The Chain Explosion Burning Mexico

To Jean Francois Boyer

The disappearance of 43 student teachers of the Mexican southeastern state of Guerrero and events that has been occurring since then as a chain explosion, have been approached by the largest amount of newswriters on a local and global level, more than any recent political event in the country.

It seemed me writing another article only would result in to tell again what had been emotionally said before: horror, anger, resignation, crime committed by the state, fatigue, drug violence, macabre, failed state, guerrilla, revolution and even the dull Scream by Edvard Munch.

However, after my dear friend Jean Francois Boyer, a French journalist, told me I was very quiet about it, I felt a duty to seek a reflection that could contribute to analysis the news.

First I wondered if we are really thinking the case of the missing of Ayotzinapa or circling around the same ideas.

My answer is we are repeating ourselves even beyond this tragic event: Is Mexico which is repeating itself from long time ago. Not only violence of organized crime or complicit and disable governments, but also the Left, Guerrero’s students and the entire public at large.

The battles between Mexican State and different organizations generated even years before the world wide known 1968 student’s massacre, are still tought thru the conceptual pair of repression/rebellion.

Small changes incurred since then are asynchronous. Federal governments have partially come to have political relations with certain legal requirements, but many state and local governments have not even begun. The urban middle classes now have different ways to ask for what they want, not the poorest, such as Guerrero’s.

The confrontation between the mayor of Iguala and student teachers is the local version of death struggle developed between the Federal Government and teachers of the 70’s, that ended with the death of guerrilla leaders Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez.

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism southeast Mexico style remains today the way of thinking of students and mini-guerrillas who still inhabit it, and bullets the response of municipal authority.

As part of the state of repetition, student teachers little have thought if their activism lead to socialist revolution or the community of tombs. Local government authoritarianism nor if guns carried maintain power or jail.

In this logic, there is no vision about life and its value. It is possible to kill in the name of Law, as under its yoke to die for something as ethereal as Society, State, Order, Future of Generations, or as perverse as “to buy the house my mom always wanted”, thanks to misleading money and goods as representatives of enjoyment.

While student teachers struggled to survive, also marched on the road to kidnapping and maybe death by the hand of questionable political reading that both Marx and Lenin would criticize for taking action lacking objective and subjective conditions of the Revolution: the widespread global poverty and awareness in most people of the need for socialism.

Youth disappeared in Ayotzinapa probably will not have a life of romance, personal growth and satisfaction. Would leave behind instead a wake of frustration and a growing feeling of resentment.

Little can be done politically to do something productive and create a truly democratic society in Mexico. When the strings are tightened, only the most powerful is strengthened, in this case, capitalism, because governments are only its representatives.

Under neoliberalism, the Left has found its place in the past or nostalgia without seeking the way to the future. A future that can only be built by creating conditions of spiritual and material equality among those who prefer to survive.