Democracy, But More

Compromise or no, in the eyes of millions of Mexicans, Lopez Obrador represents a chance to scrap the present economic policies of Fox’s National Action Party. Despite being lauded as the party that broke the 71-year stranglehold of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the PAN strategy of basing economic development on privatization and foreign investment is indistinguishable from the PRI before it. Both parties’ austerity policies have held wages down and discouraged independent union organization, while opening Mexico to imports from the U.S. The flood of cheap corn—a staple crop of millions of small Mexican farmers—has multiplied by 15 times during the 12 years the North American Free Trade Agreement has been in effect. As a result, income has declined over the last two decades. 

The government estimates that 40 of the country’s 104.5 million people live in poverty, 25 million in extreme poverty. 

Mexico has become an exporter both of the goods made by low- wage labor in foreign-owned border factories and of labor itself, as millions of people cross that border looking for work in the north. 

The march of a million Mexicans is a clear demonstration that movements protesting those policies are growing. According to Alvarez, “The social movements of the last two years have been, in the countryside, openly against NAFTA, and in the city, against privatization and the dismantling of the welfare state.” This is the upsurge in popular sentiment that Lopez Obrador hopes to ride into office and the reason why he represents such a problem, not just for Fox, but for the Bush administration as well. Mexico, under the impetus of this movement, will go in the direction of Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and even Venezuela—rejecting the “free trade” model and economic control from Washington. 

“What people want is justice,” says Rufino Dominguez, coordinator of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, a group that organizes indigenous people both in their home communities in Mexico, and as the latest and largest wave of migrants coming to the U.S. “To us, democracy means more than elections. It means economic stability—our capacity to make a living in Mexico, without having to migrate. It means a halt to the continued violation of human rights in our communities. It means having a government that attends to the needs of the people. We’re tired of governments which put other interests first.” 

No one understands the price of corporate trade policies better than those who have paid them, leaving their homes and traveling thousands of miles in search of work. “We know the reasons we have to leave,” Dominguez asserts. “Over 5,000 of us have died trying to cross the border....” 

The Frente’s leader in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca, Juan Romualdo Gutierrez Cortez, an elementary school teacher, emphasizes that “migration is a necessity, not a choice—there is no work here. Education is linked to development. You can’t tell a child to study to be a doctor if there is no work for doctors in Mexico. It is a very daunting task for a Mexican teacher to convince students to get an education and stay in the country. Children learn by example. If a student sees his older brother migrate to the United States, build a house and buy a car, he will follow.” 

Integrating Mexico’s exile population into the country’s political process is a fundamental part of its movement for democracy. 

According to Jesus Martinez, a professor at California State University in Fresno, “Mexico has undergone a process of democratic transformation since the 1980s, but it is still incomplete. Mexicans living abroad, who represent 16 percent of the electorate, still have not been granted the right to vote. That’s part of the inclusion that has to take place.” 

Mexico’s exile population is excluded from the political process that governs peoples’ lives in the U.S. as well. Undocumented migrants (estimated at over 4 million people) are excluded from all U.S. social benefit programs. The U.S. Congress recently decided to make obtaining a drivers license almost impossible. Even the act of working is a federal crime, despite the fact that big sections of the U.S. economy are totally dependent on migrant labor. 

Legal or not, Mexican migrants cannot vote to choose the political representatives who decide basic questions of wages and conditions at work, the education of their children, their healthcare or lack of it, and even whether they can walk the streets without fear of arrest and deportation. 

Although excluded from the U.S. electorate, popular pressure to guarantee migrants the right to vote in Mexican elections has been growing for two decades. Last year, Martinez was elected a deputy to the Michoacan state legislature, representing his state’s residents living abroad. He was a candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the party of Lopez Obrador. “In Michoacan, we’re trying to carry out reforms that can do justice to the role migrants play in our lives,” Martinez says. “We have the most pro-immigrant governor in the state’s history, who has finally treated migrant concerns as a priority.” 

On a national level, however, the PAN and PRI have resisted change, while simultaneously claiming interest in the vote of Mexicans living abroad. Fox and the PAN congratulate migrants for sending home remittances to their families, which last year totaled $17 billion. This money now sustains entire communities, easing pressure on the government to find funding for education, health care, social services, and economic development. Employers in the U.S. likewise find the present system convenient, since they have no obligation to pay the cost of maintaining the communities from which their workers come. 

But convenience comes at a price. The Mexico-based political machines that produced the votes that have kept the PRI in power for decades, and which now support the PAN as well, have little influence or control over the votes of people living thousands of miles away in another country entirely. Mexicans living in the U.S. have little reason to be loyal to a political class that created the conditions forcing them to emigrate. 

PRI and PAN control the national congress and, while they voted over a decade ago to permit Mexicans in the U.S. to vote, they only set up a system to implement that decision at the end of April. 

It is a very limited implementation. Voters will require credentials that can only be obtained in their home communities and will only be able to vote by mail beginning in 2006. Some observers believe that of the 9.2 million Mexicans living in the U.S., fewer than half a million will actually cast ballots. 

“It is limited,” concedes Dominguez, “but it is the fruit of many years of fighting by organizations here in the U.S. It’s not all we wanted, but it’s a beginning. And most important, now that they’ve passed the law and started to create a process, there’s no going back.” 

Dominguez believes that in a close election, barring fraud, the votes of 500,000 people could determine Mexico’s next president. This prospect is as frightening to both PRI and PAN as the candidacy of Lopez Obrador. Not only might there be a candidate proposing a change in Mexico’s direction, but a sizable number of people with good reasons for voting for him.