Huge March in Oaxaca After Attack by Mexican Cops

by SA Editors / November issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

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.