Monday, June 21, 2004

 

PAN reaching out to Mexico’s farm sector

 

By Barnard R. Thompson

 

Stepping yet further up to Mexico’s political plate, the National Action Party (PAN) is finally embracing the nation’s campesino, indigenous and rural sectors in a formal, weighty and seemingly dual faceted manner.  This, essentially, after 65 years of political neglect of the farm and rural sectors — ever since the PAN was founded in 1939.

 

What is more, by doing so the PAN is taking dead aim at another of the cornerstones of the still powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.  Since 1938 especially, campesino and farm organizations in Mexico, most often grouped together in federations and confederations, have been key components in the PRI machine that has delivered the vote that kept the party in power for decades.

 

The ruling PRI, founded in 1929 by the government as the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), went through a major reorganization in 1938.  The party’s name was changed to the Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM), and its basic structure was adjusted to a tripartite make-up — agrarian, labor and popular partitions, outwardly at least dropping the military.

 

As the new system took shape criticism erupted from new and developing social and economic groups that were not part of sector organizations.  As such they did not have a say in the political process, which led to another structural change in 1946.

 

The official party was renamed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and an adjustment was made to incorporate all feasible entities while shifting real political power even more from the sectors to the authoritarian party itself, which meant to the nation’s ruling oligarchy.  Still, the agrarian, labor and popular sector formation was kept as the basic structure of the PRI, and those wings of the party continue as its foundation.

 

It should be noted that over the years some campesino and peasant groups chose leftwing organizations over the PRI and its sectoral groupings.  The Mexican Communist Party (PCM) was founded in 1919, and even since 1963 when the PCM began its mergers with and into other leftist alliances some of its small farm and labor organizations have remained loyal.

 

Since it’s beginning, the relatively conservative National Action Party has largely included urban middle to upper class professionals and entrepreneurs with strong ties to business, industry and the Catholic Church.  As well, with some exceptions this includes the membership surge of businesspeople and professionals that began in the 1980s.

 

With the mainly urban base of the PAN — and due in part quite certainly to the rural strength of the PRI, Mexico’s campesino and farm sectors actually seemed of little political interest to party leaders for almost 65 years, but now — with a number of state elections this year and next, and presidential elections in 2006 — things are apparently changing.

 

On June 13 the PAN formally created a new political organization with the installation of the “National Council for the Rural Action Program of PAN,” or Plantar.  The Council, that will coordinate and guide the new farm and rural area political experience, was introduced and outlined during a gala inauguration held at PAN headquarters in Mexico City.

 

During the ceremony PAN President Luis Felipe Bravo Mena described Plantar as a result of talks with farm and rural residents of Mexico.  “There are campesinos, indigenous producers, farm leaders who are members of the PAN, working with the PAN, and they want to develop farm and rural areas with PAN values.  We are going to take a step so that all of this has a link, a coordination, an expression, besides reinvesting in a social program to benefit the farm and rural sectors.  That is how Plantar was born.”

 

Bravo also said: “I asked myself why … in spite of having hundreds of thousands of campesinos, farmers and indigenous people who belong to the PAN … why is there no presence, a voice, something that gives them not just a social expression but also a political expression based on PAN values, principles and that which the PAN has been doing for so long in rural areas?”

 

A day before the PAN event a new campesino federation, obviously similar to those that are part of the PRI and its former machine, was also inaugurated.  The National Integration Union of Social Economy and Solidarity Organizations (Unimoss), that reportedly brings together 4,200 associations with some 700,000 members nationwide, is additionally said to be based on PAN principles.  Still, while Unimoss leaders say they will absolutely support President Vicente Fox Quesada, they claim no affiliations exist with the government or the PAN.