RELEASE OF FOUR COMRADES FROM MORELIA JAIL
By Manolo Sarmiento
Mexico City
In reply to repressive measures directed against the students in Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan, the students of the University of Mexico organized a series of protest actions, including meetings and the use of flying squads which circulated throughout Mexico City to call public attention to the arbitrariness of the government in ordering the Mexican army to occupy the University of San Micolas de Hidalgo de Morelia.
Some revolutionary organizations sent representatives to Morelia itself to register protests. The Liga Obrera Estudiantil 23 de Marza, a revolutionary Marxist group in the National School of Political Sciences, sent a delegation of four members: Carlos Duran, Juan Leal, Enrique Martinez and Humberto Torres.
Their mission was to help organize defense efforts for the students of Morelia and Mexico City who were jailed as a result of the military move. They also had the task of bringing to the attention of the people the energetic protests of the group against the government provocation and of calling for self-defense committees to carry on the revolutionary struggle of the people of the city and the peasants in the surrounding region. .
The four students fell into the hands of the secret service in Morelia which had established a quasifascist control of the city. The McCarthyite gutter press controlled by the government and the monopolies set its propaganda machine going at once. The students were pictured as "promoters of a vast nationwide conspiracy” in which the events in Morelia were "one more cog." They came as representatives of a terrorist group that was “out to overthrow the government." They were alleged to belong to a "Trotskyist Soviet" (sic) organization seeking to destroy "democracy" in Mexico.
All the daily papers in the country set up a hysterical anti-Communist clamor such as has become routine in this year of crisis 1966. Apparently it has been a long time since Mexico had a government threatened by so many plots as the present Diaz Ordaz regime. Newspaper readers have been told this year of three big governmental crises provoked by Communist groups which, by magic, in spite of being "tiny groups of foreign lunatics, having no connection with the national life, separated from the Mexican people, desperate terrorists, foul criminals, prophets without followers, isolated as if they had small-pox," etc., have thrice greatly endangered the powerful government that smashed them. The first time was during the conflict at the University of Mexico when they caught the "international band of Argentinians controlled by Adolfo Gilly" that wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to "overthrow" the government. (The followers of Posadas arrested at the time played no role in the student movement in question.) The second time was when they caught the MRP [Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo] group headed by the journalist Victor Rico Gal4&n. The third was when they launched the repression in Morelia.
In each of the three occasions the specter haunting "democracy" was "Trotskyism, this rabid Communism, linked up with Peking and the USSR." All the "decent people" joined in the chorus of hate against the “professional subverters of law and order." One sector succeeded in making its own shrill voice heard above all the rest, this was the "left" group headed by Lombardo Toledano. They have openly approved and encouraged the “hunt for the Trotskyists, agents of imperialism," acting, in short, as if they were still living in the good old days of Stalinism.
Up until the arrest of the four revolutionary Marxist students, the government jailed its victims on charges of “inciting rebellion." This time the machine stopped half way. The energetic protests of the students in the National School of Political Sciences stood in the way. As a matter of fact, in contrast to the previous occasions, these four students had strong ties with the student body; they are integral members of the student community in which they have gained distinction as vanguard fighters. They are not isolated from all sectors of the population. This saved them from the heavy charges laid against the defendants in the earlier cases.
By way of protesting the arrest of the four, the students took over twentythree buses on various lines in the city. This was in return for the arbitrary arrest of the four revolutionary students. The authorities, anxious to avoid a conflict at
the University of Mexico after the Morelia disaster, sought to nip things in the bud. They refrained from pressing heavy charges and released the students without demanding bail. The firm attitude of the Liga Obrera Estudiantil, backed by the unanimous approval of the students in their school (in the general assembly of the National School of Political Sciences only four votes were cast in favor of returning the buses before their jailed comrades were released) and the students belonging to the university group of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (the followers of Posadas) proved decisive.
A fact worth noting was the complete bankruptcy of the leaders of the left student groups adhering to the Maoist. orientation. Together with the young revolutionary Marxists they have constituted the most dynamic sector of the student left. These student leaders scored the action of the members of the Liga Obrera Estudiantil as "adventurist" and refused to collaborate in carrying it out, some of them not even expressing verbal solidarity. |
After they were released the revolutionary Marxist students told how barbarously they had been treated. They had been pounded and kicked and submitted to long periods of questioning (at times up to twelve hours). Their hair had been cut off. Although they had been held for a week, no charges had been brought against them. The police held them incommunicado for four days, refusing relatives permission to visit up to the last minute.. They tried to terrorize them -with threats. For food. they were given something remotely resembling coffee and a tortilla with some beans. The four students had to sleep in a hole without beds and without toilet facilities. ,
In short, the government violated the highest law of the country, the federal constitution which they shout so much about in public. In the most frenetic way the government accuses "the reds" of violating the constitution when it is only the government that is doing this, and in a systematic way. It is the government that stands back of the hysterical campaign being waged over the radio and television and in the press. It is a way of chaining down revolutionary action and covering up the way the government has compelled both the bourgeois and revolutionary opposition to go underground in political activities. In Mexico we are witnessing a rhiieal change in political trials. They are now part of an indiscriminate repression that is arousing profound social unrest among the people. .
The main lesson to be drawn in this context from the energetic student action is that. the struggle. to free the political prisoners from the jails throughout the country is bound up with advancing a genuine struggle for. socialism. This cannot be done through lukewarm actions and looking for an impossible alliance with the liberal sectors of the bourgeoisie; but only through an intransigent social struggle at all levels that will bring the workers to establishing their rule. And this poses the urgent necessity of constructing a revolutionary Marxist party in Mexico.