Massive popular demonstrations continue against the abduction, disappearance and possible murder of the 43 teacher-training students from Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero. Now the fight is directed to the national government of President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The Ayotzinapa case revealed several things. The first is that many state and municipal governments (including their police forces) are directly controlled by drug gangs (such as the so-called Guerreros Unidos). This is the case in Iguala city and in Guerrero as a whole. The second is that the national government has a deep complicity with these sectors and has therefore done everything to hinder the investigation and clarification of the facts.
Drug dealers
For various reasons, as the long common border and the big movement of people in both directions, Mexico has become the main gateway for illegal drugs into the US, either self-produced or as a route from Colombia.
Some estimate that the drug trade moves annually between 30 and 40 billion dollars in Mexico (equivalent to the GDP of Bolivia or Paraguay), with a high profit margin. This explains the proliferation of cartels and extensive armed groups which dominate many areas of the country, including municipalities and state governments as in the case of Guerrero and the neighboring Michoacan.
It also explains that bourgeois politicians of different parties are “sold to” or associated with cartels, as they make significant financial contributions to election campaigns of several of them, including the PRI, Peña Nieto’s party.
In many countries there is a strong debate on what to do with drug trafficking. Indeed it is currently a branch of capitalist production, but with special features for the high rate of accumulation generated from its banning.
The bourgeoisie, including in imperialist countries, are divided as to address this issue. A sector promotes the strengthening of “combating it”, ie repression. Not only to prevent the sudden emergence of new bourgeois sectors that accumulated huge capital but also (and largely, mainly) because it justifies the creation of law enforcement agencies, ultimately directed against the mass movement. Bush used this argument in his country and Latin America’s “war on drugs”.
Another sector chooses to ally themselves and receive part of the profits. Finally, there are those who argue that legalizing the banned drugs would end the problem. Beyond the moral debates, our position is in favor of legalizing these drugs and an immediate end to all repression of consumers.
The “dirty war”
On this structural basis, the processes stripped by the facts of Ayotzinapa are much deeper. What has been called a “dirty war” against movements and social struggles is developing in Mexico. It is estimated that in recent decades thousands were killed and thirty thousand disappeared after extrajudicial killings by paramilitary groups, from torture or massacres. The facts of Iguala are part of this process: it is an attack directed against a sector of students known by their long fighting tradition.
In this “war”, the Mexican bourgeoisie, the national government and the drug gangs are allied. It might be more correct to say that the Mexican bourgeoisie and national government used these bands (and the municipal police controlled by them) as tools of “dirty” repression.
The self-defense groups
In response to the “dirty war” and the partnership between governments and drug traffickers began to emerge in the country the so-called “self-defense groups” or “community policing”. The whole populations of the cities decided to organize and arm and defend themselves, in some cases achieving the control of goods’ prices, especially in regions dominated by drug gangs allied with municipal institutions and their police, where violence against the people is harder.
This happened in Michoacán, Cheran, La Ruana and Tepalcatepec, where the “community police” were armed with machetes, knives and guns to contain the drug dealers and their own municipal police.
Then the national government began to intervene, not by attacking the gangs but to pursue, arrest and torture the main leaders of the “self-defense groups”. It defended not only its alliance with drug traffickers but also the “monopoly of weapons” which is the basis of every state and bourgeois regime. An organized and armed population represents a major threat to capitalist rule and must be given a lesson.
The persecution of the self-defense members has been systematic. A census conducted recently reveals that the country has more than 3,000 prisoners linked to a political process, a number that the Peña Nieto government refuses to acknowledge. Four hundred of these prisoners come from self-defense organizations.
The best known are Nestora Salgado (from the Regional Coordination of Community Authorities- CRAC, who began her struggle in the community police of Olinalá and is imprisoned over a year ago) and Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles, from Tepalcatepec, leader and spokesman of the Community Police of the State of Michoacán.
A process of mass mobilization
In this situation, there is an increasing indignation of the Mexican people. The kidnapping of students from Ayotzinapa has generated a mobilization process that spread from Iguala to the state of Guerrero and from there to all Mexico. In Iguala, the anger led people to burn the Town Hall and the Legislative Assembly of the state of Guerrero was also the target of the people’s rage.
Tens and hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets demanding clarification of the facts and punishment of those responsible, and received the solidarity of numerous events and demonstrations throughout the world.
On October 6, a strike spanned eight states and the demonstrations continued spreading to north and south of the country. The student movement and the educational community, in universities and schools, are at the center stage. But they have the support of large sections of the population. There were new demonstrations in most of the country in November.
As the facts are not elucidated, the anger is not directed just to the municipal and state authorities but is pointing, increasingly, towards the government of Peña Nieto and the PRI, which seek to limit the damage ( ie, the alleged perpetrators) to the Guerreros Unidos gang, trying to hide their connivance.
On October 22, as part of a national protest day, 70,000 people marched in Mexico City to the historic Zocalo square. The march entered the square, shouting “Out with Peña Nieto!” It was the largest mass mobilization in many years – and the largest student mobilization since 1968 – that raised this slogan since the inauguration of the current president in December 2012.
More recently, protesters blocked the Acapulco International Airport and delayed the flight of the president and his entourage to China. Even now there is a Facebook page called “Out with Peña Nieto!” In the most recent demonstrations, puppets with the president’s face were burned.
The facts of Ayotzinapa acted as the trigger for anger against a regime and a government that retain strong Bonapartist and repressive features. This is added by the deterioration of the economic and social situation which Peña Nieto and the PRI face with a clearly pro-imperialist policy.
The current process of mobilization begins to raise – along with the clarification of the crime in Ayotzinapa and the demand for the punishment of the responsibles – the resignation of Peña Nieto and the opening of a profound process of democratic discussion on how the country should be run.
We believe that only a workers’ government will end the problems affecting the country, originated by a semi-colonial capitalism tied to US imperialist interests, including drug trafficking and collusion of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state with it.
