BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

Just when foreign capitalist investors thought it was safe to go back to Mexico, a new guerrilla organization made its appearance with a series of armed actions in several Mexican states. The shock waves have put a spotlight on rising peasant protests throughout Mexico's countryside.

The guerrilla group, the People's Revolutionary Army (EPR), announced its existence June 28 during a rally in the mountain village of Aguas Blancas, Guerrero, commemorating a massacre of 17 peasants by the state police.

Fifty armed guerrillas appeared at the rally, which had been organized by the Organization of Peasants of the Southern Sierra (OCSS), whose members were murdered on June 18, 1995, on their way to an OCSS demonstration. While the two groups are not related, many local peasants welcomed the guerrillas, who read a statement and then melted into the hills.

Since then the EPR has carried out several ambushes of army garrisons in Guerrero. On August 28 it carried out coordinated attacks on police and army posts in the southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero and the central state of Mexico, while in Chiapas it blocked a major highway and distributed literature. The group deployed scores of combatants and apparently took few casualties.

On August 7, four EPR leaders held a press conference in the eastern mountains near the Gulf of Mexico, where they released a document, the Manifesto of the Sierra Madre Oriental, later published in several Mexican newspapers. The rebel commanders said the organization was founded in May 1994 and is made up of 14 organizations, including groups of peasants and Indians.

The EPR manifesto calls for overthrowing the current regime and replacing it with a "revolutionary government" that will carry out a range of demands. Among these are: renegotiating Mexico's huge foreign debt, an agrarian reform to confiscate big landed estates, return communal lands to farm families, and extend credit and other aid to peasants; autonomy for indigenous peoples; equal rights for women; an end to police and army repression; rights for immigrants and refugees in Mexico, such as Guatemalans; and unemployment insurance.

The document proposes nationalizing "the strategic sectors of the economy and natural resources of the country, as well as the property of the big domestic and international monopolies."

The rebel commanders said they respected the Chiapas-based Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) - which has engaged in a cease-fire and negotiations with the government since October 1995 -but that the EPR would not agree to similar talks with the regime.

Government deploys army
The government of President Ernesto Zedillo, while trying to downplay the importance of the EPR, mobilized thousands of soldiers to the southern states. In his September 1 state of the union address, originally planned as self-congratulation on the country's economic upturn, Zedillo condemned the EPR as terrorists and said his government would use "all the force of the state" to crack down on it.

In Guerrero authorities arrested eight young members of the OCSS and accused them of being guerrillas. The peasants later testified state police had tortured them while ordering them to confess to being EPR members.

The Mexico City daily La Jornada reported that the U.S. government is preparing to send 20 UH-1H "Huey" military helicopters to the Mexican air force, officially for use against drug traffickers.

Meanwhile, government, church, and bourgeois political leaders, as well as many left-wing organizations, joined the chorus of condemnations of the new guerrilla group as "violent" in contrast with what they term the more "reasonable" EZLN. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), one of the main capitalist parties, labeled the June 28 proclamation by the EPR a "provocative act."

"In this country at this time the method of armed struggle is inappropriate," PRD leader Pablo Gómez opined.

Some working people took a different view. "They have a reason to take up arms, because the government ignores the necessities of the community - infrastructure, electricity, water, and phones," said Reyes Vicencio, 31, a member of the restaurant workers union in Guerrero.

The guerrilla attacks, the biggest since the EZLN-led peasant rebellion in Chiapas in early 1994, terrified government officials, who have been working hard to coax foreign investors back to Mexico since the collapse of the peso in December 1994.

The Zedillo government is bragging about a surge in economic growth - a 7.2 percent increase in the gross domestic product (GDP) - for the first time since the deep 1995 recession. "Mexico Pays Its Debts," the New York Times cheered in a July 28 editorial after the Zedillo regime announced it was repaying most of the $12.5 billion borrowed from Washington in the bailout engineered by the Clinton administration after the peso collapse.

In return for a promised $50 billion in "loan guarantees" cobbled together by Washington at the beginning of 1995, the U.S. rulers wrested an agreement from the Mexican government that all revenues from the state-owned oil monopoly Pemex would be deposited in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before being transferred to Mexico - or seized in the case of a loan default.

Harsh austerity plan
The Zedillo regime has carried out a harsh austerity plan to repay the loans and make interest payments on the country's foreign debt - now $98 billion, or 38 percent of Mexico's GDP. The government imposed a cap on wage increases well below the rate of inflation, increased the highly regressive sales tax from 10 to 15 percent, and raised many fees for public services.

Meanwhile, the gap between the wealthy capitalist minority in Mexico, on one hand, and working people and layers of the middle classes, on the other, has grown. While Mercedes-Benz sales to rich Mexicans rose 50 percent over last year, real wages for workers fell in May for the 16th consecutive month, 9 percent below what they were a year earlier. In the same period, the number of working people classified as living in extreme poverty grew to 22 million, up by 5 million - this in a nation of 92 million.

The social crisis and increasingly visible class inequalities have led to growing revolts. A feature article in the July 20 New York Times reported that recently, when a train loaded with corn passed through a shantytown outside the northern city of Monterey, residents halted it while families rushed out to fill sacks of grain. In June, a train full of wheat was sacked in the northern state of Durango.

"The train robbery near Monterrey was reminiscent of the 1910 Revolution, when peasants routinely assaulted trains," Times reporter Anthony DePalma observed.

DePalma also described a scene in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City. "One simmering Sunday in May, a hundred peasant farmers stormed a luxurious hillside mansion here and, in a scene out of an old newsreel of the 1910 Revolution, pounded on the gates with machetes and their clenched fists until the wealthy owners abandoned their brunch and fled."

The farmers took over the Quinta Piedra estate, saying it was purchased illegally and belonged to the peasant community. They drew up a list of other illegally acquired properties in the area and are demanding return of the land.

"We tried to talk to the rich people but they never paid attention to us," said Nicanor Demesa Ortiz, one of the peasants who took over Quinta Piedra. "But what we did here was to show that no one, no matter how powerful or influential, is immune to the power of the people or to what is right."  
 
 
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