Mexico:

A Marxist Analysis of the UNAM Student Strike, 1999-2000

For Free, Quality Education for All!

Forge a Leninist-Trotskyist Workers Party!

(Young Spartacus pages)

From 20 April 1999 through 6 February 2000, students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) shut down the university in protest against attacks on public education. With more than 250,000 students from high school through graduate school and a main campus called University City (CU) spanning more than two million square meters in the south of Mexico City, UNAM is the biggest university in Latin America. It has long been a center of the left in Mexico, including during the student strike and mass protests before the 1968 Olympics, which were brutally suppressed by government forces in what became known as the Tlatelolco massacre.

The 1999-2000 student strike was called against attacks that aimed to exclude thousands of poor and working-class youth from higher education, including the proposed imposition of tuition and limiting the time allowed to complete a degree. The strike polarized Mexican society, gaining support among key sectors of the working class in Mexico City. In the course of the strike, a layer of student activists broke from illusions in the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), although many of these students turned to a more left version of bourgeois populism represented by the Zapatistas. The strike ended only when thousands of police, dispatched by the federal government and the PRD-led Mexico City government, raided CU and arrested about 700 students.

The strike took place in the context of a push by the rapacious U.S. imperialists and their lackeys in the Mexican bourgeoisie to implement austerity measures, including privatizing state-owned industries, slashing government programs and attacking the living standards of the working class and peasantry, as dictated by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the International Monetary Fund. These “neoliberal” attacks were first implemented in Mexico by presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000)—the last two presidents from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled Mexico for some seven decades. In the late 1980s, a section of the PRI led by populist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas broke away to form what became the PRD. Cárdenas lost to Salinas in the fraudulent 1988 presidential elections. When the UNAM strike began, Cárdenas was the mayor of Mexico City. In July 2000, former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox, of the Catholic right-wing National Action Party (PAN), won the presidential election, ending the period of PRI rule.

Our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México intervened in the strike, combating illusions in the PRD—a capitalist party that pushes populist rhetoric—and struggling to win young militants to the perspective of forging a revolutionary workers party. Seeking to bring the power of the international working class to bear in defense of the besieged strikers, after the brutal police crackdown the International Communist League mobilized protests internationally, elicited statements of solidarity and raised money for their defense, including here in the belly of the imperialist beast. We print below the translation of an article that appeared in the GEM’s newspaper, Espartaco No. 31 (Spring 2009), on the anniversary of the strike.

* * *

The UNAM strike from April 1999 to February 2000 was the longest and perhaps the most militant student struggle in the history of that institution. For ten months, tens of thousands of radicalized students, mainly from working-class and poor families, occupied the facilities of the largest university in Latin America in a vital struggle to defend free public education.

Having gone as far as it could as a student strike, this movement showed its potential for igniting proletarian struggle. Indeed, the student movement of 1999 had something that others, including 1968, lacked: the active sympathy of key sectors of the proletariat. The student struggle intersected broad worker discontent with the neoliberal policies of brutal capitalist austerity and the threat of the privatization of the energy sector, which led to numerous joint mobilizations of students and unions such as the UNT [National Workers Union], the SME [Mexican Electrical Workers Union] and sections of the SUTERM [national electrical workers union]. However, mainly thanks to the services of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, the working class was demobilized and the strike was left isolated.

The strike was able to stop the imposition of tuition, an important gain, but it was brutally broken in February 2000 by the armed forces of the bourgeois state. This police operation, under the joint command of the federal government and the local PRD government, left hundreds of activists in jail or expelled and their movement dismembered. Access to higher education remains out of reach for the majority (this year alone, 155,000 undergraduate applicants will not be admitted to UNAM).

During the course of our intervention in the strike—helping to extend the strike to the Universum [Science Museum] on the first day, defending the facilities, building barricades, intervening constantly in CGH [General Strike Council] assemblies and in demonstrations and workers’ assemblies—we struggled for a strategy centered on mobilizing the social power of the working class and against illusions in the bourgeois populism of the PRD. The struggle for free public education has always been explosive in Mexican society, but, as with other basic rights, free, quality public education for all cannot be fully achieved under capitalism because of the nature of the system itself, which is based on maximizing profits for the capitalist class at the expense of the interests of workers and the oppressed. We struggle to win students to the side of the working class through building a vanguard workers party whose purpose would be the struggle for international socialist revolution—the only way to achieve an egalitarian communist society on the basis of abundance.

The Post-Soviet World and the Strengthening of Nationalist Populism

The political context of the UNAM strike was conditioned by the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, which eliminated the powerful military and economic counterweight to imperialism constituted by the first and most powerful workers state, which issued from the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917. The International Communist League was unique in defending to the last barricade the Soviet degenerated workers state, which, despite its Stalinist degeneration, still had collectivized property in the means of production and a planned economy. We also fought for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return the USSR to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.

The rise of U.S. imperialism as the hegemonic power after the counterrevolution brought with it an imperialist military advance and increased intervention in the neocolonial economies of the Third World. The investment of U.S. capital in Mexico underwent enormous growth and a qualitative expansion with the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has ruined millions of peasants. The increasing intervention of imperialist capital in Mexico led to a brutal decrease in the standard of living of the masses and a general attack on social gains, such as public education and workers’ rights. It also undermined the corporatist national economic structure, which was the foundation of the septuagenarian PRI regime, enabling the PAN to come to power in the elections in 2000.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to proclaim the “death of communism” and declare that Marxism was a “failed experiment.” In this reactionary period, workers organizations around the world generally no longer identify with the ideals of Marxism. In Mexico, where there has never been a mass labor party and where nationalism has served to bind the working class to the bourgeoisie, for many students even the notion of the enormous social power of the working class—which they have never seen mobilized to a significant degree—is a mere abstraction.

Faced with the pro-imperialist “free market” reforms pushed by the “technocrats” of the PRI in the ’90s, and without a class-struggle alternative within the spectrum of political organizations in Mexico, most leftist-minded students and workers even more strongly adopted the populist ideology of the sector of the Mexican bourgeoisie grouped around the PRD. The PRD took advantage of the massive discontent with the PRI regime and the electoral fraud in the 1988 elections. Thus, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas won the election for mayor of Mexico City in 1997. Throughout 1999, the PRD was mainly working on building an alliance with the PAN to present its then-traditional candidate, Cárdenas, as a contender in the following year’s [presidential] elections—which he lost ignominiously to the neo-Cristero Fox.

At the beginning of 1999, UNAM was a bastion of the PRD in the capital (and still is). Most groups with a certain amount of influence among leftist students at the university, such as En Lucha and the Socialist Workers Party (POS), were tailing populism. Others were openly and directly the arm of the PRD at UNAM, like the “historical” CEU [University Student Congress] and the CEM [Metropolitan Student Committee]. In our interventions before and during the strike, we Spartacists denounced the class-collaborationist politics of all these organizations. The PRD, a party that is committed to the perpetuation of the Mexican capitalist system based on private property in the means of production, is the enemy of the victory of the proletariat, and its differences with the PRI and the PAN are merely about how to administer the capitalist state.

The influence of populism at UNAM was also reflected in the support for the EZLN [Zapatistas] in the CGH. It was not unusual for student assemblies to end with the singing of the Zapatista anthem, followed by the bourgeois national anthem! From the beginning of their movement, the Zapatistas were aptly described by Carlos Fuentes as the “first post-communist rebellion,” and they explicitly stated that their ideology was “neither communist nor, as they say, Marxist.” By the spring of 1994, they were not even in favor of the overthrow of the Salinas de Gortari government, and they openly reduced their role to being a mere pressure group for the democratic reform of the capitalist state. (Today, the EZLN pushes illusions in a new bourgeois constitution to serve the poor and oppressed, as they stated in the “Sixth Declaration,” the program of the “other campaign.”)

Since the Zapatista uprising in 1994, we Spartacists have called for the defense of the EZLN against the attacks of the bourgeois state and for the immediate withdrawal of the army from Chiapas. At the same time, we reject the program of the EZLN, which denies the fundamental division of society into two classes with conflicting interests and dissolves the working class in the mass of the “people.” Correspondingly, they embrace and promote the fallacy of bourgeois nationalism—the supposed community of interests between the exploited and the exploiters of the same country. Camouflaged by the fashionable rhetoric of eternal “resistance,” Zapatismo is an ideology of defeat; it is the clear reflection of the acceptance of the bourgeois lie of the “death of communism.”

By the end of the summer of 1999, there was a radicalization of the strikers and many boasted of being communists, which was reflected in their signs and slogans. But their vision of “communism” was really a version of the same radical populism; it had more to do with Zapatismo (original [from the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution] and current) than with the October Revolution or the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. This prefigured the current fashion among populist intellectuals of talking about “socialism,” which they identify with bourgeois regimes like that of Hugo Chávez.

There is no “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” wing of the bourgeoisie, which as a class is tied to and intrinsically dependent on imperialist finance capital. The proletariat is the only class with the objective interest and the social power to destroy capitalism and satisfy the aspirations of the masses, such as political democracy, agrarian revolution or national emancipation. Formerly associated with bourgeois revolutions—like the great French Revolution of the 18th century—in the epoch of imperialist decay these democratic demands cannot be resolved without a socialist revolution with the revolutionary proletariat leading the peasant masses and the urban poor, and its international extension, especially and urgently to the imperialist colossus of the North. Only through an internationally collectivized and planned economy will it be possible to eliminate the misery inherent in this society. This is the essence of Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

The Student Struggle and the Centrality of the Proletariat

The student struggle was sparked by the attempt to impose the General Regulation of Payments (RGP) in March 1999 by then-university chancellor Francisco Barnés de Castro, as part of an austerity plan that included cutting UNAM’s budget by 30 percent during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo. In response, students carried out several rolling strikes beginning March 11, in preparation for the indefinite strike that would break out on April 20. Parallel to this and until August of the same year, massive joint mobilizations of workers and students against privatizations and in defense of free education filled the streets of the city.

There was evident sympathy for the student struggle among the working class; the call for a worker-student alliance was in vogue and the slogan “SME, UNAM will triumph united!” was common. There was a conjunctural unity of interests between the striking students and the workers who were fighting against privatizations and increased poverty. As we explained in a speech on August 13 at a rally of the CGH in the Zócalo [Mexico City’s main plaza]: “The fight in defense of public education, which is part of a broader struggle against the privatizing schemes directed against the working class, can go forward only if the unions also go on strike. By themselves, students lack any social power. What is needed is that labor flex its muscles through strike actions to stop production and services. That the student strike has lasted so long is due to the support received from university workers, reinforced by brigades of workers from other powerful unions” [printed in “Down With Government Repression Against UNAM Student Strike!” WV No. 718, 3 September 1999].

Indeed, students, together with peasants, small vendors and professionals, are part of the petty bourgeoisie, an enormous and heterogeneous social layer with no direct relationship to the means of production and highly stratified between its highest and lowest levels. Lacking social power and its own class perspective, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of offering an alternative to capitalism; it follows the bourgeoisie or the proletariat depending on the relationship of forces between them.

We Spartacists were guided by the understanding formulated more than 40 years ago by our comrades of the Spartacist League/U.S.:

“It is false to assume that the student movement can break its isolation by merely seeking ‘allies’ in the labor movement.... It is naive and hypocritical to sit back and expect the workers to ‘rise,’ come to the rescue of the students and remake society without revolutionary consciousness and leadership. Students must go to the workers not as students seeking allies and followers, but as revolutionaries, with the understanding that only the working class, because of its unique position as society’s producers, has the power to lead a social revolution in modern society. This involves a complete change of orientation, from student radical to working-class revolutionary, and an adoption of Marxism, the ideology of the revolutionary working-class struggle.

“It is only through the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party that the struggles of students, workers and Black people can be effectively linked.”

—“The Berkeley Student Strike,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 9 (January-February 1967)

As an integral part of this perspective, we categorically opposed the bourgeois nationalism that dominated the student movement and the workers protests, which were usually carried out under the prominent slogan of “The fatherland cannot be sold!” and at which prominent members of the PRD like the sinister Porfirio Muñoz Ledo—a former president of the PRI who enthusiastically supported the Tlatelolco massacre—frequently enjoyed themselves parading on the platforms next to the union bureaucrats. Indeed, bourgeois nationalism has historically been the main ideological obstacle preventing the working class in Mexico from acquiring revolutionary consciousness. As we pointed out in a 22 July 1999 flyer: “Our revolutionary internationalist defense of the working class and its struggles is counterposed to the poison promoted by the labor bureaucracy, which pushes the false ideology of unity between Mexican workers and bosses.”

Universities Under Capitalism and the Perspective of the CGH

While supporting those demands in the students’ six-point list that sought to prevent UNAM from becoming increasingly elite, such as through the imposition of tuition, we exposed how some other demands sowed illusions in the capitalist regime. Thus, for example, the demand for dismantling the police structure at UNAM referred only to “external” police and porro thug elements at the service of the administration, but not to Auxilio UNAM (now Vigilancia UNAM) [campus police]. The job of these “official” campus police forces is to regiment the students and the workers at the university and serve as spies and thugs for the authorities.

Throughout the strike, the question of Auxilio UNAM, whose members are organized in STUNAM [UNAM workers union], was a key point in our intervention. Indeed, most leftist activists consider the police (which together with the army, the courts and the jails form the core of the bourgeois state) part of the working class. This is a suicidal illusion. As we emphasized in the August 13 speech mentioned above:

“Cops are not ‘workers in uniform’ but the attack dogs of the bourgeois state. The presence of cops in the university, affiliated to STUNAM, is an immediate danger for the union itself and for the student strike, as well as for any action the STUNAM may be involved in. ‘Auxilio UNAM’ cops out of the university and STUNAM!

“No illusions in the PRD, a bosses’ party!”

The bourgeois state is a machine of repression dedicated to the perpetuation of the capitalist system. Thus, it cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed; it must be destroyed through a socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state to defend the proletariat as the new ruling class against the bourgeoisie and to lay the basis for a socialist society.

The universities are an important pillar of capitalist society, as they are charged with training the future administrative, technical and ideological personnel of bourgeois society. The university administration is the administrative arm of the bourgeoisie within the university and it works hand in hand with the state to regiment and repress the students and workers. Thus, counterposed to the call for a University Congress, we Spartacists call for abolishing the administration and for student, teacher and worker control of the university. These slogans, together with our main call for free, quality education for all, point toward the need for socialist revolution, the only way to put both education and culture not only within reach, but also at the service of the masses. As we repeatedly explained in our interventions and propaganda during the strike:

“We fight…for the students to receive stipends for food, transportation, study materials, etc. We call for: completely open admissions, made economically real by providing students with a living stipend! While defending access to higher education against further attacks, our program is not limited to defending the status quo of automatic admission to UNAM only for a select number of relatively privileged high schools.”

—“Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!” Espartaco supplement, 22 July 1999

A central part of the strategy of the CGH, which took up the traditions of the 1968 student movement, was its faith in “public dialogue” with the administration. With this perspective, they ignored the reality of the divisions and contradictory class interests in society. The “Manifestos to the Nation” published by the CGH are full of such illusions: “If Dr. Francisco Barnés de Castro had been more concerned with the interests of the university community than with those of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the neoliberal policies of the Federal Government, this strike would have been avoided, and together we would have been able to find solutions to the problems of the University” (20 April 1999). The idea was to publicly discredit the administration, which presumably would then act in the interests of the educational needs of the masses. And this was the central, suicidal strategy of the CGH throughout the ten months of the strike. The bourgeoisie and its representatives cannot be “convinced” to stop exploiting, oppressing and repressing. The working class and the poor have never gained anything by “reasoning” with the capitalist exploiters, only through class struggle.

The CGH’s illusions in the administration are analogous to the illusions of the EZLN that the government should transcend class interests and “rule by obeying.” This goes hand in hand with the idea that the university can be a “democratic island” abstracted from society. In the context of the UNAM strike, the demand for a decisive University Congress parallel to the administration was one of the concrete expressions of the illusions in the administration. The innocuous character of this call was demonstrated by the fact that even the administration accepted it and adopted it as its own. More ominously, by the end of the strike this call became the focal point of a campaign by the administration (supported by the STUNAM bureaucracy) in favor of calling off the strike in exchange for the promise of a “University Congress” to resolve the “remaining issues.”

Student Impotence: Between “Militant Dialogue” and “Powerful Actions”

All the other tendencies and organizations represented in the CGH, from the “moderates” to the “ultras,” showed their political bankruptcy during the course of the strike. En Lucha and the PCM (M-L) [Mexican Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)], perhaps the two most influential organizations in the “ultra” CGH, simply promoted a student version of populism, and they are responsible for a large part of the decisions, illusions and narrowness that characterized the CGH’s politics.

The strike committee in the School of Political Science, led by [“ultra” student leader] “El Mosh,” often expressed a refreshing disdain not only for the PRD, but also for the EZLN for its criticisms of the CGH from the right. In fact, in September of 1999, in a letter published in La Jornada newspaper, [Zapatista leader] “Subcomandante” Marcos complained bitterly about the evident political differentiation within the CGH, accusing the “ultras” (and the Political Science Committee in particular) of wanting to “impose silence” on PRD moderates and of wanting to make itself into “a homogeneous entity” through purges. Nevertheless, the political perspective of the Political Science Committee—typical of the majority of the young strikers and strategically centered on “powerful actions” such as blocking streets—is perhaps the clearest proof of the desperation and narrowness of radical student populism. Despite their militancy, these youth were politically led toward the democratic reform of the university and the state.

The other organizations who claim to be Trotskyist have a fundamental political responsibility for keeping the strike within the framework of university politics and helping to ensure that no significant number of these radical youth managed to break decisively with bourgeois politics. The Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), for example, distinguished itself only by giving the dominant politics of the CGH a more militant appearance. Far from fighting illusions in “dialogue” with the administration, the LTS reduced itself to spicing them up with absurd pseudo-radical rhetoric, calling for a “militant dialogue”! On the struggle against capitalist repression, they said: “We call on the EZLN to lead this campaign, putting all resources at its service, and to actively join in the protest actions” (undated leaflet of ContraCorriente—at that time the youth group of the LTS—and others, distributed during the UNAM strike). But the EZLN has no program to end capitalist repression, which requires overthrowing the bourgeois state through socialist revolution. The LTS’s tailing of the EZLN is a reflection of its rejection, in deeds, of Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

From Open Illusions in the PRD to “Persona Non Grata”

The student movement experienced a significant radicalization in the summer of 1999. In the face of the recalcitrance of the elitist university authorities, the strike continued. Various sectors of the bourgeoisie and the pro-PRI trade-union bureaucracies called openly for repression, and some even called for UNAM to be closed. Utilizing his social base in the university, during the first few months of the strike Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the head of the PRD city government, mobilized his university acolytes grouped in the CEU, la Red and Higinio Muñoz’s CEM (not to mention the shameless pseudo-Trotskyists of the POS) to end the strike. Their fundamental problem was that the majority of the CGH wanted to fight.

The bourgeoisie was conscious of the possibility that the student strike might spark an explosion of proletarian struggle. Ending the strike once and for all thus became the priority. The PRD and the Cárdenas government launched a propaganda offensive against the CGH—accusing the strikers of being “ultras,” “extremists,” etc.—with the obvious intention of preparing the road for repression. In a supplement to Espartaco dated July 22 we wrote:

“Today, many students continue to be under the illusion that the PRD is not capable of unleashing state repression against the strikers, and there is always someone in the discussions and assemblies and marches who tells us that, in spite of their disenchantment with the PRD, they have no other option for the presidential elections…. The PRD is not opposed in any way to the use of state repression, and it has shown this several times, repressing the protests of CNTE teachers and student strikers. Looking toward the presidential elections, the PRD…must prove itself capable of administering the capitalist state, in the face of the growing concern of the Mexican bourgeoisie and the imperialists about the explosive situation in Mexico.”

In response to the anti-strike campaign, the PRD’s organizations became increasingly discredited and isolated; in meetings of the CGH choruses of “CEU out!” were common and the term “PRDer” became more and more of an insult. As we wrote in the article quoted above, “although the openly PRD-partisan CEU has now lost its authority, the self-proclaimed Trotskyist POS, influential in the leadership of the student movement, has quickly taken its place.” Even before the upcoming campaign, beginning on July 3 the POS called for an end to the strike.

On July 28, a group of pompous, right-wing “emeritus” professors—among them the “Marxist” Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez—issued a “proposal” that would become a tool of the administration, the state and the PRD against the student strike. The “emeritus” group demanded the end of the strike in exchange for the temporary suspension of the General Regulation of Payments. The issue of fees, like all the other demands of the CGH, would be debated in “discussion and analysis spaces,” after which the administration’s right-wing puppet Consejo Universitario [University Council] would make decisions. In essence, the “emeritus” group was calling for the end of the strike with nothing in return.

On August 4 the PRD government brutally repressed a strike picket line at an “alternate site” for registration, resulting in more than 100 strikers being beaten and arrested. From then on, the PRD mobilized its riot police (as well as numerous porro thug attacks and provocations) more and more brutally and actively against the CGH. The repression deeply shook the strikers. At the same time, worker support for the student strike was more than tangible. In addition to the joint marches, every day hundreds of STUNAM workers helped students guard the facilities, and they continued to do this on their own initiative throughout the strike. It was especially significant that, beginning in July, the SME had pickets at UNAM for several weeks, carrying with them the enormous social weight of the electrical workers union to discourage any attempt to break the strike.

Far from being intimidated, the CGH kept organizing flying pickets throughout the city to guard threatened university facilities, as well as to prevent “extramural” classes and registration for the coming semester. On August 8, a few days after the first massive PRD attack on the strike, the CGH declared Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and other prominent populists to be “persona non grata” at UNAM. Shortly afterward, the main PRD spokesman in the strike, Fernando Belaunzarán, was literally kicked out of the CGH—well deservedly, of course. The CEU ceased to exist as a current in the strike. The CEM, the POS and [the International Marxist Tendency’s affiliate] Militante were profoundly discredited. The “moderates” briefly attempted to organize an “alternate CGH” as a provocation and sabotage, which only led to ridicule by the majority of the strikers.

The PRD’s expulsion from the CGH was a product of disappointment and healthy fury against this bourgeois party due to the increasing repression against the CGH, and was perhaps the most significant reflection of the radicalization of the student strikers. We fought in our interventions to give this disillusionment with the PRD a class character: the understanding that the PRD is a bourgeois party that serves the capitalist regime, that has nothing to offer the workers and oppressed other than hunger and repression.

The Responsibility of the Union Bureaucracies

While the venal PRI bureaucracies openly supported the repression, the SME bureaucracy, worried that worker discontent might escape its control, withdrew the ephemeral workers guards from CU [the main campus of UNAM] at the beginning of August, in an obvious response to the growing disrepute of the PRD in the CGH. After the march on August 28—when hundreds of thousands of workers and the CGH mobilized against the privatizations and in defense of free education—the SME bureaucracy stopped all joint mobilizations with the students. For its part, responding to pressure from its base, the STUNAM bureaucracy gave considerable material support to the CGH, even while it backed the “democratic” provocations of the administration—from supporting the proposal of the “emeritus” group in July to the de la Fuente “plebiscite” in January 2000. More significantly, it did everything in its power to demobilize the workers. Thus, with the argument that it did not want to “confront” the student strike, the STUNAM bureaucracy postponed its strike deadline, which should have been November 1, to 1 February 2000 (when they would then call off the strike!). This was a particularly grotesque and obvious maneuver to isolate the students. As we wrote at the time: “What the student strike needs to win is precisely to be extended to the proletariat. What the nationalist bureaucracy of STUNAM wants to avoid is causing greater problems for the bourgeoisie, not for the student strikers” (Espartaco No. 13, Autumn-Winter 1999). In reality, the central responsibility for the isolation of the strike rests with these popular, supposedly “independent” and “militant” bureaucracies.

All unions today are led by pro-capitalist bureaucracies—the labor lieutenants of capital in the workers movement—who are conscious of their privileges deriving from their position at the head of workers organizations. The central role of the bureaucracies is to keep the working class under control and tied to the bourgeoisie. We Trotskyists fight to replace all these bureaucracies with genuine class-struggle leadership. As Leon Trotsky explained in his article “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940):

“The trade unions of our time will serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capital to subordinate and discipline the workers and to obstruct the revolution or, on the contrary, the unions will become tools of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat....

“In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in addition, the organs of proletarian revolution.”

The Internationalist Group (IG), another of the pseudo-Trotskyist groups active in the strike, brags of having played an important role in the formation of the workers guards of the SME and other unions that were present on the main campus of UNAM for a few weeks in July and August of 1999. The presence of these guards temporarily halted the capitalist repression and showed the type of mobilizations that were necessary to win the strike. Nonetheless, in a typically centrist manner, when the IG promoted the formation of workers guards in a STUNAM meeting on 6 July 1999, it avoided any mention of the presence of the Auxilio UNAM police in the union. Then, it publicly accused us of sabotaging the meeting for having explained exactly this key question! This behavior by the IG was completely consistent with its history, since stumbling over the class line has been a defining characteristic of the IG from its beginnings. Its Brazilian comrades debuted in 1996 by dragging a union into the bourgeois courts—a class betrayal—as part of an intra-bureaucratic fight for control of the union…which was infested with cops! (See Espartaco No. 10, Autumn-Winter 1997 [“IG’s Brazil Cover-Up: Dirty Hands, Cynical Lies,” WV No. 671, 11 July 1997].)

The IG was by then inventing a class difference between these pro-PRD union bureaucracies and those that are tied to the PRI. The IG considers that the unions affiliated with the PRI are nothing more than “an arm of the bourgeois state” (El Internacionalista, March 2000). The IG’s politics are not based on any Marxist analysis but rather are an accommodation to the anti-union prejudices dominant in the student body. Thus, according to the IG’s convenient “analysis,” the only genuine workers unions in the country are those tied to the PRD! But the class struggle does not appear to be particularly concerned with the IG’s rulings. In fact, defying their right-wing leadership, entire sections of the powerful SUTERM, together with the pro-PRD unions and the CGH, called the enormous mobilization of 28 August 1999. Between the end of September and mid-October 1999, the sugar workers union, affiliated with the CTM [pro-PRI Mexican Labor Federation], carried out an economic strike, and a workers delegation came to the CGH to express its solidarity and donate tons of sugar for the student strikers to sweeten their coffee. In addition, for several years now, the miners union has been involved in the hardest class struggles against state interference and in defense of economic conquests. The IG has a union-busting line in the service of the bourgeois PRD and its lieutenants in the workers movement. With this spurious “justification,” the IG in fact refuses to defend the PRI unions and their struggles against the state and the bosses—a class betrayal—because their leaderships support the wrong bourgeois party.

The Strike at an Impasse

After the retreat of the union bureaucracy, the bourgeois offensive against the strike became especially brutal and sinister. Besides the constant porro thug provocations, on October 5 “El Mosh” and our comrade Humberto Herrera, a union member with 20 years of experience at the time, were kidnapped and tortured for hours. In response, sections of our International Communist League held protests at Mexican embassies and consulates around the world demanding: “Defend the UNAM strike! Down with state terror against the left! For union strikes against privatizations and in defense of public education!” A few days later, on October 14, a CGH march on the Periférico beltway was brutally attacked by riot police. In spite of the brutal repression, the strikers were determined to continue with their struggle, as shown by the November 5 CGH march from Televisa San Angel to Los Pinos [the official residence and office of the president] via the Periférico, which had more than 100,000 participants and was surrounded by more than 15,000 cops.

Faced with growing criticism from the bourgeoisie over his inability to resolve the conflict, the chancellor, Francisco Barnés, tendered his resignation on November 12. This awakened new illusions within the CGH, and many strikers celebrated this “victory.” The LTS was among the most enthusiastic, writing soon afterward:

“The CGH, with its democratic organization and great methods of struggle (like the occupation of facilities and mobilizations like the ones on the Periférico), got rid of Barnés, the first great triumph of the strike.”

—Estrategia Obrera No. 11, January-February 2000

The LTS’s glorification of the supposed “horizontal democracy” of the CGH and its “great methods of struggle” (the “powerful actions” of “El Mosh”) show the total prostration of these pseudo-Trotskyists in the face of student militancy and their lack of a forward-looking perspective. Barnés’s resignation was no triumph. In reality, the student strike had gone as far as it could as such, and in the face of the withdrawal of union support, it found itself at an impasse.

The Breaking of the Strike

The incompetent Barnés was soon replaced by a much more efficient politician, de la Fuente, who wasted no time before starting to pave the way for massive repression and the final breaking of the strike through his university “plebiscite” on the strike. With the support of the entire spectrum of the populist intelligentsia (including Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis, and many other current members of [leading PRD politician] Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s top brass), de la Fuente mobilized bourgeois “public opinion” against the CGH, demanding the end of the strike in ex-change for the promise of a “congress” and declaring that any “dialogue” was at an end until the strike was lifted. Nonetheless, En Lucha again misled the CGH into a renewed attempt at “dialogue” with the person who would, a few months later, facilitate the massive repression of the strike.

The CGH responded to de la Fuente’s “plebiscite” with its own plebiscite in the middle of January, in which hundreds of thousands, within UNAM and outside it, declared their support for the CGH’s demands. After the repression against the December 11 protest, there were several more attacks, including the police occupation of the Prepa 3 high school on February 1. The biggest blow was when the STUNAM bureaucracy postponed the strike scheduled for February 1, at a moment when it was clear that massive repression was coming. Finally, on February 6, the PFP [Federal Preventive Police] and the riot police—more than 2,000 in all—took over the main campus and broke the strike, with about 700 arrests. Putting a spotlight on repression in Mexico, the ICL again held protests around the world against the repression and for the immediate release of all those detained. We again called on STUNAM to flex its muscles in defense of the students through a strike. Letters of solidarity written as a result of our campaign arrived from important unions in South Africa and Italy, among others. We also organized an international fund drive to help the detained students make bail.

As we wrote in a 6 February 2000 ICL statement [“Free All Arrested UNAM Strikers! Defend Public Education!” WV No. 729, 11 February 2000]:

“The government has bloodied and repressed the students because they think they can get away with it. The student strike has held out for many months and the students have fought valiantly. But student protest on its own is insufficient. To go beyond verbal protest and change society, students and all those seeking social justice must be anchored in the social and economic realities of the country and must mobilize the tremendous social power of the proletariat against the Mexican rulers and their imperialist overlords. We say: No new 1968 massacres! Mobilize the power of the working class! Forge a revolutionary Trotskyist party!”

The history of the UNAM strike brings key lessons for social activists today. The illusions of the CGH leaders in the “democratization” of UNAM and their confidence in the authorities reflect the rejection of the need for the revolutionary reorganization of society. Only through the construction of a revolutionary workers party can a consistent struggle be waged for the interests of workers, women, indigenous people, peasants and all the oppressed. Any path other than the revolutionary one leads inevitably to co-optation by the PRD or some other bourgeois force and/or being crushed by the state. The purpose should not be to pressure the PRD and its numerous fellow travelers but to break with them; it is nationalist populism that prevents successful struggle by the working class and keeps it divided. To forge a revolutionary party that, in Lenin’s words, acts as the “tribune of the people,” the fight against all forms of oppression and backwardness is key. A constant feature of our intervention during the UNAM strike was the fight against students’ enthusiastic acceptance of widespread discrimination and fanaticism. We constantly had to raise our voices against the sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic epithets that echoed during the marches and assemblies of the strike.

In the struggle against false bourgeois ideology, we Spartacists raise the declaration of Leon Trotsky: “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer” (Lessons of October, 1924). We emphasize that students have an important role to play: the revolutionary organization of the working class must unite the vanguard of the working class with declassed intellectuals who use their abilities and knowledge in the service of proletarian emancipation. Quoting James P. Cannon, the founder of Trotskyism in the United States, the Spartacist speaker concluded his remarks on 13 August 1999:

“‘Our party is a party of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is the only solution to the problem of the working class, and all our work must lead to that goal.’ Such is the basis of Spartacist politics. Break with the bourgeoisie! No illusions in the bourgeois PRD! Forge an international Leninist-Trotskyist party! For new October Revolutions around the world!”