Proceso: Jesús Cantú
Whenever Mexican governments have clearly and openly allied with big business, they have generated social explosions of different sizes and characteristics, but always at a cost of human lives and social and political stability. In the sixties and seventies, this caused the 1968 student movement and the emergence of guerrilla groups, first rural ones and urban ones later on. In the nineties, there was the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
The cumulative impact of all these movements in the construction of Mexico's political institutions has not been minor. Everyone recognizes that the beginning of the process of political liberalization with the electoral reform of 1977 had, among its other motivations, the opening of legal paths so the disagreements of the guerrillas could be expressed by these routes. Nor can the influence that the Zapatista uprising had on the electoral reforms of 1994 and 1996 be ignored.
The last months of the PAN government of Felipe Calderon and the early ones of Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI are clearly marked by the effort to revive the so-called structural reforms, which basically involves aligning Mexican law with requirements of the neoliberalism that has prevailed since the early eighties and in Mexico found its biggest promoter in Carlos Salinas de Gortari [President, 1988-94].
Devaluation of the peso in December 1994, the economic crisis it provoked, and the PRI's subsequent loss of a majority in the Congress and then of the Presidency, delayed implementation of the most important reforms for nearly twenty years, but that hasn't discouraged their promoters. The election results of July 1, 2012, and the distribution of seats in Congress has allowed them to push them forward again, the best example being the labor reform approved even before the change of government [MV Note: The new Congress took office in September, the President in December].
Joined with this reform, and as a product of the Pact for Mexico, were education and telecommunications reforms. Expected, among others, are energy [state oil company] and tax reforms, which may also have an orientation similar to the labor reform and respond to requirements of international financial organizations.
The opponents of reform are many and varied and have been present at different stages and in different ways. They were particularly present at the May 1 [Labor Day] demonstrations. But there have also been violent actions in various states of the country, particularly in Guerrero, Michoacán and Mexico City. It is very symptomatic that some of these events have taken place in two of Mexico's poorest states, and they require further reflection before one thinks that the way to confront the excesses is simply and only by application of the criminal justice system.
So far in Guerrero, police have arrested four teachers who are members of the State Coordinating Committee of Education Workers of Guerrero [CETEG], accusing them of sedition, riot, terrorism and damage. [MV Note: The teachers were released on bail. They are not charged with terrorism, as initially reported.] To focus the answer on criminalization of opponents and exaggeration of their crimes contributes to exacerbating tensions and eventually can contribute to the emergence of social eruptions.
The consequences [of such eruptions] can be greater than in the past because of the present conditions of the country. It is enough to know that the number and type of weapons found in Mexico today is far superior to that which existed in the moments before there were armed community police in several states (Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca and State of Mexico, among those that are known), and certainly there is the presence and extent of organized crime groups, particularly the drug cartels, which may seek alliances with the guerrillas, as has happened in South American countries. Spanish original