The PRI and Loathing in Mexico City

2013-01-02 · first published in CounterPunch · 190 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to counterpunch.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at CounterPunch: read it in full (Internet Archive copy).

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Protests at Peña Nieto's inauguration Welcome to a new era in Mexico – or so some would have you believe. Twelve years after finally losing power in the democratic transition of 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), aka “the dinosaur”, is back and attempting to rebrand itself as the medicine that Mexico needs in these blood-soaked neoliberal times. True to form, the T. Rex started making waves the day that party golden boy Enrique Peña Nieto took office on December 1st.

It’s a return of the party that governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years (1929-2000) and created the hugely corrupt and desperately undemocratic political system that prevails to this day. Blame former president Felipe Calderon of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) whose ill-advised, corruption-drenched “Drug War” took well over 60,000 lives in the past six years. Not to mention near-stagnant economic growth, rising poverty and the countryside devastated by US agricultural imports – all of which can, of course, be traced back to the PRI era and were merely reinforced by the “Christian democratic” PAN.

Welcome to Mexico’s political time warp.