The seedbeds-roundtables organized by the EZLN, like the one that takes place this week in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, constitute spaces open to critical thinking about what occurs in Mexico–and in the planetary ambit–with the imposition of neoliberal globalization based on social war, dispossession and systemic violence and characteristic of a process of re-colonization of our countries.
We remember, in this direction, one of the theses on anti-systemic struggles of the late SubcomandanteInsurgente Marcos, which I consider necessary to assume in its depth and present timeliness: “One cannot understand and explain the capitalist system without the concept of war. Its survival and its growth depend primarily on war and on everything that is associated with it and that it implies. By means of it and in it, capitalism dispossesses, exploits, represses and discriminates. In the stage of neoliberal globalization, capitalism makes war on all of humanity. (Escritos sobre la guerra y la economía política. México, Pensamiento Crítico Ediciones, 2017, p. 275)”
The analysis of the electoral conjuncture underway makes sense when it is based on this context of militarized and criminal capitalist globalization, in which procedural democracy collapses and enter into a crisis with no return, characterized by the loss of legitimacy and credibility of the states responsible for carrying out, monitoring and sanctioning the alleged legality of those elective processes.
The entry of two known electoral criminals as supposedly independent candidates to the Presidency of the Republic is one more demonstration of the palpable institutional deterioration of the Mexican State, gravely worn out by that “unrecognized armed conflict;” that is, the war that Felipe Calderón initiated and Enrique Peña Nieto continued.
The decision of the judges of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) to endorse the registry of Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, alias El Bronco, on the electoral ballot for the Presidency, is especially grotesque and defies all legal logic, when evidently his citizen support signatures were fraudulently obtained; many were apocryphal or simulated; thousands of others didn’t even present voter credentials. He also used public resources for his campaign, other resources of unknown or suspicious origin, from ghost companies; he didn’t report millions of pesos to the INE, and, as if this were not enough, officials of his failed state administration participated in the collection of signatures. Also, the adulterated and illegal manner of obtaining citizen support, the origin and exercise of Margarita Zavala’s monetary resources, have been very questioned, and, it’s clear, both characters of the national picaresque do not resist a judicial investigation, at least, for alleged electoral and fiscal crimes.
María de Jesús Patricio Martínez’ campaign for citizen support, at the other equidistant pole, put into evidence the moral illegality of the professional political class and that of the partidocracy, and it demonstrated a paradox of neoliberal times, the anti-systemic is the only one capable of acting with honesty and based on ethical principles, respecting legality and the rules of the game, while the governmental institutions violate their own laws and regulations, act with discretion, according to their class interests, and they are the principal enemies of the system of capitalist representative democracy. The electoral process, consequently, will be marked by what is already seen as a State election, which, in the Mexican case, is characterized by a deviation of power; in other words, by its criminal character. That means that the de facto powers, the dominant mafia groups that sustain it, will be the ones that will ultimately decide who can guaranty the continuity of the system of the prevailing capitalist exploitation-domination and will use repressive apparatuses available to the State, both legal and clandestine, to try to impose their candidate.
On the other hand, the proposal of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army, to form an Indigenous Government Council, whose purpose is the reconstitution of the original peoples, the establishment of alliances with the country’s exploited and oppressed, forming territorial networks of support and organization, coincides fully, with another of the theses of the late Sub Marcos: “great transformations do not start above or with monumental and epic events, but rather with small movements in their form and that appear irrelevant to the politician and the analyst above.” (Ibid. p. 276)
In this war against humanity, in which the very survival of the human species is at play, the original peoples of all the continents constitute the socio-ethnic sectors best prepared to confront it due to their forms of organization and making decisions with a collectivist tendency, which, in many cases, carries with it the formation of self-government and the adoption of redistributive and self-sustainable economies, and, above all, of taking care of Mother Earth; their resistances in defense of the territories besieged by capitalist corporations, in which organized crime directly threatens not only territories but also the existence of indigenous culture and the very life of the members of the original peoples.
Particularly in Latin America, the indigenous peoples are in permanent struggle against the newlatifundistas (large landowners) and their modern white guards (private police), now with the uniform of security companies; against the consortia that attempt to seize seeds and introduce transgenic varieties; against the mining companies that poison all the surrounding environment with mercury and cyanide, contaminating rivers and underground currents; against the privatization of water; against the highway megaprojects, wind farms, tourism and hydroelectric projects; in sum, against everything that the political class that aspires to govern in the name of democracy and progress supports.
The struggle continues. There is life after July 1.