POLICIA But what is happening in the cities where the tendency towards union-sectorial structures are less common?
That is where we find a much opportunist adherence, associated in part with expectations of positions 1n une state.
This is how political clientalism structures the internal alignments, which have gotten to the point of violence - last Sunday a reunion of District 15 of La Paz finished in blows with the kidnapping of supporters of the majority line and police intervention.
In the municipalities of Quillacollo and Sacaba, in Cochabamba, fights with sticks, rocks and dynamite extended over the last few days in the streets.
On top of this, there is the denouncing corruption and undue influence of MAS
by other MAS members in the mass media.
"All this means that the opposition [to the Morales government] is disconcerted, because they insist in codifying the MAS as a party and not as the political arm of the social movements", said MAS constituent assembly delegate Raul Prada, who is counted as one of the "invited".
Nevertheless, coming out of the oil crisis and the entanglement of the Constituent Assembly, two lines are appearing to emerge, more sociological than political, and associated with interpretive frameworks, lifestyles and levels of radicalism.
They could be groupedalthough not without being a bit arbitrary into two blocs: the "populist unionism" of Evo Morales and the social movements, and the "multiculturalist socialdemocracy" of Vice-President Garcia Linera and a sector of the tunctionaries and Constituent Assembly delegates from the middle class.
Pidela Last,
While in the first group the predominate logic "friend/enemy" — antagonism between the people and the oligarchy and direct action over "institutionality" — the second favours a socialregional pact over a long time, gradualism in reforms, and a more institutional discourse.
It is no coincidence that it was the vice-president who negotiated the approval of the need for a two-thirds majority of the Constituent Assembly to approve the new constitution, which is now rejected by MAS and Evo Morales.
But, once again: the lack of spaces for debate means these differences are expressed in a disguised form of day-to-day politics.
And the Bolivian left continues to be a jigsaw puzzle that must be put together. • First published in Green Left Weekly, September 27, 2006. Liam Mac Uaid Electoral fraud is a long established Mexican tradition. So too is using the police and the army to disperse demonstrations with violence and murder.
In May this year the police shot dead teachers who were demonstrating for a pay rise. However since July Mexican workers and poor have been challenging the authority of the state in the most dramatic way possible.
It began when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), convincingly argued that the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón stole the presidency when he claimed to have won by a one percent margin
López Obrador was seen by the peasants, the urban poor and many workers as their candidate. His campaign had spent much of the year travelling across the country addressing rallies and large meetings of the people who are the victims of the Mexican economy's subordination to the United States.
In common with the rest of Latin America Mexico is a country where the rich are rich by first world standards and the poor are very poor.
As we report elsewhere in this issue American imperialism is responding to the poor of Mexico by building a fence to keep them out of the United States. That is how desperate life is for tens of millions of Mexicans.
López Obrador's electoral programme was something like that of the British Labour Party in the 1950s. He planned to introduce social programmes to provide health, housing and education. He wanted to make the country self-sufficient in oil and gas and to protect Mexican industry against foreign imports with tariff barriers.
This was not a revolutionary programme to put the working class in power. It was a reformist set of proposals that would alleviate some of the misery of Mexico's poor. It was enough however to frighten the rich élite that runs Mexico.
For US imperialism it came dangerously close to putting López Obrador and the millions of voters who supported him in the same camp as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. More importantly it was a programme that the Mexican masses felt offered something press has published photographs of dumped ballot boxes.
When it became apparent that the election had been stolen the masses moved into action. At the end of July there was a rally with an estimated three million people in Mexico City. Many of them stayed on and set up an encampment in the main plaza the Zócalo. They shut down businesses and paralysed the traffic.
On September 17 López Obrador's supporters held a National Democratic which they declared him president by a show of hands.
This is a situation that Marxists call "dual power". Millions of people refuse to accept the legitimacy of the state and the government and set up their own structures to run society.
But the PRD is not going to be the party that leads them to take control of society. López Obrador and his advisors have started to demobilise the movement.
Yet the masses have had a sense of their own power and the protests that began in the capital have started spreading across other parts of the country. The Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, the APPO, controls much of the city of Oaxaca. Several thousand protesters are camped in its town square. They have taken over the radio stations and public building and are controlling the traffic and are demanding an end to poverty and corruption.
The wave of rebellion that has washed across Latin America has now broken on the shores of Mexico, right on the borders of the United States, home to millions of the continent's dispossessed.