As Mexico celebrates 201 years of hard-won independence from Spain, it now finds itself in the shadow of and in conflict with the greatest colonial, imperial power in history, while itself descending potentially into military dictatorship as national conflicts rise globally and as class conflicts intensify domestically. An elderly Russian exile who spent his last days in the old Mexico of the late 1930s, on the eve of WWII, correctly anticipated these junctures.
In recent days, the Mexican Senate passed through legislation spearheaded by the President that would bring municipal policing under military control, although it’s questionable if it will pass Congress. “Leftist” President, Adres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), has said he would bypass Congress via executive fiat, should the bill fail. These moves come as a longtime internal conflict in Mexico has steadily intensified, drug cartels inflicting terror campaigns on civilians in northern border towns, thus forcing the reversal of campaign promises to de-militarize Mexico.
This also comes at a time when Mexican workers are growing in militancy and distrust of the Mexican state and its rulers. Earlier this year for instance, 78% of the 88% of workers who participated in a General Motors union election at a factory in Guanajuato voted in favor of a new independent union, discarding its former government-affiliated union that often sided with bosses in order to keep labor peace. Workers at the plant took advantage of a labor reform inaugurated by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, ratified in 2019, stipulating that new labor contracts needed to be approved by workers in secret ballot elections. They used a rejection of a contract to build momentum for a new union election, which brought to victory SINTTIA, over the collaborationist Confederation of Mexican Workers affiliate who’d ‘represented’ them for 25 years. This union struggle was supported by independent unions at Volkswagen and Audi in Puebla and Nissan in Morelos and by the United Auto Workers and AFL-CIO in the U.S., Unifor in Canada, and other international unions, according to The Militant newspaper.
In April, Mexican truckers shut down an international border crossing in Pharr, TX, in protest against increased wait times imposed by Governor Greg Abbott. In the face of growing militancy among the Mexican working class, as well as mounting clashes with Washington over matters of diplomacy and the management of natural resources like water and oil, the Mexican state has steadily increased its military presence among civilian life and politics in the name of combatting drug cartels. Often, it’s been trade union leaders caught in the crossfire of gun battles staged by reactionary forces inside Mexico. Others are straight up targeted.
Long seen as a government with broad social services for its people and one that encourages the participation of workers in political life, Mexico fosters a terrorizing atmosphere for working civilians and anyone who petitions the government, including journalists, as Mexico consistently ranks among the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters. Many, including myself, who descend from Mexico, live near it, and miss the old peaceful Mexico of lore, have always struggled to answer what went wrong and how to fix it. That was until I read, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” by Lev Davidovich Bronstein, known to history as Leon Trotsky, or, as I once heard a former Trotskyist say, he would go on to be affectionately dubbed by the Mexican people while there in exile, Don León. If only rumor, it would still be appropriate to grant the old man this title of honor.
It was the first draft of an article he clearly intended to expand upon, found on his desk after being killed in Mexico City by a Stalinist psychopath. The old man — as those of us who identify with his cause of communist internationalism affectionately refer to him — wrote masterful work while south of the Rio Grande, in between political meetings, farming and visits from Andre Breton, Mexican politicians, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. This was one of those works, despite being unfinished. Although he settled-in well, gaining the mutual respect and admiration for the Mexican people and their elected leaders, he nevertheless placed Mexico’s objective political reality within the broader context of international capitalism.
A thesis for understanding the imperialist epoch and the place of unions inside it, Trotsky also anticipated Mexico’s turn towards a military dictatorship, which the recent moves to militarize municipal police suggest, in typical fashion for the person about whom a trilogy titled, “The Prophet,” was made.
He began by explaining that the social conditions of imperialism in this era were such that trade unions in all countries were growing ever closer to the state, including Stalinist Russia. This, he explained, was a dialectical reflection of the bureaucratization and centralization of monopoly capitalism (“MC”). As MC becomes more and more dependent on the state, and vice versa, so do the trade unions, whose leaderships then and now were and are class-collaborationist and co-dependent on the bourgeois state. Nevertheless, he believed a struggle had to be launched by revolutionary parties worldwide for leadership over the unions in every country, despite the totalitarian conditions inside Germany and Russia at the time.
He went on to discuss cases where this was so, focusing on for example the state of the trade unions during the defeated Spanish Revolution, the betrayal of the unions in America for Roosevelt’s entry into the second imperialist world slaughter, and others, including Mexico, wherein he had a front-row seat. Then, a legislative reform had recently passed through the Mexican Congress, which supposedly gave workers say over the railways and oil fields in the name of “nationalization.”
Trotsky explained that such capitalist nationalization was intended to keep the workers under the discipline of a semi-totalitarian union apparatus and a latent totalitarian state who could flip a switch at any moment and transform the semi-state unions into instruments of repression, while militarizing the police:
“The nationalization of railways and oil fields in Mexico has of course nothing in common with socialism. It is a measure of state capitalism in a backward country which in this way seeks to defend itself on the one hand against foreign imperialism and on the other against its own proletariat. The management of railways and oil fields through labor organizations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for in the essence of the matter the management is affected through the labor bureaucracy, which is independent of the workers, but in return, completely dependent on the bourgeois state.”
[…]
“In Mexico the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions and have, in the nature of things, assumed a semi-totalitarian character. The state-ization of the trade unions was, according to the conception of the legislators, introduced in the interests of the workers in order to assure them an influence upon the governmental and economic life. But insofar as foreign imperialist capitalism dominates the national state and insofar as it is able, with the assistance of internal reactionary forces, to overthrow the unstable democracy and replace it with outright fascist dictatorship, to that extent the legislation relating to the trade unions can easily become a weapon in the hands of imperialist dictatorship.”
[…] Last one:
“The feebleness of the national bourgeoisie, the absence of traditions of municipal self-government, the pressure of foreign capitalism and the relatively rapid growth of the proletariat, cut the ground from under any kind of stable democratic regime. The governments of backward, i.e., colonial and semi-colonial countries, by and large assume a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character; and differ from one another in this: That some try to orient in a democratic direction, seeking support among workers and peasants, while others install a form close to military-police dictatorship. This likewise determines the fate of the trade unions. They either stand under the special patronage of the state or they are subjected to cruel persecution.”
When seeing him discuss “internal reactionary forces” enabled by foreign imperialism, one could say Trotsky also anticipated the emergence of the so-called ‘drug cartels.’ alongside the Bonapartist state and its institutional organs.
The U.S. - Mexico border has steadily militarized since the signage of the USMCA’s precursor, NAFTA, in 1994, which proletarianized large swaths of its once rural populations that in turn led to mass migrations to the U.S., beginning with border barriers that resembled military installations, along with militarized border agents. On the Mexican side, the military took a far more visible presence in public, in the name of fighting insurgent drug cartels operating in northern Mexico. On a reporting trip to Reynosa, Tamaulipas in 2018, I witnessed tanks on the Mexican side of the bridge connecting the city to Hidalgo, Texas. It was the first time I’d seen a live military tank. I’ll never forget it.
During the Trump administration, U.S. national guard troops were deployed to the border under a declared national emergency regarding immigration. Biden lifted the emergency, but U.S. military personnel remain on the border, as congressionally approved border walls continue to be built in South Texas.
Mexico’s military has played a historic role in domestic politics ever since its independence, starting with its first Bonapartist regime led by President Jose Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, which overthrew Mexico’s Republican Constitution in 1835, leading to the Texian, Californian, Zacatecan, Yucatan and Rio Grande insurrections, revolutions. The entire 19th century in Mexico after the war with the U.S. was characterized by coup d'état after coup d'état, until the revolution of 1914, which ushered in one-party rule for 71 years.
Even then, the Mexican military was always in the background, intervening when needed, like in 1968, when they set fire to university protests in Mexico City, resulting in a mass casualty situation. In more recent times, 43 disappeared civilians known as the Ayotzinapa students were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Mexican army. The general in charge of the operation was recently arrested and scapegoated.
While free from colonial oppression once and for all, Mexico isn’t free from foreign capital, which regulates its domestic economy for its own interests, while imperialism fuels internal strife by selling arms to the paramilitaries, to keep the increasingly fragile Mexican state off balance.
Mexican workers who rise up are shot at from all sides: The reactionary paramilitary forces on the one hand and the Bonapartist state on the other. As revolutionary Cuba proved, former colonial countries can only be free and independent in the truest sense if and when the working classes throw off foreign capital, and properly nationalize industry under workers’ control. Let us drink to the aspiration of revolutionary leadership emerging in Mexico, for true, lasting peace and prosperity.
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