Mexican elections pose challenge for left parties APOYA AL CEU

Scan page 8

elected leadership of the fighting student movement. Banner reads: a series of harsh economic austerity packages. This has led to unbearable hardships for Mexico's poor and oppressed.

Inflation is nearing the 200-percent mark. The value of the peso, Mexico's currency, has fallen to about 1500 to the U.S. dollar. And over 2 million workers are without jobs; 675,000 of them having permanently lost their jobs in the last four years.

The "reconversion" of Mexican industry demanded by the IMF has also meant the proliferation of "maquiladora" sweat-shop factories near the U.S. border, the reprivatization of nationalized industries, and the bankruptcy of large Mexican capitalist ventures-such as the steel mills in Monterrey.

A new period of combativity These capitalist austerity measures have, in turn, provoked mass discontent, mobilizations, and even strikes. A new period of working-class combativity is opening up.

From November 1986 to February 1987, university students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) mobilized by the hundreds of thousands against "reforms" aimed at adapting the university to the needs of industrial "reconversion." [See article in this section.] The six-day strike of the Electrical Workers' Union (SME) was the first national industrial strike in many years. SME strikers demanded better wages and working conditions. Thousands of strikers also backed the student struggle and marched with the students in mass rallies in early February.

In March, teachers in the state of Chiapas staged a 60-day strike for better pay. And most recently the strikes of the autoworkers at Volkswagen in Puebla and Ford in Hermosillo, Sonora, have demonstrated the determination of the Mexican workers to resist the all-out attacks on their standard of living.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of landless peasants continue to occupy lands of the "terratenientes"—or large landowners. In April, thousands of peasant families in the state of Sonora confronted the police and the army before they were finally evicted from the occupied lands.

Democratic Current of the PRI Against the backdrop of this economic crisis-and of the increased mobilizations by the workers-an important ruling-class political crisis has also developed.

For the first time in 50 years, a split has developed within the ruling PRI. A dissident Democratic Current has emerged with the demand to open up the presidential succession process and to return to the PRI's nationalist and populist economic policies.

The Democratic Current fears that the NI PRT poster calling for support to the Univer Abrogation [of the "reforms"] or Strike!

HUELGA

TRANSPONMACION PRT student Council, the Current as follows:

"As was to be expected, the crisis has reached the ruling PRI. The Democratic Current represents the first important fissure in the official party. It is, in fact, a split-even though the Current has not yet been explicitly expelled from the PRI.

"The Current represents the emergence of a sector of the capitalist class which is uneasy with the course of the PRI and wants to do something about it. It wants to prevent the total abandonment of the traditional reformist rhetoric and practice of the party." (Bandera Socialista, July 20, 1987)

The left and the elections Meanwhile, the upcoming 1988 presidential elections have also become a focus of activity and debate among the various parties comprising the Mexican left.

The two main reformist parties on the left, the Mexican Workers Party (PMT) and the Socialist Unified Party of Mexico (PSUM), fused in April 1987 with three minor parties to create the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS).

The PMT is a petty-bourgeois nationalist party; the PSUM is led by the pro-Moscow Stalinists. Both parties have an important following among intellectuals and the media, as well as strong links to the tradeunion bureaucracy (the "charros") and to the dissident Democratic Current of the PRI.

In early 1986, the PSUM issued a statement calling on all left parties in Mexico to form a "mass party of the left." The PSUM was particularly intent on getting the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) to join this fused party.

The PRT is a Trotskyist party with a proud 10-year history and deep roots in the mass movements. [See article in this section on the PRT convention.] In August 1986, the PRT leadership— after considerable debatedecided to oppose a fusion with the PSUM and the PMT, which had accepted the PSUM's offer.

The PRT proposed instead that they all form an electoral coalition that would run a single left candidate in the 1988 presidential The PRT resolution stated: "It would be greatly irresponsible to prematurely create a unified party, which would have important differences within it, and which could break into pieces soon after its creation."