From the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico:

In the Face of the Crimes of the State: Never Forgive, Never Forget, but Rather Resistance and Revolution!

September 24, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The following flyer from the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico, was translated from Spanish by revcom.us; the original article appeared at aurora-roja.blogspot.com.

Fifty years after the massacre of Tlatelolco [October 2, 1968], four years after Ayotzinapa and Tlatlaya, two years after Nochixtlán, these and many other crimes of the state remain in absolute impunity. And the armed forces and police of this criminal state continue murdering, disappearing and torturing thousands of people. In a “listening” forum in Ciudad Juárez, Andrés Manuel López Obrador [newly elected Mexican president] insisted that in order to achieve “pacification and reconciliation,” the victims would have to grant “forgiveness”. The victims and their families began to shout very justly so, “Never forgive, never forget!” and “Without justice, there is no forgiveness!” “Forgiving” crimes against humanity would only contribute to perpetuate the monstrous war against the people by the state, in collusion at all levels with organized crime, which has resulted in more than 200,000 murders in the last 12 years. The only hope of justice is the determined resistance of the people to expose and denounce these crimes, and the only definitive way out of so many horrors is a revolution that overthrows this criminal state and the current rotten inhuman system, responsible for so much misery and unnecessary suffering.

Ayotzinapa: It Was the State, and They Continue Lying to Cover It Up

The evidence compiled by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) leaves no doubt that the federal government, as well as the state and municipal governments, participated directly in the joint operation that resulted in the murder of six people and the disappearance of the 43 teaching college students of Ayotzinapa, and who later took actions to cover up this terrible crime. Military and police from the three levels of government spied on the students with the C4 [Center of Command, Control, Communications and Computer] system from when they left the school. The police and the armed forces (as well as drug traffickers) participated in the coordinated operation to prevent the students from leaving Iguala in the State of Guerrero, and the army took control of the C4 at critical times and suppressed the videos of these crimes.

Then the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and its Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) set up a cover-up of this state crime, with the alleged “historical truth” that the 43 students had been incinerated by an organized crime group in the Cocula dump on the very night of September 26, 2014. This lie has been rejected by virtually every independent investigation, including the investigations by the GIEI itself, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The government fabricated its lie by torturing people illegally detained. The recent report of the UN High Commissioner confirms that, in the 34 cases that it investigated, the detainees were tortured.

A video and other evidence also indicate that they planted, under the command of Tomás Zerón of the AIC, a piece of bone, from the missing student Alex Mora Venancio, in a garbage bag along the San Juan River on October 28, 2014, to be “discovered” the next day by divers from the Marines. In addition, they planted 42 bullet shell casings in the Cocula dump. If the federal government planted Alex’s bone, obviously it was directly involved in these crimes. Authorities at the highest level of the government know where the disappeared students are, and they are only trying to cover up the role of their own uniformed assassins.

And they continue to cover up this massacre: Ten federal government entities have filed at least 222 court appeals to prevent the creation of a “Truth Commission,” and former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto appears in government ads to defend the same lie “that the 43 young people had been incinerated by a criminal group.” Nobody from the new incoming federal government has come out to expose him for what he is: A cynical and lying criminal. Alejandro Encinas (future undersecretary of human rights of the Secretariat of the Interior) promises to push for a real investigation as of December 1, but López Obrador has already promised to choose the new heads of the armed forces from among today’s same criminal generals and admirals. So, what will his government do in the face of the opposition from the armed forces, the police and the PGR to being investigated?

It is because of the tenacious resistance of the family members, the students and thousands of other people in Mexico and the world that the state has not yet been able to bury the whole truth and close the case. Whether all the truth comes out and there is possibility of some justice, will depend on the determined resistance of the people, independent of the state, who free of restraints, expose the state’s crimes and its lies.

NEVER FORGET October 2, and the Same Murdering State Still Stands

Although there have been some changes in form, in essence the current state is still the same state as the one that massacred more than one hundred students and others on October 2, 1968, when the army opened fire on a peaceful rally under orders from President Gustavo Díaz Órdaz and his Secretary of the Interior, Luís Echeverría, with the backing and advice of U.S. imperialism. Although the first government with parties “alternating in power” and a supposed “democratic transition” with Vicente Fox as president, promised to investigate and clarify “the crimes of the past” with a special prosecutor’s office, this office was finally dissolved and none of the executioners responsible for the massacres of Tlatelolco, the “Halconazo” of June 10, 1971 [massacre of students by elite Mexican army soldiers], nor the government’s dirty war in the following years was put on trial or punished.

The 1968 student movement erupted at a time of revolts and revolutions that convulsed the world and encouraged the hopes of millions of the possibility of overthrowing the current capitalist system and getting to a much better socialist society. This movement fought the antiriot police heroically, demanded freedom for political prisoners, mocked the “regime of the Mexican Revolution,” and exposed the reactionary nature of the repressive forces of the state, which was and remains an oppressive machine to subdue all mass opposition that threatens or even hinders the “proper functioning” of the reigning system.

Stop the War Against the People!

This reactionary repressive role of the state is largely disguised now with the supposed “war against organized crime” declared 12 years ago by then President Felipe Calderón with the sponsorship of the U.S. government, which is really a war against the people. This accelerated the militarization of Mexico, increased the scourge of organized crime, and led to a huge escalation of widespread violence against the people—murders, femicides, disappearances, torture, and the unjust imprisonment of thousands of innocent people—at the hands of the forces of the state and also criminal groups, who act in collusion while competing and clashing among each other. This is a form of preventive counterinsurgency, which tries to prevent a mass insurgency from arising. In the Enrique Peña Nieto government, all this reactionary violence against the mass movements and also against the population in general has intensified. Just in July 2018, the official figure (which minimizes the actual number) was 2,599 murders—the highest figure for which there are records. In the first seven months of 2018, 16,339 people are murdered. The murders of women classified as femicide also hit a record 78 women in July, an official figure that omits many misogynistic murders that are not recorded as femicides. The Femicide Map, for example, reported more than 230 femicides per month in 2017.

Immigrants, mainly Central Americans, are a key target of this war, with the Mexican state acting as U.S. guard dog. They flee from criminal and patriarchal violence and from misery, the product of the destruction of the countryside and the environment, as well as the super-exploitation by imperialist companies. The Mexican government and the hitmen collude to kidnap, deport, disappear, or murder them. The crime of the 72 executed immigrants buried in San Fernando, Tamaulipas brought to light this massacre, but remains in absolute impunity. The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement says that it has documented between 70 and 80,000 disappeared Central Americans in the six years of Calderón government, 30 percent of them women and girls, many of them sold into human trafficking networks. Since 2014, the Mexican state, with the U.S. calling the shots, has intensified this persecution, deporting more Central Americans than the U.S. and also collecting their biometric data for the U.S. Currently, the Trump/Pence fascist regime is seeking to impose a Mexico as a “safe third country,” corralling the migrants in Mexico who are seeking asylum in the U.S.

The Army and the Marines Disappear or Murder the Detainees

“Extrajudicial executions” are already the daily norm. The crime of Tlatlaya in 2014 still remains unpunished, where the army soldiers murdered 22 people, executing the majority of them after they had surrendered, obeying written orders to “go out into the night to shoot down criminals.” Later, the police arrested and tortured the witnesses.

Since January 2018, the Marines have unleashed a reign of terror in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. As of May, they had disappeared 36 people, nine of them had already appeared murdered with signs of torture. Despite videos, photographs, witnesses, and even several cases in which family members followed the kidnapper Marines to their bases, the commanders keep denying everything, just as they did in March when a Marine helicopter murdered two girls and their mother, a fact that was later verified by the expert reports.

The Problem Is the System, the Solution Is the Revolution

Why, in these and many other cases, do the forces of the state murder, disappear, torture, and repress people? It is not simply due to corrupt officials, the lack of “training in human rights” or that “they are not doing their job.” The truth is that by repressing people, the state is doing its job: Its job is to defend a system based on the exploitation and oppression of the great majority by a handful of big Mexican and foreign capitalists. There is no way to maintain this system of big injustices and inequalities without sowing terror among the people on the bottom of society and repressing the outbreaks of protest and rebellion, and this is precisely the fundamental role of the current state. The election of López Obrador as president has awakened in many hopes that he may at least lessen the growing horrors that we are living, but the reality is that he is going to be at the head of the same criminal state, representing and defending the same heartless system.

The only way out for the people is the most determined independent resistance that exposes the criminal state, and contributes to preparing a revolution guided by the New Communism, to overthrow the current predominantly capitalist system subordinated to imperialism which is the root of so much misery and injustice, and create a new socialist society. If you want to contribute to another future that is possible and much better, share this flyer and contact us.

Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico
aurora-roja.blogspot.com
September 1, 2018

 

On August 27, 1968, armored tanks went up against students in Mexico City who staged a protest in the Zócalo plaza, one of the largest protests against the government in Mexico's history. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Protest of family members and others against disappearance of people by Marines, Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

“We Are All Ayotzinapa! The State Is Not Negligent, It Is Criminal! The people stand up for another future!—National Resistance Network ‘¡Stop the War on the People!’”