From A World to Win News Service

Mexico: “From Ayotzinapa to the ‘Porkys’: The crimes of a depraved state in the service of an oppressive system—Fight the power and prepare for revolution!”

July 11, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Revcom.us editors note: We are posting this article from Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR), Mexico, about developments in that country. For readers who are not familiar with the situation, here are brief explanations of terms mentioned in the headline and in the first sentence, and we have added footnotes.

Ayotzinapa—On September 26, 2014, the Mexican police killed six people, wounded 25, and detained 43 students in Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero. The students were from Ayotzinapa teacher training college in rural Guerrero. The 43 students were “disappeared” while in police custody and have not been heard from since—and what has come out since then points to the involvement of the Mexican police, military, and government in this crime.

Tlatlaya—On June 30, 2014, Mexican soldiers killed 22 people in a remote area in the state of Mexico in what the authorities described as a “shootout.” But later revelations indicated that the soldiers executed civilians and then placed weapons alongside the corpses.

“Porkys”—A group of young men from wealthy and powerful families in the state of Veracruz who have been accused of raping women but who were protected by the government until widespread outrage forced authorities to charge several of the men.

 

June 27, 2016. A World to Win News Service. The following is by AuroraRoja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR), Mexico. (aurora-roja.blogspot.com)

Ayotzinapa, Tlatlaya, the cover-up of the “Porkys” case and so many other crimes have been carried out by a State that is the executioner of the people it claims to represent. They kill, rape, disappear and unjustly imprison people, all the while bragging about their “democracy” and “state of law.” They do it to spread fear, especially among the rebellious and those at the bottom of society, to protect a system based on the making of scandalous profits for a handful by exploiting and oppressing the vast majority of people.

The good news is that we can get rid of that system. We can and must carry out a real revolution that overthrows this system, defeats and dismantles this State, and creates a new and much better society, a society that will put an end to all the horrors we are living through, and that will unite with the oppressed in the rest of the world for the final emancipation of humanity.

This system’s crimes are monstrous.

The federal government, along with the state and municipal governments, were direct participants in a joint operation to murder and disappear the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college students and later to cover up these terrible crimes.

This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence presented in the reports of the Intergovernmental Group of Independent Experts.¹ Soldiers and police of all three of these levels of government were tracking the students since the day before they were killed by means of a joint command and control system known as C-4. All of these repressive bodies were in the streets of Iguala the night these crimes were committed. All took part in an operation to keep the students from leaving the area. The army took control of the C-4, including the surveillance cameras, during the critical hours, and later deleted the videos of these crimes. The Navy and the Attorney General’s Office later tortured people to back up the lie that organized crime had killed the 43 students and burned their bodies at the Cocula rubbish dump. Everything indicates that the federal government also planted “evidence” to support this lie, the 42 bullet casings found in the heap, and a bone identified as belonging to the disappeared student Alex Mora Venancio found in the San Juan River a day after a visit there by Tomas Zerón, head of the Federal Investigation Agency. This visit was recorded by independent reporters but unmentioned in the official report. If the federal government planted the bone from Alex’s body, then obviously it was directly involved and its hands are totally covered in blood. The federal government was directly implicated in these crimes which it now claims to be “investigating” while in reality covering up for and protecting the material and intellectual authorities in the army and the state and federal government. That’s why we say, From Iguala [where the students were murdered] to Los Pinos [the Mexican president’s residence], jail the murderers! The whole damn system is guilty!

So far there has been impunity for the cold-blooded massacre of people detained by the army in Tlatlaya, following orders from the upper ranks to “wipe out criminals in the night.” The officers were never touched, and the seven soldiers following orders were freed despite the courageous testimony of witnesses who had been tortured by the police to keep the truth from coming out, and even the evidence presented by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) regarding what it called the “execution” of “at least 12 to 15 people” in June 2014. This was no isolated incident. Many more people were killed in Tanhuato and Apatzingan in 2015.² No one knows how many people have been murdered or disappeared by the Army, Navy and Federal Police.

Torture is a routine procedure for the Army and police at all levels. A video posted to social media on April 13, 2016 showed two soldiers and a federal cop in Guerrero smothering a woman for four minutes, holding her head in a plastic bag while she was handcuffed and lying on the ground. The video caused so much uproar that they had to issue a cynical apology, but the woman is still in prison based on her “confession” under torture. Last year, when UN Special Reporter on torture Juan Méndez declared that torture has become “generalized” in Mexico, the federal government denied it, and tried to discredit him and keep him from coming back to Mexico.

The state has committed and covered up thousands of disappearances throughout the country. In many cases it is the “forces of order” themselves that commit these crimes, like the Army in the Juarez Valley and the Navy in Nuevo Leon. In other cases people are disappeared by organized crime, but the authorities work hand in hand with them to cover up these crimes and even threaten and repress the victims’ families when they demand justice. In Tetelcingo, Morelos, mass protests brought to light two secret mass graves where 150 people who had been murdered were clandestinely buried by the state prosecutor’s office.

The government protects woman-killers and rapists like “the Porkys” in Veracruz. In the face of tens of thousands of cases of “femicide” and rape all over the country, the government combines cynical declarations with actions meant to guarantee the impunity of the woman-haters and criminalize the victims, like the case of Yakiri, a woman indicted for having defended herself from an attempted rape and murder, and Daphne, a 17-year-old in Veracruz raped by “the Porkys,” four sons of rich and influential fathers protected by the state for more than a year until popular outrage finally forced the government to issue arrest orders for them, but only one has been indicted. In response to these and many other crimes, people marched in 25 cities in Mexico to protest “macho” [male supremacist] violence on April 24, giving voice to a new spirit of resistance among women, especially young women.

The State is unleashing a wave of repression to silence people’s protests. It represses teachers struggling against the reactionary counter-“reform” of the educational system. [Six teachers were shot dead during protests against the new educational measures in Oaxaca on June 19. See June 20 posting on aurora-roja.blogspot.com, in Spanish only.] It has jailed hundreds of political prisoners, while activists, journalists and human rights defenders are murdered for having opposed the crimes of this system.

All these crimes follow a logic, the logic of a State that exists to defend the interests of the predominantly capitalist system against the vast majority of people who are exploited and oppressed by this system. This State is utterly corrupt, it’s true, but the problem is one far more deeply rooted than corruption, or even a “narco state” or “failed state,” as some people think. The underlying cause of the brutal violence against the people by the police, military and other repressive institutions is the system whose functioning they defend and maintain.

This is a system marked by enormous inequalities and injustices, based on the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of people by a small capitalist class under the domination of the imperialist-capitalists in the global system. The system works to meet the needs of these classes and capital itself in competition with other capitals to extract greater profits and continue expanding as they dispossess people and drive them off their land and devastate the environment, condemning the majority to grinding poverty and an exhausting struggle to survive, forcing the other classes in society to go along or simply submit. This system can’t satisfy the needs of the great majority of people; it can’t eliminate patriarchy and the oppression of women; the oppression, discrimination and robbery suffered by indigenous peoples; the lack of any future for the youth; or the poverty of a large part of the people. It can’t even get rid of the scourge of organized crime, a high-yield death machine that flourishes under imperialist capitalism, boosting the incomes of banks, shopping centres and all kinds of legal “investments” profits paid for by the stolen lives of our youth and the overall degradation of society.

The State apparatus exists to maintain this system and prevent or suppress any obstacles or threats to its functioning. That is why it carries out unjust and often arbitrary violence, to intimidate, demoralize and terrorize the vast majority, to prevent or put down resistance and rebellion, and try to rob people of their hope for a better world.

We will no longer tolerate these great injustices. We will struggle to put an end to them, not just lessen them slightly. And we will forge the leadership, consciousness and organization needed to make revolution.

The attacks on the people are growing because the system’s contradictions are getting sharper. The same contradictions that lead to greater attacks on people also provide the basis for a revolution to put an end to this system and launch a new stage of communist revolution in the world. This revolution is not an “illusory dream.” It is a liberating change that we can bring about through the difficult and persistent struggle of millions of people guided by the scientific method of the new synthesis developed by Bob Avakian. We call on all those who want to work for this revolution right now to get organized in the Revolutionary People’s Movement to study and apply this new synthesis of communism and advance toward revolution.

We also call upon all those who oppose, from many different points of view, the crimes committed or covered up by this state to unite against this war on the people by joining the “Stop the War on the People” National Resistance Network and the End Patriarchy and the War against Women initiative, struggling together to expose this criminal State and strengthen the resistance and struggle to put an end to these horrors.

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1. This panel of experts, appointed by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, interviewed witnesses and reviewed the government’s claims. Their findings, released in September 2015, pointed to a government cover-up based on torture of witnesses and tampering with key evidence. See “On the Anniversary of the Disappearance of 43 Students: Reports Shreds Mexican Government Lies” at www.revcom.us. [back]

2. In May, police killed 42 people at a ranch in Tanhuato in the state of Michoacán; in January, police killed 16 people from a group of protesters in two separate but related incidents in Apatzingan, Michoacán. [back]

 

 

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