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A huge, peaceful demonstration against the occupation of
Oaxaca by federal police and demanding the resignation of the gangster
governor of this Mexican state took place on Nov. 5. The Asamblea Popular
de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), which called the “Megamarch,” estimated
the participants at more than a million.
This outpouring of anger against a
corrupt and illegitimate state government and a complicit federal
government gives a cutting edge to the crisis that has been shaking
Mexico, in particular, since the fraudulent election of the conservative
presidential candidate Felipe Calderón.
Election fraud has become a growing
scandal in Mexico as the social crisis of the country has deepened and
the bourgeois politicians have more and more resorted to stealing
elections in order to stay in office.
The traditional ruling party, the Partido
Revolucionario Institutional, has been reduced to a minority party in
national elections. In the recent presidential elections, its candidate
came in a poor third. The official winner was the candidate of the National
Action Party (PAN), a right-wing party seen by many as an alternative to
the PRI simply because it was long shut out of national office.
The fact is that the PAN works hand in
glove with the PRI, and this reality is being highlighted by its failure
to oppose the sending of the federal police to suppress the mass movement
in Oaxaca.
PRI corruption, gangster-style violence,
and vote stealing have been particularly notorious in the less developed
states like Chiapas and Oaxaca, with large indigenous populations.
When the PRI governor of Oaxaca, Ulises
Ruíz Ortíz, ordered the state police to break up an encampment of
teachers striking for higher wages and benefits for students on June 14,
the accumulated anger at his corruption, his diversion of money from the
needs of education and the people, and his vote stealing boiled over. It
led the masses and social organizations to form the Popular Assembly of
the Peoples of Oaxaca, based on the idea that the masses needed a
leadership that would directly represent them and not depend on
fraudulent bourgeois elections.
The presidential candidate of the Partido
Revolucionario Democrático (PRD), López Obrador, who was defeated by
fraud, also took a step in this direction with the formation of the
National Democratic Convention. Both in Mexico City and in Oaxaca city
there have been huge demonstrations protesting election fraud.
This questioning of the legitimacy of the
bourgeois elections and the turn to mass action as a method for the
people to express their real feelings and interests is an important rise
in the consciousness of the masses in Mexico, even if there is still no
leadership that can focus it toward a revolutionary seizure of power.
This radicalization has led the Cuban
revolutionary journalist Celia Hart to write that the events in Oaxaca
are the most important revolutionary development in Latin
America—surpassing even the anti-imperialist moves and gestures of Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela, which have aroused enthusiasm in Cuba—and that they
represent the storm clouds of coming socialist revolution.
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