In face of US threats, Mexican president calls for “national unity”
In face of US threats,
Mexican president calls for “national unity”
By Clodomiro Puentes
14 February 2017
14 February 2017
Last week, Enrique Peña Nieto issued a call for
“national unity” during a brief televised address. It was clearly a bid to
redirect social anger from the crisis-ridden PRI (Institutional Revolutionary
Party) government and deflect it onto to the Trump administration, which is
reviled in Mexico in roughly equal measure.
Referring obliquely to the telephone exchange in
which Trump thuggishly threatened to send troops into Mexico, Peña Nieto
recounted that, “Although we haven’t reached agreement on any issue, this
conversation opened a space for the Mexican government and the US government to
continue a dialogue.”
BLOG: WHAT COUNTRY DESERVES RESPECT WHICH EXPORTS THEIR POOR, CRIMINALS AND CARTELS TO LOOT AMERICA????
BLOG: WHAT COUNTRY DESERVES RESPECT WHICH EXPORTS THEIR POOR, CRIMINALS AND CARTELS TO LOOT AMERICA????
He said these “issues” included “national
sovereignty,” “respect of our dignity and independence” and “cooperation
between two countries that are neighbors, friends and allies in trade,” all of
which euphemistically point to the Trump administration’s intention to
renegotiate harsher terms for Mexico’s subordination to US imperialism.
Unmentioned in the address was the PRI’s
inability and unwillingness to do anything other than accede on every point of
substance relating to Trump’s proposed border wall, plans to carry out the
deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, the potential scrapping of
NAFTA and a more bellicose footing throughout the Americas on the pretext of
“national security,” all of which are of a piece with Washington’s
“America-first” strategy.
The Mexican president promised to provide over
one billion pesos in additional funding to the country’s consulates in the
United States in an effort to appear invested in the defense of immigrants of
Mexican origin against predatory US immigration policies. The Mexican
Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE) issued a statement last Friday urging
Mexican nationals living in the US to “take precautions and stay in contact
with their nearest consulate to obtain the necessary help,” citing the recent
deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos, a Mexican-born mother of two in
Arizona, whose deportation was “not deemed a priority” for ICE officials under
the Obama administration.
“The case of Mrs. Garcia de Rayos illustrates
the new reality that the Mexican community in US territory is living before the
severest application of migratory control measures,” the SRE explained. The
SRE’s recommendation and Peña Nieto’s measly influx of funds to Mexican
consulates is a fraud, given the PRI government’s broad cooperation with the
Obama administration’s 3 million deportations, and the Peña Nieto
administration’s own heavy-handed policing of its southern border with Central
America. The Trump administration’s policies represent not a break, but a
continuity and escalation of those pursued by his predecessor in the White
House.
The PRI government invocation of nationalism is
utterly cynical. It has followed Washington’s dictates slavishly in terms of
the raft of the counter-reforms dubbed the “Pact for Mexico,” in large part
engineered by Washington, including a privatization of the country’s energy
sector that was essentially cooked up by the State Department during Hillary
Clinton’s tenure.
The Mexican ruling elite finds itself in a weak
position, caught between the intransigence of the Trump administration, on the
one hand, and mounting social anger from its own population, on the other.
Peña’s nationalist appeal rings false to the
broad mass of the Mexican public, which has correctly taken his address for
what it is: a desperate effort to shore up public support for a despised and
discredited political establishment that extends beyond Peña himself and the
PRI government.
The popular reaction to Peña’s appeals stands in
stark contrast to that of Mexico’s ruling circles, which have rallied around
the slogan of “national unity,” while disagreeing over who will be its standard
bearer.
None other than Carlos Slim, the
fourth-wealthiest person in the world, insists on lining up firmly behind the
Peña Nieto administration. “We have to support him. The whole country must do
it before a special threat in relation to the US that we have not seen.” He
made his remarks days before the centenary of the 1917 Constitution,
demagogically invoking the historical memory of US intervention in the Mexican
Revolution. This nationalist bluster gives way to negotiating trade relations
with the Trump administration from its present position of weakness, with Slim
concluding that, “the best border wall is investment, economic activity and
employment opportunities in Mexico.”
Expressing the most minor tactical differences
with Slim, Miguel Angel Mancera, the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution)
mayor of Mexico City, stated, “It is the national unity of Mexicans, not
[national unity] with the government.” He continued, “The president has a vote
of confidence from a lot of people because he’s the one who has to represent
the country in a negotiation with Trump. But he has a mandate not to give in,
to go in with force and dignity. If the president were to err, then a very
unfavorable wave would sweep in. My proposal is not to give Mexico bad news.
There shouldn’t be another increase in the price of gasoline, for example.”
The social basis for the
embattled president’s “vote of confidence,” comes from within the Mexican
bourgeoisie itself, while the references to the possibility of an “unfavorable
wave” unless there are some paltry concessions in areas such as the
implementation of the gasolinazo point to a deep nervousness
within Mexican ruling circles.
On this point, it is unlikely that Peña’s recent
announcement postponing the next round of fuel price hikes by one week will do
anything to steer the Mexican political establishment out of the adverse
currents that so trouble Mancera.
The invocation of “national unity” flies in the
face of the deep social chasm that exists in Mexico. According to a recent
Oxfam report, the country’s four wealthiest billionaires control as much wealth
as the poorest half of the population. What’s more, the study points out that
the top 10 percent as a whole accounts for 67 percent of Mexico’s national
wealth.
“There can be no social cohesion with these
levels of concentration of wealth globally and nationally,” noted the director
of Oxfam Mexico, Ricardo Fuentes Nieva.
Nevertheless, the Mexican pseudo-left, whose
outlook has its material basis in the “next 9 percent,” also seeks to shackle
the Mexican working class to a regime of inequality on the basis of “national
unity.”
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (popularly known as
AMLO), head of Morena (Movement of National Regeneration) and the current
favorite in the 2018 presidential elections, is in fact the initiator of the
call for “national unity.” His recent statement, “Political Accord of Unity for
the Prosperity of the People and the Rebirth of Mexico,” repeats his ongoing
targeting of “the mafia in power,” while avoiding any mention of Mexico’s
relationship to US imperialism—indeed, he has gone on record as stating that
Obama, the president known as the deporter-in-chief, was “a good, but not
exceptional president.”
AMLO’s lenient attitude to the architects of the
miserable conditions facing the Mexican working class extends to the “mafia in
power” so often called out in his stump speeches. Last year he stated, “we do
not consider the members of the group in power, in spite of the great harm that
they have caused to the people and the country, to have any ill intention, and
we assure them, before their possible defeat in 2018, that there will be no
reprisals or persecutions of anyone.”
His frequently invoked promise to combat
corruption and “establish an authentic democracy” is contradicted by his
unwillingness to hold any of the political establishment legally accountable
for mass killings, disappearances and wholesale corruption. Beginning its
existence as a split from the PRD, Morena as a political party has its social
base not in the working class, but in the more privileged layers of the upper
middle class, with links to academics, professionals and trade union
bureaucrats.
The pseudo-left organization Izquierda
Socialista (Socialist Left) falsifies the historical origins and social base of
Morena, falsely portraying it as a workers’ party burdened by an opportunist
leadership: “We make a call to the base of Morena … to recuperate control of
the party … to demand respect for party democracy, to prevent Morena ending up
becoming another version of the PRD and the rest of the parties of the regime.”
It is an absurdity to speak of Morena, founded
by Lopez Obrador, a bourgeois politician, in terms of “recuperating” control
over the party by the working class. It only exposes Socialist Left’s own
orientation, which is not to the Mexican working class, but to Morena’s social
base in the upper middle class.
For its part, the Movement of Socialist Workers
(MTS), the Mexican section of the Morenoite FT-CI, counterposes to Izquierda
Socialista’s outright tailing behind Morena little else than a nationalist
course independent of Morena: “For the socialists of the MTS, the working
population must reject unity with our executioners ... The unity that
socialists propose is … [a] unity to achieve national independence.”
Characteristically for the MTS, the rest of the
world—particularly in terms of the international working class—is wholly absent
from its strategy. The glaring indifference to international questions of both
the MTS and Socialist Left is not merely a question of “mistaken” positions,
but a political strategy that is rooted in the strivings of the upper middle
class to maintain its privileged position within the capitalist system.
The interests of the Mexican working class
cannot be defended on the basis of a strategy of “national unity” that
presupposes a community of interest between workers and figures like Carlos
Slim. Mexican workers are economically linked and united in a production
process that stretches across national boundaries to the rest of the international
working class, and in particular the working class of the United States. To
effectively defend their social interests, this economic unity brought about by
capitalist globalization must be shaped into a political unity on the basis of
an internationalist and socialist program.
SOMEDAY IS HERE TODAY!
THE FALL OF AMERICA UNDER THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY FASCIST INVASION,
OCCUPATION AND LOOTING
As
economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants
impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of
dollars."
FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE:
MEXICO’S STAGGERING LOOTING IN OUR OPEN BORDERS….
ARIZONA…. MEXICAN
WORLD CAPITAL FOR LA RAZA CAR THEFT
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/frosty-wooldridge-what-if-hillary-gets.html
Here did those vehicles go? Who stole them? Take a guess. Arizona is the
temporary home of 500,000 illegal aliens. They cost Arizona taxpayers over $1
billion annually in services for schools, medical care, welfare anchor babies,
loss of tax base and prisons. Illegals use those vehicles for smuggling more
people and drugs from around the world into our country. When the vehicles are
recovered, they are smashed-up wrecks in the desert. If not found, they have
new owners south of the border as thieves drive the cars through the desert and
into Mexico as easily as you drive your kids to soccer practice. THAT’S how
porous our borders are!
THE INVADING CRIMINALS: A county by county chart:
OBAMA’S INVASION OF ILLEGALS IS WORKING!
They’re
already signed up to vote LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEM!
“According to Immigration and Customers Enforcement data
first obtained by the Associated Press this week, about 70 percent of the
40,000 migrant family members arrested at the border since May did not follow
up their arrest with a necessary visit to an immigration office.”
MEXICANS ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA,
XAVIER BECERRA AND
KEVIN de Leon and
ethnic cleansing of
NON-HISPANICS from
California prior to annexation by Mexico.
THE REAL FACE OF CALIFORNIA UNDER MEXICAN
OCCUPATION:
“The California-Mexico border
would surely be opened wide, prompting a spike in unfettered immigration by
desperately poor people, drug dealers, and gang members to what is already a
virtually lawless and out-of-control welfare state.”
THE LA RAZA MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
BEFORE AND AFTER BARACK OBAMA’S 8 YEARS OF SABOTAGE
OF AMERICAN’S HOMELAND SECURITY
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