Elections in Mexico are always a sham, but this time they were resisted.
On 7 June, mid-term elections took place for 500 federal parliamentary seats, nine state governorships and over 1,000 town majors.
Mexican elections often are characterised by the buying of votes, and massive fraud and corruption scandals. This time was no different in those regards. There were high levels of violence, the assassination of candidates and party activists, and the militarisation of the streets and polling stations. At least seven candidates were murdered, most from the centre-left. In all cases there are allegations that goons loyal to the Jurassic ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), were responsible.
The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 years, from 1929 until 2000. Despite successive rounds of electoral reforms over decades, beginning with the introduction of proportional representation for the Congress in 1977, electoral fraud is endemic and has repeatedly robbed candidates of the centre-left from assuming the presidency.
Vote buying, ballot-box stuffing and candidate assassinations are part of the general corruption that characterises the Mexican state. Therefore, most Mexicans are not keen on participating in elections. Only 47 percent did this year.
Still, large numbers of activists often become involved in campaigns of the electoral left. It is also common for the radical left and a number of autonomous organisations and communities to call for people to not vote. They argue that whoever wins, they do not represent the people.
But this time there was a militant rejection of the electoral farce by a section of the population. A number of organisations, led by the relatives of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/rage-mexico-over-43-disappeared-students">43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero</a> and a dissident section of the teachers’ union (CNTE), called for an active boycott aimed at disrupting the elections to protest the corruption and the disappearance of thousands of Mexican people.
The call attracted a range of independent trade unions, activists from the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, human rights groups, community organisations and indigenous communities. The activist priest Alejandro Solilande, known for his work with Central American migrant workers and families of disappeared people, said, “Our movement has grown from indignation to mobilisation”, and that it is vital to expose the government that “exterminates our youth” and to “re-found” Mexico.
Angry mass mobilisations are common during election periods, but generally after results are released. This time, mobilisations began days in advance. The active boycott call was followed in numerous cities across the country, but achieved momentum mainly in Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas, in the east and south-east of the country.
In Mexico City, students prevented ballot boxes from being brought into voting centres located in a number of high schools and university campuses.
Oaxaca, the radical teachers’ bastion
In towns in Oaxaca, the dissident faction of the CNTE and the National Popular Assembly led the actions. Oaxaca’s teachers have for more than a year been mobilising for the repeal of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s so-called education reform, which among other things aims to introduce punitive teachers’ evaluation. They also have other demands relating to entitlements and in defence of public education.
As part of the protests, political headquarters were stormed, electoral paperwork was burnt, voting stations were destroyed and entrances to towns were blocked. In the small coastal town of San Francisco del Mar, the community barricaded all three entrances to the town; elections did not take place.
A similar story was repeated in eight other small municipalities in Oaxaca. Oaxaca is one of the most politically tense states, and includes the presence of guerrilla groups such as the Popular Revolutionary Front.
The government made a show force by deploying an additional 1,500 federal police the night before the election. These were reinforcements to 3,000 personnel brought in days in advance to the region of Pinotepa. Similar force was displayed across the southern states. Local and federal police, military police and marines guarded voting stations during this “celebration of democracy”.
Oaxaca’s electoral representatives asked the Electoral Commission to postpone the election or “call for extraordinary elections when the conditions are better”, but elections went ahead anyway.
The strong police presence did not deter the highly disciplined and determined teachers and activists from continuing their protests, destroying ballot boxes and preventing elections from taking place in a number of municipalities. Protests increased when Heriberto Magariño, leader of the teachers in the Istmo region, was, together with two dozen other teachers, detained by marines and taken to the General Prosecutor.
Guerrero, ‘There won’t be elections while we are missing the 43’
Guerrero, one of the poorest states of the country, is home to the families of the 43 Ayotzinapa students who were kidnapped by the state, handed over to drug cartels and disappeared last September. It was one of the states where the active boycott had the most resonance.
In the capital, Chilpancingo, hundreds of teachers and students built a tent city in the city square to coordinate the boycott and half of the 30,000 teachers from Guerrero were ready to mobilise. Melitón Ortega, father of one of the disappeared youth told the crowd: “We don’t want elections to give power and legitimacy to those candidates, to legitimise that they keep robbing us, killing us, disappearing us, that we get further impoverished with no justice”.
In the community of Tixtla, student activists, teachers and community members participated in protests that involved burning ballot boxes, marching and graffitiing the entire town in opposition to the election of the mayor.
In the mountainous municipality of Tlapa, near Ayotzinapa, members of Guerrero’s Popular Movement (MPG) led demonstrations, burning a truck and occupying the municipal council. Manuel Olivares, a local human rights advocate commented in regards to the militarisation of the region: “There is no democracy in a country that that imposes election though blood and fire”.
Following confrontations with goons from the PRI, more than 30 teachers and activists from Guerrero’s Teachers Coordinator were arrested by police. In response, Tlapa’s MPG detained 35 police officers with the hope of exchanging them for the political prisoners.
A police and military operation to free the cops resulted in the assassination of Antonio Vivar Díaz, a 28-year-old community development student, leader of the MPG and community guard commander. Mexican newspaper <a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2015/06/10/201cen-tlapa-ya-traian-ubicados-a-lideres-del-boicot-electoral201d-narran-5001.html">La Jornada</a> reported that his funeral became a big political action.
The State of Michoacán, one of the hardest hit by drug violence, is another example of the rejection of the traditional electoral system. The indigenous peoples in the town of Cherán expelled all political parties in April 2011. The community is governed under constitutionally-recognised customary law, with local representatives elected in community assemblies. Once again, Cherán did not allow the formal state-run elections to occur and interrupt their local democracy. Other towns in the state are following their lead.
Ultimately, PRI and the ultra-conservative National Action Party claimed a majority in Congress and half of the mayor positions, including Tixtla and Tlapa. Hundreds of protesters have been jailed for participating in the active boycott, dozens of others are injured and at least one protester was killed.
However, the active boycott was an example of organisation and coordination at a broad level to challenge the current political system. In some cases it effectively confronted the armed advances of the ruling party.
Protests against the electoral farce and for the freedom of political prisoners continue, mainly in the southern states. At the same time, in the marginalised suburbs of the State of Mexico, poor PRI supporters protest outside the party offices demanding the flat-screen TV and $250 they were promised in exchange for their vote.

Lourdes García Larqué

Resisting Mexico’s sham elections

The Festival of Rebellion and Resistance Against Capitalism made its way through Mexico in December 2014 and January 2015. The festival was organised by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), a federation of indigenous communities in resistance from around the country.
The event provided useful insights into the ravages of capitalism in Mexico and the current state of the Zapatista movement and the indigenous struggle.
Most of the nearly 3,000 registered participants were indigenous activists, representing more than 20 indigenous language groups. There were many non-indigenous activists from organisations and collectives affiliated to the “Other Campaign”, which the EZLN initiated in opposition to the presidential election of 2006. The event also attracted more than 400 international guests, mainly from the Americas and Europe.
Perhaps the most important guests were a group of campesinos (small farmers and rural workers) and students from the state of Guerrero. They are parents, siblings and surviving classmates of 43 students from the rural teacher-training college at Ayotzinapa, who were forcibly disappeared (i.e. kidnapped by government forces and allegedly handed over to a drug cartel) for their organised opposition to the government’s neoliberal education “reforms” and their struggle against the conditions of extreme poverty and neglect they live and work under.
The issue of the 43 students has provoked outrage in Mexican society, as it demonstrated the links between all levels of government, all the major political parties and organised crime in the bloody repression of social movements.
We joined the festival for its last two legs, both in Chiapas. First was the New Year fiesta in the town of Oventik, in an area of Zapatista self-government. Oventik is an impressive place, as it has been built by the community.
In addition to shops and dwellings, there are a school, sport facilities, a church and a building dedicated to the organisation of women. Almost all the buildings are adorned with murals depicting dignified and happy masked Zapatista men, women and children, as well as revolutionary heroes from Emiliano Zapata to Che Guevara.
At roughly 11pm, more than 1,000 people gathered around a stage and watched as 43 empty chairs were set out. The families of the missing students were then welcomed. They held pictures of their missing sons, as we chanted “No están solos!” / “You are not alone!” Two of the parents gave speeches.
We had heard parents of the Ayotzinapa students speak twice before in Mexico City. Always they apologised for not being “orators”, for being “just” campesinos. In truth, these parents have become key orators and leaders of the struggle in Mexico.
Their fierce determination to speak out has kept the issue alive and has rallied large numbers to their cause for more than six months now.
The Ayotzinapa families also attended the conference sessions that began three days later at CIDECI-Unitierra, the University of the Earth, a Zapatista-built and run campus on the outskirts of San Cristobal.
The first day of the two-day event comprised reports from all of the previous sessions that had occurred in different states as well as new contributions by people telling of the problems that capitalism is causing in their local area. The two main themes that emerged were dispossession and repression.
Much of the dispossession related to “mega-projects”: dams, mines, highways, airports. One of the most obscene examples is the proposed Parque de las Siete Culturas, the Seven Cultures Theme Park in Puebla, whose investors will profit from selling knowledge about indigenous cultures. To make way for this development, the indigenous people are being displaced from their land – but not without resistance. Their representative stated that they “refuse to be turned into cultural merchandise”.
As for repression, we learned that Ayotzinapa is representative of a broader pattern in Mexico. Virtually every community in resistance spoke of the political prisoners taken from their struggle. Many also could talk of their disappeared or slain. Ever harsher anti-protest laws are being enacted. Bravery underlies all of the examples of radical activism in Mexico.
The final day involved the proposals session. Everyone was free to make proposals for action, and more than 100 speakers did. But these proposals were not discussed and debated, fleshed out, amended, adopted or rejected. They were simply stated, then added to the more than 400 pages of minutes.
While the event allowed for a sharing of stories, some participants expressed that their communities had raised money to send them there, and when they got back would want to know what courses of action had been decided.
The event was not structured to allow these decisions to be made. It appears that decision making – other than for local matters – is confined to the CNI leadership, which has a representative structure, and to the EZLN, which has an essentially military structure.
The Zapatistas and the larger networks of indigenous resistance in Mexico have maintained themselves impressively over the last 21 years. Numerous and varied mass struggles have continued to emerge, the most recent surrounding the 43 students. They have not yet achieved justice, but the government’s attempts to silence them have certainly failed.

Patrick Weiniger

The Zapatista festival of resistance

It has been almost two months since 43 students from a rural teacher training college in Ayotzinapa, in the Mexican countryside, were “disappeared” in an act involving the Mexican state, drug cartels and criminal organisations.
The case has highlighted the level of violence and impunity that prevails in the country.
On 26 September, six people were killed – including three student teachers, one of whom was found tortured and with the skin of his face removed – near the town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, several hours south of Mexico City. Twenty-six people were seriously injured, and 43 were disappeared, following an attack by local police following orders from the town mayor, who suspected that the students intended to protest a local political event.
All of the disappeared are from rural teacher training college Raúl Isidro Burgos, which trains poor, mainly indigenous, children of peasant and labourer families, giving them the opportunity to further their education and support their impoverished communities.
Survivors and witnesses say that soon after being kidnapped by police, the students were handed over to the drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos. The government, unable or unwilling to clarify the facts or bring any form of justice, has released dribs and drabs of information. Yet to date little has been clarified. Dozens of police agents and a handful of alleged drug cartel members had been detained as scapegoats, but there is still no sign of the students.
Twelve mass graves were found in the region surrounding the area where the students went missing, which contained the remains of at least 38 people, according to national newspaper El Universal. Security agencies declared those the missing students, but the announcement was later contradicted by investigators from an Argentinean forensic team.
The federal government reluctantly engaged in discussions with the families and promised to search for the missing students. Reports were released by the Federal Investigative Police and presented by attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam on 7 November.
Murillo Karam read the alleged confessions of two captured suspects. The 43 students, the suspects allegedly admitted, were kidnapped and transported in a truck and a smaller pick-up. Some of them suffocated in the truck; the rest were interrogated, killed, dumped in a garbage tip and burnt – some of them while still alive. The fire raged for more than 14 hours, fuelled by diesel, old tires and logs. The remains then were crushed with shovels and put in black rubbish bags. Some were dumped into a river.
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (which has led forensic investigations in several countries and is known for identifying the remains of Che Guevara) studied the remains and concluded that the bodies do not belong to the students.
The parents continue to hope that their children are alive. One mother said at a press conference after Murillo Karam’s statements: “Do they expect, with how much we love them, that we will accept the presumption that they are dead, without any irrefutable evidence? Do they expect we would blindly trust what the government says – the same government that took our children?”
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets, chanting, “They took them alive, we want them alive!” and “It was the state!”, from Ayotzinapa to New York, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi and across the world. Strikes have taken place in most Mexican universities and high schools. People have had enough of the violence that has engulfed the country and the impunity that reigns. Offices of traditional political parties have been burnt and roads barricaded.
Why the rural schools?
The case of the Ayotzinapa students is not isolated; there are specific reasons why these students were targeted. The rural teacher training colleges (normales rurales) were established as a result of the social struggles of the rural poor during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. They were founded during the 1920s to provide an education for the children of campesinos (peasant farmers or rural labourers) and to train teachers willing to go to remote communities and respond to the specific needs of ejidos – communal land units that were distributed after the revolution.
Most importantly, the normales rurales aimed to develop community leaders and carriers of the socialist education program of the revolution.
From the beginning, however, the normales rurales were not a priority for the state, so the colleges had to find their own resources, produce their own food and maintain their own buildings. This sort of collective action and independence has characterised the schools ever since.
Critical pedagogy and democratic education are part of the curriculum. Students, teachers and the community participate together in activities such as collective harvesting and maintaining roads and public infrastructure. Students from the normales rurales face the everyday realities of the Mexican countryside, which has been further impoverished since the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.
The schools that the students end up teaching in often lack chairs, tables, boards or even roofs. Students at these schools come without eating breakfast, having walked up to three hours to attend. Parents and students are often victims of state repression, or the violence of multinationals and their hired criminals.
It is no surprise that the normales rurales trained revolutionary leaders such as Genaro Vazquez, Lucio Cabaña and Othon Salazar, socialist rural teachers who led important guerrilla movements during the second half of the 20th century. All three in fact were students from Ayotzinapa. From the moment the Mexican government abandoned its rhetoric of socialist education (a legacy of reforms carried out in the 1930s), the normales rurales have become a thorn in the side of the state.
A number of the schools have been closed down, and they have been derogatively labelled “nests of communists”, “Bolshevik kindergartens”, or “guerrilla nurseries”. Students from the schools are often discriminated against when applying for jobs; sometimes they are brutally killed. The government has tried modifying the curriculum to undermine the basis of the normales rurales and the core ideals of their graduates. This has been a major mobilising factor in a campaign that the rural students have been waging for public, democratic, critical education and broader social justice.
The commitment of these students to their communities is remarkable. Take the example of Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz, one of the disappeared. He was accepted into a teacher training college closer to Mexico City, where he would have gained better career opportunities. He insisted on staying in Ayotzinapa so that he could give back to his community and support his father by working in the cornfields. His family still hopes he will be back for the next harvest season. They had hoped he would return for this harvest, but in lieu of that, Emiliano’s classmates are helping his father in the fields.
Not an isolated case
The targeting of oppositional students from normales rurales fits a broader pattern of political violence and organised crime in Mexico. Between 2006 and 2012, there were more than 136,000 violent deaths, and 26,000 forcibly disappeared people, as a result of the state’s long running “war on drugs”.
This is a sham war that was supposed to target drug cartels and other criminal organisations, but whose victims have been workers, the rural poor, indigenous communities and students. It aims to terrorise people and clear away opposition to the government’s neoliberal attacks and dismantling of the remnants of social welfare.
The corporate media, national and international, have made a great effort to portray the right wing president Enrique Peña Nieto as the country’s “saviour”. For example, the February edition of Time magazine displayed on its cover a bold picture of the president with the tag line “How Enrique Peña Nieto’s sweeping reforms have changed the narrative in his narco-stained nation”.
 In September, the Atlantic Council (a right wing think tank) awarded Peña Nieto the “Global Citizen Award” for “creating a governing mandate … through extraordinary leadership and sweeping reforms in telecommunications, energy, education, labour and more”. Yet, in Mexico, the extremely unpopular reforms result in booing and heckling wherever the president goes, including in the most prestigious private universities in the country.
In his first 14 months of government, from December 2012 to February this year, there were nearly 24,000 violent deaths, an undetermined number of forced disappearances and hundreds of political internments. While the violence is generalised and affects, at some point, all levels of society, it continues to be the poor, the working class and the rural farmers that are the main targets of both the state and the criminal organisations.
Communities in Guerrero, for example, fight multinational mining corporations that, with government permission, attempt to displace them to exploit natural resources. The weekly newsmagazine Contralínea has documented at least 35 major cases of social conflict that involve road blockages, sabotage and other expressions of resistance, linked to mining.
The case of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa is sparking reactions the government did not foresee. The challenge is to turn this outrage into a successful movement that opposes not only the murders and disappearances, but also the political class and the economic agenda that has generated this violence.
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Lourdes García Larqué is a Mexican activist based in Melbourne. She has participated in a number of Latin America solidarity groups and is a producer of Accent of Women on 3CR community radio. Recently she organised national actions in solidarity with Mexican students and against Enrique Peña Nieto’s visit to Australia.

Resisting Mexico’s sham elections

The Zapatista festival of resistance

Rage in Mexico over 43 disappeared students

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