UNREST IN MEXICO
Mexico City
Things are becoming grim in Mexico. A year of repression culminated spectac-— ularly May 15-16 with the military occupation of Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora. The mass movement there had developed even more broadly and militantly than in Morelia last October.
The struggle became acute in April when the electoral campaign opened and the question of candidates came up for decision in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.
The local bourgeoisie, one of the richest in Mexico, had its own candidate for governor, Fausto Acosta Romo, who was defeated in the battle for nomination by the PRI six years ago. The federal government, which is closely linked with U.S. imperialism, had a different one, Faustino Félix Serna.
The present governor, Luis Encinas Johnson, popularly known as "Johnson, el pequefio" [Johnson, the little], was of course with the machine.
The struggle within the PRI was very sharp. The local bourgeoisie, aware of its disadvantageous position in the bureaucratic apparatus of the official party, turned to the popular sectors in order to exert pressure on the functionaries who were to decide on the nomination.
The students in Hermosillo, ranging from the university down to the grade schools, responded unanimously to the appeal and went out into the streets in big demonstrations. The upshot was that the populace in the city and later the entire state repudiated the "central" government and its political instrument, the PRI.
Johnson, "el pequefio," replied with repressive measures. This included asking the neighboring U.S. state of Arizona for arms, a move that had decided impact on public opinion nationally.
The popular demonstrations spread in face of the provocation, reaching the level of a semi~insurrection as the police invaded the campus, seeking the centers of political opposition. The fury of the public was such as to frighten the bourgeoisie who had touched off this chain reaction.
Acosta was called into Mexico City for consultation. He left at the beginning of May and the most consistent students in his own movement turned increasingly in the direction of uncompromising opposition to Johnson, "el pequefio.".
The demonstrations reached such a pitch that the local government lost control. An appeal for help was sent to the federal government.
Troops were sent in and they took over everything, including the schools. A curfew was decreed in Hermosillo. The other communities in the state found thenselves in virtually the same situation.
Thus, in less than a year, the Diaz Ordaz government did what even the "“gorilia" Ongania has not yet done in Argentina -- use troops to occupy the centers of primary and secondary education.
Among those taken in the raids was Ramén Danzés Palomino, the candidate of the Mexican Communist party. On May 28 it was reported that he was being held in the penitentiary at Hermosillo.
On the same day that Sonora underwent military occupation, at Querétaro the regime pompously commemorated the centennial of the victory of the Mexican people over Emperor Maximilian.
The secretary of public education, the novelist Agustin YA4fiez, said in an official speech in the presence of President Diaz Ordaz: "The negative explosions of juvenile groups are attributable in great part to lack of civic education and the spirit of solidarity."
He said further: "Any disorders, any loss of time and energy infringing the law, slows down progress and conspires against the nation."
These were obvious allusions to the student movement in Mexico, particularly in Sonora, which is the only sector of the populace at the moment expressing the discontent existing throughout Mexico.
Only a few days after the repression in Sonora, the army had to intervene in a state in the south, Guerrero, in an area near the tourist center at Acapulco. The reason -- protests against police brutality.
A week after the repression in Sonora, university students in Campeche, at the opposite end of the country, demonstrated against the governor there.
Luis Echeverria, the secretary of the interior, said May 23 in referring to these events: "I am of the opinion, in the first place, that these incidents are much smaller in scale than those that occur normally in all countries in the world. In the second place, I_believe that they _have
no interconnection whatsoever that they have no common denominator." [Emphasis added. ]
The government is thus disinclined at the moment to engage in red-baiting. It wishes to avoid giving the impression that these demonstrations in widely separated regions were due to revolutionary forces. Discontent is much too general to attribute it to the left which would thus appear stronger than it really is.
However, this did not persuade the most reactionary journals to give up McCarthyism. For example the May 29 issue of the weekly Tiempo [Time] carried the following headline: "Mao and Castro in Mexico."
The article, a review of the many student actions in the past year in all parts of the country, offers the conclusion that what is happening in Mexico is due to “a semi-occult or subterranean power...{Cwhich] is taking advantage of every incident in Mexico -- if it doesn't create them -- in order to perpetrate excesses, resort to violence and accustom the youth and adolescents to cultivate, as the best of atmospheres, indiscipline and violence, and, basing itself on this, to resort to the use and abuse of multitudinous aggression." [Emphasis added. ]
This "semi-occult power" is, naturally, exposed at once: "Isn't the conclusion justified that Mexico has already become subject to the action of the obscure forces -- obscure in name but quite clear in actuality -- which, as in those areas of the world (Africa, Asia and the Americas), where the social situation offers elements favorable to the objective of undermining democracy, when it exists, are trying to open step by step, when they can't do it in giant strides, the road to subversion oriented toward a regime analogous to the one in Castroite Cuba, the Soviet Union or Red China?"
Reference is then made to Mao's "four stages" for “overcoming the democracies": agitation, terrorism, guerrilla struggles and military action to overthrow the government. The conclusion is then posed: "Is Mexico in the first stage?"
Tiempo is a semiofficial magazine. It thus reflects the thinking of the top circles of the government, presumably including the president himself. If Echeverrfa's declarations at the moment contradict Tiempo's hypothesis, perhaps only a matter of tactics is involved. The government is not yet prepared to resort more extensively to the McCarthyite "explanation" for living conditions that are becoming more and more insupportable to the Mexican people.