Break with the Bosses' Parties: PRI, PAN, PRD!

Mexico: Down With Brutal Repression Against Oaxaca Teachers!

We print below a translation of a June 15 leaflet issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, protesting brutal state repression against a continuing teachers strike in the state of Oaxaca. The strike, led by Local 22 of the National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), is part of a series of labor battles in recent months in Mexico that have met with vicious state repression carried out by the three major bourgeois parties. (See “Miners, Steel Workers Strikes Shake Mexico,” WV No. 872, 9 June.)

The teachers strike has rallied the support of the workers and poor in Oaxaca and throughout Mexico, including a demonstration of some 300,000 in Oaxaca City on June 16. The union has called three meetings of a Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, with the participation of unions, students, social organizations and others, demanding the resignation of Oaxaca state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The strike and repression take place in the context of the July 2 presidential elections in Mexico. The union vowed to cast a “punishment vote” against the PRI’s presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo and the National Action Party’s (PAN) Felipe Calderón, and thus effectively threw its support to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the bourgeois-nationalist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Support to López Obrador means derailing the militancy of the workers and poor into support for a party of the class enemy. In the same vein, a national strike called for June 28 by the union federation, the National Union of Workers, and other unions was called off because the unions “did not want to put obstacles in the way of the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, nor do they want to be accused of creating a climate of tension in the electoral process of 2 July” (La Jornada, 27 June). As we go to press, election officials have declared the results too close to call, and López Obrador and Calderón have both claimed victory. The GEM stands for the political independence of the proletariat, calling for no vote to the bourgeois PRI, PRD or PAN, and for the construction of a revolutionary workers party.

Initial reports that the June 14 police attack resulted in deaths were inaccurate. The strikers’ militant repulsion of the police onslaught forced the state to release those arrested on June 14, and the governor has “suspended” (for now) orders for the arrest of 25 union leaders. Here in the U.S., teachers unions and others have picketed the Mexican consulates in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities in solidarity with the Oaxaca teachers. In New York City, the Spartacist League joined two demonstrations initiated by the Internationalist Group. In another example of international solidarity, Local 22 has signed a statement issued by the Partisan Defense Committee demanding freedom for U.S. death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

* * *

JUNE 15—After the criminal attacks on the miners strikes in Lázaro Cárdenas and on the Atenco peasants, for the third time in eight weeks the state unleashed murderous repression yesterday, this time on the Oaxaca teachers, organized in SNTE Local 22 (which belongs to the dissident CNTE [National Educational Workers Coordinating Committee]), who have been on strike since May 22 demanding decent wages. Up to 80,000 teachers had participated in combative demonstrations to win the strike, demanding greater resources for public education and raising slogans against the PRI government. At 4:50 a.m. yesterday, the PRI state government unleashed some 3,000 police with firearms and concussion and tear gas grenades, supported by at least one helicopter throwing gas grenades, to clear out an occupation the teachers were maintaining downtown. The presence of many children, the teachers’ sons and daughters, was of little concern to them. According to the teachers union leadership, two teachers and two minors were killed in the attack (there are reports indicating up to ten dead). Over 90 people were injured and an indeterminate number were arrested.

Among the arrested are teacher Eduardo Castellanos Morales, university student Acelo Ruiz Méndez and Oziel Martínez Martínez, against whom the state has pressed charges, as ridiculous as they are sinister, of terrorism and of bearing firearms and explosives. The governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, maintains the transparent lie that the police found AK-47 assault rifles and a backpack full of grenades inside Local 22 headquarters. Paraphrasing General Anaya [of the Mexican-American War], had the teachers possessed such an arsenal, the cops would have never made it that far. In reality, as the Lázaro Cárdenas miners did last April, the teachers fought the police heroically with stones and sticks—and they managed to re-take the city’s main square. La Jornada (15 June) reported: “As the teachers picked up what was left of their belongings, they indignantly displayed the traces of the battle: pillows, food, burnt TVs, tents cut with knives, diapers, walkers, babies’ bottles, the children’s toys.” Airport workers have warned that the government is sending 700 members of the PFP [Federal Preventive Police] to definitively break the strike. We Trotskyists of the Grupo Espartaquista de México protest this attack in the strongest manner possible and solidarize fully with the teachers strike. Freedom now for all the arrested! Drop all the charges! Victory to the teachers strike!

The impoverished Mexican masses keenly feel the need for education; teachers have a long history of combativity and they form a link between the powerful industrial unions and the poor peasantry. The teachers of Oaxaca—one of the poorest states in the country—and of Mexico as a whole, earning miserable salaries, struggle under horrendous conditions to provide education to children who often don’t have anything to eat. Especially in rural areas, most times there aren’t even school buildings, and teachers give classes in miserable huts or inside abandoned buses and lack books and all kinds of elementary educational materials. Barely 45 percent of students finish junior high school. Over two million indigenous children between six and 14 years old can neither read nor write. This gives an idea of why the 1999-2000 UNAM student strike in defense of free education was so explosive and awakened widespread sympathy and support among workers and the impoverished masses. The struggle of the Oaxaca teachers is the struggle of the entire working class. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Many workers and a great part of the poor population in general place their hopes in the PRD as an alternative to the rapacious economic policies of the PAN. While the population is highly polarized on the eve of the elections, the bourgeois parties are united like fingernail and flesh in repressing workers and the poor. And this is so because the elementary interest of the bourgeois parties, the PRI, PAN and PRD, as well as that of their tiny competitors, is to maintain the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. As we warned in Espartaco No. 25 (Spring 2006), the PRD “is an enemy of the working class. As it has already done in Mexico City, in the event that it wins the presidency it will administer brutal capitalist exploitation on the national level—and it will not hesitate for a second to unleash the repressive force of the state against those who support it today.” Thus, on April 20 the PRI, PAN and PRD united in a failed police attack to break the powerful miners and steel workers union strike—whose recent mobilizations represent the most important outbreak of class struggle in the last decade—in Lázaro Cárdenas [state of Michoacán], where two workers were killed. On May 4, in an attempt to behead the combative organization of the Atenco peasants, the Peoples Front in Defense of the Land, the three main bourgeois parties united once more, sending at least 3,500 police to occupy the town of San Salvador Atenco, state of México, killing two youth, arresting over 200 people, beating them brutally and raping at least seven women.

This increase in state violence is an attempt by the three capitalist parties to intimidate and smash anyone they perceive as an opponent, and in the last analysis is directed against the working class, its organizations and its right to strike. The entire bourgeoisie is fearful of the threat of social explosions in the face of the growing polarization around the presidential elections that will take place in little over two weeks, and is trying to eliminate the so-called “red flashpoints” in the most open, cynical and criminal manner. The working class should defend itself decisively against this murderous attack by the bosses. The UNT [National Union of Workers] and other union groupings already some time ago had called for a national strike on June 28 in solidarity with the miners and steel workers and in defense of union autonomy. Hernández Juárez, leader of the telephone workers and of the UNT, has ratified this call in the face of state repression in Oaxaca. On this morning’s TV news shows, some bourgeois commentators mocked this call, given that the UNT has called in the recent past for national strikes that simply don’t happen or are so weak they pass nearly unnoticed. But the working class —some of whose strategic components are organized in the UNT—has immense social power which allows it to paralyze the entire economy. It is necessary for the working class to flex its powerful muscle against bloody repression, in defense of its union organizations and the elementary right to strike. All out on strike this June 28!

The working class must abandon all illusions in the bosses’ parties. It is necessary to forge a revolutionary workers party to lead the working class in the struggle to smash the murderous capitalist system, which is based on the drive for profit, and replace it with the rule of the workers. Only thus will murderous state violence directed against the workers and the poor end, once and for all. That is the purpose of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Victory to the teachers and miners strikes! Drop all the charges against Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and all the miners on trial! Freedom now for all the arrested in Atenco and Oaxaca!