Mexico

Alan Woods and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, addressed a packed meeting last week in the auditorium of the Leon Trotsky Museum, in Coyoacan, Mexico, to launch the Mexican edition of Leon Trotsky’s Stalin’s Gangsters.

On May 30 the Mexican edition of Reason in Revolt was launched in a large lecture theatre in the Polytechnic, with about 150 students, workers, trade unionists and peasant activists listening and taking part in the debate. The mood was very enthusiastic and once again shows the powerful impact the Marxist Tendency is having in Mexico.

On Tuesday, May 29, over 150 people, mainly workers and trade unionists filled a hall in the Workers' University of Mexico to hear Alan Woods speaking on Venezuela and the Latin American revolution. The ideas he outlined connected immediately with the mood of Mexican workers and youth after the tumultuous events of last year when millions mobilise against electoral fraud.

Alan Woods spoke at a second meeting in Puebla, presenting Reason in Revolt. The meeting was a great success, and shows the growing thirst for revolutionary ideas in Mexico.

On Thursday May 24 the supporters of the Mexican Marxist Tendency Militante and the Frederick Engels Foundation in Puebla organized a very successful public meeting to launch the book Bolshevism: the Road to Revolution.

Just six months after Calderon assumed the presidency and the anti-fraud movement and the APPO were defeated, the situation in Mexico is heating up again. The previous showdown over the elections and the revolutionary struggle in Oaxaca solved nothing. The bourgeois, foolishly, perhaps believed that the working class was finished, and that the struggle was over. They will not be able to maintain that opinion any longer.

Hundreds of thousands gathered once again in the Zocalo Square in Mexico City on November 20 to celebrate the swearing in of the real winner of the presidential election, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The movement in Mexico is revealing a resilience and determination to go on. All the conditions for revolution exist, if only the leaders would take advantage of these.

Pickets in solidarity with the struggle in Oaxaca took place in several countries yesterday. Today we provide reports on pickets in London, Moscow and Athens with more to follow soon.

Yesterday, some 40 activists gathered in front of the Mexican embassy in Brussels. Young people and veterans of international solidarity work joined with Mexicans, Chileans and others to protest against the brutal repression of workers and peasants in Oaxaca.

The armed forces have been used against the working people of Oaxaca in Mexico. The real face of the Mexican ruling class has been shown to the masses. Here we publish a statement by the comrades of the Marxist tendency, Militante, in Mexico on what measures the movement should take now.

What is a revolution? Trotsky explained that it starts when the mass of ordinary people who normally are not interested in politics, rise up and start to take their destiny into their own hands. This is clearly what has been developing in Mexico over the recent period.