BOOK REVIEW by Seth Sandronsky
Wealth Extraction Sparks Mexican Revolutions
In Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now (Monthly Review, paperback, 2010), James D. Cockcroft provides a window to the past and present of the US neighbor. A speaker of English and Spanish, Cockcroft is also a prolific author of books on Mexico, with over a half-century of experience and study there.
His new book published a century after the Mexican Revolution arrives at a crucial time, as pundits and politicians “talk loud and say nothing” about the struggles of common people in Mexico.
Lost in such odious fog is the nation’s place as a site of wealth extraction for Mexican elites and US financial and industrial firms. Cockcroft offers up that story and much more in a clear, left analysis in 176 pages, a notable effort.
A photo of Ricardo Flores Magón opens the book. This Mexican revolutionary, 1874-1922, has scant name recognition in the US now. But his ideas and activities as a revolutionary activist of anarchist, communist and socialist leanings, run a red line through Cockcroft’s book.
He situates the Zapatista movement with Subcomandante Marcos rising in Chiapas against the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Congress passed under President Clinton and took effect on Jan. 1, 1994, in the tradition of Magón. The two figures and their anti-imperialist movements, separated by decades, reveal differences and similarities. It’s a complex process to compare and contrast such actors and factors across time and space, but Cockcroft handles it with a deft touch.
A current flashpoint which he details is soaked in blood. I mean Mexico’s lethal war over the distribution of illegal drugs for mainly US consumers. The Mexican death toll is 7,000 people per year, or roughly 20 lost lives each day, so the lucrative drug trade can continue. US businesses export most of the weaponry that fuel this conflict. But it is Mexico that US lawmakers and demagogues describe as a “failed state.”
Cockcroft counters that description by pulling the curtain back on US involvement, commercially and militarily. One example is the public relations playbook of portraying US military aid as nurturing an embattled Mexican democracy. Just the opposite is the case. Cockcroft paints a vivid picture of a militarized social landscape, peddled to Americans as a battle between the forces of good and evil.
Another theme that recurs is the prize of Mexico’s fossil fuels and labor services. Both are raw materials to profit US investors mainly. Cockcroft does a nice job of fleshing out the historic and current resistance of the Mexican people to such outside extraction of their wealth. They resist, he writes, as they have against colonial invaders in the past. Cockcroft makes the connections without jargon….
Read the entire review in The Progressive Populist
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