Student Resistance to Campus Goons: Bastion of the Fight Against Fascism

MEXICO, September 13—On September 3, a group of thugs on campus violently attacked students from CCH Azcapotzalco (a campus of the Autonomous University of Mexico—UNAM) in a cowardly and cunning manner.  The students and supporters from other UNAM campuses, were rallying in the courtyard of the campus rectory demanding: that more groups be allowed on campus, for improved security conditions, and the resignation of the president.The school president Enrique Graue admitted days later that he had witnessed the attack from the rectory’s tower, along with various other school authorities who were present.  No one did a thing while the students were attacked with rocks, sticks, pipes, Molotov cocktails, fireworks, and sharpened objects.  Two students were hospitalized with serious injuries and various others were wounded.  
University authorities have historically tolerated, and quietly organized and financed various groups of goons at UNAM.  They are part of the repressive measures used by UNAM officials against students, faculty, and workers who fight back.
Federal and local Mexico City officials have also protected and sheltered these groups.  A good example is Hector Carranza—nicknamed The Scorpion—who was identified as one of the attack leaders.  He got his start inside the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and has recently been identified as a functionary of the PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party) government.
University and government officials have hypocritically distanced themselves from repression and from the campus hooligan groups, but they have all responded before and after the attack in an erratic and lukewarm manner.   Both groups have accused each other for the release of two of the students’ attackers, clearly showing their complicity in the attack and their protection of the violent groups that operate at UNAM.
Students and faculty from the majority of UNAM campuses responded to the September 3rd attack by staging a strike.  More than 30,000 marched on the main campus against the repression, supported by students from other institutions like Poli and ENAH.  
The students remain brave in the face of this terror and responded with solidarity and collectivity to the attack on their fellow schoolmates.  The groups behind the attack by these campus goons—with the objective of destabilizing the incoming nationalist capitalist Lopez Obrador government—underestimated the ability of the students to organize and fight against the repression and injustices of the capitalist system.
Unlike other periods of history when violent groups were used to slow down university protests, the current terror and violence is set-up as the main way to control groups that are rebelling against the system’s attacks.  Along with the legal methods used like the Internal Security Law, these attacks also represent methods used to control social protests nationwide.These attacks have not intimidated the college students.  They have also not frightened the thousands in communities that are resisting the interests of mining concerns, the students resisting school closures (one of the results of the murder of the student teachers from Ayotzinapa), nor the farmworkers of Atenco who still resist the building of the new Mexico City airport.
The communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rejects the repression by these campus goons as a mark of the violent fascist attacks by the capitalists against the working class.  We call on all workers to show solidarity with the students.  Principally though, we must organize a party that doesn’t rely on electoral politics, but one that seeks to change this repressive capitalist system for an equal communist society. the answer to fascist repression is the organized struggle of the working class.