Toronto Star | August 9, 2001 | By Will Weissert
Protesters want subsidies, return to pre-Fox ways
Thousands of farmers marched through the Mexican capital yesterday demanding subsidies and a halt to free trade posing the most direct challenge yet to President Vicente Fox's eight-month-old administration.
The march, on the birthday of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, was a show of force for the "old Mexico," opposed to the new, entrepreneurial nation that the businessman Fox has promised.
The protesters' rhetoric harkened back to Zapata's 1910-1917 Revolution, which created the communal farms that served as the political backbone of the former ruling party, whose 71-year reign Fox ended in last year's elections.
Streams of farmers chanted "Zapata Lives! The struggle continues!" as they fanned out across the world's second-largest city to blockade government offices and shut down a half-dozen major boulevards.
"Rural Mexico could explode," said protest organizer Alvaro Lopez, leader of the Agrarian Congress farm group. "This could take us to the edge of anarchy."
While march organizers said more than 5,000 farmers participated, yesterday's turnout was lower than the tens of thousands promised by labour unions.
The farmers are suffering from a prolonged drought that has withered crops in northern Mexico and low prices for coffee, basic grains, sugar and tropical cash crops like bananas.
They complained Fox has abandoned any pretense at making Mexico self-sufficient in food production, something to which the former ruling party at least paid lip service largely to ensure farmers' political support.
"With the trade opening and in the framework of globalization, the government took the easy way out, saying, 'It's easier to buy cheap imports than to support expensive domestic production,' " Lopez said.
Fox drew the battle lines Tuesday when he encouraged farmers to modernize, adopt new crops and rely less on government. He said he wanted to end "corruption, paternalism, political favouritism and bureaucracy" in farm policy.
But he showed no sign of stepping away from the two things that angered protesters most: his commitment to free-trade agreements that have let in cheap foreign grain and his close relationship with the United States.
Fox said Mexico doesn't have the money to compete in a subsidy race with developed countries, and that farmers should leave behind corn and change to crops where they have an advantage like the winter-vegetable exports that made Fox's family wealthy.
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