Testing times for Mexican democracy

Democracy in Mexico was a long time in coming. The 2000 election of President Vicente Fox brought to an end a period of one-party rule by the Institution Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had dominated the country for seventy years. It was hailed as a breakthrough, and yet already the fledgling democracy is under assault from those who helped to achieve it in the first place.

President Fox is a pro-Washington premier who was wildly popular at his inauguration, a photogenic politician who promised much. His stock among Mexicans has, however, rapidly dwindled, largely due to his inability to tackle Mexico’s endemic problems of corruption, poverty and the flood of workers to the United States. His tenure has further been hampered by a humiliating defeat in mid-term parliamentary elections in 2003, wrecking many of his plans for the second half of his presidency.

By law, Fox will step down after his six-year term. Currently the most popular candidate for the 2006 election is the mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. A left-leaning politician, Obrador came to power in 2000, and during his term has ploughed money into welfare programs and other social projects. Most notably, he has authorised the construction of traffic-easing double decker highways, introduced scholarship schemes for poor children and provided a monthly allowance for elderly and the disabled. Whilst his critics maintain that he has lost control of a spiralling civic debt, Obrador’s populist approach, and his strong stance against the corruption that is endemic in the city, have earned him a status that most politicians can only dream about.

Yet his route to the Palacio Nacional looks set to be derailed before it has even begun. On the 8th of April the Mexican Congress voted to strip him of his mayoral immunity from prosecution, thus allowing him to be prosecuted. Obrador’s crime? Contempt of court resulting from a decision to allow construction of a road to a hospital on a piece of disputed land.

The Congressmen who voted against Obrador are abetted by both Vicente Fox and the White House. What are they trying to prevent? The problem for them is that they can see which way the winds are blowing in Latin America. In the first half of this decade, democratic elections have seen left-leaning governments installed in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. In Bolivia, indigenous groups have used peaceful protests and roadblocks to force the resignation of one pro-US President, and are keeping his replacement in check. Recently in Ecuador, thousands of people spilled out onto the streets of Quito to object to President Gutierrez’ sacking of elected Supreme Court members. Meanwhile in Venezuela, the socialist and US-baiting Hugo Chavez has won two elections and successfully fought a hastily arranged recall vote organised by his wealthy (and Washington-backed) opponents. These are the acts of a continent long used to suffering at the whims of Washington and the international community at large, and starting to settle its own destiny. The White House, preoccupied by the Middle East, has belatedly realised that much of its own hemisphere is now set against the Washington consensus and the IMF-imposed diktats that have brought more misery and equality to the Americas with few of the promised benefits. With the Free Trade Area of the Americas looking stillborn, there is concern emanating from the US that a leftwards shift in Mexico could disrupt the NAFTA treaty and cause a further schism between the two nations that lie across from each other on the Rio Grande.

Right now, despite his overwhelming popularity, it is unclear whether Obrador will be eligible to run in the 2006 election. On the 24th April, a rally in Mexico City brought out nearly a million followers, who marched silently through the streets, eager to demonstrate their support for the embattled mayor. It is clear that the mayor retains the popularity of his huge constituency, although in more remote parts of the country his profile remains relatively low. Whether he will be allowed to exercise his right to run for the presidency – and indeed whether Mexican democracy will survive its first, tenuous steps – remains to be seen.

Review: "Beneath The Roses" at the White Cube Gallery

Gregory Crewsdon’s large-scale photographs hang, imposing and unlabelled, in the bare expanse of Hoxton’s White Cube, the only thematic clue coming from the exhibition’s title: the dark underbelly of urban and suburban America, the vicious and viscous horror that hides furtively beneath the neon and brownstones and bucolic idylls of the Midwest.

Each photograph holds a self-contained tableau depicting carefully staged scene’s from American life. As your eyes adjust to the size of each piece, and the abundance of peculiarities within each one, the softest glimmers of a deeper narrative begin to swell. Questions are hung on the myriad details that are packed into the frame. A middle-aged couple stand in their bedroom, the woman’s face frozen in consternation, her moribund husband glaring at the floor; the patio door lies ajar. Elsewhere, a group of teenagers are scattered across a woodland redoubt. The eye focuses on the boy kneeling before a hole, his shirt removed, a length of frayed rope coiled on the ground beside him; he looks furtively at the stout frame of another boy who faces away from the camera. A woman sits in the passenger seat of a car on a twilit street, the tarmac scarred with rainfall. The driver’s seat is empty, the door ajar; her companion fled? In every photograph it seems that the camera has arrived a fraction late, just missing the pivotal event. In close proximity to the images, I found myself helplessly drawn in, and half-expected the actors to start moving; as if these characters existed in a film that I had paused on my VCR. It becomes an infuriating game, trying to piece together the sequence that leads to the moment captured by Crewsdon’s camera; and the dark nature of the material leads of expositions of a fanciful and macabre nature.

The photographs clearly invite comparisons with Edward Hopper’s paintings (though Hopper invests far less symbolism. The colours, reminiscent of Francis Bacon, are vivid and carefully delineated; in one shot, a bright pink camisole stands out against the browns and greens of a backyard post-coital embrace. Yet the images are closer to film stills in both aesthetic and method of production. Crewsdon employed professional actors, lighting designers and cinematographers to realise his visions. The late Eighties preoccupations of David Lynch, when his television series Twin Peaks uncovered the dark secrets of a pastoral town, are reflected in the empty small town streets and lumbering suburban clichés. The children searching through the overgrown skids and train tracks of a suburban town evoke Jeffrey discovering the severed ear in Blue Velvet.

In fact, the repetition and reminiscence of the Lynchian preoccupation – the terror beneath the peremptory normality of suburbia – becomes a little too mundane. We have been down this route before, so many times that the question of what is ‘normal, or perceived to be as such, in American society has ceased to have any relevance. Crewsdon’s images are intriguing to look at, yet they offer a predictably menacing slice of familial discontent that is becoming a little tired. Furthermore, the motifs that appear in several of the photographs – assorted pills scattered across a bedside table, empty liquor bottles – gradually become a little too contrived and provide too much justification.

Still, for stretching the mind’s tendency to string narratives together out of disparate elements, Crewsdon’s exhibition is certainly worth a visit.

Gregory Crewsdons ‘Beneath The Roses’ is on at the White Cube, Hoxton, until May 21st

Death of a radical feminist

As a male, what was there to say about Andrea Dworkin? The radical feminist died this week, aged 58, her reputation largely shredded and her stock amongst many other intellectuals at a level of insignificance. Publicly, she was even more anonymous. The critic Elaine Showalter once said that she “doubt[s] many women will get up to watch her funeral at 4am”. In fact I doubt whether many women will even be aware of whom Andrea Dworkin was, let alone mourn her passing.

No doubt, her death will be framed within the context of the familiar myths that surrounded her. Namely, that she was a man-hating anti-pornography killjoy who, most controversially, viewed the very act of sexual intercourse as a form of rape.

None of these things were really true in any meaningful sense, yet they became useful weapons with which her enemies – among them other feminists and critics from the left and right – could bash her. Not only that, but her physical appearance was ridiculed and called to attention. Indeed, she was overweight; she abhorred the use of makeup, and generally eschewed the beauty regime that so many young women today see as an intrinsic part of femininity. Many commentaries on her work would, at some point, recourse to the issue of her physicality, as if it invalidated her argument in some way.

The feminist backlash against Dworkin came to a head in 2000, when – in two essays, published by the Guardian newspaper and the liberal News Statesman magazine – she revealed that, whilst staying in a European hotel in 1999, she had been drugged and raped. Seizing on supposed inconsistencies in her testimonies, critics such as Catherine Bennett questioned the validity of the assault, and skirted dangerously close to accusing Dworkin of inventing the whole episode. The attack – and presumably the response to it – left her in a state of despair, in which she claimed she was ‘ready to die’.

It was no doubt due in part to her bellicose writing style that such a backlash occurred. While Dworkin was no man-hater – she lived with partner John Stoltenberg for the last three decades of her life – she did suffer horrific traumas at their hands. After being arrested at a Vietnam War protest, the 18-year old Dworkin was subjected to a vicious body cavity that left her with internal scarring. Some years later, she entered into a violently abusive marriage that she was lucky to survive. Influenced by these experiences, amongst others, her writing often took on a vitriolic and excessive tone that often careered into bouts of vigilantism and revenge. She advocated the execution of paedophiles, and often called on abused women to take up arms against their assailants. She took a dim view of sexual intercourse, and described the use of force in sex – inherent in the very action itself – as a form of rape. Her view was that in a patriarchal society, any form of heterosexual relationship is necessarily oppressive. And she viewed the very existence of pornography, as well as its manufacture, as a form of violence against women.

I found some of this ridiculous, some of it detestable, some even plain wrong. And yet as a man I was fascinated by it. And that remains the troubling thing. Because even when I disagreed with her, I could never stop reading. I wanted to be drawn into the world of victimisation that she described, to see the fear and subjugation that Dworkin painted as the lot of the typical woman. And that world was at once terrifying, absurd, aggressive and yet imbued with just enough truth to send a frisson of guilt and even recognition down the spine.

She was an extremist, and she knew as much. Yet amidst the internecine fighting that characterises much feminist writing today, her vehemence and outrage and originality of thought – no matter how unpalatable – will be sorely missed.

The end of New Labour

To the surprise of nobody, Tony Blair this week announced a general election for the 5th of May. Cue the starting pistol, although in reality, the major players have been limbering up for the final sprint finish for several months.

For some time now the electorate has been urged to undergo a little collective amnesia when considering Labour’s record in power. In the Wednesday edition of the Guardian, the government’s cheerleader Polly Toynbee continued in the vein that she has been ploughing for several months: forget about Iraq, vote Blair and eventually you’ll get Chancellor Gordon Brown moving in to Number 10.

Forget Iraq. As if it were that simple to forego. Never mind the deaths of British soldiers, the uncounted tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, the lies over WMD, the revisionist talk of ‘Iraqi liberty’ in a country where fundamental Islam is now taking root, the abject refusal of Blair to even contend an apology, the disgraceful tangent we have joined America in forging on the world stage. Two years ago, more than a million people showed their defiance and disgust at the idea of war, a demonstration that cut across class, culture, race, background and ideology. It amounted to nothing. Tony Blair ignored the wishes of the people who twice elected him to bloated Commons majorities, and now when an election is looming and the Conservative are in the ascendancy, he wants us to forget about that betrayal and put the past behind us and come back into the fold. Yet for many, Iraq looms over Blair – and, due to his increasingly presidential style, over the entire Labour party, notwithstanding those who fought against it – like a barrage balloon, dwarfing everything else into insignificance.

The arguments for the good that Labour has done ring hollow, mainly because they’re not being made at all by the government. Instead, potential swing voters who are considering defecting to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens or even Respect, are being admonished by the spectre of a Michael Howard victory on May 6th. Forget Iraq, we are being told; forget everything else, strip the issue to its core – that by not voting for Labour, you could be sentencing the country to another period of Tory rule.

It is no wonder that political apathy is so widespread, nor is it surprising that this election will surely sink below the 59% voter turnout of 2001. The choice is a stark one, but depressing on both sides. On one hand, an eminently dislikeable and inept public servant who will pick and choose issues from the far right – immigration, land rights for gypsies, ‘tougher’ penalties for criminals – in order to slap together a reactionary agenda that will appeal to the baser instincts of the populace. On the other, a distrusted prime minister who has successfully moved his party further and further to the right, and who will be consigned to history as the joint architect of an illegal, immoral and thoroughly opposed military folly.

Michael Howard is seeking to reposition the election as a “referendum” on Tony Blair’s eight years in power. His ploy, and a clever one at that, is to emphasise Blair’s visibility as the head of the government, whilst Labour tries to underplay it. The Evening Standard reported on Thursday that the Prime Minister’s image will be absent from the party’s manifesto brochure; likewise, many MPs are looking to marginalise Mr. Blair’s prominence in their own constituencies, a fact which Mr. Howard cleverly mocked in the Commons.

But for the traditional Labour voter, the issue shouldn’t be a referendum on Blair as much as it should be one on the entire party’s ideological path. To pin the blame for New Labour’s excesses entirely on the Prime Minister, while holding onto the quaint notion that the rest of the party retains a socialist bent, is a naïve belief that should firmly be debunked. In the years between the 1992 loss and the 1997 landslide, the party took huge strides to the right that cannot and will not be simply overturned by a change in leadership. In the London Review of Books, John Lancaster talks of the path that David Blunkett took in going from leader of the ‘loony Left’ Sheffield council in the 1980s, to the Labour home secretary who introduced authoritarian measures such as the suspension of prisoner’s rights, the widespread use of ‘anti-social behaviour orders’, and who described civil liberties concerns as ‘airy-fairy’. Blunkett’s journey may have been the most dramatic in its rightward tangent, but the truth is that the entire apparatus of the party now stands to the right of centre on most issues that concern Labour voters. This may well be a successful formula for winning elections, but in such a dire situation, is this even a welcome result?

Well, yes. A victory for Labour in this election is, at a stretch, a desirable objective, but with certain caveats. Some intellectuals have argued that another landslide is necessary in order for Gordon Brown to have a workable mandate when the inevitable happens and Tony Blair finally stands aside. I disagree with this, and would go as far as saying that another huge Labour majority on May 6th would be almost as bad as a Conservative victory. Ideologically, Brown differs from Blair in the most trivial ways, and thus a strong showing at this election would merely set into stone the New Labour doctrine of rightward expansion into traditional Conservative territory. They should be returned to power on a slim majority, so that the party can take stock of its situation and begin to rediscover its roots. This election must signal the beginning of the end for New Labour.

Venezuela and the new Latin America

After a period of relative quietude, the frisson between the United States and Venezuela has boiled over again in recent months, like a spiteful clash between old lovers. In his weekly television address, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed that the US was trying to kill him. This was in response to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s description of Chavez as a ‘negative force’ in the region. Chavez, not normally known for his romantic overtures, went on to brazenly suggest that Dr. Rice’s obsession with him was down to a latent sexual frustration and claimed she ‘didn’t know what she was missing’.

The amusing rhetoric belies a fragile relationship that has come dangerously close to cracking. Since his 1999 election to the presidency, Chavez has often been singled out as a problem by the US. His close ties to Fidel Castro have been criticized. His ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, with its emphasis on the re-distribution of oil revenues to social projects and literacy campaigns for the majority of Venezuelans who live in poverty, have been derided as quasi-communist. In April 2002, a coup d’etat was staged, with the US offering discreet complicity; 48 hours later Chavez was returned to the Miraflores palace following widespread demonstrations by his many supporters.

Photogenic, light-skinned Venezuelans have accused Chavez of wrecking the country and waging a war on the formerly prosperous middle class. Yet Chavez was re-elected in 2000, and in August 2004 a long-running campaign aimed at dissolving his presidency was derailed when 60% of the population voted to keep him in power. His is a power base rooted in the poor, the oppressed, the millions who live in the slums of Caracas, the rural people who until the arrival of Chavez had little opportunity of bettering themselves. In the President, with his indigenous heritage, they see one of their own.

The latest volleys between Washington and Caracas come at a time of increased U.S. interference in Venezuela. Donald Rumsfeld has been sounding ominous warnings about the supposed ‘threat’ posed by Chavez to the region’s stability, and the right-wing National Review duly complied by describing Chavez as one of “Latin America’s Terrible Two”, along with the resurgent Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. In that article, the former Latin American aide Otto Reich amply demonstrated his mastery of Bush-speak, describing the Cuban president Fidel Castro as an “evil genius” and dredging up the spectre of an “axis of subversion” between the two countries that could threaten to unhinge the entire region.

The U.S. has also become worried about what they see as an increasing militarism in Venezuela. The government has recently bought a supply of Ak-47s from Russia, and a deal was signed to buy ships and transport plans from Spain. Rumsfeld openly queried Venezuela’s recent acquisitions, saying that he “can’t understand why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK47s”, an interesting remark from a man whose country spends more on defence than the rest of the world’s nations combined. The irony of this is, of course, that Washington is becoming increasingly reliant on the 1.5 million barrels of oil they buy daily from Venezuela.

All this talk of ‘subversion’ masks the real fear that Washington has over the region. Over the last five years, a swath of countries across Latin America have elected centre-left democratic governments, and in doing so fundamentally altered the political makeup of the hemisphere. The days of the Washington consensus, and IMF-dictated economic policies that insisted on free market reforms and cutbacks on social expenditure, appear to be over. Argentina and Brazil are led by governments that are willing to stand up to the hegemony that the West has long held over their countries. In Bolivia, indigenous groups have managed to unseat one unpopular President, and are challenging the exploitation of their country’s natural resources by multinational corporations. Most recently, Uruguay elected its first ever leftist President, Tabare Vazquez, who on his first day in office re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba and signed an energy co-operation deal with Venezuela.

It is this increased regional integration that perturbs Washington; thus these efforts, in the words of the Venezuelan Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel, to “destroy Latin American unity”. The idea of a powerful Latin American bloc – a dream that was borne in the mind of the 19th century liberator, and oft-invoked Chavez hero, Simon Bolivar – which could pose a difficult partner in trade negotiations, is something that the US wishes to undermine at all costs. A ‘trial run’ for such a group was seen in the abortive Cancun WTO negotiations in 2003, when the so-called G22 – a group of developing nations worldwide, spearheaded by Brazil and India – directly challenged the hitherto Western-dominated meeting and effectively brought the talks to an end. Such a pact across Latin America – with its shared geography, language, and history of colonial exploitation – could dramatically alter the balance of power in global trade.

And with the oil-rich Venezuela reaching out to the rest of the continent, and other nations of the 'global south', it is possible that the balance could be shifting for good. Perhaps Condoleeza Rice should take up Chavez's offer, at least on the grounds of diplomatic necessity.