October 2001   

Presidents George W. Bush y Vicente Fox Quesada in February 2001, while the U.S. leader announced air strikes against Iraq. (Foto: AP)

The following article is translated from the October 2001 supplement to El Internacionalista (edición México), published the Grupo Internacionalista/México.

As soon as the Bush administration launched its war cry that “you are either with us or against us” in the new war to restructure the world, the businessmen’s government of Mexican president Vicente Fox stressed once again that it is a faithful lackey of its imperialist masters. It not only justified U.S. imperialism’s attacks on semi-colonial countries but offered the United States “all the oil it needs” to carry out bombings of Afghanistan and any other country chosen as a target of this imperialist war. Foreign minister Jorge Castañeda has endlessly repeated that the Fox regime supports the U.S. military actions and is committed to providing whatever assistance is it asked to give.

This is no accident. The shock waves of the September 11 attacks have reached capitalist Mexico, and the government is preparing to back up the imperialists in the war. Recall that in the Second World War, the Mexican government not only made itself an unconditional provider of raw materials and labor for its Washington overlords, but participated militarily in the inter-imperialist slaughter, sending Squadron 201 to join in air combat in the South Pacific. After declaring war on the Axis powers, the government of then-president Manuel Ávila Camacho proceeded to arrest Japanese citizens, especially in northern Mexico, where it even built concentration camps. This is the real face of Mexican bourgeois nationalism, from the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which governed the country for more than seven decades, and its offspring the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) to the PAN (Fox’s National Action Party), now in office.

Today history is repeating itself. In less than a month, 81 immigrants of Arab origin have been arrested in Mexico. Immediately after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center, the National Immigration Service (INM) arrested 41 Iraqis. Since then, immigrants from Jordan, Pakistan, Yemen and Lebanon have been arrested, as well as 14 more Iraqis (La Jornada, 2 October). While the media report that the military’s Grupo Beta is carrying out humanitarian missions to help those who want to cross the U.S. border by handing out packages of rescue materials, the truth is that the Mexican state carries out “border patrol” functions in the service of the United States. Every year, many thousands of Central American immigrants on their way to the U.S. are arrested and deported to their impoverished countries of origin. With consummate cynicism, the head of the INM said that “before the attacks [in the U.S.] Mexicans felt sympathy for migrants and tended to protect them, but after September 11 this attitude changed.”

Thus the Mexican bourgeoisie “does its part” to whip up anti-Arab xenophobia (which in the U.S. goes hand in hand with racism against Latin American immigrants – a considerable number of whom today are going along with the campaign of imperialist jingoism). Both in Mexico and the U.S., revolutionary Marxists demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Immigrants of Arab origin are facing the alternative of spending a long period rotting in the Mexican immigration cops’ cells, or being deported to their countries of origin where they will also be subjected to repression. It is crucial to demand that they be freed immediately.

At the same time that the U.S. government shored up the “home front” by launching a wholesale attack on democratic rights and intensifying repression against ethnic minorities, immigrants, workers and the poor, Fox demands “national unity” while pledging to maintain “peace” in Mexico. What this means is that domestic repression will be raised to new heights. Already before the September 11 attack in the U.S., the Mexican bourgeoisie had begun a witch hunt against leftists. After some firecrackers went off at three Banamex bank branches in Mexico City, causing light damage, an “anti-terrorist” campaign was launched which culminated in the lightning detention of five people who the authorities claimed were suspected members of the FARP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People), an organization which claimed responsibility for the incident.

Fox’s “democratic” government put on a show aimed at “proving” the infallibility of the bourgeois state and assuring the domestic and imperialist capitalists that their businesses are being well protected. The supposed identification of suspects was carried out so fast that even the bourgeois media expressed its skepticism. Those arrested are the brothers Antonio, Héctor and Alejandro Cerezo Contreras as well as Pablo Alvarado and Sergio Galicia, now being held in the maximum security prison of La Palma at Almoloya in the State of Mexico.
 

Mexican Marines. (Foto: Proceso)

These victims of the government’s “anti-subversive” campaign join Erika Zamora, who has been imprisoned in the state of Guerrero for the last three years since the army massacre of peasants and supposed guerrillas in the town of El Charco. The Grupo Internacionalista demands: Freedom now for the prisoners of bourgeois repression! Drop all charges against those accused of “terrorism”! It is the duty of the working class to mobilize for this objective, putting in practice the old proletarian motto that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” 

Since the Cerezo Contreras brothers are students at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), the authorities started a witch hunt against students who participated in the 1999-2000 UNAM student strike. The government announced, among other things, that intelligence operations were being carried out at the university in order to “detect” activities that “pose a threat to national security” – that is, to bourgeois rule. This witch hunt continues and has made itself felt on several recent occasions. More than 100 students were reportedly arrested on October 2, the day of the annual march commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. The police of the Federal District, governed by the PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, harassed students at several schools and arrested dozens at the UNAM-affiliated Prepa 5 for the “crime” of standing on the sidewalk outside their school. The cops also tried to arrest students who were going to the Tlatelolco march on city buses, accusing them of “kidnapping” the buses despite the fact that they had paid their fares. At recent rallies in front of the U.S. embassy to protest the imperialist war, the government has mobilized hundreds of police, who have also demanded demonstrators’ names and copies of the leaflets they hand out.

It should be clear to all that the main target of the Fox government’s repressive onslaught is the working class. As of September 11 it announced that thousands of cops from the Federal Police (PFP) would be deployed to watch over “strategic facilities” across the country. Not only was “vigilance” beefed up at border crossings, but PEMEX (Mexico’s state oil company) and electrical power plants will be under police guard. These “precautions” against terrorist attacks are aimed in the final analysis at preventing any upsurge among the working class, which has been under constant assault from the government’s starvation policy and the catastrophic fall in living standards.

Protests against the imperialist war have already taken place in Mexico, but their outlook has not gone beyond the limits of bourgeois nationalism. Some meetings called by left groups like the Partido Obrero Socialista (Mexican followers of the late Argentine pseudo-Trotskyist caudillo Nahuel Moreno) have whipped up the most bald-faced nationalism, insisting “this is not a Mexican war” (“esta no es una guerra de los mexicanos”). They simultaneously call for the removal of foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, showing that at bottom they seek only to suggest a different course for Fox’s bourgeois government. Now Juventud Revolución (youth group of the local followers of French fake-Trotskyist Pierre Lambert, who are genuine “ultras” of reformism) calls for “peace, freedom and democracy” while undertaking the measures required to be officially recognized as a nationwide political organization by the Federal Electoral Commission, in the hopes that their parliamentary cretinism will gain them a few advantages. What they hide is that the struggle against imperialist war requires a policy of internationalist class struggle, counterposed to the pure and simple bourgeois nationalism they capitulate to (in particular when represented by the party of repression led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas [the PRD]).

In the imperialist epoch, the bourgeoisies of countries of belated capitalist development are characterized by their subordination to imperialism. Finding themselves between their demanding imperialist masters on one side and a concentrated and restive proletariat on the other, they have had to construct bonapartist or semi-bonapartist regimes under the aegis of imperialism. Their task and mission is squeezing the last drop of sweat and blood from the worker and peasant masses. The only way out is to struggle against capitalism, which means war, racism, the oppression of women and economic crises. This means taking the path of workers revolution and its extension to the south and to the north, beyond the Río Bravo (Rio Grande) to the United States. This perspective requires forging, in the heat of struggle, national sections of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. It is to this perspective that the Grupo Internacionalista and League for the Fourth International devote our efforts. Join us!