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The official swearing-in of Felipe Calderon
as president of Mexico presented formidable logistical difficulties
to the high echelon military officers designated to protect chiefs
of state here. For three days prior to the constitutionally-mandated
ceremony in the congress of the country, the presidium had been
turned into a war zone when deputies and senators of the three
parties that back left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's
claim that he is the legitimate president of Mexico stormed the
tribune and fought members of Calderon's rightist National Action
Party or PAN in a series of battle royals that featured punches,
pepper gas, hair-pulling, hammerlocks, tossed soft drinks, torn
suits and bloody noses - the final fracas occurred just minutes
before the scheduled swearing in.
For two nights, both parties
camped out on the platform, huddled in sleeping bags, glaring
at each other and howling popular songs to keep the other side
awake, the PRD ironically at stage right, the rightists at stage
left. Getting Calderon onto the stage would be a nightmare.
Meanwhile, outside the congress
which angry throngs of Lopez Obrador's people threatened to overrun
to prevent Calderon's investiture, thousands of federal preventative
police and military troops crouched behind two meter tall metal
barricades, backed up by tanks, water cannons, tear gas launchers,
long guns, and snipers on nearby roofs.
To whisk the President-elect
through this labyrinth without incident, the Estado Mayor or
elite presidential command, first sent out a dummy caravan whose
route was tracked by the two national television networks in
a successful ploy to thwart the protestors. Calderon was then
smuggled into congress in an unmarked vehicle through the underground
parking lot while hundreds of ceremonially garbed cadets awaited
the fake motorcade on the steps of the legislative palace.
The president-elect then emerged
from backstage as a phalanx of burley bodyguards opened an aisle
on the PAN side of the tribune for the blunt 44 year-old rightist
to deliver the briefest acceptance speech in the annals of such
ceremonies - the short, balding Calderon had to pin the presidential
sash on his
own chest while his predecessor Vicente Fox smiled wanly at his
side - Fox is reported to have suffered a mild heart attack several
days before the change of power and the relationship between
the two men has always been frosty.
But the official swearing-in
had been preempted by the unprecedented transfer of powers from
Fox to Calderon at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, in the
early morning hours with the military brass bearing witness.
Never before in Mexico had power changed hands in such circumstances.
Swearing the oath read to him by an unidentified voice off camera,
Felipe Calderon became the first Mexican president ever to privately
assume power - the constitutionally mandated congressional swearing-in
was designed to bolster the PANista's dubious claim to the office
awarded to him by a razor-thin margin in the fraud-marred July
2nd election.
The militarized spectacle of
this post-midnight swearing-in broadcast nationally by the nation's
two-headed television monopoly sends a clear signal of just how
Felipe Calderon intends to govern this sharply polarized land
- with the military and the media.
Indeed, repression is right
at the top of Calderon's menu as evidenced by his cabinet appointees,
many of them like him chosen from the right wing of the rightist
party. The new interior secretary who oversees national security
and internal political relations and whose powers are second
only to the president, Jose Ramirez Acuna, had perhaps the blackest
human rights record of any state governor outside of Oaxaca tyrant
Ulisis Ruiz when he ruled Jalisco, never once accepting recommendations
from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to curtail flagrant
abuses by his security forces.
Ramirez Acuna was notorious
for ordering the brutal repression of an anti-globalization demonstration
during a Latin American-European Union summit in Guadalajara
in May 2004 in which a hundred protestors were jailed and beaten,
tortured for days by state police and thrown into Jalisco's maximum
lock-ups for months despite an outcry from national and international
human rights organizations. Ramirez Acuna's appointment as Interior
secretary during a particularly turbulent moment of social upheaval
her is a sign of the "Hard Hand" ("Mano Dura")
to come.
Even more ominous is the naming
of Eduardo Medina Mora as the nation's attorney general. Medina
Mora, former director of the CISEN, Mexico's top intelligence
agency, served as public security secretary under Fox and organized
the bloodthirsty police attack on the rebellious farmers of San
Salvador Atenco last May in which hundreds were brutalized, two
young men killed, and 23 women raped or otherwise sexually abused
by the security forces.
The expected wave of repression
has already descended over Oaxaca where the Oaxaca Peoples Popular
Assembly or APPO and dissident education workers have occupied
the center of the state capital for six months. On October 27th,
following the murder of independent U.S. journalist Brad Will
on the barricades by a death squad in the employ of Governor
Ruiz, a leading member of the PRI party which ruled Mexico for
seven decades and whose removal is the key demand of protestors,
Fox moved in thousands of Federal Preventative Police, a corps
culled from the military, who retook the central plaza. Since
then, the dissidents have waged a fierce resistance from behind
barricades thrown up throughout the state. Ruiz's gunsills have
now killed 18 demonstrators beside Will - whose killers, police
officers themselves, were released from custody last week by
the governor's police.
A peaceful march by the APPO
and its supporters November 25th was cruelly suppressed by the
federal troops, unleashing elements of Ruiz's ministerial police
who burnt down the Assembly's encampments, raided APPO leader
Flavio Sosa's offices, and broke into hospitals and private homes
hunting protestors. More than 160 militants detained by state
and federal cops have been shipped out of state to prisons as
far north as Matamoros on the U.S. border in a concerted PRI-PAN
plan to crush the self-designated "Commune of Oaxaca."
As might be expected in the
throes of the government-ordered crackdown which accompanies
Calderon's ascendancy to high office, and the sealing of the
stealing of the July election that has soured many Mexicans on
the effectiveness of the ballot to bring social change, the armed
option has emerged as an enticing alternative. The first bombings
here in six years were staged in mid-November by a coalition
of tiny guerrilla cells that split from the all-but-dormant Popular
Revolutionary Army (EPR) in the late '90s, and caused moderate
property damage to the bunker that houses the maximum electoral
tribunal - the TRIFE - which confirmed Calderon's victory, the
heavily-fortified national headquarters of Ruiz's PRI, and a
transnational bank - bombings at transnational banks occurred
in 2000.
Also on the move and a target
of opportunity for Calderon's security apparatus are the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and its quixotic spokesperson
Subcomandante Marcos who was relatively untouched during the
Fox years. This December 1st, the Marcos-directed Other Campaign
completed its itinerary of moving from conflict point to conflict
point across the Mexican geography listening to "those at
the bottom", the first stage of weaving a national tapestry
of resistance of "los de abajo" in every region of
the land. The Other Campaign now returns to Chiapas where the
EZLN will evaluate the dangers that a Calderon presidency presents
- a second group of Zapatista comandantes is projected to resume
the Other Campaign's route in and around January 1st. The plan
and pace of "La Otra" seems aimed at the calling of
a constitutional convention in 2010, the bi-centennial of Mexico
as a nation.
In his first address as president
of Mexico, Calderon repeatedly called for "unity" and
"dialogue" even as his big business backers were embarking
on a TV hit piece campaign accusing Lopez Obrador and his supporters
of undermining the nation. Given the seismic divide between
rich and poor, brown and white, that has been so evident in past
months, and the hard hand still to come, reconciliation seems
improbable. Felipe Calderon will be encased in a security bubble
for as long as he is president; unable to travel the country
he claims to have won in the stolen July 2nd election without
inciting riot and resistance.
Mexico has been verging on
ingovernability for many months and Calderon's heavy-handed feint
to slam the lid on the upsurge from down below will only crank
up class and race discontent.
"Coyuntura", the
gathering of objective and subjective forces, is a favorite tool
of political analysts for measuring the possibilities of social
change here. Revolutionary "coyunturas" come together
when these two forces are in alignment - when the popular movements,
the subjective force, has grown sufficiently strong to overcome
the increasingly onerous objective forces - in this case, the
growing impoverishment of three quarters of the population now
living in and around the poverty line thanks to the machinations
of neo-liberalism, a personal philosophy of which Calderon is
fatally enamored.
In this respect, the new Mexican
president ends up on the losing side in Latin America - the election
of Raul Correa in Ecuador is just the latest milestone in the
pendulum swing to the left on the southern continent. Indeed,
Calderon represents a last losing gasp for Washington's hegemony
in the hemisphere. It is not just of passing significance that
virtually all of Latin America's heads of state with the notable
exception of Alvaro Uribe, Washington's puppet in Colombia, chose
to absent themselves from the inauguration.
Felipe Calderon has been programmed
by his transnational handlers to facilitate their business arrangements
south of the border from 2006 through 2012 but history, which
in Mexico is as present as the present, may derail this carefully
laid plan. In Mexico, revolutions explode in hundred year cycles.
In 1810, the black and brown
underclass rose up to overthrow the Spanish and win the nation's
independence. In 1910, Mexico erupted in the first great social
revolution of largely indigenous farmers in the Americas, a revolution
that was sparked by a stolen election. For Felipe Calderon,
2010 looms on the horizon.
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