HISTORY OF MEXICO

                                                                                                                                            U.S. Intervention in Mexico
   
    The first struggles of Mexicans against submission have been recorded in grand monuments, códices & inscriptions.  However, it is not until after the Spanish conquest that Mexican history became a confrontation, at times open, at times quiet, but always present, between the exploited and the exploiters tied to the foreigners.  Along with new territories the conquistadores discovered peoples who did not willfully succumb to the yoke of the Spanish crown. 
    This would be done by force and weakness.  The force of greater development which included better weapons; and the weaknesses of the indigenous peoples dispersed as they were in a vast territory, separated by war and distinct languages, religions and cultures as well as internally divided by opposing classes.
    Thus, it wasn't but a fistful of knights who subjugated thousands of "backward" Indians.  It was the Indians themselves led by the conquistadores to subjugate their own brothers, thus defeating their resistance which never truly ceased: one of the first chapters of the other history, that of the oppressed, which the dominant classes and their historians have silenced or deformed since then.
    Contrary to what is predicated by those reactionary historians, barbarism was certainly not in those primitive inhabitants of America, but in the gangs of adventurers who, anxious for riches, carried out a criminal war of extermination which along with disease pestilence and famine decimated the Mexican people.  At the beginning of the Conquest the population of Mexico was above 9 million inhabitants - by the middle of the following century it was reduced to 3 million.
    True, the ferocity of the conquistadores paralyzed most indigenous people with fear, but not all.  From the Mayas who received the first Spanish armies with arrows, to the Purhépechas who rose up in 1767, Mexicans posed a tenacious resistance to the colonialists. 
    The Tepehuanes of Durango (1616), the Tarahumaras of Chihuahua (1648,1650,1652), the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca (1660), the Tzeltales, Tzotzlies and Choles of Chiapas (1695), the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico (1680,1696) the Yaquis of Sonora (1740), the Indians of California (1743), and the black slaves of Veracruz headed by Yanga and again the Maya (1761), all rose up in arms against oppression.  Of these fundamentally indigenous uprisals - no less than fifty in the colonial period - the exploiters would remember nothing.
    Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the indigenous communities were robbed of their best lands, which remained in the hands of the Spaniards and Criollos.  Many indigenous tribes and villages were cast away to inhospitable mountains, or to the hot plains of the coast, to regions ripe for diseases, extremely difficult to live in: a destiny of slow death.
    Even so, this brutally direct extermination subsided the conquistadores discovered an inexhaustible vein: the brown vein of the strong indigenous arms.  What followed the direct theft of wealth was the exploitation of labor.
    And so, after stealing gold, silver and jewels, the Spaniards took over lands, subjugated the indigenous peoples and barbarously destroyed the native civilizations.  In this way, the majority of Indians became subject to the encomiendas ( great areas of land whose indigenous population encomendado or commissioned by the king to Spanish nobles, {essentially a form of slavery }) there constituting the fundamental force of labor.  Decapitation, impalement, and beastly aperramientos ( the use of trained man-eating dogs in bloody hunts for Indians where the victims would be torn to pieces by the dogs ) gave way to more productive forms of genocide.  As a consequence the Indians were subjected to exploitation in a variety of forms, from standard slavery, the encomienda, and indentured servitude to peonage, debt and forced labor.  As a form of defense, the Indians preserved their languages, religions (under cover of Christianity), medicine and customs in forms which have persisted to date.
    Not even the spirit of the indigenous was spared of slavery: the conquistador chained it with religion, which attempted to justify plunder.  Nevertheless, it must be recognized that among the missionaries there were great men who stood out for their defense of the Indians, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Toribiod de Benavente, López de Gomara, Alonso de Zorita, and Basco de Quiroga;  but the majority were a basic component of the colonial state, which soon became the principle landholder as well as maintaining strong political power thanks to their control of education, publications and direct domination of the Indians.
    As do all exploiters, Spain created a legal "justification" for their exploitation.  Ironically, following the royal orders, the colonial government "conceded" the use and enjoyment of certain lands, waters, and mountains to the indigenous peoples.
    And so, over and above the exploitation of the direct producers, the indigenous peoples, the growth of mining and other industries, the expansion of commerce and the development of wage labor, arduously began to develop the capitalist relations of New Spain.  But the colonial regiment in which these new relations took shape, also deformed them creating within these a dependency which these would drag on for centuries.  Thus developed the technological backwardness of three centuries of colonial domination, the deformed structure of the economy and the continual pillage of the wealth created by the workers, which obstructed the conditions necessary to pass from artisanry to great industrialization.  The Spanish prohibition on the cultivation in America of important crops such as grapes, olives and mulberry; the limitations on the industries of New Spain intended to protect the manufacturers of the metropolis; the restrictions on commerce among the very colonies of Spain, and finally the defeats suffered by the Spanish army against England and France which culminated in the invasion of the Iberian peninsula by Napolean's troops.  All of these factors combined ever more with the growing popular discontent which included Criollo industrialists and merchants who felt Spanish dependence was an obstacle to their expansion.
    In this way for better or for worse, the development of economic ties among different regions and diverse sectors of production, intertwined with the incipient development of an internal market, as well as the ideological domination of the Catholic Church, placed the objective conditions by which Mexico began its national formation along with other brother countries as it finally threw off the Spanish yoke with a long war of independence.  Headed by Hidalgo, Morelos, Guerrero and so many more liberal heroes, the Mexican people broke the yoke which tied them to the Spanish crown and won their coveted liberty.
    The patriotism of those heroes was based upon an intelligent analysis of the social situation and a profound tie to the people, which permitted them to take the vanguard, constructing as a part of the struggle a precious union between revolutionary action and thought, which awaits a rescue by the popular vanguards of the new revolution.
    In this libertarian act, it was the peasant masses who made up the majority of victorious insurgent guerrillas and armies; and the agrarian content - restitution of lands to their legitimate owners - of Hidalgo and Morelos' proclamations were, along with political liberty, a powerful magnet which attracted popular patriotism with a powerful force.  And even though it was clear who was the enemy, the truth is that the armies which defended Spanish domination were formed, in great majority, by Mexicans of peasant extraction - only the officials and high chiefs were Spaniards.
    Hidalgo understood the necessity for realizing serious social transformations for the popular  masses.  It was he who raised the demand that all lands expropriated from the peasants who constituted the principle energizing force of the rebellion be returned. 
    It was the great Morelos who for his part sensed and focused the sentiments of the nation proclaiming the inalienable right of the Mexican people to form and change their government according to their wishes.  Upon Morelos' death, Vicente Guerrero kept alive the flame of independence in the southern mountains.  Not anti-guerrilla blockades, nor threats, nor amnesties were able to bend the hero who years later would attempt to create the first popular government. 
    But it would not be the advanced social ideas of  Hidalgo, Morelos and the liberals which would form independent Mexico.  The impossibility of definitively extinguishing the flame of liberty pushed an opportunist encounter with those who before had fought with blood.  So it was that the coronel of the royal army, Agustín de Iturbide, consumed the process of independence.  Incapable of defeating the great guerrillero of the south, Vicente Guerrero, decided to maneuver him and win him over to his cause which was nothing short of independence from Spain ( offering King Ferdinand VII a Mexican empire he could not accept ) to enthrone the new dominant classes, leaving the machinery of the state and its principal economic activities in the hands of the Criollo petty bourgeois who in turn were obligated to share power with the remnants of the old forces.

Independence was not the same for all

    The Indians, the poor peasants, the small artisans and employees, the workers of field and city, continued to drag on in miserable existence, subjected to big hacienda owners and merchants, the church, and high officials who keeping with the inertia imposed by 300 years of colonial domination, continued to twist the development of agriculture and industry, giving Mexico the role of supplier of cheap raw materials in the international division of labor.
    The stagnation of agrarian property in the hands of the religious corporations and in the few indigenous communities which were able to conserve their lands, represented a barrier to the capitalist dynamic which demanded, moreover, that these be integrated into the capitalist mode of production as  thousands of free "arms" which would come from the despoiled indigenous peasants.  Paradoxically, once Mexico conquered and maintained its independence (much through the efforts of its indigenous peoples) the liquidation process of the indigenous communities accelerated notably.
    Even though the Political Constitution had liberal tendencies, reality was such that there was no economic structure nor organized strength to give any order to the confusion in which our young nation was developed: Yucatan separated from the Republic, Tabasco following its example, Texas independent, commerce paralyzed, agriculture ruined, industry stopped, treasury bankrupt, "barbarians" destroying the border territories…chaos.  Riots, conspiracies and insurrections, declarations, covenants and pronouncements reflect the incapacity of the different sectors of the dominant classes, including the clergy, to exert a definitive hegemony over the state apparatus.  Between 1821 and 1850 there were 50 different governments, almost all of which were products of coups or cuartelazos.  The operetta empire of Agustín de Iturbide and the grotesque dictatorship of Antonio López de SantaAnna, were nothing but the most torpid attempts of the conflicting powers to impose their dominion on the social body. 
    For its part, the new oligarchy took as spoils of war the public "hacienda", and awarded itself as the pensions of war, and wrung out the people ever increasing amounts of taxes.  Yet, the long war had affected the productive activities from which was generated the wealth to be taxed.  This shortfall pushed the government  the easy road of public debt, in this way adding yet another link to the deforming chain of dependency which would not disappear through mere proclamations, political plans, or manifestoes by so-called nationalists.
    Thus the past leaves its legacy: the colonial apparatus is survived by a juridical superstructure which with Byzantine detail, regulated production, commerce, privileges, monopolies, manufacturing licenses,  importation and exportation permits, seals, excise taxes, and tributes creating a net which drowned the capitalist relations of production.  All of these barriers had to be abated in order to give way to the internal free market, a market which demanded to basic commodities: land and labor power.     
    It is true that the disappearance of Spanish political control left the proletariat classes able to move freely which manifested among others things into commerce.  However, the old economic structures not only did not disappear but remained vigilant, contributing to the concentration of wealth and the conservation of a rigid structure of classes.
    This rigidity was a  barrier to the capitalist market and its need for free commerce within the country as well as abroad, "sacudiendose de paso las onorosas cargas fiscales".
    And this need for free exchange manifested itself as an urgency to contain the expansionist Yankee which, born alongside the U.S. in 1776, expressed the necessity of the young North American capitalism to conquer the markets and resources it demanded for its industrial development.
    Logically, the disability of the Mexican state was not only due to economic but also to a series of contradictions in the political which facilitated the taking of our lands by the voracious Yankee expansionism.  With quick diplomatic maneuvering and pressure which culminated in the savage war of conquest, the North Americans first colonized the territory of Texas whose independence they promoted as an "autonomous republic" in 1836.  They finished by annexing Texas to convert it into a vanguard of aggression against Mexico and in 1848, they took another large part of the territory robbing in total 945,000 square miles.  A plunder they immediately sought to by making a payment of $26,000.  In 1853, the Yankees still took more than 100,000 square kilometers (La Mesilla) in an illegal "purchase" that was only yet another plunder.  In the same year, backed by the North American authorities, William Walker, a filibuster, headed an expedition to try to take Sonora.  That this same pirate invaded out sister country of Nicaragua three years later is another "coincidence" the victor's history attempts to hide.  But we do not forget.
    The Mexican government had declared that it would consider the annexation of Texas as a declaration of war on Mexico by the U.S.  Even so, after the annexation (1845) the U.S. troops invaded Mexico and since the Mexican army logically posed resistance, the U.S. declared war on our country: they occupied a considerable part of the North, landed at Veracruz, and took over the capital of the Republic.  On the 14th of Spetember, 1847, the stars and stripes flew disrespectfully above the National Palace. 
    The invasion and plunder of our territories, was only possible through blood and fire, defeating through armed force the heroic and patriotic defenses embodied by the people. 
    The governor of Oaxaca for example, actively prepared a defense against the North American invaders, "Oaxaqueños, let us march to combat, valor and perseverance will defeat all.  Let us not think about anything but war if we do not want to become the vile slaves of our invaders…That war and that plunder are one of many acts now attempted to be hidden under a mountain of declarations on good neighbors and preferential treatment."
    In the middle of that complex situation, the most reactionary groups took notice, the cartoon aristocracy of colonial inheritance, the dignitaries of the high clergy which maintained its state as the richest great landholders, and the military caste; those who in the end, projected their castration upon the people whom they thought incapable of self-government, to promote, no longer the ridiculous empire of Iturbíde, but their old wish -- the installation of a European monarchy with which to share the exploitation of the people in return for the preservation and increase of their wealth.

In their struggle the people forge their national identity

    Partially as an opposition to the reactionary forces which sought a return of the old regime, as well as because of the scandalous territorial plunder and governmental corruption, a liberal-federalist tendency consolidated itself.  This tendency was supported by the nascent bourgeoisie, liberal landholders, public functionaries and advanced intellectuals who saw in the old economic, juridical and ideological structures (above all religious) a barrier to their intentions for social change, and took as a starting point the Revolution of Ayutla (1854) whose respective Plan proposed the derailment of the SantaAnna dictatorship and called for a congress to draw up a liberal and democratic constitution.  With the Liberal Party in power, it was publicized on February 5, 1857, being the most advanced Magna Carta of its time. 
That constitution was the project the bourgeoisie never put into practice, just as the brilliant group of "pure" liberals which included: Benito Juarez, Francisco Zarco, Melchor Ocampo, Santos Degollado, Juan Alvarez, Ponciano arriaga, Guillermo Prieto, and so many more, represent the last historical attempt to govern serving the interests of the people.
The traitor lawyers who at the front of the modern Mexican bourgeoisie who piece by piece have given the national wealth to imperialists for over 60 years are not the inheritors of those great people, but of their enemies (Miramón, Mejía, Márques, and Labastida) of those who a century ago began the auction of the country.     
Seen as such, at a historical moment in which the proletariat was a class still few in number and unorganized, a moment in which the clergy and high bourgeoisie threw themselves into the arms of foreign capital, the Reformers, who for the most part came from the petty bourgeoisie, constituted the most revolutionary group of the country.  Their doctrine was positivism, which represented an enormous advance as opposed to the obscure power of the clergy, while at once it grounded the philosophical foundations of liberalism which would "allow the existence" of the individual.  In this way, this order built upon a series of individual liberties, which offered society an entire social project, concretized itself in a new body of law.  Born were the Constitution of 1857 and the Laws of Reform, which addressed the need
to legalize the capitalists requirements which included: to throw into the labor market a great mass of men robbed of their means of production - their land, while at once definitively turning that land into a commodity which could freely pass from one hand to the next, escaping the prison of the "idle hands" of the clergy.  Yet, it would not be those who worked the lands of the clergy who would take ownership of those resources, as they had no money with which to buy them, nor the valor to defy the saintly rage of the clergy.  It was the merchants, great landowners, generals and high functionaries who would extend their properties, doing away with the liberal dream of a Republic of small property owners.
    But when the liberals appeared to favor free trade, when they finally, had structured a national state which legally guaranteed the right to pursue any type of industry, commerce or work, when they had legalized their free access to the natural resources of the nation…it was too late.  European countries who were at the lead on the capitalist road, sought to control the natural resources and wealth created by the Mexican worker.  Thus, the consolidation of the liberal group - which occurred largely though the taking of power - indirectly produced the unification of its opposite, the conservative group which with the clergy at its head, drove the country into a war of fratricide.
    After three difficult years of struggle, the guerrillas of the popular army of the legitimate government defeated the troops of the false conservative "government" which from the onset of course counted on its recognition by the United States, Spain, England, France and the other capitalist countries.
    The costs of this war left the treasury penniless, forcing Juarez' government to call for a moratorium of two years on the payment of interest on long term foreign loans in order to give the country a brief breath.  This circumstance was taken advantage of by the conservative-clerical block to try to restore its power through foreign intervention.  Towards this end, the reactionary governments of England, france and Spain carried out what one honest European reporter called, "one the most monstrous enterprises recorded in the historical annals of the world".  As the assistant count of  marshal Bazaine, Commander in Chief of the invading French army stated, " in the first place this was not about satisfying French financial pretenses - the expedition's sole objective was to depose Juarez, and in order to do so the French army had to enter Mexico at bayonet point. "  And so it did, abandoned by its English and gachupin cohorts ( who retreated their troops after observing the enthusiastic popular support Juarez enjoyed ) the French adventurers invaded our country and imposed by armed force the dolefuldoleful
 puppet Maximilian of Hapsburg, while on the other side of the world they began their aggression against Vietnam. 
    At the heights of their historical duties, the liberals, led by Benito Juarez, headed a people at war against the foreigner and his local accomplices.  In a heroic pilgrimage, Juarez retreated to the North away from the enemy advances.  As he passed through Matamoros, Coahuila, some humble farmers offered to care for the cumbersome national archives that the president of the Republic carried with him in his wagon train.  Juarez trusted the farmers with the records instructing them to respond with their life for that sacred deposit.  And so they did.  More than one was killed by the enemy without ever revealing the location of the hideout where the precious documents were hidden.  It is a silent heroism, without exaggerated gestures, of a people who learns - and pays - in the struggle itself the high price of freedom.
    The threat of converting the entire nation into a colony unified Mexicans into a force patriotically headed by Juarez and the Liberal Party struggled powerfully against the invader and their allied traitors.  Relying particularly on war by guerrilla, the people fought selflessly and resolutely towards the defeat of the best army of the world in those days.  And it is only just to rescue along with the immortal names of Zaragoza and Gonzalez Ortega those of the valiant guerrilla chiefs Ramon Corona, Carvajal, Nicolas Romero, Riva Palacio, and the Indian Rubi and the guerrillera Ignacia Riechi.  The strength of these combatants consisted of the guerrillas, the traditional form of peasant struggle.  They counted on the support of the absolute majority throughout the country and at the front were the working classes.  It is also just to give a place of honor at the side of our heroes to the Spanish guerrilla Nicolas Regules and to the patriot Italian General Ghilardi, companion at arms of Garibaldi, who after the fortifications at Puebla on the fifth of May, continued fighting valiantly against the invaders by whom he was cowardly assasinated after being imprisoned.  Thus, the barbarism of the soldiers of Napolean III's  "French cult" discovered since its arrival, the cruelty which always characterizes imperialist armies against peoples they consider "inferior".  Moreover, the French also carry the infamous honor of being the first to organize a horde of European and North American adventurers to combat against the nationalist guerrillas under the command of one such Dupin, who distinguished himself for his perversity…the dignified predecessors of the Yankee mercenaries and attachés who today massacre the defenseless peasants of Central America. 
    In contrast with such lowly actions, the incorruptible pen of the great writer Victor Hugo proclaimed his solidarity with the Mexican resistance.  And our America did not stay far behind.  In a warlike roar, the powerful words of Jose Marti fought for our defense, and the Congress of Colombia, interpreting the just sentiment of the entire continent, declared the patriot Benito Juarez, the Hero of the Americas. 
    When the invader was finally expulsed by the patriotic armies, composed in its majority, as always, by peasants, the Liberal Party was on the road to disintegration, the land and labor which was liberated from plunder had passed from the hands of the church and the indigenous communities, not to a dynamic capitalist market but to a smaller number of great secular landholders who cancelled - along with external factors - the possibility to develop production and distribution within the classical models of free trade.
   
    But it was too late.  The development of global capitalism would not be equal in all countries, the advance of some had to be founded upon the underdevelopment of others.  Capitalist accumulation in Europe and the United States occurred thanks to the "deaccumulation" of Africa, Asia and Latin america.  Thus, our America continued inserted in global capitalism as the provider of natural resources and cheap labor.  There was no possibility of consolidating a national bourgeoisie with sufficient strength. Above all economic strength, to direct the country towards an independent road.  Undeniably, the patriotism of Benito Juarez and the men of the Reform preserved the nationhood of Mexico against the attacks of the foreign invader, but the political identity was not enough for the bourgeoisie.  It demanded for its expansion the over-exploitation of labor, complete plunder of peasant lands, capital it did not have, technology it did not know and a historical initiative it did not possess.  In its impatience to have even the crumbs of others, the dominant classes decided to infinitely offer the countries natural wealth to the foreigners: the oil, mining, commerce, railroads, public services, electrical industry, manufacturing industry, and land.  The country was turned over like slices of pie to the voracious capitalists of the U.S. and to their non-competitive partners England, France and Germany.   The plunder of natural resources was accompanied by a ferocious exploitation not rivaled by the Conquest.  This was the bourgeois project, whose realization was assumed by a great coward who accurately represented his class, the dictator Porfirio Diaz and his “cientificos”, all of which were great landowners: De la Barra, Creel, Limantour, Terrazas, Escandon…
    Porfirio was not only military.  Other interests attracted him also such as the extensive sugarcane plantations he owned in his native state of Oaxaca.  Diaz represented an entire sector of the propertied class which was presented with great possibilities of expansion by the Reform.  Over the years Diaz had developed a series of bonds to great landholders, military leaders, foreign financiers, and industrial barons with which large scale business was possible, on an international level since the growing global demand for raw materials drove foreign capitalists, Europeans and Americans, to search for, extract, and market those raw materials where so ever they may be for the global market.  To be sure, along with the purpose of uniting the country as a means of communication & transportation, the railroads were also frequently put to work for the dictatorship through massive transportation of troops for the repression of peasants and workers.
    The essential infrastructure was handed over, of course, to the foreign monopolies.  During the 34 years of the Porfiriato dictatorship most of the railroad system which exists today was constructed, albeit it was in better conditions then than now.  Obviously, the principle lines went North to the United States and the principle ports of the Gulf.  Mining was intensified and diversified to include industrial mining.  The textile industry was modernized and industry was diversified as well to include the production of paper, cement, and beer.  The cigar and shoe industries grew notably.  Basic industries like electricity and petroleum surged with vigor.  Financial and credit needs of this expansion gave birth to a banking apparatus which came to complete the circle to develop with all precision a phenomena which to this day has played a determinant role in the history of Mexico.  As is logical, the growth of industry brought with it a growth of the proletariat, but also an increase in the rate of exploitation.  This paradise for foreign investors and their local cohorts the hacienda owners, bankers, generals, functionaries, and knights of industry, was constructed upon a most barbarous repression of peasants, workers, progressive intellectuals and a level of corruption only beat by the modern governing politicians.  The working class continued to be reduced to the degrading role which has been violently imposed upon them for centuries: that of simple labor power.
Despite the brutality of that repression the nascent workers' movement rebelled over and over, exercising year after year a right legally denied them: the strike.  Nevertheless, it must be clear that armed force was not the only method the dictatorship resorted to.  Little by little, the dictatorship infiltrated its agents into the workers' movement, granting some concessions to those who "behaved", hoping to build upon these a movement against their rebel brothers whose proletarian organizations did not attempt to pass economist limits, going barely beyond the mutualismo of the mid-century.  And even though socialist literature had already begun to be distributed, no capable leadership existed which could lead the working class to assume its historical mission.
In 1872, the Workers' Circle of Mexico emerged with a primarily economic platform, searching for the unification of all Mexican workers in a central organization of national character.  That same year a Penal Code became law which outlawed and punished basic rights of workers as if they were crimes: association and the strike.
If the worker was in a bad situation the peasant was even worse off.  Instead of creating a "free" labor force, the plunder of the means of production from the direct producers forced these into the slavery of peonage, serving the great haciendas and plantations which through the monopoly of export commerce, were also subservient to imperialist capital.
The expropriation of their lands, the violence with which they were exploited  and the miserable wages they received, forced many peasants to emigrate to the United States, thus establishing the bracero phenomena which would become a constant in the underdevelopment of Mexico.
    As a counterpoint to the rise in agriculture for export, the Porifirista bourgeoisie was unable to feed the people it exploited, so that corn and wheat had to be imported on a regular basis. Exactly as is the case today.
    While the price of agricultural products remained high, real wages were lowered yearly. Made worse by sharecropping, servitude, payment in merchandise, a voucher system, company stores and the military draft.
    Poverty and repression, lack of land, unemployment and underemployment, chronic hunger and marginalizing of social benefits, all were since early days ever present obstacles for the Mexican peasantry.
    The pitiless exploitation of the peons and day laborers in the countryside, and of the industrial proletariat and workers in the cities and mining centers, generated a rabid discontent that erupted here and there during Porfirio Díaz’s administration, without finding a coherent direction. It was only when the growing concentration of land tenure, the wealth of the ranches at the hands of the a tiny minority of the dictatorial court, closed off the distribution of profits and the juicy public service jobs to liberal sectors of the bourgeoisie, that some members of this class began to coalesce into a trend that sought the economic and political benefits of power. The growing frequency of public disturbances, the lack of Díaz’s popularity, and the constant uprisings no only of heroic peasants such as the Yaquis, the Tarahumaras, the Tzotziles, and the Mayas, but also soldiers who had been trained by the dictatorship in its own image, the diffusion of revolutionary ideas such as those of Flores Magón, everything, showed the rigidity of a state apparatus that after 30 years of oppression was no longer a guarantee of bourgeois “law and order” so that it got in the way for the popular turmoil it caused. The conclusion was clear: the dictator could only be removed the way he was put in power, by force, since his inflexibility left no alternative. Least of all were the miners in Cananea who heroically showed the lack of alternatives by sacrificing themselves in the struggle for the 8 hour week and a living minimum wage. These demands were also unveiled by the Liberal Party, whose visionary leaders fought for the restitution of the communal lands and the distribution of fallow land among the peasants, the Sunday day off, the abolishment of the company store, the granting of pensions, indemnities and worker guarantees, as well as special protection to the eternal forgotten: the indigenous people.
    Drenched in blood the worker’s struggles of Cananea and Rio Blanco, ripped apart with bayonets the Yaqui rebellions and that of the peasants of Tomochic (1892), Papantla (1895), Acayucan (1906) and many more, the Diaz regime did not show strength, but rather weakness, no its firmness, but its imminent downfall.
    Diaz was flirting with the possibility of increasing concessions to British capital against the North Americans, which made the Yankee monopolies nervous, some of whom were sympathetic to the attempts of a sector of the landowning industrial bourgeoisie to end the sclerotic tyranny of the 80-years old dictator. The North Americans helped Madero, sold him weapons and allowed him to conspire on their territory.

Thus the Revolution of 1910 exploded.
    The poor peasants, the peons of the haciendas, the dispossessed indigenous people, the exploited workers, the persecuted intellectuals, all took up arms against the dictatorship. Against the dictatorship, not against Capitalism, since the Revolution never had a socialist program or direction.
    It was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Democratic because in it participated the popular masses, bourgeois because the tendency that consolidated within the leadership of the process (Madero and Carranza) belonged to this class, or had a petty-bourgeois origin (Obregon, Calles)  
who evolved to a bourgeois class position, as have all the presidents of Mexico since.
    At first, the Revolution was headed by Francisco Indalecio Madero, representative of the liberal bourgeoisie in the north (landowning and industrial), who tried to seize power without a substantial change in the social-political structures.
    Madero tried by all means to avoid the Revolution. He wrote a letter to Diaz, met with him and told him he agreed with the re-election, he only asked that he be given a chance at the vice-presidency. Diaz rejected such an exotic proposition. Only then did Madero decide to become Diaz’s rival in the elections, winning by a landslide. Even so, by a series of threats, a persecution of voters, riding roughshod over the opposition, tricks, theft and open fraud, the dictatorship “won” the elections. Same as now, in spite of the political reforms.
    In the middle of his campaign, Madero was thrown in jail. He escaped to the United states, where he organized his supporters and wrote the Plan de San Luis, calling to the people to rise up in arms. To make sure he had peasant support- he guessed that this was the only force strong enough capable of overthrowing the dictatorship- he promised to give back the lands that had been dispossessed.
    The breadth of the popular mobilizations showed the ruling class that there was nothing left for Diaz to do But neither they nor Madero wanted a Revolution, whereupon they came to an accord: Diaz was to resign the presidency, which fell under the charge of one of his ministers, Leon de la Barra. The minister called new presidential elections, which Madero won with an overwhelming mandate.
    But once in power, not only did Madero betray the promises that had won peasant support, he dissolved their army and fought them, sending Victoriano Huerta’s troops to combat them. His vacillations and fears provoked unease among the North American capitalists, who did not see in Madero the proxy of steel they thought they had spawned.
    The contingents that had brought down the dictatorship were composed, as always, of peasants-but landless peasants- because by 1910 the vast majority of people in the countryside had been dispossessed   of their lands. They had  no alternative but to sell their labor force, although not in the conditions of “freedom” in the classical capitalist sense, but rather in a complex of social relations of production in which the predominance of capitalism joined with certain factors, (servitude, payment in kind, the company store ) that, while not conforming to a feudal mode of production, (the peon did not work for free on the plantation, and the boss was a bourgeois), did give a special characteristic to the development of capitalism in Mexico. The theft of lands had reached such immense proportions that 90%m of the peasantry were landless and were subject to exploitation under peonage, in some cases permanent, sometimes temporary. If we add to this the fact that 70% of the population in the country was rural we can see that the causes of the Revolution were fundamentally to be found in the social situation in the countryside. This gave the Mexican Revolution rural character, peasant, agricultural worker, or however one wants to characterize it, but not of  a bourgeois moving force, for these peasants were not even small land owners. They were masses of ragged men who rose up against an unbearable oppression.
    Zapata opposed Madero’s betrayal in the Plan de Ayala where he raised once more the old peasant slogans that comprised his war cry “Land and Freedom”.In the north, Villa occupied lands and distributed them among the freed peons.
    Imperialism required  a strong protector, of the Porfirio type, not a lukewarm and weak-kneed liberal who while leaving the repressive structure of the dictatorship intact, showed himself to be unable to stop the most sanguine revolutionary tendencies in Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa. What was needed was to stop this and other threats once and for all, what was needed was a docile agent who would stop at nothing to bring about the Yankee plans. They found him in Victoriano Huerta, an old warmonger of the Diaz regime who, due to the stupidity of “messenger” Madero remained as a general in command of the troops.  Obeying the outrageous Yankee interference of ambassador Henry Lane Wilson,.Victoriano Huerta assassinates the president and plunks himself down in the presidential chair while facing the heroic opposition of a few popular representatives, but with the servile consent of many intellectuals who in exchange for patronage lower themselves to the pitiful  role of cheerleader of the dictator, such as, Salvador Diaz Miron, Jose Juan Tablada, Jose Lopez Portillo y Rojas, etc.
    Against the seizure there rose a rich northern landowner, a politician (Senator) of the Diaz regime: Venustiano Carranza. Here the liberal bourgeoisie found the ideal leader to first stop and then liquidate the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata. Taking as his flag the liberal Constitution of 1857, Venustiano Carranza first grouped the revolutionary forces against Huerta’s usurpation. It must remain clear that it was the peasant armies of the Northern Division and the Freedom Army of the South which were the executors of Huerta’s overthrow while Carranza and his cabinet waited in the comfort of their refuge in northern Sonora. 
    In spite of the fact that it was the United States who had put Huerta in power, they decided to break with his government because he was flirting with British capital and above all, because he had no hope to detain the overwhelming advance of the Revolution, as may be seen in the glorious battles of Torreon and Zacatecas.
    In April of 1914, several North American Marines were arrested in Tampico by a Huerta troop, who  freed them immediately, but the Yankee government used this as an excuse to once more invade our soil.
    The people rejected with unanimous heroism the Yankee invasion, which stopped as soon as World War I started. Carranza tried to place himself at the head of the popular front, raised himself up as a defender of national sovereignty and took on an anti-imperialist position which sparked the active support of all Mexicans. Nevertheless, Carranza’s refusal to validate  the revolutionary  agrarian measures put into practice by Villa and Zapata made them turn against Carranza. The two were even able to take Mexico City .  The capital under the power of the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata! But there was one great sector lacking: the proletariat. Weak in numbers and especially organizationally, the working class and its leaders showed themselves unable to lead the movement from  a genuinely  revolutionary perspective.
    After Huerta’s defeat, the revolutionary Convention   was unable to channel the Zapatista and Villista guerrillas toward the final seizure of political power. Carranza and his cohorts took advantage of  this weakness. They regrouped their military forces with which Obregon had fought Villa, and took over,  now  peacefully, the agrarian and social promise that the popular base dreamed of , the fulfillment of which they had been giving their lives.  Thus undermining the ideological base of the agrarian guerrillas, Carranza reverted to corruption and double-dealing. He flattered the leaders of  the House of the World Worker (founded in 1912) and promised them the formation of the “Red Battalions” of workers who fought against the rebel army of their brothers in the countryside, making them retreat. Thus instead of the worker-peasant alliance, condition and guarantee of people’s triumph, there occurred the antagonism between working classes, encouraged by the bourgeoisie.
    Once the military force of the peasants had been contained, Carranza showed his true face: in August of 1916 he reestablished the death penalty for participation in labor strikes.
    Once again, Imperialism menaced the nation, as using as an excuse the incidental invasion of the town of Columbus by Pancho Villa, it coordinated a brutal invasion. (In this adventure a young lieutenant participated who would later become President participated, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well of the Secretary of State who would be a future president, Franklin D, Roosevelt).which Mexicans faced  with combative force. The decided anti-imperialist wave showed the Yankees the firm determination of our people to defend their sovereignly and they had to retreat, later recognizing the Carranza government, in which they saw the leader of the bourgeois faction who would dominate  over the radical tendencies of the revolutionary movement.
    Determined to legitimize his power as soon as possible, Carranza called a Constitutional Congress to write the Political Constitution of 1917, which is theoretically still in force.
    Against the position of capitalists, the high church, the landowners and military enriched by the revolutionary struggle, among whom, of course was Carranza himself, the radical petty bourgeoisie was able to include in the Constitution a series of peasant and worker’s conquests won in battle, which turned it into the most advanced bourgeois constitution of its time.
    `This Constitution is the great national project that the Mexican bourgeoisie never put into practice. Its articles were aimed at affecting property rights of the landowners, the church and the mining and petroleum companies, but frightened by the force of the popular movement, especially the peasantry, which it did not feel sure it could contain efficiently, it rejected the support of the masses to take forward the national program inherent in the Constitution, and passing over a million Mexicans dead in the Revolution, gave away the national wealth  to foreign monopolies, and sought a new accommodation with reactionary forces, content with the left overs from the plunder  of our raw materials and our labor force. For a number of years, murder would be the most expedient way to do away with the enemies of the regime. This is how Zapata, Villa and Carranza himself die.
    Thus defining the direction that had to be taken, the first task of the Mexican bourgeoisie was the integration of a modern state that would take on a basic role in the capitalist economy.
    Top achieve this, its first step was precisely to hide the class nature of the state. Taking advantage of the organizational weakness of the workers, of the ignorance of the peasants, and of the confusion which reigned during those years, the new bourgeoisie took over the representation of the whole nation. Ever since the bourgeois governments have passed themselves off as revolutionary governments, governments of the people and for the people.
    Even so, at that time, the people had shaken off the yoke of Diaz’s oppression and they would not easily  accept their new masters “just because”. Something had to be done for the masses who could not forget the blood shed in the hard years of struggle.
    And something was done. With great pomp and circumstance Obregon began the agrarian reform and began to distribute. Little by little, some lands, without affecting the great haciendas, many of which were already in the hands of the “revolutionary” generals (Governors and their descendants posses extensive properties). But more than lands, the presidents distributed illusions, for the political objective of the agrarian reform was to pacify the peasants and turn them into a base of support of the new governing group. When the men of the countryside dreamed of “ a piece of land for each” they exchanged the paths of the mountains for the hallways of the agrarian offices, where they are tricked by agronomists, legal shysters and corrupt functionaries who make them go back and forth , lose their records, extort them, and once in a while recognize their rights. And there’s more: to formalize the political subjection of the peasantry, the group in power encouraged the creation of the National Agrarian Party, that allowed the State to absorb what was left over of Zapatismo, in exchange for agrarian promises that were never kept. When the armed peasant vanguard led by Ursulo Galvan demanded the application of Article 27 of the Constitution, the Obregon agrarian mask fell and many peasants were assassinated by the army and the white guards of the landowners.
    Mexico was not just a country of peons and landowners. Even though it had been unable to lead the Revolution, there existed a working class that also had to be controlled by the new bourgeoisie. Since 1918, Obregon supported the birth of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, whose first leader, Luis N. Morones, was the model for future labor leader corruption: Fidel Velazquez, and Hernandez Galicia, of Rodriguez Alcaine and Napoleon Gomez Sada, the labor leaders under the thumb of the State. Since the workers could not be given a piece of the factory, their situation became better, at least  in comparison with the Diaz regime, and there was much demagoguery, so that the group in power passed itself off a s a friend of the workers, encouraging them  to  befriend  the bosses, so that there would be “harmony in the factors of production”.
    The first attempts to form Social Security, The Federal Labor Law, the Arbitration Board, the minimum wage and other benefits date from this time, without there ever having been put into practice the content of Article 123 of the Constitution. It was at this time that the myth appeared that Mexico was not a socialist country, of course, but neither was it capitalist, but a different nation where a fantastic system of a mixed economy operates.
    Although scientific socialism was already known to a few intellectuals and advanced workers, (the Communist Party had been founded in 1919) there was no political organization capable of giving the movement a working class direction, so that the bourgeoisie was able to also impose a class collaboration face on the proletariat. This was imposed because when the working class went farther than the reformist leaders, the “worker’s government” immediately resorted to repression: in the railroad workers strike of 1921 the army violently took over the installations, and later an important the streetcar workers strike was put down by the army and CROM scabs.
    This implacable repression is very important in the history of our working class, without understanding it it is impossible to understand the submission of the Mexican working class movement.
    Since then the Mexican State has been combining reforms, trying to get support from the masses, with the most violent repression against leaders, movements and organizations that do not conform with the pittance that the bourgeoisie throws at them.
    Without a vanguard to orient them, the working masses fell under State control and were used politically to annihilate the left over big landowning church bourgeoisie.  This is how the armed contingents of peasants, directed by the government, the famous “agraristas” confronted the attempts to restore the ancien regime.
    The new bourgeoisie desperately needed this support but it was not an homogenous group. There were still many military leaders and armed landowners who either fought the weak land distribution assassinating the peasants who received their tiny plots of land, or felt themselves masters of the region and were not disposed to submit to the still weak power of the centralized government.
    Besides, one must remember that at that time (the decade of the 20s) England, United States France, Germany, etc. were in the throes of an imperialist phase, and had investments in our country, investments, property and interests that could be affected by the new Constitution. They threatened the Mexican government, including with invasion, if they dared apply the laws which our people had won at the price of a million lives. In this way the great petroleum, mining and railroad monopolies as well as the international financiers, led by the North American bankers, presented the government with a series of objections which the “undefeated” government of Obregon docilely accepted, without being obliged by international law nor Mexican law. The landed estates of the mining and petroleum companies remained intact, Mexico recognized a debt so inflated it could never be paid, it promised to pay off damages caused to the Americans not only by the Revolutionaries, but by the jackal Huerta. By 1926 foreign investment was greater than that of the Diaz regime. That was and continues to be the shameful reality of Mexican foreign relations- much anti-imperialist talk, but a shameless handing over of out=r wealth to foreign monopolies. In fact, agriculture, cattle raising and =fishing. Mining petroleum and other extractive branches, manufacturing and production of consumer goods, the food industry, banking and finances, air maritime and land transport, in a word all the productive apparatus was subordinated to the needs of the imperialist economy. This penetration was possible because the national bourgeoisie could not confront capitalist penetration, and it did not have the alternative of its own independent  development. Lacking a tradition of initiative, isolated from a people it detested and feared, behind in the taking over of interactional markets, infernally divided. The Mexican bourgeoisie took over in great measure the role of junior partner of imperialism, of guardian of Yankee interests on our soil, ready top guarantee energy, land transportation, water, roads, wood, coal, sulfur, aluminum, copper bauxite, iron, highways, railroads, airports, maritime ports, everything for monopoly capital, as well as the labor of compatriots who dispossessed of all means of subsistence could only count on the energy of their arms, on their labor force to sell at a meager price.
    Another force that had to be liquidated by the new rising bourgeoisie was the high catholic clergy.
    After being defeated in the Reform War, the church of the rich maneuvered with patience and ability until it had reconquered a good part of its former power, with the silent complicity of the Profirio dictatorship. Alarmed by the anti-clergy content of the new Constitution, fearful of seeing its economic interests and its new political forces being affected, the high church allied itself with the most backward landowners and the most reactionary circles of the North American oligarchy, to unleash a systematic opposition against the new regime which culminated in the Cirstero War. In the Bajio, armed bands of peasants and fanatical lumpen proletarians confronted the government causing a good number of dead, more than among the federal troops, among the agraristas, who with the hope of getting a piece of land supported the government of president Calles.                 
    One must bear in mind that in the Church-State conflict there was only the disunited façade
of the confrontation between the united reactionary forces and the national bourgeoisie that had not yet lost its revolutionary spirit, so that it still had the support of workers and peasants, since the defeat of the government would have signified the return to the old dictatorship, which would have annulled the privileges reached by the national bourgeoisie
    When the rejection of the masses and the defection of the North American monopolies canceled out the possibility of victory, the cristeros fell back on individual terrorism and murdered Obregon, on the eve of his being reelected for a second term. But their cause had no future, so that the religious authorities and the government, pushed by the North American ambassador, made peace
    The last serious threats to the new bourgeois power came from some military groups, the most significant being the General Escobar revolt; all were put down, their leaders shot without trial and their properties confiscated.
    Nevertheless, the violence drained the group in power, whose hegemony could not be consolidated as a class if they did not overcome their differences and understood, once and for all, that the vast resources of the country, and first of all the labor force of millions of workers and peasants was enough booty to satisfy their ambition and that of their foreign masters, as long as between thieves there remained the minimum order and discipline that is required of a well-organized gang, because capitalism develops more and better among the peace of bourgeois institutions than among coup d’etats. Thus was in Mexico the old colonial-militarist model was forever liquidated, giving our country a different face than that of other Latin American countries, where the military and the most reactionary landowners did assume power.
    Paradoxically, it was General Calles, the supreme leader, who warned of the need to share power in order to keep it, and issued a call in 1929 to the military and local political leaders to join the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), precursor of the PRI. It was an alliance of winners, of the powerful, even though they called themselves “popular” to give themselves a coating of legitimacy. The people. Clearly. Could not be kept separate from the apparatus of political domination (there had to be a base to rest on), but it had to be organized by the State, not before it, that is, instead of class struggle, there was to be class collaboration under the leadership of the State.
    Nevertheless, this class collaboration met the resistance of thousands of peasants, who still had the fresh experience of taking their right to the land by force of arms, and in 1926 on the 20th of November they celebrated with the inauguration of The National Peasant’s League, which under the leadership of Ursulo Galvan, united more than 300,000 peasants around a program that ranged from the internationalist character of the struggle and alliance with the proletariat to the socialization of the land and means of production. Repression was swift and forced the militants of the League to organize and armed defense, fir the “agrarian” government was frightened of an independent peasant movement with socialist tendencies.
    The League, the Communist Party, and other organizations formed the Worker-Peasant Block (BOC)  to which was joined the United Mexican Confederation of Unions, (CSUM) one of whose most prestigious leaders was the Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella, Mella was shot dead on the streets of Mexico city by Cuban agents with the complicity  of the Mexican police.
    The BOC program was even more radical than the League’s; abolition of the bourgeois government, substitution of the chambers for worker-peasant councils, nationalization of the industry, suppression of the landed estates, creation of armed peasant units. Which of the current opposition parties, with or whiteout recognition, has a program like this?
    The peasant self-defense groups were later manipulated by the government. Who used them to put down the Escobar rebellion. Later, with the excuse that the BOC had to take advantage of the rebellion to establish a proletarian regime by force, the State unleashed a cruel repression led by the then Secretary of Defense, Plutarco Elias Calles. Applauded and supported by Imperialism, the government unleashed an anti-communist campaign that culminated in the breaking of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, established by Alvaro Obregon.
    When in March of 1929 the PNR was founded, leaders of the National Peasant’s league were invited with the obvious aim of diving it, as  indeed happened. Some activists joined the official party, others joined the CSUM, and the rest followed Ursulo Galvan, who died shortly afterwards. The remains of the League fell to the Mexican Peasants Confederation of the PNR, showing at this point the inability of the peasant movement to organize itself independently of the State.
    If control over the peasants was vast, what can be said of the worker’s movement! Calles corrupted it buying its leaders. As a prize to the leaders who kept the workers under control and who took them to collaborate with the bosses, he gave ministries, governorships, and other government posts, where they did not hesitate to exercise their mission as foremen. As secretary of Industry, Commerce and Transportation, the worker’s “leader” Luis N. Morones declared a wildcat strike of railroad workers that was fiercely put down by the army. The strike left hundreds in jail and mobilized protests in the whole country.
    The PNER was born on the backs of the masses, as a maneuver of the ruling class to perpetuate its power with and institutional disguise. Calles himself needed no other title than that of “Supreme leader”, so that he put as president of the National Executive Committee of the PNR another general-politician who was well identified with the new politics: Lazaro Cardenas. Political power thus started to consolidate at the center, where deputies, senators and governors were decided upon, the same as Porfirio Diaz. The Same as today, for the leadership of Obregon and Calles was the embryo of today’s  political system in Mexico.
     The PNR, which was later named the PRM and now is called the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was never a political party in the traditional sense, that is it was not born as an organization that sought power, but as an organization in power, the PRI has always had power. That is the secret of its “success”, to be able to have all the force of the State behind it, the army, to start with, for soldiers don’t watch over elections, they watch to make sure the PRI wins. It has been this way for 50 years, since its first “elections” the State party has resorted to every form of repression to make its candidate win. Today its is not necessary to count the votes to know the results; the PRI always wins. What difference does it make if an opposition party wins, say in some municipal elections in Juchitan. Just in the state of Oaxaca there are more than 500 municipalities, that is more than 500 presidents affiliated with the PRI.
    The same year that the government party was founded a profound economic crisis shook the capitalist world, especially the United state, which brought grave consequences to dependent states like ours. Scarcity, unemployment, poverty lashed against the working masses in the countryside and the cities.
    The weight of monopolies in the Mexican economy notably increased in the following years, sharpening the need for imperialism to control more sources of raw materials for its industries, as well as transferring some production (especially light industry) to countries under its dominion. To do this it was necessary to have a partner (which could be none other than the Mexican State) that would make the great investments needed for the exploration and extraction of oil, the laying of railways, construction of highways, ports and communication lines. These activities did not create wealth, for the only beneficiaries were the contractors and their corrupt official cronies who gave them the contracts. In this way in the middle of the thirties, State capitalism in Mexico began its transformation in Monopoly State Capitalism.
The requirements of Imperialist capital.
    These were combined with the need of the State to widen its social base, since the broken promises made to workers and peasants during the heroic stage of the Revolution in addition to the destruction caused by the world crisis, had driven important groups to distraction and had pushed them to act politically, disenchanted by the anti-popular and repressive policies of the supreme leader and his puppets. In order to recover that support, it was necessary to reorganize the masses, so that it was the State itself that proposed the institutions to carry out the task. There appeared the great mass institutions controlled by the State; the Mexican Peasant Confederation (CCM) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). It must be noted that Cardenas was against incorporating the peasant masses into the CTM. After 1935 he established the mechanisms to organize the rural workers within the CCM which later became the National Peasant Confederation (CNC). Thus deepening Calles’s work, Cardenas’s solution to avoid a worker-peasant alliance was to incorporate them as sectors of the PNR.
    These organizations were doomed from the start, since being delivered by the State the working class movement lacked from the beginning any hope of independence. It must also be noted that control over the labor force has always been one of the most important conditions for North American investors. The ties of the CTM and the gangster Yankee union, American Federation of Labor are not a coincidence.
    Additionally, the impulse given by general Cardenas to mass organizations obeyed the need to have a real base of support to be able to confront and then expel the anticlerical “supreme leader”, Plutarco Elias Calles, who once exiled in the U.S. prayed Mexico would be saved from communism! Not only reactionaries were fooled by Cardenas’s reforms. Ironically, the general secretary of the U.S. communist Party, Earl Browder came to Mexico to scold the communists who “didn’t understand” Cardenas, and influenced in the Mexican Communist Party to adopt the line of “unity at all costs”, which, though it may have had validity  in a  Europe attacked by fascism, in our country it had none, since it was interpreted as ”subordination at all costs”.
    The workers, peasants, intellectuals and students who enthusiastically joined the politics of the State, learned rapidly that the limits were very clear, and crossing the line was to be implacably repressed. Anyone who tried to go beyond the directives marked by the State were punished by firings, persecution, jail and murder. Attempts to radicalize the agrarian sector that affected the great landed estates near the government were repressed, honest and scientific dissent was crowned by corruption. Not all on the left lost perspective, however, there were voices raised to denounce the payments by the government to the Yankees “hurt” by the Revolution, the devaluation of the peso which benefitted the mining companies, leaving them millions in extra profits, the declaration of the non-existence of the first petroleum strikes, the military repression against the peasants in Puebla and Chiapas, the prohibition of the circulation through the post office of the newspaper “El Machete”, organ of the Mexican Communist Party.
    In spite of the myopia of the national and foreign bourgeoisie who were unable to understand the situation, Cardenas’s reforms were the requirement to provide the basis of a relatively high level of industrialization, that would end in State monopoly capitalism. As far as the petroleum expropriation, attempts had been made since the new Constitution had established the legal basis for this measure. Plutarco E. Calles as we have seen, had to step back when he tried to apply petroleum legislation in 1925. In 1938, together with other factors, there was certainty that the U.S. government would not go as far as invading, since in some ways the New Deal proposed by Roosevelt was not incompatible with populist reforms. Nevertheless, the reaction against the appropriation was violent.  The U.S. pressured all the capitalist countries not to buy Mexican oil and gas. Strangely, one who did not obey this “suggestion” was Somoza, who bought Mexican petroleum in 1939. Pressures on the national economy became so great that the peso had to be devaluated. This was the signal to stop the reforms and turn to the right.
    The advances marked by the Cardenas regime had the double function of guaranteeing an increase in capitalist accumulation and strengthening the legitimacy of the bourgeois State. General Cardenas was a bourgeois, let there be no mistake. This does not diminish his merits, it simply shows up as a fact when he indicated his successor at the end of his term.
Another representative of the bourgeois class: Manuel Avila Camacho.
    Avila Camacho’s cabinet was made up of the right tied to imperialism and capital. One who obtained recognition of the United Sates became head of the State Department. Foreign Relations were under a professional anti-communist: Ezequiel Padilla, agent of imperialism who led the repressive campaign against teachers, intellectuals, students and the progressive remains of the Cardenas regime. In October of 1940, the police assaulted the offices of the communist party and assassinated Rafael Morales Ortega, many others were thrown in jail. To give an appearance of legality  to the brutal anti-communist offensive, the charge of “social dissolution” was invented, used against any militant, leader, worker or honest intellectual. Calls were issued to workers not to strike, the Federal Labor Law was reformed making legal strikes more difficult, anyone who participated in an “illegal” strike was cause for dismissal, fighting leaders were persecuted and the workers movement was persecuted by all means available to the State.
    The harmony was shallow as was shown by the presidential guards who fired upon a union delegation that had obtained an audience with president Manual Avila Camacho. Eight workers were killed and many more were wounded. Popular indignation was manifest when one hundred thousand people attended the funeral, the greatest mobilization of the time.
    At the beginning of the Second Imperialist War, the Mexican government kept a hypocritical “neutrality” which did not prevent it from allowing the U.S. to open air and military bases in our country and to use the Gulf of Magdalena (Baja California) for its war navy. We were not the only friendly nation, of course. At the beginning of 1942 imperialism imposed on the docile Latin American countries a Reciprocal Assistance Treaty which would coordinate judicial, police and spy activities in a clear show of bourgeois internationalism. Even so, neutrality did not last long and Mexico entered the War in May of 1942, which made some military maneuvers necessary and to assure the backing of the population, General Cardenas was invited to head the Secretariat of National Defense, which he accepted immediately.
    Taking advantage of the war as a pretext, the ruling class made the workers promise not to go on strike for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, real wages fell (in spite of some measures which sought popular support, such as frozen rents in the cities), scarcity reached the point of provoking demonstrations against the high cost of living in Monterrey, Tampico, Durango, Monclova, and other cities. These mobilizations were answered with repression, which extended to workers who in spite of the adverse conditions and pushed by the growing poverty, increased the number of strikes.
    On the world scene, the second Imperialist War changed the correlation of forces. Supported by the overwhelming advance of the Red Army, the working class and the progressive forces of Eastern Europe defeated the fascist hordes and destroyed the local reactionary bourgeoisies taking those countries out of the capitalist orbit and consolidating the socialist bloc, to which was added a few years later socialist China with its 800 million inhabitants.
    In spite of the importance of the international juncture, one could not help but notice the lack of a scientific and practical direction on the part of the working class. Moreover, in some quarters on the left Earl Browder’s theory that progressive U.S. capitalism was helping in the industrialization of Mexico found support!
    The CTM, on its part, fulfilled its liquidationist role at the end of the World War and  signed an agreemenet with the industrialists calling for workers and bosses, in the interest of national develpment (underdevelopment),  to continue the unequal development of the various regions that endures to this date.
    In the countryside things were no better. The partial weakening of the communal land system
went hand in hand with the strengthening of the agrarian bourgeoisie, who, taking advantage of the notable insufficiency of the ejidal plots, exploited the labor power of the communal land workers, turning them into a good portion of the farmworking proletariat. Fleeing poverty in the country, thousands of Mexicans continued the emigration to the U.S. looking for bread that was unavailable in their own land. The bit of land that has been given back to the peasants is usually the worst quality, and when it is good, its is swallowed up by the ever expanding racnches and haciendas.
    The dispersion and the lack of organization of the laboring masses in the countryside  made them easier to repress than in the cities. Hundreds of peasants, the mosr active ones, the most self-sacrifing ones, died under the criminal bullets of the army and the white guards of the landowners.
    There is no doubt that during the war years and through the following period, Mexico’s industrialization achieved a relative growth, but it was mostly to complement the development of imperialist industrial development and at the cost of greater exploitation of the workers. This was translated into greater profits for the North American monopolies, who deepened their marriage to the State under the guise of a “mixed economy” which we still have today. As a matter of fact, by leaving 51% of shares in the hands of their local accomplices, U.S. corporations were assured a good cut of the wealth created by Mexican workers. This booty was greater when foreign capital became “partners” (as it continues doing) with State enterprises, because their profits rose thanks to the exemptions, subsidies and outright  gifts (such as forgiving the taxes owed after the due date), that the generous Mexican State gives to its imperialist benefactors.
    As if this were not enough, in 1942 U.S. capitalists were still being compensated for damages during the Revolution. Outstanding compensation was paid to the Yankee petroleum companies, and raw materials were sold to the U.S. (especially during the War) at a price lower than on the international market. 
    With the relative growth of the economy during the war years, the number of workers also rose. The Mexican State likewise perfected its control apparatus, since one the main lessons of Cardenas for the ruling class was to use ideological means to manipulate  the working class. For example, as a reflection of the governing role and with the aim of disguising even more the repressive nature of the State, in this case its ideological apparatus, Avila Camacho, General of the Division. Dissolved the military sector of the PRM. Since then, with obvious intent to distance itself from the South American gorillas, the government placed especial emphasis in its “civilian control” which did not diminish one whit the repressive character of the State. It must be remembered that according  to the Constitution, the president of the Republic, for example, Lopez, Portillo, is the commander in chief of the Mexican army. It must also not be forgotten that in addition to the many public offices, deputies, senators and governors, carried out by soldiers and police, the presence of generals at the head of the official party has not been lacking; Plutarco Elias Calles,  Lazaro Cardenas,Gabriel Leyva, Rodolfo Sanchez Taboada, Agustin Olachea, Corona del Rosal, this besides the half dozen other generals who have occupied the presidency since the triumph of the Revolution.  
    As one would expect, at the end of the imperialist war, local industry began to lose foreign customers, so that it deepened its alliance with the U.S. monopolies to produce for the country what the country consumed. Imported goods began to be substituted by goods made in Mexico, these were not national goods, but goods produced by factories mostly by foreign monopolies that took advantage of our raw materials, government subsidies and the low salaries paid Mexican workers, to obtain super profits.  The myth of the “Mexican Miracle” was born, the country was “taking off”. (read monopoly State capitalism), and it was heading resolutely toward “stabilizing development”. Some assembly products were developed, and many light industries, but capital; goods continued to be imported, without which no development is possible. Foreign investment grew noticeably, a situation which has not changed much. In 1981 Yankee monopolies invested in Mexico more than 25 billion pesos, more than in any otrher Latin American country. Mexico started to become and industrial-agrarian country, in which industry has progfessively more weight, with the reduction in the population which labors in the country and the increase in the industrial labor sector.
    In the countryside the amount of fallow lands was increased and landowners were given the right of appeal whenever they were affected by a land question.
    Great irrigation projects were constructed, but not benefit the poor peasants, but rather for capitalist agriculture, especially that which was exported: coffee, cacao, cotton, sugar cane, fruits and vegetables. Capitalist development in the countryside incresased the demand for foodstuffs and raw materials for industrial development, at the same time that it freed more working peasants for the factories.
    The fears of capitalists within and without the country that had been awakened by Cardenas’s reforms dissipated. The collaboration of the government became servile, its dependence was accentuated in all areas. Under Cardenas, the regime confronted monopolies which were centered around the exploitation of raw materials, but from 1946 to 1981 successive governments have turned the country over to the monopolies that seek to rich off the internal Mexican market. Naturally the weight of development fell on the shoulders of the workers, who year after year could see the wealth that they created grow at the same time that their real salaries were diminished. This pauperization has not stopped. Today in 1981, a Mexican worker makes less than 40 years ago.
    Th peso devaluations for the years 1938, 1949, 1954, 1960 and 1976 were general lowering of salaries that increased poverty among workers, who throughout those years used up every constitutional avenue to fight their oppression.  At the end of 1947 the railway workers, miners and petroleum workers unions signed an solidarity agreement to unite progressive sectors of the working class against the reactionary politics of the government, the high cost of living and the increasing imperialist penetration. Then as now, the reaction of the State was a repressive one, the railway workers were attacked, their leader,. Valentin Campa was jailed and replaced by a spurious sell out leader, Diaz de Leon. Later it was the petroleum workers’ turn, bribery, threats, police force and the replacement of labor leaders by an executive committee paid for by the government itself. The repression of the miners in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, exemplifies the degree of servility reached by the “regimes that came out of the Revolution”, whenever they must protect the interests of their Yankees bosses, they do not hesitate to trample on the rights and dignity of the workers of Mexico. The government occupied a perfectly legal movement militarily at the workplace and in the town of Nueva Rosita, the miners cooperatives were closed down, the clinic they had built with their dues was closed, and private doctors were forbidden to care for the miners. The striker’s wives would gather blood and guts that were thrown away at the slaughterhouse, to boil them and have something to eat.
    January 20, 1951, the miners and their families held a march to the capital. After walking 1,500 kilometers in a month and a half, sleeping outdoors and eating whatever people along the way would give them, the miners and their families were not even received by the president.
    In spite of the imperialist war against democratic Korea giving a certain push to the national economy, the situation of the masses did not get better. Years went by without the working class being able to develop forms of struggle that would at least allow them to defend themselves against the government repression. When scarcity and lack of democracy had finally pushed  workers to fight, vast sectors of the population have joined in, as happened in the teacher’s strike of 1958, which received important support from other workers and students who developed parallel struggles in support of the teachers. Telegraph workers, bureaucrats, and especially railway workers were encouraged by the designation of Lopez Mateos as successor to the eldery Ruiz Cortines. Nevertheless, repeating the old maneuver, the labor realtions board refused to recognize the real leaders of the railway workers, who had no legal standing, as if they simply did not exist for the State,. They were not allowed as representatives of the workers, and their demands were certainly not heard.
    When the workers of Sections 35 and 36 of the petroleum workers union held a hunger strike for the recognition of their real leaders, they were attacked by several squadrons of riot police. Student demonstrations against the rise in bus fares were repressed and several students were jailed. Finally, on the 6th of September, 1958 there was demonstration that was put down, where the teacher leaders Othon Salazar and Encarnacion Perez were jailed, along with other teachers, in spite of the fact that the then Secretary of State had guaranteed that the march would be protected.
    Railway workers, teachers, telegraph workers, students all met with the president, who liked to call himself a “workers’ president”., even claiming that his government would be “a left wing government, within the Constitution”. Very well, railway workers, teachers, telegraph workers, students and peasants were thrown in jail, beaten and even murdered, asd was the great peasant leader, Ruben Jaramillo, shot along with his pregnant wife and other members of his family in 1967. Also during the presidency of this “working class president” was created the Investigative Committee of Anti-American Activities imitating the infamous McCarthy hearings. Under charges of social dissolution were David Alfaro Siqueiros and the reporter Filomena Mata thrown in jail. Another legal and peaceful movement, that of doctors and health workers, was violently put down in 1964.\
    The conviction that armed struggle was the only way out impelled  Arturo Gamiz, a professor from Chihuahua, and his guerrilla group to assault the army barracks of the repressive government
in the Chihuahua mountains on the 23 of September of 1965, the first serious attempt since the Revolution of 1910 to attack the repressive supports of the State. In the mountains of Guerrero, teachers Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabanas unfurled a guerrilla war that had the support of the peasants, and was only quelled by the military occupation of Guerrero with its trail of murders :disappearances” tortures and rapes against the civilian population and the death of those leaders. Since then Guerrero remains practically under a state of siege.
Tlatelolco 1968
    Scarcity and the high cost of living and the increase in repressive violence set the stage for  student demands to become the firing pin that exploded into a movement joined in by workers, peasants, intellectuals, professionals, housewives, the unemployed, in a word, the people. The demands were completely legal; free political prisoners, repeal of the crime of social dissolution, firing of the police chief in the Federal District. Nevertheless, from the first the answer of the State was clear; a growing repression culminating in the slaughter in Tlatelolco on the 2nd of October where the Mexican army- the army of the pro-imperialist Mexican bourgeoisie-  with methodical precision fired from tanks, armored cars and helicopters upon the defenseless population. The dead numbered into the hundreds; students, workers, people invited to the rally, some peasants who had come from afar to lend their support, and to make their own demands, mothers in sympathy with their children’s rebellion, democratic professionals, once more the people faced the repressive nature o f the bourgeois State. the voices that were asking for a dialog were answered with the hoarse roar of firearms, reason was met with bullets, constitutional rights were trampled underfoot, belief in legality was rebutted with death.
    Without an organized -and organizing- vanguard the movement lacked a clear perspective. Even so, the massacre shook the national conscience. Mexico was not what it thought it was.
    We did not have a state of law. What was to be done? The answers flowed through two different channels. The first, easy, sure, opportunistic, recommended to use up all legal means (as if the State hadn’t already used them up!) Was in favor of class collaboration and declared that the condition for revolution were not ripe, without mentioning what these conditions were and how they might be brought about.
    The other, an increase of armed movements in Guerrero, Jalisco, the Federal District, Nuevo Leon, etc., strong student movements in Morelia, Puebla, Monterrey, Sinaloa, Guerrero, the Federal District, etc., workers movements for salary raises and union democracy, community movements, occupation of lands by landless peasants, sit-ins in city halls as protest against political fraud, were some o f the immediate results of the crisis of ‘68. The popular student movement not only destroyed the myth of State legality, it also uncovered the obvious, that which the economy of that other myth of the “Mexican Miracle” could no longer hide; falling agricultural production, lessening investment, the rise in the deficit in balance of trade, constant lowering of real salaries, and massive unemployment. The basis for social change were ripe, but the majority of left organizations continued mired in reformism, trying to build pressure groups so the State would act in favor of the workers.
    In opposition to the reform movement, gathering the best traditions of the popular struggle, armed theoretically with Marxism-Leninism, a new organization came forth which addressed the need of the people to win their national liberation.

    The national circumstances revealed the exhaustion of the developmental model, which led to a sharp crisis. Along with a series of economic measures, the Mexican State opened a political dialog to contain popular discontent within acceptable limits.
    Nevertheless, armed repression did not fade into the background. On June 10, 1971, a peaceful student demonstration was put down. This time the professional assassins did not wear police uniforms, but were dressed as civilians. This gross deception fooled no one. Dozens of witness testimony revealed the paramilitary bands of “Hawks” were made up of armed forces personnel and lumpens working with the police of the federal District. Where were and where are those responsible for that massacre? Luis Echeverria continues as spokesman for an economic front fromhis organization, Mexican Publishing Association, Alfonso Martinez Dominguez, Head of the City Council, is now governor of the state of Nuevo Leon, Rogelo Flores Curiel, chief of police, was until recently governor of nayarit, Pedro Ojeda Paullada, District Attorney in charge of investigating the “Hawks” (whom he never found) is Secretray of Labor, Rodolfo Mendiolea, head of the SWAT team, is Chief of the Federal Judicial Police, Miguel Nassar, before an underling, is now Chief of Federal Security Forces. All of them- must one say it? -continue enjoying impunity, wealth and power.

   
The economic crisis continues to sharpen. 
    The “loose fabric” of the economy became an open stagnation of production. Plans to convert our country into a springboard for Yankee exports failed. Production of foodstuffs was not enough. Prices of sugar, bread, milk, etc went up considerably; inflation reached as much as 20%, which was less than the 30% of 1981. The public debt shot up to the point of placing Mexico as the number one debtor beholden to U.S. imperialism.
    Unable to offer a revolutionary political laternative in view of the facts, groups on the left spoke of
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    20 million houses have dirt floors, 7 million thatched roofs, 4.5 million new houses are needed.
    Half a million Mexicans die annually from preventable diseases. One fourth of these deaths is attributable to malnutririon. 28 million lack the most elemental medical services.
    More than 10 million Mexicans are exploited and oppressed as braceros in the U. S.
    According to 1970 figures-the situation is owrse now- 10 million Mexicans do not eat meat, 11 million do not eat eggs, 18 million do not drink milk, 33 million do not eat fish.
    There is only one underdeveloped country (Nepal) where capitalists pay less taxes than in Mexico.
    More than 5 million people go barefoot. 13 million wear sandals and occasionally shoes.
    5% of the population-the rich- received 36% of the national wealth, 47 times more than the poorest 10%. 50% of the population receives 16.7% of generated products. Out of the national budget an amount is set aside for the indigenous people that is 30 times less than that for the average citizen.
    65% of imports in Mexico come form the U.S. 72% of sales go to that country. 65% of those sales were petroleum. In 1979 and 1980 Mexico paid more in the foreign debt and interest payments than the total of all income from its export of hydrocarbons.
    On the national railroads there are more Yakees freight trains than Mexican ones.

    In the face of this situation, the State headed off a rebellion by an electoral reform, which, without giving people access to political power, has indeed allowed the State to keep control over the workers, since the parties and organizations that have answered the call for political reform are more interested in participating in electoral politics, rather than proposing to the working class an agenda to seize power. With programs more or less reformist, in which there is no mention of workers taking power, neither by reformist nor by revolutionary means.
    The disillusionment of the masses after 60 years of fraud and lies manifests itself in abstentions that have not responded to electoral campaigns. This does not mean the people are satisfied, for, in spite of official control in recent months there has been a wave of strikes which, if they only demand economic benefits, they nevertheless show the general malaise of exploited people.
    The situation is even more explosive in the countryside, where poverty reaches incredible levels. According to official data 76 of each 100 peasants are unemployed and there are 6.5 million landless peasants. The new law of fishing and agriculture is no more than a legal attack by the bourgeoisie to turn over to capitalist production the remaining lands of the peasants, who have always lacked the technical and financial means to reach a good production level.
    Along with this hardening of the social and economic situation which accompanies State monopoly capitalism, repression has sharpened and there are thousands of acses of workers, especially peasants and students who have been murdered or jailed by the oppressive government, which, following the Yankees directives relative to the gorillas of the Continent “disappears” opponents that cannot buy a scholarship, a ranch or a seat in government.
    Police invasion o f the universities, the embargo of the installations of striking telephones workers, detentions without a warrant, continue showing, day after day, that the first to exhaust legal means for the transformation of society has been the Mexican State.
    The history we have briefly  reviewed shows that Mexican workers have never been docile in accepting exploitation, even in the most adverse circumstances, the people have always fought oppression by the powerful.
    In the last of these national struggles, thousands of peasants, workers, artesans, and intellectuals have fought for a better life, yet today millions of Mexicans are hungry, sick, ignorant, poor and unemployed. Why? Why are the main means of production, the best lands, the great factories, the mines, the petroleum deposits, transportation, communications, the great businesses and banks in the hands of the great monopolies associated with the bourgeois State and with foreign capital, principally North American?
    This means that the Mexican State that came out of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1910 is not an “agrarian” or “worker’s” state, much less a revolutionary one.
    The Mexican State is a bourgeois State, which since the beginning has served to bring about and guarantee the exploitation of  Mexican workers. It is now the primary boss and empresario. To achieve its class aims, the Mexican State, from Carranza, Obregon, and Calles through Echeverria and Lopez Portillo, have played with reform and repression, controlling the people economically, politically and ideologically, falling back on jailings, and wholesale murder of leaders. When corruption or threats have not been able to contain popular struggles, the bourgeoisie has never- not even during the Cardenas regime- has been ready to peacefully cede one millimeter of its power.
    60 years ago the Mexican bourgeoisie could have gone in a different direction. It did not, and now it is too late. The only interest it has is to exploit the workers in the country and in the city for its own benefit and that of its partners, the North American monopolies, even at the cost of national sovereignty, which was won at such sacrifice during the war of Independence and the reform. The Mexican bourgeoisie cannot head the struggle for national liberation. It cannot participate alongside the people, since its interests are the same as those of the Yankee monopolies, and far from being an ally, the Mexican bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialism are the principal enemies.
    It is from this enemy,  this class that the people have to take political, military and economic power, to have even the possibility of solving the great problems of the population.
 Hunger and unemployment, poverty and exploitation, will only disappear when workers themselves head production and the State in a socialist society. This goal of socialism cannot be reached pressuring the bourgeois state to be less exploitative and repressive; that is, in order to stop being bourgeois, the only way for the Mexican people to achieve liberation is through revolutionary popular war. History shows that the peaceful avenues for social transformation were canceled out by the State itself from, its inception as a political machine of repression.
    Revolutionary violence is not a desperate act, ultraleft, petty-bourgeois, adventurist, provocateurist, or anything like. It is the necessary historical response of the people; to suppress forever exploitation of man by man.
    There is no alternative. A study of the history of class struggle in Mexico, the class nature of the Mexican state, the current phase of capitalist development, the national situation, the Central American revolution and the world imperialist crisis, show uis that the moment has arrived for the final struggle, the  irrevocable independence of our people.
    We know that our arguments will cause interest surprise and even apprehension among honest peasants, workers, artesans, community people, students and intellectuals.