The Power of Mexico’s Capitalists
Dan La Botz, Guest Blogger
Dan La Botz is co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis. This is the second part of a two-part series. The first part is available here.
Mexico’s capitalist class is wealthy, well organized, and politically powerful. Mexican businesspeople have for many decades been organized in the Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic (COPARMEX) which brings together “more than 36,000 member companies across the country are responsible for 30% of GDP and 4.8 million formal jobs.” COPARMEX, and other business organizations, such as the National Chamber of the Manufacturing Industry (CANACINTRA), have worked for years, principally through the PAN but also with the PRI to develop policies, write legislation, and to lobby for their political agenda.
The Mexican capitalists brought neoliberal government to power in two stages: First, the victory within the PRI of the so-called “Technocrats” over the “Dinosaurs” (that is, the neoliberals over the economic nationalists) in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, the electoral victory of the PAN. The two PAN administrations—under Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006-2012)—demonstrated that the party was incapable of governing Mexico. Fox’s administration failed to deliver on its promises to the business class, while Calderón initiated the disastrous war on drugs with the tens of thousands of dead and forcibly disappeared as well as widespread police and army human rights violations.
Peña Nieto, the governor of the State of Mexico (the country’s most populous state, which wraps around the Mexico City Federal District and includes much of the Mexico City metropolitan area) won back the presidency for the PRI in 2012. He has been the champion of Mexican capitalists and foreign investors, pushing forward the neoliberal agenda that the PRI had initiated back in the 1980s. Immediately after his election, “EPN” (as he is widely known) succeeded in drawing the PAN and also the ostensibly left-of-center PRD, into his Pact for Mexico. The pact bound these parties to the neoliberal program advocated by COPARMEX and by foreign investors. Over the last three years, Mexico then passed the so-called reforms—education, labor, energy, and telecommunications—representing a clear victory for big business.
Nevertheless, Mexico’s capitalist class faces a serious problem: economic stagnation. After 2008, virtually the entire world economy went into crisis, followed in many cases by prolonged stagnation. Because of its high degree of integration into the North American economy, Mexico’s economic growth depends upon the United States, its largest trading partner. The world economy and the U.S. economy have not been strong enough to pull Mexico out of its economic doldroms. Mexico’s GDP is not growing at even one percent per year. For the working class, this has meant a continual decline in its standard of living. This situation might drive workers to fight back, but workers’ independent organization is as of yet non-existent.
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