From A World to Win News Service:
Aurora Roja, Mexico: March in Oaxaca Demands Justice for Disappeared Students
September 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
September 21, 2015. A World to Win News Service. The following is from Aurora Roja, voice of the Organizacion Comunista Revolucionaria de Mexico (aurora-roja.blogspot.com). It has been edited for publication in this news service.
A march of about a thousand people was held in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, Mexico September 12 to demand justice for the 43 students who disappeared a year ago and punishment for those responsible for this crime.
Called by the “Stop the War on the People” National Resistance Network, the march began at the entrance to the university campus. Among the diverse groups and individuals involved was Clemente Rodríguez Moreno, father of Cristian Alfonso Rodríguez, one of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College students kidnapped by state forces in the town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, September 26, 2014. (Oaxaca is a state on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, adjacent to Guerrero.)
The majority of the marchers were members of the National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), along with members of the People’s Revolutionary Movement (MPR) and the National Resistance Network, contingents from the International Network of Oaxaca Indigenous People (RIIO), people from the Committee for the Defence of the People’s Rights (CODEP), the Totonundó Canoe Collective, construction workers, shopkeepers, students and residents of various neighbourhoods and slums in the city of Tlaxiaco.
Marchers chanted, “From Iguala to Los Pinos (the presidential residence), jail the murderers,” “Arm in arm, we are all Ayotzinapa” and “They were taken away alive, we want them back alive.” People came out in the side streets to support the march by raising their fists and in other ways.
The protest ended with a rally near the Saturday market in the city centre, where vendors from many indigenous and peasant communities come to sell their wares. The father of a disappeared student denounced the federal government’s long string of lies to the families and the Mexican people in response to the families’ demands that the students be brought back alive. He called for people to join this movement for the lives of the students and the thousands of other people who have disappeared in Mexico, and for justice.
He announced that on September 26, the anniversary of the students’ disappearance, the families and teachers’ college students would gather at four points around Mexico City and march to the central plaza of the capital. This will be preceded by a two-day hunger strike. He called for people to follow the example of Chilpancingo, Tixtla and other places on 15 September and instead of celebrating the country’s independence, demand justice for the disappeared and the resignation of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The families’ demands were also supported by speakers from the teachers’ union and other organizations.
In this rally as well as all along the march route people from the Revolutionary People’s Movement exposed and denounced the role of the army, federal police, state and municipal police in this horrible crime. (The students disappeared while returning to their school from political fund-raising activities in buses they had commandeered. The Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College is attended mainly by young men from peasant families and other poor and often indigenous youth, and has a strong history of radicalism.) Even before the buses were attacked, the students were monitored and followed by a federal government security unit known as C4 that coordinated between the various security forces in real time.
This is one of many facts that the government has tried to hide. A recent report by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission confirmed the conclusions reached by independent scientists and journalists. It presented evidence that the federal prosecutor was lying when he claimed that the disappeared students were burned in a rubbish heap. The people have to be drawn even more broadly and deeply into the struggle alongside the families and Ayotzinapa teachers’ college students to demand justice and the punishment of those responsible, from the president on down, the speaker said.
The Revolutionary People’s Movement declared that the basic problem is the capitalist-imperialist system and that system’s ruling class in Mexico, the big Mexican and foreign capitalists and the landlord class, and the criminal and illegitimate state that protects them. The suffering this system causes is as extreme as it is unnecessary, from India, where 150,000 farmers ruined by global capitalism have committed suicide over the last decade; and Eastern Europe, where every year thousands of women are kidnapped to be turned into slaves to be sold on the global sex market; to Mexico, with more than 150,000 people murdered, more than 30,000 femicides, more than 25,000 people disappeared and hundreds of political prisoners, a country where Central American migrants are extorted, kidnapped and murdered with total impunity, often by the government itself working in collusion with organized crime, among the many other crimes committed or facilitated by the government.
This system doesn’t deserve to go on any longer, the speaker said. It has to be overthrown and dug up from the roots. We need a revolution. The Revolutionary People’s Movement speaker at the rally ended with these words: “We can’t let our children, our grandchildren and even our grandchildren’s grandchildren continue to suffer the horrors of this criminal system, having to fight the same horrors and worse, and even the possible extinction of the human race. Let history say, on the contrary, that here and now, as in other places on this planet, there has begun a new movement for revolution that will not stop until the liberation and emancipation once and for all of all humanity. History remains to be written, and its unfolding depends on what we do, each and every one of us here right now. Dare to struggle for a liberating revolution!”
(The “Stop the War on the People” network has called for a Third National Week of Resistance from October 19-25, 2015.)
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
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