Mexico: government's political crisis persists

5 January 2015. A World to Win News Service. In his first state visit to the state of Oaxaca and his first public appearance in the new year, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto received an unexpected "welcome" from local schoolteachers calling for him to be driven from office. What was supposed to be a reboot for Pena's authority turned out to be another disaster. Pena's visit was unannounced, to avoid protests, but was to be highly publicized afterwards. His speech was to promote a strategic plan to transform the country's economy by further opening its oil and gas industry and other sectors to foreign capital, along with an education "reform" whose content is symbolized by the attack on and disappearance of 43 teachers' college students, rural youth whom the authorities believe should be beaten down, not educated. The Oaxaca teachers climbed the barriers surrounding the industrial facility where he was to speak and clashed with police in an effort to prevent his entrance, which took place only amid tear gas and stones. About 150 family members and fellow students of the disappeared Ayotzinapa youth travelled from the southern state of Guerrero to the federal capital on 24 December, Christmas Eve, declaring that they would not celebrate the holidays or allow Pena to do so with his family until the government produced their sons alive. A long line of riot police and barricades prevented them from entering the presidential residence, Los Pinos. Standing outside in a heavy, cold rain, they warned that the holidays and the new year would not see them stop struggle for justice. They returned to Los Pinos on 26 December and then again 31 December. These protests followed a growing wave since the students disappeared on 26 September, including marches of tens of thousands of people in the capital and several cities in Guerrero on 8 November. A ceremonial door of the presidential palace, originally built for the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez, was set on fire. There was an angry mass assault on local government buildings in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo on 14 December. In December more evidence emerged linking the police detention and subsequent disappearance of the students to the highest levels of the federal government. These facts go against the official narrative, repeated by much of the world media, that the mayor of the city of Iquala sent his police to attack a caravan of students on their way home to Ayotzinapa after a protest because he was afraid that they would spoil an event hosted by his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda. The two were arrested some months ago and now she has been indicted as the “mastermind” behind the disappearance, in connection with her brothers, allegedly leaders of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, to whom the police are said to have turned over the students for execution. Leaked government documents from an initial investigation (later abandoned) and a scientific investigation revealed three key points: 1) Federal police and authorities were following the students' movements that day in real time through a local command post and coordinated with the police in the operation against them. Sixteen federal police were on the scene. According to the report in the magazine Proceso, federal authorities "orchestrated" the attack. 2) The students, preparing for a trip to the capital for a national protest, arrived in Iquala more than an hour after the mayoral event was over. It has also come out that the students were not entering but leaving town when their buses were stopped. So the official fable about the motives behind the attack don't hold up. 3) A team of scientists looking into the affair contested the federal attorney general's claim that it is impossible to identify bodies said to be those of the students, even by DNA traces, because of a massive fire. Their report concluded that there is no evidence of a fire capable of such destruction at the rubbish site where they were supposedly dumped. This means the question of what happened to the students is still open, and the authorities are hiding the truth. (See "Iguala: la historia no oficial" in Proceso nos. 1989 and 1990, excerpts posted online on 13 December 2014, and, in English, the UK Guardian summary of the leaked documents and scientific report, 16 December.) These and other facts have not been totally unknown before; the point is that a political situation is developing in which a broad section of Mexican society is taking note of information previously thought almost unbelievable because of the radical implication that the whole state structure and its institutions from top to bottom have blood on their hands. Aurora Roja, the publication and website of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (OCR) of Mexico, has put this event in the context of previous federally-led or federally-covered up attacks on the Ayotzinapa students; the concerted cover-up of responsibility for the attack by the three major political parties and state institutions, including the judiciary and army as well as the presidency; and above all, the "war against the people" being waged by the government, through its armed forces and security forces and the various drug gangs associated with different state entities. This effort to prevent rebellion has now sparked the most powerful rebellion Mexico has seen in decades and a golden opportunity to build a movement for making a revolution. As Aurora Roja has demonstrated, drawing on many investigations by journalists, human rights researchers and studies by oppositional organizations, this “war against the people” has been waged in coordination with the U.S. government and armed forces. The U.S. government has threatened sanctions against Mexico because of its failure to protect endangered sea turtles, but continues to aid, arm and coordinate with the Mexican government after about 100,000 people have been massacred since the previous president launched a “war on drugs” in 2007. The White House denied news reports that U.S. President Barack Obama planned to discuss these massacres at their scheduled meeting in Washington 6 January. Although a spokesperson acknowledged receiving a letter from Human Rights Watch about "generalized torture" and widespread "extrajudicial executions by security forces" under Pena's government, documenting 149 cases of forced disappearances, he said that any discussion of "human rights" between the two presidents would be in the context of security cooperation, according to Proceso (5 January). The U.S. has provided more than two billion dollars for Mexico's "war on drugs". The International Crisis Group (icg.org), a think tank set up to advise the U.S. and European governments, warns, "Mexico is facing a crisis of legitimacy." It cites polls showing that most people now have little respect for the army, police, governing parties and judiciary (in descending order of disrespect) – and "democracy in Mexico." That is a system, says Aurora Roja, in which elections are the adornment of "a criminal and illegitimate state" that just happens to be both a vassal and a weak link for the rulers of the U.S.