Marcos: With Calderón, Anyone Is Within the Military Machine’s Sights

[From: detodos-paratodos.blogspot.com]

by: JESUS NARVAEZ ROBLES

Tepic, Nayarit, May 28, 2007.

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s government not only is preparing to unleash selective repression against social strugglers and popular movements, but anyone who “is in the military machine’s sights,” asserted Subcomandante Marcos here. Upon presenting “some reflections realized during the second stage of the Other Campaign in the country’s north,” Marcos warned that “taking the Mexican Army out of its barracks is easy, but returning it to the ambit to which it corresponds is not so simple, because it behaves as before an enemy, not before its fellow citizens.”

In a recap of “the situation of labor, of exploitation and repression” which reins in Mexico, Marcos warned: “The Calderón government’s dispositions and actions confirm the analysis that we have made since the middle of 2005: the country is on the path to a social explosion and in the face of that four alternatives present themselves: 1) Calderón’s, which is the use of indiscriminate force, the alternative of massive repression; 2) gradual control and demobilizing, in other words that of the forces that point towards 2012 for an orderly change and a change without rupture; 3) that of chaos and civil war; and, finally, 4) that of an organized alternative, anticapitalist and to the Left, by the organizations, groups, collectives, families and individuals of the Other Campaign.”

After pointing out that currently “olive green is in style and it is singing praises to an Army fulfilling the work of internal police, violating fundamental laws and internal regulations,” Marcos indicated that “a view with the minimum of criticism is enough to realize that the Mexican political system is dead, unstable and without a solid frame of reference.

“The national situation is a catastrophe; the economy has been abandoned to the ups and downs of the international market; social security is a pile of wreckage in the wind; public education is a poor imitation of the courses of personal and corporate excellence; cultural politics is a section many times assigned to a corner in the social pages; public health is a dirty, slovenly, inefficient commercial center, whose business debates between trademarks and generics. Nothing of what was the spinal column of the national state remains standing,” he said.

He added: “The Mexican political class thought that it was only trying to enter to relieve the PRI in the administration and sale of the horn of plenty called Mexico, and it didn’t turn out that way, that what tumbled together with the PRI hegemony was something else. What happened there above, in national politics, is only a pale reflection of what happened and happens at the basis of the nation State in Mexico. The Mexican political system’s former unwritten rules crumbled, among them that which was fundamental: that of presidential succession.

“That national tradition called cover up no longer exists, and these are times that run without even the minimum political oxygen (breathing room) that permitted Vicente Fox to survive initially as ruler. Felipe Calderón sees with desperation that he does not carry his own party along with him. His effective mandate ended when he abandoned the Congress of the Union like a criminal, after that accidental taking of power.

The media’s power was insufficient

“Being sustained in the mass media was not sufficient and, by what one sees, neither is filling the cities and streets with soldiers. Thus, the presidential highway has been initiated and the aspirants are practically defined: Marcelo Ebrard and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for the PRD or for the new party they are forming; Enrique Peña Nieto and Beatriz Paredes, for the rubble called the PRI, besides Martha Sahagún, in ways of reappearing, for the PAN and a Francisco Ramírez Acuña who appears more vigilant of prison than of political office,” Marcos indicated.

He added that “the political class’ enthusiasm for that unsustainable farce of the struggle against drug trafficking, which we all know is no more than the Los Pinos cartel’s struggle to take possession of everything, hides two things: the criminalization of the social struggle which permits them to control the limits of power that they maintain, and the media attention about the bloody acts of that war lost from its beginning, which permits the politicians to measure the impact that the heavy hand has in the polls.”

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Translation: Mary Ann Tenuto-Sánchez