Murderders! Teacher, Student Rebellion Shake Fascist State

MEXICO CITY, June 28—As murderous capitalist rule in Mexico accelerates its decay into fascism, hundreds of thousands in the capital are protesting in solidarity with the teachers’ rebellion in the majority-indigenous state of Oaxaca. On June 19, at least ten workers were killed and dozens wounded after the cops opened fire on a group of teachers, students and other demonstrators blocking a major highway between Oaxaca and Mexico City.
Masses of rebels have taken the streets to protest racist President Enrique Peña Nieto’s education reforms. They were met by thousands of federal and local cops, as well as military forces equipped with riot gear, high-caliber weapons, planes, helicopters and tanks. The struggle is growing. On June 22, more than 200,000 doctors and nurses joined the teachers’ national strike to protest Pena Nieto’s Universal Health System reform, which they called a “disguised way of privatizing health in Mexico” (telesurtv.net, 6/21).
Progressive Labor Party is fighting with the working class in these battles. We are bringing communist revolutionary politics as an alternative to this capitalist hell that promotes relentless attacks on the working class and inter-imperialist war.
We call on all Party members to mobilize and protest at Mexican consulates in support of our class brothers and sisters in struggle. San Francisco and New York City comrades have responded with solidarity rallies (see more next issue). Workers: Struggles have no borders! Fight for communism!
Fighting the Terrorist State
More and more, the battles against racist cops and education reforms, which hurt indigenous and Black workers most of all, are becoming one fight against the ruling-class state apparatus. The rebels linked the murders of the protesting teachers to the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the state of Guerrero.
Organized by the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, a militant branch of the national teachers unión, teachers in Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas have been on strike for a month to try to force the rulers to cancel the proposed education reforms. These bosses’ attacks would impose standardized testing and use teacher evaluations to discipline education workers, similar to anti-worker reforms in the United States. They would also severely curtail the influence of the teacher unions and threaten teacher colleges with a history of class-conscious fightback.  
Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero are the poorest states in Mexico; Michoacán is the tenth- poorest. That says a lot in a country where the minimum salary is 73 pesos—less than four U.S. dollars—a day!
The bosses’ immediate objective is to crush the most militant sector of Mexico’s working class: the teachers, and especially the teachers in Oaxaca, long a combative force. Communists understand that an attack on one section of the working class is a forewarning of attacks on the whole working class.
Workers Block Oil Refinery
The massacre of teachers in Oaxaca reflects a mandate for the Mexican capitalists from their big-power imperialist masters in the U.S. and China, who are competing to control natural resources throughout Latin America.
In contrast to the well-publicized teachers strike, the bosses’ media are ignoring a recent insurrection in the Istmo de Tehuantepec, a region in Oaxaca State that includes the second-shortest route between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, after the Panama Canal. In the port of Salina Cruz, forces of resistance have blocked the entrance to the country’s biggest oil refinery run by Pemex, the state-owned petroleum company.
This area is of high economic, strategic and geopolitical importance—and a potential flashpoint of the rivalry between China and the U.S. After decades of trying to establish an industrial and logistics corridor, better known as the Transístmico, Pena Nieto inaugurated a wind farm in the Istmo (Milenio.com, 2/3/16), ignoring fierce opposition from teacher unions and indigenous groups that condemned the project as harmful to their way of life. As a report by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico noted, the prevailing model of wind energy development in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec “favors developers, limiting the benefits received by local communities and increasing social backlash against the projects” (Problemas del Desarrollos, July-September 2014).
On March 4, the Communication and Transportation secretary inaugurated the Autopista Mitla-Tehuantepec, a 40-kilometer road through the Sierra Madre Mountains (Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 4/3/16). In addition, a Transístmico train will connect Salinas Cruz, Oaxaca, with Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, creating a regional cluster of industry, including oil refineries. In June 2014, Pemex began building a pipeline to “allow for the transportation of cheap, clean and secure combustibles” (El Financiero, 1/27/15). The goal of Transístmico is to exploit the demand for transporting goods from the East coast of North America to China. Meanwhile, China will be able to further its interests in the petrochemical industry in Veracruz.
Fascist Control Aids Imperialist Aims
As a result of these high-stakes capitalist investments and the super-exploitation of local workers, resistance and repression are both concentrated in this area of Oaxaca state. The local and national authorities defend the criminal capitalist system, where blood, death and jail are the order of the day. They will stop at nothing to try to check the mobilization of rebelling teachers, students and parents. The Istmo is testament to the fact that control of the working class is crucial to the bosses’ imperialist aims.
Fascism is the natural outgrowth of global capitalism. It represents the intensification of the repressive and ideological forces to maintain the domination of the capitalist class. As R. Palme Dutt wrote in Fascism and Social Revolution, “The causes of fascism lie deep-rooted in existing society. Capitalism in its decay breeds fascism.” These rising fascist conditions are what we are witnessing today in Mexico.
This is not a local fight; it is part of a global class war. The teachers’ movement is directly confronting the bosses who are enriching themselves by exploiting and terrorizing the working class. This fight is crucial to the resistance against the capitalist state terrorists who have left hundreds of youth, teachers and farmworkers dead or disappeared. Our class is waging a crucial fight to create a “corridor” of struggle that will take us to the ultimate solution, a communist revolution.