advance for the -left by FELIPE GARCIA CASILLAS The campaign of the left in the Mexican presidential elections (held on July 4) concluded on June 27 with a central meeting in Mexico City.. More than 15, 000 people packed the Arena México and wound up the campaign singing the Internationale and raising hundreds of red flags. At the podium, together with the leaders of the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM — Mexican Communist party) and the Movimiento de Organización Socialista (MOS - Movement of Socialist Organization), stood the leaders of the Liga Socialista (LS — Socialist League) and the Liga Comunista Internac ionalista (LCI - Internationalist Communist League), representing the strong and militant contingent of the Fourth International, made up of more than 1,000 comrades who occupied part of the stadium. Thus ended the most important electoral campaign organized by the left in Mexico in at least forty years. But the importance of the campaign that presented Valentín Campa, a member of the PCM, as a candidate For president went beyond the mere fact that the left parties participated in the elections for the first time in a long while. Above all, the importance of this experience was rooted in the fact that in spite of the small mass influence of the Mexican left, the Campa candidacy was the only genuine alternative to the candidate of the ruling party. At the same time, the campaign also showed broad sectors of the masses the antidemocratic character of the regime, which denies all legal rights to the genuine opposition parties. In fact, the antidemocratic Mexican election law lays down a series of requirements for any party's obtaining legal registration (and with it the right to participate in the elections) such that in practice it is only the gov28 ernment itself that decides whether a party is legal or not. In this manner, ever since its consolidation under Cárdenas, the Bonapartist regime has granted legal registration only to parties linked to the government, besides the party of the "revolution become government, *the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI - Institutional Revolutionary party). The debate in the left The electoral experience of the left in Mexico has been extremely meager and negative. Nearly all this tradition and experience has been linked to the Communist party. Since its presentation of Hernán Laborde as a presidential candidate in the 1930s, the CP had not run any candidates officially; on the contrary, it had supported the candidates of the PRI, as in the case of Avila Camacho and Miguel Alemán. On the other hand, because of the weakness of the left, since 1968 the predominant attitude has been to call for abstention and to denounce the elections of 1970 and 1973 (for president and parliament respectively) as a farce. These positions coincided with the growing disinterest of the population in elections and their disillusionment due to the frustration caused by various electoral frauds staged by the government against opposition candidates who had massive support. Thus, early in 1975, when a debate began on the electoral practice of the left, not only was there no experience to fall back on, but on the contrary there was a great tradition of abstentionism, as in other Latin American countries, as well as a great mistrust in this method of struggle.
Because of the experience of the past, in many radicalized sectors the tactic of electoral participation was regarded as synonymous with conciliation with and tail-ending of the class enemy. The dead weight of abstentionism affected all the currents of the left. Because of this, the organizations claiming allegiance to the Fourth International in Mexico, while differing over what particular tactic to recommend, agreed from the beginning that it was corract to participate in the elections at this juncture and struggled against the ultraleft and sectarian currents, which were present especially in the student movement. The Partide Mexicano de los Trabajodores (PMT - Mexican Workers party), founded after the massacre of June 10, 1971, by some leaders of the 1968 movement such as Heberto Castillo and by Demetrio Vallejo, leader of the railway workers union, finally decided after some vacillations to abstain from electoral participation. The PMT made use of some of the slogans of the student movement in an attempt to give a left cover to its decision, which was profoundly reformist and electoralist at bottom. Asserting that they were not inclined to "play into the hands of the goverment, " the PMT leaders refused to participate since the government had denied them legal registration and their votes would thus not have been counted. In fact, the PMT has been the only left organization in recent years to make the effort to fulfill the requirements demanded by the election law in order to obtain registration. Conceived as an electoralist party with a reformist and grodualist line, the PMT certainly octed consistently in refusing to participate in the elections once the government denied it all guarantees for its participation. In any event, the decision was inevitably a difficult one for the ranks of this party, who have been trained for electoral participation and whose main work during the past two years has been the campaign for massive affiliation aimed af making sure that the party had the number of members required by the law for legal registration. At the least a small trade-union sector of the PMT broke with the party when it decided to abstain. This sector went over to the CP in order to be able to propose one of its trade-union leaders as a candidate for parliament. After trying to obtain the agreement of the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS — People's Socialist party), the Partido Socialisto de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers party), and the PMT, the Communist party finally had to form the Coalición de Izquierda (Left Coalition) with only the Liga Socialista and the Movimiento de Organización Socialista. The Coalición de Izquierda While we have said that the elections of 1976 were marked fundamentally by the presence of the left, of the same time we must explain they were centrally marked by the Coalición de Izquierda made up of the CP, ES, and MOS. It was this coalition that objectively constituted the reference point for all political currents.
The debate over what attitude to take toward the elecfions was axised around the policy of the Coalición. The traditional abstentionism of the left was thrown into crisis by the Campa candidacy. In spite of its electoralist conception, the PMT was outflanked by the Coalición. The major centrist current - the group around the magazine Punto Critico - began by calling for abstention under the slogan "Our candidate (Marx) is not registered, " but wound up on June 27, the day the campaign ended, calling for a vote for Campa. One week before the elections! Such a sharp turn was exceeded only by the Posodista grouplet, which first called for a vote for Campa and then, one week later, switched to support López Portillo, the PRI candidate! Its self-criticism stated that the error had been corrected thanks to a letter from "Comrade J. Posados. The unpopularity of the Mexican CP among certain sectors of the brood vanguard resulted in the fact that much of the criticism they made of the Coalición was genuinely sectarian - for example the accusation that the Coalición was a popular front or the embryo of a popular front. We do not deny that the CP was interested in this. Its policies are in accordance with such interests. Besides, we have said that before forming the Coalicion the CP tried for a popular front with some bourgeois forces. But faced with the refusal of these forces, the CP was compelled to reach agreement only with the Liga Socialista and the MOS. Hence, the Coalición de Izquierda was not a popular front. In order to be able to speak of a popular front it is not enough for there to be a reformist program or for the CP to be prepared to hitch itself to the wagon of the "democratic bourgeoisie"; a key element is necessary: the presence of a bourgeois force holding hegemony in the Coalición, There was no such force. The MOS is no more than a reformist groupiet in process of being assimilated by the PCM, which was obviously the hegemonic force in the Coalición. Still more sectarian and groundless was the criticism of the LS according to which the L5 had violated principle by signing platforms and making electoral blocs with other political organizations, especially the PCM. Apart from the experience of the Bolsheviks' making electoral fronts with the Mensheviks, it is obvious that there are more recent examples in which supporters of the Fourth International itself have made use of just this possibility. For example, in 1958 the Socialist Workers party, the American Trotskyist organization, called for the creation of an "electoral coalition of socialist forces for united political action of socialists, as was explained by Comrode James P. Cannon in a meeting in which Vincent Hallinan, who had been the presidential candidate of the Progressive party in 1952, also participated. On the contrary, it is much more important to highlight the unprecedented character of the Mexican Communist party's making an electoral bloc with an organization of the Fourth International. This event is a sign of the
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MEXICO new times in which we are living. The PCM is now unable to slander the Trotskyists, calling them agents, for it has even established electoral blocs with them. In this context it is noteworthy that in an interview with the magazine Excélsior a few days before the elections Valentf'n Campa himself admitted that he had been expelled from the Mexican Communist party in 1940 for opposing the assassination of Trotsky (only because he believed that Trotsky was already "liquidated politically"). In a biographical note on Campa, Oposición, the official organ of the PM, affirmed even more audaciously that during the time he was outside the party it was Campo who represented the real "Communist tradition. " Because of this, while some people were denouncing the LS for allegedly having capitulated to Stalinism, a rightist split from the pro-Soviet PCM was denouncing that party for having capitulated to TrotskyismI TONIDOS VENGERRA The Front of the Revolutionary Left The other organization of the Fourth International in Mexico, the LCI (formerly the GCI, Internationalist Communist Group), did not participate in the Coalición de Izquierda. Its refusal to do so was not based on the sectarian reasons mentioned above. The LC!'s criticism of the Coalición de Izquierda related to the platform it put forward. The LCI called for the formation of a Frente de la Iz= quierda Revolucionaria (FIR - Front of the Revolutionary Left) around a revolutionary program. It did not call for fielding another candidate but insteod for supporting Valentfn Campa, thus expressing a class-againstclass vote. But at the same time the LCI called for a vote to an alternative program to that of the Coalición through the formula "FIR-Campa." Nevertheless, the LCI's project of grouping the revolutionary laft together did not succeed. While agreeing 30 with the electoral platform proposed by the LCI for the FIR, the great majority of centrist currents refused to participate jointly with the CI because of the LCI's insistence on calling for a vote to Campa. The sectarianism of the centrists toward the PCM further isolated and weakened them in this important conjuncture, but it also prevented more forces from coming together with the LCI in the FIR. The LCI's overestimation of left centrism had its counterpart in an underestimation of the PCM. The only peculiar feature of the PCM is its relative weakness. It is this weakness and not any supposed revolutionary character that prevents it from coalescing a popular front. It is also this weakness that compels it to negotiate with organizations of the Fourth International. Ir is obvious that such negotiations on an electoral front between the PCM on the one side and both the Ll and LS on the other would have been more favorable to the latter two organizations, including as regards the content of the electoral platform. The above does not take account of the analysis of the current relationship of forces within the organized left in Mexico, In the process of recomposition that has been going on within the left during the past two years three currents may be highlighted as hegemonic: the PCM, the PMT, and the Fourth International. Because of a total lack of understanding of what is involved in this reshuffling of the forces of the left, the LCI Futilaly attempted to link up with centrism at a time when it could have conducted a more audacious participation in relation to the Coalición and especially toward the PCM. The results of the July 4 elections, even if this was not recognized officially, reflected the rise of Mexican mass struggle. More than a million votes went to Campa! That is, more than the number of votes the PPS and the PARM (Partido Auténtico de la Revolución Mexicana - Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution) contributed to López Portillo, who got a total of 15 million votes. The importance of this result is all the greater if account is taken of the fact that these were votes for a left candidate, for a declared communist candidate, which means a lot in Mexico after decades of control by the PRI. In their own way, the election results reflect not only the rise of struggles, especially workers struggles, but also the influence the left is beginning to hold within these struggles. This influence broadened considerably during the electoral campaign. Of course, it wos the PCM that drew the greatest profit from the experience, basically because of its larger apparatus. But the PCM was not the only one to profit. Certainly since, as has been shown in the present conjuncture, the PCM will not be the sole viable option on the left during the ever greater struggles that are on the agenda for the immediate future in Mexico. Slowly but surely, the revolutionary Marxist alternative is also gaining in strength. The great leap forward in this direction will occur soon with the founding of the Mexican section of the Fourth International with the unification of the Liga Comunista internacionalista and the Liga Socialista.