Comrades: wake up, wake up, disinherited brothers. Let us go to the Revolution, to confront despotism; but we remember the idea that there is to take the Earth in the present movement, and that the triumph of this movement must be the economic emancipation of the proletariat, not by governing decree of anybody, but by the force of fact; not by the approval of any Congress, but by the direct action of the proletariat.
Ricardo Flores Magon, from Regeneration, 28 of January of 1911.
The previous is one of the ideas of one of the great revolutionaries of consequece who saw with enough clarity the imminence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and along with that elevated the Mexican Liberal Party to the level of the dominant era; the necessity to transform the society as a whole.
The historical development in our country has given reason to the Magonistas - as also this political current is known because the bourgeois small current that triumphed in the Revolution of 1910, was but a single one which made small reforms obliged by the push of the masses, but in turn fomented the formation of a new political class that has been dedicated to the sacking of the national wealth.
We are in a situation similar to that which gave origin to the Revolution of 1910 and it is necessary to reflect and to look for in our history examples that help us to find answers to the challenges that we face as a Nation.
We think that it is necessary to impel the broad and profound discussion of the great national problems, to be able to participate in a way that allows the recovering of the mother country for those who with their work generate the wealth of the same.
With that intention we reproduce the following document as a small tribute to those who with their life in the battlefields has contributed to forge the mother country and to those who at the moment fight from any trench with the only interest to create a truely Free, Democratic and Independent Mexico.
Important movements like the one of the railway workers, candlemakers, doctors, farmers, and students were repressed during the decades of the 40s and 50s.
The economic, social and political conditions for the appearance of a armed movement revolutionary were patent. The 23 of September of 1965, after a period of training, a military-political group headed by professor Arturn Gámiz García, tried to take the Military Headuarters of the city of Madera, in the state of Chihuahua. Because of several circumstances they failed in this attempt and most of the combatants who decided themselves to exert revolutionary violence to transform the country, they lost their lives assassinated in unequal combat or once they were captured they were disarmed.
That fact marked the beginning in Mexico of the armed revolutionary fight for the construction of the socialism. The example of the insurgents of the Madera Headuarters (Raid) extended to national scope. In other parts of the country other groups of citizens prepared themselves for combat for the radical transformation of the society.
In other points of the republic, the preparations and the formation of a start began the nucleus of which later would be the Revolutionary Workers' Party Clandestine Union of the People (PROCUP). Nevertheless the romance of guerilla belligerence in the mountains, takes the Party of the Poor (PDLP) and National Civic Revolutionary Association (ACNR), organizations who in the state of Guerrero fight to the forces of security of the Mexican State. Commanders Lucio Cabañas Barrientos and Genaro Vasquez Rojas, occupied a place in the history of the country, when dying in combat and without wavering in the consequent fight by the fulfillment of their liberating ideals.
As of 1968, after the great student-popular movement that affected to the country and that was suffocated with the massacre of 2nd of October in the Plaza of the Three Cultures of Tlatelolco, hundreds of Mexicans radicalized themselves and they decided to undertake violent forms of struggle because of the impossibility of the society acceding to substantial changes in pacific form.
That is the context that explains the surge of groups of urban guerrillas like the Movement of Revolutionary Action (SEA), Communist League 23 of September, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People (FRAP), Urban Zapatista Front(FUZ), the Lacandones, the Armed Commandos of the People, and others more than did not achieve notoriety. A process of proliferation of armed groups was developed, with more or less clarity of objectives and means that were proposed to reach and to use through their action.
This period included a great part of the decade of the 70s and it was characterized by the attempts of the Communist League 23 of Septiember to hegemonize a process revolutionary unity starting off of false premises, such as agglutinating the groups around the material resources, without a formation and ideological selectivity, and without considering the importance of a necessary correct attitude toward life and not only toward the enemy.
Those attempts of unity of the armed revolutionary groups, under false premises, lead to the failure of their project and they were easily infiltrated and decimated by the Mexican State.
Hundreds of heroic combatants of the diverse revolutionary forces were assassinated and disappeared during the dirty war of the 70s. But its blood has been germinated in the heart of thousands of Mexicans that today, all over our mother country are dedicated to the fulfillment of the noble tasks of the revolution.
In 1974 a revolutionary group was struck, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), that set out to wage the war of guerrillas in the state of Chiapas and counted cells in Monterrey and Mexico City, among other points. That structure disappeared from the public scene after the repressive blow and it's probable that it is the antecedent of the Zapatista Army of Liberación Nacional (EZLN), the movement that burst in into the national political life the first days of 1994.
The Party of the Poor and the Revolutionary Workers' Party Clandestine Union of the People, did not participate in those attempts of unity, considering that result would be finite and would not withstand the test of the time. The Party of the Poor (PDLP), continued its belligerence in mountains of Guererro and it faced in 1974 a strong military misfortune, with the death in combat of Commander Lucio Cabañas Barrientos and the dispersion of his forces, which later would regroup and and would be developed with greater quality.
After the military defeat of several groups in the decade of the 70s, the PROCUP and the PDLP fortified and initiated an organic coordination around the political strategic and tactical alignament of Prolonged Popular War, contemplating all the forms of struggle around the armed revolutionary struggle and considering as essential strategic factors, the formation of a party, a revolutionary army and a powerful political movement of the masses.
One of the causes that led diverse armed groups to defeat, were the insurreccional and narrow conceptions of Communist League 23 of September, their disconnection from the struggles of the masses and the conception that made the military aspects prevail over the political aspects.
In the first days of 1994, the existence and military-political action of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation spread widely, fundamentally in the state of Chiapas. The EZLN began a new stage, qualitatively superior in development of the revolutionary movement, agreeing in a assembly of concepts and forms with the rest of the armed national revolutionary movement.
In June of 1996 the Revolutionary Popular Army makes its appearance (EPR) that is the result of the unity of 14 revolutionary organizations, among them the PROCUP-PDLP and that one sees are under the direction of the Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party (PDPR).
Without a doubt the future times are marked by the strengthening of the present poles of agglutination of the revolutionary forces, the growth of groups, armed organizations that will capitalize the present political conjuncture, and by the sprouting of new groups and organizations who consider the exercise of revolutionary violence to accede to the substantial tranformations that the country requires.
To assimilate the historical experiences of the revolutionary movement in Mexico, Latin America and the rest of the world, is essential, for development of viable alternatives in our mother country. To prevent the counterinsurgent policy of the Mexican State and North American imperialism, is basic.
But truely funtamental is the deep understanding of which revolutionary coordination and unity, are necessary and essential elements to make of Mexico and Latin America a great socialist mother country.
Generals Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa at the front of the masses of armed peasants constituted powerful armies that managed to overcome the constitutionalists; in 1914 they took the capital from the Republic and they were virtually in power; nevertheless, they did not have the revolutionary, theoretical and practical perspective that he allowed them to orient the transformation of the country, reason why resigned to the historical responsibility that the force of the arms had deposited in their hands and they fell back to their states, yielding from then the initiative to the bourgeoisie that after assassinating traitorously the popular caudillos (Emiliano 1919 Francisco and Zapata Villa in 1923) imposed and built the bases of its economic and political project.
On the other hand the working class, limited in its political horizon of fight by anarco-syndicalist conceptions and in spite of the efforts made by the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and the brothers Flores Magón, to equip it with an own program and political independence, finally it was instrumentalized by the bourgeoisie, organized in the so-called "Red Battalions" and was pushed into confrontation with the peasant armies. Thus was the hope suffocated in the peoples' own blood to see crystallized the worker-peasant alliance, fundamental bastion of the proletarian revolution.
The historical experience of the democratic-bourgeois revolution in Mexico (1910-1919) constitutes the preamble of the outstanding Marxist intellectual surge, of the first communist parties and the first attempts of socialist, anti-imperialist revolution and by the national liberation that is registered in the continent.
1. With the antecedent of the democratic-bourgeois revolution (1910-1919), Mexico today has the minimum economic-material conditions to undertake the construction of a socialist economy and society.
2. The enrichment of the universal culture and of the economic, political and philosophical group of Mexican intellectuals, produces the possibility that our country has to accede to the assimilation of the revolutionary experiences of other peoples.
3. The anti-imperialist roots of the revolutionary process in Mexico are nourished by the successive interventions in our country, that even led to the loss of half of our national soil, which combined with the extensive border shared with imperialism and the millions of chicanos and illegal victims of the discrimination and exploitation forms an unpublished scene of the anti-imperialist struggle, whose reach was already announced by the events of Los Angeles.
4. The great ethno-cultural diversity of the country is a point of encounter with the roots that we share with other peoples of the continent.
5. The great geographic diversity that allows development of all the forms of the war, and
6. The geopolitical and economic importance that our country has in relation to North American imperialism, means that the revolutionary process in Mexico necessarily incites and changes the correlation of forces in the international plane and fortifies as no other the push of the revolutionary processes in the continent.
The blunting of the armed revolutionary movement in Mexico does not constitute the twilight of the guerrilla in Latin America nor last of it revolutions after the crisis of the socialism in Europe, but the test of its historic usefulness and the hope of the encounter of the revolution that was obscured by the adversity of the international context and the weaknesses of the development of the revolutionary processes in America.
We revolutionaries in Mexico have the responsability of not incurring the errors of other revolutionary processes, strengehening the development of our strategic unity and to help in the design of a revolutionary global strategy on the continent, that spearheads the anti-imperialist fight toward the enormous Latin and interracial population that is in the United States. We must educate the people in the consciousness which inevitably will be tested by a prolonged military process and which is based on our own forces, rejecting the narrow conceptions that can lead to frustration of the masses and to the wearing down of the revolutionary militancy.
© 1997 villista@iname.com
Consiga su propia/Get your own Página Principal Gratis/Free Home Page