{"id":23188,"date":"2006-09-08T07:35:12","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T12:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/?p=23188"},"modified":"2017-10-08T07:44:28","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T12:44:28","slug":"english-mexico-an-insurrection-of-reason-commentaries-on-denise-dressers-talk-at-uc-berkeley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/?p=23188","title":{"rendered":"(English) Mexico: An Insurrection of Reason? – Commentaries on Denise Dresser’s talk at UC Berkeley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disculpa, pero esta entrada est\u00e1 disponible s\u00f3lo en English<\/a>. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language.<\/p>

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by Alejandro Reyes<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Article written for (and censured by) the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mexico’s electoral democracy, belatedly born only six years ago when the single-party system that ruled the country for seven decades finally fell, is undergoing a serious credibility crisis. Suspicions of electoral fraud and a growing social movement led by center-left PRD former candidate Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador have left the world wondering about the health of the infant democracy. At the same time, Mexico ‘s society is more fractured than ever, with deep antagonisms dividing the right and the left, the rich and the poor, the north and the south, and a profound social discontent setting the stage for what promises to be an unstable and explosive sexenio<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Speaking at UC Berkeley, political analyst Denise Dresser pointed to the presidential campaigns of both Felipe Calder\u00f3n of the conservative PAN and Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador as responsible for creating the antagonisms that led to the current crisis. In her analysis, both candidates catered almost exclusively to their hard base, neglecting other sectors of society. As a result, neither candidate was able to obtain a significant majority.<\/p>\n

Behaving as a skillful \u201cprofessional politician,\u201d Felipe Calder\u00f3n opted for a campaign of contrasts, portraying himself as the \u201ccandidate of stability.\u201d Although Vicente Fox’s government did not bring about the changes that most people expected, in many people’s eyes it was an improvement from the violence, corruption, and economic crises brought about by prior PRI governments. Calder\u00f3n therefore positioned himself as the only candidate capable of maintaining stability, while presenting long lists of proposals to go beyond the paralysis of the Fox government.<\/p>\n

More importantly, however, Calder\u00f3n engaged in a virulent campaign of fear, embodied in a highly successful slogan that is in great part responsible for today’s divisions in Mexican society: \u201cL\u00f3pez Obrador, a danger for M\u00e9xico.\u201d By cleverly associating the PRD candidate with both old-time populism and Manichean images of \u201cradical\u201d world leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, Calder\u00f3n managed to awaken fear\u2014and hatred\u2014in many Mexicans, who saw in him the possibility of a return to instability. People who however moderately had benefited from Vicente Fox’s presidency felt the urge to defend their privileges against the impending danger of a supposedly radical left that would bring about economic and social chaos.<\/p>\n

However successful Calderon’s campaign of fear might have been, it nonetheless failed to recognize the concerns of millions of Mexicans who felt that the PAN’s neoliberal economic policies not only did not benefit them, but drove them to increasing hardships. Nor did it recognize the many Mexicans for whom the discourse of hard-handed solutions set off ominous alarm bells of a return to repression. Many of those people saw L\u00f3pez Obrador as a hopeful alternative.<\/p>\n

Yet L\u00f3pez Obrador’s combative discourse of \u201cprivileging the poor\u201d alienated the middle and upper classes. Furthermore, this discourse was not backed by an articulated project capable not only of redistributing wealth but also of generating it. In Dresser’s view, the PRD candidate would have done well to \u201cslide from the radical left to the pragmatic center,\u201d and she gave as successful examples the electoral victories of Tony Blair, Ricardo Lagos, and Felipe Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n

As the crisis deepens, both sides, according to Dresser, are doing the worst thing possible. Felipe Calder\u00f3n and the PAN, on one hand, believe that by simply ignoring the opposition or stimulating hatred toward it, the problem will disappear. By so doing, they fail to recognize the legitimate grievances of a significant portion of the population. On the other hand, L\u00f3pez Obrador’s radicalization is seen by Dresser with troubled perplexity. She sees his apparent transformation into a \u201crevolutionary\u201d social leader as a danger to the PRD and a source of unnecessary social instability. In the final analysis, Dresser seemed to suggest that the only sensible option for expression of social discontent is strictly institutional. What is needed, she said, is indeed an insurrection… but an \u201cinsurrection of reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

As reasonable as that may sound, it is unclear what form that insurrection might take or how such \u201cinsurrection\u201d would satisfy the demands of those who feel cheated by what they perceive as a fraudulent election and, most importantly, those who are being driven to despair by economic policies that are destroying their means of survival. Dresser asks some important questions which, however, are left unanswered, and are therefore rhetorical: \u201cIf elections are never reliable, what other process is Mexico going to have to represent and empower its citizens? \u2026 If we cannot believe in anything anymore, are we left no other option but to believe only in L\u00f3pez Obrador?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet there are important social movements in Mexico which have been asking those very questions since well before the elections. The Zapatista’s \u201cOther Campaign\u201d has been actively experimenting for a year now with alternative ways of empowering citizens through an innovative articulation of local autonomies and an ongoing reinvention of participative democracy. And although the merits of that approach may be questioned, what surprises is the fact that Dresser should not even mention it.<\/p>\n

Yet perhaps it should not be so surprising. Dresser’s position reflects the views of what she calls \u201c Mexico ‘s moderate left.\u201d It is an illustrated, middle-class left that understands well the workings of the power structures but that has difficulty perceiving popular movements as legitimate struggles. More importantly, it is a left that cannot imagine \u201cthe people\u201d as capable of being protagonists of their own history.<\/p>\n

Particularly indicative of this were Dresser’s comments on the situation in Oaxaca . According to her, \u201cOaxaca began as a legitimate movement of teachers asking for wage increases; it has now turned into something else. The movement has been infiltrated by very radical groups for whom education is far removed from their intention, which is to remove the governor.\u201d These words show a worrisome lack of understanding of what is perhaps one of Latin America’s most important social movements today. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, which commands the movement, is made up of over 350 social organizations, a few of which may be characterized as \u201cradical,\u201d but that represent the diversity of Mexico’s society. Therefore, to speak of \u201cinfiltration\u201d implies that certain groups should under no circumstances have a right to democratic participation. More troubling, however, is Dresser’s apparent understanding of legitimacy. While teachers demanding wage increases are seen by her as legitimate, a broad social movement with ample popular support that aims at removing a violent, corrupt, and fraudulently elected governor is not, despite the fact that Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution states that \u201cthe people have the inalienable right to alter the form of their government.\u201d Furthermore, her unequivocal condemnation of the movement’s takeover of a TV station and several radio stations fails to recognize the significance of the struggle for access to the media and the brutality of state violence to control the flow of information. It is important to note that this struggle started with the destruction of the teacher’s radio station by the state police, continued with paramilitary attacks against Radio Universidad, and has recently escalated to state-sponsored killings.<\/p>\n

Failing to analyze the deeper significance of grass-roots movements like Oaxaca and issues such as repression, the right to information, and self-determination leads us to a very narrow understanding of democracy and closes possible doors to deeper structural change.<\/p>\n

Denise Dresser is a professor in the department of Political Science at ITAM in Mexico City and columnist for the newspaper Reforma and the weekly Proceso. She spoke at UC Berkeley on September 5, 2006, as part of the US-Mexico Futures Forum series. <\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disculpa, pero esta entrada est\u00e1 disponible s\u00f3lo en English. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language. by Alejandro Reyes Article written for (and censured by) the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley Mexico’s electoral democracy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[954,953,190],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mexico","category-mundo","category-radiozapatista"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiozapatista.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}