Protesters mark the seven-month anniversary
of the Ayotzinapa students' disappearance in Chilpancingo, Mexico.
(Reuters/Emiliano Torres)
Yesterday, as Baltimore
restaged the
intifada, protesters in Mexico, in Chilpancingo, the capital of the
state of Guerrero, rammed a flaming truck into the glass-fronted
congressional building, and set fire to at least six other vehicles.
They had taken to the streets to mark the seven-month anniversary of the
disappearances of the 43 students,
who have come to represent the hundreds of thousands of dead as a
result of US-Mexico’s drug, immigration, and trade policies (a number of
the relatives of the disappeared are currently in New York, where they
are appealing to the United Nations to end Washington’s so-called Merida
Initiative, or Plan Mexico, which sends billions of dollars to Mexico
to supposedly fight drugs but which the relatives of the 43 say goes to “
suppress dissent”).
Elsewhere this week, in Oaxaca, protesters did damage to the building
of the governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Videos of the
Chilpancingo protest are
here,
here,
here. In Mexico City, demonstrators erected an “
anti-monument,” a large red 43 in the middle of the business center.
Obviously, the right way to think about the murder of Freddie Gray
and the protests that followed is to think deeply about slavery and
post-Abolition racism in the United States. Immediately after the
trouble began yesterday, historians and critics on social media were
broadcasting information about
Baltimore’s history as a slave port,
its long history of police brutality, its equally long history of
resisting race terror. Apparently, Spiro Agnew’s law-and-order
response to a protest that turned violent in 1968 bought him his spot on Nixon’s ticket.
One can also, without diluting the power of that deep history, think
about the repression and reaction laterally, as an effect of the same
transnational policing and trade policies responsible for the
disappearance of the 43 student-activists in Mexico. Since the August
murder of Michael Brown and the September abduction of the 43 Mexican
students, #BlackLivesMatter and #TodosSomosAyotzinapa are just two of
the hashtags that have captured distinct heterodox protest movements
that are converging.
I was at an event the other night at CUNY, a “Citizen’s Tribunal,” part of a “
caravan” that is bringing the parents and advocates of the 43 disappeared to over 40 US cities (Roberto Lovato writes about it
here in
The Nation).
At the CUNY event, a lawyer for the parents said that the two principal
obstacles to “neoliberalism”—and hence the two principal targets of
neoliberalism’s enforcers—were the
ejidos, that is, peasant
communities who still hold and work their land in common, and the rural
teacher-training institutes (like the one where the 43 were enrolled),
which for decades has taken the lead in protesting the dispossession
generated by “free trade.” In the wake of Baltimore, that observation
put me to think that Mexican peasant communities and African-American
urban communities are broadly structurally analogous in their relation
to “free trade” capitalism.
On both sides of the border, the absence of any sane, humane,
industrial or rural policy has created concentrations of dispensable
peoples. On both sides of the border, children of these dispensable
people are most vulnerable. “In 2007, Baltimore City African American
infants
were almost nine times more likely to die before age 1 than White
infants residing in Baltimore City.” In Mexico, the southern agrarian
states, including Guerrero, that have suffered under NAFTA have
similarly
stunningly high rates
of infant mortality. On both sides of the border, these people, the
victims of failed government policy, are then blamed for the failure of
government policy, their culture, their attitude, their “
values,” and their music (rap, hip-hop, and the
narcocorrido).
On both sides of the border, rolling protests, days of rage and
frustration like those seen in Baltimore and Chilpancingo have
difficulty coalescing into a national movement, building a coalition
with elites or national-level political parties due to the fragmentation
of politics, itself an effect of government economic policy.
On both sides of the border, US federal money funds the
overpolicing of the crisis. “The weapons that are given to Mexico [by Washington] are used to kill us, not help us,”
said
Blanca Luz Nava Velez, whose 19-year-old son, Jorge, is among the
missing. And on both side of the border, the crisis is generated by
federal policies (enacted by both Washington and Mexico City) that are
designed to keep pay low and jobs precarious: What demands can a
segregated labor force divided by a garrisoned border make on capital that can go anywhere it wants, anytime it wants?
Advocates of the North American Free Trade Agreement did say that
economic liberalization would bring about a convergence. They were
right. Just wait to see what the
TPP brings.
