
United States was unwilling to upset the delicate balance between slave
and free states.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica">Western Destiny</font></b>
</p><p>The presidential election of 1844 brought into office a firm believer
in what soon became known as "manifest destiny." James K. Polk was determined
to complete the annexation of Texas, buy California from the Mexicans,
and bluff the British into ceding the better part of Oregon. The Texans
were impatient for a settlement, and Polk's predecessor, John Tyler, had
welcomed the Lone Star State into the Union three days before he left office.
If the United States had continued to hesitate because of Mexican sentiments,
Texas might have remained independent or even accepted protectorate status
from Britain or France.
</p><p>As for California, Mexico's position was so weak it was bound to be
supplanted soon, if not by the U.S. then by Britain, Russia, or perhaps
even the Mormons. Polk had reason to believe that Mexico would be willing
to sell. In the meantime, if Oregon joined the Union the careful balance
of free and slave states could be maintained.
</p><p>When Texas joined the United States in March, 1845, Mexico immediately
broke off diplomatic relations and threatened war. Polk sent General Zachary
Taylor with 2,000 men to protect the new state from Mexican depredation
while annexation was accomplished. Nevertheless, Polk had every reason
to seek a diplomatic solution with Mexico, partly because he was afraid
war might break out with Britain over the Oregon question. He decided to
send a special emissary, John Slidell, to Mexico with instructions to resolve
all outstanding issues.
</p><p>On the question that had caused the rupture – annexation of Texas –
Slidell was not to compromise. Mexico had been unable to reconquer her
wayward territory, whose independence had been recognized by the major
powers. By refusing to accept the loss of Texas and by persisting in border
skirmishes, Mexico had perpetuated a crisis on the American border that
could have led to European intervention. Texas was now part of the United
States.
</p><center><img src="sword.gif" height="100" width="390"></center>
Several other matters were open to negotiation. One was the settlement
of $3.25 million in claims by Americans on the Mexican government. Mexico
had recognized these claims under international arbitration, but had later
refused to pay. Another issue was final determination of the Texas-Mexico
border. As a Mexican territory, the Texas border had been at the Nueces
River, but after their revolution the Texans claimed the Rio Grande as
the border – without, however, establishing full authority in the disputed
territory. Slidell was authorized to release Mexico from the $3.25 million
obligation in return for recognition of the Rio Grande border. This was
a reasonable offer, especially since Mexico had already, in effect, declared
war, and unpaid international obligations were then considered grounds
for belligerency. By accepting this offer, Mexico could easily have avoided
war.
<p>Besides these immediate questions, Slidell was to offer $15 million
but, if necessary, propose considerably more for the Mexican lands stretching
from Texas to the Pacific. If the entire tract was not for sale, he was
to offer $5 million for New Mexico.
</p><p><table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="12"></td>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">Mexico had a standing
army of 27,000 men versus an American army of only 7,200.</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
The Mexican government, threatened by a militant opposition and wracked
by internal dissension, refused even to receive Slidell. This was a fatal
mistake. The rebuff left Polk with no means to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
He ordered Zachary Taylor into the disputed region between the Nueces River
and the Rio Grande, but he warned Taylor not to seek engagement with any
Mexican troops he might encounter. In the meantime, he made preparations
to ask Congress to declare war, but Mexico forced the issue.
</p><p>On April 23, 1846, sixteen hundred Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande.
Two days later they ambushed a U.S. Army patrol, inflicting sixteen casualties
and taking prisoners. Mexico "shed American blood upon American soil,"
and the war began.
</p><p>The Mexicans, of course, saw the war as a just effort to retake what
was rightfully theirs. Why, though, would they make war on the United States
when they had been unable to subdue a breakaway territory? Astonishingly
enough, Mexico fully expected to win. It had a standing army of 27,000
men versus an American army of only 7,200. French advisors to the Mexican
army had an exaggerated estimate of its fighting prowess, which the Mexicans
gladly believed. The generals intended not only to take back Texas but
to annex parts of the United States. Indeed, the Mexican dictator of the
moment, General Mariano Paredes, boasted that he would not negotiate <i>until
the Mexican flag flew over the capitol dome in Washington.</i> The Mexicans
were also counting on diplomatic and even military support from Britain,
but the Oregon issue was resolved just before they attacked.
</p><p>In his two-volume work, <i>The War With Mexico,</i> Pulitzer prize-winning
historian Justin H. Smith described the war fever among the generals: "Mexico
wanted [war]; Mexico threatened it, Mexico issued orders to wage it." By
no stretch of the imagination was Mexico thrust into an unwanted war by
Yankee aggressors.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica">American Arms</font></b>
</p><p>The military history of the Mexican War makes interesting reading and
is a credit to the tradition of American arms. <table align="left" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">By accepting payment,
Mexico ratified the transfer of payment.</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
<td width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
Throughout the two-year
campaign, small but superbly led and highly motivated American units consistently
outfought the Mexicans. The Mexican army, impressive enough in numbers
and parade-ground panache, was utterly unable to fight a determined adversary.
</p><p>The American war effort was not all glorious. Although the Regular Army
behaved with proper discipline, some of the volunteer militia units conducted
themselves so badly they created guerrilla resistance among previously
noncombatant Mexican civilians. Also, the war was all-too-effective training
for America's fratricidal tragedy just 13 years later. Among the junior
officers sent to Mexico, 200 would go on to be generals in the Union and
Confederate armies.
</p><p>The Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo ended the war in 1848 on terms advantageous
to the United States. Mexico agreed to cede California, Arizona, Nevada,
Utah, and the western parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico – in all,
525,000 square miles of land that contained virtually no Mexicans.
</p><p>All but overlooked today is the fact that the United States forgave
the $3.25 million debt, and paid Mexico $15 million for the ceded territories.
According to the rules of 19th century warfare, after routing Mexico's
armies and occupying its capital, the United States could have seized territory
under whatever terms it liked. To have paid what it considered a reasonable
amount <i>before</i> fighting an expensive war – estimated to have cost
$100 million – was a magnanimous gesture.
</p><p>The Mexican position today is that the United States stole Mexican territory.
However, Mexico could have refused the money or promptly returned it. By
accepting payment it ratified the transfer. Furthermore, only five years
later, Mexico agreed to sell an additional parcel of land to the United
States, which was to be used for the southern route of the transcontinental
railway. The Gadsden Treaty of 1853 settled a number of disputes about
the post-1848 U.S.-Mexico border and secured 19 million additional acres
of territory for the United States. In return, the United States paid Mexico
$10 million. There was no threat of war or coercion. This freely negotiated
settlement of the new border and additional transfer of land were further
ratification by Mexico of the consequences of war with the United States.
</p><p>In conclusion, the United States had ample to reason to pursue, in 1846,
the course that it did. As a practical matter, the real issue decided by
the war was whether Britain, France, Russia, Mexico or the United States
would acquire the vast territories of the American Southwest. President
Polk resolved the question in favor of the United States in a refreshingly
straightforward nineteenth century manner. <img src="textend.gif" alt="Text end." height="8" width="11">
</p><p><i>Eric Peterson lives in Oregon and </i>
<br><i>writes about American history.</i>
<font size="+3">The War With Mexico</font></font><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1"></font></font></b>
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">The actual circumstances
of the war were far different from today's conventional wisdom.</font></font></b>
</p><p><i>by Erik Peterson</i></p></center>
<p><font size="+3">A</font>pril 25, 1996 will mark the 150th anniversary
of the outbreak of the Mexican War. Today, most Americans have been taught
that it was an imperialistic war of aggression, and Mexicans cite the "illegal
seizure" of their territories to justify the current colonization of the
American Southwest. In fact, by contemporary and even by today's standards,
the war was far from unjustified.
</p><p>The conflict began with Texas. When the colony of New Spain broke free
from its European namesake in 1821 and christened itself Mexico, it inherited
vast lands north of the Rio Grande that had been only nominally under Spanish
control. Texas was a remote wilderness, constantly terrorized by Commanches,
with a Mexican population of only 3,500.
</p><p>Mexico could have concentrated on subduing the Indians and settling
its northern territories. Instead, almost from the first days of independence,
the country was wracked by a series of political upheavals. The small,
predominantly white, Spanish-speaking elite consumed all of its energies
in fratricidal power struggles, while the Mestizo and Indian majority remained
mired in poverty.
</p><center><img src="map.gif" height="329" width="390"></center>
In order to legitimize its claim on Texas, Mexico needed to occupy it.
Since it was unable to do this itself, the Mexican government enlisted
the help of immigration agents or <i>empresarios</i> to recruit settlers
from the United States. The <i>empresarios,</i> chief among them Steven
F. Austin, acted as representatives of the Mexican government. They were
authorized to offer immigrants cheap land in return for accepting Mexican
citizenship and converting to Roman Catholicism. The Americans appear to
have made a good faith effort to fulfill the first requirement but often
sidestepped the second.
<p><table align="left" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">"Mexico</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">wanted [war]; Mexico
threatened it,</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">Mexico</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">issued orders</font></font></b>
<br><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">to wage it."</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
<td width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
The new settlers created a frontier version of the plantation-based,
slave-owning society of the neighboring Southern states. By the early 1830s,
however, Mexico began to fear that the <i>empresarios</i> had been too
successful: American immigrants outnumbered Mexicans four to one, and seemed
likely to identify with the land of their birth.
</p><p>General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna became President of Mexico in 1833,
and in 1835 abrogated the constitution and declared himself dictator. This
act alone provoked rebellion in seven Mexican states, including Texas,
but Texans had additional reasons for discontent. Determined to reverse
the Americanization of the territory, Santa Anna had decreed an end to
American immigration, abolished slavery, repealed the local political autonomy
Texans had enjoyed, and announced he would forcibly settle the land with
Mexican convicts.
</p><p>It is hard to imagine policies better calculated to rouse the ire of
free-spirited Texans. In 1836 they overthrew local Mexican garrisons and
declared independence. Santa Anna promptly invaded Texas with an army of
3,000 men, but after several engagements was decisively beaten by Sam Houston's
men at the battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna was captured, and in order
to gain freedom agreed to recognize Texan independence, with the Rio Grande
as its border. He later disavowed this treaty, and Mexico waged a nine-year
guerrilla war against its former territory.
</p><p>The United States recognized Texas as an independent republic in 1837,
and recognition soon followed from France, Great Britain, Holland, and
Belgium. Despite strong Texan sentiment to join the Union, the American
government demurred; Mexico threatened war if Texas were annexed, and the
United States was unwilling to upset the delicate balance between slave
and free states.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica">Western Destiny</font></b>
</p><p>The presidential election of 1844 brought into office a firm believer
in what soon became known as "manifest destiny." James K. Polk was determined
to complete the annexation of Texas, buy California from the Mexicans,
and bluff the British into ceding the better part of Oregon. The Texans
were impatient for a settlement, and Polk's predecessor, John Tyler, had
welcomed the Lone Star State into the Union three days before he left office.
If the United States had continued to hesitate because of Mexican sentiments,
Texas might have remained independent or even accepted protectorate status
from Britain or France.
</p><p>As for California, Mexico's position was so weak it was bound to be
supplanted soon, if not by the U.S. then by Britain, Russia, or perhaps
even the Mormons. Polk had reason to believe that Mexico would be willing
to sell. In the meantime, if Oregon joined the Union the careful balance
of free and slave states could be maintained.
</p><p>When Texas joined the United States in March, 1845, Mexico immediately
broke off diplomatic relations and threatened war. Polk sent General Zachary
Taylor with 2,000 men to protect the new state from Mexican depredation
while annexation was accomplished. Nevertheless, Polk had every reason
to seek a diplomatic solution with Mexico, partly because he was afraid
war might break out with Britain over the Oregon question. He decided to
send a special emissary, John Slidell, to Mexico with instructions to resolve
all outstanding issues.
</p><p>On the question that had caused the rupture – annexation of Texas –
Slidell was not to compromise. Mexico had been unable to reconquer her
wayward territory, whose independence had been recognized by the major
powers. By refusing to accept the loss of Texas and by persisting in border
skirmishes, Mexico had perpetuated a crisis on the American border that
could have led to European intervention. Texas was now part of the United
States.
</p><center><img src="sword.gif" height="100" width="390"></center>
Several other matters were open to negotiation. One was the settlement
of $3.25 million in claims by Americans on the Mexican government. Mexico
had recognized these claims under international arbitration, but had later
refused to pay. Another issue was final determination of the Texas-Mexico
border. As a Mexican territory, the Texas border had been at the Nueces
River, but after their revolution the Texans claimed the Rio Grande as
the border – without, however, establishing full authority in the disputed
territory. Slidell was authorized to release Mexico from the $3.25 million
obligation in return for recognition of the Rio Grande border. This was
a reasonable offer, especially since Mexico had already, in effect, declared
war, and unpaid international obligations were then considered grounds
for belligerency. By accepting this offer, Mexico could easily have avoided
war.
<p>Besides these immediate questions, Slidell was to offer $15 million
but, if necessary, propose considerably more for the Mexican lands stretching
from Texas to the Pacific. If the entire tract was not for sale, he was
to offer $5 million for New Mexico.
</p><p><table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="12"></td>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">Mexico had a standing
army of 27,000 men versus an American army of only 7,200.</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
The Mexican government, threatened by a militant opposition and wracked
by internal dissension, refused even to receive Slidell. This was a fatal
mistake. The rebuff left Polk with no means to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
He ordered Zachary Taylor into the disputed region between the Nueces River
and the Rio Grande, but he warned Taylor not to seek engagement with any
Mexican troops he might encounter. In the meantime, he made preparations
to ask Congress to declare war, but Mexico forced the issue.
</p><p>On April 23, 1846, sixteen hundred Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande.
Two days later they ambushed a U.S. Army patrol, inflicting sixteen casualties
and taking prisoners. Mexico "shed American blood upon American soil,"
and the war began.
</p><p>The Mexicans, of course, saw the war as a just effort to retake what
was rightfully theirs. Why, though, would they make war on the United States
when they had been unable to subdue a breakaway territory? Astonishingly
enough, Mexico fully expected to win. It had a standing army of 27,000
men versus an American army of only 7,200. French advisors to the Mexican
army had an exaggerated estimate of its fighting prowess, which the Mexicans
gladly believed. The generals intended not only to take back Texas but
to annex parts of the United States. Indeed, the Mexican dictator of the
moment, General Mariano Paredes, boasted that he would not negotiate <i>until
the Mexican flag flew over the capitol dome in Washington.</i> The Mexicans
were also counting on diplomatic and even military support from Britain,
but the Oregon issue was resolved just before they attacked.
</p><p>In his two-volume work, <i>The War With Mexico,</i> Pulitzer prize-winning
historian Justin H. Smith described the war fever among the generals: "Mexico
wanted [war]; Mexico threatened it, Mexico issued orders to wage it." By
no stretch of the imagination was Mexico thrust into an unwanted war by
Yankee aggressors.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica">American Arms</font></b>
</p><p>The military history of the Mexican War makes interesting reading and
is a credit to the tradition of American arms. <table align="left" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="188">
<table border="2" cellpadding="12" width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<center><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="+1">By accepting payment,
Mexico ratified the transfer of payment.</font></font></b></center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</td>
<td width="12"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12" width="188"></td>
<td height="12" width="12"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
Throughout the two-year
campaign, small but superbly led and highly motivated American units consistently
outfought the Mexicans. The Mexican army, impressive enough in numbers
and parade-ground panache, was utterly unable to fight a determined adversary.
</p><p>The American war effort was not all glorious. Although the Regular Army
behaved with proper discipline, some of the volunteer militia units conducted
themselves so badly they created guerrilla resistance among previously
noncombatant Mexican civilians. Also, the war was all-too-effective training
for America's fratricidal tragedy just 13 years later. Among the junior
officers sent to Mexico, 200 would go on to be generals in the Union and
Confederate armies.
</p><p>The Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo ended the war in 1848 on terms advantageous
to the United States. Mexico agreed to cede California, Arizona, Nevada,
Utah, and the western parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico – in all,
525,000 square miles of land that contained virtually no Mexicans.
</p><p>All but overlooked today is the fact that the United States forgave
the $3.25 million debt, and paid Mexico $15 million for the ceded territories.
According to the rules of 19th century warfare, after routing Mexico's
armies and occupying its capital, the United States could have seized territory
under whatever terms it liked. To have paid what it considered a reasonable
amount <i>before</i> fighting an expensive war – estimated to have cost
$100 million – was a magnanimous gesture.
</p><p>The Mexican position today is that the United States stole Mexican territory.
However, Mexico could have refused the money or promptly returned it. By
accepting payment it ratified the transfer. Furthermore, only five years
later, Mexico agreed to sell an additional parcel of land to the United
States, which was to be used for the southern route of the transcontinental
railway. The Gadsden Treaty of 1853 settled a number of disputes about
the post-1848 U.S.-Mexico border and secured 19 million additional acres
of territory for the United States. In return, the United States paid Mexico
$10 million. There was no threat of war or coercion. This freely negotiated
settlement of the new border and additional transfer of land were further
ratification by Mexico of the consequences of war with the United States.
</p><p>In conclusion, the United States had ample to reason to pursue, in 1846,
the course that it did. As a practical matter, the real issue decided by
the war was whether Britain, France, Russia, Mexico or the United States
would acquire the vast territories of the American Southwest. President
Polk resolved the question in favor of the United States in a refreshingly
straightforward nineteenth century manner. <img src="textend.gif" alt="Text end." height="8" width="11">
</p><p><i>Eric Peterson lives in Oregon and </i>
<br><i>writes about American history.</i>
We'd better heed our own backyard
James P. Pinkerton
May 4, 2006
For the United States, the second most important foreign policy developments are occurring in South America. Maybe soon, the most important.
The news from Bolivia - a country that is nationalizing, or, if you prefer, stealing, foreign-owned assets - is just the latest in a string of anti-capitalist, anti-American developments in South America. In recent years, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile have all elected left-leaning governments, determined to reverse "globalization" and thwart American influence. And similar governments are likely to win soon in Peru and Mexico.
In particular, the oil-empowered Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, an avowed fan of Cuba's Fidel Castro, is emerging as a genuine U.S. enemy. Americans, of course, have been mostly preoccupied with the Middle East, but the problems to our south - trade, energy, immigration, narcotics trafficking - are likely to worsen as North-South cooperation worsens.
And one of these days a Latin country will emerge as a serious military power, thus ending America's fortuitous two-century-long monopoly of force in this hemisphere.
Yet, Uncle Sam's dominion over the Americas was not entirely an accident of geography. Since Thomas Jefferson bought out Napoleon in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, and since the United States fought the British to a draw in the War of 1812, we aimed to keep other great powers out of North America. And to further tidy up our control, in 1867 we bought Alaska from Russia.
In the meantime, no great rival emerged in South America. Local patriots expelled the Spanish colonizers in the early 19th century, but Simón Bolivar's dream of an Estados Unidos for his continent was thwarted as Spanish America broke up into more than a dozen countries. From a power-politics perspective, this was great news for the United States on the divide-and-conquer principle.
To help keep this factionalization permanent, the United States enunciated the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that Latin America would never be recolonized by foreign powers.
But, of course, the United States retained its determination to reshape politics in "our backyard." At the turn of the past century, President Theodore Roosevelt decided, for sound geopolitical reasons, to build a shipgoing canal across Central America, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The best place for such a waterway was through Colombia. But there was a catch: In TR's view, Colombians were bad partners.
So the 26th president hatched a plan: He helped foment a revolution, in which that strategic part of Colombia declared itself to be the independent nation of Panama. The United States immediately recognized the new country, purchased the land for the canal and started digging.
Today, the Organization of American States consists of 35 nations, with the United States being vastly more powerful than all the other members put together. Whereas some countries are tormented by the presence of a mortal rival on their border - Israel and the Arabs, South and North Korea, India and Pakistan - the United States is unchallenged by neighbors. Moreover, of the nine nuclear powers in the world, three are in Europe and five are in Asia; we have a nuke-opoly in our home hemisphere.
But we could be losing our "home-field advantage" as anti-yanqui feeling rises and as techno trends shrink the world. Nationalist fervor forced the United States to give back the Panama Canal - whereupon key infrastructure was snapped up by a company controlled by the People's Republic of China. In addition, the Chinese have "peacekeepers" in Haiti and reportedly are helping Cuba drill for offshore oil. Monroe Doctrine, RIP.
And one of these days we are going to discover that a big country, such as Brazil, or a rich country, such as Venezuela, has gained possession of a nuclear weapon. At that point, presumably, we will start paying closer attention to national security, closer to our own homeland.
James P. Pinkerton's e-mail ad- dress is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
James P. Pinkerton
May 4, 2006
For the United States, the second most important foreign policy developments are occurring in South America. Maybe soon, the most important.
The news from Bolivia - a country that is nationalizing, or, if you prefer, stealing, foreign-owned assets - is just the latest in a string of anti-capitalist, anti-American developments in South America. In recent years, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile have all elected left-leaning governments, determined to reverse "globalization" and thwart American influence. And similar governments are likely to win soon in Peru and Mexico.
In particular, the oil-empowered Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, an avowed fan of Cuba's Fidel Castro, is emerging as a genuine U.S. enemy. Americans, of course, have been mostly preoccupied with the Middle East, but the problems to our south - trade, energy, immigration, narcotics trafficking - are likely to worsen as North-South cooperation worsens.
And one of these days a Latin country will emerge as a serious military power, thus ending America's fortuitous two-century-long monopoly of force in this hemisphere.
Yet, Uncle Sam's dominion over the Americas was not entirely an accident of geography. Since Thomas Jefferson bought out Napoleon in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, and since the United States fought the British to a draw in the War of 1812, we aimed to keep other great powers out of North America. And to further tidy up our control, in 1867 we bought Alaska from Russia.
In the meantime, no great rival emerged in South America. Local patriots expelled the Spanish colonizers in the early 19th century, but Simón Bolivar's dream of an Estados Unidos for his continent was thwarted as Spanish America broke up into more than a dozen countries. From a power-politics perspective, this was great news for the United States on the divide-and-conquer principle.
To help keep this factionalization permanent, the United States enunciated the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that Latin America would never be recolonized by foreign powers.
But, of course, the United States retained its determination to reshape politics in "our backyard." At the turn of the past century, President Theodore Roosevelt decided, for sound geopolitical reasons, to build a shipgoing canal across Central America, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The best place for such a waterway was through Colombia. But there was a catch: In TR's view, Colombians were bad partners.
So the 26th president hatched a plan: He helped foment a revolution, in which that strategic part of Colombia declared itself to be the independent nation of Panama. The United States immediately recognized the new country, purchased the land for the canal and started digging.
Today, the Organization of American States consists of 35 nations, with the United States being vastly more powerful than all the other members put together. Whereas some countries are tormented by the presence of a mortal rival on their border - Israel and the Arabs, South and North Korea, India and Pakistan - the United States is unchallenged by neighbors. Moreover, of the nine nuclear powers in the world, three are in Europe and five are in Asia; we have a nuke-opoly in our home hemisphere.
But we could be losing our "home-field advantage" as anti-yanqui feeling rises and as techno trends shrink the world. Nationalist fervor forced the United States to give back the Panama Canal - whereupon key infrastructure was snapped up by a company controlled by the People's Republic of China. In addition, the Chinese have "peacekeepers" in Haiti and reportedly are helping Cuba drill for offshore oil. Monroe Doctrine, RIP.
And one of these days we are going to discover that a big country, such as Brazil, or a rich country, such as Venezuela, has gained possession of a nuclear weapon. At that point, presumably, we will start paying closer attention to national security, closer to our own homeland.
James P. Pinkerton's e-mail ad- dress is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
VDARE.COM - http://vdare.com/awall/060503_may_day.htm
May 03, 2006
Memo From Mexico, By Allan Wall
May Day In Mexico – Dick Morris’ Bad Advice
May 1st in the United States was "The Great American Boycott". Here in Mexico it was "Nothing Gringo on May 1st."
So what did I do on May Day?
Did I gather other expatriate gringos and march in the streets, waving the Stars and Stripes and demanding my "rights"?
Hardly! Had I done that, I wouldn’t be in Mexico anymore. The Mexican government, unlike our leaders, still understands such quaint concepts as national sovereignty and national identity. So they don’t put up with that sort of thing.
But I had a good day anyway. I dined at an American franchise steak and salad restaurant, with my wife, our boys, and the suegros (my wife’s parents). And my father-in-law paid.
Leaving the restaurant, we stopped an American franchise office supply store, and then passed by Wal-Mart Super-Center.
Judging from the parking lot, the Wal-Mart didn’t look very boycotted.
Overall the "Day Without Gringos" didn’t amount to much down here. May Day is an official holiday, so the boys didn’t go to school (nor did my wife, who is a teacher).
There was a pro-forma protest at the American embassy, where demonstrators were regaled with a speech by "Delegado Marcos", the white Mexican leader of the Chiapas Indian movement.
In Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo, protestors blocked the border for a few hours.
The real May Day action was in the U.S.A., and I watched some of it on TV.
It’s sad to watch the slow-motion fall of one's own country from foreign soil. It’s no wonder the Mexicans don’t respect us—we don’t respect ourselves. A great nation wouldn’t allow this sort of thing. A great nation wouldn’t have allowed it to get this far.
As I reported earlier, the Fox administration had previously taken a neutral stance on the "Great American Boycott", instructing Mexican consulates not to participate.
On the eve of May Day, Fox advised the marchers to be prudent…so as not to provoke "xenophobia". [Espera Fox que boicot en EU no alienta xenophobia, EL Universal, April 30th]
And on May 2nd, after the marches, Fox’s spokesman Ruben Aguilar extended his congratulations to the marchers in the U.S. for being peaceful and respectful. Aguilar stated that the Mexican government supports the demands the "migrants" are making in the United States. [Congratula a Presidencia marcha pácifica de migrantes, Universal, May 2nd, 2006]
As I reported in a previous VDARE.com article, U.S. immigration policy is an issue in the Mexican Presidential election.
On May 2nd, PRD candidate Lopez Obrador (aka El Peje, aka AMLO) said that, if elected, he would make "migration" his number one priority in relations with Washington. [ Mexico leftist to push US on immigration reform, By Kieran Murray Reuters, May 2, 2006
The same thing is true of Fox, who has always made it his top priority.
Oddly, the possibility of the leftist AMLO winning the Mexican presidency has so scared some U.S. pundits that they are ready to surrender to Mexico on immigration in order to prevent it.
Chief among these is Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former spin doctor.
In a recent piece of scaremongering propaganda Morris says that Americans must help PAN candidate Calderon beat AMLO, by surrendering on immigration. Because, according to Morris, "A harsh shift in U.S. immigration policies could fuel a leftist victory in Mexico….We have only to hope that Congress won't pass legislation that alienates the Mexican electorate and delivers the country into AMLO's hands." [Mexico's Hugo Chavez by Dick Morris FrontPageMagazine.com, April 4, 2006]
Morris tells us that "Lopez Obrador has attacked U.S. attempts to restrict Mexican immigration and will benefit tremendously if Congress alienates the Mexican electorate."
Morris is worried about Congress "alienating the Mexican electorate"?
How about alienating the American electorate?
Here is Morris’ flawed logic:
"Mexicans are deeply offended by the idea of a wall designed to keep them out. Building a wall on the border without also starting a guest-worker program will play badly in Mexico. A wall with a guest-worker program might go down better, particularly if the legislation didn't include punitive provisions making illegal immigration a felony."
So Morris would have us craft our immigration policy around what he thinks would benefit a Mexican political party?
This is madness. US immigration policy is already in bad enough shape without making it even worse in order to manipulate the Mexican election.
Dick Morris worked as an advisor for Vicente Fox in 2000. He may be working for Calderon in this election. And he has the gall to tell Americans to adopt a surrender-to-Mexico immigration policy to influence a Mexican election.
AMLO may lose anyway. Calderon has been ahead in most of the latest polls.
But why are people concerned about Mexico having a "pro-American" president? Being "pro-American" is not part of the job description of the president of Mexico.
It’s a lot more important to have a pro-American president of the United States!
A pro-American president of the United States would put the jobs of American workers ahead of the jobs of the "willing workers" of the world.
A pro-American president would care about American citizenship and national identity.
A pro-American president would defend a distinct American nation with its own future.
If we had that kind of a president, it wouldn’t matter to Americans what the president of Mexico did or didn’t do!
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) resides in Mexico, with a legal permit issued him by the Mexican government. Allan recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his FRONTPAGEMAG.COM articles are archived here his "Dispatches from Iraq" are archived here his website is here. color="#990000">.</font>
May 03, 2006
Memo From Mexico, By Allan Wall
May Day In Mexico – Dick Morris’ Bad Advice
May 1st in the United States was "The Great American Boycott". Here in Mexico it was "Nothing Gringo on May 1st."
So what did I do on May Day?
Did I gather other expatriate gringos and march in the streets, waving the Stars and Stripes and demanding my "rights"?
Hardly! Had I done that, I wouldn’t be in Mexico anymore. The Mexican government, unlike our leaders, still understands such quaint concepts as national sovereignty and national identity. So they don’t put up with that sort of thing.
But I had a good day anyway. I dined at an American franchise steak and salad restaurant, with my wife, our boys, and the suegros (my wife’s parents). And my father-in-law paid.
Leaving the restaurant, we stopped an American franchise office supply store, and then passed by Wal-Mart Super-Center.
Judging from the parking lot, the Wal-Mart didn’t look very boycotted.
Overall the "Day Without Gringos" didn’t amount to much down here. May Day is an official holiday, so the boys didn’t go to school (nor did my wife, who is a teacher).
There was a pro-forma protest at the American embassy, where demonstrators were regaled with a speech by "Delegado Marcos", the white Mexican leader of the Chiapas Indian movement.
In Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo, protestors blocked the border for a few hours.
The real May Day action was in the U.S.A., and I watched some of it on TV.
It’s sad to watch the slow-motion fall of one's own country from foreign soil. It’s no wonder the Mexicans don’t respect us—we don’t respect ourselves. A great nation wouldn’t allow this sort of thing. A great nation wouldn’t have allowed it to get this far.
As I reported earlier, the Fox administration had previously taken a neutral stance on the "Great American Boycott", instructing Mexican consulates not to participate.
On the eve of May Day, Fox advised the marchers to be prudent…so as not to provoke "xenophobia". [Espera Fox que boicot en EU no alienta xenophobia, EL Universal, April 30th]
And on May 2nd, after the marches, Fox’s spokesman Ruben Aguilar extended his congratulations to the marchers in the U.S. for being peaceful and respectful. Aguilar stated that the Mexican government supports the demands the "migrants" are making in the United States. [Congratula a Presidencia marcha pácifica de migrantes, Universal, May 2nd, 2006]
As I reported in a previous VDARE.com article, U.S. immigration policy is an issue in the Mexican Presidential election.
On May 2nd, PRD candidate Lopez Obrador (aka El Peje, aka AMLO) said that, if elected, he would make "migration" his number one priority in relations with Washington. [ Mexico leftist to push US on immigration reform, By Kieran Murray Reuters, May 2, 2006
The same thing is true of Fox, who has always made it his top priority.
Oddly, the possibility of the leftist AMLO winning the Mexican presidency has so scared some U.S. pundits that they are ready to surrender to Mexico on immigration in order to prevent it.
Chief among these is Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former spin doctor.
In a recent piece of scaremongering propaganda Morris says that Americans must help PAN candidate Calderon beat AMLO, by surrendering on immigration. Because, according to Morris, "A harsh shift in U.S. immigration policies could fuel a leftist victory in Mexico….We have only to hope that Congress won't pass legislation that alienates the Mexican electorate and delivers the country into AMLO's hands." [Mexico's Hugo Chavez by Dick Morris FrontPageMagazine.com, April 4, 2006]
Morris tells us that "Lopez Obrador has attacked U.S. attempts to restrict Mexican immigration and will benefit tremendously if Congress alienates the Mexican electorate."
Morris is worried about Congress "alienating the Mexican electorate"?
How about alienating the American electorate?
Here is Morris’ flawed logic:
"Mexicans are deeply offended by the idea of a wall designed to keep them out. Building a wall on the border without also starting a guest-worker program will play badly in Mexico. A wall with a guest-worker program might go down better, particularly if the legislation didn't include punitive provisions making illegal immigration a felony."
So Morris would have us craft our immigration policy around what he thinks would benefit a Mexican political party?
This is madness. US immigration policy is already in bad enough shape without making it even worse in order to manipulate the Mexican election.
Dick Morris worked as an advisor for Vicente Fox in 2000. He may be working for Calderon in this election. And he has the gall to tell Americans to adopt a surrender-to-Mexico immigration policy to influence a Mexican election.
AMLO may lose anyway. Calderon has been ahead in most of the latest polls.
But why are people concerned about Mexico having a "pro-American" president? Being "pro-American" is not part of the job description of the president of Mexico.
It’s a lot more important to have a pro-American president of the United States!
A pro-American president of the United States would put the jobs of American workers ahead of the jobs of the "willing workers" of the world.
A pro-American president would care about American citizenship and national identity.
A pro-American president would defend a distinct American nation with its own future.
If we had that kind of a president, it wouldn’t matter to Americans what the president of Mexico did or didn’t do!
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) resides in Mexico, with a legal permit issued him by the Mexican government. Allan recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his FRONTPAGEMAG.COM articles are archived here his "Dispatches from Iraq" are archived here his website is here. color="#990000">.</font>
Mexico's Hugo Chavez
By Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 4, 2006
In its debate over how to change the U.S. immigration system, Washington neglected to assess the impact Mexico's summer election could have.
And Mexico's choice could not be more important to the United States.
On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next president.
Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.
Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary.
Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro.
Lopez Obrador is not inevitable. Recent polls show the candidate of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderon, closing in. But much will hinge on the resolution of the immigration debate now roiling Congress.
Lopez Obrador has attacked U.S. attempts to restrict Mexican immigration and will benefit tremendously if Congress alienates the Mexican electorate. A recent survey by John Zogby found that two-thirds of Mexicans feel Americans are racist and biased against them. A harsh shift in U.S. immigration policies could fuel a leftist victory in Mexico.
Mexicans are deeply offended by the idea of a wall designed to keep them out. Building a wall on the boarder without also starting a guest-worker program will play badly in Mexico. A wall with a guest-worker program might go down better, particularly if the legislation didn't include punitive provisions making illegal immigration a felony.
I have worked as a consultant for Fox and PAN, so I appreciate the delicacy of the political situation in Mexico. In Fox's election in 2000 ened the 71-year authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) heavily dominated by old corrupt leaders linked to the drug traffic, Now PAN has nominated Calderon, once Fox's energy minister, to run for president.
The PRI's candidate this year, Roberto Madrazo, is widely expected to finish third - the party is still identified in the popular mind with the corruption of the past.
Most observers see feel the race will be between Lopez Obrador and Calderon. While the PAN candidate would be no puppet of the United States, he is fully committed to free market economics and wants a close relationship with our country. Lopez Obrador would be part of the Latin America's new, anti-U.S. left in.
That Latin Left includes Venezuela's President Evo Morales, who won as an overtly pro-cocoa-cultivation candidate. And in Peru, Ollanta Humala, a Chavez ally, is likely to finish first in this month's election and probably will win the runoff.
But Mexico, with its vast oil resources and its long border and free-trade agreement with the United States, would be the crown jewel for America's enemies. We have only to hope that Congress won't pass legislation that alienates the Mexican electorate and delivers the country into AMLO's hands.
By Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 4, 2006
In its debate over how to change the U.S. immigration system, Washington neglected to assess the impact Mexico's summer election could have.
And Mexico's choice could not be more important to the United States.
On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next president.
Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.
Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary.
Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro.
Lopez Obrador is not inevitable. Recent polls show the candidate of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderon, closing in. But much will hinge on the resolution of the immigration debate now roiling Congress.
Lopez Obrador has attacked U.S. attempts to restrict Mexican immigration and will benefit tremendously if Congress alienates the Mexican electorate. A recent survey by John Zogby found that two-thirds of Mexicans feel Americans are racist and biased against them. A harsh shift in U.S. immigration policies could fuel a leftist victory in Mexico.
Mexicans are deeply offended by the idea of a wall designed to keep them out. Building a wall on the boarder without also starting a guest-worker program will play badly in Mexico. A wall with a guest-worker program might go down better, particularly if the legislation didn't include punitive provisions making illegal immigration a felony.
I have worked as a consultant for Fox and PAN, so I appreciate the delicacy of the political situation in Mexico. In Fox's election in 2000 ened the 71-year authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) heavily dominated by old corrupt leaders linked to the drug traffic, Now PAN has nominated Calderon, once Fox's energy minister, to run for president.
The PRI's candidate this year, Roberto Madrazo, is widely expected to finish third - the party is still identified in the popular mind with the corruption of the past.
Most observers see feel the race will be between Lopez Obrador and Calderon. While the PAN candidate would be no puppet of the United States, he is fully committed to free market economics and wants a close relationship with our country. Lopez Obrador would be part of the Latin America's new, anti-U.S. left in.
That Latin Left includes Venezuela's President Evo Morales, who won as an overtly pro-cocoa-cultivation candidate. And in Peru, Ollanta Humala, a Chavez ally, is likely to finish first in this month's election and probably will win the runoff.
But Mexico, with its vast oil resources and its long border and free-trade agreement with the United States, would be the crown jewel for America's enemies. We have only to hope that Congress won't pass legislation that alienates the Mexican electorate and delivers the country into AMLO's hands.
Mexico bars immigrants from thousands of jobs
Restrictions south of the border prohibit non-natives from official posts
Restrictions south of the border prohibit non-natives from official posts
Updated: 1:20 p.m. PT May 21, 2006
MEXICO CITY - If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn’t be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn’t have been allowed on the force.
Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies “xenophobic,” Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.
In the United States, only two posts — the presidency and vice presidency — are reserved for the native born.
In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens.
Foreign-born Mexicans can’t hold seats in either house of the congress. They’re also banned from state legislatures, the Supreme Court and all governorships. Many states ban foreign-born Mexicans from spots on town councils. And Mexico’s Constitution reserves almost all federal posts, and any position in the military and merchant marine, for “native-born Mexicans.”
Encouraging tighter restrictions
Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges.
Mexico’s Interior Department — which recommended the bans as part of “model” city statutes it distributed to local officials — could cite no basis for extending the bans to local posts.
After being contacted by The Associated Press about the issue, officials changed the wording in two statutes to delete the “native-born” requirements, although they said the modifications had nothing to do with AP’s inquiries.
“These statutes have been under review for some time, and they have, or are about to be, changed,” said an Interior Department official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name.
But because the “model” statues are fill-in-the-blanks guides for framing local legislation, many cities across Mexico have already enacted such bans. They have done so even though foreigners constitute a tiny percentage of the population and pose little threat to Mexico’s job market.
Just 0.5 percent
The foreign-born make up just 0.5 percent of Mexico’s 105 million people, compared with about 13 percent in the United States, which has a total population of 299 million. Mexico grants citizenship to about 3,000 people a year, compared to the U.S. average of almost a half million. FREE VIDEO
“There is a need for a little more openness, both at the policy level and in business affairs,” said David Kim, president of the Mexico-Korea Association, which represents the estimated 20,000 South Koreans in Mexico, many of them naturalized citizens.
“The immigration laws are very difficult ... and they put obstacles in the way that make it more difficult to compete,” Kim said, although most foreigners don’t come to Mexico seeking government posts.
J. Michael Waller, of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, was more blunt. “If American policy-makers are looking for legal models on which to base new laws restricting immigration and expelling foreign lawbreakers, they have a handy guide: the Mexican constitution,” he said in a recent article on immigration.
Calls for change
Some Mexicans agree their country needs to change.
“This country needs to be more open,” said Francisco Hidalgo, a 50-year-old video producer. “In part to modernize itself, and in part because of the contribution these (foreign-born) people could make.”
Others express a more common view, a distrust of foreigners that academics say is rooted in Mexico’s history of foreign invasions and the loss of territory in the 1847-48 Mexican-American War.
Speaking of the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who enter Mexico each year, chauffeur Arnulfo Hernandez, 57, said: “The ones who want to reach the United States, we should send them up there. But the ones who want to stay here, it’s usually for bad reasons, because they want to steal or do drugs.”
Some say progress is being made. Mexico’s president no longer is required to be at least a second-generation native-born. That law was changed in 1999 to clear the way for candidates who have one foreign-born parent, like President Vicente Fox, whose mother is from Spain.
But the pace of change is slow. The state of Baja California still requires candidates for the state legislature to prove both their parents were native born.
SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12250584/
to sum this shit up, mexico is fucked up just like how N.O. is fucked up. You can't have a one party government. Plus, there's no true middle class. You either rick, or you are poor.
One thing we must be careful of is this, there are 12 million illegals right now, right now we need something to both, limited MORE illegals from coming, and help out the ones who are here. Also, it would be nice for us to really push for a diplomatic change with mexico. Something has to give down there, because Mexico has alot of potential of being a powerful ally.
Last, but not least, do you see alot of canadians flocking across North Dakota? Its basically an open border between us and canada. It could be like that for mexico if they politically reform. Socialism DO NOT WORK!!!
One thing we must be careful of is this, there are 12 million illegals right now, right now we need something to both, limited MORE illegals from coming, and help out the ones who are here. Also, it would be nice for us to really push for a diplomatic change with mexico. Something has to give down there, because Mexico has alot of potential of being a powerful ally.
Last, but not least, do you see alot of canadians flocking across North Dakota? Its basically an open border between us and canada. It could be like that for mexico if they politically reform. Socialism DO NOT WORK!!!
?????actinanass said:
Mexico is only fucked up like N.O. is fucked up in that Americans call the shots in both places.
Please read the thread. Socialism is exactly where Mexico is headed just like every other southern and central American nation that the US has bullied and imposed its will on over the past century or so.
Who do you think supported Mexico's one party system all this time? Do you really think the US would invade places like Grenada and Iraq but allow its southern neighbor to do whatever it pleased?
The flood of immigrants into the US from Mexico was made worse when NAFTA pushed poor subsistence farmers into starvation level poverty when it forced them to compete with multinationals like ConAgra and others who are using alien technology and resources by comparison.
The two things that keep Mexico fucked up for Mexicans will not be changing anytime soon if the powers that be can help it, and those two things are US Business Interests and Complicit Mexican Leaders.
Election News- Mexico Elite Sees Leftist as a Danger - LA Times 5-24-06
Mexico Elite Sees Leftist as a Danger
Some fear that Lopez Obrador will take from the rich to give to the poor if he is president.
By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer
May 24, 2006
MEXICO CITY — An insidious force is threatening the collective peace of mind in Lomas de Chapultepec, the Beverly Hills of this capital city.
The 10-foot walls and the electrified fences that are de rigueur for most homes can't keep the force out, nor can the neighborhood's ubiquitous private security guards. It seeps in, like a noxious vapor: the possibility that a certain leftist politician with a tropical accent might be elected the next president of Mexico in July.
ADVERTISEMENT
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a native of the sultry state of Tabasco and onetime mayor of Mexico City, is the boogeyman of the rich here. Once the clear front-runner, he is now in a tight race with Felipe Calderon, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party. The possibility of a Lopez Obrador victory has some wealthy Mexicans preparing as if for an earthquake or a hurricane.
"If he wins, this country will be ruined. I'll be better off leaving," declared Marta Garcia at the Starbucks in Lomas de Chapultepec, where a cafe mocha and a blueberry muffin cost slightly more than the daily minimum wage of $4.50. "I'll move to Guatemala."
With its main slogan of "For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First," Lopez Obrador's campaign has exposed deep class and ethnic tensions in Mexico. Although he's made quiet overtures to the business community and financial markets, wealthy Mexicans and some in the country's business community see him as a dangerous Robin Hood figure who will take from the rich to give to the poor.
The biggest fear of many wealthy Mexicans is Lopez Obrador's vow to toughen tax enforcement to raise the revenue to pay for social programs. Mexico has a reputation in financial circles as a vast, tax-free "enterprise zone" for the rich.
"We have a saying here," Mexico City economist Mario Correa said. "If you pay taxes in Mexico, then you don't have a good accountant."
Guillermo Oropeza, a sales manager for a movie distribution company and resident of Santa Fe, another exclusive enclave here, believes that Lopez Obrador lacks a basic understanding of economics.
"He doesn't have the intellectual capacity to be president," Oropeza said. "He can't win. It would be absurd."
At a campaign stop this month in the state of Jalisco, Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, insisted that he had nothing against the wealthy. "We are not against businesspeople," he said. "We need businesspeople, and their investments, to create jobs for our people and get our economy moving again."
As mayor of Mexico City from 2000 until last year, Lopez Obrador instituted a variety of public works programs and subsidies for the poor. Most residents saw him as a competent and compassionate administrator of an overpopulated megalopolis beset by social ills: He left office with an 84% approval rating in the city, according to one poll.
But Calderon, once significantly behind, has had considerable success playing on the fears of the wealthy — and the anxieties of many in the middle class. He has used a series of ads attacking Lopez Obrador to propel himself forward in several recent polls.
"Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico," intoned one of the ads, comparing him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a self-styled populist and the bete noire of Latin American conservatives. Another ad argues, with considerable exaggeration, that Lopez Obrador bankrupted Mexico City with expensive public works projects.
It isn't hard to find executives, Lomas de Chapultepec homemakers and students at elite colleges here who repeat those arguments. A few speak of the candidate and his supporters using the colorful and insulting vocabulary with which the rich talk about the city's poor majority.
In the parlance of the city's "educated society," Lopez Obrador and his followers are nacos, a slur meaning "rube" or "uncultured."
"Only the nacos, the people who are dying of hunger, will vote for him, just so they can get everything for free, instead of working to make this country better," a man who identified himself as Andres Lavoisere wrote on a Mexican blog recently.
The slang word turns up in thousands of Web postings about Lopez Obrador, along with a slew of conspiracy theories that "prove" he is the candidate of social anarchy and collapse.
One widely circulated e-mail argues that leaders with Lopez in their names have always brought bad fortune to Mexico. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost Texas and California in the 19th century. Jose Lopez Portillo presided over a period of hyperinflation in the 1980s and nationalized the banking system.
"Lopez Obrador closes this circle of evil," the e-mail warns. He is "a lying oddball, corrupt and a manipulator of the ignorance and the hope of Mexico's poor."
Carlos Zavala Rocha, a 67-year-old owner of a recording company, recently received an anti-Lopez Obrador joke in his e-mail, a fictional dialogue between two children on the playground of a Mexico City prep school.
"Hey, there's good news," the first child says. "This man called Lopez Obrador is ahead in the polls."
"How is that good news?" his friend asks.
"Because my papa says that if that man wins, we're moving to Miami!"
The contention that a Lopez Obrador victory would eventually bring an exodus of the rich and their money from Mexico is an article of faith among many here.
"We've lived through out-of-control inflation and devaluation of our currency, and we don't want to go through that again," Zavala Rocha said. "People with money are going to take their money out of Mexico."
Among the very top members of Mexico's business elite, the mood isn't quite so grim.
Lorenzo Zambrano, president and chief executive of the cement company Cemex, recently told The Times that Lopez Obrador probably would take steps to increase government intervention in the economy if he became president.
"He would be a throwback to what we had … 20 years ago," Zambrano said. "To go back 20 years is not a process I look forward to."
Still, Zambrano said he believed that big business could work with such a government. "Lopez Obrador will be a challenge if he becomes president, but it won't be a tragedy," he said.
Some executives, such as telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim, are hedging their bets. Slim, the world's third-richest man, gave the maximum campaign contributions of nearly $94,000 to Lopez Obrador and each of the leading candidates.
Many executives decline to speak about Lopez Obrador on the record. In a rare moment of candor, Claudio X. Gonzalez, chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico and one of the nation's most influential businessmen, lashed out at the candidate last year. He called Lopez Obrador a "retrograde and dinosaur-like" leftist who would upend the nation's economic stability.
Some critics charge that Lopez Obrador has deliberately stoked the country's class divisions.
When the anti-crime group Mexico United organized a massive demonstration last year to protest a wave of kidnappings, then-Mayor Lopez Obrador said the group was directed by pirrurris (rough translation: filthy rich people) with a hidden agenda to destabilize his government.
"He polarizes and scares people in order to win votes," said Maria Elena Morera Galindo, the group's director. "What he says doesn't scare me, but it does sadden me, because we're all Mexicans."
Still, she hopes to work with Lopez Obrador if he's elected president: This month, he signed a pledge to work toward the group's goals.
Lopez Obrador's efforts to calm the markets and woo corporate support have taken place in private, behind-the-scenes meetings. Last year, he sent letters to several hundred of Mexico's top executives outlining his economic strategy. He assured them that if he became president, he would continue the fiscal and monetary discipline that has lowered inflation and interest rates.
On the campaign trail, Lopez Obrador repeatedly takes up the theme of economic injustice. His followers affectionately call him El Peje, a nickname derived from the name of a tropical fish.
At a recent Lopez Obrador campaign stop in the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, his supporters raised a banner that declared: "We're Indians, but we're not fools any longer." The newspaper El Universal reported that Lopez Obrador told the crowd that he was sure they would not vote for Calderon because to do so was to become a ladino, or someone who rejects his Indian roots.
Analysts here say that Lopez Obrador's support extends beyond the poor. He has the support of the intelligentsia, pollster Dan Lund said. One is writer Elena Poniatowska, who recently appeared in a televised ad in support of the candidate.
Garcia, the Lomas de Chapultepec homemaker, said she was trying to step across the class divide to persuade the people who work for her to vote for Calderon.
"I try to talk to my gardener, to the two girls who work for me, the guy who takes out the trash," she said.
Her workers love Lopez Obrador for the subsidies he gave to Mexico City seniors, she said.
"They think that the money he gave to the grandmothers came out of his own pocket. I tell them it comes from their taxes…. But they just don't understand."
*
Times staff writer Marla Dickerson contributed to this report.
Mexico Elite Sees Leftist as a Danger
Some fear that Lopez Obrador will take from the rich to give to the poor if he is president.
By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer
May 24, 2006
MEXICO CITY — An insidious force is threatening the collective peace of mind in Lomas de Chapultepec, the Beverly Hills of this capital city.
The 10-foot walls and the electrified fences that are de rigueur for most homes can't keep the force out, nor can the neighborhood's ubiquitous private security guards. It seeps in, like a noxious vapor: the possibility that a certain leftist politician with a tropical accent might be elected the next president of Mexico in July.
ADVERTISEMENT
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a native of the sultry state of Tabasco and onetime mayor of Mexico City, is the boogeyman of the rich here. Once the clear front-runner, he is now in a tight race with Felipe Calderon, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party. The possibility of a Lopez Obrador victory has some wealthy Mexicans preparing as if for an earthquake or a hurricane.
"If he wins, this country will be ruined. I'll be better off leaving," declared Marta Garcia at the Starbucks in Lomas de Chapultepec, where a cafe mocha and a blueberry muffin cost slightly more than the daily minimum wage of $4.50. "I'll move to Guatemala."
With its main slogan of "For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First," Lopez Obrador's campaign has exposed deep class and ethnic tensions in Mexico. Although he's made quiet overtures to the business community and financial markets, wealthy Mexicans and some in the country's business community see him as a dangerous Robin Hood figure who will take from the rich to give to the poor.
The biggest fear of many wealthy Mexicans is Lopez Obrador's vow to toughen tax enforcement to raise the revenue to pay for social programs. Mexico has a reputation in financial circles as a vast, tax-free "enterprise zone" for the rich.
"We have a saying here," Mexico City economist Mario Correa said. "If you pay taxes in Mexico, then you don't have a good accountant."
Guillermo Oropeza, a sales manager for a movie distribution company and resident of Santa Fe, another exclusive enclave here, believes that Lopez Obrador lacks a basic understanding of economics.
"He doesn't have the intellectual capacity to be president," Oropeza said. "He can't win. It would be absurd."
At a campaign stop this month in the state of Jalisco, Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, insisted that he had nothing against the wealthy. "We are not against businesspeople," he said. "We need businesspeople, and their investments, to create jobs for our people and get our economy moving again."
As mayor of Mexico City from 2000 until last year, Lopez Obrador instituted a variety of public works programs and subsidies for the poor. Most residents saw him as a competent and compassionate administrator of an overpopulated megalopolis beset by social ills: He left office with an 84% approval rating in the city, according to one poll.
But Calderon, once significantly behind, has had considerable success playing on the fears of the wealthy — and the anxieties of many in the middle class. He has used a series of ads attacking Lopez Obrador to propel himself forward in several recent polls.
"Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico," intoned one of the ads, comparing him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a self-styled populist and the bete noire of Latin American conservatives. Another ad argues, with considerable exaggeration, that Lopez Obrador bankrupted Mexico City with expensive public works projects.
It isn't hard to find executives, Lomas de Chapultepec homemakers and students at elite colleges here who repeat those arguments. A few speak of the candidate and his supporters using the colorful and insulting vocabulary with which the rich talk about the city's poor majority.
In the parlance of the city's "educated society," Lopez Obrador and his followers are nacos, a slur meaning "rube" or "uncultured."
"Only the nacos, the people who are dying of hunger, will vote for him, just so they can get everything for free, instead of working to make this country better," a man who identified himself as Andres Lavoisere wrote on a Mexican blog recently.
The slang word turns up in thousands of Web postings about Lopez Obrador, along with a slew of conspiracy theories that "prove" he is the candidate of social anarchy and collapse.
One widely circulated e-mail argues that leaders with Lopez in their names have always brought bad fortune to Mexico. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost Texas and California in the 19th century. Jose Lopez Portillo presided over a period of hyperinflation in the 1980s and nationalized the banking system.
"Lopez Obrador closes this circle of evil," the e-mail warns. He is "a lying oddball, corrupt and a manipulator of the ignorance and the hope of Mexico's poor."
Carlos Zavala Rocha, a 67-year-old owner of a recording company, recently received an anti-Lopez Obrador joke in his e-mail, a fictional dialogue between two children on the playground of a Mexico City prep school.
"Hey, there's good news," the first child says. "This man called Lopez Obrador is ahead in the polls."
"How is that good news?" his friend asks.
"Because my papa says that if that man wins, we're moving to Miami!"
The contention that a Lopez Obrador victory would eventually bring an exodus of the rich and their money from Mexico is an article of faith among many here.
"We've lived through out-of-control inflation and devaluation of our currency, and we don't want to go through that again," Zavala Rocha said. "People with money are going to take their money out of Mexico."
Among the very top members of Mexico's business elite, the mood isn't quite so grim.
Lorenzo Zambrano, president and chief executive of the cement company Cemex, recently told The Times that Lopez Obrador probably would take steps to increase government intervention in the economy if he became president.
"He would be a throwback to what we had … 20 years ago," Zambrano said. "To go back 20 years is not a process I look forward to."
Still, Zambrano said he believed that big business could work with such a government. "Lopez Obrador will be a challenge if he becomes president, but it won't be a tragedy," he said.
Some executives, such as telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim, are hedging their bets. Slim, the world's third-richest man, gave the maximum campaign contributions of nearly $94,000 to Lopez Obrador and each of the leading candidates.
Many executives decline to speak about Lopez Obrador on the record. In a rare moment of candor, Claudio X. Gonzalez, chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico and one of the nation's most influential businessmen, lashed out at the candidate last year. He called Lopez Obrador a "retrograde and dinosaur-like" leftist who would upend the nation's economic stability.
Some critics charge that Lopez Obrador has deliberately stoked the country's class divisions.
When the anti-crime group Mexico United organized a massive demonstration last year to protest a wave of kidnappings, then-Mayor Lopez Obrador said the group was directed by pirrurris (rough translation: filthy rich people) with a hidden agenda to destabilize his government.
"He polarizes and scares people in order to win votes," said Maria Elena Morera Galindo, the group's director. "What he says doesn't scare me, but it does sadden me, because we're all Mexicans."
Still, she hopes to work with Lopez Obrador if he's elected president: This month, he signed a pledge to work toward the group's goals.
Lopez Obrador's efforts to calm the markets and woo corporate support have taken place in private, behind-the-scenes meetings. Last year, he sent letters to several hundred of Mexico's top executives outlining his economic strategy. He assured them that if he became president, he would continue the fiscal and monetary discipline that has lowered inflation and interest rates.
On the campaign trail, Lopez Obrador repeatedly takes up the theme of economic injustice. His followers affectionately call him El Peje, a nickname derived from the name of a tropical fish.
At a recent Lopez Obrador campaign stop in the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, his supporters raised a banner that declared: "We're Indians, but we're not fools any longer." The newspaper El Universal reported that Lopez Obrador told the crowd that he was sure they would not vote for Calderon because to do so was to become a ladino, or someone who rejects his Indian roots.
Analysts here say that Lopez Obrador's support extends beyond the poor. He has the support of the intelligentsia, pollster Dan Lund said. One is writer Elena Poniatowska, who recently appeared in a televised ad in support of the candidate.
Garcia, the Lomas de Chapultepec homemaker, said she was trying to step across the class divide to persuade the people who work for her to vote for Calderon.
"I try to talk to my gardener, to the two girls who work for me, the guy who takes out the trash," she said.
Her workers love Lopez Obrador for the subsidies he gave to Mexico City seniors, she said.
"They think that the money he gave to the grandmothers came out of his own pocket. I tell them it comes from their taxes…. But they just don't understand."
*
Times staff writer Marla Dickerson contributed to this report.
J
JUju2005
Guest
Re: Election News- Mexico Elite Sees Leftist as a Danger - LA Times 5-24-06
Latin America, not just Mexico. China does not have Labor unions.
Re: Election News- Mexico Elite Sees Leftist as a Danger - LA Times 5-24-06
.
aint this what she did for the troops............
Dolemite said:
.
aint this what she did for the troops............
Last edited by a moderator:
Dolomaricon,your hatered for Mexico goes beyond your love for you homeland,which is nothing but a welfare stae of America.You know la verdar about tu pais verdar,have they ever been independent from the colonial powers of europe...............Why does your country have a flagg at all...they are not independent of colonial control.They are still a puppet of Ameerican and could not surive if it was not for them.So tell the truth pinch mariposa that u are..........and keep doing this for them crackkkas that you love so mushhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh .Pinche mariposa que tu eres.......y tu pais tambien...........
.Pinche mariposa que tu eres.......y tu pais tambien........... ¿Por qué defiende usted México cuando usted sabe que se obtiene el gobierno malo? You simply make no sense at all. All up in threads talking shit about Bush, white people and America but the minute Mexico gets called out, you talk about a brothers mother. No wonder you get little respect.
-VG
-VG
VegasGuy said:
He talks chit abut Mexico and Mexicans all day long like he got dissed by some Mexican bitch and he can't let it go.He gets no respect for that alone,he is a simp.He acts like a puta.....I got no love for him ,bush or American for that matter.............why does he have so much Mexican hate in his lil fecal matter mind...........and why do you defend him???????????
And as far as respect,I get it from the ones that matter.........
you stupid bitch -Brown Pride said:He talks chit abut Mexico and Mexicans all day long like he got dissed by some Mexican bitch and he can't let it go.He gets no respect for that alone,he is a simp.He acts like a puta.....I got no love for him ,bush or American for that matter.............why does he have so much Mexican hate in his lil fecal matter mind...........and why do you defend him???????????
if mexico doesnt suck why are you here and why arent americans tryin to jump fences southward?
the point of the thread was to show why mexico has millions of people literally running to get out of it and my posts firmly show the US and corruption as the underlying factors
despite all your faggotry i will make you this offer- apologize for using the n-word and insulting black remarks and refrain from doing so in the future and I will as well and you can show everyone how u arent a racist
holla when u are back from banishment
funny how people call me a racist and full of hate yet I am the one to offer peace to someone who started all of this nonsense
Mexico sucks because their elections are as corrupt as ours.
Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat
There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America
Greg Palast
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian
There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.
Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.
Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations".
Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... and Mexico.
What those Latin American countries have in common, besides a lack of terrorists, is either a left-leaning president or a left candidate for president ahead in the opinion polls, leaders of the floodtide of Bush-hostile Latin leaders. It seems that the Bush government feared the leftist surge was up against the US's southern border.
As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?
Notably, ruling party operatives carried registration lists normally in the hands of elections officials only. (In Venezuela in 2004, during the special election to recall President Hugo Chavez, I saw his opponents consulting laptops with voter lists. Were these the purloined FBI files? The Chavez government suspects so but, victorious, won't press the case.)
There's more that the Mexico vote has in common with Florida besides the heat. The ruling party's hand-picked electoral commission counted a mere 402,000 votes more for their candidate, Felipe Calderón, over challenger Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That's noteworthy in light of the surprise showing of candidate Señor Blank-o (the 827,000 ballots supposedly left "blank").
We've seen Mr Blank-o do well before - in Florida in 2000 when Florida's secretary of state (who was also co-chair of the Bush campaign) announced that 179,000 ballots showed no vote for the president. The machines couldn't read these ballots with "hanging chads" and other technical problems. Humans can read these ballots with ease, but the hand-count was blocked by Bush's conflicted official.
And so it is in Mexico. The Calderón "victory" is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador's call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks.
Blank ballots are rarely random. In Florida in 2000, 88% of the supposedly blank ballots came from African-American voting districts - that is, they were cast by Democratic voters. In Mexico, the supposed empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest.
There's an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It's called "negative drop-off". In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice?
There are signs of Washington's meddling in its neighbour's election. The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush's party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files? (US contractor ChoicePoint, its Mexican agents facing arrest for taking the data, denied wrongdoing and vowed to destroy its copies of the lists. But what of Mr Bush's copy?)
Mexico's Bush-backed ruling party claims it has conducted Mexico's first truly honest election, though it refuses to re-count the ballots or explain the purge of voters. Has the Pan and its ally in Washington served democracy in this election, or merely Florida con salsa?
· Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08 and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War
gregpalast.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1815750,00.html
Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat
There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America
Greg Palast
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian
There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.
Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.
Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations".
Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... and Mexico.
What those Latin American countries have in common, besides a lack of terrorists, is either a left-leaning president or a left candidate for president ahead in the opinion polls, leaders of the floodtide of Bush-hostile Latin leaders. It seems that the Bush government feared the leftist surge was up against the US's southern border.
As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?
Notably, ruling party operatives carried registration lists normally in the hands of elections officials only. (In Venezuela in 2004, during the special election to recall President Hugo Chavez, I saw his opponents consulting laptops with voter lists. Were these the purloined FBI files? The Chavez government suspects so but, victorious, won't press the case.)
There's more that the Mexico vote has in common with Florida besides the heat. The ruling party's hand-picked electoral commission counted a mere 402,000 votes more for their candidate, Felipe Calderón, over challenger Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That's noteworthy in light of the surprise showing of candidate Señor Blank-o (the 827,000 ballots supposedly left "blank").
We've seen Mr Blank-o do well before - in Florida in 2000 when Florida's secretary of state (who was also co-chair of the Bush campaign) announced that 179,000 ballots showed no vote for the president. The machines couldn't read these ballots with "hanging chads" and other technical problems. Humans can read these ballots with ease, but the hand-count was blocked by Bush's conflicted official.
And so it is in Mexico. The Calderón "victory" is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador's call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks.
Blank ballots are rarely random. In Florida in 2000, 88% of the supposedly blank ballots came from African-American voting districts - that is, they were cast by Democratic voters. In Mexico, the supposed empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest.
There's an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It's called "negative drop-off". In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice?
There are signs of Washington's meddling in its neighbour's election. The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush's party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files? (US contractor ChoicePoint, its Mexican agents facing arrest for taking the data, denied wrongdoing and vowed to destroy its copies of the lists. But what of Mr Bush's copy?)
Mexico's Bush-backed ruling party claims it has conducted Mexico's first truly honest election, though it refuses to re-count the ballots or explain the purge of voters. Has the Pan and its ally in Washington served democracy in this election, or merely Florida con salsa?
· Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08 and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War
gregpalast.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1815750,00.html
You know the elections are rigged when a small percentage of the population dominates the elected officials.....
the majority of the population are the ones voting for them....
voting for their own suffrage....
the majority of the population are the ones voting for them....
voting for their own suffrage....
Mexican Govt. is like deadbeat parents who send their young up the block to get clothed and fed by others...there is no middle class Mexican in Mexico, only in the United States do they maintain a social class, beginning from benefits from the welfare state and working their up the ladder, while Papi waiting tables and doing landscape, Mami is poppin' babies and collecting benefits from county, with or without citizenship, not speaking English and communicating via Nextel 
hoppin the border is easier than staying home and fighting US backed corruption and oppressionGET YOU HOT said:Mexican Govt. is like deadbeat parents who send their young up the block to get clothed and fed by others...there is no middle class Mexican in Mexico, only in the United States do they maintain a social class, beginning from benefits from the welfare state and working their up the ladder, while Papi waiting tables and doing landscape, Mami is poppin' babies and collecting benefits from county, with or without citizenship, not speaking English and communicating via Nextel
Governor urges immigrants to assimilate into U.S. culture
The Associated Press
Published: October 5, 2006
LOS ANGELES California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that some Mexican immigrants "try to stay Mexican" when they come to the United States, and he urged them to assimilate into the fabric of American society.
Recalling his own experience emigrating from his native Austria, the Republican governor said Thursdya that immigrants should learn English and U.S. history and "make an effort to become part of America."
"That is very difficult for some people to do especially, I think, for Mexicans because they are so close to their country here so they try to stay Mexican but try to be in America. So there's this kind of back and forth," he said.
"What I'm saying to the Mexicans is you've got to go and immerse yourself and assimilate into the American culture, become part of the American fabric. That is how Americans will embrace you," he added.
Schwarzenegger's comments were condemned by several Democrats supporting the candidacy of his rival in the November election, Phil Angelides. They depicted his remarks as part of a pattern of statements revealing insensitivity toward immigrants and others.
The governor's "comments today were a calculated political insult to all immigrants," California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis said in a conference call organized by the Democratic Party that "it's not the governor's place to tell immigrants to abandon their language and their culture."
The office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the state's leading Hispanic politicians, did not respond to requests for comment.
The governor's comments, after an event in Los Angeles, echoed an opinion piece he wrote in September, which was published in the Los Angeles Times. He was critical of protesters who waved Mexican flags at immigration rallies.
"The message that sends is that you do not want to learn our language or our culture," Schwarzenegger wrote.
Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's campaign, said in a statement that "Phil Angelides' brand of divisive politics rings hollow for immigrants and American-born Californians alike who share the governor's view of the American dream."
The dispute follows a controversy last month about Schwarzenegger's choice of words. The governor apologized for saying in a taped, private meeting that the mixture of Hispanic and black blood gives Puerto Ricans and Cubans "very hot" personalities.
LOS ANGELES California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that some Mexican immigrants "try to stay Mexican" when they come to the United States, and he urged them to assimilate into the fabric of American society.
Recalling his own experience emigrating from his native Austria, the Republican governor said Thursdya that immigrants should learn English and U.S. history and "make an effort to become part of America."
"That is very difficult for some people to do especially, I think, for Mexicans because they are so close to their country here so they try to stay Mexican but try to be in America. So there's this kind of back and forth," he said.
"What I'm saying to the Mexicans is you've got to go and immerse yourself and assimilate into the American culture, become part of the American fabric. That is how Americans will embrace you," he added.
Schwarzenegger's comments were condemned by several Democrats supporting the candidacy of his rival in the November election, Phil Angelides. They depicted his remarks as part of a pattern of statements revealing insensitivity toward immigrants and others.
The governor's "comments today were a calculated political insult to all immigrants," California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis said in a conference call organized by the Democratic Party that "it's not the governor's place to tell immigrants to abandon their language and their culture."
The office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the state's leading Hispanic politicians, did not respond to requests for comment.
The governor's comments, after an event in Los Angeles, echoed an opinion piece he wrote in September, which was published in the Los Angeles Times. He was critical of protesters who waved Mexican flags at immigration rallies.
"The message that sends is that you do not want to learn our language or our culture," Schwarzenegger wrote.
Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's campaign, said in a statement that "Phil Angelides' brand of divisive politics rings hollow for immigrants and American-born Californians alike who share the governor's view of the American dream."
The dispute follows a controversy last month about Schwarzenegger's choice of words. The governor apologized for saying in a taped, private meeting that the mixture of Hispanic and black blood gives Puerto Ricans and Cubans "very hot" personalities.
The Associated Press
Published: October 5, 2006
LOS ANGELES California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that some Mexican immigrants "try to stay Mexican" when they come to the United States, and he urged them to assimilate into the fabric of American society.
Recalling his own experience emigrating from his native Austria, the Republican governor said Thursdya that immigrants should learn English and U.S. history and "make an effort to become part of America."
"That is very difficult for some people to do especially, I think, for Mexicans because they are so close to their country here so they try to stay Mexican but try to be in America. So there's this kind of back and forth," he said.
"What I'm saying to the Mexicans is you've got to go and immerse yourself and assimilate into the American culture, become part of the American fabric. That is how Americans will embrace you," he added.
Schwarzenegger's comments were condemned by several Democrats supporting the candidacy of his rival in the November election, Phil Angelides. They depicted his remarks as part of a pattern of statements revealing insensitivity toward immigrants and others.
The governor's "comments today were a calculated political insult to all immigrants," California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis said in a conference call organized by the Democratic Party that "it's not the governor's place to tell immigrants to abandon their language and their culture."
The office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the state's leading Hispanic politicians, did not respond to requests for comment.
The governor's comments, after an event in Los Angeles, echoed an opinion piece he wrote in September, which was published in the Los Angeles Times. He was critical of protesters who waved Mexican flags at immigration rallies.
"The message that sends is that you do not want to learn our language or our culture," Schwarzenegger wrote.
Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's campaign, said in a statement that "Phil Angelides' brand of divisive politics rings hollow for immigrants and American-born Californians alike who share the governor's view of the American dream."
The dispute follows a controversy last month about Schwarzenegger's choice of words. The governor apologized for saying in a taped, private meeting that the mixture of Hispanic and black blood gives Puerto Ricans and Cubans "very hot" personalities.
LOS ANGELES California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that some Mexican immigrants "try to stay Mexican" when they come to the United States, and he urged them to assimilate into the fabric of American society.
Recalling his own experience emigrating from his native Austria, the Republican governor said Thursdya that immigrants should learn English and U.S. history and "make an effort to become part of America."
"That is very difficult for some people to do especially, I think, for Mexicans because they are so close to their country here so they try to stay Mexican but try to be in America. So there's this kind of back and forth," he said.
"What I'm saying to the Mexicans is you've got to go and immerse yourself and assimilate into the American culture, become part of the American fabric. That is how Americans will embrace you," he added.
Schwarzenegger's comments were condemned by several Democrats supporting the candidacy of his rival in the November election, Phil Angelides. They depicted his remarks as part of a pattern of statements revealing insensitivity toward immigrants and others.
The governor's "comments today were a calculated political insult to all immigrants," California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis said in a conference call organized by the Democratic Party that "it's not the governor's place to tell immigrants to abandon their language and their culture."
The office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the state's leading Hispanic politicians, did not respond to requests for comment.
The governor's comments, after an event in Los Angeles, echoed an opinion piece he wrote in September, which was published in the Los Angeles Times. He was critical of protesters who waved Mexican flags at immigration rallies.
"The message that sends is that you do not want to learn our language or our culture," Schwarzenegger wrote.
Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's campaign, said in a statement that "Phil Angelides' brand of divisive politics rings hollow for immigrants and American-born Californians alike who share the governor's view of the American dream."
The dispute follows a controversy last month about Schwarzenegger's choice of words. The governor apologized for saying in a taped, private meeting that the mixture of Hispanic and black blood gives Puerto Ricans and Cubans "very hot" personalities.