the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 24, 2014
Demonstrations in Mexico protesting police brutality, the power of the drug cartels and the corruption of politicians have occurred continuously in recent weeks. On November 8th, after three cartel thugs confessed to killing and burning the bodies of 43 students who disappeared six weeks before, demonstrators burned the door of the National Palace in the main square of Mexico City.
The pressure of demonstrations has helped expose more information about the massacre of student demonstrations on September 26th in the city of Iguala, in the south of Mexico. Not only had the police shot and killed six students and wounded some twenty others, but the police themselves kidnapped the 43 students! It came out that Iguala police have been working with the local drug cartel to keep this city of 140,000 “under tight control.” The mayor and his wife, who are tied to this mafia, ordered the police to turn the 43 students over to the cartel!
It was only under the pressure of demonstrations demanding a search for surviving students that the President of Mexico, Peña Nieto, launched a federal police investigation. The search by federal police turned up several mass graves with the remains of at least 80 bodies, a testament to the inhumanity of the drug traffickers. But the students’ bodies weren’t in them.
Up to now, 74 people, including the mayor of Iguala, have been arrested. This tragedy reveals the condition of Mexico today: a country where drug cartels and complicit politicians are part of the machinery of the state apparatus. Besides the Mexican bourgeoisie and the U.S. corporations, the cartels dominate this country and get rich behind the facade of a president who regularly closes his eyes to this murderous rottenness.
Peña Nieto is the leader of the PRI (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party), with its decades of corruption. His adversaries aren’t better: when the right-wing PAN (National Action Party) was in power from 2000 to 2012 the power of the cartels grew. As far as the so-called left-wing PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party), the mayor of Iguala is a member. So they’re all connected to the corruption.
Faced with legal and extra-legal repression, faced with corruption that weighs on the entire society, the Mexican population can only count on its own mobilization to improve the situation.