Mexico's Revolution Then and Now

James D. Cockcroft

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781583673645
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

Written to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the first predominantly anti-capitalist revolution in the world, Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now is the perfect introductory text and one that will also sharpen the understanding of seasoned observers. Cockcroft provides readers with the historical context within which the revolution occurred; explains how the revolutionary process has played out over the past ten decades; tells us how the ideals of the revolution live on in the minds of Mexico's peasants and workers; and critically examines the contours of modern Mexican society, including its ethnic and gender dimensions. Well-deserved attention is paid to the tensions between the rulers and the ruled inside the country and the connected tensions between the Mexican nation and the neighboring giant to the north.

Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now also explores the possibility of Mexico’s revolutionary history finally bearing the fruit long hoped for by the country's disenfranchised—a prospect kept alive by the unyieldingstruggle of the last one hundred years. This is the definitive introduction to one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE
Mexicans Rise Up, 1910–2010: Similarities and Differences

If what they want is martyrs from Cananea, here they’re going to find them, in the doorways to the mine.

—JESÚS VERDUGO, strike committee president,
Cananea, February 15, 2010

To understand the strengths and weaknesses of multiple generations of popular movements against the economic system and its power elites in Mexico and achieve a more profound historical analysis, we must uncover several of their shared characteristics, always in an international context. This chapter will compare the two periods 1900–1910 and 2000–2010.

The Revolution of 1910–1917 was an explosive confrontation between social classes that pitted peasants and workers against landlords and capitalists. It was marked by intense nationalism, that is, a challenge to the economic and political interests of the imperialist powers, especially the United States, whose investors controlled 14–20 percent of the land in Mexico.

Whatever the internal class and ethnic divisions may have been, when the revolutionary struggles erupted from their social bases, all the fractions of the “modernizing” bourgeoisie and the “traditional” oligarchy agreed on one thing: the need to defeat the peasants and workers and prevent the lower classes from conquering the upper classes definitively. In this sense, there was no social revolution, only a political one, and even that political revolution was less complete than is customarily assumed. The social struggles have continued, with their ups and downs, until today.

The Constitution of 1917 proclaimed a supposedly “revolutionary” capitalist state with a strong presidency, which, as it turned out, required years of internal and external struggles to become consolidated. There were many competitors for state power, but almost all who triumphed were big boosters of manipulating revolutionary rhetoric for capitalist ends. President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) introduced a profound nationalism, but he never intended to break with the capitalist system. Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) and his successors were servants of foreign capital, criminals and thieves on a grand scale, who sacrificed national dignity (dignidad)—a hugely important concept in Latin America connoting self-respect and pride—on the altar of their own greed and the economic and political interests of Mexico’s giant neighbor to the north, the United States.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, situations remarkably similar to those of the first ten years of the previous century have reemerged in Mexico. Among the recurrences are: economic crisis; corruption and divisions among the elites; an overwhelming influence of foreign capital; fraudulent elections; labor strikes and international fights for labor and human rights; increased militarization; guerrilla attacks; new political parties and anticapitalist ideologies; waves of migration; massacres, tortures, and imprisonments of activists; blocked upward mobility, and often downward mobility, for the intermediate classes¹; and an immiseration of the masses accompanied by an incipient loss of fear among the populace in the face of state repression.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico had a “modernizing dictatorship” entering its twilight years of power, during which many of its citizens were unemployed or obligated to work in the United States. Today, as another supposedly modernizing dictatorship enters its final years, nearly a third of Mexico’s labor force is unemployed or working in the United States, where more than 41 million Mexicans and their families reside. Some 12 million of them do not have legal papers and survive under increasingly difficult and terrifying conditions.

Today the authoritarian system does not have a leader like Porfirio Díaz, frequently reelected as president, but small powerful groups who share the presidency, always at the beck and call of big capital, foreign and domestic. To maintain their power, they use fraudulent electoral processes, disinformation campaigns trumpeted by the mass media, clientelism, corruption, and above all, violence by military, police, paramilitary, and narcotrafficking forces. All these forces share political power more completely each day, whatever their internal conflicts might be.²

These ruling groups consist of handfuls of individuals, interconnected but fighting among themselves—businessmen, narcotraffickers, military officers, and political leaders, principally from the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and PAN (National Action Party) but also former PRI and PAN members who now form the major part of the leadership of the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). Most are corrupt, and all accept and serve the neoliberal system of contemporary capitalism and economic integration with the United States under terms that are disastrous for the nation, echoing the situation during the “porfiriato” (thirty-four-year reign of Porfirio Díaz). Blathering about “the new democracy” that enables more than one party to win the presidency, they practice the old dictatorship of capitalist interests.

The catastrophic results of this are evident. Mexico has become a militarized society known around the world for its violence. Its economy is in free fall, with the second most unequal income distribution in the Americas after Haiti. In the last twenty-five years the Mexican minimum wage has been the weakest of all in Latin America.

It is not surprising then that today, just as during the first decade of the previous century, a social volcano is boiling up. In 1910 Mexico had an economy that still had not recovered from the impact of a recession three years earlier. Peasants, Indians, and women were seething with anger against the violent abuses they were suffering and the losses of their lands and communal rights. Urban proletarians were becoming increasingly anxious about their miserable salaries and work conditions and a staggering rate of unemployment and underemployment in an atmosphere of growing violence, militarism, and paramilitarism, all in a nation gravely threatened by U.S. intervention. Mexicans on both sides of the border were rising up in anger.

Isn’t this the situation today? In recent years, Mexicans have been rebelling more and more against their desperate economic situations and state repression, protesting the continuous presence of soldiers, paramilitaries, and policemen in their towns and cities. They have been organizing in various parts of the country at levels of self-discipline and dignidad (dignity) that are truly impressive. For example, the May 2006 revolt by residents of San Salvador Atenco, twenty miles outside Mexico City, blocked the construction of an international airport. Also in 2006, the peoples of Oaxaca commenced a nonviolent uprising and created the self-governing “Commune of Oaxaca” that electrified the world. The neo-Zapatistas’ equally inspiring creation of autonomous municipalities in Chiapas have survived military encirclement. Following from the examples set by the armed struggle of the Magonistas³ and Zapatistas, women have been participating more than ever and assuming leadership positions.

Mexico’s peoples have also been self-organizing immense street demonstrations. In 2001 the nation’s original peoples trekked, by foot and bus, from the trails of their remote villages to Mexico City’s main thoroughfares for “the March of the Colors of the Earth.” To protest the electoral coup d’état of 2006 that stole Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s popular victory, the people of greater Mexico City carried out a three-month-long “popular assembly and vigil” in the main streets of the world’s second largest metropolis. The new slogan became “Effective Suffrage, No Imposition,” a slight modification of Francisco I. Madero’s “Effective Suffrage, No Reelection” (ironically Díaz’s motto in 1876, but one that the Magonistas introduced in the first years of the twentieth century through the popular revolutionary newspaper Regeneración, the “independent newspaper of combat”). On December 4, 2009, to commemorate the ninety-fifth anniversary of Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s entry into Mexico City, independent trade unionists, teachers, students, and brigadistas (brigade members loyal to López Obrador) peacefully engineered “the taking of Mexico City.”

Each day Mexico’s peoples direct their frustration and outrage at the economic system and its spokespeople. A growing number of Mexicans cite Article 39 of the Constitution of 1917, which grants the people national sovereignty and “the inalienable right to change or modify the form of their government.” Many voices in the popular resistance movements, including López Obrador’s, are calling for the founding of a new republic with full national sovereignty.

That is exactly what the revolutionaries of a hundred years ago sought and, despite their divisions and defeats, achieved on paper if not on the ground in the 1917 Constitution. Influenced by the Magonistas, it was at the time the most progressive constitution in the world. In order to deepen our historical perspective on contemporary problems, a brief review of the Magonistas’ political analysis and practice can be quite illuminating, especially with regard to the roles of the original peoples and the peasantry, women, immigrants in the United States, workers, and the unemployed, underemployed, and overexploited masses. Of equal importance is the Magonista approach to the role of the state, the clergy, military and paramilitary repression, nationalism and internationalism.

THE ORIGINAL PEOPLES AND THE PEASANTRY

The original peoples of Mexico and all the Americas have experienced colonialism and imperialism as an uninterrupted process of 518 years of genocidal subjection and enduring resistance. This process has entailed ecological destruction, the creation and perpetuation of an unpayable debt as a tool for economic blackmail and domination of a people, and the routine use of kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and violence against women.

The Magonistas understood the suffering and dignity of the original peoples. Ricardo Flores Magón and his two brothers, Jesús and Enrique, like Benito Juárez, grew up among them in Oaxaca. The Flores Magóns’ parents, who had considerable Indian blood, maintained traditional, communal, customs.⁴ Flores Magón and the PLM emphasized recognizing the rights and cultures of the original peoples and all of the peasantry. Many women and men from the peasantry and the nascent proletariat joined the political, economic, military, and ideological fights of the PLM, from the big strikes of the first decade of the twentieth century to the key military victories that forced Porfirio Díaz to sign the “peace treaties of Ciudad Juárez” and leave the country in 1911.

The Yaqui Javier Buitimea and the Mayo Fernando Palomares were Magonista leaders in Sonora during those years. Later, the young lawyer Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, a PLM veteran, became a key adviser for Emiliano Zapata. During the Aguascalientes Convention of 1914 he crumpled the Mexican flag in his fist, asserting that it symbolized “the lie of history” since “our independence was no independence for the native race, but for the Creoles alone,” a sensational challenge that brought leveled pistols before his chest.⁵

Primo Tapia, a Purépecha from Zacapu, Michoacán, began his political life as an emigrant to the United States, where he became a Magonista and participated in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) after it was founded in 1905. He returned to Mexico in 1919 and led revolts in various states, thereby forcing their governments to distribute lands to the original peoples but also earning the hatred of the authorities and the hired gunmen of the large estate owners. After joining the Communist Party of Mexico in 1921, he helped organize the National Peasant League (1926), but was captured and died under torture the same year.

In 1905–1906, the PLM proclaimed a revolutionary ideology opposed to imperialism and in favor of the workers, peasants, and progressive elements of the bourgeoisie and intermediate classes. Thousands of Mexicans united behind their cause. On July 1, 1906, the PLM printed half a million copies of its program, in which it emphasized the importance of the original peoples and the need for radical agrarian reform. Most of the program’s points were more revolutionary than the Zapatistas’ “Plan de Ayala” (November 1911) or the Constitution of 1917. Point 48 of the program guaranteed “protection of the Indian race.”

The “exposition” of the program and Point 50 stipulated “the return of the ejidos⁶ to the peoples who have been stripped of them … especially to restore to Yaquis, Mayas, and other tribes, communities, or individuals the lands of which they have been dispossessed.” Also, by calling for a complete agrarian reform and not mentioning indemnity for the expropriated lands, the PLM program was the most revolutionary of the epoch (and in this regard today as well).

Points 28, 37, and 47 of the program exemplified its revolutionary character. The first proclaimed, “All debts of rural day laborers to their employers are hereby declared null and void.” The second said, “the state will either create or develop an agricultural bank that will lend money to poor farmers at low interest rates, payable in installments.” The third provided for “measures to eliminate or restrict usury, pauperism, and scarcity of basic staples.”

The program even had a “special clause” on not paying the national debt, very relevant during the economic crisis that so oppresses Mexico and other developing nations now: “The Mexican people do not want any more debts burdening the Fatherland and therefore will not recognize any debts that the dictatorship, under any form or pretext, thrusts upon the Nation, whether by contracting loans, or by recognizing, too late, previous obligations which no longer have legal value.”

In his famous essay, “To the Proletarians,”⁷ Ricardo Flores Magón explained why there were so many economic points in the PLM program. “To be effective, political freedom requires the presence of another freedom,” he wrote, “economic freedom.” The rich “enjoy economic freedom and that is why they are the only ones who benefit from political freedom … therefore the program shows the measures the Mexican proletariat must take to conquer its economic dependence.”

WOMEN

On September 24, 1910, Regeneración published a famous and controversial article by Ricardo Flores Magón, “To the Woman”:

If the man is enslaved, so are you. Chains don’t recognize gender … the same claws that exhaust the man strangle you…. The frontiers of women’s destiny are lost in the blackness of fatigue and hunger or in the darkness of marriage and prostitution…. A woman’s wage is so paltry that frequently she has to prostitute herself in order to sustain her children, when in the marriage market she fails to meet a man who takes her as a wife, another type of prostitution sanctioned by law … because marriage is nothing else but prostitution in the majority of cases…. A woman’s condition in this century varies according to her social standing, but tradition and law continue to subordinate her to the man. An eternal minor, she is placed by law under the tutelage of the husband; she cannot vote and cannot be voted for, and to be able to sign civil contracts she must possess worldly goods.⁸

The PLM, in spite of the patriarchal tendencies of many of its male members, was the only party at the time that encouraged women to enlist in its ranks as members with full rights. Many working women responded, particularly in the textile and cigarette industries, and became active militants in the strikes of the so-called “precursor era.” Women became leaders in the fights launched by the Magonistas, and many of them were jailed or assassinated (as in Río Blanco-Orizaba, Veracruz, in January 1907). For example, Margarita Ortega led a Magonista guerrilla group in the northwest. Her daughter was assassinated by soldiers in 1912. Margarita herself was captured in 1914 by federal troops loyal to Huerta, tortured for four days, and finally executed.⁹

According to Enrique Flores Magón, “Our women comrades smuggled arms from El Paso” (in the folds of their clothing). In May 1911, the New York Times observed that “women have taken a spectacular part in the revolution.”¹⁰ A large number of these revolutionary women came from the PLM or felt inspired by it. However, Sara Estela Ramírez, Teresa Urrea, and María Talavera have received relatively little attention when compared to the women commanders of the Zapatistas, or the “women revolutionary soldiers,” before the post-1917 official mythology converted them into simply the servants of men in arms. Yet these three women reflect the wide range of origins, courage, and strength of women choosing to be independent at a time when it was extremely dangerous to do so. Each of them related to Magonism and the struggles of los de abajo (the underclasses).

Sara Estela Ramírez, a poet, schoolteacher, trade union organizer, and journalist, was an important spokesperson of the PLM. In one of her poems she wrote: “The worker is the arm, the heart of the world.” Her poem “To the Woman” shows her feminist attitude: “Rise up! / … to action / and powerful, beautiful in qualities, magnificent ...