MEXICANS CONNECT ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCES

A surge of grassroots organizing for fundamental change is underway in Mexico. The September 26-27, 2014 police attack on students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college, which took place in Iguala, Guerrero, and the subsequent disappearance of 43 of those students, exposed the complicity and corruption between government officials, political parties, police and organized crime; it shocked Mexico’s conscience and left a deep wound in the nation’s heart. A few examples of the growing momentum for radical change are described below.

After the police attack and enforced disappearance of 43 students, the State Coordinator of Education Workers of Guerrero (Ceteg), the state affiliate of the National Coordinator of Education Workers, a lefty labor union, wasted no time in calling a meeting in Ayotzinapa. Participants in the October 15 meeting, held a mere 18 days after the attack, vowed to engage in various kinds of social protest and to organize in order to accumulate forces and grow the movement. The participants also formed the National Popular Assembly (ANP, its initials in Spanish), composed of 53 social and student organizations in the country. (Students also have a national organization.) Afterwards, parents, relatives, student survivors, teachers and friends of the 43 disappeared students attended meetings within Guerrero and in different parts of the country to gather momentum and support for their on-going search for the students and for truth and justice. The parents and student survivors split up in small groups and visited communities and social organizations around the country; it seemed like they were everywhere, and it still seems that way after five months.

One of their visits was to Chiapas, where they met with civil society in San Cristóbal and with the statewide teachers’ union in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state’s capital. On November 15, 2014 they met with the Zapatistas in Oventik, a Zapatista Caracol, the autonomous regional government center. The Zapatistas had also been busy organizing since their re-emergence on December 21, 2012. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) initiated a new organizing phase with the Escuelitas Zapatistas (Little Zapatista Schools) in 2013, where folks were invited into Zapatista homes and communities to learn first-hand about autonomy. Escuelitas were held twice in 2013 (August and December) and the first week of January 2014. They also held a Seminar in honor of Juan Chávez Alonso, a very well known and highly respected indigenous leader that died. This was a step in renewing the relationship between the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the EZLN.

From August 4-8, 2014, the EZLN held a “sharing,” or exchange of struggles, thoughts and ideas, with the National Indigenous Congress in La Realidad. On August 9, they presented a joint report that, in addition to a long list of government plans to facilitate corporate takeovers of indigenous lands (dispossession), included plans to sponsor a joint global festival of resistances and rebellions against capitalism in several different locations between December 22, 2014 and January 3, 2015.

Following the November 15 meeting with the Ayotzinapa parents in Oventik, the EZLN issued a December 12 comunicado [1] in which it invited the parents to send a 20-person delegation to the Festival of Resistances and Rebellions Against Capitalism (R&R Festival) as honored guests. The EZLN stated that it would cede its spaces to speak to the parents. The parents accepted and were thus able to tell their story to indigenous representatives of many anti-capitalist struggles around the country, as well as to adherents of the Sixth Declaration that attended the Festival. The Zapatistas gave the parents their full support and urged members of the CNI to welcome the families of the 43 disappeared students into their communities and to listen to what they had to say. Besides urging everyone to struggle against capitalism and its destruction of Mother Earth, the EZLN also urged CNI members and adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle to support the struggle of the Ayotzinapa families and students for truth and justice. Subcomandante Moisés stated:

“We understand that right now, truth and justice for Ayotzinapa is the most urgent demand.” [2]

After the Festival of Resistances and Rebellions against Capitalism

On February 1, representatives from 60 towns in the state of Morelos met to form the Congress of Morelos Towns in order to unite opposition to the Morelos Integral Project; a collection of energy and infrastructure projects intended to facilitate industrialization and mining. Some of the towns had sent representatives to the R&R Festival and one of the towns, Amilcingo, hosted the Festival. Representatives from Ayotzinapa spoke at the February 1 meeting, and the Congress of Morelos Towns voted to join their struggle.

An ambitious project called the Constituyente Ciudadana, which organizers had been working on for eleven months, made an important announcement on February 5. In Mexico City, human rights activist Bishop Raúl Vera López, [3] other activists, clergy, members of campesino, union and social organizations, as well as survivors of the violence that envelops Mexico presented the initiative of a Popular Citizens Convention, which will convoke a series of sessions throughout the country, and a March 21 meeting for discussing the political reality and to formulate a new Constitution. Reasoning that the current Constitution is “dead,” proponents of this project want citizens to agree on a new constitution that will provide economic, social and political justice to all citizens. This work takes place without political parties. [4]

Among the project’s proponents present at the Mexico City announcement, in addition to Vera López, were: the painter Francisco Toledo, Javier Sicilia, Father Alejandro Solalinde, the priest Miguel Concha, Gilberto López y Rivas, migrant defender Leticia Gutiérrez, as well as union representatives, among them Martín Esparza (Electricians Union) and members of different churches. At the start of the February 5 event, they remembered the events that occurred in Iguala, Guerrero, which resulted in 43 students from the rural teachers college at Ayotzinapa being forcibly disappeared.

The ANP held a National Popular Convention (CNP) over the weekend of February 6-8. Two thousand (2,000) delegates from 244 social organizations coming from the interior of the country attended. A central purpose of the convention is to generate ‘‘a reflection within all the organizations that envisions the possibility of giving direction to the movement and grouping together and unifying all of the country’s political forces, respecting their diversity and natural dynamic, but giving it direction through a political program. [5]

The ANP held another meeting on February 22 with 153 delegates from 55 social organizations. Again headed by the Ayotzinapa parents, they agreed to make it their priority to enter military barracks to search for their missing sons and to hold a second National Popular Convention (CNP) on April 10 and 11. According to Vidulfo Rosales Sierra, a lawyer with the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of La Montaña, “they are accumulating forces with the political movement, and will invite other actors like the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), and the Constituyente Ciudadana (Citizens Constitutional Convention) that the Bishop of Saltillo, Raúl Vera, impels, so as to be assembled in one single force that permits us to arrive at the convention with more strength.” [6]

The fact that the project for a constitutional convention had been worked on for eleven months demonstrates that the Ayotzinapa case is not what motivated that project. One possible motivation was the package of constitutional “reforms” the Congress passed last year. That package included an energy reform that now gives energy companies the right to “use” anyone’s land, whether private, ejido or communal land, for oil and gas exploration and exploitation; in other words, the right to poison indigenous and campesino land and thereby render it useless for producing crops. The package also included an education reform that takes union rights away from teachers and implements a system similar to the “no child left behind” policy in the United States. A “tax reform” requires small cooperatives and others previously not taxed to keep books and pay taxes. Collectively, these “reforms” were known as the Pact for Mexico, sponsored by the PRI.

Another major motivation was very likely the out-of-control violence and resulting insecurity caused by Drug War militarization and the actions of organized crime. At the February 1 Congress in Morelos described above, Javier Sicilia announced that organized crime has provoked the following number of victims in Mexico: “(…) more than 160,000 murders were committed in the eight most recent years and more than 30,000 disappeared and 500,000 displaced exist.” [7]

In addition to victims of organized crime, all the campesinos affected by the energy “reform” and teachers affected by the education “reform,” Ayotzinapa has added momentum for the citizens’ constitutional convention, grassroots anti-capitalist organizing and fundamental change in Mexico. What provides a hopeful sign is that so many diverse social organizations, unions and churches are coming together with a common goal: a citizens’ constitutional convention.

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By: Mary Ann Tenuto-Sánchez

[1] https://compamanuel.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/ezln-on-ayotzinapa-the-festival-and-hysteria/

[2] https://compamanuel.wordpress.com/category/1st-worldwide-festival-of-resistances-and-rebellions-against-capitalism/

[3] Raúl Vera López is the Catholic Bishop of Saltillo and the president of the Board of Directors of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) in Chiapas. He also served as Assistant Bishop of the San Cristóbal de las Casas Diocese in Chiapas, under the late Bishop, Don Samuel Ruiz, the founder of Frayba.

[4] http://constituyenteciudadana.org/

[5] http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/02/06/politica/005n2pol

[6] http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/02/22/politica/007n1pol

[7] http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/02/01/estados/019n1est