[Peace-discuss] Fw: Swine Flu: New Pretext to Push Back Revolt Against Fraudulent Regime in Mexico

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Swine Flu: New Pretext to Push Back Revolt Against Fraudul
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Larry Duncan 
To: lduncan at igc.org 
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:28 PM
Subject: Swine Flu: New Pretext to Push Back Revolt Against Fraudulent Regime in Mexico




Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:46:37 -0700
From: Alan <ilcinfo at earthlink.net>
Subject: Swine Flu: New Pretext to Push Back Revolt Against Fraudulent Regime in Mexico




Swine Flu: New Pretext to Push Back Revolt Against Fraudulent Regime in Mexico


By ALAN BENJAMIN


The swine flu that has already killed hundreds of people across Mexico is a threat of unknown magnitude. According to most researchers, is seems far less lethal than the SARS in 2003, but as an influenza the concern is that it may be more durable.


Most healthcare specialists believe that this porcine virus was conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty. Many reports suggest that it originated in a pig farm in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Others point to a Smithfield pig-processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. (from which the virus was then taken back to Mexico by migrant workers).


The Mexican authorities knew of the existence of this swine flu as early as mid-February but did nothing about it for two entire months. Government officials have been forced to acknowledge as much. Outrage over the Mexican government's ineptitude has swept the country. On April 29, the Frente Sindical Mexicano (FSM) held a press conference during which it lambasted the Mexican government for its handling of the entire healthcare crisis.


While we may never know the exact origin of this virus, there are two things we do know without a shadow of a doubt:


(1) The rapid spread of this pandemic is directly related to the dismantling of the public healthcare systems in Mexico under NAFTA and to the extreme poverty that plagues this country as a result of the policies of pillage and privatization imposed by the U.S. government and transnational corporations.


Renowned Mexican actress Ofelia Medina, in a column in La Jornada (April 26), noted that, "in our country, millions of people are ill every day because of malnutrition and extreme poverty, with more than 100 children dying each and every day from otherwise preventable illnesses. Why is there no national emergency for those 40,000 children who die every year? Why is there no national emergency to put an end to malnutrition and preventable diseases?"


Medina goes on to decry the policies of the PRI and PAN implemented over the past 15 years in the framework of the NAFTA agreement that have led to the gradual dismantling of the ISSSTE (Institute of Social Security for State Workers), the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), and the Secretaría de Salubridad (now downsized and renamed Secretaría de Salud).


Yes. Mexico needs to implement a real National Healthcare Emergency Plan to address the growing swine-flu crisis and to address the underlying healthcare crisis that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year from otherwise preventable illnesses. But this requires repealing NAFTA as well as all privatization measures that have destroyed the social safety and healthcare systems in Mexico, with the renationalization of the IMSS and ISSSTE.


It requires that all payments on Mexico's foreign debt be halted so that all resources available can be put to use developing and distributing the medicines and vaccines needed to treat the population. (El Universal newspaper on April 25 reported that the health ministry has an agreement with a private firm, Birmex, to develop anti-flu vaccines, but the total output under this agreement covers only 5% of total demand in normal times.)


It also requires halting all privatization measures of Pemex, Mexico's main source of income. Funds from Pemex are needed to rebuild Mexico's economy and to finance such a National Healthcare Emergency Plan. These are only some of the measure that would need to be implemented under such a plan.


2) The current swine-flu crisis is being wielded by the fraudulent administration of Felipe Calderón as an instrument to push back the massive popular revolt against his hated presidency.


On Saturday, April 25, Calderón issued a decree which with one stroke of the pen eliminates some of the most basic democratic rights guaranteed in Mexico's Constitution. Henceforth, the federal government "can enter anyone's home or business in the pursuit of the fight against the epidemic." The decree, under Point 8, also authorizes the government "to ban all public assemblies or meetings of any sort."


Under this decree, for example, all May Day demonstrations across Mexico this year have been banned.


The press conference by the Frente Sindical Mexicano blasted the government's manipulation of this epidemic to attack the rights and gains of the Mexican people. "This attack against our Constitutional rights," stated the FSM, "is despicable and absolutely intolerable for all organizations that represent the urban and rural workers and that need to be able to assemble to defend those very rights."


Indeed. The administration of Felipe Calderón has tried, by every means available, to roll back the massive wave of resistance that has engulfed Mexico since 2005, when mass marches of 2 million and 3 million people first took to the streets of Mexico City to protest the refusal by then-President Vicente Fox to allow Andrés Manuel López Obrador to run for president.


The attempt to keep López Obrador off the 2006 presidential ballot was foiled by this emerging mass movement. Then the regime resorted to unprecedented fraud to prevent López Obrador from taking office, which he had rightfully won in the July 2006 election. Outrage over this fraud swept the country, with the staging of the nation's largest demonstrations ever and the literal occupation of downtown Mexico City by hundreds of thousands of protesters for close to six months.


The regime then resorted to repression against the movement, beginning with the repression of the teachers' strike in the state of Oaxaca and the repression of the community activists of Atenco. But even this repression failed to quash the growing revolt from below.


More recently, the Mexican government -- in close coordination with the U.S. authorities -- has made use of the phony war on drug trafficking to go after all dissidents, to militarize the country, to try to atomize the social protest movements, and to create the kind of chaos aimed at getting people off the streets and back into their homes.


All these measures have been deemed necessary by a tiny and corrupt elite who run the country on behalf of U.S. corporate interests to continue to impose on Mexico a whole host of policies that have been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Mexican people.


We are presenting in this issue of The Organizer and in our monthly labor supplement, Unity and Independence, a series of articles on Mexico that focus on the mass resistance movement in this recent period. This will enable our readers to appreciate more fully the depth and self-organization of this movement and to better understand why the Calderón administration is implementing extreme anti-Constitutional measures at this time.


What Mexico needs is not more repression and more half-baked solutions from a president imposed by fraud. It needs to restore its democracy and sovereignty -- so that the people can live free from poverty and illness!


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