Articles by: Fred Rosen
Alan Knight, a specialist on the Mexican Revolution, once wrote, “Revolutionary generations die, but the legacy of (especially successful) revolutions is never entirely spent." In this interview, he discusses revolutionary icons, the competing claims to revolutionary legitimacy by contemporary political actors, and official amnesia over tensions within the revolution, among other topics.
Benedicto Martínez, a leader of Mexico’s Authentic Workers Front (FAT), talks to NACLA about the bleak prospects faced by workers in an age of global labor markets and an anti-labor state.
Marchers have recently taken to the streets in Mexico on three different occasions. The marches generally represent three different groups vying for political influence. At the center of the storm is President Calderón's proposed step-by-step privatization of the nation's state-owned oil company, Pemex. The government has succeeded in driving a wedge between independent-minded unions and those being reeled into the pocket of the government in support of the privatization.
According to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a growth of only 15% in food prices in 2008 is likely to drive some 15.7 million Latin Americans into a position of desperate food insecurity (“indigence”), and another 15 million into moderate insecurity (“poverty”).
Mexico suffers from a resilient tradition of impunity: the propensity of rulers and contenders alike to place themselves above the law. The student movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried the torch against impunity, but was brutally repressed. In 1989 the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was formed to carry on the struggle, but by 2008, as the party’s “tribes” vie for power, the PRD itself has reverted to the tradition of impunity within its own internal politics.