

The following series is taken from Executive Intelligence Review V20, 
#5 and is the cover story of that issue.  For further information on 
EIR, please contact me by Email.

Mexico's Pronasol: Nazi-communists dance 
to Wall Street's tune
by Carlos Cota Meza

Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's
National Solidarity Program (Pronasol, or Solidarity) has
achieved worldwide notoriety. Its most radical advocates
maintain that with Pronasol, Salinas could aspire to some
Nobel Prize in the future. Pronasol has been praised and
supported by George Bush and Bill Clinton. It has received
the backing of numerous European governments, the
Vatican's State Department, and the Vatican's ambassador
to Mexico. A variety of regional governments, including
Chile, Brazil, and Costa Rica, have sent delegations to
Mexico to learn the ``secret'' of Pronasol. Anti-poverty
``experts'' from China and India have been sent to Mexico
to study its unique success. 
   Above all, the bankers of Wall Street are euphoric.
The {Wall Street Journal} of Jan. 8 wrote: ``The
Solidarity Program is the fulcrum of President Carlos
Salinas de Gortari's effort to ensure that the benefits
from Mexico's free market economic renaissance reach the
very poor.... And the do-it-yourself anti-poverty plan has
been such a success that hardware stores can scarcely
keep picks and shovels in stock.''
   The Mexican government's own public explanations
about its program do not suffer from modesty either. With
President Salinas in the lead, officials say that with
Solidarity, ``we have done in 30 months what for other
nations has taken their entire history.'' They say that the
program is intended ``to construct a social state with full
respect for citizens' rights,'' or that it offers ``a space
for the exercise of direct democracy,'' and so on. 
   The truth is that Pronasol emerged from the
recommendations of the World Bank, that the Mexican
government allocate budget resources to a program for
``combatting extreme poverty'' which would, at the same
time, serve to create a base of political support among
the impoverished layers of the population for the
government's neo-liberal economic policies (payment of the
foreign debt, budget cuts, wage freezes, privatization,
elimination of traditional social aid institutions). It is
the creation of a new corporatist, Nazi-communist entity,
which rejects any form of traditional management of the
national economy. 
   The source of Pronasol's financing is no secret. Each
time that Salinas de Gortari refers to it, he insists that
its projects be financed with money from the privatization
of state companies. But this is a simplistic explanation.
Through the privatization of state companies, money is
obtained for paying off the foreign debt. Those payments
in turn produce some ``relief'' on payment of future
interest costs. A portion of that ``relief'' is allocated to
Pronasol. This is why, while the Salinas government's
amortization and interest payments on the foreign debt
(through June 1992) has been more than $44 billion, the
National Solidarity Program has received nearly $9 billion
over five years (including 1993 allocations). Pronasol's
resources have grown from year to year: $547 million in
1989; $1.222 billion in 1990; $1.729 billion in 1991;
$2.267 billion in 1992; and $2.582 billion in 1993. 

               - A brainwashing program -
   Beyond all the propaganda, Pronasol is a
brainwashing program not unlike the Maoists' Cultural
Revolution, which seeks the reform of the Mexican state,
the restructuring of the ruling PRI party elites, to win
votes for the government, and to coopt independent and
leftist political organizations. All of this is intended
to establish a new political base of support under the
corporatist control of the presidency, as a means of
giving continuity to neo-liberal economic policies with
the backing of the poor.
    Every social program of previous governments is now
accused of being ``ruinous populism by a paternalistic
state.'' Analysts of the speeches of the President and of
other government officials about Pronasol have encountered
a strange mixture of ideologies. The Italian Communist
Antonio Gramsci is sometimes cited; Gramsci postulated
that power would be given to civil society through the
process of ``social autogestion'' and suppression of the
bourgeois state, much like the Count Saint Simon who,
together with other ``utopian socialists'' like Pierre
Joseph Proudhon (of the ``Philosophy of Misery'') urged a ``new entrepreneurial
ethic.'' In practice, Pronasol translates into the
re-creation of Adolf Hitler's ``voluntary work armies.'' 
   To carry out this ``cultural revolution'' (reform of
the state), the Salinas government is relying on an
impressive political apparatus. From the very beginning of
the program, suspicions were aroused by the fact that its
facilitators were in the majority ``former'' leftist
militants. On every level of the Pronasol hierarchy, one
finds ``ex''-communists, ``ex''-Trotskyists, ``ex''-Maoists,
``ex''-guerrillas from Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, and
Argentina. Many of them have done jail time for acts of
terrorism. All work on an intellectual level as the heads
of promotion teams, as field organizers (all are
self-dubbed ``employees at the service of the people'').
According to information put out by Pronasol, there are
some 700,000 Solidarity ``militants.'' Arturo Marti@aanez
Nateras, former communist and current coordinator of
Pronasol's regional programs, says that the National
Solidarity Program does everything. ``If it's a matter of
settling accounts with a mayor, a Pronasol official
appears to purge him; if one seeks to promote such and
such a person, he is identified as a prominent member of
the Pronasol family. Absolutely everything is decorated
with the tricolor bow,'' which is Solidarity's emblem. 
   On June 10, 1992, the creation of a National
Solidarity Institute was announced, whose purpose is to
prepare ``labor cadre who will be able to organize,
represent, lead, and act under the Solidarity philosophy.''
Documents of the institute complain that ``labor
organizations have been generally incapable of superseding
the traditional forms of labor intervention and action.''
Sources have revealed that the institute is offering
courses propagandizing against the Mexican Labor
Federation (CTM) and its leader Fidel Vela@aazquez, the
oldest and most established labor organization on the
Mexican political scene. The ``fourth historic reform'' or
``re-founding'' of the ruling PRI party that has been
announced, has as one of its primary objectives the
incorporation of ``Solidarity Committees'' into the
structure of the ruling party such that these become the
party's new base of support. 
   For the communists of the Pronasol family, the
political line is: ``With Solidarity, the balance of power
in Mexico has been changed. There has been a transfer of
power from the bureaucracy to the organized communities.''
At the same time, these official communists are completely
interlinked with the opposition communists organized
around the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who
have proclaimed that their fight against the International
Monetary Fund and its policies is now over. 
   Adolfo Gilly, a national executive committee member
of the PRD and a longstanding Trotskyist leader in Mexico,
proposes the creation of new political organizations
against those which ``wasted the decade of the eighties
with illusory slogans such as non-payment of the foreign
debt.... The International Monetary Fund and World Bank
have built-in and unavoidable guarantees so that no
government in its right mind could, on its own, take the
risk of that kind of measure.... The restructuring of
Latin American capitalism [has done away with] the
outmoded national-populist pacts for all time.'' As
Pronasol's regional coordinator Marti@aanez Nateras has
indicated, Pronasol has become a parallel government at
the local level, and in many states at the level of
governorships, where Solidarity delegates have more
political and budgetary power than governors themselves. 

               - New budgetary structure -
   In May 1992, the national congress approved a
presidential initiative to create a new cabinet post:
Secretary of Social Development. The Pronasol structure
has been integrated into that new department, which has
not only replaced the Department of Ecology and Urban
Development, but establishes a new ministerial hierarchy
and new budget. The Secretary of Social Development
coordinates the operations of the Departments of
Education, Labor, Social Security; the State Workers
Institute; Family Development; the National Housing
Institute; Popular Housing Development; and the National
Development Bank. 
   One of the main objectives of this reorganization is
to reduce the costs of various public works projects, by
using the semi-slave labor power provided by Pronasol. As
the {Wall Street Journal} wrote on Jan. 8, ``Because
citizen participation minimizes labor costs and reduces
waste, the program's $9 billion price tag is far less than
what the government would have paid to do the work
itself.... Solidarity road-building projects ... cost just
70% of what the government used to pay to do the jobs.'' 
   A Pronasol census revealed that there are 40 million
officially poor in Mexico, of whom 17 million subsist
under conditions of ``extreme poverty.'' It is among this
sector of the population that Pronasol operates, not to
combat the structural causes of poverty but rather to
organize and convert it into a political force. 
   According to Salinas's Fourth State of the Nation,
address given Nov. 1, 1992, there are 100,000 ``Solidarity
Committees'' spread throughout Mexico and organized by
official communists. The people they serve have no place
in the government's neo-liberal economic model, since they
are not even considered a reserve army of labor power.
Instead, they are viewed as a potential organized
battering ram against other Mexicans who have had access
to ``modern Mexico,'' namely, the exploited {maquiladora}
workers, those who still have a bit of land, those who are
making starvation wages but are still organized in unions,
etc. 
   According to the Salinistas, who hope to perpetuate
their stay in power beyond the year 2000, it is the
targeted victims of Solidarity who will demand that the
dismantling of the state and of the national economy
continue, that payment of the foreign debt be maintained,
and that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
continue to govern Mexico. Herein lies the ``success'' of
Pronasol, touted worldwide. 
   Salinas de Gortari has brought together Nazis and
communists to work for the imposition of the policy of the
international financial institutions. And for these
supranational oligarchic institutions, the deal has come
cheap: a mere $9 billion spent so that in 1994 there will
be a new government in Mexico controlled by Carlos Salinas
de Gortari, Wall Street's man. 

----
         John Covici
          [email-masked]