Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico

Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982

Fernando Calderon, Adela Cedillo, Fernando Herrera Calderon, Adela Cedillo, Fernando Calderon, Fernando Herrera Calderon, Adela Cedillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136478505
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

The Cold War in Latin America spawned numerous authoritarian and military regimes in response to the ostensible threat of communism in the Western Hemisphere, and with that, a rigid national security doctrine was exported to Latin America by the United States. Between 1964 and 1985, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uraguay experienced a period of state-sponsored terrorism commonly referred to as the "dirty wars." Thousands of leftists, students, intellectuals, workers, peasants, labor leaders, and innocent civilians were harassed, arrested, tortured, raped, murdered, or 'disappeared.'

Many studies have been done about this phenomenon in the other areas of Latin America, but strangely, Mexico's dirty war has been excluded from this particular scholarship. Here for the first time is a sustained look at this period and consideration of the many facets that make up the nearly two decades of the Mexican dirty war. Offering the reader a broad perspective of the period, the case studies in the book present narratives of particular armed revolutionary movements as well as thematic essays on gender, human rights, culture, student radicalism, the Cold War, and the international impact of this state-sponsored terrorism.

1

Madera 1965

Primeros Vientos¹

Elizabeth Henson

Introduction

Madera, Sierra of Chihuahua, Mexico. Just before dawn on September 23, 1965, a squad of 13 poorly armed young men who called themselves the Grupo Popular Guerrillero de la Sierra (GPG) attacked an army base on the edge of this town of 12,000 inhabitants, expecting to find some 70 soldiers asleep in the barracks. Minutes later, soldiers who had camped on the outskirts fell on them from behind and cut off their retreat; they killed eight guerrillas but five escaped with the help of townspeople into the surrounding mountains. Four soldiers were killed and a fifth died of wounds; soldiers killed a deaf milkman when he disobeyed an order to halt. The governor of the state, former revolutionary war general Práxedis Giner Durán, refused efforts of family members to remove the bodies and ordered them to be thrown into a common grave without shrouds. “They wanted land? Give it to them until they’re full!”²

Weeks after the attack, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered 5,000 hectares of land to be distributed to the Ejido Belizario Domínguez³ and Giner signed an agreement giving 39,000 hectares to form the Ejido Huizopa, both in the municipality of Madera.⁴ In 1971, President Luis Echeverría distributed 256,000 hectares of Bosques de Chihuahua (Chihuahua’s Forests), the local logging company and the guerrilla’s principal antagonist, to form the largest ejido in the republic, that of El Largo, whose members continued to supply lumber to the company.⁵

The attack on the base developed from a popular movement that had organized demonstrations, land invasions, and armed self-defense by campesinos⁶ and students throughout the state during the previous six years. Mid-century industrial growth—the so-called Miracle—had long put increasing pressure on campesinos, both landless workers whose demands for ejidos had languished for decades and serrano smallholders confronting encroaching timber barons. In November 1959, caciques had assassinated a Madera schoolteacher who had been advising campesinos in conflict with Bosques de Chihuahua, setting off a cycle of recurring protests. Students at the normal schools (teachers’ training schools, called normalistas) joined petitioners for ejidos in land invasions, many of them in the fertile valley of the Río Conchos, dominated by vast agribusiness. Protesters occupied the downtown plaza in front of the Office of Agrarian Affairs (DAAC) for months at a time on two separate occasions. Students from the preparatory schools (high schools), the state university, and the normal schools raised both their own demands and those of the campesinos. In the sierra, smallholders and ejidatarios battled caciques allied with Bosques de Chihuahua as they sought to open new tracts to large-scale timbering. These various currents of resistance united in the General Union of Mexican Workers and Campesinos (UGOCM), under the auspices of Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Popular Socialist Party (PPS), whose General Secretary in Chihuahua was the young normalista and later schoolteacher Arturo Gámiz, a member of the PPS youth section who had attended secondary school at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City and taken part in the wave of strikes which ended with an army occupation of the dormitories.⁷ The strength of the movement was such that two presidents of the republic were compelled to meet with its leaders.

The armed component of Mexico’s first guevarist group came from the sierra, from people whose propensity for armed self-defense easily loaned itself to foquista revolutionary theories then gaining currency within the broader movement. Unlike many later armed movements undertaken by students frustrated by their inability to bring about social change through other means—this was not the case in Guerrero—the roots of the original Grupo Popular Guerrillero (GPG) were endemic. I would argue for the importance of the popular movement that produced the GPG and against its teleological collapse into fascination with the guerrilla, a figure that tends to eclipse all others. As in the revolution of 1910, Chihuahua fielded an army whose social origins were various.

The attack represented the confluence of two traditions of armed struggle, one being foquismo inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959 and the other dating back to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Apache Wars, when mestizo settlers were given land in return for defending the frontier. These serrano ranchers, who have been described by Alonso, Fuentes Mares, Jordán, Katz, Knight, Nugent, and Orozco⁸ in similar terms, now fought to defend semi-autonomous rural communities in isolated hinterlands threatened by the expansion of logging. The Revolution of 1910 began in the sierra and they had been a major component of Pancho Villa’s Army of the North.

In the early 1960s, the UGOCM led hundreds of land invasions and demonstrations receiving broad support; federal agrarian officials had ordered the state authorities to satisfy some of the protesters’ demands, but the state remained adamant in opposition. Giner’s recalcitrance resulted in the radicalization of protests. In early 1964, the GPG, led by Gámiz and Salomón Gaytán, whose father had fought for the expropriation of a local hacienda and whose land had been taken by the caciques, emerged in the sierra and withstood repeated attempts by rural police and federal troops to dislodge them, expropriated a large cache of automatic weapons, and enjoyed the protection of local campesinos.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 mounted a challenge to the traditional communist parties, the PPS and the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM), who took their leadership from Moscow. The orthodox parties had long given up on revolution and advocated the negotiation of successive stages, based on the notion that Latin America’s mode of production was semi-feudal and must evolve into capitalism to create the conditions for socialism. This strategy tied the masses and their vanguard to an alliance with sectors of the elite, while emphasizing the importance of the urban working class over rural workers and subsistence farmers.

The Cuban Revolution would not have happened without the handful of guerrilla fighters based in the rugged mountains who acted in defiance of the traditional communist party, which only offered support when faced with a fait accompli. It also would not have happened without the workers and students in the cities and canefields, whose contribution has been downplayed in the official myth.⁹ But it was the barbudos from the sierra and not the party leaders who took power and whose achievement opened the way for a new formulation of revolutionary strategy.

With foquismo, Latin America became a source of ideas; other exports have been Liberation Theology, la nueva canción, and dependency theory. Foquismo held that a small band of dedicated revolutionaries could demonstrate elite vulnerability and grow into a magnetic center, a foco, capable of attracting campesinos, students, workers, and foreign journalists, eventually maturing into a people’s army. The initial conditions were unimportant, what mattered was the revolutionary will. This theory received its definitive explication in Revolution in the Revolution?¹⁰ written by the French philosopher and journalist, Régis Debray. First published in French in 1967, it would not have been available to the militants of the UGOCM but the ideas were already in wide circulation.

Foquismo implied a dramatic break with existing practices and beliefs. By insisting that the revolutionaries could themselves bring about the necessary conditions for the mobilization of forces sufficient to bring down US-backed dictatorial regimes, the foquistas challenged the orthodox doctrine, which required the maturing of objective and subjective conditions. They also posed an explicit challenge to the traditional party, by insisting the vanguard would emerge in the course of struggle. The image of triumphant barbudos entering Havana on tanks proved irresistible to tens of thousands of young people. Their attempts to apply the Cuban model to a variety of circumstances resulted in disaster.

The guerrilla movement led by Arturo Gámiz was among those failures. Gámiz seems to have believed the Cuban myth, which he had studied in Che Guevara’s Guerra de Guerrillas, and he and his companions took the leap between being convinced of the necessity for armed struggle to believing the same masses who mobilized for land invasions were only waiting for the signal to rise up in arms. The consequences were tragic and resulted in repression that drove the remnants of the movement underground. It later emerged in two distinct currents: as successor guerrilla organizations, the GPG–Arturo Gámiz and the Movimiento 23 de Septiembre (September 23rd Movement), and in the legal and aboveground Committees for Popular Defense, who fought for urban land in Chihuahua City.

Cuba’s support for all Latin American movements except Mexico became more pronounced as the US blockade tightened and Cuba had less to lose. Mexico had been the one Latin American government that defied the USA in refusing to join the Organization of American States’ boycott of Cuba.¹¹ The Cuban refusal to support Mexican revolutionary movements contributed to the blanket of silence which muffled the Mexican experience for many years. While members of solidarity movements in the USA publicized atrocities committed by regimes in Brazil and the Southern Cone, they ignored similar activities in Mexico, where they occurred under a civilian regime.

Agrarian Struggles

The struggle for land has animated generations of revolutionaries but the small farming unit, whether cooperative or not, rarely provides a dignified living. The failure of the ejido system was obvious long before the dissolution of Article 27 of the Constitution, which promised land to the landless, in the early 1990s and cannot be blamed only on greed and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and Glossary
• Preface
• Introduction: The Unknown Mexican Dirty War
• 1. Madera 1965: Primeros Vientos
• 2. Seizing Hold of Memories in Moments of Danger: Guerrillas and Revolution in Guerrero, Mexico
• 3. In the Vanguard of the Revolution: The Revolutionary Action Movement and the Armed Struggle
• 4. “Por la reunificación de los Pueblos Libres de América en su Lucha por el Socialismo”: The Chicana/o Movement, the PPUA and the Dirty War in Mexico in the 1970s
• 5. From Books to Bullets: Youth Radicalism and Urban Guerrillas in Guadalajara
• 6. A Revolutionary Group Fighting Against a Revolutionary State: The September 23rd Communist League Against the PRI-State (1973–1975)
• 7. Armed Struggle Without Revolution: The Organizing Process of the National Liberation Forces (FLN) and the Genesis of Neo-Zapatism (1969–1983)
• 8. Subjugating the Nation: Women and the Guerrilla Experience
• 9. Armed Forces and Counterinsurgency: Origins of the Dirty War (1965–1982)
• 10. Transcending Violence: A Crisis of Memory and Documentation
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index