Mexico & Nafta - 10 February 2004
What went on in Tlalnepantla
Heavy-handed police intervention on 14 January in the municipality of Tlalnepantla has left one person dead and 20 injured. The state authorities sent in 800 policemen to evict protesters from the town hall. The protesters had been there since 2 November in an attempt to stop the (then-newly elected) mayor Elías Osorio Torres, a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which dominates the state, from taking office.
The media and leftwing politicians in Mexico tried to portray the violence as a popular reaction against the imposition of a candidate; in fact the truth is rather more complicated and interesting. Tlalnepantla, a poor, mostly-Indian village in the backlands of Emiliano Zapata's home state of Morelos is one of the municipalities which has traditionally chosen its mayor according to traditional Indian methods. Indian elections prize consensus above all else, so usually there is only one candidate in the actual election. To choose this one candidate, a preliminary public meeting is held which decides on who will run for mayor, and they are then the only candidate in the formal election.
The preliminary meeting in Tlalnepantla, which drew 400 of the 5,600 people who live in the municipality, was held in April 2003. The only candidate, a Priísta, Conrado Pacheco, drew the support of only 30 of the 400 at the meeting. This meant that according to traditional election methods, he had failed to be nominated/elected. Pacheco ignored this setback, and stood in the official election on 6 July. The big difference was that by then he had switched his party allegiance and become a Fuerza Ciudadana politician. He came fourth of 11 candidates. The election was won by his PRI replacement, Elías Osorio, who scored 405 votes, just three more than the runner up from the Partido Acción Nacional. Pacheco, who got 339 votes, was the only one of the 11 candidates who refused to accept the result.
On 16 November, Pacheco called another assembly under the traditional system which he and his supporters claim drew 1,303 people. Of these all but one, apparently, voted for Pacheco. As a result of this meeting, Pacheco's supporters prevented Osorio from taking office. It was only when the state authorities sent in 800 policemen that Osorio was able to take his post. The state is currently governed by a Panista, Sergio Estrada Cajigal, and it is interesting that a PAN governor was prepared to risk so much trouble to uphold the democratic election of a Priísta.
The implications
Rightwing commentators are seething that all the usual leftwing suspects (the former Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, fellow travellers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the peasants who stopped Mexico City's new airport being built at San Salvador Atenco) have rallied behind Pacheco. The right wingers argue that the key point is that Osorio was chosen in a properly-run secret ballot, not at some intimidating public meeting.
Pacheco's supporters want the municipality to declare itself a municipio autónomo. This is what several municipalities have done in the southern state of Chiapas, at the instigation of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). There have been unconfirmed allegations, mainly from Osorio, that the protesters in Tlalnepantla were being advised by a guerrilla group which had set up a training camp in the municipality.
The interior minister Santiago Creel was adamant that there was no evidence of any camps, or of guerrilla involvement. The worry from the federal authorities' point of view is that the Zapatistas first edged on the scene in 1993 in this way, with reports and allegations of training camps in the Chiapas jungle. The Zapatistas then shocked the world with a well-planned uprising on 1 January 1994 in which they seized control of three of Chiapas' main towns and confronted the Mexican army for a week. What is clear is that when the police arrived at Tlalnepantla they were ambushed and shot at by snipers and had petrol bombs and gas canisters thrown at them. At least two patrol cars were set on fire and Osorio's own vehicle was torched.