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Global Economy and Latin America's Instability Frame Struggle for Justice in Mexico

Peter Lumsdaine, 1999

As the last year of the 20th century enters its final months, historic developments in the Americas portend a new upsurge the struggle for economic justice and human rights in global society. Set against a continuing fragility in Latin American and global financial systems, late 1999 in the Western Hemisphere is marked by four extraordinary situations: the escalating upheaval in the northern Andes; preparations for a pivotal year in Mexico; an unprecedented confrontation now looming between grassroots U.S. movements and the world economic elite; and the unknown but potentially serious impacts of the Y2K computer infrastructure problem on nations south of the U.S. border, as well as throughout the other poor less-prepared nations of the world.

In Colombia, an increasingly powerful leftist insurgency - the oldest in the hemisphere and arguably the strongest in the world - is on a political/ military collision course with right-wing death squads, government forces, and their growing corps of U.S. military "advisors". According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, over 35,000 people have been killed in the 1990s alone, and the country has more internal refugees than Rwanda - well over a million people.

 

The battle-hardened leftist guerrillas have committed human rights abuses, including assassinations and kidnappings of wealthy land barons, as well as the tragic 1999 killing of three U.S activists by rogue rebel soldiers (who are being tried for murder by the guerrilla organization). However, last year's study by independent human rights groups attributed 84% of the abuses to army and landowner-backed death squads, whose standard operations included massacre, burning and torture of unarmed civilians, such as poor peasants thought to sympathize with the leftists. Both sides make arrangements and derive income from cocaine and other drugs, with the insurgents taxing the drug trade and forcing the narcotraficantes to pay higher prices to the coca leaf-growing peasants, while the rightist paramilitary and official government forces are heavily interlocked with the drug lords.

 

This year, U.S. military aid to the Colombian government QUADRUPLED to $286 million dollars, under the banner of the "Drug War" - through U.S. Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey has said that the Drug War and operations to crush the insurgency are now virtually indistinguishable in Colombia. After Israel and Egypt, Colombia now gets more U.S.military aid than any country in the WORLD - and another huge increase for next year is being discussed by the White House. Over 250 U.S. Special Forces troops are already officially in Colombia at any given time, and the number of these advisors is likely to increase rapidly if present policies continue. At the same time, tentative new peace negotiations inch forward, the Colombian army has withdrawn from a large zone of the nationıs jungle interior, and numerous civilian groups continue their struggles for justice and human rights.

 

In neighboring Venezuela, the LARGEST source of U.S. imported oil in the world, charismatic ex-paratrooper Hugo Chavez won a landslide election and has mobilized a left-wing populist movement, backed by 70% of the population and many of the nation's soldiers, to strip power and wealth from the county's old ruling elite. Chavez has panicked U.S. corporate investors and made peace overtures toward the Colombian guerrillas, as refugees from right-wing terror flee into Venezuela.

 

This year, Mexico's rising tide of support for the center-left opposition nearly swept charismatic radical populist and nonviolence advocate Felix Salgado to the governorship of Guerrero, a linch-pin state where U.S.-trained commandos hunt peasant rebels in the mountains above Acapulcoıs neon beachscapes.

This April our Resource Center for Nonviolence human rights delegation met with Salgado and his supporters as they shut down the state legislature building in a mass sit-in against electoral fraud, reminiscent of the U.S. civil rights movement 40 years earlier. Our group also visited farming communities in the Sierra Madre, including a Oaxacan Zapotec village where 25% of the men were political prisoners or in hiding from the army. Yet while opposition candidates gather increasing momentum, the shadow of military repression lengthens in the slums and countryside. Amnesty International's 1999 report details a grim picture of increasing terror, political imprisonment, torture and murder as Special Forces troops trained in North Carolina crack down against indigenous villages, campesino peasant unions and the urban poor - from Chiapas and Oaxaca to Guerrero and Mexico City. With investors on a post-devaluation rebound, the poor majority caught in the worst depression since the 1930s, and many analysts worried about a new financial crisis in the months ahead (September 1st San Francisco Chronicle),the stakes are rising. Electoral fraud or assassination to retain power, a military strike to wipe out rebel leadership OR a new uprising from the nation's impoverished lower depths all remain distinct possibilities.

In many ways the pattern of Colombia is being duplicated in Mexico, - political corruption, at least two competing parties representing the same wealthy elite, deep poverty, economic instability, violently repressive security forces, paramilitary death squads, close links of the governing elite with the international drug trade. The increasing possibility of Colombia-style war between a growing peasant guerrilla underground and increasingly U.S.-backed security forces now looms on the horizon.

On November 29 - four weeks before the turn of the millennium - leaders of the planetıs most powerful economic institution, the World Trade Organization or WTO, will assemble in Seattle to chart the course for global corporate dominance in the 21st century. The WTO leaders are seeking to increase theirŒlegalı ability to impose international sanctions on any government whose labor or environmental laws Œinterfereı with investment and profit. High-level representatives from numerous multinational corporations, 134 national governments, Clinton, Gore, and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates - who invited the entire crowd - plan to hold five days of historic meetings.

Thousands of concerned people from labor unions, environmental organizations, human rights groups, farmersı associations and delegates from Third World nations will also converge on Seattle for a week of teach-ins, conferences, church services, giant puppet street theater and festivals, marches, and civil disobedience challenging the WTO. The counter-conference and mass direct actions will propose, explain and demand humanitarian ecological alternatives to the militarized, genetically engineered world order of fabulously rich and desperately poor which the WTOıs global elite is planning for the 21st century. It is perhaps no wonder that at the end of their historic jungle conference on Œneo-liberalismı versus humanity, the Zapatistas declared the most threatening organization on the planet to be: the WTO.

Finally, it now appears quite clear that the direct and indirect impacts of the Y2K computer problem early next year are likely to be felt most sharply in the cash-strapped, stress-torn, less-prepared nations of the Third World - which certainly could include the Latin American nations described above. The CIA and Pentagon have publicly predicted a likely collapse in key parts of some countiesı economic and governmental infrastructure, generating potentially massive social unrest and upheaval.

Thus the approaching turn of the century and millennium exemplifies the ancient Chinese pictogram for Œcrisisı: that is, a combination of Œdangerı with Œopportunityı - opportunity for a more humane and ecological way of life being born out conscientious struggle as the currently ascendant militarized techno-corporate world order begins to fracture.

YOU CAN HELP !!

Join us at:
Stop the WTO delegation organizing meetings in San Jose and Santa Cruz - call (831)423-1626 or Silicon Valley Toxics Coaliton for details.
The Friday October 22 San Jose premiere of Nettie Wildıs acclaimed film ³A Place Called Chiapas² at the Towne movie theater.
. The Wednesday evening October 27 Forum on Global Justice and the World Economy in the 21st Century, & pm at the Louden Nelson Center auditorium in Santa Cruz - on the 70th anniversary of the Great Depression market crash.
COME TO SEATTLE November 29 - December 3, for as many days as you can ($124 round-trip plane fares and $46 round trip bus fares ! still available) - donıt miss this historic moment! Stand up for the childrenıs future at the edge of the new millennium ....

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