August 31, 2006

“Pinche Indios!”

Diary of the Mexican Earthquake

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

The criminal fraud perpetrated in the July 2 presidential election against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) by the right-wing PAN party, President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal once again rips the mask off racism in Mexico.

As has been evident since the campaigns kicked off last January, Lopez Obrador represents the aspirations of Mexico’s brown underclass. His right-wing rival Felipe Calderon’s people are translucently white. Although the media and the political class refuse to recognize this reality, two months after the most hotly-contested presidential race in the nation’s history, racism is driving the Mexican car to the precipice.

Although color has been at the core of post-electoral turmoil here for two months, one of the few to play the race card out loud was newly-elected senator Maria Irma Ortega of the anything but green Mexican Green Environmental Party (PVEM), a sometimes Fox ally that is always available to the highest bidder. Forced to enter the Senate building in downtown Mexico City by the back door because striking teachers from Oaxaca were blocking the front entrance and Lopez Obrador’s people were clogging the side streets, Ortega screamed at the press what a lot of white Mexicans are muttering under their breath these days: “how is it possible that these pinche indios (f– Indians) won’t let me pass?”

The startlingly incendiary conflict in the southern state of Oaxaca where police death squads roll through the streets before dawn gunning down teachers and supporters grouped together in the Oaxaca Popular Peoples’ Assembly (APPO) on orders from Governor Ulisis Ruiz, a white man, is fragrant with racism. Oaxaca is Mexico’s most indigenous state, home to 17 distinct Indian cultures, More than 1.5 million citizens of indigenous descent are the majority in 412 out of the state’s 572 municipalities or counties. The APPO is comprised of representatives from many of these majority indigenous municipalities and many of their comrades on the barricades, striking members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union, teach in the Indian outback bi-lingual “maestros” are traditionally the most radical wing of Section 22.

It is hardly a coincidence that Lopez Obrador, a white man who grew up in the Chontal Indian region of his native Tabasco state and who has the overwhelming support of “the people the color of the earth” as FULL ARTICLE