Mexico: Cops Shoot Down Students in Guerrero

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a translation of a 17 December 2011 leaflet issued by our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, and its youth group, Juventud Espartaquista. The leaflet denounces the brutal state repression against student protesters in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. The murderous cop attack was ordered by Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) state governor Ángel Aguirre and by the federal government of the right-wing clericalist National Action Party (PAN). As opposed to much of the left, which capitulates to the bourgeois-populist PRD, we Marxists fight for the political independence of the Mexican proletariat. As the statement explains, the PAN, PRD and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—which ran the country for seven decades until its 2000 electoral defeat—are all bourgeois parties whose differences “can be reduced to how best to administer the capitalist system of exploitation.”

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17 DECEMBER 2011—At least since last November, students at the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, have kept up a movement to demand an increase in admissions, higher food stipends, job assignments upon graduating, and a guarantee that their school will not be shut down. PRD governor Ángel Aguirre, together with the PAN federal government, responded to these basic demands on December 12 by unleashing police terror against a student protest on the Autopista del Sol [Mexico City-Acapulco highway]. The repressive forces of the state—federal, municipal and judicial police—opened fire on the students, killing two of them; four more were wounded, 22 arrested, and 20 have been reported disappeared (La Jornada, 14 December). Although 21 of the arrested are now free, one of them, Gerardo Pérez Torres, is still in jail—accused of firing at the students! Active and massive solidarity with the students of Guerrero is needed, in particular mobilizing the support of the working class. An injury to one is an injury to all! Free Gerardo Pérez Torres now!

The demands of rural teachers college students have changed very little in the last 50 years, and in all this time the response of the ruling capitalists/landowners—especially but not only in Guerrero—has varied from class disdain to more abject police/military brutality. It is no accident that none other than [former PRI governor] Rubén Figueroa, member of a long line of brutal Guerrero caciques [local political bosses] who is responsible for the 1995 massacre in the town of Aguas Blancas, has come out in defense of Governor Aguirre. The bourgeoisie allocates resources for education in proportion to what its own priorities require for the training of capitalist society’s future administrative, technical and ideological personnel. Aside from that, they couldn’t care less about the general education of the masses of exploited and oppressed—especially poor peasants and indigenous people. We communists fight for free, quality education for all—in the city and in the countryside—with open admissions and student stipends. Placing education at the service of the workers and peasants requires putting an end to the system of capitalist exploitation, which is dedicated to producing profits for the numerically small bourgeoisie, through a socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie and establishes a collectivized, planned economy to satisfy the needs of the population.

The calls for “punishment for the guilty” and against impunity only sow illusions in the capitalist state, which cannot grant “justice” to the exploited and oppressed masses. The state consists fundamentally of armed bodies of men at the service of the bourgeoisie to repress the workers and the poor. What this attack shows—once again—is that the PRD, like the PAN and the PRI, is a party of capital that has no qualms about unleashing repressive force against the workers and poor. As we Spartacists have always insisted, the PRD, including AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador], is a bourgeois party, whose differences with the PRI and PAN can be reduced to how best to administer the capitalist system of exploitation. The bourgeois state cannot be reformed and its nature will not change because it is headed by one or another capitalist politician. To end once and for all the murderous state violence directed against workers, poor peasants and other oppressed sectors, the working class—the only class with the social power and the interest to bring down capitalism—must destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with its own rule: a workers and peasants government, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. To achieve the above it is necessary for the proletariat to break with all bourgeois parties and politicians and forge a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggle to end capitalism. This is the aim of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).