HARD TIMES ON THE LEFT
An interview with reporter John Ross

by Hank Sims and Zeke Minaya

Reporter John Ross, by his own admission, is not an "objective journalist." With over thirty years of experience reporting in Latin America, he is a solid devotee of the "writing is fighting" school. And it's always been clear where his sympathies lie: Ross has always identified with the underprivileged, and in his unusually moving reporting, has always fought to give voice to the voiceless.

A poet and writer of fiction as well as a reporter, Ross discovered Mexico in the early 1960's, by following the "Beatnik Trail" down to Mexico City, where Jack Kerouac had a home and did much of his writing. When "the beats got boring," he put down roots in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, where he stayed at least six months a year over the next decade, discovering Mexican culture and history and meeting Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas , son of the beloved ex-president Lazaro Cárdenas and future candidate for the presidency.

After short stints in California (as a labor and environmental organizer) and Argentina (as a freelance reporter), Ross returned to Mexico in 1985, to cover the devastating earthquake that lay ruin to much of Mexico City. After the quake, he again made Mexico his home, quickly developing a reputation as one of the most knowledgable and insightful foreign correspondents to work in the country. He covered Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas' bid for the presidency in 1988, and beat the world press by reporting on the Zapatista movement several months before the rebels rose in arms.

Ross is the author of two books of reportage, Rebellion From the Roots and The Annexation of Mexico : From the Aztecs to the IMF; Tonatiuh’s People, a novel; and several books of poetry. His next book, which will be published in the fall, is a day-by-day chronicle of the Zapatista rebellion, from its inception to the upcoming presidential election.

He talked with Ezequiel Minaya and Hank Sims about the state of the Mexican Left over lunch in a downtown restaurant.

Q: You've given Cárdenas a lot of sympathetic coverage over the years, and were one of the first to charge that the presidency was stolen from him in 1988. What's gone wrong with the Cárdenas candidacy?

ROSS: One of the dates that people forget was last March 14th , the PRD held an internal election to select a new party president and it was wholesale fraud all over the country. You couldn't tell who won. They had to cancel the election and hold it again in June but it was like the biggest embarrassment, people were saying "what is this?"

There are very few people who are members of the PRD. They have a lot of support, but when you start driving the support base away like that, people are not going to be very enthusiastic about your presidential candidate, even if he is Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas.

Cuauhtemoc didn’t do a bad job as mayor -- he put a lot of things in motion that Rosario Robles has been able to reap. And she’s a great mayor. She's the best thing that's ever happened to the Mexico City.

Q. Then why the backlash?

ROSS: Cárdenas' presentation is bad. I've been following this guy around for years. I traveled all throughout the country with him in '89. I've known him since the 1960's. His presentation is just bad. He doesn't say very much. Even when he says something he doesn't say very much. He always looks dour, you know, even when he's trying to laugh and smile -- it always looks like it's totally forced.

Q: The Bill Bradley of Mexico.

ROSS: Yeah. He's got the jowl, the whole thing — good ideas but bad presentation. Combined with the fact that he was under this incredible barrage from the media, during his years in mayor's office. He had very poor public relations. You got the impression that his attitude was "I don't have to respond to these guys," so he didn't respond to them. It got to be like a nightly media lynching.

For example: when Paco Stanley, the TV comedian, was gunned down in a gang shooting, the president of TV Azteca goes on the air and says, "We demand that Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas resign, because he can't protect the citizens of the city." The guy was gunned down in some kind of cocaine deal — he owed a dealer some money, apparently. City Hall never said a thing, never put out a press release, never called a press conference, never defended itself.

Cárdenas was scared of the city workers union — with the city workers union, you got to be a member of the PRI, it's old style. The union would say things like "We can cut of your pumps, put your city under garbage in five minutes." So one of the first things Cárdenas does is give them a 19% raise, five percent over what Zedillo had set down for the rest of the country. Cárdenas won a five percent increase for workers in Mexico, and never put out a press release, never held a press conference, and never communicated. You wouldn't have known this had happened if you didn't read the columns in the newspapers.

There's another reason why Cárdenas and the PRD have suffered a great insufficiency of enthusiasm this time around. I saw Cárdenas at least once a day throughout the '88 elections. Cárdenas, at every opportunity, would let it be known that he would not negotiate with Carlos Salinas, that the vote would not be negotiated. This past spring, as a result of an interview with Salinas and a confession by Manuel Camacho Solis [former mayor of Mexico City], it turns out that during one of those days, Cárdenas had met with Salinas, at Camacho's house. That was another moment when everyone in the PRD just groaned.

Cárdenas has just swatted everyone away. Some PRD people must have told him, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea, that you should run." Maybe it's time for new blood in the party. But Cárdenas , much as it pains me to say it, has to be the big dog in the party.

So I think that he was a great disappointment. Then he and the PRD got placed squarely in the middle of the whole UNAM strike. They were as much the enemy of the General Strike Council as Zedillo and the PRI were. In many respects, it was worse. Many perredistas were saying that ultras like Mosh were working for the PRI Or if they weren't directly in their employ, the effect of their actions was to discredit Cárdenas , and so help the PRI.

Q. People don't seem to have much sympathy for the strikers. The general consensus, even among people who have previously taken every opportunity to denounce the government, was that the strike was counterproductive, and that the strikers were nothing more than arrogant kids.

ROSS: They are arrogant. It was so clear what happened. These guys, for the first time in their university careers, they had a little bit of clout. More than a little bit of clout — they ran the whole show. And they weren't going to give it up. Even at every strategic point, where it appeared that they could force the university congress to meet their terms, they would purposely blow the whole deal to pieces.

On the day that Barnes quit, they went out to the Chopo (the rock and roll market) and organized a march from the Chopo, down Reforma, and attacked the U.S. Embassy. Supposedly it was in sympathy with the demonstrators in Seattle. And they wanted Mumia released.

But it didn't have anything to do with Seattle or Mumia. It was because Barnes had just resigned, and there was going to be a meeting the next morning where it appeared that the General Strike Coucil was going to say, "O.K., we can go back into negotiations."

So they broke out the windows, everyone got arrested, it torpedoed everything, and it their whole chance was gone the next day. Negotiations, for them, were not possible. They lose power if they negotiate.

It was an interesting process. I, personally, got angrier and angrier when the ultras — and there were ultras and megaultras, ultritas, lots of different kinds of ultras — when one group of these mega-ultra-ultras hung up barbed wire in the Che Guevara auditorium so the moderates could not get to the stage. Finally, most everyone said, "This is so sectarian now, we can't get behind it."

I've just been going through Marcos' communiques from the earliest days of the strike. Right around July and August of last year, there were a lot of connections between Marcos and the students. The students went down to Chiapas a lot. But the ultras always condemned Marcos. Marcos' contacts were with the so-called moderates.

These are like 18-year-old kids, you know? You can be an ultra in the morning, a moderate in the afternoon, a mega-moderate in the evening… people changed their votes and their opinions all the time. That was one of the beset things about the strike: for a long time no one could define it. It was still debatable. I mean, the debates took a long time, but in the end people got tired. They got tired of being exiled, of having gangs of people yanking them out the auditorium and being told that they could never come back because they were traitors, that they had sold out the strikers.

I don't think you can manage this stuff. Movements don't get managed. They develop in an organic sense, leadersdevelop according to the needs of the situation. It's when they began to manage it that the strike lost its momentum. Someone began to say we're in control, this is where we're going with this, and we have the grand plan. You guys are just the pawns in the grand plan. That wasn't what this was about! This is about changing civil life, it's not about changing one cacique for another cacique.