Venezuela
The Venezuelan revolutionary socialist party, the Partido Revolución y Socialismo (PRS) has debated standing a candidate against Chávez in the presidential elections in Venezuela in December.
The majority of the PRS, including well-known trade union leaders such as Orlando Chirino, decided last month to back Chávez and his campaign for 10 million votes.
However a significant minority within the party, the Juventud de Izquierda Revolucionaria (JIR) has argued for standing a candidate, as part of the fight for working class political independence.
The JIR, which is part of the international grouping associated with the PTS in Argentina, characterises Chávez as a bourgeois nationalist politician, who manages Venezuelan capitalism in the interests of sectors of national capital and the multinationals.
It criticises the PRS trade unionists for, on the one hand rightly promoting trade union independence and democracy within the UNT, yet at the same time backing Chávez politically.
As a result of the PRS majority decision, the JIR has declared itself a public faction of the party, though it doesn’t look like it will be able to put up a workers’ candidate. Nevertheless, the issues raised by the JIR are vital for socialists in Venezuela.
Mexico
By Dan La Botz
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), has called for a campaign of civil disobedience to pressure the election authorities to carry out a vote-by-vote recount. He has summoned the Mexican people to defend their votes, their elections, and the institution of democracy itself. What is at stake, he says, is not only his election but the very future of the country.
Speaking on July 30 before a crowd estimated at perhaps as many as two million people—the largest demonstration in Mexican history—López Obrador launched the civil disobedience campaign by declaring a permanent sit-in in the Zócalo, the national plaza, and in dozens of locations throughout the Mexican capital. He himself took command of the movement from a tent in the Zócalo where, seated at a small table with the Mexican flag behind him, he appeared to be simultaneously the Mexican shadow president and the leader of the greatest social movement in Mexican history in almost a hundred years.
Having fought throughout his campaign to win the election and to change the political direction of the country to the left, López Obrador has decided that he will not let the election be stolen from him as it was from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988. Claiming that votes were stolen by everything from stuffing ballot boxes to manipulating computer programs, López Obrador has demanded that the Mexican election authorities do right. To do right means to count the votes, each and every one of them, a process he is sure, and his followers are sure, will make him the next president of Mexico.
The Mexican Federal Election Institute (IFE) declared Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN) to be the winner on July 6, but López Obrador and his supporters have argued that the election was stolen and have demanded a recount “polling-place-by-polling-place and vote-by-vote.” López Obrador has pursued both a legal strategy, filing appeals with the election authorities demanding that the votes be recounted, and a political strategy, attempting to set in motion a civil disobedience campaign that will pressure the authorities to insure a fair election. The campaign of civil disobedience, peaceful but forceful action, is centered in Mexico City, the heart and brain of Mexico.
• This article is abridged from Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a monthly collaboration of the Mexico City-based Authentic Labor Front (FAT), the Pittsburgh-based United Electrical Workers (UE), and the Resource Center of the Americas.
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna_articles.php?id=105
