I went to Mexico on holiday once. The wonky picture of Mr and Mrs Trotsky’s headstone proves it. That’s qualification enough to write an article for SR about the place.

Electoral fraud is a long established Mexican tradition. So too is using the police and the army to disperse demonstrations with violence and murder. In May this year the police shot dead teachers who were demonstrating for a pay rise. However since July Mexican workers and poor have been challenging the authority of the state in the most dramatic way possible. It began when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), convincingly argued that the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón stole the presidency when he claimed to have won by a one percent margin
López Obrador was seen by the peasants, the urban poor and many workers as their candidate. His campaign had spent much of the year travelling across the country addressing rallies and large meetings of the people who are the victims of the Mexican economy’s subordination to the United States. In common with the rest of Latin America Mexico is a country where the rich are rich by first world standards and the poor are very poor. As we report elsewhere in this issue American imperialism is responding to the poor of Mexico by building a fence to keep them out of the United States. That is how desperate life is for tens of millions of Mexicans.
López Obrador’s electoral programme was something like that of the British Labour Party in the 1950s. He planned to introduce social programmes to provide health, housing and education. He wanted to make the country self-sufficient in oil and gas and to protect Mexican industry against foreign imports with tariff barriers. This was not a revolutionary programme to put the working class in power. It was a reformist set of proposals that would alleviate some of the misery of Mexico’s poor. It was enough however to frighten the rich élite that runs Mexico. For US imperialism it came dangerously close to putting López Obrador and the millions of voters who supported him in the same camp as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. More importantly it was a programme that the Mexican masses felt offered something for them.
The theft of votes and dropping people of the electoral register were staggering. The election was won by 243 000 votes but 940 000 votes were not counted. The Mexican press has published photographs of dumped ballot boxes. When it became apparent that the election had been stolen the masses moved into action. At the end of July there was a rally with an estimated three million people in Mexico City. Many of them stayed on and set up an encampment in the main plaza the Zócalo. They shut down businesses and paralysed the traffic.
On September 17 López Obrador’s supporters held a National Democratic Convention in the Zócalo at which they declared him president by a show of hands. This is a situation that Marxists call “dual power”. Millions of people refuse to accept the legitimacy of the state and the government and set up their own structures to run society. But the PRD is not going to be the party that leads them to take control of society. López Obrador and his advisors have started to demobilise the movement. Yet the masses have had a sense of their own power and the protests that began in the capital have started spreading across other parts of the country. The Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, the APPO, controls much of the city of Oaxaca. Several thousand protesters are camped in its town square. They have taken over the radio stations and public building and are controlling the traffic and are demanding an end to poverty and corruption.
The wave of rebellion that has washed across Latin America has now broken on the shores of Mexico, right on the borders of the United States, home to millions of the continent’s dispossessed.