From O Proletariado
Organ of the Central Committee of the
Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil
November, 1996

The communist guerrillas of Mexico
The Massacre of Aguas Blancas

On June 28, 1995, in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, Aguas Blancas valley, in the State of Guerrero, police troops ambushed a truck filled with peasants, killing 17 and wounding others. The peasants belonged to the OCSS (Peasants Organization of the Southern Sierra) and they were headed to a demonstration to demand from the authorities the appearance alive of one of their leaders.

One year later, on June 28, 1996, more than 5,000 people, organized by the FACMLN (Broad Front for the Construction of the Movement of National Liberation), met at Aguas Blancas to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre. At the end of the demonstration there appeared a column of one hundred masked guerrillas armed with AK-47 and R-15 rifles, who came down from the mountains and were received with prolonged applause from the demonstrators, as noted by the press that was there.

For the first time the EPR (Revolutionary Popular Army) presented itself in public. As was widely reported by the Mexican and international press, a young indigenous revolutionary read the "Manifesto of Aguas Blancas," which began: "Today, July 28, it has been one year since the massacre of Aguas Blancas, perpetrated by the repressive forces of the oligarchy and the anti-popular government against 17 defenseless peasants of the Sierra of Guerrero, a situation not [mudou]. The repression, persecution, imprisonment, assassinations, massacres, tortures and disappearances continue as policy of the government, a situation similar to that which in 1967 and 1968 led Comandantes Lúcio Cabañas Barrientos and Genaro Vásquez Rojas to take up arms against exploitation and oppression; this experience, the unjust present situation and the revolutionary spirit which it awakens inspires again the struggle of the Mexican people.

According to the manifesto: "The Revolutionary Popular Army is made up of men and women of different exploited and oppressed sectors of the people, who have understood the necessity to organize themselves against the reactionary violence of the exploiters and oppressors, who for decades have tried to drown in blood the struggle of the Mexican people for their just aspirations." "...Our Army struggles as well for the profound transformation of society, by means of the armed road of revolution, as one more form of struggle that the people develops in defense of their interests and to achieve their objectives."

And it ends with the call: "People of Mexico, let us hold up the banners of struggle of our brothers who have fallen to the bullets of the repressive forces of the government" and "Let the indignation and profound grief not only remain in our memory and in our hearts, let the grief and the memory of our loved ones who have disappeared, been tortured and massacred strengthen the conviction with which we take up the arms of liberation; let the grief be transformed into the spirit of struggle to confront the anti-popular government and its repressive forces, let the blood shed by the martyrs of our Mexico not remain unpunished. No more massacres of unarmed people, no more crimes without punishment." "We call upon all the people to take up the revolutionary democratic struggle for liberation of the nation and of those enchained by large capital and the oppressor State." Having rendered homage with 17 rounds to the peasants who were brutally assassinated, the column of the EPR withdrew to the mountains.

The Chorus of Reaction

The legal and electoral left, in the person of Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas of the PRD, hastened to attack the revolutionaries, characterizing them as a "fraud," an attitude which was rapidly taken advantage of by the Secretary of the Government of Zedillo, Emilio Chuayffet who, repeating the defamation made his own the cackling of Cárdenas. Meanwhile, shortly afterward that term ceased to be used, with a great outcry in the press it fell into ridicule, for the days that followed had as center of the events and of the national and international media, the resounding armed actions of the EPR not only in Guerrero, but in 11 federal states, including the Federal District, Mexico City, undertaking to demonstrate another reality.

August 28, particularly, signified a night of "terror" for the government and its security apparatus, as the paper La Jornada reported: "Two months after its first public appearance, the Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR) decided to demonstrate that it could act not only in Guerrero and that it was not a fraud, and on Wednesday the 28th, during a long night, carried out attacks in a devastating manner on military installations and outposts and on the police forces in this state, as well as in Oaxaca, Puebla and State of Mexico. At the same time, in Chiapas, considered the exclusive terrain of the EZLN, it carried out five highway blockades, as a 'political-military demonstration,' with a character 'essentially of resistance and self-defense,' in order not to interfere with the process of the dialogue in Chiapas. In the attacks, the members of the EPR utilized high-caliber arms, grenades and bombs. The result was 15 soldiers and police dead and at least 22 wounded."

The PDPR and the EPR

Always denouncing the anti-popular and anti-national character of the government of the Mexican oligarchs, the PDPR and the EPR are struggling for the revolutionary overthrow of the government and the construction of the Democratic and Popular Republic. As they affirmed in their declarations to the press: "The PDPR (The Revolutionary Popular Democratic Party) is clandestine, carrying out work in the cities and among all sectors since Mexico is no longer only an agricultural country. The PDPR does not reject any form of struggle. An armed process can not arise without an insurgent populace. It is supported by our Party, which is essentially political, because by its propositions the State constitutes an enemy which has to be destroyed."

Declared one of the Comandantes of the EPR, José Arturo, in granting declarations to the press about the recent events in the country and about their organizations: "We the EPR and the PDPR arose as a joint effort of various organizations with political plans established with a revolutionary political line, a structure and, one must say, with a relationship with the masses. This is it directly. We were born and grew up in different epochs and circumstances, then, we are made up of fourteen organizations, among them we can mention the Francisco Villa Commando, the Morelos Commando, the Mexican Armed Commandos, the Genero Vásquez Brigade, the Vicente Guerrero Brigade, the Workers Self-Defense Brigade, the 18th of May Brigade, the Peasants Brigade for Justice, the Ricardo Flores Magón Revolutionary Organization, the Armed Revolutionary Organization of the People and the Clandestine Workers Revolutionary Party Union of the People - Party of the Poor.

It is all one process. We have united in one single front, there is an assimilation and there is a process in which some organizations have grouped themselves, moving toward this process of unification, they have given their coordination and finally the EPR achieved its structure: this was on the 1st of May of 1994. Afterwards, on the 18th of May of 1996 there was formed a single political-military structure, a single political line with a single army."

The EZLN and Negotiations

Differently from the EZLN, the EPR made clear that its objective is to overthrow the present government of the oligarchs and U.S. imperialism, by means of the revolutionary democratic road and therefore there is nothing to negotiate with it. It declared that the uprising of the EZLN in Chiapas was important and marked a new phase in the armed revolutionary movement. However, having acknowledged that the language utilized by Subcomandante Marcos has a great convocatory power, Comandante José Arturo considered that "poetry can not be the continuation of politics by other means" (the classic definition of war), and added: "For us language is very important. By means of words one succeeds in developing a moral force, but they are not backed up with more solid elements from the theoretical, political and ideological point of view, they tend as well to wear away and disperse. And the objective is not only to create a moral force, but to materialize it in order to be able to realize the social and historical tasks which we have before us."

"...we consider that the EZLN has taken the decision that the road is that of negotiation. In this sense we have an important difference, since we consider that the government is a repressive government, the assassin of the people and with it we can not sit down to negotiate."

The PROCUP - PdlP

The Clandestine Workers Revolutionary Party Union of the People - Party of the Poor has been involved for more than 30 years in clandestine armed struggle and at the same time is tightly linked with the popular masses of the countryside and the city. As part of the front of 14 organizations which make up, first the EPR and then the PDRP, by its trajectory, experience and development, it has indicated that it has been the backbone of this whole process.

Continuers of the armed struggle of Arturo Gámiz García, Genaro Vásques Rojas, Lúcio Cabañas Barrientos, Hector Eládio and many others, the PROCUP-PdlP arose as the result of the effort to, under the new conditions of imperialist domination, develop the revolutionary struggle in Mexico.

It affirms that: "Our Party throughout its whole history has conceptualized in a systematic and organized manner the different stages of the revolutionary process. From 1964 to 1972 we proposed as the strategic objective the seizure of power by the proletariat, developing the revolutionary armed struggle as general strategy and the necessary strategic tasks corresponding to this stage: to consolidate the revolutionary nucleus and to forge the organization, the study of Marxism-Leninism, the reeducation and recruitment conceived as tactical forms of this process, the ideological struggle against opportunism, actions of expropriation, military preparation and the formation of nuclei of militants.

Beginning in 1972 we adopted the line of Prolonged Peoples War, maintaining the strategic objective of the seizure of power by the proletariat and establishing new strategic tasks. Today our strategic objectives are concretized in the seizure of political power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the construction of socialism, this being possible by means of the development and fulfillment of the strategic tasks:

1) To consolidate and develop the Party and the Army of the People.

2 - To mobilize, unify, organize and lead the popular will to fight.

3 - The unity of the revolutionary forces.

4 - To destroy the economic, political and military power as well as the ideology and culture of the national and foreign enemies.

5 - To construct an economy, an ideology and a new culture which will develop during the process of the war.

6 - Solidarity at all levels with the revolutionary processes in the world."

Concerning the character of the Mexican revolution at the present stage, the PROCUP-PdlP defines it as socialist, related to the degree of development of capitalism, the class struggle, the results of the historic process, in which there have been two bourgeois-democratic revolutions since the war of independence, which prepared and determined the economic development of the country: the Reform headed by Benito Juárez and that of 1910-1917, lead by the popular leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, a revolution betrayed by the bourgeoisie which assassinated them.

"Mexico is a capitalist country dependent on Yankee imperialism, subject to the laws of development of State monopoly capitalism and the robbery which imperialism carries out in various forms in our dependent countries. The contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production in Mexico is manifested in a larger concentration of the means of production and social wealth in a reduced number of bourgeois and oligarchs and in the ever increasing pauperization of the proletariat and the other exploited sectors, sharpening the misery, exploitation and oppression, which leads to a greater polarization of Mexican society into two fundamental and antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, this latter constituting, by the position which it occupies in production and by its ideology, the revolutionary class called upon to head the struggle of the whole people for socialism.

"The economic development of capitalism and the class struggle in our country determines the necessity and the socialist character of the revolution, the only one which can solve the problems of our people opening up a new historic stage in Mexico. The conditions of development of the international economic system, the role played on a world scale by imperialism and the dependency with respect to it of the Mexican economy, determine the anti-imperialist content of the revolution, with U.S. imperialism and the national bourgeoisie constituting the fundamental enemies of our people.

"The socialist revolution in Mexico can not become a reality without the existence of a historic vanguard capable of analyzing the concrete reality of the country and of the world to lead in a serious manner the proletariat and the other exploited sectors of our people in the revolutionary struggle for the seizure of political power, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism."

"The PROCUP-PdlP is a vanguard party of the proletariat which aspires to form part of the historic vanguard which will lead our people to the triumph of socialism, defining itself as party of the class which recognizes and adopts Marxism-Leninism as its philosophical conception and fundamental guide for revolutionary action.

"The Party has as political line the Strategy and Tactics of Prolonged Peoples War (PPW) as the result of the assimilation of the historical experience of the peoples of the world and of the international proletariat; of the analysis of the historic development of our people and of the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of our country. We recognize as the fundamental road for the socialist revolution in Mexico the revolutionary armed struggle and around that we develop all forms of struggle, subject to the concrete analysis of the specific conditions of the development of class struggle and to the extent that these forms of struggle contribute to the strengthening of the proletariat in its struggle for the achievement of its historic objectives.

The revolutionary struggle of our people is part of the struggle of the peoples of the world to destroy the capitalist system, imperialism and for the construction of socialism. According to this conception, our Party is a detachment of the international proletariat guided by the principle of proletarian internationalism."

Beyond that, the PROCUP-PdlP has developed itself both in relationship with the masses as well as in party life, understanding the party as a product of the masses, basing itself on the exercise of constructive criticism and self-criticism. As well, it has taken as a lesson from the experience in the construction of the party and in the formation of its militants the need to strive to practice correct attitudes relating to life and not only relating to the enemy.

Combating the military conception of the armed band (foco), incorrect and so dangerous for the revolutionary movement, it fights for the simultaneous construction of the Party and the Popular Army, basing itself on the integral political-military formation of all the militants of the Party and of the indispensable condition of member of the Popular Army.

As well the PROCUP-PdlP synthesizes its thought and action in the main slogans of:

For our Proletarian Comrades!

Resolved to Win!
For the Socialist Revolution!
Victory or Death!

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