“Anti-Terror” Hysteria in Mexico

Down With Campaign Against Leftist Activists!

We print below a translation of an April 17 leaflet issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México.

The Grupo Espartaquista de México repudiates the campaign of vilification against leftist activists, UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] students and the workers movement after the brutal attack by the Colombian government against a FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] encampment in Ecuador on March 1. This outrageous attack, which was carried out by the Uribe regime with the backing of its imperialist sponsors in Washington, killed 22 people—among them UNAM students Verónica Velásquez, Fernando Franco and Juan González, as well as IPN [National Polytechnic Institute] student Soren Ulises Avilés. There were only three survivors, among them UNAM graduate Lucía Morett. This is the context of the sinister witchhunt launched by the right-wing media, which seeks to link leftists in Mexico with the FARC. There are also threats of criminal charges against Lucía Morett in Mexico. Down with the witchhunt! Government hands off the FARC supporters! No charges against Lucía Morett and the other survivors of the massacre in Ecuador!

The objective of this sinister media campaign is to pave the way for the repression and criminalization of social protest. The campaign recently escalated with the publication in Excélsior (10 April) of an article by right-winger Jorge Fernández Menéndez. Based on the supposed discovery by Colombian forces of files on the computer of assassinated FARC leader Raúl Reyes—supposedly not destroyed by the bombs that wiped out the encampment and destroyed the bodies of more than two dozen people—the frame-up diatribe attempts to link Fermín García (trade-union militant and member of Ricardo Flores Magón-Movimiento de Lucha Popular), his companion Margarita Villanueva, Rosario Ibarra, Edgard Sánchez, the Comité Cerezo, ¡Eureka!, PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] and PT [Labor Party] members with the FARC, EPR [Popular Revolutionary Army] and the ERPI [Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People]. We Spartacists say: Down with the attacks against Fermín García, Margarita Villanueva, Rosario Ibarra, Edgard Sánchez, and the others!

While we maintain our programmatic differences with the guerrilla road, we say: From Mexico to Colombia, down with state terror against the EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation], the EPR, the ERPI and the FARC! Bring back the disappeared activists of the EPR, alive and free! The workers movement as a whole must protest against this witchhunting campaign! An injury to one is an injury to all! The capitalist state and its courts are organs of repression against the workers and the oppressed. It is necessary to build a revolutionary workers party to overturn the murderous capitalist system, based on the thirst for profits, and replace it with a workers and peasants regime, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution throughout the Americas and internationally.