Mexico '82 presidential candidate: Mexico '82 presidential candidate

Scan page 8

Rosario Ibarra, a renowned human rights activist, was the presidential candidate of an electoral coalition formed by the PRT (Partido Revolucioinario de los Trabajadores—Mexican section of the Fourth International) in the 1982 Mexican elections.

The first woman to run for any major office in the history of Mexico, "Rosario," as she was popularly known, captured the attention of the millions of oppressed and exploited of Mexico. Her campaign synthesized the need for working-class political independence, and focused on the defense of democratic rights-in particular the fate of the over 500 "disappeared" political activists.

A high point of her campaign was an election eve rally of 50,000 people in Mexico City. Despite massive electoral fraud, the PRT presidential candidate obtained nearly 500,000 votes. Bandera Socialista, the newspaper of the PRT, estimated that the actual vote was probably closer to twice that amount.

Socialist Action reached Rosario Ibarra at her home in Mexico and was granted the following interview. Given the coming elections in this country, we think her comments will be of particular interest to our readers.

Socialist Action: How did your presidential campaign involve the organized and unorganized women of Mexico, and what was your message to the oppressed women you spoke to?

Rosario Ibarra: The electoral coalition that ran me for president brought together large numbers of women who are working in organizations where there are men and women. But there were also many women's organizations participating in the campaign. On one occasion they held a very important and militant meeting in Mexico City which was attended by well over a thousand women.

Our campaign also reached sectors of the unorganized and marginalized women. For them the campaign was a call for hope. They saw in me the opportunity to carry forward their struggle. They said, "Well, Rosario is a housewife. She is just like us and speaks like us. She doesn't give speeches with big words that no one can understand. She isn't like the women from the PRI who are only capable of reading speeches written by the bosses."

NTERVIEW

spoke to the women-and to working people in general-about their problems and how to solve them. I told them that politics doesn't have to be a dirty business, but that it is made dirty by dirty politicians and their corrupt system. I said that the repressive exploiting class makes politics dirty, but that with struggle, we can keep it clean as we fight for our rights—for those things that the working people of Mexico need.

Across the country, numerous committees of peasant women and women in the shantytowns sprang up in support of our campaign. Everywhere people identified with us and expressed their solidarity with the first woman in the history of Mexico to run for president.

S.A.: In several articles we read that the election campaign had reached remote towns where quite spontaneously workers and peasants came out onto the streets to greet you. How did you feel when you saw such an outpouring from the people?

Socialist Action list Action FI R.l.: Actually it is an overwhelming feeling, but I felt sad because those people hoped for a change with these elections. Yet the electoral road will not provide that change-of that I am completely sure-in a country where electoral frauds are carried out daily and where the government resorts to "political reforms" as an escape valve for popular discontent.

S.A.: How did you utilize this campaign to advance independent working class politics?

R.I.: We used the campaign as best we could to raise consciousness about the necessity of a revolutionary change. We said that you can never trust-not even for a single moment-any party of the ruling class. Take, for example, the case of Jesse Jackson and of the Democratic Party in the United States. Even if Jesse Jackson has the best intentions in the world and is a person above reproach, he will not be able to change the conditions in your country, because the Democratic Party is a party that has forced people into war, into exploitation, into poverty, into racism, and into Yankee intervention in other countries. In Mexico, and in the United States as well, it is important to get rid of the idea held by some people that by exchanging a bad president for a good one, or one ruling-class party for another, they are going to change things.

S.A.: Your example then is one of a candidacy that can be placed at the service of the struggles of working people and their allies...

R.I.: That's it. We did not want to speak about the virtues of the "political reforms" or about the good that would result if we came to power through the electoral process. We used the campaign to link up with the struggles of all the oppressed and exploited and to say that it is necessary to completely change the existing structures and to end the system of exploitation. We said that the workers and peasants should govern, not a few exploiters who take turns in power as if they were some sort of hereditary monarchy. And the people understood this perfectly. The political capacity of the Mexican people is enormous. We often repeated what a great Mexican political thinker once said, and that is that there is "a latent socialism in the Mexican people. I think the government now regrets having given us this political opening. They saw that our campaign was a danger..

S.A.: Didn't people tell you that you have to be "realistic"? In the United States, this is said by many of the left groups who are supporting Jesse Jackson as the only "realistic" alternative.

R.I.: In the United States you have a well-cemented two-party system with the Democrats and Republicans taking turns in office. In order to draw the American people into the electoral game, they must be given the illusion that there is a "real" contest at the voting booths. But it is really nothing more than a facade.

S.A. : Could you tell us something about the National Front Against Repression (FNCR) of which you are the main leader?

R.I.: Originally, we formed a committee of relatives to defend the political prisoners, the detainees, the disappeared, and the political exiles. In the committtee we only had relatives for quite valid reasons-anyone could come and say "I am a sympathizer," but really be with the police. So we accepted only relatives of actual victims of political repression. Later we formed the Political Council of the committee, in which political parties, trade unions, and other forces could participate. This was a big step forward in that we understood that the struggle for our children was the struggle of many; it was a struggle for all working people because they were the children of the working people of Mexico. It was not solely a matter of human rights, as the Argentine mothers suggested. When we spoke with them we told them that it was an error on their part not to tie their struggle to that of the people for fear that it could be said that they belonged to some political tendency.

CANDIDATA DE LA INCORD EL 4 DE JULIO S.A.:.. yet the mothers keep coming out onto the streets of the Plaza de Mayo demanding that the political prisoners be released and that those responsible for the thousands of disappeared be punished..

R.I.: That's right. The mothers are out there but the new government is trying to marginalize them, to isolate them-something they could not do with us because we have tied ourselves to the struggles of working people. We waited at the factories at 5 a.m. We went to the universities. We went to the fields. In short, we traveled throughout the country, calling out to the people. We stopped in the doors of churches calling on the entire people to solidarize themselves with our struggle. We brought to the president-first to Lopez Portillo and now to Miguel de la Madrid-thousands and thousands of signatures of Mexican citizens who wanted freedom for the political prisoners.

That was the situation from 1977 until 1979, when we said that we had to involve the organizations more deeply in this work. We realized that if they were not permitted to take any initiative, they would not want to continue to participate. So the leadership of the committee called for the formation of the National Front Against Repression in 1979.

In December of 1979 we organized a big march and conference on the International Day for Human Rights. On December 12, the FNCR was born. It was composed of 52 national organizations, although in a short time it had many more. Since 1979 it has been a united organization and has served as the base for broader coalitions such as the National Workers, Peasants, and Popular Assembly, which has more than a hundred organizations.

The FNCR has maintained itself and grown because it has a clearly defined objective: the struggle against repression. We have placed ourselves in a very good position. We have the ability to initiate dialogues and to call actions. We have also organized various conferences: the Conference against the Repression of the Daughters of the People of Chiapas; a conference in Juchitan, Oaxaca; a conference in support of the struggle of the people of Chihuahua; a conference against the oppression of the native population in Oaxaca.

Right at this moment the FNCR is organizing a conference to be held in Mexico City in late February on the struggle of women, and the oppression— and repression-they face in Mexico. This will be the first such national conference ever held here on this issue. There have been various "round tables" before on women's issues, but this is going to be a conference with the participation of radical women, working women, and women from the shanty-towns.

S.A.: We have been told that the FNCR is organizing a tour for you in the next couple of months.....

R.I.: Yes. We are going to try to strengthen all the fronts in the provinces of Mexico in order to gain a bigger hearing and become larger and more permanent. We want to go to the United States, as well, and to several European countries. In the long run, we'd like to sponsor an international conference on the Mexican-U.S. border on the issue of Native Americans. The aim of all these initiatives is to attract greater attention to the increasing repression in Mexico. I

Scan page 9

Virtually every prion in the building • • • aerospace WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING • oil (continued from page 1: “"No union can stand alone"”)

example, a new classification of refinery mechanic in Houston requires the worker to know the skills of a machinist, pipefitter, and boilermaker. If this trend continues, there will be an inevitable decrease in the quality of work performed and an increase in safety hazards to the workers. To pursue their drive for profits, the companies must attempt to destroy the traditional craft training programs and undermine the special craft status which has enabled these workers to enjoy relatively high wages and decent job security.

The ultimate goal is to eliminate individual crafts and create one category of workers trained in a variety of skills. The objective would be to cut costs by speed up and reduction in current craft wage rates and size of the workforce. Whatever the outcome of this round of negotiations in oil, the companies can count on continued resistance to their overall plan to eliminate the crafts.

HUNGER (continued from page 12: “[The Revolutionary Imagination that is why so many…]”)

Clearly, the problem of world hunger is no longer caused by a physical lack of food production capacity. The earth now possesses the material means and technological ability to feed all its inhabitants. Yet hunger persists.

Why do good harvests and huge surpluses create a crisis? How can there be too much food in a world still plagued by malnutrition, hunger, and even famine?

Why-spend tens of billions of dollars to decrease food production? Isn't that a criminal policy in a hungry world? Why not spend that money to increase the food supply until everyone on earth is assured an adequate, healthy diet?

The problem is not technological, but social. It is a result of the supply-anddemand system that determines the price of food at any given moment, and therefore who will or will not be able to afford to buy it. The supply of food is the amount available: the current harvest plus whatever is in storage. The demand, however, is not a measure of how much food people need, but of how much they can afford to pay for it. As the Times articles explain, "half the world is undernourished. These people live in countries that cannot pay for America's exports. "There is a surplus in the world if you equate production with the numbers of people who can pay for it," said Mr. Renshaw [a European Common Market official]."

A good harvest increases that "surplus." When the supply goes up, the price goes down. That means that the farmers' reward for a job well done is reduced income. If the surplus continues to mount and prices continue to drop, farmers go bankrupt and agricultural production comes to a standstill; the system locks up.

Ironically, this is the ultimate logic of the "free enterprise" system that supposedly offers incentives for hard work and high productivity. In fact, it can only function in an economic environment of relative scarcity. When the level of productivity reaches the stage of being able to provide more than enough to satisfy everybody's needs—as is now the case with agriculture-the market system based on supply and demand ceases to work efficiently and begins to turn in an irrational direction.

That explains the "logic" behind the U.S. government's huge payments to restrict food production: its strategy is to keep the supply of food low-that is, to create an artificial scarcity—in order to keep the price of food high. Working people get a raw deal coming and going: our tax money is being spent to drive up our supermarket bill. Yet within the bounds of the free market system, the Some prospects trades, in the steel, auto and electrical plants, from the Teamsters to Longshore unions are losing jobs and bargaining strength as employers spread the use of lower paid non-union labor. Many of these unions function in the refineries and are threatened by the contracting out language as much as OCAW. All unions are our natural allies in this fight. The labor outreach actions taken at the Union Oil refinery in Rodeo were positive, but they were confined to one local area. We need a national mobilization of trade union solidarity.

At the Chevron refinery here in Richmond, Calif., a Union Solidarity Coalition was formed, which includes seven different unions. Prior to the current OCAW negotiations each union cooperated in educational efforts, in organizing new members, and in mobilizing refinery workers in rallies. The lessons learned in Rodeo are being applied in Richmond— no union can stand alone. A national drive with this theme would increase the power of oil workers-and workers in other industries-to resist concessions.

only choice is between restricting production or allowing a total collapse.

Governmental policy-makers add insult to injury by demagogically waving the free-market flag, pretending that they are adamantly opposed to the very policies they are carrying out: "The Reagan administration argues that reducing government's role in agriculture and encouraging a return to open markets could solve many problems." This is the purest hypocrisy imaginable; they are fully aware that "reducing government's role in agriculture" would lead straight to paralysis.

The only solution to the twin crises of hunger and overproduction must be found outside the market system. Food must be produced and distributed according to a rational determination of human needs-that is, a plan-rather than by the blind forces of supply and demand. American governments, be they Republican or Democratic administrations, have resisted meaningful concessions in this direction, because any such steps are alien to the capitalist economic system and anathema to the capitalist class, which controls the Democratic and Republcan parties.

The Times articles, for example, mention that the confluence of widespread hunger and bulging grain warehouses suggests "possible increased uses of American farm surpluses to aid the needy overseas." Among the many phoney excuses offered to explain why this cannot be done, the real reason is hinted at: "a move to distribute America's surpluses abroad threatens to disrupt international trade...." In other words, giving the food away, which reduces the potential pool of paying customers, is bad for profits, so it won't be done. the International had pulled the rug out from under them.

However, spirits remained high among the workers who gathered for the Feb. 9 vote. One way that many expressed their pride in having fought the company was by wearing a T-shirt that read: "We struck, we stuck, scabs suck."

The Local 148 membership had been kept mobilized and informed during the strike with mass meetings each Monday and Tuesday as the strikers came in to pick up their strike benefits. A strike support office was opened in the union headquarters and was staffed by striking workers, union officials, and volunteers from other unions.

Several thousand supporters of the strike marched in a mass picket line and rally on Jan. 27 and again on Feb. 7. Striking Continental Airlines pilots and attendants were there- unmistakable in their full uniforms. About 400 Douglas HaD TR Huelga! Farmworkers" Cesar Chavez addresses Feb. 7 solidarity rally for McDonnell Douglas strikers Likewise, "the use of agricultural surpluses to feed America's hungry has encountered almost as many problems as foreign food aid." Food processing corporations have complained that "giving away food hurts their business, by replacing purchases the poor might have otherwise made with food stamps."

Are the farmers to blame?

While farmers have been put in a position of dependence upon government subsidies for survival, it is important to understand that most do not benefit from the irrational policies that restrict food production. Those who do benefit are, for the most part, millionaire rural capitalists such as former President Carter, the peanut "farmer."

The Times articles, discussing the government's farm support programs, makes this clear: "Much of the money went to a relatively few large, successful farmers, while little or nothing went to many less prosperous ones with small and medium-size farms.... Of the $18.8 billion in price supports and farm workers likewise made the trip to Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 27 to join one of the most militant picket lines yet organized in the Continental Toni Carpenter, a Continental flight attendant told the Feb. 7 rally, "These planes are going to be up in the air, built by scab workers, flown by scab pilots, with scab flight attendants pouring coffee down the throats of those foolish enough to fly in them— unless the workers all stick together."

Local 148 President Bob Berghoff echoed the need to "join labor together because we need to fight together," when he announced the kick off of a labor coalition against concessions. While he spoke, supporters of the strike signed up scores of unionists to participate in the group.

In the past few years workers have taken defeat after defeat. There is a growing sense among the most militant layers of the labor movement that bigger and more difficult battles lie ahead. These militants can turn back the bosses' offensive by recapturing the proud past of the labor unions that won their battles under the slogan, "An injury to one is an injury to all."

The aerospace workers in California, the copper miners in Arizona, the Greyhound workers, the Continental Airlines workers— and all other unionists fighting to hold the line gainst the corporations— are helping to write a new chapier of labor solidarity. • Dear Socialist Action, Enclosed is a check for $1000.00 from the estate of Al Furth, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and a longtime member of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. Al had set aside this sum to be used to advance the revolutionary ideas of Lenin, Trotsky, and Cannon.

As the executor of Al's will, I am sending this contribution in his behalf. I see Socialist Action as the continuation of the founding ideas of the Socialist Workers Party. I am confident you will succeed in strengthening your new organization.

In solidarity, Leo Frumkin income supplements in 1983, about onefourth went to the 112,000 largest farmers.... The 1.4 million smallest producers got little help from the Government."

Solving the food crisis will require doing away with incentives not to grow crops, but the farmers need not bear the burden of such a dramatic policy change. Rather than being subject to the whims of blind market forces as they are now, farmers should be guaranteed an income providing a decent standard of living, as part of a national food production plan.

In a word, the root cause of the hunger/overproduction crisis is capitalism. It can only be solved by the workers and small farmers themselves taking power out of the hands of the bankers, corporations, and landlords, and replacing the system of production for profit with a system that meets human needs. L AVAILABLE SOON "In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity"

by Dianne Feeley and Paul LeBlanc This 80-page pamphlet is a response to SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes' attack on Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. It surveys the history of the Marxist movement and present day realities, demonstrating the relevance of Trotsky's ideas in the "age of permanent revolution.

Price: $4.00 (includes mailing cost) Can be ordered from Socialist Action 3435 Army St., Rm. 308 San Francisco, CA 94110 Socialist Action February 1984 g

Scan page 10

In the 1940-42 period McKinney organized Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Southeastern Missouri and Northern Arkansas area. At the

----- pull-quotes -----

SUBSCRIBE BSCRI NOW

like The 'merican Wa