http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/3833400.html

May 1, 2006, 11:42PM
IN MEXICO
Leftists blame local struggles on capitalism
Marchers say U.S. power is causing downfall across the border


By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

MEXICO CITY - Mexican immigrants and their U.S. boycott were on the minds and lips of tens of thousands of unionized workers and leftist protesters who marched Monday through the heart of Mexico City.

"Immigrant brothers, we are with you," chanted a cohort of street merchants arriving for a midday protest that began in front of the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy and coursed for several miles to the sprawling central plaza downtown. "Open the borders."

But while support for the U.S. boycott ran wide among the marchers here, it didn't seem very deep nationwide. Despite calls for a boycott of U.S. brand businesses, commerce seemed brisk as usual at many of them.

And at the marches themselves, the immigrant issue seemed tacked on to more traditional leftist demands and complaints: curtailing capitalism and U.S. power, condemning the U.S. government and President Bush, denouncing President Vicente Fox and about every other Mexican politician as lapdogs of the American empire.

"Fox is a puppet of the empire," said Arturo Guerrero, a 56-year-old educator, who said he has participated in leftist protests since 1968. "This isn't just against Fox but against all the capitalist system that has been imposed upon us."

Monday, after all, was May Day. That's Labor Day here and in much of the world. And since it began more than century ago to commemorate the police killings of protesting workers in Chicago in 1886, May Day has been the holiday of holidays for left-thinking people nearly everywhere.


A game for the rich
The tens of thousands who gathered at the embassy — marshalled by Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the failed 1994 Maya indian uprising who remains an icon of rebellion here — presented a kaleidoscope of dissent.

They came from the Old Left, the New Left, the Gay Left and the left-behind Left. Trotskyists marched alongside transsexuals, Stalinists bumped shoulders with socialists.

T-shirts blazoned with the likeness of Che Guevara, the icon of the Cuban Revolution, covered many a belly. Hats of the sort favored by Latin American peasants or China's long-dead Chairman Mao, shielded heads from the sun.

Activists hawked newspapers, magazines and pamphlets parsing every splinter of leftist thought.

By the marchers' logic, illegal immigration to the United States is but one more result of a game rigged to benefit the rich, another blow against the U.S.-dominated global capitalist system.

"We want to tell our brothers and sisters struggling north of the border that we are with them," Marcos said in the speech in front of the embassy, before leading the crowd to the Zocalo, as the central plaza is known. "We are struggling for another Mexico, one that doesn't obligate its workers to migrate somewhere else to find a dignified life."

"Workers to power!" shouted a small group of mostly young marchers, who arrived carrying the hammer and sickle flag of the former Soviet Union and large portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.


Little effect on business
Thousands of unionized workers who marched earlier in the day echoed that support for the immigrants. But their ire was directed mostly at Fox, whose government has been disputing with the unions since deposing the head of the national miners union in February.

The union marchers called for better wages and working conditions. They demanded that Fox's government stay out of the internal affairs of unions. They called for a system fairer to labor.

Of course, the big problem facing Mexican workers is that there are many more of them than there than there are jobs to be filled.

That reality — which has existed for decades as Mexico's population expansion far outstripped its economic growth — has driven millions of Mexicans north of the border, many of them illegally.

"We are not against the United States, we are against the big corporations," university student Rodrigo Uribe, 18, said in English as he held one end of a posterboard U.S. flag that had American corporations names where the stars might be. "It's not fair that the rich make deals among themselves while the workers suffer."

As they made their way downtown, those marching with Marcos hiked past the hundreds of farmers who have been holding naked protests demanding resolution of a decades old land dispute. As the march streamed by, the peasant protesters stripped in solidarity.

Though activists here and across Mexico had been calling for a boycott of Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other American brand business, it seemed to have little effect.

Several dozen diners filled the tables at a McDonald's in downtown Mexico City, just a few yards from where the protest march passed on the way to the downtown plaza.

"In reality, this is a day like any other," said Nayely Madrid, the 21-year-old assistant manager at the restaurant.

dqalthaus@yahoo.com