Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Questions about a revolutionary heritage

Not everyone is sure that Mexico's revolutionary heritage is revolutionary.

Critics say Mexican Revolution's goals are elusive

As Mexico prepares to mark 100 years since a revolution fought to install democracy and improve the lot of the country's landless peasants, many are focusing on how short it fell from its mark.

Mexico's democracy is anemic and the plight of the poor remains largely unchanged, critics say.

Hundreds of protesters gathered at Mexico City's independence monument Friday, blocking one of the city's main boulevards, to denounce what organizers called the failures of the bloody, seven-year conflict that began Nov. 20, 1910, and saw peasant armies led by mustachioed heroes Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa topple the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Rather than democracy, it set the stage for 71 years of paternalistic political domination by the Revolutionary Institutional Party that only ended a decade ago.

"The legacy of the revolution is a really mixed bag," said Jose Antonio Ibanez, coordinator of the human rights program at the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City. "It undoubtedly changed the face of Mexican society, but it fell far short of its objectives. ... The poor people, the farmers who fought in the revolution, those whose blood built this country, they're still completely marginalized."…

Today, another bloody war against drug traffickers, which has cost at least 28,000 lives over the past four years and transformed some areas of Mexico into battlegrounds, also casts a pall on Saturday's anniversary celebration.

The violence is so bad that dozens of towns in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas have scrapped parades planned for Saturday. In parts of the same state, drug gangs have kidnapped ranchers or run them off land they've held since the time of the revolution…

Pundits compared the revolution's worst excesses to the cartel executions that dominate contemporary news broadcasts.

"Were the pitiless revolutionaries of yesteryear the ancestors of the current killers?" a column in Thursday's El Universal newspaper asked. "Or is it simply that ... the history of Mexico is a history of treason and violence that are as Mexican as the tortilla?"...