Mexico: May the heroic spirit of Nochixtlan herald a liberating revolution!

11 July 2016. A World to Win News Service. Striking teachers and other people have continued to block roads connecting southern Mexico and the country's capital. On 19 June, police and snipers opened fire in an assault on a protest barricade in Nochixtlan, a small town north of the capital city of Oaxaca. Since then teachers, students and many others have occupied the main square in that city. Teachers also blockaded streets, a shopping mall and train tracks in Michoacan, a state in western Mexico. On 1 July, teachers took action in the south, west, center and north of Mexico, including the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Michoacan, Chiapas and Nuevo Leon, and Mexico City.

The government claims that the 400 federal police and 200 state police sent to break the motorway barricade in Nochixtlan were unarmed and the shooting was by unknown snipers – actually, protestors themselves. Yet photos and video footage clearly shows police carrying guns, and, in at least one case, very clearly firing into the crowd, who nevertheless beat back the police attack for several hours. Snipers were reportedly posted on the rooftops of buildings at the entrance to the town. The use of snipers to simultaneously crush demonstrations and create confusion by pretending that the attacks came from protestors is a government tactic that has been infamous since the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, when hundreds of Mexico City university students were gunned down in the beginning of what was called the "Dirty War" against the widespread radical upsurge of that decade.

Education and specifically rural education has been a crucial issue in Mexican society going back to the days when the country was dominated by Spain, feudal landlords and their all-powerful and soul-crushing Catholic Church. The current government of President Enrique Pena Nieto has adopted a plan to use exams to kick out many teachers, shrink the number of students and eliminate aspects of the country's educational system rooted in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and later reforms. The government's response to student and teacher defiant opposition has been to attack the teachers and their union, arresting its leadership several days before the 19 June blockades.

Teachers and especially rural teachers have often been in the forefront of rebellious opposition to the government. This is the second time in a decade that teachers have paralysed roads in Oaxaca. Rural teacher training schools, such as the Ayotzinapa teacher's college in the neighbouring state of Guerrero, are attended by youth from indigenous peasant familes. Teachers and students have to build their own facilities and figure out how to fund them and feed themselves. Often they turn their schools into local sites of political ferment. In September 2014, in the town of Iquala, 43 Ayotzinapa students on a bus returning from a fund-raising protest were kidnapped by local police acting in coordination with the army and federal government, and never seen again.

Since then hundreds of thousands of people in many parts of the country have filled the streets and plazas demanding that the president and the government either produce the students or account for this crime. Last April, a prestigious international investigating committee declared that the government had thwarted its work through a combination of non-cooperation, attempted intimidation and retaliation meant to drive them out of the country. Evidence against the government, however, is continuing to mount. An analysis of the corpse of one of the kidnapped students' classmates, one of six kidnapped the day before the others disappeared, and, unlike the others, later found, revealed that he had been tortured to death, according to a report released 11 July by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission. It said that he had 64 factures in his body, mainly his skull. The Ayotzinapa students are only a few of the tens of thousands of people declared to have disappeared during the last decade.

The following is from Aurora Roja, the Website of the Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR), Mexico (aurora-roja.blogspot.com).

They are a bunch of damned murders! The State sent the federal and local police to smash the motorway blockades and resistance of the teachers and people of Nochixtlan, Hacienda Blanca and other towns in Oaxaca on 19 June in an attempt to teach a lesson to people nationwide: don't you dare defy the system. Photos and videos taken that day in Nochixtlan and their metadata conclusively show that the police were carrying arms since early that morning and that they opened fire on the crowd from up close, as did snipers on a building rooftop, aiming to kill, leaving 12 people dead and 97 wounded. The authorities stopped ambulances from coming and blocked medical assistance. The police themselves set fire to vehicles on the motorway so that later they could blame the movement. These are new crimes by the murderer State that is trying to intimidate people who will no longer stand for the poverty and oppression imposed by this system, a system that has killed, tortured and disappeared people in Iguala, Tlatlaya, Apatzingán, Tanhuato and committed many other crimes.

We need to get organized for revolution, a liberating communist revolution that will smash this criminal State and put an end to this predominantly capitalist system that in the last few years has killed more than 150,000 people, and disappeared 30,000. Some 30,000 women have been murdered. Instead of this system driven by the need for maximum profits for a handful of people, at the cost of the poverty and oppression of the vast majority, we need a new socialist system that serves the people and the emancipation of humanity.

In Nochixtlan, the people fought heroically and chased off the murdering police. When the police first attacked, the small number of people at the barricades retreated and sounded the alarm. Thousands of people from nearby towns and small cities came to their rescue – women and men, teachers, students, youth, peasants, workers, shopkeepers and others. Armed with slingshots, stones and fireworks, they came to bravely stand up to the repressive forces of the State who were armed with assault rifles, handguns, tear gas and a helicopter. The heroism was amazing. Bullets and murder did not make them give way. This demonstrates the great revolutionary potential that is latent in the people.

Many people are sick and tired and angry, sentiments that are the result of the contradictions and outrages of this predominantly capitalist system that produces a handful of hugely rich capitalists and landowners and a majority of poor people. A patriarchal, male supremacist system that has given absolute impunity to the murderers and rapists of tens of thousands of women, a system based on the oppression, discrimination and plunder of indigenous peoples, homophobia and discrimination against LGBT and other differently-gendered people, the destruction of the environment and the barely disguised and disgusting collaboration between the oppressor government and organized crime. Usually people's anger at these horrors is suppressed, hidden, because it finds no way to express itself. The great merit of today's teachers' struggle is that it has brought forward and brought together the struggle and rebellion of many other sections of the people across the country and even among Mexicans abroad. Now the government will try to use negotiations to trick and demobilize the people. We need to struggle to spread and strengthen the people' protests and get organized right now for the coming revolution. History has demonstrated that this system and its representatives, even when they are forced to make concessions by the people's struggle, will never stop exploiting, oppressing, torturing, killing and disappearing us.

The big capitalist media have told lie after lie – it has been really disgusting. They are trying to hide the proven truth, that the police were armed and opened fire on the people, trying to blame the people for their own deaths, defaming the teachers' movement and inventing lies about so-called "radical infiltrators". Every day the media shed great tears about how much money the big capitalists are losing because of the protests, and don't even mention the people killed by the government. They don't report that it was the police who burned the vehicles or that the authorities prevented the wounded from getting medical treatment, and threaten the people (including many local authorities) and radio stations and alternative media who support the movement.

Now the government and media come and tell us they are going to "investigate". Of course they will – just like they "investigated" Ayotzinapa, Tlatlaya, Tlatelolco, Aguas Blancas, Acteal, Atenco and so many other massacres and blood crimes they committed with total impunity, crimes that they continue and will continue to commit until the people finally achieve justice by means of communist revolution. It has to be emphasized that these same media, rulers and so-called experts lying to us about the crimes of this system have also lied to us about communism. They tell us "communism is dead" because the end of capitalism terrifies them. Not only is communism not dead, it is advancing, learning from its past achievements and errors. There is a new communism, the new synthesis of communism by Bob Avakian, that is even more scientific, revolutionary and liberating. People need the truth to get free, and the truth has to be taken out to them about the criminal nature of this system and the real revolutionary solution.

The ruling class mass murderers preach to the people that they should avoid violence! After the Nochixtlan massacre, the head of the Employers' Coordinating Council shamelessly declared, "It is unacceptable for any cause, no matter how just, to resort to violent and illegal means to exercise pressure." Was he criticizing the State? No, he was praising the murdering police and attacking the movement for which the dead gave their lives. They consider it just fine when the ruling class and their state carry out massacres, torture and disappearances, but if the people so much as put up a barricade to defend themselves against the murdering police, they call this "illegal" and "violence". What hypocrisy! Their whole system is based on death, on the exploitation and oppression of the great majority of people by a handful. It's not enough for them that this system's laws are dictated by the interests of the big capitalists and the imperialists, to protect the system and their property; even so they violate their own laws every day with extra-judicial executions, torture, corruption, their alliance with organized crime and so many other shameful things. It's intolerable!

Faced with the endless violence, oppression and misery caused by this system, the only way out for the people is determined struggle and revolution. A real, liberating and triumphant revolution can't be made through foolishness. It requires a scientific understanding of the problem and solution, and leadership, organization, preparation and deep ties with the people. If we don't want our children and their children to have to suffer the same abuses and worse, until the possible extinction of humanity due to global warming and this system's other crimes, now is the time for the people to prepare for revolution. This is why we call on you to get together with the Revolutionary Communist Organization of Mexico, get into the new synthesis of communism and be part of fighting the power and preparing the people for revolution. We need to struggle to build a real revolutionary communist party in Mexico that can embrace a wide range of protest, rebellion and dissent and channel it all as much as possible toward a liberating revolution and the emancipation of humanity.

The so-called educational "reform" is a completely reactionary counter-reform. Communist revolution will implement a critical, scientific, diverse and inspiring education. The educational "reform" imposed by imperialist organizations like the OECD and owners' groups like "Mexico First" is part of a process meant to privatise the educational system, take away teachers' rights, smash the democratic teachers' movement, eliminate any critical or progressive aspect of the curriculum and, for the great majority of people, reduce education to preparations to take stupid multiple choice exams. In contrast, as pointed out in the pamphlet A Liberating Revolution, after today's oppressive system is overthrown, "The educational system will be transformed from top to bottom, providing a scientific and interesting content that will awaken students' desire to know and change the world we live in and explore the richness of cultures and human knowledge... Students and teachers will no longer be treated as if they were the enemy, with rigid exams and evaluations that discriminate against indigenous people, the poor and women. Instead, students and teachers will be encouraged to cooperate to improve teaching and learning... There will be a transformation of the policies and social and structural factors that close the doors to a decent education for the vast majority of poor and indigenous people."