Angry Women Close Congress – in Mexico
By John
Ross
Mexico City - “The Adelitas
have arrived/To defend our oil/Whoever wants to give it to the foreigners/Will
get the shit kicked out of him!” yodeled the brigades of women pouring
onto the esplanade of the Mexican senate to protest a petroleum privatization
measure President Felipe Calderón insists is not a petroleum privatization
measure and which he sent on to the Senate for fast-track ratification at the
tag end of the winter-spring session this April.
Inside the small, ornate Senate, leftist
legislators aligned in the Broad Progressive Front (FAP), some dressed in white
oil workers overalls and hard hats, were camped out under pup tents arranged
around the podium, paralyzing legislative activities and demanding an ample
national debate on Calderón’s not-so-veiled plans to open up the
nationalized petroleum corporation PEMEX to transnational
investment.
The Broad Progressive
Front, the legislative coalition that also leads a popular movement opposed to
the proposed reform of the country’s energy sector, ended a 16-day
take-over of the Mexican Congress on April 25.
The FAP claimed to have achieved three
objectives through its occupation of the Congress. First, it had prevented the
Calderón government from rushing the bills through Congress. Second, it has
won an agreement to a 71-day debate over the proposed legislation. Third, it had
alerted Mexican society to the dangers inherent in the proposed
legislation.
Fear of a Secret
Vote
The hullabaloo, which has been
brewing for months, exploded when rumors circulated that Calderón’s
right-wing PAN party and allies in the once-ruling (71 years) PRI had cooked up
a secret vote approving the privatization measure - such covert maneuvering is
called an “albazo” or “madruguete” here, a pre-dawn ruse
to approve legislation in the dark when there is significant opposition, often
behind locked doors and military and police barricades. Seizing the podiums in
both houses of congress and the timely arrival of the Adelitas prevented a
madruguete and derailed Calderón’s plans to fast-track the
privatization of PEMEX.
Under the
President’s “energy reform” package, building and operating
refineries and pipelines will be opened up to the private sector - 37 out of
PEMEX’s 41 divisions would be subject to partial privatization. One
example: a modified form of “risk” contract, which relegates a
percentage of the petroleum brought in to the private driller, and which is
outlawed under Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, would become the law of
the land.
In an analysis
anti-privatizers label “catastrophic” which Calderón sent on to
congress to back up his initiative, the President pinned salvation of PEMEX on
deep water (“aguas profundas”) drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that
would necessitate the “association” of private
capital.
The
Adelitas
Mexico’s petroleum
industry was expropriated from an array of oil companies known collectively as
the “Seven Sisters” in March 1938 by then-President Lazaro Cardenas,
an act that remains a paragon of revolutionary nationalism throughout Latin
America. But down the decades, PEMEX has subcontracted out important parts of
its structure - the Exploration or PEP division in particular - to transnational
drillers and service corporations like Halliburton, now its number one
subcontractor, that suck billions of dollar in profits from Mexican oil each
year.
The appearance of the Adelitas
and their male counterparts (“Los Adelitos”) is the latest gamble by
the left populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) who many
Mexicans feel was defrauded out of the presidency by Calderón in tainted
2006 elections, to monkey wrench the right-wing government’s plans to
return PEMEX to the contemporary version of the Seven Sisters. The PAN was
indeed founded in 1939 to oppose Cárdenas’s nationalization of the
oil industry.
Organized by
neighborhoods and by workplaces, the Adelita brigades are the lineal descendants
of the groups of anguished AMLO supporters who came together after the stolen
2006 election in a seven-week sit-in that shut down the capital’s main
thoroughfares. At last count, there were 41 registered brigades - 28 Adelitas
and 13 Adelitos, about 50,000 citizens in all. Operating in shifts, 13,000
“brigadistas” have been encamped off and on for a week in front of
the Senate and the Chamber of
Deputies.
Passive Resistance: Not One
Window Broken
The creation of so large
a citizens’ army pledged to carry out civil disobedience to prevent the
passage of legislation it thinks detrimental to the republic is unprecedented in
Mexico’s political history. As thousands sat down in the street to block
the automobiles of PAN and PRI senators from entering the precinct, AMLO, who
often cites Dr. King and Gandhi as role models, urged non-violence: “not
one window broken, not one stone
thrown.”
“Tienen miedo
porque no tenemos miedo!” the Adelitas sang back in a call and response
that is always a feature of López Obrador’s mobilizations,
“They are frightened because we are not
afraid.”
Similar brigades, led by
women, have invaded local congresses outside of Mexico City and one band of
activists closed Acapulco’s busy airport last week. Shutting down Mexico
City’s Benito Juárez International Airport is the Adelitas’
ultimate threat.
The Adelitas, like
most of the weapons in AMLO’s arsenal, are drawn from Mexico’s
revolutionary history. Las Adelitas were “soldaderas” or women
soldiers who fought shoulder to shoulder with the men in Pancho Villa’s
“División del Norte” (Northern Division) during the 1910-1919
revolution. With their long skirts, broad sombreros, bandoleers strung across
their chests, and toting .22 carbines, the Adelitas were emblematic of the many
courageous women who participated in that epic struggle. The first Adelita is
thought to have been Adelita Velarde, a nurse from Ciudad Juárez,
Chihuahua.
Fighting
ASPAN
AMLO’s crusade has not been
confined to one house of congress. On April 8, when the President sprung his
initiative on the legislature, FAP members stormed the tribune in the Chamber of
Deputies (Mexico’s version of the U.S. House of Representatives) while
lawmakers were preparing to grant Calderón permission to travel to New
Orleans for the April 21-22 summit of the ASPAN (The North American Security and
Prosperity Agreement) - Mexican presidents must solicit congress for permission
to travel.
ASPAN is a corollary of
NAFTA that projects North American security and energy integration and
Calderón was eager to attend the summit with the re-privatization of
Mexican oil in hand.
Suddenly, the
FAPOs unfurled a 60-foot banner that announced Congress had been closed
(“Clausurado”) and cast it over the entire presidium, trapping
president Ruth Zavaleta, who occupies Nancy Pelosi’s position in the
Mexican house, in its folds. Struggling to free herself of the fabric, Zavaleta
reappeared with her gavel in hand but the ensuing chaos prevented her from
calling for a vote on the President’s travel
arrangements.
Days later, the tribune
was still draped in the banner and FAP deputies had chained shut the doors of
the chamber and moved the desks of the PAN legislators to the podium to
barricade themselves from attempts to take it back.
Media Spots: AMLO =
Hitler
Despite a vicious anti-AMLO
media blitz - or perhaps because of it - Lopez Obrador remains the only figure
on the Mexican political stage who is able to convoke tens of thousands of
supporters, often with virtually no notice.
Although Calderón’s scam to
fast track privatization through congress was blunted by the Adelitas and the
FAPs, the PAN and the PRI - the latter a repository of seven decades of dirty
tricks - still have plenty of room in which to connive. Now the PRI, seconded by
Calderón’s right-wing minions, proposes an uninterrupted 50 day
“national” debate to be restricted to the two houses of congress
with a congressional vote by mid-summer. Calderón’s initiative can
only pass if at least half of the PRI’s 120-vote delegation goes along
with the game.
Even if the
privatization measure eventually passes, the legislation is bound to wind up in
the Mexican Supreme Court the moment it clears congress. Ironically, the Supreme
Court was the instrument by which Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry in
the first place.
Demanding a Debate and
Referendum
Meanwhile, López
Obrador’s people are clamoring for a very different kind of debate, one
that would unfold over the next four months - 120 days - and be conducted inside
and outside congress in every state and municipality in the country with the
prospect of a national referendum in the fall to decide the issue - one poll has
62% of those questioned opposed to the privatization of Mexico’s oil. Such
grassroots decision-making would be a revolutionary strophe here in the land of
the “albazo” and the
“madruguete.”
Out on the
esplanade of the Senate, the Adelitas were shaking their boodies to “La
Cumbia del Petrolio.” There were enough pink “gorras”
(baseball caps), pink hankies, and pink parasols that read “Defend Our
Oil” to make Code Pink blush. Brigadista Berta Robledo, a nurse about to
retire from the National Pediatric Hospital, hugged a blade of shade under the
punishing mid-day sun.
“Are you
tired, compañeras?” the compañera with the bullhorn asked and
Berta came to her feet with a loud “No!” “Sure the sun is hot
but so what?” she responded to a gringo reporter’s stupid question,
“the sun can’t stop us, the rain can’t stop us, the cold
can’t stop us and you know why? Because we are right! We are fighting for
our oil and for our country. This is the resistance. We don’t get
tired.”
John Ross is at home
in the belly of the Monstruo writing a book about the belly of the
Monstruo.
Posted: Thu - May 1, 2008 at 07:13 PM
