Vol. 79/No. 23      June 22, 2015

“Working people in the U.S. and Mexico face the same system, the same class forces — the capitalist rulers and their police,” said Steve Clark, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party who chaired the meeting. “We have a long history of connected struggles.”

The three panelists — David Valle, speaking for the group Somos los otros (We are the others); Nellie Moctezuma, a construction worker; and Andrés Pérez, representing the Socialist Workers Party — have been active in different ways building actions in response to the “disappearance” of 43 students in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.

Students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college were preparing for a political demonstration when they were attacked by police in the town of Iguala last September. Three were killed and 43 others have not been seen since. The federal government says local officials had them turned over to a drug cartel and killed. The mayor of Iguala, his wife and about 100 others have been charged.

Many people don’t trust the government’s account. There have been many large protests in Mexico, the United States and other countries, including a march to the United Nations here in April led by relatives of the missing students, demanding a full and impartial investigation.

Valle said disappearances are common in Mexico, but this case inspired a rising protest movement that is “the biggest threat yet to the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto.” Valle pointed to the autonomous communities of indigenous people in Mexico led by the Zapatista movement as a way forward.

Beginning in 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army led protests in the southern state of Chiapas against the conditions of indigenous rural poor there. The Mexican government responded by occupying Chiapas with 50,000 troops, and continued repression over the next several years despite a cease-fire. Today the Zapatistas organize autonomous municipalities, independent of local government, on land seized in the struggle in the 1990s.

The Ayotzinapa students “were poor, mostly farmers. They were considered rebellious by the authorities,” Moctezuma said. In contrast, most schools “don’t teach indigenous people any of our real history or beauty.”

Many indigenous farmers are being driven off their land and forced to move to other parts of Mexico or other countries, he said. “We have to pay someone to help us cross the border. We find jobs that don’t pay enough.”

Moctezuma applauded the 30,000 farmworkers in Baja California who recently won a strike for higher pay and against sexual harassment of female workers. “Out of this oppression, people realize they have to get together.”

“The Socialist Workers Party champions the fight to get the truth out on the 43 students,” Pérez said. He noted that the owners of the drug cartels are part of the capitalist class of Mexico. “The drug trade is totally intertwined with the legal economy. You can’t get rid of organized crime without getting rid of the capitalist class.”

“In our hemisphere one country dealt a mortal blow to capitalist rule, legal and illegal,” Perez said. “That’s Cuba, where workers and peasants led by the July 26 Movement organized to take power, get rid of organized crime, destroy the repressive apparatus, carry out a land reform and a massive literacy campaign — in the process transforming their own self-confidence and capacities. That’s what’s needed in Mexico and in the United States.”

There was discussion on the call by some participants in the protests for Peña Nieto to resign, and what alternative is possible. There are three main capitalist parties in Mexico — Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

“People aren’t willing to vote for these parties any more. What the Zapatistas say about communities governing themselves is right,” Moctezuma said.

If Peña Nieto resigned “it wouldn’t change the system, but it would give people hope,” Valle said. “Creating a new party isn’t the solution either. It would just be corrupted.” What’s needed is a self-governed community without leaders, like the Zapatistas, he said, because leaders inevitably “become oppressors.”

“The Zapatistas are a local social movement,” Pérez said. “They don’t have a program to organize a party of workers, farmers and the indigenous people that can get rid of the capitalist class and organize a workers and farmers government.”

Pérez said that he was a student in Mexico City in 1968 when the Mexican government massacred students at a protest. He then began studying the Cuban Revolution, including the Second Declaration of Havana, a revolutionary program for the continent produced by the working people of Cuba through mass mobilizations in the early 1960s.

“I came to the U.S. and found the Socialist Workers Party, which not only defends the Cuban Revolution, it wants to emulate it and make a revolution here.” Addressing the fellow panelists, he said, “I think that’s what you should do while you’re here.”

Informal discussion continued for some time after the meeting.  
 
 
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