Mexico: "Spread the people's awakening and rebellion against the criminal state!"

1 December 2014. A World to Win News Service. Huge numbers of people marched in Mexico City and a dozen other cities in about a third of Mexico's states in a "National Civil Shutdown" 1 December to step up the movement demanding that the government return the 43 Ayotzinapa teachers' college students kidnapped in September. On the day that President Enrique Pena Neto marked the end of his second year in office with a speech promising institutional reform, the demand that he resign reflected a growing sentiment that his government is totally illegitimate. Teachers and others in many states from Sonora and Durango in the north to more than a hundred schools in the state of Mexico and southern states went on strike. The day began when thousands of teachers in Santa Cruz blockaded an oil refinery, while others briefly seized the state's main airport. Teachers, students and members of indigenous organizations blocked motorways and marched in San Cristobal de la Casas, Chiapas. Education workers in Guerrero, the state where Ayotzinapa is located, forced major stores to close. They later stormed the state prosecutor's office in Chilpancing, torched police cars and rubbished administrative offices. In Guadalajara, a group of writers led a march from the International Book Fair to the city centre. In Veracruz, demonstrators responded to government accusations by chanting "We are not infiltrators, we're the people and we're mad as hell" and covered the walls of the National Election Institute with graffiti. In many places marchers carried photos of the disappeared students and denounced the government's attempts to criminalize and smash the protest movement. A half dozen marches criss-crossed the capital until they joined in a single stream led by Ayotzinapa parents. In the evening, as tens of thousands of people, said to be mainly secondary school and university students, along with union members and others, marched down a major avenue chanting slogans demanding the president's resignation, hundreds of police '"kettled" (trapped) a contingent of about 500 youth. Observers from the country's National Human Rights Commission came and escorted the demonstrators away from the police to safety. Solidarity demonstrations took place abroad, including Los Angeles (California) and Frankfurt, Germany. While the 1 December march in LA was at the Mexican Embassy, a protest was scheduled at U.S. government facilities for 2 December to condemn U.S. complicity in the Mexican government's war against the people The following, written shortly after a previous round of protests on 20 November, is from the Web site of the Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR) of Mexico (aurora-roja.blogspot.com). The parents of the 43 disappeared students arrive at the capital's main square in the afternoon of 20 November as part of the fourth Global Action Day for Ayotzinapa, the teachers' college they attended. After talking with many people in the course of their three car caravans through various parts of the country, they came to a very clear conclusion: "It's not just the state of Guerrero – everywhere in Mexico there are secret mass graves, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances." Throughout Mexico and around the world, the fourth Day of Protest marked a new upsurge of struggle. Many people once kept silent by fear now dare to protest and demonstrate. Many who were once overwhelmed by the daily struggle to survive or to get ahead, kept in ignorance by the mass media and its disinformation, are beginning to awaken to political life and demand justice in this totally unjust society. Tens of thousands of people converged on the Mexico city centre, according to La Jornada and AFP. Their lively and combative marches throbbed with music. There were solidarity strikes at more than a hundred public and private universities in several states. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in 120 cities in Mexico and more than 30 cities around the world, from Argentina to Russia and in many places in the U.S. It was a magnificent day of struggle and rebellion, a repudiation of the criminal state that is responsible for the murders and disappearances of the Ayotzinapa students in Iguala and countless other blood crimes in its war against the people. Once again the Mexico City government of Miguel Mancera of the PRD (the "leftist" opposition party to which the mayor of Iguala belongs) and the federal government headed by Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI (the historic governing party) joined efforts to brutally and arbitrarily suppress demonstrators in the capital, again revealing the common interests of the governing parties in repressing the people. Because of the usual coordination between the government and the media there was no television coverage of the capital riot police and the federal police beating people randomly, including children and the elderly. Instead TV newscasters lectured about "violence" because a few people threw things at the national palace, which these parrots for the system consider much more reprehensible than the many murders carried out by the government. As usual they chattered about "violent demonstrators" and "the victimized police", while covering up the police violence and random arrests. The repression was documented in videos and photos circulating on the Net. Groups of peaceful demonstrators, sometimes including whole families, were "kettled", pushed up against the metal fences surrounding closed stores and mercilessly beaten, many until they fell to the ground. An elderly man who held up a text to the riot police, asking them to read it, was brutally clubbed by a group of police. The so-called "law enforcement" forces also attacked reporters and representatives of human rights organizations. As usual the arrests were arbitrary. They included a Chilean student who happened to go by on a bike and an art student whose outrageous arrest was videoed and posted on the Net. Although the numbers reported are contradictory, at least 26 people were arrested. Of the 15 who were taken to the federal prosecutor's office, 11 have been treated as if they were dangerous criminals, locked up in high security prisons in the states of Veracruz and Nayarit, charged with criminal conspiracy, riot and attempted homicide. After the federal district authorities had bailed another 11 people who had been arrested, they received orders to stop releasing prisoners on bail and imprisoned three men and a woman still in custody. A policeman told people who had been arrested in a demonstration near the airport, " We're going to take you to Oaxaca and dump you like the 43" students. Obviously the state was prepared to unleash even bloodier repression. Photos posted on the Net showed snipers on the roofs of the national palace during the demonstration, recalling the army's massacre of hundreds of students and other people in 1968. A few hours before the state unleashed its guard dogs against the people, President Pena Nieto led an armed forces ceremony where he condemned violence "no matter who commits it" and condemning the "unjust" accusations against the army for the cold-blooded killing of 21 youth who had surrendered to the armed forces in Tlatlaya and participating in the repression of the Ayotzinapa teachers' college students in Iguala. State violence gets total impunity, while the people are met with an iron fist. The families of the disappeared students have not even been allowed to see the files on this case, even though full access to the files was one of the the ten points the president had supposedly agreed to with the families. None of these points were respected. After leaving a meeting with representatives of the federal government on 21 November, family members of the 43 disappeared students threw water and soda cans to express their outrage at the duplicity of the government, which has not released any reliable information about the search for the disappeared and instead is increasingly trying to repress the protest movement. President Pena Nieto talks about "peace and justice" while the state he heads is waging a war against the people and committing all kinds of injustice with total impunity. He condemns "the attack on our institutions" when those institutions are attacking, disappearing and killing the people. This is clear not only in this case but in the endless number of cases of murders, disappearances and tortures committed by the armed forces and police who still enjoy impunity. None of this would have come out without the struggle for justice for the Ayotzinapa students, a justice that will never come from the government. Many people are asking, Why? What should we do now? The problem is not just with certain politicians or electoral parties. From the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre to the Atenco massacre and now Ayotzinapa, all the main electoral parties have taken part in vicious repression against the people. Nor is the problem just neo-liberalism. Tlatelolco, the 1971 massacre by paramilitary forces, the dirty war and many other state crimes took place before the system began to implement these free-market policies. Today's state is rooted not so much in the 1910 Revolution as the counter-revolution carried out by the "constitutionalist" forces led by generals Carranza and Obregon, who treacherously murdered Zapata and Villa and slaughtered the revolutionaries who followed them and the Flores Magon brothers. The state established back then was a state in the service of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system that has increasingly evolved into a capitalism under the heel of imperialism, especially the U.S. This state has always oppressed and repressed the people while defending the exploitative system that still keeps the majority of the people in poverty and subject to reactionary violence, just as the global capitalist-imperialist system suppresses the great majority of humanity. Since we can't hope for justice from this state, what should we do? We should learn from the very positive initiative taken by the families of the 43 disappeared students, who took their struggle to the people in many areas and at the same time learned from the suffering of those people. We have to spread the exposure and struggle, taking it above all, more deeply among the masses of proletarians and peasants and the poor and oppressed of the countryside and cities in general. Along with the students and intellectuals who have powerfully driven the beginning of this movement, these lower masses can get to the root of the problem and completely change this country. Let's spread the brigadeo (a currently widespread activity in which groups form up brigades to go out and do mass agitation, locally and across the country) and many other creative mechanisms through which everyone can learn the truth about these state crimes! Amidst this exposure and resistance to the criminal state, and struggle for justice for the students, we need to be forging a movement for revolution, because revolution is the only possible way to put an end to the massacre of our youth, the massacre of women and other intolerable injustices. Only revolution can lead to emancipation as we overthrow this criminal state and build a new state power that serves the people and humanity, as we dismantle this inhuman predominantly capitalist system and unchain the creativity of the people to build a new, fundamentally different and liberating state. Even the most advanced people in the 1910 revolution did not have the understanding necessary to lead that process, but today, as a result of the very positive and also negative lessons of the socialist revolutions of the past century, and other sources of knowledge, a new revolutionary understanding has been brought forward, the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian, which gives us new tools to be able to discover and forge the road to liberation. Let's not let ourselves be tricked by the illusion of being able to put this broken and intolerable system back together again. Revolution is the only road to people's emancipation from so many insufferable and unnecessary injustices. In order for this struggle to really contribute to the building of a much better world and not waste today's awakening of millions of people, we need to forge the movement for revolution that does not yet exist and yet is so necessary. – end item –