PWW Editorial: Mexico rejects status quo

This article was reprinted from the July 12, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), under the leadership of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, has won a stunning victory in the race for mayor of the hemisphere's largest city, Mexico City. The PRD followed up that victory by winning 26 percent of the vote for the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, ending seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The PRD was organized in 1987 when Cardenas and other PRI members, tired of corruption and authoritarianism, abandoned PRI. They were joined by socialists, independent labor and peasant leaders and by former members of the Communist Party of Mexico, which had been dissolved.

The PRI and President Ernesto Zedillo have betrayed Mexico's revolutionary tradition in which the Mexican people fought domestic reaction and repeated military incursions by U.S. imperialism. In compliance with the profit dictates of Wall Street, the World Bank, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, Zedillo has enforced extreme austerity, pushing millions of Mexicans into poverty while the profits of U.S.-based transnational corporations in Mexico soared.

The position of the PRD remains complicated because the extreme right-wing National Action Party (PAN) won 27 percent in the lower house while the PRI garnered 38.9 percent. The PRD will obviously need to form tactical coalitions with PRI and other independent deputies to push through a program that benefits the people.

Recently, coalitions of center and left forces, including Communists, have triumphed in France, England, Italy, Mongolia, Nepal, the Congo, El Salvador and Guatemala - proof that the masses are fighting back against the profit- greedy "New World Order." This dovetails with a similar upsurge by the labor movement here in the U.S. More than ever it is time for working people around the world to seek wider and stronger joint action on the demand, "people before profits."