Although the Mexican media was focused on the occupation of the nation’s congressional tribunal April 10 by opposition legislators protesting the Calderon administration’s proposed PEMEX oil company reform, other events of national significance unfolded on the 89th anniversary of the assassination of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Across rural and urban Mexico, farmers and their allies held protests, conducted highway blockades, convened meetings and staged marches to vent their anger over current agricultural and other policies.

“If we were to deliver a report to General Zapata today, we could say that poverty in the countryside continues, that migration to the U.S. grows daily and that the agricultural branches of production are not profitable,” said Federico Valle Vaquera, national director of the CIOAC rural advocacy organization.

Involving thousands of people, and encompassing political forces ranging from the revolutionary left to the centrist National Campesino Confederation, numerous activities were reported in the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, Guerrero, Veracruz, and Chiapas, among other places. In Chiapas, members of the National Struggle Front for Socialism blockaded an international bridge connecting Mexico to Guatemala.

In the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, hundreds turned out for a march to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), social security and energy reform initiatives, the Lomas de Poleo land conflict, and the presence of the Mexican army in the border city.

Ciudad Juárez’s El Diario newspaper ran a photograph that showed a Mexican soldier with a camera allegedly snapping pictures of protestors and journalists from El Diario and TV Azteca.

Demonstrators also blasted last month’s assassination of farm leader Armando Villareal Martha and the recent arrests of social activists Cipriana Jurado and Carlos Chavez. Attending the event, Jurado reported that charges against her for allegedly participating in the blockade of an international bridge in Ciudad Juárez in 2005 had been dropped.

While Zapata anniversary protests are nothing new in Mexico, a noteworthy development in this year’s actions was the linkage between agricultural, water and energy issues. In the northern border state of Sonora, for instance, forty farmers blockaded the state office of the federal Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries to protest what they said were excessive electricity and water rates. In the coffee-producing highlands of Veracruz, an estimated 500 growers demanded $150 million in government subsidies as an answer to 80 percent price hikes for petrochemical-based fertilizers.

Soaring fertilizer prices also prompted farmers in Guerrero to seize state and federal agricultural agency offices and blockade for one hour the Highway of the Sun that connects Mexico City to the tourist resort of Acapulco.

Small growers in the indigenous La Montana region of Guerrero have complained of fertilizer price hikes in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 percent in recent months. Schooled in the practices of the Green Revolution, most Mexican farmers still rely on petrochemical-based fertilizers to grow their crops.

Agriculture and energy was a theme picked up by Mexican Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas yesterday. Speaking at an official Zapata anniversary ceremony in the state of Morelos, Cardenas implied a direct relationship between improvement in the rural economy and passage of the Calderon Administration’s controversial energy reform package in the Mexican Congress.

“(Rural Mexico) can’t be removed from the issues related to the energy reform,” Cardenas said. “We can’t bet on populism or on deceit,” Cardenas added in an indirect poke at opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s movement against the privatization PEMEX.

In recent weeks, the heated debate over PEMEX has diverted public attention away from Mexico’s ongoing rural crisis, which resurfaced as a pressing national issue in the wake of the mass farmer protests against NAFTA earlier this year. Negotiations between farm groups and the Calderon Administration have since broken down. To the chagrin of many farmers, Calderon administration officials insist that renegotiating NAFTA is off the table. Consequently, more rural protests are almost certain in the weeks and months ahead. It remains to be seen to what degree the anti-NAFTA movement will coalesce with the campaign against the privatization of PEMEX.

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Sources:
-- La Jornada, April 11, 2008. Articles by Andres T.Morales, Matile Perez U., P. Munoz, C. Gomez, J. Aranda, and correspondents.

-- El Diario de Juárez, April 11, 2008. Article by Pedro Sanchez Briones.

-- El Sur, April 11, 2008. Articles by Zacarias Cervantes.

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Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico

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