The other face of the PAN. |
While it is good the stranglehold of PRI has been broken, and the PAN
congratulated for its contribution to breaking that stranglehold, it
is only the beginning of the development of a proper democracy in
Mexico. From this article, the PAN does not herald that development,
at least not in Baja California.
THE NEW INDIAN FACE OF INSURGENT POLITICS IN BAJA CALIFORNIA
By David Bacon
THE VALLEY OF SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA (7/3/00) - If you
think the National Action Party, which won Sunday's national
presidential election in Mexico, represents political
change, look no further than Baja California, where it has
governed for ten years.
Just eight months ago, 38-year old Celerino Garcia and his
older brother were sitting in a jail cell, arrested by Baja
California's PAN authorities on trumped up charges of
illegally taking land. Today Garcia, not the PAN, is the new
face of politics in Baja California. It is a face with the
angular lines and dark complexion of the native Mixtec
people of the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca.
The village where Garcia was born, San Juan Mixtepec, sits
in the heart of a hilly region that in many ways was never
completely colonized by the Spaniards centuries ago. Both
Mixtecs, and their neighboring Zapotecs, preserved their
native pre-Columbian languages and many of their customs,
setting them apart from the Mexican mainstream. Today many
Mexicans still scornfully refer to these indigenous people
as "oaxacitas," or "little Oaxacans." Discrimination against
them is widespread.
Garcia and his brother Benito joined the great exodus of
Mixtecs and Zapotecs from their ancestral villages, forced
by poverty to seek jobs as migrant farm laborers in northern
Mexico. They arrived in the dusty farm town of San Quintin,
three hours south of the U.S. border, where a tiny coterie
of wealthy growers own almost all the land from the ocean to
the mountains, and plant their extensive fields with
tomatoes and strawberries for the U.S. market.
The brothers were more than just workers, however. They
quickly became organizers, demanding conditions for their
people better than the starvation wages and debt-driven
servitude they found in the fields. "For the last twelve
years, we've been trying to organize an independent union,"
Celerino Garcia explains. "But any act of protest here to
win our rights is met with repression." The brothers'
efforts made the two of them well-known personalities.
Celerino became even better-known when he began telling the
valley's farm laborers about their rights in the native
Mixtec language, on the town's tiny radio station, XEQIN.
Their efforts didn't make the Garcias popular with the
growers, however. In Baja California, the misery of Mixtec
and Zapotec migrant workers has been a national symbol of
social discrimination for decades. This year, for the first
time, a Mixtec has been running for the Mexican Federal
Chamber of Deputies. Garcia's candidacy, on the slate of the
left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution, is part of a
rising from below. Indios in Baja are giving notice that
they will no longer be treated as political nonentities.
But his campaign is more than that.
Garcia's campaign is the above-ground, visible tip of a
struggle for political change with roots far deeper. From
Tijuana south down the peninsula, social movements are
coalescing into a progressive power base. That base shows
every sign of transforming the Baja California political
landscape, and is spilling across the U.S. Mexico border
into California as well.
It is a different political transformation than the one
chronicled this week by the mainstream press in both Mexico
and the United States. Their attention is focused on Vicente
Fox, the national presidential candidate of the National
Action Party (PAN), which unseated Mexico's ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for the first time
in its history.
But to Garcia, "the PAN here is no different than the PRI.
If anything, it's worse." The decade of PAN rule in Baja
California has been an era, the brothers charge, been marked
by political repression, unfettered capitalism and an
abdication of any responsibility for social justice towards
the poor.
While the Mexican press presents Fox, a Coca-Cola executive,
as a new democratic alternative to the old PRI, which has
governed Mexico for 70 years, the migrants from the south
who live in Baja don't expect much change. "The PAN's
policies here are the same as the PRI's," asserts Ramiro
Orea, a PRD organizer in Ensenada. "They both rely on our
low wages to provide an incentive to foreign investors in
the maquiladoras, or to keep our agricultural exports cheap.
Anytime we try to change that, the government sees us as a
threat and intervenes to try to stop us. If people in the
U.S. think that Vicente Fox is going to bring about a change
of policy here in Mexico, just look at what his party does
here in Baja."
The election has tested the new Baja alliance's power to
challenge the barriers to the political participation of
people on the bottom. "People who still have homes in Oaxaca
have to vote in special places, often many kilometers from
where they're staying, and the ballots there ran out with
dozens of people still in line," Celerino Garcia explains.
"They lose a whole day of work when they vote, and this year
ranchers offered to pay them twice the day's pay if they
worked instead. When workers did vote in past elections,
some were fired for that alone, because the ranchers know
without asking which party they were voting for. We know
they were threatened again this time. And in at least one
workers' neighborhood here, Lazaro Cardenas, the PRI brought
in over 200 ineligible people to vote."
The PRD's national standard-bearer, presidential candidate
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, came in third in Sunday's national
election. And Garcia won't become a deputy in Mexico City
this term either, finishing third behind the PAN and PRI.
But writing off the PRD here would be a big mistake.
The arrest of the two brothers highlights the impact of
demographic changes sweeping the peninsula. Until the 1960s,
Baja California Norte was a desert state with a small
population. But in the wake of the end of the bracero
program in 1964, maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories)
began to proliferate in Tijuana, eventually drawing hundreds
of thousands of workers up to the border.
Further south down the peninsula, San Quintin's growers also
looked north, developing an agro-industrial empire supplying
produce for the U.S. market. To bring in their crops,
thousands of workers migrated every year from extremely poor
indigenous communities in Oaxaca and other states of
southern Mexico.
Wages in San Quintin were kept low to make the valley's
strawberries and tomatoes cheaper in New York and Los
Angeles. "Today the minimum wage here is 37.4 pesos a day
(about $4)," says Domiciano Lopez, a local community
organizer. "While some workers can earn twice that much in
the fields, a kilo of meat costs 38 pesos in the local
market - half a day to a day's wages. That means families
here eat meat once a month."
At first, Mixtec and Zapotec families lived in labor camps,
and returned to their homes at the end of each harvest
season. But as the years went by, many decided to stay in
the valley. As the permanent population grew, so did
discontent. In 1988, over a thousand tomato and strawberry
pickers struck to win better wages. Their efforts to form an
independent union were broken, however, and the strike's
leaders fled to the U.S.
"We've been trying to gain a registro (government legal
recognition) since 1984, but we've always been denied, first
by the PRI, and then the PAN," says Julio Cesar Alonzo, an
organizer for the Independent Confederation of Farm Workers
and Peasants (CIOAC), in which the Garcia brothers are also
active.
With more workers settling in San Quintin, the pressure for
housing in the valley's small towns escalated, as families
tried to escape the miserable conditions in the camps.
"Over 20,000 of us here in San Quintin have no property,"
Garcia says. "We've always had to live in the camps. So we
made a proposal to the state - that they set aside an area
of 50 hectares, which we would divide and develop for
workers. But the PAN refused to do this. In their eyes,
we're strangers. They just want us to work to make the
ranchers wealthy, and then go back to Oaxaca."
In San Quintin, as in Ensenada and other peninsula towns,
the local PAN government has its own program for selling
land for new homes. But farm laborers say they can't afford
the price and the interest rates. So the CIOAC organized the
workers and pooled their money. They found an older woman in
the local community who still had some land of her own, and
they bought it.
San Quintin's tiny coterie of big landowners were already
nervous. One of the local companies, facing financial
problems, had failed to pay its workers for four weeks. When
its owners, the Canelos family, didn't come up with the
money, an angry crowd of pickers set fire to their ABC
packing shed.
Fear of labor unrest was compounded by new fears of losing
political control.
While 60% of the valley's population consists of migrants,
in past years they never voted in local elections because
they still officially resided in their home towns in Oaxaca.
By settling down in San Quintin, however, these workers
potentially might become an indigenous voting majority in
the valley, upsetting the political structure long-dominated
by the growers. To head it off, police moved in. Local
authorities ignored the documents showing the land had been
bought legally, and instead accused the Garcias of illegally
occupying it. The two were sent to jail.
According to Celerino Garcia, "here in San Quintin, the
government associates the movement for indigenous rights
with the movement to organize a union, They thought putting
me and Benito in jail would stop us, but the opposite
happened. People got angry and our movement got bigger."
CIOAC's political allies in other Baja cities began
organizing demonstrations and marches. For two days, crowds
of protestors sat-in at state government offices in San
Quentin, Ensenada and Tijuana. Celerino and Benito were
released, but others were then arrested for the sit-ins.
The fight over land in San Quintin wasn't the first in Baja.
The influx of hundreds of thousand of people from southern
Mexico, heading towards the border in search of work, has
produced immense pressure for land and housing. The PAN
state government has done almost nothing to provide it in an
affordable way.
While the state set up an agency in 1987 to sell land to
barrio residents to build houses, Ensenada's Ramiro Orea
says it charges prices most can't afford, and high interest
on its loans. When people get together to buy land of their
own at lower prices, as they did in San Quintin and are now
doing in Ensenada as well, the state tries to stop them,
fearing competition.
Further north in Tijuana, maquiladora workers have also
struggled to find the land on which to build homes. There
the CIOAC organized maquiladora workers to take over vacant
land and form the neighborhood of Maclovio Rojas a decade
ago. Since then, as in San Quintin, residents have faced the
hostility of the state government. Barrio leader Hortensia
Hernandez was jailed twice, the last time for over 2 months
in 1997, when a group of neighboring ranchers, backed by
government officials, contested the land's title.
"For poor people - workers, people in the barrios - the
state has refused to budget money for social services," Orea
explains. "We have terrible problems of lack of housing in
Baja. In the colonias for workers, dirt streets turn to mud
when it rains, and in many neighborhoods there are no
sewers, running water or electricity. Getting any of these
services requires a big fight. So that's what we do. We
fight."
Common struggles over land and housing, like those Orea
describes, have become the magnet pulling together the
social movements of the poor in different Baja cities,
"We've came together to oppose the policies of the PAN state
government," he explains.
In addition to housing organizations, this new statewide
network also includes independent unions - the October 6
union organized by maquiladora workers in Tijuana and a
union for street sellers in Ensenada.
Two years members of the Tijuana union struck the Han Young
factory, which produces truck bodies for Hyundai, in the
border's first legal walkout by maquiladora workers. Since
then Baja's PAN government has defied a succession of
Federal court orders which upheld the legality of the union
and its strike. Not only have authorities brought in police
and strikebreakers to break it, but strikers and their
supporters were beaten a week ago in front of state and
federal labor officials by government-affiliated union
thugs.
In Ensenada, Ramiro Orea and Armando Reyes helped
streetsellers who hawk souvenirs and craft items to tourists
on the waterfront to leave another government-affiliated
union and form a similar independent organization. Sellers
were unhappy because the old organization had charged them
numerous fees, but failed to protect them against the
police, who tried to run them off of the streets. "
Every day some of us were getting arrested," says Filiberto
Delgado, one of the sellers. "Only the PRD tried to help us,
proposing to the city that we get permanent places to sell
our goods, so we'll be secure and safe."
Delgado, like many sellers, has his three children with him
when they're not in school. "I don't let them work, but I
don't have money to pay for childcare either," he says, "so
here they are, suffering the heat and thirst on the streets
along with me." When the police would pick him up, other
sellers or friends would have to grab the children and take
care of them until he returned.
"It's a bad life, but we make it good," he says.
In Ensenada, the PRD is based among the streetsellers, and
in the poor barrios on the hills which ring the city. Only
one of city's thirteen city councilmembers belongs to the
PRD, although the party's vote has grown in each of the past
two elections. If the state PAN government hadn't changed
the election laws two years ago, the PRD would have had two
council members for their current 15% of the vote, and Orea
would be one of them.
Together these housing groups and unions make up ENFOCA, the
Power Network of Citizens, Workers and Farm Laborers. This
network provides the popular base for the growth of the
Party of the Democratic Revolution in Baja California.
When Celerino and Benito Garcia were arrested in San
Quentin, ENFOCA's network up and down the peninsula came
together to mount the demonstrations which eventually freed
them. The actions marked the organization's first attempt to
operate on a statewide level.
The defense effort even spread north across the border, to a
radio station in El Centro, in California's Imperial Valley.
There Filemon Lopez, a Mixtec like Celerino Garcia, hosts a
radio show called "The Mixtec Hour." Lopez became the
coordinator of the International Network of Oaxacan
Indigenous People, and used his access to the airwaves to
alert the thousands of Oaxacans living in the Imperial and
Central Valleys to the crisis in San Quintin. People
responded by deluging the Baja California governor with
letters and faxes, demanding the Garcia brothers' release.
Oaxacans in California, Washington state, and other states
maintain a close network of families and people from the
same towns back home. That network mobilized many Oaxacans
living in the U.S. to come to the border, to cast their
votes for the PRD. Although Mexican law permits its citizens
to cast votes outside the country, the PRI government has
never created a system for doing that, fearing that most
would cast votes for the opposition. "We're helping Oaxacans
to organize in all the places we find ourselves," Lopez
says. "Being discriminated against because of being
indigenous, and having our labor rights violated, has forced
us to get better organized."
Another indigenous leader, Sergio Mendez of the Binational
Indigenous Oaxacan Front, declares angrily that while "San
Diego is the most racist area of California, the indignities
which our brothers are subjected to there don't compare to
those they suffer here, where the government says its on
our side." Mendez' anger was fueled by Fox's campaign
proposal that Mexicans be trained to do gardener jobs in Los
Angeles. "We aren't animals to be exported," he declared
angrily. "Although we're exploited and treated like slaves,
we know how to think for ourselves."
Whether in California or in Baja, the organization of
Oaxacan communities in exile is destined to play a key role
in reshaping local politics. In San Quintin, while farm
workers made up 18% of the vote recorded in the previous
election according to CIOAC, Garcia says this year it almost
doubled to 32%. Although in the district as a whole he came
in third, in some precincts in the San Quintin Valley the
PRD won a majority. While it may take some time for detailed
figures to be released, it is clear that the organization
which produced those votes, and those of indigenous people,
workers and barrio residents elsewhere on the peninsula, is
growing.
"This election gives us a base for 2001 - it's the best the
PRD has ever done in this state," he announced.
Political change is in the wind in Baja California. But it's
not coming from a PAN victory in Mexico City. And if it
didn't overturn the state's power structure in this
election, it will clearly provide the vehicle for serious
challenges to it in the years to come.
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