Mexico

On 22 November, at the Leon Trotsky House Museum in Mexico City, Alan Woods began his talk on the English Revolution by saying that, while postmodernists claim there are no laws in history and that it is impossible to understand, there are recurrent processes and even familiar characters across the centuries. Similar material conditions provoke historical phenomena with certain similarities.

On Monday, dozens of young people and workers assembled in the auditorium of the Leon Trotsky House Museum to listen to a speech by Alan Woods, leader of the International Marxist Tendency. The event was about the ideas of Karl Marx, 200 years since his birth. The day (November 20), could not be more appropriate, as it also marked the anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

We publish here a joint solidarity statement from the comrades of Bloque Popular Juvenil (El Salvador), Izquierda Marxista (Honduras) and La Izquierda Socialista (Mexico) to the thousands-strong migrant caravan travelling from Central America to the United States. The migrants have been met with prejudice, attacks by the media and state repression – their plight expresses the suffering of a whole region, plagued by the policies of American imperialism and oligarchical rule.

2 October marks 50 years since the 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco, Mexico, when the army was used to mow down student protesters on the eve of the Olympics. We publish this detailed article by Ubaldo Oropeza, editor of La Izquierda Socialista, about the movement, its origins, development and aftermath, as well as the main lessons that can be drawn from it.

New waves of student protest have been erupting in the universities and colleges of Mexico City. Students in all the major universities in the capital have come out en masse in solidarity after 14 students at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) were injured by porros(semi-fascist shock groups) earlier this month.

This article was written on 10 May, prior to Andres Manuel LopezObrado (AMLO)'s election as President of Mexico. However, we think it is still relevant after the Mexican elections as it reveals the brewing conflict between AMLOand the Mexican ruling class.

Yesterday, on 2 July, there was massive participation in the Mexican general elections, in which there were 18,229 public positions at stake. However, by far the most important was the presidency. With more than 89 million voters registered, the level of participation – according to the available data – was one of the highest in the history of Mexico.

On the 1 July, Mexicans will go to the polls in a crucial election. All opinion polls show that a victory for the candidate of Morena(Movement for National Renewal), Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is quite likely. However, nothing is certain in Mexico. The ruling class has already used election fraud to cheat AMLO out of winning the elections twice and will certainly try a third time. In this article, the comrades from the Mexican section of the IMT – La Izquierda Socialista – explain why they advocate a critical vote for Lopez Obrador, address the limitations of his programme and assert the need to organise to struggle against capitalism (read the ...

Hoy 7 de noviembre, a las 18 horas, en la ciudad de México, en el auditorio de la casa museo León Trotsky, se ha celebrado la reunión en conmemoración de los 100 años de la gran revolución de octubre, con cerca de 100 asistentes. El tema de la charla fue; México y Rusia dos revoluciones del siglo XX. Como invitados para hablar en la reunión estaban: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas; el embajador de la Federación Rusa en México, Eduard R. Malayan; el nieto de León Trotsky, Esteban Volkov y el dirigente de la Corriente Marxista Internacional Alan Woods.

On 8-9 July, the comrades of Juventudes Marxistas (Marxist Youth) and Izquierda Socialista (Socialist Left) organised a camp to celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, an historic event which showed the potential of the working class to take power, eradicate oppression and build an alternative to capitalist society.

Los trabajadores del Sindicato Independiente de los Trabajadores de La Jornada (Sitrajor) han votado por mayoría la huelga el día viernes 30 de junio para defender su Contrato Colectivo de Trabajo, el cual pretende eliminarse por la grave situación financiera por la que atraviesa la empresa que imprime el periódico, el cual ha sido considerado como de izquierda y dar cierta apertura en sus páginas a los movimientos obreros, sociales, populares y estudiantiles en el país.

This article was originally published in Spanish in the runup to the a strike in Mexico on 17 March.