THE CASE OF RUTA 100: MURDER AND PRIVATIZATION IN MEXICO CITY
The murders which followed protests of Mexico City’s decision to end Ruta 100 of the public bus service, are indicative of the PRI’s corruptive tactics as it loses grasp of its political legitimacy.
By Fred Rosen
With Mexico’s growing extremes of wealth and poverty, and the rise of serious opposition movements throughout the country, the legitimacy of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has been stretched to the breaking point. The old system, for all intents and purposes, has died, and yet nothing has arisen which might credibly take its place. In the interim, to borrow a line from Antonio Gramsci, a great many morbid symptoms have appeared. One such symptom is the case of a Mexico City public bus line called Ruta 100. It is a case that combines murder, corruption, and fiscal restructuring.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, April 9, the Federal District’s appointed municipal government dissolved Ruta 100 on the grounds that it was continually unable to generate a profit. At the same time, a number of the leaders of the bus line’s independent, leftist union were imprisoned, charged with misappropriating pension funds. Five months and three deaths later, it appears that the charges of malfeasance may have been grossly misplaced.
The state-subsidized bus line was organized in the early 1980s to serve many of the outlying areas of the rapidly expanding city. It never operated at a profit, and since it was assigned many of the routes in which the private carriers had no interest, it is not clear that it was ever meant to. Its union, the Ruta 100 Urban Transport Workers Union (SUTAUR), was never dominated by the PRI, and was sympathetic to and financially supportive of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. SUTAUR was one of the principal forces behind the founding of the radical Independent Proletariat Movement (MPI), and together with its political allies, the union had long been in the forefront of militant and disruptive resistance to fiscal austerity and restructuring in Mexico City.
The day after Ruta 100 was dissolved, the union’s legal advisor, Ricardo Barco López, was arrested and beaten up by federal judicial police. The day after that, the district transportation minister who had declared the company’s bankruptcy, Luis Miguel Moreno, was found with two parallel bullets in his heart. His death was ruled a “suicide.” Two months later, things took a turn for the truly macabre. On Sunday morning, June 18, the offices of the union’s legal advisor were found broken into and ransacked. On Monday, June 19, the prosecutor in charge of the corruption case against 11 jailed SUTAUR leaders, Jesús Humberto Priego Chávez, was shot to death in front of his Mexico City home.
Then, on Tuesday, June 20, in a crime that finally provoked widespread indignation about this case, a judge named Abraham Polo Usearga was found in his office with a bullet in his head. This time, there were no announcements about the evidence of suicide. Polo, it turns out, had feared for his life ever since refusing the city’s request to order an arrest warrant against SUTAUR leaders last December, ruling that insufficient evidence existed to support a four-year-old corruption complaint resurrected by the city. In January, the chief justice of the Federal District Court, Saturnino Aguero, ordered Polo to produce the arrest warrant immediately. According to Polo, Aguero warned him that he would have to “accept the consequences” if he refused. On March 27, convinced he could no longer function as an independent judge, Polo resigned, and agreed to testify on behalf of the company in bankruptcy hearings. In open letters and interviews until his death, he made public the verbal and physical harassment he continued to face.
The Ruta 100 events are instructive in several respects. To begin with, the case high-lights the deadly internal power struggle within the PRI, the growing use of assassination as a method of settling political disputes, the deep corruption of the judicial system, and the nature (in the words of an editorial in the daily La Jornada) of those “vague and oft-mentioned ‘dark forces’ who enjoy a shameful impunity.” Judge Polo’s murder demonstrates what happens to dissidents within the system.
The case also highlights the lack of formal channels of opposition and dissent, and the PRI’s intolerance of any movement it cannot incorporate and control. The action against Ruta 100 and SUTAUR is a case study of how the party can maneuver to get a local opposition force out of the way. The case also illustrates the connections between privatization, fiscal restructuring, and union busting. Many speculate that the government dissolved the bus company in order to terminate a relatively generous collective-bargaining contract, thereby greasing the skids for more privatization in Mexico City. All this is grist for the mill of that still inchoate force which may one day lead Mexico out of its present chaos.
