The Revolution Returns?

By Alessandro

The recent abduction of 43 student teachers of the Escuela Normal Rural "Raúl Isidro Burgos" is deeply related to the violence at the heart of globalized capitalism. On September 26, the students were arrested by local police while protesting discriminatory government hiring in the southern state of Guerrero. They have not been seen since, and despite the state’s attempts to implicate the students in narcotrafficking or pass responsibility onto local cartels, the Mexican people continue to demand the students’ return in mass protests. In the past decade 27,000 Mexicans have been disappeared.

On the one hand, Mexico has over the last two hundred years been in a continual process of social transformation that began with the struggle for independence and continues in the recent abductions and subsequent popular mobilization. National consciousness has been refined again and again through heroic popular struggle—personified by figures such as Father Hidalgo, Poncho Villa, Emilio Zapata, the EPR, the EZLN, and now the 43 disappeared students.

Such figures serve as conduits for the growing rage felt by the Mexican people as the contradictions of capitalism and (neo-)colonialism periodically intensify. It must be remembered that over the centuries the people of Mexico have not only suffered terribly but have also triumphed, toppling oppressive formations such as the moribund Spanish Empire, the despotic Porfiriato, and perhaps (finally) the “perfect dictatorship” of the Counterrevolutionary PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) Regime.

In contradiction with this, the recurring obstacle to the desires of the Pueblo Mexicano is Imperialist Interference. While it was possible for the Mexican people to decisively smash the mechanisms of Liberal government, the Porfiriato, it has never been possible to escape the shadow of their large Imperialist neighbor. From Independence onwards, Mexico and her people have had a relationship with the USA that, despite rhetoric extolling brotherhood and equality (e.g., NAFTA) have amounted to Colonizer (USA) and Colonized (Mexican Nation).

"It was the state"

The present moment in Mexico is characterized by a state dominated by the PRI (the ruling party for the majority of the last 75 years), an entity that has sold out to oligarchical interests both foreign and domestic who a century ago supported Porfirio Díaz. This betrayal has been compounded by the American Drug War, itself a new excuse to violate the sovereignty of Latin American countries from Colombia to Mexico in the name of combating an American (and general capitalist) problem, the population's dependence on narcotics to lessen the alienating experience of daily life under capitalism.

The popular uprising in response to the Ayotzinapa abduction, an incident that is unique only in the sense that it has triggered a colossal response from the Mexican people, must be seen as more than just a simple response to a heinous crime. This popular mobilization is instead the stirring of the creative energies of the Mexican Revolution, once again risen to smash the Neo-Porfiriato that serves the new Imperio Universal, that of global capitalism.

While the people of Mexico are not uniform in their demands nor their position in relation to both production and Empire, the historico-political force that they channel and use now as they have in the past, represent the rich faculties of a people who have throughout history struggled against foreign oppressors and domestic traitors with a fortitude matched by few others.