Restructuring and Rioting in Mexico

From Anathema

Mass mobilizations, widespread looting, blockades, gas seizures, sabotage, arson, and other assaults on law and order broke out across Mexico in early January in response to the government’s deregulation of gas prices and the resulting nationwide spike in prices. Around 2000 people have been arrested so far amidst ongoing and spreading rebellions that local sources are calling potentially “uncontainable.”

A series of spontaneous mass mobilizations began after new polices that ended government subsidization of fuel prices took effect on January 1. Prices immediately shot up by 20%, creating an unbearable situation for most Mexicans, those of whom earning minimum wage would now have to work for twelve days in order to buy one tank of gas. The purchasing power of the average Mexican has shrunk by 11.1% since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in 2012. President Nieto currently holds the lowest presidential popularity ratings in modern Mexican history.

The resulting nationwide rebellion has been especially notable so far for its targeted disruption of the gas industry, coupled with people directly taking back resources that they need for survival, via looting and sabotage. On January 2, at least 21 highway blockades halted traffic across Mexico, with tens of thousands of people in the streets. In addition to blockading the circulation of fuel and other commodities central to the economy, protesters occasionally hijacked fuel tankers and took gas directly from them. These events have received almost no media coverage in the United States.

Over the following days, truckers and protesters blocked eleven Pemex (Mexico’s oil company) processing and distribution centers. Pemex also reported pipeline sabotage. On January 5, 14,000 bus, truck and taxi drivers began a strike in the oil-producing state of Veracruz. In Acapulco, taxi drivers were reportedly encircling Pemex oil trucks, forcing them to stop and taking turns siphoning gas from the tankers. When confronted by soldiers, the drivers threatened to light the tanker on fire if soldiers intervened, and were allowed to continue. At least 250 stores across the country were looted within the first few days of the rebellion, with apparently relatively strong public approval and participation. Protesters occupied gas stations across the country for days. A communiqué from a cell of the FAI/IRF (Informal Anarchist Federation) announced that they had burned down a gas station in Tultitlán, proclaiming: “Burn what must be burned!”

As global capital, in its attempts to find new sources from which to squeeze out profits, has restructured the sphere of commodity circulation, struggles against capitalist exploitation have likewise increasingly targeted the sphere of circulation. In the U.S., blockades of facilities and highways have spread over the past few years from ecodefense campaigns to anti-police uprisings, becoming a standard tactic that clearly disrupts a crucial mechanism of the economy — the flow of commodities.

The current uprising in Mexico involves some of the most successful and widespread instances of this trend to date. As of January 10, Pemex reported that its ability to supply gas stations around the northern border city of Mexicali had reached “critical levels” due to a blockade at one of its storage sites. This success may be due to an approach to blockades that sees them not just as a temporary disruption that conveys a message, but a point of material damage that should be sustained as long as possible while other resources that people need are expropriated. The protests in Mexico have specifically targeted central nodes of production and distribution, while spatially extending expropriation and economic disruption across the whole country, functionally redrawing the map of how resources are distributed.

Rebels have also taken advantage of structural problems with Mexico’s oil production and distribution system; these have been exacerbated by protests and have led to widespread fuel shortages. Because Pemex’s refineries do not process Mexican crude oil quickly enough, Pemex also imports oil and its imports have been frequently delayed at overcrowded ports. Gas is already regularly stolen from pipelines — more than $1 billion in gasoline every year is expropriated by criminal networks. As one industry executive in Mexicali commented on the uprisings, “The assembly plant industry is at risk, and the operations of the whole productive sector.”

Mexico’s current industrial production system originated in order to serve the U.S. and global capitalism. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), another attempt to shore up global capital through colonial land grabs and state deregulation of industry, violently restructured Mexico’s landscape and turned areas like Mexicali into a giant industrial plant sprawl to supply the U.S. market with things Americans need, like smartphone chips and jet airliner parts. Mexico also accounts for a fifth of all automobile production in North America. It would basically be economically impossible to repurpose Mexican production for exports to markets other than the U.S.

With the rise of Trump to power in the U.S., though, the U.S. is turning to protectionist measures internationally in order to bolster its own declining economy — Trump is very vocally planning to leverage tariffs on Mexican imports and bring production back to the U.S. This has led to several American automotive companies already discussing withdrawing production from Mexico, and for the Mexican peso to spiral into a disastrous devaluation.

On the whole, though, Trump’s seemingly irrational foreign trade policy is in the interest of global capital and perhaps even necessary for its survival. Financial markets have already reacted well to Trump’s election. But capital can only survive by increasingly crushing the people who work for it, and Trump’s policies clearly benefit some people while destroying most others. This is where the tension comes in, from the point of view of capital and the state — a tension between sustaining itself through intensified violence and avoiding the consequent public unrest that might actually threaten its existence.

Deregulation and austerity are the main strategies currently available to the Mexican government in order to keep its economy afloat. After years of declining production, Mexico had to move in 2013 to denationalize its oil and gas industry and open it up to foreign exploration and investment. This strategy has begun to pay off — in November, international oil companies paid billions of dollars to the Mexican government for rights to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. But the price of such strategies is that they’re so violent and exploitative for its population that they produce widespread discontent and rebellion. In the case of Mexico, this tension may finally become unsustainable, as these rebellions seem to be getting out of the state’s tenuous control.