The war that most interests Peña Nieto

Víctor M. Quintana S.

11/05/2014

Opinión

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The government of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) declared war on drug trafficking. The war still continues, and has cost more than one hundred thousand deaths. His successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, has continued the war without changing it, but the war that he is really interested in is not this one. His war is the offensive on various fronts that he has unleashed in benefit of a few and against the rights of all.

Beginning with the prolongation of Calderon’s battle, it is evident that homicidal violence has rallied in various parts of the country. En Tamaulipas – a state “that is putrifying” according to one reader of La Jornada – has already seen several weeks of massacres and blockades. In Morelos, the wave of criminal violence has just assassinated the coordinator of Social Work of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos and his wife. In the State of Mexico, in Michoacán, in Jalisco, in Guerrero, in Chihuahua, the cartels are reorganizing, disputing new spaces, making new perverse alliances, showing that the federal strategy in its diverse forms, operations, coordination, etc. etc., have not really touched them in their lines of survival. But, we must insist, this is not the principal war of Peña Nieto.

The interest of Peña and his allies is to strengthen and increase the power of money everywhere. It is to ensure that in questions of infrastructure, energy, telecommunications, tourism, wages, the benefit of those who hold this power prevails over the rights of the majority.

Those who struggle to defend human rights and their territory are criminalized and deprived of freedom. There is a formal and informal assault on the communities and university students who struggle against the gas pipeline that will impact the states of Morelos, Tlaxcala and Puebla. There is open combat against the community policies of Guerrero who attempt to defend themselves against the invasion and devastation of Canadian mining companies.

There is also a systematic attack on anything that has to do with the Nation’s assets. Transnational interests take advantage of the legislature, PRI, PAN and their allies to impose their law and widen the loophole opened by the constitutional reform to open the way for mining and gas companies. As if this were not enough, they move against the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE) and Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), in order to starve them to death.

In the area of telecommunications, secondary legislation opens the way in benefit of the television oligopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca, against the rights of audiences, of the public, of communities.

There is a merciless offensive against tens of thousands of Central American migrants, who are hassled and gaoled. In 13 months, 74 thousand have been deported. But there is complete silence and submission over the eleven hundred of our compatriots deported daily from the United States in similar conditions.

Family economy also suffers a continuous wave of attacks. Everyone sees this, except those who enjoy, elaborate and impose economic policies. Wages are at the lowest level in 28 years; the OECD points out that 18.5% of Mexican workers cannot live on their wages, the highest percentage cited by this organization, and that in Mexico buying a month’s meagre basic rations takes thirteen days work. The National Association of Departmental Shops complains of the collapse of sales in the supermarkets. Growth expectations fall daily, the year started at some 4% and now hardly reaches 3.4%. But there is no mention of any wage increase and the monthly rise of gasoline prices will continue until 2019. Worse still, and cruder than the preaching of those who used to promise heaven in exchange for suffering and submission on earth, is the Peñanietista litany of “suffering now” to enjoy the benefit of structural reforms that appear ever smaller and further away.

Internal consumption is falling, increasing insecurity for people. This matters little, as long as profits are not endangered.

In any war, the strongest fight to impose their laws, their treaties. In this one, whose visible leader is Peña Nieto, there is no question of constitutional reforms or secondary legislation. What they want above anything else is to establish, by blood and fire, the primary law, the unique law of profit and money.

Unfortunately this war is not simply metaphorical. The wave of destruction is more than real: communities torn apart, the environment devastated, natural resources looted, jobs lost, wages cut, prisoners, deaths, exiles.

Against this globalized war of profit against legal rights, as Alain Touraine has noted, we can only set moral principle that goes beyond ideology. On these principles we must base our resistance.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

-Víctor M. Quintana S. is an advisor for the Frente Democrático Campesino of Chihahua and a Researcher/Professor in the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez.

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