Tomorrow's protests focus on the PRI's proposed privatization of PEMEX, Mexico's state petroleum utility. The core of the issue presented to Mexico's people by AMLO, is the conversion -- AMLO calls it simply, "theft" -- of petroleum resources dedicated by Mexico's Constitution, to the benefit of the people of Mexico.
However, PEMEX has become an inefficient and corrupt state bureaucracy, characterizable by incompetence at many levels. It regularly imports oil to Mexico, failing to calculate future prices of oil on the world market and appropriately maintain reserves, at a cost in the billions per year.
PEMEX production has fallen approximately 50% since the crises of 1988, where independent analysts report it should have doubled. According to sources in Mexico's Society of Petroleum Engineers, the same amount of opportunities or more, in other fields and regions, have not been explored.
Reform is clearly needed in this sector of the economy, as in many others which are dominated by state-controlled monopolies and syndicates left over from the years of centralized, state-planned economics. Yet while the PRI plans and promises reform and growth, it is hard to see how such plans could materialize.
A glance across the resumes of the the PRI Presidency's ministers and other high-level appointments, reveals a pattern of crony patronage appointments, individuals given positions in return for support and vote-gathering.
The same is true of PEMEX's engineers, who often make $500K USD per year with benefits, in a very poor country. And the same pattern, repeats itself in sector after sector, of the state-controlled economy.
The effects of NAFTA, which was supposed to bring "free trade" and its benefits to Mexico, remain questionable. Major sectors of the economy, such as electricity and gas, telecommunications, cement and transportation, remain largely under state-planned control. Mexico's two major television networks, from which three-quarters of Mexican's receive their news, remain a state-controlled duopoly.
Where NAFTA opened markets, such as in agriculture, many sectors of Mexico's economy, especially the informal sectors, were decimated. Much of Mexico's countryside today has lost its population-- the price of staples such as corn, having been so undercut by subsidized imports from the United States, that the population could not survive.
Many millions of those affected, especially farmers, have fled to the United States. 50% of Mexican's today live in poverty-- 20%, in starvation.
Of the past's weeks demonstrations, the semi-official press report 16 detained, for carrying weapons or bombs such as molotov cocktails. Reports, pictures and evidence from the protesting opposition, indicate far many more were actually detained-- and that while some of the protesters clearly engaged in violence, the vast majority of detainees, appear to have been peacefully protesting.
Mexico in the past decades has a history of "disappeareds," attributed by the State as acts of the cartels and drug lords. Scholars, NGOs and others, have quietly presented the case that these disappearances are often the result of political or state violence-- and that the State itself, in Mexico, is often so corrupt as to make it and the drug cartels, indistinguishable in moments of violence.
Mexico's Press, remains at best "semi-free," with its extreme left unwilling to print materials and evidence for fear of violent reprisals or assassination, and its center far more restrained or actively complicit in presenting narratives designed by the PRI-State apparatus. Official numbers of Press deaths in Mexico remain among the highest in the world-- actual deaths, much less those "disappeared" or intimidated, being much higher.
In the aftermath of the 2012 elections, amid what would be an ultimately unsuccessful contestation of the election in front of Mexico's Supreme Court-- Mexico's law outlaws vote-buying, and many other irregularities, but there is no procedural legal mechanism in place to enforce this; moreover, there were reasons to wonder if the Supreme Court, mostly PRI appointees, would be allowed to overturn an election on rule-of-law grounds-- AMLO learned that many members of his party, the "Party of the Democratic Revolution,' ("PRD"), were being bribed to join the PRI's "Pacto por Mexico."
AMLO responded by quitting the PRD, which had been for more than a quarter-century Mexico's movement for democracy against one-party rule, and turning a civil branch of the PRD, MORENA, the "Movement for National Regeneration," into a new and independent political party, seeking certification to run in the coming mid-term and Presidential elections.
Internal divisions and disagreements amid PRD and MORENA members, abound. MORENA faces an uphill battle for the number of members necessary for certification this fall, much less, to mount a viable Presidential campaign in 2018.
Portions of Mexico's remaining civil society, especially the student movement which emerged in the wake of the 2012 elections, the "132s", have emerged with a strong critique of the nation's political economy, state media distortion of facts and reality, and access to free information. Their position and power remains unclear, and evidently weak.
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