Defend APPO! All Military Forces Out of Oaxaca!

Protest Bloody Crackdown in Mexico!

On Saturday, November 25, Federal Preventive Police (PFP), which have occupied Oaxaca since October 27, and local cops brutally cracked down on protesters in the city. Four days later, police removed the final barricades that had been set up by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). APPO had been occupying much of Oaxaca City in southern Mexico for some six months after the Oaxacan governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), sent police to attack striking teachers in June. The government continues to round up activists and has already jailed some 220. Most have been moved by helicopter to the Pacific state of Nayarit, some 24 hours away from Oaxaca by car. Police have sexually abused activists. Dozens of people have been “disappeared” or killed. In Mexico City on December 4, federal police arrested four leaders of APPO—the brothers Flavio and Horacio Sosa Villavicencio, Ignacio García Maldonado and Marcelino Coache Verano. Free all the arrested!

On December 1 in Mexico City, some 200,000 people protested the inauguration of Felipe Calderón of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), while inside the Congress, members of the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) jeered Calderón as he sneaked in through the back door to take the oath of office. Mexico has been gripped by multi-sided social turmoil, from the peasant protests in the village of Atenco, outside Mexico City, and the Sicartsa steel workers strikes in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, to the mass protests against the outcome of the July presidential elections. Calderón has promised more repression, threatening those who “challenge the authority of the state.” His newly appointed secretary of the interior (who controls the secret police and other repressive forces), Francisco Ramírez Acuña, was infamous as governor of the state of Jalisco for the brutal treatment he meted out to “anti-globalization” protesters outside an international summit in Guadalajara in 2004.

We print below a translation of a November 26 leaflet issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, the day after the government’s attack in Oaxaca.

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Yesterday, once again the brutal capitalist rulers unleashed massive repression against the APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). At the end of the peaceful mass demonstration in Oaxaca City—which demanded the resignation of the Oaxacan governor-executioner Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, freedom for jailed activists and the withdrawal of the Federal Preventive Police—the marchers planned to peacefully “surround” the PFP agents in [Oaxaca’s] downtown historical district for 48 hours. The PFP was already waiting for the marchers: plainclothes agents opened fire against the marchers, while the police launched tear gas bombs against them. La Jornada (26 November) reports that at least three people were killed by gunfire, although the figure is still not confirmed, and more than 140 were injured—at least 20 of them by gunshot—and 100 arrested. On Friday night, two members of the APPO had been kidnapped, César Mateos Benítez and Luis Sosa Campos. Ulises Ruiz now threatens massive arrests against those who defended themselves from the police attack yesterday, without “distinguishing between the acts of vandalism and those who participate in some way at the negotiating tables.” Since last May, when the teachers strike began, there have been 300 people arrested—57 of whom remain in prison—63 people disappeared and 17 dead.

This sinister attack must not pass with impunity! The Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, stands in solidarity with the struggle of the Oaxacan masses and calls for the entire workers movement to protest against this new and brutal attack. As we wrote in an October 29 leaflet, “The teachers and the APPO must not stand alone against the murderous repression of the capitalist state. The attack against teachers is an attack aimed at the entire workers movement, and it is in the interests of the workers movement to defend the teachers in Oaxaca. The industrial working class must flex its powerful muscle through strike actions in defense of the Oaxaca teachers and the APPO.” [See “Down With Bloody State of Siege in Oaxaca!” WV No. 880, 10 November.] Free all those arrested now! Drop all the charges! PFP, army out of Oaxaca! Defend APPO against state repression!

In the face of the increasing social unrest fed by the brutal, rightist starvation policies of the PAN government, the bourgeoisie itself is divided and fearful of a broader social explosion. On September 1, a massive police mobilization put a large part of Mexico City under a virtual state of siege. Nonetheless, with protests in the streets and in Congress, [President Vicente] Fox decided to avoid a confrontation and did not give his last state of the union speech before Congress. The PRD, the APPO and others have again called for massive demonstrations for December 1 with the purpose of preventing Felipe Calderón’s taking office as the new president, and certainly the PAN does not want to start its new term with such an affront. For over a week, the PAN government has already surrounded the Congress with police and installed checkpoints around it, and now the police mobilization will surely be bigger. With this new attempt to smash the APPO once and for all, the government is launching a threat against the unions and all social activists, including its own bourgeois opponents in the PRD.

The fanatically obscurantist PAN members are truly a very dangerous beast. The bourgeois PRD has tried to ride the wave of social discontent and co-opt the struggle in Oaxaca, calling for the withdrawal of the PFP and the dismissal of Ulises Ruiz. An important part of the Oaxacan masses, as well as a large part of the working class and the poor on a national level, see the PRD as representing their interests. But this is a bourgeois party, whose differences with the PAN are at bottom over how to administer the capitalist system of exploitation. When the struggle goes beyond its control, the PRD will not hesitate one moment in unleashing the repressive forces against those who today support it, just as it did against the students during the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] strike of 1999, against the workers of Sicartsa this past April, against the peasants of Atenco, among many other examples.

Combatting all illusions in the bourgeoisie and its parties, the Trotskyists of the Grupo Espartaquista de México fight for the construction of a Leninist-Trotskyist workers party to lead the working class toward socialist revolution—the only way to stop once and for all the brutal capitalist repression against the workers and the poor.