Interview with Ivan Guerrero, editor of Mexican Marxist paper, Revolucion
The narco-traffic war which started approximately in December 2006, has provoked, already by 2018, 200,000 internally-displaced people and deaths. This has completely changed the consciousness of Mexican workers; it has caused a profound shake-up in the country and people are searching for change.
Both in 2006 and in 2012, people oriented towards the PRD, the Partido de al Revolucion Democratica. The difference is that in 2012, the PRD didn’t have any perspectives, and this disappointed the workers, so there was a split around Lopez Obrador. In my opinion, it would have been better if Obrador had taken up the fight within the party and kicked out its right wing. In the end, that did not happen. There was a split and a new party – Morena – was formed.
Today we can say that this party is a kind of an independent PRD or PRD-light. This is unfortunate. In the first place, the party didn’t base itself on socialist principles. This was predictable for sure, because the leaders are not Marxists or anything like that. The second problem is that the right-wing parties like PRI and PAN have been very opportunist – once they have seen how Morena has grown, some of them have jumped ship and joined Morena’s leadership.
This has made the party itself turn to the right and this in turn has provoked changes in the consciousness of the working class. The more advanced part of the working class has noted this, but the rest have not yet drawn that conclusion. In any case, the whole working class is searching for a way out of this situation. And that explains why Morena is still the favourite to win these elections in 2018. Actually, they had already won in 2006 and 2012, but there was electoral fraud both times and Morena’s leadership allowed that to happen. But today, in 2018, we have a very volatile situation in Mexico.
It is partly because of the narco-traffic war. Mexico is the second-most violent country in the world. Mexico also has the fourth largest bourgeoisie after Germany, USA and Japan – according to Obrador himself. So all these elements contribute to a profound yearning for change in Mexico. And that is why we think that the situation after the July elections could become revolutionary. Anything can happen.
We don’t know if the ruling class will make another electoral fraud, which could in turn pave the way for a movement of the masses. In fact, Lopez Obrador mentioned this a month ago. That he, on this occasion, would not “tie the rope on the tiger”, meaning that he would not prevent the mass movement from going into action. We say that at the end of the day, these are living forces. It is not like in quantum mechanics or biology, where you deal with dead forces. These are living forces and accidents can play a predominant role in the events of the next days.
June 25, 2018.
Watch interview in Spanish on:
